The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This edition is highlighting Dr. Steiner's letter to Friederich Theodor Vischer (mailed, June 20, 1882). This presentation was translated by Daniel Hafner, August 2005, and revised October, 2011.

Modern natural science regards Experience as the only source for the investigation of truth. And not wrongly, to be sure. Its area is the realm of outer, spatial things and temporal processes. How should one be able to make anything out about an object belonging to the outer world, without having gotten to know it by means of sense-perception, that is, the only manner of coming in contact with things spatial-temporal. First get to know the object,¹ and then theorize about it, so goes the maxim asserted by modern science over against the speculative systems of the philosophers of nature from the beginning of this century. This principle is completely justified, but by an erroneous conception, it has led science astray. The misunderstanding lies in the character attributed by the inductive method, and by the materialism and atomism issuing from it, to general concepts. For the person of understanding, there can be no doubt that the current state of natural science in its theoretical part is essentially influenced by concepts as they have become dominant through Kant. If we want to go into this relationship more closely, we must commence our consideration with him. Kant limited the scope of Recognition to Experience, because in the sensory material communicated by it, he found the only possibility of filling in the concept-patterns, the categories, inherent in our mental organization, by themselves quite empty. For him, sensory content was the only form of such a conceptual pattern. Thereby he had steered the world's judgment into other courses. If, earlier, one had thought of concepts and laws as belonging to the outer world, if one had ascribed to them objective validity, now they seemed to be given merely by the nature of the “I.” The outer world counted merely as raw material, to be sure, yet as that which alone reality was to be ascribed to. This standpoint was inherited from Kant by Inductive Science. It too counts the material world as the only thing real; for it, concepts and laws are justified only to the extent that they have that world as their content and mediate the recognizing of it. It regards concepts reaching beyond this realm as unreal. For it, general thoughts and laws are mere abstractions, derived from the agreements experienced in a series of observations. It knows mere subjective maxims, generalizations, no concrete concepts bearing their validity in themselves. This must be borne in mind if one wants to penetrate from a lot of murky concepts circulating nowadays through to complete clarity. One will first have to ask oneself:what then is Experience, really, gained of this or that object? In works on the philosophy of experience, one will search in vain for a matter-of-fact, satisfying answer to this certainly justified question.

Recognizing an object of the outer world in its essential being cannot, after all, possibly mean perceiving it with the senses, and as it presents itself to them, so drawing up a likeness of it. One will never see how, from something sensory, a corresponding conceptual photograph could come about, and what relation there could be between the two. An epistemology that starts from this standpoint can never get clear about the question of the connection of concept and object.² How is one to see the necessity of going beyond what is given immediately by the sense, to the concept, if in the former the essential being of an object of the sensory world were already given? Why the conceptual comprehending too, if the looking-at were already sufficient? At the least, the concept, if not a falsification, would be a highly unnecessary addition to the object. That is what one must arrive at, if one denies the concreteness of concepts and laws. Over against such pictorial explanations as, say, that of the Herbartian school, too: that the concept is the mental correlate of an object located outside us, and that the recognizing consists in acquiring such a picture, we now want to seek a reality explanation of recognizing. In keeping with the task we set ourselves, we here want to limit ourselves merely to the recognizing of the outer world. In this case, two things come into consideration in the act of recognizing: The confirmation^TR1 of thinking, and that of the senses. The former has to do with concepts and laws, the latter with sensory qualities and processes. The concept and the law are always something general, the sensory object something particular; the former can only be thought, the latter only looked at. The media through which the general appears to us as something particular are space and time. Every particular thing and every particular process must be able to be fitted into the conceptual content of the world, for whatever of it were not lawful and conceptual in nature does not come into consideration for our thinking at all. Hence, recognizing an object can only mean: giving what appears to our senses, in space, a place in the generality of the conceptual content of the world, indeed letting it merge into it completely. In the recognizing of a spatial-temporal object, we are thus given nothing else than a concept or law in a sense-perceptible way. Only by such a conception does one get over the previously mentioned unclearness. One must allow the concept its primariness, its own form of existence, built upon itself, and only recognize it again in another form in the sense-perceptible object. Thus we have reached a reality definition of Experience. The philosophy of induction can by its nature never reach a definition of this kind. For it would have to be shown in what way experience transmits concept and law. But since that philosophy sees these two as something merely subjective, its path to that is cut off from the beginning.

From this, one sees at the same time how unfruitful the undertaking would be to want to make out anything about the outer world without the help of perception. How can one gain possession of the concept in the form of viewing, without accomplishing the viewing itself? Only when one sees that what perception offers is concept and idea, but in an essentially other form than in pure thinking's form freed of all empirical content, and that this form is what makes the difference, does one comprehend that one must take the path of experience. But if one assumes the content to be what matters, then nothing can be put forth against the assertion that the same content could after all also be acquired in a manner independent of all experience. So experience must indeed be the maxim of the philosophy of nature, but at the same time, recognition of the concept in the form of outer experience. And here is where modern natural science, by seeking no clear concept of experience, got on the wrong track. In this point it has been attacked repeatedly, and is also easily open to attack. Instead of acknowledging the apriority of the concept, and taking the sense world as but another form of the same, it regards the same as a mere derivative of the outer world, which for it is an absolute Prior. The mere form of something is thus stamped the thing itself. Atomism, to the extent that it is materialistic, issues from this unclearness of the concepts. We want here, based on the preceding, to subject it to a careful, and—as I believe I can assume—the only possible, critique.

However opinions may diverge in the detail, atomism ultimately amounts to regarding all sensory qualities, such as: tone, warmth, light, scent, and so on, indeed, if one considers the way thermodynamics derives Boyle's law, even pressure, as mere semblance, mere function of the world of atoms. Only the atom counts as ultimate factor of reality. To be consistent, one must now deny it every sensory quality,because otherwise a thing would be explained out of itself. One did, to be sure, when one set about to build up an atomistic world system,attribute to the atom all kinds of sensory qualities, albeit only in quite meager abstraction.³ One regards it, now as extended and impenetrable, now as mere energy center, etc. But thereby one committed the greatest inconsistency, and showed that one had not considered the above, which shows quite clearly that no sensory characteristics whatsoever may be at tributed to the atom at all. Atoms must have an existence inaccessible to sensory experience. On the other hand, though, also, they themselves, and also the processes occurring in the world of atoms, especially movements, are not supposed to be something merely conceptual. The concept, after all, is something merely universal, which is without spatial existence. But the atom is supposed, even if not itself spatial, yet to be there in space, to present something particular. It is not supposed to be exhausted in its concept, but rather to have, beyond that, a form of existence in space. With that, there is taken into the concept of the atom a property that annihilates it. The atom is supposed to exist analogously to the objects of outer perception, yet not be able to be perceived.In its concept, viewability is at once affirmed and denied.

Moreover, the atom proclaims itself right away as a mere product of speculation. When one leaves out the previously mentioned sensory qualities quite unjustifiably attributed to it, nothing is left for it but the mere “Something,” which is of course unalterable, because there is nothing about it, so nothing can be destroyed, either. The thought of mere being, transposed into space, a mere thought-point, basically just the arbitrarily multiplied Kantian “thing in itself,” confronts us.

Against this, one could perhaps object that after all it is all the same what is understood by Atom, that one should let the scholar of natural history go ahead and operate with it—for in many tasks of mathematical physics, atomistic models are indeed advantageous—; that after all, the philosopher knows that one is not dealing with a spatial reality, but with an abstraction, like other mathematical notions. To oppose the assumption of the atom in this respect would indeed be mistaken. But that is not the issue. The philosophers are concerned with that atomism for which atom and causality⁴ are the only possible motivating forces of the world, which either denies all that is not mechanical, or else holds it to be inexplicable, as exceeding our cognitive ability.⁵ It is one thing to view the atom as a mere thought-point, another thing to want to see in it the fundamental principle of all existence. The former standpoint never goes beyond mechanical nature with it; the second holds everything to be a mechanical function.

If someone wanted to speak of the harmlessness of the atomistic notions, one could, to refute him, go ahead and hold up to him the consequences that have been derived from them. There are especially two necessary consequences: firstly, that the predicate of original existence is squandered on isolated substances void of spirit, quite indifferent toward one another, and otherwise wholly undefined, in whose interaction only mechanical necessity rules, so that the entire remainder of the world of phenomena exists as their empty haze, and has mere chance to thank for its existence; secondly, insurmountable limits to our recognizing result from this. For the human mind, the concept of the atom is, as we have shown, something completely empty, the mere “Something.” But since the atomists cannot be content with this content, but call for actual substance, yet determine this substance in a way in which it can nowhere be given, they must proclaim the unrecognizability of the actual essential being of the atom.

Concerning the other limit of knowledge, the following is to be noted. If one sees thinking too as a function of the interaction of complexes of atoms, which remain indifferent toward one another, it is not at all to be marveled at, why the connection between movement of the atoms on the one hand, and thinking and sensation on the other, is not to be comprehended,⁶ which atomism therefore sees as a limit of our recognition. Only, there is something to comprehend only where a conceptual passage over exists. But if one first so limits the concepts that in the sphere of the one, nothing is to be found that would make possible the passage to the sphere of the other, then comprehending is excluded from the start. Moreover, this passage would have to be indeed not of a merely speculative nature, but rather it would have to be a real process, thus permitting of being demonstrated. But this is again prevented by the non-sensoriness of atomistic motion. With the giving up of the concept of the atom, these speculations about the limit of our knowledge fall away by themselves. From nothing must one guard oneself more than from such determinations of boundary, for beyond the boundary there is then room for everything possible. The most irrational spiritism, as well as the most nonsensical dogma, could hide behind such assumptions. The same are quite easy to refute in every single case, by showing that at their foundation there always lies the mistake of seeing a mere abstraction for more than it is, or holding merely relative concepts to be absolute ones, and similar errors. A large number of false notions has come into circulation especially through the incorrect concepts of space and time.⁷

Hence we must subject these two concepts to a discussion. The mechanistic explanation of nature needs for the assumption of its world of atoms, besides the atoms in motion absolute space as well, that is, an empty vacuum, and an absolute time, that is, an unalterable measure of the One-After-Another.⁸ But what is space? Absolute extension can be the only answer. Only, that is only a characteristic of sensory objects, and apart from these a mere abstraction, existent only upon and with the objects, and not beside them as atomism must necessarily assume. If extension is to be present, something must be extended, and this cannot again be Extension. Here, for a proof of the absoluteness of space, one will be able to raise as an objection, say, the Kantian invention about the two gloves of the left and right hand. One says, their parts have, after all, the same relationship to one another, and yet one cannot make the two congruent. From this, Kant concludes that the relationship to absolute space is a different one, hence absolute space exists. But it is more obvious, after all, to assume that the relationship of the two gloves to one another is simply such that they cannot be made congruent. How should a relationship to absolute space be thought of, anyway? And even assuming it were possible, the relationships of the two gloves to absolute space would, however, only then establish in turn a relationship of the two gloves to one another. Why should this relationship not just as well be able to be a primary one? Space, apart from the things of the world of the senses, is an absurdity. As space is only something upon the objects, so time is also given only upon and with the processes of the world of the senses. It is inherent in them. By themselves, both are mere abstractions. Only the sensory things and processes are concrete items of the world of the senses. They present concepts and laws in the form of outer existence. Therefore they in their simplest form must be a fundamental pillar of the empirical study of nature. The simple sensory quality and not the atom, the fundamental fact and not the motion behind what is empirical, are the elements of the empirical study of nature. It is thereby given a direction which is the only possible one. If one takes that as a basis, one will not be tempted at all to speak of limits of recognizing, because one is not dealing with things to which one attributes arbitrary negative characteristics such as supersensible and the like, but rather with actually given concrete objects.

From these mentions, important conclusions will also result for epistemology. But foremost, it is certain that the atom and the motion behind the empirical must be exchanged for the fundamental sensory elements of outer experience, and henceforth can no longer count as principles of the study of nature.

• 1. Compare Vischer, Old and New, Part 3, pp. 51ff.
• 2. Compare with this the keen-minded discourses of John Rehmke in his sound work The World as Perception and Concept, Berlin, 1880.
• TR1. Translator Note: “confirmation” (Bestätigung) could be a mistake for “activation” (Betätigung).
• 3. Here belong the indications Du Bois-Reymond gives about such a system, as well as the experiments performed by Wiessner, Schramm. Translator's Note: “Schrann” is presumably a mistake for “Schramm” (Heinrich Schramm wrote The General Movement of Matter as Fundamental Cause of All Phenomena), and so I have changed it.
• 4. Compare Vischer, Old and New, Part 2.
• 5. This view is advocated by Du Bois-Reymond in Concerning the Limits of the Recognition of Nature and The Seven Riddles of the World, Leipzig, 1882.
• 6. Du Bois-Reymond: Concerning the Limits of the Recognition of Nature (see p. 4, footnote).
• 7. Vischer has repeatedly pronounced the necessity of a correction of our concept of time (Critical Passages, 1873, Old and New, Part 3).
• 8. Compare: Otto Liebmann,Thoughts and Facts, Strasbourg, 1882.

Rudolf Steiner's Original Letter to Friedrich Theodor Vischer:

Nov. 25, 1886

Three years ago, you were so kind as to give me your opinion, an opinion of surpassing value to me, about a short essay in which I treated the mistakes of atomism, and of modern natural science in general. I had submitted to you the mss. of the essay.

This incident encourages me to send you also the attached treatise about the theory of knowledge in Goethe's view of the world.

Though the essay refers to Goethe, I confess that my main concern was to provide a contribution to the theory of knowledge rather than to Goethean research.

In considering Goethe's Weltanschaung—view of the world—my concern was not as much with his positive presentation as with the direction of his way of looking at the world. Goethe's and Schiller's scientific disclosures are for me a middle for which the beginning and the end have to be sought.

The beginning: by an account of the fundamental principles which we must think of as supporting this view of the world; the end: by an exposition of the consequences which this method of viewing the world has for our view of the world, and of life.

If I tell you that I owe much of my philosophic education to the study of your writings, you will understand how desirable it is for me to find your approval of my own thinking.

Commending myself to your benevolence, I am, most sincerely,

Rudolf Steiner

First, we will call to mind the current doctrine of sense impressions, then point to contradictions contained in it, and to a view of the world more compatible with the idealistic understanding.

Current (1890) natural science thinks of the world-space as filled with an infinitely thin substance called ether. This substance consists of infinitely small particles, the ether atoms. This ether does not merely exist where there are no bodies, but also in the pores (pertaining) to bodies. The physicist imagines that each body consists of an infinite number of immeasurable small parts, like atoms. They are not in contact with each other, but they are separated by small interstices. They, in the turn, unite to larger forms, the molecules, which still cannot be discerned by the eye. Only when an infinite number of molecules unite, we get what our senses perceived as bodies.

We will explain this by an example. There is a gas in nature, called hydrogen, and another called oxygen. Hydrogen consists of immeasurable small hydrogen atoms, oxygen of oxygen atoms. The hydrogen atoms are given here as red circlets, the oxygen ones as blue circlets. So, the physicist would imagine a certain quantity of hydrogen, like a figure 1, a quantity of oxygen like figure 2. (See table)

Now we are able, by special processes, not interesting us here, to bring the oxygen in such a relation to the hydrogen that two hydrogen atoms combine with one oxygen atom, so that a composite substance results which we would have to show as indicated in figure 3.

Here, always two hydrogen atoms, together with one oxygen atom form one whole. And this still invisible, small formation, consists of two kinds of atoms, we call a molecule. The substance whose molecule consists of two hydrogen atoms, plus one oxygen atom is water.

It also can happen that a molecule consists of 3, 4, 5 different atoms. So one molecule of alcohol consists of atoms of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.

But we also see by this that for modern physics each substance (fluid, solid, and gaseous) consists of parts between which there exist empty spaces (pores).

Into these pores, there enter the ether atoms which fill the whole cosmos. So, if we draw the ether atoms as dots, we have to imagine a body like figure 4. (The red and blue circlets are substance atoms, the black dots are ether atoms.)

Now we have to imagine that both the substance-atoms and the ether-atoms are in a state of constant motion. The motion is swinging. We must think that each atom is moving back and forth like the pendulum of a clock.

Now in A (see figure 5) we imagine a body, the molecules of which are in constant motion. This motion is transferred also to the ether-atoms in the pores, and from there, to the ether outside of the body of B, e.g. to C. Let us assume in D a sense-organ e.g. the eye, then, the vibrations of the ether will reach the eye, and through it, the nerve N. There, they hit, and through the nerve-conduit L, they arrive at the brain G. Let us assume for instance that the body A is in such a motion that the molecule swings back and forth 461 billion times a second. Then, each ether-molecule also swings 461 billion times, and hits 461 billion times against the optic nerve (in H). The nerve-conduit L transfers these 461 billion vibrations to the brain, and here, we have a sensation: in this case high red. If there were 760 billion vibrations I could see violet, at 548 billion yellow, etc. To each color sensation there corresponds, in the outside world, a certain motion.

This is even simpler in the case of the sensations of sound. Here also the body-molecules vibrate. The medium transferring this to our ear is not the ether but the air. At 148 vibrations per second we perceive the tone D, at 371 the tone F sharp, etc.

Thus we see to what this whole interpretation leads: whatever we perceive in the world with our senses, colors, tones, etc., is said not to exist in reality, but only to appear in our brain when certain vibratory forms of motion are present in the outer world. If I perceive heat, I do so only because the ether around me is in motion, and because the ether atoms hit against the nerves of my skin; when I sense light, it is because the same ether atoms reach the nerve of my eye, etc.

Therefore, the modern physicist says: in reality, nothing exists except swinging, moving atoms; everything else is merely a creation of my brain, formed by it when it is touched by the movement in the outer world.

I do not have to paint how dismal such a view of the world is. Who would not be filled with the saddest ideas if for example, Hugo Magnus, who is quite caught in that way of thinking, exclaims, “This motion of the ether is the only thing which really and objectively exists of color in creation. Only in the human body, in the brain, these ether movements are transformed into images which we usually call red, green, yellow, etc. According to this, we must say: creation is absolutely colorless ... Only when these (colorless) ether movements are led to the brain by the eye, they are transformed to images which we call color.” (Hugo Magnus, Farben und Schöpfung, 8 lectures about the relation of color to man and to nature, Breslau, 1881, p. 16f.)

I am convinced that everyone whose thinking is based on sound ideas, and who has not been subjected from early youth to these strange jumpy thoughts, will consider this state of affairs as simply absurd.

This matter, however, has a much more dubious angle. If there is nothing in the real world except swinging atoms, then there cannot be any true objective ideas and ideals. For when I conceive an idea, I can ask myself, what does it mean outside of my consciousness?—Nothing more than a movement of my brain molecules. Because my brain molecules at that moment swing one way or another, my brain gives me the illusion of some idea. All reality in the world then is considered as movement, everything else is empty fog, result of some movement.

If this way of thinking were correct, then I would have to tell myself: man is nothing more than a mass of swinging molecules. That is the only thing in him that has reality. If I have a great idea and pursue it to its origin, I will find some kind of movement. Let us say I plan a good deed. I only can do that if a mass of molecules in my brain feels like executing a certain movement. In such a case, is there still any value in “good” or “evil”? I can't do anything except what results from the movement of my brain molecules.

From these causes came the pessimism of delle Grazie. She says: For what purpose is this illusionary world of ideas and ideals when they are nothing but movements of atoms. And she believes that current science is right. Because she could not transcend science, and could not, as apathetic people do, disregard the misery of this belief; she succumbed to pessimism.

(See Rudolf Steiner and Marie delle Grazie, Nature and Our Ideals, published by Mercury Press.)

The error underlying the theories of this science is so simple that one cannot understand how the scientific world of today could have succumbed to it.

We can clarify the issue by a simple example. Let us suppose someone sends me a telegram from the place A. When it reaches me, I get nothing but paper and lettering. But if I know how to read, I receive more than merely paper and printed signs, that is, a certain content of thought. Can I say now: I have created this content of thought only in my brain, and paper plus lettering are the only reality? Certainly not. For the content which is now in me is also present in the place A in the same manner. This is the best example one can choose. For in a visible way, nothing at all has come to me from A. Who could maintain that the telegraph wires carry the thought from one place to the other? The same is true about our sense impressions. If a series of ether particles, swinging 589 billion times a second, reach my eye and stimulate the optic nerve, it is true that I have the sensation green. But the ether waves as paper and written symbols for the telegram in the example above are only the carriers of “green”, which is real on the body. The mediator is not the reality of the matter.

As wire and electricity for the telegram, so the swinging ether is here used as mediator. But just because we apprehend “green” by means of the swinging ether, we cannot say: “green” is simply the same as the swinging ether.

This coarse mistaking of the mediator for the content that is carried to us, lies at the root of all current sciences.

We must assume “green” as a quality of bodies. This “green” causes a vibration of 589 billion vibrations per second, this vibration comes to the optic nerve which is so constructed that it knows: when 589 billion vibrations arrive, they can only come from a green surface.

The same holds true for all other mental representations. If I have a thought, an idea, an ideal, it of course must be present in my brain as a reality. That is only possible if the brain particles move in a certain way, for an entity existing in space cannot suffer any changes except by motions. But we would be deadly mistaken about the content of the idea as compared to the way it appears in the body, if we were to say: the motion itself is the idea. No—the motion only provides the possibility for the idea to gain form and spatial existence.

But there is another aspect. For us men, there is nothing [in] which we are completely present as in our ideas, our ideals and mental representations. For them we live, we weave.

When we are alone in the dark, in complete silence, so that we have no sense impressions,—of what are we totally and fully conscious?—Our thoughts and ideas! After these comes everything we can experience through the senses. That is given to me when I open my sense organs to the outer world and keep them receptive. Aside from ideas, ideals and sense impressions, nothing is given to me. Everything else can only be derived as existing and ideas on the basis of our sense impressions.

Can I make such an assumption about moving atoms? If motion occurs, there must be something that moves. By what do I recognize motion? Only by seeing that the bodies change their place in space. But what I see before me are bodies with all qualities of color, etc.

So what does the physicist want to explain? Let us say color. He says: it is motion. What moves? A colorless body. Or, he wants to explain warmth. He again says: it is motion. What moves? A body without warmth. In short: if we explain all qualities of bodies by motion, we finally have to assume that the moving objects have no qualities, as all qualities originate in motion.

To recapitulate. The physicist explains all sense-perceivable, all sense-perceptible qualities by motion. So, what moves cannot yet have qualities. But what has no qualities cannot move at all. Therefore, the atom assumed by physicists is a thing that dissolves into nothing if judged sharply.

So, the whole way of explanation falls. We must ascribe to color, warmth, sounds, etc., the same reality as to motion. With this, we have refuted the physicists, and have proved the objective reality of the world of phenomena and of ideas.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Six Questions about Some Basic Concepts of Natural Science. (Answered in 1919.)

(The exact questions no longer exist.)

1. Atoms are to be regarded as ideal contents of space. The contents are the results of force-directions meeting each other—e.g., directions of force.
   
   
   abc are active in space, and by their meeting a resultant force is carried which is effective as an atom of tetrahedral character.
   
   Elements are the expression of certain meetings of forces; that they manifest themselves as such is due to the fact that one force, in meeting another, produces a result, while other effects of forces on each other are without result.
   
   Crystals are the result of more complicated meetings of forces, atoms the result of simple meetings.
   
   Amorphic masses result from the neutralization of force-reactions.
2. Force is the revelation of spirit viewed in a one-sided way. One cannot say that force has an effect on matter, since matter consists merely in the affects of the force-rays when they meet. Never does one form of energy pass over into another one; as little as the activity of one man goes into that of another. What passes over is merely the arithmetical expression of measure. If mechanical energy passes over into warmth the real occurrence is as follows: a certain quantity of this revelation which reveals itself in warmth is stimulated in a spiritual being by a certain quantity of mechanical energy. (This is so in a healthy fashion with Mayer. It was only Helmholtz who botched up this matter.)
3. Neither sound, nor warmth, nor light, nor electricity are vibrations, just as little as a horse is a sum of gallop-paces. Sound, for instance, is an essential entity, and the effect of this real quality in its passage through the air is vibration. For man as a sensing being, the vibration is motivation to imitate the essential entity in himself; this constitutes the perception of sound. It is similar with others: light, etc.
4. Light is that by which it is perceived. (See my introduction to Goethe's Theory of Color.) The vibration is the revelation of light in the ether.
   
   The refraction of light is the result of the effect of a certain force-direction upon the light-direction. Newton's color rings (circles), phenomena of interference, are results of light-radiation (effect of light in the ether), and of the effects of other forces found in the path of light (weakening effects, gradually weakening affects of other forces). The same goes for phenomena of polarisation. One should not seek the polarisation figures in the structure of the essence of the light but in the structure of the medium which places itself in the path of light.
   
   The speed of transmission is the result of a kind of friction of the light against the medium.
5. Light is not to be considered as a function of electricity, but the latter is to be considered as a kind of corporeal carrier of light.
   
   Electrically charged matter: certain accumulations of force retain those accumulations of force which manifest as electricity.
6. Mathematics is the abstracted sum of the forces effective in space. If one says, “Mathematical propositions are valid a priori”, this comes from the fact that man exists within the same lines of force as the other beings, and that he can disassociate himself from everything that does not belong to the scheme of space, etc.

It seems to me that all previous interpretations of the fairy tale suffer from the mistake of not taking into account one word that is explicitly mentioned in the fairy tale. When the old man with the lamp is asked which of the three secrets he knows is the most important, he answers: the revealed one. And when asked if he does not want to reveal it, he replies: as soon as I know the fourth. But the snake knows this fourth secret and whispers it to the old man. There can be no doubt that the secret that is revealed is the most important secret, for it brings about the state longed for by all the characters in the fairy tale. But since this state of affairs is described to us in great detail at the end, we must see the disclosure of the actual secret in the presentation of the circumstances at the end of the fairy tale. However, we must assume that the old man knows this secret very well, because he is, after all, the only person who is always above the circumstances, who directs and guides everything. And so the question arises, what can the old man learn from the snake? How to achieve what he and everyone else most urgently desire, the snake does not need to tell him, because he knows that himself. But we have seen that the snake is the most important being in the whole process, because only by sacrificing itself can everything be achieved. But it must come to the realization that this is necessary. And the old man cannot know when the time will come when the snake will come to this realization. Because that is up to the snake. The fourth secret is therefore when the snake wants to bring about the salvation of all the other figures through its sacrificial death. That she is willing to do this, she apparently whispers into the old man's ear. And now the latter can speak the word: “The time has come.”

What is now coming to light is the secret hidden in the fairy tale. And we just have to know how to find the crux of the matter, where the solution presents itself within the riddle. The desired goal is achieved in the revival of the youth, his union with the beautiful lily, and then through the fact that both realms, this side and the other side of the river, are connected by the magnificent bridge, on which all people can move freely back and forth as they please. Even though the snake is the originator of it all, she alone could not give the youth the gifts by which he can rule the newly established kingdom. These he receives from the three kings. From the brazen one he receives the sword with the order: “the sword on the left, the right free.”

The silver one gives him the scepter with the remark: “Feed the sheep.” Finally, the golden one places the oak wreath on his head with the words: “Recognize the highest.” Let us try to penetrate the meaning of these symbolic acts. The sword can only signify the power, the physical strength and violence that is given to the new ruler with it. However, he should not wield it in his right hand, where it always indicated a willingness to fight and war, but should hold it in his left hand, thus using it for protection, to ward off evil. The right hand, however, should be free for deeds of genuine humanity. What does the sceptre represent to the youth? The words: feed my sheep, remind us of Christ's command to the apostle: “Feed my lambs, feed my sheep”. Thus, piety and religious purity of heart emanate from this king and are imparted to the youth. Finally, from the third king, the youth is given the oak wreath and the gift of knowing the highest. The three kings are thus the three fundamental powers of the human mind: the will as the founder of power and physical strength and violence; the mind as the promoter of piety; and reason as the source of wisdom. Thus, it is not force, piety and wisdom themselves that are symbolized by the three kings, but the powers from which the latter emanate. Therefore, when the old man calls out the words, “There are three that rule on earth: wisdom, appearance and force,” the three kings each rise when their names are mentioned. There seems to be some ambiguity here in that the second king, the silver one, is presented as the ruler of the realm of appearances, whereas, judging by his words, we can only see in him the guardian spirit of piety. However, this contradiction is immediately resolved when we recall the close relationship that Goethe establishes between aesthetic and religious feelings. We need only think of words such as these: “There are only two true religions: one that recognizes the sacred that dwells in and around us in a completely formless way, and the other that recognizes and worships it in the most beautiful form.” Goethe sees art as only a different form of religion, and that is why he has the bearer of religion called upon here with the words: appearance, that is beautiful appearance. Now that we know the meaning of the kings, it will be possible to draw conclusions about other things that appear in the fairy tale. Above all, we are interested in the king of wisdom. He is made of gold. So we will have to see in gold a symbol of wisdom and everywhere we encounter this metal in the fairy tale, we will have to recognize this highest power of the human soul.

We now encounter gold in the form of the will-o'-the-wisp and the snake. Both relate to it quite differently. While the will-o'-the-wisps know how to acquire it easily everywhere and then throw it around wastefully and arrogantly, the snake only acquires it with difficulty and absorbs it organically, processing it in its body so that it permeates its entire being. So, without doubt, the will-o'-the-wisps are a symbol for all those personalities who gather their wisdom from all sides and then give it out lightly, without permeating themselves with it inwardly. In short, the will-o'-the-wisps represent all unproductive minds that can teach but not create. What they teach is therefore always more or less empty phrases. If these phrases fall on fertile ground, they can still achieve the very best.

A person can communicate a word to another that he does not understand at all and in which the person who hears it recognizes a deep meaning. The truth is expressed by the fact that this gold, which the will-o'-the-wisps only know how to flaunt, is processed by the serpent in the best way. The snake embodies the solid human striving, the strict progression on the path of wisdom, supported by honest work.

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Goethe expresses this by having them translated in the time of twilight on the shadow of the giant. The giant is thus at the same time the symbol of violence, of blind arbitrariness, and his shadow that of the senseless works of this arbitrariness. Arbitrariness acts unconsciously, it is powerless to create things that are preconscious and planned, just as the giant's shadow is not his own work, just as he accompanies it without his conscious intervention. Once we are familiar with the realm of the lily, that on the other side of the river will also be clear to us. It is, of course, that of mere natural, sensual life, where man gives in to his natural instincts, pursues every desire, every passion, and so the realm where not freedom but natural necessity reigns. The river is now what separates the two. What seizes it in its hand becomes arbitrary and that means spiritual death. We are all born to freedom, it is our original home. We all come from the same place, but we cannot return to it without a fundamental transformation of our personality. That is why the ferryman can take any traveler across, but cannot bring anyone across. Everyone can only cross over in the already characterized way. Only when that ideal state has truly been reached, when perfect wisdom, perfect piety and power prevail, then everyone can cross over and back at will, at any moment. That we are right in our assertion that the river is the symbol of the state and of society is proved by the fact that the temple of the ruler is erected above it.

There is also other evidence for this. The ferryman demands fruit of the earth from every traveler he ferries as a reward. These fruits of the earth are simply the duties that the state and society impose on people in return for their legal benefits and protection. When the ferryman rejects the gold pieces of the will-o'-the-wisps, it means that the state can only recognize real services, and will even become displeased if you try to fob it off with mere words. When the old woman has to confess to the river that she owes it by dipping her hand into the water, this also corresponds to reality. Those who refuse to provide the state with the services it prescribes are held liable for it with body and property.

Now let us consider the old man with the lamp. The lamp has the property of shining only where another light is brought to it. Here we must remember how Goethe expresses his own view through the saying of an old mystic: “Were the eye not solar, the sun could never behold it; were not the power of the God within us, how could we be enraptured by the Divine!” Just as the lamp does not shine in the dark, so the higher light of truth does not shine for those who do not have the appropriate organs from which the inner light flows towards the outer. But this higher light of enlightenment is the power that guides everything towards the ultimate goal. Wherever this light shines, everything radiates the gold of truth again. This means that all beings reveal their inner, nobler nature to us. The light of the lamp turns stone into gold, wood into silver, and dead animals into precious stones. It is the higher light that ultimately establishes the right harmony in the work of the three kings. In the past, the fourth king ruled and he was not influenced by the lamp. In him, the three elements, which can only be perfected separately, are in disorderly, chaotic confusion. He does not possess these elements properly, but has only usurped them. He was able to rule as long as there was darkness. When the light appears, his figure disintegrates into nothing. The will-o'-the-wisps lick up all the gold that he has inside him. This means that this unproductive science feeds on the past. It absorbs everything without selection or any sense of inner meaning. Who does not remember those historians and literary historians who absorbed every worthless trifle with [three manuscript pages missing here]

not consumed in activities that befit only the free human spirit, but brought to bear in the development of their powers within strict natural regularity. Man, who is inwardly unfree, will, if his activity[ies] run quite mechanically like clockwork, still prove himself best. —

Thus Goethe embodied his views on the relationship between a person's inner and outer development in this fairy tale.

The parallelism with the ideas that Schiller was actively pursuing at the time and that found expression in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man is striking. Schiller also asked himself how freedom and natural necessity can coexist. And Schiller finds the bridge between the two in beauty and in artistic creation.

When the artist creates his works, he acts freely, but at the same time he unconsciously creates like a “dreamer, like a sleepwalker. In this respect, he is again subject to natural necessity. He is free and at the same time obeys the laws of nature. Indeed, he completely forgets his free self and creates under an irresistible compulsion, like nature. And so Schiller comes to the same conclusion by a completely different route. He also finds that only through an act of complete self-denial, through the sacrifice of the conscious self, can the realm of natural necessity be reconciled with that of freedom. The subject was certainly discussed at length between the two poets, for immediately after the first half of the fairy tale is received, Schiller refers to a conversation he had with Goethe, from which he reports that Goethe wants the highest to emerge from the interaction of all forces. Schiller solved the problem scientifically, Goethe poetically.

Perhaps my explanation will not be shared by many, perhaps it will be corrected or supplemented in some details. But I believe I have shown one thing: that Goethe's deep spirit, borne by the most perfect ideals and the most significant truths, also shines forth from this poem. And it is refreshing to see the two greatest minds of our nation working together in a joint intellectual endeavor on a task that should bring nothing less than the solution to the most serious question of conscience for humanity: How do we achieve perfect, unrestricted freedom? And for this reason, my observation that Goethe understood the realm of freedom to be on the other side of the river seemed to me not unworthy of mention.

Given that Goethe's Gretchen is by no means a dramatic figure, clearly defined by the poet in all her parts, every stage portrayal of Gretchen will have to include something that is not provided for in the poetry itself. Ms. Wiecke-Halberstedt's Gretchen is such a performance that the spectator has to say to himself: those traits of the characterization that come from the actress and not from the poet are so eminently in the spirit of the latter that the whole can only be described as a figure without contradictions. This must be said first, because in our opinion it is the greatest theatrical achievement to round off Goethe's Gretchen, whose entire being the poet only allows to shine through in individual images, into a whole. If we were asked which Gretchen we prefer: the one created by Wessely, who from the outset presented her in a way that bordered on the rapturous, or the one we saw here recently, which initially seemed to us like a meaningfully posed question to the human mind, which only comes to life through its own deep inwardness at Faust's side, we would find it difficult to say. Both views are possible and convincing. Perhaps the second, however, only for Ms. Wiecke, given the depth of her very unique instrument. In any case, Wessely's portrayal would be preferable for those artists who do not have such an instrument at their disposal, one that is capable of imprinting the tone of the meaningful on the naive and simple.

With consummate mastery, we found in Ms. Wiecke's portrayal: the prayer before the Mater Dolorosa and the dungeon scene. If the loud exclamations in the latter, which sometimes sounded unpleasant, could be improved, then we would have no reason, even with the greatest conscientiousness, to find fault with these two scenes, which we have seen as among the greatest artistic achievements. We also feel that the scene with Lieschen at the well and the first one in Martha's garden are happy ones. When the shrine is opened and she sees the casket, it must be made very clear, in our opinion, that Gretchen is filled with astonishment and curiosity and not a trace of fright. At the end of the monologue spoken at this point, it must not be overlooked that a certain resigned tone softens Gretchen's words: “Oh, we poor things!” so that the spectator is not left with the impression that she is truly overcome by envy of those blessed with happiness. In the fifth line from the end, I think the correct emphasis is:

“But one leaves it all too.”

It seems important to us to give the scene in the garden shed such a character that one recognizes from Gretchen's expressions exactly: she sees the story with the sleeping draught as a wrong, but she cannot refuse Faust even that which seems wrong to her. The passage in the second part, “die sich einmal nur vergangen” (she who once committed a transgression), points to this. It cannot be the surrender that took place in full love that is this wrong, but the offense against the mother.

But it seems even more significant to me that the religious conversation on Gretchen's part is conducted in such a way that it shows that in this case she, in her positive faith, is superior to Faust. This scene in particular is misunderstood everywhere. Faust's words: “Who may call him?” to: “Umnebelnd Himmelsglut.” everywhere as something particularly profound, while they are nothing but phrases spoken with beautiful words, hollow and shallow. This is the language of the man who has cast off scholasticism and has exchanged nothing better for it in the realm of ideas. The words are beautiful, but shallow. Gretchen senses this and therefore she says:

That is all very well and good;
the parson says something similar,
only with a few different words.

She does not know it quite, but she stands with her positive Christianity much higher than Faust with his phrases, which “seem tolerable”, but with which it is nevertheless “crooked”.

We must not forget that the Faust who stands before Gretchen here is a thoroughly worthless and wicked fellow, and that it is only the pain of the wrong he has done to her and his own healing nature that raise him to a higher plane in the second part. What attracts Gretchen to Faust is the rest of the significant human being that Faust always was, and which comes gloriously to the fore when Faust is completely absorbed in his love for the girl. In all other respects, however, Faust has been degraded during the tragedy of Gretchen, has become unhealthy and degenerate. Gretchen does not know what to make of Faust's hollow talk about God. In her innocence she sees something momentous in it, because she assumes that only the momentous can be in Faust; but in all of it she must be utterly amazed at the words, which are unconvincing to her in the face of her ideas about God. And in her correct instinct, she attributes them to the influence of the evil spirit. Gretchen must act throughout the scene in such a way that it is clear that she senses something special about Faust that she cannot explain rationally, but which makes her uncomfortable because it seems wrong to her. This trait sheds a very unique light on all the following scenes, preparing the mood that the audience must have at the end of the first part: Faust alone is to blame for Gretchen's moral and physical downfall, but this guilt is his fate. It is a psychologically profound trait in Gretchen's nature that after the fall, and in the knowledge of her wrongdoing, something like faith takes root in her soul, that something must not be right after all, and so she searches Faust's mind; this is how the religious conversation is motivated. From the words, “If one hears it that way, it seems tolerable,” the mood must already be announced in Gretchen's soul, which leads her from

doubt through guilt to madness. I would just like to emphasize in closing that I am far from believing that these objections must be binding. There is even a general lack of clarity regarding the religious dialogue, and the commentators on Faust – with the exception of Vischer – are completely wrong in their interpretation. But an excellent actress like Mrs. Wiecke could contribute a great deal to a better understanding of Faust by taking these objections into account. R. Steiner.

We have found the completion of the world process in knowledge. All events are expressions of the laws that operate in the things of the world. But it would remain forever a mere appearance if human consciousness did not confront things and in it the laws would enter into existence in their very own form.

At the beginning of the process of knowledge, we feel ourselves to be outside of things, alien to them; at the end of it, we have lived ourselves into them.

Our own actions are only a special case of general world events. When we have recognized their lawfulness, then our actions are also our work. We have become one with world lawfulness. It is not outside of us, but within us. The end of knowledge is identical with merging into the world's lawfulness. But this merging also means at the same time that we have mastered the process that we ourselves have initiated. As long as the world's lawfulness is something outside of us, it rules us; what we accomplish happens under its compulsion. If it is within us, then this compulsion ceases. For what was compelling has become our own nature. It no longer rules over us, but in us over everything else. The realization of an event by virtue of a law external to the realizer is an act of unfreedom; that by the realizer is an act of freedom. The process of knowledge is the development of the human personality towards freedom.

Where is the psychology here? The author addresses anthropological, ethical and metaphysical questions. His style is critical. This essay is not psychological like, for example, Saitschick's treatment of Dostoyevsky. Despite many apt remarks, it does not do justice to Nietzsche because the author shows only a limited understanding of him. From many parts of the book, I would conclude that Weigand was highly talented. But a series of trivialities astonishes me. Anyone who wants to understand Nietzsche psychologically must realize that in this man certain intuitions appear through the medium of a grotesquely distorting mind. A Nietzschean psychology would have the task of laying bare those intuitions and then showing the way in which Nietzsche's mind distorts them.

General discouragement in the field of philosophy – cowardice of thought – Volkelt as an example -—. It was he who, in the introduction to his “Traumphantasie” (1875), sharply criticized the only apparent resignation, but in truth half-heartedness and discouragement of thought, which no longer wants to boldly tackle the central problems of existence. (1884), Basel inaugural address: On the Possibility of Metaphysics. The expression of this despondency is the emergence of the many epistemologies - Lotze's saying about sharpening knives - but the knives have remained blunt - epistemology has not grasped the actual fundamental philosophical task - Lasalle's saying: “Philosophy can be nothing but the consciousness that the empirical sciences attain of themselves.”

All our philosophical science is under the spell of Kantianism. Since Otto Liebmann (1865) proclaimed the motto “back to Kant”, it has not been abandoned by research. Our most important natural scientists are subject to it.

All higher thinking of our nation is based on the fundamental tone of Kant's world view. We believe that with Kantianism we have now overcome dogmatism; in truth, we have exchanged nothing but a bad dogma, an article of faith: the belief in Kant's infallibility. Before Kant, there were dualists, monists, and pluralists. There was a limit to science, but not a limit to knowledge. It was Kant who first drew limits to our knowledge. Kant established a dualism, a two-worlds theory, which has forever blocked our access to the foundations of existence. Kant exchanged the certainty and security of our knowledge for its absoluteness.

He examines our cognitive faculty in order to gain an understanding of its capabilities. He finds two roots: sensuality and reason. Our mental organization creates our experience with the material of sensations. Therefore, cognition is limited to the latter. Skimming over experience is impossible because of the nature of the cognitive faculty. The In-Itself is forever unknowable. Theoretical reason only as a regulative. Surrogate practical reason. Ethics of the categorical imperative. Should. Kantianism perfect dualism. Two worlds: the world of the self and the world of experience. Two principles of knowledge: knowledge and belief. The subjectivism that this entails has not been abandoned.

As long as the trick of looking around the corner, i.e. 'without imagining, is not invented, Kant's proud self-modesty will have it that of the being, its that can be recognized, but never its what.

This dogma is the rock on which every opposing opinion is dashed. Otto Liebmann calls the sentence a sacrosanct principle. Hartmann's transcendental realism is based on it. Necessary consequences, e.g. spiritism. Du Bois-Reymond's view. Ignorabism. Subjectivism in modern science a consequence of Kantianism.

But how did the world of ideas come to be indicated? The split into subject and object is a product of our organization. Not a manifold is given to us, but we split the one into a manifold. Not unity is an illusion, but multiplicity. The task of science must therefore be: to overcome the multiplicity in the mind that is caused by our organization and to reshape it into unity. An element of science is only justified if it is split off from the whole of reality somewhere. Science is therefore only ever an association of the elements of reality that have been split up by our organization. The nature of the association must arise from the nature of the elements themselves. Immanent theories. They are contrasted with the transcendent theories. Atomism and metaphysical theories. The hypothesis is justified only insofar as it presupposes things that are relatively inaccessible to us only because of their remoteness in space and time. Metaphysical hypotheses are a non-starter. What matters is not that the consequences of a hypothesis are confirmed, but that the content of a hypothesis can be proven as a fact if the empirical possibility were present. Extension of this principle to inorganic and organic natural sciences. Haeckel's monism is therefore correct in principle. If we understand ourselves correctly, the world does not lead us out of itself. It must be explainable from within itself. There is only one world of experience, but it contains all the elements for its explanation and comprehensibility. There is nothing inexplicable in nature. The things that are supposed to be inexplicable to us must first be invented. Nothing truly real is incomprehensible; only the fantastic entities that humanity has created as reality and beyond that, are incomprehensible. We always remain only before the self-created barriers of knowledge.

Nietzsche admired the greatness of the personalities and the impulsive natures of the ancient philosophers. It took the greatest courage of thought to think the thoughts that were thought in the tragic age of the Greeks: by Thales, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras. No one understands these sages unless they can build up a picture of their personalities from their thoughts. We are not interested in their teachings, but in their characters. We are drawn to explore their questions, to find out what kind of person Heraclitus was, because we have the feeling that his philosophy was only a condition of life that Heraclitus had to create for himself in order to be able to exist. One can wander through dreary stretches of modern philosophical history; nowhere is there such a necessary connection between character and the world of ideas. With most of the philosophers of the present day, one has the feeling that they pursue philosophy as an external business; one can also imagine them without this business. Indeed, the connection between the world of the senses and the personality rarely interests them. They strive for “objective truth,” that is, for that insipid and weak construct that arises from cowardly thinking, because not the whole personality is active when philosophizing. The ancient philosophers before Socrates were artists. And Nietzsche is another such philosophical artist. Only a fool would choose him as a master and swear by his words. Only the artistically sensitive person can gain a relationship with Nietzsche. He created his world of ideas like the ancient philosophers of the tragic age, because he needed it to live. Truth for him is not what can be supported by the strict proofs of school logic, but what proves to him to be life-promoting.

He does not prove his views, he tries them out on his own body to see if he can live with them. His rich, bold, deep nature needed dangerous truths to sustain itself. This is the charm of Nietzsche's writings: they always point us to the great man who creates a zest for life in them. A nature as rare and lonely as Nietzsche's could not easily get along with the world. He erected his thoughts between himself and the world in order to be able to endure the world.

Not the rigid thinking, not the so-called scientific drive, but the mood conjures up Nietzsche's thoughts. They detach themselves from him as products of the personality. All thoughts that go beyond a mere description of actual observation arise in this way. It's just that those who believe in objective truths don't have enough insight to understand this.

Even their most objective truths are the products of subjective personalities, only tailored for a certain average way of life. Objectivity means nothing more than being suitable for a large number of people to live by. But the select personality needs select truths. The more objective a truth is, i.e., the more universally valid it is, the more trite it is. Anyone who demands that we accept their truths must also assume that we are similar personalities to them. It follows that only the most stale truths can be universally valid.

If a god could write a philosophy, it would presumably contain all objective truth; but for us mere humans, it would be irrelevant because we do not see the world from an absolute, divine center, but rather from our own individual vantage point. We would presumably not know what to do with a divine truth that was not tailored to our point of view.

Friedrich Nietzsche by Lic. Dr. Eugen Kretzer. Enthusiastic and understanding approval with regard to the first writings. – Correct insight that “Zarathustra” does not signify a new epoch – no understanding of the second epoch. Everything is explained by illness. A Christian's protest against the Antichrist. The point that matters in Nietzsche's last period is nowhere sharply emphasized; in his last period, Nietzsche is namely the negator of all kinds of knowledge, because he is the affirmator of life. Knowledge presupposes a reality that we do not have, that we strive for. Nietzschean reality is to be within ourselves, to be created by us. We are not to be cognizers, creators; we are to be commanders. This also applies to morality. Anyone who clings to a “should” and wants to recognize good and evil is placing the source of morality outside of themselves. Nietzsche wants to determine morality; to create, not to cognize – and therefore, to be beyond good and evil.

Goethe did not expect any political revolution to happen. He knew that the world of ideas, which still dominated European humanity at the time, was outdated and overripe. The old forms of government and life went together with the old world of thought and feeling. There was a thirst for freedom, a desire to break out of the old forms of life and society; but it could not be done because in feeling and in thinking people still lived deeply in the traditional conceptions.

Hegel was the right philosopher for this old world view. In the Prussian state, this world view found its corresponding realization.

It was not the political revolutions that overthrew the old sentiments; they do not truly revolutionize. And more important than bloodshed and bayonets for the progress of humanity are the spiritual revolutions.

That such a revolution was announced in the French dispute was felt by Goethe. And he felt it because he himself, in his youth, had confronted the dying ideas with the ideas of the new world order. What Geoffroy proclaimed in France, Goethe proclaimed in Germany 40-50 years earlier.

Goethe felt the need for a worldview. The urge for knowledge dominated his entire being. But it was not the urge for knowledge as most researchers see it. That is something that is learned.

Goethe's personality strove for the all-round development of the personality. Nothing should be missing that belongs to the individual in order to be a whole person. The great fundamental question belongs to this personal wholeness: what is man's relationship to the world? What is his task? How can he fulfill his mission? What is his responsibility? Can he set his own tasks; or does he have to comply with the decrees of a higher being?

Goethe would have liked to have had contemporary philosophers teach him about these questions. He could not find anyone who could have given him an answer to the questions of knowledge that he had to ask. What the philosophers could tell him contradicted his nature. He did not understand his surroundings. This lack of understanding of his surroundings is vividly illustrated in [text breaks off]