The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] When the human soul consciously enters the elemental world, it finds itself obliged to change many of the ideas which it acquired in the physical world; but if the soul strengthens its forces to a corresponding degree, it will be quite fit for the change. Only if it shrinks from the effort of this acquiring strength, may it be seized by the feeling of losing, on entering the elemental world, the firm basis on which it must build up its inner life. The ideas which are gained in the physical world only offer an impediment to entering the elemental world as long as we try to keep them in exactly the same form in which we gained them. There is, however, no reason except habit for adhering to them in this way. It is also quite natural that the consciousness, which at first only lives in the physical world, should be accustomed to look upon the form of its ideas which it has shaped there, as the only possible one. And it is even more than natural, it is necessary. The life of the soul would never attain its inner solidarity, its necessary stability, if it did not develop a consciousness in the physical world which in a certain respect lived in fixed ideas, rigorously forced upon it. Through everything which life in the physical world can give the soul, is it able to enter the elemental world in such a way that it does not lose its independence and firmness of nature there. Strengthening and reinforcement of the life of the soul must be gained in order that that independence may not only be present as an unconscious quality of the soul on entering the elemental world, but may also be kept clearly in the consciousness. If the soul is too weak for conscious experience in the elemental world, on entering it the independence vanishes, just as a thought does which is not imprinted with sufficient clearness on the soul to live on as a distinct memory. In this case the soul cannot really enter the supersensible world at all with its consciousness. When it makes the attempt to enter, it is again and again thrown back into the physical world, by the being living within the soul which may be called the guardian of the threshold. And even if the soul has, so to speak, nibbled at the supersensible world, so that on sinking back into the physical world it retains something of the supersensible in its consciousness, such spoil from another sphere often only causes confusion in the life of thought. It is quite impossible to fall into such confusion if the faculty of sound judgment, as it may be acquired in the physical world, be adequately cultivated. By thus reinforcing the faculty of judgment, the soul will develop the right relation to the events and beings of super-sensible worlds. For in order to live consciously in those worlds, an attitude of the soul is necessary which cannot be developed in the physical world with the same intensity with which it appears in supersensible worlds. This is the attitude of surrender to what is being experienced. We must steep ourselves in the experience and identify ourselves with it; and we must be able to do this to such a degree that we see ourselves outside our own being and feel ourselves within some other being. A transformation of our own being into the other with which we are having the experience must take place. If we do not possess this faculty of transformation, we cannot experience anything genuine in supersensible worlds. For there all experience is due to our being able to realise this feeling, “Now I am transformed in a certain definite way; now I am vitally present in a being which through its nature transforms mine in this particular way.” This transformation of self, this conscious projection of oneself into other beings, is life in supersensible worlds. By this process of conscious self-projection into others, we learn to know the beings and events of those worlds. We come to notice that with one being we have a certain degree of affinity; but that, by virtue of our own nature, we are further removed from another. Variations of inner experience come into view, which, especially in the elemental world, we must call sympathies and antipathies. For on encountering a being or event of the elemental world, we feel an experience emerging in the soul which may be denoted sympathy. By this experience we recognise the nature of the elemental being or event. But we must not think that experiences of sympathy and antipathy are only of account in proportion to their intensity or degree. In the physical world it is indeed in a certain sense true that we only speak of a strong or weak sympathy or antipathy as the case may be. In the elemental world, sympathies and antipathies are not only distinguishable by their intensity, but also in the same way as, for instance, colours may be distinguished from each other in the physical world. Just as we have a physical world of many colours, so can we experience an elemental world containing many sympathies or antipathies. It has also to be taken into account that antipathy in the elemental realm does not carry with it the meaning that we inwardly turn away from the thing so described; by antipathetic we simply mean a quality of the elemental being or event which bears a similar relation to the sympathetic quality of another event or being as does blue to red in the physical world.

[ 2 ] We may speak of a “sense” which man is able to awaken for the elemental world in his etheric body. This sense is capable of perceiving sympathies and antipathies in the elemental world just as the eye becomes aware of colours and the ear of sounds in the physical world. And just as there one object is red and another blue, so the beings of the elemental world are such that one radiates a certain kind of sympathy, and another a certain kind of antipathy to our spiritual sight.

[ 3 ] This experience of the elemental world through sympathies and antipathies is again something not confined to the clairvoyantly awakened soul; it is always at hand for every human soul, being part of its nature. But in the ordinary life of the soul the knowledge of this part of human nature is not developed. Man bears within him his etheric body; and through it is connected in manifold ways with beings and events of the elemental world. At one moment of his life he is woven with sympathies and antipathies into the elemental world in one way; at another moment in another way.

[ 4 ] The soul, however, cannot continuously so live as an etheric being that sympathies and antipathies are always active and clearly expressed within it. Just as waking life alternates with sleep in physical existence, so does a different state contrast with that of experiencing sympathies and antipathies in the elemental world. The soul may withdraw from all sympathies and antipathies and experience itself alone, regarding and feeling merely its own being. Indeed, this feeling may reach such a degree of intensity that we may speak of willing our own being. It is then a question of a condition of the soul's life not easy to describe, because in its pure, original nature it is of such a kind that nothing in the physical world resembles it except the strong, unalloyed ego-feeling or feeling of self in the soul. As far as the elemental world is concerned we may describe this state as one in which the soul feels the impulse to say to itself with regard to the necessary surrender to experiences of sympathy and antipathy: “I will keep entirely to myself and within myself.” And by a species of development of will the soul wrenches itself free from the state of surrender to the elemental experiences of sympathy and antipathy. This life in the self is, as it were, the sleeping state of the elemental world; whereas the surrender to events and beings is the waking state. When the human soul is awake in the elemental world and develops a wish to experience itself only, that is to say, feels the need of elemental sleep, it can obtain this by returning to the waking state of physical life with a fully developed feeling of self. For such experience, saturated with the feeling of self, in the physical world is synonymous with elemental sleep. It consists in the soul's being torn away from elemental experiences. It is literally true that to clairvoyant consciousness the life of the soul in the physical world is a spiritual sleep.

[ 5 ] When awakening to the supersensible world takes place in rightly developed human clairvoyance, the memory of the soul's experiences in the physical world still remains. It must remain, otherwise other beings and events would be present in clairvoyant consciousness, but not the clairvoyant's own being. We should in that case have no knowledge of ourselves; we should not be living in the spirit ourselves; but other beings and events would be living in our soul. Taking this into consideration, it will be clear that rightly developed clairvoyance must lay great stress on the cultivation of a strong ego-feeling. This ego-feeling developed with clairvoyance is by no means something which only enters the soul through clairvoyance; it is merely that we get to know that which always exists in the depths of the soul, but which remains unknown to the soul's ordinary life as it runs its course in the physical world.

[ 6 ] The strong ego-feeling is not there through the etheric body as such, but through the soul which experiences itself in the physical body. If the soul does not bring that feeling with it into the clairvoyant state from its experience in the physical world, it will prove insufficiently equipped for experience in the elemental world.

[ 7 ] On the other hand, it is essential for human consciousness within the physical world that the soul's feeling of self, its experience of the ego, although it must exist, should be modified. By this means it is possible for the soul to undergo within the physical world training for the noblest of moral forces, that of fellow-feeling, or feeling with another. If the strong ego-feeling were to project itself into the soul's conscious experiences within the physical world, moral impulses and ideas could not develop in the right way. They could not bring forth the fruit of love. But the faculty of self-surrender, a natural impulse in the elemental world, is not to be put on a par with what is called love in human experience. Elemental self-surrender means experiencing oneself in another being or event; love is the experiencing another being in one's own soul. In order to develop the latter experience, the feeling of self, or ego-experience, present in the depths of the soul, must have, as it were, a veil drawn over it; and in consequence of the soul's own forces being thus dulled, one is able to feel within oneself the sorrows and joys of the other being: love, which is the source of all genuine morality in human life, springs up. Love is the most important result for man of his experience in the physical world. If we analyse the nature of love or fellow-feeling, we find it is the way in which spiritual reality is expressed in the physical world. It has already been said that it is in the nature of what is supersensible to become transformed into something else. If what is spiritual in man as he lives the physical life becomes so transformed that it dulls the ego-feeling and lives again as love, the spiritual remains true to its own elemental laws. We may say that on becoming clairvoyantly conscious the human soul awakes in the spiritual world; but we must say just as much that in love the spiritual awakens in the physical world. Where love and fellow-feeling are stirring in life, we sense the tragic breath of the spirit, interpenetrating the physical world. [In the preceding sentence, the translation of the German “Zauberhauch” is “tragic breath” ... a better translation might be, “magic touch.”—e.Ed] Hence rightly developed clairvoyance can never weaken sympathy or love. The more completely the soul becomes at home in spiritual worlds, the more it feels lovelessness and lack of fellow-feeling to be a denial of spirit itself.

[ 8 ] The experiences of consciousness which is becoming clairvoyant, manifest special peculiarities with regard to what has just been stated. Whereas the ego-feeling—necessary as it is for experience in supersensible worlds—is easily deadened, and often behaves like a weak, fading thought in the memory, feelings of hatred and lovelessness, and immoral impulses become intense experiences immediately after entering the supersensible world. They appear before the soul like reproaches come to life, and become terribly real pictures. In order not to be tormented by them, clairvoyant consciousness often has recourse to the expedient of looking about for spiritual forces which weaken the impressions of these pictures. But by doing so the soul steeps itself in these forces, which have an injurious effect on the newly-won clairvoyance. They drive it out of the good regions of the spiritual world, and towards the bad ones.

[ 9 ] On the other hand, true love and real kindness of heart are experiences of the soul which strengthen the forces of consciousness in the way necessary for acquiring clairvoyance. When it is said that the soul needs preparation before it is able to have experiences in the supersensible world, it should be added that one of the many means of preparation is the capacity for true love, and the disposition towards genuine human kindness and fellow-feeling.

[ 10 ] An over-developed ego-feeling in the physical world works against morality. An ego-feeling too feebly developed causes the soul, around which the storms of elemental sympathies and antipathies are actually playing, to be lacking in inner firmness and stability. These qualities can only exist when a sufficiently strong ego-feeling is working out of the experiences of the physical world upon the etheric body, which of course remains unknown in ordinary life. But in order to develop a really moral temper of mind it is necessary that the ego-feeling, though it must exist, should be moderated by feelings of good-fellowship, sympathy, and love.

[ 1 ] In order to understand the mutual relations of the various worlds, we must take into account the fact that a force which in one world is bound to develop activity in conformity with the order of the universe, may, when it comes to be developed in another world, be directed against that order. Therefore it is necessary for man's being that there should exist in his etheric body the two opposing forces, the capacity for transformation into other beings, and the strong ego-feeling, or feeling of self. Neither of these forces of the human soul can be unfolded in physical existence except in a deadened form. In the elemental world they exist in such a way as to make man's being possible by their mutual balance, just as sleep and the waking state make human life in the physical world possible. The relation of two such opposing forces can never be that of one effacing the other, but must be of such a kind that both are developed and act upon each other in the way of balance or compensation.

Now it is only in the elemental world that the ego-feeling and the capacity for transformation act upon each other in the way indicated; the physical world can only be worked upon, in conformity with the order of the universe, by the result of these two forces in their mutual relationship and cooperation. If the capacity for transformation which it is necessary for a person to possess in his etheric body were to extend in the same degree to physical existence, he would feel himself in his soul as something which in considering his physical body he is not. The physical body gives man in its own world a certain fixed stamp, by means of which he is put into that world as a particular personal being. He is not put into the elemental world with his etheric body in this manner. In the elemental world, in order to be a human being in the full sense, he must be able to assume the most varied forms. If this were impossible to him, he would be condemned to complete isolation in the elemental world; he would not be able to know about anything in it except himself; for he would not feel himself related to any other being or event. This, in the elemental world would be equivalent to the non-existence of those beings or events, as far as such a person was concerned.

If, however, the human soul were to develop in the physical world the capacity for transformation necessary for the elemental world, its personal identity would be lost. Such a soul would be living in contradiction with itself. In the physical world, the capacity for transformation must be a power at rest in the depths of the soul; a power which gives the soul its fundamental tone or keynote, but which does not come to development in that world.

Clairvoyant consciousness has therefore to live itself into the capacity for transformation; if it were not able to do this, it could make no observations in the elemental world. It thus acquires a faculty which it should only bring to bear so long as it knows itself to be in the elemental world, and which it must suppress as soon as it returns to the physical world. Clairvoyant consciousness must ever observe the boundary of the two worlds, and must not use in the physical world faculties adapted for a supersensible world. If the soul, knowing itself to be in the physical world, were to allow the capacity for transformation possessed by its etheric body to go on working, ordinary consciousness would become filled with conceptions which do not correspond to any being in the physical world. Confusion would reign in the life of the soul's thought. Observation of the boundary between the worlds is a necessary presupposition for the right working of clairvoyant consciousness. One who wants to acquire this consciousness must be careful that no disturbing element creeps into his ordinary consciousness through his knowledge of supersensible worlds.

If we learn to know the guardian of the threshold we know the state of our soul with regard to the physical world, and whether it is strong enough to banish from physical consciousness the forces and faculties, belonging to supersensible worlds, which should not be allowed to be active in ordinary consciousness. If the supersensible world is entered without the self-knowledge brought about by the guardian of the threshold, we may be overwhelmed by the experiences of that world. These experiences may thrust themselves into physical consciousness as illusive pictures. In that case they assume the character of sense-perceptions, and the necessary consequence is that the soul takes them for realities when they are not so. Rightly developed clairvoyance will never take the pictures of the elemental world for reality in the sense in which physical consciousness has to take the experiences of the physical world as realities. The pictures of the elemental world are only brought into their true association with the realities to which they correspond, by the soul's faculty of transformation.

[ 2 ] Again, the second force necessary for the etheric body—the strong ego-feeling—should not be projected into the soul's life within the physical world in the same way as is appropriate for it in the elemental world. If it is, it then becomes a source of immoral propensities, as far as these are connected with egoism. It is at this point in its observation of the universe that spiritual science finds the origin of evil in human action. It would be misunderstanding the order of the world to surrender oneself to the belief that this order could be maintained without the forces which form the source of evil. If these forces were non-existent, the etheric being of man could not come to development in the elemental world. These forces are entirely good when they come into operation in the elemental world only. They bring about evil when they do not remain at rest in the depths of the soul, there regulating man's relation to the elemental world, but are transferred to the soul's experience within the physical world and are changed thereby into selfish impulses. In this case they work against the faculty of love and thus become the causes of immoral action.

[ 3 ] If the strong ego-feeling passes from the etheric to the physical body, it not only effects a strengthening of egoism, but a weakening of the etheric body. Clairvoyant consciousness has to make the discovery that on entering the supersensible world, the necessary ego-feeling is weak in proportion as egoism in the experiences of the physical world is strong. Egoism does not make a human being strong in the depths of his soul, but weak. And when man passes through the gateway of death, the effect of the egoism which has been developed during the life between birth and death is such as to make the soul weak for the experiences of the supersensible world.

[ 1 ] If the soul enters the supersensible world with clairvoyant consciousness, it learns to know itself there in a way of which in the physical world it can have no conception. It finds that through its faculty of transformation it becomes acquainted with beings to whom it is more or less related; but in addition to this it becomes aware of meeting beings in the supersensible world to whom it is not only related, but with whom it must compare itself, in order to know itself. And it further observes that these beings in supersensible worlds have become what the soul itself, through its adventures and experiences in the physical world, has become. In the elemental world beings confront the human soul who have developed within that world powers and faculties which man himself can only unfold through still having about him his physical body, in addition to his etheric body and the other supersensible principles of his being. The beings here alluded to have no such body with physical senses. They have so evolved that through their etheric body they have a soul-nature such as man has through his physical body. Although to a certain degree they are beings of like nature to himself, they differ from him in not being subject to the conditions of the physical world. They have no senses of the kind which man possesses. Their knowledge is like man's; only they have not acquired it through the gateway of the senses, but through a kind of ascent, or mounting-up of their ideas and other soul-experiences out of the depths of their being. Their inner life is, as it were, at rest within them, and they draw it up out of the depths of their souls, as man from the depths of his soul draws up his memory-pictures.

[ 2 ] In this way man becomes acquainted with beings who have become within the supersensible world that which he may become within the physical world. Owing to this, these beings are a stage higher than man in the order of the universe, although they may be said to be, in the manner indicated, of the same nature as he. They constitute a kingdom above man, a hierarchy superior to him in the scale of beings. Notwithstanding their similarity to man, their etheric body is different from his. Whereas man is woven into the supersensible etheric body of the earth through the sympathies and antipathies of his etheric body, these beings are not earth-bound in the life of their soul.

[ 3 ] If man observes what these beings experience through their etheric bodies, he finds that their experiences are similar to those of his own soul. They have thinking power; they have feelings and a will. But through their etheric body they develop something which man can only develop through the physical body. Through their etheric body they arrive at a consciousness of their own being, although man would not be able to know anything about a supersensible being unless he carried up into supersensible worlds the forces which he acquires in the physical body.

Clairvoyant consciousness learns to know these beings through developing a faculty for observing them by the help of the human etheric body. This clairvoyant consciousness lifts the human soul up into the world in which these beings have their field of activity and their abode. Not till the soul experiences itself in that world, do pictures or conceptions arise in its consciousness which bring about knowledge of these beings. For these beings do not interpose directly in the physical world, nor therefore in man's physical body. They are not present in the experiences which may be made through that body. They are spiritual, supersensible beings, who do not, so to say, set foot in the physical world.

If man does not respect the boundary between the physical world and supersensible worlds, it may happen that he drags into his physical consciousness supersensible images which are not the true expression of these beings. These images arise through experiencing the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings, who though of like nature to the supersensible beings just described, are contrasted with them through having transferred their field of activity and their abodes to the world which man perceives as the physical world.

[ 4 ] When man with clairvoyant consciousness contemplates the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings from the supersensible world, after having through his experience with the guardian of the threshold, learned the right way to observe the boundary between that world and physical existence, he learns to know these beings in their reality, and to distinguish them from those other spiritual beings who have remained in the sphere of action adapted to their nature. It is from this standpoint that spiritual science must portray the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings.

It then appears that the field of activity adapted to the Luciferic beings is not the physical but, in a certain respect, the elemental world. When something penetrates into the human soul which rises as though out of the waves of that world like pictures, and when these pictures work with a vivifying effect on man's etheric body, without assuming an illusive existence in the soul, then the Luciferic essence may be present in these images, without its activity transgressing against the order of the universe. In this case the Luciferic nature has the effect of emancipation upon the human soul, raising it above mere entanglement in the physical world. But when the human soul draws into the physical body the life which it should only develop in the elemental world, when it allows feeling within the physical body to be influenced by sympathies and antipathies which should only hold sway in the etheric body, then the Luciferic nature gains through that soul an influence which is opposed to the general order of the universe. This influence is always present when in the sympathies and antipathies of the physical world, something is working besides that love which is based on sympathy with the life of another being present in that world. Such a being may be loved because it comes before the one loving it endowed with certain qualities; in this case there is no admixture of a Luciferic element with the love. Love which has its basis in those qualities in the beloved being which are manifest in physical existence, keeps clear of Luciferic interference. But love, the source of which is not thus in the beloved being, but in the one loving it, is prone to the Luciferic influence. A being loved because it has qualities to which, as lovers, we incline by nature, is loved with that part of the soul which is accessible io the Luciferic element.

We should therefore never say that the Luciferic element is bad under all circumstances, for events and beings of supersensible worlds must be loved by the human soul in the manner of the Luciferic element. The order of the universe is not transgressed until the kind of love with which man ought to feel himself drawn to the supersensible is directed to physical things. Love for the supersensible rightly calls forth in the one loving it an enhanced feeling of self; love which in the physical world is sought for the sake of such an enhanced feeling of self is equivalent to a Luciferic temptation. Love of the spiritual when it is sought for the sake of the self has the effect of emancipation; but love for the physical when it is sought on account of the self has not this effect, but, through the gratification gained by its means, only puts the self in fetters.

[ 5 ] The Ahrimanic beings make themselves felt in the thinking soul just as the Luciferic beings affect the feeling soul. The former chain thought to the physical world. They turn it away from the fact that thoughts of any kind are only of importance when they assert themselves as part of the universal order, whose discovery is not bound within physical existence. In the world into which the human life of the soul is woven, the Ahrimanic element must exist as a necessary counterbalance to the Luciferic. Without the Luciferic element, the soul would dream away its life in observation of physical existence, and feel no impulse to rise above it. Without the counter-effect of the Ahrimanic element, the soul would fall a victim to the Luciferic influence; it would underrate the importance of the physical world, in spite of the fact that some of its necessary conditions of existence are in that world. It would not wish to have anything to do with the physical world. The Ahrimanic element has the right degree of importance in the human soul when it leads to a way of living in the physical world which is suitable to that world; when we take it for what it is, and are able to dispense with everything in it which in its nature must be transitory.

It is quite impossible to say that a person could avoid falling a victim to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements by rooting them out of himself. It is, for instance, possible that if the Luciferic element in him were rooted out, his soul would no longer aspire to the super-sensible; or, if the Ahrimanic element were eradicated, that he might not any more realise the full importance of the physical world: the right relation to one of these elements is arrived at when the proper counterpoise to it is provided in the other. All harmful effects from these cosmic beings proceed entirely from one of them becoming the unlimited master of the situation, whatever it may be, and from not being brought into the right harmony through the opposite force.

[ 1 ] Earlier in this book mention was made of a Moon and Sun condition, preceding the Earth condition, and only in that Moon period do there appear to clairvoyant consciousness impressions which are reminiscent of the impressions of earth-life. Such impressions are no longer to be gained when clairvoyant sight is directed to the still further distant past of the earth's Sun condition. The latter is revealed wholly as a world of beings and the actions of those beings. In order to get an impression of this Sun period, it is necessary to keep at a distance all ideas of the earth's mineral and plant life. For such ideas only have a meaning with regard to earlier conditions of the earth period; and, those of them which concern plant-life, to the long-past Moon period. To the earth's ancient Sun condition conceptions lead which may be prompted by the animal and human kingdoms of nature—conceptions, however, which do not merely portray what the senses disclose about the inhabitants of those kingdoms.

[ 2 ] Now the clairvoyant consciousness of man finds within the etheric body active forces which form themselves into pictures of such a kind that they bring to expression the way in which the etheric body received, through the actions of spiritual beings during the ancient Sun period, its first beginning in the cosmic order of things. This beginning may be traced in its further development through the Moon and Earth periods. We find that in the course of these it was transformed, and through this transformation became what is now seen to be the active etheric body of man.

[ 3 ] In order to understand the physical body of man, we require, however, a different activity of human consciousness. At first it appears as an outer counterpart of the etheric body. But close observation shows that man could never arrive at a complete development of his being, unless the physical body were something more than merely a physical manifestation of the etheric body. If this were so, definite willing, feeling, and thinking would take place in man, but they could not be so synthetised that the consciousness which expresses itself as an ego-experience could arise in the human soul. This becomes specially evident when the consciousness develops the quality of clairvoyance. Man's ego-experience can at first only take place in the physical world, when he is invested with his physical body. Thence he is able to take his experience into the elemental and spiritual worlds and interpenetrate his etheric and astral bodies with it. For man has an etheric and an astral body in which the ego-experience does not at first arise. Only in his physical body can that experience take place. Now if the human physical body is looked at from the spiritual world, it turns out that there is something in it, belonging to it intrinsically, which even from the spiritual world is not fully disclosed in its reality. If the consciousness enters the spiritual world in a clairvoyant capacity, the soul grows familiar with the world of thought-reality; but the ego experience, which through an adequate strengthening of soul-force may be carried into that world, is not woven simply out of universal thoughts; it does not yet feel in the world of cosmic thoughts anything in that environment which is equal to its own being. In order to feel this, the soul must advance still further into the supersensible. It must come to experiences in which it is abandoned even by thoughts, so that all physical experiences and all experiences also of thinking, feeling, and willing are, as it were, left behind it on its journey into the supersensible. Then for the first time does it feel itself one with a reality which so underlies the universe that it takes precedence of everything which man, as a physical, etheric, and astral being, is able to observe. Man then feels himself in a still higher sphere than the spiritual world so far known to him. We will call this world in which only the ego can experience itself, the super-spiritual world. From it even the region of thought-reality seems an outer world. When clairvoyant consciousness is transferred to this super-spiritual world, it goes through an experience which may be described and characterised somewhat as follows, by tracing the path followed by clairvoyant consciousness through its various stages.

When the soul feels itself in its etheric body, and elemental events and beings are its environment, it knows it is outside the physical body; but that physical body still exists as an entity, although when seen from without it appears transformed. To spiritual sight a part of it becomes detached, and is manifest as the expression of the deeds of spiritual beings who have been active from the beginning of the earth's existence up to the present time. Another detached part appears as the expression of something which was already in existence during the ancient Moon condition of the earth. This state of things continues as long as the consciousness is only experiencing itself in the elemental world. In that world the consciousness is able to become aware of the way in which man was constituted as a physical being during the ancient Moon period.

When the consciousness enters the spiritual world, another part of the physical body becomes detached. It is the part which was formed during the Moon period by the deeds of spiritual beings. But another part is left behind. It is that which existed during the Sun condition of the earth as man's physical entity at that period. But even of this physical entity something is left behind, when, from the standpoint of the spiritual world, everything is taken into account which happened during the Sun period through the deeds of spiritual beings.

What is then left behind is first revealed as the action of spiritual beings when the consciousness reaches the super-spiritual world. It is revealed as already existent at the beginning of the Sun period, and we have to go back to a condition of the earth before its Sun period. In my book Occult Science, I endeavoured to vindicate the use of the term Saturn period for this condition of the earth's existence. In this sense the earth was Saturn before it became Sun. And during that Saturn period the first beginning of the physical human body came into existence out of the cosmic world?process through the deeds of spiritual beings. That beginning was afterwards so transformed during the succeeding Sun, Moon, and Earth periods by the further actions of other spiritual beings that the present physical human body became what it now is.

[ 1 ] When the soul experiences itself in its astral body and has living thought-beings as its environment, it knows itself to be outside both the physical and etheric bodies. But it also feels that its thinking, feeling, and willing belong but to a limited sphere of the universe, whereas in virtue of its own original nature it should embrace much more than is allotted to it in that sphere. The soul that has become clairvoyant may say to itself within the spiritual world: “In the physical world I am confined to what my physical body allows me to observe; in the elemental world I am limited by my etheric body; in the spiritual world I am restricted by finding myself, as it were, upon an island in the universe and by feeling my spiritual existence bounded by the shores of that island. Beyond them is a world which I should be able to perceive if I were to work my way through the veil which is woven before the eyes of my spirit by the actions of living thought-beings.” Now the soul is indeed able to work its way through this veil, if it continues to develop further and further the faculty of self surrender which is already necessary for its life in the elemental world. It is under the necessity of still further strengthening the forces which accrue to it from experience in the physical world, in order to be guarded in supersensible worlds from having its consciousness deadened, clouded, or even annihilated. In the physical world the soul, in order to experience thoughts within itself, has need only of the strength naturally allotted to it apart from its own inner work. In the elemental world thoughts, which immediately on arising fall into oblivion, are softened down to dreamlike experience, i.e. do not come into the consciousness at all, unless the soul, before entering this world, has worked on the strengthening of its inner life. For this purpose it must specially strengthen the will-power, for in the elemental world a thought is no longer merely a thought; it has an inner activity, or life of its own. It has to be held fast by the will if it is not to leave the circle of the consciousness. In the spiritual world thoughts are completely independent living beings. If they are to remain in the consciousness, the soul must be so strengthened that it develops within itself and of itself the force which the physical body develops for it in the physical world, and which in the elemental world is developed by the sympathies and antipathies of the etheric body. It must forgo all this assistance in the spiritual world. There the experiences of the physical world and the elemental world are only present to the soul as memories. And the soul itself is beyond those two worlds. Around it is the spiritual world. This world at first makes no impression upon the astral body. The soul has to learn to live by itself on its own memories. The content of its consciousness is at first merely this: “I have existed, and now I am confronting nothingness.” But when the memories come from such soul-experiences as arc not merely reproductions of physical or elemental occurrences, but represent free thought-experiences induced by those occurrences, there begins in the soul an exchange of thought between the memories and the supposed nothingness of the spiritual environment. And that which arises as the result of that intercourse becomes a world of conceptions in the consciousness of the astral body. The strength which is needful for the soul at this point of its development is such as will make it capable of standing on the shore of the only world hitherto known to it, and of enduring the facing of supposed nothingness. This supposed nothingness is at first an absolutely real nothingness to the soul. Yet the soul still has, so to speak, behind it the world of its memories. It can, as it were, take a firm grip of them. It can live in them. And the more it lives in them, the more it strengthens the forces of the astral body. With this strengthening begins the intercourse between its past existence and the beings of the spiritual world. During this intercourse the soul learns to feel itself as an astral being. To use an expression in keeping with ancient traditions, we may say, “The human soul experiences itself as an astral being within the cosmic Word.” By the cosmic Word are here meant the thought-deeds of living thought-beings, which are enacted in the spiritual world like a living discourse of spirits; but in such a way that the discourse exactly corresponds in the spiritual world to deeds in the physical world.

[ 2 ] If the soul now wishes to step over into the super-spiritual world, it must efface, by its own will, its memories of the physical and elemental worlds. It can only do this when it has gained the certainty, from the spirit discourse, that it will not wholly lose its existence if it effaces everything in itself which so far the consciousness of that existence has given it. The soul must actually place itself at the edge of a spiritual abyss and there make an act of wiII to forget its willing, feeling, and thinking. It must consciously renounce its past. The resolution that has to be taken at this point may be called a bringing about of complete sleep of the consciousness by one's own will, not by conditions of the physical or etheric body. Only this resolution must not be thought of as having for its object a return, after an interval of unconsciousness, to the same consciousness that was previously there, but as if that consciousness, by means of the resolution, really plunges into forgetfulness by its own act of will. It must be borne in mind that this process is not possible in either the physical or the elemental world, but only in the spiritual world. In the physical world the annihilation which appears as death is possible; in the elemental world there is no death. Man, in so far as he belongs to the elemental world, cannot die; he can only be transformed into another being. In the spiritual world, however, no positive transformation, in the strict sense of the word, is possible; for into whatever a human being may change, his past experience is revealed in the spiritual world as his own conscious existence. If this memory existence is to disappear within the spiritual world, it must be because the soul itself, by an act of will, has caused it to sink into oblivion. Clairvoyant consciousness is able to perform such an act of will when it has won the necessary inner strength. If it arrives at this, there emerges from the forgetfulness it has itself brought about the real nature of the ego. The super-spiritual environment gives the human soul the knowledge of that real ego. Just as clairvoyant consciousness can experience itself in the etheric and astral bodies, so too can it experience itself in the real ego.

[ 3 ] This real ego is not created by clairvoyance; it exists in the depths of every human soul. Clairvoyant consciousness simply experiences consciously a fact appertaining to the nature of every human soul, of which it is not conscious.

[ 4 ] After physical death man gradually lives himself into his spiritual environment. At first his being emerges into it with memories of the physical world. Then, although he has not the assistance of his physical body, he can nevertheless live consciously in those memories, because the living thought-beings corresponding to them incorporate themselves into the memories, so that the latter no longer have the merely shadowy existence peculiar to them in the physical world. And at a definite point of time between death and rebirth, the living thought-beings of the spiritual environment exert such a strong influence that, without any act of will, the oblivion which has been described is brought about. And at that moment life emerges in the real ego. Clairvoyant consciousness, by strengthening the life of the soul, brings about as a free action of the spirit that which is, so to speak, a natural occurrence between death and rebirth. Nevertheless, memory of previous earth-lives can never arise within physical experience, unless the thoughts have, during those earth-lives, been directed to the spiritual world. It is always necessary first to have known of a thing in order that a clearly recognisable remembrance of it may arise later. Therefore we must, during one earth-life, gain knowledge of ourselves as spiritual beings if we are to be justified in expecting that in our next earthly existence we shall be able to remember a former one.

[ 5 ] Yet this knowledge need not necessarily be gained through clairvoyance. When a person acquires a direct knowledge of the spiritual world through clairvoyance, there may arise in his soul, during the earth-lives following the one in which he gained that knowledge, a memory of the former one, in the same way in which the memory of a personal experience presents itself in physical existence. In the case, however, of one who penetrates into spiritual science with true comprehension, through without clairvoyance, the memory will occur in such a form that it may be compared with the remembrance in physical existence of an event of which he has only heard a description.

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner's Riddles of Philosophy, Presented in an Outline of Its History is not a history of philosophy in the usual sense of the word. It does not give a history of the philosophical systems, nor does it present a number of philosophical problems historically. Its real concern touches on something deeper than this, on riddles rather than problems. Philosophical concepts, systems and problems are, to be sure, to be dealt with in this book. But it is not their history that is to be described here. Where they are discussed they become symptoms rather than the objects of the search. The search itself wants to reveal a process that is overlooked in the usual history of philosophy. It is the mysterious process in which philosophical thinking appears in human history. Philosophical thinking as it is here meant is known only in Western Civilisation. Oriental philosophy has its origin in a different kind of consciousness, and it is not to be considered in this book.

[ 1 ] What is new here is the treatment of the history of philosophic thinking as a manifestation of the evolution of human consciousness. Such a treatment requires a fine sense of observation. Not merely the thoughts must be observed, but behind them the thinking in which they appear.

[ 1 ] To follow Steiner in his subtle description of the process of the metamorphosis of this thinking in the history of philosophy we should remember he sees the human consciousness in an evolution. It has not always been what it is now, and what it is now it will not be in the future. This is a fundamental conception of anthroposophy. The metamorphosis of the consciousness is not only described in Steiner's anthroposophical books but in a number of them directions are given from which we can learn to participate in this transformation actively. This is explicitly done not only in his Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment but also in certain chapters of his Theosophy, An Outline of Occult Science and several other of his anthroposophical books.

[ 1 ] The objection may be raised at this point that the application of concepts derived from spiritual exercises is not admissible in a field of pure philosophical studies, where every concept used should be clearly comprehensible without any preconceived ideas. Steiner's earlier philosophical books did not seem to imply any such presuppositions and his anthroposophical works therefore appear to mark a definite departure from his earlier philosophical ones.

[ 1 ] It is indeed significant that the anthroposophical works appear only after a long period of philosophic studies. A glance at Rudolf Steiner's bibliography shows that it is only after twenty years of philosophical studies that his anthroposophy as a science of the spirit appears on the scene. The purely philosophical publications begin with his Introductions to Goethe's Natural Scientific Writings (1883 – 97) and with the Fundamental Outline of a Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception (1886). They are followed by his own theory of knowledge presented in Truth and Science in 1892 and his Philosophy of Freedom (also translated as Philosophy of Spiritual Activity) of 1894. This work presents clearly the climax of Steiner's philosophy and it should be studied carefully by anyone who intends to arrive at a valid judgment of his later anthroposophy. It is, however, still several years before the books appear that contain the result of his spiritual science. Not only his book on Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time of 1895 and his Goethe's World Conception of 1897 but also his World-and Life-Conceptions in the Nineteenth Century of 1900 and even his Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age and Its Relation to Modern World Conception of 1901 could have been understood as merely historical descriptions.

[ 1 ] With Steiner's next work we seem to enter an entirely different world. Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity clearly begin the series of his distinctly anthroposophic works. Like his >Theosophy (1904), his >Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment (1905/08) and his >Occult Science (1910) it could only have been written by an occultist who spoke from a level of consciousness that one did not have to assume as the source of his earlier books.

[ 1 ] To the casual reader it could appear that there was a distinct break in Steiner's world conception at the beginning of the century, and this is also the conclusion drawn by some of his critics.

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner's own words, however, as well as a study of both phases of his work leave no doubt that there was no such break in his world conception. He clearly states that knowledge derived from a higher level of consciousness was always at his disposal, also at the time of his early philosophical publications. His deep concern was the question: How could one speak about worlds not immediately accessible to scarcely anybody else in an age in which materialism and agnosticism ruled without any serious opposition. He found both so deeply rooted in Western Civilisation that he had to ask himself at times: Will it always be necessary to keep entirely silent about this higher knowledge.

[ 1 ] In this time he turned to the study of representative thinkers of his time and of the more recent past in whose conceptions of world and life he now penetrated to experience their depth and their limitations. In Goethe's world he found the leverage to overcome the basic agnosticism and materialism to which the age had surrendered. In Nietzsche he saw the tragic figure who had been overpowered by it and whose life was broken by the fact that his spiritual sensitivity made it impossible for him to live in this world and his intellectual integrity forbade him to submit to what he had to consider as the dishonest double standard of his time.

[ 1 ] Neither Rudolf Steiner's Nietzsche book nor his writings on Goethe's conception of the world are meant to be merely descriptive accounts of philosophical systems or problems. They reveal an inner struggle of the spirit that is caused by the spiritual situation of their time and in which the reader must share to follow these books with a full understanding. When these studies are then extended to comprise longer periods of time as in the World and Life Conceptions of the Nineteenth Century and in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age soul conditions under which the individual thinkers have to work become more and more visible.

[ 1 ] When Rudolf Steiner published the present work in 1914 as The Riddles of Philosophy he used the book on the World and Life Conception of the Nineteenth Century as the second part, which is now preceded by an outline of the entire history of philosophy in the Western world.

[ 1 ] At this time Steiner's anthroposophical books had appeared in which the evolution of human consciousness plays an important role. It could now be partly demonstrated in an outline of the philosophic thinking of the Western world.

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner's approach to history is symptomatological, and it is this method that he also applies to the history of philosophy. The thoughts developed in the course of this history are treated as symptomatic facts for the mode of thinking prevalent in a given time. He sees four distinct phases in the course of Western thought evolution. They are periods of seven to eight centuries each, beginning with the pre-Socratic thinkers in Greece.

[ 1 ] Here pure thought as such free of images develops out of an older form of consciousness that is expressed in myths and symbolic pictures. It reaches its climax in the classical philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and ends with the Hellenistic period.

[ 1 ] A second phase begins with Christianity and reaches as far as the ninth century A.D. This time Rudolf Steiner characterizes as the age of the awakening self-consciousness and he is convinced that an intense historical study of this period will more and more prove the adequacy of that term. The emergence of a greater self-awareness at this time diminishes the importance of the conceptional thinking as the religious concern of the soul with its own destiny grows. The emerging self-consciousness of this phase is intensely felt, but does not lead to an intellectual occupation with the concept of this “self.” In a third period a new concern becomes prevalent when the scholastic philosophers become more and more confronted with the tormenting question of the reality of thought itself. What is often regarded as an aberration into mere verbal quarrels, the medieval discussions of the significance of the universal concepts, is now seen as a soul struggle of a profound human concern. Thus the long war between Realism and Nominalism appears in a new light. As the nominalists seem to emerge more and more as the victors the thought climate for the fourth phase is gradually prepared.

[ 1 ] Since the Renaissance natural science proceeds to develop a world conception in which the self-conscious ego must experience itself as a foreign element. The emergence of this experience leads to a new inner struggle in which the fourth phase of the history of philosophy is from now on deeply engaged in its predominant thought currents: It is the phase of consciousness in which we still live. The various forms of idealistic[,] materialistic and agnostic philosophies are subject to the tension caused by the indicated situation. As Steiner characterizes them he points out that the different thinker personalities can be quite unconscious of the currents that manifest themselves in their thinking although their ideas and thought combinations receive direction and form from them.

[ 1 ] In the last chapter of the second part of the book Steiner describes his own philosophy as he had developed it in his earlier books Truth and Science and Philosophy of Freedom. In this description the relation between his philosophical works and his anthroposophical ones also becomes clear. As a philosophy of spiritual activity, the Philosophy of Freedom had not merely given an analysis of the factors involved in the process of knowledge, nor had the possibility of human freedom within a world apparently determined on all sides, merely been logically shown. What the study of this book meant to supply was at the same time a course of concentrated exercise of thinking that was to develop a new power through which man really becomes free. As Aristotle's statement (Metaph. XII, 7) that the actuality of thinking is life in this way becomes a real experience of the thinker, human freedom is born. Man becomes free in his actions in the external world, developing the moral imagination necessary for the situation in which he finds himself. At the same time his spirit frees itself from the bodily encasement in which thoughts had appeared as unreal shadows. The process of his real spiritual development has begun.

[ 1 ] In this way the Riddles of Philosophy may be considered as a bridge that can lead from Steiner's early philosophical works into the study of anthroposophy. The undercurrents characterized in the four main phases of the evolution of thought lead from potentiality to ever increasing actuality of the awakening spirit. And for the exercises described in the specific anthroposophic books there can be no better preparation than the concentrated study of Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

[ 1 ] Fritz C. A. Koelln
Bowdoin College
Brunswick, Maine
April, 1973

[ 1 ] The description of the life of the philosophical spirit from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present time, which has been attempted in this second volume of The Riddles of Philosophy, cannot be of the same character as the survey of the works of the preceding thinkers. This survey had to remain within the most restricted circle of the philosophical problems. The last sixty years represent the age in which the mode of conception of natural science attempted, from different points of view, to shake the foundation on which philosophy formerly stood. During this time, the view arose that maintained that the results of natural science shed the necessary light on the question of man's nature, his relation to the world and other riddles of existence, which the intellectual work of philosophy had formerly sought to supply. Many thinkers who wanted to serve philosophy now tried to imitate the mode of investigation of natural science. Others laid the foundation for their world conception, not in the fashion of the old philosophical mode of thinking, but simply by taking over that basis from the mode of conception of natural science, biology or physiology. Those who meant to preserve the independence of philosophy believed it best to examine thoroughly the results of natural science in order to prevent them from invading the philosophical sphere. It is for this reason necessary, in presenting the philosophical life of this period, to pay attention to the views that, derived from natural science, have been introduced into world conceptions. The significance of these views for philosophy becomes apparent only if one examines the scientific foundations from which they are derived, and if one realizes for oneself the tendencies of scientific thinking according to which they were developed. This situation is given expression in this book by the fact that some parts of it are formulated almost as if a presentation of general natural scientific ideas, and not one of philosophical works, had been intended. The opinion appears to be justified that this method of presentation shows distinctly how thoroughly natural science has influenced the philosophical life of the present time.

[ 2 ] A reader who finds it reconcilable to his mode of thinking to conceive the evolution of the philosophical life along the lines indicated in the introduction of the first volume of this book, and for which the more detailed account of the book has attempted to supply the foundation, will also find it possible to accept the indicated relation between philosophy and natural science in the present age as a necessary phase of its evolution. Through the centuries since the beginning of Greek philosophy this evolution tended to lead the human soul toward the experience of its inner essential forces. With this inner experience the soul became more and more estranged in the world that the knowledge of external nature had erected for itself. A conception of nature arose that is so exclusively concerned with the observation of the external world that it does not show any inclination to include in its world picture what the soul experiences in its inner world. This conception considers it as unjustified to paint the world picture in a way that it would show these inner experiences of the human soul as well as the results of the research of natural science. It characterizes the situation in which philosophy found itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in which many currents of thought can still be found in the present time. Such a judgment does not have to be artificially introduced to the study of the philosophy of this age. It can be arrived at by simply observing the facts. The second volume of this book attempts to record this new development, but it has also made it necessary to add to the second edition a final chapter that contains “A Brief Outline of an Approach to Anthroposophy.”

One can be of the opinion that this account does not belong in the framework of the whole book but, in the preface to the first volume, it was announced that the purpose of this presentation “is not only to give a short outline of the history of philosophical problems, but also to discuss these problems and the attempts at their solution through their historical treatment.” The view expressed in this book tries to show that many situations arising from the attempted solutions in the philosophy of the present tend to recognize an element in the inner experience of the human soul that manifests itself in such a way that the exclusive claim of natural science can no longer deny that element a place in the modern world picture. As it is the philosophical conviction of the author of this book that the account of the final chapter deals with soul experiences that are adequate to bring fulfillment to the search of modern philosophy, he feels he was justified in adding this chapter to his presentation. As a result of observation of these philosophies, it seems to the author to be basically characteristic of them and of their historical manifestation that they do not consistently continue their direction toward the goal they are seeking. This direction must lead toward the world conception that is outlined at the end of the book, which aims at a real science of the spirit. The reader who can agree with this can find in this conception something that supplies the solutions to problems that the philosophy of the present time poses without giving answers. If this is true, the content of the last chapter will also throw light on the historical position of modern philosophy.

[ 3 ] The author of this book does not imagine that everyone who can accept the content of the final chapter must necessarily also seek a world conception that replaces philosophy by a view that can no longer be recognized as a philosophy by traditional philosophers. What this book means to show is that philosophy, if it arrives at the point where it understands itself, must lead the spirit to a soul experience that is, to be sure, the fruit of its work, but also grows beyond it. In this way, philosophy retains its significance for everyone who, according to his mode of thinking, must demand a secure intellectual foundation for the results of this soul experience. Whoever can accept these results through a natural sense for truth, is justified in feeling himself on secure ground even if he pays no special attention to a philosophical foundation of these results. But whoever seeks the scientific justification of the world conception that is presented at the end of the book, must follow the path of the philosophical foundation.

[ 4 ] That this path, if it is followed through to its end, leads to the experience of a spiritual world, and that the soul through this experience can become aware of its own spiritual essence through a method that is independent of its experience and knowledge through the sense world, is what the presentation of this book attempts to prove. It was not the author's intention to project this thought as a preconceived idea into his observation of philosophical life. He wanted to search without bias for the conception expressed in this life itself. He has at least endeavored to proceed in this way. He believes that this thought could be best presented by speaking the language of a natural scientist, as it were, in some parts of the book. Only if one is capable of temporarily identifying oneself completely with a certain point of view is it possible to do full justice to it. By this method of deliberately taking the position of a world view, the human soul can most safely obtain the ability to withdraw from it again and enter into modes of conception that have their source in realms that are not comprised by this view of the world.

[ 5 ] The printing of this second volume of The Riddles of Philosophy was about half finished before the great war that mankind is now experiencing broke out. It was finished just as this event began. This is only to indicate what outer events stirred and occupied my soul as the last thoughts included in this book passed before my inner eye.

Rudolf Steiner
September 1, 1914, Berlin

[ 1 ] If we follow the work of the mind invested by man in his attempts to solve the riddle of world and life, the words, “Know Thyself,” which were inscribed as a motto in the temple of Apollo, will suggest themselves to the soul in its contemplation. The understanding for a world conception rests on the fact that the human soul can be stirred by the contemplation of these words. The nature of a living organism involves the necessity of feeling hunger. The nature of the human soul at a certain stage of its development causes a similar necessity. It is manifest in the need to gain from life a certain spiritual return that, just as food satisfies hunger, satisfies the soul's challenge, “Know Thyself.” This feeling can lay hold on the human soul so powerfully that it can be forced to think, “Only then am I fully human in the true sense of the word when I develop within myself a relation to the world that expresses its fundamental character in the challenge, ‘Know Thyself’.” The soul can reach the point where it considers this feeling as an awakening out of the dream of life that it dreamt before this particular experience.

[ 2 ] During the first period of his life, man develops the power of memory through which he will, in later life, recollect his experiences back to a certain moment of his childhood. What lies before this moment he feels as a dream of life from which he awoke. The human soul would not be what it should be if the power of memory did not grow out of the dim soul life of the child. In a similar way the human soul can, at a more developed stage, think of its experience of the challenge expressed in the words, “Know Thyself.” It can have the feeling that a soul life that does not awake out of its dream of life through this experience does not live up to its inner potentialities.

[ 3 ] Philosophers have often pointed out that they are at a loss when asked about the nature of philosophy in the true sense of the word. One thing, however, is certain, namely, that one must see in philosophy a special form of satisfying the need of the human soul expressed in the challenge, “Know Thyself.” Of this challenge one can know just as distinctly as one can know what hunger is, although one may be at a loss to give an explanation of the phenomenon of hunger that would be satisfactory to everybody.

[ 4 ] It was probably a thought of this kind that motivated Johann Gottlieb Fichte when he stated that the philosophy a man chooses depends on the kind of man he is. Animated by this thought, one can examine the attempts that have been made in the course of history to find solutions for the riddles of philosophy. In these attempts one will find the nature of the human being himself revealed. For although man will try to silence his personal interests entirely when he intends to speak as a philosopher, there will, nevertheless, immediately appear in a philosophy what the human personality can make out of itself by unfolding those forces that are most centrally and most originally its own.

[ 5 ] Seen from this viewpoint, the examination of the philosophical achievements with regard to the world riddles can excite certain expectations.

We can hope that such an examination can yield results concerning the nature of human soul development, and the writer of this book believes that in exploring the philosophical views of the occident he has found such results. Four distinctly discernible epochs in the evolution of the philosophical struggle of mankind presented themselves to his view. He had to recognize the difference of these epochs as distinct as the difference of the species of a realm of nature. This observation led him to acknowledge in the realm of the history of man's philosophical development the existence of objective spiritual impulses following a definite law of evolution of their own, independent of the individual men in whom they are observed. The achievements of these men as philosophers thus appear as the manifestation of these impulses that direct the courses of events under the surface of external history. The conviction is then suggested that such results arise from the unprejudiced observation of the historical facts, much as a natural law rests on the observation of facts of nature. The author of this book believes that he has not been misled by preconceptions to present an arbitrary construction of the historical process, but that the facts force the acknowledgment of results of the kind indicated.

[ 6 ] It can be shown that in the evolutionary course of the philosophical struggle of mankind, periods are distinguishable, each of which lasts between seven and eight centuries. In each of these epochs there is a distinctly different impulse at work, as if it were under the surface of external history, sending its rays into the human personalities and thus causing the evolution of man's mode of philosophizing while taking its own definite course of development.

[ 7 ] The way in which the facts support the distinction of these epochs is to be shown in the present book. Its author would like, as far as possible, to let the facts speak for themselves. At this point, he wants to offer a few guiding lines from which, however, the thoughts expressed in this book did not take their departure; they are the results of this book.

[ 8 ] One can be of the opinion that these guiding lines correctly should have been placed at the end of the book because their truth follows only from the content of the complete presentation. They are, however, to precede the subject matter as a preliminary statement because they justify the inner structure of the book. For although they were the result of the author's research, they were naturally in his mind before he wrote the book and had their effect on its form. For the reader, however, it can be important to learn not only at the end of the book why the author presents his subject in a certain way, but to form his judgment concerning this method of presentation already during the reading. But only so much is to be stated here as is necessary for the understanding of the book's arrangement.

[ 9 ] The first epoch of the development of philosophical views begins in Greek antiquity. It can be distinctly traced back as far as Pherekydes of Syros and Thales of Miletos and it comes to a close in the age of beginning Christianity. The spiritual aspiration of mankind in this age shows an essentially different character from that of earlier times. It is the age of awakening thought life. Prior to this age, the human soul lived in imaginative (symbolic) thought pictures that expressed its relation to the world and existence.

All attempts to find the philosophical thought life developed in pre-Greek times fail upon closer inspection. Genuine philosophy cannot be dated earlier than the Greek civilization. What may at first glance seem to resemble the element of thought in Oriental or Egyptian world contemplation's proves, on closer inspection, to be not real thought but parabolic, symbolic conception. It is in Greece that the aspiration is born to gain knowledge of the world and its laws by means of an element that can be acknowledged as thought also in the present age. As long as the human soul conceives world phenomena through pictures, it feels itself intimately bound up with them. The soul feels itself in this phase to be a member of the world organism; it does not think of itself as an independent entity separated from this organism. As the pure pictureless thought awakens in the human soul, the soul begins to feel its separation from the world. Thought becomes the soul's educator for independence.

But the ancient Greek did not experience thought as modern man does. This is a fact that can be easily overlooked. A genuine insight into the ancient Greek's thought life will reveal the essential difference. The ancient Greek's experience of thought is comparable to our experience of a perception, to our experience of “red” or “yellow.” Just as we today attribute a color or tone percept to a “thing,” so the ancient Greek perceives thought in the world of things and as adhering to them. It is for this reason that thought at that time still is the connecting link between soul and world. The process of separation between soul and world is just beginning; it has not yet been completed. To be sure, the soul feels the thought within itself, but it must be of the opinion to have received it from the world and it can therefore expect the solution of the world riddles from its thought experience. It is in this type of thought experience that the philosophical development proceeds that begins with Pherekydes and Thales, culminates in Plato and Aristotle and then recedes until it ends at the time of the beginning of Christianity. From the undercurrents of the spiritual evolution, thought life streams into the souls of man and produces in these souls philosophies that educate them to feel themselves in their self-dependence independent of the outer world.

[ 10 ] A new period begins with the dawn of the Christian era. The human soul can now no longer experience thought as a perception from the outer world. It now feels thought as the product of its own (inner) being. An impulse much more powerful than the stream of thought life now radiates into the soul from the deeper currents of the spiritual creative process. It is only now that self-consciousness awakes in mankind in a form adequate to the true nature of this self-consciousness. What men had experienced in this respect before that time had really only been harbingers and anticipatory phenomena of what one should in its deepest meaning call inwardly experienced self-consciousness.

It is to be hoped that a future history of spiritual evolution will call this time the “Age of Awakening Self-Consciousness.” Only now does man become in the true sense of the' word aware of the whole scope of his soul life as “Ego.” The full weight of this fact is more instinctively felt than distinctly known by the philosophical spirits of that time. All philosophical aspirations of that epoch retain this general character up to the time of Scotus Erigena. The philosophers of this period are completely submerged in religious conceptions with their philosophical thinking. Through this type of thought formation, the human soul, finding itself in an awakened self-consciousness entirely left to its own resources, strives to gain the consciousness of its submergence in the life of the world organism. Thought becomes a mere means to express the conviction regarding the relation of man's soul to the world that one has gained from religious sources. Steeped in this view, nourished by religious conceptions, thought life grows like the seed of a plant in the soul of the earth, until it breaks forth into the light.

In Greek philosophy the life of thought unfolds its own inner forces. It leads the human soul to the point where it feels its self-dependence. Then from greater depths of spiritual life an element breaks forth into mankind that is fundamentally different from thought life—an element that filled the soul with a new inner experience, with an awareness of being a world in itself, resting on its inner point of gravitation. Thus, self-consciousness is at first experienced, but it is not as yet conceived in the form of thought. The life of thought continues to be developed, concealed and sheltered in the warmth of religious consciousness. In this way pass the first seven or eight hundred years after the foundation of Christianity.

[ 11 ] The next period shows an entirely different character. The leading philosophers feel the reawakening of the energy of thought life. For centuries the human soul had been inwardly consolidated through the experience of its self-dependence. It now begins to search for what it might claim as its innermost self possession. It finds that this is its thought life. Everything else is given from without; thought is felt as something the soul has to produce out of its own depth, that is, the soul is present in full consciousness at this process of production. The urge arises in the soul to gain in thought a knowledge through which it can enlighten itself about its own relation to the world. How can something be expressed in thought life that is not itself merely the soul's own product? This becomes the question of the philosophers of that age. The spiritual trends of Nominalism, Realism, Scholasticism and medieval Mysticism reveal this fundamental character of the philosophy of that age. The human soul attempts to examine its thought life with regard to its content of reality.

[ 12 ] With the close of this third period the character of philosophical endeavor changes. The self-consciousness of the soul has been strengthened through century-long work performed in the examination of the reality of thought life. One has learned to feel the life of thought as something that is deeply related to the soul's own nature and to experience in this union an inner security of existence. As a mark of this stage of development, there shines like a brilliant star in the firmament of the spirit, the words, “I think, therefore I am,” which were spoken by Descartes (1596–1650). One feels the soul flowing in thought life, and in the awareness of this stream one believes one experiences the true nature of the soul itself. The representative of that time feels himself so secure within this existence recognized in thought life that he arrives at the conviction that true knowledge could only be a knowledge that is experienced in the same way as the soul experiences thought life resting on its own foundation. This becomes the viewpoint of Spinoza (1632–1677).

Now philosophies emerge that shape the world picture as it must be imagined when the self-conscious human soul, conceived by the life of thought, can have its adequate position within that world. How must the world be depicted so that within it the human soul can be thought to correspond adequately to the necessary concept of the self-consciousness? This becomes the question that, in an unbiased observation, we find at the bottom of the philosophy of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). It is also distinctly the question for which Leibnitz (1646–1716) seeks the answer.

[ 13 ] With conceptions of a world picture arising from such a question the fourth epoch in the evolution of the philosophical world view begins. Our present age is approximately in the middle of this epoch. This book is to show how far philosophical knowledge has advanced in the conception of a world picture in which the self-conscious soul can find such a secure place, so that it can understand its own meaning and significance within the existing world. When, in the first epoch of philosophical search, philosophy derived its powers from the awakening thought life, the human soul was spurred by the hope of gaining a knowledge of a world to which it belongs with its true nature, which is not limited to the life manifested through the body of the senses.

[ 14 ] In the fourth epoch the emerging natural sciences add a view of nature to the philosophical world picture that gradually senses its own independent ground. As this nature-picture develops, it retains nothing of a world in which the self-conscious ego (the human soul experiencing itself as a self-conscious entity) must recognize itself. In the first epoch the human soul begins to detach itself from the experienced external world and to develop a knowledge concerned with the inner life of the soul. This independent soul life finds its power in the awakening thought element. In the fourth period a picture 'of nature emerges that has detached itself in turn from the inner soul life. The tendency arises to think of nature in such a way that nothing is allowed to be mixed into its conception that has been derived from the soul and not exclusively from nature itself. Thus, the soul is, in this period, expelled from nature, and with its inner experiences confined to its subjective world. The soul is not about to be forced to admit that everything it can gain as knowledge by itself can have a significance only for itself. It cannot find in itself anything to point to a world in which this soul could have its roots with its true being. For in the picture of nature it cannot find any trace of itself.

[ 15 ] The evolution of thought life has proceeded through four epochs. In the first, thought is experienced as a perception coming from without. In this phase the human soul finds its self-dependence through the thought process. In the second period, thought had exhausted its power in this direction. The soul now becomes stronger in the experience of its own entity. Thought itself now lives more in the background and blends into self knowledge. It can no longer be considered as if it were an external perception. The soul becomes used to experiencing it as its own product. It must arrive at the question of what this product of inner soul activity has to do with an external world. The third period passes in the light of this question. The philosophers develop a cognitive life that tests thought itself with regard to its inner power. The philosophical strength of the period manifests itself as a life in the element of thought as such, as a power to work through thought in its own essence. In the course of this epoch the philosophical life increases in its ability to master the element of thought. At the beginning of the fourth period the cognitive self-consciousness, on the basis of its thought possession, proceeds to form a philosophical world picture. This picture is now challenged by a picture of nature that refuses to accept any element of this self-consciousness. The self-conscious soul, confronted with this nature picture, feels as its fundamental question, “How do I gain a world picture in which both the inner world with its true essence and the external nature are securely rooted at the same time?” The impulse caused by this question dominates the philosophical evolution from the beginning of the fourth period; the philosophers themselves may be more or less aware of that fact. This is also the most important impulse of the philosophical life of the present age.

In this book the facts are to be characterized that show the effect of that impulse. The first volume of the book is to present the philosophical development up to the middle of the nineteenth century; the second will follow that development into the present time. It is to show at the end how the philosophical evolution leads the soul to aspects toward a future human life in cognition. Through this, the soul should be able to develop a world picture out of its own self-consciousness in which its true being can be conceived simultaneously with the picture of nature that is the result of the modern scientific development.

[ 6 ] A philosophical future perspective adequate to the present was to be unfolded in this book from the historical evolution of the philosophical world view.

[ 1 ] With Pherekydes of Syros, who lived in the sixth century B.C., a personality appears in the Greek intellectual-spiritual life in whom one can observe the birth of what will be called in the following presentation, “a world and life conception.” What he has to say about the problems of the world is, on the one hand, still like the mythical symbolic accounts of a time that lies before the striving for a scientific world conception; on the other hand, his imagination penetrates through the picture, through the myth, to a form of reflection that wants to pierce the problems of man's existence and of his position in the world by means of thoughts. He still imagines the earth in the picture of a winged oak around which Zeus wraps the surface land, oceans, rivers, etc., like a woven texture. He thinks of the world as permeated by spiritual beings of which Greek mythology speaks.

But Pherekydes also speaks of three principles of the world: Of Chronos, of Zeus and of Chthon.

[ 2 ] Throughout the history of philosophy there has been much discussion as to what is to be understood by these three principles. As the historical sources on the question of what Pherekydes meant to say in his work, Heptamychos, are contradictory, it is quite understandable that present-day opinions also do not agree. If we reflect on the traditional accounts of Pherekydes, we get the impression that we can really observe in him the beginning of philosophical thought but that this observation is difficult because his words have to be taken in a sense that is remote from the thought habits of the present time; its real meaning is yet to be determined.

[ 4 ] Pherekydes arrives at his world picture in a different way from that of his predecessors. The significant fact is that he feels man to be a living soul in a way different from earlier times. For the earlier world view, the word, “soul,” did not yet have the meaning that it acquired in later conceptions of life, nor did Pherekydes have the idea of the soul in the sense of later thinkers. He simply feels the soul-element of man, whereas the later thinkers want to speak clearly about it (in the form of thought) and they attempt to characterize it in intellectual terms. Men of earlier times do not as yet separate their own soul experience from the life of nature. They do not feel that they stand as a special entity beside nature. They experience themselves in nature as they experience lightning and thunder in it, the drifting of the clouds, the course of the stars or the growth of plants. What moves man's hand on his own body, what places his foot on the ground and makes him walk, for the prehistoric man, belongs to the same sphere of world forces that also causes lightning, cloud formations and all other external events. What he at this stage feels, can be expressed by saying, “Something causes lightning, thunder, rain, moves my hand, makes my foot step, moves the air of my breath within me, turns my head.” If one expresses what is in this way experienced, one has to use words that at first hearing seem to be exaggerated. But only through these exaggerations will it be possible to understand what is intended to be conveyed.

A man who holds a world picture as it is meant here, experiences in the rain that falls to the ground the action of a force that we at the present time must call “spiritual” and that he feels to be of the same kind as the force he experiences when he is about to exert a personal activity of some kind or other. It should be of interest that this view can be found again in Goethe in his younger years, naturally in a shade of thought that it must assume in a personality of the eighteenth century. We can read in Goethe's essay, Nature:

She (nature) has placed me in life; she will also lead me out of it. I trust myself into her care. She may hold sway over me. She will not hate her work. It was not I who spoke about her. Nay, what is true and what is false—everything has been spoken by her. Everything is her fault, everything her merit.

[ 5 ] To speak as Goethe speaks here is only then possible if one feels one's own being imbedded in nature as a whole and then expresses this feeling in thoughtful reflection. As Goethe thought, so man of an earlier time felt without transforming his soul experience into the element of thought. He did not as yet experience thought; instead of thought there unfolded within his soul a symbolic image. The observation of the evolution of mankind leads back to a time in which thought-like experiences had not yet come into being but in which the symbolic picture rose in the soul of man when he contemplated the events of the world. Thought life is born in man at a definite time. It causes the extinction of the previous form of consciousness in which the world is experienced in pictures.

[ 6 ] For the thought habits of our time it seems acceptable to imagine that man in archaic times had observed natural elements—wind and weather, the growth of seeds, the course of the stars—and then poetically invented spiritual beings as the active creators of these events. It is, however, far from the contemporary mode of thinking to recognize the possibility that man in older times experienced those pictures as he later experienced thought, that is, as an inner reality of his soul life.

[ 7 ] One will gradually come to recognize that in the course of the evolution of mankind a transformation of the human organization has taken place. There was a time when the subtle organs of human nature, which make possible the development of an independent thought life, had not yet been formed. In this time man had, instead, organs, that represented for him what he experienced in the world of pictures.

[ 8 ] As this gradually comes to be understood, a new light will fall on the significance of mythology on the one hand, and that of poetic production and thought life on the other. When the independent inner thought experience began, it brought the picture-consciousness to extinction. Thought emerged as the tool of truth. This is only one branch of what survived of the old picture-consciousness that had found its expression in the ancient myth. In another branch the extinguished picture-consciousness continued to live, if only as a pale shadow of its former existence, in the creations of fantasy and poetic imagination. Poetic fantasy and the intellectual view of the world are the two children of the one mother, the old picture-consciousness that must not be confused with the consciousness of poetic imagination.

[ 9 ] The essential process that is to be understood is the transformation of the more delicate organization of man. It causes the beginning of thought life. In art and poetry thought as such naturally does not have an effect. Here the picture continues to exert its influence, but it has now a different relation to the human soul from the one it had when it also served in a cognitive function. As thought itself, the new form of consciousness appears only in the newly emerging philosophy. The other branches of human life are correspondingly transformed in a different way when thought begins to rule in the field of human knowledge.

[ 10 ] The progress in human evolution that is characterized by this process is connected with the fact that man from the beginning of thought experience had to feel himself in a much more pronounced way than before, as a separated entity, as a “soul.” In myth the picture was experienced in such a way that one felt it to be in the external world as a reality. One experienced this reality at the same time, and one was united with it. With thought, as well as with the poetic picture, man felt himself separated from nature. Engaged in thought experience, man felt himself as an entity that could not experience nature with the same intimacy as he felt when at one with thought. More and more, the definite feeling of the contrast of nature and soul came into being.

[ 11 ] In the civilizations of the different peoples this transition from the old picture-consciousness to the consciousness of thought experience took place at different times. In Greece we can intimately observe this transition if we focus our attention on the personality of Pherekydes of Syros. He lived in a world in which picture-consciousness and thought experience still had an equal share. His three principal ideas—Zeus, Chronos and Chthon—can only be understood in such a way that the soul, in experiencing them, feels itself as belonging to the events of the external world. We are dealing here with three inwardly experienced pictures and we find access to them only when we do not allow ourselves to be distracted by anything that the thought habits of our time are likely to imagine as their meaning.

[ 12 ] Chronos is not time as we think of it today. Chronos is a being that in contemporary language can be called “spiritual” if one keeps in mind that one does not thereby exhaust its meaning. Chronos is alive and its activity is the devouring, the consumption of the life of another being, Chthon. Chronos rules in nature; Chronos rules in man; in nature and man Chronos consumes Chthon. It is of no importance whether one considers the consumption of Chthon through Chronos as inwardly experienced or as external events, for in both realms the same process goes on. Zeus is connected with these two beings. In the meaning of Pherekydes one must no more think of Zeus as a deity in the sense of our present day conception of mythology, than as of mere “space” in its present sense, although he is the being through whom the events that go on between Chronos and Chthon are transformed into spatial, extended form.

[ 13 ] The cooperation of Chronos, Chthon and Zeus is felt directly as a picture content in the sense of Pherekydes, just as much as one is aware of the idea that one is eating, but it is also experienced as something in the external world, like the conception of the colors blue or red. This experience can be imagined in the following way. We turn our attention to fire as it consumes its fuel. Chronos lives in the activity of fire, of warmth. Whoever regards fire in its activity and keeps himself under the effect, not of independent thought but of image content, looks at Chronos. In the activity of fire, not in the sensually perceived fire, he experiences time simultaneously. Another conception of time does not exist before the birth of thought. What is called “time” in our present age is an idea that has been developed only in the age of intellectual world conception.

If we turn our attention to water, not as it is as water but as it changes into air or vapor, or to clouds that are in the process of dissolving, we experience as an image content the force of Zeus, the spatially active “spreader.” One could also say, the force of centrifugal extension. If we look on water as it becomes solid, or on the solid as it changes into fluid, we are watching Chthon. Chthon is something that later in the age of thought-ruled world conception becomes “matter,” the stuff “things are made of”; Zeus has become “ether” or “space,” Chronos changes into “time.”

[ 14 ] In the view of Pherekydes the world is constituted through the cooperation of these three principles. Through the combination of their action the material world of sense perception—fire, air, water and earth—come into being on the one hand, and on the other, a certain number of invisible supersensible spirit beings who animate the four material worlds. Zeus, Chronos and Chthon could be referred to as “spirit, soul and matter,” but their significance is only approximated by these terms. It is only through the fusion of these three original beings that the more material realms of the world of fire, air, water and earth, and the more soul-like and spirit-like (supersensible) beings come into existence. Using expressions of later world conceptions, one can call Zeus, space-ether; Chronos, time-creator; Chthon, matter-producer—the three “mothers of the world's origin.” We can still catch a glimpse of them in Goethe's Faust, in the scene of the second part where Faust sets out on his journey to the “mothers.”

[ 15 ] As these three primordial entities appear in Pherekydes, they remind us of conceptions of predecessors of this personality, the so-called Orphics. They represent a mode of conception that still lives completely in the old form of picture consciousness. In them we also find three original beings: Zeus, Chronos and Chaos. Compared to these “primeval mothers,” those of Pherekydes are somewhat less picture-like. This is so because Pherekydes attempts to seize, through the exertion of thought, what his Orphic predecessors still held completely as image-experience. For this reason we can say that he appears as a personality in whom the “birth of thought life” takes place. This is expressed not so much in the more thought-like conception of the Orphic ideas of Pherekydes, as in a certain dominating mood of his soul, which we later find again in several of his philosophizing successors in Greece. For Pherekydes feels that he is forced to see the origin of things in the “good” (Arizon). He could not combine this concept with the “world of mythological deities” of ancient times. The beings of this world had soul qualities that were not in agreement with this concept. Into his three “original causes” Pherekydes could only think the concept of the “good,” the perfect.

[ 16 ] Connected with this circumstance is the fact that the birth of thought life brought with it a shattering of the foundations of the inner feelings of the soul. This inner experience should not be overlooked in a consideration of the time when the intellectual world conception began. One could not have felt this beginning as progress if one had not believed that with thought one took possession of something that was more perfect than the old form of image experience. Of course, at this stage of thought development, this feeling was not clearly expressed. But what one now, in retrospect, can clearly state with regard to the ancient Greek thinkers was then merely felt. They felt that the pictures that were experienced by our immediate ancestors did not lead to the highest, most perfect, original causes. In these pictures only the less perfect causes were revealed; we must raise our thoughts to still higher causes from which the content of those pictures is merely derived.

[ 17 ] Through progress into thought life, the world was now conceived as divided into a more natural and a more spiritual sphere. In this more spiritual sphere, which was only now felt as such, one had to conceive what was formerly experienced in the form of pictures. To this was added the conception of a higher principle, something thought of as superior to the older, spiritual world and to nature. It was to this sublime element that thought wanted to penetrate, and it is in this region that Pherekydes meant to find his three “Primordial Mothers.” A look at the world as it appears illustrates what kind of conceptions took hold of a personality like Pherekydes. Man finds a harmony in his surroundings that lies at the bottom of all phenomena and is manifested in the motions of the stars, in the course of the seasons with their blessings of thriving plant-life, etc. In this beneficial course of things, harmful, destructive powers intervene, as expressed in the pernicious effects of the weather, earthquakes, etc. In observing all this one can be lead to a realization of a dualism in the ruling powers, but the human soul must assume an underlying unity. It naturally feels that, in the last analysis, the ravaging hail, the destructive earthquake, must spring from the same source as the beneficial cycle of the seasons. In this fashion man looks through good and evil and sees behind it an original good. The same good force rules in the earthquake as in the blessed rain of spring. In the scorching, devastating heat of the sun the same element is at work that ripens the seed. The “good Mothers of all origin” are, then, in the pernicious events also. When man experiences this feeling, a powerful world riddle emerges before his soul. To find the solution, Pherekydes turns toward his Ophioneus. As Pherekydes leans on the old picture conception, Ophioneus appears to him as a kind of “world serpent.” It is in reality a spirit being, which, like all other beings of the world, belongs to the children of Chronos, Zeus and Chthon, but that has later so changed that its effects are directed against those of the “good mother of origin.” Thus, the world is divided into three parts. The first part consists of the “Mothers,” which are presented as good, as perfect; the second part contains the beneficial world events; the third part, the destructive or the only imperfect world processes that, as Ophioneus, are intertwined in the beneficial effects.

[ 18 ] For Pherekydes, Ophioneus is not merely a symbolic idea for the detrimental destructive world forces. Pherekydes stands with his conceptive imagination at the borderline between picture and thought. He does not think that there are devastating powers that he conceives in the pictures of Ophioneus, nor does such a thought process develop in him as an activity of fantasy. Rather, he looks on the detrimental forces, and immediately Ophioneus stands before his soul as the red color stands before our souls when we look at a rose.

[ 19 ] Whoever sees the world only as it presents itself to image perception does not, at first, distinguish in his thought between the events of the “good mothers” and those of Ophioneus. At the borderline of a thought-formed world conception, the necessity of this distinction is felt, for only at this stage of progress does the soul feel itself to be a separate, independent entity. It feels the necessity to ask what its origin is. It must find its origin in the depths of the world where Chronos, Zeus and Chthon had not as yet found their antagonists. But the soul also feels that it cannot know anything of its own origin at first, because it sees itself in the midst of a world in which the “Mothers” work in conjunction with Ophioneus. It feels itself in a world in which the perfect and the imperfect are joined together. Ophioneus is twisted into the soul's own being.

[ 20 ] We can feel what went on in the souls of individual personalities of the sixth century B.C. if we allow the feelings described here to make a sufficient impression on us. With the ancient mythical deities such souls felt themselves woven into the imperfect world. The deities belonged to the same imperfect world as they did themselves.

The spiritual brotherhood, which was founded by Pythagoras of Samos between the years 549 and 500 B.C. in Kroton in Magna Graecia, grew out of such a mood. Pythagoras intended to lead his followers back to the experience of the “Primordial Mothers” in which the origin of their souls was to be seen. It can be said in this respect that he and his disciples meant to serve “other gods” than those of the people. With this fact something was given that must appear as a break between spirits like Pythagoras and the people, who were satisfied with their gods. Pythagoras considered these gods as belonging to the realm of the imperfect. In this difference we also find the reason for the “secret” that is often referred to in connection with Pythagoras and that was not to be betrayed to the uninitiated. It consisted in the fact that Pythagoras had to attribute to the human soul an origin different from that of the gods of the popular religion. In the last analysis, the numerous attacks that Pythagoras experienced must be traced to this “secret.” How was he to explain to others than those who carefully prepared themselves for such a knowledge that, in a certain sense, they, “as souls,” could consider themselves as standing even higher than the gods of the popular religion? In what other form than in a brotherhood with a strictly regulated mode of life could the souls become aware of their lofty origin and still find themselves deeply bound up with imperfection? It was just through this feeling of deficiency that the effort was to be made to arrange life in such a way that through the process of self-perfection it would be led back to its origin. That legends and myths were likely to be formed about such aspirations of Pythagoras is comprehensible. It is also understandable that scarcely anything has come down to us historically about the true significance of this personality. Whoever observes the legends and mythical traditions of antiquity about Pythagoras in an all-encompassing picture will nevertheless recognize in it the characterization that was just given.

[ 21 ] In the picture of Pythagoras, present-day thinking also feels the idea of the so-called “transmigration of souls” as a disturbing factor. It is even felt to be naive that Pythagoras is reported to have said that he knew that he had already been on earth in an earlier time as another human being. It may be recalled that that great representative of modern enlightenment, Lessing, in his Education of the Human Race, renewed this idea of man's repeated lives on earth out of a mode of thinking that was entirely different from that of Pythagoras. Lessing could conceive of the progress of the human race only in such a way that the human souls participated repeatedly in the life of the successive great phases of history. A soul brought into its life in a later time as a potential ability what it had gained from experience in an earlier era. Lessing found it natural that the soul had often been on earth in an earthly body, and that it would often return in the future. In this way, it struggles from life to life toward the perfection that it finds possible to obtain. He pointed out that the idea of repeated lives on earth ought not to be considered incredible because it existed in ancient times, and “because it occurred to the human mind before academic sophistry had distracted and weakened it.”

[ 22 ] The idea of reincarnation is present in Pythagoras, but it would be erroneous to believe that he—along with Pherekydes, who is mentioned as his teacher in antiquity—had yielded to this idea because he had by means of a logical conclusion arrived at the thought that the path of development indicated above could only be reached in repeated earthly lives. To attribute such an intellectual mode of thinking to Pythagoras would be to misjudge him. We are told of his extensive journeys. We hear that he met together with wise men who had preserved traditions of oldest human insight. When we observe the oldest human conceptions that have come down to us through posterity, we arrive at the view that the idea of repeated lives on earth was widespread in remote antiquity. Pythagoras took up the thread from the oldest teachings of humanity. The mythical teachings in picture form appeared to him as deteriorated conceptions that had their origin in older and superior insights. These picture doctrines were to change in his time into a thought-formed world conception, but this intellectual world conception appeared to him as only a part of the soul's life. This part had to be developed to greater depths. It could then lead the soul to its origins. By penetrating in this direction, however, the soul discovers in its inner experience the repeated lives on earth as a soul perception. It does not reach its origins unless it finds its way through the repeated terrestrial lives. As a wanderer walking to a distant place naturally passes through other places on his path, so the soul on its path to the “mothers” passes the preceding lives through which it has gone during its descent from its former existence in perfection, to its present life in imperfection. If one considers everything that is pertinent in this problem, the inference is inescapable that the view of repeated earth lives is to be attributed to Pythagoras in this sense as his inner perception, not as something that was arrived at through a process of conceptual conclusion.

Now the view that is spoken of as especially characteristic of the followers of Pythagoras is that all things are based on numbers. When this statement is made, one must consider that the school of Pythagoras was continued into later times after his death. Philolaus, Archytas and others are mentioned as later Pythagoreans. It was about them especially that one in antiquity knew they “considered things as numbers.” We can assume that this view goes back to Pythagoras even if historical documentation does not appear possible. We shall, however, have to suppose that this view was deeply and organically rooted in his whole mode of conception, and that it took on a more superficial form with his successors.

Let us think of Pythagoras as standing before the beginning of intellectual world conception. He saw how thought took its origin in the soul that had, starting from the “mothers,” descended through its successive lives to its state of imperfection; Because he felt this he could not mean to ascend to the origins through mere thought. He had to seek the highest knowledge in a sphere in which thought was not yet at home. There he found a life of the soul that was beyond thought life. As the soul experiences proportional numbers in the sound of music, so Pythagoras developed a soul life in which he knew himself as living in a connection with the world that can be intellectually expressed in terms of numbers. But for what is thus experienced, these numbers have no other significance than the physicist's proportional tone numbers have for the experience of music.

For Pythagoras the mythical gods must be replaced by thought. At the same time, he develops an appropriate deepening of the soul life; the soul, which through thought has separated itself from the world, finds itself at one with the world again. It experiences itself as not separated from the world. This does not take place in a region in which the world-participating experience turns into a mythical picture, but in a region in which the soul reverberates with the invisible, sensually imperceptible cosmic harmonies. It brings into awareness, not its own thought intentions, but what cosmic powers exert as their will, thus allowing it to become conception in the soul of man.

[ 23 ] In Pherekydes and Pythagoras the process of how thought-experienced world conception originates in the human soul is revealed. Working themselves free from the older forms of conception, these men arrive at an inwardly independent conception of the “soul” distinct from external “nature.” What is clearly apparent in these two personalities—the process in which the soul wrests its way out of the old picture conceptions—takes place more in the undercurrents of the souls of the other thinkers with whom it is customary to begin the account of the development of Greek philosophy. The thinkers who are ordinarily mentioned first are Thales of Miletos (640–550 B.C.), Anaximander (born 610 B.C.), Anaximenes (flourished 600 B.C.) and Heraclitus (born 500 B.C. at Ephesus).

[ 24 ] Whoever acknowledges the preceding arguments to be justified will also find a presentation of these men admissible that must differ from the usual historical accounts of philosophy. Such accounts are, after all, always based on the unexpressed presupposition that these men had arrived at their traditionally reported statements through an imperfect observation of nature. Thus the statement is made that the fundamental and original being of all things was to be found in “water,” according to Thales; in the “infinite,” according to Anaximander; in “air,” according to Anaximenes; in “fire,” in the opinion of Heraclitus.

[ 25 ] What is not considered in this treatment is the fact that these men are still really living in the process of the genesis of intellectual world conception. To be sure, they feel the independence of the human soul in a higher degree than Pherekydes, but they have not yet completed the strict separation of the life of the soul from the process of nature. One will, for instance, most certainly construct an erroneous picture of Thales's way of thinking if it is imagined that he, as a merchant, mathematician and astronomer, thought about natural events and then, in an imperfect yet similar way to that of a modern scientist, had summed up his results in the sentence, “Everything originates from water.” To be a mathematician or an astronomer, etc., in those ancient times meant to deal in a practical way with the things of these professions, much in the way a craftsman makes use of technical skills rather than intellectual and scientific knowledge.

[ 26 ] What must be presumed for a man like Thales is that he still experienced the external processes of nature as similar to inner soul processes. What presented itself to him like a natural event, as did the process and nature of “water” (the fluid, mudlike, earth-formative element), he experienced in a way that was similar to what he felt within himself in soul and body. He then experienced in himself and outside in nature the effect of water, although to a lesser degree than man of earlier times did. Both effects were for him the manifestation of one power. It may be pointed out that at a still later age the external effects in nature were thought of as being akin to the inner processes in a way that did not provide for a “soul” in the present sense as distinct from the body. Even in the time of intellectual world conception, the idea of the temperaments still preserves this point of view as a reminiscence of earlier times.

One called the melancholic temperament, the earthy; the phlegmatic, the watery; the sanguinic, the airy; the choleric, the fiery. These are not merely allegorical expressions. One did not feel a completely separated soul element, but experienced in oneself a soul-body entity as a unity. In this unity was felt the stream of forces that go, for instance, through a phlegmatic soul, to be like the forces in external nature that are experienced in the effects of water. One saw these external water effects to be the same as what the soul experienced in a phlegmatic mood. The thought habits of today must attempt an empathy with the old modes of conception if they want to penetrate into the soul life of earlier times.

[ 27 ] In this way one will find in the world conception of Thales an expression of what his soul life, which was akin to the phlegmatic temperament, caused him to experience inwardly. He experienced in himself what appeared to him to be the world mystery of water. The allusion to the phlegmatic temperament of a person is likely to be associated with a derogatory meaning of the term. Justified as this may be in many cases, it is nevertheless also true that the phlegmatic temperament, when it is combined with an energetic, objective imagination, makes a sage out of a man because of its calmness, collectedness and freedom from passion. Such a disposition in Thales probably caused him to be celebrated by the Greeks as one of their wise men.

[ 28 ] For Anaximenes, the world picture formed itself in another way. He experienced in himself the sanguine temperament. A word of his has been handed down to us that immediately shows how he felt the air element as an expression of the world mystery. “As our soul, which is a breath, holds us together, so air and breath envelop the universe.”

[ 29 ] The world conception of Heraclitus will, in an unbiased contemplation, be felt directly as a manifestation of his choleric inner life. A member of one of the most noble families of Ephesus, he became a violent antagonist of the democratic party because he had arrived at certain views, the truth of which was apparent to him in his immediate inner experience. The views of those around him, compared with his own, seemed to him to prove directly in a most natural way, the foolishness of his environment. Thus, he got into such conflicts that he left his native city and led a solitary life at the Temple of Artemis. Consider these few of his sayings that have come down to us. “It would be good if the Ephesians hanged themselves as soon as they grew up and surrendered their city to those under age.” Or the one about men, “Fools in their lack of understanding, even if they hear the truth, are like the deaf: of them does the saying bear witness that they are absent when present.”

The feeling that is expressed in such a choleric temperament finds itself akin to the consuming activity of fire. It does not live in the restful calm of “being.” It feels itself as one with eternal “becoming.” Such a soul feels stationary existence to be an absurdity. “Everything flows,” is, therefore, a famous saying of Heraclitus. It is only apparently so if somewhere an unchanging being seems to be given. We are lending expression to a feeling of Heraclitus if we say, “The rock seems to represent an absolute unchanging state of being, but this is only appearance; it is inwardly in the wildest commotion; all its parts act upon one another.” The mode of thinking of Heraclitus is usually characterized by his saying, “One cannot twice enter the same stream, for the second time the water is not the same.” A disciple of Heraclitus, Cratylus, goes still further by saying that one could not even enter the same stream once. Thus it is with all things. While we look at what is apparently unchanging, it has already turned into something else in the general stream of existence.

[ 30 ] We do not consider a world conception in its full significance if we accept only its thought content. Its essential element lies in the mood it communicates to the soul, that is, in the vital force that grows out of it. One must realize how Heraclitus feels himself with his own soul in the stream of becoming. The world soul pulsates in his own human soul and communicates to it of its own life as long as the human soul knows itself as living in it. Out of such a feeling of union with the world soul, the thought originates in Heraclitus, “Whatever lives has death in itself through the stream of becoming that is running through everything, but death again has life in itself. Life and death are in our living and dying. Everything has everything else in itself; only thus can eternal becoming flow through everything.” “The ocean is the purest and impurest water, drinkable and wholesome to fishes, to men undrinkable and pernicious.” “Life and death are the same, waking and sleeping, young and old; the first changes into the second and again into the first.” “Good and evil are one.” “The straight path and the crooked . . . are one.”

[ 31 ] Anaximander is freer from the inner life, more surrendered to the element of thought itself. He sees the origin of things in a kind of world ether, an indefinite formless basic entity that has no limits. Take the Zeus of Pherekydes, deprive him of every image content that he still possesses and you have the original principle of Anaximander: Zeus turned into thought. A personality appears in Anaximander in whom thought life is borne out of the mood of soul that still has, in the preceding thinkers, the color of temperament. Such a personality feels united as a soul with the life of thought, and thereby is not so intimately interwoven with nature as the soul that does not yet experience thought as an independent element. It feels itself connected with a world order that lies above the events of nature. When Anaximander says that men lived first as fishes in the moist element and then developed through land animal forms, he means that the spirit germ, which man recognizes through thinking as his true being, has gone through the other forms only as through preliminary stages, with the aim of giving itself eventually the shape that has been appropriate for him from the beginning.

[ 32 ] The thinkers mentioned so far are succeeded historically by Xenophanes of Kolophon (born 570 B.C.); Parmenides (460 B.C., living as a teacher in Athens), younger and inwardly related to Xenophanes; Zenon of Elea (who reached his peak around 500 B.C.); Melissos of Samos (about 450 B.C.).

[ 33 ] The thought element is already alive to such a degree in these thinkers that they demand a world conception in which the life of thought is fully satisfied; they recognize truth only in this form. How must the world ground be constituted so that it can be fully absorbed within thinking? This is their question.

Xenophanes finds that the popular gods cannot stand the test of thought; therefore, he rejects them. His god must be capable of being thought. What the senses perceive is changeable, is burdened with qualities not appropriate to thought, whose function it is to seek what is permanent. Therefore, God is the unchangeable, eternal unity of all things to be seized in thought.

Parmenides sees the Untrue, the Deceiving, in sense-perceived, external nature. He sees what alone is true in the Unity, the Imperishable that is seized by thought. Zeno tries to come to terms with, and do justice to, the thought experience by pointing out the contradictions that result from a world view that sees truth in the change of things, in the process of becoming, in the multiplicity that is shown by the external world. One of the contradictions pointed out by Zeno is that the fastest runner (Achilles) could not catch up with a turtle, for no matter how slowly it moved, the moment Achilles arrived at the point it had just occupied, it would have moved on a little. Through such contradictions Zeno intimates how a conceptual imagination that leans on the external world is caught in self-contradiction. He points to the difficulty such thought meets when it attempts to find the truth.

One will recognize the significance of this world conception, which is called the “eleatic view” (Parmenides and Zeno are from Elea), if one considers that those who hold this view have advanced with the development of thought experience to the point of having transformed it into a special art, the so-called dialectic. In the “art of thought” the soul learns to feel itself in its self-dependence and its inward self-sufficiency. With this step, the reality of the soul is felt to be what it is through its own being. It experiences itself through the fact that it no longer, as in earlier times, follows the general world experience with its life, but unfolds independent thought experience within itself. This experience is rooted in itself and through it, it can feel itself planted into a pure spiritual ground of the world. At first, this feeling is not expressed as a distinctly formulated thought but, in the esteem it enjoyed, it can be sensed vividly as a feeling in this age. According to a Dialogue of Plato, the young Socrates is told by Parmenides that he should learn the “art of thought” from Zeno; otherwise, truth would be unattainable for him. This “art of thought” was felt to be a necessity for the human soul intending to approach the spiritual fundamental grounds of existence.

[ 34 ] Whoever does not see how, in the progress of human development toward the stage of thought experience, real experiences—the picture experiences—came to an end with the beginning of this thought life, will not see the special quality of the Greek thinkers from the sixth to the fourth pre-Christian centuries in the light in which they must appear in this presentation. Thought formed a wall around the human soul, so to speak. The soul had formerly felt as if it were within the phenomena of nature. What it experienced in these natural phenomena, like the activities of its own body, presents itself to the soul in the form of images that appeared in vivid reality. Through the power of thought this entire panorama was now extinguished. Where previously images saturated in content prevailed, thought now expanded through the external world. The soul could experience itself in the surroundings of space and time only if it united itself with thought.

One senses such a mood of soul in Anaxagoras of Clazomenae in Asia Minor (born 500 B.C.). He found himself deeply bound up in his soul with thought life. His thought life encompassed what is extended in space and time. Expanded like this, it appears as the nous, the world reason. It penetrates the whole of nature as an entity. Nature, however, presents itself as composed only of little basic entities. The events of nature that result from the combined actions of these fundamental entities are what the senses perceive after the texture of imagery has vanished from nature. These fundamental entities are called homoiomeries. The soul experiences in thought the connection with the world reason (the nous) inside its wall. Through the windows of the senses it watches what the world reason causes to come into being through the action of the homoiomeries on each other.

[ 35 ] Empedocles (born 490 B.C. in Agrigent) was a personality in whose soul the old and the new modes of conception clash as in a violent antagonism. He still feels something of the old mode of being in which the soul was more closely interwoven with external existence. Hatred and love, antipathy and sympathy live in the human soul. They also live outside the wall that encloses it. The life of the soul is thus homogeneously extended beyond its boundaries and it appears in forces that separate and connect the elements of external nature—air, fire, water and earth—thereby causing what the senses perceive in the outer world.

[ 36 ] Empedocles is, as it were, confronted with nature, which appears to the senses to be deprived of life and soul, and he develops a soul mood that revolts against this extirpation of nature's animation. His soul cannot believe that nature really is what thought wants to make of it. Least of all can it admit that it should stand in such a relation to nature as it appears according to the intellectual world conception. We must imagine what goes on in a soul that senses such a discord in all its harshness, suffering from it. We shall then be capable of entering into the experience of how, in this soul of Empedocles, the old mode of conception is resurrected as the power of intimate feeling but is unwilling to raise this fact into full consciousness. It thus seeks a form of existence in a shade of experience hovering between thought and picture that is reechoed in the sayings of Empedocles. These lose their strangeness if they are understood in this way. The following aphorism is attributed to him. “Farewell. A mortal no longer, but an immortal god I wander about . . . and as soon as I come into the flourishing cities I am worshipped by men and women. They follow me by the thousands, seeking the path of their salvation with me, some expecting prophecies, others, curative charms for many diseases.”

In such a way, a soul that is haunted by an old form of consciousness through which it feels its own existence as that of a banished god who is cast out of another form of existence into the soul-deprived world of the senses, is dazed. He therefore feels the earth to be an “unaccustomed place” into which he is cast as in punishment. There are certainly other sentiments also to be found in the soul of Empedocles because significant flashes of wisdom shine in his aphorisms. His feeling with respect to the “birth of the intellectual world conception” is characterized, however, by the thought mood mentioned above.

[ 37 ] The thinkers who are called the atomists regarded what nature had become for the soul of man through the birth of thought in a different way. The most important among them is Democritus (born 460 B.C. in Abdera). Leucippus is a kind of forerunner to him.

[ 38 ] With Democritus, the homoiomeries of Anaxagoras have become, to a considerable degree, more material. In Anaxagoras, one can still compare the entities of the basic parts with living germs. With Democritus, they become dead indivisible particles of matter, which in their different combinations make up the things of the outer world. They mix freely as they move to and fro; thus, the events of nature come to pass. The world reason (nous) of Anaxagoras, which has the world processes grow out of the combined action of the homoiomeries like a spiritual (incorporeal) consciousness, with Democritus, turns into the unconscious law of nature (ananke). The soul is ready to recognize only what it can grasp as the result of simple thought combinations. Nature is now completely deprived of life and soul; thought has paled as a soul experience into the inner shadow of inanimate nature. In this way, with Democritus, the intellectual prototype of all more or less materialistically colored world conceptions of later times has made its appearance.

[ 39 ] The atom world of Democritus represents an external world, a nature in which no trace of soul life can be found. The thought experiences in the soul, through which the soul has become aware of itself, are mere shadow experiences in Democritus. Thus, a part of the fate of thought experiences is characterized. They bring the human soul to the consciousness of its own being, but they fill it at the same time with uncertainty about itself. The soul experiences itself in itself through thought, but it can at the same time feel that it lost its anchorage in the independent spiritual world power that used to lend it security and inner stability. This emancipation of the soul was felt by the group of men in Greek intellectual life known as “Sophists.” The most important among them is Protagoras of Abdera (480–410 B.C.). Also to be noted besides him are Gorgias, Critias, Hippias, Thrasymachus and Prodicus.

The sophists are often presented as men who superficially played with their thinking. Much has been contributed to this opinion by the manner in which Aristophanes, the playwright of comedies, treated them, but there are many things that can lead to a better appreciation of the sophists. It is noteworthy that even Socrates, who to a certain limited extent thought of himself as a pupil of Prodicus, is said to have described him as a man who had done much for the refinement of the speech and thinking of his disciples.

[ 40 ] Protagoras's view is expressed in the famous statement, “Man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are; of those that are not, that they are not.” In the sentiment underlying this statement the thought experience feels itself sovereign. It does not sense any connection with an objective world power. If Parmenides is of the opinion that the senses supply man with a world of deception, one could go further and add, “Why should not thinking, although one experiences it, also deceive?” Protagoras, however, would reply to this, “Why should it be man's concern if the world outside him is not as he perceives and thinks it? Does he imagine it for anyone else but himself? No matter how it may be for another being, this should be of no concern to man. The contents of his mind are only to serve him; with their aid he is to find his way through the world. Once he achieves complete clarity about himself, he cannot wish for any thought contents about the world except those that serve him.” Protagoras means to be able to build on thinking. For this purpose he intends to have it rest exclusively on its own sovereign power.

With this step, however, Protagoras places himself in contradiction to the spirit that lives in the depths of Greek life. This spirit is distinctly perceptible in the Greek character. It manifests itself in the inscription, “Know Thyself,” at the temple of Delphi. This ancient oracle wisdom speaks as if it contained the challenge for the progress of world conceptions that advances from the conception in images to the form of consciousness in which the secrets of the world are seized through thought. Through this challenge man is directed to his own soul. He is told that he can hear the language in his soul through which the world expresses its essence. He is thereby also directed toward something that produces uncertainties and insecurities for itself in its experience. The leading spirits of Greek civilization were to conquer the dangers of this self-supporting soul life. Thus, they were to develop thought in the soul into a world conception.

In the course of this development the sophists navigated in dangerous straits. In them the Greek spirit places itself at an abyss; it means to produce the strength of equilibrium through its own power. One should, as has been pointed out, consider the gravity and boldness of this attempt, rather than lightly condemn it even though condemnation is certainly justified for many of the sophists.

This attempt of the sophists takes place at a natural turning point of Greek life. Protagoras lived from 480 to 410 B.C. The Peloponnesian War, which occurred at this turning point of Greek civilization, lasted from 431 to 404 B.C. Before this war the individual member of Greek society had been firmly enclosed by his social connections. Commonwealth and tradition provided the measuring stick for his actions and thinking. The individual person had value and significance only as a member of the total structure. Under such circumstances the question, “What is the value of the individual human being?” could not be asked. The sophists, however, do ask this question, and in so doing introduce the era of Greek Enlightenment. Fundamentally, it is the question of how man arranges his life after he has become aware of his awakened thought life.

[ 41 ] From Pherekydes (or Thales) to the sophists, one can observe how emaciated thought in Greece, which had already been born before these men, gradually finds its place in the stream of philosophical development. The effect thought has when it is placed in the service of world conception becomes apparent in them. The birth of thought, however, is to be observed in the entire Greek life. One could show much the same kind of development in the fields of art, poetry, public life, the various crafts and trades, and one would see everywhere how human activity changes under the influence of the form of human organization that introduces thought into the world conception. It is not correct to say that philosophy “discovers” thought. It comes into existence through the fact that the newly born thought life is used for the construction of a world picture that formerly had been formed out of experiences of a different kind.

[ 42 ] While the sophists led the spirit of Greece, expressed in the motto, “Know Thyself,” to the edge of a dangerous cliff, Socrates, who was born in Athens about 470 and was condemned to death through poison in 399 B.C., expressed this spirit with a high degree of perfection.

[ 43 ] Historically, the picture of Socrates has come down to us through two channels of tradition. In one, we have the figure that his great disciple, Plato (427–347 B.C.), has drawn of him. Plato presents his philosophy in dialogue form, and Socrates appears in these dialogues as a teacher. He is shown as the “sage” who leads the persons around him through intellectual guidance to high stages of insight. A second picture has been drawn by Xenophon in his Memorabilia of Socrates. At first sight it seems as if Plato had idealized the character of Socrates and as if Xenophon had portrayed him more directly as he had been. But a more intimate inspection would likely show that both Plato and Xenophon each drew a picture of Socrates as they saw him from a special point of view. One is justified, therefore, in considering the question as to how these pictures supplement and illuminate each other.

[ 44 ] The first thing that must appear significant here is that Socrates' philosophy has come down to posterity entirely as an expression of his personality, of the fundamental character of his soul life. Both Plato and Xenophon present Socrates in such a way that in him his personal opinion speaks everywhere. This personality carries in itself the awareness that, whoever expresses his personal opinion out of the true ground of the soul, expresses something that is more than just human opinion, something that is a manifestation of the purposes of the world order through human thinking. By those who think they know him, Socrates is taken as the living proof for the conviction that truth is revealed in the human soul through thinking if, as was the case with Socrates, this soul is grounded in its own substance. Looking on Socrates, Plato does not teach a doctrine that is asserted by contemplative thought, but the thought has a rightly developed human being speak, who then observes what he produces as truth. Thus, the manner in which Plato behaves toward Socrates becomes an expression for what man is in his relation to the world. What Plato has advanced about Socrates is significant and also the way in which he, in his activity as a writer, has placed Socrates in the world of Greek spiritual life.

[ 45 ] With the birth of thought man was directed toward his “soul.” The question now arises as to what this soul says when it begins to speak, expressing what the world forces have laid into it. Through the attitude Plato takes with respect to Socrates, the resulting answer is that in the human soul the reason of the world speaks what it intends to reveal to man. The foundation is laid with this step for the confidence expressed in the revelations of the human soul insofar as it develops thought in itself. The figure of Socrates appears in the sign of this confidence.

[ 46 ] In ancient times the Greek consulted the oracles in the most important questions of life. He asked for prophecy, the revelation of the will and the opinion of the spiritual powers. Such an arrangement is in accord with the soul experience in images. Through the image man feels himself bound to the powers holding sway over the world. The oracle, then, is the institution by means of which somebody who is especially gifted in that direction finds his way to the spiritual powers better than other people. As long as one did not experience one's soul as separated from the outer world, the feeling was natural that this external world was able to express more through a special institution than through everyday experience. The picture spoke from without. Why should the outer world not be capable of speaking distinctly at a special place? Thought speaks to the inner soul. With thought, therefore, the soul is left to its own resources; it cannot feel united with another soul as with the revelations of a priestly oracle. To thought, one had to lend one's own soul. One felt of thought that it was a common possession of all men.

[ 47 ] World reason shines into thought life without especially established institutions. Socrates felt that the force lives in the thinking soul that used to be sought in the oracles. He experienced the “daimonion” in himself, the spiritual force that leads the soul. Thought has brought the soul to the consciousness of itself. With his conception of the daimonion speaking in him that, always leading him, told him what to do, Socrates meant to say, “The soul that has found its way to the thought life is justified to feel as if it communicated in itself with the world reason. It is an expression of the high valuation of what the soul possesses in its thought experience.”

[ 48 ] “Virtue,” under the influence of this view, is placed in a special light. Because Socrates values thought, he must presuppose that true virtue in human life reveals itself in the life of thought. True virtue must be found in thought life because it is from thought life that man derives his value. “Virtue is teachable.” In this way is Socrates' conception most frequently expressed. It is teachable because whoever really seizes thought life must be in its possession. What Xenophon says about Socrates is significant in this respect. Socrates teaches a disciple about virtue and the following dialogue develops.

Socrates: Do you believe there is a doctrine and science of justice, just as there is a doctrine of grammar?
The disciple: Yes, I do.
Socrates: Whom do you consider now as better versed in grammar, the one who intentionally writes and reads incorrectly, or the one who does so without intention?
The disciple: I should think the one who does it intentionally, for if he meant to, he could also do it correctly.
Socrates: Does it not seem to you that the one who intentionally writes incorrectly knows how to write, but the other one does not?
The disciple: Without doubt.
Socrates: Who now understands more of justice, he who intentionally lies or cheats, or he who does so inadvertently?

Socrates attempts to make clear to the disciple that what matters is to have the right thoughts about virtue. So also what Socrates says about virtue aims at the establishment of confidence in a soul that knows itself through thought experience. The right thoughts about virtue are to be trusted more than all other motivations. Virtue makes man more valuable when he experiences it in thought.

[ 49 ] Thus, what the pre-Socratic age strove for becomes manifest in Socrates, that is, the appreciation of what humanity has been given through the awakened thought life. Socrates' method of teaching is under the influence of this conception. He approaches man with the presupposition that thought in life is in him; it only needs to be awakened. It is for this reason that he arranges his questions in such a way that the questioned person is stimulated to awaken his own thought life. This is the substance of the Socratic method.

[ 50 ] Plato, who was born in Athens in 427 B.C., felt, as a disciple of Socrates, that his master had helped him to consolidate his confidence in the life of thought. What the entire previous development tended to bring into appearance reaches a climax in Plato. This is the conception that in thought life the world spirit reveals itself. The awareness of this conception sheds, to begin with, its light over all of Plato's soul life. Nothing that man knows through the senses or otherwise has any value as long as the soul has not exposed it to the light of thought. Philosophy becomes for Plato the science of ideas as the world of true being, and the idea is the manifestation of the world spirit through the revelation of thought. The light of the world spirit shines into the soul of man and reveals itself there in the form of ideas; the human soul, in seizing the idea, unites itself with the force of the world spirit. The world that is spread in space and time is like the mass of the ocean water in which the stars are reflected, but what is real is only reflected as idea. Thus, for Plato, the whole world changes into ideas that act upon each other. Their effect in the world is produced through the fact that the ideas are reflected in hyle, the original matter. What we see as the many individual things and events comes to pass through this reflection. We need not extend knowledge to hyle, the original matter, however, for in it is no truth. We reach truth only if we strip the world picture of everything that is not idea. [ 51 ] For Plato, the human soul is living in the idea, but this life is so constituted that the soul is not a manifestation of its life in the ideas in all its utterances. Insofar as it is submerged in the life of ideas, it appears as the "rational soul” (thought-bearing soul), and as such, the soul appears to itself when it becomes aware of itself in thought perception. It must also manifest itself in such a way that it appears as the "non-rational soul” (not-thought-bearing soul), As such, it again appears in a twofold way as courage-developing, and as appetitive soul. Thus, Plato seems to distinguish three members or parts in the human soul: The rational soul, the courage-like (or will-exertive) soul and the appetitive soul. We shall, however, describe the spirit of his conceptional approach better if we express it in a different way. According to its nature, the soul is a member of the world of ideas, but it acts in such a way that it adds an activity to its life in reason through its courage life and its appetitive life. In this threefold mode of utterance it appears as earthbound soul. It descends as a rational soul through physical birth into a terrestrial existence, and with death again enters the world of ideas. Insofar as it is rational soul, it is immortal, for as such it shares with its life the eternal existence of the world of ideas.

[ 52 ] Plato's doctrine of the soul emerges as a significant fact in the age of thought perception. The awakened thought directed man's attention toward the soul. A perception of the soul develops in Plato that is entirely the result of thought perception. Thought in Plato has become bold enough not only to point toward the soul but to express what the soul is, as it were, to describe it. What thought has to say about the soul gives it the force to know itself in the eternal. Indeed, thought in the soul even sheds light on the nature of the temporal by expanding its own being beyond this temporal existence. The soul perceives thought. As the soul appears in its terrestrial life, it could not produce in itself the pure form of thought. Where does the thought experience come from if it cannot be developed in the life on earth? It represents a reminiscence of a pre-terrestrial, purely spiritual state of being. Thought has seized the soul in such a way that it is not satisfied by the soul's terrestrial form of existence. It has been revealed to the soul in an earlier state of being (preexistence) in the spirit world (world of ideas) and the soul recalls it during its terrestrial existence through the reminiscence of the life it has spent in the spirit.

[ 53 ] What Plato has to say about the moral life follows from this soul conception. The soul is moral if it so arranges life that it exerts itself to the largest possible measure as rational soul. Wisdom is the virtue that stems from the rational soul; it ennobles human life. Fortitude is the virtue of the will-exertive soul; Temperance is that of the appetitive soul. These virtues come to pass when the rational soul becomes the ruler over the other manifestations of the soul. When all three virtues harmoniously act together, there emerges what Plato calls, Justice, the direction toward the Good, Dikaiosyne.

[ 54 ] Plato's disciple, Aristotle (born 384 B.C. in Stageira, Thracia, died 321 B.C.), together with his teacher, represents a climax in Greek thinking. With him the process of the absorption of thought life into the world conception has been completed and come to rest. Thought takes its rightful possession of its function to comprehend, out of its own resources, the being and events of the world. Plato still uses his conceptual imagination to bring thought to its rightful authority and to lead it into the world of ideas. With Aristotle, this authority has become a matter of course. It is now a question of confirming it everywhere in the various fields of knowledge. Aristotle understands how to use thought as a tool that penetrates into the essence of things. For Plato, it had been the task to overcome the thing or being of the external world. When it has been overcome, the soul carries in itself the idea of which the external being had only been overshadowed, but which had been foreign to it, hovering over it in a spiritual world of truth. Aristotle intends to submerge into the beings and events, and what the soul finds in this submersion, it accepts as the essence of the thing itself. The soul feels as if it had only lifted this essence out of the thing and as if it had brought this essence for its own consumption into the thought form in order to be able to carry it in itself as a reminder of the thing. To Aristotle's mind, the ideas are in the things and events. They are the side of the things through which these things have a foundation of their own in the underlying material, matter (hyle).

[ 55 ] Plato, like Aristotle, lets his conception of the soul shed its light on his entire world conception. In both thinkers we describe the fundamental constitution of their philosophy as a whole if we succeed in determining the basic characteristics of their soul conceptions. To be sure, for both of them many detailed studies would have to be considered that cannot be attempted in this sketch. But the direction their mode of conception took is, for both, indicated in their soul conceptions.

[ 56 ] Plato is concerned with what lives in the soul and, as such, shares in the spirit world. What is important for Aristotle is the question of how the soul presents itself for man in his own knowledge. As it does with other things, the soul must also submerge into itself in order to find what constitutes its own essence. The idea, which, according to Aristotle, man finds in a thing outside his soul, is the essence of the thing, but the soul has brought this essence into the form of an idea in order to have it for itself. The idea does not have its reality in the cognitive soul but in the external thing in connection with its material (hyle). If the soul submerges into itself, however, it finds the idea as such in reality. The soul in this sense is idea, but active idea, an entity exerting action, and it behaves also in the life of man as such an active entity. In the process of germination of man it lays hold upon material existence.

While idea and matter constitute an inseparable unity in an external thing, this is not the case with the human soul and its body. Here the independent human soul seizes upon the corporeal part, renders the idea ineffective that has been active in the body before and inserts itself in its place. In Aristotle's view, a soul-like principle is active already in the bodily element with which the human soul unites itself, for he sees also in the bodies of the plants and of animals, soul-like entities of a subordinate kind at work. A body that carries in itself the soul elements of the plant and animal is, as it were, fructified by the human soul. Thus, for the terrestrial man, a body-soul entity is linked up with a spirit-soul entity. The spirit-soul entity suppresses the independent activity of the body-soul element during the earth life of man and uses the body-soul entity as an instrument. Five soul manifestations come into being through this process. These, in Aristotle, appear as five members of the soul: The plant-like soul (threptikon), the sentient soul (aisthetikon), the desire-developing soul (orektikon), the will-exerting soul (kinetikon) and the spirit-soul (dianoetikon). Man is spiritual soul through what belongs to the spiritual world and what, in the process of germination, links itself up with the body-soul entity. The other members of the soul come into being as the spiritual soul unfolds itself in the body and thereby leads its earth life.

With Aristotle's focus on a spiritual soul the perspective toward a spiritual world in general is naturally given. The world picture of Aristotle stands before our contemplative eye in such a way that we see below the life of things and events, thus presenting matter and idea; the higher we lift our eye, the more we see vanish whatever bears a material character. Pure spiritual essence appears, representing itself to man as idea, that is, the sphere of the world in which deity as pure spirituality that moves everything has its being. The spiritual soul of man belongs to this world sphere; before it is united with a body-soul entity, it does not exist as an individual being but only as a part of the world spirit. Through this connection it acquires its individual existence separated from the world spirit and continues to live after the separation from the body as a spiritual being. Thus, the individual soul entity has its beginning with the human earthly life and then lives on as immortal. A preexistence of the soul before earth life is assumed by Plato but not by Aristotle. The denial of the soul's preexistence is as natural to Aristotle, who has the idea exist in the thing, as the opposite view is natural to Plato, who conceives of the idea as hovering over the thing. Aristotle finds the idea in the thing, and the soul acquires in its body what it is to be in the spirit world as an individuality.

[ 57 ] Aristotle is the thinker who has brought thought to the point where it unfolds to a world conception through its contact with the essence of the world. The age before Aristotle led to the experience of thought; Aristotle seizes the thoughts and applies them to whatever he finds in the world. The natural way, peculiar to Aristotle, in which he lives in thought as a matter of course, leads him also to investigate logic, the laws of thought itself. Such a science could only come into being after the awakened thought had reached a stage of great maturity and of such a harmonious relationship to the things of the outer world as we find it in Aristotle.

[ 58 ] Compared with Aristotle, the other thinkers of antiquity who appear as his contemporaries or as his successors seem to be of much less significance. They give the impression that their abilities lack a certain energy that prevents them from attaining the stage of insight Aristotle had reached. One gets the feeling that they disagree with him because they are stating opinions about things they do not understand as well as he. One is inclined to explain their views by pointing to the deficiency that led them to utter opinions that have already been disproved essentially in Aristotle's work.

[ 59 ] To begin with, one can receive such an impression from the Stoics and the Epicureans. Zeno of Kition (342–270 B.C.), Kleanthes (born 200 B.C.), Chrysippus (282– 209 B.C.), and others belong to the Stoics, whose name was derived from the Hall of Columns in Athens, the Stoa. They accept what appears reasonable to them in earlier world conceptions, but they are mainly concerned with finding out what man's position is in the world by contemplation of it. They want to base on this, their decision as to how to arrange life in such a way that it is in agreement with the world order, and also in such a way that man can unfold his life in this world order according to his own nature. According to them, man dulls his natural being through desire, passion and covetousness. Through equanimity and freedom from desire, he feels best what he is meant to be and what he can be. The ideal man is the “sage” who does not hamper the process of the inner development of the human being by any vice.

[ 60 ] As the thinkers before Aristotle were striving to obtain the knowledge that, after him, becomes accessible to man through the ability to perceive thoughts in the full consciousness of his soul, with the Stoics, reflection concentrates on the question as to what man is to do in order to express his nature as a human being in the best way.

[ 61 ] Epicurus (born 324 B.C., died 270 B.C.) developed in his own way the elements that had already been latent in the earlier atomistic thinkers. He builds a view of life on this foundation that can be considered to be an answer to the question: As the human soul emerges as the blossom of world processes, how is it to live in order to shape its separate existence, its self-dependence in accordance with thinking guided by reason? Epicurus could answer this question only by a method that considered life only between birth and death, for nothing else can, with perfect intellectual honesty, be derived from the atomistic world conception. The fact of pain must appear to such a conception as a peculiar enigma of life. For pain is one of those facts that drive the soul out of the consciousness of its unity with the things of the world. One can consider the motion of the stars and the fall of rain to be like the motion of one's own hand, as was done in the world conception of more remote antiquity. That is to say, one can feel in both kinds of events the same uniform spirit-soul reality. The fact that events can produce pain in man but cannot do so in the external world, however, drives the soul to the recognition of its own special nature. A doctrine of virtues, which, like the one of Epicurus, endeavors to live in harmony with world reason, can, as may easily be conceived, appreciate an ideal of life that leads to the avoidance of pain and displeasure. Thus, everything that does away with displeasure becomes the highest Epicurean life value.

[ 62 ] This view of life found numerous followers in later antiquity, especially among Roman gentlemen of cultural aspiration. The Roman poet, T. Lucretius Carus (95–52 B.C.), has expressed it in perfect artistic form in his poem, De Rerum Natura.

[ 63 ] The process of perceiving thoughts leads the soul to the recognition of its own being, but it can also occur that the soul feels powerless to deepen its thought experience sufficiently to find a connection with the grounds of the world through this experience. The soul then finds itself torn loose from these grounds through its own thinking. It feels that thinking contains its own being, but it does not find a way to recognize in its thought life anything but its own statement. The soul can then only surrender to a complete renunciation of any kind of true knowledge. Pyrrho (360–270 B.C.) and his followers, whose philosophical belief is called scepticism, were in such a situation. Scepticism, the philosophy of doubt, attributes no other power to the thought experience than the formation of human opinions about the world. Whether or not these opinions have any significance for the world outside man is a question about which it is unwilling to make a decision. [A true skeptic is agnostic on a subject. Doubt denotes an opinion for which a burden of proof is needed. Skepticism should be neutral – e.Ed]

[ 64 ] In a certain sense, one can see a well-rounded picture in the series of Greek thinkers. One will have to admit, of course, that such an attempt to connect the views of the individual thinkers only too easily brings out irrelevant aspects of secondary significance. What remains most important is still the contemplation of the individual personalities and the impressions one can gain concerning the fact of how, in these personalities, the general human element is brought to manifestation in special cases. One can observe a process in this line of Greek thinkers that can be called the birth, growth and life of thought: in the pre-Socratic thinkers, the prelude; in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the culmination; after them, a decline and a kind of dissolution of thought life.

[ 65 ] Whoever contemplates this development can arrive at the question as to whether thought life really has the power to give everything to the soul toward which it has led it by bringing it to the complete consciousness of itself. For the unbiased observer, Greek thought life has an element that makes it appear “perfect” in the best sense of the word. It is as if the energy of thought in the Greek thinkers had worked out everything that it contains in itself. Whoever judges differently will notice on closer inspection that somewhere in his judgment an error is involved. Later world conceptions have produced accomplishments through other forces of the soul. Of the later thoughts as such, it can always be shown that with respect to their real thought content they can already be found in some earlier Greek thinker. What can be thought and how one can doubt about thinking and knowledge, all enters the field of consciousness in Greek civilization, and in the manifestation of thought the soul takes possession of its own being.

[ 66 ] Has Greek thought life, however, shown the soul that it has the power to supply it with everything that it has stimulated in it? The philosophical current called Neo-Platonism, which in a way forms an aftermath of Greek thought life, was confronted with this question. Plotinus (205–270 A.D.) was its chief representative. Philo, who lived at the beginning of the Christian era in Alexandria, could be considered a forerunner of this movement. He does not base his effort to construct a world conception on the creative energy of thought. Rather, he applies thought in order to understand the revelation of the Old Testament. He interprets what is told in this document as fact in an intellectual, allegorical manner. For him, the accounts of the Old Testament turn into symbols for soul events to which he attempts to gain access intellectually.

Plotinus does not regard thought experience as something that embraces the soul in its full life. Behind thought life another life of the soul must lie, a soul life that would be concealed rather than revealed by the action of thought. The soul must overcome the life in thought, must extinguish it in itself and only after this extinction can it arrive at a form of experience that unites it with the origin of the world. Thought leads the soul to itself; now it must seize something in itself that will again lead it out of the realm into which thought has brought it. What Plotinus strives for is an illumination that begins in the soul after it has left the realm to which it has been carried by thought. In this way he expects to rise up to a world being that does not enter into thought life. World reason, therefore, toward which Plato and Aristotle strive, is not, according to Plotinus, the last reality at which the soul arrives. It is rather the outgrowth of a still higher reality that lies beyond all thinking. From this reality beyond all thought, which cannot be compared with anything that could be a possible object of thought, all world processes emanate.

Thought, as it could manifest itself in Greek spiritual life, has, as it were, gone through a complete revolution and thereby all possible relationships of man to thought seem to be exhausted. Plotinus looks for sources other than those given in thought revelation. He leaves the continuing evolution of thought life and enters the realm of mysticism. It is not intended to give a description of the development of mysticism here, but only the development of thought life and what has its origin in this process is to be outlined. There are, however, at various points in the spiritual development of mankind connections between intellectual world conceptions and mysticism. We find such a point of contact in Plotinus. His soul life is not ruled only by thinking. He has a mystical experience that presents an inner awareness without the presence of thoughts in his soul. In this experience he finds his soul united with the world foundation. His way of presenting the connection of the world with its ground, however, is to be expressed in thoughts. The reality beyond thought is the most perfect; what proceeds from it is less perfect. In this way, the process continues down into the visible world, the most imperfect. Man finds himself in this world of imperfection. Through the act of perfecting his soul, he is to cast off what the world in which he finds himself can give him, and is thus to find a path of development through which he becomes a being that is of one accord with the perfect origin.

[ 67 ] We see a personality in Plotinus who feels the impossibility to continue Greek thought life. He cannot find anything that would grow as a further branch of world conception out of thought itself. If one looks for the sense in which the evolution of philosophy proceeds, one is justified in saying that the formation of picture conception has turned into that of thought conceptions. In a similar way, the production of thought conception must change again into something else, but the evolution of the world conception is not ready for this in the age of Plotinus. He therefore abandons thought and searches outside thought experience. Greek thoughts, however, fructified by his mystical experiences, develop into the evolutionary ideas that present the world process as a sequence of stages proceeding in a descending order, from a highest most perfect being to imperfect beings. In the thinking of Plotinus, Greek thoughts continue to have their effect. They do not develop as an organic growth of the original forces, however, but are taken over into the mystical consciousness. They do not undergo a transformation through their own energies but through nonintellectual forces.

Ammonius Sakkas (175–242), Porphyrius (232–304), Iamblichus (who lived in the fourth century A.D.), Proclus (410–485), and others are followers and expounders of this philosophy.

In a way similar to that of Plotinus and his successors, Greek thinking in its more Platonic shade continued under the influence of a nonintellectual element. Greek thought in its Pythagorean nuance is treated by Nigidius Figulus, Apollonius of Tyana, Moderatus of Gades, and others.

• [ 3 ] 1. This book, which is to give a picture of the world and life conceptions of the nineteenth century is, in its second edition, supplemented by a brief account of the preceding philosophies insofar as they are based on an intellectual conception of the world. I have done this because I feel that the ideas of the last century are better shown in their inner significance if they are not taken by themselves, but if the highlights of thought of the preceding ages fall on them. In such an “introduction” not all the “documentary materials” can be given that must form the basis of this short sketch. If I should have the opportunity to develop the sketch into an independent book, it would become clear that the appropriate basis really exists. I also have no doubt that others who want to see in this sketch a suggestion for new viewpoints will find the documentary evidence in the historical sources that have been traditionally handed down to us.

[ 1 ] A foreshadowing of a new element produced by thought life itself emerges in St. Augustine (354–430). This element soon vanishes from the surface, however, to continue unnoticeably under the cover of religious conception, becoming distinctly discernible again only in the later Middle Ages. In St. Augustine, the new element appears as if it were a reminiscence of Greek thought life. He looks into the external world and into himself, and comes to the conclusion: May everything else the world reveals contain nothing but uncertainty and deception, one thing cannot be doubted, that is, the certainty of the soul's experience itself. I do not owe this inner experience to a perception that could deceive me; I am in it myself; it is, for I am present when its being is attributed to it.

[ 2 ] One can see a new element in these conceptions as against Greek thought life, in spite of the fact that they seem at first like a reminiscence of it. Greek thinking points toward the soul; in St. Augustine, we are directed toward the center of the life of the soul. The Greek thinkers contemplated the soul in its relation to the world; in St. Augustine's approach, something in the soul life confronts this soul life and regards it as a special, self-contained world. One can call the center of the soul life the “ego” of man. To the Greek thinkers, the relation of the soul to the world becomes problematic, to the thinkers of modern times, that of the “ego” to the soul. In St. Augustine, we have only the first indication of this situation. The ensuing philosophical currents are still too much occupied with the task of harmonizing world conception and religion to become distinctly aware of the new element that has not entered into spiritual life. But the tendency to contemplate the riddles of the world in accordance with the demand of this new element lives more or less unconsciously in the souls of the time that now follows. In thinkers like Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and Thomas Aquinas (1227–1274), this tendency still shows itself in such a way that they attribute to self-supportive thinking the ability to investigate the processes of the world to a certain degree, but they limit this ability. There is for them a higher spiritual reality to which thinking, left to its own resources, can never attain, but that must be revealed to it in a religious way. Man is, according to Thomas Aquinas, rooted with his soul life in the reality of the world, but this soul life cannot know this reality in its full extent through itself alone. Man could not know how his own being stands in the course of the world if the spirit being, to which his knowledge does not penetrate, did not deign to reveal to him what must remain concealed to a knowledge relying on its own power alone. Thomas Aquinas constructs his world picture on this presupposition. It has two parts, one of which consists of the truths that are yielded to man's own thought experience about the natural course of things. This leads to a second part that contains what has come to the soul of man through the Bible and religious revelation. Something that the soul cannot reach by itself, if it is to feel itself in its full essence, must therefore penetrate into the soul.

[ 3 ] Thomas Aquinas made himself thoroughly familiar with the world conception of Aristotle, who becomes, as it were, his master in the life of thought. In this respect, Aquinas is, to be sure, the most prominent, but nevertheless only one of the numerous personalities of the Middle Ages who erect their own thought structure entirely on that of Aristotle. For centuries, he is il maestro di color che sanno, the master of those who know, as Dante expresses the veneration for Aristotle in the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas strives to comprehend what is humanly comprehensible in Aristotelian method. In this way, Aristotle's world conception becomes the guide to the limit to which the soul life can advance through its own power for him. Beyond these boundaries lies the realm that the Greek world conception, according to Thomas, could not reach.

Therefore, human thinking for Thomas Aquinas is in need of another light by which it must be illuminated. He finds this light in revelation. Whatever was to be the attitude of the ensuing thinkers with respect to this revelation, they could no longer accept the life of thought in the manner of the Greeks. It is not sufficient to them that thinking comprehends the world; they make the presupposition that it should be possible to find a basic support for thinking itself. The tendency arises to fathom man's relation to his soul life. Thus, man considers himself a being who exists in his soul life. If one calls this entity the ego, one can say that in modern times the consciousness of the ego is stirred up in man's soul life in a way similar to that in which thought was born in the philosophical life of the Greeks. Whatever different forms the philosophical currents in this age assume, they all hinge on the search for the ego-entity. This fact, however, is not always brought clearly to the consciousness of the thinkers themselves. They mostly believe they are concerned with questions of a different nature. One could say that the Riddle of the Ego appears in a great variety of masks. At times it lives in the philosophy of the thinkers in such a concealed way that the statement that this riddle is at the bottom of some view or other might appear as an arbitrary or forced opinion. In the nineteenth century this struggle over the riddle of the ego comes to its most intensive manifestation, and the world conceptions of the present time are still profoundly engaged in this struggle.

[ 4 ] This world riddle already lived in the conflict between the nominalists and the realists in the Middle Ages. One can call Anselm of Canterbury a representative of realism. For him, the general ideas that man forms when he contemplates the world are not mere nomenclatures that the soul produces for itself, but they have their roots in a real life. If one forms the general idea “lion” in order to designate all lions with it, it is certainly correct to say that, for sense perception, only the individual lions have reality. The general concept “lion” is not, however, only a summary designation with significance only for the human mind. It is rooted in a spiritual world, and the individual lions of the world of sense perception are the various embodiments of the one lion nature expressed in the “idea of lion.”

Such a “reality of ideas” was opposed by Nominalists like Roscellin (also in the eleventh century). The “general ideas” are only summary designations for him, names that the mind forms for its own use for its orientation, but that do not correspond to any reality. According to this view, only the individual things are real. The quarrel is characteristic of the specific mentality of its participants. Both sides feel the necessity to search for the validity, the significance of the thoughts that the soul must produce. Their attitude to thoughts as such is different from what the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle were toward them. This is so because something has happened between the end of the development of Greek philosophy and the beginning of modern thought. Something has gone on under the surface of historical evolution that can, however, be observed in the attitude that the individual thinkers take with respect to their thought life.

To the Greek thinker, thought came as a perception. It arose in the soul as the red color appears when a man looks at a rose, and the thinker received it as a perception. As such the thought had the immediate power of conviction. The Greek thinker had the feeling, when he placed himself with his soul receptively before the spiritual world, that no incorrect thought could enter from this world into the soul just as no perception of a winged horse could come from the sense world as long as the sense organs were properly used. For the Greeks, it was a question of being able to garner thoughts from the world. They were then themselves the witnesses of their truth. The fact of this attitude is not contradicted by the Sophists, nor is it denied by ancient Scepticism. Both currents have an entirely different shade of meaning in antiquity from similar tendencies in modern times. They are not evidence against the fact that the Greek experienced thought in a much more elementary, content-saturated, vivid and real way than it can be experienced by the man of modern times. This vividness, which in ancient Greece gave the character of perception to thought, is no longer to be found in the Middle Ages.

What has happened is this. As in Greek times thought entered into the human soul, extinguishing the formerly prevalent picture consciousness, so, in a similar way, during the Middle Ages the consciousness of the “ego” penetrated the human soul, and this dampened the vividness of thought. The advent of the ego-consciousness deprived thought of the strength through which it had appeared as perception. We can only understand how the philosophical life advances when we realize how, for Plato and Aristotle, the thought, the idea, was something entirely different from what it was for the personalities of the Middle Ages and modern times. The thinker of antiquity had the feeling that thought was given to him; the thinker of the later time had the impression that he was producing thought. Thus, the question arises in him as to what significance what has been produced in the soul can have for reality. The Greek felt himself to be a soul separated from the world; he attempted to unite with the spiritual world in thought. The later thinker feels himself to be alone with his thought life. Thus, the inquiry into the nature of the “general ideas” begins. The thinker asks himself the questions, “What is it that I have really produced with them? Are they only rooted in me, or do they point toward a reality?”

[ 5 ] In the period between the ancient current of philosophical life and that of modern philosophy, the source of Greek thought life is gradually exhausted. Under the surface, however, the human soul experiences the approaching ego-consciousness as a fact. Since the end of the first half of the Middle Ages, man is confronted with this process as an accomplished fact, and under the influence of this confrontation, new Riddles of Life emerge. Realism and Nominalism are symptoms of the fact that man realizes the situation. The manner in which both Realists and Nominalists speak about thought shows that, compared to its existence in the Greek soul, it has faded out, has been dampened as much as had been the old picture consciousness in the soul of the Greek thinker.

[ 6] This points to the dominating element that lives in the modern world conceptions. An energy is active in them that strives beyond thought toward a new factor of reality. This tendency of modern times cannot be felt as the same that drove beyond thought in ancient times in Pythagoras and later in Plotinus. These thinkers also strove beyond thought but, according to their conception, the soul in its development, its perfection, would have to conquer the region that lies beyond thought. In modern times it is presupposed that the factor of reality lying beyond thought must approach the soul, must be given to it from without.

[ 7 ] In the centuries that follow the age of Nominalism and Realism, philosophical evolution turns into a search for the new reality factor. One path among those discernible to the student of this search is the one the medieval Mystics—Meister Eckhardt (died 1327), Johannes Tauler (died 1361), Heinrich Suso (died 1366) – have chosen for themselves. We receive the clearest idea of this path if we inspect the so-called German Theology (Theologia, deutsch), written by an author historically unknown. The Mystics want to receive something into the ego-consciousness; they intend to fill it with something. They therefore strive for an inner life that is “completely composed,” surrendered in tranquillity, and that thus patiently waits to experience the soul to be filled with the “Divine Ego.” In a later time, a similar soul mood with a greater spiritual momentum can be observed in Angelus Silesius (1624–1677).

[ 8 ] A different path is chosen by Nicolaus Cusanus (Nicolaus Chrypffs, born at Kues on the Moselle, 1401, died 1464). He strives beyond intellectually attainable knowledge to a state of soul in which knowledge ceases and in which the soul meets its god in “knowing ignorance,” in docta ignorantia. Examined superficially, this aspiration is similar to that of Plotinus, but the soul constitution of these two personalities is different. Plotinus is convinced that the human soul contains more than the world of thoughts. When it develops the energy that it possesses beyond the power of thought, the soul becomes conscious of the state in which it exists, and about which it is ignorant in ordinary life.

[ 9 ] Paracelsus (1493–1541) already has the feeling with respect to nature, which becomes more and more pronounced in the modern world conception, that is an effect of the soul's feeling of desolation in its ego-consciousness. He turns his attention toward the processes of nature. As they present themselves they cannot be accepted by the soul, but neither can thought, which in Aristotle unfolded in peaceful communication with the events of nature, now be accepted as it appears in the soul. It is not perceived; it is formed in the soul. Paracelsus felt that one must not let thought itself speak; one must presuppose that something is behind the phenomena of nature that will reveal itself if one finds the right relationship to these phenomena. One must be capable of receiving something from nature that one does not create oneself as thought during the act of observation. One must be connected with one's “ego” by means of a factor of reality other than thought. A higher nature behind nature is what Paracelsus is looking for. His mood of soul is so constituted that he does not want to experience something in himself alone, but he means to penetrate nature's processes with his “ego” in order to have revealed to him the spirit of these processes that are under the surface of the world of the senses. The mystics of antiquity meant to delve into the depths of the soul; Paracelsus set out to take steps that would lead to a contact with the roots of nature in the external world.

[ 10 ] Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) who, as a lonely, persecuted craftsman, formed a world picture as though out of an inner illumination, nevertheless implants into this world picture the fundamental character of modern times. In the solitude of his soul life he develops this fundamental trait most impressively because the inner dualism of the life of the soul, the contrast between the “ego” and the other soul experiences, stands clearly before the eye of his spirit. He experiences the “ego” as it creates an inner counterpart in its own soul life, reflecting itself in the mirror of his own soul. He then finds this inner experience again in the processes of the world. “In such a contemplation one finds two qualities, a good and an evil one, which are intertwined in this world in all forces, in stars and in elements as well as in all creatures.” The evil in the world is opposed to the good as its counterpart; it is only in the evil that the good becomes aware of itself, as the “ego” becomes aware of itself in its inner soul experiences.