The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] In my "Key Points of the Social Question", it was said of the politics to which modern civilization has brought itself that it had reached the nil point of its ability in 1914. It has not left this point since. The path from Versailles to London is the impossible attempt to stop at this point and yet at the same time to make progress. The terrible war proved that it was not possible to continue the policy pursued up to that point. We sailed into the decisions by force. The negotiations in London did not get beyond this way of bringing about decisions.

[ 2 ] We will not get out if we do not move in the direction of the insight that the future of modern civilization will be decided by ideas. What these ideas must be has often been said in this journal. Until what has been said here has been introduced into the realm of insightful will by a sufficiently large number of people, we will have to continue to live under the sign of violence.

[ 3 ] A union of states has won a victory. In America, before this victory was won, Woodrow Wilson said what the victors wanted to do with the victory. America had to convince itself through Versailles that what had been said were insubstantial words. You cannot create realities with insubstantial words. Lloyd George is reported to have said recently that you never know how far you will be led if you have to resort to force. In America, Harding has been seated in the chair where Woodrow Wilson previously spoke insubstantial, ineffective words. Harding has now also spoken. For all that is relevant to modern civilization, these new words are nothing more than a continuation of Wilson's.

[ 4 ] Victory will decide nothing for modern civilization. For ideas must decide. And these ideas will decide, regardless of whether they appear with the victor or the vanquished and gain recognition. The situation within modern peoples is such that the necessary ideas can override victory or defeat.

[ 5 ] It is sad when those who speak of ideas in this way today are answered: The victors have the power, and ideas cannot help the defeated. Without ideas, the victors will only be able to bring about a life of violence and through violence. With this life, they will lead the world and thus themselves into decline. The defeated could lead the world to uplifting forces through ideas. He could make much out of defeat with ideas, the victors will not be able to make anything out of victory without ideas. Seen from the center of Europe, it is truly tragic when the victor, Lloyd George, longs for a capable German statesman. From the London point of view, however, one should find it tragicomic, because one cannot find it comic, because the world situation is too serious for that.

[ 6 ] The negotiations in London, Harding's inaugural speech, are proof that the victors are helpless in everything except the use of force. Wherever one recognizes this, one will be at the beginning of the insight that only new ideas can help. For the helplessness is only a consequence of the fact that in London, as in Versailles, they want to build a new world with the old ideas and do not realize that among the dead that the war has brought are above all these old ideas. The war was characterized by these old ideas. It owed its existence to the fact that these ideas were already corpses in 1914.

[ 7 ] In London they were negotiating about economic matters. If the modern unitary state formations want to bring about economic decisions, they can only do so by force. The real decisions must be made by world economic life, which is detached from these entities. This is one of the points on which the threefold structure is based. It must do this because it wants to speak out of reality. In Versailles and London, people wanted to act out of unreality.

[ 8 ] People keep coming and saying to the promoters of the ideas of threefolding: Why don't you make us practical suggestions? They don't realize that the necessary ones have already been made. We can only make progress with the threefold structure. Without it, you can go to Versailles, to London, to Italy, to America; it will help nothing.

[ 9 ] This has often been said here. Today it only needs to be pointed out that the events in London and their consequences speak the same language.

[ 10 ] And the East? One looks longingly towards it; one longs for Lenin's and Trotsky's fall. One assumes that these fanatics for destructive forces will disappear from the scene tomorrow. After all, it will only help modern civilization if ideas of construction flow over that on which they have worked with forces of decline.

[ 11 ] There is talk of the need to seek economic links with the East. They must certainly be established. But above all, the East is seeking intellectual understanding with Central Europe. This has not yet been offered to it. If it first brings it the stimulating ideas, then the economic connection will come as a consequence. To talk about the latter without wanting the former is to place oneself outside the conditions of real life.

[ 1 ] The circumstances of the times and the opposition of wide circles interested in economic life force the "Coming Day" to dispense with a further socio-economic program for the immediate present and to keep its activities within narrower limits. In the near future, it will be the association of some economic enterprises with spiritual enterprises that support each other. The spiritual enterprises: Waldorf School, Clinical Therapeutic Institute, Biological and Physical Research Institute are to serve scientific-spiritual and moral-social progress in the sense that corresponds to the demands of the present and the near future. The purely economic undertakings should provide the material basis for the overall enterprise. They should initially carry those undertakings that can only bear economic fruit and financial returns in some time, because the spiritual seed to be poured into them now can only sprout after some time.

[ 2 ] The shareholders will continue to receive the dividend promised in the program from this closely held company. An expansion of the activity can also take place as far as possible in this transformed program. Although the program originally developed for the further development of economic life in connection with the cultivation of spiritual values is a necessity of our time, its comprehensive realization is currently hopeless due to the limited willingness of the contemporary community involved in economic life. Thus, what is initially possible must take precedence over what is necessary. Those personalities who are sympathetic to the idea of the "Coming Day" will be all the better able to unite their interests in it. Serving them will be the duty of its leadership.

Since the earliest times, it has been felt that the study of the human being is the most worthy pursuit of human research. Anyone who allows themselves to be influenced by what has come to light over time as knowledge of the human being can easily become discouraged. A wealth of opinions presents itself as answers to the question: what is the human being, and what is his relationship to the universe? The most diverse differences between these opinions arise in contemplation. This can lead to the feeling that man is not called to such research and that he must refrain from achieving anything that can give satisfaction to the feeling mentioned.

Is such a feeling justified? It could only be so if the perception of different views on a subject were a testimony to man's inability to recognize anything true about the subject. Anyone who wanted to accept such a testimony would have to believe that the whole essence of a thing should suddenly reveal itself to man, if knowledge could be spoken of at all. But it is not the case with human knowledge that the essence of things can suddenly reveal itself to it. It is rather the case with it, as with the picture that one paints, for example, of a tree from a certain side or photographs. This picture gives the appearance of the tree, from a certain point of view, in full truth. If one chooses a different point of view, the picture will be quite different. And only a series of pictures, from the most diverse points of view, can give an overall idea of the tree through their interaction.

In this way, however, man can also only look at the things and entities of the world. Everything he can say about them, he must say as views that apply from different points of view. It is not only so with the sensory observation of things, it is also so in the spiritual. With regard to the latter, one should not be misled by the above comparison and imagine that the diversity of points of view has something to do with space. Each view can be a true one if it faithfully reflects what is observed. And it is only refuted when it is shown that it can legitimately be contradicted by another view given from the same point of view. A difference between one view and another given from a different point of view, on the other hand, is as a rule meaningless. Anyone who views the matter in this way is protected against the obvious objection that every opinion must appear justified when viewed in this way. Just as the image of a tree must have a very specific shape from one point of view, so must a mental view from one point of view. But it is clear that one can only prove an error in the view if one is clear about the point of view from which it is given.

We should get along much better in the world of human opinions than we often do if we always kept this in mind. One would then realize how the differences of opinion in many cases arise only from the diversity of points of view. And only through different true views can one approach the essence of things. The mistakes that are made in this direction do not arise from the fact that people form different views, but rather from the fact that each person wants to see his view as the only legitimate one.

An objection to all this presents itself easily. One could say that if man wants to present the truth, he should not give an opinion, but rise above possible opinions to an overall view of a corresponding thing. This demand may sound acceptable. But it is not realizable. For what a thing is must be characterized from different points of view. The chosen image of the tree being painted from different points of view seems appropriate. Anyone who wants to avoid looking at the different images in order to gain an overall picture might end up painting something very blurry and foggy; but there would be no truth in such a blurry picture. Nor can truth be gained by a knowledge that wants to encompass the object with a single glance, but only by combining the true views that are given from different points of view. This may not correspond to human impatience; but it corresponds to the facts that one learns to recognize when one develops a meaningful striving for knowledge.

Few things can lead so strongly to a genuine appreciation of truth as such a striving for knowledge. And this appreciation may be called genuine because it cannot be followed by faintheartedness. It does not lead to despair in the striving for truth, because it recognizes truth as such in limitation; but it protects against the empty arrogance that, in its possession of truth, believes it can encompass the comprehensive essence of things.

Those who take this sufficiently into account will find it understandable that, in particular, knowledge of man should be sought in such a way that one tries to approach his nature from different points of view. One such point of view shall be chosen for the following remarks. It shall be characterized as one that lies between two others, as it were, in the middle. And it is not to be asserted that there are not many other points of view besides the three considered here. But the three shall be chosen here as particularly characteristic.

The first aspect to be considered in this regard is anthropology. This science collects everything that can be observed about humans and seeks to gain insights into their nature from the results of its observations. For example, it considers the structure of the sensory organs, the shape of the bone structure, the conditions of the nervous system, the processes of muscle movement, etc. With her methods, she penetrates into the finer structure of the organs and seeks to learn about the conditions of feeling, of imagining, etc. She also investigates the similarity of the human being to the animal and seeks to gain an idea of the relationship between humans and other living beings. She goes further and examines the living conditions of primitive peoples, who appear to be lagging behind in their development compared to civilized peoples. From what she observes in such peoples, she forms ideas about what the more developed peoples were once like, which have progressed beyond the level of education at which those remained. She studies the remains of prehistoric people in the layers of the earth and forms concepts about how cultural development has progressed. She examines the influence of climate, the seas, and other geographical conditions on human life. It seeks to gain an understanding of the conditions of racial development, of the life of nations, of legal conditions, the development of writing, of languages, etc. The name anthropology is used here for the entire physical study of man; it includes not only what is often counted in the narrower sense, but also the morphology, biology, etc. of man.

At present, anthropology generally keeps within the limits that are now considered to be those of scientific methods. It has compiled an enormous amount of factual material. Despite the different types of representations in which this material is summarized, it contains something that can have the most beneficial effect on the knowledge of human nature. And this material is constantly growing. It corresponds to the views of the present time to place great hopes in what can be gained from this side in elucidating the human riddle. And it is quite natural that many consider the point of view of anthropology to be as certain as they must regard the next one to be characterized here as doubtful.

This other point of view is that of theosophy. Whether this term is fortunate or unfortunate is not to be examined here. It is only a second point of view in relation to the anthropological view of man that is to be characterized. Theosophy assumes that man is above all a spiritual being. And it seeks to recognize him as such. It bears in mind that the human soul not only reflects and processes things and events perceived by the senses, but that it is capable of leading a life of its own, which receives its stimuli and content from a source that can be called spiritual. It relies on the fact that man can penetrate into a spiritual realm just as he penetrates into a sensory one. In the latter, man's knowledge expands as he focuses his senses on more and more things and processes, and forms his ideas on the basis of these. In the spiritual realm, however, knowledge advances differently. The observations are made in inner experience. A sensual object presents itself to man; a spiritual experience arises within, as if rising from the center of the human being itself. As long as a person cherishes the belief that such an ascent can only be an inner matter of the soul, so long must Theosophy be highly doubtful to him. For such a belief is not far from the other, which assumes that such experiences are only further inner workings of what has been observed by the senses. It is only possible to persist in such a belief as long as one has not yet obtained the conviction through compelling reasons that from a certain point on, the inner experiences, like the sensory facts, are determined by something that is an external world to the human personality. Once one has obtained this conviction, then one must recognize a spiritual external world just as one recognizes a physical one. And then it will be clear to everyone that man is connected with a spiritual world in relation to his spiritual nature, just as he is rooted in a physical world through his physical nature. It will then also be understood that materials for the knowledge of man can be taken from this spiritual world, just as anthropology takes materials for the physical man from physical observation. Then the possibility of research in the spiritual world will no longer be doubted. The spiritual researcher transforms his soul experience in such a way that the spiritual world enters into his soul experiences. He shapes certain soul experiences in such a way that this spiritual world reveals itself in them. (How this happens is described by the writer of this sketch in his book: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” Berlin, Philosophisch-theosophischer Verlag.) This kind of inner life can be called “clairvoyant consciousness.” But one must keep far from this concept all the nonsense that is done in the present with the word “clairvoyance”.

To arrive at inner experience in such a way that these or those facts of the spiritual world reveal themselves directly to the soul requires long, arduous, and self-denying soul-searching. But it would be a fatal mistake to believe that only those who experience spiritual realities directly through such soul-searching can reap the fruits of their soul-searching. The case is quite different. When spiritual facts have been revealed through the appropriate soul-searching exercises, they are, as it were, conquered for the human soul. When the spiritual researcher communicates them after having found them, they can be understood by every person who listens to them with a healthy sense of truth and unprejudiced logic. One should not believe that only a clairvoyant consciousness can have a well-founded conviction of the facts of the spiritual world. Every soul is tuned to recognize the truth of what the spiritual researcher has found. If the spiritual researcher wants to assert something that is untrue, this will always be ascertainable through the rejection of the healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic.

The direct experience of spiritual knowledge requires complicated soul paths and soul activities; possession of such knowledge is necessary for every soul that wants to have a full consciousness of its humanity. And without such consciousness, a human life is no longer possible from a certain point of existence.

Even if Theosophy is able to provide knowledge that satisfies the most important needs of the human soul, and that can be recognized by the natural sense of truth and by sound logic, there will always be a certain gap between it and anthropology. It will always be possible to show the results of Theosophy regarding the spiritual essence of man and then be able to point out how anthropology confirms everything that Theosophy says. But there will be a long way from one field of knowledge to the other.

But it is possible to fill the gap. In a certain respect, this is done here by sketching an anthroposophy. If anthropology can be compared to the observations of a wanderer who walks from place to place and from house to house in the plain in order to gain an idea of the nature of a region; if theosophy resembles the overview that can be gained from the summit of a hill over the the same district: then anthroposophy is to be compared with the view that one can have from the slope of the hill, where the individual is still in front of one's eyes, but the manifold is already beginning to merge into a whole.

Anthroposophy will observe the human being as he presents himself to physical observation. But it will cultivate observation in such a way that the physical fact is used to seek out the reference to a spiritual background. In this way, anthroposophy can lead from anthropology to theosophy.

It should be noted that only a very brief sketch of anthroposophy is intended here. A detailed presentation would require a great deal. The sketch is intended to take into account only the physical body of man, insofar as this is a revelation of the spiritual. And within these limits, anthroposophy is meant in the narrower sense. It must then be followed by a psychosophy, which considers the soul, and a pneumatosophy, which deals with the spirit. In this way, anthroposophy leads into theosophy itself.

The beginning of anthroposophy is to be made with a consideration of the human senses. Through the senses, the human being enters into a relationship with an external world. When speaking of the senses, two things should be considered. First, one should disregard how the human being enters into another world, namely the spiritual world, through a different path, as described above. And then one should initially disregard whether there is anything spiritual behind what the senses observe. When speaking of the senses, one should approach the spiritual in such a way that one waits to see to what extent the hint of the spiritual arises naturally from the observation of the senses. The spiritual must not be rejected nor presupposed; its manifestation must be awaited.

It is not the objects of sensory observation, but the senses themselves, as human organs, that are considered here. On the basis of what his senses convey to him, man forms ideas about an external world. This is how knowledge of this external world comes about. In relation to knowledge, one can speak of truth and error. Does error now arise in the realm of the senses, or only where judgment, memory, etc. are used to form ideas about the statements of the senses? We have a right to speak of illusions. If, through some irregularity in the ear or the eye, a sound or a light appears differently than it would with the normal formation of the organs concerned, then, for example, there is an illusion. Does this mean that Goethe was wrong when he said, “You may trust your senses implicitly; they will not let you see anything false if your intellect keeps you alert”? Goethe's statement proves to be immediately justified when we consider the following. An error that is caused by reason or memory is different from a sensory deception. The latter can be corrected by common sense. If, through an error of the eye, a tree standing before him appears to someone as a human being, he will only fall into error if he does not correct the eye defect and sees in the pretended human being an enemy against whom he defends himself. It is not so with an error of the intellect, for there it is this intellect itself that errs, and which therefore cannot at the same time correct its own mistakes. The illusions of the senses only become real errors through the mind. This distinction is not pedantry, but a necessity.

Many people are accustomed to listing five types of sensory perception when speaking of sensory perception: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching (or feeling). But we cannot stop here, because there are other ways in which a person enters into a relationship with the outside world that differ from those of hearing or seeing, for example. Even anthropological science currently speaks of senses other than those included in the above list. It is not necessary here to go into the list given by anthropology. It should only be noted that here lies one of the very gratifying points where science, based on mere sensory-physical facts, is pushed by its own observations to views that partly coincide with what the spiritual researcher must establish. Such points of contact will arise more and more in the course of time; and if goodwill prevails on both sides, a time will soon come when natural science and spiritual research will be mutually accepted.

In anthroposophical terms, everything that causes a person to recognize the existence of an object, being or process in such a way that it is justified to place this existence in the physical world can be called a human sense that leads man to recognize the existence of an object, being or process in such a way that he is justified in placing this existence in the physical world.

Seen in this light, the most indeterminate and general sense appears to be that which can be called the sense of life. Man only really notices the existence of this sense when something is perceived through it that breaks through the order in the body. Man feels weariness and fatigue in himself. He does not hear the fatigue, the weariness; he does not smell it; but he perceives it in the same sense as he perceives a smell, a sound. This kind of perception, which relates to one's own corporeality, is ascribed to the sense of life. It is basically always present in an alert person, even if it only becomes quite noticeable when there is a disturbance. Through it, the person perceives themselves as a corporeal self filling the space.

This sense is different from the one by which a person perceives a movement they have performed, for example. You move a leg, and you perceive this movement. The sense by which this happens is called the sense of self-motion. The difference between this sense and the first arises when you consider that through the sense of life you only perceive something that is present in the inner body without you doing anything about it. The sense of one's own movement perceives such things that require activity or mobility.

The third sense arises when one notices how the human being is able to maintain a certain position in relation to above and below, right and left, etc. It can be called the sense of equilibrium or the sense of static. Its peculiarity arises from the fact that one must have a perception of one's position if one is to maintain oneself in it as a conscious being. If the sense of equilibrium does not function, then dizziness will overtake the person; he will fall over. An unconscious object is maintained in its position without being aware of it. Such an object cannot be affected by dizziness. When speaking of this sense, anthropology points to a small organ in the human ear. There are three semicircular canals in the so-called labyrinth of the ear. If these are injured, dizziness occurs.

If you survey the peculiarities of the three senses listed, you will find that humans perceive something through each of them that relates to their own physical existence. Through the sense of life, he acquires general sensations about his corporeality; through the sense of self-movement, he perceives changes in this corporeality of his; through the sense of equilibrium, he perceives his relationship to the spatial outside world. However, he receives this perception in such a way that it reveals itself to him as a state of his own corporeality, as his own sensation of position. — Through these three senses, the human being acquires the sensation of his own corporeality as a whole, which is the basis for his self-awareness as a physical being. One can say that through the senses of life, of self-movement and of balance, the soul opens its gates to one's own corporeality and senses this as the physical external world that is closest to it.

With the following senses, the human being encounters the external world that does not belong to him in this way. The first sense to be considered here is that through which man comes into closest contact with what is called matter. Only gaseous or airy bodies allow close contact with the material. And this is conveyed through the sense of smell. Without a substance being divided into the finest particles and thus spreading like air, it cannot be perceived by the sense of smell.

The next stage of sensory perception is that by which not only the substance as such, but also the effects (deeds) of the substance are perceived. This happens through the sense of taste. This sense can only perceive a watery body, or one that is dissolved in the fluid of the mouth in order to be tasted. Through the sense of taste, man penetrates one degree deeper into the external materiality than through the sense of smell. With the latter, it is the substance itself that approaches the person and manifests itself in its own way; with the sense of taste, what is felt is the effect of the substance on the person. This difference can best be felt by considering how, in the sense of smell, the gaseous nature of the substance must be ready to approach the person so that he can perceive it as it is; in the sense of taste, the person, through his own liquid, dissolves the substance, thus making a change with it, in order to penetrate into those peculiarities of that substance which it does not reveal to him by itself. The sense of smell is suited to perceive the outer side of material things; the sense of taste penetrates more into the inner side of material things. And this inner aspect of material things man must first induce to reveal itself by changing the outer aspect.

Man penetrates even deeper into the inner aspect of the physical external world through the next sense. It is sight. Whether man sees a body as red or blue reveals more about the inner aspect of this body than is contained in the effect conveyed by the sense of taste. It depends on the nature of a body whether it behaves towards the colorless sunlight in such a way that it appears red or blue under its influence. Color manifests itself as the surface of a body. But one can say how the body reveals itself on its surface; this is an appearance of its inner essence through the medium of light.

The sense of warmth penetrates even deeper, as it were, below the surface of the bodies. If you feel a piece of ice or a warm object, you are aware that cold or warmth is something that does not just appear on the surface like color, but that permeates the body completely. You will notice how the sequence of senses characterized here is such that with each successive one, the human being delves deeper into the interior of the bodies of the external world.

A further advance in this immersion is given with the sense of hearing. It leads to the interior of the bodies to a far greater degree than the sense of warmth. Sound causes the interior of the bodies to tremble. It is more than a mere image when one speaks of the soul of a body being revealed through sound. Through the warmth that a body carries within itself, one experiences something of its difference from its surroundings; through sound, the intrinsic nature, the individuality of the body emerges and communicates itself to perception.

If, as is appropriate, one speaks of meaning where knowledge comes about without the participation of understanding, memory, etc., then one must recognize other senses than those listed. If we apply this distinction, it is easy to see that in everyday life the word “sense” is often used in a non-literal way. For example, when we speak of a sense of imitation, a sense of concealment, etc. In what appears as imitation, concealment, etc., the intellect and judgment are already involved. Here we are not dealing with mere sensory activity.

But the situation is quite different when we perceive in language what is revealed by the sound. It is certainly self-evident that a complicated act of judgment is involved in the perception of something spoken, that comprehensive soul processes come into play that cannot be described by the word “sense”. But there is also something simple and direct in this area that represents a sensation before all judgment, just as a color or a degree of warmth is. A sound is not felt only in terms of its pitch, but something much more inward is grasped with it than the tone itself. If we say that the soul of a body lives in the tone, we may also say that in the sound this soul-life reveals itself in such a way that it is released and freed from the physical, and enters into manifestation with a certain independence. Because the sensation of sound precedes judgment, the child learns to sense the sound-meanings of words before it can use judgment. It is through speech that the child learns to judge. It is entirely justified to speak of a special sense of sound or sense of language. The reason that recognizing this sense is difficult is because the most diverse exercise of judgment usually occurs in addition to the direct sensation of what is revealed in the sound. But a careful examination of oneself shows that all hearing of what is given in sounds is based on an equally direct, judgment-free relationship to the being from which the sound emanates, as is the case when a color impression is perceived. It is easier to grasp this fact if we visualize how a sound of pain allows us to directly experience the pain of a being, without any kind of reflection or the like interfering with our perception. It is important to consider that the audible sound is not the only thing through which such inwardness is revealed to a person, as is the case with the sound of speech. Gesture, facial expression, and physiognomy ultimately lead to something simple and direct, which must be counted as much a part of the meaning of speech as the content of the audible sound.

To an even greater degree, the sensory character is hidden in the next sense to be characterized. When we understand a person who communicates through speech, gestures, etc., it is true that judgment, memory, etc. play a predominant role in this understanding. But here too, right self-contemplation leads us to recognize that there is a direct grasping and understanding that can precede all thinking and judging. The best way to develop a feeling for this fact is to realize how one can understand something even before one has developed the ability to judge it. There is, in fact, a very direct perception of that which reveals itself in the concept, so that one must speak of a sense of concept. What a person can experience as a concept in his own soul, he can also receive as a revelation from another being. Through the perception of the concept, one delves even deeper into the inner being of another person than through the perception of sounds. It is not possible to delve even further into another person than to the sensation of what lives in him as a concept. The sense of concept appears as that which penetrates into the innermost being of an external being. With the concept that lives in another person, the human being perceives what lives in him or her in a soul-like way. The sensory character of what is usually called the sense of touch does not appear in the same way as with the ten senses mentioned. This sense conveys external pressure, resistance, hardness, softness. One must visualize the essence of what is meant by “pressure”. The process is by no means a simple one. In reality, we do not perceive the pressing body directly, but rather the fact that it causes us to recoil at this or that point on the skin, or that we have to make a greater or lesser effort to make an impression on the body. There is a remarkable difference between this perception and that of, for example, a degree of warmth that is revealed on a body. Even if it is absolutely true that a cold bath will appear in a different state of warmth to a person who is hot from exercise than to a person who is freezing, that is, that in the perception of warmth, the subjective state is also perceived, it remains true that essentially the nature of the external object is revealed in the warmth. This results in a direct relationship between the feeling person and the object. It is not the same as saying to oneself that one must exert oneself more or less to make an impression on a body or to overcome the resistance it offers through its hardness or softness. What one says to oneself is the reproduction of an experience that one has within oneself in the body. And even if the fact is hidden, it is still true that in such a perception the judgment plays along, as it were secretly: “I find strong resistance, therefore the body is hard.” Just as it is true that, for example, in the sense of language, perception can be a completely direct one without any judgment, it is also true that, in the sense of touch, there is always an underlying judgment, however hidden. What is directly sensed by the sense of touch can always be found within the realms of the first three senses listed here. A body that presses on me, for example, causes a shift in the position of my body, which is sensed by the sense of life, or the sense of self-movement, or the sense of balance.

It is necessary to clearly define the differences between the individual sensory areas. With each sense, the relationship that a person has with an external object is different than with the other senses. Through the sense of life, the sense of self-movement, and the sense of balance, a person is immersed in his or her own physicality and perceives him or herself as a being of the external world. Through the sense of smell, the sense of taste, and the sense of sight, the physical reveals itself insofar as it manifests itself outwardly. Through the sense of warmth, it reveals inwardness, but still in an external way. With the help of the sense of hearing, the sense of speech, the sense of thought, the human being perceives an alien inwardness that is external to him. If one pays attention to these differences between the sensory areas, then one will not be tempted to speak too much in general terms about what a sense, sensory perception, etc. is. Rather, one will pay attention to the particular relationship through which the human being enters into the external world through each sense. It does not say much to characterize sensory perception, for example, as an impression that is directly caused by a stimulus of the sensory nerve in the soul. Through such definitions, it is all too easy to lose the characteristic of each individual sense in blurred generalizations. But it is important to note that the impression we experience from the warmth of a body is quite different in nature from that caused by a light impression. If we do not take this into account, we are easily led, for example, to place far too much value on judgments such as: “Man perceives the external world through the senses and forms ideas and concepts on the basis of sensory perceptions.” Here sense perception is simply set against conceptual thought. Such a judgment obscures the necessary free view of the fact that, for example, the sensation of smell is very far removed from the conceptual experience, but that the sense of hearing as a sense perception already approximates to what is present within the soul as such an experience.

Another aspect now becomes part of the sensory life of the human being. Here too we can distinguish a number of areas. First of all, there is the process by which the inner life of the body is sustained from the outside: breathing. In this process, the life of the body touches the outer world; it confronts the outer world, as it were, in a form in which it cannot continue to exist, in order to receive from it the strength to continue. These words express approximately what is revealed to man in the breathing process, without going into the results of sensory science. The latter belong to anthropology. But what is characterized here is experienced by man directly in life, in his desire for air, in the observation of the inhibition of life when there is a lack of air, etc. A further process in this area is that which can be described as warming. For the maintenance of bodily life, man depends on the development of a quite definite degree of warmth within his body, which does not depend on the processes that determine the warmth of his surroundings, but on those that take place within him, and which maintain the intrinsic warmth within definite limits, however the external warmth may be constituted. A third process of this kind is nutrition. Through it, the life of the body enters into a relationship with the external world in such a way that the substances consumed by it are replaced. A fourth process must be added to nutrition if it is to take place. In the mouth, the food consumed must interact with the saliva secreted by the body; similarly, such a process takes place during the further digestive process. This can be described as the fourth process in this area: secretion. Physical self-observation now shows that this process is followed by another. In the secretion that aids digestion, what is secreted is merely able to transform the food in such a way that it can be absorbed into the body. But man must also secrete that which can enter into this bodily life. He must transform the nutrients in such a way that they can serve to build up his body. This is based on a process that goes beyond what is given in the secretion just characterized. This process shall be called the process of preservation. Another process arises when we turn our attention to human growth. This goes beyond mere maintenance. In addition to the maintenance process, which would leave the body as it is at a particular point in time, there is another process that can be described as a growth process. The growth process and the maintenance process reach their conclusion when the finished body presents itself to the human being in a very specific form. This shaping of the human being from the inside out into a very specific form is called production. Reproduction then presents itself as a repetition of this production. That which belongs to one's own body is brought forth in such a way that it remains united with the human being; in reproduction, the brought forth comes out. Since here, for the time being, we are only speaking of the human being as a self-contained physical individuality, the process of reproduction is not taken into account.

The processes that are referred to here as aspiration, warming, nutrition, secretion, maintenance process, growth process and production are now followed by inner experiences for humans in a similar way to how inner experiences follow the processes of sensory perception in the ego. Emotional experiences follow breathing, warming and nourishment. These experiences are less noticed in their middle states, but they immediately stand out when this state is disturbed in one direction or the other. If breathing cannot take place in the appropriate way, anxiety and the like occur. A disturbance of the warmth state manifests itself in the feeling of frost or heating. Disturbance of nutrition manifests itself in hunger and thirst. It can be said that breathing, warmth and nutrition are linked to inner experiences, which reveal themselves as a kind of well-being, comfort, etc. These experiences are always there; they underlie what manifests itself as malaise, discomfort, hunger, etc. when there is a disturbance. Real introspection now shows that such emotional experiences are also related to secretion, the process of preservation, the process of growth and the process of creation. Think of how states of fear and anxiety manifest themselves in excessive perspiration; and you will be able to admit that secretion of this kind, within certain limits, is connected with a feeling that manifests itself in a general sense of comfort, just as one can see that all secretion is accompanied by an emotional state that escapes the attention of consciousness as long as it is normal. And further, self-reflection shows that such emotional experiences are also connected with the processes of preservation, growth and production. One can feel, for example, that the feeling of strength of youth is the expression of what inner experiences follow growth.

These inner emotional experiences are now something that stands in a similar way in the human being to the processes of breathing, warming, growing, etc., as the inner experiences that follow sensory perceptions stand in the “I” to the processes of these perceptions. It is therefore possible to speak of the fact that, for example, breathing is connected with an experience in the human being in a similar way to how hearing is connected with the experience that is designated as sound. The only difference is that the degree of clarity with which external sense perceptions are inwardly relived is much greater than that which is accorded to the inner experiences characterized here. Hidden beneath or within the 'ego-person' is another person who is built up out of inner experiences, just as the ego-person is built up out of the results of external sense perceptions. But this human being who lies beneath the 'I-human' is only really noticed in life when he announces himself to the 'I-human' in the disturbances of his experiences. But just as little as one may throw together the process of sensory perception with the process in the ego that is linked to it, so little may one do so, for example, in relation to the breathing process and the inner experiences (of an emotional nature) that combine with this process. It would be easy to be tempted to completely misunderstand the nature of these inner experiences and to say that there is no essential difference between them and those that develop under the influence of sense perceptions. It must be admitted that the difference between the two types of inner experiences, for example, between the sense of life and the inner emotional experience during the breathing or warming process, is not particularly clear. But it can easily be determined by more exact observation, if one bears the following in mind. It belongs to a sense experience that a judgment can only be attached to it through the “I”. Everything that a person accomplishes under the influence of a judgment must, if it relates to sense perceptions, be such that the judgment is made within the “I”. For example, one perceives a flower and passes judgment on it: this flower is beautiful. What is now evoked by the processes of breathing, warming, nourishment, etc., as inner experiences, points, without the intervention of the “I”, to something similar to judgment. In the experience of hunger there is an immediate indication of something corresponding to hunger and connected with it in the same way that, after making a judgment in response to a sense perception, the human being connects with that sense perception. Just as the activity of the 'I' connects with the sense perception when making a judgment, so with hunger something external is connected without the 'I' establishing this connection. This union may therefore be called an instinctive manifestation. And this applies to all inner experiences that are connected with breathing, nourishment and growth processes. We must therefore distinguish between the instinctive inner experiences of breathing comfort and warmth and well-being, and the corresponding perceptions of the meaning of life. The wave of instinct must, as it were, first beat against the 'I-human being' in order to reach the realm of the meaning of life. The structure of the inner experiences that take place through the processes described behind the 'I-human being' are now to be ascribed to the 'astral human being'. Again, the name 'astral human being' should initially be associated with nothing other than what is described here. Just as the “I-person” draws his experiences from the “sense world” through the sense organs, so the “astral person” draws his from the world that is given to him through the processes of breathing, growing, etc. For the time being, let this world be called the “world of life”.

In order for a “life world” to exist, the organs of life must be built out of a world that lies beyond all life in a similar way to the forces for building the sense organs lying beyond the world of sense perceptions. This world reveals itself again in its effects, in the structure of the organs of life. The individual areas of the life processes: breathing, warming, nourishment, etc., can be interpreted as references to just as many areas of this world. One can now see that the areas of the life processes are less strictly separated from each other than the areas of sensory perception. The sense of taste, for example, is strictly separated from the sense of sight, whereas the areas of life processes are closer; they merge more. Breathing leads to warming, which in turn leads to nutrition. - Anthropology therefore shows essentially separate sensory organs for sensory perception; for the life processes, it shows organs that flow into one another. Thus the lungs, the most exquisite respiratory organ, are connected with the organs of blood circulation, which serve for warming; these in turn flow together with the digestive organs, which correspond to nutrition, etc. — This is an indication that the corresponding areas of the world in which their constructive forces lie also relate to each other in a different way than the forces for building the sense organs. The latter must, as it were, be more mobile in relation to one another than the organs of sense. The experiences of the sense of taste, for example, can only meet with those of the sense of hearing in the common 'I' to which they belong. The feeling of growth, on the other hand, meets with itself through that which is revealed in the breathing process. The feeling of the power of growth is revealed in the ease of breathing, in warming, etc., through increased inner life. Each feeling-like experience of this kind can coincide with another of the same kind. The areas of sensory perception could be depicted as a kind of circumference, with the individual areas resting on it while the “I” moves across them. The life processes can be depicted in a different way. They can all be imagined as being mobile and capable of moving across each other.

Now, however, there are also clear relationships between the sense perceptions and the life processes. Take the breathing process and relate it to the auditory perception. In both cases, the corresponding bodily organ is directed towards the outside world. This is an indication that in the outer world that which has a relationship to both the one and the other organ reveals itself. It is only that, for instance, two things reveal themselves in the air; in relation to one, the respiratory organ is formed and places it at the service of the body; in relation to the other, the structure of the organ of hearing is related. It may be recognized that the forces that shape the organ of hearing must, so to speak, be more original than those that form the respiratory organ. For in the developed human body, everything is interdependent. A human organ of hearing can only unfold from the inside out if the respiratory system is predisposed in just the way it is. From out of the organism, the respiratory system grows towards the outer world, as does the organ of hearing. Now the respiratory organ serves only the inner life of the body; the organ of hearing, however, must be adapted to the outer world - to the realm of sound. In the outgrowth of the respiratory organ from the body, therefore, only the nature of the body itself needs to be taken into account; the organ of hearing must outgrow itself in such a way that it is appropriate for the outer world of sound. No other organ needs to lie in front of the respiratory organ; it grows in accordance with the inner formative forces. The organ of hearing, however, must grow towards an already existing structure. Its adaptation to the outer world must precede its emergence from the inner life of the body. This shows that the forces that form the organ of hearing as a sensory tool belong to a world that is the more original or higher than the other, in which lie the forces that reveal themselves as such, which form both the organ of hearing and the organ of respiration from the body. A similar thing can be shown for other sensory perceptions and life processes. One's attention is drawn to the sense of taste. The secretions can be related to it in a similar way to the respiratory process to the sense of hearing. The saliva of the mouth contains what the food dissolves and thus makes it possible to taste. A similar reflection to the one just made can show that the forces from which the secretory organs are formed are the less original ones compared to those through which the sense of taste arises.

In the light of such considerations, one can therefore assume a higher supersensible entity in man, whose powers reveal themselves in the structure of the human sense organs. Likewise, there is another whose effects reveal themselves in the structure of the human organs of life. The latter world is felt by the 'astral man' as his instinctive inner experiences; the former manifests itself to the 'I-man' as a sensory reality (sensual world). However, neither the first world through the senses nor the second can come directly to manifestation in the astral man.

It has been said that the supersensible world reveals itself in the “I”, as it were shrunk to a point, in its own nature; in the same sense, it can be recognized that the second of the worlds mentioned shows itself in the emotional experiences of the “astral man”, which can be described as life instincts. In these experiences something is expressed with which the other instinctive experiences of the “astral man” merge into one and are an image of a supersensible world in the sense that the “I-man” is an image of such a world.

The “I-person” and the “astral person” represent two human parts that express themselves in inner processes. In order to make the “I-person” possible, the forces of a supersensible world build up the sense organs. In so far as the human body is the carrier of the sense organs, it shows itself to be built out of a supersensible world. Let us now call this carrier of the sense organs the physical human body. The 'I-human' permeates it in order to live with its help in the sense world. We must therefore see in the physical human body an entity that is built out of forces that are related in their nature to the 'I' itself. Within the sense world, the physical human body can only reveal itself in its sensory manifestation. According to its inner reality, it is a being of a supersensible nature. — In order to make the “astral human being” possible, another world, which is added to the characterized supersensible world as a “life world”, builds the organs of life. The forces of this world have proved to be akin to those of the experiences that the “astral human being” has in the instincts of life. What builds up the physical human being reveals itself in the sense world in the sense described above. The forces that build the organs of life can only reveal themselves in the physical world in the processes of life. This is because they generate the organs of life, and only through such organs can a life process manifest itself. The organs of life themselves are not organs of perception. Therefore, not only the forces that build up the organs of life remain imperceptible to the senses, but the manifestation of these forces in the human being cannot become manifest to the senses either, but can only be an intuitive, instinctive experience. This revelation will now be called the 'etheric human body'. (The word 'etheric' should be understood to mean only what is meant here, and in no way what bears the name 'ether' in physics.) Just as the physical human body relates to the 'I-human', so the 'etheric human body' relates to the 'astral human'. The physical body is, in its essence, such that it provides the I with sense experiences; the “etheric body” can only be experienced directly by the “astral human being” in terms of feeling. The relationship between the I and the physical human body is the same as that between the “astral human being” and the “etheric human body”. Thus the organs of life presuppose forces to which they adapt themselves, in that they shape sense organs, such as the organ of hearing, out of the body in the sense of experiences to which they themselves do not serve; and the sense organs in turn presuppose the organs of life in that they are maintained by their processes.

Thus we can distinguish: 1. A supersensible world in which lie the forces for building up the sense organs. 2. A supersensible world in which lie the forces for building up the organs of life. The former presupposes the latter; therefore the former can be called the higher spiritual world and the latter the lower spiritual world. 3. A world in which the astral human being is related to the life processes in such a way that these reveal themselves in him as life instincts. This presupposes the life processes, and thus the second world. It may be called the astral world. 4. A world in which sense experiences reveal themselves to the human being through the sense organs. This, however, is the physical-sensual world.

The physical human body is formed from the higher spiritual world, in so far as it is the carrier of the sense organs. The etheric human body is formed from the lower spiritual world, in so far as it builds up the life organs. In the astral world, the astral human being enters into a relationship with the processes of life, in so far as these reveal themselves in the life instincts. In the physical world, the human ego enters into a relationship with the sense experiences (sound, tone, warmth, light, etc.) that present themselves as the external world, insofar as these reveal themselves as the sense world.

If we now assume, as we have done above, that the formative forces for the organs of life and the predispositions for the sense organs lie in the lower spiritual world, then a distinction arises for the formative forces of the organs of life prevailing in this world between those that presuppose an internalized substance and those that shape their organs for the absorption of the substance from outside. It is easy to see that the latter are a prerequisite for the former. For if matter itself did not possess the potential to become internalized, it could not become active within itself. Thus, forces must prevail in matter that enable it to evoke counter-effects from what is external to it. The above description has shown that matter can produce such counter-effects in itself. The reversed senses of life, of self-movement and of equilibrium carry within them the hidden possibility of acting in such a way that, in order to produce internal formations, they are active as substance itself, without using the internal formative principles as such. They act, after all, not only within, but also outside their measure. If we now imagine these three inverted sensory activities as being so effective that they do not encounter any internally formed organ, but remain in the character of their effectiveness, then they reach a boundary where they must return into themselves. At this boundary, therefore, the material would throw itself back into itself; it would be inhibited in itself. At this boundary, what could be called materiality in materiality would be given. And this points to the possibility of how the organs that need inner substance arise out of a world in which the material-outer becomes material-inner. In this world, the first rudiments would have to lie both for those organs of the life process that are supplied by internalized substance and for those that need external substance. And the forces that bring the external substance to the interior should already have the potential for this internalization. Just as the forces in the organs of life themselves point to a world of other forces, from which the organs of life are first formed, so the internal flow of matter in the organs of life points to potentialities from an even higher world, from which they are formed. We are led to point to an outer world which, through the contrast between the sense of life, the sense of self-movement and the sense of equilibrium, can spark an inner world within itself. This world, however, can be called the “higher spiritual world”. What would be sought in it? Not forces that shape organs of life in the first place, but those that implant in their structures the potential to become organs of life. These forces, however, are to be thought of as the opposites of the sense of equilibrium, the sense of self-movement and the sense of life. If these forces are stopped before they reach the limit of their effectiveness, through inner formative processes in organs that are already being formed, then they shape the sense organs of hearing, of sound and of concept out of such organ predispositions. What happens when they reach the limit of that activity which lies in their own character? If the sense of life that is turned inwards did not encounter something in the organ of concepts that it only has to reshape, then it would obviously lead the conceptual experience back into itself. And in its reflection, it would immediately encounter itself. It would be the same as in a sensory experience, but it would have an independent existence without an underlying sensory organ. The same could be said for the sense of balance and equilibrium when reversed. In the higher spiritual world, we would thus find sense experiences that are at rest in themselves and which prove to be related to those sense experiences to which the human being in the physical world is closest with his ego, the experiences of the sense of concept, sound and hearing. But those experiences are as if there were not, as it were, a human ego standing before them and taking them in, but as if there were a being behind them that creates them in its own activity.

On the basis of the above considerations, the following can be said about the principles of education for humans:

It is assumed:

1. A higher spiritual world; in this lie forces that form structures which, in independent substance, represent living sensory experiences. And imprinted in these structures are the predispositions for the organs of life.

2. A lower spiritual world; in this lie the formative powers of the organs of life. The forces active in the first world form such structures that nourish themselves from the already internalized substance. The forces of this world themselves attach to them those that first internalize external matter. This results in a difference between the organs of life in terms of how they are produced and how they are nourished. The formations formed out of the first world are transformed into sense organs that nourish themselves from internalized matter. The formative forces of this world themselves add to these sense organs those that are in an interdependent relationship with external matter.

3. The astral world; in this lie the formative forces of the sense organs. But the life organs must also be transformed out of this world in such a way that they can receive the sense organs.

4. The physical world; in this world lie the sensory experiences of the human being.

It must now be recognized that these four worlds interact, that the forces of each higher world persist in the lower ones. The fact that the organs mentioned are derived from the forces of higher worlds can only mean that these organs are subject to the influences of the higher worlds, even if they occur in the lower worlds. From the physical world the forces of the higher worlds do not act on the sense organs; from the astral world the forces of the two spiritual worlds do not act on the life organs; and from the lower spiritual world the forces of the higher ones do not act on the endowments of the life organs characterized above. It follows that the forces of the higher worlds must show themselves active in a different way from the physical world than if they were to act directly from their own world. The forces of the higher spiritual world can only act as formative forces on the human being, who is endowed with sense organs, life organs and organ systems. They can determine the shape and position of the organs. Thus, the shape and position of the organs of the human body result from the activity of the higher spiritual world in the physical one. The I experiences concepts in conceptual perception; the sense of life, in its inverted form, produces the living concepts of the higher spiritual world. In the physical world, they can only function as formative forces. It is certainly clear that man owes his ability to perceive concepts to his upright form. No other creature on earth has the ability to perceive concepts, nor has any other the same upright form. (A little thought will show that in the case of animals that appear to have an upright form, this is due to something other than inner forces). In this way, one can see from bottom to top that which is connected to conceptual perception when the inverted sense of life is not involved. From this, one can conclude that there is a direction from top to bottom for the inverted sense of life. It would be even more correct to say that there is a direction almost from top to bottom. For one should see something in the direction of growth from bottom to top that is opposed to the reversed sense of touch. Insofar as the ego represents a contrast to the sense of touch, in the sense of the above explanations, one can regard the vertical direction of growth of the body upwards as an ego-bearer, like a continuous overcoming of the weight downwards, which of course represents a reversal of the sense of touch. From all this, the contrast between 'up-down' and 'down-up' in the human body can be interpreted as if a current from bottom to top takes place in such a way that the overcoming of the reversed sense of life from top to bottom is given in it. Now, the effect of the higher spiritual world on the physical human body must be seen in this reversed sense of life. Thus we can say that the human body, in so far as it is the carrier of the I, strives upwards; the physical human body, in so far as it shows in its form the effect of the higher spiritual world, from above downwards. In so far as the human being physically expresses the image of a being belonging to the higher spiritual world, one can see it as the meeting of the ego body with the physical body, arising from the interpenetration of two directions of force. In his ego experience, the human being belongs to the physical outer world, but at the same time he represents that which gives an image of the experience reflected back into itself. This is an image of what has been characterized as the self-contained sensory experiences of the higher spiritual world. In the body, insofar as it is the carrier of the ego, we can thus see an image of matter internalizing itself. Another contrast comes to light in 'backwards-forwards'; 'forwards-backwards'. The sense organs, together with the nerves belonging to them, now essentially represent organs that reveal their growth from front to back; if one imagines them, as is certainly justified, growing in such a way that their formative forces are opposed to the original direction of growth, coming from the lower spiritual world, then one may look for this latter direction in the direction from back to front. And then we shall be able to say that in the conclusion from behind in relation to the human form there is something analogous to that in the conclusion from below upwards in relation to the higher spiritual world. In the outer form, the forces of the lower spiritual world that cannot act on the human being from the physical world then worked from the front to the back on the organs of life; but from the back to the front, the forces of the lower spiritual world worked into the physical human world. They express what, in the sense of the above considerations, may be called the astral human being. Insofar as the astral human being shows itself in its bodily form, it strives from behind to the front just as the physical human body strives upwards. The third antithesis would be “right-left”; “left-right”. The symmetry of the human form in relation to this direction can be seen as an indication that the forces are balanced there. This can be seen when one observes the interaction in these directions of the human physical form, insofar as the physical organs have already been formed from the lower spiritual world, with the formative forces of the sense organs. In the left half of the body of the person facing forward, one would have to imagine the formative forces of the astral world for the sense organs, insofar as these forces no longer have a direct effect in the physical world, as from the left half of the body to the right; those forces of the astral world that have such an effect on the body that their effect is expressed in the body would then have to work to the left. Since these forces must act on organs that already come from the lower spiritual world, they will show an inward effect, as the forces of the higher and lower spiritual worlds show an outward effect in their formation. (What has been said here can be found substantiated in anthropology in the lines of the nerve tracts that cross in the organism.) This points to a permeation of the astral world with the etheric body of the human being, insofar as this is expressed in the physical form. It can be said:

1. The formation of the physical human body is conditioned by the direction from above to below from the higher spiritual world.

2. The shape of the human body, insofar as it is the carrier of the astral human being, points in the direction from back to front.

3. The shape of the human body, insofar as it is the carrier of the life processes, points both to the direction “right-left” and “left-right”.

4. The result of these formations would then be the actual physical human form. In order for this to come about, the formative forces indicated must permeate each other. Such interpenetration can only be conceived if the human being places himself in the physical world in such a way that the forces of the physical outer world in the direction of “right-left” and “left-right” are grasped by the forces of the astral world in such a way that the possibility remains open in their formation to then shape themselves further in the direction from back to front, and according to this determination, that from top to bottom remains open. For only if one imagines a direction that in principle goes from right to left and from left to right, acting on all sides, and then changes as in the direction towards the front, and is then transformed again upwards, can one imagine how the above comes about. But in order that this may result in the human form, for these forces, opposing forces must be thought of, proceeding from the physical world itself. These are then those forces which show themselves to be no longer acting from the physical world, but as forces coming from the higher worlds, as characterized above. But the latter alone may be sought in the physical human being. Man enters into relation with the others only as such a disposition. If we seek in the physical world the clue to man's relation to higher worlds, we must look not to the life processes and their connection with the organs, nor to the life of the sense organs, nor to the brain, but solely to the 'how', the form of the bodily shape and the organs. This 'how' shows that the clues to the spiritual worlds can still be perceived in the physical human being. (The difference between man and animal in relation to the higher worlds can therefore be seen from an observation of the bodily form, insofar as the animal is arranged in a different way in the spatial directions; but this different arrangement reveals that the higher worlds have a different effect on the animal and on man).

The anthroposophical considerations can be made fruitful if one applies the given considerations to the details of the human body shape. It will then everywhere result in full harmony with the anthropological observations. The indication of how in the organ of hearing, organ of sight, etc. conversions of organ systems that are in the process of developing or an inverted sense of smell in the organ of taste, can lead to ideas that must be found again in the organ forms. The asymmetrical organs are understood if we conceive of them in such a way that their forms have been formed by the fact that the “left-right” and “right-left” forces of the astral world could be excluded. If one recognizes, as has been done above, a reversal of the sense organs, a turning inwards of the same, then one will also be able to admit that the transformation can also be conditioned by other principles. Take the organ of hearing. The same has been related to the sense of balance. One can imagine that the activity that manifests itself in the sense of balance, an inward-facing organ system that has not yet differentiated into the organ of hearing, diverts it from its original direction of formation. The sense of sound would then come about if another activity were directed towards the corresponding organ system. This could be related to the experiences of the sense of self-movement. This would throw light on the fact that the organ of hearing finds expression in an organ turned towards the outer material, while the organ of speech cannot be perceived externally. The experience of the sense of self-movement corresponds to the inside of the body, while the experience of the sense of balance is expressed in relation to the outer spatial directions. One could therefore also call the speech organ a hearing organ held back inside the body. For the experience of the self, which does not correspond to any sensory experience, not a special organ, but only the upward striving of other organ systems, would come into consideration. Thus, in the speech organ and the organ of concepts, we can see structures whose physical form is determined by their tendency towards the experience of self. In what the body, as the carrier of the 'I', participates in from within, we can recognize the inversion in the formative forces, and say that when the body, as the carrier of the 'I', reshapes an organ, the nature of the formations of the higher spiritual world must be recognizable in its image. One such organ is the speech organ (the larynx). If the series of organs comprising the ear, sense of sound and sense of concept can be called a progressive bodily internalization of the sense potential, then the sense of sound can be recognized as reversed in the speech organ. Here the sound does not become a sense experience that strives inward through an organ toward the I, but is a sense content that is self-contained and creative, a truly reversed sense experience. The formation of the larynx corresponds exactly to these conditions. One can then also look for an organ that corresponds to an ability in man that stands between speaking and I, as grasping stands between hearing and I. Through this, something would have to arise from within man that is not as poor in content as the I-experience and does not yet flow directly into the outer world in its revelations. This would be the organ in the human brain that corresponds to the imagination. We will gradually learn to distinguish between the organ of concept and the organ of imagination in the brain.

Since the formative forces of the three higher worlds are to some extent still present in the form of the physical human body, it must also be recognized that the formative forces of the two higher spiritual worlds can act on the astral body directly from the astral world; and finally, that the life organs, as they are from the lower spiritual world, are directly influenced by the higher spiritual world. Taking into account such forces, the shape and position of the heart, the respiratory and circulatory organs, the muscular and skeletal systems, etc. can arise.

In the human form within the physical world, it is revealed that its development has not merely followed an adaptation to circumstances that are alien to the inner nature of the human being, but that this form ultimately expresses in image what the character of the “I” is. The human being's developmental disposition must be conceived in such a way that, in its formation, points of contact are given to the forces of the higher worlds. In the sense-perceptible world, only the content of sensations is given for perception, and the I, when it perceives itself, confronts these as pictorial sensations. Pictorial sensation, however, belongs to the astral world. In the I's experience of itself, the pictorial sensation thus stands, as it were, free in space. It has been shown that the sense of taste can be seen as an inverted sense of smell. If we do not think that the impact of the substance in the sense of smell is what causes the sensation, but rather that the experience of smell itself, as a self-experience in the I, becomes a component of the latter, then we can see in a desire or in a movement impulse of the astral I the response of this I to something that originates from the substance and is incorporated into the I without physical mediation. Behind the experience of smell, in addition to the experience of images, are the astral counter-effects against the desires and impulses of the ego. In the case of sound, it is possible to clearly distinguish between what is detached from the external object and what is perceived about this object through senses other than hearing. And what is detached is the experience of the self by the ego. We can certainly say that when an object is heard, only the sound-producing object belongs to a world in which the ego is not present, in which it cannot identify with the sensory experience. In the sense of one's own movement, the position and change in the shape of one's own organism is perceived. In this case, it seems obvious that, in addition to the self-experience of the ego, only an astral counter-effect to a movement impulse needs to be assumed. If there are only sense experiences in the physical world, then we can only speak of sense experiences in this world. But since a physical body must have sense organs in order to have sense experiences, there is nothing in this physical world for a human being but sense experiences and the perception of the self as an astral image experience. The ego has no other possibility than to experience objects of the external world, and to find the sense experiences combined in the most diverse ways. What happens is nothing but a free-floating in space of sense experiences. But let us assume that the human form as such is not meaningless, but that it depends on the direction and position of one organ in relation to another. And if we look at the physical world from this point of view, it is essential that the organ of taste is an upturned organ of smell. For if we now think of the experience of smell, as it is, as an image-sensation, without denying the substance itself, as space-filling, the ability to present this experience as an image-sensation, just as the ego-perception is in itself a freely floating image-sensation in space , then it must be recognized that something depends on whether the surface of an object is turned towards an object in such a way that, in order to receive the image sensation emanating from it, one sensory organ or the other must be turned towards it. For the human being in the physical world, however, it will only follow that, depending on the use of the organ, it perceives smell one time and taste the next. But if not only the ego perception in the physical world comprised the ego, but this ego were essentially based on the shape of its body in such a way that it experienced all visual impressions as its own, then in this ego the visual sensation of smell would be the ego's experience of itself on the one hand, and that of taste on the other. If we were dealing not with the finished physical form, but with one in the process of formation, there would be no perception of the self; the self-experience of the self would have to be quite different.

[ 1 ] The views on the value and fruitfulness of philosophy have undergone a profound change within our nation in recent times. Whereas at the beginning of the century Fichte, Schelling and Hegel worked with bold intellectual courage to solve the riddles of the world and considered the human faculty of knowledge capable of penetrating into the deepest mysteries of existence, today we avoid entering into the central problems of the sciences because we are convinced that it is impossible for the human mind to answer the ultimate and highest questions. We have lost confidence in thinking. The despondency in the philosophical field is becoming more and more general. We can see this in the transformation that an important and meritorious contemporary philosopher has undergone since his first appearance in the mid-seventies. I am referring to Johannes Volkelt. In 1875, in the introduction to his book on "The Dream-Fantasy", this scholar sharply criticized the half-heartedness and feebleness of the thinking of his contemporaries, which did not want to penetrate the depths of objects, but tentatively and uncertainly groped around on their surface. And when he gave his inaugural speech in 1883 on taking up the professorship of philosophy in Basel, this timidity had affected him to such an extent that he proclaimed it a necessary requirement of philosophical thinking to dispense with clear, universally satisfactory solutions to the ultimate questions and to be content with finding the various possible solutions and the ways and means that could lead to the goal. However, this means declaring uncertainty to be a characteristic feature of all in-depth research. A clear proof of the discouragement in the philosophical field is the emergence of a myriad of writings on epistemology. No one today dares to apply his cognitive faculty to the study of world events until he has anxiously examined whether the instrument is suitable for such a beginning. The philosopher Lotze mocked this scientific activity with the words: the eternal sharpening of knives has already become boring. - However, epistemology does not deserve this mockery, as it is responsible for solving the big question: To what extent is man capable of taking possession of the secrets of the world through his knowledge? - Once we have found an answer to this question, we have solved an important part of the great problem of life: What is our relationship to the world? - It is impossible for us to avoid the task of testing and sharpening our tools for such important work. It is not the operation of epistemological research that is lamentable, but the results of this research in recent decades present us with a depressing picture. The "sharpening of the knives" has been to no avail, they have remained blunt. Almost without exception, epistemologists have come to the conclusion that the tentativeness in the field of philosophy necessarily follows from the nature of our cognitive faculty; they believe that the latter cannot penetrate to the bottom of things at all because of the insurmountable limits set for it. A number of philosophers maintain that the critique of knowledge leads to the conviction that there can be no philosophy apart from the individual empirical sciences and that all philosophical thought has only the task of providing a methodological foundation for individual empirical research. We have academic teachers of philosophy who see their real mission in destroying the prejudice that there is a philosophy.

[ 2 ] This view is damaging the entire scientific life of the present. Philosophers, who themselves lack any stability within their field, are no longer able to exert the kind of influence on the individual specialized sciences that would be desirable to deepen research. We have recently seen in a characteristic example that the representatives of individual research have lost all contact with philosophy. They drew the false conclusion from the Kantian approach, which they rightly describe as unfruitful for true science, that philosophy as such is superfluous. Hence they no longer regard the study of it as a necessary need of the scholar. The consequence of this is that they lose all understanding for a deeper conception of the world and do not even suspect that a truly philosophical view overlooks it and knows how to grasp its problems much more thoroughly than they themselves can. Eduard von Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Unconscious" was published in 1869. In one chapter of the book, the author attempted to deal philosophically with Darwinism. He found that the prevailing view of Darwinism at the time could not stand up to logical thinking and sought to deepen it. As a result, he was accused of dilettantism by natural scientists and condemned in the harshest possible terms. In numerous essays and writings he was accused of lacking insight into scientific matters. Among the opposing writings was one by an anonymous author. What it said was described by respected natural scientists as the best and most pertinent thing that could be said against Hartmann's views. The experts considered the philosopher to be completely refuted. The famous zoologist Dr. Oskar Schmidt said that Anonymus' writing had "completely confirmed the conviction of all those who are not sworn to the unconscious that Darwinism" - and Schmidt means the view of Darwinism held by natural scientists - "is right". And Ernst Haeckel, whom I also admire as the greatest German natural scientist of the present day, wrote: "This excellent paper says essentially everything that I myself could have said about the philosophy of the unconscious to the readers of the history of creation..."

[ 3 ] When a second edition of the work was later published, the author's name on the title page was Eduard von Hartmann. The philosopher had wanted to show that it was not at all impossible for him to familiarize himself with scientific thought and to speak in the language of natural scientists if he wanted to. Hartmann thus provided proof that it is not the philosophers who lack an understanding of natural science, but conversely the representatives of the latter who lack insight into philosophy.

[ 4 ] The situation is no better with literary history. The followers of Scherer, who currently dominate this field, show in their writings that they lack any philosophical education. Scherer himself was alien and hostile to philosophy. With such an attitude, however, it is impossible to understand the German classics, because their creations are completely imbued with the philosophical spirit of their time and can only be understood from this.

[ 5 ] If we want to summarize these facts in a few words, we must say: the belief in philosophy has experienced a deep shake-up in the widest circles.

[ 6 ] According to my conviction, for which I will provide some evidence in a moment, the current characterized here is one of the saddest scientific aberrations. But before expressing my own opinion, allow me to indicate where the reason for the error lies.

[ 7 ] Our philosophical science is under the powerful influence of Kantianism. This influence is more significant today than it has been at any time. In 1865, Otto Liebmann demanded in his essay "Kant and the Epigones" that we must return to Kant in philosophy. - He saw the salvation of his science in the fulfillment of this demand. He was merely expressing the view of the vast majority of philosophers of our time. And natural scientists, insofar as they are still concerned with philosophical concepts, also see Kant's doctrine as the only possible form of central science. Starting from philosophers and naturalists, this opinion has also penetrated the wider circles of educated people who have an interest in philosophy. Kant's view has thus become a driving force in our scientific thinking. Without ever having read a line by Kant or heard a sentence from his teachings, most of our contemporaries view world events in his way, for a century the proud-sounding word has been uttered again and again: Kant had liberated thinking humanity from the shackles of philosophical dogmatism, which made empty assertions about the essence of things without undertaking a critical investigation into whether the human mind was also capable of making out something absolutely valid about this essence. - For many who utter this word, however, the old dogma has been replaced by a new one, namely that of the irrefutable truth of Kant's fundamental views. These can be summarized in the following sentences: A thing can only be perceived by us if it makes an impression on us, exerts an effect. But then it is always only this effect that we perceive, never the "thing in itself". We cannot form any concept of the latter. The effects of things on us are now our perceptions. What we know of the world is therefore not the things, but our ideas of the things. The world given to us is not a world of being, but a world of imagination or appearance. The laws according to which the details of this imaginary world are linked can of course not be the laws of the "things in themselves", but those of our subjective organism. What is to become an appearance for us must obey the laws of our subject. Things can only appear to us in a way that corresponds to our nature. We ourselves prescribe the laws of the world that appears to us - and this alone we know.

[ 8 ] What Kant thought he had gained for philosophy with these views becomes clear if we take a look at the scientific currents from which he grew and which he confronted. Before the Kantian reform, the teachings of the Leibniz-Wolff school were the only dominant ones in Germany. The followers of this school wanted to arrive at the fundamental truths about the nature of things by means of purely conceptual thinking. The knowledge gained in this way was regarded as clear and necessary as opposed to that gained through sensory experience, which was seen as confused and random. Only through pure concepts was it believed that scientific insights into the deeper context of world events, the nature of the soul and God, i.e. the so-called absolute truths, could be gained. Kant was also a follower of this school in his pre-critical period. His first writings are entirely in its spirit. A change in his views occurred when he became acquainted with the explanations of the English philosopher Hume. The latter sought to prove that there is no such thing as knowledge other than experience. We perceive the sunbeam, and then we notice that the stone on which it falls has warmed up. We perceive this again and again and get used to it. We therefore assume that the connection between the sun's rays and the warming of the stone will continue to apply in the same way in the future. However, this is by no means a certain and necessary knowledge. Nothing guarantees us that an event which we are accustomed to seeing in a certain way will not take place quite differently on the next occasion. All propositions in our sciences are only expressions established by habit for frequently noticed connections between things. Therefore, there can be no knowledge about those objects which philosophers strive for. Here we lack experience, which is the only source of our knowledge. Man must be content with mere belief about these things. If science wants to deal with them, it degenerates into an empty game with concepts without content. - These propositions apply, in the sense of Hume, not only to the last psychological and theological insights, but also to the simplest laws of nature, for example the proposition that every effect must have a cause. This judgment, too, is derived only from experience and established by habit. Hume only accepts as unconditionally valid and necessary those propositions in which the predicate is basically already included in the subject, as is the case, in his view, with mathematical judgments.

[ 9 ] Kant's previous conviction was shaken by his acquaintance with Hume's view. He soon no longer doubted that all our knowledge is really gained with the help of experience. But certain scientific doctrines seemed to him to have such a character of necessity that he did not want to believe in a merely habitual adherence to them. Kant could neither decide to go along with Hume's radicalism nor could he remain with the advocates of Leibniz-Wolffian science. The latter seemed to him to destroy all knowledge, in the latter he found no real content. Viewed correctly, Kantian criticism turns out to be a compromise between Leibniz-Wolff on the one hand and Hume on the other. And with this in mind, Kant's fundamental question is: How can we arrive at judgments that are necessarily valid in the sense of Leibniz and Wolff if we admit at the same time that we can only arrive at a real content of our knowledge through experience? The shape of Kant's philosophy can be understood from the tendency inherent in this question. Once Kant had admitted that we gain our knowledge from experience, he had to give the latter such a form that it did not exclude the possibility of generally and necessarily valid judgments. He achieved this by elevating our perceptual and intellectual organism to a power that co-creates experience. On this premise, he was able to say: Whatever is received by us from experience must conform to the laws according to which our sensuality and our intellect alone can comprehend. What does not conform to these laws can never become an object of perception for us. What appears to us therefore depends on the things outside us, how the latter appear to us is determined by the nature of our organism. The laws under which it can imagine something are therefore the most general laws of nature. In these also lies the necessary and universal nature of the course of the world. In Kant's sense, we do not see objects in a spatial arrangement because spatiality is a property that belongs to them, but because space is a form under which our sense is able to perceive things; we do not connect two events according to the concept of causality because this has a reason in their essence, but because our understanding is organized in such a way that it must connect two processes perceived in successive moments of time according to this concept. Thus our sensuality and our intellect prescribe the laws of the world of experience. And of these laws, which we ourselves place in the phenomena, we can of course also form necessarily valid concepts.

[ 10 ] But it is also clear that these concepts can only receive their content from the outside, from experience. In themselves they are empty and meaningless. We do know through them how an object must appear to us if it is given to us at all. But the fact that it is given to us, that it enters our field of vision, depends on experience. How things are in themselves, apart from our experience, is therefore not something we can determine through our concepts.

[ 11 ] In this way Kant has saved an area in which there are concepts of necessary validity; but at the same time he has cut off the possibility of using these concepts to make something out about the actual, absolute essence of things. In order to save the necessity of our concepts, Kant sacrificed their absolute applicability. For the sake of the latter, however, the former was valued in pre-Kantian philosophy. Kant's predecessors wanted to expose a central core from the totality of our knowledge, which by its nature is applicable to everything, including the absolute essences of things, to the "interior of nature". The result of Kant's philosophy, however, is that this inner being, this "in itself of objects" can never enter the realm of our knowledge, can never become an object of our knowledge. We must be content with the subjective world of appearances that arises within us when the outside world acts upon us. Kant thus sets insurmountable limits to our cognitive faculty. We cannot know anything about the "in itself of things". A renowned contemporary philosopher has given this view the following precise expression: "As long as the trick of looking around the corner, that is, of imagining without imagination, has not been invented, Kant's proud self-determination will remain that of the existing its that, but never its what is recognizable" - that is: we know that there is something that causes the subjective appearance of the thing in us, but what is actually behind the latter remains hidden from us.

[ 12 ] We have seen that Kant adopted this view in order to save as much as possible of each of the two opposing philosophical doctrines from which he proceeded. This tendency gave rise to a contrived view of our cognition, which we need only compare with what direct and unbiased observation reveals in order to see the entire untenability of Kant's thought structure. Kant thinks of our experiential knowledge as having arisen from two factors: from the impressions that things outside us make on our sensibility, and from the forms in which our sensibility and our understanding arrange these impressions. The former are subjective, for I do not perceive the thing, but only the way in which my sensuality is affected by it. My organism undergoes a change when something acts from the outside. This change, i.e. a state of my self, my sensation, is what is given to me. In the act of grasping, our sensuality organizes these sensations spatially and temporally, the mind again organizes the spatial and temporal according to concepts. This organization of sensations, the second factor of our cognition, is thus also entirely subjective. - This theory is nothing more than an arbitrary construction of thought that cannot stand up to observation. Let us first ask ourselves the question: Does a single sensation occur anywhere for us, separately and apart from other elements of experience? - Let us look at the content of the world given to us. It is a continuous whole. If we direct our attention to any point in our field of experience, we find that there is something else all around. There is nowhere here that exists in isolation. One sensation is connected to another. We can only artificially single it out from our experience; in truth, it is connected with the whole of the reality given to us. This is where Kant made a mistake. He had a completely wrong idea of the nature of our experience. The latter does not, as he believed, consist of an infinite number of little mosaic pieces from which we make a whole through purely subjective processes, but it is given to us as a unity: one perception merges into another without a definite boundary. If we want to consider an individuality separately, we must first artificially lift it out of the context in which it is located. Nowhere, for example, is the individual sensation of red given to us as such; it is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it belongs and without which it could not exist. We must disregard everything else and focus our attention on the one perception if we want to consider it in its isolation. This lifting of a thing out of its context is a necessity for us if we want to look at the world at all. We are organized in such a way that we cannot perceive the world as a whole, as a single perception. The right and left, the top and bottom, the red next to the green in my field of vision are in reality in uninterrupted connection and mutual togetherness. However, we can only look in one direction and only perceive what is connected in nature separately. Our eye can only ever perceive individual colors from a multi-membered color whole, our mind individual conceptual elements from a coherent system of ideas. The separation of an individual sensation from the world context is therefore a subjective act, conditioned by the peculiar arrangement of our mind. We must dissolve the unified world into individual perceptions if we want to observe it.

[ 13 ] But we must be clear about the fact that this infinite multiplicity and isolation does not really exist, that it is without any objective meaning for reality itself. We create an image of it that initially deviates from reality because we lack the organs to grasp it in its very own form in one act. But separating is only one part of our cognitive process. We are constantly busy incorporating every individual perception that comes to us into an overall conception that we form of the world.

[ 14 ] The question that necessarily follows here is this: According to what laws do we link what is separated in the act of perception? - The separation is a consequence of our organization; it has nothing to do with the thing itself. Therefore, the content of an individual perception cannot be changed by the fact that it initially appears to us to be torn from the context in which it belongs. But since this content is conditioned by the context, it initially appears quite incomprehensible in its separation. The fact that the perception of red occurs at a certain point in space is caused by the most varied circumstances. If I now perceive the red without at the same time directing my attention to these circumstances, it remains incomprehensible to me where the red comes from. Only when I have made other perceptions, namely those of the circumstances to which the perception of the red is necessarily connected, do I understand the matter. Every perception therefore points me beyond myself, because it cannot be explained by itself. I therefore combine the details separated from the whole of the world by my organization into a whole according to their own nature. In this second act, therefore, that which was destroyed in the first is restored; the unity of the objective regains its rightful place in relation to the subjectively conditioned multiplicity.

[ 15 ] The reason why we can only take possession of the objective form of the world in the detour described above lies in the dual nature of man. As a rational being, he is very well able to imagine the cosmos as a unity in which each individual appears as a member of the whole; as a sensual being, however, he is bound to place and time, he can only perceive individual of the infinitely many members of the cosmos. Experience can therefore only provide a form of reality conditioned by the limitations of our individuality, from which reason must first gain the objective. Sensual perception thus distances us from reality, while rational contemplation leads us back to it. A being whose sensuality could view the world in one act would not need reason. A single perception would provide it with what we can only achieve by combining an infinite number of them.

[ 16 ] The examination of our cognitive faculty that we have just undertaken leads us to the view that reason is the organ of objectivity or that it provides us with the actual form of reality. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the fact that reason appears to lie entirely within our subjectivity. We have seen that, in truth, its activity is intended precisely to abolish the subjective character that our experience receives through sensory perception. Through this activity, the contents of perception themselves re-establish in our minds the objective context from which our senses have torn them.

[ 17 ] We are now at the point where we can see through the fallacy of Kant's view. What is a consequence of our organization: the appearance of reality as an infinite number of separate particulars, Kant conceives as an objective fact; and the connection that is re-established, because it corresponds to objective truth, is for him a consequence of our subjective organization. Precisely the reverse of what Kant asserted is true. Cause and effect, for example, are a coherent whole. I perceive them separately and connect them in the way they themselves strive towards each other. Kant allowed himself to be led into error by Hume. The latter says: If we perceive two events over and over again in such a way that one follows the other, we become accustomed to this togetherness, expect it in future cases as well, and designate one as cause and the other as effect. - This contradicts the facts. We only bring two events into a causal connection if such a connection follows from their content. This connection is no less given than the content of the events themselves.

[ 18 ] From this point of view, the most commonplace as well as the highest scientific thought finds its explanation. If we could encompass the whole world with one glance, then this work would not be necessary. Explaining a thing, making it comprehensible, means nothing other than putting it back into the context from which our organization has torn it out. There is no such thing as a thing that is separated from the world as a whole. All separation has only a subjective validity for us: for us, the world as a whole is divided into: Above and below, before and after, cause and effect, object and idea, substance and force, object and subject and so on. However, all these opposites are only possible if the whole in which they occur confronts us as reality. Where this is not the case, we cannot speak of opposites. An impossible opposition is that which Kant calls "appearance" and "thing-in-itself". This latter term is completely meaningless. We have not the slightest reason to form it. It would only be justified for a consciousness that knows a second world in addition to the one that is given to us and that can observe how this world affects our organism and results in what Kant calls an appearance. Such a consciousness could then say: The world of human beings is only a subjective appearance of that second world known to me. But people themselves can only recognize opposites within the world given to them. Contrasting the sum of everything given with something else is pointless. The Kantian "thing in itself" does not follow from the character of the world given to us. It is invented.

[ 19 ] Unless we break with such arbitrary assumptions as the "thing in itself" is, we can never arrive at a satisfactory worldview. Something is only inexplicable to us as long as we do not know what is necessarily connected with it. But we have to look for this within our world, not outside it.

[ 20 ] The mysteriousness of a thing only exists as long as we consider it in its particularity. But this is created by us and can also be removed by us. A science that understands the nature of the human cognitive process can only proceed in such a way that it seeks everything it needs to explain a phenomenon within the world given to us. Such a science can be described as monism or a unified view of nature. It is opposed by dualism or the two-world theory, which assumes two absolutely different worlds and believes that the explanatory principles for one are contained in the other.

[ 21 ] This latter doctrine is based on a false interpretation of the facts of our cognitive process. The dualist separates the sum of all being into two areas, each of which has its own laws and which are externally opposed to each other. He forgets that every separation, every segregation of the individual realms of being has only subjective validity. What is a consequence of his organization, he considers to be an objective fact of nature that lies outside him.

[ 22 ] Such a dualism is also Kantianism. Appearance and the "as-itself" of things are not opposites within the given world, but one side, the "as-itself", lies outside the given. - As long as we separate the latter into parts - however small these may be in relation to the universe - we are simply following a law of our personality; but if we consider everything given, all phenomena, as one part and then oppose it with a second, then we are philosophizing into the blue. We are then merely playing with concepts. We construct a contrast, but cannot gain any content for the second element, because such a content can only be drawn from the given. Any kind of being that is assumed to exist outside the latter is to be relegated to the realm of unjustified hypotheses. Kant's "thing-in-itself" belongs in this category, and no less the idea that a large proportion of modern physicists have of matter and its atomistic composition. If I am given any sensory perception, for example the perception of color or heat, then I can make qualitative and quantitative distinctions within this perception; I can encompass the spatial structure and the temporal progression that I perceive with mathematical formulas, I can regard the phenomena as cause and effect according to their nature, and so on: but with this process of thinking I must remain within what is given to me. If we practise a careful self-criticism of ourselves, we also find that all our abstract views and concepts are only one-sided images of the given reality and only have sense and meaning as such. We can imagine a space closed on all sides, in which a number of elastic spheres move in all directions, bumping into each other, bouncing against and off the walls; but we must be clear that this is a one-sided idea that only gains meaning when we think of the purely mathematical image as being filled with a sensuously real content. But if we believe that we can explain a perceived content causally through an imperceptible process of being that corresponds to the mathematical structure described and that takes place outside our given world, then we lack any self-criticism. Modern mechanical heat theory makes the mistake described above. The same can be said of modern color theory. It, too, places something that is only a one-sided image of the sensory world behind it as its cause. The whole wave theory of light is only a mathematical image that represents the spatio-temporal relationships of this particular field of appearance in a one-sided way. The undulation theory turns this image into a real reality that can no longer be perceived, but is rather the cause of what we perceive.

[ 23 ] It is not at all surprising that the dualistic thinker does not succeed in making the connection between the two world principles he assumes comprehensible. One is given to him experientially, the other is added by him. Consequently, he can only gain everything that is contained in the one through experience, and everything that is contained in the other only through thinking. But since all experiential content is only an effect of the added true being, the cause itself can never be found in the world accessible to our observation. Nor is the reverse possible: to derive the experientially given reality from the imagined cause. This latter is not possible because, according to our previous arguments, all such imagined causes are only one-sided images of the full reality. If we survey such a picture, we can never find in it, by means of a mere thought process, what is connected with it only in the observed reality. For these reasons, he who assumes two worlds that are separated by themselves will never be able to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of their interrelation.

[ 24 ] And herein lies the reason for the assumption of limits to knowledge. The adherent of the monistic worldview knows that the causes of the effects given to him must lie in the realm of his world. No matter how far removed the former may be from the latter in space or time, they must be found in the realm of experience. The fact that of two things which explain each other, only one is given to him at the moment, appears to him only as a consequence of his individuality, not as something founded in the object itself. The adherent of a dualistic view believes that he must assume the explanation of a known thing in an arbitrarily added unknown thing. Since he unjustifiably endows the latter with such properties that it cannot be found in our entire world, he establishes a limit of cognition here. Our arguments have provided the proof that all things that our cognitive faculty supposedly cannot reach must first be artificially added to reality. We only fail to recognize that which we have first made unrecognizable. Kant commands our cognition to stop at the creature of his imagination, at the "thing-in-itself", and Du Bois-Reymond states that the imperceptible atoms of matter produce sensation and feeling through their position and movement, only to conclude that we can never arrive at a satisfactory explanation of how matter and movement produce sensation and feeling, for "it is quite and forever incomprehensible that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not be indifferent to each other. atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move. It is in no way comprehensible how consciousness could arise from their interaction". - This whole conclusion collapses into nothing if one considers that the atoms moving and lying in a certain way are an abstraction to which an absolute existence separate from the perceptible event cannot be ascribed.

[ 25 ] A scientific dissection of our cognitive activity leads, as we have seen, to the conviction that the questions we have to ask of nature are a consequence of the peculiar relationship in which we stand to the world. We are limited individualities and can therefore only perceive the world piecemeal. Each piece, considered in and of itself, is a riddle or, to put it another way, a question for our cognition. However, the more details we get to know, the clearer the world becomes. One perception explains another. There are no questions that the world poses to us that cannot be answered with the means it offers us. For monism, therefore, there are no fundamental limits to knowledge. This or that can be unresolved at any given time because we were not yet in a position in terms of time or space to find the things that are involved. But what has not yet been found today may be found tomorrow. The limits caused by this are only accidental ones that disappear with the progress of experience and thought. In such cases, the formation of hypotheses comes into its own. Hypotheses may not be formed about something that is supposed to be inaccessible to our knowledge in principle. The atomistic hypothesis is a completely unfounded one. A hypothesis can only be an assumption about a fact that is not accessible to us for accidental reasons, but which by its nature belongs to the world given to us. For example, a hypothesis about a certain state of our earth in a long-gone period is justified. Admittedly, this state can never become an object of experience because completely different conditions have arisen in the meantime. However, if a perceiving individual had been there at the assumed time, then he would have perceived the state. In contrast, the hypothesis that all sensorygualities owe their origin only to quantitative processes is unjustified, because processes without quality cannot be perceived.

[ 26 ] Monism or the unified explanation of nature emerges from a critical self-examination of man. This observation leads us to reject all explanatory causes outside the world. However, we can also extend this view to man's practical relationship to the world. Human action is, after all, only a special case of general world events. Its explanatory principles can therefore likewise only be sought within the world given to us. Dualism, which seeks the basic forces of the reality available to us in a realm inaccessible to us, also places the commandments and norms of our actions there. Kant is also caught up in this error. He regards the moral law as a commandment imposed on man by a world that is alien to us, as a categorical imperative that he must obey, even when his own nature develops inclinations that oppose such a voice sounding from the hereafter into our here and now. One need only recall Kant's well-known apostrophe to duty to find this reinforced: "Duty! thou great and sublime name, who dost not hold in thyself anything that is pleasing and ingratiating, but dost demand submission", who dost "lay down a law... before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly work against it." Monism opposes such an imperative imposed on human nature from the outside with the moral motives born of the human soul itself. It is a delusion to believe that man can act according to other than self-made imperatives. The respective inclinations and cultural needs generate certain maxims that we call our moral principles. Since certain ages or peoples have similar inclinations and aspirations, the people who belong to them will also establish similar principles to satisfy them. In any case, however, such principles, which then act as ethical motives, are by no means implanted from outside, but are born out of needs, i.e. generated within the reality in which we live. The moral code of an age or people is simply the expression of how one believes it is best to approach the prevailing cultural goals within it. Just as the effects of nature arise from causes that lie within the given nature, so our moral actions are the results of motives that lie within our cultural process. Monism thus seeks the reason for our actions within human nature in the strictest sense of the word. However, it also makes man his own lawgiver. Dualism demands submission to moral commandments taken from somewhere; monism points man to himself, to his autonomous being. It makes him the master of himself. Only from the standpoint of monism can we understand man as a truly free being in the ethical sense. Duties are not imposed on him by another being, but his actions are simply guided by the principles that everyone finds lead him to the goals that he considers worth striving for. A moral view based on monism is the enemy of all blind faith in authority. The autonomous man does not follow a guideline which he is merely supposed to believe will lead him to his goal, but he must realize that it will lead him there, and the goal itself must appear to him individually as a desirable one. This is also the basic idea of the modern state, which is based on the representation of the people. The autonomous individual wants to be governed according to laws that he has given himself. If the moral maxims were determined once and for all, they would simply have to be codified and the government would have to enforce them. Knowledge of the general human moral code would be sufficient for government. If the wisest person, who knows the contents of this holy book best, were always at the head of the state, the ideal of a human constitution would be achieved. This is roughly how Plato conceived the matter. The wisest would command and the others would obey. The representation of the people only makes sense on the condition that the laws are the expression of the cultural needs of an age, and these latter are again rooted in the aspirations and wishes of the individual. Through the representation of the people it is to be achieved that the individual is governed according to laws which he can say correspond to his own inclinations and aims. In this way the will of the state is to be brought into the greatest possible congruence with the will of the individual. With the help of popular representation, the autonomous individual makes his own laws. Through the modern constitution of the state, then, that which alone has reality in the realm of morality, namely individuality, is to be brought to bear, in contrast to the state, which is based on authority and obedience, and which has no meaning unless one wishes to attribute an objective reality to abstract moral norms. I do not wish to assert that we may at the present time present the ideal state I have characterized as desirable everywhere. The inclinations of the people who belong to our national communities are too unequal for that. A large part of the people is dominated by needs too base for us to wish that the will of the state should be the expression of such needs. But mankind is in a state of continuous development, and a sensible popular education will try to raise the general level of education so that every man can be capable of being his own master. Our cultural development must move in this direction. We do not promote culture through paternalistic laws that prevent people from becoming the plaything of their blind instincts, but by encouraging people to seek a goal worth striving for only in their higher inclinations. Then we can let them become their own legislators without danger. The task of culture therefore lies solely in the expansion of knowledge. If, on the other hand, associations are formed in our time that want to declare morality to be independent of knowledge, such as the "German Society for Ethical Culture", this is a fatal error. This society wants to induce people to live according to general human moral standards. Indeed, it also wants to make a code of such standards an integral part of our teaching. This brings me to an area that has so far been least touched by the teachings of monism. I am referring to pedagogy. What is most incumbent upon it: the free development of individuality, the only reality in the field of culture, is what has been most neglected up to now, and the budding human being has instead been locked into a network of norms and commandments which he is to follow in his future life. The fact that everyone, even the least of us, has something within himself, an individual fund that enables him to achieve things that only he alone can achieve in a very specific way: this is forgotten. Instead, they are put through the torture of general conceptual systems, tied to conventional prejudices and their individuality is undermined. For the true educator, there are no general educational norms, such as those that the Herbartian school wants to establish. For the true educator, every person is something new and unprecedented, an object of study from whose nature he draws the very individual principles according to which he should educate in this case. The demand of monism is that, instead of implanting general methodological principles in prospective educators, they should train them to become psychologists who are capable of understanding the individualities they are to educate. Monism is thus suited to serve our greatest goal in all areas of knowledge and life: the development of the human being towards freedom, which is synonymous with the cultivation of the individual in human nature. That our time is receptive to such teachings, I believe I can infer from the fact that a young generation enthusiastically acclaimed the man who for the first time transferred the monistic teachings to the field of ethics in a popular manner, albeit reflected from a sick soul: I mean Friedrich Nietzsche. The enthusiasm he found is proof that there are not a few among our contemporaries who are tired of chasing after moral chimeras and who seek morality where alone it really lives: in the human soul. Monism as a science is the basis for truly free action, and our development can only take the course: through monism to the philosophy of freedom!

According to the latest publications of the Goethe Archive

[ 1 ] Once before, a celebration of Goethe's birthday prompted a man here in Frankfurt to openly confess that he also saw in Germany's greatest poet a spirit who was one of the first to be considered when speaking of the pathfinders in the field of natural knowledge. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote an article in the Goethe album that greeted August 28, 1849, which was as full of strong words of anger at the opponents of Goethe's Theory of Colors as the philosopher's soul was full of enthusiastic appreciation for Goethe the naturalist. "Not crowned monuments, nor canon salutes, nor the ringing of bells, let alone banquets with speeches, are sufficient to atone for the grave and outrageous injustice Goethe suffers in regard to his color theory." Far be it from me to draw your attention today to this particular point of the poet's scientific activity. The time will come when the scientific prerequisites for an understanding between researchers will also exist for this question. At present, physical research is moving in a direction that cannot lead to Goethean thinking. Goethe also wants to bring the consideration of purely physical phenomena as close as possible to the human-personal. To him, man is "the greatest and most exact physical apparatus that can exist", and this is - in his opinion - "precisely the greatest misfortune of modern physics, that one has, as it were, separated experiments from man and merely wants to recognize nature in what artificial instruments show, indeed, to limit and prove what it can achieve". In their anxious avoidance of everything subjective and personal, however, the physicists of our time go much further than those whom Goethe intended to target with these words. The ideal of our contemporaries in this respect is to trace all phenomena back to as few inanimate basic forces as possible, which act according to purely mathematical and mechanical laws. Goethe's mind was directed elsewhere. In his view, what is only hidden in the rest of nature appears in man in his very own form. For Goethe, the human spirit is the highest form of the natural process, the organ that nature has created in order to reveal its secret. All the forces that tremble through the world penetrate the human soul in order to express what they are in essence. Goethe could not conceive of a nature separate from man. A dead, spiritless matter was impossible in his imagination. He rejected an explanation of nature with principles from which man could not also be understood in terms of his existence and essence.

[ 2 ] Just as understandable as the opposition of the physicists is the approval that Goethe's view of nature found among some of the most outstanding investigators of the phenomena of life, especially the most intellectual natural scientist of our time, Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel, who has given Darwin's ideas on the origin of organisms a perfection appropriate to German thoroughness, even attaches the greatest importance to recognizing the harmony of his basic convictions with those of Goethe. For Haeckel, Darwin's question about the origin of organic forms immediately became the highest task that the science of organic life can set itself, that of the origin of man. And he was compelled to assume such natural principles in place of the dead matter of the physicists that one need not stop at human beings. In his recently (1892) published work "Monism as a Bond between Religion and Science", which I am convinced is the most significant manifestation of the latest natural philosophy, Haeckel expressly emphasized that he could no more conceive of an "immaterial living spirit" than of a "dead spiritless matter". And Goethe's words that "matter can never exist and be effective without spirit, spirit never without matter" are entirely consistent with this.

[ 3 ] In contrast to the stubborn resistance of physicists, we find here a conception of nature that proudly claims Goethe's ideas for itself.

[ 4 ] For those who set themselves the task of fully appreciating Goethe's genius in a particular field, the question now arises: Does the direction of modern natural science that we have just characterized do full justice to Goethe? Those who are only concerned with this natural science will of course simply ask: to what extent does Goethe agree with me? He regards Goethe as a forerunner of his own direction with regard to those views which the latter has in common with him. His yardstick is the contemporary view of nature. Goethe is judged by it. My point of view in the following arguments is towards these judges: How would Goethe have behaved towards those naturalists who today speak approvingly of him in their way? Would he have believed that they had brought to light ideas that he had only anticipated, or would he rather have thought that the form they had given to natural science corresponded only imperfectly to his beginnings? How we answer this question and how we ourselves then relate to Goethe's world view will determine whether we see Goethe, the natural scientist, as merely a more or less interesting phenomenon in the history of science or whether we also want to make his creations fruitful for our knowledge in the field of natural science and, to use Herman Grimm's phrase, place him in the service of the times.

[ 5 ] The point is to penetrate the spirit of Goethe's view of nature from his own way of looking at and thinking, not from an external comparison with scientific ideas of the present. If we want to understand Goethe correctly, the individual achievements in which his rich mind laid down his scientific thoughts are less important than the intentions and aims from which they emerged. Outstanding men can become epoch-making for mankind in two ways. Either they find the solution to questions that have already been asked, or they find new problems in phenomena that their predecessors carelessly passed by. Galileo, for example, influenced the development of science in the latter way. Countless people before him had seen a swinging body without noticing anything remarkable about it; this phenomenon revealed to his gaze the great task of learning the laws of pendulum motion, and he created entirely new scientific foundations in this field of mechanics. In spirits of this kind, needs that their predecessors had not yet known arise for the first time. And the need opens the eyes to a discovery.

[ 6 ] A need of this kind awoke in Goethe at an early stage. His research instinct was initially ignited by the diversity of organic life. He saw the abundance of forms in the animal and plant kingdoms with a different eye than his scientific contemporaries. They believed that they had done enough by observing the differences between the individual forms, identifying the peculiarities of each particular species and genus and, on the basis of this work, creating an external order, a system of living things. Linné, the botanist, in particular, was a master in this art of classification. Goethe became acquainted with this man's writings in 1782, as we know from his correspondence with Frau von Stein. What was the most important thing for Linné, to precisely determine the characteristics that distinguish one form from another, was initially not even a consideration for Goethe. For him, the question arose: what lives in the infinite abundance of the plant world that unites this diversity into a unified natural kingdom? He first wanted to understand what a plant actually is, and then he hoped to understand why plant nature manifests itself in such an infinite number of forms. He himself later said of his relationship with Linné: "That which he tried to keep apart by force had to strive towards unification according to the innermost needs of my being." That Goethe was on the right path to finding a law of nature here can be seen from a simple observation of how natural laws express themselves in phenomena. Every natural phenomenon emerges from a series of circumstances that determine it. Let's take something very simple. If I throw a stone in a horizontal direction, it will fall to earth at a certain distance from me. It has described a very specific line in space during its flight. This line is dependent on three conditions: the force with which I push the stone, the attraction that the earth exerts on it, and the resistance that the air offers it. I can explain the movement of the stone to myself if I know the laws according to which the three conditions act on it. That phenomena of inanimate nature must be explained in this way, that is, by seeking their causes and their laws of action, was not doubted by anyone concerned with the history of science at the time of Goethe's appearance. into consideration. But the situation was different when it came to the phenomena of life. Genera and species were seen before us and within them each being was equipped with such an arrangement, with such organs, as corresponded to its vital needs. Such a regularity was only considered possible if the organic forms were designed according to a well-considered plan of creation, according to which each organ received the formation it must have if it is to fulfill its intended purpose. Thus, while one sought to explain the phenomena of inanimate nature from causes that lie within the world, one believed that one had to assume extra-worldly explanatory principles for organisms. The attempt to attribute the phenomena of life to causes that lie within the world we can observe was not attempted before Goethe; indeed, as late as 1790, the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant called any such attempt "an adventure of reason". One simply imagined each of Linnaeus' species to have been created according to a certain preconceived plan and thought one had explained a phenomenon when one recognized the purpose it was supposed to serve. Such a way of looking at things could not satisfy Goethe. The idea of a God who leads a separate existence outside the world and directs his creation according to externally imposed laws was alien to him. Throughout his life, he was dominated by the thought:

"What would a God be who only pushed from the outside,
Run the universe in circles on his finger?
It befits him to move the world within,
Nature in itself, to nurture itself in nature,
So that what lives and weaves and is in him,
Never misses its power, never misses its spirit."

[ 7 ] What did Goethe have to look for in the science of organic nature in accordance with this attitude? Firstly, a law that explains what makes a plant a plant and an animal an animal; secondly, another that makes it comprehensible why the common underlying principle of all plants and animals appears in such a diversity of forms. The basic essence that expresses itself in every plant, the animality that is found in all animals, that is what he sought first. The artificial partitions between the individual genera and species had to be torn down, it had to be shown that all plants are only modifications of an original plant, all animals of an original animal. Kant had declared it impossible that we could recognize the original form that underlies all organisms and that we are able to find the lawful causes within our world of appearance that cause this original form to appear once as a lily and another time as an oak. Goethe undertook "the adventure of reason" and thus accomplished a scientific deed of the first order. Goethe thus set out to form an idea of that original form and to seek the laws and conditions that explain its appearance in its manifold forms. In his opinion, however, science must do justice to both of these requirements. He who has no concept of the original form can indeed state the facts under whose influence one organic form has transformed itself into another, but he can never arrive at a real explanation. That is why Goethe considered it his first task to find the original plant and the original animal or, as he also called it, the type of plants and animals.

[ 8 ] What does Goethe understand by this type? He spoke clearly and unambiguously about it. He says that he felt the need to "establish a type against which all mammals could be tested for similarity and difference, and just as I had previously sought out the original plant, I now sought to find the original animal, which ultimately means: the concept, the idea of the animal". And another time with even greater clarity: "But once you have grasped the idea of this type, you will realize how impossible it is to establish a single genus as a canon. The individual cannot be a pattern of the whole, and so we must not seek the pattern for all in the individual. The classes, genera, species and individuals behave like the cases to the law: they are contained in it, but they do not contain or give it." So if Goethe had been asked whether he saw his archetype, his type, realized in a particular animal or plant form that existed at some time, he would undoubtedly have answered with a resounding no. He would have said: Just like the domestic dog, even the simplest animal organism is only a special case of what I understand by type. The type is not realized at all in the external world, but it arises as an idea within us when we consider what living beings have in common. As little as the physicist makes a single case, a random phenomenon, the starting point of his investigations, as little may the zoologist or botanist address a single organism as a primordial organism.

[ 9 ] And here is the point at which it must become clear that the newer Darwinism falls far short of Goethe's basic ideas. This scientific current finds that there are two causes under the influence of which one organic form can transform itself into another: adaptation and the struggle for existence. Adaptation is understood to mean the fact that an organism undergoes a change in its vital activity and in its form as a result of influences from the outside world. As a result, it acquires characteristics that its ancestors did not have. In this way, therefore, a transformation of existing organic forms can take place. The law of the struggle for existence is based on the following considerations. Organic life produces many more germs than there is room on earth for their nourishment and development. Not all of them can reach full maturity. Each developing organism seeks the means for its existence from its environment. It is inevitable that with the abundance of germs a struggle will arise between the individual beings. And since only a limited number can find a livelihood, it is natural that this consists of those who prove to be the stronger in the struggle. These will emerge victorious. But which are the strongest? Undoubtedly those with an organization that proves to be adequate to provide the means of life. The creatures with inappropriate organization must succumb and die out. Therefore, says Darwinism, there can only be functional organizations. The others have simply perished in the struggle for existence. Taking these two principles as a basis, Darwinism explains the origin of species in such a way that organisms transform themselves through adaptation under the influence of the outside world, transplant the new characteristics gained in this way to their descendants and, of the forms transformed in this way, always preserve those that have assumed the most appropriate form in the transformation process.

[ 10 ] Goethe would undoubtedly have no objection to these two principles. We can prove that he was already familiar with both. But he did not consider them sufficient to explain the forms of organic life. For him they were external conditions under the influence of which what he called type takes on particular forms and can transform itself in the most varied ways. Before something transforms, however, it must first exist. Adaptation and the struggle for existence presuppose the organic, which they influence. Goethe first sought to obtain the necessary precondition. His essay "An attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants", published in 1790, pursues the idea of finding an ideal plant form that underlies all plant beings as their archetype. He later attempted to do the same for the animal world.

[ 11 ] Just as Copernicus sought the laws for the movements of the limbs of our solar system, Goethe sought those according to which a living organism is formed. I will not go into the details, but will gladly admit that they are in great need of improvement. However, Goethe's undertaking represents a decisive step in exactly the same way as Copernicus' explanation of the solar system, which was also significantly improved by Kepler.

[ 12 ] I have already in 1883 (in my edition of Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschners Nat. Lit, 1.vol.), I endeavored to show that the newer natural science has only brought one side of Goethe's view to fruition.¹ The study of the external conditions for the transformation of species is in full swing. Haeckel ingeniously sought to determine the degrees of relationship of the forms of the animal world. Virtually nothing has been done to discover the inner laws of organism formation. Indeed, there are researchers who regard such laws as mere figments of the imagination. They believe they have done all that is necessary when they show how the more complicated living beings have gradually built themselves up from elementary organisms. And these elementary organic entities are to be explained by the mere lawful combination of inorganic substances in the same way as the formation of a chemical compound is explained. Thus one would have happily accomplished the feat of explaining life by destroying it or, rather, by thinking of it as non-existent. Goethe would never have agreed with such an approach. He sought natural laws for the living, but nothing was further from his mind than the attempt to simply transfer the laws of the inanimate to the animate.

[ 13 ] Until the opening of the Goethe Archive, some of my assertions could perhaps have been disputed, although I believe that for anyone who reads Goethe's scientific writings in context, there is no doubt about the way their author thought. But these writings do not form a coherent whole. They do not represent an all-round view of nature, but only fragments of such a view. They have gaps which anyone who wants to gain an idea of Goethe's world of ideas must fill in hypothetically. Goethe's handwritten estate, which is in the Goethe Archive in Weimar, now makes it possible to fill in numerous and important gaps. It has given me the gratifying certainty that the ideas I had previously formed about Goethe's scientific thinking, which I have just characterized, are completely correct. I had no need to modify my concepts, but today I can substantiate with Goethe's own words many things that I was only able to represent hypothetically before the opening of the archive.²

[ 14 ] We read, for example, in an essay published in the Weimar edition of the sixth volume of Goethe's scientific writings: The metamorphosis of plants "shows us the laws according to which plants are formed. It draws our attention to a double law: 1. to the law of inner nature, by which plants are constituted, 2. to the law of external circumstances, by which plants are modified."

[ 15 ] It is particularly interesting, however, that we can follow the train of thought step by step through which Goethe sought to recognize this law of inner nature, according to which plants are formed. These thoughts developed in Goethe during his Italian journey. The notepads on which he jotted down his observations have been preserved. The Weimar edition has included them in the seventh volume of his scientific writings. They are a model of how a researcher seeks to fathom the secrets of nature with a philosophical eye. With the same deep seriousness with which he pursued his artistic interests in Italy, he endeavoured to recognize the laws of plant life. These sheets provide full proof that a long endeavor lay behind Goethe when, around the middle of 1787, he elevated the hypothesis of the primordial plant to a decisive scientific conviction.

[ 16 ] The poet devoted even more time and effort to applying his ideas to the animal kingdom and human beings. As early as 1781, he began the serious study of anatomy in Jena. In this field, Goethe found a scientific view that his whole nature resisted. It was believed that there was a slight difference between humans and animals in terms of anatomical structure. Animals have a small bone (intermaxillary bone) between the two symmetrical halves of the upper jaw, which contains the upper incisors. In humans, it was believed, there was no such bone. This view must have immediately appeared to Goethe to be a mistake. Where there is such a similarity of structure as in the skeleton of man and that of the higher animals, there must be a deeper natural law underlying it, where such a difference in detail is not possible. In 1784 Goethe succeeded in proving that the intermediate bone is also present in man, and thus the last obstacle that stood in the way of establishing a uniform type for all animal organizations up to man was removed. As early as 1790, Goethe set about following up his essay on the metamorphosis of plants with a similar essay "On the Form of Animals", which unfortunately remained a fragment. It can be found in the eighth volume of the natural scientific writings of the \Weimar edition. Goethe then set about realizing this intention again in 1795, but this time he did not finish it either. We can recognize his intentions in detail from the two fragments; the execution of the enormous idea would have taken more time than the poet had available given his wide-ranging interests. However, these endeavors are followed by a single discovery that clearly shows us what they were aimed at. Just as Goethe sought to trace all plants back to the original plant and all animals back to the original animal, he also strove to explain the individual parts of one and the same organism from a basic component that has the ability to transform itself in a variety of ways. He thought that all organs can be traced back to a basic form that only takes on different shapes. He saw an animal and a plant individual as consisting of many details. These details are identical in structure, but identical or similar, dissimilar and dissimilar in appearance. The more imperfect the creature is, the more the parts resemble each other and the more they resemble the whole. The more perfect the creature becomes, the more dissimilar the parts become. Goethe therefore strove to find similarities between the individual parts of an organism. In the case of the animal skeleton, this led him to an idea of far-reaching significance, that of the so-called vertebral nature of the skull bones. We are dealing here with the view that the bones that surround the brain have the same basic shape as those that make up the spine. Goethe probably suspected this soon after beginning his anatomical investigations. It became a complete certainty for him in 1790, when he found a sheep's skull on the dunes of the Lido in Venice, which had fallen apart so happily that Goethe believed he could clearly recognize the individual vertebral bodies in the pieces. Here, too, it has been claimed that Goethe's discovery was much more of a lucky idea than a real scientific result. It seems to me, however, that it is precisely the latest work in this field that provides full proof that the path Goethe took was the right one. In 1872, the outstanding anatomist Carl Gegenbaur published studies on the head skeleton of the Selachians or prehistoric fishes, which show that the skull is the remodeled end part of the backbone and the brain is the remodeled end part of the spinal cord. One must now imagine that the bony skull capsule of the higher animals consists of remodeled vertebral bodies which, however, in the course of the development of higher animal forms from lower ones, have gradually assumed such a shape and have grown together in such a way that they appear suitable for enclosing the brain. Therefore, the vertebral theory of the skull can only be studied in connection with the comparative anatomy of the brain. That Goethe was already considering this matter from this point of view in 1790 is shown by an entry in his diary, which was recently found in Goethe's archive: "The brain itself is only one large main ganglion. The organization of the brain is repeated in each ganglion, so that each ganglion is to be regarded as a small subordinate brain."

[ 17 ] From all this it is clear that Goethe's scientific method is equal to any criticism and that in the pursuit of his natural philosophical ideas he made a series of individual discoveries which today's science, albeit in an improved form, must also consider to be important components of knowledge of nature. However, Goethe's significance does not lie in these individual discoveries, but in the fact that his way of looking at things led him to completely new guiding points of view on the knowledge of nature. He was fully aware of this himself. On August 18, 1787, he wrote to Knebel from Italy: "After what I have seen of plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, if I were ten years younger, I would be very tempted to make a journey to India, not to discover new things, but to look at what I have discovered in my own way." These words express Goethe's view of scientific knowledge. Faithful, sober observation alone cannot lead to the goal. Only when we find the appropriate point of view from which to look at things do they become comprehensible to us. Through his way of looking at things, Goethe destroyed the great dividing wall between inanimate and animate nature; indeed, it was he who first elevated the doctrine of organisms to the rank of a science. Schiller expressed the essence of this approach in meaningful words in a letter to Goethe on August 23, 1793: "I have long watched the course of your mind, albeit from quite a distance, and have noted the path you have marked out with ever renewed admiration. You are looking for the extraordinary in nature, but you are looking for it in the most difficult way, which any weaker force would be wary of. You take the whole of nature together in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the ground of explanation for the individual. From the simple organization you ascend step by step to the more intricate, in order finally to build the most intricate of all, man, genetically from the materials of the whole edifice of nature. By recreating him from nature, as it were, you seek to penetrate his hidden technology."

[ 18 ] From this school of thought, a view of nature had to develop that was equally far removed from crude materialism and nebulous mysticism. For them it was self-evident that the particular could only be recognized through experience, the general, the great lawful connections of nature only by ascending from observation to the idea. Only where both interact: Idea and experience, Goethe sees the spirit of true natural research. He expresses this aptly with the words: "Time is governed by the pendulum swing, the moral and scientific world by the alternating movement from idea to experience" (Goethes Werke, II. Abteilung, 6. Band, p. 354). Goethe believed that only in the idea could he come close to the secret of life. He found causes at work in the organic world that are only partly perceptible to the senses. He sought to recognize the other part by attempting to recreate the laws of nature in images. Although life expresses itself in sensory reality, it does not exist in it. That is why it cannot be found through sensory experience. The higher spiritual powers must intervene. It is popular today to recognize only the intellect as having a right to speak in science alongside sober observation. Goethe believed that he could only come into possession of the truth by exerting all his intellectual powers. That is why he never tired of putting himself in relation to the most diverse types of scientific endeavor. In the scientific institutes of the Jena University he sought to acquire the factual knowledge for his ideas; from its famous philosophical teachers and from Schiller he sought information about the philosophical justification of his school of thought. Goethe was not a philosopher in the true sense of the word, but his way of looking at things was philosophical. He did not develop any philosophical concepts, but his scientific ideas are based on a philosophical spirit. By his nature, Goethe could neither be a one-sided philosopher nor a one-sided observer. Both sides worked harmoniously together in him in the higher unity, the philosophical observer, just as art and science are united again in the comprehensive personality of Goethe, who interests us not only in this or that branch of his work, but in its entirety as a world-historical phenomenon. In Goethe's mind, science and art worked together. We see this best when, in view of the Greek works of art in Italy, he wrote that he believed that the Greeks followed the same laws in their creations as nature itself, and he remarked that he believed he was on the trail of these laws. He wrote this at a time when he was pursuing the idea of the primordial plant. There can therefore be no doubt that Goethe thought of the artist's work as being guided by the same basic maxims that nature follows in its productions. And because he suspected the same basic essences in nature that guided him as an artist in his own work, he was driven by a scientific knowledge of them. Goethe professed a strictly unified or monistic view of the world. He saw unified fundamental powers ruling from the simplest process of lifeless nature right up to the imagination of man, from which the works of art spring.

[ 19 ] Rudolf Virchow emphasizes in the remarkable speech he gave on August 3 of this year to celebrate the birthday of the founder of Berlin University that the philosophical era of German science, in which Fichte, Schelling and Hegel set the tone, has been definitively over since Hegel's death and that we have been living in the age of the natural sciences ever since. Virchow praises this age for the fact that it increasingly understood that natural science could only be understood by studying nature itself: in museums, collections, laboratories and institutes, and that no information about natural processes could be gained from the study rooms of philosophers. This is the expression of a widespread prejudice of our time. The advocate of a strictly scientific view of the world would have to say to himself that what belongs to external nature and what we alone can accommodate in scientific institutes is only one part of nature, and that the other, certainly no less essential part, is not to be sought in the study, but certainly in the mind of the philosopher. This is how Goethe thought, and his thinking is therefore more scientific than that of modern natural science. The latter leaves the human urge for knowledge completely unsatisfied when it is a matter of something higher than what is accessible to sensible observation. It is therefore no wonder that Virchow has to complain at the same time about the worst intrusions of mysticism into the field of the science of life. What science fails to do, a deeper need seeks in all kinds of mysterious forces of nature, namely the explanation of facts once they exist. And Virchow also admits that the age of natural science has so far been unable to explain the essence of life and the human spirit.

[ 20 ] But who can hope to see thought with his eyes, to perceive life with a microscope? The only way to achieve something here is to go in the second direction, through which Goethe sought to reach the primordial organisms. The questions that modern natural science cannot answer are precisely those that Goethe undertakes to solve in a way that people today do not want to know about. This opens up a field in which Goethe's scientific work can be put at the service of the times. They will prove effective precisely where the current method proves impotent. It is not only a matter of doing justice to Goethe and assigning his research the right place in history, but also of continuing to cultivate his way of thinking with our more perfect means.

[ 21 ] He himself was primarily concerned that the world should recognize what his view of nature meant in general, and only secondarily what he was able to achieve with the help of this view with the means of his time in particular.

[ 22 ] The scientific age has torn the bond between experience and philosophy. Philosophy has become the stepchild of this age. However, the need for a philosophical deepening of our knowledge has already arisen in many cases. For the time being, this need is still trying to satisfy itself in a number of misguided ways. The overestimation of hypnotism, spiritualism and mysticism are among them. Raw materialism is also an attempt to find the way to a philosophical overall view of things. Injecting a little philosophy into the scientific age is a desirable goal for many today. May we remember at the right time that there is a path from natural science to philosophy and that this is mapped out in Goethe's writings.

• 1. My "Introductions to Goethe's Natural Scientific Writings" included in the Kürschner edition attempt to present in detail the scientific significance of these writings and their relationship to the present standpoint of science
• 2. A complete, systematically organized whole of Goethe's morphological and general scientific ideas will form volumes 6-12 (6, 7, 8, 9 have already been published) of the second section of the Weimar Goethe Edition. The arrangement of the material is in agreement with the editor of the volumes, Prof. Suphan, and with his continued active participation by myself and (for the 8th volume) by Prof. Bardeleben in Jena, as editor of these writings.

On the occasion of his hundred and fiftieth birthday: August 28, 1899

[ 1 ] When Johann Gottlieb Fichte sent Goethe the work in which bold intellectual power and the highest ethical seriousness found an incomparable expression, the "Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre", he enclosed a letter containing the words: "I regard you, and have always regarded you, as the representative of the purest spirituality of feeling at the presently attained stage of humanity. It is to you that philosophy rightly turns: your feeling is the same touchstone." These sentences were written in 1794. Like the great philosopher, the bearers of the most diverse intellectual currents could have written to Goethe at that time. The poet and thinker Goethe was at the height of his life at this time. Albert Bielschowski, the biographer who most lovingly immerses himself in this personality and provides us with the most intimate picture of him, already felt the same way about Goethe's contemporaries in the 1990s: "Goethe had received a dose of everything human and was therefore the 'most human of all men'. His figure had a great typical character. It was a potentized image of humanity itself. Accordingly, everyone who approached him had the impression that they had never seen such a complete human being before."

[ 2 ] This was Goethe's relationship to his spiritual environment when he entered his fiftieth year one hundred years ago. He stood there as an accomplished man. The study of antiquity had given his artistic work the degree of perfection that was demanded by the innermost essence of his personality and beyond which there was no further progress for him; his insight into the workings of nature had come to an end. From then on, all that remained for him was to carry out the ideas of nature that had taken root in his mind. At that time, the "most human of all men" had a completely mature effect on those around him.

[ 3 ] Schiller expressed this in eloquent words in the letter he addressed to Goethe on August 23, 1794: "I have long watched the course of your mind, although from quite a distance, and have noticed the path you have marked out for yourself with ever renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it in the most difficult way, from which any weaker force would be wary. You take the whole of nature together in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the ground of explanation for the individual... If you had been born a Greek, indeed only an Italian, and had been surrounded from the cradle by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. Already in your first view of things you would then have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now that you were born a German, since your Greek spirit was thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but either to become a Nordic artist yourself, or to replace your imagination with what reality withheld from it through the help of the power of thought, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within, as it were, and in a rational way." Goethe replied on the 27th: "For my birthday, which comes this week, no more pleasant gift could have been given to me than your letter, in which you, with a friendly hand, draw the sum of my existence and encourage me through your participation to a more diligent and lively use of my powers."

[ 4 ] We can expand on this sentence and say: Goethe could not have received a more meaningful gift in the time of his maturity than Schiller's devoted friendship. The latter's philosophical sense led Goethe's pure spirituality of feeling into new spiritual regions.

[ 5 ] The beautiful similarity between the two spirits that developed is characterized by Schiller in a letter to Körner: "Each could give the other something that he lacked and receive something in return. Goethe now feels the need to join me in order to continue on the path that he had previously taken alone and without encouragement, in community with me."

[ 6 ] Around the time his friendship with Goethe began, Schiller was preoccupied with the ideas expressed in his "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man". He reworked these letters, originally written for the Duke of Augustenburg, for the "Horen" in 1794. What Goethe and Schiller discussed orally at the time and what they wrote to each other was always linked to the ideas in these letters. Schiller's reflections concerned the question: What state of the soul's powers corresponds in the highest sense of the word to an existence worthy of man? "Every individual human being, one can say, carries within himself a pure, ideal human being by disposition and destiny, with whose unchanging unity in all his variations it is the great task of his existence to agree," it says in the fourth letter. A bridge is to be built from the man of everyday reality to the ideal man. There are two instincts that hold man back from ideal perfection if they are developed in a one-sided way: the sensual and the rational instinct. If the sensual instinct has the upper hand, man is subject to his instincts and passions. His actions are the result of a lower compulsion. If the rational instinct predominates, man endeavors to suppress instincts and passions and to pursue a purely spiritual virtue. In both cases, man is subject to compulsion. In the former, his sensual nature forces his spiritual nature into submission, in the latter, his spiritual nature forces his sensual nature into submission. Neither the one nor the other can justify a truly humane existence. Rather, this presupposes a perfect harmony of both basic drives. Sensuality should not be suppressed, but ennobled; instincts and passions should be raised to such a high level that they work in the direction prescribed by reason, the highest morality. And moral reason should not rule like a higher law in man, to which one submits reluctantly, but one should feel its commandments like an unconstrained need. "If we embrace with passion someone who is worthy of our contempt, we feel embarrassed by the compulsion of nature. If we are hostile to another who compels our respect, we feel the compulsion of reason. But as soon as he interests our affections and earns our respect, both the compulsion of feeling and the compulsion of reason disappear, and we begin to love him" (Letter 14). A person who experiences no coercion from either sensuality or reason, who acts out of passion in the spirit of the purest morality, is a free personality. And a society of people in which the natural instinct of the individual is so ennobled that it does not need to be restrained by the power of the whole in order to make harmonious coexistence possible is the ideal state towards which the state of power and coercion must strive. Outer freedom in living together presupposes inner freedom of the individual personalities. In this way, Schiller sought to solve the problem of freedom in human coexistence, which was on everyone's mind at the time and which sought a violent solution in the French Revolution. "To give freedom through freedom is the fundamental law" of a humane empire (27th letter).

[ 7 ] Goethe found himself deeply satisfied by these ideas. He wrote to Schiller about the "Aesthetic Letters" on October 26, 1794: "I immediately read the manuscript sent to me with great pleasure; I slurped it down in one go. Just as a delicious drink, analogous to our nature, slips down willingly and shows its healing effect on the tongue through the good mood of the nervous system, so these letters were pleasant and beneficial to me; and how could it be otherwise, since I found what I had long recognized as right, what I partly lived and partly wished to live, presented in such a coherent and noble way."

[ 8 ] This is the nature of the circle of ideas that Schiller stimulated in Goethe. Out of it has now grown a poem by the former, which, because of its mysterious character, has experienced the most varied interpretations, but which only becomes completely clear and transparent if one understands it from within the circle of imagination described: the enigmatic fairy tale with which Goethe concluded his story "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten", which appeared in the "Horen" in 1795. -- What Schiller expressed in philosophical form in his "Aesthetic Letters", Goethe portrayed in a lively fairy tale filled with rich poetic content. The humane state that man achieves when he has attained the full possession of freedom is symbolized in this fairy tale by the marriage of a young man to the beautiful lily, the representative of the realm of freedom, the ideal man that the man of everyday life carries within himself as his goal.

[ 9 ] The largest number of attempts at interpretation undertaken to date can be found in the book "Goethes Märchendichtungen" by Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck (Heidelberg 1879, Carl Wintersche Universitätsbuchhandlung). I have found that these attempts at interpretation give nice suggestions and are in many respects correct, but that none of them is completely satisfactory. I have now sought the roots of the explanation in the soil from which Schiller's "Aesthetic Letters" also grew. Although my interpretation has had a convincing effect on many listeners in several oral lectures - the first time on November 27, 1891 at the Goethe-Verein in Vienna - I have so far hesitated to submit it to print. Nor have I yet added it to my book "Goethe's Weltanschauung", published in 1897. I felt the need to allow the conviction of its correctness to mature in me over a longer period of time. It has only strengthened to this day. The following cannot follow the course of the fairy-tale plot, but must be arranged in such a way that the meaning of the poem is revealed most comfortably.¹

[ 10 ] One person who plays an outstanding role in the development of the events in the "fairy tale" is the "old man with the lamp". When he comes into the crevices with his lamp, he is asked which is the most important of the secrets he knows. He replies: "The revealed one." And when asked if he would not reveal this secret, he says: "If he knows the fourth. But the serpent knows this fourth secret and says it in the old man's ear. There can be no doubt that this secret refers to the state that all the characters in the fairy tale long for. This state is described to us at the end of the poem. We must assume that the old man knows this secret, for he is the only person who always stands above the circumstances, who directs and guides everything. So what can the serpent tell the old man? He is the most important being in the whole process. By sacrificing himself, he achieves what ultimately satisfies everyone. The old man obviously knows that he must sacrifice himself in order to bring about this satisfaction. What he does not know is when she will be ready. Because that depends on her. She must come to the realization of her own accord that her sacrifice is necessary for the common good. That she is ready for this sacrifice is the most important secret, and she tells the old man this in his ear. And now he can utter the great word: "It's time!""

[ 11 ] The desired goal is brought about by the revival of the youth, by his union with the beautiful lily and by the fact that both realms, the one on this side and the one on the other side of the river, are connected by the magnificent bridge formed from the sacrificed body of the serpent. Even if the serpent is the author of the happy state, he alone could not bestow on the youth the gifts by which he rules the newly founded kingdom. He receives them from the three kings. From the bronze king he receives the sword with the order: "The sword on the left, the right free!" The silver king gives him the sceptre, saying: "Feed the sheep!" The golden one presses the oak wreath on his head with the words: "Recognize the highest! " The three kings are the symbols for the three basic powers of the human soul, and the words they speak indicate how these three basic powers should be expressed in the perfect human being. The sword denotes will, physical strength and power. Man should not hold it in his right hand, where it signifies readiness for conflict and war, but in his left hand for protection and to ward off evil. The right hand should be free for acts of noble humanity. The handing over of the sceptre is accompanied by the words: "Feed the sheep!" They are reminiscent of Christ's words: "Feed my lambs, feed my sheep!" This king is therefore the symbol of piety, of the noble heart. The golden king imparts the gift of knowledge to the young man with the oak wreath. The will, which expresses itself in power, in violence, piety and wisdom in their most perfect form are bestowed on the youth, the representative of a humane existence. These three powers of the soul are symbolized by the three kings. Therefore, when the old man speaks the words: "There are three that reign on earth, Wisdom, Appearance and Violence", the three kings rise up, each at the mention of the soul power of which he is the symbol. There seems to be an ambiguity in the fact that the silver king is presented as the ruler in the realm of appearances, while according to his words he is to signify piety. This contradiction is immediately resolved when one considers the close relationship Goethe establishes between aesthetic feelings - which the beautiful appearance of artistic works creates - and religious feelings. Just think of sentences from him like this: "There are only two true religions: the one that recognizes and worships the sacred that dwells in and around us, completely formless, the other that recognizes and worships it in the most beautiful form." Goethe sees art as just another form of religion. When he was struck by the beauty of Greek works of art, he uttered the sentence: "There is necessity, there is God."

[ 12 ] From the meaning of the kings, we can infer other things in the fairy tale. The king of wisdom is made of gold. Where we usually encounter gold in fairy tales, we will therefore see in it the symbol of wisdom, of knowledge. This is the case with the will-o'-the-wisps and the snake. The former know how to acquire this metal easily and then throw it away lavishly and arrogantly. The serpent comes to it with difficulty, but absorbs it organically, processes it in its body and permeates itself completely with it. In the will-o'-the-wisps we undoubtedly have before us a pictorial representation of personalities who gather their wisdom from all sides and then give it away proudly and carelessly without having sufficiently imbued themselves with it. Unproductive spirits are the will-o'-the-wisps who spread undigested knowledge. If their words fall on fertile ground, they can bring about the very best. A person can impart teachings that he himself has no deep understanding of to another, and this other person can recognize a deep meaning in them. The serpent represents the solid human endeavor, the honest striding along the path of knowledge. For her, the gold squandered by the will-o'-the-wisps becomes a precious commodity that she keeps within herself. For Goethe, the thought of someone giving away the wisdom he had absorbed as a teacher was an uncomfortable one. In his opinion, teaching easily leads to appropriating science in order to be able to spend it again. He therefore considers himself fortunate that he can devote himself to research without having to hold a professorship at the same time. Only those who are in the latter position - apart from exceptions, of course - will truly immerse themselves selflessly in things and serve true humanity. Those who acquire wisdom for the sake of teaching easily become false prophets or sophists. The false lights are reminiscent of these. But only selfless knowledge, which is completely absorbed in things and which is visualized in the serpent, can come to the insight that the highest can only be reached through selfless devotion. The man who lets his everyday personality die in order to awaken the ideal man within himself reaches this highest. What a mystic like Jakob Böhme expressed with the words: death is the root of all life, Goethe expressed with the sacrificing snake. In Goethe's view, those who cannot free themselves from their small ego, who are unable to develop the higher ego within themselves, cannot reach perfection. Man must die as an individual in order to revive as a higher personality. The new life is then only the most humane, the same life that, to use Schiller's words, feels no coercion from either reason or sensuality. In "Divan" we read Goethe's beautiful words: "And as long as you do not have this, this: Die and become! You are but a dreary guest on the dark earth." And one of the "Proverbs in Prose" reads: "One must give up one's existence in order to exist." The snake gives up its existence in order to form the bridge that connects the two realms, that of sensuality and that of spirituality. The temple, with its colorful bustle, is the serpent's higher life, which it has purchased through the death of its lower nature. Her words that she wants to sacrifice herself voluntarily in order not to be sacrificed are just another expression of Jakob Böhme's sentence: "He who does not die before he dies, corrupts when he dies"; in other words, he who lives without killing off the lower nature within him, dies in the end without having any idea of the ideal man within him.

[ 13 ] The youth is driven by an indomitable desire for the realm of the beautiful lily. Consider the characteristics of this realm. Although people have the deepest longing for the realm of the lily, they can only enter it at certain times. At midday, when the serpent forms a bridge over the river; then in the evening and morning, when the giant's shadow spreads across the river. Anyone who approaches the ruler of this realm, the beautiful lily, without having the inner aptitude for it, can damage his life in the most serious way. Furthermore, the lily itself has a desire for the other realm. Finally, the ferryman can take anyone across, but no one across. So what does the realm of the beautiful lily mean? Goethe says in "Proverbs in Prose": "Everything that liberates our spirit without giving us dominion over ourselves is pernicious." Only those people who are allowed to abandon themselves unreservedly to their inclinations have mastery over themselves, because these are only effective in a moral sense. "Duty, where one loves what one commands oneself", is a saying by Goethe. Those who seize freedom without having control over themselves are like the young man who was paralyzed by the touch of the lily. The realm of the one-sidedly acting instinct of reason, of purely spiritual morality, is that of the lily. That of one-sided sensuality is on the other side of the river. In the still imperfect human being the harmony between sensual instinct and rational instinct is generally not established. Only at certain moments does he act out of passion in such a way that this action is also moral in itself. This is symbolized by the fact that the snake can only form a bridge over the river at certain moments, at midday. The fact that the lily longs for the other realm expresses the fact that the rational instinct only fulfills its nature when it does not act like a strict legislator beyond the desires and instincts and restrains them, but when it penetrates them, connects with them. The ferryman can bring everyone across, but no one across. Men come from the realm of reason without having done anything themselves, but they do not return from the realm of the passions to their true homeland without their intervention. Except in those moments when man reaches the ideal state of life by balancing reason and sensuality, he also seeks to attain it by force, by arbitrariness, which finds expression in political revolutions. Goethe brings the giant and his shadow for this kind of combination of both realms. In revolutions, the urge for the ideal state lives itself out dully, just as the shadow of the giant lies across the river at dusk. There is also historical evidence that this interpretation of the giant is correct. On October 16, 1795, Schiller wrote to Goethe, who was on a journey that was to extend to Frankfurt a. M.: "It is indeed dear to me to know that you are still far away from the Main River. The shadow of the giant could easily touch you a little roughly." What the arbitrariness, the lawless course of historical events has in its wake is thus meant by the shadow of the giant.

[ 14 ] Reason and sensuality interpose themselves so that the still imperfect human being is prevented from destroying morality through his passions: Custom, all that is social order of the present. This order finds its symbol in the river. In the third of the "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" Schiller says of the state: "The compulsion of needs threw man into it before he could choose this state in his freedom; necessity arranged him according to mere natural laws before he could do so according to the laws of reason." The river separates the two realms until the serpent sacrifices itself. The ferryman wants to be rewarded by every wanderer with the fruits of the earth; the state and society impose real duties on man; they can no more use the phrase-like chatter of false prophets and people who merely pay with words than the ferryman can use the gold pieces of the will-o'-the-wisps. The old woman confesses herself a debtor to the river and clings to it with her body; her form disappears because she is a debtor. Thus the individual confesses himself a debtor to the state; he is absorbed in the state, surrenders a part of his self to it. As long as man is not at such a height that he acts freely out of himself morally, he must renounce to determine a part of his self of his own accord; he must commit himself to the state.

[ 15 ] The lamp of the old has the property of shining only where another light is already present. We must remember the saying of an old mystic repeated by Goethe: "If the eye were not sunny, how could we see the light? If God's own power did not live in us, how could the divine delight us?" Just as the lamp does not shine in the dark, so the light of truth and knowledge does not shine for those who do not have the appropriate organs, the inner light, to meet it. But it is this light of wisdom that leads man to his goal; it brings him to establish the harmony of his instincts. This light allows him to recognize the laws of things. What for him is dead matter is transformed through knowledge into a living thing that is transparent to our spirit. The world stands differently before him who has recognized it than before him who lives without knowledge. The transformation that all things undergo for our spirit when they are illuminated by the light of knowledge is symbolized by the transformation that things undergo through the light of the lamp. This light transforms stones into gold, wood into silver and dead animals into precious stones.

[ 16 ] Through the sacrifice of the serpent, the realm of the fourth king, who chaotically carried gold, silver and ore, comes to an end. The harmonious interaction of the three metals that make up the other three kings begins. Through the awakening of the ideal man, the forces of the soul cease to work chaotically and one-sidedly, they achieve perfect harmony. The will-o'-the-wisps lick up the gold of the fourth king. Once the humane state has been reached, the unproductive spirits have the business of scientifically processing the past, in which the imperfect still prevailed, as history. The figure of the pug also sheds light on the nature of the will-o'-the-wisps. They throw him their gold and he dies from eating it. Thus perishes he to whom false prophets and sophists teach their indigestible doctrines.

[ 17 ] The temple is erected on the river in which the marriage of the young man with the beautiful lily takes place. The free society will grow out of the coercive state, in which everyone can abandon himself to his inclinations, because they only work in the sense that noble coexistence of people is possible. Then man will no longer experience the satisfying state only in moments, he will no longer seek to attain it by revolutionary force, it will be present for him in every moment. At the end of the fairy tale we find the poetic image for this truth: "The bridge is built; all the people continually cross over and over, to this day the bridge teems with wanderers, and the temple is the most visited on the whole earth."

[ 18 ] If one accepts this basis of interpretation, then every event, every person in the fairy tale is self-explanatory. Take the hawk, for example. It catches the sun's rays in order to reflect them back to the earth before the sun itself is able to send its light directly onto the earth. In this way, human intuition can also predict the events of a not-too-distant future. In the servants of the beautiful lily one can see representatives of those happily inclined human beings to whom the harmony of sensuality and reason is given by their nature. They will live on into the new realm without noticing the transition, just as the servants slumber during the moment of transformation. - The fact that the symbol of brute force, the giant, finally plays a role as an hour hand, I would like to interpret as meaning that unreason can also fill its place in the workings of the world, if it is not used for activities that befit the free human spirit, but is brought to unfold its power within strict natural regularity.

[ 19 ] So Goethe was inspired by Schiller to express his ethical creed in his own poetic way, as Schiller himself did in a different way in the "Aesthetic Letters". In the letter in which he announces the receipt of the manuscript, Schiller refers to the discussions that took place about these ideas in the period in question: "The "fairy tale" is colorful and funny enough, and I find the idea you once mentioned: "the mutual assistance of forces and the rejection of each other, quite well executed."

• 1. In my lectures I have often been asked by listeners whether the "Fairy Tale" is included in the Goethe editions. I therefore expressly note that it is included in every Goethe edition and that it forms the conclusion of the stories "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten".