The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the rise of what we call Christian mysticism, at the time of Gnosis, mysticism was called "Mathesis". It was a knowledge of the world on a large scale, built on the pattern of mathematics. The mystic does not merely seek to know the external space according to inwardly gained laws, but he seeks to know all life; he engages in the study of the laws of all life. Starting from the very simplest, he ascends to the perfect. The basis of mystical thought, the fundamental concepts of mysticism, the content of what is called mysticism, is little understood, not only because it is judged merely by the external word. When one reads representations of mysticism, it is as if one were reading a representation in which angles and corners in a house are spoken of, where the mathematician actually means mathematical angles and corners. But the words of mysticism refer to contexts of life.

We now consider a picture of mystical imagination up to Meister Eckhart in the 13th and 14th centuries, whose sermons inspired all later mystics. We must link up there with a name that is often misjudged, that of Dionysius Areopagita. In the Acts of the Apostles we are told of a Dionysius who is said to have been a disciple of the Apostle Paul. In the 6th century, some writings appeared that are extremely stimulating for those who need a religion of the mind. They were translated from Greek into Latin, and thus they became known to the occidental spiritual life. This was done at the court of Charles the Bald by the theologian Scotus Erigena.

Today in learned writings the works of Dionysius are usually called those of Pseudo-Dionysius. One cannot trace the writings further back than the 6th century. But since they were handed down by tradition, it can be assumed with certainty that the writings existed in the oldest times of the occidental world. In the 6th century, however, they were probably first written down.

The mystic thinks differently than the rationalist and materialist do. The mystic says: I look out into space, see the world of laws according to which the stars move; I grasp these laws and recreate them. So there is a re-creating power of the spirit. The thought is nothing merely imaginary for the mystic. The thought that lives in man is only a re-creating thought, in which man re-creates what creates outside in the world. The spirit, which creates outside in the world, is the same spirit, which thinks its laws in me. He sees outside in the world speaking thoughts. The creating powers of the universe have imprinted the laws on the star orbits. This spirit celebrates its self-knowledge, its rebirth in the human spirit. The mystic said to himself: In the universe outside the thought creates. By recognizing, man recognizes the objective thought outside. In man he becomes subjective thought. There is a link, which at the same time separates man in his inner experience from the outer thought and causes that the thought from outside flows into him.

When we look at a crystal, the thought of a cube or some other thought is realized in the crystal. If I want to understand this thought, I must reconstruct the thought, relive it. That what lives in the external world comes into relation with me happens through the sensation from within, through the way of the eye, the sensation that relives the thoughts.

So we have to distinguish: First, the creating thought in the universe; second, the physicality or corporeality of man as the connecting link; third, the afterliving thought in man. - The body of man opens the gate for the creative thought to flow in from outside, and thereby to shine forth again within. The body of man forms the mediation between both thoughts, the creating and the post-creating. Man calls that which is first creating thought in nature the spirit. That which feels the thought, he calls body. That, which lives after the thought, he calls soul. - The spirit is the creator of the thought. The body is the receiver of the thought. The soul is the experiencer of the thought.

The creating spirit outside grasps the mystic under three terms. This is clearly stated by Arıstoteles. He has a quite strange concept of the creator of the world. He says that this world creator cannot be found directly, but is contained in every thing. If the divine spirit were present today somewhere in some form, and if we were to form a picture of the creator afterwards, we would still have only an imperfect picture of him. We must not form a definite, limited picture of the world spirit. Only in the future will we recognize what actually drives the world and sets it in motion. The world is in perpetual perfection. The one who creates in the world is the actual mover, the original mover, the unmoved mover. We must look up to him and recognize in him the elemental force that lives in everything. The primordial spirit of Aristotle moves everything in the world, but it does not live itself out completely in any being; it is the creative spirit that moves the external world, that shapes it.

Always something is already realized in the world. We raise our gaze to the stars of a solar system. There we find a great perfection. Thinking in terms of the theory of evolution, we must understand that this world system was not always there, but that it has been formed. Wherever we look out into the universe, we must say that it has formed up to a certain degree of perfection. In different degrees of perfection what is reached is present through the unmoved mover. One can always distinguish everywhere between what is already present, realized, and the distant, divine goal. But why does a world system, an earth, move towards this distant goal? It must have in itself a striving for the unmoved mover. In mysticism one needs a designation for this striving in the individual world system. One asked oneself, how did man strive for this unmoved mover? He directed his mind to it. The expression of this direction was always given in the contents of his religious creeds, in which still today the instruction is present to reach the unmoved mover. In the Indian world the expression of the striving was called Veda or Word. Among the Greeks it was called Logos, Word. It is the striving of man for the unmoved mover who draws us to himself. That which is realized is called the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, in the first times of Christian mysticism. That which strives toward is the Word. In Gnosticism and in Augustine, the Holy Spirit is the thought that shapes the universe. That which strives in all things to arrive at the form of the Spirit is called Logos or Word. The third is the unmoved mover itself, what the Christian mysticism of the first centuries calls the Father. This is the threefold aspect under which thought presents itself in the external world. The first Christian mysticism said: God presents himself in three masks - mask = persona, from personare, to sound through -, thus in three masks or three persons of the divine spirit. Under these three masks the spirit shows itself in the universe.

What lives as spirit within man is the soul. This soul cannot create a thought for itself. It must first have the sensation of the object. Then it can mentally recreate the object in itself. Then we have the mental image in the soul; then the consciousness of the image comes to us. What lives in the soul we can represent under two aspects: the aspect of the sensation, the great stimulator, the great fertilizer; then comes what shines in the soul as mental image; that is the resting in the soul, what receives its content from outside. The resting soul, which lets itself be fertilized by the impressions from the world, is the mother. The sum of the sensations through the universe is the soul-male, the father. That which can be fertilized is the soul-feminine, the mother-soul, the eternal-feminine. That by which man becomes conscious of himself, the mystic calls the Son.

The aspects of the soul are: Father, Mother and Son. They correspond to the three aspects in the cosmos: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the aspects of the world spirit.

Having his soul impregnated by sensation, man gives birth once again to the whole universe out of his soul as a son. This universe born out of the soul as mother the mystic calls the Christ. The man who approaches the ideal of becoming more and more conscious of the universe, approaches what the mystic calls the Christ in man. Meister Eckhart says that in the soul Christ is born. Likewise Tauler says: Christ is the universe reborn in every human being. This trinity was in ancient Egypt: Osiris, Isıs and Horus.

The third thing the mystic considers is the bodily self. The mystic distinguishes as his experience the three persons of the universal spiritual life as Father, Mother and Son. It is in this sense that the Meister Eckhart must be read. The recognition is for the Meister Eckhart a resurrection. He says that God has created in him an eye with which he can look at himself. When man feels himself as an organ of the Godhead, which thereby looks at itself, then he has become a mystic; a higher knowledge has then dawned on him.

We have seen that underlying the mysticism of the Middle Ages is the view of the threefoldness of human nature and of the whole universe. We have seen how the mystic imagined the spirit and the physical and the spiritual. It is in the nature of mystical imagination that the mystic experiences in the spirit what is outside in nature, that he creates from himself what is outside in nature. In all knowledge, in all inner experience he seeks a revival of the universe from the soul of man. In the laws that govern the universe, he sees the great world thoughts, world ideas. Thus he stands completely on the standpoint of the Platonic world view. Plato was the great mystic of antiquity, and all those who practiced mysticism in the Middle Ages were based on Platonism. If the mystic therefore sees in nature the creating thought, the cosmic thought, then every single thing that surrounds the mystic becomes an expression of the spiritual. He distinguishes: first, the great laws of the world, the creative thoughts; second, formless matter; third, the power which matter becomes through the spirit's activity in it. Thus: first, law or world-thought; second, matter; third, force. The force arises from the fact that the world-thought expresses itself in the matter. Nothing could be perceived with the senses, if the force did not push itself to the senses and exert an effect on the senses. In the outer physical there are therefore three members. In the soul the external arises again inwardly.

We distinguish in the sense of mysticism: first, the father principle, the sum of all sensations and perceptions; second, that which receives the sensation in the soul was called the soul mother; third, the consciousness itself, wherein the sensation revives, was called the son. This is the connection of sensation, mental image, and thought.

In the soul itself, the mystic experiences the spirit in its inwardness as spirit directly, in three members: first, the Father Spirit, the unmoved mover of Aristotle; second, the longing for the unmoved mover that lived in the soul: the Word or Logos; third, the coming to life in the spiritual world: this is the Spirit.

The soul can sink into itself, look spiritually, through inspiration or intuition. The mystic says: when I look out into nature, the force acts on me, and I feel the force acting on me - called energetics, the life of force. - By immersing itself in the outside world, the soul must be animated by the sensation, according to the sentence of Aristotle. He says: If I want to see the unmoved mover, I must be free from all external sensation. This immersion into the soul he calls catharsis, purification. After the catharsis, the soul unites with the spirit when it becomes intuitive, when it does not unite with sensation from the external world.

The henosis - union - is the immersion in the spirit, the union with the divine original spirit. This can proceed only when the soul is purified from external sensation. This purified soul, free from external sensation, the mystic calls the virgin soul, which is not fertilized by external sensation. Just as the soul is otherwise fertilized by the outer world through sensation, so it is fertilized inwardly through the idea. If the soul experiences the idea in itself, if it lets itself be virginally fertilized by the spirit, then this conception is for the mystic the immaculate, virginal conception: the conceptio immaculata. The Idea will generate in the soul not only the Son who reproduces the external world, but the Son who is the Spirit itself. The revival of the second principle of the Spirit, the Word or Logos in the virgin soul, the mystic calls the revival of the Christ principle. Thus the soul can be impregnated by sensation and give birth to the Christ in itself, which is buried in the external world, or it can be impregnated by the idea, and then the soul gives birth in itself to the spiritual Christ, the Word or Logos. Only the one who experiences the Christ, the Logos in himself, is a real participant in the Christ principle in the higher sense for the Master Eckhart. It is of no help if man knows himself united with his God, if he regards the God as an external reality, but only if he lets the Christ-principle come to life in his soul. With his teachings, the Master Eckhart made hearts glow again and again by showing people that man can become drunk if he experiences this in himself. The deepest birth of the spirit must be born from one's own soul. The mystics have all understood this. Eckhart says that what matters is not the image that has become present, but that which is always present to man. God and I are one in recognition. God became man so that I might become God. He further speaks of how in each individual human being the higher, inner human being, who leads up to the spirit, comes to life. Two people live in each one, the worldly man and the spiritual man. The inner, spiritual man goes his ways for himself.

The outer man can lead a life for himself; but the inner life takes its own course by allowing itself to be fertilized inwardly by the Logos. Again and again Eckhart held this up to man through his powerful sermons. The little spark in the soul is the essential. The Fünklein is an eternal One.

When man experiences the revival of the Fünklein, he feels God Himself in the soul. There is an artistic expression among the mystics: the soul has let itself into the ground. - This is a connection to the image of the door with the hinge. As the hinge, on which the door turns, remains unmoved, so the inner man remains unmoved; inside he leads his own life. The inner experiencing of God is what comes about when the soul lets itself into its ground. The mystic calls the awareness of the divine life in himself the serenity (Angelus Silesius). The mystic experiences the God within himself. Through this, God is present in the person as in a dwelling. The mystic feels himself as a mediator of God and the world; he carries out the orders of the Godhead lowered into the soul. He has the mental image that God needs man; this mental image runs like a leitmotif through the whole mysticism of the Middle Ages. This is what constitutes the consecration of mysticism.

Eckhart compares the world to a building, and people to the building blocks. Man, as a building block, should not withdraw from the universe. The mystic feels united with the primordial divine life: this is the being enlightened, which in mysticism is called the self-knowledge of man. It shows that, just as the mathematician generates numbers, man can generate the highest from himself. Self-knowledge becomes immediate enthusiasm, because self-knowledge means devotion to the Godhead.

In John Tauler, this moodiness of the mystic comes out in his whole life: his life was an exposition of the divine life. He says, as long as I only discuss and present the highest divine wisdom, I have not achieved the right thing. I must disappear myself completely and let God speak from me. He says God looks at His own laws, through which He created the world, through me, my self is the self-life: I must let God experience Himself in me.

Eckhart's mysticism is a mystical knowledge; in Tauler we find mystical life. From the time on, a special artistic expression of the mystic is found: the one who experiences God in himself is called "God-friend".

An unknown personality appeared during Tauler's sermon; he is called the "God-friend from the upper country". He never meets us otherwise than that he appears, as it were, as a mirror of the other personalities who are influenced by him. Johannes Tauler states in his master book that he communicated knowledge of God to people, but he could not yet let life overflow; then the God-friend came and gave Johannes Tauler his enlightenment. The original source itself came alive in him. For a long time he gave up all preaching and withdrew with the unknown man from the upper country, in order to bring himself into the state of mind in which this spiritual life was rising, so that he made himself the channel of divine wisdom and it overflowed through him into others. His speech gained fire, he made the greatest impression; people were transformed by his words, through which people found the spark within them kindled. The dying to all that lives in the outside world, that is the revival of the new man: that is what Johannes Tauler could now bring about through the power of his word. Goethe says: "For as long as you do not have this, this dying and becoming, you are only a dull guest on the dark earth." The experience of the conceptio immaculata is the dying and becoming, in the lower sense and in the higher sense. Those who listened to Tauler experienced the Unio mystica. Just as man feels all the external beauties that come from outside through sensation, so the mystic feels the beauty of the spiritual world through Christ, whom he experiences; it is an experience that makes him drunk: this is the true music of the spheres. Just as man feels the sensual harmony in the world of sensation, so the mystic feels in the soul the coherence of the great laws of the world, the action, the creation of the Logos, of God Himself, the music of the spheres. Through the human soul, the eternal God expresses himself in his Logos. Johannes Ruysbroek, the Belgian mystic, emphasizes this thought in a particularly intense way. The mystic understands in mysticism the lighting up of the divine source in his own soul. The mystic felt in himself, in self-knowledge, the divinity. Through this he found such flaming words for it.

Today we come to a high point of medieval mysticism, to the mystic who was at the same time one of the most important scholars of his time: Nikolaus Chrypff or Krebs, of Kues on the Moselle, called the Kusan. He was one of the most interesting personalities of his time. He lived from 1401 to 1464. He was at the height of his time in the various sciences. He was a mathematician, physicist, jurist, first lawyer. He was also one of the leading, the tone-setting men of his time. He was extraordinarily ahead of his time. About a hundred years later, Nicolaus Copernicus put the worldview of astronomy on a new footing. But Nicolaus of Cusa had already clearly stated that the earth moves around the sun. Even more significant seems to be that the Cusan was not only a deep, leading thinker, but a clear thinker. He is a thinker who had absorbed scholasticism completely, That which is expressed by scholasticism is studied very little. The tremendous clarity and sharpness of conceptualization is the essential thing about it. Never has there been such a sharp guidance of the conceptual contours, never such a strict limitation of the concepts related to the spiritual life. Whoever wants to train himself in clear thinking, whoever works with firm, conceptual outlines, would have to immerse himself in one of the scholastic works. Cusanus underwent this training.

He also possessed everything related to the social knowledge of his time. He had a comprehensive circle of vision. In 1432, at the Council of Basel, he took an important position. Then he made long journeys through Germany and the Netherlands, dedicated especially to the reform of education. He emerged from the school of the "Brothers of Common Life". There, the focus was on a thorough formation of the mind and a clear education of the intellect. The Kusanian undertook his journey in the service of this school. Scientifically trained, clear and sharp thinking - he stands there freely, as a personality of impressive character. If he had wanted to, he could have achieved many things in the scientific field. As a preacher he knew how to grasp the listeners in the depth of their minds through his sermon. That which made his preaching so significant was the stream that emerged from medieval mysticism, the stream that we find in Eckhart, in Tauler and Suso, and in another guise in Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus.

Deepness of mind, fire of soul, was paired in him with a quite transparent, sharp conceptual faculty. Everything that the mind can grasp, that reason can survey, gave the Cusanian only the substructure for what he had to say to the world. He was sent by the Pope to Constantinople to bring about a union between the Greek and Roman Churches. On his way home, he had an epiphany in which he felt that there was something else besides the knowledge of the intellect. From then on, he attributed the highest value only to that which is higher than knowledge. He wrote the work: "De docta ignorantia" out of this mood. The title: "Of the learned ignorance" should mean: something that goes beyond the mere sensory and intellectual knowledge, a seeing, a being enlightened. If one wants to understand this completely, one has to take some terms to help, which only the 19th century brought.

The 19th century has developed a peculiar physiology of the senses, for example in the famous Law of the Energies of the Senses by the physiologist Johannes Müller. He says that we can see a color, take in light, this stems from the fact that our eye is built in a certain way. If we did not have the eye, the world shining in light and colors would be lightless, without the perception of colors. The same can be said about the arrangement of our ear. It depends on the arrangement of our senses how the external world penetrates into us. It depends on the specific energies of our senses how we perceive the world. Helmholtz has spoken about how he thinks of the relationship. He says: How can I know how the light in itself, the sound in itself is formed? Only signs of the external world are our sensory perceptions.

The Kusanian calls "knowledge" also in this sense knowledge, namely as the impressions processed by the mind.

We now ask: Do not our senses have an intimate relation to what we see, hear, and so on? We have to imagine that the eye itself is built by light, that the senses are not only there for the outside world, but from the outside world. The eye has been formed by the light. Who are the ones who build our senses? If man were not limited within the limits of his ordinary consciousness, he would know this.

In the single individual must be the force which forms the senses. In embryonic life the light must be effective, the sound must be effective. They must work in embryonic life in the individual himself and form the organs. The light closes the eye from within, the sound the ear. We perceive the external qualities only through the senses. The senses have also formed these external qualities. They are the builders of our own organs. We ourselves are light from the world-light; we are sound from the world-sound.

The mystic lives himself into that which lives and weaves around him and in him. The creating light, which works outside and creates inside, he feels. He is himself shining and sounding in a shining and sounding world. When he lives in the creative light, lives in the creative sound, then he has mystical life. Then something comes over man that is different from the light from outside and the sound from outside. Whoever has experienced this once, feels it as truth. The Gnostics, the Egyptian mystics, the mystics of the Middle Ages speak of the creating light. They call it the aeon light. It is a light which from the mystic awakens the objects around him to living life. This is the pleroma of the Gnostics. Thus, the mystic feels blessed in the world light. He feels blissfully interwoven with this aeon light. There he is not separated from the essence of things; there he is partaker of the immediate creative power. This is what the mystic calls his bliss in the creative light. The Vedanta wisdom calls the world wisdom Chit, but the bliss where the mystic is immersed in the things, where the soul merges completely with the things, is called Anända. Chit is world wisdom, Anända is the wisdom that merges directly with the aeon light, that feels one with the all-light shining through the world. This mood the Kusanian calls "docta ignorantia."

Just as man can have the experience of merging with the Aeon Light into the Pleroma, so he can also merge with the cosmic world-thought. Then he feels the world thoughts resounding in his own inner being. When man becomes aware of the thought that brings the law to existence in things, and feels this swelling up in him as his own law, then the things resound in their own essence in his soul, that he becomes intimate with the things, as the friend becomes intimate with the friend. This perception of the whole world the Pythagoreans called harmony of the spheres. This is the resounding of the essence of things in man's own soul. There he feels united with the power of God. That is the hearing of the harmony of the spheres, of the creating universal law; that is being interwoven with the being of things, that is where the things themselves speak, and the things speak through the language of his soul out of himself. Then he has attained what the Cusanian says no words are capable of expressing.

The being is the seen. This does not express the sublime existence which comes as a predicate to things when the mystic unites himself in the deepest way with things. This sublime existence is the sat of the Indians.

The Pythagorean school distinguishes three stages: First, the external perception = Chitz second, the Pleroma = Anända; third, the harmony of the spheres = Sat.

The Pythagorean school distinguishes three stages.

These are the three stages of cognition in the Cusanus: first, knowledge; second, super-knowledge or beatification; third, deification. Thus he calls them in the "Docta ignorantia."

That he knows these states gives his writings a mellowness, a softness, that one may say they are perfectly sweet with maturity. Moreover, his writings are wonderfully clear, transparent, full of tremendous ideas.

He was a leading spirit. All who follow him then stand on the foundation he laid. So also Giordano Bruno. Cusanus drew his wisdom from the Pythagorean school. He understood what was meant by the Pleroma, the Aeon Light and the Harmony of the Spheres. - Ruysbroek and Suso are also the precursors of Cusanus in their refined and spiritually drunken way.

The "Theologia deutsch" is like an overture to what the Cusanian wrote. A reprint of it has been procured by Franz Pfeiffer after a manuscript of 1497. Deep, cozy tones of a historically unknown personality are contained in this writing. If someone wants to understand the Sat of Vedanta philosophy, he must, as in Anända he must pour himself out into the world, in Sat he must pour out his will completely. In the deification (Sat) the selfless will must be there; his will must have become impersonal. - The one who wrote the "Theologia deutsch" made sure that his name did not come down to posterity. He calls himself only "the Frankfurter". Man must surrender his will to the Divine, as a messenger of the Godhead, and that which man wills of himself he calls Scripture, an offering.

Before Cusanus, mysticism strove from mere knowledge into the introduction into the pleroma, the creating world-light. Then in the learned not-knowing this came out in a learned and perceptive way. Knowledge and understanding were awakened to immediate, new life.

The Kusanian's not-knowing is at the same time a super-knowing. He distinguishes three stages: Knowledge, Beatification, Deification - Chit, Anânda, Sat. He is at the same time the greatest scholar and one of the deepest human beings.

We have seen how the life of the Middle Ages developed in the cities.

We have come to the point where public life takes place mainly in the life of cities. Originally the inducement to settle in the cities was the oppression of the country people and the spread of commerce.

We have seen how those who escaped their oppressors or devoted themselves to trade settled either in a bishop's see or in some other site of medieval power. At first, the part of the population that inhabited the cities was not in a pleasant position; they had to pay dues to their former lord of the manor, supply weapons, clothes and so on. Those who had moved to the cities and devoted themselves to trade, as well as those who were royal, episcopal or other officials, at first formed the actually free privileged classes. But more and more the privileges of the officials and the merchants who formed the patriciate were taken away from the privileged by those who lived depressed. On the Rhine in southern Germany, this equality was won in the 13th and 14th centuries. Kings and emperors reckoned with it.

Earlier the wandering kings had held court soon here soon there, now they settled in the cities. The rulers had to reckon with the cities, they found in them reason to develop their own power. Therefore, certain rights were given to the cities, jurisdiction, right to mint coins and so on. In this way their power grew more and more. A democratic element was now formed in Germany. In the past, the basic nobility, the feudal nobility, had given the time its certain character. Instead, something new has arisen. More and more privileges were eliminated in the cities. Instead of making general observations, let us turn to specific examples. Cologne had long been an important trading city, the seat of a powerful clergy; in the spiritual sphere, too, the cities were becoming a power. There, the subordinate class soon acquired equal rights with the patrician class, a kind of constitution, the oath book, in which was recorded what rights each individual had. The guilds, of which there were twenty-two in Cologne, had joined together, and before the 14th century they had also been dependent on the patricians here. Now, in 1321, these conquered equal rights.

The city council was not only composed of patricians, but the members of the guilds had equal voting rights. In order to make this council as democratic as possible, the members were always to be elected for only half a year, after which they were to be ineligible for three years. With the implementation of the democratic principle, the interest of the individual citizen in the flourishing of the cities also grew. Until the 12th century, such cities were not much other than dirty villages with thatched houses. But we see them growing in quite a striking way in a few years. Every man is now a citizen, and with the participation of the individual grows the prestige and beauty of the city.

What the cities indicated had a determining effect also on the whole high politics. What could interest cities like Hamburg, Lübeck, Cologne politically, as kings and dukes used to do outside? When the cities began to do politics, it was done in the urban way. Wide areas allied to protect their urban interests. Such powerful alliances of cities were first formed in northern Germany, and later the northern Italian cities also formed such alliances. The German cities also gained significant influence abroad; in Bergen, in London they had their powerful guildhall.

As the princes had to decide to grant the cities the right to such politics, so the cities also gradually became the center of a new culture. A material culture, to be sure, but one that led to the settlement of wider areas. New cultural centers were formed, in which a lively trade with the northern countries, especially with Russia, flourished; the legendary Vineta was such a trading center. We see how trade policy developed, powerful trade routes emerged, along the Rhine, through northern and central Germany, with important trading cities such as Magdeburg, Hildesheim, Erfurt, Breslau and so on. From these alliances of cities emerged what is called the Hansa. In the course of time, it became necessary to pursue not only trade but also war policy. In the background lurked enemies, the knights and dukes, who enviously followed the development of the cities. The cities had to surround themselves with walls and defend themselves against their enemies. Thus they became more and more powerful cultural centers, also centers of spiritual life. Whatever spiritual life was felt in those days was drawn together in the cities. Art also blossomed in the medieval cities under the influence of the free bourgeoisie. In Venice, the Hall of Clothiers is painted by Titian.

A new form of warfare also emerged. By the application of the powder, whose use was known already earlier in the Orient, but was found only now for Europe, a new, the democratic form of the fight arises opposite to the single fight of the armored knights. The use of gunpowder continues to develop. First there were crude blunderbusses and mortars, but soon more perfect weapons were invented, especially by Kaspar Zöllner in Vienna.

What developed especially in the cities in connection with the spirit of ecclesiastical life is of special importance for the progress of culture. We have seen how the highest ecstasy of the religious enthusiasm presents itself in the crusades. We have seen how German mysticism blossomed, especially on the Rhine, how the brothers of the common life cultivated a deep piety completely independent of Rome. Two different currents of time now confront us: on the one hand, the bourgeois is concerned with the elevation of material life; on the other hand, we see here a spiritual life directed inwardly. In the early Middle Ages, material and spiritual life were closely intertwined; the prosperity of its fruits, like his religious feeling, the peasant believed to be supported and blessed by the church. Now that personal efficiency came to the fore, these directions split.

The peculiar architectural style of the Middle Ages, mistakenly called Gothic, came from the south of France, originated in areas where lived such pious heretics as the Cathars, the Waldenses, who strove to deepen the inner life and break with the lavish life of the bishops and the clergy. A peculiar spiritual life spreads from there; German mysticism is strongly influenced by it.

What a profound influence this attitude had on the outer form of these churches is evident from the fact that all these Gothic minsters possessed a mystical decoration in the marvelous stained-glass windows. This art, which was completely lost in the 17th century, was not artistic allegory, but the symbols that were painted there really exerted a mystical influence on the crowd when the sunshine shone through them into the dim high churches. This type of construction was closely related to the conditions of the medieval cities; the town hall and the guildhall were also Gothic. The city, which was surrounded by walls, was dependent on expanding within these walls, the Romanesque architectural style was not sufficient for this. This is how the towering Gothic churches came into being, an expression at the same time of the inwardness of the life of the time; the dances of the dead that often adorned them brought to mind the transience of everything earthly.

In caring for the cleanliness and beauty of their city, the citizens find a noble way to keep their name in the memory of their fellow citizens. Especially beautiful fountains are erected everywhere. We see that at that time something comes into being which acquired special importance in the Middle Ages, the public baths, which were not lacking in any town. In the later Middle Ages, these baths gave rise to moral outrages and for this reason were eradicated by Protestantism. But this civic spirit went even further, it intervened in public life by creating charitable institutions that can still be considered models today. And these charitable institutions were also urgently needed, because in the 14th century Europe was afflicted by severe plagues, famines, leprosy, the plague or, as it was called at that time, "the black death". But medieval man knew how to counter this. Infirmaries, hospitals, and priests' houses were built everywhere, and even strangers were cared for in the so-called slum hostels. Misery was then synonymous with stranger and only later acquired a different meaning.

In addition to these bright sides of medieval life, there were, of course, some dark ones. Above all, the harsh treatment of all those who did not belong to a fixed community. They were outcasts, something for which the cities did not pay. All those who did not belong to the guild had to suffer bad treatment. Especially the "traveling people". The name "dishonest people" was created at that time, a terrible name for the traveling people. The dishonest people included all kinds of professions, actors, jugglers, shepherds and so on. They were not allowed to join the guilds, they could not show themselves anywhere without the risk of being tortured. The same happened to the Jews. The prejudice against them is not very old. In the early Middle Ages we find many Jews recognized as scholars. In later times they met the money needs of princes and knights. Due to the peculiar conditions of the Middle Ages, they attained the position of money lenders, which stood between commerce and usury and earned them hatred. However, the kings' need for money always gave them certain rights; this activity earned them the strange name of royal chamberlains. Another dark side was the judicial system, the criminal law that necessarily came up with the Middle Ages. In earlier times, justice was really related to revenge, either a damage should be repaired, or revenge should be taken. The concept of punishment did not exist, it came up only now. Roman legal concepts were becoming established. Judicial power was a valuable prerogative of a city and the citizens were proud not only of their churches and walls, but also of their high court. Often the harshest punishments were imposed for the most trivial of causes.

So the 15th and 16th centuries of medieval life is under the influence of urban life. Another current went alongside it. What we understand today as great politics was related to this other current. This is the movement known as that of the heretics or Cathars. You can gauge the extent to which this took hold if you consider the fact that in Italy in the 13th century there were more heretics than orthodox.

Here also lay the real conflict that led to the Crusades. When at the church meeting in Clermont in 1095 the decision was taken to launch them, it was not only riffraff, no, it was also decent people who set out in disorderly crowds under Peter of Amiens and the knight Walter von Habenichts for the promised land. It was a papal enterprise, it was not merely born of enthusiasm. It was a matter of the papal influence being pressed by the heretics. The pope's endeavor was, what actually took place, to thus create a drain for the heretics.

In the first real crusade, it was largely heretics who set out. This is also evident from the person of the leader. Gottfried von Bouillon was of a decidedly anti-papal disposition, as can be seen from his previous life. For when, at the instigation of Pope Gregory, a counter-king was set up against Henry IV in the person of Duke Rudolf of Swabia, Gottfried of Bouillon fought on the side of Emperor Henry and killed Rudolf of Swabia. It is necessary to see what it was about for him, but which did not come to execution: to found an anti-Rome in Jerusalem. That is why he called himself only "Protector of the Holy Sepulchre" and tried to raise the flag of anti-Roman Christianity in Jerusalem with unpretentious modesty. After the Crusades, the Ghibelline party arose from the representatives of such views; opposite them, on the side of the Pope, stood the Guelfs.

Also when we consider the second crusade, undertaken in 1147 by Emperor Conrad III at the instigation of Bernard of Clairvaux, we see the same phenomena. These crusades had no further significance in themselves, they only showed what spirit was blowing through the world. Barbarossa, who undertook five Roman campaigns against the Pope and the northern Italian cities that sided with him, in order to force them down, was forced to grant them independence in the Peace of Constance after he failed to take their fortress of Alessandria.

The German papal party was composed especially of the princely families who had remained behind from the old nobility. Henry the Proud and his son Henry the Lion fought for the old ducal power against the imperial power. Usually, by marriage with an emperor's daughter, these recalcitrant princes were then bound to the imperial power. By the enfeoffment of relatives of the emperor with finished dukedoms such rearrangements of the power relations were brought about again and again in the consequence.

Emperor Frederick Barbarossa undertook the third crusade, which also led to no real successes, but which became important through the Kyffhäuser saga, which tied itself to it. Those who can read legends know that they are dealing with one of the most important ones. It did not originate from the soul of the people, as it is usually said, because only the individual wrote poems and then what he produced spread among the people, as it also happens with the folk song, of which professors claim that it originates directly from the people and does not come from the heads of individuals. The legend originated from the mind of a man who knew how to use symbols that had a deep meaning, such as the cave in Kyffhäuser, the ravens and so on. It is one of the legends that can be found all over the world, a proof that there is something similar everywhere.

The Barbarossa saga is a very important saga from the point of view of cultural history. - Rome was in the church the advocate of what resulted from the, the Germanic spirit in connection with Christianity imposed external accessory. - In a grotto the emperor was supposed to be hidden. From time immemorial grottoes were secret places of worship. Thus the Mithras service was generally held in grottoes. In this worship, Mithras was depicted on the bull, the symbol of the lower animal nature, which was overcome by Mithras, the predecessor of Christ. In the Kyffhäuser legend, the emperor hidden in the rocky grotto became the advocate of that which turned against Rome and its influence in German spiritual life. How much there is in this legend! A pure Christianity, longed for by many at the time, was to emerge from hiding when the time came.

It was under the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II that the Mongol invasion occurred that devastated Europe. It is not a history of the Hohenstaufens that I wish to give you here, only to hint at what developed from the Crusades: expanded trade relations, a revival of the sciences and arts through contact with the Orient. What the crusaders gained in new experiences and goods, they brought back home.

It was also then that the two great monastic orders came into being that became of particular importance for spiritual life, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominicans represented the spiritual direction known as realism, while the Franciscans leaned toward nominalism. In the Holy Land also happened the foundation of the spiritual orders of knighthood; the Order of St. John was initially founded for the care of the sick.

From a similar mood to that which I have described to you as that of Gottfried von Bouillon, the second order of knights, that of the Templars, emerged. Its real aims were kept secret, but through intimate agitators the order had soon become very powerful. An anti-Roman principle prevailed in it, as was also evident in the Dominicans, who were often in complete opposition to Rome; thus they were in violent opposition to the Pope on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The Templars sought to purify Christianity. Referring to John the Baptist, they advocated an ascetic tendency. Their acts of worship were so hostile to the church out of resistance to the Roman secularization that it is not appropriate to speak about it publicly today. The order had become very inconvenient to the clergy and princes because of its power, it had to suffer severe persecutions and perished after its last Grand Master, Jacob of Molay, had suffered martyrdom with a number of brothers of the order in 1314.

The "German Order of Knights" was also of similar origin. With the Order of the Brothers of the Sword, which joined it, it made it its special task to convert the areas of Europe that still remained pagan, especially in the East, from its headquarters in Marienburg. From the reports of contemporaries, one gets a strange picture of the inhabitants of the areas that today form the provinces of East and West Prussia. Albert von Bremen describes the old Prussians as complete heathens. Among this people, of whom it is not exactly certain whether they were of Germanic or Slavic stock, are found the old pagan customs of eating horse meat and drinking horse blood. The chronicler describes them as pagan cruel people.

Before coming into contact with the German knights, the Brothers of the Sword had especially aspired to worldly violence.

One can only construct the development. Although the cities had formed, a part of the ducal power and the robbery knighthood had remained. It was not enthusiasm for Christianity, but mere egoism that caused the remnants of the feudal nobility to gather in these two German orders of knights. In these areas, no significant influence of the cities was felt. The other two Christian orders were compounds of those who were not connected with Rome. If you study the historical sources, you will often find alliances between them and the cities.

Besides these two currents of urban development and deeper religious life, we see that the imperial power lost all importance. In the years 1254 to 1273 there was no bearer of imperial power in Germany; the imperial dignity was temporarily sold to foreign princes, one of whom, Richard of Cornwall, came to Germany only twice, while the second, Alfonso of Castile, never entered it at all.

When at last one again proceeded to a proper election of emperors, the endeavor was not to establish any central imperial power or to attempt once more to create an imperial power, but the desire was decisive to bring order with regard to the robber baronry.

So they chose Count Rudolf of Habsburg. If one is to ask what he and his successors did for the empire, it would be difficult to say, for they were not active in public affairs. They were busy establishing their domestic power. Thus, after the death of Duke Heinrich Jasomirgott, Rudolf of Habsburg granted Lower Austria to his son and thus established the Habsburg house power. His successors sought to increase this power by conquests and especially by marriage treaties, and no longer cared about anything connected with general interests.

You see what was really significant for the further development: the events that resulted in the medieval conditions what finally led to the great discoveries and inventions at the end of the Middle Ages. We see the cities with powerfully rising, but secularized culture; in the church we see the divorce, the schism, the separation; out of this current the last act of the medieval drama dawns, we see the twilight of the Middle Ages, the dawn of a new time.

We are progressing more and more in the contemplation of history to the times when the great inventions and discoveries happened in the 15th century.

The new time begins. For a historical consideration this new time has special interest; in characteristic features the transition to the great state formations of Europe takes place. We have seen how from the feudal power the transition to the modern princely power develops. On the one hand it means a reaction of old remnants from earlier times and only in a certain way a renewal. That which remained of the old claims of princes and dukes, what was left, gathers its forces again and determines the map of Europe through its family private relations.

The landed property had been replaced in its domination by the cities, the bourgeoisie flourished and all the real cultural factors emanated from the cities. The emperorship had sunk to a shadow power; after a long interregnum Rudolf of Habsburg was elected, but the emperor had become very unnecessary in the empire; he hardly needed to be seen there. The Habsburg dynasty only endeavored to increase its domestic power through this imperial power, wherever rights remained to it outside the power of the cities. It is a simple process that takes place here, also the rest - princes and dukes - gather what remained to them to strengthen their house power, creating the basis for large political territories.

The Mongol invasion, later the invasions of the Turks, give rise to this. Only larger princes are able to defend their territories; the smaller ones join the more powerful one and thus form the basis for future states. The new emperor meant very little. As mentioned, Rudolf of Habsburg was only anxious to establish a domestic power. After overcoming Ottokar of Bohemia, his son was enfeoffed with his lands, and later the Habsburg house power was strengthened by always marrying new territories to it.

Only the process of all these purely private undertakings can interest us, that it came to the uprising of the Swiss Confederates, who wanted to be free from the claims, which the successor of Rudolf of Habsburg, Emperor Albrecht I, made on them. Through hard struggles they obtained to be dependent only on imperial power - imperial immediacy; they did not want to know anything about princely power.

The endeavor to increase one's own house power continues under the following emperors; thus Adolf of Nassau seizes a large part of Thuringia, which he wrests from the weaker princes. Albrecht of Austria and his successor Henry of Luxembourg also seek to enrich themselves in this way, the latter by marrying his son to a Bohemian princess. This is a typical case of the development of the conditions of the time.

This current continued under new growth of ecclesiastical power, but at the same time there was also a growth of the current that wanted to have nothing to do with the Church. The teachings of the Waldenses or Cathars had a stirring effect, there were tremendous struggles against the reemerging princely power. The situation of the peasants, which had been lifted by the emergence of the cities, now became more and more oppressive because of the feudal and robber baronies, the bishoprics and abbeys, to which they had to be in thrall. The cities had had a time of bloom, at that time the principle had applied: City air makes free. - But in the course of time many cities had become dependent, especially the Hohenstaufen had succeeded in bringing many cities into dependence. Now the cities tried to keep off further influx, they made an end of it and looked for princely protection. As a result, the peasant population became more dependent on their landlords. The mood of the oppressed was stirred up by the Waldensians and heretics, for whom the church was no longer sufficient.

The cry for freedom and the Christian-heretical mood went hand in hand; religious sentiment merged with political movement and this popular mood found its expression in the peasant wars. Whoever wants to grasp this spiritual heretic mood independent of external church and princely power, must realize that especially in the Rhine regions - "the Holy Roman Empire's alley of the priests" - hard battles were waged by the princely power against this current for decades. Popular preachers, especially those from the Dominican Order, resisted, and even fought, because they did not want to submit to the oppression of the people by the papal power. They do not agree with the political expansion of power of the papacy and the expansion of the power of the princes.

The French kings saw in the papacy a support in the struggle with the German princely power. So the pope was led to Avignon and during about seventy years the popes had their seat there. Henry of Luxembourg fought with the Pope, to whom the King of France lent his support. Thus, from Avignon, from France, the pope now dominates Christendom, and as the princes increasingly assert their power over their feudatories, so the popes strive for ever greater extension of their authority. The secular clergy, the power-owning abbeys and bishoprics were dependent on the pope. Meanwhile, the princes arbitrarily shaped the map of Europe. Emperor Charles IV united Brandenburg, Hungary and Bohemia under his household power. The imperial dignity has become a titulature, the emperors are content to administer their private lands, the imperial title is bartered away by the princes.

If we want to understand the real history, we must keep in mind how the great change from the Middle Ages to the new age consisted in the princes using for their private interests that discontented mood; the states that are formed we see spreading their tentacles over a centuries-old popular current, and it is this current for religious liberty that is used first to fight the papacy and to stop its power, and then to creep itself into that position of power.

That current developed at the bottom of the popular soul; it aspired to something quite different from what the Reformation then brought. The secularized clergy had become as much of an oppressor as the secular princes. The urban population, in their egoism, did not feel compelled to side with the oppressed; only when their own freedom was threatened did they endeavor to preserve it. Thus, in the Swabian League of Cities and in the Palatinate, they did not succeed after all, so that new princely power emerged here as well.

Already during the reign of Emperor Sigismund there was an outbreak in Bohemia in a peculiar religious movement. A movement that spread among a man who - one may acknowledge or deny what he represented - nevertheless relied only on his own conviction; a conviction that was based on the purest will, on the fire in his own breast. This man was John Hus of Hussonetz, the preacher and professor at the University of Prague. Based on something that was spreading throughout Europe - for even before that, in England, through Wiclif, the establishment of original Christianity had been urged - but which received special splendor through the fiery eloquence of the outstanding man, Hus found approval everywhere. Everywhere his words found acceptance, because one only had to point out the shameful behavior of the secular clergy, the sale of the bishoprics and so on. They were heartfelt words, because they proclaimed something that went through the whole of Europe as a mood and only emerged where a personality was found to give it expression. Through the popes and the counter-popes, the church had fallen into disarray; the popes themselves had to do something. Thus the Council of Constance was convened. It constituted a turning point in medieval life. A transformation into a pure church was sought. This project set in motion a lively opposition. Political motives played a part, and Emperor Sigismund himself was keenly interested. The worst abuses of the church were to be corrected, for the clergy was completely neglected, and incredible abuses had also broken out in the monasteries. In Italy, Savonarola had begun his powerful agitation against the secularization of the Church. The council also wanted to settle accounts with this. The president of the Council was Gerson, the head of the University of Paris, a second Tauler for the Romance countries. This fact was significant for the outcome of the Council, because with the help of Gerson it had become possible for the emperor to wrest the leadership from the popes and to put an end to Hussitism. Because this current had nothing to do with the development of political power, but arose from the deepest soul of the people, it was so dangerous for the spiritual and especially for the secular rulers. It is not Rome alone, it is the emerging princely power to which Hus fell victim. The Hussites waged their war for a republican Christianity not only against the church, it was waged against the approaching princely power.

But in Protestantism this power allies itself with religious discontent in order to exploit it for its own purposes. The deeds of the successors of Hus were thus condemned to death that the princely power had triumphed. Otherwise, the emperors did not have special power in those times: the emperor Frederick II, for example, was commonly called the "useless emperor."

This gives us a picture of the peculiar development in that time. In the more and more emerging cities a flourishing life, whereas there, where the feudal power asserted itself, continuously increasing oppression; in the field of deeper religious life at the same time, influenced by these two factors, a strong movement, as it emerged in the appearance of a Wiclif, a Hus. Italy offers us a brilliant picture of that urban life in its city republics; in Florence, for example, it was the Medicean merchants who had a fundamental effect on the culture of Italy. All these cities were authoritative cultural factors.

So you will understand that the means by which one otherwise attained power were no longer sufficient. In the Middle Ages, except for the number of clergymen who worked in the monasteries and in civil service positions, no one had been able to read and write. Now this relationship has become different. Reading and writing are spread by the new currents that now flood over the masses. The great writing institutes spread in copies what was formerly forbidden to the people, and these copies were bought as later books: writings of the New Testament, popular science books, books of sagas, legends, heroes and medicines were thrown into the people in the 14th century.

In particular, schools had been established everywhere by the Brothers of the Common Life, as already mentioned. Along the Rhine by name, what had formerly been hidden in monasteries was now brought to light. A formal transcription industry arose in Hagenau in Alsace, whose announcements, such as those of Lamberts, are similar to today's catalogs. A sustained manuscript trade also emanated from Cologne, and the Brothers of Common Life were also called "Brödder von de penne."

Here we have the preparatory stage of the art of book printing. It arose from a deep need, it did not come into being as if shot from a gun, but was prepared by the fact that it had become a need, in that the books produced by copying were too expensive, but also the poorer classes of people demanded books. It was a means then of rousing the people.

The men who led the peasants' cause at that time could only spread these pamphlets among the people by the fact that the conditions were favorable to them. Thus the peasants' alliances, the "Poor Conrad", the "Bundschuh" with the slogan: "We may not recover from priests and nobility" were formed at that time. The need for something new emanated from all sides, and when Gutenberg invented movable type around 1445, the means was given to be able to develop the cultural life of that time. The receptivity was prepared for the expansion of the field of vision. Under the influence of such moods the secularization of arts and sciences developed, and thereby the period of inventions and discoveries. Whereas formerly the church alone had been the bearer of the arts and sciences, now the cities and the bourgeoisie are the bearers of culture; from the former merely ecclesiastical culture it has been brought over and secularized.

We come to the discoveries, which we can only briefly enumerate, which extended the scene of human history over vast unknown territories. In addition, there was the invasion of Greece by the Turks, through which the culture that still existed there gained influence on Europe. A great number of Greek artists and scholars emigrated to the other countries, namely to Italy, and found accommodation in the cities. They fertilized the spirit of the Occident. This reformation is called the Renaissance. Ancient Greece rose again, and only now could people get to know the scriptures on which Christianity was based. The ancient Hebrew Testament was read, thanks to Reuchlin in particular, and through him and Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the movement we know as humanism was set in motion. From the efforts initiated by these influences came the dawn of the new age. Something else resulted from the spread of Turkish violence. For a long time the Occident had been in contact with the Orient. Through the rule of the Italian cities over the seas, of which Venice was the center, it had been possible to bring the products of the Orient, especially Indian spices, to Europe. When the invasion of the Turks made the possibility of this connection more difficult for the merchants, the need arose to find another way to India around Africa. From Portugal and other southern countries, shipments went out to explore the areas around Africa, and Bartolomeo Diaz succeeded in finding the Cape of Storms, later Cape of Good Hope, and Vasco da Gama the sea route to India in 1498. This marked the beginning of a new era for European economic life, which culminated in the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492. But that belongs to the history of more modern times.

So we have come to know the exit of the Middle Ages and the factors that lead over to a new time. Shaken we see the whole life in its foundations. And if one often thinks that the cuts in the historical view are chosen arbitrarily, this cut is really significant. It happened one of those "jerks", as we have been able to trace in the middle of the Middle Ages with the founding of cities, in the beginning with the migration of peoples.

Now under the aegis of the city culture in connection of all these inventions with the great scientific conquest, which is the deed of Copernicus, a whole new culture is evoked. The secularization of the culture, a strengthening of the princely power is brought about by this current. Smaller areas had not been able to resist the devastating moves of the Turks, they had joined more powerful ones. The expansion of the great states is due to all these factors. In manifold pictures we have seen the conditions change, we have seen how the bourgeoisie arises, how it blossoms and how it is confronted with a dangerous opponent in the princely power.

You know that the present is the result of the past, we shall therefore make history in the right way if we learn from the past for the present and the future in the way that comes to us in the saying of an old Celtic bard who says that it is the most beautiful music to him when he hears the great deeds of the past stirring and thrilling him. As true as it is that human existence is the most important phenomenon, and thus man himself the most worthy study, it is also true that man remains a great mystery to himself. When man realizes that he remains a mystery to himself, he will come to the right study. For only then will man face himself in right appreciation, when he knows that this is his secret: his own existence standing in connection with the all-being. This gives him the right basis for all his doing and acting.

But if he wants to know something about this secret of his own existence, he must turn to science, which tells of his own striving. In world history we see how feelings and thoughts turn into actions. That is why we should learn world history, so that we can inspire our hopes, thoughts and feelings with it. Let us bring over from the past what we need for the future, what we need for life, for action!

Discussion in the “Giordano Bruno League for a Unified World View” with a speech by Rudolf Steiner.

The purpose of the Bruno Federation is to promote a unified worldview. It does not see this as a final accomplishment, but as a task in the solution of which it seeks to participate in a research and teaching, organizing and stimulating way. In doing so, it is particularly concerned with bringing the various points of view to an understanding and, if possible, to some reconciliation. He also strives for unity in that he wants to harmoniously combine science, philosophy, art and devotion. As one of the means to this end, the league considers not only larger public lectures but also discussions about questions of world view in a smaller circle, as well as the publication of such league discussions through printing.

The first attempt to discuss a unified worldview took place in March 1902. The topic for discussion was: “What does a unified worldview mean in terms of its concept and value?” The new secretary of the federation, Dr. Hermann Friedmann, had taken on the introductory presentation, but was unable to deliver it due to illness. Mr. Wolfgang Kirchbach kindly stepped in for him to improvise and present his own views. After the Federal Chairman, Dr. Bruno Wille, had pointed out the purpose of the discussion evenings, Miss Maria Holgers read Hölderlin's moving poem “To Nature”. Wolfgang Kirchbach then took the floor:

"The Chairman has just emphasized that it is an equally difficult, challenging and significant task to establish and pursue a monistic worldview. Therefore, today, at our first discussion, I will try to present to you the full difficulty of the problem we face. However, this reference to the difficulty of our task is intended to be purely academic.

The sentence I have to talk about is formulated: What does ‘a unified worldview’, in terms of its concept and value, mean to us, or rather to me? I will briefly present the problem as it relates to me. For those who are not yet familiar with it, I emphasize that the word ‘unified worldview’ here is only a translation of the word “monistic,” which expresses the processing of all conceptual and other knowledge into a worldview of the unity of being, of the existence of the world in a unity. The word ‘unified worldview’ would probably describe the meaning more aptly.

But if we establish a unified worldview, we cannot deny ourselves the question of the value of such a worldview, the areas in which it is of value and the areas into which it breaks down.

To seek unity in the realm of the cosmos, as nature and its laws are popularly called, would be one side of a unified research and thinking. However, as it stands at present, science does not yet give those who have penetrated more deeply into it the right to speak objectively of unity in the cosmos. We are accustomed to thinking of this world as quantitatively represented in terms of matter and, in connection with it, the concept of force. The dualism that adheres to this combination of concepts has led to attempts to dissolve it into a unity. It was said that force is a function, an expression of matter, and in this way a certain unity was gained by conceiving of matter as something essentially one. In a completely different way, actual natural science has developed the concept of matter. With the help of its analytical methods, it has isolated more and more elements from the surrounding cosmos and, through empirical work, has found about seventy different elements, that is, materials, instead of a monistic matter. Thus the term “matter” has only the value of a linguistic abstraction, like the term “animal”. It does not correspond to any real individual, but the unity of these seventy elements is for the time being only a hypothesis.

We find the same thing with regard to the concept of force since Robert Mayer's discovery of the unity of force and the transformability of energy. They are faced with the tremendous mystery that the mechanical force and perhaps the same force that sets the globe and the sun in permanent relation and causes the rotation of the stars, that perhaps the same force, converted and transformed, represents those phenomena that a thunderstorm, for example, presents to us. But the fact remains that this phenomenon of electricity manifests itself differently than, say, the force that drives a stone to the center of the earth. Thus, science has not yet shown that we must assume a unity of nature in the sense that the various forms of energy are one. The different phenomena have not yet been bridged; here, too, we are only faced with hypotheses.

The same applies to a whole series of other phenomena. For example, we do not know where to draw the line between the higher concept of life of the organic and that of the inorganic. The entire explanation of nature is in the throes of a lively dispute on this point.

Since we have to tie in with this aspect of the world view with the material that science provides us, we must therefore admit that, objectively, the unity of the universe has not yet been proven as a fact.

But what about the other question that needs to be addressed in our overall quest for a unified world view? It is the question: How does our own thinking, which is based on unity, relate to its object, the world? Here we are faced with an apparent dualism. We see: there is something outside, and here is something that absorbs this outside. We have a duality here. But now we ask: To what extent can and may we assume that the functions of our brain, the forms of expression, categories of our mind form a unity with the world? The fact that you relate all the functions of your mind to a unity could at best be deduced from the fact that you localize them together in your body. First of all, the activity you perform when you research the cause that causes a stone to fall towards the earth is quite different from asking: Is it possible under the given conditions that this fall occurs? It could well be that the ideas supplied by the various mental activities come into conflict with each other and thus there would be no unity within you. A further question would be how the unified picture of the world that you carry within you corresponds to objective reality. To what extent do the laws that prevail in my mind also operate in the external world? In doing so, we will first have to think dualistically. Resolving this dualism into a monism is, however, a supreme urge in thinking itself; but epistemology is faced with a major problem here. Since Kant, dealing with it has been a duty for anyone who deals with questions of world view.

Thus, in constructing a unified worldview, we have to perform two operations: on the one hand, to empirically trace the infinite multiplicity of the world down to its smallest differentiations, and on the other hand, to always form our thinking in an epistemological sense into a monism, into a unification of that multiplicity into a unity.

In working with the material in this direction, we would soon encounter difficulties, not to mention those in the ethical realm. The question would soon arise before us as to what extent we can judge the moral life in man himself and the processes in the cosmos from the point of view of unified moral laws. For we cannot let any process of this world affect us without at the same time processing it ethically. The joy of the cosmos, the contemplation of harmony in infinite diversity, is at the same time a moral engagement. So the question arises: Can we arrive at a monistic view in ethical thinking itself and connect it with the rest of the monistic contemplation? — At the same time, the question arises for us: Could our moral feeling not also find satisfaction through a different contemplation? Why, for example, does the devout Christian consider his doctrine, which recognizes only one God, to be so infinitely higher than paganism, which has several deities? And how has the Christian nevertheless arrived at a dualism, even at the assumption of an even greater multiplicity in the supernatural world?

If scientific considerations were to yield proof of dualism, we would have to declare ourselves satisfied with that. To establish a monism just for the sake of being monistic would be worthless. But we have in mind a monism, a being of things themselves, by which we can measure the value of all our views: the true, the truth. There is only one lasting evaluation for every single science, for every knowledge: that its statements are true, that is, that they correspond to objective processes. This is also the only valid assessment for a worldview. Only if a monistic mode of explanation proved to be true in all objective circumstances, as in our subjective actions, in all manifestations of the diversity of life, would it be valuable; I could see no other criterion for judging the value of this world view. This monon of truth, which can never become untrue, is so far the only recognizable eternal unity, to which objective phenomena in their multiplicity and transitoriness interact with the spirit."

After these words of Kirchbach, Dr. Rudolf Steiner rose to give the following remarks:

"I would like to stick closely to the question: What does a unified worldview mean in terms of its concept and values? In doing so, I am in direct opposition to the previous speaker. If I ask myself: From the standpoint of our modern natural science and spiritual science, are we justified in considering the world to be a unity? I have to say that we are, we are at least placed in the position of having to search for it. In the face of the manifold diversity into which the specialization of the sciences has undoubtedly led us, I ask: Where should we look for unity? To say from the outset that this or that must first be demonstrated as a unity seems to me to be the exaggerated demand of an extreme epistemology. For me, the pursuit of a unified worldview is justified by the simple fact that it is an indelible need of the human spirit that has existed at all times, perhaps more clearly in pre-Christian times, when it had not yet been suppressed by the dogmas and views of the church, which a union that seeks to build on Giordano Bruno's legacy has a particular duty to fight against.

Meanwhile, I find that the results of the natural sciences also meet this need. Chemistry has found seventy elements and will perhaps increase this diversity; but at the same time it has found something very special: Between these elements, it has found certain relationships with regard to atomic weight, for example, according to which a scale of the elements can be constructed that is also a classification of these elements according to their acoustic, optical and other physical properties. From a gap in this scale, one has inferred missing elements, partially predicted their properties and actually discovered them afterwards. Thus the phenomenal elements, although different, nevertheless represent a great unity, which we can follow with the calculation.

However, the chemist is forced to look for the unity elsewhere than in the brutal concept of a unified substance, namely in a system of lawful relationships. Professor Ostwald spoke out in this direction at a congress of natural scientists. Recently a journal has been founded to further develop the outdated materialism in this new natural philosophical sense. So we are standing in front of a new world view, which we cannot yet conclude, but to which a perspective has been opened up, and indeed a perspective on unity.

The same applies to the uniformity of force. In terms of phenomena, we will probably never be able to trace electricity back to pure gravitation, but in the mathematical formula we use to calculate and convert it, we have something real and fundamental; and thus a perspective has been opened up for us regarding the unity of force.

Without wanting to take the exact position of Goethe's metamorphosis theory, which was the first to seek a unifying principle in the organic realm, I do think, however, that it also represents an important step towards a unified world view. Added to this is the biogenetic law, according to which every being, in its embryonic development, once again passes through the forms of the species from which it originated. Since it has become possible to produce organic substances in the laboratory, we are offered a clear prospect of unity here as well.

If one does not want to demand unity in the phenomenal, this perspective shows us where to look for the monon. And it is becoming increasingly clear to us what all great philosophers had no doubt about: that what we experience in the external world is equivalent to what we experience in the mind. If we proceed from external to internal experience, we will arrive at a unified world view. For those seeking unity, the last decades of science are quite comforting, for from all fields elements are flowing to them that open up a unified worldview.

Its value lies in the fact that it satisfies a spiritual need, which, just as necessary as air and light, belongs to the happiness of a spirit that develops this need within itself.

Mr. Kirchbach replied as follows: “Regarding the question: How do we arrive at a unified worldview and how do we imagine it? Dr. Steiner has given many suggestions with which I fully agree. But there are individual points that can be argued about. The example given by the previous speaker of Goethe's doctrine of the metamorphosis of plants shows how even a great mind could believe that he had found a unifying principle in a point that later turned out to be questionable. Goethe believed that the same morphological principle applied to the chlorophyll leaf as to the stem, and he saw the principle of the leaves recurring in the shape of the petals and in the pistil, so that to him all parts of the plant were only modifications of one and the same morphological principle. On the other hand, it is a fact that in the rose the stem leaf has only one median channel, while the petal has three, so there is indeed a fundamental difference in the morphological structure of the rose, as well as a chemical one.

The newer cell theory seeks unity in a completely different area than in this apparent morphology. Here the cell is the formative principle and brings about the overall structure through the sum of all factors to which it is subject. Perhaps it will be similar with some of the concepts of Darwinism.

I have used this example to show how difficult it is to find unity even in natural phenomena, because we must first learn to group the phenomena correctly according to mere observation before we can conclude their essential unity through mathematical or other logical mediation.

Dr. Bruno Wille: “You have just heard two representatives of worldviews that, I think, agree on the fundamentals, apart from a few points of difference. First of all, certain difficulties were pointed out that apparently stand in the way of developing a unified worldview. We do, of course, first experience nature as a multitude, as an enormous amount of different sensations. Only when we compare this diversity in a spirit of seeking unity and partly bridge the differences, partly dissolve them, can we come closer to a unified world view.

To seek such unity is indeed, as Dr. Steiner says, a general human need; first of all a logical need. Our cognitive apparatus, which seeks to comprehend the world, tends to think of all that is multiple as a unity. Thus, despite all their differences, we see a certain commonality in the trees of our forests in Brandenburg and combine them into a single unit, for example, in the term “pine”. We then order the pines together with the birches, oaks and aspens, with the blueberries, ferns and mosses into an even higher unit, into the term “plant”. If we compare a plant with ourselves, then here again a unity is present; we are dealing with organic living beings. Thus our thinking is constantly in search of overarching associations and contexts. This, of course, raises the important question of epistemology: Does our thinking correspond to the world independent of us? Is the unity of nature more than a mere subjective, intellectual experience? The answer is highly complex. Today I am content with a simple 'Yes', while I still note: I also seek the monism in that, unlike Kant, I understand subject and object, spirit and nature as an inseparable unity and, like the medieval 'realists', see a real, not just nominal identity in the concept.

For our moral endeavors, too, doubt about what is morally true, right, and salutary can only be dispelled if we can derive the individual moral ideas from a supreme unity. If there were two or more world principles that were in absolute opposition to each other, contradictory principles for our moral life would also be derived from them; and in fact we would end up in terrible contradictions in all areas of our lives. Thus, our entire idealism points us to monism, to the search for the eternal One.

Of course, science has not yet given a clear and unequivocal answer to the question of why we have to look for the One in the seemingly manifold world; but, as Dr. Steiner very rightly emphasized, the magnificent development of science in the last century was so fruitful for the cause of a unified world view that the monistic philosopher must not fail to make full use of these fruits. On the other hand, the natural scientist should not look down on the millennia-old work of philosophy with contempt, but rather take the doubts raised by philosophy seriously and seek to answer them. I am pleased that Dr. Steiner has acknowledged that old materialism has become untenable. This insight is a fruit of philosophical criticism. And so philosophy and natural science belong together as complementary ways of looking at the world.

To supplement the scientific facts, in which Dr. Steiner rightly sees important aspects of monism, I would like to refer to the following pages of my unified world view. Above all, I would like to emphasize that we find a comprehensive natural law in all world processes and phenomena, for which we have never been able to establish an exception: the law of causality. It is a fact that every process follows, in terms of thought, from another, which we can call the cause of the following. I now think that in this context, cause and effect mean nothing other than what we call development. We can understand the emergence of the effect from the system of its conditions as the further development of the cause. The law of causality thus permeates all world processes, for which we can in turn determine special rules, the special laws of nature. According to such 'eternal, ironclad, great laws', the world comes together for us as a unity, in contrast to the dualistic world view, which admits of miracles, i.e. exceptions to the laws of nature, which it cannot plausibly explain without 'higher counsel', that is, without admitting human ignorance.

I find a further unity of the world in the fact that everything I know about the universe is an experience, either an experience for me or an experience for other beings, as well as an experience of the self. If by this is not meant only the experience of ideas, which would bring us closer to the idealistic view that regards only the idea as the real thing in the world, then I think we can all agree on this sentence; for no one would be able to prove that there is any existence that is not an experience. In this fundamental principle of my world view, I have achieved a reconciliation of significant contradictions, which give cause for concern in any one-sided materialistic or mechanistic monism. Thus I have overcome the contradiction between matter and spirit, which I unite by understanding all that is physical as experience, not, of course, as mere phenomenon for our senses, but as a way in which the eternal One experiences Itself. In general, my monism denies all absolute contradictions. For me, death means another side of life. I can only imagine the emergence of the organic from the inorganic if there is no absolute contradiction between the two natural kingdoms. In the moral life, I regard evil only as an immature form, a lower stage of the good; thus I do not accept any absolute evil, only a relative one. So too is error only an immature truth, a certain stage of development on the way to knowledge.

I seek a unified worldview, as you can see, also in the sense that I strive for a subjective unity, a unity between my various spiritual aspirations, my manifold experiences and personality forces. I have overcome the opposition between head and heart, between sentiment and reason, between true religiosity and scientific knowledge, as well as the opinion that art is only an illusion, a sweet deception that stands in the way of cool insight. So I emphasized at the founding of our association that in cultivating a unified worldview, people should be guided to transform the tearing hostilities in their inner life into harmony – into a reconciliation; not, of course, into a sentimental reconciliation, but into a clear unity of their highest spiritual deliberations.

Wolfgang Kirchbach: “In concluding this discussion, I would like to ask you to consider the conversation that has taken place between the three gentlemen as the preface to the discussions that follow. In the upcoming discussions, we may perhaps refrain from continuing them in this general way. Lines have been described along which an inner consensus can be followed. In the next discussions, we want to pick out specific questions. All speakers agree that a unified worldview is an unavoidable need. So our main task would be to determine how far these efforts have come and to limit the question to specific points. I do not want to give any further details about this yet and so I will end the novel with a “to be continued” for today, to whet your appetite: “How will it continue?”

ACCOMPANYING NOTE: Friends who heard that there existed notes of a lecture on Shakespeare given by Dr. Steiner in 1902 at the Workmen's School in Berlin, expressed the wish to read these notes. They were taken down by Frl. Johanna Mücke, who did not know shorthand, so that they do not claim to be complete. Their 7 pages of typescript may correspond to about 25 typescript pages of the original text of the lecture. But important points emerge even from these incomplete notes.

—Marie Steiner

According to a remark by the famous writer Georg Brandes, we should include Shakespeare in the German classics. And if we consider the enormous influence Shakespeare has had on Goethe, schiller and the development of German literature in general since he was rediscovered in the middle of the eighteenth century, especially through Lessing, we must agree with that remark – especially in view of the excellent translations of his work by Schlegel and Tieck.

A legend has arisen about Shakespeare and whole libraries have been written about each of his works. Academics have given many interpretations of his plays, and finally a number of writers have decided that an uneducated actor could not have produced all the thoughts which they discovered in Shakespeare's works, and they became addicted to the hypothesis that not William Shakespeare, the actor of the Globe Theatre, could have written the plays which bear his name, but some other highly learned man, for example Lord Francis Bacon of Verulam, who in view of the low estimation of literary activity at that time, borrowed the actor's name. These suppositions are based on the fact that no manuscripts written by Shakespeare's hand have ever been found; they are also based upon a notebook discovered in a London library with single passages in it which are supposed to correspond with certain passages in Shakespeare's plays. But Shakespeare's own works bear witness that he is their author. His plays reveal that they were written by a man who had a thorough knowledge of the theatre and the deepest understanding for theatrical effects.

That Shakespeare himself did not publish his plays was simply in keeping with the general custom at his time. Not one of his plays was printed during his lifetime. They were carefully kept under wraps; people were to come to the theatre and see the plays there, not read them at home. Prints which appeared at that time were pirated editions, based on notes taken during the performances, so that the texts did not completely correspond to the original versions, but were full of errors and mutilations.

These partial omissions and mistakes led certain researchers to claim that Shakespeare's plays, as they were then available, were not works of art of any special value and that originally they must have existed in quite a different form. One of these researchers is Eugen Reichel, who thinks that the author of Shakespeare's plays was a man with a certain definite worldview. But such opinions are contradicted by the fact that the plays, in the form in which they now exist, exercise such an extraordinary influence. We see this great effect in plays that have undoubtedly been mutilated, for example in Macbeth. The hold of Shakespeare's plays on his audience was proved by a performance of Henry V under the direction of Neuman-Hofer at the inauguration of the Lessing Theatre. It did not fail to produce a powerful impression in spite of an extremely bad translation and poor acting.

Shakespeare's plays are above all character dramas. The great interest which they arouse does not so much lie in the action, as in the wonderful development of the individual characters. The poet conjures up before us a human character and unfolds his thoughts and feelings in the presentation of an individual personality.

This artistic development, which culminated in Shakespeare, was made possible by the preceding phase of cultural development: the Renaissance. Shakespeare's character-dramas could only arise as a result of the higher estimation of the individual during the Renaissance. During the early middle ages we find, even in Dante and in spite of his strong personality, the basic expression of the Christian ideas of that time. The Christian type of his time, not the individual human personality, appeared in the foreground. This was the general conception. The Christian principle had no interest in the individual personality. But little by little a new worldview aroused interest in the Individual human being. Only gradually did a new interest in the individual arise by means of the different viewpoint.

The fact that Shakespeare's fame spread so quickly proves that he found an audience keenly interested in the theatre, that is to say, with a certain understanding for the representation of the personality as offered by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's chief aim was to describe individual characters, and he was far from presenting to his audience an ethical or moral idea. For example, the idea of tragic guilt, as found in Schiller's dramas, who thought that he had to encumber his hero with it in order to justify his downfall, does not exist in Shakespeare's plays. He simply allows the events to take their course consistently, uninfluenced by the idea of guilt and atonement. It would be difficult to find a concept of guilt in this sense in any of his plays.

Shakespeare also did not intend to present a certain idea, not jealousy in Othello or ambition in Macbeth, no, simply the definite characters of Othello, Macbeth, or Hamlet. Just because he did not burden his characters with theories was he able to create such great ones. He was thoroughly acquainted with the stage, and this practical knowledge enabled him to develop his action in such a way as to thrill an audience. In the whole literature of the world there are no plays which are so completely conceived from the standpoint of the actor. This is a clear proof that Shakespeare, the actor, has the merit of having written these plays.

Shakespeare was born in Stratford in 1564. His father was in fairly good circumstances, so that his son was able to attend the Latin grammar school in his hometown. There are many legends about Shakespeare's youth. Some say that he was a poacher and led an adventurous life. These things have been adduced against his authorship, yet these very experiences could only enrich his dramatic creation. Even the fact that in spite of his good education he was not encumbered with higher academic study, gave him the possibility to face things more freely and in a far more unprejudiced way. The poet's adventurous nature explains to some extent some of the greatest qualities in his plays: the bold flight of his fantasy, his sudden transformations in the action, his passion and daring, all bear witness to a life full of movement and color.

In 1585, when Shakespeare's financial conditions were no longer in a flourishing state, he went to London. There he began his theatrical career in the most menial way, by holding the horses of the visitors while they were enjoying the performance. He then became supervisor of a number of such boys who had to hold the horses' reins, and was at last admitted to the stage. In 1592 he played his first important role.

His fame soon began to spread—both as an actor and as a dramatist—and his conditions improved, so that in 1597 he was able to buy a house in Stratford. After he became part-owner of the Globe Theatre he was a wealthy man.

The plays written during Shakespeare's first period: Love's Labour Lost, As You Like It, etc., do not differ so greatly from the plays of his contemporaries, of Marlowe and others; their expressive power, their purity and naturalness were moreover impaired by a certain artificial note which was the fashion in those days. The great character-plays, which were to establish his fame for all time, followed: Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar.

Some of Shakespeare's biographers and commentators wish to deduce from certain of his later plays troubled experiences which embittered him. But in Shakespeare's case this is difficult to establish, because his identity withdraws behind his characters. They do not voice his thoughts, but they all think and act in accordance with their own disposition and character.

It is consequently useless to ask what Shakespeare's own standpoint may have been on certain difficult questions. For it is not Shakespeare, but Hamlet who broods over the problem of “to be, or not to be”, who recoils from his father's ghost, just as Macbeth recoils from the witches. Whether Shakespeare believed in ghosts and witches, whether he was a churchgoer or a freethinker, is not the point at all: He simply asked himself: how should a ghost or a witch appear on the stage so as to produce a strong effect upon the audience? The fact that this effect is undiminished today proves that Shakespeare was able to answer this question.

We should not forget that the modern stage is not favourable to the effect which Shakespeare's plays can produce. The importance which is now attributed to props, costumes, the frequent changes of scenery, etc. diminish the effect which is to be produced by the characters in the plays—for this remains the chief thing. In Shakespeare's time when a change of scenery was simply indicated by a notice-board, when a table and a chair sufficed for the furniture of a royal palace, the effect produced by the characters must have been much greater than today.

Whereas in the modern theater so much depends on scenery, props, etc., when the playwright usually gives a detailed description of the scenery so that the effect of his plays may be handicapped by bad staging, Shakespeare's plays leave a strong impression, even when performed badly.

And when a times comes in which we again see the essential more than is the case today, will the effect of Shakespeare's art be ever greater: through the power of characterization which remains alive and unequaled through the centuries.

An introductory lecture by Rudolf Steiner: “Before which forum can a decision be made regarding ‘a unified worldview?’ — An attempt at an answer to the question of ‘Truth and Science’ ”; followed by discussion.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner, as speaker: I was once inspired to pose our question “Before which forum must a unified worldview be decided?” by the earlier discussions of our association, which, after all, wants to cultivate a monistic worldview, and also by my personal involvement in the dispute over Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle). Here in the group, the questions were often considered: What is the essence of a unified worldview, what is its value, do we actually have the right to speak of a specifically monistic one? It was emphasized once that according to the present standpoint of science we have no right to speak of unity in material respects, and on another occasion Dr. Penzig explained that in the striving after a unified world picture embracing the whole of nature and the spiritual world one could not but round off the objective picture given by the individual sciences, thus forcing the facts. Even then I noticed that the greatest advances often originated from such supposed falsifications. The Copernican system, for example, was a “falsification” of the facts available for its time, just as the Lamarck-Darwin theory of evolution is nothing more. Just as Tycho de Brahe provided the only possible world view for his time, so it is easy for the fact fanatic, who does not want to go beyond the objectively given facts with his thinking, to prove the “falsifications” that Lamarck-Haeckel's theory of evolution contains according to the current state of science. Nevertheless, I believe that, like Copernicus, Haeckel will be proved right. At the time, I strongly supported the much-debated “Welträtsel” because I admired the consistency and extreme boldness with which a mind creates and “falsifies” a world view from a one-sided point of view. Although my basic philosophical views are only opposed to his in what he fights against in them and agree with him in what he presents positively. At the same time, however, I was described as one of Haeckel's main opponents, an experience that seems symptomatic to me of our time, in that the author's world of ideas takes on a completely different image in someone else's mind. We use our terms, based on their usual position in intellectual life, to put forward ideas that mean something other than what we want to express.

In the course of these arguments about Haeckel and in the discussions within the Bund, a question has been brought to life for me that I have often asked myself: What is the relationship between truth and science? Does science contain truth? Does it contain any elements that could lead to the construction of a unified world view? Do we have the right to construct a unified world view or any world view at all on the basis of science?

This question, which has occupied people for centuries, has been closer to being solved in the past than in modern times, and has been obstructed in

way of solution by the so-called theory of knowledge has blocked itself, one must realize before which forum anything at all can be established in relation to truth and science, in relation to the truth content of science.

Nowadays, after all the developments of the 19th century, we have the idea of truth as something that must correspond to objective reality. We find ourselves in an intensive fanaticism of facts that does not allow us to go beyond mere registration. If truth is only a conceptual repetition of what exists outside of us, then, according to the perception of those who today strive for a worldview, this is also nothing more than a counter-image of facts existing outside of us, of the reality already finished in the world outside of us. If it were possible to take a photograph of the world from some corner in the most favorable perspective possible, the ideal of a worldview would be achieved. But to construct such a world view would actually be superfluous, a mere luxury of the human mind, if, like science, it were to be nothing more than a mere repetition, a kind of photographic counter-image of what is going on in the world, what is available in a completed form. The fact that the individual still forms an individual counter-image alongside science would be completely superfluous, infinitely unimportant for the whole world context. If nature has provided and developed everything for us except the final point, then what the human spirit dreams and creates does not belong to reality. For this point of view, which appears grotesquely in today's science, even in Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle), man is nothing more than a mere speck of dust in the cosmos, differing from the worm only quantitatively. If he forms a picture of the world, he lives a life of luxury, doing something that adds not the slightest thing to the evolution of the world. Rather, he is required never to contribute anything of his own that is not found in the rest of nature, but only to register, compare, and logically combine.

We ask: Is this procedure of merely confronting objective nature logically, never adding anything beyond the current state of affairs, consistent with the course of nature's entities; is there perhaps nothing in the direction of nature's development that compels us to add anything to reality? Nature gives us the answer itself. In particular, it should give it to the evolution theorist.

Allow me to explain this to you in a concise way, assuming that nature is at the stage of its development that there were only monkeys and no humans. The monkeys would have investigated the phenomena of the world, they would have found what lies beneath them, and monkeys too. If they had taken the empirical standpoint, they would have been satisfied with the realization that the world ends with monkeys. Perhaps they would have founded a monkey ethic based on general monkey perception, so that nothing new would have been added to the world here and they would have remained at their standpoint. But from our standpoint of knowledge, we know that in the principle of development there was indeed something that led beyond the ape genus, that, because it was a productive principle, because it led beyond what was present as a completed reality, , led to the development of man, something that was not limited to the actual, which, as a real imagination, as it were, real intuition in nature, leads it beyond its individual stages and lifts it beyond the immediate present.

Man, too, as a product of evolution, as a being in nature, is there to live for evolution, not merely to look back and form a picture of evolution and regard himself as the end of the series. A Weltanschhauung that seeks to summarize the content of all his thinking and doing will therefore not only be theoretical and contemplative, but also practical and postulating. Man should therefore not only repeat nature in some way, but see if there are not forces within him that lead beyond the immediately given. He should make the development spiritually, ideally alive in himself, should seek the forces that drive the species forward, that bring about progress, not merely examine his mental powers to see if they correspond to reality. The question “Can we penetrate to the thing in itself, see into the essence of the world?” is a disaster, an obstacle for man. But when he places himself in the process of evolution, intervening in nature to advance it a step further, he comes to a sense of his exalted task, of his position within the world.

There are in fact rudiments for the formation of this superscientific standpoint, which fully recognizes science but rises above what science offers it as the lawfulness of logical thought. Maeterlinck, for example, has advanced similar views in one of his more recent books, in which he describes the marriage of the bees. One wonders: can we speak of truth in the sense of scientific truth, of agreement with the given reality, which is always in the material small print, if it is to be the content of a world view, or does it, as a world view , does it lead beyond the purely objective truth in a similar way to the poetic truth according to the view of those who understand it in the Goethean sense, as the poetic truth leads beyond the immediate naturalistic truth?

Such approaches can be found in many forms today, to the delight of those who see truth in living life, and to the horror of fact fanatics like Tycho de Brahe or Haeckel's opponents. But it does not belong in their forum. The truth, which wants to fertilize, will always be a search, will always have to “falsify” the image of the fact fanatics; but it stands infinitely above this, in that it develops something intuitive, spiritual in man, adding something new to nature, which would not be without the human spirit. Thus, what man cherishes in his dreams, what he creates in his mind, acquires more than the significance of mere luxury; in life, it becomes a cosmic truth, something that man has newly generated. Thus, on the foundation of science, he rises to productive work that flows freely from his soul as original intuition. At the highest level of development, he has a task that no other being in the world has; he adds something that would not exist forever without him.

These views may be abhorrent to the pure scientist, but I believe it is a correct insight that man has the right to be productive in his world view, a feeling that was different times, when we had not yet been blinded by a fanatical belief in facts and by epistemology, times that were convinced from the outset of the cosmic character of this addition.

Let me conclude with the words of Angelus Silesius, which express the realization of the unique significance of the human spirit in the world:

Without me, God could not create a single little worm; if I became nothing, it would have to break into nothingness.

Schäfer, former spokesperson for the Free Religious and Humanist Community in Berlin, objects to the term “falsification” for Copernicus' error. If he had assumed a circular motion instead of an elliptical one, then that would have been an inadequate conception, which, like many similar ones, has been clarified by the advancing human spirit, as it will always be the fate of man to have to stop in front of imperfections of his conceptions, which will only be resolved later.

The speaker would have preferred to have seen the topic formulated as follows: “By what forum, by what court can a judgment be passed on a Weltanschhauung, on truth and untruth, and thus on its right and wrong?”

This forum can only be the personality, its sovereignty. From this position then flows the feeling of responsibility.

Dr. Stern: “An important basis for our discussion is the question as to whether a world view, that is, a general philosophical view of the true nature of the world and of all that exists, is possible at all. This question has been answered very differently. While on the one hand it is considered unobjectionable to create a dogmatic world view based on experience, another opinion, to which I subscribe, is critical positivism, which, starting from scientific knowledge, does not stop at the individual fact, but still does not consider it possible to gain a true picture of the cosmos.

To justify the dogmatic method, reference is made to the metaphysical drive that undoubtedly exists in man, even in the child who breaks the toy in order to get to the bottom of the matter.

In the formation of metaphysical systems to satisfy this urge, however, two psychological errors have crept in: Greek philosophy singled out one of the various parts of the universe and made it the subject, the true essence of nature. So Thales the water. In more recent times, people have fallen back on the idea of considering various psychological abilities of human nature individually and, fantastically magnified, of imposing them on nature as an entity. Thus Hegel makes reason the world principle, Schopenhauer blind will. Lotze assumes a comprehensive consciousness that mediates all interaction. Thus philosophy has happily returned to where it started, in hylozoism.

I consider it impossible to find a general, true and correct worldview, on the one hand because of the subjective nature of the human mind, which sees everything through subjective glasses and, according to Kant, can never recognize the thing in itself, and on the other hand for the objective reason that all our research covers only such a small part of the universe and it is generally impossible that such a large part of what is happening will ever enter into the circle of our experience that we can draw universally valid conclusions about the whole world from it.

Benedikt Lachmann: “Dr. Steiner seems to me to be positing a contradiction between human beings and nature. The essence of the human being, like that of every other form of existence, can be dissolved into a play of forces, of movement and resistance, that fight with each other in vain. It cannot be a matter for human beings to rise above these forces, but rather they must seek to engage with them as best they can.

Wolfgang Kirchbach: “Dr. Steiner said that it is a danger, indeed a necessity of the human spirit, to arrive at a falsification if it does not want to content itself with a simple image, an imitation of reality. In contrast to this, Baco of Verulam believed that he could build a correct world view based solely on the perceptionibus sensuum, and he rejected the Copernican system because it contradicted his conception of the perceptiones.

When determining the truth, it depends on the knowledge that man has of his powers and abilities, which are given to him to judge reality. This includes, for example, mathematical judgment, which corrects perceptions. One can only speak of falsification in the sense that man unilaterally renounces one or the other ability. There have also been minds that thought in full possession of all their mental abilities at a certain level of maturity, which we call reason. When Mr. Schäfer says that the forum of a worldview is the sovereignty of my personality, he certainly meant that this forum is the total possession of the mental powers of my personality, and we can agree on the name reason.

The rational grasp of truth demands that every judgment be reconciled with reality for every thought, in science as well as in world view, and requires observation, perception, correction of perception, to find the concept, the expression that expresses the greatest sum of known facts according to the respective state of knowledge, that expresses the greatest concordance of our judgments with reality.

This is the only way to make research and imagination productive, to protect oneself from error, which is refuted by reality, without content and unproductive. Only in this way is it possible to add something productively to nature. Even if the poet gives us a view of the world, we think it better that he creates realistic figures in which a social or other general law can be observed in his work. His work is also only a reflection of reality, but the act of finding the real inner symbol is an eminently productive activity, just as in science the act of finding the comprehensive, fruitful generic term from the sum of the opposing and restrictive data.

It does, however, require a productive imagination, but this also needs a rational regulator, a restriction of fantasy through reality.

This method has added something to the world by creating new organs. Through methodical and reasonable observation, Kant has added a completely new element to what we commonly call nature in the moral realm, the world of sensation and feelings of pleasure, which extends far beyond empirical nature: the categorical imperative.

Dr. Steiner: “I must confess that the attacks have not touched on what I have said today at all. I did not speak of a contradiction between humanity and nature. I was speaking rather from the standpoint of the most consistent point of view in the theory of evolution, that I regard all stages of nature, from the lowest to the highest stirrings of the spirit, as unified, and only appearing in different forms. But an amoeba is not a human being, and it is not a matter of blurring all distinctions. But if I say that in nature everything is only force, resistance, motion, then it is too reminiscent of the sentence: All cats are gray at night. It is not possible to get to the bottom of the world in the twinkling of an eye. Only when I have distinguished things can I look for a unifying, connecting principle. In the sense of the connecting principle of development, I have spoken of the task of man as one within nature, given by the facts of development.

I fully agree that we must adhere to reality if we want to be productive, and that we must correct our imagination in line with it. I only pointed out that efforts to present a world view that is only a copy of reality, as Büchner wants, have not yet met these requirements, and that, for example, this too is forced to do violence to the facts. It is not the intention that is important here, but the result. One behaves as if one wanted to give a picture of reality, but cannot. My principle is therefore not a theoretical, but a practical going beyond reality in the sense in which I see it in the principle of development, where creatures go beyond their own kind. This aspect of the problem has not been touched upon in the discussion.

I did not use the word falsification in the sense of the imperfection of a presentation that will only be clarified later, but rather meant that researchers are always forced into deliberately false representation for the sake of the system when they seek comprehensive unity, and therefore asked whether what we are entitled to call reality in the highest sense at all coincides with what the naturalist thinks of as reality. When Haeckel illustrates three stages of embryonic development with the same stereotype, he is forced to falsify in order to be able to provide evidence according to the scientific method. I mean that such forgers are nevertheless right, as Haeckel is in relation to his opponents who cling to the purely factual nature of the scientific method, because they intuitively see beyond the individual facts, not in a fanciful way.

But when Dr. Stern rejects the possibility of a world picture, of an overall view in principle, and in doing so draws on the diversity of philosophical systems to support his view, it is a fable convenue based on incomplete ideas of the individual systems. The most significant attempts at truth that have been made, from Vedanta philosophy through Greek to German, are approximations to the truth in varying degrees.

The forum before which the legitimacy of one or the other view is decided can only be the forum of the human being, his sovereign personality, as I agree with Dr. Schäfer. This sentence seems to me to be a truly real one, which has been formed not out of theoretical fantasies but out of the experience of men who have worked practically. But just as it is true that the personality is the ultimate forum, so it is certainly true that then the personality must always feel the responsibility of this position and the duty to constantly develop, to educate the depths of the personality. The child cannot be a forum in the same way as someone who is at the height of knowledge. The question therefore arises: Where in us humans lies the potential for development, the productive element? What in us corresponds to that which nature drives forward, which allowed apes to leave their species and become human?

If I regard man as a product of evolution, then I can indeed see him as the highest possible forum. But I also have the obligation to constantly call the highest human in me into existence and have no right in any moment of my life to recognize myself as the final and absolute forum, but I can, as I am in development, give myself up to the expectation that in every moment of my existence a higher point of knowledge than I now have can arise. The further development of the personality must be based on science, but it must also go beyond it, as art and poetry do. Just as art and poetry cannot be reduced to blind phantasms, so, when people control their personality by means of the principle of development, however far they go beyond objective nature, agreement will arise in the most diverse people, as the agreement of philosophical systems of all times shows.

The solution to the question “To what extent does science contain truth? Can it alone lead to truth?” lies in this sovereign meaning of human personality.

The world, especially for science, is in many respects dualistically constructed. Evolution is only possible because nature has prepared the future in it in a twofold way. Nature presents itself to man as an apparent, seemingly irreconcilable contradiction that cannot be resolved by science, as force, matter, and so on.

This is where the significance of human personality comes in. Only the life activity of man can be unifying, monistic. It consists in dissolving these apparent contradictions into a higher, productively generated view of life, in the life of development, in the uniting of contradictions, in living action.

Therefore, the question of the validity of the world view is to be decided before the forum of life, not before the forum of knowledge.

Lecture by Rudolf Steiner at the Giordano Bruno League

Dr. Steiner begins by saying that in the current state of German intellectual life, a man who is worldly-wise in the ordinary sense would not speak publicly on such a topic, because there is hardly any other that would be so likely to compromise him, and then continues: “Theosophy is a name often claimed by people who want to explore their destiny in spiritualistic circles. And yet, even though it has a whiff of fraudulence about it, I am fully aware of the topic when discussing its connection to German intellectual life. I much preferred being in my chemical laboratory to being in any spiritualist circle, and I know that one can get one's hands dirty in such circles, but I have also washed my hands and hope that I will be able to give you an understanding of the word theosophy as a serious worldview. It must be clearly stated that a serious world view can only be sought on the basis of modern natural science. I will never deviate from the idea that only in it is salvation to be found. But science still fills hearts and minds with its materialistic philosophy, and even if individual enthusiasts claim that we have long since passed the age of Büchner and so forth, if we

the materialism of the 1850s will continue to conquer the world. Almost all natural scientists of the present day are materialists, even if they deny it.

Natural science has shown us how gradually beings came into existence and perfected themselves until man appeared. But here, according to Haeckel in the 22nd link of his organic ancestral series, it stopped. David Friedrich Strauß praised the fact that natural science has freed us from miracles, from the miracle in the sense in which Linné said in the 18th century: “

How can we restore the harmony that existed for the ancient religions, and even for the early Middle Ages? With St. Augustine, this discord gradually emerged, leading to the two great dualistic currents in the contrast between scholasticism and Galileo and so on. Science was like a son who returns home from abroad and can no longer be understood by his father, and Protestantism is nothing more than the father's declaration that he wants to disinherit the son, and Kantianism is the conclusion, the last phase of this process!

The first great attempt to overcome this dichotomy was made by the German idealist philosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Three years after Hegel's death, Fichte's son published a book on human self-knowledge. It deals with this as a task that natural science itself has set. I.H. Fichte says something like: When we observe natural beings, we see their eternal laws. But when we regard the human soul itself as a natural process, we are faced with a change in our understanding. The laws of nature lie outside our personality in the natural basis from which we have emerged, but in our soul we do not see finished natural laws; we are natural law ourselves. There nature becomes our own deed, there we are development. We do not merely recognize, we live. We now have the task of creating eternal iron laws, no longer merely recognizing them. I.H. Fichte then suggests: at this point, man not only lives in his knowledge of nature, at this point he realizes and lives the divine, the creative, at this point philosophy passes over into theosophy!

This is how the concept of theosophy appears in German intellectual life. We can now perhaps see more clearly that theosophy is nothing other than the ultimate demand of a true monism between knowledge of nature and knowledge of the self. This gives us a perspective for reconciling the contradictions between religion and science. We now know that there is no other divine power that can elevate the worm to man; we know that we ourselves are this divine power.

One may ask: But what is the use of such knowledge? Well, I would reply, what significance does the simple recording of facts have, which is usually called knowledge? Those who I would call cosmic loafers are satisfied with that.

Those who understand the concept of theosophy in this way will also understand Fewerbach, who says that man has created God in his own image. We are quite willing to admit that the concept of God is born of the human heart, and that God, as a symbol of an inner ideal, can develop man beyond man.

In this way we shall gain a divine wisdom that will express the divinity of nature. We are now living in a time that could become an important turning-point in the spiritual development of Europe, as it was for the age in which Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and Galileo lived and founded modern natural science. But the latter has not known how to celebrate its reconciliation with religion. We are faced with this task, we must fulfill it. No matter how inadequate these attempts may be, there are currents in modern intellectual life that are moving in this direction. Religions are not founded as such, and so there are no religious geniuses in the sense that there are scientific and artistic geniuses. But there are personalities who express the content of knowledge of their time as religious feeling. I am well aware of the great defects and errors of the theosophical movement. Duboc has called theosophy a feminine philosophy. We can change that by making it a masculine one in critical Germany.

I know that there can be no salvation outside of science, but we must find new methods of soul research based on natural science in order to do what all the old religious views were able to do: establish a great unity between religious need and science. Theosophy in the sense I have characterized it has nothing to do with the reports of facts of hypnotism and somnambulism that are often lumped together with it; indeed, one could reject these and still be a theosophist, but these appearances of abnormal mental life are not to be rejected at all, and in the scientific interpretation of these facts, undertaken particularly by French and English scholars, I see the first tentative attempts at real soul research.

Dr. Steiner concluded his programmatic lecture with a reference to a painting by the Belgian Wiertz, “Man of the Future”. It shows a giant holding cannons and other attributes of the culture of our time, smiling as he shows them to his wife and children, who have shrunk to the size of pygmies in comparison. It will be our task to ensure that we do not appear so pygmy-like in front of the man of the future.

First, O. Lehmann-Rußbüldt gave a lecture on Dr. Steiner's lecture for orientation purposes, adding that it was his personal wish that not only the 250 to 300 listeners to the lecture would have been present, but also the 2000 to 3000 people who make up the spiritual public life in Germany. Dr. Steiner's call to make theosophy, if it is a female philosophy according to Duboc, into a male one in critical Germany, should be underlined thickly, so that it would take up a whole page in print, because there is certainly no small danger in the theosophical movement. The speaker acknowledged that, despite electricity and precision mechanics, our intellectual culture could be called crude compared to the harmony that existed between science and religion in the great cultures of antiquity, but, he added emphatically, we do not want to despair of ourselves because of that. The obvious superiority of our intelligence, as it manifests itself in the machine age, could be a guarantee that we will deepen and expand what the culture of antiquity only had a presentiment of, albeit in the most magnificent way. To this end, the speaker quoted a passage from Count Gobineau's racial work about the spiritual disposition of the Aryan, which can certainly also be applied to the peoples of the Atlantic world, i.e. Western Europe and North America:

"The Aryan is thus superior to other men mainly to the extent of his intelligence and energy, and thanks to these two abilities, if he succeeds in conquering his passions and his material needs , he is likewise granted the ability to achieve an infinitely higher morality, although in the ordinary course of things one can find as many reprehensible actions in him as in individuals of inferior races.” The speaker concluded by saying that, in his opinion, science would develop from the defamed hypnotism and somnambulism into an expanded and refined psychology, which would mean as much to us for the knowledge of the soul as astronomy and chemistry mean for the knowledge of nature, despite the fact that these sciences have developed from astrology and alchemy.

In the discussion that followed, Nicolai was the first to criticize the fact that it was not explained what Theosophy actually wanted and could do.

Dr. Steiner replied that his lecture had only wanted to emphasize the connection between monism and the world view, which was already moving in modern tracks in the days of Vedanta philosophy in India. The dualism that has been emerging in Christianity since the 4th century consists in the fact that it may well accept the eye and the senses for the knowledge of the world of phenomena, but for the knowledge of our origin and our destination, it does not allow the means of our knowledge either, but refers us to faith, to the revelations of old books and prophets. But monism promises a development of knowledge, just as it has been able to establish a development of species for living beings. In the writings of Vedanta philosophy, there is a conversation in which a disciple asks the teacher: What happens when I die? The teacher replies: The solid and liquid parts of your body will become solid and liquid again, because man is like a stone and an animal; even the expressions of your thoughts and actions dissolve into your surroundings, but what remains is the “development,” the reason for what has formed your personality. — Thus, Vedanta philosophy is already monistic in its core. What lives only in the unconscious in animals, namely the urge to develop their personality, must enter into fullest consciousness in humans and merge with consciousness as an ideal.

Fritz Sänger polemicized against Dr. Steiner. The Theosophists always pretend that they already possessed and still possess the results of modern natural science, but they have never given any examples of such superiority. He feared that a movement of this kind was only too well suited to undermine the results of modern natural science; despite the most careful observation, he had only been able to find the expression of idiocy in spiritualism, but he had to acknowledge the fact of hypnotism.

After Köhn had spoken in warm and urgent words in favor of Dr. Steiner, O. Lehmann-Rußbüldt remarked that Mr. Sänger's remarks were typical of the representatives of so-called natural science of all times. Fifteen years ago, Sänger would have declared as nonsense the fact, demonstrated by Krafft-Ebing among others, that a lime-leaf laid on a hypnotized person causes a burn like a glowing piece of iron if the hypnotized person is to regard it as such; just as a hundred years ago the French materialists declared it to be nonsense that meteorites can fall from space onto the earth.

Dr. Steiner then once again vigorously opposed the confusion of Theosophy and spiritualism. If Mr. Sänger had encountered such Theosophists who gave cause for this, then he should stick to them, but he, Dr. Steiner, firmly rejected this. He considers it immoral in the philosophical sense to seek teachings about destiny and human nature through the manifestations of so-called spirits; that would be gross materialism. He also does not place any particular value on the name Theosophy. Above all, he finds the high ethics of Theosophy meaningful in his sense, which, for example, leads to the most serious consequences in education. What a perspective for the mind of the educator when he is aware that he has to unfold a seed of divinity in the child! ^{1Our reporter, Mr. Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, the second chairman of the Bruno-Bund, feels the need to add to the report here that he also sees this lecture, alongside so many other significant phenomena in the spiritual life, as a nucleus of a new, noble culture. “Times of great upheaval do not come upon us like a mystical something; if we create them, they are there.” I would welcome the ‘Cheosophical’ movement with a program as formulated by Dr. Steiner. Let us hope that the newly emerging life forces of rejuvenation can create, above all, more lively, poetically inspiring words; what use are all the ‘isms’ to us! In any case, the golden wheat of genuine theosophy has unfortunately been buried under so much chaff of parroting Indian vocabulary that the philosophical hero who can collect it in a new sheaf, that is, under a new name, is highly welcome.}