The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have already presented some of the answers to the question: Why is spiritual research misunderstood? — in the lecture I gave here a few weeks ago on “Healthy Soul Life and Spiritual Research”. Today I would like to consider other points of view which may provide a more comprehensive answer to the question posed. Naturally, in view of the attitude of the esteemed audience, who are accustomed to finding it in these lectures, it cannot be my intention today to go into individual attacks here and there on what is called spiritual research here. If out of wounded ambition or other motives, here and there perhaps even from the ranks of those who previously believed themselves to be quite good exponents of this spiritual science, then these are matters which, when examined more closely, show just how insignificant such objections actually are in the face of the great tasks that spiritual research has to fulfill. Therefore, the necessity to deal with one or other of them can only arise here and there for external reasons. As I said, it is not my intention. My intention is to show how one can really have difficulties in understanding the spiritual science meant here, how it can be difficult for the soul to bring understanding to spiritual science, from the education of the times, from what one can acquire in terms of habits of thought, of feelings, of feelings of world view from our present time, how it can be difficult for the soul to understand spiritual science. In a sense, I do not want to explain the unjustified objections in their reasons, but rather the objections that arise from the times to a certain extent, one might say, completely justified objections, those objections that are understandable for a soul of the present.

Spiritual science is not only confronted with objections that arise from other currents of thought in the present day; spiritual science, it can be said, still has almost all other currents of thought opposed to it in a certain way, precisely from the point of view that has just been mentioned. When materialistic or mechanistic world-views arise, or, as one would like to express it today in a more educated way, monistic world-views, opponents arise who start from a certain spiritual idealism. The reasons such spiritual idealists have to put forward for their world view against materialism are, as a rule, extraordinarily weighty and significant. These are objections, the significance of which can certainly be shared by the spiritual researcher, who can certainly understand them and grasp them in the same way as someone who proceeds merely from a certain spiritual idealism. The spiritual researcher, however, does not speak about the spiritual world merely in the way, for example, that spiritual idealists of the ilk of Ulrici, Wirth, Immanuel Hermann Fichte — who, however, as we saw yesterday, does go into it more deeply — and others do. He does not speak merely in abstract terms, hinting that there must be a spiritual world behind the sensual world; he cannot leave this spiritual world undefined, cannot grasp it in mere concepts, he must move on to a real description of the spiritual world. He cannot merely content himself with a conceptual allusion to an unknown spiritual world, as the spiritual idealists would have it. Rather, he must provide a concrete description of a spiritual world that is revealed in individual entities that have not physical but purely spiritual existence ; in short, he must present a spiritual world that is as diverse and as full of content as the physical world is, and should actually be much, much fuller of content if it were described in reality. And when he not only speaks of the fact that there is a spiritual world in general that can be proven by concepts, but when he speaks specifically of a spiritual world as something credible, as something that can be perceived just as the sensory world , then he has as his opponents not only the materialists, but also those who only want to speak about the spiritual world in abstract terms from the standpoint of a certain spiritual-conceptual idealism. Finally, he has opponents among those who believe that spiritual science can affect any kind of religious sentiment, who believe that religion is endangered, that their religion is endangered when a science of the spiritual world appears. And there are many other individual currents that could be mentioned, which basically the spiritual scientist has to oppose in the manner indicated, and still understandably so today. So these are important objections, justified to a certain extent from a certain point of view, and I would like to discuss them by name.

And there is the first objection to the aspirations of spiritual science, which is particularly significant in our time, and which comes from the natural scientific world view, the world view that seeks to create a world view based on the progress of modern natural science, which is justifiably seen as the greatest triumph of humanity. And it must be said again and again that it is difficult to realize that the true spiritual researcher, after all, denies absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing at all, of what legitimately follows from the results of modern science for a world view; on the contrary, he stands in the fullest sense of the word on the ground of this newer natural science itself, insofar as it is a legitimate basis for a world view.

Let us look at this newer direction in natural science from a certain point of view. We can only emphasize individual points of view. In this way we are confronted with all those people who justifiably cause difficulties for spiritual science, because they say: Does not modern natural science show us, through the marvel of the human nervous system, and in particular the human brain, how what the human being experiences spiritually is dependent on the structure and functions of this nervous system and this brain? And it is easy to believe that the spiritual researcher wants to deny what the natural scientist has to say from his field of research. Only the amateur spiritual researcher and those who want to be spiritual researchers, but basically can hardly claim the dignity of an amateur, do much harm, because true spiritual research is always confused with its charlatan or amateurish activities. It is difficult to believe that, for example, with regard to the significance of the physical brain and nervous system, the humanist actually has more in common with the natural scientist than the natural scientist himself.

Let us take an example. I deliberately do not choose a more recent example, although with the rapid pace of modern science, many things change quickly and older research is easily overtaken by later research. I deliberately choose not to choose a more recent example, which could also be done; instead, I choose the distinguished brain researcher and psychiatrist Meynert, because I would like to take as my starting point what he had to say about the relationship between the brain and the life of the soul based on his brain research. Meynert is very knowledgeable about the human brain and the human nervous system in both healthy and diseased states. His writings, which set the tone in his field at the end of the nineteenth century, must command the greatest respect from anyone who becomes familiar with them. Not only for the purely positive research, but also for what such a man has to say on the subject. And this must be emphasized: when people who have easily acquired some kind of spiritual-scientific world view, without knowing anything, without ever having looked through a microscope or a telescope or without having done something that would even remotely give them the opportunity to get an idea of this miraculous structure of the human brain, for example, when such people speak of the baseness of materialism, then one can understand, on the other hand, with the conscientiousness of the research and the care of the methods, that one does not want to get involved at all with what is being said from the apparent spiritual-scientific side. When someone like Meynert studies the brain, he first finds that the outer layer of the brain consists of a billion cells in a highly complex way — Meynert estimates that there are about a billion of them —, all working together work into each other, sending their extensions to the most diverse parts of the human body, sending their extensions into the sensory organs, where they become sensory nerves, sending their extensions to the organs of movement, and so on. To such a brain researcher it then becomes apparent how connecting fibers lead from one fiber system to the other, and he then comes to the conclusion that what the human being experiences as a world of ideas, what separates and connects in concepts, in ideas, is separated and connected when the external world makes an impression through his sense organs, is absorbed and processed by the brain, and that it produces what are called soul phenomena from the way it is processed. When even philosophers come and say: Yes, but the phenomena of the soul are something quite different from movements of the brain, from some processes in the brain, — when even philosophers come and speak like that, then it must be said against it that what arises out of the brain as the life of the soul for such a researcher does not arise in a more marvelous way than, let us say, a clock, for example, in which one does not assume that a special soul-being lives inside it and gives the time; or, let us say, a magnet that attracts a body out of its purely physical powers. What there proves to be active as a magnetic field around the physical body – why, if we understand it in terms of greater complications, should that not be born out of the brain, the human soul life? In short, we must on no account belittle what comes from this side. Under no circumstances may we deny its justification without going into the matter in greater detail. One can scoff at the idea that this brain, by unwinding its processes, is supposed to produce the most complicated mental life, but one can equally find in nature an abundance of such processes, where one will not a priori speak of an underlying mental life. Not by starting from preconceived opinions, but by also engaging with what is justified in the minds of those who have difficulty in approaching spiritual research. Only in this way, I would say, can order and harmony be created in the confused minds of worldviews.

Thus there is no reason why that which is understood in the ordinary sense of life as the life of the soul should not be produced by a mere mechanical process, in so far as it takes place in the mechanics of the brain and nervous system. The nervous system and the brain can be so intricately arranged that the unrolling of its processes results in the soul life of man. Therefore, no one who merely has a naturalistic way of looking at things will be able to dispute the legitimacy of a scientific, materialistic world view. And it must be said that precisely because natural science has achieved such perfection and such a justified ideal in its field, it is actually difficult for spiritual science today to confront natural science, for the simple reason that the spiritual scientist must have the ability and capacity to fully recognize the justified things that come from this side. But for that reason it must be emphasized again and again that a mere composition of what is derived from the observation of nature, even if it extends to our own human life, can never, never be used to create a spiritual world view. If we want to get to the life of the soul, then this life of the soul must be experienced in itself, then this life of the soul must not flow from external processes, then one must not say that the brain cannot produce the soul processes of its own accord, but one must experience the soul processes.

In a certain area, everyone can experience the soul independently of the brain processes. This is in the moral area, in the area of the moral life. And here it is clear from the outset that what shines forth to man as moral impulses cannot result from any unwinding of mere brain processes. But I say explicitly: what can arise in man as moral impulses, insofar as the will, insofar as feeling is at work in them, insofar as the moral is experienced. So in this area, where the soul must grasp itself in its immediacy, everyone can come to realize that the soul has a life of its own, independent of the body. However, not everyone has the ability to add to this inner grasping, to this inner strengthening of the soul in the moral life, what Goethe, for example, added in the essay on 'Contemplative Judgment' mentioned yesterday, but also in many other places in his works. Not everyone can say, as Goethe did from the depths of his inner experience: If, in the moral world, we can rise to impulses that work independently of the body, then why should this soul not be able, with regard to other spiritual things, as Goethe says in contrast to Kant, to “bravely endure the adventure of reason” — as Kant called all going beyond sensory perceptions? That means not only to proceed to a spiritual-soul life by inwardly experiencing how moral impulses arise from the depths of the soul, and not from the life of the brain, but also to have other spiritual experiences that testify to the soul's spiritual perception with spiritual organs, just as we perceive the sensual with sensual organs. But for this to happen, the ordinary life in the world, to which one passively devotes oneself, must be supplemented by another, a life of inner activity. And this is what is lost today for many who have become accustomed to having the truth dictated to them from somewhere. They want something that appears from outside, something that can be based on solid ground, rather than inner experience. What is experienced in the soul itself seems to them to be something that is arbitrarily formed within, not firmly supported by anything. What should be true should be firmly based on what is externally established, to whose existence one has contributed nothing oneself.

This is indeed the right way to think in the field of natural science. Into the study of nature one will only bring all kinds of useless stuff if one adds all kinds of fantasy products to what the external senses offer and what one can get from the observed external sense material through the experiment or through the method. On the ground of natural science, this is fully justified. But we will see shortly how little it is justified on the ground of spiritual research. But even if one engages with the justified aspects of the scientific world view, one can see how it becomes weak through this unaccustomed effort of inner self-exploration, how it becomes weak when it is supposed to perform an activity that is indispensable if one wants to make even a little progress in spiritual science. To advance in spiritual science, it is not necessary to do all kinds of nebulous things, to train oneself to have certain clairvoyant experiences in the ordinary sense of the word, through hallucinations, through visions and so on — that is not the first thing, nor is it the last; that has already been discussed in the lecture on 'Healthy Soul Life and Spirit Research'. But what is indispensable if one is to arrive at a deeper understanding — I do not want to say, at becoming a justified follower — of spiritual science, that is a thinking that has been worked through, a really worked through thinking. And the cultivation of thinking suffers to a great extent from the fact that one has become accustomed to observing only the form of appearance. Outwardly, in the sensual world, in external observation or in experiment, one abandons oneself to what external nature expresses, and in this field one represents what experiment says. One does not dare — and yet one is right in this area — to say anything as a summarizing law that is not dictated from outside. But the inner activity of the soul suffers from this. Man gets used to becoming passive; man gets used to trusting only what is, as it were, interpreted and revealed to him from outside. And seeking truth through an inner effort, through an inner activity, that falls completely out of his soul habit. But it is necessary above all when one enters spiritual science that thinking is worked out, that thinking is so worked out that nothing escapes one of certain lightly-donned objections that can be made, that above all, that one foresees what objections can be made; that one makes these objections oneself in order to gain a higher point of view, which, taking the objections into account, would find the truth. I would like to draw your attention to one example, as an example among hundreds and thousands that could almost be suggested by Meynert. The reason I do this is because I was just allowed to mention to you that I consider Meynert to be an excellent researcher, so that it cannot be said that I am somehow belittling people here. When it comes to refutation, I do not choose people whom I hold in low esteem, but precisely people whom I hold in the highest esteem.

In this way, we encounter Meynert, for example, in how he conceives of the formation of the perception of space and time in man. Meynert says: Let us suppose – and this example is particularly relevant to us now – that I listen to a speaker. I will gain the idea that his words are spoken little by little, in time. How does this idea arise, Meynert asks, that one has the notion that words are spoken little by little, in time? Well, you can imagine that Meynert is talking about all of you who understand my words in such a way that they appear to you bit by bit, in time. Then he says: Yes, this time only arises through the brain's perception; that we think of one word after the other, that only arises through the brain's perception. The words come to us, they come to our sense organs, they go from these sense organs in a further effect to the brain. The brain has certain internal organs through which it processes the sensory impressions. And there arises - internally - through certain organs the conception of time. The conception of time is thus created there. And so all perceptions are created from the brain.

That Meynert does not just mean something subordinate can be seen from a certain remark in his lecture “On the Mechanics of the Brain Structure,” where he talks about the relationship between the outside world and the human being. He says that the ordinary, naive person assumes that the outside world is as he creates it in his brain. Meynert says: “The daring hypothesis of realism is that the world that appears to the brain would also exist before or after the existence of brains.” However, the structure of the brain, which is capable of consciousness, which allows the same to be considered responsible for shaping the world, leads to the negation of this hypothesis. That is to say: the brain constructs the world. The world as man imagines it, as he has it before him as his sensory world, is created by processes of the brain, from within. And so man not only creates the images, but he also creates space, time, infinity. For all this, Meynert says, certain mechanisms of the brain exist. From this, man creates, for example, time.

It is a pity that in such lectures, which of course have to be short, one cannot always go into all the individual transitions of these thoughts. That is why some things may appear opaque. But the actual crux of such a way of thinking will be apparent. It must be said that as soon as one is on the way to regarding the brain as the creator of the soul-life as it is found in man in the beginning, then what Meynert says is entirely justified. It lies on this path; one must arrive at it. And one can only avoid such a conclusion if one has a thinking process so well developed that the often very simple counter-arguments immediately come to mind. Just think what the conclusion would be if Meynert's argument were correct: you are all sitting there, listening to what I am saying. Your brain organizes what I say in time. Not only does your auditory nerve convert it into auditory images, but what I say is organized in time. So you all have a kind of dream image of what is being spoken here, including, of course, the person standing in front of you. As for what is behind it, naive realism, says Meynert, assumes that there stands a man like yourselves who speaks all this. But there is no compulsion here; for this man with his words, you create him in your brain; there may be something quite different behind it.

The simple thought that must impose itself, that it also depends on the fact that, for example, I now arrange my ideas in time myself, so that time does not just live in your brain with you, but that time already lives in it, as I place one word after the other – this easily attainable thought does not come at all if you drill in a certain direction. That time has an object, that it lives out there, can be easily seen in the case I have mentioned. But once you are in a certain direction of thought, you do not see left or right, but continue in your direction and arrive at extremely sharp and highly remarkable results. But that is not the point. All the ingenious results that may arise in the course of such a train of thought can be strictly proved, the proofs may strictly interlock. You will never find a mistake in Meynert's thinking if you go on in his stream. But what matters is that thinking is so thoroughly worked through that the counter-arguments can be dealt with, that thinking finds out of itself what throws the whole stream out of its bed. And this, to make thinking so mobile, so active, is precisely what prevents the very justified immersion in the external world, as science must strive for. Therefore, as you can see, this is not a subjective difficulty, but a very objective one, due to the times. This can be experienced in all possible fields.

For more than a hundred years, philosophers have been gnawing away at the old Kantian word with which he wants to unhinge the concept of God. If you merely think of a hundred dollars, they are not a single dollar less than a hundred real dollars. A hundred thought, a hundred possible dollars are exactly the same as a hundred real dollars! On this, that conceptually, mentally, a hundred possible dollars contain everything that a hundred real dollars contain, Kant builds his entire refutation of the so-called ontological proof of God's existence. Now, anyone with agile thought will immediately come up with the most definite objection: for someone with agile thought, with developed thought, a hundred imaginary thalers are, in fact, exactly one hundred thalers less than a hundred real thalers! They are exactly one hundred thalers less. The point is to be made aware of how one has to think, not just that what one thinks can be logically proved. Of course, Kant's fabric of ideas is so firmly supported that only with the utmost acumen can logical errors be detected in it. But what matters is not just to have in mind what arises within certain habitual currents of thought, but to have thought worked out so that one's thinking is truly within the objective world, so that one's thinking is not just within oneself but within the objective world, so that the counter-instances flow to one from the objective world itself. Only a mature thinking can achieve such counter-instances, and only through this does one's thinking acquire a certain affinity with the thinking that objectively pulses and permeates the world.

I said that it is important to grasp the soul in action, so to speak. What is really at issue is that when man wants to grasp the soul, he does not merely draw conclusions based on the fact that it is impossible to develop soul life from the brain and its processes; rather, this soul life must be experienced directly, independently of brain life. Then one can speak of soul life. Today, people look at this inner active experience as if something were being built up inwardly only in the imagination, whereas the true soul researcher knows exactly where imagination ends and where, through the development of one's own soul life, where he does not spin out of fantasy, but where he has connected with the spiritual world and draws from the spiritual world itself that which he then expresses in words or concepts or ideas or images. Only in this way will the soul be able to gain knowledge of itself.

I will now have to develop what appears to be a rather paradoxical view, but a view that must be expressed because it can really shed light on the nature of spiritual research. From what I have said before, you can already see that the spiritual researcher is not at all averse to the idea that the brain produces certain ideas from within itself, so that the soul life that can arise without inner participation can really only be a product of the brain. And a certain habit, which has arisen precisely through the formation of the present, consists in the following: For the reasons indicated, a person becomes averse to seeking anything that he is to consider true through inner activity. He condemns all of this as fantasy or reverie, and then he brings it not only theoretically in his views, but practically to the point that he really excludes what the soul works out in itself, that he excludes it as much as possible in his work towards a world view. When one excludes the life of the soul in this way, the ideal that emerges is the picture of the materialistic world view. What does one actually do when one excludes this inner life? Yes, when one excludes this inner life, it is roughly the same as when one releases one's bodily-physical life from the life of the soul. Just as the watchmaker who has worked on the watch, who has worked his thoughts into it, leaves the watch to itself when it is finished and the watch itself then produces the phenomena that were first placed into it by the watchmaker's thoughts, so the life of the soul can indeed continue, continue in the brain, without the soul being present. And with the present system of education, people are becoming accustomed to this. They not only become accustomed to denying the soul, but actually to eliminating the soul; in short, not to respond to it through inner activity, but to rest on the laurels of what is merely produced by the brain. And the paradox that I want to say is that the purely materialistic world view, as it appears, is in fact a brain product, that it is in fact automatically generated by the self-movement of the brain. The external world is reflected in the brain, which passively sets the brain in motion, and this materialist world view arises. The strange thing is that the materialist is quite right for himself if he has first eliminated the soul life. Because he has taken pure brain-life as his basis, nothing else can appear to him but pure brain-life, which then produces soul-life out of itself, as roughly formulated by the naturalist Carl Vogt: the brain sweats out thoughts, just as the liver sweats out bile. Those thoughts that arise in the field of materialism are indeed sweated out. The image is crude, but they do indeed arise from the brain, just as bile comes out of the liver. This is how errors arise. Errors do not arise simply from saying something wrong, but from saying something right that is valid in a limited field, that is even valid in the only field one wants to have.

The materialistic world view comes not from a logical error, but from the tendency of the mind not to exert itself intellectually, not to deepen its thinking, as has been explained here in the last lectures, not to stir up its inner soul life, but to abandon itself to what the body can do. The materialistic world view does not come from a logical error, but from the tendency of the mind not to be inwardly active at all, but to abandon itself to what the body says. This is the secret of the difficulty in refuting materialism. If someone who does not want to engage his soul life excludes activity from the outset and basically finds it more comfortable to produce only what a brain produces, then it is not surprising that he gets stuck in the realm of materialism. He cannot accept, however, that this brain itself — thank God he has it, because he would not be able to create it with all his materialistic world view! — that this brain itself is created out of the wisdom of the world and that it, because it is created, built up out of the wisdom of the world, is so arranged that it in turn can work like a clock; so that it can be entirely material and produce through itself. This wisdom is a kind of phosphorescence, a phosphorescence that is in the brain itself; it brings out what has already been put into it spiritually. But the materialist does not need to concern himself with this, but simply leaves to what has condensed out of the spiritual, I might say into matter, and which now, as with the work of the clock, produces spiritual products.

You see, the spiritual researcher is so grounded in the justified view of nature that he is compelled to utter something that might seem as paradoxical to some people as what has just been said. But you can see from this that one must already go into the nerve of spiritual science if one wants to judge this spiritual science. And it is also understandable to find, because what can be said again is so well founded, - it is also understandable that so many objections and misunderstandings arise. Spiritual research that is taken seriously is all too easily confused with all that is done in a dilettante manner and which can very easily be mistaken for true, thorough spiritual research. I have often been reproached for the fact that the writings I have written on spiritual science are not popular enough, as they say; that the lectures I give here are not popular enough. Well, I neither write my writings nor give my lectures in order to please anyone, to speak to anyone's heart as they want it to be; but I write my writings and give my lectures as I believe they should be written and given so that spiritual science can be presented to the world in the right way. In older times there was also spiritual science - I have mentioned this often - although spiritual science had to change through the progress of humanity and at that time came from different sources than the spiritual science of today. From the outset, only those who were considered mature were admitted to the places where spiritual science was presented. Today, such an approach would be quite nonsensical. Today we live in public life, and it is taken for granted that what is being investigated is carried into public life, that all secrecy and the like would be foolish. This secrecy cannot be any more than what is otherwise present in public life today: that those who have already studied something are then offered the opportunity to hear something further in more detailed lectures. But that is also done at universities, and in the whole of external life. And when people talk about some kind of secretive behavior, it is just as unjustified and unfounded as when people talk about secretive behavior in university lectures. But so that not everyone who does not want to make an effort to penetrate the subject can penetrate it in so-called popular writings that are so easy on the eye, or rather believe they can penetrate it, the writings are written and the lectures are held in such a way that some effort is necessary and some thought must be applied on the way into the secret science. I am fully aware of how prickly and scientific some of the things I present are for those who do not want such prickly science. But it must be so, if spiritual science is to be properly integrated into the spiritual culture of the present time. It is not surprising that when people here and there, in small or large groups, devote themselves to spiritual science without having any knowledge of the progress of science in our time and with a desire to speak with a certain authority, they are denounced by scientists. Something special, something significant must be seen in the form in which the messages are given. This must be seen in that inner activity, activity of the soul, is necessary in order to see how the soul itself lives as something that uses the body as an instrument, but that is not the same as the physical.

Now, if we look at all this correctly, where do the misunderstandings come from? When the soul develops, when it develops the forces slumbering within it, as has been explained here several times, then the first of these slumbering forces is the power of thought, which must be developed in the way that has just been indicated again. If the soul wants to develop the forces lying dormant in it, it needs a certain inner strength, a certain inner power. It must exert itself inwardly. This is not what people like under the influence of the present time, this inward exertion. Artists are the ones who like it most. But even in the field of art, people have now progressed so far that they would rather just copy nature, having no idea that the soul must first strengthen itself inwardly, must first work inwardly to add something special and new to mere nature. So the power of thinking is the first thing that must be strengthened. Then, as the lectures of the last few weeks have shown, feeling and will must also be energized. And this energizing, that is what it is actually called, that one says: Yes, everything in this spiritual science arises only in an inward way. People shy away from the idea of acquiring strength through something inward, and they do not even consider the considerable difference that must exist between the perception of external nature and the perception of the spiritual world.

Let us take a good, hard look at this difference. What difference arises? With regard to external nature, our organs are already given to us. The eye is given to us. But Goethe has now spoken the beautiful word: “If the eye were not solar, how could we see the light?” As true as it is that you would not hear me if I did not speak, that you must first come to me with your listening in order to understand what is being said, so true is it for Goethe that the eye arose from sunlight itself, light itself, albeit indirectly through all kinds of hereditary and complicated natural processes, the eye has arisen, that the eye not only creates light in the Schopenhauerian sense, but that it itself is created by light. That is to be firmly held. But one could say: thank God for those who want to be materialistic: they no longer need to create their eyes, because these eyes are created out of the spiritual; they already have them, and by perceiving the world, they use these already finished eyes. They direct these eyes towards external impressions, and the external impressions are reflected; with the whole soul they are reflected in the sense organs. Let us assume that a human being could only experience the development of the eye with his present consciousness. Let us assume that. Let us assume that a human being enters nature as a child, with only the predisposition for the eyes. The eyes would have to arise through the influence of sunlight. What would take place in the growth of the human being? The result would be that through the sunbeams, which are not yet visible themselves, the eyes would be brought out of the organization, and by sensing: I have eyes, he senses light in the eye. By knowing the eye as his, as his organization, he senses the eye living in the light. In this way, it is basically the same with sense perception today: the human being experiences himself by experiencing in the light. With his eye in the light, he experiences what has been developed through sense perception, where, as I said, thank God, we already have our eyes.

But this must also be the case with spiritual research. There must really be brought out of the still unformed soul the organic, there must first be brought out spiritual hearing, spiritual seeing. The organic, the spiritual eye, the spiritual ear, as it were, must first be brought out of the inner being, to use these expressions of Goethe's again and again. There one must really feel one's way in the spiritual world by developing one's soul, and then, by feeling one's way in it, one forms the organs, and in the organs one experiences the spiritual world just as one experiences the physical-sensual world in the organs of the physical body. So first of all that which man already has here for sense perception must be created. He must have the power to create the organs first in order to experience himself in the spiritual world through these organs.

What stands in the way of this is what can truly be called nothing more than the inner weakness of the human being that has been produced by today's education. Weakness, that is what holds man back from taking hold of his inner being in the same way that one takes hold of something with one's hands. It is a foolish expression to say, but let us say it, to take hold of one's inner being in such a way that it is really active inwardly, as it would be if one first created hands to touch the table. So he creates his inner being to touch what is spiritual, and with the spiritual he touches spiritual. It is weakness, then, that keeps men from penetrating to real spiritual research. And it is weakness that gives rise to the misunderstandings that stand in the way of spiritual research: inward weakness of soul, an inability to see the possibility of reshaping the inwardly material into inwardly spiritual organs in order to grasp the spiritual world (because we still have traces of Faustism). That is one thing.

And there is a second point, which can be understood if one is willing to do so: Man always has a strange feeling about the unknown; above all, he has a feeling of fear about the unknown. Now, in the beginning, everything that can be experienced in the world of the senses is a complete unknown, which cannot only be explored in the spiritual world, but about which one must also speak when speaking of the spiritual world. One has a fear of the spiritual world, but a fear of a very special kind, namely a fear that does not come to consciousness. And how does the materialistic, the mechanistic, the, as one says today, “educated” — materialistic it is, after all! — monistic world view arise? It arises from the fact that there is fear in the soul of that breakthrough of sensuality, because one is afraid precisely of the fact that if one breaks through to the spiritual through sensuality, one comes into the unknown, into nothingness, as Mephistopheles says to Faust. And Faust says: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” Fear of what can only be sensed as the nothing, but a masked fear, fear that wears a mask! It is necessary to realize that there are subconscious or unconscious soul processes, soul processes that proliferate down there in the soul life. It is remarkable how people deceive themselves about many things. For example, it is a very common delusion to believe that one does not really want something out of a very thick selfishness, but one wants it out of selfishness. Instead, one invents all sorts of excuses about how selflessly, how lovingly one wants to do this or that. In this way, a mask is placed over the egoism. This occurs particularly often, for example, in societies that come together to cultivate love. Yes, one can even make studies about such masking of egoism quite often. I knew a man who repeatedly stated that what he was doing, he was doing entirely against his actual intention and against what he loves; he was only doing it because he considered it necessary for the good of humanity. I kept saying: Don't fool yourself! You are doing it out of your own selfishness, because you like it, and then it is better to admit the truth. Then you are on the ground of truth when you admit that you like the things you want to do and do not keep any such mask.

Fear is what leads to the rejection of spiritual science today. But this fear is not admitted. They have it in their soul, but they do not let it up into their consciousness and invent reasons, reasons against spiritual science, proofs that man must immediately begin to fantasize when he leaves the solid ground of sensual observation and so on. Yes, they invent very complicated proofs. They set up entire philosophies, which in turn can be logically incontestable. They invent entire philosophical worldviews that actually mean nothing more to those who have insight into such things than that everything they invent – be it transcendental realism, empiricist realism, be it more or less speculative realism, metaphysical realism, and whatever these “isms” are called – arises from fear. These “isms” are invented and worked out from very strict lines of thought. But at bottom they are nothing more than the fear of setting the soul on the path that leads to experiencing in its concreteness what one feels to be the unknown. These are the two main reasons for the misunderstanding of spiritual science: weakness of the soul life, fear of the supposed unknown. And anyone who understands the human soul can analyze today's worldviews in terms of it. On the one hand, they arise from the impossibility of strengthening thinking itself in such a way that the counter-instances immediately reach it, and on the other hand, there is the fear of the unknown. Sometimes, because of the fear of penetrating into the so-called unknown, one even lets the unknown be unknown, and many say: Yes, we admit: behind the world of the senses there is still a spiritual world, but man – we can prove this strictly – cannot penetrate into it. Most people then start, when they want to prove something, with the words, “Kant already said,” because they always assume that the person to whom they say, “Kant already said,” does not understand anything about Kant. So people invent proofs that the human mind cannot penetrate into the world that lies behind sensuality. These are only excuses, however ingenious they may be, excuses for fear. But they do assume that there is something behind sensuality. They call this the unknown and prefer to found an agnosticism in Spencer's sense or in some other sense, rather than find the courage to really lead their soul into the spiritual world. |

Recently, a strange Weltanschhauung has come into being, the so-called Weltanschhauung of the “as if.” It has even been transplanted into Germany. Hans Vaihinger has written a thick book about the Weltanschhauung of the “as if.” In this philosophy of life, one says: Man cannot say that such concepts as the unity of his consciousness really correspond to reality, but man must look at the phenomena of the world as if there were a unified soul, as if there were something at the basis of it all that is conceived as a unified soul. Atoms – the as-if philosophers cannot deny that no one has ever seen an atom and that one must think of the atom in such a way that it cannot be seen, because even light is only supposed to arise through the vibrations of the atom. At least the as-if philosophers do not speak of the fable of the atomic world that still haunts this or that corner. But they say: Well, it just makes it easier to understand the sensory world if we think of the sensory world as if atoms existed.

Those who have an active soul life will notice the difference between moving with their active soul life in a spiritual reality, in the unified soul weaving, or merely asserting a concept in external, intellectual realism, as if the phenomena of human activity were summarized by a soul being. At least if one really stands on the practical ground of world-views, one will not be able to apply the as-if philosophy well. For example, a philosopher who is highly esteemed today is Fritz Mauthner, who is regarded as a great authority because he has finally transcended Kantianism. Whereas Kant still conceived of concepts as something with which reality is summarized, Mauthner sees language merely as that in which the world view is actually concluded. And so he has now happily brought about his “Critique of Language” and written a thick “Philosophical Dictionary” from this point of view, and above all acquired a following that regards him as a great man. Well, I do not want to go into Fritz Mauthner today, I just want to say: one could now try to apply the as-if philosophy to this Fritz Mauthner. One could say: let's leave it open whether the man has spirit, has genius, but let's look at what he is spiritually as if he had spirit. You will see, if you go about it sincerely, that you will not succeed. The 'as if' cannot be applied where the thing does not exist.

In short, it is necessary, to say it once more, to get to the root of spiritual science itself and that one knows precisely in spiritual science what this spiritual science must recognize as justified on the ground on which misunderstandings can arise. For, however much these misunderstandings are misunderstandings on the one hand, it is equally true on the other hand that these misunderstandings are nevertheless justified if the spiritual scientist is not fully able to think along with what the natural scientist is thinking. The spiritual researcher must be able to think along with the natural scientist. Indeed, he must even be able to test the natural scientist at times, especially those who always emphasize standing on the firm ground of natural science. Admittedly, even if one only tests it superficially, as it stands with an apparently purely positivistic world view, which rejects everything spiritual, then the following becomes apparent. As you know, I do not underestimate Ernst Haeckel where the esteem is justified; I fully recognize him. But when he speaks of Weltanschauung, it is precisely in this that his weakness of soul reveals itself, which is not capable of pursuing anything but the one path he has taken. And here we come upon an example that must be emphasized again and again when one is seriously concerned with the present time. We come upon the infinitely widespread superficiality of thinking and the general dishonesty of life. For example, we see how Ernst Haeckel points out that one of the greatest authorities to which he himself refers is Karl Ernst von Baer. And again and again we find Karl Ernst von Baer cited as a man who is supposed to prove the purely materialistic world view that Haeckel derives from his research. How many people go to gain insight into what is actually behind today's scientific endeavor? How many people go and touch something like this? How many people stop to consider that Haeckel writes: Karl Ernst von Baer can be seen as someone who speaks in the way that Haeckel derives from it! So one naturally believes that Baer speaks in the way that Haeckel can derive from it. Well, I will read you a few passages from Karl Ernst von Baer: “The earth is only the seedbed on which the spiritual heritage of man proliferates, and the history of nature is not only the history of progressive victories of the spiritual over matter. That is the fundamental idea of Creation, to the end of which, no, for its accomplishment, it causes individuals and generations to fade away and builds the future on the scaffolding of an immeasurable past.

Haeckel constantly cites this wonderful, spiritual view of the world! We must pursue scientific development. If only this were the case to some extent today with those who want to be called to it, one would not have to struggle so terribly against the superficiality that produces the countless prejudices and errors that then stand in the way of such a pursuit as spiritual science as misunderstandings.

Or let us take a look at an honorable man in the nineteenth-century quest for a worldview: David Friedrich Strauß, an honorable man – they are all honorable, after all! Starting from other views, he ultimately wants to place himself entirely on the ground: The soul is only a product of the material. Man has emerged entirely from what today's materialism wants to call nature. When one speaks of will, there is no real will, but rather brain molecules somehow revolve, and then the will arises as a haze. In this context, David Friedrich Strauss says: “In man, nature has not only wanted upwards in general, it has wanted beyond itself.” That is: nature wills! One has arrived at the point where one can be a materialist without even taking his words seriously. Man is denied the will because man is supposed to be like nature, and then one says: that nature has willed. One can easily pass over such a matter. But anyone who is serious about striving for a worldview will realize that such things are the source of countless aberrations and that these things are instilled into the public consciousness. And from what then arises from this instillation, misunderstandings arise regarding true spiritual science and true spiritual research.

And from the other side come the objections of those who profess this or that religious creed and believe that their religion is endangered by the coming of a spiritual science. I must emphasize again and again: it is the very same people who opposed Copernicus, Galileo and so on, who objected that religion would be endangered if it were to be proposed that the earth moves around the sun. One can only say to these people: how timid you actually are within your religions! How little you have grasped your religion if you are immediately afraid that your religion could be endangered if anything is researched! I always have to mention that theologian, who remained a good theologian and a devout follower of his church, who was a friend of mine, who was then elected rector of the University of Vienna in the 1990s and who, in his speech, which he gave about Galileo, said: “There were once people – we know that within a certain religious community these people existed until 1822, when it was allowed to believe in the Copernican world view! – there were once people who believed that something like the Copernican or Galilean world view could endanger religions. Today we have to be so far, said this theologian, this devout priest and follower of his church until his deathbed, that we find religion in particular to be deepened, strengthened by the fact that we look into the glory of the works of the Divine, that we learn to recognize them more and more. That was Christian talk!

But more and more people will emerge who say: Yes, this spiritual science says this or that about Christ; one should not say that. We imagine the Christ to be like this or like that. One can even come and tell these people: We do indeed accept what you say about the Christ, exactly as you say it. We just see a little more. We do not see this Christ as just a being, as you do, but as a Being, even as a cosmic Being, who gives the earth meaning and significance in the whole universe. But you are not allowed to do that. You are not allowed to go beyond what certain people see as the right thing. Spiritual science provides insights. Through the realization of the truth, one can never want to somehow justify something that is called a religious creation, even though there will always be fools who say of spiritual science that it wants to found a new religion. Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion. Religions are founded in a completely different way. Christianity was founded by its founder through the Christ Jesus living on earth. And just as little as any science will explain the Thirty Years War when it recognizes it, so it will explain just as little anything else that was there in reality. Religions are based on facts, on facts that have happened. Spiritual science can only claim to understand these facts differently, or perhaps not even differently, but only in a higher sense than one can without spiritual science. But it is equally true that, whether from a high or a low point of view, by understanding the Thirty Years' War, one does not somehow establish something in the world that is connected with the Thirty Years' War. It is always the superficiality that sometimes also feels limited in its perceptions and does not want to engage with the things that are actually at stake. If one were to engage with spiritual science, one would recognize that although the materialistic worldview may easily lead people away from religious feeling and religious contemplation, spiritual science establishes precisely that in man which can be a deeper religious experience, but only because it lays bare the deeper roots of the soul and thus leads man in a deeper way to an experience of that which has emerged externally and historically as religion. Spiritual science will not found a new religion. It knows only too well that Christianity once gave meaning to the earth. It will only try to deepen this Christianity more than others who do not stand on the ground of spiritual science can deepen it. From materialism, however, something like this has been achieved, as, for example, David Friedrich Strauß concluded, who calls the belief in resurrection a humbug and then says: The resurrection had to be put forward, because Christ Jesus said many noble things, said many truths. But if you say truths, says David Friedrich Strauß, you do not make a special impression on people; you have to embellish it with a great miracle, the miracle of the resurrection. But then all Christian development would be a result of humbug! That, indeed, is what materialism has brought. Spiritual science will not do that! Spiritual science will try to understand from its very foundations that which lives in the mystery of resurrection, in order to present to mankind, which has now advanced and can no longer understand it in the old way, that which materialism has called a humbug, in the right way. But the aim here is not to engage in religious propaganda, but only to draw attention to the significance of spiritual science and to the misunderstandings that stand in its way and that stem from an assumed religious life.

Today, people have not yet reached the point where materialism would have a bad moral result on a large scale, but it would soon have it if people could not penetrate the spiritual self-active foundations of the soul life through spiritual science. Spiritual science will also mean something for what humanity needs as a moral life, which can give people a rebirth at a higher level of this moral life.

These things can only be characterized in general terms. Time does not permit a detailed description. I have tried to at least characterize some of the misunderstandings that are repeatedly found when spiritual science is judged. I would never want to engage with what arises from the general superficiality of our time, at least not in the sense of refuting anything. Sometimes one could at most engage with it in the sense of providing a little material to make people smile or perhaps even laugh.

As I said, one cannot engage with the kind of superficiality that is spreading today and that is, in a sense, setting the tone because printing ink on white paper still has a great magical effect. But insofar as the objections that are made, even if they say nothing at all, are instilled into the public, one must speak of them. And the misunderstandings that arise from what comes out of such instilling are what one has to struggle with at every turn today if one takes something like spiritual science seriously. Again and again one encounters objections that do not arise from some activity of the soul, but are instilled by the general superficiality that reigns and lives in our time. But anyone who is familiar with spiritual science knows, as I have often explained here, that this spiritual science must and will develop in the same way as everything that, in a sense, must incorporate something new into the spiritual development of humanity. From a certain point of view, such an encounter was granted to the newer natural scientific world view until it became powerful and could work through external power factors and no longer needed to work merely through its own power. Then the time comes when, even without the soul being activated, world views can be built on such factors that have power. Is there a big difference between two things? Those who today base their monistic world-views on many grounds consider themselves wonderfully exalted, sublimely above those who may stand on the ground of a religious-theological world-view and, in the opinion of the former, are quite dogmatically limited, swearing only by authority. For anyone who looks into the way in which misunderstandings arise, it is of no great merit in terms of what the human soul really works for, whether one swears by the church fathers Gregory, Tertullian , Irenaeus or Augustine, and also look upon them as authorities, or whether one looks upon the church fathers Darwin, Haeckel, Helmholtz, insofar as they are really church fathers, and swears by them. What matters first is not whether one swears by one or the other, but what matters is how one stands in the process of acquiring a world view. And in a higher sense, in a much higher sense than mere abstract idealism could, the following will apply to spiritual science: at first it will be met with misunderstanding and error everywhere; but then what at first appeared as fantasy, as reverie, will become a matter of course. This is how it was with Copernicanism and Keplerism, and how it is with everything that is to be incorporated into the spiritual development of mankind. At first it is nonsense, then it becomes a matter of course. This is also the fate of spiritual science.

But this spiritual science has something important to say to humanity, as can be seen from everything I have said in other lectures and will probably also emerge from today's lecture. It has something to say to humanity that points to the living entity that makes a human being a human being in the first place: it does not present itself to him for passive contemplation, does not reveal itself to him from the outside, but he must grasp it himself in a living way, he can only recognize its existence through his own activity. We must overcome the weakness that regards everything as fantasy whose existence cannot be grasped in passive surrender, but only in active inner cooperation with the whole of the world. Only when he realizes that knowledge of it can only become his if it becomes active knowledge will man know what he is and what his destiny is. The spirit already has the strength to struggle through, and it will struggle through against all misunderstandings that are justified in the sense intended today, and all the more so against those that arise from the superficiality of the time. For it is a beautiful saying, which Goethe claims is in harmony, as he himself says, with an ancient sage:

If the eye were not solar,
How could we behold the light?
If the god-own power were not in us,
How could we delight in the divine?

The divine spiritual essence that weaves and lives through the world is that from which we originated, emerged. Our material world is also born of the spiritual. And only because it is already born and man does not need to produce it in his own activity, does man, if he is a materialist, believe in it one-sidedly today. The spiritual must be grasped in living activity. The divine spiritual must first weave itself into the human being, the spiritual sun must first create its organs in the human being. Thus one could modify Goethe's saying by saying: If the inner eye does not become spirit-like, it can never behold the light that is the essence of the human being. If the human soul cannot unite with that from which it has come from eternity to eternity, with the Divine-Spiritual, which is one being with its own being, then she will be unable to grasp the glimpse of light into the spiritual, then the spiritual eye will not be able to arise in her, then she will never be able to delight in the Divine in the spiritual sense, then the world will be empty and barren for human knowledge. For we can only find that in the world for which we create the organs for.

If the outer physical eye were not sun-like, how could we behold the light? If the inner eye does not become spirit-sun-like, we can never behold the spiritual light of the human entity. If man's own inner activity does not become truly spiritual and divine itself, then never can that which makes him a true human being, the spirit of the world, which lives, weaves and works through the world and comes to human consciousness in him, even if he does not come to God-consciousness, never can that come through his soul's pulsations.

On March 23 and 24, I will speak here again, tying in with Nietzsche's tragic world view with Wagner and about some more intimate, more precise truths that can lead the human soul to truly break through the world of the senses and enter into the living spiritual life. I will then speak in more detail about this path of the human soul into the spiritual world than has been possible so far.

Anyone who wishes to attach any value to the form of spiritual-scientific world view that I will be speaking about today and tomorrow will need to familiarize themselves with the peculiar contradiction inherent in the development of humanity, namely that a spiritual current, a spiritual impulse, can be eminently timely from a certain higher point of view, and that this timeliness is nevertheless at first sharply rejected by contemporaries, rejected in a way that one might say is thoroughly understandable.

The impulse for a new view of the universe of space, which Copernicus gave at the dawn of the new era, was timely from the point of view that the development of humanity at the time of Copernicus made it necessary for this impulse to come. This impulse proved to be quite untimely for a long time to come, in that it was opposed by all those who wanted to hold on to old habits of thought, to prejudices that were centuries and millennia old. To the followers of spiritual science, this spiritual scientific world view appears to be in keeping with the times, and it is out of date from the point of view of those who still judge it from that perspective. Nevertheless, I believe that in the course of today's and tomorrow's lecture I will be able to show that in the subconscious depths of the soul of contemporary humanity there exists something like a yearning for this spiritual-scientific world view and something like a hope lives for it:

As it presents itself at first, this spiritual science wants to be a genuine continuation of the scientific work of the spirit, as it has been done in the last centuries. And it would be quite wrong to believe that this spiritual science somehow developed opposition to the great triumphs, to the immense achievements and the far-sighted truths that natural scientific thinking of the last centuries has brought. On the contrary, what natural science was and is for the knowledge of the external world, that this spiritual science wants to be for the knowledge of the spiritual world. In this way, it could almost be called a child of the scientific way of thinking, although this will still be doubted in the broadest circles today.

In order to give an idea, not a proof, but initially an idea that should lead to understanding, the following is said about the relationship between the spiritual science meant here and the scientific world view: If we look at the great, powerful of the development of natural science knowledge in the last three to four centuries, we say that on the one hand it has brought immeasurable truths across the broad horizon of human knowledge, and on the other hand that this thinking has been incorporated into practical life. Everywhere we see the benefits of this in the fields of technology and commerce, which have been brought to us by the laws and insights of natural science that have been incorporated into practical life. If we now wish to form an idea of the attitude of spiritual science to these advances, we can begin by making a comparison. We can look at the farmer who cultivates his field and reaps the fruits of the field. The greater part of these fruits of the field are taken into human life and used for human sustenance; only a small part remains. This is used for the new sowing of the fruits. Only the latter part can be said to be allowed to follow the driving forces, the inner life and formative forces that lie in the sprouting grain, in the sprouting fruit itself. What is brought into the barns is mostly diverted from its own developmental progress, is, as it were, led into a side stream, used for human food, and does not directly continue what lies in the germs, what the own driving forces are.

Thus, the spiritual science referred to here appears to be more or less what natural science has brought in the way of knowledge in recent centuries. By far the greatest part of this has rightly been used to gain insight into external, sensual-spatial facts, and has been used for human benefit. But there is something left over in the human soul from the ideas that the study of nature has provided in recent centuries that is not used to understand this or that in the sensual world, that is not used to build machines or maintain industries, but that is brought to life so that it is preserved in its own right, like grain that is used for sowing again and allowed to follow its own laws of formation. man imbues himself with the wonderful fruits of knowledge that natural science has brought forth, when he allows this to live in his soul, when he has a feeling for asking: How can the life of the soul be illuminated and recognized through the concepts and ideas that natural science has provided? How can one live with these ideas? How can one use them to understand the main driving forces of human soul life? If the human soul has a feeling for raising these questions with the spiritual treasure acquired, not in theory but with the full wealth of soul life, then what can only now, in our time, when science has been cultivated on its own ground, so to speak, for a while, merge into human culture.

And in another respect too, this spiritual science can be called a child of the scientific way of thinking, only the spirit must be investigated in a different way from nature. Precisely if one wants to approach the spirit with the same certainty, method and scientific basis as natural science approaches nature, then one must transform scientific thinking and shape it in such a way that it becomes a suitable tool for the knowledge of the spirit. These lectures will share some insights into how this can be achieved. Especially when one is firmly grounded in natural science, one realizes that the means by which it works cannot be used to gain spiritual knowledge. Time and again, enlightened minds have spoken of the fact that, starting from the firm ground of natural science, man must recognize that his power of knowledge is limited. Natural science and Kantianism — to mention only these — have contributed to the belief that the cognitive powers of the human mind are limited, that man cannot penetrate through his knowledge into the regions where the source lies, to which the soul must feel connected; where man realizes that not only the forces that can be grasped by natural science are at work, but other forces as well. In this respect spiritual science completely agrees with natural science. Precisely for the cognitive abilities that natural science has magnified, and on which natural science must also stop as such, there is no possibility of penetrating into the spiritual realm.

But in the human soul lie dormant other cognitive faculties, cognitive faculties that cannot be used in everyday life and in the hustle and bustle of ordinary science, but that can be brought forth from this human soul and that, when they are brought forth, when they are, as it were, from the hidden depths of the human soul, then they make something different out of the person: they permeate him with a new kind of knowledge, with a kind of knowledge that can penetrate into areas that are closed to mere natural science. It is (I attach no special value to the expression, but it clarifies the matter) a kind of spiritual chemistry through which one can penetrate into the spiritual regions of existence, but a chemistry that only bears a similarity to external chemistry in terms of secure logic and methodical thinking: it is the chemistry of the human soul itself. And from this point of view, in order to make ourselves understood, I will say the following by way of comparison: when we have water before us, this water has certain properties. The chemist comes and shows that this water contains hydrogen and oxygen. Take hydrogen: it burns, it is gaseous, it is quite different from water. Would someone who knew nothing about chemistry ever be able to tell from looking at water that it contains hydrogen? Water is liquid, does not burn, and even extinguishes fire. Hydrogen burns, is a gas. In short, would someone be able to tell from looking at water that it contains hydrogen? Nevertheless, the chemist comes and separates the hydrogen from the water. Man can be compared to water as he appears in everyday life, as he appears to ordinary science. In him are united the physical and the bodily and the spiritual-soul. External science and the world view that is based on it are quite right when they say: Yes, this person standing before us cannot be seen to have a spiritual-soul within him; and it is understandable when a world view completely denies this soul-spiritual. But that is just as if one were to deny the nature of hydrogen.

However, there is a need for proof that the spiritual-soul can really be represented separately from the human being, separate from the physical body, in spiritual-soul chemistry. This can be. That there is such a spiritual-mental chemistry is what spiritual science has to say to mankind today, just as Copernicanism had to say to a surprised mankind that the earth does not stand still, but moves around the sun at a furious pace, but the sun stands still. And just as Copernican writings were on the Index until well into the 19th century, so too will the insights of spiritual science be on the Index of other worldviews for a long time to come. These are worldviews that cannot free themselves from centuries-old prejudices and habits of thought. And the fact that this spiritual science can already, to a certain extent, touch hearts and souls, that it is not exactly outside the search of our time, we have a small proof of this, which I do not want to boast about, but which may be mentioned as a testimony to, I would say, the hidden timeliness of spiritual science in souls. Are we indeed in a position, already in our time, to build a free school of spiritual science on free Swiss soil; and can we not see, through the understanding of the friends of this spiritual current, the emblem of the same in the new architectural style of the double-domed rotunda, which is to rise from Dornach's heights, near Basel, as a first external monument to what this spiritual science has to offer to modern culture? That this building is already being erected, that the forms of its domes are already rising above the rotunda, allows us today to speak of spiritual science with much more hope and inner satisfaction, despite all the opposition, despite all the lack of understanding that it encounters and must still encounter in wide circles.

What I have called spiritual chemistry is certainly not something that can be achieved through external methods that can be seen with the eyes and that are brought about by external actions. What can be called spiritual chemistry takes place only in the human soul itself, and the procedures are of an intimate soul-spiritual nature, procedures that do not leave the soul as it is in everyday life, but which affect this soul in such a way that it changes, that it becomes a completely different tool of knowledge than it usually is. And they are not some kind of, one might say, miraculous exercises, some exercises taken from superstition, which are thus applied in spiritual chemistry, but they are thoroughly inner, spiritual-soul exercises, which build on what is also present in everyday life: powers of the soul , which are always there, which we need in everyday life, but which, in this everyday life, I would say, are only used incidentally, but which must be increased immeasurably, must strengthen themselves into the unlimited if man is to become truly a spiritual knower.

The one power that is active in our whole soul life, more incidentally, but must be increased immeasurably, we can call it: attention. What is attention? Well, we do not let the life that flows past the soul shape itself; we gather ourselves up inwardly to turn our spiritual gaze to this or that. We pick out individual things, place them in the field of vision of our consciousness, and concentrate the soul forces on these details. And we may say: Only in this way is our soul life, which needs activity, also possible in everyday life, that we can develop such an interest that highlights individual events and facts and entities from the passing stream of existence. This attention is absolutely necessary in ordinary life. One will understand more and more, especially when spiritual science also penetrates a little into the soul, that what people call the memory question is basically only an attentiveness question, and that will throw important light on all educational questions. One can almost say that the more one endeavors to put the soul into the activity of attentiveness again and again, already in the growing and also in the later human being, the more the memory is strengthened. Not only does it work better for the things we have paid attention to, but the more often we can exercise this attention, the more our memory grows, the more intensively it develops. And another thing: Who has not heard today of that sad manifestation of the soul that could be called the discontinuity of consciousness? There are people today who cannot look back on their past life and remember it in its entirety, who do not know afterwards: You were with your ego in this or that experience; who do not know what they have been through. It may happen that such people leave their home because they have lost the consistency in their mental experience; that they leave their home without rhyme or reason, that they go through the world as if with the loss of their own self, so that it takes them years to find their self again and to be able to pick up where their self left off. Such phenomena would never lead to the tragedy that they often do if it were known that this integrity, this consciousness of being fully aware of oneself, also depends on the correct development of the activity of attention.

Thus, the exercise of attention is something we absolutely need in our ordinary lives. The spiritual researcher must take it up, develop it into a special inner soul strengthening, deepen it into what could be called meditation, concentration. These are the technical terms for the matter. Just as in our ordinary life, prompted by life itself, we turn our attention to this or that object, so the spiritual researcher, out of inner soul methodology, turns all soul powers to a presentation, an image, a sensation, a will impulse, an emotional mood that he can survey, that is quite clear before his soul, and on which he concentrates all the soul's powers; but he concentrates in such a way that he has suppressed, as only otherwise in deep sleep, all sensory activity directed towards the outside world, so that he has brought all thinking and striving, all worries and affects of life to a standstill, as otherwise only in deep sleep. In relation to ordinary life, man does indeed become as he otherwise does in deep sleep; only that he does not lose consciousness, that he keeps it fully awake. But all the powers of the soul, which are otherwise scattered on external experience, on the worries and concerns of existence, are concentrated on the one idea, feeling or other that has been placed by will into the center of the human soul life. As a result, the powers of the soul are concentrated and that which otherwise only slumbers, only works for this life as it were between the lines of life, that power is brought to the fore, is shaped out of the human soul; and it actually comes about that through this inner strengthening of the human soul in the concentrated activity, in the attention increased to the immeasurable, this soul learns to experience itself in such a way that it becomes capable of consciously tearing itself out of the physical-sensual body, as hydrogen is dissolved out of water by the chemical method.

However, it is an inner soul development that takes years if the spiritual researcher wants to enable his soul to tear itself away from the physical body through such attention and concentration exercises. But then the time comes when the spiritual researcher knows how to connect a meaning to the word, oh, to the word that sounds so paradoxical to today's world, to the word that seems so fantastic to this world: I experience myself as a spiritual being outside of my body and I know that this body is outside of my soul – well, like the table is outside of my body. I know that the soul, inwardly strengthened, can experience itself in this way, even if it has the body before it like a foreign object, this body with all the destinies that it undergoes in the ordinary outer life. In what he otherwise is, the human being will completely express himself as a spiritual-soul entity separate from his body. And this spiritual-soul entity then displays very different qualities than it does when it is connected to the physical-sensual body and makes use of the intellect bound to the brain.

First of all, the power of thought detaches itself from physical experience. Since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather report on real facts, please do not be put off by the fact that I want to describe, unembellished and without prejudice, what may still sound paradoxical today. When the spiritual researcher begins to associate a meaning with the word: You now live in your soul, you know that your soul is a truly spiritual being in which you experience yourself when you are outside of your senses and your brain, then he initially feels with his thinking as if outside of his brain, surrounding and living in his head. Yes, he knows that as long as one is in the physical body between birth and death, one must return again and again to the body. The spiritual researcher knows exactly how to observe the moment when he, after having lived with the pure spiritual-soul, returns with his thinking to his brain. He experiences how this brain offers resistance, feels how he, as it were, submerges with the waves of his earlier, purely spiritual life and then slips into his physical brain, which now, in its own activity, follows what the spiritual-soul accomplishes. This experience outside of the body and this re-immersion into the body is one of the most harrowing experiences for the spiritual researcher.

But this thinking, which is purely experiencing itself and takes place outside the brain, presents itself differently from ordinary thinking. Ordinary thoughts are shadowy compared to the thoughts that now stand before the spiritual researcher like a new world when he is outside his body. Thoughts permeate each other with inner pictorialness. That is why we call what presents itself to the spiritual eye: imaginations - but not because we believe that these only contain something fantastic or imagined, but because what is perceived there is actually experienced is experienced, imagined; but this imagination is an immersion in the things themselves, one experiences the things and processes of the spiritual world, and the things and processes of the spiritual world present themselves in imaginations before the soul. —- Thus thinking can be separated from the physical-bodily life, and the spiritual researcher can know himself in a world of spiritual processes and entities.

But other human faculties can also be detached from the purely physical and bodily. When the thinking is detached, the spiritual researcher experiences himself first in his purely spiritual and soul-like essence, after all that has been described so far. But what he experiences there with the things and processes in the spiritual world is a completely different way of perceiving than the ordinary perception. When we usually perceive things, they are there and we are here; they confront us. This is not the case from the moment we enter a spiritual world in our spiritual and soul experience, which arises around us with the same necessity as colors and light arise around the blind man when he has undergone an operation. No, we do not experience the spiritual world in the same way as the external world. This experience is such that one does not merely have the things and beings of the spiritual world before one, but one submerges oneself in them with one's entire being. Then one knows: one perceives the things and beings by having flowed into them with one's being and perceiving that which is in them in such a way that they reproduce themselves in the images that one sees. One feels that all perception is a reproduction. One feels that one is in a state of constant activity. Therefore, one could call this revival of the imaginative world of thought a spiritual mimic, a spiritual play of expressions. One tears oneself out of the bodily with its soul-spiritual; but this soul-spiritual is in perpetual activity and submerges into the processes of the spiritual world and imitates what lives in them as their own powers; and one feels so connected with the beings that one can compare this submerging with standing before a person and intuiting what is going on in his life, and having such an inner experience of it that one would show the expression of sorrow in one's own countenance if the other were sad, and show the expression of joy in one's own countenance if the other were joyful. Thus one experiences spiritually and soulfully what others are experiencing; one becomes the expression of it oneself. In the spiritual countenance, one expresses the essence of things. One is driven to active perception. One may say: spiritual research makes quite different demands on the human soul than external research, which passively accepts things. The soul is required to be inwardly active and to be able to immerse itself in things and beings and to express itself in the way that things present themselves to it.

Just as the power of thought, as a spiritual-soul power, can be separated out of the physical-bodily in spiritual chemistry, so can another power, which man otherwise only uses in the body, which, so to speak, pours itself into the body, be separated out of this body. However strange it may sound, this other power is the power of speech, the power that we otherwise use in ordinary life when speaking.

What happens when we speak? Our thoughts live within us, our thoughts vibrate with our brain; this is connected to the speech apparatus, muscles are set in motion; what we experience inwardly flows out into the words and lives in the words. From the point of view of spiritual science, we must say that in speaking we pour out what is in our soul into physical organs. The detachment of the speech power from the physical-sensory body arises from the fact that the human being increases attention, as described, and adds something else – again, an activity that is usually already present and must also be increased to an unlimited degree. This power is devotion.

We know it in those moments when we feel religious, when we are devoted to this or that being in love, when we can follow things and their laws in strict research, when we can forget ourselves with all our feelings and thoughts. We know this devotion. It actually only flows between the lines of ordinary life. The spiritual researcher must increase this power to infinity; he must strengthen it without limit. He must indeed be able to give himself up to the stream of existence in such a way as he is otherwise only given up to this stream of existence – without doing anything himself to what he experiences – in deep sleep, when all the activity of his limbs rests, when all the senses are silent, when man is only completely given up and does nothing; but then he has lapsed into unconsciousness in his sleep. But if a person can bring himself by inner volition to do it again and again as an exercise for his soul, to suppress all sensory activity, to suppress all movement of the limbs, to transfer his physical-sensual life into a state that is otherwise only in deep sleep, but to remain awake, to keep his inner and develops the feeling of being poured into the stream of existence, wanting nothing but what the world wants with one: if he evokes this feeling again and again, but evokes it apart from attention, then the soul strengthens itself more and more.

But the two exercises - the one with attention and the one with devotion - must be done separately from each other; because they contradict each other. If attention requires the highest level of concentration on one object - deep meditation - then devotion, passive devotion to the flow of existence, requires an immense increase in the feeling that we find in religious experience or in other devotion to a loved one. The fruits that man draws from such an immeasurable increase of devotion and attention are precisely that he separates his spiritual-soul life from the physical-bodily. And so the power that otherwise pours into the word, that is activated by it not remaining within itself but setting the nerves in motion, this power can be separated from the outer speech activity and remain within itself in the soul-spiritual. In this way, the power of speech – we can call it that – is torn out of its sensual-physical context, and the person experiences what, in Goethe's words, can be called spiritual hearing, spiritual listening.

Once again, the human being experiences himself outside of his body, but now in such a way that he submerges himself in things and perceives the inner essence of things; but also perceives it in such a way that he recreates it within himself, as with an inner gesture, not just with a facial expression, but with an inner gesture, as with an inner gesture. The soul-spiritual, torn out of the body, is thus activated, as when we are tempted, through a special disposition in relation to our talent for imitation, to express through our gesture what occupies us. What is done only by special talents, the soul, which is torn out of the body, does in order to perceive. It plunges into things, and it actively recreates the forces that are at play within them. All this perception in the spiritual world is an activity in which one engages, and by perceiving the activity in which one has to place oneself, because one recreates the inner weaving and essence of things, one perceives these things. In the outer, sensory world, hearing is passive; we listen. Speaking and hearing flow together in spiritual hearing. We immerse ourselves in the essence of things; we hear their inner weaving. What Pythagoras called the music of the spheres is something that the spiritual researcher can truly achieve. He immerses himself in the things and beings of the spiritual world and hears, but also speaks by uttering. What one experiences is a speaking hearing, a hearing speaking in immersing oneself in the essence of things. It is true inspiration that arises.

And a third inner activity, a third kind of inner experience, can come over the spiritual researcher if he continues to develop increased attention and devotion. What occurs to and in the spiritual researcher as he experiences himself outside his body, I would like to discuss it in the following way.

Let us consider the child. I cannot speak about this in detail, I only want to hint at what is important for the purpose of today's lecture: it is a peculiarity of the growing human being that he must give himself his direction in space, that he must give himself the way in which he is placed in space, in the course of childhood. The human being is born unable to walk or stand, initially, as we say here in Austria, having to use all fours. Then he develops those inner powers that I would call powers of uprightness, and through this something comes to the fore in man that so many deeper minds have sensed in its significance by saying: because man can rise in the vertical direction, he knows how to direct his gaze out into the vastness of the celestial space, his gaze does not merely cling to earthly things. But the essential thing is that through inner forces, through inner strength and experience, man develops out of his helpless horizontal life, so to speak, into an upright vertical life. The scientist will readily understand that the inner activity of man is something quite different from the hereditary forces that give the animal its powers of orientation in the world. The forces at work in the animal that bring the animal in this or that direction to the vertical act quite differently in man, in whom a sum of forces is at work that pulls him out of his helpless situation and that works inwardly to instruct him in the direction of space through which he is actually an earthly man in the true sense of the word, through which he first becomes what he is as a human being on earth. These forces work very much in secret. One can only cope with them when one has already delved a little into spiritual science; but it is a whole system, a great sum of forces. They are not all used up in the childlike period of man, when he learns to stand and walk. There are still forces of this kind slumbering within man; but they remain unused in the outer life of the senses and in the outer life of science.

Through the exercises of increased attention and devotion performed by the soul, the human being becomes inwardly aware of how these forces that have raised him as a child are seated within him. He becomes aware of spiritual powers of direction and of spiritual powers of movement, and the consequence of this is that he is able to add to the inner mimic, to the inner play of the features, to the inner ability to make gestures, to the inner gesture, also the inner physiognomy of his spiritual and soul life. When the soul and spirit have emerged from the physical body, when a person begins to understand as a spiritual researcher what is meant by the words: 'You experience yourself in the soul and spirit' — then the time also comes when he becomes aware of the forces that have raised him up, that have placed him vertically on the earth as a physical, sensual being. He now applies these powers in the purely spiritual-soul realm, and this enables him to use these powers differently than he does in his ordinary life; he is able to give these powers other directions, to shape himself differently than he did in physical experience during his childhood. He now knows how to develop inner movements, knows how to adapt to all directions, knows how to give his spiritual self different physiognomies than as an earthly human being; he is able to delve into other spiritual processes and beings; he knows how to connect that he transforms the powers which otherwise change him from a crawling child to an upright human being, that he transforms these in the inner spiritual things and entities, so that he becomes similar to these things and entities and thus expresses them himself and perceives them through this. That is real intuition. For the real perception of spiritual entities and processes is an immersion in them, is an assumption of their own physiognomy. While one experiences the processes in the beings through inner mimicry, while one experiences the mobility of the spiritual beings by being able to recreate their gestures; one is now able to transform oneself into things and processes, one is able to take on the form of the spiritual, and in so doing one perceives it, that one has become it oneself, so to speak.

I did not want to describe to you in general philosophical terms the way in which the spiritual researcher enters into the spiritual worlds. I wanted to describe to you as concretely as possible how this spiritual-soul experience breaks away from the bodily, from physical-sensory perception, and submerges into the spiritual world by becoming active in it. But this has become evident, that every step into the spiritual world must be accompanied by activity, that we must know with every step that things do not reveal their essence to us, but that we can only know that about things and processes of the spiritual world, which we are able to recreate, to search for, by being able to behave actively perceptively. This is the great difference between spiritual knowledge and ordinary external knowledge: that external knowledge is passively surrendered to things, while spiritual knowledge must live in perpetual activity, man must become what he wants to perceive.

Even today, or one could also say, even today, one is forgiven when one speaks of a spiritual world in general. People still put up with that. But it still seems paradoxical in our time that someone can say: A person can detach themselves from all seeing, hearing, all sensory perceptions, all thinking that is tied to the nerves and brain, and then, while everything that is experienced in physical existence disappears completely before them, can feel surrounded, know that they are surrounded by a completely new, concrete world, indeed, by a world in which processes and beings are purely spiritual, just as processes and beings in the physical world are physical. Spiritual science is not a vague pantheism, it is not a general sauce of spiritual life. In the face of spiritual science, if one speaks only of a pantheistic spiritual being, it is as if one said: I lead you to a meadow, something sprouts there, that is nature; then one leads him into a laboratory and says: That is nature, pan-nature! All the flowers and beetles and trees and shrubs, all the chemical and physical processes: Pan-Nature! People would be little satisfied with such Pan-Nature; because they know that you can only get along if you can really follow the individual. Just as little as the external science speaks of Pan-Nature, just as little spiritual science speaks of a general spirit sauce; it speaks of real, perceptible, concrete spiritual processes and entities. It must not be afraid to challenge time by saying: Just as we, when we are in the physical world, first see people around us as physical beings among, one might say, the hierarchies of physical beings, of minerals, plants, animals and human beings, the same fades from our spiritual horizon when we immerse ourselves in the spiritual world; but spiritual realms and hierarchies emerge: beings that are initially the same as human beings, beings that are higher than human beings; and just as animals, plants and minerals descend from human beings in the physical world, there are beings and creatures ascending from human beings into higher realms of existence, individual, unique spiritual entities and creatures.

How the human soul places itself in the spiritual world, what its life is like within this spiritual world according to spiritual research, which in principle has been indicated today; how the human soul has to live in this spiritual world when it lays aside the physical body at death, when it traverses the path after passing through the gate of death, in a purely spiritual world, will be the subject of the day after tomorrow. The lecture the day after tomorrow will deal with individual insights of spiritual science about this life after death.

What spiritual science develops as its method – well, you notice it immediately – it differs very significantly from what our contemporaries can admit as such, based on the thought habits that have formed over the centuries and which are just as stuck in relation to this spiritual science as the thought habits of past centuries were stuck in relation to the Copernican world system. But how should spiritual science think about the search of our time if it wants to understand itself correctly and behave correctly towards this search of our time?

The first objection that can so easily be made from our time is that one says: Yes, the spiritual scientist speaks of the fact that the soul should first develop special powers; then it can look into the spiritual world. But for the one who has not yet developed these powers, who has not yet mastered the art of forming mental images, of separating thought, of separating the powers of speech, of separating the powers of spatial orientation, of separating the powers of orientation in the world of beings, the spiritual world would be of no concern to him! Such an objection is just like that of someone who would say: For someone who cannot paint, pictures are of no concern. — That would be a pity. Only someone who has learned to paint can paint pictures. But it would be sad if the only pictures a person who could paint could understand were those that had to do with the world of nature. Of course, only the painter can paint it; but when the picture stands before man, it is the case that the human soul has the very natural powers within itself to understand the picture, even if it is not able to paint it. And the human soul has a language within itself that connects it to the living art. Such is the case with spiritual science. Only he who has become a spiritual researcher himself can discover and describe the facts, processes and entities of the spiritual world; but when the spiritual researcher endeavors — as has been attempted today, for example, with regard to the spiritual scientific method — to clothe what he has researched in the spiritual world in the words of ordinary thoughts and ideas , then what he gives can be grasped by every soul, even if it has not become a spiritual researcher; if it can only do away with all that comes from contemporary education, from education that pretends to stand on the firm ground of natural science, but in truth does not stand on it at all, but only believes it. If only the soul can rid itself of all prejudices, if it can truly devote itself to the contemplation of a picture as impartially as the mind researcher knows how to tell, then the result of spiritual research can be understood by every soul. Human souls are predisposed to truth and to the perception of truth, not to the perception of untruth and falsity, if only they clear away all the debris that accumulates from prejudice. Deep within the human soul is a secret, intimate language, the language by which everyone at every level of education and development can understand the spiritual researcher, if only they want to.

But this is precisely what the spiritual scientist finds in the search of our time. In past centuries, people believed that they could only know something about the spiritual world through religious beliefs; in recent times, these souls have been able to believe that certain knowledge can only be built on external facts; in our time, souls do not yet know this in their superconsciousness, as one might say – what they can realize in concepts and ideas and feelings, it is not yet settled -, but for the spiritual researcher it is clear: we live in a time in which, in the depths of human souls, in those depths of which these souls themselves do not yet know much, longing for spiritual science, hope for this spiritual science, is being prepared. More and more it will be recognized that old prejudices must vanish. Especially in regard to thinking many things will be recognized. Thus there will still be many people today, especially those who believe themselves to be standing on firm philosophical ground, who will say: Has not Kant proved it, has not physiology proved it, that man cannot penetrate below the sense world with his knowledge? And now along comes a spiritual science that wants to refute Kant, wants to show that what modern physiology so clearly demonstrates is not correct! Yes, spiritual science does not even want to show that what Kant says from his point of view and what modern physiology says from its point of view is incorrect; but time, the still secret search of time, will learn that there is another point of view regarding right and wrong than the one we have become accustomed to. Let us see how the real practice of life – the practice of life that is the fruitful one – relates to these things.

Someone could prove by strict arguments that man with his eyes is incapable of seeing cells, for example. Such a line of argument could be quite correct, as correct as Kant's proof that man, with the abilities that Cart knows, cannot penetrate into the essence of things. Let us assume that microscopic research did not yet exist and it was proved that man cannot see the smallest particles. This may be correct. The proof can be absolutely conclusive in every respect and nothing could be said against the strict proof that man with his eyes cannot see the smallest partial organisms of the large organisms. But that was not the point in the real progress of research; there it was important to show, despite the correctness of this proof, that physical tools can be found, microscope, telescope and others, to achieve what cannot be achieved at all demonstrably if the abilities remain unarmed, which man has. Those are right who say: Human abilities are limited; but spiritual science does not contradict them, it only shows that there is a spiritual strengthening and reinforcement of the human powers of cognition, just as there is a physical strengthening, and that despite the correctness of the opposite train of thought, fruitful spiritual research must place itself precisely beyond such correctness and incorrectness. People will learn to no longer insist on what can be proved with the limited means of proof available; they will realize that life makes other demands on the development of humanity than what is sometimes called immediately and logically certain.

And another thing must be said if the real, not merely the imagined, search of the time is to be related to what spiritual research really has as its task, as its goal. Once again, reference may be made to the truly tremendous progress of natural science. It is not surprising, in view of these great and powerful advances in natural science, that there are minds today that believe they can build a world structure on the firm ground of natural science, which, however, does not reflect on such forces as have been discussed today. Today there is a widespread, I might say materialistically colored school of thought; but it calls itself somewhat nobler because the term 'materialistic' has fallen out of favor: the monistic school of thought. This monistic school of thought, whose head is certainly the important in his scientific field Ernst Haeckel and whose field marshal is Wilhelm Ostwald. This school of thought attempts to construct a world view by building on the insights that can be gained purely from the knowledge of nature. The search of the time will come to the following conclusion in relation to such an attempt: as long as natural science stops at investigating the laws of the outer sense existence, at visualizing the connections in this outer sense existence of the soul, as long as natural science stands on firm ground. And it has truly achieved a great thing; it has achieved the great thing of thoroughly extinguishing the light of life of old prejudices. Just as Faust himself stood before nature and resorted to an external, material magic, so today, anyone who understands science can no longer resort to such material magic. But it is something else that spiritual life itself, in the ways that have been characterized, imposes an inner magic on the soul. But against all these superstitious currents of thought, against everything that seeks to explain external nature in the same way that we might explain a clock, by saying that there are little spirits inside it, and against every explanation of nature that finds this or that being behind natural phenomena, natural science has achieved great things in negation, and as a worldview. And let us take a look at how the so-called scientific view of nature works, as long as the minds can deal with eliminating the old, unhealthy concepts of all kinds of spiritual beings that are invented behind nature. As long as a front can be made against such spiritual endeavors, a scientific worldview thrives on fighting what had to be fought.

But this fight has in a sense already passed its peak, has already done its good; and today the search of the time goes to ask: By what means can we build a world view in which the human soul has space in it? Since this scientific worldview, this Haeckel-Ostwald materialism fails completely when the person understands himself correctly. It will become more and more evident that the champions of the purely materialistic world-view, in their capacity as soldiers, are great in combating ancient superstition, but that they are like warriors who have done their duty and now have no talent for developing the arts of peace, for developing industry, for tilling the soil. Natural science should not be belittled when it becomes a world view in order to combat superstitious beliefs. As long as such world view thinkers can stop at the fight, they still have something in the fight in the soul that sustains them, but when the person then wants to build a real world view in which the soul has a place, then they are like the warrior who has no talent for the arts of peace. He stands before the question of his soul, let us say, in the peacetime of worldly life, and an image of the world does not build itself up.

Such a mood will assert itself more and more in the souls; the spiritual researcher can already see these moods in the depths of the souls. Where these souls know nothing about it, the longings for what spiritual research wants to bring to the world prevail. That is the secret of our time. But if, from a higher point of view, one might say, it is thoroughly in keeping with the times, this spiritual research world view is out of touch with many contemporaries who do not yet look deeply into what they themselves actually want. Therefore, this spiritual science initially brings a world view that is seen as if it does not stand on firm scientific ground. The other world view, that of so-called monism, wants to be built solely on the foundation of external science. This world view, one can see today from its reverse side, where it must lead if the soul really wants to see its hopes and longings fulfilled. In the activity of spiritual research, of which has been spoken, what really elevates the soul to the spiritual community arises for the soul, the spiritual world arises in perceptible activity, in active perception. Through spiritual science, man can again know of the true spiritual world, of spiritual reality. The so-called monistic world view has nothing to say about this. The spiritual search of our time.

But this seeking of our time, this seeking of human souls, cannot be suppressed, and so some of our contemporaries have already become accustomed to placing their thoughts about spiritual things within themselves in such a way that these thoughts run like scientific thoughts: that the external is observed in passive devotion. What has happened? The result is that a part of our contemporaries — those who occupy themselves with it, they know it — have fallen into the habit of wanting to look at the spiritual as one looks at the sensual. I am not saying that some things that are absolutely true cannot come about in this way; but the method of such an approach is different from that of spiritual science. What is called spiritualism wants to look at spiritual beings and processes externally, without active inner perception, without rising into the spiritual worlds, externally passively, as one looks at physical-sensory processes. Whose child is purely external, we may say materialistic spiritualism? It is the child of that school of thought that takes the so-called monistic point of view and succumbs to the superstition of materialism, the mere workings of external natural laws. What — some contemporary will say — spiritism, a child of Haeckel's genuine monism? — The search of the time will be convinced that it is just with this child as with other children. Many a father and mother has the most beautiful ideas about all the things that should develop in a child, and yet sometimes a real rascal can arise. What monism dreams of as a true cultural child is not important; what is important is what really arises. Mere belief in the material will produce the belief that spirits too can only operate and reveal themselves materially. And the more pure monistic materialism would grow, the more spiritualist societies and spiritualist views would flourish everywhere as the necessary counter-image. The more the blind adherents of the Haeckel and Ostwald direction will succeed in pushing back true spiritual science in matters of world view, the more they will see that they will cultivate spiritualism, the other side of true spiritual research. As firmly as the spiritual researcher stands on the ground of the researchable, the knowable, the knowable spiritual life, he can no more follow the method that wants to materialize the spirit and passively surrender to what is spirit, while one can only experience it in the active.

But I would also like to characterize the quest of our time, which cannot yet be understood in terms of another. A man who deserves a certain amount of esteem as a philosopher has written a curious essay in a widely read journal. In it he writes, for example, that Spinoza and Kant are quite difficult for some people to read. You read yourself into them; but the concepts just wander around and swirl around – well, it is certainly not to be denied that it is so for many people when they want to read themselves into Kant or Spinoza, that the concepts swirl around in confusion. But the philosopher gives advice on how this could be done differently, in line with the search of our time. He says: Today we have a device, a technical advance, through which what is presented to the soul in the merely abstract thoughts of Kant and Spinoza can be brought to the soul quite vividly, so that one can passively surrender to it in perception. The philosopher wants to show in a kind of cinematograph how Spinoza sits down, first grinds glass, how then the idea of expansion comes over him - this is shown in changing pictures. The picture of expansion changes into the picture of thinking and so on. And so the whole ethics and world view of Spinoza could be vividly constructed in a cinematographic way. The outer search of the time would thus be taken into account. It is remarkable that the editor of the journal in question even made the following comment: “In this way, the age-old metaphysical need of man could be met by an invention that some people consider to be a gimmick, but which is very much in keeping with the times.

Now, from a certain point of view, it might be entirely appropriate to the search of our time, but only on the surface, if one could read Spinoza's “Ethics” or Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” in front of the cinematograph. Why not? It would take into account the passive devotion that is so popular today. It is so loved that one cannot believe that the spiritual must have a reality into which one can only find one's way by taking every step with it. That one expresses in oneself, in one's spiritual soul, what the essence of things is, that our time does not yet love. Let us take a look at a billboard! Let us try to guess the thoughts of the people standing in front of it. Not many people will go to a lecture where there are no slides, but only reflections that the souls also create the thoughts that are put forward, as opposed to a lecture where spiritual and psychological matters are supposedly demonstrated in slides, where one only has to passively surrender.

Anyone who looks into the search of our time, where it asserts its deepest, still unconscious hopes and longings, knows that in the depths of the soul, the urge for activity still rests; the urge to find itself again as a soul in full activity. The human soul can only be free, with a secure inner hold, if it can develop inner activity. The human soul can only find its way and find its bearings in life by becoming conscious of itself, by realizing that it is not only that which is passively given to it by the world, but by knowing that it is present when it is able to experience in activity; and of the spiritual world it can only perceive that of which it is able to take possession in activity. In reflecting on what spiritual science offers, the process of comprehension must develop into active participation; but in this way spiritual science becomes a satisfaction of the deepest, subconscious impulses in the souls of the present, and in this way it meets the most intimate search of our time. For with regard to the things touched on here, our time is a time of transition. It is easy to say, even trivial, that we live in a time of transition, because every time is a time of transition. Therefore, it is always correct to say that we live in a time of transition. But if one emphasizes that one lives in a time of transition, it depends much more on what any given time is in transition from. If we now want to describe our time in its transition, we have to say: it was necessary - because only through this could the natural sciences and what has been achieved through them come about - that for centuries humanity went through an education towards passivity; because only in this way, through devotion to materialistic truths, could it be achieved what had to be achieved, especially in the field of natural science. But the fact is that life unfolds in rhythms. Just as a pendulum swings up and then swings down again, swinging to the opposite side, so too must the human soul, when it has been educated in a justifiable way for a period of time to be faithfully and passively devoted, pull itself together again in order to find itself again; in order to take hold of itself, it must pull itself together to become active. For what has it become through passivity? Well, what it has become through passivity, I will say it unashamedly with a radical-sounding sentence that will certainly sound much too paradoxical to many. But on the other hand, it is precisely the assimilation of spiritual science that shows, as it actually is only the fact, that one does not pull oneself together to face the consequences of the scientific world view if one does not emphasize this radical result. They lack the courage to draw the real consequences, even those who claim to stand solely and exclusively on the ground of what true science yields. If they had this consistency, then one would hear strange words murmured through the seeking of the time.

The Old Testament documents begin with words – I do not want to talk about their inner meaning today; everyone may take the words as they can take them; some may consider them to be an image, others an expression of a fact: everyone can agree on what I have to say about these words – the words are: “You shall be as God, knowing – or discerning – good and evil!” The words resound in our ears, from the beginning of the Old Testament. However you look at it, you have to admit that it expresses something momentous for human nature and the human soul. It is attributed to the tempter, who approaches man and whispers in his ear: “If you follow me, you will be like a god and distinguish good from evil.” It will be possible to surmise that the inclination not only towards good would not express itself in man without this temptation; that without this temptation the inclination would have arisen only towards good, so that all human freedom is in some way connected with what these words express. But they do express that man was, as it were, invited by the tempter to look beyond himself as a different being from what he is: to behave like a god towards good and evil. As I said, however you may think about these words and the tempter, I am certainly not demanding today that you immediately accept him as a real being – although it is quite true for those who see through things, the word: “The devil is never felt by the people, even when he has them by the collar.” But he who is able to eavesdrop a little on the search of the time, hears today in this search of the time his whispering again. It is drawing near. Call it a voice of the soul or whatever you will: there it is — it can be said without any superstition. And for those who have the courage to draw the final consequences of a purely scientific worldview, it brings forth words of great peculiarity, of a strange wisdom. It is just that the people who claim to be on the basis of pure science do not have the courage to draw the final conclusion. They do include in their feelings and thoughts the belief in a distinction between good and evil, which they would actually have to deny if they wanted to be purely on the basis of science. It is a fact that as soon as one places oneself on the ground of mere natural science, not only does the sun shine equally on good and evil, but according to the laws of nature, evil is performed from human nature just as much as good. And so he, the tempter, drawing the conclusion, whispers to man: Don't you see, you are just like highly developed animals. You are like animals and cannot distinguish between good and evil. — This is what makes our time a time of transition, that the tempter speaks to us again in our time with the opposite voice to that with which he spoke according to the Old Testament: You are only developed animals and so, if you understand yourselves, you cannot make any distinction between good and evil.

If one had the courage to be consistent, it would be the expression of a pure, passively surrendered worldview. That time be spared from this voice – let it be said merely figuratively – that knowledge of spiritual life be brought into the seeking of the time: that is the task, that is the goal of spiritual science. Those who still fight against this spiritual science today from the standpoint of some other science will have to realize that this fight is like the fight against Copernicanism. Now that we are also being noticed more in the world through the building of our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, which used to ignore us, the voices of our opponents are growing louder. And when I recently objected in the writing: “What is spiritual science and how is it treated by its opponents” that the opponents of spiritual science today stand on the same point of view as the opponents of Copernicus, one who felt affected rightly said: Yes, the only difference would be that what Copernicus said are facts, while spiritual science only puts forward assertions. He does not realize, the poor man, that for people of his mind the facts of Copernicanism at that time were also nothing more than assertions, empty assertions, and he does not realize that today he calls empty assertions what, before real research, are facts, albeit facts of spiritual life. And so one can find objections raised by both the scientific and religious communities regarding this spiritual science. Just as people said at the time of Copernicus, “We cannot believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, because it is not in the Bible,” so people today say, “We do not believe what spiritual science has to say, because it is not in the Bible.” But people will come to terms with what spiritual science has to say, as they came to terms with what Copernicus had to say.

And again and again we must remember a man who was both a deeply learned man and a priest, who worked at the local university and who, when he gave his rector's speech about Galileo, spoke the beautiful words: At that time, the people who believed that religious ideas were being shaken stood against Galileo; but today – as this scholar said at the beginning of his rectorate – today the truly religious person knows that every new truth that is researched adds a piece to the original revelation of the divine governance of the world and to the glory of the divine world order. Thus one would like to make the opponents of spiritual science aware of something that could well have been, even if it was not really so. Let us assume that someone had stepped forward before Columbus and said: We must not discover this new land, we live well in the old land, the sun shines so beautifully there. Do we know whether the sun also shines in the newly discovered land? So it is that those who believe their religious feelings disturbed by the discoveries of spiritual science appear to the spiritual scientist in the face of his religious ideas. He must have a shaky religious concept, a weak faith, who can believe that the sun of his religious feeling will not shine on every newly discovered country, even in the spiritual realm, just as the sun that shines on the old world also shines on the new world. And anyone who faces the facts impartially can be sure that this is so. But in its quest, when time becomes more and more imbued with spiritual science, it will be touched by it in a way that many today still cannot even dream of.

Spiritual science still has many opponents, understandably so. But in this spiritual science one does feel in harmony with all those spirits of humanity who, even if they have not yet had spiritual science, have sensed those connections of the human soul with the spiritual worlds that are revealed through spiritual science. In particular, with regard to what has been said about the new word of the tempter, one feels in harmony with Schöller and his foreboding of the spiritual world. Through his own scientific studies, Schiller has gained the impression that he has to lift man out of mere animality and that the human soul has a share in a spiritual world. On the soil of spiritual science, one feels in deep harmony with a leading spirit of the newer development of world-views when one can summarize, as in a feeling, what today wants to be expressed with broader sentences, with the words of Schiller:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped onto the cloudless brow!
And the exalted stranger, the thought,
Leaped out of the amazed brain!

In confirmation that animality receded and that the human being belongs to a spiritual world, in confirmation of such sentences, spiritual science today stands before the quest of our time.

The expansion, the strengthening, the securing of this innermost essence, this spiritual inner essence of the soul, is to be offered to the search of the time through spiritual science.

[ 1 ] Our view as to the sources of our knowledge cannot be with out influence upon our view in regard to practical conduct. Man behaves according to thought characterizations which lie within him. What he performs is directed according to purposes, goals, which he sets up for himself. But it is obvious that these goals, purposes, ideals, etc., will bear the same character as the rest of man's thought world. Thus a dogmatic science must result in a practical truth essentially unlike that which follows from our theory of knowledge. If the truths to which a person attains in knowledge are determined by objective necessity residing outside of thought, such also will be the ideals which he sets up as the bases of his conduct. In that case a person behaves according to laws in whose establishment he has no part in any real sense: he thinks a norm for himself which is fore-ordained for his behavior from without. But this is the character of a commandment which man has to obey. Dogma as a practical truth is moral commandment.

[ 2 ] The case is entirely different when the theory of knowledge here presented is made basic. This recognizes no other basis for truths than the thought content residing within these. When, therefore, a moral ideal comes into existence, it is the inner power lying in its content which governs our conduct. It is not because an ideal is given to us as a law that we conduct ourselves according to it, but because the ideal, by virtue of its content, is active within us, directs us. The impulse toward conduct lies, not without us, but within us. If we felt ourselves subjected to the commandment of duty, we should be compelled to behave in a definite manner, because it was so ordered. Here shall comes first and afterwards will, which must unite itself to the former. This is not true according to our point of view. The will is sovereign. It performs only what lies as thought-content in the human personality. Man does not receive laws from an external Power; he is his own lawgiver.

[ 3 ] Who, indeed, according to our world view, should give these to him? The World-Fundament has poured itself out completely into the world; it has not drawn back from the world in order to control it from without, but impels it from within; it has not withheld itself from the world. The highest form in which it emerges within the reality of ordinary life is that of thought and, with this, human personality. If, then, the World-Fundament has goals, these are identical with the goals which man sets up for himself as he manifests his own being. Man is not behaving in accordance with the purposes of the Guiding Power of the world when he investigates one or another of His commandments, but when he behaves in accordance with his own insight. For in him the Guiding Power of the world manifests Himself. He does not live as Will somewhere outside of man; He has renounced his own will in order that all might depend upon the will of man. If man is to be enabled to become his own lawgiver, all thought about world-determinations outside of man must be abandoned.

[ 4 ] We take this opportunity to call attention to the very excellent treatment of the subject by Kreyenbühl inPhilosophische Monatsheften(Vol. 18, No. 3). This paper correctly explains how the maxims of our conduct result directly from the determination of our individuality; how everything which is ethically great is not given through the power of the moral law but is performed on the basis of the direct impulse of an individual idea.

[ 5 ] Only from such a point of view is a true human freedom possible. If man does not bear within himself the reason for his conduct, but must guide himself in accordance with commandments, he then acts under a compulsion; he stands under a necessity almost like a mere entity of Nature.

[ 6 ] Our philosophy is, therefore, in the highest sense a philosophy of freedom. It shows first theoretically how every force which controls the world from without must fall away in order to make man his own master, in the best of all senses of that word. When man acts morally, this is not, from our point of view, the fulfillment of duty, but the expression of his wholly free nature. Man acts, not because he ought, but because he wills. This point of view Goethe also had in mind when he said: “Lessing, who was reluctantly conscious of many sorts of limitations, causes one of his characters to say, ‘No one must, must.' A brilliant and happy man said: ‘He who wills must.' A third—to be sure, an educated person—added, ‘He who has insight also wills.'” There is no impulse, therefore, for our conduct save our own insight. The free man acts according to his insight, without the intrusion of any sort of compulsion, according to commands which he gives to himself.

[ 7 ] It is about these truths that the well known Kant-Schiller controversy revolves. Kant took the standpoint of the commandment of duty. He thought it degrading to the moral law to make it dependent upon human subjectivity. According to his view, man acts morally only when he banishes all subjective motives in his conduct and simply bows to the majesty of duty. Schiller saw in this point of view a degradation of human nature. Must this be so evil that its own impulses must be thus completely set aside if it is to be moral! Schiller and Goethe's world-conception can recognize only the point of view we have set forth. The point of departure for human action is to be sought in man himself.

[ 8 ] For this reason, in history also, the subject of which is man, we must not speak of influences upon man's conduct from without, of ideas which reside in the age, etc. Least of all must we speak of a plan constituting the basis of history. History is nothing but the evolution of human action, points of view, etc. Goethe said: “In all ages it is only the individuals that have been effectual for science, not the age. It was the age that put Socrates to death with poison; the age that burned Huss; the ages have always remained alike.” All a priori constructions of plans which are supposed to form the basis of history are contrary to the historical method as this issues from the nature of history. The goal of history is to learn what men contribute for the advancement of their race; to learn what goal this or that personality has set for himself, what direction he has given to his age. History is to be based entirely on human nature. The will, the tendencies of human nature, are to be grasped. Our science of knowledge excludes all possibility that a purpose should be ascribed to history, as if men were educated from a lower stage of perfection to a higher, etc. In the same way it seems fallacious from our point of view when the effort is made (as Herder does in Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Humanity ) to set historical events in due order like facts of Nature, according to the succession of cause and effect. The laws of history are of a far higher sort. One fact in physics is so determined by another that the law stands above the phenomenon. A historical fact, as something ideal, is determined by the ideal. Here one can speak of cause and effect only when one depends wholly upon the external. Who could believe that he is in keeping with the facts when he calls Luther the cause of the Reformation? History is a science of ideas. Its reality consists of ideas. Therefore devotion to the object is the sole correct method. Every step beyond that is unhistorical.

[ 9 ] Psychology, the science of peoples, and history are the leading forms of spiritual, or cultural, science. Their methods, as we have seen, are based upon the direct grasp of the ideal reality. Their subject is the Idea, the spiritual, as that of inorganic science is the natural law and that of organics is the type.

We can no longer go on as we have done up to now. Morality, which has been trampled deep into the dust, must be revived! So thought a number of well-meaning people, and they founded an "Association for Ethical Culture". The news has just gone out from Berlin that this new institution for the salvation of mankind has come into being, and the invitation to join. And among the founders we find many a name that belongs to a personality we admire. The purpose of the association should be to emphasize the general humanity of all religious and moral characteristics of the individual religions and cultures and to make this the carrier of its world view and way of life. This is to be achieved through literary (lectures, discussions and the publication of writings) and practical (acts of charity and efforts to improve the situation of the suffering population) association activities. In view of the first part of the program, a discussion of this association probably belongs in this section of a literary journal.

The basic error at the root of this is the belief in a general human morality. As little as "man in general" is possible, but only a conceptual fiction, so little can we speak of ethics in general. Every people, every age, indeed every individual has their own morality. The thinker can then seek out what all these moral views have in common, he can search for the driving forces that are equally effective in all of them. But the result obtained in this way has only theoretical value. It is infinitely important for the realization of man's ethical nature, his moral essence; it can never be made the basis for the conduct of life. And there can be nothing more satisfying than that this is not possible. Otherwise, the individual expression of national and human natures, of ages and individuals would be replaced by the template-like actions of moral puppets, which would always be strung up on the strings of the general human moral doctrine.

Nowhere more than in moral life can the principle apply: Live and let live! The respective morality of a person or an age is the unconscious result of his view of the world and life. According to a certain way of thinking and feeling, action acquires an individual character; and there can never be any thought of a separate cultivation of the latter. Today, an elite of educated people is working on a reorganization of our view of life, both in terms of science as well as religion and art. Everyone is doing their bit. What comes out of this will determine our actions. The cultivation of knowledge, truth and artistic views can be the content of common endeavors. It will then automatically lead to a common ethic in many areas. If everyone openly presents what he knows, if he puts on the public agenda what he has achieved; in short, if he expresses himself in every direction: then he will be more to the whole than if he approaches it with the pretension of being able to tell it how it should behave. Many of our contemporaries have finally had enough of all the talk about what we should and should not do. They want insight into the workings of the world. If they have this, then they also know how to behave in the world they recognize. And anyone who does not have this insight and yet approaches them with good teachings for our actions is considered a moral philosopher. Our task within humanity results simply from our realization of the nature of that part of it to which we belong. For those who recognize the truth of these propositions, aspirations such as those underlying the "Association for Ethical Culture" are considered unfashionable and backward.

We have other things to do than think about how we should behave. Our whole life is in a period of transition because our old views are no longer adequate for modern consciousness, and because the materialism that the natural sciences want to put in its place is only a view for flatheads. We may soon be at the point where someone speaks the redeeming word that solves the riddle of the world from the side from which mankind of the present has posed it. We are again suffering from the great questions of knowledge and the highest problems of art. The old has become rotten. And when the great solution is found, in which many people will be able to believe for some time, when the new gospel is there, then, as always in this case, the new custom will also arise of its own accord as a necessary consequence. New world views bring forth new moral teachings all by themselves. The Messiah of truth is always also the Messiah of morality. We have no use for popular educators who have a lot for our hearts but nothing for our heads. The heart follows the head if the latter only has a certain direction.

If efforts such as those of the "Association for Ethical Culture" have long been the order of the day in America, we Germans have no reason to imitate them. Among peoples with predominantly practical, materialistic tendencies, a certain slackness has set in with regard to questions of knowledge. They do not have the lively interest in questions of knowledge and truth that is still native to us in Germany. It is therefore convenient for them to be able to make themselves comfortable on the resting bed of a general human moral doctrine. The stereotypical morality does not hinder them in what they think about. They do not know the torments of the thinker, not those of the artist. At least not those who belong to the societies for ethical culture. But whoever, like the German, has ideal life in him, whoever wants to advance spiritually, the path must be free and open for him, not obstructed by moral rules and popular education measures. To repeat an often-used expression, everyone must be able to be happy in his own way. Therefore, no modern thinker can join the association in question or approve of its tendencies. I have no doubt that the word "tolerance", which the association has written on its banner, will exert its talmigold-like effect on broad sections of society. It will certainly achieve just as much as the other, no less abused, words: Liberalism and humanity. Goethe said that he wanted nothing to do with liberal ideas; only attitudes and feelings could be liberal. A sworn liberal, when I once quoted the great poet's view to him, was soon finished with his judgment: it was just one of the many weaknesses that Goethe had in himself. To me, however, it seems like one of the many views that Goethe has in common with all people who are energetically active in the intellectual field: the ruthless advocacy of what is recognized and understood as true, which is at the same time combined with the highest respect for the individuality of others. Only those who are something themselves can also recognize the other, who likewise means something. The average person, who wants to be everything and therefore nothing, demands the same kind of nothingness alongside his own. Those who live according to the template themselves also want to shape others according to it. That is why all people who have something to say are also interested in others. But those who really have nothing to say speak of tolerance and liberalism. But by this they mean nothing more than that a general home should be created for everything that is insignificant and shallow. But they should not count on those who have tasks in the world. For them it is hurtful if they are expected to bend under the yoke of any generality, be it that of a general standard of art or that of a general morality. They want to be free, to have free movement of their individuality. The rejection of any norm is the main characteristic of modern consciousness. Kant's principle: Live in such a way that the maxim of your actions can become universal, has been dismissed. It must be replaced by: Live in the way that best corresponds to your inner being; live yourself fully, completely. It is precisely when each individual gives to the whole what no one else can give, but only he, that he does the most for it. Kant's principle, however, demands the performance of what all can do equally. However, the right person is not interested in this. The "Society for Ethical Culture" has a poor understanding of our times. Their program proves that.

Among the accusations that are currently being made against spiritual science and spiritual research, one of the most significant is that these spiritual science or spiritual research would be in opposition to the well-established results of natural science, the natural science that is rightly called the pride of our present spiritual life, indeed of our entire present cultural life. Should the accusation be substantiated that spiritual science and spiritual research intend to oppose these established results of natural science, then, it can be said, spiritual research would truly be in a bad way. Not only would its possibility of finding access to the understanding and heart of the modern human being be in doubt, but its very justification would be in question. Therefore, in addition to everything that has been said in the previous lectures about the relationship between spiritual research and natural science, today this particular episodic consideration may be added about the relationship between spiritual research and natural science, before the next time we look at a figure who is only accessible to spiritual science in the eminent sense: the figure of Jakob Böhme.

Spiritual research, as it is meant here in these reflections, undoubtedly presents itself as something that often appears new in the face of the habits of thought and spiritual aspirations of our time, as something that falls outside the usual ways of thinking, the modes of representation of contemporary spiritual life. And the question suggests itself: how is it that precisely at a time when the educated person who is interested in spiritual questions at all places all hope in what science can give – how is it that at such a time this spiritual science wants to gain recognition, that it places itself in the middle of the triumph of scientific thinking?

Perhaps the easiest way to answer this question is to take a brief look at intellectual life in the last third or perhaps the second half of the nineteenth century. This was the time when not only did scientific research rise to its zenith, experiencing victory after victory, but it was also the time when hopes grew ever greater that all possible information about the meaning of what can be called spirit and spiritual life would come from the natural sciences. Anyone who was fully aware of the intellectual life in the last third of the nineteenth century, or let us say, anyone who was able to let the great hopes of this intellectual life of the nineteenth century take effect on them, for example in the eighties nineteenth century, could not fail to notice how questions were coming from all areas of scientific research, questions that seemed to force all human thought to be placed on a new footing that broke with the old. Only one point will be emphasized. In the 1770s and 1780s, anyone interested in intellectual life could become acquainted with what was more or less new in the field of natural science at the time, for example, the mechanical theory of heat. Those who were familiar with natural science recognized that something like the mechanical theory of heat was an enormous achievement of the human mind. But perhaps we are less interested in the point of view of such a person than in the point of view of someone for whom the question of spiritual knowledge was of primary importance. What did such a person see?

Such a person might have noticed that among the many sensory impressions that assail the human being when using his senses, there is the sensation of what is called heat or, let us say, heat and cold. Like color, like light and like sound, warmth is, after all, also a sense impression. Through his senses, man feels that the world around him is in a certain state of warmth, and he perceives this warmth first as an impression on his sensation. At that time, as has just been mentioned, it was considered a fact proven by research at that time that what man calls warmth, what he believes to be the case, and what he perceives as being spread out in space, permeates bodies and affects beings, that this objectively out there in nature is nothing other than the movement of the smallest parts of the body. So you could say to yourself: When you put your hand into lukewarm water and perceive a certain state of warmth, this sensation of a state of warmth is only an appearance. What appears to you as an immediate impression is only an appearance, it is only an effect on your organism that is caused by something outside. It is only a small kind of movement; you do not perceive the movement. The smallest parts of water are active, but you do not perceive the activity, the movement. Rather, because the movement is so fast, you do not perceive it as such, but it gives you the impression of warmth. When books appeared at that time, such as “Heat, considered as a form of motion,” it was considered a great achievement of the time, and we younger people at that time had to study how the smallest molecular parts move in a liquid, in a gas gas, bumping into the walls, colliding with each other internally, and it was clear that what is going on internally is, in sensation, what gives the appearance of what is called heat. From there, a certain habit of thinking emerged, a certain way of looking at natural phenomena, and I myself still remember how, when I was a little boy, my school principal, enthusiastic about this scientific achievement of his time , regarded all natural forces, from gravity to heat and chemical and magnetic forces and so on, as mere appearances and saw the truth in those movements, in those fine states of motion inside the body. That school director, Heinrich Schramm his name was, saw gravity, the force of falling, for example, only as a movement of the smallest parts of the body. In the light of such a view of nature, there was indeed something that could lead one to say: So everything “real” is just, let us say, space extended to infinity, matter situated in this space and divided into the smallest parts, and the movements of this matter! And the hope could well arise that, just as heat, electricity, magnetism and light could be explained as a fine activity of the smallest particles of matter, so too would one day the activity of thinking, the activity of the soul, be able to be explained as a fine activity of that matter which composes the human or animal body.

There then followed a number of phases in the development of the scientific-theoretical way of thinking. For example, in the 1880s, if you were a physicist, you had to understand light and the whole world of colors as a kind of glow and study infinitely complicated, fine movements and motions within matter and the ether. Then, in the course of the 1880s, it became apparent that people were becoming skeptical of these fine motions and limited itself more to considering the phenomena, the facts, as they present themselves, to express them through the calculation, to describe them, and not so much to speculate about what is supposed to be imperceptible, but only supposed to underlie everything: about the finer activities of matter and ether. That was more in the field of physics.

In the field of physics, there was no real possibility of getting out of the habitual thinking that arose when one considered these fine movements of matter in relation to something that was supposed to make it possible to grasp the spirit in its immediacy. Something was holding us back, so to speak, from the natural sciences, from looking at the spirit in the way that was asserted in the last lectures here. In addition, there were quite different things. Anyone who was involved in the development of natural science at that time was not only confronted with what has just been characterized, but also with the repercussions of all that had been revealed, for example, by the great discoveries of Schleiden and Schwann in the first half of the nineteenth century, through which the smallest parts, the cells, were found within the plant and animal organism. This did not prove the reality of atoms and molecules, but the organic forms were reduced to their smallest building blocks, to cells whose forms were only accessible to the microscope. Then there was the fallout from what was associated with the name Darwin, and one was further under the impression of the great deed of Ernst Haeckel, who in the 1860s had extended Darwin's theory to include humans.

Thus, a scientific approach was adopted that started with the simplest things in the plant and animal world and observed how, from the imperfect to the more perfect beings and up to to man, the individual organs themselves arose in such a way that, by comparison, one could, as it were, determine the process by which the individual organs, which were more complicated, developed from the simpler ones. An enormous amount of material was collected. The breadth and scope of this material was so great that, for example, in the 1870s, one of the most important comparative anatomists of the present day, Carl Gegenbaur, was able to say in his “Comparative Anatomy” (1878) that, especially in the last few decades, an enormous amount of individual knowledge had been collected that showed how related living beings are in terms of their organs, and that one had to wait for the possibility - so Gegenbaur thought - to raise knowledge to “insight”; and he promised himself from the Darwinian method that it would be possible to show what the comparison of the organs of the highest living beings with those of less perfect beings would irrefutably reveal, that there is also a so-called physical descent of the perfect living beings from the imperfect ones. Thus, as it were, the chain was seen to close in the evolution from imperfect living beings to more perfect ones, even up to man, and it could be said that the most complicated being we know, the human body, arises through a kind of summation of those forces and activities prevail even in the simplest creatures, and even through a summation of the forces and activities in inanimate nature itself, the most complicated being we know, the human body, would ultimately come into being.

Enormous hopes were pinned on this scientific ideal. In fact, at that time it was difficult to distinguish between what were scientific facts and what was thought or speculated into the facts, because for anyone who thought deeply, a distinction between facts and theories did indeed exist. The difference was that one could say to oneself: If one proceeded as carefully and subtly as Darwin himself, especially in his earlier years, one would find an enormous amount of material on the mutual relationships and points of comparison between the individual living creatures, from the imperfect ones of the animal and plant kingdoms up to man. But there is a difference, one could say, between what emerged as a fact from the similarity of the external structure and from the similarity of the internal processes, and what could only be imagined: the hypothesis, the assumption of the descent of the perfect living beings from the imperfect ones, because this descent could not be traced according to the facts known so far. One had before one the sum of living beings, more perfect and less perfect. But for anyone who could think thoroughly, descent as such always remained only a hypothesis if one wanted to remain on scientific ground. But the material was impressive.

The results of scientific research penetrated deep into the soul, sometimes with a shattering effect due to the magnitude of the insights that could be gained. In addition, there were many other things. Today's introductory lecture must refer to many individual aspects. For example, reference must be made to the tremendous discovery made by Helmholtz in the field of light phenomena and the effects of light on the human organ of sight, and also made by Helmholtz in relation to sound and tone phenomena and the effect of sound and tone on the human ear and the human organ of hearing. In this way, knowledge of the visual process, which had previously remained mysterious, was acquired. We also learned to recognize what happens in the ear, for example, what a complicated miracle, one might say, a piano-like apparatus is located in the ear. In place of much of what previously seemed merely imagined, there now came a more precise knowledge of the structure of the human organs. One could say to oneself: What appears on the outside as mere movement and activity is transformed — such a transformation, as we have just seen, essentially resulted from the mechanical theory of heat — by the wonderful workings in the organs, in relation to the perceptions that live in the soul. And the inner life of the soul is ultimately built up from what our organs shape out of the workings of matter and space.

In many cases, the whole spiritual process that took place in the souls at that time can actually be described by saying that the souls were stunned by everything that was found there, both on a large and on an individual scale. One had to say to oneself: an earlier time knew nothing of all this. Many traditions about the human soul life seemed obsolete now that one was only beginning to study the effect of matter and its movements on the human organism, to study it scientifically in the true sense of the word.

For the spiritual scientist, the whole thing was, let us say, less important because of the details than because one had to admit: in order to enter into the wide perspectives that are opened up into a world of pure fact, something is needed that one does not initially believe to be present in the old considerations of the soul or spiritual life. In many souls that experienced all this in the last third of the nineteenth century, the following feeling arose, for example. These souls could say to themselves: Of course, in the old days many things were thought about the big questions, for example, about the change from sleep to waking and back, about the question of the immortality of the human soul, about the questions of life and death, about the origin of existence, and so on. But if we compare the entire methodical way of thinking, the entire way of conducting spiritual research in those ancient times, from which such traditions of soul research arise, and compare it with the strict, conscientious way of modern scientific research, then what has come down to us from those ancient times simply falls short of the strict and conscientious method of today's scientific research. Even if the spiritual researcher was not affected by the results of natural research, and perhaps was not even carried away by the results, the one thing that had a tremendous effect on the spiritual researcher was the rigor of scientific thinking, the conscientiousness, the tremendous sense of truth in scientific thinking.

In the face of such facts, anyone who was at all concerned with science, whether natural science or the humanities, had to develop the urge that can be characterized as follows: Science in the most serious sense of the word, which can set the tone for the spiritual life of the present day, can only seek its salvation in the strict thinking, in the truly conscientious research that can be learned from natural science. Such an urge gradually transforms itself, and also had to transform itself, into a kind of scientific conscience in the spiritual-scientific researcher. One could say to oneself: Certainly, as in all ages, so also in modern times the soul has the urge and the impulse to get to know its own nature and essence, and above all to get to know the processes that reach beyond birth and death. But only that which presents itself in the form of a scientific way of thinking can make an impression on the culture of our time for those who look clearly and impartially. One certainly saw many things about all kinds of psychological questions that one would like to say today — appear on the spiritual market. One saw many things that were and are truly quite far removed from conscientious methods of thinking developed through natural science; but one could say: Such things may sometimes make an impression here or there for a while, due to the carelessness and convenience of contemporary thinking make an impression here and there for a while, but such an impression cannot endure, for even the most casual will eventually ask themselves: What can conscientious thinking, trained in natural science, say to that which has supposedly been researched about the spiritual world?

Thus, the need arose for the soul researchers to conduct research entirely according to the model of natural science. One might say that psychology, the doctrine of the soul by Franz Brentano, who has already been mentioned here, is a kind of ideal that has not been fully realized, a psychology that was intended to fill many volumes. But of all these volumes, only one appeared, the first, in the spring of 1874. And although it was promised that the next volume would appear in the fall of the same year, it has not appeared to this day.

Brentano did not proceed according to the pattern of those psychologists of whom it was said last time that they completely exclude the great questions, for example, about the nature of the alternation of sleep and waking, the question of the immortality of the human soul, and the like, but he wanted to treat all these questions entirely according to the pattern of strict scientific methodology. He failed. And why did he fail? Franz Brentano could never bring himself to take the path that has shown itself to be necessary for the present precisely because a mind like Brentano's failed after he did not want to take it. This path has been characterized in the past lectures and especially last time. From this path it was shown how it alone is suitable to lead us into the higher regions, into the spiritual regions of existence, into that which also reaches beyond birth and death. Franz Brentano could not bring himself to go this way. That one must go this way if one wants to reach an end, a goal, he has literally proved negatively by the fact that his psychology stopped at the first volume, which has nothing to do with any of the great questions just mentioned, that he could not yet approach the great questions, as he wanted to.

I have tried to give you a picture of the spiritual life of the 1880s, the period in which anyone seeking access to the spiritual realms would have found themselves. If one allowed everything that has been mentioned to take effect, one could not so easily be satisfied with the then emerging, initially sporadic products of the burgeoning spiritual science. I will only point out, how a work like “Esoteric Buddhism” by A. P. Sinnett came at the same time into the middle of not only scientific research itself, but also into the scientific education of the time.

I do not want to discuss the title question, that here Buddhism has nothing to do with the Buddha and with Buddhism as it is meant as a religious confession, but note that with this book, which in German-speaking areas in the eighties years of the nineteenth century, was initially an overview of world phenomena, of the great course of cosmic events and also of the questions that arise in connection with the nature of man, as well as in the relationships beyond birth and death. What was communicated in this book could at first seem striking. For anyone who turned their gaze to spiritual things could, as such, agree with much of what was written in Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism” in a certain respect. Much of it did not contradict what one could and was allowed to think, even if one stood strictly on the ground of natural science. But there was one thing that contradicted the scientific education of the time, one thing that made it impossible to simply accept this book as an interesting product of its time: the way in which the book was presented, the way in which it summarized things and the way in which these things were, for example, sources, was in no way justified before the strict scientific education and truthfulness, and that a person educated in natural science, no matter how much he agreed with the individual results and messages of this book, had to feel repelled by the whole way of presenting them.

The same applied to many other works that appeared in this field. It was even the case with the book by A. P. Blavatsky, who was justifiably famous to a certain extent, that appeared at the end of the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s: “The Secret Doctrine”. Anyone who had to do with these things could say to themselves: There is profound knowledge and insight into spiritual things in this book, but the whole way of presenting it is so chaotic, so mixed up with scientific dilettantism, which is particularly evident in the refutation of scientific theories and hypotheses, that those who have been scientifically educated cannot go along with this book at all.

Thus, two things emerged, so to speak: for someone who had a heart and mind for the existence of a spiritual world, on the one hand there was the scientific way of thinking, the whole scientific way of conceiving things. He could use it to develop his scientific conscientiousness, to free himself from all dilettantism, if he seriously engaged with it. But he could also learn from it how to conduct rigorous research into the factual, and how, through such research, to arrive at verified results that really intervene in life, that are not only foundational for a theory but for the facts of life. On the other hand, however, he could say to himself: But where one seeks to gain something for a spiritual interpretation of life's phenomena from natural science itself, where natural science tries to do so through itself, little can be squeezed out of it for the spiritual, and the less so the more rigorously it proceeds in the realm of the factual. Therefore, someone in such a position had good reason to look back a little at the history of the development of mankind. There he could learn that, even if one disregards spiritual-scientific research, something is gathered together in the various spiritual documents of the peoples and epochs, something purely externally documentary lies there that encloses a grandiose spiritual core of knowledge, which, if one looks at it more closely, is not to be taken lightly take it lightly, but the more one delves into this compilation, the more it offers in the way of insights into spiritual life, even if one cannot approach the way it is presented, or even the way it must be found according to this way of presentation.

Only for those who approach the subject superficially can what ancient Egyptian or Chaldean wisdom contains be no more than a collection of human musings. Those who delve deeper will not find musings, but will actually see how plausible ideas about the nature of the spirit and its effectiveness are contained in these things in a variety of forms that look grotesque to today's world. And just as with Egyptian or Chaldean wisdom, this turns out to be particularly true for ancient Indian wisdom, as far as it has been handed down. Of course, one will not be able to see something like Indian wisdom with the grandiose, significant impression that it must make on everyone, for example, with the eye of a modern philosopher like Deußen, but one will have to immerse oneself in it without prejudice in terms of certain spiritual connections that are obvious from within. But one thing is striking: from the way the whole is presented, it is evident that spiritual knowledge of the kind that we encounter here is not gained in the same way and by the same method as our present-day research methods, by which natural science strides from triumph to triumph. If one is open-minded enough to confidently recognize natural science on the one hand and, on the other, to how a spiritual achievement and spiritual work from ancient times resound, then one will be able to let the overwhelming insights into the spiritual life sink in, and at the same time one will see how completely different the methods must have been with which those spiritual-scientific insights were gained in ancient times.

Now spiritual research itself shows us how very differently that which we can properly call, for example, ancient Indian wisdom, is gained. This wisdom reveals insights that penetrate deeply into the essence of things. We find that this wisdom was not gained through external observation, not through the kind of thinking we call natural science today, but through a kind of soul self-knowledge similar to the one we have been able to characterize here for modern times. Yoga methods, methods of self-education of the soul, were used. These led the soul to see and perceive and recognize not only in the way one perceives and recognizes in ordinary everyday life, but to feel that higher powers of knowledge are emerging within it, which can see into the spiritual worlds that open up around us if we only open up the organs for them within us. But for our existence within the physical life, everything that confronts us as soul activity is, in a certain way, bound to the instrument of the physical body. And now spiritual research shows us how the ancient Indian research was itself connected to the instrument of the physical body in a different way than our present research, as it is common practice in science. Today, science conducts research through the senses and through the mind, which is connected to the instrument of the brain. What did the yoga method lead to? What it brought him to can only be briefly indicated here, because we only want to orient ourselves about the relationships between natural science and spiritual science.

Yoga method initially led people to a certain extent to switch off the brain's thinking instrument, even to switch off everything that the rest of the higher nervous system conveys. In the yoga methods, the instrument of that strictly inward vision was made precisely that part of the human nervous system which today appears to us in science as a subordinate part, but which is in the strictest sense bound up with the workings of the human organism itself, that which we call the solar plexus and the sympathetic nervous system. Just as our present-day scientific research is connected with the higher nervous system, so these ancient methods of enlightenment were connected with the nervous system that we today even regard as a lower one, in a sense. But because this subordinate nervous system is connected to the forces of existence and the life forces and is intimately related to that through which the human being is immersed in the divine-spiritual existence, because it is thus related to the sources of human existence, one recognized not only the penetration of the human organism by spiritual forces, but just as one looks with the eye into the worlds of light, so with the instrument of the sympathetic nervous system one looked into the spiritual worlds, beholding concrete facts and entities in them. Anyone who is able to understand how a person who is able to penetrate into his own depths, even to the instrument, is able to relate to the universe also understands how that ancient oriental wisdom has come to us. If we follow the old wisdom, we find it discovered everywhere, coming to the surface of human thought through ancient methods of research, through ancient yoga methods. We find the most diverse wisdoms among the most diverse peoples, and by merely occupying ourselves with them, we penetrate more and more into their depths and recognize how people came to have them in those times when they knew relatively little about today's physical astronomy, anatomy, physiology, and so on. The ancient wisdom of India did not know as much as we do today about the workings of the human physical body, but it was possible to place oneself in the position of the organism by applying the deeper-lying nervous system. And it was the same with other peoples.

Now, by letting one's gaze wander, so to speak, over everything that was effective as such old wisdom up to the sixth century BC, one can penetrate as far back as, for example, ancient Greek times. There we find, apart from everything else, an outstanding thinker, a thinker who has been misunderstood just as often for the good as for the bad: Aristotle, who was active only a few centuries before the founding of Christianity. He still seems strange to us today. If we take him at his word, then we find in him, first of all, in many fields, something of what is today called natural science. For in the old wisdoms, natural science in the modern sense is not present. Even in the nineteenth century, people who wanted to stand strictly on the ground and only on the ground of natural science spoke in the most laudatory terms about what Aristotle had contributed to natural science. So we find in Aristotle the starting points of what can be called scientific research even today. In addition, we find in his works a well-developed doctrine of the human soul.

We shall not go into the details of his psychology, but merely point out how Aristotle's doctrine of the human soul relates to what has been handed down from ancient times about the human soul and its connection with the great spiritual worlds. One can only understand what Aristotle wrote about the soul if one realizes that all this is given to him as a tradition of ancient, primeval thinking, gained in the way just described. Aristotle is no longer familiar with the research methods of ancient times; they are foreign to him. But what he was able to say about the structure, the organization of the human soul, about the difference between what is bound to the physical body and thus to death and what, after death, participates in a spiritual life in eternity, what Aristotle is able to say about all this, that is like something handed down from ancient times, which he knows in terms of content, which he has received in such a way that he could say: it makes sense to my mind. But he only knows the individual parts, what he calls, for example, the vegetative soul, the spiritual soul, and so on. But how the individual parts are connected with the spiritual world, that he no longer knows. He can enumerate the parts, describe them rationally and classify them, and make them plausible to the intellect, but he can no longer show how these parts of the human soul are connected with the spiritual world.

Aristotle's way then passed over to later times. Natural science became more and more developed. Of course there was the medieval low and the new dawn of natural science at the beginning of the modern age, but if we disregard that, we can say that natural science became more and more developed.

What is the basis of man's relationship to science and to the objects of science? If we consider what it would mean for the individual human being if he were alone with his senses, if he could not open his senses and, as it were, attach them to the realms of nature that are poured out around us, what would individual human life be without its integration into nature? Let us look at the matter very fundamentally. We could perhaps squeeze our eyes if we could not connect them with nature, and would thereby be able to have something that would be like a shining of the inner light. But compare the poor inner life in the whole physical world, which man could only have through himself if he could not connect with the realms of nature. Compare it with the rich life that opens up when man opens his eyes and the other sense organs to the riches of nature and its impressions. We are human beings not only by living within ourselves, but by opening the organs to the riches of nature that are poured out around us, and by interacting with these riches. If we knew only what the eye, what the other sense-organs can produce for themselves, how poor in content we would be as human beings here in the physical world! Compare this with what the life of the soul gradually became in the times when natural science was just emerging and leading from triumph to triumph.

In relation to the life of the soul, what Aristotle had given was, so to speak, continued. They only occupied themselves with the observation of the phenomena of the soul itself. But this is the same as allowing the senses to be active only within themselves - and up to our time, official soul science has done it that way. Up to our time, the content of official soul science is nothing other than what can be compared to the mere inner activity of our sense organs or our brain when the brain's thoughts are not directed out into the world. But we have already seen in the previous lectures how, through the methods of spiritual science, and this was also the case with the old spiritual science, the soul is attached to spiritual realms above, which are just as concretely and internally structured as the realms around us in the physical world, to which the sense organs are attached.

These spiritual realms, these very concrete spiritual facts and entities, were not accessible for a certain period of time, which was precisely what allowed external scientific research to mature. As a result, knowledge of the soul's life became increasingly impoverished because of the lack of a spiritual perspective that provided concrete confirmation of the spiritual world. At best, the soul was still investigated in its inner life, as Franz Brentano did in the 1870s, as you can see for yourself in his “Psychology”. But his research is like investigating the eye only in terms of what it can do by itself, and not in terms of what it can do when it is directed towards the facts of nature.

Now it may be said that precisely because of the ever more precise examination of the physical processes of the human being, the view was diverted from the spiritual worlds with which the soul is connected. — On the one hand, the soul is connected with these spiritual worlds, which it enters when it has passed through the gate of death, or when it enters another world through sleep. But the soul is connected to the physical world through its organs, through the entire nervous system and through the entire blood circulation. The fact that natural science has become more and more significant in its methods has directed people's attention to the connection between the soul and the physical world. The results of natural science were so magnificent in this respect that it completely filled people, for example, with how the soul lives out in its connection with the bloodstream and so on. Every new triumph of natural science was in a sense detrimental to directing the gaze of the soul to the connection with the spiritual world.

Nothing else applies either. If you want to get to know a clock, you will get to know it poorly in its entirety as an organism if you say: “There I see how the hands of the clock move forward, there may be a little demon inside that moves the hands forward.” If someone who says something like this still felt so exalted above someone who merely studies the mechanism of the clock,

you would be laughed at, because you only get to know the clock if you really study its mechanism. And it is a different matter again to get to know the spiritual life of the watchmaker or the person who invented the watch through the mechanism of the watch. You can go both ways: examine the mechanical operation of the clockwork and get to know the human train of thought that led to the invention of the watch. But it would be nonsense if someone wanted to infer the existence of demons that set the whole clockwork in motion.

This was gradually lost to mankind for the study of mankind, which in the case of the clock would correspond to the tracing of the ingenious mechanism back to the thoughts of the inventor. For it would correspond to the human soul to trace thoughts back to the entities of the spiritual world. In natural science, on the other hand, it went triumphantly from fact to fact, which corresponds to the clockwork. It is interesting to note that the knowledge handed down from ancient times is usually lost to mankind in those epochs in which a particular piece of knowledge can be precisely investigated by natural science. It is remarkable that at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, we see that the philosopher Cartesius still had a certain idea that something similar to a spirit in the human being works from the heart to the head, to the human being's head. Cartesius still speaks of certain spirits of life that are not of a physical nature, but whose forces play between the heart and the head. Then we see how such knowledge increasingly disappears in the spiritual life of humanity.

Those who wonder why this is so can get the following answer. We see that, historically, at the same time as this disappearance of knowledge of spiritual processes related to the heart, the knowledge of the physical organism of the heart and of blood circulation emerged. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, we see first the English physician Harvey publishing his discovery of blood circulation, and Marcello Malpighi in Bologna, as an anatomist, showing for the first time the blood circulation of the frog, how artful the whole blood circulation is. Thus, attention was drawn to the sensory process. Knowledge of spiritual facts was, so to speak, pushed down by the exact knowledge of the sensory process. While it is a triumph for natural science that Francesco Redi, born in 1624, formulated the proposition that contradicted many assertions of earlier times, “everything alive comes from living things.” While this proposition is a triumph, we can say: By reducing the organic to its germ, to the physically indeterminate organic germ, humanity lost sight of how the spiritual itself, independently of the organic germ, intervenes in evolution. Humanity lost its understanding of the spiritual germ. It was step by step. The more science advanced, the more the view of the spiritual world was lost.

Such things are not just coincidences, nor are they something that can be blamed or criticized, but they are necessary developmental processes in the shaping of humanity as a whole. That is how it has to be. Often, while one thing rises and develops upwards, another thing goes down. What we today admire in natural science, indeed recognize as necessary, presents itself to us, if we are true connoisseurs of natural scientific development, in such a way that we say: spiritual science has not the slightest reason to fight natural science in any way, provided it keeps within its limits, nor has reason to complain about the one-sidedness of natural science. For it is only by refraining from mixing all kinds of speculation into scientific research and instead keeping one's gaze calmly fixed on physical and sensory processes that the great achievements of science have been achieved to date. Yes, one can see, especially at the dawn of the newer spiritual life, how only through resistance to Aristotelianism, and also to the justified content of Aristotelianism, such minds as Galileo or Giordano Bruno came to their successes, by refusing to mix anything into their research other than what spread out before their senses and was instructive enough.

Today, the humanities researcher must confront the natural sciences researcher in such a way that he says: the more natural science research itself is kept pure from all speculation and all philosophy, the more one turns one's gaze purely to the facts and does not invent all sorts of spiritual essences, but only takes what one can actually research, the better it is for natural science. The spiritual scientific researcher in particular would like to advocate keeping the scientific facts pure of all scientifically or spiritually speculated talk. Therefore, on the one hand, one can be a spiritual scientific researcher today and, on the other hand, advocate the authenticity and soundness of scientific research. And it is only a prejudice to believe that the spiritual researcher has to turn against natural science.

It is a different matter when there are numerous theories that are already approaching spiritual science and that one would like to derive from natural science theories. In this case, the natural science researcher himself enters the path of spiritual science, in which he is, in most cases, only very little familiar. But one thing remains, even for spiritual science and spiritual research, from natural science knowledge: that is the conscientious method, the conscientious sense of truth, which we have already characterized in the past lectures and also characterized, and which is to remain with the facts.

How do these facts arise? We have seen that through the fact that certain powers unfold in the human soul, which from this soul also reveal the connection with the higher worlds, just as the senses reveal the connection with the physical world. Just as the senses are meant to fathom the facts of the physical world and leave them at that, not to distort them by speculation, so it is important not to philosophize and speculate about the results of clairvoyant observation, but to take the strict standpoint of the facts here too. Then one stands quite firmly on the standpoint of spiritual science, but quite similarly in its field, as one stands firmly on the ground of natural science in relation to it. That is the kind of spiritual science as it is represented here.

This is the only thing that can be the subject of a spiritual research that feels responsible for the spiritual needs of our time. And this is also the case with strict scientific research into the facts that are available to spiritual science, which is immediately apparent when science, understanding itself, reaches its limits.

This again, purely from the facts, gives rise to very strange results. I would just like to remind you of what results when we take the views of the great naturalist Du Bois-Reymond, as expressed in his speeches. Perhaps the most significant speech was the one on the “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, which he gave at the forty-fifth meeting of German naturalists and physicians in Leipzig on August 14, 1872. There is a passage in it – and I still remember the deep impression this passage made on me as a very young person when I first heard the speech – a passage that roughly says: When we have a person before us in their waking life, science cannot say anything about how sensation, perception, desire, passion or affect arise from the activity of the smallest parts of the brain. “What conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and on the other hand the original, not further definable, undeniable facts for me: “oh feel pain, feel pleasure; I taste sweet, smell the scent of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see roses, and the certainty flowing just as directly from it: ”so I am?” — It is quite and forever incomprehensible that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not care how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they lie and will move.

Du Bois-Reymond considered it impossible to understand the soul life in a natural scientific way in the waking state of man. Therefore, he said: When we have the sleeping human being before us, in whom the life of sensations, of perceptions, desires, affects, passions has been extinguished, then we can explain the sleeping human being scientifically; then we have something before us that we can call an inner organic activity. But as soon as this organism is awakened and life, sensation, desire, imagination, etc., are infused into it, it is different. Then this life, this soul content, cannot be explained scientifically from what the scientist can recognize. Sleeping man, Du Bois-Reymond believes, is scientifically comprehensible, but not waking man.

That is one side of the story. On the other hand, read the more recent treatises on the nature of sleep: you will find it admitted everywhere that natural science, so to speak, knows nothing about the reasons for sleep, that it knows nothing about the sleeping person, who, according to Du Bois-Reymond, should be fathomable after all. On the one hand, we see indications of the brilliant progress of natural science, but we also see it admitting its limitations by admitting that the waking human being with his or her soul life cannot be scientifically understood. On the other hand, however, we have, as in our days, the confession that man's sleep cannot be explained to this day. Why not? Not because sleep belongs to those areas where the spirit plays into ordinary life, because we cannot explain sleep if we cannot explain waking.

In one of the first lectures of this winter semester, I pointed out how, at best, a mechanism can be conceived scientifically that automatically, after a certain period of time, causes the urge to switch off consciousness and sensory activity in order to eliminate fatigue. But as I said, if we want to limit ourselves to the fact that sleep is brought about by a kind of independent process in the organism that happens automatically, then we have no explanation for the reindeer that did not work but still takes its afternoon nap, nor do we have an explanation for the sleep of the small child that sleeps the most. On the other hand, I have pointed out that sleep can only be explained if we assume that in the sleeping person we have only the physical body and the etheric body lying in bed, and that when they fall asleep, a spiritual element, namely the astral body and I, moves out of the human being's being. What happens when, during sleep, the soul-like part of the human being is, as it were, outside the physical body and the etheric body? We will talk about these things in more detail. Today, only the following should be mentioned.

As the soul-like part goes out of the physical body and its animator, something is evoked that is opposed to the waking activity of the soul. In its waking activity, the soul is active. No limb moves without the soul knowing it. At the very least, representations are evoked without the soul making use of the brain as an instrument. The soul must be active in the waking state. The opposite is the case in sleep. We can say that the soul enjoys its own body in the sleep-life. If we proceed according to spiritual research, we have, according to the difference, soul activity and soul enjoyment in wakefulness and in the state of sleep, and we understand the interrelation between soul work and soul activity and soul enjoyment, which must pour into soul activity if it is to continue in an appropriate way. Now it is no longer the reindeer taking its afternoon nap that confounds us, although it is not at all tired, but we know that the soul, when it enjoys its body, can exaggerate, and that one can sleep when one is not at all tired. We understand it when we know how, in certain constitutions, the enjoyment of the bodily can be experienced to an exaggerated degree.

All this can be understood if we know how to explain sleep from a spiritual scientific point of view. That is to say, there is an area in which natural science believes itself to have unlimited sway, and where spiritual science has only so much to say, namely that spirit permeates everything, including natural processes. But then there begins an area where there is no longer anything that science can investigate. There are facts, but they are facts that can only be seen when the seeing is not a sensual seeing but a supersensible beholding. If spiritual science proceeds with the same conscientiousness and becomes accustomed to thinking as strictly in its field as natural science in its, then it cannot come into conflict with natural science. But with that, spiritual science stands on ground that in many respects contradicts what has gradually emerged in the course of humanity's spiritual life.

Thus we see how those who can be regarded as forerunners of genuine spiritual research, Goethe for example, had to fight against what was opposed to spiritual research activity. We see it most clearly when we look at how Goethe once defended himself against Kant. It was Kant who first sought to determine how the knowledge that has emerged in modern times is bound to the instrument of the brain, how it must be limited to external experience and cannot penetrate into the depths of the world with which our spiritual and soul life is connected. Hence Kant's strict boundary between “science” and what he calls “belief”; and for Kant, higher realms are only accessible through belief. Therefore, he replaces knowledge about a world of eternity or of the divine-spiritual with a belief that is to be based on the “categorical imperative”. Thus, he decrees that what should be knowledge in spiritual science is mere belief. But Goethe says in his beautiful essay on “Contemplative Judgment” with reference to Kant: “If one can already feel one's way in the intuited sense into a spiritual region in which the divine-spiritual is rooted, from which the moral arises, why should the human spirit, when it rises into this spiritual region, not also really pass the adventure of reason? For Kant called it a “daring adventure of reason” when man wants to penetrate into regions in which, according to Kant, knowledge cannot exist. For Western thinking, the question is: how do you get from science to the humanities? The fact that you do not have to fight science, but that you fully recognize it, yes, you can be a loyal recognizer of its successes, nevertheless, you can expand human knowledge to those areas, according to the model of scientific research, with which the soul is connected in its spiritual foundations in those impulses that give it life even after it has left the physical body and is preparing for a new form of a later physicality.

It will be the task of true spiritual research to increasingly move away from the unjustified mocking or refutation of the legitimate claims of science in our time. Of course, this will depend on spiritual research being recognized only as justified if it is familiar with the state of scientific research at present, and if it therefore does not act in an amateurish way against what can be legitimately demanded from the scientific education of the present day. But just as the natural scientist cannot stop at investigating only the inner nature of the eye, the ear, the sense of warmth, and so on, but must direct what the senses are able to experience within themselves outwards to the rich concrete environment of the physical, so the soul must be recognized by the soul living together with that with which it is connected in the spiritual, and that only begins where scientific research has its limits.

This is precisely the relationship between natural science and spiritual science, but it also offers the possibility of real continuity and peace and mutual understanding between natural science and spiritual scientific research. If what has already been said in this respect in the previous lectures is combined with what I was able to sketch out today about the relationship between scientific and spiritual scientific research, it will be possible to gain understanding for the legitimacy of spiritual scientific research, and also for the possibility of spiritual research to stand on an equal footing with natural science in our time. And it may be hoped that the justified objections and the justified doubts which still exist on the part of natural scientists today will gradually disappear when natural scientists see not only all kinds of confused stuff, as well as arbitrary assertions and superstition, in the field of spiritual research, but how spiritual research is well acquainted with what the present-day scientific education demands.

If this happens, then spiritual research will appear more and more justified before the scientific conscience of the present, and then, from what arises within the facts of spiritual life, one will gradually be able to understand that spiritual research is really possible and really justified, and that the objections against spiritual research actually belong to an area in relation to which one can say something similar to what Goethe once said in relation to another area, namely in relation to rising above all ignorance and all illogic.

In summarizing the relationship of the spiritual researcher to those who appear as enemies of spiritual scientific research, I would like to end with a few words that are comparative and remind you of something that Goethe once said in reference to something quite different. Goethe was thinking of an old Greek doctrine and exposition on motion, which, however, still influenced much of more recent philosophy. This doctrine says: If any object moves, it can be observed as being at rest at every moment, and at every moment, even at the shortest point in time, it is at rest. It is at rest, even if only for a moment. Thus there could be no such thing as “movement,” because at every moment a moving body is at rest and therefore has no movement. Such is the Zen conclusion of movement, and such is how Greek thought came to haunt us until recent times.

Goethe found this objection to movement very strange, and he once said the beautiful words:

Enemies may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,
Go around in front of their noses.

I cannot help but think of this saying when I see how much has been said in recent times to the effect that 'spirit', what you call 'spirit', is the result of purely material activity, material processes and movements; that spirit arises from matter. Just as movement, in the sense of what has just been said, only emerges from rest and is nothing real, so spirit is nothing real apart from matter.

If, in the sense in which we are attempting to penetrate into the spiritual world in these reflections, one tries to gain knowledge of the spiritual and thus really enters into the nature of what the spiritual is, then one may well describe what spiritual scientific research brings to light about the spirit in its relationship to opponents and enemies of spiritual science enemies of spiritual science, then, with a slight alteration of the words of Goethe just quoted, one might perhaps describe it in the following way, and with this I would like to summarize today what I have to say about the relationship between natural science and spiritual science:

Adversity may arise,
But thou shalt remain calm, remain cheerful!
And even if they deny the spirit,
Thou shalt not brood over it,
And in the end thou shalt prove them right:
Their spirit is in a bad state indeed.

Living Education

In these five lectures my task has been to describe briefly some guidelines for Waldorf education. Here I have not tried to get into details but describe the spirit of this method as a whole, which should flow from anthroposophy. Perhaps even more than details—though they may be important—contemporary humanity needs a complete renewal and strengthening of all spiritual life. Aside from the spiritual substance that is of course necessary, all spiritual callings require a renewed enthusiasm that springs from knowledge of the world—a worldview that has been taken hold of in spirit. Today it is becoming obvious to a wide range of people that teachers—who must be soul-artists—need such enthusiasm more than anyone else. Perhaps people seek along paths that cannot lead to the goal, because people everywhere continue to fear a thorough investigation of spiritual matters. We base our educational method on the discovery of a teaching method—conditions that will make education viable through reading human nature itself; such reading will gradually reveal the human being so that we can adjust our education to what is revealed to every step of the curriculum and schedule.

Let’s for a moment go into the spirit of how we read the human being. We have seen that children are naturally completely open—in a religious attitude, as it were—to their immediate human surroundings; they are imitative beings, and they elaborate in themselves through will-imbued perception all that they experience unconsciously and subconsciously from their environment. Children’s bodily nature has a religious disposition, from the moment of entering the world until the change of teeth—of course, not in terms of substance, but in its constitution as a whole. The soul is initially spirit, which reveals itself outwardly as a natural creation. Human beings do not enter the world without predispositions—they do not arrive only with the physical forces of heredity from their ancestors but with forces individually brought from a previous earthly life. Consequently, they may at first be equally open to beauty and ugliness, to good and evil, to wisdom and foolishness, to skillfulness and unskillfulness. Our task, therefore, is to work around children—to the degree that we control our very thoughts and feelings—so that children may become beings who imitate goodness, truth, beauty, and wisdom.

When we think in this way, life flows into our interactions with children; education very obviously becomes a part of that life through our interactions with them. Education, therefore, is not something we work at in isolated activities, but something lived. Children develop in the right way in their growth to adulthood only when education is lived with children and not forced on them.

Morality and the Child’s Natural Religious Feeling

What we have educated in children very naturally in a priestly way—what is really a religious devotion—we must now be able to reawaken at a higher soul level during the second stage of life, between the change of teeth and puberty. We do this by transforming pictorially everything we bring them, by transforming education into an artistic activity; nevertheless, it is a truly subjective and objective human activity. We educate children so that, through their relationship to the teacher, they are devoted aesthetically to beauty and internalize the images. Now it becomes essential that, in place of the religious element, a naturally artistic response to the world arises. This naturally artistic human attitude (which must not be confused with the treatment of “art as a luxury,” which is so much a part of our civilization) includes what now would be seen as a moral relationship to the world.

When understood correctly, we realize that we will not get anything from children between the change of teeth and puberty by giving them rules. Prior to the change of teeth, moralizing won’t get us anywhere with children; moralizing is inaccessible to a child’s soul during the first period of life. Only the morality of our actions have access at that age—that is, the moral element children see exprEssentialEd in the actions, gestures, thoughts, and feelings of those around them. Even during the second period of life—between the change of teeth and puberty—moralistic rules will not get us very close to a child. Children have no inner relationship to what is contained in moral commands. To them, they are only empty sounds.

We get close to children during this stage of life only by placing them in the context of natural authority. Children who cannot yet understand abstractly beauty, truth, goodness, and so on may develop this impulse through a sense that the teacher acts as the incarnation of goodness, truth, and beauty. When we understand children correctly, we understand that they have not gained any abstract, intellectual understanding for the revelations of wisdom, beauty, and goodness.

Nevertheless, children see what lives in the teacher’s gestures, and they hear something revealed in how the teacher’s words are spoken. It is the teacher whom the child calls—without saying it—truth, beauty, and goodness as revealed in the heart. And this is the way it must be.

When a teacher corresponds to what the child needs at this age, two things gradually grow in the child. The first is an inner aesthetic sense of pleasure and displeasure in the moral realm. Goodness pleases children when our whole personality exemplifies it. We must plan education so that the natural need to take pleasure in goodness can develop—and, likewise, displeasure in evil. How do children ask questions? Children do not ask intellectually with words, but deep in their hearts. “May I do this?” or, “May I do that?” They will be answered, “Yes, you may,” if the teacher does it. “Should I leave this undone?” “Yes, because my teacher shows that it may be left undone.”

This is how children experience the world through the teacher—the world as goodness or evil, as beauty or ugliness, and as truth or falsehood. This relationship to the teacher—the activity of the hidden forces between the child’s heart and that of the teacher—is the most important aspect of the teaching method; the conditions for life in education are contained in this.

This is how pleasure in morality and displeasure in immorality should develop between the change of teeth and puberty. Then, however, something appears in the background of that growing moral feeling. What first existed naturally during the first period of the child’s life—as a religious surrender to the environment—is resurrected, as it were, in a different form in this moral development; and, if the teacher’s soul forces are equal to it, it is easy to relate what arises as pleasure in good and displeasure in evil to what flows as soul through the manifestations of nature. First a child is surrendered naturally to nature itself; since the moral element in the environment is perceived as a part of nature, a moral gesture is felt, imitated and made part of the child’s being. But as we unfold the child’s sense of pleasure in the good, this religious and natural attitude is transformed into a soul quality.

Now consider what this means. Until the change of teeth, through the magic of completely unconscious processes, we allow the child’s religious attitude to develop naturally, through pure imitation; thus, we ground the religious element while we cannot yet touch the force of the inner, free individuality. We educate through nature and do not interfere with the soul and spirit. And when we approach the soul element between the change of teeth and puberty—since it is then that we must approach it—we do not force a religious feeling but awaken the child, and thus evoke the I in the human being.

In this way, we are already practical philosophers of freedom, since we do not say: You must believe this or that of the spirit; rather, we awaken innate human beliefs. We become awakeners, not stuffers of the souls of children. This constitutes the true reverence we must have for all creatures placed in the world by the Godhead, and we owe this especially to the human being. And thus we see how the I arises in the human being, and how moral pleasure and displeasure assume a religious quality.

Teachers who learn to observe what was initially a purely natural religious aspect as it strives toward transformation in the soul, embody through their words something that becomes a pleasing image of goodness, beauty, and truth. The child hangs on to something in the adult’s words. Teachers and educators are still active in this, but their methods no longer appeal only to imitation but to something that exists behind imitation. It no longer stimulates outer bodily nature but the soul element. A religious atmosphere permeates moral pleasure and displeasure.

The Intellect after Puberty

The intellect becomes active in its own way once children reach puberty. Because of this, I have suggested that it is actually a matter of bringing human beings to the point where they find within themselves what they must understand—draw from their own inner being what was initially given as spontaneous imitation, then as artistic, imaginative activity. Thus, even during the later period, we should not force things on the human being so that there is the least feeling of arbitrary, logical compulsion.

It was certainly a great moment in the development of spiritual life in Germany when—specifically in reference to moral experience—Schiller opposed Kant’s concept of morality. When Kant said, “Duty, you sublime and powerful name—you who bear no enticements but demand stern submission,” Schiller stood against it. He opposed this concept of duty, which does not allow morality to arise from goodwill but only from subjection. Schiller replied to Kant’s idea of duty with the remarkable words containing a true moral motto: “I willingly serve my friend, but unfortunately I serve him from inclination; alas, I therefore lack virtue!”

Indeed, moral life as a whole arises from human nature in purity only when duty becomes a deep human inclination, when it becomes, in the words of Goethe, “Duty—that is, where people love what they tell themselves to do.” It was a great moment when morality was purged of Kant’s influence and made human again through Schiller and Goethe.

What came at that time from German spiritual life nevertheless became immersed in nineteenth-century materialism, as it still is today. Something appeared in civilization because we forgot this powerful action in the moral realm, and our task is now to raise humanity out of it. This rehabilitation of the human being as a fully human and moral being is the special task of those who have to teach and educate. In this consciousness, the impulse of living education will be able to arise. We may say that the sun of German spiritual life shining in Schiller and Goethe in the moral sphere should shine down especially in the actions of those teachers and educators of the present who understand the task of this their own age, and who seek to develop through education a really human relationship of human beings to their own being and to the real needs of the civilization of the age. The task of this educational conference was to speak of the position of education in regard to human individuality and the culture of the age. We shall only accomplish this task if we can think with gratitude of the impulses that flowed into the evolution of Central Europe through great and shining spirits like Goethe and Schiller. When we seek to comprehend our true situation in the world, it is not merely in order to develop a critical sense, but above all things a gratitude for what has already been accomplished by human beings before us.

One could say, of course, that self-education should refer only to the education people give themselves. However, all education is self-education, not just in this subjective sense, but in an objective sense as well—in other words, educating the self of another. To educate (erziehen) means to “draw out,” and it is related to “drawing” (ziehen). The essence of what we invoke is left untouched. We do not smash a stone in order to pull it out of the water. Education does not demand that we in any way injure or overpower those who have entered the world; on the contrary, we must guide them to experience particularly the stage of culture reached by humanity as a whole when it descended from the divine-spiritual worlds into the sensible world. All these ideas, felt and experienced, are a part of the teaching method. The people who least understand the situation of education in our time are those in whom such ideas do not live.

In the moral realm we allow pleasure in the good and displeasure in the evil to grow; we allow the religious element, which was originally natural in the child, to awaken in the soul. In the depths, however, between the change of teeth and puberty there develops the seed and foundation—something already was present—that becomes free understanding after the age of puberty. We prepare a free understanding of the world that includes the religious and moral spheres. It is great when a person can recognize how pleasure and displeasure were experienced as a permeation of the whole life of feeling as the moral qualities of good and evil during the second period of life.

Then the impulse arises: The good that pleased you—this is what you must do! And what displeased you, you must not do. This principle of morality arises from what is already present in the human I, and a religious devotion toward the world arises in the spirit, which had been a thing of nature during the first period, and a thing of the soul during the second. The religious sense—and will applied to the religious impulse—becomes something that allows human beings to act as though God were acting in them. This becomes the expression of the I, not something imposed externally. Following puberty, if the child has developed in accordance with a true understanding of the human being, everything seems to arise as though born from human nature itself.

As I have already suggested, in order that this can happen, we must consider the whole human being during the earthly pilgrimage from birth to death. It’s easy to say that one will begin education by employing the principle of simply observing the child. Today people observe the child externally and experimentally, and from what they perceive in the child they think they can discern the method of teaching. This is impossible, since, as we have seen, a teacher whose uncontrolled choleric temperament leads to angry behavior sows a seed that will remain hidden, and later develop as gout, rheumatism, and disease of the whole organism.

This is what happens in many other relationships; we must keep in mind the earthly life of the whole human being. We must remember this when we are concerned with an event in a particular life period. There are those who limit themselves to a triviality often known as “visual instruction.” They entrench themselves behind the rule—as obvious as it is foolish—that children should be shown only what they can comprehend, and they fall into absurdities that could drive a person crazy. This principle must be replaced by that deeper principle that helps us to understand what it means for the vitality of a person when, at the age of forty, a sudden realization occurs: For the first time I can understand what that respected authority thought and accomplished earlier. I absorbed it because, to me, that individual embodied truth, goodness, and beauty. Now I have the opportunity to draw from the depths what I heard in those days.

When things are reinvigorated in this way, there is an infinitely rejuvenating and vitalizing effect on later life. The human being is deprived of all this at a later age if the teacher fails to insure that there actually is something in the depths that will be understood only later on. The world becomes empty and barren, unless something can arise anew again and again from the essence of human nature—something that permeates outer perception with soul and spirit. Therefore, when we educate this way, we give the human being full freedom and vitality for the rest of life.

Materialism and Spirit in Education

At this point, let me mention something I have often spoken of. A true teacher must always keep in view all of human life. A teacher must, for example, be able to see the wonderful element that is present in many older people, whose very presence brings a kind of blessing without much in the way of words; a kind of blessing is contained in every gesture. This is a characteristic of many people who stand at the threshold of death. From where does this come? Such individuals have this quality because, during childhood, they developed devotion naturally. Such reverence and devotion during childhood later becomes the capacity to bless. We may say that at the end of earthly life, people cannot stretch out their hands in blessing if they have not learned to fold them in prayer during childhood. The capacity for blessing when one grows old and comes near the threshold of death originates with folding one’s hands in prayer with reverent, childhood devotion. Everything visible as a seed in the child will develop into good or evil fruit as the person progresses farther along in earthly life. And this is something else that must be continually within view in order to develop a genuine teaching method based on real life in education.

Thus—at least in rough outline—we have the foundation for an attempt to bring anthroposophy to fruit in education through Waldorf schools. This education conference should illuminate what has been attempted in this way and practiced for some years. It has been illuminated from various perspectives and we have shown what the students themselves have accomplished—though, in relation to this, much has yet to be demonstrated and discussed.

At the beginning of today’s lecture, I was addrEssentialEd with loving words from two sides, for which I am heartily grateful; after all, what could be done with impulses, however beautiful, if there were no one to realize them through devotion and selfsacrifice? Therefore, my gratitude goes to the Waldorf teachers who try to practice what needs to underlie this kind of renewal in education. My gratitude also goes out to today’s youth, young men and women who, through their own educational experiences, understand the true aims of Waldorf education. One would be happy indeed if the cordiality felt by young people for Waldorf education carried their message to our civilization and culture.

I believe I am speaking for the hearts of all of you when I respond with words of gratitude to those who have spoken so lovingly, because, more than anything else, education needs human beings who will accomplish these goals. A painter or sculptor can work in solitude and say that even if people do not see the work, the gods do. When a teacher performs spiritual actions for earthly existence, however, the fulfillment of such activities can be expected only in communion with those who help to realize them in the physical realm of the senses.

As teachers and educators, this impulse must live in our awareness, especially in our time. Therefore, as we conclude these lectures—this lecture must be the last, since I am wanted elsewhere and cannot remain in Stuttgart—allow me to point to something. Based on anthroposophy and not forcing it on people as a worldview—based on anthroposophy because it gives a true knowledge of the human being in body, soul, and spirit—let me conclude by saying that this education serves, in the most practical way possible, the deepest needs and conditions of our modern civilization. The people of Central Europe can hope for a future only if their actions and thoughts arise from such impulses.

What is our most intense suffering? By trying to characterize our education I repeatedly had to point out that we stand with reverent awe before the human I-being placed in the world by divine powers helping to develop that I. The human I is not truly understood unless it is understood in spirit; it is denied when understood only in matter. It is primarily the I that has suffered because of our contemporary materialistic life, because of ignorance, because of the wrong concept of the human I. This is primarily due to the fact that—while we have hammered away at perception of matter and at activity in matter—spirit has been shattered, and with it the I.

If we place limits on knowledge, as is common, saying that we cannot enter the realm of spirit, this implies only that we cannot enter the human realm. To limit knowledge means that we remove the human being from the world as far as knowing is concerned. How can a soul be educated if it has been eliminated by materialistic concepts? Elimination of the soul was characteristic of the kind of materialism we have just passed through, and it still prevails throughout human activity.

What has happened in the materialistic attitude of the more modern time? It is an attitude that, as I have said, was justified from a different perspective because it had to enter human evolution at some point, but now it must pass away. In expressing this attitude, we may say that the human being has surrendered the I to matter—connected it to matter. Consequently, however, the genuine, living method of teaching, the real life of education has been frozen; only external techniques can survive in a civilization bound by matter. But, matter oppresses people. Matter confines each person within the bodily nature, and each individual thus becomes more or less isolated in soul. Unless we find other human beings in spirit, we become isolated souls, since human beings cannot, in fact, be found in the body.

Thus, our civilization’s materialistic view has produced an age when human beings pass each other by, because their perceptions are all connected with bodily nature. People cry out for a social life out of the intellect, and at the same time develop in their feelings an asocial indifference toward one another as well as a lack of mutual understanding. Souls who are isolated in individual bodies pass one another by, whereas souls who awaken the spirit within to find spirit itself also find themselves, as human beings, in communion with other human beings. Real community will blossom from the present chaos only when people find the spirit—when, living together in spirit, they find each other.

The great longing of today’s youth is to discover the human being. The youth movement came from this cry. A few days ago when the young people here came together, it became evident that this cry has been transformed into a cry for spirit, through the realization that the human being can be found only when spirit is found; if spirit is lost, we lose one another.

Last evening, I tried to show how we can find knowledge of the world—how the human being living on earth in body, soul, and spirit can develop out of such knowledge. I tried to show how a worldview can develop into an experience of the cosmos, and the Sun and Moon may be seen in everything that grows and flourishes on Earth. When we educate young people with this kind of background, we will properly develop the experience of immortality, the divine, the eternally religious element in the growing child, and we implant in the child’s being an immortal aspect destined for further progress, which we must carry in spirit through the gate of death.

This particular aspect of education is not what we are discussing here. The relationship between education and the human I, as well as culture, is what we had to look at first. Nevertheless, we may be sure of one thing; if people are educated properly on Earth, the heavenly being will also be educated properly, since the heavenly being lives within the earthly being. When we educate the earthly being correctly, we also promote the true development of the heavenly being through the tiny amount of progress that we make possible between birth and death.

In this way we come to terms with a view that progresses, in the true sense, to a universal knowledge—a knowledge that understands the need for human cooperation in the great spiritual cosmos, which is also revealed in the realm of the senses. True education recognizes that human beings are coworkers in building humankind. This is what I meant yesterday when I described the view of life that I said must form the background of all teaching and education.

From this, it follows that we cannot understand the world as a one-sided subject of the head alone. It is untrue to say that we can understand the world through ideas and concepts. And it is equally false to say that the world can be understood through feeling alone. It has to be understood through ideas and feeling, as well as through the will; human beings will understand the world only when divine spirit descends into will. Humankind will also be understood then—not through one aspect, but through the whole being. We need a worldview not just for the intellect, but for the whole human being—for human thinking, feeling, and willing—a concept of the world that discovers the world in the human body, soul, and spirit.

Only those who rediscover the world in the human being, and who see the world in human beings, can have a true concept of the world; because, just as the visible world is reflected in the eye, the entire human being exists as an eye of spirit, soul, and body, reflecting the whole cosmos. Such a reflection cannot be perceived externally; it must be experienced from within. Then it is not just an appearance, like an ordinary mirrored image; it is an inner reality. Thus, in the process of education, the world becomes human, and the human being discovers the world in the self.

Working this way in education, we feel that the human race would be disrupted if all human experience were tied to matter, because, when they deny their own being, souls do not find one another but lose themselves. When we move to spirit, we find other human beings. Community, in the true sense of the word, must be established through spirit. Human beings must find themselves in spirit; then they can unite with others. If worlds are to be created out of human actions, then the world must be seen in human beings.

In conclusion, allow me to express what was in the back of my mind while I was speaking to you. What I said here was intended as a consideration of education in the personal and cultural life of the present time. Now, in conclusion, let me put this in other words that include all I have wanted to say.

To spend oneself in matter
is to grind down souls.
To find oneself in the spirit
is to unite human beings.
To see oneself in all humanity
is to construct worlds.

The isolation of man's ideas (especially his mathematical ideas) from his direct experience has proved to be the outstanding feature of the spiritual development leading to modern scientific thinking. Let us place this process once more before our mind's eye.

We were able to look back into ages past, when what man had to acquire as knowledge of the world was experienced in communion with the world. During those epochs, man inwardly did not experience his threefold orientation—up-down, left-right, front-back—in such a manner that he attributed it solely to himself. Instead, he felt himself within the universal whole; hence, his own orientations were to him synonymous with the three dimensions of space. What he pictured of knowledge to himself, he experienced jointly with the world. Therefore, with no uncertainty in his mind, he knew how to apply his concepts, his ideas, to the world. This uncertainty has only arisen along with the more recent civilization. We see it slowly finding its way into the whole of modern thought and we see science developing under this condition of uncertainty. This state of affairs must be clearly recognized.

A few examples can illustrate what we are dealing with . Take a thinker like John Locke, who lived from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century. His writings show what an up-to-date thinker of his age had to say concerning the scientific world perception. John Locke⁴³ divided everything that man perceives in his physical environment into two aspects. He divided the characteristic features of bodies into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities were those that he could only attribute to the objects themselves, such as shape, position, and motion. Secondary qualities in his view were those that did not actually belong to the external corporeal things but were an effect that these objects had upon man. Examples are color, sound, and warmth. Locke stated it thus: “When I hear a sound, outside of me there is vibrating air. In a drawing, I can picture these vibrations in the air that emanate from a sound-aroused body and continue on into my ear. The shape that the waves, as they are called, possess in the vibrating air can be pictured by means of spatial forms. I can visualize their course in time—all this, belonging to the primary qualities, certainly exists in the external world, but it is silent, it is soundless. The quality of sound, a secondary quality, only arises when the vibration of the air strikes my ear, and with it arises that peculiar inner experience that I carry within me as sound. It is the same with color, which is now lumped together with light. There must be something out there in the world that is somehow of a corporeal nature and somehow possesses shape and movement. This exercises an effect on my eye and thus becomes my experience of light or color. It is the same with the other things that present themselves to my senses. The whole corporeal world must be viewed like this; we must distinguish between the primary qualities in it, which are objective, and the secondary qualities, which are subjective and are the effects of the primary qualities upon us.”

Simply put, one could say with Locke that the external world outside of man is form, position, and movement, whereas all that makes up the content of the sense world exists in truth somehow inside us. The actual content of color as a human experience is nowhere in the environment, it lives in me. The actual content of sound is nowhere to be found outside, it lives in me. The same is true of my experience of warmth or cold.

In former ages, when what had become the content of knowledge was experienced jointly with the world, one could not possibly have had this view because, as I have said, a man experienced mathematics by participating in his own bodily orientation and placing this orientation into his own movement. He experienced this, however, in communion with the world. Therefore, his own experience was sufficient reason for assuming the objectivity of position, place, and movement. Also, though in another portion of his inner life, man again had this communion with the world in regard to color, tone, and so forth. Just as the concept of movement was gained through the experience of his own movement, so the concept of color was gained through a corresponding internal experience in the blood, and this experience was then connected with whatever is warmth, color, sound, and so forth in the surrounding world. Certainly, in earlier times, man distinguished position, location, movement, and time-sequence from color, sound, and warmth, but these were distinguished as being different kinds of experiences that were undergone jointly with different kinds of existence in the objective world.

Now, in the scientific age, the determination of place, movement, position, and form ceased to be inward self-experience. Instead, they were regarded as mere hypotheses that were caused by some external reality. When the shape of a cannon is imagined, one can hardly say: This form of the cannon is actually somehow within me. Therefore its identification was directed outward and the imagined form of the cannon was related to something objective. One could not very well admit that a musket-ball was actually flying within one's brain; therefore, the hypothetically thought-out movements were attributed to something objective.

On the other hand, what one saw in the flying musket-ball, the flash by which one perceived it and the sound by which one heart it, were pushed into one's own human nature, since no other place could be found for them. Man no longer knew how he experienced them jointly with the objects; therefore, he associated them with his own being.

It actually took quite some time before those who thought along the lines of the scientific age perceived the impossibility of this arrangement. What had in fact taken place? The secondary qualities, sound, color, and warmth experience, had become, as it were, fair game in the world and, in regard to human knowledge, had to take refuge in man. But before too long, nobody had any idea of how they lived there. The experience, the self-experience, was no longer there. There was no connection with external nature, because it was not experienced anymore. Therefore these experiences were pushed into one's self. So far as knowledge was concerned, they had, as it were, disappeared inside man. Vaguely it was thought that an ether vibration out in space translated itself into form and movement, and this had an effect on the eye, and then worked on the optic nerve, and finally somehow entered the brain. Our thoughts were a means of looking around inside for whatever it was that, as an effect of the primary qualities, supposedly expressed itself in man as secondary qualities. It took a long time, as I said, before a handful of people firmly pointed out the oddity of these ideas. There is something extraordinary in what the Austrian philosopher Richard Wahle⁴⁴ wrote in his Mechanism of Thinking, though he himself did not realize the full implications of his sentence: “Nihil est in cerebro, quod non est in nervis.” (“There is nothing in the brain that is not in the nerves.” It may not be possible with the means available today to examine the nerves in every conceivable way, but even if we could we would not find sound, color, or warmth experience in them. Therefore, they must not be in the brain either. Actually, one has to admit now that they simply disappear insofar as knowledge is concerned. One examines the relationship of man to the world. Form, position, place, time, etc. are beheld as objective. Sound, warmth, experience and color vanish; they elude one.⁴⁵

Finally, in the Eighteenth Century, this led Kant⁴⁶ to say that even the space and time qualities of things cannot somehow be outside and beyond man. But there had to be some relationship between man and the world. After all, such a relationship cannot be denied if we are to have any idea of how man exists together with the world. Yet, the common experience of man's space and time relationships with the world simply did not exist anymore. Hence arose the Kantian idea: If man is to apply mathematics, for example, to the world, then it is his doing that he himself makes the world into something mathematical. He impresses the whole mathematical system upon the “things in themselves,” which themselves remain utterly unknown.—In the Nineteenth Century science chewed on this problem interminably. The basic nature of man's relation to cognition is simply this: uncertainty has entered into his relationship with the world. He does not know how to recognize in the world what he is experiencing. This uncertainty slowly crept into all of modern thinking. We see it entering bit by bit into the spiritual life of recent times.

It is interesting to place a recent example side by side with Locke's thinking. August Weismann,⁴⁷ a biologist of the Nineteenth Century, conceived the thought: in any living organism, the interplay of the organs (in lower organisms, the interaction of the parts) must be regarded as the essential thing. This leads to comprehension of how the organism lives. But in examining the organism itself, in understanding it through the interrelationship of its parts, we find no equivalent for the fact that the organism must die. If one only observes the organism, so Weismann said, one finds nothing that will explain death. In the living organism, there is absolutely nothing that leads to the idea that the organism must die. For Weismann, the only thing that demonstrates that an organism must die is the existence of a corpse. This means that the concept of death is not gained from the living organism. No feature, no characteristic, found in it indicates that dying is a part of the organism. It is only when the event occurs, when we find a corpse in the place of the living organism, that we know the organism possesses the ability to die.

But, says Weismann, there is a class of organisms where corpses are never found. These are the unicellular organisms. They only divide themselves so there are no corpses. The propagation of such beings looks like this:

One divides into two; each of these divides into two again, and so on. There is never a corpse. Weismann therefore concludes that the unicellular beings are immortal. This is the immortality of unicellular beings that was famous in nineteenth-century biology. Why were these organisms considered immortal? Because they never produce any corpses, and because we cannot entertain the concept of death in the organic realm as long as there are no corpses. Where there is no corpse, there is no room for the concept of death. Hence, living beings that produce no corpses are immortal.

This example shows how far man has removed himself in modern times from any connection between the world and his thinking, his inner experiences. His concept of an organism is no longer such that the fact of its death can be perceived from it. This can only be deduced from the existence of something like a corpse. Certainly, if a living organism is only viewed from outside, if one cannot experience what is in it, then indeed one cannot find death in the organism and an external sign is necessary. But this only proves that in his thinking man feels himself separated from the things around him.

From the uncertainty that has entered all thinking concerning the corporeal world, from this divorce between our thoughts and our experience, let us turn back to the time when self-experience still existed. Not only did the inwardly experienced concept exist alongside the externally excogitated concept of a triangle, square, or pentagram, but there were also inwardly experienced concepts of blossoming and fading, of birth and death. This inner experience of birth and death had its gradations. When a child was seen to grow more and more animated, when its face began to express its soul, when one really entered into this growing process of the child, this could be seen as a continuation of the process of birth, albeit a less pronounced and intensive one. There were degrees in the experience of birth. When a man began to show wrinkles and grey hair and grow feeble, this was seen as a first mild degree of dying. Death itself was only the sum total of many less pronounced death experiences, if I may use such a paradox. The concepts of blossoming and decaying, of being born and dying, were inwardly alive.

These concepts were experienced in communion with the corporeal world. No line was drawn between man's self-experience and the events in nature. Without a coastline, as it were, the inner land of man merged into the ocean of the universe. Owing to this form of experience, man lived himself into the world itself. Therefore, the thinkers of earlier ages, whose ideas no longer receive proper attention from science, had to form quite different ideas concerning something like what Weismann called the “immortality of unicellular beings.” What sort of concept would an ancient thinker have formed had he had a microscope and known something about the division of unicellular organisms? He would have said: First I have the unicellular being; it divides itself into two. Somewhat imprecisely, he might have said: It atomizes itself, it divides itself; for a certain length of time, the two parts are indivisible; then they divide again. As soon as division or atomization begins, death enters in. He would not have derived death from the corpse but from atomization, from the division into parts. His train of thought would have been somewhat as follows: A being that is capable of life, that is in the process of growth, is not atomized; and when the tendency to atomization appears, the being dies. In the case of unicellular beings, he would simply have thought that the two organisms cast off by the first unicellular being were for the moment dead, but would be, so to speak, revived immediately, and so forth. With atomization, with the process of splitting, he would have linked the thought of death. If he had known about unicellular beings and had seen one split into two, he would not have thought that two new ones had come into being. On the contrary, he would have said that out of the living monad, two atoms have originated. Further, he would have said that wherever there is life, wherever one observes life, one is not dealing with atoms. But if they are found in a living being, then a proportionate part of the being is dead. Where atoms are found, there is death, there is something inorganic. This is how matters would have been judged in a former age based on living inner knowledge of the world.

All this is not clearly described in our histories of philosophy, although the discerning reader can have little doubt of it. The reason is that the thought-forms of this older philosophy are totally unlike today's thinking. Therefore anyone writing history nowadays is apt to put his own modern concepts into the minds of earlier thinkers.⁴⁸ But this is impermissible even with a man as recent as Spinoza. In his book on what he justifiably calls ethics, Spinoza follows a mathematical method but it is not mathematics in the modern sense. He expounds his philosophy in a mathematical style, joining idea to idea as a mathematician would. He still retains something of the former qualitative experience of quantitative mathematical concepts. Hence, even in contemplating the qualitative aspect of man's inner life, we can say that his style is mathematical. Today with our current concepts, it would be sheer nonsense to apply a mathematical style to psychology, let alone ethics.

If we want to understand modern thinking, we must continually recall this uncertainty, contrasting it to the certainty that existed in the past but is no longer suited to our modern outlook. In the present phase of scientific thinking, we have come to the point where this uncertainty is not only recognized but theoretical justifications have been offered for it. And example is a lecture given by the French thinker Henri Poincaré⁴⁹ in 1912 on current ideas relating to matter. He speaks of the existing controversy or debate concerning the nature of matter; whether it should be thought of as being continuous or discrete; in other words, whether one should conceive of matter as substantial essence that fills space and is nowhere really differentiated in itself, or whether substance, matter, is to be thought of as atomistic, signifying more or less empty space containing within it minute particles that by virtue of their particular interconnections form into atoms, molecules, and so forth.

Aside from what I might call a few decorative embellishments intended to justify scientific uncertainty, Poincaré's lecture comes down to this: Research and science pass through various periods. In one epoch, phenomena appear that cause the thinker to picture matter in a continuous form, making it convenient to conceive of matter this way and to focus on what shows up as continuity in the sense data. In a different period the findings point more toward the concept of matter being diffused into atoms, which are pictured as being fused together again; i.e. matter is not continuous but discrete and atomistic. Poincaré is of the opinion that always, depending on the direction that research findings take, there will be periods when thinking favors either continuity or atomism. He even speaks of an oscillation between the two in the course of scientific development. It will always be like this, he says, because the human mind has a tendency to formulate theories concerning natural phenomena in the most convenient way possible. If continuity prevails for a time, we get tired of it. (These are not Poincaré's exact words, but they are close to what he really intends.) Almost unconsciously, as it were, the human mind then comes upon other scientific findings and begins to think atomistically. It is like breathing where exhalation follows inhalation. Thus there is a constant oscillation between continuity and atomism. This merely results from a need of the human mind and according to Poincaré, says nothing about the things themselves. Whether we adopt continuity or atomism determines nothing about things themselves. It is only our attempt to come to terms with the external corporeal world.

It is hardly surprising that uncertainty should result from an age which no longer finds self-experience in harmony with what goes on in the world but regards it only as something occurring inside man. If you no longer experience a living connection with the world, you cannot experience continuity or atomism. You can only force your preconceived notions of continuity or atomism on the natural phenomena. This gradually leads to the suspicion that we formulate our theories according to our changing needs. Just as we must breath in and out, so we must, supposedly, think first continuistically for a while, then atomistically for a while. If we always thought in the same way, we would not be able to catch a breath of mental air. Thus our fatal uncertainty is confirmed and justified. Theories begin to look like arbitrary whims. We no longer live in any real connection with the world. We merely think of various ways in which we might live with the world, depending on our own subjective needs.

What would the old way of thought have said in such a case? It would have said: In an age when the leading thinkers think continuistically, they are thinking mainly of life. In one in which they think atomistically, they are thinking primarily of death, of inorganic nature, and they view even the organic in inorganic terms.

This is no longer unjustified arbitrariness. This rests on an objective relationship to things. Naturally, I can take turns in dealing with the animate and the inanimate. I can say that the very nature of the animate requires that I conceive of it continuistically, whereas the nature of the inanimate requires that I think of it atomistically. But I cannot say that this is only due to the arbitrary nature of the human mind. On the contrary, it corresponds to an objective relating of oneself to the world. For such perception, the subjective aspect is really disregarded, because one recognizes the animate in nature in continual form and the inanimate in discrete form. And if one really has to oscillate between the two forms of thought, this can be turned in an objective direction by saying that one approach is suited to the living and the other is suited to the dead. But there is no justification for making everything subjective as Poincaré does. Nor is the subjective valid for the way of perception that belonged to earlier times.

The gist of this is that in the phase of scientific thinking immediately preceding our own, there was a turn away from the animate to the inanimate; i.e., from continuity to atomism. This was entirely justified, if rightly understood. But, if we hope to objectively and truly find ourselves in the world, we must find a way out of the dead world of atomism, no matter how impressive it is as a theory. We must get back to our own nature and comprehend ourselves as living beings. Up to now, scientific development has tended in the direction of the inanimate, the atomistic. When, in the first part of the Nineteenth Century, this whole dreadful cell theory of Schleiden⁵⁰ and Schwann⁵¹ made its appearance, it did not lead to continuity but to atomism. What is more, the scientific world scarcely admitted this, nor has it to this day realized that it should admit it since atomism harmonizes with the whole scientific methodology. We were not aware that by conceiving the organism as divided up into cells, we actually atomized it in our minds, which in fact signifies killing it. The truth of the matter is that any real idea of organisms has been lost to the atomistic approach.

This is what we can learn if we compare Goethe's views on organics with those of Schleiden or the later botanists. In Goethe we find living ideas that he actually experiences. The cell is alive, so the others are really dealing with something organic, but the way they think is just as though the cells were not alive but atoms. Of course, empirical research does not always follow everything to its logical conclusion, and this cannot be done in the case of the organic world. Our comprehension of the organic world is not much aided by the actual observations resulting from the cell theory. The non-atomistic somehow finds its way in, since we have to admit that the cells are alive. But it is typical of many of today's scientific discussions that the issues become confused and there is no real clarity of thought.

• 43. John Locke: Wrington by Bristol 1632–1704 Oates, Essex. Theologian, philosopher, and physician. Because raised Protestant and Puritan, he was persecuted in England and had to flee to Holland until after the English Revolution of 1689. From 1675–1689 Locke worked with many interruptions at his main work. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690. Originally he had planned a critical presentation of the already recognized teaching of primary and secondary sense characteristics, but then it grew to a perception theory or world view. His Essay was published 4 times in his lifetime. See Riddles of Philosophy, The Philosophy of Freedom, trans. Michael Wilson (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1964) and “Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa” in Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age.
• 44. Richard Wahle: 1857–1935, Vienna, Professor of Philosophy. Only valued perceptions, imaginations, and feelings, but rejected all philosophy hitherto written as theories of cognition. The “Ego” is for him “a summary of surface-like, physiologically accompanied pieces of consciousness, which are brought into being by invisible forces.” Some writings: The Whole of Philosophy and Its End, 1894; About the Mechanism of the Spiritual Life, 1906; The Tragic Comedy of Wisdom, 1915; Development of Characters, 1928; Basics of a New Psychiatry, 1931.
• 45. See Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 4.
• 46. Immanuel Kant: 1724–1804. Lived in Koenigsberg, which he seldom left. Philosopher, scientist, mathematician. Professor in Koenigsberg 1770–1794. Critique of Pure Reason, 1781. Its popular edition Dissertation on Any Future Metaphysics, 1783, his ethic Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, aesthetic and natural theology is handled in Critique of Judgment, 1790. He wrote the first mechanical cosmology 1755. It was taken up and changed by Laplace (1796) and known as the Kant-LaPlace Theory. Rudolf Steiner's exposition on Kant's theory is found in Truth and Knowledge, The Philosophy of Freedom, and An Autobiography, ed. Paul M. Alien, 2nd ed. (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, Garber Communications, 1980).
  
  E.g. in Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Aesthetic, Common Remarks”: “We wanted to say that all our opinions are nothing but the conception of the appearance; that the things we look at are not actually what we take them for, nor is their relation constituted as they appear to us, and that if we would suspend our subject or even our subjective constitution of our senses as a whole, the whole constitution, all relationships of objects in space and time, even time and space itself would disappear. They would only exist in us, not as phenomena in themselves.”
• 47. August Weismann, Frankfurt A.M. 1834–1914 Freiburg. Biologist, genetic scientist. Theory of polarity between cells (soma) and seed plasma. Determinants as heredity carriers. Writing: Studies on the Descent Theory.
• 48. Goethe's recital from Faust I, Act 1, Scene 2, “Night,” Gothic Room, Wagner and Faust:
  
  “My friend, the time of past
  Is a book with seven seals.
  What you call the Spirit of Time
  Is fundamentally the Gentleman's own spirit,
  In which the times reflect themselves.”
• 49. Henry Poincaré: Nancy 1854–1912 Paris. Author of the popular philosophical writings Science and Hypothesis (1902), The Value of Science (1905), Science and Method (1909), and Last Thoughts (1912). The lecture in question was held by Poincaré shortly before his death in a lecture cycle Conferences de Foi et de Vie printed in Le Materialisme Actuel with M.M. Bergson, H. Poincaré, Ch. Gide, Ch. Wagner, Firm Roz, De Witt-Guizotfriedel, Gaston Rion. (Paris: 1918), page 53.
• 50. Mathias Jakob Schleiden: Hamburg 1804–1881 Frankfurt A.M. Lawyer, physician, and, mainly, biologist. Developed a cell formation theory in Contributions to Phylogenesis (1838).
• 51. Theodor Schwann: Neuss 1810–1882 Cologne, biologist. Founded the cell theory with his Microscopic Examinations of the Harmony in Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants (1839).

I. Report in “Germany”, Third Sheet, dated December 13, 1903

On Friday evening, Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave the third of six announced theosophical lectures in the recreation room. The title of the lecture was: “World Law and Human Destiny – a Christmas Meditation”. He explained the following:

From time immemorial, man has been regarded as a “world in miniature” (microcosm) in relation to the “world at large” (macrocosm). This view is not only arrived at by the intellect but also by the feelings, which rise up to the lofty starry heavens and to the ideals of the human spirit with equal reverence and enthusiasm. Two things, says Kant, fill the mind with ever-increasing admiration and awe: “the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” But one can just as easily say: How unequal the “great” and the “small world” are. The starry sky with its eternally unchanging laws and the moral and spiritual nature of man, which follows its laws only gropingly and uncertainly, straying every moment. In the face of the starry sky, even the greatest admirers arise in those who know and study its laws. Keppler literally shouted in admiration when he had researched the secrets of planetary orbits. The human heart, on the other hand, with its fickleness and confusion, evokes the most reservations in those who know it best. Goethe, one of the greatest experts on human nature, repeatedly fled from its labyrinths to the unerring laws of external nature. Goethe himself pointed the way to finding his way around such feelings. He said: “Noble, helpful and good, let man be.” That is a commandment that no one imposes on nature. Man can be blamed for leaving the paths of justice and virtue, but not the volcano that wreaks untold havoc. You have to find harmony with nature, even if it seems destructive. We know that its laws are immutable. Have they always been? No, the laws of planetary motion, at the discovery of which Kepler rejoiced, were only given to the solar system after a long cosmic struggle. Harmony is born out of the chaotic primeval nebula. The research that is able to penetrate to supersensible facts shows that external nature is born out of spirit, out of the thought of the world, just as human actions are born out of human thoughts. Here, Theosophy explains the difference between human beings and external nature. Man is not just the physical being that can be perceived with the external senses. Within his physical body, he still has the soul organism (astral body) and within the latter, only the eternal spirit (mental body), in which thoughts, in which moral feeling, the voice of conscience, have their origin. Between these three components of his being, the struggle that has come to a preliminary conclusion in the outer nature still exists in man. This outer nature, too, was once a world of thought; it passed through the stage of the soul (astral) existence before it became what it is today. But the struggles in this field are over. In inanimate nature, there are no longer any unsatisfied desires and passions that have their seat in the soul (astral) body. This is not yet the case in man. His development, his perfection, is only to lead him to the point where his eternal laws, which lie in the world of thought, find their harmonious expression in outer physical existence, in action. This lack of harmony is also evident in the relationship between destiny and character, between attitude and action. The good often have to suffer, while the wicked are happy; an act of cruelty often bears the same fruit in the outer, sensual existence as a noble deed. Only by placing oneself in the position of the great law of spiritual causes and effects, which brings about a balance in the many lives of the human spirit that can never be understood in one life, can one arrive at a solution to this apparent injustice in the world. Not only the theosophists of the present day know that the human spirit does not embody itself only once, but many times, but deeper spirits of all times have professed this view. Giordano Bruno and Lessing need only be cited as examples. Much in a person's life seems incomprehensible because it has its cause in previous lives. Someone who is particularly clever has the disposition to be clever because he has had experiences in a previous life that led him to be clever. All the painful experiences we have had in the past life as a result of merely indulging in pleasure and pain in our actions have brought about the voice of conscience in the present life. And actions and thoughts that do not bear the fruits corresponding to them in the present life will do so in subsequent embodiments. This is the great law of karma, of spiritual causes and effects in the human world. For everyone there will come a time when they are so perfect that their memory will shine for all their previous incarnations. Then they will recognize karma as the just law of harmonious balance and perfect justice. And they will then be able to shape their lives in such a way that they no longer grope in error, but move within immutable laws, just as the sun, in the course of a year, shows us only regular positions. Therefore, nations have always taken the (apparent) course of the sun in the sky as a symbol for the great role models, for the sons of the gods, for the saviors of the world, who already prematurely carry within them the divine soul, towards which human beings develop. The Christians, too, in the fourth century fixed the birth of their savior of the world on December 25, the time of the winter solstice. Just as this solstice brings light again, so the Son of God brought spiritual light by showing that man progresses towards perfection and by exemplifying this perfection himself. From the sounds of Christmas, if we understand the true meaning, we hear the goal of human development resound: the former harmony between world law and human destiny.

II. Report in the “Weimarische Zeitung”, Second Supplement, December 13, 1903

Weimar, December 12.

World Law and Human Destiny. Dr. Steiner's lecture yesterday, which was poorly attended, was intended as a Theosophical Christmas meditation. Apparently, as was explained in it, there is an unbridgeable contradiction between world law and human destiny. However, this is not the case in reality. The fact that the spiritual substance, the bearer of eternal law in man, can only work through the medium of the astral body and therefore loses much of its power and purity, creates disharmony in human destiny. In the great nature, this dispute has apparently been resolved. The Kant-Laplace theory of the formation of this planetary system out of the primeval nebula is correct, but this world was preceded by an astral world and a spiritual world. External nature is therefore, as it were, a model for human beings, an invitation to hurry towards the goal, towards perfection. Dr. Steiner answered the question as to why good people are often unhappy in this life, while villains are happy, by saying that people are what they have made themselves in previous lives. The justice of the law of karma is based on its effectiveness over all the lives of the individual. The wisdom of men is also the experience of countless embodiments, and the only reason why there are different kinds of wisdom is that people have had different experiences in the past. This is known by those who are alive today and have acquired the ability to look back on their past lives, explained Dr. Steiner. Everyone will be able to look back in the same way once they have reached a certain level, and then their path of development will appear completely harmonious. During his lecture, Dr. Steiner felt compelled to explain that he had been misunderstood in connection with his lecture “The Pilgrimage of the Soul”. This misunderstanding had found expression in a critical note in the “Weimarische Zeitung”. No polemic with Dr. Steiner is intended here, but the speaker cannot be spared the reproach that in his lecture yesterday he again allowed Theosophy to be in possession of universally valid truth. When he took the precaution of always using the expressions, “We (the Theosophists) know,” or “The Theosophists know,” or “Those who have become sufficiently wise know,” this only means that the rest of humanity is not yet as wise as the small group of Theosophists. But since, according to Dr. Steiner's own words, what he proclaims is actually the truth for those who have been theosophically trained, it is difficult to see how the critical note in question in the “Weimarische Zeitung” could have been inspired by a misunderstanding. Every founder of a religion, every leader of a sect, every architect of a philosophical system believed himself to be in possession of the one universally valid truth. Not only the speculative minds believed it, but every human being, no matter how little developed, every animal, every manifestation of nature believes it. Only that truth then bears the name “right”. From the fact that, as Schopenhauer says, every phenomenon is felt behind it by the whole of nature, the bellum omnium contra omnes arose. If now, once again, the only truth is to be found, it is certainly justified to put an ironic question mark behind this message!

Let us transport ourselves in imagination toRammenau in Oberlausitz, a spot not far from Kamenz in Saxony, the birthplace of Lessing. The year is 1769. A house of no great size stands beside a brook. The generations inhabiting this house, as records show, had been engaged in the ribbon-weaving industry, from father to son, ever since the period of the Thirty Years' War. The standard of life prevailing at this time in the house was not even as high as tolerable comfort, indeed it was very near to poverty. By the brook that flowed past the house, in this year of 1769, stood a seven-year-old boy, fairly small, rather sturdily built for his age, with red cheeks and expressive eyes, that at this moment were showing signs of deep distress. The boy had just thrown into the brook a book that was floating away. At this juncture his father appeared on the scene from the house and must have spoken to the boy more or less to the following effect: “Why, Gottlieb, whatever are you thinking of? You are flinging into the water what your father bought for you with hard-earned money to give you pleasure!” The father was very angry, for just before this he had given the book as a present to his son Gottlieb, who till then had had no acquaintance with books apart from the Bible and the hymn book.—Now what had really happened? Hitherto young Gottlieb had received with the most serious attention whatever had been taught him of the contents of the Bible and hymn book, and he was a boy good at his lessons at school. Wishing to please him, his father bought him one day for a present the book of folk tales called Der Gehörnte Siegfried (The Horned Siegfried). Gottlieb plunged deeply into the study of this book, with the result that he had to be scolded for his forgetfulness and inattention to all his lessons, which he had till then found so interesting. That went to the boy's heart. He was so fond of the Gehörnte Siegfried, his newly acquired book; it aroused in him such deep interest and sympathy. But on the other hand this thought was vividly present to his mind: “You have neglected your duty.” Such were the thoughts in the mind of the seven-year-old boy. So he went off to the brook and forthwith flung the book into the water. He was punished for it, because though he could tell his father the facts, he could not explain the real underlying reason.

Let us now follow the boy Gottlieb at this stage of his life into other situations. For instance, we catch sight of him one afternoon on a lonely moor far away from his parents' house, standing there from 4 o'clock onwards and gazing into the distance, utterly absorbed in the view of the solitary spaces surrounding him. And thus he was still standing at five and at six o'clock and even when the bell sounded for evensong. Then a shepherd came by, and seeing the boy standing there, gave him a cuff and told him to come along home.

Two years after this time, in 1771, Baron von Miltitz was visiting the landowner in Rammenau. He had come over from his own estate in Oberau one Sunday, in order to dine with the neighbouring squires and enjoy their society; and before the meal he had intended to hear the morning sermon. However, he arrived too late to hear the clergyman of Rammenau, well known to him as a worthy man; for much to his regret the sermon was already over. When the visitors, his host and the other persons present were talking amongst themselves about this, somebody made the suggestion: “Oh there is a boy in the village who might perhaps repeat the sermon by heart; it is known that he can do so.” And so Gottlieb, now nine years of age, was fetched, and came along in his blue peasant smock. A few questions were put to him which he answered briefly with “yes” and “no.” He felt very ill at ease in this high-class society. Then it was suggested to him to repeat the sermon which he had heard just before. He paused to meditate and then, speaking as it were from the depth of his soul, as if he felt intimately every word, he repeated from beginning to end the sermon which he had heard, in the presence of the visiting landowner and the company. And he repeated it in such a way that all felt as if everything that he said were proceeding directly out of his own heart; he seemed to have so imbibed it that it had become part of himself. Thus with inward fire and animation, which increased as he went on, the nine-year-old Gottlieb recited the whole sermon. ... This nine-year-old Gottlieb was the son of Christian Fichte, the ribbon-weaver. The landowner von Miltitz was profoundly astonished at this experience, and declared that he must himself take charge of the boy's education. In view of the straitened circumstances of the boy's parents, the relief from such a responsibility was bound to be extremely welcome to them, even though they deeply loved the boy. For after Gottlieb many other children had come, till they were now a large family; and so they had no choice but to grasp the helping hand which Baron von Miltitz so generously offered. And Baron von Miltitz was so strongly impressed by his encounter with the boy that he wanted to take young Gottlieb away with him immediately. And so he took him away to his own home at Oberau near Meissen. ... Young Gottlieb, however, felt by no means at home in the mansion, which formed so great a contrast with everything to which he had been accustomed in the poor ribbon-weaver's cottage. He felt indeed altogether unhappy over the whole affair, till he was sent to Niederau nearby to a clergyman named Leberecht Krebel. And there Gottlieb grew up in an environment full of intimacy and affection, in the household of this excellent minister Krebel. With his unusual gifts the boy found himself deeply attracted by all the gleams of truth which he divined in his talks with the worthy pastor. And when Gottlieb reached the age of thirteen he was able, with the support of his benefactor, to enter the Schulpforta School.

He was transferred to the strict discipline of Schulpforta, which did not by any means suit him. He observed that the manner in which the pupils lived together involved much concealment towards the teachers and officials, and much duplicity in behaviour. Further he was altogether out of harmony with the system by which the older boys were set in authority over the younger as prefects. Gottlieb had already at that time absorbed Robinson Crusoe and many other tales, and had been influenced by them. At first this school life seemed intolerable to him. He could not reconcile it with his conscience that there should be—as he felt—concealment, duplicity, deceit in any place intended to promote spiritual growth. What was to be done? He resolved to escape secretly into the world outside. Accordingly, he made ready and simply ran away. On the way there arose in his mind, prompted by his innermost feelings, the thought: “Have you done right? ought you to do this?” Where should he now turn for counsel? He fell upon his knees, addressed a prayer to Heaven and waited for a sign to be given him from the spiritual worlds as to what he should do. The sign from within urged him to turn back, and he willingly did so. Very fortunately there was then at Schulpforta an unusually sympathetic headmaster, by name Geisler, who persuaded young Gottlieb to relate the whole affair to him and showed deep understanding. Instead of punishing him, he even made it possible for Gottlieb to be on happier terms with himself and his environment, as happy indeed as he could wish. He was able also to make friends with the most gifted among the staff.

It was not easy for him to obtain satisfaction for his intellectual needs. Already aspiring, even at that age, towards the highest, he was not free to study the authors of whom he had heard so much; for Goethe, Schiller, and in particular also Lessing, were at that period forbidden fruit at Schulpforta. However, there was one of the masters who obtained for him a remarkable book, Lessing's Anti-Goeze, that inspired polemic against Goeze, which contained the whole substance of Lessing's profession of faith, his lofty and valiant outlook, expressed in free and outspoken language.

Thus Gottlieb in these early years imbibed from this Anti-Goeze all that it was able to give him. It was not only the ideas which he appropriated, indeed that was the least important part; he also made his own the manner of approach towards the highest things and the attitude towards various views of the world.

And so Gottlieb's schooldays went by at Schulpforta. When he had to write his examination thesis on leaving, he chose a literary subject. It was a remarkable piece of work. It was altogether lacking in the quality characteristic of many young people who introduce all kinds of philosophical ideas into their school compositions. This essay contained no trace of philosophy or of philosophical ideas and notions. On the other hand it already betrayed the fact that the young man made it his special aim to observe human beings, to look into the depth of their heart; and it was this acquired knowledge of men which found expression above all in this school essay.

In the meantime his benefactor Baron von Miltitz had died. The funds so generously supplied for the young man stopped. Fichte passed his final examination at Schulpforta, went to Jena, and had to live there in the direst poverty. He could take no share at all in anything that then made up the student life of Jena. Day by day he had to earn by hard toil what he required for his bare subsistence. And he could only find in rare hours the opportunity of nourishing the aspirations of his spirit. Jena proved to be too small, so that Fichte was unable to find his spiritual food there. It struck him that he would have better facilities at Leipzig, a larger city, and went there to try. He tried to prepare himself there for the situation in life which was the ideal of his father and mother, deeply god-fearing people; namely for the Saxon ministry, for a post as minister and preacher. Indeed one may say he had shown himself predestined for the office of preacher. He had proved so capable of assimilating the truths of Holy Writ that even in his father's house he was frequently invited to make comments on this or that passage in the Bible, and similarly while he was living with the good clergyman Leberecht Krebel. And whenever he was able to visit his home for a short time, in the place which contained his parents' unpretentious cottage, he was allowed to preach there, for the local minister was a friend of his. And he would preach in such a way, prompted as it were by a sacred enthusiasm, that what he was able to impart was the very word of God, in a version that was at once individual and yet altogether in conformity with the Bible itself.

So he went on trying, at Leipzig, to train himself for his calling as a country pastor. But it proved difficult. It was hard for him to secure any teaching position which he thought himself able to fill. He occupied himself with correcting work, with tutoring, but this life became very hard for him. And above all he found himself in the course of it unable to make any progress with his own intellectual aims. He was already twenty-six, and these were hard times for him. One day he had no more resources left and no prospect of securing anything during the next few days; no prospect either that, if things were to go on in the same way, he could ever secure entry to even the most modest profession which he had set himself as an aim. His people at home could support him only to a very meagre extent; for, as I have said, it was a family abundantly blessed with children.

And so one day he stood at the edge of an abyss and in his soul, like a desperate temptation, the question arose: “Have I no prospects for this life of mine?” Though it may not have been quite present to his consciousness, yet in the background of his mind was the idea of a voluntary death. Then, just at the opportune moment, appeared the writer Weisse, who had become one of his friends. Weisse offered him a post as tutor at Zurich and took steps to ensure that he should really be able to take up this post within three months. And so from the autumn of 1788 onwards we find our Fichte at Zurich. Let us try once more to picture him with the mind's eye, as he stood in the pulpit in the Zurich Minster, now completely possessed with his own conception of the Gospel of St. John, already quite intent on the endeavour to reproduce the teachings of the Bible in a form of his own. He did this in such a way that those who heard his inspiring words resound through the Zurich Cathedral must have thought that a man had arisen who was capable of rendering the scriptures with quite a new eloquence, in a new way, with a fresh inspiration. Many, doubtless, who heard him then in the Cathedral at Zurich, must have carried away this impression.

And now we can follow him again into a new situation. He became a tutor in the Ott household, in the inn “Zum Schwert” at Zurich. There he encountered a peculiar narrow-minded outlook to which he could only partially adapt himself. He succeeded in getting on good terms with his pupil, but less so with the parents. And we can trace what Fichte really was in the following incident. One day the pupil's mother received a singular letter from her son's tutor, who was living in the house. What were the contents of this letter? Roughly as follows. Education was a task, the writer said, to which he, Fichte, would willingly lend himself. What he knew of his pupil gave him an assured prospect of being able to do great things with him. But the process of his education would have to be developed in one particular point: it was essential above all to educate his mother! For a mother who behaved in such a way towards a pupil was the greatest obstacle to any education under her roof! I need not dwell upon the peculiar feelings with which Frau Ott read this epistle. However, the incident was passed over, and up to the spring of 1790, that is for about eighteen months, Fichte was able to pursue a fruitful activity in the Ott household at Zurich.

But Fichte was not by any means the man to circumscribe within the limits of his profession the thoughts which filled his soul. It was not in his nature to avert his attention from the spiritual processes taking place around him. Through his inner zeal and the close interest he felt for all the spiritual changes going on around him, he became closely absorbed also in what was going on in his own environment. There in Switzerland his thoughts turned to the ideas which were then filling the minds of all men, to the mental reactions provoked by the outbreak of the French Revolution. We can, so to speak, overhear him discussing at Olten, whenever he found any specially gifted people to talk to, the questions which were then dominating France and the world with their imperious significance; making up his mind that those were the ideas which deserved primary attention, and associating all the preoccupations derived from his deep religious feeling and acute intellect with the new ideas of human happiness, human rights and the high ideals of humanity.

Fichte was no egoist, capable only of developing his soul rigidly from within. This soul of his grew in communion with the outer world. His soul knew unconsciously the duty of existing for something beyond one's self, of standing as a personification of the world's purpose in the age in which one lives. That was one of Fichte's deepest convictions. And thus, just at the period when his spirit was most sensitively aware of the processes at work in his environment, he developed in close communion with the Swiss element. And we always find that this German-Swiss element left a permanent mark on the whole personality of Fichte in his later life and work.

It is necessary to understand the deep-seated difference between Swiss life, and life a little further north, in Germany, in order to grasp the impression which the Swiss environment, the Swiss character and endeavour made upon Fichte. For example, this Swiss element is distinguished from other forms of German life especially by the way in which it infuses a kind of self-conscious element into all the intellectual life, so that all cultural activity acquires a political expression; everything is so conceived that the current conceptions serve to put the individual into touch with immediate action, with the world. For this German-Swiss character art, science, literature are only separate tributaries of the whole river of life.

It was this element which appealed so happily to Fichte's own spiritual character. He too was a man who could not conceive any human activity or any human endeavour in isolation. For him too every individual factor had to be linked with the entirety of man's action, meditation and feeling and with man's whole philosophy. Moreover, in Fichte his capacity for achievement was intimately linked with his ever unfolding personality. No one who reads Fichte to-day, who approaches those writings of his which often seem so arid in their substance, or those particular writings and treatises which radiate intelligence, can have any notion of what Fichte must have been when he poured into his discourse, upon a cause which he deeply felt and espoused, all his inner fire and intensity. For into his discourse there passed also what he was. He even attempted at that time—it was an abortive attempt—to establish at Zurich a school of public speaking. For he believed that through the manner in which spiritual things are set before men a different and more effective influence could be exerted than merely through the ideas themselves, however excellent these may be.

At Zurich, in the household of a Swiss named Rahn, then well-to-do, a brother-in-law of Klopstock, Fichte found stimulating society which made a strong impression upon him. He formed a deep attachment to the daughter, Johanna Rahn. With this niece of Klopstock he formed a close intimacy, at first a friendship, which developed gradually into love. By now his position as tutor at Zurich was no longer really tenable, and he needed to look further afield. He did not want at that moment, before he had made his way in the world—as he frequently remarked at the time—to enter the Rahn household as a member of it, and perhaps live on its resources. He wanted to make his way further in the world—with him we cannot say his “fortune”—but his way.

He returned again to Germany, to Leipzig. He thought of remaining there for a while, hoping to find what his real vocation might be, to find that form of spiritual expression which he sought as his object in life. He intended then to return after a while, to work out in freedom what he had brought into harmony within himself. But then an unexpected event happened which upset all his plans. Disaster overtook Rahn, for he lost his whole fortune. Fichte was now not only tormented by the knowledge that the people dearest to him had sunk into poverty, but he himself was compelled to resume his wanderings through the world, abandoning the cherished plans which he had nursed in his innermost heart.

The first thing that offered was a post as tutor at Warsaw. However, as soon as he arrived and presented himself there, the aristocratic lady whose house he was to enter formed the impression that Fichte's manners, which then and subsequently struck many people as downright and vigorous, were really uncouth and that he had no talent for adapting himself to social life. When this was pointed out to him, he could not endure it and took his departure.

His way now led him to that place where he might expect to find a man whom he revered more than anybody, not only among his contemporaries but in his whole generation, towards whom he had been drawn when for a while he was immersed in the study of Spinoza and his philosophy; a man towards whom he had been drawn while studying his writings, with which he was now wholly in accord. As at an earlier date his thoughts were filled with the Bible and other works, so now the writings of this man, Immanuel Kant, confronted him as a new creation. So he made his way to Königsberg and sat at the feet of the great teacher. And he found himself altogether in harmony with the image reflected in his soul of this teaching, which he held to be the greatest ever bestowed upon mankind. And in Fichte's soul, all the ideas derived from his own devout nature, from his meditation on the divine guidance of the world and on the way in which the mysteries of this guidance have been revealed throughout eternity to mankind—all this was blended with what he learned and heard from Kant. And he projected all that arose in his soul into a work which he entitled Kritik aller Offenbarung (A Critique of all Revelation). This was in 1792, when Fichte was thirty years of age. Then a remarkable thing happened. Kant immediately recommended a publisher for the book, which aroused his enthusiasm. It went out into the world without the author's name, and nobody supposed it to be anything but a work by Immanuel Kant himself. Thus favourable criticisms were showered upon it from every quarter. Meanwhile Fichte, again through Kant's intervention, had secured in the excellent Krockov household near Danzig a tutoring post which this time was very congenial to him, and in which he could freely cultivate his spiritual aspirations; and it was intolerable to him so to appear before the world that the public, when discussing his book, in fact associated it with another author. He could not endure that; and when the first edition, which was soon exhausted, was followed by a second, he published his name. And now he had a singular experience. A great many critics at least found it impossible to say the exact contrary of what they had said before; but the judgment at first passed upon the book was now toned down. This was for Fichte yet another lesson in his study of human psychology.

After he had spent some time in the Krockov household he felt able, in view of his present status in the world, not indeed in a mundane sense, but intellectually—for he had proved that he was capable of something—he felt able to prepare for his return to the Rahn household. Only thus had he resolved to win Klopstock's niece, and now he could do so. So in 1793 he went back again to Zurich, and Klopstock's niece became his wife.

He set to work now, with the utmost intensity, not only to develop in himself the ideas he had assimilated from Kant, but also to immerse himself more deeply in all that had occupied his mind during his first stay at Zurich, in all those ideas about the aims and ideals of humanity which were now permeating the world. And he mingled the substance of his own thoughts about human ideals and endeavours with the ideas now passing through the world. He was so independent a nature that he could not refrain from communicating to the world his inevitable conclusions on the ideas about human progress then held by the most radical thinkers. The book now published by him in 1793 was entitled: Beiträge zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (Suggestions for the Enlightenment of Public Opinion on the French Revolution).

Simultaneously with the elaboration of this book there went on in his mind a perpetual revision of those views of the world which he had formed for himself from contact with the outlook of Kant. There must be, he said to himself, a philosophy of life which, in the light of a supreme impulse, could illuminate the whole domain of knowledge for the human mind. And this philosophy, aspiring so strongly towards the highest that no higher ideal of knowledge could ever be found, was the ideal which now hovered before Fichte's eyes.

By a singular concatenation of circumstances, while he was still engaged in working out his ideas within himself, he received a message from Jena. The impression made there by Fichte's achievement was such that on the strength of it he was invited, when Karl Leonhard Reinhold resigned his post at Jena University, to succeed him there as Professor of Philosophy. Those who were then directing the intellectual life in that University welcomed with the utmost satisfaction the idea of introducing into this famous College (then the highest in prestige of any in Germany) the remarkable personality who, while in one aspect he struck them as a hot-head, in another made the impression of a man striving, especially in his quest for a philosophy of life, towards the highest levels of thought.

And now let us just attempt to view him in imagination as he discharges the duties of his new appointment. He desired to transmit to those who now from 1794 onwards were his pupils, the outlook on the world which had formed itself within him. But Fichte was not a teacher like any other. Let us first consider the results of his spiritual evolution. It would take too long to explain this in his own words, but it can be characterized out of his own spirit as follows. He aspired towards a supreme ideal of such a kind that the human spirit might apprehend the stream and mystery of the world at a point where the spirit is directly one with this stream and mystery. So that man gazing into this mystery of the universe might be able to link his own existence with it, that is to say, to know it. This result could not be attained in any exterior sensuous existence. It could not be reached by any eye, any ear, any other sense, nor by everyday human understanding either. For all that can be apprehended outwardly by the senses must first be co-ordinated by human intelligence; it has its existence in the outer world. It can only be considered as real when its existence is, so to speak, confirmed by the observations of the senses. But that is no real existence; or at least no opinion can be formed at first about the real existence of what is only apprehended by the senses. The source of all knowing must rise in the depth of the Ego itself. That cannot be a something complete in its existence, for a completed existence in the inner self would be equal to what appears as completed existence within the outer senses. It must be a creating reality. This is the Ego itself, that Ego which recreates itself every moment, that Ego which is grounded not on a completed being, but on an inward activity. This Ego cannot be deprived of its being, since that being consists in its creation; in its self-creation. And into this self-creation flows everything that has real being. Away then with this Self out of the world of the senses, and into those spheres where the spirit moves and has its being, where the spirit works as creator; we must lay hold of this spiritual life and act from the point where the Ego unites with the spiritual processes of the world. We must plunge into that current which is not external complete being, but which from the source of the divine world- existence creates the Ego, first as Ego and then as human ideals, as the great conceptions of Duty.

Such was the form which the Kantian philosophy had assumed in Fichte's soul. And thus he did not want to present his hearers with a ready-made doctrine; with that this man was not concerned. With Fichte it was not a lecture like another lecture, a doctrine like another doctrine. No; when this man took his place at the lecturer's desk, then what he had to say there, or rather to do there, was the fruit of a long meditation of many hours during which in thought he saw inwardly the divine being, the divine spiritual ebb and flow streaming through the world, and permeating in its course the Ego which ever recreates itself, by a sublime process above and beyond all sensuous existence. After having brooded long in self-imposed debate as to what the world's spirit had to impart to the soul about world mysteries, then, and only then, did he come before his audience. But then he was not concerned to convey his message, but to create an atmosphere of communion between himself and his hearers. His endeavour was that what had come to life in his soul concerning the world mysteries should come to life likewise spontaneously in the souls of his listeners. His purpose was to awaken spiritual activity and spiritual being. From the souls of his hearers, as they hung upon his words, he sought to call forth a self-renewing spiritual activity. He did not merely communicate ideas. The following is an instance of what he sought to give to his hearers; one day he was attempting to illustrate this self-renewing faculty of the Ego, how all mental activity can arise in the Ego and how man can only reach a real grasp of world mysteries by laying hold of this self-renewing faculty within himself; and when he was attempting to illustrate this, entering the spiritual world with his hearers, and, as it were, taking each one by the hand to guide him into the spiritual world, he said: “Now may I ask you just to fix your attention for a moment upon the wall. Well, you have now, I hope, formed a mental picture of the wall. The wall is now present in your minds as an image. And now think of a person thinking of the wall. Detach your minds altogether from any thought of the wall itself. Fix your attention entirely on the person thinking of the wall.”

This direct manner, this direct relation which Fichte sought to establish with his hearers made many of them uneasy, but at the same time impressed them profoundly. The spirit at work in Fichte had to come to grips with the spirit of his hearers.

Thus for several years the man worked on, never repeating the same lecture, but continually creating anew. For he did not care about imparting in sentences this or that information, but strove ever and again to awaken a new response in his hearers. This is evident from his oft-repeated assertion: “It matters nothing that what I have to say to men should be repeated by this person or that, but rather the essential is that I succeed in kindling a flame in men's souls, a flame which shall induce every one to think for himself. Let no one repeat my words after me, but let each one be stimulated by me to deliver his own message.” Fichte's aim was to produce, not pupils, but original thinkers. If we follow out the history of Fichte's influence, we can understand how it was that this man, the most German of the German philosophers, did not train any real students of philosophy. He founded no school of philosophy. But the direct relationship which he established with his pupils again and again produced men of mark.

Now Fichte was aware—inevitably, since he sought to lead the minds of men up to a direct contact with creative spiritual reality—he was aware that he must speak in quite a special way. Fichte's whole style was indeed hard to follow. None of those who attended any of his courses at Jena had ever come into contact with such teaching before. Schiller himself was astonished at it, and Fichte once discussed with Schiller how his, Fichte's, teaching activity and his manner of presentation appeared to himself. For example, Fichte remarked; “Of course, if people just read what I have said, then it is impossible, as people read to-day, that they should comprehend what I am trying to say.” Then, taking up one of his books, he attempted to illustrate how, in his judgment, his work should be read aloud. Then he said to Schiller: “You see, people nowadays do not know how to recite inwardly. But people can only grasp the inner meaning of my lectures by really reciting them mentally, otherwise it is lost.” Certainly Fichte's own rendering of his lectures was no mere reading, it was direct speech itself. Therefore even to-day we ought in studying Fichte to recite his words mentally against the background, as it were, of his whole spiritual life, which merits our attention as representing the spiritual life of the whole German people. Even to-day we ought still to train ourselves in reciting and listening inwardly to those passages of Fichte which otherwise seem so dry and so bare.

We have now reviewed in our minds Fichte's spiritual development and reached one of the peaks of his spiritual life. It is right therefore to glance back for a moment over this remarkable evolution. We first visualised Fichte as he stood before Baron von Miltitz in his blue peasant smock, a sturdy red-cheeked peasant boy who had no other education than that open to his class, but who, even as a nine-year-old child, had assimilated that education till it had become the most fundamental possession of his soul. In him we have an example of a soul grown to maturity wholly out of the midst of the German people, without at first receiving any culture other than that which belongs to the common every-day life of the German people. We have followed this spirit through difficult phases; this spirit—whose ideal it really is to remain within the people, but yet is bound to yield to the deepest motives of his being—can be followed in his course as he rises to the loftiest heights of inner spiritual growth and work, until at last he becomes, as we have been able to illustrate, a moulder of men. We are following the road traversed by a German spirit growing directly out of the people and climbing by its own strength alone to the topmost peaks of spiritual being.

Thus up to the spring of 1799 Fichte discharged the duties of his teaching post at Jena. Even before that time all sorts of dissensions had arisen, for it must be admitted that Fichte was not by any means the kind of man who is easy in intercourse, the kind of man willing for the sake of friendly relations to use roundabout methods and facile gestures in his dealings with other people. But here we come to an important point, which has significance for the whole of the German life of that epoch.

One person in particular felt deep satisfaction—a feeling which Goethe also shared—at having been able to call Fichte to his University at Jena: this person was the Duke, Karl August. And we may well, I think, record here the singular tolerance shown by Karl August in calling to his University the man who had most freely applied the Kantian philosophy in criticism of revealed religion; and moreover in inviting to his University the man who had most boldly and outspokenly taken a stand for the freest ideals of human development. It would be, I feel, a failure to do justice to Karl August, that noble spirit, if we passed on without pointing out what unusual broad-mindedness this German prince must then have needed, in calling Fichte into his service. This invitation was described by Goethe as a piece of audacity; and I should like to remind you of the world of prejudices which Karl August and Goethe, who in the nature of things were bound to be the chief authors of this invitation, had to face in taking it on themselves to bring Fichte to Jena. As I say, it would be almost an injustice not to point out Karl August's remarkable freedom from all prejudice. And to illustrate this I should like to read out a passage from Fichte's book entitled: Suggestions for the Enlightenment of Public Opinion on the French Revolution:

“They (Fichte is referring to the European princes, including those of Germany) are for the most part brought up in indolence and ignorance, or if they know anything it is a kind of knowledge specially concocted for them; it is a notorious fact that once they are on the throne they neglect to go on with their education, that they read no new works except perhaps shallow sophistries and that they are invariably behind their times by at least as many years as they have reigned.”

That passage is from the last book which Fichte had then written—yet the Duke Karl August invited this man to his University!

Anyone who gives a little attention to the whole situation of Fichte and those who had sent for him will come to this conclusion: that those people who held the view of the great and magnanimous Karl August and Goethe had undertaken a campaign against the people of their immediate circle, who were altogether and absolutely in disagreement with the idea of sending for Fichte. And this was a campaign which was not easy to undertake; for as already stated, it was not possible with Fichte to make use of manoeuvres such as are so generally practised in the world. Fichte was a man who by his awkwardness, by his bluntness often offended the very people whom it was most desirable to avoid offending. He was not a man to make smooth gestures: he was a man who, if something did not please him, would strike out with his fist against the world. And the manner in which Fichte was then using his whole energy to impart his message to the world was admittedly such as to cause Goethe and Karl August some distress; it was not easy for them, it was very hard for them to put up with it, and they were distressed.

And so little by little the storm-clouds gathered. First of all, Fichte wanted to give a course of ethical lectures, those which are printed under the title “Lectures on the Morality of the Scholar.” The only suitable hour that he could find was on Sunday. But this was a shocking suggestion to all who held that it would be a profanation of the holy day to address the Jena students on a Sunday on the subject of morality as Fichte conceived it. And protests of every sort and kind poured in upon the Weimar Government, upon Goethe and Karl August. The whole Senate of Jena University passed a unanimous resolution to the effect that a deplorable sensation and infinite mischief would result if Fichte were to deliver lectures on morals in the University on Sundays—he had selected the hour of the afternoon church service. In this affair Karl August was forced for the time being to leave Fichte's adversaries in possession of the field. But once again it would not be right to pass on without drawing attention to the manner in which he did it. The following is an extract from the letter sent by Karl August to the University of Jena:—

“In accordance with your request we have resolved that the above-mentioned Professor Fichte shall be permitted to continue his moral lectures on Sunday only after the close of the afternoon church service.” However, Karl August was brought to this decision only on account of “a circumstance so unusual as the arrangement of lectures of this kind during the hours appointed for Divine Service.” In the official decree sent by the Duke to the University Senate he wrote in reference to these lectures:—“We have been glad to assure ourselves that if his (Fichte's) moral lectures resemble the accompanying admirable essay from his pen, they may well prove to be of the highest value.”¹

But the attack was pressed home. The enemy never afterwards let go their hold. And so, in 1799, came about that unhappy controversy over the charge of atheism, as a result of which Fichte had to relinquish his position as lecturer at Jena. A younger man named Forberg had contributed to the periodical Fichte was then editing, an article which incurred from a certain quarter a charge of atheism. Fichte, for his part, thought that what this young man had written was rather imprudent, and wished to add marginal comments. Forberg disagreed with this suggestion; so that Fichte in that lofty manner of his which he used not alone in great matters but also in the smallest ones, would not hear of rejecting the article because he disagreed with it, and would not add marginal notes against the author's will; however, he wrote in the form of a preface some lines about the basis of the belief in the divine governance of the world. These lines of his were wholly imbued, through and through, with the spirit of genuine and deeply-felt reverence and piety, exalted to that spiritual level of which Fichte said that it was the only true reality, that we can only grasp reality when the Ego feels itself moving in the sphere of the spirit, immersed in the spiritual stream of the world. We must not, therefore, he added, apprehend the existence of God by any external revelation or external knowledge whatever. We must apprehend the existence of God in the living process of creation. We must sense the creative process of the world by standing in the stream of it, ourselves ceaselessly creating and so attaining our own immortality.

But in consequence of this article the charge of atheism was now turned against Fichte himself. It is impossible to relate here the full details of this controversy. It is indeed grievous to observe how Goethe and Karl August, against their will, had to take sides against Fichte; who, however, would never be restrained, when he felt impelled to communicate his appointed message to the world, from retorting to an attack by a direct blow. So matters went on till Fichte heard that steps were to be taken against him, that he was to be reprimanded. Goethe and Karl August would have preferred to see the matter settled by a reprimand. But Fichte said to himself that to accept a reprimand for ideas drawn from the deepest sources of the human spirit, would mean an offence against honour, not his personal honour, but that of the spiritual life itself. And so he then wrote a private letter, which however was viewed as an official communication and filed among the official documents, to the Minister Voigt at Weimar, to the effect that he would never accept any reprimand, no, rather he would take his departure! And whenever Fichte wrote about matters of this kind he wrote as he spoke. It used to be said of him that he had a sharp tongue when necessary; and in correspondence too he could be cutting towards anybody, whoever it might be. Thus the authorities had no alternative, unless everything were to be turned upside down at Jena, but to accept the resignation which Fichte had not really meant to tender, for his private letter had been treated as an official communication. At any rate that was how it came about that Fichte had to give up his post as teacher at Jena, which had been blessed with such fruitful influence.

Shortly afterwards we see him appear at Berlin. He has now approached from a fresh angle the position of the Ego in the ever-moving stream of the world-spirit. The book which he then wrote (and which can now be bought cheaply in Reklam's Universal Library) was called Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The Destiny of Man). Into the composition of this work he threw his whole being and energy. In it he strove to show how those who only view the world of the senses from outside, co-ordinating it with the understanding, can only point the way towards a meaningless view of the world. The gist of Part I is to show how in this fashion one arrives only at a dream-reflection of life. The object of Part II is to show how the mind thus comes to regard the world as a chain of exterior necessities. And in Part III we come to the enquiry as to how the soul fares when it seeks not merely an image but a direct participation in that great creative process of all existence. After putting the finishing touches to the work, Fichte wrote to his wife, whom he had then left behind at Jena: “I have never before looked so deeply into religion as during the composition of the last part of this work, The Destiny of Man.”

Apart from a short interval in 1805, which he spent at the University of Erlangen, Fichte passed the remainder of his life in this world at Berlin. At first he gave private lectures at the various houses in which he lived, lectures of an impressive character; subsequently he was invited to assist in the newly-founded University, to which we must now turn our attention.

As I said, apart from the short interlude in 1805 at Erlangen, his work now lay in Berlin. He was still drawing from ever fresh sources in his soul the ideas which he had to impart to the public. So at Erlangen, continually recasting his ideas in a fresh mould, he presented his theory of knowledge, his outlook on the world. Strangely enough, whereas at Jena he had from the beginning of his course a fair audience which steadily increased, and similarly in Berlin, the number of his hearers in Erlangen dwindled by one half in the course of the term. Everyone knows how professors generally take such a falling-off; anyone who has any experience knows that they simply have to accept it. But Fichte did not react to it in that way. One day when his audience at Erlangen had diminished to one half, he referred to it, taking for granted that his words would reach also those who had stayed away, in one of those thundering tirades in which he demonstrated to people that, if they would not hear what he had to say, then they were good only for external historical knowledge, not for intellectual knowledge. And after going on to discuss what a man should become in life if in his spiritual strivings he rejected this intellectual kind of knowledge, he continued as follows:—“Now as to the time of my lectures. I have heard how much dissatisfaction is felt at the choice of time. I will not consider this strictly according to principles which are really self-evident and which would have to be applied here. I will take it that the persons concerned are only misinformed, and will try to put them right. No doubt they may say that there is a tradition in this matter dating from long ago. Supposing that this were the fact, I should have to reply that grave abuses must have existed in the university from the earliest times. ... I myself have held at Jena from six to seven o'clock in summer and winter a course such as this, attended by hundreds, whose numbers used to increase considerably towards the close. I must say openly that when I arrived here I selected this hour because no other was available. Now that I have realised the point of view adopted towards it, I shall select it deliberately for the coming summer.

“At the back of all these difficulties we find a deep-seated incapacity in people to occupy themselves and a great deal of shallowness and ennui, so that after a meal has been taken, by God's grace, at midday, people find it unendurable to stay any longer in the town. And even if you were to give me proofs—which I hope it would be impossible to supply—that such has been the custom at Erlangen since its foundation, in the whole of Franconia, indeed throughout South Germany, then I would not hesitate to answer that in that case shallowness and futility must have made their headquarters at Erlangen and the whole of South Germany.” Whatever one may think of such outbursts as this, it is truly characteristic of Fichte as regards his intense concentration on the spiritual message which he was trying to deliver to mankind. Whenever he spoke he did not seek merely to say something but to do something for men's souls, to lay hold on them; thus every soul who stayed away was a real loss, not for himself but for the purpose which he was trying to realise for mankind. For Fichte the word was also an act. Since he himself dwelt within the spiritual world, it was possible for him through spiritual communion to gather others around him within that world, because he was himself within it and was no mere theoretical champion of the principles he professed when he said: “Reality is not in the outer world of the senses but in the spirit; and whoever knows the spirit can perceive behind all sensuous existence the spiritual reality.”

And to him this was no mere theory, it was also a practical reality, as was proved at a later date at Berlin by the following incident. One day when his audience was assembled in the lecture hall, which was near the Spree Canal, a terrible message was brought. Some children, with Fichte's son among them, had been playing down there; a boy had fallen into the water and it was thought to be Fichte's son. Fichte and a friend set out, and in the presence of all his students, they pulled the boy out of the water. Although the boy bore a close resemblance to Fichte's son, it was not in fact he. Yet for a moment Fichte had been convinced that it was his son. He did what he could for the child, who however was dead when taken from the water. Anybody who knows the intimate family affection in Fichte's household between him, his wife Johanna and their only son, will realise something of what Fichte went through at that moment; the terrible shock that he underwent and then the transition from this shock to the deepest joy when he was able to clasp his son in his arms. When he had done this and changed his clothes, he proceeded to deliver the remainder of his two-hour lecture just as he always did, that is, wholly intent on his subject.

This was not a unique instance. Often and often did Fichte give similar proofs of his integral loyalty to the world of the spirit. For example, it was at this period at Berlin that he delivered public lectures which were intended as a criticism and a severe indictment of his age. He passed in review one by one the various epochs of history. But it was, he said, the age in which he lived, which had brought selfishness to the extreme limit. And in that age of selfishness he found himself confronting the personality of Napoleon, in whom, in his view, this selfishness was incarnate. During all this period when the Napoleonic chaos was enveloping north and central Germany, Fichte never in his heart viewed himself otherwise than as Napoleon's spiritual antagonist. And so we get his character study of Napoleon, of which it may be said that an image of the Emperor, profoundly German in its approach and in its vigour and based on the loftiest philosophical standpoint, had shaped itself in the mind of this German thinker who had grown out of that peasant boy in a blue smock of whom earlier we had a glimpse. We have come now to a state of human existence at the present time, said Fichte, in which people have lost their consciousness of the spiritual influence which pulsates through the world and also through human existence and evolution, and which, in the form of the moral impulses, carries mankind forward from epoch to epoch; of the truth that in the march of history man is only of value in so far as he is sustained by what is permanent from age to age in the moral impulses and the moral order of the world. Of all this people no longer know anything. We have arrived at an epoch in which we see one generation succeed another like links in a chain. Even the best minds, said Fichte, have forgotten the moral principles which must pervade these links. And in such a world we encounter the personality of Napoleon, an inexhaustible source of energy indeed, but a man who, though he may have had in his soul occasional glimpses of freedom, has never formed any true notion of the real all-embracing ideal of freedom as it works from age to age in men's moral aspirations and in the moral framework of the world. And from this fundamental deficiency that a personality which is only a shell, without any true spiritual core, can yet wield such immense force, from this phenomenon Fichte traced the personality, the whole “catastrophe” as he expressed it—Napoleon.

In mentioning this and in placing side by side these two personalities—Fichte, the most forceful exponent of the German outlook with his view of Napoleon, and on the other side Napoleon himself—reference should be made to an observation attributed to Napoleon at St. Helena, after his downfall; for it is only in this light that the whole situation can be clearly grasped. At St. Helena, after his downfall, Napoleon expressed himself as follows: “Everything would have gone all right. I should not have fallen before all the Powers which ranged themselves against me. With one factor only did I fail to reckon, and it is this that really brought about my downfall, namely—the German philosophers!” Let narrow minds say what they will about the value of philosophy; this piece of self-revelation from Napoleon's own lips has more weight, I think, than all the objections that might be raised against Fichte's idealism, which indeed had a thoroughly practical aspect.

Finally, it is possible to adduce another proof, a proper historical proof, that it is not so difficult for an idealist such as Fichte to be practical when occasion demanded. It had become necessary for him to enter as a partner into his father's business, which had now been taken over by his brothers. We see him accordingly as a partner in the family ribbon-weaving business. His parents were still alive; and we may note that he proved to be a good and prudent business man, capable of lending valuable assistance to his brothers, who had remained simply men of business. A man such as Fichte has many critics who say: “Oh these idealists, they dwell in a dream-world, they understand nothing of practical life!” But it may well be imagined that Fichte from the depth of his being, and especially in his lectures on Die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (The Vocation of the Scholar), had something to say which cannot be too often repeated in the face of those who point to the unpractical nature of idealism, of the spiritual world altogether. In the introduction to this course of lectures Fichte made the following observations:—

“That ideals cannot be demonstrated in the actual world is a fact which we know perhaps as well as our critics, perhaps better. We merely assert that reality must be judged with reference to these ideals and must be modified by those who feel in themselves the strength to do so. Supposing however that our critics cannot even concede so much; well, seeing that they are what they are, this inability will mean small loss to them, and none to the world. It will simply mean that they do not count in the process towards the ennoblement of mankind, which anyway will go forward without any doubt; as to these others, may kindly nature have them in her keeping, granting them in God's good time rain, sunshine, wholesome nourishment and proper circulation of the blood, and, in addition to all these—right thoughts!”

The significance of ideals, the significance also of practical life, was something already quite clear to the mind of this German. But then Fichte's was a nature which stood by itself. He may be called one-sided; but this one-sidedness must occur sometimes in life, just as there are certain forces which must occasionally overshoot the mark in order to achieve the best results.

Undoubtedly Fichte's behaviour often had a rough side to it, as when apart from his lectures on the principles of morality, he attempted to take practical steps at Jena against the tyranny of routine, and against drinking and loafing ways among the students. He had by now a certain following in student circles. Further, as a result of his influence, petitions had been presented to the authorities asking for the abolition of this or that society which was particularly given to disorder. As we have seen, Fichte was a rugged nature, not skilful in making smooth gestures, but quite likely, metaphorically of course, to strike out fiercely with his fist now and then; and indeed matters came to such a pass that the majority of the Jena students were altogether opposed to Fichte and his practical moral influence. So they banded themselves together and smashed his windows. To Goethe, though he respected Fichte and was respected by him, the incident suggested a humorous comment. “Why yes,” said Goethe, “that is the philosopher who derives everything from the Ego! It is truly an inconvenient way of being assured of the existence of the non-ego, to have one's windows smashed; that was not what one assumed as the contrary of the Ego.”

All this, however, does not mean that there was any lack of harmony between Fichte's and Goethe's philosophical outlook. And Fichte was profoundly right in the feeling he expressed in a letter to Goethe on 21st June, 1794, soon after the beginning of his lectures at Jena, when sending to Goethe the proofs of his work on the Theory of Knowledge:

“I regard you, and have always done so, as representing the purest spirituality of feeling at the point so far reached by human progress. Philosophy rightly turns towards you, for your feeling is its best criterion.”

And Goethe wrote to Fichte, after receiving the pages of the Theory of Knowledge: “There is nothing in your work which is not altogether in line with my own customary way of thinking.” Again, in another letter to Fichte, referring also to the Theory of Knowledge: “These ideas are indeed now in harmony with nature; but men's minds must also come into harmony with them and I believe that you will be able to present them in the right way.” And if anyone to-day should assert that he finds this Theory of Knowledge, as then published by Fichte, dry and unlike Goethe, or that Goethe would have had no taste for such things, one must reply to this criticism as I replied when publishing the letters of Fichte to Goethe, in the Weimar Schiller-and-Goethe Archives, in the Goethe Year-Book of 1894.² In the Goethe-Schiller Archives there are extracts from Fichte's Theory of Knowledge in Goethe's own hand, accompanied sentence by sentence by the ideas inspired in him reading Fichte; and after all it is intelligible that Goethe, one of the most German among Germans, out of the pure spirituality of feeling with which he sought for a fresh outlook on the world, should inevitably hold out his hand to the man who as the most German of all Germans was in quest of a philosophical outlook based on the force of pure reason alone. Goethe once also, by the way, expressed very aptly his relationship towards the philosophy of Kant. What he said was—not word for word, but in substance—as follows: Kant had argued that, by turning his attention outward upon the world, man can only arrive at sense-knowledge. But his sense-knowledge is nothing but appearance, merely something which man himself by his point of view introduces into the world. Knowledge must be deposed from its seat, for it is only by a belief that it is possible to arrive at freedom, at infinity, at a conception of the divine spiritual existence. And this attempt to arrive not at a belief, but at a direct insight into the spiritual world, this attempt to bring the individual creative process into communion with the creativeness of the divine world spirit, this attempt which Kant believes to be impossible, would be, as he terms it, the “venture of reason” and Goethe's comment on this is: “Very well then, an attempt must certainly be made to undertake, undaunted, this venture of reason! And assuming that a man has no doubts of the spiritual world but believes in freedom and immortality in God, why should he not face this venture of reason and with the creative element of the soul transport himself into the heart of the creative process which ebbs and flows through the world?” In Fichte, Goethe found a conception of the same venture, only imagined in another way.

And indeed it had to emerge sooner or later, albeit in a rugged form, this urge towards spirituality, towards the apprehension of the all-creating world-intelligence, towards the state where the creative Ego indwells in the creative world-being and is one with it. And in Fichte's view the impulse in this direction was to be given by his Theory of Knowledge. In this theory the very spirit of the German people produced before the world what it had to utter about life and the world and the aims of mankind; it was as it were a direct gesture from the German people, from out of which we see Fichte's soul mount upwards to the heights. Indeed he himself was aware that his philosophy was always rooted in his living intercourse with the spirit of the German people. This spirit found here, it is true, only such expression as it could, seeing that it had first to emerge through the medium of such a rough-hewn personality as Fichte's. No, truly, his was not a personality easy to deal with. Of this we find again another illustration in the following connection. When a University was to be founded at Berlin, and it fell to Fichte to work out a scheme for it, his plan, worked out to the smallest details, showed what his conception of a University was like. And what was his idea? In this University to be started at Berlin he wanted to build something so fundamentally novel, especially for the beginning of the nineteenth century, that—we may say it without the slightest fear of contradiction—this novelty is as yet unrealised anywhere in the world, and the world is still waiting for it. Needless to say, Fichte's scheme was not put into practice, though indeed he was aiming at nothing else than, as he expressed it, to make the University into a “School of training in the scientific application of intelligence.” What was this University to become? A place of nurture, which might be termed a school of training for the scientific use of the intelligence! Accordingly, it was to turn out, not specialists in this subject or that, such as philosophers or natural scientists or physicians or jurists, but human beings so closely fitted into the structure of the world as to have entire command over the art of using their intelligence. Only imagine what a blessing it would mean if such a University really existed anywhere in the world! if actually we could find realised anywhere a school that would turn out people who have made their inner soul so vital that they could move freely within the essential logic of existence!

But truly this personality was not easy to deal with! It was something massive which existed in order to leave a distinctive mark on history. Fichte became the second Rector of the new University. He filled the position so energetically that he was only able to remain Rector for four months; for neither the students nor the authorities concerned could tolerate any longer what he was attempting to accomplish. All this however, just as with Fichte himself, is typical of German national feeling. For when he delivered his Reden an das deutsche Volk (Addresses to the German People), to which, and indeed to the whole great phenomenon of Fichte, I have already repeatedly referred here, not only during the war but also before it—when he delivered these Addresses he knew that he was trying to communicate to the German people what he had, so to speak, overheard in his meditative conversations with the world-spirit. The only response at which he was aiming was to arouse in their souls whatever can be aroused out of the deepest sources of the German being. This manner which Fichte adopted towards his time and towards those whose souls he hoped to raise to a level sufficient for the tasks of the wider universe, all this was unlikely to make any impression on idlers or superficial people, except perhaps to excite their curiosity. But this latter response was the last which Fichte sought to evoke. Needless to say, when such an intellectual phenomenon as Fichte appears in the world, the very easiest course is to turn it into ridicule; there is nothing easier than to play the critic and to laugh at it. People did this a good deal, and the result was sometimes to place Fichte in difficult situations. For example, immediately after his arrival at the University of Jena, he found himself in quite a serious dilemma through his inability to agree with others who after all were also philosophers. Thus there was at the Jena University a man who was the traditional professor of philosophy, a man by the name of Schmid. This man had expressed such vehement condemnation of Fichte's previous work that it was really outrageous that Fichte was now to become his colleague. Thereupon Fichte in turn published a few remarks in the periodical in which Schmid's criticism had appeared. And so the affair went on, backwards and forwards. Fichte assumed his position at Jena just at the time when he was writing in the Jena periodical to which Schmid had contributed “I declare that for me Herr Schmid will no longer exist in this world.” It was a serious matter to take his place beside his colleague in such an atmosphere. A less serious, but no less characteristic incident, was as follows: at that time there was appearing at Berlin a periodical called Der Freimütige (The Independent) directed by the “celebrated” German writer Kötzebue and another man. It was impossible to make out (indeed I believe that even by the most intimate clairvoyance it would not have been possible) the reason why this Kötzebue attended Fichte's lectures. But these doubts lasted only for a while, and presently the reason became clear when Der Freimütige, then a very prominent magazine at Berlin, began to publish the most vicious attacks upon Fichte's lectures. One day Fichte found it more than he could stand. Thereupon he took a number of this magazine Der Freimütige and dissected it before his audience, ridiculing the opinions expressed in the article with the inimitable humour which he had at his command. The countenance of one member of the audience, whose presence there so far had been unexplained, grew longer and longer. And finally Herr Kötzebue stood up with a very long face and announced that he did not see why he should listen to this any longer; so he went off and did not return. But Fichte was heartily glad to be rid of him.

Through the way in which he adapted himself in practice to life, when he was trying to remould the innermost depths of human existence, Fichte knew how to find the tone precisely adapted to the situation before him. Even though he dwelt altogether in the spiritual world, he was yet no otherworldly idealist, but he was a man standing altogether by himself and was accustomed to pay earnest heed to what he felt to be the innermost promptings of his own nature. Accordingly, at a certain time when Napoleon had conquered Berlin and the French were in occupation, he was unable to remain in the city. He did not choose to remain in a city which was under the French yoke. He went therefore first to Königsberg, subsequently to Copenhagen, returning only when he was ready to come forward as the German who could put before his compatriots the very soul of his nation and its national characteristics, in his Addresses to the German People.

Fichte is rightly regarded as a direct expression of German national sentiment, as an expression of that spirit which eternally and profoundly—in so far as we are able to apprehend the spirit of German nationality—dwells in our midst—and not merely in thought. A philosopher, Robert Zimmerman, by no means in accord with Fichte in his philosophical outlook, has finely characterised this aspect of Fichte in the following passage:

“As long as there beats in Germany a heart capable of feeling the shame of foreign domination, so long will the memory of this brave man persist among us; at a moment of the deepest humiliation, amid the ruins of the monarchy of Frederick the Great, in the midst of the French occupation of Berlin, within sight and hearing of the enemy, surrounded by spies and informers, there was a man who yet undertook the task of regenerating from within by the spirit the energies of the German people which had been broken from without by the sword; and at the very moment when Germany's political existence seemed as if annihilated for evermore, this man undertook to recreate it for future generations by the inspiring thought of universal culture.”

It is true that to-day we may think quite differently as to the substance of many of the ideas expressed in the Addresses to the German People, and indeed in Fichte's other writings; but that, as I should like to repeat once more, is not the main question. The main thing is that we should feel the German spirit which pervades his productions, and the renewal of the German spirit in its relations with the world at large, the revival which breathes forth from the Addresses to the German People. The main thing is that we should feel this as the spirit which is now alive amongst us and which we can perceive only in this one instance of Fichte, who has thus taken his place in German evolution—at first, indeed, in a style which attracted widespread notice. Power and energy combined with profound introspection—such were the qualities with which this soul strove to take his place in world evolution. Accordingly, at the period when the end of his life was approaching, in the autumn of 1813, Fichte again found an opportunity of repeating in the most intimate form before his Berlin audiences his whole Theory of Knowledge, after remoulding and recasting it, as a result of further meditations, till it embodied his deepest thoughts. In these Addresses, once more penetrating the souls of his hearers in the way described earlier, he considered again the impossibility for man to go behind the veil of his existence unless he be willing to embrace this existence in the spirit, beyond all sensuous reality. But to those men who believe themselves able to apprehend the truth of existence through the sense-world and the results of sense-experience alone, to these people Fichte proclaimed in these lectures, which are among his last:

“All their knowledge only leads to misunderstanding and vain words; and for that they praise themselves and think all is well. For example, as regards sight: the image of an object is thrown on the retina. Similarly the image of an object is reflected in the surface of still water. Do we therefore hold that the surface of the water can see? What is that further factor which makes the difference between that image in the water and real seeing, the factor which exists in us but not in the water? But these people have not even an inkling of this, for their minds do not reach so far.”

We must become aware, says Fichte, of a special sense, a new sense within one's self, if we mean to experience that existence in the spirit which alone makes all other existence intelligible. “I am, and I am with all my aims only in a supersensuous world.” These words are Fichte's own, and they run like a leitmotiv through all Fichte's utterances throughout his life, which he again confirmed in another way in that autumn of 1813. And what was it that he spoke of then? Of the necessity for men to become conscious that with the outlook on things and the world current in ordinary life and ordinary knowledge one could never get behind the reality of being. We must, he said, become aware that a supersensuous mind dwells in every one of us, and that man can merge his being in a world beyond the senses, and with this supersensuous mind can become, as a creative Ego, one with the stream of the creative pervading world-spirit. It is, he says, as though a seeing man comes to a world of the blind and tries to explain to the inhabitants colour and form, and the blind people deny that these exist. Even so the materialist denies, because he does not possess the requisite sense, like the man who knows: “I am, and I am with all my aims and deeds in the supersensuous world.”³ And with such emphasis did Fichte then impress upon his hearers this existence in the supersensuous, this life in the spiritual, that he said: “Accordingly the new sense is the sense of the spirit; the sense for which only spirit and nothing else whatever has being, and for which also that other, the every-day existence assumes the form of spirit and is transformed into it, for which therefore being as such has actually disappeared.”

It is a glorious fact that in German spiritual development there should have been someone to bear witness in this way to the life of the spirit, in the presence of those who were eager to hear what the German nation, on its highest level, and speaking from the depth of its being, has to utter. For that is what this German nation communicated through Fichte, and it is true of Fichte more than of any other man, that he represented the German soul speaking, at the level it had then reached, to the German nation itself.

Whether we consider this Fichte externally, or whether we look with the inner eye into his soul, always he appears to us as the most direct expression of German nationality itself, not that which is present only at a particular time within the German people, but what is ever present, what is ever there in our midst, if we only know how to perceive it. Through his personality Fichte presents himself to us in such a way that we desire to have his image as if plastically before our souls; and with the mind's eye clearly to see him and hear him as he creates that atmosphere which rises as he speaks between his soul and that of his hearers, so that we seek to draw quite close to him. The result is that we can feel his presence, as I would put it, like that of a legendary hero, a hero of the spirit, who with the eyes of the spirit can always be seen as a leader of his people, if this people only know itself aright! His own people can visualize him, by bringing his image plastically before their souls as one of their chief spiritual heroes.

And to-day, in this age of deeds, in this age when the German people is wrestling as never before for its very existence, we shall do well to evoke with the vision of the spirit the image of this man, who was able to depict German nature and character from the loftiest point of view, but also in the most vigorous individual style, so that of him more than of any other we may believe that, if we understand him rightly, we still have him actually among us. For everything in him is cast so wholly in one mould, he comes forward so directly towards us that as we look at him, he seems to stand before us in his fashion as he lived; whether each single feature stands out from his complete being, or whether we let ourselves be influenced by the most intimate aspects of his soul, in either case he stands before us as a whole. We cannot comprehend him else, for otherwise we comprehend him only blunderingly and superficially.

Yes, we can catch a glimpse of him at his work of kindling among his compatriots the souls of men to surrender themselves, creative in the stream of creation, to the vital forces of the world; ascending, in company with those others, to spiritual experience and entering as a living influence into the process of development of his people. We need but to open the eyes of the spirit. It is only thus plastically that he can be understood; but if we open the eyes of the spirit to his greatness as a national figure, then we shall find him standing in our midst. He endeavoured, as we have seen, to produce effects different from those of other teachers by using language as a medium of doing rather than saying when he came before his audience; in such a way that it was indifferent to him what he said, because he aimed solely at kindling the hearer's soul to deeds of his own, because something had to take place in the souls of his hearers to make them undergo a change between entering and leaving the hall. All this has the quite unusual result that we find his living image, that of a man of the people moulding his fellows, present to our minds; and that we seem to hear him transforming into the words which are themselves deeds those thoughts overheard, as it were, in the solitary meditations and dialogues with the world-spirit, whereby he prepared himself for every single lecture; so that when he had finished speaking, he dismissed his audience as changed people. They had become other beings, not through his strength but through the awakening and kindling of their own. If we understand him rightly in such a way, then we may believe that we hear him clairaudiently as he strives to reach with the sharp edge of his words the spirit which he has already apprehended in the soul, seeking ever—as was said of him—to send out into the world, through his cultivation of the soul, not merely good but great men.

If we indeed form within us a living image of what he was, we cannot fail to hear his words, those words which seemed to be but using this Fichte to communicate a message from the heart of the world, kindling as it came fire and warmth and light. Fortitude vibrated in his words, and moral energy emanated from them. In others too fortitude was kindled by his words as they poured through the ears into the souls and hearts of those who heard him, and from these utterances streamed out into the world a flow of moral energy, when Fichte's followers, with their souls thus aflame with the fire of his eloquence, went out into the world, as we so often learn from contemporaries, as the most capable men of their time. By opening the ears of the spirit we can hear Fichte, if we understand him at all, directly as if he were a living presence speaking out of the heart of his people. And whoever has any ear for such national greatness will hear it still in our midst. It is rare indeed to find ourselves confronted with any spirit in whom we can trace all that he is into every single act of his life. That sense of duty, of the moral order the world, which he embodied at the climax of his philosophical development, can it not already be noted in the seven-year-old boy who threw the Gehörnte Siegfried into the water, because he had conceived a passion for it which he felt to be in contradiction to his duties? The brooding man preparing by meditation for his lectures, with his spirit intent on the mysteries of the world, can he not be found already in embryo in the boy who stood for hours on the moor with his eyes fixed in one direction, lost in the mysteries of nature till the shepherd passed and led him home? That intense fire which inspired Fichte in his teacher's chair at Jena and later when, as he said, he was speaking to the representatives of his whole nation in the Addresses to the German People—can we not feel it already in the incident when he so impressed Baron von Miltitz by his reproduction of the country clergyman's sermon? And if we possess even a little spiritual divination, can we not feel this spirit very near to us in every single act, even in the slightest act of his life? Can we not feel how fortitude of soul, moral energy stream out from this spirit throughout the whole subsequent German development? Can we not feel the lasting vitality, even if we can no longer agree with the ideas in detail, in the Addresses to the German People? Although the work was twice confiscated by the censorship in 1824, it could not be killed; it is alive more than ever to-day, and is destined to live on in men's souls.

How clearly we can see him, this Fichte, standing in our midst! How clearly we can hear him, if we understand him rightly! If we use our spiritual sense we can feel how he thrilled the hearts of his followers, and beyond that of the whole German people in all its subsequent evolution; and we can feel that what he created, the stream of spiritual energy which he contributed to the ever-moving current of his nation's development, must remain something imperishable! We cannot help ourselves, if we understand him aright, we must feel this spirit of Fichte to be

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner: Sonderdruck aus dem Goethe-Jahrbuch, fünfzehnter Band 1894: Neue Mitteilungen. Sieben Briefe von Fichte an Goethe. Zwei Briefe von Fichte an Schiller. (Reprint from the Goethe Year-Book, Vol. 15: New Communications. Seven Letters from Fichte to Goethe. Two Letters from Fichte to Schiller.)
• 2. See Rudolf Steiner: Reprint from the Goethe Year-Book, Vol. 15, 1894: Further Communications; Seven Letters from Fichte to Goethe; Two Letters from Fichte to Schiller. That Goethe was keenly interested in Fichte's philosophy and by no means adopted a negative attitude towards it, is proved by a passage in a letter to Fichte of 24th June, 1794, in which he says about the first sheets of the Theory of Knowledge: “There is nothing in the pages you have sent me which I do not understand or at least believe that I understand, nothing which cannot be easily assimilated to my accustomed way of thinking.” Further evidence of this can be seen in the fact that Goethe made long extracts from this work, still preserved in the Goethe Archives.
• 3. “Imagine a world of people blind from birth, for whom therefore only those things and their relationships are known which can be apprehended by touch. Go among these, and talk to them of colour and the other relationships which are present only through light to the sense of sight. You will be talking to them of nothing, and it is all the better if they say so; for thus you will soon perceive your error and, unless you have the power of opening their eyes, you will desist from useless explanation.”

Why did Friedrich Nietzsche think himself mad about the big questions of human morality? It would have been much easier to listen to the philosophy professor from America Felix Adler on the "morality common to all good people" and proclaim what he heard to the German people as a doctrine of salvation. This is what an elite of German educated people did and founded a "Society for Ethical Culture", whose purpose is to make this "commonality" the mainstay of the lives of educated people. I note from the outset that the founders of the society include men whom I hold in high esteem. But the foundation itself stems from a backward view of life. Official philosophers, who today still regurgitate the old Kant concept-cripple, Nietzsche calls him-stand firmly on the standpoint of believing that there is such a thing as a morality "common to all good men"; modern thinking, which grasps its time and looks a little into the future, is beyond that. "Act in such a way that the principles of your actions can apply to all people"; that is the core sentence of Kant's moral doctrine. And this little saying rings in our ears in every key from the confessions of those who call themselves freethinkers, liberals, apostles of humanity etc.. But today there is also a circle of people who know that this sentence is the death of all individual life, and that all cultural progress is based on living out individuality. What is special in every human being must emerge from him and become part of the development process. If one disregards this special something that everyone has for himself, then all that remains is a very banal "general" that cannot advance humanity by a single step. A few rules of expediency for mutual intercourse, that is all that can emerge as something "common to all good people". But the ethical life of man in the true sense of the word only begins where these laws based on utility end. And this life can only come from the center of the personality and will never be the result of implanted doctrines. There is no such thing as general human ethics. Modern feeling must reply to the Kantian proposition with the exact opposite: Act as, according to your particular individuality, only you can act; then you will contribute most to the whole, for you will accomplish what another cannot. This is how all the people of whom history tells us have acted. That is why there are as many different moral concepts as there have been and are peoples, ages, indeed basically as many as there are individuals. And if this natural law were to be replaced by that which is considered correct by moral philosophers who think in the Kantian sense: a bland uniformity of all human action would be the necessary consequence. Such "general" moral principles have often been established; but no human being has ever organized his life according to them. And the realization that this is a business for idle minds should be the hallmark of all modern thinking.

But it is lamentable to hear that these dreary moral maxims are to be inculcated into the education of young people. Mr. von Gizycki has spoken the harshest words about the pedagogically reprehensible influence of purely confessional education. Hardly any modern thinker will argue with him about this. But what the denominations do with their moral principles is what the "ethical society" wants to imitate with general human principles. There and here, however, nothing is achieved but the killing of the individual and the subjugation of life through lifeless, rigid laws. The priests of religion are to be replaced by the priests of general human morality. But things are even worse with the latter than with the former. The denominational moral doctrines are the results of certain world views, which after all constitute the legitimate cultural content of mankind; the general human moral doctrine is a sum of commonplaces; they are scraps gathered from all possible moral views, which do not stand out from the background of a great contemporary view. Anyone who considers such things to be viable or even suitable for reforming the ethical content of our culture is giving a poor testimony to their psychological insight.

Among the statutes of the "Society for Ethical Culture" are also some that will have a favorable effect. The initiation of a more lively discussion of religious issues, the striving to improve the living conditions of the poorer sections of the population are all things that deserve recognition. But all this has nothing to do with the basic tendencies of society, which want to push back all conceptions of ethical life to a level that has been overcome by modern consciousness. The spread of these basic ideas could only hinder the development of truly modern views.