The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] The German people must face the truth about the outbreak of war. It can draw strength for the action it now needs from this truth. The gravity of the present situation demands that all reservations raised by one side or the other against the revelation of the events that preceded the outbreak of war in Germany

[ 2 ] This publication is intended as a contribution to the presentation of the truth about these events. It stems from the man who was at the center of what happened in Berlin at the end of July and beginning of August 1914, the Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Helmuth von Moltke. You will see from the article how strongly this man can be said to have been at the center of these events.

[ 3 ] The widow of Mr. von Moltke, Mrs. Eliza von Moltke, is fulfilling a duty imposed on her by history by not withholding these records from the public. Anyone who reads them will probably come to the conclusion that they are the most important historical document that can be found in Germany about the beginning of the war.

[ 4 ] They characterize the mood in which the war was considered inevitable in military circles. They set out the military reasons that led to the war's initial development, which brought the German people the condemnation of the whole world.

[ 5 ] The world wants an honest confession of truth from the German people. Here it has one, written down by the man whose records bear the stamp of honesty in every sentence, who - as you will see from the records - at the moment when he wrote could want nothing other than to let the purest subjective truth flow from his pen.

[ 6 ] And this truth: read correctly, it results in the complete condemnation of German politics. A condemnation that could not be harsher. A condemnation that points to completely different things than those that are accepted by friend and foe alike.

[ 7 ] It is not the actual causes of the war that are described in these records. These are to be found in events that naturally go back a long way. But what happened at the end of July 1914 sheds the right light on these events. The collapse of the house of cards that has been called German politics can be seen in this light. We see people involved in this policy who have no need to prove that they wanted to avoid war. You can believe them that they wanted to avoid the war. It could only have been avoided if they had never been able to get to their posts. It was not what they did that contributed to bringing about the disaster, but the whole nature of their personalities.

[ 8 ] It is shocking to read in these records how German military judgment contrasts with German political judgment at the decisive moment. The political judgment is completely beyond any possibility of assessing the situation, is at the zero point of its activity, and the result is a situation about which the chief of staff writes: "The mood became more and more agitated and I stood there all alone."

[ 9 ] Consider what is written in these notes from this sentence to the other: 'Now you can do' what you want."

[ 10 ] Yes, that's how it was: the Chief of the General Staff stood there all alone. Because German politics had reached the zero point of its activity, Europe's fate on July 31 and August 1, 1914 lay in the hands of the man who had to do his military duty. Who did it with a bleeding heart.

[ 11 ] Whoever wants to judge what happened there must pose the question properly, without bias; how did it come about that at the end of July 1914 there was no other power in Germany to decide the fate of the German people than the military alone? If this was the case, then the war was a necessity for Germany. Then it was a European necessity. The Chief of the General Staff, who "stood alone", could not avoid it.

[ 12 ] The unfortunate invasion of Belgium, which was a "military necessity" and a political impossibility, shows how everything in Germany was based on military judgment in the times leading up to the outbreak of war. The writer of these lines asked Mr. von Moltke, with whom he had been friends for years, in November 1914: What did the Kaiser think of this invasion? And he replied: He knew nothing about it before the days leading up to the outbreak of war. Because, given his character, one would have had to fear that he would have blabbed the matter to the whole world. This could not happen, for the invasion could only succeed if the enemy was unprepared. - And did the Chancellor know about it? Yes, he knew about it.

[ 13 ] These things must not be concealed today by anyone who knows them, no matter how reluctant he may be to share them. Just for the sake of abundance I want to remark that, after the whole nature of my discussions with Mr. von Moltke, I have not the slightest obligation to conceal these things, and that I know I am acting in his interest when I communicate them. They show how German politics drifted into the zero point of its activity.

[ 14 ] One must point to these things if one wants to speak of the "guilt" of the German people. This "guilt" is of a very special kind. It is the guilt of a completely apolitical people, to whom the intentions of their "authorities" have been veiled by impenetrable veils. And which, due to its apolitical disposition, did not even suspect how the continuation of its policies would lead to war.

[ 15 ] It must also seem incomprehensible that even some time before the war words were spoken in an official capacity by a personality from which one had to conclude that in Germany there was no intention of ever violating Belgian neutrality, while Mr. von Moltke also told me in November 1914 that this personality must have known of the intention to march through Belgium.

[ 16 ] The question of whether the German people could have intervened to prevent the outbreak of war in 1914 is completely answered by these records. The deeds that could have brought about the events of that year to leave Germany in a different state than it was would have had to lie far in the past. Once this state existed, nothing else could have happened than did happen. This is how the German people must view their fate today. And from the strength that this insight gives them, they must find their way forward. The events during the terrible catastrophe of the war prove this no less than those contained in these notes on the beginning of the war. But it is not for me to speak about them here; for it is incumbent upon me only to introduce these notes.

[ 17 ] You can see from the notes that the decisive factor was not the assumption that France or England would violate Belgian neutrality if Germany did not do so, but that France would wage a defensive war behind its strong eastern front, which was to be avoided. For Germany, this starting point had determined the entire organization of the war for many years. And this starting point had to place the decision at the forefront of military judgment, unless politicians had been working for just as long to be able to bring other forces into the field for such a decision. This did not happen. We had been driven towards a development which, at the decisive moment, made it necessary to allow every political judgment to take precedence over military judgment. Behind what the records point to at this point lies what is actually decisive. The appeal "to the German people and the cultural world" pointed this out. The German Reich was "placed in the world context without an essential objective justifying its existence". This objective should not have been such that only military power had to carry it, could not be directed at all towards development of power in the external sense. It could only be directed towards the internal development of its culture. Through such an objective, Germany would never have needed to build its being on things that would bring it into competition and then into open conflict with other empires, to which it would have to succumb in the development of external power. A German Reich would have had to develop a policy that refrained from the external idea of power, a true cultural policy. The idea should never have arisen in Germany that anyone who considers this cultural policy to be the only possible one is an "impractical idealist". For the general world situation meant that all development of power ultimately had to be transformed into purely military power; and the fate of the German people could not be left to this alone.

[ 18 ] In these notes, the authoritative figure recounts in a simple manner what he experienced and did at the end of July and beginning of August 1914; and this account sheds a bright light on the tragedy of Germany's fate. It shows "how German politics at that time behaved like a house of cards, and how, by arriving at the zero point of its activity, all decisions as to whether and how to start the war had to pass into the judgment of the military administration. Whoever was in charge of this administration could at that time, from the military point of view, not act differently than was done, because from these points of view the situation could only be seen as it was seen. For outside the military sphere, one would have been in a position that could no longer lead to action." ¹

[ 19 ] The full proof of this can be found in Helmuth von Moltke's notes. A man speaks there who regarded the "coming war" as the greatest misfortune of the German, indeed of the European peoples; to whom it had been so close to his mind for years and who was about to do so at the decisive moment: to violate his military duty if he allowed the start of the war to be postponed even for a few hours. For many years before the war I saw how this man was devoted to the highest spiritual ideas with fervent longing, how his attitude was such that the slightest suffering of any being was close to his heart; I heard him speak many things; hardly anything significant about military matters. Truly it is not he, but the military mindset through him that speaks from a sentence like the following in the notes: "The highest art of diplomacy, in my opinion, does not consist in maintaining peace under all circumstances, but in permanently shaping the political situation of the state in such a way that it is in a position to enter into war under favorable conditions." And how military thinking overshadows the explanations that Helmuth von Moltke gives himself about the historical development of mankind and Europe when writing these notes.

[ 20 ] You will understand why, based on such premises, these notes contain the sentence: "Germany did not bring about the war, it did not enter it out of a desire for conquest or out of aggressive intentions against its neighbors. - The war was forced upon it by its enemies, and we are fighting for our national existence, for the survival of our people, our national life." I could never have had any other impression than that this inwardly so distinguished man would have taken his leave long before the war if he had had to say anything other than what is expressed in the above sentences about the "coming" war, which he considered inevitable. As things stood, military thinking in Germany could not come to a different judgment. And through this judgment it was condemned to bring itself into conflict with the rest of the world. The German people will have to learn from their misfortune that their thinking must be different in the future. Militarily, the war had to be considered necessary; politically, it was unjustifiable, indefensible and futile.

[ 21 ] How tragic it is that a man must turn to an act whose responsibility makes his heart bleed, which he must regard as his sacred duty; and which outside Germany must be regarded as a moral transgression, as the deliberate bringing about of war. Thus world events collide in a sphere of life where the idea of "guilt" would have to be cast in a completely different light than is now so often the case on all sides.

[ 22 ] There has been talk of the German "warmongers". And rightly so, they were there. It was said that Germany never wanted the war. And rightly so. Because the German people did not want it. But the "warmongers" could not really have brought about the war in the last days; their efforts would have come to a dead end if military thinking had not considered it necessary. The records do contain the sentence: "I am convinced that the Emperor would not have signed the mobilization decree at all if Prince Lichnowsky's dispatch had arrived half an hour earlier". The political mood was against the war; only this political mood had become zero compared to the military considerations. And it had itself become zero in relation to the question of how to proceed against the East or the West. This did not depend on the political situation at the time in question, but on military preparations. Much has been made of a Crown Council or the like, which is said to have been held in Potsdam on July 5, and which is said to have prepared the war according to plan. Well, Mr. von Moltke, in whose military will the decision was made at the end of July, went to Carlsbad for a cure in June; he only returned from there towards the end of July. Until the end of his life he knew nothing of such a crown council. He made the decision purely from a military point of view. Certainly, what was expressed in the European situation in July 1914 and what ultimately provided the basis for the military considerations to turn out as they did: it goes back to events that took place over a period of years. Many German personalities are to blame for these events; but they brought them about because they saw the essence of Germany in external power and splendor, not because they wanted to "incite" to war. And those who agitated for war: the politically peaceful mood would have come to an end with them in the fateful days of July; their efforts would have run out blindly if the events that forged the chain of immediate causes of war in Germany from the beginning had not occurred after July 26. The decision lay with Mr. von Moltke; and he would have had nothing to do with any warmongers, as is clear from the records. How often, after his farewell, could I hear words from his mouth that clearly stated: one would never have listened to warmongers, no matter which camp they came from. If asked about Bernhardi, he would only have said that he could have written as many books as he wanted: no one in our country ever listened to anyone like that. I would not write something like that here if the records did not give me the full right to do so; and if numerous conversations with Mr. von Moltke during the war did not also give me this right. - Before that, as already mentioned, he hardly ever spoke to me about military matters. - I know through how many channels such sentiments as Bernhard's can also pass to authoritative personalities, and how authoritative those who are not in the "authoritative" places can be. But Mr. von Moltke was authoritative; and what he did stemmed from his uninfluenced convictions. - One can disregard all the war-mongering - which is by no means denied here: the immediate causal current that led to Germany's declarations of war began with the judgments that Mr. von Moltke formed after his arrival in Berlin from the purely military point of view of the European situation. Everything else, which one wants to count among the immediate causes of war, ran blind and could not have led to what has become.

[ 23 ] Thus the records are full proof that not the military judgment as such and not the completely inadequate political judgment on the part of Germany caused the war in 1914, but the fact that there was no German policy which could prevent the exclusiveness of the military judgment. Only through such a policy could something different have happened in 1914 than happened. Thus these records are a terrible indictment of this policy. This realization must not remain hidden.

[ 24 ] One might object to the publication of these notes on the grounds that the sentence at the end reads: "They are only intended for my wife and must never be made public." Mr. von Moltke wrote this in November 1914 in Homburg, where these notes were written. There is nothing in these communications that I did not hear from Mr. von Moltke in November and later and for which I was never given an obligation to conceal. On the contrary: I would be violating my duty against the necessary communication of what must not be concealed if I were to hold back even now with what I know. I would have to saw what is in these communications, even if they were not there; and could saw it, for I knew all the things before I had read the records. And by publishing them, Mrs. von Moltke shows that she has an understanding for historical duties; and she knows from the difficult time of mental suffering that began for her husband with his departure that she is acting in his spirit and not against it by publishing them. This man suffered unspeakably. In his soul he lived every vibration of his people's war fate until his death. And so the words that the notes should only be "intended for my wife" are proof of the absolute honesty and sincerity of what he wrote down. At the moment of writing, this man believed that he was only writing for his wife: how could the slightest dishonesty enter into the notes! I say this only to the public, for I knew the man from whose lips a subjective untruth never came.

[ 25 ] Why did these records not become known earlier? You might ask. Oh, people have tried long enough to make their content heard by those who should have heard it in order to give direction to their actions. They did not want to hear it. They were not interested in it. It was not part of the "department". Now the public has to get to know him.

Written in Stuttgart, May 1919
Rudolf Steiner

• 1. Cf. the author's "Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage", Verlag Greiner und Pfeiffer, Stuttgart 1919.

The German people can only create space for a healthy reconstruction of the social order by unreservedly uncovering the truth about the causes of the outbreak of war, insofar as they can be found by them, and about the effectiveness of the powers that were really decisive in Germany during the war. Regardless of what the rest of the world does, the German people are finally doing their duty: they are finally telling the full truth, which has not yet been told. Today, it owes itself and its honor unsparing truthfulness before the public.

The undersigned committee of the Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, which - following the appeal "An das deutsche Volk und an die Kulturwelt" written by Dr. Rudolf Steiner - has set itself the goal of liberating the forces that can lead to a reconstruction of the social body, declares in order to create space for these forces:

1. we demand a truthful account of the events that led to the war, in particular everything that took place in Berlin in the last days before its outbreak, regardless of whether this is approved from a low utilitarian point of view or not, and regardless of whether leading personalities are compromised as a result. We call on official bodies and private individuals who can contribute to overcoming the cover-up of the causes of the war created by the leading circles during the war and not removed after the capitulation to come forward with their knowledge without reserve. If anyone needs assistance in revealing the truth, we are ready to be of service to them. We are not concerned with punishing the guilty, but with ruthlessly exposing the truth.

2. as far as we ourselves are able, we help the truth to break through. The publication initiated by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in these 'days in agreement with the wife of Colonel General v. Moltke of the records of this man, who was at the center of the decisive events, on the course of the actions and omissions of the leading circles in Berlin that led directly to the war, we make our own affair.¹

3 We call on the relevant government circles to allow the facts brought to light in these records to be made the basis of a discussion of the truth before the widest public, covering all related facts.

Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus Working Committee.

Whoever shares the view expressed in the above appeal and wishes to uncover the full truth about the important events before the beginning of the war is requested to send in this sheet with their signature and address.

Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus
Stuttgart office
Champignystrasse 17

• 1. Die "Schuld" am Kriege. Published by Greiner & Pfeiffer, Stuttgart. Published by the Bund für Dreigliederung, Stuttgart. Price M. 1.20.

An interview by "Matin" reporter Jules Sauerwein with Dr. Rudolf Steiner about the unpublished memoirs of the late German Chief of Staff von Moltke October 1921

[ 1 ] "You know that, if your opponents are to be believed, the Chief of the General Staff is said to have lost first his head and then the Battle of Marne through you."

[ 2 ] This is the question I put to the famous spiritual researcher and sociologist Rudolf Steiner, born a German-Austrian. I have had sincere admiration and friendly feelings for him for more than fifteen years. It gave me great satisfaction at the time to translate several of his theosophical works into French. Whenever my travels permit, I never fail to pay a brief visit to Dr. Steiner in Dornach when passing through Basel.

[ 3 ] This time, too, I met him at the strange and imposing building that was given the name Goetheanum by his students in honor of Goethe as a forerunner of spiritual science. I have already written in the "Matin" about the man as well as the building and its wonderful location on the last foothills of the Jura, crowned by castle ruins.

[ 4 ] Rudolf Steiner had just returned from Germany after giving lectures on his teachings to thousands of enthusiastic listeners in Stuttgart and Berlin. In Dornach on the same day he received a group of 120 theologians with whom he had entered into a discussion of theological and religious questions. Quite a number of these theologians intended to tackle a reorganization of religious life on the basis of the teachings advocated by Dr. Steiner.

[ 5 ] Dr. Steiner was working on a huge group of wooden sculptures depicting Christ and the underlying seductive powers, Lucifer and Ahriman. It is one of the most impressive creations I have ever seen; it will form the central end of the smaller domed room in the Goetheanum. As I watched the listeners coming up the hill in small groups at dusk to gather for the lecture, Dr. Steiner told me about the attacks of his opponents. Clerics and all-Germans and fanatical followers of various religious denominations are fighting against him with every weapon and at every opportunity.

The fear of the truth

[ 6 ] When I asked him the question about General von Moltke straight away, he turned his penetrating eyes on me, which looked at me from a face furrowed by forty years of intense spiritual struggle.

[ 7 ] "What you tell me does not astonish me. No means will be spared to drive me out of Germany and possibly also out of Switzerland. These attacks are based on a wide variety of grounds. But insofar as they extend to my relations with Moltke, they have a very specific aim. They want to prevent the publication of some notes that Moltke made for his family before his death and whose publication in the book trade I was supposed to arrange in agreement with Mrs. von Moltke.

[ 8 ] These memoirs should have been published in 1919. Immediately before its publication, a person in charge of Prussia's diplomatic representation in Stuttgart came to see me to tell me that this publication was impossible and that they would not want it in Berlin. Later, a general who had been in positions around General von Moltke and Wilhelm II came to me and gave me the same ideas. I protested against this and wanted to disregard it. I thought of turning to Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, who was present in Versailles at the time, but could achieve nothing. My efforts were all the more unsuccessful as at the same time Mrs. von Moltke was approached with ideas that she could not resist.

[ 9 ] Why these fears? These memoirs are by no means an indictment of the imperial government. But it is clear from them, what is perhaps worse, that the imperial government was in a state of complete confusion and under incomprehensibly reckless and ignorant leadership. One can apply to the responsible personalities the sentence I wrote down in my preface: 'It was not what they did that contributed to bringing about the disaster, but the whole nature of their personalities.

[ 10 ] I might add that it was the peculiar circumstances which caused the weight of the decisive decisions to rest finally on a single man, the Chief of the General Staff, who saw himself compelled to do his military duty because politics had come to a standstill. I never spoke to him about political or military issues before Moltke's resignation. It was only later, when he was seriously ill, that he naturally spoke openly to me about all these matters, and since this will interest you, I will tell you what he told me himself and what is also evident from his unpublished memoirs.

[ 11 ] At the end of June 1914, Moltke, who had been Chief of the General Staff since 1905, went to Carlsbad for health reasons. Until his death, he knew nothing of a Potsdam consultation on July 5 or 6. He had only returned to Berlin in good health after the ultimatum to Serbia. Since his return he had, as he said, been firmly convinced that Russia would attack. He clearly foresaw the tragic development that things were bound to take, that is, he believed in the participation of France and England in the world conflict. He wrote a memorandum for the Kaiser pointing out the necessity of measures to be taken. The plan of the German General Staff had essentially been laid down for a long time. It had been drawn up by Moltke's predecessor, von Schlieffen. You know its main features: Large masses were to be thrown against France in order to achieve a quick decision in the west at any cost. A weak defensive army was planned against Russia, which was to be replenished later after the decision on the western theater of war.

Disturbed people

[ 12 ] Von Moltke had changed his predecessor's plan on one important point, however. While Schlieffen had envisaged a simultaneous march through Belgium and Holland, Moltke had renounced Holland in order to give Germany breathing space in the event of a blockade.

[ 13 ] When Moltke arrived at the castle on Friday, July 31, he found people completely confused. He had the impression, as he said, that he found himself in the position of having to make a decision all by himself. The Kaiser had not yet signed the mobilization order that day, an order which in Germany was tantamount to a declaration of war, for as soon as this order was given, everything, including the first operation, was carried out at specific times with a relentless automatism. Wilhelm II contented himself for that day with proclaiming the imminent threat of war. The following day, on Saturday, August 1, at four o'clock in the afternoon, he summoned Moltke again, and in the six hours that followed, the following drama unfolded.

[ 14 ] Moltke met the Emperor in the presence of Bethmann Hollweg, whose knees were literally trembling, the War Minister Falkenhayn, General von Plessen, Lyncker and several others. The Emperor voiced strong opposition to the intentions of the Chief of Staff. He had, he said, received the best news from England. England would not only remain neutral - as George V informed him - but would even prevent France from taking part in the war. Under these conditions, it would be logical to throw the whole army against Russia. No, replied Moltke, the plan must be carried out in the East as well as in the West as it is laid down, if we do not wish to bring about the greatest misfortune.

The technical reasons

[ 15 ] The objections do not affect Moltke; he refuses to change anything. He asserts that the mobilization order must be complied with without delay. He does not believe in the English telegrams, and with the mobilization order in his hand, which Wilhelm II has just signed, he is dismissed, leaving the others in a state of complete confusion. Thus it came about that the decision on the outbreak of war had to be made for purely military reasons. On the way from the palace to the General Staff, his car was overtaken by an imperial automobile. Moltke is recalled on behalf of the Emperor. The Emperor is more excited than ever. He shows his Chief of Staff a telegram from England. He believes he can see with absolute certainty from this telegram that the conflict is confined to the East and that England and France will remain neutral. 'An order must be sent immediately to the army,' he concludes, 'not to proceed in the west. Moltke's reply was that an army could not be exposed to the alternative of orders and counter-orders. While Moltke was standing there, the Kaiser turned to the wing adjutant on duty and ordered him to immediately transmit an order to the command of the 16th Division in Trier that it was not to march into Luxembourg. Moltke went home. Shaken, because he expects the greatest disaster from such measures, he sits down at his table. He declares that he cannot take any measures for the army in accordance with the Emperor's telephonic order. This order is brought to him by an adjutant for his signature. He refuses to sign and pushes the order back. He remained in a state of dull exhaustion until 11 o'clock in the evening, even though he had returned from Karlsbad in good health. At 11 o'clock he is rung up. The Emperor asks for him again. He immediately goes to the palace. Wilhelm II, who had already retired, throws on a robe and says: "Everything has changed. Disaster is on its way. The King of England has just declared in a new telegram that he has been misunderstood and that he will not accept any obligation on behalf of himself or France. He concludes with the words: "Now you can do what you like. And now the war begins.

Bloomy omens

[ 16 ] In the month of August, I saw General von Moltke only once, on August 27 in Koblenz. Our conversation revolved around purely human matters. The German army was still in full victory mode. There was no reason to talk about what was not yet there. The Battle of Marne unfolded later. I had not seen von Moltke until then. It took place under conditions which must have shaken von Moltke's expectations to the core. During the trial maneuvers he had several times ordered a cautious advance on the right wing, which could have been considered in a march on Paris. Three times Kluck, who had supreme command of the right wing, had advanced too quickly. Each time Moltke said to him, "If you advance just as quickly at the decisive moment, we will lose the war in an emergency. When Kluck's army was threatened with being surrounded, Moltke was seized by a terrible premonition. The thought came to him: the war could be lost for Germany. This seems to me to be part of the 'psychology' of the course of the war. When von Moltke returned to headquarters on September 13, he gave the impression of a deeply shaken man. Those around the Kaiser thought he was ill. From that moment on, Falkenhayn, without having the official title, was in fact in command. Later, when Moltke was confined to bed, Wilhelm II visited him. Is it still me who is in charge of the operations? he asked the Emperor. I do indeed believe that it is still you, replied Wilhelm II. For weeks, the Kaiser did not even know who was the actual commander-in-chief of his troops.

[ 17 ] But now a new example of the opinion people had of Wilhelm II in his own environment. One day, when von Moltke was describing to me the feelings of deep sorrow he was experiencing on his return to Belgium after the capture of Antwerp, I asked him for the first time about the invasion of Belgium. How was it, I asked, that a Minister of War could claim in the Reichstag that the plan to invade Belgium had not existed? This minister, Moltke replied, did not know my plan, but the Chancellor was up to date. And the Kaiser? Never, said Moltke: he was too talkative and indiscreet. He would have blabbed it to the whole world!"

Jules Sauerwein

Note from the editors, Rudolf Steiner, whom we informed of our intention to publish his conversation with Jules Sauerwein here as well, writes the following

Dreigliederung, Vol. 3, No. 15, October 12, 1921 / Das Goetheanum, Vol. 1,. No. 9, October 16, 1921

[ 1 ] It seemed impossible not to answer the questions put to me during a visit by my friend Dr. Jules Sauerwein. For, firstly, I consider the present moment to be one in which everyone who knows anything about the truth of the war must speak. Under the circumstances, I should have considered silence to be a breach of duty. What I have said, I could say quite independently of Mr. von Moltke's memoirs. I heard all this from Mr. von Moltke in November 1914 and later myself - even often - and was never under any obligation to remain silent. It was only natural not to talk about it at an inappropriate time.

[ 2 ] Secondly, there is something else to consider. I knew Mr. von Moltke and for years learned to appreciate the nobility of this personality, whose lips certainly never uttered a subjective untruth. In July 1914 he was placed in a tragic situation. He knew the dreadful thing that had to be decided, and his military duty required him to decide alone. Now I may perhaps remark that on another visit shortly before, Dr. Jules Sauerwein told me that news was now being spread from certain quarters that von Moltke had died in mental derangement. He asked me what was true about these things and their connection with the war. I also felt obliged not to remain silent in the face of these outrageous and untrue scatterings. (I need hardly say that Mrs. von Moltke knew nothing of a conversation with Dr. Sauerwein.)

[ 3 ] I believe that the discussions about the "guilt" of the war are on the wrong track. One cannot speak of "guilt" in the way one does. There is tragedy. And the war was caused by a tragic situation. That shows best how I must believe what I have heard from Mr. von Moltke about the next war. I do not feel compelled to go into the nonsensical talk of von Moltke's "mystical" inclinations. What he did with regard to the war he considered a necessity out of his military duty. And I think that what he said is suitable for putting the discussion about the "guilt" of war on a different footing from that on which it stands in the world today.

Rudolf Steiner

[ 1 ] When I wrote the few "subsequent remarks" in No. 15 of this weekly on Dr. Sauerwein's reproduction of a conversation between him and me, I had not yet read any of the comments that appeared in the press about the "Matin" article. I assumed that every unbiased reader of this article must recognize that there is something in what I have communicated about von Moltke's oral or written statements, the right further discussion of which must lead to the world no longer being able to speak of a "guilt" of Germany, but of a tragic doom. For these statements make it clear:

[ 2 ] 1. that the circumstances at the end of July 1914 in Germany placed the decision on the measures to be taken in the hands of one man, the Chief of the General Staff von Moltke. At the decisive moment, he was allowed to do nothing other than his military duty. This eliminates all talk of German warmongers. For it is precisely von Moltke's account that proves that even if such warmongers had been present, they would have had no influence on von Moltke's decision. Moltke's account is not that of a party, but that of a man who acted with a highly developed sense of responsibility. His word comes before all others. It is not spoken to the detriment of Germany.

[ 3 ] 2 It is clear from the reproduction of von Moltke's statements that he knew nothing of a Potsdam consultation (an alleged Crown Council) on July 5 or 6 until his death. This disproves all the fairy tales that have linked decisive events to such a council. How anyone can say that I continue to perpetuate this fairy tale is beyond me.

[ 4 ] 3. I have often heard from von Moltke that the war plan essentially originated with von Schlieffen. It seems important that von Moltke emphasized that he had abandoned von Schlieffen's intention of marching through southern Holland with the right wing, preferring to take on the great technical difficulties caused by the fact that the right wing of the German army had to force its way through the narrow space between Aachen and the southern border of the province of Limburg. From this it is clear to any unbiased person that the German army command was most earnestly endeavoring not to do a single bit more towards the west of what was then regarded as such a grave injustice than it had to do according to the responsibility it bore. Anything else would have been a matter for the political leadership. The fact that von Schlieffen considered more to be necessary can serve as proof of this fact. From the fact that more than a decade before the outbreak of war there was the intention to march through Holland, nothing can really be concluded about the events of 1914. To want to incriminate Germany with this is simply ridiculous.

[ 5 ] 4. Anyone who knew von Moltke should know that no untruth could come from his lips in any of these matters. But it is important for the world to know how he found himself in his surroundings in that hour which he regarded like no other as Germany's hour of destiny. To conceal what was going on between him and those around him is to withhold from the world the most important thing that can be known about the outbreak of war. Others may think differently, perhaps to spare this or that person. But they should not impute dishonest intentions to those who cannot agree with them.

[ 6 ] Now, of the press statements that have been linked to Dr. Sauerwein's article, those in the "Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung" are probably the ones that can be taken most seriously.

[ 7 ] In response to Major General von Haeften's remark that my reports are intended to make it clear that "all those men in whose hands the fate of Germany lay at that time were more or less weaklings", I will only say this: After all, one need only read the many memoirs that have been written since the end of the war to see what "those men" threw at each other; and one will then hardly say, with an unbiased judgment, "Such a tendency cannot be opposed explicitly enough. " I have reproduced Moltke's judgment. If you want proof of this, read von Tirpitz's memoirs. What I cannot accept, however, is von Haeften's sentence: ... . for weakness and recklessness in such a situation are perhaps more burdensome and a greater guilt than a conscious will to war." Can one speak like this if one lives in the real world and not in a ghost world? What Germany is accused of is a "conscious will to war". It is seen as its fault. If one can no longer speak of a conscious will to war, but only of "légèreté" and "ignorance inconcevables" (incomprehensible recklessness and ignorance), then it is possible to work towards revising the views on "guilt". Incidentally, it is significant that von Haeften does not speak of what I actually said, but of "weakness and recklessness". I have often heard and read these words in Germany, but I have not used them. The fact that recklessness and ignorance, i.e. qualities for which those who have them are ultimately not responsible, can justify "greater guilt" than a "conscious will to war", will firstly be difficult to convey to a legal mind, and secondly, if viewed correctly, "in such a situation" as that of July 1914, it may well lead to tragic doom, but not to a conviction for "conscious" guilt.

[ 8 ] What Mr. von Haeften further claims about von Moltke's relationship with me, he could know better. He says: "As long as he was in full possession of his health, Colonel General von Moltke was completely opposed to Mr. Steiner and his endeavours, even though Mrs. von Moltke, who was under the spell of Steiner's ideas, had often tried to influence her husband in Steiner's direction. Only the mentally and physically ill colonel general showed himself open to Steiner's ideas during his visit to Homburg Castle in November 1914, and after his resignation from his position as chief of the general staff of the army, he placed his trust in Mr. Steiner, a trust that the latter does not repay him well today." These assertions about my relationship with Mr. von Moltke are all objective falsehoods. Rather, the following is true. I have frequented Mr. von Moltke's house since 1904. I was invited to every single visit. The invitation came not only from Mrs. von Moltke, but also from Mr. von Moltke. I have the greatest admiration for Mr. von Moltke. But I never imposed myself on him. The conversations, which often lasted many hours, always covered questions of worldview. Mr. von Moltke was enlightened enough to see that my world view was far removed from all nebulous mysticism and wanted to rest on a secure foundation of knowledge. He would not have been easy to "influence", even if I had tried. But he saw that I was not at all interested in "influencing" him. He told me not once, but very often: "Your world view satisfies the mind, because it is the case with it, which I have never encountered with any other, all things support each other and fit together without contradiction." Because his thinking was quite healthy, he also had healthy skepticism and did not get over many things easily. He had doubts time and again. But even in the face of these doubts, he always made use of the above-mentioned sentence. He also said to me: "When people with the usual education of today find out about your views, you will have wonderful things to experience."

[ 9 ] This relationship has existed between Mr. von Moltke and me since 1904; and my visit to Homburg, which was also by invitation, has not changed it in the slightest. From my visit to Homburg until his death, he believed me no less and no more than he had done ten years earlier. - Whether, in his opinion, which is the only thing that really matters to me in this matter, I thank him less for his trust than someone who says that von Moltke only talked to me because he was mentally and physically ill, and yet he also enjoyed his trust, I don't want to argue about that at all. It just strikes me that someone who was "in the official environment" of Colonel General von Moltke at the outbreak of the war and during his stay in Homburg speaks of his "resignation from his position as Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army" without fear of using a dubious phrase with this formulation.

[ 10 ] I have already said above that Sauerwein's article disproves the fairy tale of the Crown Council on July 5. If it is said that I have concealed the fact that Colonel General von Moltke could not have known anything about the Crown Council because it never took place, then this seems to me to be a quibble, for if Mr. von Moltke knew nothing about such a thing, then nothing of any significance could have taken place.

[ 11 ] The fact that today Holland cannot be drawn into a new French propaganda campaign regarding the question of guilt by reasonable people, because it has been said that Mr. von Moltke wanted to refrain from marching through Holland, seems to me, as I have said above, quite clear. Mr. von Moltke's words prove that long before 1914 such a march through Holland was refrained from, despite the fact that Mr. von Schlieffen, whom Mr. von Moltke also regarded as a great military authority, believed that such a march might be necessary. But it is not entirely irrelevant that this march through, which Mr. von Haeften also admits that von Schlieffen had included in the "circle of his considerations", should only have been carried out on the condition that "Holland would voluntarily join the German side in the event of the outbreak of war". So says Mr. von Haeften. No one will dispute this. And if, as must certainly be admitted from the military point of view, this is a relief for Germany, it may also be asserted that, on further examination of this matter, the mention of von Schlieffen's intentions with regard to Holland should also make the march through Belgium appear in a different light than the one in which it has hitherto been seen alone. For this premise also applies to Belgium within certain limits. Mr. von Moltke reckoned that although Belgium would not side with the Germans, it would be friendly enough not to put up any resistance in arms to the march through. It is therefore not at all certain that Germany would have marched through Belgium in any case if things had not simply been rushed in the decisive days. How to judge these things politically is not for me to discuss here, although I know that the Belgian guarantee of neutrality was a very special one; for I did not speak about it with Dr. Sauerwein, but only about Mr. von Moltke's opinion.

[ 12 ] The shifts in dates mentioned by Mr. von Haeften, which can be found in Sauerwein's article, have been corrected in No. 15 of this weekly publication. What Mr. von Haeften adds in detail to what was said in the "Matin" article does not essentially contradict what was said there; it even supplements it and confirms it in essential points. Mr. von Haeften says: "Mr. Steiner's assertion that Colonel General von Moltke refused to countersign an order from the Kaiser delivered to him by a wing adjutant and sent the officer back is a free invention. Colonel-General von Moltke merely refused to sign a corresponding draft order from the head of the Operations Department (Lieutenant-Colonel Tappen)." There is nothing to correct other than the "wing adjutant", because I did not claim that the "draft order" was written by the Kaiser himself. And I readily admit that an officer knows more about wing adjutants than Sauerwein. Von Moltke's own words about it are: "As the dispatch to the 16th Division was presented to me, repeating the order given by telephone, I struck the pen on the table and declared I would not sign it." Mr. von Haeften emphasizes: "General von Moltke was a soldier unwaveringly loyal to his Emperor, despite some conflicting opinions, especially during the last years of his life." I fully agree with this. One can say even more. Von Moltke was one of the very best servants of his Emperor. And as a man who was always fully aware of his responsibilities, he never held back from giving the Emperor the advice he considered most suitable for him, even if it ran counter to the Emperor's opinions. But that is precisely what makes von Moltke's statements, which are reproduced completely correctly, so valuable. It was not an opponent of the Emperor who made them, but one of his most loyal servants who wrested them out of the matter. Anyone who believes that von Moltke spoke out of resentment or bitterness misjudges the colonel general. Everything that he experienced from the end of July 1914 onwards has cast him down; but he was never in a state that can be described as mentally ill in the sense that those who now believe they have to excuse his statements with the state of his soul do.

[ 13 ] What he said is, in my firm conviction, suitable for placing all previous discussion about the "question of guilt" on a basis on which the present rulers of the victorious states do not want it, but for which more and more reasonable people all over the world will be accessible. I cannot understand why Mr. von Haeften, whom I have come to know as a reasonable man, is not open to such a consideration today. One should realize that the German people will have the most to "pay for" if saying things like those of Moltke's opinion is repeatedly portrayed as an offence. The German people have no need to hold back with the truth. Those who believed they had to do so have done them the most harm so far. The truth will not incriminate the German people, it will exonerate them. We should have realized this in the days leading up to the Versailles peace treaty. We should realize it again today. Those who want to defend the German politicians of 1914 should be reminded of what von Tirpitz wrote in his "Memoirs". For example, on page 242: "The impression of the headlessness of our political leadership became more and more disturbing. The march through Belgium did not seem to have been an established fact beforehand (he means on the night of August 1 to 2). Since the Russian mobilization, the Chancellor gave the impression of a drowning man... . While the lawyers of the Foreign Office were engrossed in the doctoral question of whether we were already at war with Russia or not yet, it turned out in passing that they had forgotten to ask Austria whether it wanted to fight with us against Russia." On page 245, the same von Tirpitz says: "After the Chancellor left the meeting, Moltke complained to the Kaiser about the 'deplorable' state of the political leadership, which had no preparations for the situation and now that the avalanche was rolling, was still thinking of nothing but legal notes." And men about whom someone (von Tirpitz) who has worked with them has to speak in this way should not be criticized by the German people, but "thanked". They should be satisfied with the opinion that they "thought and acted logically and dutifully". On page 248, von Tirpitz says: "The moral blamelessness of our government at that time can only be made clear by an open presentation of its diplomatic inadequacy.....

[ 14 ] Von Moltke's views and statements are certainly in the direction in which these matters must be clarified. If they are discussed correctly, they cannot fail to have an effect. However, if they are discussed in the way they have been so far, this will of course result in something that the German "people will have to pay for", as unfortunately they already have to "pay for" enough.

[ 15 ] Whether one has a right to speak of "political dilettantes" in the way Mr. von Haeften does, with the background provided by von Tirpitz's words on page 248, among others, must be seriously questioned. It says that the politicians of 1914 "were lacking" ... "through lack of straight and clear thinking."

[ 16 ] I would prefer to remain silent for the time being about personal slurs such as those contained in sentences about my "addiction to playing a political role". I would not have expected this judgment from Mr. von Haeften, whom I once got to know as a noble-minded man. It seems as if you can't just have prejudices from the outset, but as if, even if you didn't have them once, you can still acquire them afterwards.

[ 17 ] What I have said I believed I could not conceal, because unfortunately I see that personalities who can certainly have the subjective opinion that they do not want to do the "business of their enemies" do so precisely because they do not want to give the truth free rein. In my opinion, I have to recognize again today how some people are sinning in this direction.

[ 1 ] I feel obliged to respond to the thoroughly objective objections raised by Major Muff ("Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt", November 1, 1921) against the intention and content of the "Matin" interview. For the time being, however, I would like to express my satisfaction with this objectivity; for when one continually hears only personal slurs from so many sides, one is glad to have to deal with a noble tone in polemics for once.

[ 2 ] First of all, Major Muff says that I added to Dr. Sauerwein's interview in subsequent remarks: "One cannot speak of guilt in the way one does. There is tragedy. And the war was caused by a tragic situation." If you read a few more sentences in my "supplementary remarks", you will come across the following words: "And I think that what he (Moltke) said is suitable for putting the discussion about the 'guilt' of the war on a different basis than the one on which it stands in the world today." Major Muff says: "As Germans, we have every reason to oppose such a shift in the level of discussion." To be honest, that seems a little unworldly to me. The whole context of my words implies that the discussion "in the world", that is, under today's conditions, should essentially be placed on a different footing from the one on which it stands among Germany's opponents. On what basis does it stand? On no other basis than that Germany deliberately brought about the war. The fact that Lloyd George sometimes speaks this way, sometimes a little differently, cannot really lead to the belief that "the truth about the guilt of the war" ... "is already on the march". If one looks at the discussion about war guilt today without being unworldly, then one could be satisfied if the discussion were based on the following by reasonable people outside Germany: there is no "guilt" on the German side, as has been thought up to now, but at the starting point there is a tragic situation in Germany. I believe that it is really not in Germany's interest to reject such a shift in the basis for discussion. Especially not if one admits the essence of this tragic situation, as Major Muff does. He speaks of the "political harmlessness, to put it mildly" of the leading German politicians in the face of Moltke's judgment at the outbreak of the war. Now, in view of the magnitude of the matter, it is perhaps not entirely necessary to express oneself "mildly". If this is not the case, Major Muff's sentence will also have to be seen as proof that the German politicians failed completely in 1914. But therein lies the tragic situation.

[ 3 ] That is what is so peculiar about the polemic surrounding the "Matin" interview: One says that what this interview contains is mistaken; and one then states what one oneself has to say: and in everything factual one only gives confirmations of what is in the interview.

[ 4 ] Major Muff believes that the "Matin" article will cause the "normal thinker" to "blame" Germany after all, because it is said that the German mobilization plan provided for war not only against Russia but also against France, and that this plan had to be carried out with an "inexorable automatism". To support this belief, Major Muff quotes a sentence from the interview, to which he adds an interjection of his own: "So it came about that the decision on the outbreak of war had to be made out of purely military considerations - meaning the inflexible deployment plan of the German General Staff." This quote becomes incorrect when Major Muff adds the words: "what is meant is the inflexible deployment plan of the German General Staff". These words are not in the interview. What is meant is stated in the words that precede them in the interview. And these are: "With the mobilization order in his hand, which Wilhelm II has just signed, he (Moltke) is dismissed, leaving the others in a state of complete confusion." After pointing out that the leading political figures were in "complete confusion", Major Muff says the following: "So it came about that the decision on the outbreak of war had to be made for purely military reasons." Major Muff now construes a decision which, according to Moltke's clear statements, according to his records (and also according to Haeftens' statements in the "Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung"), cannot be understood as anything other than military, into a political one brought about by Molike. He says that Moltke had the firm conviction "that Russia would attack and that France and England would side with him. For him, this meant a war on two fronts, not for military but for political reasons". Moltke told the Kaiser, when he expressed his will to march east with the entire army for political reasons, that the deployment of an army of millions could not be improvised, that it was the result of long, arduous work, and that once it had been decided, it could not be changed. If the emperor wanted to lead the entire army to the east, he would not have a ready army, but a desolate heap of disorganized armed men without provisions. What could be clearer than that military reasons are being pitted against political ones. Major Muff actually feels compelled to admit this. That is why he says Moltke's reasons were political; but he gave military ones. And he constructs his train of thought as follows: "If Moltke refused to abandon the two-front deployment, which was based on Schlieffen's operational studies, this was ... not because it would not have been technically possible to carry out a different deployment, but because he was firmly convinced that France and England would immediately side with Russia... . He, the soldier, had no political grounds against the appointed leaders of German foreign policy. He had to use every means at his disposal to prevent a decision which, as head of military operations, presented him with an insoluble and disastrous task for Germany. Naturally, he resorted to a means by which alone he could expect success. For technical reasons, he declared himself unable to carry out the deployment against Russia alone, as demanded by the Kaiser and his political advisors. However, Moltke's records clearly show that his refusal was in fact based solely on political reasons." The opposite is the case. If anything is clear from Moltke's notes, it is that for military-technical reasons - Major Muff says: "as head of military operations" - he considered the strict implementation of the two-front war to be absolutely necessary at the hour in which the relevant decisions had to be made. Given Moltke's character, I cannot imagine that he would have simply closed his mind to the reasons that were certainly expressed. If one then does not quibble over words, if one refrains from describing what is certainly characterized as military-technical as political, then one can compare Major Muff's statements with those of the interview without bias. And lo and behold: the interview states: "He (Moltke) clearly foresaw the tragic development that things had to take, that is, he believed in the participation of France and England in the world conflict." Moltke's decision is attributed exactly the same as that of Major Muff. And he too thinks nothing of the appointed political leaders. But he thus admits that the decision was in von Moltke's hands. And he had to do his military duty. - How one can then still believe that the interview leads to the assertion that the German general staff brought about the tragic situation is unfathomable. From beginning to end, the interview wants to show that the tragic situation was due to the politicians' incompetence and that the German Chief of Staff acted as he had to act according to his duty. For Dr. Sauerwein, there was no reason to "laugh up his sleeve". This could only arise if people in Germany continued to say that they were "opposed" to the "shift in the level of discussion" in the direction that one could not speak of "German guilt" in the sense in which it had previously been spoken of in the non-German world.

[ 5 ] If one wishes to stick to the straightforward, unconcealed facts as described by von Moltke, it is not a matter of discussing the doctoral question of whether the assertion that the mobilization order in Germany was equivalent to a declaration of war was nonsensical from a military point of view. We are not talking about military-technical definitions, but about the reality of late July and early August 1914. And Major Muff himself says of this reality that the military-technical "nonsense" was politically correct insofar as "in our efforts to localize the war, unlike our opponents, we had postponed every military measure until the very last minute, thereby giving them a valuable head start, so that the mobilization order and the start of the war coincided in time". One would think that for events taking place in time, this temporal coincidence would come into consideration, not the fact that the mobilization order and the beginning of the war have theoretically different definitions. Major Muff says: "According to plan, however, the deployment should follow immediately after mobilization so as not to lose any time. But according to the nature and manner of the preparations, the simple addition to the mobilization order should have been made: Aufmarsch wird zunächst nicht ausgeführt, would have sufficed to merely bring the mobilization to a conclusion." Certainly, according to everything that can be known from Moltke's statements, he would not have made this addition after issuing the mobilization order. For he was of the opinion that any delay would be detrimental. So although this assertion is theoretically correct, it is of no practical significance.

[ 6 ] Major Muff attaches great importance to the fact that there was also a plan for a sole deployment in the east. In contrast, two questions must be asked. First, why did von Moltke not reckon with this plan at the moment of the decision? Major Muff will say because he thought the politicians' opinion that the West would remain neutral was nonsense. But then he could not say to the Emperor: if you marched in the East, you would not have a powerful army, but rather a desolate pile of armed, unprovisioned people. And secondly: if he said this - and he did say it - why wasn't he told back? We also have the deployment plan for the East alone? There is no need to doubt that Major Muff rightly spoke of such a deployment plan on paper; but Moltke obviously did not consider it feasible for military reasons at the time when the decision had to be made by him.

[ 7 ] Major Muff also says: "Steiner undoubtedly wants to hold his shield over Moltke's memory. In truth, however, he places a tremendous responsibility on him when he claims that the decision on the outbreak of war was made by the Chief of Staff's rigid deployment plan." Firstly, I have not "claimed" anything at all, as far as I am concerned, but simply reproduced Moltke's own statements faithfully. Secondly, it is clear from this reproduction that, according to the wording of the interview, the final decision was made as follows: "At 11 o'clock he (Moltke) is rung... He goes immediately to the castle. Wilhelm II.... says: Everything has changed. The King of England has just declared in a new telegram that he has been misunderstood and that he does not assume any obligation on his behalf or on behalf of France. He concludes with the words: Now you can do what you like."

[ 8 ] I have already discussed the passage through Holland in No. 17 of this weekly publication. With regard to the Battle of the Marne, the sentences in the interview are based on von Moltke's statements; what Major Muff says is largely based on conclusions, which, however, do not affect the essence of the interview at all. For this lies in the emphasis on the "psychology" of the course of the war at the time of the Battle of the Marne. I have spoken of this because, as Major Muff does again, it is claimed that "the Chief of the General Staff, whose leadership lacked a sure hand, was more to blame than the leader of the 1st Army". Moltke's statement is a psychological counter to this assertion. - If one were to confront the "Matin" interview impartially, one would see what could be gained from Moltke's statements to exonerate Germany. In France, they are not "laughing up their sleeves" about it, but are trying to discuss it as little as possible for the time being. Because the right discussion leads to things that people don't want to hear yet. In Germany, this discussion should be conducted differently than it is. There will be more to say about this in this weekly publication.

[ 1 ] Unspeakable suffering, deep sorrow live in the souls of men of the present, side by side with the will to offer to this moment, incomparable in world history, the sacrifices of courage, of valor, of love, which it requires. The warrior is steeled by the awareness that he is fighting for a most precious good that the earth has to give to mankind. He faces death with the feeling that his dying is demanded by that Life which, as something higher than the single man, may lay claim even to his death. Fathers, mothers, and sons, wives, sisters, and daughters must, out of personal suffering, find themselves in the Idea that out of blood and death, the development of mankind will rise to aims for which the sacrifices were necessary, and which will justify them. The upward glance from individual experience to the life of mankind, from the transitory to that which lives in this transitory as the imperishable: this is demanded by the experiences of this time. The confidence rises up, from the sensation of what is happening, that what is experienced will be lifted up by the dawn of a new age of mankind, whose powers are to be ripened by this experience.

[ 2 ] One would like to look with the understanding that seeks also to under stand men's aberrations, upon the flames of hatred that are kindling. Too strong, for many a one, is the impression he receives when he compares what is currently being experienced with what seemed to him already achieved for the present by the development of mankind. Men who understood how to speak out about these achievements of mankind from a full inner participation, have found words to do so like those spoken by the fine German contemplator of art Herman Grimm, who died in the year 1901. He compares man's experience in earlier time with what the present brings to this experience. He says: “Sometimes it feels to me as if one were transposed into a new existence, and had taken along only the most needful spiritual hand-baggage. As if fully altered conditions of life were compelling one to fully new thought-work. For distances are no longer something that separates people. With the ease of child's play our thoughts circle the compass of the earth's surface, and fly from every single person to every other person, wherever he be. The discovery and exploitation of new forces of nature unites all peoples to incessant shared work. New experiences, under whose pressure our view of all things visible and invisible alters in uninterrupted change, force upon us new ways of observing, also for the history of the evolution of mankind.” Before the outbreak of this war, every European person had, in his individual way, such sensations in his soul. And now: what has been made, for the time of this war, of what stirred people to these sensations. Is it not as if mankind were to be shown how the world looks when much that is fruit of development ceases to take effect? And yet also: does the war by its horrors not show what the conflicts of peoples, fought out with the means brought by the newest developments, must lead to?

[ 3 ] Confusing can be the sensations that arise out of the experiences. One would like to understand out of the presence of this confusion why it is that many people cannot comprehend that war itself brings war's horrors and suffering, and why they decry the opponent as a “barbarian” when a bitter necessity forces upon him the use of the means of battle created by the modern age.

[ 4 ] Words of hate-filled condemnation of German essential being, now spoken by leading personalities among the peoples with which Germany currently lives at war: how do they sound to a soul that senses as true expression of German feeling what the already mentioned Herman Grimm, shortly before the entry of this century, characterized as a fundamental trait in the understanding of the life will of modern humanity. He wrote: “The solidarity of moral convictions of all men is today the church that connects us all. We seek more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All really earnest strivings of the masses know only this one goal. Here the separation of nations already exists no longer. We feel that over against the ethical world view, no national difference prevails. We would all sacrifice ourselves for our Fatherland; but we are far from longing for, or bringing about, the moment when this could happen by war. The assurance that keeping peace is the most sacred wish of all of us is no lie. `Peace on earth and good will to men' permeates us. The inhabitants of our planet, taken all together as a unity, are filled with a delicate sensibility understandable to all ... people as a totality acknowledge themselves as subject to an invisible court of judgment, throning as if in the clouds, before which they regard not being allowed to stand vindicated as a calamity, and to whose judicial procedure they seek to adapt their internal disputes. With anxious striving they here seek their right. How are the French of today at pains to make out their intended war against Germany to be a moral requirement, whose acknowledgement they demand from the other peoples, indeed from the Germans them selves.” Herman Grimm's life work is grounded in such a way with all its roots in the German life of the spirit, that one can say: when he utters such a thought, it is as if he were permeated by the consciousness that he is speaking on the spiritual charge of his people. That he is using words with which he would be al lowed to have the certainty: if the German people as a whole could express it self, it would use such words to express its attitude as to how it conceives of its own willing within the entirety of mankind. Herman Grimm does not want to say that what is present of such an attitude in the present life of mankind could prevent wars. He does speak of having to have the thought that the French want a war against Germany. However, that this attitude will prove its power, even right through wars, that had to be Herman Grimm's conviction, when he brought to expression thoughts like those quoted. Opponents of the German people currently speak as if they held it to be proven that the only cause of this war lay merely in this: that the Germans lack the understanding for such an attitude. As if the result of this war would have to be that the Germans are forced to an understanding of such an attitude. As if among the Germans, authoritative minds had set themselves the task of obliterating this attitude in their people.

[ 5 ] One now hears some names of German personalities spoken in a hate-filled manner. Not only by journalists, also by spiritual leaders of the peoples living at war with Germany. Indeed, such voices also come from countries with which Germany has no war. Among these German personalities is for example the historian of the German people, Heinrich von Treitschke. The Germans who form thoughts about the scientific significance and the essence of the personality of Treitschke pronounce the most divergent value judgments concerning him. From what points of view these judgments are passed, whether they are justified or unjustified, does not matter at this moment; concerning the voices of the opponents of the German essential being, quite another point of view is defining. These opponents want to see in Treitschke a personality who has affected the present German generation in such a way that the German people currently holds itself to be in all directions the most gifted of peoples, which therefore wants to force the others to subordinate themselves to its leadership, and sets the attainment of power above all justice. Were Treitschke still alive, and heard the judgments of the opponents of the German essential being concerning his person, he could remember words he wrote down in 1861, as the expression of his deepest sensibility, in the treatise on Freeness. He there spoke his mind about such people as set a limit right away to their respect and tolerance for alien opinions, when in such opinions something confronts them that does not please them. In such people—Treitschke opines—the thought conceals itself in a veil of passion, and he says: as long as such a manner of replacing judgment with the cliché born of passion is still alive, “there is yet alive in us, even if in a milder form, the fanatical spirit of those zealots of old who used to mention alien opinions only in order to prove that their authors had earned themselves rightful claims to the Lake of Hell.” A man who as Frenchman among Frenchmen, as Italian among Italians, had worked the way Treitschke did as German among Germans: he would not appear to the Germans as a seducer of the French or Italians. Treitschke was an historian and politician, who out of a strong, decided feeling sense, gave all his judgments an imprint that had the effect of sharpness. Those judgments too had such an imprint which he pronounced, out of love for his people, about the Germans. But all these judgments were carried by the feeling: not only his soul was speaking thus, but the course of German history. At the close of the Foreword of Part Five of his German History in the Nineteenth Century stand the words: “as surely as man only understands what he loves, just as surely can only a strong heart that senses the fortunes of the Father land like suffering and happiness of its own experience, give inner truth to the historical narrative. In this might of heart and mind, and not merely in the perfected form, lies the greatness of the historians of antiquity.” Some judgments that Treitschke uttered about what the German people has experienced at the hands of other peoples sound like harsh condemnation of these other peoples. How statements of Treitschke's that go in this direction are to be understood, only he recognizes who also looks at the harshness of the judgments with which Treitschke often passes verdict upon what he finds reprehensible within his own people. Treitschke had the deepest love for his people, which was noble fire in his heart; but he believed it does no harm when one passes verdict most brusquely where one most loves. It would be thinkable that enemies of the German people could turn up who assembled from Treitschke's works a collection of pronouncements, then took away from these pronouncements the color of love they have with Treitschke, and daubed them with their color of hatred: they could thereby prepare word weapons against the German people. These word weapons would not be worse, either, than those with which they shoot at a distorted image of Treitschke in order to wound the German people. Herman Grimm, who knew how to appreciate Treitschke, and was well acquainted with him and his personal manner, spoke some time after his death the words: “Few have been so loved, but also so hated, as he.” Treitschke was grouped by Grimm with the German historians Curtius and Ranke to a trinity of German teachers, about which he expressed himself thus: “They were friendly and confiding in their intercourse. They sought to further their listeners. They acknowledged merit where they met it. They did not seek to suppress their opponents. They had no party and no fellow partisans. They spoke their minds. In their bearing lay something exemplary. They saw in science the highest flowering of the German spirit. They stood up for its dignity.” There is a thorough discussion of Treitschke's German History by Herman Grimm. Whoever reads it must come to the recognition that Herman Grimm counted Treitschke among those who, regarding the relation the German people wants to have to other peoples, thought no differently from himself.

[ 6 ] Whoever from an enemy country reviles a German personality such as lived in Treitschke, and brands him a seducer of the younger generation, lacks a judgment about how a German who sensed “the fortunes of the Fatherland like suffering and happiness of his own experience” had to speak to Germans who, for an understanding of their own history, have to look at experiences in the past that Herman Grimm (in his book on Michelangelo, 16th printing) characterizes with the words: “For thirty years Germany, which was unable to tip the scales as a nation of its own, was the battlefield for the peoples bordering around us, and after the foreigners who had thus waged war upon each other on our ground had finally made peace, the old indefinite situation returned.” In Herman Grimm's Goethe book, there is about these experiences, with the same reference: “the Thirty Years' War, this terrible disease brought in to us from without and nourished artificially,” made “all the young shoots of our forward development wilt and die off.” What a short time had just elapsed since the German people had freed itself from the effect of the suffering that Europe had brought it through the Thirty Years' War, when in the beginning of the Nineteenth Century the other destiny experience came to pass, which coincided with a flourishing of German spiritual life. Were they the words of a man in whose heart the sufferings of his people resonated “like suffering of his own experience,” or were they words of a seducer of the people, with which Treitschke spoke of the spirits whose working coincided with Germany's destiny experience of the beginning of the Nineteenth Century? He speaks about these spirits thus: “They guarded our people's very Own, the sacred fire of Idealism, and we have them pre-eminently to thank that there was still a Germany even when the German Empire had vanished, that in the midst of affliction and bondage the Germans were still permitted to believe in themselves, in the imperishability of German essential being. From the educational molding through and through of the free personality is sued our political freedom, issued the independence of the German state.” Do the opponents of German essential being demand that Treitschke should have said: history teaches that the Germans “are permitted to believe in the imperishability of German essential being” because for all the past and the future they can keep themselves convinced that French, English, Italians, Russians have never fought and will never fight for anything else than for “right and freedom” of peoples? Should the other Germans who are presently called Germany's seducers give the Germans the advice: build not on what in hard wars has gotten you “right and freedom;” you will have “right and freedom” because with those who surround you, the sense for “right and freedom of peoples” shines resplendent in bright light? Only, you must not believe that you are allowed to think of your “right as a people” other than in the sense of what you are deemed entitled to by the peoples who encircle you. You must only never call anything else your “freedom as a people” but what these peoples will show you by their behavior that you “as a people are free to do?”

[ 7 ] Where the sensations are rooted which those who belong to “Europe's Middle” have in the present war, the author of this brief writing would like to state. The facts he wants to discuss are, in their general basic features, certainly known to every reader. It does not lie in the author's intention to speak in this direction about what is not yet known. He would only like to point toward certain connections in which what has long been known stands.

[ 8 ] If opponents of the German people should perhaps read this brief writing, they will quite comprehensibly say: so speaks a German, who can naturally bring no understanding toward the opinion of other peoples. Whoever judges in this way does not comprehend that the paths the author of this contemplation seeks in order to discuss the coming about of this war are quite independent of how much of the essential being of a non-German people he understands or does not understand. He wants to speak in such a way that if the reasons he puts forward for what is claimed are any good, his thoughts can be right, even if he, with respect to an understanding of the special quality and the value of non German peoples, as far as they may be closed to a German, were the pure fool. When, for example, he refers to what a Frenchman says about the intentions of the French for war, and on that basis forms a judgment about the coming about of the war, then this judgment could be right, even if a Frenchman were to believe he had to deny in him any understanding of French special quality. When he forms judgments about the English political ideal, it does not come into question how the Englishman for himself thinks or senses, but what the actions are like in which this political ideal lives itself out, and what the German in particular experiences through these actions. For himself, to be sure, the author is convinced that in this brief writing there will lie no occasion to judge what understanding he brings toward this or that non-German folk quality.

[ 9 ] The author of the brief writing believes that what he allows himself to pronounce as a German about the feeling of “Middle Europe,” he may say, for he spent the first three decades of his life in Austria, where he lived as an Austrian German by descent, nationality, and upbringing; and for the other—almost just as long—time of this life, he has been permitted to be active in Germany.

[ 10 ] Perhaps someone who knows the one or the other of the author's writings will seek of one who stands at the vantage point of the science of the spirit, as it is meant in these writings, “higher points of view” in the following discussions than he finds. Especially those will be unsatisfied who expect to find here some thing about how the present war events can be judged “on the basis of the eternal, highest truths of all being and life.” To such “disappointed ones,” who will perhaps turn up precisely among the friends of the author, he would like to say that the “highest eternal truths” are of course valid everywhere, thus also for the present events, but that this contemplation was not undertaken in the intention of showing how one can bear witness to these “higher truths” with respect to these events as well, but in another intention, the intention of speaking of these events themselves. [The author hopes to be able to give other things about the present time and the peoples of Europe soon in a second brief writing. The thoughts written down here are concentrated from lectures the author held in several places in recent months.]

[ 11 ] Whoever has allowed Fichte's manner of spirit to work upon him, senses in all following time that he has taken something into his soul that has still an other effect entirely than the ideas and words of this thinker. These ideas and words transform themselves in the soul. They become a power that is essentially more than the remembrance of what was received directly from Fichte. A power that has something of the quality of living beings. It grows in the soul. And in it, the soul feels a never dwindling means of strength. If one senses the special quality of Fichte this way, one can never separate from this sensation the mental representation of the inner essential being-ness with which the German soul spoke through Fichte. How one stands toward Fichte's world view does not matter here. It is not the content, it is the power by which this world view is created. That power is what one feels. Whoever wants to follow Fichte as a thinker must enter into seemingly cold regions of ideas. Into regions in which the power of thinking must cast aside much that is otherwise dear to it, in order merely to find it possible that a man can put himself into such a relationship toward the world as Fichte had. But if one has followed Fichte thus, then one feels how the power that held sway in his thinking streamed into the life-giving words with which, in a destiny-bearing time, he sought to enflame his people to world-effective deed. The warmth in Fichte's Speeches to the German Nation is one with the light that shone for him in his energetic thought work. And the connection of this light with this warmth appears in Fichte's personality as that by which he is one of the most authentic embodiments of German essential being. This German essential Being had first to make Fichte into the thinker he was, before it could speak through him the penetrating Speeches to the German Nation. But after it had created such a thinker as Fichte, this German essential Being could not speak otherwise to the nation than happened in these speeches. Again it matters less what Fichte said in these speeches than, rather, how German-ness, through them, placed itself before the consciousness of the people. A thinker who in his world view is far removed from Fichte's trains of thought, Robert Zimmermann, must speak the words: “As long as in Germany a heart beats that is able to feel the shame of foreign tyranny, the memory of the courageous one will live on, who at the moment of deepest humiliation, in the midst of French-occupied Berlin, before the eyes and ears of the enemies, among spies and informers, under took to raise the power of the German people, broken from without by the sword, upright again from within by the spirit, and at the same instant when the political existence of this people seemed to be annihilated forever, to create it anew, by the enthusiastic thought of universal education, in future generations.”

[ 12 ] One need not have the aim of awakening sentimental feelings if, to characterize the special quality of how Fichte is connected with the deepest essential being of being German, one portrays the last hours in the life of the thinker.—Fichte's wife, the life companion who truly was not only worthy of him, who fully measured up to his greatness, had done hospital service for five months under the most difficult conditions, and had thereby contracted lazaret fever. The wife recovered. Fichte himself fell prey to the disease and succumbed to it. His son described the manner of Fichte's dying. The last report that the dying one received was that delivered by the son, of Blucher's crossing of the Rhine, of the advance of the allies against the French enemy. The soul wresting itself from the thinker's body lived entirely in the profound joy over these events; and as the formerly icy-sharp thinking passed over in the dying one into fever fantasies, he felt himself among the midst of the fighters. How the image of the philosopher stands before the soul, who—right over into the fever fantasies clouding the consciousness—is like the Entity, revealing itself, of the will and working of his people! And how in Fichte the German philosopher is one with every stirring of life of the whole man. The son hands the dying one a medicine. The dying one gently pushes back what is proffered; he feels himself entirely one with the world-historical working of his people. In such feeling he concludes his life with the words: I need no medicine; I feel that I have recovered. He had “recovered” in the feeling of participating in his soul in the experience of the elevation of the German essential Being.

[ 13 ] From the upward glance to Fichte's personality, one is allowed to draw the power to speak about German essential being. For his striving was to make this essential being astir, as an actively working power, right into the sources of his special nature. And in the contemplation of his personality it comes clearly to light that he felt his own work of spirit connected with the deepest roots of the German essential being. These roots themselves, though, he sought in the foundations of the working of spirit which he beheld behind all of the world's outer, sense-accessible functionings. He could not conceive of German working with out a connection of this working with the spirituality illuminating the world through and through and warming it through and through. He saw the essential being of German-ness in the welling forth of the life expressions of the people from the primal source of the originally spiritually alive. And what he himself understood as world view that issues from this primal source in the sense of the German quality, he spoke out about it thus: “It—this world view—glimpses time and eternity and infinity, as they come into being out of the appearing and becoming visible of that One that is in itself simply invisible, and only in this its invisibility is grasped, rightly grasped.”—“All persistent existence appearing as not spiritual life is but an empty shadow cast from seeing, transmitted in multiple ways by nothingness, as opposed to which, and by whose recognition as nothingness transmitted in multiple ways, seeing itself is to rise to the recognizing of its own nothingness, and to the acknowledgment of the invisible as the only true being.”

[ 14 ] In his Speeches to the German Nation, Fichte seeks to grasp all truly German life expressions this way, out the source of spiritual life, and to receive out of this source the words themselves with which he speaks of these life expressions.—One will perhaps pause with special feelings at one passage in these Speeches, if from their tone and bosom depth, one has imbued oneself with the feeling perception: how this man stands with his whole soul within the viewing of the spiritual essential being of the world! How this standing with his soul within the spiritual world is for him such an immediate reality as for the outer man the standing within the material world by means of the senses! One may think how ever one does about the characterization of his time as developed by Fichte in the Speeches; if one hears of this characterization through his words, it cannot matter whether one agrees with what is said or not, but what a magical breath of human ethos one feels.—Fichte talks of the age he would like to help to bring about. He uses a simile. And this simile is where one is held fast with one's feelings in the sense hinted at. He says: “The age appears to me like an empty shade, who is standing above its corpse, which a host of diseases has just driven it out of, and lamenting, and is unable to tear its gaze from the once so beloved sheath, and despairingly tries all means of re-entering that housing-place of plagues. Though the enlivening airs of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already received her, and surround her with warm breath of love, though secret voices of her sisters are already greeting her joyfully and welcoming her, though there is already a stirring and an expanding in her inner being in all directions, to develop the glorious shape to which she is to grow: yet she has no feeling for these airs as yet, or hearing for these voices, or if she had, she is consumed in pain at her loss, with which she believes she has at the same time lost herself.”

[ 15 ] The question is natural: how is the mood of a soul who, in a contemplation of the age and the changing of the ages, is driven to such a comparison? Fichte is talking here about the existence of the human soul after its separation from the body by death, the way a person otherwise talks about a material process that plays itself out before his senses. To be sure, Fichte is using a simile. And a simile must not be exploited in such a way that one would like to prove something by it about a significant view of the person who utters the simile. But the simile points to a mental representation that lives in the soul of the simile-maker with regard to an object or process. Here, with regard to the experiences of the human soul after death. Without wanting to claim anything about how Fichte would have made a pronouncement about the validity of such a mental representation if he had done so in the context of his world view, one can never-the-less lead this mental representation before one's soul. Fichte speaks of the human soul as of a being so independent of the body that this being separates from the bodily nature in death, and is able to look consciously at the separated body the way the man in the sense world looks at an object or process with his eyes. Apart from this looking at the body which one has left, the new environment which the soul enters when it has separated from the body is hinted at too. That modern form of the science of the spirit which talks about these things on the basis of certain soul experiences is allowed to find something significant in this Fichtean simile. What this science of the spirit strives for is a recognition concerning the spiritual worlds entirely in the sense of the type of recognition that is acknowledged by modern natural science as justified concerning the natural world. Though this form of spirit science is presently still seen by many as a dreaming, as a wild flight of fancy; yet so it also went for many people for a long time with the view, contradicting the senses, of the orbit of the earth around the sun. It is essential that this science of the spirit has as its basis a real recognizability of the spiritual world. A recognizability that rests not on concepts thought out, but on experiences of the soul of man that are really to be achieved. As he can know nothing of the properties of hydrogen who knows only water, which has hydrogen in it, so he can know nothing of the true being of the human soul who experiences the soul only the way it is when it is in connection with the body. Yet the science of the spirit leads to this: that the spiritual-and-soul re leases itself for its own perception from the physical-and-bodily, as by the methods of the chemist hydrogen can be released from water. Such a release of the soul happens not by false mystical flights of fancy, but by rigorously healthy intensified inner experiencing of certain soul faculties, which, though always pre sent in every soul, remain unnoticed and unconsidered in normal life and in nor mal science. By such strengthening and enlivening of soul forces, the soul of man can come to an inner experiencing in which it beholds a spiritual world, as it beholds with the senses the material world. It then knows itself to be indeed “outside of the connection with the body” and equipped with what—to use Goethean expressions—one can call “eyes of spirit” and “ears of spirit.” Spirit science talks of these things not at all in a pseudo-mystical sense, but in such a way that for it, the progression from the usual view of the sense world to the viewing of the spiritual world becomes a definite process inherent in the essential being of the nature of man, which to be sure one must call forth by one's own inner experiencing, by a definitely directed self-activation of the soul. But with respect to this too, the science of the spirit is allowed to feel itself in unison with Fichte. When in 1813 in autumn he delivered his Doctrine before listeners as ripe fruit of his spirit striving, he spoke the following as introduction: “This doctrine presupposes a completely new inner sense instrument, by which a new world is given that for the ordinary person does not exist at all.” Fichte does not at all mean by this an “organ” that exists only for “chosen,” not for “ordinary people,” but an “organ” that anyone can acquire, but which for man's ordinary recognizing and perceiving does not come to consciousness. With such an “organ,” man is now really in a spiritual world, and is able to speak about life in this world as by his senses about material processes. For anyone who puts himself into this position, it becomes natural to speak about the life of the soul the way it is done in the Fichtean simile quoted. Fichte makes the comparison not out of a general belief, but by a standing within the spiritual world that has been experienced. One must sense in Fichte a personality that in every stirring of life consciously feels itself one with the holding sway of a spiritual world, and beholds itself standing within this world as the man of the senses does in the material world. Now, that this is the mood of soul that he has the German basic tenor of his world view to thank for, Fichte distinctly states. He says: “ The true philosophy¹ that has come to an end within itself, and has truly penetrated beyond appearance to its core, ... proceeds from the one, pure, divine life—as life outright, which remains that for all eternity, and in eternity always remains one, but not as from this or that life; and it sees how merely in the appearance this life closes and again opens, endlessly on, and only in consequence of this law comes to an existence, and to a Something at all. For it, existence comes about, which the other (here Fichte means un-German philosophy) takes as given in advance. And so this philosophy (Fichte means the one he professes) is in the quite proper sense only German, that is, original; and conversely, were someone but to be come a true German, he would not be able to philosophize otherwise than thus.”

[ 16 ] It would be wrong to quote these words of Fichte's in characterization of his soul mood without at the same time calling to mind the others that he spoke in the same context of the speech: “Anybody who believes in spiritual-intellectual activity, and freeness of this spiritual-intellectual activity, and wants the eternal further education of this spiritual-intellectual activity by freeness, he, wherever he was born, and whatever language he speaks, is of our lineage, he belongs to us, and he will join us.”—In the time when Fichte saw German nationality threatened by western foreign rule, he felt the necessity of declaring that he sensed the essential-being quality of his world view as a gift extended to him as if by the German Folk Spirit. And he unreservedly brought it to expression that this sensation had led him to the recognition of the tasks he was allowed to accord the German Folk within the evolution of humanity, in the sense that from the recognition of these tasks the German may derive his right and his vocation to all that he intends and fulfills in the context of peoples. That he may seek in this recognition the source from which there flows to him the power to get involved in this evolution as a German with all that he has and is.

[ 17 ] Whoever in the present time has taken up Fichte's soul mood into the life of his own soul, will find in the world view of this thinker a power which does not let him remain at this world view. Which leads him, in his striving for spiritual-intellectual activity, to a viewpoint that shows the connections of man with the world differently from how Fichte presented them. He will be able to gain by Fichte the ability to see the world differently from how Fichte saw it. And he will sense just this manner of striving in a Fichtean way as a profound relation ship with this thinker. Such a one will also certainly not reckon among the ideals which he would like to stand up for unconditionally the plan of education that Fichte in his Speeches to the German Nation characterized as the one that appeared salutary to him. And so it is with much that Fichte wanted to advance as content of his views. But the soul mood that from him communicates itself to the soul that can meet with him works like a spring still flowing in the present in full freshness. His world view strives for the strongest exertion of the powers of thought that the soul can find in itself, in order to discover in man what shows man's being as “higher man” in man in connection with the spirit foundation of that world which lies beyond all sense experience. Certainly that is the way of every striving for a world view that does not want to see in the sense world itself the basis of all being. But Fichte's special quality lies in the power he wants to give to thought out of the depths of the essential being of man. So that this thought find by itself the firmness that lends it weight in the spiritual world. A weight that maintains it in the regions of soul life, and in which the soul can feel the eternity of her experiencing, yes, so create this eternity by willing it that this willing is allowed to know itself to be connected with the eternal spirit life.

[ 18 ] Thus does Fichte strive for “pure humanity” in his world view. In this striving he is allowed to know himself to be at one with all that is human, wherever and however it ever makes its appearance on the earth. And in a time heavy with destiny, Fichte uttered the word: “Were someone but to become a true German, he could not philosophize other than thus.” And through all that he says in the Speeches to the German Nation, the extension of this thought sounds through like a foundation tone: If only someone is a true German, he will out of his German-ness find the path upon which an understanding of all human reality can ripen. For it is not that Fichte thinks he is allowed to see only the world view in the light of this thought. Because he is a thinker, he gives as an example what kind of thinker he by his German-ness had to become. But he is of the opinion that this fundamental essential being of German-ness must speak itself out in every German, wherever he has his place in life.

[ 19 ] The passion of the war wants to deny Germans the right to speak about the German element the way Fichte did. From the countries living at war with the Germans, personalities who occupy a high position in the spiritual life of these countries also speak out of this passion. Philosophers use the power of their thinking to corroborate—in unison with the opinion of the day—the judgment that the German ethnic element itself has estranged itself from that willing that lived in personalities of Fichte's quality, and has fallen prey to what is designated with the now popular word “barbarism.” And if the German voices the thought that this ethnic element did after all produce people of that quality, then probably the utterance of such a thought will be designated as most superfluous. For one would probably like to reply that all of that is not what is being talked about. That one knows how to honor it that the Germans have had Goethe, Fichte, Schiller, etc. in their midst; but that their spirit does not speak out of what the Germans are bringing about in the present. And so the passionate critics of the German essential being will probably even manage to find the words: out of the dreamy quality of the Germans—which we have always evaluated correctly—why shouldn't dreamers still turn up today as well who, in response to the words with which we meet what the German weapons do to us, answer with a characterization of the German essential being given them by their Fichte in a past that is lost to them; which characterization he himself would probably change, though, if he saw how the German manner is today.

[ 20 ] There will come times that will acquire a calm judgment about whether the condemnation of German willing spoken out of passion does not correspond to blind inebriation, equivalent in its reality-value with a dream, and whether next to that, the “dreaming” that still speaks about present German willing in Fichte's manner does not perhaps signify that waking state which does not insert between itself and the events the passions, hostile to reality, which lull judgment to sleep.

[ 21 ] Working out of no other spirit than that in whose name Fichte spoke can the willing appear to the German which the German people must develop in the fight forced upon it by the enemies of Germany. As if in a far-spread fortress, the opponents hold the body enclosed which is the expression of what Fichte characterized as the German Spirit. That Spirit which the German warrior feels himself as a fighter for, whether he does this in conscious recognition of this Spirit, or takes his stand in the battle out of the subconscious powers of his soul.

[ 22 ] “Who wanted this war?” so ran a question posed to the Germans by many opponents, which presupposed, as self-evident answer, that the Germans wanted it. Yet to such a question, not passion may reply. Also not the judgment that wants to draw conclusions only from the facts that preceded the war in the very most recent time. What happened in this very most recent time is rooted deeply in the currents of European will impulses. And an answer to the above question can be sought only in the impulses that have long been set against the German element.

[ 23 ] Here only such impulses are to be pointed to as are so well known, in their general essence, that it can seem fully superfluous to speak about them when one wants to say something about the causes of the coming about of the present war. There are, however, two points of view from which the seemingly superfluous can appear desirable after all. The one results when one considers that in the forming of a judgment about important facts, what matters cannot be solely that one knows something, but from what bases one forms one's judgment. One is led to the second point of view when, in the contemplation of im pulses of peoples, one wants to recognize in what manner they are rooted in the life of the peoples. From the insight into this manner, there results a feeling perception about the strength with which these impulses live on in time, and take effect at the moment that is favorable to them.

[ 24 ] Ernest Renan is one of the leading spirits of France in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. This author of a Life of Jesus and of the Apostles wrote in an open letter during the war in the year 1870 to the German author of a Life of Jesus, David Friedrich Strauss: “I was at the Seminaire St. Sulpice, around the year 1843, when I began to get to know Germany through the writings of Goethe and Herder. I believed I was entering a temple, and from that moment on, all that until then I had held to be a splendor worthy of the Godhead only made upon me the impression of wilted and yellowed paper flowers.” Further the French man writes in the same letter: “in Germany” there has “for a century come about one of the most beautiful spiritual developments known to history, a development which, if I may venture the expression, has added a level of depth and ex tension to the human spirit, so that whoever has remained untouched by this new development is to him who has gone through it as one who knows only elementary mathematics is to him who is experienced in differential calculus.” And this leading Frenchman brings clearly to expression in the same letter what this Germany, before whose life of spirit “all that until then” he “had held to be a splendor worthy of the Godhead only made upon” him “the impression of wilted and yellowed paper flowers,” would have to expect from the French if it did not conclude the war of then with a peace agreeable to Renan's fellow countrymen. He writes: “The hour is solemn. There are in France two currents of opinion. The ones judge thus: Let us make an end to this hated business as quickly as possible; let us give away everything, Alsace, Lorraine; let us sign the peace accord; but then, hatred unto death, preparations without rest, alliance with anyone convenient, unlimited permissiveness toward all Russian overreachings; one single goal, one single driving force for life: the struggle of obliteration against the German race. Others say: Let us save France's integrity, let us develop the constitutional institutions, let us make good our mistakes, not by dreaming of revenge for a war in which we were the unjust attackers, but by concluding a treaty with Germany and England whose effect will be to lead the world further on the path of free civilized morality.” Renan himself calls attention to this: that France was the unjust attacker in the war of then. And so it is not necessary to put forward the easily demonstrable historical fact that Germany had to wage that war to put in its bounds the constant disturber of its work. Now, one can disregard to what extent Germany was striving for Alsace-Lorraine as a region of related ethnic stocks; one need only emphasize the necessity which Germany was put into by this: that it could only get itself some calm at the hands of the French if with the Alsace-Lorraine region it took away from its neighbor the possibility of disturbing this calm so easily in the future as had often happened in the past. But thereby a brake was put on the second current in France spoken of by Renan; not this one had prospects for its goal of “leading the world further on the path of free civilized morality,” but the other, whose “single goal, single driving force,” for life was: “the struggle of obliteration against the German race.” There were men who in some of what has happened since the War of 1870 believed they recognized signs that a bridging of the conflicts was possible on a peaceful path. In the course of the last years many voices that sounded in this tone could be heard. Yet the impulse directed against the German people lived on, and there remained alive the driving force: “alliance with anyone convenient, unlimited permissiveness toward all Russian overreachings; ... the struggle of obliteration against the German race.” Out of the same spirit, sounds are issuing again at present through quite a few of the leading minds of France. Renan continues his contemplation about the two previously portrayed currents in the French people with the words: “Germany will decide whether France will choose this political strategy or that one; it will thereby decide at the same time about the future of civilized morality.” One must really first convert this sentence into the German meaning to appraise it rightly. It means: France has proven to be an unjust attacker in the war; in the event that Germany, after a victory over France, does not conclude a peace that leaves France unimpededly in the position to become such an unjust attacker again as soon as it pleases, then Germany is deciding against the civilized morality of the future. What is decided, out of such an understanding, concerning “hatred unto death, preparations without rest, alliance with anyone convenient, unlimited permissiveness toward all Russian overreachings,” what is decided concerning the “single driving force for life: the struggle of obliteration against the German race,” that and nothing else provides the basis for an answer to the question: “Who wanted this war?”

[ 25 ] As to whether the “alliance” will be found, there too, men capable of taking a look at the impulses directed against Germany were already giving an answer back when Renan spoke out in the sense characterized. A man who seeks a look forward from the then present into the future of Europe, Carl Vogt, writes during the War of 1870: “It is possible that even if its territory is left intact, France will take advantage of the opportunity to whet the nicked blade sharp again; it is probable that with no annexation, it will have more than enough to do with its own internal affairs, and will consider a renewed war all the less, since a powerful current of peace must take hold in the hearts and minds; it is certain that it will set aside all scruples should an annexation take place. Which wager then should the statesman choose?”—It is easy to see that the answer to this question depends also upon one's view about the coming European conflicts. By itself, France will not dare, even in the longer term, to brave the fight against Germany anew, the blows have been too heavy and thorough for that,—but as soon as another enemy arises, it will be able to put to itself the question whether it is in a position to join in, and on whose side.—As far as I'm concerned, I am not in doubt for a moment that a conflict between the Germanic and the Slavic world is approaching and that in it, Russia will take over the leadership on the one side. This power is preparing even now for this eventuality; the national Russian press spits fire and flames against Germany. The German press is already letting its calls of warning resound. A long time has passed since Russia collected itself after the Crimean War, and as it seems, it is now found advisable in Petersburg to take up the Oriental question once again ... If the Mediterranean is someday supposed to become, according to the more pompous than true expression, a “French lake,” Russia has the at least much more positive aim of making the Black Sea a Russian lake, and the Sea of Marmara a Russian pond. That Constantinople .... needs to become a Russian city, is an established goal of “the Russian policy,” which finds its “supporting lever” in “Pan-Slavism.” (Carl Vogt's Political Letters, Biel 1870.) To this judgment of Carl Vogt's about what he foresees for Europe, there could be added those of not a few other personalities, gleaned from the contemplation of European directions of willing. They would make what is to be indicated here more vividly insistent, and yet speak of the same fact: that already in 1870 an observer of these directions of willing had to point to the East of Europe if he wanted to answer for himself the question: Who will want to wage a war against Middle Europe sooner or later? And his gaze had to fall upon France when he asked: who will want to wage this war together with Russia against Germany? Vogt's voice comes especially into consideration because in the letter in which he so speaks, he says some unfriendly things to Germany. He can truly not be accused of bias in favor of Germany. But his words are proof that the question: who will want this war? had long been answered by the facts before those causes were at work which Germany's opponents would so like to hear as an answer when they raise the question: Who wanted this war? That it took more than forty years from then to the outbreak of the war, is not thanks to France.

[ 26 ] In the Russian spiritual life of the Nineteenth Century, there come to light directions of thought that bear the same countenance as the will to war that has unloaded at present from the East against Middle Europe. To what extent those persons are right who assert that the reference to this kind of directions of thought is inappropriate, can be known by him too who sees in such a reference the right way to the understanding of the relevant events. What one calls the “causes” of these events in the ordinary sense can quite certainly not be sought in such directions of thought of Particular people—who today aren't even alive anymore. As regards these causes, there will certainly eventually be some agreement for those who will show that these causes lie with a number of per sons, whom they will then point to. Against this way of looking at the issue, no objection shall be made, its full justification shall not be contested. Yet some thing else, something no less justified, is the recognition of the powers and driving forces operative in the historical process. The directions of thought pointed to here are not these driving forces; but these driving forces show themselves upon and in the directions of thought. Whoever recognizes the directions of thought, holds fast in his recognition the beings in the folk forces. It can also not be objected that it is asserted by many with a certain rightness that the directions of thought that come into question are no longer alive at present. What is alive in the East flickered up in souls of thinkers, formed itself back then to thoughts, and lives at present—in another form—in the will to war.

[ 27 ] What flickered up is the idea of the special mission of the Russian people. What comes into consideration is the manner of h o w this idea is brought to bear. In it lives the belief that the Western European life of the spirit has entered the state of wizened old age, of decline, and that the Russian Folk Spirit is called to effect a total renewal, rejuvenation of this life of the spirit. This idea of rejuvenation grows to the opinion that all historical progress of the future coincides with the mission of the Russian People. In the first half of the Nineteenth Century Khomiakov already builds out this idea to a comprehensive edifice of doctrine. This edifice of doctrine is to be found in a work published only after his death. It is carried by the belief that the Western European development of the spirit was basically never set up to find the way to proper humanness. And that the Russian folk element must first find this way. Khomiakov looks in his fashion at this Western European development of the spirit. Into this development has flowed, according to his kind of view, to begin with, the Roman essential being. That this has never been able to manifest inner humanity in the deeds of the world. That on the contrary, it forced upon the human inward being the forms of external laws of men, and thought in a rational, materialistic way of what ought to be taken hold of in the inner weaving of the soul. This external way of grasping life continued, Khomiakov opines, in the Christendom of the Western European peoples. That their Christianity lives in the head, not in the soul's in most. Now according to Khomiakov's belief, what Western Europe has as life of the spirit, has been made by modern “barbarians”—again externalizing after their fashion what ought to live inwardly—out of the Roman element and Christendom. That the turning inward will have to be brought by the Russian people, in keeping with the higher mission embodied in it by the spiritual world.—In such an edifice of doctrine, there rumble sensations whose complete interpretation would necessitate a detailed characterizing of the Russian folk soul. Such a characterization would have to point to forces inherent in this folk soul that will one day occasion it to adapt in a corresponding way for itself, out of its inner power, what holds sway in the Western European life of the spirit and will only then give the Russian people what it can ripen to in the course of history. What of the result of this ripening of the Russian people the other peoples will make fruitful for themselves, the Russian people should leave up to these peoples. Otherwise, it could fall prey to the sad misunderstanding of taking a task it has to fulfill for itself to be a task for the world, and thereby taking away its very most essential point.—Since it is a matter of the rumbling of sensations of such a misunderstood task, the idea in question did connect it self, in the heads it appeared in, only all too frequently with political directions of thought that demonstrate that in these heads this idea is the expression of the same driving powers that from the East laid in other people the germ to the pre sent will to war. Even if on the one hand one will be able to say of the lovable, poetically high-minded Khomiakov that he expected the fulfillment of the Russian mission by a peaceful current of spirit, yet the reminder is also permissible that in his soul this expectation associated with what Russia would like to attain as military opponent of Europe. For one will certainly do him no wrong when one says that in 1829 he took part in the Turkish War as a volunteer hussar be cause he sensed, in what Russia was then doing, a first flashing up of its world-historical mission.—What rumbled in the lovable Khomiakov often in poetic transfiguration; it rumbled on; and in a book by Danilevsky Russia and Europe, which toward the end of the Nineteenth Century was regarded by a number of personalities as a gospel on the task of Russia, the driving powers are brought to expression which thought of the “spiritual task of the Russian people” as fused to complete unity with a far-reaching will to conquest. One need but look at the expression this fusion of spiritual willing with intentions of attack has found be fore all the world, and one will find clear symptoms of what mattered to begin with to many of those, also, who wanted to derive the mission of Russia from the essential being of the spiritual world. This mission is brought together with the conquest of Constantinople, and it is demanded of the will which is thereby assigned its direction that without sensing “love and hate,” it dull itself against all feeling toward “Reds or Whites, toward demagogues or despots, to ward the legitimate or revolutionaries, toward Germans, French, English, or Italians,” that it regard as “true allies” only those who support Russia in its striving. It is said that “in Europe the balance of political driving powers” is especially pernicious to what Russia must will, and that one must further “any violation of this balance,” “whatever side it may come from.” “It is incumbent upon us to reject forever any cooperation with European interests.”

[ 28 ] Especially characteristic is the position the fine-minded Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovieff has taken toward these directions of thought and sensation. Solovieff can be regarded as one of the most significant embodiments of Russian essential being of spirit. In his works there lives beautiful philosophical power, noble upward spiritual vision, mystical depth. Yet he too was long imbued with the idea rumbling in the heads of his fellow countrymen of the lofty mission of the Russian element. With him too this idea associated with the other one about the exhausted-ness of the Western European element. For him, the reason Western Europe was not able to help the world to the revealing of full inmost humanity was that this Western Europe had expected salvation from the development of the individual powers inherent in man. Yet in such striving out of man's own powers, Solovieff could see only an unspiritual false path, from which mankind had to be redeemed by this: that without human doing, by a miracle, spiritual power would pour itself from other worlds onto the earth, and that that folk element which was chosen to receive this power would become the savior of a mankind that had lost its way. In the essential being of the Russian people he saw what was prepared to receive such an extra-human power, and hence to be the savior of true humanity. Solovieff's growing together with the

Russian essential being got to the point where in his soul the rumbling of the Russian ideal was pleased to look benevolently for a time upon others who were likewise possessed by this rumbling. Yet this was only able to be so until his soul, which was filled with genuine idealism, awakened to the feeling sense that this rumbling was based on the misconception of a future ideal for the Russian people's own development. He made the discovery that many others do not speak at all about which ideal the Russian people strives after for its own salvation, but rather that they make the Russian people, as it presently is, itself to an idol. And through this discovery, Solovieff became the harshest critic of those who, under the flag of a mission of the Russian people, were introducing into the will of the nation, as wholesome driving powers of further spirit development, the attacker instincts directed against Western Europe. Out of the doctrine of Danilevsky's book Russia and Europe, the question was staring at Solovieff: why must Europe look with concern at what is coming about within the borders of Russia? And in the soul of the Russian this question takes on the form: “Why does Europe not love us?” And Solovieff, who saw the Russian attacker instincts in the garb of the ideas of the world-historical mission of Russia especially spoken out in Danilevsky's book, found in his way the answer to this question in a critique of this book (1888). Danilevsky had opined, “Europe fears us as the newer and higher cultural Type, called to replace the wizened old age of the Romanic-Germanic civilization.” Solovieff quotes this as Danilevsky's belief. And to it he replies: “Nevertheless, both the content of Danilevsky's book and his later admissions and those of his like-minded friend—meaning Strakhov, who advocated Danilevsky's ideas after his death—lead to a different answer: Europe looks upon us as an opponent and with worry because in the Russian people there live dark and unclear elemental forces, because its spiritual and cultural powers are meager and insufficient, whereas its demands make their appearance blatantly, and sharply defined. Mightily the calls resound out to Europe of what the Russian people wills as a nation, that it wants to annihilate Turkey and Austria, defeat Germany, wants to seize Constantinople, and if possible, India too. And when they ask us, in place of what we seize and destroy, what favors we want to bestow on mankind, what spiritual and cultural rejuvenation we want to bring into world evolution, we must either be silent or babble meaningless clichés. And if Danilevsky's bitter confession that Russia is beginning to fall ill is just, then instead of the question: why does Europe not love us? we would have to occupy ourselves rather with a different one, a question closer to us and more important to us: why and wherefore are we ill? Physically, Russia is still fairly strong, as shown in the latest Russian war; so our malady is a moral one. There weigh upon us, according to the words of an old author, the sins hidden in the folk character and not coming to our awareness—and so it is needful above all to bring these up into the light of bright consciousness. As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elemental instincts must cause us only harm. The essential, indeed the only essential question for true patriot ism is not the question about the power of Russia and about its calling, but about its sins.”

[ 29 ] One will have to point to these directions of will coming to light in the East of Europe if one wants to speak of operative forces in the attacker will of this East; what came to expression through Tolstoy represents inoperative forces.

[ 30 ] This doctrine of the “mission of Russia” can receive an illumination by this: that side by side with it, one contemplates an example of how such a mission of a people is sensed within that life of spirit which the speakers of this mission look down upon as upon a life of spirit condemned to wizened old age. Schiller stood especially close to Fichte in his life of thought when in his Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man he sought for a prospect that lets man behold in himself the “higher,” the “true man.” If one enters into the soul mood that holds sway in these aesthetic letters of Schiller's, one will be able to find in them a high point of German perceptive feeling. Schiller is of the opinion that man can become unfree toward two sides in his life. He is unfree when he faces the world in such a way that he lets the things affect him only through the necessity of the senses; then the sense world governs him, and his spirituality subordinates itself to it. But also when man obeys only the necessity holding sway in his Reason he is unfree. Reason has its own demands, and if he submits to these demands, man cannot experience the free holding sway of his will in the rigid necessity of reason. Through the reason-necessity, he does live on a spiritual level, but the spirituality subjugates the sense life. Man becomes free when he can experience in such a way what affects the senses that in the sense-perceptible something spiritual manifests, and when he experiences the spiritual itself in such a way that it can be pleasing to him like what affects the senses. That is the case when man stands before the work of art, when the sense impression becomes spiritual pleasure, when what is experienced spiritually, transfiguring the sense impression, is felt. On this path, man becomes “completely man.” Many prospects that result from this way of mind shall be disregarded here. Only one thing that is striven for with this Schiller view shall be pointed out. One of the paths is sought on which man, through his relationship to the world, finds in himself the “higher man.” This path is sought out of the contemplation of the human entity. Just really place beside this way of mind, which wants to speak humanly in man with man himself, the other, which supposes that the Russian folk quality is the one that in contrast to other folk qualities must lead the world to true humanity.

[ 31 ] Fichte seeks to characterize this way of mind inherent in the essential being of the German attitude in his Speeches to the German Nation with the words: “There are peoples who, while themselves retaining their peculiarities and wanting them honored, also let the other peoples have theirs, and do not begrudge them, and grant them; without doubt the Germans belong to these, and this trait is so deeply founded in their entire past and present life in the world that very often, in order to be just both towards the contemporary world abroad and towards antiquity, they are unjust towards themselves. Again there are other peoples whose narrowly ingrown self never allows them the freeness of separating off for a cool and calm contemplation of what is foreign, and who are therefore compelled to believe there is only one way of qualifying as an educated person, and that every time this way is the one that some chance has cast precisely upon them at this point in time; that all other people in the world have no other calling than to become as they are, and that they ought to pay them the greatest thanks if they are willing to take upon themselves the pains of thus forming them. Between peoples of the first kind, an interplay of mutual formation and education most beneficial to the development of man in general takes place, and an interpenetration in which nevertheless each one, with the good will of the other, remains himself. Peoples of the second kind are able to educate nothing, for they are unable to take hold of anything in its existent state; they only want to annihilate everything that stands existent, and outside of them selves everywhere produce an empty place, in which they can only keep repeating their own shape; even their initial apparent entry into foreign customs is only the good-natured condescension of the educator toward the apprentice who is now still feeble but gives good hope; even the figures of the perfection of the ancient world they do not like, until they have wrapped them in their garment, and if they could, they would wake them up from the tombs to educate them after their fashion.” That is how Fichte passes verdict concerning some national peculiarities; only, after this judgment there follows straightway a sentence in tended to take away from this judgment any tinge of a national arrogance of his own: “To be sure, far be the audacity from me to accuse any existent nation as a whole and without exception of that narrow-mindedness. Let us rather assume that here too those who do not express themselves are the better ones.”

[ 32 ] These contemplations would not like to answer the question: who wanted this war? out of such a mood of soul as some personalities of the countries at war with Middle Europe do. They would like to let the conditions influencing the events speak on their own. He who is writing down these contemplations asked among Russians whether they had wanted a war against Middle Europe.—To him, what Renan predicted² in the year 1870 seems to lead onto a surer path than the judgments presently pronounced out of passion. This seems to him to be a path to the only region of judgment which, regarding the war, can and should be entered upon by him too who makes himself mental representations about what judgments of thought are superfluous and inappropriate when the judgments of deed by the weapons have to decide about the destinies of peoples out of blood and death.

[ 33 ] It is certain that driving powers pushing for war can be compelled by other forces into a life of peace long enough until they have weakened in themselves so far that they become ineffective. And whoever has to suffer from this effectiveness will make an effort to create these peacekeeping forces. The course of history shows that for years, Germany has taken upon itself this effort concerning the will forces streaming from West and East. Everything else that one can say regarding the present war in the direction of France's and Russia's driving powers weighs less than the simple, patent fact that these driving powers were sufficiently deeply anchored in the willing of these two countries to defy everything that wanted to hold them down. Whoever states this fact does not necessarily have to be reckoned among those personalities who judge out of inclination or disinclination, predetermined by the events—quite comprehensible in this time, of course—toward this or that people. Disdain, hatred, or the like need have nothing to do with such formation of judgment. How one loves such things, or does not love them, how one assesses them in feelings, is entirely another matter than setting forth the simple fact. It also has nothing to do with how one loves or does not love the French, how one values their Spirit, when one believes one has reasons for the opinion that driving powers to be found in France are entwined in the present war complications. What is said about such driving forces as are present in peoples, can be kept free of what falls within the realm of accusation or blame in the usual sense.

[ 34 ] One will seek in vain among the Germans for such driving forces as had to lead to the present war in a similar way to those characterized by Solovieff among the Russians, proclaimed in advance for the French by Renan. The Germans could foresee that one would wage this war against them some day. It was their obligation to arm for it. What they have done to fulfill this obligation, is called among their opponents the cultivation of their militarism.

[ 35 ] What the Germans have to accomplish, for their own sake, and in order to fulfill the tasks laid upon them by world-historical necessities, would have been possible for them to accomplish without this war, if these accomplishments were just as acceptable to others as they are necessary to them. It did not at all depend on the Germans how the other peoples took the fulfillment of the world-historical tasks that in recent time in the realm of material culture added themselves for the Germans to their tasks existing earlier. In the power that, working only out of itself, establishes the position of their material cultural accomplishments, the Germans were able to place the trust they could gain from the way their work of spirit has been received by the peoples. If one looks at the German manner, one notices that nothing is inherent in it that would have made it necessary for the German to establish in any other way before the world the present work he has to accomplish than has happened with his purely spiritual accomplishments.

[ 36 ] It is not necessary that the German make the attempt himself to characterize the significance for mankind of the German quality of spirit and accomplishment of spirit. If he wants to record verdicts as to what significance this quality and accomplishment have for mankind outside of the German area, he can seek the answers among this mankind outside of the German area. One will be permitted to listen to the words of a personality who belongs to the leading ones in the region of the English language, to the words of the great speaker of America, Ralph Waldo Emerson.³ In his contemplation on Goethe, he gives a characterization of the German quality of spirit and accomplishment of spirit in their relationship to the world's formative cultural education. [Emerson's sentences are quoted here according to the translation by Herman Grimm. Cf. his book: Fifteen Essays, Third Installment.] He says: “What distinguishes Goethe for French and English readers is a property which he shares with his nation,—a habitual reference to interior truth. In England and in America there is a respect for talent; and, if it is exerted in support of any ascertained or intelligible interest or party, or in regular opposition to any, the public is satisfied. In France there is even a greater delight in intellectual brilliancy for its own sake. And in all these countries, men of talent write from talent. It is enough if the understanding is occupied, the taste propitiated,—so many columns, so many hours, filled in a lively and creditable way. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what is it for? What does the man mean? Whence, whence all these thoughts?” And in another pas sage of this contemplation on Goethe, Emerson molds the words: The “earnest ness enables them—Emerson means men educated in Germany—to out-see men of much more talent. Hence almost all the valuable distinctions which are current in higher conversation have been derived to us from Germany. But whilst men distinguished for wit and learning, in England and France, adopt their study and their side with a certain levity, and are not understood to be very deeply engaged, from grounds of character, to the topic or the part they espouse,—Goethe, the head and body of the German nation, does not speak from talent, but the truth shines through. He is very wise, though his talent often veils his wisdom. However excellent his sentence is, he has somewhat better in view. He has the formidable independence which converse with truth gives. Hear you, or forbear, his fact abides.”

[ 37 ] A few more thoughts of Emerson's shall be added that will quite certainly be allowed to stand here; after all, an English-American spoke them about the Germans. “The Germans think for Europe ... The English want the faculty of grouping men in natural classes by an insight of general laws ... The English cannot interpret the German mind.” Emerson was able to know what infusion German spiritual work is capable of giving to mankind.

[ 38 ] In the sentences quoted, Emerson speaks of the “French sprightliness,” and of the “fine practical understanding of the English.” If one wanted to continue in his sense with regard to the Russians, one could perhaps say: the German lacks the impulse of the Russians to seek a mystical power for all their life expressions, even the practical, by which they are justified.

[ 39 ] And in these relationships of the spirits of these peoples lies something quite similar to the military conflicts presently in effect. In the driving force that from the side of the French led to the war with Germany, their temperament is at work, what Emerson means by their sprightliness is at work. In this temperament lies the mysterious force that so bubbles over when it utters itself in Renan's words: “hatred unto death, preparations without rest, alliance with anyone convenient.” That before the war France stood armed with a military almost equal to Germany's in absolute terms, but in relation to its population even more than one and a half times as large, is a result of this mysterious force, over which result, the cliché about “German militarism” is to be drawn as a concealing veil.—In Russia's will to war, the mystical belief is at work, even where it finds only an instinctive expression. To characterize the conflicts effective to day between French and Russians on the one hand and Germans on the other hand, one will have to observe the moods of the souls.—The military conflict between British and Germans, by contrast, is such that the Germans see themselves facing only “fine practical” driving forces. The ideal of English policy is, in keeping with the essential being of the country, entirely oriented toward practical goals. Be it emphasized: in keeping with the essential being of the country. What its inhabitants reveal of this essential being, say in their behavior, is itself a working of this essential being, but not the basis of the English political ideal. Activity in the sense of this ideal has engendered in the Briton the habit of counting as guideline for this activity what seems to him to correspond to personal interests of life. It does not contradict the presence of such a guideline that it asserts itself in the shared life of society as a definite rule, which one strictly obeys if one wants to have manners. It also does not contradict it that one holds the guideline to be something quite other than it is.⁴ All of this holds good only for the Briton insofar as he is integrated into the world of his political ideal. And by this, a military conflict is created between England and Germany.

[ 40 ] That one day the time must come when on soul territory, the world view of the German essential being, aiming as it does for the spiritual, will have to achieve its world validity by conquest—obviously, only by a battle of spirits—over against the one that has its representatives out of the English essential being in Mill, Spencer, the pragmatist Schiller, in Locke and Huxley, among others: the fact of the present war can be an admonition for this. But this has nothing directly to do with this war.

[ 41 ] Goethe had in mind the guideline characterized for England's political ideal when he, who counted Shakespeare among the spirits that exerted the greatest influence on him, spoke the words: “But while the Germans torture themselves solving philosophical problems, the English with their great practical mind laugh at us, and win the world. Everyman knows their declamations against the slave trade, and while they would have us believe⁵ what humane principles lie at the basis of such a policy, it now comes out that the true motive is a real object, without which the English, as is known, never do so, and which one should have known.”—About Byron, who became his model for Euphorion in the Second Part of Faust, Goethe says: “Byron is to be regarded as man, as Englishman, and as patriot. His good qualities are to be derived primarily from the man; his bad ones, that he was an Englishman. All Englishmen are as such without real reflection; distraction and partisan spirit do not allow them to reach any calm formative training. But they are great as practical men.”

[ 42 ] These Goethean verdicts, too, touch not the Englishman as such, but only what reveals itself as “total essential being England” when this total essential being reveals itself as bearer of its political ideal.

[ 43 ] The political ideal mentioned has developed the habit of establishing as great a space of the earth as possible for England's use, in keeping with the guideline characterized. Regarding this space, England appears like a person establishing his house at his pleasure, and growing accustomed to bar his neighbors as well from doing anything that makes the inhabitability of the house less pleasant than one wishes.

[ 44 ] England believed the habit of being able to live on in this fashion was threatened by the development that Germany unnecessary had to strive for in most recent time. Hence it is understandable that it did not want to allow a military conflict to arise between Russia-France on the one hand and Germany-Austria on the other without doing everything that could contribute to eliminating the nightmare of threat caused to it by Germany's cultural work. That, how ever, was to join Germany's opponents. A purely political “fine practical under standing” calculated what danger could arise for England from a Germany victorious against Russia and France.—This calculating has as little to do with a merely moral indignation over the “violation of Belgian neutrality” as it has much to do with the “fine practical understanding,” which sees the Germans in England's circle of interests when they enter Belgium.

[ 45 ] What this “fine practical” direction of will in connection with other forces directed against Germany has to bring into operation in the course of time, was able to show itself, for a German sensing, when the question was asked: how did England's political ideal always work when a European land power had to find that the world-historical conditions demanded that it expand its activity over the seas? One needed only to look at what this political ideal had done regarding Spain and Portugal, Holland, France, when these unfolded their activity at sea. And one could remember that this political ideal always “had a fine understanding for the practical,” and that it knew how to calculate how the European directions of will that were directed against the countries in which a young maritime activity was unfolding were to be brought into a relationship of forces in such a way that a prospect opened up that England would be freed of its competitor.

[ 46 ] What the People of Germany had to sense regarding the European situation before the war, emerges upon observation of the forces directed upon this people from the periphery. From England, the “fine practical” “ideal” of this country. From Russia, directions of will that opposed the tasks that had emerged for Germany and Austria-Hungary for “Europe's Middle.” From France, folk forces whose being was not to be sensed otherwise for the German than in the manner which Moltke, in reference to France's relationship to Germany, once molded into the words: “Napoleon was a passing phenomenon. France remained. We already had to do with France centuries ago, we shall still have to do with it in centuries. ... the younger generation in France is raised in the belief that it has a sacred right to the Rhine, and that it has the mission of making it the border of France at the first opportunity. The Rhine border must become a truth, that is the theme for the future of France.”

[ 47 ] In the face of these three directions of will, world-historical necessity had forged together Germany and Austria-Hungary into “Europe's Middle.” There have always been people grown together with this European middle who sensed how tasks will grow up for this European middle that will reveal themselves to them as tasks to be solved in common by the peoples of this middle. Like a representative of such people, one long dead shall be remembered here. One who bore the ideals of “Europe's Middle” deep in his soul, in which they were warmed by the power of Goethe, from which he let his whole world conception and the inmost impulses of his life be carried. It is the Austrian researcher of literature and language, Karl Julius Schröer. A man who was all too little known and appreciated by his contemporaries in his being and significance. The writer of these contemplations counts him among those personalities to whom he owes immeasurable thanks in life. Schröer wrote down in his book on German Poetry in the year 1875, as written trace of the sensations that the events of 1870/1871 had stirred for the forming of an ideal of “Europe's Middle,” the words: “We in Austria see ourselves, just at this significant turning point, in a peculiar situation. Though the free movement of our life of state has cleared away the wall of separation that parted us from Germany up to a short time ago, though we are now given the means of working our way upward to a common cultural life with the other Germans, yet just now it has come to pass that we were not to participate in a great act of our people. ... A wall of separation could not arise through this in the German life of the spirit. Its roots are not of a political but of a culture-historical nature. We want to keep our eyes on this untearable unity of the German life of the spirit ... in the German Empire may they appreciate and honor our difficult cultural task, and as for the past, not blame us for what is our fate, not our fault.” Out of what sensations would a soul who so feels speak, if he still dwelt among the living, and beheld how the Austrian in full unity with the German of Germany is fulfilling an “act of his people!”

[ 48 ] “Europe's Middle” is formed by “fate;” the souls that feel themselves as belonging to this middle with an engagement full of understanding place it in the responsibility of the spirit of history to judge what in the past—and what also in the present and future is its “fate, not its fault.”

[ 49 ] And whoever wants to assess the understanding which the ideas of a common direction of will of the “Middle of Europe” have found abroad in Hungary, let him read voices from Hungary such as one is to be found in the article about “The Genesis of the Defensive Alliance,” by Emerich von Halasz, in the March, 1911 issue of Young Hungary. In it are the words: “If we ... consider that Andrassy stepped back from directing affairs more than thirty, and Bismarck more than twenty-one years ago, and this great work of peace stands ever yet in full power, and promises to have still further a long duration: then surely we need not surrender to a gloomy pessimism ... Bismarck and Andrassy with united force found an impressive solution to the middle-European problem, and thereby fulfilled a civilizational work that hopefully will outlast several generations ... In the history of alliances we seek in vain for a formation of such duration and of such mighty conception.”

[ 50 ] When the characterized directions of willing, turned against “Europe's Middle,” had joined for common pressure, it was inevitable that this “pressure” determined the sensations that formed within the middle-European peoples concerning the course that world events were taking. And when the facts of the summer of 1914 came about, they found Europe in a world-historical situation in which the forces operative in the life of peoples enter actively into the course of events in such a way that they remove the decision about what is to happen from the realm of ordinary human assessment, and place it into that of a higher order, an order by which world-historical necessity takes effect within the course of human development. Whoever senses the essential being of such world-moments, also lifts his judgment out of the region in which questions nest of the type, what would have happened if in an hour heavy with destiny this or that proposal of this or that personality had had more effect than was the case? In moments of world-historical turnings, men experience in their decisions forces about which one only judges aright if one endeavors—remember the words of Emerson⁶—not only to “see the particular” but to “conceive of” mankind “as a whole by higher laws.” How should it be permissible to judge by the laws of ordinary life the decisions of men that cannot be made out of these laws, because in them the spirit is at work who can be beheld only in the world-historical necessities.—Natural laws belong to the natural order; above them stand the laws that belong to the order of ordinary human living-together; and above them stand the spiritual-operative laws of world-historical becoming, which belong to yet another order, the one through which men and peoples solve tasks and go through developments that lie outside the realm of ordinary human living together.

[ 51 ] The preceding thoughts contain what the author of this brief writing spoke out in lectures held before the military entry of Italy into the present wrestling of peoples. From this fact, one will find it comprehensible that in this writing nothing is included about the driving powers that from this side have become the will to war against “Middle Europe.” A brief writing appearing later will hopefully be able to bring an addition in this regard.

Berlin, 5 July 1915.

• 1. on p. 11 beginning “The true philosophy” has been corrected in one point. The present essay, as printed in 1915 (3rd printing) misquotes one word, Leben, as Lebens (this is now corrected in the Complete Edition of Rudolf Steiner's works [vol. 24, latest edition only, 1982]). The alteration is presumably unintentional, producing as it does the meaning “... and it sees how merely in the appearance of this life closes and again opens, endlessly on, ...” Therefore I have translated according to the original Fichte.
• 2. on p. 23. The 3rd printing (1915) has a sentence that would mean, uncorrected: “It seems to him that what Renan predicted in the year 1870 to lead onto a surer path than the judgments presently pronounced out of passion.” The present translation is based on the assumption that Ihm scheint, daß, was (1915) should probably read Ihm scheint das, was.
• 3. On pp. 24 f. there are quotations from Emerson. Rudolf Steiner uses a free but very true German rendering by Herman Grimm. Here the passages are given in Emerson's original English, but with unmarked omissions and sentence divisions as in the German. Nevertheless I have left Rudolf Steiner's footnote unaltered.
• 4. On p. 26 the expression “something quite other than it is” is based on the correction of etwa to etwas. Otherwise it would mean “perhaps quite other than it is.”
• 5. On p. 26 the expression “have us believe” is based on the correction of weiß to weis. Otherwise it would mean “make us white.”
• 6. On p. 29, Emerson's thoughts are quoted in brief phrases taken from a free rendering in German. I have translated the German into English, rather than replacing it with Emerson's own words.

[ 1 ] During these fateful times, in central European cities, I have had to give lectures based on some of the views developing in me for thirty-five years about the thought-worlds of a series of German and Austrian personalities. I wanted to speak about personalities in whose thoughts urgent life questions were striving for a solution, and in whose spiritual struggles the essential nature of the German people (Volkheit) also revealed itself. I would like to take what I expressed there as the leading thoughts for this book. This book is meant to speak about the striving of the human spirit for knowledge of its own being, in connection with seekers who pursued neither their own personal infatuations in knowledge nor arbitrary aesthetic inclinations, but rather thoughts that arise from an irresistible, healthy urge of human nature and are native to the heart's needs of a people, in spite of the spiritual heights toward which those seekers were striving. We will be speaking, to be sure, about personalities whose sense for the realities of life is often denied by those who do not want to acknowledge that the human being is confused and incapacitated by the surface of reality if he cannot confront it with understanding for the spirit holding sway in the depths. Thoughts struggling for a knowledge of the spirit are often repellent to that attitude of soul which is far too eager to cite Goethe in opposing such thoughts: “Gray, dear friend, is all theory—and green the golden tree of life.” That attitude of soul disregards the fact that these words come from Goethe's sense of humor and are put into the devil's mouth as a teaching the devil considers good for a pupil of his.

It does not affect a life-sustaining thought to be called gray by a view catering to comfortableness in thinking; this view regards the grayness of its own theory as the golden radiance of the green tree of life.

[ 2 ] It goes against the feeling of many to speak about the effects of a people upon the world views of personalities who spring from this people. To do so, they believe, contradicts the obvious truth that knowledge of the true is a treasure of life possessed by all men in the same way. This is really just as valid for the highest thoughts of a world view as it is for the commonplace truth that two times two is four. But just because this is so obvious, one should not suppose without going further into the matter, that this obvious fact has been overlooked by someone seeking, within the being of the thinkers of a people, the roots of the people from which these thinkers stem. The human spirit, after all, lives not only in the abstract formation of certain concepts; it also draws its life from forces which souls, out of their most intimate experiences, allow to sound along with the insights born from these experiences. Goethe felt this when he wrote to a friend: “To judge by the plants and fish I have seen in Naples and Sicily, I would, if I were ten years younger, be very tempted to make a trip to India, not in order to discover something new, but rather to contemplate in my own way what has already been discovered.” Goethe in fact knows how something already discovered can be seen in a new light when it is regarded in a new way. And what humanity develops in the way of thoughts for its spiritual life about questions of knowledge speaks not only about what people are seeking, but also about how they seek. Someone receptive to such thoughts feels in them the soul pulse that heralds the life from which they shine into our reason. Just as it is true that in a thought one also learns to know its thinker, it is evident that in a thinker one can behold the people from which the thinker has arisen.

As to the content of truth dwelling in a thought and as to whether a mental picture (Vorstellung) has grown from the roots of genuine reality: these can certainly be determined only by powers of knowledge that are independent of place and time. Still, as to whether a particular thought, as to whether an idea leading the human spirit in a certain direction, arises within a certain people: this does depend upon the sources from which the spirit of this people can draw. Karl Rosenkranz certainly did not want to prove anything about the truth of Hegel's thought from the fact that he brought these thoughts into connection with the German folk spirit, when in 1870 he wrote his book Hegel as the German National Philosopher. He held the view he had already expressed in his description of Hegel's life: “A true philosophy is the deed of a people ... But at the same time, for philosophy, insofar as it is philosophy, the particularities of its folk origins are of no importance at all. There, the universality and necessity of its content and the perfection of its proof are alone of significance. Whether the true is recognized and expressed by a Greek or German, by a Frenchman or an Englishman, carries no weight for the true itself, as true. Every true philosophy, therefore, as a national philosophy is at the same time a universally human one and, in the larger course of humanity, an indispensable part. It has the power to spread absolutely through all peoples, and for every people there comes the time when that people must acquire for itself the true philosophy of the other peoples, if it wants in other ways to further and assure its own progress.”

[ 3 ] One's antipathy to the folk aspect of the thoughts in a world view can also assume other forms. Out of a recognition of the folk aspect of such thoughts one can raise an objection against their cognitive value. One might believe that such thoughts are thrust thereby into the realm of imagination, and that one must speak of them in the same way as of a German poetry, for example, whereas it would be inadmissible to speak in the same sense of a German mathematics or a German physics. There are people who see every world view—every philosophy—as a poetic work in concepts (Begriffsdichtung). Such people do not need to concern themselves with the objection that arises out of the feeling described above. But what this book presents is not written from that point of view. This book takes the position that no one can speak seriously about a world view who does not ascribe a cognitive value to it, who does not presuppose that its thoughts stem from realities common to all people. One can also say: “That is correct, in general; but a world view valid and common to all people is an ideal that has nowhere been realized as yet; all existing world views still carry with them what has been imposed upon them by the imperfection of human nature.” But we can dispense with any discussion here of imperfections existing in world views because of that human factor. For, it is certainly not our intention, in the folk characteristics of the thoughts in world views, to seek excuses for the weakness of such thoughts, but rather grounds for their strength. Therefore, we can leave out of our considerations here the assertion that thinkers, in fact, just as they are dependent upon their personal standpoints, are also dependent upon what adheres to them from their people; and that, just because of this, they cannot win through to a universally human world view. This book speaks about a series of personalities in such a way that their thoughts are acknowledged as really having universal human validity. What are characterized as errors or as one-sided views are spoken of only insofar as one can see in them roundabout ways to the truth. If an unconditionally valid objection could spring from the feeling mentioned above, such an objection would be justified with respect to the way in which the thoughts in world views are brought into connection, in this book, with the essential being of the German people.

But one can understand the reply that must be made to this feeling only if one can free oneself from a belief which also causes serious misapprehensions in other ways. This belief is that the diverse thought-configurations of thinkers who are searching into questions of how to view the world are in fact just so many different, mutually incompatible world views.

[ 4 ] Out of this belief the natural-scientifically minded person often opposes the mystic, and the mystic often opposes the natural-scientifically minded person. The scientist believes that natural-scientific knowledge alone is the true result of research into reality; it is from this knowledge that one must gain thoughts able to bring understanding of the world and of life, so far as this understanding is attainable to man. The mystic adheres to the view that the true being of the world reveals itself only to mystical experience, and that the thoughts of the natural-scientifically minded person cannot lay hold of genuine reality. The “monist” is content only when he pictures the existence of a unified foundation for the material and the spiritual world. One kind of monist sees this foundation consisting in the material elements and their effects, in such a way that spiritual phenomena become for him manifestations of the material world. Other monists ascribe true being only to the spirit, and believe that everything material is only a kind of spirituality. The dualist sees in any such unification a misunderstanding both of the essential being of matter and of the spirit. In his view, both must be regarded as regions of the world that are more or less independent in themselves.

A long list would result if one wanted to characterize even just the most outstanding of these supposed world views. Now there are in fact many people who believe they have gone beyond all talk of world views. They say: “I guide myself in knowledge according to what I find within reality; what some world view or other considers reality to be does not concern me.” Such people do indeed believe this; but their behavior shows something totally different. They do, in fact, more or less consciously, or even unconsciously, adhere in the most definite manner to one or another world view. Even though they do not express or think this world view directly, they do develop their picture of the world along its lines and oppose, reject, or treat the mental pictures of other people in a way corresponding to this “world view.”

[ 5 ] A misapprehension of the relationship of man to the world outside him underlies the conscious or unconscious belief in any such supposed world views. The person who is caught up in this misapprehension does not distinguish rightly between what man receives from the outer world for the formation of his thoughts, and what he brings up out of himself when he forms thoughts.

[ 6 ] When one notices that two thinkers express different thoughts about the questions of life, one all too readily has the feeling: If both were bringing true reality to expression in their thoughts, they would have to say the same thing, not something different. And one thinks that the difference cannot have its basis in reality but must lie only in the personal (subjective) way thinkers grasp things. Even though this is not always openly acknowledged by those who speak about world views, this opinion does underlie—more or less consciously, or even unconsciously—the spirit and style of their words. In fact, the thinkers themselves for the most part live in just such a preconception. They express their thoughts on what they consider reality to be, regard these thoughts as their “system” and rightful world view, and believe that any other direction in thought is based on the personal peculiarities of the thinker.

The presentation in this book has a different view as its background. (This view, to be sure, can at first be presented here only as an assertion. I hope the reader will be able to find in the book itself some substantiation for this assertion. In many of my other books I have made every effort to bring much more of this substantiation.) Two divergent directions in thought, in their essential nature, can often be understood only by regarding their differences to be like those between two photographs of one tree taken from two different sides. The pictures are different; their differences, however, are not based upon the nature of the camera, but rather upon the position of the tree relative to the camera. And this position is something lying just as much outside the camera as the tree itself. The pictures are both true views of the tree. The divergent elements of two world views do not prevent them both from bringing true reality to expression.

The confusion in ideas arises when people do not understand this, when they make themselves—or are made by other people—into materialists, idealists, monists, dualists, spiritualists, mystics, or even into Theosophists, and when they mean to express by this that one arrives at a true view about life's sources only if one's whole way of thinking is in tune with one of these concepts. But it is reality itself that one wants to know from one side through materialistic ideas, from another side through spiritual ideas, from a third side as a unity (monon), from a fourth as a duality. The thinking person would like to encompass the essential being of reality through one way of picturing things. And when he notices that he undertakes this in vain, he gets around this fact by saying: All our mental pictures about the roots of real life have a personal (subjective) form, and the essential being of the “thing-in-itself” remains unknowable.

So much confusion in our thought life could be cleared up by realizing that many a person, in speaking of a world view different from his own, is like someone who—knowing a picture of a tree taken from one side, and being presented with a picture taken from another side—does not want to admit that it is a “correct” picture of the same tree! [ 7 ] Many “practical” people, to be sure, seek refuge from such tormenting philosophical questions by saying: “Let those fight about these things who have the leisure and the desire for it; that doesn't affect reallife; real life does not have to bother about that,” But only those can speak in this way, after all, who have absolutely no inkling of how far removed their thoughts are from the real driving powers of life. It is such people whose picture stood before the soul of Johann Gottlieb Fichte when he spoke the words: “Although, within the sphere that ordinary experience has drawn around us, people themselves are thinking more universally and judging more correctly, perhaps, than ever, still the majority of them are totally confused and blinded as soon as they are supposed to go even a short distance outside that sphere. If it is impossible to rekindle in them the spark of higher genius once that has been extinguished, then one must let them remain peacefully within that sphere, and, insofar as they are useful and indispensable within that sphere, let their value, in and for that sphere, remain undiminished. But when they themselves now demand that everything to which they cannot lift themselves be brought down to their level, when they demand, for example, that all printed matter should be like cookbooks, arithmetic books, or service regulations, and when they decry everything that cannot be used in this way, then they themselves are in error in a major way.—We others know, perhaps as well, perhaps even better than they, that ideals as such cannot appear in outer reality. We only assert that reality must be judged according to ideals and, by those who feel the strength within them to do so, must even be changed according to ideals. When people cannot convince themselves of this fact, very little is lost to them, given that they already are who they are; and mankind loses nothing. It merely becomes clear that such people cannot be counted upon in any plan to ennoble mankind. Mankind will doubtless proceed on its way; and may benevolent nature hold sway over such people and bring them rain and sunshine at the right time, wholesome nourishment and undisturbed circulation of their juices, and also clever thoughts!”

It is actually a disaster when the ideas, fruitful for life, of the individual world views are kept at a distance from this life by the belief that their differences prove them all to be subjectively colored by the thinkers' ways of picturing things. Through this a semblance of justification is given to the talk of those opponents of ideas just characterized. It is not the content of thinkers' world views that condemns these world views to fruitlessness for life, but rather the belief, following in their wake, that a particular direction in thought must reveal all of reality or else these are all views with a merely personal coloring.

This book would like to show the extent to which the truth—and not just personally colored views—lives in the ideas of individual thinkers, in spite of their differences.

[ 8 ] Only by trying to know how far reality reveals itself in its relation to man through different ways of picturing things does one also struggle through to a sound judgment about what originates in the being of the thinker who is observing the world. One sees how the nature of one thinker is moved toward one relationship between extrahuman (objective) reality and man, and how that of another thinker is moved more toward a different relationship. First of all one sees the sharply marked, personal direction of a personality's thought. Because one notices how his world view is based upon a personal tendency in thought, one is tempted to believe that his world view is therefore only a personal (subjective) way of picturing things. But if one recognizes how a personal tendency in thought, in fact, moves the thinker to adopt a particular viewpoint through which extrahuman (objective) reality can place itself in a particular relationship to him, then one wrests oneself from the confusion into which one can fall by looking at the different world views.

[ 9 ] Many people will perhaps reply to this: Yes, from a certain point of view, all that is completely obvious and does not need to be stated beforehand. But the person who says this is often precisely the one who, in his judgments and actions, violates this view of truth and reality everywhere.

[ 10 ] But the view we have presented is not meant to justify every human opinion that regards itself as a world view. Actual errors, faultiness in the sources of knowledge, viewpoints from which only a beclouded fantasy would want to create thoughts for a world view: all this will in fact reveal itself in the light toward which our view is pressing. By seeking to experience the extent to which the one reality manifests itself in divergent human thoughts, our view can also hope to see where a human opinion is rejected by reality itself.

[ 11 ] If one senses how the forces of a people work in the thinkers of a people, then this sense stands in complete harmony with the view presented here. A people does not want to decide how a thinker is to shape his thoughts; but, together with other forces determining his viewpoint, his people affects the relationship to existence through which reality, in one direction or another, manifests itself to him. His people need not cloud his power of vision; it can prove particularly able to put the thinker belonging to it in a place where he can develop a certain way of picturing the truth common to all mankind. His people does not want to judge his knowledge; but it can be a faithfully supportive adviser on the way to truth. Indications about the extent to which this can be sensed with respect to the German people are meant to be given in this book by portraying a series of personalities who have arisen out of this people. The author of this book hopes that one will recognize his sense that a loving, thoughtful penetration into the particular soul nature of one people does not necessarily lead to a non-recognition and disregard for the being and worth of other peoples. At another time it would be unnecessary to state this specifically. It is necessary today in view of the feelings that are expressed from many sides about what is German.

[ 12 ] It is completely natural for the author of this book to speak about the part played in spiritual life by both German and German-Austrian personalities; he is, after all, a German-Austrian by birth and education, who lived his first three decades of life in Austria, and then a period of time—which will soon be just as long—in Germany.

In his book The Riddles of Philosophy he has expressed his thinking on the place held by most of the personalities discussed in this present book within the general spiritual life. It was not his intention to repeat here what he said there. He can readily understand that someone could hold a different view than he does about the choice of the personalities portrayed. But, without striving for completeness in anyone direction, he wanted simply to portray some things that have become perception and life experience for him.

Rudolf Steiner
Berlin, May 1916

Addition, for the Second Edition of 1918

[ 13 ] If, as an observer, one confronts the “thinking, observations, and contemplations” of a personality, one can sense that one is observing forces at work in the soul of such a personality which give the direction and particular characteristics to his way of picturing things, but which he himself does not make into a content of his thinking. This sense must not lead to the vain opinion that one can place oneself as observer above the personality observed. The fact that, as an observer, one has a different viewpoint than the observed personality makes it possible for one to say many things that the other has not said—that he has indeed not confronted in his own thinking, but has left within his unconscious soul life—because through his not saying certain things, what he did say attained its full significance. The more significant what a man has to say is, the more extensive is that which holds sway unconsciously in the depths of his soul. What is unconscious in this way, however, sounds forth in the souls of those who penetrate into the thinking and contemplations of such a personality. And they may also raise it into consciousness, because for them it can no longer hinder what they want to say.

[ 14 ] The personalities with whom this book is concerned seem, to a particularly strong degree, to be of the kind that stimulate one to press on through what they have said to what they have left unsaid. Therefore the author of this book, from the viewpoint he has taken, believed he could make his presentation a complete one only by adding the final chapter, “New Perspectives.” He believes that in doing so he has not introduced something into the views of these personalities that does not belong there, but rather has sought the source from which these views, in the true sense of their thought content, have flowed. In this case what was left unsaid is a rich seed bed from which what has been said grew as individual fruits. If, in observing these fruits, one also becomes aware of the seed-bearing ground from which they have sprung, then precisely through this one will realize how—with respect to what the soul must experience in dealing with the most significant riddles of man—one can find in the personalities portrayed in this book a profound stimulus, powerful indications in sure directions, and strengthening forces in gaining fruitful insights. By looking at things in this way one can overcome the aversion to the seeming abstraction of the thoughts of these personalities that prevents many people from approaching them at all. One will see that these thoughts, regarded in the right way, are filled with a boundless warmth of life—a warmth that the human being must seek if he really understands himself rightly.

If, as an observer, one confronts the “thinking, observations, and contemplations” of a personality, one can sense that one is observing forces at work in the soul of such a personality which give the direction and particular characteristics to his way of picturing things, but which he himself does not make into a content of his thinking. This sense must not lead to the vain opinion that one can place oneself as observer above the personality observed. The fact that, as an observer, one has a different viewpoint than the observed personality makes it possible for one to say many things that the other has not said—that he has indeed not confronted in his own thinking, but has left within his unconscious soul life—because through his not saying certain things, what he did say attained its full significance. The more significant what a man has to say is, the more extensive is that which holds sway unconsciously in the depths of his soul. What is unconscious in this way, however, sounds forth in the souls of those who penetrate into the thinking and contemplations of such a personality. And they may also raise it into consciousness, because for them it can no longer hinder what they want to say.

The personalities with whom this book is concerned seem, to a particularly strong degree, to be of the kind that stimulate one to press on through what they have said to what they have left unsaid. Therefore the author of this book, from the viewpoint he has taken, believed he could make his presentation a complete one only by adding the final chapter, “New Perspectives.” He believes that in doing so he has not introduced something into the views of these personalities that does not belong there, but rather has sought the source from which these views, in the true sense of their thought content, have flowed. In this case what was left unsaid is a rich seed bed from which what has been said grew as individual fruits. If, in observing these fruits, one also becomes aware of the seed-bearing ground from which they have sprung, then precisely through this one will realize how—with respect to what the soul must experience in dealing with the most significant riddles of man—one can find in the personalities portrayed in this book a profound stimulus, powerful indications in sure directions, and strengthening forces in gaining fruitful insights. By looking at things in this way one can overcome the aversion to the seeming abstraction of the thoughts of these personalities that prevents many people from approaching them at all. One will see that these thoughts, regarded in the right way, are filled with a boundless warmth of life—a warmth that the human being must seek if he really understands himself rightly.

[ 1 ] In his addresses on The Basic Characteristics of Our Present Age and To the German Nation, Johann Gottlieb Fichte seeks to portray the spiritual forces working in the evolution of mankind. Through the thoughts he brings to expression in these addresses, he imbues himself with the feeling that the motive force of his world view streams from the innermost being of the German people (Volksart). Fichte believes he is expressing the thoughts that the soul of the German people must express if it wants to reveal itself from the core of its spirituality. The way in which Fichte struggled for his world view shows how this feeling could live in his soul. It must seem important to someone observing a thinker to investigate the roots from which the fruit of his thoughts have sprung; these roots work in the depths of his soul and are not expressed directly in his thought-worlds, yet they live as the motive forces within these thought-worlds.

[ 2 ] Fichte once expressed his conviction that the kind of world view one has depends upon the kind of person one is. He did so out of his awareness that all the life forces of his own personality had to bring forth—as its natural and obvious fruit—the conceptually strong heights of his world view. Not many people want to get to the heart of this world view because they consider what they find there to be thoughts—estranged from the world—into which only “professional” thinkers need penetrate. This feeling is understandable in someone without philosophical training who approaches Fichte's thoughts as they appear in his works. Still, for someone who has the possibility of entering into the full life of these thoughts, it is not strange to imagine that a time will come when one will be able to recast Fichte's ideas into a form comprehensible to anyone who wants, out of life itself, to think about the meaning of this life. These ideas could then be accessible even to the simplest human heart (Gemüt), however far removed from so-called “philosophical thinking.” For, these ideas have in fact received their philosophical form from the character assumed by the evolution of thought in thinking circles at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century; but these ideas get their life from experiences that are present in the soul of every human being, To be sure, the time has not yet arrived when it is fully possible to recast Fichte's thoughts from the language of the philosophy of his time into a universally human form of expression. Such things become possible only through the gradual progress made by certain ways of picturing things in man's spiritual life. Just as Fichte himself was obliged to carry his soul experiences to the heights of what one usually calls “abstract thinking”—and finds cold and estranged from life—so today also it is only possible to a very limited degree to carry these soul experiences down from those heights.

[ 3 ] From his early youth until his sudden death while still in the prime of life, Fichte struggled for ever new forms of expression for these soul experiences. In all his struggles, one basic cognitive impulse is evident. Within man's own soul Fichte wishes to find a living element in which the human being grasps not only the basic force of his own existence, but in which there can also be known—in its essential being—what weaves and works in nature and in everything else outside him. In a drop of water, relative to the ocean, one has only a tiny sphere. But if one knows this little sphere in its character as water, then in this knowledge one also knows the whole ocean in its character as water. If something can be discovered in the being of man that can be experienced as a revelation of the innermost weaving of the world, then one may hope, through deepened self-knowledge, to advance to world knowledge.

[ 4 ] Long before Fichte's time, the development of mankind's view of the world had already taken the path that proceeds from this feeling and this hope. But Fichte was placed at a significant point in this evolution. One can read in many places how he received Ws most direct impetus from the world views of Spinoza and Kant. But the way he finally acted in understanding the world through the essential nature of his personality becomes most visible when he is contrasted with the thinker who came forth just as much from the thinking of the Romance peoples as Fichte did from the German: Descartes (1596–1650). In Descartes there already comes to light—out of the feeling and hope described above—the way a thinker seeks certainty in world knowledge by discovering a solid point in self-knowledge. Descartes takes doubt in all world knowledge as his starting point. He says to himself: The world in which I live reveals itself within my soul, and from its phenomena I form mental pictures for myself about the course of things. But what is my guarantee that these mental pictures of mine really tell me anything about the working and weaving of the world in its course? Could it not be the case that my soul does indeed receive certain impressions from the things of the world, but that these impressions are so far removed from the things themselves that in these impressions nothing of the meaning of the world is revealed to me? In the face of this possibility can I say that I know this or that about the world? One sees how, for a thinker in this ocean of doubt, all knowledge can come to seem like a subjective dream, and how only one conviction can force itself upon him: that man can know nothing. But in the case of a person for whom the motive force of thinking has become as alive as the motive force of hunger is in the body: for him the conviction that man can know nothing means for the soul what starvation means for the body. All the innermost impressions about the health of one's soul, in a higher sense, right up to feeling the salvation of one's soul (Seelenheil) are connected with this.

[ 5 ] It is within the soul itself that Descartes finds the point upon which he can base conviction: The mental pictures form for myself of the world's course are no dream; they live a life that is a part in the life of the whole world. Even though I can doubt everything, there is one thing I cannot doubt, for to express doubt in it would belie my own words. For is it not certain that when I give myself over to doubt I am thinking? I could not doubt if I did not think. Therefore I cannot possibly doubt my own experience in thinking. If I wanted, through doubt, to kill thinking: it would just rise up living again out of the doubt. My thinking lives, therefore; it does not stand in some dream world; it stands in the world of being (Sein). If I could believe that everything else, even my own body, gave me only the illusion of being, still my thinking does not deceive me. Just as true as it is that I think, it is true that I am, insofar as I think. It was from sentiments such as these that Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito ergo sum) rang out into the world. And whoever has an ear for such things will also hear the power of this statement resounding in all subsequent thinkers until Kant.

[ 6 ] Only with Fichte do its reverberations cease. If one enters deeply into his thought-world, if one seeks to experience with him his struggles for a world view, then one feels how he too is seeking world knowledge in self-knowledge; but one has the feeling that Descartes' statement, “I think, therefore I am” could not be the rock upon which Fichte, in his struggles, could believe himself secure against the waves of doubt that can turn man's mental pictures into an ocean of dreams. Looking at what Fichte wrote in his book The Vocation of Man (published in 1800), one feels how his ability to doubt lives in a very different part of the soul than with Descartes: “Nowhere is there anything enduring, neither outside me nor within me; there is only unceasing change. Nowhere do I know of any being, not even my own. There is no being. I myself do not know at all and do not exist. Pictures exist: they are all that there is, and they know about themselves in the manner of pictures—pictures that float past without anything there for them float past; pictures that relate to each other through pictures of pictures; pictures without anything pictured in them, without significance and purpose. I myself am one of these pictures; no, I am not even that; I am only a confused picture of the pictures.—All reality transforms itself into a strange dream, without a life that is dreamed about, and without a spirit who is dreaming; transforms itself into a dream that is connected with a dream about itself, My perceiving is the dream; my thinking—the source of all being and all reality that I imagine to myself, the source of my being, my power, my aims—is a dream about that dream,” These thoughts do not arise in Fichte's soul as the ultimate truth about existence, He does not wish, as one might suppose, really to regard the world as a dream configuration, He wants only to show that all the usual arguments for the certainty of knowledge cannot withstand penetrating examination, and that these arguments do not give one the right to regard the ideas one forms about the world as anything other than dream configurations. And Fichte cannot allow that any kind of certainty about being is present within thinking. Why should I say, “I think, therefore I am” since, after all, if I am living in an ocean of dreams, my thinking can be nothing more than “a dream about a dream”? For Fichte, what penetrates and gives reality to my thoughts about the world must come from a completely different source than mere thinking about the world.

[ 7 ] Fichte claims that the distinctive spirit (Art) of the German people lives in his world view. This thought makes sense when one brings before one's soul precisely his picture of that path to self-knowledge which he seeks in contradistinction to Descartes. This path is what Fichte felt to be German; and as a traveler on this path, he differs from Descartes, who takes the spiritual path of the Romance peoples. Descartes seeks a sound basis for self-knowledge; he expects to find this sound basis somewhere. In thinking he believes he has found it. Fichte expects nothing from this kind of search. For, no matter what he might find, why should it afford a greater certainty than anything already found? No, along this path of investigation there is absolutely nothing to be found. For, this path can lead only from picture to picture; and no picture one encounters can guarantee, out of itself, its being. Therefore, to begin with, one must entirely abandon the path through pictures, and return to it again only after gaining certainty from some other direction.

[ 8 ] With respect to the statement “I think, therefore I am,” one need only say something that seems quite simple if one wants to refute it. This is after all the way with so many thoughts a person incorporates into his world view: they are not dispelled by elaborate objections but rather by noting simple facts. One does not undervalue the thinking power of a personality like Descartes by confronting him with a simple fact. The fable of the egg of Columbus is true forever.¹ And it is also true that the statement “I think, therefore I am” simply shatters upon the fact of human sleep. Every sleep, which interrupts thinking, shows—not, indeed, that there is no being in thinking—but that in any case “I am, even when I am not thinking.” Therefore, if only thinking is the source for being, then nothing could guarantee the being of soul states in which thinking has ceased. Although Fichte did not express this train of thought in this form, one can still definitely say: The power lying within these simple facts worked—unconsciously—in his soul and kept him from taking a path like that taken by Descartes.

[ 9 ] Fichte was led onto a completely different path by the basic character of his sense of things. His life reveals this basic character from childhood on. One need only let some pictures from his life arise before one's soul to see that this is so. One significant picture that rises up vividly from his childhood is this. Johann Gottlieb is seven years old. Until this time he was a good student. In order to reward the boy's industriousness, his father gives him a book of legends, The Horned Siegfried. The boy is completely taken with this book. He neglects his duties somewhat. He becomes aware of this about himself. One day his father sees him throwing The Horned Siegfried into the brook. The boy is attached to the book with his whole heart; but how can the heart be allowed to keep something that diverts one from one's duty? Thus the feeling is already living unconsciously in the young Fichte that the human being is in the world as an expression of a higher order, which descends into his soul not through his interest in one thing or another, but through the path by which he acknowledges duty. Here one can see the impulse behind Fichte's stance toward certainty about reality. Perceptual experiences are not what is certain for man, but rather what rises up livingly in the soul in the same way that duty reveals itself.

[ 10 ] Another picture from Fichte's life: The boy is nine years old. A landowner near his father's village comes into town one Sunday to hear the minister's sermon. He arrives too late. The sermon is over. People remember that nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb retains sermons in his soul so well that he can completely reproduce them. They fetch him. The boy, in his little farmer's smock, appears. He is awkward at first; but then presents the sermon in such a way that one can see that what lived in the sermon had utterly filled his soul; he does not merely repeat words; he speaks out of the spirit of the sermon that lives within him entirely as his own experience. This ability lived in the boy: to let light up in one's own self what approaches this self from the world. This was, after all, the ability to experience the spirit of the outer world in one's own self. This was the ability to find within the strengthened self the power to uphold a world view. A brightly-lit, evolving stream of personality leads from such boyhood experiences to a lecture by Fichte—then professor in Jena—heard and described by the gifted scientist Steffens. In the course of his lecture Fichte calls upon his listeners: “Think about the wall,” His listeners made every effort to think about the wall. After they had done this for a while, Fichte's next demand follows: “And now think about the one who thought about the wall,” What striving for a direct and living relationship between one's own soul life and that of one's listeners! What pointing toward an inner soul activity to be undertaken immediately—not merely to stimulate reflection on verbal communications, but rather to awaken a life element slumbering in the souls of his listeners so that these souls will attain a state that changes their previous relationship to the course of the world.

[ 11 ] Such actions reflect Fichte's whole way of clearing the path for a world view. Unlike Descartes, he does not seek an experience of thinking that will establish certainty. He knows that in such seeking there is no finding. In such seeking one cannot know whether one's discovery is dream or reality. Therefore do not launch forth in such seeking. Strengthen yourself instead, by waking up. What the soul experiences when it wants to press forward out of the field of ordinary reality into that of true reality must be like an awakening. Thinking does not guarantee the being of the human “I.” But within this “I” there lies the power to awaken itself to being. Every time the soul senses itself as “I”—in full consciousness of the inner power that becomes active in doing so—a process occurs that presents itself as the soul awakening itself. This self-awakening is the fundamental being (Grundwesenheit) of the soul. And in this power to awaken itself there lies the certainty of the being (Sein) of the human soul. Let the soul go through dream states and states of sleep: one grasps the power of the soul to awaken itself out of every dream and every sleep by transforming the mental picture of its awakening into the image of the soul's fundamental power. Fichte felt that the eternity of the human soul lies in its becoming aware of its power to awaken itself. From this awareness came statements like these: “The world I was just marveling at disappears before my gaze and sinks away. In all the fullness of life, order, and growth that I see in it, this world is still only the curtain—by which an infinitely more perfect world is hidden from me—and the seed from which this more perfect world is to evolve. My belief goes behind this curtain and warms and enlivens this seed. My belief does not see anything definite, but expects more than it can grasp here below or will ever be able to grasp in the realm of time.—This is how I live and this is how I am; this is how I am unchangeably—firm and complete for all eternity; for, this being is not taken on from outside; it is my own one true being and existence.” (Vocation of Man)

[ 12 ] When one looks at the whole way Fichte approaches life and at how permeated all his actions and thinking are with an attitude friendly to life and fostering of life, one will not be tempted to regard a passage like this as proof of a direction in thought hostile to life, that turns away from immediate and vigorous life on this earth. In a letter from the year 1790 there is a sentence that sheds significant light on Fichte's positive attitude toward life, precisely in relation to his thoughts about immortality: “The surest means of convincing oneself of a life after death is to lead one's present life in such a way that one can wish an afterlife:”

[ 13 ] For Fichte, within the self-awakening inner activity of the human soul there lies the power of self-knowledge. And within this activity he also finds the place in the soul where the spirit of the world reveals itself in the spirit of the soul. In Fichte's world view the world-will weaves and works in all existence; and within the willing of its own being the soul can live this world-will within itself. The grasping of life's duties—which are experienced differently in the soul than are the perceptions of the senses and of one's thoughts—is the most immediate example of how the world-will pulses through the soul. True reality must be grasped in this way; and all other reality, even that of thinking, receives its certainty through the light shed upon it by the reality of the world-will revealing itself within the soul. This world-will drives the human being to his activity and deeds. As a sense-perceptible being, man must translate into reality in a sense-perceptible way what the world-will demands of him. But how could the deeds of one's will have a real existence if they had to seek this existence in a dream world? No, the world cannot be a dream, because in this world the deeds of one's will must not merely be dreamed; they must be translated into reality.

Insofar as the “I” awakens itself in its experience of the world-will, it attains firm supports for certainty about its being. Fichte expressed himself on this point in his Vocation of Man: “Without any instrument weakening its expression, within a sphere completely similar in nature to itself, my will must work absolutely in and through itself: as reason it must work upon reason and as something spiritual upon something spiritual; it must work in a sphere for which my will nevertheless does not provide the laws of life, activity, and continuity; this sphere has them in itself; my will has therefore to work upon self-active reason. But self-active reason is will. The laws of the supersensible world, accordingly, would be a will ... That lofty will, accordingly, does not separated from the rest of the world of reason—take a path all its own. There is a spiritual bond between this will and all finite reasonable beings, and this will itself is the spiritual bond of the world of reason ... I hide my face before you and lay my hand on my mouth. I can never see how you are for yourself nor how you appear to yourself, just as certainly as I can never become yourself. After living through a thousand times a thousand spiritual worlds, I will still grasp you just as little as now, within this hut of the earth.—What I grasp, through my mere grasping of it, becomes something finite; and this, even through infinite intensification and enhancement, can never be transformed into something infinite. You are different from the finite not in degree but in kind. Through that intensification they make you only into a greater and ever great man; but never into God, the Infinite, Who cannot be measured.”

[ 14 ] Fichte strove for a world view that pursues all being into the very roots of what lives in the world, and that learns to know the meaning of what lives in the world: learns to know it through the human soul's living with the world-will that pulses through everything and that creates nature for the purpose, in nature, of translating into reality a spiritually moral order as though in an outer body. Such a world view seemed to Fichte to spring from the character of the German people. To him a world view seemed un-German that did not “believe in spirituality and in the freedom of this spirituality,” and that did not “want the eternal further development of this spirituality and freedom.” In his view, “Whoever believes in a standstill, a regression, or a circle dance, or even sets a dead nature at the helm of world rulership” goes not only against any more deeply penetrating knowledge, but also against the essential nature of what is truly German.

• 1. The problem was to stand an egg on end. Columbus's table companions tried to do this without breaking the egg and of course failed. Columbus was more realistic. He flattened one end of the egg. – Ed.