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GA 20. The Riddle of Man — German Idealism as the Beholding of Thoughts: Hegel |
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One can arrive at a positive judgment and can find the essential thing about this world view to lie in the fact that it contains the affirmation: Whoever observes in its true form the world [ Note: Otto Willmann has written an excellent book dealing with The History of Idealism. With a far-reaching knowledge of his field, he points out the weaknesses and one-sidednesses that have come into the evolution of world views in the nineteenth century through the continuing effects of the Kantian formulation of questions and direction in thought. |
GA 20. The Riddle of Man — German Idealism as the Beholding of Thoughts: Hegel |
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Through Hegel, the “I think, therefore I am” seems to spring up again in the evolution of German world views like a seed, fallen into the earth, arises as a wide-branching tree. For, what this thinker created as a world view is a comprehensive thought-painting or, so to speak, a many-membered thought-body, consisting of numerous single thoughts that mutually carry, support, move, enliven, and illuminate one another. What is meant here by thoughts does not stem from the sense impressions of the outer world, nor even from the everyday experiences of human feeling life (Gemüt); what is meant is thoughts that reveal themselves in the soul when the soul lifts itself out of its sense impressions and out of the experiences of its feeling life and makes itself into an onlooker of the process by which a thought, free of everything of a non-thought nature, unfolds into further and ever further thoughts. When the soul allows this process to occur within itself, it is then supposedly lifted out of its usual being and interwoven with its activity into the spiritually supersensible world order. Then it is not the soul that thinks; the world-all thinks within the soul; the soul becomes a participant in a happening outside man into which man is merely interwoven; and in this way the soul experiences within itself what works and weaves in the depths of the world. Looking at this more closely, one can see that Hegel seeks his world view from a completely different viewpoint than from Descartes's “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes wants to draw certainty about the existence of the soul from the soul's thinking. With Hegel it is a matter of saying nothing at first about the thinking of the individual human soul. but of shaping the life of this soul in such a way that its thinking becomes a revelation of world thinking. Then. Hegel believes, what lives as thought in all world existence will reveal itself; and the individual soul finds itself as a part in this thought-weaving of the world. From this point of view the soul must say: The highest and deepest thing that is and lives in the world is the creative reigning of thoughts, and I find myself as one of the ways this reigning element reveals itself. In this turn away from the individual thoughts of the soul and toward world thoughts above and beyond the soul. there lies the significant difference between Hegel and Descartes; Hegel made this turn; Descartes did not. And this difference brings about another one relative to the development of the world views of both men. Descartes seeks certainty for the thoughts that the human being forms in the life in which he stands with his senses and his soul. Hegel at first does not seek within the field of these thoughts; he seeks a form of thought-life that lies above and beyond this field. If Hegel did in fact remain in the region of thoughts and found himself therefore to be in opposition to Fichte and Schelling, he did so only because he believed he felt, in thoughts themselves, the inner power needed to penetrate into the supersensible realm. Hegel was an enthusiast with respect to the experience man can have when he gives himself over entirely to the primal power of thoughts. In the light of a thought raised to an idea, the soul, for him, extricates itself from its connection with the sense world. One can feel the power lying in this enthusiasm of Hegel when one encounters in his writings — in which for many people there reigns such a repellent, knotty, yes, it seems, horribly abstract language-passages that often show so beautifully the heart's tones he can find for what he experiences with his “abstractions.” Just such a passage, for example, stands at the end of his Phenomenology. There he calls the knowing that the soul experiences when it lets world ideas hold sway within it “absolute knowing.” And at the end of this book he looks back upon those spirits who have striven for the goal of “absolute knowing” in the course of mankind's evolution. Looking back from his era, he finds the following words to say about these spirits: “The goal — absolute knowing, or the spirit knowing itself as spirit — has as its path the memory of spirits, as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their kingdom. Their preservation of their free existence, on the one hand, appearing in the form of chance happening, is history; but their preservation of their comprehended organization, on the other hand, is the science of manifest knowing; both together — comprehended history — constitute the memory and the Golgotha (Schädelstätte) of the absolute spirit, the reality, truth, and certainty of its throne, without which the absolute spirit would be lifeless and alone; only — From the cup of this realm of spirits This inwardly powerful element of a thought-life that wants to overcome itself within itself in order to lift itself into a realm where it is no longer living in itself but where the infinite thought, the eternal idea, is living in it: that is the essential element in Hegel's seeking. Through this, higher striving in knowledge receives a far-reaching character with him that wants to guide toward one goal directions in this striving that are often separated and therefore proceeding one-sidedly. In Hegel one can find a pure thinker who wants to approach the solution to the riddle of the world only through a human reason free of mysticism. One can speak of ice-cold abstract thoughts by which alone he wants to comprehend the world. Thus one will be able to see in him the dry, mathematically inclined man of intellect. But where does living in the ideas of one's reason lead him? It leads him to the surrender of the human soul to the supersensible world powers holding sway in the soul. Living in these ideas becomes a true mystical experience. And it is absolutely not nonsensical to recognize mysticism in Hegel's world view. One must only have a sense for the fact that what they mystic expresses can be experienced in Hegel's works in connection with the ideas of one's reason. It is a mysticism that removes the personal element — which for the mystic of feeling is the main thing, and the only thing he wants to speak about — as in fact a personal matter for the soul itself, and that expresses only that to which mysticism can lift itself when it struggles up out of personal soul darkness into the radiant clarity of the world of ideas. Hegel's world view has its place in the course of mankind's spiritual evolution through the fact that in it the radiant power of thoughts lifts itself up out of the mystical depths of the soul, and through the fact that in Hegel's seeking, mystical power wants to reveal itself with the power of the light of thought. And this is also how he sees his place in the course of this evolution. Therefore he looked back upon Jakob Böhme in the way expressed in these words (to be found in his History of Philosophy): “This Jakob Böhme, long forgotten and decried as a pietistic visionary, has regained his rightful esteem only in recent times; Leibniz revered him. His public has been greatly reduced by the Age of Enlightenment; in recent times his profundity has been recognized again. ... To declare him a visionary means nothing. For if one wants to, one can call every philosopher so, even Epicurus and Bacon. ... But as to the high esteem to which Böhme has been raised, he owes this particularly to the form of his contemplation and feeling; for, contemplation and inner feeling ... and the pictorial nature of one's thoughts the allegories and so on — are partly considered to be the essential form of philosophy. But it is only the concept, thinking, in which philosophy can have its truth, in which the absolute can be expressed and also is as it is in and for itself.” And Hegel finds these further words for Böhme: “Jakob Böhme is the first German philosopher; the content of his philosophizing is truly German. What distinguishes Böhme and makes him remarkable is ... that he set the intellectual world into his own inner life (Gemüt), and within his own consciousness of himself he beheld, knew, and felt everything that used to be in the beyond. This general idea of Böhme proves on the one hand to be profound and basic; on the other hand, however, he does not achieve clarity and order in all his need and struggle for definition and discrimination in developing his divine views about the universe.” Such words are spoken by Hegel, after all, only from the feeling: In the simple heart of Jakob Böhme there lived the deepest impulse of the human soul to sink itself with its own experience into world experience — the true mystical impulse — but the pictorial view, the parable, the symbol must lift themselves to the light of clear ideas in order to attain what they want. In Hegel's world view Jakob Böhme's world pictures are meant to arise again as ideas of human reason. Thus the enthusiast of thoughts, Hegel, stands beside the deep mystic, Jakob Böhme, within the evolution of German idealism. Hegel saw in Böhme's philosophizing something truly German, and Karl Rosenkranz, the biographer and independent student of Hegel, wrote a book, Hegel as the German National Philosopher, for the celebration of Hegel's hundredth birthday in 1870, in which these words occur: “One can assert that Hegel's system of thought is the most national one in Germany, and that after the earlier dominion of the Kantian and Schellingtan systems, none has reached so deeply into the national movement, into the furthering of German intelligence, into the elucidation of public opinion, into the encouraging of the will ... as that of Hegel.” With such words Karl Rosenkranz does in fact, to a high degree, speak the truth about a phenomenon of German spiritual life, even though, on the other hand, Hegel's striving had already encountered the most bitter and scornful opposition in the decades before these words were written — an opposition whose beginnings were described in significant words by Rosenkranz himself soon after Hegel's death: “When I consider the fury with which Hegelian philosophy was attacked, I am surprised that Hegel's expression, that ‘the idea in its movement is a circle of circles,’ has not moved people to call his philosophy Dante's funnel into hell, which narrows toward the end and finally brings one up against Satan incarnate” (Rosenkrantz: From My Notebook. Leipzig 1854). There can be very different viewpoints from which a person seeks to describe the impression he gains of a thinker personality like Hegel. In another place (in his book Riddles of Philosophy) the present author attempted to show the view one can attain about Hegel when one fixes one's eye on his work as a stage in the philosophical evolution of mankind. Here this author would like to speak only of what comes to expression through Hegel as one of the strengths of German idealism in world views. This is trust in the carrying power of thinking. Every page in Hegel's works strengthens this trust which finally culminates in the conviction: When the human being fully understands what he has in his thinking, then he also knows that he can attain entry into a supersensible spiritual world. Through Hegel, German idealism has accomplished the affirmation of the supersensible nature of thinking. And one can have the feeling that Hegel's strengths, and also his weaknesses, are connected with the fact that one time in the course of the world a personality had to stand there for whom all life and work are ensouled by this affirmation. Then one sees in Hegel's world view a source from which to draw what can be gained from this affirmation in the way of strength for life, without perhaps accepting the content of the Hegelian world view in anyone point. If one relates in such a way to this thinker personality, one can receive a stimulus from him, and along with it the stimulus of one strong element of German idealism; and from this stimulus one can gain the strength to form a completely different picture of the world than that painted by Hegel himself. As strange as it may sound: Hegel is perhaps best understood when one directs the power of cognitive striving that held sway in him onto paths that he himself never took at all. Hegel felt the supersensible nature of thinking with all the power available to man in this direction. But he had to expend so much human strength in conducting this feeling through a complete thinking process for once, that he was not able himself to lead the supersensible nature of thinking up into supersensible realms. The exemplary psychologist, Franz Brentano expresses in his Psychology how modern psychology does indeed investigate the ordinary life of the soul in a strictly scientific way, but, in these investigations, has lost all perspective into the great questions of soul existence. He says: “The laws of mental association, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the germinating of pleasure and love, all these would be anything but a true compensation for not gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body ... if the modern way of thinking really did signify the elimination of the question of immortality, then this elimination would have to be called an extremely portentious one for psychology:” Now one can say that in many people's view not only the scientific approach of psychology but the scientific approach altogether seems to signify the elimination of such questions. Over Hegel's world view there seems to hover like an evil fate the fact that, with its affirmation of the supersensible nature of the thought-world, his world view has walled off the entrance into a real world of supersensible facts and beings. In someone who is a student of Hegel in the sense Karl Rosenkranz is, for example, this fate seems to work on. Rosenkranz wrote a psychology (Psychology or Science of the Subjective Spirit, 1837; third edition, 1863). There, in the chapter on “Old Age,” one can read (p. 119): “Psychology touches here on the question of immortality, a favorite theme of lay philosophers — often with the preconceived intention of guaranteeing a reunion after death, as one usually expresses it. If the spirit, as a self-conscious idea-entity, is qualitatively different from its organism, then the possibility of immortality makes sense. But as to the how of actual immortality, we are unable to gain the slightest inkling with any objective value. We can see that if we continue to exist as individualities, our being is still unable to change, after all, with respect to having to live within the true, good, and beautiful; but the modality of an existence separated from our organism is a riddle for us. Why should we not then acknowledge here the limits of our knowing? Why should we either flatly deny the possibility of immortality or offer for speculation fantastic dreams of a soul sleep, of a soul body, and of other such dogmas? Where true knowing ceases, faith enters; and we must leave it up to faith to depict a not impossible hereafter.” Rosenkranz airs an opinion like this within a psychology completely permeated with the conviction of having a knowledge about what the supersensible world-thought brings to earthly reality within the being of the human soul. This is a science — wishing to weave entirely within the supersensible — that comes to an immediate halt when it notices the threshold to the supersensible world. One can deal with this phenomenon only if one feels in it something of the destiny that is cast over man's striving in knowledge — and that seems so inextricably interwoven with Hegel's world view — through the fact that, by focussing with all its strength upon the supersensible nature of thinking, and, in order to achieve maximum effect with this focus, his world view loses the possibility of a different focus upon the supersensible. Hegel at first seeks to find the circumference of all the supersensible thoughts that arise in the human soul when the soul lifts itself up out of all observation of nature and all earthly soul life. He presents this content as his Logic. But this logic contains not one single thought leading out of the region encompassed by nature and earthly soul life. Then Hegel seeks further to present all those thoughts which, as supersensible beings, underlie nature. Nature becomes for him the revelation of a supersensible thought-world that hides its thought-being within nature and presents itself as the opposite of itself, as something of a non-thought kind. But here also there are no thoughts that non-thought kind. But here also there are no thoughts that I do not express themselves within the circumference of the sense world. In his philosophy of the spirit, Hegel depicts how world I ideas are holding sway in the individual human soul, in associations of human souls (peoples, states), in the historical evolution of mankind, in art, religion, and philosophy. Everywhere in his philosophy is also the view that the supersensible thought-world absolutely expresses itself within the soul element as this stands with its being and working within the sense world, and that therefore everything present in the sense realm is of a spiritual nature with respect to its true being. Nowhere, however, is there a start in the direction of penetrating with knowledge into a supersensible region for which no configuration in the sense realm is present. One can acknowledge all this to oneself and yet not seek to judge the expression of German idealism in Hegel's world view negatively just because Hegel, in spite of his supersensible idealism, remained stuck in observation of the sense world. One can arrive at a positive judgment and can find the essential thing about this world view to lie in the fact that it contains the affirmation: Whoever observes in its true form the world [ Note: Otto Willmann has written an excellent book dealing with The History of Idealism. With a far-reaching knowledge of his field, he points out the weaknesses and one-sidednesses that have come into the evolution of world views in the nineteenth century through the continuing effects of the Kantian formulation of questions and direction in thought. The depictions I gave in this present book sought within the life of the world views of the nineteenth century to find those impulses and streams through which thinkers have freed themselves from Kant's formulation of questions and direction in thought, and through which they have taken paths to which precisely they could do justice who judge the matter according to just such a far-reaching view as that underlying Willmann's book. Many views that wish to attach themselves to Kant in modern times, without sufficient insight into the preceding evolution of world views, revert in fact to views characterized correctly in the following words by Willmann to the effect “that according to Aristotle our knowledge begins with the things of the world and on the basis of sense perceptions only then forms the concept ... that this forming of concepts occurs through a creative act, in which the human spirit grasps the thought-element within the things ... One still always has to indicate to certain sense-bound and banal people that perceiving can never enhance itself to the point of being able to think, that sensations and feelings cannot bunch together into concepts, and that, on the contrary, perceiving and sensing must themselves be constituted by something, and constituted, in fact, on the basis of the thoughts existing in the things; ... only thoughts can grant us any necessitated and universal knowledge.” Someone who thinks in this way — if he frees himself from certain misapprehensions holding sway, understandably, among the adherents of Willmann's kind of thinking — can speak with comprehension and appreciation, even from Willmann's standpoint, of Schelling's and Hegel's direction in thought and of much that, like them, rums away from “sense-bound banality.” A time will also come when Willmann's kind of thinking will be judged with less bias in this direction than is now the case. This kind of thinking will then be just as correct in its appreciation of what, in the evolution of modern world views, has broken free of “sense-bound banality” as it is correct now in condemning views that have fallen prey to this and many other “banalities.”! ] spread out before our senses recognizes that it is in reality a spiritual world. And German idealism has expressed through Hegel this affirmation of the spiritual nature of the sense-perceptible. |
GA 28. The Story of My Life — Chapter VI |
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Therefore, whatever I had established upon the basis of Goethe's theory of the organic sent me afresh to the theory of cognition. I had before my mind theories such as that of Otto Liebmann, which expressed in the most varied forms the dogma that human consciousness can never get outside itself; that it must therefore be content to live in that which reality sends into the human soul, and which presents itself within in spiritual form. |
GA 28. The Story of My Life — Chapter VI |
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In the field of pedagogy Fate gave me an unusual task. I was employed as tutor in a family where there were four boys. To three I had to give only the preparatory instruction for the Volkschule. 1The Volkschule course usually extends from the sixth to the tenth year; the Mittelschule covers the three following years, though the term is not always so definite. and then assistance in the work of the Mittelschule. The fourth, who was almost ten years old, was at first entrusted to me for all his education. He was the child of sorrow to his parents, especially to his mother. When I went to live in the home, he had scarcely learned the most rudimentary elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic. He was considered so subnormal in his physical and mental development that the family had doubts as to his capacity for being educated. His thinking was slow and dull. Even the slightest mental exertion caused a headache, lowering of vital functions, pallor, and alarming mental symptoms. After I had come to know the child, I formed the opinion that the sort of education required by such a bodily and mental organism must be one that would awaken the sleeping faculties, and I proposed to the parents that they should leave the child's training to me. The mother had enough confidence to accept this proposal, and I was thus able to set myself this unusual educational task. I had to find access to a soul which was, as it were, in a sleeping state, and which must gradually be enabled to gain the mastery over the bodily manifestations. In a certain sense one had first to draw the soul within the body. I was thoroughly convinced that the boy really had great mental capacities, though they were then buried. This made my task a profoundly satisfying one. I was soon able to bring the child into a loving dependence upon me. This condition caused the mere intercourse between us to awaken his sleeping faculties of soul. For his instruction I had to feel my way to special methods. Every fifteen minutes beyond a certain time allotted to instruction caused injury to his health. To many subjects of instruction the boy had great difficulty in relating himself. This educational task became to me the source from which I myself learned very much. Through the method of instruction which I had to apply there was laid open to my view the association between the spiritual-mental and the bodily in man. Then I went through my real course of study in physiology and psychology. I became aware that teaching and instructing must become an art having its foundation in a genuine understanding of man. I had to follow out with great care an economic principle. I frequently had to spend two hours in preparing for half an hour of instruction in order to get the material for instruction in such a form that in the least time, and with the least strain upon the mental and physical powers of the child, I might reach his highest capacity for achievement. The order of the subjects of instruction had to be carefully considered; the division of the entire day into periods had to be properly determined. I had the satisfaction of seeing the child in the course of two years accomplish the work of the Volkschule, and successfully pass the examination for entrance to the Gymnasium. [ Note: That is, the boy completed in two years what children usually do in the years from the sixth to the tenth year of age. Moreover, his physical condition had materially improved. The hydrocephalic condition was markedly diminishing. I was able to advise the parents to send the child to a public school. It seemed to me necessary that he should find his vital development in company with other children. I continued to be a tutor for several years in the family, and gave special attention to this boy, who was always guided to make his way through the school in such a way that his home activities should be carried through in the spirit in which they were begun. I then had the inducement, in the way I have already mentioned, to increase my knowledge of Latin and Greek, for I was responsible for the tutoring of this boy and another in this family for the Gymnasium lessons. I must needs feel grateful to Fate for having brought me into such a life relationship. For through this means I developed in vital fashion a knowledge of the being of man which I do not believe could have been developed by me so vitally in any other way. Moreover, I was taken into the family in an extraordinarily affectionate way; we came to live a beautiful life in common. The father of these boys was a sales-agent for Indian and American cotton. I was thus able to get a glimpse of the working of business, and of much that is connected with this. Moreover, through this I learned a great deal. I had an inside view of the conduct of a branch of an unusually interesting import business, and could observe the intercourse between business friends and the interlinking of many commercial and industrial activities. My young charge was successfully guided through the Gymnasium; I continued with him even to the Unter-Primai. [ Note: The next to the last year in the Gymnasium. By that time he had made such progress that he no longer needed me. After completing the Gymnasium he entered the school of medicine, became a physician, and in this capacity he was later a victim of the World War. The mother, who had become a true friend of mine because of what I had done for her boy, and who clung to this child of sorrow with the most devoted love, soon followed him in death. The father had already gone from this world. A good portion of my youthful life was bound up with the task which had grown so close to me. For a number of years I went during the summer with the family of the children whom I had to tutor to the Attersee in the Salzkammergut, and there became familiar with the noble Alpine nature of Upper Austria. I was gradually able to eliminate the private lessons I had continued to give to others even after beginning this tutoring, and thus I had time left for prosecuting my own studies. In the life I led before coming into this family I had little opportunity for sharing in the play of children. In this way it came about that my “play-time” came after my twentieth year. I had then to learn also how to play, for I had to direct the play, and this I did with great enjoyment. To be sure, I think I have not played any less in my life than other men. Only in my case what is usually done in this direction before the tenth year I repeated from the twenty-third to the twenty-eighth year. It was during this period that I was occupied with the philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann. As I studied his theory of knowledge, continual opposition was aroused within me. The opinion that the genuinely real lies as the unconscious beyond conscious experience, and that the latter is nothing more than an unreal pictorial reflection from the real – this was to me utterly repugnant. In opposition to this I postulated that the conscious experience can, through the strengthening of mental life, dip down within the real. I was clear in my own mind that the divine-spiritual reveals itself in man if man makes this revelation possible through his own inner life. The pessimism of Eduard von Hartmann appeared to me as an utterly false questioning of human life. I had to conceive man as striving toward the goal of drawing up from within himself that with which life fills him for his satisfaction. I said to myself: “If through the ordering of the world a ‘best life’ were simply imparted to man, how could he bring this inner spring to a flowing stream?” The external world order has come to a stage in evolution in which it has ignored the good and the bad in things and in facts. Then first the human being awakes to self-consciousness and guides the evolution farther, but in such way that this evolution takes its direction toward freedom, not from things and facts, but only from the fountain head of man's being. The mere introduction of the question of pessimism or optimism seemed to me to be running counter to the free being of man. I frequently said to myself: “How could man be the free creator of his highest happiness if a measure of happiness were imparted to him through the ordering of the external world?” On the other hand, Hartmann's work Phänomenologie des Sittlichen Bewusstsein [ Note: Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness. attracted me. There, I found, the moral evolution of man was traced according to the clue of what is empirically observable. It does not become – as in the case of Hartmann's theory of knowledge – speculative thought linked to unknown being which lies beyond consciousness; but rather it is that which can be experienced as morality, and grasped in its manifestations. And it was clear to me that no philosophical speculation must think beyond the phenomena if it desires to reach the genuinely real. The phenomena of the world reveal of themselves this genuinely real as soon as the conscious soul prepares itself to receive the revelation. Whoever takes into consciousness only what is perceptible to the senses may seek for real being in a beyond-consciousness; whoever grasps the spiritual in his perception speaks of this as being on this side, not of a beyond in the sense characteristic of a theory of cognition. Hartmann's consideration of the moral world seemed to me congenial because in this his beyond standpoint withdraws wholly into the background, and he confines himself to that which can be observed. Through a deeper penetration into phenomena, even to the point where these disclose their spiritual being – it was in this way that I desired to know that knowledge of real being is brought to pass, not through inferential reasoning as to what is “behind” phenomena. Since I was always striving to sense a human capacity on its positive side, Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy became useful to me, in spite of the fact that its fundamental tendency and its conception of life were repugnant; for it cast a penetrating light upon many phenomena. And even in those writings of the “philosopher of the unconscious” from which in principle I dissented I yet found much that was immensely stimulating. So it was also with the popular writings of Eduard von Hartmann, which dealt with cultural historical, pedagogical, and political problems. I found in this pessimist “sound” conceptions of life such as I could not discover in many optimists. It was just in connection with him that I experienced that which I needed,-to be able to understand even though I had to oppose. It was thus that I sat till late many a night – when I could leave my boys to themselves, and after I had admired the starry heavens from the balcony of the house – in studying the Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness and the Religiöses Bewusstsein der Menscheit in der Stufenfolge seiner Entwickelung 5Religious Consciousness in Man in the Stages of its Evolution. and while I was reading these writings I attained to an ever increasing assurance concerning my own standpoint in regard to the theory of knowledge. Upon the suggestion of Schröer, Joseph Kürschner invited me in 1884 to edit Goethe's scientific writings with an introduction and accompanying interpretive notes as a part of the edition of Deutsche National-Literatur planned by him. Schröer, who had taken responsibility for Goethe's dramas within the great collective work, was to preface the first volume assigned to me with an introductory foreword. In this he analysed the manner in which Goethe as poet and as thinker was related to the contemporary spiritual life. In the philosophy introduced by the age of natural science which followed after Goethe, he saw a falling away from the spiritual height upon which Goethe had been standing. The task which had been assigned to me in the editing of Goethe's scientific writings was characterized in a general way in this preface. For me the task included an exposition in which natural science should be on one side and Goethe's whole philosophy on the other. Now that I had to come before the public with such an exposition, it was necessary for me to bring to a certain issue all that I had thus far won for myself in the way of a world-conception. Until that time I had occupied myself as a writer with nothing more than brief articles for the press. It was not easy for me to write down what was a vital inner experience in such manner that I could consider my work worthy of publication. I always had the feeling that what had been elaborated within appeared in a very paltry form when I had to present it in a finished shape. So all literary endeavours became to me the source of continual inner unhappiness. The form of thought by which natural science has been dominated since the beginning of its great influence upon the civilization of the nineteenth century seemed to me ill-adapted to reach an understanding of that which Goethe strove to attain for natural science, and actually did in large measure attain. I beheld in Goethe a personality who, by reason of the unusual spiritual relationship in which he had placed man with reference to nature, was also in a position to place the knowledge of nature in the right form in the totality of human achievement. The form of thought of the period in which I had grown up appeared to me fit only for shaping ideas regarding lifeless nature. I considered it powerless to enter with capacity for knowledge into the realm of living nature. I said to myself: “In order to attain to ideas which can mediate a knowledge of the organic, it is necessary that one should first endue with life the concepts adapted for an understanding of inorganic nature.” For these seemed to me dead, and therefore fit only for grasping that which is dead. How the ideas became endued with life in Goethe's spirit, how they became ideal forms, this is what I sought to set forth in order to clarify Goethe's conception of nature. What Goethe thought and elaborated in detail regarding this or that field of the knowledge of nature appeared to me of less importance than the central discovery which I was forced to attribute to him. This I saw in the fact that he had discovered how one must think in regard to the organic in order to come at it understandingly. I found that mechanics completely satisfy the need for knowledge in that they generate conceptions in a rational manner in the human mind which then prove to be real when applied in the sense-perception of that which is lifeless. Goethe was to me the founder of a law of organics, which in like manner applies to that which has life. When I looked back to Galileo in the history of modern spiritual life, I was forced to remark how he, by the shaping of ideas from the inorganic, had given to the new natural science its present form. What he had introduced for the inorganic Goethe had striven to attain for the organic. Goethe became for me the Galileo of the organic. For the first volume of Goethe's natural-scientific writings I had first to elaborate his ideas on metamorphosis. It was difficult for me to express the relation between the living ideal forms through which the organic can be understood and the formless ideas suited to enable one to grasp the inorganic. But it seemed to me that my whole task depended upon making this point in true fashion intelligible. In understanding the inorganic, concept is added in series to concept, in order to survey the correlation of forces which bring about an effect in nature. In reference to the organic it is necessary so to allow one concept to grow out of another that in the progressive living metamorphosis of concepts there come to light images of that which appears in nature as a being possessing form. This Goethe strove to do in that he sought to hold fast in his mind an ideal image of a leaf which was not a fixed lifeless concept but such a one as might present itself in the most varied forms. If one permits these forms in the mind to proceed one out of another, one thus constructs the whole plant. One re-creates in the mind in ideal fashion the process whereby nature in actual fashion shapes the plant. If one seeks in this way to conceive the plant world, one thus stands much nearer in spirit to the world of nature than in conceiving the inorganic by means of formless concepts. For the inorganic one conceives only a spiritual fantasm of that which is present in nature in a manner void of spirit. But in the coming into existence of a plant there lives some thing which has a remote resemblance to that which arises in the human mind as an image of the plant. One becomes aware of how nature, while bringing forth the organic, is really bringing into action something spiritually similar within her own being. I desired to show, in the introduction to Goethe's botanical writings, how in his theory of metamorphosis he took the direction of thinking about the workings of organic nature in the manner in which one thinks of spirit. Still more spiritual in form appeared to me Goethe's way of thinking in the realm of the animal and in the lower natural stages of the human being. In relation to the animal-human, Goethe began by seeing through an error which he noticed among his contemporaries. These sought to ascribe a special position in nature to the organic bases of the human being by finding individual distinctions between man and the animal. They found such a distinction in the intermaxillary bones which the animals possess, in which their upper incisor teeth are bedded. In man, they said, such a special intermediary bone in the upper jaw is lacking; his upper jaw consists of a single piece. This seemed to Goethe an error. For him the human form was a metamorphosis of the animal to a higher stage. Everything which appears in the forming of the animal must be present also in the human, only in a higher form so that the human organism might become the bearer of the self-conscious spirit. In the elevation of the whole united form of man Goethe saw the distinction from the animal, not in details. Step by step does one perceive the organic creative forces become more like spirit as one rises from consideration of the plant-beings to the varied forms of the animals. In the organic form of man creative forces are active which bring to pass the highest metamorphosis of the animal shape. These forces are present in the process of becoming of the human organism; and they finally live there as the human spirit after they have formed in the natural basic parts a vessel which can receive them in their form of existence free from nature. In this conception of the human organism it seemed to me that Goethe had anticipated everything true which was later affirmed, on the ground of Darwinism, concerning the kinship of the human with the animal. But it also seemed to me that all which was untrue was omitted. The materialistic understanding of that which Darwin discovered leads to the adoption of conceptions based upon the kinship between man and the animals which deny the spirit where it appears in its highest form in an earthly existence – in man. Goethe's conception leads to the perception of a spiritual creation in the animal form which has simply not yet arrived at the stage at which the spirit as such can live. That which lives in man as spirit creates in the animal form at a preliminary stage; and it metamorphoses this form in the case of man in such a way that it can then appear, not only as creative, but also in its own living presence. Viewed in this way, Goethe's consideration of nature becomes one which, while tracing the natural process of becoming from the inorganic to the organic, also leads natural science over into spiritual science. To bring out this fact was to me of more importance than anything else in working up the first volume of Goethe's natural-scientific writings. For this reason I allowed my introduction to narrow down to an explanation of the way in which Darwinism establishes a one-sided view, coloured by materialism, which must be restored to wholeness by Goethe's way of thinking. How one must think in order to penetrate into the phenomena of life – this is what I wished to show in discussing Goethe's view of the organic. I soon came to feel that this discussion required a basis upon which to rest. The nature of cognition was then conceived by my contemporaries in a way which could never arrive at Goethe's view. The theorists of cognition had in mind natural science as it then existed. What they said in regard to the nature of cognition held good only for a conception of inorganic nature. There could be no agreement between what I must say in regard to Goethe's kind of cognition and the theories of cognition ordinarily held at that time. Therefore, whatever I had established upon the basis of Goethe's theory of the organic sent me afresh to the theory of cognition. I had before my mind theories such as that of Otto Liebmann, which expressed in the most varied forms the dogma that human consciousness can never get outside itself; that it must therefore be content to live in that which reality sends into the human soul, and which presents itself within in spiritual form. If one views the thing in this way, one cannot say that one perceives a spiritual relationship in organic nature after the manner of Goethe. One must seek for the spirit within the human soul, and consider a spiritual contemplation of nature inadmissible. I discovered that there was no theory of cognition fitting Goethe's kind of cognition. This induced me to undertake to sketch such a theory. I wrote my Erkenntnistheorie der Goethe'schen Weltanschauung 6Theory of Cognition in Goethe's World Conception out of an inner need before I proceeded to prepare the other volumes of Goethe's natural scientific writings. This little book was finished in 1886. |
GA 28. The Story of My Life — Chapter XXI |
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Many other Weimar friends besides these appeared in this circle: Fresenius, Heitmüller, Fritz Koegel, too, and others. When Otto Erich Hartleben came to Weimar, he also always appeared in this circle, after it had been formed. Conrad Ansorge had grown out of the Liszt circle. Indeed, I speak nothing but the truth when I assert that he considered himself one of the pupils of the master who understood him in an artistic sense most truly of all. |
GA 28. The Story of My Life — Chapter XXI |
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Through the liberal politician of whom I have spoken I became acquainted with the owner of a book-shop. This book business had seen better days than those it was passing through during my stay in Weimar. This was still true when the shop belonged to the father of the young man whom I came to know as the owner. The important thing for me was the fact that this book-shop published a paper which carried sketchy articles dealing with contemporary spiritual life and whatever was then appearing in the fields of poetry, science, and art. This paper also was in a decline; its circulation had fallen off. But it afforded me the opportunity to write about much which then lay within the scope of my thinking or had a relation to this. Although the numerous essays and book reviews which I thus wrote were read by very few, it was an important thing to me to have a paper in which I could publish whatever I pleased to write. There was a stimulus in this which bore fruit later, when I edited the Magazin für Literatur and was therefore compelled to share intensely in thought and feeling in contemporary spiritual life. In this way Weimar became for me the place to which my thoughts had often to turn back in later years. The narrow limits within which my life had been restricted in Vienna were now expanded, and I had spiritual and human experiences the results of which appeared later on. Most important of all, however, were the relationships with men which were then formed. When in later years I have recalled to memory Weimar and my life there, my mental gaze has often been directed to a house which had become dear to me in very special measure. I became acquainted with the actor Neuffer while he was still engaged at the Weimar theatre. I appreciated in him at first his earnest and austere conception of his profession. Into his judgment concerning the art of the stage he allowed nothing of the dilettante to enter. This was satisfying for the reason that people are not always aware that dramatic art must fulfil genuinely artistic requirements in the same way as does, for instance, music. Neuffer married the sister of the pianist and composer Bernhard Stavenhagen. I was introduced into his home. One was in this way received at the same time in friendly fashion in the home of the parents of Frau Neuffer and Bernhard Stavenhagen. Frau Neuffer is a woman who radiates a spiritual atmosphere over everything about her. Her sentiments, deeply rooted in the soul, shone with wonderful beauty in the free and informal talk in which one shared while in her home. She brought forward whatever she had to say thoughtfully and yet graciously. Every moment that I spent with the Neuffers I had the feeling: “Frau Neuffer strives to reach truth in all the relationships of life in a way that is very rare.” That I was welcomed there was evidenced in the most varied incidents. I will choose one example. One Christmas Eve Herr Neuffer came to my home, and – as I was not in – left the request that I must without fail come to his home for the ceremony of Christmas gifts. This was not easy, for in Weimar I always had to share in several such festivities. But I managed somehow to do this. Then I found, beside the gifts for the children, a special Christmas gift for me all nicely wrapped up, the value of which can be seen only from its history. I had been one day in the studio of a sculptor. The sculptor wanted to show me his work. Very little that I saw there interested me. Only a single bust which lay out of sight in a corner attracted my attention. It was a bust of Hegel. In the studio, which belonged to the home of an old lady very prominent in Weimar, there was to be seen every possible sort of sculpture. Sculptors always rented the room for only a short time; and each tenant would leave there many things which he did not care to take with him. But there were also some things which had lain there for a long time unobserved, such as the Hegel bust. The interest I had conceived in this bust led from that time on to my mentioning it here or there. So this happened once also in the Neuffer home; there also I added a casual remark to the effect that I should like to have the bust in my possession. Then on the following Christmas Eve it was given to me as a present at Neuffer's. At lunch on the following day, to which I was invited, Neuffer told how he had procured the bust. He first went to the lady to whom the studio belonged. He told her that some one had seen the bust in her studio, and that it would have a special value for him if he could procure it. The lady said that such things had been in her house for a long time past, but whether a “Hegel” bust was there – as to that she knew nothing. She appeared quite willing, however, to guide Neuffer around in order that he might look for it. Everything was “thoroughly searched”; not the most hidden corner was left uninspected; nowhere was the Hegel bust discovered. Neuffer was quite sad, for there had been something very satisfying to him in the thought of giving me pleasure by means of the Hegel bust. He was already standing at the door with the lady. The maid-servant came along. She heard the words of Neuffer's: “Yes, it is a pity that we have not found the Hegel bust!” “Hegel!” interjected the maid: “Is this perhaps that head with the tip of the nose broken off which is under my bed in the servant's room?” Forthwith the final act of the expedition was carried out, and Neuffer actually succeeded in procuring the bust; before Christmas there was still time to supplement the defective nose. So it was that I came by the Hegel bust which is one of the few things that later accompanied me to many different places. I always liked to look again and again at this head of Hegel (by Wassmann, the year 1826) when I was deeply immersed in the world of Hegel's ideas. And this, as a matter of fact, happened very often. This countenance, whose features are the most human expression of the purest thought, constitutes a life-companion wielding a manifold influence. So it was with the Neuffers. They spared no pains when they wished to give someone pleasure by means of something that had a special relation to him. The children that came one by one into the Neuffer home had a model mother. Frau Neuffer brought them up less by what she did than by what she is – by her whole being. I had the happiness of being godfather to one of the sons. Every visit to this house was the occasion of an inner satisfaction. I was privileged to make such visits also in later years after I had left Weimar but returned to and fro to deliver lectures. Unfortunately this has not been possible now for a long while. It thus happens that I have not been able to see the Neuffers during the years in which a painful fate has broken in upon them; for this family is one of those most sorely put to the test by the World War. A charming personality was the father of Frau Neuffer, the elder Stavenhagen. Before this time he had been engaged in a practical occupation, but he had then settled down to rest. He now lived wholly in the contents of the library he had acquired for himself; and it was a thoroughly congenial picture to others – the way in which he lived there. Nothing self-satisfied or top-lofty had entered into the lovable old man, but rather something that revealed in every word the sincere craving for knowledge. The relationships in Weimar were then of such a character that souls which felt elsewhere unsatisfied would turn up here. So it was with those who made a permanent home there, but so also with those who loved to come again and again as visitors. One had this feeling about many persons: “Visits to Weimar are different for them from visits to other places.” I had this feeling in a very special way about the Danish poet, Rudolf Schmidt. He came first for the production of his play, Der verwandelte König. [ Note: The King Transformed. During this very first visit I made his acquaintance. Later, however, he appeared on many occasions which brought visitors from elsewhere to Weimar. The fine figure of a man with those wavy locks was often among these visitors. The way in which a man “is” in Weimar had in it something that drew his soul. He was a very sharply marked personality. In philosophy he was an adherent of Rasmus Nielson. Through this man, who derived his thought from Hegel, Rudolf Schmidt had the most beautiful understanding of the German idealistic philosophy. And if Schmidt's opinions were thus clearly stamped on the positive side, they were no less so on the negative. Thus he became biting, satirical, utterly adverse when he spoke of Georg Brandes. There was something artistic in seeing a person revealing an entire expansive field of experience poured out before you in his antipathy. Upon me these revelations could never make any impression except an artistic one; for I had read much from Georg Brandes. I had been especially interested in what he had written, in a manner rich in spiritual wealth and out of a wide range of observations and knowledge, about the spiritual currents of the European peoples. But what Rudolf Schmidt brought forward was subjectively honest, and because of the character of the poet himself it was really captivating. At length I came to feel the deepest and most heartfelt love for Rudolf Schmidt; I rejoiced on the days when he came to Weimar. It was interesting to hear him talk about his northern homeland, and to perceive what significant capacities had sprung up in him from the fountain-head of his northern experiences. It was no less interesting to talk with him about Goethe, Schiller, Byron. Then he spoke very differently from Georg Brandes. The latter is always in his judgments the international personality, but in Rudolf Schmidt there spoke the Dane. For this very reason he talked about many things and in many connections in a more interesting way than Georg Brandes. During the latter part of my stay in Weimar, I became an intimate friend of Conrad Ansorge and his brother-in-law, von Crompton. Conrad Ansorge later developed in a brilliant way his great artistic powers. Here I need speak only of what he was to me in a beautiful friendship at the close of the 'nineties, and how he then impressed me. The wives of Ansorge and von Crompton were sisters. Because of this relationship, our gatherings took place either at von Crompton's home or at the hotel Russischer Hof. Ansorge was an energetically artistic man. He was active both as pianist and as composer. During the time of our Weimar acquaintance he set to music poems of Nietzsche and of Dehmel. It was always a delightful occasion when the friends who were gradually drawn into the Ansorge-Crompton circle were permitted to hear a new composition. To this group belonged also a Weimar editor, Paul Böhler. He edited the Deutschland, which had a more independent existence side by side with the official journal, the Weimarische Zeitung. Many other Weimar friends besides these appeared in this circle: Fresenius, Heitmüller, Fritz Koegel, too, and others. When Otto Erich Hartleben came to Weimar, he also always appeared in this circle, after it had been formed. Conrad Ansorge had grown out of the Liszt circle. Indeed, I speak nothing but the truth when I assert that he considered himself one of the pupils of the master who understood him in an artistic sense most truly of all. But it was through Conrad Ansorge that what had come in living form from Liszt was brought before one's mind in the most beautiful way. For everything musical which came from Ansorge arose out of an entirely original, individual human being. This humanity in him might be inspired by Liszt, but what was delightful in it was its originality. I express these things just as I then experienced them; how I was afterward related to them or am now related is not here under discussion. Through Liszt, Ansorge had once at an earlier period been bound to Weimar; at the time of which I am here speaking, his soul was freed from this state of belonging to Weimar. Indeed, the characteristic of this Ansorge-Crompton circle was that it was in a very different relationship to Weimar from that of the great majority of persons of whom I have hitherto been able to state that they came into close touch with me. Those persons were at Weimar in the way I have described in the preceding chapter. The interests of this circle reached outward from Weimar, and so it came about that at the time when my Weimar work was ended and I had to think about leaving the city of Goethe, I had formed the friendship of persons for whom the life in Weimar was not especially characteristic. In a certain sense one “lived oneself” out of Weimar while among these friends. Ansorge, who felt that Weimar put fetters upon his artistic development, moved at nearly the same time as I did to Berlin. Paul Böhler, although editor of the most widely read paper in Weimar, did not write in the contemporary “spirit of Weimar,” but expressed many a sharp criticism, drawn from a broader range of view, against that spirit. It was he who always raised his voice when dealing with this theme to place in the true light what was born of opportunism and littleness of soul. And in this way it happened that, just at the time when he was a member of this circle, he lost his place. Von Crompton was the most lovable personality one could imagine. In his house the circle passed the most delightful hours. Frau von Crompton was there the central figure, a richly spiritual and gracious personality like sunlight to those who were privileged to be about her. The whole group stood, so to speak, in the sign of Nietzsche. They looked upon Nietzsche's view as possessing greater interest than all others; they surrendered themselves to that mood of soul which manifested itself in Nietzsche, considering it as representing in a certain way the flowering of a genuine and free humanity. In both these aspects von Crompton especially was a representative of the Nietzsche followers in the 'nineties. My own attitude toward Nietzsche did not change at all within this circle. But the fact that I was the one who was questioned when any one wished to know something about Nietzsche brought it about that the relation in which the others stood to Nietzsche was assumed to be my own relation also. But I must say that this circle looked up in a more understanding fashion to that which Nietzsche believed that he knew, and that they sought to express in their lives what lay in the Nietzsche ideals of life with greater understanding than was present in many other cases where Superman and Beyond Good and Evil did not always bring forth the most satisfying blossoms. For me the circle was important because of a strong and vital energy that bore one along with it. On the other hand, however, I found there the most responsive understanding for everything which I thought it possible to introduce into this circle. The evenings, made brilliant by Ansorge's musical compositions, its hours filled with interesting talk about Nietzsche in which all shared, when far-reaching and weighty questions concerning the world and life formed, so to speak, a satisfying converse, – these evenings were, indeed, something to which I can look back with contentment as having given a beautiful character to the last part of my stay at Weimar. Since everything which had a living expression in this circle was derived from a direct and serious artistic experience and sought to permeate itself with a world-conception which held to the true human being as its central point, one could not cherish any sense of dissatisfaction if there was manifested something opposed to the Weimar of that time. The tone was different from that which I had experienced previously in the Olden circle. There much irony found expression; one looked upon Weimar also as “human, all too human” as one would have seen other places if one had been in these. In the Ansorge-Crompton circle there was present rather --I mean to say – the earnest feeling: “How can the evolution of German culture progress further if a place like Weimar does so little to fulfil its foreordained tasks?” Against the background of this social intercourse my book Goethe's World-Conception came into being, with which I ended my work at Weimar. Some time ago, when I was preparing a new edition of this book, I sensed in the way in which I then shaped my thoughts for the volume an echo of the inner nature of the friendly gatherings of the circle I have here described. In this book there is somewhat more of the personal than would have been the case had there not re-vibrated in my mind while I was writing it what had over and over resounded in this circle with strong and avowed enthusiasm about the “nature of Personality.” It is the only one of my books of which I would say just this. All of them I can assert to have been personally experienced in the truest sense of the word; not, however, in this way, when one's own personality so strongly enters into the experiences of the personalities about one. But this concerns only the general bearing of the book. The philosophy of Goethe, as revealed in relation to the realm of nature, is there set forth as this had already been done in my Goethe writings of the 'eighties. Only in regard to details my views had been broadened, deepened, or confirmed by manuscripts first discovered among the Goethe archives. In everything which I have published in connection with Goethe the thing that I have striven to do has been to set Goethe's “world-conception” before the world in its content and its tendency. From this was to appear, as a result, how that in Goethe which is comprehensive and spiritually penetrating into the thing leads to detailed discoveries in the most varied fields of nature. I was not concerned to point out these single discoveries as such, but to show that they were the flowers of the plant of a spiritual view of nature. To characterize this view of nature as a part of what Goethe gave to the world – such was my purpose in writing descriptions of this portion of Goethe's work as a thinker and researcher. But I aimed at the same objective in arranging Goethe's papers in the two editions in which I collaborated, that in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur and, also the Weimar Sophie edition. I never considered it a task which could fall to my lot because of the entire work of Goethe to bring to light what Goethe had achieved as botanist, zoologist, geologist, colour-theorist, in the manner in which one passes judgment upon such an achievement before the forum of competent scientists. Moreover, it seemed to me inappropriate to do anything in this direction while arranging the papers for the two editions. So that part also of the writings of Goethe which I edited for the Weimar edition became nothing more than a document for the world-conception of Goethe as revealed in his researches in nature. How this world-conception cast its special light upon things botanical, geological, etc., this must be brought to the fore. It has been felt, for instance, that I ought to have arranged the geological-mineralogical writings differently in order that “Goethe's relationship to geology” might be seen from the contents of these. But it is only necessary to read what I said about the arrangement of the writings of Goethe in this field in the introductions to my publications in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur, and there could be no doubt that I would never have agreed to the point of view urged by my critics. In Weimar this could have been known when the editing was entrusted to me. For in the Kürschner edition everything had already appeared which had become fixed in my point of view before the idea had ever arisen of entrusting to me a task in Weimar. The task was entrusted to me with full knowledge of this circumstance. I will by no means deny that what I have done in many single details in working up the Weimar edition may be pointed out as “errors” by specialists. This may be rightly maintained. But the thing ought not to be so presented as if the nature of the edition rested upon my competence or lack of competence, and not upon my fundamental postulates. Especially should this not be done by those who admit that they possess no organ for perceiving what I have maintained in regard to Goethe. When the question concerns individual errors of fact here and there, I might point out to those who criticize me in this respect many much worse errors in the papers I wrote as a student in the Higher Technical Institute. I have made it very clear in this account of the course of my life that, even in childhood, I lived in the spiritual world as in that which was self-evident to me, but that I had to strive earnestly for everything which pertained to a knowledge of the outer world. For this reason I am a man slow in development as to all the aspects of the physical world. The results of this fact appear in details of my Goethe editions. |
GA 300c. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner II — Fifty-Seventh Meeting |
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They should also read from Wilhelm Müller, Novalis, Immermann, Eichendorff, Uhland, including some small examples from Herzog Ernst, then Lenau, Gustav Schwab, Justinus Kerner, Geibel, Greif, Heine, but only his decent things, Hebbel, a little of Otto Ludwig, and Mörike. That is approximately what they need. Also, Kleist and Hölderlin. I would advise some of the other things in the curriculum for other classes, namely, Lessing, Herder, and Klopstock. |
GA 300c. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner II — Fifty-Seventh Meeting |
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Dr. Steiner: First, I would like to return to the situation in the 9b class. Although I already spoke about this, I want to return to it because that situation has some principle significance. First, I would like to say that the discussion with the boys occurred, and I would like to hear what consequences it has had in their behavior. The discussion also showed that something we could expect at this age is present in the boys, namely very strongly developed intellectual forces. These intellectual forces become apparent at puberty. Particularly with boys, this often arises as a certain subconscious desire to exercise their intellectual strength. It is natural that, when left to themselves, boys see rowdy behavior as the only possibility of expressing those intellectual forces. If we do not want them to do that, we must direct them toward other things. Intelligence is simply bursting out of those five boys, though to the least extent with K.F., and it demands to be freed. At that age, pedagogical activity needs to take a different direction, as I have mentioned in some lectures. The boys must learn to take interest in something that will use their intellect. Otherwise, it remains unused and will live itself out in such things as we have experienced. The main thing is that we work with the boys during the course of instruction so they can exercise their intellect in a way that brings it into a kind of tension and then finds resolution. That is something you can weave into every lecture. You can pose questions that lead to a kind of tension and then allow the students to experience the resolution. Particularly at this age, simply listening has an unfavorable effect. There is no doubt that in the 9b class, you have counted too much upon their simply listening, at least at times. As soon as the boys are occupied, they become well behaved. If they have to just listen, that changes because their intellect, their inner strengths, stagnate. It would be good if you recognized that their behavior was not the result of disrespect, but arose from a genuinely appropriate human standpoint, and that they denied nothing. You should also be aware that they did not try to gloss over anything. They were quite convinced that they had done quite useless things and that they really should not have done them. They showed an honorable human perspective when they described how T.L. made himself into their spokesman in a most natural way. He began by stating that he actually had no right to speak about the situation since he was the one who had most misbehaved. But, since things had gone so far, he wanted to speak. He spoke very reasonably. They are really very good boys, including F.R. In regard to their understanding of themselves, many adults could learn something from them. They do not embellish things. They recognized that it was very wrong to write on the bathroom doors. Something goaded them on. All the other bathrooms were smeared, and that one was still clean. They did not see why they should not decorate that one, too. When such thoughts arise out of latent intelligence, then that intelligence forces them to smear over blank surfaces so that they are like the others. In that case, a certain attitude has taken over, which we cannot say arises out of boredom. They said that the school administration signed other documents, so when they wrote something, they thought it should also be signed by the administration. In all these things, we can see that they acted with a great deal of style. The boys were as though possessed, and now they are all very sorry about it. All these things are moods we need to look into, but we need to have some humor; otherwise the boys will get us down. The boys see the actual cause of the problem in the statement by the 9a class teacher that the 9b class was worthless. They said that if he came into their class, which he knows nothing about, he would learn what it is like. That is quite intelligent. They are filled with a kind of feeling for truth. The boys are not dumb. If we can guide their intelligence in the proper direction, they may, without doubt, be able to achieve a great deal. They are really wonderful boys. I have to say that if you judge them too harshly, then, in my opinion, you have forgotten your own youth some fifteen years ago. Things are different, but if you can remember, some of you will certainly have been there. The main difference is that some years ago, boys did such things more secretively, but now they are more open. To me, the important thing is that we can expect no improvement if we do not succeed in getting the boys to use their intelligence in class. The situation is such that we must find a way to use their intelligence in our teaching, otherwise it will remain unoccupied and they will use it for getting into trouble. I asked F.R. how it was that he came to place the discussion between Raphael and Grünewald in the Marquardt Hotel in his essay. He said he knew nothing about Raphael or Grünewald, so he wrote it that way. T.L. then added that he had written something reasonable later. I said they should let me see something they had written on the walls, but they said they could not say such things to a polite person. They are ashamed and trying to behave. I would now like to hear what has happened since then. They promised me they would behave as proper young men with the teacher and would be polite to the girls. A report is given about what occurred in the class since then. Dr. Steiner: We cannot give the children riddles. I tried that with the anthroposophists in Dornach. You need to use their intelligence as you teach. A great deal is needed to direct your teaching toward the thinking of children at that age and then to maintain that. In the humanities, there is a danger of teaching unprepared. That is, you are in danger of leaving the material as you know it now, as you learned it yourself. You need to rework it. That is one problem. The other problem is that you are often too anthroposophical, like Mr. X. Yesterday, I was sitting on pins and needles worrying that the visitors would think the history class was too religious. We should not allow the history class to be too religiously oriented. That is why we have a religion class. The visitors seem to have been very well-meaning people. Nevertheless, had they noticed that, they could easily have categorized the Waldorf School as being too anthroposophical and of bringing that into the classroom. I came into one class, eurythmy, and it was immediately obvious not only that the students were well behaved, but that they had behaved well before I arrived. We could present such an exemplary class as the 9a eurythmy class to the entire world. You could quite clearly see the class had been well behaved before I came in. You can easily see if a class begins to behave well only when you step into the room. That was a very exemplary class. Concerning the 8a and 8b classes, I could not see that they were such terribly clever misbehaved children. Initially, you will have to reach B.B. in the only way you can reach him, through his intellect. You cannot reach him through commands. On the other hand, if you make it clear to him that what he wants to do is nonsense, he will do what you ask of him. You could explain things to him as I recently did. He had written in his notebook with a pencil. There is no sense in telling someone with his temperament that he may not write with a pencil. If you do so, you can be certain that things will get worse. I told him he had smeared over everything, and that it looks horrible. I had barely turned around before he picked up his feather, prepared it, and then began to write in ink. Everything depends upon the way you present it. You need to meet the boy with what he understands and does not understand. He is a troubled boy. Sometimes it will occur to him to make a face, but he is a very well intentioned boy. You need to teach him that his faces do not look good. At the proper time, you need to teach him that he looks ugly when he does that. That is something you need to take into account at this age. They no longer accept commands. The power of authority quickly diminishes just when you have become strongly oriented in that direction. Then you encounter opposition. You need to be observant there. I would recommend that you read the four lectures I gave about adolescents. Read them and you will find all kinds of ways you can avoid that. I hope we can move beyond it. A teacher gives a detailed report about a visit Dr. Steiner and three teachers made to the Ministry of Education and about what they learned regarding the requirements in the various subjects of the final examination. Dr. Steiner: They are also tested in freehand drawing. Mr. Wolffhügel should take that up in the twelfth grade. I told the men that after we have sufficiently developed our curriculum, I would attempt to develop the teaching of freehand drawing using Dürer’s Melancholia as a basis. It contains all possible shades of light and dark, and it can also be transformed into color. If the children really understand that picture, they should be able to do everything. In order to find something out, I asked whether, aside from the condition that the student must be eighteen years old, a student who had studied completely privately, who had never gone to school, would be allowed to take the examination. I was told that such a student would be admitted. From that, he admitted that we are not required to obtain official certification from the school board. I asked this question to see if there was some possibility that people could force us to come under the control of the School Review Board. Aside from some of the things that have occurred, the Education Law in Württemberg is one of the most liberal. No other place in Germany or Switzerland has such a liberal education law. Nevertheless, things could change for the twelfth grade. Now that we know the students will be tested only on the material from the twelfth grade, I think it would be advisable to complete everything else and then begin on what the people there want. We need to do a little more to complete chemistry and then go on to more of what is required in the final examination. We have done little in geology and the children learn about geological formations only very slowly. Before the holidays, we should at least awaken a little geological thinking, so they know what geological formations are, what kinds of stone and fossils they contain. We could give an overview before the holidays so that the students could learn the details afterward. We need to limit some things. Technology and eurythmy will end in February, as will religious instruction. You could give some work to X. (a newly hired teacher). I have hired X. so that he will find support within the faculty. If he wastes his time, I will hold you responsible for it. He is so talented that you could give him work; he can do it if he wants to. The whole faculty is responsible for looking after him. For the time being, you need to try to finish chemistry. Before the holidays, give the students an overview about geology up to the Ice Age. Afterward, we will have to teach them about alcohol, the nature of alcohol, concepts about ethers, the nature of essential oils, then the nature of organic poisons, alkaloids, and some idea about cyanide compounds in contrast to organic compounds. They need to understand qualitative relationships. They can understand all of it from that perspective. When speaking about geology, I recommend you go backward, beginning with the present, the alluvial period to the diluvial. Then discuss the Ice Age. Use the change in the axis of the Earth to give them an idea of the relationship of such events as the Ice Age to things outside the tellurian, without tying them to specific hypotheses. From there you can go back to the Tertiary period. Explain when the second and first realms of mammals arose. When you get back to the carbon period, you can simply teach the change. It would be better if you made the transition in the following way. In the later formations, we have the minerals precipitated out and the vegetable and animal fossilized. Now we are back in the Carboniferous period. What could be fossilized of animals does not exist. We only find fossilized vegetable material. The Carboniferous period is all plant. There is no differentiation, as nothing more than plant material exists. We can go still further back where we find things completely undifferentiated. Tell them in that way. Perhaps you could give a lecture of mine. I once explained geology to the workers in a living way. I told them everything about geology in two hours. Those two lectures were certainly important. You could find them and work in the same way. Earlier forms were only etheric. We should imagine the Carboniferous period such that we recognize that the individualization of plants was not nearly so strong as people imagine. Today, people think there were ferns, but actually what petrified was a much more undifferentiated soup. The etheric was continuously active in that soup, resulting in secretions that precipitated and held the organic mass in a nascent state, which then petrified. I would like to take this opportunity to give you, with some reservations, the divisions that can serve as a theme. Though there are some limitations, you could treat the entirety of zoology by dividing the animals into three groups with four divisions each, resulting in twelve classes or types of animals.
In discussing the zodiac, you should begin with the mammals, represented by Leo; then birds, Virgo; reptiles, Libra; amphibians, Scorpio; fish, Sagittarius; articulates, Capricorn; worms, Aquarius. Then continue on the other side, where you have the protists, Cancer; corals, Gemini; echinoderms, Taurus; ascidians, Aries; mollusks, Pisces. You should realize that the zodiac arose at a time when the names and classifications were very different. In the Hebrew language, there is no word for fish, so it is quite reasonable that you would not find fish mentioned in the story of creation. They were seen as birds that lived in water. Thus, the zodiac is divided in this way, into seven and five parts for day and night. There is also something in that which corresponds to the threefolding of the human being. The first group are the animals related to the head, namely, the protists, sponges, echinoderms, and ascidians. The second group are the rhythmic animals, the mollusks, worms, articulates, and fish — that is, the middle part of the human being and the head. The third group are the animals of the limbs, so you can see how each aspect is added. Thus, we have the limbs, the rhythmic system, and the head. These all tend toward a threefolding, but are not yet complete. If you look at it from the perspective of the human being, the head corresponds to the first group, the human rhythmic system to the second group, and the human limbs to the third group. From a geological perspective, things begin with the head. You need to follow geological formations through the twelve stages. You should begin with the first group, go on to the second, and then to the third. You need to complete that with geological formations. The infusoria go back to the beginning and are the first group. The forms of that first group that still exist are degenerated forms of the etheric forms from very early times. The forms of the second group are half degenerated. Actually, only their antecedent nondegenerated forms belong to that. Only in the third group do we find really primary forms not yet degenerated, which therefore form the basis for teaching about formations. When teaching animal geography, you need to consider the zodiac in connection with what I have just said, that is, look at the projection of the zodiac upon the Earth. You will then find the areas of the animal groups on the Earth. You have some globes where the zodiac is drawn upon the Earth. They will provide you with what you need. We can actually not speak about volcanic formations, only volcanic activity that goes through geological formations. We should also try to bring the plants into twelve groups. I will do that later. A teacher makes a comment. Dr. Steiner: You have already read nineteenth-century German literature. You should, of course, try to give the students some examples. You could read Tieck’s Phantasus and some small pieces from Zacharias Werner. They should also read from Wilhelm Müller, Novalis, Immermann, Eichendorff, Uhland, including some small examples from Herzog Ernst, then Lenau, Gustav Schwab, Justinus Kerner, Geibel, Greif, Heine, but only his decent things, Hebbel, a little of Otto Ludwig, and Mörike. That is approximately what they need. Also, Kleist and Hölderlin. I would advise some of the other things in the curriculum for other classes, namely, Lessing, Herder, and Klopstock. Logau was good — better sayings were never written. He makes up wonderful sayings. Then, also, Gottfried Keller and Grillparzer. From the poets that I mentioned, use only lyric examples. The students need to read something from Keller, but tell them Der grünen Heinrich (Green Henry). Read Richard Wagner also. [That was all given as preparation for the final examination.] Dr. Steiner: I wanted to discuss the zoological division and the curriculum. What remains to discuss? A teacher: What should we tell students about the examination? Dr. Steiner: You need to tell them only that we are completely informed about it. There is a basic inner rule of pedagogy that those being taught should never know or discuss the secrets of education. That has become a problem here and must be eliminated as quickly as possible. It cannot continue. The perspective which has slowly arisen that no differences of age are taken into account has led to the children’s thinking about how they are taught and the methods used. We could tell them the following: You need to be eighteen years old, and you need a report from us. We could go on to say that we know what is needed, and that if they study industriously, they will pass the examination. What more can we do? We can say only external things. It is not good for the children to become accustomed to having conferences with us. They should feel that the teachers will do what is right. They are afraid they will miss a number of interesting things. A number of classes were cancelled because of the heat. Dr. Steiner: Those are natural events. Winter will certainly be cold again. (Speaking to an eighth-grade teacher) The children should know that when you are occupied with one or two, others may still be questioned. The children should be interested in the others in the class. Basically, when it is not a question of helping with an arithmetic problem, but is some instruction that can be heard by the others, it should be interesting not only to one individual, but to everyone. They should expect to be called upon at any time. You should do it in such a way that you continue with one of the others who has been inattentive. Then, they will get the feeling that they may be required to continue with the reading at any time. When you ask about material previously covered, you must do it in a different way. You must ask the questions so that the children can answer. In time, you will learn how to do that in practice, but you will need to be lively in your manner. You should skip from one student to the other so that the children notice that you are skipping around. You now have a contact with the students that a few years ago you did not have at all. On the other hand, I think you too often “show them how.” Many classes are terribly restless because they are always being shown how to do something. That should be limited. You can do that by calling more often upon specific students who are able to respond. One thing is troubling me, and that is the question of how to solve the problem of painting in the notebooks. The children should paint only on stretched paper. We cannot afford painting boards because they are too expensive. We could just use smooth boards. Wouldn’t it be possible in the shop class to make smooth boards for stretching the paper? It is not good to have the children paint in their regular notebooks. When they begin painting, they should also stretch their paper. Ch.O. has a dangerous condition. He is clearly malnourished, and he will soon have a blood problem. When you go through these classes and look at the children, it is terrible. We need to determine which children are right on the edge. The real problem is not how much they eat, but that they digest it properly. There are also a number of troubled children we need to give some attention to. St.B. in the first grade sees astral flies. He needs to be treated with something. His whole astral body is in disarray. There is a strong asymmetry of the astral body in all directions. Try to have him do some curative eurythmy exercises where he has his hands behind his back. Have him do exercises we normally do toward the front, but have him do them toward the back. |
GA 52. Spiritual Teachings Concerning the Soul — Epistemological Foundation of Theosophy I |
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But it has been necessary to look around, maybe just in our time, at Kant, Locke, Schopenhauer or at other writers of the present, we say at Eduard von Hartmann and his disciple Arthur Drews, or the brilliant theorist of knowledge Volkelt or Otto Liebmann, or at the somewhat journalistic, but not less strictly rational Eucken. Who has looked around there who has familiarised himself with this or that of the shadings which the philosophical-scientific views of the present and the latest past took on understands and conceives — this is my innermost conviction — that a real, true understanding of this philosophical development does not lead away from theosophy, but to theosophy. |
GA 52. Spiritual Teachings Concerning the Soul — Epistemological Foundation of Theosophy I |
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It will be nothing strange to many among you that one can find if the word theosophy is pronounced nothing else than a smile with many of our contemporaries. Also it is not unknown to many that just those who demand scholarship or, we say, philosophical education in the present look at theosophy as something that one must call a dilettantish activity, a fantastic belief. One can find in particular in the circles of scholars that the theosophist is regarded as a type of fantastic dreamer who bears witness to his peculiar image worlds because he has never made the acquaintance with the bases of knowledge. You find particularly in the circles which consider themselves as the scientific ones that they presuppose easily that the theosophist is basically without any philosophical education, and even if he has also acquired it or speaks of it, it is a dilettantish, a picked up matter. These talks should not deal with theosophy directly. There are enough others. It should be a discussion with the western philosophical education, a discussion how the scientific world behaves to theosophy, and how it could behave, actually. They should disprove the prejudice, as if the theosophist is an uneducated, dilettantish person with regard to science. Who has not heard often enough that philosophers of the most different schools — and there are enough philosopher schools — state that mysticism is an unclear view filled with all kinds of allegories and feeling elements, and that theosophy has not achieved a strictly methodical thinking? If it did this, it would see that it walks on nebulous ways. It would see that mysticism could root only in the heads of eccentric people. This is a well-known prejudice. However, I do not want to begin with a reprimand. Not because it would not correspond to the theosophical conviction, but because I do not consider theosophy as anything dilettantish from my own philosophical education and speak, nevertheless, out of the depths of its conviction. I can understand absolutely that somebody who has taken up the western philosophy in himself and has the whole scientific equipment has it hard to see something else in theosophy than what is just known. For somebody who comes today from philosophy and science it is much more difficult really to familiarise himself with theosophy, than for that who approaches theosophy with a naive human mind, with a natural, maybe religious feeling and with a need to solve certain riddles of life. Because this western philosophy puts so many obstacles to its students, offers them so many judgments which seem to be contradictory to theosophy that it makes it apparently impossible to get involved with theosophy. Indeed, it is true that the theosophical literature shows little of that which resembles a discussion with our contemporary science and which one could call philosophical. Therefore, I have resolved to hold a series of talks on it. They should be an epistemological basis of theosophy. You will get to know the concepts of the contemporary philosophy and its contents. If you look at this in a real, true and deep sense, you see — but you must really wait till the end — the basis of the theosophical knowledge following from this western philosophy. This should not happen juggling with expert dialectic concepts, but it should happen, as far as I am able to do it in some talks, with any equipment which the knowledge of our contemporaries provides us; it should happen with everything available to give something that can be experienced of a higher world view also to those who do not want to know it. What I have to explain would not have been possible in another age to explain in the same way. But it has been necessary to look around, maybe just in our time, at Kant, Locke, Schopenhauer or at other writers of the present, we say at Eduard von Hartmann and his disciple Arthur Drews, or the brilliant theorist of knowledge Volkelt or Otto Liebmann, or at the somewhat journalistic, but not less strictly rational Eucken. Who has looked around there who has familiarised himself with this or that of the shadings which the philosophical-scientific views of the present and the latest past took on understands and conceives — this is my innermost conviction — that a real, true understanding of this philosophical development does not lead away from theosophy, but to theosophy. Just somebody who has argued thoroughly with the philosophical doctrines has to come to theosophy. I would not need to deliver this speech unless the whole thinking of our time were influenced just by a philosopher. One says that the great mental achievement of Immanuel Kant gave philosophy a scientific basis. One says that what he performed to the definition of the knowledge problem is something steadfast. You hear that anybody who has not tackled Kant has no right to have a say in philosophy. You may examine the different currents: Herbart, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, from Schopenhauer up to Eduard von Hartmann — in all these lines of thought only somebody can find the way who orientates himself to Kant. After different matters were striven for in the philosophy of the 19th century, the calling resounds from Zeller in the middle of the seventies, from Liebmann, then from Friedrich Albert Lange: back to Kant! — The lecturers of philosophy are of the opinion that everybody has to orientate himself to Kant, and only somebody who does this can have a say in philosophy. Kant dominated the philosophy of the 19th century and of the present. However, he caused something else than he himself wanted. He expressed it with the words: he believes to have accomplished a similar action like Copernicus. Copernicus turned around the whole astronomical world view. He removed the earth from the centre and made another body, the sun, to the centre which was once imagined to be movable. However, Kant makes the human being with his cognitive faculties the centre of the physical world view. He really turns around the whole physical world view. It is the opinion of most philosophers of the 19th century that one has to turn around. You can understand this philosophy only if you understand it from its preconditions. One can understand what has flowed from Kant’s philosophy only if one understands it from its bases. Who understands how Kant came to his conviction that we can never recognise the things “by themselves,” because all things we recognise are only phenomena who understands this can also understand the development of the philosophy of the 19th century, he also understands the objections which can be made against theosophy, and also how he has to behave to them. You know that theosophy rests on a higher experience. The theosophist says that the source of his knowledge is an experience which reaches beyond the sensory experience. You can see that it has the same validity as that of the senses that what the theosophist tells about astral worlds et cetera is as real as the things which we perceive with our senses round us as sensory experience. What the theosophist believes to have as his source of knowledge is a higher experience. If you read Leadbeater’s Astralebene (Astral Plane), you think that the things are as real in the astral world as the cabs and horses in the streets of London. It should be said how real this world is for somebody who knows them. The philosopher of the present argues immediately: yes, but you are mistaken, because you believe that this is a true reality. Has the philosophy of the 19th century not proved to you that our experience is nothing but our idea, and that also the starry heaven is nothing else than our idea in us? — He considers this as the most certain knowledge which there can only be. Eduard von Hartmann considers it as the most natural truth that this is my idea, and that one cannot know what it is also. If you believe that you can call experience “real,” then you are a naive realist. Can you decide anything generally about the value experience has facing the world in this way? This is the great result to which Kantianism has come that the world surrounding us must be our idea. How did Kant’s world view come to this? It came from the philosophy of the predecessors. At that time when Kant was still young, the philosophy of Christian Wolff had the mastery over all schools. It distinguished the so-called knowledge of experience which we acquire by the sensory impressions and that which comes from pure reason. According to him, we can get to know something of the things of the everyday life only by experience, and from pure reason we have things which are the objects of the highest knowledge. These things are the human souls, the free will of the human being, the questions which refer to immortality and to the divine being. The so-called empiric sciences deal with that which is offered in natural history, in physics, in history et cetera. How does the astronomer get his knowledge? He directs his eyes to the stars; he finds the laws which are commensurate with the observations. We learn this while opening our senses to the outside world. Nobody can say that this is drawn from mere reason. The human being knows this because he sees it. This is an empiric knowledge which we take up from life, from the experience in ourselves, not caring whether we order them in a scientific system or not; it is knowledge of experience. Nobody can describe a lion from his very reason. However, Wolff supposes that one can draw that which one is from pure reason. Wolff supposes that we have a psychology from pure reason, also that the soul must have free will that it must have reason et cetera. Hence, Wolff calls the sciences which deal with the higher capacities of the soul rational psychology. The question whether the world has a beginning and an end is a question which one should decide only from pure reason. He calls this question an object of rational cosmology. Nobody can decide on the usefulness of the world from experience; nobody can investigate it by observation. These are nothing but questions of the rational cosmology. Then there is a science of God, of a divine plan. This is a science which is also drawn from reason. This is the so-called rational theology, it belongs to metaphysics. Kant grew up in a time when philosophy was taught in this sense. You find him in his first writings as an adherent of Wolff’s philosophy. You find him convinced that there is a rational psychology, a rational theology et cetera. He gives a proof which he calls the only possible proof of the existence of God. Then he got to know a philosophical current which had a stupefying effect on him. He got to know the philosophy of David Hume. He said that it waked up him from his dogmatic slumber. — What does this philosophy offer? Hume says the following: we see that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. We have seen this many days. We also know that all people have seen sunrises and sunsets that they have experienced the same, and we get used to believing that this must take place forever. Now another example: we see that the solar heat falls on a stone. We think that it is the solar heat which warms up the stone. What do we see? We perceive solar heat first and then the warmed up stone. What do we perceive there? Only that one fact follows the other. If we experience that the sunbeams warm up the stone, then we have already formed the judgment that the solar heat is the cause that the stone becomes warm. That is why Hume says: there is nothing at all that shows us more than a sequence of facts. We get used to the belief that there a causal relationship exists. But this belief is only a habituation and everything that the human being thinks of causal concepts exists only in that experience. The human being sees a ball pushing the other, he sees that a movement takes place through it, and then he gets used to saying that lawfulness exists in it. In truth we deal with no real insight. What is the human being considered from the knowledge of pure reason? This is nothing else — Hume says — than a summary of facts. We have to connect the facts of the world. This corresponds to the human way of thinking, to the tendency of the human thinking. We have no right to go beyond this thinking. We are not allowed to say that it is something in the things which has given them lawfulness. We can only say that the things and events flow past us. But the things “in themselves” do not show such a connection. How can we speak now of the fact that something manifests itself to us in the things that goes beyond experience? How can we speak of a connection in experience that is due to a divine being, that goes beyond experience if we are not inclined to turn to anything other than to the ways of thinking? This view had the effect on Kant that it waked up him from dogmatic slumber. He asks: can there be something that goes beyond experience? Which knowledge does experience deliver to us? Does it give us sure knowledge? Of course, Kant denied this question immediately. He says: even if you have seen the sun rise hundred thousand times, you cannot infer from it that it also rises tomorrow again. It could also be different. If you inferred only from experience, it could also turn out once that experience convinces you of something different. Experience can never give sure, necessary knowledge. I know from experience that the sun warms up the stone. However, I am not allowed to state that it has to warm up it. If all our knowledge comes from experience, it can never exceed the condition of uncertainty; then there can be no necessary empiric knowledge. Now Kant tries to find out this matter. He looks for a way out. He had made himself used through his whole youth to believe in knowledge. He could be convinced by Hume’s philosophy that there is nothing sure. Is anywhere anything where one can speak of sure, necessary knowledge? However — he says — there are sure judgments. These are the mathematical judgments. Is the mathematical judgment similar to the judgment: in the morning the sun rises and sets in the evening? I have the judgment that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. If I have given the proof with one single triangle, it suffices for all triangles. I see from the nature of the proof that it applies to all possible cases. This is the peculiar of mathematical proofs. For everybody it is clear that these must also apply to the inhabitants of Jupiter and Mars if they generally have triangles that also there the sum of the angles of a triangle must be 180 degrees. And then: never can be two times two anything else than four. This is always true. Hence, we have a proof that there is knowledge which is absolutely sure. The question cannot be: do we have such knowledge? But we must think about the possibility of such judgments. Now there comes the big question of Kant: how are such absolutely necessary judgments possible? How is mathematical knowledge possible? — Kant now calls those judgments and knowledge which are drawn from experience judgments and knowledge a posteriori. The judgment: the sum of angles of a triangle is 180 degrees; however, is a judgment which precedes all experience, a judgment a priori. I can simply imagine a triangle and give the proof, and if I see a triangle which I have not yet experienced, I can say that it must have a sum of angles of 180 degrees. Any higher knowledge depends on it that I can make judgments from pure reason. How are such judgments a priori possible? We have seen that such a judgment: the sum of angles of a triangle is equal 180 degrees, applies to any triangles. Experience has to submit to my judgment. If I draw an ellipse and look out into space, I find that a planet describes such an ellipse. The planet follows my judgment formed in pure knowledge. I approach the experience with my purely in the ideal formed judgment. Have I drawn this judgment from experience? — Kant continues asking. There is no doubt, forming such purely ideal judgments, that we have, actually, no reality of experience. The ellipse, the triangle — they have no reality of experience, but reality submits to such knowledge. If I want to have true reality, I must approach experience. If, however, I know which laws work in it, then I have knowledge before all experience. The law of the ellipse does not come from experience. I myself build it in my mind. Thus a passage begins with Kant with the sentence: “Even if all our knowledge starts from experience, nevertheless, not everything does arise from experience.” I put what I have as knowledge into experience. The human mind is made in such a way that everything of its experience corresponds only to the laws which it has. The human mind is made in such a way that it must develop these laws inevitably. If it moves up to experience, then experience has to submit to these laws. An example: Imagine that you wear blue glasses. You see everything in blue light; the objects appear to you in blue light. However the things outdoors may be made, this concerns me nothing at all provisionally. At the moment when the laws which my mind develops spread out over the whole world of experience the whole world of experience must fit into it. It is not right that the judgment: two times two is four is taken from experience. It is the condition of my mind that two times two must give always four. My mind is in such a way that the three angles of a triangle are always 180 degrees. Thus Kant justifies the laws out of the human being himself. The sun warms up the stone. Every effect has a cause. This is a law of the mind. If the world is a chaos, I push the lawfulness of my mind toward it. I conceive the world like a string of pearls. I am that who makes the world a knowledge mechanism. — You also see how Kant was induced to find such a particular method of knowledge. As long as the human mind is organised in such a way as it is organised as long everything must submit to this organisation, even if reality changes overnight. For me it could not change if the laws of my mind are the same. The world may be as it wants; we recognise it in such a way as it must appear to us according to the laws of our mind. Now you see which sense it has, if one says: Kant turned the whole theory of knowledge, the whole epistemology. One assumed before that the human being reads everything from nature. Now, however, he lets the human mind give the laws to nature. He lets everything circle around the human mind like Copernicus let the earth circle around the sun. Then, however, there is something else that shows that the human being can never go beyond experience. Indeed, it appears as a contradiction, but you will see that it corresponds to Kant’s philosophy. Kant shows that the concepts are empty. Two times two is four is an empty judgment if not peas or beans are filled into it. Any effect has a cause — is a purely formal judgment if it is not filled with particular contents of experience. The judgments are formed before in me to be applied to the observation of the world. “Observations without concepts are blind — concepts without observations are empty.” We can think millions of ellipses; they correspond to no reality if we do not see them in the planetary motion. We have to verify everything by experience. We can gain judgments a priori, but we are allowed to apply them only if they correspond to experience. God, freedom and immortality are matters about which we can ponder ever so long about which we can get knowledge by no experience. Therefore, it is in vain to find out anything with our reason. The concepts a priori are only valid as far as our experience reaches. Indeed we have a science a priori which only says to us how experience has to be until experience is there. We can catch as it were experience like in a web, but we cannot find out how the law of experience has to be. About the “thing-in-itself” we know nothing, and because God, freedom and immortality must have their origin in the “thing-in-itself,” we can find out nothing about them. We see the things not as they are, but in such a way as we must see them according to our organisation. With it Kant founded the critical idealism and overcame the naive realism. What submits to causality is not the “thing-in-itself.” What submits to my eye or my ear has to make an impression on my eye, on my ear at first. This is the perception, the sensations. These are the effects of any “thing-in-itself,” of things which are absolutely unknown to me. These produce a lot of effects, and I order them in a lawful world. I form an organism of sensations. But I cannot know what is behind them. It is nothing else than the lawfulness which my mind has put into the sensations. What is behind the sensation, I can know nothing about it. Hence, the world which surrounds me is only subjective. It is only that which I myself build up. The development of physiology in the 19th century agreed apparently completely with Kant. Take the important knowledge of the great physiologist Johannes Müller. He has put up the law of the specific nerve energy. It consists in the fact that any organ answers in its way. If you let light into the eye, you have a beam of light; if you bump against the eye, you will likewise have a light sensation. Müller concludes that it does not depend on the things outside, but on my eye what I perceive. The eye answers to a process unknown to me with the colour quality, we say: blue. Blue is nowhere outdoors in space. A process has an effect on us, and it produces the sensation “blue.” What you believe that it stands before you, is nothing else than the effect of some unknown processes on a sense. The whole physiology of the 19th century confirmed this law of the specific nerve energy apparently. Kant’s idea seems to be thereby supported. One can call this world view illusionism in the full sense of the word. Nobody knows anything about what has an effect outside, what produces his sensations. From himself he spins his whole world of experience and builds up it according to the laws of his mind. Nothing else can approach him, as long as his organisation is made in such a way as it is. This is Kant’s doctrine motivated by physiology. Kant calls it critical idealism. This is also that which Schopenhauer develops in his philosophy: people believe that the whole starry heaven and the sun surround them. However, this is only your own mental picture. You create the whole world. — And Eduard von Hartmann says: This is the most certain truth which there can be. No power would be able one day to shake this sentence. — Thus the western philosophy says. It has never pondered how experience basically comes about. Somebody is only able to stick to realism who knows how experiences come about and then he comes to the true critical idealism. The view of Kant is the transcendental idealism, that is he knows nothing about a true reality, nothing of a “thing-in-itself,” but only of an image world. He says basically: I must refer my image world to something unknown. — This view should be regarded as something steadfast. Is this transcendental idealism really steadfast? Is the “thing-in-itself” unrecognisable? — If this held true, then could not be spoken of a higher experience at all. If the “thing-in-itself” were only an illusion, we could not speak of any higher beings. Hence, this is also an objection which is raised against theosophy: you have higher beings of which you speak. We see next time how these views must be deepened. |
GA 52. Spiritual Teachings Concerning the Soul — Epistemological Foundation of Theosophy II |
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Our modern philosophy is based on Kantianism. It has taken on different forms, those from Herbart and Schopenhauer to Otto Liebmann and Johannes Volkelt and Friedrich Albert Lange. We find more or less Kantian coloured epistemology everywhere according to which we deal only with phenomena, with our subjective world of perception, so that we cannot penetrate to the being, to the root of the “thing-in-itself.” |
GA 52. Spiritual Teachings Concerning the Soul — Epistemological Foundation of Theosophy II |
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With the remark that the present, in particular the German philosophy and its epistemology makes it difficult to its supporters to find access to the theosophical world view I have started these talks before eight days, and I added that I try to outline this theory of knowledge, this present philosophical world view and to show how somebody with an absolutely serious conscience in this direction finds it hard to be a theosophist. On the whole, the theories of knowledge which developed from Kantianism are excellent and absolutely correct. However, one cannot understand from their point of view how the human being can find out anything about beings, generally about real beings which are different from him. The consideration of Kantianism has shown us that this view comes to the result in the end that everything that we have round ourselves is appearance, is only our mental picture. What we have round ourselves is no reality, but it is controlled by the laws which we ourselves prescribe to our surroundings. I said: as we must see with coloured glasses the whole world in this colour nuance, in the same way the human being must see the world — after Kant’s view — coloured as he sees them according to his organisation no matter how it may be in the external reality. That is why we are not allowed to speak of a “thing-in-itself,” but only of the quite subjective world of appearance. If this is the case, everything that surrounds me — the table, the chairs et cetera, is an image of my mind; because they all are there for me only, in so far as I perceive them, in so far as I give form to these perceptions according to the law of my own mind, prescribe the laws to them. I cannot state whether still anything exists except for my perception of the table and the chairs. This is basically the result of Kant’s philosophy in the end. This is not compatible, of course, with the fact that we can penetrate into the true nature of the things. Theosophy is inseparable from the view that we can penetrate not only into the physical existence of the things, but also into the spiritual of the things; that we have knowledge not only of that which surrounds us physically, but that we can also have experiences of that which is purely spiritual. I want to show you how a vigorous book of the world view which is called “theosophy” today represents that which became Kantianism later. I read up a passage of the book that was written a short time before Kantianism was founded. It appeared in 1766. It is a book which — we can say it absolutely that way — could be written by a theosophist. The view is represented in it that the human being has not only a relationship to the physical world surrounding him, but that it would be proved scientifically one day that the human being belongs also to a spiritual world, and that also the way of being together with it could be scientifically proved. Something is well demonstrated that one could assume that it is proved more or less or that it is proved in future: “I do not know where or when that the human soul is in relation to others that they have effect on each other and receive impressions from each other. The human being is not aware of that, however, as long as everything is good.” Then another passage: “Indeed, it does not matter whichever ideas of the other world we have, and, hence, any thinking about spirit does not penetrate to a state of spirit at all ...” and so on. The human being with his average mental capacity cannot realise the spirit; but it is said that one can assume such a common life with a spiritual world. With such a view Kant’s epistemology is not compatible. He who wrote the foundation of this view is Immanuel Kant himself. That means that we have to register a reversal in Kant himself. Because he writes this in 1766, and fourteen years later he founds that theory of knowledge which makes it impossible to find the way to theosophy. Our modern philosophy is based on Kantianism. It has taken on different forms, those from Herbart and Schopenhauer to Otto Liebmann and Johannes Volkelt and Friedrich Albert Lange. We find more or less Kantian coloured epistemology everywhere according to which we deal only with phenomena, with our subjective world of perception, so that we cannot penetrate to the being, to the root of the “thing-in-itself.” At first I would like to bring forward to you everything that developed in the course of the 19th century, and what we can call the modified epistemology of Kant. I would like to demonstrate how the current epistemology developed which looks with a certain arrogance at somebody who believes that one can know something. I want to show how somebody forms a basic epistemological view whose kind of view is based on Kant. Everything that science has brought seems to verify the Kantian epistemology. It seems to be so firm that one cannot escape from it. Today we want to roll up it and next time we want to see how one can find the way with it. First of all physics seems to teach us everywhere that that is no reality the naive human being believes that it is reality. Let us take the tone. You know that the oscillation of the air is there outside our organ, outside our ear which hears the tone. What takes place outside us is an oscillation of the air particles. Only because this oscillation comes to our ear and sets the eardrum swinging the movement continues to the brain. There we perceive what we call tone and sound. The whole world would be silent and toneless; only because the external movement of our ear is taken up by the ear, and that which is only an oscillation is transformed; we experience what we feel as a sound world. Thus the epistemologist can easily say: tone is only what exists in you, and if you imagine it without this, nothing but moved air is there. The same applies to the colours and the light of the external world. The physicist has the view that colour is an oscillation of the ether which fulfils the whole universe. Just as the air is set swinging by the sound and nothing else than the movement of the air exists if we hear a sound, light is only an oscillatory movement of the ether. The ether oscillations are a little bit different from those of the air. The ether oscillates vertically to the direction of the propagation of the waves. This is made clear by experimenting physics. If we have the colour sensation “red,” we have to do it with a sensation. Then we must ask ourselves: what is there if no feeling eye exists? — It should be nothing else of the colours in space than oscillatory ether. The colour quality is removed from the world if the feeling eye is removed from the world. What you see as red is 392 to 454 trillions oscillations, with violet 751 to 757 trillions oscillations. This is inconceivably fast. Physics of the 19th century transformed any light sensation and colour sensation into oscillations of the ether. If no eye were there, the whole colour world would not exist. Everything would be pitch-dark. One could not talk about colour quality in the outer space. This goes so far that Helmholtz said: we have the sensations of colour and light, of sound and tone in ourselves. This is not even like that which takes place without us. We are even not allowed to use an image of that which takes place without us. — What we know as a colour quality of red is not similar to about 420 trillions oscillations per second. Therefore, Helmholtz means: what really exists in our consciousness is not an image but a mere sign. Physics has maintained that space and time exist as I perceive them. The physicist imagines that a movement in space takes place if I have a colour sensation. It is the same with the time image if I have the sensation red and the sensation violet. Both are subjective processes in me. They follow each other in time. The oscillations follow each other outside. Physics does not go so far as Kant. Whether the “things-in-themselves” are space-filled whether they are in space or follow each other in time, we cannot know — in terms of Kant; but we know only: we are organised this and that way, and, therefore, something — may it be spatial or not — has to take on spatial form. We spread out this form over that. For physics the oscillatory movement has to take place in space, it has to take a certain time ... The ether oscillates, we say, 480 trillions times per second. This includes the images of space and time already. The physicist assumes space and time being without us. However, the rest is only a mental picture, is subjective. You can read in physical works that for somebody who has realised what happens in the outside world nothing exists than oscillatory air, than oscillatory ether. Physics seems to have contributed that everything that we have exists only within our consciousness and except this nothing exists. The second that the science of the 19th century can present to us is the reasons which physiology delivers. The great physiologist Johannes Müller found the law of the specific nerve energy. According to this law any organ reacts with a particular sensation. If you push the eye, you can perceive a gleam of light; if electricity penetrates it, also. The eye answers to any influence from without in such a way as it just corresponds to it. It has the strength from within to answer with light and colour. If light and ether penetrate, the eye answers with light and colour sensations. Physiology still delivers additional building stones to prove what the subjective view has put up. Imagine that we have a sensation of touch. The naive human being imagines that he perceives the object. But what does he perceive really? The epistemologist asks. What is before me is nothing else than a combination of the smallest particles, of molecules. They are in movement. Every particle is in such movement which cannot be perceived by the senses because the oscillations are too small. Basically it is nothing else than the movement only which I can perceive, because the particle is not able to creep into me. What is it if you put the hand on the body? The hand carries out a movement. This continues down to the nerve and the nerve transforms it into a sensation: in heat and cold, in softy and hard. Also in the outside world movements are included, and if my sense of touch is concerned, the organ transforms it into heat or cold, into softness or hardness. We cannot even perceive what happens between the body and us, because the outer skin layer is insensible. If the epidermis is without a nerve, it can never feel anything. The epidermis is always between the thing and the body. The stimulus has an effect from a relatively far distance through the epidermis. Only what is excited in your nerve can be perceived. The outer body remains completely without the movement process. You are separated from the thing, and what you really feel is produced within the epidermis. Everything that can really penetrate into your consciousness happens in the area of the body, so that it is still separated from the epidermis. We would have to say after this physiological consideration that we get in nothing of that which takes place in the outside world, but that it is merely processes within our nerves which continue in the brain which excite us by quite unknown external processes. We can never reach beyond our epidermis. You are in your skin and perceive nothing else than what happens within it. Let us go over to another sense, to the eye, from the physical to the physiological. You see that the oscillations propagate; they have to penetrate our body first. The eye consists of a skin, the cornea, first of all. Behind this is the lens and behind the lens the vitreous body. There the light has to go through. Then it arrives at the rear of the eye which is lined with the retina. If you removed the retina, the eye would never transform anything into light. If you see forms of objects, the rays have to penetrate into your eye first, and within the eye a small retina picture is outlined. This is the last that the sensation can cause. What is before the retina is insensible; we have no real perception of it. We can only perceive the picture on the retina. One imagines that there chemical changes of the visual purple take place. The effect of the outer object has to pass the lens and the vitreous body, then it causes a chemical change in the retina, and this becomes a sensation. Then the eye puts the picture again outwardly, surrounds itself with the stimuli which it has received, and puts them again around in the world without us. What takes place in our eye is not that which forms the stimulus, but a chemical process. The physiologists always deliver new reasons for the epistemologists. Apparently we have to agree with Schopenhauer completely if he says: the starry heaven is created by us. It is a reinterpretation of the stimuli. We can know nothing about the “thing-in-itself.” You see that this epistemology limits the human being merely to the things, we say to the mental pictures which his consciousness creates. He is enclosed in his consciousness. He can suppose — if he wants — that anything exists in the world which makes impression on him. In any case nothing can penetrate into him. Everything that he feels is made by him. We cannot even know from anything that takes place in the periphery. Take the stimulus in the visual purple. It has to be directed to the nerve, and this has to be transformed anyhow into the real sensation, so that the whole world which surrounds us would be nothing else than what we would have created from our inside. These are the physiological proofs which induce us to say that this is that way. However, there are also people who ask now why we can assume other human beings besides us whom we, nevertheless, recognise only from the impressions which we receive from them. If a human being stands before me, I have only oscillations as stimuli and then an image of my own consciousness. It is only a presupposition that except for the consciousness picture something similar to the human being exists. Thus the modern epistemology supports its view that the outer content of experience is merely of subjective nature. It says: what is perceived is exclusively the content of the own consciousness, is a change of this content of consciousness. Whether there are things-in-themselves, is beyond our experience. The world is a subjective appearance to me which is built up from my sensations consciously or unconsciously. Whether there are also other worlds, is beyond the field of my experience. When I said: it is beyond the field of experience whether there is another world, it also beyond the field of experience whether there are still other human beings with other consciousnesses, because nothing of a consciousness of the other human beings can get into the human being. Nothing of the world of images of another human being and nothing of the consciousness of another human being can come into my consciousness. Those who have joined Kant’s epistemology have this view. Johann Gottlieb Fichte also joined this view in his youth. He thought Kant’s theory thoroughly. There may be no nicer description of that than those which Fichte gave in his writing On the Determination of the Human Being (1800). He says in it: “nowhere anything permanent exists, not without me not within me, but there is only a continuous transformation. I nowhere know any being, and also not my own. There is no being. — I myself do not know at all, and I am not. Images are there: they are the only things that exist, and they know about themselves in the way of images — images which pass without anything existing that they pass; which are connected with images to images. Images which do not contain anything, without any significance and purpose. I myself am one of these images; yes, I myself am not this, but only a confused image of the images.” Look at your hand which transforms your movements to sensations of touch. This hand is nothing else than a creation of my subjective consciousness, and my whole body and what is in me is also a creation of my subjective consciousness. Or I take my brain: if I could investigate under the microscope how the sensation came into being in the brain, I would have nothing before myself than an object which I have to transform again to an image in my consciousness. The idea of the ego is also an image; it is generated like any other. Dreams pass me, illusions pass me — this is the world view of illusionism which appears inevitably as the last consequence of Kantianism. Kant wanted to overcome the old dogmatic philosophy; he wanted to overcome what has been brought forward by Wolff and his school. He considered this as a sum of figments. These were the proofs of freedom, of the will, of the immortality of the soul and of God’s existence which Kant exposed concerning their probative value as figments. What does he give as proofs? He proved that we can know nothing about a “thing-in-itself” that that which we have is only contents of consciousness that, however, God must be “something-in-itself.” Thus we cannot necessarily prove the existence of God according to Kant. Our reason, our mind is only applicable to that which is given in the perception. They are only there to prescribe laws of perception and, hence, the matters: God — soul — will — are completely outside our rational knowledge. Reason has a limit, and it is not able to overcome it. In the preface of the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason he says at a passage: “I had to cancel knowledge to make room for faith.” He wanted this basically. He wanted to limit knowledge to sense-perception, and he wanted to achieve everything that goes beyond reason in other way. He wanted to achieve it on the way of moral faith. Hence, he said: in no way science can arrive at the objective existence of the things one day. But we find one thing in ourselves: the categorical imperative which appears with an unconditional obligation in us. — Kant calls it a divine voice. It is beyond the things, it is accompanied by unconditional moral necessity. From here Kant ascends to regain that for faith which he annihilates for knowledge. Because the categorical imperative deals with nothing that is caused by any sensory effect, but appears in us, something must exist that causes the senses as well as the categorical imperative, and appears if all duties of the categorical imperative are fulfilled. This would be blessedness. But no one can find the bridge between both. Because he cannot find it, a divine being has to build it. In doing so, we come to a concept of God which we can never find with the senses. A harmony between the sensory world and the world of moral reason must be produced. Even if one did enough in a life as it were, nevertheless, we must not believe that the earthly life generally suffices. The human life goes beyond the earthly life because the categorical imperative demands it. That is why we have to assume a divine world order. How could the human being follow a divine world order, the categorical imperative, if he did not have freedom? — Kant annihilated knowledge that way to get to the higher things of the spirit by means of faith. We must believe! He tries to bring in on the way of the practical reason again what he has thrown out of the theoretical reason. Those views which have no connection apparently to Kant’s philosophy are also completely based on this philosophy. Also a philosopher who had great influence — also in pedagogy: Herbart. He had developed an own view from Kant’s critique of reason: if we look at the world, we find contradictions there. Let us have a look at the own ego. Today it has these mental pictures, yesterday it had others, tomorrow it will have others again. What is this ego? It meets us and is fulfilled with a particular image world. At another moment it meets us with another image world. We have there a development, many qualities, and, nevertheless, it should be a thing. It is one and many. Any thing is a contradiction. Herbart says that only contradictions exist everywhere in the world. Above all we must reproach ourselves with the sentence that the contradiction cannot be the true being. Now from it Herbart deduces the task of his philosophy. He says: we have to remove the contradictions; we have to construct a world without contradiction to us. The world of experiences is an unreal one, a contradictory one. He sees the true sense, the true being in transforming the contradictory world to a world without contradictions. Herbart says: we find the way to the “thing-in-itself,” while we see the contradictions, and if we get them out of us, we penetrate to the true being, to true reality. — However, he also has this in common with Kant that that which surrounds us in the outside world is mere illusion. Also he tried in other way to support what should be valuable for the human being. We come now, so to speak, to the heart of the matter. Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that any moral action makes only sense if there is reality in the world. What is any moral action if we live in a world of appearance? You can never be convinced that that which you do constitutes something real. Then any striving for morality and all your goals are floating in the air. There Fichte was admirably consistent. Later he changed his view and got to pure theosophy. With perception we can never know about the world — he says — anything else than dreams of these dreams. But something drives us to want the good. This lets us look into this big world of dreams like in a flash. He sees the realisation of the moral law in the world of dreams. The demands of the moral law should justify what reason cannot teach. — And Herbart says: because any perception is full of contradictions, we can never come to norms of our moral actions. Hence, there must be norms of our moral actions which are relieved of any judgment by mind and reason. Moral perfection, goodwill, inner freedom, they are independent of the activity of reason. Because everything is appearance in our world, we must have something in which we are relieved of reflection. This is the first phase of the development of the 19th century: the transformation of truth to a world of dreams. The idealism of dreams was the only possible result of thinking about being and wanted to make the foundation of a moral world view independent of all knowledge and cognition. It wanted to limit knowledge to get room for faith. Therefore, the German philosophy has broken with the ancient traditions of those world views which we call theosophy. Anybody who calls himself theosophist could have never accepted this dualism, this separation of moral and the world of dreams. It was for him always a unity, from the lowest quantum of energy up to the highest spiritual reality. Because as well as that which the animal accomplishes in desire and listlessness is only relatively different from that which arises from the highest point of the cultural life out of the purest motives, that is only relatively different everywhere which happens below from that which happens on top. Kant left this uniform way to complete knowledge and world view while he split the world in a recognisable but apparent world and in a second world which has a quite different origin, in the world of morality. In doing so, he clouded the look of many people. Anybody who cannot find access to theosophy suffers from the aftermath of Kant’s philosophy. In the end, you will see how theosophy emerges from a true theory of knowledge; however, it was necessary before that I have demonstrated the apparently firm construction of science. Science seems to have proved irrefutably that there are only the oscillations of the ether if we feel green or blue that we sense tone by the aerial oscillations. The contents of the next lecture will show how it is in reality. |
GA 28. The Story of My Life — Chapter IV |
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There stood Rieger of the Old Czechs, altogether with the deeply characteristic sentiment of the organized Czechs as they had been built up during a long period and had come to self consciousness during the second half of the nineteenth century – a man seldom shut up to himself, a powerful mind and a steadfast will. There spoke on the right side of the Chamber in the midst of the Polish seats Otto Hausner – often only setting forth the results of reading spiritually rich; often sending well-aimed shafts to all sides of the House with a certain sense of satisfaction in himself. A thoroughly self-satisfied but intelligent eye sparkled behind a monocle; the other always seemed to say “Yes” to the sparkle. |
GA 28. The Story of My Life — Chapter IV |
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For the form of the experience of spirit which I then desired to establish upon a firm foundation within me, music came to have a critical significance. At that time there was proceeding in the most intense fashion in the spiritual environment in which I lived the “strife over Wagner.” During my boyhood and youth I had seized every opportunity to improve my knowledge of music. The attitude I held toward thinking required this by implication. For me, thought had content in itself. It possessed this not merely through the percept which it expressed. This, however, obviously led over into the experience of pure musical tone-forms as such. The world of tone in itself was to me the revelation of an essential side of reality. That music should “express” something else besides the tone-form, as was then maintained in every possible way by the followers of Wagner, seemed to me utterly “unmusical.” I was always of a social disposition. Because of this I had even in my school-days at Wiener-Neustadt, and then again in Vienna, formed many friendships. In opinions I seldom agreed with these friends. This, however, did not mean at all that there was not an inwardness and mutual stimulus in these friendships. One of these was with a young man pre-eminently idealistic. With his blond hair and frank blue eyes he was the very type of a young German. He was then quite absorbed in Wagnerism. Music that lived in itself, that would weave itself in tones alone, was to him a cast-off world of horrible Philistines. What revealed itself in the tones as in a kind of speech – that for him gave the tone-forms their value. We attended together many concerts and many operas. We always held opposite views. My limbs grew as heavy as lead when “oppressive music” inflamed him to ecstasy; and he was horribly bored by music which did not pretend to be anything else but music. The debates with this friend stretched out endlessly. In long walks together, in long sessions over our cups of coffee, he drew out his “proofs” expressed in animated fashion, that only with Wagner had true music been born, and that everything which had gone before was only a preparation for this “discoverer of music.” This led me to assert my own opinions in drastic fashion. I spoke of the barbarism of Wagner, the graveyard of all understanding of music. On special occasions the argument grew particularly animated. At one time my friend very noticeably formed the habit of directing our almost daily walk to a narrow little street, and passing up and down it many times discussing Wagner. I was so absorbed in our argument that only gradually did it dawn upon me how he had got this bent. At the window of one of the little houses on the narrow alley there sat at the time of our walk a charming girl. There was no relationship between him and the girl except that he saw her sitting at the window almost every day, and at times was aware that a glance she let fall on the street was meant for him. At first I only noticed that his championship of Wagner – which in any case was fierce enough – was fanned to a brilliant flame in this little alley. And when I became aware of what a current flowed from that vicinity into his inspired heart, he grew confidential in this matter also, and I came to share in the tenderest, most beautiful, most passionate young love. The relation between the two never went much beyond what I have described. My friend, who came of people not blessed with worldly goods, had soon after to take a petty journalistic job in a provincial city. He could not think of any nearer tie with the girl. But neither was he strong enough to overcome the existing relationship. I kept up a correspondence with him for a long time. A melancholy note of resignation marked his letters. That from which he had been forced to cut himself off was still living and strong in his heart. Long after life had brought to an end my correspondence with this friend of my youth, I chanced to meet a person from the same city in which he had found a place as a journalist. I had always been fond of him, and I asked about him. This person said to me: “Yes, things turned out very badly for him; he could scarcely earn his bread. Finally he became a writer in my employ, and then he died of tuberculosis.” This news stabbed me to the heart, for I knew that once the idealistic, fair-haired youth, under the compulsion of circumstances, had in his own feelings severed his relation with his young love, then it made no difference to him what life might further bring to him. He considered it of no value to lay the basis for a life which could not be that one which had floated before him as an ideal during our walks in that little street. In intercourse with this friend my anti-Wagnerism of that period came to realization in even more positive form. But, apart from this, it played any way a great rôle in my mental life at that time. I strove in all directions to find my way into music which had nothing to do with Wagnerism. My love for “pure music” increased with the passage of years; my horror at the “barbarism” of “music as expression” continued to increase. And in this matter it was my lot to get into a human environment in which there were scarcely any other persons than admirers of Wagner. This all contributed much toward the fact that only much later did I grudgingly fight my way to an understanding of Wagner, the obviously human attitude toward so significant a cultural phenomenon. This struggle, however, belongs to a later period of my life. In the period I am now describing, a performance of Tristan, for example, to which I had to accompany one of my pupils, was to me “mortally boring.” To this time belongs still another youthful friendship very significant for me. This was with a young man who was in every way the opposite of the fair-haired youth. He felt that he was a poet. With him, too, I spent a great deal of time in stimulating talk. He was very sensitive to everything poetic. At an early age he undertook important productions. When we became acquainted, he had already written a tragedy, Hannibal, and much lyric verse. I was with both these friends in the “practice in oral and written lectures” which Schröer conducted in the Hochschule. From this course we three, and many others, received the greatest inspiration. We young people could discuss what we had arrived at in our minds and Schröer talked over everything with us and elevated our souls by his dominant idealism and his noble capacity for imparting inspiration. My friend often accompanied me when I had the privilege of visiting Schröer. There he always grew animated, whereas elsewhere a note of burden was manifest in his life. Because of a certain discord he was not ready to face life. No calling was so attractive to him that he would gladly have entered upon it. He was altogether taken up with his poetic interest, and apart from this he found no satisfying relation with existence. At last he had to take a position quite unattractive to him. With him also I continued my connection by means of letters. The fact that even in his poetry he could not find real satisfaction preyed upon his spirit. Life for him was not filled with anything possessing worth. I had to observe to my sorrow, how little by little in his letters and also in his conversation the belief grew upon him that he was suffering from an incurable disease. Nothing sufficed to dispel this groundless obsession. So one day I had to receive the distressing news that the young man who was very near to me had made an end of himself. A real inward friendship I formed at this time also with a young man who had come from the German Transylvania to the Vienna Hochschule. Him also I had first met in Schröer's Seminar periods. There he had read a paper on pessimism. Everything which Schopenhauer had presented in favour of this conception of life was revived in that paper. In addition there was the personal, pessimistic temperament of the young man himself. I determined to oppose his views. I refuted pessimism with veritable words of thunder, even calling Schopenhauer narrow-minded, and wound up my exposition with the sentence: “If the gentleman who read the paper were correct in his position with respect to pessimism, then I had rather be the wooden board on which my feet now tread than be a man.” These words were for a long time repeated jestingly about me among my acquaintances. But they made of the young pessimist and me inwardly united friends. We now passed much time together. He also felt himself to be a poet, and many a time I sat for hours in his room and listened with pleasure to the reading of his poems. In my spiritual strivings of that time he also showed a warm interest, although he was moved to this less by the thing itself with which I was concerned than by his personal affection for me. He was bound up with many a delightful friendship, and also youthful love affairs. As a means of living he had to carry a truly heavy burden. At Hermannstadt he had gone through the school as a poor boy and even then had to make his living by tutoring. He then conceived the clever idea of continuing to instruct by correspondence from Vienna the pupils he had gained at Hermannstadt. The sciences in the Hochschule interested him very little. One day, however, he wished to pass an examination in chemistry. He had never attended a lecture or opened a single one of the required books. On the last night before the examination he had a friend read to him a digest of the whole subject-matter. He finally fell asleep over this. Yet he went with this friend to the examination. Both made “brilliant” failures. This young man had boundless faith in me. For a long time he treated me almost as his father-confessor. He opened up to my view an interesting, often melancholy, life sensitive to all that is beautiful. He gave to me so much friendship and love that it was really hard at times not to cause him bitter disappointment. This happened especially because he often felt that I did not show him enough attention. And yet this could not be otherwise when I had so many varieties of interests for which I found in him no real understanding. All this, however, only contributed to make the friendship a more inward relationship. He spent his summer vacation at Hermannstadt. There he sought for students in order to tutor them by correspondence the following year from Vienna. I always received long letters at these times from him. He was grieved because I seldom or never answered these. But, when he returned to Vienna in the autumn, he hurried to me like a boy, and the united life began again. I owed it to him at that time that I was able to mingle with many men. He liked to take me to meet all the people with whom he associated. And I was eager for companionship. This friend brought into my life much that gave me happiness and warmth. Our friendship remained the same till my friend died a few years ago. It stood the test of many storms of life, and I shall still have much to say of it. In retrospective consciousness much comes to mind of human and vital relationships which still continues to-day fully present in my mind, united with feelings of love and gratitude. Here I cannot relate all this in detail, but must leave quite unmentioned much which was indeed very near to me in my personal experience, and is near even now. My youthful friendships in the time of which I am here speaking had in the further course of my life a special import. They forced me into a sort of double mental life. The struggle with the riddle of cognition, which then filled my mind more than all else, aroused in my friends always, to be sure, a strong interest, but very little active participation. In the experience of this riddle I was always rather lonely. On the other hand, I myself shared completely in whatever arose in the existence of my friends. Thus there flowed along in me two parallel currents of life: one which I as a lone wanderer followed, the other which I shared in vital companionship with men bound to me by ties of affection. But this twofold life was on many occasions of profound and lasting significance for my development. In this connection I must mention especially a friend who had already been a schoolmate of mine at Wiener-Neustadt. During that time, however, we were far apart. First in Vienna, where he visited me often and where he later lived as an employee, he came very close to me. And yet even at Wiener-Neustadt, without any external relationship between us, he had already had a significance for my life. Once I was with him in a gymnasium period. While he was exercising and I had nothing to do, he left a book lying by me. It was Heine's book on the romantic school and the history of philosophy in Germany. I glanced into it. The result of this was that I read the whole book. I found many stimulating things in the book, but was vitally opposed to the manner in which Heine treated the content of life which was dear to me. In this perception of a way of thought and order of feeling which were utterly opposed to those shaping themselves in me, I received a powerful stimulus toward a self-consciousness in the orientation of the inner life which was a necessity of my very nature. I then talked with my schoolmate in opposition to the book. Through this the inner life of his soul came to the fore, which later led to the establishing of a lasting friendship. He was an uncommunicative man who confided very little. Most people thought him an odd character. With those few in whom he was willing to confide he became quite expressive, especially in letters. He considered himself called by his inner nature to be a poet. He was of the opinion that he bore a great treasure in his soul. Besides, he was inclined to imagine that he was in intimate relation with other persons, especially women, rather than actually to form these ties into objective fact. At times he was close to such a relation, but he could not bring it to actual experience. In conversation with me he would then live through his fancies with the same inwardness and enthusiasm as if they were actual. Therefore it was inevitable that he experienced bitter emotions when the dreams always went amiss. This produced in him a mental life that had not the slightest relation to his outward existence. And this life again was to him the subject of tormenting reflections about himself, which were mirrored for me in many letters and conversations. Thus he once wrote me a long exposition of the way in which the least or the greatest experience became to him a symbol and how he lived in such symbols. I loved this friend, and in my love for him I entered into his dreams, although I always had the feeling when with him: “We are moving about in the clouds and have no ground under our feet!” For me, who ceaselessly busied myself to find firm support for life just there – in knowledge – this was an unique experience. I always had to slip outside of my own being and leap across into another skin, as it were, when I was in company with this friend. He liked to share his life with me; at times he even set forth extensive theoretical reflections concerning the “difference between our two natures.” He was quite unaware how little our thoughts harmonized, because his friendly sentiments led him on in all his thinking. The case was similar in my relation with another Wiener-Neustadt schoolmate. He belonged to the next lower class in the Realschule, and we first came together when he entered the Hochschule in Vienna a year after me. Then, however, we were often together. He also entered but little into that which concerned me so inwardly, the problem of cognition. He studied chemistry. The natural scientific opinions in which he was then involved prevented him from showing himself in any other light than as a sceptic concerning the spiritual conceptions with which I was filled. Later on in life I found in the case of this friend how close to my state of mind he then stood in his innermost being; but at that time he never allowed this innermost being to show itself. Thus our lively and long arguments became for me a “battle against materialism.” He always opposed to my avowal of the spiritual substance of the world all the contradictory results which seemed to him to be given by natural science. Then I always had to array everything I possessed by way of insight in order to drive from the field his arguments, drawn from the materialistic orientation of his thought, against the knowledge of a spiritual world. Once we were arguing the question with great zeal. Every day after attending the lectures in Vienna my friend went back to his home, which was still at Wiener-Neustadt. I often accompanied him through the streets of Vienna to the station of the Southern Railway. One day we reached a sort of climax in the argument over materialism after we had already arrived at the station and the train was almost due. Then I put together what I still had to say in the following words: “So, then, you maintain that, when you say ‘I think,’ this is merely the necessary effect of the occurrences in your brain-nerve system. Only these occurrences are a reality. So it is, likewise, When you say ‘I am this or that,' ‘I go,’ and so forth. But observe this. You do not say, ‘My brain thinks,’ ‘My brain sees this or that,’ ‘My brain goes.’ If, however, you have really come to the opinion that what you theoretically maintain is actually true, you must correct your form of expression. When you continue to speak of ‘I,’ you are really lying. But you cannot do otherwise than follow your sound instinct against the suggestion of your theory. Experience offers you a different group of facts from that which your theory makes up. Your consciousness calls your theory a lie.” My friend shook his head. He had no time to reply. As I went back alone, I could not but think that opposing materialism in this crude fashion did not correspond with a particularly exact philosophy. But it did not then really concern me so much to furnish, five minutes before the train left, a philosophically convincing proof as to give expression to my certitude from inner experience of the reality of the human ego. To me this ego was an inwardly observable experience of a reality present in itself. This reality seemed to me no less certain than any known to materialism. But in it there is absolutely nothing material. This thorough-going perception of the reality and the spirituality of the ego has in the succeeding years helped me to overcome every temptation to materialism. I have always known “the ego is unshakable.” And it has been clear to me that no one really knows the ego who considers it as a form of phenomenon, as a result of other events. The fact that I possessed this perception inwardly and spiritually was what I wished to get my friend to understand. We fought together many times thereafter on this battlefield. But in general conceptions of life we had so many similar sentiments that the earnestness of our theoretical battling never resulted in the least disturbance of our personal relationship. During this time I got deeper into the student life in Vienna. I became a member of the “German Reading Club” in the Hochschule. In the assembly and in smaller gatherings the political and cultural phenomena of the time were thoroughly discussed. These discussions brought out all possible – and impossible – points of view, such as young people hold. Especially when officers were to be elected, opinions clashed against one another quite violently. Very exciting and stimulating was much that there found expression among the youth in connection with the events in the public life of Austria. It was the time when national parties were becoming more and more sharply defined. Everything which led later more and more to the disruption of the Empire, which appeared in its results after the World War, could then be experienced in germ. I was first chosen librarian of the reading-room. As such I found out all possible authors who had written books that I thought would be of value to the student library. To such authors I wrote “begging letters.” I often wrote in a single week a hundred such letters. Through this “work” of mine the library was very soon much enlarged. But the thing had a secondary effect for me. Through the work it was possible for me to become acquainted in a comprehensive fashion with the scientific, artistic, culture-historical, political literature of the time. I was an eager reader of the books given. Later I was chosen president of the Reading Club. This, however, was to me a burdensome office. For I faced a great number of the most diverse party view-points and saw in all of these their relative justification. Yet the adherents of the various parties would come to me. Each would seek to persuade me that his party alone was right. At the time when I was elected every party had favoured me. For until then they had only heard how in the assemblies I had taken the part of justice. After I had been president for a half-year, all turned against me. In that time they had found that I could not decide as positively for any party as that party wished. My craving for companionship found great satisfaction in the reading-room. And an interest was awakened in a broader field of the public life through its reflection in the occurrences in the common life of the students. In this way I came to be present at very interesting parliamentary debates, sitting in the gallery of the House of Delegates or of the Senate. Apart from the bills under discussion – which often affected life profoundly – I was especially interested in the personalities of the House of Delegates. There stood every year at the end of his bench, as the chief budget expositor, the keen philosopher, Bartolemäus Carneri. His words were a hailstorm of accusations against the Taaffe Ministry; they were a defence of Germanism in Austria. There stood Ernst von Plener, the dry speaker, the unexcelled authority in matters of finance. One was chilled while he criticized the statement of the Minister of Finance, Dunajewski, with the coldness of an accountant. There the Ruthenian Thomeszuck thundered against the politics of nationalities. One had the feeling that upon his discovery of an especially well-coined word for that moment depended the fostering of antipathy against the Minister. There argued, in peasant-theatrical fashion, always intelligently, the clerical Lienbacher. His head, bowed over a little, caused what he said to seem like the outflow of clarified perceptions. There argued in his cutting style the Young Czech Gregr. One felt in him a half-demagogue. There stood Rieger of the Old Czechs, altogether with the deeply characteristic sentiment of the organized Czechs as they had been built up during a long period and had come to self consciousness during the second half of the nineteenth century – a man seldom shut up to himself, a powerful mind and a steadfast will. There spoke on the right side of the Chamber in the midst of the Polish seats Otto Hausner – often only setting forth the results of reading spiritually rich; often sending well-aimed shafts to all sides of the House with a certain sense of satisfaction in himself. A thoroughly self-satisfied but intelligent eye sparkled behind a monocle; the other always seemed to say “Yes” to the sparkle. A speaker who, however, even then often spoke prophetic words as to the future of Austria. One ought to-day to read again what he then said; one would be amazed at the keenness of his vision. One then laughed, to be sure, over much which years later became bitter earnest. |
GA 28. The Story of My Life — Chapter XXX |
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“One need not be surprised if, in the presence of such phenomena, men with deeper intellectual needs find the proud structure of thought of the scholastics more satisfying than the ideal content of our own time. Otto Willmann has written a noteworthy book, his Geschichte des Idealismus [ Note: History of Idealism. in which he appears as the eulogist of the world-conception of past centuries. |
GA 28. The Story of My Life — Chapter XXX |
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The decision to give public expression to the esoteric from my own inner experience impelled me to write for the Magazine for August 28, 1899, on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Goethe's birth, an article on Goethe's fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, under the title Goethes Geheime Offenbarung. [ Note: Goethe's Secret Revelation. This article was, of course, only slightly esoteric. But I could not expect more of my public than I there gave. In my own mind the content of the fairy-tale lived as something wholly esoteric, and it was out of an esoteric mood that the article was written. Since the 'eighties I had been occupied with imaginations which were associated in my thought with this fairy-tale. I saw set forth in the fairy-tale Goethe's way from the observation of external nature into the interior of the human mind as he placed this before himself, not in concepts, but in pictures of the spirit. Concepts seemed to Goethe far too poor, too dead, to be capable of representing the living and working forces of the mind. Now in Schiller's letters concerning education in aesthetics, Goethe saw an endeavour to grasp this living and working by means of concepts. Schiller sought to show how the life of man is under subjection to natural necessity by reason of his corporeal aspect and to mental necessity through his reason. And he thought the soul must establish an inner equilibrium between the two. Then in this equilibrium man lives in freedom a life really worthy of humanity. This is clever, but for the real life of the soul it is far too simple. The soul causes its forces, which are rooted in the depths, to shine into consciousness, but to disappear again in the very act of shining forth after they have influenced other forces just as fleeting. These are occurrences which even in arising also pass away; but abstract concepts can be linked only to that which continues for a longer or shorter time. All this Goethe knew through experience; he placed his picture-knowledge in a fairy-tale over against Schiller's conceptual knowledge. In experiencing this creation of Goethe's, one had entered the outer court of the esoteric. This was the time when I was invited by Count and Countess Brockdorff to deliver a lecture at one of their weekly gatherings. At these meetings there came together seekers from all sorts of circles. The lectures there delivered had to do with all aspects of life and knowledge. I knew nothing of all this until I was invited to deliver a lecture; nor did I know the Brockdorffs, but heard of them then for the first time. The theme proposed was an article about Nietzsche. This lecture I gave. Then I observed that among the hearers there were persons with a great interest in the spiritual world. Therefore, when I was invited to give a second lecture, I proposed the subject “Goethe's Secret Revelation,” and in this lecture I became entirely esoteric in relation to the fairy-tale. It was an important experience for me to be able to speak in words coined from the world of spirit after having been forced by circumstances throughout my Berlin period up to that time only to let the spiritual shine through my presentation. The Brockdorffs were leaders of a branch of the Theosophical Society founded by Blavatsky. What I had said in connection with Goethe's fairy-tale led to my being invited by the Brockdorffs to deliver lectures regularly before those members of the Theosophical Society who were associated with them. I explained, however, that I could speak only about that which I vitally experienced within me as spiritual knowledge. In truth, I could speak of nothing else. For very little of the literature issued by the Theosophical Society was known to me. I had known theosophists while living in Vienna, and I later became acquainted with others. These acquaintance ships led me to write in the Magazine the adverse review dealing with the theosophists in connection with the appearance of a publication of Franz Hartmann. What I knew otherwise of the literature was for the most part entirely uncongenial to me in method and approach; I could not by any possibility have linked my discussions with this literature. So I then gave the lectures in which I established a connection with the mysticism of the Middle Ages. By means of the ideas of the mystics from Master Eckhard to Jakob Böhme, I found expression for the spiritual conceptions which in reality I had determined beforehand to set forth. I published the series of lectures in the book Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens. 2Mysticism at the Beginning of the Modern Spiritual Life. At these lectures there appeared one day in the audience Marie von Sievers, who was chosen by destiny at that time to take into strong hands the German section of the Theosophical Society, founded soon after the beginning of my lecturing. Within this section I was then able to develop my anthroposophic activity before a constantly increasing audience. No one was left in uncertainty of the fact that I would bring forward in the Theosophical Society only the results of my own research through perception. For I stated this on all appropriate occasions. When, in the presence of Annie Besant, the German section of the Theosophical Society was founded in Berlin and I was chosen its General Secretary, I had to leave the foundation sessions because I had to give before a non-theosophical audience one of the lectures in which I dealt with the spiritual evolution of humanity, and to the title of which I expressly united the phrase “Eine Anthroposophie.” 3“An anthroposophy.” Annie Besant also knew that I was then giving out in lectures under this title what I had to say about the spiritual world. When I went to London to attend a theosophical congress, one of the leading personalities said to me that true theosophy was to be found in my book Mysticism ..., I had reason to be satisfied. For I had given only the results of my spiritual vision, and this was accepted in the Theosophical Society. There was now no longer any reason why I should not bring forward this spiritual knowledge in my own way before the theosophical public, which was at first the only audience that entered without restriction into a knowledge of the spirit. I subscribed to no sectarian dogmatics; I remained a man who uttered what he believed he was able to utter entirely according to what he himself experienced in the spiritual world. Prior to the founding of the section belongs a series of lectures – which I gave before Die Kommenden, entitled Von Buddha zu Christus. [ Note: From Buddha to Christ. In these discussions I sought to show what a mighty stride the mystery of Golgotha signifies in comparison with the Buddha event, and how the evolution of humanity, as it strives toward the Christ event, approaches its culmination. In this circle I spoke also of the nature of the mysteries. All this was accepted by my hearers. It was not felt to be contradictory to lectures which I had given earlier. Only after the section was founded – and I then appeared to be stamped as a “theosophist” – did any objection arise. It was really not the thing itself; it was the name and the association with the Society that no one wished to have. On the other hand, my non-theosophical hearers would have been inclined to permit themselves merely to be “stimulated” by my discussions, to accept these only in a “literary” way. What lay upon my heart was to introduce into life the impulse from the spiritual world; for this there was no understanding. This understanding, however, I could gradually find among men interested theosophically. Before the Brockdorff circle, where I had spoken on Nietzsche and the on Goethe's secret revelation, I gave at this time a lecture on Goethe's Faust, from an esoteric point of view. [ Note: This was the lecture which was later published, together with my discussions of Goethe's fairy-tale, by the Philosophische-Anthroposophische Verlag. The lectures on mysticism led to an invitation during the winter from the same theosophical circle to speak there again on this subject. I then gave the series of lectures which I later collected into the volume Christianity as Mystical Fact. From the very beginning I have let it be known that the choice of the expression “as Mystical Fact” is important. For I did not wish to set forth merely the mystical bearing of Christianity. My object was to set forth the evolution from the ancient mysteries to the mystery of Golgotha in such a way that in this evolution there should be seen to be active, not merely earthly historic forces, but spiritual supramundane influences. And I wished to show that in the ancient mysteries cult-pictures were given of cosmic events, which were then fulfilled in the mystery of Golgotha as facts transferred from the cosmos to the earth of the historic plane. This was by no means taught in the Theosophical Society. In this view I was in direct opposition to the theosophical dogmatics of the time, before I was invited to work in the Theosophical Society. For this invitation followed immediately after the cycle of lectures on Christ here described. Between the two cycles of lectures that I gave before the Theosophical Society, Marie von Sievers was in Italy, at Bologna, working on behalf of the Theosophical Society in the branch established there. Thus the thing evolved up to the time of my first attendance at a theosophical congress, in London, in the year 1902. At this congress, in which Marie von Sievers also took part, it was already a foregone conclusion that a German section of the Society would be founded with myself – shortly before invited to become a member – as the general secretary. The visit to London was of great interest to me. I there became acquainted with important leaders of the Theosophical Society. I had the privilege of staying at the home of Mr. Bertram Keightley, one of these leaders. We became great friends. I became acquainted with Mr. Mead, the very diligent secretary of the Theosophical Movement. The most interesting conversations imaginable took place at the home of Mr. Keightley in regard to the forms of spiritual knowledge alive within the Theosophical Society. Especially intimate were these conversations with Bertram Keightley himself. H. P. Blavatsky seemed to live again in these conversations. Her whole personality, with its wealth of spiritual content, was described with the utmost vividness before me and Marie von Sievers by my dear host, who had been so long associated with her. I became slightly acquainted with Annie Besant and also Sinnett, author of Esoteric Buddhism. Mr. Leadbeater I did not meet, but only heard him speak from the platform. He made no special impression on me. All that was interesting in what I heard stirred me deeply, but it had no influence upon the content of my own views. The intervals left over between sessions of the congress I sought to employ in hurried visits to the natural-scientific and artistic collections of London. I dare say that many an idea concerning the evolution of nature and of man came to me from the natural-scientific and the historical collections. Thus I went through an event very important for me in this visit to London. I went away with the most manifold impressions, which stirred my mind profoundly. In the first number of the Magazine for 1899 there appears an article by me entitled Neujahrsbetractung eines Ketzers. 6New Year Reflections of a Sceptic. The meaning there is a scepticism, not in reference to religious knowledge, but in reference to the orientation of culture which the time had taken on. Men were standing before the portals of a new century. The closing century had brought forth great attainments in the realm of external life and knowledge. In reference to this the thought forced itself upon me: “In spite of all this and many other attainments – for example, in the sphere of art – no one with any depth of vision can rejoice greatly over the cultural content of the time. Our highest spiritual needs strive for something which the time affords only in meagre measure.” And reflecting upon the emptiness of contemporary culture, I glanced back to the time of scholasticism in which, at least in concepts, men's minds lived with the spirit. “One need not be surprised if, in the presence of such phenomena, men with deeper intellectual needs find the proud structure of thought of the scholastics more satisfying than the ideal content of our own time. Otto Willmann has written a noteworthy book, his Geschichte des Idealismus [ Note: History of Idealism. in which he appears as the eulogist of the world-conception of past centuries. It must be admitted that the human mind craves those proud comprehensive illuminations through thought which human knowledge experienced in the philosophical systems of the scholastics ... Discouragement is a characteristic of the intellectual life at the turn of the century. It disturbs our joy in the attainments of the youngest of the ages now past.” And in contrast to those persons who insisted that it was just “true knowledge” itself which showed the impossibility of a philosophy comprising under a single conception the totality of existence, I had to say: “If matters were as they appear to the persons who give currency to such voices, then it would suffice one to measure, weigh, and compare things and phenomena and investigate them by means of the available apparatus, but never would the question be raised as to the higher meaning of things and phenomena.” This is the temper of my mind which must furnish an explanation of those facts that brought about my anthroposophic activity within the Theosophical Society. When I had entered into the culture of the time in order to find a spiritual background for the editing of the Magazine, I felt after this a great need to recover my mind in such reading as Willmann's History of Idealism. Even though there was an abyss between my perception of spirit and the form of Willmann's ideas, yet I felt that these ideas were near to the spirit. At the end of September 1900, I was able to leave the Magazine in other hands. The facts narrated above show that the purpose of imparting the content of the spiritual world had become a necessity growing out of my temper of mind before I gave up the Magazine; that it has no connection with the impossibility of continuing further with the Magazine. As into the very element suited to my mind, I entered upon an activity having its impulse in spiritual knowledge. But I still have to-day the feeling that, even apart from the hindrance here described, my endeavour to lead through natural-scientific knowledge to the world of spirit would have succeeded in finding an outlet. I look back upon what I expressed from 1897 to 1900 as upon something which at one time or another had to be uttered in opposition to the way of thinking of the time; and on the other hand I look back upon this as upon something in which I passed through my most intense spiritual test. I learned fundamentally to know where lay the forces of the time striving away from the spirit, disintegrating and destructive of culture. And from this knowledge came a great access of the force that I later needed in order to work outward from the spirit. It was still before the time of my activity within the Theosophical Society, and before I ceased to edit the Magazine, that I composed my two-volume book Conceptions of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century, which from the second edition on was extended to include a survey of the evolution of world-conceptions from the Greek period to the nineteenth century, and then appeared under the title Ratzel der Philosophie. [ Note: Riddles of Philosophy. The external occasion for the production of this book is to be considered wholly secondary. It grew out of the fact that Cronbach, the publisher of the Magazine, planned a collection of writings which were to deal with the various realms of knowledge and life in their evolution during the nineteenth century. He wished to include in this collection an exposition of the conceptions of the world and of life, and this he entrusted to me. I had for a long time held all the substance of this book in my mind. My consideration of the world-conceptions had a personal point of departure in that of Goethe. The opposition which I had to set up between Goethe's way of thinking and that of Kant, the new philosophical beginning at the turning-point between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel – all this was to me the beginning of an epoch in the evolution of world-conceptions. The brilliant books of Richard Wahle, which show the dissolution of all endeavour after a world-conception at the end of the nineteenth century, closed this epoch. Thus the attempt of the nineteenth century after a world-conception rounded itself into a whole which was vitally alive in my view, and I gladly seized the opportunity to set this forth. When I look back to this book the course of my life seems to me symptomatically expressed in it. I did not concern myself, as many suppose, with anticipating contradictions. If this were the case, I should gladly admit it. Only it was not the reality in my spiritual course. I concerned myself in anticipation to find new spheres for what was alive in my mind. And an especially stimulating discovery in the spiritual sphere occurred soon after the composition of the Conceptions of the World and of Life. Besides, I never by any means penetrated into the spiritual sphere in a mystical, emotional way, but desired always to go by way of crystal-clear concepts. Experiencing of concepts, of ideas, led me out of the ideal into the spiritual-real. The real evolution of the organic from primeval times to the present stood out before my imagination for the first time after the composition of Conceptions of the World and of Life. During the writing of this book I had before my eyes only the natural-scientific view which had been derived from the Darwinian mode of thought. But this I considered only as a succession of sensible facts present in nature. Within this succession of facts there were active for me spiritual impulses, as these hovered before Goethe in his idea of metamorphosis. Thus the natural-scientific evolutionary succession, as represented by Haeckel, never constituted for me something wherein mechanical or merely organic laws controlled, but as something wherein the spirit led the living being from the simple through the complex up to man. I saw in Darwinism a mode of thinking which is on the way to that of Goethe, but which remains behind this. All this was still thought by me in ideal content ; only later did I work through to imaginative perception. This perception first brought me the knowledge that in reality quite other beings than the most simple organisms were present in primeval times. That man as a spiritual being is older than all other living beings, and that in order to assume his present physical form he had to cease to be a member of a world-being which comprised him and the other organisms. These latter are rejected elements in human evolution; not something out of which man has come, but something which he has left behind, from which he severed himself, in order to take on his physical form as the image of one that was spiritual. Man is a microcosmic being who bore within him all the rest of the terrestrial world and who has become a microcosm by separating from all the rest – this for me was a knowledge to which I first attained in the earliest years of the new century. And so this knowledge could not be in any way an active impulse in Conceptions of the World and of Life. Indeed, I so conceived the second volume of this book that a point of departure for a deepening knowledge of the world mystery might be found in a spiritualized form of Darwinism and Haeckelism viewed in the light of Goethe's world-conception. When I prepared later the second edition of the book, there was already present in my mind a knowledge of the true evolution. All through I held fast to the point of view I had assumed in the first edition as being that which is derived from thinking without spiritual perception, yet I found it necessary to make slight changes in the form of expression. These were necessary, first because the book by undertaking a general survey of the totality of philosophy had become an entirely different composition, and secondly because this second edition appeared after my discussions of the true evolution were already before the world. In all this the form taken by my Riddles of Philosophy had not only a subjective justification, as the point of view firmly held from the time of a certain phase in my mental evolution, but also a justification entirely objective. This consists in the fact that a thought, when spiritually experienced as thought, can conceive the evolution of living beings only as this is set forth in my book; and that the further step must be made by means of spiritual perception. Thus my book represents quite objectively the pre-anthroposophic point of view into which one must submerge oneself, and which one must experience in this submersion, in order to rise to the higher point of view. This point of view, as a stage in the way of knowledge, meets those learners who seek the spiritual world, not in a mystical blurred form, but in a form intellectually clear. In setting forth that which results from this point of view there is also present something which the learner uses as a preliminary stage leading to the higher. Then for the first time I saw in Haeckel the person who placed himself courageously at the thinker's point of view in natural science, while all other researchers excluded thought and admitted only the results of sense-observation. The fact that Haeckel placed value upon creative thought in laying the foundation for reality drew me again and again to him. And so I dedicated my book to him, in spite of the fact that its content – even in that form – was not conceived in his sense. But Haeckel was not in the least a philosophical nature. His relation to philosophy was wholly that of a layman. For this very reason I considered the attack of the philosophers that was just then raging around Haeckel as quite undeserved. In opposition to them, I dedicated my book to Haeckel, as I had already written in opposition to them my essay Haeckel und seine Gegner. [ Note: Haeckel and His Opponents. Haeckel, in all simplicity as regards philosophy, had employed thought as the means for setting forth biological reality; a philosophical attack was directed against him which rested upon an intellectual sphere quite foreign to him. I believe he never knew what the philosophers wished from him. This was my impression from a conversation I had with him in Leipzig after the appearance of his Riddle of the Universe, on the occasion of a presentation of Borngräber's play Giordano Bruno. He then said: “People say I deny the spirit. I wish they could see how materials shape themselves through their forces; then they would perceive ‘spirit’ in everything that happens in a retort. Everywhere there is spirit.” Haeckel, in fact, knew nothing whatever of the real Spirit. The very forces of nature were for him the “spirit,” and he could rest content with this. One must not critically attack such blindness to the spirit with philosophically dead concepts, but must see how far the age is removed from the experience of the spirit, and must seek, on the foundation which the age affords – the natural biological explanation – to strike the spiritual sparks. Such was then my opinion. On that basis I wrote my Conceptions of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century. |
GA 196. The History and Actuality of Imperialism — Lecture I |
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Therewith royal dignity became a symbol, so that what existed here on the physical earth was no longer reality. The people of the Middle Ages did not worship Karl the Great and Otto I as gods, which was the case in more ancient times, but they saw in them godly representatives. And that had to be continually confirmed, for of course it became ever weaker in consciousness. But it still retained a symbolic reality, a reality of signs. |
GA 196. The History and Actuality of Imperialism — Lecture I |
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Today's lecture will be episodic, a kind of interspersion into our considerations, because I would like our English friends, who will soon be going home, to be able to take as much as possible with them. Therefore I will structure this lecture in a way to be as effective as possible. Today I would like, at first historically, not so much referring to the present — that can be done tomorrow perhaps — I would like to say something about imperialism, historically, but in a spiritual-scientific sense. Imperialism is a much discussed phenomenon recently, and discussed by those who are more or less conscious of its relationship to the total phenomena of the present time. But when such things are discussed, what is not taken into account, or at least not enough, is that we live within the historical course of events, that we stand in a very definitive historical evolutionary epoch and that we can only understand this evolutionary epoch if we know where the phenomena which surround us, in which we live, come from. Basically, what is most effective today and what will show itself to be an even more effective imperialism in the future will be its bearer — the Anglo-American people. As far as its name is concerned, it has shown itself to be something new: economic imperialism. But most important is the fact that everything said about this economic imperialism is untrue, everything, I would say, seems to be hanging in the air, which more or less consciously leads to untruthfulness. So in order to recognize how in these times realities are completely different from what is said about them, a more profound observation of the historical course of events is necessary. I only need to mention one item of present-day phenomena in order to characterize the public's ability to judge. We have experienced how at first in various parts of Europe and finally even in Germany, Woodrow Wilson has been glorified. Our Swiss friends know very well that while Woodrow Wilson was being glorified I always spoke out against him in the sharpest terms here in Switzerland, for what Woodrow Wilson is today, he was of course also then when he was being glorified by the whole word. (It is already being reported — although I can't say if it's the complete truth — that in America they are thinking of declaring him unfit to govern, that there are doubts about his judgment.) The public's capacity for judgment, as it zips around the world today, is sufficiently characterized by such things. And one must only remember a second thing. During the last four of five years, an enormous amount of pretty things have been talked about: the self-determination of peoples and so forth. All these things were not true, for what was behind them was something completely different, it was of course a question of power. And in order to understand what it's about, what is said, thought and judged, it is necessary to return to the realities. And when things such as imperialism are considered — “Imperial Federation League” is the official designation in England since the beginning of the twentieth century — we must realize that they are the recent products of an evolution and they go back to a remote past, and can only be explained by a true consideration of history. We do not want to delve so deeply into the past as we could when studying the spiritual evolution of humanity, but we do want to go at least as far back as several centuries before the Christian era. We find imperialistic empires in Asia, and a subspecies of such empires in Egypt. Most characteristic of the Asiatic impulse are, for example, the historically known Persian empire and, especially, the Assyrian empire. But it is not sufficient to study this first phase of imperialism only in the last, historically known stage of the Assyrian empire, simply because the motivators dominating the Assyrian empire cannot be understood without reaching back to even earlier oriental conditions. Even in China, whose whole organization reaches so far back, the organization of recent times has changed so much that the true character of an oriental imperialism as it once existed is not recognized. However, the conditions which are known historically make it possible to see what the fundamentals are. We cannot understand the old oriental imperialism without knowing the conscious relationship between people of a region, let's say an empire, and what we today would call the ruler or the rulers of that empire. Because of course our words for ruler or king and so forth no longer express the feelings about the ruler or the rulers. It is very difficult to understand the feelings of people in general of the third to fourth century before the Christian era because it is difficult nowadays to take account of how people felt in those ancient times about the relation of the physical world to the spiritual world. Today most people think, if they even think about a spiritual world, that it is somewhere in the distant beyond. And when the spiritual world is spoken about — and in the future it will again have to be spoken about as being present among us just as the sense world is — then what results is what has led for example to the Protestant mentality. But the essential nature of ancient times is that no distinction was made between the physical and spiritual worlds. This is so much the case that when ancient times are referred to by people of today they can hardly imagine much consistency, for the way of thinking was so different then from what it is today. Rulers, a ruling caste, slaves, ruled people, that was reality — not something called a physical reality, but it was the reality, simultaneously the physical and the spiritual reality. And the ruler of an oriental empire — what was he? The ruler of the oriental empire was God. And for the people of those times there was no God beyond the clouds, no choir of spirits who surrounded the highest God — that view came later — but rather what we today call ministers or court jesters, somewhat disrespectfully, were beings of a divine nature. For it was obvious that because of the mystery schooling they had gone through, they had become something greater than ordinary people. They were looked up to, just as the Protestant mentality looks up to its God or certain more liberal circles look up to their invisible angels and such. Extra invisible angels or an extra super-sensible invisible God did not exist for the people of the ancient orient. Everything spiritual lived in man. In the common man lived a human soul. In those whom we would today call rulers, lived a divine soul, a God. The concept of a really existing godly empire, which at the same time was a physical empire, is no longer taken into consideration. That a king has real divine power and dignity is considered absurd today, but was a reality in oriental imperialism. As I mentioned, a subspecies was found in Egypt, for there we find a true transition to a later form. If we go back to the oldest form of imperialism, we find it based on the king being God who really physically appeared on earth, the son of heaven who physically appeared on earth, who was even the father of heaven. This is so paradoxical for the contemporary mind, that it seems unbelievable, but it is so. We can learn from Assyrian documents how conquests were justified. They were simply carried out. The justification was that they had to expand more and more the God's empire. When a territory was conquered and the inhabitants became subjects, then they had to worship the conqueror as their god. During those times no one thought of spreading a certain worldview. Why would it have been necessary? When the conquered people openly recognized the conqueror, followed him, then all was in order, they could believe whatever they wanted. Belief — personal opinion — wasn't touched in ancient times, nobody cared about it. That was the first form in which imperialism appeared. The second form was when the ruler, the one who was to play a leading role, wasn't the god himself, but the god's envoy, or inspired by the god, interpenetrated with divinity. The first imperialism is characterized by realities. When an oriental ruler of ancient times appeared before his people, it was in all his splendor, because as a god he was entitled to wear such clothes. It was the clothing of a god. That's what a god looked like. It meant nothing more than what the ruler wore was the fashion of the gods. And his paladins were not mere bureaucrats, but higher beings who accompanied him and did what they did with the power of higher beings. Then came the time, as already mentioned, when the ruler and his paladins appeared as God's envoys, as interpenetrated with divinity, as representatives. That is very clear in Dionysus the Areopagite. Read his writings, where he describes the complete hierarchy, from the deacons, archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, up to the church's whole hierarchy. How does he do this? Dionysus the Areopagite presents it as though in this earthly churchly hierarchy is mirrored what God is with his archangels and angles, super- sensibly of course. So above we have the heavenly hierarchy and below it's mirror image, the worldly hierarchy. The people of the worldly hierarchy, the deacons, archdeacons, wear certain clothes, and they perform their rituals; they are symbols. The first phase was characterized by realities, the second phase was characterized by signs, by symbols. But this has been more or less forgotten. Even Catholics understand little of the fact that the deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops are the representatives of the heavenly hierarchies. This has been mostly forgotten. With the advancement of imperialism a division occurred, a real division. On one hand there were the leaders tending more towards being divine representatives, priestly, where the priests were kings; on the other hand the tendency towards the secular, although still by the grace of God. Basically these were the two forms: the churches and the empires. During the first imperialism, when all was physical reality, something like this would have been unthinkable. But in the second phase of imperialism the division occurred. On one side more secular, but nevertheless representative of God, on the other side more church oriented, also representative of God. That system held until the middle ages and, I would even say, until the year 1806, but more as a shadow, retained in kings and paladins as God's representatives. The Roman Catholic Church's propagation tended more towards the priestly. But where this phenomenon of God's representative or envoy, which held through the entire middle ages, was most strongly maintained was in the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which finally disappeared in 1806. In “Holy” you have a whiff of what was divine during the ancient times on earth; “Roman” indicates the provenance, where it came from; “German Nation” was what it covered, the more secular element. Therefore in the second phase of imperialism we no longer merely have the Church's anointed imperialism, but we have the tangled web of the divine and the secular anointed in the empires. That already began in the old Roman Empire during pre-Christian times and extended into the late Middle Ages. But this imperial Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation always had a double character. Remember that it goes back to Karl the Great. But Karl the Great was crowned by the Pope in Rome. Therewith royal dignity became a symbol, so that what existed here on the physical earth was no longer reality. The people of the Middle Ages did not worship Karl the Great and Otto I as gods, which was the case in more ancient times, but they saw in them godly representatives. And that had to be continually confirmed, for of course it became ever weaker in consciousness. But it still retained a symbolic reality, a reality of signs. These emperors of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation went to Rome in order for the Pope to crown them. Istwan I was also crowned king of Hungary by the Pope in the year 1000. The anointment, and therefore the power, was bestowed on the world's rulers by the clergy. It was also thought that there was justification for other peoples being incorporated into the empire. Even Dante thought that the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was justified in ruling the whole world. So the formula for imperialism is even to be found in Dante. In fables and other lore where the events of history are crystallized in human consciousness, things are expressed from various viewpoints, not just one. We could say that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Europe the consciousness existed — not a clear one, more like a feeling — that once in ancient times in the Orient men lived on the physical earth who were themselves gods. They didn't think it was a superstition, oh no, rather they thought that such gods could no longer live on the earth because the earth had become so bad. That's been lost, what made men gods, the “Holy Grail” has been lost and now, in Central Europe, it can only be found in the way Percival found it: one seeks the way to find god within, whereas earlier god was a reality in the empire. Now the empire is merely a sum of symbols, of signs, and one must find the spirit in the symbols. Of all the things which once existed, only remnants remain. Reality is deadened. Remnants remain, remnants of the most diverse kind. Generally, as long as things are real, definite, they later become ambiguous. And thus in Europe diversity grew from clear reality. As long as the Holy Roman Empire had meaning in human consciousness, the representative of the empire was powerful and competent enough to subdue the individual angel-symbols, the local princes, for that consciousness included the emperor's right to do so. But his right rested more or less on something ideal, which more and more lost its meaning, and the local princes remained. So we have in the Holy Roman Empire something which gradually had its inner substance squeezed out until only the exterior remained. The consciousness that earthly men were representatives of God was lost. And the expression for the fact that people no longer believed that certain individuals were representatives of God is Protestantism — protest against the idea of men as representatives of God. If the principle of Protestantism had rigorously penetrated, no prince could have been crowned “by the Grace of God” again. But such things remained as remnants. These remnants remained until 1918, then they disappeared. These remnants, which had already lost all inner meaning, remained as outer appearances until then. The local German princes were the outer appearances; they only had meaning in those ancient times when they were symbols for an inspirational kingdom of heaven. Other remnants remained. Not so long ago a pastoral letter was written by a Central-European bishop — perhaps he was an Archbishop. In that pastoral letter he more or less claimed that the catholic priest is more powerful than Jesus Christ for the simple reason that when the Catholic priest performs the transubstantiation at the altar, Jesus Christ must be present in the Sanctissimum, in the Host. The transubstantiation must really take place through the priest's power. It means that the action performed by the priest forces the Christ Jesus to be present on the altar. Therefore the more powerful is not the Christ Jesus, but he who performs the transubstantiation at the altar! If we wish to understand such a thing which, as I said, appeared in a pastoral letter a few years ago, we must go back, not to the times of the second imperialism, but to the times of the first imperialism, many elements of which are retained in the Catholic Church and its institutions. Therein lies the remnant of the consciousness that those who rule on the earth are the gods, whereas the Christ Jesus is only the son of God. What was written in that pastoral letter is of course an impossibility for the Protestant mentality, just as for today it is almost impossible to believe that thousands of years ago people actually saw the ruler as God. But these are all real historical factors, real facts which played a role historically and are still present today. These earlier realities play strongly into later events. Just look at how Mohammedanism [Islam] has spread. Certainly Mohammed never said: Mohammed is your God — as it would have been said thousands of years earlier by an oriental ruler. He limited himself to what corresponded more to the times: There is a God , and Mohammed is his prophet. In people's consciousness he was God's representative — the second phase of imperialism. The manner in which Islam spread, however, corresponded to the first phase. For Muslims have never been intolerant towards other beliefs the way some others were. The Muslims were content to defeat the others and make them their subjects, just as it was in older times when a profession of faith was not required, for it was a matter of indifference what they believed if they just recognized God. And something also remained of the first phase of imperialism — strongly influenced by the second — in Russian despotism, in tsarism. The way in which he was recognized by his subjects goes back, at least partially, to the first phase of imperialism. It was not so much a question of what was in the consciousness of the Russian people, for the rulership of the tsars rested on the Germanic and the Mongolian elements rather than that of the Russian peasantry itself. Now we come to the third phase of imperialism. It has been formulated since the beginning of the twentieth century, since Chamberlain and his people coined the expression “Imperial Federation League,” but the causes go back to the second half of the seventeenth century, when that great upheaval occurred in England as a result of which everywhere in the west that the Anglo-American people lived, the king, who earlier had been God, then an anointed one, became a kind of mere shadow — one cannot say a decoration exactly, but rather something more tolerated than taken seriously. The English speaking peoples bring other preconditions to what we may call the people's will, the voting system, than, say, the French — the Latin peoples in general. The Latin peoples, especially the French, certainly carried out the revolution of the eighteenth century, but the French people today are more royal than any other. To be royal doesn't only mean to have a king at the top. Naturally a person whose head has been cut off cannot run around; but the French as a people are royal, imperialistic, without having a king. It has to do with the mood of soul. This “all are one” feeling, the national consciousness, is a real remnant of the Louis IV mentality. But the English-speaking peoples brought other preconditions to what we may call the people's will. And little by little this became what the elected parliaments decided, and thus the third form of imperialism developed, which was formulated by Chamberlain and others. But today we want to consider this third imperialism psychologically. The first imperialism had realities: One person was the God for the mentality of the other people. His paladins were the gods who surrounded him, sub-gods. The second form of imperialism: What was on the earth was the sign, the symbol. God acted within men. Third form of imperialism: Just as the previous evolution was from realities to signs and symbols, now the development is from symbols to platitudes. This is an objective description of the facts, without being emotionally tinged. Since the seventeenth century what has been called the will of the people in the public life of the Anglo-American peoples in the law books — of course categorized according to classes — is no more than empty platitudes. Between what is said and reality there is not even the relation which existed between the symbol and reality. So the psychological path is this: from reality to symbol and then to platitudes — to words which have been squeezed out, dried out, empty words. This is the reality of the third imperialism: squeezed out, empty words. And nobody imagines that they are divine, at least not where they originated. Just think about the basis of that imperialism, the ruling elements of which are empty platitudes: during the first imperialism the kings, in the second imperialism the anointed, now the empty platitudes. From majority decisions of course nothing real results, only a dominant empty platitude. The reality remains hidden. And now we come to an important factor upon which reality is based: the colonization system. Colonization played an important role in the development of this third imperialism. The “Imperial Federation League” summarizes the means of spreading imperialism to the colonies. But how do the colonies become part of the empire? Think back on real cases. Adventurers who no longer rightly fit into the empire, who are somewhat down at heel, go to the colonies, become rich, then spend their riches at home, but that doesn't make them respectable, they are still adventurers, bohemians. That's how the colonial empire is created. That is the reality behind the empty platitudes. But remnants remain. Just as symbols and empty platitudes remain as remnants of the original realities, or symbolic crowns on princes and tsars, also from the enterprises of the somewhat foul smelling colonists, realities remain. The adventurer's son is not so foul smelling, right? He already smells better. The grandson smells even better and a time comes when everything smells very good. The empty platitudes are now possessed by what smells good. The empty platitudes are now identified with the true reality. Now the state can spread its wings, it becomes the protector and everything has been made honest. It is necessary to call things by their real names — although the names seldom describe the reality. It's necessary because only thus can we understand what tasks and what responsibilities confront humanity in these times. Only in this way is it possible to realize what a fable convenue so called history really is, meaning that history which is taught in the schools and universities. That history does not call things by their real names. On the contrary, its effect is that the names describe what is false. What I have just described is something terrible, isn't it. But you see, it's a question of guiding the feelings towards responsibilities. Let's now consider the other side. Let's consider such an ancient empire. In people's minds it was an earthly reality; the priest-king came from the mysteries. The second was no longer earthly reality, it was symbolic. It is a long way from the godly jewelry the rulers and their paladins in the ancient oriental empires wore and the “Roter Adler” [Red Eagle] medals hung around people's necks long afterward. But that's how things evolved. It went from reality to nothing, not even a sign or symbol, but basically the expression of the empty platitude. Finally this empty platitude system, which has spread from the west to the rest of the world, has penetrated public affairs. I have even met court councilors — who anyway have little counseling to do — but what about the titular court councilors? Just an empty platitude hung on certain people and everything remains as before. Whereas in the first phase the physical reality was thought to be spiritual, in the future this physical reality may no longer be thought of as spiritual. Nevertheless, the spiritual must be present here in the physical world. That means that spiritual reality must exist alongside physical reality. The human being must move around here within the physical reality, and recognize a spiritual reality, must speak of it as something real, super-sensible, invisible, but which exists, which must be established among us. I have spoken about something quite terrible: about the platitude. But if the world had not become so platitude oriented, there would be no room for the introduction of a spiritual empire. Precisely because everything old has now become platitudes, a space has come into being in which the spiritual empire can enter. Especially in the west, in the Anglo-American world people will continue to speak in the usual terminology, things that come from the past. It will continue to roll on like a bowling ball. It will roll on in the words. You can find innumerable expressions especially in the west which have lost all meaning, but are still used. But not only in these expressions, but in everything described by the old words the empty platitude lives, in which there is no reality, for it has been squeezed out. That is where the spiritual, which has nothing of the old in it, can find room. The old must first become empty platitude, everything that continues to roll on in speech thrown overboard, and something completely new must enter, which can only propagate as a world of the spirit. Only then can there be a kingdom of Christ on earth. For in that empire a reality must exist: “My kingdom is not of this world.” In the kingdom of this world, in which the kingdom of Christ will propagate, there will exist much that has not become empty platitude. But in the western world, everything originating in ancient times is destined to become platitude. Yes, in the west, in the Anglo-American world, all human tradition will become platitude. Therefore the responsibility exists to fill the empty vessel with spirit, about which can be said: “This kingdom is not of this world!” That is the great responsibility. It's not important how something came about, but what we do with what has come about. That is the situation. Tomorrow we will speak about what can be done, for under the surface, especially in the western countries, the secret societies are most active, trying to insert the second phase of imperialism into the third. For in the Anglo-American people you have two imperialisms pushed together, the economic one of a Chamberlain and the symbolic imperialism of the secret societies, which play a very effective role, but which are kept secret from the people. |
GA 30. Two Essays on Haeckel |
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How deep-rooted is the prejudice against the idea of evolution can be seen at any moment by the objections which our philosophical contemporaries make against it. Otto Liebmann, who, in his Analysis of Reality and his Thoughts and Facts, has subjected the fundamental views of science to criticism, expresses himself in a remarkable manner about the conception of evolution. |
Whoever says, on the contrary, purpose is in no way whatever operative in the production of the organic world; living creatures come into existence according to necessary laws just as do inorganic phenomena, and purposefulness is only there because that which is not purposeful cannot maintain itself; it is not the cause of what happens, but its consequence: he makes confession of Darwinism. No heed is paid to this by anyone who asserts, like Otto Liebmann, “Charles Darwin is one of the greatest teleologists of the present day” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. i, p. 113). No, he is the greatest anti-teleologist, because he would show to such minds as Liebmann, if they understood him, that the purposeful can be explained without assuming the action of operative purposes. |
GA 30. Two Essays on Haeckel |
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Goethe has given glorious expression, in his book upon Winkelmann, to the feeling which a man has when he contemplates his position within the world: “When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, worthy, and valuable whole, when harmonious contentment yields him pure, free rapture, then would the universe, could it but feel itself, burst forth into rejoicing at having attained its goal, and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.” From out of this feeling there arises the most important question that man can ask himself: how is his own becoming and being linked with that of the whole world? Schiller, in a letter to Goethe of 23rd August, 1794, admirably characterises the road by which Goethe sought to come to a knowledge of human nature. “From the simple organism you ascend step by step to the more complex, in order finally to build up the most complex of all, man, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature.” Now this road of Goethe's is also that which natural science has been following for the last forty years, in order to solve “the question of questions for humanity.” Huxley sees the problem to be the determination of the position which “man occupies in nature, and his relation to the totality of things.” It is the great merit of Charles Darwin to have created a new scientific basis for reflection upon this question. The facts which he brought forward in 1859 in his work, The Origin of Species, and the principles which he there developed, gave to natural research the possibility of showing, in its own way, how well founded was Goethe's conviction that Nature, “after a thousand animal types, forms a being that contains them all — man.” To-day we look back upon forty years of scientific development, which stand under the influence of Charles Darwin's line of thought. Rightly could Ernst Haeckel say in his book, On our Present Knowledge of Man's Origin, which reproduces an address delivered by him at the Fourth International Congress of Zoologists in Cambridge on 26th August, 1898: “Forty years of Darwinism! What a huge progress in our knowledge of Nature! And what a revolution in our weightiest views, not only in the more closely affected departments, but also in that of anthropology, and equally in all the so-called psychological sciences.” Goethe, from his profound insight into Nature, foresaw to its full extent this revolution and its significance for the progress of man's intellectual culture. We see this particularly clearly from a conversation which he had with Soret on 2nd August, 1830. At that time the news of the beginning of the Revolution of July reached Weimar and caused general excitement. When Soret visited Goethe, he was received with the words: “Now, what do you think of this great event? The volcano has burst into eruption; all is in flames, and it is no longer a conference behind closed doors!” Soret naturally could only believe that Goethe was speaking of the July Revolution, and replied that under the known conditions nothing else could be expected than that it would end with the expulsion of the Royal family. But Goethe had something quite different in his mind. “1 am not talking of those people at all; I am concerned with quite other things. I am speaking of the conflict, so momentous for science, between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire that has come to a public outbreak in the Academy.” The conflict concerned the question whether each species in which organic nature finds expression possesses a distinct architectural plan of its own, or whether there is one plan common to them all. Goethe had already settled this question for himself forty years earlier. His eager study of the plant and animal worlds had made him an opponent of the Linnæan view, that we “count as many species as different forms were created in the beginning (in principio).” Anyone holding such an opinion can only strive to discover what are the plans upon which the separate species are organised. He will seek above all carefully to distinguish these separate forms. Goethe followed another road. “That which Linnaeus strove forcibly to hold apart was bound, according to the innermost need of my being, to strive after reunion.” Thus there grew up in him the view which, in 1796, in the Lectures upon the three first chapters of A General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, he summed up in the sentence: “This, then, we have gained, that we can unhesitatingly maintain that all complete organic natures — among which we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and, as the head of the last, man — have all been shaped according to one original type, which only inclines more or less to this side or the other in its constant parts, and yet daily develops and transforms itself by reproduction.” The basic type, to which all the manifold plant-forms may be traced back, had already been described by Goethe in 1790 in his Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants. This way of regarding things, by which Goethe endeavoured to recognise the laws of living nature, is exactly similar to that which he demands for the inorganic world in his essay, written in 1793, Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject: “Nothing happens in Nature which is not in some connection with the whole, and if experiences only appear to us as isolated, if we can only regard experiments as isolated facts, that does not imply that they actually are isolated; it is only the question: How shall we find the connection of these phenomena, these occurrences?” Species also appear to us only in isolation. Goethe seeks for their connection. Hence it clearly appears that Goethe's effort was directed to apply the same mode of explanation to the study of living beings as has led to the goal in that of inorganic nature.
How far he had run ahead of his time with such conceptions becomes apparent when one reflects that at the same time when Goethe published his Metamorphosis, Kant sought to prove scientifically, in his Critique of Judgment, the impossibility of an explanation of the living according to the same principles as hold for the lifeless. He maintained: “It is quite certain that we cannot even adequately learn to know, far less explain to ourselves, the organised beings and their inner possibility according to purely mechanical principles of nature; and, indeed, it is so certain that we can boldly say it is senseless for man even to conceive such a purpose, or to hope that sometime perhaps a Newton may arise who will make comprehensible the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no purpose has ordered; rather one must simply and flatly deny any such insight to man.” Haeckel repudiates this thought with the words: “Now, however, this impossible Newton really appeared seventy years later in Darwin, and, as a matter of fact, solved the problem whose solution Kant had declared to be absolutely unthinkable!” That the revolution in scientific views brought about by Darwinism must take place, Goethe knew full well, for it corresponds with his own way of conceiving things. In the view which Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire defended against Cuvier, that all organic forms carry in them a “general plan modified only here and there,” he recognised his own again. Therefore he could say to Soret: “Now, however, Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is decidedly on our side, and with him all his important disciples and followers in France. This event is for me of quite extraordinary value, and I rejoice rightly over the general victory gained at length by a cause to which I have devoted my life, and which is most especially my very own.” Of still greater value for Goethe's view of Nature are, however, the discoveries of Darwin. Goethe's view of Nature is related to Darwinism in a way similar to that in which the insights of Copernicus and Kepler into the structure and movements of the planetary system are related to the discovery by Newton of the law of the universal attraction of all heavenly bodies. This law reveals the scientific causes, why the planets move in the manner which Copernicus and Kepler had described. And Darwin found the natural causes, why the common original type of all organic beings, which Goethe assumed, makes its appearance in the various species. The doubt as to the view that there underlies each distinct organic species a special plan of organisation, unchangeable for all time, took firm hold upon Darwin upon a journey which he undertook to South America and Australia in the summer of 1831 as naturalist on the ship Beagle. As to how his thought ripened, we get an idea in reaching such communications from him as the following: “When, during the voyage of the Beagle, I visited the Galapagos Archipelago, which lies in the Pacific Ocean some five hundred English miles from the South American coast, I saw myself surrounded by peculiar kinds of birds, reptiles, and snakes, which exist nowhere else in the world. Yet they almost all bore upon them an American character. In the song of the mocking thrush, in the sharp cry of the carrion hawk, in the great chandelier-like Opuntico, I clearly perceived the neighbourhood of America; and yet these islands were separated from the mainland by so many miles, and differed widely from it in their geological constitution and their climate. Yet more surprising was the fact that most of the inhabitants of each separate island of this small archipelago were specifically different, although closely related to one another. I often asked myself, then, how these peculiar animals and men had originated. The simplest answer seemed to be that the inhabitants of the different islands descend from one another, and in the course of their descent had undergone modifications, and that all the inhabitants of the archipelago had descended from those of the nearest mainland, viz., America, from which naturally the colonisation would proceed. But it long remained for me an unintelligible problem: how the necessary degree of modification could have been attained.” As to this “how,” it was the numerous breeding experiments which he tried, after his return home, with pigeons, fowls, dogs, rabbits, and garden plants that enlightened Darwin. He saw from them in how high a degree there lies in organic forms the possibility of continually modifying themselves in the course of their reproduction. It is possible, by creating artificial conditions, to obtain from a given form after a few generations new kinds, which differ much more from each other than do those in Nature, whose difference is regarded as so great that one inclines to ascribe to each a special underlying plan of organisation. As is well known, the breeder utilises this variability of kinds to bring about the development of such forms of domesticated organisms as correspond with his intentions. He endeavours to create the conditions which guide the variation in a direction answering his purpose. If he seeks to breed a kind of sheep with specially fine wool, he seeks out among his flock those individuals which have the finest wool. These he allows to breed. From among their descendants he again selects for further breeding those which have the finest wool. If this is carried on through a series of generations, a species of sheep is obtained which differs materially from its ancestors in the formation of its wool. The same thing can be done with other characteristics of living creatures. From these facts two things become obvious: that organic forms have a tendency to vary, and that they pass on the acquired modifications to their descendants. Owing to this first property of living creatures, the breeder is able to develop in his species certain characteristics that answer his purposes; owing to the second, these new characteristics are handed on from one generation to the next. The thought now lies close at hand, that in Nature also, left to itself, the forms continually vary. And the great power of variation of domesticated organisms does not force us to assume that this property of organic forms is confined within certain limits. We may rather presuppose that in the lapse of vast time-periods a certain form transforms itself into a totally different one, which in its formation diverges from the former to the utmost extent imaginable. The most natural inference then, is this, that the organic species have not arisen independently, each according to a special plan of structure, alongside each other; but that in course of time they have evolved the one from the other. This idea gains support from the views at which Lyell arrived in the history of the earth's development, and which he first published in 1830 in his Principles of Geology. The older geological views, according to which the formation of the earth was supposed to have been accomplished in a series of violent catastrophes, were thereby superseded. Through this doctrine of catastrophes it was sought to explain the results to which the investigation of the earth's solid crust had led. The different strata of the earth's crust, and the fossilised organic creatures contained in them, are of course the vestiges of what once took place on the earth's surface. The followers of the doctrine of violent transformations believed that the development of the earth had been accomplished in successive periods, definitely distinguished from one another. At the end of such a period there occurred a catastrophe. Everything living was destroyed, and its remains preserved in an earth-stratum. On the top of what had been destroyed there arose a completely new world, which must be created afresh. In the place of this doctrine of catastrophes, Lyell set up the view that the crust of the earth has been gradually moulded in the course of very long periods of time, by the same processes which still in our time are going on every day on the earth's surface. It has been the action of the rivers carrying mud away from one spot and depositing it on another; the work of the glaciers, which grind away rocks and stones, forward blocks of stone, and analogous processes, which, in their steady, slow working have given to the earth's surface its present configuration. This view necessarily draws after it the further conclusion that the present-day forms of plants and animals also have gradually developed themselves out of those whose remains are preserved for us in fossils. Now, it results from the processes of artificial breeding that one form can really transform itself into another. There remains only the question, by what means are those conditions for this transformation, which the breeder brings about by artificial means, created in Nature itself? In artificial breeding human intelligence chooses the conditions so that the new forms coming into existence answer to the purposes which the breeder is following out. Now, the organic forms living in Nature are in general purposefully adapted to the conditions under which they live. A mere glance into Nature will teach one the truth of this fact. Plant and animal species are so constructed that they can maintain and reproduce themselves in the conditions under which they live. It is just this purposeful arrangement which has given rise to the supposition that organic forms cannot be explained in the same way as the facts of inorganic Nature. Kant observes in his Critique of Judgment: “The analogy of the forms, in so far as they seem to be produced in accordance with a common basic plan, despite all differences, strengthens the presumption of a real relationship between them in their generation from a common mother through an approach, step by step, of one animal species to another. ... Here, therefore, it is open to the archaeologist of Nature to cause to arise that great family of creatures (for one would be forced to conceive them thus if the thoroughgoing connected relationship spoken of is to hold good) from the traces left over of her older revolutions, according to all their known and supposed mechanisms. But he must equally for that purpose ascribe to this common mother an organisation purposely fitted to all these creatures, for otherwise the purposive form of the products of the plant and animal kingdoms is unthinkable as to its possibility.” If we would explain organic forms after the same manner in which natural science deals with inorganic phenomena, we must demonstrate that the particular arrangement of the organisms — devoid of a purposeful object — comes into being by reason of what is practically natural necessity, even as one elastic ball after having been struck by another is fulfilling a law as it rolls along. This requirement has its fulfilment in Darwin's teachings regarding natural selection. Even in Nature organic forms must, in accordance with their capacity for assimilating modifications which have been brought about by artificial breeding, become transformed. Should there be nothing available for directly bringing about the change, so that none but the forms aimed at should come into existence, there will be, regardless of choice, useless, or less useful, forms called into being. Now, Nature is extremely wasteful in the bringing forth of her germs. So many germs are, indeed, produced upon our earth, that were they all to attain to development we should soon be able to fill several worlds with them. This great number of germs is confronted with but a comparatively small amount of food and space, the result of this being a universal struggle for existence among organic beings. Only the fit survive and fructify; the unfit have to go under. The fittest, however, will be those who have adapted themselves in the best possible way to the surrounding conditions of life. The absolutely unintentional, and yet — from natural causes — necessary, struggle for existence brings in its train the same results as are attained by the intelligence of the breeder with his cultivated organisms: he creates purposeful (useful) organic forms. This, broadly sketched, is the meaning of Darwin's theory of natural selection in the struggle for existence; or, otherwise, the “selective theory.” By this theory, that which Kant held to be impossible is reached: the thinking out in all its possibilities of a predetermined form in the animal and vegetable kingdom, without assuming the Universal Mother to be dowered with an organism directly productive of all these creatures. As Newton by pointing out the general attraction of the heavenly bodies showed why they moved in the set courses determined by Copernicus and Kepler, so did it now become possible to explain with the help of the theory of selection how in Nature the evolution of the living thing takes place, the course of which Goethe, in his Metamorphosis of Plants, has observed: “We can, however, say this, namely, that proceeding from a relationship that is hardly distinguishable between animal and plant, creatures do little by little evolve, carrying on their development in opposite directions — the plant finally reaching its maturity in the form of the tree, and the animal finding its culminating glory in man's freedom and activity.” Goethe has said of his ancestors: “I shall not rest until I have found a pregnant point from which many deductions may be made; or, rather, one that will forcibly bestow upon me the overflow of its own abundance.” The theory of selection became for Ernst Haeckel the point from which he was able to deduce a conception of the universe entirely in accordance with natural science. At the beginning of the last century Jean Lamarck also maintained the view that, at a certain moment in the earth's development, a most simple organic something developed itself, by spontaneous generation, out of the mechanical, physical, and chemical processes. These simplest organisms then produced more perfect ones, and these again others more highly organised, right up to man. “One might therefore quite rightly name this part of the theory of evolution, which asserts the common origin of all plant and animal species from the simplest common root-forms, in honour of its most deserving founder, Lamarckianism” (Haeckel, Natural History of Creation). Haeckel has given in grandiose style an explanation of Lamarckianism by means of Darwinism. The key to this explanation Haeckel found by seeking out the evidences in the individual development of the higher organisms — in their ontogeny — showing that they really originated from lower forms of life. When one follows out the form-development of one of the higher organisms from the earliest germ up to its fully developed condition, the different stages are found to present configurations corresponding to the forms of lower organisms. At the outset of his individual existence man and every other animal is a simple cell. This cell divides itself, and from it arises a germinal vesicle consisting of many cells. From that develops the so-called “cup-germ,” the two-layered gastrula, which has the shape of a cup- or jug-like body. Now, the lower plant-animals (sponges, polyps, and so on) remain throughout their entire existence on a level of development which is equivalent to this cup-germ. Haeckel remarks thereupon: “This fact is of extraordinary importance. For we see that man, and generally every vertebrate, runs rapidly, in passing, through a two-leaved stage of formation, which in these lowest plant-animals is maintained throughout life” (Anthropogenesis). Such a parallelism between the developmental stages of the higher organisms and the developed lower forms may be followed out through the entire evolutionary history. Haeckel clothes this fact in the words: “The brief ontogenesis or development of the individual is a rapid and abbreviated repetition, a condensed recapitulation of the prolonged phylogenesis or development of the species.” This sentence gives expression to the so-called fundamental biogenetic law. Why then do the higher organisms in the course of their development come to forms which resemble lower ones? The natural explanation is that the former have developed themselves out of the latter; that therefore every organism in its individual development shows us one after another the forms which have clung to it as heirlooms from its lower ancestors. The simplest organism that once upon a time formed itself on earth, transforms itself in the course of reproduction into new forms. Of these, the best adapted in the struggle for existence survive, and transmit their peculiarities to their descendants. All the formations and qualities which an organism exhibits at the present time have arisen in the lapse of enormous time-periods by adaptation and inheritance. Heredity and adaptation are thus the causes of the world of organic forms. Thus, by investigating the relationship of individual developmental history (ontogeny) to the history of the race (phylogeny), Haeckel has given the scientific explanation of the manifold organic forms. As a natural philosopher he has satisfied the human demand for knowledge, which Schiller had derived from observation of Goethe's mind; he ascended from the simple organisations step by step to the more complicated, to finally build up genetically the most complex of all, man, from the materials of the whole structure of Nature. He has set forth his view in several grandly designed works — in his General Morphology (1866), in his Natural History of Creation (1868), in his Anthropogenesis (1874) — in which he “undertook the first and hitherto the only attempt to establish critically in detail the zoological family-tree of man, and to discuss at length the entire animal ancestry of our race.” To these works there has been further added in recent years his three-volumed Systematic Phylogeny.
It is characteristic of Haeckel's deeply philosophical nature that, after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, he at once recognised the full significance for man's entire conception of the Universe, of the principles therein established; and it speaks much for his philosophical enthusiasm that he boldly and tirelessly combated all the prejudices which arose against the acceptance of the new truth by the creed of modern thought. The necessity that all modern scientific thinking should reckon with Darwinism was expounded by Haeckel at the fiftieth meeting of German scientists and doctors on the 22nd September, 1877, in his address, The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole. He delivered a widely-embracing Confession of Faith of a Man of Science on the 9th October, 1892, in Altenburg at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society for Natural Science of the Osterland. (This address was printed under the title, Monism as a link between Religion and Science, Bonn, 1892.) What has been yielded by the remodelled doctrine of evolution and our present scientific knowledge towards the answering of the “question of questions,” he has recently expounded in its broad lines in the address mentioned above, On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man. Herein Haeckel handles afresh the conclusion, which follows as a matter of course from Darwinism for every logical thinker, that man has developed out of the lower vertebrates, and further, more immediately from true apes. It has been, however, this necessary conclusion which has summoned to battle all the old prejudices of theologians, philosophers, and all who are under their spell. Doubtless, people would have accepted the emergence of the single animal and plant forms from one another if only this assumption had not carried with it at once the recognition of the animal descent of man. “It remains,” as Haeckel emphasised in his Natural History of Creation, “an instructive fact that this recognition — after the appearance of the first Darwinian work — was in no sense general, that on the contrary numerous critics of the first Darwinian book (and among them very famous names) declared themselves in complete agreement with Darwinism, but entirely rejected its application to man.” With a certain appearance of justice, people relied in so doing on Darwin's book itself, in which no word is said of this application. Because he drew this conclusion unreservedly, Haeckel was reproached with being “more Darwinian than Darwin.” True, that held good only till the year 1871, in which appeared Darwin's work, The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection, in which Darwin himself maintained that inference with great boldness and clearness. It was rightly recognised that with this conclusion must fall a conception belonging to the most treasured among the collection of older human prejudices: the conception that the “soul of man” is a special being all to itself, having quite another, a different, “higher origin” from all other things in Nature. The doctrine of descent must naturally lead to the view that man's soul-activities are only a special form of those physiological functions which are found in his vertebrate ancestors, and that these activities have evolved themselves with the same necessity from the mental activities of the animals, as the brain of man, which is the material condition of his intellect, has evolved out of the vertebrate brain. It was not only the men with old conceptions of faith nurtured in the various ecclesiastical religions who rebelled against the new confession, but also all those who had indeed apparently freed themselves from these conceptions of faith, but whose minds nevertheless still thought in the sense of these conceptions. In what follows the proof will be given that to this latter class of minds belong a series of philosophers and scientific scholars of high standing who have combated Haeckel, and who still remain opponents of the views he advocated. To these ally themselves also those who are entirely lacking in the power of drawing the necessary logical conclusions from a series of facts lying before them. I wish here to describe the objections which Haeckel had to combat. A bright light is thrown upon the relationship of man to the higher vertebrates, by the truth which Huxley, in 1863, expressed in his volume on Man's Place in Nature, and other Anthropological Essays: “Thus whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result — that the structural differences which separate man from the gorilla and the chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the gorilla from the lower apes” (see Man and the Lower Animals, p. 144). With the help of this fact it is possible to establish man's animal line of ancestry in the sense of the Darwinian doctrine of descent. Man has common ancestors with the apes in some species of apes that have died out. By a corresponding utilisation of the knowledge which comparative anatomy and physiology, individual developmental history, and palaeontology supply, Haeckel has followed the animal ancestors of man lying still more remotely in the past, through the semi-apes, the marsupials, the earliest fishes, right up to the very earliest animals consisting only of a single cell. He is fully entitled to ask: “Are the phenomena of the individual development of man in any way less wonderful than the palaeontological development from lower organisms? Why should not man have evolved in the course of enormous periods of time from unicellular original forms, since every individual runs through this same development from the cell to the fully developed organism?” But it is also by no means easy for the human mind to construct for itself conceptions in accordance with Nature as regards the unfoldment of the single organism from the germ up to the developed condition. We can see this from the ideas which a scientist like Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) and a philosopher like Leibnitz (1646-1716) formed about this development. Haller maintained the view that the germ of an organism already contains in miniature, but fully and completely formed in advance, all the parts which make their appearance during its development. Thus, development is taken to be not the formation of something new in what is already present, but the unfolding of something that was already there but invisible to the eye because of its minuteness. But if this view were correct, then in the first germ of an animal or vegetable form all following generations must be already contained like boxes one inside the other. And Haller actually drew this conclusion. He assumed that in the first human germ of our root-mother, Eve, the entire human race was already present in miniature. And even Leibnitz also can only imagine the development of men as an unfoldment of what already exists: “So I should opine that the souls, which some day will be human souls, were already there in germ, like those of other species, that they existed in man's ancestors up to Adam, therefore from the beginning of things, always in the form of organised bodies.” The human understanding has a tendency to imagine to itself that anything coming into existence was somehow already there, in some form or other, before its manifestation. The entire organism is supposed to be already hidden in the germ; the distinct organic classes, orders, families, species, and kinds are supposed to have existed as the thoughts of a creator before they actually came into existence. Now, however, the idea of evolution demands that we should conceive the arising of something new, of something later, from out of something already present, of something earlier. We are called upon to understand that which has become, out of the becoming. That we cannot do, if we regard all that has become as something which has always been there. How great the prejudices are that the idea of evolution had to face was clearly shown by the reception which Caspar Friedrich Wolff's Theoria Generationis, which appeared in 1759, met with among the men of science who accepted Haller's views. It was demonstrated in this book that in the human ovum not even a trace of the form of the developed organism is present, but that its development consists in a series of new formations. Wolff defended the idea of a real evolution, an epigenesis, a becoming from what is not present, as against the view of seeming evolution. Haeckel says of Wolff's book that it “belongs, in spite of its small size and awkward language, to the most valuable writings in the whole field of biological literature. ...” Nevertheless, this remarkable book had at first no success whatever. Although scientific studies, as a result of the stimulus imparted by Linnaeus, flourished mightily at that time, although botanists and zoologists were soon counted no longer by dozens but by hundreds, yet no one troubled himself about Wolff's Theory of Generation. The few, however, who had read it, held it to be fundamentally wrong, and especially Haller. Although Wolff proved by the most accurate observations the truth of epigenesis, and disproved the current hypotheses of the preformation doctrine, nevertheless the “exact” physiologist Haller remained the most zealous follower of the latter and rejected the correct teaching of Wolff with his dictatorial edict: “There is no becoming” (Nulla est epigenesis!). With so much power did human thinking set itself against a view, of which Haeckel (in his Anthropogenesis) remarks: “To-day we can hardly any longer call this theory of epigenesis a theory, because we have fully convinced ourselves of the correctness of the fact, and can demonstrate it at any moment with the help of the microscope.” How deep-rooted is the prejudice against the idea of evolution can be seen at any moment by the objections which our philosophical contemporaries make against it. Otto Liebmann, who, in his Analysis of Reality and his Thoughts and Facts, has subjected the fundamental views of science to criticism, expresses himself in a remarkable manner about the conception of evolution. In face of the facts, he cannot deny the justice of the conception that higher organisms proceed from lower. He therefore endeavours to represent the range and importance of this conception for the higher need of explanation as being as small as possible. “Accepted, the theory of descent ... granted that it be complete, that the great genealogical register of Nature's organic beings lies open before us; and that, not as an hypothesis, but as historically proven fact, what should we then have? A gallery of ancestors, such as one finds also in princely castles; only not as a fragment, but as a completed whole.” This means that nothing of any consequence has been accomplished towards the real explanation, when one has shown how what appears later proceeds as a new formation from what preceded. Now it is interesting to see how Liebmann's presuppositions lead him yet again to the assumption that what arises on the road of evolution was there already before its appearance. In the recently published second part of his Thoughts and Facts he maintains: “It is true that for us, to whom the world appears in the form of perception known as time, the seed is there before the plant; begetting and conception come before the animal that arises from them, and the development of the embryo into a full-grown creature is a process of time and drawn out in time to a certain length. In the timeless world-being, on the contrary, which neither becomes nor passes away, but is once and for all, maintaining itself unchangeably amid the stream of happenings, and for which no future, no past, but only an eternal present exists, this before and after, this earlier and later, falls away entirely. ... That which unrolls itself for us in the course of time as the slower or more rapidly passing succession of a series of phases of development, is in the omnipresent, permanent world-being a fixed law, neither coming into existence nor passing away.” The connection of such philosophical conceptions with the ideas of the various religious doctrines as to the creation may be easily seen. That purposefully devised beings arise in Nature, without there being some fundamental activity or power which infuses that purposefulness into the beings in question, is something that neither these religious doctrines nor such philosophical thinkers as Liebmann will admit. The view that accords with Nature follows out the course of what happens, and sees beings arise which have the quality of purposefulness, without this same purpose having been a co-determinant in their production. The purposefulness came about along with them; but the purpose did not co-operate in their becoming. The religious mode of conception has recourse to the Creator, who has created the creatures purposefully according to his preconceived plan; Liebmann turns to a timeless world-being, but he still makes that which is purposeful be brought forth by the purpose. “The goal or the purpose is here not later, and also not earlier than the means; but the purpose helps it on in virtue of a timeless necessity.” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. ii, p. 268.) Liebmann is a good example of those philosophers who have apparently freed themselves from the conceptions of faith, but who still think altogether on the lines of such conceptions. They profess that their thoughts are determined purely by reasonable considerations, but none the less it is an innate theological prejudice which gives the direction to their thoughts.
Reasoned reflection must therefore agree with Haeckel when he says: “Either organisms have naturally developed themselves, and in that case they must all originate from the simplest common ancestral forms — or that is not the case, the various species of organisms have arisen independently of one another, and in that case they can only have been created in a supernatural manner, by a miracle. Natural evolution or supernatural creation of species — we must choose between these two possibilities, for there is no third!” (Free Science and Free Teaching, p. 9.) What has been proffered by philosophers or scientists as such a third alternative against the doctrine of natural evolution shows itself, on closer examination, to be only a belief in creation which more or less veils or denies its origin. When we raise the question as to the origin of species in its most important form, in that which concerns the origin of man, there are only two answers possible. Either a consciousness endowed with reason is not present prior to its actual appearance in the world, but evolves as the outcome of the nervous system concentrated in the brain; or else an all-dominating world-reason exists before all other beings, and so shapes matter that in man its own image comes into being. Haeckel (in Monism as the Link between Religion and Science, p. 21) describes the becoming of the human mind as follows: “As our human body has slowly and step by step built itself up from a long series of vertebrate ancestors, so the same thing holds good of our soul: as a function of our brain it has developed itself step by step in interaction with that organ. What we term for short the ‘human soul’ is indeed only the sum-total of our feeling, willing, and thinking — the sum-total of physiological functions whose elementary organs consist of the microscopic ganglionic cells of our brain. Comparative anatomy and ontogeny show us how the marvellous structure of the latter, of our human soul-organ, has built itself upwards gradually in the course of millions of years out of the brain-forms of the higher and lower vertebrates; while comparative psychology shows us how, hand in hand therewith, the very soul itself — as a function of the brain — has evolved itself. The latter shows us also how a lower form of soul activity is already present in the lowest animals, in the unicellular protozoa, infusoria, and rhizopods. Every scientist who, like myself, has observed through long years the life-activity of these unicellular protista, is positively convinced that they also possess a soul; this ‘cell-soul,’ too, consists of a sum of feelings, representations, and volitions; the feeling, thinking, and willing of our human soul is only different therefrom in degree.” The totality of human soul-activities, which find their highest expression in unitary self-consciousness, corresponds to the complex structure of the human brain, just as simple feeling and willing do to the organisation of the protozoa. The progress of physiology, which we owe to investigators like Goltz, Münk, Wernicke, Edinger, Paul Flechsig, and others, enables us to-day to assign particular soul-manifestations to definite parts of the brain as their special functions. We recognise in four tracts of the grey matter of the cortex the mediators of four kinds of feeling: the sphere of bodily organic feeling in the meso-cranum lobule, that of smell in the frontal lobule, that of vision in the chief basal lobule, that of hearing in the temple lobule. The thinking which connects and orders the sensations has its apparatus between these four “sense-foci.” Haeckel links the following remark to the discussion of these latest physiological results: “The four thought-foci, distinguished by peculiar and highly complicated nerve-structure from the intervening sense-foci, are the true organs of thought, the only real tools of our mental life” (On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man, P-15). Haeckel demands from the psychologists that they shall take such results as these into account in their explanations about the nature of the soul, and not build up a mere pseudo-science composed of a fantastic metaphysic, of one-sided, so-called inner observation of soul-events, uncritical comparison, misunderstood perceptions, incomplete experiences, speculative aberrations and religious dogmas. As against the reproach that is cast by this view at the old-fashioned psychology, we find in some philosophers and also in individual scientists the assertion that there cannot in any case be contained in the material processes of the brain that which we class together as mind and spirit; for the material processes in the areas of sense and thought are in no case representations, feelings, and thoughts, but only material phenomena. We cannot learn to know the real nature of thoughts and feelings through external observation, but only through inner experience, through purely mental self-observation. Gustav Bunge, for instance, in his address Vitalism and Mechanism, p. 12, explains: “In activity — therein lies the riddle of life. But we have not acquired the conception of activity from observation through the senses, but from self-observation, from the observation of willing as it comes into our consciousness, as it reveals itself to our inner sense.” Many thinkers see the mark of a philosophical mind in the ability to rise to the insight that it is a turning upside down of the right relation of things, to endeavour to understand mental processes from material ones. Such objections point to a misunderstanding of the view of the world which Haeckel represents. Anyone who has really been saturated with the spirit of this view will never seek to explore the laws of mental life by any other road than by inner experience, by self-observation. The opponents of the scientific mode of thought talk exactly as if its supporters sought to discover the truths of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so forth, not by means of observing mental phenomena as such, but from the results of brain-anatomy. The caricature of the scientific world-conception thus created by such opponents for themselves is then termed materialism, and they are untiring in ever repeating afresh that this view must be unproductive, because it ignores the mental side of existence, or at least gives it a lower place at the expense of the material. Otto Liebmann, whom we may here cite once more, because his anti-scientific conceptions are typical of the mode of thought of certain philosophers and laymen, observes: “But granting, however, that natural science had attained its goal, it would then be in a position to show me accurately the physico-organic reasons why I hold that the assertion ‘twice two are four’ is true and assert it, and the other assertion ‘twice two are five’ is false and combat it, or why I must, just at this moment, write these very lines on paper the while I am entangled in the subjective belief that this happens because I will to write them down on account of their truth as assumed by me” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. ii, p. 294 et seq.). No scientific thinker will ever be of opinion that bodily-organic reasons can throw any light upon what, in the logical sense, is true or false. Mental connections can only be recognised from the side of the mental life. What is logically justified, must always be decided by logic; what is artistically perfect, by the aesthetic judgment. But it is an altogether different question to inquire: How does logical thinking, or the aesthetic judgment arise as a function of the brain? It is on this question only that comparative physiology and brain-anatomy have anything to say. And these show that the reasoning consciousness does not exist in isolation for itself, only utilising the human brain in order to express itself through it, as the piano-player plays on the piano; but that our mental powers are just as much functions of the form-elements of our brain, as “every force is a function of a material body” (Haeckel, Anthropogenesis, pt. ii, p. 853). The essence of Monism consists in the assumption that all occurrences in the world, from the simplest mechanical ones upwards to the highest human intellectual creations, evolve themselves naturally in the same sense, and that everything which is called in for the explanation of appearances, must be sought within that same world. Opposed to this view stands Dualism, which regards the pure operation of natural law as insufficient to explain appearances, and takes refuge in a reasoning being ruling over the appearances from above. Natural science, as has been shown, must reject this dualism. Now, however, it is urged from the side of philosophy that the means at the disposal of science are insufficient to establish a world-conception. From its own standpoint science was entirely right in explaining the whole world-process as a chain of causes and effects, in the sense of a purely mechanical conformity to law; but behind these laws, nevertheless, there is hidden the real cause, the universal world-reason, which only avails itself of mechanical means in order to realise higher, purposeful relations. Thus, for instance, Arthur Drews, who follows in the path of Eduard von Hartmann, observes: “Human works of art, too, are produced in a mechanical manner, that is when one looks only at the outward succession of single moments, without reflecting on the fact that after all there is hidden behind all this only the artist's thought; nevertheless one would rightly take that man for a fool who would perchance contend that the work was produced purely mechanically ... that which presents itself as the inevitable effect of a cause, on that lower standpoint which contents itself with merely gazing at the effects and thus contemplates the entire process as it were from behind, that very same thing reveals itself, when seen from the front, in every case as the intended goal of the means employed” (German Speculation since Kant, vol. ii, p. 287 et seq.). And Eduard von Hartmann himself remarks about the struggle for existence which renders it possible to explain living creatures naturally: “The struggle for existence, and therewith the whole of natural selection, is only the servant of the Idea, who is obliged to perform the lower services in its realisation, namely, the rough hewing and fitting of the stones that the master-builder has measured out and typically determined in advance according to their place in the great building. To proclaim this selection in the struggle for existence as the essentially adequate principle of explanation of the evolution of the organic kingdom, would be on a par with a day-labourer, who had worked with others in preparing the stones in the building of Cologne Cathedral, declaring himself to be the architect of that work of art” (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 10th ed., vol. iii, p. 403). If these conceptions were justified, it would be the task of philosophy to seek the artist behind the work of art. In fact, philosophers have tried the most various and diverse dualistic explanations to account for Cosmic processes. They have constructed in thought certain entities, supposed to hover behind the phenomena as the spirit of the artist rules behind the work of art. No scientific consideration would be able to rob man of the conviction that perceptible phenomena are guided by beings outside the world, if he could find within his own consciousness anything that pointed to such beings. What could anatomy and physiology accomplish with their declaration that soul-activities are functions of the brain, if observation of these activities yielded anything which could be regarded as a higher ground for an explanation? If the philosopher were able to show that a universal world-reason manifests itself in human reason, then all scientific results would be powerless to refute such knowledge. Now, however, the dualistic world-conception is disproved by nothing more effectively than by the consideration of the human mind. When I want to explain an external occurrence — for instance, the motion of an elastic ball which has been struck by another, I cannot stop short at the mere observation, but must seek the law which determines the direction of motion and velocity of the one ball from the direction and velocity of the other. Mere observation cannot furnish me with such a law, but only the linking together in thought of what happens. Man, therefore, draws from his mind the means of explaining that which presents itself to him through observation. He must pass beyond the mere observation, if he wants to comprehend it. Observation and thought are the two sources of our knowledge about things; and that holds good for all things and happenings, except only for the thinking consciousness itself. To that we cannot add by any explanation anything that does not lie already in the observation itself. It yields us the laws for all other things; it yields us at the same time its own laws also. If we want to demonstrate the correctness of a natural law, we accomplish this by distinguishing, arranging observations and perceptions, and drawing conclusions — that is, we form conceptions and ideas about the experiences in question with the help of thinking. As to the correctness of the thinking, thought itself alone decides. It is thus thought which, in regard to all that happens in the world, carries us beyond mere observation, though it does not carry us beyond itself. This fact is incompatible with the dualistic world-conception. The point which the supporters of this conception so often emphasise, namely, that the manifestations of the thinking consciousness are accessible to us through the inner sense of introspection, while we only comprehend physical and chemical happenings when we bring into the appropriate connections the facts of observation through logical, mathematical combination, and so on; in other words, through the results of the psychological domain: this fact is the very thing which they should never admit. For let us for once draw the right conclusion from the knowledge that observation transforms itself into self-observation when we ascend from the scientific into the psychological domain. If a universal world-reason underlay the phenomena of nature, or some other spiritual primordial being (for instance, Schopenhauer's will or von Hartmann's unconscious spirit), then it follows that the human thinking spirit must also be created by this world-being. An agreement of the conceptions and ideas which the mind of man forms from phenomena, with the actual laws proper to these occurrences, would only be possible if the ideal world-artist called forth in the human soul the laws according to which he had previously created the entire world. But then man could only know his own mental activity through observation of the root-being by whom he is shaped, and not through self-observation. Indeed, there could be no self-observation, but only observation of the intentions and purposes of the primordial being. Mathematics and logic, for example, ought not to be developed by means of man's investigating the inner, proper nature of mental connections, but by his deducing these psychological truths from the intentions and purposes of the eternal world-reason. If human understanding were only the reflection of an eternal mind, then it could never possibly ascertain its own laws through self-observation, but must needs explain them from out of the eternal reason. But whenever such an explanation has been attempted, it is simply human reason which has been transferred to the world outside. When the mystic believes that he rises to the contemplation of God by sinking down into his own inner being, in reality he merely sees his own spirit, which he makes into God; and when Eduard von Hartmann speaks of ideas which utilise the laws of Nature as their hodmen-helpers in order to shape the building of the world, these ideas are only his own, by means of which he explains the world. Because observation of the manifestations of mind is self-observation, therefore it follows that it is man's own spirit which expresses itself in the mind, and not any external reason. The monistic doctrine of evolution, however, is in complete agreement with the fact of self-observation. If the human soul has evolved itself slowly and step by step along with the organs of the soul out of lower conditions, then it is self-evident that we can explain its development from below scientifically, though we can discover the inner nature of that which emerges from the complex structure of the human brain only from the contemplation of this very nature itself. Had spirit been always present in a form resembling the human, and had it at last created its likeness in man alone, then we ought to be able to deduce the human spirit from the All-spirit; but if man's spirit has arisen as a new formation in the course of natural evolution, then we can understand its origin by following out its line of ancestry; we learn to know the stage at which it has at last arrived when we contemplate that spirit itself. A philosophy that understands itself, and turns its attention to an unprejudiced contemplation of the human spirit, thus yields a further proof of the correctness of the monistic world-conception. It is, however, quite incompatible with a dualistic natural science. (The further development and detailed proof of a monistic philosophy, the basic ideas of which I can only indicate here, I have given in my =The Philosophy of Freedom, Berlin, 1894, Verlag Emil Felber.) For one who understands aright the monistic world-conception, all the objections urged against it from the side of ethics lose all significance. Haeckel has repeatedly pointed out the injustice of such objections, and also called attention to the fact that the assertion that scientific monism must needs lead to ethical materialism, either rests upon a complete misunderstanding of the former, or else aims at nothing more than casting suspicion upon it. Naturally monism regards human conduct only as a part of the general happenings of the world. It makes that conduct just as little dependent upon a so-called higher moral world-order, as it makes the happenings in Nature dependent upon a supernatural order. “The mechanical or monistic philosophy maintains that, everywhere in the phenomena of human life, as in those of the rest of nature, fixed and unalterable laws rule, that everywhere there exists a necessary causal connection, a causal nexus of appearances, and that in accordance therewith the entire world knowable to us constitutes a uniform whole, a 'monon.' It maintains further that all phenomena are produced by mechanical causes, not by preconceived purposive causes. There is no such thing as a ‘free will’ in the ordinary sense. On the contrary, those very phenomena which we have accustomed ourselves to view as the freest and most independent, the manifestations of the human will, appear in the light of the monistic world-conception as subordinated to just as rigid laws as any other phenomenon of nature” (Haeckel, Anthropogenesis, p. 851 et seq.). It is the monistic philosophy which first shows the phenomenon of free will in the right light. As a bit cut out of the general happening of the world, the human will stands under the same laws as all other natural things and processes. It is conditioned according to natural law. But inasmuch as the monistic view denies the presence of higher, purposeful causes in the course of Nature, it at the same time also declares the will independent of such a higher world-order. The natural course of evolution leads the processes of Nature upwards to human self-consciousness. On that level it leaves man to himself; henceforward he can draw the impulses of his action from his own spirit. If a universal world-reason were ruling, then man also could not draw his goals from within himself, but only from this eternal reason. In the monistic sense man's action is hereafter determined by causal moments; in the ethical sense it is not determined, because Nature as a whole is determined not ethically but in accordance with natural law. The preliminary stages of ethical conduct are already to be found among the lower organisms. “Even though later the moral foundations have in man developed themselves much more highly, nevertheless their most ancient, prehistoric source lies, as Darwin has shown, in the social instincts of the animals” (Haeckel, Monism, p. 29). Man's moral conduct is a product of evolution. The moral instinct of animals perfects itself, like everything else in Nature, by inheritance and adaptation, until man sets before himself moral purposes and goals from out of his own spirit. Moral goals appear not as predetermined by a supernatural world-order, but as a new formation within the natural process. Regarded ethically, “that only has purpose which man has first endowed therewith, for only through the realisation of an idea does anything purposeful arise. But only in man does the idea become effective in a realistic sense. To the question, What is man's task in life? Monism can only answer, that which he sets himself. My mission in the world is no (ethically) predetermined one; on the contrary, it is, at every moment, that which I elect for myself. I do not enter on life's journey with a fixed, settled line of march” (cp. my The Philosophy of Freedom, p. 172 et seq.). Dualism demands submission to ethical commands derived from somewhere or other. Monism throws man wholly upon himself. Man receives ethical standards from no external world-being, but only from the depths of his own being. The capacity for creating for oneself ethical purposes may be called moral phantasy. Thereby man elevates the ethical instincts of his lower ancestors into moral action, as through his artistic phantasy he reflects on a higher level in his works of art the forms and occurrences of Nature. The philosophical considerations which result from the fact of self-observation thus constitute no refutation, but rather an important complement of the means of proof in favour of the monistic world-conception, derived from comparative anatomy and physiology. The famous pathologist, Rudolf Virchow, has taken up a quite peculiar position towards the monistic world-conception. After Haeckel had delivered his address on The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole at the fiftieth congress of German scientists and doctors, in which he ably expounded the significance of the monistic world-conception for our intellectual culture and also for the whole system of public instruction, Virchow came forward four days later as his opponent with the speech: The Freedom of Science in the Modern State. At first it seemed as if Virchow wanted monism excluded from the schools only, because, according to his view, the new doctrine was only an hypothesis and did not represent a fact established by definite proofs. It certainly seems remarkable that a modern scientist wants to exclude the doctrine of evolution from school-teaching on the ostensible ground of lack of unassailable proofs while at the same time speaking in favour of Church dogma. Does not Virchow even say (on p. 29 of the speech mentioned): “Every attempt to transform our problems into set formula, to introduce our suppositions as the basis of instruction, especially the attempt simply to dispossess the Church and replace its dogmas without more ado by a ‘descent-religion;’ yes, gentlemen, this attempt must fail entirely, and in its frustration this attempt will also bring with it the greatest dangers for the whole position of science!” One must needs, however, here raise the question — meaningless for every reasonable thinker — Have we more certain proofs for the Church's dogmas than for the “descent-religion?” But it results from the whole tone and style in which Virchow spoke that he was much less concerned about warding off the dangers which monism might cause to the teaching of the young than about his opposition on principle to Haeckel's world-conception as a whole. This he has proved by his whole subsequent attitude. He has seized upon every opportunity that seemed to him suitable to combat the natural history of evolution and to repeat his favourite phrase, “It is quite certain that man does not descend from the ape.” At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the German Anthropological Society, on 24th August, 1894, he even went so far as to clothe this dictum in the somewhat tactless words: “On the road of speculation people have come to the ape theory; one might just as well have arrived at an elephant theory or a sheep theory.” Of course, this utterance has not the smallest sense in view of the results of comparative zoology. “No zoologist,” remarks Haeckel, “would consider it possible that man could have descended from the elephant or the sheep. For precisely these two mammals happen to belong to the most specialised branches of hoofed animals, an order of mammalia which stands in no sort of direct connection with that of the apes or primates (excepting their common descent from an ancestral form common to the entire class).” Hard as it may be towards a meritorious scientist, one can only characterise such utterances as Virchow's as empty verbalism.
In combating the theory of descent, Virchow follows quite peculiar tactics. He demands unassailable proofs for this theory. But as soon as natural science discovers anything which is capable of enriching the chain of proofs with a fresh link, he seeks to weaken its probatory force in every way. The theory of descent sees in the famous skulls of Neanderthal, Spy, etc., isolated palaeontological remains of extinct races of lower men, which form a transition-link between the ape-like ancestor of man (Pithecanthropus) and the lower human races of the present day. Virchow declares these skulls to be abnormal, diseased formations, pathological productions. He even developed this contention in the direction of maintaining that all deviations from the fixed organic root-forms must be regarded as pathological formations. If, then, by artificial breeding we produce table-fruit from wild fruit, we have only produced a diseased object in Nature. One cannot prove more effectively the thesis of Virchow (hostile to any theory of evolution), “The plan of organisation is unalterable within the species, kind does not depart from kind,” than by declaring that what shows plainly how kind departs from kind, is not a healthy, natural product of evolution, but a diseased formation. Quite in accord with this attitude of Virchow's to the theory of descent were, further, his assertions in regard to the skeleton remains of the man-ape (Pithecanthropus erectus), which Eugen Dubois found in Java in 1894. It is true that these remains — the top of the skull, a thigh-bone, and some teeth — were incomplete; and a debate that was most interesting arose about them in the Zoological Congress at Leyden. Out of twelve zoologists, three were of opinion that the remains were those of an ape, three that they were those of a human being, while six defended the view that they belonged to an extinct transition form, between man and ape. Dubois set out in a most lucid manner the relation of this intermediate link between man and ape, on the one hand to the lower races of humanity, on the other to the known anthropoid apes. Virchow declared that the skull and the thigh-bone did not belong together; but that the former came from an ape, the latter from a human being. This assertion was refuted by well-informed palaeontologists, who, on the basis of the conscientious report of the find, expressed themselves as of opinion that not the smallest doubt could exist as to the origin of the bony remains from one and the same individual. Virchow tried to prove that the thigh-bone could only have come from a man, from the presence of a bony outgrowth which could only proceed from an illness that had been cured through careful human nursing. As against that, the palaeontologist Marsh showed that similar bony outgrowths occur also in wild apes. A third assertion of Virchow's, that the deep groove between the upper edge of the eye sockets and the low roof of the skull in Pithecanthropus bore witness to its simian nature, was refuted by the palaeontologist Nehring's showing that the same formation existed in a human skull from Santos in Brazil. Virchow's fight against the evolution doctrine appears indeed somewhat of a riddle when one reflects that this investigator, at the beginning of his career, before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, defended the doctrine of the mechanical basis of all vital activity. In Würzburg, where Virchow taught from 1848 to 1856, Haeckel sat “reverentially at his feet and first heard with enthusiasm from him that clear and simple doctrine.” But Virchow fights against the doctrine of transformation created by Darwin, which furnishes an all-embracing principle of explanation of that doctrine. When, in the face of the facts of palaeontology, of comparative anatomy and physiology, he constantly emphasises that “definite proof” is lacking, one can only point out, on the other side, that knowledge of the facts alone does indeed not suffice for the recognition of the doctrine of evolution, but there is needed in addition — as Haeckel remarks — a “philosophical understanding” as well. “The unshakable structure of true monistic science arises only through the most intimate interaction and mutual penetration of philosophy and experience” (Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 34, Vortrag). In any case, the campaign which Virchow has carried on for many years past against the doctrine of descent, with the applause of theological and other reactionaries, is more dangerous than all the mischief which a “descent-religion” can cause in unripe heads. A technical discussion on the point with Virchow is made difficult by the fact that, fundamentally, he remains standing on a bare negation, and in general does not bring forward any specific technical objections against the doctrine of evolution. Other scientific opponents of Haeckel's make it easier for us to attain clearness in regard to them because they give the reasons for their opposition, and we can thus recognise the mistakes in their inferences. Among these are to be reckoned Wilhelm His and Alexander Goette. His made his appearance in the year 1868 with his Researches as to the First Beginnings of the Vertebrate Body. His attack was primarily directed against the doctrine that the form-development of a higher organism from the first germ to the fully-developed condition can be explained from the evolution of the type. We ought not, according to him, to explain this development by regarding it as the outcome of the generations from which the single organism descends through inheritance and adaptation, but we should seek in the individual organism itself the mechanical causes of its becoming, without regard to comparative anatomy and ancestral history. His starts from the view that the germ, conceived as a uniform surface, grows unequally at different spots, and he asserts that in consequence of this unequal growth the complex structure of the organism results in the course of development. He says: “Take a simple layer and imagine that it possesses at different places a different impulse to enlargement. One will then be able to develop from purely mathematical and mechanical laws the condition in which the formation must find itself after a certain time. Its successive forms will accurately correspond to the stages of development which the individual organism runs through from the germ to the perfected condition. Thus we do not need to go beyond the consideration of the individual organism in order to understand its development, but can deduce this from the mechanical law of growth. “All formation, whether consisting in cleavage, in the formation of folds, or in complete separation, follows as a consequence from this fundamental law.” The law of growth brings into existence the two pairs of limbs as follows: “Their disposition is determined, like the four corners of a letter, by the crossing of four folds which limit and bound the body.” His rejects any help drawn from the history of the species, with the following justification: “When the history of development for any given form has thoroughly fulfilled the task of its physiological deduction, then it may rightly say of itself that it has explained this form as an individual form” (cp. His, Unsere Körperform und das physiologische Problem ihrer Entstehung). In reality, however, nothing whatever has been accomplished by such an explanation. For the question still remains: Why do different forces of growth work at different spots in the germ? They are simply assumed by His to exist. The explanation can only be seen in the fact that the relations of growth of the individual parts of the germ have been transmitted by inheritance from the ancestral animals, that therefore the individual organism runs through the successive stages of its development because the changes which its forefathers have undergone through long ages continue to operate as the cause of its individual becoming. To what consequences the view of His leads may best be seen from his theory as to the orbital lobule, by which the so-called “rudimentary organs” of the organism were to be explained. These are parts which are present in the organism without possessing any sort of significance for its life. Thus man has a fold of skin at the inner corner of his eye which is without any purpose for the functions of the organ of sight. He possesses also muscles corresponding to those by which certain animals can move their ears at will. Yet most people cannot move their ears. Some animals possess eyes which are covered over with a skin and thus cannot serve for seeing. His explains these organs as being such, to which “up to the present it has not been possible to assign any physiological role, analogous to the snippets, which, in cutting out a dress, cannot be avoided even with the most economical use of the stuff.” The evolution theory gives the only possible explanation of them. They are inherited from remote ancestors, in whom they subserved a useful purpose. Animals which to-day live underground and have no seeing eyes, descend from such ancestors as once lived in the light and needed eyes. In the course of many generations the conditions of life of such an organic stock have changed. The organisms have adapted themselves to the new conditions in which they can dispense with organs of sight. But these organs remain as heirlooms from an earlier stage of evolution; only in the course of time they have become atrophied, because they have not been used. These rudimentary organs form one of the strongest means of proof for the natural theory of evolution. If any deliberate intentions whatever had ruled in the building up of an organic form, whence came these purposeless parts? There is no other possible explanation of them, except that in the course of many generations they have gradually fallen into disuse. Alexander Goette, also, is of opinion that it is unnecessary to explain the developmental stages of the individual organism by the roundabout road through the history of the species. He deduces the shaping of the organism from a “law of form” which must superadd itself to the physical and chemical processes of matter in order to form the living creature. He endeavoured to defend this standpoint exhaustively in his Entwickelungs-geschichte der Unke (1875). “The essence of development consists in the complete but gradual introduction into the existence of certain natural bodies of a new moment, determined from without, viz., that of the law of form.” Since the law of form is supposed to superadd itself from without to the mechanical and physical properties of matter, and not to develop itself from these properties, it can be nothing else but an immaterial idea, and we have nothing given us therein which is substantially different from the creative thoughts, which, according to the dualistic world-conception, underlie organic forms. It is supposed to be a motive-power existing outside of organised matter and causing its development. That means, it employs the laws of matter as “helpers,” just like Eduard von Hartmann's idea. Goette is forced to call in the help of this “law of form,” because he believes that “the individual developmental history of organisms” alone explains and lies at the basis of their whole shaping. Whoever denies that the true causes of the development of the individual being are an historical result of its ancestral development, will be driven of necessity to have recourse to such ideal causes lying outside of matter. Weighty evidence against such attempts to introduce ideal formative forces into the developmental history of the individual, is afforded by the achievements of those investigators who have really explained the forms of higher living creatures on the assumption that these forms are the hereditary repetition of innumerable historical changes in the history of the species, which have occurred during long ages. A striking example in this respect is the “vertebral theory of the skull-bones,” already dimly anticipated by Goethe and Oken, but first set in the right light by Carl Gegenbauer on the basis of the theory of descent. He demonstrated that the skull of the higher vertebrates, and also that of man, has arisen from the gradual transformation of a “root-skull” whose form is still preserved by the “root-fishes,” or primordial gastrea, in the formation of the head. Supported by such results, Gegenbauer therefore remarks rightly: “The descent theory will likewise find a touch-stone in comparative anatomy. Hitherto there existed no observation in comparative anatomy which contradicts it; all observations rather lead us towards it. Thus that theory will receive back from comparative anatomy what it gave to its method: clearness and certainty” (cp. the Introduction to Gegenbauer's Vergleichende Anatomie). The descent theory has directed science to seek for the real causes of the individual development of each organism in its ancestry; and natural science on this road replaces the ideal laws of development which might be supposed to superpose themselves on organic matter, by the actual facts of the ancestral history, which continue to operate in the individual creature as formative forces. Under the influence of the theory of descent, science is ever drawing nearer to that great goal which one of the greatest scientists of the century, Karl Ernst von Baer, has depicted in the words: “It is one fundamental thought which runs through all forms and stages of animal evolution and dominates all particular conditions. It is the same fundamental thought which gathered together the scattered masses of the spheres in universal space and formed them into solar systems; the same thought caused the disintegrated dust on the surface of the planet to sprout forth into living forms. But this thought is nothing else but Life itself, and the words and syllables wherein it expresses itself are the various forms of that which lives.” Another utterance of Baer's gives the same conception in another form: “To many another will a prize fall. But the palm will be won by the fortunate man for whom it is reserved to trace back the formative energies of the animal body to the general forces and vital functions of the universe as a whole.” It is these same general forces of Nature which cause the stone lying on an inclined plane to roll downwards, which also, through evolution, cause one organic form to arise from another. The characteristics which a given form acquires through many generations by adaptation, it hands on by heredity to its descendants. That which an organism unfolds to-day, from within outwards, from its germinal dispositions, had developed itself outwardly in its ancestors in mechanical struggle with the rest of the forces of Nature. In order to hold this view firmly it is doubtless necessary to assume that the formations acquired in this external struggle should be actually transmitted by heredity. Hence the whole doctrine of evolution is called in question by the view, defended especially by August Weismann, that acquired characteristics are not inherited. He is of opinion that no external change which has occurred in an organism can be transmitted to its offspring, but that only can be inherited which is predetermined by some original disposition in the germ. In the germ-cells of organisms innumerable possibilities of development are held to lie. Accordingly, organic forms can vary in the course of reproduction. A new form arises when among the descendants possibilities of development come to unfoldment other than in the ancestors. From among the ever new forms arising in this way, those will survive which can best maintain the struggle for existence. Forms unequal to the struggle will perish. When out of a possibility of evolution a form develops itself which is specially effective in the battle of competition, then this form will reproduce itself; when that is not the case, it must perish. One sees that here causes operating on the organism from without are entirely eliminated. The reasons why the forms change lie in the germ. And the struggle for existence selects from among the forms coming into existence from the most diverse germ-dispositions those which are the fittest. The special characteristic of an organism does not lead us up to a change which has occurred in its ancestors as its cause, but to a disposition in the germ of that ancestor. Since, therefore, nothing can be effected from outside in the upbuilding of organic forms, it follows that already in the germ of the root-form, from which a race began its development, there must have lain the dispositions for the succeeding generations. We find ourselves once more in face of a doctrine of Chinese boxes one within another. Weismann conceives of the progressive process through which the germs bring about evolution, as a material process. When an organism develops, one portion of the germ-mass out of which it evolves is solely employed in forming a fresh germ for the sake of further reproduction. In the germ-mass of a descendant, therefore, a part of that of the parents is present, in the germ-mass of the parents a portion of that of the grandparents, and so on backwards to the root-form. Hence through all organisms developing one from another there is maintained an originally present germ-substance. This is Weismann's theory of the continuity and immortality of the germ-plasm. He believes himself to be forced to this view, because numerous facts appear to him to contradict the assumption of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. As one specially noteworthy fact he cites the presence of the workers, who are incapable of reproduction, among the communal insects — bees, ants, and termites. These workers are not developed from special eggs, but from the same as those from which spring the fruitful individuals. If the female larvae of these animals are very richly and nourishingly fed, they then lay eggs from which queens or males proceed. If the feeding is less generous, the result is the production of sterile workers. Now, it is very easy and obvious to seek the cause of this unfruitfulness simply in the less effective nourishment. This view is represented among others by Herbert Spencer, the English thinker, who has constructed a philosophical world-conception on the basis of natural evolution. Weismann holds this view to be mistaken. For in the worker-bee the reproductive organs do not merely remain behindhand in their development, but they actually become rudimentary; they do not possess a large proportion of the parts necessary for reproduction. But now, he contends, one can demonstrate in the case of other insects that defective nourishment in no way entails such a degeneration of organs. Flies are insects related to bees. Weismann reared the eggs laid by a female bluebottle in two separate batches, and fed the one plentifully, the other meagrely. The latter grew slowly and remained strikingly small. But they reproduced themselves. Hence it appears that in flies insufficient nourishment does not produce sterility. But then it follows also that in the root-insect, the common ancestral form, which in line with the evolution doctrine must be assumed for the allied species of bees and flies, this peculiarity of being rendered unfruitful by insufficient nourishment cannot have existed. On the contrary, this unfruitfulness must be an acquired characteristic of the bees. But at the same time there can be no question of any inheritance of this peculiarity, for the workers which have acquired it do not reproduce themselves, and accordingly, therefore, can pass on nothing by heredity. Hence the cause must be sought for in the bee-germ itself, why at one time queens and at another workers are developed. The external influence of insufficient nourishment can accomplish nothing, because it is not inherited. It can only act as a stimulus, which brings to development the preformed disposition in the germ. Through the generalisation of these and similar results, Weismann comes to the conclusion: “The external influence is never the real cause of the difference, but plays the part of the stimulus, which decides which of the available dispositions shall come to development. The real cause, however, always lies in preformed changes of the body itself, and these — since they are constantly purposeful — can be referred in their development only to processes of selection,” to the selection of the fittest in the struggle for existence. The struggle for existence (selection) “alone is the guiding and leading principle in the development of the world of organisms” (Aüssere Einflüsse der Entwickelungsreize, p. 49). The English investigators Francis Galton and Alfred Russel Wallace hold the same view as Weismann as to the non-inheritance of acquired characteristics and the omnipotence of selection. The facts which these investigators advance are certainly in need of explanation. But they cannot receive such an explanation in the direction indicated by Weismann without abandoning the entire monistic doctrine of evolution. But the objections urged against the inheritance of acquired characteristics are the least capable of driving us to such a step. For one only needs to consider the development of the instincts in the higher animals to convince oneself of the fact that such inheritance does occur. Look, for instance, at the development of our domestic animals. Some of them, as a consequence of living together with men, have developed mental capacities which cannot even be mentioned in connection with their wild ancestors. Yet these capacities can certainly not proceed from an inner disposition. For human influence, human training, comes to these animals as something wholly external. How could an inner disposition possibly come to meet exactly an arbitrarily determined action of man? And yet training becomes instinct, and this is inherited by the descendants. Such an example cannot be refuted. And countless others of the same kind can be found. Thus the fact of the inheritance of acquired characteristics remains such; and we must hope that further investigations will bring the apparently contradictory observations of Weismann and his followers into harmony with monism. Fundamentally, Weismann has only stopped half-way to dualism. His inner causes of evolution only have a meaning when they are ideally conceived. For, if they were material processes in the germ-plasm, it would be unintelligible why these material processes and not those of external happenings should continue to operate in the process of heredity. Another investigator of the present day is more logical than Weismann — namely, J. Reinke, who, in his recently published book, Die Welt als That; Umrisse einer Weltansicht auf naturwissenschaftlicher Grundlage, has taken unreservedly the leap into the dualistic camp. He declares that a living creature can never build itself up from out of the physical and chemical forces of organic substances. “Life does not consist in the chemical properties of a combination, or a number of combinations. Just as from the properties of brass and glass there does not yet emerge the possibility of the production of the microscope, so little does the origination of the cell follow from the properties of albumen, carbohydrates, fats, lecithin, Cholesterin, etc.” (p. 178 of the above-named work). There must be present besides the material forces also spiritual forces, or at least forces of another order, which give the former their direction, and so regulate their combined action that the organism results therefrom. These forces of another order Reinke calls “dominants.” “In the union of the dominants with the energies — the operations of the physical and chemical forces — there unveils itself to us a spiritualisation of Nature; in this mode of conceiving things culminates my scientific confession of faith” (p. 455). It is now only logical that Reinke also assumes a universal world-reason, which originally brought the purely physical and chemical forces into the relation in which they are operative in organic beings. Reinke endeavours to escape from the charge that through such a reason working from outside upon the material forces, the laws which hold good in the inorganic kingdom are rendered powerless for the organic world, by saying: “The universal reason, as also the dominants, make use of the mechanical forces; they actualise their creations only by the help of these forces. The attitude of the world-reason coincides with that of a mechanician, who also lets the natural forces do their work after he has imparted to them their direction.” But with this statement the kind of conformity to law which expresses itself in mechanical facts is once more declared to be the helper of a higher kind of law, in the sense of Eduard von Hartmann. Goette's law of form, Weismann's inner causes of development, Reinke's dominants are fundamentally just nothing else but derivatives of the thoughts of the world-creator who builds according to plan. As soon as one forsakes the clear and simple mode of explanation of the monistic world-conception, one inevitably falls a victim to mystical-religious conceptions, and of such Haeckel's saying holds good, that “then it is better to assume the mysterious creation of the individual species” (Uber unsere gegenwärtige Kenntniss vom Ursprung des Menschen, p. 30). Besides those opponents of monism who are of opinion that the contemplation of the phenomena of the world leads up to spiritual beings, who are independent of material phenomena, there are still others who seek to save the domain of a supernatural order hovering over the natural one, by denying entirely to man's power of knowing the capacity to understand the ultimate grounds of the world-happenings. The ideas of these opponents have found their most eloquent spokesman in Du Bois-Reymond. His famous “Ignorabimus” speech, delivered at the Forty-fifth Congress of German Scientists and Doctors (1872), is the expression of their confession of faith. In this address Du Bois-Reymond describes as the highest goal of the scientist the explanation of all world-happenings, therefore also of human thinking and feeling, by mechanical processes. If some day we shall succeed in saying how the parts of our brain lie and move when we have a definite thought or feeling, then the goal of natural explanation will have been reached. We can get no further. But, in Du Bois-Reymond's view, we have not therewith understood in what the nature of our spirit consists. “It seems, indeed, on superficial examination, as though, through the knowledge of the material processes in the brain, certain mental processes and dispositions might become intelligible. Among such I reckon memory, the flow and association of ideas, the consequences of practice, the specific talents, and so on. A minimum of reflection, however, shows that this is a delusion. Only with regard to certain inner conditions of the mental life, which are somehow of like significance with the outer ones through sense impressions, shall we thus be instructed, not with regard to the coming about of the mental life through these conditions. “What thinkable connection exists between the definite movements of definite atoms in my brain on the one hand; and, on the other, those for me primary, not further definable, not to be denied facts: ‘I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I taste something sweet, smell the odour of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red,’ and the equally immediate certainty flowing therefrom, ‘therefore I am!’? It is just entirely and for ever incomprehensible that it should not be indifferent to a number of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., atoms, how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move.” But who asked Du Bois-Reymond first to expel mind from matter, in order then to be able to observe that mind is not in matter? The simple attraction and repulsion of the tiniest particle of matter is force, therefore a spiritual cause proceeding from the substance. From the simplest forces we see the complicated human mind building itself up in a series of developments; and we understand it from this its becoming. “The problem of the origin and nature of consciousness is only a special case of the general problem in chief: that of the connection of matter and force” (Haeckel, Freie Wissenschaft and freie Lehre, p. 80). As a matter of fact, the problem is not at all, How does mind arise out of mindless matter? but, How does the more complex mind develop itself out of the simplest mental (or spiritual) actions of matter — out of attraction and repulsion? In the preface which Du Bois-Reymond has written to the reprint of his “Ignorabimus” speech, he recommends to those who are not contented with his declaration of the unknowableness of the ultimate grounds of being, that they should try to get along with the faith-conceptions of the supernatural view of the world. “Let them, then, make a trial of the only other way of escape, that of supernaturalism. Only that where supernaturalism begins, science ceases.” But such a confession as that of Du Bois-Reymond will always open the doors wide to supernaturalism. For whenever one sets a limit to the knowledge of the human mind, there it will surely start the beginning of its belief in the “no longer knowable.” There is only one salvation from the belief in a supernatural world-order, and that is the monistic insight that all grounds of explanation for the phenomena of the world lie also within the domain of these phenomena. This insight can only be given by a philosophy which stands in the most intimate harmony with the modern doctrine of evolution. |