The Rudolf Steiner Archive

then the wonderful words in it:

“She has thought and continues to think; but not as a
human being, but as nature.”

That is to say, Goethe is clear about one thing: spinning a mechanical web of concepts about nature does not provide an understanding of nature. Only such a deeper search in the existence of nature creates knowledge of nature, through which the human soul finds in the depths of this natural existence that which is related to what it can seek out in the depths of its own being when it penetrates into them.

We may now ask: Is such striving, as it can be characterized by Kant, can be characterized by the ideal figure of Goethe's Faust, - is this striving a solitary, a merely individual one, or does it have anything to do with the overall striving of the German national spirit, the German national soul? Even if we consider Kant, the abstract philosopher, who hardly ventured a few miles beyond Königsberg and spent his whole life in abstract thought, we clearly see, especially in the way he worked his way from his earlier world view to his later one, how he, despite his reclusiveness, developed out of everything all that in the German national spirit aspired after certainty, and how, owing to this national spirit, he did not come to a narrowing of the human soul to the sphere of mere human thinking, but was led up to the horizon on which the whole range of ideas and ideals appeared to him, which give man impulses in the course of his human development.

One might say that what was later expressed by the most German of German philosophers, Fichte, already lives in Kant; what has become so dear to the German worldview, especially from the eighteenth century onward, already lives in Kant. This German world view came to value having a view of the world that does not need to be disconcerted by what presents itself to the senses, for the absolute validity of that which is man's duty, love, divine devotion, moral world. overlooks the world and looks at the way in which he is placed in the world, he sees himself surrounded by the field of vision of sensual impressions and what he can divine behind them; but he also sees himself placed in such a way that he world without this second aspect of the world; he sees himself so placed that behind him, in his soul, the divine ideals are at work, which become his duty and deed, and these ideals do not bear the coarse sensual character that the world of external movement and external revelation has. One might say that when the German mind looks at the stiffness and smoothness of natural existence, to speak symbolically, at the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, it feels the need to recognize: How can we become immersed in that which is so indifferent in nature, that which appears in ideals as a demand, as a duty, as a moral life? How can we become immersed in that which appears as the highest value of life, as a moral ideal? How does the reality of moral ideals relate to the reality of external nature? This is a question that cannot be answered lightly, but which can also be found in tremendous depth, heart-wrenching. And so it was felt in the best German minds at the time when Kant's world view was forming. Sensuality had to be presented in such a way that it was no obstacle to the moral world flowing into the world through human beings. Morality could not be a reality that presents itself indifferently, and against which moral ideas must rebound. When moral ideas from the spiritual world are put into action through human beings, they must not be repelled by the rigid materialistic barrier of the sensory world. This must be taken as a profound insight, then one understands why Kant wants to dethrone ordinary knowledge so that a real source can be thought for the moral idea. Then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical , but which arose from deep German striving: “All sensuality, everything we can see and feel outside and think about the external world, is only the sensualized material of our duty.” The true world is the world of the ruling spirit, which lives itself out as man perceives it in ideas and ideals, and these are the true reality, they are what pulses through the world as a current, what only needs something to which it can apply itself, to illustrate it. Sensuality has no independent existence for Fichte, but is the sensitized material for human fulfillment of duty.

From a philosophy that seeks to validate everything spiritual, that must be sought from a natural disposition towards idealism, such words emerged; and one may find such words one-sided, but that does not matter when such words are made into dogma. But to take them as symptoms of a striving that lives in a people, that is the significant thing; and to recognize that such minds, which create in the sense of such a word, precisely because of the idealistic character of the German national soul, elevate Germanness to the arena of thought. In order to give thought its vitality, human knowledge and striving must go beyond what Cartesius could merely find. And Goethe's Faust, this image of the highest human endeavor, this image that one must first struggle to understand by allowing many German cultural elements to take effect, from what did it emerge? — It is truly not invented, did not come about in such a way that a single person created it out of themselves; rather, it emerged from the legends, from the poetry of the people themselves. Faust lived in the people, and Goethe was still familiar with the “puppet show of Dr. Faust”; and in the simple folk character, he already saw the traits that he only elevated to the arena of thoughts. Nothing is more vivid than Goethe's “Faust” to show how something supreme can emerge from what lives most deeply, most elementarily, most intimately in the simple folk being. One would like to say: not Goethe and Goethe's nature alone created Faust, but that Goethe brought Faust forth like a germ that lay within the German national organism, and gave it its essence, embodied it in such a way that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the highest striving of the German spirit for the arena of thought. Not the striving of isolated personalities out of their own nature, but precisely when it confronts us in its greatness from the whole nation, it is the result of German idealism.

And how does thought work within this German idealism? One comes to an understanding of how it works precisely by comparing this German idealistic striving of thought with what is also a striving of thought, let us say, for example, in Descartes. In Descartes, thought confines man within the narrowest limits; it works as a mere thought and remains as such confined to the world in which man lives directly with his senses and his mind. Within German idealism, the personality does not merely encounter the thought as it enters the soul, but the thought becomes a mirror image of that which is alive outside the soul, that which vibrates and permeates the universe, that which is spiritual outside of man, that which is above and below the spirit of man, of which nature is the outer revelation and the life of the soul is the inner revelation. Thus, thought becomes an image of the spirit itself; and by rising to the level of thought, the German wants to rise through thought to the living spirit, wants to penetrate into that world that lives behind the veil of nature in such a way that by penetrating this veil, man not only visualizes something, but penetrates with his own life into a life that is related to him. And again, since man is not satisfied with what he can experience in his soul, he seeks to penetrate into what lies behind thinking, feeling and willing, for which these three are outer shells, for which even the thought is only an inner revelation, in which man lives and works, in which he knows himself as in a living being that creates the scene of thoughts within him. And so we can see how, especially in those times when the German mind, seemingly so detached from external reality, from external experience, strove for a world view, this German mind felt itself entirely dominant and weaving within the arena of thought. And there is first of all Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who regards external nature only as an external stimulus to that which he actually wants to seek, to whom, as already mentioned, the whole of the external sense world has become only the sensitized material of our duty; who wants to live only in that which can penetrate from the depths of the world in a mental way and can be directly realized before the human soul. That is the essence of his world view, that only what emerges in a contemplative way from the deepest depths of the soul and announces itself as emerging from the deepest depths of the world is valid for him.

For his successor Schelling, the urge for nature, the Faustian urge, becomes so vivid within him that he considers the knowledge of nature, which only wants to express itself in concepts about nature, as nothing. Only when the human soul comes to regard all of nature as the physiognomy of man, only when nature is regarded in such a way that nature is the physiognomy of the spirit that rules it, only then does one live in true knowledge of nature; but then, by penetrating through the bark, one feels creative in nature. And again, a paradoxical but appropriate word for the essence of Germanness comes from Schelling: To recognize nature is actually to create nature! Admittedly, this is at first a one-sided saying; but a saying that represents a one-sidedness need not remain so; rather, if it is rightly recognized, this creative knowledge of nature will lead the spirit to reflect inwardly, to awaken slumbering powers within itself, which penetrate to the spiritual sources of nature. The source, the germ of that which can be true spiritual science, we can find it precisely within this world picture of German idealism!

In the third of the German idealistic philosophers, in Hegel, who is difficult to understand and who is so far removed from many, this lively character of the scene of the thoughts within German idealism appears in the same way. In our own time, when the abstract is so much decried and mere thought is so little loved, this world-view strikes us as strange. And yet Hegel feels himself closely connected with the Goethean direction of nature towards the spirit. The content of his world-view – what is it if not mere thinking, a progression from one thought to another? With his world-view we are presented with a thought organism; necessity is created for us, so that we stand face to face with a mere thought organism, which we can only create by thinking it, as we would with any other organism through our senses. But behind this presentation of a thought organism there is a consciousness, a certain attitude. This attitude consists in stripping away all sense perceptions, all perceptions of the senses, for a few moments of world-gazing, stripping away everything that one wants and feels as an individual, and surrendering to what as if the thought itself were taking one step after another, — that man then immerses himself in a world that is a thinking world, but no longer his thinking world, so that he no longer says to this world: I think, therefore I am! but: “The spirit of the world thinks in me, and I give myself to the spirit of the world as a theater, so that in what I offer as soul to the all-encompassing spirit of the world, this spirit can develop its thoughts from stage to stage and show me how it bases its thoughts on world-becoming. And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience in the soul only what that soul can experience when it surrenders all its own being to the thinking that thinks itself within it. One must also see this Hegelian philosophy, this so idealistic excerpt from the German essence, in such a way that one does not take it as a dogmatics, on which one can swear or not, but as something that, like a symptom of German striving in a certain time, can stand before us. In Hegel's philosophy, the world spirit appears as a mere thinker; but while it is true that much more than mere thinking was needed to shape the world, it is nevertheless true that the path that once led to it, to seek logic, is one which produces in man the attitude towards the living that reigns behind existence and which leads man to the scene not of abstract, intellectual thought, but of living thought, which in the experience of thought has experience of the world.

The three idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, sought to elevate the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different directions: Fichte tried to shine a light into the depths of the human ego and did not say, like Descartes, “I think, therefore I am!” For Fichte, if he had only been able to arrive at Descartes' thought, would have said: “There I find within me a rigid existence, an existence to which I must look. But that is not an ego. I am only an ego if I can secure my own existence myself at any time. Not through the act of thought, not through mere thinking can I arrive at my ego, but through an act of action. That is a continuous creative process. It does not depend on looking at its being; it leaves its previous being; but by having the power to create itself again in the next moment, out of the act of doing, it is constantly being reborn. Fichte does not grasp the thought in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the scene of the thought itself, where he creates vividly and lives creatively. And Schelling, he tries to recognize nature, and with genuinely German feeling he lives into the secrets of nature, even if, of course, his statements, if you want to take them as dogma, can be presented as fantastic. But he immerses himself in natural processes with his deepest emotions, so that he does not feel merely as a passive observer of nature, as a being that merely looks at nature, but as a being that submerges itself in the plant and creates with the plant in order to understand plant creation. He seeks to rise from created nature to creative nature. He seeks to become as intimate with creative nature as with a human being with whom he is friends. This is an archetypally German trait in the Schellingian nature. Goethe sought to approach nature in a similar way from his point of view, as his Faust expresses it, as to the “bosom of a friend”. There Goethe, to describe how far removed every abstract observer is from a contemplation of nature, there he calls what he, as an external naturalist, is to the earth, his friendship with the earth. So human, so directly alive does the German spirit feel itself in Goethe to the spirit that reigns in nature in the striving to be scientific, in that he wants to raise science itself to the arena of thoughts. And Hegelian logic – abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel – what becomes of it? When one considers how mere logic often appears to man, and compares this with what prevails in Hegel's idealistic world-view, then one gets the right impression of the world-importance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel's work, what appears to be the furthest thing from mysticism, the clear, crystal-clear, one might say, crystal-cold thought itself, is felt and experienced in such a way that although the thought , but that what the soul experiences in terms of thought is direct mystical experience; for what Hegel experiences in terms of thought is a becoming one with the divine world spirit, which itself permeates and lives through the world. Thus, in Hegel, the greatest clarity and conceptual sobriety become the warmest and most vibrant mysticism. This magic is brought about by the way in which the German mind rises from its direct and living idealism to the realm of thought. In doing so, it proves that what matters is not the individual expressions that are arrived at, but the soul foundations from which the human soul seeks a worldview. Hegel is said to be a dry logician. In answer to this it may be said: He who calls Hegel's logic by that name is himself dry and cold. He who is able to approach this logic in the right way can feel how it pulsates out of German idealism; he can feel in the apparently abstract thoughts, which in Hegel's system are so spun out of one another, the most living warmth of soul that is necessary to strip away all individuality and to connect with the divine, so that in Hegel logic and mysticism can no longer be distinguished; that although nothing is nebulous in it, a mystical trait prevails in all its details.

Even in our time, the German mind, even the opponents of German idealism, has endeavored time and again to fathom the fundamental idealism of this German nature in its significance as a riddle. And the best German minds, even those who are opponents of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, if we turn our gaze to them, we still find that the development of Germany consists in absorbing more and more of the basic impulses of this idealism.

How these fundamental impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has often been discussed and will be discussed more often. Attention should only be drawn to how – one might say – German idealism, after it had reached one of its high points in the German world view, then continued to have an effect on German intellectual life as a different impulse. There was a period in this German intellectual life, and it was lived out in minds of the very, very first order until the middle of the 19th century, until the last third of the 19th century, when the view was that such creative work as is expressed, for example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought really takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creativity, was only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, in the sphere of natural science, the same process of thinking can be observed that is expressed in Goethe's Faust. example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creation, is only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, music has a different area; that music is, as it were, the field that does not seek to grasp the highest in man by the detour of a work of fiction such as Faust, but that music is the field in which sensuality must be grasped directly. For example, the contrast between the legend of Don Juan and that of Faust has been cited, with a certain amount of justification after the experiences that could be had within the development of humanity, how mistaken it is to legend on the same level as the Faust legend; it has been asserted that what this other legend, which shows man completely absorbed in sensual experience, can be correspondingly portrayed only within music that directly evokes and seizes sensuality. — The way in which the German does not rise to the scene of thought in the abstract, but in a lively way, has also brought the refutation of this view. In Richard Wagner, we have in modern times the spirit that has triumphed over the merely external, emotional element in music, that has sought to deepen the setting of the thoughts so that the thought itself could take hold of the element that was thought to live only in music. To spiritualize music from the standpoint of the spirit, to show that, was also only possible for German idealism. One can say: Richard Wagner showed that in the most demure element for thought there is nothing that could resist or be opposed to the strength of life that dominates the German spirit. If, through his philosophy and his contemplation of nature, the German has tried to present nature to his soul in such a way that the seemingly mechanical, the seemingly external and rigid loses its mechanical aspect and what would otherwise appear in a formal way comes to life and moves as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself , on the other hand, the element that flows in the immediate sensual sequence of tones has been allowed to seek its connection, its marriage, with that which leads the human soul to the highest heights and depths in the realm of thoughts, in Wagner's music, which has thus effected an elevation of an artistic-sensual element into a directly spiritual atmosphere.

This aspect of German idealism, which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the scene of thought – I wanted to characterize this aspect today with a few strokes. This trait of German idealism, this living comprehension of the otherwise dead thought, is one side, but a remarkable side, of the nature of the German people, and will appear as a remarkable phenomenon to anyone who, I might say, is able to place themselves within the German people in a way that revitalizes thought within themselves. Indeed, the German cannot arrive at the fundamental trait of his people's character other than by penetrating ever deeper into the self-knowledge of the human being. And this the German may, as it seems to me, feel so rightly in our immediate present, where this German essence really has to defend itself in a fight imposed on it, where this German essence must become aware of itself by having to wage a fight, which it feels is due to it from the task that appears to it as a sacred one, entrusted to it by the world forces and world powers themselves. And although today, in a different way than in the times of which we have mainly spoken, the German must fight for his world standing, his world importance, it must still come to life before our soul, for which the German today enters into a world-historical struggle. A future history will have to establish more and more the deeper connection between the German soul, struggling through the course of the world, and the bloody events of the times, which, however, bring us bliss out of pain and suffering. I wanted nothing with today's reflection but to show that the German has no need to speak out of hatred or outrage when he wants to compare his nature with that of other nations. We do not need to point out the nature of the German soul in order to exalt ourselves, but in order to recognize our duties as they have been handed down to us by world history, we may point this out. And we do not need, as unfortunately happens today in the camp of our enemies, to invent all sorts of things that can serve to belittle the opponent, but we can point out the positive that works in the German national substance. We can let the facts speak, and they can tell us that the German does not want to, but must, according to his abilities, which are inspired by the world spirit, his nature, his abilities – without any arrogance – in comparison to the nature of other peoples.

From this point of view, we do not need to fall into what so unfortunately many of our opponents fall into. We look over to the West. We certainly do not need to do as the French do, who, in wanting to characterize German nature in its barbarism, as they think, in its baseness, want to exalt themselves; truly, the French needed, as they believe, a new sophistry to do so. And minds that spoke highly of the German character just before the war, even at famous teaching institutions, can now, as we can see, find the opportunity to advocate the view that, given the nature of his world view, the German cannot help but conquer and , as Boutroux says, to assimilate what is around him; for the German does not want to ascend to the sources of existence in a modest way, as Boutroux thinks, but claims that he is connected to these sources, that he carries the deity within himself and must therefore also carry all other nations within himself. This German world view is certainly profound; but it is not conceived immodestly.

Nor perhaps does the German need what is sought today from the British side when German character is to be characterized. The British, in emphasizing the peculiarities of their own national character, have never taken much interest in penetrating the German national character. When the forties in Germany were passing through a period of development, it seemed to me that the German mind was so fully occupied with the sphere of ideas that the way Hegel's disciples thought was felt by Schelling , who was still alive, and by his students, was felt to be too abstract, too logical, and that on Schelling's side, efforts were made to gain a greater liveliness for the thoughts themselves on the stage of thoughts. Whereas in Hegel one sensed that he allowed one thought to emerge from another through logical rigor, Schelling wanted people to sense the thoughts as active, living things that do not need to be proven in logic, just as what happens from person to person in living interaction cannot be encompassed in logic. He wanted to grasp it in something that is more than logic, wanted to grasp it in a living way, and that is how a great dispute arose on the scene, which the German tries to illuminate with the light he wants to ignite from his living knowledge. The English observed this dispute that arose. A London newspaper wrote what seemed to them a clever article about this dispute, in which it was said: These Germans are actually abstruse visionaries. Many are concerned with the question of who is right: Schelling or Hegel. The truth is only that Hegel is obscure and Schelling even more obscure; and the one who finds this is the one who will most easily come to terms with things—a piece of wisdom that roughly corresponds to the point of view of studying the world not when it is illuminated by the sun but at night, when all cats are black or gray. But anyone who today surveys the British judgment on the necessity of what is happening within the German character will perhaps be reminded of such “deeply understanding” words, especially when these words are used primarily to conceal what is actually taking effect and what one does not want to admit even to oneself. The present-day British really need a new mask to characterize their relationship to the Germans, and the foreign philosophers need a new sophistry to disparage Germany – a new sophistry that they have found since the outbreak of the war.

And the Italians? They also need something to reassure them about their own actions at the present time. Without arrogance, the German may say: it will uplift him within the difficult world situation when he thinks of the duty the world spirit has assigned to him, as he gains self-knowledge and this becomes knowledge of the German essence. What he should do will flow to him as realization from the realization of the German essence. When D'Annunzio spoke his resounding words before the Italian war broke out, he truly did not delve as deeply into Italian national character as he could have. But it is not for us Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in what the Roman spirit has created, to believe that d'Annunzio's hollow words really come from the deepest essence of Italian culture; but that they come from the motives that d'Annunzio needs to justify himself. The others needed sophistry, masks, to remove the causes of the war from their own soil, so to speak. The Italian needed something else, a justification that we have already seen emerging in recent years, a strange justification: he needed a new saint, a saint appointed from within the ranks of the profane, “holy egoism”. We see it recurring again and again, and it is to this that we see the representatives of Italian character repeatedly appeal. A new saint was needed to justify what had been done.

Perhaps it will lead the objective, unbiased observer of the German character to a position within today's historical events; because German character does not arise from such sophistry, such masks, nor from the “appointment of a new saint”, but from human nature, from what this human nature allows to be expressed, from what the national spirit of the German people has revealed to the best minds of this people have revealed to this people, but also what these spirits hoped for the people, because that is also a peculiarity of this German nature, which can be described by saying that the German always sought to direct his soul's gaze to what was aroused in him from the scene of thoughts, and from this he also wanted to recognize what hope he could harbor for what his people could achieve.

And today, when we need to develop love, a great deal of love, for what the ancestors of the German character have established within the German national soul and national strength, in order to place ourselves in today's historical events through this love, today, when we need faith in the strength of the present, today when we need confident hope for the success of that which the German character must achieve in the future. Today, we can look at what Germans have always loved, believed, and hoped for in the context of their past, present, and future. And so let us end with the words of a man who is indeed unknown today in the widest circles, but who in lonely thought wanted to fathom the popular and the intellectual of Goethe's Faust in those years of German life in which Germany had not yet produced the German state in its modern form. In those years, which preceded the deeds of the German power, in the sixties, a lonely thinker was concerned with the idea: in imagination, in the life of the soul, in idealism, the German wanted to rise to the highest that can only somehow be sensed by him. He had to develop a strength that must lie in his nature and that gives us hope that this strength will be fruitful, victorious in action. A simple German Faust observer, an observer of poetry that truly shows that German nature holds future forces, is quoted with his words. By pointing to words that Goethe himself, intuitively placing himself in the German future, spoke as a 65-year-old old man, he ties his own words to them and says:

"The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
the primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through rocks as through books.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
will never live in the scholarly hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken her,
She has taken the glass from the hothouse with her.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
A mild light will still pour forth,
From whose reflection of those stars
The late grandchildren will learn to see,
To report in prophetically higher visions
Of God and humanity higher things.»

And the Faust viewer from the sixties continues:

"Let us add the wish that the Master's word, which looks down on us from better stars with a mild light, may come true in its people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and urge, but with God's will, with indestructible strength, and that in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of Faust expects of the coming centuries, German deed too may no longer be a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!

We believe that such hopes, expressed by the best of Germans from the deepest German national sentiment, may be fulfilled in our own day, out of the blood and the creative energy of our courageous and active people. We believe that in these difficult days the German can develop to his strength, over which the atmosphere of hatred spreads, still another: that he can vividly grasp to strengthen his strength the love for what has been handed down in spirit and strength, in the life and work of his fathers as a sacred legacy, because he can be convinced that he, by permeating himself with this love for the past, he will find the strength to believe; because in this faith and this love he may find the hope for those fruits that must blossom for the German people out of blood and suffering, but also out of the blessed deed of the present, which the German performs not out of bellicosity but out of devotion to a necessity imposed on him by history. Thus, in the present difficult times, what may support, uplift and guide the German through the difficult struggle in which he finds himself is integrated into German life, German work, German feeling and sentiment: love for the German past, faith in the German present, confident hope for the German future.

For many years now, I have been giving the lectures on spiritual science during the winter season from this very place. I have always tried to begin these lectures with a consideration of the connection between the particular view of the spiritual world that is represented within this spiritual science, as it is meant here, and the general spiritual life. And already last winter, I tried — which must be particularly obvious in our present fateful time — to turn my attention to the feelings that are currently living within the German people, to that time of German spiritual development in which, out of the very core of the German being, a connection, a living together with the spiritual world, was sought in a truly idealistic form. In our time, in which the German nation must defend itself against a world of enemies in its existence, in its hopes for existence, it must be particularly obvious to look to the time of which one of the most popular historians of the German nation says: it is the time in which the idealistic spirits of this German nation have shown that even in times of extreme distress, in times of extreme hostility, the German character is able to salvage that greatness which can be saved by cultivating the spiritual life, as it appears to be inherent in the very deepest characteristics of this nation. We need not fall into the error of our opponents, who today believe, in such a strange and peculiar way, that they must particularly characterize the importance of their own nation by belittling the nature of the opponents. We need not fall into the error, for example, of those of whom we now hear that the German Weltanschauung itself must have seduced them into leading the German people into the most savage warfare. We can, without making the mistake of belittling our opponents, turn our attention to what the German people believe, must believe, according to their very nature: that their world-historical task is rooted in the deepest inwardness of their nature. And there is no need, as so many of Germany's enemies do today, to form an opinion about the popular, be it one's own or that of another people, out of direct hatred and antipathy in the present.

And so let us take as our starting-point for today's consideration an idea which an outstanding mind, relatively calm, was able to form in a time long before our own fateful time. This idea was formed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller's great friend, who was able to delve so wonderfully into the essence of the development of humanity, who knew how to depict the needs of man within the development of world history in such a subtle way, In 1830, when Wilhelm von Humboldt looked back on what Schiller's friendship meant to him, but also on what Schiller's significance for the development of the German people was, on what Schiller's entire intellectual development was, he expressed himself in the following way about the German essence:

Thus someone who has devoted much thought to the feelings that go with knowing this points to what he had to believe lies in the task and the immediate destiny of the German people.

And when we look at what has shaped the German character from the spiritual side in the great age when German idealism raised Germanness to the stage of thought; and when we point to the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century with all what had developed up to the immediate phase of development of our time, then we see something that cannot be grasped by the certainly significant but not very lofty concept, let us say, of the internationality of science and the like, which, insofar as it concerns science, is self-evident. But what emerged so powerfully in Germany's greatest periods in terms of intellectual development was that at that time, through those minds that felt so intimately connected to German nationality, such as Fichte, for example, the question of the whole significance of knowledge, of what man can achieve through the knowledge that he develops as science; the question of the relationship of this knowledge to the secret of the world, to the eternal-working, eternal-spiritual in the world itself. That knowledge has been called into question, that knowledge itself has become a mystery, and that it is precisely through this tendency towards the mysteriousness of knowledge that man has had to make the matter of this knowledge a personal and yet objective and factual human interest, that is the tremendously significant thing is how one can feel connected in every fiber of one's being to what man can achieve through an ideal in his striving, through the pursuit of knowledge; how one can strive for knowledge full of light and yet still raise the question: Can one go beyond this knowledge, or rather must one go beyond this knowledge if one wants to arrive at the deepest thing that connects man to the eternal sources of existence? And the reason why this riddle could present itself to the German soul in its best minds in a particularly intense way lies in the fact that during the period of German idealism, the striving asserted itself to have knowledge not only as something that something that teaches you about the world in terms of concepts, something you can stand coolly opposed to in your desire to dissect the phenomena of the world, but to have knowledge as something that lives in the whole soul and sustains the human being. It was precisely out of this yearning for the vitality of knowledge, out of this intimate feeling of connection with knowledge, that the great riddles of knowledge arose. It seems as if one only wants to have knowledge, only wants to cultivate a science, if this science can really live in such a way that one can also find the way to the sources of existence in the experiencing of knowledge.

It is appealing to see how German minds want to live in their knowledge, in their science, in a much higher sense than is usually meant when one speaks of the connection between life and science. Last winter, in a similar context, I tried to characterize Fichte's idiosyncrasy, this noble German spirit who, in one of the most difficult times in the development of the German people, placed his spiritual striving entirely at the service of his people, who, from the depth of his spirit, found the most wonderful words of power to inspire German enthusiasm. The way in which he felt connected with the pursuit of knowledge, and how he strove to rise to German idealism, is part of what Fichte was able to be to his people. A picture that has been preserved for us can illustrate this beautifully. Forberg, who heard Fichte speak when he tried to bring to life, from the depths of his striving for wisdom, what he saw as his connection with the weaving, ruling world spirit, said the following beautiful words about Fichte's way of speaking about spiritual matters:

And if one wants to characterize Fichte's German nature, one must point out how, by wanting to rule in the realm of concepts, he sought within this realm of concepts something that was more than what is often called concepts and ideas, something that was a revival of those forces of the human soul, which are one with the creative powers of all existence, those creative powers that live outside in nature, that have placed man himself in nature, that guide and direct historical life, that interweave and permeate all existence. But in order to gain such a view in full vitality, Fichte could not stop at the abstractness of the concepts, at concepts that are only views. For this he needed concepts that were directly experienced and imbued with soul by an element of activity that not only illuminates the human soul, but also strengthens it, so that this human soul, by first withdrawing from the external world, feels connected to the very innermost part of reality. And so Johann Gottlieb Fichte directed his contemplation to something living in the human soul, something that is being willed into existence. And what he sensed there, as flowing into his will, he experienced as if the divine spiritual forces that permeate and interweave the world were entering the soul, and the soul itself felt at rest within the divine experience. If one wishes to call this trait in Johann Gottlieb Fichte mystical, then one must remove from this expression everything that brings any kind of nebulousness into the world view; one must then bring this concept together with everything that is the highest energy of knowledge in Fichte's entire striving. Then German idealism appears as if compressed into a focal point, not only when Fichte talks about German nationality, but especially when he speaks of the highest matters to which his thinking and, one might say, his inner experience turns. In his attempt to visualize the ruling will in his own soul and to make it come alive before those to whom he speaks, he speaks about this will as if he were aware that the innermost essence of the whole world lives in this will. He speaks as if he himself felt the exalted will of the world pulsating in the human soul's own will, when this human soul, in its striving for knowledge, goes back to the innermost outflow and activity of the will itself. Fichte speaks wonderful words here:

Thus Fichte addresses what he senses as the will of the world by deepening his quest for knowledge, so that it may find what, in the innermost part of the soul, holds that soul together with the sources of existence; that from which the soul must create if it wants to feel that its creation in harmony with the historical and eternal powers that guide all existence itself. That science, through an idealistic consideration of life, must lead to such a grasp of human inwardness that in this inwardness, at the same time, the innermost of the world's existence in human striving is embraced, that is the basic feature of German idealism. And with this idealism, Fichte's philosophical comrades basically also face the great riddles of existence. |

From a certain point of view, I tried last winter to present this very arena of thought within German idealism and the world view of this German idealism. I undertook to show how Fichte tried to grasp the world through the experience of the innermost nature of the human will itself, by wanting to grasp the human soul where the will can delve into it. I wanted to show how Fichte, in his attempt to penetrate to the human ego in its essence, could not be satisfied with grasping this ego in being or in mere thinking, in the sense of Descartes with his “I think , therefore I am”, but how Fichte wanted to grasp the self, the innermost essence of the human soul, in such a way that there lies in it something that can never lose its existence because it can create this existence anew in every moment. Fichte wanted to show the living, ever creative will as the source of the human ego; not by a judgment of the kind: I think, that is something, therefore I am — not by that did Fichte want to find the essence of the ego, but by showing that even if this ego were not in any given moment, or if it could be said of it, on the basis of some evidence, that it were not, then this judgment would be invalid on the grounds that this ego is a creative one, because it can, in every moment, generate its existence anew out of the depths of this ego. In this perpetual re-creation, in this continuity of the creative, in this connection with the creative of the world, Fichte tried to recognize the essence of the ego in the will, to preserve it in the will, to shape the striving for knowledge in a living way.

And Schelling, Fichte's philosophical companion, who in many respects went so far beyond him, placed himself before nature in such a way that nature was not for him what it otherwise is in many respects for external science: a sum of phenomena that one dissects; rather, for Schelling, nature was to the human spirit in its nature, except that the human spirit stands in the present, experiences itself, but nature has lived through this spirit, so that it now rests enchanted in it, so that it hides behind its veil and reveals itself through its external appearances. Just as one regards a person in relation to his physiognomy, not only describing this physiognomy formally like a statue, but looking through the physiognomy to what is the living soul life, what looks through the physiognomic features, what spiritualizes and warms the outer form. Through the outer phenomena of nature, through the outer revelations as through the physiognomy of nature, Schelling wanted to go back to what is spiritual in nature, to unite the spirit in the soul with the spirit in nature. And from this arose in him that one-sided but bold way of striving for knowledge, which is expressed in Schelling's saying: “To comprehend nature is to create nature!” That in the human soul there could be something that only needs to be dragged into creative, living existence, and by so doing, not creating the outer phenomena of nature, but creating images that are the same as what lives behind nature, is expressed in the words: “To understand nature is to create nature!” Today, there is truly no need to take this philosophy of German idealism dogmatically; one need not be a follower of it, that is not the point. What is important is to get to know the power and inner soul from which such a direction of spiritual life arises. And so someone could be an opponent of the dogmas of German idealism in the fullest sense of the word, but find something resiliently alive, something that carries the future, in the way the human soul wanted to penetrate into the deepest secrets of existence back then.

And in this context, we may refer to Hegel, the third in this series, who was not afraid to ascend into the coldest realms of pure thought. For Hegel believed that when the soul withdraws from all the warmth of external observation, from all direct resting in natural existence, when it is all alone with the concepts that live in the soul in such a way that this soul is no longer present with its arbitrariness in the thinking of the concepts, but the soul abandons itself to the process of how one concept arises from the other, how concepts prevail within her, without her turning in any way to anything other than to these prevailing pure, crystal-clear and transparent concepts, which she lets prevail and weave within her as they themselves want, not as the soul wills, - then, Hegel believed, in this process, in this flowing of concepts, a union of the soul with the ruling world spirit itself, which lives out itself in concepts, which, through the millions of years, by sending its concepts commanding through infinity, allowed the outer world to emerge from the condensation of these concepts and then placed man into it so that man can awaken in his soul these concepts from which the world itself emerged. Is it really one-sided, the way Hegel delves into the world of existence by trying to penetrate to the sources of existence by squeezing out all other reality from the pure world of concepts? Is it one-sided in the sense that the World-Spirit, which flows and weaves through the world as if it were a mere logician, conjure up the world out of pure logic, this striving, which arises directly from the German essence and German nature, also shows how the German spirit, in its striving for knowledge, by its very nature seeks to connect with that which lives in the soul, that which can be directly beheld in the soul in its inwardness and which, by being thus beheld, simultaneously seizes the spirit flowing in the world. The fundamental principle of this striving is the seizing of the world-spirit by the spirit developed in the soul. And even if the right way of relating to world-life and its knowledge can only be solved by the human soul in a reasonably satisfactory way in the farthest, farthest future, the way in which it has been attempted within German idealism , this way of seeking the world spirit is so intimately connected with the German essence and at the same time it is the way in which, in our time, the eternal must be sought in the temporal human soul.

One can see how closely interwoven with German striving this kind of knowledge is when, at the dawn of the newer spiritual striving, one looks at how two phenomena confront each other at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century; that is, the time when those forces first emerged that gave the newer world view the impulses for European development. It is interesting to see how the German soul relates to this dawn of intellectual life, for example, by juxtaposing two images from the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Regardless of one's own opinion of this remarkable spirit, let us consider him only in the context of the development of modern spiritual striving, if one places Jakob Böhme and compares him with a contemporary striving spirit in Western Europe, with a spirit who is also characteristic of his people, as Jakob Böhme is characteristic of his people, with Montaigne.

Montaigne is also a great and important figure, expressing one of the elements that arise at the dawn of the modern intellectual life. He is the great doubter. He is the one who, from within French culture, receives the following impulse: Let us look at the world. It reveals its secrets to us through our senses. We will try to reveal these secrets through our thinking. But who can say, in any way, that the senses do not deceive; that what is revealed to the senses from the depths of the world can somehow have a connection, which can be visualized, with the sources of existence. And who can deny, this great doubter asks, that if one does not rely on the senses, but on judgment, on thinking, if one seeks evidence and each piece of evidence in turn demands evidence, and the new proof in turn demands another proof, that one can then proceed along the chain of proofs and must also proceed, because everything that one believes to have proven appears fleeting when one looks at it more closely. Neither thinking nor sensual observation can provide any certainty. Therefore, a wise man, according to Montaigne, is one who does not seek such certainty at all; who has an inner irony about the phenomena of the world and about the knowledge of the sources of existence; who knows that although one can reflect on and observe all things , but that one thereby acquires only a knowledge that one can just as well admit as reject, without having any hope of attaining anything else through spiritual striving than precisely such a thing to which one can only relate doubtfully and ironically.

At the same time, within the German being stands Jakob Böhme, who undertakes the journey into the depths of the human soul by means of mere inner development of soul powers, by mere immersion in what the soul can draw up from its depths. And in the fact that he finds these depths of the human soul in the way he believes he is able to find them, he was clear about it, he was convinced that by descending into the depths of the human soul, he at the same time hears the sources of all existence, natural and spiritual, of all comprehensive existence, flowing into these depths. For Jakob Böhme, descending into the depths of the soul also means reaching out into the divine spiritual life that governs the world. And so Jakob Böhme sought this path; that in this path there can be no question of doubt or of an ironic mood in the Montaignean sense, because Jakob Böhme in his way is clear about the fact that he lives in the spirit, because one cannot doubt that in which one lives, in which one co-creates by immersing oneself in it. And one would like to say: Only a revival of this endeavor of Jakob Böhme's in a higher form lies in what lives on the scene of German idealism through the spirits just mentioned. And these just mentioned spirits basically all turn their gaze to a personality who – however much this has been doubted from a narrow-minded point of view – in her entire being, in her entire nature, emerged from the deepest popular German culture, to Goethe. And Fichte, the philosopher who was only struggling for clarity, who was never satisfied if he could not express what he had to say in concepts with sharp outlines, Fichte, who could be considered a dry, sober man of knowledge — that was not his way, but that is what characterizes his striving characterizes – who could be thought of as far, far removed from Goethe in the nature of his being, – Fichte addressed beautiful words to Goethe in which he wanted to express how he tried to align himself with the highest that he strove to bring forth, with what Goethe was by nature. When Fichte had brought the first, most abstract, one might say coldest, most historical, form of his “Wissenschaftslehre” to print, he presented the book to Goethe and wrote to him:

“I regard you and have always regarded you as the representative (of the purest spirituality of feeling) at the present level of humanity. It is to you that philosophy rightly turns. Your feeling is the same touchstone!”

Words that each of the others could have addressed to Goethe in the same way, and indeed each of them did address to Goethe in one way or another, as history shows.

And when Schiller, in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”, which, as I allowed myself to characterize here last winter, have been far too little appreciated, tried to answer the question from the depths of Kantian philosophy: How must the human soul strive in order to truly come to live together with the spirit of the world in freedom in the harmonious interaction of all its powers? And when Schiller turned his gaze to Goethe, he saw in him something like the German spirit in one of its centers, seeking to bring forth before the world, out of the deepest inwardness of his being, the highest that he had come to. Schiller admired the pure, free humanity of the ancient Greeks, that pure, free humanity that, on the one hand, is allowed to turn to external nature, but which does not allow this nature to have such an external hold on it as the more recent spiritual striving, in which man becomes unfree in his striving in the face of the coherence of nature. This Greek nature, which on the other hand became so aware of itself in the depths of its soul that it sensed itself as nature itself, also in its innermost being, this Greek element, which stood before Schiller's soul like a model of all human striving and living, Schiller saw it shine anew in Goethe's nature and life in the face of the newer spirit of the people. And Schiller characterized this at about the same time as Fichte wrote the words just quoted to Goethe, in a letter to Goethe with the following words:

"For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have been watching the course of your mind and have noted the path you have set out on with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary for nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route, which any weaker force would do well to avoid. You take all of nature to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the explanatory basis for the individual. Step by step, you ascend from the simple organization to the more complicated, in order to finally build the most complicated of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature. By recreating him in nature, as it were, you seek to penetrate his hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea, which shows sufficiently how much your mind holds the rich totality of its conceptions together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would be enough for such a goal, but even just to embark on such a path is worth more than any other ending – and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad, between Phthia and immortality. If you had been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and if from your cradle you had been surrounded by a refined nature and idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. You would have absorbed the form of the necessary into the first view of things, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now that you have been born a German, now that your Greek spirit has been thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but to either become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace what reality withheld from your imagination by the application of your powers of thought, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way, so to speak.” The creative force that arises from the deepest inwardness, that not only creates the present, but that even gives birth to the past anew out of its own essence: the Goethean spirit. In this letter, Schiller selflessly characterizes it wonderfully, in which he truly laid the foundation for the friendship between these two minds, Goethe and Schiller; Schiller wonderfully characterizes this inwardness of the creation of the Goethean spirit. And truly, Goethe appears in the image of German idealism with all his striving.

Therefore, out of the striving of Goethe's personality, a poetic figure could arise that – I do not believe that one has to be prejudiced to say this – is uniquely placed in world literature and in the whole of world creation, the figure of Faust. How does he stand there, this Faust? As the highest representative of human striving, but still – after all, he is a university professor at heart – as a representative of the striving for knowledge, for knowledge! And right at the beginning of Faust, what becomes a riddle, what becomes a big question? Knowledge itself, the striving for knowledge becomes a question! Two elements come to life in this Faustian legend. And one must point out this living out of the two elements if one wants to understand the basic character of Goethe's Faustian creation on the one hand and, on the other hand, its connection with the innermost nature of German spiritual striving.

Of course, the term magic and everything connected with it is not exactly popular today. But Goethe was compelled to place his Faust before magic, after knowledge and insight had become a question, a riddle, for Faust. And the fact that today we are able to separate everything that is conventionally associated with the concept of magic from a deeper spiritual striving will be my particular task tomorrow in the lecture where I want to speak about the eternal powers of the human soul. But the way in which Goethe has Faust turn to magic can perhaps be thought of as quite separate from all the wild superstition and nebulous striving associated with the word magic and with magical striving in general. One can overlook secondary matters and look at the main thing, namely, the fundamental human striving as expressed in Faust. Why must Faust, who has really been involved in all human sciences, wanted to gain clarity in all human sciences about that which underlies existence as a source, why must Faust turn to magic, to a completely different way of interacting with nature than is the case with the ordinary pursuit of knowledge? Why? Because Faust has experienced everything that can be experienced in the pursuit of knowledge; because he has experienced everything that can be felt by a person who has a yearning for the depths of the nature of the world; everything that can be felt by a person when he feels alive in himself, which external science can comprehend. This science visualizes the laws of nature in concepts, in ideas. But do I exist with these concepts, or do I only have something in these concepts that weaves itself as a ghost in my own soul and that perhaps, with regard to this image, is clearly, but not with regard to its life, directly connected to the sources of existence? What forces itself into the soul as a question of this kind can be felt in different ways. It can be felt weakly, but it can also be felt strongly, so that the enigma that lives itself into the soul through these feelings becomes like a nightmare from which this human soul wants to free itself. For the soul can say to itself: All this knowledge is only something that one forms on the basis of existence. All this knowledge is something that has been subtracted from existence. But I must still descend into existence with what I experience in myself.

What one might say Schelling believed in his presumptuousness, Faust cannot believe: that by living in concepts, one creates in nature. Rather, he wants to descend into nature. He wants to seek out nature where it lives in creation. He wants to unfold an activity that is such that the human soul accomplishes it, but which, in that this activity is within the soul, is both creating nature and creating soul at the same time. Because Faust cannot do this in any other way, he tries to do it by seeking to invigorate within himself the path that ancient magicians have tried. Faust tries to have something in his soul that does not merely depict nature in terms within him, but that appears to him in what lives and creates behind appearances. He seeks to bring the spiritual in the creative power of nature, which flows and weaves through the world, which surges up and down in the tides of life and the storm of action, not only into knowledge, but seeks to connect with it in a living way. He seeks the path to it in such a way that the spiritual creation of nature stands beside him, as the soul of a human being stands embodied here in physical existence, so that one experiences existence, not just knows about it.

And in this way Faust stands before nature in the same way as—one need only point to a spirit like Jakob Böhme, in his own way, one need only look at that which underlies German philosophical striving in the idealistic period—Faust, yearning , yearning for knowledge, expecting certain achievements, to which he wants to rise, so in the face of nature, so next to nature, as befits the innermost life and weaving of the German spirit: to create nature in the soul and to let it become living science, living knowledge. That is why Goethe has to bring his Faust together with magic.

There is something else that Goethe brings together with his Faust, something that perhaps even more than the magical element that confronts us in the first scenes and then continues in what I would call a directly dramatic way, while it loses itself as a magical element – which seems perhaps even more wonderful than this magical element for this Goethean Faustian poem, which is now also intimately interwoven with the spiritual striving of the German people.

Let us try – as I said, without pronouncing dogmatically or in any way on the value – to place ourselves in the position of Jakob Böhme; let us try to bring to life before our soul one of the aspects of Jakob Böhme's striving. A great question confronts Jakob Böhme with regard to the riddle of existence, the question that arises from the contemplation of the world when one says: The world is governed by the World Spirit in its goodness, in its wisdom. He who is able to immerse himself in the spirit of the world senses the surging of the world's wisdom, the surging of the world's benevolence. But evil intrudes, evil in the form of suffering, evil in the form of human deeds. If we do not look at the abstraction of the thought, but at a striving for knowledge that is based on feeling and emotion, a striving for knowledge that takes hold of the whole person, we stand in awe at the way in which Jakob Böhme raises the question of the origin of evil. He cannot avoid saying to himself: the spirit of the world, the divine spirit of the world, must be thought of as connected with the sources of life; but one does not find the origin of evil by immersing oneself in the spirit of the world. And yet evil is there. — With tremendous intensity, the question of the origin of evil arises in the quest for knowledge of Jakob Böhme. He seeks to answer it by asking about evil, as one might ask about the origin of the deeds of light. What Jakob Böhme has developed in depth can only be illustrated here through this comparison, for the sake of brevity. For, just as one can never derive from the light that which appears as the deeds of light, but always needs darkness for this; just as one can never derive darkness, with which light must appear together, from the light itself, but rather one must go to this source of light if one wants to examine the deeds of light in external nature, Jakob Böhme attempts to find the essence, not merely the principle, of evil, not in the Divine either, but in that which takes its place beside the Divine, like the shadow, like the darkness beside the light, which one does not seek in the light, but for which one does not need reasons in the same way as for the light itself. He seeks to find it by undertaking the previously characterized journey into the depths of the soul and at the same time trying to grasp the existence of the world at its sources in the soul. Thus he does not confront evil as something that can be recognized in a concept, but as something that he tries to grasp in its reality. In his attitude towards evil as something that cannot be grasped conceptually but only in reality, Schelling is followed in his very significant treatise “Philosophical Investigations Concerning the Essence of Human Freedom and the Related Objects”, 1809. Schelling consciously follows Jakob Böhme in his search for evil.

Goethe, from the depths of the German soul, sensed this riddle of evil in a completely different way. Just think what a challenge it was to create a work of poetry in the way that Goethe did in his Faust. On the one hand, Goethe had to present a purely inward striving, which, after all, could only be expressed, one might think, by depicting a person who presents himself to the world lyrically. Goethe seeks to bring it to dramatic life as Faust stands before the world. He does this, however, by allowing what lives in the soul to shine through in such a way that it is inwardly alive in the soul and becomes external. The dramatic not only places the human being in the world as he stands in it lyrically, but also as he stands in it actively. This enables Goethe, as a dramatist must, to lead man out of subjectivity, out of the mere inwardness of the being into the outer world. But one should try to imagine what a challenge lay in what can be characterized in the following way. Now Faust is to strive, as man does when he lets the riddles of existence take effect on him, to go forward in the world, to become a fighter in the world. And yet such struggles, which arise from the riddles of knowledge, are inner struggles. As a rule, man stands alone in this, and as a rule nothing dramatic is connected with it. Dramas proceed differently, in that one simply lets the interior of the human soul unroll. What enabled Goethe to transform what is basically only an internal matter of the human soul into a vivid dramatic image? Simply by the fact that, just as he brings the human soul out into nature through magic on the one hand, on the other hand he brings this human soul out into the big wide world by trying to show that when one seeks out seeks out evil and wants to experience it in its reality, one cannot understand it merely as an inner principle and seek an inner explanation for it, but one must step out into life as it confronts one full of life. Therefore, Goethe cannot direct his attention to evil in such a way that he finds something in him that is mere philosophy, but he must direct his attention to the essence, to one who fights Faust, to one who is the embodiment of evil, who is as alive as the principle of evil as man is alive here in his physical body. And he must be able to feel and show that the fight against evil is not just an abstract, inward struggle, but that it is a struggle that is waged hourly, momentarily, in which man lives. In everything he does, he essentially encounters evil. Thus this obstacle was overcome. What is otherwise an abstract philosophical principle was brought into direct existence, into essential existence. Walking, changing, acting, fighting were brought about, which one otherwise speaks about. For these reasons, on the one hand, the magical element had to be revived in Faust, in that Faust tries to penetrate the shell of nature. On the other hand, evil had to be contrasted with Faust as something essential, something that is much more than what is usually called an idea or a concept; something that is usually conceived as living only within the soul had to be embodied, placed out into the world. And so in poetry, too, there was a need to resort to that deepening of the conception of evil which we find as such a wonderful fundamental trait of the German spiritual striving, from Jakob Böhme up through all the deeper German spirits who cannot satisfy themselves by seeking evil only in philosophical concepts, but who want to go out into the world. And in going out into the world, they encounter evil just as one encounters another human being in the physical world. In order to spiritually unlock the inner world, the striving had to connect with such a view of evil. That is to say, just as nature is to be sensed through magic to its sources, so spiritual life is to be placed in the context of human life by showing evil itself as a spiritually active being. Thus, as a poet, Goethe elevates man to the realm of the ideal, but of the living ideal.

And he was faced with a dilemma in yet another way: he, the great artist, of whom Schiller said that he could give birth to a Greece out of his own inwardness. He was faced with a dilemma in yet another way, one that we may only gradually come to see in its full significance. In Faust, we see the striving human being. Many commentators on Faust have emphasized the fact that Goethe did a great deed in having Faust redeemed, in not allowing Faust to perish, as was the case in earlier representations of Faust, but in having him redeemed, because, in accordance with the newer world view, one must assume that within man lie the forces that can achieve victory over evil. Yes, what this actually means for the overall view of the Faust epic is something that is not usually considered. One says, offhand: Goethe's Faust could only become what it is if Goethe had the idea from the very beginning to take into account the innermost nature of man in such a way that Faust could be redeemed. One imagines a drama, one imagines a work of art that takes place in time and that is supposed to be great, in such a way that one knows from the beginning what must come out in the end. And that is what it should actually be. For man, as one so often says, must bring with him his convictions from the highest riddles of life. Actually, nothing more and nothing less is expressed by this than that “Faust” should, by its very nature, be the most boring piece of writing in the world. After all, every pedant today knows, or at least believes he knows, that if man strives correctly, he should ultimately be redeemed. And now one of the greatest poets is to present a grandiose world poem in order to show this self-evident truth through all possible forms! And yet, Goethe has succeeded in embodying the thought just expressed, not in some abstract way, but in presenting living life before us through a long, long series of images. Why? Simply because he has shown how that which, when inwardly conceived in abstract thoughts, would be a mere truism, a matter of course, is set forth in life in a completely different way; because he attempts to extend life, on the one hand, in the direction of the magical , on the other hand, towards the spiritual side; because the striving for nature is not a striving for knowledge but a magical one; because the striving for evil or the recognition of evil is not just a philosophical matter but a matter of life. How does something become a matter of life that is otherwise only the soul's inner, abstract striving? It becomes a matter of life when the human being, when he stands before nature in the same way that Faust stands before nature in the sense of his striving, wants to go beyond abstract knowledge. He wants to go beyond that which can only live in concepts, which spins itself out as ideas, as concepts. He wants to enter into the sphere of nature, where there is creative life, with which the soul's own creative life connects, in order to go beyond nature's creation through mere abstract conceptual life.

But when you take hold of the matter in full life, you enter into that in man from which man in turn emerges by being able to acquire consciousness in his concepts. One need only go back to what, for example, the Greek Stoics strove for in their earnest quest for knowledge. They wanted a wisdom that would smooth the world, that would survey the world, and that would have nothing to do with human passion. Man should become dispassionate, dispassionate, in order to feel his soul absorbed in the calm conceptual grasping of the wisdom that pervades the world. Why did the Stoics want this? Because they felt that one comes out of a certain intoxication of life, out of a half-unconscious immersion in life, by coming to dispassionate understanding. Stoicism consists precisely in the search for a life free of intoxication.

Now, in the course of human evolution, the personality that is to be represented in Faust stands before nature in such a way that knowledge becomes a question for it, the very thing by which man tries to save himself from the intoxication of life. He can enter into the intoxication of life by immersing himself with the creative powers of the soul, but he does not absorb the same powers with which he has just risen, but rather he submerges himself seeking to connect the foundations of the soul with the foundations of nature. But from this arises what is now the error of Faust in the first part of the story, the submerging into sensuality, into sensual life, even into the outer trivial life, which he must undergo in his own personality because he is to connect what lives in his own personality, what lives in the depths of his soul, with what lives in the depths of world existence. The task of the first part of Faust and also of a large part of the second part is to present in a lively way the error by which man can be tested in his soul.

To what extent man, by wanting to grasp the world personally, the world in its power through knowledge, exposes himself to the danger of being submerged in the personal and being drawn into the whirlpool of life, is depicted in “Faust”. And that does not depend on some abstract doctrine, but on the will, on the character of this Faust. It is only through this that the poem becomes a poem. And on the other hand, since the human being strives for a real knowledge of evil and is not satisfied with a principal, conceptual understanding of evil, he must break through the ordinary life of the soul; for there he finds only concepts, ideas and feelings. He must go through this soul life, he must go to the place where man, without seeing the essential reality through the senses, perceives an essential reality through the pure soul experiences, from the spirit. This becomes the task of the one who wants to recognize evil in its reality through direct experience. This becomes the task of Faust in relation to Mephistopheles. But man cannot approach evil at all as he is at first. It is virtually impossible to approach evil as man is at first; for one must know the world, and one can only know it by knowing it in the soul. One must form concepts. One must have in one's soul that which can be experienced in one's soul. After all, as newer philosophers have so rightly and so wrongly asserted, one cannot transcend one's consciousness. But if one remains in consciousness, evil remains only an abstract concept, does not appear in essence.

Faust is faced with a great, so to speak, impossible task. But great, as it says in “Faust” itself, is “he who desires the impossible”. Faust is faced with the virtually impossible task of going beyond that which is the sole source of his consciousness, of going out of consciousness. This will be his further path, the path out of the ordinary consciousness of the soul. Tomorrow we will speak about the path of knowledge out of the ordinary consciousness to those realms where the spirit is grasped directly as spirit. This stands before Faust as a task. He cannot find evil in its essential nature in the field to which consciousness is initially directed. Therefore, he must again, and now not in a general, trivial, abstract way, come to find the reconciliation of man with existence, but in the way that he is able to do so as an individual human being. It must be shown how he finds his way out of ordinary consciousness to an understanding of life that now comes from deeper forces of the soul.

Thus we see Faust going, I might say, everywhere touching and feeling the existence of the world, feeling it inwardly, to see where he can find the gate through which he can penetrate into the inner being. Thus we see how he soars so high that, having transformed the soul and transformed it more and more, he really descends in experience to those depths towards which Jacob Boehme strove and which are then hinted at to us in the second part of “Faust” that Faust finds something widest, greatest, highest and at the same time deepest, which he had already striven for in his walk to the Mothers, in that his senses fail him, in that he goes blind and in his inner being inner bright light comes to life. Out of the ordinary consciousness, to a different consciousness, to a consciousness that slumbers in the depths of the soul, as the depths of the sources of nature slumber under the shell of nature that one sees with the outer senses, to a deeper consciousness that always accompanies man between birth and death, but that is not present in the ordinary field of consciousness. Faust must be guided in two ways through the strengthening of the spiritual life to the gates that lead from the abstractness of the idea to the livingness of spiritual existence itself: As a magician, Faust knocks at the gate of existence, which leads from mere observation of nature to co-creation with nature; in his dealings, in the living, dramatic dealings with Mephistopheles and with all that is structured by them, Faust knocks at the other gate, at that other gate that leads from the ordinary consciousness of the soul to a superconscious, supersensible consciousness, which opens up a spiritual world, from which evil also really originates, behind the ordinary existence of the soul, just as external natural revelation is only the expression of that which lives and moves entirely in nature.

Through the connection with what, one can say, is peculiar to the German national spirit, Goethe created a piece of writing that could only become a piece of writing in the most difficult sense. For the most non-sensuous, the most distant from the senses, the purely inward, was to be shaped dramatically. But this inwardness can only become dramatic if it is expanded in two directions. And Goethe sensed the necessity of this expansion in two directions. In doing so, he created the possibility of placing this unique poetry, which in a sense no one else in another nation would have conceived in the same way, into the world evolution.

If one has these thoughts, one can perhaps still raise the question: Yes, but did Goethe not actually create a work of art that requires a great deal of preparation to understand? It almost seems that way. For the commentaries that scholars, both German and non-German, have written about Goethe's “Faust” fill several libraries, not just one. But if one were to believe that a great deal of preparation is needed to understand the Faust epic, then the thought must arise: what did Goethe actually make this Faust epic out of? Was it the result of a philosophical quest? Was it speculation about the magical foundations of nature? Or was it speculation about the sources and origins of evil? No, truly not! He saw the puppet show, a pure folk performance, the folk play of Faust, which was presented to the simplest minds. He transformed what lives and breathes in it according to his own mind. The Faust legend, therefore, presents us with a work of art and a work of the spirit in the best sense of the words. If we look only at the most general aspect of its origin, it shows how this summit of German intellectual life has its source in the most direct folklore, that is, in the most elementary of the folk spirit, and how German idealistic intellectual striving is connected with the essence of the German folk spirit. It can also be proved historically from the origin of the highest poetry of mankind from the simplest folk drama. This is a significant world-historical drama, that a spirit that can delve so deeply into the folklore in its inner work, like Goethe, is able to create something supreme out of the most primitive folklore, something supreme that, as we have been able to show, is also connected to the most significant philosophical pursuit, to the philosophical idealistic pursuit in Germany's great intellectual period. In Faust — as I said, these things must not be taken dogmatically — we see the striving Fichte. How? Fichte does not seek to grasp being and the ego by bringing thought to consciousness, as Descartes and Cartesius did. Instead, Fichte seeks to grasp being and the ego by connecting with the world-creating powers that play into the inner soul, so that the ego creates itself in every moment. We see this, only translated into the dramatic will, into the directly living, flashing up again in Faust. Faust is not satisfied with the self that human striving for knowledge was able to convey to him, but he wants to experience his own self directly in the spiritual world. The whole progress of the dramatic action in 'Faust' consists in the fact that the ego, in its dealings with the world, creates itself anew, always elevating itself. Fichte lives in Goethe's Faust; Schelling also lives in Goethe's Faust, in that Faust, on the one hand, seeks to unite the truth of magic with his soul, but also seeks true striving in the depths of the soul seeks the true striving in the depths of the soul; in that which cannot be found in the ordinary life of the soul, in thinking, feeling and willing, he seeks it in his dealings with the representative of evil, as a direct spirit. Faust truly seeks out nature where it lives in creation. Schelling had, I might say, presumptuously explained it when he said: To understand nature is to create nature! Fichte stands on healthier ground when he says: To understand nature is to live with one's own creation in the creation of nature. But one can see how the power for a deeper striving for knowledge, for the sources of existence, also lives in Fichte. Hegel strove for the sober thought, and one cannot be more sober than Hegel. The world spirit with which the soul in Hegelian philosophy seeks to unite itself becomes a mere logical spirit. To think of the divine spirit of the world as a logical soul that only builds the world logically! It must not be taken dogmatically, but it must be taken as an expression of the striving that remains mystical even in the most extreme logic, that seeks a union of the deepest part of the soul with the summit of the whole existence of the world itself in nature and history. Hegel must also be taken in this way, that one cannot find one's own self in what the senses provide us, but only in what the human soul can achieve within itself when it comes out of the sensual world. This is also what Hegel's philosophy strives for. And Faust, after his eyesight has gone, is illuminated by a brighter light within. What Hegel seeks on the right path, only to fail to perceive as the right goal, is what Faust seeks: to let one's own self merge with the world-self, to unite with it, and thus to experience the world-self in one's own self.

As Wilhelm von Humboldt said, can we not say that this German striving has not only tried in a beautiful way to establish harmony between philosophy – if one wants to call the pursuit of a worldview such – and poetry, and art in general, but that the German spirit has also brought this striving to external expression in a very unique way in Faust? Is not the very essence of Germanness characterized in this harmonious blending of the creations of the imagination with the quest of the sense of truth? Is it not otherwise in the world, where one finds that the imagination creates in freedom, but in unreality? The sense of truth creates according to the necessities of existence, but it does not come to a real life through this, only to an objectification, to a representation of experience. To bring fantasy out of its unreality and to animate that which it is able to create in such a way that the created lives together with the living spirit, so that harmony, harmonious harmony between poetry and philosophy can also exist in a work of art for once – that is what Goethe attempts, out of the whole originality and the truly not at all philosophical nature of his being. And when he has achieved this harmonizing of poetry and philosophy, of imagination and philosophy, by connecting with the most popular sources of the German spirit, then we may say: just as this Goethean work (we might also show it in other of his works, but it is most clearly and explicitly shown in his “Faust” — shows itself in connection with what the idealistic German world view has sought; there it is, as it now stands before us, seemingly the spiritual heritage of a few who prepare themselves especially for it. One can also see that, basically, supporters and opponents have tried to come to terms with the paths taken in the Goethe, Schiller, Schelling and Hegel era in the further course of German intellectual life up to our time. Infinite efforts have been made to understand the paths taken at that time along which one can find the sources of existence. But anyone who delves deeper into the ideas of those who lived in the arena of German idealism may come to the conclusion that what was developed there need not remain the property of only a few, of only a few individuals. Of course, if today we want to delve into the world view as presented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel themselves, if we get involved in their books, it is understandable that we will soon close the books again if we do not want to make a special study of them. For it is understandable to say: All this is quite incomprehensible. Nor is there any criticism to be made of those who claim that it is incomprehensible and indigestible. But there is a possibility, and this possibility is actually offered by human development, that what appears to be an indigestible good for a few can become quite popular, can really find its way into the whole spiritual cultural life of humanity. In order to grasp the cosmic striving of man in the way it was grasped in German idealism, it was necessary that some people should devote themselves entirely to the particular formulation of concepts and ideas, that they should attempt this in a solitude of spiritual life that stands alone as such.

But it does not have to stay that way. It is possible to popularize that which lives in Fichte's thoughts, which are so abstract, so abstruse, and, as many might say from their point of view, so convoluted – I know that for many people I am saying something paradoxical, but time will teach that it is correct – if you live into the spirit and the way of thinking, to present it in such a way that it can be directly conveyed to the boy or girl in earliest youth; that it can be understood in the way one understands something that lies completely in the nature of human life if one wants to grasp this human life. And so with all the other spiritual heroes! It can be done just as it can with the Grimm fairy tales. It takes no more spiritual activity of the soul to recognize, feel and sense Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in the depths of their creations than it does to grasp a fairy tale in the right imaginative way, as it is in the Grimm fairy tales. But the path will first have to lead people to live with something that belongs to the highest that humanity has gone through in terms of knowledge and poetry. And that is the significance of this idealistic striving of the German spirit. If one can show how one can grasp the essence of the soul in a simple way by appealing to the creative powers that lie within everyone, if one can show how these powers can be accessed in the right way, then one can bring this to people in a simple, elementary and direct way, whereas Fichte, to find it for the first time, needed a particularly high level of intellect. The same applies to everything else. But is what I am saying really so incredible? I do not think that anyone who remembers how he learned to understand the Pythagorean theorem at school will find it so incredible. But that does not mean that he is inclined to consider himself a Pythagoras, although the spiritual level and power of Pythagoras was necessary to first discover the Pythagorean theorem. An intense stream of spiritual world experience will flow from what the best German minds have sought in lonely, abstruse thoughts within German idealism, down to the most ordinary aspirations and lives of human beings.

And there is much, infinitely much, in this ordinary striving of man, if he is able to relate to the ever-creative and to feel that the human ego is creatively creative in the infinite. It is only by merging with the creative forces of nature that the human soul will be able to experience and feel the great beauties of nature as it reveals itself. And in a similar way, this applies to the other elements of this German intellectual life.

One must feel this, then the right feeling comes over one for the connection of the German striving with the entire world striving. And to revive this feeling in our days, it seems certainly appropriate to our destiny-bearing time. And it already belongs to that in which the German soul finds its strength. In conclusion, an example of this.

Even before the unity of the German people, the new German state, came about out of the context of the world, out of history, an unknown spirit writes beautiful words in his contemplation of Goethe's “Faust”. It was in 1865. I only quote these words of an otherwise quite unknown interpreter of Faust because they express what countless others have felt in exactly the same way. Since the emergence of the elevation in German idealism, which we have spoken of again today, countless of the best German minds have felt the connection between the paths that the idea takes in idealism into the spirit of nature and into the deeper foundations of the soul-spiritual itself. They felt that there is a connection between what the German spirit at its height has created for thought, what it has given to humanity as the sum of thoughts and artistic creations, and a connection between all this and what can also live in the German deed, in what the German people have to do when they have to carry out their world struggles on a different stage than that of thought. The connection between German intellectual life and German action was most deeply felt by those who knew how to place German thought and German idealistic work highest in their way of thinking. And from the contemplation of the past of German idealism, with its ascent to the heights where thought introduces to the life of the spirit—from the contemplation of this sphere of German idealism, there has always emerged the most beautiful hope that the German people will find the impulse for action from the same source when they need it.

What could be shown by many can be exemplified by one – and deliberately by one who is little known, Kreyssig, an explainer of Faust. Kreyssig, in 1865, wrote a paper about Goethe's “Faust” in which he tried to clarify, in his own way, what Goethe actually wanted with his “Faust.” He concludes with the words:

“And so we would then also know the overall impression that the contemplation of this giant monument of our great educational epoch, which after all remained unfinished and fragmentary, leaves behind, here we cannot summarize it better than in the simple memory of a passage from the famous legacy of the then 75-year-old poet to the younger world, which was preparing to take on new paths.”

Kreyssig cites Goethe's own thoughts, where he envisages the way in which Goethe sought a path into the spiritual world into old age. Kreyssig states how the power that leads into this spiritual world seems to him to be connected with the power that German action is to create in distant, distant times, which Goethe, as an old man, could only guess at:

The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
The primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through books as readily as through rocks.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
Will never live in the learned hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken it,
It has taken the glass of the hothouse with it.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
a mild light will still pour forth,
from whose reflection of those stars
the late grandchildren will learn to see,
and in prophetically higher visions
to accomplish greater things for the world and humanity.

And the “Faust” interpreter adds - in 1865 -:

"Let us add the wish that the words of the master, who looks down on us with a mild light from better stars, may come true for his people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and struggle, but, God willing, with indestructible strength, and that “in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of 'Faust' expects from the coming centuries, German action too, no longer as a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!"

Thus thought a German personality in 1865 of the German idea in connection with the hoped-for German deed. How the disembodied souls of such personalities may look upon the field in which the German deed is called upon for its realization today!

But precisely in connection with the faith, love and hope of such personalities, and especially of those personalities who, either through creation or understanding, have stood within the world view of German idealism, it may be said: the German need not, if he wants to recognize the impulses that are to inspire him, disparage any opponent. He has only to reflect on what he must believe, according to the innermost part of his being, to be his world-task. He must therefore reflect that he looks up to the way in which it has been handed down by his fathers, his ancestors, to his time; how it has become a force for the present, and how from this force, which is before his eyes, which lives in his soul, from the present hope may spring into the future.

Indeed, in the context of the present with German idealism, one can say from the innermost feeling: By looking to the past of thought or to what he has striven for outside of thought, the German feels feel his world task; he may feel it in this fateful time, he may feel it out of his love for his past and out of his faith in the power of the present, which becomes his when he has the right love for what the past has brought him. And from this love and from this faith, from this dual relationship between past and present, will spring in the right way that which, transcending blood and pain, allows us to glimpse a blessed present: German hope for the future. Thus, by delving into the idealism of the German essence, we can create a triad of love for the German past, faith in the German present, and hope for the German future.

Reflections on the eternal forces of the human soul from the point of view of spiritual science, as this spiritual science is meant here, are naturally, one might say, quite naturally exposed to misunderstandings in our time. And it is quite natural for it to be refuted from this or that point of view, which is undoubtedly justified from a certain side. When such refutations take place, the following occurs: the person who supposes to refute such results of spiritual science puts forward these or those reasons and then thinks that what he wants to have is met, and that the spiritual scientist cannot agree with his reasons at all. Precisely such a consideration as is to be undertaken here today on the basis of the results of spiritual science is subject to the misunderstandings indicated, for the matter usually lies — yes, one can say, in the cases that have come to light the matter always lies — in such a way that the person who refutes brings forward things with which the spiritual scientist absolutely agrees. It is just that spiritual science has something to say that is not affected at all by such objections, by such objections, which the spiritual scientist often accepts to a much greater extent than the person making the objections.

This applies in particular to the question that is to be asked today, and to what is often said on the part of the scientific world view. I have often emphasized from this platform that the humanities scholar is in no way opposed to the scientific world view based on the great achievements of modern times, especially when it comes to questions of the human soul. Of course, there are many things that can be said about the eternal character of the human soul from the point of view of those who want to practice psychology, the study of the soul, in a sense that is still valid today. Then the natural scientist comes, and I say expressly, often with full justification, and says: There we see the human soul-expressions, man's thinking, man's feeling, man's willing, as they express themselves from birth or from the time when man can develop conscious ideas, until death. If we look at this life of the soul, then the representative of the scientific world view must say that it appears to be bound in the strictest sense to the bodily processes; and one can show how it is bound to the bodily processes, how the bodily develop little by little from the earliest childhood, and how, in strict parallel with these physical processes, the faculties of thinking, of perceiving, of understanding and perceiving, develop as these physical processes, as they say, perfect themselves. One can see, again, how, with the fading of the physical processes of the human being, the mental processes also gradually recede into the background, gradually recede, subside. Yes, one can show even more. One can show how, in the case of illness or the like, parts of mental life disappear due to the exclusion of some brain activity or some part of the nervous system; how inability takes the place of ability when organic functions are excluded. What has been stated could be multiplied ad infinitum. So it is justified to say: Is not everything that man develops with his thinking, feeling and willing bound to the physical processes that are gradually being discovered by natural science, just as the flame is bound to the fuel of the candle? And in fact, some of the so-called proofs that are presented for the existence of a soul-core within ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, they really resemble something that one would imagine by saying that one finds something in the flame that cannot perish if the material of the candle is somehow removed from the flame. It may be said that much of the ordinary teaching on the soul is so constructed, according to the reasons and the kinds of proof, that it corresponds exactly to the thought one would have in order to prove that what lives in the flame cannot disappear if the flame is deprived of its fuel.

Now it must be emphasized that with regard to all that has just been indicated, spiritual science stands entirely on the ground of natural science, and indeed, as we want to see in particular through today's consideration, it must place itself more intensely and more strongly on this ground of natural science than natural science itself can do according to the current state of its research. In its method, in the way it thinks and is minded, spiritual science also stands in the same direction as indicated for human research through the newer methods of natural science. But the way in which these newer methods of natural science have been applied to the life of the soul shows that they do not lead to those regions in which the real riddles of the human soul are to be found.

In order not to make merely general remarks, I would like to consider a specific case. One of the more recent scientists who wanted to place psychology entirely on the basis of the scientific way of thinking was the psychologist Franz Brentano, who has already been mentioned here in these lectures on several occasions. His scientific endeavors took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the natural scientific way of thinking quite rightly made a great, even overwhelming impression on the personalities of this age, so that no kind of scientific research wanted to escape what lay in the fertility of natural scientific observation. And one of those who went along with it completely and said, ” If strict scientific results are to be achieved, then they must be achieved by a method that is constructed according to the model of natural science, otherwise they are not truly scientific results. One of the personalities who took this position, both with regard to the study of the soul and to the study of nature, was Franz Brentano. His theses, which he formulated at the beginning of his teaching career in Würzburg in the 1850s, went something like this: The future of the study of the soul depends entirely on its moving in the same channels as the study of nature. Now, with regard to the hopes that the study of the soul can have for our age and the future, Franz Brentano is a characteristically strong personality. He has begun to write a “Psychology,” a book that has achieved a certain fame in the narrower circles of the soul researchers. When the first volume of his psychology was published, he promised that the second volume would appear before the end of the year in which the volume was published – it was 1874 – and then the third volume in quick succession. So far, only the first volume has been published! And this is characteristic precisely because Franz Brentano is one of the most conscientious and energetic of thinkers.

Franz Brentano sets out to pursue the science of the soul in the spirit of modern natural science. He begins by examining the soul life as it presents itself in the ordinary existence of man; by investigating how, as man lives within the ordinary physical world, thought follows thought; what are the laws that cause one thought to evoke another; what are the laws that give rise to this or that sensation of pleasure or pain in the human soul. In short, he endeavored to investigate in a natural-scientific sense the life of the soul as it takes place within the ordinary physical existence of man. The aim of psychology is already clear to this student of the soul, but he sees no possibility of doing anything to approach this aim in any way. A saying of Franz Brentano is characteristic here, and runs as follows: “For the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle, to gain certainty about the survival of our better part after the dissolution of the body, the laws of association of ideas, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the sprouting and driving of lust and love, would be anything but a true compensation.... And if it really meant... “– he means the newer natural scientific way of thinking – ‘the exclusion of the question of immortality, then [this loss] would have to be called an extremely significant one for psychology.’

Franz Brentano is quite typical of those representatives of newer psychology who, while wanting to stand on the ground of newer natural science, that is, wanting to observe mental life exactly as one otherwise observes external natural phenomena, but who, in the course of their observations, let slip precisely those questions that are important, significant, and intimately connected with human life. We can, as Brentano says, in the sense of modern natural science, come to an understanding of how ideas are linked, how opinions take hold in the human soul, how pleasure and suffering are mutually dependent, but one cannot comment on the important question of what the eternal forces of the human soul are from what one wants to achieve with this method. And so it must be said that in more and more writings and literature on psychology in recent times, the question of the eternal forces of human existence has disappeared. Just try to leaf through the literature on psychology and you will see how true what I have just said is.

Spiritual science now attempts to find its way to the riddles of the human soul by adopting the attitude of the natural sciences. But it is convinced that the way of thinking that is so fruitful for the observation and study of the secrets of external nature must be internalized and completely transformed if one is to pursue spiritual science from the same attitude from which one pursues natural science. Spiritual science shows that the processes of the soul life that take place in ordinary thinking, feeling and willing between birth and death really contain nothing that is not as bound to the physical body as the flame is bound to the candle's material. Spiritual science shows that one cannot get at what is present in the soul as eternal with those functions of the soul life that are completely suitable for ordinary life and are also completely suitable for ordinary scientific research. Spiritual science shows that the soul of man, as it is in everyday life and in ordinary scientific research, is bound to the physical functions of the body, and that one must first seek out what is eternal in the soul by seeking a way from the ordinary soul functions to where these ordinary soul functions do not reach, where they do not come when they only accomplish what is accomplished in everyday life and ordinary science. An inner development of the soul abilities to a point that is completely superfluous for ordinary life is necessary if one wants to find the eternal powers of the human soul.

In earlier lectures I have already spoken about this development of the soul abilities of the human being from certain points of view, to a different view than that of everyday life. Today, I want to put the question in a different light from a different point of view.

What is considered the most important thing in ordinary science, the most important thing in ordinary life, for example in thinking and imagining, comes into play in a completely different way for spiritual research than in this everyday life. In ordinary life, it is a matter of our recognizing something by thinking about something that initially approaches us from outside. We perceive what approaches us from outside; we perceive even that which is in historical becoming; we think about it, and in so doing we explore the laws of external facts and of historical becoming. Thought arises in us, and precisely because we can think, because our thoughts have a certain content, we know something about the external world. And so it is right for our everyday life. It is also right for the activities of ordinary science.

But if one wants to grasp thinking in such a way as it must be grasped in order to arrive at true spiritual-scientific results, then one must grasp it in the following way. I will show, by means of a comparison that I have already used here once before, the quite different way in which the spiritual researcher must approach thinking, imagining, as compared with the way in which a person in ordinary life or in ordinary science approaches it. I have already hinted at it: When we use our hands for some external work, it depends, first of all, on our doing this external work, that the results of this external work be there. What is realized in the outer world through our work is what is seen. But that is not the only result of the work. The outer world must look at this result, and it has a right to look at it. But by repeatedly doing this or that, man also strengthens the strength of his hands and arms at the same time, and not only strengthens them but also makes them more adept at doing this or that. One can say – if we may use the word, which is of course only correct in a relative sense – that man makes the dexterity of his hands and arms more perfect by working. In terms of external labor, this is perhaps a very small thing, if we look only at how the result of the work fits into the context of human life. In this respect, it is a secondary result that the human hand and arms become more skillful. But for humans, it matters a great deal. Or even if one did not want to accept that, it is precisely this that is there as a secondary result! But with this we can compare what man achieves in imagining, in thinking. In ordinary life and in ordinary science, it is important to form a certain content of thought. Certainly, that is also quite right. But in forming this content of thought, in thinking, something similar really happens to thinking as happens to the strength of the hand and arm when one works. Thinking undergoes something inwardly, and it is precisely this, which is really quite unimportant for ordinary life and for ordinary science, even in relation to their achievements, that spiritual scientific research must now turn its inner gaze to: to what happens in thinking. The soul must be directed not to the content of the thoughts, but to the activity. And not to the mere activity either, but to what happens in the activity of thinking — if I may use the expression, which has only relative validity, once more — in the direction of perfection, of the development of thinking.

The soul's gaze must be trained to do this. And it must be possible to do so in order to enter into regions where the eternal powers of soul life open up, to disregard the content of thinking and to direct the soul's gaze to the activity of thinking, to what one does by thinking. This is achieved systematically and methodically through an intimate inner activity, which could also be called an intimate inner soul experiment, and which I have often referred to here as meditation. The word meditation need only be taken in the sense in which it is used here, as a technical term for the striving to develop such an ability by which the gaze of the soul can be directed precisely at this development of thinking. And one can really achieve this setting of the inner soul forces in this direction through what is called meditation, if this meditation is practiced in the right sense. Of course, I can only give the principles here with regard to what meditation is. More details can be found in my books, especially in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” where the soul's activities, the inner soul experiments, as it were, that set the whole soul life on the path that is to be indicated here in principle, are discussed in detail. Thinking and imagining must often be brought into a possibility, so that it stands, as it were, as external things stand, that one can look at it, that one holds it, as it were, more firmly, in the inner soul capacity, than one is accustomed to holding it when one lets thinking proceed only in such a way that it serves one in understanding the external world. And to bring the soul into such a direction, one must again and again, now out of the most inner freedom and arbitrariness, give the thinking a direction, which one gives it only to really feel inwardly what has just been indicated, to experience it inwardly, to strengthen this thinking so that one can inwardly experience what has been indicated. To do this, one must bring into one's thinking, into one's imagination, thoughts, ideas, upon which one then draws one's entire inner soul life, so that one really forgets the world and everything around us, disregarding the whole course of the rest of one's soul life, in order to concentrate all one's soul powers on one point, on one thought content that one has placed at the center of one's imagination. It is a seemingly undemanding activity of the inner soul life, but with reference to what is meant here, as it is said in Goethe's “Faust”: “Although it is easy, yet the easy is difficult!” In general, it is easy to give thought a direction such as that indicated here. But in order to summon up the inner strength needed to observe thinking in its activity, the process must be repeated over and over again. Depending on the individual, it may take weeks, months or years before any result is achieved. So that most people, if they take such an inner path, have long since lost their patience by the time any result might come.

Then there is another factor to be taken into account: if we take any thought from our soul life, as it presents itself to our memory, then this thought, which we have thought often, and which is linked to this or that external stimulus, cannot help us much in the activity we have indicated. For when a person draws a thought from the depths of his soul, a vast number of other sensations and remnants of sensations that would otherwise have remained unconscious are associated with it; and one experiences many things through this thought that one would otherwise not experience in the ordinary course of life. We cannot know whether what we experience in these thoughts is not somehow a reminiscence, some hidden memory from ordinary life. And finally, when we take a thought that is linked to something external, we cannot be quite so sure either. For, although we form a thought from the external world, this thought does indeed enter our consciousness, but we are never fully aware of the impression that we still receive more or less unconsciously alongside it. For my part, one can bring into consciousness any thought of an external object that one has seen. And by concentrating all the soul's power on it, something that one did not bring to consciousness in an immediate contemplation can well emerge, and one can believe that one has somehow brought what one is experiencing up from unknown worlds, while one has only brought it up from one's own soul, from the part that otherwise remains unconscious. Therefore, it is best to form ideas that one can easily keep track of and that do not run the risk of conjuring up something from one's soul life and then making us believe that we are experiencing something that is nothing more than reminiscences of our own subconscious soul life. To prevent this from happening, it is good to form a thought or take a thought from the literature of spiritual science that one can survey, to which one has not yet attached any habits, so to speak, of which one knows how its individual parts are composed, of which one knows that it does not subconsciously evoke something from one's soul life that then presents itself to one's mind instead of one experiencing something new. I have therefore often said: Since it is not at all important to recognize anything external through these activities of the soul life, which one calls meditation, to visualize any external truth, it is good to to take symbolic images, about which one is clear from the outset: they express nothing external, they are only placed at the center of thinking in order to exercise the thinking, to strengthen the thinking. For everything depends on taking hold of the processes of thinking in a living way by performing them. Through free inner activity, one must place a content at the center of one's soul life and then limit oneself entirely to that content. Only a few minutes need be spent on the individual content for the individual exercise, because as a rule it does not depend on the length of time at all, but on how far one really succeeds in concentrating the soul power in such a way that it is directed at one point and thereby strengthens inwardly, so that this inner thinking activity does not go unnoticed, but occurs with such strength that one can feel it inwardly, that one can experience it inwardly. If one now, with sufficient patience and persistence and energy, repeatedly performs such an experiment on the soul, one finally comes to really place one's thinking, that which otherwise withdraws as an inner thought process, in front of one's soul, to really place oneself in relation to one's inwardness in a completely different way than one has otherwise related to this inwardness. One comes to discover something quite new in oneself. But it is only new for one's consciousness; it is always there in the person. The soul's processes that one has accomplished merely lead to noticing it. What one discovers is always present in every person. But as a new human being in man, as something of which we notice that it also fills us, which we did not know before - we can now grasp a new human being in man with the power that we have become aware of through the comprehension, through the inner energizing, strengthening of thinking. And if we practise this long enough, with sufficient intensity and patience, it really takes us beyond the realm of ordinary thought and imagination, leading us to a completely different way of looking at our soul from the one we are accustomed to. But at the same time we notice something that can only be noticed at a point where the human being really arrives at a result. One must patiently wait until what is now being related as a result comes about. One arrives at a shattering result. |

This shattering result is always reminiscent of an expression that has often been used in the course of human development. It has been used within those circles that have known something of the fact that there is such an expansion of soul life as that which is spoken of here. Now, in order to explain what is meant here, it must be said that spiritual science of the kind meant here has only become possible in our age. Humanity is evolving. What occurs in some form or other in a later age was not possible in an earlier one. The newer form of natural science, as it has developed since the time of Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus, was not possible in the earlier epochs of human evolution. But these earlier epochs had to precede the newer one. In these earlier epochs, attempts were made to penetrate to the innermost nature of things in a quite different way from that which is the case in the present epoch. Just as natural science in its newer form was not yet possible in the Greco-Roman period, for example – not possible in terms of purely external facts, not only in principle – so spiritual science, as it is meant here and is described here according to its method, is something that can only dawn upon our time within the evolution of humanity. But just as man delved into nature in the same way as the human faculties that lay closest to the surface in the evolution of humanity, so too did he seek to gain access to the eternal forces of the human soul and develop the soul faculties in the same way as in ancient times, so that they might see in the old way what is eternal in the development of the human soul. In days gone by, people often spoke of the goal of developing the inner life of the soul as I have just described. They said that in order to reach the eternal foundations of his soul life, man must approach the portals of death. The full significance of this saying, “to approach the gate of death,” is only realized when one has truly brought this inner experience, which has just been described as meditation, to a certain point. One comes to a point where one discovers within oneself a real second person, a person who can only be grasped through strengthened thinking, just as one grasps the ordinary physical person through ordinary comprehensive volition, through what one can otherwise do within oneself. One comes to this second man in oneself, who is felt inwardly, so to speak, by the invigorating thinking, but at the same time one comes to realize, to see through direct observation, how this second man is connected, not with constructive but with destructive forces of our human organism. One comes to realize that, basically, one carries within oneself the conditions of death since birth or, let us say, since conception; that certain processes in the human being are real, that they take place and that, when they reach a certain point, they must lead to death. Alongside that which animates the human being, alongside that which is the ascending life process, which of course cannot be seen with the ordinary soul powers either, stands that which is the eroding soul powers, which, I would say, are destructive soul powers. And with the highest development of these destructive soul powers, with that which rules and lives in man as, one may say, the cause of death, as the lasting cause of death, one sees most intimately connected with it that which is now this second man, whom one feels inwardly, as it were, with one's thinking. Indeed, only through an inner experience can one come to assert what I am now asserting. Just as little as someone who does not know that water is divided into hydrogen and oxygen in electrolysis can discern anything about hydrogen or oxygen , just as little can anything be recognized in the ordinary life of the soul that is similar to the experience that has now been hinted at and that has been expressed at all times with the words: one approaches the gate of death.

One experiences that just as there is something in water that cannot be seen directly when looking at the water, even though it can be seen as hydrogen and oxygen, there is something in man that is connected with his thinking, but at the same time with the forces that give him death. One looks within oneself at the human being who brings it about that one can have precisely the purest, most abstract thinking, the one that furthest advances one in ordinary life, between birth and death, but that one could not have it if the death-giving powers in man did not come to their highest flowering. And by discovering through the strengthening of thinking that which brings death, an experience is directly linked to it, an inner experiential knowledge — one cannot call it anything other than an inner experiential knowledge —, not something that could ever be reached by a conclusion of reason; just as little as looking at water externally can be reached by a conclusion of reason, that hydrogen and oxygen are in it. One gains the experience by saying to oneself: One now looks beyond the scope of what ordinary consciousness overlooks and gets to know the human being who, between birth and death, is connected to the forces that give birth. But at the same time, one gets to know oneself in such a way that, by looking through oneself, one gets to know in this second self that which was there before one entered into physical existence through birth or, let us say, conception. From this moment on, one comes to know that not only have the hereditary powers of the ancestors, of father and mother, placed the human being in existence, but that spiritual powers, which come from a purely spiritual world, have combined with what lies in the hereditary current.

In ordinary life, we are accustomed to calling only that 'knowledge' which is arrived at by pointing to certain facts that already exist before the knowledge is acquired. For spiritual facts, this way of thinking would be exactly the same as saying: I want to communicate something to someone, but I don't say it out loud, because by saying it out loud it is no longer an objective fact that is there; it has to come about by itself. Just as in speaking one produces something that is not exhausted in the content of what is spoken, so spiritual scientific knowledge is bound to an activity in which what is the content of knowledge is first realized, just as what is the content of speaking is first realized in speaking. And now we really come to realize that in spiritual fields there exists in a higher form that which natural science has been striving towards since about the middle of the nineteenth century: what is called the “transformation of forces”. Transformation of forces is, for example, in its simplest form: you press on the table, and the force of your pressure, the work of your pressure, is transformed into warmth. Your pressure force is not lost, but transformed. This law of the transformation of forces has indeed taken hold of the scientific mind and thus acquired great significance. The spiritual scientist who brings himself to the point I have indicated learns to recognize that what underlies all our thinking and what I have just called “the death-bringing forces” are in fact eternal life forces, but can only become active as eternal life forces if they take hold of an organism, a physical organism. If they are present in the purely spiritual world before birth or, let us say, before conception, they are eternal life forces. And they must lose the form of eternal life forces; they must transform themselves into such forces that build up the organ of physical thinking between birth and death. They have to do this in order to build up the organ of physical thinking. They can therefore only again occupy themselves with their spiritual character when the organ of the physical body, the organ of thinking, has been broken down. Therefore it is really impossible to find within the physical life that of which has now been spoken. For one could not think at all in the ordinary sense if one could find that of which has been spoken. One thinks in the physical life — this is particularly shown by spiritual science — with the organ of thinking. It is not the thinking that is created by the eternal activity and the eternal powers of the human soul, but the organ of thinking; this must always be there first, so that thinking can take place. This ordinary physical thinking would therefore have to cease if one wanted to look at the very thing that matters. It is not thinking that comes from the eternal powers, but the organ of thinking, which remains hidden behind thinking. And it is precisely this organ of thinking that must remain hidden so that thinking can come to the fore.

Therefore, as one progresses in this inner development of the soul, one has an experience that is, I might say, no less harrowing than that which has just been described by the traditional expression “approaching the gates of death”. One experiences: Yes, your thinking, you thus strengthen it; your thinking becomes stronger in itself, so that it can inwardly feel a second person who is within you. — But one thing applies above all to this thinking. All that I have said is meant only in the main, for the reason that, since one is developing in the inner life of the soul, a residue of ordinary thinking always remains; otherwise one would have to leap out of ordinary thinking and leap into the other. So what I say is always meant only comparatively, that is, not in the full sense, but only in the main.

What stands out as particularly characteristic, as particularly significant, in that thinking strengthens itself, is something that represents a certain importance precisely for the ordinary life of the soul and now for this life of the soul, which has actually ceased to exist as a result of the strengthening of thinking. It is possible to retain through ordinary memory, through the ordinary ability to remember, what one has thus attained through thinking. The convenience of ordinary life also ceases, that one simply transmits one's thoughts to memory and then has them and only needs to remember them; that too actually ceases. So, when one has strengthened one's thinking, one has, despite the strengthening, reached a point where, by placing oneself in this strengthened thinking, one is continually faced with the feeling that this thinking will soon be lost again as it arises. And that is precisely the difficulty, which causes a great many people to lose patience and never to develop such inner soul powers as are meant here. Someone who does exercises like the ones suggested may do them for a long time, but he does not realize that what one produces in this way is just as difficult to retain as it is sometimes to retain a dream. When you wake up, you know exactly what you dreamt, but you can't hold on to it, it disappears. And that's how it is with what you have achieved. It can only be incorporated into your ordinary memory with great difficulty.

That is why, when you present spiritual truths, they always have to be created in the moment; however strange or paradoxical it may sound, it is simply true that you cannot retrieve them from ordinary memory. And why is that so? It is because man, as he is in ordinary life, continually tends to let what he actually achieves through the formation, the development of the organ of thinking, what comes out of the eternal, slip down into the physical. No sooner has one attained what the eternal presents than it slips into the ordinary organ of thinking. That is, it passes over into the ordinary life of the soul and thereby loses its eternal form. One constantly sees that one grasps something as it arises, only to lose it again immediately. And only long practice is necessary to observe to some extent what arises and immediately passes away; to have in the soul that which arises and immediately passes away. Thus, one realizes that one actually needs a completely different consciousness than the consciousness that simply comes from the ordinary organ of thought. And one gradually comes to realize – which in turn is a harrowing experience of the soul – that yes, you do attain something through your soul development; but with the consciousness that you have there, which serves you in the most fruitful way in ordinary life, you cannot hold on to it after all. For this ordinary consciousness is organized in such a way that the eternal escapes from it, so that it may be efficient. The conviction finally arises: You need another consciousness, you need a consciousness that goes beyond the consciousness that is fruitful for your ordinary life, because with this consciousness you cannot hold on to the eternal.

Therefore it is necessary that such pure mental exercises, as they have been designated as a member of the meditative life, are supplemented by other exercises, which one can now call exercises of the will, of the feeling will It is not enough to exercise the power of thinking, of visualizing, inwardly in the indicated manner, for by this inward exercise alone one would arrive at a state where what arises continually ceases. Therefore, spiritual science must also advise us to treat the will in a different way than it is treated in ordinary life. In everyday life, the will functions in the soul life in such a way that, when we will, our attention is actually directed to that which is to happen, to that which flows out of the will into action, even if we only will inwardly, if it remains with the intention – with the inward presentation of the volition. Attention is always directed to that into which the will is lived, into which the will flows. If we apply the same effort to an inner cultivation of the will as can be applied in the manner indicated to the cultivation of imagination and of thinking, we can develop the will to such a point that we attain the possibility of developing the will that is necessary to reach the eternal powers of the human soul. To do this, however, it is necessary to practise the will inwardly in such a way that one really does establish a quite intense calmness of soul, that one quiets the surging and swaying of desires, the surging and swaying of the other impulses of desire that play a great role in life, so that one, as it were, establishes complete calmness in the inner life of one's soul and then reflects on what one may have wanted at some time. All the liveliness that the will is imbued with when it is directly present is, so to speak, taken away by placing remembered will in front of you, by looking back in the evening, for example, at what you willed during the day, and now letting this will work on you in such a way that you do not become an inner critic, but you look at this volition; you look at it now that it no longer directly tempts you to direct your attention to external deeds alone, but now that the volition has detached itself in your inner soul life from the external activity, you can direct your attention to what the soul life is and what it does in the volition. We also make progress in this field if we make an effort, I might say, again as an inner experiment, to will that which we have found good for this or that reason, to place it in the inner life of our soul, and then to visualize in a fine, intimate way: What do you experience when you place yourself in the position of your soul in wanting this? — whereby one completely disregards what is connected with the desired itself, but only places oneself in what the soul inwardly feels by undergoing the volition.

Again, long exercises in this direction are necessary if one wants to come to a conclusion; but one comes to a conclusion: namely, one discovers that during one's life one actually carries an invisible, an imperceptible spectator with oneself all the time. Again, one discovers a person, a new person, but a person who is always there, but who is not noticed. Just as the inner man, as characterized above, is not noticed in thinking, so the inner spectator is not noticed in willing, because attention is directed to something quite different. This inner man is now actually a consciousness that is unconsciously — if I may use the paradoxical expression — always in us, that is not raised into the ordinary consciousness, but that is there nevertheless.

It is difficult to talk about these things for the reason that one talks about things that are realities, but are actually unfamiliar to man; unfamiliar because they are not brought to consciousness in ordinary life. The spiritual scientist is not talking about anything new. He is not talking about anything that does not exist. He is only pointing out what exists in every human being. But in order to show it, it is necessary to approach it in such a way that one approaches it actively; that one does not merely point out facts that want to guarantee a being, but for which observation first brings forth what is, but what can only be shown through the activity.

And now, when one has progressed to a certain point in this field, something happens in the soul that can bring one to the deepest shock. One now gets to know something to a great extent, which one experiences in the outer life, namely within the intentions, the desires, the will that one has in the soul, but, I would say, only on the outside, only in bits and pieces. One experiences in a comprehensive way what one can call: the direct contemplation, the direct feeling of what suffering, what pain is. For basically, each piece of this attainment of consciousness, which otherwise remains unconscious, is connected with deprivation and pain. But the two experiences now come together. The one experience that led one to the perception, I would say, the flowering of the dying power in man, and the one that led one to the perception of an unconscious consciousness that is always present in man, that always watches man as an observer – these two experiences are linked together. From the first experience one realizes: This basically cannot be designated as such being as otherwise any being is designated. It cannot maintain itself in existence if it is not borne by consciousness, if, in other words, it is not remembered by a certain consciousness. And one makes a discovery - one of the most magnificent, powerful inner experiences that one can have on the path of knowledge at first: one makes the discovery that what you produce out of an energizing of your thinking is like a fleeting dream. It cannot approach the ability of ordinary consciousness to remember. But if you really strengthen that which lives in the will, as your observation, as your subconscious consciousness, then this is now the consciousness that can grasp the other, which otherwise cannot be remembered, and which can hold it.

And now one is at the experience, which in relation to the scientific attitude can be compared entirely with the way one does it in the outer natural life, how one observes the outer natural life. One looks at the plant. You see how it develops into the germ in the flower and how this germ, when it is planted in the earth, is the beginning of a new plant. The end is combined with the beginning to form a cycle, a circle. In the same way, but at a higher level, the end and beginning of the physical life of a human being is grasped. It is known that that which existed before birth, or let us say conception, has united from the spiritual world with that which lies in the physical line of inheritance, and which permeates and interweaves with the physical organization in the human being. We know that this lives itself out in such a way that it brings forth an organ, that this organ brings it to thinking, and that its outermost development brings it to memory; but that in so doing, having emerged from the spiritual world, it has has attained a form in this transformation that is, so to speak, a highest bloom, which must now be grasped by a consciousness that is of a completely different kind than that through which it first comes out of the spiritual world, is produced. This consciousness lies like a seed of consciousness, like something that underlies as will, but in ordinary will, because attention is not directed to it, does not become conscious. That which lies in man as death-giving unites, when man passes through the gate of death, with this seed of consciousness that lies in the volition. And the ordinary physical life is only a holding apart of the one and the other. We live physically so long as the one and the other are kept apart, so long as we place ourselves with our being in between. In the experience of death, the first is grasped by the second, the consciousness grasps the former and carries it through the gate of death back into the spiritual world.

Just as one can see from the plant seed in the flower that it will begin the cycle again if it goes through the necessary intermediate conditions, so one experiences that what was present before birth, what lies in man as the power to give birth, descends to a renewed earthly life when it has gone through spiritual conditions. By linking end and beginning in a way that is entirely in keeping with the spirit of natural science, one arrives at a confirmation of what has emerged in one of the most beautiful phases of modern spiritual life and — one might say — has emerged as if from the thinking of a great thinker: what was brought to light by Lessing when he concluded his most mature work, 'The Education of the Human Race', with the reference to the necessity of thinking of repeated earthly lives. At that time it leaped forward as if from a thinking that had struggled to an independent world-view. The more recent spiritual science strives to substantiate scientifically, but, as we shall see, inwardly scientifically, that which presented itself in Lessing's thinking, this teaching of repeated earth-lives! Today it is also regarded as something fantastic, as something dreamy; just as at a certain time, which is not far behind us, the doctrine was regarded: Living things can only arise from living things. — But anyone who has recognized such a view as truth also knows that truth has a difficult path to follow in humanity, but that it will also find this path!

It seemed fantastic and dreamy to most people when the more recent natural science-minded people came forward and said: Man thinks that a firmament above limits the space, while this firmament is nothing more than the expression of the end of the ability to see itself. What you see as the firmament is only brought about by yourselves; that is precisely what your gaze penetrates, that is precisely where your seeing penetrates! It is not externally present in nature, but externally in nature is the infinity of space, in which countless worlds are embedded! From the standpoint that was adopted at the time when the old concept of the firmament of space was to be overcome, spiritual science today stands, I would say, with regard to the spiritual firmament of the human soul between birth or conception and death. Man initially looks after conception, after birth, or to a point, to which his memory reaches, and to his death. But there is nothing that limits life, just as the firmament does not limit space. Rather, what man does not see expands behind it because he does not try to expand his capacity for knowledge, his capacity for thought, beyond this temporal firmament. Out there, beyond this firmament, lie repeated earthly lives and the intervening lives in which the soul lives in a purely spiritual world.

It is certainly even more difficult to become accustomed to the thought processes that are necessary to reach this spiritual firmament than it was to reach the removal of the physical firmament. But our time is quite ripe, out of a scientific attitude, I would say, to go beyond what the external natural science can achieve. And so I do not hesitate, even if it must lead to even worse misunderstandings than what has been said so far, to make the concrete application, the particular application of that kind of spiritual research that I have just characterized, in a particular case that can interest us at all times, but especially in our fateful time.

We speak and will speak more and more of the immortal forces of the human soul when we come to a true science of the soul. But we will also learn to speak again of what invisibly reigns in the visible, what imperceptibly reigns for the ordinary historical view in the course of human life. In connection with the eternal forces of the human soul, we have spoken of death, which is indeed a mystery, not only for those who say that they desire a life beyond the gates of death, but above all for those who must grasp life itself; for much of the understanding of life lies in the unraveling of the mystery of death. But in our time, death approaches us in a completely different way, in the midst of pain and suffering, but also in the midst of hope and certainty about the future. Death comes upon us in such a way that it seizes blossoming human life, not in the sense that the forces that give death internally expire, depending on how it is allotted to the person; this cannot be explained further today, but it could also be characterized in the sense of spiritual science. Death does not come upon us in such a way that these death-bringing forces from within, from the organic, take away the physical body from that which, as higher consciousness, unites with the Eternal in the life of the will, which is death-bringing, but which is one with the Eternal —, not only does death approach us in this way, but it also takes the physical human body away from the soul in the prime of life through violent interventions from the outside, let us say, through a bullet or otherwise. Although I shall be giving more exact details in a week's time in the lecture on 'The Human Soul and the Human Spirit', I would like to venture to simply relate here a research result that lies on the path just characterized.

It would take a great deal of time to fully explain how the same method that has just been demonstrated for ordinary, simple results also leads to the investigation of what is to be discussed now. But it is exactly the same method that, in the further course, also leads us to the knowledge of precisely the great connections in life.

We must bear in mind that no force is lost; it remains available, it transforms. If the physical body is taken away by an external influence, say by a bullet, in the prime of human life, then, based on the general human disposition, such forces are available that could have provided for the person for a long time in relation to his life in the physical world. These forces are not lost. The spiritual researcher must ask: where do these forces come from, and where do they go? A significant question arises before us. Last winter, in a lecture, I spoke from the point of view of how this force lives on in the present. Now I will speak about it in so far as these forces are linked to the historical course of humanity. The spiritual researcher must ask: Where do these forces, which cease to work in a person when his body is forcibly taken from him, reappear elsewhere? Just as one searches in natural science when some force is lost, how this force, transformed into other forms, reappears, so the spiritual researcher searches in the spiritual world phenomena to find what is lost on one side on the other. And it is precisely by seeking what is being discussed here that one comes to say: In the development of mankind, forces arise that we observe, for example, when we educate a human being. We observe how a person can become capable of thinking, doing or feeling this or that. We guide the abilities present in him in such a way that we know: we do nothing special when we develop human abilities in general. We know that when he is later able to do this or that, it is because this or that has been developed in him.

But besides all this, other forces arise in human life, forces that are called ingenious forces, forces that appear while one is educating a person. One can be much more stupid than the one one is educating: these ingenious forces still come out. They come to light, one speaks of a divine favor, of a coming forth of forces, without one being able to do anything about it. Of course, I am not just talking about the powers that the higher geniuses, the higher minds, show, but about the genius that is in every human being. Even the simplest person needs a certain amount of inventiveness in their most everyday tasks in order to really make progress. There is only a difference in degree between what is needed in ordinary life and the highest powers of genius. These powers of invention arise, one might say, out of the twilight of becoming; they arise in man as something that is bestowed on him by the world spirit, by the divine spirit that pervades the world, as one might say at first, without being able to claim that one has cultivated them, that one has nurtured them through education. And then the remarkable and surprising result emerges, that these powers, which thus come to light as powers of invention, as powers of genius, are transformed powers. Those forces are transformed into ingenious forces that disappear when a person's physical body is taken from him externally, which he would have been able to retain in the normal course of events if the bullet had not hit him. This is a surprising connection that emerges: The forces that a person carries into death by passing through the gate of death by force, by having their physical body taken from the outside, not by internal organic processes, these forces are not lost; these forces emerge, and not only in the later earthly life of the individual human being — that appears in a completely different way — but they emerge in the course of history, they emerge in completely different people. They become, so to speak, embedded in historical evolution, if I may use such a trivial, philistine expression. And what are the forces of a violent death in prehistoric times are transformed into forces of genius in an earlier or later post-historical period, which arise within the evolution of humanity.

If one follows spiritual science to such points, then for those who have practice in thinking, I mean inner practice in the paths that thinking must take in order to approach realities, true connections arise that come to light in the spiritual world — but which are no more wondrous than when mysterious natural connections occur, connections that only live in a higher sphere, and because they live in a higher sphere, they are all the more important for the elevation of our life, more important than how the soul feels in existence, how the soul can also permeate itself religiously with the cosmic connection, more important than mere external knowledge of nature. Spiritual science does not want to replace any religion; religious feeling has a completely different origin. But spiritual science is, if one can say so, suitable for deepening these religious feelings, for stimulating them even in those who have lost all religious feeling through the influences of modern natural science. Spiritual science shows connections within the spiritual life that arise entirely from the attitude of a scientific way of thinking. Not that all the riddles of the world will be solved, but what otherwise presents itself only as fact alongside fact is inwardly illuminated, in a similar way to how natural facts are illuminated when they can be traced back to the chain of causes and effects.

Now, in conclusion, I would like to say something that is not logically connected to the above as a final consideration of what has just been explained – I will have more to say on this next Friday – but rather something that is only is connected to it only through the logic of feeling, a logic of feeling that must be understandable to anyone who is connected to what permeates and moves us all in our time.

It is precisely this that we see: the people of Central Europe surrounded, beset, fighting for their existence. Yesterday I tried to show what spiritual endeavors are present within this circle of existence. I do not believe that I am forced, I might say, to serve the times in an outward way, to drag together what I have to say. Yesterday I tried to show how in German spiritual life, just as this German spiritual life was seeking its paths of knowledge in an idealistic way through its great philosophers, a path lies into the spiritual worlds. It must not be taken dogmatically, as I emphasized again and again yesterday, but rather in terms of the way of seeking, in terms of the way of striving. One must examine the direction in which the inner soul forces of the German idealistic philosophers moved. And if we follow, as I tried to do yesterday, the way in which, on the one hand, through abstract, sober thinking, and on the other hand, through energetic views of the will, as with Fichte, or through powerful poetic creative powers, as in Goethe, opened up Germany's idealistic path to the world, then one has an impression of how the soul of the nation itself, this German national soul as a whole, has immersed itself in meditation, the meditation of an entire national soul in the idealistic development from the end of the eighteenth century into the first third of the nineteenth century! He who sees in meditation, in the particular training of thinking, feeling and willing, the way into the spiritual worlds, may say, without having to forcibly wrench anything into such an assertion, what can truly be the most intimate conviction for the modern spiritual researcher: The progress of spiritual science can be depicted as the development of a germ that is rooted in German idealistic philosophy; it is present in all of German idealistic spiritual striving around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has continued to have an effect into our days, as I attempted to characterize yesterday. Indeed, in all that I have been able to speak about here in these lectures over the years, I have always been aware that what is now being presented as spiritual science is nothing other than Goetheanism, German idealism. I mean this specific idealism as it emerged at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the German mind, transferred to our time; not simply viewed historically as it was at that time, but grasped in a living way in our time! And I was aware that, in essence, I was never presenting anything other than Goetheanism by presenting spiritual science in the sense in which it can be in our time. However strange it may sound to some people today, if one looks at it from this point of view, one finds that striving for the spiritual world is firmly anchored in what German spiritual striving has once risen to as its highest peak, as a highest inner peak.

And when this connection is allowed to work in one's soul, one can place oneself in our fateful days in such a way that what the German people sought on the one hand in the most extreme development of their spiritual efforts is only a different side of what must work in our time so that the historical task set for the German people in our days can be solved in the external fields of action. That is why everything the German people accomplishes is intimately connected with the deepest soul life, with what was great and significant at a time when, in relation to the outside world, the ground was pulled out from under the feet of the German people. Therefore, it may be said that, if, besides the external struggle which will be decided by arms and about which it is not proper for the spiritual observer to speak, because things will be decided not by words but by arms, if, besides this struggle, something has developed that strikes us as so strange that this German spiritual life is disparaged by opponents, so that one might believe that these opponents only find the possibility of letting their own intellectual life shine in a special light by disparaging German intellectual life, then a consideration of the inner significance, the inner world significance of German intellectual life leads precisely to the realization of how little the German needs to look at his own intellectual life in such a way that, in a comparison, the intellectual life of others would have to be disparaged. The German need only look at the task set for him from the innermost part of the world spirit to know what he has to do in the world, what he has to carry over into the future.

Therefore, one may say from the bottom of one's heart: This German national spirit, which reigns in the totality of German life, which reigns in German thought, in German meditation, as I have indicated, which reigns in German action, this German national spirit may point out when it is now being reproached in such an unintelligent way from here and there with having produced a world view that is based solely on force and power. It may point out how it can refute this strange talk through its connection with the spiritual. And when it is said that the German national spirit has played its part in historical development, then it follows that the germ of the highest spiritual life lives in the meditation of the German national spirit, as indicated above. One has only to imagine how these germs develop into blossoms and fruits, and how these blossoms and fruits must develop in the future. Then, through the genuine consciousness that flows from such thinking, from such feeling, and from such sentiment, it can be said: To those who today belittle this German national spirit or even want to deny it its spiritually fruitful powers for the future, to those, out of the consciousness of its spiritual and historical deeds and tasks, this German national spirit holds up the book of destiny, which it believes it can correctly decipher by considering the German task and the German spirit. And he says to all those who believe that they must take a stand against German intellectual life, not only with weapons but also with weapons of words, and prophesy its downfall: he believes that he can hold this up to them as a sure conviction, based on an understanding of the course of German intellectual life, a page from the book of fate of the development of mankind. And on this one page is written – no matter what may be said or maintained – the future of the German spirit, the future of the German national soul!

Consider what is to be the subject of today's lecture only as an insertion into the series of lectures this winter. It is perhaps justified precisely by our fateful time, in which the two Central European empires, so closely connected with each other, must approach the great demands of historical becoming in our present and for the future. I also believe I am justified in saying something about the intellectual life of Austria, since I lived in Austria until I was almost thirty years old and had not only the opportunity but also the necessity from a wide variety of perspectives to become fully immersed in Austrian intellectual life. On the other hand, it may be said that this Austrian intellectual life is particularly, I might say, difficult for the outsider to grasp in terms of ideas, concepts, and representations, and that perhaps our time will make it increasingly necessary for the peculiarities of this Austrian intellectual life to be brought before the mind's eye of a wider circle. But because of the shortness of the time at my disposal I shall be unable to give anything but, I might say, incoherent pictures, unpretentious pictures of the Austrian intellectual life of the most diverse classes; pictures which do not claim to give a complete picture, but which are intended to form one or other idea which might seek understanding for what is going on in the intellectual life beyond the Inn and the Erz Mountains.

In 1861, a philosopher who was rarely mentioned outside his homeland and who was closely connected to Austrian intellectual life, Robert Zimmermann, took up his teaching post at the University of Vienna, which he then held until the 1890s. He not only awakened many people spiritually, guiding them through philosophy on their spiritual path, but he also influenced the souls of those who taught in Austria, as he chaired the Real- und Gymnasialschul-Prüfungskommission (examination commission for secondary modern and grammar schools). And he was effective above all because he had a kind and loving heart for all that was present in emerging personalities; that he had an understanding approach for everything that asserted itself in the spiritual life at all. When Robert Zimmermann took up his post as a philosophy lecturer at the University of Vienna in 1861, he spoke words in his inaugural academic address that provide a retrospective of the development of worldviews in Austria in the nineteenth century. They show very succinctly what made it difficult for Austrians to arrive at a self-sustaining worldview during this century.

Zimmermann says: “For centuries in this country, the oppressive spell that lay on the minds was more than the lack of original disposition capable of holding back not only an independent flourishing of philosophy but also the active connection to the endeavors of other Germans. As long as the Viennese university was largely in the hands of the religious orders, medieval scholasticism prevailed in its philosophy lecture halls. When, with the dawn of an enlightened era, it passed into secular management around the middle of the last century, the top-down system of teachers, teachings and textbooks, which was ordered from above, made the independent development of a free train of thought impossible. The philosophy of Wolff – which in the rest of Germany had been overcome by Kant – in the diluted version of Feder, with a smattering of English skepticism, became the intellectual nourishment of the young Austrians thirsting for knowledge. Those who, like the highly educated monk of St. Michael's in Vienna, longed for something higher had no choice but to secretly seek the way across the border to Wieland's hospitable sanctuary after discarding the monastic robe. This Barnabite monk, whom the world knows by his secular name of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and the Klagenfurt native Herbert, Schiller's former housemate, are the only public witnesses to the involvement of the closed spiritual world on this side of the Inn and the Erz mountains in the powerful change that took hold of the spirits of the otherworldly Germany towards the end of the past, the philosophical century."

One can understand that a man speaks in this way who had participated in the 1848 movement out of an enthusiastic sense of freedom, and who then thought in a completely independent way about fulfilling his philosophical teaching. But one can also ask oneself: Is not this picture, which the philosopher draws almost in the middle of the nineteenth century, perhaps tinged with some pessimism, some pessimism? It is easy for an Austrian to see things in black and white when judging his own country, given the tasks that have fallen to Austria due to the historical necessities – I say expressly: the historical necessities – that the empire, composed of a diverse, multilingual mixture of peoples, had to find its tasks within this multilingual mixture of peoples. And when one asks such a question, perhaps precisely out of good Austrian consciousness, all sorts of other ideas come to mind.

For example, one can think of a German Austrian poet who is truly a child of the Austrian, even the southern Austrian mountains; a child of the Carinthian region, born high up in the Carinthian mountains and who, through an inner spiritual urge, felt compelled to descend to the educational institutions. I am referring to the extraordinarily important poet Fercher von Steinwand.

Among Fercher von Steinwand's poems, there are some very remarkable presentations. I would like to present just one example to your souls as a picture of this Austrian intellectual life, as a picture that can immediately evoke something of how the Austrian, out of his innermost, most original, most elementary intellectual urge, can be connected with certain ideas of the time. Fercher von Steinwand, who knew how to write such wonderful “German Sounds from Austria” and who was able to shape everything that moves and can move human souls from such an intimate mind, also knew how to rise with his poetry to the heights where the human spirit tries to grasp what lives and works in the innermost weaving of the world. For example, in a long poem, of which I will read only the beginning, called “Chor der Urtriebe” (Choir of Primeval Instincts).

In the boundless expanse
of our ancient mother Night,
hark! there seems to be a struggle
of the most mysterious power!
Do we hear foreboding stride?
Has longing awakened?
Has a flash of inspiration ignited?
Do dreams glide through the vastness?
How the forces of the forces intoxicate each other,
blissful exchange!
Sudden hurrying,
quiet lingering,
revelatory listening
alternates with waving
Amazed fear!
The charm of attainment
Rises, to sink,
Sinks, to hate,
White with the pale
Image of the embrace
Hatred not to grasp.
Dark ramifications
Sprouting affections
Seek for tendrils.
Heavy thoughts
Dawn and falter
Over the expanses,
Seem to guess
Or to guide.
What they prepare
Are they the seeds
Of mighty deeds,
Radiant times?
Who felt the stirred up
Creatively!
Who wandered through it,
Blissfully enjoying,
Or untangled it,
Opening up great things!
Up there it moves like a ghostly embrace,
We in warmth,
We also gain,
search and ponder,
see ourselves lifted,
highest endeavor
happily interwoven.
That blows around us,
arises in us:
“It is you, ideas! -—"

The poet sees how, as he seeks to delve into the “choir of primal urges” that are world-creative, ideas come to him. He seeks to rise up to that world that lived in the minds of the philosophers I had the honor of speaking of last week: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. But we may ask ourselves how it was possible for that intimate bond to be woven in Fercher von Steinwand's soul, which must have connected him – and it really connected him – between the urge of his soul, which awakened in the simple peasant boy from the Carinthian mountains, and between what the greatest idealistic philosophers in the flowering of German world view development sought to strive for from their point of view. And so we ask: Where could Fercher von Steinwand find this, since, according to Robert Zimmermann's words, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel were not presented in Austria during Fercher von Steinwand's youth – he was born in 1828 – since they were forbidden fruit during his youth there? But the truth always comes out. When Fercher von Steinwand had graduated from high school and, equipped with his high school diploma, went to Graz to attend the University of Graz, he enrolled in lectures. And there was a lecture that the lecturer reading it on natural law was reading. He enrolled in natural law and could naturally hope that he would hear a lot of all kinds of concepts and ideas about the rights that man has by nature, and so on. But lo and behold! Under the unassuming title “Natural Law,” good Edlauer, the Graz university professor, the lawyer, spoke of nothing but Fichte, Schelling and Hegel for the entire semester. And so Fercher von Steinwand took his course in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel during this time, quite independently of what might have been considered forbidden, and perhaps really was forbidden, according to an external view of Austrian intellectual life. Quite independently of what was going on at the surface, a personality who was seeking a path into the spiritual worlds was therefore immersing himself in this context with the highest intellectual endeavor.

Now, when one sets out to follow such a path into the spiritual worlds through Austrian life, one must bear in mind – as I said, I do not want to justify anything, but only give pictures – that the whole nature of this Austrian spiritual life offers many, many puzzles to those – yes, I cannot say otherwise – who are looking for a solution to puzzles. But anyone who likes to observe the juxtaposition of contradictions in human souls will find much of extraordinary significance in the soul of the Austrian. It is more difficult for the Austrian German to work his way up than in other areas, for example in German, I would say, not so much in education, but in the use of education, in participating in education. It may look pedantic, but I have to say it: it is difficult for the Austrian to participate in the use of his intellectual life simply because of the language. For it is extremely difficult for the Austrian to speak in the way that, say, the Germans of the Reich speak. He will very easily be tempted to say all short vowels long and all long vowels short. He will very often find himself saying “Son” and “Sohne” instead of “Son” and “Sonne”. Where does something like that come from? It is due to the fact that Austrian intellectual life makes it necessary – it is not to be criticized, but only described – that anyone who, I might say, works their way up from the soil of the folk life into a certain sphere of education and intellect has to take a leap over an abyss – out of the language of their people and into the language of the educated world. And of course only school gives them the tools to do so. The vernacular is correct everywhere; the vernacular will say nothing other than: “Suun”, quite long, for “Sohn”, “D'Sun”, very short, for “Sonne”. But at school it becomes difficult to find one's way into the language, which, in order to handle education, must be learned. And this leap across the abyss is what gives rise to a special language of instruction. It is this school language, not some kind of dialect, that leads people everywhere to pronounce long vowels as short vowels and short vowels as long vowels. From this you can see that, if you are part of the intellectual life, you have a gulf between you and the national character everywhere. But this national character is rooted so deeply and meaningfully, not so much perhaps in the consciousness of each individual as, one might say, in each person's blood, that the power I have hinted at is experienced inwardly, and can even be experienced in a way that cuts deep into the soul. And then phenomena come to light that are particularly important for anyone who wants to consider the place of Austrian higher intellectual life in the intellectual life of Austrian nationality and the connection between the two. As the Austrian works his way up into the sphere of education, I would say that he is also lifted into a sphere, in terms of some coinage of thought, some coinage of ideas, so that there really is a gulf to the people. And then it comes about that more than is otherwise the case, something arises in the Austrian who has found his way into intellectual life, something that draws him to his nationality. It is not a home for something that one has left only a short time ago, but rather a homesickness for something from which one is separated by a gulf in certain respects, but in relation to which one cannot, for reasons of blood, create it, find one's way into it.

And now let us imagine, for example, a mind – and it can be quite typical of Austrian intellectual life – that has undergone what an Austrian scientific education could offer it. It now lives within it. In a certain way, it is separated from its own nationality by this scientific education, which it cannot achieve with ordinary homesickness, but with a much deeper sense of homesickness. Then, under certain circumstances, something like an inner experience of the soul occurs, in which this soul says to itself: I have immersed myself in something that I can look at with concepts and ideas, that from the point of view of intelligence certainly leads me here or there to understand the world and life in connection with the world; but on the other side of an abyss there is something like a folk philosophy. What is this folk philosophy like? How does it live in those who know nothing and have no desire to know anything of what I have grown accustomed to? What does it look like over there, on the other side of the abyss? — An Austrian in whom this homesickness has become so vivid, which is much deeper than it can usually occur, this homesickness for the source of nationality, from which one has grown out, such an Austrian is Joseph Misson.

Misson, who entered a religious order in his youth, absorbed the education that Robert Zimmermann pointed out, lived in this education and was also active in this education; he was a teacher at the grammar schools in Horn, Krems and Vienna. But in the midst of this application of education, the philosophy of his simple farming people of Lower Austria, from which he had grown out, arose in him, as in an inner image of the soul, through his deep love of his homeland. And this Joseph Misson in the religious habit, the grammar school teacher who had to teach Latin and Greek, immersed himself so deeply in his people, as if from memory, that this folklore revealed itself poetically in him in a living way, so that one of the most beautiful, most magnificent dialect poems in existence was created. I will just, to paint a picture for you, recite a small piece from this dialect poetry, which was only partially published in 1850 – it was then not completed – just the piece in which Joseph Misson so truly presents the philosophy of life of the Lower Austrian farmer. The poem is called: “Da Naaz,” - Ignaz - “a Lower Austrian farmer's boy, goes abroad”. So, Naaz has grown up in the Lower Austrian farmhouse, and he has now reached the point where he has to make his way into the world. He must leave his father and mother, the parental home. There he is given the teachings that now truly represent a philosophy of life. One must not take the individual principles that the father says to the boy, but one must take them in their spiritual context; how it is spoken about the way one has to behave towards luck when it comes, towards fate ; how one should behave when this or that happens to one; how one should behave when someone does one good; how one should behave towards kind people and how towards those who do one harm. And I would like to say: to someone who has undergone his philosophical studies to the extent that he has become a theologian, this peasant philosophy now makes sense. So the father says to the Naaz when the Naaz goes out:

From the first song.
Teach your children on the road.

Naaz, iazn loos, töös, wos a ta so, töös sockt ta tai Voda.
Gootsnom, wails scho soo iis! und probiast tai Glück ö da Waiden.
Muis a da sogn töös, wo a da so, töös los der aa gsackt sai.
I and my mother were dreaming and dreaming, as you know, seeing nothing else.
What we see, work and worry about,
We do it for the children, what we don't do, is not good enough! —
If we are once a little pressed for time and are short of hands, take it easy, but find us a few decent places for the children, preferably under the shade of trees, where the fish spawn. —
If your luck turns around, so live not all the days,
Stay even, in the middle of the river, don't cut the rope too short.
Luck is round and round, so roll it back again soon.
If good luck and misfortune happen, it doesn't lie in sorrows.
Don't let anything get you down, don't let it get to the clouds.
If we're down, we'll pull through, I hope so, he'll do it again!
Mocka'r and hocka'r and pfnotten and trenzen with the kimt nix außa.
Kopfhängad, grod ols won amt' Heana s Prot häden gfressa:
Töös mochts schlimmi nöd guit, gidanka'r ös Guidi no pessa!
Look at the situation we are in, think about the future!
If you give us something, don't be stingy, take this and that: it's good!
Look, my dear, we realize: a little courtesy is not too much to ask for! —
It's getting more chivalrous, foreign people, it's a saying, a word of honor.
Don't be too proud, don't be afraid of a fool.
Don't open your coat, don't let your luck run out.
There are two weeks below and one above, so give an old one. If no one chips what is also often there, give a groden. Look after your health, health is allways good for the soul. What have we, who have everything in this world, if we are not healthy? Our friends and our comrades in arms! Olli, they may know us – and fools, fools is the best!

Translation:

A lesson from my father for the journey

Ignaz, now listen, what I say to you, your father says to you.
In God's name, because it has to be so, and you should seek your fortune in the wide world,
That is why I have to tell you this, and take to heart what I say to you.
I and your mother are old and have stayed at home; you know that you can't make anything out of that.
You slave away, toil, work hard and weaken yourself with worry. You do this for the sake of your children; what wouldn't you do to keep them from going astray. If you have grown weak and sickly later in life, and hard times come, they will also jump in lovingly, but you can find this in proper, righteous children, helping to provide the things that the state and life demand so that we can have some relief.
If you should ever be lucky, don't live like a cavalier.
Stay as you were, in the golden mean of the middle road, don't stray from the right path in life.
Luck is round like a ball; it rolls away from us just as easily as it comes to us. If something doesn't work out or you experience misfortune, don't talk about it to people. Stay calm; don't let anything show on your face; don't be timid; complain about everything to God only; ask him; I tell you, he makes everything better again! Acting sad, withdrawing, making sour faces, being whiny: none of this achieves anything. |
Hanging your head as if the chickens had eaten your bread:
This does not improve anything bad, let alone make the good even better!
Keep the possessions you take with you; plan for the future a little.
If someone gives you something, accept it without being ungracious and say, “May God reward you!” —
Pay attention, Ignaz; and remember this well: no one has ever been punished for being polite! —
Don't be contrary; being away from home makes people modest; that's a saying and it's true.
Don't be tempted into gambling; don't pay too much attention to the dance floor.
Don't have your cards read; and don't seek your destiny in the dream book.
If two paths go in different directions, and one of them is new, then go the old one.
If one of them is uneven, which is often the case, then go the even one.
Guard your health; of all goods, health is the better one.
Admit it: what in the world do you really possess if you don't have your health?
-----
If you come home one day and no longer find us old people in this little room,
then we will be where your grandfather and grandmother are joyfully awaiting us,
where our benefactors will find us and our deceased relatives. Everyone will recognize us immediately – and this, Ignaz, is a very beautiful thing. Now it says:

From the second song.
How the girl leaves her father's house and gives her father's home sorrow and tears.

Vodar and Muidar said: “Good luck for all we hope for,
We wish you a long life and good health!”
“As you wish,” said Muida and wiped the tears from my eyes,
“If you want respect and honor in this world, that's how we pray."
“People set it up earlier and people later,
I and your dad, we pray, child, that no misfortune befalls you.
Go to your niece and nephew and bring them to the Moata; stop by in Piasenrait, don't stay at the Moam's, you'll find a welcome, see everything beautiful, Naaz, and say hello a lot; When you come, we will be very happy to see you, when you come home!"
The old woman cries and gives him a Guglhupf cake, a soapbox and
, in addition, a white, newly washed cloth.
Hoamlih gives him three more in a paper bag.
The Vada gives him an extra two guilders, more can't be given.
“Money, Naaz, is a piglet that won't be viable at will, Naaz."
The door opens, and Naaz looks around the room,
“Main!” says Muida, ‘that's a terrible thing to say!’
He points to the gun rack hanging just inside the door:
“Gootsnom!” Muida says, makes a cross on his forehead with a damar – and then
-----
“I'm serious, Naaz, now goodbye, take care that all is well, Naaz!
Come on, let's go to the barn, so that we know right away
Where or when or what or said that something has fallen. If you come across the Graanitz, don't take a smudge pot full of ears
Drink from a watered well, it helps for the Hungarian crown!»
Godspeed once more and once more and go out into the world with trepidation.
Hunotmal doesn't ring, they look around and beckon to their father. “Look at your sign,” cries the father of the wide world, ‘it's not valid!” “Go to the Moam,’ cries the old mother, ‘we greet you, don't forget us.’

Narration:
How Ignaz leaves his father's house and his parents see him off.

Father and mother, I bid you farewell and God bless you for all the kindness you have shown me.
I hope with all my heart that you live a long life and stay healthy.
As God wills, says the mother and wipes her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief,
If the Lord calls us from the world, we are prepared for it.
For some people it is given up earlier and for some later.
I and your father pray, Ignaz, that no misfortune befalls you.
We will walk with you for a bit and accompany you to the image of the Mother of God.
Once you are in Piasenrait, stop by at your aunt's. You will be welcomed there.
Tell her all the nice things, Ignaz, and give her our warmest regards.
If she can come, we would be very happy if she visited us.
So speaks the old mother and wraps him a crumpet, a pastry, and also a piece of white bread in a freshly washed 'cloth'. She secretly gives him three shiny new twenties, wrapped in paper. The father gives him a two-guilder piece, more he cannot give. We don't have much money, Ignaz, take what you can with good will.
Before the door opens, Ignaz looks around and takes one last look at the room.
“Oh dear,” says his mother, ‘that's a bad sign, as if you'll never see it again,’
and she dips two fingers into the holy water font hanging next to the door.
In God's name, says the mother, and makes a cross on his forehead with his thumb – and they leave. Now it's getting serious, Ignaz, now God keep you, be well, Ignaz, Let us hear from you from time to time so that we always know how you are doing or if you are sick. When you come to Graanitz, take a handful of earth beforehand,
Austrian for: border. Drink it in diluted wine, it helps against fever.
They say goodbye to you, once and again, and part sadly.
A hundred times is not enough for them to look around and wave their hands.
“Mind your ID,” the father calls from afar, ‘don't lose it.” “Go to your aunt,’ the old woman calls, ‘we send her our regards, don't forget that.’

The entire philosophy of the farming community emerges before the friar, and so vividly that one sees how intimately he has grown with it. But he is also connected to something else: to that which is so fundamentally connected to the Austrian character, to the character of the Austro-German peasantry in the Alps: to the direct, unspoilt view of nature that arises from the most direct coexistence with nature. The description of a thunderstorm is owed to what comes to life again in Joseph Misson. It vividly describes how the Naaz now travels and how he comes to a place where heath sheep graze, which a shepherd, called a Holdar there, knows how to observe closely: how they behave when a thunderstorm is coming. Now he tells himself what he sees there:

When a cloud appears in the west and it doesn't come from below, it means a thunderstorm.
“One,” he thinks, ‘is coming, the other is going, now you have to decide which way you're going.’
Get on a donkey and look – now it thunders!
Immediately again – and how it rumbles over the Beringer!
It roars and rushes powerfully into the wood, that it is completely out!
“Oh, where this breaks out, our heaven be gracious!"
Then the Holdar, takes off his hat and ‘if only,’
he looks at the Guirkan, ‘if only it doesn't scare someone!’
“Just as we are,” he says, ‘two thunderstorms are coming together.’ (This convergence of two thunderstorms is now vividly described.)
And the dog sticks its snout up in the air and sniffs the air.
He points to a swallow, which flies quietly to the barn and drinks.
Then it is quiet and sultry and the air thickens.
The birds fall asleep in the nests and the sheep bow their heads.

Reproduction:
How Ignaz gets caught in the weather and doesn't know whether to

Listen, he says to himself, sit down for a moment and think about which way you will go.
He goes to the heath and looks around – suddenly there is a clap of thunder,
followed by another, and how it rumbles over the mountains!
It creaks and hisses mightily in the wood, as if it were completely dead. Well, may the Lord have mercy on anyone this happens to, says the lad to himself, taking off his coat, saying, looking at the clouds, just hoping it doesn't start raining. It seems to me, he says, like two thunderstorms mixed together. And the dog lifts its muzzle to sniff the air, then, sensing no danger, draws its tail between its legs, goes over to the lad and lies down beside him. Now it is quiet and sultry, and the leaves tremble in the trees, the birds sleep in their nests, and the sheep put their heads together.

The good Naaz is aware of all this, and then the poet, who has meanwhile described how the Naaz entered “a Lucka” - a rock cave, a stone cave - waits there until the worst is over. Then he hangs his boots on the other shoulder and continues on his way. But the adventure with the weather is not over yet. Naaz comes to a little stream; which has of course swelled due to the weather. Naaz sees that:

"Look, the stream is so big, now I can't go around! —
Töös owa», sockt a, «wiat toh wos sain? iozt kan ik nid umi!»
He looks like a fool, the stream is too big, now he cannot cross it.
But something like that, he says, what could it be? Now I cannot cross it!

Now, in such a way, Misson, this man who really created from the depths of the folk tradition, wanted to embody the figure of Naaz. When one takes on such a figure, one sees how deeply, deeply in the subconscious soul, I could say, Austrian nationality sits with those souls who have also worked their way up into a high sphere of education. And one sees from such an example what remains of nationality for the soul in the higher sphere of education when one looks at this Austrian nationality.

One must say: mystics, in the sense that the human soul really delves into its inner life, really tries to understand what lives and moves within man, such mystics are not really found in Austria. Mystics who deal a lot with the human ego cannot flourish there. On the other hand, to feel the mysterious forces of nature in a certain way, more than just poetically, I would say, to feel the gnomes, the goblins, the spirits of nature in their liveliness, also with a certain humor, so that at the right moment you do not feel compelled to admit the full reality, but to feel in the co-experience of nature that which lives and moves in nature as a higher spiritual being – that is Austrian again. Therefore, within the Austro-German national character, it is not easy to find mystics who could be successors of Eckhart, Johannes Tauler.

On the other hand, the remarkable peasant philosopher Conrad Deubler is a truly Austrian figure. He was born in 1814 in Goisern, in the middle of the mountains, and died there in 1884 as an innkeeper. He was and remained a true farmer; but a man who so he has grasped it vividly, has penetrated it with his peasant wisdom, with a certain, I would say, curt peasant wisdom, — Conrad Deubler, such a philosopher could flourish; a philosopher who did not get involved in lengthy justifications, but liked this doctrine, and now he took from the Austrian mind everything to make this teaching appear plausible. From a primitive, elementary, rustic understanding he brought about, I might say, a Darwinian conception adapted to the Austrian peasant, by means of which he was able to carry on a copious correspondence with the great theologian and writer David Friedrich Strauss, with Feuerbach, with Ernst Haeckel, and so on. To grasp the whole expanse of nature with the intellect is more to the taste of the Austrian soul than to mystically immerse oneself in it. Therefore, one finds individual people among Austrian farmers who know every little herb in the mountains, who are also spiritually connected to the inner workings of each little herb, who, for example, engage with philosophers such as Ennemoser and Eckartshausen, who want to give a certain deeper picture of nature in its entirety, and who also want to place the human being in this picture of nature. But within this Austrian peasantry and that which arises from this peasantry, one will not easily find a pure mystic who engages in the contemplation of the human soul, averting his gaze from the external world of the senses. For it is the direct connection with that which makes an impression on the senses that characterizes the Austrian mind in the broadest sense for anyone who sees it – the seeing of more than the sensual, but the direct seeing – the seeing that does not need to reflect, that seeing that, I might say, sometimes skips the mind and goes directly to the heart.

Therefore, it can be said that in Austrian poetry, the soul and the landscape resonate with each other directly, sometimes in a way that is so moving, as in the case of Lena; but in general, this absorption of the whole soul in what can be done directly by a person, what can be accomplished by him without it being related to immediate usefulness, - that is something that belongs to the emotional qualities of the Austrian.

I would like to say, on the one hand, on this side of the Leitha, in the Austrian mountains, in the Austrian regions, there is something that can be depicted in a picture, as I attempted with Joseph Misson. On the other side of the Leitha, you are immediately in touch with the wide-open spaces of the Hungarian steppes; but you also live with what resounds in the sensual, I would say, spiritually, which the sensual tries to exhaust spiritually as much as it can be exhausted. Anyone who has ever crossed over to Hungary and listened to a Hungarian band, with all that these people put of their souls into their simple and wonderful playing, in which pain rages demonically, the lust and the exuberance of life at the same time, understands a poem like that of the Hungarian Szäz, which refers to this direct coexistence with the sensual, but which is felt spiritually, deeply spiritually and emotionally:

Listen, oh listen to the violin's song.
How it laments and how it weeps;
So much sorrow in four strings,
So much pain and grief combined!

Like the nightingales' flutes
In the silent, shadowy forest,
How the sobs of the abandoned orphan

That is lament, that is sorrow,
Which oppresses and yet uplifts,
Which weeps for the past, yet hopefully
Lives for a beautiful future.

Listen, a curse is heard – and swords
Mix clashing into the But a little fiddle bow.

Hear, oh hear the violin sounds,
How it spurs and laughs and cries,
In four strings such feeling,
So much joy and pain combined! —

You have to look very closely to understand the relevant things, you have to look very closely at the intimate interweaving of the senses with the outside world, so that the senses, in their interweaving with the outside world within the sensual, can more easily see the spiritual than when this spiritual awakens intellectually in the mind. It can be said that when it comes to making a judgment directly from the heart, to criticizing or approving the world, the Austrian will, under certain circumstances, have a little confidence in himself. He will also, especially if he has learned something, like to move in abstract terms, he will like to give something to the culture of the head, but above all want to be rooted in the culture of the heart. But the way from the head to the heart, the way from the heart to the head, is just so long, and it is so difficult to find! Often one easily stops in the middle!

It is, in a sense, quite characteristic of what, for example, a good connoisseur of Austrian culture, a contemporary, said about an Austrian personality, the former director of the Burgtheater in Vienna, Max Burckhard: that despite all his energy, the most characteristic thing about this quintessentially Austrian man, Max Burckhard, was that he never really wanted to undergo the transition from feeling to understanding or from understanding to feeling. He wanted to keep them both separate. While Max Burckhard was director of the Vienna Burgtheater, Hermann Bahr recounts, and Wilbrandt's play 'The Master of Palmyra' was to be performed at the Burgtheater, a play that is considered by many to be particularly significant and that for many is something tremendously high-minded, Burckhard did not want to stage the play. He could not understand why something so significant was seen in it; he always rejected it. So it was that well-meaning people, that is, people who meant well by Wilbrandt and the “Master of Palmyra,” managed to at least get Burckhard to attend a lecture on the “Master of Palmyra” in a really high-level society. He knew the piece, of course, but it was not to be read to him, but all the beautiful, aesthetic passages, the treatises were to have an effect on him, which the invited real professors and asthetics had to present about the mastery of this piece. Well, Burckhard was really a very clever man who, when it came down to it, was able to dialectically stand his ground and get into the spiritual ideas. He listened to the lecture. He did not just listen to the lectures of the aesthetes and professors, who said that something had been created “from the depths of human nature that points to the highest regions of spiritual life”. He also listened to how the beautiful characteristics are to be understood according to all chapters of aesthetics. He was silent. He did not allow himself to follow these trains of thought in any way. He could understand them, of course. It would have been easy for him to refute the matter from his point of view, to get involved in it. On another occasion, he might have done so, getting involved in long-winded discussions about the matter. He remained silent, he said nothing. Then ladies, especially the lady of the house, approached him: didn't he at least want to say how he related to all the witty remarks about one of the most witty plays ever written. Was it not the duty of the Burgtheater to perform the epoch-making play? But he did not engage in a discussion. He said: “I'm not putting it on!” And why? Why? They wanted to hear from him, the witty man, how he related to all the things that had been discussed wittily for hours. He just said: “Because it's a Holler!” — “A Holler” is something that means the same in Austria as “quatsch” in Berlin. But he did not engage in a discussion. That is to be taken as characteristic. He relied on his immediate judgment of the heart, on what his mind told him, and he did not find it necessary to engage in discussions of dialectics and so on; his whole criticism was that it is a “Holler”.

And so it is interesting to see, actually, how at a time when the most wonderful and glorious discussions were being held within the rest of the German-speaking world about the significance, nature and essence of drama, discussions in which Goethe and Schiller participated in such a profound way – I am referring in particular to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century – how in this period a discussion of aesthetics, of the meaning and essence of drama, was also ignited in Austria. But how was the discussion of drama ignited there in Austria? In a very strange way, everything that was presented there for and against this way of thinking ignited in Austria; what was discussed in such a well-known profound way within the Schiller-Goethe circle and the broader circles of the whole of German intellectual life, all of this ignited in Austria in a very peculiar way, namely through dance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two types of dance were the subject of a very energetic and significant discussion there. At the turn of the century, Noverre was the master of dance; and his student was then Muzzarelli. Muzzarelli represented a dance, a style of dance, in which the main thing was to make beautiful movements, artificial movements, to intertwine artificial movements through their lines, where the external spatial image of presenting oneself was taken into account. Now, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an opponent of this 'dance form' emerged in the person of Salvatore Vigano. And for this dance form of Salvatore Vigano, whose wife in particular danced the dance form he represented in a masterly fashion, whole texts were written, which did not apply to any other dance form. Whole stories, whole narratives were clothed in the dance form, so that the situations, the gestures, the form of expression, the events, the content to be told, were expressed. And now one should just delve into the far-reaching, passion-stirring discussions that have arisen about which dance is artistically the right one.

There was the Austrian playwright Ayrenhoff, who had already grown old at the time, the author of a large number of plays, who was completely on the side of the Muzzarelli dance, who spoke out most negatively against Salvatore Vigano and against the impossibility of expressing inner feelings through dance in such an unchaste way. Ayrenhoff could not understand that they even wanted to dance entire pieces, such as 'Richard the Lionheart' or 'The Daughter of the Air'. Ayrenhoff had been educated in the appreciation of beautiful form, of the sweep of lines, and his dramas were also constructed in this way. The sweep of lines in the portrayal of characters, seeing how some situation dissolves into a joke, or the transition of a situation into a joke, that was what mattered. These extraordinary forms were what mattered. He saw this in Muzzarelli's dance as well. And he was an important poet for Austria at that time. His importance can be seen from the fact that he received extraordinary recognition from Frederick the Great, who otherwise had no interest in German literature of the time. And “The Stagecoach”, a comedy by Ayrenhoff, Frederick the Great called “the best comedy that is written at all except the comedies of Moliere”. Yes, Frederick the Great went so far as to once show himself at a parade of the field marshal lieutenant - because that was Ayrenhoff and at the same time a poet - because he, Frederick the Great, was so interested in him.

On the other side, on Viganos' side, was Heinrich Joseph von Collin, who came from Belgium; but in a sense, Belgium belonged to Austria at that time. He had written the tragedy “Regulus,” but also other plays. Collin now advocated expression in dance with great enthusiasm. And he now staged his dramas in such a way that they expressed inwardness in what was being portrayed; that it was not so much about the way situations and jokes followed one another, about the external forms, but rather that the inner nature of the human being was expressed in what happened on stage. And Robert Zimmermann, who is deeply rooted in Austrian intellectual life, has spoken very beautifully of this Heinrich Collin, showing that this Heinrich Collin, who is basically also completely forgotten in Austria, but who But who can lead us deep into the course of Austrian intellectual life, who knew nothing of Fichte, and in his dramas revived the same kind of soul-feeling that lay in Fichte's philosophical representations. To make matters worse, Heinrich Collin's brother, Matthäus von Collin, has explicitly shown how Heinrich Collin knew nothing of Fichte, how he arrived at Fichteanism, but in a poetic way, in his Austrian way, entirely out of a strange parallelism of intellectual life, in the way that I have just described.

Without reflecting on the intuition, without merging into the intuition, Fichte comes back to what I described eight days ago. He says: The outer sense world, that which man lives out in the sensual, outer existence, is the sensualized material of our duty. Now that duty confronts him in such a deeply objective way and at the same time becomes related to the divine weaving and being that permeates the world, Fichte comes to say: one must not think in such a way that external sensual happiness could be bestowed on the one who faithfully fulfills his duty, but — even if this is somewhat one-sided, in the way it is presented, the energy of a certain striving of German idealism expresses itself in it; things must not be taken dogmatically – but what Fichte says is: the one who is completely absorbed in his duty must not claim that the reward for it will somehow be found in the external world of the senses. Therefore, the truly tragic – and this was Fichte's conviction – will appear when duty does not find any reward, but rather finds misfortune in the external world.

Heinrich Collin presents the same tendency in his plays. He wants to embody in a dramatic way the human soul that is built upon itself, that can live within itself without combining the happiness of the sensual world with duty. And so a deeply ethical trait emerges, but one that is intimately connected with the direct contemplation of the world as it presents itself to the senses; one that has even emerged from an aesthetics that has been formed through dance.

This close connection with observation, this life in direct perception and also the placing of what the heart experiences in direct perception, the reluctance to seek the way from the head to the heart, must be seen as one of the characteristics that are really deeply connected with this Austrian intellectual life.

And so many things in this Austrian spiritual life appear to us in such a way that contradictions are present in it, but contradictions that, if one lets them take effect in the right way, seem understandable in people who, within Europe, are placed in difficult tasks, in the mediation of the West with the East, and, I would like to say, must feel this placing in every detail of their way of life.

One can say: Wherever we touch this Austrian intellectual life, it appears to us as follows: the innermost is directly fanned in the outer world, without the mediation of a mystical dialectic. And from this underground, a phenomenon as likeable as the Austrian philosopher Bartholomäus von Carneri can be explained – as I said, I only want to present images. He was born in Trento in 1821, the son of an Austrian civil servant; deformed from birth (he was a twin), he already went through a difficult, painful youth, and then, after he had familiarized himself with the diversity of Austrian intellectual life, he became acquainted with Darwinism. For Carneri, Darwinism is not something that he simply accepts, but rather, for him, Darwinism becomes a life riddle itself. That the world, in the sense of Darwinism, can be explained by the externally observable development, is understandable to him, despite the fact that he has immersed himself deeply in German idealism. But in a certain respect, Darwinism becomes a life riddle for Carneri, the Austrian philosopher: If Darwinism is correct, what about human morality, human ethics? And so Bartholomew of Carneri becomes, one might say, the greatest ethicist, the greatest moral teacher of Darwinism. He interprets Darwinism in such a way that he seeks within the purely natural development, how the forces of nature complicate up to man, so that he still sees a spiritualization in this complication of the forces of nature, as they configure themselves. He does not want a rift between nature and spirit, but he does not want to stop at nature. He wants to chase the spirit out of itself in the configuration of the forces of nature. At the same time, he wants to find the connection between human ethics and human moral life and the explanation of nature in terms of Darwinism. Thus, for Carneri, the necessity to create an ethic arises directly from the world that appears vivid to him through Darwinism. I would like to say that what the human heart wants and needs to set before itself must be directly connected to the secrets and mysteries of nature. And it is particularly interesting to see in Bartholomäus von Carneri how he now strives for a unified world view, for a world view that fully embraces Darwinism in the spirit of the times, in the spirit of nineteenth-century materialism, but can only embrace it if if spirituality springs and can spring everywhere in nature itself, but a spirituality that is grasped directly in feeling, that is not first brought down from some transcendental spheres, as with Fichte, but that appears to him directly during the experience of sensuality. It is remarkable how the characteristic of Austrianism appears precisely in such a personality, in a personality like Carneri, who, however, also wants to place himself uniformly in the world in a different way, who everywhere sets out to show how, on the one hand, nature reaches up to the spirit, and on the other hand, the spirit works down to nature, how a unity lives in everything. Carneri also sought to depict this unity in life. He sought to bring it into life. And so one of the personalities arises, who appeared in particular in the 1860s and 1870s in Austria as fine minds, one of the personalities who were then also politically active. Carneri was on the side of the intellectual Austrian politicians of the 1870s, Plener, Beer, Herbst, Berger and so on. But wherever he spoke – and he often spoke – his words were imbued with a lofty idealism, but precisely with an idealism rooted in Darwinism, which was aware of its roots in Darwinism: I may be an idealist because my ideals come to me directly when I immerse myself in the development of nature.

It is the same spirit, in another field, that then again held sway in Robert Hamerling. In Robert Hamerling, in whom, I might say, the Austrian German found expression in the fact that Hamerling's motto was: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland,” which combined good Austrian-ness with good German-ness. In this Hamerling everything that can be called the interpenetration of idealism with direct feeling and with intuition found direct expression. Even in Austria, where people might have been better able to understand it, Hamerling's vividly sensual images, I would say sensually imbued images, were often condemned, for example in his “Ahasver,” also in “Aspasia” and in “King of Sion.” But they did not understand that it was precisely Hamerling's idealism, which I would call Austrian idealism, that needed the sensory image to visualize itself in, so as not to suffer from the division of the world into the sensual on the other. And so for Hamerling the spiritualized sensual, the aesthetic idealism, became the goal toward which he directed his whole feeling, his whole perception and his whole thinking as a vision of the future. And in many respects it is precisely in the case of such intellectuals as Carneri and Hamerling that the difficulties of Austrian intellectual life come to light, difficulties which consist in the fact that one is placed in a multiform surging mass of humanity and has to find one's way. Hence the phenomena that so often occur within Austrian intellectual life, where a clear view of this or that remains with mere description and does not somehow find its way into action and then peter out in a certain pessimism. Hence certain phenomena are only possible in Austrian intellectual life.

Is it not really somewhat strange that there was an Austrian in the first half of the nineteenth century who was born near Znaim, who bore the typically Austrian name Karl Postl, who also became a clergyman at his mother's request, but then, like the Barnabite monk Karl Leonhard Reinhold, also cast off the robe of the order and disappeared? He has disappeared. Then a book appears: “Austria as it Is,” from America; it describes Austrian views. That was in 1828. Then, from this same Karl Postl, who called himself not Karl Postl but Charles Sealsfield, appear, for example, descriptions of the decline of the Native Americans, from which one can see how fundamentally sound this man's direct view of nature is. No one at that time had any idea that the simple Karl Postl from Austria was hidden in this Charles Sealsfield. All the stories that otherwise appear on similar subjects – just see for yourself – are written, so to speak, from the point of view of a certain education, written in a certain way, so that you notice the theory. These Postl stories are written in such a way that the eye immediately grows into what it sees; the whole soul grows together with direct perception. He then spends his lifetime from the age of thirty to the age of sixty in the canton of Solothurn in Switzerland, where he is also buried. He returns and describes the life of Germans in America in such a vivid way that it should still have a significant effect on the soul today, if only it were read.

A specifically Austrian phenomenon is also a personality, whom not only the younger, but perhaps the older members of the audience gathered here have met, those books that are written, as is modestly stated on the title page, “for maidens”; “Weihgeschenk für Jungfrauen” it says. A story, a wonderfully vivid story, steeped in a Goethean, one might almost say, Greek spirit. On the title page it says: “Weihgeschenk für Jungfrauen” by Christian Oeser, “Letters on the Main Subjects of Aesthetics.” Published in the first half of the nineteenth century in the first edition, these books experienced many editions. Those who read them today still get something from them that can expand the heart, that can warm the soul. Christian Oeser - yes, who is Christian Oeser? This Christian Oeser is the same man who, for example, had a drama published in Pressburg in 1839 that nobody knew the author of – “Life and Deeds of Emerich Tököly” “by A. Z.”, that is, from A to Z, so that all the letters between A and Z are included. Those who understood something about dramatic characterization saw in the figure of Tököly a Hungarian Götz. It is a portrayal that can be directly compared to Goethe's “Götz von Berlichingen”, which was born out of the struggles that took place in Hungary shortly before the drama was written and that moved many, many souls and the world. The drama went out into the world, and so did several others by the same author. No one knew who it was from. That remained so. In 1869, the German Schiller Foundation took a decision to pay the then support allowance to a Mrs. Therese Schröer in Vienna. The document with which the allowance was paid stated that it had been learned that the widow of one of the most worthy German writers was not living in circumstances befitting her and his merits, and that she was therefore being paid this annual allowance. It was the widow of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, the author of many plays, who had to remain unnamed, the author also of that “Weihgeschenkes für Jungfrauen”, which is imbued with the spirit of Goethe; a quiet man who was a secondary school teacher in Preßburg, but who, as such, wrestled with the highest problems of human life, who was poor and whom no one knew. Even in his own town no one could or might know that this man was the author of these dramas.

Many similar phenomena could be cited. They show that in order to get to know Austrian intellectual life, one must not consider it in terms of what, I mean, goes as a more or less Catholic, as a more or less Protestant current through the development of the times but how one must grasp this Austrian intellectual life where it works out of the root of the people and where it can appear directly in its great significance. One must not look at Austrian intellectual life through the lens of the fact that Austria is a more Catholic country. On the one hand, this Austrian intellectual life works its way to the roots of the nation, as we have seen with Misson; on the other hand, however, it works its way up to great heights in a remarkable way. Consider, for example, the following phenomena: When the Protestant pedagogue Friedrich Dittes, who was brought from Germany during the so-called Liberal Era of Austrian development and placed at the head of the K.K. When the Protestant pedagogue, who had been brought from Germany during the so-called Liberal Era of Austrian development, looked around for important pedagogues of the immediate past, he, the Protestant pedagogue who had been brought from Germany, found the Austrian Vincenz Eduard Milde to be one of the most important pedagogues of the immediate past. In 1811, Milde published an “educational theory”. In Misson, we have come to know a mind that, clothed in the robes of a religious order, worked its way up to what I would call the management of educational life, and then worked its way back down to the roots of folklore, creating his “Naaz”: peasant philosophy! In Milde we see another priest, a good Catholic; a Catholic in whom Friedrich Dittes, the Protestant pedagogue, finds one of his most important pedagogical predecessors. Spiritual life reaches out across the differences of confession in a wonderful way. Instead of a long further description, I would like to read you just one passage from Milde's theory of education, so that you can see how, in this book, published in 1811, educational work is understood in a soul-drenched way; how, in contrast to on, who worked his way down into the people, to the highest views, the most ideal views of general human activity through pedagogy, the Catholic priest Milde works his way up, how seriously, how dignified, how tremendously deep he takes the pedagogical profession. He describes how the teacher should behave in order to gain the right relationship with the pupil; first:

"1. Through diligent study of anthropology; 2. through reading well-written biographies and truthfully portrayed educational histories; 3. through thoughtful interaction with children, through unnoticed, quiet observation of them, especially of their behavior towards other children; 4. by remembering his own youth, by reflecting on the course, the reasons, the means and obstacles his own education, on the difference between his present and former way of thinking and feeling; 5. by reflecting on the success and failure of his efforts in educating the pupil; 6. by observing the methods of other educators and the success of their way of treating the children”; - finally - ‘7. by observing the course of development of nature left to itself.’

The meaning of life should be built on a healthy anthropology, that is, the study of man. Then the teacher should constantly consult with himself, as it were, meditating, in order to always find the way to the child's soul. A truly soul-filled educational vision is also poured out on this quite remarkable work, which arose, so to speak, in the quiet of Austrian intellectual life through a man who was a clergyman in the outer life, who rose to become Archbishop of Vienna and who, in his way, truly represents that Austrian intellectual life to which one attaches such great importance and to which one must attach such great importance; that Austrian intellectual life that is directed towards the general human and basically maintains the connection with the roots of the people everywhere. Yes, I say, in 1811 a leading work on education appeared in Austria that had a great impact and was also highly praised by the Protestant pedagogue Dittes in the 1860s and 1870s. It was published again very recently by the Austrian pedagogue Franz Tomberger in a short outline. One must only consider what that means. In 1811, it had only been a short time since teachers in very, very remote areas of the Austrian lands, namely the German-Austrian lands, had a very strange position, not only in the village but also in the city. Not only did the teacher not have a school building – in many areas, shortly before this “Erziehungslehre” was published, a school building was a rarity; the students gathered around the teacher, the teacher went from house to house, sometimes he was there, sometimes in the next house; wherever there was space, he taught. But that was not the only thing. For example, paying the teacher a salary, yes, that would not have been understood; that is something that must be given freely! But the teacher only needed to teach the students in winter; in summer, the children were needed outside in the fields anyway. Well, so that he doesn't starve, he is granted the right to herd cows during the summer, to be a “Holdar”. But that did not prevent all that I have just described from happening. And that did not prevent a work on the art of education from appearing after such a relatively short time in Austrian intellectual life that it was not only exemplary but also epoch-making. One has to familiarize oneself with this juxtaposition of contradictions that arise from the difficulties of Austrian life.

But this is also why the Austrian needs what appeared in the most diverse forms in Viennese life in the course of the nineteenth century. Actually, a piece of Viennese life is also what you were able to get to know here in Berlin some time ago, although it had been quite “de-Viennified” to a certain extent, as connoisseurs generally admitted – what you were able to get to know through the performance of “Alpenkönig und Menschenfeind” by Ferdinand Raimund, with the character of Rappelkopf, and, what is also well known from the same author, “Verschwender”. I do not want to speak of a well-known matter, but rather show how Austrian intellectual life can be illustrated here and there, as it were, by the splashing of a wave that makes visible in pictures what lives in Austria. Therefore, I want to speak less about Ferdinand Raimund than about the man who replaced him in the hearts of the Viennese in the 1830s and 1840s, when Raimund had become very much a part of their lives: Nestroy. And Johann Nestroy, as a folk dramatist, is, I would say, truly an Austrian product. Indeed, one has even had to hear from some clever people of the present day that Nestroy is even characterized by his fellow countrymen as not being a real Viennese, because in the early days of his career, in particular, he only told the Viennese rough truths, not only created folk plays where honest people are always right, but where he could really, forgive the harsh expression, give the people a piece of his mind. Plays like these made up the content of his first theatrical career. He actually created a great deal; in thirteen years, he wrote around seventy such farces. But they truly contain that Austrian spirit that those who know it recognize as being truly embodied in Nestroy. It is not true that the Austrians of that time wanted to hear honest portrayals of characters from the theater, of people who recognize the simplicity of life. No, that was then and Nestroy grew out of it – what was demanded was that one could say: Now he has given them what for again, that is, he has really given them a telling-off. And with such a scolding, Nestroy, himself playing at the Vienna Karl Theater, actually entertained the Viennese so much that one can say: one sees in the spirit that lives in these Nestroy folk farces, one might say folk city farces, the Austrian spirit that needs to, in the criticism of life as well as in the jokes about life, in the humor of life, to overcome many a difficulty; who needed to let his soul feel at ease after hard work in a light way, and yet in a way that was not entirely free of sympathy and antipathy. And so Nestroy is truly a typical figure of Austrian urban popular theater around the mid-nineteenth century. He had his view of life and of the events of life expressed by a character in the following manner: “I believe the worst of everyone, even of myself, and I have seldom been mistaken!” With this view of life, he, who was personally kind and loving, and who in personal dealings actually had only kind and loving words, really created character figures that easily illustrate the view of life of the Austrians in Vienna at that time , that Austrianness that wanted to be hard at work, but that wanted to build a philosophy of life from the heart, without much dialectic, that also had to have humor, that also should not exaggerate the seriousness of life too much. There was a lot in the way of facing life. So Nestroy created a character that kept reappearing under this name or under a different name; once he called him “Schnofer!” And this Schnoferl also had an attitude towards life. For example, he once talks about how he fared in life with love: “With love, things went splendidly for me, it was all right, but with dislike, things are always bad!” This same Schnoferl, who, as I said, cannot see the funny side of life, once said about what he saw in his own heart: “The pragmatic story of my heart falls into three miserable chapters: futile musings, failed attempts and worthless triumphs.” Those are the three miserable chapters. Nestroy portrayed such characters with great acuity, so much so that an important Viennese critic once said: “In Nestroy, you could see the demonic expression that could intensify to the point of being devilish when he let his eyes play from the stage into the audience.” And so Nestroy expressed well a certain Austrian view of life in need of humor in the years before 1848, or even from the beginning of the forties.

Then came a time when one could not bear this outpouring of good and evil, this Nestroyan world beyond good and evil, of good, over-good and evil people, for a while. One wanted more honest figures, one wanted to be moved more and sworn at less. One had had enough of swearing for a while, one wanted to be moved. Nestroy didn't really like that, and so he said: Yes, in the past people still knew something about what a life story is; in modern times, if you go by those who now create life stories for the stage, if there are only three jokes in it - in Nestroy's plays there was one joke after another - there are only corpses in their blood, gravediggers and blubberers. He didn't really want to go along with that. But then again, he was able to keep up with the times. And so Nestroy found a peculiar, I would even say humanly free point of view, especially during the difficult year of 1848. He was a liberal man, he was a man who was thoroughly on the side of the progressives, who did not depend on anyone in any direction, but at the same time he found the right words for many a cry for freedom, for those who only go so far. And so he managed to maintain Austrian humor even in these difficult times. Just look at this: in a play that was written during one of Austria's most difficult times, “Freedom in Krähwinkel” – he also played in this play himself – this Austrian describes how the mayor of Krähwinkel imagines freedom. He has the constable Klaus express it: “Freedom is something terrible. The Lord Mayor always says: the ruler is the father, the subject is a little child, and freedom is a sharp knife.” And one of those who, in a Nestroyesque way, understands this a little, who also understands the people of Krähwinkel in their pursuit of freedom, characterizes them in the same way: ”No, I know the people of Krähwinkel. I know the Krähwinkler, you just have to let them run riot; once the rapture is over, we'll catch them with our hand in it, and then we'll really tweak the people's nose.” In the role that Nestroy himself played, to which he gave the name ‘Ultra’, a freedom fighter now appears who is really portrayed in such a way that humor can once again take hold of him. Nestroy spoke the following through the Ultra: “Now that the fight that had broken out has ended happily, he proclaims freedom: 'I proclaim freedom of speech, of the press and other freedoms for Crowwinkel, indifference of all classes, free speech, free elections according to previous opinion, an infinitely broad basis, which will gradually extend in length, and in order to avoid all disputes in this matter, no system at all.” Then Ultra comes – one must always imagine him as presented by Nestroy himself – to an opinion about what reaction actually is. What is reaction? “Well,” says Ultra, ‘as it was on a large scale, so we have had it here on a small scale. Reaction is a spectre, but spectres only exist for the timid: so don't be afraid of it, then there will be no reaction at all.’

But in Nestroy's personality itself there is something like a thoroughly correct placing of his own personality in life. A person like Nestroy was thoroughly a personality who was accessible to the depths of the soul. But what he created, he wanted to create from direct life and for direct life. And so Nestroy is not at all inclined to reflect on the ego. Once, he came into contact with the profound, inestimably esteemed poet Friedrich Hebbel, the great poet Hebbel. But Hebbel and Nestroy were like the north and south poles. Friedrich Hebbel, outwardly impeccable in his suit, correct in every gesture, Nestroy naughty in every gesture, with a rustic suit that he wore with particular dignity! Now Nestroy became acquainted with a play like “Judith and Holofernes”, a play in which Hebbel has actually exhausted the infinite depths of the human soul and embodied them in dramatic form so that one must say: It is truly a wonderful struggle with the existential problems of life, reaching the heights of the human spirit, but not for Nestroy, one might be tempted to say, because it cannot be readily and directly taken humorously. But he took it humorously, precisely as a taunt, saying, “No, that's nothing!” He also thought, “That's a nonstarter!” I'll do a Holofernes now, Judith and Holofernes, that must be the right thing; that's not something that Hebbel did.” But now he wanted to create a character in Holofernes who was so completely turned inward, to his human ego. Nestroy was very good at creating a character who acted entirely out of the abundance of the soul's will and wanted something. But he only wanted into this ego in a genuinely Austrian way, so to speak. Yes, not through speculation, not through dialectics, not even through dramatic dialectics! So he presents himself as a figure of Holofernes, full of ego, full of the power of personality, so strong that he wants to see who is stronger, “I” – or, as he said – “I or I!” – so that he feels doubly. So he wants to wrestle with himself, so that he sees who is stronger, I or I. That becomes Nestroy's Holofernes. But he knows how to position himself in life just right. And when he hears that people say that he denies a purely artistic principle with his plays that are directly inspired by folklore, well, he says that he will not allow such an accusation, because people should consider what it actually means to write folk plays. Anyone who writes popular plays and even wants to compare himself to Goethe is just like someone who makes a Zwetschkenkrampus and wants to act as a rival to Canova. A Zwetschkenkrampus is a figure made out of dried plums on St. Nicholas' Day to look like a clown or Santa Claus.

We also need to be thoroughly familiar with this side of Austrian identity. Because it is deeply, deeply interwoven with what the Austrian soul seeks in a certain view of life, which I would characterize in the following way: Because of the difficulties of his life, the Austrian feels the need to rest in a view of life that makes one forget the seriousness of life and yet, in turn, brings strength in the subconscious soul to be prepared for life. Nestroy is certainly deeper than those who took over from him at the end of the nineteenth century. You cannot compare Nestroy's farces with those of Berg, who certainly wrote more in the same period, but had sunk to a much lower level. But this peculiar view of life, which in turn goes back to a general human one, is part of the overall shaping of this Austrian's soul. And this view of life also shows that in Austria something comes from much deeper human sources and shapes the life of the soul than all that which is usually conceived of as ideas that draw together human development. One must not think of the Austrian as being wrapped up in this or that prejudice, but to get to know him, one must consider Austrian national character. |

I have only been able to present it to your minds in a few images today; I have not really chosen them with the aim of making the Austrian lovable, but simply to describe him as he is. I did not want to summarize anything special, but only to show individual traits, of course very individual lost traits, but which can nevertheless illustrate this or that, illustrate above all how a special note, a special tone, lives in this Austrian character, over the whole of this Austrian culture, from such figures as I have described to you today, to the Magyar Emmerich Madách, the man who created the well-known “Tragedy of Man”. Out of a life of suffering, and truly out of a life of suffering, Madách rose to create a form of human philosophy that suited him. He shows the creation of man, Adam and Eve. He shows how Adam and Eve are placed in the world by the divine creator, perceiving this world as a mystery. Now Lucifer shows them what will follow. Adam is shown how he will live again, how he will return in Egyptian times, how he will live as an Egyptian, as a pharaoh; how Eve will be his slave. The Egyptian culture with all that it can trigger in the soul of the re-embodied Adam is presented by the poet. And further, we are led into the Roman period; Adam is reborn in the time of the Roman Empire. In the time of Christianity, in turn, in the time of the Franco-English culture, in the time of the German culture; at the end of the earth time, he is placed in an embodiment. The whole of human life is led past him.

As one can see, there are many paths that lead up from the depths of joy and suffering that can arise in the Austrian soul, up to the peaks of human world and life views. And it is a special note that one must say: It is precisely through the contemplation of this special note, this special 'tone in Austrian folklore that it already corresponds to an inner necessity that, for example, the German-Austrians were separated for a time from the general German intellectual life. It was precisely through this separation that they developed their innermost selves properly, that they emphasized what was truly their own in the right way. But such a separation does not destroy what connects the peoples. And what we see today, this interaction of the two Central European empires into a great overall concept of Central Europe, into an overall being of Central Europe, is firmly anchored in both the inhabitants of the one and the inhabitants of the other empire, if one looks straight into the depths of the soul. This can be seen in the depths of the national character, for example, where the will of Austria is realized, and again in the heights of Austrian achievement. When, as it seemed, a deep rift had opened up in 1866 between the hearts of the great German Empire and the hearts of the best Austrians, there was not a mood at the height of humanity after that year 1866 that cried out for revenge. There was not a mood that was later in other places, after a people had been defeated, where it was said that one must always and again and again bring the thought of revenge to life in one's soul. No, but an 'Address was delivered to the throne immediately after 1866 in Austria, which contained the words; 'It is not the secret thought of retaliation that guides our steps; a nobler satisfaction is granted to us if we succeed more and more in transforming disfavor and enmity into respect and affection through what we achieve and what we create.

These words also express the bond between the Austrian and German hearts that has been so beautifully realized today. That bond, which is expressed so beautifully in a poem by von Hamerling that truly springs from the Austrian soul: Germany is my fatherland, but in Austria I feel my motherland. I feel a sense of belonging to my mother country. This sense of belonging was so vividly experienced that it can be expressed in a few words that originated in Austria. These are strange words, perhaps not in a completely satisfactory form, but they are words that may be read aloud, especially in our time. I will say afterwards in which period these words were written. In a poem entitled “Austria and Germany” it says:

Let Russia and England prudently confer,
Perhaps not even unhappily find it,
If we here engage in a little battle,
If they try to take away our just rights!

You, German brothers, will not advise here –
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And among us every ambition will fade
Before the: One people in word and deed.

And if one among us has failed,
If discord has existed anywhere in German hearts,
There is only one thing that now inspires us:

What we have in common, our joys and our sorrows!
So let us also have in common:
A German war, if not a German peace!

They could be words written in our time. But they were written in April 1859 by the son of that Tobias Gottfried Schröer I mentioned, by Karl Julius Schröer, who worked in Vienna, having come from Zisleithania, in Austria. He worked in a way that can be said to have been suitable for, on the one hand, connecting the soul with what lives and weaves in the people and, on the other hand, carrying the souls up to the heights of spiritual life – Karl Julius Schröer, who first developed a beneficial activity as director of the Viennese Protestant schools and then as professor of German literature at the Technical University. I myself feel — please excuse this personal remark — deeply connected with this activity, because Karl Julius Schröer was once my dear teacher. This Karl Julius Schröer, on the one hand, he carried his popular research into the really deep foundations of folklore. First of all, he had Christmas plays printed that were performed among the farmers during the Christmas season but that had emerged from the people themselves. Then he was a dialect researcher, a researcher who studied the peculiarities of the Austrian dialect in the Gottschee region in Carniola, among the Germans of Spiš in Slovakia, among the so-called Heanz in western Hungary, who also researched the dialect of Lower Austria and everywhere pointed out the close connection between all Austrian intellectual life and its roots in the folk tradition; and who, on the other hand, carried the soul up to the heights of Goethe's world view through research into Faust, and in this sense again had a beneficial effect on his students. In 1859 this man expressed Austria's unity with Germany in this way. I have quoted his words to show how the Austrian national character leads to that beautiful and glorious ideal towards which we must strive today and which must develop out of the great demands and devoted deeds of our time: a Central Europe in which everything that has long been working together in our hearts will finally be united. And especially by considering the special tone that prevails in Austrian nationality and Austrian intellectual life, one can say that what should be achieved there in separation will be able to combine with the wider Germanic character in a more intimate way for the benefit and blessing of Central European development. And so we see, I would say, even if we look with an understanding of the essence of nationality at what is developing out of blood and suffering and pain in our time as a future ideal for Central Europe, we see that something is developing that must be created by the devoted and courageous deeds of arms, but which is firmly rooted, so firmly rooted that the guarantee of its durability can be seen in the hearts and souls of those who are drawing closer together and have joined forces for common action.

In conclusion, let me say: what is now coming together historically is not only coming together through external necessity, it is coming together through the inner bonds of the souls, the hearts of the peoples of Central Europe.

Anyone who regards spiritual science, as it is meant here and as I have been allowed to present it here for years, as something that is very far removed from ordinary human nature, in the ordinary life of man, something strangely remote, alien, and, as it were, otherworldly; who sees in spiritual research something that can only be acquired through special, extraordinary gifts, not accessible to ordinary human nature. In contrast to this, it has been emphasized time and again: spiritual science wants to be nothing more than the genuine continuation of the natural scientific world view for the spiritual realm, insofar as this has found its methods in more recent times, which, in relation to the research of material, external sensory phenomena, has led to previously unimagined results and successes. The difficulty in understanding the whole attitude and intention of spiritual science lies in the fact that, from the point of view of the present-day world-view attitude, it is difficult for man to realize that this spiritual science basically wants nothing more than to inner human thought and other soul experiences in a similar way, through purely inward processes, as certain external manipulations, certain external actions are refined and developed in the scientific experiment. Just as the scientific experiment, through which nature is to be coaxed into revealing its secrets, is basically nothing more than a refinement, in a certain sense an elevation, if I may use the word, of activities that are otherwise also carried out with external material things, which are only carried out in a certain, let us say, methodical sense, so that through their combination nature reveals its secrets to the human soul. Just as the scientific experiment is nothing more than a continuation, so to speak, of the external activity of man, so too is spiritual scientific research nothing more than a continuation, let us say, a refinement of what the human soul accomplishes in the ordinary course of life and in ordinary science in terms of thinking and other soul activities. The first difficulty is that the path from one to the other is not always sought in the way I indicated here eight days ago.

The other difficulty is that, when it comes to the results of natural science, people accept much more than they realize, and what is presented to them, if they find it plausible according to their common sense, even if they do not apply the methods themselves and cannot carry out the experiments in the laboratory or in the clinic. There is no desire to seek everything out directly, but to accept with common sense what the researcher has to give, who has familiarized himself with the methods. In relation to spiritual science, the researcher has no choice but to follow the same procedure as in natural science. He gives of himself in the same way, out of the same line of thought, that which he now researches so objectively through intimate inner soul processes, as the secrets of nature are researched through experiments. And he also counts on the fact that approval will come through common sense, which speaks for what the inner experiment, as I expressed myself eight days ago, has to give. Now, however, in the face of the results of spiritual science, in the face of the secrets of the course of development, of the destinies of the human soul, there exists in all men the desire not only to accept the results of research, but also to more or less investigate for themselves that which they are supposed to consider correct in this field. The paths that the soul can take in every human being, and which are indicated, for example, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, do indeed offer every human soul the opportunity to convince itself and to verify within itself what the spiritual researcher has to say, by experiencing these intimate, inner processes in the soul. But these paths must be taken. And although many people repeatedly take this path, the subjective difficulty arises for the human soul that these paths are not easy, but are found to be difficult by the human soul, so that it loses patience after the first steps, or at least does not have the inclination to take them with the same conscientiousness with which the natural scientist prepares an experiment. And in all this a certain faith speaks in the human soul, a faith that is a prejudice compared to real spiritual research; but in human life it is prejudices that decide in most cases. Faith arises that the human soul, just as it is, if it only reflects a little, if it only develops a little those habits of thought, experiences and lives out those mental processes that are so immediately given in life, then it must come to realize what the secrets of inner human nature are. One has the feeling that it should not be difficult to recognize the most mysterious thing in the world, in the outer world, the human being himself, in his essence. One has this feeling that it should not be difficult. In order to recognize the inner workings of a piece of clockwork, one allows oneself to study the things. In the face of the most complicated, the most mysterious thing in the world of the senses that surrounds us, human nature, one would really like to believe that everyone can recognize the full truth about the nature of man without first preparing for a certain point of view, without first going through an inner journey of the soul in order to recognize one's own nature. One might think that it would be quite good, comfortable, perhaps even beautiful, if it were so, if one needed no preparation at all to explore the human being. But in contrast to this, one can only say: It is just not so, but to explore the human being in his innermost nature, the paths of spiritual research are needed. That is a truth. And whether or how the human being comes to terms with it is not considered in the face of this truth. Man must first acquire the means through a preparatory path, through which he can reveal his own secret.

And yet, the starting points are by no means a secret. The lecture eight days ago was already able to show this, and today I would like to return to the fundamentals with a few words. Every human being thinks in life, develops his thinking further, when he dedicates it to scientific use. Thinking and imagining is an everyday inner activity of the soul. The only thing that matters now is to face this thinking in such a way as one does not face it in ordinary life and in ordinary science, in order to explore the ways of the spiritual. In ordinary life and in ordinary science, people form images, concepts and ideas in order to use them to depict something external. And he is satisfied when he forms something external in his ideas. He rightly calls this the truth for ordinary life and for ordinary science, that he can form ideas that depict an external reality for him, visualize it inwardly, and allow him to relive it inwardly. Now it has been pointed out that where this ordinary thinking of everyday life and also the thinking of ordinary science ends, only that which is necessary for the exploration of the spiritual life of man begins. That is to say, the thinking, the same thinking that is used in everyday life, has to be experienced inwardly and strengthened inwardly in a different way than it is experienced and strengthened in ordinary life and within ordinary science. As I have indicated, it is strengthened by that inner process which, so to speak – the word should not be misunderstood – represents the inner, intimate, purely mental experiment, which at least initiates it through the process that one calls real meditation – if it did not sound pedantic, one could say 'in the technical sense of the word'. In this case, thinking is done in order to strengthen thinking inwardly, to experience the process of thinking. We do not usually experience it. We believe we experience it in ordinary life or in ordinary science. We do not experience it there. We have it, we handle it, we apply this thinking; but the soul is directed towards the outside world, towards something real besides thinking. The point is to be able to pay attention to thinking itself. But to do that, it must be intensified. That is to say, it must be driven in the way it is driven in the sense of meditation, in that one sets thinking in motion, not in order to visualize something external, not to revive something external inwardly, to depict it, but to experience inwardly only this process, this process of thinking, and to look at it in the experience. That is what matters. And for this it is necessary not to abandon oneself to the soul processes of ordinary life, but through inner arbitrariness, out of complete free will (I am here giving the fundamental principles; the details can be found in my book, How to Know Higher Worlds) — easily comprehensible images are introduced into the thinking, images that can be relied upon not to conjure up all manner of inner reminiscences and obscure the clear experience of the process; ideally symbolic images that are not intended to represent anything external, that are not meant to serve to visualize something external but only to set thinking in motion and in motion and thereby to strengthen inwardly, so that one does not merely practice this thinking but experiences it inwardly, that one now really experiences oneself as an inward thinker, just as one otherwise experiences oneself inwardly in one's muscle feeling.

If one pursues the development of the soul in this way on one side, one arrives, as I have described, at a certain point that represents a significant, even a shattering inner experience. And I will once again characterize how this experience makes one relate to human nature in a completely different way than one usually does in life. It is completely in agreement with the scientific way of thinking, even taking it to its furthest conclusions, and with the spiritual-scientific view. Within the ordinary thinking that one does as a person embodied in the sense world, one needs an organ for this thinking. And not only that, but every time we think, there must first take place an inner process that cannot be incorporated into thinking, or even into consciousness, but must precede it. Thinking can only take place when it has been prepared internally, by the organs. So that every time one thinks, two things happen: a process of which one is unaware, which first prepares the organism, the outer body, so that those processes take place which then come to consciousness as a thought, as an idea. By meditating, by concentrating all the powers of the soul on a particular idea, as it were, by concentrating them, holding them in the thought, not allowing the flow of thought to flow as it does in ordinary life, but holding the thought in, that is, stopping the thought, and now thinking not to depict something external, but to sense one's inner thinking, to sense the process of thinking — by accomplishing this, one notices inwardly: what one has actually done so far as thinking, how one has engaged in thinking, that ceases. One does not emerge from a clear conception of consciousness, one does not enter into a nebulous state; but this thinking, which is carried forward in its flow by the process of the outer world, ceases as such. One enters into an inner experience that initially brings one much more together with oneself, that leads one into the process that is pre-thought, that first prepares our body so that we can unfold thinking. You come down below the thinking. This cannot be proved in any other way than by direct experience. The thinking that one has in ordinary life seems like a river flowing towards the sea. Now you know: now you are in a deeper layer of being, now you are in the process that you cannot experience in ordinary life because it must precede thinking.

This process, however, if it is continued with patience, persistence and energy, as indicated eight days ago, leads far; it takes less time for some people, for some people years, although the individual exercise should not be exaggerated. This inner experience leads to experiencing what lies in thinking, not just thinking about it. This means experiencing thinking not as it reflects something external, but as it is formed within the human being, how it first takes hold of the organism and is shaped within the human being. At first, one does not know what this inner experience actually means. One feels, so to speak, as if one were coming down from the ordinary soul life at this or that point into a world that one has not known before. But then one first becomes acquainted with the significant result of what lies as a living force in thinking and what preceded the formation of our physical body, and preceded above all everything in human experience that one remembers back to in later life, all the way to birth, to conception and further back. That is to say, one learns to recognize oneself as a spiritual being who does not live in us in order to use the organism as an organ for perceiving the external world, but as a spiritual being who, before our birth, or, let us say, before conception, shaped that which, from the human spirit, from the human soul, must be shaped on the human body. One learns experientially to recognize what is formed from that trinity, which results from father and mother, but also from what lies beyond the line of inheritance and comes down from the spiritual world to connect with what is given through the line of inheritance. For this, it is only necessary to deepen the process of thinking, to inwardly strengthen the process of thinking. One can be led — of course not by ordinary thinking — to the intuition — for it must be an intuition — of that which has preceded our birth or our conception, which comes down from the spiritual world to connect with the physical body, which is given by the current of inheritance, in the physical world. Anyone who demands proof of this would first have to familiarize themselves with the nature of all ordinary proof. Facts cannot be proved at all. Just imagine that no one had ever seen a whale. No one would ever be able to prove from any zoological knowledge that a whale exists. There is no way to lead from any concepts and ideas to reality if the process of concepts and ideas is meant to be as it happens in ordinary life. And so, on the one hand, it leads us out of the world in which we live between birth and death and into the world from which we came when we entered our physical embodiment and into which we pass when we go through the gate of “death.” Thus the path that leads out of this sensual world into the spiritual world on the one hand, leads through a special inner development, a special inner handling of thought. And here it must be said that although spiritual science in its whole attitude, in its whole position to the world, really works out of the spirit of the natural-scientific attitude, there still arises that difference from ordinary natural science, which is conditioned by the fact that natural science is directed towards the outer world and that spiritual science wants to do the same for the world of the spirit that natural science wants to do for the outer world. In spite of the complete harmony, a difference – not an opposition, but a difference – emerges, which could be characterized from many sides, but for our purposes today it can be characterized in the following way: For ordinary life and ordinary science, what we accomplish in thinking is the final result, that which we want to arrive at. By working in thought in outer reality, we arrive precisely at that which we want from outer reality. All the activities that we apply to the knowledge of the outer world and of life in this outer world, insofar as they are soul activities, are only preparation for the spiritual-scientific path. In outer science, in the outer world, one thinks in order to arrive at the result of thinking. But this thinking, as practised in the outer world, only prepares the soul so that, through this thinking, the soul comes to a point of inner experience where it encounters the spiritual world. So everything that outer life can give us in terms of thinking, thinking power and the results of outer science is used differently in spiritual science than in ordinary life and ordinary science. It is used in such a way that it only forms the thinking, the thinking side of the human spirit and soul to a certain point. What is the result in ordinary life, in ordinary science, is a living preparation for spiritual science. And what then emerges as fact, as I have just described in the most elementary way, does not come during the effort. The inner effort is only to lead the soul to a certain point. There one still remains basically in the area of ordinary life, as long as one makes an inner effort, as long as one is in meditation. Only then, when one has just carried out the effort, when one has now let it have an effect on the soul and then again suppresses and quietly waits, the spiritual scientific results come. They can only appear as spiritual facts, for the vision of which one has prepared oneself by creating the inner spiritual eye. Just as nature produces the eye in the human organism, so that it may look out upon the outer world and receive light and colors, so man, through all his thinking and all the inner efforts of his soul, works toward meeting that which is to and must come to him from the other side. Inner revelation, inner approach to the soul must be what confronts one as a fact of the spiritual world. That is one side.

On the other hand, one can say that it is just as intimate an inner experience of the will as that which I have described was an inner experience of thinking. In ordinary life, one performs actions that arise from impulses of will, from wishes and desires. But one does not pay attention to the fact that there is something special in this will. That there is something special in the will of man comes to one when one withdraws from life, even if only for minutes, in meditation, and looks at how one has willed; when one inwardly directs the soul not to a willing that passes into the outer action, but to an inward beholding of the willing. Incidentally, anyone who performs their thought meditation in the right way will automatically come to this inner contemplation of the will. For meditation, in so far as it is also just a placing-in-the-middle-of-consciousness of a thought, is at the same time an intimate summoning of an inner volitional process. One experiences the volition in such a way that one is inwardly together with it. Through the intensification, through the strengthening of that which has already been called meditation for the previous soul experience, it follows quite naturally that one learns to direct one's attention to the inner process of willing in such a way as one never directs it when the willing simply passes over into outer action, because there one directs one's attention to what one wills in the outer sense world. But one must direct one's attention to a volitional process, insofar as the essence of this volitional process takes place within the soul. It must again be a very intimate process. And it is precisely this volition that one recognizes best of all in the meditation process itself, if one really experiences the meditation process only inwardly. And then it turns out that by doing this again and again with inner perseverance and energy, one finally comes to a point where one discovers an inner observer within oneself. It is difficult to express this, because it is so far removed from ordinary thought habits that it seems as if one is speaking of something terribly fantastic, whereas one is speaking of a reality that one really comes upon. Thus one discovers an inner man in oneself, who continually looks at what is going on in our volitions, in our whole volition, an observer of whom one is unaware in ordinary life because one does not direct one's attention to him. Not a thought, but a real being is constantly watching us and is in our will. Just as we relate to the things of external perception with our thoughts, so something in us relates to our will. What color and sound are for the senses and for the consciousness that perceives the external world, that is our will for an inner observer. There is an inner observer in us, for whom we provide the material for observation in our decisions of will and in our executions of will, just as colors and sounds provide the material for observation for us in the outer world.

It is difficult to talk about these things because one believes one is talking about something imagined, whereas one is talking about something that, when the soul has prepared itself, comes to meet it again. This higher consciousness is now such that one really goes through the most harrowing experience in the soul: one comes out of everything in which one is connected with the ordinary life of the soul, as if by an inner leap, and is able to put oneself in the place of this observer, even if only for a moment, I would say. There are enough of these moments. One feels towards one's whole human being, as he stands in ordinary life, now in the same way as one usually feels with this ordinary human being towards the things, the colored and sounding things of outer nature. If one carries this experience further, then at a certain point in one's inner experience one realizes what it means to unfold inner soul activity that does not make use of the bodily organ, but stands face to face with this outer physicality as the ordinary person stands with the table or the chair or any other external object. To experience one's soul life outside of the body, that is what one can experience. And then one knows what life looks like when one passes through the gate of death, when one lives free of the body, even when the physical body is destroyed. It is an inwardly vibrant soul life that then passes over into the spiritual world in order to live through the spiritual world and to take the forces from the spiritual world from now on. One gets to know these forces in their uniqueness, which are gradually the preparation for the soul being to descend to a new earthly embodiment after passing through the life between death and new birth.

Starting from what is present in the will of man, from what is present in thinking, in imagining, thus starting from the ordinary man, one arrives at the results of spiritual science. And these results of spiritual science are not something that the spiritual researcher has for himself. It is the greatest error to believe that the spiritual researcher creates anything new in the soul in relation to what is already there. Truly, just as little as the natural scientist creates anything when he studies nature, but only listens to its secrets, so the spiritual scientist creates nothing in relation to the inner life of the soul. He can only approach what is prenatal, what lives on after death, what the eternal powers of the human soul are, what the human spirit and human soul are.

Here again, I would say, a half or sometimes even completely selfish prejudice interferes with what the spiritual researcher actually wants to say. People say: the spiritual researcher can do something that other people cannot – and then they transfer this to his human value, they transfer this to his significance as a human being. But he has nothing in him that is different from what every ordinary person has in him. Because what he discovers as prenatal is always in human nature, and it does not become different for him just because he acquires knowledge of it. What goes out through the gate of death is present in the spiritual researcher as it is present in every human being. And the knowledge that the spiritual researcher acquires is no more real to the soul and spiritual existence of man than the knowledge of natural science is to the external world of nature. It would even be good if in literature dealing with such subjects certain words were not taken so literally that one inwardly, so to speak, scatters incense, as it were, and inwardly experiences something very special in one's feelings. Often, someone who can see into the spiritual world is called an initiate. But when the word 'initiate' is spoken, it is associated with something as if one were now dealing with a very special person. This should be avoided, but one should take things as they are to be taken in accordance with the descriptions just given. And the spiritual researcher himself is convinced: only the prejudices mentioned at the beginning prevent his results from being accepted just as they are by common sense, as the results of the chemist, the physicist and so on are accepted. For in principle there is no difference.

By developing thinking in the way it has been described, one comes to enter the spiritual world on one side. One encounters the prenatal life, the life of the human soul in the spiritual world, and from there one has a view of the spiritual world itself with its spiritual beings. This comes to one in such a way that one has a vivid picture of it. But one must realize that this vision differs from the perceptions, the sensations, the feelings one has in relation to the external sense world. Anyone who thinks that this beholding can be achieved by him in such a way that it is, as it were, only a foggy repetition of the beholding of the sense world, is completely mistaken. On the contrary, one must be clear about the fact that everything that makes the sense world just that is due to the fact that we behold it with our organs. Such colors as are in the outer sense world can only be perceived by an eye, such tones as are in the outer world can only be heard by a sense-perceptive ear. Nevertheless, one can speak of beholding, of spiritual beholding. One can speak of a soul eye, of a spirit eye, when one approaches the spiritual world from this side, to use Goethe's words, 'spirit eye'. The only difference between this kind of beholding and other forms of seeing is that in true clairvoyance one is always aware that one is evoking the vision oneself. Just as one is aware when writing that one is presenting as reality that which one has seen. But in this self-evocation, one follows an inner reality, a spiritual reality, just as one does not scribble something arbitrary when writing, but expresses an inner reality, albeit an inner reality that belongs to the outer world. This much more active, ever-present inner cooperation with the act of observation is precisely what distinguishes this – I now say: true – inner clairvoyance from the external sense perception that is given to us passively, that approaches us when we hold out the eye to it. But we also only acquire this ability to trace the spiritual world in a spiritual way when we have prepared ourselves so that the spiritual world comes to meet us as a result. Out of this experience the soul then draws the vision, and it has the need to do so because it corresponds to an inner urge to have that which otherwise lives and weaves as an experience, but is not yet reality, as a real picture before it.

And if you go to the other side, if you leave the world of the senses through the will, as has been described, and come to the inner observer who really accompanies you, but who is not observed because attention is withdrawn from him in ordinary life, then one feels: There is always someone within you who is watching you, who in turn expresses what you want, where you direct your intentions, what belongs to your sphere of desire, of will. But this watching now presents itself in such a way that one feels inwardly complicit with this spectator, this higher human being in the human being, this spiritual human being in the physical human being. One feels how he participates, how his doing is in everything, in everything. I called this inner participation an observer because it helps one to understand him; but he is not an observer in the sense of watching, but in the sense of participating. We feel the human being who passes through the gate of death even now in our body, if we bring ourselves to make him active in us in this way. But then we must call this inner activity, if we have called the other “clairvoyance”, “clairaudience”. “Mental ears”, to use a word from Goethe again, arise in the depths of the soul. One lives, so to speak, in a world of audible, spiritual vibrations, which one knows corresponds to inner reality. One knows that one is directly spiritual essence and can now enter into the “company” — to use this trivial word — of the other spirit beings that are in the spiritual world.

Now, however, when the terms “clairaudience” and “clairvoyance” are used, it must always be pointed out that it is precisely on this point that weighty and, I must even say, justified objections and misunderstandings arise against spiritual science. For with good reason — and I ask you to note that I say with good reason — the words “clairvoyance”, “clairaudience” and so on are widely disregarded and regarded as something that, in any case, does not can lead to a better knowledge of reality than ordinary thinking and imagining, but which, on the contrary, must lead away into all kinds of fantasies, all kinds of daydreams, yes, into a morbid way of thinking that is precisely the opposite of true reality. But here too, spiritual science not only stands on the same ground as natural science, but on the contrary: true spiritual science draws precisely the very utmost conclusions. And what has been characterized here in this context, and for which the words “clairvoyance” and “clairaudience” have been used, which are simply there, has absolutely nothing to do with what is often called that in ordinary life; I would now like to illustrate how this has nothing to do with it, perhaps in a far-fetched way.

By applying our thinking in ordinary life, practicing, practicing, we use our body for our thinking. How much of our body is not needed now. As I said, we will not consider the extent to which the nervous system is the organ of thinking. Now, in the lecture I gave eight days ago, I pointed out that ordinary thinking is connected with the fact that, from the moment we are able to think in life, a process of decomposition actually takes place in us, a process of decomposition in relation to subtle life processes. This is shown by spiritual science. I can only mention this today. I spoke about it in more detail last time, in the lecture eight days ago, but it will be explained in more detail in the following lectures.

Up to the point that one remembers back in life, a process takes place in the human being, and that is first in the prenatal period, before conception, in the purely spiritual world. A process takes place that aims at activities that, so to speak, build up the organism, that lie in the direction of the organism's life. Up to the point in life that we remember, this inner activity of strength, which is the not yet thinking thinking being, thinking power, ceases to build up the human being. From this moment on, it breaks down in man, actually perpetually carrying out destructive processes, which then add up and finally bring about the external physical death of man, which take the body of man away from his soul and his spirit. So that when we examine thinking from a spiritual scientific point of view, we find it bound to a process of disintegration, to a process that, when thinking proceeds as it does in ordinary life, breaks down. The breakdown must then always be replaced by thinking standing still in sleep. But the breakdown process is stronger, more intense, and ultimately slowly causes death, insofar as it is connected with those processes of the organism that are anchored in the organism of thinking. Of course, death is also connected with other processes. Thus, by developing this ordinary everyday thinking, we depend on our organization in such a way that this thinking is actually connected with a destruction of the organism. So what brings us death in the organism is connected with that which is the highest flowering of human inner experience for this world between birth and death.

This is an activity that must now be increased in the process, in the inner soul-searching that has been mentioned. Thinking through meditation and also the development of the will through meditation lead the human being to become independent of his body, to lift himself out of his body and carry out a special soul activity in which he maintains himself knowledgeably outside of his body and independently of his body. The “outside” is not meant so much in a spatial sense as in the sense that the person knows himself to be independent of the physical activity of his body. In the case of what in ordinary life is called clairvoyance, clairaudience and so on, which can intensify to the point of hallucination and illusion, there is now the disastrous superstition that one can thereby gain insights into the world that lie beyond birth and death. But through what is called clairvoyance or clairaudience in ordinary life, one cannot get to any processes or events in the spiritual world that lies beyond birth and death. For ordinary, everyday thinking, we have to destroy something that is a totality in our body, so to speak, and we have to destroy it to the extent that it lies in what we might call normal life activity. We place ourselves with our whole being in the environment and let it degrade by practicing and executing the thinking. In what is usually called clairvoyance or clairaudience, the whole human being is not confronted with the world, but only a part of the world is confronted in a morbid way, so that the human being does not go beyond thinking, but down; not rising into the supersensible, but moving down into the subsensible. Because he seizes less of his organ in this ordinary clairvoyance than in ordinary thinking, in this ordinary clairvoyance, thus because he seizes only a part of his organism, he comes to hallucinations, to illusions, which certainly also point to a reality, but to one that is less real than our ordinary sense reality, which we experience between birth and death. This ordinary clairvoyant with his supersensible clairvoyance, which must either be understood as something that must go below ordinary reality or else be misunderstood and lead to dreaming and fantasizing, to a morbid worldview, this supersensible clairvoyance is based on the fact that one sees less of the world than one perceives through the ordinary conception of the sensory world. One also leaves the world, so to speak, but in a morbid way; one limits oneself to something that lies below the reality of ordinary experience. And this hallucinatory, illusionary clairvoyance is more closely connected to physicality, and now to morbid physicality, than ordinary thinking, feeling and willing.

Therefore, spiritual science takes the view that it is precisely with true clairvoyance, true clairaudience, that all these morbid forces that can lead people to supersensible vision are overcome. What the genuine spiritual researcher develops is not the same as what the morbid person develops when he becomes clairvoyant and has hallucinations, as it is called in ordinary life. It is precisely what overcomes the powers of hallucination in man, what eradicates all powers of hallucination in man, what kills in man all that leads to illusions. One comes to spiritual reality precisely by moving away from that morbid immersion in the lower-sensual, which in ordinary life is called clairvoyance or clairaudience. Therefore, what has been described here, which consists precisely in not diving deeper into one's own organism as in ordinary clairvoyance, but rising above it, becoming independent of it, and thereby seeing and hearing in the spiritual world, is a clairvoyance that, in contrast to ordinary clairvoyance, is an absolutely healing process. It can only be healing, can only lead to an intensification of all illusion-free human experience compared to the experience as it exists in the ordinary world of the senses. While the hallucinator, the illusioner, the one who is often called a clairvoyant in ordinary life, is a fantasist because he goes down into the subsensory, in the one who develops true clairvoyance and true clear hearing , it is only that his healthy view of life is so heightened that there is much less possibility of his being under illusion than in the case of one who merely enters the world with his five senses and his common sense.

This is the source of endless misunderstandings, because time and again what has been described as true clairvoyance is confused with what in trivial life is so often called clairvoyance, clairaudience and so on, but which is due to some defect in the physical organism. One can have such a defect or cause it oneself through all kinds of unnaturalness, in so far as it is also easier and more convenient to achieve what one confuses with what can be achieved through a further development of healthy human perception. It must be expressly emphasized that overcoming the sub-sensible behavior of the soul is precisely what is achieved in the very best way - much healthier than through common sense - precisely through true clairvoyance and true clairaudience.

Thus one can say: spiritual science is an exploration. It is not correct to speak of a further development of the soul, for it is an exploration of the deeper forces that lie in the human soul and in the human spirit, to which one does not direct one's gaze because one has not developed the spiritual ear and spiritual eye, the organ for it, and does not direct one's gaze towards it in ordinary life. It is a seeking out of the eternal forces of the human soul. And if one holds fast to this, then one comes to say the following, which, when expressed in this way, may be surprising, but which is a matter of course for anyone who sees through the actual facts. On the surface, spiritual science, that is, the real knowledge of the human soul and the human spirit, is still something that is regarded by the majority of humanity as a fantasy, as a reverie, as something nonsensical, to which just a few people can devote themselves, who have actually lost their common sense through something. Seen inwardly, seen in accordance with the truth, the spiritual researcher actually has no opponent in the world. And the strange thing about it is that the spiritual researcher asserts nothing other than something that, basically, every person agrees with – with the very slightest exceptions, which in turn are based on particularly peculiar states of mind. With a few exceptions, every person must actually agree with him – they just don't know it, they just believe that they cannot agree with him. That is it! Because anyone who is just aware that they go through the world thinking cannot in reality be more opposed to the spiritual researcher. Because everyone who goes through the world thinking shows that thinking means something in the world; he thereby admits that thinking is a process that takes place above the world of the senses. By thinking, we inwardly experience something that takes place above the world of the senses, that does not belong to the world of the senses, one could perhaps also say that it takes place below the world of the senses. One admits this in the moment when one thinks precisely. One simply does not admit it, and by doing so one is an opponent of spiritual science. One admits it in the moment when one realizes that thinking, even in ordinary life, could not develop an image of the external world if it were in this external world, in the sense world. For if thinking belonged to the sense world, it could no more make an image of the sense world than a flame can make an image of a candle. It is the product of the candle, but the product can never make an image. So anyone who, in this sense, wants to be an opponent of the spirituality of thinking would have to be an opponent of spirituality in general. Because thinking is in itself something above the world of the senses, because it is evoked through inner effort, through an inner soul activity, therefore not just through processes, which take place like the other bodily processes. That simply arises from the fact that one lets this thinking judge about the world of the senses. And by admitting that thinking does not arise out of the sense world, but that it judges the sense world, one already takes the standpoint that thinking as such does not belong to the sense world, that it is something spiritual. If one wanted to take the standpoint that it is not something spiritual, that it arises out of the sense world, then one would have to organize one's opposition quite differently. And only he who says, 'I do not believe that this thinking has any significance beyond the sense world, so I stop thinking,' can truly be an opponent of the spirituality of thinking. I do not inwardly strengthen myself to any thought, but I abandon myself to the sense world; then thinking must come by itself. Anyone who does not abolish thinking can never be an opponent of the spirituality of thinking, if he only really thinks correctly; if he only 'goes' with his thinking to the appropriate conclusions. In fact, in practice, all those who think are of this opinion. For any other opinion is not an opposition to spiritual science, but an opposition to oneself. One asserts something different from what one practices in practice. Anyone who exercises thinking at all thereby acknowledges that thinking is spiritual.

Spiritual science now accomplishes nothing other than to lift this thinking out of abstraction, out of imagery, out of the fact that it merely means something, and that the spiritual researcher thus lives into the process of thinking that thinking becomes an experience for him. And one becomes immersed in this same experience that one otherwise has in thinking, but to which one just does not pay attention, so that one does not realize that it is an experience. At the moment when one no longer takes thinking as in ordinary life, where it means something, depicts something, but takes it as one otherwise lives physically in the body, experiences the process of life - in that moment the spiritual world, spiritual entities, the truly spiritual world, creeps into the experienced thinking, and the other is a self-evident progression.

The spiritual researcher therefore needs to refer to nothing but what every person who practices thinking actually admits. For in what he admits, in the training of thought, the spiritual world is found. In thinking, man is already clairvoyantly immersed in the spiritual world, except that instead of living thinking, he receives thinking that is merely a reflection. Therefore, I can again express the comparison that has already been described many times. When one stands before a mirror image, one experiences oneself inwardly, but one experiences oneself in such a way that the mirror provides the image. Everything is in the mirror, except that it provides the dead image that is not experienced. It is as if one could conjure away the mirror image and now experience the whole pictorially within oneself. This is how it is when, in thinking, one departs from one's pictorial nature, which really relates to the experienced thinking like the reflection, and passes over to the experience of thinking itself. As I said, the spiritual worlds creep into thinking. The I, the deeper I, the spectator living within us, creeps into the inwardly formed world of the will in the manner described.

Again, every person who understands himself is basically a follower of spiritual science, also with regard to this volition. For anyone who does not admit that there is something in the will that is just as inwardly conscious as we are conscious in our ordinary physical thinking, anyone who does not admit that there is another, inward man within man, comes, through consistent thinking, to have to say to himself: If I deny that there is something going on in me that relates to me as my view relates to external nature, if I believe that the mere physical organism carries out my will, then I must draw the logical conclusion: then I no longer have to inwardly summon up a will; then I must no longer believe that I can take a step in life through an inwardly but must lie down and wait until my organism walks around in the world and does what I then need only watch. He, then, who does not so deny the volition that he lies down on the sofa and says: I deny the volition, it is anchored in the physical organism, — he believes in this inner spectator. And the next step is only a further development of this conviction, attained directly through true, healthy, inner contemplation, that this spectator is there. Hence the spiritual researcher comes to the realization: I do not really have opponents in reality. People are only ever opponents of themselves. In theory, through their misunderstood concepts, they do not admit what they admit in practice by living. The spiritual researcher simply expresses what lies in every human being's natural world view. And so one will understand more and more that the spiritual researcher expresses nothing other than what people actually unconsciously live as their tangible world view between the lines of life in their ordinary natural life, even if they do not express it out of misunderstanding. This will be understood more and more, especially in the face of spiritual science. Then spiritual science will no longer appear as something strange, but as the self-evident explanation and as the self-evident spiritualization that one needs for life.

And so, as spiritual researchers, we come out of the human nature that stands in ordinary life and is active in ordinary science in two ways. We come out on the side of clairvoyance, in the true sense of the word, as it has been presented; on the other side, in the direction of clairaudience, where one enters into one's own observer, who then lives with other spiritual beings in the spiritual world, which man enters when he has passed through the gate of death. But there one comes into an immediate inner mobility, into an activity; there everything is just as active as everything here is passive.

If we now look at ordinary life, at the ordinary inner experiences of the soul, we must say that these inner experiences of man are such that, without his knowing it, the objects of clairvoyance and clairaudience are continually within him, that these objects are continually active in his ordinary mental life. What enters from the spiritual world remains active in us by going through conception and birth. This is what man, when he notices it, calls more the spiritual in his soul life. But that which passes through the gate of death, which lies in the will, so that it is like an inner spectator, that is what man, when he has it not in connection with the whole macrocosm but in the ordinary experience of the soul, calls more the soul in him. And the spiritual and soul aspects in all their diversity and variety ultimately lead back to these two aspects of human nature. The spirit always lies in what we develop on the side of thinking. One becomes ingenious — if the word may now be used only in a technical sense — without going the paths of the spiritual researcher, which may still remain in the unconscious, by developing one's thinking to ever greater inner mobility, to ever greater inventiveness, so that thoughts flow more abundantly and are more related to what belongs together in the sequence of ideas that one can have. Through this spiritualization, in which that lives which can be found in its true essence through the above-mentioned path of thinking and meditation, through this spiritual life in the human soul, one learns in life – but now practically, not theoretically – that which can be called knowledge of human nature. One learns what guides one to place the human being in the right way into the world. One learns what reveals the connections of the world before one's own soul. One thereby distances oneself in a certain way, by developing the spirit, from what expresses itself as a physical human being. Through the development of one's spiritual self, one approaches that which was primarily active when we entered the world of the senses. In a sense, then, by becoming spiritual, one distances oneself from what is directly experienced in the world of the senses. This is why, by becoming spiritual, one enters into a certain cool atmosphere. But by surveying the wise connections of the world, which reveal themselves to the inner soul, one can go far in this direction. One can gather a lot in the world, feel what the other does not feel, be able to express a lot about world connections, also invent things that are then translated into reality from the world connections. One can go far in this way. The whole process is such that the world, I would say, becomes more luminous, that it becomes transparent to us. It is the process of becoming spiritual, of the spirit rising within the human being like a preliminary stage, like a preliminary stage not yet imbued with true clairvoyance, of entering into the world from which we have come through conception or through birth.

One does not become soulful, but one becomes full of soul. The soul, as it develops, lies in the deepening of inner experience. Those who deepen their soul life do not yet arrive at the clairaudient experience of their inner observer, but this observer works in them in a particularly strong and intense way, so that their inner soul life becomes more real than it would otherwise be. He becomes soulful. As a result, he learns less from life about human nature and about a comprehensive, enlightened view of world affairs and of man's connection to world conditions. But he does become more real in his inner experience. The soul becomes more intense, it is inwardly strengthened. What lives in the will, one might say, vibrates and surges in the will during life, pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, which surge up and down and are basically connected internally with the will nature of the human being – this could be proved strictly psychologically, but there is no time for that – is experienced in a more intense way when the human being grows stronger within himself in this way. Not only what is present in him as pleasure and pain, what inner feelings arise from him, is experienced more intensely, but precisely through this strengthening of the soul, he can extend his pleasure and pain to that which is pleasure and pain, joy and pain, happiness and misery in other beings around him. This is connected with the soul-filled. But this in turn is connected with what passes through the gate of death as the essence of the individual personality, what is taken along through the gate of death by connecting in the way described eight days ago with what is now the spirit and what is achieved through meditation in thinking.

In this way one becomes strong in love by strengthening the soul. One becomes light in spirit by strengthening the spirit. But by strengthening the spirit, one alienates oneself, on the other hand, from the connection with the inner reality of the body, with the reality that places one in the sense world, in the way I have described. Therefore, one must not become hostile to reality in a false way, because otherwise one could very easily become unrealistic with this removal in the direction of the spiritual, with the abandonment of corporeality. One could lose the connection that living thinking has with reality, even if it is not consciously realized, but only unconsciously experienced, as is the case in ordinary life. Then, through a digression of the spirit, one would come to the point where thoughts spin out of one another, but where one no longer lives so intensely in these thoughts that one has the connection with reality. One then enters into a mental process in which one can think, but one loses the connection with reality. One becomes a doubter, a skeptic. And if this increases to a certain degree, one can go through all the torments of skepticism, one can only consider what takes place in thinking as sophistry. One becomes a skeptic who does not draw his spiritual nourishment from the source of reality.

And by straying, as it were, to the other side, to that process which strengthens the will internally, which expands the circle of the internal experience of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain beyond that which is within oneself, it may be that this inner self-nature is still so strong that it does not let go of that which is strengthening itself. Then it may be that while the person is indeed living with the environment, his empathy, his co-experiencing with the environment strengthens his selfishness. And it may even be that the compassion, the shared experience, hides behind the mask of selfishness, that the looking at the pain and suffering actually only becomes a shared experience through what it does to oneself, while the real compassion consists in spreading one's own self over what the other is experiencing. Thus it may be, to put it in extreme terms, that the unpleasant, the uncomfortable that pain causes us, is then experienced in a completely selfish way when the inner self does not release the strengthened soul life.

But that is why love is rooted in the strengthened soul life. And the human soul is that which bears the source of love within itself just as that which is spirit bears the source of knowledge of the world within itself. Spirit opens up and reveals to us the light that illuminates the world for us; soul ignites within us that which connects us with every being, with the innermost being of every being, that which allows us to live directly as human beings among other human beings, and that which allows us to live at all among other human beings. Love is the fundamental element of the soul. Light in the spiritual world is the fundamental element of the spirit. Anyone who really wants to go the spiritual research path, even if it is only a short way – for if one goes even a short way one can see for oneself – will see that what the spiritual researcher asserts is true.

Therefore, anyone who follows the path of spiritual research must above all ensure that what he develops as spirit does not lack the foundation of soul life. The spirit can only distance itself from the reality of one's own personality and thus from the grasp of world reality if love does not prevail in the soul. If love reigns in the soul, if the soul is permeated and energized by the element of love, then it is strong enough to hold the spirit, no matter to what heights of light it may rise. And again, if a person does not disdain to seek wisdom in the world, wisdom-filled connections – not wisdom that is identical with cleverness, but humble wisdom that prevails in the world – if he wants to realize this wisdom in himself and not just grasp it with his mind, not merely with abstraction, but allows it to submerge into the loving soul; when everything that is wisdom, light, is warmed through by what arises in the soul, which places man in life as a lover of humanity, and on the other hand, when wisdom, the spirit, makes him a judge of character, then, in turn, this is suitable to lead man away from egoism and to really carry love up into that which he, by adding knowledge to love, can experience as an overview of the world: the spirit that is rooted in the loving soul, warm soul love that allows itself to be illuminated by the spirit, that is an ideal of humanity.

And basically, everyone admits that this is the ideal of humanity, as it has been carried out. The opponents of spiritual science are only there because of misunderstandings. So that one can also say in a particular case: the spiritual scientist is really in complete agreement with what people say, yes, often with what they say against spiritual science. When, for example, Leonard Nelson wrote a very spirited essay in the September issue of the 'Neuer Merkur' about the present-day tasks in relation to philosophy, it seems as if everything that Nelson, who is one of the most brilliant people of the present day, expresses there could be characterized as opposition to spiritual science. The counter-check would be that the spiritual researcher has no need to say no to anything this man says. On the one hand, Leonard Nelson shows how man degenerates when he cultivates only the intellect; how he thereby enters into an abstraction that cannot lead him to any truly life-filled philosophy. In a much more consistent and higher sense, this must be admitted by the spiritual researcher who seeks the agony of skepticism, of doubt, which becomes suffering, when the spirit wants to develop in a one-sided way, without the root of soul love. Nelson only points to thinking and knows nothing about the fact that when this same thinking is experienced, a completely different world creeps into it, a world that is much richer in content than the sensual world and that remains closed to him. One completely agrees with what he positively asserts. He just does not allow himself to agree with himself, he misunderstands himself. Likewise, one can agree with him when he says on the other hand: When man now delves into his own nature, broods within himself, a false mysticism comes to light, man enters into a nebulous inner dreaming. He does not want to be anchored only through thinking; he believes that he is closer to the basis of the world precisely through feeling. In truth, it is only a subjective thing that is achieved there. The spiritual researcher is in complete agreement with what is said in a positive way. But the author of the essay, on the other hand, does not know that one discovers something completely new if one only goes the right way. He does not understand himself and basically only refutes himself by having a different view from the one he, if I may use the paradoxical expression, asserts as a view and practically exercises. What he does is completely in line with spiritual science. Basically, the spiritual researcher is not opposed to what people really mean; and they are only opponents because they misunderstand each other and thus misunderstand him, talk at cross purposes.

This can also be seen when a person, who believes that he must have a different worldview from that of spiritual science, and that precisely because of the certain results of natural science, lets himself go and replaces what he is only deluding himself about with what lives in him in a natural way. Yesterday I spoke about a thinker, and from what I said you will have gathered that I have the highest regard for this thinker. He is the Austrian philosopher Bartholomäus von Carneri. I respect Carneri because he, with such a strong spirit, tried to develop an ethic, a moral teaching, out of Darwinism. But he stands on ground that produces thoughts which naturally oppose what spiritual science says, because he himself does not understand, because he presents things that contradict what he asserts. Let us assume that such a man lets himself go and inwardly lives what he only thinks out in a way that is misleading to himself. Let us assume that such a man comes to a moment when he abandons himself to life and not to his crooked thinking. Let us assume that he would surrender to life in an elementary way and speak from inner strength, the same strength that had led him to his warped thinking. We can observe this in Carneri. Carneri had actually been born a cripple, with a warped spine, had grown up in great agony and had become a very old man. Life was truly agony for him. He could only write with his left hand, his right hand had been completely paralyzed throughout his life, and the same applied to the whole of the right side of his body, which was unusable in certain respects. In addition, there were the constant breathing disorders associated with such an organism. And yet, the man was standing on solid Darwinian ground and at the same time sought to found a world view for ethics that disregards what is misunderstood as dualism. After all, one could also claim that water is only one unit. But water is not a unit because it consists of hydrogen and oxygen. You are not really breaking with tradition when you speak of body, soul and spirit, but Carneri believed that. We can take him at his word.

I will give you an example from real life that may be dismissed as laughable by many who are accustomed to contemporary philosophical thinking. But it really does show how Carneri, the man who conjures up ethics out of materialism, who actually denies the independent powers of the human soul in theory, becomes his own opponent at a moment when he is forced to speak from the depths of his soul, becomes his own opponent and speaks for a moment as if he were the best supporter of a doctrine that recognizes the independence of the mind and soul of man, as I have presented it today. Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, a friend of Carneri, recounts how she once visited him when he had already reached a ripe old age, after he had had another attack that really showed how the discomforts of life can turn it into a torture. She said to him: “How have you been able to bear it all these years, keeping that smile, that kindness and joy of living?” Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, the Austrian poet, not only said it, but she “cried out in agony” when this person found it so difficult to breathe and had an attack of suffocation. Then she continues:

"Slowly he raised his head, which had sunk low on his chest, wiped the sweat from his forehead and cheeks with his trembling left hand, breathed deeply and looked at me with a look that was again all sun and willpower. ‘How –’ he smiled. 'But don't you understand that in my daily struggle with such a beast, I wanted to remain a human being, I had to remain a human being? I –' he smiled again, 'had my ambitions. Should' – he pointed to his still-twitching body – 'should be stronger than me? Should be able to rob me day after day? To make me loathe all the joy and beauty of life? Would I be a man if I did not remain the stronger? So it began and so it will end!.. ."

Marie Eugenie delle Grazie continues: “Outside it was spring. A blossoming apple tree swayed in front of the open bay window. Sucking in the bright, patient eyes of its beauty, Carneri spoke softly: ”How many trees do you think are blooming now, even though the worm is inside and on them? Should I be weaker or more foolish? Even nature, insofar as it does not think, does it like me. And the straight ones. Only one thing matters: how long you can do it. But that is strength. And we have so many words for what strength is. Should I think about which one is the right one?"

And he often did that. But his thinking did not keep pace with that inner attitude which emphasizes the strength of the soul in those moments when he felt that he was the victor over the mere externals of bodily life.

The materialistic view believes that when one has a human being before him as a physical creature, certain processes take place in his body, and these processes result in thinking, feeling and willing. The spiritual researcher does not seek to refute this view. It is precisely the peculiarity of his position that his relationship to the other sciences cannot be one of refutation. Rather, he is in a position to admit that everything is indeed quite correct: that every thought that expresses itself corresponds to a brain process. Something is happening in the brain!

The highest ideal of natural science will be to show what the organic process of thinking is. But what is the relationship between this organic process and thinking? I can only express it comparatively now, but it could be presented in detail. However, it will be understood quite well precisely through a comparison. When a person walks along a road and the road has a somewhat soft surface, so that every step is imprinted, the traces can be seen afterwards. Someone could come and say: Yes, there are certain impressions in the earth – I now investigate the forces in the earth that form these impressions from within the earth, that have caused the path to be formed in such a way. Someone who only looks at the earth and forgets that a person has walked over it might believe that. This is precisely how one proceeds when seeking the causes of thinking in the brain and in the actual processes that take place in it and accompany thinking. Just as the footprints did not come from inside the earth, so too what can be found in the brain does not come from inside the person, but is imprinted in it by the living soul, just like the footsteps in the ground. And just as the one who wants to derive the footsteps from the forces of the earth itself and not from the person who has stepped them in thinks wrongly, so too the one who believes that he can derive from the inner processes of the nervous system what takes place in the brain during the course of thinking under these nervous processes thinks wrongly. These are the traces that this living soul imprints. This living soul is not seen within, but it works and lives within. And it cannot be found through external research, but its paths, its destinies, its life can only be found through those processes that are purely inner soul processes and that have been spoken of today as the paths by which one finds the human soul and human spirit!

In conclusion, I would like to summarize in a few words what I have tried to express as the characteristic of the human spirit, which is effective above all in bringing in forces from the whole world, but not just forces, like the external forces of nature, but forces that are now truly forces of the inner human being and inwardly spiritualize what is given through the stream of inheritance. But it is the soul that lives and expresses itself in the fact that it can be found as an inner spectator, or perhaps better said, as a spiritual listener in the will. Thus soul and spirit permeate the human being. But soul and spirit are also involved in the way the human being relates not only to the temporal but also to the eternal worlds. And from what has been said, it is clear that the spirit leads up to those luminous heights where we can see through the world and see it in its connection with man himself, where the soul strengthens man inwardly, where the soul is the source of what human love is, what human knowledge is. The spirit is something that can be viewed under the symbol of light, but precisely of the inner light. Soul is something that can be viewed under the symbol of inner warmth, which spreads over all of life and expands the circle in which the soul can experience life, with relish and sorrow, painfully and joyfully. So that what the relationship is between the human soul and the human spirit, and again what the human soul and the human spirit together are in the human being, in the entire human being, who consists of the physical, but which is the carrier of the inner inner man, who spiritualizes himself and ensouls the bodily man, and who is the actual eternal in the temporal, — so that this relationship can be expressed by the words with which I want to conclude this reflection:

When man, warm in love,
gives himself to the world as a soul,
When man, light in mind,
acquires the spirit from the world,
In the spirit-illuminated soul,
In the soul-borne spirit,
The spiritual man in the bodily man
will truly reveal himself.

We are transported to Rammenau in Upper Lusatia, a place near Kamenz where Lessing was born. 1769, to be precise. A relatively small house stands by a stream. It is known that the ribbon weaving trade has been hereditary in the family since the time of the Thirty Years' War. The house was not exactly prosperous, but rather quite poor. A stream flows past the little house, and by the stream stands a seven-year-old boy, relatively small, rather stocky for his age, with rosy cheeks and lively eyes that are currently filled with deep sorrow. The boy has just thrown a book into the stream. The book floats away. The father comes out of the house and says something like the following to the boy: Gottlieb, what were you thinking of! You throw into the water something your father bought at great expense to give you great joy! The father was very angry because he had given the book to Gottlieb the other day as a gift, to the boy who until then had learned nothing from books except what one can learn from the Bible and the hymnbook.

What had actually happened? Young Gottlieb had absorbed what he had been given from the Bible and the hymnal with great inner strength, and he was a boy who had studied well at school. His father wanted to give him a treat and one day bought him 'Siegfried and the Horned One' as a present. The boy Gottlieb immersed himself completely in reading 'Siegfried and the Horned One', and as a result he was scolded for his forgetfulness and inattention with regard to everything he had been interested in before, with regard to his schoolwork. This upset the boy. He had grown so fond of his new book, 'Siegfried of the Horns', and took such a deep interest in it. But on the other hand, the thought was vividly present in his mind: 'You have neglected your duty!' Such were the thoughts of the seven-year-old boy. So he went to the stream and threw the book into the water without further ado. He received his punishment because he was able to tell his father the facts and what he had done, but not the real reason for it.

We follow the boy Gottlieb in this age into other life situations. We see him, for example, far from his parents' house, standing outside on a lonely pasture, from four o'clock in the afternoon, gazing into the distance, completely absorbed in the view of the distance that was spread around him. He is still standing there at five, still standing there at six, still standing there when the bells ring for prayer. And the shepherd comes and sees the boy standing there. He pokes him and makes him aware that he should go home with him.

Two years after the event we have just assumed, in 1771, Baron von Miltitz is staying with the landowner in Rammenau. He wanted to come there from his own estate in Oberau on a Sunday to have lunch and to socialize with his neighbors. He also wanted to hear the sermon beforehand. But he arrived too late and was unable to hear the Rammenau preacher, whom he knew to be a decent man. The sermon was already over. He was very sorry about that, and his regret was discussed many times among the guests, the innkeeper and the others gathered. Then they said: Yes, but there is a boy in the village who can perhaps repeat the sermon; they know about this boy. And now nine-year-old Gottlieb was fetched. He came in his blue peasant's smock, they asked him a few questions, and he answered them briefly with yes and no. He felt very little at home in the distinguished company. Then someone suggested that he repeat the sermon he had just heard. He gathered himself together and, with deep inward inspiration and the most heartfelt participation in every word, he repeated the sermon he had heard from beginning to end to his landlord's estate neighbor. And he repeated it so that one had the feeling that everything he said came directly from his own heart; he had absorbed it so completely that it was all his own. With inner fire and warmth, growing ever more fiery and warm, nine-year-old Gottlieb presented the entire sermon.

This nine-year-old Gottlieb was the son of Christian Fichte, the ribbon weaver. The lord of the manor of Miltitz was amazed at what he had experienced in this way, and said that he must ensure the further development of this boy. And the acceptance of such a concern had to be something extraordinarily welcome to the parents because of their meager external circumstances, although they loved their boy dearly. For Gottlieb had many brothers and sisters, and the family had grown quite large. The baron's offer of help was most welcome. The baron was so touched by Gottlieb's story that he wanted to take the nine-year-old boy with him immediately. He took Gottlieb to Oberau near Meissen. But young Gottlieb did not feel at home there at all, in the big house that was so different from what he had been used to in his poor ribbon weaver's cottage. In all the grandeur, he felt utterly unhappy. So he was given to a pastor named Leberecht Krebel in nearby Niederau. And there Gottlieb grew up in a loving environment, with the excellent pastor Leberecht Krebel. He immersed himself in everything that shimmered through the conversations that the brave pastor had with the exceptionally talented boy. And when Gottlieb was thirteen years old, he was accepted at Schulpforta with the support of his benefactor.

Now he was plunged into the strict discipline of Schulpforta. This discipline did not particularly appeal to him. He realized that the way the pupils lived together made it necessary to practice some secrecy and some cunning in their behavior toward the teachers and educators. He was completely dissatisfied with the way older boys were placed there as “senior companions,” as they were called, for the younger boys. Even at that time, Gottlieb had absorbed “Robinson” and many other stories. At first, school life had become unbearable for him. He could not reconcile it with his heart that somewhere where one should grow towards the spiritual world, he felt, there was concealment, cunning, deception. What to do? Well, he decided to go out into the wide world. He set out and just went through. On his way, the thought comes to him, deeply carried by feeling: Have you done right? Are you allowed to do this? Where does he go for advice? He falls to his knees, says a pious prayer and waits until some inner hint is given to him from the spiritual worlds as to what he should do. The inner hint was that he turned back. He turned back voluntarily. It was a great stroke of luck that there was an extraordinarily loving headmaster there, Rector Geisler, who let the young Gottlieb tell him the whole story and who had a deep inner sympathy for Gottlieb; who did not punish him, who even put him in a position that young Gottlieb could now be much more satisfied with himself and his surroundings than he could actually only wish for. And so he was also able to join the most talented teachers.

His aspirations were not easily satisfied. The young Gottlieb, who already longed for the highest at this age, was not actually allowed to read what he had previously heard about by hearsay: Goethe, Wieland, but especially Lessing, were at that time forbidden reading in Schulpforta. But there was a teacher who was able to give him a remarkable reading: Lessing's “Anti-Goeze”, that pamphlet against Goeze, which is supported by inner strength and contains everything that Lessing had to offer as his creed in a high, but free-minded way of thinking, in a free and frank language.

Thus Gottlieb absorbed at a relatively young age what he could from this “Anti-Goeze”. Not only did he appropriate the ideas – that would have been the very least for him – the young Gottlieb also adopted the style, the way of relating to the highest things, the way of finding one's way into a worldview.

And so he grew up in Schulpforta. When he had to write his final examination paper, he chose a literary topic. A strange final paper. It lacked what many young people do: they intersperse their schoolwork with all sorts of philosophical ideas. Nothing of philosophy, nothing of philosophical ideas and concepts was found in this final paper. On the other hand, it was already evident in it that the young man set out to observe people, to look at them into their innermost hearts, and strove for knowledge of human nature. This was particularly evident in this school assignment.

Now, in the meantime, the charitable Baron von Miltitz had died. The generous support that had been offered to the young Gottlieb, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, dried up. Fichte took his school-leaving examination at Schulpforta, went to Jena and had to live there in deepest poverty. He could not participate in any of the student life that was then in Jena. He had to work hard from day to day to earn what he needed for bare survival. And he could only devote a few hours to nourishing his deeply aspiring mind. Jena proved to be too small. Johann Gottlieb Fichte could not support himself there. He thought he would fare better in Leipzig, a larger city. There he tried to prepare for the position that was the ideal of his father and mother, who were devout people: a Saxon parish, a preaching position. He had, I might say, shown himself to be predestined for such a preaching post. He could become so absorbed in the traditions of Scripture that he was repeatedly asked to give short reflections on this or that Bible passage, even in his father's house. He was also asked to do this when he was with the brave pastor Leberecht Krebel. And whenever he was able to spend a short time at home, in the place where his parents' modest house stood, he was allowed to preach there, because the local pastor liked him. And he preached in such a way that what he was able to say was the biblical word in an independent but thoroughly biblical way, as if carried by a holy enthusiasm.

So he wanted to prepare for his rural theological profession in Leipzig. But it was difficult. It was difficult for him to get a teaching position that he thought he could fill. He worked as a tutor and a private teacher. But this life became hard for him. And above all, he was unable to really advance spiritually during this life. He was already twenty-six years old. It was a hard time for him. One day he had nothing left and no prospect of getting anything in the next few days; no prospect that, if things went on like this, he would ever be able to achieve even the most modest profession he had set his mind to. He could only be supported by his parents in the most frugal way; as I said before, it was a family blessed with many children.

Then one day he stood before the abyss, and the question arose like a wild temptation before his soul: No prospect for this life? — He might not have fully realized it, but in the depths of his consciousness, self-chosen death lurked. Then the poet Weisse, who had become a friend of his, came at the right time. He offered him a position as a private tutor in Zurich and made sure that he could actually take up this position in three months. And so, from the fall of 1788, we find our Johann Gottlieb Fichte in Zurich. Let us try to follow him with the gaze of the soul, as he stands in the pulpit of Zurich Cathedral, now completely filled with his own understanding of the Gospel of John, already completely filled with the endeavor to express in his own way that which is expressed in the Bible. So that when one heard his inspiring words resound in the Zurich cathedral, one could believe that someone had stood up who was able to pour the Bible into a completely new word in a completely new way, as if through a new inspiration. Many who heard him in the Zurich cathedral at the time certainly had this impression.

And then we follow him into another phase of his life. He became a tutor in the Ott household, at the “Zum Schwert” inn in Zurich. He only to a small extent submitted to the peculiar prejudiced view that was held of him there. He got on well with his pupils, less well with their parents. And we sense what Fichte is from the following. One day, the mother of the pupils received a strange letter from the tutor. What did this letter say? It said, roughly, that education was a task to which he – he meant himself, Johann Gottlieb Fichte – would gladly submit. And what he knew about the pupils and had learned from them gave him the certainty that he could do a great deal with them. But the education must be taken up at a certain point; above all, the mother must be educated. For a mother who behaves like that towards her child is the greatest obstacle to education in the home. I need not describe the strange feelings with which Frau Ott in Zurich read this document. But the matter was once again postponed. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was able to work in a blessed way in the Ott house in Zurich until the spring of 1790, so for more than a year and a half.

But Fichte was not at all suited to confine what his soul embraced to his profession. He was not at all suited to turn his gaze away from what was going on in the intellectual culture around him. He grew into what was going on spiritually around him through the inner zeal and the inner interest he took in everything that was going on in the world around him. Yes, he grew into all of it. In Switzerland, he grew into the thoughts that filled the minds of all people at the time, thoughts that were passed on from the erupting French Revolution. I would like to say that we can eavesdrop on him as he discusses with a particularly talented person in Olten the questions that were occupying France and the world in such a significantly intervening way at the time; how he found that these were the ideas should now be pursued; how he incorporated everything that occupied him internally, arising from his deep religiosity and keen intellect, into the ideas of human happiness, into the ideas of human rights, of lofty human ideals.

Fichte was not a solitary being who could only develop his soul rigidly out of his inner self. This soul grew together with the outside world. This soul felt, as if unconsciously, the duty of a human being not only to be for himself, but to stand as an expression of what the world wants in the time in which one lives. That was a deepest feeling, a deepest sentiment in Fichte. And so it was that at the very time when he was, one might say, most receptive to the growing together of his soul with what lived and breathed in his spiritual environment, he grew together with the Swiss element, and from this Swiss-German element we always find an influence in the whole of Fichte, as he later works and lives.

One must have an understanding of the profound difference between what lives in Switzerland and what, I would say, lives a little to the north in Germany if one wants to grasp the impression that Fichte's Swiss environment, Swiss humanity and human striving made on him. It differs, for example, essentially from other Germanic peoples in that it imbues everything that is spiritual life with a certain self-confident element, so that the whole cultural element takes on a political expression; that everything is thought in such a way that the person feels placed through the thought into direct action in the world. Art, science, literature, they stand as individual tributaries of the whole of life for this Swiss Germanic spirit.

This was what could also combine with Fichte's soul element in the most beautiful way. He was also a person who could not think any human activity or any human aspiration individually. Everything had to be integrated into the totality of human activity and human thought and human feeling and the whole human world view. In Fichte's work, what he could achieve was directly connected with his increasingly strong and powerful personality. Anyone who reads Fichte today, who engages with his writings, which often appear so dry in content, with the sparkling spirit of individual treatises, individual writings, will have no idea of what Fichte must have been like when he put all his inner fire, his inner presence in what he meant spiritually and what he had spiritually penetrated, into speech. Because what he was flowed into his speech. That is why he tried – it was a failed attempt – to found a school of rhetoric even back then in Zurich. For he believed that by the way the spiritual can be brought to people, one can indeed work in a completely different way than just through the content, however solid it may be.

Fichte also found a stimulating and soul-stirring relationship in Zurich, in the house of Rahn, a wealthy Swiss at the time, who was Klopstock's brother-in-law. And Fichte developed a deep affection for the daughter, Johanna Rahn. He was connected with Klopstock's niece by a close friendship that developed more and more into love. At first, the position as a private tutor in Zurich was no longer tenable. Fichte had to look further. He did not want to somehow become a member of the Rahn family and live off the Rahn family's funds, even though he was now, before he had made a name for himself in the world (he often spoke of this at the time). He wanted to continue to seek his path in the world; we must not say “his luck” when it comes to him, but rather “seeking his path in the world”.

He went back to Germany, to Leipzig. He thought he would stay there for a while; he hoped to find there what could be his real profession, to find that form of spiritual expression that he wanted to make his way in life. Then he wanted to return after some time to freely elaborate what he had united with his soul. Then something unexpected happened that changed all his plans for life. Rahn collapsed and lost all his wealth. Not only was he now tormented by the worry that the people he loved most had fallen into poverty, but he now had to take up his wanderer's staff and move on into the world, had to give up his favorite plans that had opened up to him from the depths of his soul.

Initially, a position as a private tutor in Warsaw presented itself to him. However, as soon as he arrived there and introduced himself, the aristocratess in whose house he was to enter found that the movements of Fichte, which were already then and later firmly and energetically found by some, were actually clumsy; that he had no talent at all for finding his way into any society. They let him know that. He could not bear that. So he left.

His path now led him to the place where he could first believe that he would find a person whom he held in the highest esteem among all the people not only of his own time but of the entire age, and whom he had approached after having been completely absorbed in the world view of Spinoza for a while ; a man whom he had approached by studying his writings, in which he had completely, completely found his way, so that, as the Bible or other writings had once stood before him, so now, in a very special new form, the writings of this man stood before him – namely Immanuel Kant. He made his way to Königsberg. And he sat at the feet of the great teacher and found himself completely absorbed in the way his soul could reflect what he considered to be the greatest teaching ever given to mankind. And in Fichte's soul, what lived in his soul out of his pious mind, out of his musings on the divine governance of the world and on the way in which the secrets of this governance have always been revealed to humanity, to the world, united with what he had learned and heard from Kant. And he developed the thoughts that arose in his soul into a work to which he gave the title “Critique of All Revelation”. Fichte was born in 1762, and was thirty years old when he wrote it. A strange thing happened at that time. Kant immediately recommended a publisher for the work that had so captivated him: “Critique of All Revelation.” The work went out into the world without the name of the author. No one thought it was anything but a work by Immanuel Kant himself. The good reviews flew in from all sides. This was unbearable for Fichte, who in the meantime, again through the mediation of Kant, had been offered a position as a private tutor in the excellent Krockow household, near Danzig, which he now found very appealing, where he could also freely pursue his intellectual endeavors. It was unbearable for him to appear before the world in such a way that when people spoke of his work, they actually meant someone else's. The first edition, soon out of print, was followed by a second, in which he named himself. Now, however, he had a strange experience. Now, to say almost the opposite of what one had said earlier was not possible, at least for a large number of critics; but one toned down the judgment one had had earlier. It was another piece of human knowledge that Fichte had acquired.

After he had spent some time in the Krockow house, he was able to make the plan, in the way he was now placed in the world, not outwardly, but spiritually - he had shown that he was capable of something - to go back to the Rahn house; only in this way he wanted to win Klopstock's niece for himself, now he could do it. And so he went back to Zurich again in 1793. Klopstock's niece became his wife.

Not only did he now continue to work in the deepest sense on what he had absorbed as Kantian ideas, but he also delved further into all that had already occupied him during his first stay in Zurich; he delved into the ideas of human goals and human ideals that were now going around the world. And he wove together the way he himself had to think about human endeavor and human ideals with what was now going through the world. And he was such an independent nature that he could not help but tell the world what he had to think about what the most radical natures were now thinking about human progress. “Contributions to the Correction of the Public's Judgments of the French Revolution” was the book that appeared in 1793.

At the same time as he was working on this book, he was constantly working on the ideas of the world view that he had gained from the Kantian world view. There must be a Weltanschhauung, he said to himself, which, starting from a supreme impulse for human knowledge, could illuminate all knowledge. And this Weltanschhauung, which asks about the highest in such a way that one could never find a higher for knowledge, that was Fichte's ideal.

In a strange way, the circumstances are linked. While he was still busy with the inner elaboration of his ideas, he received a letter from Jena, from Jena-Weimar. Such an impression had been made there by what Fichte had achieved that, when Karl Leonhard Reinhold left the University of Jena, Fichte was invited to take up the professorship of philosophy on the basis of what he had achieved. Those who were involved in the intellectual life of the University of Jena at the time greeted the idea of bringing this spirit, who on the one hand seemed to them to be a sparkling mind, but on the other hand, especially in matters of world view, to be striving for the highest, with the greatest satisfaction.

And now let us try to visualize him as the administrator of the teaching position that has been taken up. What had emerged as his Weltanschauung he wanted to convey to those who were now his pupils, starting from the year 1794. But Fichte was not a teacher like others. Let us first look at what had emerged in his soul. It is not possible to express this directly in his words – that would take too long – but it can be characterized entirely from his spirit. He was searching for a supreme being, one with whom the human spirit could grasp the stream of the world, the secret of the world, at one point, where the spirit was directly one with this stream of the world, with this secret of the world. So that man, by looking into this secret of the world, could connect his own existence with this secret, could thus know it. This could not be found in any external sensual existence. No eye, no ear, no other sense, no ordinary human mind could find it. For everything that can be seen with the senses externally must first be combined by the human mind; it has its being in the external world; one can only call it being if one's being is, so to speak, confirmed by what one observes with one's senses. That is not true being. At least, we cannot form any judgment at all about the true being of that which presents itself only to the senses. The source of all knowledge must arise from the innermost part of the I itself. But this cannot be a finished being, for a finished being within would be the same as that which is given to the outer senses as a finished being. It must be a creating being. That is the I itself, the I that creates itself anew every moment; the I that is not based on a finished existence but on an inner activity; the I that cannot be deprived of existence because its existence consists in its creating, in its self-creating. And into this self-creating flows everything that has true existence. So out of all sensory existence with this ego, and into the spheres where spirit surges and weaves, where spirit works as creativity! To grasp this spiritual life and activity where the ego is united with the spiritual activity and weaving of the world; to interpenetrate with that which is not external, finished existence, but what the ego creates out of the source of the divine life of the world, first as ego, and then as that which is the ideals of humanity, what the great ideas of duty are.

This was how Kantian philosophy had become embedded in Fichte's soul. And so he did not want to present his listeners with a finished doctrine; that was not what mattered to him. Fichte's lectures were not like any other lecture; his teachings were not like any other teaching. No, when this man stood at his lectern, what he had to say there, or rather, what he had to do there, was the result of long hours of meditation, during which he felt that he was inwardly immersed in the divine being, in the divine spiritual weaving and working that permeates and flows through the world, in a state that was elevated above all sensual being. After long inner communion with himself, in which he had communed with the world-spirit of the soul concerning the secrets of the world, he went forth to his listeners. But it was not his intention to impart what he had to impart, but to spread a common atmosphere from himself over his listeners. What mattered to him was that what had come to life in his soul through the secrets of the world should also come to life directly in the souls of his listeners. He wanted to awaken spiritual life, awaken spiritual being. He wanted to draw out of the souls of his listeners self-creative spiritual activity by making them cling to his words. He did not merely impart. What he wanted to give his listeners was something like the following. One day, when he wanted to illustrate this self-creative aspect of the ego — how all thinking activity can become in the ego and how man cannot come to a real understanding of the secrets of the world other than by grasping this self-creative aspect in the ego — as he was grasping the spiritual world with his listeners, as it were leading each spiritual hand into the spiritual world, 'wanted to achieve this, he said, for example: “Imagine a wall, my listeners!” Now, I hope you have now thought of a wall. The wall is now as a thought, as an idea in your soul. Now imagine the one who thinks the wall. Completely abandon all thought of the wall. Think only of the one who is thinking the wall!

Some listeners became restless, but at the same time, in the deepest part of their being, they were seized by the direct way, by the direct relationship in which Fichte wanted to place himself in relation to his listeners. The spirit from Fichte's soul was to grasp the spirit in his listeners.

And so the man worked for years, never giving the same lecture twice, always creating and reshaping it anew. For that was not what mattered to him, to communicate this or that in sentences, but to always awaken something new in his listeners. And he repeated again and again: “What matters is not that what I say or what I have to say should be repeated by this or that person, but that I should succeed in kindling in souls such flames which will become the cause for each person to become a self-thinker; that no one says what I have to say, but that each person is inspired by me to say what he himself has to say. Fichte did not want to educate students, but to educate self-thinkers. If we follow the history of Fichte's influence, we can understand that this most German of German philosophers did not actually educate any students of philosophy; he did not found a school of philosophy. Energetic men emerged everywhere from this direct relationship that he established with his students.

Now, Fichte was aware – and indeed had to be aware, since he wanted to lead the consciousness of man to the point of directly grasping the creative spiritual reality – that he had to speak in a very special way. Fichte's whole manner was difficult to grasp. Basically, all those who somehow participated in his way of teaching had not yet heard anything like what he practiced in Jena at the time. Even Schiller was astonished at this, and to Schiller he once spoke about the way in which he actually imagined his work in his own consciousness, for example as follows: When people read what I say, they cannot possibly understand what I actually want to say the way they read today. He then took one of his books and tried to read aloud what he thought was necessary to express what he wanted to say. He then said to Schiller: “You see, people today cannot recite inwardly. But because what is contained in my periods can only be brought out through true inward recitation, it just does not come out.

Of course, Fichte brought out something quite different from his own periods. What he spoke was spoken language. Therefore, even today, Fichte should be sought in the center of all the soul life to which one can devote oneself as the soul life of the whole German people; even today one should still have the effort to take in, with inner declamation, with inner listening, what otherwise seems so dry and so sober in Fichte.

Thus, as we let Fichte's intellectual development pass before our soul, we stand, as it were, on one of the intellectual summits of his being. And our gaze may well wander back to this remarkable intellectual journey.

We have visited Johann Gottlieb Fichte as he stood before Baron von Miltitz in his blue peasant's smock, a true red-cheeked, stocky peasant child, with no education other than a peasant child could have, but such that this education was already the innermost property of the soul in the nine-year-old. We have here an example of how a soul grows out of the German people, entirely out of the German people, which at first receives nothing but what lives within this German people, lives in the direct way of life of this people. We follow this soul through difficult circumstances, this soul, which is actually regarded as an ideal in the people, but must remain in the people, but must be left to the innermost impulse, the innermost drive of its being. We follow this soul as it rises to the highest heights of human inner activity, work, as it becomes a human shaper in the way we have just been allowed to describe it. We follow the path that a German soul can take, which grows directly out of the people and rises to the highest heights of spiritual being only through its own strength.

Fichte continued his teaching post in Jena until the spring of 1799. There had been all sorts of disagreements before then. For Fichte was certainly not a person who was easy to get along with, a person who would be inclined to make all sorts of detours in life and to make all sorts of soft gestures in his behavior towards people in order to make it easy to get along with him. But one important thing emerges that is significant for German life at that time.

The one person who was particularly pleased – and who agreed with Goethe on this point – was Karl August, who was able to appoint Fichte to his university in Jena. And I believe one can safely say, as an example of Karl August's complete lack of prejudice, that he appointed to his university the man who had applied Kantian philosophy to revelation in the freest way possible, but not only that – he appointed to his university the man who had advocated the freest humanistic goals in the freest, most unreserved way. I believe that one would not do justice to Karl August, this great mind, if one did not point out the high degree of lack of prejudice that this German prince needed at the time to appoint Fichte. A daring act, Goethe called this call. But I would like to say that Karl August and Goethe, who above all were and had to be the soul of this call, took it upon themselves to bring Fichte to Jena against a world of prejudice. I say it would almost be a wrong not to draw attention to the degree to which Karl August's lack of prejudice had developed. And for this purpose, I would like to read a sentence from Fichte's book, which is entitled “Contributions to the Correction of the Opinions of the Public on the French Revolution”: “They” – he means the princes of Europe, including the princes of Germany – “who are mostly educated in inertia and ignorance , or if they know anything, they know a truth expressly fabricated for them; they, who are known not to work on their education once they come to rule, who read no new writing except perhaps some watery sophistries, and who are always, at least during their years of rule, behind their age... .” That was in the last book that Fichte had written – and Karl August summoned this man to his university.

If you delve a little into the whole situation in which Fichte and those who appointed him found themselves, you come to the conclusion that the people who were of the mindset of the great, liberal-minded Karl August and Goethe actually waged a campaign against those who were in their immediate environment and who agreed with the appointment of Fichte as little as possible. And it was a campaign that was not at all easy to undertake, because, as I said, making a scene in the sense that one likes to make a scene in the world was not possible with Fichte. Fichte was a person who, through his crookedness, through his brusqueness, hurt everyone whom one would actually like to not hurt. Fichte was not a person who made a soft movement with his hand. Fichte was a person who, when something was not right for him, made his thrusts into the world with his fist. The way in which Fichte, with his full strength at the time, put what he had to tell the world into the world was not easy for Goethe and Karl August; it was very difficult for them, they groaned a little under it.

And so little by little the thunderstorms drew up. Fichte, for example, wanted to give lectures on morality, lectures that were printed as “Lectures on Morality for Scholars.” He found no hour but Sunday. But that was terrible for all those who believed that Sunday would be desecrated if one were to speak about morality in Fichte's sense to students in Jena on Sunday. And all manner of complaints were made to the Weimar government, to Goethe, but also to Karl August. The entire Jena Senate of Professors expressed the opinion that it caused an enormous stir and discord when Fichte held moral lectures at the university on Sundays – and he had in any case chosen the hour when the afternoon service was held. Karl August had to give way to Fichte's opponents in this matter, too, I would say first. But it would not be good if it were not made clear today how he had done it. Karl August wrote to the University of Jena at the time:

“We have therefore resolved, at your request, that the aforementioned Professor Fichte should only be allowed to continue his moral lectures on Sundays, in the hours after the end of the afternoon service, as a last resort.” The decree explicitly referred to the fact that “something as unusual as giving lectures on Sundays during the hours set aside for public worship” had occurred. But in issuing this decree, Karl August could not avoid adding the words: “We have gladly satisfied ourselves that if Fichte's moral lectures are similar to the excellent essay attached to this, they can be of excellent use.” But it continued to bother people. One could say that the opponents did not let up. And so it came about in 1799 that there was that unfortunate atheism dispute, as a result of which Fichte had to resign his teaching position in Jena. Forberg, a younger man, had written an essay in the journal that Fichte published at the time, which had been accused of atheism from a certain point of view. Fichte thought that the young man had been imprudent in what he had written, and he wanted to make a few marginal notes on it. But Forberg did not agree with this. And Fichte, in his free manner, which he not only used in the big things but in the smallest details, did not want to reject the essay just because he did not agree with it. He also did not want to make marginal notes against the will of the author. But he sent ahead an essay of his own, “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine World Government.” It contained words that were steeped in true, sincere worship of God and piety, words that may be said to have been elevated to the most spiritual level, but elevated to the most spiritual level, to that spiritual, of which Fichte wanted to say that it is the only real thing; that one can grasp reality only if one feels oneself with one's ego moving in the spiritual, standing in the spiritual current of the world. One must then grasp the existence of God not through some external revelation or external science, but in the living activity and weaving. One must grasp the creation of the world by flowing within it, creating oneself unceasingly and thereby giving oneself its eternity.

But Fichte's essay was accused of atheism all the more. It is impossible to recount this dispute, this accusation of atheism, in full detail. It is basically terrible to see how Goethe and Karl August had to take sides against Fichte against their will; but how Fichte cannot be dissuaded, now, I would like to say, from striking out with his fist when he believes that he has to push through what he has to push through. So it comes about that Fichte hears that they want to do something against him, want to reprimand him. Goethe and Karl August would have liked nothing better than to have been able to give this reprimand. Fichte said to himself: To accept a reprimand for what one has to scoop out of the innermost sources of human knowledge would be to violate one's honor - not the honor of the person, but the honor of the spiritual endeavor. And so he first wrote a private letter to the minister Voigt in Weimar, which was then put on file, in which he said: He would never allow himself to be reprimanded; no, he would rather resign. And when Fichte wrote about things of this nature, he wrote as he spoke. It was said: He spoke cuttingly when it was necessary. So he also wrote cuttingly – to everyone, whoever it was. There was no other way to avoid a complete collapse in Jena than to accept the resignation that Fichte had not actually offered, because a private letter had been put on record. So it came about that Fichte had to leave his very beneficial teaching post in Jena in this way.

We see him soon after that appearing in Berlin. We see him there appearing, now grasping the standing of the ego in the weaving and ruling world spirit from a new side: “The Destiny of Man” he wrote at that time. But he wrote it in such a way that he put his whole being, his whole nature, into this work. In this work he wanted to show how those who only look at the world of the senses from the outside, and only combine it with the intellect, lead to a world view that is without substance. How this only leads to a dream of life is the content of the first part. How to get away from seeing the world as a chain of external necessities is the content of the second part. And the content of the third part of 'The Destiny of Man' is the examination of what happens to the soul when it tries to grasp in its inner being that which creates the inner life, and which is thereby not only an imprint but a co-creation in the great creation of all world existence. After finishing the work, Fichte wrote to his wife, whom he had left behind in Jena at the time: “I have never had such a deep insight into religion as when I completed this work ‘The Destiny of Man’.”

With a brief interlude in 1805, during which he stayed at the University of Erlangen, Fichte then spent the rest of his life in Berlin, first giving private lectures in a wide variety of homes, lectures that were very forceful; later he was called to help at the newly founded university, which we will talk about in a moment.

I said that, with a brief interlude in Erlangen, he had now returned to Berlin. For what he had to give people was something he was always drawing from his soul, and casting anew in ideal form. In Erlangen, he presented his scientific theory and his world view with great zeal. It is strange that while he had an increasing number of listeners when he began his lectures in Jena, and the same was true in Berlin, the audience in Erlangen halved during the semester. Well, we know how professors usually accept this decrease; anyone who has experienced this knows that it is simply accepted. This was not the case with Fichte. When the number of students in Erlangen had fallen by half, he spoke out – admittedly only to those who were present, not to those who had left, but he assumed that they would find out – and delivered one of those thunderous speeches in which he made it clear to the people that if they did not want to hear what he had to say to them, they would only be open to external historical knowledge, not to reasonable knowledge. And after he had added what man becomes in life if, as a spiritual seeker, he does not want to acquire this reasonable knowledge, he said: “The time in which I read? I have indeed heard how little satisfaction there is with the choice of the hour. I do not want to take this too strictly, concluding from principles that actually go without saying and that would have to be applied here. I just want to consider those who are affected to be ill-informed and report it better. They may say that it has always been this way. If this were true, I would have to reply that the university has always been in a very poor state... I myself have a similar college to this one in Jena, where I read to hundreds of people from 6-7 o'clock in the summer and winter, which used to get very crowded towards the end. I just have to say: when I arrived here, I chose this hour because there was no other left. Since I have recognized the way of thinking about it, I will choose it with care and do so in the future. The reason for all these abuses is that there is a deep inability to deal with oneself, and a wealth of shallowness and boredom when, after lunch has been consumed at 12 o'clock, one can no longer stand in the city. And if you were to prove to me – which, I hope, cannot be done – that this has been the custom in Erlangen since its founding, that it is the custom throughout Franconia, indeed throughout southern Germany, I will not shy away from replying that, accordingly, Erlangen and Franconia and all of southern Germany must be the home of shallowness and lack of spirit.” He delivered a thunderous speech. You can think of such a thunderous speech as you like, but it is genuinely Fichtian, Fichtian in the way that Fichte wanted to be in it and always was in it in what he wanted to bring to people spiritually; that Fichte did not just want to say something with what he said, but to do something for the souls, to reach the souls. Therefore, every soul that stayed away was a real loss, not for him, but for what he wanted to achieve for humanity. For Fichte, action was the word. He was rooted in the spiritual world, and this enabled him to stand with others in the spiritual world at the same time as in a common spiritual atmosphere; that he really did not just theoretically advocate the proposition: the outer sense world is not the real thing, but the spirit, and the one who knows the spirit also sees the spiritual being behind all sense being.

For him, this was not just theory, but a practical reality, so that later in Berlin the following could happen: He had gathered his audience in his lecture room. The lecture room was near the Spree Canal. Suddenly, a terrible message came: children, including Fichte's boy, had been playing down below, a boy had fallen into the water, and it was said to be Fichte's son. Fichte set out with another friend, and while the audience were all standing around, the boy was pulled out of the water. The boy looked very much like Fichte's son, but he was not. For a moment, however, Fichte had to believe that it was his son. The child was pulled out of the water dead. He took care of the child. Those who know what a close family life there was in Fichte's house between Fichte, his wife Johanna and their only son, who remained the only one, know what Fichte went through in that moment: the greatest horror he could have gone through, and the transition from the greatest personal horror to the greatest personal joy when he could take his son back in his arms. Then he went into an adjoining room, changed his clothes and continued his two-hour lecture in the way he had always given lectures before, completely immersed in the subject.

But not only that. Fichte often provided examples of such engagement in intellectual life. For example, during his time in Berlin, we find him giving lectures that were supposed to be a critique of the contemporary era, a severe indictment of this era. He took a similar approach when reviewing the individual eras of history. That alone, in which he lived, he said, was the one in which selfishness had reached its highest point. And into this age of selfishness he found himself placed as the one who embodied selfishness in the person of Napoleon. Fichte basically never thought of himself as anything other than the opponent in spirit to Napoleon at that time, while the Napoleonic chaos was descending on Central Europe. And there is one characteristic of Napoleon which may be said of him: in the image of the man of Germanic stock, in the blue coat, which was the image of the peasant boy as described earlier, there arose an image of Napoleon, which was just as much the product of the most profound Germanic strength and Germanic outlook as it was of the highest philosophical view of life. We have arrived at a time in human existence, as Fichte said, when we have lost the realization that the spirit and spiritual essence pulsates through the world and also through human life, runs through human development, and that man is only of value in the course of history to the extent that he is carried by what is preserved of moral impulses, of moral world order from epoch to epoch. But they know nothing of this. We have arrived at an age in which we see generation after generation in the world appearing like links in a chain. The best have forgotten, as Fichte said, what must run through these chain links as a moral worldview. Napoleon has been placed in this world. A source of tremendous power, but a human being, as Fichte said, in whose soul individual images of freedom can be found, but never a real idea, a real concept of true, comprehensive freedom, as it works from epoch to epoch in the moral ideal of human beings, in the moral world order. And from this fundamental defect, that a personality which is only a shell, which has no soul-core, can develop such power, from this phenomenon Fichte derived the personality and the whole misfortune, as he said, of Napoleon.

If we compare Fichte, the most powerful German world-view man with his idea of Napoleon, and Napoleon himself, then, in order to make the whole situation clear, we must refer to a saying of Napoleon's, which, as is told, he did on St. Helena after his fall, because it is only through this that the whole situation is fundamentally illuminated: everything, everything would have gone. I would not have fallen against all the powers that rose up against me. There was only one thing I did not reckon with, and that actually brought about my downfall: the German ideologues! Let the little minds talk about the ideology of this or that, this self-knowledge of Napoleon's weighs, I think, more than anything one might want to object to Fichte's idealism, which was, however, thoroughly practical.

That it is not difficult for an idealist like Fichte to be practical at times can be proved by Fichte himself, and in a truly historical way. It became necessary for him to join his father's business as a partner, after his brothers had taken it over. There he was, a partner in the ribbon-making business of his family. His parents were still alive. And now we can see how he fared as a partner in a ribbon-making business. He was a good, careful businessman who really was able to help his brothers, who remained pure business people, a lot. In the face of all those who say, “Ah, these idealists, they understand nothing of practical life, they are dreamers!” — Fichte, speaking from the very essence of his entire existence, was able to say, especially in the lectures he gave on “The Task of the Scholar,” words that must always be repeated in the face of those people who speak of the impracticality of ideals, of the impracticality of the spiritual world in general. When Fichte spoke about the destiny of the scholar, he said the following sentences in the preface: “That ideals cannot be represented in the real world, we know perhaps as well as they, perhaps better. We only claim that reality must be judged by them, and modified by those who feel the strength within themselves to do so. Even if they cannot be convinced of this, they lose very little by it, once they are what they are; and humanity loses nothing by it. It merely makes it clear that the plan for the ennoblement of humanity does not rely on them. The latter will undoubtedly continue on its way; let benign Nature rule over the former and give them rain and sunshine, wholesome nourishment and undisturbed circulation of the fluids, and with that - wise thoughts, in due time!” This German man already knew about the meaning of ideals, and also about the meaning of practical life in the right sense. But Fichte was precisely this nature that was turned in on itself. One may call this one-sidedness, but such one-sidedness must appear in life from time to time, just as forces in life must act in such a way that they occasionally overshoot the mark, so that in overshooting the mark they achieve the right result.

Certainly, there was some harshness mixed into Fichte's behavior when he did not just want to give moral lectures to the people in Jena, but also wanted to practically fight all of the students' idleness, all of the drinking, all of the loafing around. He had already gained a certain following among the student body. In addition, a number of people had submitted a petition that this or that association, which was particularly idle, should be abolished. But he was a gruff character, he was a person who did not know how to make soft hand movements, but instead sometimes beat the air roughly with his fist – all of course meant symbolically. So then what happened was that a large part of the Jena student body was quite opposed to Fichte's practical moral effectiveness. And they got together and broke his windows. Which then prompted Goethe, who admired Fichte and was admired by Fichte, to the good joke: Well, that's the philosopher who traces everything back to the ego. It is indeed an uncomfortable way to be convinced of the existence of the non-ego when one's windows are broken; that's what you get for being the non-ego, its opposite!

But all this cannot be proof to us that Fichte's way of philosophizing was not in complete harmony with Goethe's way of philosophizing. And Fichte felt this deeply when, on June 21, 1794, soon after he had begun his lectures in Jena, he wrote to Goethe, sending him the proofs of his Theory of Knowledge: “I regard you, and have always regarded you, as the representative... (of the purest spirituality of feeling) at the present level of humanity. It is to you that philosophy rightly turns: your feeling is the same touchstone.” And Goethe writes to Fichte when he has received the Theory of Knowledge: ”There is nothing in what you have sent that I do not understand or at least believe I understand, nothing that does not readily follow from my usual way of thinking.” And Goethe continues along the following lines: I believe that you will be able to present to human souls in a proper way that which nature has always been in agreement with, but with which human souls must come to terms. And if today someone who finds that science, which Fichte had printed at the time, dry and un-Goethean, were to claim that Goethe had no sense for this matter, then one would have to reply to him as I did when I published Fichte's letters to Goethe in the Goethe Yearbook in 1894 at the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv in Weimar. In the Goethe Schiller Archive, there are excerpts from Fichte's “Wissenschaftslehre” written by Goethe himself, where Goethe wrote down sentence by sentence the thoughts that came to him while reading Fichte's “Wissenschaftslehre”. And finally, one also understands how one of the most German of Germans, Goethe, at that time, out of the purest spirituality of feeling, out of which he sought a new world view, had to reach out to him who, out of reason-energy, as the most German of Germans at that time, sought a philosophical world view. Goethe once put it beautifully when he spoke of his relationship to Kant's philosophy. He said something like this, not literally, but completely in line with the meaning: Kant came along and said that by looking at the world, man could only have sensory knowledge. But sensory knowledge is merely an appearance, merely something that man himself brings into the world through his perception. Knowledge must be set aside; one can only come to freedom, to infinity, to an understanding of the divine-spiritual existence itself through a faith. And what one might undertake, not in order to arrive at a belief, but to arrive at an immediate beholding of the spiritual world, to a living and weaving of one's own creative activity in the creative activity of the divine world spirit, and which Kant believes one cannot undertake, of which Kant says it would be “the adventure of reason.” And Goethe says: Well, then one would have to dare to bravely endure this adventure of reason! And if one does not doubt the spiritual world, but believes in freedom and immortality, in God, why should one not bravely face this adventure of reason and, with the creator of the soul, be able to place oneself in the creative spirituality that pervades and interweaves the world, in the world itself? - Only in a different way from how Goethe wanted to face it, he still found it with Fichte.

And this urge towards spirituality, towards an understanding of the creative wisdom of the world, had to emerge one day, even if it was in a brusque manner, by the creative self experiencing itself as one with the creative world essence within it. And according to Fichte's view, this was to happen through his theory of knowledge. As we have been able to characterize it, it is a direct deed of the German people, for we see Fichte's soul growing up from the German people, and Fichte was aware that basically his philosophy was always a result of his lively interaction with the German national spirit. With that, the German national spirit has presented to the world what it itself had to say about the world and life and human goals. It presented itself in the way that it could only present itself, in that it happened at the first onset of such a rugged personality as Fichte was.

Fichte was not easy to deal with. For example, when the university was founded in Berlin and Fichte was to elaborate the plan, he formed an idea of the university and worked out the plan for this idea in great detail. But what did he want? He wanted to create something so fundamentally new at the University of Berlin, at that time at the beginning of the 19th century, that we may say, without any contradiction arising, that this new thing has not yet been realized anywhere in the world; that the world is still waiting for it to be realized. Of course, Fichte's plan has not been realized, although, as he put it, he wanted nothing more than to make the university an institute that meant “a school of the art of real use of the mind.” So it was not people who know this or that that were to come out of the university, who were philosophers or natural scientists or physicians or lawyers, but people who are so immersed in the overall structure of the world that they can fully master the art of using reason. Imagine what a blessing it would be if there were such a university somewhere in the world! If only an art school could be realized somewhere that would produce people who have brought their inner soul to life so that they can truly move freely in the essence of existence.

But this personality was not easy to handle; it was there to give history a powerful impetus. Fichte also became the second rector of the university. He took such an energetic approach to his job that he was only able to serve as rector for four months. Neither the students nor the authorities involved could stand what he wanted to implement for any longer. But all of this was forged out of German national character, just as it appeared in Fichte. For when he delivered his 'Speeches to the German Nation', about which I have already spoken here repeatedly, not only during the war but also before the war, as well as about the great phenomenon of Fichte in general, he knew that he wanted to tell the German people what he had, as it were, overheard through his meditative dialogue with the world spirit. He wanted nothing more than to stir in their souls that which can stir in the souls of men from the deepest source of Germanness. The way in which Fichte positioned himself in his time and in relation to those whom he wanted to move in the direction of a soul that was equal to the tasks of world existence was not, however, likely to make any impression on shallow, superficial people other than that of curiosity. But Fichte did not want to create that at all. Of course, it is always the easiest thing to do when something like Fichte's spirituality comes into the world, to make fun of it. Nothing is easier than to criticize, to make fun of it. People did that enough. That put Fichte in serious situations. For example, as soon as he came to the University of Jena, he was already in a rather serious situation because he could not really agree with those – well, they were also philosophers. For example, at the University of Jena there was the one who was the senior philosopher. His name was Schmid. He had spoken so disparagingly about what Fichte had achieved up to that point, even though Fichte was now to become his colleague, that it was actually shameful that Fichte was now to become his colleague. So Fichte said a few words in the journal in which Schmid had expressed himself. And so it went back and forth. Fichte actually took up his teaching post in Jena by having the Jena journal in which Schmid had written insert: “I declare that for me Mr. Schmid will no longer exist in the world.” — So he stood next to his colleague.

The situation was a serious one. A less serious, but no less significant one was this: a journal called “Der Freimütige” was published in Berlin at the time. Kotzebue, the “famous” German poet Kotzebue and yet another person were involved in publishing this journal, putting it together. It is actually impossible to find out - I really don't think even the most intimate clairvoyance could find out! what this Kotzebue actually wanted in Fichte's lectures back then. But only for a while could it not be found out. It later became clear because the most malicious attacks on Fichte's lectures appeared in the “Freimütigen”, which at the time was making itself quite important in Berlin. Fichte finally had enough. And lo and behold, he took a number of these “Freimütigen” and tore them apart in front of the audience, tearing them apart in such a way that he - which he could do - poured an invincible humor over what this “Freimütige” had to say. The face of one of the listeners, whose reason for attending was previously unknown, became longer and longer. And finally, Mr. Kotzebue stood up with a long face and declared that he no longer needed to listen to this! He then left and did not return. But Fichte was quite glad to be rid of him.

Yes, Fichte was already able to find a tone that directly grasped the situation, in the way he practically engaged with the life that he wanted to shape as the innermost life of human existence. Although he lived entirely in the spiritual world, he was not an unworldly idealist. He was a man who rested entirely on himself and who took with all seriousness what he found in himself as his essential nature. Therefore, at a certain time, when Napoleon had overcome Prussia and the French were in Berlin, he could not remain in Berlin. He did not want to be in the city that had been subjugated by the French. He went to Königsberg, and later to Copenhagen. He only returned when he wanted to appear as the German man who presented the innermost essence of his nationality, of being a nation, of his national character, to his fellow countrymen in the “Speeches to the German Nation”.

Fichte is rightly perceived as an immediate expression of German nationality, as the expression of that which, as spirit, always lives in our midst, insofar as we are able to grasp Germanness in its spirit, not only in thought, as a philosopher put it so beautifully, who as a philosopher was not at all in agreement agreement with Fichte, Robert Zimmermann, who said: “As long as a heart beats in Germany that can feel the shame of foreign domination, the memory of the brave will live on, who, in the moment of deepest humiliation, under the ruins of the collapsed monarchy of Frederick the Great, in the middle of French-occupied Berlin, occupied Berlin, in front of the eyes and ears of the enemies, among spies and informers, to raise the strength of the German people, broken from the outside by the sword, from the inside by the spirit, and to create it anew in the same moment that the political existence of the same seemed to be destroyed forever, through the inspiring idea of general education, undertook to recreate it in future generations.” Even today, I would like to reiterate that, with regard to the content of much of what is in the “Speeches to the German Nation” and indeed what is in Fichte's other writings, we may have to think quite differently. What is important is that we feel the German spirit flowing through its products, and the renewal of the German spirit with regard to its position in the universe, as it is given in the “Speeches to the German Nation”. That we feel this as the spirit that is in our midst and that we grasp it only in the one example of Fichte, through which he has placed himself in an admittedly initially remote way in the German development. This spirit wanted to place itself in the evolution of the world powerfully and energetically, but deeply inwardly. Therefore, even in the time when his twilight years were already approaching, Fichte found the opportunity, precisely in the most intimate way, to once again cast and renew his entire theory of knowledge, to meditate on it again, and to bring it to his Berlin audience in the fall of 1813, which he had grasped as his deepest thoughts. There he once again, in the manner described, seized the soul of his listeners, casting his gaze on how impossible it is for a person to come to understand existence and its reality without wanting to grasp this existence in the spirit, beyond all sensuality. But to those people who believe they see any true existence in the world of the senses and in what is formed only after the world of the senses, he called out in the lectures that belong to the last that Fichte spoke: “Their knowledge is lost in misunderstanding and empty words; and they praise themselves for it, and quite rightly find that it is so. Take seeing, for example: an image of an object is cast onto the retina. On the calm surface of the water, an image of the object is also reflected. So, in our opinion, does the surface of the water see? What is the added element that must come between this image and the actual seeing that is present with us, but not with the surface of the water? They do not even have a notion of this, because their sense does not go that far. A special sense, a new sense, Fichte says, must be realized within oneself if one wants to experience that being in the spirit that makes all other being comprehensible in the first place. “I am, and I am with all my goals only in a supersensible world!” This is one of the words that Fichte himself coined and which, like a leitmotif, runs through everything Fichte said throughout his life, which he reaffirmed in a different way that fall of 1813. And what was he talking about then? That people must become aware that one can never get behind true being in the way one sees things and the world in ordinary life and in ordinary science. One must become aware that a supersensible sense lives in every human being and that man can merge into a supersensible world, can live into this sense as a creator in his ego in the creative, weaving world spirit. It is, as Fichte says, as if a seeing person comes into a world of blind people and wants to make them understand the world of colors and forms, and the blind people refuse to believe him. Thus, the materialistically minded person, because he has no sense for it, denies the one who knows: I am, and I am in the supersensible world with all my goals and creations. And so Fichte impressed upon his listeners this being in the supersensible, this life in the spiritual, this handling of a supersensible-sensual that he said:

“The new sense is therefore the sense for the spirit; the one for which there is spirit, and nothing else at all, and to which the other, the given being, also takes on the form of the spirit, and is transformed into it, to which therefore being in its own form has indeed disappeared.”

It is a great thing that in this way the confession of the spirit has been made within the German development of thought, before those who wanted to seek what, in the highest sense, the German people have to say when they speak from the innermost part of their being. For it is through Fichte that the German people have spoken. And for Fichte more than for anyone else it is true that the German folk spirit at that stage, as it could speak, spoke to the German people.

Whether we look at him externally, this Fichte, or turn our soul's gaze to his soul, he always appears to us as the most direct expression of German nationality itself, of that which is not only present within Germanness at some time or other, but is always present; which, if only we know how to grasp it, is always among us. Precisely through what Fichte is, how he presents himself to us, presents himself so that we have his image vividly before our soul, we would like to see him, to listen to him in spirit when he creates an atmosphere that spreads between his soul and the soul of his listeners, that we want to be very close to him: that makes us feel we can feel him, I would like to say, like a legendary hero, like a spiritual hero, who, as a leader of his people, can always be seen in spirit if this people only understands him correctly. They can see him by vividly imagining him as one of their best spiritual heroes.

And today, in the age of action, when the German people must struggle for their existence in an incomparable way, the image of the one who , German character, from the highest point of view, but also in the most energetic, in a single way; to describe it in such a way that we can believe in him more than in any other: we have him directly among us when we understand him correctly. For everything in him is so very much of a piece, it presents itself so directly that he stands among us in all his liveliness as we contemplate him; whether the individual trait emerges from the totality of his being or whether we allow the most intimate sides of his soul to affect us, he stands before us as a whole. He cannot be grasped by us otherwise, otherwise he is grasped in a haphazard, superficial way.

Yes, he can be seen how he kindles in his people the soul's devotion to the life-giving powers of the world, working within the creator, how he rises with this soul to experience in the spirit, and how he integrates himself as life into the developmental progress of his people. One need only open the eye of the soul. He will not be understood if he is not understood in this vivid way. But if you open your soul's eye to the greatness of your people, then he is standing among us.

The way he sought to work differently from other teachers, by standing before his audience and not speaking but acting with his words, acting as if it mattered little to him what he said, because it was only meant to ignite the soul of the listener, because something should happen to the soul, something should be done, and because the souls should leave the hall differently than they entered it, — this has the very peculiar effect that he must become alive to us in the way he worked from the people into the people, and that we believe we hear him when he had heard in lonely meditation, by which he well prepared himself for every spoken lecture, what he had heard in his self-talk with the world spirit, now did not present to his listeners, but converted it into the word that is action, so that he released those to whom he had spoken as other people. They had become other people, but not through his power, but through the awakening and ignition of their own power. If we understand him correctly in this way, then we can believe that we hear him keenly, how he wants to grasp the spirit directly with his word, with the sharpness, with the sharp knife of his word, which he previously grasped in the soul, by placing, as has been said of him, not just good, but great people in the world through his care of the soul.

If you really bring to life what he was, you cannot help but hear his words, his words that seem to come from the spirit itself, which in this Fichte only made itself a tool to speak, to speak out of the spirit of the world itself, inspiring, awakening fire and warmth and light. His words were full of heartiness, and they drove courage forward. His words became spirited when they flowed through the ears into the souls and hearts of the listeners; they carried spiritedness out into the world when the fire that these words ignited in the souls of the listeners made these listeners, as we so often hear from those who were Fichte's contemporaries, go out into the world as the most capable men. If you open your spiritual ear, you can hear, if you understand Fichte at all, the one who speaks from the spirit of his people, directly as a contemporary. And whoever has an ear for such greatness of nation will hear it in the midst of us. And rarely will a spirit stand before us in such a way that we can follow everything that it is into every single act of life. Do we not see the duty, the moral world order, as he represented it at the height of his philosophy, when we see the boy, how he, at seven years old, because he has grasped the love for “Horned Siegfried” out of inclination, throws it into the water because he does not feel in harmony with his duties? Do we not see the pensive man preparing for his lectures, who knows how to focus his mind on the secrets of the world, in the boy standing outside in the pasture and letting his gaze wander for hours in one direction into the secrets of nature until the shepherd comes and leads him home? Do we not feel the whole fire that inspired Fichte, that inspired him on his lectern in Jena, and later, when he spoke to the representatives, as he said, of his entire people in the “Speeches to the German Nation”? Do we not feel it already there, where he, repeating the sermon of the country pastor, made an impression on Baron von Miltitz? Do we not feel this spirit very close to us in every single thing, even in the smallest acts of his life, if we are able to feel just a little spiritually? Do we not feel how soulfulness, heartiness, moral courage radiates from this spirit into all subsequent German development? Do we not feel the eternal life that lives there, even if we cannot agree with the individual in the “Speeches to the German Nation”? Although they were confiscated twice by the censor in 1824, they could not be killed. They live today and must live in souls.

How we can see him, this Fichte, in our midst! How we can hear him, if we understand him correctly! We can feel him, if we feel with our soul how he inspires his listeners, how he inspires the entire German nation in its more distant development, how that which he created, what he allowed to flow through the continuous developmental current of his people, must remain immortal! We cannot help it, if we understand him correctly, we must feel this spirit of Fichte among us.

Although I already touched on Goethe's “Faust” in this space this winter, in a consideration of Goethe's world view in the context of German idealism, I will take the liberty today of coming back to you with a consideration of Goethe's “Faust” as a kind of introduction to the six lectures I have announced. I believe that in connection with Goethe's Faust, the world view that I am representing here yields so many insights that some light will fall on the following, which will be spoken here in the near future. Of course, today I will only be able to make aphoristic remarks about the topic I have set myself, because this topic is so extensive in itself that one can never get further than highlighting this or that point of view from a wealth of points of view. And of course it also follows that one must be one-sided with each such consideration of Goethe's “Faust”. But that is a risk one must be willing to take.

After a consideration of Goethe's “Faust” that lasted more than half a century, my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer completed the third edition of his “Faust” edition 1892 with a preface in which the words are found: “Only the German way of thinking was able to solve the Faust problem.” And it is essentially on these words that I would like to base my reflections today.

According to a certainly justified opinion of Herman Grimm, who was so deeply involved in all that Goethe had striven for and experienced, the Faust problem will be the starting point for recurring reflections on Goethe's “Faust” through the centuries, even millennia, which will certainly differ considerably from one another in the succession of times. In this regard, Herman Grimm already spoke a very significant word in the 1870s, which I would now also like to mention in my introduction. Herman Grimm said at the time: “We are still too deeply immersed in the world that Goethe wanted to depict allegorically and symbolically in the second part of the play; here, too, only later times will gain the right point of view.” It may be said that the standpoint which Herman Grimm assumes here is as modest as it is lofty, for he speaks from a deep consciousness of all that has been poured into this Faustic poetry, which was given to the world through Goethe. And Herman Grimm continues: “We would do an injustice to Goethe's Faust if we took it only for what his many-colored experiences make it appear, and the time will yet come when the interpreters of this poem will occupy themselves more with what lies in it than with what merely clings to it.”

Of course, such statements must still apply in many respects today. Nevertheless, decades have passed since Herman Grimm wrote these words, and today, we may perhaps already entertain the hope, from the many insights that spiritual life has experienced, that we can get more into what lies in Faust than what hangs on Faust, as Herman Grimm puts it.

And so today I would like to draw your attention to how the world wandering that Faust undertakes from his study to the world, in which people more or less live, came about, and how through this world wandering, he gradually rises to the point of view of a worldview in the broadest sense of the word, which represents a kind of rebirth of Faust out of German intellectual life, insofar as Goethe himself participated in this German intellectual life. I believe that we shall only be able to arrive at a full understanding of the figure of Faust and its significance for life if we seek from the outset to delve into what is actually living in Faust's soul at that moment when we have him before us as a poetic figure at the beginning of the Faustic poetry, as it has now been completed by Goethe. What lives in Faust, as expressed in the opening monologue, “Have now, alas, philosophy...” and so on, speaks in a deeply significant way. But a kind of light must also be cast on what lives in Faust's soul at the moment that the poetry presents to us at its beginning, from a deepening into all that takes place later in the course of the events that the Faust epic represents. Faust stands there in opposition to the sciences that he lists as the sciences of the four faculties, and we see quite clearly from what he expresses how unsatisfied he is with the sciences that have affected his soul. We may ask: What does Faust really want? And perhaps this question can only be answered adequately if we bear in mind in the further course of the first monologue that Faust, despite having absorbed the sciences of the four faculties, has devoted himself to magic, that is, to what he has been able to learn as traditional, conventional historical magic from the various writings about this magic.

I would like to point out right away that a misunderstanding of the first Faust monologue can easily arise from the fact that one might believe that the moment in which Faust surrenders to magic coincides with the moment in which he speaks this monologue, and that Faust had not yet surrendered to magic before those feelings that live in this monologue go through his soul. That would be a misunderstanding and would make understanding the whole state of Faust's soul extremely difficult. Rather, we must assume that Faust, at the very moment when he expresses his feelings in that monologue, is already deeply immersed in what he addresses as magic; that he has done a great deal of study on this magic. And we can prove this from the Faustian legend itself. When the poodle that accompanies Faust on his Easter walk later takes on different forms and Faust does not know what is in this poodle, Faust reaches for a magical-occult book and now knows exactly, at least in his opinion, how he can use all sorts of incantations from these books to get to the bottom of the secret of this poodle and how he should behave towards this spiritual manifestation that he believes he has before him. We must therefore assume that Faust has already, to a certain extent, familiarized himself with these things.

Now we learn that Faust takes a book of magic and that he wants to assuage his dissatisfaction by first turning to the spirit of the great world, to the spirit of the macrocosm, as he puts it. What does he actually want? Perhaps we shall only be able to see what he wants if we delve a little into Goethe's soul itself, which indeed placed its feelings in the Faust character, at least during the time when the first Faust monologue and the first parts of “Faust” were created.

What world and worldview did Goethe actually face? Goethe was confronted with a worldview that could be built on the basis of what had been recognized about natural and spiritual life. He was in the midst of a worldview that fully took into account the scientific revelations made by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and so on. Goethe was confronted with what, in the spirit of Kant, could be called the world view of the Enlightenment, the penetration into the secrets of nature by means of the mind, which synthesizes the experiences of the senses and the experiences of history. What presents itself to the human soul in the way of ideas, which, as we would say today, are grasped in a healthy way by the normal mind and which arise above and beyond what can be investigated by the normal experience of the outer senses, it was such a world view that surrounded Goethe. How could he and his needs live into the world view that could give such a world view? He could not completely live himself into such a world view; for what Goethe constantly wanted, and what he now lets his Faust want, is a direct growing together of the innermost soul with what weaves and lives through the world outside, a growing together of the soul itself with the world secrets present in the world, with the deeper revelations and the revealing powers and entities of the world.

Now Goethe's Faust faced the view of the Enlightenment of nature and the spirit of the world in such a way that what could result in the way just characterized a world view seemed far removed from being able to grasp the entities that pervade the world and that he wanted to grasp with the innermost powers of the soul, with which he wanted to live together. For what this world view, based on the science of the time, could give him, at most it gave him knowledge, something that filled his head, his mind, but which could not identify so closely with human inner experience that one could really have entered with this inner experience into the forces that live and weave in nature and the spirit world. “Thus must I seek,” says Goethe's Faust, ”to get at the inmost powers and entities of the world in such wise that, by grasping them, my soul may be partaking in the spiritual-natural weaving and living of the world. But if I grasp only that which can be grasped from the present standpoint of a scientific world-view, then I grasp only in a dry, sober way with the knowledge these mysterious connections of the world, that which moves the world in its inmost being. And this knowledge can never give me that fullness which lies in grasping that which lets me live together with the secrets of the world.

And so Goethe's Faust wants to delve into what permeates and gives life to the world, into the world of nature and the spirit, in a different way. And since Goethe was certainly never of the opinion held by many people today and in the past, that what is current and has been achieved in their own time is necessarily right — in contrast to which one can say how gloriously far we have come — Goethe wants to tie in with what has gone before, from which the present has developed. And so he also lets his Faust tie in with the world view from which the world picture surrounding him has developed, with a world view that certainly had the belief that with what it gained, it entered into an experience of the secrets of existence. What kind of world view was that?

Well, you only need to pick up something like the works of Agrippa von Nettesheim or some other similar medieval philosopher, and you will be able to gain an insight into what Goethe's Faust actually means when it invokes the spirit of the macrocosm. Such concepts, such ideas, as surrounded Faust in the philosophy of the Enlightenment — I am referring to Goethe's Faust, not the sixteenth-century Faust — did not yet exist at the time when Agrippa von Nettesheim wrote. At that time, people did not yet form a picture of the world in such abstract terms as in the Age of Enlightenment. Instead, by developing philosophical worldviews, they lived, I would say, in images, in imaginations. But one also lived in the belief that one could bring about something through which nature and the spiritual world would express themselves intimately about what they actually are. And what one now got as a world view was at the same time interwoven with the feelings and perceptions of the soul, was in a certain way the same as what the soul experienced within itself. Today one would say: it was very anthropomorphic. That is certainly true; it was the case that in what he abstracted from the world, man felt forces that were related to the forces of his own soul. One spoke of sympathies and antipathies of things and similar forces in the natural world, as one experienced them in one's own soul existence. But further: In the time in which Agrippa von Nettesheim wrote, little was believed that could be attained by man through himself, that man could simply achieve by developing the powers of his soul life, by developing those powers of cognition in order to give them a higher form than that which man has by nature. They did not believe in the power of research of the human soul itself; they rather believed that through all kinds of external activities, these or those experiments — but not experiments in our present sense — they would, so to speak, give the spiritual that lives in nature the opportunity to show how it lives in natural facts. Through all kinds of events, it was thought that the secrets of nature could be discovered. It was not believed that consciousness can directly penetrate nature through the powers it acquires. It was believed that one had to perform certain actions or events in order to, as it were, by means of magic, make nature speak and express its spirit. Man's consciousness itself was to seek this separately. They wanted to do something in the external world that would cause nature to reveal its secrets and finally express how the forces in nature are arranged, from which man himself then builds himself out of nature and the spiritual world. So they wanted just what Goethe's Faust craves: to live together with the weaving and essence of nature itself; and they believed they could achieve it.

What stood before man as nature and spiritual world had been thoroughly permeated by spirit. And the development necessitated by the world had to set in place an outer image of nature, precisely the image of nature of a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Galileo, or what has come from that, an image of nature from which precisely that which these medieval philosophers wanted to seek out of nature has been removed. In this world view of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, and in what has been created from it, it was precisely these ideas that were the decisive, the decisive, the justified ones, which Goethe's Faust did not perceive closely enough, were not inwardly full enough to face the world with them in such a way that one can fully experience this world in one's own soul.

And so, in the moment in which the first monologue transports us, there lives in Faust's soul the urge to experience the secrets of the world through that ancient magic, to connect the laws and essence of the world with the experiences of his own soul. And he believed that he could achieve this by devoting himself to the formulas and images that were supposed to represent the macrocosm from the book he picked up.

But Faust – I emphasize this expressly – Goethe's Faust, not the sixteenth-century one – is precisely the human being, the personality of his time. Humanity advances precisely in its organization, even if it is not visible to a rough observation. In this time, one could no longer get behind the secrets of existence in the same way as Agrippa von Nettesheim, for example. One could no longer indulge in the belief that what one attains, whether through imagination or external influence, through magical experimentation, really has something to do with the innermost workings of the world. And so Faust is finally faced with the realization: Yes, I try it the way these ancients did, to connect with the spiritual, with the natural forces of existence - but what does it give me? Does it really lead me into what lives and moves in nature and the spiritual world? No, it gives me a spectacle - what a spectacle! But alas, only a spectacle!

And in this sense, Goethe's Faust is truly representative of the Goethean period. It has become impossible to reach the sources of existence in this way, to grasp infinite nature, not merely to penetrate it with ideas or with laws of nature, but to experience it. He cannot succeed because the time when one could believe that real knowledge of nature and the spiritual world could be attained in this way is past. What a spectacle! And he turns away from what the contemplation of the signs of the macrocosm can give him. He turns to the microcosm, to the earth spirit.

What is this earth spirit? Well, if you take the whole of what is presented in Goethe's “Faust” in connection with the appearance of the earth spirit, you find that this earth spirit is the representative of everything that, in the course of historical development, flows over the earth in the broadest sense flows over the earth, which works in such a way that what lies in our deepest drives, what, as it were, orbits the earth and places us human beings with our innermost selves into its currents, comes out of it into our soul, into our heart, into our very innermost being. In a sketch that he later made for his 'Faust', Goethe himself summarized the idea of this earth spirit, as it were, as a world and deed genius. This reminds us that what Goethe actually addresses in his poetry as the earth spirit is something that lives in the course of historical development, that has an effect on our soul, insofar as we are children of a particular age, insofar as certain impulses live in us, a certain form of that which can be achieved in existence in one way or another lives in us. But this depends on how we are placed in a particular epoch in relation to what flows out of the earth spirit that has been ruling over the earth throughout the ages. So this earth spirit, as it is written in Faust, may say:

... in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
Woe to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I create at the whirring loom of time
And work the living garment of the Godhead.

Now, I would like to say, a word is uttered in “Faust” that is often misleading when given a slightly exaggerated explanation. I do not want to fall into the trap that many all too easily fall into, of reading all kinds of things into a poem like the Faust poem. And I know very well that almost every explanation that one can dream up fits, if one twists it skillfully, almost everything. I would like to try to derive everything I have to say from the Faust legend itself. I now mean at this moment the word:

Two souls, alas! dwell in my breast,
The one seeks separation from the other...

One of these characterizes Faust as if it lived in all the impulses of this earthly life. He explicitly says of the other soul that it wants to rise from the dust of earthly life to the realms of the high ancestors. Now, I think it is an oversimplified explanation when one simply says that this is the lower and that the higher nature of man. Of course, with such abstractions one always comes close to the truth. One cannot go wrong, because the more abstract one is, the more correctly one will express oneself as a rule. But with a work of fiction such as Faust, it is important to accurately and specifically capture the feelings that are embodied in the work of fiction. And it seems to me, in fact, when Faust speaks of his two souls, that one soul is the one that experiences, above all, what the human inner being is, that experiences the influx of the forces, the impulses of the earth spirit, the one soul that perceives how impulses rise up from the deep foundations of human existence of the individual human individuality and fill the soul life. The other soul seems to me to be the one that has been active in striving for what the spirit of the macrocosm is to reveal, that wants to rise from the mere dust of earthly existence to the realms of high ancestors, that is, to all the spiritual that lives in the natural and spiritual world and from which the human being not only as a historical being, but from which he has emerged as a complete, as a whole being, as a natural and historical being, to the universe as it has gradually developed over the centuries, millennia, millions of years, into which the spirits of the centuries, millennia and millions of years have laid their impulses. It is to this universe, then, to the spiritual ancestors from whom this human being on earth has developed, that this soul wants to rise. Of course, as soon as one expresses such things in such sharply defined words as I have just done, one again makes the meaning somewhat one-sided. That too should certainly not be denied. But nevertheless, I believe that the two directions of feeling that live in Faust's soul and that he describes as his two souls are these: one of them goes out into the macrocosm, into the universe, and encompasses spiritual beings, as a whole, as a great thing, and nature at the same time, the whole cosmos, insofar as man is grounded in this cosmos as a microcosm. And in the other direction of feeling, I believe I must recognize that which flows from the current of historical becoming into the human soul and makes man a member, a child of a very specific time; so that we are Earth Spirit, as the opposite of the spirit of the great world, we are led to that which stirs in our own soul as the striving to embrace the full human being, in contrast to the individual expressions, which must always remain in the individual human life. Faust believes he can feel at one with this spirit, which makes man a whole human being, and indeed now as a historical being, by confronting the Earth Spirit. But the Earth Spirit rejects him. He refers him to the spirit that he understands. And at the same time he makes it clear to him how he, Faust, is not the same as the Earth Spirit itself. What is the underlying reason for this?

Now, we can perhaps recognize what is at the root of this if we consider the further progress of Goethe's Faustian poetry. Where does Faust feel he is placed immediately after he is rejected by the Earth Spirit? Wagner is the one he feels himself confronted with! And one may look for so much of the most noble humor in Goethe's world literature that one can, to a certain extent, be of the opinion: By the Earth Spirit rejecting Faust and pointing to the spirit that he understands, he is actually pointing him in a certain respect to the spirit of Wagner, whom Faust will face in the very next moment. Thus the Earth Spirit is actually saying to Faust: First become aware of how similar what lives in your inner being, what you have been given out of the spirit of the earth, is to the whole formation of Wagner's soul! And what emerges from this Wagnerian soul in the course of Goethe's poem? Yes, we see how Wagner lives on in the poem up to a certain point in time, which is precisely indicated to us in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” in the classical Walpurgis Night, where that which Wagner has brought forth out of his world view, the homunculus, must dissolve in the weaving and ruling of the whole world, as Goethe characterizes it in the various figures of the classical Walpurgis Night. And so we are led, I would say, to the ideal, to the ultimate goal of Wagner's striving. We may well call this the creation of the homunculus.

What then is this homunculus? Certainly, Goethe's Faustian poetry - and this is the incomparably great thing about it - presents in a magnificent, dramatic way these things that are otherwise often only the subject of abstract philosophical consideration. But that is precisely the great thing, that for once in the world it has been possible to bring that which other people can only approach in philosophical ideas to a truly poetic, genuinely artistic form. What then is this homunculus, this homunculus idea, when we present Goethe's world view, interwoven with his artistic sensibilities? Wagner is steeped in the world view that had developed by the time the young Goethe felt he was stepping into it, a world view that, so to speak, only takes into account the mechanistic view of nature and history, which emerged as the first product of what Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler - certainly out of necessity - had to make of the old world view. In place of the living, organic element, which in the pre-Copernican world view was interwoven into the human world view, into the world view of the philosophers, there now arises a world view that is more and more interwoven only with concepts and ideas that represent the world as a mechanical one. And so Wagner was still able to cling to the habit of deriving an understanding of the human being from the world as a whole, from the cosmos as a whole. Thus he was able to come to the view that man, too, could be created through a correspondingly complicated mechanistic juxtaposition of the mechanical laws that permeate and animate the world. And this creation of man, which brings only that into the image, into the conception of man, into that which one can feel and prove and experience about man, which flows from the mechanistic world view, we see this in what the ideal of Wagner represents, in the Homunculus.

Thus, the Earth Spirit clearly shows Faust the direction in which he would actually end up if he remained at the level of the world view at which he is currently standing. He points the way clearly, and one is tempted to say: Don't we see, when we want to dig deeper into the feelings and emotions that underlie the Faustian legend, that if Faust stops where he is before his world wandering, he would come to where Wagner comes: to grasp the human being as a mechanism that is only capable of life, even as an idea, if it can merge with what the world itself lives through and surges through, and where Faust's soul in particular wants to pour out into a higher, experienced knowledge, in contrast to the knowledge that Wagner can achieve, who is completely immersed in the world view of the Enlightenment.

Now we have to look a little into Goethe's soul itself if we want to discover what the role of Homunculus actually is in the whole of “Faust”. We know, if we have explored Goethe's world view a little, how Goethe sought knowledge in his own way, how he wanted to get behind the appearances of nature. Over many years, I have tried to show how Goethe worked in this direction in the introductions to my edition of Goethe's scientific writings and also in my book “Goethe's World View”. Goethe tried to find out for himself what lives in the processes and beings of external nature. And in a certain contrast to what surrounded him as science, he developed his metamorphosis doctrine, his ideas of the primal plant, the primal animal, of the primal phenomenon. What did he actually want with that? What he wanted with it is closely related to what he wanted to pour into his Faust, and what really shows how Goethe strove from a completely different attitude to knowledge than the science around him. In a passage in which Goethe seeks to describe what became clear to him during his travels through Italy, his idea of the archetypal plant, the mental image he sought to see in every plant and which would explain all plant life and every individual plant , he says: If you have this original plant, if you have truly grasped what this original plant should be, then you have something from which you can even invent individual plant forms that could live quite well. This goes to the very heart of Goethe's scientific endeavour. Through his scientific endeavour, Goethe did not want to arrive at ideas such as the world view of the Enlightenment around him. Goethe wanted to arrive at ideas that, so to speak, only represent in the soul, but activate the same forces that we have outside in plants, in animals, in all of nature itself. Goethe wanted to unite what grows and happens in the plant, and he did not want to have an idea that appears as an abstraction compared to what lives and weaves out there in nature; he wanted to have an idea that one can say lives in the imagination as something that is of the same nature as what lives out there in the plant. Goethe did not want to gain ideas that could be said to represent what is out there in the world, but in reality what is out there in the world is quite different. Goethe wanted to gain ideas through which what lives outside in a natural way would come to life in the soul in a way that is appropriate to the soul. That was his whole endeavour. Goethe wanted a kind of knowledge that can be described as living knowledge, as living together with nature. That is to say, he wanted to be able to walk through nature and its formations with the ideas he had in such a way that these ideas relate to the inner life of nature and its formation. As the forms of nature change, so should what lives in the soul change. There should be nothing living in the soul that the soul has merely abstracted from nature, but the soul should have merged with nature, lived together with it. Goethe strove for a knowledge that he really presents in a wonderful and artistic way in the fate of the homunculus in the classical Walpurgis Night. Homunculus is an idea derived from the human being, which must therefore remain with mere mechanism, with mere abstraction. Just as Goethe's ideas, Goethe's metamorphosic ideas, are not supposed to be such ideas, but rather represent the forces and living essence of nature itself, so this homunculus, instructed by a view of nature , which was even closer to nature than that which surrounded Goethe, taught by the natural philosophy of the ancient Greek philosophers, Thales, Anaxagoras, but also taught by the transformative being Proteus, must dissolve. Just as Goethe's metamorphic ideas should unite with nature itself, so should the homunculus unite with world events. He cannot live as he has emerged from Wagner's views. He is a mere idea, a mere thought. He must connect with existence. When the homunculus is seized by the living, the role of Wagner is played out.

Faust must begin a world wandering that takes him beyond what he could have achieved, but which must play out in this way, as the role of Wagner played out with the creation of the homunculus. And to this end, Goethe shows us how Faust now develops not those powers as his powers of knowledge that lead him to the macrocosm in the sense in which the macrocosm can only be grasped in the Copernican, Keplerian, Galilean way; but Goethe shows us how Faust now wills just that which the Earth Spirit can give out of the realm of the innermost, one might also say, the lowest forces of soul existence. With the forces that can come from this, Faust is to begin his journey through the world. And now we see Faust going through this journey through the events that are first presented in the first part of Goethe's “Faust”. There we see how Mephistopheles confronts Faust. I do not want to get involved here in all possible explanations of what this Mephistopheles actually is; but I want to go into what necessity shows us, that Goethe must go beyond what is presented in the first part of “Faust”. According to what we have just considered, Goethe has, to a certain extent, initially presented Faust as powerless in the face of the spirit of the macrocosm. But he does not immediately present him as powerless in the same way in relation to the spirit of the earth. But Faust – and this must certainly be emphasized – initially still stands by what a bygone age, from which humanity had in turn come to a more developed world view, still regarded as something right or at least as something possible. I will not go into what Mephistopheles becomes in his relationship with Faust in terms of the soul, nor into how Mephistopheles is more or less a realistic, more or less a mythological figure. I just want to draw attention to what happens to Faust under the influence of Mephistopheles.

On the one hand, in ancient times, magic, imagination or external actions were used to uncover the secrets of nature. Faust cannot be associated with this, as we will see. On the other hand, however, there was something else connected with the search for the secrets of the world in ancient times, something that has been preserved to our times: the belief that something could be learned about the secrets that prevail in man by, as it were, — we shall speak about this healthy power of the soul in particular tomorrow in connection with spiritual research — and that one exposes something in man that is less than this healthy power of the soul, which one can perhaps call, improperly but with a word that is understandable to us at this moment, the normal power of the soul. We need only recall words such as hypnotism, somnambulism, all the forms of superstitious clairvoyance, and we have the whole wide area into which we are led, perhaps in a not immediately transparent way, by the events of the first part of Goethe's Faust. And Mephistopheles is simply, I might say, such an emissary of the Earth Spirit, who for a while brings Faust to become really similar to the medieval Faust, be it the real historical Faust, who received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1509, who is really an historical personality, be it the Faust of the folk book or one of the other numerous figures, or the Faust of the puppet show that Goethe got to know. This Faust of the puppet theater, this Faust of the sixteenth century, as he then continued to live on through the centuries, cannot be understood without taking into account unhealthy, morbid forces of the human soul, as we must call them today, forces of the human soul that are achieved by a damping down, a paralyzing of the human consciousness, as it is present in normal life. Whether one reads the life story of Faust — the Faust who received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1509 — or delves into the book Faust, which appeared in 1589, one encounters on the one hand a real personality on the one hand and on the other a poetic personality, who is to the highest degree what today, with a more or less apt word, is called “medial”, “medial” with all the morbid, abnormal phenomena associated with it.

Now it is not immediately apparent that Goethe wanted to show Faust, for example, the mediality of the appearance of the earth spirit until the end of the first part of his “Faust”, but what happens really leads us into this realm. And one would like to describe Mephistopheles as the spirit who, in Faust's nature, evokes such a world view that people can believe that it solves deeper secrets of existence, namely, people who do not really trust in human full consciousness and therefore believe that one must first paralyze and cloud this consciousness in order to get behind the secrets of existence. In a book that is certainly one-sided but by no means undeserving, Kiesewetter has portrayed Mephistopheles as a kind of second ego of Faust, not as a higher ego, but as the ego that one recognizes if one disregards the part that expresses itself in a person's normal higher mental life and descends into the regions of the soul, where the instinctive nature, where, I might say, the sub-sensible — by no means the supersensible! — comes to expression. In a way that is not immediately apparent, but which becomes quite clear to anyone who follows the events in the first part of “Faust” with understanding, it now becomes apparent that Faust, in his wanderings through the world, really can be believed to be attained by the path of such an abnormal, subdued, somnambulant consciousness, or in the ordinary, trivial sense, by one who is not clear-minded. But something else is also made clear to us, something that is extraordinarily important for understanding both the human soul and the “Faust” poem. While Faust is becoming familiarized with everything that can be recognized with deeper, but only sub-sensuous, driving forces, which then expresses itself in the witches' kitchen, in Walpurgis Night and so on, he is at the same time becoming familiarized, we may say, with tragic-moral aberrations, with the rule of impetuous drives. Of course, what we encounter, for example, in the “Gretchen” poem is one of the perfect flowers of world literature. But it is perhaps one of the perfect flowers of world literature precisely because the poet has succeeded in depicting the tragedy that flows from human drives that are not clarified by what one can call higher human nature in the true sense of the word. And Mephisto throws together for Faust a certain world knowledge, a satisfaction of knowledge, with this emergence of blind instinct from the depths of the soul, where man abandons himself to his nature without accompanying his life with a moral judgment of the world. This is portrayed in Goethe's poetry in a grandiose and tragically manner. But at the same time it shows us how everything that is realized in the field of what is so often referred to as clairvoyance - we will talk about these things again in more detail tomorrow - what could be called somnambulistic clairvoyance, which arises from the consciousness being , that in addition to the powers of cognition, the corporeality of the human being is altered and used in this, even if it is a subtle change; how all that is achieved in this area is on exactly the same level of human nature as the blind nature of drives and passions. This result, which for many people is a terrible one, emerges from the way in which Goethe presents the aforementioned clairvoyance, somnambulism, as arising when one transforms into powers of knowledge what lives in the drives of the human being, in those instincts that have not yet been clarified into normal human cognitive ability, in the blind, unconscious instincts that follow impulses, but impulses not interwoven with the realm of moral judgment. And Goethe wants to show that such a view of the world, as expressed in the witches' kitchen on Walpurgis Night, is only the opposite of the blind rule of the drives, where man rules with his morbid soul life. This intimate connection between the lower human instinctual life and what is often seen as clairvoyance and which is believed to lead to higher knowledge of human nature, because one has no trust in normal human nature, is dramatically characterized in the first part of Faust. And it is stated with sufficient clarity that the person who attains such clairvoyance does not rise above normal people, but sinks below what are ordinary scientific powers of knowledge, into the same regions of human existence where blind drives prevail. If one wishes to study the physiology of blind instincts in greater detail, one can delve into the revelations of somnambulists, hypnotized subjects, and mediums. But if one wants to penetrate to the real higher secrets of existence (and we will talk about this in more detail tomorrow), one must realize that with such clairvoyance one does not rise above normal people, but sinks below them human being, — a clairvoyance that Goethe, not preaching morality but artistically depicting, dramatically interweaves into the aberrations of the human subconscious being. This is what Faust had to go through during that world wandering, which is presented to us in the first part.

And now we see how Goethe, in a remarkable way, at the very beginning of the second part, has Faust face both natural and spiritual life. He interprets this very clearly, I might say magnificently clearly, not, of course, with philosophically abstract words, but through the power of creation. We shall not concern ourselves today with the question, which has also been raised by some commentators on Faust, as to whether a personality such as Faust can really recover from the serious crimes he has committed in the events depicted in the first part when, as has been said, he goes out into the wide expanse of nature and experiences what is depicted at the beginning of the second part. To what extent the guilt that he has incurred continues to prevail in Faust's soul is not something we want to dwell on today. It can continue to prevail. What Goethe wants to show, however, is how Faust rises out of his entanglement in the sub-sensible humanity. And there we see Faust at the beginning of the second part, I might say, placed in the healthiest way in nature and see the spiritual world working on him in the healthiest way. For what Goethe presents by having the chorus of spirits act on Faust is really only an external dramatic representation of a process that can be described, more or less accurately, as an internal process that takes place in exactly the same way as it does when the genius seizes the poet, when it is not something in the external sense that has a magical effect on the person, when it is not human consciousness is dulled, as in some kind of somnambulistic vision, but rather where something flows into human consciousness, which is indeed a spiritual influence, but which does not flow into a consciousness that is tuned down, into a consciousness that is dulled, but into the consciousness that is most healthily immersed in the natural and historical life of humanity. And has Faust progressed on his journey through the world since he beheld the sign of the Macrocosm and addressed the world as a spectacle? Yes, Faust is further along, quite considerably further! And Goethe wants to show that Faust's healthy nature has withstood the temptations that Mephistopheles has brought upon him so far, and which have consisted in his wanting to push him down into the sub-sensible, into that which lives in man when instinctive forces and not elevated powers of knowledge are brought to some world-view. At the moment depicted at the beginning of Part One, Faust has opened the book of Nostradamus. The sign of the macrocosm appears before his soul. He tries to put himself in the place of that which can be represented to him through the words and signs of this macrocosm. “What a spectacle! But alas! Only a spectacle!” At this moment, one might say, Faust aspires to a kind of morbid mental life, in which he then also remains, although the word “morbid” should not be understood here in a philistine sense.

Now that Faust has been placed in the midst of a healthy experience of nature and spirit, and the spirit has had its effect on his normal consciousness, he utters another word, a parallel word, I would say, to the word “What a spectacle! But alas! Only a spectacle!” Faust confronts the phenomena caused by the sunshine; but he turns away and turns to the waterfall, which reflects in colors what the sun can do. “So let the sun remain behind me,” says Faust. He wants to look at the reflection of what the sun causes. ‘We have life in the colored reflection’ – a wonderful intensification compared to the first word: ”What a spectacle! But alas! Only a spectacle!” Now Faust can grasp how what appears to him as nature is truly spiritual, because he knows how to relate to what lives in nature in the sense of the word with which the second part of Faust concludes: “All that is transitory is but a parable” - grasping in the parable what lives spiritually in nature. And so we see how, at the beginning of the second part of Faust, through an effect of the spiritual world on normal consciousness, Faust is brought to a healthy position in relation to the world; how he is now really no longer, I would like to say, in the belief that one can achieve something by going back to the old magic, and how he has now also learned that one can achieve nothing with all that is false clairvoyance, that is somnambulism. Now he faces the world as a healthy person. He can nevertheless attain life in a colorful reflection, that is, attain what lies behind the world of nature and history.

And truly, we now see how Faust develops more and more into what Goethe himself wanted to develop into. Of course, when we look at Goethe's development of world view, everything appears to us, I might say, more in an abstract, philosophical form. But that is precisely, as I said, the great thing that Goethe has succeeded in doing, to shape it dramatically on the outside, which other people can only rise to in philosophy. And so we see that Faust is now able to place himself in the world of historical development, that he is able to find the eternal-meaningful, the spiritual-real in this historical development. But for this it is necessary that Faust now really experiences in his soul an increase of his powers of knowledge. Through what he has experienced with Mephistopheles, he has not experienced an increase, but a damping down of his power of knowledge; he is not seeing, he has been blinded. Now, out of historical becoming, he longs to have a figure like Helen of Troy brought to life before him again. How can he achieve this? Precisely by developing something within himself, which is so beautifully and profoundly portrayed in the scene that represents the “walk to the mothers”. Goethe himself confessed to Eckermann that he got the inspiration to include this mother scene in the second part of “Faust” from reading Plutarch, where it is described how a personality of ancient times, who went around in a difficult situation as if he were insane and spoke of the “mothers,” of those mothers who were referred to as goddesses, who were deeply revered in the secrecy of ancient mysteries. Why should Faust descend to these mothers? Goethe speaks to Eckermann in a strangely mysterious way. He says that with regard to this scene, he betrayed himself the least. We may well assume that Goethe did not express this in full, clear, abstract terms, but that which really lived in his soul as his path to the mothers in full, clear realization. I have often spoken about this path to the mothers, but today I would just like to hint: When we immerse ourselves in the ancient world view into which Goethe places Faust, into the classical age of Greek civilization, into which he has already placed us when he encounters Helen, when we immerse ourselves in this ancient world, into which Faust is now also supposed to plunge, we find that this ancient world brought forth something out of itself with the powers that were still peculiar to ancient man: powers of knowledge that, one might say, penetrate more deeply into the workings of the world because they were even more deeply connected to the nature of existence than the powers of knowledge of the souls of the time in which Goethe lived, which had already become more separated from the direct life with the natural existence and had to find the way back into the natural existence. But it has already been indicated that when man delves into the life of his soul, he can find something that is not the same as what was indicated earlier as the sub-sensible driving forces, as those impulses that leave a person blind, but still work as impulses; but that a person can dive down into the depths of their soul life with full consciousness, with nothing other than their normal consciousness, which only dives deeper into their soul. Then, through this immersion in his deeper soul powers, he attains something quite different from the sub-sensible soul powers of somnambulism or hypnotism or similar phenomena of human life, as just described. He has the possibility of descending so deeply into his soul that he really brings up powers that are just as conscious and that he masters just as much as the powers of normal consciousness, to which he is not a slave as in somnambulism or in ordinary mediumship. And that Faust descends to the mothers, after he has recovered as far as it has been indicated, that is precisely the dramatic representation of this descent to those powers of the soul, which, when we grasp them in our soul, bring an inner higher man to the outer world, so that we can also see more in the outer world than what the mere senses or the mind bound to the senses see.

And now we see how Faust can continue his journey through the world by consciously descending into the depths of the soul; and how, in contrast to this, Wagner is presented with his Homunculus , who only arrives at the abstract idea of humanity, which must merge with life, which cannot sustain itself, which, before an insight, if it merely remains mechanistic, is scattered. This is contrasted with what Faust achieves in the ascent of his world wanderings. But there is something else! We are also clearly shown how Mephistopheles really brought those forces to Faust that are below the senses, in that Mephistopheles, one might say, morally ends, if the word may be applied here in the classical Walpurgis Night, when he unites with the Phorcys, with those entities that are born out of the darkness and the abyss, out of that abyss that represents the lower human nature. If we really go into what Goethe, in his own words, has incorporated into 'Faust', it is presented to us quite clearly and distinctly. The forces that Mephistopheles now feels are with him on the classical Walpurgis Night are not superhuman, they are subhuman. One cannot arrive at a different view of the world with those powers of perception that go beyond the ordinary powers of perception, except by enhancing and enriching what one has in the ordinary powers of perception. But with the supersensible powers of perception, one arrives at something that is fundamentally poorer than normal human life. And it cannot be emphasized often enough that it was also said in Faust that the life that is attained through a dimming of human consciousness, whether through somnambulism or mediumship, is poorer than what man attains with his normal consciousness of the world. When man looks at the world with his normal consciousness, he has his two eyes through which he looks out into the world. This is a certain richness in the sensory world. Where Mephistopheles is with the spirits of darkness, they have only one eye between them and have to pass it from one to the other. They are poorer. Mephistopheles belongs to a world — at least he feels a kinship with this world — that is poorer than the normal human world. This world has nothing more to offer Faust, now that he has begun the descent to the mothers, that is, to the deeper forces of the human soul, to which Mephistopheles can still pass the key, but to which Mephistopheles himself cannot lead him.

And now we see how Goethe, at a higher level of his world wanderings, is able to place Faust in the right way in relation to the real, truly surviving spirit of the past. Indeed, Goethe has the following written next to the title of the third act of the second part: Classical-Romantic Phantasmagoria. This is not presented as reality, but he has life “in a colorful reflection”. He grasps it with the deeper but conscious powers of the human soul and then strips it away again, as we are shown in the fourth act of part two. And so, if time allowed, we could still teach many more things that would make it clear to us how Goethe lets his Faust undergo a world journey, out of the aberrations that arise when one has no faith in normal human consciousness. The old magic that Faust first falls prey to and surrenders to has no trust in what consciousness is able to give, and separates the events that are supposed to take place magically out there in all kinds of ceremonies from consciousness. What takes place in the weaving and working of the spirits outside of full consciousness is supposed to reveal the spiritual world; but not what takes place in normal consciousness, but what takes place in the subconscious, in the dark drives, is supposed to explain what flows through the world as a secret. From this Goethe had to lead his Faust to that which can be recognized as the spiritual world without any impairment of normal consciousness, through a further development of normal consciousness. This is, it seems to me, very clear, if not as an idea - Goethe himself said this - but as an impulse that is shaped entirely artistically, in Goethe's “Faust” among many others, it is also embodied. From this point of view, if I may use the trivial word, it really appears to be entirely in the role of Goethe's Faust when, after he has found the deepening of normal consciousness, he has really come to has really come to the point of rejecting all false seeking along false, magical, somnambulistic paths, and wants to face the world as a human being who seeks to know the higher only through an elevation of the soul forces.

Thus we read in the second part of “Faust”:

Unhappy phantoms! Thus you treat
The human race a thousand times over;
Even indifferent days you transform
Into hideous confusion of web-enmeshed torments.
Demons, I know, are hard to get rid of,
The spiritual bond cannot be severed...

And further: I have not yet fought my way into the open.
If I could remove magic from my path,
Unlearn the spells altogether,
I would be a man alone in front of you,
Then it would be worth the effort to be human.

Faust wants to be a person who, through neither outer magic nor inner clouding of consciousness, faces the world of the spirit and is also able to introduce this world of the spiritual from this consciousness into social human life, into the life of 'deed'. And this is portrayed towards the end of the second part of 'Faust' in such a wonderful, in such a grandiose way. So Goethe has tried in his own way to show how man, through a development of the powers within him, can truly penetrate to the secrets of existence, by also clearly and dramatically portraying the aberrations that stand in man's way.

One would like to say that the human being who wants to come out of human forces themselves to a coexistence with the spiritual world really stood in a Faustian form - not by being called Faust, but really in a Faustian form - already opposite Augustine, who indeed attributes to the Manichean bishop Faustus the possibility of coming close to the secrets of the world through an inner elevation of human powers of knowledge. Goethe, in allowing the medieval Faust to have an effect on him, found himself in a world that had already passed judgment on this kind of Faust. The judgment was that a person who wanted to come to the secrets of existence out of his own powers in such a way must fall away from the stream of humanity as an evil element. Goethe could not agree with this view. Goethe was clear about the fact that a human being can only be a complete human being when he is capable of realizing the striving of Faust, even if not in the old way in which the Faust of the folk tale or that of the sixteenth century wanted to realize it. And Goethe was able to arrive at this view because he was deeply imbued with what, as I have often said here, can be called idealism, world-view idealism in the development of German thought.

In these lectures, I have tried to present figures such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in their - albeit only philosophical - striving to grasp the spiritual world. I have also sufficiently emphasized that one need not be a dogmatic adherent of any one of the Fichtean, Schellingian, or Hegelian schools in order to be truly impressed by the greatness of these figures, who stand at the center of German idealism. One should take them as seekers of knowledge, as human beings with a certain kind of inner life. Disregarding the details of their specific world-view, But they do stand there in a striving for a world-picture that is closely akin to Goethe's striving for a world-picture and that, when it is seen in its deeper inter-connections, shows itself to be fundamentally the same as the striving for a world-picture in Germany at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. This striving is destined to continue to work within the process of German evolution.

We know that Kant developed a world view that was not related to Goethe's. I have often pointed this out. It cannot be justified here, I just want to mention it. Kant came to the view that, fundamentally, man cannot see into the deeper sources of nature and spirit. And he stated that if man really wanted to delve into the workings of the world with his ideas, he would need a completely different faculty of perception than he actually has. Then, not only concepts and ideas that depict things would have to flow into his knowledge, but the living stream of existence itself. We can see that Goethe felt this, for example, in his idea of metamorphosis with the primal plant, the primal animal, which Kant excluded from human cognition. And Kant said: “The one who wanted to embrace faith – I am quoting inaccurately, but it roughly corresponds to the wording – that he really looks into the sources of existence, would have to embark on an adventure of reason, to a kind of contemplative judgment; he would have to not only comprehend, but inwardly experience and contemplatively experience the stream of world existence itself.

In the beautiful little essay on “Contemplative Judgment,” Goethe expounds on this Kantian idea, and explicitly says: If one can rise to a higher region with regard to the ideas of freedom and immortality, why should one not also dare to take on the adventure of reason with what the human soul can otherwise experience in nature, in itself? What does Goethe actually want? That means nothing other than: Goethe wants to stir up such knowledge in himself that makes it possible for him, with what he has in his soul, to truly immerse himself in the living world, not just to know the world, but to experience it. Goethe himself strove for such knowledge and for such a position in relation to world phenomena, as he dramatically embodies them in his “Faust”. And Goethe had developed within himself the conviction that man can not only acquire knowledge that reflects a world outside of him, but that he can also awaken within himself a world of ideas that experiences the stream of the existence of the world; but that this is possible only by undertaking what Kant still calls an adventure of reason: to draw up from the depths of the soul the powers that can cognize more than the senses and the understanding limited to the senses. And that is the great thing, that Goethe, who regarded what he did as the nerve of his own cognitive faculty, at the same time understood as a vital impulse, that he felt compelled to solve the problem of knowledge not only philosophically, but as a living man; that for him the question of what can be known of the world and how one can work within the world of deeds, what one can hold in one's soul as the content of knowledge and as an impulse for action in the world of deeds, becomes a life problem. That is the great and significant thing, that for him the happiness and ruin of man depends on it; that for him the satisfaction of a longing depends on it, which concerns the whole person. But it is through this that the problem of knowledge could become for Goethe an artistic, a dramatic, a vital problem in the widest sense of the word. And because Goethe conceived knowledge as something that really leads to life, Faust, in his presentation, was truly satisfied in what he sought by growing together, as it were, with Goethe's world-view itself. For has not his soul, from the very beginning, sought to live in communion with what is spread out spiritually in nature? In Faust it is a quest from the very beginning. In order to realize it to some extent within himself, he needed his wanderings in the world. While he is still in his world, in the “cursed, dull wall-hole,” what kind of longing does he have there?

Oh, would you, full of moonlight,
For the last time on my pain,
Which I so many a midnight
At this desk herangewacht:
Then, over books and paper,
Trübsel'ger friend, you appeared to me!
Ah! could I but on mountain heights
In thy dear light go,
Around mountain caves with spirits hover,
On meadows in thy dawn weave,
From all knowledge smoke unburden,
In thy dew healthy me bathe!

He wants to get out with his soul, to unite with what lives in nature. He has come there, he has been reborn after his world wandering in that which Goethe has imbued with his soul and lives through as what can be called: the highest, most beautiful flowering of German intellectual life.

Therefore, it can be said that Goethe really did incorporate into his “Faust” what he had gained for himself in a struggling life of knowledge and the world throughout his entire life, for “Faust” accompanied him throughout his entire life. Many secrets are still contained in this “Faust”. But it also contains the fact that Faust's journey through the world has brought him to the point where, through the experiences of his own life, he has matured to take in what Goethe had acquired for himself, not as an adventure of reason, but as something that can be attained by descending to the 'Mothers', that is, by attempting in a healthy way to develop the normal spiritual powers already present in one's soul. In this way one finds not something below the soul nor something outside of it, but something truly super-sensuous. And the fact that within the development of the German soul a work like Faust has become possible characterizes the whole of this development, and determines the position which it must hold in the evolution of the world.

There was always an awareness that more is given with “Faust” than merely that which lived in Goethe. Of course, there were always Mephistopheles-like natures in the outer world as well; they cannot comprehend anything like that which lives in Goethe's Faust. And finally, I would like to point out to you just such an external Mephistophelean nature. I would like to read a critique of Goethe's “Faust” that was written in 1822, from which you can see that “Faust” was also judged differently from the way it is judged by those who try to immerse themselves in it selflessly. One would like to say, a criticism that comforts one that so very often the Mephisto natures in the world confront that which honestly and convincingly seeks the sources and reasons for existence. For such natures as that which wrote on Faust in 1822 are not so rare in the present day either. Now that I have tried to lead you on a journey through Faust's experiences, let us also hear something of the echo that Faust has found in a Mephistophelean nature. I shall omit those passages that are not suitable for a public lecture because they are too cynical. The prologue in heaven, where the Lord discusses Faust's nature with Mephisto, shows this man, after he has established “that Mr. von Goethe is a very bad versifier,” the following:

“This prologue is a true model of how one should not write in verse.”

And now the critic continues – in 1822, ladies and gentlemen! –:

"The ages that have passed have nothing to show that could be compared to this prologue in terms of presumptuous wretchedness... But I must be brief because I have taken on a long and unfortunately also boring piece of work. I shall show the reader that the infamous Faust enjoys an usurped and undeserved celebrity only due to the corruptive collective mind of an associatio obscurorum vivorum... I am not motivated by any rivalry for fame to pour out the lye of strict criticism on Mr. von Goethe's Faust. I do not walk in his footsteps to Parnassus and would be glad if he had enriched our German language with a masterpiece... Among the crowd of bravos, my voice may indeed fade away, but it is enough for me to have done my best; and if I manage to convert even one reader and bring him back from worship of this monster, then my thankless effort will not be regretted... Poor Faust speaks a completely incomprehensible gibberish, in the worst rhyming nonsense ever written in Quinta by any student. My preceptor would have beaten me if I had made verses as bad as the following:

Oh, full moon, thou that dost sow
On me my punishment,
For many a midnight
At this desk I have watched.

I will not dwell on the inferiority of the diction or the wretchedness of the versification; the reader has enough evidence from what he has seen that the author cannot compete with the mediocre poets of the old school when it comes to verse construction.

Mephistopheles himself recognizes that Faust was already possessed by a devil before the contract. But we believe that he does not belong in hell, but in the madhouse, with all that is his, namely hands and feet, head and so on. Many poets have given us examples of sublime gibberish, nonsense in grandiose words, but I would call Goethe's gallimathias a genre nouveau of popular gallimathias, because it is presented in the most vulgar and bad language...

The more I think about this long litany of nonsense, the more likely it seems to me that it is a bet that if a famous man comes up with the shallowest, most boring nonsense, , there will still be a legion of silly writers and gullible readers who will find and exegize profound wisdom and great beauties in this flat-footed nonsense.

And so it goes on. Finally, he says:

"In short, a miserable devil who could learn from Marinelli in Lessing. After him, I, in the name of common sense, reverse the judgment of Mrs. von Staël in favor of the aforementioned Faust and do not condemn him to hell, which could cool this frosty product, since even the devil feels wintery inside, but to be hurled into Cloaca Paranassus. By rights.

The world ignores such judgments. And the world sees in Faust one of the deepest attempts of the human spirit, not only in a philosophical way, but in a dramatic, very lively way, to present the problem of knowledge and humanity in the broadest sense to people, to fathom it at all. And there was always an awareness that Goethe succeeded not only in expressing the Goethean world view and Goethean sentiments in his Faust, but, as Herman Grimm says so beautifully, the entire world view of the entire century. And Herman Grimm was right to use this word. “We have,” he says, “a literature of our own, the purpose of which is not only to prove Goethe's credo, but also the credo of his entire century in Faust.”

I could also point out how deeply rooted the rebirth of Faust is in the entire German intellectual life after his world wandering. The depth to which this German spiritual life itself has sunk is shown by the fact that the whole wealth of this spiritual striving could find expression in a work such as Goethe's Faust, and Herman Grimm's words will certainly prove true: not only Goethe's Weltanschhauung, but the Weltanschhauung of the whole century. And a Weltanschhauung such as will live on in the coming centuries in the very broadest sense has been expressed in Goethe's Faust. That German intellectual life was able to produce this work will be a fact for all future times, which, despite all prejudices about German intellectual life, will be recognized by those who can grasp this German intellectual life impartially and objectively. By expressing the deepest striving of the German spirit through Goethe in Faust in such a great way, this German spirit has spoken for all time to all people of the development of the earth an imperishable word of knowledge of human life in being and in free will and in work, a word that will remain, just as will remain that which is the true, deep fruits of German spiritual life. Among these deepest, truest, most imperishable fruits will be found what we can find in Faust. And so we may say: by immersing ourselves in Goethe's Faust, we become acquainted with a part of the imperishable nature of the German spirit itself. And this German spirit has spoken to the whole world by being able to express such things as are hidden in an obvious secret in Faust, to use another of Goethe's words – obvious if one only seeks it. In the face of Faust, we may apply Goethe's own saying: “All that is transitory is but a parable.” But we may also expand on this saying: in works that, out of the transitory, incline towards the eternal, as Goethe's Faust does, the immortal speaks at the same time in an eternal way to the eternity of human existence.

Among the many prejudices against spiritual science, as it is meant here, are those that associate the methods of spiritual research, that which can be described as the paths of spiritual research, with an abnormal, pathological mental life. Although anyone who follows more closely what can be said about the course of such soul development, which is to lead to spiritual research, can only come to such a prejudice either out of ignorance, out of lack of knowledge, or out of ill will, this prejudice must be discussed at some point. For there is plenty of ignorance in the sense mentioned, as well as ill will, in the world. I do not wish to go into individual attacks that have been made against spiritual science from this particular quarter, but I would just like to discuss in general terms the possible attacks, the possible objections and prejudices, and show how unjustified they actually are in the face of the nature of true spiritual research. To do this, however, I must briefly present some material from a certain point of view that was already the subject of the lectures I gave here at the beginning of the winter. I must sketch out the way of spiritual research in a very sketchy way.

The way of spiritual research - as has been emphasized here again and again - is a purely inward path of the soul, a path that is only traversed within the life of the soul itself, and it consists of certain activities of the life of the soul, of certain exercises of the soul life, which lead this soul life from the point at which it stands in ordinary life to another point, from which it is precisely in a position to approach what can be called the spiritual world. Now, in summarizing a great deal, I have just dealt with the exercises that the spiritual researcher has to go through in two main groups in one of the lectures I gave this winter. The first exercises consist of forming one's thinking differently, in a certain way, from the way it is in ordinary life: exercises of thinking. They belong to the first group of spiritual research exercises. Exercises of the will, undertaken in a certain way, belong to the second group of spiritual research exercises.

Today, I will have to say a lot, of course in a brief summary, for a full understanding of which it is necessary either to know what has been said in earlier lectures or to read, for example, my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or the second volume of my “Occult Science”. For I shall endeavor to show how thinking is changed by certain exercises, technically called meditation and concentration of thought, in comparison with ordinary thinking. I do not propose to go into the way these exercises are done, but I may mention at once that in the actual thinking exercises it is a matter of raising into consciousness what is always present in human thinking, and especially in the healthiest human thinking , but which remains more or less unconscious within this healthy human thinking of everyday life, for the reason that we carry out this thinking of everyday life in the sense of what could be called adaptation to the laws, to the processes of the outer world. We do not perceive the external world only through our senses; we think about the external world, we form ideas that become thoughts, we connect these ideas in our thought life. We connect them, when it comes to healthy thinking that belongs to reality, in a very specific, lawful way. Even that which is called logic can only describe how judgments are made, how thinking moves inwardly, so to speak, in order to arrive at what is called truth. The actual process of thinking, the inward activity of thinking, essentially remains unconscious in ordinary thinking. The aim of the first group of exercises is to bring to consciousness what happens in ordinary thinking but remains unconscious, so that we do not merely let our thoughts be woven and live under the compulsion of the currents of the world, but so that our full, conscious will comes to expression in our thinking.

We must realize, when we truly observe the process of thinking and imagining, that we are doing so in the sense that it is imposed on us as a compulsion of the flow of reality. The exercises, which are now particularly thinking exercises, aim to take such ideas and such kinds of ideas into consciousness in the processes that are called meditation and concentration of thought, so that one always has conscious will in the whole process of meditating, of concentrating, that there is no moment when the conscious will does not prevail. And if you have the necessary patience and the necessary stamina and energy to do such exercises, it turns out that you come to detach the activity of thinking, the act of thinking, so to speak, from what ordinary life is the state of being in thought, that one learns to concentrate not only on what is being thought, but on the process of thinking, on that inner weaving and life of the soul that takes place when one thinks. And I have also dealt with the accompanying phenomena associated with this inner discovery, which consists in becoming aware of the thinking activity in thinking. The accompanying phenomenon is this: that one can, to a certain extent, regard one's thoughts themselves, which one is otherwise accustomed to having in one's thinking activity, as something secondary, and indeed, that one can ultimately have them entirely outside one's thinking activity. One begins with certain thoughts, but one passes over to a mere conscious, volitional, fully volitional thinking activity. One is able to switch thoughts on and off and consciously control one's thinking activity. As a side effect of this, one certainly becomes firm and strong in this voluntary use of thinking activity. But at the same time one enters into a certain emptiness of consciousness, into an empty weaving and living of consciousness. Therefore, as I said, these exercises, which relate to mere thinking, must never be undertaken alone. Indeed, the exercises of meditation and concentration are already undertaken in such a way that, by going through them in consciousness, the ordinary element of the will undergoes training at the same time; so that one comes to raise into consciousness what is hidden in the will in ordinary life. And then one comes to find something quite real in ordinary volition, in ordinary will activity, something that is always there, but which otherwise remains stuck down in the unconscious. One cannot will just anything, nor can one pour just any volition into an action without the element I am speaking of being present in the activity. But it remains unconscious. Through those exercises which are based on a kind of concentration, meditation, on an inner, now more, I would say, soul-related activity, one comes to discover what otherwise, by willing, by letting a will flow into the action, unconsciously pours into the willing or into the action, but which one does not look at. Now one discovers it. Strangely enough, one discovers in the will something that resembles consciousness. One discovers a consciousness that is different from the usual consciousness. One discovers – and one must take this, what is now being looked at, not as an image, but as a reality, as a truth – that another consciousness than our ordinary daytime consciousness accompanies us continually, that we are just not aware of this other consciousness, if the paradoxical expression may be used. One discovers another person in the person. One discovers that which can be named: a consciousness that is constantly watching us. And one learns to handle this consciousness, which one thus discovers in the operations of one's will, like the ordinary consciousness. One also learns to connect this consciousness with the results that one has achieved through the thinking exercises, so that the two connect with each other to a certain extent and one is now able to perform soul tasks, which one now knows are completely free from any physical involvement. The latter must be an inner experience, and it becomes an inner experience.

Thus one develops one's soul life into a consciousness that is different from the ordinary one, and one gives this soul life a content by discovering the will in thinking, by discovering thinking as this “activity in itself.” Not in such an abstract way as it is done by ordinary philosophies or other sciences, but in a living way one discovers the thinking activity as a volitional activity. One can now also say that one discovers the will in thinking, and one can say that in the will one discovers a consciousness that can be addressed as a thinking consciousness, just as the ordinary everyday consciousness that we have in life is a thinking consciousness. In thinking, one discovers the will; in the will, one discovers objective thinking that is not otherwise handled by us – if I may use the expression – a thinker in us that is within us, that is objectively present. This essentially characterizes what is to be achieved.

Other accompanying phenomena of this process must also be characterized in order to have a complete picture when one has arrived at discovering thinking as an activity, to find in one's thinking that which can otherwise remain unconscious; I have described this in more detail in earlier lectures. Then one finds oneself confronted with something as one is otherwise confronted with the objects and processes of the external world. But an important, essential peculiarity arises. What one now experiences with the help of the developed thinking and that consciousness of which I have just spoken, that other consciousness than the ordinary one, what one discovers in this way, differs quite essentially from the soul experiences one otherwise has in ordinary life. One may interpret the process more materialistically or more spiritually, but that does not matter, just as it does not matter in the case of today's reflections, which are based on experience rather than interpretation. That which has entered into us through our ordinary experiences, through our perceptions, and which has become thoughts, ideas, is transformed in such a way that it can remain in our memory, in our recollection, as one says, even if, of course, quite different processes are behind this retention. Just as experiences of ordinary perception and ordinary thinking gain the possibility, through a certain process of the soul, of being stored directly in memory, and become, as it were, our memory treasure without our intervention, so it is not the case with those experiences that we make in the way I have just described, with the developed consciousness and the developed will-filled thinking activity. These experiences are made, but they pass by being made, so that one can actually only hold on to them for a moment. They do not become embedded in our organic life. One can compare their fleetingness with the fleetingness of dream experiences. But one is not saying more than a comparison. After all, the dream still has the peculiarity that it can at least be remembered in a certain way directly through itself. What is experienced in the spiritual world in the way described takes place, but does not pass through itself into the ordinary store of memory. And that is the peculiar thing about it: if one wants to face reality in the spirit, one can never proceed in such a way that one can simply extract from one's memory what one has once experienced and then have it again. You would not have it again; instead, you have to experience it anew. Of course, what I have described is slowly preparing itself; it prepares itself through all possible stages. But if you consider all the things described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” for example, what you come to last is what I have just described.

Now you will say: So spiritual experiences can only be had and then have to be forgotten. They would have to, if nothing else were added. And the other thing that is added now is at the same time the special fact of spiritual loss, which must be taken into account if one wants to understand the relationship between the healthiest soul life and spiritual research, and how unfounded the prejudices are that somehow spiritual research could have something to do with pathological soul development. The peculiar thing at issue here is that the state of consciousness that is attained through the true, through the right spiritual-scientific path develops. It comes about, it is then there for our soul life. But the ordinary state of consciousness with which we otherwise live in everyday life remains as it was before we entered this other state of consciousness. That is to say, we remain capable of judgment or, for that matter, deficient in judgment in exactly the same way as we were before; we initially remain full of affect or less full of affect in exactly the same way as we were before. At first, it is possible to observe the other person, who one was before and who one has now remained, with the same objectivity with which one can observe today the processes that one went through emotionally yesterday, for example. Just as little is changed in the ordinary consciousness by the fact that one has attained this other consciousness, as the soul life that one went through yesterday is somehow changed by the fact that one looks at it today. And if it is changed, if you fantasize something into it, then the observation is not the one that can lead to any objectivity; then something must have taken place that is not in order. So you face your ordinary mental life in the same way that you face, I would say, a previous mental experience. The ordinary mental life remains completely intact. And if one wants to store up spiritual-scientific experiences, one must first take over into the ordinary consciousness, which has been preserved, that which one has experienced in the spirit, and then one can store it in one's memory in the same way as one can store experiences of the ordinary consciousness. But it is always necessary that the ordinary consciousness stands beside the newly attained consciousness and that what is undertaken for ordinary life is not undertaken with the newly attained consciousness, but with the ordinary consciousness. If, then, one wants to incorporate spiritual-scientific experiences into the ordinary life of thought, which can be preserved in memory, then one must first take them over from the other consciousness. If one wants to recognize that these spiritual experiences are true, then one cannot experience this in the other consciousness – this must be expressly emphasized – but one must judge them with the ordinary consciousness. They must be subjected to the judgment of the ordinary consciousness. Insight into the spiritual facts is gained through the developed consciousness; insight into the truth of these spiritual facts is initially gained through one's completely ordinary, healthy judgment, which remains completely intact if all exercises are completed in the proper manner.

But this is how the consciousness I have just spoken of differs from all pathological mental states. It differs from pathological states of consciousness in that the pathological states of consciousness develop out of the healthy ones – for my sake – that those that can still be considered healthy pass over into the pathological states of consciousness. The altered consciousness replaces the first. But even if you can think in succession: healthy consciousness, sick consciousness, healthy consciousness again, you cannot think in the actual conscious sense that you are normal, reasonable and crazy at the same time. Because then you would not be crazy. In the moment when you can judge your craziness with your normal mind, you are truly not crazy. This is the special fact that must be considered, that all altered consciousness, all morbid consciousness, arises out of the healthy one like a metamorphosis, and that one should never actually speak of a double ego – which has already been criticized by the excellent criminal anthropologist Benedikt – but should speak of an altered consciousness for the usual pathological phenomena.

This simultaneously characterizes the aim of spiritual-scientific exercises, the goal to which what is called spiritual research actually leads the human being. Now it is quite understandable – I say expressly: quite understandable – that anyone who does not immediately grasp the full essence of the matter at hand can easily fall prey to the prejudice: Well, yes, someone has done mischief with their soul life and has arrived at an abnormal soul life. Perhaps one could also, as one otherwise does, quite nicely, for example, in addition to the usual abnormal, morbid soul phenomena, which all basically have to be characterized by the fact that in reality not one consciousness can exist alongside the other but that one must develop out of the other, that one must replace the other. One could, in addition to these abnormal mental phenomena, simply register new ones – that is how it is done – in which one consciousness could exist alongside the other. For anyone who is not familiar with these things can, after all, basically come to no other conclusion than that the person who has come to such a different consciousness is basically subject to abnormal thinking, or also to abnormal volition or feeling in some way.

These things are quite understandable at first, although after all they do not stand in any other field than that in which someone who has reached a certain level of education in agriculture – and this is by no means meant to be disparaging! — can, from his point of view, also regard as a madman the person who, for example, spends the whole day dealing with quite clever mathematical operations, because it is human nature to regard as abnormal everything that one does not think and believe in oneself. Basically, the prejudices that are often brought against spiritual science from this side are nothing more than the instinct of human nature, just as characterized, to accept only that which one can experience inwardly.

Now, however, the fact is that there are indeed many opportunities to confuse true spiritual research with all kinds of nonsense. Spiritual research – that is, in a sense, given by the necessities of life – will initially speak to a smaller, closed circle of people, just as it ultimately happens in other fields. Of course, today those who have the task of speaking to people about spiritual research are often criticized for speaking to all kinds of small circles and the like, for speaking to people who have only just agreed to listen to the things. Yes, but I can see no objective difference between this process and the other, that at the beginning of a semester a number of students are enrolled with some lecturer, and he then also speaks to this closed circle. And unless other nonsense is going on, I cannot see why the closed circle of a lecture hall should be less called a sect, if one wants to use the term, than a number of people who hear something spiritual. But in spiritual science one is initially dealing with things that cannot be easily controlled by the processes and events of the external physical plane. If someone says that a composite body consists of these or those elements, then one can verify something like that immediately by external means. All spiritual-scientific results can also be verified, but it is necessary to first go the way of the spiritual researcher that has been described. So although these things can be verified, they cannot be verified in the ordinary state of mind in which other things that are purely taking place in the external physical world can be verified. Therefore, and I need not make a detailed transition to cite the experience I want to characterize, it happens that in this area, where verification can only be achieved by applying the appropriate means, there is in fact an enormous amount of what can be called a belief in the authority of what is said, what can be called mere empty talk. Yes, societies are easily formed for the purpose of spiritual life, from motives that need not be characterized here, which make tolerance, mutual love and mutual trust their first principle with a certain right. That is a fine principle. But experience has shown many times over that nowhere is there more arguing and disagreement than in such societies. And although such societies have often taken up the cause of venerating truth as the highest, experience shows that in no other field is truth less respected than within societies that claim to have such corresponding goals. And so it happens that within circles where supposedly spiritual science is practiced, much nonsense prevails. And then it is difficult for those who do not get involved in the matter itself, but judge things according to external symptoms and external events, to distinguish truth from nonsense. And now, in the further course of today's reflections, I would like to provide some information that can help to distinguish truth from nonsense in this field. Above all, I would like to emphasize that one should not be too critical of the prejudices that spiritual research has brought to the side just characterized today, that one can even find these prejudices understandable to a very large extent. I will now mention something very specific.

When one has entered the spiritual world in a certain way, when one has had spiritual experiences, that is, when one has come to know spiritual reality, then one arrives at what I have already characterized here several times, but which you can find precisely characterized in the books mentioned – one comes to what is called imaginative knowledge, not because it is just a matter of exercises in the imagination, of mere imagination in the ordinary sense, but because one comes into the position of having to express pictorially what one experiences. Of course, what a person initially has in terms of imagination, and also in terms of how he can put the ideas into words, how he can characterize the ideas, that refers to the physical world. If one is now transported into a completely different world and then does not characterize it differently, namely characterizes this other world as pictorial for oneself, then one forms false ideas about it. What is stated in detail about the spiritual world must always be absorbed with the awareness that everything the spiritual researcher describes flows out of fully conscious will activity, that he is not describing from some vague, indefinite , but that, in contrast to every half-remembered or visionary consciousness, he consciously, with full will, develops that which he presents as imagination, as images for the spiritual experiences. Just as he presents that which he presents in this sense, that everything is permeated by him willfully, so it must also be received in this sense.

To depict spiritual experiences, which are nevertheless really present in the life of the soul, even if they have to be depicted pictorially, it is of course necessary to take pictorial images from ordinary life, so that what is spiritually experienced is characterized by designating one thing with this color, another with that color, and so on. But there is a certain necessity — but now purely in a soul-spiritual sense, not in a physiological-organic sense — for the description of one, let us say, this color, this sound and this tactile experience, for the description of the other to use something else. And just as when speaking in a particular language one does not first explain that this word has this meaning and that word has that meaning, so too, when one describes one's spiritual experiences in concrete terms, the world of images in which one expresses oneself must be there like an inner language, like something through which one visualizes and represents the actual spiritual experience behind it. Now, if such a description of a spiritual experience occurs, and if this or that spiritual being is described in terms of red, blue and so on, which is quite correct and by which it is really represented, not just characterized, then of course the person who receives this description and is completely unfamiliar with the way it is actually meant can say: We know this! We know that from the field of psychology! We are well acquainted with those mental states in which soul experiences arise purely from the inner being as a secondary sense perception or as a hallucination or even as an illusion. It is therefore entirely justified when it is pointed out, for example, that there are people — after certain experiences have been gathered, even one-eighth of all people have this characteristic — who, for example, when they perceive a certain tone without seeing any color, add a color, but in such a way that it becomes quite objective to them. Such color phenomena, which are not evoked by an external impression but which arise from within and join a sound – I do not want to go into the various hypotheses that have been made about this – are called secondary sensory perceptions. And what people can experience in this way can go so far that, for example, when they pick up a printed matter, the individual letters appear to them in different colors according to their content, depending on whether it is an o or an a. In short, the psychiatrist can of course say: we know these things. And he can say this all the more when mental experiences occur that have the full character of sense perceptions but are formed from within as hallucinations. And if one often takes hallucinations that come to mind in a particularly vivid and plastic way, then one can say: Yes, is not the morbid soul life capable of really producing inner effects? And if one then hears what is presented from this or that side, the claim that they have developed in relation to the soul life, one finds exactly the same. The important thing is that, precisely because of the nonsense mentioned, secondary sensations or hallucinatory states very often occur in people who have a particular disposition to them, and then it is claimed that these are “higher experiences”, that they have really received something from the spiritual world. Yesterday, in connection with Faust, I already pointed out that nothing is given from the spiritual world, but these are mere transformations of the inner life of the instincts, which have merely arisen from within the human being. It does not give us more than the normal life of the soul, but rather less, because there is something that works below the level of the normal life of the soul and that only, when it is raised into consciousness, is transformed into things that look like the ordinary life of the soul. But there is a considerable difference between what is attained by true spiritual research and, if one wants to use the expression, true clairvoyance, and what is often called “clairvoyance” in ordinary life.

And this enormous difference will be noticed if you take what has been said: in all the activities of the spiritual researcher, in all the activities of the true clairvoyant, there is full volitional activity, there is no element in the realization of which you are not present, while the vision has the peculiarity that it comes about without the will being active in it. And one can even answer the question, “How does the spiritual researcher differ from the ordinary visionary, from the hallucinator?” — despite the fact that for many this will seem extremely paradoxical — by saying that they differ in that the spiritual researcher never has visions and hallucinations in the usual sense, precisely because his training in spiritual science goes far beyond the possibility of ever having hallucinations or visions in the usual sense of the word. And this is connected with the fact that what is a spiritual research experience, as I have said, must not be directly fixed in the human organization, but must always be experienced anew.

If spiritual-scientific experience were to become established in the organism in its immediacy, it could indeed lead to an illusory life, because it would then arise from the organism through itself, because it would become attached to the organism and the person would lose control over it. He can only be present at the production of impressions if he approaches each one, I might say, as a virgin, as he approaches, for example, an external impression. And only through this virginal approach to the spiritual experience each time can he know that he has an impression from the spiritual world, just as he knows through ordinary life that when he sees an external object, such as a clock, this clock is not hallucinated, but that there really is an external impression. Through what is happening between him and the clock, he can distinguish what he is now experiencing in direct activity in the external physical world from what arises in him that could, for example, force him into some hallucination or illusion. And again, only by maintaining the same spiritual experiences in the same state of virginity, by not forcing them into the physical body, but by constantly renewing them, does he know that he is not confronted with what arises from his own organization, but that he is always confronted with objective experiences that come from a spiritual world And one certainly still learns, if one is really involved in the way described in the living comprehension of the spiritual world, that inner energy, that inner strength, which one needs, in order to come, let us say, to imaginative knowledge, to recognize, curiously enough, as the same strength that dispels illusions and hallucinations. That is what matters. It is not the power by which hallucinations arise that one invokes, but precisely the power by which one dispels illusions and hallucinations and delusions, and whatever else these things may be called.

And so one could also cite something else, which in turn could be made as an objection in a very easily understandable way. When someone who is still inexperienced in these matters hears that a person who describes his spiritual experiences using terms such as 'world of color' or 'world of sound', as you do in my 'Theosophy', for example, illustrates the soul and spirit worlds in this way, he might say: Yes, if one has to come to the conclusion that one can recognize the spiritual world as a colorful world, as a resounding world, on the one hand all of this is considered a hallucinatory, visionary activity, a pathological state; on the other hand, however, we also know – he may object – that someone born blind cannot be brought to such visions, which play out in colorful images, through any process of spiritual schooling, nor can someone born deaf be brought to such auditory hallucinations. And it is very easy to refute this by saying: So we are dealing purely with the development of the person, which depends on the presence of certain organs.

An objection raised from this point of view is of no more value to the person who sees through things than the question: whether someone who has very good thoughts can express these thoughts in a language that he has not learned at the moment. He cannot, of course, express the thoughts in a language that he has not learned, quite naturally. So someone who is born blind cannot express in colors what he experiences mentally. But that does not mean that he cannot experience exactly the same things as someone who is able to express it in colors, that is, who also illustrates it to himself in colors, deliberately expressing it in this way. It is often necessary, though, to really get to know things intimately if one wants to see through the justification or non-justification of objections.

But if one does not look at things according to their inner character, according to their inner being, but according to how they appear externally, then one will very easily find that there are indeed – if I may use the trivial expression – there are some truly crazy people who belong to some movement that calls itself a spiritual research organization, and who come up with all kinds of stuff that can more or less really be put into the category that the psychiatrist is very familiar with. If, for example, someone approaches a psychiatrist and tells him that he is the reincarnation of John, the psychiatrist is fully justified in saying: We are dealing with an ordinary megalomaniac. From a spiritual scientific point of view, we are dealing with an ordinary megalomaniac because the truly reincarnated John would not express himself in such a way. But quite apart from that, it must be clear that when one is dealing with such phenomena, which must truly be described as pathological, one cannot characterize the essence of the matter in terms of it; for one must consider the whole way in which spiritual research has presented itself in our present time. It must be clear that a world-view is dominant today that leaves very, very many people unsatisfied for various reasons. I do not need to explain why various religious worldviews leave many, many people unsatisfied today, because that is too well known. But I need only point out that even those worldviews that are very often built on the so-called solid ground of the scientific way of thinking leave many people unsatisfied, and for two reasons. Firstly, partly because those who adopt the scientific way of thinking really do recognize that, as a rule, the answers to the big questions do not lie in the scientific results, as one can get them, but at most the clues to the questions themselves. For those who can see things clearly, scientific books usually do not lead to answers, but rather to more questions. That is one side of it. On the other hand, however, there are other reasons why building a worldview on a scientific or even on a modern basis today leaves some people unsatisfied. It must be said that building a worldview today on a scientific or historical basis requires a great deal. Above all, it requires making an effort to learn many, many facts and chains of facts. It cannot always be said that those who do not want to build a worldview on the basis of the scientific way of thinking really do so because they realize that nothing satisfactory, nothing easily satisfying, can be built on it; rather, very often it is simply out of laziness, out of an inability to familiarize themselves with the necessary facts and chains of facts. People shy away from dealing with the difficulty that today's science offers, for themselves. And so it turns out that very many people find it more convenient not to go the long way of preparation, which claims a certain scientific basis, but find it more convenient to take in what can actually be absorbed – sometimes as a mere phrase, as a nice saying – that which comes out of spiritual science in some way. One also likes it because it initially ties in with what is of direct personal interest to the individual. One likes it more, it satisfies one more than when one starts with nature and then tries to arrive at some understanding of the human being, insofar as this can be gained from natural science. In this way one has a long and arduous path to tread. Many want to avoid this. That is why people who actually have no opportunity to gain anything for their satisfaction through what the current education offers approach spiritual science, and then they do not develop in spiritual science what comes from spiritual science, but they carry into the spiritual scientific world current what they previously have in their whole organism, in their whole soul.

If someone has something in his whole affect, in his whole emotional life, which, if one describes things symptomatically from an external point of view, can be described as a tendency towards megalomania – I know very well that I am only expressing one symptom here – then it can of course very easily happen that this tendency towards megalomania is now brought into the spiritual scientific movement. And then it is quite natural that the person concerned connects what he hears about the human being, not in an objective way with the human being, but with what he himself develops through his tendency to feelings and emotions. And then it just happens that when he learns about the law of repeated earthly lives, he naturally finds it very satisfying when he can dream up some way to be, say, the reincarnation of so-and-so. But there is one who considers things rationally is quite clear about the fact that what the person in question has brought into spiritual science has led him to such an idea and that spiritual science cannot have led him to this idea. And anyone who takes into consideration what is only a very brief mention of the path of spiritual research in the last chapter of my 'Theosophy' — he does not even need to get to know it anymore — and who then still really takes it seriously with what can be gained from today's official psychiatry, from recognized psychiatry, cannot possibly come to the idea that something can be contributed to the illness of the soul life from the spiritual scientific path itself. Conversely, however, spiritual-scientific activities can be distorted and caricatured by what is brought into spiritual science by people who have the necessary aptitudes for it. Someone could enter the spiritual-scientific world-view current enter, let us say, the world of the stock exchange instead of the spiritual-scientific current of thought, and he might have such tendencies that develop into megalomania; then he would naturally live out his megalomaniacal ideas in all kinds of fantasies related to the world of the stock exchange. He might see himself as a special stock market king or something similar. If, instead of entering the world of the stock market, he enters the world of the spiritual-scientific school of thought, he will live out the same tendencies by considering himself, for example, to be the reincarnation of John the Baptist.

And so one can say: in a certain sense spiritual research itself suffers from the fact that many people who have failed in their quest for a worldview because of what is otherwise offered today for the quest for a worldview come into some spiritual research current and then clothe in all kinds of spiritual scientific ideas that which they would otherwise have lived out in a completely different way. It is easy to observe that especially in circles composed of people who, because of a failed world-view aspiration, profess a spiritual-research direction, many of them approach spiritual research precisely at the moment when they become disillusioned with what the external world can offer them. Now just think about what is actually happening here. Before this, the person lived with his predispositions, which naturally had to lead to some abnormality of the soul life at some point. This abnormality of the soul life would certainly have occurred. But at the moment when it is still hidden, when he no longer really knows his way around the outside world, he turns to some kind of spiritual research direction. The consequence of this is that he cannot be saved in the way I will shortly indicate, but that he carries what is stirring within him into the spiritual research direction. And because of all these facts it may just happen that because such a spiritual research direction is otherwise looked upon with envy, it is blamed for having caused mental illness in such people. Of course, on the one hand, every sane psychiatrist and every sane spiritual researcher will be quite clear about the true process. Now, in order to understand more in this field, it will be good to consider once more how the two types of consciousness, of which has been spoken, do not really have to behave in such a way that one develops from the other, that one replaces the other, but that they exist side by side, that full consciousness is present for two soul lives, but that they do not fall apart. These two souls should not be understood as more than what is already characterized in the concrete. This, then, is what must be borne in mind.

Now the question may be raised: Does this spiritual research as such have any positive significance for ordinary life, for the external life in the physical world? One might think that it has no significance, because it has just been said that what is experienced in the spiritual world cannot flow directly into ordinary consciousness. But the following can happen, for example. It can happen that a person in the spiritual world perceives this or that moral impulse, a moral motive that can only be recognized from the spiritual world. Our moral view from the spiritual world can certainly be enriched. Likewise, our natural view from the spiritual world can be enriched. Now, let us consider the case that one receives a moral impulse from the spiritual world through a spiritual experience, that is, an impulse to do this or that in ordinary physical life. Then, according to what has been discussed, this moral impulse, which is first experienced in the spiritual world, must be taken over into the ordinary physical consciousness and justified there, yes, placed in the world in the same way as moral impulses are otherwise placed in the world. In this way all possibility will be removed that a person might appear in the world and say: I must now do this or that, because this is my mission – a phrase that one hears very, very often precisely in the areas that I could only characterize by saying: 'Nonsense is being done with it'. The true spiritual researcher will never receive motivation from the spiritual world in this way. What he receives from the spiritual world enters his ordinary consciousness, and he now develops those ideas that are adapted to the external physical world, and with his will impulse he enters into this physical world, just as if one received an impulse to recognize some scientific connection. One will not present this scientific connection from the outset as an illumination, but will take it over into ordinary consciousness, test it against common sense and against all that one has so far known in the field of natural science, and will now begin, having taken it over, to place it in the system of natural scientific knowledge that one has developed. If one bears this in mind, it will never be possible to come into conflict or disharmony with the outer physical life. But someone who, on the basis of impulses that are compulsively inherent in him, as compulsive drives, ascribes this mission to himself can come into such a conflict, into such a disharmony, which then, of course, because it comes only from within him, is not at all adapted to the outer world, will fit into the outer world as badly as possible. He will tend to be a destructive individual rather than one who could enrich social life through what can be experienced in the spiritual world. The path that leads to spiritual research thoroughly familiarizes one with all these things. And it must be said that everything that is otherwise added to the described training group of thinking and will is essentially there to ensure that, on the one hand, the human being does not bring anything unhealthy into his spiritual life from the ordinary physical life, that he is truly free with his spiritual and soul life from his bodily life, and on the other hand, that he does not caricature what can be experienced in the spiritual realm by taking it, not into healthy reason and normal affect life, but into the pathological realm of affect life. But if what actually underlies experience in the spiritual world is developed in a healthy way of this kind, then one not only has something healthy in the spirit-research way, but one has something that is healthy-inducing, one really has something that also helps people in terms of their health. But it must proceed as I have described or at least outlined it today. Confusions, which then lead to the most unfortunate prejudices, will always occur.

In this way spiritual research comes to a deeper understanding of the human soul, to a vision of more in the human soul than can be seen in this human soul with the ordinary soul mood. And if one does not misuse the word, one can call such a view of what lives in the soul beyond the ordinary soul life a mystical view of one's own soul. One can call such a life a life in mysticism. Again, it is quite understandable when someone who is a layman in these matters says: Yes, we know mysticism quite well; we have come to know it quite well, only we call it mystical madness. For there is indeed a pathological condition that can be strictly defined and is called mystical madness. It leads from a purely pathological basis to a kind of soul-vision that is purely organic and physiological, for example to an inner brooding in which one then comes to find all kinds of religious visions of a visionary kind within oneself. In short, there is what is called mystical madness in psychiatry.

Someone who is grounded in spiritual research will not want to criticize the psychologist, although there are, of course, enough people who believe that they also understand spiritual science. He will not say: When you speak of mystic madness, you are dealing with a person who is sacred to God and to whom more is revealed than to others. No, the healthy spiritual researcher also describes the mystic madman as a mystic madman, just like the psychiatrist himself, in exactly the same sense and also with the same caution, which I do not need to go into today. In regard to everything that has natural, healthy justification, spiritual science stands completely on the ground of natural science, denying nothing that is accepted as justified by natural science, not even in the matters that have just been discussed. And so the spiritual researcher, without lapsing into dilettantism, can, if he is able to judge things, quite properly and positively agree with the psychiatrist on all pathological phenomena that are externally designated as symptoms of madness, be it as mystical madness, religious madness or the like. He will never deny that these things exist and occur here and there in a specific case.

But if true spiritual research is really done with inner energy, then it does indeed happen that certain types of abnormal mental life are healed and balanced out through what the person concerned experiences mentally, in the way it has been described today. If the person who does such exercises, as indicated today and as described in more detail in the books mentioned, comes to true mysticism, to that which can objectively occur in the human soul as spiritual-soul experience, then he may even have had a tendency, a disposition, to mystical madness before: this will disappear, it will be corrected! All false mysticism in the sense indicated is dispelled by true mysticism. And it can go much further. A tendency towards megalomania, or other things, can be overcome by finding one's way into spiritual-scientific life in this way. Not to mention the fact that the more and more this living in the spiritual-soul life is intensified, the energies that are developed there can also assert themselves further, into the life of the body. But I do not want to go into this chapter today, which can only be discussed in detail and in a special way. Thus, in this limited field, which has been discussed today, there is not only something healing in delving into spiritual research – and this could actually be extended in a certain way to all phenomena of the morbid soul life – but there is also something healing about it. And it must be understood in this sense. One must always be clear about the fact that what appears as spiritual research can easily be confused with the abnormal soul life because it deviates from the experiences of ordinary soul life, and that the abnormal soul life can also be confused by its carrier himself, of course, with that which is healthy soul life. And there one experiences the strangest things even with the bearers of abnormal mental life, when they turn to spiritual research. There is now so much available in the literature for the possibility of progressing to a certain degree on the spiritual research path that anyone, and anyone can use it safely, provided they follow the instructions. Now let us suppose that someone wants to make progress. At first he is driven by an inner impulse, a urge to advance. Often it is curiosity, a desire for sensationalism, to look into the spiritual world. In the course of his striving, however, he very often fails to achieve what he initially imagines. The reasons why this or that is not achieved, the reasons why this or that is achieved wrongly, are sufficiently explained in the books mentioned. However, because he does not really want to enter into the spiritual-scientific world-view current, the person concerned is unwilling to say that he is not making progress or that he is coming to a caricature of spiritual-scientific thought, and does not admit that he has neglected this or that, but is often inclined to say: the prescriptions are to blame; I have come to this or that which seems abnormal to me, the prescriptions are to blame or the person who gave the prescriptions. And especially when there is some kind of morbid disposition, a belief is very easily formed that can be characterized by a kind of persecution mania precisely towards the person who has given the instructions in any way, in order to make the soul's journey into the spiritual world through exercises. This is a very, very common phenomenon, one that occurs again and again and can be exploited, because of course it is very easy to refer to the testimony of such people. I do not wish to refer to individual cases, but only to show how, through the introduction of a morbid mental life into the spiritual-scientific world-view, the spiritual-scientific world-view as such can indeed be misunderstood. Therefore, anyone who wishes to become acquainted with this spiritual-scientific world-view would do well to become acquainted with it where it can be recognized in its essential nature.

And there it will be found that what I have said in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is true, all that I have described today and otherwise: that man comes to certain harrowing experiences that can throw him off balance in a certain way, but not as an objective fact, as something that emerges from within. For all these reasons it may happen that in various writings dealing with such things - I have expressed this in the book mentioned - there is much talk of the dangers connected with the ascent into the higher worlds. The descriptions of such dangers are indeed apt to make fearful minds look upon this higher life only with shuddering. Yet it must be said that this danger exists only when the necessary precautions are disregarded. If, on the other hand, every precaution is taken that true schooling of the spirit provides, then the ascent will take place in such a way that the power of the manifestations will surpass in magnitude what the boldest imagination can conceive. And when it is said that man learns to recognize impending dangers at every turn, so to speak, he must face these dangers boldly and courageously. It is possible for him to make use of such forces and paths that are withdrawn from sensory perception. And he is threatened by temptations to take hold of precisely these forces in the service of a selfish, unhealthy interest or to use these forces in the wrong way due to a lack of clear thinking about the conditions of the sensory world. But if all the rules are really observed in the appropriate way, there can be no question of entering into an unhealthy soul life. And if they are not observed in the appropriate way, then one should not be surprised if what is to be achieved is not achieved. After all, this is what spiritual science has in common with other things in life. If someone is supposed to learn something at school and instead of going to school always goes behind the school, he will not achieve what is to be achieved at school either. Although this is a very trivial comparison, it is still an apt comparison.

There could be much more said about the various errors and prejudices that can be held against spiritual science. But anyone who is deeply immersed in this spiritual science itself knows that much of it is different from what one is accustomed to in ordinary education and worldviews today. Much is different. For example, a critic of my book 'Theosophy' recently said: Well, various things are claimed there, but they should first be examined objectively. If it is claimed that one can see this or that in the spiritual world, then, according to this critic, the objective test would be to sit five or six spiritual researchers down together on both sides and have them give their spiritual research experiences about one and the same thing. If they agree, then from this critic's point of view it is said to be self-evidently correct. The man criticized the book “Theosophy”. But if he had really read it – and one is almost tempted to believe that he is not at all able to understand a book written in this way – then he would have had to recognize that this path is out of the question; but that the only correct examination is possible if he tries to set out on the path of spiritual research himself. Everyone can investigate and will find that everything is confirmed by his own research. Why all this is possible is something I have recently discussed in a note on the sixth edition of my 'Theosophy'. But one must simply engage with the subject itself. Today one must already be able, I would say, to rise to the point of view that spiritual science is something that is, in a true, genuine sense, a continuation of the scientific way of thinking that the dawn of modern times has brought; but precisely because it, like natural science, wants to penetrate into the processes of the senses, into the spiritual world, and explore its secrets, it must also proceed differently than the natural scientific way of thinking, which is directed only at the external. And when one has understood the matter in this way, one will find that, basically, the way in which spiritual science is received does not differ so much, after all, in terms of understanding and also in terms of ill will, from the way in which other spiritual movements were received that were unusual for conventional views. Certainly, anyone who wants to attain higher spiritual experiences has a long, long way to go before they can get there. But today we live in a time of human development when everyone can develop to a certain extent within themselves, which can at least lead them to the conviction, to the own-achieved conviction, of what the spiritual path is. To understand that the results of spiritual science are true, one need only have common sense; this has been emphasized many times here. For the one who can research them can only recognize and confirm their truth through the common sense that he must have in addition. And when it comes to natural science, it is easier to say that a spiritual science initially leads one to questions that nature poses, that it enriches one's entire knowledge of nature, than that it simply deals with the so-called “meaning of life” in a philistine, pedantic way. It does find the meaning of life, but in a different way than one often imagines.

So, what is necessary for understanding spiritual research does not necessarily mean that one has to go a long way oneself, and also what one needs in the present, so to speak, for the security of one's soul – for that security that one can gain when one knows that this soul goes through births and deaths, that does not belong to temporality but to eternity - one does not even need to approach spiritual research itself; rather, when the spiritual researcher describes what he has researched and presents this description appropriately, then one already has in it what is needed. I have often mentioned this here, but it cannot be repeated often enough: just as little as one needs to feel the need to have the fact itself in front of one, but finds satisfaction in the picture, so it is the case that for certain soul needs one really has enough in the description that the one who is a spiritual researcher gives. Indeed, he can have what he wants for his soul's needs not only through his spiritual research, but also by drawing it from the spiritual worlds and carrying it down into the world in which he himself lives, by describing it for himself. That it is also necessary today to indicate those exercises by means of which one can take certain steps in spiritual research does not depend on the fact that only he can have the fruits of spiritual research who enters into the spiritual world itself, but on something quite different. It is connected with the fact that present-day humanity has indeed reached a point in its development where it no longer wants to accept things merely on authority, where it really wants to develop to at least that degree, that it can say: I can also judge to a certain extent what the spiritual researcher says. Therefore the development of spiritual research will take the course that a larger number of people will be found who take the first steps, which already lead very far, in the field of spiritual research, in order to be able to accept - without relying on authority and not only on the mere sense of truth, which is also sufficient for the needs of the soul - that which is brought from the spiritual worlds through spiritual research. For the needs of the soul, self-research would not be necessary. But for the needs of the time, self-research will develop more and more. For the needs of the soul, it is just as sufficient to hear what the spiritual researcher says as it is for the ordinary person not to carry out chemical experiments in a laboratory, but to accept the results of chemistry for ordinary life. Let each one now beat his breast and say to himself how much of his scientific knowledge he has accepted on authority. Undoubtedly, if we look at the matter in terms of truth, belief in authority has never been as great as it is today, although to many people this seems a completely paradoxical statement.

When all these things are taken into consideration, it must be said that spiritual science must indeed be something that wants to place itself in the spiritual development of humanity, from the present into the future, not because it ascribes this mission to itself only from spiritual worlds, but because one can recognize, according to what lives in humanity today as a need, as a possibility for development, that spiritual science is just as necessary for further development as Copernicanism was in the dawn of modern times, as Galilean science was, as Keplerian science was. He who sees through these things will not be able to despair, nor will he be able to become fainthearted in the face of all the misunderstandings that are brought against spiritual research. He will not become fainthearted, but rather, when he considers the great examples of history, he will see how, again and again, everything that has to be integrated as something new into the spiritual development of humanity is met with prejudice. Just as Copernicanism had to face prejudices, and as in the ecclesiastical field it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that it was allowed to be believed, so too must spiritual science, in principle, face prejudices.

But anyone who has followed the course of truth through human historical development for a little while knows that truth is something that is intimately related to the human soul. One can misunderstand the truth, but even if it were so misunderstood in a time, in an age, that it would have to disappear for the time being, it would rise again! For it has forces by which it forces its way through the narrowest crevices of the rocks of prejudice in the course of human development. One can hate the truth. But anyone who hates the truth will ultimately only be able to disadvantage himself. You can push the truth back in any age, but the truth cannot be completely suppressed, for the reason that it is, figuratively speaking, the sister of the human soul. The human soul and the truth are sisters. And just as discord can sometimes break out between siblings, but agreement will always come again when they remember their common origin in the right way, so too, when discord and hatred and misunderstanding breaks out between the human soul and the truth, there will always come times when it will be recognized from both sides, when it will be confirmed from both sides, that truth and the human soul belong together and have one origin in the eternal spirit of the world. Therefore, anyone who sees through such things, as I have tried to express figuratively, will be able to say with justification, as expressed in a proverb with which I will conclude today's reflections, in one of those proverbs that are said in certain regions of Germany: “A proverb - a truth”. Yes, it is a proverb and a truth: you can squeeze the truth, but you cannot crush it!

Reflections such as those we are considering this evening are meant to be an interlude in the otherwise continuous presentation of the humanities. In particular, I would like to try this evening to develop some of the ideas I touched on in my lecture last December on the intellectual and cultural situation in Austria. In our time, in which the concept of Central Europe, and also of Central European intellectual life, must increasingly develop as a result of difficult events and experiences, it seems justified to take a look at the lesser-known circumstances of Austrian intellectual life.

Hermann Bahr, who is known in the broadest circles as a witty man, as a man who cultivates the most diverse areas of literature, comes, I would say, from a typically Austrian region: from Upper Austria, and visited France, Spain and Russia at a relatively young age, and I know that at the time he was of the opinion that he could faithfully represent the essence of French and even Spanish and Russian intellectual culture to a certain extent. He even immersed himself so completely in Spanish politics that, as he assured us at the time, he wrote a fiery article in Spain against the Sultan of Morocco when he returned. Well, for decades now, after his world travels, he has been staying in Austria, working as a playwright, as an editor, as a general observer of art, and also as a biographer, for example of the much-misunderstood Max Burckhardt, and so on. Until recently, I tried to keep track of what Hermann Bahr was writing. In recent times, and actually for quite a while, one finds in his work an endeavor, which he often expressed himself, that he is searching, to discover Austria. Now imagine, the man who thought he knew French, even Spanish character, who wrote a book about Russian character, then goes back to his homeland, is such a member of his homeland that he only needs to speak five words and you immediately recognize the Austrian; the man seeks Austria! This may seem strange. But it is not so at all. This search originates from the quite justified feeling that, after all, for the Austrian, Austria, Austrian nature – I would say – Austrian national substance is not easy to find. I would like to describe some of this Austrian national character in a few typical personalities, insofar as it is expressed in Austrian intellectual life.

When I was young, many people were of the opinion, the then justified opinion, that when considering art, artistry, literature, and intellectual development, one looked too much to the past. In particular, much blame was attached to the scientific history of art and literature, for which a personality is only considered if they lived not just decades but centuries ago. At that time, considerations could hardly rise to the immediate perception of the present. I believe that today one could feel something opposite: in the way that considerations about art and artists are so commonplace, we now often experience that everyone more or less starts with themselves or with their immediate contemporaries. I do not wish to consider the present situation of Austrian intellectual life here, but rather a period of time that is not so far in the past. I do not wish to proceed in a descriptive manner. With descriptions, one is always right and always wrong at the same time. One touches on one or the other shade of this or that fact or personality, and both the person who agrees and the person who refutes will undoubtedly be right in the case of a general characteristic, in the case of general descriptions. I should like to give a symptomatic description. I should like to pick out individual personalities and in these personalities to show some of the many things that are alive in the Austrian intellectual world. You will excuse me if I start with a personality who is close to me. I believe, however, that in this case being close to someone does not prevent me from making an objective assessment of the personality in question. But on the other hand, I believe that in this person I have encountered a personality in life that is extraordinarily characteristic of Austrian intellectual life.

When I came to the Vienna Technical University in 1879, the subject, which was of course taught there as a minor subject, was the history of German literature, Karl Julius Schröer. He is little known and much misunderstood by those who have met him. I now believe that he is one of those personalities who deserve to live on in the intellectual history of Austria. However, an important literary historian once made some strange comments about Karl Julius Schröer in the presence of a party at which I was sitting next to him. There was talk of a German princess, and the literary historian in question wanted to say that this German princess, however talented she might otherwise be, sometimes, as he put it, “could be very wrong” in her literary judgments; and as an example, he cited the fact that she considers Karl Julius Schröer to be an important man. Schröer took up a position as a teacher of German literary history at a Protestant lyceum in Pressburg around the middle of the last century, at a momentous point in Austrian intellectual life. He later taught the same subject at the University of Budapest. Karl Julius Schröer was the son of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, who was mentioned in my previous lecture on Austrian identity. Tobias Gottfried Schröer was also an extraordinarily important figure for Austria. He had founded the Pressburg Lyceum and wanted to make it a center for the cultivation of German intellectual life. His aim was to help those Germans in Austria who were surrounded by other nationalities to become fully aware of their identity as part of the German intellectual world.

Tobias Gottfried Schröer is a personality who, from a historical-spiritual point of view, comes across in such a way that one would like to feel a certain emotion, because one always has the feeling: how is it possible in the world that an important mind can remain completely unknown due to the unfavorable conditions of the time, completely unknown in the sense that one calls “being known” that one knows that this or that personality has existed and has achieved this or that. However, the achievements of Tobias Gottfried Schröer are by no means unknown or unappreciated. I just want to emphasize that as early as 1830 Tobias Gottfried Schröer wrote a very interesting drama, “The Bear”, which has at its center the personality of Tsar Ivan IV, and that Karl von Holtei said of this drama that if the characters depicted were Schröer's creations, then he had achieved something extraordinarily significant. And they were Schröer's inventions except for Ivan IV. However, the level-headed man, the not at all somehow radically minded Tobias Gottfried Schröer, had a flaw. In those days, people could not be allowed to read what he wrote, so to speak, that is, this view was held by the censors. And so it came about that he had to have all his works printed abroad and that one could not get to know him as the important dramatic poet that he was. He wrote a drama in 1839 called “The Life and Deeds of Emmerich Tököly and His Fellow Rebels”. In this work, one encounters in a large historical painting all the intellectual currents that existed in Hungary at that time. And in the character of Tököly himself, one encounters what critics of the time rightly called a Hungarian Götz von Berlichingen, not so much because Tököly had to be called a Götz von Berlichingen, but because Schröer managed to depict Tököly in such a vivid way that the dramatic figure of Tököly could only be compared to Götz von Berlichingen. It was only by a strange mistake that Tobias Gottfried Schröer was sometimes recognized. For example, he wrote a paper “On Education and Teaching in Hungary”. This paper was regarded by many as something extraordinary. But it was also banned, and attention was drawn to the fact that this author - who was basically the calmest man in the world - was actually a dangerous person. But the Palatine of Hungary, Archduke Joseph, read this writing. Now the storm that had risen over this writing subsided. He inquired about the author. They did not know who he was. But they speculated that it was the rector of a Hungarian school. And Archduke Joseph, the Palatine of Hungary, immediately took the man - it was not the right one! - into the house to educate his son. What a tribute to a personality! Such things have happened many times, especially with regard to this personality. For this personality is the same one who, under the name Christian Oeser, has written all kinds of works that have been widely distributed: an “Aesthetics for virgins,” a “World history for girls' schools.” If you read this “World History for Girls' Schools” by a Protestant author, you will certainly find it quite remarkable, and yet it is true that it was once even introduced in a convent as the corresponding world history – truly, in a convent! The reason for this was that there is a picture of St. Elizabeth on the title page. I leave it to you to believe that the liberalness of the nuns might have contributed to the introduction of this “world history for girls' schools” in a convent.

After pronouncing such sentences, Karl Julius Schröer let his gaze wander over the times when the German essence was thoroughly misunderstood by other nations around it as a result of various events. He spoke about this as follows: “The German name was held in low esteem by the nations that owed it so much; at that time, the German was valued in France almost on a par with barbarians.” In 1846, he spoke to his audience at the German Lyceum in Pressburg! But in contrast to this, Karl Julius Schröer was full of enthusiasm for what one could say he saw as the German intellectual substance, not for what is merely called nationality in the ethnographic sense, but for the spiritual that permeates everything that holds the German essence together. I quote a few of Karl Julius Schröer's statements from this time, which now lies far behind us, for the reason of showing how peculiarly that which is called the confession of German nationality lives in the more outstanding minds. Basically, we have to keep in mind that the way the German stands by his nationality cannot be understood by the other nationalities of Europe, because it is fundamentally different from the way the other nationalities stand by what they call their nationality. If we look at the more outstanding and deeply feeling Germans, we find that they are German in the best sense of the word because they see Germanness in what is spiritually pulsating, but also as a force tinged with this spirituality, in what counts itself German; that Germanness is something like an ideal for them, something to which they look up, that they do not see merely as a national organism. And therein lie many of the difficulties why German character – even in our days, and especially in our days – is so misunderstood, so hated. Such Germans as Karl Julius Schröer want to achieve their Germanness through knowledge, by gaining insight into the possibilities of life and action that the living organism of a nation offers. And again and again Karl Julius Schröer's gaze wanders, not in arrogance, but in modesty, to the question: What world-historical mission in the development of the human race has that which, in this best sense of the word, can be called Germanness and German nature? And before world history it wants to be justified, what is built up in views on German nature. Much more could be said about the special position of such minds in relation to the German character. Thus Karl Julius Schröer, speaking from this attitude, says: “The world epoch that begins with Christianity is also called the Germanic world; for although the other nations also have a great share in history, almost all the states of Europe were founded by Germanic peoples... .” — this is a truth that, at least today, is not readily acknowledged outside of the German border posts. Of course, it is not heard, but it is not readily acknowledged. “... Spain, France, England, Germany, Austria, even Russia, Greece, Sweden and so on, were founded by Germans and imbued with the German spirit.”

And then Karl Julius Schröer cites for his listeners a saying of a German literary historian, Wackernagel: “Throughout Europe now flowed...” - namely after the migration of peoples - “A pure Germanic blood, or combining Roman-Celtic blood, now flowed a Germanic spirit of life, took the Christian faith... on its purer, stronger floods and carried it along.” There was no time in which the hatred of Europe would have prompted such views as today. They were views that arose in a thoroughly honest way from the contemplation of the German character by this mind. And so he expressed himself: “The civilized peoples of Europe are one great family, and it is a single great course of the nations of Europe that leads through all errors back to the source of truth and true art, on which all nations accompany the Germans, often overtaking them, but in the end one after the other falling behind them. The Romance peoples are usually the first in everything: the Italians, then the Spaniards, the French, then come the English and the Germans. One of these nations usually represents the culmination of a particular trend of the times. But lately, even the English have had their hour struck in art and science... “—said in 1846, though with reference to the development of intellectual life—”... and the time has come when German literature is visibly beginning to rule over Europe, as the Italian and French did before!"

Thus was the man rooted in his Austrian homeland. And since I later became very close to him, I know well that it meant nothing to him, absolutely nothing that could somehow be described in words: he would have wanted the domination of one nation over another—not even within Austria. If one wants to call an attitude like Karl Julius Schröer's national, then it is compatible with the acceptance of every nationality, insofar as this nationality wants to assert itself alongside others from the germ, from the source of its own being, and does not want to dominate these others. His concern was not to cultivate the supremacy of the German character over any other nationality or over any legitimate national aspiration, but to bring to full development within the German character what is inherent within that German character. And that is what is special about this man: that he felt himself intertwined with Austrian national character through his entire aesthetic sensibility, through his entire feeling, artistic feeling, popular feeling, but also through his scientific endeavors. He became, so to speak, an observer of this Austrian national character.

And so we see that as early as the 1950s, out of his deep love for the people, he collected those wonderful German Christmas plays that have been preserved among the German population of Hungary, and published “German Christmas Plays from Hungary”, those Christmas plays that are performed in the villages at Christmas time, at the time of the Epiphany. They are strange games! They were actually only printed for the first time in the mid-nineteenth century – and Schröer was one of the first to have such things printed. They have been preserved from generation to generation in the rural population. Since then, many such Christmas games have been collected in the most diverse areas, and much has been written about them. With such heartfelt love, with such intimate connection to folklore, as Kar! Julius Schröer wrote his introduction to the “German Christmas Plays from Hungary” at the time, hardly anything has been written in this field since. He shows us that manuscripts of the plays were always preserved from generation to generation, as they were a sacred ritual that people prepared for in the individual villages when Christmas season approached; and that those who were chosen to play, that is, to go around the village and the most diverse locales to play these games for the people, in which the creation of the world, the biblical history of the New Testament, the appearance of the three kings, and the like were depicted. Schröer describes how those who prepared for such plays not only prepared themselves for weeks by learning things by heart, by being drilled by some kind of director, but how they prepared themselves by following certain rules; how they did not drink wine for weeks, how they avoided other pleasures of life for weeks in order to have the right feelings, so to speak, to be allowed to perform in such plays. How Germanic character has absorbed Christianity can be seen, how this Christianity has flowed into these strange plays, which are sometimes crude, but always deeply moving and extraordinarily vivid. Later, as I said, others also collected these things; but none approached it with such devotion of his personality, with such a connection to what was being lived out, as Karl Julius Schröer, even if his representations, scientifically speaking, are long outdated.

Then he turned to the study of German folklore as it is spread throughout the vast territory of Austria-Hungary, of German folklore as it lives in the people. And there are numerous treatises by Karl Julius Schröer in which he presents this folklore in terms of its language and the intellectual life expressed through it. We have a dictionary, a description of the dialects of the Hungarian highlands, the area that was settled by German settlers on the southern slopes of the Carpathians, and still is today, although most of the area is Magyar. With tremendous love, through Karl Julius Schröer, I would say, every word was recorded that resonates with the dialect of this area; but we have always recorded it in such a way that one can see from his descriptions how his interest was directed towards seeking out what the cultural task was, what the particular way of life of the people who, coming from afar, had to push their way into the east at a certain time in order to temporarily cultivate their own culture in the midst of other peoples, later to remember it and then gradually to be absorbed into other cultures. What Schröer has achieved in this field will in many ways represent something for the future, like wonderful memories of the ferment that shaped German identity in the wide expanse of Austria.

Karl Julius Schröer later came to Vienna. He became director of the Protestant schools and later professor of German literary history at the Vienna Technical University. And I myself experienced how he knew how to influence those who were receptive to the presentation of directly felt intellectual life. Then he turned more and more to Goethe, delivered his “Faust” commentary, which appeared in several editions, and in 1875 wrote a history of German poetry that was met with much hostility. It became an example at the time after it was published, a “literary history from the wrist” called. However, Schröer's literary history is not a literary history written according to the methods that later became common in the Scherer school. But it is a literary history in which there is nothing but what the author experienced, experienced in the poetic works, in art, in the development of German intellectual life in the nineteenth century up to his time; because that is what he wanted to present at the time. Karl Julius Schröer's entire life and intellectual development can only be understood by considering the Austrian character of Schröer's entire personality, which brought the scientific and artistic into direct connection , and to experience it in direct connection with folklore, that folklore which, particularly in Austria, I would say, presents a problem at every point of its development, if one only knows how to experience and observe it. And one must often think, perhaps also abroad: Is this Austria a necessity? How does this Austria actually fit into the overall development of European culture?

Well, if you look at Austria in this way, it appears to be a great diversity. Many, many nations and ethnic groups live side by side, pushed together, and the life of the individual is often complicated by these underlying factors, even as a soul life and as a whole personality life. The things that now play from one nation into another, what comes to light through this lack of understanding and the desire to understand and the difficulties of life, it comes to one's attention at every turn in Austria, combined with other historical conditions of Austrian life. There is a poet who, with great but, I would say, modest genius, understood how to depict something of this Austrian essence. At the end of the 1880s and in the 1890s, he could occasionally be seen performing in Vienna when one came to the famous Café Griensteidl in Vienna and also in certain other literary circles. Yes, this Café Griensteidl basically belongs to Austrian literature; so much so that a writer, Karl Kraus, wrote a series of articles entitled “Demolished Literature” when it was demolished. Today, one still reads about Café Griensteidl as if it were a beautiful memory. Please excuse me for including this, but it is too interesting, because at Café Griensteidl, if you went there at certain times of the day, you could really see a cross-section of Austrian literature. But today, when you read about these things, you often read about the times of the waiter Heinrich, who later became famous, the famous Heinrich of Griensteidl, who knew what newspapers each person needed to have when they came in the door. But that was no longer the real time, the time of the somewhat jovial Heinrich, but the real time was that of Franz vom Griensteidl, who had lived through the days when Lenau and Grillparzer and Anastasius Grün gathered at the Café Griensteidl every day or twice a week, and who, with his infinitely dignified manner, would occasionally tell a story in his own way about one of these literary greats when you happened to be waiting for a newspaper. As I said, Jakob Julius David also occasionally appeared in the circle of people there. Actually, David only emerged in Austrian intellectual life at the end of the 1880s and beginning of the 1890s. When you sat with him, he spoke little; he listened even less when people spoke to him because he was severely hard of hearing. He was very severely short-sighted and usually spoke from a compressed soul, from a soul that had experienced how often in life what we call fate weighs heavily on the soul. When I spoke to the half-blind and half-deaf man, I often thought how strongly Austrian identity was expressed in this personality, who had gone through a difficult youth, a youth full of privation and poverty in the valley of the Hanna, in the valley through which the March flows, where German, Hungarian and Slavic populations border on each other and are mixed everywhere. If you drive down from this valley to Vienna, you will pass poor huts everywhere; this was especially the case when David was young. But these humble huts often have people as inhabitants, each of whom harbors in his soul the Austrian problem, that which, in all its broad specificity, contains the Austrian problem, the whole diversity of life that challenges the soul. This diversity, which wants to be experienced, which cannot be dismissed with a few concepts, with a few ideas, lives in these strange, in a certain way closed natures. If I wanted to characterize what these natures are like, which David has described as being particularly prevalent in Austrian life, I would have to say: they are natures that feel deeply the suffering of life, but they also have something in them that is not so common in the world: the ability to endure suffering to a certain extent. It is even difficult to find words for what is made of the often arduous experience, especially in these Austrian regions. There is no sentimentality, but a strong ability to experience the diversity of life, which of course brings about clashes, even among the lowest peasant classes. But this does not turn into a weariness of life, into some kind of world-weary mood. It transforms itself into something that is not defiance and yet has the strength of defiance. It transforms itself, if I may say so, weakness into strength. And this strength is realized in the area in which it finds itself through the necessities of life. And weakness, which in a sense had been transformed into strength, showed itself in David. This man was half blind and half deaf. But he once said to me: “Yes, my eyes cannot see much in the distance, but all the more so when using a microscope, I see close up.” That is to say, up close he observed everything exactly through his eyes as if through a microscope; but he looked at it so closely that one must say: In what he saw with his eyes, there was something great that intervened, explaining and illuminating what was behind it. And as a substitute for the wide-ranging view, this man had a deep gaze in the small field of vision that he overlooked with his microscopic eyes, an obsession with getting behind the reasons for things. And that was transferred to his entire mental life. This allowed him to see the people he wanted to describe, deep, deep into their hearts. And as a result, he was able to depict many, many types of Austrian life in poetry, drama, novellas, and even lyric poetry. How this entire Austrian mood can form in the soul, not into sentimentality, but into a certain inner strength, which is not defiance, but contains the strength of defiance, is particularly evident where Jakob Julius David speaks for himself. There he says:

Almighty! Thou hast taken much from me,
Thou alone knowest what I have lost;
My eye sees the beautiful world blurred,
And only muffled, muffled and quiet
Life's sounds come to my ailing ear.
Once it hurt me – and for my own good,
I thank you today that I previously criticized you
You have spared me much sorrow, many horrors
Saved me from hearing and seeing...

Indeed, the man was such that he did not have to see and hear many things in order to bring out of the depths of his soul many things that he wanted to embody poetically. As I said, I would like to show what is expressed in such Austrian sounds in individual symptoms. And one must not introduce a touch of sentimentality when Jakob Julius David speaks of his fate in this way:

In the west you see gray in the valley
The heaviest clouds hang –
That reminds me of the days,
Which have passed for me...

In the east, asleep in the light of the storm, That is my today...

But this “today” he uses up, he exhausts it, and for him it became the possibility of describing Austrian folklore in such a way that everywhere, quite remarkably, one sees individual destinies in his work – many of his novellas have only a few characters. These individual destinies make one say: The way in which the characters collide with each other because they are placed next to each other in the world by kinship or otherwise is extremely moving and takes us deep into realities. But what Jakob Julius David captures so, I would say, microscopically and yet movingly and vividly, very rarely occurs in such a way that a large painting of world history is not somehow behind it, with the individual event taking place against its backdrop.

This contextual thinking of the small, which does not become shadowy and blurred because it appears on such a background, that this letting the small happen is colored by the greatness of world-historical becoming, that is what we find to be the most characteristic of a well-known Austrian poet, but one who unfortunately is not well enough known. We are talking about the greatest poet of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century, the poet whose home we find if we go just a little way west from the home of Jakob Julius David: we are talking about Robert Hamerling.

It is remarkable how the traits exhibited by individual personalities within Austrian intellectual life seem to clash, but when viewed from a certain higher perspective, they present themselves as qualities alongside other qualities, flowing together into a great harmony. It is remarkable: Karl Julius Schröer did not want to accept Robert Hamerling at all. To him he was a poet of secondary importance, a poet who, above all, is said to have destroyed his poetic power through his erudition. On the other hand, in Robert Hamerling there is the same attitude, the same noblest grasp of the German essence that I tried to describe in such a characteristic personality as Karl Julius Schröer. But that too is typical of Hamerling, and what I am describing to you here as typical personalities can be found in many, many others in Austrian life. I am trying to pick out only the characteristic traits that can really be presented as individual traits, but in such a way that they can stand for the whole. What is peculiar about Robert Hamerling is that he grows out of the smallest things. He comes from the Waldviertel in Lower Austria, from that poor region that bears its fruit only with difficulty because the soil is rocky and covered with forest, a region that is cozy and charming, and can be particularly enchanting in its hilly nature. Out of this peculiar nature and out of the limitations of the human character, Robert Hamerling's great spirit emerged. And he grew into a similar understanding of the German character to that of Karl Julius Schröer's spirit. We see this in one of Robert Hamerling's best poems, 'Germanenzug', where the way in which the German spirit lived in Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet, is particularly clearly expressed. The ancient Germans move from Asia and camp on the Caucasus. Wonderfully, I would say, with magical vividness, it is described how evening falls, how the sun goes down, twilight reigns, the moon appears, how the entire army of Teutons camps, sleep spreads and only the one blond-haired , the spirit of Asia appears to him, releasing his people to Europe, and how the spirit of Asia permeates Teut with that which is in store for the Teutons up to their development in Germanness through history. There the great becomes great, but there also, with noble criticism, what is to be blamed is already expressed. There many a trait that especially people like Robert Hamerling see in Germanness is expressed by the goddess Asia. There the future is spoken of:

But however proudly you aspire, highly soaring, always still a blaze
you will keep the ancient sacred fire.
The dream-filled
drunkenness of God will live on in you...
You only strive because you love: your boldest thought
will be devotion that wants to sink into God.

Thus spoke Asia to the blonde Teut, the leader of the Germanic peoples to Europe, speaking in advance of the genius of Germanness, and continuing:

Do you know the highest path for your struggle
When you grow strong in certain unity in the future?
Do you know the beacons in the sea of time
Which, beckoning afar with the flame of purity,
Bring you to the last, most beautiful goal?
High above, they shine with an eternal radiance
The sacred ideals
Of humanity: freedom, justice, and light and love!
These are the last fully glowing flames
of the original light - to stir them up all together
into one glow in the quarrelling hustle and bustle
of the life of nations: that is your mission...

And Robert Hamerling could not help but consider the details that he presents, for example, as an epic poet or as a playwright, in the context of the great spiritual development of humanity. I would say that all these observers over there in Austria have something in common with microscopic vision, which, however, wants to reach beneath the surface of things; and Robert Hamerling shows it most beautifully. And they have something in common with western Austria, of which one can say: it has a certain right to place the individual within the greater whole. Because the way the valleys stand between the mountains in some areas of western Austria is expressed in turn in what lives in a poet like Robert Hamerling. We can see that a great variety of things are expressed in this Austrian intellectual life, in all its sides, which may perhaps repel each other, but which nevertheless represent a diversity that is unity in the whole picture of culture that one can draw.

And in this diversity, the sounds that come from other nationalities combine not in disharmony, but in a certain sense in harmony. It is of course not possible to say anything specific about what sounds from other nationalities into Austrian intellectual life as a whole. Only a few symptoms will be characterized. For example, within Czech literature – with regard to these descriptions, I must of course be cautious, since I do not speak Czech – we have a newer poet, a recently deceased poet, who, as someone who wrote about him put it, has become for his people something similar to what was said about a great Czech musician: that he was there like a whale in a carp pond. That is how Jaroslav Vrchlický is placed in the spiritual life of his people. In his works, the whole of world history comes to life: the oldest human life of the distant past, Egyptian, European life of the Middle Ages and modern times, Jewish intellectual life, the whole of world history comes to life in his lyric poetry, comes to life in his dramas, in his stories, and is alive everywhere. This Jaroslav Vrchlicky – his real name is Emil Frida – has an incredible productivity. And when you consider that this man has translated a large, large area of the literature of other nations for his nation, in addition to his own extremely widespread production, then you can appreciate what such a mind means for his nation. I have to read to you, because otherwise I might forget to mention some of the poets of world literature that Vrchlicky has translated for Czech literature: Ariosto, Tasso, Dante, Petrarca, Leopardi, Calderon, Camöens, Moliere, Baudelaire, Rostand, Victor Hugo, Byron, Shelley, Gorki, Schiller, Hamerling, Mickiewicz, Balzac, Dumas and others. It has been calculated that Vrchlicky alone translated 65,000 verses by Tasso, Dante and Ariosto. And yet this man was, I would say, the very embodiment of his nationality. When he emerged on the scene in the stormy 1870s – he was born in 1853 – it was a difficult time for his nation, with all the contradictions that had arisen; in relation to the Germans, all sorts of opposing factions had emerged within his own nation. At first he was much contested. There were people who said he could not write Czech; there were people who made fun of what Vrchlicky wrote. But that stopped very soon. He forced recognition. And in 1873 he was, one might say, like an angel of peace among the terribly feuding parties. He was recognized by all, and in his popular poetic works he resurrected entire paintings of world developments from all of them; just not – and this is striking – anything from Russian folklore! A man who wrote a short biography about him – before the war – expressly warned in this biography: one should see from this man in particular how little foundation there is for the fairy tale that the Czechs, or the western Slavs in general, have something to expect from the great Russian empire when they look within, as is often said.

We see this expansion in a different way, this: to see the individual experience against the background of the great interrelationships of humanity and the world — we see it in a different way in a poet whom I already referred to in my last lecture on Austrianness, the Hungarian poet Emmerich Madách. Madách was born in 1823. Madách wrote, one must say, truly imbued with a full Magyar spirit, among other things that cannot be mentioned here, The Tragedy of Man. This The Tragedy of Man is again something that does not tie in with the great events of humanity, but directly represents these events of humanity themselves. And one would like to say how Madách, the Magyar, the native of eastern Austria, presents this “tragedy of man”, which differs, for example, from the figures that Hamerling, in his own way, created out of the great painting of world history in “Ahasver”, “King of Sion”, “Aspasia”. They differ as the mountains of western Austria differ from the wide plains of eastern Austria, or rather – and I would like to be more precise here – as the soul, when it rises in the often so beautiful – especially when they are bathed in sunlight – valleys of western Austria and lets its gaze wander over the mountains that border these valleys, — how the soul, in this absorption, differs from that mood of going out into the wide open, but indefinite, that overcomes it when the Hungarian puszta, with its wide plain character, affects that soul. You know from Lenau's poetry, what this Hungarian puszta can become for the human soul.

A remarkable poem, this “Tragedy of Man”. We are placed directly at the beginning of creation. God appears alongside Lucifer. Adam dreams the future world history under Lucifer's influence. This happens in nine significant cultural images. In the beginning, we are introduced to the Lord and Lucifer; Lucifer, who wants to assert himself in his entire being towards the creator of this existence, into which the being of man is intertwined. And Lucifer admonishes the creator of the world that he is also there and that he is of the same age as the creator of the world himself. In a sense, the Creator must accept Lucifer as his helper. We hear the significant words in the poem: “If the negation” - namely Lucifer - “has even the slightest hold, your world will soon unhinge it.” With this, Lucifer threatens the creative spirit. The Lord hands Lucifer two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of immortality. But with these, Lucifer tempts man. And he tempts Adam, thereby causing Adam to lose paradise. And outside of paradise, Lucifer introduces Adam to what in the visions of Madách is the knowledge of the forces of nature, of the whole fabric of forces that can be gained through knowledge of man through the natural phenomena unfolding before the senses. It is the invisible cobweb of natural laws that Lucifer teaches Adam outside of paradise. And then we are shown how Lucifer makes Adam dream of the more distant fate of the world. There we see how Adam is re-embodied as a Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, and Eve, in her re-embodiment, meets him as the wife of a slave who is mistreated. Adam is seized by a deep melancholy; that is, he sees it in his dream, in which his later life, all his later embodiments, appear before the soul's eye. He sees it in such a way that he is seized by deep bitterness about what is to become of the world. And further, we are shown how Adam is re-embodied in Athens as Miltiades, how he must experience the ingratitude of the people; further, we are shown how he has to observe the declining culture and the penetration of Christianity in ancient Rome, in the imperial period. Among crusaders later in Constantinople, Adam comes to us in a new life. He is embodied again as Kepler at the court of Emperor Rudolf; as Danton during the French Revolutionary period. Then he is embodied again in London. There he becomes acquainted with that through which, according to the view of Madách, Lucifer has a characteristic effect on the present. The words must already be spoken that are written in it: “Everything is a market where everyone trades, buys, cheats, business is cheating, cheating is business.” It was not written under the influence of the war, because the poem was written in the 1860s. Then, in a later life, Adam is led to the end of time on Earth, to a landscape of ice, and so on. It is undoubtedly interesting, but one would also like to say that, like the Hungarian steppes, which extend into infinity and leave much incomprehensible and unsatisfactory – that is how this poem is. And only sporadically do we realize that the poet actually means that the whole thing is a dream that Lucifer inspires in Adam. And what the poet really wants to say is that this is how the world would be if only Lucifer were at work. But man also has an effect. Man has to seek his strength and counteract Lucifer. But this is hardly hinted at, only, I would like to say, hinted at at the end, but in such a way that what appears as positive in the face of the negative, in the face of sadness, in the face of suffering, must also be summarized, like suffering that develops into defiant strength. “Fight and trust” is what Adam is taught. But what man can fight for is not shown at all. What the world would become if it were left to nature alone is depicted. And this poem has grown out of a deep inner life and a difficult life experience.

Madách is also one of those natures who, in a different way, can be characterized by saying: Oh, this diversity of life, which is linked to the historical conditions of Austria, passed through his soul; but at the same time also the strength to transform weakness into strength.

Madách comes from old Hungarian nobility. He grew up in the Neögrader district. He lost his father very early. His mother was a spiritually strong woman. Madách became a dreamy, contemplative person. In 1849, after the revolution, he took in a refugee who was already gone when the police came looking for him; but the police still came to the conclusion that Madách had taken in this refugee. Madách was put on trial and sentenced to four years in prison. It was not so much the prison, which he accepted as an historical necessity, that had a severely distressing effect on Madách, but the fact that he had to separate from his wife, from his family, who was like his other self, whom he loved most tenderly, and that he not see her, not share in this life for four years, was devastating to him, that was the real hard blow of fate that made him doubt humanity, if it had not been for the fact that every hour he spent in prison was followed by the hope: you will see her again then. And so he wrote his poems, in which he imagined going through the door. Even after he was actually released, he wrote the last of these poems on the way home, in which he wonderfully describes the heaven that would now receive him. And he really did come home. The woman he loved so tenderly had meanwhile become unfaithful to him, she had left with another. And through the gate through which he wanted to enter in the sense of the poem he had written, he had to enter his treacherously abandoned home. In visions, the traitor and his betrayal often stood before his eyes. It was from such sources that his historical and human feelings, his feelings about the world, were formed. This must certainly be borne in mind if one is to appreciate this poetry, to which one might possibly have many objections.

For that is the point – and it would be interesting to develop this in detail – that the diversity that is in Austrian life and that is brought about by such things as I have mentioned can, again and again, broaden one's view and present one with tasks, so that one must directly link one's own experiences to the great experiences of humanity, yes, to the tasks of humanity. And just as with Hamerling, although he spent half his life on his sickbed, every poetic note he uttered was connected with the most direct experience, so too with Emmerich Madách on the other hand.

You see, this diversity – one can ask: did it have to be forged in the course of human development in Central Europe? Is there any necessity in this? If you look at the matter more closely, you do indeed get an insight into such a necessity, to find the most diverse human minds in a single area of space also united in shared destinies. And I would like to say that it always seemed to me like a symbol of what is present in the national community, in the diversity of the people, that nature, and strangely enough especially around Vienna, has already created something of a great diversity in the earth. Geologically, the so-called Vienna Basin is one of the most interesting areas on earth. As if in an earthly microcosm, as in a small Earth, everything that interacts with each other is brought together, but it also symbolizes what can explain to you that which is otherwise spread over the Earth's surface. And for those who have an interest in and an understanding of scientific observations, the contemplation of this Vienna Basin, with the numerous secrets of the Earth's formation that can be studied there, is deeply inspiring. One is tempted to say that the Earth itself develops a diversity that is bound into a unity in the center of Europe. And what is geologically present in the Earth is basically only reflected in what takes place above this Earth's surface in the minds of human beings.

I say all this not to make propaganda for Austria, but only to describe a characteristic feature. But this characteristic feature comes to the fore when one wants to describe Austria. And, I would like to say, when one goes into the field of exact science, of geology, one finds in Austria something that corresponds to what Austria's great poets claim as their most distinctive feature. If you observe Hamerling, if you observe Jakob Julius David, if you consider other great Austrian poets: the characteristic feature is that they all want to tie in with the great destiny of humanity. And that is also what gives them the most intimate and profound satisfaction. A man who was a friend of mine wrote a novel at the time, to Hamerling's great satisfaction, in which he attempted to express medieval knowledge in the form of individual figures in terms of cultural history. The novel is called “The Alchemist”. It is by Fritz Lemmermayer. And Fritz Lemmermayer is not an outstanding talent. He is even a talent who, after this novel, has hardly achieved anything significant again. But one can see that the essence that runs through the nation can take hold of the individual and find characteristic expression even in this untalented person, in all his volition.

As I said, even in the exact science of geology, something like this can come to the fore. It is probably a deep necessity that this is the case with the great Viennese geologist Eduard Sueß, perhaps one of the greatest geologists of all time, to whom we owe the study of the conditions of the Vienna Basin. Just the sight of this Vienna Basin, with its tremendous diversity, which in turn combines into a wonderful unity, could instinctively give rise to a great, powerful geological idea, which comes to light in this man and of which one must say that it could only have been developed from the Austrian character, for Eduard Sueß is an archetypally Austrian personality in his entire being: this unity in diversity, I would say, this microscopic imprint of the entire geology of the earth in the Vienna Basin. This is evident in the fact that Eduard Sueß, in our time, that is, in the last third of the nineteenth century, was able to make the decision to create a three-volume work, “The Face of the Earth,” a book in which everything that lives and works and has lived and worked in the earth in geological terms is pieced together into a significant, rounded image on a large scale, so that the earth becomes visible. Every aspect is treated with exactitude, but when one beholds the entire face of the Earth as Sueß has created it, the Earth appears as a living being, so that one immediately sees: Geology comes from the earth. If one followed Suess further, something would be created in which the planet would be directly connected to the whole cosmos. Suess takes the earth so far in this respect that, to a certain extent, the earth is alive and one only has the need to ask further: How does this earth live in the whole cosmos, now that it has been understood geologically?

Just as much in Austrian poetry is connected with the Austrian landscape and Austrian nature, so I believe that the geology of Austria in the narrower sense is connected with the fact that, perhaps, in the spiritual life of humanity: that from Vienna this book in the field of geology could arise, this book, which is just as exactly scientifically as ingeniously assessed and executed and in which really everything that geology has created up to Sueß is processed in an overall picture, but in such a way that one really believes at last that the whole earth is no longer the dead product of the usual geology, but as a living being. I believe that in this area, precisely what could come from Eduard Sueß's Austrian identity plays into the scientific achievements—by no means in any way into the objectivity of the sciences, which is certainly not endangered by this—what could come from Eduard Sueß's Austrian identity. And when you look into this Austrianness in so many different areas, you realize that figures like those created by Jakob Julius David really do exist, in whom a single trait of the soul often takes hold because the difficulties of life have pushed aside the others, and fills them so completely that the individual soul has its strength, but also its power and its reassurance and its consolation. These figures become particularly interesting when these souls mature into people of knowledge.

And there is a figure from the Upper Austrian countryside, from the Ischl area – I have already referred to the name in the previous lecture – there is the remarkable farmer and philosopher Conrad Deubler. If you imagine every figure that Jakob Julius David created from Austrian life to be a little younger, if you imagine the events of this life that shaped this life later to be absent and imagine them in the soul of Conrad Deubler, then any such figure could become Conrad Deubler. Because this Conrad Deubler is also extremely characteristic of the people of the Austrian Alpine countries. Born in Goisern in the Ischl region, he becomes a miller, later an innkeeper, a person who is deeply predisposed to be a person of insight. When I now speak about Conrad Deubler, I ask that it not be taken as discordant to point out that, of course, a world view such as Conrad Deubler's is not represented here; that it is always emphasized that one must go beyond what Conrad Deubler thought in order to achieve a spiritualization of the world view. But what matters is not clinging to certain dogmas, but being able to recognize the honesty and justification of every human striving for knowledge. And even if one cannot agree with anything that Conrad Deubler actually professed, the contemplation of this personality, especially in connection with characteristics of Austrian life, means something that is typical and significant in particular, in that it expresses how, from within those circumstances, there is a striving for wholeness that, in many respects, can be compared spiritually to being spatially enclosed by mountains. Conrad Deubler is an insightful person, despite not even having learned to write properly, despite having had very little schooling. Jakob Julius David calls the personalities he describes and sketches “musers.” In my home region of Lower Austria, the Waldviertel, they would have been called “simulators.” These are people who have to go through life musing, but who associate something sensitive with musing, who find much to criticize in life. In Austria, we call this “raunzing” about life. People grumble about life a lot. But this criticism is not dry criticism; this criticism is something that is immediately transformed into inner life, especially in figures like Conrad Deubler. He is a man of insight from the very beginning, even though he couldn't write properly. He is always going for books. In his youth, he starts with a good book, a book that aspires from the sensual to the spiritual: Grävell, “Der Mensch” (Man). Deubler reads this in 1830 (he was born in 1814), and Sintenis, “Der gestirnte Himmel” (The Starry Sky), Zschokke's “Stunden der Andacht” (Hours of Devotion). But he doesn't really feel at home with these things, he can't go along with these things. He is a contemplative by nature, and he is imbued with enthusiasm to find satisfaction for the soul not only for himself, but also for those who inhabit his village with him. Something in these people is striving out of the traditional worldview. Then Conrad Deubler becomes acquainted with the ideas that most deeply moved and stirred the times at that time – he becomes acquainted with writings that were written out of the spirit of Darwinism. He becomes acquainted with Ludwig Feuerbach, with David Friedrich Strauss. Later he becomes acquainted with the writings of Ernst Haeckel, but this is later. He reads all of this, devouring it. I will mention in passing that he was sentenced to several years in prison for dealing with such reading material and reading such things to his fellow villagers, and for founding a kind of library for his fellow villagers. It was from 1852 to 1856 – for religious disturbance, blasphemy and spreading blasphemous views! But as I said, I only mention this in passing, because Conrad Deubler bore the whole thing manfully. For him, it was a matter of penetrating to knowledge out of a fundamental urge of his soul. And so we see in this farmer what we may see in another spirit, I would say, on a higher plane of life, at the very end. We see in this spirit how attempts are made to reconcile the scientific way of thinking with the deepest needs of the soul. That Conrad Deubler could arrive at a purely naturalistic-materialistic view of life should, as I said, not concern us. For what matters is not that, but that in such people there lives the urge to see nature itself spiritualized. Even if they initially only accept it sensually, in them all lives the urge to accept nature spiritually. And from such a view of nature, a spiritualized view of life must nevertheless arise in the course of human evolution. So this simple farmer has gradually become a famous personality, especially among the most enlightened spirits of the materialistic epoch. He was an enthusiastic traveler and not only learned in his early youth in Vienna what he wanted to learn, he also traveled to Feuerbach in Nuremberg. But it is particularly interesting how his inn in Goisern became a place of residence for the most important people in the field of natural science and natural philosophy. Haeckel repeatedly stopped at Deubler's, staying there for weeks at a time. Feuerbach often stopped there. Deubler corresponded with David Friedrich Strauß, with the materialist Vogt, with the so-called fat Vogt, with all kinds of people, and we should not be disturbed by the unorthographic, the ungrammatical, but rather we should be struck by the unspoilt nature of the man of knowledge.

And I would like to say that this trait, which in Deubler appears in the rustic and coarse, appears in the man, whom I already referred to in the previous lecture, in a highly subtle way: Bartholomäus von Carneri, the real Austrian philosopher of the last third of the nineteenth century. Carneri is also the type of mind that is initially overwhelmed by Darwinism, but which shows all the more clearly how impossible it is for him to really accept science as it is accepted in Central Europe; how it is impossible for such a mind not to link science to the innermost striving of the human being, not to seek the path that leads from science to religious deepening and religious contemplation. Bartholomäus von Carneri is precisely one of those minds for whom it is true when Asia says to the blond Teut that the most serious thinking in the German spirit wants to arise out of love and come to the intimacy of God. Even if this intimacy with God comes to us, as it were, in atheistic clothing in Carneri, it still comes to us from the most intense and honest spiritual striving. Carneri, as a philosopher and as a man of world-view, stands entirely on the ground of the view that everything that is spirit can only appear to man in matter. And now Carneri is under the influence of a strange delusion. One could say that he is under the influence of the delusion that he now regards the world in terms of nothing but concepts and ideas, in terms of nothing but perceptions and sensations that are born of the spirit, with which he believes he can grasp and comprehend only material things, only the sensual. When someone looks at something sensual, says Carneri, this sensuality can be divided, but the division goes only so far that we can survey this limited thing with our senses. But when the division continues, when the differentiation becomes so fine that no sense can oversee it, then what lives in the differentiated material must be grasped by thinking, and then it is spirit, - spiritually out of the belief that actually only the natural is naturally understood. This is very characteristic, because Carneri's world view is really instinctive spiritualized materialism; one could even say purest spiritualism. And only through the trend of the times, through the effect of the times, did the deception arise that what Carneri speaks of can only be meant spiritually, when in fact it is fundamentally only expressions of the material. But what Carneri grasps so instinctively idealistically, consciously naturalistically, he must necessarily attach to ethics. And what man works out for himself in the way of morals becomes, for Carneri, because he strives for a certain monism of world view, only a sum of higher natural laws. And so Carneri, precisely because he is subject to the characterized deception, transfers the moral, the highest impulses of moral action, into the human soul like natural impulses. And there one sees particularly what is actually at work in minds like Carneri's. In their youth, they lived in a world view that made a fundamental distinction between spirit and nature. They could not reconcile this with the urge of their souls. What science has produced in three to four centuries, these minds had grasped instinctively: No, nature cannot be what it is or should be according to the old traditions; in many of its aspects, nature cannot simply be an abandoned child of the gods. What is the lawfulness of the world must live in nature.

And yet, although such people only wanted to be naturalists, it was basically the urge to give nature its spirit, which lived in them. This is what makes these men so extraordinarily characteristic. And if it can be shown, even in the case of Sueß, the geologist, how his nationality gave a special human colouring to his great work on geology, the same could be shown in the case of a philosopher like Carneri, if one were now to follow his inner life. Precisely what emerges from the observation with regard to the lawful connection between the most diverse nationally colored human minds, as they can be found in Austria, had the particular effect that there, in complicated form, in manifold form, human images stepped before the soul in such a way that riddle upon riddle arose. And in looking at human experiences, at people one has before one daily, one looked at something where the natural plays up into the moral and the moral plays down again into the natural. So it was that in Carneri a noble ethical world view of the historical course of humanity was intimately mixed with a certain naturalism, which, however, is basically only a transitional product, a transitional from which most of all that could be found as a later stage is represented here as a spiritual science, if one is only aware that everything in the world needs its historical development.

Thus, in Carneri's work, a certain view of the ethical, historical ethical life of humanity is combined with the natural life. For him, natural life and historical life merge into one. He sharpens his view of the natural phenomena he has observed so wonderfully, I might say so lovingly and intimately, for the phenomena of humanity, insofar as they take place between nation and nation. The one always clarifies the other. And Carneri had the opportunity, in particular, to be able to contribute to the development of Austria's destiny because he was a member of the Austrian Parliament for a long time and because he absorbed the basic conditions of Austria at that time in the most honest way into his soul. He was born in Trento in 1821, the son of a senior Austrian civil servant. It is remarkable that today I often have to describe personalities to you who were outwardly tormented by deep suffering. Carneri was a twin child. His twin sister developed quite well. But from the beginning he was afflicted with a curvature of the spine. He was ill all his life, paralyzed down one side. He also corresponded with Conrad Deubler. And although I have already been made aware from another source of what Carneri's external life was like, I would still like to present to you the words that Carneri wrote to Deubler on October 26, 1881, so that you can see what an extraordinarily physically tormented man Carneri was. “Do you know,” Carneri wrote to Deubler, ”that the description of your home has made my heart very heavy? It reminded me of the time when I was healthy. I have the forest just behind the house and I have not entered it for years because I can only walk on completely flat paths. I have long since renounced any higher enjoyment of nature, but also everything that is called social entertainment. Incidentally, I can't say that I feel any less happy as a result. Due to a muscle cramp in my neck (torticollis intermittens), which often extends across half of my body, my existence is an extraordinarily arduous one. But I don't mind, and that's what matters. In short, it will be difficult for me to visit you; but if it is feasible one day, I will. We are sticking together, even without knowing each other face to face, and that's the main thing."

And I have read here before how the Austrian poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, who knew Carneri well, described the exterior of Carneri from a moving scene. She describes it as follows: ”... “How could you bear it, all these years, and still keep that smile, that kindness and joy of life?” I cried out in agony when Carneri suffered such an attack in my presence. Slowly he raised his head, which had sunk low on his chest, wiped the sweat from his forehead and cheeks with his trembling left hand, breathed deeply and looked at me with a look that was once again all sun and willpower. “How so?” he smiled. ‘But don't you understand that in my daily struggle with such a beast, I wanted to remain a man, and become a man I had to? I —, he smiled again, ’just had my ambitions. That‘, he pointed to his still-twitching body, ’should be stronger than me? Should it be able to rob me of my days? To make me loathe all the joys and beauties of life? Would I be a man if I did not remain the stronger? So it began, and so it will end.

Thus speaks one who, due to the previously described deception, believes himself to be a naturalist, but who has absorbed a noble ethic from naturalism. But he also shows us a personality that, in a certain respect, contains within itself much that is genuinely Austrian: the ability to turn a strong soul into a strong soul and not to be able to bear weakness being taken as weakness, but rather acting — was particularly developed in this Carneri. And this sense is poured over his entire philosophy. And if you read his works, you will find this sense. But you will also find the infinitely loving response to the facts of life. Incidentally, it already emerges in his poems, in his various writings, which appeared as early as 1840. And the whole of Carneri – it was wonderful to look at him. He stands before me as I look down from the gallery of the Austrian House of Representatives. It was always an important day when one knew that Carneri would speak. Carneri, who was half paralyzed, who could only walk on flat paths, who could only speak in such a way that half of his tongue participated in the speaking, so to speak, that only half of his brain was only half thinking. This Carneri had conquered his physicality; that he now stood there and that his speech was imbued with the most tremendous acumen, with which he saw through everything that could be seen through, that could be condemned. And everywhere he found the right words, which shot like an arrow at those who were to be hit, and which could everywhere inspire those who wanted to be inspired. Carneri was far too much of an idealist for his speeches to always be followed by action. But his speeches were feared in a certain way. In a scholarly way, he presented to his parliament what he carried in his whole thinking – one might say: Austria. This lived and this spoke. And whether he spoke where he could agree with something or whether he spoke as an opponent – that which was discerning Austrian patriotism always spoke through Carneri; such a patriotism, which seeks the tasks of this Austrian national community in the whole historical development of mankind. And even when he spoke about individual matters, not in abstract terms but with all the color of his speech, a great historical trend came to life. And even when he had to reproach, when he had to reproach bitterly, I would say that in his thoughts the blood relationship between this thinker Carneri and Austrian-ness came to life. Therefore, anyone who is aware of this can never forget how the words of one of his last speeches must have sounded from Carneri's mouth, where he saw some things approaching that the opponents of Central Europe had overestimated, that were not as the opponents of Central Europe believed, but that could have been brought about by many out of lack of understanding. Carneri was one of those who saw it from afar, but who, above all, did not want to merely criticize it, so that Austria would remain truly strong. That is why his words of reproach had such an effect that they could remain in the soul. And those who heard such words of reproach, such words of reproach imbued with the deepest feeling, which he uttered in one of his last most brilliant speeches, where he said: “I document thereby express my conviction... which can be summarized in two words, two words which — and I have experienced many a serious moment in my sixty years — I utter for the first time in my life today: Poor Austria!” That such words could be spoken, that there were people who felt that way, is where the forces lie that today have their counter-image in the vilifications of Austria's opponents, outside of Austria, among the enemies of Austria. In Carneri, something of the spirit of those who, in all their diversity, strove to bring Austria powerfully into harmony, because they understood the necessity of the harmony of this diversity, lived.

In the end, he went blind. He celebrated his eightieth birthday in 1900 – by then he had gone blind. As a blind man, he wrote his Dante translation at the time. He dictated from memory, because he had Dante's Divine Comedy in his soul and was able to translate it from memory. At that time, his life was behind him. In many, it lives on, in more people than one might think. He had become blind, weak. As a blind man, he sat in a wheelchair; he had eighty years behind him, sixty years of work. “Realized” - I say this in parentheses - when this man was eighty years old and blind, the University of Vienna ‘recognized’ him by awarding him the doctorate as an eighty-year-old blind man and declaring that it understood something of his merits, with the words: ”We highly appreciate that you have been able to give your scientific ideas such a form that they are able to penetrate into further circles of the people, and that your honorable sir, in addition to the noblest devotion to Austria, has always represented those principles of freedom in your public activities, without whose unreserved recognition a successful advancement of knowledge and scientific work is not possible.” One must be glad that such things as Carneri has done for the benefit of his country and, dare I say it, for the benefit of humanity, are at least recognized; even if one can become eighty years old, blind and deaf before they are recognized. Well, that is the way things are going today.

Unfortunately, I have already taken up far too much of your time; but I could continue at length by attempting to describe, not by means of description, but by means of symptoms, in which, I believe - not always in such a refined way, of course - Austrian folklore lives, but which also shows what this Austrian folklore is when it can show itself in its noblest blossoms. I have mentioned these noblest blossoms because I believe that it is good if the population of Central Europe gets to know each other better in our difficult times, also in a spiritual sense. For time is forging a whole out of this Central Europe, and a unified spirit already prevails in this whole. And the better we get to know this unified spirit, the more alive it will appear to us, and the more we will be able to trust it. All the more will one be able to believe that, despite all misunderstanding, it cannot be overcome. In the German representatives of Central Europe there lives, in many cases, what I have already had to characterize as not simply an instinctive devotion to nationality, but an ideal to which one wants to develop, which consists in spirituality and in the development of strength, which one can only approach and which one can only truly appreciate when one regards it in connection with what leads to the salvation of all mankind. Indeed, there is something about the most German of Germans when they speak of their nationality that others cannot understand; for never does anything else live in the Germans but the duty: You must develop what wants to live through your nationality in the world! The duty to develop is, in a sense, to be national. Hence the constant urge to place one's own nationality within the context of the goals of all humanity. And so it was with Carneri, that in his soul-searching he found what, ethically, must be connected as the basic features of the development of all humanity with natural law. For him, this was one. But he regarded it with such love that for him the Germanic ideals were also part of the historical development of all mankind. And he could compare, and only because he really compared, he felt entitled to think about the Germanic as he did. I would have much more to say about it, but there is not enough time. A mind like Carneri's first looks at the essential nature of the various nations, and then he allows the value of his own nation to emerge before himself in the right image. He considers his own national substance in connection with other national substances. From this point of view, he says to himself: The freedom of all nations, the recognition of every nation, is compatible with everything German, because that lies in the whole German development. And this, for Carneri, is contradicted, for example, by the Pan-Slav ideal, which proceeds from the a priori view that supremacy must one day be granted to every nation; which works towards getting supremacy. In contrast to this, Carneri says: The leadership of the Germanic spirit, which dominates Europe and extends to the distant West, originates from the concept of morality, which, on the favorable soil that has made it flourish, bears beneficial fruits. It cannot, therefore, last any longer than this world is habitable. And precisely at the time when Carneri was a member of the Austrian parliament, the situation in Central Europe, particularly in the political sphere and in the field of political observation, was such that England and the English constitution were seen as a model. Many politicians wanted to model the constitution of all countries on the English model. And much else in England was seen as a model. Carneri was very much involved in such politics, where many of his comrades thought this way. But Carneri wanted to come to clarity. Carneri wanted to be objective in his view of humanity. But out of this objectivity arose his sense of belonging to the Germanic-Germanic essence and his objective assessment of a country like England. What I am going to share with you now, Carneri did not just write before the war – he died long before the war, after all – he wrote it in the 1860s. “England,” he says, ‘the country of continuous progress par excellence, will turn to general ideas if it is not to descend from the proud heights it has climbed. Nothing characterizes it better than the fact that it has become so ’practical' in the self-confident development of its greatness that it had to learn from the Germans that it had produced the greatest playwright in the world!” In a spirit like Carneri's, this is not just any kind of jingoism, it is a sense of belonging to the Germanic essence; a sense of belonging that arises from knowledge, that arises precisely from deep knowledge, and that does not want to allow itself to appear in the world and claim what it is entitled to claim before it can justify itself before the entire mission of humanity on earth. This is something that, whether it is spoken in Germany or in Austria, can find little understanding among the others, because it is basically the national conception of the specifically German.

With regard to Austria, however, I have, I believe, characterized something of Austrian-ness for you more than descriptive words can, by showing some of living people. And I hope that I have characterized Austrian character in these living people in such a way that, through the contemplation of these living people, the conviction can arise that this Austria is not just a motley collection, brought together by some arbitrary act, but that it corresponds to an inner necessity. The people I have tried to present to you prove this. And they prove this, I think, by the fact that one can say of them, as of deeply thinking souls, seeking a world view or an art out of a deep temperament, what has been said in another area and in another respect with reference to the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky. The saying that was then repeated was once said with reference to the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky: “In your camp is Austria!” I believe that one can expand on this saying and say of such people, as I have tried to interpret for you, that in their searching souls Austria lives, Austria lives as something that they feel is a necessity: “In their thoughts Austria lives!” And I believe that Austria lives in a very lively way.

In the course of my lectures here I have often spoken about the great period of spiritual development that may be called the time of German idealism. And in general it is well known today, even in wider circles, what the whole intimate spiritual process of development from Kant up through Hegel means for the spiritual life of humanity in general. However, when something like this is mentioned, I do not want to fail to add that the great thinkers who come into question here are never really properly appreciated, if one is still even remotely on the ground that leads one to accept as dogma what a person expresses as a truth that he has recognized or, let us say better, meant. One can go beyond this; then one is in a position to completely abandon the formulation of any human opinion, any human construct. But to see the way in which a person has sought truth, how, as it were, the truth instinct lived in him, the how of the search for truth, that is what remains as the eternally interesting thing about the figures of, in particular, the thinkers of the past. And in particular, what remains with respect to the thinkers of German idealism, among many other things, is what one can feel, so to speak, again and again when one delves into them: that they have achieved a certain ability to orient themselves with respect to what man can call truth, truth research, world view, that they knew, as it were, how impossible it is to orient oneself in the world if one relies only on taking in the impressions of the world, letting them take effect on one, in order to be at their mercy, like a plaything, so to speak. Above all, these thinkers knew that what can decide the sense of truth, the sense of worldview, must be sought in the depths of the human soul itself, since it must be brought up.

Karl Rosenkranz was a less recognized latecomer to these great thinkers, who also became less well known. And this Karl Rosenkranz tried in the 1860s of the last century to review in his mind's eye what had developed as an understanding of the human soul and its powers since German idealism through the influences of a more scientific way of thinking. I would like to read to you the introduction to today's reflections on how Karl Rosenkranz, the well-educated, subtle Hegelian, has commented on this soul-searching of the thirty years that followed the period of German idealism. Karl Rosenkranz wrote in 1863:

It can be said of these thinkers that they had a sense of the productivity of thought; they had confidence in the power of thought, which, by intensifying itself, can find within itself that source from which that which is able to enlighten the world bubbles forth. And they knew that no matter how much external methods and instruments of natural science are perfected, that which truly quickens the spirit in man is not to be found in the realm that can be conquered by external methods and instruments. I have often said here that the spiritual science that wants to be represented in these considerations cannot, for example, be in any kind of contradiction with the scientific world view of our time. On the contrary, it is in complete harmony with every legitimate formulation of the scientific world view. This spiritual science does not want to be some kind of new religion; it wants to be a genuine, true continuation of natural science, or rather of the natural scientific way of thinking. And one can say that for anyone who observes the development of science over the time that has passed since Karl Rosenkranz wrote what you have read, it offers impulses in every field that lead directly to this spiritual science, if one is really able to engage with it. And this natural science offers such impulses precisely when one engages with it where it itself attempts to extend its observations in such a way that they lead to the realm of the spiritual.

Now there is a science that is particularly suited to making it clear where natural science is leading when it wants to approach the realm of the spiritual in a way that is right for it and its methods. This science is called, with a somewhat cumbersome word, psychophysiology, and as a rule we are dealing with people in the field of psychophysiology who thoroughly understand how to apply the scientific methods that can be acquired in the various scientific workshops. Now there are already psychological laboratories, and in these psycho-physiologists we also have people who can be trusted to be familiar with the scientific way of thinking, with the way this scientific way of thinking relates to the world and its phenomena. We can now begin to understand what has been achieved in this psycho-physiological field. If you want to educate yourself in a short time, I advise you to take Theodor Ziehen's “Physiological Psychology”, because it gives a quick overview and because it is basically, even the older editions, at the complete level of today's research in this field. But you could just as easily look for this physiological psychology in some other author. If you now engage with this physiological psychology, you get an idea of how the person who uses scientific methods in the sense of the scientific way of thinking approaches the human being in order to examine that which I would say, clinically and in the sense of a physical laboratory, or a psychological laboratory for all I care, can be investigated in a person, what can be investigated in a person by the person expressing themselves spiritually and psychologically. And it may be said that even if what is science in this field today often represents an ideal, the various directions towards this ideal can already be seen everywhere, and anyone who is not prejudiced will want to fully recognize the great merits of the individual research in this field. Naturally, in the sense of today's scientific thinking, these researchers are endeavoring to seek the physical, the bodily, in everything that takes place in the human being in a spiritual and mental way, to seek those processes in the human body that take place while something spiritual and mental is happening in us. And in this field, as I said, paths have already been opened. And there one experiences something very peculiar at first. And at this moment, when I try to describe to you what one experiences, I emphasize that I initially place myself completely on the ground of what is justified in this field of science. One experiences something remarkable; one experiences that researchers in this field can investigate what we call the life of human ideas in a truly magnificent way. In our mental life, ideas are stimulated by external impressions that we can perceive. These ideas join together and separate from one another. This is what our soul life consists of, insofar as it is a life of ideas: we form inner images of the impressions from the outside world, and these images group themselves. This is a large part of our soul life. Now the psychophysiologist can follow how the ideas socialize inwardly, how they form, and he can follow the physical processes everywhere in such a way that he always sees: On the one hand, there is the mental process in the life of ideas, and on the other hand, there is the physical process. And it will never be possible, if one is only unprejudiced, to discover a real soul life in a person to whom such a physical counterpart cannot be shown, even if, as I said, proof is still a scientific ideal today. And so it is extraordinarily appealing, extraordinarily interesting, to follow in the human thinking apparatus — now really conceived as a thinking apparatus in the proper sense, in so far as it is bodily-physically constructed — how everything happens when man inwardly experiences his imaginative life. And it is precisely in this respect that the book by Theodor Ziehen contains something extraordinarily significant, yes, I would even say scientifically extraordinarily reasonable.

But now for the other peculiarity. The moment one has to speak of feeling and especially of will in the life of the soul, this psychophysiology not only fails, I might say instinctively, but with the truly modern psychophysiologist it even fails quite consciously. And you can see in Ziehen's book how, at the moment when one is supposed to talk about feeling and will, he does not get involved in it at all, continuing the investigations up to that point. How does he speak of feelings? Well, he says it bluntly: the natural scientist does not speak of an independent emotional life in man, but rather, in that one gets impressions from the outside - these impressions are stronger or weaker, they have these or other characteristics - a certain “feeling tone” is formed afterwards. He speaks only of feeling tone, and so, to a certain extent, of a way in which the sensation sinks in first, and then the image, into the soul life. That is to say, the psychophysiologist loses his breath — forgive the trivial expression, but it has to be said — at the moment when he is to pass from the life of images and their parallelization in the psychophysiological mechanism to the life of feeling. And if he is as honest as Theodor Ziehen, he admits this by simply saying what he does: In the past, people still thought naively, speaking of three soul powers, of a thinking or imagining, of a feeling, of a willing. But for the natural scientist, there can be no question of a feeling, of a real soul-being that lives in pleasure and pain like a real one. These are all only tones in which there are shades of what the life of perception and feeling is. So the scientist consciously, not just unconsciously, loses his breath; consciously he stops breathing scientifically.

And this occurs to an even greater extent when we speak of the third soul power, the will. In psychophysiology, we find nothing about the will except what is expressed: it cannot be found, it is impossible to find it, especially with the means of a rational, scientific way of thinking. It is an interesting and extraordinarily important result that must be noted and taken seriously. The natural scientist can say: Well, I have this scientific view; with this scientific view, I find, so to speak, the thinking apparatus, the mental apparatus for the soul life, insofar as it takes place in the mental life; I do not concern myself with the other! The scientific researcher can rightly say that. The amateur world-viewer, who likes to give himself the grandiose title of monist, will not easily notice that the breath has been suppressed quite arbitrarily, but he will believe that by passing over from the life of thinking into the life of feeling and of will, he continues to breathe, and he will see in the life of feeling and of will only a kind of product of the development of the life of thinking. And so it is only natural that we arrive at the strange conclusion that people like Theodor Ziehen say: the will is not present at all, the will is a pure invention.

What do we actually have when we speak of the will in any of our activities? Well, as people think in a trivial way of looking at things, will is already present when I just move my hand. But first of all I have the impression, I feel a mental impression that causes me to move my hand. And then my mental life passes over to the observation of my moving hand, which I may also perceive with senses other than the eye. But I have only a sum of ideas. I simply go from the impressions to the ideas of movement. That is, I am actually just constantly watching myself. And if one wants to be a part of these confrontations - I now say: of the dilettantish monism, of the world view - then one should feel how one is eradicating precisely that which is the most intimate inner experience — the life of feeling and the life of will — when man is made into what he must not be made into, when natural science is not left as natural science but is turned into a Weltanschhauung in an amateurish way.

For the spiritual researcher, however, the path of the natural scientist is of extraordinary importance, because this path has already been followed to such an extent that it clearly shows how far the scientific method of research can go. A clear boundary can already be seen. Particularly when one delves into the works of those thinkers who preceded the natural science direction, the thinkers of German idealism, one finds in them a clear awareness that the higher secrets of the world must be investigated by immersing oneself in the human soul. These thinkers were even ridiculed for wanting to unravel these secrets of the world, as it were, and develop them all from the human soul. But it is also characteristic of what these thinkers actually achieved, and it is particularly characteristic for the observer to compare what the German idealists achieved and what was then achieved by the scientific way of thinking and research. What did these German idealists achieve, these much-mocked German idealists? Hegel – perhaps I may, without seeming immodest, draw attention to the accounts I have given of Hegel in 'Riddles of Philosophy', in the new edition of my 'World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century'. — Hegel tried to grasp everything that lives and moves in the world in pure thought, so to speak, to extract the entire network of thought from the abundance of phenomena, facts and things in the world. But one must admit, despite all objections, that this network of thoughts cannot be gained through contemplation, cannot be gained through external observation. For one tries only once to let the outside world have its effect on oneself, not to produce within oneself the source of thinking, which makes the soul active – nothing will come out of thoughts! But if one does not want to apply one's thoughts to the world, if one denies that thoughts can have any meaning, because they necessarily have to arise, one might say, out of the human soul, then one would have to renounce any mental discussion of the world. And not even Haeckel would want to do that!

By handling thought in general, one lives entirely in thought, in the awareness that thought expresses something that has significance for the world itself. The Hegelians were only aware of the fact that thought is an inner experience and, despite being an inner experience, has objective significance for the existence of the world. But if we now take a closer look at what the whole idealistic way of thinking has achieved – I will now say: through thought and in thought, for whose way of observation it has had such practice – we can hardly expect anyone today, for example, to go through Hegel's writings for what I am about to mention. But if someone does so, they come to the following: Hegel is a master in the handling of thought, which is not influenced at all by any sensual impression from outside; he is a master in the development of one thought out of another, so that one has a whole living organism of thoughts in his – well, let us use the terrible word – system. But let us take a closer look at this Hegel with all his thoughts. We can, I would say, divide him into two parts. The first part is where he develops thoughts. But all these thoughts relate to that which is externally sensual in the world. They are only, I might say, internal reflections of that which is externally sensual in the world. And the second part relates to the historical development of humanity, to social and state concepts, and it culminates in what the human being can develop in terms of perceptions, thoughts and ideas, which then express themselves emotionally as religion, visually as art, and in terms of ideas as science. So that is what Hegel wants to achieve by bringing the thought to life within him; he regards this as the innermost source of world existence, and he pursues it to the flowering of development in religion, in art, in science. But religion, art and science - are they not in turn merely something that has a meaning for the outer physical world? Or could anyone imagine that the content of religious belief could somehow have a meaning for a spiritual world? Or could he even believe that art, which must speak through the sensual tool, can have any meaning - an immediate meaning, of course - within the spiritual world? Or our science? Well, we will talk about that later.

Hegel does find the thought, but it is only a thought that, though it lives and moves within, only reflects the external. This thought cannot come to life in any world that could exist except the sensual-physical world. A spiritual world does not come about through Hegelianism, but only the spiritual image of the physical world.

And science? Precisely the science that followed, which is to be taken very seriously, now examines this thought, this thought life of the human being, and finds: it comes to it, in that it finds the thinking apparatus in man, as it were, for the thought life, right up to the feeling and will life; there it has to stop. If we now really hold the two together, must we not assume that, on the one hand, Hegelianism, for example, or in general that idealistic world view of which we have spoken, really did strive into a spiritual world — but found more than merely the spiritual counter-image of what is not spiritual? On the other hand, must we not say: So could not this Hegelianism, this idealism gain access to that which it must admit to its existence because thought could have no meaning as purely spiritual in the face of reality if there were not a spiritual world? It is interesting that everything that German idealism has just produced in terms of thought flows from the spiritual world, but that there is nothing in it but what the scientific way of thinking can assume as its thinking apparatus. But in other words, if one really wants to enter the spiritual world, and if one wants to enter it in such a way that one can stand before natural science, then one must enter the realm of feeling and will, but not in the sense in which one feels and wills in ordinary life, but in the way the natural scientist enters the world of nature. Now,

Now, from other points of view, I have often indicated here the ways in which one can truly enter the spiritual world while remaining on the firm ground of natural science. Today, through this historical overview, I only wanted to show how, through the thinking that one usually knows, even when it is driven to such purity, to such cold, sober, icy purity as in German idealism, one can indeed come to the conviction that there is a spiritual world, for this thinking is not won by an outer impression, it must itself come from the spiritual world. But one cannot enter the spiritual world through this thinking.

Why can one not enter the spiritual world through this thinking? As I said, I have often treated this question here from different points of view. Today, I would like to approach it again from a different point of view. We cannot enter into the spiritual world because in recent times we have increasingly tried to expunge from our thinking everything that the natural scientist no longer finds in it. This means that we have tried to expunge feeling and will from our thinking. To see that this is so, one has only to consider the basis of the great, most important significance of the natural scientific way of thinking. It rests on the fact that, when one goes about observing nature, one must, I might say, kill and paralyze all soul-life within oneself. Whether he is observing things and their facts or experimenting, the naturalist will strictly exclude everything that comes from his feelings and everything that comes from his will. He will never allow what he feels towards things to interfere with what he wants to express about what he has observed, what he would prefer to be the truth, so to speak, rather than what the things themselves say. It may be said that the scientific development of modern times, which goes back three to four centuries, has really provided a good training in what is called scientific objectivity. Selfless, in the good sense of scientific and in many ways ennobling, would be the right description for human life, which may be called the elimination of the self in the face of the language of natural phenomena. Great progress has been made in this respect. And in psychophysiology, we have even gone so far as to think in such a way that we no longer find feeling and will in thinking. That is to say, what was a method of research has already become practical, has already come to life. We should switch off the soul when observing nature. One has learned to exclude it in such a way that one can no longer find it in the whole field of observation. What remains unconscious in our thinking, when we give ourselves completely passively to the external world, as must be the ideal of the natural scientist — when he also sets up the experiments, it must be his ideal — unconscious in thinking remains that which can be called: will. It is precisely the endeavor to eliminate the will from thinking when one conducts research in relation to nature in today's sense. It remains unconscious because one always needs a will when one adds one thought to another – they do not do it themselves, after all – or when one separates one thought from another. Nevertheless, it remains the ideal of natural science to suppress as much as possible of this will that lies in the life of thought. It is therefore quite natural that the scientific ideal, I might say, makes the inner life of the soul die away for the sake of human habit. And it is much more due to this — and I expressly say: justified — scientific ideal that the exclusion of the soul has been able to take place as it has, that one must precisely disregard everything of the soul, exclude everything of the soul, if one wants to follow nature faithfully in the sense of today's natural science.

But there is another side to this. And it is extremely important to consider this other side. What is it that man seeks when he seeks knowledge? Well, first of all, when he seeks knowledge, he seeks something that is true apart from him. For if he did not think of truth as something separate from himself, he could create it for himself in every moment. That he does not want to do that is readily admitted. So when man seeks an ideal of knowledge, he seeks to bring to life within himself something to which he contributes as little as possible. Just consider how opposed people are today to self-made concepts, especially in the scientific field! So one strives to have something in one's knowledge that, I might say, reflects external reality, but which has just as little to do with this external reality as a mirror image has with what is reflected. Just as the mirror image cannot change what is reflected, so too should what comes to life in the soul as the content of knowledge not change what takes place outside. But then one must eliminate all soul activity, for then the soul can have no significance for knowledge. And when one strives so hard to eliminate the soul, it is not surprising that in this field the soul cannot be found. Therefore spiritual research must begin precisely where the scientific way of thinking must end. That is to say, thought must be sought in what the will is in thought. And this happens in everything that the soul has to undergo in those inner experiments, as has been mentioned here often enough, everything that the soul has to undergo in inwardly strengthening and intensifying the thinking, so that the will working in the thinking no longer remains unconscious to the thinking , but becomes conscious of this will, so that man really comes to experience himself in such a way that he, as it were, lives and moves in thinking, is directly involved in the life and movement of the images themselves and now no longer looks at the images themselves, but at what he does. And in this, the human being must become more and more, I would say, a technician, acquiring more and more inner practice, living into what happens through himself as the life of the imagination unfolds. And everything that the human being discovers in himself otherwise remains between the lines of life. It always lives in the human being, but it does not rise up into consciousness, the will is suppressed in the life of the imagination. When one develops such inner vitality, such inner liveliness, that one not only has images but enters with one's experience into this surging and ebbing, into this becoming and passing away of the images, and when one can take this so far you no longer bring the content of the ideas into your attention, but only this activity, then you are on the way to experiencing the will in the world of ideas, to really experiencing something in the world of ideas that you otherwise do not experience in life. This means that, if we are to remain true to what the scientific way of thinking itself leads to, we must go completely beyond the way in which natural science conducts research. In a sense, we must not take what natural science investigates, but we must observe ourselves doing natural science. And what is practiced in this way, and what can only lead to success if it is practiced for years – after all, all scientific results are only achieved through long work – what is achieved in this way is a living into a consciousness in a completely different world. What is achieved can only be experienced; it can be described, but it cannot be shown externally, it can only be experienced. For what is achieved in practice is, I would say, what the scientific way of thinking already points to. This scientific way of thinking tells us: If I go on my way, I come to a limit. I go as far as I can still find something human. There I do not find a world in which there is will and feeling. But this world, where feeling and will are discovered just as objectively as plants and minerals are otherwise discovered here, this world can be found if one can make this inner experience of the ideas effective in the soul between the lines of the rest of the imaginative life. Only now one experiences that which one can otherwise only sense. Today, the natural scientist will already be more or less inclined to say: It is blind superstition when someone claims that what is known in the physical world as thinking, as imagining, can somehow take place without a thinking apparatus, without a brain, without a nervous system. The natural scientist asserts this on the basis of his theory. One could easily believe — and laymen in relation to this spiritual research do believe — that spiritual research must disprove the scientist's assertion. This is not the case. On the contrary, in as far as this assertion can be well derived from the facts of natural science, the spiritual researcher is standing firmly on the ground of natural research in this field. Only he actually experiences what the scientist deals with on the basis of theory. For when one experiences this weaving and living, as I have indicated, in the world of ideas, then one knows: now one has arrived at the point where the thinking apparatus can give one nothing more. All thinking one has done so far is bound to the thinking apparatus. Now one has arrived at that inner experience, that weaving, that is no longer bound to the thinking apparatus.

But at the same time, one has arrived at something that, when stated, initially seems outlandish compared to the usual ways of thinking in the present day. But everything that has ever appeared in science and had to be incorporated into the intellectual development of the world was outlandish at first and then taken for granted. At first it seems strange, but it is a truth. By awakening this inner life and activity, one leaves the world one experiences between birth or, let us say, between conception and death here on earth. One leaves it and enters a world that one cannot experience in the physical body. Rather, one is in the world to which one belonged before birth or, let us say, when the spiritual soul was just beginning to adapt to what it had been given of the physical by the hereditary current, or what it gave itself. We are dealing with forces that do not use the thinking apparatus to develop an imaginative life, but forces that first form and fully develop the thinking apparatus only in the course of life after birth. For the inner nervous life, the inner nervous web, is only chiseled out and plasticized in the course of the first years and long beyond, when we have entered our physical existence. One is in the forces that shape the human being inwardly as plastic forces, so that he can become what he is; so that he is a creature of his spiritual and soul self. But one must not believe that one should not take this existence to the full, and I now mean, in practical earnest. For you see, out of a natural weakness of human nature, the spiritual researcher will always be asked to recognize first of all that which is the immediate present, which is, I might say, more the confused spiritual of the physical-sensual world. Here in the physical-sensual world, one gets to know things with the senses. But that which has formed these senses themselves, that which underlies these senses as the architect, that one gets to know, if one knows how to transport oneself out of the physical lifetime into the time that preceded the physical life and will follow the physical life, in the way it has been described. One gets to know a world with which this world here has basically no similarity. And in what I have described as the inner experience of the thinking activity instead of the thoughts, a real spiritual world opens up, in which the world really opens up, in which the human being is with other spirit beings when he is not embodied in the physical body. This world is just as concrete and just as vividly inwardly visualized as the external, real, physical world. Only, as I have already explained here, something else must be added.

We see that in the path taken by thinking, everything comes down to strengthening, to intensifying thinking, to an inward powerful experience of thinking. So it comes down to the fact that ultimately, before this inward powerful experience, the content of thinking lies, of course, only in consciousness, and the soul can truly experience itself in the weaving of the imagination. But there must be added, as a parallel experiment, I might say, to our life a culture, a development of the will element, of the will and feeling element. Now, while everything depends on inwardly strengthening this thinking, I might say, on becoming it, in the development of thinking into the spiritual world, everything in the other development of the will depends on develop the opposite qualities: calmness of soul, composure; that one becomes capable of confronting what we call our actions, the unfoldings of our will, in the way one can learn from the study of nature. Not that one becomes a cold person, sucked dry like a lemon; one does not become that. On the contrary, everything that otherwise often remains unused by the deeper-lying 'temperament and affects comes to the soul when it is subjected to the observation that comes from composure and calmness. If one first trains oneself, then trains, as Goethe, for example, trained himself in observing the types of plants and animals, if one first trains oneself to observe the outside world in such a way that one really practices self-denial and then does not transfer this pedantically and theoretically to self-observation, but acquire the appropriate reinforcement and then turn the view that you have sharpened on nature back to yourself, then you will find the possibility to observe your own soul life, insofar as it develops from will and from feeling, from sympathies and antipathies and flows into actions as will impulses. you gain the opportunity to observe this life of the soul in such a way that you now do not stand beside yourself in the figurative sense, but really stand beside yourself and consciously look at this person, as one can look at another person, or, as I said eight days ago: as one also bears one's own life of yesterday in one's memory, because one also does not change it. One looks at this by bringing an awareness out of the ordinary awareness. You really come to the possibility of saying to yourself: you keep still within the otherwise flowing stream of soul experiences that arise from feeling and will. By keeping still yourself, by attaining complete inner peace, by really standing still, not going along with the affects, not going along with the will impulses and so on, but just standing still with the soul, you naturally duplicate yourself. For it would be a bad thing if, as I said, one became an expressionless human being, if one did not remain completely within the whole of the temperament of the person who goes further; if one could not live with all his feelings and temperaments. But the other person, whom I called the spectator in the previous lecture, remains standing: This makes him stay there, and one's own soul life really begins to move around him, as the planets move around the sun. All a spiritual process! It is difficult to learn to stand still, but one cannot observe the life of the will if one cannot stand still. If one goes with the flow of the life of the will, one is always in the middle of everything. When you stop, you can observe it because, to use a crude expression, it rubs against you as it passes by and moves away from you. But all this does not have to remain theory – remaining in theory is of no use – but it must really become an inner practice of life. Then it is not an image, but reality, that a second person emerges from the first and unites with it. Just as under certain conditions oxygen unites with hydrogen, so too, as I have just described, the second person unites with the person who has been seized, who lives and weaves with the life of ideas. And this is now really a person who lives outside of ideas. While in the past one discovered in the images a spiritual, concrete world in which there are spiritual beings, just as there are animals and minerals here on earth, when what I have just described is added, through the second person being at rest in the face of the will impulses, one discovers in fact that that which out of this spiritual world always develops into the physical world, always finds its way into the physical world; that which in the spiritual world always strives to find physical expression either through union with the physical, as is the case with human or animal life, or through direct manifestation, as is the case, for example, with crystals.

And now what is often regarded as madness by people today is beginning to be experienced inwardly; what Lessing said, what he expresses so beautifully in his “Education of the Human Race”, is now beginning to be experienced. Now the human being knows – by having achieved this inner stillness in the face of the impulses of the will – that something lives in him that once wanted to unite with this body because it developed such powers earlier, as it is now developing again, as they are now showing themselves, and as they live in this body, just as the germ lives in the plant. And just as the germ in the plant is the source of a new plant, so that which is now being grasped in man is the source of a future life, which will be grasped when the time between death and birth or a new conception is completed. The repeated lives on earth become a thought, which is a real continuation of the scientific idea of development. And only someone who cannot take his thinking far enough to see that what lives in man really lives in this man, insofar as he is a physical being, as the plant germ lives physically in the plant for a new plant, that a spiritual-soul man lives, that this spiritual-soul man, I would like to say, , has its cover in the physical body, but the germinal development is for a following earth life. Only the one who cannot think sharply enough, who cannot really think out the thoughts that are already there today and that are also used in natural science, can escape the necessity of searching for these eternal powers of the human soul from the natural scientific way of thinking. of the human soul, which are sought entirely scientifically, by first simply, I would say seriously, taking science at its word: that it must stand still in the face of emotional and will life, but then it will reach precisely into this emotional and will life, by seeking it where it would otherwise remain unconscious: in thinking. And on the other hand, thinking is sought out where it otherwise hides; for in the will, where it flows in, this thinking hides. But precisely because this natural science is taken very seriously, these eternal powers of the human soul are discovered, which cannot be reached by observing man in the abstract and saying, “There must be something eternal in this man too”; for it is not so that one can reach this eternal something by extending the lines backwards and forwards as one likes, because it is not so. These lines are not straight, continuous lines. Just as, when I have a plant in front of me, this plant forms the germ and in the germ is the disposition for the new plant, I have to go from plant to plant, adding one link to the next. In the same way, when we achieve this second thing, calmness in the life of the will, I would say that we find another memory that lights up, the memory of earlier earthly lives. And in the same way, when we achieve this second thing – peace in the life of the will – I would say that we find, as if a memory were lighting up, a review of earlier earthly lives. Admittedly, most people will give up quite early on if they are to undertake research that is not as convenient as the study of the natural world. There you have the object or the experiment in front of you, you surrender passively, you observe. No, the spiritual world cannot be observed in this way! The spiritual world can only be grasped if you really change your inner being, bring it to life for the spiritual world. For the physical world, we have hands; for the spiritual world, we must first develop the ability to grasp ideas, which, like inner hands, like inner grasping organs, can grasp the spiritual world. The researcher is always active and engaged when he is truly immersed in the spiritual world.

But now I said, one usually stops early, one will not easily lead the way, which is a laborious one, to a successful end. Indeed, the desires that can be fulfilled in this exploration of the eternal powers of the human soul, these desires are certainly shared by many people – because it is not true, “beautiful”, “infinitely beautiful” it is to look back on past lives on earth! You experience it again and again, how people find it beautiful. Those who have had a little taste of what spiritual research is, and then call themselves spiritual researchers, we experience it again and again with them, that they look back on their previous lives on earth. These earlier lives are, of course, the lives of people who were important, and who can be found in history here and there. I once participated – as I have mentioned before – in a café in an Austrian city. The following people were present: Seneca, no – Marcus Aurelius, the Duke of Reichstadt, the Marquise Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, Emperor Joseph and Frederick the Great. And all these people really believed in their flashback to past lives on Earth!

In the real flashback there is something unpleasant for ordinary desires. This flashback really satisfies nothing but knowledge. And one must have a pure striving for knowledge if one wants to achieve anything at all in this field. If one does not have this pure striving for knowledge, then one can achieve nothing. One can achieve nothing in relation to outer nature if one cannot develop that selflessness in the good and bad sense of which I have spoken. But this must be increased if one now wants to develop, for instance, the ability to look back into earlier earth lives. And when this ability to look back arises in one's own experience, it is usually disappointing in the sense that it has now been interpreted. But it can never arise — and this is an empirical law — if one could somehow use what one learns from it in this earth life. I say: arise in oneself. So every time a review of earlier earth-lives really occurs within oneself, it can only satisfy one's knowledge. It can never help one in any way to satisfy any wishes in the earth-life in which one is living. If anyone believes that he must know his past lives in order to appreciate his position in the world, he will go very far astray if he tries to learn about these past lives by his own research. And in many other respects, too, the wishes that anyone may have are very seldom satisfied in any way by real, genuine spiritual research.

With regard to these desires, the following must be noted, for example: First of all, it is the case that anyone who enters into spiritual research more as a layman or as an amateur – but of course anyone can do that, you can read about it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” — who enters into it as a layman, he aspires above all to see a great deal, to see a great deal in the spiritual world. That is natural and understandable. And so he might believe that the experienced spiritual researcher is advising him to occupy himself with it a great deal and to devote all the time he has to spiritual research. A spiritual researcher who is aware of his responsibility and knowledgeable will not do that at all. He will not do it himself either, but he knows that it is very bad to withdraw one's ordinary thinking, the thinking one must apply in the outer world, from the outer world after becoming a spiritual researcher; that it is bad to withdraw one's thinking, which is directed towards the outer world, and no longer want to know anything about the outer world. If you become a mental ascetic for my sake and use all your thinking only to delve into the spiritual world, you will achieve nothing in reality. You will become a dreamy brooder. You will experience something within yourself that could border on, I would say, some kind of religious madness. But if you really want to become a spiritual researcher, it is necessary to take every precaution into account – and you will find them all listed in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – in order to remain a reasonable person, the same reasonable person, as I said today eight days ago, who one was before one entered into spiritual research – at least no less reasonable. And to achieve this, the spiritual researcher tries to keep his interest aroused for everything that can arouse his interest in the outside world. Indeed, when one is in the process of developing as a spiritual researcher and is doing so as a rational human being, one will feel an ever-increasing need to broaden, not narrow, one's horizons in terms of observing and living with the world, to occupy oneself with as much as possible that is connected with experiences, observations and happenings in the external physical world. Because the more you are distracted from what you are trying to achieve, the better. In this way one achieves that thinking is again and again, I would like to say, disciplined by the outer, physical world and does not go on the free flight path, on which the soul can easily go, when it now withdraws from the outer world and buries itself as much as possible only into that, in which it believes to live as in a spiritual extended one. So, interest is what belongs to spiritual research like an external practical support.

Therefore, the beginner in spiritual research in particular will have to be advised not to change his usual way of life significantly, but to enter into spiritual research without attracting attention to this external way of life, so to speak. If one changes one's external way of life too much, then the contrast between one's inner experience and one's experience with the outer world is not great enough – and it must be great. All the things that people strive for today, who seek their salvation in, well, how should I put it, withdrawing from the world, founding colonies, wearing long hair when they have worn it short before, or wearing it short when they have worn it long before, or putting on special clothes and so on, and also acquiring different habits, all this is evil. This is bad because one is demanding two things of oneself: to adapt to a new way of life and at the same time to adapt to the spiritual world. But what I said here eight days ago must be emphasized: While in any pathological state that develops in consciousness, this pathological state is there and the rational human being is gone, when developing self-awareness for spiritual research, the old human being must remain entirely as he is, and alongside that, the other consciousness must stand. The two must always be there side by side. One can say, in trivial terms: In the case of the spiritual researcher, the developed consciousness, the experience in another world, stands completely separate from what he otherwise is in the world.

Nothing has changed in what one is in the world, other than what was previously. And one looks at what one was in the world, as one looks at one's experiences of yesterday. And just as one can no longer touch these yesterday's experiences, one does not touch what one was before entering the spiritual world. If you are a crazy person or a hypnotized person or a person who can somehow be considered pathological, then that is what you are and you cannot also be a reasonable person. Because you will never discover that someone is reasonable and a fool at the same time. That is precisely what matters, that one can say: the pathological consciousness is an altered consciousness; the consciousness has undergone a metamorphosis. If one is truly at home in the spiritual world, there has been no metamorphosis at all, but the new consciousness has taken its place alongside the old one. And that is the essential thing, what matters, so that man can really fully grasp the two consciousnesses.

A further, I might say, uncomfortable aspect of attaining such spiritual goals as those indicated arises from the fact that the natural scientist naturally becomes accustomed to remaining in his field and world with what results from his field; that he therefore rejects - if he did it only for himself, it would not matter - as a world view that which lives just beyond his world view. All greatness of ordinary life, even of practical life, all greatness of natural science, too, is based on the way of thinking that has developed over the last three to four centuries. And usually, spiritual science does not regard what science achieves for life, even for external life, with less respect, but often with more; it is fully recognized by spiritual science. But precisely this spiritual science also knows that scientific thinking is easy — forgive me for using a trivial expression again — if you reject what you need as a thought. Indeed, today it is already the case that inventing an experiment involves much more than observing what comes to light through the experiment. Reading the mind of nature is easy and convenient. For this, little inner activity is needed. This activity cannot be compared at all with that which is needed if one wants to develop within oneself what has been discussed today. And so it happens that those who, in their consciousness, stand on the strict ground of science, but who, in their instincts, abandon themselves to the comfort of read thoughts, say quite naturally: Well, yes, that is something so contrived and fanciful that comes from this spiritual science. But there is something that one must perhaps admit without arrogance and pride: a more astute thinking is needed to recognize spiritual-scientific truths. But they do present themselves to astute thinking, for example, even if the person to whom they are to present themselves has not become a spiritual scientist. Today, people do not want to believe in authority; but, hand on heart - I have said this often enough: How many people believe, despite never having seen the corresponding experiment, that water can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, or other things! If you get to the bottom of things, there has never been a time as steeped in a belief in authority as the present day, and never a time as subject to dogmas as the present day. Only today one can say, as I stated decades ago in my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings, that people believe the dogma of experience, whereas in the past people accepted the dogma of authority. Just as one can apply in practical life, without having been in the laboratory oneself, what comes from the laboratory, so one can apply to one's world view, through corresponding really strenuous thinking, what the spiritual researcher brings to light and of which he knows that he has really discovered it in the spiritual world.

These are the inconveniences in relation to spiritual research; but many such inconveniences could be enumerated. The main thing is this, that people very easily shrink from what must arise as a kind of soul mood when the path into the spiritual world is taken. First of all – and I would like to develop what I have to say historically, so to speak – it is a matter of historical development. Most people say, for example: Oh, there have been so many philosophers and philosophies in the world, and they have all claimed different things. Oh, it is best not to deal with these philosophers and philosophies at all! But such a judgment arises only under the influence of the belief that one can grasp a philosopher only if one understands him as a dogmatist and not, I might say, as an inner artist of thoughts. You can understand him as an inner artist of thought, and then you will get a great deal out of him, especially if you study him very closely, let him have a very intimate effect on you and believe nothing of it, then go to the other and see again a serious endeavor that lives in the pursuit of truth, and you will become versatile. And precisely through this one acquires a sense for being at home in the spiritual world. Indeed, one then experiences that one becomes clear about this, especially when one genuinely follows the paths in the presence of nature research: everything one gets from observation and experiment is basically inner experience, and the outer should never be called a natural law or something like that, but — Goethe has already chosen the magnificent expression — archetypal phenomenon, archetypal appearance. And when more is experienced in the external sense world, it is experienced through the activity of the inner. Thought must reach under the phenomenon. You cannot get down under the phenomenon without thinking. This requires an inner strengthening of thought, a real inner powerful experience and continuation of the line of thought.

Under the influence of the scientific way of thinking, one does not want this. Therefore, from this point of view, the scientific way of thinking today still has something of the last remnant of ancient magic, as paradoxical as that may sound. Here it becomes clear to us that what we today call scientific experimentation and observation has developed in a straight line from ancient magic, where it was believed that through events — in the course of events through the ceremonial that was used as a basis — one could learn something that one did not experience inwardly. They shuddered at the thought of inner experience. They did not want to delve into things and wanted to be dictated to by the spirits outside, who magically live in the phenomena, that which one can only find by allowing one's inner experience to flow into the outer. But all such things are just as if someone were to say: The hands of the clock move forward because a little demon sits inside it, a little elemental spirit. Today, this is only noticed in a subtle way, but in the scientific experiment, or when the physiologists come and cut up small frog corpses to see the internal parts, you still have in mind that shudder at the secrets of nature that was present in ancient magic. This must also come out! One must not faint when one is called upon to extend one's thinking to include nature. One must have the strength to truly grasp natural phenomena. Among modern achievements — and all achievements, of course, are such — this particular weakness shows us what is commonly known as wanting to explore the spirit through external events, in that people get ready to sit around a table, for example, to seek the spirit through all kinds of mechanical, again external events, not by immersing one's own spirit in the essences of the world, but by external events. Of course, they only seek, well, let's say, in knocking tones or something else, the spirit. They don't think that they could find it much closer if they thought about the fact that when eight people are sitting around the table, there are eight embodied spirits that can be perceived differently than just the spirit that is knocking on the table through all sorts of nonsense. And so, like the other side, like a grotesque side, the counter-image of experimentation has become the order of the day, where one really wants to seek the spirit in the most crude way through things that one has to overcome.

But then there is another side to this, which today is often called a worldview in the popular sense. It is quite natural that little by little, I would say, a shyness has developed to really develop this inner soul activity, because it is considered to be something really subjective. One believes that one is merely working out a subjective thing. One only becomes aware that one can find the objective under the subjective when one really penetrates into the matter. One shies away from really developing the inner being. It would be just as if one shrank from developing arms and legs before birth, because one would believe that one would thereby bring something subjective into the world and that arms and legs could never perceive anything objective. One shrinks back, one does not want to develop the inner being. One wants to develop only that which, as we have said, is rightly linked to the mere thinking apparatus. That is to say, one only wants to let the thinking apparatus work in oneself; one really withdraws into the inactive life of imagination. And the consequence of this is that all kinds of world views develop, about which one could certainly agree with the modern psychiatrist if one only takes an entirely objective, unbiased point of view. One can certainly agree with the modern psychiatrist, for example, about what is called monism today. It is clear to both of us that those people who are monists in today's crude materialistic sense do not have the courage to develop their inner activity, that they only allow their thinking apparatus to function and that they can naturally only receive a reflection of the external physical world from their thinking apparatus. If you open a psychiatric book at random, you will find the definition of this state of mind: A set of ideas arises which the person concerned considers to be correct because he is not aware that they only come from the thinking apparatus; he considers these ideas to be correct in the absolute sense. In the psychiatric sense, this is called delusional ideas as opposed to obsessive ideas. Many delusional ideas today are worldviews! If you look at the spiritual-scientific world view, you will see that it cannot fall into either of these errors, neither into the superstition of the external view of nature, which is still based on something of magic, that is, superstition , nor can it play into the realm of delusions, because the spiritual researcher is very clear about the fact that he himself creates and brings forth what he inwardly generates for the purpose of exploring the world, and he also knows: He is allowed to create and bring forth it himself. Then it can touch the outer world. Thus he can never fall into a world view that would be nothing but a delusion.

But, as has often been suggested, the things that have been discussed again today arise when the scientific way of thinking, as it has developed over the past three to four centuries, is continued. But it must be continued in such a way that truth is not merely observed, but experienced. Therefore, a certain artistic feeling that goes into the most spiritual life is a much better preparation for spiritual-scientific experience than any other preparation. And therefore one will always find that the ascetic withdrawal from art, as it is so often noticeable in people who have aspirations of spiritual exploration of things, is of great evil, that in fact the spiritual research also broadens the horizon of the human being through the study of this artistic field. Hegel, for example, could not find a metaphysical meaning in art. For him, art was only the highest flowering of that which develops here in the physical world. But for the one who truly penetrates into the spiritual world, it is clear: that which must remain imagination here, as long as it moves on the physical plane as a human soul power, that is nevertheless born out of the spiritual, that is the physical image for the spiritual, that is the messenger that comes from the spiritual world. And if we can only grasp this supersensible mission of art, then we already have, I would say, a beginning for a truly living, atmospherically living penetration of the spiritual world. Otherwise, however, this spiritual science will continue to be treated as every spiritual impulse has been treated that has had to fit into the spiritual development of humanity. I have often pointed out here that by far the greatest number of people were hostile to the Copernican world view, understandably so, because it contradicted all habits of thought. Until then, people had thought: the earth stands still, one stands firmly on the stationary earth, the sun moves, the stars move. Now, all at once, one was supposed to rethink everything. And it cannot even be said that this Copernicanism became great precisely because, as monism demands today, it only looked at the external senses; for the external senses are precisely in line with what was thought earlier. The external sense world shows us, for this sense world itself, that the earth stands still and the sun moves. Copernicanism arrived at something new precisely by contradicting the sensory perception. And today one must arrive at something new by contradicting the usual conception of the soul as a matter of course, by contradicting precisely that which one would so easily believe is something in itself, namely what can be described as the eternal power of the human soul, namely thinking, feeling and willing, that one describes precisely that which now proves to be an inner semblance, an inner reflection of the truly eternal, and that the truly eternal, the truly eternal powers of the human soul, lie beneath this semblance. And only when one deepens one's imagination and thinking to such an extent that one goes beyond ordinary thinking to active thinking, where thinking becomes will – but will that is experienced, not merely observed as in the case of Schopenhauer – and where volition becomes thinking in that one can interpret it calmly, only then does one discover the eternal powers of the human soul, and one becomes aware that one is this physical human being, I would say, entirely according to a natural law, only conceived in a higher sense. One is this physical human being because one is transformed out of spiritual forces. In natural science, everyone knows: when you stroke the table in this way, warmth arises. There he believes in the transformation of forces. Today this is called the transformation of energies. Transformation of energies, transformation of forces, also exists in the spiritual world. What we are otherwise spiritually, transforms into the physical. This transformation of the spiritual is just as when heat is generated by friction.

All that is needed is a change in thinking habits. This is difficult for some people. Not only do they have thinking habits that they cannot let go of, but these thinking habits have even hardened into concepts. And when someone speaks today of the continuation of natural science, of the living continuation as it is meant here, then those who are so very much inside, stick-thick inside the habits of thinking, will look and say: He wants to found a new religion, that is quite clear, he wants to found a new religion! All this must be understood, must be taken for granted. And it will be understood if one allows the soul's gaze to wander a little over the course of the development of the human mind. But from a certain point of view, spiritual science does give a certain satisfaction for what the best of people have striven for. Not an easy satisfaction. Even people are afraid of this slight satisfaction, which is also something that is opposed to spiritual science. There is someone who once objected: Yes, this spiritual science wants to answer the questions, the secrets of the world. Oh, how dull life will be when all questions have been answered, because the fact that one can have questions is what life is all about. Such people, who think this way, would be surprised at what happens to them when they enter into real spiritual science! Indeed, the lazy person believes that spiritual science is something like a spiritual morphine to calm him down. That is not what it is at all. The questions do not become fewer, the riddles do not become fewer, but rather they increase. New riddles and mysteries are constantly arising. And if, as an ordinary materialist, you pick up Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddles) or his better works, then you will have answers! For the spiritual researcher, only the questions arise; only the questions leap out. And he knows that the questions that arise for him are not answered by theories, but by experience. He is looking at a development of infinite perspective. And by raising questions, he is precisely reviving the life of the soul, preparing it for the answers that are given by ever new and new events. Life becomes richer and infinitely richer as more and more questions are raised. Again, this is an inconvenience for many who seek comfort and not knowledge.

But on the whole, spiritual science is something that even the best people have sought, and what young Goethe already had in mind when he repeated to a wise man, whom he kept so hidden,:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undaunted
The earthly breast in the dawn!

Yes, one must only find it, this dawn! He who seeks it from the bottom because he is afraid of the sun will not find this dawn in the right sense. And this is the one who, as a spiritual researcher, would be afraid of the whole, full, living human existence. He who now wants to withdraw into some aesthetic cloud-cuckoo-land in order to find the spiritual world is like a person who seeks the dawn because he is afraid of the sun, of the full shining sun. But one can also seek the dawn in another sense, in the sense that it is the afterglow of the sun, which always shines and which also shone before it rose for us for our day, for other areas. If one seeks the spiritual dawn in this way, then the opened spiritual knowledge becomes becomes a means, a tool for the realm from which one came before the transformation into the physical human existence and to which one returns after the transformation of the physical human existence, to that spiritual power with which one truly scientifically reveals to oneself the law of repeated earth lives. Spiritual science then becomes the dawn that one experiences as a reflection of the sun's activity, which one cannot have directly by observing the sun's radiance that is assigned to one in the realm in which one will one day stand here in the physical world, to that sun's radiance that spreads out in the spiritual world, into which one enters by that one has precisely the courage and strength to step out of the sensual-physical world in order to enter another, and in this other world, which one can experience, in the sense that Hegel now in turn correctly sensed when he said: Oh, how miserable is the thought that seeks immortality only beyond the grave. If you seek the immortal, if you seek the eternal powers of the human soul, you can find them. But they must be sought.

Because man is such a dual creature, he can truly find the other side of his nature. And for those who, from the standpoint of ordinary monism, disapprove of the search for the eternal powers of the human soul because it tears the soul apart into two parts, for them it must always be true that one says: Yes, one is no longer a monist when one admits that monon water breaks down and must break down into hydrogen and oxygen for knowledge, if one wants to learn to recognize it? One is truly no less a monist if one admits that true knowledge of the actual spiritual essence must be sought from that out of which the monon, the unity, the wholeness of man, becomes. But those who take such paths, as they have been tried to be characterized today, are certain that they lose nothing of what the world is to them and what they can be to themselves in the world by entering the spiritual world; that it is not a impoverishment of life that occurs, but an enrichment of life, and from this point of view, a higher satisfaction of life. Something new throbs through mind and soul, through thinking and heart, when that which can be aroused by the absence of fear of powerlessness, by the absence of shyness of courage, now permeates mind and soul, thinking and heart, in order to inwardly rise above oneself. And that is basically what the best have striven for.

But just as everything in the development of the spirit could only come into being at a certain point in time, so too could spiritual science only come into being at a certain point in time. But however it is viewed, however it is regarded, however it is ridiculed and mocked, it will live on just as truly as other things have survived that were ridiculed and mocked. When someone first said, “All life comes from life,” he was expressing something for which, in those days, he was condemned to suffer the same fate as Giordano Bruno. Today it is taken for granted. Thus in the world, truths are transformed into human conceptions, from craziness to self-evidence. For many, spiritual science is a craziness today. In the future, it will also fall prey to this fate of becoming a matter of course.