The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If you take the concept of Jesus from the Koran, for example, and consult from 19th Surah, you will see that it specifically mentions that the Nathan Jesus Child actually spoke immediately at his birth. This is what the Koran says: “Jesus spoke and said:‘See, I am the servant of God. He has given me the book and He has made me to a prophet and He has blessed me wherever I am, and He has given me His blessings so long as I live, and love to my mother and peace upon the day of my birth and the day when I die and the day when I am resurrected again to life. This is Jesus, the son of Mary, the Word of truth’ ”. This actually appears in the Koran.

In the ancient Jewish teachings as they are contained in the Talmud and other writings apart from the Old Testament, you learn that which is more of a conceptual nature, but on the other hand the Haggadah is the name given to that which modern people would call legends and tales. However, these legends and tales in the Haggadah refer more to actual perception in the spiritual world; they go back to imaginative knowledge.

I am going to share a portion from the Haggadah about Solomon with you. It says: “Rabbi Joachin says: The feet of man guarantee for him that they bring him to that place where he is supposed to go. And they tell about those Moors who are the sons of Shesher named Elacoraf and Akia who are the scribes of Solomon. One day Solomon saw the Angel of Death who was very sad and he asked: Why are you sad? The Angel of Death replied: Because I require these two Moors. As a result of that Solomon gave his Moors to the Seherem (Seherem are those demons who for imaginative vision look like goats and fly through the air) and sent them into the City of Loos. When these two Moors arrived there, they died. A few days afterwards, Solomon again saw the Angel of Death and this time the Angel was laughing. And Solomon said to the Angel: Why do you laugh? The Angel of Death replied: You sent them precisely to the place where I wanted them to go. So at that time Solomon said the following: The feet of the human being guarantee for him that they bring him to the place where he is supposed to be. Thus Solomon had an experience with the Angel of Death, an experience which confirmed the truth of that which Rabbi Joachin said, namely, the feet of man guarantee for him that he is taken to the place where he needs to be.”

Now, my dear friends, you will see that a number of questions are raised in this story from the Haggadah. The feet of the man guarantee that he is brought to the place where he is supposed to go. Why are the feet spoken of so precisely? In such ancient imaginative legends, nothing of an arbitrary nature is there, everything has its definite deep significance. So we have the first question which one can ask. Then we also have another: Why was the Angel of Death sad when he appeared before Solomon with the statement that he is going to take the two scribes away? It seems ridiculously trivial to say that the Angel was sad; he was going to do his job. Then Solomon asks him: “Why are you sad?” What is the significance of this question? The Angel of Death says he is sad because he demands the two scribes. But Solomon gives them to the demons who carry them into the City of Loos.

Now, you see the question about the city of Loos can be more easily answered. The city of Loos was so organized that no one was allowed to die within the city, hence those people who were ready to die were carried outside the city. It was the only city which had this organization. Therefore when Solomon heard that the Angel of Death was going to take his scribes, he sent them to the city because he believed that if they were in the city, the Angel of Death could not get hold of them. This is the story given in the Haggadah. However, these stories are found in many other places in Jewish tradition. There it is related in this way: They had only arrived at the gates of the city because they fell down during their flight. And because they were not able to enter the city, the Angel was able to get hold of them. However, the next day you have the Angel of Death standing before Solomon and laughing. This is very strange; the Angel is laughing because he was able to get hold of these two scribes for death. Solomon recognizes the truth of Rabbi Joachin when he says: “The feet of human beings are a guarantee that he is brought to the place where he is supposed to be.”

Now, it is important to understand that both scribes, both Moors, are the sons of Shesher, who himself was the scribe for David. Thus, this indicates that these two scribes of King Solomon were very special. we must put all these things together if we want to perceive the whole significance of the questions which surface when we speak about this very significant cognitive moment in the life of King Solomon. Now, remember that King Solomon was not wise because he was clever in the sense that modern man is clever, he was called the wise Solomon because he was able to have real vision into the spiritual world; the spiritual world was open to him. Therefore Solomon was to experience that truth which Rabbi Joachin imparted, namely, the truth in connection with the feet of human beings.

When you consider the human being in comparison with the animal, then you see a very important difference. Through the fact that man has a vertical spine, he is at right angles to the surface of the earth. The spine of the animal, however, is parallel to the surface of the earth. Now I hope that no one here is going by object to telling us about the kangaroo. These are exceptions which can be explained if we go into the details of the situation. But let us put that on the side for the moment. We know man has an upright spine and the spine of the animal is horizontal. Now, when we draw a line through the spine of the animal—it is not a straight line, but a curved one—then we have a line curving parallel to the curvature of the earth which means when we draw a circle parallel to the earth then that passes through the spine of the animal. However, when we draw the same curve for the human being, then we find that this curve has a middle point. In the case of the animal we have seen the middle point of the curve was the middle point of the earth. However in the middle point of the curve that we draw through the spinal column of man, there you have the middle point of the moon. Why? Because that particular stage of development which the animal is going through at present, man already went through in the ancient Moon period. Therefore, at the present time man still has a connection with the moon insofar as the curve passing through his spine has its center point in the moon, just as the curve passing through the animal has its center point in the earth. Therefore man is connected with the moon in a similar descriptive way as the animal is connected with the earth.

Now, man has torn himself away from the earth; man is not as united with the earth as is the animal kingdom. As far as his external physical nature is concerned, man has torn himself loose from his earth planet. However, he has only torn himself loose in one aspect of his nature; he has another aspect through which he is attached to the earth, and that is with his feet. Man has to stand upon the earth with his feet. However, passing over from the Moon development to the earth development, he has torn himself away from the earth with his hands. His feet, however, are still connected with the earth. If you understand the human form as it has developed itself in the transition from the Moon evolution to the Earth evolution, so you must say: In so far as man belongs to the earth, the earth has been able to attach itself to him in his feet. What guarantees does man have to come to the earth? This is guaranteed by man's foot situation. Hence we have the explanation in the Hebrew: The feet guarantee him. The word ‘guarantee’ in the Hebrew is the same as the word you use in reference to guaranteeing someone an amount of capital, the word guarantee indicates that as far as his feet are concerned, it is guaranteed that he has a connection with the earth. That does not mean that the feet of the human being carry him to the place of his death, but the whole secret of the human form lies in this sentence as Solomon has recognized it through the fact that he is able to look into the spiritual world.

Now, I have yet to describe that which Solomon revealed when he had words with the Angel of Death. We will see this from the example of how we have a wisdom present in humanity which we previously called the primal wisdom. This primal wisdom passed away in order that man could have an opportunity during the Earth evolution to develop this wisdom again, but to develop it out of himself in complete freedom.

Now, there is another riddle in this story about the Angel of Death. At one time he is sad and at another time he is laughing. We can just think about the true nature of laughing and weeping. You know very well that if you see a person walking along the street who is laughing to himself, you would say that he is crazy. You see that laughing is something which you expect one to participate in with other people. On the other hand, when it comes to crying, you know that usually you cry when you are alone. To explain this phenomenon of weeping and laughing, we have to remember that we generally think that what we are as human beings is only enclosed within our skin and we forget the fact that the air is outside us and when we breathe it in, it becomes part of us and then we breathe it out again. Therefore we are part of our whole environment. And when we go to sleep, we breathe out our ego and astral body, we breathe it in again when we wake up. So we see that there is a flowing life between us and the spiritual world. Actually when we laugh, we spread out our ego and astral body outside us. You stretch out, you expand your astral body and your ego when you laugh. And this expansion of the astral body goes out to the ether body. The invisible man spreads himself out elastically. That is the process when you laugh. The reverse process takes place when you weep. There you have the astral body contracting together with the ether body and pressing itself an the physical body which then presses out tears.

Now we go back to Solomon. When Solomon looked at the Angel of Death, he did not see a physical body, but he saw a spiritual being. What he really saw when the Angel laughed was the Angel spreading himself out. The first time he saw the Angel, he was weeping, that means the Angel was drawing himself together. Here we see how spiritual beings fulfil their activities. Laughing and weeping is an accompaniment of life with us human beings through which we only express our inner being; we show how our inner being is constituted. In the case of spiritual beings, they show their actions. As far as we are concerned, when we laugh and cry, it has very little significance for other people. We do not produce activities through our laughing and crying. These are accompaniments of our life. However, in the moment when we approach certain spiritual beings who with their actual self are occupied more in working than we are, there you have the significance of the expanding out and the contracting in. The Angel of Death, because he was in the position of having to fetch these two Moors to death, had to hold his forces together, he had to condense himself in order to give support for his forces because he was about to perform some activity which expressed itself in the fact that he was sad. That is only an indication of how he is drawing himself together. The next day when he had accomplished his task, then the elasticity expressed itself again, he spread himself out and you had the appearance of laughter.

Now we come to the next question: Why were they led to the City of Loos and what is the meaning of this whole process with Solomon? In the first place we must contemplate the fact that Solomon was a person who stands in connection with the spiritual world. I told you that it is very significant that both scribes were the sons of Shesher who had been the scribe of King David. Thus they are very valuable personalities and scribes at that ancient time signified something different from what it means today. Scribes in Egypt, for example, were people who were able with all sorts of inner fervor to paint letters in the sense of the ancient Egyptian script, and when someone painted a false letter, he stood under the penalty of death, because he was dealing with something of a holy nature. There was something of a holy nature in the letters; this applied to the scribes of King Solomon who also stood in connection with the spiritual world. They stood in communion with Solomon who imparted his knowledge of the spiritual world to them. And the City of Loos points out the fact to us that there was something in these scribes which enabled them to have a feeling of their immortality even during their life, they had this connection with the spiritual world. We ought to bring our attention to the fact that they knew of their soul-spiritual kernel which passes through the portal of death. They knew this not only theoretically, but they belonged to those who, as it were, were initiated in a certain degree into these mysteries.

Hence the Angel of Death had some difficulty here, because it was necessary to put himself in a certain connection with King Solomon, which means that both scribes, as well as King Solomon, lived in the consciousness of their immortality. Therefore it was necessary for the Angel of Death to enter into the whole process which he had to execute because a consciousness was present of the death which was involved here. This did not mean that King Solomon wanted to protect his scribes from death and therefore sent then to the City of Loos, but it was supposed to indicate that here we are dealing with death which was completely conscious, that the knowledge of death was part of their knowledge. Here the main emphasis was that Solomon was conscious of the death of his scribes and when it is said that he sent then to the city of Loos, that should only indicate to us how the Ahrimanic force represented by the Angel of Death is represented by its agent as the demonic goat which enters into the situation. Thus the whole process which occurs consciously is supposed to be explained to us through the story in the following way: A death once occurred in such a way that a wise man was conscious of it. That is what Rabbi Joachin wanted to indicate. The whole process is connected with the spiritual world. This arising of knowledge of the super-sensible world in King Solomon is indicated by this story. Rabbi Joachin said: “Man is bound to the earth through the form of the feet and its relationship to the earth, and it is expressed that man is connected to the earth in a one-sided way, that only his feet are guarantee for the fact that man belongs to the earth. The upright posture of man is a guarantee for the fact that he is given over to the spiritual world with his essential kernel. And because Solomon was able to believe him, he was able to be made consciously aware of the death of his scribes who were dear to him.

Therefore we see that the idea of these ancient traditions can only be understood with the aid of spiritual science. You learn from that that Solomon's wisdom is connected with the fact that he was able to look into the spiritual world and discover the mystery of death. In the line of the generations which descends from King Solomon, you have the physical preparation, as it were, for this clairvoyance in so far as it is able to enter the portal of death. Therefore we see the body of Jesus descending from the Solomon line of the House of David, but the soul is that of Zarathustra. We have to be clear about the soul being that of Zarathustra and why it had to enter into a body which descended from someone who was permeated with clairvoyance.

Now, I have often spoken about that which came with the soul of Zarathustra. Today I only want to emphasize the fact that that which came later was mostly removed from the teaching of Zarathustra and then passed over into the teaching of Mani, and further on into the teaching of Manichaeisn. We know the deepest questions of the riddle of man belongs to the question of the relationship of good and evil, and we know that we can understand it when we have insight into the working of Lucifer and Ahriman. But this working of Lucifer and Ahriman leads us back to Zarathustra. Lucifer and Ahriman are already present as a fact of the spiritual world in the teaching of Zarathustra. And let us try to bring the Zarathustrian teaching of the good and evil into connection with the teaching of predestination which is connected with the Islamic religion.

Let us consider the import of this teaching of predestination. On the one side it says: Everything which occurs has been predetermined, so that even taking a step in front of my door was predetermined. Even when I die that was predestined. Everything is strongly predestined, which means that for the consciousness of the Islamic person, everything that occurs was already previously written in the Book of God. However, every time this Islamic person is confronted with something, he says: “If it is the will of God.” He is completely convinced of the fact that everything is written in the Book of God; however, he says: “I will only do this thing if it is the will of God”. A Westerner would say to this Islamic person: “If you say that everything is predestined, then it does not make any sense to say I will do it if God wills it. Why do you say: ‘I will do it if God wills it?’ There is no doubt about it since everything is already determined from the beginning.” Here we have an insoluble contradiction; it really is an insoluble contradiction. Look at Western philosophy, at Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and so on, and you will find the after-working of this insoluble contradiction, but it appears in a particularly crass way in the teaching of Kismet, of everything being predestined. Here we have a teaching which, in this connection, is different from the teaching of Zarathustra, that the people who know Zarathustra know about Lucifer and Ahriman. At first we have the teaching of primal wisdom which did not contain any contradictions and this transforms itself into teaching which does carry a contradiction. A person who does not recognize that life is filled with contradictions will really never understand life. Life, when it is only approached with the human understanding is bound to give many contradictions.

First we have the age of Zarathustra and then this is followed by a time when man is confronted by contradictions. But through these contradictions he should be stimulated to develop his real inner life. Now, you have something happening in the earth evolution where something which did not belong to the earth evolution comes in in order that man can resolve these contradictions. Here we have the Nathan Jesus coming into earth evolution and with this Nathan Jesus you have something which helps to solve all the earth contradictions, because the Nathan Jesus comes from the spiritual world and is not attached to the earth. In the Nathan Jesus we have a healing of the contradictions which occurs in human beings during the earth sojourn. So we find where you have this contradiction of the predestination and the idea ‘If God wills it’ in the Koran, and you have in this very same Koran the allusion to the Nathan Jesus which I quoted earlier, who spoke immediately at birth. You see, all these things are very complicated.

It requires courage, courage in order to think things toward the end. And this is the sort of courage that we get from spiritual science. Too often today people are apathetic, but in spiritual science we want to replace apathy with calmness. With apathy you do not care; with calmness you are able to absorb these things in a mood of equanimity.

Tomorrow I would like to briefly return to the spiritual side of the early days of Christianity and its lasting impact. This will lead to some deeper insights into the public lectures of the last few days. Today I would like to give a kind of philosophical introduction to this, to familiarize you with some history, because it is good if we, within the spiritual science movement, also know something of how people strive in the rest of the world to get to the bottom of the world's mysteries, how they think and feel about these mysteries in the world.

If you look at the history of philosophy from the beginning to the present day, you will basically only find certain philosophical currents discussed, philosophical currents that are close to most contemporary philosophers. However, one would be quite wrong to see everything that exists in the present in terms of such more philosophical research paths in what is usually found. For example, most of you are unaware that during the 19th century, particularly in the second half of the 19th century and especially towards the end of the 19th century, there was a lively philosophical life within the Catholic Church that continues to this day. that within the Catholic Church, a very peculiar philosophical direction, differing from the other philosophy of the world, was cultivated by the learned priesthood and is cultivated by many, so that in this field one has a rich literature, at least as rich a literature as on other directions of philosophical activity. And this literature is called the literature of Neuscholastik.

A curious circumstance has led to the fact that the school, which flourished in the middle of the Middle Ages, which basically began with Scotus Erigena and then continued through Thomas Aquinas to the times of Duns Scotus, reappeared in the 19th century, and indeed out of a very specific need for knowledge, albeit one colored by religious belief. Particularly from the second third of the 19th century onwards, we see this direction of neo-scholasticism emerging in Catholic circles. In all Central and Western European languages, books upon books are being written in an attempt to understand anew what was lived in scholasticism. And if one tries to explore the inner reason why scholasticism is reviving, one must actually open up a broad view. And this is what we want to point out today.

In the lectures I have given in the last few days, I have repeatedly emphasized that one way to spiritual-scientific knowledge is through a very special treatment of thinking, of concepts, of logic; that through the influence of the exercises that lead to this development of thinking, the human being no longer thinks in his physical body, but in his ether body. Thus he not only thinks dead conceptual logic, but he lives in the activity of thinking, that is, he lives and moves in his ether body, as we can express it technically. It is a living into the etheric body when logic itself comes to life, when — as I have put it in popular terms — the statue, through which one can visualize the logic at work in ordinary life, comes to life, when the human being becomes alive in his ether body, that is, the concepts are no longer dead concepts, but those living concepts begin, of which I have said for years that the concept gains life, as if one were with one's soul in a living being. For many centuries, humanity has basically known nothing of this liveliness as the truth of concepts and ideas in external philosophy. I have tried to point out this fact in the first chapter of my “Riddles of Philosophy” that was added to the new edition.

Even in the last philosophical periods of Greek civilization, humanity actually no longer knew anything philosophically about the possible liveliness of concepts and ideas. Let us keep that in mind. Initially, the Greeks — you can read about this in my “Riddles of Philosophy” — had concepts and ideas in the same way that people today have sensory perceptions, a color, a sound or a smell. The great Plato, up to Aristotle, and even more so the older philosophers, did not believe that they had formed the concept, the thought, internally, but that they received it from things, just as one receives red or blue, that is, the sensory perceptions.

Then came the time - and I have described how this continues in cycles - when one no longer felt inwardly that the things had given one the concept, but one only felt that the concept arose in the soul. And now one did not know what to do with the concept, with the inner idea, which the Greek had still believed he received from things. Hence arose those scholastic problems, those scholastic puzzles: What does the concept mean at all in relation to things? — The Greek could not ask it that way, because he had the consciousness that things give him the concepts, so the concepts belong to things as colors belong to things. — That ceased when the Middle Ages came. Then one had to ask: What kind of relationship does something that arises in our mind have to things? And besides: the things out there are many and varied and individual, but the concepts are general, a unity. We go through the world and encounter many horses; we form the unified concept of horse out of these many horses. Every horse coincides with the concept of horse.

Today, many people, who are even less familiar with the concept than the medieval philosophers, who saw it as a sharp problem, say: Well, the concept is just not in the things themselves.

I have repeatedly mentioned a comparison that my friend, the late Vincenz Knauer, a great connoisseur of medieval philosophy, often used for those people who say: Out there is only the material of the animal, the soul makes the concept. Old Knauer would always say: People claim: The lamb is outside, but what is really there is only matter. The wolf is outside, but what is really there is only matter. The soul creates the concept of the lamb, and the soul creates the concept of the wolf. And old Knauer said: If only matter were really present, and you locked up a wolf that ate nothing but lambs, then when it had discarded its old matter it would finally be only lamb, because it would have only lamb matter in itself. But one would notice with amazement that it would still have remained the wolf, that something else must therefore be present in addition to matter.

For medieval scholasticism, this presented a significant problem, a significant enigma. The scholastics said to themselves: the concepts are the universals because they encompass many individual things. And they could not say, as today's man likes to say, that these universals are only something that has arisen in the mind of man, that has nothing to do with things. These medieval philosophers distinguished three types of universals. First, they said, universals are ante rem, before the thing, before what you see out there, so the universal “horse” is thought of before all possible sensual horses, as a thought in the deity. So said medieval scholasticism.

Then there are universals in re, in things, and specifically as essence in things, precisely what matters. The universal “wolf” is what matters, and the universal “lamb” is what matters. They are what ensures that the wolf does not become a lamb, even if it eats nothing but lambs.

And then there is a third form in which the universals exist, that is: post rem, after the things as they are in our minds, when we have considered the world and subtracted them from the things. The medieval scholastics attached great importance to this distinction, and it was this distinction that protected them from that skepticism, from that dissection, which cannot get to the essence of things, for the reason that they consider the concepts and ideas that man in his soul gains from things to be only a product of the soul and do not imagine anything about them that could have any significance for things themselves.

The particular form of this skepticism can be found in one form with Hume and in another form with Cart. There, concepts and ideas are only that which the human mind forms as ideas. Through concepts and ideas, man can no longer approach things.

For theologians who want to be philosophers at the same time, who thus want to penetrate theology philosophically, a very special difficulty has arisen and will always arise. For the theologian is dependent not only on seeing the things in the world, but also on thinking them in a certain relationship to the divine essence, and he gets into difficulties when he and which form the content of the only ideal knowledge – if one does not ascend to spiritual science – cannot himself bring these into any relationship with the Godhead, that is, think as universals ante rem, as universal concepts before the things.

Now there is something very significant connected with what I have said. There will always be people who cannot see anything in the concept that has to do with things, who only see the material in things outside, and on the other hand, there are those who can see something real in the concepts that has to do with the things themselves, that is, what is in the things and what the human mind draws out of the things, what the human mind makes out of universals in re into universals post rem.

Those who recognize that the concepts have a reality outside the human mind were called realists in the Middle Ages and later, especially in Catholic philosophy. And the view that the concepts and ideas have a real significance in the world is called realism. The other view, which assumes that concepts and ideas are fabricated only in the human mind, as it were, as words, is called nominalism, and its representatives are called nominalists.

You will easily see that the nominalists can actually see the real only in the manifold, in the multitude. Only the realists can see something real in the comprehensive, in the universal. And here we come to the point where a particular difficulty arose for the philosophizing theologians. These Catholic theologians had to defend the dogma of the Trinity, of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the three persons in the Godhead. After the development of ecclesiastical theology, they could not help saying: the three persons are individual, complete entities, but at the same time they are supposed to be one unity! If they had been nominalists, the divinity would always have fallen apart into three persons for them. Only the realists could still think of the three persons under one universal. But for that, the universal concept had to have a reality; for that, one had to be a realist. Therefore, the realists got along better with the Trinity than the nominalists, who had great difficulties and who, in the end, when scholasticism was already coming to an end and had degenerated into skepticism, could only hide behind the fact that they said: You cannot understand how the three persons are to be one divinity; but that is precisely why you have to believe it, you have to give up understanding; something like that can only be revealed. The human mind can only lead to nominalism, it cannot lead to any kind of realism. And basically it is the Hume-Kantian doctrine that has become pure nominalism by way of phenomenalism.

The central dogma of the Trinity, of the three divine persons, thus depended on realism or nominalism, on one or the other conception of the essence of universals. You will therefore understand that when Kant's philosophy increasingly became the philosophy of Protestant circles in Europe, a reaction took hold in Catholic circles. And this reaction consisted in saying to oneself on this ground that one must now again take a close look at the old scholasticism, one must fathom what scholasticism actually meant. In short, because they could not arrive at a new way of understanding the spiritual world, they tried to reconstruct scholasticism. And a rich literature arose that set itself the sole task of making scholasticism accessible to people again.

Of course, this literature was only read by Catholic theologians, but on a large scale. And for those who are interested in everything that is going on in the intellectual culture of humanity, it is by no means useless to take a brief look at the extensive literature that has come to light. It is useful to take a look at this neoscholastic literature if only because it allows us to see how black and white can coexist in the world – please note that the word has no negative connotation here! The whole way of thinking, the whole way of looking at the world, is different in the progressive current of philosophy, which follows Kant, Fichte, Hegel, or earlier Cartesius, Malebranche, Hume, up to Mill and Spencer. It is a completely different kind of intellectual research, a completely different way of thinking about the world, than that which emerged, for example, in Gratry and the numerous neoscholastics who wrote everywhere, in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, England, and Germany; for there is a wealth of neoscholastic literature in all countries. And all the orders of the Catholic priesthood have taken part in the discussions. The study of scholasticism became particularly lively from 1879 onwards, when Pope Leo XIII's encyclical “Aeterni patris” was published. In this encyclical, Catholic theologians were made to study Thomas Aquinas as a matter of duty. Since that time, a rich literature has emerged in the tradition of Thomism, and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas has been thoroughly studied and interpreted. However, the whole movement had already begun earlier, so that today libraries can be filled with the many brilliant works that have emerged from this renewal of Thomism.

You can educate yourself, for example, from a book like “The Origin of Human Reason” or from many French books or, if you prefer, from numerous works by Italian Jesuits and Dominicans, with which this philosophy has been driven again. Much ingenuity has been applied to the study of scholasticism in all countries – an ingenuity that people, even those who study philosophy today, usually have no idea of, because they do not have the necessary interest to pay attention to all sides of human endeavor. The need to take a stand against Kantianism arose from this side, which, by becoming pure nominalism, especially in the second half of the 19th century, removed the ground from under Catholic theology.

I am now speaking purely historically, not to evaluate anything, not even to refute anything, or to agree with anything, but purely historically. And then one can see that basically, to this day, people are still endeavoring to understand what the concept and the thinking are actually about. In the modern age, people can no longer achieve anything with the concept in its old sense. It must be revitalized if we are to make progress. Long-term attempts must be made to understand, theoretically, with the mere concept of the image, what significance thinking has for divinity.

Others have endeavored in other ways. For example, a very significant current has emerged that is even very close to Catholicism and has been pursued by priests within Catholicism, but it has not found the favor of Catholic authority to the extent that scholasticism did. In the encyclical “Aeterni patris”, Catholic theologians were even dutifully encouraged to renew the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, to resurrect it. Another direction has not received as much favor from the Catholic authorities: that is the direction of Rosmini-Serbati and Gioberti. Rosmini, who was born in Rovereto near Trento and died in nearby Stresa in 1855, expressed his aspirations particularly in works that were not actually published until after his death. And it is interesting to see how Rosmini wanted to work his way up by examining the real value of the concept. Rosmini came to understand that man has the concept present in his inner experience. A person who is only a nominalist stops at the fact that he experiences the concept internally and passes over the question of where the concept is present in reality. Rosmini, however, was ingenious enough to know that even if something reveals itself within the soul, this does not mean that it has reality only within the soul. And so he knew, in particular, by starting from the concept of being, that the soul, by experiencing the concepts, at the same time experiences the inner essence of things as they live in the concepts. And so Rosmini's philosophy consisted in seeking inner experiences, which for him were experiences of concepts, but in doing so he did not arrive at the liveliness of the concepts, only at the diversity of the concepts. And now he sought to specify how the concept lives simultaneously in the soul and in things. This is very clearly expressed in the work by Rosmini that was left behind and is entitled “Teosofia”. Within Catholicism, others also held a similar point of view, but Rosmini is one of the most ingenious.

Now, however, Catholic theology finds such a direction as Rosminian somewhat inconvenient and uncomfortable, because it is very difficult for this side to reconcile the concept of revelation with this theory of concepts. For the concept of revelation amounts to the fact that the highest truths must be revealed. They cannot be experienced inwardly in the soul, but must be revealed outwardly in the course of human history. Man can only approach reality with his concepts to a certain degree, and the sphere of revelations rises above this sphere of concepts. From this point of view, the scholastics had to stand. This is also compatible with what Catholicism still regards as its core today, better than the Rosminian experienced concepts. Because when you have experienced concepts, it is actually God who lives in you. And basically, Catholic theology is horrified when people claim that God lives in man. That is why Leo XIII declared Rosmini's philosophy heretical in the 1880s by a decree of his own and forbade Catholic theologians to study and teach Rosmini's philosophy unless they had permission from their superiors. For in this way, strict measures are taken within the operations of Catholic theologians. I do not know whether this is always the case without exception. In the publications of Catholic theologians of all camps, one will in any case always find the seal of the superior episcopal authority. This then means that Catholic theologians are allowed to study such a work. There are certain exceptions for those who are university teachers, but things are handled very strictly, at least in theory.

In this way, one also sees the attempt to work one's way into an understanding of the relationship between thinking and the world.

I would like to make an interjection here that is of a completely different nature. Such interjections are sometimes necessary. Many of our friends believe that they are doing our movement a great favor when they explain to Catholic theologians, for example, that we are not at all anti-Christian and that we are in fact seeking an honest concept of Christ. And in their good faith, our friends go so far as to tell this or that Catholic theologian about the way we characterize Christianity. For our friends then believe, in their – forgive me – naivety, that they can make these theologians see that we are good Christians. But they can never admit that as Catholic theologians! My dear friends, we will be much more agreeable to them if we do not seek the Christ, if we do not care about the Christ! For it is not a matter for them – this must always be borne in mind – that someone is seeking this or that concept of Christ, but for them it is a matter of the supremacy of the Church. And precisely if one had an equally good or better concept of Christ outside the Church, then one would be fought against most of all. Thus, those of our friends who are most gullible do us the greatest harm, who go to Catholic theologians and try to convince them that we are not anti-Christian. For they will say: It is even worse if a concept of Christ could take root outside the church. One must judge the things of life according to one's circumstances and not according to one's naive opinion. We will be fought against particularly sharply if the theologians should make the discovery that we understand something of the inner existence of Christianity that could make a convincing impression on a larger circle of humanity.

But it can be seen that it had become necessary to work one's way into an understanding of the concept and its relationship to reality. And here it must be said: what is contained in the writings of Rosminis is among the most brilliant things that have been accomplished in this direction in modern times. He has worked through this for all areas, and it could be of very special value if one studied Rosmini's concepts of beauty, his aesthetic concepts. Rosmini's theory of beauty, his aesthetics, is something particularly valuable that one should engage with in order to see how a modern mind works its way up to standing at the gateway to spiritual science and just not being able to enter into spiritual science. This can be studied to such an outstanding degree in Rosmini.

Thus we find that there are really spiritual currents that want to work towards an understanding of the concept, but do not come to realize that we are now living in a time when the concept must become alive if one wants to enter into reality.

So the concept has gone through a certain history. I have dealt with this history in part in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” in that first chapter of which I spoke. But here I would like to point out something further. We can say, then, that the concept continues to develop. There was a time when the concept was a perceived concept, as color or sound was perceived. This was the case with the Greeks. Plato is just the last one to speak so realistically about the concepts that one can see how something of the understanding for such a grasp of the concepts resonates in him. With Aristotle it is already different. Then comes the Middle Ages, where one has the concept purely rationally, and where one seeks how it relates to things as a universal, and where one reaches for bridges and comes to the structure: ante rem, in re, post rem – before, in, after things.

Then comes the time when the concept is fully understood in a nominalistic way. This extends into our time. But the reaction is asserting itself, the side currents that seek the concept as an inner experience, as with Rosmini. From here (see diagram: Rosmini) one would come to the life or experience of the concept. So the concept would be chained, so to speak, to the physical body in this time (see diagram: before Plato to the Middle Ages), and now pass over to the etheric body. The concept would lead to the clairvoyant experience of the concept. But then one would have to say that the entire earlier perceived concept and the nominalistic and rational concept have developed out of an atavistic clairvoyance of the concept, and that now the way in which the concept is to be experienced is a conscious one, whereas in earlier times it was more subconscious. And indeed, if you go from Plato, from the Greek philosophers, who had the concept as a perceived one, to the echoes of Zarathustrianism, you have this atavistically grasped – or perhaps one does not need to say “atavistic” because this expression is only valid today – so dream-like, clairvoyantly experienced concept.

Thus the Near Eastern philosophies presented the concept as something that they experienced pictorially. Persian philosophy sees in the “horse in general” a being in general that is specified and differentiated from the individual horse, still something living. The Persians called this “Feruer”. This is abstracted and becomes the Platonic idea. The Persians' Feruer becomes the Platonic idea.

Abstraction is gaining more and more ground because thinking is only experienced in the physical body. We must return to the consciously experienced concept. In this field you see a wonderful cycle taking place from the old clairvoyance of the concept through what the concept had to become in the age of physical experience: the merely rational concept, the merely conceptualized concept, the merely logical concept.

I have often emphasized that logic only came into being through Aristotle, when one had the concept only as a concept. Before that, for the experienced concept, one did not need logic. And now logic comes to life, the statue of logic comes to life.

This example of the concept shows once again what can be seen in general and on a large scale. We also have to work our way into the whole course of human development in the individual, because then we understand more and more clearly the meaning underlying the spiritual current to which we belong. And we really do become more and more objective through these things, but that is also necessary. Where would we end up if objectivity were not understood at all and our dear friends were to drag everything more and more into the personal sphere! Our task must be to work objectively, and the purely personal must recede more and more.

German philosophy before Schopenhauer

[ 1 ] The years 1781 and 1807 mark an era of fierce battles within the development of German science. In 1781, Kant woke his contemporaries from their philosophical slumber with his "Critique of Pure Reason" and presented them with riddles which the cognitive power of the nation's best minds endeavored to solve over the next quarter of a century. A philosophical excitement of the highest order can be observed among those involved in these intellectual battles. In rapid succession, one school of thought replaced another. The shallow intellectual clarity that had prevailed in the books of philosophical literature before Kant was replaced by scientific warmth, which gradually grew into the captivating eloquence of Fichte and the poetic verve with which Schelling was able to express scientific ideas. An examination of this intellectual movement reveals an incomparable intellectual wealth, but also a restless, hasty rush forward. Some ideas entered the public domain prematurely. The thinkers did not have the patience to allow their ideas to mature. This restless development ended with the publication of Georg Wilh. Friedr. Hegel's first major work, the "Phenomenology of Spirit", in 1807. Hegel did the last work on this book in Jena in the days when the terrible turmoil of war in 1806 broke over the city. The events of the following years were not conducive to philosophical battles. Hegel's book did not immediately make such a strong impression, challenging the minds to cooperate, as Fichte and Schelling did when they first appeared. But even their influence gradually waned. For both of them, the period of their activity at the University of Jenens was the most brilliant of their lives. Fichte taught at this university from 1794 to 1799, Schelling from 1798 to 1803. The former moved from Jena to Berlin because the accusation of atheism brought against him by envious and unreasonable people had brought him into conflict with the Weimar government. In the winter of 1804/s he gave his lectures on the "Fundamentals of the Present Age" in Berlin, in which he effectively advocated idealistic thinking, and in the winter of 1807/8 his famous "Speeches to the German Nation", which exerted a powerful influence on the strengthening of national sentiment. As a champion of national and liberal ideas, in the service of which he placed his thinking and his eloquence, he achieved a more powerful effect during this period than through the philosophical lectures he gave at the University of Berlin from its establishment in 1810 until his death in 1814. Schelling, who did not make the transition from philosophical to political activity, was soon completely forgotten after his time in Jenens. He moved to Würzburg in 1803 and then to Munich in 1806, where he worked on expanding his ideas, which few people were still interested in. At the end of the first decade of our century, there was no longer any sign of the lively philosophical debate that Kant's revolutionary act had provoked: Fichte and Schelling's time was over, Hegel's era had not yet dawned. Hegel led a quiet existence from 1806 to 1808 as editor of a Bamberg newspaper and then until 1816 as principal of the Nuremberg grammar school. His enormous influence on German intellectual life only began with his appointment to Berlin in 1818.

[ 2 ] This characterizes the circumstances that Arthur Schopenhauer found himself in when, after an eventful youth, he began his philosophical apprenticeship in 1810. He heard echoes of Fichte's, Schelling's and above all Kant's views from the pulpits and from the works of contemporary philosophers. The way in which Schopenhauer turned the views of his great predecessors, especially Kant and Fichte, into elements of his own system of ideas can be understood by examining the period of his life that preceded his preoccupation with philosophy.

Schopenhauer's youthful life

[ 3 ] Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig on February 22, 1788. His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, lived in this city as a wealthy merchant. He was a man of thorough professional training, great worldly experience, rare strength of character and a sense of independence that nothing could overcome. His mother Johanna Henriette, née Trosiener, was a fun-loving, artistic woman who was extremely open to intellectual pleasures and had a strong penchant for socializing, which she could easily satisfy with her intelligence and intellectual alertness. Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer was 41 and Johanna 22 years old when Arthur, their first child, was born from their marriage in 1785. He was followed in 1797 by the second and last, Adele. The philosopher's parents had not been driven to marry by rapturous passion. But the relationship, based on mutual respect, must have been a very happy one. Johanna speaks about it with the words: "I could be proud to belong to this man, and I was. I feigned ardent love for him just as little as he laid claim to it."

[ 4 ] In 1793, the previously free city of Danzig was incorporated into the Prussian state. Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer did not like the idea of becoming a Prussian subject. He therefore emigrated to Hamburg with his wife and child. In the years that followed, the small family traveled frequently. The reason for this was Johanna's longing for a change in living conditions, for ever new impressions, and her husband's intention to give his son the widest possible knowledge of the world based on his own experience. Arthur's father had decided that he should become a capable merchant and a man of the world. All educational measures were undertaken with this in mind. The boy received his first lessons at a private institute in Hamburg. At the age of ten, he embarked on a long journey with his father to France, where he spent the next two years of his life. After Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer had shown his son Paris, he took him to Havre to leave him with a business friend, Grégoire de Blésimaire. The latter had the young Schopenhauer educated together with his own son. The result of this education was that Arthur returned, to his father's great delight, as a perfect young Frenchman who had acquired a great deal of appropriate knowledge and had forgotten his mother tongue to such an extent that he could only make himself understood with difficulty in it. But the twelve-year-old boy also brought back the most pleasant memories from France. In his 31st year, he said of this stay: "I spent by far the happiest part of my childhood in that friendly town on the Seine estuary and the sea coast." After returning to his parents' home, Arthur Schopenhauer attended a private educational establishment run by Dr. Runge and attended by the sons of wealthy Hamburgers. At this school, pupils were taught what was needed to turn them into capable and socially educated businessmen. Latin was taught for one hour a week, just for the sake of appearances. Arthur Schopenhauer enjoyed these lessons for almost four years. What he was taught here in the sciences was presented to him in a form appropriate to the practical goals of the future merchant. But it was enough to awaken in him a powerful inclination towards a scholarly career. His father did not like this at all. In his opinion, he found himself in the embarrassing position of having to choose between two things: the present wishes of his beloved son and his future happiness. Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer thought that the academic profession could only bring a man poverty and worry, not happiness and contentment. Forcing his son into a profession was contrary to the nature of his father, who considered freedom to be one of man's greatest possessions. However, he considered a ruse to be appropriate and expedient to dissuade the young man from his inclination. Arthur had to decide quickly: either to go on a long pleasure trip through a large part of Europe, which his parents wanted to undertake, and on his return to devote himself definitively to the mercantile profession, or to stay behind in Hamburg to begin his Latin studies immediately and prepare himself for the learned profession. The wonderful expectations that the thought of the journey aroused in the young Schopenhauer caused him to repress his love of science and choose the profession that appealed to his father. This was a decision that his father foresaw, as he was well aware of his son's desire to see the world. Arthur Schopenhauer left Hamburg with his parents in the spring of 1803. The next destination was Holland, then the journey continued to England. After a stay of six weeks in London, Arthur was left behind in Wimbledon for three months to learn the English language thoroughly with Mr. Lancaster. During this time, his parents traveled to England and Scotland. The stay in England engendered in Schopenhauer the hatred of English bigotry that remained with the philosopher throughout his life, but it also laid the foundation for the thorough mastery of the English language that later made him appear as such in conversation with Englishmen. Life in Lancaster's boarding house did not suit Schopenhauer very well. In letters to his parents, he complained of boredom and the stiff, ceremonial nature of the English. He was overcome by a general mood which, it seems, could only be dispelled by a preoccupation with fine literature, especially the works of Schiller. We can see from his mother's letters that she was worried that her son's fondness for poetic reading might blunt him to the seriousness of life. "Believe me," she wrote to him on July 19, 1803, "Schiller himself would never be what he is if he had only read poets in his youth." From England, the Schopenhauer family traveled to France via Holland and Belgium. They visited Havre again and spent some time in Paris. In January 1804, the journey continued to the south of France. Schopenhauer got to know Bordeaux, Montpellier, Nimes, Marseille, Toulon, the Hyeric Islands and Lyon. From Lyon, the travelers turned to Switzerland, then to Swabia, Bavaria, Vienna, Dresden and Berlin. The impressions that Schopenhauer received during the course of the journey were profound. In Paris, he saw Napoleon shortly before he forced his way to the imperial crown (May 18, 1804). In Lyon, his mind was stirred by the sight of several places that recalled the atrocities of the Revolution. And everywhere it was especially the scenes of human misery that he viewed with deep sympathy for the unfortunate and oppressed. For example, he was seized with an unnameable sense of pain when he saw the terrible fate of six thousand galley slaves in the Bagno of Toulon. He thought he was looking into an abyss of human misfortune. But he was also filled with joy when he saw the magnificent works of nature during his journey, a feeling that increased in Switzerland at the sight of Mont Blanc or the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen to the point of rapture at the sublimity of nature's workings. Later, in Book 3 of Volume II of his main work, he compared genius to the mighty Alpine mountain, because the frequently noted gloomy mood of highly gifted spirits reminded him of the summit, which is usually shrouded in a veil of clouds, and the peculiar cheerfulness that occasionally emerges from the general gloomy mood of genius reminds him of the magical glow of light that becomes visible when the veil of clouds breaks early in the morning and the summit becomes clear. The Krkonoše Mountains in Bohemia, which were visited on the way from Vienna to Dresden, also made a significant impression on Schopenhauer. Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer started his journey home from Berlin, while Arthur traveled with his mother to his native city of Danzig, where he was confirmed. In the early days of 1805, the now seventeen-year-old young man arrived back in Hamburg. He now had to keep his father's word and dedicate himself to the commercial profession without refusal. He was apprenticed to Senator Jenisch in Hamburg. Once awakened, his love of the sciences could not be stifled. The merchant's apprentice felt unhappy. After the long journey, on which new images had been presented to the onlooker's eye every day, he could not bear the monotony of his professional work; after the relaxed lifestyle of the past years, the necessary regularity in his 'activities seemed like servitude to him. Without any inner involvement in the duties of his profession, he only did the bare minimum. On the other hand, he used every free moment to read or to indulge in his own thoughts and reveries. He even resorted to cunning pretenses towards his teacher when he wanted to have a few free hours to attend the lectures on craniology given by Doctor Gall, who was in Hamburg at the time.

[ 5 ] This was Arthur Schopenhauer's situation in April 1805, when his father's life ended suddenly when he fell from a loft. Whether the man, who was suffering from memory loss in his final weeks, sought 'death' himself or found it by chance is still unclear today. The son's gloomy mood was heightened by this event to such an extent that it was little short of true melancholy. The mother moved to Weimar with her daughter in 1806, after the business had been liquidated. She thirsted for the intellectual stimuli of this city of art. Arthur's striving for liberation from torturous circumstances now met with no external resistance. He was his own master. His mother exercised no coercion. Nevertheless, there were reasons that prevented him from throwing off the hated shackles immediately after his father's death. He loved his father dearly. It was contrary to his feelings to take a step that the deceased would never have approved of. Also, the overwhelming pain of the sudden loss had so paralyzed his energy that he could not make a quick decision. To all this was added the fact that he believed himself too old to be able to undertake the preliminary studies necessary for the scholarly profession. His ever-increasing aversion to the commercial profession and the belief that he was wasting his life's energies in vain filled his letters to his mother in Weimar with miserable complaints, so that she considered it her duty to ask her friend, the famous art writer Fernow, for advice on what to do in the interests of her son's future happiness. Fernow wrote to her friend with his opinion. He considered the age of eighteen to be no obstacle to devoting oneself to the sciences; indeed, he claimed that it was at this happy age that "memory and judgment unite in the maturing power of the mind, so that what is undertaken with firm resolution can be carried out more easily and quickly, and knowledge can be acquired sooner than in an earlier or later period of life". Schopenhauer, to whom his mother sent Fernow's letter, was so shocked by its contents that he burst into tears after reading it. Fernow's lines brought about what was otherwise not in his nature: to make a decision quickly. The time from the spring of 1807 to the fall of 1809 was enough for Schopenhauer to acquire the knowledge he needed to attend university. He lived in Gotha until the beginning of 1808, where Döring taught him Latin and Jacobs German. He spent the rest of his time in Weimar, where Fernow introduced him to Italian literature. In addition to the old languages, in which the philologist Passow and the grammar school director Lenz were his teachers, he studied mathematics and history. On October 9, he entered the University of Göttingen to study medicine. A year later, he swapped medicine for philosophy.

The student years. Relationship with Kant and Fichte

[ 6 ] As a personality whose character traits were already sharply defined, who had already formed firm opinions on many things on the basis of substantial experiences and a rich knowledge of the world, Schopenhauer entered the study of philosophy. At the beginning of his time at university, he once said to Wieland: "Life is a miserable thing; I have resolved to do mine by thinking about it." Life made him a philosopher. It also determined the philosophical tasks he devoted himself to solving. In this he differs from his predecessors: Kant, Fichte and Schelling, as well as from his antipode Hegel. These were philosophers for whom their tasks arose from the consideration of other people's views. Kant's thinking was given a decisive impetus by delving into Hume's writings, Fichte's and Schelling's work was given direction by Kant's critiques, Hegel's thoughts also developed from those of his predecessors. The ideas of these thinkers are therefore links in a continuous series of developments. Even if each of the philosophers mentioned sought in the foreign systems of thought that inspired him those germs whose further development corresponded precisely to his individuality, it is still possible to trace the series of developments described purely logically, without taking into account the personal bearers of the ideas. It is as if one thought had brought forth another without any human being having been active in the process. For Schopenhauer, on the other hand, a large number of individual doubts and puzzles arose from his experiences, from the direct observation of human conditions and natural events, to which his travels gave him the opportunity, before he knew what others thought about the life of the spirit and the workings of nature. The questions posed to him by his experiences had a thoroughly individual and often coincidental character. This is why he occupies an isolated position in German philosophy. He took the elements for solving his tasks from everywhere: from contemporaries and from philosophers of the past. The question as to why these elements have become elements of a body of thought can only be answered by examining Schopenhauer's individual personality. Fichte's, Schelling's, Hegel's philosophical systems arouse the feeling that they had to follow Kant's because they were logically demanded by it; of Schopenhauer's, on the other hand, it is quite easy to imagine that we would have missed it entirely in the history of philosophy if the creator's life had taken a different turn by some accident before his productive period. The peculiar charm of Schopenhauer's world of ideas is due to this character. Because it has its sources in individual life, it corresponds to the philosophical needs of many people who, without seeking special expertise, nevertheless want to hear an opinion on the most important questions of life.

[ 7 ] Some of Schopenhauer's philosophical statements are merely views wrapped in a scientific garment, which life before his philosophical studies had produced in him. His starting point is not a principle from which all philosophical science can be derived, but rather individual basic views on various aspects of world events emerge from the whole of his personality, which only later coalesce into a unity. Schopenhauer therefore compares his world of thought to a crystal whose parts shoot together from all sides to form a whole.

[ 8 ] One of these basic views developed in Schopenhauer as a result of the influence that his Göttingen teacher Gottlob Ernst Schulze had on him. The latter described Kant and Plato to the young philosopher as the thinkers he should adhere to first and foremost. Schulze himself had appeared as an opponent of Kant in his 1792 publication "Aenesidemus". Schopenhauer had the good fortune to have Kant pointed out to him by a man who also had the ability to draw attention to the philosopher's contradictions.

[ 9 ] Kant endeavored to seek out the conditions under which the human striving for knowledge can arrive at truths of unconditional and necessary certainty. The Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, of which Kant was a follower until his in-depth study of Hume's writings, believed that such truths could be spun out of pure reason through purely conceptual thinking. It contrasted these pure rational truths with the knowledge of experience gained through observation of the outer life of nature and the inner life of the soul. According to this view, the latter are not made up of clear, transparent concepts, but of confused and dark ideas. Therefore, this philosophical way of thinking wanted to develop the most valuable insights into the deeper connection of natural events, the nature of the soul and the existence of God from pure concepts of reason. Kant professed these views until he was completely shaken in his convictions by Hume's remarks on the concepts of cause and effect. Hume (1711 to 1776) sought to prove that we can never gain insight into the connection between cause and effect through mere reason. According to Hume, the concept of causation comes from experience. We perceive the emergence of fire and then the heating of the air surrounding it. We have observed the same sequence of these perceptions countless times. We get used to it and assume that we will always observe the same thing as soon as the same conditions are met. But we can never gain an objective certainty about this, for it is impossible to see with the help of mere concepts that something must necessarily follow because something else precedes it. Experience only tells us that up to a certain point in time a certain event has always resulted in a certain other event, but not that the one must result in the other, i.e. that it will not be different in the future. All our knowledge about nature and about the life of our soul is made up of complexes of ideas that have formed in our soul on the basis of observed connections between things and events. Reason can find nothing in itself that gives it the right to connect one idea with another, i.e. to make a cognitive judgment. From the moment Kant recognized the significance of Hume's investigations, his thinking took on a completely new direction. But he arrived at different conclusions from Hume himself as a result of Hume's considerations. He agreed with Hume that we cannot gain any information about a connection lying in things from mere reason. What laws things have in themselves, our reason cannot decide; only the things themselves can teach us. He also agreed with Hume that there is no unconditional and necessary certainty in the information that experience gives us about the connection between things. But on this, Kant maintained, we have perfect certainty that things must stand in the relation of cause and effect and in other similar relations. Kant did not lose his belief in absolutely necessary knowledge about reality as a result of Hume's statements. The question arose for him: How can we know something absolutely certain about the connection between things and events in reality, even though reason cannot decide how things relate to each other by their very nature and experience does not provide any absolutely certain information? Kant's answer to this question was: The necessary connection in which we see the things and phenomena we perceive does not lie in these things themselves, but in our organization. It is not because one event necessarily follows from another that we notice such a connection, but because our mind is so organized that it must connect things according to the concepts of cause and effect. Thus it does not depend on the things at all, but on us, in what relations they appear to us. Kant allows only sensations to be given by an external power. Their arrangement in space and time and their connection through concepts such as cause and effect, unity and multiplicity, possibility and reality, is, in his view, only accomplished by our mental organism. Our sensuality is such that it can only look at sensations in space and time, our intellect such that it can only think of them in certain conceptual relationships. Kant is therefore of the opinion that our sensuality and our intellect prescribe the laws of their connection to things and events. Whatever is to become the object of our experience must obey these laws. An examination of our organization reveals the conditions under which all objects of experience must necessarily appear. From this view arose for Kant the necessity of attributing to experience a character dependent on the human faculty of cognition. We do not know things as they are in themselves, but as our organization makes them appear to us. Our experience therefore contains only appearances, not things in themselves. Kant was led to this conviction by the train of ideas that Hume stimulated in him.

[ 10 ] Schopenhauer describes the change brought about in his mind by these thoughts as a spiritual rebirth. They fill him with all the greater satisfaction as he finds them in full agreement with the views of the other philosopher to whom Schulze had pointed him, those of Plato. The latter says: "As long as we relate to the world merely perceptively, we are like people who sit in a dark cave so tightly bound that they cannot turn their heads, and see nothing but by the light of a fire burning behind them, on the wall opposite them, the shadowy images of real things passing between them and the fire, and indeed of each other, and each of themselves only the shadows. Just as these shadows relate to the real things, so our objects of perception, according to Plato's conviction, relate to the Ideas, which are the objects of perception. The objects of perception arise and pass away, the ideas are eternal. Schopenhauer found the same view in Kant as in Plato: that the visible world has no true being. Schopenhauer soon regarded this as an incontrovertible, indeed as the first and most universal truth. For him it took the following form: I gain knowledge of things insofar as I see them, hear them, feel them, etc., in a word: insofar as I imagine them. An object becomes my object of knowledge means: it becomes my imagination. Heaven, earth, etc., are therefore my conceptions, for the thing in itself that corresponds to them has become my object only because it has assumed the character of conception. Schopenhauer took from the thought worlds of Kant and Plato the germ of those parts of his philosophical system in which he treats the world as imagination.

[ 11 ] Schopenhauer considered the distinction between appearance and "thing-in-itself" to be Kant's greatest merit; however, he found Kant's remarks on the "thing-in-itself" itself to be completely misguided. This error also gave rise to Schulze's fight against Kant. According to Kant, things in themselves are the external causes of the sensations that occur in our sensory organs. But how do we arrive at the assumption of such causes, asks Schulze and with him Schopenhauer. Cause and effect are connected merely because our organization demands it, and yet are these concepts to be applied to a realm that is beyond our organism? Can the laws of our organism also be decisive beyond it? These considerations led Schopenhauer to seek a different path to the "thing-in-itself" than the one taken by Kant.

[ 12 ] Such a path is outlined in J. G. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. It took its most mature form in the lectures that Fichte gave at the University of Berlin between 1810 and 1814. Schopenhauer went to Berlin in the fall of 1811 to continue his studies. "He listened very attentively to Fichte lecturing on his philosophy," he later said in the description of his curriculum vitae, which he submitted to the Faculty of Philosophy in Berlin when he wanted to become a private lecturer. We learn the content of Fichte's lectures from his "Sämtliche Werke Vol. 2 und aus seinem Nachlaß Vol. i". The doctrine of science is based on the concept of knowledge, not that of being. For man can only learn something about being through his knowledge. Knowledge is not something 'dead, finished, but a living becoming. The objects of knowledge arise through its activity. It is characteristic of everyday consciousness that it notices the objects of knowledge, but not their emergence. Insight into this emergence comes to those who reflect on their own activity. Such a person sees how he himself creates the entire world existing in space and time. According to Fichte, this creation is a fact that one notices as soon as one pays attention to it. However, one must have an organ that is capable of overhearing knowledge as it is produced, just as one must have an eye in order to see colors. To him who has this organ, the perceptible world appears as a creature of knowledge, arising and passing away with knowledge. Its objects are not permanent beings, but passing images. Everyone can only observe the production of these images in themselves. Through self-perception, each person recognizes in the things given to his knowledge a world of images created by himself. This is only a subjective appearance whose meaning does not extend beyond the individual human being. The question arises: Are these images the only thing that exists? Are we ourselves nothing but this activity that creates the appearance? The question can be answered by reflecting on man's moral ideals. Of these it is clear without further ado that they are to be realized. And it is also absolutely certain that they must be realized not only by this or that human individual, but by all men. This necessity is inherent in the content of these ideals. They are a unity that embraces all individuals. Every human being perceives them as ought. They can only be realized through the will. But if the expressions of the will of the individuals are to harmonize into a unified world order, they must be founded in a single universal will. What wills in any individual is in essence the same as what wills in all others. What the will accomplishes must appear in the corporeal world; it is the scene of its activity. This is only possible if its laws are such that it can absorb the activity of the will into itself. There must be an original correspondence between the driving forces of the corporeal world and the will. The doctrine of science thus leads to a unified world principle, which manifests itself in the physical world as force and in the moral order as will. As soon as man finds the will within himself, he gains the conviction that there is a world independent of his individual. The will is not the knowledge of the individual, but the form of being. The world is knowledge and will. In the realization of moral ideals, the will has a content, and insofar as human life participates in this realization, it acquires an absolute value that it would not have if it existed merely in the images of knowledge. Fichte sees the will as the "thing in itself" independent of knowledge. All we recognize of the world of being is that it is will.

[ 13 ] The view that the will that man encounters in himself is a "thing in itself" is also Schopenhauer's view. He, too, is of the opinion that in our knowledge we have given only the images produced by us, but in our will we have given a being independent of us. The will must remain when knowledge is extinguished. The active will shows itself through the actions of my body. When the organism does something, it is the will that drives it to do it. Now I also learn about the actions of my body through my knowledge, which creates a picture of it for me. Schopenhauer says, according to the expression into which he has put Kant's basic view (cf. p. 245): I imagine these actions. This imagination of mine corresponds to a being independent of me, which is will. What we know of the activity in our own bodies, Schopenhauer also seeks to prove of that of the rest of nature: that it is, according to its being, will. This view of the will is the second of the links that make up Schopenhauer's philosophy.

[ 14 ] In the absence of historical evidence, it is impossible to determine how much of Schopenhauer's doctrine of will was influenced by Fichte. Schopenhauer himself denied any influence on the part of his Berlin teacher. He disliked the way Fichte taught and wrote. Given the striking agreement between the views of the two philosophers and the fact that Schopenhauer listened "attentively" to Fichte's lectures and even once had a lively discussion with him during a consultation, it is difficult to reject the idea of such influence. It was therefore in Göttingen and Berlin that Schopenhauer was first inspired when he based his system of thought on the two principles: "The world is my imagination" and "The world is will."

The influence of Goethe

[ 15 ] In the spring of 1813, Schopenhauer left Berlin due to the unrest of the war and went to Weimar via Dresden. He did not like the conditions in his mother's house, so he initially settled in Rudolstadt. In the summer of 1813, he worked on part of his theory of ideas. All our ideas are objects of our cognizing subject. But nothing existing and independent on its own, nor anything separate and torn off, can become an object for us. The ideas stand in a lawful connection which is given to them by our cognitive faculty and which can be recognized in form from its nature. The ideas must stand in such a relation to each other that we can say: one is grounded in the other. Reason and consequence is the general form of the connection between all ideas. There are four kinds of grounding: the ground of becoming, of cognition, of being and of volition. In becoming, one change is justified by another in time; in cognizing, one judgment by another, or by an experience; in being, the position of one part of time or space by another; in willing, an action by a motive. Schopenhauer gave a detailed account of what he had to say about these propositions in his essay "On the Fourfold Root of the Theorem of the Sufficient Ground", which earned him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Jena on October 2, 1813. In November of that year he returned to Weimar, where he remained until May 1814 and lived in close contact with Goethe. Goethe had read Schopenhauer's first work and was so interested in the author that he personally introduced him to the theory of colors. Schopenhauer found that his philosophical convictions and Goethe's Theory of Colors were in perfect agreement. He decided to justify this in a special treatise, which he began to write after moving to Dresden in May 1814. His thoughts on the nature of sensory perception also developed in the process. Kant was of the opinion that sensations arise from the excitation of the senses by "things in themselves"; these are the simple impressions of color, light, sound, etc. As these come from outside, they are not yet arranged in space and time. For this order is based on an arrangement of the senses. The outer senses arrange the sensations in space, the inner sense in time. This gives rise to perception. According to its nature, the intellect then arranges the perceptions according to the concepts of cause and effect, unity and multiplicity: Cause and effect, unity, multiplicity, etc. In this way a coherent experience is formed from the individual perceptions. Schopenhauer finds the senses quite unsuitable for the production of perception. The senses contain nothing but sensation. The sensations of color, for example, arise through an effect on the retina in the eye. They are processes within the organism. They can therefore only be perceived directly as states of the body and within it. The inner sense initially arranges the sensations in time so that they gradually enter consciousness. They only acquire spatial relationships when they are perceived as effects and an external cause is inferred from them. The arrangement according to cause and effect is a matter for the intellect. It regards sensations as effects and transfers their causes into space. It takes possession of the material of sensation and constructs the views in space from it. These are therefore the work of the intellect and not of the senses*. Since the objects that are seen and felt in space are derived from the senses ¹ Since the colors are first built up from the semantic perceptions, they cannot be derived from them. Therefore, colors, which are sensations, cannot be derived from objects, as Newton does. They are created by the eye and must be explained by the eye's equipment. It must be shown how the retina produces colors. Only the cause of colors, light, which is still entirely uncolored, can be transferred to the outside. Goethe also assumes the uncolored light in his Theory of Colors. Schopenhauer's work "On Sight and Colors" was published in 1816. Goethe had already received the manuscript from the author for review in 1815.

The main work

[ 16 ] Schopenhauer stayed in Dresden until September 1818, a period dedicated to the completion of his main work "The World as Will and Representation". New ideas were added to those developed in Göttingen, Berlin and Weimar and initially recorded in short aphorisms. Frauenstädt published a number of these aphorisms in his book "Aus Schopenhauers Nachlaß". Schopenhauer lived in particularly happy circumstances while he was writing them. His creative energy was stimulated by his contact with men of letters, who held him in high esteem for his abilities. The picture gallery and the collection of antique statues satisfied his aesthetic needs. They stimulated his thinking about art and artistic creation. From March 1817 to March 1818, he summarized the individual ideas of his philosophy into a whole. The remarks on perception, which were already contained in the work on colors, also form the beginning of "The World as Will and Representation". The intellect creates the external world and brings its phenomena into a context according to the law of cause and consequence, which has the four forms indicated. Kant ascribed twelve modes of connection (categories) to the intellect; Schopenhauer can only recognize those of reason and consequence (causality). Through the intellect we have given the vivid world. In addition to the intellect, reason is also active in man. It forms concepts from the views. It seeks out what different views have in common and forms abstract units from them. In this way it brings larger parts of experience under one thought. As a result, man does not merely live in his immediate present view, but can draw conclusions about the future from past and present events. He gains an overview of life and can also organize his actions accordingly. This distinguishes him from the animal. The latter has views, but no concepts of reason. Its actions are determined by the impressions of the immediate present. Man is guided by his reason. But reason cannot generate content on its own. It is only the reflection of the visual world. Therefore, it cannot produce moral ideals that are independent of experience and that shine before action as an unconditionally commanding ought, as Kant and Fichte claim. The rules according to which man organizes his actions are taken from his life experiences. Understanding and reason have their organ in the brain. Without the brain there are no views and no concepts. The whole world of imagination is a phenomenon of the brain. In itself there is only the will. This contains no moral ideals; we know it only as a dark urge, as an eternal striving. It gives rise to the brain and thus to understanding and reason. The brain creates the objective world, which man surveys as experience subject to the law of reason. The ideas are arranged spatially and temporally. They form nature in this order. The will is non-spatial and non-temporal, for space and time are created by the cognizing consciousness. The will is therefore a unity in itself; it is one and the same in all phenomena. As an appearance, the world consists of a multiplicity of things or individuals. As a thing in itself it is a wholeness. The individuals arise when consciousness confronts the object as subject and observes it according to the law of the ground. But there is another way of looking at it. Man can go beyond the mere individual. He can seek in the individual thing that which is independent of space, time and causality. In every individual there is something permanent that is not limited to the individual object. A particular horse is conditioned by the causes from which it emerged. But there is something in the horse that remains, even if the horse is destroyed again. This something that remains is not only contained in this particular horse, but in every horse. It cannot be produced by the causes which only bring about the creation of this one particular horse. That which remains is the idea of the horse. The causes embody this idea only in a single individual. The idea is therefore not subject to space, time and causality. It is therefore closer to the will than the individual. The idea is not directly contained anywhere in nature. Man only sees it when he looks away from the individual nature of things. This happens through the imagination. The material embodiment of ideas is art. The artist does not copy nature, but imprints on matter what his imagination sees. Music is an exception. It does not embody ideas. For even if ideas are not directly contained in nature, the imagination can only extract them from nature by searching for what remains in individuals. These are the models of art. Music, however, has no model in nature. Musical works of art do not depict anything in nature. Man creates them out of himself. But since there is nothing in him, apart from ideas and concepts, that he could represent other than the will, music is the direct image of the will. It speaks so much to the human mind because it is the embodiment of that which constitutes the innermost essence, the true being of man. This view of music is rooted in ideas that we find in Schopenhauer long before he became involved in philosophy. As a Hamburg merchant's apprentice, he wrote to his mother: "How did the heavenly seed find room on our hard soil, on which necessity and shortcomings fight for every little place? We are banished from the primal spirit and are not meant to reach it.... And yet a compassionate angel has implored the heavenly flower for us and it is rooted high in full glory on this soil of misery. - The pulsations of the divine art of music have not ceased to beat through the centuries of barbarism, and a direct echo of the eternal has remained in it, comprehensible to every sense and elevated even above vice and virtue." This idea of youth confronts us in philosophical form in Schopenhauer's main work.

[ 17 ] The same passage in the letter also contains a thought that took on a scientific form in the last section of the book "The World as Will and Representation": that of a general end of the world and of the nothingness of existence. The will is an eternal striving. It is in its nature that it can never be satisfied. For when it reaches a goal, it must immediately continue on to a new one. If it ceased to strive, it would no longer be will. Since human life is by its very nature will, there is no satisfaction in it, but only eternal longing for such satisfaction. Deprivation causes pain. This is therefore necessarily connected with life. All joy and happiness can only be based on illusion. Satisfaction is only possible through illusion, which is destroyed by reflecting on the true nature of the world. The world is void. Only those who fully realize this are wise. The contemplation of eternal ideas and their embodiment in art can for a moment take us beyond the misery of the world, for the aesthetically pleasurable person immerses himself in the eternal ideas and knows nothing of the particular sufferings of his individual. He behaves in a purely recognizing way, not wanting, and therefore not suffering. Suffering, however, returns immediately when he is thrown back into everyday life. The only salvation from misery is not to will at all, to kill the will within oneself. This is done by suppressing all desires, by asceticism. The wise man will extinguish all desires within himself, completely negate his will. He knows no motive that could compel him to will. His striving is directed towards only one thing: redemption from life. This is no longer a motive, but a quest. Every individual will is determined by the general will and is therefore unfree; only the universal will is not determined by anything and is therefore free. Only the negation of the will is an act of freedom, because it cannot be brought about by an individual act of will, but by the one will itself. All individual willing is the willing of a motive, hence the affirmation of the will.

[ 18 ] Suicide does not bring about a negation of the will. The suicide destroys only his particular individual; not the will, but only a manifestation of the will. Asceticism, however, does not merely annihilate the individual, but the will itself within the individual. It must ultimately lead to the complete extinction of all being, to redemption from all suffering. If the will disappears, then every appearance is also destroyed. The world has then entered into eternal rest, into nothingness, in which alone there is no suffering, thus bliss.

[ 19 ] The will is a unity. It is one and the same in all beings. Man is only an individual in appearance, in being only the expression of the general will of the world. One human being is not in truth separate from the other. What the latter suffers, the latter must also regard as his own suffering, he must suffer with it. Compassion is the expression of the fact that no one has a particular suffering, but that everyone feels the general suffering. Compassion is the basis of morality. It destroys egoism, which only seeks to alleviate one's own suffering. Compassion causes people to act in a way that is aimed at eliminating the suffering of others. Morality is not based on the principles of reason, but on compassion, i.e. on a feeling. Schopenhauer rejects all rational morality. Its principles are abstractions that only lead to moral, non-egoistic action through connection with a real driving force: compassion.

[ 20 ] Schopenhauer's doctrine of salvation and compassion emerged from his doctrine of the will under the influence of Indian views: Brahmanism and Buddhism. Schopenhauer studied Indian religious ideas as early as 1813 in Weimar under the guidance of the Orientalist Friedrich Majer. He continued these studies in Dresden. He read the work "Oupnek' hat", which a Persian prince translated from Indian into Persian in 1640 and of which a Latin translation was published by the Frenchman Anquetil Duperron between 1801 and 1802. According to Brahmanism, all individual beings have emerged from a primordial being to which they return in the course of the world process. Through individualization, the evils and the end of the world have arisen, which will be destroyed as soon as the existence of the individual beings has ceased and only the primordial being will still exist. According to Buddhism, all existence is linked to pain. This would not be destroyed even if there were only one single primordial being. Only the destruction of all existence through renunciation and suppression of the passions can lead to salvation, to nirvana, that is, to the destruction of all existence.

[ 21 ] At the end of 1818 (with the date 1819), "The World as Will and Representation" was published by Brockhaus in Leipzig. In the same year, Hegel was appointed to Berlin. Hegel held a completely opposite view to that of Schopenhauer. What for Schopenhauer could only create a reflection of the real, reason, was for Hegel the source of all knowledge. Through reason, man grasps being in its true form, the content of reason is the content of being; the world is the appearance of the rational, and life is therefore infinitely valuable because it is the representation of reason. This doctrine soon became the philosophy of the age and remained so until it had to give way to the rule of the natural sciences around the middle of the century. The latter did not want to justify anything from reason, but everything from experience. The flourishing of Hegelian philosophy prevented any influence of Scho penhauer's philosophy. It remained completely unnoticed. In 1835, Schopenhauer received the following information from Brockhaus in response to an inquiry about the sales of his main work: the work had not been distributed at all. A large part of it had had to be turned into waste paper.

Stay in Berlin

[ 22 ] After completing "The World as Will and Representation", Schopenhauer left Dresden and went to Italy. He saw Florence, Bologna, Rome and Naples. On his return journey, he received news from his sister in Milan that the Hamburg trading house in which his mother and sister had invested their entire fortune, and Schopenhauer himself only part of his fortune, had stopped making payments. This experience made it seem advisable for him to look for a new source of income, as he did not want to depend on his uncertain fortune. He returned to Germany and habilitated at the University of Berlin. He announced the following lecture for the summer semester of 1820: "The whole of philosophy, that is the doctrine of the nature of the world and of the human spirit". He was unable to exert any influence as an academic teacher or as a writer alongside Hegel. For this reason, he did not give any more lectures in the following years, although he continued to announce such lectures in his catalog until 1831. He felt unhappy in Berlin; the location, climate, surroundings, way of life, social conditions: he disliked everything. In addition, he was completely disintegrating due to the property issue with his mother and sister. He himself had lost nothing through his skillful appearance; his mother and sister, on the other hand, had lost 70 percent of their fortune. Embittered by the lack of recognition, loneliness and the rift with his relatives, he left Berlin in May 1822 and spent several years traveling. He went through Switzerland to Italy, spent a winter in Trier, a whole year in Munich and only returned to Berlin in May 1825. In 1831 he moved to Frankfurt am Main. He fled from the cholera that prevailed in Berlin at the time and which he was particularly afraid of because he had a dream on New Year's night from 1830 to 1831 that seemed to point to his imminent death.

The creation of the last writings and the growing Rubm

[ 23 ] With the exception of the period from July 1832 to June 1833, when Schopenhauer sought recovery from an illness in Mannheim, he spent the rest of his life in Frankfurt in complete solitude, filled with deep resentment at his age, which showed so little understanding for his creations. He lived only for his thoughts and his work, aware that he was not working for his contemporaries, but for a future generation. In 1333 he wrote in his manuscript book: "My contemporaries must not believe that I am now working for them: we have nothing to do with each other; we do not know each other; we pass each other by as strangers. - I write for the individuals who are like me, who live and think here and there in the course of time, communicate with each other only through the works they have left behind and are thus each the consolation of the other."

[ 24 ] The publication of "The World as Will and Representation" marked the end of Schopenhauer's production of ideas. What he published later does not contain any new basic ideas, but only expansions of what is already contained in the main work, as well as arguments about his position towards other philosophers and views on particular questions of science and life, from the standpoint of his world view.

[ 25 ] Schopenhauer believed he recognized an ally in the battle for his ideas in the natural sciences. At the universities of Göttingen and Berlin, in addition to his philosophical education, he acquired a thorough education in the natural sciences and later informed himself in detail about all advances in the knowledge of nature. On the basis of these studies, he formed the opinion that natural science was moving in such a direction that it must one day arrive at the results that he himself had found through philosophical thinking. He attempted to provide proof of this in his work "The Will in Nature", published in 1836. All research into nature consists of two parts, the description of the forces of nature and the explanation of the laws of nature. The laws of nature, however, are nothing other than the rules that the imagination gives to phenomena. These laws can be explained because they are nothing but the forms of space, time and causality, which stem from the nature of the cognizing subject.The forces of nature cannot be explained, but only described as they present themselves to observation. If we follow the descriptions that natural scientists give of the forces of nature: gravity, magnetism, heat, electricity, etc., we see that these forces are nothing more than the forms of action of the will at various levels.

[ 26 ] In the same sense as Schopenhauer gave a more detailed exposition of the doctrine of the will in "Will in Nature", so in "The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics" he expanded the views contained in the main work on the freedom of the will and the basis of morality. The book is composed of two prize papers: one on the "Freedom of the Will", which was crowned by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in 1839, and the other on the "Foundation of Morals", which was carried out at the instigation of the Danish Academy, but was not crowned by it.

[ 27 ] What Schopenhauer still had to say to the world is contained in his last book, "Parerga und Paralipomena", which appeared in 1851. It contained a series of treatises on philosophy, psychology, anthropology, religion and wisdom in a presentation that captivates the reader, because he does not merely read assertions and abstract proofs, but sees through to a personality whose thoughts arise not only from the head, but from the whole person, and who seeks to prove his views not only through logic, but also through feeling and passion. This character of Schopenhauer's last work and the work of some of his followers, whom the philosopher had already won in the forties, made it possible for him to say of himself in the evening of his life: My time has come. Unnoticed for decades, he became a widely read writer in the second half of the century. As early as 1843, F. Dorguth published a pamphlet entitled "The False Root of Ideal Realism", in which he called Schopenhauer "the first real systematic thinker in the entire history of literature". This was followed in 1845 by another by the same author: "Schopenhauer in his truth". Frauenstädt also worked as a writer to spread Schopenhauer's teachings. He had "Letters on Schopenhauer's Philosophy" published in 1854. However, an article by John Oxenford in the "Westminster Review" from April 1853, which Otto Lindner had translated and published in the Vossische Zeitung under the title "Deutsche Philosophie im Auslande", made a particular impression. In it, Schopenhauer is described as a philosophical genius of the first rank; his depth and wealth of ideas are sought to be proven by reprinting individual passages from his works. Lindner himself became an enthusiastic apostle of Schopenhauer's teachings through the "Parerga und Paralipomena", to which he was able to render great service through his position as editor of the Vossische Zeitung. David Asher in particular promoted the understanding of Schopenhauer's ideas on music through essays in German and English journals. And it was these ideas about music that made one of Schopenhauer's most ardent admirers, Richard Wagner, the man who showed the art of music new paths. For him, these ideas were like a new gospel. He saw them as the most profound philosophy of music. The artist, who wanted to express the deepest secrets of existence in musical language, felt a spiritual affinity with the philosopher who declared music to be the image of the will of the world. In December 1854, the sound poet sent the thinker in Frankfurt the text of his "Ring der Nibelungen" with the handwritten dedication: "Out of admiration and gratitude", shortly after Schopenhauer had refused to visit Wagner in Zurich.

[ 28 ] Schopenhauer was able to watch his fame grow for about a decade. On September 21, 1860, he died suddenly as a result of a lung attack.

Bibliography and text treatment

[ 29 ] The last editions of his works published during Schopenhauer's lifetime are: Die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, 2nd edition 1847; Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 3rd edition 1859; Der Wille in der Natur, 2nd edition 1854; Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, 2nd edition 1860; Parerga und Paralipomena, i. edition 1851; Das Sehn und die Farben, 2nd edition 1854. Schopenhauer produced a Latin translation of the latter work in 1829 for the "Scriptores ophthalmologici minores", which was published in the third volume of this journal in 1830 under the title "'Theoria colorum physiologica". After Schopenhauer's death, Julius Frauenstädt, in accordance with the philosopher's last will and testament, produced new editions of the works, for which he used the manuscript bequest. This consists of manuscript books and hand-copies of the works. The manuscript books are Reisebuch (begun September 1818), Foliant (begun January 1821), Brieftasche (begun May 1822), Quartant (begun November 1824), Adversaria (begun March 1828), Cholerabuch (written while fleeing from cholera, begun September 1831), Cogitata (begun February 1830), Pandektä (begun September 1832), Spicilegia (begun April 1837), Senilia (begun April 1852) and the lectures Schopenhauer gave in Berlin. In these manuscript books, as well as on the pages pasted through the manuscript copies, are Schopenhauer's additions which he intended to include in later editions of his works, as well as remarks on philosophical works, aphorisms, etc.. Frauenstädt published what could not be used for the new editions of the works in 1864 under the title: "Aus Arthur Schopenhauers handschriftlichem Nachlaß. Treatises, Notes, Aphorisms and Fragments". After Frauenstadt's death in 1879, the manuscript books passed into the possession of the Royal Library in Berlin, while the hand-copied copies were passed into private hands. For any complete edition of Schopenhauer's works, Frauenstadt's principle must generally be followed: "I have ... I have proceeded in such a way that I have only included the additions in the text, whether they were written down or quoted from the manuscript books, when, after careful consideration, I found a place for them where they fit in without constraint, not only in terms of content but also in terms of form, i.e. diction; in all other cases, however, where either the strict sequence of thought or the pleasing sentence structure of the text did not permit their inclusion in the same, I have placed them in the most appropriate place either as notes below or as appendices after the text. " However, Frauenstädt sometimes did not apply this principle strictly enough. Therefore, in the present complete edition, all those additions that Frauenstädt included in the text have been removed from the text and relegated to the notes, of which it can be assumed that Schopenhauer, in accordance with the strict demands he placed on style, would never have added them to his works in the first version, but only after a complete reworking. As far as the arrangement of the writings in a complete edition is concerned, several statements by Schopenhauer should be taken into consideration: A letter to Brockhaus dated August 8, 1858, in which, should a complete edition become necessary, he speaks of the following order: i. World as will and imagination. 2. parerga. 3. fourfold root; will in nature; basic problems of ethics; sight and colors. On September 22 of the same year, he was already of a different opinion. He wanted to place the Parerga at the end and let the writings listed earlier under 3. precede it. As you can see, Schopenhauer was vacillating with regard to the order. The present Complete Edition therefore follows the statement he made in the draft of a preface to the Complete Edition about the order in which his works should be read. The following arrangement corresponds to this statement: i. Fourfold root of the proposition of the sufficient ground. 2 World as will and imagination. 3. will in nature. 4. basic problems of ethics. 5. parerga and paralipomena. These writings are followed by the work on "Sight and Colors", which Schopenhauer says in the same passage "goes for itself". Next is the aforementioned Latin translation of this work, followed by what has been published from his estate. The four short descriptions of his life written by Schopenhauer himself form the end of the edition: i. The one attached to his application for the doctorate. 2. the Curriculum vitae, which he sent to Berlin for the purpose of his habilitation. 3. the biography he sent to Eduard Erdmann in April 1851 for use in his History of Philosophy, 4. the one he provided for the Meyersche Konversationslexikon in May of the same year.

[ 30 ] A biography of the philosopher was provided by Gwinner in 1862: "Arthur Schopenhauer aus persönlichem Umgange", which was published in 1878 under the title "Schopenhauers Leben" in a second, revised and much enlarged edition. This biography is an invaluable monument to Schopenhauer's personality due to the wealth of material it contains and its vivid portrayal of Schopenhauer's personality, despite the obvious differences in Gwinner's and Schopenhauer's views. In 1893, Kuno Fischer published an account of Schopenhauer's life, character and teachings as the eighth volume of his "History of Modern Philosophy".

• 1. I have provided a critique of this view in my book "Die Philosophie der Freiheit. Outlines of a modern world view". 1894.

[ 1 ] Present day philosophy suffers from an unhealthy faith in Kant. This essay is intended to be a contribution toward overcoming this. It would be wrong to belittle this man's lasting contributions toward the development of German philosophy and science. But the time has come to recognize that the foundation for a truly satisfying view of the world and of life can be laid only by adopting a position which contrasts strongly with Kant's. What did he achieve? He showed that the foundation of things lying beyond the world of our senses and our reason, and which his predecessors sought to find by means of stereotyped concepts, is inaccessible to our faculty of knowledge. From this he concluded that our scientific efforts must be limited to what is within reach of experience, and that we cannot attain knowledge of the supersensible foundation, of the “thing-in-itself.” But suppose the “thing-in-itself” and a transcendental ultimate foundation of things are nothing but illusions! It is easy to see that this is the case. It is an instinctive urge, inseparable from human nature, to search for the fundamental nature of things and their ultimate principles. This is the basis of all scientific activity.

[ 2 ] There is, however, not the slightest reason for seeking the foundation of things outside the given physical and spiritual world, as long as a comprehensive investigation of this world does not lead to the discovery of elements within it that clearly point to an influence coming from beyond it.

[ 3 ] The aim of this essay is to show that everything necessary to explain and account for the world is within the reach of our thinking. The assumption that there are principles which belong to our world, but lying outside it, is revealed as the prejudice of an out-dated philosophy living in vain and illusory dogmas. Kant himself would have come to this conclusion had he really investigated the powers inherent in our thinking. Instead of this, he shows in the most complicated way that we cannot reach the ultimate principles existing beyond our direct experience, because of the way our faculty of knowledge functions. There is, however, no reason for transferring these principles into another world. Kant did indeed refute “dogmatic” philosophy, but he put nothing in its place. This is why Kant was opposed by the German philosophy which followed. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel did not worry in the least about the limits to cognition erected by Kant, but sought the ultimate principles within the world accessible to human reason. Even Schopenhauer, though he maintained that the conclusions of Kant's criticism of reason were eternal and irrefutable truths, found himself compelled to search for the ultimate cause along paths very different from those of Kant. The mistake of these thinkers was that they sought knowledge of the highest truths without having first laid a foundation by investigating the nature of knowledge itself. This is why the imposing edifice of thought erected by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel stands there, so to speak, without foundations. This had a bad effect on the direction taken by the thought of these philosophers. Because they did not understand the significance of the sphere of pure ideas and its relationship to the realm of sense-perceptions, they added mistake to mistake, one-sidedness to one-sidedness. It is no wonder that their all too daring systems could not withstand the fierce opposition of an epoch so ill-disposed toward philosophy; consequently, along with the errors much of real value in their thought was mercilessly swept away.

[ 4 ] The aim of the following inquiry is to remedy the lack described above. Unlike Kant, the purpose here is not to show what our faculty of knowledge cannot do, but rather to show what it is really able to achieve.

[ 5 ] The outcome of what follows is that truth is not, as is usually assumed, an ideal reflection of something real, but is a product of the human spirit, created by an activity which is free; this product would exist nowhere if we did not create it ourselves. The object of knowledge is not to repeat in conceptual form something which already exists, but rather to create a completely new sphere, which when combined with the world given to our senses constitutes complete reality. Thus man's highest activity, his spiritual creativeness, is an organic part of the universal world-process. The world-process should not be considered a complete, enclosed totality without this activity. Man is not a passive onlooker in relation to evolution, merely repeating in mental pictures cosmic events taking place without his participation; he is the active co-creator of the world-process, and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe.

[ 6 ] This insight has the most significant consequences for the laws that underlie our deeds, that is, our moral ideals; these, too, are to be considered not as copies of something existing outside us, but as being present solely within us. This also means rejecting the “categorical imperative,” an external power whose commandments we have to accept as moral laws, comparable to a voice from the Beyond that tells us what to do or leave undone. Our moral ideals are our own free creations. We have to fulfill only what we ourselves lay down as our standard of conduct. Thus the insight that truth is the outcome of a free deed also establishes a philosophy of morality, the foundation of which is the completely free personality.

[ 7 ] This, of course, is valid only when our power of thinking penetrates—with complete insight—into the motivating impulses of our deeds. As long as we are not clear about the reasons—either natural or conceptual—for our conduct, we shall experience our motives as something compelling us from outside, even though someone on a higher level of spiritual development could recognize the extent to which our motives originated within our own individuality. Every time we succeed in penetrating a motive with clear understanding, we win a victory in the realm of freedom.

[ 8 ] The reader will come to see how this view—especially in its epistemological aspects—is related to that of the most significant philosophical work of our time, the world-view of Eduard von Hartmann.

[ 9 ] This essay constitutes a prologue to The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, a work which will appear shortly.

[ 10 ] Clearly, the ultimate goal of all knowledge is to enhance the value of human existence. He who does not consider this to be his ultimate goal, only works as he learned from those who taught him; he “investigates” because that happens to be what he has learned to do. He can never be called “an independent thinker.”

[ 11 ] The true value of learning lies in the philosophical demonstration of the significance of its results for humanity. It is my aim to contribute to this. But perhaps modern science does not ask for justification! If so, two things are certain. first, that I shall have written a superfluous work; second, that modern scholars are striving in vain, and do not know their own aims.

[ 12 ] In concluding this preface, I cannot omit a personal remark. Until now, I have always presented my philosophical views in connection with Goethe's world-view. I was first introduced to this by my revered teacher, Karl Julius Schröer who, in my view, reached such heights as a scholar of Goethe's work because he always looked beyond the particular to the Idea.

[ 13 ] In this work, however, I hope to have shown that the edifice of my thought is a whole that rests upon its own foundation, and need not be derived from Goethe's world-view. My thoughts, as here set forth, and as they will be further amplified in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, have been developed over many years. And it is with a feeling of deep gratitude that I here acknowledge how the friendliness of the Specht family in Vienna, while I was engaged in the education of their children, provided me with an ideal environment for developing these ideas; to this should be added that I owe the final shape of many thoughts now to be found in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” to the stimulating talks with my deeply appreciated friend, Rosa Mayreder in Vienna; her own literary works, which spring from a sensitive, noble, artistic nature, presumably will soon be published.

Written in Vienna in the beginning of December 1891.
Dr. Rudolf Steiner

[ 1 ] Present⁵ day philosophy suffers from an unhealthy belief ⁶ in Kant. This work is intended to be a contribution toward overcoming this. It would be wrong to belittle this man's lasting contributions to the development of German scholarship. But the time has come to recognize that the foundation for a truly satisfying view of the world and of life can be laid only by adopting a position which contrasts strongly with Kant's. What did he achieve? He showed that the foundation of things lying beyond the world of our senses and our reason, and which his predecessors sought to find by means of stereotyped concepts, cannot be known, is inaccessible. From this he concluded that our scientific efforts must be limited to what is within reach of experience, and that we cannot attain knowledge of any supersensible primal grounds, of the “thing-in-itself”. But suppose the “thing-in-itself” and something’s transcendental primeval grounds are nothing but illusions! It is easy to see that this is the case. It is an instinctive urge, inseparable from human nature, to search for the deep nature of things and their primal principles. This is the basis of all scientific activity. [ 2 ] There is, however, not the slightest reason for seeking these primal grounds outside the given physical and spiritual world, so long as a comprehensive investigation of this world does not lead to the discovery of elements within it that clearly point to an influence coming from beyond it.

[ 3 ] Our discussion therefore seeks to show that everything necessary to explain and account for the world is within the reach of our thinking. The adoption of principles lying outside of our world shows merely the prejudiced preconception of a dead philosophy living in ingeniously contrived dogmatic illusions. Kant himself would have come to this conclusion had he really investigated the powers inherent in our thinking. Instead of this, he shows in the most complicated way that we cannot reach the ultimate principles existing beyond our direct experience, because of the way our knowing faculties are set up. There is, however, no reason for transferring these principles into another world. Kant did indeed refute “dogmatic” philosophy, but he put nothing in its place. This is why Kant was opposed by the German philosophers who followed. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel did not worry in the least about the limits to knowing erected by Kant, but sought the ultimate principles within the world accessible to human common sense and reason (Vernunft). Though he maintained as eternal and irrefutable the truths Kant concluded in his critique of sense and reason, even Schopenhauer found himself compelled to search for primal world causes along paths very different from those of his master. The mistake of these thinkers was in seeking an inner familiarity with the highest truths without having first laid a groundwork by investigating the nature of knowing itself. Therefore, the proud thought-structures of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel stand without a foundation, the lack of which had a damaging effect on their thought-process. Without familiarity with how the pure world of ideas is connected to the realm of sensory perception, they built error on error, bias upon bias. It is no wonder that their all too daring systems could not withstand the fierce opposition of an epoch so ill-disposed toward philosophy, so that much of good quality was swept away with the pitiful bad.

[ 4 ] The aim of the following inquiry is to remedy the lack described above. Unlike Kant, the purpose here is not to show what our faculty of knowing cannot do, but rather to show what it can do.

[ 5 ] The outcome of this investigation into what is generally taken as truth is not merely an ideal reflection of something real, but rather is a free production of the human spirit, in that nothing at all can exist unless brought forth by ourselves. The object of knowing is not to repeat in conceptual form something which already exists, but rather to create a completely new arena, which when combined with the world given by our senses constitutes complete reality. Engaging in this spiritual creativity is a person’s most noble activity, and is organically connected to general world happenings. Without this activity, world events could not be thought of as a self-contained whole. Concerning the course of world events, a person is not a passive onlooker, merely replicating pictures within his spirit of what takes place in the cosmos without his own activity, but rather is the active co-producer of world processes, and inner knowing is the consummate arm within the organism of the universe.

[ 6 ] For the laws of our actions, for our moral ideals, this viewpoint has the important consequence that these also cannot be viewed as the image of something external to us, but rather as something that only exists within us. A powerful entity, whose commandments we must regard as our moral laws, is in this way also rejected. We do not know any “categorical imperative”,⁷ which similarly is a voice external to us, that stipulates what we are to do, or what we are to allow to happen. Our moral ideals are our own free creations. We must carry out only what we ourselves lay down as our standard of conduct. The viewpoint of truth grounded on free activity is therefore also a moral teaching, whose foundation is the completely free personality.

[ 7 ] Of course, these sentences only apply to that part of our actions whose laws we infuse with idealism in complete consciousness. So long as motives are still innate, conceptually unclear, or unconscious, someone of a higher spiritual level can probably recognize to what extent these laws of our actions are founded merely on individuality and circumstance, even though we ourselves perceive them to be affecting us from outside, compelling us. Every time we succeed in infusing our motives with clarity, with conscious awareness, we make a conquest in the field of freedom.

[ 8 ] How our outlook is related to the most significant philosophical work of the present, for instance the world-view of Eduard von Hartmann, the reader will learn in detail in our discussion, insofar as the problem of knowing ⁸ comes into consideration. [ 9 ] It is a philosophy of freedom, made as a prologue to a more detailed work soon to follow.⁹

[ 10 ] Increasing the fullness of existence-awareness of human beings is clearly the real goal of science (Wissenschaft). Anyone who does not pursue this intentionally is only following the work of whomever his master is; he is “researching” just by chance. He can never be called “an independent thinker”.

[ 11 ] What gives the development of science its true value is the philosophical presentation of the meaning and value of its results for humankind. It is my aim to contribute to this. But perhaps modern science does not ask for justification! If so, two things are certain. First, that I shall have written a superfluous work, and second, that modern scholars are striving in vain, and do not know their own aims.

[ 12 ] In concluding this preface, I cannot omit a personal remark. Until now, I have always presented my philosophical views in connection with Goethe's world-view. I was first introduced to this by my honored teacher Karl Julius Schröer,¹⁰ who in my view reached the heights as a Goethe-scholar because he always looked beyond the particular to the idea.

[ 13 ] In this work, however, I hope to have shown that the whole structure of my thought rests on its own foundation, and need not be derived from Goethe's world-view. My thoughts set forth here, and further amplified in my forthcoming book Philosophy of Freedom, have been developed over many years. And it is with a feeling of deep gratitude that I here acknowledge how the friendliness of the Specht family in Vienna, while I was engaged in the education of their children,¹¹ provided me with an ideal environment for developing these ideas. To this should be added that I owe the final shape of many thoughts now found in my Philosophy of Freedom to some stimulating talks with my deeply appreciated friend, Rosa Mayreder ¹² in Vienna. Her own literary works, which spring from a sensitive noble artistic nature, presumably will soon be published.

Written in Vienna in the beginning of December 1891.
Dr. Rudolf Steiner

• 5. t/n Known also as Truth and Knowledge
• 6. t/n Glauben. Belief, of Anglo-Saxon derivation, suggests intellectual assent, whereas faith, of PIE derivation, (Vertrauen in German), involves trust in a direct perception of truth, and is not used here. .
• 7. t/n Categorical imperatives for Kant are actions that are imperative due to their belonging to a category of actions that we ought to hold as universal law due to their nature.
• 8. t/n Erkenntnisproblem, AKA epistomology
• 9. t/n The Philosophy of Freedom, originally known in English as The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
• 10. t/n Schröer was Steiner’s professor at the Technical College of Vienna, a German language professor, who lectured on Goethe, Schiller, and Walther von der Vogelweide, and who recommended Steiner to be the editor of Goethe’s natural scientific writings.
• 11. t/n From July 1884 to September 1890, Rudolf Steiner tutored the 4 Specht sons. This was reviewed in Steiner’s autobiography.
• 12. t/n Rosa Mayreder 1858–1938, an author, painter, musician, and feminist, circled in a plethora of artists, writers, and philosophers, including Rudolf Steiner. Her husband became rector of the Technical University of Vienna where Steiner was a student.

Rudolf Steiner's lecture at the Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society

Those who portray the spiritual life of Germany from the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century usually see, alongside the high point of art in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven and others, only an epoch of purely speculative thinking in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and a few less important philosophers. It is frequently held that the latter personalities are to be recognized as mere laborers in the field of thought. It is admitted that they have done extraordinary work in the speculative field; but one is all too easily inclined to say that these thinkers were quite far removed from actual occult research and real spiritual experience. And so it happens that the theosophically striving person expects little gain from delving into their works.

Many who attempt to penetrate the thought-web of these philosophers give up the work after a time because they find it fruitless. The scientific investigator says to himself: These thinkers have lost the firm ground of experience under their feet; they have built up in the nebulous heights the chimeras of systems, without any regard for positive reality. And anyone interested in occultism will find that they lack the truly spiritual foundations. He comes to the conclusion: They knew nothing of spiritual experiences, of supersensible facts, and merely devised intellectual constructs.

As long as one stops at merely observing the outer side of spiritual development, it is not easy to come to a different opinion. But if one penetrates to the undercurrents, the whole epoch presents itself in a different light. The apparent airy-fairy notions can be recognized as the expression of a deeper occult life. And Theosophy can then provide the key to understanding what these sixty to seventy years of spiritual life mean in the development of mankind. During this time in Germany, there are two sets of facts, one of which represents the surface, but the other must be regarded as a deeper foundation. The whole thing gives the impression of a flowing stream, on the surface of which the waves ripple in the most diverse ways. And what is presented in the usual [literary histories] are only these rising and falling waves; but what lives in the depths is left unconsidered, and from which the waves actually draw their nourishment.

This depth contains a rich and fertile occult life. And this is none other than that which once pulsated in the works of the great German mystics, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius. Like a hidden power, this life was contained in the worlds of thought that Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel found. The way in which, for example, Jakob Böhme had expressed his great spiritual experiences was no longer at the forefront of the leading literary discussion; but the spirit of these experiences continued to live. One can see how this spirit lived on in Herder, for example. Public discussion led both Herder and Goethe to the study of Spinoza. In the work that he called “God”, the former sought to deepen the conception of God in Spinozism. What he contributed to Spinozism was nothing other than the spirit of German mysticism. One could say that, unconsciously to himself, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius were guiding his pen. It is also from such hidden sources that we can explain how, in the “Education of the Human Race”, the ideas of reincarnation emerged in a mind as rationally inclined as Lessing's was. The term “unconscious” is, however, only half accurate, because such ideas and intuitions led a full life within Germany, not on the surface of literary discussion, but in the most diverse “occult societies” and “fraternities”. But of the above, only Goethe can be considered as having been initiated into the most intimate life of such “fraternities”; the others had only a more superficial connection with them. Much of it found its way into their lives and work as inspiration, without them being fully aware of the real sources.

In this respect, Schiller represents an interesting phenomenon of intellectual development. We cannot understand the real intellectual nerve of his life if we do not delve into his youthful works, which can be found in his writings as “Correspondence between Julius and Raphael”. Some of the material contained in it was written by Schiller while he was still at the Karls School in Stuttgart, while some of it was only written in 1785 and 1786. It contains what Schiller calls the “Theosophy of Julius,” by which he means the sum of ideas to which he had risen at that time. It is only necessary to cite the most important thoughts from this “theosophy” to characterize the way in which this genius assembled his own edifice of ideas from the rudiments of German mysticism that were accessible to him. Such essential thoughts are, for example, the following: “The universe is a thought of God. After this [idealized] image of the spirit entered into reality and the born world fulfilled the plan of its creator – allow me this human representation – so the task of all thinking beings in this existing whole is to find the first drawing again, the rule in the machine, the unity in the composition, the law in the phenomenon and to transfer the building backwards to its ground plan... The great composition that we call the world now only remains strange to me because it exists to symbolically describe the [manifold] expressions of that [being]. Everything in me and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of a force that is similar to me. The laws of nature are the ciphers that the thinking being combines to make itself understandable to the thinking being – the alphabet by means of which all spirits negotiate with the most perfect spirit and with themselves... A new experience in this [realm of truth], gravity, the discovery of blood circulation, Linnaeus's system of nature classification: these things seem to me to be, in their very origin, what an antique, unearthed in Herculaneum, reveals to me – both mere reflections of a spirit, a new acquaintance with a being similar to myself. [...] There is no longer any wilderness in all of nature for me. Where I discover a body, I suspect a spirit. Where I perceive movement, I guess a thought... We have concepts of the wisdom of the supreme being, of his benevolence, of his justice – but none of his omnipotence. To express its omnipotence, we help ourselves with the piecemeal idea of three successions: nothing, its will [and] something. It is desolate and dark – God calls: light – and there is light. If we had a real idea of its active omnipotence, we would be creators, like Him.” Such were the ideas of Schiller's theosophy when he was in his early twenties. And from this basis he rises to the comprehension of human spiritual life itself, which he places in the context of cosmic forces: “Love, then, the most beautiful phenomenon in the creation of the soul, the almighty magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and the loftiest virtue. Love is only the reflection of this one primal power, an attraction of the excellent, based on an instantaneous exchange of personality, a confusion of beings. When I hate, I take something away from myself; when I love, I become richer by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of a lost possession; hatred of men is a prolonged suicide; egotism is the greatest poverty of a created being.” From this starting-point Schiller seeks to find an idea of God corresponding to his own feeling, which he presents in the following sentences: ”All perfections in the universe are united in God. God and nature are two entities that are completely equal to each other... There is one truth that runs like a fixed axis through all religions and systems: Approach the God you mean.

If one compares these statements of the young Schiller with the teachings of the German mystics, one will find that in the latter, there are sharply defined contours of thought, which in Schiller's works appear as the exuberant outpourings of a more general world of feeling. Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius have as a certain view of their intuitive mind what Schiller has in mind in the vague presentiment of feeling.

What comes to light in such a characteristic way in Schiller is also present in other of his contemporaries. Intellectual history only has to present it in the case of Schiller because it has become a driving force of the nation in his epoch-making works. It can be said that in Schiller's time, the spiritual world of German mysticism as intuition, as direct experience of spiritual life, was hidden as if under a veil; but it lived on in the world of feeling, in the intuitions. People had retained devotion and enthusiasm for that which they no longer saw directly with the “sense organs of the spirit”. We are dealing with an epoch of veiling of spiritual vision, but of a kind that is based on feeling, on an intuitive sense of this world.

This entire process is based on a certain law-governed necessity. What entered the hidden world as spiritual insight emerged as artistic life in this period of German spiritual life. In occultism, one speaks of successive cycles of involution and evolution. Here we are dealing with such a cycle on a small scale. The art of Germany in the epoch of Schiller and Goethe is nothing more than the evolution of German mysticism in the realm of outer, sensual form. But in the creations of the German poets, the deeper insight recognizes the intuitions of the great mystical age of Germany. The mystical life of the past now takes on a completely aesthetic, artistic character.

This is clearly expressed in the writing in which Schiller reached the full height of his world view, in his [letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”]. The dogmatist of occultism will perhaps find nothing in these “letters” either but the spirited speculations of a fine artistic mind. In reality, however, they are dominated by the endeavour to give instructions for a different state of consciousness than the ordinary one. A stage on the way to the “higher self” is to be described. The state of consciousness Schiller describes is indeed far removed from the life of experience of the astral or devachanic, but it does represent something higher than our everyday life. And if we approach it with an open mind, we can very well recognize in what can be called the 'aesthetic state', according to Schiller, a preliminary stage of those higher forms of intuition. Schiller wants to lead man beyond the standpoint of the 'lower self'. This lower self is characterized by two qualities. Firstly, it is necessarily dependent on the influences of the sensual world. Secondly, it is subject to the demands of logical and moral necessity. It is thus unfree in two directions. The sensual world rules in its drives, instincts, perceptions, passions, and so on. In his thinking and in his morality, the necessity of reason prevails. But only the person who has ennobled his feelings, drives, desires, wishes, etc., so that only the spiritual is expressed in them, and who, on the other hand, has so completely absorbed the necessity of reason within himself that it is the expression of his own being, is free in the sense of Schiller. A life led in this way can also be described as one in which a harmonious balance has been established between the “lower and higher self”. Man has so ennobled his desire nature that it is the embodiment of his “higher self”. Schiller sets this high ideal in these “Letters”; and he finds that in artistic creation and in pure aesthetic devotion to a work of art, an approach to this ideal takes place. Thus, for him, life in art becomes a genuine means of educating the human being in the development of his “higher self”. For him, the true work of art is a perfect harmony of spirit and sensuality, of higher life and outer form. The sensual is only a means of expression; but the spiritual only becomes a work of art when it has found its expression entirely in the sensual. Thus, the creative artist lives in the spirit; but he lives in it in a completely sensual way; through him, everything spiritual becomes perceptible through the senses. And the person who immerses himself aesthetically perceives through his external senses; but what he perceives is completely spiritualized sensuality. So one is dealing with a harmony between spirit and sensuality; the sensual appears ennobled by the spirit; the spiritual has come to revelation to the point of sensual vividness. Schiller would also like to make this “aesthetic state” the model for social coexistence. He regards as unfree a social relationship in which people base their mutual relationships only on the desires of the lower self, of egoism. But a state in which mere legislation of reason is called upon to rein in the lower instincts and passions also seems no less unfree to him. As an ideal, he presents a social constitution within which the individual feels the “higher self” of the whole to be so strong that he acts “selflessly” out of his innermost urge. The “individual ego” should come to the point where it becomes the expression of the “total ego”. Schiller perceives social action that is driven by such impulses as the action of “beautiful souls”; and such “beautiful souls”, which bring the spirit of the “higher self” to revelation in their everyday nature: for Schiller, they are also the truly “free souls”. He wants to lead humanity to “truth” through beauty and art. One of his core statements is: “Only through the dawn of the beautiful does man penetrate into the realm of knowledge.”

Thus, from Schiller's view of the world, art is assigned a high educational mission in the evolutionary process of humanity. One can say: What Schiller presents here is the mysticism of the older period of German intellectual life that has become aesthetic and artistic.

It might now appear that it is not easy to build a bridge from Schiller's aestheticism to another personality of the same time, but who is no less to be understood as coming from an occult undercurrent, to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On superficial examination, Fichte will be seen as a mere speculative mind, as an intellectual thinker. Now it is true that thought is his domain and that anyone seeking spiritual heights above the world of thought will not find them with Fichte. Those who want a description of “higher worlds” will look for them in vain with him. Fichte has no experience of an astral or mental world. According to the content of his philosophy, he is concerned only with ideas that belong to the physical world. But the matter presents itself quite differently when one looks at his treatment of the world of thoughts. This treatment is by no means a merely speculative one. Rather, it is one that corresponds completely to occult experience. Fichte considers only thoughts that relate to the physical world; but he considers them as an occultist would. It is for this reason that he himself is thoroughly conscious of living in higher worlds. We have only to refer to his lectures in Berlin in 1813, where he says: “Imagine a world of the blind-born, who know only those things and their relations that exist through the sense of touch. Stand among them and speak to them of colors and the other qualities that are only present through light for those who can see. Either you speak to them of nothing, and that is fortunate if they say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, stop the futile talking. Or they want to give your teaching a reason for some reason: so they can only understand it from what they know through touch: they will want to feel the light and the colors and the other relationships of visibility, feel that they are feeling, and lie to themselves about something they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret it.” At another time, Fichte states directly that for him his contemplation of the world is not merely a speculation about that which the ordinary senses give, but that a higher sense, one that reaches beyond them, is necessary for it: ”The new sense is is the sense for the spirit; for which there is only spirit and absolutely nothing else, and to which even the other, the given existence, takes on the form of the spirit and is transformed into it, to which therefore existence in its own form has in fact disappeared... It has been seen with this sense ever since man has existed, and all that is great and excellent in the world, and which alone makes humanity endure, comes from the visions of this sense. But that this sense should have seen itself, and in its difference and contrast to the other ordinary sense, was not the case. The impressions of the two senses merged, life disintegrated into these two halves without a unifying bond.” These last words are extremely characteristic of Fichte's place in the world of intellectual life. It is indeed true of the merely external (exoteric) philosophical striving of the West that the sense of which Fichte speaks “did not see itself”. In all mystical currents of intellectual life that are based on occult experience and esoteric contemplation, it is clearly mentioned; but its deeper basis was, as has already been explained, unknown in Fichte's time for the prevailing literary and scholarly discussion. For the means of expression of German philosophy at that time, Fichte was indeed the scout and discoverer of this higher meaning. That is why he took something quite different as the starting point of his thinking than other philosophers. As a teacher, he demanded of his students, and as a writer, of his readers, that they should, above all, perform an inner act of the soul. He did not want to impart knowledge of anything outside themselves, but rather he called on them to perform an inner action. And through this inner action they should ignite the true light of self-awareness within themselves. Like most philosophers of his time, he started from Kant's philosophy. Therefore, he expressed himself in the form of Kant's terminology, just as Schiller did in his mature years. But in terms of the height of inner, spiritual life, he surpassed Kant's philosophy very far, just like Schiller. If one attempts to translate Fichte's demands on his readers and listeners from the difficult philosophical language into a more popular form, it might go something like this. Every thing and every fact perceived by a person imposes its existence on that person. It is there without any action on the part of the person, at least as far as their innermost being is concerned. The table, the flower, the dog, a luminous apparition and so on are there through something foreign to man; and it is only for him to establish the existence that has come about without him. For Fichte, the situation is different for the “I” of man. The “I” is only there to the extent that it attains being through its own activity. Therefore, the sentence “I am” means something completely different than any other sentence. Fichte demanded that one become aware of this self-creation as the starting point for any spiritual contemplation of the world. In every other realization, man can only be receptive; in the “I” he must be the creator. And he can only perceive his “I” by looking at himself as the creator of this “I”. Thus Fichte demands a completely different way of looking at the “I” than at all other things. And he is as strict as possible in this demand. He says, “Most people would be more easily persuaded to consider themselves a piece of lava in the moon than an ego... Anyone who is not yet at peace with himself on this point does not understand fundamental philosophy, and does not need it. Nature, of which he is a machine, will guide him in all his affairs without any effort on his part.” To philosophize requires independence: and this one can only give oneself. We should not want to see without an eye; [but should] also not claim that the eye sees.

This very sharply defines the boundary where ordinary experience ends and the occult begins. Ordinary perception and experience extend as far as the human being's objective perception organs are built in. Occultism begins where man begins to build higher organs of perception for himself through the dormant powers within him. Within ordinary experience, man can only feel like a creature. When he begins to feel like the creator of his being, he enters the realm of so-called occult life. The way Fichte characterizes the “I am” is entirely in line with occultism. Even if he remains in the realm of pure thought, his contemplation is not mere speculation, but true inner experience. But for this very reason, it is also so easy to confuse his world view with mere speculation. Those who are driven by curiosity into the higher worlds will not find what they are looking for by delving into Fichte's philosophy. But for those who want to work on themselves, to discover the abilities slumbering in their souls, Fichte can be a good guide. He will realize that what matters is not the content of his teachings or dogmas, but the power that grows in the soul when one devotedly follows Fichte's lines of thought. One would compare this thinker to the prophet who did not enter the promised land himself, but led his people to a summit from which they could see its glories. Fichte leads thought to the summit from which entry into the land of occultism can be made. And the preparation that one acquires through him is as pure as can be imagined. For it completely transcends the realm of sense perception and the realm of that which originates from the nature of human desire and covetousness (from the human being's astral body). Through Fichte, one learns to live and move in the very pure element of thought. One retains nothing of the physical world in the soul except what has been implanted from higher regions, namely thoughts. And these form a better bridge to spiritual experiences than the training of other psychic abilities. For thought is the same everywhere, whether it occurs in the physical, astral or mental world. Only its content is different in each of these worlds. And the supersensible worlds remain hidden from man only as long as he cannot completely remove sensual content from his thoughts. If the thought becomes free of sensuality, then only one step remains to be taken and the supersensible world can be entered.

The contemplation of one's own self in Fichte's sense is so significant because, in relation to this “self”, man remains without any thought content at all if he does not give himself such a content from within. For all the rest of the world's content, for all perception, feeling, will and so on, which make up the content of ordinary existence, the outer world fills man. He needs - according to Fichte's words - basically nothing but the “machine of nature”, which “manages its business without his intervention”. But the “I” remains empty, no outside world fills it with content, if it does not come from within. The realization “I am” can therefore never be anything other than the human being's most intimate inner experience. So there is something speaking in this sentence within the soul that can only speak from within. But this apparently quite empty affirmation of one's own self is how all higher occult experiences take place. They become more meaningful and full of life, but they retain the same form. Through the ego experience as presented by Fichte, one can get to know the type of all occult experiences, initially in the purely intellectual realm. It is therefore correct to say that with the “I am” God begins to speak in man. And just because this happens in a purely mental form, so many people do not want to recognize it.

Now, however, a limit to knowledge had to be reached precisely by the keenest minds that followed in the footsteps of Fichte. Pure thinking is namely only an activity of the personality, not of the individuality, which passes through the various personalities in recurring reincarnations. The laws of even the highest logic never change, even if in the stages of re-embodiments the human individuality ascends to the stage of the highest sage. The spiritual perception increases, the perceptive faculty expands when an individuality that was highly developed in one incarnation is re-embodied, but the logic of thought remains the same even for a higher level of consciousness. Therefore, that which goes beyond the individual incarnation can never be grasped by any thought-experience, no matter how refined, even if it rises to the highest levels. This is the reason why Fichte's way of looking at things, and also that of his contemporaries who followed in his footsteps, could not bring them to a realization of the laws of reincarnation and karma. Although various indications can be found in the works of the thinkers of this epoch, they arise more out of a general feeling than out of a necessary organic connection with their thought-structures. It may be said that the mission of these personalities in the history of thought was to present pure thought experiences as they can take place within an incarnation, excluding everything that reaches beyond this one embodiment of the human being.

The evolution of the human spirit proceeds in such a way that in certain epochs portions of the esoteric original wisdom are transferred into the consciousness of the people. And at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century it fell to the German national consciousness to shape the spiritual life of pure thought in its relation to the individual personal existence. If we consider what has already been said in connection with Schiller's personality, that art at this time was to be brought to the center of spiritual life, then we will find the emphasis on the personal point of view all the more understandable. Art is, after all, the living out of the spirit in sensual-physical forms. But the perception of these forms is conditioned by the organization of the individual personality living within the one incarnation. What extends beyond the personality into the supersensible realm will no longer be able to find immediate expression in art. Art does cast its reflection into the supersensible realm, but this reflection is only carried over as the fruit of artistic creation and experience by the abiding essence of the soul from one reincarnation to another. That which enters into existence directly as art and aesthetic experience is bound to the personality.

Therefore, in the case of a personality of the marked epoch, a theosophical world view in the most eminent sense also has a thoroughly personal character. This is the case with Friedrich von Hardenberg, who as a poet bears the name Novalis. He was born in 1772 and died as early as 1801. What lived in this soul, which was entirely imbued with a theosophical attitude, is present in some of his poetry and in a series of poetic-philosophical fragments. This attitude flows from every page of his creations to the reader; but everything is so that the highest spirituality is coupled with an immediate sensual passion, with very personal drives and instincts. A truly Pythagorean way of thinking lives in this young man's nature, which was further nourished by the fact that Novalis worked his way up to become a mining engineer by undergoing thorough mathematical and scientific training. The way in which the human mind develops the laws of pure mathematics out of itself, without the help of any kind of sensory perception, became for him the model for all supersensible knowledge in general. Just as the world is harmoniously structured according to the mathematical laws that the soul finds within itself, so he thought this could be applied to all the ideas underlying the world. That is why man's relationship to mathematics took on an almost devotional, religious character for him. Sayings such as the following reveal the peculiarly Pythagorean nature of his disposition: “True mathematics is the actual element of the magician... The highest life is mathematics... The true mathematician is an enthusiast per se. Without enthusiasm, there is no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. All divine messengers must be mathematicians. Pure mathematics is religion. One can only attain mathematics through a theophany. Mathematicians are the only happy people. The mathematician knows everything. He could do it even if he didn't know it. ... In the East, true mathematics is at home. In Europe, it has degenerated into mere technique. He who does not grasp a mathematical book with devotion and read it like the word of God does not understand it. ... Miracles, as unnatural facts, are amathematical, but there is no miracle in this sense, and what is called that is precisely understandable through mathematics, because there is nothing miraculous about mathematics."

In such sayings, Novalis has in mind not merely a glorification of the science of numbers and spatial dimensions, but the realization that all inner soul experiences should relate to the cosmos as the purely sensual-free mathematical construction of the mind relates to the outer numerical and spatially ordered harmony of the world. This is beautifully expressed when he says: “Mankind is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this limb with the upper world, the eye that looks up to heaven.” The identity of the human ego with the fundamental essence of the objective world is the leitmotif in all of Novalis's work. Among his “Fragments” is the saying: “Among people, one must seek God. In human affairs, in human thoughts and feelings, the spirit of heaven reveals itself most brightly.” And he expresses the unity of the ‘higher self’ in all of humanity in the following way: ”In the I, in the point of freedom, we are all in fact completely identical – only from there does each individual separate. I is the absolute total place, the central point.” At Noyalis, Noyalis's position is particularly evident, which was dictated by his awareness of art and artistic feeling at the time. For him, art is something through which man rises above his narrowly defined “lower self” and connects with the creative forces of the world. In the creative artistic imagination, he sees a reflection of the magical forces at work. Thus he can say: “The artist stands on man as the statue stands on the pedestal.” “Nature will be moral when, out of true love for art, it surrenders to art and does what art wills; art, when, out of true love for nature, it lives for nature and works after nature. Both must do it at the same time, out of their own choice for their own sake and out of the other's choice for the sake of the other.... When our intelligence and our world are in harmony, then we are equal to God.” Novalis's lyrical poems, especially his ‘Hymns to the Night,’ are imbued with such sentiments, as are his unfinished novel ‘Heinrich von Ofterdingen’ and the little work ‘The Apprentices at Sais,’ which is rooted entirely in mystical thinking and feeling.

These few personalities show how German poetry and thought in that period were based on a theosophical-mystical undercurrent. The examples could be multiplied by numerous others. Therefore, it is not even possible to attempt to give a complete picture here, but only to characterize the basic note of this spiritual epoch with a few lines. It is not difficult to see that individual mystical and theosophical natures with a spiritual and intuitive mind found the theosophical basic ideas in their own way. Thus, theosophy shines out beautifully from the creations of some personalities of this epoch. Many could be cited where this is the case. Lorenz Oken could be mentioned, who founded a natural philosophy that on the one hand points back to Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme through its mystical spirit; on the other hand, through ingenious conceptions about evolution and the connection of living beings, it is a forerunner of the justified parts of Darwinism. Steffens could be cited, who sought reflections of a cosmic spiritual life in the processes of earth development; Eckartshausen (1752–1803) could be referred to, who sought to explain the abnormal phenomena of nature and soul life in a theosophical-mystical way ; Ennemoser (1787–1854) with his “History of Magic”, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert with his works on dream phenomena and the hidden facts in nature; and the brilliant works of Justinus Kerner and Karl Gustav Carus are rooted in the same school of thought. Schelling moved more and more from pure Fichteanism to theosophy, and then, in his “Philosophy of Mythology” and “Philosophy of Revelation”, which were not published until after his death, traced the developmental history of the human spirit and the connection between religions back to their starting point in the mysteries. Hegel's philosophy should also be viewed in theosophical light, and then one would see how wrong the history of philosophy is in regarding this profound spiritual experience of the soul as mere speculation. All this would require a detailed work if it were to be treated exhaustively. Here, however, only a little-known personality is to be mentioned, who, in the focus of his mind, combined the rays of theosophical world-view and created a structure of ideas that in many respects completely coincides with the thoughts of theosophy that are being revived today. It is I. P. V. Troxler, who lived from 1780 to 1866 and whose works, in particular, the “Blicke in das Wesen des Menschen” (Glimpses into the essence of man), published in 1812, come into consideration. Troxler objects to the usual division of human nature into soul and body, which he finds misleading because it does not exhaust nature. He initially differentiates between four parts of the human being: spirit, higher soul, soul (which he considers the lower soul) and body. One need only see this classification in the right light to recognize how close it is to the one commonly found in theosophical books today. The body in his sense coincides completely with what is now called the physical body. The lower soul, or what he, in contrast to the body, calls the body, is nothing other than the so-called astral body. This is not just something that has been inserted into his world of thought, but he himself says that what is subjectively the lower soul should be characterized objectively by falling back on the term used by the ancient researchers, the astral body. “There is therefore,” he explains, ”necessarily something in man which the sages of ancient times foresaw and proclaimed as a σῶμα αστροιδες (Soma astroeides) [and ομραγιον σῶμα (Uranion soma)], or as a σχημα πνευματιχον ([scheme] pneumatikon) [sensed] and proclaimed, and what is the substrate of the middle sphere of life, the bond of immortal and mortal life.” Among the poets and philosophers who were Troxler's contemporaries, theosophy was alive as an undercurrent; but Troxler himself became keenly aware of this theosophy in the intellectual world around him and developed it in an original way. Thus, he himself comes upon much of what is found in the ancient wisdom teachings. It is all the more appealing to delve into his thought processes, since he does not directly build on old traditions, but rather creates something like an original theosophy out of the thinking and attitudes of his time.

We have been trying to come to grips with the following question: Why does man not notice how different—different spiritually and in their culture—are the several periods in which, during our present earth-cycle, he has spent his repeated earth-lives. We need to understand clearly why it is so widely believed that Man has altered very little during thousands of years, since history began, whereas Spiritual Science shows how greatly souls changed in their essential character during the third; fourth and fifth Post-Atlantean epochs—the fifth being our present one. These changes are confirmed by Spiritual-Scientific knowledge, but we find very little trace of them if we scan outer history, as usually presented and written.

I have already tried to show, in approaching this question, that, if one pays a little attention to the soul-element in history the changes spring to lisht. I have endeavoured to make comprehensible the difference between the feelings of the human soul, in, for instance, the eleventh or twelfth centuries, and those of the of the human soul of to-day. As an example I tried to illuminate for you the soul of Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century. Such examples might be multiplied, but before we go further in this direction, we will revert once more to the kernel of our question: What is it that prevents man from observing rightly how his various earth-lives differ in this respect?

He is chiefly prevented by the circumstance that, as constituted in the present earth-era, he has exceedingly little perception of his real ego, his true human self. But for certain hindrances, he would have quite a different idea of his nature and being, We will deal with these hindrances presently. For the moment I would like to point out,—you can take it, to begin with, simply as an hypothesis—how man would appear to himself if his real being were revealed to him.

If this were possible, he would above all notice a great and constant change in his personal life between birth and death. Looking back from whatever age—20, 30, or 50—towards his birth, he would see himself in perpetual metamorphosis. He would perceive by-gone changes morn clearly and realise hopefully that further changes are in store for him in the future. These I have mentioned in other lectures.

Because present-day man is too little inclined to realise himself as a soul-being, he has not much idea of how he has altered in the course of time. Strangely, but truly, his idea of himself is divided into two parts. He sees his bodily part on the one hand, a more or less constant factor in his life between birth and death. He is conscious, of course, that he “grows”, that he was tiny and became bigger, but that is almost all he knows consciously about his outer physical being. Take a simple example. You cut your nails—why? Because they grow. That shows, if you think about it, that a continual process of shedding takes place in your organism as regards the outer bodily part of it. In fact you drive that part out, so that in a certain time, at most in six or seven years, the material of the body is completely changed. You continually get rid of your material outfit. Man, however, is not conscious of this outer dissolution and continual reconstruction from within. Just fancy, how differently we should know ourselves, if we were conscious of how, as it were, we shed the external part of our physical body, dissolve it, and rebuild ourselves anew from within—we should be observing the metamorphosis of our own being!

Something else would be linked with this. If we really took into our consciousness that the body we bear is our possession for only seven years, that we have thrown off all we possessed of it before that, we should appear to ourselves much more spiritual. We should not have the deceptive notion, “I was a little child to begin with—then I grew bigger and different”—but we should know that though the material of the child-substance is somewhere, what has remained is not material, but absolutely super-substantial. If man could bring this metamorphosis into consciousness, he would be looking back at something retained ever since childhood. He would recollect himself as a spiritual being. If we knew what takes place in us, we should have much more spiritual conceptions of ourselves.

Yet again—suppose we looked at ourselves much less abstractly, we talk about ourselves as though we had a “Spiritual centre.” We speak of our Ego and we have the idea: “Our Ego was there in our childhood, and accompanied us further,” and so on; but we really picture it simply as a kind of spiritual centre. If only we could rise to the other conception—that of outer dissolution and inner reconstruction—we could not help regarding the Ego as the efficacious, active cause of it. We should see ourselves as something very real and inwardly active. In short, we would look upon our Ego not as something abstract, but would survey its inwardly active work on our body, leading this from one metamorphosis to another. We should correct any erroneous conceptions which we cherish on the subject at present. They are even embodied in the expression of speech. We say “we grow,” because we have the notion that we were to begin with, children, and have grown taller; but the matter is not as simple as that. The truth is that in a tiny child the bodily and the soul-spiritual activities are experienced more as a unity wherein the head-organism and the reproduction-organism (sex-organism) are closely associated. The two experiences of head and body separate later, becoming alien to one another. The material organism of childhood does not increase, for it is thrown off, dissolved; but the two poles of our own being grow wider apart. By this means, later on, in a fully formed body, in which the poles have separated from one another, our substance is organised from within. It seems to us as mere growth, but that is not so; we are organised inwardly, therefore we are connected with different outward things in earlier and later periods of life. As time goes on, the head-organism needs to move itself further away from the immediate earth-forces. The head rises; consequently, we “grow.”

All these conceptions would change if we accepted the actual truth—which we do not do. We leave out of account the constantly changing body, the body that is always becoming different we ignore it and imagine that it grows of itself and becomes larger; and so we fail to notice what a rich, mobile, living, inward entity is the ego, which works on us unceasingly between birth and death. Such a conception would give us a really coherent idea of ourselves if we could but grasp it, but modern man is not capable of that. This is to some extent connected with the destiny of the human race, with the whole development of our epoch. Man does not really identify himself with his living, active, ego, which actually builds his organism from year to year, but he divides it; on the one side he looks at his organism, which he imagines to be solid and enduring, and on the other at his ego, which he makes into an abstraction, a figure of straw. Such a man says: We have on the one side a sense-organism, a bodily one, through which we cannot approach things because they can only make “impressions” on us: the essential nature of the thing does not reveal itself to us at all; the “thing-in-itsef!” cannot be apprehended, we have only phenomena. Certainly, to look on the body as enduring substance gives this argument some justification. Then he looks at this insubstantial ego and says: There, within, there is something like a “feeling of duty,” and he sums it up as the “categorical imperative.” The unity is split up. If we thus divide the unity in human nature, criticising it from two sides, we become followers of Kant. What I am now saying goes into the very depths of present-day human thought.

Man of this age is little fitted to comprehend himself as a complete being in the word. He divides himself in the way I have described. The result is that we never contemplate our real soul-being with the eye of the spirit, or we would see that this part of ourselves is what continually works upon and changes the body. We look merely at the abstract body and the abstract ego and do not trouble about what the whole undivided human being may be. To become aware of that would at once lead us to recognise that this undivided being is different from incarnation to incarnation. The true, genuine human ego, concealed as it is, hidden at present from the soul's gaze, differs from life to life. Of course, if we are thinking of the abstraction, “ego,” not of the concrete human ego, we cannot arrive at the idea of the ego being so different from life to life. The result of thinking abstractly in this way is that things which are in any way similar are ultimately reduced to a featureless uniformity. Souls of course are similar in successive earth-lives; but on the other hand, they also differ, because from life to life a man passes through the course of human development. Because man does not in truth behold either the mutability of his body, or the real, whole activity of his ego, he does not see his true being. This is, as it were, a golden rule for gaining real knowledge of man and insight into his nature. And why?

The answer to this question lies in what you know of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic elements. We divide our being in such a way that on the one side we place our body, which we regard as having been small once and having expanded and grown, whereas it has in reality continually renewed itself. What is it that appears to us if we look at the body in this way? The Ahrimanic element, active within ourselves. But this Ahrimanic element is not our real human being; it belongs to the species and indeed remains the same though all ages. Therefore in looking at the body, we are really looking at our Ahrimanic part, and this is all that modern scientific anthropology describes in man. That is one thing we see—the corporeal part of ourselves, which we hare conceived of as being dense. The other is the abstract ego, which is in reality fluctuating, living strongly within us only; while we form a conception of ourselves, between birth and death. There we have our individual education, our uselessness and also our value,—there we survey our own personal life between birth and death; but we do not see our ego as it is in reality, as it works upon the metamorphoses of our physical body; we see it as Lucifer shows it to as, rarified. We see our physical part materialised, densified by Ahriman; our soul-spiritual part rarified by Lucifer.

If this was not so, if we did not divide ourselves so that one pole of our being is Ahrimanic and the other Luciferic, we should have a much more intimate connection with the dead who are always among us, because we should be more closely related to the spirituel world. We should comprehend the complete reality, to which belongs also the world in which man is after he passes through the gate of death, and before he returns to this world through the gate of conception.

Thus we never have our real being before us, but on the one side the physical-corporeal Ahrimanic phantom, on the other the soul-spiritual Luciferic phantom; two phantoms, two delusive images of ourselves, yet between that, imperceptible to us, lives the real man, that being to which we must refer when we say “man,” because this is the true man, progressing from life to life.

We must in all seriousness consider what this means for human knowledge. In this way we shall come to understand why it could be imagined that throughout the various epochs man remains the same. What we see are the incorrect thoughts about man; on the one side the idea of what does remain true to the species through long ages, and on the other, the real soul-spiritual psychic being, which is supposed not to extend beyond the life between birth and death. An understanding of how the soul-spiritual element alters the body from year to year would lead to a grasp of the mighty transition which occurs when it envelopes itself in the physical-corporeal through conception or leaves it again through death. We pay no heed to the work performed by the soul-Spiritual element on the body.

All this can be expressed in a different way. What we conceive of as our complete organism is but a small part of what we are as human beings. We only “dwell” in this organism. What we are accustomed to look upon as our organism, densified through Ahriman as we see it, has its real origin much more in our last incarnation than in this one. From the various studies of this year and former years you will gather that your physiognomy, in its present form, results from your preceding incarnation, your last earth-life. In a person's physiognomy we can really see a connection with his former life. Everything belonging to the physical corporeal organism is much more deeply connected with the last life than with the present one. Man of to-day is easily beguiled into saying: inasmuch as we have had no previous life, it cannot give us our present form, whether great or small. That is only self-persuasion. If we were to understand ourselves correctly, we should be obliged to look back to a former life. Paying attention to what forms our organism, in the way I have set forth, would bring enlightenment. A sudden light would be thrown on what we ourselves cannot form, and we would see how it has been formed by an earlier life. We can really have insight into someone if we know how his soul-spiritual part has fashioned his organism. This comes forth, as it were, out of his personality, and behind it remains what Ahriman makes visible as the result of th earlier embodiment.

For anyone who is accustomed to look upon man as a real living being, it is, when meeting a fellow-man, as though an entity emerged from him. Ths entity is his present self: only as a rule it is invisible. The other entity remains a little behind the first, and this it is which was formed from the past life. In the emerging entity something soon presents itself. At first, this entity is, I might say, perfectly transparent, but it rapidly becomes opaque, because the soul-spiritual element, appearing as an active power, densifies the entity which has just emerged. And then appears something else, which seems to be a seed for the ensuing earth-life.

For him who can perceive the connections, present-day man is seen as threefold. All sorts of myths convey this in their symbols. Call to mind numerous descriptions in which three consecutive generations are set forth, obviously to illustrate the threefold nature of man. Remember many of the renderings of Isis, also various Christian portrayals in which three figures are described as belonging together. Man's threeford nature is what is really meant. Of course a materialistic interpretation is possible—“Grandmother, Mother and Child,” if you like; but the threefold character is put there because it corresponds to a reality which can be perceived. We can most truly picture earlier times if we divest ourselves of the fantastic ideas of modern learning (which always tries to spin a meaning round pictorial representations), and take notice of what humanity's perceptions were in a past not so very far behind us, and how these were expressed artistically.

This kind of consideraticn is of the utmost importance. if we are to bring home to ourselves that the Christ, Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, has His relation (of which we speak so often), to the true human ego. If we consider St. Paul's words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” this “in me” refers to the true, hidden ego, invisible to view as yet. Man must in a sense look on it as a Spiritual being if he would find the right connectiona with the Christ. One would like to know how certain passages in the Gospels can possibly be understood, if this is not taken into account. For instance, the passage at the very beginning of the Gospel of St. John, where John speaks as go the Christ came to man as to the abode where He belongs. The (German) translators usually construe it “He came unto His own estate, and his own people received Him not,” yet the Gospel goes on to say: “But to as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the children of God, even to them that believe on His Name, which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John I. 12,13.). And it is made quite clear that He desired to come to all men who had this consciousness; yet those without, indeed all men, are certainly born “of blood” and “of the will of man”. The being I have been describing as the “true man”, not born of blood nor of the will of man, comes indeed from the spiritual world, and clothes himself in physical heredity. The Gospel is speaking of the man of whom I have told you to-day, and that is why it is so difficult to understand and is so erroneously expounded, fettered as it is by the conceptions current, to-day. Without the conceptions conveyed by Spiritual Science, the underlying, aspects of the Gospels cannot be understood; with them, a sudden light breaks in.

In respect of all these relationships, something tremendous happened at the Mystery of Golgotha for the evolution of humanity. Before then, as you know, the complete human ego lived differently in the body. The Mystery of Golgotha marked a point of time in which the whole consciousness of man was changed, as the result of the Union of the Christ-Being with earthly evolution. Now the time has , for an increasing comprehension of the Mystery of Golotha and its conneetion with mankind.

A knotty point for the many expositors of the Gospels, for instance, is the saying which, however epressed or translated., always has the same ring—the saying that “The Kingdom of Heaven has descended.” Amongst those who have entirely misconceived this expression is H.P. Blavatsky, who seized upon it and asserted that Christians therefore maintained that with the Mystery of Golgotha a sort of heavenly kingdom had come down to earth, and yet nothing different has happened—the ears of corn and the cherries have not become twelve times is large, etc.; intimating that on the physical earth nothing is altered. This “descent of the Kingdom of Heaven,” of the spiritual kingdom, crates great difficulties for many commentators of the Gospels, because they do not clearly understand it. The meaning really is that until the Mystery of Golgotha, men had to experience what they could of the spiritual on the physical plane by means of atavistic clairvoyance. After that, they had to lift themselves up to the spiritual, and discern things in the Spirit, which really has drawn near to them. There is no need for the word-spinning arguments which are brought forward from all quarters; the' truth must be recognised, and this truth is as follows:—

The effect for men of Christ having passed through the Mystery of Golgotha is that they can no longer receive spiritual life mearly through the fact of their physical existence, but only by living in the spiritual world. Anyone who now lives only in the physical world, is no longer living on the earth, but below the earth; because from the Mystery of Golotha onwards, the possibility is given us of living in the spirit. The spiritual kingdom has in truth come among us. Taken in this sense; the expression is at once understood, but only in connection with the Christ. This, however, was to be temporarily hidden. As man made the effort to acquire it, it would be gradually communicated to him; and only by gaining insight into it can the real course of, modern history since the Mystery of Golgotha be understood. Christianity, as it had come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, was in its early centuries implanted in the Gnosis, which was then more or less still in existence. It embodied very spiritual views of the real nature of Christ Jesus. Then the Church took on a defined form. This form can be traced historically, but you must bear in mind what its task was from the third, fourth, fifth century onwards. The explanation now given must not on any account be misunderstood. Spiritual Science, as here advocated, stands on the ground of genuine, active tolerance for all existing religious revelations. Spiritual Science must therefore be able to discover the relative truth of the different religious creeds. It is not that Spiritual Science leans more or less sympathetically towards this or that creed; its aim is to distinguish the truth contained in the different religious denominations; it weighs them all with care, and refuses to be one-sided. Spiritual Science must not be proclaimed as leaning towards this or that Creed: it is the Science of the Spirit. It can for instance, fully appreciate that it is a pity that for many people the inner content of Catholic ritual is lost. It knows how to appreciate the special virtues of Catholic ritual in relation to the course of civilisation, and also that a certain artistic output is closely related to Catholic ritual, which indeed is only a continuation of certain other religious creeds, much more so than is commonly thought. In this ritual there resides a deep element of the Mysteries. However, what I have to say essentially concerns sonething else, at all events not the Catholic ritual, which has its full inner justification as an extraordinary impulse for human creative achievement. What I now have to set forth is this: that ecclesiastical forms were given certain tasks—which are indeed still theirs to a certain extent, but were given for the most part at the time when such ardent souls as Bernard of Clairvaux found their way to their God through the Church. We must always discriminate between the Churches and such personalities as Bernard of Clairvaux and multitudes of others. What then, was the task of the Church? Its task was to keep souls as far away as possible from an understanding of Christ, to bring it about that souls should not approach too near to Him: The history of Church-life in the third or fourth century, and later on, is substantially the story of the estrangement of the human mind from a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha; in the development of the Church there is a certain antagonism towards an understanding of Christ. This negative task of the Church has its justification in the fact that men must always strive anew through the force of their own minds and souls to reach the Christ, and fundamentally through all these centuries man;s approach to the Christ has been a continual struggle of the individual against ecclesiasticism. Even with such men as Bernard of Clairvaux, it was so. Study even Thomas Aquinas. He was reckoned a heretic by the orthodox; he was interdicted, and only later did the Church adopt his teaching. The path to Christ was really always a “defensive action” against the Church, and only slowly and gradually could men win their way to Christ. We have but to think, for instance, of Petrus Waldus, the founder of the so-called sect of the “Waldenses,” and his associates in the twelfth century, none of whom at that time had any knowledge of the Gospel. The spreading of Church-life had come on without the Gospels. Just think of it! From those around Petrus Waldus a few persons were chosen who could translate something of the Gospels; thus they learnt to know the Gospels, and as they learnt, a holy, lofty Christian life flowed to them from the Gospels. The outcome was that Petrus Waldus was declared a heretic by the Pope, against the will of his contemporaries. Up to this time a certain amount of gnostic knowledge had spread even in Europe, as for instance among the “Catharists” translated as “Purified Ones;” it was directed to acquiring concepts, concrete concepts, about the Christ and the Mystery theof Golgotha. From the standpoint of the official Church this was not allowed, therefore the Catharists were heretics: “hetzer” (German for “heretic”) is only an alteration of their neme—it is the same word.

It is very necessary to take that of which I am now speaking in its full strictness, in order to distinguish the path of Christianity from that of the Church, and thus to grasp how, in our age, through the principles of Spiritual Science, a way must be paved tothe true Christ, to the real Christ-concept. Very many features of the present day become clear when we realise that not all that called itself Christian was intended to communicate the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, but that much was even intended to hinder that understanding, to raise a barrier against it. Does this barrier exist to this day? Indeed it does! I would like to give you a case in point.

Manifold endeavours, including that of Protestantism, were always in opposition to the Church, because the Church in many ways had the task of erecting a barrier against the understanding of Christ, and men could do no other than strive for that understanding. Petrus Waldus felt that need when he had recourse to the Gospels. Until then, there was only the Church—not the Gospels. Even now, many strange opinions are held about this relation of the Church to the Gospels. I want to read you a passage from a modern writer, very characteristic of this state of things, from which you will recognise that the opinion which condemnned Petrus Waldus to excommunication is deeply rooted even now. Take it as an example of what is being said even to-day:

“The Gospels and Epistles are for us incomparable written records of revelation but they are neither the foundation on which our Faith was built, nor the unique source from which the content of the latter is spontaneously created. In our view the Church is older than the sacred writings; from her hand we receive them, she guarantees their trustworthiness, and as regards the dangers of hand-written transcriptions, and of the changing of the text in translation into all languages of the earth, the Church is the only authoritative interpreter of the sense and import of every particular utterance.” (“The Principles of Catholicism and Science”, by George von Hertling, Freiburg 1899.)

This means that the actual content of the Gospels is irrelevant; all that matters is what the Church declares is to be found in them. I have to say this, for the simple reason that even in our own circles there is much simple mindedness on the subject. Again and again one hears the view that it would be useful if we could approach the Catholic Church, saying that our interpretation is entirely favourable to the Christ. But that would not help us at all, it would only blacken us in the eyes of the Church, because she allows nothing to be upheld about the Christ, or about any conclusions beyond those of Natural Science, unless the Church herself recognises it as in agreement with her doctrine. Whoever among us upholds a conception of Christ, and believes thereby to vindicate himself in the eyes of the Church, really accuses himself—is indeed regarded as having done so, because he has no right to declare anything about the Christ from any other source than the Church's owm doctrine .

The same author from whose work I have just read, speaks very clearly on the subject: “Believers are in just the same position as is the investigator of nature with the facts of exoerience.” He means that the believer must receive what the Church dictates to him about the spiritual world, just as the eyes take in the facts of nature.

“He must neither take anything away nor add anything, he must take it as it stands; above all the very purest reception of the true content of the matter is expected of him. The truths of revelation are something given, for him who grasps them in faith. For him, they are conclusive and complete. No enrichment of them has been possible since Christ: their volume cannot to decreased, and any change in their content is out of the question”.

So speaks one who subscribes fully to the genuine orthodox Catholic view—a view which must dissociate itself, for instance, with a certain aversion from any train of thought such as Lessing's, which leads-towards a renewed search for the Spiritual. Lessing's views went as far as to embrace repeated earth-lives; they are a product of modern spiritual life. The bitterest opposition is bound to exist between the Catholic Church and such Cerman spiritual life as flowed through Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller. This same person (von Hertling) writes further:

“The edifice of Church dcctrine, as it appears to the Theologian of to-day and is presented by him, was not complete and ready-made from the beginning. What Christ imparted to the Apostles, what they proclaimed to the world, was not a methodical, fully prepared system, developed at all points: it was a rich store of truths, all united as in a focus in one event of sacred history: the story of the Redemption, of the Incarnation of the Divine Logos; but the instruction of the believers, and the necessary defence against heathen assaults, as well as against the misrepresentations of heretics, made it necessary tc unite these truths in a system, to develop their full content, to determine their purport.—This was done by the unwearying proclamation of the doctrine by those specially chosen as instruments, according to the Catholic interpretation under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but at the same time vith the co-operation of the learning of the early Church.

“No new language was creeted by this revelation, but what was already current was used; the sense and meaning of individual words being recoined and heightened. Theology, which undertook to think out the content of Revelation while setting it in order for expository purposes, needed for the task certain tools and resources: sharply circumscribed ideas for organising the subject-matter; special exnression for making comprehensible relationships which far exceeded the experience of everyday life. A new task in the history of the world thereby devolved upon Greek philosophy. It had the vessels ready Prepared, into which an infinitely richer content, springing from a higher source, was to be poured. Platonism was the first source of this creative work. The drift of its speculation on the super-sensible distinctly singled it out for the task. Much later, after the lapse of more than a thousand years, when the most important essentials of revelation had at last been formulated in dogma, the close union of theological science with Aristotelian philosophy was completed and exists to this day”.

(Because, therefore, the philosophy of Aristotle was united with the Church as long ago as the Middle Ages, its value for the Church today is beyond question!)

“With its help, the sainted Thomas Aquinas, the greatest master of system known in history, raised the great edifice of doctrine, which, only modified here and there in detail, has determined Catholic theology as to form, expression and method of teaching ever since.”

The author in question regards what he calls Church doctrine as having come about by means of a certain union between the Christian wisdom-element and Greek Aristotelian Philosophy. He does recognise the possibility that in a very distant future, (he says expressly “in a future by no means near as yet”), Christianity might be approached through quite different ideas He says: Supposing that Christianity had not been spread abroad throurth Greek philosophy, but as it might have been, through the Indian, it would have come forth in an entirely different form. However, it must remain in the form it has received: it must not, be changed by any novel view, arising in modern times. But he in certainly aware that there are points where he is treading on thin ice:—

“I am only against a spiritual disposition which, in realms where full freedom is accorded to Scientific investigation, is deaf to all the fundamental objections, and holds fast to tradition.”

Yet he holds strongly enough to tradition!

And finally, it is then necessary to give way, as was done in the case of the Copernican system."

That waseonly in 1827! He turns away from legitimate endeavours to understand Christianity afresh, with a modern consciousness. That is remarkably little to his taste. He says:

“I could conceive that a far-distant future might loosen the union of Theology and Aristotelian philosophy, replacing it's no longer comprehensible or satisfying concepts with others, which would correspond to a knowledree improved in many ways.” He “could conceive”—that what nobody in any case understands to-day might be replaced by something equally incomprehensible.

“It would not be offending against the warning of the Gospel, because it would not be pouring new wine into old skins, for on the contrary new vessels would be produced, to preserve therein the never-failing wine of the doctrine of salvation, in its essential character, and to purvey it to the faithful.”

But that must not happen. He goes on:

“But the vessels must be chosen ones. The attempts made by Cartesianism in the seventeenth century, and by the philosnphy of Kant and Hegel in the nineteenth, exhort us to prudence. A school of ideas which would replace Aristotelianism would have to arise, just as that did, From fulness of knowledge and contemporary consciousness.”

Then these same men would oppose it, because they at any rate are not the offspring of “fulness of knowledge and contemporary consciousness”.

“It would have to acquire equal authority over wide circles of thinking humanity, and even then its transformation into ecclesiastical theology would hardly be attained without errors and perplexities on all hands.”

It would be necessary to “labour” to bring about understanding. “As, for instance, in the thirteenth century, when through the Arabs the complete philosophy of Aristotle was brought to the Christian West. Its reception aroused severe opposition. Even a Thomas Aquinas was not spared hostility. He was held by many to be an innovator, against whom the champions of the well-tried old order had to marshal their forces.”

It is remarkable how it is with this principle of over coming an old way of understanding. “Christianity—men may think it quite a good principle, but they absolutely will not admit its validity in their own epoch. It cannot be said that such a thing is done in simplicty. It is very learned, for the pamphlet concludes with a really significant reference—a reference to an Order which has at all times had reputation for shrewdness—a brotherhood which has a different standing from that of Bernard of Clairvaix or Francis ef Assisi, whose reputation rested or a certain mystical tendency. This other Order reckoned mystical piety aad such-like of less value than a certain shrewdness and understanding of worldly affairs. Hence the pamphlet says in conclusion:

“I end with an utterance of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which has been incorporated into the constitution of the Jesuit Order, and has ben referred to of late in different quarters: “Scientific pursuits, if they are undertaken with pure stiving in the service of God, are on that account, because they comprehend the whole of humanity, not less, but more pleasing to God than pennance.”

The endeavour has been made in our own time to awaken clear understanding on all sides. I will prove this to you by an example. I have been reading to you from this author so that you may see the position taken up by those who hold certain views, as regards a movement I was describing. This attitude of theirs was perceived by a writer who published a short time ago, (it is importent to note that it is of recent date) an article on the author of this pamphlet. I will read an extract from it:

“At the Conference in 1893, on the subjct of Catholic Science and the position of Catholic savants at the present day this declaration was made:

“We Catholic-Scientists of the nineteenth century are convinced that there is no antagonism between Science and Faith, but that they are ordained to combine in inner harmony. We are convinced that no two sides of truth exist, or can exist. God is the source of all truth; He has spoken to us through the Prophets and the incararnated Logos; He speaks to us through the ordained ministry of the Church, and no less in the laws of logic, which we must hold to when we strive for knowledge of the truths of Nature. eBcause God cannot contradict Hinself, therfore no antagonism can exist between supernatural and natural truths; between the teachings of revelation and a science which earnestly, honestly brings to light the laws and the rules of method.”

“This really means, however, that philosophy is reduced to silence. Its freedom is just the same for us as that of a flock of sheep in its enclosure, or the prisoners within walls. Philosophy, as regards its own principles, is just as little free under the determining, limiting rule of faith as they—who are allowed to walk about on their own feet, to use their own-hands and to move as they like, but in a strictly—enclosed space. The phrase “Catholic philosophy” embodies a direct contradiction, for by its own account of itself it is not unconditionally free.”

If our Spiritual Science were not independent, it would not be what it ought to be.

“Catholic philosophy has to follow a prescribed line of march. A philosophy claiming to be based. on scientific method must hold firm, regardless of consequences, to nothing outside the results of its own researches and its own thinking. It is bound by strict rules of investigation and verification, and is forbidden to take its stand within any particular religion or on any point of ecclesiastical dogma. Otherwise it is not science but unscientific dogmatism, governed not by principles of knowledge, but by faith and the power of faith. In that case it does not go its way unhindered and uninfluenced, nor does it follow impartially its own laws, but it acknowledges as a matter of course an ordained truth, and, in relation to that, resigns its independence.” (Dr. Bernhard Münz. “The German Imperial Chancellor as Philosopher” in the “Austrian Review”, 15th April 1918.)

That is precisely the task of the present time, to find the way for every hman being to stand on his own feet. A man who maintains such things as you have just heard quoted stands in sharpest contradiction to this task. There are neople who see that such opinions preclude any possibility of a scientific view of the universe; but it seems very difficult at the present time to prove the impartiality of one's judgment, however necessary it may be. The further progress of civilisation will depend on men comin to learn how in their soul-being they are connected with the Spiritual world; whoever shuts his eyes to this, hinders the most important task of his own day. There is no escape from this conclusion. The remarkable thing to-day is that people can look at the matter, and in a marvellous way draw other conclusions from it. The author of this article writes of the man from whose pamphlet I have read to you, which culminated in the confession of Jesuitism. The “subject” of the article is Georg von Hertling, now “Count” Hertling.—The author of the article, however, in spite of having said that the outlook he is criticising “excludes all science”, adds in conclusion:

“Count Hertling is a decided, strongly-marked individuality. Individuality literally means indivisibility, but in this case it implies divisibility, inner blending, universal organisation. Individual soul, family soul, and nation-soul meet and are accentuated side by side in this man: this trinity-of soul it is that makes him so strong and stamps him as the predestined Chancellor of the German Empire.” A need of our time is to find a way of touching the nerve through which the current of Spiritual Science must flow, and this can be none other than the one which enables the soul to find its onn way to the spiritual world. This must be thoroughly understood, for it is bound un with the deepest needs, the most indispensible impulses, our age. Our time demands of man that he should be able, in noticing a thing, to admit it, and to draw the real conclusions from it. Spiritual Science can be genuine only in those who have the courage to face truth and to maintain it; otherwise such experiences as I have described will become more frequent. I must add this, because more and more simple minds are to be found amongst us who hear with joy any praise of Spiritual Science, or what appears like it. Discrimination precisely in these very points is necessary. “Praise” can be far more hurtful and run far more counter to our efforts, than adverse criticism, when honestly meant.

Hermann Heisler, a protestant theologian, gave seventeen sermons in Constance and published them afterwards under the title of “Vital questions of the Day”. By chance a characteristic review of his book fell into my hands, and our unsophisticated friends would perhaps count it as something to be pleased with, inasmuch as it is unadulterated praise:

“These sermons deserve particular attention, on account of their authorship. Heisler was for ten years an evangelical Pastor in Styria and Bohemia, then, alarmed at the danger of becoming numbed by the routine of his office, resigned it for the time being, in order to devote himself for a year to studying the fundamentals of natural science and philosophy. Finally, urged by an inner call, he returned to his spiritual sphere with new joyfulness and love. As he could not serve his country with the colours, he offered his spiritual services to the Church of his native Baden, and was entrusted with a cure of souls at Constance, where these seventeen addresses were given in 1917. They are remarkable as regards their substance. They are all based on deep spiritual effort, and expect hearers and readers alike to share in it. They are not, designed to arouse beautiful feelings but to lead through earnest thinkins to convinced knowledge. They avoid the sermonising tone, and read almost like scientific treatises developed in a popular way about religious problems. I would instance the sermon on that many-sided conception, freedom. It arrives at the true conclusion: ‘Of course there always remains as absolute necessity which directs us. Even as free human beings, we still follow the aim which most attracts us; but the divine gift of freedom which Christ brings us is that the lower attractions of the sense-world lose their constraining power over our souls, and the majesty of the spiritual world gains inner sovereignty over us.’ ” The peculiar feature of Heisler's preaching, however, does not lie in the powerful grasp of his thinking, but in its special content: Heisler is a convinced, inspired Theosophist. He himself would rather use the term, “follower of Spiritual Science”. That must not be confused with the spiritualistic belief in the materialisation of spirits. It calls for a purely spiritual activity, bound to no material means. Our thoughts are forces, which, invisible yet powerful, stream out from us and impress the seal of our being on the whole of Nature, beneficially or the reverse. This belief in the imperishable power of the spirit is set forth for our comfort in the address, ‘Our Dead are Alive;’ it takes an amazing form in the one on ‘Destiny.’ Based on the account in St. John's Gospel of the man born blind, the old Indian and Orphic doctrines of the soul's pilgrimage, its reincarnation in an earthly body, is taught; the preacher would thereby solve the riddle of how fate so often seems unjust, and, like Lessing in his “Education of the Human Race,” would arouse a belief in a carefully planned divine education of humanity. When I add that Heisler looks upon this teaching, indeed on all his Spiritual Science, as a return to the New Testamet, lecturinrg upon it as science, and consciously overstepping the Kantian boundary between knowledre and faith, I have sketched his schene of thoght it its main features.”

“Well, we might say, what more is wanted! Really nothing better could be written! But the author of the review concludes his considerations thus: “I myself reject this Spiritual Science and abide by Kant; but after all, the sermons contain so much that is good, and Theosophy is for the moment agitating theology in so significant a way, (cf. for example, Rittlemeyer's writings in the Christliche Welt), that I believe I do many theologians and laity a service by drawing attention emphatically to these addresses.” (D. Schuster in “The Hanover Courier”, 18th July, 1913.)

That is often the way of thought in our age: inner force and courage are lacking in it. The man has “nothing but good” to say; one notices that he has insight into the good, because he can define it in charming words; but then—“I personally reject this Spiritual Science”! There you have the fruits of what I began by describing, and much in the present time is connected with these “fruits”. In the next lecture I will deal further with the tendency I have been discussing, and its effpcts in social democacy and Bolshevism.

Those who describe the intellectual life of Germany from the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century usually see, alongside the high point of art in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven and others, only an epoch of purely speculative thought in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and a few less important philosophers. It is widely believed that the latter personalities should be recognized merely as workers in the field of thought. It is admitted that they have done extraordinary work in the speculative field, but one is all too easily inclined to say that these thinkers were quite remote from actual occult research, from real spiritual experience. And so it happens that the theosophically striving person expects little profit from delving into their works.

Many who attempt to penetrate the thought-web of these philosophers give up the work after a time, because they find it unproductive. The scientific investigator says to himself: These thinkers have lost the solid ground of experience under their feet; they have built up in the nebulous heights the chimeras of systems, without any regard to positive reality. And for those interested in occultism, they lack the truly spiritual foundations. He comes to the conclusion: They knew nothing of spiritual experiences, of supersensible facts, and merely devised intellectual constructs.

As long as one stops at merely observing the outer aspects of the spiritual development, one will not easily come to a different opinion. But if one penetrates to the underlying currents, then the whole epoch presents itself in a different light. The apparent airy constructs of mere thought can be recognized as the expression of a deeper occult life. And Theosophy can then provide the key to understanding what these sixty to seventy years of spiritual life mean in the development of humanity.

In Germany at this time, there are two sets of facts, one of which represents the surface, but the other must be regarded as a deeper foundation. The whole thing gives the impression of a flowing stream, on the surface of which the waves ripple in the most diverse ways. And what is presented in the usual literary histories is only these rising and falling waves; but what lives in the depths and from which the waves actually draw their nourishment is ignored.

This depth contains a rich and fertile occult life. And this is none other than that which once pulsated in the works of the great German mystics, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius. Like a hidden power, this life was contained in the worlds of thought that Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel found there. The way in which, for example, Jakob Böhme had expressed his great spiritual experiences was no longer at the forefront of the prevailing literary discussion, but the spirit of these experiences continued to live on. One can see how, for example, this spirit lived on in Herder. Public discussion led Herder, like Goethe, to the study of Spinoza. In the work which he called “God,” Herder sought to deepen the conception of God in Spinozism. What he contributed to Spinozism was nothing other than the spirit of German mysticism. One could say that, unconsciously to himself, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius were his guides. It is from such hidden sources that we can explain how, in the “Education of the Human Race”, a rationalist spirit such as Lessing was, could have incorporated ideas about reincarnation. The term “unconscious” is, however, only half accurate, because such ideas and intuitions may not have been on the surface of literary discussion in Germany, but they certainly lived a full life in the most diverse “occult societies” and “fraternities”. But of the above, only Goethe can be considered as having been initiated into the most intimate life of such “fraternities”; the others had only a more superficial connection with them. Much of it found its way into their lives and work as inspiration, without their being fully aware of the real sources.

In this respect, Schiller represents an interesting phenomenon of intellectual development. We cannot understand the real intellectual nerve of his life if we do not delve into his youthful works, which can be found in his writings as “Correspondence between Julius and Raphael”. Some of the material contained in it was written by Schiller while he was still at the Karls School in Stuttgart, while some of it was only written in 1785 and 1786. It contains what Schiller calls the “theosophy of Julius” and by which he refers to the sum of ideas to which he had risen at that time. It is only necessary to cite the most important thoughts from this “theosophy” to characterize the way in which this genius assembled his own edifice of ideas from the rudiments of German mysticism that were accessible to him. Such essential thoughts are, for example, the following: “The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal image of the spirit had passed over into reality and the born world fulfilled the design of its creator – allow me this human conception – so the vocation of all thinking beings is to seek out in this existing whole the first drawing, the rule in the machine, the unity in the composition, the law in the phenomenon, and to transfer the building backwards to its ground plan... The great composition that we call the world now remains strange to me only because it exists, symbolically describing to me the manifold expressions of that being. Everything in and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of a force that is similar to me. The laws of nature are the ciphers that the thinking being puts together to make itself understood to the thinking being – the alphabet by means of which all spirits negotiate with the most perfect spirit and with themselves... A new experience in this realm of truth, gravity, the discovery of blood circulation, the Linnaean system of nature, mean to me originally just what an antique, excavated in the Herculaneum - both only a reflection of a spirit, a new acquaintance with a similar being to me ... There is no longer any wilderness for me in all of nature. Where I discover a body, I sense a spirit. Where I perceive movement, I divine a thought... We have concepts of the wisdom of the supreme being, of his goodness, of his justice – but none of his omnipotence. To describe his omnipotence, we help ourselves with the piecemeal notion of three successions: Nothing, His Will, and Something. It is waste and dark – God calls: Light – and there is Light. If we had a real idea of His active omnipotence, then we would be creators, like He is...

Such were the ideas of Schiller's theosophy when he was in his early twenties. And from this basis he rises to the comprehension of human spiritual life itself, which he places in the context of cosmic forces: “Love, therefore, - the most beautiful phenomenon in the creation of the soul, the almighty magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and the loftiest virtue – love is only the reflection of this one power, an attraction of excellence, based on an instantaneous exchange of personality, a confusion of beings. When I hate, I take something away; when I love, I become richer by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of a lost possession—hatred of men is prolonged suicide; selfishness is the greatest poverty of a created being.” From there, Schiller then seeks a God idea that corresponds to his feelings, which he presents in the following sentences: “All perfection in the universe is united in God. God and nature are two forces that are completely equal... It is a truth that, like a fixed axis, runs through all religions and systems - ‘Draw near to God, you who believe’.”

If we compare these statements of the young Schiller with the teachings of the German mystics, we will find that the latter have sharply defined thought contours that appear in his work as the exuberant expression of a more general world of feeling. Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius have as a definite view of their intuitive mind what Schiller has in mind in the vague presentiment of feeling.

What comes to light in such a characteristic way in Schiller is also present in other of his contemporaries. Intellectual history only has to describe it in his case, because in his epoch-making works it has become a driving force for the nation. One can say that in Schiller's time, the spiritual world of facts of German mysticism as intuition, as direct experience of spiritual life, was hidden as if under a veil; but it lived on in the realm of feeling, in intuitive perceptions. People had retained devotion and enthusiasm for that which they no longer directly saw with the “spiritual senses.” We are dealing with an epoch in which spiritual vision was veiled, but in which feeling and intuitive sensing of this world were not.

All this process is now based on a certain lawful necessity. What entered into seclusion as spiritual vision emerged as artistic life in this period of German intellectual life. In occultism, one speaks of successive cycles of involution and evolution. Here we are dealing with such a cycle on a small scale. The art of Germany in the epoch of Schiller and Goethe is nothing more than the evolution of German mysticism in the realm of outer sensuous form. But in the creations of the German poets, the deeper insight recognizes the intuitions of the great mystical age of Germany. The mystical life of the past now takes on an entirely aesthetic, artistic character.

This is clearly expressed in the writing in which Schiller reached the full height of his world view, in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”. The occult dogmatist will perhaps find nothing in these Letters either but the brilliant speculations of a fine artistic mind. In reality, however, they are dominated by the endeavour to give a guide to a different state of consciousness from the ordinary one. They describe one stage on the way to the “higher self”. The state of consciousness that Schiller describes is indeed far removed from the astral or devachanic life of experience; but it does represent something higher than our everyday life. And if we approach it with an open mind, we can very well recognize in what can be called the 'aesthetic state', according to Schiller, a preliminary stage of those higher forms of intuition. Schiller wants to lead people beyond the standpoint of the 'lower self'. This lower self is characterized by two qualities. Firstly, it is necessarily dependent on the influences of the sensual world. Secondly, it is subject to the demands of logical and moral necessity. It is thus unfree in two directions. The sensual world prevails in its drives, instincts, perceptions, passions and so on. In his thinking and in his morality, the necessity of reason prevails. But only the person who has ennobled his feelings, drives, desires, wishes, and so on, so that only the spiritual is expressed in them, and who, on the other hand, has so completely absorbed the necessity of reason in himself that it is the expression of his own being, is free in Schiller's sense. A life led in this way can be characterized as one in which a harmonious balance has been achieved between the lower and higher selves. Man has ennobled his desire nature to such an extent that it is the embodiment of his “higher self”. Schiller sets this high ideal in these “Letters”, and he finds that in artistic creation and in pure aesthetic devotion to a work of art, there is an approach to this ideal. Thus, for him, life in art becomes a genuine means of educating the human being in the development of his “higher self”. For him, the true work of art is a perfect harmony of spirit and sensuality, of higher life and outer form. The sensual is only a means of expression; but the spiritual only becomes a work of art when it has found its expression entirely in the sensual. Thus the creative artist lives in spirit, but he lives in it in a completely sensual way; through him, everything spiritual becomes perceptible through the senses. And the person who immerses himself aesthetically perceives through his external senses; but what he perceives is completely spiritualized sensuality. So we are dealing with a harmony between spirit and sensuality; the sensual appears ennobled to the spirit, the spiritual comes to revelation to the point of sensual vividness. Schiller would also like to make this “aesthetic state” the model for social coexistence. He regards as unfree a social relationship in which people base their mutual relationships only on the desires of the lower self, of egoism. But a state in which mere legislation of reason is called upon to rein in the lower instincts and passions seems no less unfree to him. As an ideal, he posits a social constitution within which the individual feels the 'higher self' of the whole to be so strong as his own being that he acts 'selflessly' out of his innermost urge. The “individual ego” should come to the point where it becomes the expression of the “total ego”. Schiller perceives social action that is driven by such impulses as the action of “beautiful souls”; and such “beautiful souls”, which bring the spirit of the “higher self” to revelation in their everyday nature, are for Schiller also the truly “free souls”. He wants to lead humanity to “truth” through beauty and art. One of his core sayings is: Only through the dawn of the beautiful does man enter the land of knowledge.

Thus, from Schiller's world view, art is assigned a high educational mission in the evolutionary process of humanity. One could say that what Schiller presents here is the aesthetic-artistic mysticism of the earlier period of German intellectual life.

It might now appear that it is difficult to build a bridge from Schiller's aestheticism to another personality of the same period, but who is no less to be understood as coming from an occult undercurrent, namely Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On superficial examination, Fichte will be seen as a mere speculative thinker, as an intellectual. It is true that his domain is that of thought, and that those who want to seek out spiritual heights that lie above the world of thought will not find them with Fichte. Those who want a description of “higher worlds” will look for them in vain with him. Fichte has no experience of an astral or mental world. According to the content of his philosophy, he is concerned only with ideas that belong to the physical world. But the matter presents itself quite differently when one looks at his treatment of the world of thought. This treatment is by no means a merely speculative one. It is one that corresponds entirely to occult experience. Fichte only considers thoughts that relate to the physical world; but he considers these as an occultist would. Therefore, he himself is quite aware of leading a life in higher worlds. One need only see how he expresses himself in the lectures he gave in Berlin in 1813: “Imagine a world of the blind-born, to whom only those things and their relationships are known that exist through the sense of touch. Stand among them and speak to them of colors and the other qualities that are perceived only through the light of sight. Either you speak to them of nothing, and this is fortunate if they say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, you will stop talking to no avail... Or, for some reason, they want to give your teaching reason after all: so they can understand it only in terms of what they know through touch: they will want to feel light and colors and the other relationships of visibility, assume they feel it, contrive something within the feeling and lie to themselves about what they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret.” At another time, Fichte says directly that for him his contemplation of the world is not merely a speculation about that which the ordinary senses give, but that a higher sense, reaching beyond these, is necessary for it: ”The new sense is is the sense for the spirit; for the one who is only spirit and absolutely nothing else, and to whom even the other, the given being, takes on the form of the spirit and is transformed into it, to whom therefore being in its own form has indeed disappeared... This sense has been seen in this way since the beginning of time, and everything great and excellent in the world, which alone makes humanity endure, comes from the visions of this sense. But that this sense should have seen itself in its difference and contrast to the other ordinary sense was not the case. The impressions of the two senses merged, and life disintegrated into these two halves without a unifying bond.” These last words are extremely characteristic of Fichte's place in the world of spiritual life. For the merely external (exoteric) philosophical striving of the West, it is indeed true that the sense of which Fichte speaks “did not see itself”. In all mystical currents of spiritual life that are based on occult experience and esoteric contemplation, it is clearly expressed; but, as already mentioned, the deeper basis for this was unknown in the prevailing literary and scholarly discussions of Fichte's time. In the terminology of contemporary German philosophy, Fichte was indeed the scout and discoverer of this higher meaning. That is why he started from something quite different than other philosophers. As a teacher he demanded of his students, and as a writer of his readers, that they should first of all perform an inner deed of the soul. He did not want to impart knowledge of anything outside of themselves, but he did make the demand that they perform an inner act. And through this inner act they were to ignite the true light of self-awareness within themselves. Like most philosophers of his time, he started from Kant's philosophy. Therefore, he expressed himself in the form of Kant's terminology, just as Schiller did in his mature years. But in terms of the height of inner, spiritual life, he surpassed Kantian philosophy very far, just as Schiller did. If one attempts to translate Fichte's demands on his listeners and readers from the difficult philosophical language into a more popular form, it might be expressed something like this: Every thing and every fact perceived by man imposes its existence on him. It is there without any action on the part of man, as far as his deepest inner being is concerned. The table, the flower, the dog, a light phenomenon and so on are there through something foreign to man; and it is only for man to determine the existence that has come about without him. For Fichte, the situation is different with the “I” of man. It is only there in so far as it attains being itself through its own activity. Therefore the sentence “I am” means something quite different from any other sentence. Fichte demanded that one should become conscious of this self-creative process as the starting point for any spiritual contemplation of the world. In every other realization, man can only be receptive; in the case of the “I” he must be creative. And he can perceive his “I” only by looking at himself as the creator of this “I. Thus Fichte demands a completely different way of looking at the ‘I’ than at all other things. And he is as strict as possible in this demand. He says, ”Most people would be more easily persuaded to consider themselves a piece of lava in the moon than an I...” He who is not yet at peace with himself on this point does not understand fundamental philosophy, and does not need it. Nature, of which he is a machine, will guide him without any effort of his own in all the business he has to carry out. To philosophize requires independence: and this one can only give oneself. - We should not want to see without the eye; but we should not claim that the eye sees either."

This very sharply delineates the boundary between ordinary experience and the occult. Ordinary perception and experience extend no further than the organs of perception that are objectively built into the human being. The occult begins where man begins to build higher organs of perception for himself through the dormant powers within him. Within ordinary experience, man can only feel himself to be a creature. When he begins to feel himself as the creator of his being, he enters the realm of the so-called occult life. The way Fichte characterizes the “I am” is entirely in line with occultism. Even though he remains in the realm of pure thought, his contemplation is not mere speculation, but true inner experience. But for this very reason it is also all too easy to mistake his world view for mere speculation. Those who are driven by curiosity into the higher worlds will not find what they are looking for by delving into Fichte's philosophy. But for those who want to work on themselves, to discover the abilities slumbering in their souls, Fichte can be a good guide. He will realize that what matters is not the content of his teachings or dogmas, but the power that grows in the soul when one devotedly follows Fichte's thought paths. One might compare this thinker to the prophet who did not enter the promised land himself, but led his people to a summit from which they could see its glories. Fichte leads thinking to the summit from which entry into the land of the occult can be made. And the preparation that one acquires through him is as pure as can be imagined. For it completely transcends the realm of sense perception and the realm of that which originates from the desire and covetousness of man (from his astral body). Through Fichte, one learns to live and move in the very pure element of thought. One retains nothing of the physical world in the soul except what has been implanted from higher regions, namely thoughts. And these form a better bridge to spiritual experiences than the training of other psychic abilities. For thought is the same everywhere, whether it occurs in the physical, astral or mental world. Only its content is different in each of these worlds. And the supersensible worlds remain hidden from man only as long as he cannot completely remove sensual content from his thoughts. When the thought becomes free of sensuality, then only one step remains to be taken, and the supersensible world can be entered.

The contemplation of one's own self in Fichte's sense is so significant because, with regard to this “self”, man remains without all thought content if he does not give himself such from within. For all the rest of the world, for all perception, feeling, will and so on, which make up the content of ordinary existence, the outer world fills the human being. He needs - in Fichte's words - basically to be nothing more than the “machine of nature”, which “manages its business without his intervention”. But the “I” remains empty, no outer world fills it with content if it does not come from within. Therefore, the realization “I am” can never be anything other than man's most intimate inner experience. Thus, there is something speaking in this sentence within the soul that can only speak from within. But the way this seemingly empty affirmation of one's own self occurs is how all higher occult experiences take place. They become richer in content and more vital, but they retain the same form. Through the experience of the I, as presented by Fichte, one can get to know the type of all occult experiences, at least in the purely mental sphere. It is therefore correct to say that with the “I am” God begins to speak in man. And it is only because this happens in a purely mental form that so many people do not want to recognize it.

But now, precisely with the keenest minds, which walked in such ways as Fichte, a limit of knowledge had to occur. Pure thinking is namely only an activity of the personality, not of the individuality, which passes through the various personalities in recurring reincarnations. The laws of even the highest logic never change, even if in the stages of re-embodiments the human individuality ascends to the stage of the highest sage. The spiritual perception increases, the perceptive faculty expands when an individuality that was highly developed in one incarnation is re-embodied, but the logic of thought remains the same even for a higher level of consciousness. Therefore, that which goes beyond the individual incarnation can never be grasped by any experience of thought, no matter how subtle, even if it rises to the highest levels. This is the reason why Fichte's way of looking at things, and also that of his contemporaries who followed in his footsteps, could not bring them to a realization of the laws of reincarnation and karma. Although various indications can be found in the works of the thinkers of this epoch, they arise more from a general feeling and are not necessarily and organically connected with their thought-structures. It may be said that the mission of these personalities in the history of thought was to present pure thought experiences as they can take place within an incarnation, excluding everything that reaches beyond this one embodiment of the human being.

The evolution of the human spirit proceeds in such a way that in certain epochs portions of the original esoteric wisdom are transferred into the consciousness of the people. And at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, it fell to the German national consciousness to shape the spiritual life of pure thought in its relationship to the individual personal existence. If we consider what has already been said in connection with Schiller's personality, that at this time art was to be placed at the center of intellectual life, then we will find the emphasis on the personal point of view all the more understandable. Art is, after all, the living out of the spirit in sensuous, physical forms. But the perception of these forms is conditioned by the organization of the individual personality living within the one incarnation. What projects beyond the personality into the supersensible realm will no longer be able to find expression in art directly. Art does reflect the supersensible, but this reflection is only carried over as the fruit of artistic creation and experience by the abiding essence of the soul from one reincarnation to another. That which enters into existence directly as art and aesthetic experience is bound to the personality. Therefore, in the case of a personality from the characterized epoch, a theosophical world view in the most eminent sense also has a thoroughly personal character. This is the case with Friedrich von Hardenberg, who as a poet bears the name Novalis. He was born in 1772 and died as early as 1801. What lived in this soul, which was entirely permeated by theosophical sentiment, is contained in a few poems and a series of poetic-philosophical fragments. From every page of his creations, this attitude flows towards the reader; but everything is such that the highest spirituality is coupled with an immediate sensual passion, with very personal drives and instincts. A truly Pythagorean way of thinking lives in this young nature, which was further nourished by the fact that Novalis worked his way up to become a mining engineer through a thorough mathematical and scientific education. The way in which the human mind develops the laws of pure mathematics out of itself, without the help of any sensory perception, became for him the model for all supersensible knowledge in general. Just as the world is harmoniously structured according to the mathematical laws that the soul finds within itself, so he thought this could be applied to all the ideas underlying the world. That is why man's relationship to mathematics took on an almost devotional, religious character for him. Sayings like the following reveal the peculiarly Pythagorean nature of his disposition: “True mathematics is the actual element of the magician. ... The highest life is mathematics... The true mathematician is an enthusiast per se. Without enthusiasm, there is no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. All divine messengers must be mathematicians. Pure mathematics is religion. One can only attain to mathematics through a theophany. Mathematicians are the only happy people. The mathematician knows everything. He could do it even if he didn't know it... In the East, true mathematics is at home. In Europe, it has degenerated into mere technique. He who does not grasp a mathematical book with reverence and read it as the word of God does not understand it... Miracles as unnatural facts are amathematical – but there is no miracle in this sense, and what is called a miracle is precisely understandable through mathematics, because there is nothing miraculous about mathematics."

In such sayings, Novalis has in mind not merely a glorification of the science of numbers and spatial magnitudes, but the idea that all inner soul experiences should relate to the cosmos as the pure, sensuality-free, mathematical construction of the mind relates to the outer, numerically and spatially ordered harmony of the world. This is beautifully expressed when he says: “Humanity is, as it were, the higher meaning of our planet, the eye that it raises to heaven, the nerve that connects this limb to the upper world.” The identity of the human ego with the essence of the objective world is the leitmotif in all of Novalis's work. Among his “fragments” is the saying: “Among people, one must seek God. In human affairs, in human thoughts and feelings, the spirit of heaven reveals itself most brightly.” And he expresses the unity of the ‘higher self’ in all of humanity in the following way: ”In the I, in the point of freedom, we are all in fact completely identical - only from there does each individual separate. I is the absolute total place, the central point.” In Novalis, the position that the consciousness of the time assigned to art and artistic feeling is particularly evident. For him, art is something through which man grows beyond his narrowly defined “lower self” and through which he relates to the creative forces of the world. In the creative artistic imagination, he sees a reflection of the magical forces of action. Thus he can say: “The artist stands on man as the statue stands on the pedestal.” “Nature will be moral when, out of true love for art, it surrenders to art and does what art wills; art, when, out of true love for nature, it lives for nature and works for nature. Both must do it at the same time, of their own choosing, for their own sake, and of the other's choosing, for the sake of the other... When our intelligence and our world are in harmony, we are equal to God.” Novalis's lyric poems, especially his ‘Hymns to the Night,’ are imbued with such sentiments, as are his unfinished novel ‘Heinrich von Ofterdingen’ and the little work ‘The Apprentices at Sais,’ which is rooted entirely in mystical thinking and feeling.

These few personalities show how German poetry and thought in that period was based on a theosophical-mystical undercurrent. The examples could be multiplied by numerous others. Therefore, it is not even possible to attempt to give a complete picture here, but only to characterize the basic note of this spiritual epoch with a few lines.

It will not be difficult to see, however, that individual mystical and theosophical natures with a spiritual-intuitive mind found the theosophical basic ideas themselves in part in their own way from this whole life. Thus, theosophy shines out beautifully for us from the creations of some personalities of this epoch. Many could be cited where this is the case. Lorenz Oken could be mentioned, who founded a natural philosophy that, on the one hand, points back to Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme through its mystical spirit, and, on the other hand, is a forerunner of the justified parts of Darwinism through ingenious conceptions about evolution and the connection between living beings. Steffens could be cited, who sought in the processes of the development of the earth reflections of a cosmic spiritual life. One could refer to Eckartshausen (1752-1803), who sought to explain the abnormal phenomena of nature and soul life in a theosophical-mystical way. Ennemoser (1787-1854) with his “History of Magic”, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert with his works on dream phenomena and the hidden facts in nature and the spirited explanations of Justinus Kerner, and Karl Gustav Carus are also rooted in the same school of thought. Schelling went from pure Fichteanism more and more to theosophy, and then in his “Philosophy of Mythology” and “Philosophy of Revelation,” which were not published until after his death, traced the developmental history of the human spirit and the connection between religions to their starting point in the mysteries. Hegel's philosophy should also be viewed in theosophical light, and then one would see how wrong it is in the history of philosophy to consider this profound spiritual experience of the soul to be mere speculation. All this requires, if it is to be treated exhaustively, a detailed work. Here, however, only a little-known personality is to be mentioned, who, in the focus of his mind, combined the rays of theosophical world-view and created a structure of ideas that in many respects completely coincides with the thoughts of theosophy that are being revived today. It is J. P. V. Troxler, who lived from 1780 to 1866 and whose works include, in particular, “Glimpses into the Essence of Man”, published in 1812. Troxler objects to the usual division of human nature into soul and body, which he finds misleading because it does not exhaust nature. He initially distinguishes between four elements of human nature: spirit, higher soul, soul (which he considers the lower soul) and body. One need only see this classification in the right light to recognize how close it is to the one commonly found in theosophical books today. The body as he understands it coincides completely with what is now called the physical body. The lower soul, or what he, in contrast to the body, calls the body, is nothing other than the so-called astral body. This is not something that has been inserted into his world of thought, but he himself says that what is subjectively the lower soul should be characterized objectively by resorting to the term astral body used by the ancient researchers. “There is therefore,” he explains, ”necessarily something in man which the sages of ancient times sensed and proclaimed as a σῶμα αστροειδες (Soma astroeides) and οὐρανόν σῶμα (Uranion soma), or as a σχῆμα πνευματικόν (schema pneumatikon), and what is the substrate of the middle sphere of life, the bond of the immortal and the mortal life?” Among the poets and philosophers who were Troxler's contemporaries, theosophy was alive as an undercurrent; but Troxler himself became keenly aware of this theosophy in the intellectual world around him and developed it in an original way. Thus, he comes to many of the ancient wisdom teachings through his own efforts. It is all the more appealing to delve into his thought processes, since he does not directly build on old traditions, but rather creates something like an original theosophy out of the thinking and attitudes of his time.

For the reasons expressed in the previous chapter, it is impossible to speak adequately about the relation between anthropology (natural science) and anthroposophy (spiritual science) in connection with Max Dessoir's book Beyond the Soul. But I believe that this relation can become visible if I place here what I wrote with a different intention, in memory, namely, of the philosopher Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in March 1917. The departure of this man, whom I held in the highest esteem, had the effect of bringing before my soul anew his significant life's work; it moved me to express the following.

[ 2 ] At this moment when the death of this revered person has interrupted his work, it seems to me that I might make an attempt, from an anthroposophical viewpoint to arrive at a view of Franz Brentano's philosophical life's work. I believe that the anthroposophical viewpoint will not let me fall into a one-sided evaluation of Brentano's world view. I assume this for two reasons. Firstly, no one can accuse Brentano's way of picturing things of having even the slightest tendency in an anthroposophical direction. If he himself had had any cause to judge it, he would certainly have rejected it decisively. Secondly, from my anthroposophical viewpoint, I am in a position to approach the philosophy of Franz Brentano with unconditional reverence.

[ 3 ] With respect to my first reason, I believe I am correct in saying that if he had arrived at an assessment of what I mean by anthroposophy, Brentano would have shaped it the way he did his judgment on Plotinus' philosophy. As with it he would certainly also have said of anthroposophy: “mystical darkness and an uncontrolled fantasy roving into unknown regions.” As with neo-platonism he would have urged caution with respect to anthroposophy “so as not, enticed by empty appearances, to lose oneself in the labyrinthine passages of a pseudophilosophy.” Yes, he may also have found anthroposophy's way of thinking to be too dilettantish even to be worthy of being reckoned to the philosophies which he judged the way he did those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In his inaugural Vienna address he said of them: “Perhaps the recent past has also been an ... epoch of decay, in which all concepts ran together in a muddy way, and no trace was to be found of a method in keeping with facts.” I believe that Brentano would have judged in this way, even though I also of course not only consider this judgment to be totally unfounded, but also regard as unjustified any pairing of anthroposophy with the philosophies with which Brentano would probably have paired it.

[ 4 ] Now with respect to my other reason for coming to terms with Brentano's philosophy, I must confess that for me his philosophy belongs to the most inviting accomplishments in soul research in modern times. It is true that I was only able to hear a few of Brentano's lectures in Vienna some thirty-six years ago; but from then on I have followed his literary activity with warmest interest. Unfortunately, when measured against my wish to hear from him, his publications came at too great an interval from each other. And these writings are mostly of such a kind that one peered through them as though through little openings into a room filled with treasures; one looked, so to speak, through occasional publications upon a broad realm of the unpublished thoughts that this exceptional man bore within himself—bore within himself in such a way that it strove in continuous evolution toward lofty goals of knowledge. When, therefore, in 1911, after a long interval there appeared his book on Aristotle, his brilliant book Aristotle's Teaching on the Origin of the Human Spirit, and his republishing of the most important sections of his Psychology, with its penetrating addenda, the reading of these books was a series of festive joys for me.

[ 5 ] With respect to Franz Brentano I feel myself imbued with a kind of soul disposition of which I believe I may say that one acquires it when the anthroposophical viewpoint— out of scientifically acquired conviction—in fact takes hold of one's soul disposition. I strive to gain insight into the value of his views, even though I am under no illusion about the fact that he could—yes, would even have had to—think about anthroposophy in the way indicated above. I am truly not saying this here in order to fall foolishly into a vain self-critique of my soul disposition when confronted by hostile or differing views, but rather because I know how many misunderstandings of my assessments of other spiritual streams have occurred through the fact that in my books I have so often expressed myself in a way stemming from this soul disposition. [ 6 ] It seems to me that the whole methodology of Brentano's soul research is permeated with the basic thoughts that moved him in 1868 to set up his guiding principle. As he was entering his philosophical professorship at that time in Wurzburg, he placed his way of picturing things into the light of the thesis: True philosophical research cannot be of any other kind than that which is considered valid in natural-scientific cognition. “Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est.” ¹ When he then published the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874—at the time of entering his Vienna professorship—he sought to present soul phenomena scientifically, in accordance with the above guiding principle. What Brentano wanted to accomplish with this book and its further manifestations in publications during his lifetime pose a significant scientific problem for me. As is clear from his book, Brentano counted on a series of books to contain his psychology. He promised to publish a second book shortly after the first. But no sequel was ever published to his first book, which contained only the preliminary ideas of his psychology. When he published the lecture he had given in 1889 to the Vienna Bar Association, entitled The Origins of Moral Knowledge, he wrote in the preface:

It would be a mistake, just because of the chance request for this lecture to regard it as the passing work of the moment. It offers the fruits of years of reflection. Of everything I have published so far its contents are definitely the ripest creation. They belong to the thought complex of a "descriptive psychology" which I dare to hope I will be able to reveal in its full scope to the public in the not too distant future. Its far removal from any tradition and more especially the significant development of my own views as presented in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint will clearly show that I have not in fact been idle during my long literary retirement.

But this “descriptive psychology” also never appeared. By reading his Research into the Psychology of the Senses (1907), which is restricted to one small area, devotees of Brentano's philosophy can reckon what they would have gained from such a descriptive psychology.

[ 7 ] The question must be asked: What made Brentano hold back ever and again from continuing his publications, and then not to publish at all something he believed would be ready shortly? I confess that I was shaken to the core when I read the following words in the memorial to Brentano written by Alois Höfler in May 1917: “Brentano was working ahead so confidently on his main problem, proof of God's existence, that a few years ago an excellent Viennese doctor and close friend of Brentano's told me that Brentano had assured him a short while ago that he would now have his proof of God's existence ready in a few weeks ...” I felt the same way when I read in another memorial (by Utitz): “The work that he loved the most fervently, that he applied himself to his whole life long, remains unpublished.”

[ 8 ] It seems to me that Brentano's destiny with respect to his projected publications represents a weighty, spiritual-scientific problem. It is true that we can approach this problem only if we are willing to study, in its own special character, what Brentano was able to communicate to the world. [ 9 ] I consider it important to note that Brentano wants, with real acumen, to establish as a basis for his psychological research a pure mental picture of the genuine soul element. He asks himself: What is characteristic of all the occurrences that one must address as soulful? And he found what he expressed in the following way in the addenda of his Psychology (1911): “What is characteristic of every soul activity consists, as I believe I have shown, in its relation to something as object.” Mental picturing is a soul activity. Characteristic of it is that I not only picture but that I picture something, that my mental picture relates to something. Borrowing from medieval philosophy, Brentano calls this characteristic of soul phenomena an “intentional relation.” In another place he said:

The characteristic common to everything of a soul nature is what is often called “consciousness,”—to use a term that unfortunately can be quite misleading—i.e., it is a subjective activity, in a so-called intentional relation to something that perhaps is not real but nevertheless is given in an inwardly objective way. No hearing without something heard; no believing without something believed; no hoping without something hoped for; no striving without something striven for; no joy without something to be joyous about; and so on.

This intentional inner awareness, therefore, is something which in fact guides us as a kind of leitmotiv in such a way that through it one recognizes everything to which we can apply it as being of a soul nature.

[ 10 ] Brentano contrasts soul phenomena with physical phenomena: colors, sound, space, and many others. He finds that these last are different from the soul phenomena through the fact that an intentional relation is not characteristic of them. And he limits himself to attributing this relation to soul phenomena and to denying it to physical phenomena. But now, precisely when one learns to know Brentano's view on the intentional relation, our inner vision is led to the question: Does not a viewpoint like this require us to look at physical phenomena also from the same viewpoint? Now someone who, in the sense of Brentano, tests physical phenomena for a common element as he did with soul phenomena will find that every phenomenon in the physical realm exists through (by virtue of) something else. When a body dissolves in a fluid, this phenomenon of the dissolved body occurs through the relation to it of the dissolving fluid. When phosphorus changes color under the influence of the sun, this phenomenon points in the same direction. All the qualities of the physical world exist through the interrelations of things to each other. What Moleschott says is correct for physical existence: “All existence is an existence through qualities. But there is no quality that does not exist through a relation.” Just as everything of a soul nature contains something in itself by which it points to something outside itself, so conversely, a physical thing is so constituted that it is what it is through the relation to it of something outer. Someone like Brentano who emphasizes with so much acumen the intentional relation of everything of a soul nature, must he not also direct his attention upon a characteristic element of physical phenomena that results from the same train of thought? At the very least, it seems certain that a study like this of the soul element can discover the relation of this soul element to the physical world only if it takes this characteristic element into consideration.²

[ 11 ] Now Brentano discovers three kinds of intentional relations in our soul life. The first is the mental picturing of something; the second is the acceptance or rejection that expresses itself in judging; the third is the loving or hating that is experienced in our feeling. If I say, “God is just,” I am picturing something to myself; but I do not yet accept or reject what I am picturing; but if I say, “There is a God,” I accept what I am picturing through a judgment. If I say, “I like to feel pleasure,” I am not only judging, I am experiencing a feeling. From such presuppositions Brentano distinguishes three basic categories of soul experiences: mental picturing, judging, and feeling (or the phenomena of loving and hating). He replaces the usual division of soul phenomena (into mental picturing, feeling, and willing) with these three basic categories. So whereas many people put mental picturing and judging into the same category, Brentano separates them. He does not agree with combining them, because, unlike other thinkers, he does not regard judgments as merely the connecting of mental pictures, but rather, in fact, as the acceptance or rejection of what has been pictured, which are not activities of mere mental picturing. On the other hand, with respect to their soul content, feeling and will, which other people separate, merge for Brentano into one. What is experienced in the soul when one feels oneself drawn to do something, or repelled from doing it, is the same as what one experiences when one is drawn to pleasure or repelled by pain.

[ 12 ] It is evident from Brentano's writing that he sets great store in having replaced the traditional division of soul experience into thinking, feeling, and willing by the other one into mental picturing, judging, and loving/hating. By this division he seeks to clear the way for an understanding of what truth is, on the one hand, and moral goodness on the other. For him truth is based on right judgment; moral goodness on right love. He finds that “We call something true when its acceptance is right. We call something good when the love we bring to it is right.”

[ 13 ] One can see from Brentano's presentations that when he observes the right acceptance in judgment with respect to truth and the right experience of love with respect to moral goodness, he is taking a sharp look at soul phenomena and circumscribing them. But, within his thought sphere, one can find nothing that would suffice to make the transition from our soul experience of mental picturing to that of judging. No matter where we look in Brentano's thought sphere we seek in vain the answer to the question: What is happening when the soul is conscious of not merely picturing something to itself, but also of finding itself moved to accept this something though judgment?

Just as little can one escape a question with respect to our right love of the morally good. Within the region that Brentano circumscribes as the "soul element," the only phenomenon pertaining to moral action is right loving. But does not a relation to the outer world also belong to a moral action? With respect to a characterization of a deed for the world, is it enough to say: It is a deed that is rightly loved? ³

[ 14 ] In following Brentano's trains of thought, we mainly have a feeling that they are always fruitful because they take up a problem and move it in one direction with acumen and scientific thoroughness; but one also feels that Brentano's trains of thought do not reach the goal that his starting points promise us. Such a feeling can come over us when we compare his threefold division of our soul life into mental picturing, judging, and loving/hating to the other division into mental picturing, feeling, and willing. One follows his views with a certain amount of agreement, but ultimately remains unconvinced that he has done sufficient justice to the reasons for membering the soul the other way. Let us just take the example of the conclusions he draws from his soul division about the true, the beautiful, and the good. Whoever members our soul life into cognitional mental picturing, feeling, and willing can hardly do otherwise than closely connect our striving for truth with mental picturing, our experience of beauty with feeling, and our accomplishment of the good with willing. The matter looks different in the light of Brentano's thought. There the mental pictures as such have no relation to each other by which the truth as such could already reveal itself. When the soul is striving to perfect itself relative to its mental pictures, its ideal cannot therefore be the truth; beauty is its ideal. Truth does not lie on the path of mere mental picturing; it lies on the path of judging. And the morally good does not find itself as essentially united with our willing; it is a content of our feeling; for, to love rightly is a feeling experience. For our ordinary consciousness, however, the truth can be sought, after all, in our mentally picturing cognition. For, even though the judgment that leads to the truth does not lie only in the connecting of mental pictures but rather is based on an acceptance or rejection of the mental pictures, still the acceptance or rejection of these pictures can only be experienced by our consciousness in mental pictures.

And even though the mental pictures in which something beautiful presents itself to the soul do manifest in certain relationships within our life of mental pictures, still, the beauty is experienced, after all, by our feeling.

And although something morally good should call forth the right love in our soul, still the essential factor in the morally good after all, is the accomplishment through the will of what is rightly loved.

[ 15 ] One only recognizes what we actually have in Brentano's thoughts about the threefold division of our soul life when one realizes that he is speaking of something completely different from what those thinkers mean who divide it into mental picturing, feeling, and willing. The latter simply want to describe the experiences of ordinary consciousness. And this consciousness experiences itself in the different kinds of activity of mental picturing, feeling, and willing. What does one actually experience there? I tried to answer this question in my book The Riddle of Man ⁴ and summarized the findings presented there in the following words:

Human soul experience, as it manifests in thinking, feeling, and willing, is at first bound to the bodily instruments. And this experience takes shape in ways determined by these instruments. If someone asserts, however, that when he observes the manifestations of the soul through the body he is seeing the real life of the soul, he is then caught up in the same error as someone who believes that his actual form is brought forth by the mirror in front of him just because the mirror possesses the necessary prerequisites through which his image appears. Within certain limits this image, as image, is indeed dependent upon the form of the mirror, etc.; but what this image represents has nothing to do with the mirror. In order to completely fulfill its essential being within the sense world, human soul life must have an image of its being. It must have its image in consciousness; otherwise it would indeed have an existence, but no picture, no knowledge of it. This image, now, that lives in the ordinary consciousness of the soul is fully determined by the bodily instruments. Without these, the image would not be there, just as the mirror image would not be there without the mirror. But what appears through this image, the soul element itself, is—in its essential being—no more dependent upon the bodily instrument than the person standing before the mirror is dependent upon the mirror. The soul is not dependent upon the bodily instruments; only the ordinary consciousness of the soul is so.⁵

If one is describing the realm of consciousness that is dependent upon our bodily organization, one is correct in membering it into mental picturing, feeling, and willing.⁶ But Brentano is describing something different. Bear in mind to begin with that by “judging,” he means an acceptance or rejection of a content of mental pictures. Our judgment is active within our life of mental pictures; but it does not simply accept the mental pictures that arise in the soul; through acceptance or rejection it relates them to a reality. If one observes more closely, this relating of our mental pictures to a reality can only be found in a soul activity that occurs within the soul itself. But this can never totally correspond to what the soul produces when, through judging, it relates a mental picture to a sense perception. For there the compulsion of the outer impression holds sway, which is not experienced in a purely inner way, but only as an echoed experience, and as a mentally pictured, echoed experience leads to its acceptance or rejection. On the other hand, what Brentano describes corresponds totally in this respect with the kind of cognition that we called "Imaginative cognition" in the first essay of this book. In Imaginative cognition the mental picturing of our ordinary consciousness is not simply accepted; it is developed further in inner soul experience so that out of it the power emerges to relate the soul's experiences to a spiritual reality in such a way that this reality is accepted or rejected. Brentano's concept of judgment, therefore, is not perfectly realized in our ordinary consciousness, but only in the soul that is active in Imaginative cognition.

Furthermore, it is clear that, through Brentano's complete separation of the concept of mental picturing from the concept of judgment, he takes mental picturing to be mere image. But this is how ordinary mental picturing lives in Imaginative cognition. So even this second quality that anthroposophy attributes to Imaginative cognition is to be found in Brentano's characterization of soul phenomena.

What is more, Brentano addresses the experiences of feeling as manifestations of love and hate. Whoever ascends to Imaginative cognition must, in fact, for supersensible vision, transform the kind of soul experience that manifests in ordinary consciousness as loving and hating—in Brentano's sense of the words—in such a way that we can confront certain characteristics of spiritual reality that are described in my book Theosophy, for example, in the following way:

Among the first things one must acquire for an orientation in the soul world is the ability to distinguish between its different kinds of entities in the same way that one distinguishes in the physical world between solid, fluid, and gaseous entities. To attain this, one must know the two basic forces that are of primary significance here. One can call them “sympathy” and “antipathy.” The way these basic forces work in a soul entity determines its kind.

Whereas loving and hating remain something subjective for the life of the soul in the sense world, Imaginative cognition lives along with objective occurrences in the soul world through inner experiences that are equivalent to loving and hating. There also, where he is speaking about soul phenomena, Brentano describes a characteristic of Imaginative cognition through which this cognition already extends into the realm of a still higher kind of knowledge ⁷ and from the fact that he presents moral goodness as right loving one can see that he has a mental picture of an objective kind of loving and hating in contrast to ordinary consciousness' subjective kind of feeling.

Finally, one must pay particular attention to the fact that for Brentano willing is absent from the realm of soul phenomena. Now, the willing that flows out of ordinary consciousness belongs entirely to the physical world. Although in itself it is a purely spiritual being manifesting in the physical world, our willing, in the form in which it can be thought by ordinary consciousness, realizes itself totally in the physical world. If one is describing the ordinary consciousness present in the physical world, willing must not be absent from this picture. If one is describing the seeing consciousness, nothing from our mental pictures about ordinary willing must pass over into these descriptions. For, in the soul world to which Imaginative consciousness is related, what happens as the result of a soul impulse is different from what occurs through the acts of will characteristic of the physical world. So when Brentano focuses on the soul phenomena in that realm in which Imaginative cognition is active, the concept of willing must evaporate for him.

It really seems obvious that, in describing the essential being of soul phenomena, Brentano was actually compelled to depict the essential being of seeing cognition. This is clear even from certain details of his descriptions. Let us look at one example from the many that could be introduced. He says: “The characteristic common to everything of a soul nature is what is often called ‘consciousness’—to use a term that unfortunately can be quite misleading...” But, when one is only describing those soul phenomena which by belonging to ordinary consciousness are determined by the bodily organization, this term is not at all misleading. Brentano has a sense for the fact, however, that the real soul does not live in this ordinary consciousness, and he feels impelled to speak about the essential being of this real soul in pictures that, to be sure, must be misleading if one wants to apply the usual concept of consciousness to them.

[ 17 ] Brentano proceeds in his investigations in such a way that he pursues the phenomena of the anthropological realm up to that point where they compel an unbiased person to form pictures of the soul that coincide with what anthroposophy, following its own paths, discovers about the soul. And the findings on both paths prove to be in fullest harmony with each other, precisely through Brentano's psychology. Brentano himself, however, did not wish to abandon the anthropological path. He was hindered from doing this by his interpretations of the guiding principle he had set up for himself: “True philosophical research cannot be of any other kind than that considered valid by the natural-scientific kind of cognition.” A different interpretation of this guiding principle could have led him to recognize that the natural-scientific approach is seen in the right light precisely at the point when one becomes aware that tills approach, in accordance with its own essential nature, must transform itself in dealing with this spiritual realm. Brentano never wished to make the true soul phenomena—which he called soul phenomena “as such”—into objects of an avowed consciousness. If he had done this, he would have progressed from anthropology to anthroposophy. He feared this path, because he was only able to regard it as an erring into “mystical darkness and an uncontrolled roving of fantasy into unknown regions.” He would not permit himself to investigate at all what his own psychological view demanded. Every time he was faced with the necessity of extending his own path into the anthroposophical realm he stopped short. He wished to answer by anthropology the questions that can only be answered by anthroposophy. This effort was doomed to failure. Because it had to fail, he could not proceed in a satisfying way to develop further what he had begun. To judge by the findings in the first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, if he had continued on with it, it would have to have become anthroposophy. If he really had produced his Descriptive Psychology, anthroposophy would have to have shone through it everywhere. If he had carried further the ethics in his book The Origins of Moral Knowledge—in a way corresponding to its starting point—he would have to have hit upon anthroposophy.

[ 18 ] Before Brentano's soul there stood the possibility of a psychology that could not be given a purely anthropological form. Anthropology cannot even think at all about the most significant questions that must be raised about human soul life. Modern psychology only wants to be anthropological because it considers anything going beyond it to be unscientific. Brentano says, however:

The laws of mental association, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the germinating of pleasure and love, all these would be anything but a true compensation for not gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body... And if the difference between these two views really did signify the inclusion or exclusion of the question of immortality, this would have to be called an extremely portentous difference, and a metaphysical investigation of substance as the bearer of [soul] states would be unavoidable.

Anthroposophy shows that metaphysical speculation cannot take one into the region indicated by Brentano; the only way to enter it is through activation of soul powers which cannot descend into ordinary consciousness. Through the fact that in his philosophy Brentano portrays the essential being of the soul in such a way that the essen79 tial being of seeing cognition comes to clear expression in this portrayal, this philosophy is a perfect vindication of anthroposophy. And one can regard Brentano as a philosophical investigator whose path takes him to the very doors of anthroposophy, but does not wish to open these doors, because the picture he has made for himself of natural- scientific thinking created the belief in him that by opening these doors he would land himself in the abyss of nonscience.

The difficulties often confronting Brentano when he wishes to extend his picture of the soul stem from the fact that he relates his picture of the essential being of the soul element to what is present in ordinary consciousness. He is motivated to do this by his wish to remain in the thought mode that seems to him to be scientifically valid. But this approach, with its means of cognition, can only in fact attain to that part of the soul element that is present as the content of ordinary consciousness. This content, however, is not the real soul element but only its mirror image. Brentano grasps this image only from the side of intelligent understanding, and not from the other side, the side of observation. In his concepts he paints a picture of the soul phenomena that occur in the reality of the soul; when he observes, he believes himself to have a reality in his mirror image of the soul element.⁸

Another philosophical stream that Brentano met with the strongest antipathy—that of Eduard von Hartmann— also took its start from a natural-scientific way of picturing the world. Eduard von Hartmann has recognized the image character of ordinary consciousness. But he also utterly rejects any possibility of bringing its corresponding reality into human consciousness in any way. He consigns this reality to the region of the unconscious. He grants the power to speak about this region only to the hypothetical application of the concepts which one has formed through ordinary consciousness and extended beyond it.⁹ Anthroposophy maintains that spiritual observation can go beyond the realm of ordinary consciousness. And that concepts are also accessible to this spiritual observation that no more need to be merely hypothetical than those acquired in the sense-perceptible world.

For Eduard von Hartmann the supersensible world is not known directly; it is inferred from what we know directly. Hartmann belongs to those present-day philosophers who do not wish to form concepts without having, as a starting point for forming these concepts, the testimony of sense observation and of their experiences in ordinary consciousness. Brentano forms such concepts, however. But he is mistaken about the reality in which they can be formed through observation. His spirit proves to be curiously divided. He would like to be a pure natural scientist, thinking in the natural-scientific mode that has developed in recent times. And yet he must form concepts that this mode would only consider justified if one did not consider this mode to be the only valid one. This division in Brentano's investigative spirit can be explained if one really studies his first books: The Manifold Significance of “Being,” According to Aristotle (1862), The Psychology of Aristotle (1867), and The Creationism of Aristotle (1882).

In these books Brentano follows Aristotle's trains of thought with exemplary scholarship. And in this pursuit he acquires a kind of thinking that cannot be limited to the concepts that hold sway in anthropology. In these books he has in view a concept of soul that derives the soul element out of the spiritual element. This soul element, stemming from the spiritual element, uses the organism—formed by physical processes—to form mental pictures for itself within sense-perceptible existence. What forms mental pictures for itself in the soul is spiritual in nature; it is Aristotle's “nous.” But this “nous” is a twofold being; as “nous pathetikos,” it only suffers things to happen to it; it allows itself to be stimulated to its mental pictures by the impressions given it by the organism. In order for these mental pictures to appear as they are in the active soul, however, this activity must work as “nous poetikos.” What the “nous pathetikos” provides would be mere phenomena within a dark soul existence; they are illuminated by the “nous poetikos.” Brentano says in this connection: “The ‘nous poetikos’ is the light that illumines the phantasms and makes visible to our spiritual eye the spiritual within the senseperceptible.” If one wants to understand Brentano, the point is not only how far he went in taking up Aristotle's mental pictures into his own convictions, but above all that he moved about in these pictures with his own thinking in a devoted way. In doing so, however, his thinking was active in a realm in which the starting point of sensory observation—and along with it the anthropological basis for forming concepts—is not present. And this basic characteristic of his thinking remained in Brentano's research. True, he wants to grant validity only to what can be recognized as conforming with the present-day, natural-scientific mode; but he has to form thoughts that do not belong in that realm. Now, according to the purely natural-scientific method, one can only say something about soul phenomena insofar as they are mirror images—determined by the bodily organization—of the real being of the soul; i.e., insofar as, in their nature as mirror images, they arise and pass away with the bodily organization. What Brentano must think the reality of the soul to be, however, is something spiritual, something independent of the bodily organization, in fact, that through the “nous poetikos” makes visible to our spiritual eye the spiritual within the sense-perceptible.

The fact that Brentano can move about with his thinking in such realms prohibits him from conceiving of the soul's essential being as something arising through the bodily organization and passing away with it. Because he rejects supersensible observation, however, he can observe within the soul's essential being no content that extends beyond physical existence. The moment he tries to ascribe a content to the soul that the soul could unfold without the help of the bodily organization, Brentano feels himself to be in a world for which he finds no mental pictures. In this frame of mind he turns to Aristotle and finds there also a picture of the soul that gives him no content other than that acquired in bodily existence. Characteristic in its one-sidedness is something Brentano wrote in this connection in his Psychology of Aristotle:

Now just as a person, when he has lost a foot or another limb, is no longer a complete substance, so, when his whole bodily part has fallen prey to death, he is of course much less a complete substance. To be sure, the spiritual part continues to exist; but those are very much in error who, like Plato, believe that the separation from the body is a benefit to them and, as it were, a liberation from an oppressive prison; the soul, after all, must now renounce all the numerous services that the bodily forces have rendered.

Brentano got into an extraordinarily interesting dispute with the philosopher Eduard Zeller over Aristotle's conception of the essential being of the soul. Zeller maintained that it is in line with Aristotle's views to accept a pre-existence of the soul before its union with the bodily organization, whereas Brentano denied any such view to Aristotle, and only allowed Aristotle to think that the soul is first created into the bodily organization; so the soul has no pre-existence, but does indeed have an after-existence when the body disintegrates. [ 19 ] Brentano maintained that only Plato accepted pre-existence, but Aristotle did not. It is undeniable that the reasons Brentano brings for his opinion and against Zeller's are weighty ones. Irrespective of Brentano's intelligent interpretation of Aristotle's relevant assertions, we are indeed faced with a difficulty in ascribing to Aristotle a belief in the pre-existence of the soul when we consider that any such belief seems to contradict a basic principle of Aristotelian metaphysics. Aristotle states, namely, that a “form” could never exist before the "substance" that bears the form. A spherical shape never exists without the substance that fills it. Since Aristotle considers the soul element to be the “form” of the bodily organization, however, it seems that we cannot ascribe to him the belief that the soul could exist before the bodily organization arose.

[ 20 ] Now Brentano, with his concept of the soul, became so caught up in the Aristotelian picture of the impossibility of pre-existence that he could not see how this picture breaks down at a crucial point. Can one really think of “form” and “matter” in such a way that one accepts the view that form could not exist prior to the matter that fills it? The spherical shape could not after all be present prior to the substance filling it? The sphere, as it appears in a substance, is certainly not present prior to the balling up of the substance. Before the substance comes together like this, however, those forces are present which act upon this substance and whose effect upon the substance reveals itself in its spherical shape. And within these forces, prior to the appearing of this spherical shape, this shape is certainly living already in another way.¹⁰ Had Brentano not felt bound, through his interpretation of the natural-scientific approach, to find the content for his concept of the soul from observation of the bodily organization, he would perhaps have noticed that the Aristotelian concept of the soul is itself burdened with an inner contradiction. Thus, through his study of Aristotle's world view, he could only think up pictures of the soul that lift it out of the realm of the bodily organization, but without indicating a soul content that allows me, with unbiased thinking, to be able to really picture the soul as independent of the bodily organization.

Besides Aristotle, Leibnitz is another philosopher whom Brentano particularly appreciates. It is especially Leibnitz's way of viewing the soul that seems to have attracted him. Now one can say that Leibnitz has a way of picturing things in this realm that seems to be a significant extension of Aristotle's view. Whereas, Aristotle makes the essential content of human thinking dependent upon sense observation, Leibnitz frees this content from its sensory foundation. Following Aristotle one will accept the statement: There is nothing in thinking that was not previously in the senses (nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu); Leibnitz, however, is of the view that there is nothing in thinking that was not previously in the senses, except thinking itself (nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus). It would be incorrect to ascribe to Aristotle the view that the essential being active in thinking is the result of forces working in the body. However, by making the “nous pathetikos” the passive receiver of sense impressions and the “nous poetikos” the illuminator of these impressions, nothing remained in his philosophy that could become the content of a soul life independent of sensory existence. In this respect, Leibnitz's statement proves to be more fruitful. Through it our attention is especially directed toward the essential being of the soul that is independent of the bodily organization. This attention, to be sure, is limited to the merely intellectual part of this essential being. And in this regard, Leibnitz's statement is one-sided. Nevertheless, this statement is a guideline that in our present-day “natural-scientific” age can lead to something that Leibnitz could not yet attain. In his time our picture of the purely natural origin of the characteristics of the bodily organization was still too imperfect. This is different now. To a certain extent today one can know scientifically how the organic bodily forces are inherited from one's ancestors, and how the soul operates within these inherited organic forces. To be sure, many who believe that they are taking the correct "natural-scientific standpoint" will not acknowledge the following view, even though, for a correct grasp of natural-scientific knowledge, it proves necessary: that everything by which the soul operates in the physical body is determined by the bodily forces that proceed from ancestor to descendant in a line of physical inheritance, with the exception of the soul content itself. This is how we can extend Leibnitz's statement today. And then it represents the anthropological validation of the anthroposophical way of looking at things. Then it directs the soul to seek its own essential content within a spiritual world, and to do this in fact through a different kind of cognition than that customary in anthropology. For, anthropology has access only to what is experienced by the bodily organization in ordinary consciousness.¹¹

[ 21 ] The view is quite tenable that Brentano had all the prerequisites, with Leibnitz as his starting point, for opening our vision to the essential being of the soul as an entity anchored in the spirit, and for strengthening the results of this vision through today's natural-scientific knowledge. Anyone who pursues Brentano's presentations can see the path laid out before him. The path that leads to a purely spiritual, recognizable soul being, could have become visible to him, if he had developed further what already lay in the sphere of his awareness when he wrote such statements as these:

But how are we to picture the engagement of the Godhead in the appearance of a human soul in a body? After creatively bringing forth the spiritual part of man out of all eternity, did the Godhead then connect it with an embryo in such a way that this spiritual part—existing up till then as a distinct spiritual substance unto itself—now ceased to be a real entity unto itself and became a part of a human nature, or did the Godhead only then bring forth this spiritual part creatively? When Aristotle accepted the first possibility, he had to believe that the same spirit would be connected again and again with ever different embryos; for, according to him, the human race perpetuates itself by endless procreation, while on the other hand, the number of spirits existing through all eternity can only be a limited one. All Aristotle interpreters agree, however, that he rejected palingenesis ¹² in his more mature period. Therefore, this possibility is out of the question, (see his book Aristotle and his World View 1911)

Although the validation of a spiritual vision of the soul's repeated earth lives through palingenesis does not lie in Aristotle's train of thought, it could have resulted for Brentano through his connecting his soul concept, which he had refined through his work with Aristotle, with the knowledge of modern natural science.

Brentano's receptivity to the epistemology of medieval philosophy would have made it all the easier for him to have taken this path. Anyone who really grasps this epistemology acquires a number of ideas able to relate the results of modern natural science to the spiritual world in a way that is not visible to the ideas arising in the purely natural-scientific research of anthropology. In many circles today one fails to recognize how much a way of picturing things like that of Thomas Aquinas can deepen natural science in a spiritual direction. In such circles one believes that modern natural-scientific knowledge requires a turning away from that way of picturing things. The truth is that one wishes at first to encompass what natural science recognizes as the being of the world with thoughts that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be incomplete in themselves. Their completion would consist in our considering them to be the kind of essential entities in the soul that they are thought to be in Thomas Aquinas' way of picturing things. And Brentano did find himself on his way to gaining the right relation to this way of picturing things. He writes, after all:

In writing The Manifold Significance of Being According to Aristotle and later my Psychology of Aristotle, I wished to further our understanding of his teachings in a twofold way: first and foremost, directly through an illumination of several of the most important points of his teachings; then secondly and indirectly—but in a more general way—by opening new and helpful sources of understanding. I drew the reader's attention to the incisive commentaries of Thomas Aquinas and showed that one can find in them truer presentations of many of Aristotle's teachings than are to be found in later interpretations.¹³

Brentano barred the path that such studies could have revealed to him, because of his inclination toward Bacon's and Locke's way of picturing things and toward everything philosophically connected with that approach. He regarded that approach above all as according with the natural-scientific method. Precisely this approach, however, leads one to think that the content of our soul life is utterly dependent upon the sense world. And since this way of thinking wants to proceed only anthropologically, only that enters into its domain as psychological results which, in truth, is not a soul reality, but only a mirror image of this reality, i.e., the content of ordinary consciousness.

If Brentano had recognized the image nature of ordinary consciousness, he would not have been able, in his pursuit of anthropological research, to stop short at the gates leading into anthroposophy.

One could of course counter my view with the opinion that Brentano simply lacked the gift of spiritual vision and so did not seek the transition from anthropology to anthroposophy, even though he was moved by his own particular spiritual disposition to characterize soul phenomena in an interesting form and so intelligently that this form can be validated through anthroposophy. I myself am not of this opinion, however. I am not of the view that spiritual vision is attainable only as a special gift of exceptional personalities. I must regard this vision as a faculty of the human soul that anyone can acquire for himself if he awakens in himself the soul experiences that lead to it. And Brentano's nature seems to me to be quite especially capable of such an awakening. I believe, however, that one can hinder such an awakening with theories that oppose it; that one keeps this vision from arising if one is entangled in ideas that from the beginning call into question the validity of such vision. And Brentano kept this vision from arising in his soul through the fact that for him the ideas that so beautifully validate this vision always succumbed to the ideas that reject it and that make one fear that through such vision one could “lose oneself in the labyrinthine passages of a pseudo-philosophy.” ¹⁴

[ 22 ] In 1895 Brentano published a reprint of a lecture he had given in the Literary Society in Vienna with reference to a book by H. Lorm, Baseless Optimism. This lecture contains his view about the “four phases of philosophy and their present status.” There Brentano expresses his belief that the course of development of philosophical research can be compared, in a certain respect, with the history of the arts.

Whereas other sciences, as long as they are practiced at all, show a continuous progress interrupted only occasionally by periods of inaction, philosophy, like the arts, shows decadent periods, in addition to those of positive development, that are often no less rich—yes, even richer—in epoch-making occurrences than periods of healthy fruitfulness.

Brentano distinguishes three such periods in the course of philosophy's development where healthy fruitfulness has passed over into decadence. Each of these periods begins with the fact that out of a purely philosophical astonishment over the riddles of the world, a truly scientific interest stirs and that this interest then seeks knowledge out of a genuine, pure drive to know. This healthy epoch is then followed by another in which the first stage of decadence appears. The purely scientific interest recedes, and people look for thoughts by which to regulate their social and personal lives, and to find their way among them. There, philosophy no longer wishes to serve a pure striving for knowledge, but rather the interests of life. A further decline occurs in the third period. Through the uncertainty of thoughts that did not arise out of purely scientific interests, one loses confidence in the possibility of true knowledge and falls into skepticism. The fourth epoch is one of complete decay. In the third epoch, doubt had undermined the whole scientific foundation of philosophy. Out of unscientific dark depths one seeks to arrive at the truth through mystical experience in fantastical, blurred concepts. Brentano pictured the first cycle of development as beginning with Greek natural philosophy; according to him, this healthy phase ended with Aristotle. Within this phase he holds Anaxagoras in particularly high esteem. He is of the view that even though the Greeks stood at the very beginning then with respect to many scientific questions, still their kind of research would be considered valid by a strictly natural-scientific way of thinking. The Stoics and Epicureans follow then in the second phase. They already represent a decline. They want ideas that stand in the service of life. In the New Academy, especially through the influence of Aenesidemus, Agrippa, and Sextus Empirikus one sees skepticism root out all belief in established scientific truths. And in Neo-Platonism, among philosophers like Ammonius Sakkas, Plotinus, Porphyrius, Jamblichus, and Proklus scientific research is replaced by a mystical experience straying into the labyrinthine passages of pseudo-philosophy.

In the Middle Ages, though perhaps not so distinctly, one sees these four phases repeat themselves. With Thomas Aquinas a philosophically healthy way of picturing things begins, reviving Aristotelianism in a new form. In the next period, represented by Duns Scotus, an art of disputation holds sway—analogous to the first period of decline in Greek philosophy—that is taken to grotesque extremes. Then follows Nominalism, bearing a skeptical character. William of Occam rejects the view that universal ideas relate to anything real, and in doing so assigns to the content of human truth only the value of a conceptual summary standing outside of reality; whereas reality supposedly lies only in the particular individual things. This analogue of skepticism is replaced by the mysticism—no longer striving along scientific lines—of Eckhardt, Tauler, Heinrich Suso, the author of German Theology, and others. Those are the four phases of philosophical development in the Middle Ages.

In modern times, beginning with Bacon of Verulam, a healthy development begins again, based on natural-scientific thinking, in which then Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz work further in a fruitful way. There follows the French and English philosophy of Enlightenment, in which principles, as one found them compatible with life, determined the style of the flow of philosophical thought. Then, with David Hume, skepticism appears; and following it, the phase of complete decay sets in, in England with Thomas Reid, in Germany with Kant. Brentano sees an aspect of Kant's philosophy that allows him to compare it with the Plotinian period of decadence in Greek philosophy. He criticizes Kant for not seeking truth in the agreement of our mental pictures with real objects as a scientific researcher does, but rather in believing that objects should conform to our human capacity for mental picturing. Brentano believes, therefore, that he must ascribe to Kant's philosophy a kind of basic mystical character that then manifests a totally unscientific nature in the decadent philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

Brentano hopes for a new philosophical upsurge arising from a scientific work in the philosophical sphere modeled upon the natural-scientific way of thinking that has become dominant in modern times. As an introduction to such a philosophy, he set forth the thesis: True philosophical research cannot be of any other kind than that considered valid by the natural-scientific kind of cognition. He wanted to devote his life's work to this thesis.

[ 23 ] In the preface to the reprint of the lecture in which he presented his view of the "four phases of philosophy," Brentano states that:

His view of the history of philosophy might strike many people as odd in its newness; for me, however, it has been an established fact for many years and has been the foundation of academic lectures in the history of philosophy given by me and several of my students now for more than two decades. I am under no illusion about the fact that my view will encounter prejudices and that these may perhaps be too strong to dispel with the first clash. Nevertheless, I hope that the facts and considerations I present cannot fail to make an impression upon anyone who pursues them thoughtfully.

[ 24 ] It is altogether my opinion that one can receive a significant impression from Brentano's presentations. Insofar as from a particular point of view, they represent a classification of phenomena arising in the course of philosophical development, they are based on well-founded insights into the course taken by this development. The four phases of philosophy present differences that are founded within reality.

As soon as one enters into a study of the driving forces within the individual phases, however, one does not find that Brentano has accurately characterized these forces. This is evident at once in his insight about the first phase of the philosophy of antiquity. The basic features of Greek philosophy from its Ionic beginnings up to Aristotle do, indeed, reveal many features that justify Brentano in seeing in them what he considers to be a natural-scientific way of thinking. But does this way of thinking really arise from what Brentano calls the natural-scientific method? Are not the thoughts of this Greek philosophy far more a result of what they experienced in their own souls as the essential being of man and his relation to the world-all? Anyone who answers this question in accordance with the facts will find that the inner impulses for the thought content of this philosophy came to direct expression—precisely in Stoicism and Epicurianism—in the whole practical philosophy of life of later Greek times. One can see how, in the soul forces that Brentano finds to be at work in the second phase, there lies the starting point for the first phase of the philosophy of antiquity. These forces were directed toward the sense-perceptible and social form of manifestations of the world-all, and therefore could only appear in an imperfect way in the phase of skepticism—which was driven to doubt the direct reality of this form of manifestation—and in the following phase of a seeing cognition, which must go beyond this form. For this reason these phases of ancient philosophy appear decadent.

And which soul forces are at work in the course of philosophical development in the Middle Ages? No one who really knows the relevant facts can doubt that Thomism represents the peak of this course of development with respect to those relationships that Brentano is investigating. But one cannot fail to recognize that, through the Christian standpoint of Thomas Aquinas, the soul forces at work in the Greek philosophy of life no longer operate merely out of philosophical impulses, but have taken on a more-than-philosophical character. What impulses are working in Thomas Aquinas insofar as he is a philosopher? One need have no sympathy for the weaknesses of the Nominalist philosophy of the Middle Ages; but one will indeed be able to discover that the soul impulses working in Nominalism also form the subjective basis for the Realism of Thomas. When Thomas recognizes the universal concepts synthesizing the phenomena of sense perception to be something that relates to a spiritually real element, he thus gains the strength for his Realistic way of picturing things out of his feeling for what these concepts signify within the existence of the soul itself, apart from the fact that they relate to sense phenomena. Precisely because Thomas did not relate the universal concepts directly to the events of sense-perceptible existence, he experienced how in these concepts another reality shines through to us, and how actually they are only signs for the phenomena of sense-perceptible life. Then, as this undertone of Thomism arose in Nominalism as an independent philosophy, this undertone naturally had to reveal its one-sidedness. The feeling that the concepts experienced in the soul establish a Realism in relation to the spirit had to disappear and the other feeling had to become dominant that the universal concepts are mere synthesizing names. When one sees the being of Nominalism in this way, one also understands the preceding second phase of medieval philosophy—that of Duns Scotus—as a transition to Nominalism. However, one cannot but understand the whole force of medieval thought work, insofar as it is philosophy, out of the basic view that revealed itself in a one-sided way in Nominalism. But then one will arrive at the view that the real driving forces of this philosophy lie in the soul impulses that, in keeping with Brentano's classification, one must designate as belonging to the third phase. And in that epoch which Brentano calls the mystical phase of the Middle Ages it becomes quite clear how the mystics belonging to it, persuaded of the Nominalistic nature of conceptual cognition, do not turn to this cognition but rather to other soul forces in order to penetrate to the core of the world's phenomena.

If, in line with Brentano's classification, we now pursue the activity of the driving soul forces in the philosophy of our time, we find that the inner character traits of this epoch are completely different from those indicated by Brentano. Because of certain of its own character traits, the phase of the natural-scientific way of thinking that Brentano finds realized in Bacon of Verulam, Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz absolutely resists being thought of purely as natural-scientific in Brentano's sense. How can one deal in a purely natural-scientific way with Descartes' basic thought: “I think therefore I am;” how is one to bring Leibnitz's Monadology or his “predetermined harmony” into Brentano's way of picturing things? Even Brentano's view of the second phase, to which he assigns the French and English Enlightenment philosophy, creates difficulties when one wants to remain with his mental pictures. One would certainly not wish to deny to this epoch its character as a time of decadence in philosophy; but one can understand this epoch in light of the fact that, in its main representatives, those non-philosophical soul impulses which were energetically at work in the Christian view of life were lamed, with re result that a relation to the supersensible world powers could not be found in a philosophical way. At the same time the Nominalistic skepticism of the Middle Ages worked on, preventing a search for a relation between the content of knowledge experienced in the soul and a spiritually real element.

And if we move on to modern skepticism and to that way of picturing things that Brentano assigns to the mystical stage, we then lose the possibility of still agreeing with his classification. To be sure, we must have the skeptical phase begin with David Hume. But the description of Kant, the “critical” thinker, as a mystic proves after all to be a too strongly one-sided characterization. Also, the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the other thinkers of the period after Kant cannot be regarded as mystical, especially if one bases oneself on Brentano's concept of mysticism. On the contrary, precisely in the sense of Brentano's classification, one will find a common basic impulse running from David Hume, through Kant, to Hegel. This impulse consists in the refusal, based on mental pictures gained in the sensory world, to depict any philosophical world picture of a true reality. As paradoxical as it may seem to call Hegel a skeptic, he is one after all in the sense that he ascribes no direct value as reality to the mental pictures taken from nature. One does not deviate from Brentano's concept of skepticism by regarding the development of philosophy from Hume to Hegel as the phase of modern skepticism. One can consider the fourth modern phase as beginning only after Hegel. Brentano, however, will certainly not wish to bring what arises there as the natural-scientific picture anywhere near mysticism. Still, look at the way Brentano himself wishes to situate himself with his philosophizing into this epoch. With an energy that could hardly be surpassed he demands a natural-scientific method in philosophy. In his psychological research he strives to keep to this method. And what he brings to light is a validation of anthroposophy. What would have to have arisen as the continuation of his anthropological striving, if he had gone further in the spirit of what he pictured, would be anthroposophy. An anthroposophy, to be sure, that stands in complete harmony with the natural-scientific way of thinking.

Is not Brentano's life work itself the most valid proof that the fourth phase of modern philosophy must draw its impulses from those soul forces that both Neo-Platonism and medieval mysticism wished to activate but could not, because they could not arrive with their inner soul activity at the kind of experience of spiritual reality that occurs with fully conscious clarity of thinking (or of concepts)? Just as Greek philosophy drew its strength from the soul impulses which Brentano sees as realizing themselves in the second philosophical phase out of a practical philosophy of living, and just as medieval philosophy owes its strength to the impulses of the third phase—that of skepticism—so must modern philosophy draw its impulses from the fundamental powers of the fourth phase—from that of a knowing seeing. If, in accordance with his way of picturing things, Brentano can regard Neo-Platonism and medieval mysticism as decadent philosophies, so one could recognize the anthroposophy that complements anthropology as the fruitful phase of modern philosophy, if one leads this philosopher's own ideas about the development of philosophy to their correct conclusions, which Brentano himself did not draw but which follow quite naturally from his ideas.

[ 25 ] The picture we gave of Brentano's relation to the cognitional demands of our day explains why his reader receives impressions that are not limited to what is directly contained in the concepts he presents. Undertones sound forth all the time as one is reading. These emerge from a soul life that lies far deeper behind the ideas he expresses. What Brentano stimulates in the spirit of the reader often works more strongly in the latter than what the author expresses in sharply-edged pictures. One also feels moved to go back often and reread a book by Brentano. One may have thought through much of what is said today about the relation of philosophy to other cognitional views; Brentano's book The Future of Philosophy, will almost always rise up in one's memory when one is reflecting in this way. This is a reprint of a lecture to the Philosophical Society in Vienna in 1892 which he gave in order to oppose—with his view of the future of philosophy—what the jurist Adolf Exner had to say on this subject in his inaugural address on Political Education (1891). This publication of the lecture contains notes that offer far-ranging historical perspectives on the course of mankind's spiritual development. In this book all the tones are sounded of what can speak to an observer of today's natural-scientific outlook about the necessity of progressing from this outlook to an anthroposophical one.

[ 26 ] The representatives of this natural-scientific way of picturing things live for the most part in the belief that this outlook is forced upon them by the real being of things. They are of the opinion that they organize their knowledge in accordance with the way reality manifests itself. In this belief they are deluding themselves, however. The truth is that in recent times the human soul—out of its own active development over thousands of years—has unfolded a need for the kind of mental pictures which comprise the natural-scientific picture of the world. It is not because reality presented this picture to them as the absolute truth that Helmholtz, Weisman, Huxley, and others arrived at their picture, but because they had to form this picture within themselves in order through it to shed a certain light upon the reality confronting them. It is not because of compulsion from a reality outside the soul that one forms a mathematical or mechanical picture of the world, but rather because one has given shape in one's soul to mathematical and mechanical pictures and thus opened an inner source of illumination for what manifests in the outer world in a mathematical and mechanical way.

Although generally what has just been described holds good for every developmental stage of the human soul, it does appear in the modern natural-scientific picture in a quite particular way. When these mental pictures are thought through consistently from a certain angle, they destroy any concepts of a soul element. This can be seen in the absolutely not trivial but most dubious concept of a “soul science without soul” that has not been thought up only by philosophical dilettantes but also by very serious thinkers.¹⁵ The mental pictures formed by natural science are leading to ever more insight into the dependency of the phenomena of ordinary consciousness upon our bodily organization. If the fact is not recognized at the same time that what arises in this way as the soul element is not this soul element itself, but only its manifestation in a mirror image, then the true idea of the soul element slips away from our observation, and the illusory idea arises that sees in the soul element only a product of the bodily organization. On the other hand, however, this latter view cannot stand up before an unbiased thinking. To this unbiased thinking, the ideas that natural science forms about nature show a soul connection— to a reality lying behind nature—that does not reveal itself in these ideas themselves. No anthropological approach, out of itself, can arrive at thorough-going mental pictures of this soul connection. For, it does not enter ordinary consciousness.

This fact shows up much more strongly in today's natural- scientific outlook than was the case in earlier historical stages of knowledge. At these earlier stages, when observing the outer world, one still formed concepts that took up into their content something of the spiritual foundations of this outer world. And one's soul felt itself, in its own spirituality, as unified with the spirit of the outer world. In accordance with its own essential being, recent natural scientists must think nature in a purely natural way. Through this, to be sure, it gains the possibility of validating the content of its ideas by observation of nature, but not the existence of these ideas themselves, as something with inner soul being.

[ 27 ] For this reason, precisely the genuine natural-scientific outlook has no foundation if it cannot validate its own existence by anthroposophical observation. With anthroposophy one can fully endorse the natural-scientific outlook; without anthroposophy, one will again and again want to make the vain attempt to discover even the spirit out of the results of natural-scientific observation. The natural-scientific ideas of recent times are in fact the results of the soul's living together with a spiritual world; but only in living spiritual vision can the soul know about its living together with that world.¹⁶ The question could easily arise: Then why does the soul seek to form natural-scientific pictures, if precisely through them it is creating for itself a content that cuts it off from its spiritual foundation? From the standpoint of the beliefs that see the natural-scientific outlook to have been formed in accordance with the way the world does in fact manifest to us, there is no way to find an answer to this question. But an answer is definitely forthcoming if one looks toward the needs of the soul itself. With mental pictures, such as only could have been formed by a pre-natural-scientific age, our soul experience could never have arrived at a full consciousness of itself. In its ideas of nature, which also continued a spiritual element, it would indeed have felt an indefinite connection with the spirit, but it would not have been able to experience the spirit in its own full, independent, and particular nature. Therefore, in the course of mankind's development, our soul element strives to set forth the kind of ideas that do not contain this soul element itself, in order, through them, to know itself as independent of natural existence. The connection with the spirit, however, must then be sought in knowledge not through these ideas of nature but through spiritual vision. The development of modern natural science is a necessary stage in the course of mankind's soul evolution. One understands the basis of this development when one sees how the soul needs it in order to find itself. On the other hand, one recognizes the epistemological implications of this development when one sees how precisely it makes spiritual vision a necessity.¹⁷

[ 28 ] Adolf Exner, whose views are opposed by Brentano's book The Future of Philosophy, confronted a natural science that wishes, it is true, to develop its ideas of nature in purity, but that is not prepared to advance to anthroposophy when it is a matter of grasping the reality of the soul. Exner found “natural-scientific education” to be unfruitful in developing ideas that must work in the way people live together in human society. For solving the questions of social life facing us in the future, therefore, he demands a way of thinking that does not rest on a natural-scientific basis. He finds that the great juridical questions confronting the Romans were solved by them in such a fruitful way because they had little gift for the natural-scientific way of picturing things. And he attempts to show that the eighteenth century, in spite of its attraction to the natural-scientific way of thinking, proved quite inadequate in mastering social questions. Exner directs his gaze upon a natural-scientific outlook that is not striving scientifically to understand its own foundation. It is understandable that he arrived at the views he did when confronted by such an outlook. For, this outlook must develop its ideas in such a way that they bring before the soul what is of nature in all its purity. From such ideas no impulse is gained for thoughts that are fruitful in social life. For, in social life souls confront each other as souls. Such an impulse can arise only when the soul element, in its spiritual nature, is experienced through a knowing vision (erkennendes Schaueri), when the natural-scientific, anthropological view finds its complement in anthroposophy.

Brentano bore ideas in his soul that definitely lead into the anthroposophical realm in spite of the fact that he wished to remain only in the anthropological realm. This is why the arguments he mounts against Exner are so penetrating, even though Brentano does not wish to make the transition to anthroposophy himself. They show how Exner does not speak at all about the real abilities of a natural-scientific outlook that understands itself; they show how he tilted with windmills in his battle against a way of thinking that misunderstands itself. One can read Brentano's book and everywhere feel in it how justified everything is that points through his ideas in one direction or another, without finding that he expresses fully what it is that he is pointing toward.

[ 29 ] With Franz Brentano a personality has left us whose work, when experienced, can mean an immeasurable gain. This gain is completely independent of the degree of intellectual agreement that one brings to this work. For, this gain springs from the manifestations of a human soul that have their source much deeper in the world's reality than that sphere in which in ordinary life, intellectual agreement is to be found. And Brentano is a personality destined to work on in the course of humanity's spiritual development through impulses that are not limited to the extension of the ideas he developed. I can very well imagine someone's total disagreement with what I have presented here as Brentano's relation to anthroposophy; regardless of one's scientific standpoint, however, it seems to me impossible—if one lets work upon oneself the philosophical spirit that breathes through the writings of this man—that one could arrive at anything less than the feelings of high esteem for the value of Brentano's personality that underly the intentions of this essay.

• 1. He later spoke about his setting up of this thesis in the lecture he held in the Vienna Philosophical Society in 1892 (published under the title The Future of Philosophy). What I refer to as Brentano's later reference to his thesis is on page 3.
• 2. Please see the last part of addendum 7, Brentano's Separation of the Soul from What Is External to the Soul.
• 3. Please see addendum 5: The Real Basis of an Intentional Relation.
• 4. Published by Mercury Press, 1990. See pages 132f. Ed.
• 5. Although the following comment is superfluous, lam sure, to many readers, I would still like to add that, by the very nature of the matter, with my comparison of consciousness to a mirror image, I am not referring to the usual practice of calling our world of mental pictures a mirror image of the outer world; I am calling the soul's experiences in ordinary consciousness a mirror image of the genuine soul element.
• 6. Please see addendum 6: The Physical and Spiritual Dependencies of Man's Being.
• 7. The first form of a “seeing cognition”—Imaginative cognition—passes over into the second form, which is called "Inspired cognition" in my books. In addendum 6, The Physical and Spiritual Dependencies of Man's Being, there is a description of how an Imagination that has already passed over into Inspiration actually lives in Brentano's definition of loving and hating.
• 8. Please see addendum 7, Brentano's Separation of the Soul Element from What is External to the Soul.
• 9. This view is expressed in his two books Modern Psychology, Leipzig 1901, and Outline of Psychology, Bad Sachsa 1908.
• 10. A mistaken view about the validity of the assertion that form cannot exist prior to the matter filling it can arise in connection with crystal formation only because there the form seems to emerge directly out of the forces dwelling in the matter. Nevertheless, unbiased thinking cannot do otherwise than situate the formative forces within the material element before the formed matter actually arises. Aristotle's picture becomes completely untenable, however, when we consider the plant, whose formative forces can certainly not be sought in the conditions within the seed alone, but rather in the effects of the outer world that are present long before the formation of the sense-perceptible plant.
• 11. There are thinkers who are repelled by the view that the essential kernel of one's soul is not inherited from its physical ancestors but originates from the spiritual world, because this view demeans the process of human procreation. The philosopher J. Frohschammer is one of these thinkers (see his book The Origin of Human Souls). According to him, we must believe that even children's souls stem from their parents, since "these living human beings do not beget mere bodies or animals" (see also Frohschammer's book on The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas). An objection based on this opinion does not apply to the view we are presenting in this book. For, one need not think that the soul kernel, descending from the spiritual world and uniting itself with what is inherited from the ancestors, is unconnected with the souls of its parents before birth, even though one does not picture this soul kernel as arising through the act of procreation.
• 12. Literally, “rebirth.” Ed.
• 13. See Brentano's Aristotle's Teachings on the Origins of the Human Spirit, 1911.
• 14. Please see addendum 8, An Objection Often Raised against Anthroposophy.
• 15. This picture of a “soul science without soul” also belongs to the realm of the riddles described in this book as existing at the “borderland of our knowing activity”; and if this picture is not experienced in such a way that it is taken as the starting point of a seeing consciousness, it then walls off the entryway to true knowing of the soul, instead of showing a path to such knowing.
• 16. Where the genuine natural-scientific approach leads is convincingly shown in a book by Oskar Hertwig, which is outstanding in many respects, The Development of Organisms, a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance, 1916. Precisely when a work, like that underlying this book, is so exemplary in its application of the natural-scientific method, it can lead to innumerable soul experiences at the “boundaries of our knowing activity.”
• 17. What is expressed here is presented in a detailed way in my book The Riddles of Philosophy. One of the basic thoughts of that book is to show how natural-scientific cognition proves its power in the soul progress of humanity.

(Representation of a scene from Faust, Part II, Act II High-vaulted, narrow Gothic Room—Laboratory.)

It is to be hoped that the scenes just witnessed may have effect and meet with a really intelligent reception in the widest circles today. For these scenes contain many germs of the evolution within which also flows the stream of Spiritual Science. We can say that, in writing these scenes out of his long and varied experience, Goethe foreshadowed much that like a seed will spring up through Spiritual Science. These scenes from the second part of “Faust” stand before our souls not only as a record of cultural history, but also as an expression of deep knowledge. To help us to a full understanding in our approach to this deepest manifestation of Goethe's spirit we may now call to our aid the already familiar ideas of Spiritual Science. For, in these ideas, all that Goethe's inner imagination develop out of the experiences of his time is formulated and brought to full consciousness.

In the first of these two scenes, above all, we have an important document of cultural history. Goethe had been matured by all that he had absorbed from natural science, and by the deepening of all his concepts through his studies and mysticism as well as what he received from Grecian art. And, at the very time when he was giving form to the ideas thus living in him, the spirits of men were seeking with infinite enthusiasm for knowledge to grapple with the highest problems of existence. Something that should not, cannot, surprise people in our circle is the fact that a really intensive striving towards the spiritual world should actually promote caricatures of itself. Both mystical striving and the deeper striving after philosophical knowledge produce their caricatures. In Goethe's immediate circle a really important endeavor, that might be described as both philosophical and theosophical, was developing at the time when the scenes were living in unfolding in Goethe's mind. It was then that Johann Gottlieb Fichte was teaching with an immense enthusiasm for knowledge. From the brief account given in my book, and from what is said about Fichte both in the development of the “Riddles of Philosophy” and in the more recent “Riddles of Man,” you can see by all that is said there about him how he strove an elemental way to formulate the divine spiritual dwelling in man's innermost soul, in such a way that, by developing this in his soul, man may become conscious of his divine spiritual origin. Fichte tried to grasp the full life of the ego in the soul of man, the active, creative ego, and also the ego filled with God. By this means he sought to feel the union of the inner human life with the whole life of the cosmos. And out of this enthusiasm he spoke. It is very easy to understand how such a spiritual thrust should meet with opposition. Naturally Fichte could not then speak in the concrete way of Spiritual Science, the time was not yet ripe for this. We might say that he tried by abstract, all-round concepts, to give life to the feeling that can then be wakened to full life in man by the impressions of Spiritual Science. Hence his language has often much about it that is abstract; this is penetrated, however, by living feeling and experience. And for what Fichte had to say to be taken seriously at all, the strong impression was needed that a personality such as his could produce. He often expressed himself strangely and in paradox—to even greater degree than is necessary in Spiritual Science, for, to those unaccustomed to it, what is true often appears foolish. This is why such a great spirit as Fichte, who had at that time to express the truth in abstract form, was thought ridiculous.

On the other hand, those who had been strongly impressed by Fichte might easily have exaggerated things, as happens often in life. Then came caricatures of him, caricatures of others as well who, inspired by the same convictions were also teaching in Jena at the time. Among these was Schelling who, striving like Fichte, actually fought his way—as I have often stressed—to a very deep conception of Christianity, even to a very deep conception of the Mystery of Golgotha. This conception gradually developed into a kind of Theosophy then expressed—though without being understood by his contemporaries—in his “Philosophy of Manifestation.” It was embodied too in the treatise on human freedom and other subjects akin to it written round Jakob Boehme. It was already living in his discourse on Bruno, or on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things, and lived especially in his splendid treatise on the Mysteries of the Samothracian Divinities, where he gave a picture of what in his opinion had dwelt in those old Mysteries. Then there were such spirits as Friedrich Schlegel, who energetically applied to the different branches of human knowledge what to those more philosophically constituted natures sought to charm from the heart of the world order. Hegel had begun to formulate his philosophy. And all this had been going on around the Goethe. These men sought to penetrate beyond what is relative in the world, beyond all that controls mankind in day-to-day life, to the Absolute, to what is not merely the background of the relative. Thus, Fichte tried to penetrate beyond the ordinary, everyday ego to the absolute ego, anchored in the Godhead, and weaving its web in eternity. Thus Schelling and Hegel sought to press through to absolute Being.

All this was naturally taken at the time in various ways. Today, particularly, when Spiritual Science can penetrate our hearts, we are able to form a very clear idea of the frame of mind of men like Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, when on talking about all that was so vividly before their spiritual eye people remained apathetic—apathetic and hostile. One can understand, too, how the youthful Fichte, meeting antiquated pedants in Jena, who each in their own way of thought they knew everything, might sometimes flare up. Fichte often flared up, not only when he was banished from Jena but also when he saw that, giving of his best, it found no entrance into any heart, any soul; for they all thought themselves wiser with their old traditional knowledge and ideas. So we can understand that when such a spirit as Fichte was faced with the pundits of Jena and had to deal with them, that he was driven to declare that everyone over thirty should be put to death!—It was a spiritual struggle of the first magnitude raging at that time in Jena, and everything going on there was vilified. Kotzebue, a poetaster who nevertheless had his public, wrote a very interesting and witty dramatic pamphlet—witty because it describes a type of young graduate educated at Jena, who when he goes home to his mother speaks in the empty phrases he learnt there. These are all given word-for-word in the pamphlet that is called “Hyperborean Ass or the New Education”. All this appears no doubt, very witty but it is really nothing more than a vulgar attack on a fine effort. We must not, of course, confuse it with what Goethe sought to denounce—the caricaturing of what is great—for we must be clear from the correspondence between Goethe and Fichte and between Goethe and Shelling, that Goethe was well able to appreciate the spirit striving after the Absolute. Although we did not find Goethe elaborating into a system any occult principles, yet we can say that he was a spiritual dwelling wholly within the aura of the occult, and knowing that what lives in the progress of good in world-evolution may incline on the one hand to the ahrimanic, on the other to the luciferic. He does not use these particular expressions but that is of no importance; he knew that actually the pendulum of world-evolution is always swinging between the ahrimanic and the luciferic. And Goethe wished to work everything out from its very depths, and everywhere to show how, fundamentally, even the striving after the highest may at the same time be dangerous. What is there that may not be so? It stands to reason that all that is best may be dangerous. And how dangerous the best may be when Ahriman and Lucifer take a hand in things, was precisely the problem Goethe had so vividly in mind.

Thus he had his Faust in mind—the Faust who strove after the deepest secrets of existence, who was to be the realisation of what stood ever before Goethe's soul, namely, the direct perception of the living and spiritual in all nature and in all history. Goethe himself was striving to find again the spiritual secrets of the early Greek days. He wanted to unite himself with all that was alive and creative in a past epoch—in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This is what he wanted to put into form in the striving of his Faust after what was still living in Helen. Goethe sought the paths by which he could lead Faust to Helen. But he was quite conscious of the danger here. However justifiable, however high-minded, the striving might be, because it could so easily lead into luciferic channels it meant danger.

Thus Goethe first showed us Faust being drawn into the luciferic channel, paralyzed by the sudden appearance of Helen, paralyzed by association with the spiritual. Faust has called up Helen from the ‘realm of the Mothers’, at first having her before him only as a spiritual force. He is paralyzed by what he experiences spiritually. Inwardly he is filled with what he has absorbed. He lives in a living, spiritual element of ancient Greece but through it becomes paralyzed.

And in this condition we find him when Mephistopheles has brought him back to his cell, to his laboratory, paralyzed by his contact with the spiritual element of the past:

“Whom Helen paralyzes, use
Not likely to regain their reason.”

as Mephistopheles says. We see, too, how a certain rift has arisen between Faust, who has been drawn into the luciferic channel, and Mephistopheles. Whether the experience is altogether conscious or not, Faust with his soul, through luciferic impulse, has entered a different spiritual channel from that of Mephistopheles. They are now separated as if by the limits of their consciousness.

Faust is dreaming—as ordinary language would have it. He knows nothing of his old world in which he is presently living. But Mephistopheles is in it, through him everything ahrimanic also comes to life. Thus, in this sense we have essentially the two worlds clashing, and this is in accordance with truth. This collision is made clear to us, and it is remarkable how deeply Goethe, in his instinctive way, goes deeper than what is Spiritual Science. This collision is made clear to us through the unsuspecting Famulus now introduced, who imperturbably swings like a pendulum between the tremendous dangers surrounding him.

We may regard him as representing the type of man who is the victim of an unimaginative, unobservant nature, from which, often, he cannot escape. He sees nothing of what goes on around him. It is in the sense that we must understand all he says.

The whole milieu in which we now find ourselves is changed by Mephistopheles meeting with his former pupil who has now taken his degree. It looks as if he were right outside the picture I have just given you; however, he represents a caricature of it. He has been infused with all that the Kant-Fichte-Schelling-Hegel philosophy was able to give, and by Schlegel's interpretation of it all; but he takes this in a very narrow, egoistic sense. We may ask why he does so? This is indeed a pertinent question. Why has the graduate become what we now see? Is it possible that in him Goethe was wishing perhaps to make fun of the Jena philosophy he so much appreciated? Most certainly not! But in his opinion the student who had received from Mephistopheles the precept Eritus sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum, would have been on this philosophical channel:

“Follow the ancient saw, follow the snake, my cousin,
God's image as thou art, thou'lt rue the way thou'st chosen.”

This impulse of the one-time student received from the Mephistopheles himself. Mephistopheles cannot complain if this old student gives him occasion to say: “How crude thou art, my friend, thou scarcely know'st” for he himself has planted all that in his soul, it is a seed of his sowing. This matured scholar has indeed taken the advice and followed Mephistopheles' cousin, the famous snake. And to begin with he has no qualms; they will come later. He is not made uneasy by the thought of his affinity with God, that he clearly refers to when announcing that he has created the world, it is he who has fashioned it.—This indeed has been accepted as the Kantian philosophy by many caricature-lovers, and even today it is still widely accepted.

Yes, my dear friends, we may indeed get to know people who take the philosophy of Kant even more egoistically than this scholar. We once knew a man who was so infected with this philosophy of Kant and Fichte that he did actually believe he had created the whole world. It had become an idée fixe with him that he had created it. I said to him at the time: Why, yes, certainly an an idea, as your idea, you have created the world, but there is something to be added to the idea. You created the idea of your own boots, but it was the shoemaker who made those boots of yours. You cannot say you made your own boots, though you may have created the idea of them.—Fundamentally, every genuine refutation, even Schopenhauer's philosophy of The World as Idea, is based on this problem of the shoemaker. Those things, however, are not always seen in the right light.

Thus the scholar meeting Mephistopheles in this way, is to some extent his victim. Philosophers have striven after the Absolute. In this man the striving after the Absolute has become a caricature. Mephistopheles has to caution him:

“Pray don't go home quite absolute.”

We see the connection with the spiritual culture of that time represented by Goethe in a very witty way. It is because the scenes are based on living reality that they are so vivid and so extraordinarily dramatic. Goethe strove again and again lead men beyond the ideas that savour rather of the tavern, ideas so often heard, such as: Ah, we should like to keep to what is good and to flee from Lucifer and Ahriman, have nothing to do with them.—It is because Goethe does not like these notions that he sometimes makes Mephistopheles quite sympathetic and kindly. For how pleasant it all is when the scholar, becoming altogether too absolute, the good Mephistopheles turns his chair round from this one scholar to the general public, to the younger pit-goers, looking there, as Goethe imagined it, for sympathy. And he makes Mephistopheles speak not merely like a devil but in a very apt way, because he knows how much of what belongs to Mephistopheles must be mixed with life for life to thrive at all, and how unwholesome are the ideas which, in the way we have shown, smell of the tavern. It is quite worth-while for once to reflect how Goethe himself did not remain cold with the coldness of the apathetic crowd. For this reason he makes his Mephistopheles expressed itself rather heatedly about the people who, as he observes, receive his wise maxims so indifferently. Goethe even then wanted to point out this coldness, though it was a long way from being as cold as the usual opinions and mood of soul today towards all that can penetrate to man from the spiritual life.

And now we see a genuine ahrimanic activity developing in the creation of Homunculus. It was not easy for Goethe to write a particular part of his Faust we have had before us here. Poets of a lesser degree can accomplish anything; circumstances permitting, such a poet would easily solve the problem of bringing Faust and Helen together. But Goethe was not a poet of that calibre; poetical creation was to him difficult and harassing. He had to find a way to bring Faust with all reality together with talent, with whom, as we have seen, he lived in another state of consciousness. He had to find some way, but was by no means clear how to find it. Faust had first to be taken down to the underworld, there to beg the help of Persephone in procuring him Helen in bodily form. But when Goethe wish to show Helen being fetched by Persephone, he felt that no ideas or concepts from the scene were forthcoming. For just think what was involved. Faust has got as far as reaching Helen imaginatively, in his soul's subconscious; he had, however, to reach her with those faculties natural to him in life. For that, Helen had to enter this sphere of consciousness. Therefore Goethe had to bring about, to a certain degree, Helen's embodiment. To this end he had recourse to what he knew from Paracelsus, whose works he had really studied, the treatise De Generatione Rerum being especially useful to him. There Paracelsus shows how homunculi may be produced by means of certain processes. It is easy, of course, for the modern man to say: Yes, but that was merely a mediaeval pre-possession of Paracelsus'. It is also easy for him to say: surely no one is asked to believe this phantasy of Paracelsus'.—True, as far as I'm concerned nobody need believe it. But it is well to consider that in this treatise De Generatione Rerum Paracelsus expressly assures us that by means of certain processes it is possible to produce something having indeed no body—mark that, please. Paracelsus expressly says that it has nobody, but faculties similar to those of the human soul, and rising to clairvoyance. Thus, Paracelsus was of the opinion that there were certain devices enabling men to produce a being that, without a physical body, develop a kind of understanding, a kind of intellectuality like human beings, and even something higher. It was of this that Goethe made use. Perhaps he thought to himself: Helen has entered the sphere of Faust's consciousness in a purely spiritual sense, but she must become more substantial.

This substantiality he brought about through the kind of being we have in Homunculus, who is as it were a bridge between the purely spiritual and the physical; for he himself has no physical body but a favorable moment originates from physical devices. So that we may say: The presence of Homunculus makes it possible to bring a quite spiritual Helen into the corporeal world where Faust has his home.

Now for all this Goethe naturally needed some kind of error, and this error is brought about in a roundabout way through Wagner. Through his materialistic mind Wagner is misled into the belief that Homunculus is entirely a material production. He could not have brought a real homunculus into being; for that, there would be required spiritual forces not at his disposal. These spiritual forces are supplied when Mephistopheles, the ahrimanic element, appears. For the ahrimanic impulse is given when something actually comes into being out of what Wagner has compounded. Had Wagner—either alone or perhaps with the help of the everywhere latent forces—succeeded in his experiment, it might have happened to him as it did to a man who wrote me some time ago saying that, at last, after endless effort, he had really brought little men to life in his room, but then could not get rid of them, he could not escape them. He wanted advice as to how he could save himself from these creatures, these living mechanisms, he had produced. They have since pursued him everywhere. One can well imagine what happens to the mind of such a man. There are, of course, still men today who have these adventures, just as there are still those who scoff at such things.

Through a coincidence, but only coincidence, at the time Goethe was writing the scene Johann Jakob Wagner, in Wurzburg, was maintaining that homunculi could be produced, and he gave the method for doing this. But it goes without saying that it is not true that Goethe took the name from him; for the name Wagner come from the old “Faust” then still in existence. This scene was first written down when Johann Jakob Wagner was still an infant.

It is due to Mephistopheles that, out of what Wagner has achieved, the Homunculus comes into being. But he does come into being, and is represented in the way Goethe had learnt from Paracelsus' instructions. And Homunculus does in fact immediately become clairvoyant, for he is able to see Faust's dream. he describes what Faust—more or less under the influence of Lucifer—is experiencing in another state of consciousness—how he has actually gained access to the Grecian world. In the description Homunculus we recognise the meeting of Zeus with Leda, the mother of Helen.

Thus we see how Goethe places a close juxtaposition the spiritual that lives in Faust, and Homunculus who knows how to grasp and interpret it. We see how Goethe works round to the ordinary physical world so that Helen can then enter it. And for all that is pictured later in the “Classical Walpurgis-night”, we see how Goethe tries to form the physical out of the eternal spiritual in Helen, with whom Faust has lived, while Homunculus traverses all the kingdoms of nature, and now taking to himself a physical body unites with Helen's spiritual element. By dint of Homunculus traversing the rounds of nature Helen becomes, externally on the physical plane, all that we find her in the third Act of the second Part of “Faust”. Thus Helen is born anew through Homunculus, through the metamorphosis is able to bring about in conjunction with all Faust is living through spiritually. This is what Goethe had in mind. This is why he introduces Homunculus and why he shows the relation between what Faust is, in a way, is dreaming, and what Homunculus sees.

With all this, Goethe comes very near true Occultism, that through Occultism of which I have often spoken, from which we are led away by abstract thinking and the desire to live in abstract concepts. I have often called attention to the way a certain one-sided cultivation of the principles of Christianity leads to the maturing of unreal, shadowy concepts as world-outlook, that are powerless to come to any understanding of real-life. And men stands to-day at the mercy of such concepts. On the one hand they have a purely mechanical knowledge of nature that, however, is no knowledge but merely a system out of which all life has been driven.

“Encheiresis naturae, Chemistry calls it,
Mocking itself, not knowing what befalls it.”

says Mephistopheles. This on the one hand that wants merely to copy down what happens outwardly, and on the other hand concepts drawn from any kind of spiritual source, either represented pantheistically or existing in some cloud-cuckoo-land of shadowy concepts, neither capable of entering right into life, nor of grasping its reality.

It is for this reason I have been pointing out how Spiritual Science is able to understand once again the real, actual, human being, for example, and to say: This human head is, from one point of view, only what the anatomist makes of it by describing it purely externally, but it is not merely what is outwardly the body for an abstract concept of a soul floating in cloud-cuckoo-land; this head must be understood as having undergone a transformation, a metamorphosis, from the body of a previous incarnation and is formed, as I have explained in recent lectures, out of the spheres of the entire cosmos. The essential thing for which concrete spiritual science must strive is to fit what is thus formed into the material world by means of concepts—concepts that do not float in the general and abstract. For what is most feared today by many bigotted Christian pastors, and people of that kind, with their unsubstantial abstractions of God and eternity, is precisely this living comprehension of the world, this concrete grasping of the material that is, indeed, at the same time a revelation of the spiritual. This diving into the real world with concepts is what man today will not have. And it is just this to which Goethe wants so vigorously to point. Hence he contrasts the spirit of Homunculus, the real, genuine spiritual that then lives on, though in a different way, in the consciousness of Faust, this way of beholding, he contrasts with the world as Mephistopheles would have it—a world derived from the association-forming tendency of the Christian middle-ages, in which is extinguished everything spiritual that approaches man's soul. Therefore Homunculus sees what is visible neither to Wagner not to Mephistopheles. Hence because Mephistopheles says:

“Marry, what moonshine dost thou not narrate!
Small as thou art, thou art a dreamer great.
Naught see I—”

Homunculus answers:

“No! The North thy heritage is,
Thy birth was in the misty ages,
The waste of priesthood and of chivalry.
And how should there thine eye be free?
In murkiness thou art at home.”

Goethe is consciously striving for a concrete grasp of reality.

I have drawn attention to the fact that here, in the passage of course where Homunculus is speaking to Mephistopheles, by some mischance a line has been left out. For in all the editions we read:

“No! The North thy heritage is,
Thy birth was in the misty ages,
The waste of priesthood and of chivalry.
And how should there thine eye be free?
In murkiness thou art at home.”

The rhyme to ‘home’ is missing.

“Dingy-brown stone-work, mouldered, horrid,
And Gothic-arched, ignoble, florid.”

Now there is no reason why the rhyme here should be missing; it must have happened therefore by some accident in the dictation that a line was missed that must perhaps have run like this:

“But what we make of this gloom?”

Thus Homunculus, having seen that Mephistopheles does not understand him, shows him clearly how by living in abstractions men have separated themselves from the concrete, spiritual world. This has arisen through the misty concepts that have been developed and have led to the narrowness in all the affairs of life in which Faust grew up, from which, however, he grew away. But the devil in Mephistopheles feels at home there. This is perhaps why Homunculus says:

“No! The North thy heritage is,
Thy birth was in the misty ages,”

By the ‘misty ages’ he means the Middle Ages, but with a play upon the old German name Nivelheim. (The line in German runs Im Nebelalter jung geworden.) Jung geworden (grown young) is an old expression—and a very good one. Just as one grows old in the physical world, so one grows young when one is born into the spiritual world. Thus, in the old German expression, to ‘become young’ meant to ‘be born,’ and is clear evidence that in language there was an understanding of the spiritual.

And now he looks about him in the gloom and sees all that is there:

“Dingy-brown stone-work, mouldered, horrid,
And Gothic-arched, ignoble, florid.”

Then:

“Awakens he here, new cares we've got.”

for he must be brought into a life that is fully living if he has no wish for merely abstract concepts. Faust has no desire, for example, to have ancient Greece pictured according to the humanists or philologists; he wants to live, really live, within ancient Greece, by having Helen, as its representative, appearing bodily before him.

Thus throughout this scent we see Goethe's wonderful feeling for the concrete. We may say indeed that every word of the poetry Goethe wrote in his old age came out of a profound experience of the world. And that gives weight to these words, enormous weight, and gives them also immortality. For how fine in this respect are the words here spoken by Mephistopheles—words acquiring their special colouring from this fact:

“Alack! Away! Forbear of yonder squabble
'Twixt tyranny and slavery to babble!
It irks me. Scarce 'tis ended when de novo
With the whole farce they start again ab ovo,
Yet none doth mark he is but made a fool
By Asmodeus who the strings doth pull.”

(By the devil of discord, with whom Mephistopheles feels himself thoroughly akin.)

“They fight for freedom—so themselves they flatter.” We feel ourselves transported almost into the present, for now too we fight for freedom. But Goethe retorts:

“Slaves against slaves, if you but sift the matter.”

To sum up, my dear friends, we might say: If only the time might come when all the striving of such a poem, as we find it revealed in Goethe by this scene, might be continued on into what should arise through present-day Spiritual Science, if only what lies in such a story of endeavour might take more hold on men, might find a haven in their souls—then we might indeed go forward as real men.

But instead, since the days of Goethe, the abstraction of all endeavour has made infinitely greater progress. Here is the point where the striver after Spiritual Science—whether or not he rises to Goethe's level—should try to become clear as to the difference between concrete spiritual endeavor and the spiritual endeavor that is abstract. You see, the study of Spiritual Science gives us concepts by means of which we can really immerse ourselves in reality and learn to understand it. Materialism gives no real concepts only the shadows of them. So how can materialism understand the difference we have made clear between the human head and the rest of the body? Or how can it understand the following, for example. Let us take a concept that is infinitely important.

We know that man has his physical body, his etheric body, his astral body and his ego. The animal has its physical body, etheric body and astral body. Let us look at the animal. It is interesting to watch animals when, having eaten their fill in the meadow, they lie down to digest. It is very interesting to watch this—and why? Because the animal with its astral being has withdrawn entirely into the etheric body. What then is its soul doing while the animal is digesting? The soul is taking part with infinity satisfaction in what is happening to the body. It lies there and watches itself digesting and this gives the animal immense satisfaction. It is interesting to see a cow, for instance, digesting spiritually as she lies there, to see how all the processes involved when foodstuffs are received into the stomach and utilised in the other parts of the body are inwardly visible to her. The animal looks on at these processes with inner satisfaction, because of the intimate correspondence between her astral and ether bodies. The astral is living in what the etheric body reflects of the physico-chemical processes whereby the foodstuffs are introduced into the organism. It is a whole world that the cow sees! True, this world consists only of the cow and the processes taking place within her, but truly, though all that this astral body perceives in the etheric body of the cow consist sonly of the processes within her own horizon, within her sphere, everything is so magnified that it is as large in the consciousness of the cow as our human consciousness when it reaches to the firmament. I should have to draw the processes taking place between the stomach and the rest of the cow's organism as a large sphere growing and expanding to a vast area, since at this moment for the cow there is nothing beyond the cow-cosmos—and this is of a gigantic size.

This is no jest but a fact. And the cow has a feeling of exaltation when seeing her cosmos thus, seeing herself as cosmos. Here we have an insight into the concrete nature of animals. For, man having an ego, the astral body is torn by it from that intimate union with the etheric body existing, for example, in the cow. Astral body and etheric body are torn asunder. Hence, when man digests after a meal he is deprived of the capacity to survey the whole digestive process of the cosmos. He remains unconscious of it all. Against that, the ego by its activities so restricts the impulses of the etheric body that they are only grasped by the astral body in the region of the sense organs. So that what in the animal forms a whole with the astral body is in men concentrated in the sense organs. That is why the sense-process in man is as great as in certain moments the animal process is for the animal.

It is in a measure a defect in man that, when he begins his afternoon nap, he cannot as he dreams look on at his digestion, for he would then see a whole world. But the ego tears man's astral body away from that world, and only allows him to see as cosmos what is going on in his sense organs.

I wanted to refer to this merely as an example, for from it we see that concrete Spiritual Science mut enter into the very essence of things with concepts that are not shadowy but go deep into reality. All concepts of Spiritual Science should be such that they go deep into reality. It is a characteristic phenomenon, however, of the materialistic age that it despises concepts of this nature; it will have nothing to do with them. Where knowledge of nature is concerned this leads in reality to lack of any knowledge at all. In life it leads to a much greater lack. It makes it impossible for man to have any sense of concrete concepts, concepts full of content. Hence, materialistic education is at the same time an education in shadowy concepts, empty of content. The two things run absolutely parallel—not to be able to understand reality in a spiritual way, to lack upon everything as a mechanism; and to be incapableof forming any concepts that can really enter into the connections of the world or of humanity.

And it is from this point of view that the present time must be understood, for that is precisely where the difficulties today arise. There are now, certainly, people with idealistic natures, but they are the idealists of a materialistic age, and for that reason talk in shadowy, general concepts, unable to gras reality, or at best grasping it only indirectly through emotion, and these idealists blow their own trumpets in the world as loudly as possible. While on the other hand as regards knowledge of nature the capacity to understand her is lacking, on the other hand we have the inevitable parallel phenomenon—the holding forth of shadowy concepts. And when men talk so, they are indeed not talking of anything that is unreal in itself but of what is connected in the worst possible way with the painful events of the present time.

In Goethe's day things had not gone so far, but today we are confronted with a wide-spread lack of power to see any difference at all between a shadowy and a real concept. Wagner, as pictured by Goethe, lives entirely in shadowy concepts, and Homunculus even tries to prove to him that he does so. For instance, when Wagner has anxiously asked:

“And I pray
What becomes of me when you all go away?”

Homunculus answers:

“Oh
Thou'llt stay at home, most weighty work to do.
The ancient parchments thou'llt unroll, no doubt,
The elements of life by precept single out,
And each to other fit with foresight due. Ponder
The what, more to the how thy thoughts apply.
Whillst through a portion of the world I'll wander
Belike I'll find the dot upon the i.”

When I read this passage it always makes me realise anew how it is taken straight from life, particularly the life of the pundits. For I know of a medical examination in which a young student came up before a very learned man, a historian, and as such pre-eminently an authority on old documents, and a professor of Historical Science. It was chiefly under him that the young medical student had studied. Among the questions he asked was this: Now, tell me, Mr X, in which papal Bull was the dot over the i first used? The student knew that at once and answered: Innocent IV's. Now another historian, of a different kind, was present. He wanted to play the part of Mephistopheles a little, so he said: Look here, my dear colleague, as I am the other examiner let me now ask the candidate a question. Tell me, Mr. X, when did this Innocent IV ascend the Papal Chair? The student did not know. Then when did Innocent IV die? The student did not know. Well then, tell me anything else at all you know about Innocent IV beyond the fact that in his Bulls the i was first dotted. But the candidate again could give no answer. Then the Professor who had to do with ancient documents and parchments said: But Mr. X, you seem to be a complete blockhead today. Then the other, still wishing to play Mephistopheles, replied: But, my dear colleague, is not this your favourite pupil? What can have turned him into a blockhead?

So then, the good Wagner, being different from Homunculus, was able to discover the dot over the i in his parchment. But since that time, thought that is abstract and purely conceptual has become universal and historic. Thus it has become possible for us to see the spectacle playing a profound part in the whole world-history—that, in an important affair, there appears before the world a document living entirely in shadow concepts. Nothing more unreal and less in conformity with the actual can be imagined thatn the note recently sent by Woodrow Wilson to the Senate of the United States of America. Today when it is only of use to understand the realities of the world, weakness is found in high places. Something different is needed from shadowy concepts, concepts that are mere shadows.

And here we may well ask ourselves whether suffering is to continue endlessly because in high places men of a materialistic civilisation flee reality, and can only grasp shadows instead of concepts? I know, my dear friends, that when we are comng up against events of such sadness as those of the present, there is little understanding to be found, for today there are very few men who can grasp the difference between shadowy concepts and reality. For the pure idealist—naturally idealism is always worthy of recognition—not understanding spiritual reality, will think it fine, infinitely fine, when people speak beautifully of Freedom and the Rights of Man, of International Federation and things of the kind. They do not see where the harm lies in these things; the lack of such insight is wide-spread.

So little understanding is there, that it makes us see the meaning of what Mephistophleles says after leaving Nicodemus. For, after all, many who rank today as people of importance speak as the scholar spoke, and even if they do not claim to have created the whole world, at any rate wish to govern it according to their dreary shadow concepts. Men have no wish to make progress in such things. They remain children forever, children who can believe that it is possible to rule the world with dummy concepts. Hence we can appreciate the meaning of those words of Mephistopheles:

“I see my word hath left you cold,
Ye artless bairns. Yet I'll not take it evil.
Think though, the Devil is old; grow old
If ye would understand the Devil.”

Those who believe the world can be governed by shadow concepts, do not understand anything of what Goethe is saying through the mouth of the Devil when the Devil speaks the truth.

We may take the Homunculus scene in the second Part of Goethe's Faust as a lecture on the understanding of the real, the actual, in our age that is dominated by dummy concepts. But these matters must really be taken very seriously. And for us in particular, my dear friends, it is most important to form really clear concepts about all the various pronouncements so plentiful in the world today and during many past decades, which have finally brought us to the present situation.