The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] In the editing of Goethe's natural-scientific writings, for which I was responsible, I was guided by the thought of enlivening the study of the particulars in these writings by presenting the magnificent world of ideas that underlies them. It is my conviction that every single assertion of Goethe's acquires an entirely new sense—its rightful sense, in fact—if one approaches it with a full understanding for his profound and comprehensive world view. There is no denying the fact that many of Goethe's statements on natural-scientific matters seem entirely insignificant when one considers them from the standpoint of modern science, which has progressed so far in the meantime. But this is not a matter for any further consideration at all. The point is what a given statement of Goethe's signifies within his world view. Upon the spiritual heights on which the poet stands, his scientific needs are also more intense. Without scientific needs, however, there is no science. What questions did Goethe address to nature? That is what is important. Whether and how he answered them are matters of only secondary consideration. If today we have more adequate means, a richer experience—well, then we will succeed in finding more comprehensive solutions to the questions he posed. But my expositions are meant to show that we can do no more than just this: to proceed with our greater means upon the paths he marked out for us. What we should learn from him, therefore, above all else, is how one should address questions to nature.

[ 2 ] One overlooks the main point if one does not credit Goethe with anything more than having given us many an observation that was rediscovered by later research, and that constitutes today an important part of our world view. The important thing for him was not at all the communicated finding, but rather the way in which he arrived at it. He himself declares appropriately: “With the opinions that one risks, it is like pieces that one pushes forward on the board; they can be taken, but they have initiated a game that will be won.” He arrived at a method thoroughly in accord with nature. He sought, with the help of those means available, to introduce this method into science. It may be the case that the individual results he attained by this have been transformed by the progress of science; hut the scientific process that he introduced is a lasting gain for science.

[ 3 ] These points of view could not be without influence upon the arrangement of the materials to be published. One can, with some seeming justification, ask: Why, since I have already departed from the order of the writings that has been usual until now, did I not right away take the route that seems recommended over all the others: to bring the general scientific writings in the first volume, the organic, mineralogical, and meteorological ones in the second volume, and those on physics in the third. The first volume would then contain the general points of view, and the following volumes the particular elaborations of the basic thoughts. As tempting as this might be, it could never have occurred to me to use this arrangement. In doing so, I would not have been able coming back to Goethe's comparison once more—to achieve what I wanted: by the pieces that are risked first, to make the plan of the game recognizable.

[ 4 ] Nothing was farther from Goethe's nature than taking one's start in a conscious way from general concepts. He always takes his start from concrete facts, compares and orders them. During this activity, the ideas underlying the facts occur to him. It is a great mistake to assert that, because of that familiar enough remark he made about the idea of Faust, it is not ideas that are the driving principle in Goethe's creative work. In his contemplation of things, after he has stripped away everything incidental, everything unessential, there remains something for him that is idea in his sense. The method Goethe employs remains—even there where he lifts himself to the idea—one that is founded upon pure experience. For, nowhere does he allow a subjective ingredient to slip into his research. He only frees the phenomena from what is incidental in order to penetrate into their deeper foundations. His subject has no other task than that of arranging the object in such a way that it discloses its innermost nature. “The true is Godlike; it does not appear directly; we must divine it from its manifestations.” The point is to bring these manifestations into such a relationship that the “true” appears. The true, the idea, already lies within the fact which we confront in observation; we must only remove the covering that conceals it from us. The true scientific method consists in the removing of this covering. Goethe took this path. And we must follow him upon it if we wish to penetrate completely into his nature. In other words: we must begin with Goethe's studies on organic nature, because he began with them. Here there first revealed itself to him a rich content of ideas that we then find again as components in his general and methodological essays. If we want to understand these last, we must already have filled ourselves with that content. The essays on method are mere networks of thought for someone who is not intent upon following the path Goethe followed. As to the studies on physical phenomena: they first arose for Goethe as a consequence of his view of nature.

[ 1 ] Someone who sets himself the task of presenting the spiritual development of a thinker has to explain that thinker's particular direction in a psychological way from the facts given in his biography. But in presenting Goethe the thinker the task does not end there. What is asked for here is not only a justification and explanation of his specific scientific direction, but rather, and primarily how this genius came at all to be active in the scientific realm. Goethe had to suffer much through the incorrect views of his contemporaries who could not believe it possible that poetic creativity and scientific study could be united in one soul. The important point here is above all to answer the question What are the motives that drive the great poet to science? Did the transition from art to science lie purely in his subjective inclinations, in personal arbitrariness? Or was Goethe's artistic direction of such a kind that it had to drive him necessarily to science?

[ 2 ] If the first were the case, then his simultaneous devotion to art and science would merely signify a chance personal enthusiasm for both these directions of human striving; we would have to do with a poet who also happened to be a thinker, and it might very well have been the case that, if his course in life had been somewhat different, he would have taken the same path in his poetry, without concerning himself with science at all. Both sides of this man would then have interested us separately, each in its own right; each on its own would perhaps have helped the progress of mankind a good deal. All this would still be the case if the two directions in spirit had also been divided between two personalities. Goethe the poet would then have had nothing to do with Goethe the thinker.

[ 3 ] If the second were the case, then Goethe's artistic direction was of such a kind that, from within outward, it necessarily felt the urge to be supplemented by scientific thinking. Then it is utterly inconceivable that the two directions could have been divided between two personalities. Then each of the two directions interests us not only for its own sake but also because of its relationship to the other. Then there is an objective transition from art to science; there is a point at which the two meet in such a way that perfection in the one realm demands perfection in the other. Then Goethe was not following a personal inclination, but rather the direction in art to which he devoted himself awakened needs in him that could be satisfied only by scientific activity.

[ 4 ] Our age believes itself correct in keeping art and science as far apart as possible. They are supposed to be two completely opposing poles in the cultural evolution of mankind. Science, one thinks, is supposed to sketch for us the most objective picture of the world possible; it is supposed to show us reality in a mirror; or, in other words, it is supposed to hold fast purely to the given, renouncing all subjective arbitrariness. The objective world determines the laws of science; science must subject itself to this world. Science should take the yardstick for what is true and false entirely from the objects of experience.

[ 5 ] The situation is supposedly quite different in the case of artistic creations. Their law is given them by the self-creative power of the human spirit. For science, any interference of human subjectivity would be a falsifying of reality, a going beyond experience; art, on the other hand, grows upon the field of the subjectivity of a genius. Its creations are the productions of human imagination, not mirror images of the outer world. Outside of us, in objective existence, lies the source of scientific laws; within us, in our individuality, lies the source of aesthetic laws. The latter, therefore, have not the slightest value for knowledge; they create illusions without the slightest element of reality.

[ 6 ] Whoever grasps the matter in this way will never become clear about the relationship of Goethean poetry to Goethean science. He will only misunderstand both. Goethe's world historic significance lies, indeed, precisely in the fact that his art flows directly from the primal source of all existence, that there is nothing illusory or subjective about it, that, on the contrary, his art appears as the herald of that lawfulness that the poet has grasped by listening to the world spirit within the depths of nature's working. At this level, art becomes the interpreter of the mysteries of the world just as science is also, in a different sense.

[ 7 ] And Goethe always conceived of art in this way. It was for him one of the revelations of the primal law of the world; science was for him the other one. For him art and science sprang from one source. Whereas the researcher delves down into the depths of reality in order then to express their driving powers in the form of thoughts, the artist seeks to imbue his medium with these same driving powers. “I think that one could call science the knowledge of the general, abstracted knowing; art, on the other hand, would be science turned into action; science would be reason, and art its mechanism; therefore one could also call art practical science. And finally then science could be called the theorem and art the problem.” What science states as idea (theorem) is what art has to imprint into matter, becomes art's problem. “In the works of man, as in those of nature, it is the intentions that are primarily worthy of note,” says Goethe. He everywhere seeks not only what is given to the senses in the outer world, but also the tendency through which it has come into being. [ 8 ] To grasp this scientifically and to give it artistic form is his mission. In its own formations, nature gets itself, “in its specific forms, into a cul-de-sac”; one must go back to what ought to have come about if the tendency could have unfolded unhindered, just as the mathematician always keeps his eye, not upon this or that particular triangle, but always upon that lawfulness which underlies every possible triangle. The point is not what nature has created but rather the principle by which nature has created it. Then this principle is to be developed in the way that accords with its own nature, and not in the way this has occurred in each particular entity of nature in accordance with thousands of chance factors. The artist has “to evolve the noble out of the common and the beautiful out of the unformed.”

[ 9 ] Goethe and Schiller take art in all its full profundity. The beautiful is “a manifestation of secret laws of nature, that, except for the phenomenon of the beautiful, would have remained forever hidden to us.” A look into the poet's Italian Journey suffices for us to know that this is not an empty phrase, but rather deep inner conviction. When he says the following, one can see that for him nature and art are of the same origin: “The great works of art have at the same time been brought forth by human beings according to true and natural laws. just as the greatest works of nature are. Everything that is arbitrary, thought-up, falls away; there is necessity, there is God.” Relative to the art of the Greeks, he says in this direction: “I have the impression that they proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds and whose tracks I am following.” And about Shakespeare: “Shakespeare allies himself with the world spirit; he penetrates the world like it does; nothing is hidden to either; however, if it is the world spirit's business to preserve mysteries before, and often after, the fact, so the poet is of a mind to give the secret away.”

[ 10 ] Here we should also recall the statement about the “joyful epoch in life” that the poet owed to Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment ⁴⁷ and for which he actually has only the fact to thank that he here “saw creations of art and of nature each treated like the other, and that aesthetic and teleological powers of judgment illuminated each other reciprocally.” “I was happy,” says the poet, “that the art of poetry and comparative natural science are so closely related, through the fact that both of them are subject to the same power of judgment.” In his essay, The Significant Benefit of a Single Intelligent Word ⁴⁸ Goethe juxtaposes, with exactly the same thought in mind, his objective poetizing and his objective thinking.

[ 11 ] Thus, to Goethe, art seems to be just as objective as science. Only the form of each is different. Each appears to flow forth from one being, to be the necessary stages of one evolution. Any view was antithetical to him that relegates art or what is beautiful to an isolated position outside of the total picture of human evolution. Thus he says: “In the aesthetic realm, it is not good to speak of the idea of the beautiful; in doing so, one isolates the beautiful. which after all cannot be thought of as separate.” Or: “Style rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge, upon the being of things, insofar as we are allowed to know this being in visible and tangible forms.” Art rests therefore upon our activity of knowing. The latter has the task of recreating in thought the order according to which the world is put together; art has the task of developing in detail the idea of this order that the world-all has. The artist incorporates into his work everything about the lawfulness of the world that is attainable to him. His work thus appears as a world in miniature. Herein lies the reason why the Goethean direction in art must supplement itself with science. As art, it is already an activity of knowing. Goethe, in fact, wanted neither science nor art: he wanted the idea. And he expresses or represents the idea in the direction from which the idea happens to present itself to him. Goethe sought to ally himself with the world spirit, and to reveal to us how it holds sway; he did this through the medium of art or of science as required. What lay in Goethe was not any one-sided artistic or scientific striving, but rather the indefatigable urge to behold “all working forces and seeds.”

[ 12 ] In this, Goethe is still not a philosophical poet, for his literary works do not take any roundabout path through thought in arriving at a sense-perceptible form; rather they stream directly from the source of all becoming, just as his scientific research is not imbued with poetic imagination, but rather rests directly upon his becoming aware of ideas. Without Goethe's being a philosophical poet, his basic direction seems, for the philosophical observer, to be a philosophical one.

[ 13 ] With this, the question as to whether Goethe's scientific work has any philosophical value or not takes on an entirely new form. It is a question of inferring, from what we have of Goethe's work, the underlying principles. What must we postulate in order for Goethe's scientific assertions to appear as the results of these postulates? We must express what Goethe left unexpressed, but which alone makes his views comprehensible.

• 47. Kritik der Urteilskraft
• 48. Bedeutende Fördentis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Methodology

[ 1 ] We have established what the relationship is between the world of ideas—attained by scientific thinking—and directly given experience. We have learned to know the beginning and end of a process: experience devoid of ideas and idea filled apprehension of reality. Between the two, however, there lies human activity. The human being must actively allow the end to go forth from the beginning. The way in which he does this is the method. It is of course the case, now, that our apprehension of that relationship between the beginning and end of knowledge will also require its own characteristic method. Where must we begin in developing this method? Scientific thinking must prove itself, step by step, to represent an overcoming of that dark form of reality which we have designated as the directly given, and to represent a lifting up of the directly given into the bright clarity of the idea. The method must therefore consist in our answering the question, with respect to each thing: What part does it have in the unified world of ideas; what place does it occupy in the ideal picture that I make for myself of the world? When I have understood this, when I have recognized how a thing connects itself with my ideas, then my need for knowledge is satisfied. There is only one thing that is not satisfying to my need for knowledge: when a thing confronts me that does not want to connect anywhere with the view I hold of things. The ideal discomfort must be overcome that stems from the fact that there is something or other of which I must say to myself: I see that it is there; when I approach it, it faces me like a question mark; but I find nowhere, within the harmony of my thoughts, the point at that I can incorporate it; the questions I must ask upon seeing it remain unanswered, no matter how I twist and turn my system of thoughts. From this we can see what we need when we look at anything. When I approach it, it faces me as a single thing. Within me the thought-world presses toward that spot where the concept of the thing lies. I do not rest until that which confronted me at first as an individual thing appears as a part of my thought-world. Thus the individual thing as such dissolves and appears in a larger context. Now it is illuminated by the other thought-masses; now it is a serving member; and it is completely clear to me what it signifies within the greater harmony. This is what takes place in us when we approach an object of experience and contemplate it. All progress in science depends upon our becoming aware of the point at which some phenomenon or other can be incorporated into the harmony of the thought-world. Do not misunderstand me. This does not mean that every phenomenon must be explainable by concepts we already have, that our world of ideas is closed, nor that every new experience must coincide with some concept or other that we already possess. That pressing of the thought-world within us toward a concept can also go to a spot that has not yet been thought by anyone at all. And the ideal progress of the history of science rests precisely on the fact that thinking drives new configurations of ideas to the surface. Every such thought-configuration is connected by a thousand threads with all other possible thoughts—with this concept in this way, and with another in that. And the scientific method consists in the fact that we show the concept of a certain phenomenon in its relationship with the rest of the world of ideas. We call this process the deriving (demonstrating) of the concept. All scientific thinking, however, consists only in our finding the existing transitions from concept to concept, consists in our letting one concept go forth from another. The movement of our thinking back and forth from concept to concept: this is scientific method. One will say that this is the old story of the correspondence between the conceptual world and the world of experience. If we are to believe that the going back and forth from concept to concept leads to a picture of reality, then we would have to presuppose that the world outside ourselves (the transsubjective) would correspond to our conceptual world. But that is only a mistaken apprehension of the relationship between individual entity and concept. When I confront an entity from the world of experience, I absolutely do not know at all what it is. Only when I have overcome it, when its concept has lighted up for me, do I then know what I have before me. But this does not mean to say that this individual entity and the concept are two different things. No, they are the same; and what confronts me in this particular entity is nothing other than the concept. The reason I see that entity as a separate piece detached from the rest of reality is, in fact, that I do not yet know it in its true nature, that it does not yet confront me as what it is. This gives us the means of further characterizing our scientific method. Every individual entity of reality represents a definite content within our thought-system. Every such entity is founded in the wholeness of the world of ideas and can be comprehended only in connection with it. Thus each thing must necessarily call upon a twofold thought activity. First the thought corresponding to the thing has to be determined in clear contours, and after this all the threads must be determined that lead from this thought to the whole thought-world. Clarity in the details and depth in the whole are the two most significant demands of reality. The former is the intellect's concern, the latter is reason's. The intellect (Verstand) creates thought-configurations for the individual things of reality. It fulfills its task best the more exactly it delimits these configurations, the sharper the contours are that it draws. Reason (Vernunft) then has to incorporate these configurations into the harmony of the whole world of ideas. This of course presupposes the following: Within the content of the thought-configurations that the intellect creates, that unity already exists, living one and the same life; only, the intellect keeps everything artificially separated. Reason then, without blurring the clarity, merely eliminates the separation again. The intellect distances us from reality; reason brings us back to it again. Graphically this can be represented in the following way:

[ 2 ] In this diagram everything is connected; the same principle lives in all the parts. The intellect causes the separation of the individual configurations—because they do indeed confront us in the given as individual elements⁵²—and reason recognizes the unity.⁵³ [ 3 ] If we have the following two perceptions: 1. the sun shining down and 2. a warm stone, the intellect keeps both things apart, because they confront us as two; it holds onto one as the cause and onto the other as the effect; then reason supervenes, tears down the wall between them, and recognizes the unity in the duality. All the concepts that the intellect creates—cause and effect, substance and attribute, body and soul, idea and reality, God and world, etc.—are there only in order to keep unified reality separated artificially into parts; and reason, without blurring the content thus created, without mystically obscuring the clarity of the intellect, has then to seek out the inner unity in the multiplicity. Reason thereby comes back to that from which the intellect had distanced itself: to the unified reality. If one wants an exact nomenclature, one can call the formations of the intellect “concepts” and the creations of reason “ideas.” And one sees that the path of science is to lift oneself through the concept to the idea. And here is the place where the subjective and the objective element of our knowing differentiates itself for us in the clearest way. It is plain to see that the separation has only a subjective existence, that it is only created by our intellect. It cannot hinder me from dividing one and the same objective unity into thought-configurations that are different from those of a fellow human being; this does not hinder my reason, in its connecting activity, from attaining the same objective unity again from which we both, in fact, have taken our start. Let us represent symbolically a unified configuration of reality (figure 1). I divide it intellectually thus (figure 2); another person divides it differently (figure 3). We bring it together in accordance with reason and obtain the same configuration.

[ 4 ] This makes it explainable to us how people can have such different concepts, such different views of reality, in spite of the fact that reality can, after all, only be one. The difference lies in the difference between our intellectual worlds. This sheds light for us upon the development of the different scientific standpoints. We understand where the many philosophical standpoints originate, and do not need to bestow the palm of truth exclusively upon one of them. We also know which standpoint we ourselves have to take with respect to the multiplicity of human views. We will not ask exclusively: What is true, what is false? We will always investigate how the intellectual world of a thinker goes forth from the world harmony; we will seek to understand and not to judge negatively and regard at once as error that which does not correspond with our own view. Another source of differentiation between our scientific standpoints is added to this one through the fact that every individual person has a different field of experience. Each person is indeed confronted, as it were, by one section of the whole of reality. His intellect works upon this and is his mediator on the way to the idea. But even though we all do therefore perceive the same idea, still we always do this from different places. Therefore, only the end result to which we come can be the same; our paths, however, can be different. It absolutely does not matter at all whether the individual judgments and concepts of which our knowing consists correspond to each other or not; the only thing that matters is that they ultimately lead us to the point that we are swimming in the main channel of the idea. And all human beings must ultimately meet each other in this channel if energetic thinking leads them out of and beyond their own particular standpoints. It can indeed be possible that a limited experience or an unproductive spirit leads us to a one-sided, incomplete view; but even the smallest amount of what we experience must ultimately lead us to the idea; for we do not lift ourselves to the idea through a lesser or greater experience, but rather through our abilities as a human personality alone. A limited experience can only result in the fact that we express the idea in a one-sided way, that we have limited means at our command for bringing to expression the light that shines in us; a limited experience, however, cannot hinder us altogether from allowing that light to shine within us. Whether our scientific or even our general world view is also complete or not is an altogether different question; as is that about the spiritual depth of our views. If one now returns to Goethe, one will recognize that many of his statements, when compared with what we have presented in this chapter, simply follow from it. We consider this to be the only correct relationship between an author and his interpreter. When Goethe says: “If I know my relationship to myself and to the outer world, then I call it truth. And in this way each person can have his own truth, and it is after all always the same one” (Aphorisms in Prose), this can be understood only if we take into account what we have developed here.

2. Dogmatic and Immanent Methods

[ 5 ] A scientific judgment comes about through the fact that we either join two concepts together or join a perception to a concept. The judgment that there is no effect without a cause belongs to the first kind; the judgment that a tulip is a plant belongs to the second kind. Daily life also recognizes judgments where one perception is joined to another, for example when we say that a rose is red. When we make a judgment, we do so for one reason or another. Now, there can be two different views about this reason. One view assumes that the factual (objective) reasons for our judgment being true lie beyond what is given us in the concepts or perceptions that enter into the judgment. According to this view, the reason a judgment is true does not coincide with the subjective reasons out of which we make this judgment. Our logical reasons, according to this view, have nothing to do with the objective reasons. It may be that this view proposes some way or other of arriving at the objective reasons for our insight; the means that our knowing thinking has are not adequate for this. For my knowing, the objective entity that determines my conclusion lies in a world unknown to me: my conclusion. along with its formal reasons (freedom from contradictions, being supported by various axioms, etc.), lies only within my world. A science based on this view is a dogmatic one. Both the theologizing philosophy that bases itself on a belief in revelation, and the modern science of experience are dogmatic sciences of this kind; for there is not only a dogma of revelation; there is also a dogma of experience. The dogma of revelation conveys truths to man about things that are totally removed from his field of vision. He does not know the world concerning which the ready-made assertions are prescribed for his belief. He cannot get at the grounds for these assertions. He can therefore never gain any insight as to why they are true. He can gain no knowledge, only faith. On the other hand, however, the assertions of the science of experience are also merely dogmas; it believes that one should stick merely to pure experience and only observe, describe, and systematically order its transformations, without lifting oneself to the determining factors that are not yet given within mere direct experience. In this case also we do not in fact gain the truth through insight into the matter, but rather it is forced upon us from outside. I see what is happening and what is there; and register it; why it is this way lies in the object. I see only the results, not the reason. The dogma of revelation once ruled science; today it is the dogma of experience that does so. It was once considered presumptuous to reflect upon the preconditions of revealed truths; today it is considered impossible to know anything other than what the facts express. As to why they are as they are and not something different, this is considered to be unexperiencable and therefore inaccessible.

[ 6 ] Our considerations have shown that it is nonsensical to assume any reason for a judgment being true other than our reason for recognizing it as true. When we have pressed forward to the point where the being of something occurs to us as idea, we then behold in the idea something totally complete in itself, something self-supported and self-sustaining; it demands no further explanation from outside at all, so we can stop there. We see in the idea—if only we have the capacity for this—that it has everything which constitutes it within itself, that with it we have everything we could ask. The entire ground of existence has merged with the idea, has poured itself into it, unreservedly, in such a way that we have nowhere else to seek it except in the idea. In the idea we do not have a picture of what we are seeking in addition to the things; we have what we are seeking itself. When the parts of our world of ideas flow together in our judgments then it is the content of these parts itself that brings this about, not reasons lying outside them. The substantial and not merely the formal reasons for our conclusions are directly present within our thinking.

[ 7 ] That view is thereby rejected which assumes an absolute reality—outside the ideal realm—by which all things, including thinking, are carried. For that world view, the foundation for what exists cannot be found at all within what is accessible to us. This foundation is not innate (eingeboren) to the world lying before us; it is present outside this world, an entity unto itself, existing alongside this world. One can call that view realism. It appears in two forms. It either assumes a multiplicity of real beings underlying the world (Leibniz, Herbart), or a uniform real (Schopenhauer). Such an existent real can never be recognized as identical with the idea; it is already presupposed to be essentially different from the idea. Someone who becomes aware of the clear sense of the question as to the essential being of phenomena cannot be an adherent of this realism. What does it mean then to ask about the essential being of the world? It means nothing more than that, when I approach a thing, a voice makes itself heard in me that tells me that the thing is ultimately something quite else in addition to what I perceive with my senses. What it is in addition is already working in me, presses in me toward manifestation, while I am seeing the thing outside me. Only because the world of ideas working in me presses me to explain, out of it, the world around me, do I demand any such explanation. For a being in whom no ideas are pressing up, the urge is not there to explain the things any further; he is fully satisfied with the sense-perceptible phenomenon. The demand for an explanation of the world stems from the need that thinking has to unite the content accessible to thinking with manifest reality, to permeate everything conceptually, to make what we see, hear, etc., into something that we understand. Whoever takes into consideration the full implications of these statements cannot possibly be an adherent of the realism characterized above. To want to explain the world by something real that is not idea is such a self-contradiction that one absolutely cannot grasp how it could possibly find any adherents at all. To explain what is perceptibly real to us by something or other that does not take part in thinking at all, that, in fact, is supposed to be basically different from any- thing of a thought nature, for this we have neither the need nor any possible starting point. First of all: Where would the need originate to explain the world by something that never intrudes upon us, that conceals itself from us? And let us assume that it did approach us; then the question arises again: In what form and where? It cannot of course be in thinking. And even in outer or inner perception again? What meaning could it have to explain the sense world by a qualitative equivalent? There is only one other possibility: to assume that we had an ability to reach this most real being that lies outside thought in another way than through thinking and perception. Whoever makes this assumption has fallen into mysticism. We do not have to deal with mysticism, however; for we are concerned only with the relationship between thinking and existence, between idea and reality. A mystic must write an epistemology for mysticism. The standpoint of the later Schelling—according to which we develop only the what (das Was) of the world content with the help of our reason, but cannot reach the that (das Dass)⁵⁴—seems to us to be the greatest nonsense. Because for us the that is the presupposition of the what, and we would not know how we are supposed to arrive at the what of a thing whose that has not already been surely established beforehand. The that, after all, is already inherent in the content of my reason when I grasp its what. This assumption of Schelling—that we can have a positive world content, without any conviction that it exists, and that we must first gain the that through higher experience—seems to us so incomprehensible to any thinking that understands itself, that we must assume that Schelling himself, in his later period, no longer understood the standpoint of his youth, which made such a powerful impression upon Goethe.

[ 8 ] It will not do to assume higher forms of existence than those belonging to the world of ideas. Only because the human being is often not able to comprehend that the existence (Sein) of the idea is something far higher and fuller than that of perceptual reality, does he still seek a further reality. He regards ideal existence as something chimerical, as something needing to be imbued with some real element, and is not satisfied with it. He cannot, in fact, grasp the idea in its positive nature; he has it only as something abstract; he has no inkling of its fullness, of its inner perfection and genuineness. But we must demand of our education that it work its way up to that high standpoint where even an existence that cannot be seen with the eyes, nor grasped with the hands, but that must be apprehended by reason, is regarded as real. We have therefore actually founded an idealism that is realism at the same time. Our train of thought is: Thinking presses toward explanation of reality out of the idea. It conceals this urge in the question: What is the real being of reality? Only at the end of a scientific process do we ask about the content of this real being itself; we do not go about it as realism does, which presupposes something real in order then to trace reality back to it. We differ from realism in having full consciousness of the fact that only in the idea do we have a means of explaining the world. Even realism has only this means but does not realize it. It derives the world from ideas, but believes it derives it from some other reality. Leibniz' world of monads is nothing other than a world of ideas; but Leibniz believes that in it he possesses a higher reality than the ideal one. All the realists make the same mistake: they think up beings, without becoming aware that they are not getting outside of the idea. We have rejected this realism, because it deceives itself about the actual ideal nature of its world foundation; but we also have to reject that false idealism which believes that because we do not get outside of the idea, we also do not get outside of our consciousness, and that all the mental pictures given us and the whole world are only subjective illusion, only a dream that our consciousness dreams (Fichte). These idealists also do not comprehend that although we do not get outside of the idea, we do nevertheless have in the idea something objective, something that has its basis in itself and not in the subject. They do not consider the fact that even though we do not get outside of the unity of thinking, we do enter with the thinking of our reason into the midst of full objectivity. The realists do not comprehend that what is objective is idea, and the idealists do not comprehend that the idea is objective.

[ 9 ] We still have to occupy ourselves with the empiricists of the sense-perceptible, who regard any explaining of the real by the idea as inadmissible philosophical deduction and who demand that we stick to what is graspable by the senses. Against this standpoint we can only say, simply, that its demand can, after all, only be a methodological one. To say that we should stick to what is given only means, after all, that we should acquire for ourselves what confronts us. This standpoint is the least able to determine anything about the what of the given; for, this what must in fact come, for this standpoint, from the given itself. It is totally incomprehensible to us how, along with the demand for pure experience, someone can demand at the same time that we not go outside the sense world, seeing that in fact the idea can just as well fulfill the demand that it be given. The positivistic principle of experience must leave the question entirely open as to what is given, and unites itself quite well then with the results of idealistic research. But then this demand coincides with ours as well. And we do unite in our view all standpoints, insofar as they are valid ones. Our standpoint is idealism, because it sees in the idea the ground of the world; it is realism because it addresses the idea as the real; and it is positivism or empiricism because it wants to arrive at the content of the idea, not through a priori constructions, but rather as something given. We have an empirical method that penetrates into the real and that is ultimately satisfied by the results of idealistic research. We do not recognize as valid any inferring, from something given and known to us, of an underlying, non-given, determinative element. We reject any inference in which any part of the inference is not given. Inferring is only a going from given elements over to other equally given elements. In an inference we join a to b by means of c; but all these must be given. When Volkelt says that our thinking moves us to presuppose something in addition to the given and to transcend the given, then we say: Within our thinking, something is already moving us that we want to add to the directly given. We must therefore reject all metaphysics. Metaphysics wants, in fact, to explain the given by something non-given, inferred (Wolff, Herbart). We see in inferences only a formal activity that does not lead to anything new, but only brings about transitions between elements actually present.

3. The System of Science

[ 10 ] What form does a fully developed science (Wissenschaft) have in the light of the Goethean way of thinking? Above all we must hold fast to the fact that the total content of science is a given one; given partly as the sense world from outside, partly as the world of ideas from within. All our scientific activity will therefore consist in overcoming the form in which this total content of the given confronts us, and in making it over into a form that satisfies us. This is necessary because the inner unity of the given remains hidden in its first form of manifestation, in which only the outer surface appears to us. Now the methodological activity that establishes a relationship between these two forms turns out to vary according to the realm of phenomena with which we are working. The first realm is one in which we have a manifoldness of elements given to sense perception. These interact with each other. This interaction becomes clear to us when we immerse ourselves into the matter through ideas. Then one or another element appears as more or less determined by the others, in one way or another. The existential conditions of one become comprehensible to us through those of the others. We trace one phenomenon back to the others. We trace the phenomenon of a warm stone, as effect, back to the warming rays of the sun, as cause. We have explained what we perceive about one thing, when we trace it back to some other perceptible thing. We see in what way the ideal law arises in this realm. It encompasses the things of the sense world, stands over them. It determines the lawful way of working of one thing by letting it be conditional upon another. Our task here is to bring together the series of phenomena in such a way that one necessarily goes forth out of the others, that they all constitute one whole and are lawful through and through. The realm that is to be explained in this way is inorganic nature. Now the individual phenomena of experience by no means confront us in such a way that what is closest in space and time is also the closest according to its inner nature. We must first pass from what is closest in space and time over into what is conceptually closest. For a certain phenomenon we must seek the phenomena that are directly connected to it in accordance with their nature. Our goal must be to bring together a series of facts that complement each other, that carry and mutually support each other. We achieve thereby a group of sense-perceptible, interacting elements of reality; and the phenomenon that unfolds before us follows directly out of the pertinent factors in a transparent, clear way. Following Goethe's example, we call such a phenomenon an “archetypal phenomenon” (Urphänomen) or a basic fact. This archetypal phenomenon is identical with the objective natural law. The bringing together discussed here can either occur merely in thoughts—as when I think about the three determining factors that come into consideration when a stone is thrown horizontally: 1. the force of the throw, 2. the force of gravity, and 3. the air's resistance and then derive the path of the flying stone from these factors; or, on the other hand, I can actually bring the individual factors together and then await the phenomenon that follows from their interaction. This is what we do in an experiment. Whereas a phenomenon of the outer world is unclear to us because we know only what has been determined (the phenomenon) and not what is determining, the phenomenon that an experiment presents is clear, because we ourselves have brought together the determining factors. This is the path of research of nature: It takes its start from experience, in order to see what is real; advances to observation, in order to see why it is real; and then intensifies into the experiment, in order to see what can be real.

[ 11 ] Unfortunately, precisely that essay of Goethe's seems to have been lost that could best have supported these views. It is a continuation of the essay, The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object.⁵⁵ Starting from the latter, let us try to reconstruct the possible content of the lost essay from the only source available to us, the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller. The essay on The Experiment came out of those studies of Goethe that he undertook in order to show the validity of his work in optics. It was then put aside until the poet took up these studies again in 1798 with new energy and, with Schiller, submitted the basic principles of the natural-scientific method to a thorough and scientifically serious investigation. On January 10, 1798 (see Goethe's correspondence with Schiller) he then sent the essay on The Experiment to Schiller for his consideration and on January 13 informed his friend that he wanted, in a new essay, to develop further the views expressed there. And he did undertake this work; on January 17 already he sent a little essay to Schiller that contained a characterization of the methods of natural science. This is not to be found among his works. It would indisputably have been the one to provide the best points of reference for an appreciation of Goethe's basic views on the natural-scientific method. We can, however, know what thoughts were expressed there from Schiller's detailed letter of January 19, 1798; along with this, the fact comes into consideration that we find many confirmations and supplementations to the indications in Schiller's letter in Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose.⁵⁶

[ 12 ] Goethe distinguishes three methods of natural-scientific research. These rest upon three different conceptions of phenomena. The first method is ordinary empiricism, which does not go beyond the empirical phenomenon, beyond the immediate facts. It remains with individual phenomena. If ordinary empiricism wants to be consistent, it must limit its entire activity to exactly describing in every detail each phenomenon that meets it, i.e., to recording the empirical facts. Science, for it, would merely be the sum total of all these individual descriptions of recorded facts. Compared to ordinary empiricism rationalism then represents the next higher level, it deals with the scientific phenomenon. This view no longer limits itself to the mere describing of phenomena, but rather seeks to explain these by discovering causes, by setting up hypotheses, etc. It is the level at which the intellect infers from the phenomena their causes and inter-relationships. Goethe declares both these methods to be one-sided. Ordinary empiricism is raw non-science, because it never gets beyond the mere grasping of incidentals; rationalism, on the other hand, interprets into the phenomenal world causes and interrelationships that are not in it. The former cannot lift itself out of the abundance of phenomena up to free thinking; the latter loses this abundance as the sure ground under its feet and falls prey to the arbitrariness of imagination and of subjective inspiration. Goethe censures in the sharpest way the passion people have for immediately attaching to the phenomena deductions arrived at subjectively, as, for example, in Aphorisms in Prose: “It is bad business—but one that happens to many an observer—where a person immediately connects a deduction to a perception and considers them both as equally valid,” and: “Theories are usually the overly hasty conclusions of an impatient intellect that would like to be rid of the phenomenon and therefore sets in its place pictures, concepts, indeed often only words. One senses, one even sees, in fact, that it is only an expedient; but have not passion and a partisan spirit always loved expedients? And rightly so, since they need them so much.” Goethe particularly criticizes the misuse to which the concept of causality has given rise. Rationalism, in its unbridled fantasy, seeks causality where, if you are looking for facts, it is not to be found. In Aphorisms in Prose he says: “The most innate, most necessary concept, that of cause and effect, when applied, gives rise to innumerable and ever-recurring errors.” Rationalism is particularly led by its passion for simple relationships to think of phenomena as parts of a chain attached to one another by cause and effect and stretching out merely lengthwise; whereas the truth is, in fact, that one or another phenomenon that, in time, is causally determined by an earlier one, still depends also upon many other effects at the same time. In this case only the length and not the breadth of nature is taken into account. Both paths, ordinary empiricism and rationalism, are for Goethe certainly transitional stages to the highest scientific method, but, in fact, only transitional stages that must be surmounted. And this occurs with rational empiricism, which concerns itself with the pure phenomenon that is identical to the objective natural laws. The ordinary empirical element—direct experience—offers us only individual things, something incoherent, an aggregate of phenomena. That means it offers us all this not as the final conclusion of scientific consideration, but rather, in fact, as a first experience. Our scientific needs, however, seek only what is interrelated, comprehend the individual thing only as a part in a relationship. Thus, seemingly, our need to comprehend and the facts of nature diverge from each other. In our spirit there is only relatedness, in nature only separateness; our spirit strives for the species, nature creates only individuals. The solution to this contradiction is provided by the reflection that the connecting power of the human spirit, on the one hand, is without content, and therefore, by and through itself alone, cannot know anything positive; on the other hand, the separateness of the objects of nature does not lie in their essential being itself, but rather in their spatial manifestation; in fact, when we penetrate into the essential being of the individual, of the particular, this being itself directs us to the species. Because the objects of nature are separated in their outer manifestation, our spirit's power to draw together is needed in order to show their inner unity. Because the unity of the intellect by itself is empty, the intellect must fill this unity with the objects of nature. Thus at this third level phenomenon and spiritual power come to meet each other and merge into one, and only then can the human spirit be fully satisfied.

[ 13 ] A further realm of investigation is that in which the individual thing, in its form of existence, does not appear as the result of something else existing beside it; we therefore also do not comprehend it by seeking help from something else of the same kind. Here, a series of sense-perceptible phenomenological elements appears to us as the direct formation of a unified principle, and we must press forward to this principle if we want to comprehend the individual phenomenon. In this realm, we cannot explain the phenomenon by anything working in from outside; we must derive it from within outward. What earlier was a determining factor is now merely an inducing factor. In the first realm I have comprehended everything when I have succeeded in regarding it as the result of something else, in tracing it back to an outer determining factor; here I am compelled to ask the question differently. When I know the outer influence, I still have not gained any information as to whether the phenomenon then occurs in this, and only in this, way. I must derive this from the central principle of that thing upon which the outer influence took place. I cannot say that this outer influence has this effect; but only that, to this particular outer influence, the inner working principle responds in this particular way. What occurs is the result of an inner lawfulness. I must therefore know this inner lawfulness. I must investigate what it is that is taking shape from within outward. This self-shaping principle, which in this realm underlies every phenomenon, which I must seek in every one, is the typus. We are in the realm of organic nature. What the archetypal phenomenon is in inorganic nature, the typus is in organic nature. The typus is a general picture of the organism: the idea of the organism; the animalness in the animal. We had to bring the main points here again of what we already stated about the typus in an earlier chapter, because of the context. In the ethical and historical sciences we then have to do with the idea in a narrower sense. Ethics and history are sciences of ideas. Their reality is ideas. It is the task of each science to work on the given until it brings the given to the archetypal phenomenon, to the typus, and to the leading ideas in history. “If ... the physicist can arrive at knowledge of what we have called an archetypal phenomenon, then he is secure and the philosopher along with him; he is so because he has convinced himself that he has arrived at the limits of his science, that he finds himself upon the empirical heights, from which he can look back upon experience in all its levels, and can at least look forward into the realm of theory if not enter it. The philosopher is secure, for he receives from the physicist's hand something final that becomes for him now something from which to start” (Sketch of a colour Theory).⁵⁷—This is in fact where the philosopher enters and begins his work. He grasps the archetypal phenomena and brings them into a satisfying ideal relationship. We see what it is, in the sense of the Goethean world view, that is to take the place of metaphysics: the observing (in accordance with ideas), ordering, and deriving of archetypal phenomena. Goethe speaks repeatedly in this sense about the relationship between empirical science and philosophy—with special clarity in his letters to Hegel. In his Annals he speaks repeatedly about a schema of science. If this were to be found, we would see from it how he himself conceived the interrelationships of the individual archetypal phenomena to be, how he put them together into a necessary chain. We can also gain a picture of it when we consider the table of all possible kinds of workings that he gives in the fourth section of the first volume of On Natural Science.⁵⁸

Chance
Mechanical
Physical
Chemical
Organic
Psychic
Ethical
Religious
Of a Genius

[ 14 ] It is according to this ascending sequence that one would have to guide oneself in ordering the archetypal phenomena.

4. Limits to Knowledge and the Forming of Hypotheses

[ 15 ] One speaks a great deal today about limits to our knowing. Man's ability to explain what exists, it is said, reaches only to a certain point, and there he must stop. We believe we can rectify the situation with respect to this question if we ask the question correctly. For, it is, indeed, so often only a matter of putting the question correctly. When this is done, a whole host of errors is dispelled. When we reflect that the object that we feel the need within us to explain must be given, then it is clear that the given itself cannot set a limit for us. For, in order to lay any claim at all to being explained and comprehended, it must confront us within given reality. Something that does not appear upon the horizon of the given does not need to be explained. Any limits could therefore lie only in the fact that, in the face of a given reality, we lacked all means of explaining it. But our need for explanation comes precisely from the fact that what we want to consider a given thing to be—that by which we want to explain it—forces itself onto the horizon of what is given us in thought. Far from being unknown to us, the explanatory essential being of an object is itself the very thing which, by manifesting within our spirit, makes the explanation necessary. What is to be explained and that by which it is to be explained are both present. It is only a matter of joining them. Explaining something is not the seeking of an unknown, but only a coming to terms about the reciprocal connection between two knowns. It should never occur to us to explain a given by something of which we have no knowledge. Now something does come into consideration here that gives a semblance of justification to the theory of a limit to knowledge. It could be that we do in fact have an inkling of something real that is there, but that nevertheless is beyond our perception. We can perceive some traces, some effects or other of a thing, and then make the assumption that this thing does exist. And here one can perhaps speak of a limit to our knowing. What we have presupposed to be inaccessible in this case, however, is not something by which to explain anything in principle; it is something perceivable even though it is not perceived. What hinders me from perceiving it is not any limit to knowledge in principle, but only chance outer factors. These can very well be surmounted. What I merely have inklings of today can be experienced tomorrow. But with a principle that is not so; with it, there are no outer hindrances, which after all lie mostly only in place and time; the principle is given to me inwardly. Something else does not give me an inkling of a principle when I myself do not see the principle.

[ 16 ] Theory about the forming of hypotheses is connected with this. A hypothesis is an assumption that we make and whose truth we cannot ascertain directly but only in its effects. We see a series of phenomena. It is explainable to us only when we found it upon something that we do not perceive directly. May such an assumption be extended to include a principle? Clearly not. For, something of an inner nature that I assume without becoming aware of it is a total contradiction. A hypothesis can only assume something, indeed, that I do not perceive, but that I would perceive at once if I cleared away the outer hindrances. A hypothesis can indeed not presuppose something perceived, but must assume something perceivable. Thus, every hypothesis is in the situation that its content can be directly confirmed only by a future experience. Only hypotheses that can cease to be hypotheses have any justification. Hypotheses about central scientific principles have no value. Something that is not explained by a positively given principle known to us is not capable of explanation at all and also does not need it.

5. Ethical and Historical Sciences

[ 7 ] The answering of the question, What is knowing, has illuminated for us the place of the human being in the cosmos. The view we have developed in answering this question cannot fail to shed light also upon the value and significance of human action. We must in fact attach a greater or lesser significance to what we perform in the world, according to whether we attribute a higher or lower significance to our calling as human beings.

[ 8 ] The first task to which we must now address ourselves will be to investigate the character of human activity. How does what we must regard as the effect of human action relate to other effects within the world process? Let us look at two things: a product of nature and a creation of human activity, a crystal form and a wheel, perhaps. In both cases the object before us appears as the result of laws expressible in concepts. Their difference lies only in the fact that we must regard the crystal as the direct product of the natural lawfulness that determines it, whereas with the wheel the human being intervenes between the concept and the object. What we think of in the natural product as underlying the real, this we introduce into reality by our action. In knowing, we experience what the ideal determining factors of our sense experience are; we bring the world of ideas, which already lies within reality, to manifestation; we therefore complete the world process in the sense that we call into appearance the producer who eternally brings forth his products. but who, without our thinking, would remain eternally hidden within them. In human actions, however, we supplement this process through the fact that we translate the world of ideas, insofar as it is not yet reality, into such reality. Now we have recognized the idea as that which underlies all reality as the determining element, as the intention of nature. Our knowing leads us to the point of finding the tendency of the world process, the intention of the creation, out of all the indications contained in the nature surrounding us. If we have achieved this, then our action is given the task of working along independently in the realizing of that intention. And thus our action appears to us as the direct continuation of that kind of activity that nature also fulfills. It appears to us as directly flowing from the world foundation. But what a difference there is, in fact, between this and that other (nature) activity! The nature product by no means has within itself the ideal lawfulness by which it appears governed. It needs to be confronted by something higher, by human thinking; there then appears to this thinking that by which the nature product is governed. This is different in the case of human action. Here the idea dwells directly within the acting object; and if a higher being confronted it, this being could not find in the object's activity anything other than what this object itself had put into its action. For, a perfect human action is the result of our intentions and only that. If we look at a nature product that affects another, then the matter is like this: we see an effect; this effect is determined by laws grasped in concepts. But if we want to comprehend the effect, then it is not enough for us to compare it with some law or other; we must have a second perceptible thing—which, to be sure, must also be dissolvable entirely into concepts. When we see an impression in the ground we then look for the object that made it. This leads to the concept of a kind of effect where the cause of a phenomenon also appears in the form of an outer perception, i.e., to the concept of force. A force can confront us only where the idea first appears in an object of perception and only in this form acts upon another object. The opposite of this is when this intermediary is not there, when the idea approaches the sense world directly. There the idea itself appears as causative. And here is where we speak of will. Will, therefore, is the idea itself apprehended as force. It is totally inadmissible to speak of an independent will. When a person accomplishes something or other, one cannot say that will is added to the mental picture. If one does speak in that way, then one has not grasped the concepts clearly, for, what is the human personality if one disregards the world of ideas that fills it? It is, in fact, an active existence. Whoever grasps the human personality differently—as dead, inactive nature product—puts it at the level of a stone in the road. This active existence, however, is an abstraction; it is nothing real. One cannot grasp it; it is without content. If one wants to grasp it, if one wants a content for it, then one arrives, in fact, at the world of ideas that is engaged in doing. Eduard von Hartmann makes this abstraction into a second world-constituting principle beside the idea. It is, however, nothing other than the idea itself, only in one form of manifestation. Will without idea would be nothing. The same cannot be said of the idea, for activity is one of its elements, whereas the idea is the self-sustaining being.

[ 19 ] So much for the characterization of human action. Let us proceed to a further essential distinguishing feature of it that necessarily results from what has already been said. The explaining of a process in nature is a going back to its determining factors: a seeking out of the producer in addition to the product that is given. When I perceive an effect and then seek its cause, these two perceptions do not by any means satisfy my need for explanation. I must go back to the laws by which this cause brings forth this effect. It is different with human action. Here the lawfulness that determines a phenomenon itself enters into action; that which makes a product itself appears upon the scene of activity. We have to do with a manifesting existence at which we can remain, for which we do not need to ask about deeper-lying determining factors. We have comprehended a work of art when we know the idea embodied in it; we do not need to ask about any further lawful relationship between idea (cause) and creation (effect). We comprehend the actions of a statesman when we know his intentions (ideas); we do not need to go any further beyond what comes to appearance. This is therefore what distinguishes the processes of nature from the actions of human beings: with nature processes the law is to be regarded as the determining background for what comes into manifest existence, whereas with human actions the existence is itself the law and manifests as determined by nothing other than itself. Thus every process of nature breaks down into something determining and something determined, and the latter follows necessarily from the former, whereas human action determines only itself. This, however, is action out of inner freedom (Freiheit). When the intentions of nature, which stand behind its manifestations and determine them, enter into the human being, they themselves become manifestation; but now they are, as it were, free from any attachment behind them (rückenfrei). If all nature processes are only manifestations of the idea, then human doing is the idea itself in action.

[ 20 ] Since our epistemology has arrived at the conclusion that the content of our consciousness is not merely a means of making a copy of the world ground. but rather that this world ground itself, in its most primal state comes to light within our thinking, we can do nothing other than to recognize directly in human action also the undetermined action of that primal ground. We recognize no world director outside ourselves who sets goals and directions for our actions. The world director has given up his power, has given everything over to man, abolishing his own separate existence, and set man the task: Work on. The human being finds himself in the world, sees nature, and within it, the indication of something deeper, a determining element, an intention. His thinking enables him to know this intention. It becomes his spiritual possession. He has penetrated the world; he comes forth, acting, to carry on those intentions. Therefore, the philosophy presented here is the true philosophy of inner freedom (Freiheitsphilosophie). In the realm of human actions it acknowledges neither natural necessity nor the influence of some creator or world director outside the world. In either case, the human being would be unfree. If natural necessity worked in him in the same way as in other entities, then he would perform his actions out of compulsion, then it would also be necessary in his case to go back to determining factors that underlie manifest existence, and then inner freedom is out of the question. It is of course not impossible that there are innumerable human functions that can only be seen in this light; but these do not come into consideration here. The human being, insofar as he is a being of nature, is also to be understood according to the laws that apply to nature's working. But neither as a knowing nor as a truly ethical being can he, in his behavior, be understood according to merely natural laws. There, in fact, he steps outside the sphere of natural realities. And it is with respect to this, his existence's highest potency, which is more an ideal than reality, that what we have established here holds good. Man's path in life consists in his developing himself from a being of nature into a being such as we have learned to know here; he should make himself free of all laws of nature and become his own law giver.

[ 21 ] But we must also reject the influence of any director—outside the world—of human destiny. Also where such a director is assumed, there can be no question of true inner freedom. There he determines the direction of human action and man has to carry out what this director sets him to do. He experiences the impulse to his actions not as an ideal that he sets himself, but rather as the commandment of that director; again his actions are not undetermined, but rather determined. The human being would not then, in fact, feel himself to be free of any attachment from behind him, but would feel dependent, like a mere intermediary for the intentions of a higher power.

[ 22 ] We have seen that dogmatism consists in seeking the basis for the truth of anything in something beyond, and inaccessible to, our consciousness (transsubjective), in contrast to our view that declares a judgment to be true only because the reason for doing so lies in the concepts that are present in our consciousness and that flow into the judgment. Someone who conceives of a world ground outside of our world of ideas thinks that our ideal reason for recognizing something as true is a different reason than that as to why it is objectively true. Thus truth is apprehended as dogma. And in the realm of ethics a commandment is what a dogma is in science. When the human being seeks the impulse for his action in commandments, he acts then according to laws whose basis is independent of him; he conceives of a norm that is prescribed for his action from outside. He acts out of duty. To speak of duty makes sense only when looked at this way. We must feel the impulse from outside and acknowledge the necessity of responding to it; then we act out of duty. Our epistemology cannot accept this kind of action as valid where the human being appears in his full ethical development. We know that the world of ideas is unending perfection itself; we know that with it the impulses of our action lie within us; and we must therefore only acknowledge an action as ethical in which the deed flows only out of the idea, lying within us, of the deed. From this point of view, man performs an action only because its reality is a need for him. He acts because an inner (his own) urge, not an outer power, drives him. The object of his action, as soon as he makes himself a concept of it, fills him in such a way that he strives to realize it. The only impulse for our action should also lie in the need to realize an idea, in the urge to carry out an intention. Everything that urges us to a deed should live its life in the idea. Then we do not act out of duty; we do not act under the influence of a drive; we act out of love for the object to which our action is to be directed. The object, when we picture it, calls forth in us the urge to act in a way appropriate to it. Only such action is a free one. For if, in addition to the interest we take in the object, there had yet to be a second motivation from another quarter, then we would not want this object for its own sake; we would want something else and would perform that, which we do not want we would carry out an action against our will. That would be the case, for example, in action out of egoism. There we take no interest in the action itself; it is not a need for us; we do need the benefits, however, that it brings us. But then we also feel right away as compulsion the fact that we must perform the action for this reason only. The action itself is not a need for us; for we would leave it undone if no benefits followed from it. An action, however, that we do not perform for its own sake is an unfree one. Egoism acts unfreely. Every person acts unfreely, in fact, who performs an action out of a motivation that does not follow from the objective content of the action itself. To carry out an action for its own sake means to act out of love. Only someone who is guided by love in doing, by devotion to objectivity, acts truly freely. Whoever is incapable of this selfless devotion will never be able to regard his activity as a free one.

[ 23 ] If man's action is to be nothing other than the realization of his own content of ideas, then naturally such a content must lie within him. His spirit must work productively. For, what is supposed to fill him with the urge to accomplish something if not an idea working its way up in his spirit? This idea will prove to be all the more fruitful the more it arises in his spirit in definite outlines and with a clear content. For only that, in fact, can move us with full force to realize something, which is completely definite in its entire “what.” An ideal that is only dimly pictured to oneself, that is left in an indefinite state, is unsuitable as an impulse to action. What is there about it to fire us with enthusiasm if its content does not lie clear and open to the day? The impulses for our action must therefore always arise in the form of individual intentions. Everything fruitful that the human being accomplishes owes its existence to such individual impulses. General moral laws, ethical norms, etc., that are supposed to be valid for all human beings prove to be entirely worthless. When Kant regards as ethically valid only that which is suitable as a law for all human beings, then one can say in response to this that all positive action would cease, that everything great would disappear from the world, if each person did only what was suitable for everyone. No, it is not such vague, general ethical norms but rather the most individual ideals that should guide our actions. Everything is not equally worthy of being done by everyone, but rather this is worthy of him, that of her, according to whether one of them feels called to do a thing. J. Kreyenbühl has spoken about this in apt words is his essay Ethical Freedom in Kant's View⁵⁹: “If freedom is, in fact, to be my freedom, if a moral deed is to be my deed, if the good and right is to be realized through me, through the action of this particular individual personality, then I cannot possibly be satisfied by a general law that disregards all individuality and all the peculiarities of the concurrent circumstances of the action, and that commands me to examine every action as to whether its underlying motive corresponds to the abstract norm of general human nature and as to whether, in the way it lives and works in me, it could become a generally valid maxim.” ... “An adaptation of this kind to what is generally usual and customary would render impossible any individual freedom, any progress beyond the ordinary and humdrum, any significant, outstanding ethical achievement.”

[ 24 ] These considerations shed light upon the questions a general ethics has to answer. One often treats this last, in fact, as though it were a sum total of norms according to which human action ought to direct itself. From this point of view, one compares ethics to natural science and in general to the science of what exists. Whereas science is to communicate to us the laws of that which exists, of what is, ethics supposedly has to teach us the laws of what ought to exist. Ethics is supposedly a codex of all the ideals of man, a detailed answer to the question: What is good? Such a science, however, is impossible. There can be no general answer to this question. Ethical action is, in fact, a product of what manifests within the individual; it is always present as an individual case, never in a general way. There are no general laws as to what one ought or ought not to do. But do not regard the individual legal statutes of the different peoples as such general laws. They are also nothing more than the outgrowth of individual intentions. What one or another personality has experienced as a moral motive has communicated itself to a whole people, has become the “code of this people.” A general natural code that should apply to all people for all time is nonsense. Views as to what is right and wrong and concepts of morality come and go with the different peoples, indeed even with individuals. The individuality is always the decisive factor. It is therefore inadmissible to speak of an ethics in the above sense. But there are other questions to be answered in this science, questions that have in part been touched upon briefly in these discussions. Let me mention only: establishing the difference between human action and nature's working, the question as to the nature of the will and of inner freedom, etc. All these individual tasks can be summed up in one: To what extent is man an ethical being? But this aims at nothing other than knowledge of the moral nature of man. The question asked is not: What ought man to do? but rather: What is it that he is doing, in its inner nature? And thereby that partition falls which divides all science into two spheres: into a study of what exists and into one of what ought to exist. Ethics is just as much a study of what exists as all the other sciences. In this respect, a unified impulse runs through all the sciences in that they take their start from something given and proceed to its determining factors. But there can be no science of human action itself; for, it is undetermined, productive, creative. Jurisprudence is not a science, but only a collection of notes on the customs and codes characteristic of an individual people.

[ 25 ] Now the human being does not belong only to himself; he belongs, as a part, to two higher totalities. First of all, he is part of a people with which he is united by common customs, by a common cultural life, by language, and by a common view. But then he is also a citizen of history, an individual member in the great historical process of human development. Through his belonging to these two wholes, his free action seems to be restricted. What he does, does not seem to flow only from his own individual ego; he appears determined by what he has in common with his people; his individuality seems to be abolished by the character of his people. Am I still free then if one can find my actions explainable not only out of my own nature but to a considerable extent also out of the nature of my people? Do I not act, therefore, the way I do because nature has made me a member of this particular community of people? And it is no different with the second whole to which I belong. History assigns me the place of my working. I am dependent upon the cultural epoch into which I am born; I am a child of my age. But if one apprehends the human being at the same time as a knowing and as an acting entity, then this contradiction resolves itself. Through his capacity for knowledge, man penetrates into the particular character of his people; it becomes clear to him whither his fellow citizens are steering. He overcomes that by which he appears determined in this way and takes it up into himself as a picture that he has fully known; it becomes individual within him and takes on entirely the personal character that working from inner freedom has. The situation is the same with respect to the historical development within which the human being appears. He lifts himself to a knowledge of the leading ideas, of the moral forces holding sway there; and then they no longer work upon him as determining factors, but rather become individual driving powers within him. The human being must in fact work his way upward so that he is no longer led, but rather leads himself. He must not allow himself to be carried along blindly by the character of his people, but rather must lift himself to a knowledge of this character so that he acts consciously in accordance with his people. He must not allow himself to be carried by the progress of culture, but must rather make the ideas of his time into his own. In order for him to do so it is necessary above all that he understand his time. Then, in inner freedom, he will fulfill its tasks; then he will set to at the right place with his own work. Here the humanities⁶⁰ (history, cultural and literary history, etc.) must enter as intermediaries. In the humanities the human being has to do with his own accomplishments, with the creations of culture, of literature, with art, etc. Something spiritual is grasped by the human spirit. And the purpose of the humanities should not be any- thing other than that man recognize where chance has placed him; he should recognize what has already been accomplished, what falls to him to do. Through the humanities he must find the right point at which to participate with his personality in the happenings of the world. The human being must know the spiritual world and determine his part in it according to this knowledge.

[ 26 ] In the preface to the first volume of his Pictures from the German Past,⁶¹ Gustav Freytag says: “All the great creations of the power of a people, inherited religion, custom, law, state configurations, are for us no longer the results of individual men; they are the organic creations of a lofty life that in every age comes to manifestation only through the individual, and in every age draws together into itself the spiritual content of the individual into a mighty whole ... Thus, without saying anything mystical, one might well speak of a folk-soul ... But the life of a people no longer works consciously, like the will forces of a man. Man represents what is free and intelligent in history; the power of a people works ceaselessly, with the dark compulsion of a primal force.” If Freytag had investigated this life of a people, he would have found, indeed, that it breaks down into the working of a sum of single individuals who overcome that dark compulsion and lift what is unconscious up into consciousness; and he would have seen how that which he addresses as folk-soul, as dark compulsion, goes forth from the individual will impulses, from the free action of the human being.

[ 27 ] But something else comes into consideration with respect to the working of the human being within his people. Every personality represents a spiritual potency, a sum of powers which seek to work according to the possibilities. Every person must therefore find the place where his working can incorporate itself in the most suitable way into the organism of his people. It must not be left to chance whether he finds this place. The constitution of a state has no other purpose than to take care that everyone find his appropriate sphere of work. The state is the form in which the organism of a people expresses itself.

[ 28 ] Sociology and political science have to investigate the way the individual personality can come to play a part appropriate to it within a state. The constitution must go forth from the innermost being of a people. The character of a people, expressed in individual statements, is the best constitution for a state. A statesman cannot impose a constitution upon a people. The leader of a state must investigate the deep characteristics of his people and, through a constitution, give the tendencies slumbering in the people a direction corresponding to them. It can happen that the majority of a people wants to steer onto paths that go against its own nature. Goethe believes that in this case the statesman must let himself be guided by the people's own nature and not by the momentary demands of the majority; that he must in this case advocate the character of his people against the actual people (Aphorisms in Prose).

[ 29 ] We must still add a word here about the method of history. History must always bear in mind that the causes of historical events are to be sought in the individual intentions, plans, etc., of the human being. All tracing back of historical facts to plans that underlie history is an error. It is always only a question of which goals one or another personality has set himself, which ways they have taken, and so on. History is absolutely to be based on human nature. Its willing, its tendencies are to be fathomed.

[ 30 ] By statements of Goethe we can now substantiate again what has been said here about the science of ethics. The following statement is to be understood only out of the relationship in which we have seen the human being to stand with respect to historical development: “The world of reason is to be regarded as a great immortal individual, which ceaselessly brings about the necessary and thereby makes itself master, in fact, of chance happening.”⁶²—A reference to a positive, individual substratum of action lies in the words: “Undetermined activity, of whatever kind, leads to bankruptcy in the end.” “The least of men can be complete if he moves within the limits of his abilities and skills.”—The necessity for man of lifting himself up to the leading ideas of his people and of his age is expressed like this: “Each person must ask himself, after all, with which organ he can and will in any case work into his age.” and: “One must know where one is standing and where the others want to go.” Our view of duty is recognizable again in the words: “Duty: where one loves what one commands oneself to do.”

[ 31 ] We have based man, as a knowing and acting being, entirely upon himself. We have described his world of ideas as coinciding with the world ground and have recognized that everything he does is to be regarded as flowing only from his own individuality. We seek the core of existence within man himself. No one reveals a dogmatic truth to him; no one drives him in his actions. He is sufficient unto himself. He must be everything through himself, nothing through another being. He must draw forth everything from himself. Even the sources of his happiness. We have already recognized, in fact, that there can be no question of any power directing man, determining the direction and content of his existence, damning him to being unfree. If happiness is to come to a person therefore, this can come about only through himself. Just as little as an outer power prescribes norms for our action, will such a power bestow upon things the ability to awaken in us a feeling of satisfaction if we do not do it ourselves. Pleasure and pain are there for man only when he himself first confers upon objects the power to call up these feelings in him. A creator who determines from outside what should cause us pleasure or pain, would simply be leading us around like a child.

[ 32 ] All optimism and pessimism are thereby refuted. Optimism assumes that the world is perfect, that it must be a source of the greatest satisfaction for man. But if this is to be the case, man would first have to develop within himself those needs through which to arrive at this satisfaction. He would have to gain from the objects what it is he demands. Pessimism believes that the world is constituted in such a way that it leaves man eternally dissatisfied, that he can never be happy. What a pitiful creature man would be if nature offered him satisfaction from outside! All lamentations about an existence that does not satisfy us, about this hard world, must disappear before the thought that no power in the world could satisfy us if we ourselves did not first lend it that magical power by which it uplifts and gladdens us. Satisfaction must come to us out of what we make of things, out of our own creations. Only that is worthy of free beings.

• 52. This separation is indicated by the solid lines.
• 53. This is represented by the dotted lines.
• 54. Meaning: that it exists—Ed.
• 55. Der Versuch als Vermittler von Subjekt und Objekt
• 56. Later footnote of the author: “In my introduction to the thirty-fourth volume, I said that the essay appears, unfortunately, to have been lost that could serve as the best support to Goethe's views on experience, experiment, and scientific knowledge. It has not been lost, however, and has come to light in the above form in the Goethe archives. It bears the date January 15, 1798, and was sent to Schiller on the seventeenth. It represents a continuation of the essay The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object. I took the train of thought of his essay from the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller and presented it in the above-mentioned introduction in exactly the same way in which it is now found to be in the newly discovered essay. With respect to content nothing is added by this essay to what I expressed there; on the other hand, however, the view I had won from Goethe's other work; about his method and way of knowing was confirmed in every respect.
• 57. Entwurf einer Farbenlehre
• 58. Zur Naturwissenschaft
• 59. Die ethische Freiheit bei Kant (Philosophische Monatshefte). Published by Mercury Press as Spiritual Activity in Kant.
• 60. Geisteswissenschaften, literally: “spiritual sciences”—Ed.
• 61. Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit
• 62. All quotations in this paragraph are from Aphorisms in Prose.

[ 1 ] When one speaks of the influence of earlier or contemporary thinkers upon the development of Goethe's spirit, this cannot be done out of the assumption that he formed his views on the basis of their teachings. The way he had to think, the way he saw the world, were inherent in the whole predisposition of his nature. And it lay in his being, indeed, from his earliest youth. In this respect he then also remained the same his whole life long. It is principally two significant character traits that come into consideration here. The first is his pressing urge to find the sources, the depths of all existence. This is, ultimately, his belief in the idea. Goethe is always filled with an intimation of something higher, better. One would like to call this a deep religious impulse of his spirit. What so many people need to do—to strip things of everything holy and pull them down to their own level—is unknown to him. But he does have the other need: to sense something higher and to work his way up to it. He sought to gain from everything an aspect by which it becomes holy to us. K. J. Schröer has shown this in the most brilliant way with respect to Goethe's attitude toward love. Goethe divests love of everything frivolous, careless, and it becomes for him a devout state. This fundamental trait of his being is expressed most beautifully in his words:

Within our bosom's pureness swells a striving,
To give oneself, in thankful, free devotion,
To something higher, purer, as yet unknown.
We call it: being devout!

[ 2 ] This side of his being, now, is inseparably connected with another one. He never seeks to approach this higher something directly; he always seeks to draw near to it through nature. “The true is like God; it does not appear directly; we must guess it from its manifestations” (Aphorisms in Prose). Besides his belief in the idea Goethe also has the other one: that we can gain the idea by contemplating reality; it does not occur to him to seek the divinity anywhere else than in the works of nature, but he seeks everywhere to gain from them their divine aspect. When, in his youth, he erects an altar to the great God who “stands in direct connection with nature” (Poetry and Truth), this ritual definitely springs already out of a belief that we gain the highest that we can attain by a faithful fostering of our interrelationship with nature. Thus, that way of looking at things which we have validated epistemologically is innate in Goethe. He approaches reality with the conviction that everything is only a manifestation of the idea, and that we can attain this idea only when we raise sense experience into a spiritual beholding. This conviction was inherent in him, and from his youth up, he looked at the world on the basis of this presupposition. No philosopher could give him this conviction. This is therefore not what Goethe sought from the philosophers. It was something else. Even though his way of looking at things lay deep in his nature, still he needed a language in which to express it. His nature worked in a philosophical way, i.e., in such a way that it can be expressed only in philosophical formulations and can be validated only by philosophical presuppositions. And he looked into the philosophers in order also to bring clearly to consciousness for himself what he was, in order also to know what lay in him as living activity. He sought in them an explanation and validation of his own being. That is his relationship to the philosophers. To this end, he studies Spinoza in his youth and entered later into scientific discourse with his philosophical contemporaries. In his early years, Spinoza and Giordano Bruno seemed to the poet to best express his own nature. It is remarkable that he first learned to know both thinkers from books hostile to them, and, in spite of this fact, recognized how their teachings relate to his nature. We see this substantiated especially in his relationship to Giordano Bruno's teachings. He becomes acquainted with him in Bayle's dictionary, where he is vehemently attacked. And Goethe receives such a deep impression from him that, in those parts of Faust which in their conception stem from the period around 1770 when he was reading Bayle, the language echoes sentences of Bruno. In his daily and yearly notebooks the poet relates that he again occupied himself with Giordano Bruno in 1812. This time also the impression is a powerful one, and in many of the poems written after this year we can recognize echoes of the philosopher of Nola. But all this should not be taken to mean that Goethe borrowed or learned anything from Bruno; he only found in him the formulations in which to express what had lain in his own nature for a long time. He found that he could most clearly present his own inner life if he did so in the words of that thinker. Bruno regarded universal reason as the creator and director of the universe. He calls it the inner artist that forms matter and shapes it from within outward. It is the cause of everything that exists, and there is no being in whose existence it does not take a loving interest. “However small and trifling a thing may be, it still has within it a portion of spiritual substance”, (Giordano Bruno, About the Cause, etc.). That was also Goethe's view, that we first know how to judge a thing when we see how it has been set in its place by universal reason, how it has come to be precisely that which confronts us. Perceiving with the senses does not suffice, for the senses do not tell us how a thing relates to the general world idea, what it means for the great whole. There we must look in such a way that our reason creates an ideal basis on which there can then appear to us what the senses convey to us; we must, as Goethe expresses it, look with the eyes of the spirit. Even for expressing this conviction he found a formulation in Bruno: “For, just as we do not recognize colours and sounds with one and the same sense, so also we do not recognize the substratum of the arts and that of nature with one and the same eye,” because we “see the first with the physical eye and the second with the eye of reason.” And with Spinoza it is no different. Spinoza's teachings are indeed based on the fact that the divinity has merged with the world. Human knowing can therefore aim only to penetrate into the world in order to know God. Any other way of arriving at God must seem impossible to anyone thinking consistently according to Spinoza's way of thinking. For God has given up all existence of His own; outside the world He exists nowhere. But we must seek Him where He is. Any actual knowing must therefore be of such a kind that, in every piece of world knowledge, it conveys to us a piece of divine knowledge. Knowing, at its highest level, is therefore a coming together with the divinity. There we call it knowing in beholding (anschauliches Wissen). We know things “sub specie æternitatis,” that is, as flowing from the divinity. The laws that our spirit recognizes in nature are therefore God in His very being; they are not only made by Him. What we recognize as logical necessity is so because the being of the divinity, i.e., the eternal lawfulness, dwells within it. That was a view which is in accordance with the Goethean spirit. His own firm belief that nature, in all its doings, reveals something divine to us lay before him in Spinoza's writings in the clearest statements. “I am holding firmly and ever more firmly to the atheist's (Spinoza) way of revering God,” he writes to Jacobi when the latter wanted to put the teachings of Spinoza in another light. Therein lies the relatedness of Goethe to Spinoza. And it indicates a superficial judgment of the matter when, with respect to this deep inner harmony between Goethe's nature and Spinoza's teachings, one ever and again emphasizes something purely external by saying that Goethe was drawn to Spinoza because he, like Spinoza, would not tolerate a final cause in explaining the world. The fact that Goethe, like Spinoza, rejected final causes was only one result of their views. But let us put the theory of final causes clearly before us. A thing is explained, in its existence and nature, by the fact that one demonstrates its necessity for something else. One shows that this thing is of such and such a nature because that other thing is like this or that. This presupposes that a world ground exists which stands over and above both beings and arranges them in such a way that they match each other. But if the world ground is inherent in every single thing, then this kind of explanation makes no sense. For then the nature of a thing must appear to us as the result of the principle at work within it. We will seek, within the nature of a thing, the reason why it is as it is and not different than it is. If we hold the belief that something divine is inherent in each thing, then it will not in fact occur to us to seek to explain its lawfulness by any outer principle. The relationship of Goethe to Spinoza should also not be grasped in any other way than that he found in Spinoza the formulations, the scientific language, for expressing the world lying within him.

[ 3 ] When we now pass on to Goethe's connection to contemporary philosophers, we must speak above all about Kant. Kant is generally regarded as the founder of present-day philosophy. In his time he called forth such a powerful movement that every educated person needed to come to terms with it. It was also necessary for Goethe to do so. But this did not prove to be a fruitful undertaking for him. For there is a deep antithesis between what the Kantian philosophy teaches and what we have recognized as the Goethean way of thinking. In fact, one can even say that all German thinking runs it course in two parallel streams: one permeated by the Kantian way of thinking and another that is close to Goethean thinking. But as philosophy today draws ever closer to Kant, it is distancing itself from Goethe, and through this the possibility for our age of grasping and appreciating the Goethean world view is being lost more and more. Let us set before us the main postulates of Kant's teachings insofar as they are of interest with respect to Goethe's views. For Kant, the starting point for human thinking is experience, i.e., the world given to the senses (among which is included the inner sense that conveys to us such facts as the psychic, historical, and the like). This world is a manifoldness of things in space and of processes in time. The fact that precisely this thing confronts me or that I experience precisely that process is of no consequence; it could also be different. I can think away the whole manifoldness of things and processes altogether. What I cannot think away, however, are space and time. For me, there can be nothing that is not spatial or temporal. Even if there were some non-spatial or non-temporal thing, I can know nothing about it, for I can picture nothing to myself without space and time. I do not know whether the things themselves partake of space and time; I only know that the things must appear to me in these forms. Space and time are therefore the prerequisites of my sense perception. I know nothing of any thing-in-itself; I only know how it must appear to me if it is to be there for me. With these postulates Kant introduces a new problem. He appears in science with a new way of asking questions. Instead of asking, as earlier philosophers did: What is the nature of things?, he asks: How must things appear to us in such a way that they can become the object of our knowing? For Kant, philosophy is the science of the factors that determine the possibility of the world as a manifestation for human beings. We know nothing about the thing-in-itself. We have not yet fulfilled our task when we arrive at a sense perception of a manifoldness in time and space. We strive to draw this manifoldness together into a unity. This is a matter for the intellect. The intellect is to be understood as a sum of activities whose purpose is to draw the sense world together according to certain forms already sketched out in the intellect. It draws together two sense perceptions by, for example, designating one as the cause and the other as the effect, or the one as substance and the other as attribute, etc. Here also it is the task of the science of philosophy to show under which conditions the intellect succeeds in forming a system of the world. Thus the world, according to Kant, is actually a subjective phenomenon arising in the forms of the sense world and of the intellect. Only one thing is certain: that there is a thing-in-itself; how it appears to us depends upon our organization. It is also obvious now that it makes no sense to ascribe to that world which the intellect has formed in association with the senses any significance other than what it has for our ability to know. This becomes clearest of all where Kant speaks of the significance of the world of ideas. Ideas for him are nothing other than the higher points of view of reason from which the lower entities, which the intellect has created, are understood. The intellect brings soul phenomena, for example, into a relationship; reason, as the faculty for ideas, then grasps this relationship as though everything went forth from one soul. But this has no significance for the thing itself; it is only a means of orientation for our cognitive faculty. This is the content of Kant's theoretical philosophy insofar as it can be of interest to us here. One sees at once that it is the polar opposite of the Goethean philosophy. Given reality is determined, according to Kant, by us ourselves; it is as it is because we picture it that way. Kant skips over the real epistemological question. At the beginning of his Critique of Reason he takes two steps that he does not justify, and his whole edifice of philosophical teachings suffers from this mistake. He right away sets up a distinction between object and subject, without asking at all what significance it has then for the intellect to undertake the separation of two regions of reality (in this case the knowing subject and the object to be known). Then he seeks to establish conceptually the reciprocal relationship of these two regions, again without asking what it means to establish something like that. If his view of the main epistemological question had not been all askew, he would have seen that the holding apart of subject and object is only a transitional point in our knowing, that a deeper unity, which reason can grasp, underlies them both, and that what is attributed to a thing as a trait, when considered in connection with a knowing subject, by no means has only subjective validity. A thing is a unity for our reason and the separation into “thing-in-itself” and “thing-for-us” is a product of our intellect. It will not do, therefore, to say that what is attributed to a thing in one connection can be denied it in other connections. For, whether I look at the same thing one time from this point of view and another time from that: it is after all still a unified whole.

[ 4 ] It is an error, running through Kant's entire edifice of teachings, for him to regard the sense-perceptible manifoldness as something fixed, and for him to believe that science consists in bringing this manifoldness into a system. He has no inkling at all that the manifoldness is not something ultimate, that one must overcome it if one wants to comprehend it; and therefore all theory becomes for him merely a supplement that the intellect and reason add onto experience. For him, the idea is not what appears to reason as the deeper ground of the given world when reason has overcome the manifoldness lying on the surface, but rather the idea is only a methodological principle by which reason orders the phenomena in order to have a better overview of them. According to the Kantian view, we would be going totally amiss if we were to regard things as traceable back to the idea; in his opinion, we can only order our experiences as though they stemmed from a unity. According to Kant, we have no inkling of the ground of things, of the “in-itself.” Our knowing of things is only there in connection with us; it is valid only for our individuality. Goethe could not gain much from this view of the world. The contemplation of things in their connection to us always remained for him a quite subordinate one, having to do with the effect of objects upon our feelings of pleasure and pain; he demands more of science than a mere statement as to how things are in their connection to us. In the essay The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object, he determines what the task of the researcher is: He should take his yardstick for knowledge, the data for his judgment, not from himself, but rather from the sphere of the things he observes. This one statement characterizes the deep antithesis between the Kantian and the Goethean way of thinking. Whereas with Kant, all judgments about things are only a product of subject and object, and only provide a knowing about how the subject beholds the object, with Goethe, the subject merges selflessly into the object and draws the data for his judgment from the sphere of the things. Goethe himself says therefore of Kant's adherents: “They certainly heard me but had no answer for me nor could be in any way helpful.” The poet believed that he gained more from Kant's critique of the power of judgment.

[ 5 ] Philosophically, Goethe benefited far more from Schiller than from Kant. Through him, namely, Goethe was really brought one stage further in the recognition of his own way of viewing things. Up to the time of that first famous conversation with Schiller, Goethe had practiced a certain way of viewing the world. He had observed plants, found that an archetypal plant underlies them, and derived the individual forms from it. This archetypal plant (and also a corresponding archetypal animal) had taken shape in his spirit, was useful to him in explaining the relevant phenomena. But he had never reflected upon what this archetypal plant was in its essential nature. Schiller opened his eyes by saying to him: It is an idea. Only from then on is Goethe aware of his idealism. Up until that conversation, he calls the archetypal plant an experience for he believed he saw it with his eyes. But in the introduction that he later added to his essay on the metamorphosis of the plants he says: “So from now on, I undertook to find the archetypal animal, which means, ultimately, the concept, the idea of the animal.” But we must bear in mind here that Schiller did not provide Goethe with something foreign to him, but rather Schiller, by observing the Goethean spirit, struggled through for the first time to a knowledge of objective idealism. He only found the right term for the way of viewing things that he recognized and marveled at in Goethe.

[ 6 ] Goethe experienced but little benefit from Fichte. Fichte moved in a sphere that was much too foreign to Goethean thinking to be of much possible benefit. Fichte founded the science of consciousness in the most brilliant way. In a unique and exemplary way, he traced the activity by which the “I” transforms the world that is given, into a world that is thought. But in doing so, he made the mistake of not merely regarding this activity of the “I” as one that brings the given content into a satisfactory form, that brings the unrelated given into the appropriate relationships; he saw this activity as a creating of everything which takes place within the “I.” Therefore his teachings appear as a one-sided idealism that takes its whole content from consciousness. Goethe, who always devoted himself wholly to what is objective, could find very little to attract him in Fichte's philosophy of consciousness. Goethe lacked understanding for the region where that philosophy is valid; but the lengths to which Fichte carried it (he saw it as the universal science) could only appear to the poet as an error.

[ 7 ] Goethe had many more points of contact with the young Schelling. Schelling was a student of Fichte. He did not only carry further the analysis of the activity of the “I,” however, but also investigated this activity within the consciousness by which nature is grasped. What takes place in the “I” when it is knowing nature seemed to Schelling to be at the same time that which is objective about nature, the actual principle within it. External nature was for him only a form of our nature concepts that has become fixed. What lives in us as a view of nature appears to us again outside, only spread out, spatial-temporally. What confronts us from outside as nature is a finished product, is only something already determined, the form of a living principle that has become rigid. We cannot gain this principle through experience from outside. We must first create it within our inner being. “To philosophize about nature means to create nature,” our philosopher says therefore. “We call nature, as a mere product (natura naturata), ‘nature as object’ (all empiricism devotes itself to this alone). We call nature, as productivity (natura naturans), ‘nature as subject’ (all theory devotes itself to this alone).” (Introduction to Schelling's First Sketch of a System of Natural Philosophy)⁶³ “The contrast between empiricism and science rests, indeed, on the fact that empiricism studies its object in existence as something finished and already brought about, whereas science, on the other hand, studies the object in its becoming and as something still to be brought about.” (Ibid.) Through these teachings, with which Goethe became acquainted partly from Schelling's writings and partly from personal encounters with the philosopher, the poet was again brought a stage higher. He now developed the view that his tendency was to proceed from what is finished, the product, to what is becoming, the productive. And, with a definite echo of Schelling, he writes in his essay The Power to Judge in Beholding that his striving was to make himself “worthy, through beholding an ever-creating nature, of participating spiritually in its productions.”

[ 8 ] And through Hegel, finally, Goethe received his last help from the side of philosophy. Through him he gained clarity, namely, as to how what he called the archetypal phenomenon fitted into philosophy. Hegel understood the significance of the archetypal phenomenon more deeply than anyone else and characterized it aptly in a letter to Goethe on February 20, 1821 with the words: “The simple and abstract, what you quite aptly call the archetypal phenomenon, this you put first, and then show the concrete phenomena as arising through the participation of yet other influences and circumstances; and you direct the whole process in such a way that the sequence proceeds from the simple, determining factors to the composite ones, and, thus arranged, something complex appears in all its clarity through this decomposition. To seek out the archetypal phenomenon, to free it from other extraneous chance surroundings—to grasp it abstractly, as we call it—this I consider to be the task for a great spiritual sense for nature, just as I consider that procedure altogether to be what is truly scientific in gaining knowledge in this field.” ... “But may I now also speak to you about the particular interest which the archetypal phenomenon, lifted out in this way, has for us philosophers; namely, that we can put something prepared in this way precisely to philosophical use! If, in spite of everything, we have finally led our initially oysterlike, grey, or completely black absolute out toward the air and light, so that it desires them, then we need windows in order to lead it out fully into the light of day; our schemata would disperse into mist if we were to transfer them directly into the colourful, confused society of a resistant world. Here is where your archetypal phenomena now stand us in excellent stead; in this twilight—spiritual and comprehensible through its simplicity, visible or graspable through its sense-perceptibility—the two worlds greet each other: our abstruse existence and the manifest one.” In this way, through Hegel, the thought becomes clear to Goethe that the empirical researcher has to go as far as the archetypal phenomena and that the paths of the philosopher lead on from there. But from this it is also clear that the basic thought of Hegelian philosophy follows from the Goethean way of thinking. The overcoming of human nature, the entering deeply into it in order to ascend from the created to the creating, from the determined to the determining, is fundamental to Goethe, but also to Hegel. Hegel, indeed, wants to present nothing other in philosophy than the eternal process from which everything finite emerges. He wants to know the given as a result of that to which he can grant validity as something undetermined.

[ 9 ] Thus for Goethe, acquainting himself with philosophers and with directions in philosophy means an ongoing clarification of what already lay in him. He gained nothing new for his views; he was only given the means of speaking about what he did, about what was going on in his soul.

[ 10 ] Thus the Goethean world view offers many points of reference for philosophical elaboration. But these were initially taken up only by the pupils of Hegel. The rest of philosophy took a stand of dignified rejection toward the Goethean view. Only Schopenhauer bases himself in many respects upon the poet, whom he values highly. We will speak in a later chapter about his apologetic of the colour theory. Here it is a matter of describing the general relationship of Schopenhauer's teachings to Goethe.⁶⁴ In one point the Frankfurt philosopher comes close to Goethe. Schopenhauer rejects, namely, any deriving from outer causes of the phenomena given us and admits the validity only of an inner lawfulness, of a deriving of one phenomenon from another. This seems to be the same as the Goethean principle of taking the data for an explanation from the things themselves; but only seemingly. Schopenhauer wants to remain in the realm of phenomena because he believes we cannot attain in knowledge the “in-itself” lying outside this realm, since all the phenomena given us are only mental pictures⁶⁵ and our ability to make mental pictures never takes us outside our consciousness; Goethe, on the other hand, wants to remain within the phenomena, because he in fact seeks within the phenomena themselves the data needed for their explanation.

[ 11 ] In conclusion, let us still compare the Goethean world view with the most significant scientific phenomenon of our time, with the views of Eduard von Hartmann. This thinker's Philosophy of the Unconscious⁶⁶ is a work of the greatest historical significance. Taken together with the other writings of Hartmann (which elaborate in all directions what he there sketched out and in fact bring new points of view to that main work in many respects), this book mirrors the entire spiritual content of our age. Hartmann demonstrates a remarkable profundity and an amazing mastery of the material of the individual sciences. He stands today in the vanguard of culture. One does not need to be an adherent of his to have to acknowledge this unreservedly.

[ 12 ] His view is not so far from Goethe's as one might believe at first glance. Someone who has access only to the Philosophy of the Unconscious will not, to be sure, be able to see this. For, one sees the definite points of contact between these two thinkers only when one goes into the consequences that Hartmann drew from his principles and which he set down in his later writings.

[ 13 ] Hartmann's philosophy is idealism. He does not want to be a mere idealist, it is true. But where, for the purpose of explaining the world, he needs something positive, he does after all seek help from ideas. And the most important thing is that he thinks of the idea as the underlying principle everywhere. His assumption of an unconscious means nothing other, in fact, than that what is present in our consciousness as idea is not necessarily bound to this form of manifestation within our consciousness. The idea is not only present (active), where it becomes conscious, but also in another form. The idea is more than a merely subjective phenomenon; it has a significance founded within itself. It is not merely present within the subject; it is the objective world principle. Even though Hartmann includes will, in addition to the idea, among the principles constituting the world, it is nevertheless incomprehensible that there are still philosophers who regard him as an adherent of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer carried to extremes the view that all conceptual content is only subjective, is only a phenomenon of consciousness. With him, it is absolutely out of the question for the idea to have participated as a real principle in the constitution of the world. For him, will is the exclusive world ground. Therefore Schopenhauer could never find a way, with any content, of handling the specialized branches of philosophy, whereas Hartmann followed up his principles into all the particular sciences. Whereas Schopenhauer can say nothing more about the extremely rich content of history than that it is a manifestation of will, Eduard von Hartmann knows how to find the ideal core of every single historical phenomenon, and how to incorporate each phenomenon into the total historical development of mankind. The individual entity, the individual phenomenon, cannot be of interest to Schopenhauer, for he knows only one essential thing to say about it: that it is a manifestation of the will. Hartmann takes up each particular entity and shows how the idea is everywhere perceptible. The basic character of Schopenhauer's world view is uniformity; that of von Hartmann is unity. Schopenhauer bases the world upon an empty uniform urge; Hartmann bases it upon the rich content of the idea. Schopenhauer sets an abstract unity as a basis; with Hartmann, we find the concrete idea as principle, whose unity—or rather unifiedness—is only one characteristic of the idea. Schopenhauer would never have been able, as Hartmann was, to create a philosophy of history or a science of religion. When Hartmann says that “reason is the logical form principle of the idea—of the idea that is inseparably united with the will—and as such altogether governs and determines the content of the world process” (Philosophical Questions of the Present Day⁶⁷), then this presupposition makes it possible for him, in every phenomenon that confronts us in nature and in history, to seek out its logical core, which, although not graspable by the senses, is quite graspable by thinking, and in this way to explain the phenomenon. Whoever does not make this presupposition will never be able to justify his wanting to determine anything at all about the world by reflection in the medium of ideas.

[ 14 ] In his objective idealism Eduard von Hartmann stands entirely upon the ground of the Goethean world view. When Goethe says that “everything of which we become aware and about which we are able to speak is only a manifestation of the idea” (Aphorisms in Prose), and when he states that the human being must develop within himself a capacity for knowledge of such a kind that the idea becomes just as observable to him as an outer perception is to his senses, then he stands upon that ground where the idea is not merely a phenomenon of consciousness but is an objective world principle; thinking is the flashing up in consciousness of that which objectively constitutes the world. The essential thing about the idea, therefore, is not what it is for us, for our consciousness, but rather what it is in itself. For, through its own particular being it underlies the world as principle. Therefore thinking is a becoming aware of what exists in and of itself. Therefore, although the idea would not come to manifestation at all if there were no consciousness, still the idea must be grasped in such a way that its characteristic feature consists not of its being conscious but rather of what it is in itself, of what lies within the idea itself; and this is not affected by its becoming conscious. Therefore, according to Eduard von Hartmann, we must base the world upon the idea—without regard to its becoming conscious—as something working and unconscious. That is what is essential for Hartmann: that we must seek the idea in everything unconscious.

[ 15 ] But not much is accomplished by this distinguishing between what is conscious and what is unconscious. For that is, after all, only a distinction for my consciousness. But one must grapple with the idea in all its objectivity, in all its fullness of content; one must consider not only that the idea is at work unconsciously, but also what this working element is. If Hartmann had stopped at the fact that the idea is unconscious and if he had explained the world out of this unconscious element—that is, out of a one-sided characteristic of the idea—then he would have added a new uniform system to the many systems that derive the world from some abstract formal principle or other. And one cannot declare his first main work to be entirely free of this uniformity. But Eduard von Hartmann's spirit works too intensively, too comprehensively and penetratingly, for him not to have recognized that the idea cannot be grasped merely as something unconscious; rather, one must in fact go deeply into what one has to address as unconscious, must go beyond this characteristic to its concrete content and derive from it the world of individual phenomena. In this way, Hartmann transformed himself from the abstract monist, which he still is in his Philosophy of the Unconscious, into a concrete monist. And it is the concrete idea that Goethe addresses in the three forms: archetypal phenomenon, typus, and “idea in the narrower sense.”

[ 16 ] What we find of Goethe's world view in Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy is the becoming aware of something objective within our world of ideas, and the devotion, arising from this becoming aware, to this objective element. Hartmann was led by his philosophy of the unconscious to this merging with the objective idea. Since he recognized that the being of the idea does not lie in its being conscious, he had to recognize the idea also as something existing in and of itself, as something objective. The fact that he also includes the will among the principles constituting the world does make him differ again from Goethe, to be sure. Nevertheless, where Hartmann is really fruitful, the will motif does not come into consideration at all. That he assumes this motif at all comes from the fact that he regards the ideas as something static which, in order to begin working, needs the impetus of will. According to Hartmann, the will alone can never achieve the creation of the world, for it is the empty, blind urge for existence. If the will is to bring forth something, then the idea must enter in, because only the idea gives the will a content for its working. But what are we to make of this will? It slips away from us when we want to grasp it; for we cannot after all grasp an empty urging that has no content. And so it turns out after all that everything which we actually grasp of the world principle is idea, because what is graspable must in fact have content. We can only grasp what is full of content, not what is empty of content. If therefore we are to grasp the concept will, it must after all arise in the content of the idea; it can appear only in and along with the idea, as the form in which it arises, never independently. What exists must have content; there can only be existence which is full; there cannot be an empty one. Therefore, Goethe pictures the idea as active, as something working, which needs no further impetus. For, something full of content may not and cannot first receive from something empty of content, the impetus to come into existence. The idea therefore, according to Goethe, is to be grasped as entelechy, i.e., as an already active existence; and one must first draw an abstraction from its form as an active existence if one then wants to bring it back again under the name will. The will motif also has no value at all for positive science. Hartmann also does not need it when he confronts the concrete phenomenon.

[ 17 ] If we have recognized in Hartmann's view of nature an echo of Goethe's world view, we find an even more significant one in that philosopher's ethics. Eduard von Hartmann finds that all striving for happiness, all pursuing of egoism, is ethically worthless, because we can, after all, never achieve contentment on this path. Hartmann considers acting out of egoism, and trying to satisfy it, to be illusory. We should grasp the task we are set in the world, and act purely for the sake of this task itself, with self-renunciation. We should find our goal in our devotion to the object, without demanding that our subject profit from it in some way. But this forms the basic impulse of Goethe's ethics. Hartmann should not have suppressed the word that expresses the character of his teachings on morality: love.⁶⁸ Where we claim nothing personally, where we act only because something objective moves us, where we find in the act itself the motive for our action, there we are acting morally. But there we are acting out of love. All self-will, everything personal, must disappear there. It is characteristic of the way Hartmann's powerful and healthy spirit works, that in spite of the fact that he first grasped the idea one-sidedly as unconscious, he still pressed forward to concrete idealism; and that in spite of the fact that he took his start in ethics from pessimism, he was still led by this mistaken standpoint to the ethical teaching of love. Hartmann's pessimism, in fact, does not mean what those people interpret it to mean who like to lament about the fruitlessness of our activity because they hope to find themselves justified by this in folding their hands in their laps and accomplishing nothing. Hartmann does not stop at such lamenting; he raises himself above any such impulse to a pure ethics. He shows the worthlessness of the pursuit of happiness by revealing its fruitlessness. He directs us thereby to our own activity. That he is a pessimist at all is his error. That is perhaps still a remnant from earlier stages of his thinking. From where he stands now, he would have to realize that the empirical demonstration that in the world of reality what is unsatisfying outweighs what is satisfying cannot establish pessimism. For the higher human being cannot wish for anything else at all than that he must achieve his happiness for himself. He does not want it as a gift from outside. He wants his happiness to consist only in his action. Hartmann's pessimism dissolves before (Hartmann's own) higher thinking. Because the world leaves us dissatisfied, we create for ourselves the most beautiful happiness in our own activity.

[ 18 ] Thus Hartmann's philosophy is yet another proof of how people starting from different points of departure arrive at the same goal; Hartmann takes his start from different presuppositions than Goethe does, but in his development of them, the Goethean train of thought confronts us at every turn. We have presented this here because we wanted to show the deep inner soundness of the Goethean world view. It lies so deeply founded in the being of the world that we must meet its basic features wherever energetic thinking penetrates to the sources of knowledge. Within Goethe everything was so very original, so totally free from the incidental, fashionable views of the time, that even his opponent must think in his sense. The eternal riddle of the world expresses itself, in fact, in single individuals; in Goethe most significantly of all in recent time; therefore one can even say that the level of a person's view can be measured today by the relationship in which it stands to the Goethean view.

• 63. Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie
• 64. An essay suite worth reading is Dr. Adolf Harpf's Goethe and Schopenhauer (Philosophische Monatshefte, 1885). Harpf, who has also already written an excellent treatise on Goethe's Principle of Knowledge (Goethes Erkenntnisprinzip, Philos. Monatshefte, 1884), shows the agreement between the “immanent dogmatism” of Schopenhauer and the objective knowledge of Goethe. Harpf, who is himself a follower of Schopenhauer, did not discover the principle difference between Goethe and Schopenhauer that we characterized above. Nevertheless, his reflections are quite worthy of attention.
• 65. Usually translated as “representations” in English versions of Schopenhauer's work—Ed.
• 66. Philosophie des Unbewussten
• 67. Philosophische Fragen der Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1885)
• 68. This does not mean to say that the concept of love receives no attention in Hartmann's ethics. He dealt with this concept both phenomenologically and metaphysically (see The Moral Consciousness, Das sittliche Bewusstsein). But he does not consider love to be the last word in ethics. Self-sacrificing, loving devotion to the world process does not seem to Hartmann as something ultimate but rather only as a means of deliverance from the unrest of existence and of regaining our lost, blissful peace.

[ 1 ] Among the main hindrances standing in the way of a just evaluation of Goethe's significance for science belongs the preconception that exists about his relationship to mathematics. This preconception is twofold. Firstly, one believes that Goethe was an enemy of this science and failed in the worst way to recognize its great significance for human knowing; and secondly, one maintains that the poet excluded any mathematical approach from the physical parts of the natural science pursued by him only because the mathematical approach was uncomfortable to him, as he had benefited from no training in mathematics.

[ 2 ] As regards the first point, one can say in refutation of it that Goethe repeatedly gave expression to his admiration for the science of mathematics in such a decisive manner that there can be absolutely no question of his attaching little value to it. In fact, he wants to be sure that all natural science is permeated by that strictness which is characteristic of mathematics. “We must learn from the mathematicians to take care to place next to each other only the elements that are closest to each other, or rather to deduce from each the elements closest to it, and even where we use no calculations, we must always proceed as though obliged to render account to the strictest geometrician.” “I heard myself accused of being an opponent, an enemy, of mathematics altogether, which no one, after all, can value more highly than I do ...”

[ 3 ] As regards the second criticism: it is of such a kind that hardly anyone who has once looked into Goethe's nature could raise it seriously. How often has Goethe spoken out against the undertakings of problematical people who strive for goals without bothering about whether, in doing so, they are keeping within the bounds of their abilities! And he himself should have violated this precept, he should have set up natural-scientific views, ignoring his insufficiencies in mathematical things! Goethe knew that the paths to what is true are infinitely many, and that each person can travel the one most in accordance with his abilities, and will arrive at his goal. “Every human being must think in his own way: for he will always find something true along his path, or a kind of truth that will help him through life; but he must not just let himself go; he must control himself ...” (Aphorisms in Prose). “The least of men can be complete if he is active within the limits of his abilities and skills; but even good qualities become obscured, cancelled out, and destroyed if that absolutely essential proportion is lost.” (Ibid.)

[ 4 ] It would be ludicrous for someone to assert that Goethe would go into an area lying outside his field of vision in order to accomplish anything at all. Everything depends upon establishing what task mathematics has and where its application to natural science begins. Now Goethe did actually undertake the most conscientious study of this. Where it is a question of determining the limits of his productive powers, the poet develops a sharpness of understanding surpassed only by his genius' depth of understanding. We would especially like to make those people aware of this who have nothing else to say about Goethe's scientific thinking than that he lacked a logical, reflective way of thinking. The manner in which Goethe established the boundary between the natural-scientific method he employed and that of the mathematicians reveals a deep insight into the nature of the science of mathematics. He knew exactly what the basis is for the certainty of mathematical theorems; he had formed a clear picture for himself of the relationship in which mathematical lawfulness stands with respect to the lawfulness of the rest of nature. [ 5 ] If a science is to have any value at all as knowledge, it must open up for us a particular region of reality. Some aspect or other of the world content must manifest itself in it. The way in which it does this constitutes the spirit of a particular science. Goethe had to recognize the spirit of mathematics in order to know what can be attained in natural science without the help of computation and what cannot. This is the point that really matters. Goethe himself indicated this with great decisiveness. The way he does this reveals a deep insight into the nature of the mathematical.

[ 6 ] Let us examine this nature more closely. Mathematics deals with magnitude, with that which allows of a more or less. Magnitude, however, is not something existing in itself. In the broad scope of human experience there is nothing that is only magnitude. Along with its other characteristics, each thing also has some that are determined by numbers. Since mathematics concerns itself with magnitudes, what it studies are not objects of experience complete in themselves, but rather only everything about them that can be measured or counted. It separates off from things everything that can be subjected to this latter operation. It thus acquires a whole world of abstractions within which it then works. It does not have to do with things, but only with things insofar as they are magnitudes. It must admit that here it is dealing only with one aspect of what is real, and that reality has yet many other aspects over which mathematics has no power. Mathematical judgments are not judgments that fully encompass real objects, but rather are valid only within the ideal world of abstractions that we ourselves have conceptually separated off from the objects as one aspect of reality. Mathematics abstracts magnitude and number from things, establishes the completely ideal relationships between magnitudes and numbers, and hovers in this way in a pure world of thoughts. The things of reality, insofar as they are magnitude and number, allow one then to apply mathematical truths. It is therefore definitely an error to believe that one could grasp the whole of nature with mathematical judgments. Nature, in fact, is not merely quantity; it is also quality, and mathematics has to do only with the first. The mathematical approach and the approach that deals purely with what is qualitative must work hand in hand; they will meet in the thing, of which they each grasp one aspect. Goethe characterizes this relationship with the words: “Mathematics, like dialectics, is an organ of the inner, higher sense; its practice is an art, like oratory. For both, nothing is of value except the form; the content is a matter of indifference to them. It is all the same to them whether mathematics is calculating in pennies or dollars or whether rhetoric is defending something true or false.” (Aphorisms in Prose) And, from Sketch of a Colour Theory: “Who does not acknowledge that mathematics is one of the most splendid organs of man, is from one aspect very useful to physics?” In this recognition, Goethe saw the possibility that a mind which does not have the benefit of a mathematical training can still occupy itself with physical problems. Such a mind must limit itself to what is qualitative.

[ 1 ] Goethe is very often sought where he is absolutely not to be found. Among the many other areas where this has happened is the way the geological research of the poet has been judged. But here more than anywhere it is necessary for everything that Goethe wrote about details to recede into the background before the wonderful intention from which he took his start. He must be judged here above all according to his own maxim: “In the works of man, as in those of nature, it is actually the intentions that are primarily worthy of attention” and “The spirit out of which we act is the highest thing.” Not what he achieved but rather how he strove for it is what is exemplary for us. We are dealing, not with a doctrine, but rather with a method to be communicated. Goethe's doctrine depends upon the scientific means of the times and can be superseded; his method sprang from his great spiritual endowment and stands up even though scientific instruments are being perfected and our experience broadened.

[ 2 ] Goethe was introduced into geology through his occupation with the Ilmenau mine, which was one of his official duties. When Karl August became ruler, he devoted himself with great earnestness to this mine, which had been neglected for a long time. First, the reasons for its decline were to be thoroughly investigated by experts and then everything possible was to be done to revive the operation. Goethe stood by Duke Karl August in his undertaking. He pressed on most energetically with this matter. This led him often into the Ilmenau mine. He wanted to familiarize himself completely with the state of affairs. He was in Ilmenau for the first time in May 1776 and often thereafter.

[ 3 ] In the midst of this practical concern, there now arose in him the scientific need to arrive at the laws of those phenomena which he was in a position to observe there. The comprehensive view of nature that worked its way up in his spirit to ever greater clarity (see his essay Nature) compelled him to explain, in his sense, what was spread out there before his eyes.

[ 4 ] Here right away a deep-lying characteristic of Goethe's nature manifests itself. He has an essentially different need than many investigators. Whereas, for the latter, the main thing is knowledge of the particulars, whereas they are usually interested in an edifice of ideas, in a system, only insofar as it is helpful in observing the particulars, for Goethe, the particulars are only intermediaries to a comprehensive, total view of existence. We read in the essay Nature: “Nature consists solely of children, and the mother, where is she?” We also find in Faust (“See all the working power and seeds”) the same striving to know not only the immediately existing, but also its deeper foundations. In this way, what he observes upon and beneath the surface of the earth also becomes for him a means It of penetrating into the riddle of how the world is formed. What he writes to the Duchess Luise on December 23, 1786, ensouls all his research: “The works of nature are always like a word that has just been spoken by God: and what is experiencable to the senses becomes for him a writing from which he must read that word of creation. In this vein he writes to Frau v. Stein on August 22. 1784: “The great and beautiful writing is always legible and is indecipherable only when people want to transfer their own petty images and their own narrow-mindedness onto the infinite beings.” We find the same tendency in Wilhelm Meister: “But if I were now to treat precisely these cracks and fissures as letters, had to decipher them, were to form them into words, and learned to read them fully, would you have anything against that?”

[ 5 ] Thus, from the end of the 1770's on, we see the poet engaged in an unceasing effort to decipher this writing. The goal of his striving was to work his way up to a view such that what he saw separated would appear to him in inner, necessary relationship. His method was “one that develops and unfolds things, by no means one that compiles and orders them.” It did not suffice for him to see granite here and porphyry there, etc., and then simply to arrange them according to external characteristics; he strove for a law that underlay all rock formation and that he needed only to hold before himself in spirit in order to understand how granite had to arise here and porphyry there. He went back from that which differentiates, to that which is held in common. On June 12, 1784, he writes to Frau v. Stein: “The simple thread that I have spun for myself is leading me beautifully through all these subterranean labyrinths, and is giving me an overview even in the confusion.” He seeks the common principle that, according to the different conditions under which it comes to manifestation, at one time brings forth this kind of rock and another time brings forth that. Nothing in the realm of experience is a constant for him at which one could remain; only the principle, which underlies everything, is something of that kind. Goethe therefore also endeavors always to find the transitions from rock to rock. One can recognize much better from them, in fact, the intention, the tendency of their genesis, than from a product that has already developed in a definite way, where nature in fact reveals its being only in a one-sided way, indeed very often “goes astray into a blind alley by specializing.”

[ 6 ] It is an error to believe that one has refuted this method of Goethe by indicating that present-day geology does not know of any such transition of one rock into another. Goethe, in fact, never maintained that granite actually passes over into something different. What is once granite is a finished, complete product and no longer has the inner driving power to become something else out of itself. What Goethe was seeking, however, is in fact lacking in present-day geology, and that is the idea, the principle that constitutes granite before it has become granite, and this idea is the same one that also underlies all other formations. When Goethe speaks therefore of the transition of one rock into a different one he does not mean by this a factual transformation but rather a development of the objective idea that takes shape in the individual forms, that now holds fast to one form and becomes granite, and then again develops another possibility out of itself and becomes slate, etc. Also in this realm Goethe's view is not a barren theory of metamorphosis but rather concrete idealism. But that rock-forming principle can come to full expression, with all that lies in this expression, only within the whole body of the earth. Therefore the history of the formation of the earth's body becomes the main thing for Goethe, and all the particulars have to fit into it. The important thing for him is the place a given rock occupies in the totality of the earth; the particular thing interests him only as a part of the whole. Ultimately, that mineralogical-geological system seems to him to be the correct one which recreates the processes in the earth, which shows why precisely this had to arise at this place and that had to arise in another. Geological deposits become of decisive importance for him. He therefore criticizes Werner's teachings, which he otherwise reveres so highly, for not arranging the minerals according to the way they are deposited, which informs us about how they arose, but rather according to incidental external features. It is not the investigator who makes the perfect system, but rather nature itself which has done that.

[ 7 ] It should be borne in mind that Goethe saw in the whole of nature one great realm, a harmony. He maintains that all natural things are ensouled with one tendency. What is therefore of the same kind had to appear to him as determined by the same lawfulness. He could not grant that other forces are at work in geological phenomena—which are in fact nothing more than inorganic entities—than in the rest of inorganic nature. The extending into geology of the laws of inorganic activity is Goethe's first geological deed. It was this principle which guided him in his explanation of the Bohemian mountains and in his explanation of the phenomena observed at the temple of Serapis at Pozzuoli. He sought to bring principle into the dead earth crust by thinking of it as having arisen through those laws which we always see at work before our eyes in physical phenomena. The geological theories of a Hutton, an Elie de Beaumont were deeply repugnant to him. What was he supposed to do with explanations that violate all natural order? It is banal to repeat so often the empty remark that it was Goethe's peaceful nature which was repelled by the theory of rising and sinking, etc. No, this theory affronted his sense for a unified view of nature. He could not insert this theory into what is in accordance with nature. And he owes it to this sense that he early on (in 1782 already) arrived at a view that professional geologists attained only decades later: the view that fossilized animal and plant remains stand in a necessary relationship with the rock in which they are found. Voltaire had still spoken of them as freaks of nature, because he had no inkling of the consistency of natural lawfulness. Goethe could make sense of a thing in one place or other only if a simple, natural connection existed between this thing and its environment. It is also the same principle that led Goethe to the fruitful idea of an ice age. (see Geological Problems and an Attempt at their Solution)⁶⁹ He sought a simple explanation, in accordance with nature, for deposits of granite masses widely separated over large areas. He had indeed to reject the explanation that they had been hurled there by a tumultuous upheaval of mountains lying far behind them, because this explanation did not trace a fact of nature back to the existing working laws of nature but rather derived this fact from an exception, from an abandonment, in fact, of these laws. He assumed that northern Germany had once had, under conditions of extreme cold, a general water level of a thousand feet, that a large part was covered with a layer of ice, and that those granite blocks were left lying after the ice had melted away With this, a view was expressed that is based upon known laws experiencable by us. Goethe's significance for geology is to be sought in his establishment of a general lawfulness of nature. How he explained the Kammerberg, whether or not he was correct in his opinion about the springs of Karlsbad, is unimportant. “It is a question here not of an opinion to be disseminated, but rather of a method to be communicated that anyone may make use of in his own way as a tool” (Goethe to Hegel, October 7, 1820).

• 69. Geologische Probleme und Versuch ihrer Auflösung

[ 1 ] Just as in geology, so in meteorology it would be an error to go into what Goethe actually achieved and consider that to be the main thing. His meteorological experiments are in fact nowhere complete. One can only look everywhere at his intention. His thinking was always directed at finding the pregnant⁷⁰ point from which a series of phenomena governs itself from within outward. Any explanation that takes manifestations, incidentals, from here and there in order to construct a regular series of phenomena was not in accordance with his approach. When confronted by a phenomenon, he looked for everything related to it, for all the facts belonging in the same sphere, in such a way that a whole, a totality, lay before him. Within this sphere, a principle then had to be found that made all the regularity, the whole sphere of related phenomena, in fact, appear as a necessity. It did not seem to him to be in accordance with nature to explain the phenomena in this sphere by introducing circumstances lying outside it. This is where we must seek the key to the principle he set up in meteorology. “More and more each day I felt the complete inadequacy of ascribing such constant phenomena to the planets, to the moon, or to some unknown ebb and flow of the atmosphere ...” “But we reject all such influences; we consider the weather phenomena on earth to be neither cosmic nor planetary, but rather, according to our premises, we must explain them as being purely telluric.” He wanted to trace back the phenomena of the atmosphere to their causes, which lay in the being of the earth itself. The important thing, to begin with, was to find the point where the basic lawfulness that determines everything else expresses itself directly. Barometric pressure provided just such a phenomenon. Goethe then regarded this also as the archetypal phenomenon and sought to connect everything else to it. He tried to follow the rise and fall of the barometer and believed that he also perceived a regularity in it. He studied Schrön's tables and found “that the aforementioned rise and fall follow an almost parallel course at different points of observation, whether nearby or remote, and also in different longitudes, latitudes, and altitudes.” Since this rising and falling seemed to him to be a direct manifestation of gravity, he believed that he saw in barometric changes a direct expression of the quality of the force of gravity itself. But one must not infer anything more from this Goethean explanation. Goethe rejected any setting up of hypotheses. He wanted to provide only an expression for an observable phenomenon, not an actual factual cause, in the sense of present-day natural science. He believed the other atmospheric phenomena should fit in quite well with this phenomenon. The formation of clouds interested the poet most of all. For this, he had found in Howard's teachings a means of grasping the ever-changing forms in certain basic configurations and thus of “firming up with enduring thoughts, something that exists as a changing phenomenon.” He still sought in addition only some means that would help him understand the transformations of the cloud forms, just as he found in that “spiritual ladder” a means of explaining the transformation of the typical leaf shape in the plant. Just as there the spiritual ladder was for him the red thread running through the individual configurations, so here in meteorology it is for him a varying “constitution” (Geeigenschaftetsein) of the atmosphere at varying altitudes. In both cases, we must bear in mind that it could never occur to Goethe to regard such a red thread as a real configuration. He was perfectly aware of the fact that only the individual configuration is to be regarded as real for the senses in space, and that all higher principles of explanation are there only for the eyes of the spirit. Present-day refutations of Goethe are therefore mostly a jousting with windmills. One attributes to his principles a form of reality that he himself denied them and believes one has overcome him in this way. But present-day natural science does not know that form of reality upon which he based things: the objective, concrete idea. From this side, Goethe must therefore remain foreign to present-day science.

• 70. “Significant Help from One Single Intelligent Word” (“Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort”)

[ 1 ] The reason for writing this chapter does not lie in the fact that the Colour Theory, accompanied by an introduction, must also be included in a Goethe edition. It stems from a deep, spiritual need of the editor of this edition. The latter took his start from the study of mathematics and physics and with inner necessity was led, by the many contradictions pervading the system of our modern view of nature, to a critical investigation of the methodological basis of these sciences. His initial studies led him to the principle of strict knowledge through experience; his insight into those contradictions led him to a strict scientific epistemology. He was protected by his positive starting point from any reversion to purely Hegelian conceptual constructs. With the help of his epistemological studies, he finally found the reason for many of the errors of modern natural science to lie in the completely incorrect standing that science had assigned to the simple sense impression. Our science transfers all sense qualities (sound, colour, warmth, etc.) into the subject and is of the opinion that “outside” the subject there is nothing corresponding to these qualities except processes of motion of matter. These processes of motion, which are supposedly all that exists within the “realm of nature,” can of course no longer be perceived. They are inferred on the basis of subjective qualities.

[ 2 ] But this inference must appear to consistent thinking as fragmentary. Motion is, to begin with, only a concept that we have borrowed from the sense world; i.e., it confronts us only in things with sense-perceptible qualities. We do not know of any motion other than that connected with sense objects. If one now transfers this attribute onto entities that are not sense-perceptible—such as the elements of discontinuous matter (atoms) are supposed to be—then one must after all be clear about the fact that through this transference, an attribute perceived by the senses is ascribed to a form of existence essentially different from what is conceived of as sense-perceptible. One falls into the same contradiction when one wants to arrive at a real content for the initially completely empty concept of the atom. Sense qualities, in fact, even though ever so sublimated, must be added to this concept. One person ascribes impenetrability, exertion of force, to the atom; another ascribes extension in space, and so on; in short, each one ascribes certain characteristics or other that are borrowed from the sense world. If one does not do this, one remains in a complete void.

[ 3 ] That is why the above inference is only fragmentary. One draws a line through the middle of what is sense-perceptible and declares the one part to be objective and the other to be subjective. The only consistent statement would be: If there are atoms, then these are simple parts of matter, with the characteristics of matter, and are not perceptible only because their small size makes them inaccessible to our senses.

[ 4 ] But with this there disappears any possibility of seeking anything in the motion of atoms that could be held up as something objective in contrast to the subjective qualities of sound, colour, etc. And the possibility also ceases of seeking anything more, for example, in the connection between motion and the sensation “red” than a connection between two processes that both belong entirely to the sense world.

[ 5 ] It was therefore clear to the editor that motion of ether, position of atoms, etc., belong in the same category as the sense impressions themselves. Declaring the latter to be subjective is only the result of unclear reflection. If one declares sense qualities to be subjective, then one must do exactly the same with the motion of ether. It is not for any principle reason that we do not perceive the latter, but only because our sense organs are not organized finely enough. But that is a purely coincidental state of affairs. It could be the case that someday mankind, by increasing refinement of our sense organs, would arrive at the point of also perceiving the motion of ether directly. If then a person of that distant future accepted our subjectivistic theory of sense impressions, then he would have to declare these motions of ether to be just as subjective as we declare colour, sound, etc., to be today.

[ 6 ] It is clear that this theory of physics leads to a contradiction that cannot be resolved.

[ 7 ] This subjectivistic view has a second support in physiological considerations.

[ 8 ] Physiology shows that a sensation appears only as the final result of a mechanical process that first communicates itself, from that part of the corporeal world lying outside the substance of our body, to the periphery of our nervous system, into our sense organs; from here, the process is transmitted to our highest center, in order to be released there for the first time as sensation. The contradictions of this physiological theory are presented in the chapter on “The Archetypal Phenomenon.” One can, after all, label only the brain substance's form of motion as subjective here. No matter how far one might go in investigating the processes within the subject, one must always remain, on this path, within what is mechanical. And one will nowhere discover the sensation in the central organ.

[ 9 ] Therefore only philosophical consideration remains as a way of gaining information about the subjectivity and objectivity of sensation. And this provides us with the following.

[ 10 ] What can be designated as “subjective” about a perception? Without having an exact analysis of the concept “subjective,” one cannot go forward at all. Subjectivity, of course, cannot be determined by anything other than itself. Everything that cannot be shown to be conditional upon the subject may not be designated as “subjective.” Now we must ask ourselves: What can we designate as the human subject's own? That which it can experience about itself through outer or inner perception. Through outer perception we grasp our bodily constitution; through inner experience, we grasp our own thinking, feeling, and willing. Now what is to be designated as subjective in the first case? The constitution of the whole organism, and therefore also the sense organs and brain, which will probably appear in each human being in somewhat different modifications. But everything that can be indicated here in this way is only a particular formation in the arrangement and function of substances by which a sensation is transmitted. Only the path, therefore, is actually subjective that the sensation has to take before it can become my sensation. Our organization transmits the sensation and these paths of transmission are subjective; the sensation itself, however, is not subjective.

[ 11 ] Now there still remains the path of inner experience for us consider. What do I experience within myself when I designate a sensation as my own? I experience that in my thinking I effect a connection to my individuality, that I extend my sphere of knowing out over this sensation; but I am not conscious of creating any content for the sensation. I only register its connection to myself; the quality of the sensation is a fact founded within itself.

[ 12 ] No matter where we begin, whether within or without, we do not arrive at a place where we could say that here the subjective character of the sensation is given. The concept “subjective” is not applicable to the content of sensation.

[ 13 ] It is these considerations that compelled me to reject as impossible any theory of nature that in a principle way goes beyond the realm of the perceived world, and to seek the sole object of natural science exclusively within the sense world. But then I had to seek, within the mutual interdependencies of the facts of precisely this sense world, that which we designate as the laws of nature.

[ 14 ] And in this way, I was forced to that view of the natural-scientific method which underlies the Goethean colour theory. Whoever finds these considerations to be correct will read this colour theory with very different eyes than modern natural scientists can. Such a person will see that what we have here is not Goethe's hypothesis confronting that of Newton, but rather at issue here is the question: Is today's theoretical physics acceptable or not? If not, however, then neither is the light that this physics casts upon colour theory. May the reader experience from the following chapters what our principle foundation is for physics, in order then, from this foundation, to see Goethe's undertakings in the right light.

1. Goethe and Modern Natural Science

[ 1 ] If it were not a person's duty to state the truth without reserve once he believes he has come to know it, the following exposition would certainly have remained unwritten. I have no doubts about the judgment that the specialists will pass on it, given the dominant trend in natural science today. One will regard it as someone's dilettantish attempt to speak for something upon which judgment has long since been passed by all “discerning” people. When I picture to myself the scorn of all those who consider themselves the only ones qualified today to speak on natural-scientific questions, I must admit to myself that there is nothing tempting, in any ordinary sense, about this undertaking. But I could not let myself be deterred by these anticipated objections. For I can raise all these objections myself and know therefore how poorly they stand up. It is not difficult, indeed, to think “scientifically” in the sense of modern natural science. Not too long ago, in fact, we experienced an interesting case in point. Eduard von Hartmann appeared with his Philosophy of the Unconscious. The gifted author of this book himself would be the last one today to deny its imperfections. But the direction of thought we encounter there is a penetrating one, which gets to the bottom of things. It therefore made a powerful impression on all those minds that had a need for deeper knowledge. But it ran counter to the paths of the natural scientists who were feeling their way along on the surface of things. They were all against the book. After various attacks from their side had proven rather ineffective, a book appeared by an anonymous author, The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Darwinism and the Theory of Evolution,⁷¹ which brought forward with the greatest possible critical acuity everything against the newly founded philosophy that could be said against it from the standpoint of modern natural science. This book caused a stir. The adherents of the current trend were satisfied by it to the highest degree. They publicly acknowledged that the author was one of them and proclaimed his views as their own. What a disillusionment they had to suffer! When the author actually revealed himself, it was Eduard v. Hartmann. This proved one thing convincingly, however: Ignorance about the findings of natural science, dilettantism, is not the reason why it is impossible for certain minds, who are striving for a deeper insight, to join that school of thought which wants to establish itself today as the dominant one. The reason, however, is their knowledge that this school is not on the right path. It is not difficult for philosophy hypothetically to take the standpoint of the present-day view of nature. In what he did, Eduard v. Hartmann showed this irrefutably to anyone who wants to see. I bring this as confirmation of my above assertion that it is also not difficult for me to raise the objections myself that someone else can make against what I bring.

[ 2 ] Indeed, anyone is considered a dilettante today who takes philosophical reflection about the essential being of things at all seriously. Having a world view is regarded as an idealistic quirk by our contemporaries of a “mechanical,” or even by those of a “positivistic,” persuasion. This view becomes understandable, to be sure, when one sees the helpless ignorance in which these positivistic thinkers find themselves when they make themselves heard on the subject of the “being of matter,” of “the limits of our knowing,” of “the nature of the atom,” or of other such things. In connection with these examples, one can make real studies of dilettantish treatment of decisive questions of science.

[ 3 ] One must have the courage to admit all this to oneself with respect to the natural science of the present day, in spite of the tremendous and remarkable achievements that this same natural science has to show in the realm of technology. For, these achievements have nothing to do with our real need for knowledge of nature. We have indeed experienced—precisely in those contemporaries to whom we owe inventions whose significance for the future we cannot for a long time even begin to imagine—that they lack a deeper scientific need. It is something entirely different to observe the processes of nature in order to place its forces in the service of technology, than to seek, with the help of these processes, to look more deeply into the being of natural science. True science is present only where the human spirit seeks to satisfy its needs, without any external purpose.

[ 4 ] True science, in the higher sense of the word, has to do only with ideal objects; it can only be idealism. For, it has its ultimate foundation in needs that stem from the human spirit. Nature awakens questions in us, problems that strive for solution. But nature cannot itself provide this solution. Through our capacity for knowledge a higher world confronts nature; and this fact creates higher demands. For a being who did not possess this higher nature, these problems would simply not arise. These questions can therefore also not receive an answer from any authority other than precisely this higher nature. Scientific questions are therefore essentially a matter that the human spirit has to settle with itself. They do not lead the human spirit out of its element. The realm, however, in which the human spirit lives and weaves as though within its primally own, is the idea, is the world of thoughts. To solve thought-questions with thought-answers is the scientific activity in the highest sense of the word. And all other scientific procedures are there, ultimately, only in order to serve this highest purpose. Take scientific observation, for example. It is supposed to lead us to knowledge of a law of nature. The law itself is purely ideal. The need to find a lawfulness holding sway behind the phenomena already stems from the human spirit. An unspiritual being would not have this need. Now let us proceed to the observation! What do we actually want to achieve by it? In response to the question created in our spirit, is something supposed to be provided from outside, by sense observation, that could be the answer to that question? Never. For why should we feel ourselves more satisfied by a second observation than by the first? If the human spirit were satisfied at all by an observed object, then it would have to be satisfied right away by the first. But the actual question is not at all one about any second observation, but rather about the ideal foundation of the observations. What does this observation admit as an ideal explanation; how must I think it so that it appears possible to me? Those are the questions that come to us with respect to the sense world. I must seek, out of the depths of my spirit itself, what I lack when confronted by the sense world. If I cannot create for myself the higher nature for which my spirit strives when confronted by sense-perceptible nature, then no power in the external world will create it for me. The results of science therefore can come only from the human spirit; thus they can only be ideas. No objections can be raised against this necessary reflection. The ideal character of all science, however, is established thereby.

[ 5 ] Modern natural science, in accordance with its whole being, cannot believe in the ideal character of knowledge. For, it does not regard the idea as that which is primary, most original, and creative, but rather as the final product of material processes. But in doing so, it is not at all aware of the fact that these material processes belong only to the sense-perceptible, observable world that, however, grasped more deeply, dissolves completely into idea. The process under consideration presents itself to observation, namely, in the following way: We perceive facts with our senses, facts that run their course according to the laws of mechanics, then phenomena of warmth, of light, of magnetism, of electricity, and finally of life processes, etc. At the highest level of life, we find that life raises itself up to the forming of concepts and ideas, whose bearer, in fact, is the human brain. We find our own “I” springing from just such a sphere of thoughts. The “I” seems to be the highest product of a complicated process that is mediated by a long series of physical, chemical, and organic occurrences. But if we investigate the ideal world of which the content of that “I” consists, we find in that world essentially more than merely the end product of that process. We find that the individual parts of that world are connected to each other in a completely different way than the parts of that merely observed process are. As one thought arises in us, which then demands a second, we find that there is an ideal connection between these two objects in an entirely different way than if I observe the colour of a substance, for example, as the result of a chemical agent. It is of course entirely obvious that the successive stages of the brain process have their source in organic metabolism, even though the brain process itself is the bearer of those thought-configurations. But the reason as to why the second thought follows from the first: this I do not find within this metabolism, but do indeed find within the logical thought-connection. Thus, in the world of thoughts, there holds sway, besides organic necessity, a higher ideal necessity. But this necessity, which the human spirit finds within its world of ideas, this it also seeks in the rest of the universe. For this necessity arises for us, indeed, only through the fact that we not only observe, but also think. Or in other words, the things no longer appear in a merely factual connection, but rather as joined by an inner, ideal necessity, if we grasp them not merely through observation but rather through thoughts.

[ 6 ] With respect to this, one cannot say: What good is it to grasp the phenomenal world in thoughts, when the things of this world perhaps do not, according to their nature, allow of any such grasp? Only someone who has not grasped the core of this whole matter can ask such a question. The world of thoughts rises up within our inner being; it confronts the objects observable to the senses; and then asks: What relationship does the world confronting me there have to myself? What is it with respect to me? I am here with all my ideal necessity, which hovers above everything transitory; I have the power within me to explain myself. But how do I explain what confronts me?

[ 7 ] It is here that a significant question is answered for us that Friedrich Theodore Vischer, for example, has raised repeatedly and declared to be the pivotal point of all philosophical reflection: the question as to the connection between the human spirit and nature. What kind of a relationship exists between these two things, which to us always appear separated from each other? If one asks this question correctly, then its answer is not as difficult as it appears to be. What meaning can this question actually have then? The question is not in fact asked by some being that stands above nature and human spirit as a third entity and which investigates that connection from this standpoint, but rather it is asked by one of the two beings themselves, by the human spirit. The latter asks: What connection exists between me and nature? But that again means nothing other than: How can I bring myself into a relationship with the nature confronting me? How can I express this relationship in accordance with the needs living in me? I live in ideas; what kind of an idea corresponds to nature; how can I express, as idea, that which I behold as nature? It is as though we have often obstructed our own path to a satisfactory answer by putting the question wrongly. A correct question, however, is already half an answer.

[ 8 ] The human spirit seeks everywhere to go beyond the succession of facts, as mere observation provides him with them, and to penetrate to the ideas of the things. Science, indeed, begins at the place where thinking begins. In the findings of science there lies, in the form of ideal necessity, that which appears to the senses only as a succession of facts. These findings only seem to be the final product of the process described above; the truth is that they are that which we must regard, in the whole universe, as the foundation of everything. Where these findings then appear for observation is a matter of indifference; for, as we have seen, their significance does not in fact depend upon that. They spread the net of their ideal necessity out over the whole universe.

[ 9 ] No matter where we take our start, if we have enough spiritual power, we will finally meet up with the idea.

[ 10 ] Through the fact that modern physics completely fails to recognize this, it is led into a whole series of errors. I want to point to only one such error here, as an example.

[ 11 ] Let us take the definition of inertia, which in physics is usually included among the “general characteristics of bodies.” This is usually defined in the following way: Without an external cause, no body can change the state of motion in which it finds itself. This definition gives rise to the picture that the concept of a body, inert in itself, is abstracted from the world of phenomena. And John Stuart Mill, who nowhere goes into the matter itself, but who, for the sake of an arbitrary theory, stands everything on its head, would not hesitate for a moment also to explain the matter in this way. But this is after all completely incorrect. The concept of an inert body arises purely through a conceptual construction. In designating as “body” what has extension in space, I can picture to myself a kind of body whose changes stem from external influences, and a kind whose changes occur out of its own impulse. If I now find something in the outer world that corresponds to the concept I have formed of a “body which cannot change itself without an outer influence,” I then call this body inert or subject to the law of inertia. My concepts are not abstracted from the sense world, but rather are constructed freely out of the idea, and with their help I only first find my way rightly in the sense world. The above definition could only take this form: A body that out of itself cannot alter its state of motion is called an inert body. And when I have recognized a body to be of this kind, I can then apply to it everything that is connected with an inert body.

2. The “Archetypal Phenomenon”

[ 12 ] If we could follow the whole series of processes that occur with respect to some sense perception or other from the peripheral nerve endings of the sense organs all the way into the brain, we would in fact nowhere arrive at a point where the mechanical, chemical, and organic—in short, the temporal-spatial processes—end and that appears which we actually call sense perception; for example, the sensation of warmth, of light, of sound, etc. One cannot find a place where the causal motion supposedly goes over into its effect, the perception. But can we then speak at all of the two things as standing in a relationship of cause and effect?

[ 13 ] Let us just examine the facts, quite objectively. Let us assume that a particular sensation appears within our consciousness. It appears at the same time in such a way that it directs us to some object or other from which it stems. When I have the sensation “red,” I generally associate with it, by virtue of the content of this mental picture, a particular place, i.e., a location in space, or the surface of a thing, to which I ascribe what this sensation expresses. This is not the case only where, through an external influence, the sense organ itself responds in its own characteristic way, as when I have a sensation of light from a blow to the eye. Let us disregard such cases in which, what is more, the sensations never arise with their usual definiteness. As exceptions, they cannot in fact teach us about the nature of things. If I have the sensation “red” along with a particular location, then I am at first directed to something or other in the outer world as the bearer of this sensation. I can very well ask myself now what spatial-temporal processes are taking place in this thing while it is appearing to me as though possessed of the colour red. I shall then discover that mechanical, chemical, or other processes offer themselves as an answer to my question. I can go further now and investigate the processes that have occurred on the way from that thing to my sense organ to mediate the sensation of the colour “red” for me. There again, in fact, nothing other than processes of motion or electrical currents or chemical changes can present themselves to me as such mediators. The result would be the same for me if I could investigate the further mediation from the sense organ to the center of the brain. What is mediated on this whole path is the perception “red” that we are discussing. How this perception manifests in a particular thing lying on the path from the stimulus to the perception depends solely upon the nature of this thing. The sensation is present at every point, from the stimulator to the brain, but not as such, not explicitly, but rather in a way corresponding to the nature of the object existing at each point.

[ 14 ] A truth results from this, however, that is qualified to shed light upon the entire theoretical foundation of physics and physiology. What do I experience from the investigation of a thing caught up in a process that appears in my consciousness as sensation? I experience no more than the way that thing responds to the action which issues from the sensation, or, in other words the way a sensation expresses itself in some object or other of the spatial-temporal world. It is far from the truth to regard such a spatial-temporal process as the cause, as that which causes the sensation in me; something quite different is the correct view: The spatial-temporal process is the effect of the sensation within a thing that has extension in space and time. I could insert as many things as I wanted into the path from the stimulator to the organ of perception: only that will occur in each one of them that can occur in it by virtue of its nature. But it is still the sensation, therefore, that expresses itself in all these processes.

[ 15 ] One should therefore regard the longitudinal vibrations of the air in the mediating of sound or the hypothetical oscillation of the ether in the mediating of light to be nothing other than the way the sensations in question can appear in a medium that, in accordance with its nature, is capable only of rarification and densification or of oscillating motion, as the case may be. I cannot find the sensation as such in this world, because it simply cannot be there. But in those processes I am absolutely not given what is objective about the processes of sensation, but rather a form of their manifestation.

[ 16 ] And now let us ask ourselves: What is the nature of those mediating processes themselves? Do we then investigate them by any means other than with the help of our senses? Can I in fact investigate my senses? Is the peripheral nerve ending, are the convolutions of the brain given to me by anything other than by sense perception? All this is both subjective and objective at the same time, if this distinction can be considered to be justified at all. Now we can grasp the matter still more exactly. By following the perception from its stimulus to the organ of perception, we are investigating nothing other than the continuous transition from one perception to the other. The “red” is present before us as that for whose sake we are undertaking the whole investigation at all. It directs us to its stimulator. In the latter we observe other sensations as connected with this “red.” These are processes of motion. The latter then appear as further processes of motion between the stimulator and the sense organ, and so on. But all of these are likewise perceived sensations. And they represent nothing more than a metamorphosis of processes that, insofar as they come into consideration at all for sense observation, break down entirely into perceptions.

[ 17 ] The perceived world is therefore nothing other than a sum total of metamorphosed perceptions.

[ 18 ] For the sake of convenience, we had to use an expression that cannot be brought into complete harmony with our present conclusions. We said that each thing which is inserted into the space between the stimulator and the organ of perception brings a sensation to expression in a way which is in accordance with the nature of that thing. But strictly speaking the thing is nothing more than the sum total of those processes as which it appears.

[ 19 ] The objection might now be raised that this kind of conclusion eliminates any enduring element in the ongoing world process, that we, like Heraclitus, are making the flux of things, in which nothing is abiding, the one and only world principle. Behind the phenomena, there must be a “thing-in-itself”; behind the changing world there must be an “enduring matter.” But let us in fact investigate more exactly what the case really is with this “enduring matter,” with what “endures amidst change.”

[ 20 ] When I confront my eye with a red surface, the sensation “red” arises in my consciousness. In connection with this sensation, we must now distinguish beginning, duration, and end. Over against the transitory sensation there supposedly now stands an enduring objective process that as such is itself objectively limited in time i.e.. has beginning, duration, and end. This process, however is supposedly occurring in connection with a matter that is without beginning or end, that is therefore indestructible, eternal. This matter is supposedly what actually endures within the changing processes. This conclusion would perhaps have some justification if the concept of time had been correctly applied to the sensation in the above manner. But must we not then distinguish strictly between the content of the sensation and the appearing of the sensation? In my perception, to be sure, they are one and the same. For, the content of the sensation must after all be present in the perception or the sensation would otherwise not come into consideration for me at all. But is it not a matter of complete indifference for this content, taken purely as such, that it enters my consciousness now at this particular moment and then, after so and so many seconds, leaves it again? That which constitutes the content of the sensation, i.e., that which alone comes objectively into consideration, does not depend at all upon that. But now that which is a matter of complete indifference to the content of something cannot, after all, be regarded as an essential determining factor for the existence of that something.

[ 21 ] But our application of the time-concept is also not correct for an objective process that has a beginning and an end. When a new characteristic arises in a particular thing, maintains itself for a time in different states of development, and then disappears again, there also we must regard the content of this characteristic as what is essential. And what is essential has absolutely nothing as such to do with the concepts of beginning, duration, and end. By “essential” we mean that by which a thing actually is precisely what it presents itself to be. What matters is not the fact that something arises at a certain moment in time, but rather what arises. The sum total of all the traits expressed by this “what” makes up the content of the world. But this “what” exists in the most manifold traits, in the most diverse forms. All these forms are in a relationship to each other; they determine each other reciprocally. Through this, they enter into a relationship of separation according to space and time. But it is only to a completely mistaken understanding of the concept of time that the concept of matter owes its existence. One believes that one would rarefy the world into a semblance without being, if one did not picture, as underlying the changeable sum total of occurrences, something that endures in time, something unchangeable, that abides while its traits are varying. But time is not after all a container within which the changes occur; it is not there before the things are, nor outside of them. Time is the sense-perceptible expression of the situation that the facts, in their content, are mutually dependent upon each other sequentially. Let us imagine we have to do with the perceivable complex of facts \(a_1\), \(b_1\), \(c_1\), \(d_1\), and \(e_1\). Another complex, \(a_2\), \(b_2\), \(c_2\), \(d_2\), and \(e_2\), depends with inner necessity upon the first complex; I understand the content of the second complex when I derive it ideally from the first one. Now let us imagine that both complexes make their appearance. For, what we discussed earlier is the entirely non-temporal and non-spatial essential being (Wesen) of these complexes. If \(a_2\), \(b_2\), \(c_2\), \(d_2\), and \(e_2\) is to come to outer manifestation, then \(a_l\), \(b_1\), \(c_1\), \(d_1\), and \(e_1\) must likewise be outer phenomena, in such a way, in fact, that \(a_2\), \(b_2\), \(c_2\), \(d_2\), and \(e_2\) also appear in their dependency upon the first complex. This means that the phenomenon \(a_l\), \(b_1\), \(c_1\), \(d_1\), and \(e_1\) must be there and make room for the phenomenon \(a_2\), \(b_2\), \(c_2\), \(d_2\), and \(e_2\) to appear. We see here that time first arises where the essential being of something comes to outer manifestation (Erscheinung). Time belongs to the phenomenal world. It does not yet have anything to do with the essential being itself. This essential being can only be grasped ideally. Only someone who cannot manage, in his train of thought, to go back from the phenomenon to the essential being will hypothesize time as something preceding the facts. Then, however, he needs a form of existence that endures beyond the changes. He conceives indestructible matter to be just such an existence. He has thereby created for himself a thing to which time supposedly can do nothing, something that abides amidst all change. Actually, however, he has only shown his inability to press forward, from the temporal phenomenon of the facts, to their essential being, which has nothing to do with time. Can I therefore say of the essential being of a fact that it arises or passes away? I can only say that one fact's content determines another and that this determining influence then appears as a sequence in time. The essential being of a thing cannot be destroyed; for, it is outside of all time and itself determines time. With this, we have shed light upon two concepts at the same time for which but little understanding is still to be found: upon essential being (Wesen) and outer manifestation (Erscheinung). Whoever grasps the matter correctly in our way cannot look for proof of the indestructibility of the essential being of something, because destruction includes within itself the time-concept, which has nothing to do with essential being.

[ 22 ] In the light of these discussions, we can say: The sense-perceptible world picture is the sum total of metamorphosing perceptual contents without an underlying matter.

[ 23 ] But our considerations have also shown us something else. We have seen that we cannot speak of a subjective character of perceptions. When we have a perception, we can follow the processes from the stimulator to our central organ: nowhere is there a point to be found where the jump can be demonstrated from the objectivity of the non-perceived to the subjectivity of the perception. This refutes the subjective character of the world of perception. The world of perception stands there as a content founded upon itself, which, for the moment, still has absolutely nothing to do with subject and object.

[ 24 ] Our discussion, of course, applies only to that concept of matter upon which physics bases its observations and which it identifies with the old, equally incorrect substance-concept of metaphysics. Matter, as the actually real element underlying phenomena, is one thing; matter, as phenomenon, as outer manifestation, is something else. Our exposition applies solely to the first concept. The second one remains untouched by it. For if I call what fills space “matter,” that is merely a word for a phenomenon to which no higher reality is ascribed than to other phenomena. I must only keep this character of matter always in mind.

[ 25 ] The world of what presents itself to us as perceptions—i.e., extension, motion, state of rest, force, light, warmth, colour, sound, electricity, etc.—this is the object of all science.

[ 26 ] If now the perceived world picture were of such a kind that, in the way it arises before us for our senses, it could express itself in accordance with its nature, unobscured; or in other words, if everything that arises in outer manifestation were a complete, undisturbed image of the inner being of things, then science would be the most unnecessary thing in the world. For, the task of knowledge would already be fully and totally fulfilled in the perception. Indeed, we would not then be able to differentiate at all between essential being and outer manifestation. The two would completely coincide as identical.

[ 27 ] This, however, is not the case. Let us imagine that element \(A\), contained in the factual world, stands in a certain relationship to element \(B\). Both elements, of course, according to our expositions, are nothing more than phenomena. Their relationship also comes to manifestation as a phenomenon. Let us call this phenomenon \(C\). What we can now determine within the factual world is the relationship of \(A\), \(B\), and \(C\). But now, besides \(A\), \(B\), and \(C\), there also exist infinitely many other such elements in the perceptible world. Let us take some fourth element or other \(D\); it enters in, and at once everything presents itself in a modified form. Instead of \(A\), in conjunction with \(B\), resulting in \(C\), an essentially different phenomenon, \(E\), will arise from the entering of \(D\).

[ 28 ] That is the important point. When we confront a phenomenon, we see it determined by many factors. We must seek out all the interrelationships if we are to understand the phenomenon. But these relationships differ from each other; some are more intimate, some more distant. The fact that a phenomenon \(E\) confronts me is due to other phenomena that are more intimately or more distantly related. Some are absolutely necessary if such a phenomenon is to arise at all; other phenomena, by their absence, would not at all keep such a phenomenon from arising, but do cause it to arise in precisely this or that way. We see from this that we must differentiate between necessary and coincidental determining factors of a phenomenon. Phenomena that arise in such a way that only the necessary determining factors bring them about can be called primary, and the others derivative. When, from their determining factors, we understand the primary phenomena, we can then also understand the derivative ones by adding new determining factors.

[ 29 ] Here the task of science becomes clear to us. It has to penetrate far enough through the phenomenal world to seek out the phenomena that are dependent only upon necessary determining factors. And the verbal-conceptual expression for such necessary relationships is laws of nature.

[ 30 ] When a person is confronting a sphere of phenomena, then, as soon as he has gone beyond mere description and registering of these, he must therefore first of all ascertain those elements which determine each other necessarily, and present them as archetypal phenomena. One must then add those determining factors which stand in a more distant relationship to those elements, in order to see how they modify those primary phenomena.

[ 31 ] This is the relationship of science to the phenomenal world: within the latter, the phenomena absolutely do arise as derivative ones and are therefore incomprehensible from the very beginning; in science, the archetypal phenomena arise in the forefront with the derivative ones following, whereby the whole connection becomes comprehensible. The system of science differentiates itself from the system of nature through the fact that in the system of science the interrelationships of the phenomena are ascertained by the intellect and are rendered comprehensible thereby. Science never has to bring something in addition to the phenomenal world, but rather has only to disclose the hidden interrelationships of this world. All use of the intellect must be limited only to this latter work. By taking recourse to something that does not manifest in order to explain the phenomena, the intellect and any scientific activity are exceeding their powers.

[ 32 ] Only someone who sees the absolute correctness of our findings can understand Goethe's colour theory. Any reflection about what a perception like light or colour might be in addition to the entity as which it manifests was completely foreign to Goethe's nature. For he knew what the powers of intellectual thinking were. Light was given to him as sensation. When he then wanted to explain the connection between light and colour, that could not occur through speculation, but only through an archetypal phenomenon, by his seeking out the necessary determining factor that must join light in order for colour to arise. Newton also saw colour arise in connection with light, but he then only thought speculatively about how colour arises out of light. It lay in his speculative way of thinking to do so; but not in Goethe's way of thinking, which was objective and rightly understood itself. Therefore, Newton's assumption that “light is composed of colored lights” had to appear to Goethe as the result of unrightful speculation. He considered himself justified only in expressing something about the connection between light and colour when some determining factor joins in, and not in expressing something about the light itself by bringing in a speculative concept. Therefore his statement: “Light is the simplest, most undivided, most homogeneous being that we know. It is not a composite.” Any statements about the composition of light are, indeed, only statements of the intellect about one phenomenon. The powers of the intellect, however, extend only to statements about the connection of phenomena.

[ 33 ] This reveals the deeper reason why Goethe, as he looked through the prism, could not accept Newton's theory. The prism would have had to be the first determining factor for the coming about of colour. But another determining factor, the presence of something dark, proved to be more primary to its coming about; the prism proved to be only the second determining factor.

[ 34 ] With this exposition, I believe I have removed any hindrances that might lie in the way of readers of Goethe's colour theory.

[ 35 ] If this difference between the two colour theories had not always been sought in two mutually contradictory forms of explanation that one then wanted simply to examine as to their validity, then the value of the Goethean colour theory, in all its great scientific significance, would have been recognized long ago. Only someone who is filled with such fundamentally wrong mental pictures—such as that, through intellectual thinking, one must go from the perceptions back to the cause of the perceptions—can still raise the question in the way present-day physics does. But someone who has really become clear about the fact that explaining the phenomena means nothing other than observing them in a connection established by the intellect must accept the Goethean colour theory in principle. For, it is the result of a correct way of looking at the relationship of our thinking to nature. Newton did not have this way of looking at things. Of course, it would not occur to me to want to defend every detail of the Goethean colour theory. It is only the principle that I want to uphold. But it can also not be my task here to derive from his principle the phenomena of colour theory that were still unknown in his day. If I should ever have the good fortune to possess the time and means for writing a colour theory in Goethe's sense that is entirely on the high level of modern achievements in natural science, that would be the only way to accomplish such a task. I would consider that as belonging to my finest life tasks. This introduction could extend only to the scientifically strict validation of Goethe's way of thinking in his colour theory. In what follows, light is also still to be shed upon the inner structure of this theory.

3. The System of Natural Science

[ 36 ] It could easily seem as though, in our investigations that attribute to thinking only a power whose goal is to connect perceptions, we ourselves were now calling into question the independent significance of concepts and ideas for which we stood so energetically at first.

[ 37 ] Only an inadequate interpretation of this investigation can lead to this view.

[ 38 ] What does thinking accomplish when it carries out the connecting of perceptions?

[ 39 ] Let us look at two perceptions \(A\) and \(B\). These are given to us at first as entities without concepts. I cannot, through any conceptual reflection, transform into something else the qualities given to my sense perception. I can also find no thought-quality by which I could construct what is given in sense-perceptible reality if I lacked the perception. I can never create a mental picture of the quality “red” for someone blind to red, even though I paraphrase it conceptually for him by every conceivable means. The sense-perception therefore has a something that never enters into the concept, that must be perceived if it is to become an object of our knowledge at all. What kind of a role does the concept play, therefore, that we connect with some sense perception or other? The concept must obviously bring to the perception a completely independent element, something new, which does belong to the sense perception, to be sure, but which does not come into view in the sense perception.

[ 40 ] But it is now certain, indeed, that this new “something” which the concept brings to the sense perception is that which first expresses what can meet our need for explanation. We are first able to understand some element or other in the sense world when we have a concept of it. We can always simply point to what sense-perceptible reality offers us, and anyone who has the possibility of perceiving precisely this element to which we are referring knows what it is all about. Through the concept, we are able to say something about the sense world that cannot be perceived.

[ 41 ] From this, however, the following immediately becomes clear. If the essential being of the sense perception consisted only in its sense-perceptible qualities, then something completely new, in the form of the concept, could not join it. The sense perception is therefore not a totality at all, but rather only one side of a totality. And it is that side, in fact, which can be merely looked upon. Through the concept it first becomes clear to us what we are looking at.

[ 42 ] What we developed methodologically in the previous chapter can now be expressed in terms of the significance of its content. Through our conceptual grasp of something given in the sense world, the “what” of that which is given to our view first comes to manifestation. We cannot express the content of what we look at, because this content consists only in the “how” of what we look at, i.e., in the form of its manifestation. Thus, in the concept, we find the “what,” the other content of that which is given in the sense world in an observed form.

[ 43 ] The world first gains its full content, therefore, in the concept. But now we have discovered that the concept points us beyond the individual phenomenon to the interrelationship of things. Thus that which appears in the sense world as separated, isolated, presents itself to the concept as a unified whole. And so our natural-scientific methodology gives rise to a monistic natural science as its final goal; but it is not an abstract monism that already presupposes the unity and then forcibly includes in it the individual facts of concrete existence, but rather it is a concrete monism that, piece by piece, shows that the seeming manifoldness of sense existence proves ultimately to be only an ideal unity. The multiplicity is only a form in which the unified world content expresses itself. The senses, which are not in a position to grasp this unified content, hold fast to the multiplicity; they are born pluralists. Thinking, however, overcomes the multiplicity and thus, through a long labour, returns to the unified world principle.

[ 44 ] The manner, now, in which the concept (the idea) expresses itself within the sense world constitutes the differences among the realms of nature. If a sense-perceptibly real entity attains only a kind of existence in which it stands totally outside the concept and is only governed in its transformations by the concept as by a law, then we call this entity inorganic. Everything that occurs with such an entity is to be traced back to the influences of another entity; and how the two act upon each other can be explained by a law standing outside them. In this sphere we have to do with phenomena and laws which, if they are primary, can be called archetypal phenomena. In this case, therefore, the conceptual element that is to be perceived stands outside of a perceived manifoldness.

[ 45 ] But a sense-perceptible unity itself, in fact, can point beyond itself; it can compel us, if we want to grasp it, to go on to further determining factors than to those perceptible to us. Then, what is conceptually graspable appears as a sense-perceptible unity. The two, concept and perception, are, indeed, not identical, but the concept does not appear outside the sense-perceptible manifoldness as a law, but rather within the manifoldness as a principle. The concept underlies the manifoldness as something that permeates it, as something that is no longer sense-perceptible, as something that we call typus. Organic natural science has to do with this.

[ 46 ] But here also the concept does not yet appear in the form particular to it as concept, but still only as typus. Where, now, the concept appears, not merely as typus, as permeating principle, but rather in its own conceptual form, there it appears as consciousness, there, there finally comes to manifestation that which is present at the lower stages only in essence. There the concept becomes a perception. We have to do with the self-conscious human being.

[ 47 ] Natural law, typus, and concept are the three forms in which the ideal element expresses itself. The natural law is abstract, standing over the sense-perceptible manifoldness; it governs inorganic natural science. Here idea and reality separate from each other completely. The typus already unites the two within one entity. The spiritual becomes an active entity, but does not yet act as such; it is not there as such, but rather, if it wants to be viewed in accordance with its existence, it must be looked at as something sense-perceptible. This is the situation in the realm of organic nature. The concept is present in a perceptible way. In human consciousness, it is the concept itself that is perceptible. The observed and the idea coincide. It is precisely the ideal element that is observed. Therefore, at this level, the ideal cores of existence of nature's lower levels can also come to manifestation. With human consciousness the possibility is given that what, at the lower levels of existence, merely is, but does not manifest, now becomes also manifesting reality.

4. The System of the Colour Theory

[ 48 ] Goethe worked at a time when human spirits were filled by a powerful striving for an absolute knowledge that would find its satisfaction within itself. Man's activity of knowing once again dared, with holy fervor, to investigate every means of knowledge in order to draw nearer to a solution of the highest questions. The period of oriental theosophy, the period of Plato and Aristotle, and then the period of Descartes and Spinoza are the representatives, in previous epochs of world history, of a similar inner deepening. Goethe is not thinkable without Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. If these thinkers possessed above all a vision into the depths and an eye for the highest, his gaze rested upon the things of immediate reality. But in his gaze there lies something of that depth itself. Goethe exercised this vision in looking at nature. The spirit of that time is poured out like a fluid over his contemplations of nature. Hence their power, which, in contemplating the details, always maintains the broad outlines. Goethe's science always goes after what is central.

[ 49 ] We can see this in Goethe's colour theory more than anywhere else. It alone, besides his attempts relative to the metamorphosis of the plant, was brought to a completed whole. And what a strictly complete system it does represent, such as is demanded by the nature of the thing itself!

[ 50 ] Let us now consider this edifice according to its inner structure.

[ 51 ] In order that something founded in the being of nature may come to manifestation, the necessary prerequisite is that a causal opportunity, an organ, be present in which this something can present itself. The eternal, iron laws of nature would, in fact, hold sway even if they never presented themselves within a human spirit, but their manifestation as such would not then be possible. They would then be present merely in essence and not in manifestation. This would also be the case with the world of light and colour if no perceiving eye confronted them. Colour, in its essential being, cannot be traced back in Schopenhauer's manner to the eye; but the possibility for colour to manifest must very definitely be shown to lie within the eye. The colour is not conditional upon the eye, but the eye is the cause of its manifestation.

[ 52 ] Here is where colour theory must therefore take its start. It must investigate the eye, must disclose its nature. This is why Goethe places physiological colour theory at the beginning. But even there his conception is essentially different from what one usually understands this part of optics to be. He does not want to explain the functions of the eye by its structure, but wants rather to observe the eye under various conditions in order to arrive at a knowledge of its capacities and abilities. Here also his procedure is essentially an observational one. What happens when light and darkness act upon the eye; what happens when defined images enter into relationship with it, etc.? He does not ask, to begin with, what processes occur within the eye when one or another perception comes about, but rather he seeks to fathom what can come about through the eye in the living act of seeing. For his purpose, that is to begin with the only important question. That other question does not belong, strictly speaking, to the realm of physiological colour theory, but rather to the science of the human organism, i.e., to general physiology. Goethe has to do with the eye only insofar as it sees, and not with the explanation of seeing that comes from the perceptions we can have of the dead eye.

[ 53 ] From there, he then goes over to the objective processes that bring about the phenomena of colors. And here it is important to bear in mind that Goethe, with these objective processes, is by no means thinking of hypothetical processes of matter or of motion that are no longer perceptible, but rather that he absolutely remains within the perceivable world. His physical colour theory, which constitutes the second part, seeks the conditions that are independent of the eye and are connected to the arising of the colors. But these conditions are still always perceptions. Here, with the help of the prism, of lenses, etc., he investigates how colors arise in connection with light. But for the time being, he does not go beyond tracing colour as such in its development and observing how, in itself, separated from objects, it arises.

[ 54 ] Only in a separate chapter on chemical colour theory does he go on to colors that are fixed, that are connected with objects. If, in the physiological colour theory, the question is answered as to how colors can come to manifestation at all, and, in the physical colour theory, the question as to how the colors come about under external conditions, so Goethe responds here to the problem of how the corporeal world manifests as colored.

[ 55 ] In this way, Goethe advances from contemplation of colour as an attribute of the phenomenal world to this world itself as manifesting with that attribute. He does not stop there, but goes on finally to contemplate the higher relationship of the colored corporeal world to the human soul in that chapter on “The sense-perceptible and moral Effect of Colour.” (“Sinnlichsittliche Wirkung der Farbe”)

[ 56 ] This is the strict, complete path of a science: from the subject as determining factor, back again to the subject as the being who satisfies himself in and with his world.

[ 57] Who will not recognize here again the impulse of the time—from subject to object and back into the subject again—that led Hegel to the architectonics of his whole system.

[ 58 ] In this sense then, the Sketch of a Colour Theory,⁷² appears as the actual optical main work of Goethe. The two essays, Contributions to Optics⁷³ and The Elements of Colour Theory⁷⁴ must be considered as preliminary studies. The Exposure of Newton's Theory⁷⁵ is only a polemical addition to his work.

5. The Goethean Concept of Space

[ 59 ] Since a complete understanding of Goethe's work in physics is possible only for someone with a view of space that is entirely consonant with his, let us describe this view here. Whoever wants to arrive at this view must have gained the following convictions from our considerations until now: 1. The things that confront us in experience as separate have an inner relationship to each other. They are, in truth, held together by a unified world bond. There lives in them all one common principle. 2. When our spirit approaches the things and strives to encompass what is separate with a spiritual bond, then the conceptual unity that our spirit establishes is not outside of the objects but rather is drawn from the inner being of nature itself. Human knowledge is not a process taking place outside of the things, not a process springing from mere subjective arbitrariness, but rather: what arises there in our spirit as a law of nature, what expresses itself within our soul, that is the heartbeat of the universe itself.

[ 60 ] For our present purposes, let us take under consideration the most external of all relationships that our spirit can establish between the objects of experience. Let us consider the simplest case in which experience summons us to a spiritual activity. Let us assume that two simple elements of the phenomenal world are given. In order not to complicate our investigation, let us take something as simple as possible—two luminous points, for example. Let us completely disregard the fact that in each of these luminous points themselves we perhaps have before us something that is already immensely complicated, that sets our spirit a task. Let us also disregard the quality of the concrete elements of the sense world we have before us, and take into consideration purely and simply the fact that we have before us two separate elements, i.e., two elements that appear to the senses as separated. Two factors, each of which is able to make an impression upon our senses—that is all we presuppose. Let us assume further that the existence of one of these factors does not exclude that of the other. One organ of perception can perceive both.

[ 61 ] If we assume, namely, that the existence of the one element is in any way dependent upon that of the other, we are then facing a different problem than our present one. If the existence of \(B\) is of such a kind that it excludes the existence of \(A\) and yet, in its being, is dependent upon it, then \(A\) and \(B\) must stand in a temporal relationship. For the dependency of \(B\) upon \(A\) requires—if one pictures to oneself at the same time that the existence of \(B\) excludes that of \(A\)—that \(A\) precedes \(B\). But that is a separate matter.

[ 62 ] For our present purposes, let us not assume any such relationship. Our presupposition is that the things with which we are dealing are not mutually exclusive in their existence, but rather are co-existing entities. When we disregard every relationship that their inner natures demand, then there remains only the fact that a relationship exists between the two separate qualities, that I can go from the one over to the other. I can move from the one element of experience over to the second one. No one can have any doubts about what kind of a relationship it is that I establish between things when I disregard their character and nature themselves. Whoever asks himself what transition can be found from one thing to another, if the thing itself remains a matter of indifference thereby, must absolutely give the answer: space. Every other connection must be based upon the qualitative character of that which appears as separate in world existence. Only space takes absolutely nothing else into consideration except the fact that the things are indeed separated. When I reflect that \(A\) is above and \(B\) is below, it is a matter of complete indifference to me what \(A\) and \(B\) are. I join no other mental picture to them at all other than that they are, indeed, separate factors of the world I grasp with my senses.

[ 63 ] What our spirit wants to do when it confronts experience is this: it wants to overcome the separateness; it wants to show that, within the particular thing, the power of the whole is to be seen. In its spatial view, the human spirit does not want to overcome anything else except the separateness as such. It wants to establish the most general relationship of all. What the spatial way of looking at things states is that A and B are not each a world in itself, but rather belong to something in common. That is what being beside one another (Nebeneinander) means. If each thing were an entity in itself, then there would be no being beside one another. I could not establish any relationship at all between one entity and another.

[ 64 ] Let us now investigate what else follows from this establishing of an outer relationship between two separate entities. I can think of two elements in only one way in this kind of relationship. I think of \(A\) as beside \(B\). I can now do the same thing with two other elements of the sense world, \(C\) and \(D\). I have thereby determined a concrete relationship between \(A\) and \(B\), and the same one between \(C\) and \(D\). Let us now entirely disregard the elements \(A\), \(B\), \(C\), and \(D\) and only relate the two concrete relationships to each other again. It is clear that I can relate these, as two particular entities, to each other in exactly the same way as I did with \(A\) and \(B\) themselves. What I am here relating to each other are concrete relationships. I can call them \(a\) and \(b\). If I now go a step further, I can again relate \(a\) and \(b\). But now I have already lost all particularity. When I look at \(a\), I no longer find any particular \(A\) and \(B\) that are being related to each other; and just as little when I look at \(b\). In both, I find nothing else at all except that a relationship was made. But this conclusion is exactly the same for \(a\) and for \(b\). What made it possible for me still to keep \(a\) and \(b\) apart was the fact that they pointed to \(A\), \(B\), \(C\), and \(D\). If I leave out its remaining elements of particularity and then relate only \(a\) and \(b\) to each other—i.e., relate together only the facts that relationships were being made at all (not the fact that something specific was being related)—then I have again arrived quite generally at the spatial relationship from which I took my start. I can go no further. I have achieved what I was striving for previously: space itself stands before my soul.

[ 65 ] Herein lies the secret of the three dimensions. In the first dimension I relate two concrete phenomenal elements of the sense world to each other; in the second dimension I relate these spatial relationships themselves to each other. I have established a relationship between relationships. I have stripped away the concrete phenomena; the concrete relationships remain for me. I now relate these themselves spatially to each other. This means: I entirely disregard the fact that these are concrete relationships; then, however, I must find exactly the same thing again in the second relationship that I found in the first. I establish relationships between similar entities. Now the possibility of relating ceases because the difference ceases.

[ 66 ] What I earlier took as the point of view for my considerations—the completely external relationship—I have now achieved again myself as a sense picture; from my spatial consideration, after I have carried out the operation three times, I have arrived at space, i.e., at my starting point.

[ 67 ] Therefore space can have only three dimensions. What we have undertaken here with respect to the mental picture of space is actually only a specific case of the method always employed by us when we confront things in observation. We regard concrete objects from one general point of view. Through this, we gain concepts about the particulars; we then regard these concepts themselves again from the same point of view, so that we then have before us any longer only the concepts of the concepts; if we still join these also, then they fuse into that ideal unity which cannot any longer be brought under one point of view with anything other than itself. Let us take a specific example. I become acquainted with two people, \(A\) and \(B\). I look at them from the point of view of friendship. In this case I will arrive at a quite specific concept, \(a\), of the friendship between the two people. I now look at two other people, \(C\) and \(D\), from the same point of view. I arrive at another concept, \(b\), of this friendship. Now I can go further and relate these two concepts of friendship to each other. What remains for me, when I disregard the concrete element I have gained, is the concept of friendship in general. But I can arrive at this in an even more real way, when I look at two other people, \(E\) and \(F\), from the same point of view, and likewise two people \(G\) and \(H\). In this, as in innumerable other cases, I can obtain the concept of friendship in general. But all these concepts, in their essential nature, are identical to each other; and when I look at them from the same point of view, it then turns out that I have found a unity. I have returned again to where I took my start.

[ 68 ] Space, therefore, is a view about things, a way in which our spirit draws them together into a unity. The three dimensions relate to each other thereby in the following way. The first dimension establishes a relationship between two sense perceptions. It is therefore a concrete mental picture. The second dimension relates two concrete mental pictures to each other and thus passes over into the region of abstraction. The third dimension, finally, establishes in addition only the ideal unity between the abstractions. It is therefore completely incorrect to take the three dimensions of space as though they were altogether of equal significance. The nature of the first dimension depends, of course, upon the perceived elements. But then the other two have a quite definite and different significance than this first one. Kant was quite wrong in his assumption when he conceived of space as the whole (totum), instead of as an entity conceptually determinable in itself.

[ 69 ] Now we have hitherto spoken of space as a relationship, a connection. But the question now arises: Is there then only this relationship of “being beside one another”? Or is there an absolute place-determination for every thing? This last question is of course not touched upon at all by our above explanations. But let us consider whether there is, indeed, any such place-relationship, any quite specific “there.” What am I actually indicating when I speak of such a “there”? Nothing else, in fact, than that I am referring to an object that is in immediate proximity to the actual object under consideration. “There” means in proximity to some object indicated by me. With this, however, the absolute place-indication is brought back to a space relationship. Our investigation is thus cancelled.

[ 70 ] Let us now raise the question quite definitely: According to the preceding investigations, what is space? Nothing more than a necessity, lying within the things, of overcoming their separateness in an entirely outer way and without entering into their nature, and of joining them into a unity, even though of just such an outer kind. Space is therefore a way of grasping the world as a unity. Space is an idea. Not, as Kant believed, an observation (Anschauung).

6. Goethe, Newton, and the Physicists

[ 71 ] As Goethe began his consideration of the being of colors, it was essentially an interest in art that brought him to it. His intuitive spirit soon recognized that the use of colour in painting is subject to a deep lawfulness. Wherein this lawfulness consisted he could not discover as long as he only moved about theoretically in the realm of painting, nor could trained painters give him any satisfactory information about this. These painters knew very well, in a practical sense, how to mix and apply the colors, but could not express themselves in concepts about the matter. When Goethe, then, was confronted in Italy not only by the most sublime works of art of this kind, but also by the most magnificent colors of nature, the urge awoke in him with special force to know the natural laws of the being of colour.

[ 72 ] Goethe himself, in the History of Colour Theory⁷⁶, gives a detailed account of the historical aspect. Let us deal here only with the psychological and factual aspects.

[ 73 ] Goethe's study of colour began right after his return from Italy. This study became particularly intensive in the years 1790 and 1791, and then occupied the poet continuously until the end of his life.

[ 74 ] We must picture to ourselves where the Goethean world view stood at this time, at the beginning of his study of colour. By this time he had already grasped his magnificent thoughts about the metamorphosis of organic entities. Through his discovery of the intermaxillary bone, a view had already arisen in him of the unity of all natural existence. Each individual thing appeared to him as a particular modification of the ideal principle that holds sway in the whole of nature. In his letters from Italy he had already stated that a plant is only a plant through the fact that it bears within itself the “idea of the plant.” This idea was something concrete for him; it was the unity, filled with spiritual content, in all particular plants. It could not be grasped by the bodily eyes, to be sure, but could very well be grasped by the eye of the spirit. Whoever can see it, sees it in every plant.

[ 75 ] Thus the whole realm of the plants and, with the further elaboration of this view, the whole realm of nature, in fact, appears as a unity that the human spirit can grasp.

[ 76 ] But no one is able to construct, from the idea alone, the manifoldness that arises before the outer senses. The intuitive spirit is able to know the idea. The particular configurations are accessible to him only when he directs his senses outward, when he observes, looks. The reason why a modification of the idea arises in sense-perceptible reality in precisely this and not in another way cannot be thought up, but rather must be sought in the realm of reality.

[ 77 ] This is Goethe's individual way of looking at things and can best be designated as empirical idealism. It can be summarized with the words: Underlying the things of a sense-perceptible manifoldness, insofar as they are of a similar kind, there is a spiritual unity that brings about their similar nature and relatedness.

[ 78 ] Taking his start from this point, Goethe was confronted by the question: What spiritual unity underlies the manifoldness of colour perceptions? What do I perceive in every modification of colour? And there it soon became clear to him that light is the necessary basis for every colour. No colour without light. But the colors are the modifications of light. And now he had to seek that element within reality that modifies, specializes the light. He found that this element is lightless matter, active darkness—in short, that which is the opposite of light. Thus each colour became for him light that is modified by darkness. It is completely incorrect to believe that with light Goethe meant the concrete sunlight that is usually called “white light.” Understanding of the Goethean colour theory is hindered only by the fact that one cannot free oneself from this picture of light and regards this sunlight, which is composed (zusammengesetzt) in such a complicated way, as the representative of light in itself. Light, as Goethe apprehends it, and as he contrasts it to darkness as its opposite, is a purely spiritual entity, is simply what all colour sensations have in common. Even though Goethe has nowhere clearly expressed this, still his whole colour theory is applied in such a way that it can only be interpreted thus. If he did experiment with sunlight in order to develop his theory, his only reason for doing so was that sunlight, in spite of its being the result of such complicated processes as those that occur in the body of the sun, does after all present itself to us as a unity that holds its parts within itself only in a state of abeyance. What we achieve for colour theory with the help of sunlight is after all only an approximation of reality, however. One cannot apprehend Goethe's theory to mean that, according to it, light and darkness are contained in an outwardly real way in every colour. No, it is rather that the outwardly real that confronts our eye is only a particular nuance of colour. Only the human spirit is able to take this sense-perceptible fact apart into two spiritual entities: light and non-light.

[ 79 ] The outer arrangements by which this occurs, the material processes in matter, are not affected in the least by this. That is a completely different matter. I am not disputing that a process of oscillation occurs in the ether while “red” arises before me. But what brings about a perception in an outwardly real way, has, as we have already shown, nothing at all to do with the essential nature of its content.

[ 80 ] Someone may object: But it can be proven that everything about the sensation is subjective and only the process of motion that underlies it really exists outside of our brain. Then one could not speak at all about a physical theory of perceptions, but only about a physical theory of the underlying processes of motion. The state of affairs with respect to this proof is about as follows: If someone in location A sends a telegram to me in location \(B\), then everything given into my hands as this telegram, without exception, has come into existence in \(B\). The telegraph operator is in B; he writes on paper that has never been in \(A\), with ink that has never been in \(A\); he himself does not know location \(A\) at all, and so on; in short, it can be proven that absolutely nothing from \(A\) has entered into what I now have before me. Accordingly, everything that comes from \(B\) is a matter of no significance for the content, for the essential nature, of the telegram; what matters to me is only communicated by \(B\). If I want to explain the essential nature of the content of the telegram, I must entirely disregard what comes from \(B\).

[ 81 ] The state of affairs is the same with respect to the world of the eye. Thinking consideration must encompass what is perceptible to the eye and must seek the interrelationships within this area. The material, spatial-temporal processes might be very important for the coming about of the perceptions; but they have nothing to do with the essential nature of perceptions.

[ 82 ] The state of affairs is the same with respect to the question often discussed today as to whether or not one and the same form of motion in the ether underlies the various phenomena of nature such as light, heat, electricity, etc. Hertz, for example, has shown recently that the transmission of electrical effects in space is subject to the same laws as the transmission of light effects. One can infer from this that waves, such as those that are the bearers of light, also underlie electricity. One has also already assumed before now, indeed, that within the solar spectrum only one kind of wave motion is active which, according to whether it falls upon reagents sensitive to heat, light, or chemicals, produces heat, light or chemical effects.

[ 83 ] But this is, in fact, clear from the very beginning. If one investigates what is occurring in that which has extension in space, while the entities we are discussing are being communicated, then one must arrive at a homogeneous motion. For, a medium in which only motion is possible, must react to everything with motion. And all the communicating that it must take over, it will also accomplish with motion. If I then investigate the forms of this motion, I do not then experience what the communicated element is, but rather how it was brought to me. It is simply nonsense to say that heat or light are motion. Motion is only the reaction to light of a matter that is capable of motion.

[ 84 ] Goethe himself had already heard of the wave theory and had seen nothing in it that could not be brought into harmony with his convictions about the essential nature of colour.

[ 85 ] One must only free oneself of the picture that, for Goethe, light and darkness are real entities, and regard them, rather, as mere principles, as spiritual entities; then one will gain a completely different view of his colour theory than one usually forms of it. If, as Newton does, one understands light to be only a mixture of all the colors, then any concept of the concrete entity “light” disappears. “Light” then evaporates completely into an empty general mental picture, to which nothing in reality corresponds. Such abstractions were foreign to the Goethean world view. For him every mental picture had to have a concrete content. But for him, the “concrete” did not cease with the “physical.”

[ 86 ] Modern physics actually has no concept at all for “light.” It knows only specific lights, colors, that in particular mixtures evoke the impression “white.” But even this “white” cannot be identified with light in itself. “White” is actually also nothing other than a mixed colour. Modern physics does not know “light” in the Goethean sense, any more than it knows “darkness.” Thus Goethe's colour theory moves in a realm that makes no contact at all with what the physicists determine conceptually. Physics simply does not know any of the basic concepts of the Goethean colour theory. Therefore, from its standpoint, it cannot judge this theory at all. Goethe, in fact, begins where physics ends.

[ 87 ] It demonstrates a completely superficial grasp of the matter when one speaks continuously of the relationship of Goethe to Newton and to modern physics, and in doing so is completely unaware of the fact that two entirely different ways of looking at the world are being indicated.

[ 88 ] We are convinced that someone who has grasped our expositions on the nature of sense impressions in the right sense can gain no other impression of the Goethean colour theory than the one described. To be sure, someone who does not accept these considerations of ours that prepare the ground will remain at the standpoint of physical optics and will therefore also reject Goethe's colour theory.

• 71. Das Unbewusste vom Standpunkte des Darwinismus und der Deszendenztheorie (1872)
• 72. Entwurf einer Farbenlehre
• 73. Beiträge zur Optik
• 74. Elemente der Farbenlehre
• 75. Enthüllungen der Theorie Newtons
• 76. Geschichte der Farbenlehre