The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is often said, and rightly so, that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will only attract the attention of the right people when it is able to engage with philosophical matters. Until it does so, it will make an amateurish impression on philosophers, and until then people will also say that the followers of this spiritual science are only followers of it because they lack a thorough philosophical education.

It would be quite hopeless to wait until a sufficiently large number of people with a philosophical education would realize that spiritual science is something that lifts even the most philosophical person far above mere philosophy. But since we cannot afford to wait for the spiritual-scientific movement, and must give spiritual science to the public as this public is capable of receiving and grasping it, even without the individual members of this public having received any particular philosophical training, if we is generally compelled to do so, it must be strictly emphasized that in the field of anthroposophy there is nothing that cannot be discussed in the strictest sense with what is necessary and right in the field of philosophy. And even if I am not in a position to give philosophical considerations due to the general direction of the theosophical movement, I would still like to use this short hour to draw the attention of those who have studied philosophical matters to some philosophical points of view. And I ask you to take this as something that falls completely outside the scope of the other anthroposophical considerations, as something that is purely a single philosophical consideration. You may find some of the things that need to be discussed difficult. But don't worry if you have to sit through a short hour of difficult and not-so-heartfelt reflections here. In any case, you can be sure that it will be extremely useful for you to establish the foundations of spiritual-scientific truths. You will find again and again, when you take in real philosophical thinking, that this philosophical way of thinking will not only greatly facilitate your understanding of spiritual science in general, but also of what is called “esoteric development”. So today's purely philosophical reflection is to be quite out of the ordinary.

You should not regard philosophy as something absolute. Philosophy is something that has only emerged in the course of human development, and we can easily state the hour of its birth, for this is more or less correctly stated in every history of philosophy. In recent times, some have objected to the fact that every history of philosophy begins with Thales, that is, with the first appearance of philosophy in Greece; and it has been thought that philosophy could be traced back beyond that time. This is not correct. What can justifiably be called “philosophy” actually begins with Greek philosophy. Oriental wisdom and knowledge are not what should properly be called “philosophy”. If we disregard the great philosophical intuitions, as they appear in a different way in Heraclitus, Thales, and later in Socrates, and go straight to philosophy as it presents itself to us in a closed world-building, in a closed structure of thought, then Pythagoras is not the first philosopher. For Pythagoras is, in a certain respect, still an intuitive seer who, although he often expresses what he has to say in philosophical forms, is not a philosophical system in the true sense of the word, any more than the Platonic system is. A philosophical system in the true sense of the word is only the great system - as a philosophical system - that Aristotle built up in the 4th century BC. We must first orient ourselves on these things.

If Aristotle is called the first philosopher and Plato is still regarded as a half-seer, it is because Aristotle is the first who has to draw solely from the source of philosophy, namely from the source of thinking in concepts. Of course, all this had been prepared for a long time; it was not as if he had to create all the concepts himself; his predecessors had done considerable preparatory work for him in this regard. But in truth, Aristotle is the first to give precisely that which, for example, was the subject of the mysteries, not in the old seer form, but in the conceptual form. And so, anyone who wants to orient themselves in philosophy will have to go back to Aristotle. In him, he will find all the concepts that have been gained from other sources of knowledge in earlier times, but he will find them processed and worked up into a conceptual system. Above all, it is in Aristotle that we must seek the starting point of a - let us call it 'science' - a science that did not exist in this form within the development of mankind and could not have come into being. Anyone who can follow the development of humanity in this way, with the means of spiritual science, knows that before Aristotle – of course this is all to be understood with the famous Gran Salz – an Aristotelian logic was not conceivable in this way, because only Aristotle created a corresponding thinking technique, a logic. As long as higher wisdom was imparted directly in the mysteries, there was no need for logic. In a certain way, Aristotle is also the unrivaled master of logic. Despite all the efforts of the 19th century, logic has basically not made much progress in all essential points beyond what Aristotle has already given.

It would take us too far afield today to point out the reasons why philosophy could only enter into humanity at this time, in the time of Aristotle. Through anthroposophy, it will gradually become clear to many why a very specific age was necessary for the foundation of philosophy.

We then see how Aristotle is the leading philosopher for a long time and, with brief interruptions - which seem more like interruptions to today's people than they really were - remains so until today. All those who are active in other fields, let us say in Gnosticism, Platonism, or in the church teachings of early Christianity, they processed the Aristotelian arts of thought. And in a wonderful way, what Aristotle gave to humanity as the formal element of thinking also spread in the West, where what the Church had to say was more or less clothed in the forms that Aristotle had given in his thinking technique. Even though in the first centuries of the spread of Christianity, Aristotle's philosophy was still disseminated in the West in a very deficient form, this is essentially because the writings of Aristotle were not available in the original language. But people thought in terms of the thinking technique developed by Aristotle.

In a different way, Aristotle found acceptance in the East, only to come to the West again via the Arabs. Thus Aristotle found his way into the West in two ways: firstly through the Christian current and secondly through the current that gradually flowed into the culture of the West through the Arabs.

It was during this period that there was a great interest in Aristotle's thinking, which represents the actual high point in medieval philosophy, namely the first form of what is called “scholasticism”, specifically “early scholasticism”. Scholasticism essentially existed to be a philosophy of Christianity. It was compelled for two reasons to take up Aristotle: firstly, out of the old traditions, because one was accustomed to knowing Aristotle in the first place; even the Platonists and Neoplatonists were more Platonists in content; in their thought technique, they were often Aristotelian. But there was another reason why scholasticism had to rely on Aristotle, namely because scholasticism was compelled to take a stand against the influence of Arabism and thus against Oriental mysticism, so that in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find scholasticism philosophically justifying Christianity in the face of the Arab world of ideas. The Arab scholars came with their wonderfully honed Aristotelian knowledge and tried to attack Christianity from a variety of positions. If one wanted to defend Christianity, one had to show that the Arabs were using the instruments they were using in an incorrect way. The point was that the Arabs gave themselves the appearance that only they alone had the correct way of thinking of Aristotle and therefore directed their attacks against Christianity from this correct way of thinking of Aristotle. In the interpretation of the Arabs, it appeared as if anyone who stood on the ground of Aristotle must necessarily be an opponent of Christianity.

The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas arose in the face of this endeavor. His aim was to show that if one understands Aristotle correctly, one can use Aristotelian thought to justify Christianity. Thus, on the one hand, there was the tradition of proceeding in Aristotelian thought technique, on the other hand, the necessity to handle this very technique of Aristotle in the right way against the onslaught of Arabism, which was expressed in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

Thus we find a peculiar synthesis of Aristotelian thought in what constitutes the essence of scholastic philosophy in its early days, a philosophy that was much maligned but is little understood today. Very soon, then, the time came when scholastic philosophy was no longer understood. And then all kinds of scholastic aberrations occurred, for example the one that is usually referred to as the school of thought called “nominalism”, while early scholasticism was “realism”. It is due to this nominalism that scholasticism soon outlived itself and fell into disrepute and obscurity. In a sense, nominalism is the father of all modern skepticism.

It is a strange tangle of philosophical currents that we see emerging in our more recent times, all of which basically flow against scholasticism. We still see some minds that stand firmly and firmly in the Aristotelian technique of thought, but which are no longer completely protected against the onslaught of modernity. Nicholas of Cusa is one of them.

But then we see how the last thing that can be saved from this philosophical-methodical basis is to save Cartesius. And on the other hand, we see how all the good elements of Arabism - that kind of philosophy that combined more Western-Oriental vision with Aristotelianism - have intertwined with that technique of thought that we call “Kabbalistic”. Among the representatives of this trend is Spinoza, who cannot be understood otherwise than by linking him, on the one hand, to Western Orientalism and, on the other, to Kabbalism. All other talk about Spinoza is talk in which one has no solid ground under one's feet.

But then “empiricism” spread with a vengeance, especially under the aegis of Locke and Hume. And then we see how philosophy finds itself increasingly confronted with purely external material research - natural science - and how it gradually retreats before this kind of research. We then see how philosophy becomes entangled in a web from which it can hardly extricate itself. This is an important point where the philosophy of modern times gets caught, namely with Kant! And we see in the post-Kantian period how great philosophers appear, such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, who appear like a kind of meteor, but who are least understood by their own people. And we see how a brief, strange wrangling over ideas takes place in order to escape from the net in which Kantianism has caught the philosophers, how impossible it is for philosophy to escape from it, and how German thought in particular suffers from Kantianism in its most diverse variations, and how even all the beautiful and great attempts that are made suffer from Kantianism. Thus we see a deficiency appear in all of modern philosophy that has two sources: One is evident in the fact that at our philosophy chairs, which believe they have more or less freed themselves from Kantianism, people are still floundering in Kant's snares; the other is evident in the fact that philosophy suffers from a certain impossibility of asserting its position, which it should defend as philosophy, against the very short-sighted natural science.

Not until our philosophy has freed itself from the nets of Kantianism and from all that causes philosophy to stop in the face of the onslaught of natural science, not until our better-intentioned elements recognize how they can get over these two obstacles that stand in their way, can any salvation on the philosophical field be expected. Therefore, the philosophical field, especially within Germany, presents a truly sad picture, and it is highly distressing to see, for example, how psychology is gradually receding, how, for example, people who are actually incapable of doing anything other than processing elementary things a little in a philosophical way, but who do not get beyond certain trivialities, have a huge reputation, like Wundt, for example. On the other hand, it must be seen that minds such as Fechner's - who could be stimulating if people had an appreciation for it - are regarded by those who are pure dilettantes as a new Messiah. This was bound to happen and is not meant as criticism.

I would now like to start from a concept that is so closely related to the web in which philosophy has become entangled since Kant, which is the fundamental evil of the philosophical mind, an evil that can be characterized by the words: “philosophy has fallen prey to subjectivism!”

If we want to understand Kant, we must first understand him historically. Kant's view is actually born entirely out of the developmental history of human thought. Those who know Kant better are aware that the Kant of the 1750s and 1760s was completely absorbed in what was the most common philosophy in Germany at the time, which was called the Enlightenment philosophy of Wolf. In its external form, it was often a jumble of empty phrases, but its spirit was partly still borrowed from the old Leibnizianism. But let us concern ourselves here with a brief characterization of Wolffianism. We can say that for Wolffianism, the world view is divided into two truths: firstly, that of external observation and what man can gain from it; secondly, that which man can gain through pure thinking: 'a priori'. Thus there was also a physics - an astronomy, a cosmology - that was gained from the consideration of facts, and a rational physics - a rational astronomy - that was gained by pure thinking. Wolff was aware that human thinking, without taking any experience into account, could construct knowledge about the nature of the world purely rationally, out of itself. This was knowledge from pure reason, “a priori”, while “a posteriori” was knowledge that was gained from the senses, from mere understanding, from experience. Likewise, for Wolff there were two psychologies, one in which the soul observed itself, and the other, the rational psychology. And in the same way, Wolff distinguished between a natural theology based on revelation, on what has come down to us as revealed truth and is present as the supersensible in religious creeds; from this he distinguished rational theology, which could be derived from pure reason - a priori - and which, for example, draws the proofs of the existence of God from pure reason.

Thus, all knowledge of the time was divided into that which was derived from pure reason and that which was derived from pure experience. Those who stood on this ground studied at all universities at that time. Kant was also one of them, even though he went beyond them, as can be seen from one of his writings entitled: “On the Concept of Introducing the Negative into the World”. Then he became acquainted with the English skeptic Hume and thus became familiar with that form of skepticism that has a shattering effect on all rational knowledge, especially on the view of universal apriority, the law of causality. Hume says: There is nothing that can be gained by any a priori form of thinking. It is simply a habit of man to think that every fact is to be understood as the effect of a cause. And so the whole rational structure is something that one has become accustomed to. For Kant, who found something plausible in Hume, the ground was thus removed for Wolffian rationalism, so that he said to himself that only knowledge from experience is possible.

Kant then found himself in a very strange situation. His whole feeling and perception resisted the assumption that there was actually nothing absolutely certain. If you were to go along with Hume completely, you would have to say: Yes, we have seen that the sun rises in the morning and warms the stones, and we have concluded from all the cases that the sun rose in the morning and warmed the stones that there is a certain causal connection in this; but there is no necessity at all that this conclusion is an absolute truth. That is Hume's view. Kant did not want to abandon the absolute truth. It was also clear to him that no a priori statement is possible without experience. He therefore turned this last sentence around and said: Certainly, it is true that man cannot arrive at anything without experience; but does knowledge really come from experience? No, said Kant, there are mathematical judgments that are quite independent of experience. If mathematical judgments were derived from experience, we could only say that they have proved true so far, but we do not know whether they are correct. Kant added: The fact that we can make judgments like mathematical ones depends on the organization of the subject at the moment we make these judgments; we cannot think differently than the laws of mathematics are, therefore all experience must conform to the realm of mathematical lawfulness. So we have a world around us that we create according to the categories of our thinking and our experiences. We begin with experience, but this has only to do with our organization. We spread out the network of our organization, capture the material of experience according to the categories of perception and understanding of our subjective organization, and basically see a world picture that we have spun according to its form. [Gap in the postscript.]

Since Kant, philosophy has become ensnared in this subjectivism – except to a certain extent in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – in this subjectivism, which states that man has something to do with things only insofar as they make an impression on him. More and more has been attributed to Kantianism. Even Schopenhauer, who in his “World as Will and Representation” really goes beyond Kant, but also others to a much greater extent, have only understood this Kantianism to mean that the “thing in itself” is completely inaccessible to human knowledge, whereas everything that occurs in man - from the first sensory impression to the processing of impressions as knowledge - is merely an effect on the subject.

You see that man is then basically cut off from everything objective, only wrapped up in his subjectivity. “Our world is not a world of things, only a world of ideas,” says Schopenhauer. The thing is something that lies beyond the subject. The moment we know something, what we have before us is already our idea. The thing lies beyond the subject, in the trans-subjective. The world is my idea and I only move within my ideas. That is the net in which philosophy has caught itself and you can find it spread over the whole thinking of the nineteenth century. And this thinking could not lead to anything else in the field of psychology either, except to understand that which is given to us as something subjective. This is even noticeable in the individual sciences. Consider the teachings of Helmholtz. Helmholtz says: That which is given to us is no longer just an image, but only a sign of the real image; man must never claim that what he perceives has a similarity to reality.

The whole development of subjectivism in the nineteenth century is an example of how people can lose their impartiality once they are wrapped up in a thought. Eduard von Hartmann's “Transcendental Realism” is an example of this. It was impossible to talk to Eduard von Hartmann about the fact that perhaps the world could not just be “my imagination”. He had become so wrapped up in this theory that it was hardly possible to discuss an epistemological question with him objectively. He could not get beyond this definition “the world is my imagination”.

Anyone who is fair will not deny that this subjectivism, which lies in the sentence “the world is my imagination”, has something tremendously seductive about it. If you look at it from the subject's point of view, you will say that if we want to recognize something, we must always be active. From the first sensation to the last generation of the point in our field of vision that means “red”, we must be active. If it were not for the way our eyes are organized, “red” could never appear in our eyes. So that when you survey the field of experience, you have the activity of the subject in the experiences, and that therefore everything within your knowledge, viewed from the subject, is produced by yourself. This is in a certain way very significant, that man must be active, down to the last detail, if he wants to recognize. The subjectivity of the human being touches on the “thing in itself”; wherever it touches, it experiences an affection; you only ever experience a modification of your own powers. So you spin yourself in; you do not go beyond the surface of the “thing in itself”. All you could achieve is to say: My own activity always pushes against the surface of the 'thing in itself', and everywhere I feel only my own activity.

I would like to give you an image. This image is one that none of the subjectively oriented philosophers has really thought through. For if they did, they would find in this image the possibility of getting out of subjectivity.

You have a sheet of paper, drip liquid sealing wax on it and now press a seal into the sealing wax. Now I ask you: What has happened here? On the seal there should be a name, let us say “Miller”. When you have pressed it, what is in the seal is absolutely identical to what is in the sealing wax. If you go through all the sealing wax, you will not find the slightest atom that has come from the seal into the sealing wax. The two touch each other, and then the name “Miller” appears. Imagine that the sealing wax were a cognizant being and would say, “I am sealing wax through and through; that is my property, to be sealing wax. Out there, the seal is a ‘thing in itself’; not the slightest part of this ‘thing in itself’ can get into me.” The substance of the brass remains completely outside; and yet, if you remove the seal, the name “Müller”, on which it depends, is absolutely correct for the sealing wax. But you cannot say that the sealing wax has produced the name “Müller”. The name “Müller” would never have come about if there had not been a touch.

If only sealing wax could talk and say, “This imprint is only subjective!” – That is basically what all Kantians conclude; only they do so in such convoluted thoughts that the simple person can no longer recognize the error in such something simple.

Now, however, the seal impression completely matches the name engraved in the seal, which is what matters here, apart from the mirror image, which is not considered here. Therefore, the impression and imprint can be considered identical, at least with regard to the essential, the name “Müller”. It is exactly the same with the impressions we receive from the outside world: they are identical with the way in which things exist outside, that is to say, in relation to the essential in both.

Now, the sealing-wax could still say: “I do not get to know brass after all.” But that would mean that what contains the name “Miller” would also be recognized in terms of its material nature. But that is not the point. You have to distinguish between refuting Kantianism – if we follow this example to its conclusion, Kantianism is absolutely refuted – and completely transcending subjectivism. And that raises the question of whether we can now also find the other thing, which is neither in the nature of the sealing wax nor in that of the brass, which is above both and will be a synthesis between objectivism and subjectivism? For merely refuting Kantianism is not enough.

If we want to answer this question, we have to delve a little deeper into the problems. The fact that recent philosophy has not been able to make any headway in this area is due to the fact that it has lost touch with a real technique of thinking. Our question now is this: Is there anything in man that can be experienced that is not subjective? Or does only that live in man that cannot go beyond subjectivity?

If humanity had been able to follow the straight path from Aristotle, it would never have been entangled in the web of Kantianism. The straight path – without the break in the Middle Ages – would have led to the realization that there is a supersubjective reality above the subjective. Mankind did not progress in a straight line from Aristotle, but rather took a detour, and this deviation already began in the later scholasticism due to the emergence of nominalism. It then rolled further and further down this wrong path until it finally found itself entangled in a formal net with Kant. To get out of this impasse, we have to go back to Aristotle and ask ourselves: Is there nothing that goes beyond the merely subjective, that is, so to speak, subjective-objective?

Let us consider how Aristotle treats cognition. He distinguishes between cognition through the “sense” and cognition through the “mind”. Cognition through the sense is directed towards the individual sensual thing, cognition through the mind is directed towards making a distinction between “matter” and “form”. And Aristotle understands “form” to mean a great deal. Mankind would first have to be made aware of Aristotle's concept of form in the right way. An old friend of mine in Vienna always made this clear to his students using one example. Matter is basically not the essence of a thing, but the essence of a thing for our minds is the “form”.

If we want to make this distinction correctly in the sense of Aristotle, then we must say: All wolves are based on the species from which they “sprang”, which transformed matter into wolves. And the human soul represents the wolves in the concept, so that the generic concept in the human soul is for Aristotle what is represented in the soul, what the species is. How man recognizes the genus in the generic concept depends entirely on him, but not the reality of the genus.

Thus we have a union between what is only in the soul, the concept, and what is in the realm of the trans-subjective or the genus. This is absolute realism, without falling into the error of Plato, who subjectivized the species and regarded them as a kind of trans-subjective powers. He grasps the concept of the species again as the essence in itself, whereas the concept is only the expression of the soul for the transcendental reality “species”.

From here we then come to the task of early scholasticism, which of course had the very special task of justifying Christianity. Here, however, we will only deal with the epistemological basis of early scholasticism in a few words. It is initially based entirely on the fact that man knows nothing but his ideas. It is true that we know through ideas, but what we imagine is not “the idea” but the object of the idea. The “representation” is an impression in the subject, and need not be more. Now it is important that you understand the relationship between subject and object in the early scholastic sense. Everything that is recognized depends entirely on the form of the human mind. Nothing can enter or leave the soul that does not come from the organization of that soul itself. But that which originally underlies the work of the soul comes about through the soul's contact with the object. And it is the subject's contact with the object that makes the idea possible. This is why early scholasticism said that man does not present his ideas, but that his ideas represent the thing to him. If you want to grasp the content of the idea, you have to look for the content of the idea in the thing.

However, this example shows that in order to absorb the scholastic concepts, one needs a keen mind and a fine distinction, which are usually lacking in those who simply condemn scholasticism. You have to get involved with such sentences: “I present” or “My ideas represent a content, and that comes from the object”. Modern man wants to get straight down to the nitty-gritty with all the concepts, as they arise for him out of trivial life. That is why the scholastics all appear to him to be school foxes. In a sense, they are, because they have just seen to it that man first learned something: a discipline of thinking technique. The thinking technique of the scholastics is one of the strictest that has ever occurred in humanity.

Thus, in all that man cognizes, we have a web of concepts that the soul acquires from the objects. There is a fine scholastic definition: in everything that man has in his soul in this way, in the representations and concepts, the object represented by the same exists in the manner of the soul. “In the cognized, the objective exists in the manner of the soul.” Down to the last detail, everything is the work of the soul. The soul has indeed represented everything in its own way within itself, but at the same time the object is connected with it.

Now the question is this: How do we get out of subjectivism today? By taking the straight path from Aristotle, we would have got beyond subjectivism. But for profound reasons, this straight path could not be followed. The early days of Christianity could not immediately produce the highest form of knowledge through thinking. In the first centuries, something else lived in the souls, which prevented scholasticism from [gap in the transcription] rising above subjectivity.

We can easily understand how to get beyond subjectivism if, in the manner of the scholastics, we understand the difference between concept and representation. What is this difference? It is easiest to understand this using a circle as an example. We can gain the representation of a circle by taking a boat out to sea to a point where we see the vault of heaven on the horizon all around us. There we have gained the idea of the circle. We can also gain the idea of the circle if we tie a stone to a thread and swing it around. Or, even cruder, we can get this idea from a wagon wheel. There you have the circle everywhere in the life of ideas. Now there is another way to get the circle, the way in which you get the circle through purely inner construction, by saying: the circle is a curved line in which every point is the same distance from a center. - You have constructed this concept yourself, but in doing so you have not described yourself.

You can gain the idea through experience, you can get the concept through inner construction. The idea still has to do with subject and object. At the moment when a person constructs internally, the subject and object are irrelevant to what he has constructed internally. Whether you really construct a circle is absolutely irrelevant to the nature of the circle. The nature of the circle, insofar as we come to it through internal construction, is beyond subject and object.

Now, however, modern man does not have much that he can construct in this way. Goethe tried to create such [inner constructions for higher areas of natural existence as well. In doing so, he came up with his “archetypes”, his “archetypal phenomena”].

In such an inner construction, the subject rises above itself, it goes beyond subjectivity. To return to the image - the sealing wax, as it were, into the matter of the seal.

Only in such pure, sensuality-free thinking does the subject merge with its object. This high level could not be attained immediately. Man had to pass through an intermediate stage first. Up to a certain point in time man worked directly out of the spiritual world; he did not think for himself, but received everything from the Mysteries. Thought only arose at a certain time. Therefore, logic was only developed at a certain time. The possibility of developing pure, sensuality-free thinking was only attained at a certain stage of development. This type was already attained, potentially, in the nineteenth century in minds such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. And we have to develop it further in the more intimate areas through spiritual science. Spiritual research is to be re-founded on pure, sensuality-free thinking, as it has been lived and expressed, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools. In earlier times of human development, people were initiated into the deeper secrets of existence by initiates. Now they must train themselves to gradually work out these things for themselves. In the meantime, it was important to maintain the connection with the divine world. In order for Christianity to mature calmly, the knowledge of the supersensible had to be withdrawn from human research for a certain period of time. People should learn to believe, even without knowing. Therefore, for a time, Christianity relied on mere belief. People were to let the idea mature quietly. Hence we have the coexistence of faith and knowledge in scholasticism. In scholasticism, the concept only wants to provide a firm support for what, with regard to supersensible objects, should be left for a certain period to what has been imparted to it through revelation. This is the standpoint of scholasticism: to keep the things of revelation aloof from criticism until man's thinking has matured. The foster-father who gave thinking its technique was Aristotle. But this thinking should first be trained on firm points of support in outer reality.

Today it is a matter of understanding the spirit of scholasticism in contrast to what dogma is. This spirit can only be recognized in the fact that what was beyond the power of judgment remained the subject of supersensible revelation, while the consequence of rational knowledge was that man himself should arrive at productive concepts, at that which is imperishable in them, through the world of sensual experience. This method of constructing concepts was to remain - and it is precisely this method that modern philosophy has completely lost. Nominalism has conquered modern philosophy by saying: the concepts that are formed according to the nature of the soul are mere names. The connection with the real had been completely lost because the instrument of those who no longer properly understood scholasticism had become blunt. Early scholasticism wanted to sharpen thinking on the thread of experience [for the supersensible-real]. But then came others who clung to the documents of experience, whereas reason was only to be trained on them. And then came the current that said: Forever must the supersensible be withdrawn from all human rational knowledge! - And according to Luther's saying, reason is “the stone-blind, the deaf, the mad fool”.

Here we see the starting point of that great conflict between what could be known and what could be believed; and Kantianism arose from this one-sided, nominalistic school of thought only in a mysterious way. For basically, all Kant wanted was to show that Reason, when left to its own devices, is nothing but a “stone-blind, deaf, and crazy fool.” When reason presumes to transgress the boundaries it itself has laid down in [...] [... gap in the transcription], then it is the “blind fool.” In the one-sided development of [nominalistic] thinking, we see the web in which Kantianism has spun itself maturing. Knowledge is tied to external experience, which is now even prescribed the limits. And faith [gap in the postscript].

It is a task that only anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will be able to accomplish: to get philosophy back on the right track.

This winter's lecture series sought to characterize the spiritual movement from various perspectives, which is supposed to be the attempt to lead the human soul through immersion in its own essence to those insights that it must long for with regard to the most important riddles of existence and life. An attempt has been made to show how, in a completely natural way, by considering present or emerging intellectual currents, spiritual science will show itself to be the right instrument for guiding the human soul into the realm of spiritual knowledge in a way that is appropriate to the present and the near future, in accordance with the laws given by the development of the human spirit. At the same time, as an undertone of these winter reflections, we have always tried to let it be heard what achievements and results spiritual life and spiritual striving have brought to humanity in the nineteenth century. For one can truly say that, given the way in which spiritual striving and spiritual life in the nineteenth century has seized humanity, and how this humanity has brought about the great triumph of material existence, it would seem a hopeless undertaking if this spiritual science, as it is meant here, had to rebel against or reject the justified demands of natural science or, in general, the intellectual results of the nineteenth century.

So it may perhaps be appropriate to end this lecture cycle by taking a look at what we can call the spiritual heritage of the nineteenth century, in order to perhaps be able to point out, by considering this spiritual heritage of the nineteenth century, how natural the spiritual science meant here is for the current development cycle of humanity.

What does this spiritual science of the soul attempt to be? It attempts to be a realization of the soul's origin in the spiritual; it attempts to be a realization of those worlds, those supersensible worlds, to which the soul belongs as a spiritual being, quite apart from the fact that this soul lives within the physical-sensory world through the tools and instruments of its body. It thus attempts to prove this soul to be a citizen of the supersensible worlds. It attempts to show that the soul, when it applies those methods often spoken of here during the course of this winter, can achieve such a development that powers of recognition are awakened in the soul, which otherwise hardly resonate in a person's life like an undertone of this life, but which, when unfolded and developed, really place this soul in the worlds to which it actually belongs with its higher being. When the soul discovers these powers in itself, it comes to recognize itself as an entity for which birth and death, or, let us say, conception and death, represent boundaries in the same sense that the blue firmament of heaven represents boundaries for the soul that recognizes in the spirit of natural science since the dawn of modern natural science, roughly since the work of Giordano Bruno and those who were like-minded to him. As the soul becomes aware of the forces slumbering within her, something similar happens in her for the temporal-spiritual as it did for the outer knowledge of the spatial-material in the time of the dawn of modern science, when, for example, For example, Giordano Bruno pointed out that this blue vault of heaven, which for centuries and centuries was thought to be a reality, is nothing more than a boundary that human knowledge sets for itself through a kind of inability and which it can transcend if it understands itself.

Just as Giordano Bruno showed that behind this blue vault of heaven lies the infinite sea of space with the infinite worlds embedded in it, so spiritual science has to show that the boundary set by birth and death or by conception and death only exists because the human soul's capacity is limited in time just as it once limited itself through the blue vault of heaven in space, but that when infinity can be extended beyond birth and death to the conception of the spiritual facts in which the soul is interwoven, the soul recognizes itself as permeating through repeated earthly lives. So that the soul's life on the one hand flows in the existence between birth and death, on the other hand in the time from death to a new birth.

If we go out with our view into the temporal-spiritual expanses, as science has gone out into spatial expanses, then the human soul recognizes itself by stepping out of the life it has gone through between death and the last birth, into the life between birth and death, both as co-creator of the finer organization of its own body and as creator of its own destiny. Furthermore, it has been said – this has perhaps been less touched upon this winter, but it has been in previous years and can be read about in spiritual-scientific literature – that the soul, when it grasps itself in its deeper powers, also traces itself back to the times when life in physical forms of existence began; that it can trace itself back to those times when it was already there before our earth planet took on its material form, before the earth as a material form itself emerged from a purely spiritual primal being, in which the human soul was already present in its first form, even before the emergence of the natural kingdoms surrounding us, the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. And again the prospect opens up of a future into which the human soul has to enter when the earthly embodiments have been fulfilled, into which it will then pass into a purely spiritual world that will replace the earth; so that one can look can look forward to a future in which the human soul will enter, will enter purely spiritually, so that it will have to bring the fruits of earthly life forms to what it will achieve again as a spiritual kingdom, as in a primeval state. But it will not achieve it in the same form as it started out, but with the result of everything that can be acquired in earthly embodiments.

When the soul takes hold of itself in such a way that it condenses with the forces slumbering within it, then it also recognizes itself in connection with worlds that are the source worlds themselves opposite our earth planet; it recognizes itself as a citizen of the entire universe. From the successive earth-lives of the individual soul, spiritual science can take the upward surge to the successive lives of the planets, and even of the suns in the universe. The method is therefore one that consists in the soul's self-education to its deepest powers. The result is the realization of the origin and direction of the soul's life, the realization that the first is spirit, to which the soul belongs, that it is spirit that lets matter emerge from itself and brings it into its forms, and the most important form, which interests us most in our earthly existence, is the form of the human body. This realization will therefore have to become part of the consciousness of humanity in the near future: that spirit is the first and the highest, that spirit releases matter out of itself, just as water gives rise to ice out of itself, that spirit is what gives its outer form to the human body, that spirit with the spiritual activities, facts and entities of the world, and that the human soul is a citizen of this world of spiritual facts and entities, which release all external material existence from themselves, pouring it into the corresponding forms that then make up the visible universe around us, which can be perceived by the senses. This is how I would briefly characterize what can be the method and what the result of what is called spiritual science here.

This spiritual science is only just beginning in our present time. It has often been emphasized that it must seem quite understandable that enemies and opponents of this spiritual science are still rising from all sides today. This must seem understandable, especially to those who stand on the ground of this spiritual science themselves and, so to speak, know its whole character in relation to the rest of the cultural life of the present day. It is not surprising that this spiritual science finds enemies and opponents, that it is seen as fantasy, as reverie, perhaps sometimes as something even worse. It would be more surprising if, given the nature of this spiritual science, there were already more voices of recognition and encouragement in the present than is the case. For it seems very much as if not only the results of this spiritual science, but also the whole way of thinking and imagining, as it had to be practiced here, contradicts all habits of thought and all modes of imagination that have arisen for humanity precisely through the legacy of the nineteenth century. But it only seems so. And it may be said that this appears most to those who believe that they must stand on the firm ground of this heritage of the nineteenth century, that they consider only a materialistic way or a materialistically colored way of looking at the world to be compatible with this heritage of the nineteenth century.

What the spiritual scientist himself must recognize as this spiritual science does not seem to contradict the legacy of the nineteenth century at all.

At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great philosopher of the West, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, was writing his famous work “The Destiny of Man,” which is a testament to the hope for what the human soul can achieve inwardly and what it can become when it becomes aware of its powers and uses them. If you follow how he expressed himself to his most intimate friends and close associates while working on this writing, it is that he was able to glimpse into the deepest secrets of human cognitive and religious feeling. When one then goes through this writing, one can be fascinated by a kind of self-testimony, which in this writing the human soul seeks for the sake of its security, for the sake of its hope. In the first chapter, Fichte assumes that the knowledge gained through the external observation of nature and the physical world is basically only an external appearance, hardly that which one could seriously call a dream. how the soul takes hold of itself, takes hold of itself in its will, how it becomes certain of its own existence, then one gets an impression, which can be characterized something like this, even more through the individual explanations of this writing than through the whole context in which it is placed. This human soul has tried to pose the question: Can I stand before myself if I have no trust in all the knowledge that presents itself to me through my senses, and even through the contemplation of the external intellect? — In the style of his time, Fichte answered this question affirmatively in a grandiose way. What is impressive about this writing is precisely what it can become for the soul through the nature of the language, through the inwardly secure tone, which is so secure despite the renunciation of outwardly apparent knowledge.

Now, this writing is right in the middle of a striving of Western intellectual life for the sources of human confidence and human knowledge. The period in which Fichte aspired to such a powerful way of grasping the human soul was followed, so to speak, by the heyday of philosophical endeavor. What Fichte himself tried, what Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer tried, what was attempted in the field of philosophy in the first third of the nineteenth century to penetrate the secrets of the world with the power of human thinking , all this worked – however one may feel today about the results of this intellectual upsurge – through the way one felt in this striving, how one willed, grandiosely on every feeling and sensing human soul.

If you let yourself be influenced by Schelling, you might say, you would gain from an understanding of the world that is made secure by intellect but then becomes more imaginative. It is a world view that could really carry him beyond all material things into the spiritual evolution of the world. If you then move on to Hegel's striving of thought, which to penetrate into the innermost being of things through the power of thought alone, so that Hegel wanted to make clear to the human soul that in the power of thought it has the sources into which all the powers of the world flow and in which one has everything to grasp oneself, so to speak, in the eternal — then one sees a powerful struggle of humanity. One need only consider the hope and confidence that were attached to this powerful struggle.

And again, if one turns back, one might notice something that can somewhat enlighten the deeper observer of this entire epoch, of which we have now briefly spoken, about its origin. Thus, if we look back to the year 1784, we find a small, characteristic essay by Kant entitled “What is Enlightenment?” Its almost pedantic style does not always allow us to see how deeply the sometimes quite intellectual thoughts of this essay are rooted in the whole struggle of the human soul in modern times. “What is Enlightenment?” This question was posed by Kant, the same Kant who was so moved by the often chaotic but nevertheless powerful striving of the human spirit, as it came to light for example in Rousseau, that when he – which is more than an anecdote – could not keep still, but disrupted his entire daily routine and went for a walk at a completely irregular time (Kant, after whose walk one could otherwise set the clock) in Königsberg! But we know how Kant's soul was stirred by the freedom movement of the eighteenth century. This then, when we take this little writing in our hands, comes across to us, one might say, quite monumentally, in the sentences that we read there. Enlightenment, Kant says, is the emergence of the human soul from its self-imposed immaturity. — Dare to use your reason! This sentence is taken from Kant's writing of 1784. One really appreciates this sentence: Dare to use your reason!as well as the others, especially when one realizes that they express something like the human soul coming to itself for the first time in a certain sense. Let us try to see these two Kantian sentences from his essay of 1784 in their true light, using a simple thought.

Cartesius, who as a philosopher did not precede Kant's work by very long — if we consider this “not very long” in terms of world development — went back to a striking and significant sentence. He pointed the human soul to its own thinking and thus did the same again that Augustine had already done in the first Christian centuries. It sounded like a keynote of Descartes's soul life when he said: “I think, therefore I am,” and in saying this he was saying something that Augustine had already said in a similar way: You can doubt the whole world, but by doubting you think, and by thinking you are, and by grasping yourself in thinking you grasp existence in yourself.

A person of sound mind cannot, according to Cartesius, possibly recognize himself as a thinking soul and doubt his existence. I think, therefore I am – this was, despite the fact that Augustine had already formulated a similar sentence, nevertheless something extraordinarily significant for the century of Cartesius and for what followed in the eighteenth century. But if we follow Cartesius as he goes on to build a worldview, looking further from this sentence as a basis, then we see that he takes up everything that has been handed down from centuries of tradition. One sees how his thinking, with what wants to arise from the human soul itself, stops at the traditions brought together from the centuries, at the spiritual truths, at the questions about the fate of the human soul after death and so on. Cartesius stops at the actual spiritual truths.

When you consider that, it becomes clear what it means that the Kantian sentences resounded in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century: Enlightenment is the stepping out of the human soul from its self-imposed immaturity, and: Dare to use your reason! That is to say, people have now dared to trust the human soul with the power to reach the sources of its existence, to reach the sources of its strength through its own power, through its own greatness. This is precisely the characterization of Kant's statement, and it is proof of it.

From there everything that is contained in the bold sentences of Fichte's writing started, from there started that bold thought work that stands so grandiosely in the philosophy of the Occident from the first third of the nineteenth century. If we consider this upsurge of the human spirit, which we do not want to consider today in terms of the truth or falsity of its content, but in terms of what the human soul hoped to gain from it in terms of inner confidence and certainty of hope, and if we turn our turns one's gaze further into the mid-nineteenth century, one is perhaps touched by a word of a man like the writer of the history of philosophy, also the independent philosopher, but especially the biographer of Hegel, Karl Rosenkranz. In his preface to his “Life of Hegel” (1844), he writes: “It is not without melancholy that I part from this work, since one would hope that one day there would be a coming to be, not just a coming to be of the becoming! For does it not seem as if we of today are only the gravediggers and monument-makers for the philosophers who gave birth to the second half of the last (eighteenth) century only to die in the first of the present?” From such a statement, one feels perhaps more than from other descriptions how around the middle of the nineteenth century the whole splendor of philosophical endeavor had quickly faded from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and from the first third of the nineteenth century.

But another splendor arose immediately. While in the 1830s and 1840s the splendor of philosophical intellectual life quickly faded, a new confidence arose, one might say a new bliss of hope. This had already been prepared by the great scientific overviews of a physiologist like Johannes Müller and by everything that people like Alexander Humboldt and others have done. But then came such significant achievements as the discovery of the cell and its effect in the living organism by Schleiden and Schwann. This marked the beginning of a new era of the splendor of scientific knowledge. And now we see, in what has been done, all that will indeed shine immortal in the evolution of the nineteenth century. We see how the great achievements of physics follow on: in the forties, the discovery of the law of the conservation of energy and of the transformation of heat by Julius Robert Mayer and by Helmholtz. Those who are familiar with contemporary physics know that it was only through this discovery that physics became possible in the modern sense. We see how physics is led from triumph to triumph, how the discovery of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen draws attention away from the material conditions on Earth and towards the material conditions in the heavens, by recognizing how the same substances are revealed in all the conditions in the heavens. We see how physics arrives at combining its theoretical foundations with the practical application of its principles, how it succeeds in penetrating into technology, and how it changes the culture of the Earth planet. We see natural fields such as electricity and magnetism, by connecting them with technology, stand as something great. We see the most highly developed future prospects joining the contemplation of the living, the organic, which was given by Darwin and in its further developments by Haeckel.

We see all this incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity. We see how Lyell's research from the beginning of the nineteenth century is followed by today's geology, which attempts to give a picture of the course of events on earth in a material sense. We see how grandiose attempts are also being made here to integrate the origin of man into the processes of the earth by means of purely material laws, to connect the biological with the geological. But all that has taken the place of the power of thought in the first third of the nineteenth century has not only deeply influenced theoretical worldviews. For if that had been the case, one could say that all this initially took place as if on a kind of upper horizon of intellectual development; but below that is the horizon of the rest of the population, who do not concern themselves with it. No, there is nothing in the development of mankind into which his instincts have not driven, which has now been sketched with a few cursory lines. We see it stretching everywhere into the mysterious formations of this spiritual path of humanity.

The human soul itself, in its innermost being and existence, has by no means remained untouched by what has taken place there. What took place there could be summarized, so to speak, characterizing the legacy that the nineteenth century left us, for example in a soul that was still allowed to listen to what came out of Fichte's mouth, which is contained, for example, in his writing “The Destiny of Man”. Such a soul would have had certain feelings and emotions about its own nature, about the way it can experience itself. This inner structure in relation to the experience of oneself at the beginning of the nineteenth century would present itself quite differently if we consider a soul that, I do not want to say, adheres to a materialistic creed, but which, with open senses and with interest, devotes itself to everything that legitimately flows from the heritage of the nineteenth century. This human soul has not remained untouched in its innermost being by what is unfolding around it in the expansion of the big city centers, has not remained untouched by the cultural achievements that stand as an embodiment of the new spiritual life, that spiritual life that has been gained from the contemplation of the new laws of the mechanical world order. From these views, which, so to speak, prove that the universe and its laws are to be regarded in a similar way to the laws that also govern machines and locomotives, a soul was still free to devote itself wholeheartedly to a work such as Fichte's “The Destiny of Man”. It has been rightly emphasized that this human soul had to undergo its transformation under the influence of all that has necessarily emerged as a material cultural result of the way of thinking, feeling and sensing that was characterized by the way it was transformed in the nineteenth century.

Consider the individual symptoms that have emerged as a result of what nineteenth-century scientific thought has delivered. Think of how the painter in earlier times stood in front of the canvas, how he mixed his colors, how he knew that they would hold; because he knew what he had mixed into them. The nineteenth century, with its great achievements and advances in technology, instructs the painter to buy his colors. He no longer knows what is presented to his senses, he does not know how long the splendor that he creates on the canvas will last, how long the impression will last. Yes, it is only under the influence of technology, which has emerged from the achievements of natural science, that we have today what we have today as public journalism, as our modern newspaper system and everything that makes an impression on the human soul, which, above all, has changed the whole pace of the human soul, and with it the thought forms, the whole influence on the feelings and thus also the structure of the feelings. Not only must we remember how quickly things come to man today through the achievements of modern technology, but we must also point out how quickly what the human mind achieves reaches other human minds through journalism, and what abundance reaches the human mind.

Now compare what a person can learn today through this journalism about what is happening in the world, and also about what the human mind is exploring, with the way he could learn about all the events at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Take a mind like Goethe's! We can look at him precisely because of the careful way in which his correspondence has been preserved, we can almost know what he did from hour to hour, we can know what he talked about and did with this or that scholar. Through this, the achievements of human intellectual life slowly flow together in his lonely Weimar room. But the central figure of Goethe was necessary for this to happen, which anyone can do today through journalism. But that changes the whole human soul, the whole position of the human soul in relation to the environment.

Let's approach something else. Today we write books or read books. Anyone who writes a book today knows that it will no longer be readable after about sixty years if it is printed on the paper that is the result of great technological advances, because it will have disintegrated. So, if you are not under any illusions, you know how much what was done in the past differs from what is available today.

In one lecture of this series, I tried to characterize a mind that, although it is connected to the whole spirit of the first half of the nineteenth century, is nevertheless a mind of the second half of that century: Herman Grimm. We have seen that he presents himself as a custodian of the heritage of the first half of the nineteenth century into the second half. But anyone who reads Herman Grimm's art essays with inner understanding will notice two things, among other things. In his work, even in the most valuable essays, a certain school resonates that he went through, a school that can be heard resonating in every essay. He was only able to undergo this schooling because, relatively early on, by what is called chance, he came into contact with a great mind, that of Emerson, a great preacher and writer who was a preacher and writer of world views not in the sense of older times, but in the most modern sense. Try to visualize Emerson, to immerse yourself in him, and you will find that a nineteenth-century spirit stands before us. Try to feel the pulse of the thoughts that arise with the coloration and nuance of the nineteenth century, even when they refer to Plato the philosopher or Swedenborg the mystic. No matter how unprejudiced they are, they are nineteenth-century thoughts that could only be thought in a century that was destined to make the telegraph the world's means of communication. Emerson, in particular, has a mind that, while rooted in Western culture, elevates this culture of the West to what it has become in the eminent sense. One tries to compare a page by Emerson with a page by Goethe, wherever one might open Goethe. Then try – which, however, you must find natural in the case of Goethe – to compare the image of the leisurely Goethe, still walking in the steps of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rapidly hurrying being of the man of the nineteenth century, which continues to have an effect in the train of thought of Herman Grimm. That is one thing.

But then we saw how Herman Grimm, in his wonderful novel of the times, 'Unüberwindliche Mächte' (Insurmountable Forces), even pointed to the existence of the human etheric body or life body, as he pointed to much that has only been fully developed in spiritual science. But one can also see how Herman Grimm deals with everything artistic in a thoroughly personally interesting, outstanding way, how he is able to juxtapose more distant periods of time artistically, how he is able to give an interesting, subtle consideration of art. It is impossible for anyone who is able to see such things to think that the thoughts that form the most beautiful essays of Herman Grimm could have been written in any other age than the one in which it was impossible for Herman Grimm to travel from Berlin to Florence or South Tyrol without being in a hurry. For this is the precondition for the formation of much of his work. Imagine that someone like Herman Grimm could have said in earlier centuries: “I have always written the most important parts of my Homer book in Gries near Bolzano during the weeks of spring, because that is when I feel the effect of spring!” That something like this could be integrated into a person's life is only possible in the overall atmosphere of the nineteenth century. There we feel a confluence of what springs forth as a wonderful contemplation of art in Herman Grimm, what proves to be an immersion into the soul of the entire cultural impact of the nineteenth century, with what emanates from technology, and flowing back into it, from the triumphs of the nineteenth century.

It is impossible to understand some of the deepest things of the nineteenth century if one is unable to summarize them with what is the most important legacy of the nineteenth century: with the scientific ideas with which the nineteenth century tried to understand the world. Today we cannot but admit that something lives in our soul as one of its most important instruments, which would not be there at all without the structure of scientific thinking, as we have it as a legacy of the nineteenth century. That is one side of it, the side that presents itself to us in what this human soul has made of itself after it has undertaken what Kant so monumentally characterized when he said: Enlightenment is the human soul's emergence from its self-imposed immaturity, and: Dare to use your reason! — This tendency of the Enlightenment, that is, the use of the means of research of the human soul, went through the philosophical upsurge and into the age of natural science, just as this human soul happens to be. But how did that happen overall? From the point of view of spiritual science, we have to consider a larger context if we want to understand what has actually been expressed, if we want to understand the configuration, the structure of our soul, in which we see the will to enlightenment on the one hand, and on the other hand everything that scientific culture has given us. To do this, we have to juxtapose at least three successive cultural epochs of human development. These cultural cycles have already been referred to in the context of these lectures, in the sense of the observation that arises from an understanding of human spiritual life, which attempts to fathom how the human soul returns through the ages in successive earthly and from earlier ages to later ones not only carries over its own guilt in order to atone for it in the sense of a great law of fate, but also carries over what it has inwardly experienced in the way of cultural achievements. In the sense of this spiritual knowledge, we initially distinguish three ages. Other ages precede these three. However, there is not enough time today to go into them.

The first age of importance for us is the Egyptian-Chaldean age, which came to an end around the eighth century BC. If we want to characterize it, we can say that during this age the human soul lived in such a way that it still sensed something of its connection with the whole universe, with the whole cosmos. In its destiny on earth, it still felt dependent on the course of the stars and the events of the great universe. This age of earlier millennia is filled with reflections on the dependence of human life on the starry worlds and the great universe, right up to about the eighth century BC. The soul felt wonderfully touched when it delved into ancient Egyptian or ancient Chaldean wisdom, when it saw how everything was geared towards feeling the connection of the soul with the cosmos beyond the narrow human existence. Something that was important for feeling this connection of the soul with the cosmos in this cultural epoch was the appearance, for example, of Sirius. And important with regard to what man did for the culture of the soul, what he utilized for the soul or accomplished for it, was the observation of the laws of the heavens. Man felt that he was born out of the whole universe, felt his connection with the extra-terrestrial as well as with the earthly; he felt, as it were, transferred down out of spiritual worlds into the earthly world. This feeling was a final echo of the ancient clairvoyance from which the human soul originated, and which has been mentioned here several times. This ancient clairvoyance was present in primeval times, and man has lost it in the course of development so that he can observe the world in its present form. At that time, in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, there was still an echo of ancient clairvoyance. Man could still grasp the spiritual connection of soul-spiritual laws in all natural existence and wanted to grasp it. In a certain respect, the human soul was not alone with itself. By feeling itself on earth, it was connected and interwoven with the forces that played into the earth from the universe.

Then came the Greco-Latin period, which we can roughly estimate, in terms of its essential nature and its after-effects, as lasting from the eighth century BC to the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth century AD, because the after-effects of this cultural epoch continue for so long. When we look at this age, especially at its first awakening, we find that the human soul has freed itself in a higher sense from the universe, in its knowledge, in its faith, in its recognition of the forces at work within it. In particular, if we look at the Greeks, we can see that the healthy human being, as he developed in the soul, also felt, as he stood on the earth, connected with his natural bodily being. This is what the Greek soul felt and experienced in the second of the periods under consideration. Today it is actually difficult to characterize what is meant by this. We have tried to bring it closer to our understanding in our reflections on Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. The Greeks lived quite differently in relation to the spiritual and soul life. This was particularly the case, for example, with the Greek artist. Today, one does not even want to admit what was special about the feelings and perceptions of the Greek soul. That the sculptor, who represented the human form in the true sense, could have before him what we call the model today, that he could shape the human form according to the model, is impossible for the Greeks to imagine. It was not so. The relationship of today's artist to his model would have been unthinkable in Greece. For the Greek knew: My entire body is alive with my soul and spirit. He sensed how the forces of this spiritual-soul life flowed into the formation of the arm, into the formation of the muscles, into the formation of the whole human form. And he knew that just as they flowed into the human form, so he had to express them in his sculptures. In accordance with his inner knowledge of the nature of the body, he knew how to recreate what he himself could feel in the external material. Thus he could say to himself: I am weak, but if I developed my will, I could let it work in the formation of the muscles, in the formation of the arm, and thereby become stronger. — What he experienced in this way he poured into his figures. The contemplation of external forms was not the essential thing for him, but the feeling of being placed in the earth's culture in one's own body and soul and the reproduction of what was experienced in the external world.

But the experience of the whole personality was also in Greek culture. It is quite impossible to think of a Pericles or any other statesman as a modern statesman would be thought of. We see a modern statesman acting on general principles, representing what he thinks and wants. When Pericles in ancient Athens steps before the people and carries out something, it is not because he says to himself: Because I see it, it must be carried out. — That is not the case. But when Pericles steps before the people and asserts what he wants, then it is his personal will. And if it is adhered to, it is because the Greek has the knowledge that Pericles can want the right thing because he feels it as a personality. The Greek is a self-contained nature, he lives himself, thinking in a closed way. He can do this because, unlike the members of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, he no longer feels a connection with the gods and so on. That is only present as an echo. But what he experiences directly is that he feels his physical body connected with the spiritual soul. So that in this way he is already more alone with his soul than the man of the Egyptian-Chaldean time, but he is still connected with all the rest of nature, because his body, his flesh, has given him this connection. One must feel that: The soul in the Greco-Latin period, already more free from the general universe than in the previous period, must still feel connected with all that is in the natural kingdoms around it. For the soul felt connected with what is an extract from these natural kingdoms, the physical-corporeal. This feeling is what must be seen as the characteristic of this Graeco-Latin period, which then included the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now we see the emergence - and we are in the midst of it with our thinking and feeling - of the third period, which we have to consider. How does it differ from the Graeco-Latin period? The human soul is much more alone, because the Greek felt connected to what he was in his body, to nature. Let us place before the Greeks the possibility that they should have looked at the smallest living creatures through a modern microscope, they should have thought of the cell theory. Impossible for the Greek soul! For it would have felt, when it came to these microscopic observations, that it was unnatural and unnatural to devise instruments through which one sees things differently than they present themselves to the natural eye of the body! — The Greeks felt so connected with nature that it would have seemed unnatural to them to see things differently than they present themselves to the eye. And to make the world's things visible through the telescope would have seemed just as unnatural to him. In many respects, the ancient Greek way of thinking resembles the way a personality felt who was inspired by this way of thinking and who made the beautiful statement: What are all the instruments of physics compared to the human eye, which is nevertheless the most wonderful apparatus! That is to say, the Greek view of the world was the most natural one, the one that one gains when one arms the senses with instruments as little as possible and thus sees things differently than when man perceives nature directly, as he is placed in the environment.

Our time is quite different! In our time it was quite natural, and it came more and more to be so through the development of the spirit since the period just characterized, that what one strove for as an objective scientific picture of the world was completely separated from what lives in the human soul. Only in this way could the view arise that the truth about the human organization can only be learned by directing the armed eye at things, by examining living beings with the microscope and applying the telescope to conditions in the sky, by using an instrument that comes to the aid of the inaccuracy of the eye. But if we consider the spirit that is expressed in this, we must say that now man separates what lives in his inner being, what is connected with his ego, from his world picture. The human ego, the human self, is even more lonely and alone than it was in Greek times. If we try to compare the Greek world view with our world view, as given to us by science, we have to say: in practice, too, efforts have been made to make this world view independent of what goes on in the deepest inner soul of man, what lives and weaves and is in the human I. In the ancient Egyptian-Chaldean period, for example, the soul and the world were one for the human being's perception. In Greek times, the human soul and the human body were one, but through the human body, the human being was still connected to his world view. Now, the spiritual-soul has become more and more detached, completely detached from what it considers to be the justified content of the world view. Lonely and closed in on itself is the human soul.

Now let us consider the remarkable polarity that becomes evident to us when we move from the Egyptian-Chaldean period through the Greek-Latin period to our own. What man strives for in our epoch above all else, in contrast to the earlier Greek epoch, is to gain a scientific world picture that is independent of his soul. What also necessarily resulted is to separate the human soul from what it was connected to in earlier times, to place the soul on its own, to push it entirely back into its consciousness. In the Egyptian-Chaldean period, the human soul still directed its spiritual and soulful gaze out into the world and allowed itself to be inspired by what was in the world. Even in Greek times, people still took what suited their conception of the world and incorporated it into art. In more recent times, the conception of the world stands alone, separate from the soul experience of the human being. And yet we must say: in modern times, when the human soul has thrown itself out of the objective world view, where it no longer finds itself in the soul in that which flows mechanically and objectively outside, when it has broken the connection with the external world existence, it still wants to gain within itself the strength for knowledge, as a world view, for its entire being. It would still have been inconceivable to the Greeks if someone had told them: Dare to use your reason! or: Enlightenment is the human soul stepping out of its self-imposed immaturity. - One could speak Socratic words in Greece, but not these words, because the Greek would not have understood them. He would have felt: What do I want through my reason? At most, to gain a picture of the world. But this image of the world lives continually in me, as the world flows into my powers and my soul and spirit. It would be unnatural in the face of what flows into me to use my reason. — And the follower of the Egyptian-Chaldean period would have found the call to use his reason even stranger and even more unnatural. To the sentence: Dare to use your reason! he would have replied: Then I would lose the best intuitions and inspirations that flow to me from the universe. Why should I use only my reason, which would impoverish me in my experience, when I make use of it, compared to what flows into me from the universe?

Thus we see how the human souls that come from earlier epochs always encounter a different age. Thus they are educated, in Lessing's expression: in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, in which the soul feels at one with the world; then in the Greek-Latin period, in which the soul feels at one with its own body, and now the souls are going through the period in which they have to find themselves within themselves because they have taken themselves out of their objective world view.

We find it quite in keeping with this that this age must produce a Fichte with his book “The Destiny of Man”, and that he raises the question: What if this world view were perhaps only an illusion, a deception, only a dream? How then can the I, which now feels impoverished — that is a feeling that comes from the times — come to inner confidence? How can it find itself?

Thus we see Fichte's teaching on the I as a necessary result of the whole evolution. We see how, precisely in the nineteenth century, because of the scientific world view – as in Fichte's time, when the power of thought was still in full bloom – the I wants to create clarity through itself. And the attempts of Schelling and Hegel, following Fichte, can only be characterized by seeing in them the endeavour to gain a connection with the world through thought from the I that has emancipated itself from the world picture. But we see how, in the third of these characterized periods, the natural-scientific world picture gradually takes away, so to speak, from the I as well, by impoverishing it, all echoes with the old world pictures. Such things are usually not sufficiently observed in our time.

If we look back to one of the people who contributed in an eminent way to our scientific world view, to Kepler, who achieved so much that still has an effect on our scientific view, we find a remarkable idea in his “Harmony of the World”. He raises his gaze from the harmony of the world to the whole Earth. But for Kepler this Earth is a giant organism, alive, somewhat like a whale. At least, when he looks for an organism among the living creatures that resembles the earth organism, he finds the whale, and he says: This giant animal, on which we walk, which breathes, does not breathe like man, but in the times determined by the course of the sun, and the rising and falling of the ocean is the sign of the inhaling and exhaling of the earth organism. Kepler finds the human view too limited to comprehend how this process takes place.

When emphasizing Kepler's connection with Giordano Bruno for a one-sided view of the world, one should not forget that Giordano Bruno also repeatedly pointed out that the Earth is a giant organism that breathes in and out with the tides of the ocean. And we do not have to go back very far to find the same idea in more recent times. There is a beautiful saying of Goethe's to Eckermann, where he says, “I imagine the earth as a giant animal that has its inhalation and exhalation process in the rising and descending air and in the ebb and flow of the sea.” That is to say, the view of the earth as presented by today's geology only emerged very gradually, and another view was lost, which we can still feel resonating in Goethe and which still comes across to us very vividly in Kepler and Giordano Bruno. What Kepler, Giordano Bruno, what Goethe thought and felt, men felt quite vividly in those ancient times when the soul felt at one with the world. That this feeling of at-one-ment with the world should have grown dim in the course of time was the natural course of evolution.

If we wish to characterize what is presented here in terms of spiritual science, we arrive at the following description. A more detailed explanation can be found in “Occult Science: An Outline”.

If we look at the human soul, not in the chaotic way that modern science often does, but with the eye of spiritual science, we see that it is divided into three parts. First, there is the lowest part of the human soul, which, as one might say, still characterizes in many respects only the whole chaotic depth of the human soul, where the upper parts of human nature do not fully reach: the sentient soul. This is where the drives, affects, passions and all the undefined feelings in the soul arise. Then we have a higher link of the human soul: the intellectual or mind soul. This is the soul that already lives more consciously within itself, that grasps itself within itself, that not only experiences itself in the surges that it feels surging up from the depths in instinct, desire and passion, but that, above all, feels compassion and shared joy, and develops within itself what we call concepts of understanding and so on. And then we have that part of the soul that we can call the consciousness soul, through which the human soul truly experiences itself in itself.

In the course of human development, these different parts have successively undergone their formation. If we go back to the Egyptian-Chaldean period, it was mainly the education for the sentient soul that people went through at that time. For the connections of the great cosmos could speak to the sentient soul, and these entered into the human soul without man being aware of it. The wisdom of the Chaldean-Egyptian culture was therefore attained unconsciously. When we move on to the Greek-Latin period, we have the special development of the intellectual or emotional soul, where through intellect and emotion — we can see from this that this soul element has two parts — the inwardness is expressed, which is already more imbued with consciousness. And in our time we now have — and this follows directly from what has been described — the culture of the human soul, whereby this human soul is to come fully to consciousness in itself, that is to say, to develop the consciousness soul. This is what reached the highest pinnacle in the nineteenth century: the objective world view, which leaves the soul alone with itself so that it can grasp its self, its I, with its consciousness soul. In order to grasp the innermost essence of the human being in its inner illumination, it was necessary that the soul did not present itself to the world in the semi-unconscious way of the Egyptian world view or in the way we have described it for the Greek-Latin , but that it broke away from the world view in order to develop within itself that which had to become strongest in it, the I, the consciousness soul. Thus, in the successive earthly lives, favorable opportunities gradually presented themselves for man to develop the sentient soul, the soul of mind or feeling, and the consciousness soul in the successive earthly cultures.

But now let us take a look at this legacy of the nineteenth century, this consciousness soul: it struggled – we can basically trace this in particular in the nineteenth century – struggled in the philosophy of a Fichte, in the subsequent philosophical representations, struggled even in the more materialistic philosophies, for example in the philosophy of a Feuerbach, who said: The idea of God is only the self-representation of man projected out of space.

Man set the idea of God outside of himself because he needed support in the lonely consciousness soul. And if one follows the most radical philosophers, Feuerbach and others up to Nietzsche, one sees everywhere the human soul coming to power and inner security after it has been torn away from the world view that has become objective. Through this process, we see the human soul developing in a very regular way, we see the development of that which reached its peak in the nineteenth century: the emancipation of the consciousness soul and the consciousness soul's taking hold of itself through its own power.

What is to set the tone in the next age is always prepared in an earlier age. It can be clearly demonstrated how the development of the intellectual or mind soul already plays a role in certain cultural phenomena of the Egyptian-Chaldean period; and in the Greco-Latin period, especially where it is post-Christian, for example in the work of Augustine, one can see how humanity struggles to prepare the consciousness soul. Therefore, we have to say: our human soul can only be fully understood when it prepares, in the midst of the age of the consciousness soul, that which is to be developed after the consciousness soul. What needs to be developed?

The inner development of the human soul strives towards what must be developed, but so too does the so-called objective world view itself. Let us consider several symptoms in conclusion. What has the nineteenth century, with its brilliant culture, achieved? We see one of the most brilliant natural scientists of the nineteenth century, Ds Bois-Reymond, with his objective world view. He wants to save – just read his speech “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” – for the human soul what he needs for its inner security, and he seeks to find his way with the idea of the “world soul” because this soul of consciousness, which has become lonely and detached from the objective world view, is inexplicable to him. But the objective world view stands in his way. Wherever the human soul makes its appearance, it manifests itself in the brain, in the nerve cords and in the other instruments of action. Now Du Bois-Reymond is at the frontier of natural science. What does he demand if he is to recognize a world soul? He demands that someone show him an instrument in the universe that is similar to the one present in man when the human soul thinks, feels and wills. He says, for instance: Show me a tangle of ganglion balls and nerve fibres embedded in the neuroglia and supplied with warm arterial blood under the right pressure, corresponding to the increased capacity of such a world soul. He does not find it. The same Du Bois-Reymond demands this, who in the same speech also stated: If you observe the sleeping human being, from falling asleep to waking up, he may be explainable in scientific terms; but if you observe the human being from waking up to falling asleep, with all the drives, desires and passions, all the images, feelings and volitional impulses that arise and subside within him, he will never be explainable in scientific terms.

He is right! But let us see where the legacy of the nineteenth century has led us. Du Bois-Reymond says: “If I look at the sleeping human body scientifically, I cannot find anything that explains the interplay of the forces that are at work in our perceptions, feelings, impulses of will, and so on. For it is simply illogical to seek an explanation for the inner nature of the phenomena of the soul in the processes of the body, just as it would be nonsensical to seek an explanation for the organ of the lungs in the inner nature of air.

This will be the legacy of the nineteenth century: science will show that, even when it remains strictly on its own terrain, it cannot explain the workings of the soul and spirit in human beings from the processes that are available to it. Rather, it can be said without reservation: When this human body awakens from sleep, the soul and spirit are inhaled, as the lungs inhale oxygen or air; and when it falls asleep, the soul and spirit are exhaled, as it were. In the state of sleep, the soul-spiritual is alone outside the human body as an independent entity.

The legacy of the nineteenth century will be that natural science will fully unite with spiritual science, which says: Man has an ego and an astral body, with which he leaves his physical body and etheric body during sleep, is in a purely spiritual world during sleep with his ego and astral body, and leaves his physical body and etheric body to the laws that are peculiar to them. In this way natural science itself will demarcate its own field, and through what it has to admit it will show how spiritual science must be added to it as a complement. And when natural science itself will correctly recognize, for example, one of its greatest achievements: the natural development of organisms from the most imperfect to the more perfect, it will see that precisely in this development of the natural natural in the sense of Darwin's theory, in which the evolution of the human soul is not included, but which must first be grasped by the spiritual-soul if the merely earthly is to be organized into the human. A fine legacy of the nineteenth century will be a correctly understood natural science, showing how spiritual science is necessary to supplement natural science. Then, as a necessary consequence, the two will be in complete harmony. And the human soul will grasp itself by awakening the slumbering powers within it and recognizing itself.

In the Egyptian-Chaldean period, people were still in contact with the cosmos. This showed man his spiritual background. In the Greco-Latin period, man was still indirectly connected to the cosmos through the body. He still felt the cosmos because he felt the unity between the spiritual-soul and the physical. Now, the objective world view has become only a sum of external processes. Through spiritual science, however, the soul, by finding itself in its own spiritual-deep powers, will recognize itself in a new way in connection with the universe. The soul will be able to say: When I look down, I feel connected with all living things, with all the kingdoms of nature that are around me. But now, after going through the culture of the sentient soul of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, through the culture of the mind or emotional soul of the Greek-Latin period, and now having absorbed the culture of the consciousness soul, in which the gaze of the I was directed towards material culture , I feel connected to a series of spiritual realms: downwards to the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms when I look out materially, and upwards to spiritual realms, to the realms of the spiritual hierarchies, to which the soul belongs just as it belongs upwards, as it is otherwise accustomed to looking downwards towards the natural kingdoms. A future perspective is opening up before her that is fully in line with the perspectives of the past. Man has worked his way out of the spiritual contexts of the past; in the future he will work his way into the spiritual realms. The soul will feel a connection with the nature kingdoms through its spiritual-soul forces, and it will feel a connection with the spiritual realms through the spirit self. For just as our time is characterized as the time of the development of the consciousness soul, so in our time the development of the spirit self is preparing for the future of human spiritual culture, which will gradually mature.

When we look at the development from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see that it is quite organically necessary for this legacy of the nineteenth century to express most characteristically a task that was present: the task of rejecting the soul back to itself, throwing it out of the natural in order to force it to develop its own soul and spiritual powers. And this will be the best legacy of the nineteenth century, when the soul will see itself as having been torn away from everything, but feeling all the more encouraged to unfold its own powers. While the Age of Reason sought to make use of reason itself, the coming age must awaken still deeper forces slumbering in the depths of the soul, and thus a spiritual world will come into view, as the soul of the future must have it.

Thus the future will be grateful to the nineteenth century for having enabled the soul to develop the higher powers of objective science out of itself. That is also a legacy of the nineteenth century. If we consider the inner development of the human soul, we see that it must pass from the development of the sentient soul, through that of the mind or emotional soul and the consciousness soul, into the development of the spirit self. But man finds the spirit-self only when he is first torn away from all the external world by the scientific observation that is the legacy of the nineteenth century. If one looks at the legacy of the nineteenth century in this way and then goes into the details, one will see that the best thing about the positive results of the scientific heritage of the nineteenth century is the strengthening of the soul, because it then finds itself in that which science cannot give it. The soul will one day stand and feel with Du Bois-Reymond: Yes, the sleeping human body can be explained by the laws of physiology, but not what is inhaled by it as spiritual-soul. The soul will feel that it must raise to consciousness that which is unconscious in sleep through spiritual-scientific methods, in order to have a view into the spiritual worlds. And then a later Du Bois-Reymond will no longer stand so perplexed before the human body when he wants to explain it scientifically, because he will say to himself: the human soul is not in there at all, in the neuroglia and in the ganglion balls; so why should I then prove neuroglia and ganglion balls in the giant world soul?

We find the idea expressed in an outstanding nineteenth-century mind, that of Otto Liebmann, who only wanted to use what the nineteenth century could give him for an understanding of the sources of existence. Liebmann lectured on philosophy in Jena for many years: Why should we not be able to assume that our planets, moons and fixed stars are the atoms or even the molecules of a giant brain spreading out in the universe in a macrocosmic way? But he thinks that it will always be denied to human intelligence to penetrate to this giant brain, and that it will therefore also be denied to penetrate to the knowledge of a spiritual world soul at all. But spiritual science shows that Otto Liebmann was quite right. For it is impossible for the intelligence he speaks of to arrive at any kind of satisfaction of human longings in this field. Because this intelligence has first become great by emancipating itself from the objective world view, it is not surprising but self-evident that a philosophy built on this objective world view can find nothing in a world soul. If, in Du Bois-Reymond's sense, the natural scientist cannot find the human soul in the ganglia balls and neuroglia of the sleeping human body, why should one be able to find anything about the nature of the world soul in the giant ganglia balls of a giant brain? No wonder the physiologist must despair of it!

But these fundamentals are the best legacy of the nineteenth century. They show that the human soul is now thrown back upon itself and must seek and find the connection with the spiritual worlds, not through contemplation, but through the development of its inner powers. The human spirit will find, when it contemplates that conception of the world which it knows as the Darwinian theory of evolution, that its greatness is based on its having excluded itself. Man would not have come to the stage of development he has now reached if he had not excluded himself from the conception of the world. But when he understands this, he will realize that he cannot find in this theory of evolution what he himself had to extract. If one understands the Darwinian theory of evolution correctly, one will find, as it is not contradictory to it, to believe the spiritual researcher when he looks, in retrospect behind the phenomena of sense, at a spirit in which the human soul is rooted as a spirit.

This final lecture should show that in truth there is not the slightest contradiction between what is meant here by spiritual science and the true, genuine achievements of natural science, and that if one delves correctly into what the scientific world view, after the course of human development has been properly understood in spiritual scientific terms, human development, one knows precisely how it cannot be otherwise, and how the scientific world view, because it has become so, is the most beautiful means of educating the human soul to become what it should become: a being striving from the consciousness soul to the spirit self.

In this way, spiritual science is also shown to be part of the culture of our time. What was prepared in the Egyptian-Chaldean period with the culture of the sentient soul, and what was further developed in the Greek-Latin period with the culture of the mind or mind soul, has found its further development in our time in the culture of the consciousness soul. But everything that comes later is already prepared in the earlier stages. Just as there was a culture of the consciousness soul even in Socrates and Aristotle, which will continue for a long time in our time, so it is true that here, within our age, there must be the source for a true teaching for the spirit self. Thus the human soul grasps itself in connection with those worlds in which it is rooted, spirit in spirit.

In addition to all else, the natural science of the nineteenth century is a means of education, and the best means of education precisely for spiritual science. Perhaps it will be seen from the winter lectures that the spiritual-scientific views presented here regarding the heritage of the nineteenth century will provide a secure foundation for spiritual science, which should not become a conglomeration and chaos of something arbitrary, but something that stands on a foundation as secure as the admirable science of nature itself. If one believes that there must necessarily be a break between what natural science is and has achieved and what spiritual science is, then one could become disillusioned with this spiritual science. But when one sees how natural science had to become what it has become so that the human soul can find its way to the spirit in the new way, as it must find it, then one will recognize it as that which must necessarily be included in evolution as that which contains the seeds for the period of time that will follow our own just as our own follows those that have gone before. Then the apparent contradictions between the natural scientific and the spiritual scientific world picture will be reconciled.

Of course, I do not for a moment believe that in the short time of the lecture - which lasted so long - I have been able to exhaust even the slightest of what shows the continuing significance of the nineteenth-century scientific path with all its forms from the perspective of spiritual science. But perhaps by expanding on what has been said, by pursuing what was intended to be inspired today, especially by comparing the results of spiritual science with the correctly understood results of natural science, the honored audience will be able to see in their souls how a spiritual consideration of human evolution shows the necessity of spiritual science entering into the progress of human development. These lectures were organized and their keynote was always taken from this consciousness of an inner necessity for development. This lecture in particular was intended to evoke the feeling of how justified it may seem that the mere confidence that philosophers like Fichte and others sought to derive from the consciousness soul cannot be gained from the consciousness soul standing alone and shut up in its own thoughts, but only when the soul realizes and recognizes that there is something quite different within it than its mere intelligence and reason: when it finds the powers within itself that lead it to imagination, inspiration and intuition, that is, to life in the spiritual world itself, and when it realizes that out of a truly inner certainty about this, it may be spoken of again in the first third of the twentieth century – with the correctly understood legacy of the nineteenth century.

When Hegel, boldly building on what he believed he had grasped in the mere consciousness soul, once spoke significant words in his lectures on the history of philosophy, we may, in translation, his words, we may perhaps use them here at the end to characterize – not conceptually summarizing, but expressing like a feeling that arises like an elixir of life from the spiritual-scientific considerations. With some modification, we want to express in Hegel's words what the soul can feel for the security of life, for the necessary sources and foundations of existence and for all life's work, what it can feel in relation to the great riddles of existence, about fate and immortality. All this is such that the soul is met with the right worldly light, when it — but now not from an indefinite and abstract consciousness soul, but from a realization that in the soul there are dormant powers of knowledge slumbering in the soul that make her a citizen of spiritual worlds - when she is completely imbued with a feeling, so that this feeling becomes the direct expression of the spiritual science in question, making the soul secure and hopeful:

The human spirit may and should believe in its greatness and power; for it is spirit from the spirit. And with this belief, nothing in the cosmos, in the universe, can prove so hard and brittle that it does not reveal itself to it in the course of time, insofar as it needs it. What is hidden at first in the universe must become more and more evident to the seeking soul in its increasing realization and surrender to it, so that it can develop it into inner strength, inner security, inner value of existence and life!

Translated by Antje Heymanns and Norbert Mulholland

For many years I have attempted to give lectures here during the winter months on a subject I call Spiritual Science. This winter again, as part of the announced lectures, we will focus on the facts of the spiritual world from the perspective of Spiritual Science. We will look at what belongs to the fundamental questions of existence: The relationship between life and death, sleep and wakefulness, human souls and animal souls, the spirit of man and of animals and the spirit in the plant realm. Then we will look at the nature of human development throughout the various stages of life; through childhood, youth and the later life years, and the part that education plays in forming a person’s main character. The life of the spirit will be illuminated by looking at great individualities of human evolution—at Zarathustra, Moses, Galilei, Goethe. An attempt will be made to show the relationship of what we call Spiritual Science to natural science, using examples from astronomy and geology. Subsequently, from the sources of Spiritual Science itself, we will try to tell what it has to say about the riddle of life.

Each year these contemplations were preceded by a kind of general orientation. We want to follow this custom again today by speaking about the significance of Spiritual Science; its nature and relationship, or its task in regard to the various spiritual needs of the present.

In the sense we speak about Spiritual Science here, one might say that it is still quite an unpopular topic today in wide circles of humanity. Indeed, one speaks about Geisteswissenschaft,¹ or ‘humanities’ from standpoints different to those that we must take. So, for example, one understands ‘history’ to be a subject that belongs to the field of humanities—but one also finds history in other scientific fields of the present. Here we want to speak in a different sense than usual about Spiritual Science. Today, when one talks about Spiritual Science’ and applies this to history, then one has to at least acknowledge that, apart from what is accessible to human observation through sensory and intellectual experiences, there are yet other major trends of history which can be considered. These trends show themselves as forces working in the stream of world happenings, and affect, as it were, the fates of individual peoples and individual states. Of course, one speaks about general ideas in history and in human life. One who thinks about what this means will soon realise that abstract ideas are being referred to; to which one appeals when talking about the nature and the strength of what guides human destiny. In a certain respect these are general ideas with which human cognitive faculty can gain an insightful relationship.

Spiritual Science is spoken of here in a different sense, in that the spiritual world is assumed to be a world that is essential, just as the human world is essential within physical existence. It will be shown that if one surmounts with the human faculty of knowledge beyond outer sense observations and intellectual experience, and goes to the guiding forces of human and cosmic existence, then one may not only arrive at abstractions, at sapless and feeble ideas; instead at something essential; at something that is alive, meaningful, spiritually imbued by existence as is the essence of man itself. So, we speak about a spiritual world with real existence here. This is exactly what makes Spiritual Science unpopular from the standpoint of the widest circles of our present-day spiritual movement. And still, the least of what one calls those who pursue such spiritual research is blabberer, dreamer or fantasist. And even today it is quite common to say that everything which presents itself as strictly methodical, or appears or wants to appear to be truly scientific on this basis, is quite dubious.

Great, tremendous progress has always had a strong suggestive effect on humanity: on all thinking, feeling and emotion. And if we look at the great advances that have been made recently in human life—we could almost say in the last centuries—, these were not in the area of Spiritual Science about which we want to talk here, but rather in the area which humanity is so proud of today—and to emphasise, rightfully so—and where there is still great hope for the future development of humanity. The progress of the last centuries up to the present time, lies in a field that grows out of the natural sciences. When we think about how enormous all of this is that today has been won not only theoretically for human knowledge in the field of natural sciences, but which promises to still be gained on the basis of natural sciences—in addition, when one weighs up the great significance of natural science achievements for external life—then one must say the blessing, the meaningfulness of natural science progress could and must have exerted a suggestive power on the human mind in our time. Even so, this suggestive effect also expressed itself in another direction. If it had solely expressed itself so that the human mind, faced with immense progress, would foremost have felt something like a kind of worldly veneration, who could even say a word against it?

However, this suggestive power has also expressed itself in another direction; namely, not only acknowledging what natural science research, and progress derived from it, signifies for our time; but it also led in a direction where, in the widest circles, the belief arose that all knowledge, all insights of humanity, can only be won on the basis of what is acknowledged today as natural science.

Based on this belief people feel entitled to conclude that Spiritual Science methods are contradictory to natural science methods. And thus, for someone standing on natural scientific ground, it would be impossible to even talk about ‘research’ in relation to the spiritual world. Therefore, a prejudice spread in the widest circles that Spiritual Science must be rejected, as it stands in opposition to the legitimate claims of the natural sciences.

It is noticeable that by raising this objection something extraordinarily difficult to weigh-up has been dropped into the equation. The natural scientific method, it is stated, is one whose research results and findings, can be verified by anyone at any time. Also, that in the process of gaining these insights, nothing of what prevails in the subjective human being as feeling; sympathy or antipathy, longing or desires, can play a role.

The prerequisite that nothing is allowed to interfere includes ‘wanting to achieve a particular result’. The human element must be excluded from research when it comes to the results of natural scientific research and only the pure objectivity of things is allowed to speak.

Spiritual Science cannot make this demand so easily. For someone who is quick to make a judgment about the general validity of this demand, the mere fact that Spiritual Science cannot comply with it will suffice as a reason to reject it. Why is this the case? The objects of natural science which it researches can be found around everyone. It begins with something that can be placed in front of anyone and about which anyone, once confronted by an object, can think about it by applying natural scientific methods. Moreover, the qualifications with which a person approaches something presented to him in the field of vision in his surroundings, do not seem to matter. This is exactly what is expressed by the general demand: Natural scientific knowledge needs to be verifiable by any human being at any given point in time.

True Spiritual Science is not able to proceed in the same way as natural science to obtain its results. First, it is not able to say that its results could be reproduced by any human being at any moment in time. This is because Spiritual Science has to presuppose that its research results will be gained by someone who does not see his inner being as something static, as something complete, who doesn’t see his subjective nature as finished but who says to himself: My subjective nature, the whole sum of my soul existence with which I am able to face this world, is not closed-off, is not finished, it can be developed, the soul-life can be deepened. The soul-life can proceed so that whatever one finds—when focussing the senses on the external world and the intellect on what the senses say—is only, as it were, a foundation for further experiences of the soul. Further soul-experiences come about when a soul immerses itself in itself, works on itself, considers the immediate comprehension of life the starting point, and then, through forces that initially slumber within it but which can be brought out, wrestles through levels of existence. These forces cannot be looked at in such a way that they can be checked by a physical eye.

Thus, what a spiritual researcher has to go through in preparation for his studies is an inner wrestling of the soul, that is completely independent from anything one has within oneself. So, if one demands of science that a human being should not contribute anything to the results that are externally presented to him, then there can be no question of Spiritual Science. But if someone reflects a little and asks himself: which part of the demands made by Spiritual Science is the most important? Then one could say to oneself, that its results should be applicable to all human beings, they should not be subject to personal arbitrariness or to someone’s individuality; and should not only be significant for the inner life of this or that person, but should be significant for all human beings.

This is the importance of all that is scientific: that it is not only valid for someone who studies the scientific topic, but also, once a topic has been researched, this may lead to insights that could be valid for all people.

Now, if it were true that what has been characterised as human development is only subjective and only valid for one or another human being, and is thus only a personal belief, then one could not really speak of Spiritual Science. But it will become apparent to us this winter that this inner life of man—the wrestling of the soul with forces that are at first dormant but are able to awaken—unfolds and develops and then leads him from experience to experience; that this soul-life can rise up to a level where its experiences will have a very specific characteristic.

If we contemplate human life, as it takes place inside the human soul, it is at first a completely personal one—this way for one, that for another. Anyone possessing healthy self-reflection will be clear about this or that arising in his soul as sympathy or antipathy, that it is, as it were, only a personal touch, and that this is the case and how it is so. But the inner experience leads to a certain point, where especially a methodically driven self-realisation, a pure self-knowledge uninfluenced by anything personal, will have to acknowledge to oneself: the ‘personal’ has just been cast off, forms a special area. But then one will reach a certain point where for the inner experience, for the super-sensible experience arbitrariness also stops, exactly the same way it stops if one faces this or that sense perceptible phenomena and one cannot think as one likes but must think according to the object. Thus the human being also comes in his inner soul to a certain sphere, to a certain area, where he becomes clearly aware that his own personal subjectivity no longer speaks. But that now super-sensible beings and forces, who are not perceptible to the physical senses, speak and for whom his individuality has as little importance as for what the external sensory objects say.

This insight must indeed be gained if we want to talk about the right to call what must be said about the spiritual world ‘science’ at all.

Again, these winter lectures are meant to prove that the research of the spiritual world can be called science.

Therefore, one must say Spiritual Science is essentially founded on what can be researched through the human soul, when it has reached a point in its inner struggles and experiences where the personal no longer has a say in the contemplations of the spiritual world, but where the soul allows the spiritual world itself to tell of its own peculiarities.

If one then wants to compare Spiritual Science with natural science, some might say: there is still an important criterion missing from Spiritual Science, namely, the ability to make a convincing impression on all people which natural science can, because one is aware that wherever natural scientific results appear, even if you have not done this research or seen it yourself, one could, if one went to an observatory or into a laboratory and used a telescope or a microscope, recognise things in the same way as the person who has informed you about it.

Furthermore, it could be said: If, on the path of Spiritual Science, a proof is a purely inner matter, and the soul is wrestling with itself until it says, ‘now you will contribute nothing from your personality to what the objects tell you’—it still remains an individual wrestling. And to one who gains certain insights in this way, or with whom the spiritual researcher shares his results, it should be said: ‘For me these results remain an unknown territory, until I myself ascend to the same point!’

As will be shown, this also is an incorrect objection. Certainly, this lonely wrestling of the human soul, this uncovering of dormant soul forces is part of ascending to the spiritual world, where it objectively speaks to us. But the spiritual world is like this: when Spiritual Scientific results are shared, they do not remain ineffective. Communications by a human soul, which are tested through Spiritual Science research, and exchanged with other souls, can, in a certain sense, be verified by every soul—not like in a laboratory where one can see what the other has found—but in such a way that one can gain insight. For in every soul lives an impartial sense of truth, a healthy logic, a healthy rationality. And when the results of Spiritual Science are clothed in healthy logic that appeals to our healthy sense of truth, then in every soul, or at least in every unbiased human soul, a chord can resonate with the communicating soul.

It can be said that every soul is pre-disposed within itself, even if it has not yet devoted itself to the markedly, lonely wrestling, to take into itself the communication from Spiritual Science by way of an unbiased logic and a healthy sense of truth. Quite certainly it has to be admitted that in the widest circles, where this or that of Spiritual Science is carried on today, that the same healthy sense of truth and healthy logic does not prevail everywhere where communications of spiritual research are received—but then, this is an inadequacy of every spiritual movement. In principle, however, what has been said is correct. Yes, in principle one should even pay attention to the fact that it must lead to error upon error when someone accepts light-heartedly and with blind faith what nowadays is often brought to humanity as Spiritual Science. Whoever stands truly grounded in Spiritual Science feels strictly obliged to share logically and rationally what he has to say, so that it actually can be verified by a healthy sense of truth and by applying logic. We have now characterised the nature of Spiritual Science from one side, by showing how its results need to be obtained.

That spirit exists as an objective fact can only be proven by Spiritual Science itself. But it should be pointed out now that this Science will lead to what we call the real, the true content of the spiritual world, a content that is filled in a living way with something essential, just as a human being himself is filled with an inner essence.

Spiritual Science is, from this point of view, clear about the fact that all external, physical-sensory existence, all existence about which the senses and rational experiences speak to us, are ultimately born out of the spiritual world. And human beings, like all other things, are born out of this spiritual world, have developed out of it, so that behind the manifest world, behind what we ordinarily call the physical external existence, the region of the spiritual world extends. Now, when Spiritual Science gradually begins to demonstrate through its observations what it is like in this spiritual world, how the spiritual world is the foundation of our manifest world, then in many circles of our time, an aversion, an antipathy appears, which at the beginning of today’s considerations was characterised as follows: at the present time, in wide circles, Spiritual Science is a rather unpopular matter. And it is not at all difficult to understand, that Spiritual Science still faces enormous resistance today. This is in fact quite obvious and not only because something that is in a certain respect newly assimilated in cultural life—like Spiritual Science and like all small and great achievements of humanity—has always been treated with a certain amount of rejection. It is so because, indeed, there is much in the area of concepts, which man today obtains as a result of natural scientific observations, that necessarily cause someone who beliefs himself to be firmly grounded in natural science, to get entangled in contradictions when he hears what Spiritual Science says. One who is grounded in Spiritual Science has no doubt at all that, with some justification, hundreds upon hundreds of so-called rebuttals of Spiritual Science could be put forward. Only in parentheses, I would like to add that I myself will soon give two lectures at different places (and here also) so that the question raised can be clarified. One of these will be titled, ‘How do you refute Theosophy?’ and the other one ‘How do you justify Theosophy?’² This is an experiment to show how someone who is grounded in Spiritual Science is able to collate absolutely everything that can be brought up against it. Yes, I will go further and say even more than has already been stated against it. The refutations of Spiritual Science, as one usually speaks of refutations today, are not particularly difficult in regard to their conclusions. It is easy to disprove spiritual scientific research.

I do not wish to compare these refutations directly, but, in order to elucidate what I wish to say, I want to take up something that one often notices when reading works by certain philosophers about the philosophy of Hegel. I do not want to speak here about the significance of Hegel’s philosophy, what is true and what is error; we want to leave that aside. Yet among the Hegel experts there will be few who would not admit that with Hegel they have to do with an eminent spirit. Now there is a strange sentence in Hegel’s writings which makes a deep impression, so to speak, on those who light-heartedly want to refute Hegel. This sentence reads; ‘All that is real is rational!’ Now imagine, as it were, the inner laughter such a sentence will trigger in one who likes to refute! A philosopher, who is supposed to be great, talks such nonsense; ‘What is real is rational!’ One only needs to cast a glance at the world to see how irrational such a sentence is! There is a simple method to disprove the truth of this sentence, and that consists in oneself committing an utterly foolish act. Because then one can state concerning this act that it is quite certainly not rational.

Should the fact that refutation is easy also lead to one taking it lightly and easily take it as meaningful? This is a completely different question, which might be answered by considering the following: Would Hegel really have been so stupid—regardless of how one stands in regards to Hegel—that he would not have realised what could be said against this sentence? Would he really have believed that no man would be able to commit an absolutely stupid act? Should one not rather feel compelled to explore what Hegel meant to say with this sentence, and realise that with such a refutation one is unable to undermine what he meant.

This could also be the case with many things regarding Spiritual Science. To take something concrete: Spiritual Science must presuppose—this can only be mentioned today—that what is recognised in the human being as the tools of thinking, of imagination, of feeling and of willing, namely the nervous system with the brain, has been produced out of something spiritual. The brain and the nervous system are instruments of something essential that cannot be demonstrated in the sensory world, but must be investigated using the characteristic methods of Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science must therefore step back from what external science, relying on sensory phenomena, says about the brain and the nervous system, to something that works in the human being as soul-spiritual itself, and which can no longer be researched by means of the senses—it can only be explored on the inner paths of the soul. Now it really is child’s play to refute what spiritual research tells about the supersensible which underlies the human brain. One could say; everything you say is itself only a product of the brain. If you do not recognise this, then observe how abilities increase according to the development phase. In lower animals the mental abilities are quite imperfect. In higher animals, and particularly in higher mammals, they are already more significant and more perfected. In man they appear most perfect, because his brain has reached the greatest perfection. This shows that what appears as spiritual life grows out of the brain. And if you still do not believe this, then approach someone who is able to show you how during certain cases of illness certain parts of the brain become ineffective, and certain abilities, as it were, can no longer be exercised by a person—so that certain parts of the brain are eroded and the spiritual life gets switched off. This shows you, how bit by bit your spiritual life can be eroded through what is evidently an organ!

Why then, do you continue to talk about spiritual beings, that are behind the manifested things? It really is child’s play to make this objection. However, it must seem obvious today that the objection is not based on natural scientific results, but has been derived from a suggestion, which for many people has been constructed out of certain natural scientific theories. This is all related to the fact that our time is under the suggestive power of the idea that truth and knowledge can only be gained by directing the senses outward, and the rational mind lit up by what has been gained. In relation to Spiritual Science, it must be said, that even if these results of natural science must cause refutations of the results of Spiritual Science to just spring forth from everywhere, one can stress that on the other hand, there is a deep need, a deep longing in our present time, to hear something from those lands about which Spiritual Science knows how to report. Simultaneously, a deep longing to hear of these has emerged and is alive and consciously present in a group of people. In a large part of humanity it lies dormant, as it were, beneath the surface of consciousness, but it will become more and more apparent. The need for the results of Spiritual Science will steadily increase. This longing, this need for spiritual scientific results will appear, as it were, as a side-effect of the admiration, of the devotion to natural scientific achievements. Precisely because the achievements of the natural sciences must necessarily turn man's gaze outwards, the longing for the results of the Spiritual Science arises within him as a counterbalance. As it developed in this regard in the nineteenth and in our [20th] century, we have arrived within evolution at a completely different viewpoint from the one which humanity had even a century ago. If one wants to speak about the value of spiritual scientific research for the present, then it is significant to recall before our souls, that even a century ago, great spirits did not feel the need to speak about spiritual scientific results in the same way as is planned to happen in this lecture series. Great individualities only set the tone for humanity. In a certain sense they only express the needs of the entire age, including the needs of lesser individualities. Such a thing can be clearly illustrated to us, if we take a look at these eminent individualities. It can be said rightly that a century ago a person like Goethe did not at all feel the need to speak about spiritual scientific results, as it is done today on the basis of Spiritual Science. When the question arose to talk about something that is beyond the external manifestations, Goethe, like so many other people, has often pleaded that this is a matter of belief and could not be a strict science. And Goethe also often expressed that essentially the communication of generally valid results on this basis could hardly be very fruitful if they were communicated by one person to another.

In the course of one century we have progressed the overall development of humanity, not only in such a way that Goethe lived in a century which neither had telegraphs, telephones, railways, and no such prospects as those offered by aeronautics; but also in relation to spiritual development, we are facing results that are different from those of Goethe’s time. You can see this in a specific example. There is a beautiful talk Goethe had with a certain person, Falk , at the occasion of Wieland’s death. There he spoke about those regions from which a certain insight must be derived of that which transcends birth and death in the human being, which does not decay with the sensory shell, which is immortal as opposed to the mortal part of the human being. The immediate occasion of Wieland’s death, who was so highly regarded by Goethe, urged him to express himself in a popular way to a person like Falk, who showed him understanding for this. What he said there is highly significant when we address the question about the significance of Spiritual Science for the present; “...You have long known that ideas that lack a firm foundation in the sensory world, for all their other value, carry no conviction for me, because I want to know about nature, not merely assume and believe. As far as the personal continuance of our souls after death is concerned, on my path this is my position: it is in no way in contradiction with the observations I have made over many years about the condition of our, and of all beings in nature; on the contrary, it even emerges from them with new conclusiveness. How much or how little this personality deserves a continued existence is a different question and a matter that we have to surrender to God. Preliminarily, I will first remark this: I assume different classes and hierarchical orders of the primordial constituents of all beings, as it were the starting points of all phenomena in nature, that I wish to call souls, because with these an ensouling of everything starts, or, even better call them ‘monads’—let us retain this Leibnizian expression for ever! There is hardly a better term for expressing the simplicity of the simplest being. Now some of these monads or starting points are, as experience shows, so small, so insignificant, that they are at most suitable for some subordinate service and existence; in contrast others are really strong and powerful. The latter therefore tend to pull everything that approaches them into their circle and transform it into something belonging to them, that is, into a body, a plant, an animal, or even higher, into a star. They continue to do this until the small or large world, whose intention lies spiritually within them, also becomes physically visible externally. Actually, only the latter I want to call souls. It follows from this, that there are world-monads, world-souls, like ant-monads, ant-souls, and that both are related in their origin, if not completely one, in their original being. Every sun, every planet carries within itself a higher intention, a higher mission, by virtue of which its developments must come about just as regularly and according to the same law that governs the development of a rosebush through leaf, stem and crown. You might want to call this an idea or a monad, as you like, I have nothing against it: suffice that this intention exists in nature invisibly and prior to the visible development out of it...”³

In a certain sense, Goethe is speaking then about what we will also speak about more often in these lectures: the reincarnation of the human soul. And he remarks, that after everything what he himself formed as conviction about the human world, the animal realm, and so on, this does not contradict what he has established as science. Now it is easy to imagine what such a statement in the mouth of Goethe says, when one remembers that Goethe, in the year 1784 made a discovery that on its own would have been sufficient to make his name famous until the furthest times, even if he would not have done anything else: The discovery of the so-called inter-maxillary bone in the human upper jaw. Man has in the upper jaw, just as animals do, an inter-maxillary bone. Just at the time when Goethe began to undertake natural scientific studies, this was generally denied. To distinguish between humans and animals one searched for differences in the external features only, and thought animals had in their upper jaw an inter-maxillary bone whilst human beings didn’t have one. This would distinguish the human structure from animal structures. Goethe didn’t want to concede, could not believe, that the difference between humans and animals would lie in this subordinate feature. And so he began to use all known means to show that the so-called inter-maxillary bone⁴ is not missing in a human being; although it fuses already shortly after birth, it exists as part of the initial structure. He succeeded to show clearly that the distinction between humans and animals does not lie in such an external criterion. From this starting point Goethe explored all areas of natural science, and was well acquainted with the scientific thinking of his time. Indeed, he was so far ahead of his time, that Darwinians, who wanted to reinterpret Goethe in Darwinian terms, can claim today: Goethe was a precursor of Darwin. Although Goethe was rooted in the science of his time and went beyond it, he could still maintain his views about the immortal part of the human being, which were reminiscent of reincarnation and actually quite compatible with his scientific ideas. What Goethe was then able to say, could basically be said by anyone. Other researchers who sought to acquire the knowledge they needed for life in a scientific manner were also in the same position. Characteristic of this is that, based on Haeckel, people invoked a great deed of Kant, namely his founding of the mechanical world-view, by referring to the “Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or an attempt to account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the entire Universe,” written by Kant in 1775. You only need to take the ‘Reclam’⁵ booklet, look at the ending and then ask: How do those who stand on the mere ground of Haeckelianism relate to Kant, when he speaks about the immortality of the human soul; about the great secrets of the human soul; about the prospect of habitability of other celestial bodies; and the continued life of the human soul on other planets? How do such followers of Haeckel relate to the possibility of reincarnation of the human being as it appears in this script by Kant that was published in 1775? Today one quotes things in such a way, that one would have to be astonished if the same people, who refer to Kant, would have really read those things. Things are different today from how they were a century or a century and a half ago.

It was a need of that time that one spoke about the spiritual things of life in a certain way, that did not want to have anything to do with science, because it was felt that this speaking did not contradict what can be claimed by science. Anyone who allows science from the time of the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century to affect them, feels that if they only absorb science through popular descriptions, then they could speak like Goethe: “The convictions I myself have formed about a spiritual life, even if they are only a personal belief, contradict in no way what is offered as science today”.

But things have changed, and today things are getting very complicated in relation to science. It must be remembered that, after Goethe's death, the great discoveries of Schleiden⁶ and Schwann⁷ concerning the human and animal cell were made and that it was only then that an elementary organism presented itself to the senses. What is the need to talk about ‘life on different celestial bodies’ and so on, when in an animal or a plant one can see how bodies are built up through the interaction of purely material visible cells!

Then came other enormous achievements. We only need to ponder the impact on human thinking that was made by the introduction of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff⁸ and Bunsen,⁹ which extended man’s view over distant worlds, and which allowed one to conclude that material existence as we find it here on Earth, is the same as that on the furthest celestial bodies—so that one can talk about a unity of substance within the entire cosmic existence. And each day adds to what we can encounter in this area. I could point to hundreds and hundreds of things that have had a revolutionary effect, not on the world of reality, but on people’s imagination. In this way the conviction had to arise that no one has the right to talk about what natural scientific methods offer in any way other than this: Wait for what natural scientific research can tell you about the foundations of life, about the origin of the spiritual life from the activity of the brain, and do not fantasize by talking about a spiritual world that supposedly underlies everything! All of this is only too easily understood. Thus has changed the persuasiveness of natural sciences in people’s view. In this regard Goethe really is a forerunner of Darwin. But despite of this he rose, in accordance with the spirit of his time, through his natural scientific research from the development of living beings, from imperfection, to perfection; to a purely spiritual worldview that definitely searches for the supersensory, for the spirit behind all sense perception. People who proceed in the same way in our time believe, that the results of natural science urge them to stop short of what these results should be; and that everything that belongs to the realm of the spirit seemingly bursts forth from the manifest background.

Today, a person cannot speak anymore in the same way as he could have spoken a century ago, about what he, through his personal conviction knows or believes to know, or what he has learned about the super-sensory world—that this does not contradict natural scientific research results. Instead, it seems that it must quite strongly contradict them—and not only for the isolated, serious, dignified truth-seeker, and striving human being does it seem so. If this is the case then we have to say: For our present time, the power of conviction, the reasons for conviction which could be brought forward only a century ago, or even later, without contradicting external scientific results—are no longer directly decisive. Today, more weightier impulses are needed to uphold what is said about the super-sensible world against the strictly scientific results of science. What we consider ourselves authorised to believe about the spiritual world, we have to be able to present in the same way, to obtain in the same objective manner as the natural scientific results are obtained—yet on a different foundation. Only a Spiritual Science that works with the same logic, with the same healthy sense of truth as natural science does, will be felt as capable of standing its ground next to a natural science that has progressed enormously. When considering this, one understands in what sense Spiritual Science has become a necessity for the present time. One also understands that this Spiritual Science alone can meet the longings, about which we have talked. These longings are present because what we have just characterised affects many human souls unconsciously—especially among the best truth-seekers, and in a field where one would not have expected it, considering how the human urge for knowledge strives beyond what has previously always been said in the field of science.

Certainly the mathematical field, the field of geometry seems to be one, where what is gained appears to be secure in its application to the sensory world. Who would believe with a light heart, so to speak, that anyone could claim that what the world has to say about mathematics, about geometry, could in any way be questioned. And yet it is characteristic that in the course of the nineteenth century there were minds who brought themselves to invent geometries and mathematics through strictly mathematical research, that were not valid within our sensory world, but would apply to quite different worlds. Thus we know that there were spirits thinking in strictly mathematical terms, who felt they could go beyond what so far existed as mathematics and geometry in the area of our sensory world, and that they could invent a geometry for a completely different sensory world. And there is not one but several such geometries. People who are mathematically trained know something about the names of Riemann,¹⁰ Lobatschewski,¹¹ Bolyai.¹² We do not want to go deeper into it here, because the only point is that something like this was able to be developed out of human knowledge. There are, for example, geometries which do not acknowledge the sentence; ‘The three angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.’ For them the triangles have a very different property, namely, for example, the three angles of a triangle are always less than 180 degree. Or another case; for Euclidean geometry one is able to draw only one parallel line through one point to a given line. Geometries have been devised where one can draw an endless amount of parallels through one point to another existing line. This means there were spirits who felt compelled to not only be smitten by other worlds, but to make up geometries for these! This illustrates mightily that even in mathematical heads there is a longing to go beyond what is in the world immediately surrounding us. Only one thing needs to be added to the fact that our time needs something that can be derived from Spiritual Science. It will be shown to us that indeed the human being, in relation to his actual spiritual-soul nature, reappears again and again in renewed lives on our Earth. What is called reincarnation is a similar fact in the spiritual-soul realm as development theory or evolutionary theory is on a subordinate level for the animal kingdom. That the human soul evolves through incarnations that it experienced during the ancient past, and through those that it will live through in the distant future. Certainly, at the present time, the art of refutation will soon be strongly directed against such things.

But one can already state that the present time has a deep longing for such results, which are connected with that by which the human being can orientate himself as to his destiny, and his whole situation in regard to the outer world.

Only recently man began to place himself appropriately as a historical being into world evolution. This has come about through external means of education. Think of mankind’s limited horizon in the 14th or 15th century before the art of printing spread educational materials. Thus, questions like the following would not yet have touched human hearts; ‘How can our soul be satisfied in the face of what we recognise as historical progress?’ Here lies the origin of a question which for many today has become a question of the heart. Historical progress shows us, that ever new achievements are made, which also have value for the inner development of the soul itself, that new and ever new facts enter into the stream of the progressing humanity. So man must ask himself; ‘What is the state of the human being himself in his innermost nature? Have the people of the past been condemned to live their lives in a dull existence, unable to participate in the evolutionary products of later progress? What then is the share of the human being in the successive developments of the human race?’

This may be a question to which many objections could be raised—we only want to say that indeed the question, the riddle, arises out of a deep feeling in the human soul: ‘Is it possible that a human soul living today, whose life is enclosed between birth and death, cannot take part in achievements that will only be imprinted into the stream of human evolution in the future?’

For the confessors of Christianity this question takes on a fundamental importance. One whose faith is based on Reformed Christianity distinguishes between the evolution of humanity in the pre-Christian epoch and the evolution in the post-Christian epoch, and states that from the Christ-event a stream of new spiritual life has emerged which earlier was not available for mankind on Earth. Thus, particularly for such a person the question arises: ‘How is it for the souls who lived prior to the Christ-event, prior to the revelation of what radiated from the Christ-Event?’

Such a question can be asked by man. Spiritual Science answers this for him not only theoretically, but also in a way that is satisfactory for him, by showing that the same people, who took in achievements of the pre-Christian era in the time before the Christ-event will be reincarnated after the stream of Christian development has begun. Therefore whatever happens in civilisation, nobody will need to miss out on. Thus, for Spiritual Science something grows out of history that is not just general abstract ideas that are cold and abstract, that must energise like rigid forces the stream of humanity, but Spiritual Science refers to history as something in which man with his innermost being participates everywhere. And since the human horizon has been broadened by modern means of education, this question is now posed in a completely different sense than about a century ago, when peoples’ horizons were more limited.

A yearning for an answer exists, that can only be quenched through Spiritual Science. If we consider all of this—and we could continue to talk in the same vein and refer to much that confirms that Spiritual Science is important for the present time because it yearns so much for its results—then we gain an idea about the significance of Spiritual Science for the present.

All the lectures, which will be held here in the course of this winter, must serve only one purpose, namely to gather material from the most diverse sides in order to show the results and the significance of Spiritual Science for human life and for the satisfaction of the highest needs of humans in general. Only this needs to be added in conclusion; one of the most common objections against Spiritual Science today, albeit one taken from a catchphrase, is that natural science has happily advanced to be able to explain the world monistically, through a uniform principle given by natural scientific methods. It has almost become a slogan, arousing antipathy in many, that states; ‘Now Spiritual Science is coming back and setting up a dualism opposed to such epistemologically beneficial monism!’ With such slogans many sins are committed.

Has the principle of a unified explanation of the universe been broken simply by the fact that two streams work together in the cosmos, one of which works from the outside and the other from the inside and they meet within the soul? May it not be assumed that what approaches the soul from two sides—namely, from sense perception on the one hand, and from spiritual scientific research on the other—is nevertheless founded in a unified existence and only initially appears for human perception in two currents? Does Monism really have to be taken superficially? If it were the case that the monistic principle were thereby broken, then someone might immediately allege that the monistic principle would also be broken apart if one concedes that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen and oxygen can nevertheless have a uniform origin, even if they unite in what we call water.

In the same way the sensory and the supersensible worlds can have a unified origin, even if one is forced by facts of natural science and Spiritual Science to say that two streams unite in the human soul, one entering from the side of the senses and the other from the side of the spirit. One cannot immediately show the unity, the ‘monon’, but it does not therefore contradict a monistic worldview. What shows itself in this way from two sides, gains the strength of full reality only when we recognise how it constitutes itself out of these two currents. If we turn our gaze to the external world, we see, through the arrangement of our senses and our intellect, a world view that does not show us what it grows out of: the spirit. But when we follow the paths of spiritual scientific research and experience the uplift in the soul, then we find the spirit. It is within our soul that spirit and matter meet. Only in the fusion of spirit and matter within our soul lies the true spirit- and matter-filled spiritual reality!

Thus, perhaps what has just been said might be summarised in words that express the same but in a poetic form, what all those who tried to gain an unbiased view of spirit and matter have felt at all times. Spiritual Science in its relationship to natural science teaches us to recognise that this is true:

The rich abundance of matter
Presses upon human sense
From World-depths mysteriously.

The clarifying Spirit-Word
Streams into depths of soul
From content filled World-heights.

They meet in the human inner being
To wisdom-filled reality.

• 1. Translator’s comment: Literal translation of Geisteswissenschaft from German is ‘Spiritual Science’, in English called ‘humanities’.
• 2. ‘How do you refute Theosophy? How do you justify Theosophy?’ Rudolf Steiner talked about this topic for the first time on 19 and 25 March 1911 in Prague, and later at various locations in Germany. The Berlin lectures were later published in the series of Architect-House-Lectures.
• 3. Goethe’s conversation with Falk on 25 January 1813: Flodard Freiherr von Biedermann: Goethe’s conversations—except those with Eckermann. Collected works, Leipzig Edition 1909, Volume 2, page 169 ff.
• 4. Translator’s comment: Today called the premaxillary bone.
• 5. Translator’s comment: Reclam is a German publishing house, established in 1828, well-known for its small sized, mainly classic books, and for its favourable prices.
• 6. Matthias Jacob Schleiden, 1805-1881, Botanist, Professor in Jena and Dorpat. ‘The Plant and its Life’, 1848.
• 7. Theodor Schwann, 1810-1882, Anatomist and Physiologist, Professor in Loewen and Luettich; ‘Microscopical researches into the accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants’, 1839.
• 8. Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, 1824–1887, Physicist, Professor in Breslau, Heidelberg and Berlin. In 1860 he discovered, together with Bunsen, spectral analysis. Researches on the Solar Spectrum and the Spectra of Chemical Elements.,1861-1863.
• 9. Robert Bunsen, 1811–1899, Chemist, he was, inter alia, Professor in Marburg and Heidelberg, ‘Collected Treatises, 3 Volumes, 1904.
• 10. Bernhard Riemann, 1826-1866, Professor in Goettingen, ‘On the Hypotheses which lie at the foundation of Geometry’, 1854.
• 11. Nikolaus Lobatschewski, 1793-1856, Russia, ‘On the Origin of Geometry’, 1829.
• 12. Johan Bolyai, 1802-1860, Ungarn, Engineering Officer and Mathematician.

According to an oft-repeated saying, it is incumbent on the philosopher to express the cultural content of his time in the form of pure thought. Just as the artist endeavors to express in a sensual, descriptive form the ideas, feelings and other contents of life that are present in the depths of the popular and contemporary consciousness, so the philosopher seeks to represent in a conceptual, thinking way the totality of everything that dominates and animates his time and his people. Kuno Fischer says in his witty work "History of Modern Philosophy": "If we want to compare a cultural system or an age with a pictorial pillar, then philosophy forms the sensing eye that looks inwards," Without this living reference to the age, without the urge to recognize that, without the urge to penetrate with calm clarity what takes place in life amidst to and fro struggles and in the restlessness of the day, in order to have a stimulating effect on it, the philosopher cannot escape the fate of leading a worthless existence on his lonely heights.

Few renowned philosophers have approached their task in the manner just described as brilliantly as our great contemporary Eduard von Hartmann. While on the one hand we see him wrestling with the deepest mysteries of world-building and the riddles of life, on the other hand he does not disdain to deal thoroughly with the pending questions of the day, with the aspirations of the parties and the interests of the state. The socio-political currents of the present, the errors of the liberal partisans, military and church policy issues, school and academic reform, national and democratic ideas occupied his interest no less than modern artistic endeavors, the women's question, and the literary events of our time. Indeed, he also spoke out openly and unreservedly on sensitive issues such as spiritualism, hypnotism and somnambulism; and when the Polish question came on the agenda in Germany, he was the first to write in favor of the solution that Bismarck later advocated as the right one. And yet, like so many philosophers, he did not intervene in the dispute of opinions with a preconceived template, but was always guided by the reasons that lay in the facts and emerged from a thorough study of the facts. To judge how Hartmann draws from the fullness of an almost immeasurable knowledge, what sum of knowledge he possesses, one must have had the good fortune to have met him personally. However, in the course of this essay we will show that this kind of work is only a consequence of his scientific conviction.

The consequence of this phenomenon, which is rare in the history of intellectual life, is also a quite incredible effect. E.v. Hartmann is now forty-nine years old, at the peak of his creative power and enthusiasm, still promising much (his first appearance was in 1868), and we already have a literature about him that is unmissable. The significance of a man is reflected differently in the consciousness of his contemporaries, and differently in that of posterity. The former can hardly find the right standard of judgment. The future historian of intellectual life in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century will have to devote a large chapter to Hartmann. We will first characterize the historical position of Hartmann's circle of ideas and then go into the individual main areas of his activity.

In the sixties of this century, German philosophy had reached a precarious point in its development. The confidence with which Hegel's students had appeared after the master's death (1830) had given way to complete discouragement in the field of this science. Starting from Hegel, they had hoped to spread a net of absolutely certain knowledge over all branches of knowledge, but the Hegelians were soon no longer able to deal with the abundance of the gradually accumulating material of actual results of research. They abandoned their doctrinal edifice piece by piece, tried to improve it here and there and to adapt the traditional doctrine to the new situation of empirical science. Most of them, however, tried to free themselves completely from the beliefs of their youth and, like the aesthetician Vischer, for example, regarded their Hegelian period only as a time for training their philosophical thinking. Complete confusion and perplexity prevailed in the cathedrals. While one group of professional philosophers gave up any prospect of success in the development of a world view for the time being and merely turned to the treatment of special questions, another group shifted to a rather unfruitful further development of Herbart's way of thinking, which had become stuck in antediluvian prejudices. The representatives of empirical science, however, looked down with contempt on all philosophy, which, in their opinion, only dealt with worthless fantasy. Finally, the great mass of educated people satisfied their philosophical needs from the world view of a thinker who had hitherto remained almost unnoticed and was in fact almost useless for a serious, thorough pursuit of science: Schopenhauer. The bad experiences that Schopenhauer had with his first work, the only one of his that was of any great significance for science: "On the Fourfold Root of the Theorem of the Ground", led him to take ever more precarious paths. He now turned personal views and subjective experiences into philosophical propositions and, in "Parerga and Paralipomena", completely sacrificed the truth to an ingenious style that captivated the audience. His explanations were gripped with greed because it was easy to obtain the phrases necessary for daily use from his writings, which offered nothing but philosophical trivialities in the appropriate form.

This was the state of philosophy when Hartmann came on the scene (1868). He did so with the indispensable self-confidence in the weapons of his thinking and in full possession of the knowledge of the individual sciences available at his time. He recognized that neither everything from Hegel could be accepted nor everything rejected. He peeled the lasting core of Hegel's world view out of its harmful shell and began to develop it further. He completely separated the method from the results of Hegel's philosophy and declared that the good in Hegel was found without, indeed against, his method, and that what the latter alone provided was of dubious value. In his view, the method needed a thorough reform. And it was here that he entered into an alliance with natural science. The demand to seek scientific results only by means of observation, which natural scientists were increasingly insisting on, also became his own in the philosophical field. "Metaphysical results according to the scientific-inductive method" became the motto of his main work "Philosophy of the Unconscious", published in Berlin in 1869. But he held the view that Hegel had also arrived at his truly valuable results using the same method, indeed that positive scientific propositions can only be arrived at in this way. Hartmann's strict consistency, however, prevented him from using this method to arrive at the one-sided views that characterize the natural sciences of the time. How can one claim that observation delivers nothing but what the senses perceive, what eyes see, ears hear and so on, he asked himself? Is not thinking an organ of perception that transcends all the senses? Should reality exhaust itself in the raw material? Open your senses to reality, but do no less with your rational thinking, he called out to the natural scientists, then you will find that there is a higher reality than the one you consider to be the only true one!

Hegel was no less thirsty for reality than a modern natural scientist, but his higher mind also revealed a higher reality to him. E. v. Hartmann also found himself in this position. He took the view that not everything we encounter in the world can be explained by causes that we perceive with our senses. Even when we see a stone fall to earth, we attribute the cause to the gravitational pull of the earth, which we can no longer perceive, but only grasp in our minds. And only when we follow an organism in its development from the egg to its completion! Who would want to satisfy his need for explanation without resorting to the view that forces are at work here which we can only visualize in our thoughts? It becomes clear to us from such a consideration of the organism that we must presuppose a unified mental basis if we want to satisfy our need for knowledge. We must add something to the perception in thought and out of thought if we want to understand the matter. What we add there can of course only be a thought, an idea. But just as we need an idea in our thinking in order to bring about the conception of an organism, for example, so there must also be something analogous in the thing itself that brings about the same thing in its reality. Hartmann calls the analog in reality, which corresponds to the idea in our consciousness, the unconscious idea.

However, this concept of the idea is not so very different from what Hegel calls the idea. Hartmann asserts nothing other than this: what works outside in the world as the cause of things and processes is expressed within our consciousness in the form of the idea. Thus he must regard the content of our world of ideas as that which lifts the veil of existence for us, insofar as the latter is possible for us at all. And Hegel says: grasp the world of ideas in your consciousness, then you have grasped the objective content of the world. So far there would now be complete agreement between the two thinkers. Whereas But whereas Hegel simply seeks out the world of ideas within us and thereby accepts their inner logical character as decisive, Hartmann says: the idea as logical, merely as it is in us, in thought, could at most again cause ideas in a logical way, but not bring forth things of reality. For this there must be a second element, a force, something utterly illogical. Of this second element of the highest reality I can, of course, only recognize the representative that it sends into my consciousness. But if I ask myself, what is the power in me that actually accomplishes that, that makes it a reality, what determines logic, then I find my will. Something analogous to this must also prevail in the external world in order to lend reality, saturated existence, to the otherwise powerless ideas. Hartmann calls this analog the unconscious will. However, unconscious idea and unconscious will together form the unconscious mind or the unconscious.

Hartmann does not claim that the unconscious idea or the unconscious will are present in the outside world in the same quality as their conscious representatives in our mind. Rather, he maintains that we know nothing about the quality of what corresponds to the idea and the will in the objective, but that for us only one thing is certain, that such analogs exist.¹

Through the latter assumption, through the unconscious will, Hartmann now essentially goes beyond Hegel. If the latter, according to his basic assumption, had to regard logical determinacy as the only thing that comes into consideration in the idea, and see the highest laws of the world in logical laws, then Hartmann claims that everything we become aware of in the world is the ideal realized by the will. Since the will is, of course, a force that knows nothing of the laws of logic, the laws of the world are not logical laws either. So if I merely look into myself and observe my world of ideas in their logical connections, I will not reach any goal. I must look out and investigate through observation what creatures the will spouts forth from the eternal source of being. What I observe there, what I ultimately gain as a result, is an idea, but an idea borrowed from reality.

Hartmann reproached the natural scientists for simply not having the ability to observe ideas and therefore stopping at mere sensory perception. The natural scientists, however, dismissed the philosopher by declaring his "Philosophy of the Unconscious" to be the work of a fantasist who wanted to discuss scientific questions in a completely amateurish manner. Soon after the "Philosophy of the Unconscious", a series of counter-writings from a scientific point of view appeared, including one by an anonymous author. The natural scientists declared it to be a very meritorious booklet, which refuted Hartmann's frivolous statements from the standpoint of true empirical science with genuine expertise. The book went through a second edition, but now the author put his full name on the title page. It was - Eduard von Hartmann. The philosopher had had the fun of thoroughly demonstrating to his opponents that one can already understand them if one only wants to stand down on their point of view. He succeeded brilliantly in showing who contradicts because they don't understand their opponent.

The success of the "Philosophy of the Unconscious" was the greatest imaginable. To date, ten editions have been published and translations have been made into all European cultural languages. Encouraged by this, Hartmann devoted all his energy to expanding his world view. He sought not only to illuminate the ever-increasing experience of natural science from the point of view of his philosophy,².

Hartmann's ethical views can mainly be found in his book "Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness". His basic views in the field of ethics are also reflected in his position on politics and the cultural issues of the day.

The unconscious idea is realized through the unconscious will. This is the essence of the world process. And the histotic process of development is only a part of this process. But as such it is again a whole, and the individual cultural systems and moral views of peoples and ages are only its parts. He who recognizes this cannot seek the purpose of his existence in a single act, but only in the value which his particular existence has for the cultural process of the whole of humanity and indirectly thereby for the whole course of the world. Only in selfless devotion to the whole, in being absorbed in humanity, can the individual find his salvation. In addition to this insight, Hartmann seeks to provide empirical proof that no pleasure in the world can grant us an unrestricted feeling of happiness. Wherever we may look, if we become attached to individual, temporary things, the deprivation will be greater than the satisfaction. We must imbue ourselves with this conviction and then dedicate ourselves all the more joyfully to the ideal life task described above. If you want to call this ethical view pessimism, then you may do so. But beware of confusing this Hartmannian view with Schopenhauer's pessimism.

The latter is convinced that the will in its lack of reason is the only world principle and that the idea has no objective meaning at all, but is merely a "brain product". He therefore finds the world unreasonable and bad. A realization through the irrational will could only produce a worthless existence. There would be nothing worth living for in the world. Since we can achieve nothing in such a world, non-action is preferable to action for human beings. As you can see, Schopenhauer's ethics ends with the recommendation of complete inaction.

Compare this with Hartmann's ethics and you will see that it leads to a completely opposite result, that it seeks satisfaction precisely in selfless, devoted action, which selfish enjoyment could never offer us. The fact that both world views are nevertheless constantly thrown together, despite repeated protests on the part of E. v. Hartmann, proves the power that slogans have even over the educated public.

But where should we take the principles for our respective actions from, asks Hartmann. We work most effectively when we grasp our task most correctly in the place where history has placed us. What is good today was not good in the Middle Ages and will not be good centuries later. What a man has to do must result from what his predecessor has done. This is where he must pick up the thread and develop it further. Only those who know their tasks for the present from the past, from historical development, can create something good. We must not enter the arena of action with abstract, template-like concepts, but equipped with knowledge of the true needs of actual reality.

Because the liberal parties want to rule the world from the outside, from theory, disregarding these needs, Hartmann is an opponent of them. He wants party principles that follow from the study of reality. He is conservative in the sense that he wants reform efforts everywhere to be linked to what already exists, but not at all in the way of many conservatives who would like to put all kinds of restraints on development or preferably even order it to stand still. Hartmann wants progress, but not in the way that liberalism sees it, but as a continuous approach to the great cultural goals of mankind. For him, each cultural epoch is only the preparation for the next. No branch of culture is excluded from this development.

Hartmann has explained how religious needs are also subject to this general law in his two works: "Die Selbstzersetzung des Christentums und die Religion der Zukunft" and "Das religiöse Bewußtsein der Menschheit im Stufengang seiner Entwicklung". We are living in a time in which the old religious forms have become rotten everywhere and must make way for new ones. Christianity is not an absolute religion, but only one phase in the religious development of mankind, and there are already enough signs of the new view that will replace it.

It would be a serious prejudice to believe that Hartmann's philosophical discussions are worthless for practical life. I would just like to point out a few things that could refute this. Hartmann theoretically called for the German-Austrian alliance and the current constellation of European states long before they actually materialized. The party formations that we have seen emerge in Germany in the second half of the past decade were previously presented by Hartmann as a necessity. We have already mentioned the Polish question. We must not forget that our philosopher is far from claiming that what he describes as necessary in this way is also the best. To demand the best is, in his view, an empty demand; one must see what can arise according to the motives at work in people and in time and offer one's hand to this. Hartmann is a real politician in the most eminent sense.

For some time now, people in German-Austria have not spoken well of Hartmann because in an essay in 1885 he spoke of a "regression of Germanism in the Austrian lands". If one were to examine the content of this essay closely, one would probably come to a different conclusion. For apart from a few remarks which make the situation of our fellow tribesmen appear sadder than it really is, and which must be set against the fact that Hartmann must have gained his knowledge in part from newspaper reports and brochures which falsify the matter, one will find in that essay only the views represented which today the most national Austrian politicians have written on their banner. Hartmann explained to the Germans in Austria that they must sink below the level of influence they deserve if they continue to lose sight of the real tasks of their nation and the Reich over liberal party programs. In his view, they must rely on the power of the people and their higher education in order to achieve what they can never achieve by making pacts with "immature nations" and through liberal phrases, namely to steer "the state of Western Austria". To accuse Hartmann of even the slightest anti-German sentiment because of this essay is unacceptable when you consider how deeply his entire world view is rooted in Germanness and how he honors this Germanness when he says, for example, that the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War "has shown so clearly that Germany will essentially have to forever renounce being understood by anything other than German blood".

The significance of Hartmann's view of the political situation will only be fully appreciated when one of his main ideas - the "complete separation of all political parties from economic and religious-church parties" - has been realized and when the Central European Customs Union he called for in 1881 becomes possible. It will then be seen that Hartmann's views are nothing but the moral, political, religious, economic, etc. forces of the. of the present. He tries to eavesdrop on the direction in which they are striving, and according to this direction he tries to show the way for practical reforms.

Recently, Hartmann gave us a two-volume "Aesthetics". The first volume seeks to give a historical account of the development of German art history since Kant; the second endeavors to build its own independent edifice of the "science of beauty". In the first part, we admire the all-round approach, which deals with every phenomenon and provides not only a historical development of the basic views of the individual aestheticians, but also an account of the progress of the individual basic aesthetic concepts, such as: beautiful, ugly, comic, sublime, graceful and so on. The fact that the often misunderstood Deutinger and the completely lost but highly significant Trahndorff find their just appreciation in the book is not one of its least merits. Anyone who wants to learn in detail how views on art have developed from Kant up to the present day must turn to this book.

In the "Science of Beauty" Hartmann, true to his principle, seeks to find that area in what actually exists in which beauty, that which is created by art, has its seat. He rejects the abstract idealism of the Schellingians, who seek beauty not in the object of art itself but in an abstract sphere and claim that every single beauty is only a reflection of the supernatural idea of beauty that never appears in its perfection. Hartmann counters this "abstract idealism" with his "concrete idealism", which seeks the reason and the root in the aesthetic object itself, in short, which also applies the observing, contemplating, not the constructing method here. What is actually the object in which the "beautiful" is realized? asks Hartmann. Neither merely the real work that we have before us, as the realists want, nor merely the harmony of feelings and sensations that it produces in us, as the idealists want, are the seat of beauty, but the appearance of reality, for the production of which the real product serves the artist only as a means. Anyone who is unable to disregard the real effects exerted on him by the art product and can only indulge in the impression of the "aesthetic appearance" detached from all reality is not yet capable of true enjoyment of art. A person who commits a crime in reality creates a real feeling of revulsion in us through his actual deed. He affects us through what he is. The actor who portrays the criminal only has the right effect on us if, denying his real being, he only arouses feelings and emotions in us through what he appears to be, through his representation, which is exhausted in appearance and behind which there is no reality. "Whoever has not yet stripped away the last trace of realistic velleities from aesthetic appearance and the content hidden in it has not yet penetrated to a purely aesthetic conception, but has more or less remained stuck in an amalgamation of aesthetic with theoretical or practical conception." (Wissenschaft des Schönen, p.21.) Only those who are able to emancipate themselves completely from the real meaning of the object in front of them and devote themselves only to the enjoyment of what it seems to be are capable of aesthetic contemplation. And now Hartmann shows us just as much how the appearance detached from reality expresses itself in individual forms of artistic creation, in the sensually pleasing, in mathematical relationships, in organic formations and so on, as he also shows us how the individual arts can evoke the "aesthetic appearance" with the means at their disposal. We ourselves have published an essay in these journals that takes as its starting point basic views that do not entirely coincide with Hartmann's. In particular, we believe that aesthetics should not neglect to say what it is in "aesthetic appearance" that actually has an effect on us. It is just as certain that he who is influenced in his aesthetic contemplation "by accidental knowledge of the private life of the actor Schultze and the dancer Müller in the judgment of their mimic artistic performances" does not arrive at the true enjoyment of art, as it is true that I must remain aesthetically unaffected even in the pure contemplation of appearances if I have no feeling for what speaks to me precisely through the aesthetic appearance. Certainly, the artist can only have an effect on me through appearance, but it is not the character of the appearance that constitutes the nature of the work of art, but the content in the appearance, that which the artist embodies in the appearance. Whoever has only a sense for appearance and none for what is expressed in appearance remains insensitive to art. Appearance is only necessary because art has something to tell us that cannot be said to us by immediate reality. It is a necessary auxiliary to art, a consequence of artistic creation, but it does not constitute the latter. These are objections of principle, however, and we would be unjust if we did not counter them with the fact that we have rarely read a book with such satisfaction, with such great benefit, as Hartmann's Aesthetics. Everyone can learn from it through the thorough knowledge of technique in the individual arts that characterizes the author, through the views on life that testify to Hartmann's genius and the great style with which he grasps the sum of all cultural expressions, and finally through the fine taste that underpins all his judgments on art.

We are rarely as pleased as when we read the announcement of a new work by Hartmann, because then we always know that a great treasure is being added to our minds. And we wish time good luck for everything that will come from Hartmann, because, as we have already mentioned, he is at the height of his creative powers. He has almost completed his system. We do not know what area his work will now focus on. But we do know this: everything we can still expect from him will have the character of greatness and significance.

• 1. Hartmann describes the relationship of something existing in consciousness to something beyond it, something unknown to us, as transcendental. This is why he calls his world view, which assumes such a reality and relates the content of consciousness to it, transcendental realism.
• 2. but also to draw the consequences for ethics, religious studies and aesthetics.

  A supplementary volume to the first to ninth edition of the "Philosophy of the Unconscious" (Leipzig, Wilhelm Friedrich) was published in 1891, which deals with the latest results of natural science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wilhelm von Humboldt makes the statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Against Kantian arguments of this kind, Goethe answers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scruples of Conscience.

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

Decision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ 1 ] It appears, however, as if we ourselves had here introduced the very subjective element we were so determined to exclude from our theory of knowledge. Although the rest of the perceptual world does not possess a subjective character—so it might be deduced from our explanation—yet thoughts, even according to our own opinion, do bear such a character.

[ 2 ] This objection rests upon a confusion of two things—the theater in which our thoughts play their role and that element from which they derive the determination of their content, the inner law of their nature. We do not at all produce a thought-content in such fashion that, in this production, we determine into what interconnections our thoughts shall enter. We merely provide the occasion through which the thought-content unfolds according to its own nature. We grasp thought a and thought b and give them the opportunity to enter into a connection according to principle by bringing them into mutual interaction one with the other. It is not our subjective organization which determines this interrelation between a and b in a certain manner, but the content ofa andb is the sole determinant. The fact that a is related to b in a certain manner and not in another,—upon this fact we have not the slightest influence. Our mind brings about the interconnection between thought masses only according to the measure of their own content. Thus we fulfill the principle of experience in its very baldest form in the case of thinking.

[ 3 ] This refutes the opinion of Kant and Schopenhauer, and in a broader sense of Fichte also, that the laws we assume in order to explain the world are merely an effect of our own mental organization, and that we inject them into the world only because of our own mental individuality.

[ 4 ] Another objection might be raised from a subjective point of view. Even though the law-controlled relationship of the thought masses is not brought about according to our own organization, but depends upon the thought-content, yet this very content may be a mere subjective product, a mere quality of our mind, so that we should merely be uniting elements produced first by ourselves. In this case our thought-world would be none the less a subjective appearance. But it is very easy to meet this objection. That is, if it were well founded, we should be uniting the content of our thoughts according to laws while remaining wholly unaware as to whence these laws come. If these do not spring from our subjective being—a supposition we have already taken under consideration and set aside as untenable—what, then, could provide us with laws of interconnection for a content produced by ourselves?

[ 5 ] In other words, our thought-world is an entity resting wholly upon itself, a totality self-enclosed, complete and entire within itself. Here we perceive which of the two aspects of the thought-world is the essential one: the objective aspect of its content and not the subjective aspect of its mode of emergence.

[ 6 ] This insight into the inner purity and completeness of thought appears at its clearest in the scientific system of Hegel. No one else has attributed to thinking a power so complete that it could form a foundation in itself for a world-conception. Hegel has absolute confidence in thinking. Indeed, it is the only factor of reality which he trusts in the fullest sense of the word. Yet, although his point of view is in the main highly correct, he more than any one else has destroyed confidence in thought by the excessively unqualified form in which he has applied it. The way in which he has presented his view is responsible for the irremediable confusion which has found its way into our “thinking about thinking.” He desired to make the importance of thought, of the idea, evident by defining rational necessity in the same terms as factual necessity. In doing so he has given rise to the fallacy that thought-determinations are not purely ideal, but factual. His point of view was soon so conceived as if he had sought for thought itself as one of the facts in the world of sensible reality. Indeed, he failed to make himself entirely clear in regard to this. The truth must be firmly grasped that the sphere of thought is in human consciousness alone. Then it must be shown that the thought-world does not thereby sacrifice in the least its objectivity. Hegel exposed to view only the objective aspects of thought; but most persons see only what is easier to be seen—the subjective aspect—and it seems to them that Hegel treats something purely ideal as a thing—that is, that he indulged in a mystification. Even many scholars of the present time cannot be said to be quite free of this fallacy. They condemn Hegel because of a defect which he himself did not possess, but which can certainly be interjected into him because he failed to explain the matter in question with sufficient clearness.

[ 7 ] We admit that we are here faced by something which is difficult for us to judge with the capacities we possess. Yet we believe it can be mastered by every energetic thinker. We must form two different conceptions: first, that by our own activity we bring the ideal world to manifestation; and, secondly, at the same time that what we by our activity call into existence rests, nevertheless, upon its own laws. It is true that we are accustomed so to conceive a phenomenon as if we needed only to stand passive before it, observing it. But this is not at all an absolute necessity. No matter how unfamiliar the conception may be to us, that we by our activity bring an objective entity to manifestation—that is, in other words, that we do not merely become aware of a phenomenon, but at the same time produce it—this conception is not at all invalid.

[ 8 ] It is only necessary that we should abandon the customary idea that there are as many thought-worlds as there are human individuals. This idea is nothing more than an ancient preconception. It is tacitly presupposed everywhere without any consciousness that another conception is at least equally possible, and that the arguments for the validity of one or the other must, therefore, at least be weighed. Let us for a moment imagine, in place of the above preconception, the following: that there is one sole thought-content, and that our individual thinking is nothing more than the act of working ourselves, our individual personalities, into the thought-center of the world. This is not the place to investigate whether this point of view is correct or not; but it is possible, and we have attained what we wished to attain: that is, we have shown that it is entirely in order to postpone for the present undertaking to prove that the objectivity of thought, which we have declared to be a matter of necessity, is not a self-contradictory conception.

[ 9 ] From the point of view of its objectivity, the work of the thinker may very appropriately be compared with that of a mechanic. Just as the latter brings natural forces into reciprocal action and thus brings about a purposeful activity and exertion of forces, so the thinker causes thought-elements to come into reciprocal activity, and these evolve into the thought-systems which compose our sciences.

[ 10 ] There is no better means of throwing light upon a conception than by exposing the fallacies arrayed against it. Here again let us resort to this method, already profitably employed more than once.

[ 11 ] It is generally supposed that the reason why we unite certain concepts into greater complexes, or why we think at all in certain ways, is because we sense a certain inner (logical) compulsion to do this. Volkelt also has appropriated this opinion. But how can this be harmonized with the transparent clearness with which our whole thought-world is present in consciousness? We know nothing in the world more thoroughly than we know our thoughts. Must we, then, assume a certain connection on the ground of an inner compulsion when everything is so clear? What need have I of the compulsion when I know the nature of what is to be united—know it through and through—and can guide myself according to this nature? All the operations of our thinking are processes which come to pass by reason of insight into the essential nature of the thoughts, and not according to compulsion. Such compulsion contradicts the nature of thinking.

[ 12 ] We might certainly admit the possibility that it may be a part of the essential nature of thinking to stamp its content directly upon its manifestation, but that, nevertheless, we cannot immediately perceive this content by means of our mental organization. But such is not the case. The way in which the thought-content meets us is a guarantee to us that we here have the essential nature of the thing before us. We are assuredly aware that we accompany with our mind every process in the thought-world. Yet we can only think that the form of manifestation of a thing is determined by its essential nature. How could we reproduce the form of appearance if we did not know the essential nature of the thing? It is possible to conceive that the form of appearance emerges before us as an existent whole and we then seek for its central core. But it is impossible to maintain the point of view that we cooperate in producing the appearance without effecting this production by means of its own central core.

It is a frequently mentioned fact that it is exceptionally difficult to obtain an understanding concerning the spiritual-scientific movement with our academic leaders in scientific circles. This is a fatal fact that science is today surrounded by such a big belief in authority. Everything that is scientific exercises such an impressive power in all directions that a spiritual movement has a hard furrow to plough if the predominating part of the scholars, one can say, almost any academic circle treat such a movement like our spiritual-scientific one in such a way, as if it were dilettantism, blind superstition or anything else.

It may be deplorable, but understandable in any case, if one hears the judgements of such academic circles about theosophy or spiritual science. If one examines these judgements, it is obvious that they belong to the judgements that were obtained without any expertise. If we then still ask the so-called public opinion, as it is expressed in our journals, we need not to be surprised, if it faces the theosophical movement not quite understanding. For this public opinion is controlled completely by the impressive power of the scientific authority and is completely dependent on it.

There are different reasons, which make this clear to us. We can see one of these reasons concerning the German cultural life simply in the fact that the academic circles, actually, left an important impact on our German cultural life, a culminating point of our deepest life of thought completely out of consideration. Indeed, you find some notes about this in any manual of philosophy, in any history of literature; but a really penetrating understanding of this most significant side of our cultural life and of that which around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries the most important German thinkers performed does not exist. In particular, there is a lack of understanding how these results of the German life of thought are rooted in the general German cultural life a hundred years ago.

If this fact were not such a one, if our academic circles were concerned with that deepening of the German life of thought around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries, there would be, for example, an understanding of Fichte's, Schelling's, and Hegel's great life of thought among our philosophers. The compendia of philosophy would not contain only single inadequate extracts of the works, but one would know what generally thought achieved in Germany. Then one would also obtain access to the spiritual-scientific movement from the point of view of scholarship.

Of all pre-schools of theosophy or spiritual science which one can go through today this school of the German thought of the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries is the very best for the present human beings. Indeed, it is not accessible to anybody, because how should the bigger national circles understand the great German thinkers really if the university circles, the academic circles lead the way to this understanding so little, if they do so little to cause a real popularity of these thinkers. One is not allowed to reproach the big audience, those who should turn to theosophy that they are not able to do it. To those, however, whose occupation it would be to let flow in the spiritual treasures of the West in the national culture, to those must be said that they fulfil their obligations in this respect in no way.

I do not name unknown names to you, but I maybe have to represent the peculiar fact that one can relate names, which you find in every philosophical compendium, with theosophy. It is peculiar that one likes to say that it is senseless to use the title “Secret Doctrine.” The Western researchers, for example, who concerned themselves with Buddhism, have repeatedly denied that Buddhism contains a secret doctrine that anything would exceed what you can read in the books.

It is not at all surprising that such academic circles assert such things. For one can conclude from it that the most important things have remained a secret doctrine to them. How should they know that there is a secret doctrine, because they have never found access to it! The most important that was performed in connection with the great German thinker Johann Gottlieb Fichte is to the majority, also even today, a deep secret doctrine. It is true, as deplorable as it may appear, the German spiritual life of the turn from the 18th to the 19th centuries originated from the so-called Enlightenment. We may characterise this Enlightenment with a few words. It was a necessary event in the modern spiritual development. The most significant spirits of the 18th century had taken up the cause of it. Kant says, enlightenment simply means what can be summarised in the sentence: “Dare to use your own reason” (first by Horace: sapere aude). This enlightenment was nothing else than an emancipation of the personality, the relief of the personality from the traditions. What one has thought for centuries, what everybody has taken up from the common spiritual substance of the people should be checked. Only that should be valid which the single personality affirms. You know, great spirits developed from the Enlightenment. One only needs to remind of the name Lessing to call one of the best. Everything that is connected with the name Kant is nothing else than a result of the Enlightenment.

Someone who has broken with this Enlightenment in a peculiar way is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. If I say, he has broken in peculiar way with this Enlightenment, and then you do not believe that I am determined to represent Fichte as an opponent of the Enlightenment. He has broken in the way that he examines all results of the Enlightenment and has continued building on its basis, but Fichte went quite thoroughly beyond that which is only enlightenment, beyond the trivial. Just Fichte gives somebody who has the possibility to become engrossed in his great lines of thought something that one can obtain among the newer spirits only from him.

After we have heard many merely popular talks, we want to hear a talk today, which seems to be far off the usual way, which our spiritual-scientific talks take in this winter. I will endeavour to show something as comprehensibly as possible that took place in the German life of thought, actually, at that time, around the turn from the 18th to the 19th centuries. It can only be sketchy what I have to say. At first this German life of thought impeded the access to the real spiritual world and then to the living and immortal essence of the human being. Today I cannot go into the worth or worthlessness of Kant's philosophy. The official philosophy calls Kant the destroyer and regards his system of theories as a philosophical action first-rate. Today I would like only to remind of a word which is known perhaps also with those who do not have the opportunity to penetrate deeper into the matter, to the word of the “thing in itself.”

The human cognitive faculties are limited in the sense of Kant's philosophy. They cannot penetrate to the “thing in itself.” Whichever ideas and concepts we form, whatever we get to know in the world, we deal with phenomena and not with the true “thing in itself” in the sense of Kant's philosophy. This is always concealed behind the phenomena. With it, blind speculation is encouraged—and we have seen it in the spiritual development of Germany very well—which wants to define and restrict the human cognitive faculties in all directions. However, at the same time the trend of the human being to penetrate to the true, to explore the depths of existence should be stopped.

It should be shown that the human being cannot automatically approach the primary sources of existence. Now it may be true that such an attitude was necessary in the course of the spiritual life of the 18th century. However, Kant's philosophy put big obstacles in the way of the further development of the spiritual life. Indeed, I know very well that there are people who say, what did Kant different from all those great spirits who have always emphasised that we deal with phenomena that we cannot come to the “thing in itself!” That is apparently right, however, it is wrong. The real spiritual researchers of all times state quite different that the world only consists of phenomena.

No true spiritual researcher has ever denied that in such a way, as we investigate the world with senses, understand it with the intellect, it offers us only phenomena. However, higher senses are to be woken in us that go beyond the usual, which penetrate deeper into the sources of existence, can, and must lead slowly and gradually to the “thing in itself.” No Eastern philosophy, no Platonic philosophy, no self-understanding worldview penetrating into the spirit has ever spoken of the world as Maya in another sense. They always said only, to the lower human cognition, a veil is before the “thing in itself,” to the higher human cognition this veil is torn, the human being can penetrate into the depths of existence. The Enlightenment reached a blind alley concerning the question in certain respects, and this is characterised best of all with a remark which you find in the preface to the second edition of Kant's main work Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and with which the Enlightenment can be caught at its despondency because it does not want to advance further.

One reads: “I had to override knowledge to create space for faith.” This is the nerve of Kant's philosophy and of that thinking to which the 18th century came and beyond which our philosophical scholarship has not yet come which still suffers from it. As long as it suffers from this illness, philosophy is never destined to understand theosophy. What does that mean: “I had to override knowledge to create space for faith”? Kant says, the thing in itself remains concealed, consequently also the thing in our breast. We do not know what we ourselves are; we can never come to the true figure of the things. As from uncertain worlds the so-called categorical imperative sounds: you shall do this or that.—We hear it, we cannot prove it, however. We just have to believe it. We hear about the divine being. We have to believe it. Just as little as we know about the destiny of the soul, about immortality and eternity. We must believe them. There is only faith in these matters that connect the human being with the divine, because no knowledge can penetrate into the divine. The human being believes knowledge if he presumes to penetrate into the divine. This divine is thereby falsified, is cast in a wrong light due to wild speculation.

Therefore, Kant wanted to save all spiritual for the mere faith and apply cognition—what one can know—only to the external impressions, to the appearance. Whatever you may read and study, otherwise, about Kant's philosophy, this thought is the essentials that it depends on. This thought became the essentials in the further development of Kant's thinking. However, someone who broke with this thought definitely out of a courageous attitude was Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814).

It is a peculiar thing that the theosophical thinkers of modern India, the renovators of the Vedanta philosophy made an astounding discovery—namely that the Germans have a great thinker, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. An Indian says this who writes under the name Bhagavan Das (1869-1958). I have got to know German theosophists who have only found out from him that Johann Gottlieb Fichte is a deep German thinker.

You can experience a lot in this regard. Weeks ago, I was in a South German city. One of the theosophical friends there said to me, now we have a university lecturer here who means, it would be good if people studied Fichte, because he got the idea that many deep thoughts were in Fichte.—That is a strange confession of a German university professor! If more than one century after Fichte a German university professor makes the discovery that Fichte achieved something great, throws a characteristic light on this kind of German scholarship.

Fichte represented the doctrine of the ego, of the human self-consciousness not speculatively, but out of the whole depth of his being, among his Jena students in the last decade of the 18th century. He did not represent it in the same way as we do it today from the spiritual-scientific point of view. He represented it in such a way that a number of persons would have come to theosophy if they had educated themselves according to his great conceptual demands; they would have come to it in a healthy way, illumining the real inside brightly. Not without reason his speeches inspired the Jena students in those days. For the following lived in him. Although he walked on the heights of thought, although he spoke in the purest, clearest, and logically sharpest thoughts, a quite warm and deep immediate personality and being expressed themselves in his thoughts at the same time. He himself pronounced the word that characterises him deepest that everyone has a philosophy, depending on which sort of a person he is.

If one expresses this trivially, one could say, it does not depend on whether anybody can think logically well or badly, because one can reason a hollow philosophy very logically, it does not depend on astuteness but on the internal experience, on that which one has fathomed with all his soul forces. This expresses itself in the language. If one is also a flat materialist, nevertheless, he can be a sharp logician, and on the other hand, someone can be a spiritualist and be logically weak. One proves no worldview, but the worldview is the expression of the innermost human being, the inner experience. Fichte pronounced this not only, but lived it also. Kant stimulated him. However, as one is stimulated by that to which one can add the drawback in his inside—because there the deepest organs emerge in the human being—, nevertheless, this was clear to Fichte.

Now follow me, I would like to say, for a short moment into the icy, but not less important regions of thoughts from which Fichte got the being of self-consciousness. I do not describe with his own words, because this would be too difficult here, but in outlines, which do not contain less truth. I would like to say what he conjured before his Jena students at that time: there is one thing for everybody in which the “thing in itself” announces itself to him, in which he expresses himself. That is his own inside. Look into it and you discover something that you can discover nowhere else at first.—We see that Fichte knew that not anybody discovers what he has to discover there, because he says a very nice word, even if it is rude to most human beings. He says, if the human beings were able to come to real self-knowledge, they would find the most significant in themselves. However, a few are successful, because they rather regard themselves as pieces of lava on the moon than as self-conscious beings.

What is self-consciousness for our time? One shows it as a conglomerate of cerebral atoms. However, one does not strive for recognising himself; one does not do this. There is no great difference whether one says that it is a conglomerate of cerebral atoms or molecules or a piece of lava on the moon.—Here Fichte draws attention clearly to the fact that that knowledge of the inside which only wants to observe how it is not the right knowledge of the inside. For the nature of the human being differs in its inside from any other being. By which does it differ? It differs by the fact that decision and action belong to the nature of the human being. From this icy region of thoughts, we want to come to flowery fields soon. Fichte calls self-knowledge not brooding in oneself, not looking into oneself, no, Fichte regards it as action. This word leads you from the wrong self-knowledge to the true self-development. The human being is not able to look simply into himself in order to recognise who he is. He has to give that to himself, which he shall become. He must become engrossed in the divine of the world and get the sparks from the divine with which he has to kindle his self perpetually. We look at a stone. It is what it is. We recognise it. We look at the plant. It is what it is. We look at our own body, our etheric body, and astral body. They are also that which they are. The human being is only that which he makes of himself, and self-knowledge is an intimate activity, no dead knowledge. While Fichte uses the (German) word “Tathandlung” (~ self-conscious action and result of the action), he says something that only the old Vedanta philosophy says in this significant kind. He reached the point that just the theosophists seek again. Often and often, I have said here that theosophy wants to show how the human being soars the divine, how it should stimulate the divine strength slumbering in the human being with which then he also becomes aware of the divine round himself. Fichte completely strives for the same. The wrong self-knowledge, he says, consists of the fact that one says, look into yourselves and you find the god in yourselves.

The right self-knowledge says something completely different. It says, if you brood in yourself, it is in such a way, as if you look into your own eye. However, this is not the task of the eye. We get to know the light with the eye. Thus, we also get to know the light of the ego with the soul. One can compare the eye with waking the inner self. As little as you find the soul in the organism, the light in the eye, just as little you find the god in yourselves. However, we find the possibility to develop the organs to find this god. The activity in the ego, which develops our spiritual organs, is the being that the human being gives himself. This is the “Tathandlung,” this is Fichte's self-knowledge. From this point, Fichte advances gradually. If you completely settle down, you educate yourselves to his thoughts, then you find a healthy access to theosophy, and nobody has to regret it one day if he settles down into the clear lines of thought of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, because he finds the way to the spiritual life.

However, there is a peculiar fact. When Johann Gottlieb Fichte has ascended to these etheric heights of thought, he lacks the view to which he did not come at that time, which the spiritual-scientific worldview brought back like a solution of the world riddle: the teaching of karma and reincarnation. If you see this, then you know to apply it to your own development. The human beings would like to judge all times, according to the same pattern. However, the human spirit is in perpetual development, and every age has other tasks. That century whose end forms in conceptual respect Johann Gottlieb Fichte had the task to emancipate the human personality. This was the good side of the Enlightenment. However, the personality is that member of the human nature, which just does not return, as well as it is. Our deepest essence that expresses itself within the personality returns in the various earth-lives. However, the single life on earth expresses itself in the personality.

Let us consider the being of the personality properly. We have four human covers basically that are not to be imagined, however, like onion skins: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and in them that which the human being works for, his refined astral body, that part on which the human ego has already worked. We have these four covers. However, in them only the imperishable everlasting essence of the human being, the so-called spiritual triad exists: manas, buddhi, and atman—spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man. These go from earth-life to earth-life and ascend then to higher states of existence. The last external cover expresses itself in the personality. It has still another importance and it has received it more and more in the human development. If we go back to the old times, we find that the human beings appreciated the individuality during the former centuries less and less; instead, the personality became more and more powerful. Today one easily confuses the concepts of individuality and personality. The individuality is the everlasting that runs through the earth-lives. Personality is that which the human being develops during an earth-life.

If we want to study the individuality, we have to look at the bottom of the human soul. If we want to study the personality, we have to observe how the essence expresses itself. The essence is born into the people, into the occupation. All that determines the inner being, it personifies it. With a human being who is still on a subordinated level of development one can perceive a little of the work on his inside. The mode of expression, the kind of the gestures and so forth is just in such a way as he has them from his people. However, those are the advanced human beings who give themselves the mode of expression and gestures from their inside. The more the inside of the human being is able to work on his appearance, the higher this develops the human being.

Now one could say, the individuality is expressed in the personality. Someone, who has his own gestures, his own physiognomy, has a peculiar character in his actions and in relation to the surroundings, has a distinct personality. Is that lost at death forever? No, this does not get lost. Christianity knows for sure that this is not the case. What one understands by resurrection of the flesh or of the personality is nothing else than the preservation of the personal in all following incarnations. What the human being has gained as a personality remains to him because it is attached to the individuality and this carries it further into the following incarnations. If we have made something of our body that has a peculiar character, this body, this strength, which has worked there, resurrects. As much we have worked on ourselves, as much we have made of ourselves, we do not lose it. Generating awareness of this knowledge is something that has not yet happened. This happens by theosophy. However, it was the task of the Enlightenment to acquire an uncertain feeling. It showed the task of the personality. Johann Gottlieb Fichte has put the idea of the personality in its everlasting importance in his construct of clear ideas. There the right thing immediately emerges for the epoch of the recognition of the everlasting and imperishable in the personality. Fichte accomplished that.

One has often said, the great human beings have the big mistakes of their big virtues, and because Fichte was able to measure out the personality with the thought uniquely, he did not penetrate to the individuality; also not his successors. However, they have implanted the thought in the personality. Someone who finds it there carries it in a healthy way through the repeated earth-lives if he approaches spiritual science. It does not depend on dogmas, but on the education that we can obtain in his spirit. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was an educator in the proper sense.

It does not depend on the fact that we become servile students of such a man, but that we also go through that strength which he went through. Then we may get other thoughts by his forces in another age. One faces such a spirit in this way. This was expressed in a certain way at his time. His personality can educate us and find pleasant expression in the distant future.

Spiritual science is so little dogmatic that it leads to the great human beings and shows that we can learn from them even more than what they have said. The expression of that which they are is the language. However, more than the expression lives in every human being, the immortal soul lives in them to which we can rise as to the true essence. Therefore, Fichte was already in the highest degree stimulating for those, at the end of the 18th century, who were sitting at his feet and listening how he measured out the human personality with world-spanning lines of thought. He inspired them to penetrate conceptionally to the soul and to acquire still quite other treasures from it than Fichte himself did.

One of those who sat at Fichte's feet and looked reverentially to him, one of those who got out the philosophical ideas, was the young short-lived German theosophist Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg, German Romantic poet and author, 1772-1801). He died around the turn of 18th to the 19th century, not yet thirty years old. Who becomes engrossed in his works goes through the finest training of theosophy. Perhaps it could be to that who is educated in the western science a much better elementary training to go through his tremendous light flashes, than through the Bhagavad Gita or similar writings that remain more or less strange to the West. Just now, it is possible to become engrossed completely in that which this great soul achieved.

He wrote a book in which he describes how a young person is introduced in the subterranean structure of the earth, in the geologic layers of the rocks and minerals by great geologists and mineralogical works. There he readily gets thoughts such as, you, rocks, I look only for you, however, what you say I look for continually.—Runes, letters, words were the stones to him, which he investigated as a miner underground; spiritual beings created in the earth and produced every single rock. He saw the spirit and soul in the earth, and every stone was to him the expression of that which the earth has to say to him. Mineralogy and geology became a runic science to him, and he attempted to penetrate to the spirit of the earth, while his great teacher made the layers and resemblances of the rocks clear to him. Just those who work in the depths of the earth are often led to deeper worldviews. Not least, miners did deep looks into the spiritual world. Staying underground has a peculiar effect on the spiritual experience.

However, something else appeared with Novalis. To understand it we only need to remember that at the front gate of Plato's school one could read the words: let none but geometers enter here.—The Platonic school demonstrated its elementary knowledge in geometrical forms, and Novalis, who illumined the secrets of existence with so big light flashes, revered mathematics like a religion. It is something sacred to him. Take this as a psychological phenomenon of peculiar kind. These strange human beings are able to feel something sacred and something like music with the abstract lines of mathematics and geometry. How circles and angles form a group together, how the different forms like polyhedra, dodekahedra and such build themselves up, then one can feel something that comes from Novalis speaking about mathematics. However, you can only take up that if you do not take up it in such a way as in our schools, but if you become engrossed in the inner music of space. Mathematics is the access to the infinite truth.

Then he heard Fichte, and from him the great truth of the ego as a personality. Then we see in this strange spirit almost the whole occultism reflected in certain ways. For someone who has knowledge in this respect Novalis is a peculiar personality. He is a personality who had already experienced the deepest initiation in former incarnations. Everything was a recollection that he experienced in the last, the third decade of his life. It becomes apparent in his life that it was more recollection of former incarnations than of the current one. This comes out in his imagination. The former incarnations completely became imagination in Novalis because they cast their shadows and found their expression as pieces of art.

Thus, we have to understand Novalis as a peculiar, tender, and intimate being. If Fichte arranges his razor-sharp thoughts and carries us off by this sharpness, then Novalis is wonderfully gentle and shows the spiritual life from a completely different side. Thus, he is the necessary supplement for someone who wants to go through the German preliminary stage of theosophy. Our best went through this pre-school in those days. We can call names of many people who attempted to penetrate in their kind, according to their character in those days into the truth which spiritual science gives humanity back today. These are names that are known more or less, however, whose bearers one has to deeper consider.

At first, we have Schelling (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Sch., German philosopher, 1775-1854). If we open ourselves to his youth writings, where he became independent, he works so strongly on that who gets involved with him because he expressed a thought of Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, German-Swiss physician, occultist, 1493-1541) in the way usual at that time. This thought was expressed not only by Schelling, but also by the great Steffens (Henrik St., Danish philosopher, 1773-1845), and in particular by the naturalist Oken (originally Lorenz Okenfuß, 1779-1851), by the great predecessor of the modern theory of evolution and founder of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians. This thought is an eminently theosophical one.

It was usual in natural sciences, also in the philosophy of Schelling and Steffens, also in that of Novalis. These thinkers said: if we look out at the world, we see a number of animals. Every animal shows certain human qualities one-sidedly developed. What the amphibians have, what the snails have is also found in the human being. Those snails, amphibians and so on have something one-sidedly physical. If one makes, however, a whole of it, one gets the harmoniously developed human body that summarises everything that is spread out outdoors. As Paracelsus says, we find letters outdoors in nature, and if we compose them, they yield a word and this word is the human being. A great theosophist—not a German one—of the 18th century (presumably Claude de Saint Martin, 1743-1803) just took this principle as the basis of his theosophical investigating. Therefore, he came so far to say, if we look at the human being, we see the remaining animal realm. This is the opposite principle of that how one studies these things today. The theorists of evolution of that time said something different from those of today.

They said, if you face a person about whom you do not know that he is, for example, a great watchmaker, and then you are not able to recognise the person. At first, you have to become engrossed in his astuteness that makes him create what he produces. What he produces, that is the point. However, nature has produced the human being as a keystone. There you have the compendium of the whole nature. If you understand this in such a way, you understand nature.—One must recognise the remaining nature from the human being and not the human being from nature. If you carry out that really, you also understand how it could emerge as a certain reflection with Schelling and Oken. With Schelling and Oken you can read, the snail is a groping animal, the insect is a light animal, the bird a hearing animal, the amphibian a feeling animal, the fish a smelling animal. Thereby they express how the senses are spread over the single animals. They are harmoniously contained in the human being. One only needs to distribute the qualities of the human being to understand the remaining nature.

In 1809, Schelling published a writing, which is of big significance for theosophy. He had got to know the deep German thinker Jacob Boehme. He became engrossed in him, and thus he got to know the nature of the bad and its coherence with freedom. You find this in his Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom. There he shows that God is the light and that from the light everything comes that shines that, however, the light has to shine into the darkness and that where light is shadow originates. Only by this comparison, one can realise what one reads in this writing. If you let the sun shine into darkness, there originates shadow; shadow must appear if the light is there, but the light does not generate it. Hence, he says, from the divine primal ground of the light everything great arises in the world. However, as well as the light is opposed to the darkness, the non-ground faces the primal ground, and from this the shadow of the good emerges, the bad. This is the indication of an infinitely deep involvement. Again, you can educate yourselves to the theosophical life if you take up that in yourselves.

Another writing by Schelling is still significant: Bruno or On the Divine and Natural Principle of Things (1802/1843). In pleasant dialogue form, like with Plato, he discusses here about the coherence of soul and spirit in the theosophical sense. Therefore, Schelling would be able to become a theosophist. He understood how to practice inner sight. Schelling was also an eager teacher at the Jena University first, and then he worked still at other sites and, finally, withdrew completely. In Munich, he lived a long time and was together with Baader (Franz Xavier von B., philosopher and theologian, 1765-1841), that spirit who renewed Jacob Boehme in such a fine way in the 19th century again. He stimulated Schelling. He wrote scarcely anything in that time. In 1809, his writing about freedom originated. Then he wrote almost nothing up to his call to Berlin by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who may be challenged in certain ways, who is not yet appreciated enough concerning insights into big, deep, and internal spiritual connections. In 1841, Schelling was appointed to Berlin. He should explain before the students what he had lived through such a long time.

He held two courses of lectures: about the Philosophy of Mythology (1856) and about the Philosophy of Revelation (1858). There he led into the essence of the old mysteries and showed how Christianity originated from them and what Christianity concerns. Then we who live more than half a century later are led automatically to reincarnation and karma. If you become engrossed in the philosophy of mythology and in the philosophy of revelation, you find, this is theosophy. However, all trivial people of that time railed against that. They could not understand what Schelling reported at that time. If the theosophists wanted to become engrossed in these writings, they would see from which depths all that is taken.

Fichte could speak of a special spiritual sense because he was one of those who wanted to open the eyes of the human beings. Fichte gave the definition of theosophy already in 1813. He said, “Appear as a sighted man in a world of blind people and speak to them of colours and light. Either you talk to them of nothing—and this is the more fortunate case if they say it, because in this way you soon notice the mistake and stop talking without success—or the more gifted people say, you are a daydreamer.”—All those experience that who are gifted with a special sense. They appear like among blind people. However, this sense can be evoked with everybody, slowly with the one, faster with the other. By the special sense, Fichte shows quite clearly that he knew what depends on in theosophy. This was the real definition of theosophy. Others scooped from such sources, from such currents of the spiritual life.

However, I would like to remind of Hegel (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich H., 1770-1831, philosopher) above all. I cannot get involved to explain Hegel's peculiar view. I would also like to remind of the name of an exceptionally gentle person, of Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780-1860, physician and naturalist), who wrote books about the essence of the soul. Schelling wrote to Schubert still in 1850 when the sixth edition of a book about the essence of the soul had appeared: you are, actually, in a more fortunate position than I am. I must get involved with the world-spanning thoughts, which introduce in the spiritual life. However, you live the intimate side that the human being meets if he investigates all intimacies of the soul.

Schubert studied that soul life which is the border area between consciousness, semi-consciousness and unconsciousness, but also the border area between everyday consciousness, dream, and clairvoyance. With Schubert, you already find explanations about the principle that controls the dream world. About that, you can find a lot with him. He studied Swedenborg (Emanuel S., 1688-1772, scientist, philosopher, and mystic) in the time in which it was possible to point to these characteristics of the human spiritual life with great thoughts in a healthy way. He represented the view that there is an etheric body and an even higher etheric body than that which decomposes after death with every human being. Schubert already pointed to that which the Vedanta philosophy calls the “fine body” (sukshma-shariram). He wrote a very nice consideration about this higher body of the human being. You can find there fine remarks with him.

You can see how at that time already the single currents flowed into each other, you can see this with a poet who interlaced these things in his poetries, with Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who represented a peculiar prince in his Prince of Homburg and created Katie of Heilbronn, a peculiar figure, too. He was stimulated to them by talks on somnambulism and on higher spiritual life.

Schubert speaks of a pre-being of the soul; he also discusses the question of reincarnation. At that time, he did not yet regard it as Christian. However, he speaks of a pre-being whose destiny he exactly pursues. Then from this, the brilliant book originates by Justinus Kerner (1786-1862, practical physician, poet and writer): The Seeress of Prevorst (1829). When in the 19th century the book about this strange woman appeared, he used a lot of theosophy for its explanation. The occultist already recognises Justinus Kerner as an expert in the basic definition that he gives about this seeress (Friederike Hauffe, 1801-1829). He was an expert because he lived in the time, which had such thoughts as I characterised them. He says of the seeress of Prevorst—she had two children and was somnambulistic in the extreme—that the mental-spiritual world was open round her and that she could observe the spiritual side of the human beings. He describes her in such a way: imagine somebody retained at the moment of death, so that the peculiar state continues for some years; the emergence of the etheric body and the odd relationship of the astral body to the etheric body lasted for years. Because her soul condition was in such a way, she was able to behold the still existing part of the etheric body of someone who had lost a limb. She could also perceive many things besides. Kerner gives appropriate explanations even if they are not at the height of our time.

You can find explanations also with Eckartshausen (Karl von E., 1752-1803, philosopher, mystic) who also wrote about the inner spiritual development. Kosti's Journey or also The Hieroglyphics of the Human Heart are writings that are adapted to open the human soul to a higher vision. He also described what he calls a soul body appropriately. Another writer is sometimes rather stimulating: Ennemoser (Joseph E., 1787-1854, physician, mesmerist) who wrote theosophy, too, informed a lot of animal magnetism and the mysteries in his works, and contributed much to show the Greek mythology in the right light.

Thus, you see a painting of the first time of the 19th century, from the first thoughts that can work educationally on the human being up to the facts that bring theosophy together with immediate spiritualistic experiences. At that time, you find everything in a pure and sometimes nobler way expressed than it was shown later by the respective authors. You can learn much more about magic spiritual life there than in that which was published by Schindler (Heinrich Bruno Sch., 1797-1859, physician and author) and Albertus (?, perhaps hearing defect, probably Carus, Carl Gustav C., 1789-1869, physician, scientist, and naturalist).

Later the interest changed more and more into an interest, similar to curiosity, the mere urge for knowledge. In the first half of the 19th century, even such spirits who could not go very deeply had the desire of ascending to spiritual heights, developing inner soul organs, and knew something concerning self-knowledge and self-development. Novalis knew how to speak in miraculous tones in his Heinrich of Ofterdingen about that all. He put the big treasure of former initiation memory in that which he has like a recollection of former lives. In the Novices of Sais he shows how Hyazinth gets to know the girl Rosenblüth (rose flower). Only the animals of the wood know something of this extremely subtle love. A wise man comes and tells about the magic life, about spiritual secrets. Hyazinth and Rosenblüth get the desire to walk to the initiation temple of Isis. However, nobody can give some indication, which is the right way to the temple. He walks and walks. There he sits down, tired among nice physical things, in particular also because of that which nature speaks to him. He drops off to dream in a ghostly way.

The temple is round him. The curtain is lifted from the veiled picture, and what does he see? Rosenblüth. He lovely describes how Rosenblüth is that feeling of unity, that uniform idea of the whole nature, how it extends over the whole nature, and how he looks for the hidden secret that life often shows to us that we only need to understand. This is wonderfully indicated. Thus, you can prospect with Novalis wonderfully if you get yourselves in how intimately he expressed the experiences of the world at that time.

I was allowed here to speak about Goethe, Herder, and Schiller and to show how they were theosophists. In a theosophical way, Novalis just pronounces what is a characteristic trait of that time what controlled it like a theosophical motto spiritually. It is included in the words: “Someone succeeded; he lifted the veil of the goddess at Sais.—However, what did he see? He saw—miracle of miracles—himself.”

Thus, the human being comes out, after he has developed the spiritual organs in himself, and searches for himself all over the world. He does not search for himself in himself, he searches for himself in the world, and with it, he searches for God. This search of God in the world, as he expresses it so nicely in this saying, is theosophy.

It is a frequently mentioned fact that it is exceptionally difficult to obtain an understanding concerning the spiritual-scientific movement with our academic leaders in scientific circles. This is a fatal fact that science is today surrounded by such a big belief in authority. Everything that is scientific exercises such an impressive power in all directions that a spiritual movement has a hard furrow to plough if the predominating part of the scholars, one can say, almost any academic circle treat such a movement like our spiritual-scientific one in such a way, as if it were dilettantism, blind superstition or anything else.

It may be deplorable, but understandable in any case, if one hears the judgements of such academic circles about theosophy or spiritual science. If one examines these judgements, it is obvious that they belong to the judgements that were obtained without any expertise. If we then still ask the so-called public opinion, as it is expressed in our journals, we need not to be surprised, if it faces the theosophical movement not quite understanding. For this public opinion is controlled completely by the impressive power of the scientific authority and is completely dependent on it.

There are different reasons, which make this clear to us. We can see one of these reasons concerning the German cultural life simply in the fact that the academic circles, actually, left an important impact on our German cultural life, a culminating point of our deepest life of thought completely out of consideration. Indeed, you find some notes about this in any manual of philosophy, in any history of literature; but a really penetrating understanding of this most significant side of our cultural life and of that which around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries the most important German thinkers performed does not exist. In particular, there is a lack of understanding how these results of the German life of thought are rooted in the general German cultural life a hundred years ago.

If this fact were not such a one, if our academic circles were concerned with that deepening of the German life of thought around the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries, there would be, for example, an understanding of Fichte's, Schelling's, and Hegel's great life of thought among our philosophers. The compendia of philosophy would not contain only single inadequate extracts of the works, but one would know what generally thought achieved in Germany. Then one would also obtain access to the spiritual-scientific movement from the point of view of scholarship.

Of all pre-schools of theosophy or spiritual science which one can go through today this school of the German thought of the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries is the very best for the present human beings. Indeed, it is not accessible to anybody, because how should the bigger national circles understand the great German thinkers really if the university circles, the academic circles lead the way to this understanding so little, if they do so little to cause a real popularity of these thinkers. One is not allowed to reproach the big audience, those who should turn to theosophy that they are not able to do it. To those, however, whose occupation it would be to let flow in the spiritual treasures of the West in the national culture, to those must be said that they fulfil their obligations in this respect in no way.

I do not name unknown names to you, but I maybe have to represent the peculiar fact that one can relate names, which you find in every philosophical compendium, with theosophy. It is peculiar that one likes to say that it is senseless to use the title “Secret Doctrine.” The Western researchers, for example, who concerned themselves with Buddhism, have repeatedly denied that Buddhism contains a secret doctrine that anything would exceed what you can read in the books.

It is not at all surprising that such academic circles assert such things. For one can conclude from it that the most important things have remained a secret doctrine to them. How should they know that there is a secret doctrine, because they have never found access to it! The most important that was performed in connection with the great German thinker Johann Gottlieb Fichte is to the majority, also even today, a deep secret doctrine. It is true, as deplorable as it may appear, the German spiritual life of the turn from the 18th to the 19th centuries originated from the so-called Enlightenment. We may characterise this Enlightenment with a few words. It was a necessary event in the modern spiritual development. The most significant spirits of the 18th century had taken up the cause of it. Kant says, enlightenment simply means what can be summarised in the sentence: “Dare to use your own reason” (first by Horace: sapere aude). This enlightenment was nothing else than an emancipation of the personality, the relief of the personality from the traditions. What one has thought for centuries, what everybody has taken up from the common spiritual substance of the people should be checked. Only that should be valid which the single personality affirms. You know, great spirits developed from the Enlightenment. One only needs to remind of the name Lessing to call one of the best. Everything that is connected with the name Kant is nothing else than a result of the Enlightenment.

Someone who has broken with this Enlightenment in a peculiar way is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. If I say, he has broken in peculiar way with this Enlightenment, and then you do not believe that I am determined to represent Fichte as an opponent of the Enlightenment. He has broken in the way that he examines all results of the Enlightenment and has continued building on its basis, but Fichte went quite thoroughly beyond that which is only enlightenment, beyond the trivial. Just Fichte gives somebody who has the possibility to become engrossed in his great lines of thought something that one can obtain among the newer spirits only from him.

After we have heard many merely popular talks, we want to hear a talk today, which seems to be far off the usual way, which our spiritual-scientific talks take in this winter. I will endeavour to show something as comprehensibly as possible that took place in the German life of thought, actually, at that time, around the turn from the 18th to the 19th centuries. It can only be sketchy what I have to say. At first this German life of thought impeded the access to the real spiritual world and then to the living and immortal essence of the human being. Today I cannot go into the worth or worthlessness of Kant's philosophy. The official philosophy calls Kant the destroyer and regards his system of theories as a philosophical action first-rate. Today I would like only to remind of a word which is known perhaps also with those who do not have the opportunity to penetrate deeper into the matter, to the word of the “thing in itself.”

The human cognitive faculties are limited in the sense of Kant's philosophy. They cannot penetrate to the “thing in itself.” Whichever ideas and concepts we form, whatever we get to know in the world, we deal with phenomena and not with the true “thing in itself” in the sense of Kant's philosophy. This is always concealed behind the phenomena. With it, blind speculation is encouraged—and we have seen it in the spiritual development of Germany very well—which wants to define and restrict the human cognitive faculties in all directions. However, at the same time the trend of the human being to penetrate to the true, to explore the depths of existence should be stopped.

It should be shown that the human being cannot automatically approach the primary sources of existence. Now it may be true that such an attitude was necessary in the course of the spiritual life of the 18th century. However, Kant's philosophy put big obstacles in the way of the further development of the spiritual life. Indeed, I know very well that there are people who say, what did Kant different from all those great spirits who have always emphasised that we deal with phenomena that we cannot come to the “thing in itself!” That is apparently right, however, it is wrong. The real spiritual researchers of all times state quite different that the world only consists of phenomena.

No true spiritual researcher has ever denied that in such a way, as we investigate the world with senses, understand it with the intellect, it offers us only phenomena. However, higher senses are to be woken in us that go beyond the usual, which penetrate deeper into the sources of existence, can, and must lead slowly and gradually to the “thing in itself.” No Eastern philosophy, no Platonic philosophy, no self-understanding worldview penetrating into the spirit has ever spoken of the world as Maya in another sense. They always said only, to the lower human cognition, a veil is before the “thing in itself,” to the higher human cognition this veil is torn, the human being can penetrate into the depths of existence. The Enlightenment reached a blind alley concerning the question in certain respects, and this is characterised best of all with a remark which you find in the preface to the second edition of Kant's main work Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and with which the Enlightenment can be caught at its despondency because it does not want to advance further.

One reads: “I had to override knowledge to create space for faith.” This is the nerve of Kant's philosophy and of that thinking to which the 18th century came and beyond which our philosophical scholarship has not yet come which still suffers from it. As long as it suffers from this illness, philosophy is never destined to understand theosophy. What does that mean: “I had to override knowledge to create space for faith”? Kant says, the thing in itself remains concealed, consequently also the thing in our breast. We do not know what we ourselves are; we can never come to the true figure of the things. As from uncertain worlds the so-called categorical imperative sounds: you shall do this or that.—We hear it, we cannot prove it, however. We just have to believe it. We hear about the divine being. We have to believe it. Just as little as we know about the destiny of the soul, about immortality and eternity. We must believe them. There is only faith in these matters that connect the human being with the divine, because no knowledge can penetrate into the divine. The human being believes knowledge if he presumes to penetrate into the divine. This divine is thereby falsified, is cast in a wrong light due to wild speculation.

Therefore, Kant wanted to save all spiritual for the mere faith and apply cognition—what one can know—only to the external impressions, to the appearance. Whatever you may read and study, otherwise, about Kant's philosophy, this thought is the essentials that it depends on. This thought became the essentials in the further development of Kant's thinking. However, someone who broke with this thought definitely out of a courageous attitude was Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814).

It is a peculiar thing that the theosophical thinkers of modern India, the renovators of the Vedanta philosophy made an astounding discovery—namely that the Germans have a great thinker, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. An Indian says this who writes under the name Bhagavan Das (1869-1958). I have got to know German theosophists who have only found out from him that Johann Gottlieb Fichte is a deep German thinker.

You can experience a lot in this regard. Weeks ago, I was in a South German city. One of the theosophical friends there said to me, now we have a university lecturer here who means, it would be good if people studied Fichte, because he got the idea that many deep thoughts were in Fichte.—That is a strange confession of a German university professor! If more than one century after Fichte a German university professor makes the discovery that Fichte achieved something great, throws a characteristic light on this kind of German scholarship.

Fichte represented the doctrine of the ego, of the human self-consciousness not speculatively, but out of the whole depth of his being, among his Jena students in the last decade of the 18th century. He did not represent it in the same way as we do it today from the spiritual-scientific point of view. He represented it in such a way that a number of persons would have come to theosophy if they had educated themselves according to his great conceptual demands; they would have come to it in a healthy way, illumining the real inside brightly. Not without reason his speeches inspired the Jena students in those days. For the following lived in him. Although he walked on the heights of thought, although he spoke in the purest, clearest, and logically sharpest thoughts, a quite warm and deep immediate personality and being expressed themselves in his thoughts at the same time. He himself pronounced the word that characterises him deepest that everyone has a philosophy, depending on which sort of a person he is.

If one expresses this trivially, one could say, it does not depend on whether anybody can think logically well or badly, because one can reason a hollow philosophy very logically, it does not depend on astuteness but on the internal experience, on that which one has fathomed with all his soul forces. This expresses itself in the language. If one is also a flat materialist, nevertheless, he can be a sharp logician, and on the other hand, someone can be a spiritualist and be logically weak. One proves no worldview, but the worldview is the expression of the innermost human being, the inner experience. Fichte pronounced this not only, but lived it also. Kant stimulated him. However, as one is stimulated by that to which one can add the drawback in his inside—because there the deepest organs emerge in the human being—, nevertheless, this was clear to Fichte.

Now follow me, I would like to say, for a short moment into the icy, but not less important regions of thoughts from which Fichte got the being of self-consciousness. I do not describe with his own words, because this would be too difficult here, but in outlines, which do not contain less truth. I would like to say what he conjured before his Jena students at that time: there is one thing for everybody in which the “thing in itself” announces itself to him, in which he expresses himself. That is his own inside. Look into it and you discover something that you can discover nowhere else at first.—We see that Fichte knew that not anybody discovers what he has to discover there, because he says a very nice word, even if it is rude to most human beings. He says, if the human beings were able to come to real self-knowledge, they would find the most significant in themselves. However, a few are successful, because they rather regard themselves as pieces of lava on the moon than as self-conscious beings.

What is self-consciousness for our time? One shows it as a conglomerate of cerebral atoms. However, one does not strive for recognising himself; one does not do this. There is no great difference whether one says that it is a conglomerate of cerebral atoms or molecules or a piece of lava on the moon.—Here Fichte draws attention clearly to the fact that that knowledge of the inside which only wants to observe how it is not the right knowledge of the inside. For the nature of the human being differs in its inside from any other being. By which does it differ? It differs by the fact that decision and action belong to the nature of the human being. From this icy region of thoughts, we want to come to flowery fields soon. Fichte calls self-knowledge not brooding in oneself, not looking into oneself, no, Fichte regards it as action. This word leads you from the wrong self-knowledge to the true self-development. The human being is not able to look simply into himself in order to recognise who he is. He has to give that to himself, which he shall become. He must become engrossed in the divine of the world and get the sparks from the divine with which he has to kindle his self perpetually. We look at a stone. It is what it is. We recognise it. We look at the plant. It is what it is. We look at our own body, our etheric body, and astral body. They are also that which they are. The human being is only that which he makes of himself, and self-knowledge is an intimate activity, no dead knowledge. While Fichte uses the (German) word “Tathandlung” (~ self-conscious action and result of the action), he says something that only the old Vedanta philosophy says in this significant kind. He reached the point that just the theosophists seek again. Often and often, I have said here that theosophy wants to show how the human being soars the divine, how it should stimulate the divine strength slumbering in the human being with which then he also becomes aware of the divine round himself. Fichte completely strives for the same. The wrong self-knowledge, he says, consists of the fact that one says, look into yourselves and you find the god in yourselves.

The right self-knowledge says something completely different. It says, if you brood in yourself, it is in such a way, as if you look into your own eye. However, this is not the task of the eye. We get to know the light with the eye. Thus, we also get to know the light of the ego with the soul. One can compare the eye with waking the inner self. As little as you find the soul in the organism, the light in the eye, just as little you find the god in yourselves. However, we find the possibility to develop the organs to find this god. The activity in the ego, which develops our spiritual organs, is the being that the human being gives himself. This is the “Tathandlung,” this is Fichte's self-knowledge. From this point, Fichte advances gradually. If you completely settle down, you educate yourselves to his thoughts, then you find a healthy access to theosophy, and nobody has to regret it one day if he settles down into the clear lines of thought of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, because he finds the way to the spiritual life.

However, there is a peculiar fact. When Johann Gottlieb Fichte has ascended to these etheric heights of thought, he lacks the view to which he did not come at that time, which the spiritual-scientific worldview brought back like a solution of the world riddle: the teaching of karma and reincarnation. If you see this, then you know to apply it to your own development. The human beings would like to judge all times, according to the same pattern. However, the human spirit is in perpetual development, and every age has other tasks. That century whose end forms in conceptual respect Johann Gottlieb Fichte had the task to emancipate the human personality. This was the good side of the Enlightenment. However, the personality is that member of the human nature, which just does not return, as well as it is. Our deepest essence that expresses itself within the personality returns in the various earth-lives. However, the single life on earth expresses itself in the personality.

Let us consider the being of the personality properly. We have four human covers basically that are not to be imagined, however, like onion skins: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and in them that which the human being works for, his refined astral body, that part on which the human ego has already worked. We have these four covers. However, in them only the imperishable everlasting essence of the human being, the so-called spiritual triad exists: manas, buddhi, and atman—spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man. These go from earth-life to earth-life and ascend then to higher states of existence. The last external cover expresses itself in the personality. It has still another importance and it has received it more and more in the human development. If we go back to the old times, we find that the human beings appreciated the individuality during the former centuries less and less; instead, the personality became more and more powerful. Today one easily confuses the concepts of individuality and personality. The individuality is the everlasting that runs through the earth-lives. Personality is that which the human being develops during an earth-life.

If we want to study the individuality, we have to look at the bottom of the human soul. If we want to study the personality, we have to observe how the essence expresses itself. The essence is born into the people, into the occupation. All that determines the inner being, it personifies it. With a human being who is still on a subordinated level of development one can perceive a little of the work on his inside. The mode of expression, the kind of the gestures and so forth is just in such a way as he has them from his people. However, those are the advanced human beings who give themselves the mode of expression and gestures from their inside. The more the inside of the human being is able to work on his appearance, the higher this develops the human being.

Now one could say, the individuality is expressed in the personality. Someone, who has his own gestures, his own physiognomy, has a peculiar character in his actions and in relation to the surroundings, has a distinct personality. Is that lost at death forever? No, this does not get lost. Christianity knows for sure that this is not the case. What one understands by resurrection of the flesh or of the personality is nothing else than the preservation of the personal in all following incarnations. What the human being has gained as a personality remains to him because it is attached to the individuality and this carries it further into the following incarnations. If we have made something of our body that has a peculiar character, this body, this strength, which has worked there, resurrects. As much we have worked on ourselves, as much we have made of ourselves, we do not lose it. Generating awareness of this knowledge is something that has not yet happened. This happens by theosophy. However, it was the task of the Enlightenment to acquire an uncertain feeling. It showed the task of the personality. Johann Gottlieb Fichte has put the idea of the personality in its everlasting importance in his construct of clear ideas. There the right thing immediately emerges for the epoch of the recognition of the everlasting and imperishable in the personality. Fichte accomplished that.

One has often said, the great human beings have the big mistakes of their big virtues, and because Fichte was able to measure out the personality with the thought uniquely, he did not penetrate to the individuality; also not his successors. However, they have implanted the thought in the personality. Someone who finds it there carries it in a healthy way through the repeated earth-lives if he approaches spiritual science. It does not depend on dogmas, but on the education that we can obtain in his spirit. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was an educator in the proper sense.

It does not depend on the fact that we become servile students of such a man, but that we also go through that strength which he went through. Then we may get other thoughts by his forces in another age. One faces such a spirit in this way. This was expressed in a certain way at his time. His personality can educate us and find pleasant expression in the distant future.

Spiritual science is so little dogmatic that it leads to the great human beings and shows that we can learn from them even more than what they have said. The expression of that which they are is the language. However, more than the expression lives in every human being, the immortal soul lives in them to which we can rise as to the true essence. Therefore, Fichte was already in the highest degree stimulating for those, at the end of the 18th century, who were sitting at his feet and listening how he measured out the human personality with world-spanning lines of thought. He inspired them to penetrate conceptionally to the soul and to acquire still quite other treasures from it than Fichte himself did.

One of those who sat at Fichte's feet and looked reverentially to him, one of those who got out the philosophical ideas, was the young short-lived German theosophist Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg, German Romantic poet and author, 1772-1801). He died around the turn of 18th to the 19th century, not yet thirty years old. Who becomes engrossed in his works goes through the finest training of theosophy. Perhaps it could be to that who is educated in the western science a much better elementary training to go through his tremendous light flashes, than through the Bhagavad Gita or similar writings that remain more or less strange to the West. Just now, it is possible to become engrossed completely in that which this great soul achieved.

He wrote a book in which he describes how a young person is introduced in the subterranean structure of the earth, in the geologic layers of the rocks and minerals by great geologists and mineralogical works. There he readily gets thoughts such as, you, rocks, I look only for you, however, what you say I look for continually.—Runes, letters, words were the stones to him, which he investigated as a miner underground; spiritual beings created in the earth and produced every single rock. He saw the spirit and soul in the earth, and every stone was to him the expression of that which the earth has to say to him. Mineralogy and geology became a runic science to him, and he attempted to penetrate to the spirit of the earth, while his great teacher made the layers and resemblances of the rocks clear to him. Just those who work in the depths of the earth are often led to deeper worldviews. Not least, miners did deep looks into the spiritual world. Staying underground has a peculiar effect on the spiritual experience.

However, something else appeared with Novalis. To understand it we only need to remember that at the front gate of Plato's school one could read the words: let none but geometers enter here.—The Platonic school demonstrated its elementary knowledge in geometrical forms, and Novalis, who illumined the secrets of existence with so big light flashes, revered mathematics like a religion. It is something sacred to him. Take this as a psychological phenomenon of peculiar kind. These strange human beings are able to feel something sacred and something like music with the abstract lines of mathematics and geometry. How circles and angles form a group together, how the different forms like polyhedra, dodekahedra and such build themselves up, then one can feel something that comes from Novalis speaking about mathematics. However, you can only take up that if you do not take up it in such a way as in our schools, but if you become engrossed in the inner music of space. Mathematics is the access to the infinite truth.

Then he heard Fichte, and from him the great truth of the ego as a personality. Then we see in this strange spirit almost the whole occultism reflected in certain ways. For someone who has knowledge in this respect Novalis is a peculiar personality. He is a personality who had already experienced the deepest initiation in former incarnations. Everything was a recollection that he experienced in the last, the third decade of his life. It becomes apparent in his life that it was more recollection of former incarnations than of the current one. This comes out in his imagination. The former incarnations completely became imagination in Novalis because they cast their shadows and found their expression as pieces of art.

Thus, we have to understand Novalis as a peculiar, tender, and intimate being. If Fichte arranges his razor-sharp thoughts and carries us off by this sharpness, then Novalis is wonderfully gentle and shows the spiritual life from a completely different side. Thus, he is the necessary supplement for someone who wants to go through the German preliminary stage of theosophy. Our best went through this pre-school in those days. We can call names of many people who attempted to penetrate in their kind, according to their character in those days into the truth which spiritual science gives humanity back today. These are names that are known more or less, however, whose bearers one has to deeper consider.

At first, we have Schelling (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Sch., German philosopher, 1775-1854). If we open ourselves to his youth writings, where he became independent, he works so strongly on that who gets involved with him because he expressed a thought of Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, German-Swiss physician, occultist, 1493-1541) in the way usual at that time. This thought was expressed not only by Schelling, but also by the great Steffens (Henrik St., Danish philosopher, 1773-1845), and in particular by the naturalist Oken (originally Lorenz Okenfuß, 1779-1851), by the great predecessor of the modern theory of evolution and founder of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians. This thought is an eminently theosophical one.

It was usual in natural sciences, also in the philosophy of Schelling and Steffens, also in that of Novalis. These thinkers said: if we look out at the world, we see a number of animals. Every animal shows certain human qualities one-sidedly developed. What the amphibians have, what the snails have is also found in the human being. Those snails, amphibians and so on have something one-sidedly physical. If one makes, however, a whole of it, one gets the harmoniously developed human body that summarises everything that is spread out outdoors. As Paracelsus says, we find letters outdoors in nature, and if we compose them, they yield a word and this word is the human being. A great theosophist—not a German one—of the 18th century (presumably Claude de Saint Martin, 1743-1803) just took this principle as the basis of his theosophical investigating. Therefore, he came so far to say, if we look at the human being, we see the remaining animal realm. This is the opposite principle of that how one studies these things today. The theorists of evolution of that time said something different from those of today.

They said, if you face a person about whom you do not know that he is, for example, a great watchmaker, and then you are not able to recognise the person. At first, you have to become engrossed in his astuteness that makes him create what he produces. What he produces, that is the point. However, nature has produced the human being as a keystone. There you have the compendium of the whole nature. If you understand this in such a way, you understand nature.—One must recognise the remaining nature from the human being and not the human being from nature. If you carry out that really, you also understand how it could emerge as a certain reflection with Schelling and Oken. With Schelling and Oken you can read, the snail is a groping animal, the insect is a light animal, the bird a hearing animal, the amphibian a feeling animal, the fish a smelling animal. Thereby they express how the senses are spread over the single animals. They are harmoniously contained in the human being. One only needs to distribute the qualities of the human being to understand the remaining nature.

In 1809, Schelling published a writing, which is of big significance for theosophy. He had got to know the deep German thinker Jacob Boehme. He became engrossed in him, and thus he got to know the nature of the bad and its coherence with freedom. You find this in his Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom. There he shows that God is the light and that from the light everything comes that shines that, however, the light has to shine into the darkness and that where light is shadow originates. Only by this comparison, one can realise what one reads in this writing. If you let the sun shine into darkness, there originates shadow; shadow must appear if the light is there, but the light does not generate it. Hence, he says, from the divine primal ground of the light everything great arises in the world. However, as well as the light is opposed to the darkness, the non-ground faces the primal ground, and from this the shadow of the good emerges, the bad. This is the indication of an infinitely deep involvement. Again, you can educate yourselves to the theosophical life if you take up that in yourselves.

Another writing by Schelling is still significant: Bruno or On the Divine and Natural Principle of Things (1802/1843). In pleasant dialogue form, like with Plato, he discusses here about the coherence of soul and spirit in the theosophical sense. Therefore, Schelling would be able to become a theosophist. He understood how to practice inner sight. Schelling was also an eager teacher at the Jena University first, and then he worked still at other sites and, finally, withdrew completely. In Munich, he lived a long time and was together with Baader (Franz Xavier von B., philosopher and theologian, 1765-1841), that spirit who renewed Jacob Boehme in such a fine way in the 19th century again. He stimulated Schelling. He wrote scarcely anything in that time. In 1809, his writing about freedom originated. Then he wrote almost nothing up to his call to Berlin by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who may be challenged in certain ways, who is not yet appreciated enough concerning insights into big, deep, and internal spiritual connections. In 1841, Schelling was appointed to Berlin. He should explain before the students what he had lived through such a long time.

He held two courses of lectures: about the Philosophy of Mythology (1856) and about the Philosophy of Revelation (1858). There he led into the essence of the old mysteries and showed how Christianity originated from them and what Christianity concerns. Then we who live more than half a century later are led automatically to reincarnation and karma. If you become engrossed in the philosophy of mythology and in the philosophy of revelation, you find, this is theosophy. However, all trivial people of that time railed against that. They could not understand what Schelling reported at that time. If the theosophists wanted to become engrossed in these writings, they would see from which depths all that is taken.

Fichte could speak of a special spiritual sense because he was one of those who wanted to open the eyes of the human beings. Fichte gave the definition of theosophy already in 1813. He said, “Appear as a sighted man in a world of blind people and speak to them of colours and light. Either you talk to them of nothing—and this is the more fortunate case if they say it, because in this way you soon notice the mistake and stop talking without success—or the more gifted people say, you are a daydreamer.”—All those experience that who are gifted with a special sense. They appear like among blind people. However, this sense can be evoked with everybody, slowly with the one, faster with the other. By the special sense, Fichte shows quite clearly that he knew what depends on in theosophy. This was the real definition of theosophy. Others scooped from such sources, from such currents of the spiritual life.

However, I would like to remind of Hegel (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich H., 1770-1831, philosopher) above all. I cannot get involved to explain Hegel's peculiar view. I would also like to remind of the name of an exceptionally gentle person, of Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780-1860, physician and naturalist), who wrote books about the essence of the soul. Schelling wrote to Schubert still in 1850 when the sixth edition of a book about the essence of the soul had appeared: you are, actually, in a more fortunate position than I am. I must get involved with the world-spanning thoughts, which introduce in the spiritual life. However, you live the intimate side that the human being meets if he investigates all intimacies of the soul.

Schubert studied that soul life which is the border area between consciousness, semi-consciousness and unconsciousness, but also the border area between everyday consciousness, dream, and clairvoyance. With Schubert, you already find explanations about the principle that controls the dream world. About that, you can find a lot with him. He studied Swedenborg (Emanuel S., 1688-1772, scientist, philosopher, and mystic) in the time in which it was possible to point to these characteristics of the human spiritual life with great thoughts in a healthy way. He represented the view that there is an etheric body and an even higher etheric body than that which decomposes after death with every human being. Schubert already pointed to that which the Vedanta philosophy calls the “fine body” (sukshma-shariram). He wrote a very nice consideration about this higher body of the human being. You can find there fine remarks with him.

You can see how at that time already the single currents flowed into each other, you can see this with a poet who interlaced these things in his poetries, with Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who represented a peculiar prince in his Prince of Homburg and created Katie of Heilbronn, a peculiar figure, too. He was stimulated to them by talks on somnambulism and on higher spiritual life.

Schubert speaks of a pre-being of the soul; he also discusses the question of reincarnation. At that time, he did not yet regard it as Christian. However, he speaks of a pre-being whose destiny he exactly pursues. Then from this, the brilliant book originates by Justinus Kerner (1786-1862, practical physician, poet and writer): The Seeress of Prevorst (1829). When in the 19th century the book about this strange woman appeared, he used a lot of theosophy for its explanation. The occultist already recognises Justinus Kerner as an expert in the basic definition that he gives about this seeress (Friederike Hauffe, 1801-1829). He was an expert because he lived in the time, which had such thoughts as I characterised them. He says of the seeress of Prevorst—she had two children and was somnambulistic in the extreme—that the mental-spiritual world was open round her and that she could observe the spiritual side of the human beings. He describes her in such a way: imagine somebody retained at the moment of death, so that the peculiar state continues for some years; the emergence of the etheric body and the odd relationship of the astral body to the etheric body lasted for years. Because her soul condition was in such a way, she was able to behold the still existing part of the etheric body of someone who had lost a limb. She could also perceive many things besides. Kerner gives appropriate explanations even if they are not at the height of our time.

You can find explanations also with Eckartshausen (Karl von E., 1752-1803, philosopher, mystic) who also wrote about the inner spiritual development. Kosti's Journey or also The Hieroglyphics of the Human Heart are writings that are adapted to open the human soul to a higher vision. He also described what he calls a soul body appropriately. Another writer is sometimes rather stimulating: Ennemoser (Joseph E., 1787-1854, physician, mesmerist) who wrote theosophy, too, informed a lot of animal magnetism and the mysteries in his works, and contributed much to show the Greek mythology in the right light.

Thus, you see a painting of the first time of the 19th century, from the first thoughts that can work educationally on the human being up to the facts that bring theosophy together with immediate spiritualistic experiences. At that time, you find everything in a pure and sometimes nobler way expressed than it was shown later by the respective authors. You can learn much more about magic spiritual life there than in that which was published by Schindler (Heinrich Bruno Sch., 1797-1859, physician and author) and Albertus (?, perhaps hearing defect, probably Carus, Carl Gustav C., 1789-1869, physician, scientist, and naturalist).

Later the interest changed more and more into an interest, similar to curiosity, the mere urge for knowledge. In the first half of the 19th century, even such spirits who could not go very deeply had the desire of ascending to spiritual heights, developing inner soul organs, and knew something concerning self-knowledge and self-development. Novalis knew how to speak in miraculous tones in his Heinrich of Ofterdingen about that all. He put the big treasure of former initiation memory in that which he has like a recollection of former lives. In the Novices of Sais he shows how Hyazinth gets to know the girl Rosenblüth (rose flower). Only the animals of the wood know something of this extremely subtle love. A wise man comes and tells about the magic life, about spiritual secrets. Hyazinth and Rosenblüth get the desire to walk to the initiation temple of Isis. However, nobody can give some indication, which is the right way to the temple. He walks and walks. There he sits down, tired among nice physical things, in particular also because of that which nature speaks to him. He drops off to dream in a ghostly way.

The temple is round him. The curtain is lifted from the veiled picture, and what does he see? Rosenblüth. He lovely describes how Rosenblüth is that feeling of unity, that uniform idea of the whole nature, how it extends over the whole nature, and how he looks for the hidden secret that life often shows to us that we only need to understand. This is wonderfully indicated. Thus, you can prospect with Novalis wonderfully if you get yourselves in how intimately he expressed the experiences of the world at that time.

I was allowed here to speak about Goethe, Herder, and Schiller and to show how they were theosophists. In a theosophical way, Novalis just pronounces what is a characteristic trait of that time what controlled it like a theosophical motto spiritually. It is included in the words: “Someone succeeded; he lifted the veil of the goddess at Sais.—However, what did he see? He saw—miracle of miracles—himself.”

Thus, the human being comes out, after he has developed the spiritual organs in himself, and searches for himself all over the world. He does not search for himself in himself, he searches for himself in the world, and with it, he searches for God. This search of God in the world, as he expresses it so nicely in this saying, is theosophy.

[ 1 ] Now, however, it seems as though we ourselves are bringing in the subjective element here, which we had wanted so decisively to keep out of our epistemology. Although the rest of the perceptual world does not bear a subjective character—as one could gather from our discussions—thoughts do, in fact, bear such a character, even according to our view.

[ 2 ] This objection is based on a confusion of two things: the stage upon which our thoughts appear, and the element which determines their content, from which they receive their inner lawfulness. We definitely do not produce a thought-content as though, in this production, we were the ones who determined into which connections our thoughts are to enter. We only provide the opportunity for the thought-content to unfold itself in accordance with its own nature. We grasp thought \(a\) and thought \(b\) and give them the opportunity to enter into a lawful connection by bringing them into mutual interaction with each other. It is not our subjective organization that determines this particular connection between \(a\) and \(b\) in precisely one particular way and no other. The human spirit effects the joining of thought masses only in accordance with their content. In thinking we therefore fulfill the principle of experience in its most basic form.

[ 3 ] This refutes the view of Kant, of Schopenhauer, and in a broader sense also of Fichte, which states that the laws we assume for the purpose of explaining the world are only a result of our own spiritual organization and that we lay them into the world only by virtue of our spiritual individuality.

[ 4 ] One could raise yet another objection from the subjectivist standpoint. Even if the lawful connection of thought-masses is not brought about by us in accordance with our organization but rather is dependent upon their content, still, this very content itself might be a purely subjective product, a mere quality of our spirit; thus we would only be uniting elements that we ourselves first created. Then our thought-world would be no less a subjective semblance. It is very easy to meet this objection, however. If it had any basis, we would then be connecting the content of our thinking according to laws whose origins would truly be unknown to us. If these laws do not spring from our subjectivity—and this subjectivity is the view we disputed earlier and can now regard as refuted—then what should provide us with laws by which to interconnect a content we ourselves create?

[ 5 ] Our thought-world is therefore an entity fully founded upon itself; it is a self-contained totality, perfect and complete in itself. Here we see which of the two aspects of the thought-world is the essential one: the objective aspect of its content, and not the subjective aspect of the way it arises.

[ 6 ] This insight into the inner soundness and completeness of thinking appears most clearly in the scientific system of Hegel. No one has credited thinking, to the degree he did, with a power so complete that it could found a world view out of itself. Hegel had an absolute trust in thinking; it is, in fact, the only factor of reality that he trusted in the true sense of the word. But no matter how correct his view is in general, he is still precisely the one who totally discredited thinking through the all too extreme form in which he defended it. The way he presented his view is to blame for the hopeless confusion that has entered our “thinking about thinking.” He wanted to make the significance of thoughts, of ideas, really visible by declaring the necessity in thought to be at the same time the necessity in the factual world. He therefore gave rise to the error that the characterizations made by thinking are not purely ideal ones but rather factual ones. One soon took his view to mean that he sought, in the world of sense-perceptible reality, even thoughts as though they were objects. He never really did make this very clear. It must indeed be recognized that the field of thoughts is human consciousness alone. Then it must be shown that the thought-world forfeits none of its objectivity through this fact. Hegel demonstrated only the objective side of thoughts, but most people see only the subjective side, because this is easier; and it seems to them that he treated something purely ideal as though it were an object, that he made it into something mystical. Even many contemporary scholars cannot be said to be free of this error. They condemn Hegel for a failing he himself did not have, but which, to be sure, one can impute to him because he did not clarify this matter sufficiently.

[ 7 ] We acknowledge that there is a difficulty here for our power of judgment. But we believe that this difficulty can be overcome by energetic thinking. We must picture two things to ourselves: first, that we actively bring the ideal world into manifestation, and at the same time, that what we actively call into existence is founded upon its own laws. Now admittedly, we are used to picturing a phenomenon in such a way that we need only approach it and passively observe it. This is not an absolute requirement, however. No matter how unusual it might be for us to picture that we ourselves actively bring something objective into manifestation—that we do not merely perceive a phenomenon, in other words, but produce it at the same time—it is not inadmissible for us to do so.

[ 8 ] One simply needs to give up the usual opinion that there are as many thought-worlds as there are human individuals. This opinion is in any case nothing more than an old preconception from the past. It is tacitly assumed everywhere, without people realizing that there is another view at least just as possible, and that the reasons must first be weighed as to the validity of one or the other. Instead of this opinion, let us consider the following one: There is absolutely only one single thought-content, and our individual thinking is nothing more than our self, our individual personality, working its way into the thought-center of the world. This is not the place to investigate whether this view is correct or not, but it is possible, and we have accomplished what we wanted; we have shown that what we have presented as the necessary objectivity of thinking can easily be seen not to contradict itself even in another context.

[ 9 ] With regard to objectivity, the work of the thinker can very well be compared with that of the mechanic. Just as the mechanic brings the forces of nature into mutual interplay and thereby effects a purposeful activity and release of power, so the thinker lets the thought-masses enter into lively interaction, and they develop into the thought-systems that comprise our sciences.

[ 10 ] Nothing sheds more light on a view than exposing the errors that stand in its way. Let us call upon this method once again as one that has often been used by us to advantage.

[ 11 ] One usually believes that we join certain concepts into larger complexes, or that we think in general in a certain way, because we feel a certain inner (logical) compulsion to do so. Even Volkelt adheres to this view. But how does this view accord with the transparent clarity with which our entire thought-world is present in our consciousness? We know absolutely nothing in the world more exactly than our thoughts. Now can it really be supposed that a certain connection is established on the basis of an inner compulsion, where everything is so clear? Why do I need the compulsion, if I know the nature of what is to be joined, know it through and through, and can therefore guide myself by it? All our thought-operations are processes that occur on the basis of insight into the entities of thoughts and not according to a compulsion. Any such compulsion contradicts the nature of thinking.

[ 12 ] Nonetheless, it could be the case that it is the nature of thinking to impress its content into its own manifestation at the same time, and that, because of our spirit's organization, we are nevertheless unable to perceive this content directly. But this is not the case. The way thought-content approaches us is our guarantee that here we have before us the essential being of the thing. We are indeed conscious of the fact that we accompany every process in the thought world with our spirit. One can nevertheless think of the form of manifestation only as being determined by the essential being of the thing. How would we be able to reproduce the form of manifestation if we did not know the essential being of the thing? One can very well think that the form of manifestation confronts us as a finished totality and that we then seek its core. But one absolutely cannot believe that one is a co-worker in this production of the phenomenon without effecting this production from within the core.

[ 1 ] The object of the following discussion is to analyze the act of cognition and reduce it to its fundamental elements, in order to enable us to formulate the problem of knowledge correctly and to indicate a way to its solution. The discussion shows, through critical analysis, that no theory of knowledge based on Kant's line of thought can lead to a solution of the problems involved. However, it must be acknowledged that Volkelt's work,ⁱ with its thorough examination of the concept of “experience” provided a foundation without which my attempt to define precisely the concept of the “given” would have been very much more difficult. It is hoped in this essay to lay a foundation for overcoming the subjectivism inherent in all theories of knowledge based on Kant's philosophy. Indeed, I believe I have achieved this by showing that the subjective form in which the picture of the world presents itself to us in the act of cognition—prior to any scientific explanation of it—is merely a necessary transitional stage which is overcome in the very process of knowledge. In fact the experience which positivism and neo-Kantianism advance as the one and only certainty is just the most subjective one of all. By showing this, the foundation is also laid for objective idealism, which is a necessary consequence of a properly understood theory of knowledge. This objective idealism differs from Hegel's metaphysical, absolute idealism, in that it seeks the reason for the division of reality into given existence and concept in the cognizing subject itself; and holds that this division is resolved, not in an objective world-dialectic but in the subjective process of cognition. I have already advanced this viewpoint in An Outline of a Theory of Knowledge, 1885,ⁱⁱ but my method of inquiry was a different one, nor did I analyze the basic elements in the act of cognition as will be done here.

[ 2 ] A list of the more recent literary works which are relevant is given below. It includes not only those works which have a direct bearing on this essay, but also all those which deal with related problems. No specific reference is made to the works of the earlier classical philosophers.

[ 3 ] The following are concerned with the theory of cognition in general:

1. R. Avenarius, Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftsmasses, usw., (Philosophy as World-Thinking According to the Principle of the Smallest Energy-Mass, etc.) Leipzig, 1876.

2. ___Kritik, der reinen Erfahrung (Criticism of Pure Experience), Vol. I, Leipzig, 1888.
3. J. F. A. Bahnsen, Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt, (The Contradictions in Knowledge and Essense of the World) Vol. I, Leipzig, 1882.
4. J. Baumann, Philosophie als Orientierung über die Welt (Philosophy as Orientation about the World) Leipzig, 1872.
5. J. S. Beck, Einzig möglicher Standpunkt, aus welchem die kritische Philosophie beurteilt werden muss (The Only Correct Point of View from which Critical Philosophy Should be Judged) Riga, 1796.
6. Friedrich Ed. Benecke, System der Metaphysik und Religionsphilosophie, usw., (System of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion) Berlin, 1839.
7. Julius Bergmann, Sein und Erkennen, usw., (Existence and Cognition, etc.) Berlin, 1880.
8. A. E. Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik (Christian Dogmatics), 2nd Edition, Berlin, 1884–5, Vol. I, pp. 51–173.
9. H. Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Kant's Theory of Experience) Berlin, 1871.
10. P. Deussen, Die Elemente der Metaphysik (The Elements of Metaphysics), 2nd Edition, Leipzig, 1890.
11. W. Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, usw., (Introduction to the Spiritual Sciences, etc.) 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.
12. A. Dorner, Das menschliche Erkennen usw., (Human Cognition) Berlin, 1887.
13. E. Dreher, Ueber Wahrnehmung und Denken (On Perception and Thinking), Berlin, 1878.
14. G. Engel, Sein und Denken, (Existence and Thinking) Berlin, 1889.
15. W. Enoch, Der Begriff der Wahrnehmung (The Concept of Perception), Hamburg, 1890.
16. B. Erdmann, Kants Kriticismus in der esten und zweiten Auflage seiner Kritik der reinen Vernunft, (Kant's Criticism in the First and Second Editions of his Critique of Pure Reason) Leipzig, 1878.
17. F. v. Feldegg, Das Gefühl als Fundament der Weltordnung (Feeling as Fundament of Universal Order), Vienna, 1890.
18. E. L. Fischer, Die Grundfragen der Erkenntnistheorie (The Basic Questions of the Theory of Cognition), Mainz, 1887
19. K. Fischer, System der Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre (System of Logic and Metaphysics, or Scientific Theory), 2nd Edition, Heidelberg, 1865.
20. ___Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (History of More Recent Philosophy), Mannheim, 1860, especially the parts concerning Kant.
21. A. Ganser, Die Wahrheit, (Truth), Graz, 1890.
22. C. Göring, System der kritischen Philosophie, (System of Critical Philosophy), Leipzig, 1874.
23. ___Ueber den Begriff der Erfahrung (On the Concept of Experience), In Verteiljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie (Quarterly for Scientific Philosophy), Leipzig, 1st Year, 1877, p. 384.
24. E. Grimm, Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnisproblems, usw., (Contribution to the History of the Theory of Cognition). Leipzig, 1890.
25. F. Grung, Das Problem der Gewissheit, (The Problem of Certainty), Heidelberg, 1886.
26. R. Hamerling, Die Atomistik des Willens, (The Atomic Theory of Will), Hamburg, 1891.
27. F. Harms, Die Philosophie seit Kant (Philosophy through Kant), Berlin, 1876.
28. E. v. Hartmann, Kritische Grundlegung des transzendentalen Realismus (Critical Establishment of transcendental Realism), 2nd Edition Berlin, 1875.
29. ___J. H. v. Kirchmanns erkenntnistheoretischer Realismus, (J. H. v. Kirchmann's Cognitional-Theoretical Realism), Berlin, 1875.
30. ___Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie, usw., (The Fundamental Problem of a Theory of Cognition), Leipzig, 889.
31. ___Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart, (Critical Survey of Contemporary Philosophy), Leipzig, 1889.
32. H. L. F. v. Helmholtz, Die Tatsachen in der Wahrnehmung. (The Facts of Perception), Berlin, 1879.
33. G. Heymans, Die Gesetze und Elemente des wissenschaftlichen Denkens (The Laws and Elements of Scientific Thinking), Leyden, 1890.
34. A. Hölder, Darstellung der Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie (A Presentation of Kant's Theory of Cognition), Tubingen, 1874.
35. A. Horwicz, Analyse des Denkens, usw., (Analysis of Thinking), Halle, 1875.
36. F. H. Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus, (David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism), Breslau, 1787.
37. M. Kappes, Der “Common Sense” als Prinzip der Gewissheit in der Philosophie des Schotten Thomas Reid (“Common Sense” as Principle of Certainty in the Philosophy of the Scotsman, Thomas Reid), Munich, 1890.
38. M. Kauffmann, Fundamente der Erkenntnistheorie und Wissenschaftslehre (Foundations of a Theory of Cognition and Scientific Theory), Leipzig, 1890.
39. B. Kerry, System einer Theorie der Grenzgebiete (System of a Theory of Border-Areas), Vienna, 1890.
40. J. H. v. Kirchmann, Die Lehre vom Wissen als Einleitung in das Studium philosophischer Werke (The Theory of Knowledge as Introduction to the Study of Philosophical Works), Berlin, 1868.
41. E. Laas, Die Kausalitat des Ich (The Causality of the I), Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie (Quarterly for Scientific Philosophy), Leipzig, 4th Year, 1880, p. ff., 185ff.,311ff.
42. ___Idealismus und Positivismus (Idealism and Positivism), Berlin, 1879.
43. F. A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism), Iserlohn, 1873–75.
44. A. v. Leclair, Beiträge zu einer monistischen Erkenntnistheorie (Studies for a Monistic Theory of Cognition), Breslau, 1882.
45. ___Das kategorische Gepräge des Denkens (The Categorical Mark of Thinking) Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie (Quarterly for Scientific Philosophy), Leipzig, 7th Year, 1883, p. 257 ff.
46. O. Liebmann, Kant und die Epigonen, (Kant and the Epigones) Stuttgart, 1865.
47. ___Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit (Contribution to the Analysis of Reality), Strassburg, 1880.
48. ___Gedanken und Tatsachen (Thoughts and Facts), Strassburg, 1882.
49. ___Die Klimax der Theorien (The Climax of the Theories), Strassburg, 1884.
50. Th. Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, (The Fundamental Facts of Soul Life) Bonn, 1883.
51. H. R. Lotze, System der Philosophie, I Teil: Logik (System of Philosophy, Part I: Logic), Leipzig, 1874.
52. J. V. Mayer, Vom Erkennen (Concerning Cognition), Freiburg i. Br., 1885.
53. A. Meinong, Hume-Studien (Essays on Hume), Vienna, 1877.
54. J. St. Mill, System der induktiven und deduktiven Logik (System of Inductive and Deductive Logic), 1843; German translation, Braunschweig, 1849.
55. W Müntz, Die Grundlagen der Kantschen Erkenntnistheorie (Foundation of Kant's Theory of Knowledge), 2nd Edition, Breslau, 1885.
56. G. Neudecker, Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie (Fundamental Problem of the Theory of Cognition), Nordlingen, 1881.
57. F. Paulsen, Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Kantschen Erkenntnistheorie (Study on the History of the Development of the Kantian Theory of Cognition), Leipzig, 1875.
58. J. Rehmke, Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, usw., (The World as Percept and Concept, etc.), Berlin, 1880.
59. Th. Reid, Untersuchungen uber den menschlichen Geist nach Prinzipien des gesunden Menschenverstandes (Inquiry into the Human Mind for the Principles of Common Sense), 1764; German translation, Leipzig, 1782.
60. A. Riehl, Der philosophische Kritizismus und seine Bedeutung für die positive Wissenschaft (Philosophical Criticism and its Importance for Positive Science), Leipzig, 1887.
61. J. Rülf, Wissenschaft des Weltgedankens und der Gedankenwelt, System einer neuen Metaphysik (Science of World-Thought and Thought-World, A System of a New Metaphysics), Leipzig, 1888.
62. R. v. Schubert-Soldern, Gund lagen einer Erkenntnistheorie (Fundamentals of a Theory of Cognition), Leipzig, 1884.
63. G. E. Schulze, Aenesidemus, Helmstädt, 1792.
64. W. Schuppe, Zur voraussetzungslosen Erkenntnistheorie (Contribution to a Theory of Cognition Free of Presuppositions), Philosophische Monatschefte (Philosophical Monthly), Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, 1882, Vol. XVIII, Nos. 6 and 7.
65. Rud. Seydel, Logik oder Wissenschaft vom Wissen (Logic, or the Science of Knowledge), Leipzig, 1866.
66. Christoph v. Sigwart, Logik (Logic), Freiburg i. Br., 1878.
67. A. Stadler, Die Grundsätze der reinen Erkenntnistheorie in der Kantischen Philosophie (The Principles of the Pure Theory of Cognition in the Philosophy of Kant), Leipzig, 1876.
68. H. Taine, De l'Intelligence, 5th Edition, Paris, 1888.
69. A. Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Researches), Leipzig, 1862.
70. F. Ueberweg, System der Logik (System of Logic), 3rd Edition, Bonn, 1882.
71. H. Vaihinger, Hartmann, Dühring, Lange, Iserlohn, 1876.
72. Th. Varnbühler, Widerlegung der Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Refutation of the Critique of Pure Reason), Leipzig, 1890.
73. J. Volkelt, Immanuel Kants Erkenntnistheorie, usw., (Immanuel Kant's Theory of Cognition, etc.), Hamburg, 1879.
74. ___Erfahrung und Denken (Experience and Thinking), Hamburg, 1886.
75. Richard Wahle, Gehirn und Bewusstsein (Brain and Consciousness), Vienna, 1884.
76. W. Windelband, Präluden (Preludes), Freiburg i. Br., 1884.
77. ___Die verschiedenen Phasen der Kantschen Lehre vom “Ding an sich” (The Various Phases of Kant's Theory of the “Thing-in-Itself” Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie (Quarterly for Scientific Philosophy), Leipzig, 1st Year (1877), p. 229 ff.
78. J. H. Witte, Beiträge zur Verständnis Kants (Contirbutions to the Understanding of Kant), Berlin, 1874.
79. ___Vorstudien zur Erkenntnis des unerfahrbaren Seins (Preliminary Studies for the Cognition of Non-Experienceable Existence), Bonn, 1876.
80. H. Wolff, Ueber den Zusammenhang unserer Vorstellungen mit Dingen ausser uns (On the Correlation of our Perceptions with Things Outside Ourselves), Leipzig, 1874.
81. Joh. Wolff, Das Bewusstsein und sein Objekt (Consciousness and its Object), Berlin, 1889.
82. W. Wundt, Logik (Logic), Vol. I: Erkenntnislehre (Theory of Cognition), Stuttgart, 1880.

The following titles related to Fichte:

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 (The Concept of Freedom of Kant and Fichte), Berlin, 1886.
3. O. Gühloff, Der transcendentale Idealismus (Transcendental Idealism), Halle, 1888.
4. P. Hensel, Ueber die Beizehung des reinen Ich bei Fichte zur Einheit der Apperception bei Kant (On the Relation between the Pure I in the Works of Fichte and the Unity of Perception in those of Kant), Freiburg i. Br., 1885.
5. G. Schwabe, Fichtes und Schopenhauers Lehre vom Willen mit ihren Consequenzen für Weltbegreifung und Lebensfuhrung (The Theory of Will of Fichte and Schopenhauer and its Consequences for Understanding the World and the Conduct of Life), Jena, 1887.

[ 4 ] The numerous works published on the occasion of Fichte's Anniversary in 1862 are of course not included here. However, I would, above all, mention the Address of Trendelenburg (A. Trendelenburg, Zur Erinnerung an J. G. Fichte—To the Memory of J. G. Fichte—Berlin, 1862), which contains important theoretical viewpoints.

• i. See Johannes Volkelt's Erfahrung und Denken. Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, Experience and Thinking. Critical Foundation for a Theory of Cognition. Hamburg and Leipzig, 1886. (Johannes Volkelt 1848–1930, philosopher, professor at Leipzig.)
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• ii. Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Schiller, publ. in English translation by Olin D. Wannamaker, New York, 1950, under the title, “The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception—Fundamental Outlines with Special Reference to Schiller.” The first German edition published Berlin and Stuttgart, 1886, revised ed., Stuttgart, 1924, with new Foreword by the author. Other editions: Dornach, 1924; Dresden, 1936; Freiburg i. Br., 1949; Dornach, 1960.
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