The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] I have described the evolution of thought from the age of Plato to that of Kant in order to be able to show the impressions which Goethe was bound to receive when he turned to the outcome of the philosophical thoughts to which he might have adhered in order to satisfy his intense desire for knowledge. He found in the philosophies no answer to the innumerable problems which his nature impelled him to face. Indeed, whenever he delved into the world-conception of some particular philosopher, he found an opposition between the drift of his questions and the world of thought from which he would have liked to get counsel. The reason for this lies in the fact that the one-sided Platonic separation of idea and experience was repugnant to his being. When he observed Nature the ideas lay there before him. He could therefore only think of Nature as permeated by ideas. A world of ideas that neither permeates the objects of Nature nor brings about their appearance and disappearance, their becoming and growth, is to him nothing but a feeble web of thought. The logical fabrication of trains of thoughts without penetration into the life and creative activity of Nature appeared to him unfruitful, for he felt himself intimately one with Nature. He looked upon himself as a living member of Nature. In his view, all that arose in his spirit had been permitted by Nature so to arise. Man should not sit away in a corner and imagine that from there he can spin out of himself a web of thoughts which elucidates the true being of things. He should rather allow the stream of world-events to flow through him perpetually. Then he will feel that the world of ideas is nothing else than the active, creative power of Nature. He will not then want to stand above the objects in order to reflect upon them, but he will sink himself into their depths and extract from them all that lives and works in them.

[ 2 ] Goethe's artistic nature led him to this mode of thinking. He felt his poetic creations grow out of his personality with the same necessity as that which makes a flower blossom. The way in which the spirit within him produced the work of Art seemed to him no different from the way in which Nature produces her creatures. And just as in the work of Art the spiritual element cannot be separated from the spiritless material, so it was impossible for him, in face of a natural object, to think the perception without the idea. A point of view to which the perception is only an indefinite, confused element and which wishes to see the world of ideas separated off, purged of all experience, is therefore foreign to him. In all those world-conceptions in which the elements of a partially understood Platonism lived, he sensed something contrary to Nature. For this reason he could not find in the philosophers what he sought. He was seeking for the ideas which live in the objects and which allow all the particulars of experience to appear as if growing out of a living whole, and the philosophers offered him husks of thought that they had combined into systems according to the principles of Logic. He always found that he was thrown back on himself when he turned to others for explanation of the problems which Nature set him.

[ 3 ] One of the things from which Goethe suffered before his Italian journey was that his yearning for knowledge could find no satisfaction. In Italy he was able to form a view of the motive forces which give rise to works of Art. He recognised that perfect works of Art contain what men reverence as the Divine, the Eternal. After beholding the artistic creations which interested him most deeply, he wrote these words: “The great works of Art, like the highest creations of Nature, have been brought forth in conformity with true and natural law. All that is arbitrary, that is invented, collapses: there is Necessity, there is God.” The art of the Greeks drew forth this utterance from him: “I suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to those laws by which Nature herself proceeds, and of which I am on the track.” What Plato believed to have found in the world of ideas and what the philosophers could never bring home to Goethe, streamed forth to him from the works of Art in Italy. What he is able to regard as the basis of knowledge is revealed to him for the first time, in a perfect form, in Art. He sees in artistic production a mode and higher stage of Nature's working; artistic creation is to him an enhanced Nature-creation. He expressed this later in his characterisation of Winckelmann: “In that man is placed on Nature's pinnacle, he regards himself as another whole Nature, whose task is to bring forth inwardly yet another pinnacle. For this purpose he heightens his powers, imbues himself with all perfections and virtues, summons discrimination, order and harmony, and rises finally to the production of a work of Art.” Goethe does not attain to his world-conception along the path of logical deduction but as a result of the contemplation of the essence of Art. And what he found in Art he seeks also in Nature.

[ 4 ] The kind of activity by means of which Goethe acquired his knowledge of Nature does not differ essentially from artistic activity. Both play into and mutually react on each other. In Goethe's view the artist must surely become mightier and more effective when, in addition to his talent, “he is a well-informed Botanist, when he knows, from the root upwards, the influence of the different parts on the health and growth of the plant, their significance and mutual interaction, when he penetrates into and reflects upon the successive development of the flowers, leaves, fertilisation, fruit and new seed. He will not then reveal his own ‘taste’ by a choice from among the phenomena, but by a true portrayal of the qualities he will instruct and at the same time fill us with admiration.” The work of Art is therefore the more perfect, the more fully it expresses the same law as that embodied in the work of Nature to which it corresponds. There is but one uniform realm of truth, and this includes both Art and Nature. Hence the faculty of artistic creation cannot differ essentially from the faculty of the cognition of Nature. Goethe says in reference to the artist's style that “it is based on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things in so far as it is granted us to cognise this essence in visible, tangible forms.” The view of the world that had proceeded from one-sided understanding of Platonic conceptions draws a sharp boundary line between Science and Art. It bases artistic activity upon phantasy, upon feeling, and would represent scientific results as the outcome of a development of concepts that is free of the element of phantasy. Goethe sees the matter differently. When he directs his gaze to Nature he finds there a sum-total of ideas; but to him the ideal constituent is not confined within the single object of experience; the idea points out beyond the particular object to related objects wherein it manifests in a similar way. The philosophical observer takes hold of this ideal element and brings it to direct expression in his thought-creations. This ideal element works also upon the artist. But it stimulates him to give form to a creation wherein the idea does not merely function as in a work of Nature, but becomes present in appearance. That which in a work of Nature is merely ideal, and is revealed to the spiritual vision of the observer, becomes concrete, perceptible reality in the work of Art. The artist realises the ideas of Nature. It is not, however, necessary that he should be conscious of these in the form of ideas. When he contemplates an object or an event something else assumes direct form in his spirit—something that contains as actual appearance what Nature contains only as idea. The artist gives us images of Nature's works and in these images the ideal content of Nature's works is transformed into perceptual content. The philosopher shows how Nature presents herself to contemplative thought; the artist shows how Nature would appear if she were to reveal openly her active forces not merely to thought but also to perception. It is one and the same truth that the philosopher presents in the form of thought and the artist in the form of an image. The two differ only in their means of expression.

[ 5 ] The insight into the true relationship of idea and experience which Goethe acquired in Italy is only the fruit of the seed that was lying concealed in his nature. The Italian journey afforded the sun-warmth which was able to ripen the seed. In the Essay “Nature” which appeared in 1782 in the Tiefurt Journal, and for which Goethe was responsible, [Compare my proof of Goethe's authorship in Vol. VII of the publications of the Goethe Society.] the germs of the later Goethean world-conception are already to be found. What is here dim feeling later develops into clear, definite thought. “Nature! we are surrounded and embraced by her, we cannot draw back from her, nor can we penetrate more deeply into her being. She lifts us, unasked and unwarned, into the gyrations of her dance and whirls us away until we fall exhausted from her arms. ... She (Nature) has thought and she broods unceasingly, not as a man but as Nature. ... She has neither language nor speech, but she creates tongues and hearts through which she speaks and feels. ... It was not I who spoke of her. Nay, it was she who spoke it all, true and false. Hers is the blame for all things, hers the credit.” At the time when Goethe wrote these sentences it was not yet clear to him how Nature expresses her ideal being through man; but what he did feel was that it is the voice of the Spirit of Nature that sounds in the Spirit of Man.

[ 6 ] In Italy Goethe found the spiritual atmosphere which was able to develop his organs of cognition in the only way that in accordance with their inherent nature they could develop, if he were ever to find complete satisfaction. In Rome he had “many discussions with Moriz about Art and its theoretical demands;” as he observed the metamorphosis of plants on the journey there developed in him a natural method that later proved fruitful for the cognition of the whole of organic Nature. “For as vegetation unfolded her procedure before me stage by stage, I could not fall into error, but allowing things as I did to take their own course, I could not fail to recognise the ways and means by which the most undeveloped state was brought to perfection.” A few years after his return from Italy Goethe was able to find a mode of procedure, born of his spiritual needs, for the observation of inorganic Nature also. “In connection with physical investigations the conviction was borne in upon me that in all observation of objects the highest duty is to search for every condition under which the phenomenon appears, with the greatest exactitude, and to strive for the greatest possible perfection of the phenomena; because ultimately they are bound to range themselves alongside each other or rather overlap each other, to form a kind of organisation before the gaze of the investigator, and to manifest their inner, common life.”

[ 7 ] Nowhere did Goethe find enlightenment. He had always to enlighten himself. He tried to find the reason for this and came to the conclusion that he had no facility for philosophy in the proper sense. The reason, however, lies in the fact that the one-sided comprehension of the Platonic mode of thought which dominated all philosophies accessible to Goethe was contrary to the healthy tendency of his nature. In his youth he had repeatedly turned to Spinoza. He admits that this philosopher always had a “pacifying effect” upon him. The reason for this is that Spinoza conceives of the universe as one great unity with the single parts proceeding necessarily from the whole. But when Goethe entered into the content of Spinoza's Philosophy he still felt it to be alien to him. “It must not be imagined that I was able to agree absolutely with his writings and admit their truth word for word; for I had already realised only too clearly that no one person understands another, nor thinks as another, even although their words may be the same; I had realised that a conversation or reading would awaken different trains of thought in different people. And one will credit the author of Werther and Faust with the fact that, deeply permeated by such misunderstandings, he is not conceited enough to imagine that he has perfect understanding of a man, who, as a disciple of Descartes has raised himself through mathematical and rabbinical culture to the summit of thought which up to the present time seems to be the goal of all speculative endeavours.” It was not the fact that Spinoza had been taught by Descartes, nor that Spinoza had attained to the summit of thought as the result of mathematical and rabbinical culture that made him an element to which Goethe could not wholly surrender himself, but it was Spinoza's purely logical method of handling knowledge—a method that is alien to reality. Goethe could not surrender himself to a mode of pure thinking free of all element of experience, because he could not separate this from the sum-total of the real. He did not want to connect one thought with another in a merely logical sense. Such an activity of thought seemed to him rather to depart from true reality. He felt that he must sink his spirit into the experience in order to reach the idea. The mutual interplay of idea and perception was to Goethe a spiritual breathing. “Time is regulated by the swings of the pendulum; the moral scientific world is regulated by the interplay of idea and experience.” To observe the world and its phenomena in the sense of these words seemed to Goethe to be in conformity with Nature. For he had no doubt but that Nature observes the same procedure; that she (Nature) is a development from a mysterious, living Whole into the diverse and specific phenomena that fill space and time. The mysterious Whole is the world of the idea. “The idea is eternal and unique; that we also use the plural is unfortunate. All things that we perceive and of which we can speak are but manifestations of the idea; we utter concepts and to this extent the idea is itself a concept.” Nature's creative activity proceeds from the ideal Whole into the particular that is given to perception as something real. The observer ought therefore “to recognise the ideal in the real and allay his temporary dissatisfaction with the finite by rising to the infinite.” Goethe is convinced that “Nature proceeds according to idea just in the same way as man follows an idea in all that he undertakes.” When man really succeeds in rising to the idea and in comprehending from out of the idea the details of perception, he accomplishes the same thing as Nature accomplishes by allowing her creations to issue forth from the mysterious Whole. So long as man has no sense of the working and creative activity of the idea, his thinking is divorced from living Nature. He must regard thinking as a purely subjective activity that is able to project an abstract picture of Nature. But directly he senses the way in which the idea lives and is active in his inner being he regards himself and Nature as one Whole, and what makes its appearance in his inner being as a subjective element is for him at the same time objective; he knows that he no longer confronts Nature as a stranger, but he feels that he has grown together with the whole of her. The subjective has become objective; the objective is wholly permeated with the spirit. Goethe thinks that Kant's fundamental error consists in the fact that he (Kant) “regards the subjective, cognitive faculty itself as object, and makes indeed a sharp but not wholly correct division at the point where subjective and objective meet “ (Weimar Edition, Part II. Volume II. Page 376.). The cognitive faculty appears to man as subjective only so long as he does not notice that it is Nature herself who speaks through this faculty. Subjective and objective meet when the objective world of ideas lives in the subject and when all that is active in Nature herself lives in the spirit of man. When this happens, all antithesis between subject and object ceases. This antithesis has meaning only so long as it is artificially sustained and man regards the ideas as being his own thoughts by which the being of Nature is reflected, but in which, however, this being is not itself active. Kant and his followers had no inkling of the fact that the essential being of objects is directly experienced in the ideas of reason. To them the ideal is merely subjective, and they therefore came to the conclusion that the ideal can necessarily only be valid if that to which it is related, the world of experience, is also merely subjective. The Kantian mode of thought is in sharp contrast to Goethe's views. There are, it is true, isolated utterances of Goethe where he speaks with some appreciation of Kant's views. He says that he has been present at many discussions of these views. “With a little attention I was able to observe the reappearance of the old cardinal question—the question as to how much the Self and how much the external world contributes to our spiritual existence. I had never separated these two, and when I philosophized in my own fashion about objects, I did so with unconscious naiveté and really believed that I saw my opinions clearly before me. As soon, however, as that dispute came into the discussion, I wanted to range myself on that side which does man most credit, and I gave entire approbation to all those friends who maintained with Kant that even if all knowledge commences with experience it is not necessarily all derived from experience.” Neither does the idea, in Goethe's view, originate from that portion of experience which may be perceived through the senses of man. Reason, Imagination (Phantasie) must be active and penetrate to the inner being of things in order to master the ideal element of existence. To this extent the spirit of man participates in the birth of knowledge. Goethe thinks that honour is due to man because the higher reality which is inaccessible to the senses, is made manifest in his spirit; Kant, on the other hand, denies the character of higher reality of the world of experience, because it contains elements that are derived from the spirit. Goethe was only able to find himself in some measure of agreement with the Kantian principles when he had interpreted them in the light of his own world-conception. The fundamental principles of the Kantian mode of thought are strongly antagonistic to Goethe's nature. If he does not emphasise this sharply enough, it is really only because he will not allow himself to enter into these fundamental principles because they are too alien to him. “It was the Introduction (to The Critique of Pure Reason) that pleased me; I could not venture into the labyrinth itself for here I was restrained by my poetic gift and there by the human intellect, and I felt no benefit anywhere.” In reference to his discussions with the followers of Kant, Goethe had to make this confession: “They listened to me, it is true, but could give me no reply nor be helpful in any way. More than once it happened that one or another of them admitted in smiling admiration, ‘it is certainly analogous to the Kantian mode of conception, but in a very peculiar sense.’” ... It was, as I have shown, not analogous at all, but the very reverse of Kant's mode of conception.

[ 8 ] It is interesting to see how Schiller tries to explain to himself the difference between the Goethean mode of thinking and his own. He senses the originality and freedom of Goethe's world-conception. He cannot, however, rid his mind of thought elements that are the result of a one-sided conception of Platonism. He cannot attain the insight that idea and perception are not separated from each other in reality, but are only thought of as separated by the intellect that has been led astray by a misguided trend of ideas. Therefore in contrast to the Goethean mode of thinking which he describes as intuitive, he places his own speculative mode of thinking and asserts that both must lead to one and the same goal if they only operate with sufficient power. Schiller assumes that the intuitive mind adheres to the empirical, the individual, and rises from there to the law, to the idea. If such a mind is endowed with the quality of genius it will cognise in the empirical, the necessary; in the individual, the species. The speculative mind, on the other hand, must proceed by the reverse path. The law, the idea, has first to be given to it and from thence it descends to the empirical and individual. If such a mind is endowed with the quality of genius it will of course always have the species only in view, but with the possibility of life and with an established relation to real objects. The assumption of a special type of mind—of the speculative in contradistinction to the intuitive—is based on the belief that the world of ideas has an existence separate and distinct from the world of perception. If this were the case a path could be found along which the content of the ideas about the objects of perception might enter the mind even when the mind does not seek it in experience. If, however, the world of ideas is inseparably bound up with the reality given in experience, if the two only exist as one Whole, there can only be an intuitive cognition that seeks for the idea in the experience and apprehends the species along with the individual. The truth is that there is no purely speculative mind in Schiller's sense. For the species exist only within the sphere to which the individuals also pertain. The mind cannot find them elsewhere. If a so-called speculative mind really has conceptions of species, these are derived from observation of the real world. When the living feeling for this origin, for the essential connection of the species with the individual, is lost, there arises the opinion that such ideas can arise in the reason also without experience. Those who hold this opinion describe a number of abstract conceptions of species as the content of the pure reason because they do not see the threads which bind these ideas to experience. Such an illusion can occur most easily in connection with ideas that are the most general and comprehensive in character. Because such ideas cover a wide region of reality, a great deal that appertains to the entities belonging to this region is effaced or obliterated. A man may absorb a number of such general ideas through tradition and then come to believe that they are inborn in human beings or that they have been spun by man from out of pure reason. A mind that lapses into such a belief may regard itself as speculative in character. It will, however, never be able to extract from its world of ideas any ideas other than have been placed there by tradition. Schiller is in error when he says that the speculative mind, if it is endowed with the quality of genius, produces “indeed only species but with the possibility of life and with an established relation to real objects” (Compare Schiller's letter to Goethe, 23rd August, 1794.). A truly speculative mind, living only in concepts of species, could find in its world of ideas no established relationship to reality other than that already existing within that world of ideas. A mind that has relation to the reality of Nature and in spite of this designates itself as speculative, is labouring under a delusion as to its own nature. This delusion can mislead it into negligence of its relation to reality and to actual life. It will imagine itself able to dispense with direct perception because it believes that other sources of truth are in its possession. The result of this always is that the ideal world of such a mind bears a dull, pale character. The fresh colours of life will be lacking from its thoughts. Those who wish to live with reality will be able to acquire little from such a world of thought. It cannot be admitted that the speculative type of mind is on the same level as the intuitive; it is stunted and impoverished. The intuitive mind is not concerned with individuals alone, it does not seek the character of necessity in the empirical. But when it applies itself to Nature, perception and idea coalesce into unity. Both are seen to exist within each other and are perceived as one Whole. The intuitive mind may rise to the most universal truths, to the highest abstractions, but direct, actual life will always be evident in its world of thought. Goethe's thinking was of this nature. In his Anthropology, Heinroth has spoken about this kind of thinking in striking words that pleased Goethe in the highest degree, because they explained to him his own nature. “Dr. Heinroth speaks favourably of my nature and activity, indeed he describes my modus operandi as original; he says that my thinking faculty is objectively active, by which he means to express that my thinking does not sever itself from the objects; that the elements inherent in the objects and the perceptions enter into my thinking and are permeated by it in a most intimate way; that my perceiving is itself thinking, my thinking, perceiving.” Fundamentally speaking, Heinroth is describing nothing else than the way in which all sound thinking is related to objects. Any other mode of procedure is a deviation from the natural path. If perception predominates in a man he adheres to the individual element; he cannot penetrate to the deeper foundations of reality. If abstract thought predominates in him, his concepts are manifestly inadequate to comprehend the whole living content of the real. The extreme of the first deviation from the natural path produces the crude empiricist who contents himself with the individual facts; the extreme of the other deviation is represented in the philosopher who worships pure Reason and who merely thinks, without realising that thoughts in their essential being, are bound up with perception. In beautiful imagery Goethe describes the feeling of the thinker who rises to the highest truths without losing the sense for living experience. At the beginning of the year 1784 he writes an Essay on Granite. He goes to a hill composed of this stone where he is able to soliloquise as follows: “Here you are resting on a substructure that extends to the very depths of the Earth; no newer stratum, no deposited, heaped-up fragments are laid between you and the firm foundation of the primordial world; you are not passing over a continuous grave as in yonder fruitful valleys; these peaks have brought forth no living thing, have devoured no living thing; they are antecedent to all life, they transcend all life. In this moment when the inner attractive and moving forces of the Earth are working directly upon me, when the influence of the heavens hovers more closely around me, it is given to me to attain to a more sublime perception of Nature, and as the human spirit gives life to everything, an image whose sublimity I cannot withstand, is stirred to activity within me. looking down this naked peak with scanty moss hardly perceptible at its base, I say to myself that this loneliness overtakes one who would fain open his soul only to the first, oldest, deepest feelings of truth. Such an one can say to himself: here on the most ancient, imperishable altar, built immediately above the depths of Creation, I bring a sacrifice to the Being of all Beings. I feel the first firm beginnings of our existence; I look over the world with its valleys now rugged, now undulating, its wide fertile meadows, and my soul, raised above itself and all else, yearns for the Heavens that draw nigh. But soon the burning sun calls back thirst and hunger—human needs—and one looks around for those valleys above which one's spirit had raised itself.” Such enthusiasm in knowledge, such a sense for the oldest, immutable truths can only develop in a man who continually finds his way back from the spheres of the world of ideas to direct perceptions.

The most important question in modern intellectual life, a question that casts its shadow on the whole of cultural life, is one that really everybody is aware of today in their feelings; yet it can only be solved, or attempted to be solved, by a method that leads to supersensible perception—from the ordinary perception of material things to Imagination, Inspiration and finally Intuition. This most important question is one that is bound to be raised by every wholly unprejudiced soul, anyone with inner integrity who has a genuine interest in the nature of man. On the one hand the soul has to face the moral, the ethical views that may be held today, and on the other it must consider life as it is seen from the scientific point of view today, a view that is rightly given recognition. Ethical and moral life faces us with burning questions today for the very reason that this is an age when ethical questions are at the same time also social questions, and the social question is one every human being feels to be a burning question.

Let us consider how the existing world presents itself to the mind in modern thought on the basis of scientific knowledge. Genuine science, genuine study of nature, aims to understand the things in this world as they are of necessity, in their causal origins. And these causal origins, this necessity, is to be consistently applied to everything that is to be found in the order of the universe, including man. When we want to understand man through science today, we apply to him, almost as a matter of routine, the method of gaining knowledge we habitually use for natural phenomena that are outside of man. We then establish hypotheses, with greater or lesser daring, to extend what science has discovered in relation to nature as it lies before us, for our observation, to cosmic facts and the nature of the cosmos. Hypotheses as to the beginning and the end of the earth are evolved on the basis of ideas formed in science. Using this scientific approach, we come to a point where we have to say to ourselves, if we are consistent in our methods: We must not stop when it comes to the freedom of man. I have already made some reference to the problem we are facing here.

Anyone who because of a certain desire for consistency looks for a formalized, standardized system that will explain the world will find that he has to decide between the premise of freedom as something given empirically, as an immediate human experience, and on the other hand natural necessity pertaining to everything. As a result of the habits of thinking and perception in which men and women have been trained over the last centuries, he will decide in favour of nature-given necessity. He has the experience of freedom, yet he will declare it to be an illusion. He will extend the sphere of absolute necessity to the most inward and subtle aspects of human nature, with the result that man is completely held in the cocoon spun by science-determined inevitability. And the same will be done with regard to the hypothetical ideas concerning the beginning and end of the earth. The laws discovered in physics, chemistry and so on are used to develop theories such as the nebula theory, which is the Kant-Laplace theory of the origins of the earth. The second thermodynamic law is used to develop theories about the heat death the earth is supposed to suffer in the end.¹

In this way we can touch even on the most intimate aspects of human nature and the very limits of the universe by applying an approach that has undoubtedly proved fruitful in modern times when it comes to elucidating the phenomena of nature, phenomena that surround us in the world where we walk about between birth and death. But when we reflect on ourselves to some extent and ask ourselves where the true rank and dignity of man lies, what value there really is in man, we turn our attention also to the moral sphere, the sphere that is responsible for moral and ethical impulses in our conscious mind. We feel that a form of existence which is really worth calling human can only be achieved by following ethical ideas, ideas that we enter into and imbue with religious feeling. We cannot call ourselves human in the real sense of the word unless we think also of impulses within us that we call moral, impulses that then flow out into the social life. We see these impulses as bearing within them the pulse of what we call the divine element in the world order. Yet for anyone who today in all honesty takes up the point of view from which an overview can be gained of the order of nature based on mechanism and causality, on necessity, there can be no bridge from this natural order—and a certain honesty in our view of things compels us also to include man in this order—to that other order which is a moral one, the order man must consider connected with all of his rank and dignity, all of his value.

Very recently, however, a certain way of putting things has been evolved that aims to pretend that the gulf which has opened up between two essential elements of our human nature does not exist. It has been said that the term ‘scientific’ can be applied only to anything that aims to explain the world, inclusive of man, inclusive of the beginning and the end of the world, in terms of natural necessity. From this point of view, nothing is considered valid unless it fits without contradiction into the system of thought representing this natural order. Separately from this, however, a realm with quite a different kind of certainty is set up, a realm based on certainty of faith. We look to the moral light that shines within us and say to ourselves: No scientific knowledge can in any way affirm the significance of this moral realm; yet man has to find certainty of faith; he must come to acknowledge this realm out of the subjective element, so that he is in some way connected with the realm that bears within it the stream of moral imperatives.

Many people will no doubt feel reassured when they have neatly separated the things one is able to know from the things one is supposed to believe. Perhaps such a separation provides a certain reassurance in life, a feeling of certainty in life. Yet if we delve deeply enough—not with one-sided thinking but with everything our thinking can experience when it links up with the whole range of faculties in the human soul and spirit—we must arrive at the following. We shall then have to say to ourselves that if the realm of natural inevitability really is the way we have got in the habit of visualizing it in recent centuries, then there is no possible way of saving the moral realm. This has to be said because there is simply no evidence anywhere in this moral realm of a power to prevail against the realm of the natural order. Merely consider the idea which had to evolve, with a certain inner justification, out of the concept of entropy²—let me state explicitly, had to evolve—that one day all other forms of energy on earth will have been converted into heat, that this heat cannot convert to other forms of energy, that this will lead to the heat death of the earth. Honest thinking, holding fast to the thought habits of modern times and therefore the principle of causation, will be unable to say anything but that this earth subject to heat death is a vast battlefield strewn with the corpses not only of all men, but also of all moral ideals. Those must disappear into a state of non-being once heat death has come upon the earth, according to a point of view that considers natural necessity to be the only valid principle.

The feeling this engenders in a person who looks at the world with an unprejudiced eye is one that takes away his certainty of a moral world order. It inevitably causes him to see the world in a dualistic way, so that really all he can say is: The moral ideal arises from the sphere of natural inevitability like froth and bubbles, and like froth and bubbles moral impulses shall vanish. You see, the inward element which has to do with the rank and dignity of man cannot be considered something which is in being and can be incorporated in a philosophy based on recognition of natural inevitability only. As I have said, it is possible to make formal distinction between scientific knowledge and faith, yet as soon as one assumes such a certainty of faith, science has to examine it rigorously, and the result will be that certainty of faith cannot provide inner assurance as to the reality of the moral sphere.

This has an effect not only on man's theoretical ideas. In anyone who is honest about life it must have an effect on his deepest feelings. In the realm of man's deepest feelings, processes that are deeply unconscious will then have a destructive effect on the foundations of man's inner certainty, on that element in man that actually enables him not only to think of his relationship to the world as one that holds firm, but also to feel and to will it to be such. Anyone who has some understanding of how these things hang together will be able to say to himself: The devastating waves thrown up so ominously from the depths of human life in the 20th century have in the final instance arisen from the accord, the unison—though we could also say the discord—of everything individual human beings experience for themselves. This disastrous time we live in has in the final instance been born out of the innermost condition and constitution of human souls and human hearts. The type of inner conflict I have described does not stay merely at the surface of soul life, as a theoretical view. It descends to the depths from which our instinctive life, the life of conscience, arises. There, the conflict is transformed into feelings that are at odds with the order existing on earth, feelings that give rise to disorder, to asocial attitudes, rather than a potential for creating social form.

What I have said today will not be appreciated to its full extent by many people; but taking a fairly unbiased look at the way the human intellect has developed over the last few hundred years and particularly in most recent times, it is possible to foresee the moral consequences, the kind of social structure which will have to result from this conflict in human souls—and within the very near future. We shall never find the answer to the burning question as to why we live in such troubled times unless we set about finding the building stones for what in the depths of human life are our own needs.

The opposite to what I have described is the cosmic insight sought through the spiritual science of Anthroposophy by progressing through Imagination and Inspiration to Intuition. We shall see how the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is able to come to terms with the most burning question of today, the question I have just been discussing, because of the insights it believes it is able to gain by following its path. I have described the path spiritual science takes through Imagination and Inspiration. I have pointed out that the exercises which I cannot describe in detail on this occasion may be found in my books, books I have mentioned several times before. Those exercises to achieve imaginative perception will make the element of spirit and soul a conscious content in the same way as our ordinary consciousness has a content within it when it lives in memory. Behind that which arises as memory, by deliberate choice or involuntarily, lies our physical and etheric organization. Processes occurring in our physical and etheric organization are coming up into conscious awareness at that point. With the exercises described in great detail in my books, it is possible to achieve purely in soul and spirit what our physical and etheric organization does in the ordinary process of remembering. As a result, ideas will arise that in a purely formal way are similar to remembered ideas, but they relate to an objective external content, not to one based on personal experience. By practising Imagination in this way we prepare ourselves for insight into a genuinely objective supersensible world.

To advance to Inspiration, it will then be necessary not only to practise the generation of such ideas in soul and spirit, ideas similar to remembered ideas, but we shall have to direct our efforts towards forgetting in soul and spirit, removing such Imaginations from the consciousness we have now achieved. We need to practise no longer to have the Imaginations, for they are unreal, but deliberately to remove them from our conscious mind, so that we then have a conscious mind, if I may put it like this, that is to some extent empty. If we achieve this, we shall have the ability, with an ego strengthened by all these exercise processes, to find our way to the revelations of the objective supersensible world. Where our Imaginations previously have been subjective, objective Imaginations will now light up in our conscious mind. The lighting up of such objective Imaginations, Imaginations not arising out of us but out of spiritual objectivity, that is Inspiration. We are in a way reaching the borders of the supersensible sphere which reveals its outer aspect to us in those Imaginations. In the sphere of our sensory perception, we can convince ourselves of the reality of the objective outside world that provides the basis for this world of the senses. We can do this by allowing the whole human being to be active within this sphere of sensory perception. In the same way, the Imaginations achieved at this point reveal to us with the fullest power of conviction the supersensible world which they bring to expression.

It is now a question of continuing on this path of knowledge to reach a further stage. We achieve this by not merely-taking the process of forgetting so far that we rid ourselves of Imaginations, but by going yet one step farther. When we attain to the imaginative world, the first thing to show itself is our own life, the course it has taken. We then live not just in the moment in our conscious awareness but within the whole river of life, gong back almost to the moment of birth. If we are then able to progress to Inspiration, the overview we have so far had over our life from the time of birth expands, and we perceive a supersensible world out of which we have come into the physical, sense-perceptible world through birth or through conception. The field of our spiritual vision will extend to the worlds we lived through before birth or conception and which we shall live through again when we have gone through the gate of death. The prospect of the supersensible world to which we belong opens up through insight gained in Inspiration.

It is possible to take our efforts beyond the point where we get rid of Imaginations containing details from within the horizon of the Imaginative world. We may forget the Imagination of our whole being as a human person, that is, discard, if we gain strength to do so, eradicate all we have experienced from birth what has become the collective content of our ego, and also what has been added as our horizon expanded to include a spiritual world. This will not weaken the ego but indeed strengthen it, through self-forgetting. And it will gradually take us into the reality of the spiritual world, the world above the one perceptible to the senses. We live into union with the reality of this spiritual world. We come to see our vision of repeated earlier lives as something showing us the ego at different stages. And once we have gained the ability to forget the ego at its present stage, that is, to shut out its imaginative content, we come to see the eternal ‘I’ or ego.

The things Anthroposophy speaks of are not derived out of any kind of blue haze of mysticism. It is possible to define every step along the way to every single insight. This way is one that is not external; it is an inner one throughout. It also is a way that leads to comprehension of a reality that is genuinely objective, though beyond sensory perception. By achieving genuine intuitive insight in this way, we come really and truly to see through our thinking, the actual process of forming ideas in everyday life, a process we apply to all our sensory perceptions. We arrive at the full, the whole reality of a process which to a certain degree can also be conceived of, empirically conceived of, in the way I have tried to describe in my Philosophy of Freedom. There I attempted to draw attention to pure thought, to the thinking processes that can also be alive within us before we have joined this particular part of our thinking with some external perception or other to make the full reality. I have drawn attention to the fact that this pure thought process as such can be perceived as an inner soul content. Its true nature, however, can only be recognised when genuine Intuition arises in the soul on its path to higher knowledge. Then we are able to see through our own thinking process, as it were. It is only through Intuition that we enter into our own thinking process, for Intuition consists in entering with our own being into something that is supersensible, in immersing ourselves in this supersensible element.

We then come to perceive something which it is again a kind of cognitive destiny to experience. We experience something quite tremendous as we enter through Intuition into the nature of cognition. We come to know how we are organized as human beings in terms of matter. We know how far our physical organization extends. And we also perceive through Intuition that it goes as far as providing a counterbase, the foundation, as it were, on which thinking can develop, and that the material processes as such need to be broken down at all points where true thinking occurs. To the same extent as material processes are broken down it is possible for something else, for thinking, the forming of ideas, to occupy the place where material elements have been subject to destruction.

I know all the objections that can be raised against the words I am now saying, but intuitive perception leads us to see, with regard to the physical sphere, that where thinking processes develop, material vision will perceive mere nothingness. It leads us to say: When I think, I am not—for as long as I regard material existence, normally considered the form of existence that counts, the only valid form of existence. Matter must withdraw first in the organism and make room for thinking, for the forming of ideas; that is when this thinking, this forming of ideas, sees a possibility of unfolding in man. At the point, therefore, where we perceive thinking in its reality, we perceive degradation, destruction of material existence. We gain insight into the way matter turns into nothing.

This is the point where we have reached the limit of the law of conservation of matter and of energy. It is necessary to recognize the limits of this law relating to matter and energy, so that we may take courage and contradict it where necessary. It will never be possible for anyone to see through the essential nature of thinking in an unbiased way, at the point where matter destroys itself, if they regard the law of conservation of matter to be absolute; if they do not know that it applies in the sphere of what we can survey externally in the field of physics, chemistry etc.. but that it does not apply at the point where thinking appears on the scene in our own human organization. If it were not necessary to present such insights to the world today, for certain underlying reasons, I would not expose myself to all the derision and objections that are bound to come from those who, conditions being as they are, consider the law of conservation of matter and of energy to be absolute, to be applicable throughout.

On the one hand therefore Intuition reveals to us the relationship of thinking to ordinary matter as it surrounds us in the physical world. On the other hand. Intuition also reveals to us the relationship of Inspiration, of the Inspiration that pertains to the spirit, to the sphere of human feelings, to the rhythmical life of man. In the sphere of nerves and senses, physical matter is destroyed. As a result the sphere of nerves and senses can provide the basis for ideation, for thinking. The second system in man is the rhythmical system. At the level of the soul, man's feeling life is connected with this in the same way as the thinking life is connected with the sphere of the nerves and senses. The relationship between the objective world outside man—which we are approaching through Inspiration—and man himself shows us that through Inspiration we become aware of a cosmic entity that extends its activities into us in the same way as the sense-perceptible world extends into us through ideation. This inspired world comes in specifically through the breathing process, the rhythms of which continue also into the processes occurring in the brain and in the rest of the organism.

We then come to know the element which lives within man as rhythm. Matter is not killed here in the same way as it is in the thinking process, but life is paralysed, so that it needs to fan itself into flame again and again. The usual, purely mechanical breathing rhythm is based on an inner rhythm which in a certain dualism splits itself into the physical process of respiration and the soul process of feeling. We perceive the unity of this feeling process, in the soul on the one hand and the physical rhythms of our respiration on the other, as something which has objective existence in Inspiration and can be penetrated by Intuition. In short, we can come to perceive the whole way in which the world of feelings and man's rhythmical element belong together, come to perceive that here the material element is not cancelled out completely as in the nerves and senses, but that the material element is partly paralysed. So we gradually come to see through man. We look at the feeling life of man and see something there that can exist only because life is partly paralysed again and again, in rhythmical sequence, and has to fan itself into flame again.

A second, important element in the nature of man is thus revealed when we perceive the way enlivening and paralysing processes act in concert. We see the significance of everything that is rhythmical in man, and how it is connected with man's essential being as a whole, in body and soul. As we come to perceive this second element in man, it will however become clear to us that man bears within himself a real force that is in rhythmical interplay with an external force that lies in the supersensible sphere. We see, as it were, an inner and an outer force swinging to and fro. In a similar way it is possible to perceive man in his metabolism and limbs.

Ascending to Inspiration, to Intuition, and Imagination, we perceive in soul and spirit the real forces that normally are unconsciously at work in man. Our usual object-bound perception only provides formal elements; we are merely looking on at a world, as it were. Anything we achieve through Imagination, Intuition and Inspiration however is first of all an independent product of our inner soul, but in supersensible perception we relate it to something that is objective in man, so that we are finally able to see how the human will acts when we act ethically. Having first of all realized that pure thought represents matter being broken down and that it altogether has to do with processes of death, processes effecting involution, we come to realize that everything that has will-like soul qualities has to do with processes of anabolism (building up)—with growth processes. The processes of growth and anabolism, the processes of organization and reproduction in us, reduce our normal conscious awareness for the depths of the human organization, and the will rises from those depths of human nature, depths our ordinary consciousness does not reach. Our thinking lives in a sphere where death enters in; the will element lives in the sphere of growth, of healthy development, of bearing fruit.

It is then possible to perceive, out of Intuition, how out of metabolism and through the will—which at this point however is motivated by pure thought—matter is pushed to the place in the human organism where it is to be broken down. Thinking activity as such breaks matter down: the will builds it up. It does it in such a way, however, that initially the building-up process remains latent in the human organization in the course of life as it moves towards death. But a building-up process is present. When we achieve truly independent moral Intuitions in our moral intentions, as described in my Philosophy of Freedom, we are living a life, on the basis of our organization, where transformed matter is, through will activity, put in a place where matter has been destroyed. Man develops inner creativity, building-up processes. In other words, within the cosmos we see nothingness getting filled with newly formed elements in the human organization, in an absolutely material sense. This means nothing else but that in consistently following the path of Anthroposophy we reach the point where purely moral ideals effect cosmic creation within man, to the point of materiality.

We have now discovered, in a way, where the moral world itself becomes creative, where something arises that ensures its own reality, out of human morality, because it bears this within itself, itself creating it. When we then come to see the outside world in the light of this Intuition, the mineral kingdom first of all shows itself to be in the process of being killed, in a process of decay. This is a process we have come to know well in the material process that corresponds to our own thinking process. We therefore come to see how this process of decay takes hold also of plant and animal life. There we are not thinking in terms of heat death—though within certain limits this does apply—but looking at the disappearance of the whole mineral-permeated world that is all around us. We see the world we realize to be based on causal necessity as one that is perishable, and we see the world we build up out of pure moral ideals arising on the basis of that other world which is dying. In other words, we now perceive how the moral world order relates to the world order of physical causality. A morally pure will is the element in human nature that overcomes causality in man himself and therefore also for the whole world.

If one takes an honest look at the explanation of nature based on causality, there is no place in the world where it is not valid within its particular sphere. And because it is valid there must be a power that destroys its validity. This power is the moral sphere. The moral sphere, recognized out of man's whole nature, holds within itself the power to break through natural causality, not by effecting miracles, however, but in a process of evolution. The element which within the individual human being thus presents itself as the destroyer of causality will only gain significance in future worlds. Yet we perceive the reality of the human will as it enters into alliance with pure thought. This provides us with the most wonderful fruit of life achieved through the scientific approach used in Anthroposophy—a glimpse of man's significance within the cosmos—and we also gain a feeling for man's rank and dignity within the cosmos.

Things are not merely connected in the world the way we often imagine them to be on the basis of the abstract concepts we use. No, they are connected as something real. One real and most important thing is the following. Not everyone is of course able today to advance to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. One thing, however, which we take with us through all these stages of cognition, even as spiritual scientists, is the thinking process in which one thought evolves from another with an inner necessity. This form of thinking is one every human being is able to experience if he enters into it without prejudice. And this is why all the findings of spiritual science, once they have been made, can also be verified by applying pure thought to them, because the spiritual scientist takes this pure thinking with him into all the elements of the ideas he forms.

In the context of everything I have presented to you, one very particular element evolves in the human soul in conjunction with what in the first place may be taken merely as an affirmation of anthroposophical spiritual science. Other ideas formed by man are derived from external perceptions or based on such external perceptions. The external perceptions provide the support for that life of ideas. There are however people today who on the basis of the thought and philosophical habits of very recent times absolutely refuse to accept that anything could possibly come to man that does not have the support of external perception. We shall end up with abstractions that have no relation to life if we refuse to accept that man is also able to understand matters of essence if only he will give himself up to his own pure thinking that organizes itself and concretely arises out of itself. It has to be accepted that he will then be able to take in the concepts gained through spiritual science, through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, concepts which the philistine will say are figments of the imagination and do not represent reality.

The philistine is too lazy to enter with his thought into the reality the spiritual scientist reveals through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Yet this reality is intimately bound up with the nature of man. We need to achieve the ability to take in anthroposophical concepts, concepts that have no correlative in the outside world perceptible to the senses, concepts we have to experience in freedom in our mind. The feeling, the attitude of mind we need for this will bring a new essential nature to our whole being.

Once spiritual science enters into cultural life it will be seen that because what is perceived in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition is a living entity within man himself—as I have indicated—the living essential being of man is taken hold of directly by spiritual science, and man is able to go through an inner metamorphosis and transformation by taking it in. He will be richer within himself. We are able to feel how he is made richer by letting an element enter into him that cannot be kindled by the outer physical reality. Full of this element, which streams through the whole human being, we then turn to our fellow men. We now gain an insight into man that we have not had before, and above all we gain love for our fellow man. Love of humanity is what the insights gained in anthroposophical spiritual science directed towards the supersensible sphere can kindle in us, a love of humanity that teaches us the value of man, that makes us aware of the rank and dignity of man.

Perception of the value of man, inner awareness of the dignity of man, will activity in love of humanity—those are the most beautiful fruits of life that can be made to grow and ripen in man when he lets the discoveries made in spiritual science enter into experience.

Spiritual science then acts on the will to the effect that the will is able to attain to what in my Philosophy of Freedom I have called moral Intuitions. And something tremendous comes into human life, for these moral ideals are Filled with what otherwise is love, and we are able to become men acting in freedom, out of the love our individual personality is capable of. With this, spiritual science is approaching an ideal that also arose in the time of Goethe, though u was Goethe's friend Schiller who put it most clearly. When Schiller really entered into Kantian philosophy he took in a great deal from Kant with regard to theoretical philosophy. When it came to Kant's moral philosophy, however, he was not able to follow Kant. In Kant's moral philosophy, Schiller found a rigid concept of duty, presented by Kant in a way that makes it appear as a force of nature, something with compelling effect on man. Schiller had an awareness of human value and the rank and dignity of man and could not accept that in order to be moral man had to be under spiritual compulsion. It was Schiller who wrote the beautiful words: ‘I am happy to serve my friends, but unfortunately do so from inclination, and it often vexes me that I am not a virtuous man.’³ For to Schiller's mind, Kant postulated that one really had to try first of all and suppress all partiality felt for a friend, and then do whatever one did for him out of a rigid notion of duty.

Schiller felt that man's attitude to morals had to be different from that presented by Kant. As far as it was possible to do so in his day, he defined his concept of this in his letters Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Training of Man in Aesthetics), aiming to show how duty has to descend and become inclination, and how inclination has to ascend, so that we develop a liking for what is the content of duty. Duty, he said, had to descend and natural instinct to ascend in a free human being who, from inclination, does what is right for the whole of mankind. If we look for the roots of moral Intuitions in human nature, if we look for the actual impulse, the ethical motivation in those moral Intuitions, we find love, a love become most pure so that it attains to the spiritual. Where this love becomes spiritual it absorbs into itself the moral Intuitions, and we are moral human beings in so far as we love our duty, in so far as duty has become something that arises out of the human individuality itself as an immediate force.

It was this which moved me to present a definite antithesis to the moral philosophy of Kant and to do so out of Anthroposophy in my Philosophy of Freedom. Kant's thesis⁴ was: ‘Duty! Great and sublime word, you have nothing in you of what is favoured, of flattery, but demand submission ... you establish a law ... before which all inclination must fade into silence, even though it run counter to it.’

If man had such a notion of duty he could never grow upwards into the spirit, to become the free originator of his moral actions within his innermost being. In such an endeavour to comprehend human nature on the basis of a genuine understanding of man in Anthroposophy, I countered this rigid concept found in Kantianism with the one you find in my Philosophy of Freedom: ‘Freedom! Gentle and truly human word, you hold within you all that is morally favoured, what does most honour to my humanity; you make me subservient to none, you do not merely establish a law, but wait to see what my moral love itself will come to recognize as law, seeing that it feels unfree in the face of any law imposed on it.’

That is what I felt I had to say in my Philosophy of Freedom, to propose that the moral element appears to the fullest degree in accord with the rank and dignity of man when it is one with man's freedom, rooted in true love of humanity. Anthroposophy is able to show how this love of duty in the wider sense becomes love of humanity and therefore the true leaven in social life, which we will be considering next. The tremendous, burning social question that today presents itself to us can only be fully understood when we make an effort to grasp the relationship between freedom, love, the nature of man, spirit and natural law.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner's reply to a question on the subject of entropy (after a lecture given on 12 Nov. 1917 in Zurich) in Anthroposophie undakademische Wissenschaften, Europa Verlag, Zurich 1950, p. 179 ff.
• 2. Entropy—in thermodynamics a quantitative factor used to define the thermal state of a system. (Translator)
• 3. From Schiller's Xenien (Gewissensskrupel)
• 4. The thesis Kant presents in relation to duty in his Critique of Practical Commonsense is: ‘Duty! Great and sublime word, you have nothing in you of inclination, of flattery, but demand submission, yet you do not threaten with what would arouse natural antipathy or fear in the mind in order to stir the will, you merely establish a law which finds its own way into heart and mind and yet against our will gains reverence (though not always adherence), before which all inclination fades into silence, even though it run counter to it.’

There have always been great searching minds. There have always been epochs in which the human mind sought to penetrate into the deepest questions; at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was particularly astonishing. In the German thinkers, we find the highest level of training. But precisely these important ones have become the least known. One man stands at the top: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Who knows and still reads his “Addresses to the German Nation” today?

Fichte's world view is a difficult one, so let us first take a look at Immanuel Kant. Kant, so to speak, set firm limits to human knowledge. He sought the thing in itself. He did not penetrate into its depths. Fichte went beyond him in a way. The Age of Enlightenment began with Kant. He said: “Man, you shall dare to use your own reason.” This caused the old belief in authority to falter. Stirring memories of the spirit of enlightenment came from France. Rousseau's spirit had a powerful effect on Kant. Materialism appeared there first, and the spirit of enlightenment also made itself felt in Germany; but something else was added there.

Lessing, in his “Education of the Human Race”, showed how he had been seized by this spirit of enlightenment; but with him, for the first time, we encounter a new idea, the idea of re-embodiment. He said: “Is not all eternity mine?” Through many lives, man walks the path to perfection. We see how Goethe showed us the great idea of re-embodiment in great images. That was Fichte's “deed”: Fichte showed in his teaching of science that man has to find the “I” within himself, and it was precisely this that was difficult for man to grasp. Fichte said: The great thing is that man himself says “I” to himself. No one can call out “I” to us from the outside. It is the only name that only we can give ourselves; it is the designation of our unique nature in relation to nature. It is there that the God in man begins to speak. With this, man has begun to ascend to ever higher levels. In 1800, Fichte wrote “On the Destiny of Man”. One should not read it, but live it, let it take effect on oneself. He suggests observing our inner life, immersing ourselves in the inner power of our nature in order to come to the certainty of our eternal essence. In his booklet “Instructions for a Blessed Life” he shows that the I has always lived in us and will always live in us. In such German writings you receive the best theosophical training.

Novalis was an eminently theosophical spirit; he died at the age of 29 as a mining engineer. He himself felt that his mathematics was a great poem. In this he recalls Pythagoras' saying that there is music of the spheres in it. Novalis sensed the movement in the universe as harmonious tones. For him, the starry world was a world built according to mathematical principles — just as the harmonies that one perceives in music can also be calculated. He also sensed and thought the layers of the earth. It was clear to Novalis that man must develop his inner senses. In “The Apprentices of Sais” he clearly stated that man is related to God and the whole world – Pictures: Hyacinth, a beautiful boy, loves the beautiful Rose Child. He owes the realization of the human ego to Fichte.

Another thinker: Schelling. In his 1809 publication “On Human Freedom”, he seeks to bring out Jakob Böhme's ideas. He is concerned with the interesting research into the origin of evil. I can only hint at a comparison today: everyone will see harmony at the bottom of everything. But how does disharmony come about? How can man come to freedom? By also having the possibility of doing evil. Schelling says: the divine good is like sunlight. When light throws light into darkness, it awakens shadows. The light would not be able to develop its power if there were nothing to cast the shadows. — Jakob Böhme calls it the counter-throw. Darkness is precisely the nothing. The something, the good, can only be understood by the fact that evil is a nothing, only a shadow. Schelling also called human beings, as a physical body, a perfection. Hands, for example, are perfect and independent, but can scratch themselves if they turn against each other. — Conversation: Clara and Benno. He had been silent for a long time, then Frederick William IV appointed him to the University of Berlin. Then he wrote “Philosophy of Mythology” and “Philosophy of Revelation”. He speaks there of ancient mysteries. What is a mystery? If we go far back behind Homer to the culture of the Greek secret schools, temple cults, we see that the disciples first had to observe the external drama, the God who descends into nature, who is hidden in all four realms, who only awakens in man. In the human breast is the place of the resurrection of God. This was not art, religion, science, it was all three at once: beauty, religion and piety. It was only later that truth, beauty and piety, science, art and religion separated. The mysteries illustrated this. In Schelling you can find the most beautiful in his “Mystical Revelations”.

Heinrich Kleist: “Käthchen von Heilbronn”, “Prinz von Homburg”. The former cannot be understood if one denies hypnosis and does not look deeper into the soul life. Kleist delved deeply into Schubert's philosophical lectures, which he heard in Dresden at the time, about dreams and the interior of the soul, and through this he gained those thoughts.

Justinus Kerner found a way to study the abnormal soul life with the seer of Prevorst. She came into a spiritual and mental environment in that state. This has many concerns. While the physical body rested during sleep, the soul perceived conditions in its environment. Kerner said: “For her, the state of constant illness is a constant dying.” Eckartshausen presents everything in an idealized way up to a certain point.

Ennemoser was somewhat superficial.

This chain of theosophical thinkers provided deep insights into the further development of humanity, showed the eternal core of being in individuality, and demonstrated re-embodiment.

What significance does the personality have for the being? It gains experience in thinking, feeling and willing. It does not discard this experience when it dies like a garment; no, life was a school for it, and what it took in during its lifetime, it takes with it as treasure into its new existence. A human being would have lived in vain if that were not the case. Thus, with each life, the individuality becomes richer. Everything that the personality has collected is the pearls of a pearl necklace. The personality is the tool for developing out of life. Earth life is what makes us more perfect. The personality lays the foundation for development.

Certain Western views underestimate the personality and believe that we simply shed our personality at death. No, we take its fruits with us. It is valuable to learn what the personality means. And all those spirits are masters at describing the personal. The mission of the German spirit at that time was to emphasize what is pure and beautiful and noble in the personality. And this is precisely what Theosophy shows: beautiful, pure and lofty thinking. Each age has its task and mission. That was the mission of German philosophy. The great minds have been almost completely forgotten, and it is our duty to learn from them. The most wonderful fruits can be gained there. Then one will truly understand the energy that emanated from those minds. “Man can do what he should, and when he says, 'I cannot,' he will not.” There were two great eras: the first when the Vedanta philosophy emerged in Asia in the post-Vedic period, the second at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany. On both occasions, the human mind experienced its greatest depth. During this time, will and strength were directed towards the ideal.

Nature is a great living thing,
And everything is fruit, and everything is seed.

[ 1 ] The decision as to whether I should be sent to the Gymnasium or the Realschule was arrived at by my father, on the basis of his intention to give me the right preparation for a “position” on the railway. This purpose of his finally took definite form in the decision that I should be a railway civil engineer. Hence his choice was the Realschule.

[ 2 ] Next, however, the question remained to be settled as to whether in passing from the village school of Neudörfl to one of the schools in the neighbouring Wiener-Neustadt, I should be prepared for admission to such a school. So I was taken to the town hall for an examination.

[ 3 ] These plans which were thus being carried through for my own future did not excite in me any deep interest. At that age these questions concerning my “position,” and whether the choice should fall on town school, Realschule, or Gymnasium were to me matters of indifference. Through what I observed around me and felt within me, I was conscious of undefined but burning questions about life and the world and the soul, and my wish was to learn something in order to be able to answer these questions of mine. I cared very little through what sort of school this should be brought about.

[ 4 ] The examination at the town school I passed very creditably. All the drawings I had made for the assistant teacher had been brought along; and these made such an impression upon the teachers who examined me that on this account my very defective knowledge was overlooked. I came out of the examination with a “brilliant” record. There was great rejoicing on the part of my parents, the assistant teacher, the priest, and many of the notabilities of Neudörfl. People were happy over the result of my examination because to many of them it was a proof that “the Neudörfl school can teach a thing or two!”

[ 5 ] For my father there came out of all this the thought that I should not spend a preliminary year in the town school – seeing that I was already so far along – but should enter the Realschule at once. So a few days later I was taken to that school for another examination. In this case matters did not turn out so well; nevertheless, I was admitted. This was in October 1872.

[ 6 ] I had now to go every day from Neudörfl to Wiener Neustadt. In the morning I could go by train; but I had to come back in the afternoon on foot, since there was no train at the right time. Neudörfl was in Hungary, Wiener Neustadt in Lower Austria. So every day I went from “Transleitanien” to “Cisleitanien.” (These were the official designations for the Hungarian and the Austrian districts.)

[ 7 ] During the noon recess I remained in Wiener-Neustadt. It so happened that a certain woman had come to know me during one of her stops at the Neudörfl station, and had learned that I was coming to Wiener-Neustadt to school. My parents had spoken to her of their concern as to how I was to pass the noon recess during my attendance at the Wiener-Neustadt school. She told them she would be glad to have me take lunch at her home without charge, and would welcome me there whenever I needed to come.

[ 8 ] In summer the walk from Wiener-Neustadt to Neudörfl was very beautiful; in winter it was often exceedingly hard. To get from the outskirts of the town to the village one had to walk for half an hour across fields which were not cleared of snow. There I often had to “wade” through the snow, and I would arrive at home a veritable “snow man.”

[ 9 ] The town life I could not share inwardly as I could the life of the country. I would fall into a brown study over the problem of what might be happening in and between those houses closed tight one against the other. Only before the booksellers' shops of Wiener-Neustadt did I often linger for a long time.

[ 10 ] What went on in the school also, and what I had to do there, proceeded at first without awakening any lively interest in my mind. In the first two classes I had great difficulty in “keeping up.” Only in the second half-year was the work easier in these two classes. Only then had I become a “good scholar”. [ 11 ] I was conscious of one overwhelming need. I craved men whom I could take as human models to follow. The teachers of the first two classes were not such men. [ 12 ] In this school life something now occurred which impressed me deeply. The principal of the school, in one of the annual reports which had to be issued at the close of each school year, published a lecture entitled Die Anziehungskraft betrachtet als eine Wirkung der Bezuegung.¹ As a child of eleven years I could at first understand almost nothing of the content of this paper; for it began at once with higher mathematics. Yet from some of the sentences I got hold of a certain meaning. There formed itself in my mind a bridge between what I had learned from the priest concerning the creation of the world and these sentences in the paper. The paper referred also to a book which the principal had written, Die allgemeine Bewegung der Materie als Grundursache aller Naturerscheinungen.² I saved my money until I was able to buy that book. It now became my aim to learn as quickly as possible everything that might lead me to an understanding of the paper and the book.

[ 13 ] The thing was like this. The principal held that the conception of forces acting at a distance from the bodies exerting these forces was an unproved “mystical” hypothesis. He wished to explain the “attraction” between the heavenly bodies as well as that between molecules and atoms without reference to such “forces.” He said that between any two bodies there are many small bodies in motion. These, moving back and forth, thrust the larger bodies. Likewise these larger bodies are thrust from every direction on the sides turned away from each other. The thrusts on the sides turned away from each other are much more numerous than those in the spaces between the two bodies. It is for this reason that they approach each other. “Attraction” is not any special force, but only an “effect of motion.” I came across two sentences stated positively in the first pages of the volume: “1. There exist space and in space motion continuing for a long period of time. 2. Space and time are continuous, homogeneous masses; but matter consists of separate particles (atoms).” Out of the motions occurring in the manner described between the small and great parts of matter, the professor would derive all physical and chemical occurrences in nature.

[ 14 ] I had nothing within me which inclined me in any way whatever to accept such a view; but I had the feeling that it would be a very important matter for me when I could understand what was in this manner expressed. And I did everything I could in order to reach that point. Whenever I could get hold of books of mathematics and physics, I seized the opportunity. It was a slow process. I set myself to read the paper over and over again; each time there was some improvement.

[ 15 ] Now something else happened. In the third class I had a teacher who really fulfilled the “ideal” I had before my mind. He was a man whom I could emulate. He taught computation, geometry, and physics. His teaching was wonderfully systematic and thorough-going. He built everything so clearly out of its elements that it was in the highest degree beneficial to one's thinking to follow him.

[ 16 ] A lecture accompanying the second annual school report was delivered by him. It had to do with the law of probabilities and calculations in life insurance. I buried myself in this paper also, although of this likewise I could not understand very much. But I soon came to grasp the idea of the law of probabilities. A more important result, however, for me was that the exactness with which my favourite teacher handled his materials gave me a model for my own thinking in mathematics. This now brought about a wonderfully beautiful relationship between this teacher and me. I was very happy to have this man through all the classes of the Realschule as teacher of mathematics and physics.

[ 17 ] Through what I learned from him I drew nearer and nearer to the riddle that had arisen for me through the paper by the principal.

[ 18 ] With still another teacher I came only after a long time into a more intimate spiritual relationship. This was the one who taught constructive geometry in the lower classes and descriptive geometry in the upper. He taught even in the second class. But only during his course in the third class did I come to an appreciation of the kind of man he was. He was an enthusiastic constructor. His teaching also was a model of clearness and order. The drawing of circles, lines, and triangles became to me, through his influence, a favourite occupation. Behind all that I was taking into myself from the principal, the teacher of mathematics and physics, and the teacher of geometrical design, there arose in me in a boyish way of thinking the problem of what goes on in nature. My feeling was: I must go to nature in order to win a standing place in the spiritual world, which was there before me, consciously perceived.

[ 19 ] I said to myself: “One can take the right attitude toward the experience of the spiritual world by one's own soul only when one's process of thinking has reached such a form that it can attain to the reality of being which is in natural phenomena.” With such feelings did I pass through life during the third and fourth years of the Realschule. Everything that I learned I so directed as to bring myself nearer to the goal I have indicated.

[ 20 ] Then one day I passed a bookshop. In the show window I saw an advertisement of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft.³ I did everything that I could to acquire this book as quickly as possible.

[ 21 ] As Kant then entered the circle of my thinking, I knew nothing whatever of his place in the spiritual history of mankind. What anyone whatever had thought about him, in approval or in disapproval, was to me entirely unknown. My boundless interest in the Critique of Pure Reason had arisen entirely out of my own spiritual life. In my boyish way I was striving to understand what human reason might be able to achieve toward a real insight into the being of things.

[ 22 ] The reading of Kant met with every sort of obstacle in the circumstances of my external life. Because of the long distance I had to traverse between school and home, I lost every day at least three hours. In the evenings I did not get home until six o'clock. Then there was an endless quantity of school assignments to master. On Sundays I devoted myself almost entirely to geometrical designing. It was my ideal to attain the greatest precision in carrying out geometrical constructions, and the most immaculate neatness in hatching and the laying on of colours.

[ 23 ] So I had scarcely any time left for reading the Critique of Pure Reason. I found the following way out. Our history course was handled in such a manner that the teacher appeared to be lecturing but was in reality reading from a book. Then from time to time we had to learn from our books what he had given us in this fashion. I thought to myself that I must take care of this reading of what was in my book while at home. From the teacher's “lecture” I got nothing at all. From listening to what he read I could not retain the least thing. I now took apart the single sections of the little Kant volume, placed these inside the history book, which I there kept before me during the history lesson, and read Kant while the history was being “taught” down to us from the professor's seat. This was, of course, from the point of view of school discipline, a serious fault; yet it disturbed nobody and it subtracted so little from what I should otherwise have acquired that the grade I was given on my history lesson at that very time was “excellent.”

[ 24 ] During vacations the reading of Kant went forward briskly Many a page I read more than twenty times in succession. I wanted to reach a decision as to the relation sustained by human thought to the creative work of nature.

[ 25 ] The feeling I had in regard to these strivings of thought was influenced here from three sides. In the first place, I wished so to build up thought within myself that every thought should be completely subject to survey, that no vague feeling should incline the thought in any direction whatever. In the second place, I wished to establish within myself a harmony between such thinking and the teachings of religion. For this also at that time had the very strongest hold upon me.

In just this field we had truly excellent text-books. From these books I took with the utmost devotion the symbol and dogma, the description of the church service, the history of the church. These teachings were to me a vital matter. But my relation to them was determined by the fact that to me the spiritual world counted among the objects of human perception. The very reason why these teachings penetrated so deeply into my mind was that in them I realized how the human spirit can find its way consciously into the supersensible. I am perfectly sure that I did not lose my reverence for the spiritual in the slightest degree through this relationship of the spiritual to perception.

[ 26 ] On the other side I was tremendously occupied over the question of the scope of human capacity for thought. It seemed to me that thinking could be developed to a faculty which would actually lay hold upon the things and events of the world. A “stuff” which remains outside of the thinking, which we can merely “think toward,” seemed to me an unendurable conception. Whatever is in things, this must be also inside of human thought, I said to myself again and again. [ 27 ] Against this conviction, however, there always opposed itself what I read in Kant. But I scarcely observed this conflict. For I desired more than anything else to attain through the Critique of Pure Reason to a firm standing ground in order to get the mastery of my own thinking. Wherever and whenever I took my holiday walks, I had in any case to set before myself this question, and once more clear it up: How does one pass from simple, clear-cut perceptions to concepts in regard to natural phenomena? I held then quite uncritically to Kant; but no advance did I make by means of him.

[ 28 ] Through all this I was not drawn away from whatever pertains to the actual doing of practical things and the development of human skill. It so happened that one of the employees who took turns with my father in his work understood book-binding. I learned bookbinding from him, and was able to bind my own school books in the holidays between the fourth and fifth classes of the Realschule. And I learned stenography also at this time during the vacation without a teacher.

Nevertheless, I took the course in stenography which was given from the fifth class on.

[ 29 ] Occasions for practical work were plentiful. My parents were assigned near the station a little orchard of fruit trees and a small patch for potatoes. Gathering cherries, taking care of the orchard, preparing the potatoes for planting, cultivating the soil, digging the potatoes – all this work fell to my sister and brother and me. Buying the family groceries in the village, of this I would not let anyone deprive me at those times when the school left me free.

[ 30 ] When I was about fifteen years old I was permitted to come into more intimate relationship with the doctor at Wiener Neustadt whom I have already mentioned. I had conceived of a great liking for him because of the way in which he talked to me during his visits to Neudörfl. So I often slipped past his home, which was on the ground floor of a building at the corner of two very narrow streets in Wiener-Neustadt. One day he was at the window. He called me into his room I stood before what seemed to me then a great library He talked again about literature; then took down Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm from the collection of books, and said I must read that and afterwards come back to him. In this way he gave me one book after another to read and invite me from time to time to come to see him. Every time that I had an opportunity to go back, I had to tell him my impression of what I had read. In this way he became really my teacher in poetic literature. For up to that time both at my home and also at school, all this – except for some “extracts” – had been quite outside of my life. In the atmosphere of this lovable doctor, sensitive to everything beautiful, I learned especially to know Lessing.

[ 31 ] Another event deeply influenced my life. The mathematics books which Lübsen had prepared for home study became known to me. I was then able to teach myself analytical geometry, trigonometry, and even differential and integral calculus long before I learned these in school. This enabled me to return to the reading of those books on The General Motion of Matter as the Fundamental Cause of All the Phenomenon of Nature. For now I could understand them better through my understanding of mathematics. Meanwhile, we had come to the course in physics following that in chemistry, and this brought me a new set of riddles concerning human knowledge to add to the older ones. The teacher of chemistry was a distinguished man. He taught almost entirely by means of experiments. He spoke little. He let natural processes speak for themselves. He was one of our favourite teachers. There was something noteworthy in him which distinguished him in the eyes of his pupils from the other teachers. One felt that he stood in a closer relationship to his science than did the others. The others we addressed with the title “Professor”; he, although he was just as much a professor, was called “Doctor.” He was the brother of the thoughtful Tyrolese poet Hermann von Gilm. He had an eye which held one's attention firmly. One felt that this man was accustomed to looking intently at the phenomena of nature and then retaining what he had perceived.

[ 32 ] His teaching puzzled me a little. The feeling for facts which marked him could not always hold concentrated that state of mind through which I was then striving toward unification. Still he must have considered that I made good progress in chemistry, for he marked my notes from the start “creditable,” and I kept this grade through all the classes.

[ 33 ] One day I found at an antiquary's in Wiener-Neustadt Rotteck's history of the world. Until then, in spite of the fact that I received the highest grades in the school in history, this subject had always remained to me something external. Now it grew to be an inner thing. The warmth with which Rotteck conceived and set forth historic events swept me along. His one-sidedness of view I did not then perceive. Through him I was led to two other books which, by reason of their style and their vivid historical conceptions, made the deepest impression on me: Johannes von Müller and Tacitus.

Amid such impressions, it was very hard for me to take any interest in the school lessons in history and in literature. But I strove to give life to these lessons from all that I made my own out of other sources. In this manner I passed my time in the three upper classes of the seven years of the Realschule.

[ 34 ] From my fifteenth year on I taught other pupils of the same grade as myself or of a lower grade. The teachers were very willing to assign me this tutoring, for I was rated as a very “good scholar.” Through this means I was enabled to contribute at least a very little toward what my parents had to spend out of their meagre income for my education. [ 35 ] I owe much to this tutoring. In having to give to others in turn the matter which I had been taught, I myself became, so to speak, awake to this. For I cannot express the thing otherwise than by saying that I received in a sort of dream life the knowledge imparted to me by the school. I was always awake to what I gained by my own effort, and what I received from a spiritual benefactor, such as the doctor I have mentioned of Wiener-Neustadt. What I received thus in a fully self-conscious state of mind was noticeably different from what passed over to me like dream-pictures in the class-room instruction. The development of what had thus been received in a half-waking state was now brought about by the fact that in the periods of tutoring I had to vitalize my own knowledge.

[ 36 ] On the other hand, this experience compelled me at an early age to concern myself with practical pedagogy. I learned the difficulties of the development of human minds through my pupils.

[ 37 ] To the pupils of my own grade whom I tutored the most important thing I had to teach was German composition. Since I myself had also to write every such composition, I had to discover for each theme assigned to us various forms of development. I often felt then that I was in a very difficult situation. I wrote my own theme only after I had already given away the best thoughts on that topic.

[ 38 ] A rather strained relationship existed between the teacher of the German language and literature in the three upper classes and myself. The pupils considered him the “keenest professor,” and especially strict. My essays had always been unusually long. The briefer forms I had dictated to my fellow pupils. It took the teacher a long time to read my papers. After the final examination, during the celebration before the close of the session, when for the first time he was “in a good humour” among us pupils, he told me how I had annoyed him with my long themes.

[ 39 ] Still another thing happened. I had the feeling that some thing was brought into the school through this teacher which I must master. When he discussed the nature of poetic descriptions, it seemed to me that there was something in the background behind what he said. After a time I found out what this was. He adhered to the philosophy of Herbart. He himself said nothing of this. But I discovered it. And so I bought an Introduction to Philosophy and a Psychology, both of which were written from the point of view of Herbart's philosophy.

[ 40 ] And now began a sort of game of hide-and-seek between the teacher and me in my compositions. I began to understand much in him which he set forth in the colours of Herbart's philosophy; and he found in my compositions all sorts of ideas that came from the same source. Only neither he nor I mentioned Herbart as the source of our ideas. This was through a sort of tacit agreement. But one day I ended a composition in a way that was imprudent in view of the situation. I had to write about some characteristic or other of human beings. At the end I used this sentence: “Such a man possesses psychological freedom.” Our teacher would discuss the compositions with the class after he had corrected them. When he came to the discussion of this particular theme, he drew in the corners of his mouth with obvious irony and said: “You say something here about psychological freedom. There is no such thing” I answered: “That seems to me a mistake, Professor. There really is a psychological freedom, only there is no ‘transcendental freedom’ in an ordinary state of consciousness.” The lips of the teacher became smooth again. He looked at me with a penetrating glance and remarked: “I have noticed for a long while from your compositions that you have a philosophical library. I would advise you not to use it; you only confuse your thinking by so doing.” I could never understand at all why I would confuse my thinking by reading the same books from which his own thinking was derived. And thus the relation between us continued to be somewhat strained.

[ 41] His teaching gave me much to do. For he covered in the fifth class the Greek and Latin poets, from whom selections were used in German translation. Then for the first time I began to regret once in a while that my father had put me in the Realschule instead of the Gymnasium . For I felt how little of the character of Greek and Roman art I should get hold of through the translations. So I bought Greek and Latin text-books, and carried along secretly by the side of the Realschule course also a private Gymnasium course of instruction. This required much time; but it also laid the foundation by means of which I met, although in unusual fashion yet quite according to the rules, the Gymnasium requirements. I had to give many hours of tutoring, especially when I was in the Technische Hochschule⁴ in Vienna. I soon had a Gymnasium pupil to tutor. Circumstances of which I shall speak later brought it about that I had to help this pupil by means of tutoring through almost the whole Gymnasium course. I taught him Latin and Greek, so that in teaching him I had to go through every detail of the Gymnasium course with him.

[ 42 ] The teachers of history and geography who could give me so little in the lower classes became, nevertheless, important to me in the upper classes. The very one who had driven me to such unusual reading of Kant wrote once a lecture for a school report on Die Fiszeit und ihre Ursachen.⁵ I grasped the meaning of this with great eagerness of mind, and conceived from it a strong interest in the problem of the glacial age. But this teacher was also a good pupil of the distinguished geographer, Friedrich Simony. This fact led him to explain in the upper classes the geological-geographical evolution of the Alps with illustrative drawings on the blackboard. Then I did not by any means read Kant, but was all eyes and ears. From this side I now got a great deal from this teacher, whose lessons in history did not interest me at all.

[ 43 ] In the last class I had for the first time a teacher who gripped me with his instruction in history. He taught history and geography. In this class the geography of the Alps was set forth in the same delightful fashion as had already been the case with the other teacher. In the history lessons the new teacher got a strong hold upon us. He was to us a personality in the full sense of the word. He was a partisan, enthusiastic for the progressive ideas of the Austrian liberal movement of the time. But in the school there was no evidence of this. He brought nothing from his partisan views into the class room. Yet his teaching of history had, by reason of his own participation in life, a strong vitality. I listened to the temperamental historical analyses of this teacher with the results from my reading of the Rotteck volumes still in my memory. The experience produced a satisfying harmony. I cannot but think it was an important thing for me to have had the opportunity to imbibe the history of modern times in this manner.

[ 44 ] At home I heard much talk about the Russo-Turkish war (1877–78). The employee who then took my father's place every third day was an original sort of person. When he came to relieve my father, he always brought along a huge carpet-bag. In this he had great packets of manuscript. These were abstracts of the most varied assortments of scientific books. Those abstracts he gave to me, one after another, to read. I devoured them. He would then discuss these things with me. For he really had in his head a conception, somewhat chaotic to be sure but comprehensive, concerning all these things that he had compiled. With my father, however, he talked politics. He delighted to take the side of the Turks; my father defended with great earnestness the Russians. He was one of those persons still grateful to Russia for the service she rendered to Austria at the time of the Hungarian uprising (1848). For my father was on no sort of terms with the Hungarians. He lived in the Hungarian border town of Neudörfl during that period when the process of Magyarizing was going forward, and the sword of Damocles hung over his head – the danger that he might not be allowed to remain in charge of the station of Neudörfl unless he could speak Magyar. This language was quite unnecessary in that originally German place, but the Hungarian regime was endeavouring to bring it to pass that railway lines in Hungary should be manned with Magyar-speaking employees, even the privately owned lines. But my father wished to hold his place at Neudörfl long enough for me to finish at the school at Wiener-Neustadt. By reason of all this, he was then not friendly to the Hungarians. So, since he could not endure the Hungarians, he liked in his simple way to think of the Russians as those who in 1848 had “shown the Hungarians who were their masters.” This way of thinking manifested itself with extraordinary earnestness, and yet in the wonderfully lovable manner of my father toward his Turkophile friend in the person of the “substitute.” The tide of discussion rose oft times very high. I was greatly interested in the mutual outbursts of the two personalities, but scarcely at all in their political opinions. For me a much more vital need at that time was that of finding an answer to this question: To what extent is it possible to prove that in human thinking real spirit is the agent?

• 1. Attraction Considered as an Effect of Motion.
• 2. The General Motion of Matter as the Fundamental Cause of All the Phenomenon of Nature.
• 3. Critique of Pure Reason
• 4. The Technische Hochschule does not correspond wholly to any English or American institution. It might be called a “university” with marked scientific emphasis.
• 5. The Glacial Age and Its Causes.

[ 1 ] We have already indicated in the previous chapter that Goethe's scientific world view does not exist for us as a complete whole, developed out of one principle. We have to do only with individual manifestations from which we see how one thought or another looks in the light of his way of thinking. This is the case with his scientific works, with the brief indications he gives about one concept or another in his Aphorisms in Prose, and with his letters to his friends. And the artistic development of his world view, finally, which does also offer us the most manifold clues to his basic ideas, is there for us in his literary works. By unreservedly acknowledging that Goethe never expressed his basic principles as a coherent whole, however, we are by no means accepting at the same time the validity of any assertion to the effect that Goethe's world view does not spring from an ideal center that can be brought into a strictly scientific formulation.

[ 2 ] We must above all be clear about what the real question here is. What it was in Goethe's spirit that worked as the inner driving principle in all his creations, that imbued and enlivened them, could not come to the fore as such, in its own particular nature. Just because it imbues everything about Goethe, it could not at the same time appear before his consciousness as something separate. If the latter had been the case, then it would have had to appear before his spirit as something complete and at rest instead of being, as was actually the case, continuously active and at work. The interpreter of Goethe is obliged to follow the manifold activities and manifestations of this principle, to follow its constant flow, in order then to sketch it in its ideal outlines, and as a complete whole. If we are successful in expressing, clearly and definitely, the scientific content of this principle and in developing it on all sides with scientific consistency, only then will Goethe's exoteric expositions appear in their true light, because we will see them in their evolution, from a common center.

[ 3 ] In this chapter we will concern ourselves with Goethe's epistemology. With respect to the task of this science, a certain confusion has unfortunately arisen since Kant that we must briefly touch upon before proceeding to Goethe's relationship to this science.

[ 4 ] Kant believed that philosophy before him had taken wrong paths because it strove for knowledge of the being of things without first asking itself how such a knowledge might be possible. He saw what was fundamentally wrong with all philosophizing before him to lie in the fact that one reflected upon the nature of the object to be known before one had examined the activity of knowing itself, with regard to what it could do. He therefore took this latter examination as his basic philosophical problem and inaugurated thereby a new direction in thought. Since then the philosophy that has based itself on Kant has expended untold scientific force in answering this question; and today more than ever, one is seeking in philosophical circles to come closer to accomplishing this task. But epistemology, which at the present time has become nothing less than the question of the day, is supposedly nothing other than the detailed answer to the question: How is knowledge possible? Applied to Goethe the question would read: How did Goethe conceive of the possibility of knowledge?

[ 5 ] Upon closer examination, however, the fact emerges that the answering of this question may absolutely not be placed at the forefront of epistemology. If I ask about the possibility of a thing, then I must first have examined this thing beforehand. But what if the concept of knowledge that Kant and his followers have, and about which they ask if it is possible or not, proved to be totally untenable; what if this con cognitive process were something entirely different from that defined by Kant? Then all that work would have been for nothing. Kant accepted the customary concept of what knowing is and asked if it were possible. According to this concept, knowing is supposed to consist in making a copy of the real conditions that stand outside our consciousness and exist in-themselves. But one will be able to make nothing out of the possibility of knowledge until one has answered the question as to the what of knowing itself. The question: What is knowing? thereby becomes the primary one for epistemology. With respect to Goethe, therefore, it will be our task to show what Goethe pictured knowing to be.

[ 6 ] The forming of a particular judgment, the establishing of a fact or a series of facts—which according to Kant one could already call knowledge—is not yet by any means knowing in Goethe's sense. Otherwise he would not have said about style that it rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge and through this fact stands in contrast to simple imitation of nature in which the artist turns to the objects of nature, imitates its forms and colours faithfully, diligently, and most exactly, and is conscientious about never distancing himself from nature. This distancing of oneself from the sense world in all its directness is indicative of Goethe's view of real knowing. The directly given is experience. In our knowing, however, we create a picture of the directly given that contains considerably more than what the senses—which are after all the mediators of all experience—can provide. In order to know nature in the Goethean sense, we must not hold onto it in its factuality; rather, nature, in the process of our knowing, must reveal itself as something essentially higher than what it appears to be when it first confronts us. The school of Mill assumes that all we can do with experience is merely bring particular things together into groups that we then hold fast as abstract concepts. This is no true knowing. For, those abstract concepts of Mill have no other task than that of bringing together what is presented to the senses with all the qualities of direct experience. A true knowing must acknowledge that the direct form of the world given to sense perception is not yet its essential one, but rather that this essential form first reveals itself to us in the process of knowing. Knowing must provide us with that which sense experience withholds from us, but which is still real. Mill's knowing is therefore no true knowing, because it is only an elaborated sense experience. He leaves the things in the form our eyes and ears convey them. It is not that we should leave the realm of the experiencable and lose ourselves in a construct of fantasy, as the metaphysicians of earlier and more recent times loved to do, but rather, we should advance from the form of the experiencable as it presents itself to us in what is given to the senses, to a form of it that satisfies our reason.

[ 7 ] The question now confronts us: How does what is directly experienced relate to the picture of experience that arises in the process of knowing? We want first to answer this question quite independently and then show that the answer we give follows from the Goethean world view.

[ 8 ] At first, the world presents itself to us as a manifoldness in space and time. We perceive particulars separated in space and time: this colour here, that shape there; this tone now, that sound then, etc. Let us first take an example from the inorganic world and separate quite exactly what we perceive with the senses from what the cognitive process provides. We see a stone flying toward a windowpane, breaking through it, and falling to the ground after a certain time. We ask what is given here in direct experience. A series of sequential visual perceptions, originating from the places successively occupied by the stone, a series of sound perceptions as the glass shatters, the pieces of glass flying, etc. Unless someone wishes to deceive himself he must say: Nothing more is given to direct experience than this unrelated aggregate of acts of perception.

[ 9 ] One also finds the same strict delimitation of what is directly perceived (sense experience) in Volkelt's excellent book Kant's Epistemology Analysed for its Basic Principles,⁴⁹ which belongs to the best that modern philosophy has produced. But it is absolutely impossible to see why Volkelt regards the unrelated pictures of perception as mental pictures and thereby at the very start blocks the path to any possible objective knowledge. To regard direct experience from the very start as a complex of mental pictures is, after all, a definite preconception. When I have some object or other before me, I see, with respect to it, form and colour; I perceive a certain degree of hardness, etc. Whether this aggregate of pictures given to my senses is something lying outside myself, or whether it is a mere complex of mental pictures: this I cannot know from the very start. Just as little as I know from the very start—without thinking reflection—that the warmth of a stone is a result of the enwarming rays of the sun, so just as little do I know in what relationship the world given to me stands with respect to my ability to make mental pictures. Volkelt places at the forefront of epistemology the proposition “that we have a manifoldness of mental pictures of such and such kinds.” That we are given a manifoldness is correct; but how do we know that this manifoldness consists of mental pictures? Volkelt, in fact, does something quite inadmissible when first he asserts that we must hold fast to what is given us in direct experience, and then makes the presupposition, which cannot be given to direct experience, that the world of experience is a world of mental pictures. When we make a presupposition like that of Volkelt, then we are forced at once into stating our epistemological question wrongly as described above. If our perceptions are mental pictures, then our whole science is a science of mental pictures and the question arises: How is it possible for our mental picture to coincide with the object of which we make a mental picture?

[ 10 ] But where does any real science ever have anything to do with this question? Look at mathematics! It has a figure before it arising from the intersection of three straight lines: a triangle. The three angles a, b, c remain in a fixed relationship; their sum is one straight angle or two right angles (180°). That is a mathematical judgment. The angles a, b, and c are perceived. The cognitive judgment occurs on the basis of thinking reflection. It establishes a relationship between three perceptual pictures. There is no question here of any reflecting upon some object or other standing behind the picture of the triangle. And all the sciences do it this way. They spin threads from picture to picture, create order in what, for direct perception, is a chaos; nowhere, however, does anything else come into consideration besides the given. Truth is not the coinciding of a mental picture with its object, but rather the expression of a relationship between two perceived facts.

[ 11 ] Let us return to our example of the thrown stone. We connect the sight perceptions that originate from the individual locations in which the stone finds itself. This connection gives us a curved line (the trajectory), and we obtain the laws of trajectory; when furthermore we take into account the material composition of the glass, and then understand the flying stone as cause, the shattering of the glass as effect, and so on, we then have permeated the given with concepts in such a way that it becomes comprehensible to us. This entire operation, which draws together the manifoldness of perception into a conceptual unity, occurs within our consciousness. The ideal interrelationship of the perceptual pictures is not given by the senses, but rather is grasped absolutely on its own by our spirit. For a being endowed only with the ability to perceive with the senses, this whole operation would simply not be there. For such a being the outer world would simply remain that disconnected chaos of perceptions we characterized as what first (directly) confronts us.

[ 12 ] So the place, therefore, where the perceptual pictures appear in their ideal relationship, where this relationship is held out to the perceptual pictures as their conceptual counter-image, this place is human consciousness. Now even though this conceptual (lawful) relationship, in its substantial makeup, is produced within human consciousness, it by no means follows from this that it is also only subjective in its significance. It springs, rather, in its content just as much from the objective world as, in its conceptual form, it springs from human consciousness. It is the necessary objective complement to the perceptual picture. Precisely because the perceptual picture is something incomplete, something unfinished in itself, we are compelled to add to this picture, in its manifestation as sense experience, its necessary complement. If the directly given itself were far enough along that at every point of it a problem did not arise for us, then we would never have to go beyond it. But the perceptual pictures absolutely do not follow each other and from each other in such a way that we can regard them, themselves, as reciprocally resulting from each other; they result, rather, from something else that is closed to apprehension by the senses. Conceptual apprehension approaches them and grasps also that part of reality that remains closed to the senses. Knowing would be an absolutely useless process if something complete were conveyed to us in sense experience. All drawing together, ordering, and grouping of sense-perceptible facts would have no objective value. Knowing has meaning only if we do not regard the configuration given to the senses as a finished one, if this configuration is for us a half of something that bears within itself something still higher that, however, is no longer sense-perceptible. There the human spirit steps in. It perceives that higher element. Therefore thinking must also not be regarded as bringing something to the content of reality. It is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas. Idealism is therefore quite compatible with the principle of empirical research. The idea is not the content of subjective thinking, but rather the result of research. Reality, insofar as we meet it with open senses, confronts us. It confronts us in a form that we cannot regard as its true one; we first attain its true form when we bring our thinking into flux. Knowing means: to add the perception of thinking to the half reality of sense experience so that this picture of half reality becomes complete.

[ 13 ] Everything depends on what one conceives the relationship between idea and sense-perceptible reality to be. By sense-perceptible reality I mean here the totality of perceptions communicated to the human being by the senses. Now the most widely held view is that the concept is a means, belonging solely to human consciousness, by which consciousness takes possession for itself of the data of reality. The essential being of reality, according to this view, lies in the “in-itselfness” of the things themselves, so that, if we were really able to arrive at the primal ground of things, we would still be able to take possession only of our conceptual copy of this primal ground and by no means of the primal ground itself. This view, therefore, assumes the existence of two completely separate worlds. The objective outer world, which bears its essential being, the ground of its existence, within itself, and the subjective-ideal inner world, which is supposedly a conceptual copy of the outer world. The inner world is a matter of no concern to the objective world, is not required by it; the inner world is present only for the knowing human being. To bring about a congruence of these two worlds would be the epistemological ideal of this basic view. I consider the adherents of this view to be not only the natural-scientific direction of our time, but also the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Neo-Kantians, and no less so the last phase of Schelling's philosophy. AII these directions of thought are in agreement about seeking the essence of the world in something transsubjective, and about having to admit, from their standpoint, that the subjective ideal world—which is therefore for them also merely a world of mental pictures—has no significance for reality itself, but purely and simply for human consciousness alone.

[ 14 ] I have already indicated that this view leads to the assumption of a perfect congruency between concept (idea) and perception. What is present in the latter would also have to be contained in its conceptual counterpart, only in an ideal form. With respect to content, both worlds would have to match each other completely. The conditions of spatial-temporal reality would have to repeat themselves exactly in the idea; only, instead of perceived extension shape colour, etc., the corresponding mental pictures would have to be present. If I were looking at a triangle, for example, I would have to follow in thought its outline, size, directions of its sides, etc., and then produce a conceptual photograph of it for myself. In the case of a second triangle, I would have to do exactly the same thing, and so on with every object of the external and internal sense world. Thus every single thing is to be found again exactly, with respect to its location and characteristics, within my ideal world picture.

[ 15 ] We must now ask ourselves: Does the above assumption correspond to the facts? Not in the least. My concept of the triangle is a single one, comprising every single perceived triangle; and no matter how often I picture it, this concept always remains the same. My various pictures of the triangle are all identical to one another. I have absolutely only one concept of the triangle.

[ 16 ] Within reality, every single thing presents itself as a particular, quite definite “this,” surrounded by equally definite, actual, and reality-imbued “those.” The concept, as a strict unity, confronts this manifoldness. In the concept there is no separation, no parts; it does not multiply itself; it is, no matter how often it is pictured, always the same.

[ 17 ] The question now arises: What is then actually the bearer of this identity that the concept has? Its form of manifestation as a picture cannot in fact be this bearer, for Berkeley was completely right in maintaining that my present picture of a tree has absolutely nothing to do with my picture of the same tree a minute later, if I closed my eyes in between; and the various pictures that several people have of one object have just as little to do with each other. The identity can therefore lie only within the content of the picture, within its what. The significance, the content, must insure the identity for me.

[ 18 ] But since this is so, that view collapses that denies to the concept or idea any independent content. This view believes, namely, that the conceptual unity as such is altogether without any content; that this unity arises solely through the fact that certain characteristics of the objects of experience are left aside and that what they have in common, on the other hand, is lifted out and incorporated into our intellect so that we may comfortably bring together the manifoldness of objective reality according to the principle of grasping all of experience with the mind in the fewest possible general unities—i.e., according to the principle of the smallest measure of force (Kraftmasses). Along with modern natural philosophy Schopenhauer takes this standpoint. But this standpoint is presented with the harshest, and therefore most one-sided consistency in the little book of Richard Avenarius, Philosophy as Thinking about the World According to the Principle of the Smallest Measure of Force. Prolegomena of a Critique of Pure Experience.⁵⁰

[ 19 ] But this view rests solely upon a total misconstruing not only of the content of the concept but also of the perception.

[ 20 ] In order to gain some clarity here, one must go back to the reason for contrasting the perception, as something particular, with the concept, as something general.

[ 21 ] One must ask oneself the question: Wherein do the characteristic features of the particular actually lie? Can these be determined conceptually? Can we say: This conceptual unity must break up into this or that particular, visible manifoldness? “No,” is the very definite answer. The concept itself does not know particularity at all. The latter must therefore lie in elements that are altogether inaccessible to the concept as such. But since we do not know any in-between entity between the perception and the concept—unless one wishes to introduce something like Kant's fantastic-mystical schemata, which today, however, cannot be taken seriously after all—these elements must belong to the perception itself. The basis for particularization cannot be derived from the concept, but rather must be sought within the perception itself. What constitutes the particularity of an object cannot be grasped conceptually, but only perceived. Therein lies the reason why every philosophy must founder that wants to derive (deduce) from the concept itself the entire visible reality in all its particularization. Therein lies also the classic error of Fichte, who wanted to derive the whole world from consciousness.

[ 22 ] But someone who wants to reproach and dismiss idealistic philosophy because he sees this impossibility of deriving the world from the concept as a defect in it—such a person is acting no more intelligently than the philosopher Krug, a follower of Kant, who demanded of the philosophy of identity that it deduce for him a pen with which to write.

[ 23 ] What really distinguishes the perception essentially from the idea is, in fact, just this element that cannot be brought into the concept and that must, in fact, be experienced. Through this, concept and perception confront each other, to be sure, as kindred yet different sides of the world. And since the perception requires the concept, as we have shown, the perception proves that it does not have its essence in its particularity but rather in its conceptual generality. But this generality, in its manifestation, can first be found only within the subject; for, this generality can indeed be gained in connection with the object, but not out of the object.

[ 24 ] The concept cannot derive its content from experience, for it does not take up into itself precisely that which is characteristic of experience: its particularity. Everything that constitutes this particularity is foreign to the concept. The concept must therefore give itself its own content.

[ 25 ] It is usually said that an object of experience is individual, is a lively perception, and that the concept, on the other hand, is abstract, is poor, sorry, and empty when compared to the perception with its rich content. But wherein is the wealth of differentiations sought? In their number, which because of the infinitude of space can be infinitely great. For all this, however, the concept is no less richly defined. The number there is replaced by qualities here. But just as in the concept the numbers are not to be found, so in the perception the dynamic-qualitative character is lacking. The concept is just as individual, just as rich in content, as the perception. The difference is only that for grasping the content of perception nothing is necessary except open senses and a purely passive attitude toward the outer world, whereas the ideal core of the world must arise in man's spirit through his own spontaneous activity, if this core is to come into view at all. It is an entirely inconsequential and useless kind of talk to say that the concept is the enemy of living perception. The concept is the essential being of the perception, the actual driving and active principle in it; the concept adds its content to that of the perception, without eliminating the latter—for, the content of perception as such does not concern the concept at all—and the concept is supposed to be the enemy of perception! It is an enemy of perception only when a philosophy that does not understand itself wants to spin the whole rich content of the sense world out of the idea. For then philosophy conveys a system of empty phrases instead of living nature.

[ 26 ] Only in the way we have indicated can a person arrive at a satisfactory explanation of what knowledge of experience actually is. The necessity of advancing to conceptual knowledge would be totally incomprehensible if the concept brought nothing new to sense perception. A knowledge purely of experience must not take one step beyond the millions of particulars that lie before us as perceptions. The science of pure experience, in order to be consistent, must negate its own content. For why create once more in concept form what is already there without it as perception? A consistent positivism, in the light of these reflections, would simply have to cease all scientific work and rely merely upon whatever happens to occur. If it does not do this, then it carries out in practice what it rejects in theory. It is altogether the case that materialism, as well as realism, implicitly admits what we are maintaining. The way they proceed is only justified from our standpoint and is in the most glaring contradiction to their own basic theoretical views.

[ 27 ] From our standpoint, the necessity for scientific knowledge and the transcending of sense experience can be explained without any contradictions. The sense world confronts us as that which is first and directly given; it faces us like an immense riddle, because we can never find in the sense world itself what is driving and working in it. Reason enters then and, with the ideal world that it presents, holds out to the sense world the principle being that constitutes the solution to the riddle. These principles are just as objective as the sense world is. The fact that they do not come into appearance to the senses but only to reason does not affect their content. If there were no thinking beings, these principles would, indeed, never come into appearance; but they would not therefore be any less the essence of the phenomenal world.

[ 28 ] With this we have set up a truly immanent world view in contrast to the transcendental one of Locke, Kant, the later Schelling, Schopenhauer, Volkelt, the Neo-Kantians, and modern natural scientists.

[ 29 ] They seek the ground of the world in something foreign to consciousness, in the beyond; immanent philosophy seeks it in what comes into appearance for reason. The transcendental world view regards conceptual knowledge as a picture of the world; the immanent world view regards it as the world's highest form of manifestation. The first view can therefore provide only a formal epistemology that bases itself upon the question: What is the relationship between thinking and real being? The second view places at the forefront of its epistemology the question: What is knowing? The first takes its start from the preconception that there is an essential difference between thinking and real being; the second begins, without preconceptions, with what alone is certain—thinking—and knows that, other than thinking, it can find no real being.

[ 30 ] If we now summarize the results we have achieved from these epistemological reflections, we arrive at the following: We have to take our start from the completely indeterminate direct form of reality, from what is given to the senses before we bring our thinking into movement, from what is only seen, only heard, etc. The point is that we be aware what the senses convey to us and what thinking conveys. The senses do not tell us that things stand in any particular relationship to each other, such as for example that this is the cause and that is the effect. For the senses, all things are equally essential for the structure of the world. Unthinking observation does not know that a seed stands at a higher level of development than a grain of sand on the road. For the senses they are both of equal significance if they look the same outwardly. At this level of observation, Napoleon is no more important in world history than Jones or Smith in some remote mountain village. This is as far as present-day epistemology has advanced. That it has by no means thought these truths through exhaustively, however, is shown by the fact that almost all epistemologists make the mistake—with respect to this for the moment undefined and indeterminate configuration that we confront in the first stage of our perception—of immediately designating it as “mental picture.”⁵¹ This means, in fact, a violating, in the crudest way, of its own insight which it had just achieved. If we remain at the stage of direct sense perception, we know just as little that a falling stone is a mental picture as we know that it is the cause of the depression in the ground where it hit. Just as we can arrive at the concept “cause” only by manifold reflection, so also we could arrive at the knowledge that the world given us is merely mental picture—even if this were correct—only by thinking about it. My senses reveal nothing to me as to whether what they are communicating to me is real being or whether it is merely mental picture. The sense world confronts us as though fired from a pistol. If we want to have it in its purity, we must refrain from attaching any predicate to it that would characterize it. We can say only one thing: It confronts us; it is given us. With this, however, absolutely nothing at all is determined about it itself. Only when we proceed in this way do we not block the way for ourselves to an unbiased judgment about this given. If from the very start we attach a particular characterization to the given, then this freedom from bias ceases. If we say, for example, that the given is mental picture, then the whole investigation which follows can only be conducted under this presupposition. We would not be able in this way to provide an epistemology free of presuppositions, but rather would be answering the question “What is knowing?” under the presupposition that what is given to the senses is mental picture. That is the basic mistake in Volkelt's epistemology. At the beginning of it, he sets up the very strict requirement that epistemology must be free of any presuppositions. But he then places in the forefront the statement that what we have is a manifoldness of mental pictures. Thus his epistemology consists only in answering the question: How is knowing possible, under the presupposition that the given is a manifoldness of mental pictures? For us the matter appears quite different. We take the given as it is: as a manifoldness of—something or other that will reveal itself to us if we allow ourselves to be taken along by it. Thus we have the prospect of arriving at an objective knowledge, because we are allowing the object itself to speak. We can hope that this configuration we confront will reveal everything to us we need, if we do not make it impossible, through some hindering preconception, for it freely to approach our power of judgment with its communications. For even if reality should forever remain a riddle to us, a truth like this would be of value only if it had been attained in connection with the things of the world. It would be totally meaningless, however, to assert that our consciousness is constituted in such and such a way and that therefore we cannot gain any clarity about the things of this world. Whether our spiritual powers are adequate for grasping the essential being of things must be tested by us in connection with these things themselves. I might have the most highly developed spiritual powers; but if things reveal nothing about themselves, my gifts are of no avail. And conversely: I might know that my powers are slight; whether, in spite of this, they still might not suffice for me to know the things, this I still do not know.

[ 31 ] What we have recognized in addition is that the directly given, in the first form of it which we have described, leaves us unsatisfied. It confronts us like a challenge, like a riddle to be solved. It says to us: I am there; but in the form in which I confront you there, I am not in my true form. As we hear this voice from outside, as we become aware that we are confronting a half of something, are confronting an entity that conceals its better side from us, then there announces itself within us the activity of that organ through which we can gain enlightenment about that other side of reality, and through which we are able to supplement that half of something and render it whole. We become aware that we must make up through thinking for what we do not see, hear, etc. Thinking is called upon to solve the riddle with which perception presents us.

[ 32 ] We will first become clear about this relationship when we investigate why we are unsatisfied by perceptible reality, but are satisfied, on the other hand, by a thought-through reality. Perceptible reality confronts us as something finished. It is just there; we have contributed nothing to its being there in the way it is. We feel ourselves confronted, therefore, by a foreign entity that we have not produced, at whose production we were not even, in fact, present. We stand before something that has already come about. But we are able to grasp only something about which we know how it has become what it is, how it has come about; when we know where the strings are that support what appears before us. With our thinking, this is different. A thought-configuration does not come before me unless I myself participate in its coming about; it comes into the field of my perception only through the fact that I myself lift it up out of the dark abyss of imperceptibility. The thought does not arise in me as a finished entity the way a sense perception does, but rather I am conscious of the fact that, when I do hold fast to a concept in its complete form, I myself have brought it into this form. What then lies before me appears to me not as something first, but rather as something last, as the completion of a process that is so integrally merged with me that I have always stood within it. But this is what I must demand of a thing that enters the horizon of my perception, in order to understand it. Nothing may remain obscure to me; nothing may appear closed off; I myself must follow it to that stage at which it has become something finished. This is why the direct form of reality, which we usually call experience, moves us to work it through in knowledge. When we bring our thinking into movement, we then go back to the determining factors of the given that at first remained hidden to us; we work our way up from the product to the production; we arrive at the stage where sense perception becomes transparent to us in the same way the thought is. Our need for knowledge is thus satisfied. We can therefore come to terms with a thing in knowledge only when we have completely (thoroughly) penetrated with thinking what is directly perceived. A process of the world appears completely penetrated by us only when the process is our own activity. A thought appears as the completion of a process within which we stand. Thinking, however, is the only process into which we can completely place ourselves, into which we can merge. Therefore, to our knowing contemplation, the reality we experience must appear to emerge as though out of a thought-process, in the same way as pure thought does. To investigate the essential being of a thing means to begin at the center of the thought-world and to work from there until a thought-configuration appears before our soul that seems to us to be identical to the thing we are experiencing. When we speak of the essential being of a thing or of the world altogether, we cannot therefore mean anything else at all than the grasping of reality as thought, as idea. In the idea we recognize that from which we must derive everything else: the principle of things. What philosophers call the absolute, the eternal being, the ground of the world, what the religions call God, this we call, on the basis of our epistemological studies: the idea. Everything in the world that does not appear directly as idea will still ultimately be recognized as going forth from the idea. What seems, on superficial examination, to have no part at all in the idea is found by a deeper thinking to stem from it. No other form of existence can satisfy us except one stemming from the idea. Nothing may remain away from it; everything must become a part of the great whole that the idea encompasses. The idea, however, requires no going out beyond itself. It is self-sustained being, well founded in itself. This does not lie at all in the fact that we have the idea directly present in our consciousness. This lies in the nature of the idea itself. If the idea did not itself express its own being, then it would in fact also appear to us in the same way the rest of reality does: needing explanation. But this then seems to contradict what we said earlier, that the idea appears in a form satisfying to us because we participate actively in its coming about. But this is not due to the organization of our consciousness. If the idea were not a being founded upon itself, then we could not have any such consciousness at all. If something does not have within itself the center from which it springs, but rather has it outside itself, then, when it confronts me, I cannot declare myself satisfied with it; I must go out beyond it, to that center, in fact. Only when I meet something that does not point out beyond itself, do I then achieve the consciousness: now you are standing within the center; here you can remain. My consciousness that I am standing within a thing is only the result of the objective nature of this thing, which is that it brings its principle along with it. By taking possession of the idea, we arrive at the core of the world. What we grasp there is that from which everything goes forth. We become united with this principle; therefore the idea, which is most objective, appears to us at the same time as most subjective.

[ 33 ] Sense-perceptible reality is such a riddle to us precisely because we do not find its center within itself. It ceases to be a riddle to us when we recognize that sense-perceptible reality has the same center as the thought-world that comes to manifestation within us.

[ 34 ] This centre can only be a unified one. It must in fact be of such a kind that everything else points to it as that which explains it. If there were several centers to the world—several principles by which the world were to be known—and if one region of reality pointed to this world principle and another one to that world principle, then, as soon as we found ourselves in one region of reality, we would be directed only toward the one center. It would not occur to us at all to ask about still other centers. One region would know nothing about the other. They would simply not be there for each other. It therefore makes no sense at all to speak of more than one world. The idea, therefore, in all the places of the world, in all consciousnesses, is one and the same. The fact that there are different consciousnesses and that each of them presents the idea to itself does not change the situation at all. The ideal content of the world is founded upon itself, is complete within itself. We do not create it, we only seek to grasp it. Thinking does not create it but rather perceives it only. Thinking is not a producer, but rather an organ of apprehension. Just as different eyes see one and the same object, so different consciousnesses think one and the same thought-content. Manifold consciousnesses think one and the same thing; only, they approach this one thing from different sides. It therefore appears to them as modified in manifold ways. This modification is not a differentness of objects, however, but rather an apprehending from different angles of vision. The differences in people's views are just as explainable as the differences that a landscape presents to two observers standing in different places. If one is capable at all of pressing forward to the world of ideas, then one can be certain that one ultimately has a world of ideas that is common to all human beings. Then at most it can still be a question of our grasping this world in a quite one-sided way, of our taking a standpoint from which this world of ideas does not appear to us in the most suitable light, and so on.

[ 35 ] We never do confront a sense world completely devoid of all thought-content. At most, in early childhood where there is as yet no trace of thinking, do we come close to pure sense perception. In ordinary life we have to do with an experience that is half-permeated by thinking, that already appears more or less lifted out of the darkness of perception into the bright clarity of spiritual comprehension. The sciences work toward the goal of fully overcoming this darkness and of leaving nothing in experience that has not been permeated with thought. Now what task has epistemology fulfilled with respect to the other sciences? It has made clear to us what the purpose and task of any science is. It has shown us what the significance is of the content of the individual sciences. Our epistemology is the science that characterizes all the other sciences. It has made clear to us that what is gained by the individual sciences is the objective ground of world existence. The sciences arrive at a series of concepts; epistemology teaches us about the actual task of these concepts. By arriving at this distinctive conclusion, our epistemology, which is in keeping with the sense of Goethe's way of thinking, diverges from all other epistemologies of the present day. Our epistemology does not merely want to establish a formal connection between thinking and real being; it does not want to solve the epistemological problem in a merely logical way; it wants to arrive at a positive result. It shows what the content of our thinking is; and it finds that this what is at the same time the objective content of the world. Thus epistemology becomes for us the most significant of the sciences for the human being. It gives man clarity about himself; it shows him his place in the world; it is thereby a source of satisfaction for him. It first tells him what he is called to be and to do. The human being feels himself uplifted in his possession of its truths; his scientific investigation gains a new illumination. Now he knows for the first time that he is most directly connected with the core of world existence, that he uncovers this core which remains hidden to all other beings, that in him the world spirit comes to manifestation, that the world spirit dwells within him. He sees himself as the one who completes the world process; he sees that he is called to accomplish what the other powers of the world are not able to do, that he has to set the crown upon creation. If religion teaches that God created man in His own image, then our epistemology teaches us that God has led His creation only to a certain point. There He let the human being arise, and the human being, by knowing himself and looking about him, sets himself the task of working on, of completing what the primal power began. The human being immerses himself ; in the world and recognizes how he can build further on the ground that has been laid; he grasps the indication that the primal spirit has made and carries out this indication. [ 36 ] Thus epistemology is the teaching both of the significance and of the vocation (Bestimmung) of man; and it solves this task (of the “vocation of man”) in a far more definite way than Fichte did at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. One does not by any means achieve, through the thought-configurations of this powerful spirit, the same full satisfaction that must come to us from a genuine epistemology.

[ 37 ] We have the task, with regard to every single entity, of working upon it in such a way that it appears as flowing from the idea, that it completely dissolves as a single thing and merges with the idea, into whose element we feel ourselves transferred. Our spirit has the task of developing itself in such a way that it is capable of seeing into all the reality given it, of seeing it in the way it appears as going forth from the idea. We must show ourselves to be continuous workers in the sense that we transform every object of experience so that it appears as part of our ideal world picture. With this we have arrived at where the Goethean way of looking at the world takes its start. We must apply what we have said in such a way that we picture to ourselves that the relationship between idea and reality that we have just presented is what Goethe actually does in his investigations; Goethe grapples with things in just the way we have shown to be the valid one. He himself sees his inner working, in fact, as a living helper in learning (Heuristik), a helper that recognizes an unknown, dimly-sensed rule (the idea) and resolves to find it in the outer world and to introduce it into the outer world (Aphorisms in Prose). When Goethe demands that the human being should instruct his organs (Aphorisms in Prose), that also means only that the human being does not simply give himself over to what his senses convey to him, but rather directs his senses in such a way that they show him things in the right light.

• 49. Kants Erkenntnistheorie nach ihren Grundprinzipien analysiert
• 50. Die Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmasses. Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung.
• 51. Vorstellung is often translated as “representation” in philosophical works.—Ed.

Shortly after the death of Voltaire (pen name of François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) Lessing's (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729-1781) writing The Education of the Human Race appeared (1780), and one would like to say that in this writing you can find the starting point of a historical consideration in the spiritual-scientific sense. I have mentioned this writing by Lessing repeatedly in these talks. It tries to find the causes for the view of the repeated lives from the consciousness of the eighteenth century.

Someone who tries to think Lessing's discussions through to the end in this testament of his intellectual work realises that by the ideas of this writing coherence comes into the whole structure of the human historical becoming. We see successive epochs in this historical becoming of the human being, which differ from each other. If we look back at ancient epochs, we realise that the human soul experiences other things, that it searched its ideals in other things than in later epochs. We can say as it were that the different epochs of the historical becoming differ sharply from each other by the character of that what they can give to the human souls. Sense and coherence come in this historical becoming if one considers that this human soul—which could participate in cultural blessings and impressions of one epoch after the belief that the human being lives only once—that this human soul appears for Lessing and the modern spiritual science in repeated lives on earth. Thus, it gets out from any epoch what it can give. Then it experiences a life between death and the next birth in a wholly spiritual world. It appears in the next epoch again, of course with some divergences in the individual lives, to carry over the fruits, the results, and the impressions of the former epoch to the next one. Therefore, we can say that the human soul participates in all epochs through the historical development. Thereby one can really speak taking up the idea of Lessing once again of a kind of education of the human soul by the spirits of the successive epochs. If one goes once spiritual-scientifically even more exactly into that what exists as elementary beginnings already in Lessing's ideas about the education of the human race, then one is in the field of the interpretation of history, where above all our souls develop only so far as one believes to be today in the wholly scientific field. Then only one will have history.

Only then, one brings sense and coherence in the historical becoming; one will recognise how an epoch builds itself up one after the other, what the souls gain from the different epochs, why they are positioned in the different epochs. Then that what spiritual science has to say no longer appears as something fantastic to many people. Then one smiles less about the fact that spiritual science assumes not only a physical-bodily cover of the human being, but that it must recognise an inner spiritual-mental being of the human being which one has to consider, however, in such a way that it develops its different formations and arrangements in the course of the epochs.

Spiritual-scientifically, we distinguish three parts in the human soul, as it has developed up to the present epoch. One may say that the most primitive part of this arrangement is that in which the blind passions work and the desires and emotions pulsate, on which, however, also that works what provides the perception of the physical outside world for us. We call this part the sentient soul. Then as distinct from the sentient soul we speak of another soul part that shows us the human being already with bigger inwardness, shows him in such a way as he can grasp himself if he turns away the look from the physical surroundings and rises above his more unaware desires, emotions, and passions. We call this higher member of the human soul the intellectual or mind soul in which the spiritual life of the human being turns already more inward. We call the highest member of the human soul the consciousness soul, that member in which, above all, the full self-awareness of the human being, the purest ego-consciousness appears.

If we speak about the three soul members—sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul and consciousness soul, we do not talk about abstractions or about arbitrarily constructed concepts and ideas; but we see at the same time how in the course of the historical development these three soul members gradually developing.

If we went far back in the historical becoming, behind the times in which Homer and Hesiod sung in which the Greek tragic poets lived and the Greek philosophy originated, we would find what we recognise in the echoes of the ancient Egyptian and Chaldean cultures even today. The outer research has already brought many things of them to light. Spiritual science, however, shows that in the epoch that dates back behind the eighth to tenth centuries before our calendar until the second and third millennia the human souls, that means our souls experienced something that one cannot compare at all with the modern life. At that time, our modern thinking that appears as something natural to us in the scientific worldview would have still been impossible. It would have also been impossible that the human soul felt isolated and strictly separated from nature at the most important moments of its life. All that was still impossible at that time. The human being felt his soul like living in the whole universe, in the whole nature, felt like a piece of nature, as the hand had to feel as a part of the organism if it could have consciousness. Only with the help of spiritual science, we can imagine the quite different soul life just today that reached possibly until the eighth to tenth centuries before our calendar.

If at that time the human being said, my desires drive me to put forward a foot, or if he said, I breathe—or if he felt hunger or saturation, he felt something in this transition of the inner experience into the movement of the body that he faced in such a way as he faced other experiences if he said to himself, it flashes, it is thundering, or, the wind blusters through the trees. The human being did not distinguish what he experienced emotionally from that what took action outdoors; he was with the whole inner life in nature. For it, however, that he felt himself still as a member in the big total organism, he had an original clairvoyance, he could behold in the spiritual world. He saw nature not in such a way as he sees her today, but ensouled by spiritual beings to which we work our way up again with the methods of spiritual science today. It was natural in those times that one experienced nature ensouled and spiritualised. However, one could not think such thoughts as we think the physical processes but one saw them like in pictures and the pictures were that what the physical principles are for us, and something of these pictures is preserved in the legends and mythologies of the nations, even in the real fairy tales until today. The human being had a pictorial imagination in ancient times.

We can gain these things today not only with the help of spiritual science, but I hope that I have succeeded in the new edition of my World Views and Approaches to Life in the Nineteenth Century (final title:The Riddles of Philosophy, CW 20) in pointing to the fact that one can consider the spiritual life completely philosophically. Then one can realise that a pictorial imagination existed in primeval times which went over to the Greek-Latin imagination only gradually, and that the human soul felt projected in the total organism of the world by the old pictorial imagination that was felt ensouled. This took place mainly in the sentient soul.

The Greek-Roman imagination lasting until the fourteenth, fifteenth centuries preferably demanded the intellectual or mind soul. I have already tried to show the quite different feeling and imagination of those times with the talks on Raphael and Michelangelo. I have explained how the Greek—later also the members of the Latin culture—felt completely one with his “soul body” because in the Greek world mainly the intellectual or mind soul was developed. He felt with his soul living within any single member of his body at the same time. While the preceding times of the sentient soul had a consciousness of the fact that the human being is a member of the whole nature, the Greek had a consciousness that that what lived in his whole body and what this body can give him is for him the immediate, true sight of nature at the same time.

This became different in modern times; also even today, one does not realise these matters with full thoroughness because one does not yet want to penetrate into spiritual science. It changed in particular since the aurora of modern thinking, since Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, and Giordano Bruno. For at that time the consciousness soul started developing. It started developing in such a way that the human being became a riddle to himself, while he started now feeling separated with his independent soul from the whole nature, while he felt his soul as something particular beside the body at the same time. As strange as it sounds, nevertheless, it is right that the human soul felt more separated from nature when the more materialistic tendencies appeared in natural sciences. What a time arose in the western culture since the fifteenth century? At this time, a net of lawfulness spreads out as it were which extends to unlimited spatial widths.

It is great to see Giordano Bruno standing there in the aurora of modern times and imagining the power of physical laws extending into infinite widths. However, in these spatial widths one cannot find what the human being experiences in his soul. If the ancient Egyptian or Chaldean looked up at the stars, he felt that from the constellation of the stars a force arose which was connected with his own moral experience in this or that way. If the old astrologer looked up at the stars and felt the human destiny in them, this view of nature still allowed him to imagine the soul in the work of nature. Now, however, a time arose which made it to the human being more and more impossible to imagine the soul within nature. Since just with the appearance of modern natural sciences the human being had to struggle with the question: how have I to position myself to the work of nature from which no longer anything soul-like shines to me? The human soul had to get around to asking itself for the position of natural sciences to the own soul. With Giordano Bruno, we see this fight. He imagines the own soul as a monad. Although he imagines the world in the sense of modern natural sciences, he still imagines it as ensouled by monads.

Leibniz (Gottfried Wilhelm L., 1646-1710) also imagines the soul as a monad, and he imagines it in such a way that it can suitably relate to the world. Leibniz asks, how must the human soul be to be able to exist in my view of nature? He cannot answer it without formulating this view of nature in a particular way at the same time.

Leibniz considers everything as a combination of monads. If we look into anything of nature, we find the underlying ensouled monads. What we see is for Leibniz in such a way, as if we look at a swarm of mosquitoes which appears like a cloudscape; if we come closer, this cloudscape disintegrates in the single mosquitoes, and the swarm of mosquitoes appears to us first only in such a way because we do not look exactly at it. I have to imagine the view of nature, Leibniz said, in such a way that the human soul can exist in it. He was able to do this only if he imagined it as a monad among monads. Hence, he differentiates monads vaguely living from day to day, then sleeping, then dreaming monads, then those as it is the human soul. However, everything else that originates because everything that we see originating appears to us only in such a way as a swarm of mosquitoes appears to us as a cloud. We could enumerate the most brilliant spirits until our days. We would find that the fight for the knowledge of the human soul presents itself compared with the modern view of nature in such a way that the human soul feels, I must be able to get an idea of that what can arise as a view of nature, and what does no longer offer any ensoulment of nature. Compared with this fight is that what appears as a more or less materialistically coloured monism only an episode that will pass by. Nevertheless, the human soul that is separated from its view of nature will strive more and more to gain contents in itself, that means to arrive at that what it extracted from nature in old epochs.

Hence, we can say: since the age of modern natural sciences everything aims at deepening the human soul in itself, and everything points to the modern spiritual science, which I represent here, that the human soul can get around—experiencing itself in a spiritual world—knowing to be carried by spiritual-divine powers whose outer expression the outer nature is. As true as the human being when he still lived in his sentient soul recognised himself as a piece of the whole nature, as true as the Greek-Latin age, which experienced itself still in the intellectual or mind soul, did not yet feel separated from the bodily, the modern human being experiences himself in the consciousness soul. However, his soul knows itself separated from nature, since it must get an idea of it that no longer contains anything mental. The human soul had to strengthen itself to conjure up the wealth of spiritual experiences from itself, which can return to that assurance which it had when it still felt as a member of the ensouled universe.

Thus, the modern human soul experiences itself in the development of the consciousness soul since the fourteenth century. From the eighth, tenth pre-Christian centuries until the time of the fourteenth, fifteenth post-Christian centuries the development of the intellectual or mind soul lasted. We have to recognise that the spiritual life that the human soul conjures up from itself will be able to become wealthier and wealthier, so that it can live again in a spiritual realm. What we experience as the inner recognition of the consciousness soul began from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries on. We live for about four centuries in this period.

Voltaire lived in the middle of this period, in the middle between the emerging consciousness soul and us. You understand this spirit if you put him historically in this age of the self-experiencing consciousness soul. Since Voltaire with all his shining spiritual qualities, with his superior intellectual activity, with all the good qualities he had is a symptomatic expression of the pursuit of the consciousness soul, just as he is with all his bad, questionable qualities.

Two matters must face him in this age. One is that a glorious view of nature developed during the last century that got its shine only in the modern natural sciences, in which however no place was for the human soul grasping itself. Besides, the most brilliant spirits attempted to solve that riddle: how does the human soul attain an idea by which it can assert itself compared to this modern view of nature? The view of nature becomes more and more glorious; the striving in the human soul to assert itself to get inner assurance appears more and more in such a way that we see it like surging up and down. Since we see the human soul, as if it wants to attempt repeatedly to find itself compared with the view of nature, but shies away from it repeatedly because it is helpless to find that in itself what the consciousness soul has to conjure up in this time. Thus, we are still fighting and that is the most important reason why spiritual science has to position itself in the fight for the inner universe about which I have spoken in these talks and which the human beings have to search.

Thus, we see spirits like Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Locke attempting as it were to answer this riddle: what do I have to do with my soul compared with the view of the outside nature? One could link to each of these spirits who face us there. We want to link, for example, to Locke (John L., 1632-1704).

Locke—who is a symptomatic expression of that what one searched in the English cultural life at the beginning of Voltaire's age to understand the soul—appears to us in the following way. Locke feels, so to speak, completely defeated by the power of the view of nature, so that he must say, we can find nothing in our soul except that, what the soul has taken up only from the outer nature by the senses. The view of nature works so immensely, so impressively that Locke wants to limit all human soul life, in so far it develops knowledge, to that, what the senses induce in it and what the reason can combine as a world view. He faces the world in such a way that he says to himself, we find nothing in the human soul that does not isolate it that does not show it as a “tabula rasa,” as a blank slate, before from the outer nature the sensory impressions come which work on the soul. We realise that the power of the view of nature is so big and immense that Locke loses the confidence to find something in the human soul generally. One must consider the moral-spiritual aspect of Locke's standpoint above all. Indeed, old traditions, the religions connected the human being with the spiritual world. Nevertheless, up to the times of modern natural sciences one believed to be connected with the spiritual of the world, also with the help of spiritual links. There was a view of nature now that worked so overpowering that the human soul did not dare to think anything about itself. Now the soul stood there—and the view with which it stood there originated from spirits like Locke above all.

The human beings said to themselves, we can know nothing that is not delivered to us by the senses and by the reason limited to the senses. Now it mattered to develop so much mental force from the old traditions and emotions that one could recognise—beside that what one can recognise only as a picture of the outer nature—any spiritual-divine world from which one had to admit that one cannot attain it by knowledge, even if one believes in it. The view of nature assumed a form at first that cast off any cognitive connection of the human soul with the divine-spiritual primordial ground.

Thus, that worldview and that attitude towards life originated in which Voltaire was put in his youth at first. He stood at first before the spirit of his time so that it made a tremendous impression on him when he fled soon to England because he had been pursued in France and became familiar there just with that philosophy of Enlightenment. This philosophy limited any human cognition generally to the consideration of the view of nature and still cherished a divine-spiritual world only because of the temperament of the soul. Thus, Voltaire's core was occupied, so to speak, by this world experience, by this soul feeling, and in his so worried and, however, so clever soul the immediate conviction emerged that one stands on sure ground only on the ground of the overpowering physical laws. However, the religious temperament was strong in him. The soul did not give up its faith in a connection with a spiritual-divine world.

We see an infinitely extensive admiration of that originating what the modern natural sciences and the view of nature have brought on one side, and an admiration of the philosophical discussions that Locke, for example, raised. On the other side, we see the need originating in him to exert everything that the human spirit can exert as reasons for such a view of nature. Nevertheless, he adhered to the old idea of the immortality of the human soul, to a connection of the human being with the whole world existence, to the idea of freedom of the human soul in certain limits. Now a peculiar trait of Voltaire faces us that shows us how in him completely a symptomatic expression of that exists what lived in the whole time.

What we face there becomes maybe most vivid if I mention another work that appeared almost at the same time as Lessing's Education of the Human Race, namely theCritique of Pure Reason by Kant. Kant lived since his youth in quite similar conditions concerning the view of nature, as Voltaire did. Kant was devoted to the spirit of Enlightenment in the sense of the word. The dictum is due to him: Enlightenment means that the human soul has the courage to use its reason. It is contained in the nice essay What is Enlightenment? (1784). As to Voltaire Kant is like the fullest consequence of the impulses of Enlightenment. Kant faces like Locke and later Hume the power of the view of nature that showed how the world and the human soul come about. Since one cannot reject what has come up as a view of nature. This worked impressively! This view of nature worked so impressively on Locke that he rejected everything for knowledge that could not come from the sensory impressions and the reason. Kant goes forward “in principle.” He is the thorough, principal man who must lead back everything to the principles, and, hence, he writes his Critique of Pure Reason.

He shows in it how the human being can generally have knowledge only from the outer nature and how the human soul can get a practical but not deniable confidence that can arise from another side than that to which the outer knowledge is due. In the second edition of hisCritique of Pure ReasonKant betrayed his position in the preface: “I had to cancel the knowledge to make room for the faith.” Kant demands an area for the faith where the conscience projects where the categorical imperative speaks which does not give knowledge, however, an impulse to which the human being has to adhere, and leads to the idea of God and the idea of freedom. That is why Kant had to tackle with the matter in principle, while he put the question: if the human soul can attain no knowledge about itself already under the impulse of the modern view of nature, how can we receive a reasonable faith? He asserted a reasonable faith for the human being by the fact that he cast off the knowledge generally from the area where something is to be said about the human soul, while he limited the knowledge to the outer world.

Voltaire did not yet have what Kant had to reduce to a principle without which he could not live which then the whole future lives on. He had the logical side only which said that any cognition limits itself to the physical knowledge. He had to take out from the power of his personality what Kant took out in a principle, from something quite impersonal. Thus, we see Voltaire conjuring up from his temperament, from his ramble mind in his whole life that is identical with a side of the cultural life of the eighteenth century what Kant tried to derive from a principle, the categorical imperative. We see him repeatedly endeavouring in his long life to exert his wit and cleverness to say to himself, we can know nothing compared with the view of nature. But now human soul, step into the breach and try with wit and cleverness to bring all reasons whichever they may be whether good or bad to maintain what must be maintained compared with the view of nature!

Thus, in Voltaire's temperament and ramble mind that lived what had shrunk with Kant to an impersonal principle. Someone who wants to assess human souls must try to search into the structure of a soul with all its fights that as it were must maintain for a long life what can disappear from it by the power and importance of the view of nature perpetually. If we consider Voltaire in such a way and turn the glance at that which he created in detail, then he becomes understandable. Since as he stood there with his soul, he had a world against himself strictly speaking. Voltaire searched a spiritual worldview in which God, freedom, and immortality have space that can be up to the view of nature. Since Voltaire became a more and more ardent and biased confessor of the modern scientific view, and this striving lived and developed in him—because it was the basis of his nature with all the forms which assumed a surely unpleasant character sometimes in the course of his life.

Just at the time in which we recognise Voltaire as the most spirited expression of the struggle of the human soul to find itself as consciousness soul it was almost impossible to realise how this struggle of the human soul relates to an older struggle of the human soul in former epochs. Voltaire could not get to a pure, noble image of the Greek culture, for example. The scientific way of thinking appeared to him much more important and greater than that which the Greeks had intended with their view of nature that contained the picture of the mental-spiritual life at the same time. Therefore, Voltaire had to misjudge an epoch as it were in which in any form of culture the affinity of the human soul with the remaining world expressed itself. One can still recognise this in the figures of Homer and the great Greek tragic poets, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As to Voltaire, one could not at all compare these Greek tragic poets to that which humanity reached in his time. To him the Greeks with their worldviews were human beings who had produced figments about nature; whereas the age of the great scientific researchers appeared as that which furthered the human beings in shorter time than all former epochs had done. Yes, in the age in which the human soul had to strive to maintain itself compared with the view of nature it had to become unfair compared with former ages in which the human soul could still extract its forces from the surrounding nature, so to speak, without its assistance.

Thus, we see the relation of Voltaire to former times gets a tragic character as it were; and we see him positioned in his surroundings in entire opposition to the world which he had grown out, actually.

If one surveys the French cultural life at the time of Voltaire, one can say that this world still cared less about the big riddles which the scientific way of thinking and the arising consciousness soul had to solve. This world still lived in those traditions that were given as it were to the world, so that it could develop in complete silence to the age of Enlightenment, to the age of the conception of itself. Voltaire saw himself surrounded with a world—and his French world was still filled with the most rigid intolerant Catholic principle—which wanted to extract anything mental-spiritual from the traditions, and which refused what was just dear to him: to be on his own towards the view of nature.

A tremendous aversion emerged in Voltaire against the cultural world surrounding him, an aversion that caused a life full of vicissitudes. He was twice in the Bastille, in 1717 and 1726; then he had to flee to England in 1726 where he stayed up to 1729. Next he returned to France and lived since 1734 a longer time secluded at the castle of the marchioness du Chatelet in Cirey in Lorraine. At that time, he became engrossed especially in scientific studies that should show him how the worldview can be grasped in the sense of modern natural sciences. From that, he got an insight of the necessary spiritual basic conditions of modern times. One may argue ever so much against him that he flattered, that he lied, that he deceived his friends, that he tried often to achieve something with the lowest means, all that was not nice. However, a holy enthusiasm was in him that expressed itself through the often cynical-frivolous form in such a way: the impulses of the human soul demand that the soul finds a worldview from itself, renews itself in a worldview that it can put before itself. At first, he could only have the view of nature. Hence, ardent hatred arose in him against Catholicism. He wanted above all to penetrate with his worldview into that which opposed him. He used any means at his disposal.

While he faced Catholicism that way, he found himself cut-off from everything that could connect him with it. For he hated the facilities and customs of Catholicism, its rites. He recognised no connection with that what resulted from his worldview that he wanted to support on natural sciences. The other matter was that he adhered to God, freedom, and immortality only because of his temperament, of his ramble and clever soul, however, only with abstract thoughts and ideas.

If the Greek looked up to those regions, where from the human being got his impulses, he saw something divine-spiritual prevailing there. Let us look at the works of the Greek tragic poets. We see in them the human world shown, adjacent to a divine-spiritual world, we see the divine world working on the world and the destinies of the human beings influenced by the destinies of the spiritual beings. We see above all in the images of the old times a lively consciousness of these spiritual beings existing in poetry. Exactly the same way as human beings could come to life in the tragedy, in the epic, these contents of consciousness could come to life in poetry. They came to life in the poems of Homer! We see in the age, when the human soul struggled out of the other co-creatures that the connection with such beings got lost to it! We can pursue how the supersensible figures still living in the Greek poetry become more and more abstract, already from Vergil until the modern times—with the exception of Dante who wrote his Divine Comedy on basis of a clairvoyant inspiration, and with whom these figures are alive again, indeed, in the form as he could see them.

Nevertheless, everywhere we see these figures growing paler and paler, and the human beings are left more and more to their own resources. We recognise that the poets must refrain more and more from a supersensible world that they do no longer face. Voltaire was too great to be able to refrain from the spiritual beings with his survey of life. His temperament was too big, too comprehensive. This was in his predisposition. Hence, the strange, the miracle which faces us as it were already in his youth epic, in theHenriade (1723) where he describes the destinies of King Henry IV of France. There we recognise that he cannot confine himself to what takes place in the outer world. However, we recognise on the other side that he feels restricted in his action everywhere, so that he is connected with the words from which he gets ideas of freedom, immortality and God only with abstractions. His soul had developed too far to show life in his Henriadein all the fights which were fought out at that time between the various religious and political parties like somebody who looks only as a human being with scientific view at it, and who grasps the other human life only as abstract ideas of God, freedom and immortality. His soul is too great for that. Hence, we see the longing projecting in Voltaire to connect the human soul with a supersensible world. However, we also realise that he cannot behold a humanly possible supersensible world from Catholicism that he hates. Since hagiography was only a collection of legends, and Christ was more or less a devout, good natured enthusiast to him.

However, Voltaire could not accept that the human life runs during its most important events only in such a way, as it happened around Henry IV of France as it looks if one investigates it with the outer senses and deduces with the reason. Thus, strange figures appear in the Henriade like the Discord(e). Why this figure of Discord with the representative of Enlightenment, with Voltaire? She looks at the events of France that do not happen in such a way, as she wants it. She wants more and more disagreement among the human beings, so that she can achieve her goal. With annoyance, she looks down at what happens against Rome, and, therefore, she takes to the road to Rome to come to an understanding with Rome.

Now one could say that all that is allegory. However, just from poetic impulses one has to say what I have just said: this Discord accepts completely realistic forms, so that one cannot consider her as mere allegory. Voltaire describes, for example, that she comes to the pope, that she is alone with him, and that she gets him around. There she behaves like a flirtatious person of the age of Voltaire; she carries out all possible arts of seduction. Just from the poetic impulses, I would like to say, I do not give an allegory credit for that it is able to sway the pope for the political party in France. With that what the pope can give her she returns to France, works as an agitator, appears in the figure of Saint Francis, as Augustine to the monks, goes from city to city, from village to village, and when she wants that Henry III does not win, she manages to seduce the Dominican monk Jacques Clement. Voltaire put everything into this portrayal what he had on his mind against Catholicism in the sense of his freethinking.

It is interesting to recognise how far Voltaire goes in the representation of this Dominican monk who should be seduced by Discord, so that he causes the doom of Henry III and Henry IV. A prayer is stated in the Henriade, which Clement, the monk, sends to heaven. I would like to read out this prayer, so that you get the feeling for that what lived in his soul against Catholicism from which he expected that one of his devout followers sends the following prayer to heaven:

O God! Whose vengeful justice should descend

To crush the tyrant, and thy faith defend

Is murder now, and heresy thy care

Thy wrath unjust, must we, thy children, bear?

Too long the partial trial we endure,

Too long a Godless monarch reigns secure.

Raise thy dread arm, o God! Thy people save,

Descend upon the king, thy anger gave;

Spirits of ruin his approach proclaim,

Ye Heav'ns announce his wrath in show'rs of flame!

Their trembling host, avenging lightnings blast,

Their chiefs, their soldiers perish to the last!

Let their two kings expire before my eyes,

Drive them like wither'd leaves, when storms arise;

Sav'd by thy arm, thy League its voice shall raise

And o'er their breathless bodies chant thy praise!

Stopp'd by these accents in her mid career,

Discord, in air suspended hung to hear;

The dropt to Hell, and from its dungeon drew

The fiercest fiend those fiery regions knew;

Fanaticism!—Nature abhors the name,

Unown'd the monster from Religion came;

Nurs'd in her bosom, arm'd for her defence,

His aim destruction, zeal his fair pretence.

The Dominican monk prays this to cause the death of Henry III and Henry IV, he prays to heaven, so that God sends death. Discord is attracted by this prayer of the monk, enters his cell, and calls “Fanaticism” as confederate from hell. Voltaire presents a figure again to us quite really! How does he speak of Fanaticism from which/whom he assumes that he finds his best support in the principles of the national disposition in modern times? He speaks about him:

'Twas he on Raba's plains, near Arnon's flood,

Taught Ammon's wretched race the rites of blood;

To Moloc's shrine, the frantic mother led,

To slay her infant which her womb had bred!

He form'd the vow which Jepthe's lips exprest,

And plung'd his #8224 in his daughter's breast!

'Twas he, at Aulis, Calchas voice inspir'd,

When Iphigenia's blood the priest requir'd;

Thy forests, France, were long his dark abode,

Where streams of blood to fierce Teutates flow'd;

Still does affrighted memory retain

The sacred murders of the Druid fane;

Rome, falling, own'd the God' mysterious birth,

From Pagan temples to the church retir'd,

The fiend, with rage, Christ's meck disciples fir'd;

Teaching the patient martyrs of his word,

To brandish persecution's bloody sword.

'Twas he, that furious sect in London bred,

By whom too good, too weak, a monarch bled!

Madrid and Lisbon yet his rites disgrace;

He lights those piles where Israel's hapless race,

By Christian priests, in yearly triumph thrown,

Their fathers' heav'n-taught faith, in flames atone!

Robed in Religion's vestments to our eyes,

Still from the church, he borrow'd his disguise ...

(Translation published by Burton and Co., London, 1797)

Discord fetches this guy from the gorges of Hell. From this guy Clement gets the #8224 with which he wounds Henry III, so that he dies.

We see spiritual powers working in Voltaire's poem that way. We realise that God sent down Louis the Saint, the ancestor of the kings, to encourage Henry IV, to instil wisdom into him as it were. Voltaire does not shrink back from putting words in the king's mouth what should happen in the history of France. We realise also that he links the time of Henry IV in an even worse sense to the fact that—after Henry had first advanced triumphantly and got tired then—he leads back this to the fact that Discord led him to the “temple of love” where he tired in unhappy love, until he is called again to a new fight. One reads this portrayal of the temple of love as he presents it as a kind of magic service that the adversaries of Henry IV are addicted to, as a kind of devil service with altars and rituals, which play a role with certain parties. One can say that Voltaire tends not by his reason, not by his intellect, not by that what he becomes from his fight for the consciousness soul but by his ramble temperament, by the sum of his emotions, to connect the whole human life with a spiritual world. However, in that struggle of the human soul, which takes place in the forecourt of the spiritual life, before one could think of spiritual science, is the tragedy of Voltaire that he must search the connection of the outer life with a spiritual world where he wants to show true experiences of the human life. Nevertheless, he can do it only insufficiently. Hence, the Henriade appears as an “unreadable” poem today because everything that Voltaire could exert along these lines is based on traditions which he hates because he feels unable to portray the secret forces anyhow which are working in the human evolution.

The agility of Voltaire's soul was necessary to keep up itself towards the fact that it can get inner contents less and less from the outer view of nature. Already in the Henriade, with those figures which are mythological figures and do not appear at all as mere allegories one notes Voltaire's soul fighting and looking for something that it can tie the human life to, and still finding nothing. One must consider this side of Voltaire and will properly appreciate what he did to understand the human development. Therefore, his marvellous characteristic of Charles XII and Louis XIV is so exemplary, in spite of all defects because for him the biggest riddle was how one experiences historical becoming. Which forces work in it, which work in the environment of the human becoming?

Because of the power that the view of nature exerted on him, he must express himself with all power and cynicism, besides, so to speak, kicking over the traces everywhere, for example, if he incriminates the Maid of Orleans of everything that he regards as superstition. But just Voltaire's soul is such by which one can recognise how souls feel which face the pulse of time in such a way that they do not hear it beating, but feel in the pulse of their own blood that an age comes to an end and a new age is not yet there.—One feels the tragic of this soul that asks, how do I find purchase compared with the new picture of nature? Today we would ask, how does the consciousness soul struggle out in the human being? We find the answer if we look at Voltaire who looks at everything that France could produce as outer culture and to whom the old traditional powers became abstract which are delivered from prehistory. He describes the heaven, the hell—the heaven even splendidly in a certain respect -, in which Henry IV is taken up by Louis the Saint. He describes how the spiritual forces divide the natural forces, how worlds work into each other,—and how all that gnaws, nevertheless, at the deepest subconscious soul grounds which search the hold where the soul can be anchored with its deepest divine being. However, Voltaire cannot find this anchor.

When the decade approached in which Voltaire died, a seed was put in a soul to search the primary source of knowledge in the human being that immerses itself not only in nature but that can also become engrossed in the spiritual universe. When Voltaire had died, Goethe bore the idea of his Faustin himself. Goethe gets out a figure, actually, of that what Voltaire would have called the most superstitious image, a figure which shows us how to search the deepest longing, the deepest wanting and the highest cognition of the human soul. Under the influence of this look into the deepest depths of the human soul, Goethe put a figure that is rather similar to Voltaire: Mephistopheles, save that Faust who searches the birth of the consciousness soul in another way says to Mephistopheles: “In your Nothingness I hope to find my All!” (verse 6256). Strictly speaking, these words sound to Voltaire from Goethe who searched the striving of modern times for the consciousness soul and its anchorage in the spiritual worlds in another way than Voltaire did. Voltaire is like the star of a declining world to which any striving is directed to achieve the consciousness soul and into which the scientific worldview shines which very strongly forces to the consciousness soul. Voltaire is still the greatest star of this declining world, although he cannot find what extends the human soul again to a spiritual world. Nothing is more typical for Voltaire than a quotation that he did about Corneille (Pierre C., 1606-1684, French dramatist) in his history of Louis XIV. There he says that Corneille edited a French translation of the booklet The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (~1380-1471), and he would have heard that the French translation would have had 32 editions. He cannot believe this and says: “for it seems to me so unbelievable that a healthy soul can read this book to an end only once.” There we see expressed how Voltaire could not find the possibility to open a source to the spiritual world in his inside.

Today we say that spiritual science is a real continuation of that to which the scientific worldview forces the human being, but also that this spiritual science is a real continuation of the Goethean worldview. We speak of the fact that in the human being a second human being lives who can experience himself emotionally, we speak with the words of Goethe: “Two souls live, alas, in my breast.” Nevertheless, we speak of it in such a way that the spiritual-mental of the human being searches its spiritual-mental native country and can find it. We talk again in spiritual science of a spiritual world to which the human being belongs with his spiritual being as he belongs with his bodily physical to the physical world. However, the view of nature overpowers Voltaire so that he has no feeling for the “second human being” in the human being. While soon after him Goethe lets his Faust strive with all power for that second human being who strives from the physical-bodily human being to the spiritual worlds, we realise with Voltaire that he can understand nothing of such a second human being. A quotation relating to this second human being is very typical: “So much I have endeavoured to find that we are two, nevertheless, I have found in the end that I am only one.” He cannot admit that this second human being is in him. He has taken care, but this is his tragedy: in the end, he can only find that he is only one who is bound to his brain. This was his deep tragedy about which Voltaire himself helped by his cynicism, even by his frivolity. Subconscious soul depths, the second human being in the human being in connection with a spiritual world,—the upper consciousness was not allowed to confess that to itself. The upper consciousness needed numbing. He could find that in the outer experience because the outer experience dedicated itself to the magnificent, clever worldview that he could create within the most inconsistent soul experiences.

 Thus, we can understand that Voltaire had a rather rough ride to manage with himself, and that he wanted many a numbing. One must already look at the greatness of this man to understand such paradoxical matter that he feigned a severe illness and called for the priest one day—it was in Switzerland where he did so many benefits—,so that the priest came along to give him the last rites. After he had received the sacraments, he jumped up and said that to the priest, it was only a joke, and mocked him. However, one must even live in such “derived” world that does not have the real connection of the human soul with the spiritual worlds as Voltaire lived in such a world and could not come to the connection to which he wanted to come.

If we look once again at Goethe, he takes a “vagrant”—Faust—to show how the deepest impulses arise in the human soul. If we pursue the whole life of Goethe, we realise how he tries to find the human character in its full juiciness in the simplest souls. Voltaire completely lives in a derived layer, in his educated class where everything is uprooted. There he cannot find what ties together the human soul with a spiritual world, and thus he can even speak to that derived layer. Today we can hardly understand that a spirit like Voltaire says: “I do not deign to write for shoemakers and dressmakers; to give those anything that they can believe in, apostles are good for that, not I.” He does not want his holiest conviction to be treated as we would want it today, namely that it penetrates into any human soul. However, he does the typical quotation that he writes only for the educated class because he grew out of it: “Only an upper class can understand heaven and earth which arise to my enlightened mind; the lowlife is in such a way that the silliest heaven and the silliest earth is just the best for it!”

In this respect, Voltaire lives within a dying cultural sphere. This is his tragedy. However, such cultural spheres also have the possibility to develop maturity concerning certain tendencies. Voltaire developed that maturity. It expresses itself in his clever, urgent judgement that does not confuse itself, even in the joke, it expresses itself in his healthy way—even if he is frivolous—to work on the world and to relate to the world in a way. Thus, one can also understand that a spirit who was so great in many a respect, as Frederick the Great (1712-1786), could feel attracted to Voltaire, could push off him again, allowed him to return after some time repeatedly, saying about him, this Voltaire deserves, actually, nothing better than to be a learnt slave, but I estimate what he can give me as his French. He could still give him even more than only the element of language. I have tried to indicate this today.

One can understand that the eighteenth century that had to put everything in the right light on one side what hampered the emerging consciousness soul what had to show a certain greatness, however, just in the downward spirit of the cultural current. One can understand that this had to be expressed in such a peculiar way just with Voltaire. You see Voltaire in the right light if you put that as a counter-image what we have found as the positive, as the continuing in the sense of Lessing or Goethe for the pursuit of the consciousness element. Indeed, what I have spoken about Voltaire today can serve only to cause a consciousness of how difficult it is to gain an objective picture just of this peculiar man: He fought for many things, he strove for live as something natural today in us—also in those who do not intend at all to read Voltaire's writings.

Yes, one can say just with Voltaire that humanity can outgrow his writings; but it cannot outgrow what he was as a force because it has to remain always as a part of the spiritual striving of humanity. Since what had to result as the liberation of the human soul is based on the fact that at first something had to be cleared away by such a decomposing, one would like to say, Mephistophelian spirit like Voltaire. One is not surprised that similar applies to the historical picture of Voltaire what happened to his mortal remains. In the honorary burial parts of the Pantheon in Paris they were buried first; when another political current got the power, it was exhumed again and dissipated; then when the third political current replaced the previous one, the bones were collected again and buried. Some people state now that these bones fetched back again are not the real ones. The historical picture of Voltaire will be right which is portrayed from the one side like that of a liberator from bondage, like an apostle of tolerance, on the other side, however, is denigrated so much. With the whole complexity of Voltaire's personality, it can easily happen if one considers the historical picture of Voltaire objectively that then some people maybe say that it is not right, as the bones buried in the pantheon are not the real ones. Nevertheless, I say, if spiritual science can fulfil its task in the present and future, the picture of the great destroyer, of that who abolished so much, can maybe arise before spiritual science in its full objectivity.Since Voltaire is a human being—he pronounced it even towards Frederick the Great—with all mistakes of a human being and, one would even like to say, a human being with all “miracles” of a human being who is well-suited to fulfil the poet's saying:

By the parties' favour and hatred confused,

His portrayal of character fluctuates in history. (Schiller in the prologue of “Wallenstein”)

His personality was such that his picture can only “fluctuate.” However, although it fluctuates, one has to confess compared with the picture of Voltaire with those to whom he is likeable as well as with those to whom he is unpleasant that he was, nevertheless, a great human being who filled a place in the ongoing education of the human race.

Berlin, June 27, 1898 Dear Madam!

The weeks that have passed since I was once again allowed to visit the Nietzsche Archive - after a long time - have brought me many worries and excitements; and with these I ask you, dear madam, to excuse the fact that I am only able to follow up on the previous discussion today. From information given to me by my dear friend Dr. Heitmüller, I see how you, madam, currently feel about the matter.

You will certainly believe in my enthusiasm for the great cause of Friedrich Nietzsche, dear madam, and you yourself have often spoken such beautiful words to me about my understanding of his art and his teaching that I was deeply moved. I have now suffered deeply since those unfortunate days, which will remain in the memory of all concerned. You may believe me, madam, that it is not at all in my nature to bring my personal interests into the great affair that has become yours through the leadership of your brother's cause. You know, madam, how satisfied I was with the secondary role I was given for a time. At that time I did not feel called upon to assert dissenting views, because I considered it my duty to do nothing against existing rights. But you, dear madam, know best of all that I myself contributed nothing to the role which circumstances then forced upon me. The pain of which I spoke was increased by a special circumstance. Surely you remember our conversation - I think it was in the late summer of '96 - about the "eternal return". At that time we arrived at an idea about this doctrine which I should have developed and defended; then this doctrine would have become a subject of discussion in the widest circles today. I am infinitely sorry that such things, which I believe lie in the direction of my talent, but which I could and should only have done with your constant support, were not done by me. The volume in which the Return of the Same is found should have become an event in Nietzsche literature. You may believe me, madam, that it is infinitely difficult for me to be so distant from the cause of Friedrich Nietzsche now. I felt the pain renewed in your last beautiful letter in the "Zukunft".

I would like to return once again to messages that my dear and highly esteemed friend Heitmüller sent me. You seem, dear madam, to doubt my courage. I assure you that I will not lack courage in a matter that is so close to my heart. And from the unreserved frankness with which I speak here, may you, madam, draw the proof of how seriously I take this matter, how it is linked to my innermost thoughts, feelings and will.

No matter how one may judge my talent: I am deeply rooted in the way of thinking that has found such a grandiose expression through Friedrich Nietzsche, and therefore feel able to contribute my mite to the spread of his art and teachings. I did this myself only recently on the occasion of a lecture I gave in the city of Kant, in Königsberg. The people of Königsberg were unable to suppress their slight displeasure, but afterwards a few clever people confessed to me that the good people of Königsberg only have the understanding for their Kant to gather every year on his birthday and eat their lunch dishes, which are popular in Königsberg. There is no toast because the people of Königsberg don't know what to say about Kant.

May these words of mine show you, madam, that nothing has changed in my nature and that I will always be able to uphold the words that I often said to you in the good, happy hours before the unfortunate events. How can we better honor and understand Friedrich Nietzsche than that we, who believe we have the talents to do so, do our part to spread his ideas? I would consider it an abandonment of myself if I acted otherwise. I am and will always have the strength and courage to stand up for his cause.

With heartfelt respect, yours sincerely

Rudolf Steiner
Berlin W., Habsburgerstr. 11 I.

[ 1 ] I have described the development of thought from Plato's time to Kant's in order to be able to show what impressions Goethe had to receive when he turned to the results of the philosophical thoughts to which he had recourse in order to satisfy his powerful need for knowledge. For the innumerable questions to which his nature urged him, he found no answers in the philosophies. In fact, every time he delved into the world view of some philosopher, an antithesis manifested itself between the direction his questions took and the thought world from which he sought counsel. The reason for this lies in the fact that the one-sided Platonic separation of idea and experience was repugnant to his nature. When he observed nature, it then brought ideas to meet him. He therefore could only think it to be filled with ideas. A world of ideas, which does not permeate the things of nature, which does not bring forth their appearing and disappearing, their becoming and growing, is for him a powerless web of thoughts. The logical spinning out of lines of thought, without descending into the real life and creative activity of nature seems to him unfruitful. For he feels himself intimately intertwined with nature. He regards himself as a living pan of nature. What arises within his spirit, according to his view, nature has allowed to arise within him. Man should not place himself in some corner and believe that he could there spin out of himself a web of thoughts which explains the being of things. He should continuously let the stream of world happening flow through himself. Then he will feel that the world of ideas is nothing other than the creative and active power of nature. He will not want to stand above the things in order to think about them, but rather he will delve into their depths and raise out of them what lives and works within them.

[ 2 ] Goethe's artistic nature led him to this way of thinking. He felt his poetic creations grow forth out of his personality with the same necessity with which a flower blossoms. The way the spirit brought forth a work of art in him seemed to him to be no different than the way nature produces its creations. And as in the work of art the spiritual element is inseparable from its spiritless material, so also it was impossible for him, with a thing of nature, to picture the perception without the idea. A view therefore seemed foreign to him which saw in a perception only something unclear, confused, and which wanted to regard the world of ideas as separate and cleansed of all experience. He felt, in every world view in which the elements of one-sidedly understood Platonism lived, something contrary to nature. Therefore he could not find in the philosophers what he sought from them. He sought the ideas which live in the things and which let all the single things of experience appear as though growing forth out of a living whole, and the philosophers provided him with thought hulls which they had tied together into systems according to logical principles. Again and again he found himself thrown back upon himself when he sought from others the explanations to the riddles with which nature presented him.

[ 3 ] Among the things which caused Goethe suffering before his Italian journey was the fact that his need for knowledge could find no satisfaction. In Italy he was able to form a view for himself about the driving forces out of which works of art come. He recognized that in perfect works of art is contained that which human beings revere as something divine, as something eternal. After looking at artistic creations which particularly interest him, he writes the words, “The great works of art have at the same time been brought forth by human beings according to true and natural laws, as the greatest works of nature. Everything that is arbitrary, thought up, falls away; there is necessity, there is God.” The art of the Greeks drew forth this statement from him: “I suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to precisely those laws by which nature itself proceeds and whose tracks I am pursuing.” What Plato believed he found in the world of ideas, what the philosophers were never able to bring home to Goethe, this looked out at him from the works of art of Italy. In art there reveals itself to Goethe for the first time in a perfect form what he can regard as the basis of knowledge. He sees in artistic production one kind, and a higher level, of the working of nature; artistic creating is for him a heightened creating of nature. He later expressed this in his characterization of Winckelmann: “... inasmuch as man is placed at the pinnacle of nature, he then regards himself again as an entire nature, which yet again has to bring forth within itself a pinnacle. To this end he enhances himself, by imbuing himself with every perfection and virtue, summons choice, order, harmony, and meaning, and finally lifts himself to the production of works of art ...” Goethe attains his world view not on a path of logical deduction but rather through contemplation of the being of art. And what he found in art, this he seeks also in nature.

[ 4 ] The activity by which Goethe takes possession of a knowledge about something in nature is not essentially different from artistic activity. Both merge into one another and extend over one another. The artist must, in Goethe's view, become greater and more decisive when, in addition to having “talent he is a trained botanist as well, when, starting with the roots, he knows what influence the various parts have upon the growth and development of the plant, what they do and how they mutually affect each other, when he has insight into, and reflects upon, the successive development of flowers, leaves, pollination, fruit and new seed. He will thereupon not merely reveal, through what he selects from the phenomena, his own tastes, but rather through a correct presentation of individual characteristics, he will also make us feel wonder and teach us at the same time.” According to this, a work of art is all the more perfect the more there comes to expression in it the same lawfulness that is contained in the work of nature to which it corresponds. There is only one unified realm of truth, and this comprises art and nature. Therefore the capacity for artistic creativity can also not be essentially different from the capacity to know nature. Goethe says about the style of the artist that it “rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge, upon the being of things, insofar as we are permitted to know it in forms we can see and grasp.” The way of looking at things which comes from Platonic conceptions taken up in a one-sided way draws a sharp line between science and art. It lets artistic activity rest upon fantasy, upon feeling; scientific findings should be the result of the development of concepts free of any fantasy. Goethe pictures the matter differently. When he turns his eye upon nature, there results for him a. number of ideas; but he finds that, within the individual object of experience, its ideal component is not closed off; the idea points beyond the individual object to related objects, in which it comes to manifestation in a similar way. The philosophizing observer holds fast to this ideal component and brings it to expression directly in his thought creations. This ideal element also works upon the artist. But it moves him to shape a work, in which the idea does not merely work as it does within a work of nature but rather comes to direct manifestation. That which, in the work of nature, is merely ideal and reveals itself to the spiritual eye of the observer, becomes real in the work of art, it becomes perceptible reality. The artist realizes the ideas of nature. But he does not need to bring these to consciousness for himself in the form of ideas. When he contemplates a thing or an event, there then takes shape immediately within his spirit something else, which Contains in real manifestation what the thing or event contains only as idea. The artist gives us pictures of the works of nature which transform the idea content of these works into a content of perception. The philosopher shows how nature presents itself to thinking contemplation; the artist shows how nature would look if it openly brought the forces working in it not merely to meet thinking but also to meet perception. It is one and the same truth which the philosopher presents in the form of thought, the artist in the form of a picture. The two differ only in their means of expression. [ 5 ] The insight into the true relationship of idea and experience which Goethe acquired in Italy is only the fruit from the seed which lay hidden in his natural predisposition. His Italian journey brought him that warmth of sun which was able to bring the seed to maturity. In the essay “Nature,” which in 1782 appeared in the Tiefurt Journal, and whose author was Goethe (see my indication of Goethe's authorship in Volume 7 of the publications of the Goethe Society), there are already to be found the seeds of the later Goethean world view. What is here dim feeling later becomes clear definite thought. “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—unable to take ourselves out of her, and unable to enter more deeply into her. She takes us up, unasked and unwarned, into the orbit of her dance and drives herself on with us, until we are exhausted and fall from her arms ... she (nature) has thought and muses continuously; but not as a human being, rather as nature ... She has no language nor speech, but she creates tongues and hearts, through which she feels and speaks ... I did not speak of her. No, what is true and false, everything, she has spoken. Everything is her fault, everything is to her credit!” As Goethe wrote down these sentences, it was still not yet clear to him how nature expresses her ideal being through man; but he did feel that it is the voice of the spirit of nature which sounds in the spirit of man.

[ 6 ] In Italy, Goethe found the spiritual atmosphere in which his organs of knowledge could develop themselves, as they, in accordance with their predisposition, would have to if he were to become fully satisfied. In Rome he “discussed art and its theoretical demands a great deal with Moritz”; as he traveled and observed the metamorphosis of plants, a method, in accordance with nature, took shape within him which later proved itself to be fruitful for gaining knowledge of all organic nature. “For as the vegetation presented its behavior to me step by step, I could not go wrong, but, while letting it be, I had to recognize the ways and means by which it can gradually help even the most hidden condition to develop to perfection.” Only a few years after his return from Italy he succeeded in finding a way of looking at inorganic nature also, born of his spiritual needs. “During physical research the conviction forced itself on me that, in any contemplation of objects, our highest duty is to search out exactly every determining factor under which a phenomenon appears and to aim for the greatest possible completeness of phenomena, because the phenomena are ultimately constrained to connect themselves to each other, or rather to reach over into each other, and they do form, as the researcher looks at them, a kind of organization; they must manifest their whole inner life.”

[ 7 ] Goethe did not find enlightenment anywhere. He had to enlighten himself. He sought the reason for this and believed to have found it in his lack of an organ for philosophy in the real sense. The reason, however, is to be sought in the fact that the Platonic way of thinking, grasped one-sidedly, which held sway in all the philosophies accessible to him, was contrary to his healthy natural disposition. In his youth he had repeatedly turned to Spinoza. He admits, in fact, that this philosopher had always had a “peaceful effect” upon him. This is based on the fact that Spinoza regards the universe as a great unity and thinks of everything individual as going forth necessarily out of the whole. But when Goethe let himself into the content of Spinoza's philosophy, he felt nevertheless that this content remained alien to him. “But do not think that I would have liked to subscribe to his writings and profess them literally. For, I had already all too clearly recognized that no one understands another, that no one, in relation to the same words, thinks the same thing that another does, that a conversation or a reading stimulate different trains of thought in different people; and one will certainly tryst the author of Werther and Faust, deeply aware as he is of such misunderstandings, not to harbor the presumption of perfectly understanding as a man who, as student of Descartes, has raised himself through mathematical and rabbinical training to the pinnacle of thinking; who, right up to the present day, still seems to be the goal of all speculative efforts.” But what made him for Goethe a philosopher to whom he still could not surrender himself completely was not the fact that Spinoza was schooled by Descartes, and also not the fact that he had raised himself through mathematical and rabbinical training to the pinnacle of thinking but rather his purely logical way, estranged from reality, of dealing with knowledge. Goethe could not surrender to pure thinking free of experience, because he was not able to separate it from the totality of what is real. He did not want, merely logically, to join one thought onto another. Rather, such an activity of thought seemed to him to lead away from true reality. He had to immerse his spirit into experience in order to come to the idea. The reciprocal working of idea and perception was for him a spiritual breathing. “Time is ruled by swings of the pendulum, the moral and scientific world by the reciprocal movement of idea and experience.” To regard the world and its phenomena in the sense of this statement seemed natural to Goethe, because for him there was no doubt about the fact that nature follows the same procedure: that it “is a development from a living mysterious whole” to the manifold particular phenomena which fill space and time. The mysterious whole is the world of the idea. “The idea is eternal and single; that we also use the plural is not appropriate. Everything of which we become aware and about which we are able to speak is only a manifestation of the idea; concepts are what we speak, and to this extent the idea itself is a concept.” Nature's creating goes from the whole, which is ideal in character, into the particular given to perception as something real. Therefore the observer should “recognize what is ideal within the real and allay his momentary discontent with what is finite by raising himself to the infinite.” Goethe is convinced that “nature proceeds according to ideas in the same way that man, in everything he undertakes, pursues an idea.” When a person really succeeds in raising himself to the idea and, taking his start from the idea, succeeds in grasping the particulars of perception, he then accomplishes the same thing that nature does when it lets its creations go forth out of the mysterious whole. As long as a person does not feel the working and creating of the idea, his thinking remains separated from living nature. He must then regard his thinking as a merely subjective activity, which can sketch an abstract picture of nature. As soon as he feels, however, how the idea lives and is active within his inner life, he looks upon himself and nature as one whole, and what appears as something subjective in his inner life has objective validity for him as well; he knows that he no longer confronts nature as a stranger but rather feels himself grown together with the whole of it. The subjective has become objective; the objective has become entirely permeated with spirit. Goethe is of the opinion that Kant's basic error consists of the fact that he “regards the subjective ability to know as an object itself and, sharply indeed but not entirely correctly, he distinguishes the point where subjective and objective meet.” The ability to know appears subjective to a person only so long as he does not heed the fact that it is nature itself that speaks through this ability. Subjective and objective meet when the objective world of ideas arises within the subject and when there lives in the spirit of man that which is active in nature itself. When that is the case, then all antithesis between subjective and objective ceases. This antithesis has significance only so long a person maintains it artificially, only so long as he regards ideas as his thoughts, through which the being of nature is mirrored but in which this being itself is not at work. Kant and the Kantians had no inkling of the fact that, in the ideas of our reason the being, the “in-itself” of things is experienced directly. For them everything of an ideal nature is merely something subjective. They therefore came to the opinion that what is ideal could be necessarily valid only when that to which it relates, the world of experience, is also only subjective. The Kantian way of thinking stands in sharp opposition to Goethe's views. There are, it is true, isolated statements of Goethe's in which he speaks approvingly of Kant's views. He tells of having been present at many conversations on these views. “With a certain amount of attentiveness I was able to notice that the old cardinal question was being revived as to how much our self and how much the outer world contributes to our spiritual existence. I had never separated the two, and when, in my way, I philosophized about things, I did so with unconscious naivety and really believed that I saw my conclusions before my very eyes. But as soon as that dispute arose in the discussion, I liked to range myself on the side which does man the most honor, and fully applauded all the friends who maintained, with Kant, that even though all our knowledge begins with experience, still it does not for that reason all spring from experience.” In Goethe's view the idea also does not stem from that part of experience which presents itself to mere perception through the senses of man. Reason, fantasy, must be active, must penetrate into the inner life of beings in order to take possession of the ideal elements of existence. To that extent the spirit of man partakes in the coming about of knowledge. Goethe believes it does man honor that within his spirit the higher reality which is not accessible to his senses comes to manifestation; Kant, on the other hand, denies the world of experience any character of higher reality, because it contains parts which stem from our spirit. Only when he first reinterpreted Kant's principles in the light of his world view could Goethe relate himself favorably to them. The basic elements of Kant's way of thinking are in sharpest opposition to Goethe's nature. If he did not emphasize this opposition sharply enough, that is certainly only due to the fact that he did not involve himself with these basic elements because they were too alien to him. “It was the opening part (of the Critique of Pure Reason) which appealed to me; I dared not venture into the labyrinth itself: sometimes my poetic gift hindered me, sometimes my common sense, and nowhere did I feel myself changed for the better.” About his conversations with the Kantians Goethe had to confess, “They certainly heard me but had no answer for me nor could be in any way helpful. It happened to me more than once that one or another of them, with smiling wonderment, admitted that what I said was analogous to the Kantian way of picturing things, but strange.” It was, as I have shown, in fact not analogous but rather most emphatically opposite to the Kantian way of picturing things.

[ 8 ] It is interesting to see how Schiller seeks to shed light for himself upon the antithesis between the Goethean way of thinking and his own. He feels what is original and free in the Goethean world view, but he cannot rid his own spirit of its one-sidedly grasped Platonic elements of thought. He cannot raise himself to the insight that idea and perception are not present within reality in a state of separation from each other but rather are only artificially thought to be separated by an intellect which has been led astray by ideas steered in a false direction. Therefore in contrast to the Goethean way of thinking, which Schiller calls an intuitive one, he sets up his own way, as a speculative one, and declares that both ways, if they only work strongly enough, must lead to one and the same goal. Schiller supposes of the intuitive spirit that he holds to the empirical, to the individual, and from there ascends to the law, to the idea In the case where such a spirit is a genius, he will recognize what is necessary within the empirical, the species within the individual. The speculative spirit, on the other hand, supposedly goes in the opposite direction. The law, the idea, is supposedly given to him first, and from it he descends to the empirical and the individual. If such a spirit is a genius, then he will, in fact, always have only species in view, but with the possibility of life and with a well-founded connection to real objects. The supposition that there is a particular way of thinking, the speculative in contrast to the intuitive, rests upon the belief that the world of ideas is thought to have an isolated existence separate from the world of perception. Were this the case, then there could be a way for the content of ideas about perceptible things to come into the spirit, even if the spirit did not seek it within experience. If, however, the world of ideas is inseparably bound up with the reality of experience, if both are present only as one whole, then there can only be an intuitive knowledge which seeks the idea within experience and which also grasps the species along with the individual. In truth there is also no purely speculative spirit in Schiller's sense. For the species exist only within the sphere to which the individuals also belong; and the spirit absolutely cannot find them anywhere else. If a so-called speculative spirit really has ideas of species, then these stem from observation of the real world. If one's living feeling for this origin, for the necessary connection of species with the individual is lost, then there arises the opinion that such ideas can arise in our reason even without experience. The adherents of this opinion label a number of abstract ideas of species as content of pure reason because they do not see the threads by which these ideas are bound to experience. Such a delusion is most easily possible with respect to the most general most comprehensive ideas. Since such ideas encompass wide areas of reality, much in them is eradicated or dimmed which is attributable to the individuals belonging to this or that area. A number of such general ideas can be taken up from other people and then believed to be innate in man or to be spun out of pure reason. An individual succumbing to such a belief may consider himself to be speculative. But he will never be able to draw from his world of ideas anything more than what those people have put there, from whom he has received these ideas. When Schiller maintains that the speculative spirit, if he is a genius, always creates “only species, but with the possibility of life and with a well-founded connection to real objects” (see Schiller's letter to Goethe of August 23, 1794), he is in error. A really speculative spirit, who lived only in concepts of species, could not find in his world of ideas any well-founded connection to reality other than the one which already lies within it. A spirit who has connections to the reality of nature and who in spite of this calls himself speculative, is caught up in a delusion about his own being. This delusion can mislead him into neglecting; his connections with reality, with his immediate life. He will believe himself able to dispense with immediate observation, because he believes himself to have other sources of truth. The result of this is always that the world of ideas of such a spirit has a dull and faded character. The fresh colors of life will be lacking in his thoughts. Whoever wants to live in association with reality will not be able to gain much from such a world of thoughts. The speculative way cannot be regarded as a way of thinking which can stand with equal validity beside the intuitive one but rather as an atrophied way of thinking, impoverished of life. The intuitive spirit does not have to do merely with individuals; he does not seek within the empirical for the character of necessity. But rather, when he turns to nature, perception and Idea join themselves together directly into a unity for him. Both are seen as existing within one another and are felt to be a whole. While he can ascend to the most general truths, to the artiest abstractions, immediate real life will always be recognizable in his world of thoughts. Goethe's thinking was of this kind. Heinroth made an apt statement in his anthropology about this thinking which pleased Goethe mightily, because it gave him insight into his own nature. “Dr. Heinroth ... speaks favorably about my being and working; he even describes my way of going about things as an original one: that my ability to think, namely, is active objectively, by which he means that my thinking does not separate itself from the objects; that the elements of the objects, one's perceptions, go into thinking and become most inwardly permeated by it; that my perceiving is itself a thinking, my thinking a perceiving.” Basically Heinroth is describing nothing other than the way any healthy thinking relates itself to objects. Any other way of going about things is an aberration from the natural way. If perception predominates in a person, then he gets stuck at what is individual; he cannot penetrate into the deeper foundations of reality; if abstract thinking predominates in him, then his concepts seem insufficient to understand the living fullness of what is real. The raw empiricist, who contents himself with the individual facts, represents the extreme of the first aberration; the other extreme is given in the philosopher who worships pure reason and who only thinks, without having any feeling for the fact that thoughts, by their very nature, are bound to perception. Goethe describes, in a beautiful picture, the feeling of the thinker who ascends to the highest truths without losing his feeling for living experience. At the beginning of 1784 he writes an essay on granite. He goes out upon a mountaintop of this stone, where he can say to himself, “You rest here directly upon a ground that reaches into the deepest places of the earth; no newer layers, no ruins, heaped or swept together, have laid themselves between you and the solid ground of the primeval world; you do not walk here, as in those fruitful valleys, upon a continuous grave; these peaks have brought forth no living thing and have devoured no living thing; they are before all life and above all life. In this moment, when the inner attracting and moving powers of the earth are working as though directly upon me, when the influences of the heavens are hovering around me more closely, I become attuned to higher contemplations of nature, and just as the human spirit enlivens all, so there stirs in me also a parable, whose sublimity I cannot withstand. So lonely, I say to myself as I look down this completely bare peak and scarcely make out in the distance at the foot a meager moss growing, so lonely, I say, does the mood of a man become, who wants to open his soul only to the oldest, first, and deepest feelings of truth. Yes, he can say to himself: here, upon the most ancient, eternal altar, which is built directly upon the deeps of creation, I bring an offering to the being of all beings. I feel the primal and most solid beginnings of our existence; I look out over the world, upon its more rugged and more gentle valleys and upon its distant fruitful meadows; my soul rises above itself and above all, and longs for the heavens nearer it. But soon the burning sun calls back thirst and hunger, his human needs. He looks back upon those valleys from which his spirit had already soared.” Only that person can develop within himself such an enthusiasm of knowledge, such feelings for the oldest sound truths, who again and again finds his way out of the regions of the world of ideas back into direct perceptions.

after eurythmy-dramatic presentations of the “Dedication” and the “Prologue in Heaven”

In the last few weeks, we have spoken of the three great, highest ideals of humanity and have described these three ideals as they have been described for a long time: the ideal of wisdom, the ideal of beauty and the ideal of kindness.

Now, in more recent times, these three highest ideals of humanity have always been associated with the three human soul powers that we know and have considered in the most diverse ways. The ideal of wisdom has been associated with thinking or imagining, the ideal of beauty with feeling, and the ideal of kindness with willing.

Wisdom can only be acquired by man through clear perceptions, through clear thinking. That which is the object of art, the beautiful, cannot be grasped in this way. Feeling is the soul power that is primarily concerned with beauty, as psychologists have long since discovered. And that which is realized as good in the world is connected with the will. It seems that what the psychologists and soul experts have said about the relationship between the three great ideals of humanity and the various soul powers is quite plausible. In a sense, we can add a kind of supplement: that Kant wrote three critiques, one of which, the “Critique of Pure Reason”, is supposed to serve wisdom because it seeks to criticize the power of imagination. Kant called another critique the “Critique of Judgment,” and it is divided into two parts: the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and the “Critique of Teleological Judgment.” Basically, when Kant speaks of judgment here, he means what is contained in the knowledge of feeling, through which one affirms that something is beautiful or ugly, useful or harmful. So we could say – as a subsection, precisely in this Kantian sense, and others have retained the terminology – that the power of judgment, whereby we are thinking not only of the imaginative judgment, but also of the fact that the judgment comes from the heart, is related to the perception of beauty. And a third of Kant's criticisms is the “critique of practical reason,” which refers to the will, to the pursuit of the good.

Now, we can find what I have just said in all psychologists, except for one psychologist who emerged in the second half of the 19th century and found that this whole division of the human soul does not work, does not correspond to the unbiased observation of the human soul. And the assignment of humanity's great ideals to the various powers of the soul – imagination, feeling and will – is just as wrong. Imagination is assigned wisdom as its highest ideal, feeling is assigned beauty, and will is assigned goodness. The psychologist I am referring to, Franz Brentano, thought that he would have to overturn the whole doctrine that I have now outlined and, one might say, fundamentally change the way the human soul is structured. He assigns imagination to beauty, let us assume. You see, while everyone else assigns feeling, or rather judgment, aesthetic judgment, or judgment in general, to beauty, Brentano assigns imagination to beauty. Brentano assigns judgment to wisdom, insofar as it is something that man acquires; he does not say imagination, but judgment. And curiously enough, he even blunts the will by not focusing on the development of the will, on the impulse of the will, but on what underlies the impulse of the will: sympathy and antipathy. — There is much to be said for looking at things this way. Language itself sometimes leads us to associate the volitional impulse with sympathy and antipathy. For example, when we say: to have repugnance for something! We do not want anything, but we have an antipathy for something. And so Brentano, as it were, blunts the will to sympathy and antipathy and assigns to the will this sympathy and antipathy to say yes or no to something. He does not go as far as the volitional impulse, but only to what underlies the will: saying yes or no to something, affirming or denying a thing.

Through imagining, Brentano argues, one never arrives at a true, that is, a wisdom-filled, view, but only at a view. He says that one imagines, for example, a winged horse. There is nothing wrong with imagining a winged horse. But it is not — we must bear in mind that Brentano is living in the age of materialism — it is not full of wisdom to imagine a winged horse, because a winged horse has no reality. Something must be added when we form an idea. But that is, the recognition or non-recognition of the idea by the power of judgment must be added, and only then does wisdom come out.

We may ask ourselves, what is it, so to speak, that underlies such a complete reversal of the powers of the soul? What has led Brentano to distribute the soul powers quite differently from the other psychologists, namely, into beauty, goodness, and wisdom? If we inquire into the reason why Brentano has arrived at this different grouping of the soul life, we can get no answer except by taking into account Brentano's own personal development. The other psychologists of modern times are people who have mostly emerged from the more recent development of world views. It is a peculiarity of modern philosophers, of all philosophers, that they know Greek philosophy relatively well - in their own way, of course - and then philosophy basically begins with Kant. And the modern philosophers do not know much of what lies between Greek philosophy and Kant. Kant himself knew little more about the period between Greek philosophy and himself than what he had read in Aume and Berkeley; he knew nothing of the development of medieval philosophy. Kant was completely ignorant of what is called the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. And those who, in their complacency, exaggerate everything in their own way, find just that much cause, because Kant knew nothing of scholasticism, to regard scholasticism as a bundle of pedantic follies and not to study it further. The fact that Kant knew nothing of scholasticism does not prevent him from also knowing nothing of Greek philosophy. Others knew more than he did in this area. Brentano, on the other hand, was a profound expert on scholasticism, a profound expert on medieval philosophy and, in addition, a profound expert on Aristotle. As for those who see the world of philosophy as beginning with Kant, they are not scholars, not genuine scholars of Aristotle, for Aristotle, the great Greek, was most grievously mistreated in the developmental history of the newer intellectual life. Brentano was a profound scholar of Aristotle and scholasticism, but not in the merely historical sense, not in the sense of someone who knew what Aristotle wrote and what the scholastics wrote, for with regard to such knowledge one can . make one's own thoughts when going through the history of philosophy! Brentano was a man who had become familiar with the philosophy of Aristotle and with scholastic philosophy, with the solitary thinking that went on for centuries in the cells of monasteries, with the thinking that worked with a thorough technique of the conceptual world, with that thorough technique of the conceptual world that has been completely lost to more recent thinking. Those who therefore heard psychology in the seventies and eighties from Brentano, basically heard a completely different tone of human thinking than has been or is heard from other philosophers of modern times. Something really did live in Brentano as an undertone of what spoke from the soul of the scholastics. And that is significant because he made this different classification out of this different thinking. So that we can say: there is the peculiar fact that all the newer thinkers, for whom scholasticism was and is merely a web of concepts, present the human soul and its relationship to wisdom, beauty and goodness in this way:

Wisdom: Imagining
Beauty: Feeling
Goodness: Wanting.

In Brentano, all the feelings and inner impulses that were in a scholastic heart lived, as far as something like that is possible in the present. He had to think in this way, had to structure the human soul differently in its powers and relate it to the great ideals of humanity. Where does that come from?

If you had been able to ask the angels on the stage – and in particular the three archangels – how they organize the soul and how they relate it to the great ideals, they would have answered you, albeit in a much more perfect way than Brentano could, with an answer similar to the one Brentano gave. Raphael, Gabriel and Michael would not understand this classification, but they would easily find their way into it, only to transform it more completely into the classification that Brentano gave. We are touching here on a significant fact in the spiritual development of mankind. However far we may be today from the thinking of the scholastic Middle Ages, there was something underlying this way of thinking that can be presented in the following way. The scholastic did not try to stop when speaking of the highest things, with what is happening directly on the physical plane, but the scholastic first tried to prepare his soul so that the spiritual entities of the higher world could speak out of it. In many respects this will be a stammering of the human soul, because it is self-evident that the human soul will only ever be able to imperfectly express the language of the higher spirits that are superior to man. But that is how the scholastics wanted to speak to a certain extent about the spiritual affairs of man, as a soul must speak that surrenders to what supersensible spirits have to say.

We are getting used to forming our agreement or disagreement with what makes an idea a valid one, a wise one, according to the external physical world, here on the physical plane, since the time of materialism is the actual time of humanity. We say that a winged horse is not a valid concept because we have never seen a winged horse. Materialism regards a concept as a wise concept if it agrees with what the external world dictates.

Brentano, so to speak, provided the last abstract imitation of the language of angels. Angels would say: That which is in accordance with the context of the messages of the beings that are beyond the threshold of the spiritual worlds is full of wisdom. It is not enough to form a concept; rather, this concept must be in harmony with what the spiritual beings reveal beyond the threshold. So mere imagining cannot serve wisdom beyond the threshold. What then can it serve? It can serve appearance, in which beauty lives. If one applies imagination to reality without further ado, then one does not arrive at the right imagination. But one may apply it to the appearance in which beauty lives and works. Brentano was quite right when he related imagination to beauty. For the angels, when they want to imagine, will always ask themselves: What kind of images may we form? Never ugly ones, but always beautiful images. But these images, which they form and which they form according to the ideal of beauty, will not correspond to reality if they do not correspond to the revelations of other entities that they encounter in the spiritual world. Imagining is really only to be assigned to beauty. Angels have the ideal of imagining in such a way that their entire world of imagination is permeated and illuminated by the ideal of beauty. And you need only read the chapter of my Theosophy that deals with the soul world, and there study the two forces in the form in which they are found beyond the threshold to the spiritual world, the two forces of sympathy and antipathy, and you will find that the relationship between sympathy and antipathy underlies the impulses of will. So that coincides again to a certain extent. But it must be related to the life of the soul, as this life, from the subconscious, still arises from the soul world in today's human soul. There you see how a modern philosopher, because he has, so to speak, atavistically preserved the scholasticism of the Middle Ages in his heart, tries to speak in the terminology of angels, albeit in the imperfect language of modern materialism. It is an extraordinarily interesting fact. Otherwise, one cannot understand how Brentano opposed the whole of modern psychology in such a way that he distinguished the powers of the soul quite differently from other psychologists and assigned them to the highest ideals of humanity in a different way.

But take what is said in this way in all its consequences. Note all the consequences. When we cross the threshold to the spiritual world, then we live in a world of beings, I said, insofar as we speak of the real. So we cannot form abstract concepts in the same sense as we do here in the physical world when we speak of the real. We have to have entities. So when we speak of the real, we have to say: It cannot be that wisdom, beauty and goodness have the same meaning in the spiritual world over there as they do here in the physical world. There they would be abstract concepts again, as we can apply them here in the physical world. There must be entities over there. — So, as soon as we speak in terms of wisdom itself, that is, seek a reality, entities must exist over there, not just what is designated in abstracto by wisdom, beauty, goodness. When one speaks of beauty in the spiritual world, one cannot say: Beauty is there as maya, as appearance in the spiritual world. Just as beauty and wisdom are imprinted in the physical world, for example, when we depict wisdom-filled beauty in drama or in other works of art, or when we depict goodness in beauty in drama or in other works of art, and how all this is interrelated, so wisdom, beauty and goodness are at work in the realm of beauty beyond the threshold. But we must not speak of them as concepts; we must not apply what is over there as we apply it here. So let us assume that someone wants to speak from over there, and he wants to speak from over there with the power of the soul, which corresponds to our imagination, so he should not say: wisdom, beauty, strength, because these are abstract ideas, he would have to cite entities. Wisdom would have to appear as an entity on the other side.

In the language of the ancient mysteries, what I am now explaining was well known, and therefore terms were introduced that could express this, that did not point to mere abstract ideas, but to entities. On the other side, beyond the threshold, there must be a Being, which here is Wisdom, a Being. If you reflect a little, you will easily find that a Being, which we call God-vision, the God-visionary, could be such a Being, corresponding to Wisdom on the other side: God-vision.

A being that corresponds to beauty, our abstract idea of beauty for the physical plane, would have to reveal itself. Beauty reveals itself, it is the appearance, the appearing, that which appears. At the moment one crosses the threshold, that which is much more alive than here on the physical plane emerges. When the beautiful is spoken of, the essentially beautiful, something so mute or merely living in human, physical hearing or speech abstractions, it is not spoken of as it is here on the physical plane. It is all revelation, living revelation. And if you combine what I am saying now with what I said earlier, you will understand that the ancient mysteries coined a word for what corresponds to it on the other side, beyond the threshold of Beauty, which can be described as the proclamation of God. God's Word, God-proclaimer, for example. You could also say the Word of God.

Likewise, there must be a being for the volition: the God-willing. Not the abstract, as we have it in our soul as volition, but a being must be on the other side of the threshold for the will. God-willer - if we may form the word. Why should we only form words that are already in use, since we are entering realms for which words have not been coined at all! God's volition, as it were. If we take God as a collective name for the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, then God has within Himself not only a volition, as we have in our souls, but a volitioner: this is essential. What in us are only the three soul powers: imagination, feeling, volition, are in God's being: the God-breather, the God-proclaimer, the God-willing. And if one takes the old Hebrew expressions, they correspond completely to the words that I have tried to coin here. Of course, you will not find the translation of these words in any Hebrew dictionary, but if you immerse yourself in what was meant, you would actually translate the old Hebrew words with these words today, and in such a way that Gottschauer means exactly the same in our language as Michael; Gottverkünder means exactly the same as Gabriel; Gottwoller means exactly the same as Raphael. While we work in the physical world through our three soul powers, the beings of the higher hierarchies work through their own entities. Just as we work through imagination, feeling and will, so a God works through Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. And that means the same for a God: I work through Michael, Gabriel, Raphael – which for our soul means: I work through thinking, feeling and willing. This translation: I work through thinking, feeling and willing - into: I work through Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, is simply the translation from the language of men into the language that should be spoken - if one speaks the real language that prevails there - beyond the threshold to the spiritual world. If you open yourself to some of the descriptions in the Bible, you will be able to feel everywhere – if you feel appropriately and not in a way that corresponds to today's interpretation of the Bible, which is a misinterpretation in many respects – you will be able to feel how this really must be intended for Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.

Wisdom: power of judgment – Godshower; Michael
Revelation of Essence

Beauty: imagination – God-announcer: Gabriel
Power of Judgment

Goodness: sympathy, affirmation / antipathy, negation –
God-willing: Raphael

Now, bearing this in mind, think back to the way Gabriel, Michael and Raphael speak in Goethe's “Prologue to Heaven”. One can only say that one is deeply shaken by the instinctive certainty with which this “Prologue in Heaven” suggests how the willing essence of the Godhead, through Raphael, the seeing essence of the Godhead, through Michael, and the beautifully revealing essence of the Godhead, the revealing, proclaiming essence of the Godhead, through Gabriel, is manifested. The volition of the Godhead lies in the harmony of the spheres, in that which expresses itself in the great movements of the heavenly bodies and in that which happens while the heavenly bodies move:

The sun sounds in the ancient manner
In the singing contest of the spheres,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.
The sight of it gives strength to the angels,

— one could also say: goodness, the strength of the super-moral life beyond the threshold. Therefore, some also refer to the three soul powers of wisdom, beauty, goodness as wisdom, beauty, strength.

When none can fathom them;

— you will bite your teeth out if you try to hold on to the Faust commentators on this line: “If no one can fathom it.” Most say: Oh yes, Goethe just meant, even though, or although, or although no one can fathom it. But that is not how a truly great poet speaks – I have often mentioned this to Goethe – that is not how a great poet speaks. Fathoming belongs to wisdom as it lives within the human physical world. Beyond the threshold, everything is a becoming acquainted with spiritual beings, whom one approaches as one approaches people here, who must also keep an inner being, who cannot be completely fathomed. This fathoming in the sense in which it occurs here on earth does not exist for the angels at all. They have the spiritual reality before them; they do not fathom; they look, because something of the power of Michael's vision has also been given to each one. Each has something of the other power, just as each soul power has something of the other, for example, imagining has something of wanting, because if we could not want when imagining, we would only dream and so on. So Raphael also has something of Michael and Gabriel in himself, of course.

The incomprehensibly high works

Are glorious as on the first day.

Try to feel these two lines with all the sensations that you can have from spiritual science!

The incomprehensibly high works

— which are described there

Are glorious as on the first day.

What does that mean? They are not glorious as on that day, glorious as on the first day. Just as they appeared glorious to the angels at that time, that is, expressing themselves, revealing themselves, they are still - luciferic. Because what has remained behind is, after all, luciferic. One must really apply the perceptions that one acquires through spiritual science. The stars shine as luciferically as on the first day. They have not progressed; they retain their original character – again a reason why the angels do not fathom them, but behold them. For angels, the luciferic is visible. It does not make the angels bad. I have often described the luciferic as a necessity in the evolution of the world. Here it is presented to you as something that the angels behold: Lucifer – not as he reigns for people – but as he gloriously maintains the indescribably high works as they were on the first day. And we are led to it in exalted language, so that we are shown how the Luciferic lives out in the universe, and the angels may look at it as on the first day. There it is justified. It should not descend into the physical world to man in the ordinary way, but live above in the world that is beyond the threshold. And the world that is pervaded and thundered through by the will of the world is first proclaimed on earth. Up there it should remain unfathomable, it should not be fathomed. Here on earth, with the powers that are given to man, it is there so that what is unfathomable for angels

be fathomed through human wisdom. But Gabriel, the proclaimer of God, the Word of God, can only hint at this as he sees it from outside the earth. Do you remember the profound Bible verse: “Before the mystery of the Incarnation they veiled their faces.” In this profound Bible verse lies the whole of the unfathomable for the angels of the worlds that are accessible to man through the wisdom that is developed on earth. And here angelic language is spoken in the 'Prologue to Heaven', which is why Gabriel, the proclaimer of God, characterizes from the outside that which reveals itself on earth as wisdom.

And fast and incomprehensibly fast
The earth's splendor revolves;
Paradise's brightness changes
With deep, shudder-filled night;

This is how it appears from the outside: the world in which we live here, which we try to unravel, and which affects us in the sphere of our senses. Out there it is the wonderful change of day and night.

The sea foams in broad rivers

Human weal and woe depend on it; out there it reveals itself only as that which, in its foaming, composes the spherical earth.

At the deep bottom of the rocks,
And rock and sea are torn away
In an eternally fast spherical course.

In which our whole earthly destiny, bound to our sensory life, is bound. The God-announcer draws it from outside the earth.

And how is the meaning of the earth revealed? By looking not only at that which is valid for the human sense realm, but also at that which sends its effect out into the universe. Gabriel describes the earth as it appears from the outside, but he describes what is significant for man in the sense realm. Michael, the God-shower, describes that which radiates out into the universe and also has its significance for the earth's surroundings, for the entire celestial sphere. Therefore, he begins with the surroundings, not below, where the sea flows, where the rivers flow, but with

the surroundings. He looks at the surroundings.

And storms roar in competition,

A deep word!

From sea to land, from land to sea,
And furiously form a chain
Of the deepest impact all around.

Just imagine, seen from the outside, let's say, the trade winds that blow out there in regular currents. Our limited natural science describes all this, what goes on in these atmospheric phenomena, but it is limited, this natural science. When one examines the regularities in atmospheric phenomena, one comes across a deep connection between these regular atmospheric phenomena and the phases of the moon, the phenomena of the moon, but not because the moon causes what happens in the atmosphere, but because, in the same measure, in parallel, the old lunar laws still govern the moon today, and the atmospheric phenomena also still remain from the old lunar laws. Not that the moon rules the atmospheric phenomena and the tides, but both are ruled by causes that go back much further, ruled in parallel. What happens in the atmosphere is therefore not only significant for that which affects people in the sphere of the senses, but it also has significance for that which happens out there in the universe. We look up at the lightning, we hear the thunder. But the Gods also see the lightning and hear the thunder from the other side. And for them it means something quite different - of which we can speak another time - than for us human beings here, who do not understand lightning and thunder. But the God-shower Michael understands from the earth precisely that which is lived out on the other side in lightning and thunder, which has been described here by me — remember the first lecture I gave here this summer — as the subterranean of the human soul, as the thunderstorms of the human soul, which I have described to you in terms of the character of Weininger, who died young. What corresponds to these thunderstorms in the human soul, in the atmosphere, has an effect. And just as the soul storms in us are harmonized and mitigated when we pour our higher soul forces over them, so for the world outside, what is stormy and thundering here in our atmosphere and is irregular in meteorology becomes regular and harmonious in the universe. Just as we, as we develop, do not remain in the storms, but progress to the harmony of the soul life. Down there, lightning and thunder

But your messengers,

- the angels -

Lord,
we honor the gentle walking of your day.

Everything falls into place, gently and harmoniously, as seen from the sphere of the angels outside.

The sight gives the angels strength,

- that is, it strengthens their volition

Since no one can fathom you,

– it is not a matter of fathoming, but of beholding!

And all your lofty works
Are glorious as on the first day.

That means: they are Luciferian, they are there for angels, they should only not have the same effect on people. Lucifer is the unjustified in the world of man, insofar as he transfers his justified sphere outside into the world of man for the spiritual world and applies the same laws there that he should only apply outside in the spiritual world.

And do you remember how I dealt with it in other lectures, based on Goethe's “Faust”, the ambiguity that still remained in Goethe when he wrote “Faust”. I told you at the time that Goethe did not yet properly distinguish between Lucifer and Ahriman. Mephistopheles is actually Ahriman, who has only been left behind in a different way than Lucifer. But this distinction is only given by the newer spiritual science. Goethe constantly confuses Lucifer and Ahriman, throws them together, so that his Mephistopheles is really a confused figure in this respect, has Luciferic and Ahrimanic traits. If Goethe had already had spiritual science, this terrible confusion with regard to the character of Mephistopheles would certainly not occur. I have already said at the time: I ask not to be accused of not sufficiently venerating Goethe or of criticizing him in a mean, philistine way because of what I say. By telling the truth, one's veneration of some genius is truly no less than if one merely praises it. I believe that no one can accuse me of having a low opinion of Goethe after what I have written and said about him. But I must always emphasize that his Mephistopheles is a confused spiritual character when I speak from the impulse of spiritual science. If Goethe had known exactly the right thing to say after the verse:

And all your lofty works
Are glorious as on the first day

first appeared Lucifer, the one who works through the appearance of the world of the spheres, through the beauty of the world of the spheres. Lucifer would stand there. And because Lucifer has as his companion Ahriman, Mephistopheles – which is the same as Ahriman – Mephistopheles would then step in, or Lucifer would step down and Mephistopheles would step up. That is what Goethe would have done if he had had spiritual science in its present form. We would have seen a red Lucifer first, and only then the gray-black Ahriman, the gray-black Mephistopheles. But Goethe did not get that far. Therefore, he only lets Mephistopheles appear, who in his own way also combines the retarded qualities that should work in the spiritual world and not work in a human way into human life. Goethe felt that, felt it correctly. That is why not everything about this Mephistopheles is quite right, although it is right. The feeling here seems much more certain than Goethe's intuition has already worked. Much of what Faust encounters as temptation really comes from Mephistopheles, but other things cannot properly be attributed to Mephistopheles. That Faust should be tempted by base passions cannot really come from Ahriman, it can only come from Lucifer. And when Ahriman-Mephistopheles says this, Goethe remembers, subconsciously, that it is not quite right. Mephistopheles should actually have Lucifer at his side. That is why Mephistopheles says: “Dust shall he eat,” that is, he shall live in lower passions, “like my aunt, the famous snake.” That is Lucifer. Then he reminds us of his aunt, the good Aunt Lucifer!' There you have the reminiscence of Lucifer, who is actually supposed to be there.

You see, there are tremendously deep secrets of the world in this “Prologue in Heaven”, by which I do not mean to say that Goethe wanted to present them as we feel them today in spiritual science. But instinctive wisdom is often much deeper than the apparent one. And in ancient times there was only instinctive wisdom, and that was truly a higher wisdom than that which is produced today by limited natural science.

Thus Mephistopheles-Ahriman entered the physical world, where he should not be. There is also a poor fit between what he has to say and the physical world and the intentions of the Deity in the physical world. He wants to rule in the world, but he finds everything “very bad”. He must be different from the others, from the genuine sons of the gods, for he is to be here in the physical world, where works are to be fathomed. Since Mephistopheles enters the physical world at all, the saying that he should not fathom the world does not apply to him; he must fathom it. He is only a half-nature on earth; as a spiritual being he does not really belong. He would have to fathom it, but cannot fathom it. That is why he finds everything “very bad”. We will talk about the extent to which he is here for creation tomorrow in connection with other teachings of spiritual science. Today we just want to say this.

So this Ahriman-Mephistopheles is different here in the physical world from the true sons of the gods. He really must be used for something else here. He must work on what is real in the physical world, unlike the true sons of the gods. They do not need to have the earthly real in their imaginations. They must delight in the “vividly rich beauty”, the beauty in their imaginations. There is a discrepancy between the angels, the true sons of the gods, and Ahriman, the Mephistopheles. For them, the angels cannot do it like Mephistopheles, they delight in the lively, rich beauty.

That which is becoming, that which is eternally working and living,
embraces you with the sweet barriers of love.

This is about as profound as the prologue gets. Remember what we said about the cosmos of wisdom and the cosmos of love? And remember the words: They veiled their faces from the mystery of the Incarnation. — Love does not live the same way for the Sons of God of Wisdom as it does for humans: they are beings within wisdom; there are limits for the true Sons of God. And by living in the great Maja, in the glory of the Luciferic world, they weave the “permanent thoughts” that are in turn beings, not abstract ideas, that are forces, not mere thoughts.

It is truly remarkable how this “Prologue in Heaven” was written in 1797, one might say, not in the language of men, but in the language of the gods, and how humanity will take a long time to fathom all the depths of this prologue. I think it is possible to get a sense of the feelings that lived in Goethe when, spurred on by Schiller, he set about continuing Faust in 1797, which he had started years ago. It began there: “Have now, alas, studied philosophy, law” and so on. Then the three parts are missing: “Dedication”, “Prelude to the Theater”, “Prologue in Heaven”. Then the whole Easter walk was missing. Some scenes were then written during the Italian journey in 1787, and under Schiller's encouragement, Goethe went back to it. He may well have thought back to the time when he had not taken Faust so deeply, when he had only taken it, albeit very deeply, as one who strives out of the world of physical reality, over the threshold, into the spiritual world, to the earth spirit and so on. But he could not take it then, he, the twenty-year-old Goethe, as he took it now at the end of the century, in 1797, when he himself felt that he really did not understand in an abstract way much of what he had to express in the “Prologue in Heaven”. For there the language of angels prevails. Those who heard the first songs of Faust would have had to develop with Goethe in the way that Goethe himself developed if they had wanted to understand what had become of the whole rich world of Faust in Goethe's soul by 1797. Something different had become of it. What he had created as a young man appeared to him in a higher sphere. He must have had some sense of the view from the spiritual sphere beyond the threshold down to the earthly world in which Faust also walked, who says: “Have now, alas, philosophy, jurisprudence...” and so on. “... studied with hot endeavor.” Goethe could say that he and his companions enjoyed something different back then than what has now become his. And he might have sensed something of how little he would be understood. For Goethe sensed already, from the end of the 1790s, that something must come like a spiritual science if what he instinctively sensed and felt as world-wisdom and world-beauty and world-strength was to be fully understood.

They will not hear the following songs,
The souls to whom I sang the first;
The friendly throng has been scattered,
Alas! the first echo has faded.

Echo from the souls to whom he read the first scenes of “Faust,” which he wrote when he was twenty years old: the first echo. But understanding at that time – for even that time is now already gone in the time of materialism – understanding, however, for crossing the threshold with a character like Faust, understanding for appealing to the earth spirit, which “weaves and lives in the tides of life, in the storm of deeds”. But a stopping at this understanding, an inability to ascend to what Goethe had to struggle to achieve. Therefore - now that the language of angels prevails and the whole is viewed from a different point of view - no longer the old resonance. Faded away, alas! - that old resonance! Scattered the souls for whom he sang the first songs. That suffering that everyone goes through who really wants to look at the spiritual world, Goethe knew it and knew that he was alone with this suffering in his time.

My suffering is heard by the unknown multitude.

This is not much different today, when one could be frightened by the applause that people give to “Faust”. For what do people today still hear of the deep wisdom that prevails in “Faust”, much more than external appearances!?

But Goethe might say, if he now felt that he had to lift up his song, the song of his suffering, into the realm of the spirit: What used to be reality to me floats far into the distance, and what used to disappear becomes reality — the silent, earnest spiritual kingdom, which one approaches with that awe that one feels when one has a presentiment of the completely different form that the world takes on the other side of the threshold and on this side of the threshold. This 'dedication' also arose from Goethe's deep sense of the possibilities of the future. If spiritual science could also deepen human hearts in such cases, so that they are really able to take what must be taken deeply, then spiritual science would fulfill one of its tasks. For the saying that I quoted here only recently is true, deeply true: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day conceived,” that is, than the day that shows us only the physical, sensual world. The world is deep as it is revealed to us by that night which, compared to physical day, is indeed night and darkness, but into which we carry that light which we kindle in our own soul as a lamp and which we then have to illuminate ourselves. The world is deep and must be fathomed by a light that we first kindle through our spiritual striving so that it may shine in the spiritual world. Then it will shine as the light does in the eternal becoming, which works and lives and in which the beings of the higher world have to dwell, so that it may be revealed to them what they need to fortify with lasting thoughts that which floats in fluctuating appearance.

From this point we will then continue our meditation tomorrow.

I would just like to ask our friends from Basel not to bring any children with them tomorrow. We have to make this exception because the presence of the personality from hell presented to you today makes this scene unsuitable for children's fantasies and dreams. So, as an exception, we ask that anyone under fifteen or sixteen years of age not be brought tomorrow.

Published in The Golden Blade, 1977. It is the seventh of twelve lectures in the volume Goetheanism as an Impulse for Transformation ... Human Science and Social Science.

It seems that it would be useful to consider matters concerned with the social life of the present in the light of our recent studies of Goethe. The nineteenth century represents a very significant turning-point in the history of mankind, particularly in relation to the social life of our own time. The middle of the century brought a much greater change in ways of thinking than is generally appreciated. When considering this change one could certainly start from personalities who were not German, for example Shaftesbury and Hemsterhuis. But these examples from England or Holland would not lead us so deeply into our theme as the study of Goethe can do. At the present time, when so much—far more than people realise—is tending towards the destruction of all that springs from middle Europe, it may be of use to link up with these things, which should live on in humanity in a way quite different from the way imagined by most Germans today.

If one looks at the present situation honestly and without prejudice, one cannot help feeling oppressed if one remembers a saying by Herman Grimm—the saying of an outstanding man who lived not very long ago. For this one need not be a German, but one needs to have some feeling for the culture of middle Europe. Herman Grimm once said that there are four personalities to whom a German can look if he wishes to find, in a certain sense, the direction for his life. These four are Luther, Frederick the Great, Goethe and Bismarck. Grimm says that if a German cannot look in the direction given by these four personalities, he feels unsupported and alone among the nations of the world.

In the nineties many people had no doubt at all that this remark was correct (though I was not one of them), but today it can give us a feeling of oppression. For one must admit: Luther does not live on effectively in the German tradition; Goethe has never been a living influence, as we have often had to emphasise, and Frederick the Great and Bismarck belong to conditions which no longer exist. Thus—according to Herman Grimm's remark—the time would have come already in which a German would have to feel unsupported and alone among the nations of the world. People do not feel deeply enough to realise fully in their soul what this signifies: less than three decades ago something could be taken as a matter of course by an enlightened spirit—and today it is quite impossible. If present-day men were not so superficial, many things would be felt much more deeply. It can sometimes be heartbreaking how little the events of the world are felt.

Looking back before the nineteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, we can observe a significant impulse. It was the impulse working in Schiller when he wrote his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man; this was the time, too, when Goethe was stirred by his dealings with Schiller. They led Goethe to express the impulse which lay behind Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters” in his own tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” You can read about the connection between Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters” and Goethe's fairy-tale in my recent small book on Goethe.

When Schiller wrote these “Letters”, his intention was not merely to write a literary essay, but to perform a political deed. At the beginning of the “Letters” he refers to the French Revolution and tries in his own way to say what may be thought about the will behind it, and behind the whole revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. He had no particular expectation as to what would be achieved through a great political change, of which the French revolutionaries hoped so much. He hoped much more for a thorough self-education of man, which he regarded as a necessity of his time.

Let us consider once more the basic conception of these “Letters.” Schiller seeks to answer, in his own way, the question: how does man achieve real freedom in his social life? Schiller would never have expected that men would be led to freedom simply by giving the right form to the social institutions in which they lived. He asks rather that by work upon himself, by self-education, man should reach this condition of freedom within the social order. Schiller believed that man has first to become inwardly free before he can achieve freedom in the external world. And he says: Man has his existence between two powerful influences. On one side he faces the influence coming from physical nature; this Schiller calls the influence of natural necessity. It includes everything produced by the sense-nature of man in the way he desires and so on. And he says: If a man obeys this influence, he cannot be free.

Opposed to the influence of the senses there is another—the influence of rational necessity. Man can commit himself to follow rational necessity, as the other pole of his existence. But then he cannot be a truly free man, either. If he follows in a logical way this rational necessity, it is still something that compels him. And if this rational necessity is consolidated into the laws of an external State, or something of that kind, in obeying such laws he is still compelled. So man is placed between reason and sensuality. His sensuality is a necessity for him, not a freedom. His reason is also a necessity, though a spiritual one; under it, he is not free.

For Schiller, man can be free only if he does not follow in a one-sided way either the influence of the senses or that of reason, but succeeds in bringing the influence of reason into closer accord with his humanity; when, that is, he does not simply submit like a slave to logical or legal necessity, but makes the content of the law, the content of rational necessity, truly his own.

Here Schiller, in comparison with Kant, whom unfortunately he otherwise followed in many ways, is a much freer spirit. For Kant regarded absolute obedience to what he calls duty—that is, rational necessity—as the highest human virtue. “Duty, thou great and sublime name ”, Kant says, on the only occasion when he becomes poetical, “having nothing that flatters or attracts us...” Schiller says: “I serve my friends willingly, and unfortunately I like to do it. And so it often worries me to find that I am not virtuous.” That is his satirical comment on Kant, who would regard serving one's friends as a duty. Schiller means that while an unfree man may serve his friends as a duty, in obedience to the “categorical imperative,” a free man carries his humanity so far that he does it because he likes to do it, out of love, as an inner matter of course.

Thus Schiller seeks to draw down rational necessity into his human realm, so that a man does not have to submit to it, but is able to practise it as a law of his own nature. The necessity of the senses he seeks to raise up and spiritualise, so that the human being is not simply driven by his sensuality, but can ennoble it, so that he may give it expression, having raised it to its highest level. Schiller believes that when sensuality and reason meet at the centre of his being, man becomes free.

It seems as if present-day man is not properly able to share what Schiller felt when he described this middle condition as the real ideal for human beings. If a mutual permeation of rational necessity and the necessity of the senses were constantly achieved, Schiller held, this ideal condition would be expressed in the creation and appreciation of art.

It is very characteristic of the time of Schiller and Goethe to seek in art a guide for the rest of human activity. The spirit of Goethe rejects everything Philistine and seeks for an ideal condition which is to be achieved in the likeness of genuine art. For the artist creates in a visible medium.  Even if he creates in words, he is working in a sense-perceptible medium. And he would produce something terribly abstract if he gave himself up to rational necessity. He must learn what he is to create from the material itself, and from the activity of shaping it. He must spiritualise the sense-perceptible by giving matter form. Through the formal pattern (Gestalt) that he gives it, matter is enabled to have an effect, not just as matter, hut in the same way that the spiritual has an effect. Thus the artist fuses spiritual and perceptible into one creation. When all that men do in the external world becomes such that obedience to duty and to the law comes about through an inclination akin to that of the artist, and when all that comes from the senses is permeated by spirit, then for individual human beings, and also for the State and the social structure, freedom is achieved, as Schiller understands it.

So Schiller asks: how must the various powers of the soul—rationality, sensuality, aesthetic activity—work together in man, if he is to stand as a free being in the social structure? A particular way for the forces of the soul to work together is what Schiller thought should be aimed at. And he believed that when human beings in whom rational necessity permeates sensual necessity, and sensual necessity is spiritualised by rational necessity—when these human beings form a social order, it will turn out to be a good one, by necessity.

Goethe often talked with Schiller, and corresponded with him, while Schiller was writing his “Aesthetic Letters.” Goethe was a quite different man from Schiller. Schiller had tremendous inner passion as a poet, but he was also a keen thinker. Goethe was not in the same way a keen abstract thinker and he had less poetic passion, but he was equipped with something that Schiller lacked: with fully human, harmonious instincts. Schiller was a man of reflection and reason; Goethe was a man of instinct, but spiritualised instinct. The difference between them became a problem for Schiller. If you read his beautiful essay on “Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” you will always feel that Schiller might just as well have written, if he had wanted to become more personal: On Goethe and Myself. For Goethe is the naive poet, Schiller the sentimental poet. He is simply describing Goethe and himself.

For Goethe, the man of instinct, all this was not so simple. Any kind of abstract philosophical talk, including talk about rational necessity, sensual necessity and the aesthetic approach—for these are abstractions if one contrasts them with one another—was repugnant to Goethe in his innermost being. He was willing to engage in it, because he was open to everything human and because he said to himself: A lot of people go in for philosophising, and that is something one must accept. He never rejected anything entirely. This is most evident when he has to talk about Kant. Here he found himself in a peculiar position. Kant was regarded by Schiller and many others as the greatest man of his century. Goethe could not understand this. But he was not intolerant, or wrapped up in his own opinion. Goethe said to himself: If so many people find so much in Kant, one must let them; indeed, one must make an effort to examine something which to oneself seems not very significant—and perhaps one will find a hidden significance in it after all. I have had in my hands Goethe's copy of Kant's Critique of Judgement; he underlined important passages. But the underlinings became fewer well before the middle, and later disappear altogether. You can see that he never reached the end.

In conversation about Kant, Goethe would not let himself become really involved in the subject. He found it disagreeable to talk about the world and its mysteries in terms of philosophical abstractions. And it was clear to him that to understand the human being in his development from necessity to freedom was not as simple as Schiller had believed. There is something very great in these “Aesthetic Letters,” and Goethe recognised that. But it seemed to him too simple to ascribe all the complications of the soul of man to these three categories: rational necessity, aesthetic impulse, sensual necessity. For him there was so much more in the human soul. And things could not simply be placed side by side in this way.

Hence Goethe was stirred to write his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in which not only three but about twenty powers of the soul are described, not in concepts, but in pictorial forms, open to various interpretations. They are headed by the Golden King, who represents (not symbolises) wisdom, the Silver King who represents beautiful appearance, the Bronze King, who represents power, and Love who crowns them all. Everything else, too, indicates soul-forces; you can read this in my article.

Thus Goethe was impelled to conceive this path for the human being from necessity to freedom in his own way. He was the spiritualised man of instinct. Schiller was the man of understanding, but not in quite the usual sense: in him understanding was led over into perception.

Now if we consider honestly the course of history, we can say: this way of looking at things, developed by Schiller in an abstract philosophical way, by Goethe in an imaginative and artistic way, is not only in its form, but also in its content, very remote from present-day men. An intimate older friend of mine, Karl Julius Schröer, who was once responsible for examining candidate teachers for technical schools, wanted to examine these people on Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters:” they were going to have to teach children between the ages of ten and eighteen. They staged a regular agitation! They would have found it quite natural to be questioned about Plato and to have to interpret Platonic Dialogues. But they had no inclination to know anything about Schiller's “Letters on Aesthetic Education,” which represent a certain culmination of modern spiritual life.

The middle of the nineteenth century was a much more incisive point in man's spiritual history than people can realise today. The period before it is represented in Schiller and Goethe; it is followed by something quite different, which can understand the preceding period very little. What we now call the social question, in the widest sense—a sense that humanity has not yet grasped, but should grasp and must grasp later on—was born only in the second half of the nineteenth century. And we can understand this fact only if we ask: why, in such significant and representative considerations as those attempted by Schiller in his “Aesthetic Letters” and represented pictorially by Goethe in his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, do we find no trace of the peculiar way of thinking we are impelled to develop today about the structure of society—although Goethe in his “Tale” is evidently hinting at political forms?

If we approach the “Aesthetic Letters” and the “Tale” with inner understanding, we can feel the presence in them of a powerful spirituality which humanity has since lost. Anyone reading the “Aesthetic Letters” should feel: in the very way of writing an element of soul and spirit is at work which is not present in even the most outstanding figures today; and it would be stupid to think that anyone could now write something like Goethe's fairy tale. Since the middle of the nineteenth century this spirituality has not been here. It does not speak directly to present-day men and can really speak only through the medium of Spiritual Science, which extends our range of vision and can also enter into earlier conditions in man's history. It would really be best if people would acknowledge that without spiritual knowledge they cannot understand Schiller and Goethe. Every scene in “Faust” can prove this to you.

If we try to discover what main influence was then at work, we find that in those days the very last remnant, the last echo of the old spirituality, was present in men, before it finally faded away in the middle of the nineteenth century and humanity was thrown back on its own resources. It lived on in such a way that a man like Schiller, who thought in abstractions, possessed spirituality in his abstract thinking, and a man who had spiritualised instincts, such as Goethe had, had it living in these instincts. In some way it still lived. Now it has to be found on the paths  of spiritual knowledge; now man has to find his way through to spirituality in freedom. That is the essential thing. And without an understanding of this turning-point in the middle of the nineteenth century, one cannot really grasp what is so important today. Take, for example, Schiller's way of approaching the structure of society. Looking at the French Revolution, he writes his “Aesthetic Letters,” but when he asks, “How should the social order develop?”, he looks at man himself. He is not dealing with the social question in a present-day sense.

Today, when the social question is under review, it is usual to leave out the individual human being, with his inner conflicts, his endeavours to achieve self-education. Only the social structure in general is considered. What Schiller expected to come about through self-education is expected to come through alterations in outer conditions. Schiller says: If men become what they can become at the midpoint of their being, they will create a right social structure as a matter of course. Today it is said: If we bring about a right social structure, human beings will develop as they should.

In a short time the whole way of feeling about this has turned round. Schiller or Goethe could not have believed that through self-education men could bring about a right social structure if they had not been able to feel in man himself the universally human qualities that social life requires. In every human being they saw an image of human society. But this was no longer effective. In those days beautiful, spiritual descriptions of the best self-education could be written—it was all an echo or in a sense a picture of the old atavistic life, but the power to achieve real results was not in it. And today's way of thinking about the best social conditions is equally powerless. It places man in an invented, thought-out social structure, but he is not effectively present there. We must look at human society in general, we must look out at the world and find ourselves there, find the human being.

This is something that only real Spiritual Science can do, in the most far-reaching sense. Take what is objected to most of all in my Occult Science: the course of evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth; everywhere man is there. Nowhere do you have the mere abstract universe; everywhere man is in some way included; he is not separated from the universe. This is the beginning of what our time instinctively intends, out of impulses that remain quite dark. The time before the middle of the nineteenth century looked at man, and believed it could find the world in man. The time after the middle of the nineteenth century looks only at the world. But that is sterile; it leads to theories which are entirely empty of man. And so Spiritual Science is really serving those dark but justified instincts. What men wish for, without knowing what they want, is fulfilled through Spiritual Science: to look at the external world and to find there the human being. This is still rejected, even regarded with horror; but it will have to be cultivated, if any real recovery in this connection is to come about in the future.

At the same time there must be a development also in the study of man. A real understanding of the social organism will be achieved only when one can see man within it. Man is a threefold being. In every age—except for our own—he has been active in a threefold way. Today he concentrates everything upon a single power in himself, because he has to stand entirely on the single point of his own self in this age of consciousness, and people feel that everything proceeds from this single point. Each man thinks to himself: If I am asked a question, or if life puts a task before me, I myself form a judgment, out of myself. But it is not the entire human being who judges in this way. The human organism has a “man in the middle,” with something above it and something below it; and it is the “man in the middle” who has the capacity to form a judgment and to act on it at any moment. Above is Revelation: what is received through religion or some other form of spiritual revelation and viewed as something higher, something super-sensible. Below, underneath the faculty of judgment, is Experience, the totality of what one has passed through.

Present-day man takes little account of either pole. Revelation—an old superstition that must be overcome! To experience, also, he pays little attention, or he would be more aware of the difference between youthful not-knowing and the knowing that comes through experience. He often gathers little from experience because he does not believe in it. Most people today, when they have grey hair and wrinkles, are not much wiser than they were at twenty. In life a man may get cleverer and cleverer, and yet be just as stupid as before. But experience does accumulate and it is the other pole from revelation. In between stands immediate judgment.

Today, as I have often said, one reads critical judgments written by very young people who have not yet looked round in the world. Old people may write lengthy books and the youngest journalists may review them. That is no way of making progress. Progress can be made when what is achieved in later life is taken as a guide, when age is held to be more capable of judgment through the experience that has been acquired.

Thus man is a threefold being in practical life. If you read my book, Riddles of the Soul, you will find that revelation corresponds to the head of man, the man of nerves and senses; immediate judgment corresponds to the breast man; experience corresponds to the man of the extremities. I could also say: the man of the life of nerves and senses, the man of the rhythmical life, and the man of metabolism. No consideration is given today to this threefold nature of man, and so there is no recognition of what corresponds to it in cosmic terms. This cannot be discerned because of the general unwillingness to rise from the sense-perceptible to the super-sensible.

Today, when a man eats—that is, unites external nourishment with his organism—he thinks: There inside is the organism, which cooks the stuff and takes from it what it needs, and lets the rest pass away unused, and so it goes on. On the other hand, I look out into the world through my senses. I take up the perceptible and transform it by my understanding; I take it into my soul, as I take nourishment into my body, What is out there, what eyes see and ears hear, I then carry within me as a mental picture; what is out there as wheat, fish, meat or whatever, I carry inside me, after having digested it.

Yes, but this leaves out the fact that the substances used in nourishment have their inner aspect. The experience of food through our external senses is not related to our deeper being. With what your tongue tastes and your stomach digests, in the way that can be confirmed by ordinary scientific research, you can maintain your daily metabolism; but you cannot take care of the other metabolism, which leads for example to the change of teeth about the age of seven.

The essential thing in this other metabolism lies in the deeper forces at work in it, which are not observed today by any chemical study. What we take as food has a deep spiritual aspect, and this is very active in man, but only while he sleeps. In your foods live the spirits of the highest Hierarchies, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Hence in your food you have something cosmically formative, and therein lie the forces which provide imperceptibly for the change of teeth, for adolescence, and for the later transformations of the human being. Only the daily metabolism is brought about by the things known to external science. The metabolism which goes through life as a whole is cared for by the highest Hierarchies. And behind the sense-perceptible world are the beings of the Third Hierarchy: Angels, Archangels, and Archai. Hence we can say: sense-perception, Third Hierarchy: foodstuffs, First Hierarchy: and in between is the Second Hierarchy, which lives in the breathing, in all the rhythmic activities of the human organism.

The Bible describes this quite truly. The spirits called the Elohim, together with Jahve, are led into men through the breath. The ancient wisdom was quite correctly aware of these things, in an atavistic way. Thus you are led through a real study of man into a true cosmology.

Spiritual Science re-inaugurates this way of looking at things. It looks for man again in the external world, and brings the entire universe into man. This can be done only if one knows that man is really a trinity, a threefold being. Today both revelation and experience are suppressed; man does not do them justice. He does not do justice to his sense-perceptions, or to the foods he eats, for he regards them merely as material objects. But that is an Ahrimanic distortion, which ignores the deeper life that underlies all created things, of which foodstuffs are an example.

Spiritual Science does not lead to a contempt for matter, but to a spiritualisation of it. If anyone were to look at food with contempt, he would have to learn that Spiritual Science says, in a way that would seem grotesque to him: the highest Hierarchies, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, they are alive in nutriments.

In our time threefold man is put together in an unclear, chaotic way, and made into a single entity. In social terms, a precisely corresponding picture arises when everything is brought under the single entity of State legalism. In fact, society should be seen as a trinity, composed of three members. First, economic activity, the natural foundation of life. Second, legal regulation, which corresponds to the middle element in man, his rhythmic nature. Third, spiritual life. Now we can see a trend towards making these three realms into one. Economic life, it is said, must be brought gradually under the control of the State. The State should become the only capitalist. Spiritual life came long ago under the dominion of the State. On the one hand we have man, who does not understand himself, and on the other the State, which is not understood, because man no longer finds himself within the social structure.

These three elements—economic life, legal regulation, spiritual life—are as radically different as head, breast and limbs. To burden the State with economic life is as if you wanted to eat with your lungs and heart, instead of with the stomach. Man is healthy only through the separation and co-operation of his three systems. The social organism, too, can be healthy only when the three elements work independently side by side, and are not thrown together in a single entity.

All legal regulation, which corresponds to the breathing, rhythmic system in man, represents a quite impersonal element, expressed in the saying: All men are equal before the law. Nothing personal comes into this; hence it is necessary that all human beings should be concerned with this middle realm and that everyone should be represented there. People are inclined to stop at this point, leaving a certain sterility on either side. We have to breathe; but we are not human beings unless nourishment is added to the breathing process from one side and sense impressions from the other. We must have a State, which rules through law, impersonal law. But economic life, which is half-personal, wherever men participate in it, and spiritual life, which is entirely personal, must work into the State from either side, or the social organism will be just as impossible as if man wanted to consist only of breathing.

This must become a new, fundamental doctrine: that the social structure has three members. You cannot live as human beings without eating; you have to receive your food from outside. You cannot maintain the State without bringing it the necessary nourishment from what human beings produce spiritually. This spiritual productivity is for the State what physical food is for individual men. Nor can you have a State unless you give it a certain natural basis on the other side in economic life. Economic life is for the State exactly like the element brought to the breathing process in human beings through sense-perceptions.

You can see that real knowledge of man and real knowledge of the social structure depend upon one another; you cannot reach one without the other. This must become the elementary basis for social insight in the future. The sin committed in relation to man by leaving out Revelation and Experience is committed by Socialist thinkers today when they leave out of  account the half-personal element in which fraternity must rule and on the other side ignore spiritual life, where freedom must rule; while the impersonal element of the law must be ruled by equality.

The great mistake of current Socialism is its belief that a healthy social structure can be brought about by State regulation, and particularly by socialising the means of production. We must appeal to all the powers of the social organism if we are to create a healthy social structure. Side by side with Equality, which is the one aim today, and is absolutely right for everything which has the character of law, Fraternity and Freedom must be able to work. But they cannot work without a threefold social order. It would be just as senseless to ask the heart and lungs to think and eat, as it is to ask an omnipotent State to direct economic life and to maintain spiritual life. The spiritual life must be independent, and co-operate only in the same way as the stomach co-operates with the head and with the heart. Things in life do work together, but they work together in the right way only if they can develop individually, not when they are thrown together abstractly.

The facts of the present time really prove that this insight must be achieved. It is very much worth observing how people at the present time do not see the connection between materialism on the one hand and abstract thinking on the other, particularly in relation to the social question. One great reason for the rise of materialism is that the State has gradually taken possession of all the academic institutions which were originally free corporations. If you go back to the times when such things were founded, from an atavistic feeling originating in clairvoyance, you will see how the necessity of co-operation between these three elements was still felt. Only since the sixteenth century has everything flowed into one, with the rise of materialism.

In earlier times, if a man wanted to be an outstanding jurist, he went to a university distinguished for the law, perhaps to Padua; if he wanted to be an outstanding physician, he went to Montpellier or to Naples; if he wanted to be an outstanding theologian, he went to Paris. These institutions did not belong to a particular State, but to humanity, and represented an independent member of the social organism.

Again, every school that is immediately under the power of the State is an impossible institution, and in the end unhealthy. Every undertaking concerned with production is unhealthy when managed by the State. You cannot pour anything into the lungs, not even water when you are thirsty. If this happens, you see how unhealthy it is.

Today people pour all kinds of economic and even spiritual undertakings into the realm which should be responsible only for the legal regulation of existing affairs. The radical parties go as far as wishing to separate the Church from the State, because they hope that people will be really interested only in what the State does. Then, in this clever, roundabout way, the Church could be expected to fade away entirely. But if you suggest to these people that schools need to be independent in order to restore productivity to spiritual life, they will contradict this very vehemently.

Every arrangement which makes for an intervention from the legal side into the spiritual life must lead to sterility. And in the same way it is false if the legal organisation intervenes in the initiatives necessary for economic life. The police, security, everything which belongs to social rights—not private rights and not penal law, which belong to the spiritual life—all these belong to the system of legal regulations. Everything economic forms an independent system and must be organised cooperatively, in a way that is half-personal. All spiritual life must be a matter for human individuality; in no other way can it flourish.

Schiller describes the middle condition that lies for man between the demands of rational necessity and the demands of this sense-life, and he relates this ideal to the creation and appreciation of art. In his “Aesthetic Letters” he says boldly that man is fully man only when he is playing, and he plays only when he is man in the fullest sense of the word. Schiller regards playing as the ideal condition, but of course you have to think of playing as Schiller does: that the necessity of reason is transformed into inclination, and inclination is raised to a spiritual level like that of reason. He calls the earnestness of life a game, in his sense of the word, for then one acts like a child who is playing, not obeying any duty but following one's impulses, and yet following them freely, because the necessities of life do not yet intervene in childhood.

A summit of human achievement is indicated in Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters”: man is fully man only when he is playing, and he plays only when he is man in the fullest sense of the word. On the other hand, when we have to begin with the concrete reality of the entire cosmos in order to find man in it, it is necessary that we should say to ourselves: man will achieve real progress for humanity only when he can take the smallest things in everyday life, even the most everyday game, and understands how to raise them into the great seriousness of cosmic existence. Therefore it has to be said: a turning-point in the history of mankind has come in this present time, where earnestness is knocking most solemnly at our doors.