The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] At the beginning of his search for a world view, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is close to Fichte insofar as the same picture of the soul—whose grasping of itself in the activity of self-awakening assures it of existence—becomes for him the sure support of knowledge. But from this basic feeling in Schelling's spirit different thoughts stream forth than from Fichte's spirit. For Fichte, the all-encompassing world-will shines into the awakening soul as a spiritual realm of light; and he wants to know the rays of this light in their essential being. For Schelling, the world riddle consists in the fact that he sees himself, with his soul awakened to egohood, confronted by a seemingly mute and lifeless nature. Out of this nature the soul awakens. This fact reveals itself to human observation. And the knowing, feeling human spirit delves down into this nature and through this nature fills itself with an inner world that then becomes spiritual life within it. Could this be so if there did not exist between the soul and nature a deeply inward relatedness at first hidden from human cognition? But nature remains mute if the soul does not make itself into the instrument of nature's speech; nature seems dead if the spirit of man does not free life from the spell of semblance (Schein). The secrets of nature must sound forth from the depths of the human soul. But in order for this not to be a deception, it must be the essential being of nature itself that speaks out of the human soul. And it must be true that the soul only seemingly goes down into its own depths when it knows nature; in actuality, when it wants to find nature, the soul must travel through subconscious passages in order to delve down with its own life into the cycle of nature's weaving.

[ 2 ] Schelling sees in nature—as it is present to ordinary human consciousness—only a physiognomical expression of true nature, so to speak, just as one sees in a human countenance the expression of the supersensible soul. And just as one lives into the soul of a person through this physiognomical expression—if one is able to take up the other person's experiences into one's own—so, for Schelling, there is a possibility of so awakening human cognitive abilities that they experience within themselves what works and weaves behind the outer countenance of nature as soul and spirit. Therefore, one cannot consider our science of this outer countenance to be a revelation of what lives in the depths of nature; nor is the cognitive power of man that is limited to such science capable of unraveling the true secrets of nature. Schelling therefore wants to bring to awakening in the human soul an intellectual beholding (intellektuelle Anschauung) that lies behind the ordinary cognitive power of man. This kind of beholding reveals itself—in Schelling's sense—as a creative power in man; but in such a way that it does not create concepts from the soul about nature, but rather, through inward co-existence with the soul element of nature, brings to manifestation the powers of ideas creating and ruling in nature. Fearful souls quake at the thought of a view of nature that is supposed to stem from this kind of an “intellectual beholding.” And the scorn and ridicule heaped upon it in the period after Schelling was great. For someone who knows how to avoid one-sidedness in these matters, there need not be the two conflicting alternatives: either to surrender to “the daydreams of nature fantasies like those of a Schelling” and bring a charge of “gross materialism” against proper, serious natural science; or maturely to take the stand-point of this science and “dismiss all Schellingian playing with concepts as childishness.” One can belong unreservedly to those who want to promote natural science to the full as demanded by our modern “natural-scientific age”; and one can nevertheless understand the justification for Schelling's attempt to create, above and beyond this natural science, a view of nature that enters an area that this natural science will not want to touch at all if it rightly understands itself. But the belief is unjustified which asserts that, besides the natural science created by our ordinary cognitive powers, there can exist no view of nature that is attained by means different from those particular to this natural science as such. Why must the natural scientist believe that his field is safe only if everyone else striving from a different point of view is silenced? For someone who will not let himself be blinded in these matters by “natural-scientific fanaticism,” the often so bitter rejection of a view of nature more in accordance with the spirit—such as that for which Schelling strove—seems no different, after all, than if a lover of photography were to say: “I make exact pictures of people that reproduce everything about them: just don't try to compare the portrait a painter makes with my kind of faithfulness to nature.”

[ 3 ] With awakened spiritual beholding Schelling wanted to find the “spirit of nature,” for which not only sense perception but also what one calls laws of nature are merely the physiognomical expression. It is important that we place before our souls the enormous impression he made in such strivings upon those of his contemporaries who had an open heart for the way this striving burst forth from his powerful, spirit-illuminated personality. There is a description, given by an amiable and gifted thinker, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, of the impressions he received of Schelling's effect in Jena. “What was it,” he writes, “that so powerfully drew both young and old from far and near to attend his lectures? Was it only the personality of the man or the particular charm of his speaking style that had such power to attract people? ... It wasn't that alone. ... In his lively words there lay, to be sure, an inspiring power irresistible to young souls with any receptivity at all. It might be difficult to make comprehensible to a reader in our day,” (Schubert is now writing down in 1854 what he had experienced about Schelling in the 1790's) “who did not participate in and hear this as a young person like I did, how it often affected me when Schelling spoke to us: I felt as though I were reading or hearing Dante, the seer in another world open only to the initiated eye. The mighty content that lay in his words—which themselves were measured, mathematically precise, and of an elegance suitable for inscription in stone—seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, presenting the understanding spirit with the task of loosing his bonds and receiving from his hand the unquenchable fire. ... But neither his personality nor the enlivening power of his speaking style could account for the interest and excitement—for or against his direction in thought—aroused by Schelling's world view immediately after it was made public in his writings; no other literary publication of this kind, long before or after, aroused such interest and excitement. When a teacher or writer speaks about sense-perceptible things or natural phenomena, one can tell right away whether he is doing so out of his own observation and experience or merely repeating what he has heard others say—or even what he has thought up out of pictures of his own. ... And it is the same with inner experience. There is a reality of a higher kind, whose existence can be experienced by the knowing spirit in us with the same sureness and certainty as our body, through its senses, experiences the existence of outer visible nature. This nature—the reality of bodily things—presents itself to our perceiving senses as a deed of that same creative power through which our bodily nature has also come about. The existence of the visible world is an actual fact in the same way as the existence of the perceiving senses. Reality of a higher kind, as a spiritually embodied fact, has also approached the knowing spirit in us; our knowing spirit will become aware of this reality when its own knowing activity lifts itself to a recognition of that by which our spirit is known and from which, according to a common, regular order, there emerges the reality of both bodily and spiritual evolution. And this becoming aware of a spiritual, divine reality in which we ourselves live, weave, and exist is the highest gain of earthly life and of the search for wisdom. ... Already in my day, among the young people who heard Schelling, there were some who had an inkling of what he meant by the ‘intellectual beholding’ through which our spirit must grasp the infinite primal ground of all being and becoming.”

[ 4 ] It was the spirit in nature that Schelling sought through intellectual beholding, the spiritual that, from the power of its creativity, brought forth nature. Nature was once the living body of this spiritual, just as the human body is so for the soul. Now it is spreading out, this body of the world spirit, revealing in its traits what once the spiritual incorporated into it, and showing, in its weaving and becoming, gestures that represent the workings of the spiritual. This spiritual working within the world body had to precede the present state of the world, so that this world body could grow hard and produce in the mineral realm a bony system, in the plant realm a nervous system, in the animal realm a soul forerunner of man. In this way the world body was led out of its youth into its old age; the present-day mineral, plant, and animal realms are, so to speak, the hardened products of what once was accomplished, in a spiritually embodied way, by an evolution that is now extinguished. Out of the womb of the aged body of the world, however, the creative spirituality could allow the soul and spirit-endowed human being to arise; within his inner life there shine forth to his knowledge the ideas with which the creative spirituality first brought about the world body. As though enchanted, there lies within present-day nature the spirit that once lived and worked in it; within the human soul this spirit becomes disenchanted. (This presentation of Schelling's relationship to nature is certainly not to be found in any actual words or even in any thoughts used by Schelling himself. Nevertheless, I believe that one can truly reproduce a person's view with such conciseness only if one fixes one's eye upon the spirit of his view, and, in order to express this spirit, uses mental pictures arising in a free way to say in a few words what the original personality expressed in a series of extensive works. Used to this end, the actual words of the personality can only misrepresent the spirit of these words.)

[ 5 ] Taking this stance toward the “spirit of nature” and its relationship to the human spirit, Schelling felt himself faced by the necessity of learning how to understand that element in the world which intrudes upon and disrupts the course of world events. Insofar as the soul gives itself over to the world of ideas holding sway in everything, the soul will knowingly experience the progressive creativity of this world of ideas. But, as though from a different direction of world existence, a disruptive, evil, malevolent element forces its way in. With the world of ideas the knowing soul does not at first enter this different field; this field borders on the world of ideas as the shadow borders on the light. Just as the light cannot be present in a shadowed space, so also the activities undertaken by the soul in its first attempts in knowledge cannot be present in the realm of disruption, evil, and malevolence. In seeking a possibility of penetrating into this region, Schelling received a stimulus from that personality who, out of the simplest feeling life of the German people, sought the solution for lofty riddles of the world: Jakob Böhme. To be sure, Jakob Böhme did read a lot about questions concerning world views and also did take up a great deal in other ways through the educational channels available to a simple man of the people in the German culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but the best thing that pulses through Jakob Böhme's writings in such an unlearned way is a popular path of knowledge; what is best there comes from the deeper heart (Gemüt) of the people itself. And Schelling lifted up into the mode of thinking contemplation what was seen by this deeper heart of the people in Jakob Böhme's unlearned but enlightened soul. It belongs to the most magnificent observations one can make in world literature to see Jakob Böhme's elemental heart's view shining through the philosophical language of Schelling's Treatise on the Essential Being of Man's Freedom.¹ Within this elemental heart's view, the profound insight holds sway that no one can arrive at a satisfying world view whose only means on the path of knowledge are those of thinking comprehension. Out of the depths of the world, something bursts into the circumference of what thinking comprehension is; this something is more far-reaching and powerful than thinking comprehension, but not more powerful actually than what the soul can experience within itself when thinking comprehension appears to the soul only as a part of the soul's own essential being. If one wants to comprehend something, one must understand how this something is necessarily connected with something else. The things of the world are indeed connected to each other necessarily on the surface, but not in the deepest foundation of the world's essential being. Freedom holds sway in the world. And only he comprehends the world who beholds free, supersensible spirituality holding sway within the necessitated course taken by the laws of nature. Freedom as a fact can always be refuted by logical reasons. Whoever realizes this is not impressed by any refutation of the idea of freedom.

Jakob Böhme's thoroughly healthy way of knowledge—his original deeper heart's knowledge, so in accordance with the feeling of the people—beheld freedom as weaving and working through everything necessitated, working even through natural necessity. And Schelling, ascending from a view of nature in accordance with the spirit to a beholding of the spirit, felt himself in harmony with Jakob Böhme.

[ 6 ] And with this the path was given him for beholding the historical evolution of the spirituallife of mankind in his own way. The deed of Christ fitted into this evolution as the greatest event on earth. Through his Philosophy of Mythology Schelling sought to understand what had occurred before this deed. Whoever believes that in history only ideas that follow necessarily from each other are revealed, does not understand the course of the world. For with freedom supersensible being reaches into this course from stage to stage; and what freedom accomplishes at each new stage can only be beheld as a fact revealed to the deeper heart (Germüt); it cannot be thought up beforehand, by logical deduction from the evolution of ideas until then, as a necessitated next stage. And what supersensible worlds, in the evolution of the earth, have let stream in through Christ must be taken as a completely free fact; not as a revelation needing illumination by ideas, but as a revelation shining out over any world of ideas. Schelling wants to speak about this world view of his in his Philosophy of Revelation.

Certainly, the “contradiction” in which this way of picturing things gets entangled is easy to point out. And this “contradiction” was held up to Schelling in every possible form, both well-meaning and malicious. Nevertheless, whoever raises this “contradiction” only shows that he does not want to recognize the reigning of free spirituality in the course of a world process that seems necessitated. Schelling did not want to deny the working of natural necessity; but he wanted to show how even this necessity is a deed of the spirituality that works through the world with freedom. And he did not want, as it were, to renounce comprehension just because the first attempts of this comprehension shatter upon the boundary of world freedom; he wanted to ascend to a comprehension of what the world of ideas holding sway in everything does not have within itself but can take up into itself. The ideas that want to know the world do not need to bow out just because mere thinking comprehension is inadequate for knowledge of life. One need not say: Because ideas, with what at first lies within their own being, do not penetrate into the depths of the world, therefore the depths of the world cannot be known. No, when ideas give themselves over to these depths and become permeated by what ideas do not have in themselves, then these ideas rise up from the ground of the world, newborn and wafted through by the essential being of the “spirit of the world.”

From the seventeenth century, the deeper heart of the German people in the Görlitz shoemaker Jakob Böhme, working on in Schelling's philosophical spirit, arrived at a world view like this in the nineteenth century.

• 1. Freiheit literally means “freehood.” Freiheit does not focus so much on “freedom” from something. It means activating the spiritual forces of one's own “I.” For Rudolf Steiner, freedom is “action, thinking, and feeling from out of the spiritual individuality of man”; it is “spiritual activity.” – Ed.!

[ 1 ] Through Hegel, the “I think, therefore I am” seems to spring up again in the evolution of German world views like a seed, fallen into the earth, arises as a wide-branching tree. For, what this thinker created as a world view is a comprehensive thought-painting or, so to speak, a many-membered thought-body, consisting of numerous single thoughts that mutually carry, support, move, enliven, and illuminate one another. What is meant here by thoughts does not stem from the sense impressions of the outer world, nor even from the everyday experiences of human feeling life (Gemüt); what is meant is thoughts that reveal themselves in the soul when the soul lifts itself out of its sense impressions and out of the experiences of its feeling life and makes itself into an onlooker of the process by which a thought, free of everything of a non-thought nature, unfolds into further and ever further thoughts. When the soul allows this process to occur within itself, it is then supposedly lifted out of its usual being and interwoven with its activity into the spiritually supersensible world order. Then it is not the soul that thinks; the world-all thinks within the soul; the soul becomes a participant in a happening outside man into which man is merely interwoven; and in this way the soul experiences within itself what works and weaves in the depths of the world.

[ 2 ] Looking at this more closely, one can see that Hegel seeks his world view from a completely different viewpoint than from Descartes's “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes wants to draw certainty about the existence of the soul from the soul's thinking. With Hegel it is a matter of saying nothing at first about the thinking of the individual human soul. but of shaping the life of this soul in such a way that its thinking becomes a revelation of world thinking. Then. Hegel believes, what lives as thought in all world existence will reveal itself; and the individual soul finds itself as a part in this thought-weaving of the world. From this point of view the soul must say: The highest and deepest thing that is and lives in the world is the creative reigning of thoughts, and I find myself as one of the ways this reigning element reveals itself.

[ 3 ] In this turn away from the individual thoughts of the soul and toward world thoughts above and beyond the soul. there lies the significant difference between Hegel and Descartes; Hegel made this turn; Descartes did not.

these thoughts; he seeks a form of thought-life that lies above and beyond this field.

[ 4 ] If Hegel did in fact remain in the region of thoughts and found himself therefore to be in opposition to Fichte and Schelling, he did so only because he believed he felt, in thoughts themselves, the inner power needed to penetrate into the supersensible realm. Hegel was an enthusiast with respect to the experience man can have when he gives himself over entirely to the primal power of thoughts. In the light of a thought raised to an idea, the soul, for him, extricates itself from its connection with the sense world. One can feel the power lying in this enthusiasm of Hegel when one encounters in his writings—in which for many people there reigns such a repellent, knotty, yes, it seems, horribly abstract language-passages that often show so beautifully the heart's tones he can find for what he experiences with his “abstractions.” Just such a passage, for example, stands at the end of his Phenomenology. There he calls the knowing that the soul experiences when it lets world ideas hold sway within it “absolute knowing.” And at the end of this book he looks back upon those spirits who have striven for the goal of “absolute knowing” in the course of mankind's evolution. Looking back from his era, he finds the following words to say about these spirits: “The goal—absolute knowing, or the spirit knowing itself as spirit—has as its path the memory of spirits, as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their kingdom. Their preservation of their free existence, on the one hand, appearing in the form of chance happening, is history; but their preservation of their comprehended organization, on the other hand, is the science of manifest knowing; both together—comprehended history—constitute the memory and the Golgotha (Schädelstätte) of the absolute spirit, the reality, truth, and certainty of its throne, without which the absolute spirit would be lifeless and alone; only—

From the cup of this realm of spirits
Foams for it its infinitude:”

[ 5 ] This inwardly powerful element of a thought-life that wants to overcome itself within itself in order to lift itself into a realm where it is no longer living in itself but where the infinite thought, the eternal idea, is living in it: that is the essential element in Hegel's seeking. Through this, higher striving in knowledge receives a far-reaching character with him that wants to guide toward one goal directions in this striving that are often separated and therefore proceeding one-sidedly. In Hegel one can find a pure thinker who wants to approach the solution to the riddle of the world only through a human reason free of mysticism. One can speak of ice-cold abstract thoughts by which alone he wants to comprehend the world. Thus one will be able to see in him the dry, mathematically inclined man of intellect. But where does living in the ideas of one's reason lead him? It leads him to the surrender of the human soul to the supersensible world powers holding sway in the soul. Living in these ideas becomes a true mystical experience. And it is absolutely not nonsensical to recognize mysticism in Hegel's world view. One must only have a sense for the fact that what they mystic expresses can be experienced in Hegel's works in connection with the ideas of one's reason. It is a mysticism that removes the personal element—which for the mystic of feeling is the main thing, and the only thing he wants to speak about—as in fact a personal matter for the soul itself, and that expresses only that to which mysticism can lift itself when it struggles up out of personal soul darkness into the radiant clarity of the world of ideas.

[ 6 ] Hegel's world view has its place in the course of mankind's spiritual evolution through the fact that in it the radiant power of thoughts lifts itself up out of the mystical depths of the soul, and through the fact that in Hegel's seeking, mystical power wants to reveal itself with the power of the light of thought. And this is also how he sees his place in the course of this evolution. Therefore he looked back upon Jakob Böhme in the way expressed in these words (to be found in his History of Philosophy): “This Jakob Böhme, long forgotten and decried as a pietistic visionary, has regained his rightful esteem only in recent times; Leibniz revered him. His public has been greatly reduced by the Age of Enlightenment; in recent times his profundity has been recognized again. ... To declare him a visionary means nothing. For if one wants to, one can call every philosopher so, even Epicurus and Bacon. ... But as to the high esteem to which Böhme has been raised, he owes this particularly to the form of his contemplation and feeling; for, contemplation and inner feeling ... and the pictorial nature of one's thoughts the allegories and so on—are partly considered to be the essential form of philosophy. But it is only the concept, thinking, in which philosophy can have its truth, in which the absolute can be expressed and also is as it is in and for itself.” And Hegel finds these further words for Böhme: “Jakob Böhme is the first German philosopher; the content of his philosophizing is truly German. What distinguishes Böhme and makes him remarkable is ... that he set the intellectual world into his own inner life (Gemüt), and within his own consciousness of himself he beheld, knew, and felt everything that used to be in the beyond. This general idea of Böhme proves on the one hand to be profound and basic; on the other hand, however, he does not achieve clarity and order in all his need and struggle for definition and discrimination in developing his divine views about the universe.”

Such words are spoken by Hegel, after all, only from the feeling: In the simple heart of Jakob Böhme there lived the deepest impulse of the human soul to sink itself with its own experience into world experience—the true mystical impulse—but the pictorial view, the parable, the symbol must lift themselves to the light of clear ideas in order to attain what they want. In Hegel's world view Jakob Böhme's world pictures are meant to arise again as ideas of human reason. Thus the enthusiast of thoughts, Hegel, stands beside the deep mystic, Jakob Böhme, within the evolution of German idealism. Hegel saw in Böhme's philosophizing something truly German, and Karl Rosenkranz, the biographer and independent student of Hegel, wrote a book, Hegel as the German National Philosopher, for the celebration of Hegel's hundredth birthday in 1870, in which these words occur: “One can assert that Hegel's system of thought is the most national one in Germany, and that after the earlier dominion of the Kantian and Schellingtan systems, none has reached so deeply into the national movement, into the furthering of German intelligence, into the elucidation of public opinion, into the encouraging of the will ... as that of Hegel.”

[ 7 ] With such words Karl Rosenkranz does in fact, to a high degree, speak the truth about a phenomenon of German spiritual life, even though, on the other hand, Hegel's striving had already encountered the most bitter and scornful opposition in the decades before these words were written—an opposition whose beginnings were described in significant words by Rosenkranz himself soon after Hegel's death: “When I consider the fury with which Hegelian philosophy was attacked, I am surprised that Hegel's expression, that ‘the idea in its movement is a circle of circles,’ has not moved people to call his philosophy Dante's funnel into hell, which narrows toward the end and finally brings one up against Satan incarnate” (Rosenkrantz: From My Notebook. Leipzig 1854).

[ 8 ] There can be very different viewpoints from which a person seeks to describe the impression he gains of a thinker personality like Hegel. In another place (in his book Riddles of Philosophy) the present author attempted to show the view one can attain about Hegel when one fixes one's eye on his work as a stage in the philosophical evolution of mankind. Here this author would like to speak only of what comes to expression through Hegel as one of the strengths of German idealism in world views. This is trust in the carrying power of thinking. Every page in Hegel's works strengthens this trust which finally culminates in the conviction: When the human being fully understands what he has in his thinking, then he also knows that he can attain entry into a supersensible spiritual world. Through Hegel, German idealism has accomplished the affirmation of the supersensible nature of thinking. And one can have the feeling that Hegel's strengths, and also his weaknesses, are connected with the fact that one time in the course of the world a personality had to stand there for whom all life and work are ensouled by this affirmation. Then one sees in Hegel's world view a source from which to draw what can be gained from this affirmation in the way of strength for life, without perhaps accepting the content of the Hegelian world view in anyone point.

[ 9 ] If one relates in such a way to this thinker personality, one can receive a stimulus from him, and along with it the stimulus of one strong element of German idealism; and from this stimulus one can gain the strength to form a completely different picture of the world than that painted by Hegel himself. As strange as it may sound: Hegel is perhaps best understood when one directs the power of cognitive striving that held sway in him onto paths that he himself never took at all.

Hegel felt the supersensible nature of thinking with all the power available to man in this direction. But he had to expend so much human strength in conducting this feeling through a complete thinking process for once, that he was not able himself to lead the supersensible nature of thinking up into supersensible realms. The exemplary psychologist, Franz Brentano expresses in his Psychology how modern psychology does indeed investigate the ordinary life of the soul in a strictly scientific way, but, in these investigations, has lost all perspective into the great questions of soul existence. He says: “The laws of mental association, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the germinating of pleasure and love, all these would be anything but a true compensation for not gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body ... if the modern way of thinking really did signify the elimination of the question of immortality, then this elimination would have to be called an extremely portentious one for psychology:” Now one can say that in many people's view not only the scientific approach of psychology but the scientific approach altogether seems to signify the elimination of such questions. Over Hegel's world view there seems to hover like an evil fate the fact that, with its affirmation of the supersensible nature of the thought-world, his world view has walled off the entrance into a real world of supersensible facts and beings. [ 10 ] In someone who is a student of Hegel in the sense Karl Rosenkranz is, for example, this fate seems to work on. Rosenkranz wrote a psychology (Psychology or Science of the Subjective Spirit, 1837; third edition, 1863). There, in the chapter on “Old Age,” one can read (p. 119): “Psychology touches here on the question of immortality, a favorite theme of lay philosophers—often with the preconceived intention of guaranteeing a reunion after death, as one usually expresses it. If the spirit, as a self-conscious idea-entity, is qualitatively different from its organism, then the possibility of immortality makes sense. But as to the how of actual immortality, we are unable to gain the slightest inkling with any objective value. We can see that if we continue to exist as individualities, our being is still unable to change, after all, with respect to having to live within the true, good, and beautiful; but the modality of an existence separated from our organism is a riddle for us. Why should we not then acknowledge here the limits of our knowing? Why should we either flatly deny the possibility of immortality or offer for speculation fantastic dreams of a soul sleep, of a soul body, and of other such dogmas? Where true knowing ceases, faith enters; and we must leave it up to faith to depict a not impossible hereafter.” Rosenkranz airs an opinion like this within a psychology completely permeated with the conviction of having a knowledge about what the supersensible world-thought brings to earthly reality within the being of the human soul. This is a science—wishing to weave entirely within the supersensible—that comes to an immediate halt when it notices the threshold to the supersensible world. One can deal with this phenomenon only if one feels in it something of the destiny that is cast over man's striving in knowledge—and that seems so inextricably interwoven with Hegel's world view—through the fact that, by focussing with all its strength upon the supersensible nature of thinking, and, in order to achieve maximum effect with this focus, his world view loses the possibility of a different focus upon the supersensible.

[ 11 ] Hegel at first seeks to find the circumference of all the supersensible thoughts that arise in the human soul when the soul lifts itself up out of all observation of nature and all earthly soul life. He presents this content as his Logic. But this logic contains not one single thought leading out of the region encompassed by nature and earthly soul life.

Then Hegel seeks further to present all those thoughts which, as supersensible beings, underlie nature. Nature becomes for him the revelation of a supersensible thought-world that hides its thought-being within nature and presents itself as the opposite of itself, as something of a non-thought kind. But here also there are no thoughts that non-thought kind. But here also there are no thoughts that I do not express themselves within the circumference of the sense world.

In his philosophy of the spirit, Hegel depicts how world I ideas are holding sway in the individual human soul, in associations of human souls (peoples, states), in the historical evolution of mankind, in art, religion, and philosophy. Everywhere in his philosophy is also the view that the supersensible thought-world absolutely expresses itself within the soul element as this stands with its being and working within the sense world, and that therefore everything present in the sense realm is of a spiritual nature with respect to its true being. Nowhere, however, is there a start in the direction of penetrating with knowledge into a supersensible region for which no configuration in the sense realm is present.

[ 12 ] One can acknowledge all this to oneself and yet not seek to judge the expression of German idealism in Hegel's world view negatively just because Hegel, in spite of his supersensible idealism, remained stuck in observation of the sense world. One can arrive at a positive judgment and can find the essential thing about this world view to lie in the fact that it contains the affirmation: Whoever observes in its true form the world spread out before our senses recognizes that it is in reality a spiritual world. And German idealism has expressed through Hegel this affirmation of the spiritual nature of the sense-perceptible.

[ 13 ] Otto Willmann has written an excellent book dealing with The History of Idealism. With a far-reaching knowledge of his field, he points out the weaknesses and one-sidednesses that have come into the evolution of world views in the nineteenth century through the continuing effects of the Kantian formulation of questions and direction in thought. The depictions I gave in this present book sought within the life of the world views of the nineteenth century to find those impulses and streams through which thinkers have freed themselves from Kant's formulation of questions and direction in thought, and through which they have taken paths to which precisely they could do justice who judge the matter according to just such a far-reaching view as that underlying Willmann's book. Many views that wish to attach themselves to Kant in modern times, without sufficient insight into the preceding evolution of world views, revert in fact to views characterized correctly in the following words by Willmann to the effect “that according to Aristotle our knowledge begins with the things of the world and on the basis of sense perceptions only then forms the concept ... that this forming of concepts occurs through a creative act, in which the human spirit grasps the thought-element within the things ... One still always has to indicate to certain sense-bound and banal people that perceiving can never enhance itself to the point of being able to think, that sensations and feelings cannot bunch together into concepts, and that, on the contrary, perceiving and sensing must themselves be constituted by something, and constituted, in fact, on the basis of the thoughts existing in the things; ... only thoughts can grant us any necessitated and universal knowledge.” Someone who thinks in this way—if he frees himself from certain misapprehensions holding sway, understandably, among the adherents of Willmann's kind of thinking—can speak with comprehension and appreciation, even from Willmann's standpoint, of Schelling's and Hegel's direction in thought and of much that, like them, rums away from “sense-bound banality.” A time will also come when Willmann's kind of thinking will be judged with less bias in this direction than is now the case. This kind of thinking will then be just as correct in its appreciation of what, in the evolution of modern world views, has broken free of “sense-bound banality” as it is correct now in condemning views that have fallen prey to this and many other “banalities.”!

[ 1 ] Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel appear in their full significance quite especially to someone who considers the far-reaching impetus they gave to personalities possessed of far less spiritual vigor than they. Something is moving and working in the souls of this trio of thinkers that could not come fully to expression within themselves. And what is working as the basic undertone in the souls of these thinkers works on in a living way in their successors and brings them to world views—in accordance with the spirit—that even the three great original thinkers themselves could not achieve because they had to exhaust their soul vigor, so to speak in making the first beginnings.

[ 2 ] Thus, in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, there appears a thinker who tries to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual than his father, Schelling, or Hegel. Whoever dares to make such an attempt will not only hear from outside the opposition of all those who are fearful about questions of world views; if he is a careful thinker, he will clearly perceive this opposition coming also from his own soul. Is there then actually a possibility of delivering the human soul of cognitive powers that lead into regions of which the senses give no view? What can guarantee the reality of such regions; what can determine the difference between such reality and the creations of fantasy and daydreaming? Whoever does not always have the spirit of this opposition at his side, so to speak, as the true companion of his prudence will easily blunder in his spiritual-scientific attempts; whoever has this spirit will recognize in it something extremely valuable for life.

Whoever enters into the arguments of Immanuel Hermann Fichte will find that a certain spiritual demeanor has passed over to him from his great predecessors that both strengthens his steps into the spiritual region and endows him with prudence in the sense just indicated.

[ 3 ] The standpoint of the Hegelian world view, which takes as its basic conviction the spiritual nature of the world of ideas, was also able to be the point of departure for Immanuel Hermann Fichte in the development of his thoughts. Nevertheless, he felt it to be a weakness in Hegel's world view that, from its supersensible vantage point, it still looks only at what is revealed in the sense world. Whoever lives into Immanuel Hermann Fichte's views can feel something like the following as its basic undertone. The soul experiences itself in a supersensible way when it lifts itself above sense perception to a weaving in the realm of ideas. Through this, the soul has not only enabled itself to see the sense world differently than the senses see it—which would correspond to the Hegelian world view—; but also, the soul has an experience of itself through this that it cannot have through anything to be found within the sense world. From now on the soul knows of something that itself is supersensible about the soul. This “something” cannot be merely the idea of the soul's sense-perceptible body. Rather, this something must be a living, essential beingness that underlies the sense-perceptible body in such a way that this body is formed according to the idea of this something. Thus Immanuel Hermann Fichte is led up above and beyond the sense-perceptible body to a supersensible body, which, out of its life, forms the first body. Hegel advances from sense observation to thinking about sense observation. Fichte seeks in man the being that can experience thinking as something supersensible, Hegel, if he wants to see in thinking something supersensible, would have to ascribe to this thinking itself the ability to think. Fichte cannot go along with this. He has to say to himself: If one is not to regard the sense-perceptible body itself as the creator of thoughts, then one is compelled to assume that there is something supersensible above and beyond this body. Moved by this kind of a view, Fichte regards the human sense-perceptible body in a natural-scientific way (physiologically), and finds that such a study, if only it is unbiased enough, is compelled to take a supersensible body as the basis of the sense-perceptible one. In paragraphs 118 and 119 of his Anthropology (second edition 1860), he says about this: “Within the material elements, therefore, one cannot find what is truly enduring, that unifying form principle of the body which proves to be operative our whole life long.” “Thus we are directed toward a second, essentially different cause within the body.” “Insofar as this [unifying form principle] contains what is actually enduring in metabolism, it is the true, inner body-invisible, yet present in all visible materiality. That other entity, the outer manifestation of this form principle, shaped by continuous metabolism: let us call it ‘corporality’ from now on; it is truly not enduring and not whole; it is the mere effect or copy of that inner bodily nature that throws it into the changing world of matter in somewhat the same way a magnetic force puts together, out of metal filing dust, a seemingly dense body that is then blown away in all directions when the uniting force is withdrawn.” This opens for Fichte the perspective of getting outside the sense world, in which man works between birth and death, into a supersensible world with which he is connected through Ws invisible body in the same way he is connected with the sense world through his visible body, For, his knowledge of this invisible body brings him to the view he expresses in these words: “For one hardly need ask here how the human being, in and for himself, conducts himself in this process of death. Man, in and for himself—even after the last, to us invisible, act of his life processes—remains, in his essential being, completely the same one he was before with respect to his spirit and power of organization. His integrity is preserved; for he has lost absolutely nothing of what was his and belonged to his substance during his visible life, He only returns in death into the invisible world; or rather, since he has never left the invisible world, since the invisible world is what actually endures within everything visible, he has only stripped off a particular form of visibility. ‘To be dead’ simply means to remain no longer perceptible to ordinary sense apprehension, in exactly the same way that what is actually real, the ultimate foundations of bodily phenomena, are also imperceptible to the senses.” And with such a thought Fichte feels himself to be standing so surely in the supersensible world that he can say: “With this concept of the continued existence of the soul, therefore, we not only transcend outer experience and reach into an unknown region of merely illusory existences; we also find ourselves, with this concept, right in the midst of the graspable reality accessible to thinking. To assert the opposite, that the soul ceases to exist, would be against nature, would contradict all analogy to outer experience. The soul that has ‘died,’ i.e., has become invisible to the senses, continues to exist no less than before, and is unremoved from its original life conditions. ... Another means of incarnation need only present itself to the soul's power of organization for the soul to stand there again in new bodily activity ...” (Paragraphs 133 Anthropology)

[ 4 ] Starting from such views there opens up for Immanuel Hermann Fichte the possibility of a self-knowledge that man attains when he observes himself from the point of view he gains through his experiences in his own supersensible entity. Man's sense-perceptible entity brings him to the point of thinking. But in thinking, after all, he grasps himself as a supersensible being, If he lifts mere thinking up into an inner experiencing—through which it is no longer mere thinking but rather a supersensible beholding,—he then gains a way of knowing through which he no longer looks only upon what is sense-perceptible, but also upon what is supersensible. If anthropology is the science of the human being by which he studies the part of himself to be found in the sense world, then, through his view of the supersensible, another science makes it appearance, about which Immanuel Hermann Fichte expresses himself in this way (paragraph 270): to “... anthropology ends up with the conclusion, established from the most varied sides, that man, in accordance with the true nature of his being, as though in the actual source of his consciousness, belongs to a supersensible world. Man's sense consciousness, on the other hand, and the phenomenal world (world of appearances) arising at the point of his eye, along with the whole life of the senses, including human senses: all this has no significance other than merely being the place in which that supersensible life of the human spirit occurs through the fact that the human spirit, by its own, free, conscious activity, leads the spiritual content of ideas from the beyond into the sense world ...” This fundamental apprehension of man's being now lifts “anthropology” in its final conclusions up to “anthroposophy.”

[ 5 ] Through Immanuel Hermann Fichte the cognitive impulse manifesting in the idealism of German world views is brought to the point of undertaking the first of those steps which can lead human insight to a science of the spiritual world. Many other thinkers strove like Immanuel Hermann Fichte to carry further the ideas of their predecessors: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. For, this German idealism points to the germinal power for a real development of those cognitive powers of man that behold the supersensible spiritual the way our senses behold the sense-perceptible material. Let us just look at several of these thinkers. One can see how fruitful the spiritual stream of German idealism proves to be in this direction if one does not refer merely to those thinkers who are discussed in the usual textbooks on the history of philosophy, but also to those whose spiritual work was enclosed within narrower boundaries. For example, there are the Little Writings (published 1869 in Leipzig) of Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died in Bromberg on August 16, 1867 as headmaster of a secondary school. His book contains essays on “the antithesis between pantheism and deism in pre-Christian religions,” on the “concept of religion,” on “Kepler, his life and character,” etc. The basic undertone of these treatises is altogether of a sort to show how the thought-life of their author is rooted in the idealism of German world views. One of these essays speaks about the “reasonable grounds for believing in the immortality of the human soul.” This essay defends immortality at first only with reasons that spring from our ordinary thinking. But at the end, the following significant note is added by the publisher: “According to a letter of August 14, 1866 to his publishers, the author intended to expand this essay for the complete edition of his collected ‘Little Writings’ with an observation about the new body that the soul is working to develop for itself already in this life. The author's death the following year prevented the carrying out of this plan.” How a remark like this spotlights the effect upon thinkers of the idealism of German world views, stimulating them to penetrate in a scientific way into the spiritual realm! How many such attempts a person would discover today, even by investigating only those thinkers still to be found in literature! How many there must be that bore no fruit in literature but a great deal in life! One is looking there really, in the scientific consciousness ruling in our day, at a more or less forgotten stream in German spiritual life.

[ 6 ] One of those thinkers, hardly ever heard of today, is Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler. Let us mention only one of his numerous books, Lectures on Philosophy, published in 1835. A personality is expressing himself in this book who is absolutely conscious of how a person using merely his senses and the intellect that deals with the observations of his senses can know only a part of the world. Like Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Troxler also feels himself in his thinking to be standing within a supersensible world. But he also senses how the human being, when he removes himself from the power that binds him to the senses, can do more than place himself before a world that in the Hegelian sense is thought by him; through this removal he can experience within his inner being the blossoming of a purely spiritual means of knowledge through which he spiritually beholds a spiritual world, like the senses behold the sense world in sense perception. Troxler speaks of a “supra-spiritual sense:” And one can form a picture of what he means by this in the following way. The human being observes the things of the world through his senses. He thereby receives sense-perceptible pictures of these things. He then thinks about these pictures. Thoughts reveal themselves to him thereby that no longer bear the sensible pictorial element in themselves. Through the power of his spirit, therefore, man adds supersensible thoughts to the sense-perceptible pictures. If he now experiences himself in the entity that is thinking in him, in such a way that he ascends above mere thinking to spiritual experiencing, then, from out of this experiencing, an inner, purely spiritual power of picture making takes hold of him. He then beholds a world in pictures that can serve as a form of revelation for a supersensibly experienced reality. These pictures are not received by the senses; but they are full of life, just as sense-perceptible pictures are; they are not dreamed up; they are experiences in the supersensible world held fast by the soul in picture form. In ordinary cognitive activity, the sense-perceptible picture is present first and then, in the process of knowledge, the thought comes to join it—the thought, which is not a picture for the senses. In the spiritual process of knowledge, the supersensible experience is present; this experience as such could not be beheld if it did not, through a power in accordance with the nature of the spirit, pour itself into the picture that brings this power to spiritually perceptible embodiment. For Troxler, the cognitive activity of the “supra-spiritual sense” is of just such a kind. And the pictures of this supra-spiritual sense are grasped by the “supersensible spirit” of man in the same way that sense-perceptible pictures are grasped by human reason in knowledge of the sense world. In the working together of the supersensible spirit with the supra-spiritual sense, there evolved, in Troxler's view, our knowing of the spirit (see the sixth of his Lectures on Philosophy).

Taking his start from such presuppositions, Troxler has an inkling of a “higher man” within the man that experiences himself in the sense world; this “higher man” underlies the sense-perceptible man and belongs to the supersensible world; and in this view Troxler feels himself to be in harmony with what Friedrich Schlegel expressed. And thus, as was already the case earlier with Friedrich Schlegel, the highest qualities and activities manifested by the human being in the sense world become for Troxler the expression of what the supersensible human being can do. Through the fact that man stands within the sense world, his soul is possessed of the power of belief. But this power after all is only the manifestation, through the sense-perceptible body, of the supersensible soul. In the supersensible realm a certain faculty of the soul underlies our power of belief; if one wants to express it in a supersensibly pictorial way, one must call this a faculty of the supersensible man to hear. And it is the same with our power of hope. A faculty of the supersensible man to see underlies this power; corresponding with our activity of love, there is the faculty of the “higher man” to feel, to “touch,” in spirit, just as the sense of touch in the sense-perceptible world is the faculty to feel something. Troxler expresses himself on this subject (page 107 of his Lectures on Philosophy, Bern, 1835) in the following way: “Our departed friend Friedrich Schlegel has brought to light in a very beautiful and true way the relationship of the sense-perceptible to the spiritual man. In his lectures on the philosophy of language and the word, Schlegel says: ‘If one wants—in that alphabet of consciousness which provides the individual elements for the individual syllables and whole words—to refind the first beginnings of our higher consciousness, after God Himself constitutes the keystone of highest consciousness, then the feeling for the spirit must be accepted as the living center of our whole consciousness and as the point of union with the higher consciousness ... One is often used to calling these fundamental feelings for the eternal: ‘belief, hope, and love.’ If one is to regard these three fundamental feelings or characteristics or states of consciousness as just so many organs of knowledge and perception of the divine—or, if you will, at least organs that give inklings of the divine,—then one can very well compare them to the outer senses and instruments of sense perception, both in the above respect and in the characteristic form of apprehension that each of them has, Then love corresponds in a striking way—in the first stimulating soul touch, in the continuous attraction, and in the final perfect union—to the outer sense of touch; belief is the inner hearing of the spirit, uniting the given word to its higher message, grasping it, and inwardly preserving it; and hope is the eye, whose light can glimpse already in the distance the objects it craves deeply and longingly.’” That Troxler himself now goes above and beyond the meaning Schlegel gave these words and thinks them absolutely in the sense indicated above is shown by the words Troxler now adds: “Far loftier than intellect and will, and their interaction, far loftier than reason and spiritual activity (Freiheit), and their unity, are these ideas of our deeper heart (Gerrütsideen) that unite in a consciousness of spirit and of heart; and just as intellect and will, reason and spiritual activity—and all the soul capacities and abilities of a lower sort than they—represent an earthward directed reflection, so these three are a heavenward directed consciousness that is illuminated by a truly divine light.” The same thing is shown by the fact that Troxler also expresses himself about the supersensible soul body in exactly the same way one encounters in Immanuel Hermann Fichte: “Earlier philosophers have already distinguished a fine and noble soul body from the coarser body ... a soul that had about itself a picture of the body that they called a schema and that was for them the inner, higher man. ... In modern times even Kant, in The Dreams of a Spirit Seer, dreams up seriously as a joke a completely inward soul man that bears all the members of its outer man upon his spiritual body; Lavater also writes and thinks in this way; and even when Jean Paul jokes about Bonet's slip and Platner's soul girdle, which are supposed to be hidden inside the coarser outside skirt and martyr's smock, we also hear him asking again, after all: ‘to what end and from where were these extraordinary potentials and wishes laid in us, which, bare as swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthly covering to pieces? ... Within the stony members (of man) there grow and mature his living members according to a way of living unknown to us.’ We could,” Troxler continues, “present innumerable further examples of similar ways of thinking and writing that ultimately are only various views and pictures in which ... the one true teaching is contained of the individuality and immortality of man.”

[ 7 ] Troxler too speaks of the fact that upon the path of knowledge sought by him a science of man is possible through which—to use his own expressions—the “supra-spiritual sense” together with the “supersensible spirit” apprehend the supersensible being of man in an “anthroposophy,” On page 101 of his Lectures there is the sentence: “While it is now highly encouraging that modern philosophy, which ... must reveal itself ... in any anthroposophy, is winding its way upward, still one must not overlook the fact that this idea cannot be the fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what philosophy sets up as subjective spirit or as finite ‘I,’ nor with what philosophy lets this ‘I’ be confronted by as absolute spirit or absolute personality.”

[ 8 ] There is no doubt that Troxler sought the way out of and beyond Hegel's thought-world more in dim feeling than in clear perception. One can nevertheless observe in his cognitive life how the stimulus of the idealism in the German world views of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel works in a personality who cannot make the views of this trio of thinkers into his own, but who finds his own way through the fact that he receives this stimulus.

[ 9 ] Karl Christian Planck belongs to those personalities in the evolution of German spiritual life who are forgotten now and were disregarded even during their own lifetimes. He was born in 1819 in Stuttgart and died in 1880; he was a professor in a secondary school in Ulm and later in a college in Blaubeuren. In 1877 he still hoped to be given the professorship in philosophy that became free then in Tübingen. This did not happen. In a series of writings he seeks to draw near to the world view that seems to him to express the spiritual approach of the German people. In his book Outline of a Science of Nature (1864) he states how he wants, in his own thoughts. to present the thoughts of the questing German folk soul: “The author is fully aware of the power of the deep-rooted preconceptions from past views that confront his book; nevertheless, just as the work itself has fought through to completion and into public view—in spite of all the adverse conditions confronting a work of this kind as a result of the whole situation and professional position of its author—so he is also certain that what must now fight for recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most obvious truth, and that through this, not merely its concerns but also the truly German view of things will triumph over any still unworthily external and un-German grasp of nature and spirit.—What, in unconscious profound inklings, has already been prefigured in our medieval literature will finally be fulfilled by our nation in the fullness of time. Impractical, afflicted by injury and scorn, the inwardness of the German spirit (as Wolfram von Eschenbach portrayed this inwardness in his Parzival), in the power of its ceaseless striving, finally attains the highest; this inwardness beholds the ultimate simple laws of the things of this world and of human existence itself, in their very foundations; and what literature has allegorized in a fanciful medieval way as the wonders of the grail, whose rulership its hero attains, receives, on the other hand, its purely natural fulfillment and reality in a lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

In the last period of his life Karl Christian Planck drew his thought-world together in a book published by the philosopher Karl Köstlin in 1881 under the title Testament of a German.

[ 10 ] One can absolutely perceive in Planck's soul a similar kind of feeling for the riddle of knowledge as that revealed in the other thinker personalities characterized in this book. This riddle in its original form becomes for Planck the point of departure for his investigations. Within the circumference of the human thought-world can the strength be found by which man can apprehend true reality, the reality that gives his existence sense and meaning within world existence? Man sees himself placed into and over against nature. He can certainly form thoughts about what rules in nature's depths as powers of true being; but where is his guarantee that his thoughts have any significance at all other than that they are creations of his own soul, without kinship to those depths? If his thoughts were like this, then it would in fact remain unknown to man what he himself is and how he is rooted in the true world. Planck was just as far as Hegel from wanting to approach the world depths through any soul force other than thinking. He could hold no other view than that genuine reality must yield itself somehow to thinking. But no matter how far one reaches out with thinking, no matter how one seeks to strengthen its inner power: one still remains always only in thinking; in all the widths and depths of thinking one does not encounter being (Sein). By virtue of its own nature, thinking seems to exclude itself from any communion with being. Nevertheless, this insight into thinking's alienation from being now becomes for Planck precisely the ray of light that falls upon the world riddle and solves it. If thinking makes absolutely no claim of bearing within itself anything at all in the way of reality, if it actually is true that thinking reveals itself to be something unreal, then precisely through this fact it proves itself to be an instrument for expressing reality. If it were itself something real, then the soul could weave only in its reality, and could not leave it again; if thinking itself is unreal, then it will not disturb the soul through any reality of its own; by thinking, man is absolutely not within any thought-reality; he is within a thought-unreality that precisely therefore does not force itself upon him with its own reality but rather expresses that reality of which it speaks. Whoever sees in thinking itself something real must, in Planck's view, give up hope of arriving at reality; since, for him, thinking must place itself between the soul and reality. If thinking itself is nothing, it can therefore also not conceal reality from our activity of knowing; then reality must be able to reveal itself in thinking.

[ 11 ] With this view Planck has, to begin with, attained only the starting point for his world view. For, in the thought-weaving immediately present in the soul during life, that thinking is by no means operative which is pure, self-renouncing, and even self-denying, There play into this ordinary thought weaving what lives in the mental picturing, feeling, willing, and wanting of the soul. Because this is so, the clouding of world views occurs. And Planck's striving is to attain a kind of world view in which everything it contains is the result of thinking, yet nothing stems from thinking itself, In everything that is made into a thought about the real world, one must look at what lives in thinking but without itself being thought by us, Planck paints his picture of the world with a thinking that gives itself up in order to allow the world to shine from it.

[ 12 ] As an example of the way Planck wants to arrive at a picture of the world through such striving, let us characterize with a few strokes how he thinks about the being of the earth.

If someone pictures the earth in the way advocated by purely physical geology, then, for Planck's world view, there is no truth in this picture. To picture the earth in this way would be the same as speaking of a tree and fixing one's gaze only upon the trunk, without its leaves, blossoms, and fruit. To the sight of our physical eyes, such a tree trunk can be called reality. But in a higher sense it is no reality. For, as a mere trunk, it cannot occur as such anywhere in our world. It can be what it is only in so far as those growth forces arise in it at the same time which unfold the leaves, blossoms, and fruits. In the reality of the trunk one must think these forces in addition and must be aware that the bare trunk gives a picture of reality deceiving to the beholder, The fact that something or other is present to the senses is not yet proof that in this form it is also a reality, The earth, pictured as the totality of what it manifests in mineral configurations and in the facts occurring within these configurations, is no reality, Whoever wants to picture something real about the earth must picture it in such a way that its mineral realm already contains within itself the plant realm, Just as the trunk configuration of the tree includes its leaves and blossoms; yes, that within the “true earth” the animal realm and man are already present along with it. But do not say that all this is obvious and that Planck, basically, is only deceiving himself in thinking that not everyone sees it this way. Planck would have to reply to this: Where is the person who sees it this way? Certainly, everyone pictures the earth as a planetary body with plants, animals, and man. But they in fact picture the mineral earth, constituted of geological layers, with plants growing out of its surface, and with animals and human beings moving around on it. But this earth as a sum, added up out of minerals, plants. animals, and human beings, does not exist at all. It is only a delusion of the senses. On the other hand there is a true earth; it is a completely supersensible configuration, an invisible being, which provides the mineral foundation from out of itself; but it is not limited to this, for it manifests itself further in the plant realm, then in the animal realm, then in the human realm. Only that person has the right eye for the mineral, plant, animal, and human realm who beholds the entirety of the earth in its supersensible nature, and who feels, for example, how the picture of the material mineral realm by itself, without the picture of the soul evolution of mankind, is a delusion. Certainly, one can picture a material mineral realm to oneself; but one is living in a world-lie and not in the world-truth if, in doing so, one does not have the feeling that with a mental picture like this, one is caught in the same madness as a person who wanted to think that a man whose head has been struck off would calmly go on with his life.

It might be said: If true knowledge necessitates what is indicated here, then such knowledge, after all, could never be achieved; for, whoever asserts that the mineral earth is no reality because it must be viewed within the entirety of the earth should say too that the entirety of the earth must be viewed in the plant system and so on. Whoever raises this objection, however, has not grasped the significance of what underlies a world view that is in accordance with the spirit. In all human activity of knowing, in fact, the issue is not merely that one think correctly, but also that one think in accordance with reality. In speaking of a painting one can certainly say that one is not thinking in accordance with reality if one looks only at one person when there are three in the painting; but this assertion, within its rightful scope, cannot be refuted by the statement: No one understands this painting who also does not know all the preceding paintings of the same artist. A thinking both correct and in accordance with reality is in fact necessary for knowing reality. To consider, on their own, a mineral as a mineral, a plant as a plant, etc., can be in accordance with reality; the mineral earth is not a real configuration, however; it is a configuration of our imagination, even when one is aware of the fact that the mineral earth is only a part of everything earthly.

That is what is significant about a personality like Planck: he attains an inner state in which he does not reflect upon but rather experiences the truth of a thought; he unfolds a special power in his own soul by which to experience when not to think a particular thought because, through its own nature, it kills itself. To grasp the existence of a reality that bears within itself its own life and its own death, this belongs to the kind of soul attitude that does not depend upon the sense world to tell it: this is or this is not.

[ 13 ] From this point of view Planck sought in thinking to grasp what lives in natural phenomena and in human existence in historical, artistic, and judicial life. In a brilliant book, he wrote on the Truth and Banality of Darwinism. He calls this work a “monument to the history of modern (1872) German science.” There are people who experience a personality like Planck as hovering in unworldly conceptual heights and lacking a sense for practical life. Practical life requires people who develop healthy judgment based on “real” life, as they call it. Now, with respect to this way of experiencing Planck, one can also hold the opinion: Many things would be different in real life if this easy-going view of life and of living life were less widespread in reality, and if on the other hand the opinion could grow somewhat that thinkers like Planck—because they acquire for themselves an attitude of soul through which they unite themselves with true reality—also have a truer judgment about the relationships of life than the people who call them “dreamers in concepts” (Begriffsschwärmer) and impractical philosophers. The opinion is also possible that those dullards who are averse to such supposed “dreaming in concepts” and who think themselves so very practical in life are losing their sense for the true relationships of life, whereas the impractical philosophers are developing it to the point that it can lead them right to their goal. One can arrive at such an opinion when one considers Planck and sees in him, combined with the acme of philosophical development of ideas, a far-sighted accurate judgment about the needs of a genuine conduct of life and about the events of outer life. Even if one holds a different view about much of what Planck has developed in the way of ideas about shaping outer life—which is also the case with the present writer,—still one can acknowledge that his views can provide, precisely in this area, a sound starting point in life for solving practical problems; even if in proceeding from there one arrives at something entirely different from one's starting point. And one should assert: People who are “dreamers in concepts” in this way and who, precisely because of this, can see what powers are at work in real life are more competent to meet the needs of this real life than many a person who believes himself to be imbued with practical skill precisely through the fact that, in his view, he has not let contact with any world of ideas “make him stupid.” (In his book, Nineteenth Century Views of the World and of Life, published in 1900, the present author has written about Karl Christian Planck's place in the evolution of modern world views. This book was published in a new edition in 1914 under the title Riddles of Philosophy.)

Someone might maintain that it is unjustified to regard Planck's thoughts as significant for the motive forces of the German people since these thoughts have not become widespread. Such an opinion misses the point when speaking about the influence of the being of a people upon the views of a thinker from that people. What is working there are the impersonal (of ten unconscious) powers of a people, living in their activities in the most varied realms of existence and shaping the ideas of a thinker like Planck. These powers were there before he appeared and will work on afterward; they live, even if they are not spoken of; they live, even if they are not recognized. And it can be the case that they work in a particularly strong way in an indigenous thinker like this, who is not spoken of, because less of what these powers contain streams into the opinions held about him than into his thoughts. A thinker like this can of ten stand there alone, and not only during his lifetime; even his thoughts can stand there alone in the opinion of posterity. But if one has apprehended the particular nature of his thoughts, then one has recognized an essential trait of the folk soul, a trait that has become a thought in him and will remain imperishably in his people, ready to reveal itself in ever new impulses. Independent of the question: What effectiveness was granted to his work? is the other question: What worked in him and will lead again and again to accomplishments in the same direction? The Testament of a German by Karl Christian Planck was republished in a second edition in 1912. It is a pity that many of those who were philosophically minded and fond of writing at that time mustered up more enthusiasm for the thoughts in Henri Bergson's world view—lightly woven and therefore more easily comprehensible to undemanding souls—than for the rigorously interrelated and far-reaching ideas of Planck. How much has indeed been written about the “new configurating” of world views by Bergson: written, particularly, by those who discover the newness of a world view so easily because they lack understanding, and of ten even knowledge, of what has already been there for a long time. Relative to the “newness” of one of Bergson's main ideas the present author has pointed in his book Riddles of Philosophy to the following significant situation. (And it should be mentioned, by the way, that this indication was written before the present war. See the foreword to the second volume of the above book.)

Bergson is led by his thoughts to a transformation of the widespread idea of the evolution of organic entities. He does not set at the beginning of this evolution the simplest organism and then think that, due to outer forces, more complicated organisms emerge from it all the way up to man; he pictures that, at the starting point of evolution, there stands a being that in some form or other already contains the impulse to become man. This being, however, can bring this impulse to realization only by first expelling from itself other impulses that also lie within it. By expelling the lower organisms, this being gains the strength to realize the higher ones. Thus man, in his actual being, is not what arose last, but rather what was at work first, before everything else. He first expels the other entities from his formative powers in order to gain by this preliminary work the strength to come forth himself into outer sense-perceptible reality. Of course many will object: But numbers of people have already thought that an inner evolutionary drive was working in the evolution of organisms. And one can refer to the long-present thought of purposefulness, or to views held by natural scientists like Nageli and others. But such objections do not pertain in a case like this one. For, with Bergson's thought it is not a matter of starting from the general idea of an inner evolutionary force, but rather from a specific mental picture of what man is in his full scope; and of seeing from this picture that this man, thought of as supersensible, has impulses within him to first set the other beings of nature into sense-perceptible reality and then also to place himself into this reality.

[ 14 ] Now this is the point. What can be read in Bergson in a scintillating lightly draped configuration of ideas had already been expressed before that by the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss in a powerful and strongly thought-through way. Preuss is also one of those personalities belonging to the presentation here of a more or less forgotten stream in the development of German world views that are in accordance with the spirit. With a powerful sense for reality, Preuss brings together natural-scientific views and world views—in his book Spirit and Matter (1882), for example. One finds the Bergsonian thought we cited expressed by Preuss in the following way: “It should ... be time ... to present a teaching about the origins of organic species that is founded not only upon principles set up in a one-sided way by descriptive natural science, but that is also in full harmony with the rest of natural laws (which are also the laws of human thinking). This teaching should also be free of any hypothesizing and should rest only upon rigorous conclusions drawn from scientific observation in the broadest sense. This teaching should rescue the concept of species as much as Is factually possible, but at the same time should take Darwin's concept of evolution into its domain and seek to make It fruitful.—The center of this new teaching is man, the species that recurs only once on our planet: homo sapiens. Strange that older observers started with objects of nature and then erred to such an extent that they did not find the path to man, in which effort even Darwin Indeed succeeded only in a most pitiful and utterly unsatisfying way by seeking the ancestor of the lord of creation among the animals. Actually, the natural scientist would have to start with himself as a human being and then, continuing on through the whole realm of existence and of thinking return to mankind ... It was not by chance that human nature arose out of earthly nature; It was by necessity. Man is the goal of tellurian processes, and every other form arising besides him has borrowed its traits from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos. ... When the germs of his being had arisen, the remaining organic element no longer had the necessary strength to engender further human germs. What arose then was animal or plant. ...”

[ 15 ] The idea, as it lives in the philosophy of German idealism's picture of the being of man, also shines forth from the mental pictures of this little-known thinker of Elsfleth, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss. Out of this view he knows how to make Darwinism—insofar as Darwinism looks only at the evolution occurring in the sense world—into a part of a world view that Is in accordance with the spirit and that wishes to know the being of man In Its development out of the depths of the world-all. As to how Bergson arrived at his thoughts—so glittering in his depletion, but so powerfully shining in Preuss's—let us emphasize that less here than the fact that in the writings of the little-known Preuss the most fruitful seeds can be found, able to give many a person a stronger impetus than that to be found in Bergson's glittering version of these same thoughts. To be sure, one must also meet Preuss with more ability to deepen one's thinking than was shown by those who waxed so enthusiastic about the “new life” instilled in our world view by Bergson. What is being said here about Bergson and Preuss has absolutely nothing to do with national sympathies and antipathies.

Recently, H. Bönke has investigated Bergson's “original new philosophical creation,” because Bergson has found it necessary in these fateful times to speak such hate-filled words and to shower such contempt upon German spiritual life (see Bönke's writing: Plagiarizer Bergson, Membre de l'Institut. Answer to the Disparagements of German Science by Edmond Perrier, President de l'Academie des Sciences. Charlottenburg, Huth, 1915). When one considers all that Bönke presents about the way Bergson reproduces what he has gotten from German thought-life, the statements will not seem exaggerated that the philosopher Wundt makes in the “Central Literary Paper of Germany,” number 46, of November 13, 1915: “... Bönke shows no lack ... of incriminating material. The greater part of his book consists of passages, taken from Bergson's and Schopenhauer's works, in which the younger author repeats the thoughts of the older, either verbatim or with slight variation. Even so, this alone is not the decisive point. Therefore, let us be a little bit clearer and more critical in ordering the examples advanced by Bönke. They then fall definitely into three categories. The first contains sentences from both authors that, except for minor differences, coincide exactly. ...” In the other categories the coincidence lies more in the way their thoughts are formed.

Now it is perhaps really not so important to show how much Bergson, who condemns German spiritual life so furiously, reveals himself to be a right willing proponent of this German spiritual life; more important is the fact that Bergson propounds this spiritual life in lightly woven, easily attainable reflections, and that many a critic would have done better to wait with his enthusiastic proclaiming of this “new enlivener” of world views until, through better understanding of those thinkers to whom Bergson owes his stimulus, the critic might have refrained from his proclamation.

That a person be stimulated by his predecessors is a natural thing in the evolution of mankind; what matters, however, is whether the stimulus leads to a process of further development or—and Bönke's presentation also makes this quite clear—leads to a process of regression as in Bergson's case.

A Side Glance

[ 16 ] In 1912 The Lofty Goal of Knowledge by Omar al Raschid Bey was published in Munich. (Please note: The author is not Turkish; he is German; and the view he advocates has nothing to do with Mohammedanism, but is an ancient Indian world view appearing in modern dress.) The book appeared after the author's death. If the author had had the wish to produce in his soul the requirements needed for understanding the series of thinkers depicted in this present book, a book like his would not have appeared in our age, and its author would not have believed he should show to himself and others, by what he said in his book, a path of knowledge appropriate to the present day. But because of the way things appear to him, the author of The Lofty Goal could have only a pitying smile for the assertion just made here. He would not see that everything he presents to our soul experience in his final chapter “Awakening out of Appearances” on the basis of what preceded this chapter and with this chapter, was, in fact, a correct path of knowledge for the ancient Indian. One can understand this path completely as one belonging to the past. The author would not see that this path of knowledge, however, leads into another path if one does not stop prematurely on the first, but rather travels on upon the path of reality in accordance with the spirit as modern idealism has done.

[ 17 ] The author would have to have recognized that his “Awakening out of Appearances” is only an apparent awakening; actually it is a drawing back of oneself—effected by one's own soul experiences—from the appearances, a kind of quaking when faced by the appearances, and therefore not an “awakening out of appearances,” but rather a falling asleep into delusion—a self-delusion that considers its world of delusion to be reality because it cannot get to the point of taking the path into a reality in accordance with the spirit. Planck's self-denying thinking is a soul experience into which al Raschid's deluded thinking cannot penetrate. In The Lofty Goal there is the statement: “Whoever seeks his salvation in this world has fallen prey to this world and remains so; for him there is no escape from unstilled desire; for him there is no escape from vain play; for him there is no escape from the tight fetters of the ‘I’. Whoever does not lift himself out of this world lives and dies with his world.” Before these sentences stand these: “Whoever seeks his salvation in the ‘I,’ for him egoism (Selbstsucht) is a commandment, for him egoism is God.” But whoever recognizes in a living way the motive soul forces that hold sway in the series of thinkers from Fichte up to Planck will see through the deception manifesting in these statements from The Lofty Goal. For he recognizes how the obsession (Sucht) with oneself—egoism—lies before the experience of the “I” in Fichte's sense, and how a fleeing from an acknowledgment of the “I”—in an ancient Indian sense—seemingly leads arrogant cognitive striving farther into the spiritual world, but actually throws one back into obsession with one's “I.” For only the finding of the “I” lets the “I” escape the fetters of obsession with the “I,” the fetters of egoism. The point, in fact, really is whether, in “awakening out of appearances,” one has experiences of The Lofty Goal that are produced by a falling back into an obsession with one's “I,” or whether one has the kind of experiences to which the following words can point. Whoever seeks his salvation in fleeing from the “I” falls prey to obsession with the “I”; whoever finds the “I” frees himself from obsession with the “I”; for, obsession with the “I” makes the “I” into its own idol; finding the “I” gives the “I” to the world. Whoever seeks his salvation in fleeing from the world will be thrown back from the world into his own delusions; he is deluded by an arrogant illusion of knowledge, which lets a vain playing with ideas appear to him as world truth; he looses the fetters of the “I” in front and does not notice how, from behind, the enemy of knowledge binds them all the faster. Whoever, scorning the phenomena of the world, wants to lift himself above the world leads himself into a delusion that holds him all the more securely because it reveals itself to him as wisdom; he leads himself into a delusion by which he holds himself and others back from the difficult awakening in the idealism of modern world views, and dreams into an “awakening out of appearances,” A supposed awakening, like that which The Lofty Goal wishes to indicate, is indeed a source of that experience which ever and again makes the “awakened person” speak of the sublimity of his knowledge; but it is also a hindrance for the experiencing of this idealism in world views. Please do not take these remarks as a wish on the author's part to disparage in any way al Raschid's kind of cognitive striving; what the present author is saying here is an objection that seems necessary for him to raise against a world view that seems to him to live in the worst possible self-delusion. Such an objection can certainly also be raised when one values, from a certain point of view, a manifestation of the spirit; it can seem most necessary precisely there, because that seriousness moves him to do so which must hold sway in dealing with questions of knowledge.

[ 1 ] The author would like to sketch several pictures—nothing other than that—and not about the spiritual thought-life of Austria but only from this life. No kind of completeness will be striven for, not even with respect to what the author himself has to say. Many other things might be much more important than what is to be brought here. But this time only a little bit will be indicated from the spiritual life of Austria that is more or less, directly or indirectly, connected in some way with spiritual streams in which the author himself has stood during his youth. Spiritual streams like those meant here can indeed also be characterized, not by presenting mental pictures one has formed of them, but by speaking of personalities, their way of thinking and inclinations of feeling, in whom one believes these streams to express themselves, as though symptomatically. I would like to depict what Austria reveals about itself through several such personalities. If I use the word “I” in several places, please consider that to be based on my point of view at that time.

[ 2 ] I would like first of all to speak about a personality in whom I believe in myself able to see the manifestation in a very noble sense of spiritual Austrianness in the second half of the nineteenth century: Karl Julius Schröer. When I entered the Vienna College of Technology in 1879, he was professor of German literary history there. He first became my teacher and then an older friend. For many years now he has not been among the living.

In the first lecture of his that I heard, he spoke about Goethe's Götz van Berlichingen. The whole age out of which this play grew, and also how Götz burst into this age became this play grew, and also how Götz burst into this age became alive in Schröer's words. A man was speaking who let flow into every one of his judgments what, out of the world view of German idealism, he had incorporated into all the feeling and willing of his entire spiritualized personality, His following lectures built up a living picture of German poetry since Goethe's appearance on the scene, They did so in such a way that through his depiction of poets and poems one always felt the living weaving of views, within the essential being of the German people, struggling to come into reality. Enthusiasm for the ideals of mankind carried Schröer's judgments along, and this enthusiasm implanted a living sense of self into the view of life that took its start in Goethe's age. A spirit spoke out of this man that wanted to communicate only what had become the deepest experience of his own soul during his observations of man's spiritual life.

[ 3 ] Many of the people who got to know this personality did not know him. When I was already living in Germany, I was once at a dinner party, a well-known literary historian was sitting beside me. He spoke of a German duchess, whom he praised highly, except that—according to him—she could sometimes err in her otherwise healthy judgment as, for example, when she “considered Schröer to be a significant person.” I can understand that many a person does not find in Schröer's books what many of his students found through the living influence of his personality; but I am convinced that one could also sense much of this in Schröer's writings if one were able to receive an impression not merely by so-called “rigorous methods” or even by such a method in the style of one or another school of literature, but rather by originality in judging, by the revelations of a view one has experienced oneself. Seen this way, a personality grown mature in the idealism of German world views does in fact speak forth from the much maligned book of Schröer, History of German Poetry in the Nineteenth Century and from others of his works. A certain manner of presentation, in his Faust commentaries, for example, could repel many a supposed free thinker. For there does work into Schröer's presentation something that a certain age believed to be inseparable from the character of what is scientific. Even strong-minded thinkers fell under the yoke of this belief; and one must seek these thinkers themselves in their true nature by penetrating through this husk of their creations that was forced upon them by this yoke.

[ 4 ] Karl Julius Schröer lived his boyhood and youth in the light of a man who, like himself, had his roots in spiritual German Austrianness, and who was one of its blossoms: his father, Tobias Gottfried Schröer.

It was not so long ago that in the widest circles certain books were known to which many people certainly owed the awakening of a feeling, supported by a view of life in accordance with the spirit, for history, poetry, and art. These books are Letters on Aesthetics' Chief Objects of Study, by Chr. Oeser, The Little Greeks, by Chr. Oeser, World History for Girls' Schools, and other works by the same author. Covering the most manifold areas of human spiritual life from the point of view of a writer for young people, a personality is speaking in these writings who grew up in the way of picturing things of the Goethean age of German spiritual development, and who sees the world with the eye of the soul educated in this way. The author of these books is Tobias Gottfried Schröer, who published them under the name Chr. Oeser. Now, nineteen years after the death of this man, in 1869, the German Schiller Foundation presented his widow with an honorary gift accompanied by a letter in which was stated: “The undersigned Board has heard with deepest regret that the wife of one of the most worthy German writers, of a man who always stood up for the national spirit with talent and with heart, is not living in circumstances appropriate to her status nor to the service tendered by her husband; and so this Board is only fulfilling the duty required of it by the spirit of its statutes when it makes every possible effort to mitigate somewhat the adversity of a hard destiny.” Moved by this decision of the Schiller Foundation, Karl Julius Schröer then wrote an article about his father in the Vienna New Free Press that made public what until then had been known only to a very small circle: that Tobias Gottfried Schröer was not only the author of the books of Chr. Oeser, but also a significant poet and writer of works that were true ornaments of Austrian spiritual life, and that he had remained unknown only because he could not use his own name due to the situation there regarding censorship. His comedy The Bear, for example, appeared in 1830. Karl von Holtei, the significant Silesian poet and actor speaks of it in a letter to the author right after its appearance: “As regards your comedy The Bear: it delighted me. If the conception, the disposition of characters, is entirely yours, then I wish you good luck with all my heart, for you will still write more beautiful plays.” The playwright took all his material from the life of Ivan (the Fourth) Wasiliewitsch and all the characters except Ivan himself are freely created. A later drama, The Life and Deeds of Emerick Tököly and his Comrades in Arms, received warm acclaim, without anyone knowing who the author was. One could read of it in “Magazine for Literary Conversation” (October 25, 1839): “An historical picture of remarkable freshness ... Works offering such a breath of fresh air and with such decisive characters are true rarities in our day ... Each grouping is full of great charm because it is full of great truth; ...The author's Tököly is a Hungarian Götz von Berlichingen and only with it can this drama be compared... From a spirit like this author we can expect anything, even the greatest.” This review is by W. v. Ludemann, who has written a History of Architecture, a History of Painting, Walks in Rome, stories and novellas, works that express sensitivity and great understanding for art.

[ 5 ] Through his father's spiritual approach the sun of idealism in German world views had already shone beforehand upon Karl Julius Schröer as he entered the universities of Leipzig, Halle, and Berlin at the end of the 1840s and there could still experience, through much that worked upon him, this idealism's way of picturing things. When he returned to his homeland in 1846, he became director of the Seminar for German Literary History and Language in the Pressburg secondary school for girls that his father had founded in this city. In this position he unfolded an activity that essentially took this form: Through his striving Schröer sought to solve the problem of how to work best in the spiritual life of Austria if one finds the direction of one's strivings already marked out by having received the motive forces of one's own soul from German culture. In a Text and Reading Book (that appeared in 1853 and presents a “History of German Literature”), he spoke of this striving: “Seniors, law students, students of theology ... came together there (in the secondary school) ... I made every effort to present to a circle of listeners like this, in large perspectives, the glory of the German people in its evolution, to stimulate respect for German art and science, and where possible to bring my listeners closer to the standpoint of modern science.” And Schröer describes how he understands his own Germanness like this: “From this standpoint there naturally disappeared from view the one-sided factional passions: one will listen to a Protestant or a Catholic, to a conservative or a subversive enthusiast, or to a zealot of German nationalism only insofar as through them humanity gains and the human race is elevated.” And I want to repeat these words, written almost seventy years ago, not in order to express what was right for a German in Austria at that time, nor even now. I only want to show the nature of one man in whom the German—Austrian spirit expressed itself in a particular way. To what extent this spirit endows the Austrian with the right kind of striving: on this question the adherents of the different parties and nations in Austria will also decide very differently. And in all this one must also remember that Schöer expressed himself in this as a young man still who had just returned from German universities. But the fact is significant that in the soul of this young man—and not for political purposes, but out of purely spiritual thoughts about how to view the world—a German Austrian consciousness formed for itself an ideal for the mission of Austria that Schröer expressed in these words: “If we pursue the comparison of Germany with ancient Greece, and of the Germanic with the Greek tribes, we find a great similarity between Austria and Macedonia. We see the beautiful task of Austria exemplified there: to cast the seeds of Western culture out over the East.”

[ 6 ] Schröer later became professor in the University of Budapest and then school director in Vienna; finally, he worked for many years as a professor of German literary history in the Vienna College of Technology. These positions were for him only an outer covering, so to speak, for his significant activity within Austrian spiritual life. This activity begins with an investigation into the soul and linguistic expressions of the German-Austrian folk life. He wants to know what is working and living in the people, not as a dry, prosaic researcher but rather as someone who wants to discover the riddle of the folk soul in order to see what forces of mankind are struggling to come into existence in these souls. Near the Pressburg region, among the farmers, there were living at that time some old Christmas plays. They are performed every year around Christmas time. In handwritten form they are passed down from generation to generation. They show how in the people the birth of Christ, and what is connected with it, lives dramatically in pictures with depth of heart. Schröer collects such plays in a little volume and writes an introduction to them in which he depicts this revelation of the folk soul with most loving devotion, such that his presentation allows the reader to immerse himself in the way the people feel and view things. Out of the same spirit he then undertakes to present the German dialects of the Hungarian mountain regions, of the West-Hungarian Germans, and of the Gottscheer area in Krain. His purpose there is always to solve the riddle of the organism of a people; his findings really give a picture of the life at work in the evolution of language and of the folk soul. And basically the thought is always hovering before him in all these endeavors of learning to know, from the motive forces of its peoples, what determines the life of Austria. A great deal, a very great deal, of the answer to the question, What weaves in the soul of Austria?, is to be found in Schröer's research into dialects.

But this spiritual work had yet another effect upon Schröer himself. It provided him with the basis for deep insights into the essential being of the human soul itself. These insights bore fruit when, as director of several schools, he could test how views about education and teaching take form in a thinker who has looked so deeply into the being of the heart of the people as he had through his research. And so he was able to publish a small work, Questions about Teaching, which in my view should be reckoned among the pearls of pedagogical literature. This little book deals brilliantly with the goals, methods, and nature of teaching. I believe that this little volume, completely unknown today, should be read by everyone who has anything to do with teaching within the German cultural realm. Although this book was written entirely for the situation in Austria. the indications there can apply to the whole German-speaking world. What one today might call outmoded about this book, published in 1876, is inconsiderable when compared with the way of picturing things that is alive in it. A way of picturing things like this, attained on the basis of a rich experience of life, remains ever fruitful even though someone living later must apply it to new conditions. In the last decades of his life Schröer's spiritual work was turned almost entirely to immersing itself in Goethe's life's work and way of picturing things. In the introduction to his book German Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, he stated: “We in Austria want to go hand in hand with the spiritual life of the German empire.” He regarded the world view of German idealism as the root of this spiritual life. And he expressed his adherence to this world view in the words: “The world-rejuvenating appearance of idealism in Germany, in an age of frivolity a hundred years ago, is the greatest phenomenon of modern history. Our intellect (Verstand)—focused only upon what is finite, not penetrating into the depths of essential being—and along with it the egoism focused upon satisfying sensual needs, suddenly retreated before the appearance of a spirit that rose above everything common.” (See the introduction to Schröer's edition of Faust). Schröer saw in Goethe's Faust “the hero of unconquerable idealism. He is the ideal hero of the age in which the play arose. His contest with Mephistopheles expresses the struggle of the new spirit as the innermost being of the age; and that is why this play is so great: it lifts us onto a higher level.”

[ 7 ] Schröer declares his unreserved allegiance to German idealism as a world view. In his History of German Poetry of the Nineteenth Century there stand the words with which he wants to characterize the thoughts in which the spirit of the German people expresses itself when it does this in the sense of its own primal being: “Within what is perceived experientially, determining factors are everywhere recognizable that are hidden behind what is finite, behind what can be known by experience. These factors must be called the ‘undetermined’ and must be felt everywhere to be what is constant in change, an eternal lawfulness, and as something infinite. The perceived infinite within the finite appears as idea; the ability to perceive the infinite appears as reason (Vernunft), in contrast to intellect, which remains stuck at what is surveyably finite and can perceive nothing beyond it.” At the same time, in the way Schröer declares his allegiance to this idealism, everything is also at work that is vibrating in his soul, which senses in its own being the Austrian spiritual stream. And this gives his world-view-idealism its particular coloring. When a thought is expressed, there is given it a certain coloring that does not allow it to enter right away the realm described by Hegel as the realm of philosophical knowledge when he said, “The task of philosophy is to grasp what is; for, what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable. When philosophy paints its gray on gray then a form of life has become old; the owl of Minerva begins to fly only when dusk is descending.” (See my book Riddles of Philosophy, vol. I.) No, the Austrian, Schröer, does not want to see the world of thoughts gray on gray; ideas should shine in a color that ever refreshes and rejuvenates our deeper heart. And what would have mattered much more to Schröer in this connection than thinking about the bird of evening was to think about the deeper human heart struggling for light, seeking in the world of ideas the sun of that realm in which our intellect, focused upon the finite and upon the sense world, should be feeling the extinguishing of its light.

[ 8 ] Herman Grimm, the gifted art historian, had nothing but good to say about the Austrian culptor Heinrich Natter. In his essay on Natter, published in his Fragments (1900), one can also read what Grimm thought about Natter's relation to Austria. “When I meet Austrians, I am struck by their deep-rooted love for the soil of their particular fatherland and by their impulse to maintain spiritual community with all Germans. Let us think now of one such person, Ignaz Zingerles. Natter's statue of Walter von der Vogelweide owes its existence to the unceasing quiet work of Zingerles. He resembled the men of our earlier centuries through the fact that he was hardly conceivable outside the province of his immediate homeland. He was a figure with simple outlines, fashioned out of faithfulness and honesty as though out of blocks of stone. He was a Tyrolean, as though his mountains were the navel of the earth, an Austrian through and through, and at the same time one of the best and noblest Germans. And Natter was also all these: a good German, Austrian, and Tyrolean.” And about the monument to Walter von der Vogelweide in Bozen Herman Grimm says: “In Natter, inwardness of German feeling was united with formative imagination, His Walter von der Vogelweide stands in Bozen as a triumphant picture of German art, towering up in the crest of the Tyrolean mountains at the border country of the fatherland, A manly solid figure.”

I often had to think of these words of Hennan Grimm when the memory came alive in me of the splendid figure of the Austrian poet Fercher von Steinwand, who died in 1902. He was “all these: a good German, Austrian, and Carinthian,” although one could hardly say of him that he was “inconceivable outside the province of his immediate homeland.” I learned to know him at the end of the 1880's in Vienna and for a short time associated with him personally. He was sixty years old at the time: a true figure of light, even externally; an engaging warmth shone from his noble features, eloquent eyes, and expressive gestures; through tranquil clarity and self-possession, this soul of an older man still gave the effect of youthful freshness. And when one came to know this soul better, its particular nature and creations, one could see how a feeling life instilled by the Carinthian mountains united in this soul with a contemplative life in the power of the idealism in German world views. This contemplation (Sinnen) was already entirely native to his soul as a poetic world of pictures; this contemplation pointed with this world of pictures into the depths of existence; it confronted world riddles artistically, without the originality of artistic creation paling thereby into thought-poetry; one can observe this kind of contemplation in the following lines from Fercher von Steinwand's Chorus of Primal Dreams:

Out of all regions
Ever ascended,
Wanders an ether in far-radiant arches;
Travel the billows to
Depths ever silent.

There with our all-seeing
Will as their cargo,
Wending their way through the fog go our ferries;
Sail between wonderful
Banks new arising.

There before all-warming
Eyes of soft mildness
Winding and turning we fashion our patterns
Out all around dreaming
Regions of star-fields.

There to misfortune we
N'er are indebted,
There we constructed our fortresses hovering, And tribulations we
Joyfully shattered.

He who would paint you with
Most holy features,
Highest abode of our contemplative urgings:
Wait for the swiftest
Servants of love!

[ 9 ] The following verses seek to portray how the soul, in thinking-waking daydreams, lives in far-away starry worlds and in immediate reality; then the poet continues:

No matter what careful
Powers accomplish,
Only on dreaming's own wide-spreading pinions
Can what is mighty be
Gained now forever.

Every o'erpowering greatness of action,
All of the angels who guard what was planted
Are given counsel by
Dreams that inspire them.

[ 10 ] Fercher von Steinwand then sings further about the penetrating of thinking, spiritualized to the point of dreaming, into the depths of the world, and about the penetrating of that kind of dreaming which is an awakening out of our ordinary waking state into those depths where the life of what is spiritual in the world can make itself tangible to the soul:

Life that our pulsating
Hearts have perceived,
Life that our struggling hearts have ascended
To all the welcoming
Cries of the spirits:

[ 11 ] And then Fercher von Steinwand lets sound forth to the human spirit what the beings of the spirit realm speak to the soul that opens itself to them in inner contemplation:

Healed ones, now be here by
Loving encircled!
What you were seeking in uplifting hours,
Here, you selected ones,
Is it disclosed;
Here in the grandeur of
Halls of the Godhead,
Where to the heart other hearts are so pleasing,
Where buried voices are
Sounding forth newly

Where now the care-worn are
Royally striving,
Radiant souls now in smiles are all wreathed,
Round all the wrecks of the
Wheels of the ages—

Only the blinded ones,
Earth-bound and foolish,
Were for the gulf of destruction begotten,
Lost to the worlds of
Spirit perfection!
Weal to the sens'tive one
Round whom we hover,
Whom we enliven to bloss'ming existence,
All without weaving in
Fugitive shadows!

[ 12 ] In the literary works of Fercher von Steinwand there then follows upon this Chorus of Primal Dreams his Chorus of Primal Impulses:

In the distances unbounded
Of our ancient mother Night.
Hark—to be in inward conflict
Seems the deep mysterious might!
Do we hear present'ment striding?
Is our longing wide awake?
Was a spirit-lightning lit?
Are our dreams through spaces gliding?

How now are powers by powers enraptured,
Blessed exchanges!
Now sudden hastenings.
Then quiet lingerings,
Reveling listenings
Change into beckonings
Marveling fearings!
Charm of desiring
Mounts, and sinks down,
Sinks into hatred.
Faced with the pallid
Picture of embracing
Cannot clasp hatred.
Ramifications dim,
Inclinings burgeoning,
Send forth their tendrils.
Ponderous inklings
Dawn and go faltering
O'er the wide spaces,
Seem to give counsel
Or to give guidance.
What they're preparing
Is it the sowing
Of immense actions,
Of radiant ages?
Who felt the furrows
To be creative!
Who wandered through them
Blissfully savoring,
Or disentangling,
Grandeurs discovering!
Yonder the stir is like spirits embracing
We are enwarmed
And are receiving,
Seeking, and thinking,
See ourselves lifted,
Woven in joy with
Highest beginnings.
You wafting ‘round us,
In us arising:
“You are ideas!—”

[ 13 ] Reflecting in this way, the poet's soul enters into an experience of how the ideas of the world-spirit announce the secrets of existence to the spirit of man's soul and of how the spirit of man's soul beholds the shapers of sense-perceptible shapes.—After presenting the observations of the soul within the chorus of primal world impulses in brilliant, ringing pictures, the poet concludes:

May duration grow accustomed
To what urge has conjured up;
May adorning and appeasement
In creation's stream prevail.
Sweetest light! in noble ringing
Mounts my heart aloft to you:
Linger at your western gate;
Help to crown the deed of love!
Risen from all earthly bonds is our impulse Soul—resurrected!
But what is ripened
Ruling, and valid
Proves to be spirit!
All that is circling,
All earth foundations,
All heavenly kindlings are
Self-made in spirit,
Came forth from spirit,
Work through the spirit
–
Powerful freedom from chaos did fashion
Space for good fortune!
Cloaked, with the dew of its deep-breathing mildness, Forest and field!
Cared that the dew and the light be companions,
Forming the hem of deep transfiguration—
Cared that each droplet should float at the threshold
of Spiritual radiance!

In Fercher von Steinwand's Complete Works (published by Theodor Daberkow in Vienna), there are also several indications about his life given by the poet himself when pressed by friends on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, He wrote, “I began life on March 22, 1828 upon the heights of the Steinwand above the banks of the Möll in Carinthia (Kärten); that means, in the midst of a defiant congregation of mountains with their heads held high, beneath whose domineering grandeur burdened human beings seem continuously to grow poorer,”

Since, in his Chorus of Primal Impulses, we find the world view of German idealism cast in the form of a poetic creation, it is interesting to see how the poet, on his paths through Austrian spiritual life, receives impulses from this world view already in his youth. He describes how he enters the university in Graz: “With my credentials—which of course consisted only of my report cards—held tight against my chest, I presented myself to the dean. That was Professor Edlauer, a criminologist of high repute. He hoped to see me (he said) industriously present in his lecture course on natural law. Behind the curtain of this innocent title he presented us for the whole semester, in rousing lectures, with those German philosophers who, under the fatherly care of our well-meaning spiritual guardians were banned and kept from us: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and so on—heroes, therefore; that means men who founded and fructified all areas of pure thinking, who gave the language and created the concepts for all the other sciences, and who, consequently, are illustrious names shining from our street comers today and seeming almost strange there in their particular diamond clarity. This semester was my vita nuova!”

[ 16 ] Whoever learns to know Fercher von Steinwand's tragedy Dankmar, his Countess Seelenbrand, his German Tones from Austria, and other works of his will be able through this to feel many of the forces that were working in the Austrian spiritual life of the second half of the nineteenth century. And everything about Fercher von Steinwand testifies to the fact that one receives out of his soul a picture from this spiritual life in clarity, truth, and genuineness. The amiable Austrian poet in dialect Leopold Hormann felt rightly when he wrote the words:

Far from all baseness
All avarice and meanness;
Foe of publicity,
That loathesome false lady;
German in soul,
Strong yet with kindness
Great in his thinking,
No faltering and wavering,
Proof against all objections:—
Fercher von Steinwand!

[ 17 ] Out of the Austrian spiritual life of the second half of the nineteenth century, a thinker arose who brought to expression deeply significant characteristics of the content of modern world views: the moral philosopher of Darwinism, Bartholomaeus von Carneri. He was a thinker who experienced the public life of Austria as his own happiness or suffering; for many years, as a representative in the federal council, he took an active interest in this life with all the power of his spirit. Carneri could only appear at first to be an opponent of a world view in accordance with the spirit. For, all his efforts go to shaping a world picture from only those mental pictures which occur in the train of thought stimulated by Darwinism. But if one reads Carneri with a sense not only for the content of his views but also for what lay beneath the surface of his truth-seeking soul, one will discover a remarkable fact. An almost entirely materialistic world picture takes shape in this thinker, but with a clarity of thought that stems from the deep-lying, idealistic basic impulse of his being. For him as for many of his contemporaries the mental pictures growing from a world view rooted entirely in the soil of Darwinism burst into his thought-life with such overpowering force that he could do no other than incorporate all his consideration of man's spiritual life into this world view. To want to approach the spirit cognitively on any path other than those taken by Darwin seemed to him to rend the unified being that must extend out over all human striving in knowledge. In his view Darwinism had shown how a unified, lawful interrelationship of causes and effects encompasses the development of all the beings of nature up to man. Whoever understands the sense of this interrelationship must also see how the same lawfulness enhances and refines the natural forces and drives in man in such a way that they grow upward to the heights of moral ideals and views. Carneri believes that only man's blind arrogance and misled overestimation of himself can entice his striving for knowledge into wanting to approach the spiritual world by different cognitive means than in approaching nature.

Every page of Carneri's writings on the moral being of man, however, shows that he would have shaped his view of life in Hegel's way if, at a particular point of development in his life, Darwinism had not struck like lightning, with irresistible suggestive force, into his thought-world; this occurred in such a way that with great effort he silenced his predisposition toward an idealistically developed world view. As his writings also attest, this world view would definitely not have arisen through the pure thinking at work in Hegel, but rather through a thinking that resounded with a hearty, contemplative quality; but his thinking would have gone in Hegel's direction.

As though from hidden depths of Carneri's soul, Hegel's way of picturing things often arises in Carneri's writings, cautioning him as it were. On page 79 of his Fundamentals of Ethics one reads: “With Hegel ... a dialectical movement took the place of the law of causality: a gigantic thought, which, like the Titans all, could not escape the fate of arrogance. His monism wanted to storm Olympus but sank back down to earth; it remained a beacon for all future thought, however, illuminating the path and also the abyss.” On page 154 of the same book, Carneri speaks of the nature of the Greek way and says of it: “In this respect We do not remember the mythical heroic age, nor yet the times of Homer. ... We take ourselves back to the highlight of ages that Hegel depicted so aptly as the youthful age of mankind.” On page 189 Carneri characterizes the attempts that have been made to fathom the laws of thinking, and observes: “The most magnificent example of this kind is Hegel's attempt to let thoughts unfold, so to speak, without being determined by the thinker. The fact that he went too far in this does not prevent an unprejudiced person from acknowledging this attempt (to see one single law as underlying all physical and spiritual evolution) to be the most splendid one on the whole history of philosophy. The services he rendered to the development of German thinking are imperishable, and many an enthusiastic student who later became an embittered opponent of his has unintentionally raised a lasting monument to him in the perfection of expression he acquired through Hegel.” On page 421 one reads: “Hegel has told us, in an unsurpassable manner, how far one can go in philosophizing” with mere, so-called, healthy common sense.

Now one could assert that Carneri too has “raised a lasting monument to Hegel in the perfection of expression he acquired through Hegel,” even though he applied this way of expression to a world picture with which Hegel would certainly not have been in agreement. But Darwinism worked upon Carneri with such suggestive power that he included Hegel, along with Spinoza and Kant, among those thinkers of whom he said: “They would have acknowledged the sincerity of his (Carneri's) striving, which would never have dared to look beyond them if Darwin had not rent the curtain that hung like night over the whole creation as long as the theory of purpose remained irrefutable. We have this consciousness, but also the conviction that these men would have left many things unsaid or would have said them differently if it had been granted them to live in our age of liberated natural science...”

[ 18 ] Carneri has developed a variety of materialism in which mental sharpness often degenerates into naiveté, and insights about “liberated natural science” often degenerate into blindness toward the impossibility of one's own concepts. “We grasp substance as matter insofar as phenomena—resulting from the divisibility and movement of substance—work corporeally, i.e., as mass, upon our senses. If the divisions or differentiations go so far that the phenomena resulting from them are no longer sense-perceptible but are now only perceptible to thinking, then the effect of substance is a spiritual one” (Carneri's Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 30). That is as if someone were to explain reading by saying: As long as a person has not learned to read, he cannot say what stands upon the written page of a book. For, only the shapes of the letters reveal themselves to his gaze. As long as he can view only these letter shapes, into which the words are divisible, his observation of the letters cannot lead to reading. Only when he manages also to perceive the letter shapes in a yet more divided or differentiated form will the sense of these letters work upon his soul.

Of course, an unshakable believer in materialism would find an objection like this absurd. But the difficulty of putting materialism in the right light lies precisely in this necessity of expressing such simple thoughts in order to do so. One must express thoughts that one can scarcely believe the adherents of materialism do not form for themselves. And so the biased charge can easily be leveled against someone trying to clarify materialism that he is using meaningless phraseology to counter a view that rests upon the empirical knowledge of modern science and upon its rigorous principles.¹ Nevertheless, the great power of materialism to convince its adherents arises only through the fact that they are unable to feel the weight of the simple arguments that destroy their view. Like so many others, they are convinced not by the light of logical reasons which they have examined, but by the force of habitual thoughts which they have not examined, which, in fact, they feel no immediate need to examine at all. But Carneri does differ from the materialists who scarcely have any inkling of this need, through the fact that his idealism continuously brings this need to his consciousness; he must therefore silence this need, often by quite artificial means. He has scarcely finished professing that the spiritual is an effect of finely split-up substance when he adds: “This conception of the spirit will be unsatisfying to many people who make other claims about the spirit; still, in the further course of our investigations, the value of our view will prove to be significant and entirely able to show the materialism which wants to grasp the phenomena of the spirit corporeally that it cannot go beyond certain bounds” (Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 30). Yes, Carneri has a real aversion to being counted among the materialists; he defends himself against this with statements like the following: “Rigid materialism is just as one-sided as the old metaphysics: the former arrives at no meaning for its configurations; the latter arrives at no configurations for its meaning; with materialism there is a corpse; with metaphysics there is a ghost; and what they are both struggling for in vain is the creative heat of sentient life” (Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 68).

But Carneri does feel, in fact, how justified one is in calling him a materialist; for, no one with healthy senses, after all, even if he is an adherent of materialism, will declare that a moral ideal can be “grasped corporeally,” to use Carneri's expression. He will say only that a moral ideal manifests in connection with what is material through a material process. And that is also what Carneri states in his above assertion about the divisibility of substance. Out of this feeling he then says (in his book Sensation and Consciousness): “One will reproach us with materialism insofar as we deny all spirit and grant existence only to matter. But this reproach is no longer valid the moment one takes one's start from this ideal nature of one's picture of the world, for which matter itself is nothing but a concept a thinking person has.” But now take hold of your head and feel whether it is still all there after participating in this kind of a conceptual dance! Substance becomes matter when it is so coarsely split up that it works only “upon the senses as mass”; it becomes spirit when it is split up so finely that it is then “perceptible only to thinking.” And matter, i.e., coarsely split up substance, is after all only “a concept a thinking person has.” When split up coarsely, therefore, substance achieves nothing more than playing the—to a materialist!—dubious role of a human concept; but split up more finely, substance becomes spirit. But then the bare human concept would have to split up even finer. Now such a world view would make that hero, who pulled himself out of the water by his own hair, into the perfect model for reality.

One can understand why another Austrian thinker, F. von Feldegg (in the November 1894 edition of “German Words”), would reply to Carneri with these words: “The moment one takes one's start from the ideal nature of one's picture of the world! What an arbitrary supposition, in all the forced wrong-headedness of that thought! Does it indeed depend so entirely on our pleasure whether we take our start from the ideal nature of our picture of the world or, for example, from its opposite—from the reality of our picture of the world in fact? And matter, for this ideal nature, is supposed to be altogether nothing except a concept a thinking person has? This is actually the most absolute idealism—like that of a Hegel, for example—which is meant to render assistance here against the reproach of materialism; but it won't do to turn to someone in the moment of need whom one has persistently denied until then. And how is Carneri to reconcile this idealistic belief with everything else in his book? In fact, there is only one explanation for this state of affairs and that is: Even Carneri is afraid of, yet covets, the transcendental. But that is a half-measure which exacts a heavy toll. Carneri's ‘Monistic Misgivings’ fall in this way into two heterogeneous parts, into a crudely materialistic part and into a hiddenly idealistic part. In the one part, the author's head is correct in the end, because he is undeniably sunk over his head in materialism; but in the other part, the author's deeper heart (Gemüt) resists the clumsy demands of rationalism's modes and conceits; it resists them with all the power of that metaphysical magic from which, even in our crudely sense-bound age, nobler natures are not able to escape entirely.”

[ 18 ] And yet, in spite of all this, Carneri is a significant personality of whom one can say (as I indicated in my book Riddles of Philosophy: “This Austrian thinker sought, out of Darwinism, to open wide vistas in viewing the world and in shaping life. Eleven years after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, Carneri came out with his book Morality and Darwinism, in which, in a most comprehensive manner, he turned this new world of ideas into the foundation of an ethical world view. After that he worked ceaselessly to elaborate a Darwinistic ethics. Carneri seeks to find elements in our picture of nature through which the self-conscious ‘I’ can fit into this picture. He wants to think this picture of nature so broadly and largely that it can also comprise the human soul.”

By their very character, Carneri's writings seem to me in fact everywhere to challenge us to root everything out of their content that their author had forced himself into by surrendering to the yoke of the materialistic world view; his writings challenge us to look only at that which—like an elemental inspiration of his deeper heart—appears in them as a revelation of a large-scale human being. Just read, from this point of view, what he thinks the task to be for an education toward true humanness: “It is the task of education ... to develop the human being in such a way that he must do the good, that human dignity not suffer from this, but that the harmonious development of a being who by his very nature is happy to do what is noble and great is an ethical phenomenon more beautiful than anything we could imagine. ... The accomplishment of this magnificent task is possible through man's striving for bliss, into which his drive for self-preservation purifies itself as soon as his intelligence develops fully. Thinking is based on sensation and is only the other side of feeling; which is why all thinking that does not attain maturity through the warmth of feeling—and also all feeling that does not illuminate itself with the light of thinking—is one-sided. It is the task of education, through the harmonious development of thinking and feeling, to purify man's striving for bliss in such a way that the ‘I’ will see in the ‘you’ its natural extension and in the ‘we’ its necessary consummation, and egoism will recognize altruism as its higher truth. ... Only from the standpoint of our drive to attain bliss is it comprehensible that a person would give his life for a loved one or to a noble end: he sees precisely in this his higher happiness. In seeking his true happiness, man attains morality, But he must be educated toward this, educated in such a way that he can absolutely do no other. In the blissful feeling of the nobility of his deed he finds his most beautiful recompense and demands nothing more.” (See Carneri's introduction to his book Modern Man.) One can see: Carneri considers our striving for bliss, as he sees it, to be a power of nature lying within true human nature; he considers it to be a power that, under the right conditions, must unfold, the way a seed must unfold when it has the appropriate conditions. In the same way that a magnet, through its own particular being, has the power to attract, so the animal has the drive of self-preservation and man the drive to attain bliss. One does not need to graft anything onto man's being in order to lead them to morality; one needs only to develop rightly their drive to attain bliss; then, through this drive, they will unfold themselves to true morality. Carneri observes in detail the various manifestations of human soul life: how sensation stimulates or dulls this life; how emotions and passions work: and how in all this the drive to attain bliss unfolds. He presupposes this drive in all these soul manifestations as their actual basic power. And through the fact that he endows this concept of bliss with a broad meaning, all the sours wishing, wanting, and doing falls—for him, in any case—into the realm of this concept. How a person is depends upon which picture of his own happiness is hovering before him: One person sees his happiness in satisfying his lower drives; another person sees it in deeds of devoted love and self-denial. If it were said of someone that he was not striving for happiness, that he was only selflessly doing his duty, Carneri would object: This is precisely what gives him the feeling of happiness—to chase after happiness but not consciously. But in broadening the concept of bliss in this way, Carneri reveals the absolutely idealistic basic tenor of his world view. For if happiness is something quite different for different people, then morality cannot lie in the striving for happiness; the fact is, rather, that man feels his ability to be moral as something that makes him happy. Through this, human striving is not brought down out of the realm of moral ideals into the mere craving for happiness; rather, one recognizes that it lies in the essential being of man to see his happiness in the achieving of his ideals. “We are convinced,” says Carneri, “that ethics has to make do with the argument that the path of man is the path to bliss, and that man, in traveling the path to bliss, matures into a moral being.” (Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 423)

Whoever believes now that through such views Carneri wants to make ethics Darwinistic is allowing himself to be misled by the way this thinker expresses himself. He is compelled to express himself like this by the overwhelming power of the predominant natural-scientific way of picturing things in his age. The truth is: Carneri does not want to make ethics Darwinistic; he wants to make Darwinism ethical. He wants to show that one need only know man in his true being—like the natural scientist seeks to know a being in nature—in order to find him to be not a nature being but rather a spirit being. Carneri's significance consists in the fact that he wants to let Darwinism flow into a world view in accordance with the spirit. And through this he is one of the significant spirits of the second half of the nineteenth century. One does not understand the demands placed on humanity by the natural-scientific insights of this age if one thinks like those people who want to let all striving for knowledge merge into natural science, if one thinks like those who toward the end of the nineteenth century called themselves adherents of materialism, or even if one thinks like those today who actually are not less materialistic but who assure us ever and again that materialism has “long ago been overcome” by science. Today, many people say they are not materialists only because they lack the ability to understand that they are in fact materialists. One can flatly state that nowadays many people stop worrying about their materialism by pretending to themselves that in their view it is no longer necessary to call themselves materialists. One must nevertheless label them so. One has not yet overcome materialism by rejecting the view of a series of thinkers from the second half of the nineteenth century who held all spiritual experiences to, be the mere working of substance; one overcomes it only by allowing oneself to think about the spiritual in a way that accords with the spirit, just as one thinks about nature in a way that accords with nature. What is meant by this is already clear from the preceding arguments of this book, but will become particularly apparent in the final considerations conceived of as “new perspectives” in our last chapter,

But one will also not do justice to the demands placed on humanity by the natural-scientific insights of our age if one sets up a world view against natural science, and only rejects the “raw” mental pictures of “materialism,” Since the achievement of the natural-scientific insights of the nineteenth century, any world view that is in accordance with the spirit and that wishes to be in harmony with its age must take up these insights as part of its thought-world. And Carneri grasped this powerfully and expressed it urgently in his writings. Carneri, who was only taking his first steps on the path of a genuine understanding of modern natural scientific mental pictures, could not yet fully see that such an understanding does not lead to a consolidating of materialism but rather to its true overcoming, Therefore he believed—to refer once more to the words of Brentano (see page 45 of this book)—that no success can be expected from modern science in “gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body,” But whoever goes deeply enough into Carneri's thoughts, not only to grasp their content but also to observe the path of knowledge on which this thinker could take only the first steps, will find that through him, in another direction, something similar has occurred for the elaboration of the world view of German idealism as occurred through Troxler, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, and others going in the direction characterized in this book. These spirits sought, with the powers of Hegelian thinking, to penetrate not merely into spirit that has become sense-perceptible but also into that realm of spirit which does not reveal itself in the sense world. Carneri strives, with a view of life in accordance with the spirit, to devote himself to the natural-scientific way of picturing things. The further pursuit of the path sensed by these thinkers can show that the cognitive powers to which they turned will not destroy the “hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body,” but rather will give these hopes a sound basis in knowledge. On the one hand, F.v. Feldegg, whom we have already mentioned (“German Words,” November 1894), is certainly justified when he says—in connection with the conflict in which Carneri was placed toward idealism and materialism:—“But the time is no longer far off in which this conflict will be settled, not merely as one might suppose within the single individual, but within our whole cultural consciousness. But Carneri's ‘Misgivings’ are perhaps an isolated forerunner of completely different and more powerful ‘Misgivings,’ which then, raging toward us like a storm, will sweep away everything about our ‘scientific’ creed that has not yet fallen prey to self-disintegration,” On the other hand, one can recognize that Carneri, by the work he did on Darwinism for ethics, became at the same time one of the first to overcome the Darwinian way of thinking.

[ 19 ] Carneri was a personality whose thinking about the questions of existence gave all his activity and work in life their particular stamp. He was not one of those who become “philosophers” by allowing the healthy roots of life reality to dry up within them. Rather, he was one of those who proved that a realistic study of life can create practical people better than that attitude which keeps itself fearfully, and yet comfortably, at a distance from all ideas and which obstinately harps on the theme that the “true” conduct of life must not be spoiled by any dreaming in concepts. Carneri was an Austrian representative in the Styrian provincial diet from 1861 on, and in the federal council from 1870 to 1891. Even now, I often have to think back on the heart-lifting impression he made on me when, from the gallery of the Viennese federal council, as a young man of twenty-five just beginning life, I heard Carneri speak. A man stood down there who had taken up deeply into his thoughts the determining factors of Austrian life and the situation arising from the evolution of Austrian culture and from the life forces of its peoples; this was a man who spoke what he had to express from that high vantage point upon which his world view had placed him. And in all this there was never a pale thought. always tones of heart's warmth, always ideas that were strong with reality, not the words of a merely thinking head; rather, the revelations of a whole man who felt Austria pulsing in his own soul and who had clarified this feeling through the idea: “Mankind will deserve its name wholly, and wholly travel the path of morality only when it knows no other battle than work. no other shield than right, no other weapon than intelligence, no other banner than civilization.” (Carneri, Morality and Darwinism, p. 508)

[ 20 ] I have tried to show how a thoughtful idealism constitutes the roots, solidly planted in reality, of Carneri's soul life; but also how—overwhelmed by the materialistic view of the time—this idealism goes its way accompanied by a thinking whose contradictions are indeed sensed but not fully resolved. I believe that this, in the form in which it manifests in Carneri, is based on a particular characteristic that the folk spirit (Volkstum) in Austria can easily impress upon the soul, a characteristic, it seems to me, that can be understood only with difficulty outside of Austria, even by Germans. One can experience it, perhaps, only if one has oneself grown up in the Austrian folk spirit (Volksart). This characteristic has been determined by the evolution of Austrian life during the last centuries. Through education there, one is brought into !:I. different relationship to the manifestations of the immediate folk spirit than in German areas outside Austria. In Austria, what one takes up through one's schooling bears traits that are not so directly a transformation of what one experiences from the folk spirit as is the case with the Germans in Germany. Even when Fichte unfolds his thoughts to their fullest extent, there lives something in them recognizable as a direct continuation of the folk element working in his Central German fatherland, in the house of Christian Fichte, the farmer and weaver. In Austria, what one develops in oneself through education and self-education often bears fewer of such directly indigenous characteristics. The indigenous element lives more indirectly, yet often no less powerfully thereby. One bears conflicting feelings in one's soul; this conflict, in its unconscious working, gives life there its particularly Austrian coloring.

As an example of an Austrian with this soul characteristic, let us look at Mission, one of the most significant Austrian poets in dialect.

[ 21 ] To be sure, poetry in dialect has also arisen in other Germans out of subterranean depths of the soul similar to those of Mission. But what is characteristic of him is that he became a poet in dialect through the above-mentioned trait existing in the soul life of many Austrians. Joseph Mission was born in 1803, in Mühlbach, in the Lower Austrian district, below Mannhardtsberg; he completed school in Krems and entered the Order of Pious Schools. He worked as a secondary school teacher in Horn, Krems, and Vienna. In 1850 there appeared a pearl of Austrian poetry in dialect written by him: “Ignaz, a Lower Austrian Farmer Boy, Goes Abroad.” It was published in an uncompleted form. The provost Karl Landsteiner, in a beautiful little book, later wrote about Mission and reprinted the uncompleted poem.)

Karl Julius Schröer said of it (1875), and quite aptly, in I my opinion: “As small as the poem is and as solitary as it has remained through the fact that Mission published nothing further, it nevertheless deserves special attention. It is of the first order among Austria's poems in dialect. The epic peacefulness that permeates the whole, and the masterful depiction in the details that enthralls us constantly, I astonishing and refreshing us through its truth—these are qualities in Mission that no one else has equaled.” The setting out on his travels of a Lower Austrian farmer boy is what Mission portrays. A direct, truth-sustained revelation of the Lower Austrian folk spirit (Volkstum) lives in this poem. Mission lived in the world of thoughts he had attained through his education and self-education. This life represented the one side of his soul. This was not a direct continuation of the life rooted in his Lower Austrianness. But precisely because of this and as though unconnected to this more personal side of his soul experiences, there arose in his heart (Gemüt) the truest picture of his folk spirit, as though from subterranean depths of the soul, and placed itself there I as the other side of his inner experience. The magic of the direct folk spirit quality of Mission's poem is an effect of the “two souls within his breast.” I will now quote a part of this poem here and then reproduce the Lower Austrian dialect in High German prose as truly and modestly as possible. (In this reproduction, my intentions are only that the sense of the poem emerge fully in a feeling way. If, in such a translation, one simply replaces the word in dialect with the corresponding word in High German, the matter becomes basically falsified. For, the word in dialect often corresponds to a completely different nuance of feeling than the corresponding word in High German.)

Lehr vo main Vodern auf d'Roas

Naaz, iazn loos, töös, wos a ta so, töös sockt ta tai Voda.
God, what's so good! and try tai luck ö da Waiden.
Muis a da sogn töös, wo a da so, töös los der aa gsackt sai.
I and tai Muida are old and tahoam, know as ee, looks nothing out.
What you look and work and plod and do not care
Do it for the children, what don't you do, don't leave the place!
I'm just a pressed person and a black woman,
Graif an s'am aa, ma fint töös pai ortlinga rechtschoffan Kinern,
Gladly under Orm, on taas mer d'Ergiibnus laichter daschwingan.
If you don't have any luck, you won't live all your life.
Just stay in the same place, in the middle of the golden mass, don't get bored.
Your luck is round as a ball, balls so lightly toni as touaha.
But if something happens and misfortune befalls you, don't let it go.
Don't let anything happen to you, don't let it happen to me, don't let it happen to you.
Klock's unsan Heagoot, pitt'en, iih so ders, er mochts wida pessa!
Mocka'r and hocka'r and pfnotten and trenzen with the kimt nix außa.
Head hanging, just as if amt' Heana had eaten her protest:
You don't like it bad, you don't like it bad, you don't like it bad! Look at your soul, what you have, think about the future!
If you give something, don't talk about it, take it and so for it: good luck!
Look Naaz, mirk ta dos fai: what little politeness iis no longer gstroft!
Get ti nea ritterla, Fremd zügelt t'Leud, ist a Sprichwoat, a Worwoat.
Let's go, don't wash your hands, don't get any more clay. Go on, don't open your eyes, you won't be lucky in Trambuich.
Go two weeks and tar oani is naich, so gee du en olden.
If you go to a place that is also often the case, you are a big one -
Look at tain Gsund, ta Gsund iis pai olIn no allwail tos Pessa.
So what do you have in the world if you are not healthy? - - - - -
Come back and you'll find our old friends in the parlor,
We often go to places where you and your friends are happy to meet us,
Finding our guittäter and our vastoabani friendschoft! Olli, sö kenan uns glai - und töös, Naaz, töös is dos Schöner!"

Advice from my Father for my Travels
(Translation of Rudolf Steiner's High German prose version.)

Ignaz, now listen well to what I say to you; I am your father.
In God's name, since it must be so that you are to seek your fortune in the wide world,
Therefore I must tell you this; and what I tell you take well to heart.
I and your mother are old and have stayed at home; you know that nothing comes from that.
One slaves away, takes pains, works hard, and weakens oneself in the care of work
One does this out of love for one's children; what would one not do just so they will not fall into bad ways.
If later one becomes weak and sick, and hard times come,
Even they spring upon us lovingly if, when they come, proper honest children
Are standing by to help, so that one can more easily do what the state and life demands.
If good fortune should find you, don't live like a cavalier.
Stay as you were, in the golden mean of the middle road; do not budge from the right path of life.
Good fortune is round like a ball; it rolls just as easily away from as toward us.
If some effort does not succeed, or if a misfortune befalls you, do not speak of it to people.
Remain calm; let nothing show; do not be faint-hearted;
Pour out your troubles to God alone; beg him; I tell you, He makes everything better again!
To act troubled, to withdraw, to pull a sour face, to be whiny: nothing is achieved by that.
To let your head hang as though the chickens had eaten your bread away from you:
That improves nothing bad, let alone making the good even better!
Guard the possessions you take with you; take a little care for the future.
If someone gives you something, just receive it, without affectation, and say: “God bless you!”
Listen, Ignaz, and remember this well: no one has ever been punished for being polite!
Don't act stubborn; new places make a person modest; this is a saying and a true word.
Don't be led astray into gambling; don't let the dance floor mean too much to you.
Don't let anyone read your future in the cards; and do not seek your destiny in the book of dreams.
If two paths lie before you and one of them is new, then you take the old one.
If one is crooked, which is often the case, then you take the straight one.
Protect your health; health is the best of all possessions.
Admit it to me, after all: What does one really possess in the world if one lacks health?
- - - - -
If you ever come back home and no longer find us old folk in this little room,
Then we are there where your grandfather and your grandmother await us with joy,
Where our benefactors and our dead relatives will find us!
They will all recognize us at once—and this, Ignaz, is something very—beautiful.

[ 22 ] In 1879 Karl Julius Schröer writes the following about this Austrian from whose educated soul there arose so magnificently the life of the peasants and also, as the above section of his poem shows so well, the native philosophy of the peasants: “His talent found no encouragement. Although he wrote much more than the above work, he burned his entire literary output ... and now lives as librarian for the Piaristic faculty of St. Thekla of the Fields in Vienna, isolated from all social intercourse, as he puts it, ‘without joy or sorrow.’” As in the case of Joseph Mission one must seek many personalities of Austrian spiritual life living in obscurity.

Mission cannot come into consideration as a thinker among the personalities portrayed in this book. Nevertheless, to picture his soul life gives one an understanding for the particular coloration of the ideas of Austrian thinkers. The thoughts of Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, and Planck shape themselves plastically out of each other like parts of a thought-organism. One thought grows forth from the other.

And in the physiognomy of this whole thought-organism one recognizes characteristics of a certain people. In the case of Austrian thinkers one thought stands more beside the other; and each one grows on its own—not so much out of the other—but out of a common soul ground. Therefore the total configuration does not bear the direct characteristics of the people; but, on the other hand, these characteristics are poured out over each individual thought like a kind of basic mood. This basic mood is held back by these thinkers within their heart (Gemüt) in the way natural to them; it sounds forth but faintly. It manifests in a personality like Mission as homesickness for what is elemental in his people. In Schröer, Fercher von Steinwand, Cameri, and even in Hamerling, this basic mood works along everywhere in the fundamental tone of their striving. Through this, their thinking takes on a contemplative character.

[ 23 ] In Robert Hamerling one of the greatest poets of modern times has arisen from the lower Austrian district. At the same time he is one of the bearers of the idealism in German world views. In this book I do not intend to speak about the nature and significance of Hamerling's literary works. I wish only to indicate something of the position he took within the evolution of world views in modern times. He did in fact give expression in the form of thoughts to his world view in his work The Atomism of Will. (The Styrlan poet and folk author Adolf Harpf published this book in 1891, after Hamerling's death.) The book bears the subtitle “Contribution to a Critique of Modern Knowledge.”

[ 24 ] Hamerling knew that many who called themselves philosophers would receive his “contribution” with—perhaps tolerant—bewonderment. Many might think: What could this idealistically inclined poet undertake to accomplish in a field that demands the strictly scientific approach? And the presentations in his book did not convince those who asked this; for their judgment of him was only a wave rising from the depths of their souls where (in an unconscious or subconscious way) this judgment issued from habits of thought. Such people can be very clever; scientifically they can be very important: and yet the struggles of a truly poetic nature are not comprehensible to them. Within the soul of such a poetic nature there live all the conflicts from which the riddles of the world present themselves to human beings. A truly poetic nature, therefore, has inner experience of these world riddles. When such a nature expresses itself poetically, there holds sway in the foundations of his soul the questioning world order that,without transforming itself in his consciousness into thoughts, manifests itself in elemental artistic creation. To be sure, no inkling of the real being of such true poetic natures is present even in those poets who recoil from a world view as from a fire that might singe their “life-filled originality.” A true poet might never shape thoughts in his consciousness for what actually lives powerfully in the roots of his soul life in the way of unconscious world thoughts: nevertheless, he stands with his inner experience in those depths of reality of which a person has no inkling if, in his comfortable wisdom, he regards as mere dreams the place where sense-perceptible reality is granted its existence from out of the spirit. If now, for once, a truly poetic nature like Robert Hamerling, without dulling his creative poetic power, is able to lift into his consciousness, as a thought-world, what often has remained unconscious in other poets, then, with respect to such a phenomenon, one can also hold the view that, through this, special light is shed from spiritual depths upon the riddles of the world. In the foreword of his Atomism of Will, Hamerling himself tells how he arrived at his thought-world. “I did not suddenly throw myself upon philosophy at some point out of a whim, for example, or because I wanted to by my hand at something different. Moved by the natural and inescapable urge that drives us, after all, to search out the truth and solve the riddles of existence, I have occupied myself since earliest youth with the great questions about human cognition. I have never been able to regard philosophy as a special department of science that one can study or not study—like statistics or forestry—but always as the investigation into what is most immediate important, and interesting to every person. ... For my own part, I could by no means keep myself from following the most primal, natural, and universal of all spiritual drives and from forming a judgment over the course of the years about the fundamental questions of existence and life.”

One of the people who valued Hamerling's thought-world highly was Vincenz Knauer, the learned and sensitive Benedictine priest living in Vienna. As guest lecturer at the university in Vienna, he held lectures in which he wanted to show how Hamerling stood in that evolutionary stream of world views that began with Thales in Greece and that manifested in the Austrian poet and thinker in its most significant form for the end of the nineteenth century. To be sure, Vincenz Knauer belonged to those researchers to whom narrow-heartedness is foreign. As a young philosopher he wrote a book on the moral philosophy in Shakespeare's works. (Knauer's lectures in Vienna were published under the title The Main Problems of Philosophy from Thales to Hamerling.)

[ 25 ] The basic idealistic mood underlying Hamerling's view of reality also lives in his literary work. The figures in his epic and dramatic creations are not a copy of what spirit-shy observation sees in outer life; they show everywhere how the human soul receives direction and impulses from a spiritual world. Adherents of spirit-shy observation are critical of such creations. They call them bloodless mental products lacking the juice of real life. They are often to be heard belaboring the catch phrase: The characters of this poet are not like the people who walk around in the world; they are schemata, born of abstractions. If the “men of reality” who speak like this could only have an inkling, in fact, how much they themselves are walking abstractions and their belief the abstraction of an abstraction! If they only knew how soulless their blood-filled characters are to someone having a sense not just for pulsing blood but also for the way soul pulses in the blood. From this kind of “reality standpoints” one has said that Hamerling's dramatic work Danton and Robespierre has enriched the shadow folk of bygone revolutionary heros with a number of new schemata.

[ 26 ] Hamerling defended himself against such criticisms in his “Epilogue to the Critics” which he appended to the later editions of his Ahasver in Rome. In this epilogue he writes: “... People say that Ahasver in Rome is an ‘allegorical’ work—a word that immediately makes many people break out in goose-bumps.—The poem is allegorical, to be sure, insofar as a mythical figure is woven in whose right to existence is always based only upon the fact that it represents something. For, every myth is an idea brought into picture form by the imagination of the people. But, people will say, Nero is also supposed to ‘represent’ something—the ‘lust for life’! All right, he does represent the lust for life; but no differently than Moliere's Miser represents miserliness and Shakespeare's Romeo love. There are, to be sure, poetic figures that are nothing more at all than allegorical schemata and consist only of their inner abstract significance—comparable to Heine's sick, skinny Kanonikus who finally was composed of nothing but ‘spirit and bandages.’ But, for a poetic figure filled with real life, its inherent significance is not some vampire that sucks out its blood. Does anything actually exist that ‘signifies’ nothing? I would like to know, after all, how a beggar would manage not to signify poverty and a Croesus wealth. ... I believe therefore that Nero, who is thirsting for life, sacrifices Just as little of his reality by ‘signifying’ lust for life when placed next to Ahasver, who is longing for death, as a rich merchant sacrifices of his blooming stoutness by happening to stand beside a beggar and necessarily making visible, in an allegorical group, the contrast between poverty and wealth,” This is how a poet, ensouled by an idealistic world view, repulses the attacks of those who shudder if they catch a scent anywhere of an idea rooted in true reality, in spiritual reality.

[ 27 ] When one begins a reading of Hamerling's Atomism of Will, one can at first have the definite feeling that he let himself be convinced by Kantianism that a knowledge of true reality, of the “thing-in-itself,” was impossible. Still, in the further course of the presentations in his book, one sees that what happened for Hamerling with Kantianism was like Carneri with Darwinism. He let himself be overcome by the suggestive power of certain Kantian thoughts; but then the view wins out in him that man—even though he cannot push through to true reality by looking outward with his senses—does nevertheless encounter true reality when he delves down through the surface of soul experience into the foundations of the soul.

[ 28 ] Hamerling begins in an entirely Kantian way; “Certain stimuli produce odors in our sense of smell. The rose, therefore, has no fragrance if no one smells it.—Certain oscillations of the air produce sound in our ear. Sound, therefore, does not exist without an ear. A rifle shot, therefore, would not ring out if no one heard it. ... Whoever holds onto this will understand what a naive mistake it is to believe that, besides the perception (Anschauung) or mental picture we call ‘horse,’ there exists yet another horse—and in fact only then the actual real one—of which our perception ‘horse’ is only a copy. Outside of myself there is—let me state this again—only the sum total of those determining factors which cause a perception to be produced in my senses which I call a ‘horse’.” These thoughts work with such suggestive power that Hamerling can add to them the words: “If that is not obvious to you, dear reader, and if your understanding shies away from this fact like a skittish horse, then read no further; leave this and every other book on philosophical matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to grasp a fact without bias and to retain it in thought.” I would like to respond to Hamerling: “May there in fact be many people whose intellect does indeed shy away from the opening words of his book like a skittish horse but who also possess enough strength of ideas to value rightly the deeply penetrating later chapters; and I am happy that Hamerling did after all write these later chapters even though his intellect did not shy away from the assertion: There in me is the mental picture ‘horse’; but outside there does not exist any actual real horse but only the sum total of those determining factors which cause a perception to be produced in my senses which I call a ‘horse’.” For here again one has to do with an assertion—like that made by Carneri with respect to matter, substance, and spirit—that gains overwhelming power over a person because he just does not see at all the impossible thoughts into which he has spun himself. The whole train of Hamerling's thoughts is worth no more than this: Certain effects emanating from me onto the surface of a coated pane of glass produce my image in the mirror. Nothing occurs through the effects emanating from me if no mirror is there. Outside the mirror there is only the sum total of those determining factors which bring it about that in the mirror an image is produced that I refer to with my name.

In imagination I can hear all the declamations against a philosophical dilettantism—carried to the point of frivolity that would dare to dispose of the serious scientific thoughts of philosophers with this kind of a childish objection. I know, in fact, what all has been brought forward by philosophers since Kant in the way of such thoughts. When one speaks as I have just done, one is not understood by the chorus that propounds these thoughts. One must turn to unprejudiced reason, which understands that the way one conducts one's thinking is the same in each case: whether, when confronted by the mental picture of the horse in my soul, I decree the outer horse to be nonexistent, or, when confronted by the image in the mirror, I doubt my existence. One does not even need to enter into certain, supposedly epistemological refutations of this comparison. For, what would be presented there—as the entirely different relationship, after all, of the “mental picture to what is mentally pictured” than of the mirror image to what is mirroring itself—already stands there for certain epistemologists as established with absolute certainty; for other readers, however, the corresponding refutation of these thoughts could in fact be only a web of unfruitful abstractions.

Out of his healthy idealism, Hamerling feels that an idea, in order to be justified within a world view, must not only be correct but also in accordance with reality. (Here I must express myself in those thoughts which I introduced in the presentation on Karl Christian Planck in this book.). If Hamerling had been less suggestively influenced by the way of thinking described above, he would have noticed that there is nothing in accordance with reality in such thoughts as those which he feels to be necessary in spite of the fact that “one’s intellect shys away from them like a skittish horse.” Such thoughts arise in the human soul when the soul has been made ill by a mind for abstractions estranged from reality and gives itself over to a continuous spinning out of thoughts that are indeed logically coherent but in which no spiritual reality holds sway in a living way. It is precisely his healthy idealism, however, that guides Hamerling in the further thoughts of his Atomism of Will out of the web of thoughts he presented in the opening chapters. This becomes particularly clear where he speaks of the human “I” in connection with the life of the soul. Look at the way Hamerling relates to Descartes' “I think, therefore I am.” Fichte's way of picturing things (of which we have spoken in our considerations of Fichte in this book) works along like a softly sounding, consonant, basic tone in the beautiful words on page 223 of the first volume of The Atomism of Will: “In spite of all the conceptual hairsplitting that carps at it, Descartes' Cogito ergo sum remains the igniting flash of lightning for all modern speculation. But, strictly speaking, this ‘I think, therefore I am’ is not made certain through the fact that I think, but rather through the fact that I say that I think. My conclusion would have the same certainty even if I changed the premise into its reverse and said ‘I do not think, therefore I am.’ In order to be able to say this, I must exist.” In discussing Fichte's world view, we have said in this book that the statement “I think, therefore I am” cannot maintain itself in the face of man's sleeping state. One must grasp the certainty of the “I” in such a way that this certainty cannot appear to be exhausted in the inner perception “I think.” Hamerling feels this; therefore he says that “I do not think, therefore I am” is also valid. He says this because he feels: Within the human “I” something is experienced that does not receive the certainty of its existence from thinking, but on the contrary gives to thinking its certainty. Thinking is unfolded by the true “I” in certain states; the experiencing of the “I,” however, is of such a kind that through this experience the soul can feel itself immersed into a spiritual reality in which it knows its existence to be anchored even during other states than those for which Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” applies. But all this is based on the fact that Hamerling knows: When the “I” thinks, life-will is living in its thinking. Thinking is by no means mere thinking; it is willed thinking. As a thought, “I think” is a mere fantasy that is never and nowhere present. It is always the case that only the “I think, willing” is present. Whoever believes in the fantasy of “I think” can isolate himself thereby from the whole spiritual world; and then become either an adherent of materialism or a doubter in the reality of the outer world. He becomes a materialist if he lets himself be snared by the thought—fully justified within its own limits—that for the thinking Descartes had in mind the instruments of the nerves are necessary. He becomes a doubter in the reality of the outer world if he becomes entangled in the thought—again justified within certain limits—that all thinking about things is in fact experienced within the soul and that with his thinking, therefore, he can in fact never arrive at an outer world existing in and of itself, even if such an outer world existed. To be sure, whoever sees the will in all thinking can, if he inclines to abstraction, now isolate the will conceptually from thinking and speak in Schopenhauer's style of a will that supposedly holds sway in all world existence and that drives thinking like whitecaps to the surface of life's phenomena. But someone who sees that only the “I think, willing” has reality would no more picture will and thinking as separated in the human soul than he would picture a man's head and body as separated if he wished his thought to portray something real. But such a person also knows that, with his experience of a thinking that is carried by will and experienced, he goes outside the boundaries of his soul and enters into the experience of a world process (Weltgeschehen) that is also pulsing through his soul. And Hamerling is headed in the direction of just such a world view, in the direction of a world view whose adherent knows that with a real thought he has within himself an experience of world-will, not merely an experience of his own “I.” Hamerling is striving toward a world view that does not go astray into the chaos of a mysticism of will, but on the contrary wishes to experience the world-will within the clarity of ideas.

With this perspective of the world-will beheld through ideas, Hamerling knows that he now stands in the native soil of the idealism of German world views. His thoughts prove even to himself to have their roots in the German folk spirit (Volkstum) that in Jakob Böhme already was struggling for knowledge in an elemental way. On page 259f. of Hamerling's Atomism of Will one reads: “To make will the highest philosophical principle is what one seems to have overlooked until now—an eminently German thought, a core thought of the German spirit. From the German Naturphilosophen of the Middle Ages up to the classical thinkers of the age of German speculation, and even up to Schopenhauer and Hartmann, this thought runs through the philosophy of the German people, emerging sometimes more, sometimes less, often only at one moment, as it were, then disappearing again into the seething masses of our thinkers' ideas. And so it was also the philosophus teutonicus who was in truth the most German and the most profound of all modern philosophers, and who was the first, in his deeply thoughtful, original, and pictorial language, to grasp the will expressly as the absolute, as the unity. ...” And now, in order to point to yet another German thinker in this direction, Hamerling quotes Jacobi, Goethe's contemporary: “Experience and history teach us that man's action depends far less upon his thinking than his thinking depends upon his action, that his concepts direct themselves according to his actions and only copy them, as it were; that the path of knowledge, therefore, is a mysterious path, not a syllogistic one, nor a mechanical one.”

Because Hamerling, out of the prevailing tone of his soul, has a feeling for the fact that the accordance of an idea with reality must be added to its merely logical correctness, he also cannot regard those pessimistic philosophers' views of life as valid which wish to determine—by an abstract conceptual weighing—whether pleasure or pain predominates in life and therefore whether life must be regarded as a good or an evil. No, reflection become theory does not decide this; this is decided in much deeper foundations of life, in depths that have to judge this human reflection, but do not allow themselves to be judged by this reflection. Hamerling says about this: “The main thing is not whether people are correct in wanting to live, with very few exceptions, at any price, no matter whether things are going well or badly for them. The main thing is that they want it and this can by no means be denied. And yet the doctrinaire pessimists do not reckon with this decisive fact. Intellectually and in learned discussions, they always only weigh against each other the pleasure and pain life brings in particular situations; but since pleasure and pain belong to feeling, it is feeling and not intellect that ultimately and decisively draws up the balance between pleasure and pain. And, with respect to all mankind—indeed one can say with respect to everything living—the balance falls on the side of the pleasure of existence. That everything living wants to live, under any circumstances and at any price, this is the great fact; and in the face of this fact all doctrinaire talk is powerless:” In the same way as the thinkers from Fichte to Planck described in this book, Hamerling seeks the path into spiritual reality, except that his striving is to do justice to the natural-scientific picture of the world to a greater degree than Schelling or Hegel, for example, were able to do. Atomism of Will nowhere offends against the scientific picture of the world. But this book is everywhere permeated with the insight that this picture of the world represents only a part of reality. This book is based upon an acknowledgement of the thought that a person is submitting to belief in an unreal world if he refuses to take up the forces of a spiritual world into his thought-world. (I use the word “unreal” here in the sense employed in our discussion of Planck.)

[ 29 ] Hamerling's satiric poem “Homunculus” speaks forcibly for the high degree to which his thinking was in accordance with reality. In this work, with great poetic force, he depicts a man who himself becomes soulless because soul and spirit do not speak to his knowledge. What would become of people who really stemmed from a world order such as the natural-scientific way of picturing things sets up as creed when it rejects a world view in accordance with the spirit? What would a man be if the unreality of this way of picturing things were real? In somewhat this way one could formulate the question that finds its artistic answer in “Homunculus.” Homunculism would have to take possession of a mankind that believed only in a world fashioned according to mechanistic natural laws. One can also see in Hamerling how a person striving toward existence's ideas has a healthier sense for practical life than a person who, fearful of the spirit, shies away from the world of ideas and feels himself thereby to be a true “man of reality.” Hamerling's “Homunculus” could help those regain their health who, precisely in the present day, are allowing themselves to be led astray by the opinion that natural science is the only science of what is real. Such people, in their fear of the spirit, say that the idealism of our classical period—which, in their opinion, has been overcome today—brought knowing man (homo sapiens) too much into the foreground. “True science” must recognize that attention should be paid above all to economic man (homo oeconomus) within the world order and in human arrangements. For such people “true science” means solely the science stemming from the natural-scientific way of picturing things. Homunculism arises out of opinions like this. The proponents of these opinions have no inkling of how they are hurrying toward homunculism. With the prophetic eye of the knower, Hamerling has delineated this homunculism. Those who fear that a rightful estimation of homo sapiens in Hamerling's sense might lead to an overestimation of the literary approach will also be able to see from “Homunculus” that this does not occur.

• 1. NoteText

[ 1 ] The purpose of this book is to indicate germinal points in the world views of a series of thinkers from Fichte to Hamerling. The contemplation of these germinal points evokes a feeling that these thinkers drew from a source of spiritual experience from which much more can flow than they brought forth. What matters is not so much one's acceptance or rejection of what they expressed, but rather one's understanding of the character of their striving for knowledge and the direction of their path. One can then arrive at the view that there is something in this character and direction that is more promise than fulfillment. And yet it is a promise with innate power, bearing the guarantee of its fulfillment within itself.

Through this one gains a relationship to these thinkers that is not one of adherence to the dogmas of their world views, but rather one leading to the insight that: Upon the paths they took, there lie living powers for seeking knowledge that did not take effect in what they themselves recognized but that can lead out of and beyond it.

This need not mean returning to Fichte, Hegel, and the others in the hope that, by taking better paths from their starting points, one will thus arrive at better results.

No, that cannot be the point for us—to be “motivated” by these thinkers in this way—but rather to gain access to the sources from which they drew and to recognize what still lies hidden within these sources as motivating powers, in spite of the work of these thinkers.

[ 2 ] A look at the spirit of the modern, natural-scientific way of picturing things (Vorstellungsart) can make one feel how much the idealism in world views living in the above thinkers is a promise awaiting fulfillment.

Through its results in a certain direction, this natural scientific way of picturing things has demonstrated the efficacy of its cognitive means. One can already find this way of picturing things essentially prefigured in a thinker who was at work when its development began—in Galileo. (In his vice-chancellor's address to the Vienna University in 1894, the Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest Laurenz Müllner discussed the significance of Galileo in the most beautiful way.) What was already indicated by Galileo reappears, in an evolved state, in the directions taken by the research of the adherents of the modern natural-scientific way of thinking. This way of thinking has attained its significance by letting the world phenomena arising in the field of sens e observation speak purely for themselves, within their own lawful interconnections, and by wishing to allow nothing of what the human soul experiences from these phenomena to flow into what this way of thinking admits as knowledge. No matter what view one might hold about the natural-scientific picture of the world—whose fulfillment of the above cognitive demand is already possible or even achieved today—this cannot detract from one's recognition that this demand provides a sound basis for a valid picture of natural existence. If the adherent of an idealistic or spiritual-scientific world view takes a negative stance toward this demand today, he shows by this either that he does not understand the meanings of this demand, or that something of a natural-scientific way of picturing things are under the misconception that through such a world view something or other of the results of natural science is called into question.

[ 3 ] To anyone who penetrates into the true meaning of modern natural science, it is clear that this science does not undermine knowledge of the spiritual world, but rather supports and ensures it. One will not be able to arrive at this clarity, however, by imagining oneself, through all kinds of theoretical arguments, to be an opponent of a knowledge of the spiritual world, but rather by turning one's gaze upon what makes the natural-scientific picture of the world sensible and meaningful. The natural-scientific way of picturing things excludes everything from what it studies that is experienced through the inner being of the human soul. It investigates how things and processes relate to each other. What the soul, through its inner being, can experience about things serves only to reveal how things are, irrespective of these inner experiences. This is how the picture of purely natural occurrences comes about. This picture will in fact fulfill its task all the better, the more it succeeds in excluding this inner life. But one must now consider the characteristic traits of this picture. What one presents to oneself in this way as a picture of nature—precisely in the case where it fulfills the ideal of natural-scientific knowledge—cannot bear within itself anything that could ever be perceived by a human being nor any other soul being. The natural-scientific way of picturing things must provide a picture of the world that explains the relationship of natural facts but whose content would have to remain unperceivable. If the world actually were as pure natural science must picture it, then this world could never arise within a consciousness as a content of mental pictures. Hamerling is of the opinion: “Certain oscillations of the air produce sound in our ear. Sound, therefore, does not exist without an ear. A rifle shot, therefore, would not ring out if no one heard it.” Hamerling is wrong, because he has not grasped the determining factors of the natural-scientific picture of the world. If he did, he would say: When a sound arises, natural science must picture something that would not sound even if an ear were there ready to hear it sound. And natural science is acting correctly in this. In his lecture, “The Limits to Our Knowledge of Nature” (1872), the natural scientist, Du Bois-Reymond expresses himself quite aptly on this subject: “Silent and dark in itself, i.e., without any qualities” is the world for the view—gained by natural-scientific study—which, “instead of sound and light, knows only oscillations of a primal substance, without qualities, that has turned into weigh able matter here and into unweighable matter there”; but to this he adds the statement: “God's words in Moses' depiction—‘Let there be light’—are physiologically incorrect. Light first came into existence when the first red ‘eyespot’ of an infusorian [euglena] distinguished light from darkness for the first time. Without optical and aural substance this world around us, glowing with color and filled with sound, would be dark and silent.” No, this second statement cannot be made by someone who in fact understands the full implications of the first. For, this world, whose picture is correctly sketched out by natural science, would remain “silent and dark” even when confronted by optical and aural substance. One fools oneself about this only because the real world, from which one has gained the picture of a “silent and dark” world, does not actually remain silent and dark when one perceives in it. But I should no more expect this picture to correspond to the real world than I would expect the portrait of a friend to step out of his picture as a real person. Just look at the matter from all sides, without preconceptions, and you will certainly find that if the world were as natural science depicts it, no being would ever experience anything about it. To be sure, the world pictured by natural science is there, in a certain way, within the reality from which man perceives his sense world; but lacking in this picture is everything by which it could be perceived by some being. What this way of picturing things must posit as underlying light, sound, warmth does not shine, sound, or warm. Only by experience does one know that the pictures arrived at by this way of thinking were drawn from something shining, sounding, warming; one therefore lives in the belief that what one pictures is also something shining, sounding, and warming. This mistaken belief is the most difficult to penetrate when one is dealing with the sense of touch. There it seems to be enough that something material—precisely as something material—is spread out around us and, through its resistance, stimulates a tactile perception. But something material-spatial can also only exert pressure; the pressure, however, cannot be felt. What seems to be the case deceives us here the most. But one does have to do in fact only with what seems to be the case. What underlies tactile sensations also cannot be felt by touch. Let it be expressly stated here that we are not merely saying that the world lying behind sense impressions is in fact different from what our senses make out of it; we are emphasizing that the natural-scientific way of picturing things must think of this underlying world in such a way that our senses could make nothing out of it if it were in actuality as it was thought to be. From observation, natural science draws forth a world picture that through its own nature cannot be observed at all.¹

[ 4 ] What we are dealing with here came to light in a world historic moment of spiritual evolution: When Goethe, out of the world view of German idealism that lay in his whole nature, rejected Newton's color theory. (For nearly three decades, the present writer has sought in various writings to draw attention to this decisive point in the assessment of Goethe's color theory. But what he said in an 1893 lecture in Frankfurt's “Independent German Academy” still holds good today: “The time will come when even for this question the scientific prerequisites for an understanding among scientists will be present. Today, precisely the investigations of physics are heading in a direction that cannot lead to Goethean thinking.”)

Goethe understood that Newton's color theory could provide a picture representing only a world that is not luminous and does not shine forth in colors. Since Goethe did not involve himself in the demands of a purely natural-scientific world picture, his actual opposition to Newton went astray in many places. But the main thing is that he had a correct feeling for the fundamental issue. When a person, by means of light, observes colors, he is confronting a different world from the only one Newton is able to describe. And Goethe does observe the real world of colors. But if one enters a realm such as this—whether of colors or of other natural phenomena—one needs other ideas than those depicted in the “dark and silent world” imagined by the natural-scientific way of picturing things. In this picture, no reality is depicted that can be perceived. Real nature simply does in fact already contain within itself something that cannot be included in this picture. The “dark world” of the physicist could not be perceived by any eye; light is already spiritual. Within the sense-perceptible the spiritual holds sway.² To wish to grasp this spiritual with the means of natural science is committing the same error as someone who demands of himself as a painter that he paint a man who can walk around in the world. For Goethe, even as a physicist, the ground on which he moved was the spiritual. The world view for which he used the term “in accordance with the spirit” (geistgemäss) made it impossible for him to find in Newton's color theory anything in the way of ideas about real light and real colors. But with the natural scientific way of picturing things, one does not find the spirit in the sense world. That the world view of German idealism had a correct feeling about this is one of its essential characteristics. It may be that what one or another personality has said out of this feeling is only a first germ of a complete plant; but the germ is there and bears within itself the power to unfold. [ 5 ] But to this insight—that in the sense world there is spirit which cannot be grasped by the natural-scientific way of picturing things—another insight must be added: modern natural science has already demonstrated, or is on its way to demonstrating, the dependency of ordinary human soul life—running its course in the sense world—upon the instrument of the body. One enters a realm here in which, as though by entirely obvious objections, one can seemingly be refuted in a crushing way if one declares one's belief in the existence of an independent spiritual world. For what could be clearer than that man's soul life, from childhood on, unfolds as the physical organs develop and declines to the extent that the organs age? What is clearer than that the crippling of certain parts of the brain also causes the loss of certain spiritual abilities? What seems clearer, therefore, than that everything of a soul-spiritual nature is bound to matter and without it can have no continued existence, at least not one about which man knows? One does not even need to take counsel on this from the brilliant results of modern natural science; De la Mettrie, in his book Man: A Machine (L'homme Machine) written in 1746, has already expressed in a sufficiently correct way what is so self-evident in this assertion. This French thinker says: “Since a feebleminded person, as one can usually observe, does not lack brains, his problem must be due to the faulty nature of this organ, its excessive softness, for example. The same applies to imbeciles; the flaws in their brains do not always remain hidden to our investigation; but if the causes of feeble-mindedness, imbecility, and so on are not always recognizable, where should one seek the causes for differences between all human spirits? These causes would escape lynx and Argus eyes. A nothing, a tiny fiber, a thing that even the finest anatomy cannot discover would have turned Erasmus and Fontenelle into two fools—an observation that Fontenelle himself makes in one of his best dialogues.” Now, the adherent of a world view in accordance with the spirit would show little insight if he did not acknowledge the telling and obvious force of such an assertion. He can take this assertion even further and say: Would the world ever have received what Erasmus's spirit accomplished if someone had killed him when he was still a child?

If a world view in accordance with the spirit ever had to resort to denying such obvious facts or even to belittling their significance, it would be in a bad way. But such a world view can be rooted in ground that no materialistic objection can take away from it.

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

[ 7 ] Eduard von Hartmann, a thinker who has come forth from the world view of German idealism, has clearly recognized that ordinary consciousness is an outcome of the bodily instruments, and that the soul itself is not contained within this consciousness. But he did not recognize that the soul can develop a different consciousness, which is not dependent upon the bodily instruments, and through which the soul can experience itself. Therefore he believed that this soul-being lay within an unconscious element about which one can only make mental pictures by drawing conclusions, from ordinary consciousness, about a “thing-in-itself”—that itself actually remains unknown—of the soul. But in this, like many of his predecessors, Hartmann has stopped short before the threshold that must be crossed if a well-founded knowledge of the spiritual world is to be attained. One cannot cross this threshold, in fact, if one is afraid to give one's soul forces a completely different direction than they take under the influence of our ordinary consciousness. The soul experiences its own essential being within this consciousness only in the images produced for it by the bodily instruments. If the soul could experience only in this way, it would be in a situation comparable to that of a being who stands before a mirror and can see only its image, but can experience nothing about itself. The moment this being became livingly manifest to itself, however, it would enter into an entirely different relationship to its mirror image than before.

A person who cannot resolve to discover something different in his soul life than is offered him by ordinary consciousness will either deny that the essential being of the soul can be known, or will flatly declare that this being is produced by the body.

One stands here before another barrier that the natural-scientific way of picturing things must erect, out of its own thoroughly justified demands. The first barrier resulted from the fact that these demands must sketch the picture of a world that could never enter a consciousness through perception. The second barrier arises because natural-scientific thinking must rightly declare that the experiences of ordinary consciousness come about through the bodily instruments and therefore, in reality, contain nothing of any soul. It is entirely understandable that modern thinking feels itself placed between these two barriers, and out of scientific conscientiousness, doubts the possibility of arriving at a knowledge of a real spiritual world that can be attained neither through the picture of a “silent and dark” nature, nor through the phenomena of ordinary consciousness, which are dependent upon the body. And whoever—merely from some dim feeling or out of a hazy mysticism—believes himself able to be convinced of the existence of a spiritual world would do better to acquaint himself with the difficult situation of modern thinking than to rail against the “raw, crude” mental pictures of natural science.

[ 8 ] One gets beyond what the natural-scientific way of picturing things can give only when one experiences in the inner life of the soul that there is an awakening out of ordinary consciousness; an awakening to a soul experience of a kind and direction that relates to the world of ordinary consciousness the way the latter relates to the picture-world of dreams. Goethe speaks in his way about awakening out of ordinary consciousness and calls the soul faculty thus acquired “the power to judge in beholding”. (anschauende Urteilskraft)³ In Goethe's view, this power to judge in beholding grants the soul the ability to behold that which, as the higher reality of things, conceals itself from the cognition of ordinary consciousness. In his affirmation of this human ability, Goethe placed himself in opposition to Kant, who had denied to man any “power to judge in beholding,” Goethe knew from the experience of his own soul life, however, that an awakening of ordinary consciousness into one with the power to judge in beholding is possible. Kant believed he had to designate any such awakening as an “adventure of reason,” Goethe replied to this ironically: “Since I had, after all, ceaselessly pressed on, at first unconsciously and out of an inner urge, toward that primal archetypal element, since I had even succeeded in building up a presentation of this which was in accordance with nature, nothing more could keep me then from courageously undertaking the adventure of reason, as the old man of Konigsberg himself calls it,” (The “old man of Konigsberg” is Kant, For Goethe's view on this, see my edition of Goethe's natural-scientific works.) ⁴ In what follows now the awakened consciousness will be called a seeing consciousness (schauendes Bewusstsein). This kind of awakening can occur only when one develops a different relationship to the world of thoughts and will than is experienced in ordinary consciousness. It is entirely understandable today that the significance of such an awakening would be regarded with mistrust. For, what has made the natural-scientific way of picturing things great is the fact that it has opposed the claims of any dim mysticism. And although only that awakening in consciousness has validity as spiritual-scientific research which leads into realms of ideas of mathematical clarity and consistency, people who wish to arrive in an easy way at convictions about the greatest questions of world existence confuse this valid awakening with their own mystical muddle-headedness, which they claim is based on true spiritual research. Out of the fear that any pointing to an “awakening of the soul” could lead to such mystical muddle-headedness, and through seeing the knowledge often presented by such mystical illuminati, people acquainted with the demands of the modern natural-scientific way of picturing things keep aloof from any research that wishes, by claiming an “awakened consciousness,” to enter the spiritual world.⁵ Now such an awakening is altogether possible, however, through one's developing, in inner (soul) experience, a certain activation differing from the usual—of the powers of one's soul being (thought and will experiences). The indication that with the idea of the awakened consciousness one is continuing in the direction taken by Goethe's world view can show that our study here wishes to have nothing to do with the mental pictures of any muddled mysticism. Through an inner strengthening, one can lift oneself out of the state of ordinary consciousness and in doing so experience something similar to the transition from dreaming into wakeful mental picturing. Whoever passes from dreaming into a waking state experiences how will penetrates into the course of his mental pictures, whereas in dreaming he is given over to the course of his dream pictures without his own will involvement. What occurs through unconscious processes when one awakens from sleep can be effected on a different level by conscious soul activity. The human being can bring a stronger exercise of will into his ordinary conscious thinking than is present there in his usual experience of the physical world. Through this he can pass over from thinking to an experience of thinking. In ordinary consciousness, thinking is not experienced; rather, through thinking, one experiences what is thought. But there is an inner work the soul can do that gradually brings one to the point of living, not in what is thought, but rather in the very activity of thinking itself. A thought that is not simply received from the ordinary course of life but rather is placed into one's consciousness with will in order that one experience it in its thought nature: such a thought releases different forces in the soul than one that is evoked by the presence of outer impressions or by the ordinary course of one's soul life. And when, ever anew within itself, the soul rouses that devotion ⁶ —practiced only to a small degree, in fact, in ordinary life—to thoughts as such, when the soul concentrates upon thoughts as thoughts: then it discovers within itself powers that are not employed in ordinary life but remain slumbering (latent), as it were. These are powers that are discovered only through conscious use. But they predispose the soul to an experience not present before their discovery. The thoughts fill themselves with a life all their own, which the thinking (meditating) person feels to be connected with his own soul being. (What is meant here by “seeing consciousness” does not arise from ordinary waking consciousness through bodily [physiological] processes the way ordinary waking consciousness arises from dream consciousness. In the awakening from this latter consciousness into day consciousness, one has to do with a changing engagement [Einstellung] of the body relative to outer reality. In the awakening from ordinary consciousness into seeing consciousness, one has to do with a changing engagement of one's soul-spiritual way of picturing things relative to a spiritual world.)

[ 9 ] For this discovery of the life in thoughts, however, the expenditure of conscious will is necessary. But this cannot simply be that will which appears in ordinary consciousness. The will must also become engaged in a different way and in a different direction, so to speak, than for experience in mere sense-perceptible existence. In ordinary life one feels oneself to be at the center of what one wills or what one wants. For even in wanting, a kind of held-back will is at work. The will streams out from the “I” and down into desire, into bodily movement, into one's action. A will in this direction is ineffective for the soul's awakening out of ordinary consciousness. But there is also a direction of will that in a certain sense is the opposite of this. It is at work when, without any direct look at an outer result, a person seeks to direct his own “I.” This direction of the will manifests in a person's efforts to shape his thinking into something meaningful and to improve upon his feelings, and in all his impulses of self-education. In a gradual intensification of the will forces present in a person in this direction there lies what he needs in order to awaken out of his ordinary consciousness. One can particularly help oneself in pursuit of this goal by observing the life of nature with inner heart's (Gemüt) involvement. One seeks, for example, to look at a plant in such a way that one not only takes up its form into one's thoughts, but also, as it were, feels along with its inner life, which stretches upward in the stem, spreads out in the leaves, opens what is inside to what is outside with its blossom, and so on. In such thinking the will is also present in gentle resonance; and there, will is a will that is developed in devotion and that guides the soul; a will that does not originate from the soul, but rather directs its activity upon the soul. At first, one quite naturally believes that this will originates in the soul. In experiencing the process itself, however, one recognizes that through this reversal of the will, a spiritual element, existing outside the soul, is grasped by the soul.

[ 10 ] When will is strengthened in this direction and grasps a person's thought-life in the way indicated, then, in actual fact, out of the circumference of his ordinary consciousness, another consciousness arises that relates to his ordinary one like this ordinary consciousness relates to a weaving in dream pictures. And this kind of a seeing consciousness is in a position to experience and know the spiritual world. (In a series of earlier books, the author of this work has presented in a more detailed way what is only indicated here briefly, as it were. In such a short presentation, objections, misgivings, etc., cannot be taken up; this has been done in my other books; and there one can find many things presented that provide the deeper foundations for what is expressed here. The titles of the relevant books are listed at the end of this book.⁷

A will that does not tend in the direction just indicated, but rather toward everyday desiring, wishing, and so on, cannot—when this will is brought to bear upon one's thought-life in the way described—lead to the awakening of a seeing consciousness out of the ordinary one; it can lead only to a dimming down of this ordinary consciousness into waking dreams, phantasmagoria, visionary states, and such like.

The processes that lead to what is meant here by a seeing consciousness are entirely of a soul-spiritual nature; and their very description protects what is attained by them from being confused with pathological states (visions, mediumism, ecstasies, and so on). All these pathological states push consciousness down beneath the level it assumes in the waking human being who can fully employ his healthy physical soul organs.⁸

[ 11 ] It has often been indicated in this book how the science of the soul developed under the influence of the modern natural-scientific way of picturing things has moved away entirely from the significant questions of soul life. Eduard von Hartmann has written a book, Modern Psychology, in which he presents a history of the science of the soul in the second half of the nineteenth century. He states there: “Modern psychologists either leave aside the question of man's free will (Freiheit) entirely, or occupy themselves with it, in fact, only so far as is necessary to show that, on a strictly deterministic basis, just that amount of practical freedom arises which suffices for judicial and moral responsibility. Only in the first half of the period under discussion do a few theistic philosophers still adhere both to the immortality of a self-conscious soul substance and also to a residue of undeterministic freedom; but mostly they are content with wanting to found the scientific possibility of their heart's wish.” Now, from the point of view of the natural-scientific way of picturing things, one can actually speak neither about the true freedom of the human soul nor about the question of human immortality. With respect to this latter question, let us recall once more the words of the significant psychologist Franz Brentano: “The laws of mental association, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the germinating of pleasure and love, all these would be anything but a true compensation for not gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body. ... And if the modern way of thinking really did signify the elimination of the question of immortality, then this elimination would have to be called an extremely portentous one for psychology:” Now for the natural-scientific way of thinking, only ordinary consciousness is present. This consciousness, however, in its entirety, is dependent upon the bodily organs. When these fall away at death, our ordinary kind of consciousness also falls away. But seeing consciousness, which has awakened out of this ordinary consciousness, can approach the question of immortality. Strange as this may seem to a way of picturing things that wishes to remain merely within natural science, this seeing consciousness experiences itself within a spiritual world in which the soul has an existence outside the body. Just as awakening from a dream gives one the consciousness that one is no longer given over to a stream of pictures without one's own will involvement, but now stands connected through one's senses with a real outer world, so the awakening into seeing consciousness gives one the direct and experienced certainty that one stands, with one's essential being, within a spiritual world, and that one experiences and knows oneself in something which is independent of the body, something which actually is the soul organism inferred by Immanuel Hermann Fichte, which belongs to a spiritual world and must still belong to it after the destruction of the body.

And since, ill seeing consciousness, one becomes familiar with a consciousness rooted in the spiritual world and therefore different from ordinary consciousness, one can no longer revert to the opinion—because our ordinary kind of consciousness must indeed fall away along with its bodily instruments—that with the destruction of the body all consciousness must cease. In a spiritual science that regards the seeing consciousness as a source of knowledge, something becomes reality of which—out of the idealism of German world views—the school director of Bloomberg, Johann Heinrich Reinhardt, had inklings (see pages 54ff. of this book): that it is possible to know how the soul, “in this life already, is elaborating the new body” that it will then carry over the threshold of death into the spiritual world. (To speak of a “body” in this connection sounds materialistic; for, what is meant of course is precisely the soul-spiritual element that is free of the body; but it is necessary in such cases to apply to something spiritual names taken from what is sense-perceptible, in order to indicate sharply that one means something spiritually real, not just a conceptual abstraction.)

[ 12 ] Relative to the question of human freedom,⁹ a particular conflict in our knowledge of the soul presents itself. Ordinary consciousness knows free human resolve as an inwardly experienced fact. Faced with this experience, ordinary consciousness cannot actually let any teaching take this freedom away from it. And yet it seems as though the natural-scientific way of picturing things could not acknowledge this experience. For every effect it seeks the causes. What I do in this moment seems to it dependent upon the impressions I have now, upon my memories, upon my inborn and acquired inclinations, and so on. Many things are working together; I cannot survey them all, therefore I appear free to myself. But the truth is that I am determined in my action by the working together of all these causes. Freedom would therefore appear to be an illusion. One does not escape this conflict as long as, from the standpoint of seeing consciousness, one does not regard ordinary consciousness as only a mirroring—effected by the bodily organization—of the true soul processes, and as long as one does not regard the soul as a being rooted in the spiritual world and independent of the body. Something that is merely a picture can, through itself, effect nothing. If something is effected by a picture, then this must occur through an entity that lets itself be determined by the picture. But the human soul is in this situation when it does something for which its only motivation is a thought present in ordinary consciousness. The image of myself that I see in a mirror effects nothing that I, with the image as motivation, do not effect. The matter is different when a person does not act according to a conscious thought but rather is driven, more or less unconsciously, by an emotion, or impulse of passion, while his conscious mental life only looks on, as it were, at the blind complex of driving forces.

Since it is therefore the conscious thoughts in man's ordinary consciousness that allow him to act freely, he could after all know nothing through ordinary consciousness about his freedom. He would only look at the picture that determines his action and would have to ascribe to it a causal power. He does not do this, because instinctively, in his experience of inner freedom, the true being of the soul shines into ordinary consciousness. (The author of this book, in his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Philosophie der Freiheit), has sought to shed light upon the question of human freedom in a detailed way out of the observation of human soul experiences.) Spiritual science seeks, from the point of view of seeing consciousness, to shed light into that realm of the true soul life from which the instinctive certainty of man's inner freedom streams into ordinary consciousness.

[ 13 ] Man experiences the picture-world of dreams through the fact that the level of life possessed by him in the sense world is toned down. A person with healthy thinking will not seek instruction from dreaming consciousness about waking consciousness; rather, he will make waking consciousness the judge over the world of his dream pictures. A spiritual science that takes the point of view of seeing consciousness thinks in a similar way about the relationship of seeing consciousness to ordinary consciousness. Through a spiritual science such as this, one recognizes that the material world and its processes are in truth only a part of a comprehensive spiritual world, of a spiritual world that lies behind the sense world in the same way the world of sense perceptible material processes and substances lies behind the picture-world of dreams. And one recognizes how the human being descends into sense existence out of a spiritual world; and how this sense existence itself is a manifestation of spiritual being and spiritual processes. It is understandable that many people, out of their habitual thinking, scorn a world view such as this because they consider it estranged from reality and because they believe it makes them less fit for life. It frightens such people to hear that, compared with a higher reality, ordinary reality has something dreamlike about it. But does anything about dream consciousness change through our seeking—from the vantage point of waking consciousness—to understand its nature in reality? A person with a superstitious relationship to his dream-pictures can cloud his judgment in waking consciousness thereby. But our waking judgment can never damage our dreams. In the same way, the adherent of a world view that does not wish to gain entry into the spiritual world can cloud his judgment about the spiritual world; but genuine insight into the spiritual world cannot adversely affect our true assessment of the physical world. Seeing consciousness, therefore, cannot reach disruptively into our life of ordinary consciousness; seeing consciousness will affect it only in a clarifying way.

[ 14 ] Only a world view that acknowledges the point of view of seeing consciousness will be able to bring the same understanding both to the modern natural-scientific way of picturing things and to the cognitive goals of modern idealism in world views that works toward knowing the essential being of the world as something spiritual. (Further elaborations on the subject of knowledge of the spiritual world are not possible within the limits of this book. The author must therefore refer the reader to his other works. His purpose here is only to present the basic character of a world view that acknowledges the viewpoint of seeing consciousness insofar as is necessary to indicate the value for life of German idealism in world views.)

[ 15 ] The natural-scientific way of picturing things is justified precisely through the fact that the viewpoint of seeing consciousness is valid. The natural scientist and thinker bases his cognitive work on the presupposition that this viewpoint is possible, even though, as a theoretical observer of his own world picture, he will not admit this. Only those theoreticians fail to see this who declare the world picture of the natural-scientific way of picturing things to be the only one justified in a world view. Theoretician and scientist can of course be combined in one person. For our seeing consciousness, sense-perceptions undergo something similar to what dream-pictures undergo when a person wakes up out of sleep. The working powers that bring about a world of pictures when he is dreaming must give way, when he wakes up, to those working powers by which he makes for himself pictures and mental pictures that he knows are conditional upon the reality surrounding him. When seeing consciousness awakens, a person ceases to think his mental pictures in terms of this reality; he knows now that he pictures things in terms of the spiritual world surrounding him. Just as dream consciousness regards its picture-world as reality and knows nothing of the environment of waking consciousness, so ordinary consciousness regards the material world as reality and knows nothing of the spiritual world. The natural scientist, however, seeks a picture of that world which manifests in the mental pictures of ordinary consciousness. But this world cannot be contained in the mental pictures of ordinary consciousness. To seek it there would be like expecting one day to dream what a dream is in its essential nature. (Thinkers like Ernst Mach and others, in fact, foundered on the obstacle indicated here.) As soon as the natural scientist begins to understand his own way of research, he cannot believe that his ordinary consciousness can enter into a relationship with the world that he depicts. In actuality, seeing consciousness enters into this kind of a relationship. But this relationship is a spiritual one. And the sense perception of ordinary consciousness is the revelation of a spiritual relationship that plays itself out—beyond this ordinary consciousness—between the soul and the world the natural scientist depicts. This relationship can only first be seen by our seeing consciousness. If the world depicted by the natural-scientific way of picturing things is thought of as material, it remains incomprehensible; if it is thought of in such a way that something spiritual is living in it which, as something spiritual, speaks to the human spirit in a way that can be known only by our seeing consciousness, then this picture of the world becomes comprehensible in its full validity. Ancient Indian mysticism is a kind of counterpart to the natural-scientific way of picturing things. Whereas natural science depicts a world that is unperceivable, Indian mysticism depicts one in which the knower does indeed want to experience something spiritual, but does not want to intensify this experience to the point of having the power to perceive. The knower does not seek there, through the power of soul experiences, to awaken out of ordinary consciousness into a seeing consciousness; rather, he withdraws from all reality in order to be alone with his knowing activity. He believes, in this way, to have overcome the reality that disturbs him, whereas he has only withdrawn his consciousness from it, and, as it were, let it stand outside himself with its difficulties and riddles. He also believes himself to have become free of his “I” and, through selfless devotion to the spiritual world, to have become one with that world. The truth is that he has only darkened his consciousness of his “I” and is living unconsciously, in fact, altogether in his “I.” Instead of awakening out of ordinary consciousness, he falls back into a dreamlike consciousness. He believes himself to have solved the riddles of existence, whereas he is only holding his soul gaze averted from them. He has the contented feeling of knowledge, because he no longer feels the riddles of knowledge weighing upon him. What a knowing “perceiving” is can be experienced only in knowing the sense world. If it has been experienced there, then it can be further developed for spiritual perceiving. If a person withdraws from this kind of perceiving, he robs himself entirely of the experience of perception and takes himself back to a level of soul experience that is less real than sense perception. He regards not-knowing as a kind of deliverance from knowing and believes that, precisely through this, he is living in a higher spiritual state. He falls into merely living in the “I” and believes himself to have overcome the “I” because he has dimmed down his consciousness that he is weaving entirely within the “I.” Only the finding of his “I” can free the human being from ensnarement by his “I.” (See also the discussions on pages 117ff. of this book [Hamerling begins in an entirely Kantian way: ...]) One can truly have to say all this, and yet have no less understanding and admiration for the magnificent creation of the Bhagavad-Gita and similar productions of Indian mysticism than someone who regards what has been said here as proof that the speaker has “no organ, in fact,” for the sublimity of genuine mysticism. But one should not believe that only the unreserved adherents of a world view know how to value it. (I write this in spite of my awareness that I experience no less from Indian mysticism than any of its unreserved adherents.)

[ 16 ] What Johann Gottlieb Fichte brings to expression lies in the direction of a knowledge relating to the world in the way characterized here. This is clear from the way he has to use the image of human dreaming in order to characterize the world of ordinary consciousness. He says: “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 to float past; pictures that relate to each other through pictures of 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.” That is a description of the world of ordinary consciousness; and it is the starting point for a recognition of the seeing consciousness which brings an awakening out of the dream of the physical world into the reality of the spiritual world.

[ 17 ] Schelling wishes to regard nature as a stage in the evolution of the spirit. He demands that nature be known through an intellectual beholding, He therefore takes a direction whose goal can be seen only from the point of view of seeing consciousness. He takes note of the point where, in his consciousness of inner freedom (Freiheit), the seeing consciousness shines into ordinary consciousness. He seeks finally to go beyond the mere idealism in his Philosophy of Revelation by recognizing that ideas themselves can only be pictures of something, out of a spiritual world, that has a relationship with the human soul.

[ 18] Hegel senses that within man's thought-world there lies something through which man expresses not only what he experiences from nature, but also what the spirit of nature itself experiences in him and through him. Hegel feels that man can become the spiritual onlooker of a world process playing itself out within him. Lifting what he thus senses and feels up to the point of view of seeing consciousness also lifts man's world picture—which for Hegel is only a reflecting upon the processes that occur in the physical world—up to the beholding of a real spiritual world.

Karl Christian Planck recognizes that the thoughts of ordinary consciousness do not themselves participate in the working of the world, because, correctly viewed, they are pictures of a life; they themselves are not this life, Therefore, Planck is of the view that precisely the person who rightly understands this pictorial nature of thinking can find reality. Insofar as thinking wishes to be nothing itself but speaks about something that is, thinking points to a true reality.

[ 19 ] Thinkers like Troxler and Immanuel Hennarm Fichte take up into themselves the forces of German idealism in world views without limitlng themselves to the views that this idealism brought forth in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Troxler and I.H. Fichte point already to an “inner man” within the “outer man,” to a spirit-soul man, therefore, which the viewpoint of seeing consciousness recognizes as an experienceable reality.

[ 20 ] The significance of the viewpoint of seeing consciousness is particularly clear when one considers that tendency in world views which, as the modern teaching of evolution, stretches from Lamarck, through Lyell and others, to Darwin and the present-day view of life. This evolutionary teaching seeks to portray the ascent of the higher life forms out of the lower ones. It thereby fulfills a fundamentally valid task. But, in so doing, it must act the same way the human soul does, in dreaming consciousness, when dealing with dream experiences; it lets the later go forth from the earlier. In actuality, however, the motive forces that conjure a subsequent dream picture out of the previous one are to be sought within the dreamer and not within the dream pictures. Only seeing consciousness is in a position to sense this. Seeing consciousness, therefore, can no more consent to seeking in a lower life form the forces that cause a higher one to arise than waking consciousness can consider one dream really to emerge from the preceding one without considering the dreamer. While experiencing itself within true reality, man's soul being observes the soul-spiritual element that it sees working in present human nature as also working already in the evolutionary forms that led up to the present human being. This soul being will not anthropomorphically dream the present human entity into the phenomena of nature; but it will know that the soul-spiritual element that seeing consciousness experiences within present-day man is at work in all the natural happenings that have led up to man. Its knowledge will be such that the spiritual world becoming manifest to the human being also contains the origins of the natural configurations that preceded man. This represents a correct development of what Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss—out of the motive forces of German idealism—was striving for in his teaching which “rescues the concept of species insofar as is factually possible, but at the same time transfers the concept of evolution set up by Darwin into its realm and seeks to make it fruitful.” From the point of view of seeing consciousness, one cannot indeed say what Preuss said: “Now the center of this new teaching is man: the species homo sapiens that appears only once upon our planet”; rather, the center of a world view that encompasses human reality is the spiritual world that reveals itself within man. And seen in this way, what Preuss believes seems true: “Strange that earlier observers started with the objects of nature and then went so far astray that they did not find the path to man, which even Darwin in fact achieved only in a most sorry and thoroughly unsatisfactorily way by seeking the progenitor of the lord of creation among the animals,—whereas, the natural scientist would have to start with himself as human being in order, proceeding through the whole realm of existence and thinking, to return again to mankind. ...”

The viewpoint of seeing consciousness cannot lead to an anthropomorphical interpretation of natural phenomena, for it recognizes a spiritual reality of which what appears in man is just as much the revelation as what appears in nature. This anthropomorphic dreaming of the human entity into nature was a forbidding specter for Feuerbach and the Feuerbachians. This forbidding specter became for them the obstacle to their recognition of a spiritual reality.

[ 21 ] This forbidding specter worked on also in Carneri's activity as a thinker. It crept in disruptively when he sought the relationship of his ethical view of life, which was based upon the soul being of man, to the Darwinistically tinged view of nature. But the motive forces of German idealism in world views drowned out this disruption, and so it came about that he started with the soul-spiritual element in man, which is ethically predisposed, and, proceeding through the whole realm of existence and thinking, returned again to a mankind that is perfecting itself ethically.

[ 22 ] The direction taken by German idealism in world views cannot flow into any acknowledgment of a teaching that dreams unspiritual motive forces into the evolution of higher forms of existence out of lower ones. For this reason, Hegel already had to say: “Thinking observation must rid itself of these nebulous mental pictures, which are basically taken from perception,—especially such pictures as the so-called emergence of plants and animals from the water, for example, and then the emergence of more developed animal organizations out of lower ones, and so on.”

And the feelings with which Herman Grimm assigns the natural-scientific world picture its place in man's larger world view are born from this idealism in world views. Herman Grimm, the brilliant art historian, the stimulating portrayer of great interrelationships in the history of mankind, did not like to express himself on questions relative to world views; he preferred to leave this realm to others. But when he did speak about these things, he did so out of the direct sense of his own personality. With respect to his judgments, he felt secure in that field of judgment which encompassed the German idealistic world view and upon which he knew he stood. And from foundations of his soul like these there came the words he spoke in his twenty-third lecture on Goethe: “Long before, already in his (Goethe's) youth, the great Laplace-Kant fantasy about the rise and eventual downfall of our globe had taken effect. Out of the rotating world mist-children already get this in school—a central drop of gas takes shape from which the earth afterwards arises and, as a solidifying globe, through inconceivable ages of time, passes through all its phases—including the episode of its habitation by the I human race—in order finally, as burnt-out slag, to plunge back into the sun; a long process—but fully comprehensible to the public—needing for its realization no further I input from outside than the efforts of some external power or other to maintain the sun at the same temperature.—A more barren perspective for the future cannot be conceived than this expectation, supposedly forced upon us today by scientific necessity. A carrion bone, avoided even by a hungry dog, would be a refreshing and appetizing morsel compared to this final excrement of creation, the earth, as they picture it ultimately falling prey again to the sun; and the intellectual curiosity with which our generation takes up such things and professes to believe them is one sign of a sick imagination that scholars of future ages will one day have to expend much keen thought to explain as a historical phenomenon of our time.—Never did Goethe allow such bleak prospects to enter ... Goethe would have taken good care not to draw the conclusions of the Darwinian school from what he first discovered from nature in this direction and then expressed.” (With respect to Goethe's relationship to the natural-scientific way of picturing things, see my introductions to Goethe's natural-scientific writings in Kürschner's “German National Literature” and my book Goethe's World View.¹⁰

[ 23 ] Robert Hamerling's reflections also move in a direction that finds its justification in the viewpoint of seeing consciousness. From the human “I” that thinks itself, he leads his observation over to the “I” that experiences itself in thinking; from the will that works in man, he leads his observation over to the world-will. But the “I” that experiences itself can only be seen when, in soul experience, an awakening within spiritual reality occurs; and the world-will penetrates into our knowledge only when the human “I,” in experience, grasps a willing in which the “I”, does not make itself a point of departure but rather an end point, a goal, in which it directs itself toward unfolding what occurs within the world of one's inner life. Then the soul lives into the spiritual reality in which the motive forces of nature's development can also be experienced in their actual being, Passages from his Atomism of Will like the following show how Hamerling's reflections lead to a sense that one is justified in speaking of this kind of awakening of the “I” that knows itself to be within the spiritual world: “In the half-light of bold mysticism and in the light of free speculation, this riddle, this wonder, this mysterious ‘I,’ interprets and grasps itself as one of the countless forms of manifestation in which infinite being (Sein) attains reality, and without which the ‘I’ would be only a nothing, a shadow,” And: “To want to trace a thought in the human brain back to the activity of thoroughly lifeless, material atoms remains for all time a vain and foolish undertaking. Material atoms could never become the bearers of a thought if there did not already lie within them something that is of the same nature as the thought. And this original something, which is related in nature to living thinking, is also without a doubt the atoms' true core, their true self, their true being (Sein),” With this thought, Hamerling does confront the viewpoint of seeing consciousness, but with mere inklings of it. Certainly, to want to trace the thoughts of the human brain back to the activity of material atoms does remain “for all time a vain and foolish undertaking,” For this is no better than wanting to trace back the mirror image of a person merely to the activity of the mirror. But in ordinary consciousness thoughts appear, after all, as the mirroring—determined by the material element of the brain—of something living and full of being that works with power in these thoughts. but unconsciously as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned. Only from the viewpoint of seeing consciousness does this “something” first become comprehensible. It is that real element in which seeing consciousness experiences itself, and to which also the material element of the brain relates like a picture does to the being that is pictured. On the one hand the viewpoint of seeing consciousness seeks to overcome the “half-light of bold mysticism” by the clarity of a thinking that is logically consistent in itself and that has full insight into itself; on the other hand, it seeks to overcome the unreal (abstract) thinking of philosophical “speculation” by a cognitive activity that in thinking is at the same time the experiencing of something real.

[ 24 ] Understanding for the experiences undergone by the human soul through the way of picturing things that manifests in the series of thinkers from Fichte to Hamerling will prevent a world view that regards the viewpoint of seeing consciousness as justified from falling back into attitudes of soul that, like the ancient Indian, seek an awakening into spiritual reality more through a dimming down of ordinary consciousness than through an intensification of it. (As the author of this book has indicated again and again in his books and lectures: that belief has gone astray which maintains that a modern person can gain anything for spiritual knowledge by reviving such older directions in world views as the Indian one; to be sure, this has not kept people from repeatedly confusing the spiritual-scientific world view advocated by him with such fruitless, anti-historical attempts at revival.)

German idealism in world views does not strive for a dimming down of consciousness, but rather, within this consciousness, seeks the roots of those soul powers that are strong enough to penetrate, with full experience of the “I,” into spiritual reality. In German idealism the spiritual evolution of mankind has taken up into itself the striving, through strengthening the powers of consciousness, to arrive at knowledge of the world riddles. But the natural-scientific way of picturing things, which has led many people into error about the carrying power of this idealistic stream, can also acquire enough freedom from bias to recognize the paths to knowledge of the real world that lie in the directions sought by this idealistic world view. One will misunderstand both the viewpoint of German idealism in world views and that of seeing consciousness if one hopes through them to acquire a so-called “knowledge” that, through a sum of mental pictures, will lift the soul up out of all further questions and riddles and lead it into possession of a “world view” in which it can rest from all further seeking. The viewpoint of seeing consciousness does not bring cognitive questions to a standstill; on the contrary, it brings them into further movement, and in a certain sense increases them, both in number and in liveliness. But it lifts these questions into a sphere of reality in which they receive that meaning which man's knowing activity is already seeking unconsciously before it has even discovered this meaning. And in this unconscious seeking is created what is unsatisfying about those standpoints in world views which do not want to grant validity to seeing consciousness. From this unconscious seeking there also arises the view—which thinks itself to be Socratic but in actuality is sophistic—that that knowledge is the highest which knows only one truth: that there is no truth.

There are people who worry when they think that man could lose his impulse for progress in knowledge as soon as he believes himself equipped with a solution to the riddles of the world. No one need have this concern with respect either to German idealism or to the viewpoint of seeing consciousness.¹¹

[ 25 ] There are also other ways for a rightful appreciation of modern idealism in world views to root out the misunderstandings that confront it. Of course, one cannot deny that many adherents of this idealism in world views, through their own misunderstanding of what they believe, have given cause for opposition, just as the adherents of the natural scientific way of picturing things, by overestimating the carrying power of their views for knowledge of reality, have evoked undeserved rejection of their views, The significant Austrian philosopher (and Catholic priest) Laurenz Müllner, in an essay about Adolf Friedrich Graf von Schack, has expressed himself in a forceful manner, from the standpoint of Christianity, on modern natural science's thoughts about evolution. He rejects the assertions of Schack that culminate in the words: “The objections raised against the theory of evolution all stem from superficiality.” And after this repudiation he says: “Positive Christianity has no reason to act negatively toward the idea of evolution as such, if natural processes are not conceived merely as a causal mechanism based from all eternity upon itself, and if man is not presented as a product of such a mechanism.” These words came from the same Christian spirit out of which Laurenz Müllner spoke in his significant inaugural address, on Galileo, as president of the Vienna University: “Thus the new world view (he means that of Copernicus and Galileo) often came to appear as antithetical to beliefs declaring themselves, with very dubious justification. to be descendants of Christian teachings, It was much more a matter of the antithesis between the wider world consciousness of a new age and the more narrowly limited consciousness of classical antiquity; it was a matter of antithesis toward the Greek world view and not toward the rightly understood Christian world view, which, in the newly discovered world of the stars, could only have seen new wonders of divine wisdom through which the wonders of divine love accomplished on the earth could only attain greater significance.” Just as in Müllner we are presented with a Christian thinker's beautiful freedom from bias relative to the natural-scientific way of picturing things, so a similar freedom from bias is certainly possible relative to German idealism in world views. Such a freedom from bias would say: Positive Christianity has no reason to act negatively toward the idea, as such, of a spiritual experience in the soul, if this spiritual experience does not lead to the death of the religious experience of devotion and moral edification, and if the soul is not deified.

And the other words of Laurenz Müllner, for an unbiased Christian thinker, could take the form: The world view of German idealism often came to appear as antithetical to beliefs declaring themselves, with very dubious justification, to be descendants of Christian teachings. It is far more a matter of the antithesis between a world view that acknowledges the spiritual being of the soul and a world view that can find no access to this spiritual being; it is a matter of antithesis to a misunderstood natural-scientific way of picturing things, and not toward the rightly understood Christian world view, which, in the genuine spiritual experiences of the human soul, could see only the revelations of divine power and wisdom, through which the experiences of religious devotion and moral edification—as well as the powers of human duty sustained by love—could only attain further strength.

[ 26 ] Robert Hamerling felt the impulse toward idealism in world views to be the basic impulse in the being of the German folk spirit (Volkstum). The way he presented his search for knowledge in his Atomism of Will shows that for his age he is not thinking of a revival of any ancient Indian stream in world views. But he does think of German idealism as striving—out of the being of his folk spirit, in the way demanded by a new age—toward the spiritual realities that were sought in bygone ages by the strongest soul forces of Asiatic humanity of that time. And he does not think of the cognitive striving of this idealism in world views, with its direction toward spiritual realities, as dimming man's gaze upward into divine heights, but rather as strengthening it; he is filled with this belief because he sees this cognitive striving itself to be merged with the roots of the religious attitude. As Robert Hamerling is writing his German Migration in 1864, he is filled with thoughts about his people's task, which is an expression of this essential characteristic. This poem is like the depiction of a vision. In primeval times, the Germans migrate from Asia into Europe. The Caucasus is a resting place for the wandering people.

The evening sinks away. Like golden landmarks
In twilight's final gleaming glow the summits
Of Caucasus, and as from distant worlds
They look down full of meaning on the groupings
Of people resting, filling up the valleys
With all their weapons, steeds, and canopies.
—
From out the glow of sun's self-sacrifice
At last like phoenix climbs the moon's full disk
And hovers high above the orient's plane.
—
But now the people rest. Yet Teut the youth,
Of kingly gaze and mien, has stayed awake,
His blond head deeply sunk in meditation.
—
And then, as from a brief dream wakening, upward
He turns his eye, a light, a clear one, falls
Like dew upon him. See! It seems to him
As though in heights above, the golden globes
Of heaven joined their shining rays together
Into a shimmering pair of starry eyes:
As though towards him a marvel,
A mild and earnest countenance inclined,
As though, before his proud and sun-like flights,
With noble features, primal mother Asia
Did eye to eye to her brave son appear.

[ 27 ] And primal mother Asia reveals to Teut his people's future; she does not speak only hymns of praise; she speaks earnestly about the people's shadow and light aspects. But she also speaks about that essential trait of the people that shows cognitive striving to be in complete unity with an upward gaze to the divine:

Your joy in dreams, divine inebriation,
Your ancient Asian homeland's blessed warmth
And heartiness will go on living in you.
Of peaceful permanence,
This holy ray will be a temple fire
Of mankind, free of smoke—with purest flame
Will glow on in your breast and will remain
Your soul nurse and the pilot at your helm!
Because you love, you strive: your boldest thinking
Will be the zeal to sink itself in God.

[ 28 ] The introduction of these words of Robert Hamerling is not meant to indicate that the idealism in world views characterized in this book nor the view put forward by the viewpoint of seeing consciousness could in any way vie with the religious world view, let alone supersede it. Both would misunderstand themselves entirely if they wished to create religions or sects, or wished to impinge upon anyone's religious beliefs.

• 1. Please see note on p. 164
• 2. What one now calls the “theory of relativity” must orient itself according to mental pictures of this sort; otherwise it does not escape from logical theories into ideas that are in accordance with reality in the sense that this concept of “accordance with reality” has been characterized in this book in describing Planck's views.
• 3. What you behold in this way is self-explanatory; i.e., seeing it and understanding (“judging”) it are synonymous. What you “see” is pure, self-evident meaning. – Ed.
• 4. Page 55ff., Rudolf Steiner's Goethean Science, Mercury Press, 1988. – Ed.
• 5. Someone whose concern is for a real knowledge of the spiritual world is very happy when a gifted artist like Hermann Bahr, in his brilliant comedy “The Master,” portrays the comedies of life that often attach themselves so insistently to endeavors seeking a science of the spirit.
• 6. Hingabe: literally "a giving oneself over to" something. – Ed.
• 7. Please see p. 167.
• 8. What is meant here should not be confused with the attitude of soul underlying ancient Indian striving for knowledge, as will be indicated in what follows. See page 72 above.
• 9. Freiheit. Please see footnote to page 35. – Ed.
• 10. Published in English as Goethean Science (1988) and Goethe's World View (1985) by the Mercury Press. – Ed.
• 11. Please see note on p. 166.

[ 1 ] Max Dessoir's book Beyond the Soul (Vom Jenseits der Seele) contains a brief section in which the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science advocated by me is portrayed as scientifically invalid. Now it might seem to many that a discussion with people who take Dessoir's point of view about science must prove altogether unfruitful to anyone advocating spiritual-scientific anthroposophy. For, such an advocate asserts the existence of a purely spiritual region of experience that a Dessoir fundamentally rejects and consigns to the realm of fantasy. Discussion of the findings of spiritual-scientific knowledge, therefore, might only seem possible with someone who already has reason to believe that such a spiritual-scientific region exists.

This view would be correct if the advocate of anthroposophy presented nothing more than his own inner personal experiences and simply placed them beside the results of the science based on sensory observation and the scientific processing of such observations. Then one could say: the adherent of natural science refuses in fact to regard the experiences of the spiritual researcher as realities; the researcher in the spiritual realm can only make an impression with his findings on those who have already adopted his own point of view.

[ 2 ] This opinion, however, rests upon a misunderstanding of what I mean by anthroposophy. It is true that this anthroposophy is founded upon soul experiences that are attained independently of sense impressions and independently of scientific judgments based only upon sense impressions. Therefore the two kinds of experiences, sensory and extrasensory, seem at first to be separated by an unbridgeable chasm.

But this is not so. There is a common ground where both approaches must meet, and where discussion is possible. This common ground can be described in the following way.

[ 3 ] Out of experiences that are not just personal to him, the advocate of anthroposophy believes himself justified in stating that human activity in knowledge can be developed further from the point at which those researchers stop who want to base themselves only upon sensory observation and intellectual judgment of such observation.

To avoid continuous, long-winded paraphrases, I would like to use the word “anthropology” from now on to designate that approach in science which bases itself on sensory observation and the intellectual processing of such observation, asking the reader to permit me this uncommon usage. In what follows, "anthropology" means only what I have just described. In this sense, anthroposophy believes itself able to begin its research where anthropology leaves off.¹

[ 4 ] The advocate of anthropology limits himself to relating his intellectual concepts—experienced in the soul—to his sense perceptions. The advocate of anthroposophy observes that these concepts—apart from the fact that we relate them to sense impressions—are able in addition to unfold a life of their own within the soul. And that, by unfolding this life within the soul, these concepts effect a development of the soul itself. The advocate of anthroposophy sees how the soul, if it is sufficiently attentive to this development, discovers spiritual organs within its own being. (In using this expression "spiritual organs," I am adopting and extending the linguistic usage of Goethe when he speaks in his world view of “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears.”) ² Such spiritual organs, therefore, are for the soul what sense organs are for the body. These spiritual organs must of course be understood as being entirely of a soul nature. Any attempt to connect them with one or another bodily configuration must be strictly rejected by anthroposophy. Anthroposophy must not picture these spiritual organs as extending in any way beyond the soul realm or encroaching upon the structure of the body. It would regard any such encroachment as a pathological configuration, to be strictly excluded from its domain. The way anthroposophy portrays the development of our spiritual organs should be strong enough proof—to anyone who really informs himself about it—that the researcher in the real spiritual realm arrives at the same conclusions as anthropologists about abnormal soul experiences like illusions, visions, and hallucinations. ³ Any confusion of anthroposophical findings with abnormal, so-called soul experiences rests entirely upon misunderstanding or insufficient knowledge of what anthroposophy actually maintains. And anyone who studies and understands anthroposophy's description of the path to development of our spiritual organs will certainly not fall prey to the notion that this path could lead to pathological configurations or states. The insightful person, in fact, will recognize that every stage of soul experience that a human being passes through on the anthroposophical path to spiritual perception lies in a realm that is entirely of a soul nature; alongside this realm, our sensory experience and normal intellectual activity will continue, unaltered, as they were before this soul realm opened up for us. The great number of misunderstandings holding sway in precisely this area of anthroposophical knowledge stems from the fact that it is difficult for many to bring something of a purely soul nature into the sphere of their attention. The power to picture mentally ⁴ fails such people the moment this ability is not supported by the sight of something sense-perceptible. Their power to picture mentally is then dampened down, even below the level of dreams, into dreamless sleep, where it is no longer conscious. One could say that such people, in their consciousness, are filled with the aftereffects or the direct effects of sense impressions, and that, alongside this fullness, a sleep is occurring that blocks out what would be recognized as being of a soul nature if it could be grasped. One could even say that the essential nature of soul phenomena is subject to such profound misunderstanding by many people just because they cannot wake up to the soul element as they can to the sense-perceptible content of consciousness.

The fact that there are people in this situation whose degree of attention is only at the level produced by ordinary external life need not surprise anyone who can grasp the point, for example, of a reproach which Franz Brentano made to William James on this subject.

Brentano writes that one must “differentiate between our activity of perceiving and its object, i.e., between perceiving and what is perceived” (“and these two differ from each other as certainly as my present memory differs from the past event I am remembering; or, to make an even more drastic comparison: they differ as much as my hatred of an enemy differs from the object of this hatred”), and Brentano adds that one sees this error cropping up here and there. He continues:

William James, among others, embraced this error and went to some length to validate it at the International Congress on Psychology (Rome, 1905). Because, according to James, when I look out into a room, my vision appears along with the room; and, furthermore, because my mental images of sense-perceptible objects differ only in strength from the visual images directly stimulated by these objects; and, finally, because we call some objects beautiful, yet the difference between beautiful and ugly is connected to differences in emotions: therefore, soul and physical phenomena should no longer be regarded as two different classes of phenomena!

I find it hard to understand how the speaker himself could not feel the weakness of these arguments. To appear at the same time does not mean to appear as the same thing; just as existing at the same time does not mean existing as the same thing. Descartes could therefore recommend without self-contradiction that one deny—at least initially—the existence of the room I see, and regard as indubitable only the existence of my vision of the room. But if James' first argument is invalid, then obviously the second is also; for, what does it matter whether imagining differs from seeing only in degree of intensity, since, according to James, even if the degree of intensity were the same in both, the total congruency of imagining with seeing would still only represent congruency with a soul phenomenon? In his third argument, James speaks of beauty.... It is certainly a strange logic that could conclude—from the fact that pleasure in the beautiful is of a soul nature— that the object with whose appearance the pleasure is connected must also be of a soul nature. If that were so, then every dislike would be identical with what one dislikes, and one would have to be careful not to regret a past mistake, since, along with this remorse, the mistake, being identical with the remorse, would repeat itself.

With arguments like these, however, we need not fear that his authority—to which, among German psychologists, there is unfortunately added that of Mach—will cause many to fail to recognize the most obvious differences.⁵

Actually, this “failure to recognize the most obvious differences” is no rare occurrence. It is based on the fact that our power of mental picturing can unfold the necessary attentiveness only for sense impressions, whereas the actual soul activity that is also occurring is present to consciousness as little as what is experienced in a state of sleep. We are dealing here with two streams of experience; one of these is apprehended in a waking state; the other—the soul stream—is grasped simultaneously, but only with an attentiveness as weak as the mental perception we have in sleep, i.e., it is hardly grasped at all. We must by no means ignore the fact that during our ordinary waking state, the soul disposition of sleep does not simply cease, but continues to exist alongside our waking experience, and that the actual soul element enters the realm of perception only when the human being awakens not only to the sense world—as this occurs in ordinary consciousness—but awakens also to a soul existence, as is the case in seeing consciousness. It hardly matters now whether this soul element is denied—in a crudely materialistic sense—by the condition of sleep (to the soul element) that accompanies our waking state, or whether, because unseen, the soul element is confused with the physical, as in James' case; the results are nearly the same: both lead to fatal nearsightedness. But it is not surprising that the soul element so often remains unperceivable, if even a philosopher like William James is unable to differentiate it correctly from the physical.⁶

[ 5 ] With people as little able as William James to distinguish between the actual soul element and the content of what the soul experiences through the senses, it is difficult to discuss that region of our soul's being in which the development of spiritual organs is to be observed. For, this development occurs precisely where his attention is unable to direct itself. This development leads from an intellectual knowing to a knowing that sees.⁷

[ 6 ] But now, through the ability to perceive the actual soul element, we have as yet fulfilled only the very first precondition, which makes it possible to direct our spiritual gaze to where anthroposophy seeks the development of soul organs. For, what meets this gaze at first compares to anthroposophy's description of a soul-being equipped with spiritual organs the way an undifferentiated living cell compares to an organism endowed with sense organs. The soul becomes conscious of possessing the individual spiritual organs themselves, however, only to the extent that it is able to use these organs. For, these organs are not something at rest; they are in continuous movement. And when they are not in use, one also cannot be conscious of their presence. For them, therefore, perceiving and being used are synonymous. In my anthroposophical writings, I describe how the development—and along with it the perceptibility—of these organs comes to light. I will indicate here only a little of what can be said in this regard.

[ 7 ] Anyone who devotes himself to reflection on the experiences caused by sense-perceptible phenomena encounters questions everywhere that this reflection seems unable to answer at first. The pursuit of such reflections leads the adherents of anthropology to set certain limits to knowledge. One need only remember how Du Bois-Reymond, in his discourse on the limits of natural science, states that one cannot know the essential nature of matter or of the simplest phenomenon of consciousness. Now one can stop short at such points in one's reflections and surrender to the opinion: there human knowledge is in fact confronted by insurmountable barriers. And one can resign oneself to the fact that knowledge is attainable only on this side of the barrier, and that beyond this only inklings, feelings, hopes, and wishes are possible, with which “science” could have nothing to do.

Or else one can start at such points to form hypotheses about a region transcending the sense-perceptible world. In this case one employs the intellect, believing that it is justified in extending its judgments out over a region of which the senses perceive nothing. In such an undertaking, one runs the risk that nonbelievers will declare that the intellect has no right to judge a reality for which it lacks the foundations of sense perceptions. For only sense perceptions could provide a content for the intellect's judgment. Without such content, its concepts must remain empty.

[ 8 ] Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not relate to “limits of knowledge” in either of these two ways. It does not form hypotheses about the supersensible world because it must agree with those who feel that any basis for reflection is lost if mental pictures are left in the same form as when taken from sense perceptions, and yet are to be applied in a realm transcending the sense world.

Anthroposophy does not relate to “limits of knowledge” in the first way either, because it realizes that in our encounter with these so-called limits of knowledge, something can be experienced by the soul that has nothing to do with the content of mental pictures gained from sense perception. If the soul focuses only upon this latter content, then, if its self-examination is honest, it must admit that this content can reveal nothing directly to our activity of knowing except a copy of what we experience through the senses. The situation changes if the soul goes further and asks itself: What can be experienced within the soul itself when it fills itself with those mental pictures to which it is led when confronted by our usual limits of knowledge? After sufficient self-examination, the soul can then say to itself: Through such mental pictures I cannot, in the ordinary sense of the word, know anything; but in the event that I really make this powerlessness of my knowing activity inwardly visible to myself, then I become aware how these mental pictures work within my own self. As ordinary cognitive pictures, these mental pictures remain mute; but the more their muteness communicates itself to our consciousness, the more these mental pictures take on an inner life of their own that unites with the life of the soul. And the soul then notices how, with this experience, it is in a situation comparable to that of a blind being who has also not experienced much development of its sense of touch. Such a being would at first keep bumping into things. It would feel the resistance of outer reality. And from this generalized sensation, it could develop an inner life for itself, filled with a primitive consciousness that no longer has merely the general sensation of bumping into things, but that differentiates this sensation and distinguishes between hardness and softness, smoothness and roughness, etc.

[ 9 ] In the same way, the soul can hold and differentiate its experience of the mental pictures it forms in its encounter with the limits of knowledge. The soul learns to experience that these limits represent nothing more than what arises when the soul is touched by the spiritual world in a soul way. The dawning awareness of such limits becomes an experience for the soul that can be compared with the experience of touch in the sense world.⁸ What the soul formerly regarded as limits to knowledge it now sees as a soul-spiritual touching by a spiritual world. And out of the soul's attentiveness to its experiences with the various pictures it makes for itself at this borderland, the general sensing of a spiritual world differentiates for the soul into diverse perceptions of a spiritual world. In this way, the spiritual world's lowest form of perceptibility, so to speak, becomes an experience. This characterizes merely the very first opening of the soul to the spiritual world. But it also shows that the spiritual experiences striven for in what I mean by anthroposophy do not point in the direction of general, nebulous, emotional experiences that the soul has of itself, but rather in the direction of something that can be developed in a lawful way into a true inner experience. This is not the place to show how this first primitive spiritual perception can be intensified by further soul practices in such a way that one can speak of other, in a certain way, higher kinds of perception besides this soul-spiritual blind groping. For a description of such soul practices I must refer the reader to my anthroposophical books and essays. Here only the basic principle of spiritual perception was to be indicated of which anthroposophy speaks.

[ 10 ] I would like, through a comparison, to clarify still further how the whole attitude of soul in anthroposophical spiritual investigation differs from that of anthropology. Picture to yourself a number of wheat kernels. These can be used as food. But one can also plant them in the earth so that other wheat plants can grow from them. Likewise, one can hold mental pictures—gained through sense impressions—within one's consciousness in such a way as to experience them as copies of sense-perceptible reality. Or, one can experience these mental pictures in such a way as to let work in the soul the power these pictures exercise through what they are, irrespective of the fact that they reproduce sense perceptions. The first way that mental pictures were described as working in the soul can be compared with what becomes of wheat kernels when they are taken up as food by a living being; the second way, with the production of a new wheat plant from each kernel.

This comparison, to be sure, is only meant to focus on the fact that from the seed there arises a plant similar to its progenitors; and that from a mental picture working in the soul there arises within the soul a power that is effective in developing spiritual organs. And one must also consider the fact that our first awareness of such inner powers can only be kindled by mental pictures that work as forcefully as those mental pictures we described as occurring at the borderland of knowledge; once awakened, however, this awareness of such powers can find other mental pictures that can also be effective—to a lesser degree, it is true—in helping one progress upon this path.

[ 11 ] At the same time, this comparison points to a result of anthroposophical investigation into the essential nature of our life in mental pictures. Just as a seed, when it is processed into food, is lifted out of the course of development that lies within its own primal being and that leads to the formation of a new plant, so a mental picture too is diverted from its own essential course of development when it is used by the picturing soul to reproduce a sense perception. The development particular to a mental picture through its own essential nature is to work as a power in the development of the soul. Just as little as one discovers the plant's laws of development when one investigates the nutritive value of its seeds, can one discover the essential nature of mental pictures when one investigates the way mental picturing brings forth a cognitive reproduction of the sense-perceptible reality it communicates. This does not mean to say that such an investigation cannot be undertaken. This is just as possible as investigating the nutritive value of seeds. But just as a study of the nutritive value of seeds addresses something different than the developmental laws of plant growth, so an epistemology that investigates how the cognitive power of mental pictures reproduces reality informs us about something different than the essential nature of our life of mental picturing. Just as little as it lies prefigured in the essential nature of a seed to become food, does it lie in the essential nature of mental picturing to provide cognitive reproductions of reality. Yes, we can even say that it is as completely external to the seed's own nature to use it as food as it is to the actual nature of mental pictures to use them to reproduce reality in cognition. The truth is that in its mental pictures the soul grasps its own evolving being. And only through the soul's own activity does it occur that mental pictures become the mediators of any knowledge of reality.⁹

[ 12 ] Now, as to how mental pictures become mediators of such knowledge, anthroposophical observation, which employs spiritual organs, arrives at different conclusions than those epistemologists do who reject this observation. Anthroposophical observation reveals the following.

[ 13 ] Mental pictures, as they are in their own primal nature, do in fact form a part of the life of the soul; but they cannot become conscious in the soul as long as the soul does not consciously employ its spiritual organs. As long as these mental pictures are active in a way corresponding to their own essential nature, they remain unconscious in the soul. The soul lives by virtue of them, but can know nothing of them. These mental pictures must dampen down their own life in order to become conscious soul experiences for ordinary consciousness. This dampening down occurs with every sense perception. Thus, when the soul receives a sense impression, there occurs a laming of our life in mental pictures; and the soul experiences this lamed mental picturing consciously as the mediator of our knowledge of external reality.¹⁰ All mental pictures that the soul relates to an outer sense-perceptible reality are inner spiritual experiences whose life has been dampened down. Everything that one thinks regarding the outer sense world consists of deadened mental pictures. Now it is not as though the life of mental pictures were lost, however; it leads its existence, separated from the realm of consciousness, in the unconscious spheres of the soul. And there it is to be found again by our spiritual organs. Now, just as the deadened mental pictures can be related by the soul to the sense world, so the living mental pictures grasped by our spiritual organs can be related to the spiritual world.

The mental pictures described above as occurring to us at the borderland of knowledge are those that, by their very nature, do not let themselves be lamed; therefore, they resist any relation to sense-perceptible reality. Precisely through this fact, they become the points of departure for spiritual perception.

[ 14 ] In my anthroposophical books, I have called the mental pictures that are grasped as living ones by the soul “Imaginative mental pictures.” One misunderstands what is meant here by “Imaginative,” if one confuses it with the pictorial form of expression that must be used to point to such mental pictures in a suitable way. What is actually meant by "Imaginative" can be clarified in the following way. When someone has a sense perception, while the outer object is making an impression on him, the perception has a certain inner strength for him. When he turns away from the object, he can then only represent it to himself in an inner picture. But this mental picture has little inner strength. It is shadowy, so to speak, when compared with the mental picture that occurs while the outer object is present. If a person wants to enliven the mental pictures that are present in his soul in the shadowy form characteristic of ordinary consciousness, he saturates them with the aftereffects of sense perception. He makes the mental picture into an image he can observe [inwardly]. Such images are certainly nothing other than the results of interaction between mental picturing and sense perception. The “Imaginative” mental pictures of anthroposophy do not arise at all in this way. In order to bring them forth, the soul must know this inner process of uniting the life of mental pictures with sense impressions so exactly that it can prevent any sense impressions—or their aftereffects, as the case may be—from flowing into its life of mental picturing. One can achieve this exclusion of perception's aftereffects only if one has learned to know how mental picturing is gripped by these aftereffects. Only then is one in a position to unite the spiritual organs in a living way with the essential being of mental picturing and thereby receive impressions from spiritual reality. Through this, the life of mental pictures is permeated from an entirely different quarter than in sense perception. One's experiences are essentially different from those to be had from sense perceptions. And yet it is possible to describe these experiences. This can be done in the following way.

When the human being perceives the color yellow he does not merely have a visual experience in his soul; a nuance of feeling accompanies what the soul experiences. This feeling may vary in strength from person to person, but it will never be totally absent. In the beautiful chapter of his Color Theory on the sensory-ethical effects of colors, Goethe describes in a quite vivid manner the participation of our feeling in red, yellow, green, etc. Now when the soul perceives something in a particular region of the spirit, it can happen that this spiritual perception is accompanied in the soul by the same nuance of feeling as occurs in the sense perception of yellow. One knows then that one is having a particular spiritual experience. In this mental picture, of course, one does not confront what one confronts in a sense perception of a yellow color. Yet, as a nuance of feeling, one has the same inner experience as when the eye is confronted by a yellow color. One says then: I perceive the spiritual experience as “yellow.” In order to express oneself even more exactly, one could perhaps say: I perceive something that is like “yellow” for my soul. But this description is unnecessary for anyone who has learned from anthroposophical literature how the process leading to spiritual perception occurs. This literature points clearly enough to the fact that the reality accessible to spiritual perception does not confront the spiritual organs like a rarefied sense-perceptible object or process, or in such a way that it could be reproduced through mental pictures that are perceptible in the ordinary way.¹¹

[ 15 ] Just as the soul, through its spiritual organs, learns to know the spiritual world lying outside of the human being, so it also learns to know the spiritual being of man himself. Anthroposophy regards this spiritual being as a member of the spiritual world. Anthroposophy proceeds from observation of one part of the spiritual world to mental pictures about the human being of what reveals itself in the human body as a spiritual human being. Working from the opposite direction, anthropology also arrives at mental pictures about the human being. When anthroposophy develops the kinds of observations described in this essay, it arrives at views about the spiritual being of man that manifests in the sense world through its body. The flower of this manifestation is human consciousness, which allows sense impressions to live on in the form of mental pictures. By proceeding from experiences of the spiritual world outside man to man himself, anthroposophy ultimately finds the human being living in a sense-perceptible body and, in this body, elaborating his consciousness of sense-perceptible reality. The last thing anthroposophy, on its path, discovers about the human being is the soul's living activity in mental pictures, which anthroposophy is able to express in coherent imaginative pictures. Then, at the end of its path of spiritual investigation, so to speak, anthroposophy can employ its vision further and see how the real life of mental pictures is lamed by the perceiving senses. With the light it sheds from the spiritual quarter, anthroposophy shows this lamed life of mental pictures to be characteristic of man's life in the sense world, insofar as he forms mental pictures. In this way, as one of the last results of its investigations, anthroposophy arrives at a philosophy of the human being. What lies on its path down to this point is to be found purely in a spiritual realm. With the results of what it has found on its spiritual path, anthroposophy arrives at a characterization of the human being who lives in the sense world.

[ 16 ] Anthropology investigates the realms of the sense world. Proceeding on its way, it also arrives at the human being. He presents himself to anthropology as drawing together the facts of the sense world in his bodily organization in such a way that from this drawing together a consciousness arises through which outer reality is presented in mental pictures. The anthropologist sees mental pictures arising from the human organism. In observing this, he must come to a halt in a certain sense. With mere anthropology, he cannot apprehend the inner, lawful connectedness of mental pictures. Just as anthroposophy, at the end of its path through spiritual experiences, still looks at the spiritual being of man—insofar as this manifests through the perceptions of the senses—so anthropology, at the end of its path through the sense world, must look at the way the sense perceptible human being is active in mental picturing in its encounter with sense perceptions. And when it observes this, anthropology finds that this activity is not sustained by the organic laws of the body, but by the thought-laws of logic. But logic is not a region that can be entered in the same way as the other regions of anthropology. In thinking that is governed by logic, laws hold sway that can no longer be regarded as those of the bodily organization. As the human being works with these laws, the same logical activity reveals itself in him that anthroposophy encounters at the end of its path. It is just that the anthropologist sees this logical activity in the light shed from the sense-perceptible realm. He sees the lamed mental pictures and, by acknowledging the existence of logic, he also concedes that in these mental pictures laws are operative from a world that is indeed united with the sense world, but does not coincide with it. In man's life of mental pictures, which is carried by a logical activity, there manifests to the anthropologist the sense-perceptible human being who extends into the spiritual world. In this way, as the final results of its investigations, anthropology arrives at a philosophy about the human being. What lies on its path up to this point lies purely in the sense world.¹²

[ 17 ] If these two paths—the anthroposophical and the anthropological—are followed in the right way, they meet at the same point. Anthroposophy brings with it to this meeting a picture of the living spiritual human being and shows how he develops, in sense-perceptible existence, the consciousness that is present between birth and death while the life of supersensible consciousness is lamed. Anthropology, at this meeting point, shows a picture of the sense-perceptible human being who apprehends himself in consciousness, but who extends up into spiritual existence and lives in that essential beingness which reaches beyond birth and death. At this meeting point, a really fruitful understanding is possible between anthroposophy and anthropology. This understanding will occur if both progress to a philosophy of the human being. The philosophy of the human being that emerges from anthroposophy will in fact produce a picture of him painted in an entirely different medium than that provided by an anthropological philosophy of the human being; but those who look at both pictures will be able to find a harmony between their mental pictures similar to that between the negative of a photograph and the corresponding positive print.

[ 18 ] This essay, I hope, has shown how the question raised at the beginning—about the possibility of a fruitful discussion between anthropology and anthroposophy—can be answered in the affirmative, especially from the anthroposophical point of view.

• 1. Although the anthroposophy advocated by me stands on a completely different ground, with its results, than the presentations of Robert Zimmermann in his book Anthroposophy (1881), still I believe myself justified in using the concept by which he characterized the difference between anthroposophy and anthropology. As the content of his anthroposophy, however, Zimmermann only draws together into an abstract schema the concepts provided by anthropology. For him, the knowing vision that is the basis for what I mean by anthroposophy lies outside the domain of scientific procedure. His anthroposophy differs from anthropology only through the fact that the former first submits the concepts it receives from the latter to a process like that of Herbart's philosophy, before making these concepts into the content of its purely intellectual schema of ideas.
• 2. A more detailed presentation and justification of this notion of “spiritual organs” can be found in my book The Riddle of Man, Mercury Press, 1990, page 125ff. and in my books on Goethe's world view.
• 3. The inner experiences that the soul must undergo in gaining the use of its spiritual organs are described in a number of my books, but especially in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and in the second part of Occult Science, an Outline.
• 4. Sich Vorstellen means to visualize, to picture to oneself mentally. The ability to “place something before oneself inwardly is a crucial factor in spiritual development and as such is referred to constantly in this essay. How do we hold something up before our inner eye? What is the attention we focus upon it? Who does this? What is the nature of mental pictures (Vorstellungen) themselves? Such questions are among the many painful riddles that ordinary consciousness cannot solve, and that bring us up against an invisible world. Translator.
• 5. See F. Brentano, Research into a Psychology of the Senses, Leipzig, 1907, p. 96f.
• 6. The awakening of those soul faculties which, in ordinary consciousness, are unawakened is described in more detail in my book The Riddle of Man, page 132ff.
• 7. For a more extensive validation of what is stated here, please see addendum 1: The Philosophical Validation of Anthroposophy.
• 8. Limits to knowledge like those discussed above do not merely present themselves in the small number of which most people are aware; they occur in great number along the paths that intelligent reflection, according to its own inner nature, must take in order to gain a relation to true reality. Please see addendum 2: The Appearance of Limits to Knowledge.
• 9. A more detailed case is made for these views in the last chapter of my book The Riddles of Philosophy: “Sketch of a Perspective of an Anthroposophy.”
• 10. Please see addendum 3: The Abstractness of Our Concepts.
• 11. For further clarification of what has just been expressed, please see addendum 4: An Important Characteristic of Spiritual Perception.
• 12. Like the thoughts before footnote 7, what has been indicated here can be clarified further in a certain direction by addendum 1: The Philosophical Validation of Anthroposophy.

[ 1 ] The preceding essay shows how strongly and concretely the anthroposophist (spiritual scientist) can wish to come to terms with the anthropologist (natural scientist). One might think that a book with purposes like those of Max Dessoir would lend itself to just such a discussion. From the anthroposophical viewpoint, Dessoir's book is written in the anthropological mode. It bases itself upon the findings of sense observation; and wants to employ the kind of thinking and research usual to the natural-scientific approach. His book belongs to what we mean by anthropological science.

[ 2 ] In that part of his book entitled “Anthroposophy,” Max Dessoir wants to deliver a critique of the anthroposophical views presented in my books.¹ He tries to reproduce in his own way some of the material from these books and then adds his critical comments. This could show us, therefore, what each of the two realms of thought has to say about one or another aspect of human striving for knowledge.

[ 3 ] Let me now present and discuss what Max Dessoir writes.

Dessoir wishes to point to my support of the view that the human soul, through inner development, can attain the ability to use its spiritual organs, and through this can bring itself into the same kind of connection with the spiritual world that it has to the sense world through its physical sense organs. You can see from my first essay how I picture what must occur in the soul in order for it to arrive at perception of the spiritual life. Max Dessoir presents in his way what I have said about this in my books. He writes:

Through this kind of inner work, the soul attains what all philosophy has sought. To be sure, we must be careful not to confuse the body-free consciousness with dream-like clairvoyance or hypnotic processes. When our soul powers are enhanced, the "I" can experience itself above consciousness, in a kind of densification and individualization of the spirit, as it were; yes, the "I," in its perception of colors and sounds, can even exclude the mediation of the body from this experience.

Dessoir then inserts the following footnote: "Refuting these assertions individually is not worth the while." So, Dessoir adds to my views about spiritual perception that T assert that in perceiving colors and sounds one can exclude the mediation of the body. Please look back at what I said in the preceding essay about the experiences of the soul through its spiritual organs, and how the soul arrives at expression of these experiences in color and sound pictures. You will see that, from the point of view of anthroposophy, I could not assert anything more absurd than that the soul, “in its perception of colors and sounds, can exclude the mediation of the body.” If I ever did make such a claim, it would then be correct to say that “refuting these assertions individually is not worth the while.” We are confronted here by a really strange fact. Max Dessoir asserts that I say something that, in accordance with my own presuppositions, I would have to label as absurd. It is of course impossible to come to terms with an objection raised by an opponent in this way. One can only recognize and show that a distorted picture was presented as though it were the actual view of the person one is opposing. [ 4 ] Now Dessoir might object to this by saying that he could not find in my earlier works any presentation as clear as that in the preceding essay on the conclusions to be drawn from my views on the point at issue here. I admit right away that on many points of anthroposophy my later presentations contain a more exact exposition of what I stated earlier, and that readers of my earlier works can perhaps arrive at an erroneous view here and there of what I myself consider to be the necessary conclusions to be drawn from my views on a certain point. I believe that any insightful person would find this obvious. For, anthroposophy represents a broad field of work, and books can only deal with individual parts of it. But in this case can Max Dessoir have recourse to my not having clarified in my earlier books the point at issue here? Dessoir's book was published in 1917. In chapter 6 of the fifth edition of my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, published in 1914, in the passage dealing with the pictorial manifestation of spiritual experiences in colors, I made the following statement:

In the descriptions that follow, one must be alert to the fact that "seeing" a color, for example, means a spiritual seeing (observing). In clairvoyant knowledge when one says, "I see red," one means, "in the soul-spiritual [realm], I am having an experience that is like the physical experience of the sense impression of the color red." Only because it is completely natural in clairvoyant knowledge in such a case to say "I see red," is this expression used. Someone who is unaware of this fact can easily mistake a color vision for a truly clairvoyant experience.

I added this footnote not because I believed that a reader with true understanding could believe that I assert the possibility of seeing colors without eyes, but because I could imagine that a superficial reader here or there, through misunderstanding, could falsely attribute such an assertion to me if I did not expressly state the contrary. Three years later, after I had expressly warded off any such imputation, Max Dessoir comes along and declares that I am asserting something that I actually consider to be absurd.

[ 5 ] But there is more. In the sixth edition of my book Theosophy, also published in 1914, the following statements are made on this subject:

One might picture that what is described here as “color” confronts the soul in the same way a physical color confronts the eye. But any such “soul color” would be nothing but a hallucination. Spiritual science has absolutely nothing to do with "hallucinatory" impressions and they are certainly not what we are referring to in these descriptions. One arrives at a correct picture when one keeps the following in mind. Relative to a physical color, the soul experiences not only the sense impression, but also has a soul experience in connection with it. When the soul perceives a yellow color through the eye, it has a different soul experience than when it perceives a blue color. Let us call this experience “living in yellow” or “living in blue.” Now, a soul that has entered the path of knowledge has a similar “experience in yellow” when confronted by the active soul experiences of other entities; and an “experience in blue” when confronted by devotional soul moods. The essential point is not that the “seer,” while picturing someone else's soul, sees "blue" the way he sees this “blue” in the physical world, but that he has an experience that justifies him in calling this picture “blue,” just as a physical person calls a curtain, for example, “blue.” Another essential point is that the “seer” is conscious of the fact that, with this experience, he is standing within a body-free experience, and thus is given the possibility of speaking about the value and significance of a soul life in a world whose perception is not communicated by the human body.²

[ 6 ] I will forgo quoting other passages from my books that present my true view on this particular subject. And as to an assessment of Max Dessoir's “version” of my statements, this I leave up to every reader who can still form an objective judgment about the facts even when anthroposophy is the topic.

[ 7 ] The level of understanding that Dessoir brings to the descriptions I attempted of the consciousness attained through spiritual organs does not bode well for his further presentations on the relation of "Imaginative" pictures to the spiritual reality to which they correspond. He has heard that anthroposophy does not explain the evolution of mankind on earth only by the means employed by anthropology but rather, with its own means, sees this evolution to be dependent upon spiritual powers and beings. In my book Occult Science, an Outline, I attempted to make this evolutionary process visible by means of "Imaginative" pictures (and through other kinds of knowledge as well that go beyond Imaginative vision, but are not so relevant to our present topic). In that book I indicated how to anthroposophical observation a picture arises of states undergone by mankind in evolutionary forms that are already close to those of the present day; and I also pointed to even earlier evolutionary forms in which the human being appeared that are quite unlike those of today and that are described by me, not in the pictures that anthropology borrows from sense perception, but in Imaginative pictures.

[ 8 ] Dessoir then informs his readers in the following way about what I have described as to the evolution of mankind. He says of my depiction of the evolutionary forms that are still close to those of the present-day human being that I designate a specific period of time in the past as the old Indian culture of mankind and then see other cultural periods succeeding it. As Dessoir puts it:

Old India is not the India we know of today, for, all geographic, astronomical, and historical references are to be taken as symbolic. Following the Indian culture, the ancient Persian culture arose, led by Zarathustra who, however, lived much earlier than the historical personality of that name. Other periods followed. We are now in the sixth period.

[ 9 ] What I say about a much earlier age of human evolution, in which mankind still appeared in forms quite unlike those of today, is reported by Dessoir like this:

This human being evolved in a distant past that Steiner calls the Lemurian age of the earth—why in the world?—and in a land that lay then between Australia and India (which, therefore, is an actual place and not a symbol).

I want here to totally disregard the fact that I could also see the entire “version” of my description as a mere distortion that could never give the reader a picture of what I mean. I only want to address one point of this “version.” Dessoir inspires in his reader the belief that I speak as though what is seen in the spirit is to be taken as symbolic, that old India, therefore, where I locate an ancient culture, is a “symbolic” land. Later, he blames me for locating a much older period of human evolution in Lemuria—between Australia and India—and in doing so contradict myself horribly, since one could notice from my presentation, after all, that I consider Lemuria to be an actual place and not a symbol.

[ 10 ] One could only agree fully with the view that a reader of Dessoir's book who has read nothing of my work and only takes up Dessoir's version of it would have to conclude that my presentation is complete rubbish—thoughtless, confused, and self-contradictory.

What really stands in my book about the region of the earth I refer to as old India? Read the pertinent passages and you will find that I express with full clarity that old India is not a symbol; it is the region of the earth that basically, if not quite exactly, corresponds with what we all call India. So, Dessoir reports to his reader, as though it were my view, something that it would never even enter my mind to imagine. And because he believes that, in describing old Lemuria, I speak, indeed, in a way that accords with my actual beliefs about old India—but not with the nonsense that he ascribes to me—he accuses me of contradiction.

[ 11 ] One has to ask oneself how the unbelievable can occur that Dessoir has me assert that old India is to be understood in a symbolic way. Out of the whole context of his presentation, I come to the following explanation. Dessoir has read something about the processes in our soul life that I call the path to spiritual vision, whose first level is Imaginative cognition. I describe there how the soul, through calm devotion to certain thoughts, evolves from its own depths the ability to form Imaginative pictures. I say that to this end the soul does best to dwell upon symbolic pictures. No one, through my description, should fall into the error of thinking that these symbolic pictures are anything other than a means of arriving at Imaginative cognition. Now, Dessoir believes that, because one arrives at Imaginative picturing by means of symbols, this picturing also consists only in symbolic pictures; indeed, he ascribes to me the view that someone who uses his spiritual organs does not look through the Imaginative pictures at realities, but only at symbols.

[ 12 ] With respect to my presentation, Dessoir's assertion that in cases like that of old India I am pointing at symbols, not realities, can only be compared with the following. Someone finds, from the condition of a certain stretch of ground, that in the region where he now is, it must have rained a short while ago. He communicates this to someone else. Naturally, he can only communicate his mental picture of the fact that it has rained. Therefore, a third person asserts that the first person is saying that the condition of the ground did not result from real rain, but only from a mental picture of rain. I am asserting neither that Imaginative pictures consist only of mere symbols, nor that they themselves are realities; I am saying that Imaginative pictures relate to a reality the way the mental pictures of ordinary consciousness do. And to impute to me that I am pointing only at symbolic realities is like asserting that the natural scientist does not see the reality to lie within the existence of that to which his mental picture relates, but rather within this picture itself.

[ 13 ] When one presents the views one wants to combat the way Dessoir does, the battle is quite easy. And Max Dessoir does make it really easy for himself to sit upon the judge's seat in a lofty manner; but he achieves this only by first perverting my presentations into distorted pictures—often into complete foolishness, in fact—and then scolding his own creation. He states: “It is self-contradictory to say that from ‘envisioned’ and merely ‘symbolic’ circumstances, the actual facts of real existence are supposed to have evolved.” But you will not find any such self-contradictory way of picturing things in any of my work. Dessoir only imputes such an element to my work. And when he goes so far as to assert: “For the point is not whether one regards the spiritual as brain activity or not, but whether the spiritual is to be regarded in the form of a childish way of picturing things or as a realm with its own lawfulness,” then the response must be: I agree with him totally that everything he serves up to his readers as my view bears the mark of a childish way of picturing things; however, what he labels as childish has nothing to do with my real views, but refers totally to his own mental pictures, which he has created by distorting mine.

[ 14 ] How is it even possible that a scholar could proceed in this way? In order to contribute toward an answer to this question I must take the reader for a little while into a realm that will perhaps not seem entertaining but that I must enter here in order to show how Max Dessoir reads the books that he appoints himself to judge. I must bring a little philology to bear upon Max Dessoir's presentations.

[ 15 ] As already mentioned, Dessoir describes my picture of the evolution of human cultural periods within certain time frames as follows: "The Old Persian culture followed the Old Indian. Other periods of time succeeded them. We are now in the sixth period." Now it might seem quite petty to criticize someone for having me say that we are now in the sixth period whereas I actually show, with all possible clarity, that we are in the fifth period. But in this case the matter is not such an insignificant one. For, anyone who has penetrated into the whole spirit of my presentation of this subject would have to admit that someone to whom it would even occur to believe I was speaking of the sixth period as our present one must have misunderstood my whole presentation in the grossest manner. My designation of the present period as the fifth is intimately connected with my whole discussion of this topic.

How did Dessoir arrive at his gross misunderstanding? One can form a picture of this if one compares my presentation of the matter with his “version” of it and, in doing so, tests it by the philological method.

When, in my description of the cultural epoch, I arrive at the fourth period—which I see to begin in the eighth century BC and end in about the fourteenth or fifteenth century—I say the following:

In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries AD, a cultural era spread over Europe in which we are still living today. It was meant to gradually replace the fourth epoch, the Greco-Roman. It is the fifth Post- Atlantean cultural epoch.

Accordingly, my view is that, through processes occurring in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, effects were prepared that needed several centuries more to ripen, in order then, in the fourteenth century, to make the transition into the fifth cultural epoch in which we are still living now. In his reading of the above passage, Max Dessoir seems to have brought it into the domain of his attention in such a way that he confused the sequence of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries with the sequence of the cultural epochs. When someone reads superficially and in addition has no understanding of what he is reading, such things can occur.

[ 16 ] I would not advance this hypothesis about Max Dessoir's superficiality by itself if it were not supported by the following discoveries that one can make in his “version” of my presentations. In order to discuss the pertinent factors here, I must introduce mental pictures relative to anthroposophical knowledge that are hardly comprehensible if not viewed in connection with the presentations in my book Occult Science, an Outline that refer to them. I myself would never tear them out of all context and introduce them to a reader or listener the way Dessoir does. But since he bases his criticism on his “version” of views that in my presentations are in a broad context, I must address this “version” here. I must show what kind of “version” this is. To begin with I must note that the depiction of such matters presents such difficulties because the content of spiritual observation can only be elucidated to some extent when one strives for the most exact possible forms of expression. Therefore, when presenting such matters, I always try to spare myself no pains or time in struggling to attain the greatest possible exactitude in my form of verbal expression. Anyone who penetrates even a little way into the spirit of anthroposophy will understand what I have just said.

In the light of this, let me now show how Max Dessoir proceeds in giving his "version" of my presentations.³

[ 17 ] With respect to the path that the soul takes in order to acquire the use of its soul organs, he presents my views in the following way:

The schooling toward a higher state of consciousness begins—at least for a human being of today— with his immersing himself with all his strength into a mental picture as though into a purely soul state of affairs. A symbolic mental picture works best, such as the visualization of a black cross (symbol of annihilated lower drives and passions), whose crossing point is circumscribed by seven red roses (symbol of purified drives and passions).

Leaving aside the fact that this statement, tom out of context, must make a strange impression upon a reader, whereas this would hardly be the case if read at its proper place in my book, I must say that, if I read what Max Dessoir states in the above sentence as the opinion of some person, I would consider the whole matter as nonsense, or at least as nonsensically expressed. For, I could find no connection between the meanings of the two symbols, between “annihilated lower drives and passions” and “purified drives and passions.” I would, in fact, have to picture that a person is supposed to annihilate his lower drives and passions, and then, at the place where the annihilation occurred, purified drives and passions arise as though shooting forth out of nothingness. But why “purified,” since there is nothing there to “purify”; something new has arisen at the place of the annihilation? In no way could my thinking deal with such a statement. But read what I wrote in my book. I say:

Picture a black cross to yourself. Let this be a symbol for the annihilated lower element of our drives and passions; and there, where the two arms cross, picture to yourself seven red, radiant roses in a circle.

You can see that I do not say that the cross is a symbol for “annihilated lower drives," but for the “annihilated lower elements of our drives and passions.” So, the lower drives and passions are not “annihilated,” but rather “transformed,” in such a way that their lower element is cast off and they themselves manifest as purified. This is how Max Dessoir deals with something that he wants to critique. Then he can portray it as a childish way of picturing things. It is definitely pedantic to correct someone's formulations in this pedagogical manner. But I am not the instigator of this pedagogical act. It is Dessoir's distortions, which can only be caught by the pedagogical approach, that make it necessary. For these distortions amount to misrepresentations— which, as far as I am concerned, arose unconsciously or through superficiality—of my own actual formulations. And only with respect to these misrepresentations is Dessoir's critique possible.

[ 18 ] Here is another example of Dessoir's “version” of what he reads. I speak—again, in a context that makes the matter appear completely different than when tom out of context in the Dessoirian manner—of certain earlier stages of the earth's evolution before it became a planet inhabitable by man in his present form of development. In Imaginative mental pictures I describe the first stage of this evolution. In order to elucidate these periods I have to speak of beings of a spiritual nature who were connected with the primal planetary form of the earth at that time. After Dessoir has me assert that through these spiritual beings “processes of nutrition and excretion develop” upon the planetary primal form of the earth, he continues: “A clairvoyant person still experiences these states today through a supersensible perception that is like smell, for these states are actually still present today.” What you will read in my book is that the relevant spiritual beings enter into interaction with "forces of taste that billow up and down" within the inner being of the primal planetary form. “As a result, its etheric or life body unfolds an activity of such a sort that one could call it a kind of metabolism.” Then I say that these beings bring life into the inner entity of this primal planetary form. “Processes of nutrition and excretion occur as a result.” It is obvious that sharpest rejection of such a description by present-day science is possible. But it should be just as obvious that a critic cannot go about his work the way Max Dessoir does. While awakening the belief that he is reproducing my description, he says that processes of nutrition and excretion develop through the beings referred to. The way I describe the matter, between my indication that beings arise and the indication that nutritional and excretory processes arise, there is an intermediary statement to the effect that an interaction develops and that through it an activity arises in the etheric or life body of these beings that now in its turn leads to the nutritional and excretory processes of the primal planetary form. What Dessoir accomplishes with my description can be compared with the following. Someone says: “A man enters a room in which a child and its father are present. The child treats the visitor in such a way that the father must punish him.” Another person now misrepresents this statement by asserting: “The punishment of the child arises from the visit of the stranger.” Now, from this assertion, could anyone know what the first person actually wanted to say? Nevertheless, Dessoir has me say in addition that the clairvoyant learns about certain conditions, arising in the primal planetary form, “through a perception that is like smelling.” But my formulation is that, in the relevant states, will forces manifest that communicate themselves “to clairvoyant perception through effects that can be compared with ‘odor.’” So, in my work, there is no trace of an assertion that the spiritual perception under discussion is “like smelling”; rather, the fact emerges quite clearly that this perception is not like smelling, but that what is perceived can be compared to odors. How such a comparison is to be understood in an anthroposophical sense is amply demonstrated at another place in this book. Nevertheless, through this misrepresentation of my formulation, Dessoir gives himself an opening for the following remark, which he probably considers clever: “I am surprised that the ‘odor of sanctity’ is not connected here with the ‘stench of the devil.’”

[ 19 ] I could now present (and rectify) more examples like these of Dessoir's “versions” of my presentations, such as the way he has me explain the “going to sleep” of a leg “through separation of the etheric body from the physical body,” whereas I do not explain in that way the objective fact of a “leg going to sleep,” but rather state that the subjective “strange sensation that one feels” results “from the separation of the etheric body.” Only if one takes my formulations the way they are given, can one form an opinion as to the significance of my statements and recognize how they absolutely do not exclude the objective facts discovered by natural science, anymore than they need to be excluded by the adherent of anthropological views. Dessoir, however, wants to make his readers believe that my views should be excluded from scientific consideration. But I need not tire the reader any longer with such corrections. I only wanted to show the degree of superficiality with which Max Dessoir reads what he sets himself up to judge.

[ 20 ] But I still want to show where that soul attitude can lead that sits in judgment with such superficiality. In my book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind, I try to show how the power to make mental pictures—which does not enter the consciousness of the child right away at birth but only at an older age—is already active before it emerges consciously, and how in its unconscious activity (in the upbuilding of the nervous system, for example, and in other ways), this power works in such a wisdom-filled way, that its later conscious working seems much less wise by comparison. For reasons too extensive to present here, I arrive at the view that our conscious life of mental picturing does indeed develop further the wisdom active in early childhood in certain formations of the human organism, but that this conscious life of mental pictures relates to that unconscious working of wisdom the way, for example, the structure of a tool stemming from conscious human wisdom relates to the marvelous structure of the human brain. The reader of the above-mentioned book can easily see from it that I do not express any such statement as the result of a sudden "inspiration," in an anthroposophical sense, even though I of course cannot present in every book the details of this path. In this respect I must ask that my books be considered as parts of one whole that mutually support and carry one another. But my concern now is not with presenting the validity of my statement about unconscious or conscious wisdom, but with something else that Dessoir does by retailoring the relevant passage of my book for his readers in the following way: “Our connection with the higher worlds— we read—is closest in our first three years of life, to which no memory extends. Especially a person who himself teaches wisdom—as Mr. Rudolf Steiner confesses—will say to himself: ‘As a child I worked upon myself through powers that worked in from the spiritual worlds, and what I can now give as my best must also work in from higher worlds; I must not regard it as belonging to my ordinary consciousness.’”

One might well ask: what picture imprints itself in a reader of Dessoir's book whose eye falls upon these sentences? Hardly anything other than that, in this book, I gave myself occasion to speak of the connection of the spiritual world to the knowing human being, and present myself as an example. It is obviously not difficult to expose someone to ridicule whom one can reproach with such bad taste. But what is the actual state of affairs? My book states:

Imagine that a person has found adherents, a few people who acknowledge him. Such a person, through genuine self-knowledge, can easily become aware that precisely the fact that he has found adherents gives him the feeling that what he has to say does not originate from him. It is much more the case that spiritual powers from higher worlds wish to communicate with his adherents and find in the teacher the suitable instrument through which to reveal themselves.

The thought will occur to such a person: As a child, I worked upon myself through powers that worked in from the spiritual world, and what I can now give as my best must also work in from higher worlds; I must not regard it as belonging to my ordinary consciousness. Yes, such a person may say that something “demonic,” something like a “daimon”— but a “daimon” in the sense of a good spiritual power—is working from a spiritual world through me upon my adherents.

Socrates experienced something like this... Many efforts have been made to explain this “daimon” of Socrates. But one can explain it only if one wishes to give oneself over to the thought that Socrates was able to feel something like what is described in the above discussion.

You can see that the issue for me is to grasp the Socratic "daimon" from the anthroposophical point of view. There are many views about this Socratic “daimon.” One can find grounds for opposing my view just as well as these other views. But what does Max Dessoir do? Where I speak of Socrates, he twists the matter to seem that I am speaking about myself by stating, “as Mr. Rudolf Steiner confesses” and even putting my name in italics. What are we dealing with here? With nothing less, in fact, than an objective untruth. I leave it up to any fair thinker to form a judgment about a critic who employs such means.

[ 21 ] But the matter does not end there. For, after using my view of the Socratic “daimon” in the way just described, Dessoir writes further:

The fact, therefore, that the individual person is the bearer of supra-individual truths coarsens here to the picture that a spirit world, conceived as thing-like, is connected with the individual person by pipes or wires, so to speak: Hegel's objective spirit transforms itself into a group of demons and all the shadow shapes of an impure religious thinking arise again. The whole direction characterizes itself as a materialistic coarsening of soul processes and as a personifying leveling of spiritual values.

In the face of such “critique,” all possibility of serious discussion with the critic really ends. Just reflect what we have before us here. I speak of the “daimon” of Socrates, about which Socrates himself has spoken, according to historical references. Max Dessoir imputes to me the view that when one speaks of the demonic in this way, then "Hegel's objective spirit transforms itself into a group of demons ..." So Dessoir uses his strange deviation from the thoughts as they were truly meant, to instill in his reader the view that someone is justified in assuming about me that I see in Fegels objective spirit “a group of demons.”

Just place beside this Dessoirian assertion all that I present in my book The Riddles of Philosophy to keep at a distance from Hegel's view of the “objective spirit” everything that could possibly stamp this spirit with the character of the demonic. Anyone who, with respect to what I have presented about Hegel, would say that the proponent of anthroposophy has mental pictures by which Hegel's “objective spirit” transforms itself into a group of demons, any such person would be asserting an objective untruth. For, he cannot even hide behind the excuse that: Yes, Steiner does in fact present it differently, but I can only imagine that the Steinerian anthroposophical presuppositions lead to the conclusions I have just drawn. To say this, in fact, would only show that he is not in a position to understand my presentations on Hegel's “objective spirit.” After making his jump from Socrates to Hegel, Max Dessoir judges on: "Out of an inability to understand in accordance with the facts there spring forth these fantasies that are not inhibited by any scientific scruples...”

Whoever reads my books and then looks at Dessoir's representation of my views might perhaps feel, when confronted by such a statement, that I have some right to give it the following turn: From Max Dessoir, out of his inability to understand, in accordance with the facts, what I say in my books, there spring forth the most superficial, objectively untrue fantasies about the mental pictures of anthroposophy.

[ 22 ] Max Dessoir shares with his readers the fact that besides my Occult Science, an Outline, he has also “used a long series of other writings.” From the way his manner of “expressing” himself has been characterized here, one can hardly ascertain what he means by “using a long series” of my writings. I looked into the chapter on anthroposophy in his book to see which of my books—besides Occult Science, an Outline—show traces of “use.” I can only discover that this “long series” consists of three small books: The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind, consisting of 64 pages; Blood Is a Very Special Fluid, a reprint of a lecture that takes up all of 48 small pages; and the 46-page booklet Reincarnation and Karma. In addition he mentions The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894) in a footnote. However much it might go against my grain to respond to this footnote with a few purely personal remarks, I must still do so, because even such incidental matters display Max Dessoir's own particular level of scientific exactitude. He states: “In Steiner's first work The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Berlin 1894), only germs of his actual teachings are to be found...” Max Dessoir calls The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity my “first” work (Erstling). The truth is that my literary activity began with my introductions to Goethe's natural-scientific writings, the list volume of which appeared in 1883, i.e., eleven years before the date set by Dessoir for my “first” work. Preceding this “first” work are the extensive introductions to three volumes of Goethe's natural-scientific works, my Science of Knowing (1886), my book Goethe As Father of a New Aesthetics (1889), and Truth and Science (1892), which lays the foundation for my whole world view. I would not have mentioned this further case of Dessoir's strange apprehension of what he writes about if the fact were not that all the basic views contained in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity were already expressed in my earlier books and only represented them in a way that synthesized them and came to terms with the philosophical-epistemological views of the end of the nineteenth century. In The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I wished to express, in a systematic, organic form, what I had written in the previous (almost entire) decade of extensive publications of epistemological groundwork and its ethical-philosophical implications for a view aiming at a grasp of the spiritual world.

[ 23 ] After writing in this way about my “first” work, Max Dessoir continues to speak about it:

It is stated there that man has taken over into himself something from nature, and therefore through knowledge of his own being, can solve the riddle of nature; that, in thinking, a creative activity precedes knowing, whereas we are not involved in the coming about of nature and so are dependent on knowing it subsequently. Intuition counts here merely as the form in which a thought content at first appears.

Look and see whether there is anything in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that could be synthesized into such monstrously trivial statements. In my book, after an extensive discussion of other philosophical directions, I tried to show that, for man, full reality is not present to sense observation, that the world picture given by the senses, therefore, is an incomplete reality. I made every effort to demonstrate that the human organization causes this incompleteness. Nature does not hide from man what is missing from the sense-perceptible picture as its essential being; rather man is so constituted that through this constitution, at the level of merely observational knowing, he hides from himself the spiritual side of his world picture. In active thinking then, the opening up of this spiritual side begins. In active thinking, according to my world view, something real (spiritual) is directly present that cannot yet be given to mere observation. That is precisely what characterizes my epistemological foundation for a spiritual science: that in intuition—insofar as it comes to expression in thinking—I do not see “merely the forms in which a thought content at first appears.” So Max Dessoir wishes to present his readers with the opposite of what is actually expressed in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

[ 24 ] In order to see this, you need only look at the following thoughts from that book:

In thinking we are given the element that joins our particular individuality into one whole with the cosmos. Insofar as we sense and feel (and also perceive) we are separate entities; insofar as we think, we are the all-one-being that permeates everything ... The perception, therefore, is nothing finished, closed off; it is one side of total reality. The other side is the concept. The act of knowledge is the synthesis of perception and concept... In contrast to the content of perception, which is given to us from outside, thought content appears in our inner being. Let us call the form in which thought content at first arises "intuition." It is for thinking what observation is for perceptions. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge.

So, I say here: I wish to use “intuition” as an expression for the form in which the spiritual reality anchored in the thought content at first appears in the human soul, before the soul has recognized that in this conceptual inner experience there is contained the side of reality that is not yet given in the perception. Therefore, I say that intuition “is for thinking what observation is for perceptions.” So even when Max Dessoir seemingly presents someone's thoughts verbatim, he is able to twist what the other person means into its opposite. Dessoir has me say “Intuition counts here merely as the form in which a thought content at first appears.” He leaves out the following sentence, which makes nonsense of his use of the word “merely.” For me, intuition counts not “merely” as the “form in which a thought content at first appears,” but as the revelation of a spiritual-real element, just as the perception is a revelation of a material-real element. If I say “My watch appears at first as the content of my vest pocket; it measures time for me,” someone else cannot assert that I said: “The watch is ‘merely’ the content of my vest pocket.”

[ 25 ] In the context of what I have published, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity lays the epistemological foundation for the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science advocated by me. I explained this in the last chapter of my book The Riddles of Philosophy. I showed there how, in my view, a path leads straight from Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to anthroposophy. But Max Dessoir, through his non-use of my two-volume book, The Riddles of Philosophy, creates for himself the possibility of telling his readers all kinds of easily misunderstood stories about the “long series” of my three small books The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind, Blood Is a Very Special Fluid, and Reincarnation and Karma. In the first little book, I try to recognize how the powers of concrete spiritual beings are at work in the course of the spiritual development of mankind. I made it clear to my readers (at least I thought I did) that I am very conscious of how easily the content of precisely this book could be misunderstood. In the preface I state expressly that someone who picks up this book without having the prerequisite background would have to "regard it as the curious product of pure fantasy.” To be sure, in this preface I name only the content of Theosophy and Occult Science, An Outline as prerequisites. That was in 1911. In 1914 my book The Riddles of Philosophy was published as the second edition of my two-volume book Nineteenth-Century Views of Life and the World (1900 and 1901). In The Riddles of Philosophy I also described how the atomic theory arose and how researchers like Galileo (in my view) fit into the course of mankind's development; in this description, I did not refer to anything other than what is “clearly evident to everyone” relative to the origins of the atomic theory or Galileo's place in the history of science.⁴

My presentation, to be sure, is made in my own way; but in this presentation I refer to nothing other than is usual in any presentation of an outline of the history of philosophy. In my book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind the attempt I made was to show how that which I myself strove in another book to show as “evident to everyone” is the result of the powers of concrete spiritual beings at work in the course of human development. Taken out of its context in The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind, the relevant thought (in my opinion) can only be rendered in the following way: In the spiritual history of mankind, besides the forces that ordinary historical methods have found to be “clearly evident to everyone,” there are other powers (supersensible beings) working as well that are accessible only to spiritual-scientific research. And the powers of these beings work in accordance with specific, knowable laws. In the way in which man's cognitive powers work in that developmental period of mankind which I call the Egypto-Chaldean (from the fourth to the first pre-Christian millennium), one can recognize the powers of those beings who arise again in the age in which the atomic theory originates, but in a different form of activity. In the arising and further development of atomism I see those powers of spiritual beings at work that were already at work in a different way in the mode of thinking during the Egypto-Chaldean age.

Even someone who only goes into my books in a quite cursory way can find that through my anthroposophic viewpoint I do not assert the existence of spiritual powers at work in the course of man's development in order to obscure purely historical observations with all kinds of anthropomorphisms or analogies or in order to shift them into the twilight dimness of some false mysticism. Max Dessoir finds it possible, with respect to our topic here, to present his readers with these words:

No! Here even the most patient reporter can no longer hold his peace. It is evident to everyone how the atomic theory arose and developed consequentially since antiquity, and now someone comes along and calls for help from the mysterious great unknown!

Whoever reads The Riddles of Philosophy can see that what is evident to everyone is also presented by me in the way it is evident to everyone: and that—for those who are able to understand that what is evident to everyone contains something that is not evident to everyone—I am pointing to this something, which is accessible to spiritual vision. And I am not pointing to a “mysterious unknown,” but to something in fact that is known through the anthroposophical viewpoint.⁵

[ 26 ] I have shown that it is inadmissible for Max Dessoir to twist my reference to Socrates to mean that I was speaking of myself. But it is clear from the context that Max Dessoir is referring to none other than himself in his comment on page 34 of his book. In order to understand this comment, one must note that Dessoir distinguishes between two regions in the moment of consciousness: between a central field and a peripheral zone. He expounds on how the contents of consciousness move continuously from one of these regions to the other. It is only that these contents take on a particular appearance when they enter the peripheral zone. They lose sharpness, show fewer characteristics than usual, and become indistinct. The peripheral zone leads a marginal existence. But there are two ways that they attain independent activity. The first way does not pertain here. Dessoir expresses himself as follows about the second way:

The other kind of independence occurs in such a way that the peripheral zone does indeed remain as a co-consciousness beside the main consciousness, but lifts itself to a greater distinctness and coherency of its content and enters thereby into a completely new relation to the simultaneous fully conscious soul activity. To use another easily grasped picture: a complex glides from the center of a circle to the periphery, but does not sink into obscurity there but rather partly preserves its distinctness and coherency.

In connection with this, Dessoir then states:

An example: When I am lecturing on very familiar trains of thoughts, it sometimes happens to me that my concepts and words end up in that region and my attention occupies itself with other things. In spite of that, I speak on, without the participation of my consciousness, as it were. When this happens the following sometimes occurs: I am surprised by a sudden silence in the room and have to be reminded that it is due to the fact that I myself have stopped talking! Habitual mental connections and judgments, therefore, can also be made subconsciously, sometimes even those that move along invisibly; the movements of the organs of speech connected with them also run their course without difficulty in their usual groove.

To be sure, if I draw the full implications of this passage, I would rather believe that they do not refer to Dessoir's own experience but rather to something that he noticed in other absent-minded lecturers, and that he is only using the words “me” and “I” stylistically as though he were putting himself in someone else's place. The context in which these sentences occur makes this explanation difficult, to be sure, and possible only if one assumes that a stylistic device got in under Dessoir's guard, which does happen to many writers in our hurried times.

But however the case may be, the essential point is that a state of soul in which the “subconscious” plays a role like that just described in Dessoir's lecturer is the very first thing that must be overcome in the soul if a person wants to penetrate to an understanding of anthroposophical knowledge. The exact opposite—the thorough permeating of concepts with consciousness—is necessary if these concepts are to have a relation to the genuine spiritual world. In the sphere of anthroposophy a speaker who continues to speak when his “attention” is occupied “with other things” is an impossibility. For, someone who wants to grasp anthroposophy must have accustomed himself to not separating the direction of his attention from the direction of a train of thought that he is evoking. He will not go on speaking of things from which he has withdrawn his attention because he will no longer be thinking about these things.

[ 27 ] But if I only look at the way Max Dessoir reports to his readers on my little book Blood is a Very Special Fluid, the thought does occur to me that he not only speaks on when his attention turns to “other things,” but in such a state actually writes on. In his report you will find the following. My statement is quoted that our “blood takes up the pictures of the outer world that our brain has inwardized,” and then Dessoir adds the comment:

This kind of monstrous ignoring of all facts combines with the assertion—just as improvable as it is incomprehensible—that prehistoric man, in the “pictures that his blood received,” also remembered the experiences of his ancestors.

But if one reads in context the sentences that Dessoir quotes and put beside them the comment on the same page—'T must speak in analogies if I want to present the complicated processes that pertain here"—then one will perhaps understand in fact what it means when someone reports the way Dessoir does.

Picture what it would be like if I were writing about Max Dessoir's Beyond the Soul and told my readers: And now someone comes along and asserts that the blood "running in our veins" is “the blood of many millennia.” This is just as improvable as it is incomprehensible and has the same value as another assertion: “But beyond any doubt, behind the surface of our consciousness there is a dark, richly-filled space, whose changes also change the curvature of the surface.” These two sentences are in Dessoir's book, the second on page 1 and the first, about the “blood of millennia,” on page 12. Both sentences, of course, are fully justified because Max Dessoir is expressing himself “in analogies.” When I have to do the same and expressly state so, Dessoir forges for himself a critical weapon out of wooden iron to refute me.

Dessoir states that my reference to spiritual being, “on the whole, characterizes itself as a materialistic coarsening of soul processes and as an anthropomorphic leveling of spiritual values.” With respect to the contents of my books, this assertion makes about as much sense as the following would make: “A thinker who is capable of saying that ‘to use an admittedly very imperfect analogy, one can call the present moment of consciousness a circle, whose circumference is black, whose center is white, and whose intermediary areas are gradations of gray,’ such a thinker's view characterizes itself ‘on the whole ... as a materialistic coarsening of soul processes.’ And the thinker who is doing this grotesque thing—comparing the present moment of consciousness with a circle and speaking of white, gray, and black—is Max Dessoir.” Now it would of course never occur to me to say such things, because I know that Max Dessoir in this case is not coarsening soul processes in a materialistic manner. But what he does to me is like what I have just hypothetically characterized.

[ 28 ] You can see the total impossibility of discussing the meaning of the law of destiny from an anthroposophical viewpoint with a critic who bases himself on presuppositions like those of a Dessoir; I would have to cite whole chapters from my books here to show Dessoir's hair-raising distortions of my descriptions of human destiny when he says:

Here, supposedly, a connection between cause and effect in the spiritual world is revealed (so causality does not pertain only to the phenomenal world as grasped by the intellect). A person who perfects himself through a series of lifetimes is subject to the law of karma, according to which every deed brings its inevitable effects along with it; thus, for example, one's present poverty is one's own fault from an earlier life.

In 1887, in my introduction to the second volume of Goethe's natural-scientific work, I wrote:

The explaining of a process in nature is a going back to its determining factors: a seeking out of the producer in addition to the product that is given. When I perceive an effect and then seek its cause, these two perceptions do not by any means satisfy my need for explanation. I must go back to the laws by which this cause brings forth this effect. It is different with human action. Here the lawfulness that determines a phenomenon itself enters into action; that which makes a product itself appears upon the scene of activity. We have to do with a manifesting existence at which we can remain, for which we do not need to ask about deeper-lying determining factors.⁶

It is perfectly clear what I mean: One cannot ask about the determining factors of a human action in the same way as with a process of nature. So there must be a difference. Therefore, my views about destiny connections, which are closely related to those about the sources of human will, cannot refer to the relation between cause and effect spoken of in natural science. For this reason, in my book Theosophy, I took every pain to make clear that I am far from thinking that the experiences of one life work over into subsequent ones the way cause and effect work in nature. Max Dessoir distorts my picture of destiny in the crudest way by weaving into his report of it the statement: “So causality does not pertain only to the phenomenal world as grasped by the intellect.”

He creates for himself the possibility of adding this comment only by lifting out of my little book Reincarnation and Karma a statement that sums up a lengthier discussion. But only this discussion gives this statement its rightful meaning. The isolated form in which Dessoir presents this statement opens it to cheap criticism. The statement reads:

Everything that I have the ability for and actually do in my present life does not stand there isolated and alone as some kind of miracle, but it is connected with my soul's earlier forms of existence as effect, and with its later forms as cause.

Anyone who goes so far as to read this statement in the context of the discussion that it sums up will find that I understand the working over of one form of life into the other in such a way that one cannot put it in the category of causality in the usual, purely natural-scientific sense. One can only use the abbreviated term “causality” in a broader sense if one explains exactly what one means by it or if one can safely assume that the reader already knows how the word is being used. What precedes my summing-up sen57 fence, however, will not allow this sentence to be understood in any other way than:

Everything that I have the ability for and actually do in my present life is connected, as effect, with my soul's earlier forms of existence to the extent that the causes (lying in my present life) of my abilities and actions relate to the other forms of my life in a kind of connection that is not causality in the ordinary sense; and everything that I have the ability for and actually do is connected with my soul's later forms of existence to the extent that these abilities and deeds are the cause of effects in my present life that now in their turn relate to the content of later forms of my life in a kind of connection that again is not causality in the ordinary sense.

Anyone who investigates my writings will see that I have never advocated a concept of karma that is incompatible with the picture of man's free being. Dessoir could have noticed this fact even if he had not “used” more of my writings than what stands in my Occult Science, An Outline:

Anyone who believes that human freedom is not compatible with predetermination of the future configuration of things should reflect that man's free action in the future depends just as little upon how the predetermined things will be, as freedom depends upon the fact that/he plans in one year to live in the house whose blueprints he is drawing up now.

For even if these statements do not relate directly to the circumstances of human earthly lives, still, someone could not write them who believes that the destinies of our earthly lives relate to each other in a way that corresponds to the law of causality in the natural-scientific sense.

[ 29 ] Nowhere in Dessoir's book can one see that he made any effort to investigate the way I build the epistemological and general philosophical foundation—in accordance also with natural-scientific views—of the anthroposophy advocated by me. Instead, he makes assertions that do not have even distant reference points in my writings. For example, on page 296f. of his book, he writes:

We hear that medieval medicine—still totally under this spell—divided up man according to the zodiac and saw in the hand with its fingers subdivisions of the heaven's proportions. Or we read in Rudolf Steiner that before fertilization the plant is in the same situation that the whole earth was before its separation from the sun. These are examples of the basic principle of seeing in small things a copy of great cosmic processes.⁷

But even if Max Dessoir's statements were just as correct as they are actually false they would still serve the purpose of lumping my anthroposophical viewpoint together with all kinds of dilettantish goings-on that manifest today as mysticism, theosophy, and the like. In reality, this assertion of Dessoir's—all by itself—proves fully that this critic approaches my anthroposophy without any understanding either for its philosophical foundation or its methods— or even, in fact, for the form of expression of its results. Basically, Dessoir's critique is no different than many other “responses” to which the anthroposophy advocated by me is prey. Coming to terms with them is unfruitful because they do not critique what they claim to be judging, but rather a caricature arbitrarily drawn by them that is then quite easy to attack. It seems quite impossible to me that anyone who sees what I value in anthroposophy could put it, as Dessoir does, together with a literary, unintended burlesque like the Faust books of J. A. Louvier, with the repulsive racial mysticism of Guido List, with Christian Science, or even with everything that Dessoir calls "NeoBuddhism."

I leave it up to those who really want to learn to know my books to judge whether Max Dessoir is justified in saying of them:

It betrays an undemanding thinking when someone requires merely that the reader acknowledge what he is reading, as not contrary to reason (for, in a broader sense, much is possible that remains improbable and fruitless); or when things are nowhere investigated, questioned, doubted, or weighed but only dictated from on high in the form, “occult science says such and such.”

Or what about a statement like: “Unsuspecting readers might be taken in by the examples sprinkled about or by the purported explanations of certain experiences ...” It can at best make me think that "unsuspecting readers" of Dessoir's book might be taken in by the quotations from my books that Dessoir sprinkles about and interprets nonsensically or by the nice trivializing of my thoughts.

If, in spite of the fruitlessness to which a discussion with this critic is doomed from the beginning, I nevertheless undertake one here, it is because I had to show once again, with an example, the kind of judgment encountered by what I call anthroposophy; and because there are altogether too many “unsuspecting readers" who form judgments about such a spiritual striving from books like Dessoir's without acquainting themselves with what is being judged, and without even an inkling of the true nature of what is being caricatured for them.

[ 30 ] I will also not judge, but leave it up to the readers of my books to judge, what significance it has when someone like Dessoir, who is far from understanding my goals and who reads the books he is judging the way he does, asserts "from on high" that I “care about certain connections with science,” but possess “no inner relation to the spirit of science.”

[ 31 ] It would almost have been a miracle for Max Dessoir's whole approach for him not to have added to everything else the statement: “Indeed the bulk of his disciples renounce fully any work of their own in thinking.” How often do those people have to hear this (whom one likes to call my “disciples”)! Certainly there are “disciples” of dubious character in every spiritual endeavor. But the point is whether they and not others perhaps are characteristic of the endeavor. What does Max Dessoir know about my “disciples”? What does he know about the number of them who are not only far from renouncing any work of their own in thinking but who—after recognizing through their work in thinking the scientific inadequacy of world views of the stripe of Dessoir's—do not disdain to draw impulses from endeavors by which, as well as I can, I am seeking a methodical path by which to penetrate a little way into the spiritual world. Perhaps a time is also coming when one will judge more correctly those present-day people who can accomplish enough work in thinking not to belong to Max Dessoir's “unsuspecting readers.”^{8 9}

• 1. Pages 254-263 of his book, Vom Jenseits der Seele, die Geheiniwissenschafien in kritischer Betrachtung; Beyond the Soul, A Critical View of the Arcane Sciences, by Max Dessoir, Ferdinand Enke Press, Stuttgart, 1917.
• 2. Please see my book Theosophy, an Introduction into Knowledge of the Supersensible World and Human Destiny. In my book Occult Science, an Outline, there is a similar presentation about seeing colors. And now we are faced with the unbelievable fact that Max Dessoir cites this book as one of the writings that he supposedly used. He asserts, therefore, that I say something the exact opposite of which stands in the book he is citing!
• 3. One could perhaps point to something here that is not taken into consideration in those circles that often want to judge anthroposophical endeavors in terms of their philosophical and scientific validity. I do not want to leave out this point, because the opinion could easily arise in some people that what I am bringing against Dessoir is a much too pedantic insistence upon my actual words. In anthroposophy we are dealing with descriptions of the spiritual. In doing so, one must use the words and even the word combinations of ordinary language. But it is absolutely the case that one cannot always find adequate terminology for that toward which the soul directs its attention when it observes something spiritual. The relationships that hold sway in the spiritual realm and the particular nature of what one can call the beings and occurrences there are much more complicated, subtle, and manifold than what comes to expression in our ordinary use of language. One attains the goal only if one avails oneself of the linguistic potential of sentence structure and word transformation, and if one strives to bring to expression through a second sentence—in connection with the first—something that one cannot adequately express in one sentence. To understand anthroposophy it is absolutely necessary to enter into such matters. The case can arise, for example, that a spiritual state of affairs is seen in a completely skewed way if the form of expression is not regarded as essential to it. Dessoir has not even come close to recognizing the need to take such things into consideration. He seems to assume everywhere that what is incomprehensible to him is based upon childish thinking and the primitive method of the other person.
• 4. I also spoke of Galileo in the introductions and annotations to Goethe's natural-scientific works (Goethean Science).
• 5. Please forgive me for borrowing from mathematics an analogy for the Dessoirian kind of critique. Suppose that, in the context of logarithms someone says: two numbers are multiplied when you add their logarithms and seek the antilogarithm of their sum as their product. Then someone comes along and says: “No! Everyone knows how numbers are multiplied and here is a person talking about addition!” Max Dessoir's critique is of this sort in the above case.
• 6. Please see page 151 of Goethean Science. Ed.
• 7. Max Dessoir writes this in reference to statements at the end of Occult Science, An Outline. He has not even come close to understanding what I said there. Otherwise the thought could never have occurred to him that the matter could have anything at all to do with his dilettantish method of seeking "correspondences" between widely separated facts. Any unprejudiced person must see that what I say about the separation of the sun and earth on the one hand and fertilization of the plant on the other can be discovered in a completely independent way, without setting out to discover “correspondences.” One could just as well say that the physicist is seeking “correspondences” when he investigates the polar-opposite facts of the anode and cathode. But Max Dessoir is far from understanding that the method employed by me has nothing to do with what he is attacking, but rather is totally in the mode of a natural-scientific thinking applied to the realm of spirit.
• 8. Only the fact that Dessoir is in no position to really form an adequate picture of anthroposophical striving can explain why he cannot enter with understanding for these strivings, even into areas very close to where his own train of thought lands him. A case in point is the area he points to in two sentences from his book: “There is nothing beyond the soul in the sense of an invisible reality, because the spiritual state of affairs is raised above the existence of things as well as of persons. What is objectively beyond the soul may be regarded as a supra-consciousness, but never as something existing spatially outside the soul.” Dessoir does not see that with such statements he does not provide a refutation, but rather a precise proof of the necessity for anthroposophy. He does not see that everywhere in my books the attempt is made to treat the relevant questions as questions of consciousness. Please take note of how this attempt is carried through precisely in my Occult Science, on Outline, for example. But Dessoir just cannot see that through this the whole cognitive process, with respect to the spiritual world, is made into an inner function of consciousness and that, within consciousness itself, other forms of consciousness must be sought in an experiential way that are not concerned in fact with “something existing spatially outside the soul,” but are concerned with the soul's presence within an existent something that is non-spatial in exactly the same sense as the experiences of ordinary consciousness themselves are already non-spatial. To be sure, someone who wants to understand this must be able to do justice in an anthroposophical sense to a statement like that of Friedrich Theodor Vischer in the first part of his book Old and New (Altes und Neues ): “The soul, to be sure, as the uppermost unity of all processes, cannot be localized in the body, even though it is nowhere else than in the body...” This statement belongs to those that lead to the borderland of our ordinary knowing, in the sense of chapter 1 of this book and in the sense of Addendum 1: The Philosophical Validation of Anthroposophy.
• 9. Please see Dessoir's response to this essay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ 1 ] Anyone who wishes his cognitive approach to be grounded in the philosophical thinking of the present day must justify epistemologically—to himself and to that thinking—the actual soul element referred to in the first chapter of this book. Of the people who recognize the real soul element from direct inner experience and who know how to distinguish it from soul experiences caused by the senses, few are asking for any such justification. Such justification often seems to them to be an unnecessary or even bothersome conceptual hairsplitting. Contrasting with their kind of aversion is the antipathy of philosophical thinkers. They want to regard our inner experience of the soul element as merely subjective, with no claim to scientific value. They therefore have little inclination, in the realm of their philosophical concepts, to seek the elements by which to approach anthroposophical ideas. This aversion, coming from both sides, makes understanding extraordinarily difficult. For, in our time, a scientific value can be ascribed to a cognitive approach only if this approach can validate its views before the same tribunal at which natural-scientific laws seek their justification.

For an epistemological justification of anthroposophical ideas, the essential point is to express in the most exact possible concepts the way these ideas are experienced. We can do this in the most varied ways. Let us attempt to describe two of these ways here. As to the first way, let us start with a consideration of memory. In doing so, we encounter at once a problematical point in modern philosophical knowledge. For, very few clear concepts about the nature of memory are operative there. I will take my start from ideas which, it is true, I have discovered on anthroposophical paths, but which can be thoroughly substantiated by philosophy and physiology. The space I can allow myself in this book, to be sure, is not sufficient for such a substantiation. I hope to present one in a future book. I believe, however, that anyone able to grasp the current findings of physiology and psychology correctly will find what I am going to say about memory to be well-founded.

The mental pictures stimulated by sense impressions enter the realm of unconscious human experience. From there, these pictures can be brought back up; they can be remembered. Mental pictures are of a purely soul nature; but consciousness of them in ordinary waking life is dependent upon the body. Furthermore, the soul bound to the body cannot, through the soul's own forces, lift these pictures out of their unconscious state into a conscious one. For this the soul needs the forces of the body. In ordinary memory the body must be active, just as it must be active in order for sensory pictures to arise in the processes of the sense organs. For me to see a sense-perceptible occurrence, a bodily activity must first develop within the sense organs; produced by them, a picture arises in the soul. For me to remember such a picture, an inner bodily activity (in delicate organs), which is the polar opposite of sense activity, must occur, and as a consequence, the remembered picture arises in the soul. This picture is connected to a sense-perceptible occurrence that stood before my soul in the past. I picture this occurrence through an inner experience that my bodily organization makes possible. Now focus on the nature of such a memory picture. For, through this one can grasp the nature of anthroposophical ideas. These ideas are not memory pictures; but they appear in the soul in the same way as memory pictures do. This is a disappointment for many people who would like to acquire pictures of the spiritual world in a more robust form. But one cannot experience the spiritual world in a form more substantial than that in which, in memory, one experiences a past sense-perceptible event that is no longer visible to one. Now this ability to remember such an event stems from the power of our bodily organization. This organization must play no part, however, in our experience of the actual soul element. Rather, the soul must awaken within itself the ability to accomplish with mental pictures what the body accomplishes with sensory pictures when it conveys the recollection of these sensory pictures. Such mental pictures—which are brought up from the depths of the soul entirely by the power of the soul just as memory pictures are raised from the depths of human nature by our bodily organization— are mental pictures that relate to the spiritual world. They are present in every soul. What must be acquired in order for us to become aware of their presence is the power, purely through the activation of our soul, to bring these mental pictures up from the depths of the soul. As remembered sensory pictures relate to a past sense impression, so these mental pictures relate to a connection—not present in the sense world—of the soul with the spiritual world. The human soul stands in the same relation to the spiritual world as a person ordinarily does to a forgotten reality; and the soul comes to know this world when it awakens powers within itself that are similar to the bodily powers which serve memory.

The essential point, therefore, in the philosophical justification of ideas about the true soul element, is to investigate our inner life in such a way that we find within it an activity which is purely of a soul nature but yet in a certain respect is similar to the activity unfolded in remembering.

[ 2 ] A second way to form a concept of a purely soul element is this. One can focus upon the findings of anthropology when it observes a person exercising will (acting). To begin with, the mental picture of the deed underlies the intended will impulse. This mental picture is known physiologically to be dependent upon the bodily organization (the nervous system). A nuance of feeling, a feeling of sympathy with what is pictured, is connected with the mental picture, and causes the mental picture to provide the impulse for action. But then the soul experience loses itself in the depths and only the result arises again consciously. The human being sees how he moves his body in order to perform what he has pictured. (Th. Ziehen has presented all this with particular clarity in his physiological psychology.)

One can see from this how, when an act of will comes into question, our conscious life in mental pictures ceases with respect to the intermediary element of will. What is experienced in the soul as we will an action performed by the body does not enter our ordinary conscious life of mental pictures. But it is also obvious that such a will impulse realizes itself through the activity of the body. It is also not difficult to recognize that the soul unfolds a will activity when, following logical laws, it seeks truth by connecting mental pictures to each other; a will activity that physiological laws cannot encompass. Otherwise, an illogical connection of mental pictures—or even a merely a-logical one— could not be distinguished from one that takes a logically lawful course. (Dilettantish claims that logical deduction is merely a characteristic acquired by the soul through adaptation to the outer world is not worthy of serious consideration.) In this will activity, which runs its course purely within the soul, and which leads to logically grounded convictions, we can see a permeation of the soul with a purely spiritual activity. Our ordinary mental picturing knows as little what occurs in our outward directed will as a sleeping person knows about himself. But we are also not as fully conscious of the logical determining factors by which we form our convictions as we are of the actual content of our convictions. Anyone who knows, even anthropologically, how to observe inwardly is able, after all, in ordinary consciousness, to recognize the presence of logical determinants. He will realize that the human being knows this logical determination the way he knows something in dreams. One is totally justified in declaring the correctness of the paradox: ordinary consciousness knows the content of its convictions; but it only dreams the logical lawfulness that lives in the seeking of these convictions. We can see: in ordinary consciousness we sleep through the will element when unfolding will to act outwardly through the body; we dream through our will activity when seeking convictions through thinking. And we know, in fact, that in this latter case what we are dreaming cannot be of a bodily nature, for then logical laws would have to coincide with physiological laws. If we form the concept of a will activity living in a thinking quest for truth, then we are conceiving of something with real soul being.

From these two epistemological approaches to the concept of real soul being in an anthroposophical sense (other approaches are also possible), we can see how far removed this essential soul being is from anything in the nature of abnormal soul activity such as visionary, hallucinatory, or mediumistic states. For, the source of all such abnormalities must be sought in the physiological realm. The soul element described by anthroposophy, however, is not only of the same kind as our soul experiences in normal healthy consciousness; within the full waking consciousness of mental picturing, we can also experience this soul element in a way similar to that of remembering past events in our life, or of arriving at convictions that are logically determined. From this we can see clearly that anthroposophy's cognitive experience runs its course in mental pictures that retain the character of ordinary consciousness which is endowed with reality from the outer world; and to this ordinary consciousness anthroposophy adds abilities that lead into the spiritual realm; everything of a visionary, hallucinatory nature, on the other hand, lives in a consciousness that adds nothing to our ordinary one but that takes abilities away from this ordinary consciousness, causing our state of consciousness to sink below the level present in conscious sense perception. For those readers who know what I have written in other books about memory and recollection, I would like to add the following. The mental pictures that have entered our unconscious and can be recollected later are to be found—as mental pictures during the time they are unconscious— within that part of the human being which in those books is called the life body (etheric body). The activity, however, through which the mental pictures anchored in the life body are recollected belongs to the physical body. I add this comment so that those who are quick to jump to conclusions will not construe as a contradiction what is in fact a distinction demanded by the nature of the case.

[ 1 ] Thinkers who strive with all their strength to gain the kind of relation to true reality that is demanded by the inner nature of the human being discuss a great number of the limits to knowledge referred to on page 16ff.; and if one looks at the nature of these discussions, one can see quite clearly that the thrust experienced by genuine thinkers in their encounter with such "limits" is in the direction of that inner soul experience which is the subject of this first essay. Take a look, for example, at the way the gifted thinker Friedrich Theodore Vischer, in the important essay he wrote on Johannes Volkelt's book Dream Fantasy, describes the cognitive experience he had in the encounter with one such limit:

“No spirit where there is no nerve center, where there is no brain,” declare our opponents. “No nerve center, no brain,” we reply, “if not evolved from below upward, through innumerable levels.” It is easy to speak scornfully of mind (spirit) hovering about in granite and limestone, no more difficult than it would be for us to ask scornfully how protein in the brain can wing its way up to ideas. Measuring the different levels defies human knowledge. It will forever remain a secret how it happens that nature—beneath whose surface, after all, the spirit must be slumbering—stands there as so complete a counterstroke of the spirit that we bruise ourselves against it; this separation seems so absolute that Hegel's formulation, as brilliant as it is, of something “other than,” or “outside of,” oneself is as good as meaningless and only hides the extreme nature of this wall of seeming separation. One does find in Fichte's work a true recognition of the cutting edge and blows of this counterstroke, but no explanation for it.

(See Friedrich Theodore Vischer, Views Old and New, 1881.) Friedrich Theodore Vischer points vigorously to one of the places to which anthroposophy must also point. But the fact does not enter his consciousness that at such a borderland of knowledge a different form of knowing activity can enter. He wishes to live at these borderlands in the same kind of knowing activity which sufficed for him before he arrived at them. Anthroposophy attempts to show that science does not end where our ordinary knowing activity gets “bruised,” where these “cuts and blows” occur in the counterstroke of reality; anthroposophy tries to show that the experiences resulting from these “bruises, cuts, and blows” lead to the development of a different kind of knowing activity, which transforms the counterthrust of reality into a spiritual perception that, to begin with, on its first level, is comparable to tactile perception in the sense world.

In the third section of Views Old and New, Friedrich Theodore Vischer states: “Good, there is no soul alongside of the body (Vischer means for the materialist); thus, precisely what we make a point of calling ‘matter’—at the highest level of its formation known to us: in the brain—becomes soul, and the soul evolves into spirit. We are supposed to form a concept [of matter], which to the analyzing intellect is in complete contradiction with itself.” Again anthroposophy must reply to Vischer's presentation: Good, for the intellect that breaks things down into their component parts, there is a contradiction here; but for the soul, this contradiction becomes the point of departure for an activity of knowing at which the analyzing intellect halts because this intellect experiences the “counterstroke” of spiritual reality.

[ 2 ] Gideon Spicker, who, besides a number of other astute books, has also written Philosophical Confessions of a Former Capuchin Monk (1910), points to one of the borderlands of our ordinary knowing activity (using words that are certainly vivid enough):

No matter what one's philosophy is, whether dogmatic or skeptical, empirical or transcendental, critical or eclectic, they all, without exception, take their start from an unproven and improvable premise: the essentiality of thinking. No investigation will ever get behind this essentiality, no matter how deep it may dig. This essentiality must be accepted unconditionally and cannot be substantiated by anything; any attempt to prove its validity only presupposes this essentiality. Under it there gapes a bottomless abyss, a frightful darkness unlit by any ray of light. We do not know, therefore, where it comes from or where it is leading. Whether a merciful God or an evil demon has laid this essentiality into our reason is equally uncertain.

Thus, even the contemplation of thinking itself leads the thinker to the limits of ordinary knowledge. Anthroposophy sets in with its knowing activity at these Emits; it knows that essentiality confronts the abilities (art) of intellectual thinking like an impenetrable wall. For a thinking that the thinker experiences, however, the impenetrability of this wall disappears; this experienced thinking finds a light with which to illuminate and look into the “darkness unlit by any ray of light” of a merely intellectual thinking; and the “bottomless abyss” is so only for the realm of sense perception; anyone who does not halt at this abyss but dares to proceed with thinking even when this thinking must set aside what the sense world has inserted into it, such a person finds a spiritual reality in this “bottomless abyss.”

[ 3 ] We could continue indefinitely like this, presenting the experiences that serious thinkers have at the limits of knowledge.

Such examples would show that anthroposophy is the natural result of the evolution of present-day thought. Many things point to anthroposophy if these many things are seen in the right light.