The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Let now fix our attention upon pure experience. In what does this consist when it comes into our consciousness, not elaborated by our thinking? It is merely juxtaposition in space and succession in time; an aggregate of nothing but unrelated single entities. No one of the objects which there come and go has anything to do with any other. At this stage, the facts of which we become aware, and which mingle with our inner life, are absolutely without bearing one upon another.

[ 2 ] There the world is a multiplicity of things of uniform importance. No thing, no occurrence, can lay claim to any greater function in the fabric of the world than any other constituent in the realm of experience. If it is to become clear to us that this or that fact possesses greater significance than another, we must not merely observe things but arrange them in thought-relationships. The rudimentary organ of an animal, which may not have the least significance in its organic functioning, possesses just as much value for our experience as the most important organ of the animal's body. That distinction between greater and lesser importance does not become apparent to us till we think back over the relationships of the individual constituents; that is, until we work over our experience.

[ 3 ] For our experience the snail, which belongs to a lower stage in organization, is of equal value with the most highly evolved animal. The distinctions between degrees of perfection in organization become evident to us only when we lay hold conceptually upon the multiplicity given to us in experience, and work it through. From this point of view, likewise, the culture of the Eskimo and that of the educated European are of equal value; Caesar's significance in the history of human evolution appears to mere experience no greater than that of one of his soldiers. In the history of literature, Goethe stands no higher than Gottsched so long as we are considering mere experiential actualities.

[ 4 ] At this stage of observation, the world appears to our minds as an absolutely flat surface. No part of this surface rises above any other; none reveals to our minds any distinction as compared with others. Only when the spark of thinking strikes this surface do there come to light elevations and depressions; one thing appears more or less lifted above the other, all takes on a certain sort of form, lines run out from one form to another; the whole becomes a self-sufficient harmony.

[ 5 ] The illustrations we have chosen seem to us to show with sufficient clearness what we mean in speaking of the greater or lesser significance of the objects of perception (here considered as identical with the things of experience): what we mean by that knowledge which first comes into existence when we observe these objects in their interrelationship. These illustrations, we believe, insure us against the objection that the realm of our experience already reveals endless distinctions among its objects before thinking appears on the field: that a red surface, for instance, is different from a green surface even without any activity of thought. That is true. But any one who would bring this argument to bear against us has entirely misconstrued our assertion. This is just what we maintain: that what is presented to us by experience is an endless mass of single entities. These single entities must naturally be different one from another; otherwise they would not appear to us as an endless unrelated multiplicity. We do not refer to an indistinguishableness among the things perceived, but to the absolute want of meaning in the single facts of the senses for the totality of our image of reality. It is just because we recognize this endless qualitative difference that we are driven to the conclusion indicated.

[ 6 ] If we were met by a unity, well defined, composed of harmoniously ordered constituents, we could not speak of the lack of distinction in significance among the constituents in relation to one another.

[ 7 ] Whoever for such a reason considers the comparison we have used inapplicable must have failed to take hold of it at the real point of similarity. It would certainly be fallacious if we should compare the perceptual world, with its endlessly varied forms, to the uniform monotony of a surface. But our surface was not intended to resemble the manifold world of phenomena, but the unified total image that we have of this world so long as thinking has not come in contact with it. After the action of thought, each single entity in this total image appears, not as it was mediated by mere experience, but with the significance which it bears in relation to the whole of reality. At the same time, each appears with characteristics which were wholly wanting in its experiential form.

[ 8 ] According to our conviction, Johannes Volkelt has been remarkably successful in delineating within clear outlines that which we are justified in designating as pure experience. Five years ago [1881] this was strikingly described in his book Kants Erkenntnistheorie;⁵ and in his latest publication, Erfahrung und Denken,⁶ he has pursued the subject still further. He has done this, to be sure, in support of a point of view fundamentally different from ours and a purpose unlike that of the present book. But this need not hinder us from setting down here his remarkable characterization of pure experience. This description simply shows us the images which pass before our consciousness in a brief period in a manner utterly void of interrelationships. Volkelt says:⁷ “For example, my consciousness now has as its content the impression that I have worked diligently to-day; immediately thereto is linked the impression that I can with a clear conscience take a walk; again there suddenly appears the perceptual image of the door opening and the postman entering; the image of the postman soon appears with out-stretched hand, then with mouth opening, then doing the opposite; at the same time there blend with the perceptual content of the opening mouth all sorts of impressions of hearing—among others, that of rain beginning outside. The image of the postman vanishes from my consciousness and the impressions which now enter have as their content, one by one: grasping the scissors, opening the letters, a critical feeling at illegible writing, visual images of the most varied written symbols, and, united with these, manifold imaginative images and thoughts; scarcely is this series at an end when there reappears the impression of having worked diligently and—accompanied by depression—the consciousness of the continuing rain; then both of these vanish from my consciousness and there emerges an impression whose content is that a difficulty supposed to have been overcome in to-day's work has not been overcome; accompanying this there enter the impressions: freedom of will, empirical necessity, responsibility, the value of virtue, incomprehensibility, etc., and these unite with one another in the most varied and complicated ways—and so it continues.”

[ 9 ] Here is described for us, with regard to a certain limited space of time, what we really experience, that form of reality in which thinking has no participation.

[ 10 ] It need not be supposed that a different result would have been attained if, instead of this every-day experience, we had described what occurs in a piece of scientific research or in an unusual natural phenomenon. In these cases as in that, what passes before consciousness consists of unrelated images. Thinking for the first time institutes interrelationship.

[ 11 ] We must also attribute to the pamphlet of Dr. Richard Wahle, Gehirn und Bewusstsein⁸ (Vienna 1884), the service of having indicated in clear contours that which is given to us by experience void of any element of thought, only we must make the reservation that what Wahle describes as characteristics pertaining without restriction to the phenomena of the outer and the inner world holds good only for the first stage of our observation of the world, that stage which we have described. According to Wahle, we know only a juxtaposition in space and succession in time. There can be, according to him, no talk of a relationship between the things appearing beside one another or after one another. For example, there may be somewhere and somehow an inner relationship between the warm sunbeam and the warming of the stone, but we know nothing of a causal relationship; to us the only thing that is clear is that the second fact comes after the first. There may likewise be somewhere, in a world inaccessible to us, an inner relationship between our brain-mechanism and our mental activity; but we know only that the two are occurrences running in parallel lines; we are not at all justified, for example, in assuming a causal relationship between the two.

[ 12 ] Of course, when Wahle sets forth this assertion as the ultimate truth of science, we must oppose this extension of the assertion; but it is entirely correct as applied to the first form in which we become aware of reality.

[ 13 ] Not only are the things of the outer world and the processes of the inner void of interrelationship at this stage of our knowledge, but even our own personality is an isolated unit in comparison with the rest of the world. We perceive ourselves as one of the numberless percepts without relationship to the objects which surround us.

• 5. Johannes Volkelt: Immanuel Kants Erkenntnistheorie (Kant's Theory of Knowledge), Leipzig, 1879.
• 6. Johannes Volkelt: Erfahrung und Denken. Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie (Experience and Thought), Hamburg and Leipzig, 1886.
• 7. Kants Erkenntnistheorie, p. 168 f.
• 8. Brain and Consciousness

Opening words by Leo Polak: Dear attendees and Mr. Speaker! As the chairman of the local Philosophy Association, I would like to welcome everyone here and believe that I have the right and the duty to make a very brief preliminary remark. We were in fact surprised that the Philosophy Association, a scientific association, organized an evening in the auditorium of the university with Dr. Steiner, whose relationship to philosophy was well known. Some people wanted to see this as a sanction and recognition of the scientific-philosophical value or significance of Dr. Steiner's work. I believe that both sides thought this wrongly. Firstly, our association did not spontaneously invite this evening's speaker from its own ranks, but merely responded to a request from the anthroposophical side to organize such an evening here, and rightly so, as I will have more to say in a few moments. Secondly, organizing this evening does not in any way imply agreement or unanimity with the work of Dr. Steiner. They know that in the same lecture halls here at the university, where, for example, critical philosophy, Kantian philosophy, is read, dogmatic, Thomist philosophy is heard, and rightly so. That is not to say the approval of those who gave rise to it, but purely and exclusively the objective attitude of science itself, which always and everywhere sees and examines everything and retains the good, which always and everywhere says, “audite et alteram partem”. Our philosophical association also wanted to express this idea. We did so in the justified conviction that the speaker this evening also holds exactly the same opinion. We also asked beforehand whether there would be an opportunity to give an account of a dissenting opinion afterwards, and, I might almost say, Dr. Steiner naturally agreed. So he also wanted to apply the “audite et alteram partem”. After these brief but necessary conditions, I ask the speaker to take the floor.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! In the various lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Holland since February 19th, on anthroposophical spiritual science and its practical orientation, my main concern has been to emphasize the practical aspects of these spiritual scientific endeavors. For these spiritual-scientific endeavors seek to accommodate the innumerable souls who, in the broadest circles of life today, long for something that arises out of the facts of this present time.

Today, however, my dear audience, allow me to speak from a completely different point of view. If, on the one hand, the anthroposophical spiritual scientist is condemned to seek their circles in the general public because of its practical approach to life, it is also the case that the roots of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science extend in a very precise way, I believe, into the philosophical foundations of human endeavor. And it is this connection between anthroposophy and philosophical research, with the way of thinking that is philosophical, that I would like to speak to you about today. I will try not to speak in generalizations, but rather to speak in three directions, in the hope that this will shed light on the connections between philosophical research and anthroposophical spiritual knowledge.

Within philosophical research, we recognize a wide variety of problems and problem formulations. Today, I would like to focus mainly on the relationships between anthroposophy and three problem formulations: the epistemological problem, the ontological problem and the ethical problem. It would be tempting, however, to also touch on the aesthetic problem, but that would mean taking up too much of your time.

The epistemological problem, in the way we find it presented today in philosophy in the most diverse forms, is concerned with justifying man's belief in the reality of the external world; it is concerned to show the extent to which we can assume a valid relationship between that which is present within our knowledge in our consciousness and that which we can regard as some kind of objective reality outside ourselves. This problem, as well as numerous others, swings back and forth between dogmatics and skepticism in the history of philosophy, one might almost say as a matter of course. And anyone who is familiar with the history of more recent epistemology knows how extraordinarily easy it is to fall into a kind of skepticism when faced with the epistemological problem. I will have more to say about this later. In any case, here we have something of what must be of particular interest to anthroposophical spiritual science in relation to philosophy: in a certain way, it presents epistemology in a very vivid and very pressing way for human research and knowledge of the limits of knowledge.

The second problem I would like to talk about is the ontological problem. It is much older than the problem of knowledge. It seeks to bring reality – namely insofar as this reality goes beyond the sensory – into consciousness in some way, by means of knowledge, from what man can experience in the entities of consciousness. Now anyone who is familiar with the history of the development of ontology knows that, basically, a very understandable skepticism has entered into the ontological problem since the time that the ontological proof of God's existence has fallen victim to criticism, especially since the criticism of Kantianism regarding this ontological proof of God's existence. Since that time, there has also been little inclination within philosophical research to find something in the ontological that can provide clues for placing oneself in the sphere of reality itself through the development of inner knowledge. So here, too, in a sense, we are approaching a kind of limit, which is probably felt much more clearly in the face of ontology than in the face of many epistemological problems.

With regard to the ethical problem, I would just like to point out in the introduction that, out of a certain – forgive the expression, it is only meant terminologically – philosophical despair, we have come to the so-called value theory in relation to the ethical problem in recent times. But that means basically nothing more than despairing of being able to see through the ethical impulses present in our consciousness in their connection with reality and therefore seeing as based on something that is supposed to have validity in our world view - the value - but which is nevertheless formulated in such a way that one does not want to imagine a certain relationship to reality, to objective being.

I did not want to say anything binding, but only point out certain forms that the three problems have taken and which give reason to intervene in these three problem formulations with anthroposophical spiritual science. Before I can do that, I would like to briefly discuss the methodology of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here, which I also do in my public lectures. However, I then try to present the things as popularly as possible, which of course has its drawbacks, but in some respects perhaps also some advantages.

I would like to say only this much today about the methodology of anthroposophy: that the entire path of research in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is based on the development of soul forces that already exist in ordinary life, that are also applied in ordinary science, but which are initially obtained from both ordinary life and ordinary science at a certain level, a level to which they are brought by inheritance, by ordinary education and so on. I need not define this stage, to which certain soul-powers are brought, for it is generally known, and what I actually want to say with this will emerge from what I have to communicate about the further development of these soul-powers.

Anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher must, through careful inner soul work, further develop certain soul powers beyond those applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science. He must first further develop what is popularly known as the ability to remember, which underlies our memory, beyond what it is in ordinary life. The method of systematically ordered meditation and concentration, as I have described it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', and in other writings of mine in the anthroposophical literature, serves this purpose. The essence of this further development of the ability to remember is based on the fact that one forms ideas that can easily be overlooked. This fact, that one demands easily comprehensible ideas in the spiritual scientific method, has its profound significance. For nothing may be used for this further development of soul forces that could somehow be a reminiscence of life or that could somehow have an autosuggestive or even suggestive effect. Therefore, it is necessary to keep the images used in meditation and concentration as simple and straightforward as possible. It is not important that such images have a truth value in the usual sense, because they are not intended to point to any reality at all. They are only to be used to develop inner soul forces. Therefore, it is important that we not be deterred by the questionable character of the relationship between a representation and reality; whether the representation is fantastic, whether the representation is somehow made quite arbitrarily, is not the point, but rather that we can survey it in terms of its entire content, so to speak, like a mathematical representation, a geometric representation. Then it is a matter of mustering the strength to go through a certain period of time – this must be learned, at first one can only do it for a very short time, little by little one acquires a certain inner practice – then it is a matter of learning to rest with the whole intensity of the soul on such ideas.

Now a misunderstanding can arise right away. Because if it is done wrongly, if all the things that I have carefully compiled in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” are not observed, then the inner state of mind that is absolutely necessary for the spiritual scientific method to work properly will not be achieved. This state of soul must be exactly the same as when solving problems in geometry or in mathematics in general. In the same way that one is fully aware of one's will at work in the soul when constructing figures, when searching for any algebraic or other relationships, one must remain fully aware of the entire content of consciousness while resting on easily comprehensible ideas. It is therefore very important that anyone who is to become a spiritual researcher in an impeccable way should actually have at least a certain degree of mathematical training, and to such an extent that he has in particular acquired the way of thinking about mathematical problems.

Perhaps I may refer to a personal experience, the following one. I always think, when I am dealing with spiritual-scientific problems, which sometimes become quite difficult for one, because they often slip away from one when one already has them – I always think of the event that helped me decades ago, perhaps forty years ago, to get ahead on the path that I am about to characterize. It was the moment when I was able to grasp the strange fact in synthetic geometry for the first time – we don't want to dwell on the justification of this assumption now – that, based on the assumptions of synthetic geometry, the one infinitely distant point of a straight line on the right side is the same as the infinitely distant point on the left side. It was not so much this mathematical fact, but the whole way of thinking, how this assumption arises from the prerequisites of synthetic geometry, of projective geometry. I am only pointing this out here to draw attention to how the same state of mind, the same way of letting consciousness work, must take place in what I call meditation and concentration.

If one now does such inner soul work for a sufficiently long time — it depends entirely on the inner destiny of the person whether it takes a short time, two or three years, or much longer, until the first inner results of this further development of certain soul abilities occur, But out of the ordinary power of memory, by which we can conjure up past events before our soul, through the further development of this power of memory, a new soul power actually arises, a soul power of which we had no idea before. This soul power is developed memory, and yet it is quite different from ordinary memory. This soul power enables us to link certain states of our consciousness with other ideas than we usually do. In his everyday life, a person lives in the alternating states between waking and sleeping. We are, of course, familiar with the various physiological hypotheses that have been put forward about them, but these are of little interest to us here. What interests us is the state of ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness is dulled, even paralyzed, to the point of complete dullness when we fall asleep, and returns to its bright state when we wake up. Of course, the human being does not arise spiritually and mentally when he wakes up; he must exist in some way between falling asleep and waking up. The fact is that during this time he does not use his senses, does not use his will organization, and does not use the mind that combines sensory perceptions. I will not go into the interruption of sleep by dreams, that would be taking it too far.

The person who has trained their memory in the way described is in exactly the same state in relation to their physical organism. When this trained memory awakens in them, they do not use their ordinary senses in the states in which they induce this memory. He knows how to switch them off, he knows how to switch off everything that is switched off during sleep. But his consciousness is not dulled. He lives in a conscious state, in a consciousness that is filled with content, and he knows that this content is of a spiritual-soul nature. Just as we otherwise receive soul-content in ordinary life through our senses, through the combining mind, so there is soul-content when the spiritual scientist makes use of the developed faculty of memory. Just as we have a sensory environment around us through our physical organism, so the spiritual scientist has a truly supersensible environment that permeates our sensory environment all around him. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a fact of the developing experience that occurs in the spiritual researcher; and any conceit, as if one were dealing with some kind of illusion, is simply excluded by the whole context of life in which one is placed by virtue of the method, which has only been outlined to you in principle, by which one reaches such a developed consciousness. One learns to recognize what it means to have consciousness in the body-free state.

I would like to show you, so that you can see that anthroposophical spiritual science does not speak from some vague, nebulous realm, but from concrete facts, to explain something very specific: our ordinary ability to remember, which is precisely what is needed to recall what we have once experienced. When this ability to remember is further developed in the way I have just described, then it becomes something else, and that is the peculiar thing. It is indeed developed memory, but there is no actual memory; the ability to remember has been transformed into an immediate perception of the spiritual, supersensible environment. This can be seen from the fact that once one has a spiritual-supernatural fact before one and can also characterize it, and one simply wants to recall this spiritual-supernatural state into consciousness again later from memory, one cannot do so immediately. It does not come up directly from consciousness. The ability to remember has been developed, and yet one does not remember exactly what one experiences through this developed ability to remember. You have to do something completely different if you want to see a spiritual state that you have once had again.

You then have to re-establish the conditions through which you called the fact before you. You can remember everything that led you to the moment of seeing the fact, then you can have the fact again, but you cannot simply reconstruct this fact from memory, as is the case with an ordinary memory. Therefore it is true when one speaks of the paradox: the one who writes his books as a spiritual researcher forgets the contents; he writes down the spiritual facts, so to speak, he takes them in, but he forgets them. Nor can he repeat a lecture from memory a second time, but he must recall the conditions under which he was placed before the vision the first time, then he can have the vision again. It is just as one can only have a perception again, if it is just a perception, by approaching the fact. Memory only gives one an image. The developed faculty of memory must simply go back to the event in the spiritual-supernatural world in order to be able to experience it again. This is, in a sense, the first step in entering the supernatural world, in developing the faculty of memory in a certain way so that it becomes a kind of supernatural faculty of intuition. In this way, one gradually comes to truly recognize the spiritual and soul as such, the spiritual and soul that underlies the human being, and the spiritual and soul that surrounds us in the outer world, which is also the basis of the facts and laws of nature.

And I want to characterize a second soul power in its further development. I believe that the development of this soul power as a power of knowledge must justifiably evoke even more contradiction than the development of the memory, because one does not want to accept this second soul power as a power of knowledge at all, it is the power of love. Of course, my dear audience, love is certainly considered to be something subjective. It is also in ordinary life. But if you apply certain spiritual research methods to the ability to love, as I have just described for the ability to remember, then something else emerges from the power of love, which is then also a power of knowledge of the supersensible world. The point is to first become aware of how you are actually undergoing a transformation every moment of your life, how you become a different person. You only have to look honestly into the depths of your soul and you will realize that what you are today was something different ten or twenty years ago. And you will have to say to yourself: In the vast majority of things, one has left oneself to the stream of life, one has had very little influence on the developmental conditions that have made one different from year to year, from decade to decade.

The spiritual researcher must move on to action in this area. He must, so to speak, take the development of his entire soul into his own hands through self-discipline. He must give himself certain directions, without thereby losing the naivety and the elementary of a full life. He must give himself certain directions and must be able to pursue what is formed out of him in metamorphosis, in careful self-observation. In this way, a certain soul power, which is otherwise latent, is drawn out of the depths of the soul. And love, which in ordinary life is bound to the physical organism, becomes independent of this physical organism in a similar way to soul power, just as the developed ability to remember does, except that the developed ability to remember conjures up images and imaginations of a supersensible world before our soul, whereas the developed power of love enables us to inwardly participate in what is presented to us in these images. Objectification of one's own soul life, absorption in objectivity, is the precondition for the knowledge of the supersensible and is achieved by developing the ability to love in this way. Through the development of the ability to remember, we attain the possibility of developing higher worlds of imagination, worlds of imagination about the supersensible. Through the development of the ability to love, we attain the ability to experience the inner reality, the essentiality of the supersensible.

I have only briefly sketched out what actually leads to the knowledge of a spiritual world, to which we belong with our actual inner human nature and in which we find the clues to the knowledge of the eternal nature of this human being. The real knowledge about the question of immortality is achieved on the path I have just characterized. In this way we come to know that part of us which passes through birth and death; we learn to recognize those worlds in which we live as [spiritual beings] before we descend to a birth or to a conception, and into which we also descend when we pass through the gate of death. But I will only hint at this; a more detailed explanation can be found in the literature, it would lead too far now.

Now, by means of such a method of spiritual research, two wrong paths of the human soul are, firstly, seen in the right way; but secondly, the conditions for avoiding them are created. The first thing is that in this way one gains a real insight into what memory actually is, by developing it. We need this power of remembrance; if we want to keep our ordinary life intact, we must be able to conjure up before our soul the images of our experiences from a certain point in our childhood that lies very early. We get to know this ability to remember through the insights I have just described, in that we say to ourselves: it actually prevents us from looking into our inner being. The mystic wants to look into the depths of the soul through direct experience. The spiritual researcher studies the dangers associated with such mystical introspection. It is a peculiarity of the soul life that what one has been experiencing since childhood between birth and death can not only arise in its original form at any given moment in consciousness, but that it can arise in the most diverse met amorphoses, so that there is the possibility that some experience, perhaps quite trivial, may gradually transform itself in the subconscious so that it later enters consciousness as a sublime-looking event. The mystic then perhaps believes he is immersing himself in some divine substratum of the soul and the world, while he has nothing but a transformed memory of life. The exact knowledge of the ability to remember leads us to avoid the mystical paths in the right way. Because if you have developed the ability to remember in the way I have described, you naturally remain a perfectly rational person. You only use this developed ability to remember when you want to. But if you have developed this ability to remember, you can really see through the ordinary memory. One can then take the path that the mystic only believes he can take. The mystic dwells in the same region of the soul where the memory is also present; basically, he sees only sensual, transformed memories. But the one who knows the developed memory, he, so to speak, sees through the ordinary memory region. Then, however, he does not get to see what a Tauler, a Mechthild of Magdeburg or anyone else believed they saw mystically, but he gets to see, but now from the inside, the material organs of the human organism. That is the real way, my dear attendees, to get to know people physically from the inside.

The mystic gets to know nothing else, so to speak, but the soul smoke, the soul mist that rises from the boiling internal organs. That is what needs to be said, that it is not at all the case that mystical raptures are present when one comes to self-knowledge through a developed memory. Rather, self-knowledge radiates into the real human organization, which can of course be recognized from the outside through anatomy and physiology, but its inner essence cannot be seen through. Here, my dear attendees, we reveal those things where we see the inner being of man in an inner connection with the surrounding nature in its various kingdoms. Only when we get to know the inner workings of the human organization in this way do we get to know the kind of physiology that shows the relationship between the various organs in their healthy and diseased states and what is present in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and in the other natural spheres and kingdoms.

This is where it is possible to internalize our medicine, which has advanced so far through external research, to build the bridge between pathology and a therapy based on a real understanding of the human being and the world; last spring I presented to doctors and medical students at our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach about such a deepening of medicine. And it is precisely in this field that one can show how the individual sciences can in turn be fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This was also shown for the other sciences by the university courses in Dornach last fall, which were given by thirty scholars in various fields of science, as well as by artists, by practical people, by commercial people. They showed how anthroposophical spiritual science can enrich the individual sciences by adding to what has led to such research triumphs in recent times, to what external research can offer, that which can be seen inwardly. For just as I have described, that through the real knowledge of the ability to remember, through its further development, the knowledge of the human being truly comes about, so too does a spiritual-supernatural knowledge of nature come about in this way.

The other pitfall to be avoided, which can be seen through with such further developed cognitive abilities, is that of dialectical-philosophical speculation, which is of course present to a certain extent within our scientific research, or at least our thinking. We research by observing phenomena and by causing phenomena through our own experiments. But we do not just apply our combining mind to it, for example in the methodical sense of doing natural science, which remains phenomenology, but we apply it to extrapolate beyond the empirical, and then we arrive at those constructions that are given in atomistics, in molecular theory. It is not the intention here to criticize the significance and justification of molecular and atomic theory, which has been confirmed by experiment. But that which, to a certain extent, is present as the supporting element of natural scientific phenomena in the form of atomistic thinking, is seen through in its unreasonableness when the second power of cognition, that which arises out of the power of love, is developed in the way described. Then we learn to recognize that we must remain within the outer empirical-sensory environment in the world of phenomena. Further penetration then depends on whether we actually get the spiritual-supersensible, and not just a small-scale translation of the sensory world of atoms.

Here, my dear audience, I would like to draw your attention to something that cannot be ignored, especially if you are a spiritual researcher. In philosophical epistemology, we speak of having sensory impressions. We speak of the quite legitimate research results of modern physiology, through which one wants to form an idea of the formation of an objective fact unknown to us, which then continues to the sensory organ. We speak of what takes place in the sensory organ, what possibly takes place in the corresponding brain sphere, and so on. In this way, one arrives at pushing the epistemological problem to the physiological problem in a certain sense, but one considers this problem at every single point in the world. One wants to go from a single phenomenon to what is behind it. One proceeds in exactly the same way as if one wanted to conclude something from a single letter on a written page. You read the whole page; the context of the letters on the whole page reveals the reason why the individual letter is as it is. In this way, we also remain within the world of phenomena. We do not speculate about the individual phenomena in terms of something underlying them, such as a “thing in itself.” Rather, we consider the context of the phenomena, reading the reality of the phenomena to certain totalities, one might say, studying them. This then leads us to that which is expressed spiritually in the phenomena, and can only be grasped spiritually with the supersensible powers of knowledge of which I have spoken.

In this way, I tried to penetrate deeper into the world through a kind of further development of the cognitive abilities of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. However, this also presents the epistemological problem to anthroposophy in a very specific way. This epistemological problem, as I have just mentioned, suffers from such things. We study in a certain way that which is supposed to be unknown to us. We then pursue it to the sense, to the brain. We come to the point where we find no transition to what actually lives in the soul. And if I — naturally leaving out much that could be said, but which is certainly well known to those present from the history of more recent epistemology — if I just pick out the most important things, so it might be the following: The conscientious epistemologist comes to the conclusion that he no longer allows the possibility, within the world of representation – on closer analysis, however, not only the world of representation arises, but also a part of the world of sensation – but let us stick to the world of representation – to relate the representations, as they live inwardly through logic, psychology, to some actual reality or to something that he would like to take as an actual reality. It comes about, so to speak, that one feels very strongly the pictorial character of the life of imagination in the empirical fact; to feel it so strongly that one sees no bridge from this experienced pictorial character of the life of imagination over into reality. Therefore, many of the newer epistemologists have given up trying to build a bridge from the life of imagination over into reality. They appeal to the will, to the will, which they felt to be the elementary point of contact with things; for them, the will has become the thing by which man is actually authorized to speak of the reality of the external world, whereas he should never actually be able to derive the reality of an external world from the world of imagination.

I believe that in this area of epistemology, an enormous amount of conscientious work has been done in recent times, and that ingenious things have come to light; the literature is indeed one of the richest. But I do not believe that one can recognize, by immersing oneself in this literature with a completely open mind, that one is standing on quite uncertain ground within this epistemology and that one cannot build a bridge from something in the soul to some reality that can reasonably be assumed. The world of imagination – if one can grasp it, it shows – really does have the character of a picture. No matter how significant the conclusions we arrive at in this pictorial realm of the life of imagination may be, we cannot escape from the pictorial to arrive at any kind of reality.

On the other hand, I do not believe that the way out of approaching reality through the will can be fully realized epistemologically. Because, dear attendees, in the imagination we are at least completely filled with the full clarity of day-consciousness; in the world of imagination we overlook exactly that which is happening, at least in the imagination, pictorially. In the activity of the will, we are asleep to a certain extent. We do not experience the activity of the will inwardly; it is not transparent to us. Therefore, it was particularly striking to me that a recent epistemologist who rejected the justification of the objective reality of the world of imagination and who assumed the activity of the will in order to establish a reality, Dilthey, that he did not refer to the experiences of the adult, but of the still dreaming child. It is indeed the case that we never come to a full awakening in relation to the actual inner essence of the will in our lives between birth and death if we do not develop the ability to love in the way I have shown. But when that happens, the whole inner soul condition changes. Then one comes to understand the reason why our imaginative life is essentially pictorial.

If one wants to grasp something like the developed capacity for knowledge, one must be prepared for a completely different state of mind. Then, of course, the usual conditions for understanding are not present. Understanding is much more an experience, an immersion in things. But the person must fulfill this prerequisite in order to penetrate into the matter at all. If one now approaches with the developed ability to remember, with one's soul experience — leaving aside bodily functions — and observes what, because of its pictorial nature, prevents the epistemologist from building a bridge to it, then one finds out why the life of imagination is essentially pictorial. One then examines precisely, but now with the developed ability to remember, what the relationship actually is between the imagination and the external, empirical world. And one finds: there is basically no relationship at all between what arises in us as an image and what is, so to speak, reflected back as images of our imagination when our organism is affected by the external world. There is no inner relationship at all between these images. There is a relationship between the content of the images and what is in the external world, but not between the essence, the being of this world of imagination and what is externally the environment. We are confronted with an environment and an inner world that are essentially distinct from one another. One can be reflected in the other, but they are different. Through the developed power of memory, one learns to recognize what actually lives in the imagination, which is essentially bound to the main human organization. It is not what comes from the outside world, which we can look at with our senses, but rather the echo of our prenatal or pre-conception spiritual being. That which essentially underlies our imaginative life is like the penetration of a shadow of our prenatal existence into our existence between birth and death. We think essentially with the powers with which we lived in the spiritual world before our conception.

This analysis is arrived at through the developed faculty of memory; hence the lack of affinity between what is actually the echo of a completely different world and what surrounds us in the external world. It is only in the course of our lives that we establish the relationship between what we bring with us from the prenatal world and what we perceive through our senses. This, ladies and gentlemen, becomes a fact. And now the epistemological problem no longer presents itself before our soul as a mere formality, but now it presents itself, so to speak, like the shadow of a very real world of facts. We learn to recognize what we actually want through conceptual cognition as human beings. Through this conceptual cognition, we want to bring two worlds into concordance: the prenatal purely spiritual world and the postnatal sensual world. The purely spiritual world dismisses us with a question, the sensual world gives us the answer.

I first tried to present this development of the human being in relation to truth in a philosophical way in my small epistemological work “Truth and Science”, where I tried to show how the grasping of reality is not a mere formal, but how man first stands vis-a-vis reality as a half, as a something that is made by himself as something not quite real; how he then acquires knowledge, especially in scientific work. That was purely scientific, philosophical-formal work based on Kantianism, an epistemology that then had to be supplemented by what I have just presented, so that light is shed by the recognition of the supersensible in methodology with regard to this supersensible, in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are some highlights with regard to the epistemological problem. This epistemological problem came to my mind particularly 30 years ago when I devoted myself to the study of the problem of freedom. I will just summarize in a few sentences what I explained in my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1892. I do not want to define freedom now, but just point out how it lives in everyone. It would be impossible to understand free actions in any way if the basis for those free actions were available to us as the result of an external, physical-sensory reality or as the result of an internal, organic reality. Only because we have images in our life of ideas, images that, as it were, mirror our prenatal existence as mirror images do not have reality but mirror what is in front of the mirror, only because such images, for which there is no external reality in relation to their essence, provide the impulses for our free actions; only because of this are free actions possible. If free acts were not based on pictorial impulses, they could not be free acts. The fact that a truly real epistemology leads us precisely to the pictorial character of the life of imagination, and in particular to the pictorial character of pure thinking, makes it possible to base a real philosophy of freedom on such an epistemology.

Now, my dear audience, how has the ontological problem been brought to skepticism? The fact that in the course of human development, which I have shown in relation to philosophy in my two-volume book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, humanity has increasingly lost the inner experience of reality, that humanity has virtually moved on to the pictorial character of conceptualized experience. Why did the ontological proof of the existence of God become invalid in a certain age?

In fact, if one studies the true history of philosophy, one finds that this refutation of the ontological proof of God's existence would have had no value at all for older times, because in those times, not only was the existence of God the existence of God with ontological proofs, but rather, one inwardly experienced the divine in the concepts, and by letting the concepts run dialectically, a reality lived in this dialectical process. This reality was lost inwardly more and more. That is the meaning of the development of the ego in humanity: that more and more the inner connection with reality was lost, so that finally the very theory of knowledge became necessary, which wanted to build a bridge from the non-existing, but merely pictorial concept to external reality. In ontology, this occurs at a higher level. We have mere dialectics instead of the dialectic full of content, instead of the real process, which lived as a supersensible process in the world of concepts. Our ontology – we have almost none anymore, but the one that still remained in older philosophers – is, I would like to say, the filtered dialectical product of an old, inner experience; inner experience that has become mere concept, mere conceptual web.

Now, what I have just characterized as the experience of a supersensible world through the developed powers of knowledge, leads one, as I have already mentioned, to ultimately rising to recognize the simultaneously real, for example, behind natural phenomena. The enrichment of therapy through spiritual science is based on the fact that what lives spiritually and soulfully in natural phenomena can be related to the recognized inner organs of the human being. At the same time, ontology takes on meaning again because the external and the spiritual and soul-like can be seen through objectively. So that what humanity, as humanity becoming free, has felt towards ontology is a kind of intermediate stage. In earlier times, through an instinctive experience of the concepts, reality was in the experience of the concepts. Then this was lost, had to be lost in the process of educating humanity to freedom, to life in pure concepts. For that is what it means to experience freedom: to be able to experience pure image concepts and to act accordingly. Now we are again faced with the possibility of giving ontology a content through the visions of the simultaneously spiritual-supersensible.

Dearly beloved, I have thus pointed out to you two fields of supersensible vision: that which, as it were, precedes our birth, and that which is the supersensible present at the same time.

And a third sphere reveals itself to man when, through a developed psychology, he first looks at what is not his imaginative faculty, but his will; the will and a part - I expressly say a part - of the feeling nature. These spheres, they also lie so far below the threshold of our waking consciousness, as our nocturnal experiences lie below this threshold for the ordinary consciousness. If one analyzes the facts of the soul without prejudice, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the same intensity of inner experience that one sees in the dullness of sleep consciousness is also seen in the experience of what is actually the effect of the will in us.

A careful analysis of consciousness, which has been carried out by numerous psychologists, shows that the human being first experiences ideas of what he should want and what he should do. He does not then experience the whole intermediate stage, where what is imagined passes over into the organism of the will. Then he experiences the other end of this will life, he experiences the transition of his will into the outer deed; he looks at what is happening through him. What lies between these two extremes, that is experienced by man with exactly the same subdued consciousness as he has in deep sleep. The emotional life is not experienced with the same intensity as the imaginative life either, but with the intensity of the dream life. But what is important now is to look at how the actual life of the will is experienced with the dullness of the life of sleep. We not only sleep in time and wake in time, but also while we are awake, we sleep with a part of our being, with our volitional being. What makes us sleep in relation to our volitional being, the reason for this, becomes apparent when knowledge is developed in the way I have explained. If one succeeds in developing the ability to love to the point where one experiences the supersensible, then there arises as a special experience the living over into the process of the will, which otherwise does not enter into consciousness, which otherwise remains dull. One does indeed come to know not only the organs of the body, as I explained earlier, but one also comes to see that part of the will that is otherwise overslept in waking, in the same way as one otherwise looks at an external fact through the senses. One arrives at a self-knowledge of the will. And through this, my dear audience, the ethical world is integrated into the rest of the world, into the world in which natural necessity otherwise prevails. In this way, we learn to recognize something that is still extremely difficult to describe, even for today's ideas.

When we consider the content of our consciousness, we can ascribe certain intensities to it in its individual parts. We can then – this can be said with particular reference to certain senses – we can then go down to intensity zero with regard to certain contents of consciousness. But we can also – and this is usually given little attention, because the necessity for it only emerges in spiritual research – we can also go down from an objectivity with regard to the intensive experience of consciousness, we have to go into the negative. Yes, it turns out to be necessary not just to speak of matter, but to speak of matter, to speak of empty space and of negative matter; thus not just to speak of empty space, but to speak of emptied space, to bring the intensity below absolute zero. This is a concept that necessarily arises for the spiritual researcher when he attempts to make a transition from the essence of the life of thinking to the essence of the life of will and the relationship of this life of will to the physical-organic functions. If we imagine by name — it could also be the other way around —, if we imagine the processes that take place between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily when imagining, if we imagine these processes as positive, then we must imagine the will processes as negative; to a certain extent, if one represents a pressure effect, we must imagine the other as a suction effect. These are more or less comparative ideas, but they lead to reality. I may briefly characterize this reality.

We usually imagine, through today's psychology, which has become more and more abstract, that there is an interaction between the processes of the brain, that is, the nervous organism, and between the soul and spiritual processes. Certainly, such an interaction exists. But the nature of this interaction presents itself before the developed ability to remember, as I have described it. That which actually comes to life in the act of imagining is not based on the progressive growth of the nervous organism, but rather, quite the opposite, on the wearing away of the nervous organism. Once this has been properly understood, then spiritual science will be followed on this point. I can only sketch it out here, but you will find detailed descriptions of the matter everywhere in our literature. Once this has been understood, you will say to yourself: you are deceiving yourself if you assume a parallelism between spiritual and mental processes and brain processes in the usual way; a deception that I will illustrate with an example.

Let us assume that someone walks over a soft road surface, a car drives over the soft ground, impressions are formed, footprints, wheel tracks. A being from Mars or wherever could now come and speculate about these impressions and say: under the surface of the ground there is a certain force that causes these impressions by pulling down and pushing up. There is no power there that causes these impressions, but they have been caused by a person who has walked over them, or a wagon that has driven over them. In what the spiritual-soulful is acting out, it simply finds a soil, a resistant soil on the physical organization, makes impressions, and in fact it even destroys the organic substance. So the organic substance is worn away. The organic processes are regressed. And by making room for the spiritual in this way, the soul penetrates. If we imagine the process as positive, then the will process is the negative, then the will process promotes organic growth, albeit in a roundabout way. But just as the process of imagination continues in the organism as a process of removal, as a process of destruction, and to a certain extent as a process of excretion of organic substance, so too does the will lie in the increased, more lively construction of the organic. This is the effect of willpower. In this way, we learn to see the interaction between the physical and the spiritual in a positive and concrete way. But through this we also learn to recognize how we not only have a nature around us that contains natural laws, but just as the will integrates itself into our own organism as a growth-promoting, growth-stimulating force, so the spiritual-soul element that we are aware of in our consciousness as ethical impulses integrates itself into the whole of nature around us.

In this way, through this supersensible knowledge, we find not only values, or something that merely corresponds to utility, but we actually find within the world that surrounds us, on the one hand, natural necessity and, on the other, objective ethical necessity. Ethical impulses are actually integrated into objective world existence. And what comes out of it – I would have to describe the process at length, but for now I can only characterize it by way of comparison – what comes out of it is this: we live in the world of natural necessity. The moral ideals arise within us. It is like with a plant. It develops leaves, flowers, and in the center of the flower, the seed of next year's plant. Leaves and flowers fall away, but the germ, which is inconspicuous, remains and develops into next year's plant.

From this point of view, which I have just discussed methodologically, the relationship between natural necessity, everything that surrounds us as natural necessity, and what arises in us as ethical impulses appears as follows. Natural necessity will undergo a process that cannot be understood merely as natural necessity, as Clausius, for example, wants to understand his entropy of the universe. Rather, there is a process of mortifying that which appears physical to us today, and how the germ lives in this physical [that which ethical impulses are] to the physical world of a distant future. And we come to realize that our physical world is the realized ethical world of a distant past, and our ethical impulses of the present are the germs of a physical world of the future. The ethical problem, understood anthroposophically, is part of the cosmological problem. Through this anthroposophical view, the human being is in turn incorporated into the whole cosmos.

This has important social implications. The ethical ideal, the ethical impulse, is intimately connected with the social impulse. The social impulses will only take hold of humanity in the right way again, they will only lead us out of the chaos of the present, when it is grasped that what man does here on earth is not something that disappears like smoke and fog, which is like ideology based on purely external, purely economic processes, but what has a cosmological significance so that, in fact, with a variant, the Christian word is true, which every person can pronounce, can repeat after the Christian master: “Heaven and earth will pass away” – that is, what surrounds us as the physical world will pass away – “but my word,” that is, the logos that lives in me also as the ethical, “will not pass away.” It creates a future world. Thus, that which lives in the human being expands into a consciousness that in turn integrates the human being into the cosmology of world evolution.

I just wanted to show you today, dear attendees, what the relationship is between anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the epistemological problem; how, in fact, what makes this epistemological problem so difficult for today's philosophy, in that on the one hand, cannot get out of the image character of the life of imagination, and on the other hand, cannot really do anything with the will because it cannot be brought out into the bright clarity of consciousness, how this problem, when grasped anthroposophically, places the human being in reality. Because that which he was in reality before his birth or conception takes on the character of an image in our life between birth and death. In this way, what is in the human being in the form of an image is linked to the external reality that he experiences and to which he himself builds the bridge. If one looks between two realities — the external environment and the internal world of ideas —, one can basically come to no solution to the problem, because one is dealing with a [shading] in the actual impulses of the inner world of ideas, an influence of that which was our reality before birth.

The ontological problem is posed anew by the fact that the human being experiences real spirituality again, that is, not only thinks dialectically, but by thinking dialectically, the spiritual-substantial, the essential is within this dialectical thinking.

The ethical problem, viewed anthroposophically, places the human being within the whole of cosmic becoming. It elevates what we do as individuals to a world fact by showing that what is ultimately necessary for a comprehensive world view is that in what happens in a person, there is not only something that is enclosed by his skin, but that, apart from the fact that he experiences it subjectively, it is also a subjective fact, it is also an objective event for the existence of the world. We live the existence of the world with us. Something lives in us, it is our subjective experience, but at the same time it is an objective experience of the world. By connecting the ethical impulses in this way with the cosmological existence, the cosmic experience of existence, the human being transcends death in the same way as he transcends birth in the other way. By understanding the powers of imagination, one comes to understand existence before birth. By understanding the will, one gets to know the germinal forces in the human organization, that which cannot be lived out at all until death, that which lives in us as the germ lives in the plant.

And from there, the path, which I cannot even hint at because of the shortness of time, is to recognize the immortality problem, namely, life beyond death. We have become so unclear about the problem of immortality in recent times because we cannot see it properly by the hand of the other problem. We do not even have a word for this other problem in ordinary language. We talk about immortality, but we do not talk about being unborn, about unbornness. Immortality belongs to the realm of the unborn. Until we are able to think and talk about being unborn in the same way as we do about immortality, we will only grope in matters of faith and not come to certain knowledge.

Dear attendees, I am well aware of how much can be objected to what I have been allowed to explain today. Believe me when I say that the spiritual researcher raises the objections that can be raised, because he is aware of the difficult and questionable areas his research enters into. But perhaps these arguments have shown that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, insofar as it emanates from the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, is not concerned with wild fantasy, nebulous mysticism, or some kind of enthusiastic theosophy, but that it has to do with something that, at least in its striving, wants to continue on the path of serious, even exact science. To what extent this can be achieved today, I cannot say. But serious research is being pursued precisely because the tremendous scientific advances of recent times point not only to themselves, but at the same time beyond themselves. It is my heartfelt conviction that today's good natural scientist is not driven by the results of natural science research, but by what a natural scientist does with mind and soul, into the development of these soul abilities, which are already applied unconsciously in natural science research. He is driven to consciously develop these abilities and is then drawn into a truly concrete grasp of the spirit. A concrete grasp of the spirit, just as science is a concrete grasp of nature, of objective natural facts, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to achieve.

Discussion

Leo Polak: Since no one else wants to take the floor, I would like to do so myself. After we have heard about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I would also like to hear something from the other side, I would like to say, from the purely philosophical side here, especially from the epistemological side. Because what pleased me most this evening was at least the striving to also give an epistemological foundation for this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as Dr. Steiner also tried to do in his works, which I am familiar with for the most part.

But then it became clear to me that there really is a fundamental contradiction, I would even say a contradiction, between anthroposophy and philosophy. In my opinion, this contradiction is not based on what Dr. Steiner founded it on. He explained somewhere that the real fact of the matter is that it is not philosophy that contradicts anthroposophy, but rather that philosophers, and especially Kant, do not understand philosophy. Now I believe that the whole attitude of philosophy towards anthroposophy is different from the opposite. I would like to say, even if it sounds a little immodest: philosophy is a little more modest; it will never dare to say, “This clairvoyant knowledge does not exist.” It will not dare to say that if Dr. Steiner believes and thinks that by developing certain soul forces he can expand memory or expand it to see a supersensible world, to see the higher world of ideas, to think with prenatal spiritual powers, and what else we have heard here, to purely spiritual in this sense, and when he thus directly beholds the supersensible non-ego, when he beholds what occurred before birth and after death, then we can simply say: We do not see this, we lack this cognitive faculty, in principle, not gradually, but in principle, and so we have to remain silent about it. The only thing we can critically note here is that it is a mistake to speak here of a mere extension of the known forces. Each time, the familiar force is not expanded, but transformed into and transferred into something that is fundamentally opposed to it. Remembering is always only remembering what one has experienced oneself. When remembering becomes beholding, when it becomes supersensible, it becomes something fundamentally different, an insight into something that is no longer and never can be a power of remembrance.

It is exactly the same with love. We do not believe for a moment, at least I am convinced, that it is a lack of my ability to love that I cannot immediately merge with that objectivity in which Dr. Steiner can, that I cannot experience the inner reality of the supersensible and therefore also solve the question of the supersensible when a before and after is experienced. I do not believe that, that is the only thing I can say; and what I can definitely say is that something new is being achieved here, and not just an expansion of our powers of knowledge and love.

But if epistemology and philosophy do not want to and cannot presume to pass judgment on spiritual powers, about which they themselves absolutely do not dispose, do not know and even cannot think, a seeing of a non-ego, then on the other hand, where the spiritual scientist turns to epistemology and wants to judge and condemn epistemological questions, she feels obliged to let her criticism be heard and to say: It is possible that clairvoyance has penetrated into the core of matter, even if epistemology does not recognize this whole matter as reality; this vision may be able to enter into the inner being of matter, but it has not entered into the inner being of epistemology; it has only been able to see epistemology and especially critique, the Kantian one, from the outside, without ever being inside.

It is clear that it would be taking this far too far if one were to expand on this with specific reasons. I would then need a whole evening here, just as the previous speaker would have needed this and more to express his view on epistemology. But there are some words that I just want to touch on briefly because they are of the utmost and greatest interest in principle. In the book 'Philosophy of Freedom', for example, Dr. Steiner particularly addresses the problem of knowledge, and perhaps the most characteristic sentence in the book is that, from the concept of knowledge as we have defined it, we cannot speak of limits to knowledge. Well, there could hardly be a more fundamental contradiction than that between critical epistemology, which I have the honor of representing here at the university and on which I give my lectures, and a statement like this, which rejects every limit of knowledge that the exact research work of so many of the greatest thinkers, and especially Kant, has taught us, could hardly be more fundamentally opposed than this between a theory that denies the limits of knowledge and one that establishes them. And this denial of origin is also the basis of the rest of the antagonism. Dr. Steiner has criticized critical idealism in this book and elsewhere, but he always remained outside the actual problem, never even touching on the essence of actual Kantianism. He believes that the phenomenon of nature is the nature of Kantianism, for which every nature, every material world, for example, not only exists as a physical world for Dr. Steiner, but there is also an ethereal body outside our physical body , we also have an astral body, we not only have the one spirit, but also four kinds of spirit, so to speak, which are then named with these Indian words: manas, budhi, atma and so on. But the physical body is denied by Kantianism as an independently existing reality; it is merely a phenomenon of the thing in itself. We also heard that day that one had even come to speculate, to a “thing in itself,” as if that were the most unreasonable thing one could do. And here, no less a figure than Kant said of the denial of this thing in itself: “I have shown with all my criticism that what we perceive, the things of the world of appearances, are not things in themselves, but appearances. That is, as is well known, the sum total of Kant's entire critique of knowledge: it would be incorrect to consider these appearances to be things in themselves; but it would be an even greater contradiction to want to deny the existence of any “thing in itself” at all. It would, of course, take me much too far afield if I were to elaborate on this point, but I can completely hint at Dr. Steiner's fundamental errors here with a few words: He has partly adopted Hartmann's criticism of idealism and in any case made the big mistake in it – which I believe I have shown in my book, and that is this – that idealism or the phenomenon of matter or nature, that one could arrive there only if one presupposes the reality of nature, the reality of /gap in the text]. This is quite incorrect and is based on the false formulation of this subjectivity of the content of perception. Not a single critical idealist in this sense says, as Dr. Steiner has him say, as he himself believes that it should be said, that colors merely depend on and exist for an eye, but every critical thinker knows here that that the eye is just as much a phenomenon and just as dependent and is not the eye [the first principle] but just as secondary, so he says: All colors exist only for and through the sense of color, the sense of sight, as a mental faculty. And in exactly the same way, all sounds in the whole world only exist if the sense of hearing is presupposed as the [primum], and not the ear or the brain. If one makes this single and absolutely necessary change in this whole critique of Dr. Steiner on Kantian idealism, then it collapses into nothing and then Dr. Steiner's only argument remains, but it is scattered and shown to have been insignificant. I would ask those experts who deal with epistemology to read the relevant passage from Dr. Steiner's work, and I would ask Dr. Steiner to consider the matter in this light and to see whether this change is not enough to show that what he has brought up here in a critical sense is unfortunate.

And there is still another fundamental difference between this merely formal, merely critical idealism and everything that Kant, I believe rightly, called enthusiastic, mystical idealism. The previous speaker wanted to make a fundamental distinction between mysticism and his teaching. I fear that some of those present here were unable or hardly able to find this difference. There was much in it that must be considered enthusiastic from a Kantian point of view, as belonging to that higher idealism. The higher / gap in the text] [is] not for me; for me it is only the pathos, the depth of experience. I believe that for some people what was presented tonight will have had a mystical quality, and quite rightly so. For mystical has always been used to describe that which is based on the direct content of the transcendent, the non-ego, that which is not directly given in the ego, that is, the non-ego. And it is precisely this insight into the supersensible, the other, the non-ego, the non-self-experienced, the previous and the subsequent, all these mystical things that we have heard proclaimed as the elements of anthroposophy. I would like to conclude with a motto from Kant's “Prolegomena”. It goes without saying that I cannot go into everything in detail, that would of course be impossible. Dr. Steiner said: “The interaction between brain and soul certainly exists.” We are very surprised at this certainty, since the whole critical theory of knowledge, in contrast to the psychology Dr. Steiner pointed to, not only denies this interaction in principle, but can also demonstrate the fundamental impossibility of interaction, because interaction requires two, two realities, and for critical idealism one of these realities does not exist materially as such, but in itself something else, something that is in itself psychic and ideal, just as we ourselves are, and just as one's own deeper opinion may be Dr. Steiner's own, but which he merely clothes in this uncritical, dogmatic, duplicated theory of perception, never speaking of images and even mirror images; when criticism shows, never Kantian criticism, that our perception never delivers images, never reproduction, but production. That would be the fundamental error, but I cannot go into that in detail now. The words of Kant with which I would like to end – there are actually two – I would first like to formulate the contrast between this clairvoyance and critical philosophy in Kant's words. Because “this much is certain and certain to me: anyone who has ever tasted criticism is forever disgusted by all the dogmatic drivel they previously had to make do with.” And further: “Criticism relates to ordinary school metaphysics” – and I would like to say also to this new metaphysics, to anthroposophy – “just as chemistry relates to alchemy or astronomy to divinatory astrology”. That is the one word that formulates the opposition in principle. The other is this: “Now suppose what seems most credible even after the most careful examination of the reasons. These may be facts or reasons, but reason does not deny that which makes it the greatest good on earth, namely, the prerogative of being the final touchstone of truth.

With this final touchstone of truth, we want to measure anthroposophy and theosophy. For, as Kant says - and with this I would like to conclude - otherwise you will become unworthy of this freedom and surely lose it.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to just touch on a few points and not keep you any longer. The first is the fundamental point that your esteemed chairman has brought forward, that there is not just a difference in degree between what I characterized as a developed ability to remember and remembering, but a fundamental contradiction. Nothing else emerges from my characterization, of course. Perhaps I may trace it back to the difficulty in communication through language, when your chairman introduced a word to justify his criticism that I have not used and would never use. I spoke of a further development of the ability to remember, not of an extension. I would like to explicitly draw attention to this. Extension is wrong. Further development can also lead to a form of the same thing, a metamorphosis that shows a fundamental opposition to that from which it developed. That just to point out how easily misunderstandings could arise within a critique. Because what I have explained is basically not changed by the fact that this principal opposition, which was already clearly included in my formulation, is particularly characterized. Because, my dear attendees, since there is of course an opposition, yes, a principal contradiction between what I have explained and Kantianism, I will never deny that.

I have never made a secret of the fact that, based on all my research results, I had to become an anti-Kantian. And what I have written in my “Truth and Science” and in my “Philosophy of Freedom” is, of course, to be taken as an examination of Kantianism based on years of effort. It is of little importance whether one says, perhaps with a somewhat imprecise expression, “Without the eye, there is no color,” as Schopenhauer actually said in various places, or whether one says, “Colors are not objective, but phenomena; the eye itself is a phenomenon.” Of course, that is all correct. And if one then goes on to say, “Without the sense of color, there would be no colors,” then one would really have to weave this into a critique, not just hint at it. Of course, all that is correct. And if one then goes on to say, “Without the sense of color, there would be no colors,” then one would really need to weave this into a critique not just in a suggestive way, but then one would need to go into great detail about how to characterize what is called the sense of color. For in my opinion, the transition to the sense of color, as soon as one wants to arrive at clear, sharply contoured concepts, is very mystical. Kantianism becomes a rather nebulous mysticism for me. And in the newer epistemology, Kantianism has become a nebulous mysticism for me in many ways. It would be more fruitful, ladies and gentlemen, to discuss the things that I have actually presented in the lecture. Because to pick out one thing from my “Philosophy of Freedom” is virtually impossible. This sentence stands in the middle of a long development. It is impossible to grasp its meaning without this long development.

When I say that one should not assume any limits to knowledge, it must be borne in mind that the meaning of this sentence emerges from the whole argument. This sentence can be understood in the most diverse ways. It can be understood in such a way that one does not initially speak of fundamental limits to knowledge, as do du Bois-Reymond in his Ignorabimus or as certain representatives of Kantianism do. But it can also be understood in such a way that one does not set any limits to research, but sees research as an [asymptotic] approximation to truth, so that one should not speak of limits to knowledge in order not to hinder the progress of research.

I don't want to try your patience too much by going into all the quotes from my writings, because that would take a really long time. I could only pick out certain things from the whole range of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and, you see, you have to start with certain things with a certain understanding. It seems to me that it is not acceptable to formulate the contrast between anthroposophy and mysticism so sharply, not only defining it so sharply, but also showing how anthroposophy can be used to avoid the danger of going astray into nebulous mysticism. It is not acceptable to describe anthroposophy as mysticism by means of pure definition. You can do that if you have made a definition of mysticism and subsumed everything that does not belong in that which you want to accept. But the progressive path of knowledge must be allowed to go beyond given definitions; you will also find in my “Philosophy of Freedom” that there is no need to rethink Kantianism. It has been considered from all sides precisely by these considerations, which I have tried to employ in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

Today, after I have passed my sixtieth year, it makes a strange impression on me when I am given the advice that I should consider Kantianism. As a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, because I didn't like my history teacher, I stapled the then-published edition of the Critique of Pure Reason into my school notebooks so that I could read Kant while the teacher was teaching history. Since that time, I have been studying Kant and I have followed this advice, given from various sides, to thoroughly consider Kantianism. That was forty-four years ago. If the admonition had not come at this point in Kantianism, with regard to which I want to confess that I am somewhat sensitive, I would not have kept you these few minutes with this purely personal matter, because that is what it is. Otherwise, I would have liked to have been mindful of the fact that I was speaking here only as a guest and therefore should have behaved as a guest. Perhaps I have already gone beyond what is necessary here by making this latter personal remark. But sometimes the personal is necessarily connected with the objective and may then be permitted as personal.

I would just like to have this mentioned for the reason that too little has actually been said about my lecture, and more of what has been formulated by me in completely different contexts has been criticized, which I find very understandable; for anyone who has been involved with Kantianism for forty-four years also understands the enthusiasm for Kant's critique of reason, for Kantian idealism; understands how one can speak of the “thing in itself”. I also appreciate all the objections that have just been raised, and I thank your chair for them. I don't want to bother you any further, but I would ask that what I actually presented in my lecture today be examined more closely.

Leo Polak: If I have perhaps given rise to misunderstandings in my words, I am happy to acknowledge my error. I see that there has also been constant talk here of further development, which I read in my notes as “expansion” of the power of remembrance. If, as the speaker himself says, he does not mean an extension, but something fundamentally new, then we fully agree on this point. And I have also given the reason why it would be unfeasible for me to go into these positive statements in more detail: because I lack all knowledge in this area. I can only say: I do not possess this ability of clairvoyance and therefore do not talk about something I do not know.

And if I might have been a little immodest again in the formulation of my advice, where it appears as if I am telling an older thinker and writer to consider this or that, I did not say he should study Kantianism; I know his work and know what he thinks about it. But he should reconsider his one argument against Kantianism – eyes, colors, sense of color – and I must stick to that. I know that Dr. Steiner has studied Kantianism, has read Kant, and so on; I simply wanted to state that in a sense he would have remained on the outside. Perhaps I am allowed to say one more thing, a saying that was not made this evening either, but that was taken from another book, “Philosophy and Theosophy”, the essay that deals with the relationship between these two, which says that Kant can only imagine a “thing in itself” in material terms, however grotesque it may sound. Therefore, I also understand why Dr. Steiner must deny the “thing in itself” if he thinks that the “thing in itself” must be imagined materially. This “thing in itself” would then be an “un-thing in itself”.

Rudolf Steiner: That is not there.

Leo Polak: Dr. Steiner says it is not there. Here it is!

Rudolf Steiner: You have the translation there. Then the sentence has been mistranslated. It doesn't mean that I refute Kant, that he could only imagine the “thing in itself” materially, but that I find that the “thing in itself”, if you want to imagine it impartially, could be imagined materially. This is not an objection that I am making, but one that many have already made, that the Kantian definition of the “thing in itself” does not exclude a material conception.

Leo Polak: Now this is the fundamental opposition of the whole of Kantianism to this doctrine, that Kant has shown by all means of epistemology and criticism, at any rate, that the “thing in itself”, whatever qualities it may have in addition , can only be in principle and fundamentally non-sensuous, supersensuous; that sensuous qualities are only the sense-thing, that is, the phenomenon. So if I also agree with Dr. Steiner, then so much the better. Then he will see that what he calls the supersensible world is not so far removed from what Kant says, only that Kant does not have a faculty of vindication. I think I have explained why I cannot go into Dr. Steiner's positive assertions: because I am a layman in that field, and that was the first commandment of spiritual science: one should not speak of what one does not understand. And if we can all finally agree that we want to understand and comprehend the world only with the means that the spirit provides us with — as Dr. Steiner ultimately also wants to do, even if he says that one can further develop the powers —, and if we want to understand the world with the spiritual powers that everyone feels within, and if we take as a point of reference, just as Kantianism does with all of critical philosophy, and just as Dr. Steiner does — I grant myself the concession of emphasizing, in a conciliatory way, that we agree — if one no longer, as a past period of science did, regards the objective, the material, the mechanical as the primary and original given, but rather, emphasizing the ego, the ego experience, the psychic, the inner life itself, and seeing, recognizing and knowing it as the primary, the founding, the starting and secure point of all science, then I believe that, marching separately, one can still beat unitedly the forces of of ignorance, of superstition and of enthusiastic mysticism, which, as I was pleased to hear, Dr. Steiner also regards as an opponent; marching separately, but unitedly overcoming these black forces of ignorance and superstition in order to achieve some light, some understanding, some insight, some comprehension. In this happy hope we want to agree and finally thank Dr. Steiner with all our hearts for what he has given with all his conviction after a long life of so many years as the result of his research. That it does not agree with our results, with the results of our research and others, that we object to in principle, I have considered it my duty not to keep to myself. Even if Dr. Steiner is a guest, I have not taken this into account and neither has Dr. Steiner. Even if the guests are friends, [gap in the text].

Today I would like to speak about the relation of the supersensible knowledge to the moral, social, and religious life of the human being.

The naturalist Wallace (Arthur Russel W., 1823-1913) who tried to create a worldview in similar way as Darwin made an important quotation about the moral development of humanity. Haeckel and many other researchers also agree to this quotation. Wallace said, as big the progress of humanity is with reference to the knowledge of nature and its backgrounds, as little is on the other side the progress of the moral life. From stage to stage, one realises the world knowledge developing. If one looks at the moral development, one cannot say that humanity has made substantial progress since ancient times.

Indeed, such a quotation is of particular significance. Indeed, someone who tries to get a deeper insight in the course of the human development will not be able to agree with this thinker for ever and ever; but for the recent, by the natural sciences determined time for which Wallace as a naturalist has a sharpened eye one will be able to maintain this quotation. In older times that the mentioned thinker can less survey, it is not right that the intellectual knowledge hurries forward in such an essential way compared to the stages of the moral development.

However, just for our time in which the scientific knowledge has advanced brilliantly one has to consider what this thinker states. Someone who looks at the catastrophic events of the last years with understanding, with empathy will admit that that which one has experienced does not give evidence of a special moral progress, which keeps up with the intellectual progress of humanity.

There seems a very important question to be which is more urgent because on the other side the desire exists just today to become aware of the areas of morality. However, someone who gets to know the real character of the scientific research in that way, as I have characterised it the day before yesterday from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint, knows while he experiences the border of this scientific cognition that it is not an accidental meeting for the last centuries, but that a causal connection is to be found. I had explained the day before yesterday how just the essentials of scientific knowledge consist of the fact that it finds its way to its progress, while it takes no account of the capacity for love which just enables us to produce the right relation to human beings. However, because this capacity for love continues having an effect in the human being, it must be retained so that scientific knowledge can be obtained, that is why the human being arrives in the scientific cognition at a certain border.

As one can easily understand, the development of the capacity for love is associated with the progressive life. If by contrast one considers those spiritual abilities that the human being just applies if he practises natural sciences, one finds that the forces that play a special role in this research cannot be directed to the progressive life, but to the dying life. While we look into life with these scientific forces, we do not look into life, but into that which dies.

It is not detrimental to the scientific research if just the strict naturalists repeatedly argue against concepts like “vitality” in science. In the course of the nineteenth century, scientific research has rightly eliminated what one called “vitality” once. However, some people believe, it is only a temporary defect that the human being cannot look into life, but is only able to look at the dying.

However, it is not in this way. The ability of knowledge that is directed to nature has to search the dead within the living. Hence, the trend is to expel life in order to search just that what does not live. One cannot say that one can also understand life with the advancing way of scientific thinking. No, this way of thinking will be great just because it does not understand life but looks for the dying.

Hence, the understanding of such soul qualities that are associated with the capacity for love has decreased in that time in which this way of thinking has reached a special height. With it, the whole moral life is connected. Love is the basic force that has to develop, so that moral life exists.

Outer events also prove what I have just explained. One experiences quite strange things in this area. I have repeatedly pointed in my talks of the last years to an excellent book by Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), The Origin of Organisms — a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). I had to appreciate this book almost as a brilliant achievement because Oscar Hertwig refutes any hasty conclusion of the materialistically minded Darwinists with conscientious scientific methods.

Now something extremely strange happened. Oscar Hertwig published another, minor writing that dealt with moral, social, and political questions. Lo and behold, this writing contains the purest nonsense. A way of thinking pervades the writing that is suitable in no way for the solution of the put questions. Thus, we see a brilliant naturalist completely failing where he wants to consider social, moral, and political phenomena.

I could increase these examples. However, you need only to point to one thing to show how the modern times have become infertile concerning the understanding of the moral life. I have to become somewhat heretic if I characterise these things because people do not yet want to believe this today,—heretic in this case not against the church but against quite different directions.

If you consider philosophical worldviews that are not superficial and arise from the mere scientific way of thinking, one likes to point to Kant and Kantianism. Just Kant was often quoted in disgusting way in the last time, I would like to say. Since one could realise that the worst hawks and the most radical pacifists quoted Kant. There are those who have changed during the last weeks just from furious hawks into radical pacifists—such persons do exist—, quoted Kant once and quote Kant now in the nicest way according to their respective opinion.

Indeed, Kant is typical in many fields for the form which modern thinking has assumed. He is also typical for how people often assume that what faces them in the spiritual life. By his way of writing, one considers Kant as an author who is somewhat hard to understand. However, because some people bring themselves to understand him and consider themselves as very clever, they find, because Kant said something clever that they can just still understand that Kant is a particularly great man.

Well, concerning the moral life Kant put up a principle that one quotes very often, indeed, it is sometimes only called, while one says, Kant put up the “categorical imperative” concerning the moral life. This “categorical imperative,” put into words, is as follows: act in such a way that the maxims of your action can become a guideline for all human beings.—This has seemed to me always in such a way, as if anybody says, let a tailor make such a jacket that all human beings can wear it.—The immediate moral impulses can be grasped only with the most individual of the human being and can enjoy life only this way. These are pressed in the empty phrases of extreme abstraction that should be applied to all human beings in the same way.

It is important to realise that one has to strive for abstractions in the area of physical laws, but this way of imagining leads away from the field in the human being that wants to be grasped if one wants to envisage the moral impulses what carries the human being immediately in the moral life and strengthens him. Since that by which we are moral human beings has to catch fire in the immediate living conditions, in the immediate relation from human being to human being. This is something very individual in every single case. The human soul must have the possibility to develop a very individual impulse from himself that cannot be characterised by the fact that one says, it should be a maxim for all human beings. No, that what can be a maxim for all human beings has the least moral impact, does not carry the human being morally through life, but that what directly obliges him in the most individual sense to behave one way or the other.

In the immediate life, no concept or mental picture carries the human being in the moral sense but love. I have already tried 25 years ago to found this teaching of individual morality in my Philosophy of Freedom struggling against the abstract trend of Kantianism. This is penetrated above all with the knowledge that the moral action can only arise from such a love of the concerning action to be done which equals the love for a single human being. Love must prevail in the action that should be a moral one, love which is not self-love, but which forces back the self and replaces it with that what should take place from pure love. The individual insight that I should carry out the action, which is up to me, changes the action into a moral one.

I have said the day before yesterday that in the characterised supersensible consciousness just the force of love prevails which does not prevail in the usual abstract thinking. Of course, I have not stated with it that the activity of the spiritual researcher is identical with that what the soul accomplishes if it feels morally. It is not identical, but it is of the same kind. As well as the soul works in the usual life in a certain area, while it feels morally, it is just active in another area, while it raises a force which normally slumbers, while it beholds into the spiritual world and develops the final goal of the supersensible knowledge, the Intuitive knowledge.

One ascends from the Imaginative to the Inspired, to the Intuitive knowledge. The Intuitive knowledge of supersensible beings and events is not like the love in the moral area, but the situation is the same in which the soul is as in the physical area while it feels love morally. The state of the soul is the same. Hence, spiritual science is allowed to say, within its own activity just that ability of the soul that is realised in the moral life is maintained on higher spiritual level.

That is why spiritual science especially cultivates that what has been eclipsed just by the glorious development of the scientific knowledge, the trend to that soul force which is necessary to the moral action. Thus, one may say, if one considers Kantianism and the scientific ways of thinking, they have pushed down the former, more instinctive life, which delivered the moral impulses as it were into the unconscious. However, spiritual science raises these forces again which are related to the moral feeling. Spiritual science will raise that into full consciousness what lived once as instinctive moral sensations in the human being.

Thus, one can understand that just in the time in which humanity left a more instinctive soul life and developed unilaterally in the area of intellectual knowledge of nature at first, the sense withdrew which is immediately directed to that what lives as moral in the human being. Thus, the conscious sense for moral impulses is not maintained just during this scientific age. It will appear if just in the centre of the soul life that force for the knowledge of higher supersensible worlds emerges which must live on another level in the normal moral feeling of the soul.

Spiritual science brings about these mental pictures of the supersensible worlds. If humanity assumes these spiritual-scientific mental pictures as well as the scientific mental pictures, they will have another significance in the soul life than the scientific mental pictures. These spiritual-scientific mental pictures are brought from such areas of the soul where the soul force related with the moral is maintained. Hence, they react upon the capacity for love and with it upon the immediately individual impulses of the moral life. While the age of abstractions could give a general definition only, spiritual science will be able to intervene immediately in life, so that the human being faces life understanding and gets the moral impulse from the intuition of life. Then another kind of moral influence than from any abstract moral theory or a sum of moral principles will originate from spiritual science. That will originate what does not only make the maxims immediately moral because one can experience them in life: moral sermons do not help much in life.

Of course, some people regard it as a requirement of our time to stress always again, the human beings should love each other.—However, this is only pointless rhetoricalness, if not even nonsense, if not even a mask for the fact that one just has little love and stresses it, hence, all the more. The less spiritual science talks about love, the more the special imaginations arising from the force of love arouse the understanding and—I would like to say—the capacity to unfold the moral in the individual situation, while they settle in the soul. Hence, spiritual science hopes if it finds the access to the human beings that it does not give moral maxims only but even moral heating fuel. Hence, spiritual science will revive that what has withered under the influence of the scientific knowledge.

Concerning the moral life one will note if one has tried to implement scientific thinking also in the moral world that this thinking in the moral area can lead only to concepts of decline because it considers the dying life only also towards nature. However, because spiritual science is related in its searching with the productive force that expresses itself in love, it will be also able to bring productive morality to humanity again. It will spread something again among the human beings that they will not despair of the question: what should I do, actually? What is my task?-, but it will work among the human beings that they receive the suggestion from it to do this and that in life and to be carried morally thereby through life. The number of those who labour and are heavy laden will decrease who suffer just from it emotionally and suffer as a result of it also physically that they cannot use life because they have nothing in their thinking, in their mental pictures and ideas that lets the moral task arise.

In spiritual science just a knowledge, a sum of qualities will exist which does not betray the human being if he envisages his life tasks, but fulfils him with moral impulses, so that he can say to himself at every moment of life, I deal with this or that. Then he finds no time to ponder with the empty soul and not to know what he should do with his life, to have to go to sanitariums, to be stimulated from the outside, so that his soul is filled, while it can only be filled really if one can get the life tasks from the depths of the own inside. One can easily argue, one does not note with some followers of spiritual science that these fruits of which I have just spoken appear with them; on the contrary, one realises that with them often above all selfishness and egoism, sometimes an ingenious egoism develops that one can find little love just with them. One should still admit this for today. That what should develop has to struggle through some obstacles. However, it is inherent in the nature of the matter that the things develop this way. It is also very much reasoned that at first something else appears.

Those are not wrong who say, yes, spiritual science also thinks that the present life points to former lives on earth and to future ones and that the human being lives during the intervals in the spiritual world—that the destiny which now the human being experiences in spite of his freedom is dependent on that what he brings with him from former lives and that that which he accomplishes in this life works again on coming lives.

Indeed, I have heard, how full persons if one has made them aware of starving and miserable people who believed, however, to be rather good followers of any spiritual-scientific direction, said, well, this is okay, we have deserved that in the former life, and he has deserved his hunger in his former life.—This is only a radical expression of that which often appears while people use what they receive from spiritual science to justify their materialist sensations. Of course, if one has to extend the human individuality beyond this single life if one has to point to that what develops as something transpersonal in the human individuality in his lives on earth, egoism can be thereby stirred up, as the theoretical egoism is often stirred up with the numerous supporters of spiritual science who are concerned with nothing more important than to invent who they were in their previous lives on earth. There are often such people. However, what forms the basis there is the following.

The human being experiences two levels if he is concerned with spiritual science. The first level consists of the fact that he accepts that what he receives from spiritual science for his own satisfaction. He is happy to find out something with which he can live. This is the first level.

The second level is that where one exceeds what generates just a subtle egoism where one goes over to that point where the will, the whole human being is stimulated in his relation to life from that what spiritual science can give.

Then egoism stops, then the worlds are woken in the human being that carry him beyond his narrow vicinity, which consist of pondering in his soul. Then the human being is directed away from himself just to other human beings. An individual-moral feeling changes into the social feeling from which then the moral action arises.

With it, we touch something that deeply penetrates into the crisis of our time. At the same time, we touch an area, in which, although it is so burning, the biggest ambiguity prevails. While I go over to the social area, I would like to point introductorily to the most important. One has the impression very easily if one speaks how the human being attains such supersensible knowledge: this is something very remote; this is something that is very strange to the usual life on earth.

That is not completely true. If one does not misuse the expression, one may say, the owner of supersensible knowledge is just a seer. Then one can have the opinion, he is proud to have acquired something that, otherwise, all other human beings do not have. However, this is not true. Every human being is in one area always—save that one does not know it in the usual life that one cannot even connect a sense with it if it is stated—, in the spiritual condition, which one can appropriate for the other areas of spiritual science only laboriously as I have characterised it the day before yesterday, so that you get to the supersensible knowledge. You are in one area always in this spiritual condition; else, you would be simply blind in this area. This is the one area if you enter just into a loving relationship to your fellow human beings. One considers the other human being from the same soul viewpoint—but just only the human being—from which you have to look if you want to have supersensible knowledge. However, you must develop the capacity first to cause the same situation in your soul concerning the other things, which the instinct or life simply causes if you face another human being with understanding love, with interest. In this case, you become clairvoyant in the usual life. It is just assigned to the human being in the usual life to become clairvoyant in this one case; for the other cases he has to appropriate the suitable abilities laboriously and methodically.

The ability to face the fellow human with understanding, with interest, to become engrossed in the characteristic of the other human being forms the basis of the true social life in spite of all objections. Because the ability must be there instinctive in the human being if he wants to establish a relationship to the fellow human because it is the ability with which one manages just the most significant investigations of spiritual science, just spiritual science works on the social life. That knowledge, which one must appropriate for the supersensible world, reacts upon the social feeling and wakes real understanding for the fellow human. This is significant.

Hence, just in that time the social demands originated in which on the other side scientific thinking celebrated the biggest triumphs with its intellectuality. Before the sixteenth century, we do not realise that the human being thought thoroughly, in particular not scientifically, about any social demand. The entire social life was instinctive.

With the emergence of the scientific habitual ways of thinking, it becomes necessary to appropriate social concepts, to assert conscious social sensations. If we see where in the most radical way the social demands appear, in the industrial proletariat, we find that this proletariat has developed its habitual ways of thinking with the help of natural sciences.

What the proletariat has experienced in the externally realised scientific way of thinking has generated the special way of dealing intellectually with the social demands. While just the position of the human being to his fellow humans that is related to clairvoyance was forced back, the social element withdrew substantially during the last centuries. Because it has withdrawn, because the social instincts did no longer exist, the intellectual social demands originated.

If we consider the human being not only concerning his physical body but if we become aware by spiritual science that he is as a soul in spiritual surroundings about which he knows nothing with his usual consciousness, then the whole human being splits up in the physical world and the spiritual world. He splits up in a peculiar way.

If we consider our view of nature, natural sciences and that what is associated with them at first, what holds true? It is peculiar that all questions for that what natural sciences give originate from the spiritual. The questions come from the spirit; indeed, one can get them from the spirit as it was done in old times, or as in recent times the naturalists do, they can be taken as heritage from the times when they settled down instinctively in the human mind. What we observe experimenting is answer only in the area of natural sciences. Questions arise from the spirit. The answers are here in the physical realm. This is a very interesting connection.

Because in old times an atavistic, instinctive spiritual life existed, scientific questions arose instinctively from the human soul. These questions were much more comprehensive than that what with scientific observations and experiments the human beings could obtain as answer. This ability to feel questions instinctively withdrew. The insight into the supersensible worlds did not yet exist; hence, one only had the heritage in the scientific questions just in the age in which one developed the methods of observing and experimenting et cetera.

Someone who looks with understanding at natural sciences, finds out for himself that all the questions are handed down from old times and become paler and paler what impairs the answers. If spiritual science did not appear that can deliver new questions for natural sciences from the spiritual world, so that that which the observation finds experimentally can be lighted up properly, one would have gradually to experience an entire paralysis of the scientific life in spite of any external methodical activity as you can already experience it very clearly today if you only have sense of it.

This holds true with reference to the view of nature. With reference to the social and moral life, the reverse holds true. The questions, the demands manifest within the physical world; and only within the spiritual world, the answers arise. There the reverse holds true.

The human being had an instinctive spiritual life once that gave the answers from the spirit to the demands, which the social moral life puts here in the physical world. He produced the moral and social maxims instinctively. The time of that is over. We live in the age where the human being has to change into the consciousness where the human being has progressed concerning intellectuality. However, this intellect works in its initial naivety in an instinctive way, I would like to say.

Thus, the social questions, the social demands appeared at first. One can find the answers only, while one ascends to the world of the supersensible from which the answers can only come. For a real social science, we need the spiritual-scientific deepening because it will be able only to give these answers. Our age proves what I had just to say in this direction.

We saw a dreadful disaster passing by during the last four and a half years. Today we see in vast areas of the earth spread what has arisen from that dreadful disaster which still contains something in its bosom that lets us look with concern at the next future. Somebody who observes these conditions impartially does not put a question in such a way as it is normally put in the abstract: what has this warlike disaster brought to the whole world, actually?—Someone who thinks spiritual-scientifically does not think in theories, not in abstractions, but points everywhere to realities. The results of this dreadful disaster appear in that what has remained now. The temporary outcome of this disaster has removed a veil, and now the truth appears naked in Eastern Europe and Central Europe and probably also in other areas. What appears now as social chaos, was also there before, it was only covered. The disaster has only removed the veil. We see that what exists as social demands and what cries for answers. Those who go forward after the pattern of scientific concepts just from the sensory life will not give these answers, but only the sources of spiritual life can give these answers.

This also results from the immediate observation if one studies conscientiously and carefully what comes to light so hopeless in this or that point, with these or those leaders of the today's social chaos because they are only robbing. What can these leaders of the today's social chaos have only in mind? They believe to overcome old classes; however, they have only borrowed the thoughts of these classes. They believe to create a new human life, but they are able to do that only with the thoughts that they have borrowed from the old human life. Karl Marx himself said mocking about the philosophers, they would always have been busy only to arrange life with thoughts; however, it would matter to transform life with thoughts.

If he had thought that through to the end, if he had done the step from the physical life to the supersensible, he would still have had to say something else. Then, however, something quite different would have resulted. Then he would have had to say, the previous thoughts are only suitable to let the physical life in such a way as it is; if one wants to transform this life and find answers to the questions that originate from the social chaos, then one needs other thoughts; since the old ones show that they cannot transform life.

Such a spirit like Karl Marx may rail against bourgeoisie or criticise it for long. It is evident to the proletarian of course. One must have experienced how it is evident to the proletarian. For years, I worked as a teacher at a school of the social-democratic party for workers. I know what makes sense to the today's proletarian; I had opportunity to get to know what lives in these souls. Big parts of the population do not have any idea of that today.

However, humanity, the proletariat too, has to get to know that what it really concerns, at first. Since we live in an age that can no longer get along with the old instincts from which the moral and social life originated that must change rather into a clear supersensible knowledge of the answers to the social and moral questions.

With it, one arrives again at that viewpoint of reality that got lost to humanity, which believes today just to be in reality. Humanity appears sometimes as someone who sees a horseshoe-shaped iron and to whom someone says. that horseshoe-shaped iron is a magnet.—Oh, says the first one, this is only iron, with it I shoe my horse.—He does not believe in the reality of that what he does not see with his eyes. Thus, it is the same as with the materialist thinking. One believes in something abstract if one just believes to look into reality. One is far away from reality because that belongs to reality what forms the basis of the things, the processes and the beings as a spiritual supersensible life. One diverges from reality with his habitual ways of thinking, sensations, and will impulses; one diverges from the moral and social life if one does not allow to be impregnated with spirit.

While with instinctive faith people lived in clear conditions that showed them how everything is connected with reality, today they live in a world order that has been complicated in which in many regards they do not even search the immediate relationship to reality. The human being knows at first what a farm product is what cabbage or wheat are, and which weight cabbage or wheat carry as products with the human being. He still knows what human work means from human being to human being; he still knows what a spiritual achievement means because he wants to accept spiritual achievements to satisfy his soul needs. As long as the human being is within the vicinity of such things, he connects the mental pictures which he obtains and that what he makes of life as a result of these mental pictures, with the immediate reality.

However, life has become more complex, and today there are many things in the outer life for which the human being hardly has the possibility to remember even how these things are connected with the immediate reality. As odd as it sounds, it holds true for the most important things. What does the human being know how capital, interest, annuity, money or even loan are associated with that what goes forward by capital, by annuity, by interest, by loan, by money in the life in which he lives?

The human being gives piece of money from one hand to the other; he uses the bank transfer, the annuity for his life. Where does he have the possibility today to remember, what it means: passing money from one hand to another that one thereby lets pass an amount of labour power from one hand to the other.

One needs only to remind of something else to realise how people have lost the connection with reality. The official economists are often so helpless if they want to find social impulses; they can answer to the question just as little what money is in the social process. There are so-called “metalists” (gold standard) and “nominalists” (paper money) in the economics concerning money. The metalists state that the metal value comes into question. The nominalists state that only the assessment which the state or other corporations ascribe to the concerning piece of money is important in the social life without considering the metal value. Science does not know at all how these things are connected with reality.

Just on this field, it becomes apparent how time urges to find reality again. Spiritual science can give the human beings another kind of mental mobility and spiritual necessity. It is true that many people regard spiritual science as difficult because they have to exert themselves; today one does not like to exert himself mentally. If one observes scientifically, does experiments, one observes the processes, and the thinking is only something like a concomitant. This proceeds parallel to the outer processes. One likes this generally today in the time of cinemas where one likes something to be shown that one only accompanies with thinking; where one does not need to think very much.

Indeed, spiritual science already demands efforts, soul activity. That is why it is hard put to become established, why it finds so many opponents. However, there is also the counter-image. Spiritual science makes the concepts nimble, so that they penetrate into reality.

Hence, spiritual science can establish order just in those fields of knowledge that lead by the only accompanying thinking to nothing right, in particular in the economics, in the social science and in the social life. It will be able to go the long ways that lead from such things like money, capital, interest, annuity, loan to reality.

Indeed, there are many people who say, spiritual science should deal with spiritual things and not aim at such materialist things like capital, interest, annuity, loan et cetera. One has to overcome just this if one soars spiritual heights. This may be quite right on one side, nevertheless, it satisfies, at least for this life on earth, selfish instincts of the human being only. It matters that spiritual science can be just the most practical for this human life.

Thus, I would especially like to point to one thing because time presses. Someone who knows the proletarian thinking knows that one statement of Marxism particularly makes sense to proletarians. Karl Marx could make plausible to the people that there are goods on the world market, which are bought after supply and demand. There is a certain law. However, there is also a special commodity because of the modern social order, the human labour power, which the enterpriser buys. Other people have other goods that they bring to the market and sell, objects that satisfy human needs.

The proletarian cannot sell such things; he can sell his labour power only. He carries that to the market, it is bought from him only for so much money as it is just necessary to support himself and his family. He receives only so much that he can carve out his existence, while the enterprisers pocket the surplus value—this is the Marxist term—or it is transferred into the remaining social circulation. The sensation that he has to carry his labour power to market lives in the proletarian, this is that what he just wants to abolish by the so-called socialisation of the means of production.

This idea will cause big moral detrimental effects. It must be pointed to it with that mental capacity, which is attained by the sense of reality which spiritual science gives that not in the way, as it appears with Auguste Comte (1798-1857, French philosopher, sociologist), but in a quite different way something is as trend in the development of humanity that demands the reorganisation of something particular. This is in such a way: we can look back at the Greek culture that was connected with slavery. Slavery disappeared gradually. What was transferred to the other person by slavery? The whole human being. This also applies to serfage where almost the whole human being was transferred to the other.

This was contained in the human development and corresponded to the instincts of that time. If one knows on one side that Plato regarded slavery as necessary, one has to imagine as compensation what is always connected with it that the slave did not regard slavery out of his instincts, his patriarchal feeling as that which we feel in the retrospect today. At that time, slavery was a normal phenomenon of the human evolution.

The trend of the development is that the human being gives away less and less from himself; as a slave he gave away himself, then the time came where his labour power is bought from him like a commodity. It will be also overcome that the human being gives away only a part of his being, his labour power.

This feeling that this has to be overcome expresses itself while the proletarian appreciates the Marxist theory of labour power as a commodity et cetera. However, it holds true that first the whole human being, then his labour power, and now as a third, something else is transferred from one human being to the other. The social life will be abolished, but something else replaces it. If one understands the social reality once in such a way that one can speak of this other, then one will find understanding if one has the new thoughts that are coming up to meet the social life.

The spiritual-scientific Intuition says to us, we live in the time in which the social structure of humanity wants to change in such a way that one cannot exchange the labour power for any means which one also gives away for an objective commodity, but that the labour power is freely used while the human being is put in a certain social position which the human society assigns to him, and he also provides his time to the human society. At first, it was the whole human being who had to sell himself or who was sold; then the human labour power; and as the third, it is time and place. In certain areas, it is already this way. It is not in such a way that we can say, we ourselves who we are in other life positions than a proletarian and give away our labour power, our achievements or anything else. We are not paid for our labour power, but we are paid at most for the fact that we work at a certain place and sacrifice our power to humanity for some time. That what does no longer belong to the human being himself, his social position which today more or less is determined by the social structure only with the officials—but that leads to other detrimental effects—this will replace payment and labour power which changes into a commodity.

You realise that if you observe the future human development from the spiritual impulses. If you understand that, you will work in such a way—if one speaks from authoritative place and works in the institutions of the public life—that one aims, for example, at such social principle, and then one will be coming up to meet what lives as a social demand today in humanity. Time presses, and I cannot state more from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint.

One may well say, in the proletarians' heads something else lives now, just the Marxist ideas; one is concerned with these people. No! I myself who taught for years among these people was not expelled by these people, but by their leaders against the will of the students. These leaders, however, will not be leaders for long. That what remained as a desert after this war disaster and on which these leaders can work for a while will see these leaders disappearing. Since they will be able to do nothing with their ideas. With the trust in the leaders' the trust in the old ideas will get lost.

One would like to long that—if the possibility is there—ears will be there to hear the real social ideas that then enough people will be there who are inclined to bring in such social ideas really in humanity instead of those who are robbing today—like Lenin (1870-1924), Trotsky (Leon T., 1879-1940) and others—and bring destruction and death on humanity. One has to regard this above all. I wanted only to indicate what one could elaborate for other fields of the social life, I wanted to indicate it only, so that one understands fundamentally that spiritual science is coming up to meet the most important demands of the present social life.

At the end, I would still like to point out that spiritual science also wants to find in the third area, in the religious life what just a goal in this field is. One can easily hear the objection: this is a sectarian movement, it wants to found a new religion—and the like. Spiritual science wants to form neither a sect nor any new religion. It wants to be the science that is demanded from the impulse of time itself. It is not in contrast to natural sciences, but it takes the view that has been inaugurated just by the scientific direction.

However, something else holds true. Spiritual science tries to understand the religious needs in the way according to the demands of the present how they will have to be understood now considering the changed conditions. Spiritual science wants to be a science. Science leads always away from the human individuality even if it puts the individual across in moral and social area. However, as a science, as a knowledge, it makes the human being unselfish, leads to the universal. However, for his full person-hood the human being always needs an immediately individual relationship to the supersensible that he can realise immediately subjectively. The human being needs not only the connection with the supersensible world, as well as spiritual science can offer it, the human being needs the connection with the religious founders by the cult, the sacraments et cetera and with the outer sense-perceptible development of decades and centuries which are connected with the religious founders and the outer manifestations. Spiritual science will deepen this spiritually and show how the supersensible manifesting in the sense-perceptible world appears if one penetrates it with supersensible knowledge.

Spiritual science will prepare the human being in modern sense to have religious needs. Nevertheless, these religious needs can only be satisfied while one looks at the old religions.

It was strangely enough a Catholic cardinal, Newman (John Henry N., 1801-1890), who said at his investiture in Rome, he sees no other salvation for the Catholic Church than a new revelation.—The Catholic cardinal showed with it only that he could not take the previous position of the human being to the old revelation because he announced just what should come up by spiritual science. It takes the world in its reality, and it knows that laws appear in the whole human development as well as in the single human being. These development laws are in such a way that that which the human being experienced at the age of 50 years cannot be a repetition of that what he experienced, for example, at the age of 25 years. One cannot experience the same at the age of 50 years in the same spiritual condition what one has experienced at the age of 25 years. To every age something else appertains and in other form.

Well, the development in the course of humanity is something else. It is not the same as with the single human being, and it is amateurish and wrong to search the analogies between the single human being and the historical development. However, spiritual science finds such laws after which the entire humanity develops and knows that the religions were founded in particular ages which are far behind us that that was summarised in Christianity what was distributed in the other religions that Christianity as a religion is in certain sense the end of the religious forms that one has not to wait for a new revelation in the sense of Cardinal Newman, but that one can understand only that revelation transformed in higher sense which appeared in Christianity as a religion among other religious revelations. Just because spiritual science thinks in the sense of reality, it does not want to found a new religion. It would do the same with it, as if it wanted to make a 50-year-old human being again 30 years old. Since the kind to position itself to the religious revelation changes with time, so that new inner bases have to be created.

Spiritual science creates these new inner bases for the modern human being and his demands that remain unaware to many people. The official representatives fear or fear supposedly that spiritual science could make the human being irreligious, they should ask themselves above all whether they themselves do not contribute more to irreligion than spiritual science does which will lead the human beings back again to the religious life in the right way.

Somebody who wants to retain the religious life as religious confession on a certain level does not want that that pushes its way through which has to push its way through necessarily from the new spiritual condition of the human beings. He is rather an opponent of religion, even if he appears as a priest, than someone who asks himself, how can the human being with his deepened inside also develop that trait again in his soul that makes him understand the religious life?

Spiritual science is no religion but science of the supersensible life. Therefore, it leads the human being also to deepening those instincts with which the religious life that has decreased under the influence of the knowledge of nature becomes again living and fertile.

People with a comprehensive, worldly spirit often find the redeeming word for a matter that scholars sitting in a room have racked their brains over for a long time in vain.

What is philosophy supposed to do alongside and above the individual specialized sciences? The representatives of the latter are probably not averse to answering this question simply as follows: it should do nothing at all. In their view, the entire field of reality is encompassed by the special sciences. Why anything that goes beyond these? The person who used the most succinct expression for this was the labor apostle Ferdinand Lassalle. "Philosophy can be nothing but the consciousness which the empirical sciences attain about themselves." These are his words. You could hardly find a better formula for the matter.

All sciences regard it as their task to investigate the truth. Truth can be understood as nothing other than a system of concepts that reflects the phenomena of reality in their lawful context in a way that corresponds to the facts. If someone stands still and says that for him the network of concepts, which represents a certain area of reality, has an absolute value and he needs nothing about it, then a higher interest cannot be demonstrated to him. However, such a person will not be able to explain to us why his collection of concepts has a higher value than, for example, a collection of stamps, which, when organized systematically, also depicts certain connections in reality. This is the reason why the argument about the value of philosophy with many natural scientists does not lead to any results. They are lovers of concepts in the same sense as there are lovers of stamps or coins. But there is an interest that goes beyond this. This interest seeks, with the help and on the basis of the sciences, to enlighten man about his position in relation to the universe, or in other words: this interest leads man to place himself in such a relationship to the world as is possible and necessary according to the results obtained in the sciences.

In the individual sciences, man confronts nature, he separates himself from it and observes it, he alienates himself from it. In philosophy, he seeks to reunite with it. He seeks to make the abstract relationship into which he has fallen in scientific observation into a real, concrete, living one. The scientific researcher wants to acquire an awareness of the world and its effects through knowledge; the philosopher wants to use this awareness to make himself a vital member of the world as a whole. In this sense, individual science is a preliminary stage of philosophy. We have a similar relationship in the arts. The composer works on the basis of the theory of composition. The latter is a sum of knowledge that is a necessary precondition for composing. Composing transforms the laws of musicology into life, ın real reality. Anyone who does not understand that a similar relationship also exists between philosophy and science is not fit to be a philosopher. All real philosophers were free conceptual artists. With them, human ideas became artistic material and the scientific method became artistic technique. Thus the abstract scientific consciousness is elevated to concrete life. Our ideas become powers of life. We have not merely a knowledge of things, but we have made knowledge into a real, self-controlling organism; our real, active consciousness has taken precedence over a mere passive assimilation of truths. This is where I seek the meaning of Lassalle's words.

This conception of philosophy should be penetrated in particular by those who want to present the historical development of philosophy in writing or in academic lectures. In the face of many an unpleasant phenomenon in this field, we welcome with pleasure a recently published book: "Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie in ihrer Entwicklung und teilweise Lösung von Thales bis Robert Hamerling. Lectures, held at the K.K. Vienna University by Vinzenz Knauer (Vienna 1892)."

From the presentation of the history of philosophy by the same author (Geschichte der Philosophie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Neuzeit. Second improved edition. 1882) we got the impression that in Vinzenz Knauer we are dealing with a philosophical nature in the truest sense of the word. It is not an external observer, but a man living in the world of ideas who describes the phenomena of philosophy in ancient and modern times. And the new book has only strengthened this conviction. The lectures are highly suitable for stimulating philosophical thought. We are not dealing with a historian who gives a lecture on one system after another and then adds a critique from any point of view - J. H. Kirchmann, Thilo and others have practiced such arts ad nauseam - but with a philosopher who develops the problems vividly for his listeners and readers.

There are people who think it is objectivity to be as external as possible to the problems they deal with. They want to see everything from a bird's eye view. Such so-called objectivity, however, does not achieve a true visualization of its subject. Knauer has a different, genuine objectivity; he penetrates so deeply into the ideas of a philosopher that he resurrects them before our minds in the most unadulterated way possible. He knows how to revive the dramatic element that characterizes the ideas of every true philosopher. Where we so often only feel "the master's own spirit", Knauer really introduces us to the "spirit of the times".

Of course, all this is only possible with the high degree of mastery of the material that we admire in Knauer. Every sentence testifies to a long, thorough immersion in philosophical world views.

I would like to award this praise unreservedly to the first part of the book, which I extend to Thomas Aquinas. From Thomas Aquinas onwards, Knauer's inclination towards dualistic and pluralistic ideas seems to me to impair the free historical presentation. I personally felt this painfully in the second part. I consider Knauer's presentation of Aristotelian philosophy to be one of the clearest, most transparent and most correct there is; his treatment of modern philosophy does not yet seem to me to be so free of scholastic concepts as to be able to do justice to monistic philosophy. Knauer fails to recognize the difference between abstract and concrete monism. The former seeks a unity alongside and above the individual things of the cosmos. This monism is always embarrassed when it is supposed to derive the multiplicity of things from the absolutized unity and make it comprehensible. The consequence is usually that it declares the multiplicity to be illusory, which results in a complete evaporation of the given reality. Schopenhauer's and Schelling's first system are examples of this abstract monism. Concrete monism pursues the unified world principle in living reality. It does not seek a metaphysical unity alongside the given world, but is convinced that this given world contains the moments of development into which the unified world principle divides and separates itself.

This concrete monism does not seek unity in multiplicity, but wants to understand multiplicity as unity. The concept of unity on which concrete monism is based conceives the latter as substantial, which sets the difference in itself. It is contrasted with that unity which is generally indiscriminate in itself, i.e. absolutely simple (Herbart's reals), and with that which, of the equalities contained in these things, combines the former into a formal unity, just as we combine ten years into a decennium. Knauer only recognizes the latter two concepts of unity. The former, since it can only explain the distinct things of reality from the interaction of many simple realities, can lead to pluralism; the latter leads to abstract monism, because its unity is not immanent in things, but exists alongside and above them. Knauer tends towards pluralism. He overlooks the concrete-monistic elements of recent philosophy. That is why this part of his lectures seems deficient to me.

I am committed to concrete monism. With its help, I am able to understand the results of recent natural science, namely Goethe-Darwin-Haeckel organicism. If Knauer had taken the science of the organic into account in his arguments in the same way as he rightly does with that of the inorganic (heat equivalent, conservation of force, second law of mechanical heat theory), he would have seen through the difficulty of applying pluralism. It is impossible to apply the theory of development (and its consequences: Heredity Theory, Adaptation Theory and Basic Biogenetic Law) by means of the interaction of distinct simple reals without contradiction.

However, these objections should not prevent me from recognizing the great importance of the second part of Knauer's book. In addition to the clear, original discussion of Herbart's thought processes, I see this significance in the comprehensive and fair treatment of Hamerling's philosophizing. The fact that Hamerling appears in such an unprejudiced, unreserved manner in the ranks of philosophers is a merit that cannot be overestimated, which Knauer has earned through these lectures. As a historian of philosophy, he has spoken a word first. He who merely compiles and develops the philosophical systems recognized by everyone in a new way cannot be compared with the one who first recognizes the significance of a phenomenon. The fact that I myself have a completely different attitude to Hamerling than Knauer does not prevent me from recognizing this in these lectures. I appreciate the poet-philosopher's philosophical view because of the many monistic elements it contains, despite its tendency towards a dualistic and pluralistic world view. In my opinion, this circumstance cannot be judged correctly as long as German philosophy remains completely dependent on Kant, which completely obscures the free view of world conditions. Kant's philosophy is a dualistic one. It bases dualism on the organization of the human cognitive organism. And the fact that the propositions which Kant put forward for the subjectivity of cognition are inviolable in a more or less modified form is regarded today as the basic dogma of philosophy, so to speak. Anyone who doubts this is declared by many to be unsuitable for philosophical thinking. Anyone who has their own opinion, regardless of this prejudice, can have bad experiences today. I recently experienced it myself. When a "Society for Ethical Culture" was formed in Germany last year along the lines of similar associations in England and America, I took the opportunity to publicly express my opinion about such a backward foundation (e.g. in the "Literar. Merkur", Vol. XII. 1892, No. 40, and "Zukunft", 1892, Vol. I, No. 5). My views in this regard are rooted in my epistemological convictions, which I last substantiated in my essay "Truth and Science". The latter represent an epistemology that is independent of Kant and has grown out of the doctrines of modern monism. They provide full proof that I arrived at my views quite independently of Nietzsche. Nevertheless, I was simply accused of Nietzscheanism by German philosophers who were supposed to know something about the matter, and I was accused not only of lacking intellect but also of having an immoral attitude. That doesn't bother me any more. Some people think differently about my intellect than the gentlemen of the "ethical culture"; and as far as my morals are concerned: in my school reports it says: "exemplary", later it said: "perfectly in accordance with the academic laws"; since then, every authority I have called upon has given me a good moral certificate. So it seems that I have done nothing that should prompt a German scholar to call me before a "moral judgment seat" (cf. Ferd. Tönnies, "Ethische Kultur und ihr Geleite"). Or is it one of the insights of the new "ethical culture" that one is morally condemned because of one's theoretical views?

[ 1 ] A free spirit acts according to his impulses; these are intuitions chosen by means of thinking from the totality of his world of ideas. The reason an unfree spirit singles out a particular intuition from his idea world in order to use it as a basis for a deed, lies in the world of perception given to him, i.e., in his past experience. Before making a decision he recalls what someone else has done or recommended as suitable in a similar instance, or what God has commanded to be done in such a case and so on, and he acts accordingly. For a free spirit these preconditions are not the only impulses to action. He makes an absolutely original decision. In doing so he worries neither about what others have done in such an instance, nor what commands they have laid down. He has purely ideal reasons which move him to single out from the sum of his concepts a particular one and to transform it into action. But his action will belong to perceptible reality. What he brings about will therefore be identical with a quite definite perceptual content. The concept will be realized in a particular concrete event. As concept, it will not contain this particular event. It would be related to the event only in the same way as a concept in general is related to a perception, for example, as the concept, lion is related to a particular lion. The link between concept and perception is the representation (cp. p. 32, f.). For the unfree spirit this intermediate link is given from the outset. At the outset the motives are present in his consciousness as representations. When he wants to do something he does it as he has seen it done or as he is told to do it in the particular instance. Here authority is most effective by way of examples, that is, by conveying quite definite particular actions to the consciousness of the unfree spirit. The Christian, as unfree spirit, acts less on the teaching than on the example of the Redeemer. Rules have less value when they refer to positive deeds than when they refer to what should not be done. Laws appear in the form of general concepts only when they forbid something, not when they bid things to be done. Laws concerning what he should do must be given to the unfree spirit in a quite concrete form: Clean the walk in front of your door! Pay your taxes in such and such an amount to the Treasury Department, etc. Laws which are meant to prevent deeds take on conceptual form: Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery! But these laws also influence the unfree spirit only through reference to a concrete representation such as that of the corresponding earthly punishment, the pangs of conscience, eternal damnation, and so on.

[ 2 ] As soon as the impulse to action is present in general conceptual form (for example: Thou shalt do good to thy fellow men! Thou shalt live in a way that best furthers thy welfare), then in each case must be found first of all the concrete representation of the deed (the relation of the concept to a perceptual content). For the free spirit, who is driven neither by any example nor by fear of punishment, etc., it is always necessary to transform the concept into a representation.

[ 3 ] By means of imagination representations are produced by man out of his world of ideas. Therefore what the free spirit needs in order to carry out his ideas, in order to bring them to fruition, is moral imagination. Moral imagination is the source from which the free spirit acts. Hence, only people with moral imagination are also morally productive in the real sense of the word. Those who merely preach morality, that is, people who devise moral rules without being able to condense them into concrete representations, are morally unproductive. They are like those critics who know how to explain rationally what a work of art should be like, but are incapable of any artistic creation themselves.

[ 4 ] In order to produce a representation, man's moral imagination must set to work in a definite sphere of perception. Men's deeds do not create perceptions, but transform already existing perceptions, that is, impart a new form to them. In order to be able to transform a definite perceptual object, or a sum of such objects, in accordance with a moral representation, one must have grasped the laws at work in the perceptual picture (the way it has worked hitherto, to which one now wants to give a new form or a new direction). Further, one must find a way by which these laws can be transformed into new ones. This part of moral activity depends on a knowledge of the sphere of phenomena with which one has to do. It must therefore be sought in a branch of general scientific knowledge. Hence moral deeds presuppose not only the faculty of moral ideation [Only superficiality could find in the use of the word “faculty” in this and other passages, a reversion to the teachings of older psychology concerning soul faculties. The exact meaning of this word, as used here, will be seen when compared with what is said on p. 29.] as well as moral imagination, but also the ability to transform the sphere of perceptions without breaking the laws of their natural connection. This ability is moral technique. It can be learned in the sense in which science in general can be learned. Because people usually are better able to find the concepts for the already created world than productively out of imagination to decide future deeds, not yet in existence, it very well may be possible that persons without moral imagination receive moral representations from others, and skillfully imprint these into actual reality. The opposite may also occur that persons with moral imagination are without the technical skill, and therefore must make use of others for carrying out their representations.

[ 5 ] Insofar as knowledge of the objects in the sphere of our activity is necessary, our action will depend upon this knowledge. What must be considered here are laws of nature. Here we have to do with natural science, not with ethics.

[ 6 ] Moral imagination and the faculty of moral ideation can become objects of knowledge only after they have been produced by the individual. By then they no longer regulate life, but have already regulated it. They must be explained in the same way as all other effective causes (they are purposes only for the subject). We therefore deal with them as with a natural philosophy of moral representations.

[ 7 ] In addition to the above, one cannot have ethics in the form of a science of standards.

[ 8 ] The standardized character of moral laws has been retained at least insofar as to enable one to explain ethics in the same sense as dietetics, which deduce general rules from the life-condition of the organism in order that on this basis they can influence the body in a particular way.⁵¹ This comparison is mistaken, because our moral life is not comparable with the life of the organism. The function of the organism takes place without our doing anything about it; we find its laws present, ready-made, and therefore can investigate them and then apply what we discover. But moral laws are first created by us. We cannot apply them until they have been created. The mistake arises through the fact that moral laws, insofar as their content is concerned, are not newly created at every moment, but are handed over. Those that we take over from our ancestors appear as given, like the natural laws of the organism. But they can never be applied by a later generation with the same rights as can dietetic rules. For they apply to individuals and not, like natural laws, to examples of a species. As an organism I am such an example of a species, and I shall live in accordance with nature if I apply the natural laws of the species to my particular case. As a moral being I am an individual and have laws which are wholly my own.^51a

[ 9 ] This view seems to contradict the fundamental teaching of modern natural science described as the theory of evolution. But it only seems to do so. By evolution is meant the real development of the later out of the earlier in accordance with natural law. By evolution in the organic world is meant that the later (more perfect) organic forms are real descendents of the earlier (imperfect) forms, and have developed from them in accordance with natural laws. According to his view, the adherent of the theory of organic evolution would have to represent to himself that there was once a time on earth when it would have been possible to watch the gradual development of reptiles out of proto-amniotes,⁵² if one could have been present there as observer and had been endowed with a sufficiently long span of life. He also would have to represent to himself that it would have been possible to observe the development of the solar system out of the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula ⁵³ if, during that infinitely long time, one could have occupied a suitable spot out in the world-ether. The fact that in such a representation, both the nature of proto-amniotes and that of the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula would have to be thought of in a way other than that of the materialistic thinker, will not be considered here. But it should not occur to any evolutionist to maintain that he can extract from his concept of the proto-amniote the concept of the reptile with all its characteristics, if he had never seen a reptile. And just as little could one extract the solar system from the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula, if this concept is thought of as being determined only from the direct perception of the primordial nebula. In other words, this means: if the evolutionist thinks consistently, then he is able to maintain only that out of earlier phases of evolution later ones come about as real facts, that if we are given the concept of the imperfect and the concept of the perfect, we can recognize the connection; but never should he say that the concept derived from what was earlier suffices to develop from it what came later. In the sphere of ethics this means that one can recognize the connection of later moral concepts with earlier ones, but not that as much as a single new moral idea could be extracted from earlier ones. As a moral being, the individual produces his own content. This content which he produces is for ethics something given, just as reptiles are something given for natural science. Reptiles have evolved out of proto-amniotes, but from the concept of the proto-amniote the natural scientist cannot extract the concept of the reptile. Later moral ideas develop out of earlier ones, but from the moral concepts of an earlier cultural epoch ethics cannot extract those for a later one. The confusion arises because when we investigate nature the facts are there before we gain knowledge of them, whereas in the case of moral action we ourselves first produce the facts which we afterwards cognize. In the evolutionary process of the moral world order we do what nature does at a lower level: we alter something perceptible. As we have seen, an ethical rule cannot be cognized straight away like a law of nature; it must first be created. Only when it is present can it become the object of cognition.

[ 10 ] But can we not make the old the standard for the new? Is it not necessary for man to measure by the standard of earlier moral rules what he produces through his moral imagination? For something that is to reveal itself as morally productive, this would be as impossible as it would be to measure a new species in nature by an old one and say, Because reptiles do not harmonize with the proto-amniotes, their form is unjustified (diseased).

[ 11 ] Ethical individualism then, is not in opposition to an evolutionary theory if rightly understood, but is a direct continuation of it. It must be possible to continue Haeckel's genealogical tree,⁵⁴ from protozoa to man as organic being, without interruption of the natural sequence, and without a breach in the uniform development, right up to the individual as a moral being in a definite sense. But never will it be possible to deduce the nature of a later species from the nature of an ancestral species. True as it is that the moral ideas of the individual have perceptibly evolved out of those of his ancestors, it is also true that an individual is morally barren if he himself has no moral ideas.

[ 12 ] The same ethical individualism that I have built up on the foundation of the preceding consideration, could also be derived from an evolutionary theory. The final result would be the same, only the path by which it was reached would be different.

[ 13 ] The appearance of completely new moral ideas through moral imagination is, in relation to an evolutionary theory, no more of a marvel than is the appearance of a new kind of animal from previous ones. Only such a theory must, as monistic world view, reject in moral life and also in science, every influence from a Beyond (metaphysical) which is merely inferred and cannot be experienced by means of ideas. This approach would then be following the same principle which urges man on when he seeks to discover the causes for new organic forms and in doing so does not call upon any interference by some Being from outside the world, who is to call forth every new kind according to a thought of a new creation, by means of supernatural influence. Just as monism has no need of supernatural thoughts of creation for explaining living organisms, neither does it derive the morality of the world from causes which do not lie within the world we can experience. The monist does not find that the nature of a will impulse, as a moral one, is exhausted by being traced back to a continuous supernatural influence upon moral life (divine world rulership from outside), to a particular revelation at a particular moment in time (giving of the Ten Commandments), or to the appearance of God on the earth (Christ). Everything that happens to and in man through all this becomes a moral element only if within human experience it becomes an individual's own. For monism, moral processes are products of the world like everything else in existence, and their causes must be sought in the world, i.e., in man, since man is the bearer of morality.

[ 14 ] Ethical individualism, therefore, is the crowning of that edifice to which Darwin ⁵⁵ and Haeckel aspired for natural science. It is spiritualized science of evolution carried over into moral life.

[ 15 ] Whoever from the outset restricts the concept natural within an arbitrary boundary, in a narrow-minded manner, may easily fail to find any room in it for the free individual deed. The consistent evolutionist is in no danger of remaining at such a narrow-minded view. He cannot let natural development come to an end with the ape, while granting to man a “supernatural” origin; in his search for man's ancestors he must seek spirit already in nature; also, he cannot remain at the organic functions of man and consider only these to be natural; he cannot but consider the free, moral life of man to be the spiritual continuation of organic life.

[ 16 ] In accordance with his fundamental principles the evolutionist can maintain only that a new moral deed comes about through a kind of process other than a new species in nature; the characteristic feature of the deed, that is, its definition as a free deed, he must leave to direct observation of the deed. So, too, he only maintains that men have developed out of not yet human ancestors. How men are constituted must be determined by observation of men themselves. The results of this observation cannot possibly contradict a true history of evolution. Only if it were asserted that the results exclude a natural development would it contradict recent tendencies in natural science. [We are entitled to speak of thoughts (ethical ideas) as objects of observation. For, although the products of thinking do not enter the field of observation, so long as thinking goes on, they may well become objects of observation subsequently, and in this way we can come to know the characteristic feature of the deed.]

[ 17 ] Ethical individualism, then, cannot be opposed by natural science when the latter is properly understood; observation shows freedom to be characteristic of the perfect form of human conduct. This freedom must be attributed to the human will, insofar as this will brings purely ideal intuitions to realization. For these do not come about through external necessity, but exist through themselves. When we recognize an action to be an image of such an ideal intuition, we feel it to be free. In this characteristic feature of a deed lies its freedom.

[ 18 ] From this point of view, how do matters stand with regard to the distinction, mentioned earlier (p. 22 f.) between the two statements: “To be free means to be able to do what one wants,” and the other: “To be able, to desire or not to desire, as one pleases, is the real meaning of the dogma of free will”? Hamerling bases his view of free will on just this distinction and declares the first statement to be correct, the second to be an absurd tautology. He says: “I can do what I want. But to say, I can will what I want, is an empty tautology.” Now whether I can do, that is, transform into reality what I want, what I have set before me as the idea of my doing, depends on external circumstances and on my technical skill (cp. p. 43). To be free means to be able to determine for oneself by moral imagination the representations (impulses) on which the action is based. Freedom is impossible if something external to me (mechanical processes or a merely inferred God whose existence cannot be experienced) determines my moral representations. In other words, I am free only if I produce these representations myself, not when I am only able to carry out the impulse which someone else has induced in me. A free being is someone who is able to will what he considers right. One who does something other than what he wills, must be driven to it by motives which do not lie within himself. Such a man is unfree in his action. Therefore, to be able to will what one considers right or not right, as one pleases, means to be free or unfree, as one pleases. This, of course, is just as absurd as it is to see freedom in the ability to be able to do what one is forced to will. But the latter is what Hamerling maintains when he says:

“It is perfectly true that the will is always determined by motives, but it is absurd to say that it is therefore unfree; for a greater freedom one can neither wish for nor imagine than the freedom to let one's will realize itself in accordance with its strength and determination.”

Indeed, a greater freedom can be wished for, and only this greater is true freedom. Namely: to decide for oneself the motive (foundation) of one's will.

[ 19 ] There can be circumstances under which a man may be induced to refrain from doing what he wants to do. But to let others prescribe to him what he ought to do, that is, to do what another, and not what he himself considers right, this he will accept only insofar as he does not feel free.

[ 20 ] External powers may prevent my doing what I want; they then simply force me to be inactive or to be unfree. It is only when they enslave my spirit, drive my motives out of my head and want to put theirs in the place of mine, that they intentionally aim at making me unfree. This is why the Church is not only against the mere doing, but more particularly against impure thoughts, that is, against the impulses of my action. The Church makes me unfree if it considers impure all impulses it has not itself indicated. A Church or other community causes unfreedom when its priests or teachers take on the role of keepers of conscience, that is, when the believers must receive from them (at the Confessional) the impulses for their actions.

[ 21 ] Addition to the Revised Edition, 1918: In this interpretation of the human will is presented what man can experience in his actions and, through this, come to the conscious experience: My will is free. It is of particular significance that the right to characterize the will as free is attained through the experience: In my will an ideal intuition comes to realization. This experience can only come about as a result of observation, but it is observation in the sense that the human will is observed within a stream of evolution, the aim of which is to attain for the will the possibility of being carried by pure ideal intuition. This can be attained because in ideal intuition nothing is active but its own self-sustaining essence. If such an intuition is present in human consciousness, then it is not developed out of the processes of the organism (cp. p. 31 ff.), but the organic activity has withdrawn to make room for the ideal activity. If I observe will when it is an image of intuition, then from this will the necessary organic activity has withdrawn. The will is free. This freedom of will no one can observe who is unable to observe how free will consists in the fact that, first, through the intuitive element the necessary activity of the human organism is lamed, pressed back, and in its place is set the spiritual activity of idea-filled will. Only one who is unable to make this observation of the two-fold aspect of will that is free, will believe that every will-impulse is unfree. One who can make the observations will attain the insight that man is unfree insofar as he is unable to carry through completely the process of repressing the organic activity, but that this unfreedom strives to attain freedom, and that this freedom is by no means an abstract ideal, but is a directive force inherent in human nature. Man is free to the degree that he is able to realize in his will the same mood of soul he also experiences when he is conscious of elaborating pure ideal (spiritual) intuitions.

• 51. Paulsen, System der Ethik, System of Ethics, 1889, partial English transl. 1899. Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908), German philosopher and educator. Educated at Erlangen, Bonn, and Berlin, where he was made extraordinary professor of philosophy and pedagogy, 1878. In 1896 he followed Zeller as professor of moral philosophy at Berlin. He was a pupil of G. T. Fechner, developing his teaching of panpsychism in his Einleitung in die Philosophie, Introduction to Philosophy, 1892, English transl. 1895. His German Education, Past and Present (English transl. 1907) is well known, as are his writings relative to the philosophy of Kant.
• 51a. Note by Rudolf Steiner: When Paulsen (p. 15 of his System of Ethics) says, “Different natural dispositions and different conditions of life demand not only different bodily diet but also a different spiritual-moral diet,” he is very near recognition of the truth, but misses the decisive point. Insofar as I am an individual, I need no diet. Dietetic means the art of bringing a particular example of the species into harmony with the general laws. But as an individual I am not an example of a species.
• 52. proto-amniotes: The original form of the innermost of the embryonic or fetal membranes of reptiles, insects, birds, and mammals. This membrane forms a closed sac surrounding the embryo and contains the amniotic fluid.
• 53. The Kant-Laplace primordial nebula. Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827), was a French mathematician and astronomer who, at the age of 24 was named “the Newton of France” for certain of his discoveries. In the years 1799–1825 his great work, the Mécanique céleste, which, as its author stated, “offers a complete solution of the great mechanical problem presented by the solar system,” appeared in 5 volumes, published in Paris. In his second great work, the Exposition du système du monde, Paris, 1796, appeared his statement of his famous “nebular hypothesis,” the origins of which he seems to attribute to Buffon, apparently unaware that Immanuel Kant had at least partially anticipated him in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, General History of Nature, published in 1755. Rudolf Steiner's criticism of the Kant-Laplace theory of the primordial nebula may be found in various places in his lectures and writings.
• 54. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834–1919), German biologist, originally a physician in Berlin, became Privatdozent at Jena, afterward extraordinary professor of comparative anatomy, later professor of zoology, a chair established for him at Jena. This position he occupied for 43 years with intervals for zoological travels to various parts of the world. When Darwin's Origin of the Species appeared in 1859, Haeckel was deeply influenced by it, so that he became “the apostle of Darwinism in Germany.” Among Haeckel's famous books are his General Morphology (1866), Natural History of Creation (1867) and Die Weltraetsel (1899), English title, The Riddle of the Universe, publ. 1901. By his 60th birthday Haeckel had published 42 works of some 13,000 pages, plus many monographs. Rudolf Steiner knew Haeckel personally, and in his autobiography. Chapter 15, Steiner recorded a very interesting and perceptive impression of the great scientist. The “genealogical tree” of Haeckel to which Steiner refers is set forth in its original form in Haeckel's General Morphology and developed in his later writings.
• 55. Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist, whose voyage on the Beagle to the Southern Seas, recorded in his Journal of a Naturalist (1837) prepared the way for his famous work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, published November 24, 1859. Next in importance among his books. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, appeared in 1868. The Descent of Man, published in 1871, dealt with “the origin of man and his history” in the light of The Origin of the Species.

I will allude briefly to the indications given in last Sunday's lecture. They were on the subject of man's relationship to the universe and attention was called to how the forces of the human will find their way out into the cosmic expanse in the direction opposite to that of the light streaming from the sun to the earth. So it can be said that forces of will stream out from earthly humanity to meet the light. On the other hand, the element of thought is borne to the earth along the waves of the moon's light.

It was further explained that what is spreads out from man at the dissolution of his physical body is of the nature of will and thus streams out into the cosmos towards its inflowing light; and that man is borne back again towards earthly existence on the currents of the thought-element which flow along the lines of light together with everything that proceeds from the moon.

Naturally, in regard to this aspect of the will-element and the light-element, of the thought-element and the moon's light, and also to what I shall say in the present lecture, it must be remembered that when speaking of these things and making use, as it were, of the structure of the universe to illustrate them, an illustration only is meant. For it must not be thought that in these happenings the actual physical sun and the physical moon are anything else than signs for what is taking place spiritually. The true state of affairs can be described approximately in the following way.

I want to speak of these things from a certain historical aspect, but they could also be presented in a different way. My aim is to make the things I am now saying intelligible to you in greater detail.—You know that according to a more materialistic mode of thinking, our solar system originated from a kind of primal nebula. Thinking that is bound up with purely material existence conceives that our visible cosmos, our solar system, sprang from a kind of primal nebula which then consolidated and contracted into what now exists as the solar system.

From all you have heard in Anthroposophy it will be clear to you from the outset that this cannot be an exhaustive presentation of the process. However much this material explanation of cosmic happenings may be modified by saying that the nebula is permeated with forces, and so on, what is actually present cannot be fully explained in this way, for the reason that nothing contained in a Kant-Laplace or other primal nebula, or what develops from it according to the laws governing the gasiform or aeriform states, could ever have produced the animal and human souls that are living on earth, or even the forces working in the growth of plants. Such an explanation of cosmic happenings is an abstraction even if a materialistic abstraction. It must surely be obvious that in the primal nebula conceived by materialistic thinking, a spiritual reality is contained and that this primal nebula is only the outer, material expression of something spiritual. To be complete, therefore the idea of the primal nebula must include the weaving activity of the spiritual. So this Kant-Laplace nebula must be amplified by being regarded as the body of an element of spirit-and-soul—not, it is true, uniform and individual as in man, but manifold, diversified, yet for all that of the nature of spirit-and-soul.

The purely materialistic way of thinking and of formulating hypotheses goes no farther than this primal nebula. Now let us imagine that not we ourselves, but other beings, beings of the future, were to evolve ideas, based on similarly materialistic thinking, of the genesis of the world-system in which they are, or rather will be, living. Whether what I am now saying represents the reality is quite beside the point; it is said only for the sake of clarifying a thought.—We will assume, then, that in a distant future such beings conceive of a Kant-Laplace nebula as the beginning of the world's existence. At what point in the course of the ages would this nebula exist? When such beings of the future look back, it would have to be assumed—in order to make the thought clear—that our earth, that is to say, our solar system, had long since passed away, that the space it occupied had as it were become free, and that then, in this freed space, a Kant-Laplace nebula of a future world had come into existence. As long as our solar system is there, this future nebula could obviously not be imagined to exist in the space it occupies, I will formulate this example by assuming that these beings who might elaborate a materialistic theory of a future world-system place their primal nebula in the space now occupied by our own. But in accordance with what has been said, spirit-and-soul too would have to be contained in such a nebula of the future; this nebula could only be the bodily expression of an element of cosmic spirit-and-soul. Where would this cosmic element originate? What would have to be said about it?

Suppose that here (drawing on blackboard) is our Kant-Laplace primal nebula (physical plus spirit-and-soul) and here the primal nebula conceived at some future time by beings of whom I have spoken. In that nebula too, the element of spirit-and-soul would have to be contained. Where would it originate? If this future nebula were to be at the place occupied by our own solar system it would include an element of cosmic spirit-and-soul. But this would be what has remained over from the solar system in which we ourselves have lived. Our solar system would have come to an end, would have dispersed in cosmic space. The element of spirit-and-soul would have remained and that would be embodied in a new Kant-Laplace primal nebula. In other words: what I have here described would represent the Jupiter evolution. But within this Jupiter evolution would be contained the element of spirit-and-soul prepared during the Earth-evolution of humanity. In the same way we must go back beyond the Kant-Laplace nebula of the Earth to the spirit-and-soul contained in it. And this was prepared by the beings of the (Old) Moon-existence.

So when you look at the present solar system, you are beholding the outer corporeality of what passed away with the Moon-existence or was transformed from the Moon-existence into the Earth-existence. And again, what we today send out into the cosmic expanse prepares the Jupiter-existence. When, therefore, we look at our solar system we are actually looking at something that is the product of an earlier stage of existence. So when I speak of the light streaming to us from the physical sun I am speaking of something that comes out of the past. And when I speak of the streams of will flowing out to meet this light, I am speaking of something that is preparing the future. The primal work, the cosmic element of which I speak in order to have a form of expression for what happens spiritually, was thus prepared by the Old Moon-existence; and what I describe as the Spiritual is already the foundation for what will live on into the Jupiter-existence. Hence it must not be said that the sun seen by our eyes out in cosmic space draws the human will to itself. This physical sun is only the symbol for that sun-nature towards which the human will streams. And equally, the physical moon is only the physical sign for the Moon-nature which in streams of thoughts pours continually into Earth-existence.

You will find these thoughts necessary if you want to understand rightly what is meant when, in what follows, I shall be speaking of cosmic relationships which reflect, in pictures, what takes place spiritually through mankind on the Earth. And here an addition must be made to what was said in the last lecture. When our solar system as a whole is observed from the Earth, we have the Sun, and, as outer planets: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—others are of less importance. Nearer to the Earth than to the Sun we have Venus and Mercury. Let us now recall that the element of will streams out from humanity on Earth towards the Sun in cosmic space, and that after the dissolution of the body the soul too is borne out into the cosmos through this element of will, which reaches, first, the Sun-existence, the Sun-sphere.

What must in this way be stated as a fact was discovered, as I said in the last lecture, through the experiences of the ancient initiates. They sent their questions towards the Sun along the streams of the will and then received the answers from the Moon in the form of thoughts. So that what I have now said, expressing it in this particular way, is a reality. And again, if more insight is to be gained, we must go back to the experiences of the initiates in the ancient Mysteries.

Think once again of the initiate of these Mysteries sending out his questions, giving them over to the stream flowing out towards the rays of the Sun; he waits, and then, after a time, receives his answers from the Moon—in this respect holding converse with the universe.

But in this process the answers received by the ancient initiates had a specific bearing only; they were answers relating to the actual structure of the universe. So that what was contained in that ancient, more primitive science—which was in truth a lofty, although dreamlike wisdom—was brought into being by the answers received to questions sent out to meet the rays of the Sun streaming from the opposite direction. These answers were to questions referring to the structure of the universe, to the forces at work in the universe, and so on. In short, they were answers relating to the realm of physics, astronomy, to the music of the spheres, to everything embraced in these domains of knowledge in the ancient sciences.

But these initiates sent out other questions as well into the universe. They also knew, for example, how to send out questions to Mars, to the Mars-sphere. At the time when Mars could be seen in the sky they gave over their questions to currents streaming in the opposite direction to the rays of Mars. When they sent their questions to Mars they did not await the answers from the Moon but from Venus, when Venus was standing in a position facing Mars. The important point, however, is that they awaited from Venus the answers to the questions they had sent upwards to Mars.

And again, they awaited from Mercury the answers to the questions sent upwards to Jupiter. The questions to Saturn were sent far out into the cosmic expanse, and the initiates knew that in this case the answers could be awaited from the heaven of the fixed stars only, or from what represented it in those olden times—the Zodiac itself.

What was the nature of these latter questions that were sent out into the universe by the ancient initiates, the answers to which they awaited? These answers were not the abstract, scientific truths connected with the structure of the universe, as I indicated just now; but the questions were those which the initiates wished to address directly to the divine-spiritual Beings.

Thus they sent upwards to Mars questions they had to put to the Angeloi, and awaited the answers from Venus. They sent upwards to Jupiter questions addressed to the Archangeloi, awaiting the answers from Mercury. And to Saturn they addressed questions to be answered by the Archai, awaiting the answers from the Zodiac.

Whereas, therefore, direct converse was held with the cosmos in a more abstract, impersonal form, in the converse of which I am now speaking the initiates were conscious of speaking to actual Beings, divine-spiritual Beings, and of receiving utterances individually from them. In this way, therefore, decisions of will were received from the choir of the Angeloi, from the choir of the Archangeloi, from the choir of the Archai. The discourse between Sun and Moon and the initiates was concerned with the outer aspect of the cosmos; the discourse with the other planets and with the Zodiac was directed to the spiritual Beings in the cosmos.

And so there was actual and continuous intercourse between man and the cosmos, not only concerning its outer structure, but also with the cosmic Beings themselves. The old initiates knew that if, for example, they were directing their forces to Mars, it would not do merely to formulate and send out their cherished questions in terms of thought. Such questions reached only as far as the Sun and the answers came back from the Moon. When the ancient initiates wished to address questions to Mars, they were obliged to do it by composing aphoristic sayings, recitatives, mantrams, which could also be declaimed. These, sent out into the universe, were the means whereby the Mars-forces were activated in such a way that the answers to the questions, coming back from Venus, were audible to a kind of inner hearing.

If it was desired to address questions Jupiter, even the declamation of mantrams did not suffice; in this case the performance of certain definite rites was necessary. And what streamed out into the universe from these rites in the form, shall we say, of cosmic thought, came back from Mercury in certain signs which the ancient initiates knew how to interpret. If they allowed themselves to be inspired by Venus they were able to interpret the corresponding signs; so, too, if they allowed themselves to be inspired by Mercury. These signs were infinitely varied. They meant nothing at all unless a man was inspired by Mercury. If he was inspired by Mercury, he knew: This or that event is an answer to a question asked by means of ritualistic acts.

In this way, happenings and processes in nature, and also those in history which otherwise appear to be nothing more than natural or historical processes, acquired definite content; they could as it were be read. Questions addressed to Saturn entailed very special difficulty, for actions lasting over a lengthy period of time were necessary before they could even be put as questions. In the ancient Mysteries this was as a rule arranged in such a way that the teachers in the Mysteries gave their pupils a certain mission to fulfil, a mission in which the life of the pupil was dedicated to some actual achievement. What it was incumbent upon these pupils to accomplish, often extending over a period of many years, constituted the questions put to the Saturn-existence. And the answers then came back from the Zodiac.

An actual and intimate participation in the cosmos and its happenings was achieved in those rites of prayer and meditation, and by other procedures carried out by the initiates and their pupils in the ancient Mysteries. Nor was anything accomplished in a short time; what took place in such Mysteries through the course of years consisted in unceasing acts of knowledge, and in acts by which the right impulses for the deeds of men were engendered.

Insight into such happenings also enables us to picture how the forces designated as those of Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Moon, Venus and Mercury, work upon man and their significance for him. The significance of the Sun-forces is that they draw man's will-nature towards the Sun and after his death lead him out into the cosmos and thence into the spiritual world. The particular quality of the Moon-forces is that they instill into man the organic configuration which makes thinking and reflection possible; but they are also the forces which bear him back again when, coming down from the spiritual world, he must find his way through the spheres of ether to earthly incarnation.

We can speak in a similar way of the other forces, known by the names of the celestial bodies they represent, and of their effects upon man. As an example, let us take the Mercury-forces. These forces are not concentrated exclusively in the planet Mercury. They permeate the whole of space that is accessible to us and the physical Mercury is merely a manifestation of the Mercury-forces in a concentrated mineral form.

Imagine the whole of our solar system filled with the Mercury-forces. They permeate all the bodies in the solar system, and naturally our own bodies as well; but at the point where Mercury appears in the heavens they are concentrated in a physical-mineral form and so are visible there.

The Venus-forces again are all-pervading. They are merely concentrated in a physical-mineral form at the definite point where Venus is seen. And so it is with all these forces. Speaking in accordance with the reality, we must say: Venus, Mercury, Moon and the rest, all interpenetrate, but their concentrations stand at different places in the heavens.

If we can gradually form a conception of this by perceiving how Mercury gives the answers for Jupiter, by learning to know Mercury, then we also acquire knowledge of what these Mercury-forces signify for man, in the unconscious realms of his life as well. To take a simple example; When we want to walk we must have certain forces by means of which, from out of the spirit, we permeate our bones and muscles. With our spirit-and-soul we have to penetrate into the physical, into the solid constituents of our body. That we are able to do this is due to the Mercury-forces.

It can therefore be said:

1. The effect of the Mercury-forces is that man can take hold of the solid constituents of his body. If there were no Mercury-forces in the world, we should be outside the solid constituents of our body all the time.

2. The Venus-forces enable man to take hold of the fluids in his body. You know that 90 per cent of you is a column of fluid. So if the Venus-forces were not in the world you would be obliged as beings of spirit to move around the outside of this column of fluid; you could not take hold of the fluids if the Venus-forces were not in the world.

3. The Moon-forces enable man to take hold of the aeriform element in his organism.

These things can be known by studying cosmology, but such study can advance to further stages. The ancient initiates pursued this kind of study, although their science was only primitive and their clairvoyance dreamlike. Let us say, for example, that from their cosmological studies they had discovered that the Venus-forces enable man to take hold of everything that is fluid in him. Then they waited until they came across someone in whom this inability to take hold of the fluids was evident—in other words, definite forms of illness were present. A very definite form of illness sets in when, for example, a man is unable to take hold of the fluid element even in a single organ only. In such a case these ancient initiates asked themselves: What kind of medicament must be administered? When a man was not properly interpolated into the Venus-forces—when, therefore, the fluids in his organism were not under sufficient control—the initiates realised that copper must be administered as a medicament. In finding that copper has the effect of enabling the soul-and-spirit to take hold of the body; that its effect is similar to that of the Venus-forces, they discovered that the nature of the forces in the metal copper is the same as the nature of those of the Venus-sphere. Hence they connected the metal copper with Venus. Or when illness was caused by a man's incapacity to take proper hold of the solid constituents of his organism, the ancient initiates found that mercury or quicksilver must be administered. In this way they established the parallelisms between the metals and the planets. The parallelisms are given in extant literature today; but it never occurs to anybody to ask: Why is copper related to Venus?—and so on. Nevertheless these things were the outcome of genuine investigation.

If, therefore, a man speaks out of real knowledge of copper as a means of healing, it is knowledge of the connection of the human being with the cosmos. To discover whether some metallic element found in a plant has a remedial effect in one respect or another, the whole relationship of this plant to the universe must be borne in mind. And from the plant's relationship to the universe, and again from the relationship of the universe to the human being, the insight comes to us of how the medicament can take effect.

The fact that there is a certain disinclination today to admit these things can be well understood. For the endeavour nowadays is to learn in four or five years—admittedly in a way somewhat open to question—everything that is needed in order to be able to heal. But because this is not possible, because we must forever be learning more, whereas the desire is to be fully qualified after these four or five years and there is unwillingness to admit that a great deal more remains to be learnt—that is why there is this aversion to something to which no end can be in sight. But the world itself is without end, not only in the extensive but also in the intensive sense, as that is usually understood.

Unlike the Mercury-, Venus-, and Moon-forces, the Mars-forces do not enable us to take hold of something, but they protect us from dissolving away in the element of warmth.

4. The Mars-forces protect us from the tendency to flow out and away in the element of Warmth. If the Mars-forces were not present and functioning in the right way, man would have the constant tendency to dissolve in the Warmth. The Mars-forces hold him together, guard him from this. This is a matter of supreme importance, for since the warmth in man's organism is greater than the warmth of his environment, he is in perpetual danger of flowing away in the element of Warmth. To prevent this is of the very greatest importance. Therefore there must be a concentration of the Mars-forces in the human organism. And this is brought about through the presence of iron in man's blood. Iron contains forces that are identical with those of Mars and they hold man together in opposition to the tendency to dissolve away into the warmth.

The Jupiter- and Saturn-forces are not present in the human organism in this material form. They are there, but in a different form, not immediately detectable.

5. The Jupiter-forces. These forces protect man from dissolving away in the element of Light, in the Light-Ether. He would become an ever-expanding cloud of light if the Jupiter-forces were not present and at work.

6. The Saturn-forces. These forces protect man from dissolving in the Chemical Ether. Penetrating as they do into the human constitution, these Saturn-forces are connected, in a certain sense, with the innermost essence of man's nature. We speak of a “sour” or a “sweet” disposition, for example, more in a metaphorical sense. But these things are not merely metaphorical; if a human being makes an impression of sourness in the moral-physical sense, this has some connection with his chemical make-up. And the Saturn-forces have their share in this chemical make-up. The particular manner in which a human being gives expression to his nature as a whole depends upon the way in which Saturn is working in him.

A melancholic person has this particular temperament because he lives very strongly in his chemical constitution, in everything that seethes and is astir in the liver, in the bile and even in the stomach; the melancholic temperament is therefore due to this living into the chemical make-up of the organism. And this characteristic again is due to the fact that in such a person the Saturn-forces work with particular strength.

The human being appears to be concentrated inside his skin, but this is only apparently so; in reality he is part and parcel of the whole cosmos, and it is possible to indicate in detail how the cosmos has its share in the formation of the human constitution.

Thus the planets near the Sun have to do more with the physical elements in man's organism: solid, fluid aeriform. The planets distant from the Sun have to do more with the etheric elements in man s organism. Between the two groups of planets is the Sun itself. The forces of Mercury, Venus and Moon bring the human being into connection with the solid, fluid and aeriform elements. The forces of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. protect him from flowing away into the Warmth, Light and Chemical Ethers. As you see, the effects are polaric. And the Sun stands between, preventing the two groups of planetary forces from interpenetrating. Suppose the Mars-forces were able to work without restraint—and they could do so on the Moon-forces, for example. If the Sun-forces were not placed in the middle, acting as a kind of dividing-wall which simply does not allow these forces to unite, the Mars-forces—which hold the human being together as an independent entity in the Warmth-element—would, it is true, still prevent him from flowing away into the Warmth; but this independent entity would then at once be obliged to take possession of the Air, and man would become a spectre of air. In order that both processes may take place, in order that man may take hold of the aeriform constituents in his organism but also live as an independent being in the Warmth-element, the two sets of forces, those of Mars and Moon, must be kept separated. And for this purpose the Sun stands between them.

This too was well known to the old initiates. If, for example, definite symptoms of illness appear in a man owing to the fact that the Mars-forces are working too strongly, so that they break through the Sun-element, with the result that the man is then living intensely in the aeriform organism because he is better able to take hold of it—in such a case the Mars-forces must be kept separate from the Moon-forces. And for this purpose aurum (gold) must be administered. To prevent the Mars-forces and Moon-forces from flowing into one another, the Sun-forces must be strengthened. In this way the remedial effect of aurum was discovered; its effect is to bring the organism again into harmonious balance, so that what ought not to flow away is kept in check.

From all this it will be evident to you that knowledge of the universe is not possible without knowledge of man, nor is knowledge of man possible without knowledge of the universe, above all in the domain where it is a matter of applying science in the art of healing.

Today I shall give neither a lecture nor a lecture, but rather discuss some things in the way that I believe is still missing in our branches. I will tie in with the brochure “Science and Theosophy” by F. vor Wrangell, published in Leipzig by Max Altmann in 1914. In doing so, I would like to show in particular how one can tie into such a writing can be linked to such a writing.¹

The title 'Science and Theosophy' obviously touches on an issue that it is important for us to consider, because we will very often be confronted with the objection that our movement is not scientific or that scientists do not know what to do with it. In short, it will certainly be necessary for one or other of us to deal with science in some way, because he will have to face this objection and perhaps also be pointed to some individual points in doing so. Therefore, it will be good to start by considering the views of a man who believes that he is fully immersed in the scientific spirit of the present day, and of whom, having read his booklet, one can readily can say that he deals with the relationship between science and theosophy in a very astute way, and in such a way that he creates a relationship that many will try to create who are involved in the scientific work of our time. And with such people, who want to create a relationship between science and theosophy, we, or at least a certain number of us, must be able to think along the same lines.

Furthermore, since the brochure is written favorably for Theosophy, we are not so much compelled to fall back on polemics and criticism, but can tie in with some of the author's thoughts, which arise from the specifics of our spiritual striving. Of course, if some of us were to write such a brochure, we might even avoid the title “Theosophy” after the various experiences we have had in such a debate. This is a question that may perhaps be examined in more detail in the course of reading the brochure itself.

The brochure is divided into individual, easy-to-follow chapters and bears as its motto a saying of Kant's, which reads:

“It is not correct to always speak in the lecture halls of wisdom that in the metaphysical sense no more than one single world can exist.” Kant.

Taken out of context, there is certainly not much to be gleaned from this saying of Kant's. However, the author of this paper wants to refer to Kant in the opinion that Kant wanted to say with this saying that the world view that external science creates need not be seen as the only possible one. Here, perhaps, the author of this paper has not quite accurately captured Kant's opinion, because Kant basically means something different in the context of his saying. Kant means: When man reflects, metaphysically reflects, he can think of various real worlds, and then the question is, why of these various conceivable possible worlds, the one in which we live exists for us, while for the author of the booklet the question is: Is it possible to have other world views besides the materialistic one? Of course, he is of the opinion that precisely another, a spiritual world view must also relate to this world of ours.

Then the writing begins with its first essay, which bears the title:

Introductory

A powerful spiritual movement has taken hold of European culture at the present time, in contrast to the materialistic current of thought that prevailed in the leading intellectual circles around the middle of the 19th century.

The author thus looks, as it were, at the hustle and bustle of intellectual work around him and finds that things have changed from the mid-19th century; that in the mid-19th century, scientific salvation was found in materialism, whereas now - in the time when this booklet was published, 1914 - a powerful spiritual movement has taken hold of European culture.

Now he continues:

What are the inner reasons for this counter-current? It seems to me that they lie not only in people's metaphysical need, but also, at least in part, in the widely awakened awareness of the danger to human civilization that is associated with the domination of a materialistic world view.

Thus the author of this booklet is one of those who not only believe that a metaphysical need of humanity has awakened in the 20th century, but also believe that there is a certain moral danger in the minds of people being seized by the materialistic world view.

With increasing speed, the materialistic intellectual current pours through numerous channels from the intellectual heights into the lowlands of human society, displacing the religious convictions based on reverence, which provided a firm hold for the moral life of the masses. It is becoming increasingly clear to many that the victory of a materialistic worldview inevitably leads to a materialistic outlook on life and a corresponding lifestyle, which sees the only reasonable degree of life in exploiting the short lifespan for as much enjoyment as possible.

In earlier times, too, when a solid edifice of morals based on tradition and authority succumbed to corrosive intellectual criticism, humanity was seized by a craving for raw sensual pleasure and led down disastrous paths that took it away from what we feel is its most intrinsic destiny.

This is not contradicted by the fact that among those men who, inspired by an unconditional love of truth, communicate the results of their research and thinking to their fellow men, without regard to the consequences might ensue that many, if not most, of these men stand at a high level of moral greatness and are moved by noble, unselfish motives, in the full conviction that they are thus serving humanity.

So here the author points out that certain dangers for the moral life of human beings must arise as a consequence of a materialistic world view, and he says: This danger cannot be countered solely with the objection that those people who theoretically recognize a materialistic world view as theirs and as the right one themselves stand on a high level of moral conduct.

The author touches here, from his own observations, on a point to which I have repeatedly referred in our spiritual science, I may well say, from a higher point of view. For if one says that a spirit such as Haeckel, who works in such an eminently theoretical and materialistic way, stands on the ground of high moral ideals and also shows a higher moral conception of life in his own conduct, and that therefore the materialistic world-view does not necessarily lead to a materialistic way of life, one forgets one thing – and I have pointed this out in various lectures that I have given – namely, one forgets that in the development of mankind, feelings and thoughts move at different speeds.

If you look at just a short piece of human development, you will find that thoughts move relatively quickly. From the 15th and 16th centuries onwards, materialistic thinking, the living out of human theorizing in materialistic thought, has developed rapidly and all sciences have gradually been permeated theoretically by materialistic thought forms. Moral life, which is expressed in feelings, has developed less rapidly. At least people still show in their old feelings and emotions that feeling has not progressed as quickly. Therefore, people today still live in terms of the moral feelings that arose from the previous worldview, and that is why there is a dichotomy today between materialistic thinking and a non-materialistic life and a non-materialistic way of life that is still in the old sense. But the time is approaching when the consequences will be drawn from the materialistic-theoretical world view, so that what can be called is just around the corner: the moral life will be flooded by the consequence of the materialistic world view. One can therefore deepen one's understanding of the different speeds that feelings and thoughts have when viewed from a spiritual science perspective.

Now it says further:

But if the final result of this mental work is one that seems to contradict the destiny of man, the question is justified as to whether there is not a fundamental error in the seemingly so solid structure of the critical train of thought.

The author is therefore convinced that immoral consequences must follow from theoretical materialism, and that he can only expect salvation for humanity from morality. And so he wonders whether a materialistic world view, which must necessarily lead to immorality, not only shows errors, but has errors in itself when viewed critically. And so he continues:

Is this error only felt in one's feelings, or can it also be discovered intellectually? I have also been concerned with this question, and in the following I will attempt to clarify it for myself. I hope that my train of thought will also interest some readers who, like me, are convinced that it is more effective to fight an error with its own weapons than to merely call it into question. To indicate my scientific standpoint, I would mention that I am an astronomer by training, that my independent work lies in the fields of theoretical meteorology and physical geography, and that from early youth I have moved almost exclusively in academic circles, and respect for strict science based on critical thinking has become second nature to me, so to speak.

This does, however, justify the author's claim to have something to say about the relationship between science and Theosophy, because he shows that he is familiar with science on a certain point and that his judgment must therefore be infinitely more valuable than the judgment of someone who, for example, reads Kant and says, that is all nonsense, we Theosophists do not need to read Kant, and who thus only reveals that he himself has perhaps not seriously read and thought through five lines of Kant. It continues:

I am firmly convinced that a Weltanschhauung which cannot stand up to a strict critique of reason cannot endure, however much it appeals to the emotions. These introductory words should inform the reader of the task I have set myself in this essay and the point of view from which I intended to treat it.

The next essay describes in a few sentences what a materialistic-mechanical worldview is, the worldview that developed in the second half of the 19th century in such a way that there were and still are many who consider what the author describes here in a few sentences to be the only scientifically possible worldview. Let us consider what the author writes:

The basic assumptions of the materialistic-mechanical worldview

Let us first consider the most important basic assumptions of a materialistic-mechanical worldview. They can be summarized in the following teachings:

1. All events that we observe through our senses and perceive mentally follow a law, i.e. every state of the cosmos is necessarily determined by the temporally preceding state and also necessarily results in the subsequent states. All changes, i.e. all events, are inevitable consequences of the forces present in the cosmos.

Now, what the author is trying to analyze here as the basic assumption of the materialistic-mechanical world view has often been said in the course of our lectures. But if you compare what the author says here with the way it is said in our lectures, you will notice the difference. And for those who want to familiarize themselves with our spiritual-scientific consciousness, it is good to become aware of this difference.

Anyone who reads this first point, in which the materialistic-mechanical world view is characterized in a beautiful, astute and scientifically knowledgeable way, will see: that is very good; that hits the mark of the materialistic-mechanical world view. But when we try to give such a characterization in the lectures that are held for the purpose of our movement, it is attempted in just the opposite way, and it would be good if one would reflect on how differently we proceed in such matters.

Herr von Wrangell, on the other hand, presents what might be called a materialistic-mechanical world view. He speaks a few sentences from his own perspective, summarizing the impressions he has gained from the matter. You will have noticed – if you are at all inclined to notice such things – that I usually do not proceed in this way, but quite differently. I usually start from something that is there, that is there as a result of a historical process. And so, if I wanted to characterize this point, I did not simply say such sentences about myself, but I chose one of the essential, and indeed good, authors to express in the words and manner of such an author what the matter in question is.

Thus, I have often linked to the name Du» Bors-Reymond that which could serve as a basis for my lectures. As a result, you may often have gained the impression, if you do not see the whole in context, that I wanted to criticize Du Bois-Reymond. But I never want to criticize, I just want to pick out a representative characteristic example so that it is he who speaks, not I. This is what one might call the sense for facts that is necessary for us, the sense that we do not make assertions but let the facts speak. I have often related that Du Bois-Reymond gave a speech on the recognition of nature at the Leipzig Natural Science Convention in 1872. He also spoke about the way in which he had come to his view of the world through his scientific research.

Du Bois-Reymond is a physiologist in his specific field of research. His main work is in the field of nerve physiology. He has often spoken in elegant terms about the world view of the natural scientists. At the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly in 1872, for example, he spoke about the limits of the scientific world view, about the limits of natural knowledge, and in doing so he also spoke of Laplacean minds. What is that? Du Bois-Reymond characterized it at the time. This Laplacian mind is that of someone who is well versed in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and so on in the present day and forms a world view out of these sciences. Such a Laplacian mind thus comes to form a world view that starts from so-called astronomical knowledge of reality.

What is astronomical knowledge of reality, we might ask; what is astronomical knowledge? We can explain it in a few words.

The astronomer visualizes: the sun, the planets, the moon, the earth; he visualizes the planets orbiting around the sun or moving in ellipses around it, he visualizes the force of attraction, the gravitation, acting on the planets, he visualizes an inertia, and from this inertia he visualizes that the planets orbit around the sun.

Thus, the astronomer has in mind that he can follow what is going on around him in the universe as the great events; that he can follow them from the material entities that can be seen in space and from the forces that they exert on each other in space. The fact that the entities exert material forces on one another sets things in motion; that is, things come into motion when one imagines the solar system in this way and looks at it in this way. One has a picture of the things that are spread out in space and of the events that take place over time.

Now, anyone who wants to form a world view that is in line with the times, in the sense of Du Bois-Reymonds, says the following. We have to assume that all matter consists of the smallest parts, of atoms. Just as a solar system consists of the sun, the moon and the planets, so does the smallest piece of matter consist of something similar to the sun with the planets. And just as the sun exerts forces and the planets exert forces on each other, so do the forces between the individual atoms. This sets the atoms in motion. So we have motion inside every material particle. The atoms, like the sun and the planets, are in motion. These movements are small, but they are such that we can compare them with the great movements performed by the heavenly bodies out in space, so that if we take the smallest piece of matter that we can see, something is going on inside it, like what the astronomer imagines out in space. And now natural science came to imagine everything in such a way that wherever something is really in motion, it stems from the fact that the atoms are guided by their forces.

In the second half of the 19th century, especially the science of heat, as it was founded by Julius Robert Mayer, Joule, Tyndall and Helmholtz, and further developed by C. ausius and others, contributed to the formation of this world view. So, when you touch a body and feel warmth, you say: what you feel as the sensation of warmth is only an appearance. What really exists outside is that the smallest parts, the atoms of the substance in question, are in motion; and you know a state of warmth when you know how the atoms are in motion, when you have an astronomical knowledge of it, to use the words of Du Bois-Reymond. The ideal of the Laplacian mind is to be able to say: What do I care about heat? My world view depends on my being able to find out the motion of the atoms, which through their motion cause all that we have in the way of heat, light, etc. This Laplacian mind thus forms a world view that consists of space, matter with its effective forces, and motion. In the lecture he gave at the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly on the limits of natural knowledge, Du Bois-Reymond posits this ideal of the Laplacian mind and asks: what would such a Laplacian mind be capable of?

You see, his ideal is astronomical knowledge of the world. If a mathematician takes the image of our solar system as it is at any given point in time, he only needs to insert certain numbers into his formula and he gets an image of what it was like an hour, three hours, ten years, centuries ago. How does one go about calculating whether a solar or lunar eclipse took place at a certain time in the first decade of our era? In this case, we have well-developed formulas based on the current state of science. All you need to do is insert the corresponding numbers into the formula to calculate each individual state. You can calculate when a solar eclipse will occur, let's say in 1970 or in 2728. In short, you can calculate every state that precedes or follows in time. And now Laplace's mind should have the formula that encompasses this entire solar system. So anyone with Laplace's mind, which included the atoms in space and all their states of motion, could - and Du Bois-Reymond says the same thing - calculate today, for example, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon from the world formula that he has of the atoms and their present states of motion. He would only have to insert the necessary information into the formula. It would only depend on the position of the atoms at that time, and the fact would have to follow: Caesar crosses the Rubicon. - If you insert certain values into the formula, a certain picture of the current state of the atoms should result, and then, for example, you would be able to recognize the Battle of Salamis. One would only need to proceed from differential to differential and one would be able to reconstruct the entire Battle of Salamis. That is the ideal of Laplace's mind: a knowledge of the world, which is called astronomical. Occasionally something more can be added about these things. Now I will only mention a small experience for those who are attentive to it. As a boy, I once came across a school program. Such school programs are printed, after all. They usually contain an essay written by one of the teachers. At the time, this essay was not that easy for me to understand, because it was titled “The force of attraction considered as an effect of motion”. Even then, I was dealing with an author who, so to speak, had also set himself the ideal of Laplace's mind; and he had expounded many other things in the same direction.

If you take all this together, you will see that I did not try to speak of an astronomical-materialistic world view as a mere idea, but to let the facts and the personalities speak for themselves. In a sense, then, I did strive to cultivate a style of presentation that excludes the personal. For if I were to relate what Du Bois-Reymond said on a particular occasion, I would let him speak for himself and not myself. My task is only to follow up what the personalities have said; I try to let the world speak. This is the attempt to exclude oneself, not to relate one's own views, but facts. When reading this point by Wrangell, one should be aware that our spiritual science already strives for the sense of fact in the way it presents the facts, the sense not merely to suckle at the objective, but the sense to immerse oneself in the facts, to really sink into them.

Now you will recognize what I have peeled out of the facts if you let the following lines of the booklet sink in again: “All events that we observe through our senses and perceive mentally proceed according to the laws of nature, that is, every state of the cosmos is necessarily conditioned by the temporally preceding state and just as necessarily results in the states that follow it. All changes, i.e. all events, are inevitable consequences of the forces present in the cosmos.

And now it says:

It does not affect the essence of the question whether one - for the sake of better clarity - calls the carrier of the forces “matter” or, according to the monists, imagines the concept “energy” as the only effective thing that, although it presents different forms of appearance to the human senses, basically represents an unchangeable sum of latent or current possibilities for movement.

I would only use such a sentence in the rarest of cases, and only when something else has already been summarized. Remember that I once spoke of what is expressed in this sentence. It says: “It does not affect the essence of the question whether, for the sake of better clarity, one calls the carrier of the forces ‘Stofb’ or, according to the process of the monists, conceives of the concept ‘energy’ as the only effective thing...”. I would not put it that way, but would point out that Haeckel's and Büchner's students, above all, look at the material that is spread out in space. According to the Swabian Vischer, they were the “Stoffhuber,” the “material boosters.”

Then came the man who is now the president of the Monistenbund: Ostwald. At a meeting of natural scientists, I believe it was the one in Kiel - I have spoken of it before - he gave a lecture on the overcoming of materialism through energetics, through energism. There he pointed out that it was not the matter that mattered, but the force. He thus replaced matter with force. Do you remember how I quoted his own words at the time? He said, in essence: when one person receives a slap in the face from another, it is not the matter of the substance that is dealt a blow, but the force with which the slap is dealt. Nowhere do we perceive the substance, but the force. And so, in place of substance, we find force, or, with a certain not merely descriptive but transformational meaning, energy. But this energism, which now calls itself monism, is nothing but a masked materialism. Again I have tried to show you by way of example how there really was a time when the “energy grabbers” took the place of the “substance grabbers”. I did not attempt to present a theoretical sentence, but tried to characterize from the real. And that must be our endeavor in any case. For it is only by having a sense for the real in the physical that we develop a sense for the real in the spiritual, and do not just mumble our own assertions.

So the author of the booklet says: “It does not affect the essence of the question whether one calls the carrier of the forces ‘matter’ for the sake of better clarity, or, according to the process of the monists, imagines the concept of energy as the only effective thing...

What the author means here by the expression “latent or actual possibilities of movement” can be explained as follows: Imagine some kind of counterweight here, and on top of it a tube, a glass tube, with water inside. This water presses on the floor here. In the moment when I pull away the counterweight, the water runs down. In the latter case, we are dealing with a current movement; before I pulled the support away, the same force was there, only it was not current, but at rest. Everything that then flowed down from the water and became current was previously latent, not current.

The course of all events is irrevocably predetermined, and man, in his thinking, feeling and willing, is just as unfree as, for example, a stone is in its fall.

That is the necessary consequence of the Laplacian world view. The Laplacian brain concludes that if I put my hand there, that is an image of the moving atoms, and if the Laplacian brain can still calculate the image, as I have indicated, then this excludes the freedom of man, that is, the Laplacian brain excludes the freedom of man.

This is the first point that Mr. von Wrangell makes on the basis of the materialistic-mechanical world view. The second point is as follows:

2. The inner experiences that take place in a person's consciousness (his feelings, thoughts, volitional impulses) are not essentially different from other processes in nature that a person observes through his senses. These inner experiences are only side effects of material processes within the human brain and nervous system.

This second point expresses that when I think, feel and will, it is only a concomitant of the inner processes that the Laplacian mind selects. We are therefore not dealing with independent thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will, but only with accompanying phenomena. If you follow what I said, for example, in the lecture 'The Legacy of the 19th Century' and in similar other lectures, if you study some of the material contained in 'Riddles of Philosophy', you will see how many minds in the second half of the 19th century, this view was taken for granted, that man is actually nothing more than the structure of material processes and their energies, and that thoughts, feelings and will impulses are only accompanying phenomena.

As the third point of the materialistic-mechanical world view, Mr. von Wrangell states the following:

3. After the physical death of man, the existence of the human individual finally ceases, because the so-called spiritual life of man is bound to his physicality and cannot exist without it.

This point can be understood by everyone as a consequence of the first point. The first point is the one that matters. The second and third are necessary consequences.

In the next essay, Mr. von Wrangell discusses what he calls:

examining these basic assumptions

What are the basic assumptions of the materialistic world view based on? Are they indisputably proven facts or only more or less probable hypotheses? The first of the three aforementioned assumptions, that all events are necessarily bound to follow a certain course, is the most important and has the most far-reaching consequences. It is not only regarded as beyond doubt by materialists, but also by many spiritualists, who, while accepting the independent existence of spiritual entities and believing in the continued existence of the spiritual being of man, their “soul”, after physical death, assume that there is an unalterable law within the spiritual world as well as within the sensory world. First of all, it should be noted that this idea of the absolute, unexceptional lawfulness, i.e. necessity of all events, also in the spiritual realm, excludes the concept of morality, of good and evil, because to act morally means to choose the good, when evil could be chosen.

In this chapter, Mr. von Wrangell tries to make it clear to himself that there can be no morality if the materialistic-mechanical world view is the only correct one. Because if I have to do every moment of my life what is only a by-product of atoms, then there can be no question of freedom, nor of morality, because everything is done out of necessity. Just as one cannot say that a stone that falls to the earth is good and one that does not fall to the earth is not good, so one cannot say that people's actions are good or not good. In the case of a criminal, everything happens out of necessity; in the case of a good person, everything happens out of necessity. Therefore there is something correct in the sentence: “First of all, it should be noted that this idea of the unconditional, unexceptional lawfulness, i.e. necessity of all events, also in the spiritual realm, excludes the concept of morality, of good and evil; because to act morally means to choose the good, when evil could be chosen.” But one cannot choose when everything is constrained by material necessity.

The next chapter is headed:

Freedom and Morality

As soon as there is no freedom of decision, there can be no question of morality in the sense in which this concept is understood by people and corresponds to our inner feelings. We can certainly speak of more or less useful, unfree actions and impulses, but a moral judgment of unfree actions or feelings has no justification, no sense. With the elimination of freedom, responsibility also ceases to exist. This undoubted connection between freedom and morality cannot be used as an argument against the concept of lawfulness; it is merely intended to remind us of the logical consequences associated with the assumption of absolute necessity.

So Mr. von Wrangell is trying to make it clear here that it absolutely follows from the materialistic-mechanical world view that one cannot actually speak of freedom and morality.

Now he is a scientific mind, and a scientific mind is accustomed to honestly and sincerely drawing the consequences of assumptions. Our time misses much that would immediately seem absurd to it if it had really already taken on the scientific conscience, if it did not stir and throw together all kinds of things without a scientific conscience. Mr. von Wrangell does not do that, but says: If we accept the materialistic world view, we can no longer speak of freedom and morality; because either the materialistic world view is correct, and then it is nonsense to speak of freedom and morality, or one speaks of freedom and morality, and then there is no sense in speaking of the materialistic-mechanical world view.

But since Hetr von Wrangell is a scientist who is already accustomed to drawing the consequences of his assumptions – that is an important fact – he is not accustomed to having things so sloppy in his thinking; because it is a sloppiness of thinking when someone says, “I am a materialist” and does not at the same time deny morality. He does not want to be guilty of this sloppiness of thinking. On the other hand, he also has the habit that one has when one has become a scientist, namely to say: May the world go to pieces, what I have scientifically recognized must be true! Therefore, one cannot simply discard the materialistic view, but if the materialistic world view is true, then it must be accepted and then one is faced with the sad necessity of having to throw morality overboard. So it is not just a matter of asking: where does morality take us? – he says that is not enough – but the materialistic world view must be examined, quite apart from the consequences this has for morality. So we have to tackle a different kind of materialistic world view.

The next chapter is called:

The World Enigma

Yes, one can say that the question of whether man is responsible for his actions, i.e., whether he has the possibility of regulating his volitional impulses according to motives that are unambiguously determined by his bodily organization, includes the whole world riddle for us humans, the question of freedom or unfreedom of will. For if this question is answered in the sense of the absolute necessity of all happenings in the whole universe, without exception, then materialism is the only correct view and the world, with all its agony and suffering, is a mechanism that runs to no purpose, without a recognizable beginning, but with the eternal death of the whole as its final goal.

When we started our spiritual science movement, I had occasion to read some poems by the poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, who, one might say, has come to terms with a materialistic-mechanical world view and even as a poet really draws the consequences from it. That is why she formed poems like “A dirty whirlwind is existence.” — One must come to that conclusion if one is not sloppy in one's thinking, if one lets one's thinking affect one's feelings. And only because people are so sloppy and cowardly in their thinking do they not ask themselves: What becomes of life under the influence of the materialistic-mechanical worldview? But it must be shown that it is inherently false, otherwise one would simply have accepted the consequence of delle Grazie.

Mr. von Wrangell continues:

The greatest minds and deepest thinkers have endeavored to solve this most important of all questions, and it seems presumptuous to want to say something new. However, it cannot be a matter of a generally valid answer here, but at most a reference to the train of thought that led to a subjective solution to the puzzle. Such a reference can sometimes be of help to a similarly minded soul.

Mr. von Wrangell thus points out that the greatest minds, poets and thinkers have endeavored to solve this question, and that it is unnecessary to say anything new about it. At most, it could be a hint at the train of thought that led to a subjective solution of this puzzle; that is, a hint at his own train of thought.

In the next chapter, he examines where the idea comes from that what precedes always follows what comes after in a lawful manner. It is called:

The origin of the law

From this point of view, it seems justified to raise the question: Where do we get the idea of the absolute lawfulness of all events? Is it perhaps an intuitive truth that underlies all thinking, or has humanity only gradually, through long and arduous mental work, come to this idea; an idea that now appears to the Europeans, who live off the cultural achievements of the past, as a self-evident truth?

So Mr. von Wrangell is asking here: Did man always believe in this unconditional law, or did people only come to it over time? Only then can one recognize the validity of this idea; for if man has always believed in it, then there must be something true about it that can be taken for granted; but if people have only just come to it, then one can examine how they have arrived at this idea. In this way one can form an opinion about its validity. He says further:

The latter is the case. This is an acquired, not an original insight. On the contrary, man's original, direct consciousness gives him the idea of inner freedom limited by external circumstances, of arbitrariness in his volitional decisions. The idea of conformity to law is only gradually being derived from experience.

Now, as you can see from my countless lectures, it is clear how slowly people have come to this idea of conformity to law, from the old clairvoyance to the time when the idea of conformity to law has come. In truth, the idea of conformity to law is only four centuries old, because it basically comes from Galileo. I have often discussed this. If you go back before Galileo, there is no idea at all that everything is permeated by such a law.

Mr. von Wrangell says: “This is an acquired, not an original insight... The idea of lawfulness has only gradually been taken from experience.” Now, I would like to know whether the child is compelled by its inner astral circumstances to reach for the sugar, that is, whether it is natural for it to do so, or whether the child thinks it already has a choice. I have told something like an anecdote before, which I would like to mention here as well. It was during my studies; I used to pace up and down in the lobby of Vienna's Südbahnhof with a fellow student. He was a hardened materialist and firmly held the view that all thinking is just a process in the brain, like the hands on a clock moving forward. And just as one cannot say that this is something special, but is connected with the mechanical substances and forces present in it, so he thought that the brain also makes these astronomical movements. That was a Laplacian head; we were eighteen to nineteen years old at the time. So I said to him once: But you never say “my brain thinks,” you say “I think.” Why do you keep lying then? Why do you always say “I think” and not “my brain thinks?” - Now, this fellow student had taken his knowledge, the ideas of volition and conformity to law, not from experience, but from complicated theories. He did not believe in inner arbitrariness, but he said “I think” and not “my brain thinks”. So he was in constant contradiction to himself.

The next chapter is called:

Freedom of the will cannot be proved by experience.

Can this contradiction be resolved rationally? It is obvious that an experience-based proof of the freedom of the will of people or other beings cannot be provided.

Mr. von Wrangell says that the truth of the freedom of the will of people cannot be proven by external experience, because one can only make one's own decision.

Mr. von Wrangell says, then, that one cannot prove the truth of the freedom of human will through external experience, because one can only make one decision. If one wanted to prove it, then one would have to be able to make two decisions. Now, I have already mentioned that one does not refer to experience at all in this question, but rather constructs an experience. For example, they once imagined a donkey with a bundle of hay on each side, the same tasty, equally sized bundle of hay. The donkey, which is getting hungrier and hungrier, is now supposed to decide whether to eat from one or the other bundle of hay, because one is as tasty as the other and as large as the other. And so he does not know whether he should turn this way or that. In short, the donkey could not come to a proper decision and had to starve between the two bundles of hay. Such things have been constructed because it was felt that one cannot get there experientially by observing freedom. Mr. von Wrangell draws attention to this and then asks the question:

But can the freedom of the will be refuted by experience? To answer this question, let us first recall some epistemological truths!

To answer this question, Mr. von Wrangell now speaks of some epistemological truths in the next chapter. This chapter is called:

Epistemological Retrospection

Man has direct awareness only of himself. He feels desires, which he seeks to satisfy and which trigger impulses of will in him; he receives impressions, of which he soon becomes convinced that they are dependent on certain sense organs of his body. When he closes his eyes, he receives no impressions of light and color; when he plugs his ears, he weakens his sound sensations or loses them altogether. Likewise, experience shows that the nose conveys the sense of smell and the mouth, in the parts covered by mucous membranes, conveys the sense of taste. Only the sense of touch seems to be tied to no particular part of the body, but can be exercised through the entire skin. The normal healthy person has five different senses in an awake state, each conveying its specific type of impression.

In this, Mr. von Wrangell is influenced by popular knowledge of the senses. Those who once listened to a small lecture cycle that I then titled “Anthroposophy” will have seen that one cannot get by with five senses, but rather has to assume twelve senses. Among these twelve senses is also the sense for the thinking of another person, for the other I. Therefore, anyone who has followed our spiritual scientific movement correctly can recognize the inadequacy of Wrangell's assertions. They are not incorrect, but they are only partially correct. We cannot say, “Man has direct consciousness only of himself.” That is incorrect. For then we could never perceive other I's.

In recent times, however, there has been a very complicated view, which is held by all sorts of people. Perhaps the philosopher and psychologist Lipps could be cited as a characteristic personality among those who hold it. They are not aware when a person confronts them that they have a direct impression of his ego, but they say: When I confront a person, he has a face; it makes certain movements, and he says certain things, and from what he says and does, one should be able to conclude that there is an ego behind it. So the ego is something inferred, not something directly perceived. A new school of philosophy, however, which has Max Scheler as its most prominent representative, takes a different view. It has already made the observation that one can have an immediate impression of the ego of another person. And what has been written about the ego, more rigorously scientifically by Husserl, the philosopher, and then somewhat more popularly, especially in his more recent essays, by Scheler, shows that more recent philosophy is on the way to recognizing that direct consciousness can also know something of another consciousness. — One can therefore say that Mr. von Wrangell has been infected by popular epistemology when he says: “Man has direct awareness only of himself.” And further: “He feels desires, which he seeks to satisfy and which trigger impulses of will in him.” And then he describes how man perceives the world through his senses.

I have already written about this sense physiology. Read in “Lucifer-Gnosis” and you will see that I tried to explain the impossibility of this sense physiology with the simple comparison of the seals. I said at the time: This sense physiology is materialistic from the very beginning. It proceeds from the assumption that nothing can enter into us from the outside, because it secretly conceives of the outside as materialistic. But it is the same as with the seal and the sealing wax: the seal always remains outside the sealing wax; nothing passes from the material of the seal into the sealing wax. But the name “Miller” engraved on it passes completely from the seal to the sealing wax. If we now place the main emphasis on what is spiritually expressed in the name Miller, and not on the material, of which nothing passes over, we can see that what is presented from the point of view of sensory physiology says nothing. But these are such horrible doctrines that have been hammered into people's brains that most people just don't follow them up, even if they want to become spiritualists. You can read more about this in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, in the chapter “The World as Illusion”.

Then Mr. von Wrangell continues:

Since man cannot imagine that an existing state can change without a cause, he assumes that the sensory impressions he feels are caused by forces that he locates outside of his own directly felt self. He calls these external causes of his internal sensory impressions “things” and, in their totality, “the world” or - epistemologically - the “not-me”, in contrast to the directly perceived “me”.

That's clear, you just have to get used to the fact that there is a bit of epistemological talk.

A thousandfold experience and the corresponding agreement with beings that he recognizes as being the same as himself - his fellow human beings - teach him that these “things,” this “not-I,” can exist independently of his consciousness.

Otherwise, man would have to believe that if he turns his eye away not only from living but also from inanimate things, things cease to exist.

If, for example, he loses consciousness during sleep, he finds upon awakening that things persist in their “reality,” that is, in their ability to evoke sensations in him. Man also recognizes his own body as belonging in some respects to the world “outside him.”

This is good to emphasize, because we not only have things that are inside, but also things that are outside.

He can receive sensory impressions from his limbs, as from other things; for example, he can see, touch, etc. his hands, and here too he distinguishes between the inner process of his sensory impressions and their outer cause, which in this case he recognizes as one of his body parts. He soon becomes convinced that it is his body, that is, that this thing has a very special connection to his “I,” to that which feels and thinks, especially through the sense of touch, which shows him that when he brings his own body parts into contact with other things, he feels the contact directly, but he does not feel it directly when other objects are brought into contact with each other.” ²

It is very good to be made aware of something like this. So this is how Mr. von Wrangell answers the question of how it comes about that a person recognizes his own body among the things that are outside in a certain thing. Those who think sloppily simply say: thinking about something like this is nonsense; these people who think about something like this want to be scientists. But Wrangell says: When these two pieces of chalk collide, it doesn't hurt, but when I bump into something with my body, it hurts. That's the difference. And because one hurts and the other doesn't, I label the one as belonging to me and the other as not belonging to me. It is good to know that we have nothing but the consequence of this consciousness.

Now, you see, my dear friends, I had intended to finish discussing this brochure today. But we have only got as far as page 10. An attempt should be made to find the connection between what is written in the world and what, in the strict sense, belongs to our spiritual science. But the next chapters are still too interesting: the formation of concepts, ideas of space and time; the principle of causality; the application of the idea of arbitrariness to the environment; observation of phenomena that occur uniformly; the essence of all science; astronomy, the oldest science; uniform motion; measurement; the principle underlying clocks. It is so interesting that perhaps we will continue the discussion tomorrow at seven o'clock.

• 1. The quotations in this and the following lectures reflect the entire text of the Wrangell brochure.
• 2. In the brochure itself, the following footnote appears: “The ‘elimination of sensitivity in sensitives’ observed by de Rochas is a particular abnormal phenomenon that deserves in-depth study.”

If one isolates the act of recognition and regards it as the activity of an outside observer of the world, then all the misleading philosophical questions arise: How is knowledge possible? Can we recognize things in themselves? Are there limits to knowledge? etc. All these questions lose their significance if we understand cognition as part of the process of life. Just as life expresses itself in plants as the production of leaves, flowers and fruits, so it expresses itself in humans as cognition. It makes just as little sense to ask: What are the limits of cognition? as it does to ask: What are the limits of flowering? The content of knowledge is a product of the world process, like the flower of the plant. The image of the world that man creates for himself is a fantasy content and toto genere different from what it depicts when it is merely considered in terms of its pictorial nature. When man speaks of the “essence of the world”, of the “thing in itself”, etc., he speaks of a need of his. We are not compelled by anything external to speak of the “essence of the world”. We are only pushed to do so by our nature. If I speak of the “essence of the world” and assert its unknowability, I am talking into the blue. There can be no other being for which there is anything that could be equated with knowledge. To speak of the existence of something that lies “beyond knowledge” is as foolish as to speak of something that lies beyond plant growth. Knowledge must remain within itself if it is to have any meaning. Kantian philosophy is the outpouring of a personality that does not know what it wants. Kant searches for something, but does not know what. Basically, he only talks about the unknowability of something, which he imagines as an indefinite goal in the blue. It is indicative of the boundless weakness of German philosophy that it cannot eliminate Kant's follies. World-negation, the beyond, etc., will only come into existence when man invents them. But it is the most empty, foolish invention there is.

When Ludwig Büchner is mentioned today, it is rare to come across any other judgment than that his "popular talk" has long been dismissed and that "in his superficiality he offered all half-wits and dilettantes scientifically interesting facts and a childishly crude metaphysics mixed with them in an easily comprehensible form". This is how, for example, a currently much-mentioned philosopher, Theobald Ziegler, characterizes the recently deceased thinker in his recently published book "Die geistigen und sozialen Strömungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts". It is a colorful society whose members are united in this judgment. Philosophers who still believe they have higher sources of knowledge than "natural science", which clings to raw reality, are joined by pusillanimous naturalists who do not dare to draw consistent conclusions about the position of man and his spirit within nature from the facts they observe. Catholic, Protestant and other clericalism seizes on the disparaging judgments of such backward philosophers and naturalists with true lust, because the weapons stored up in their own theological arsenal have gradually become too blunt. Mystically inclined natures find their most sacred feelings violated by the "crude" freethinker who wants to reduce human soul life to material foundations. Most of these disparaging judgments of Ludwig Büchner spring from minds that take his writings in a much more superficial sense than they are meant, and who know nothing better to talk about than the shallow and shallow materialism that they themselves know how to read out of them. The man who has the boldness and sharpness of thought to draw the necessary conclusions from the scientific achievements of the century, Ernst Haeckel, only ever speaks with full recognition of the author of "Force and Substance" as a thinker who occupies a place of honor among the precursors of Darwin.

It should not be denied that Ludwig Büchner is a one-sided thinker and that one can arrive at deeper ideas than was possible for his broadly conceived ideas, even if one fully agrees with the findings of natural science. At the same time, however, it must be emphasized that this school of thought, with the feelings it entails, is infinitely closer to our modern mental life than the philosophical schools of thought which, with their higher sources of knowledge, seek to artificially rescue the outdated ideas of earlier times. It is a thoroughly modern assertion, even if it is perhaps worthy of deepening, that man is conceived from light and ashes, that the activity of the same natural forces calls him into being to which the plant also owes its existence. And all the profundity that philosophers and theologians muster to prove that the spirit is higher and more primordial than the material world is further from our sensibilities than such an assertion.

Far too little attention is always paid to where the drivel about "raw materialism" actually comes from. It is not rooted in reason at all, but in the world of feelings and emotions. A millennia-old education of the human race, to which Christianity has contributed immensely, was able to instill in us the feeling that the spirit is something high and matter something common and crude. And how can the high come from the common? Reason will strive in vain to see something lower in the marvelous structure of material nature than in the ideas that philosophers and theologians have of high spiritual beings. They will never understand why the magnificent structure of the brain should be something crude compared to heaven with its ethereal angels and saints or compared to Schopenhauer's "will" or Eduard von Hartmann's "unconscious". Only those who are caught up in the sentiments that arise from a complete misunderstanding of material existence can rebel against sentences such as the one recently expressed by Ernst Haeckel in his essay "On our present knowledge of the origin of man": "The physiological functions of the organism, which we summarize under the concept of soul activity - or the "soul" for short - are mediated in man by the same mechanical (physical and chemical) processes as in the other vertebrates. The organs of these psychic functions are also the same here and there: the brain and the spinal cord as central organs, the peripheral nerves and the sensory organs. Just as these organs of the soul have developed slowly and gradually in man from the lower states of their vertebrate ancestors, the same naturally applies to their functions, to the soul itself. - This natural ... This natural conception of the human soul stands in contradiction to the dualistic and mythological ideas which man has formed for thousands of years about a special, supernatural nature of his "soul and which culminates in the strange dogma of the "immortality of the soul. Just as this dogma has had the greatest influence on man's entire world view, it is still upheld by most people today as the indispensable foundation of their ethical being. The contrast in which it stands to the natural theory of human development is at the same time still regarded in the widest circles as the most important reason against its acceptance or even as a refutation of the natural history of creation altogether." (p.42 £.) One need only discard the prejudices one has acquired against the natural, its becoming and being, and one will find in this natural something that is far more deserving of those feelings and sensations than the so-called supernatural world to which people have attached these feelings for so long. The achievements of the natural sciences will only produce a view of the world and of life worthy of them if the life of feeling is able to judge them according to their own value, not according to a value attached to them from a mythological upbringing.

With thinkers like Büchner, it is not important that contradictions can be proven in their conclusions, but rather that they know how to attribute this value to their emotional life according to natural processes. Those who are able to think more sharply will avoid these contradictions, but they will still be in agreement with Büchner in their view of nature and the position of man within it. The finest ideas of modern philosophers, who derive the world from a special spiritual being, appear antediluvian compared to the coarse and crude thought processes of this materialist. A philosopher who today still speaks of an "unconscious spirit", of a "will in nature", and a childlike believer who has the opinion that after death his soul wanders into a divine heavenly kingdom, belong together. A materialist, who says that thoughts are products of force and matter, and a thinker, who rationally deepens this thought and develops it into a world view that satisfies both heart and mind, also belong together. The kinship in the cognitive attitude is higher than the logical power of thought. For this reason, those who know how to grasp Büchner's crude assertions in terms of higher thinking will not be able to agree with the dismissive judgments of shallow minds whose seemingly philosophical talk conceals nothing but a more or less conscious desire to salvage as many shreds of an outdated world view as is still possible. Ludwig Büchner was certainly no great pathfinder of the new world view. He was a man who grasped great truths with devoted enthusiasm and knew how to express them in a way that made them comprehensible even to those who lacked a higher logical and scientific training. And those who speak of half-wits and dilettantes getting their education from his writings should bear in mind that it is not exactly complete experts and masters who parrot Mr. Ziegler's teachings. The thousands and thousands of people who have pieced together a view of life from the propositions of "force and substance" are certainly no worse than the others who do the same with Schopenhauer's sayings or even with those of their pastors. Yes, they are probably considerably better. For it is better to be a shallow man in the reasonable than a shallow man in the unreasonable.

Whoever follows the development of intellectual life in the second half of this century will understand the misunderstanding to which Büchner's intellectual physiognomy is exposed today. It is not only the religious communities that are doing everything in their power to obscure the light emanating from the newly acquired knowledge of nature - an endeavor in which they find the strongest support from reactionary and uninformed governments everywhere - but also within the scientific community itself there is often a regrettable backwardness. How little understanding there is among the philosophers of our time for the scientific approach and its achievements! In the sixties they raised the call: Back to Kant! They want to take Kant's views as a starting point in order to orient themselves on the nature of human cognition and its limits. A large but thoroughly unfruitful literature grew out of this trend. For Kant was not interested in exploring the nature of knowledge in an unbiased, unprejudiced way, but above all he wanted to gain a view of this nature that would allow him to reintroduce certain religious dogmas into human intellectual life through a small door. He more or less consciously formulated all his concepts in such a way that certain beliefs remained untouched. He must be understood from the sentence in which he himself summarized his aspirations: I wanted to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith. Today's philosophers are serving this goal. And it is a strange spectacle to watch them at work, doing their job without being fully aware of the actual impulse of their Königsberg seducer. For those who are currently trying to build a world view, it is therefore practically useless to occupy themselves with this philosophy, which follows in Kant's footsteps. He only loses precious time through this preoccupation, which he could much better use to appropriate the infinitely fruitful results of modern natural science. In Darwin's and Haeckel's writings one finds a rich and the only correct basis for the development of a world view; those who strive for such a world view feel infinitely bored by many directions of contemporary philosophy. The thought involuntarily arises in his mind: How differently would our intellectual life have developed if we had moved on from the beginnings of a view of life based on natural science created by Büchner, instead of fighting these beginnings with unfruitful logical sophistry?

It was only because many scientific circles were incapable of going further that statements such as Du Bois-Reymond's on "The Limits of Natural Knowledge" made such a profound impression. Only a man who misunderstands the scope of the scientific method and therefore cannot come to any clarity about the conclusions to which this method leads can make such a speech. It was naivety of the highest order when Du Bois-Reymond set a limit to human knowledge because it would never understand how it is that feeling and thinking, consciousness, develop from the processes of the brain. He said: "One cannot understand why a sum of material particles should not be indifferent as to how they lie and move and why they evoke the sensation of "red" through a certain position and movement and the feeling of pain through another. The researcher, who was extraordinarily capable of investigating individual natural facts, had no idea that he had first arbitrarily formed a certain idea of the nature of the substance and its effects and that only this ingenious idea of his did not allow him to come to an understanding of the connection between brain and consciousness. The only sensible path is the one that Haeckel takes when he conceives of matter and force in such a way that the connection between them and the phenomena of the mind, which has been irrefutably proven by experience, finds its explanation.

Without an understanding of the results of natural science and the methods by which these results are obtained, no world view is possible today. And the fact that Büchner recognized this, that he sought to gain a world view on the basis of these methods and results, is his undeniable merit. What he did is much more important than anything achieved by neo-Kantianism and naturalists of the caliber of Du Bois-Reymond with speeches such as the one on "The Limits of Natural Knowledge".

The book "Force and Substance" was a major blow to traditional beliefs. And the reactionaries know why they hate Büchner to the core of their souls and gladly resort to the explanations of Du Bois-Reymond and his like-minded comrades when they consider themselves too incapable of defeating the new views from the field.

From the circles into which Büchner's views have penetrated, there has also emerged a view of the entire human way of life that is in keeping with freedom. Moral concepts have undergone a thorough reform as a result. How strong the need for such a reform was in our cultural development is shown by the progress that Hegelian philosophy made after the master's death. In their own way, David Friedrich Strauss, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner worked in the direction of the natural world view. Darwinism then offered the possibility of gaining support for the great conceptions of these thinkers from the observation of facts. Like two groups of workers digging a tunnel from both sides of a mountain and meeting in the middle, the minds working in the manner of the aforementioned philosophers meet with the researchers building on Darwinism.

Our contemporaries still have a deep-seated addiction to limiting knowledge in order to make room for faith. And minds that recognize the power of knowledge to gradually displace faith are perceived as uncomfortable. Yes, "it is a delight" if one can prove any errors in their thought processes. As if it were not an old realization that in the beginning all things appear in imperfect form!

It seems as if Büchner was painfully touched by the misjudgment he encountered in the last period of his life. Following this tribute to the deceased, the management of this journal is fortunate enough to publish an essay that is certainly one of the last things written by the bold and unprejudiced thinker, the intrepid man and strong character. And it seems as if he would not have written the remarks about the "living and the dead" without a painful view of his own fate.

A few days ago, I had a dream. I dreamt of an editorial in the "Zukunft". I read very clearly a sentence about Kant in an argument about the justification of the Farmers' Union, Stirner, Nietzsche and the monarchical feeling. I couldn't believe my eyes, but this sentence literally said: "the category of the imperative". I was - in a dream - very surprised, because Maximilian Harden doesn't give himself any such airs. He once wrote a sentence in an editorial in the "Zukunft" in which he showed that he had no real concept of Kant's "Categorical Imperative"; but that he even wrote "The Category of the Imperative" instead of "The Categorical Imperative": that astonished me - even in my dream. I woke up, rubbed my eyes and said to myself: oh, you dreamer, that came again from such anger about writing. You are so terribly annoyed by all the nonsense you see every day in the "Knights of the Pen" that the anger haunts you in your sleep. But my dreams exaggerate. It is not true that "The category of the imperative" ever appeared in an editorial in the "Future".

They will probably be right, my dreams. Because Alfred, my Kerr, once told me: I don't really want to get down to business and rant to my heart's content. It must be the bitter resentment that haunts me in my sleep as a nightmare.

I got dressed, drank some coffee, and then I had to get something from a store on Potsdamer Strasse. I saw the two sculptural "works of art" erected on the Potsdamer Brücke for the first time. A staid, jovial man sits there with mild features. I could take him for a well-behaved foreman of a factory where cable ropes and electrical appliances are manufactured. He is supposed to be Werner Siemens, the greatest electrical engineer. As I had not gone out to study the secrets of the plastic arts, I passed by, not particularly dissatisfied at not having found them. C. Moser had made the monument.

I reached the other end of the bridge. There sits another man. A schoolmaster who is thinking about how to teach the children their ABCs. But no - it's supposed to be Hermann Helmholtz. I have always believed that a sculptor should pass on a man's significance to posterity along with his external features. And in Helmholtz's case, it doesn't seem so difficult to me. Anyone who delves into his writings will get a clear idea of this man's personality. And anyone who compares this idea with the features of his face will recognize the harmony of his physical and mental physiognomy, which was so striking in him. And Helmholtz also wrote memoirs. Anyone who has ever seen him must think of the researcher's outward appearance with every line. The man who, sculpted by Max Klein, is supposed to adorn one end of the Potsdam Bridge is in no way reminiscent of the writer of this memoir.

But even more. Like few researchers, Hermann Helmholtz is a type within a certain scientific movement of the present day. He is not a genius like his great teacher Johannes Müller. He did not provide the initial impetus for the discoveries and inventions that are associated with his name. If you don't want to believe me, read about it in the memoirs I mentioned. With great perspicacity and tireless work, he drew the conclusions from the achievements of his predecessors. I would like to single out the invention of the ophthalmoscope. When Helmholtz began the investigations that led him to this invention, the work carried out by his predecessors had progressed so far that only a small detail was needed to construct the important instrument, a final step on a path that had been precisely mapped out. And it was the same in the other fields in which Helmholtz worked. He lived in a time that was ripe for very specific scientific discoveries, because there was an abundance of preparatory work for them. This time demanded precise scientific workers who, through astutely constructed tools, careful laboratory work and tireless experimentation, carried out the scientific ideas of a previous era in detail. Johannes Müller, Purkinje and others gave leading ideas in the first half of the century; Helmholtz, Brücke, Ludwig, Du Bois-Reymond came to epoch-making individual discoveries from the points of view they adopted. The keen eye for the details of natural phenomena, for experimental research, for tireless observation are the characteristics of the type of natural scientist that Helmholtz represents. If you want to visualize this type by its contrast, you need only remember Ernst Haeckel. He is quite different from those belonging to this group. He too drew the consequences of a great predecessor. But he not only went beyond Charles Darwin in detail. He constructed a building for which his predecessor had provided the substructure; Helmholtz and the others mentioned provided the furnishings for a finished building, albeit one that was still empty inside. This typical significance of Helmholtz should be illustrated by the pictorial representation of his figure.

But to do so, the artist who was given such a task would have had to study the scientific nature and significance of Helmholtz from his works. I am naïve enough to believe that every artist does this before depicting a man. However, the Helmholtz monument on Berlin's Potsdamer Brücke convinced me of the opposite.

There were books at the researcher's feet, on top of which was a book on the spine - O physicist, quickly turn your eye away before it gets too offended - "The Physiology of Optics." So the visual artist didn't even get as far as the title page - or even the spine of a bound copy - of Helmholtzens "Physiological Optics".

What my dream of a writer only led me to believe: a visual artist turned it into reality. Because saying "The physiology of optics" instead of "Physiological optics" is just like saying "The category of the imperative" instead of "Categorical imperative". But not even an editorial writer does that. We writers are better people than that.

But "The Physiology of Optics" is not the only thing that characterizes the "education" of a visual artist. Beneath this "Physiology of Optics" lies another book. This one is about four centimeters thick. On its spine it says: "The Conservation of Force." Helmholtz wrote a treatise of only a few pages on this concept that dominates modern physics. Mr. Max Klein did not even glance at Helmholtz's existing works, but he saw a non-existent one in his mind.

The scholars of the Berlin newspapers have rebuked the sin against the spirit of all education; and therefore the - one of the mistakes has been made good. I do not know whether the words that were to be read at the Helmholtz monument for a few days to the annoyance of passing educated people in order to conceal the disgrace have been changed to the correct reading at nightfall. Today, however, we read the corrected version: "The physiological optics." On the other hand, a benevolent proofreader will have to make another effort because of the second "mistake". It will not be possible to make this second book thinner; but you can ask a better newspaper reader, and he will advise you to go for this work: "Tonempfindungen", because a better newspaper reader knows that Helmholtz wrote a "Lehre von den Tonempfindungen".

Whoever calls me a petty grumbler for writing this, I reply: I don't really care what is written on the monuments on the Potsdam Bridge, but to me it seems like a sad symptom. What must the "education" of visual artists be like if such "mistakes" happen to them? And what image can an artist pass on to posterity of a man whom he knows as well as the creator of the Helmholtz monument knows his writings?

Just listen to them, the visual artists, when they are amused by the omissions that writers make about their works. And if you are a writer walking across the Potsdamer Brücke in Berlin, take comfort in the fact that a "writer" is unlikely to write the same kind of nonsense about a "visual artist" as a "visual artist" has written about a "writer" here. Yes, yes, we writers are better people, and it cannot happen to any of us that, however thoroughly ignorant we may be of Kant's philosophical views, we write "The category of the imperative" instead of "Categorical imperative". Only a wicked, malicious dream can make us believe such a thing.