The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The last few years have brought us a considerable number of reflections on the cultural achievements of the past century. And in the two years that we still have to live through in this century, these reflections are likely to pile up to an immense number. Those who like to emphasize the self-evident may argue that the passing of a century is a purely coincidental turning point in the development of mankind and that, in a different chronology, this turning point could coincide with a completely different phase of this development. Such an objection cannot arise in the face of the suggestive effect of the fact that the century appears numerically as a whole.

In addition to this general point, there is another particular reason to take a look at the achievements of our culture and the directions it is currently taking at the turn of the century.

The next thing that strikes the observer is the enormous wealth of new conditions for mastering the forces of nature and the associated progress in the practical organization of life. From the railroad and steamship to the telephone, one would have to review the series of inventions with their tremendous effects if one were to revive this idea from the outside.

And it is no different with the new conditions that have been created to expand our knowledge of the world. What insights into nature are provided by spectral analysis, the discovery of Röntgen, the studies on the age of the human race, the organic theory of development and others, which I will naturally refrain from mentioning here, as I am only interested in pointing to these things.

Despite all these and many other achievements, for example in the field of art, the person with a deeper perspective cannot be very happy about the educational content of the time. Our highest spiritual needs demand something that time only provides in meagre quantities.

In Goethe's sense, one can say of education that it must lead to the highest bliss through the purest culture. Our education does not lead to this bliss. - It lets the finest spirits down when they seek to satisfy the most intimate needs of their minds. In this respect, the end of the century presents a different picture from its beginning. Consider how Fichte inflamed minds a hundred years ago when he sought to harmonize the totality of the formation of time with the innermost needs of the human spirit. Schelling and Hegel deepened the knowledge of external things in the same direction. And how the voices of these spirits were heard!

A complete change occurred around the middle of the century. The innumerable insights into external things that were coming at people seemed to completely eclipse the ability to gain insight into one's own soul and to seek harmony between the external and internal worlds.

This change is expressed in an almost paradoxical way by the low esteem in which philosophy and its proponents are held today. How does Nietzsche's view that the Greeks are so highly regarded because, unlike other peoples, they do not present prophets but their seven wise men as human ideals compare to this disdain?

We should not be surprised if, in the face of such phenomena, minds with deeper spiritual needs find the proud thought structures of scholasticism more satisfying than the ideas of our own time. Otto Willmann has written an excellent book, his "History of Idealism" ¹ (Braunschweig 1894-97), in which he proclaims himself the eulogist of the worldview of past centuries. It must be admitted: the human spirit longs for that proud, comprehensive illumination of thought which human knowledge experienced in the philosophical systems of the scholastics. And this spirit will always be unsatisfied by confessions such as the one made by the great physicist Hermann Helmholtz in his Weimar Gods Speech* a few years ago. He said: in the face of the wealth of our present knowledge, it is hardly possible for a comprehensive spirit to emerge that encompasses the totality of this knowledge with a unified circle of ideas.

The urge of the human soul to integrate all knowledge into an overall view, from which the highest spiritual needs can be satisfied, is opposed in our time by the despondency of our thinking, which does not allow us to gain such an overall view.

This despondency is a characteristic feature of intellectual life at the turn of the century. It clouds our enjoyment of the achievements of the recent past.

Wherever someone appears who tries to draw up an overall picture of our knowledge, there are countless voices testifying to this despondency, emphasizing the impossibility of such an overall picture, claiming that our knowledge is far from being ready for such a conclusion. Such voices are also audible, defending the impossibility of such a conclusion. The human mind has just seen through the successes of the sciences how incapable it is of recognizing anything about those things that were once made objects of reflection by the philosophers.

If it were up to the opinion of the people who make such voices heard, one would be content to measure, weigh and compare things and phenomena, to examine them with the available apparatuses: but never would the question be raised as to the "higher meaning" of things and phenomena.

We have lost the unshakeable belief that thinking is called upon to solve the mysteries of the world. Only a few researchers, such as Ernst Haeckel, have the inclination to penetrate existing knowledge in such a way that such sense emerges. - It does not matter whether one agrees with the thoughts that Haeckel develops in his essay "Monism as a bond between religion and science" (Bonn 1892). The essential point is that here, with the means of our intellectual education, the question is raised: how can the human mind satisfy its needs through modern knowledge? This is the same question that the religions of all times and scholasticism sought to solve with their means of education.

The fact is, however, that thoughts of this kind have little effect today in the face of the general despondency, even cowardice, of human thought.

It is therefore not at all surprising that reaction in the intellectual field is rearing its head everywhere. As long as the scientifically educated thinkers are too discouraged to offer a substitute for the outdated religious ideas from the standpoint of their knowledge, people who have the need for a world view will fall back on the traditional ideas; and the few who arrange their lives according to a modern world view will remain singers without an audience. I would like to explain the reasons why the most advanced spirits of the present are so little understood.

• 1. See note, page 635

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I

[ 1 ] What should philosophy do alongside and above the individual special sciences? ¹ The representatives of the latter are probably not averse to answering this question simply as follows: it is supposed to be nothing at all. In their view, the entire field of reality is encompassed by the specialized sciences. Why anything else that goes beyond this?

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

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

[ 4 ] I have often heard it said that our task at present is to collect building block after building block. The time is over when philosophical doctrines were proudly put forward without first having the materials to hand. Once we have collected enough of this material, the right genius will emerge and carry out the construction. Now is not the time to build systems. This view arises from a regrettable lack of clarity about the nature of science. If the latter had the task of collecting the facts of the world, registering them and organizing them systematically and expediently according to certain points of view, then one could speak like this. But then we would have to renounce all knowledge altogether, for we would probably only finish collecting the facts at the end of days, and then we would lack the necessary time to carry out the required scholarly registration work.

[ 5 ] Whoever realizes just once what he actually wants to achieve through science will soon understand the folly of this demand, which requires an infinite amount of work. When we confront nature, it initially stands before us like a profound mystery, it stretches out before our senses like an enigma. A mute being looks out at us. How can we bring light into this mystical darkness? How can we solve the riddle?

[ 6 ] The blind man who enters a room can only feel darkness in it. No matter how long he wanders around and touches all the objects: Brightness will never fill the room for him. Just as this blind man faces the furnishings of the room, so in a higher sense man faces nature, who expects the solution to the riddle from the contemplation of an infinite number of facts. There is something in nature that a thousand facts do not reveal to us, if we lack the visual power of the mind to see it.

[ 7 ] Every thing has two sides. One is the outside. We perceive it with our senses. But there is also an inner side. This presents itself to the mind when it knows how to observe. No one will believe in his own inability in any matter. Whoever lacks the ability to perceive this inner side would prefer to deny it to man altogether, or to disparage those who pretend to possess it as fantasists. Nothing can be done about an absolute inability, and one could only pity those who, because of it, can never gain insight into the depths of the world's being. The psychologist, however, does not believe in this inability. Every person with normal mental development has the ability to descend into those depths to a certain point. But the convenience of thinking prevents many from doing so. Their spiritual weapons are not blunt, but the bearers are too casual to wield them. It is infinitely more convenient to pile fact upon fact than to seek out the reasons for them by thinking. Above all, such an accumulation of facts rules out the possibility of someone else coming along and overturning what we have advocated. In this way we never find ourselves in the position of having to defend our intellectual positions; we need not be upset that tomorrow someone will advocate the opposite of our current positions. By merely dealing with actual truth, we can lull ourselves into the belief that no one can deny us this truth, that we are creating for eternity. Yes, we also create for eternity, but we only create zeros. We lack the courage of thought to give these zeros a value by placing a meaningful number in front of them in the form of an idea.

[ 8 ] Few people today have any idea of this: that something can be true, even if the opposite can be asserted with no less right. There are no unconditional truths. We drill deep into a thing of nature, we bring up the most mysterious wisdom from the most hidden shafts; we turn around, drill in a second place: and the opposite shows itself to be just as justified. That every truth is only valid in its place, that it is only true as long as it is asserted under the conditions under which it was originally founded, this must be understood above all.

[ 9 ] Who today does not cringe with respect when the name Friedrich Theodor Vischer is mentioned? But not many people know that this man considered it the greatest achievement of his life to have thoroughly attained the above-mentioned conviction of the nature of truth. If they did know it, then a quite different air would flow towards them from Vischer's magnificent works; and one would encounter less ceremonial praise, but more unconstrained understanding of this writer. Where are the times when Schiller found deep understanding when he praised the philosophical mind over the bread scholar! the one who digs unreservedly for the treasures of truth, even if he is exposed to the danger that a second treasure digger will immediately devalue everything for him with a new find compared to the one who eternally repeats only the banal but absolutely "true": "Two times two is four".

[ 10 ] We must have the courage to enter boldly into the realm of ideas, even at the risk of error. Those who are too cowardly to err cannot be fighters for the truth. An error that springs from the mind is worth more than a truth that comes from platitude. He who has never asserted anything that is in some sense untrue is not fit to be a scientific thinker.

[ 11 ] For cowardly fear of error, our science has fallen victim to bareness.

[ 12 ] It is almost hair-raising which character traits are praised today as virtues of the scientific researcher. If you were to translate them into the realm of practical living, the result would be the opposite of a firm, resolute, energetic character.

[ 13 ] A recently published work owes its origin to a firm, bold thinker's courage, which, on the basis of the great actual results of natural science and from a true, genuine philosophical spirit, simultaneously attempts to solve the world riddles: Ernst Haeckel's "The World Riddles".

II

[ 14 ] "Forty years of Darwinism! What tremendous progress in our knowledge of nature! And what a change in our most important views, not only in the fields of biology as a whole, but also in anthropology and all the so-called "human sciences"!" This is how Ernst Haeckel was able to speak of the scientific achievements associated with the name Darwin in the speech he gave at the Fourth International Zoological Congress in Cambridge on August 26, 1898. Just four years after the publication of Darwin's epoch-making work "On the Origin of Species in the Animal and Vegetable Kingdom by Means of Natural Breeding" (London 1859), Haeckel himself became the appointed pioneer, but also the continuator of Darwin's views with his "General Morphology of Organisms" (Berlin 1866). The boldness of thought, the sharpness of mind of this natural scientist and world thinker, which did not shy away from any consequence arising from the new doctrine, were already clearly evident in this book. Since then, he himself has worked tirelessly for a further thirty-three years on the construction of the scientific world view that makes our century appear as the "century of natural science". Special works that shed a bright light on hitherto unknown areas of natural life, and summarizing writings which, from the newly gained point of view, dealt with the whole field of knowledge that today satisfies our highest spiritual needs, are the fruit of this research life endowed with rare energy.

[ 15 ] And now, in his "Welträtseln", this spirit presents to us "the further elaboration, substantiation and supplementation of the convictions" which he has "already held for a lifetime" in his other "writings".

[ 16 ] What is most striking to anyone who studies Haeckel's achievements with understanding is the unity and coherence of the thinker's personality from which they emanate. There is nothing in him of the questionable striving of those who seek the "reconciliation of religion and culture" in order to be able to "feel piously and think freely at the same time". For Haeckel, there is only one source of true culture: "courageous striving for knowledge of the truth" and "gaining a clear, scientific view of the world based firmly on it" (Welträtsel, p.3 f.). He is also characterized by the iron rigour of the thinker, who relentlessly labels everything as untruth that he has recognized as such. With such rigor, he wages his war against the reactionary powers that, at the end of our enlightened century, would like to call back the former darkness of the mind.

[ 17 ] "Die Welträtsel" is a book inspired by devotion to the truth and abhorrence of outdated endeavors that are harmful to scientific insight. A book that is uplifting for us not only because of the level of insight from which the author views life and the world, but also because of the moral energy and passion for knowledge that shine out of it. For Haeckel, the natural world view has become a creed that he defends not only with reason, but with his heart. "Through reason alone can we arrive at true knowledge of nature and the solution to the riddles of the world. Reason is man's highest good and the one virtue that alone distinguishes him essentially from the animals. However, it has only acquired this high value through the advancement of culture and intellectual development, through the development of science. ... But the view is still widespread in many circles today that there are two other (even more important!) ways of knowing besides divine reason: Mind and revelation. We must decisively oppose this dangerous error from the outset. The mind has nothing to do with the knowledge of truth. What we call "mind" and value highly is an intricate activity of the brain, which is composed of feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of ideas of affection and aversion, of strivings of desire and flight. The most diverse other activities of the organism can play a part in this, the needs of the senses and the muscles, the stomach and the sexual organs, etc. All these states of mind and emotional movements in no way promote the realization of the truth; on the contrary, they often disturb reason, which alone is capable of it, and frequently damage it to a sensitive degree. No "riddle of the world" has yet been solved or even promoted by the brain function of the mind. The same also applies to the so-called "revelation and the alleged "truths of faith" achieved through it; these are all based on conscious or unconscious deception" (Welträtsel, p.19 f.). Thus speaks only a personality whose own mind is completely imbued with the truth of what reason reveals. How do those who still have words of admiration for those who build religion on the mind and want to make it "independent of progressive science as a personal experience" stand up to such courage of thought today?

[ 18 ] A deeply philosophical basic trait in his way of thinking enabled Haeckel to undertake the solution of the highest human questions from natural science, and a sure eye for the lawful connections in natural processes, which appear as intricate as possible to direct observation, bring about that monumental simplicity in his view of the world which always appears in the wake of greatness in matters of worldview. One of the greatest naturalists and thinkers of all time, Galileo, said that in all her works nature makes use of the nearest, simplest and easiest means. We are constantly reminded of this saying when we follow Haeckel's views. What many a philosopher seeks in the remotest paths of speculation, he finds in the simple, clear language of facts. But he really makes these facts speak, so that they do not stand side by side, but explain each other in a philosophical way. "We must welcome as one of the most gratifying advances in solving the riddles of the world the fact that in recent times the two only paths leading to it: experience and thought - or empiricism and speculation - have increasingly been recognized as equal and mutually complementary methods of knowledge. ... However, even today there are still some philosophers who want to construct the world merely from their heads and who disdain empirical knowledge of nature simply because they do not know the real world. On the other hand, even today some natural scientists claim that the only task of science is "actual knowledge, the objective investigation of the individual phenomena of nature"; the "age of philosophy is over and natural science has taken its place. (Rudolf Virchow, Die Gründung der Berliner Universität und der Übergang aus dem philosophischen in das naturwissenschaftlichen Zeitalter, Berlin 1893.) "This one-sided overestimation of empiricism is just as dangerous an error as the opposite of speculation. Both paths of knowledge are mutually indispensable. The greatest triumphs of modern natural science, the cell theory and the heat theory, the theory of development and the law of substance, are philosophical deeds, but not the results of pure speculation, but of the preceding, most extensive and most thorough empiricism" (Welträtsel, p. 20 f.).

[ 19 ] That there is only one kind of natural lawfulness and that we can trace such a lawfulness in the same way in the stone that rolls down an inclined plane according to the law of gravity, in the growth of the plant, in the organization of the animal and in the highest rational achievements of human beings: this conviction runs through Haeckel's entire research and thinking. He recognizes a fundamental law in the entire universe. This is why he calls his world view monism in contrast to those views that assume a different kind of lawfulness for the mechanically proceeding natural processes than for the beings (the organisms) in which they perceive a purposeful arrangement. Just as the elastic ball rolls on when it is pushed by another: all life processes in the animal kingdom, and indeed all spiritual events in the cultural process of mankind, are connected with the same necessity.

[ 20 ] "The old world view of ideal dualism with its mystical and anthropistic dogmas is sinking into ruins; but above this enormous field of ruins rises the new sun of our real-monism, which fully opens up the wonderful temple of nature to us. In the pure cult of "the true, the good and the beautiful, which forms the core of our new monistic religion, we find a rich substitute for the lost anthropistic ideals of "God, freedom and immortality"" (Welträtsel, p. 438 f.).

III

[ 21 ] The basic character of Haeckel's conception of nature lies in the elimination of any kind of theory of purpose or teleology from human ideas about the world and life. As long as such ideas still exist, there can be no question of a truly natural world view. This question of purposefulness comes to the fore in its most significant form when it is a question of determining the position of man in nature. Either something similar to what we call the human spirit, the human soul and so on, is present in the world outside man and produces the phenomena in order ultimately to create its own image in man, or this spirit is only present in the course of natural development at the time when it actually appears in man. Then the natural processes have brought forth the spirit through purely causal necessity, without it having come into the world through any intention. The latter follows irrefutably from Haeckel's premise. Basically, all other thoughts stem from outdated theological ideas. Even where such ideas still appear in philosophy today, they cannot deny their origin to anyone who takes a closer look. The crude, childish aspects of theological mythologies have been stripped away, but purposeful world ideas, in short spiritual potencies, have been retained. Schopenhauer's will and Hartmann's unconscious are nothing other than such remnants of old theological ideas. Recently the botanist J. Reinke, in his book Die Welt als Tat (The World as Act), again expressed the view that the interaction of substances and forces cannot of itself produce the forms of life, but that it must be determined in a certain way by directing forces or dominants. Haeckel's new book clearly shows that all such assumptions are superfluous, that the phenomena of the world can be fully explained for our need for knowledge if we assume nothing more than the necessity of natural law.

[ 22 ] It outlines the course of world development from the processes of inorganic nature up to the expressions of the human soul. The conviction that the so-called "world history" is a vanishingly short episode in the long course of the organic history of the earth and that this itself is only a small part of the history of our planetary system: it is supported by all the means of modern natural science. The errors that oppose it are fought relentlessly. These errors can basically all be traced back to a single one, to the "humanization" of the world. Haeckel understands this term to mean "that powerful and widespread complex of erroneous ideas which places the human organism in opposition to all the rest of nature, conceiving it as the premeditated final goal of organic creation and as a god-like being fundamentally different from it. A closer examination of this influential conception reveals that it actually consists of three different dogmas, which we distinguish as the anthropocentric, anthropomorphic and anthropolatric errors. I. The anthropocentric dogma culminates in the idea that man is the premeditated center and final purpose of all life on earth - or, in a broader version, of the whole world. Since this error is extremely desirable to human self-interest and since it is closely interwoven with the creation myths of the three great Mediterranean religions, with the dogmas of the Mosaic, Christian and Mohammedan teachings, it still dominates most of the cultural world today. - II. The anthropomorphic dogma... compares the world creation and world government of God with the artistic creations of an ingenious technician or "machine engineer and with the state government of a wise ruler. God... is... is presented as human-like... II. The anthropolatric dogma ... leads to the divine worship of the human organism, to the "anthropistic greatness". (Welträtsel, p.13 f.) The human soul is regarded as a higher being that temporarily inhabits the subordinate organism.

[ 23 ] Haeckel contrasts such mythological ideas with his - conviction of the "cosmological perspective", according to which eternal - in the sense of the divine world ground of religions - is only matter with its inherent power and from the processes of this power endowed matter all phenomena develop with necessity. The opponents of the monistic world view reject it because it declares that which bears the trait of highest purposefulness, the animal and human organism, as the work of a blind necessity, without predetermined intention, i.e. that it basically came into being by mere coincidence. If one understands by chance that which occurs without any previous thought of its existence existing anywhere, then in the scientific sense the whole universe is a mere chance; for "the development of the whole world is a uniformly mechanical process in which we can nowhere discover aim and purpose; what we call so in organic life is a special consequence of biological conditions; neither in the development of the world's bodies nor that of our inorganic earth's crust can a guiding purpose be detected" (Welträtsel, p.316). But the general law that every phenomenon has its mechanical cause exists in the whole universe, and in this sense there is no coincidence.

[ 24 ] If one follows Haeckel's explanations with understanding, one will arrive at the true concept of what today alone should be called "scientific explanation". Science must not use anything to explain a phenomenon other than what actually preceded it in time. All processes in the world are determined by those that took place before them. In this sense, they are necessary and not coincidental. However, any explanation that attributes any influence on something that came into being earlier to something that is later in time is unscientific. Whoever wants to explain man should explain him on the basis of natural processes that preceded his existence, but he should not present the matter as if the emergence of man had had a retroactive effect on these earlier processes, that is, as if these backward processes had taken place in such a way that man resulted from them as a goal. A world view that only adheres to the "before" in its explanations and derives the "after" from this is "monism". Such a worldview, on the other hand, which starts from the "after" and presents the "before" as if it somehow points to this "after", is teleology, the doctrine of expediency and thus dualism. For if it were correct, then a purposeful phenomenon would be twice present in the world, namely really in the period in which it occurs, and spiritually, ideally, according to its design, before its real emergence, as a thought, as a guiding purpose in the general world plan.

[ 25 ] May Haeckel's illuminating expositions lead to the difference between teleology and monism soon being understood in the widest circles in a way that is desirable in the interest of spiritual progress.

• 1. "The Enigmas of the World." Intelligible studies on monistic philosophy. By Ernst Haeckel. Published by Emil Strauß. Bonn 1899.

It may well be regarded as a curious symptom of the times that on the occasion of the jubilee of that body of the German Reich which was supposed to be the most learned, a theologian was at the center of the celebration. It will be said that Professor Adolf Harnack was a liberal theologian. But one thing remains true: theology can only be free-minded to the extent that it is permitted by certain basic views, without the recognition of which it would cancel itself out. Indeed, it can only be scientific to the extent that its essential dogmatic ideas allow it to be. The question: "Is theology science in the modern sense?" can only be answered with a clear "no". Science, if it is to be worthy of the name, must come to a world view independently, from human reason. Today we hear this emphasized again and again in all variations. But when a scientific body of the first rank celebrates a great feast, it does not choose a man of science, but a theologian as the main speaker and actor of its history. Theological views played such an important role at this festival that the most ultramontane press organs speak of it with particular pleasure.

For many of our contemporaries, it took the shrill discord of the lex Heinze debates to make them realize how powerfully the most reactionary attitudes intervene in our lives. Even the writers of articles in "free-minded" journals are blind to more subtle signs, such as those that emerged at the Akademiefest.

However, the reasons for the reactionary course of the present lie deep. They are to be found in the fact that the official philosophers of the present are absolutely powerless, even helpless, in the face of the onslaught of unscientific contemporary currents. In order to explain these reasons, we shall have to look at the elements which have brought about the present existence of cathederal philosophy. My view is that this philosophy is indeed unsuited to fight the battle against outmoded ideas alongside liberal natural science. In proving this assertion, I will start from the man who exerts the most profound influence on contemporary philosophical thought, Kant, and I will try to show that this influence is a pernicious one.

I

Kant's acquaintance with Hume's view shook the conviction he had held in earlier years. He soon no longer doubted that all our knowledge is really gained with the help of experience. But certain scientific theorems seemed to him to have such a character of necessity that he did not want to believe in a merely habitual adherence to them. Kant could neither decide to go along with Hume's radicalism nor was he able to remain with the advocates of Leibniz-Wolff's science. The latter seemed to him to destroy all knowledge, in the latter he found no real content. Viewed correctly, Kantian criticism turned out to be a compromise between Leibniz-Wolff on the one hand and Hume on the other. And with this in mind, Kant's fundamental question is: How can we arrive at judgments that are necessarily valid in the sense of Leibniz and Wolff if we admit at the same time that we can only arrive at a real content of our knowledge through experience? The shape of Kant's philosophy can be understood from the tendency inherent in this question. Once Kant had admitted that we gain our knowledge from experience, he had to give the latter such a form that it did not exclude the possibility of generally and necessarily valid judgments. He achieved this by elevating our perceptual and intellectual organism to a power that co-creates experience. On this premise he was able to say: Whatever we receive from experience must conform to the laws according to which our sensuality and our intellect alone can comprehend. Whatever does not conform to these laws can never become an object of perception for us. What appears to us therefore depends on things outside us; how the latter appear to us is determined by the nature of our organism. The laws under which it can imagine something are therefore the most general laws of nature. In these also lies the necessary and universal nature of the course of the world. We see that, in Kant's sense, objects are not arranged spatially because spatiality is a property that belongs to them, but because space is a form under which our sense is able to perceive things; we do not connect two events according to the concept of causality because this has a reason in their essence, but because our understanding is organized in such a way that it must connect two processes perceived in successive moments of time according to this concept. Thus our sensuality and our intellect prescribe the laws of the world of experience. And of these laws, which we ourselves place in the phenomena, we can of course also form necessarily valid concepts.

But it is also clear that these concepts can only receive content from the outside, from experience. In themselves they are empty and meaningless. We do know through them how an object must appear to us if it is given to us at all. But that it is given to us, that it enters our field of vision, depends on experience. How things are in themselves, apart from our experience, we can therefore make nothing out through our concepts.

In this way, Kant has saved an area in which there are concepts of necessary validity, but at the same time he has cut off the possibility of using these concepts to make something out about the actual, absolute essence of things. In order to save the necessity of our concepts, Kant sacrificed their absolute applicability. For the sake of the latter, however, the former was valued in pre-Kantian philosophy. Kant's predecessors wanted to expose a central core from the totality of our knowledge, which by its nature is applicable to everything, including the absolute essences of things, the "interior of nature". The result of Kant's philosophy, however, is that this inner being, this "in itself of objects", can never enter the realm of our cognition, can never become an object of our knowledge. We must content ourselves with the subjective world of appearances that arises within us when the external world acts upon us. Kant thus sets insurmountable limits to our cognitive faculty. We cannot know anything about the "in itself of things". An official contemporary philosopher has given this view the following precise expression: "As long as the feat of looking around the corner, that is, of imagining without imagination, has not been invented, Kant's proud self-modesty will have its end, that of the existing thing its that, but never its what is recognizable." In other words, we know that something is there that causes the subjective appearance of the thing in us, but what is actually behind the latter remains hidden from us.

We have seen that Kant adopted this view in order to save as much as possible of each of the two opposing philosophical doctrines from which he started. This tendency gave rise to a contrived view of our cognition, which we need only compare with what direct and unbiased observation reveals in order to see the entire untenability of Kant's thought structure. Kant imagines our knowledge of experience to have arisen from two factors: from the impressions that things outside us make on our sensibility, and from the forms in which our sensibility and our understanding arrange these impressions. The former are subjective, for I do not perceive the thing, but only the way in which my sensuality is affected by it. My organism undergoes a change when something acts from the outside. This change, i.e. a state of my self, my sensation, is what is given to me. In the act of grasping, our sensuality organizes these sensations spatially and temporally, the mind again organizes the spatial and temporal according to concepts. This organization of sensations, the second factor of our cognition, is thus also entirely subjective. This theory is nothing more than an arbitrary construction of thought that cannot stand up to observation. Let us first ask ourselves the question: Does a single sensation occur anywhere for us, separately and apart from other elements of experience? Let us look at the content of the world given to us. It is a continuous whole. If we direct our attention to any point in our field of experience, we find that there is something else all around. There is nowhere here that exists in isolation. One sensation is connected to another. We can only artificially single it out from our experience; in truth it is connected with the whole of the reality given to us. This is where Kant made a mistake. He had a completely wrong idea of the nature of our experience. The latter does not, as he believed, consist of an infinite number of mosaic pieces from which we make a whole through purely subjective processes, but is given to us as a unity: one perception merges into the other without a definite boundary.

II The reasons for the reaction within modern science

A worldview strives to comprehend the totality of the phenomena given to us. However, we can only ever make details of reality the object of our experiential knowledge. If we want to look at a detail in isolation, we must first artificially lift it out of the context in which it is found. Nowhere, for example, is the individual sensation of red given to us as such; it is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it belongs and without which it could not exist. We must disregard everything else and focus our attention on the one perception if we want to consider it in its isolation. This lifting of a thing out of its context is a necessity for us if we want to look at the world at all. We are organized in such a way that we cannot perceive the world as a whole, as a single perception. The right and left, the above and below, the red next to the green in my field of vision are in reality in uninterrupted connection and mutual togetherness. However, we can only look in one direction and only perceive what is connected in nature separately. Our eye can only ever perceive individual colors from a multi-membered color whole, our mind individual conceptual elements from a coherent system of ideas. The separation of an individual sensation from the world context is therefore a mental act, caused by the peculiar arrangement of our mind. We must dissolve the unified world into individual perceptions if we want to observe it.

But we must be clear about the fact that this infinite multiplicity and isolation does not really exist, that it is without any objective meaning for reality itself. We create an image of it that initially deviates from reality because we lack the organs to grasp it in its very own form in one act. But separating is only one part of our cognitive process. We are constantly busy incorporating every individual perception that comes to us into an overall conception that we form of the world.

The question that necessarily follows here is this: According to what laws do we combine what we have first separated? The separation is a consequence of our organization, it has nothing to do with the thing itself. Therefore, the content of an individual perception cannot be changed by the fact that it initially appears to us to be torn from the context in which it belongs. But since this content is conditioned by the context, it initially appears quite incomprehensible in its separation. The fact that the perception of red occurs at a certain point in space is caused by the most varied circumstances. If I now perceive the red without at the same time directing my attention to these circumstances, it remains incomprehensible to me where the red comes from. Only when I draw on other perceptions, namely those things and processes to which the perception of the red is connected, do I understand the matter. Every perception points me beyond itself because it cannot be explained by itself. I therefore combine the details separated by my organization from the whole of the world according to their own nature into a whole. In this second act, what was destroyed in the first is thus restored: the unity of the real regains its rightful place in relation to the multiplicity initially absorbed by my spirit.

The reason why we can only take possession of the objective form of the world in the detour described above lies in the dual nature of man. As a rational being, he is very well able to imagine the cosmos as a unity in which each individual appears as a member of the whole. As a sensory being, however, he is bound to place and time, he can only perceive individual members of the infinite number of members of the cosmos. Experience can therefore only provide a form of reality conditioned by the limitations of our individuality, from which reason must first extract that which gives the individual things and processes within reality their lawful connection. Sensory perception thus distances us from reality; rational contemplation leads us back to it. A being whose sensuality could view the world in one act would not need reason. A single perception would provide it with what we can only achieve with our mental organization by combining an infinite number of individual acts of experience.

The above examination of our cognitive faculty leads us to the view that reason provides us with the actual form of reality when it processes the individual acts of experience in the appropriate way. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the fact that reason appears to lie entirely within ourselves. We have seen that in truth its activity is destined precisely to abolish the unreal character which our experience receives through sensory perception. Through this activity, the contents of perception themselves re-establish in our minds the objective context from which our senses have torn them.

We are now at the point where we can see through the fallacy of Kant's view. What is a consequence of our organization: the appearance of reality as an infinite number of separate particulars, Kant conceives as an objective fact; and the connection that is re-established, because it corresponds to objective truth, is for him a consequence of our subjective organization. Precisely the reverse of what Kant asserted is true. Cause and effect, for example, are a coherent whole. I perceive them separately and connect them in the way they themselves strive towards each other. Kant allowed himself to be driven into error by Hume. The latter says: If we perceive two events over and over again in such a way that one follows the other, we become accustomed to this togetherness, expect it in future cases as well, and designate one as the cause and the other as the effect. - This contradicts the facts. We only bring two events into a causal connection if such a connection follows from their content. This connection is no less given than the content of the events themselves.

From this point of view, the most mundane as well as the highest scientific thought finds its explanation. If we could encompass the whole world at a glance, this work would not be necessary. To explain a thing, to make it comprehensible, means nothing other than to put it back into the context from which our organization has torn it. There is no such thing as a thing that is separated from the world as a whole. All separation has merely a subjective validity for us. For us, the world as a whole is divided into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, object and idea, substance and force, object and subject and so on. However, all these opposites are only possible if the whole in which they occur confronts us as reality. Where this is not the case, we cannot speak of opposites. An impossible opposition is that which Kant calls "appearance" and "thing-in-itself". This latter term is completely meaningless. We have not the slightest reason to form it. It would only be justified for a consciousness that knows a second world in addition to the one that is given to us, and which can observe how this world affects our organism and results in what Kant calls an appearance. Such a consciousness could then say: the world of human beings is only a subjective appearance of that second world known to me. But people themselves can only recognize opposites within the world given to them. Bringing the sum of everything given into opposition to something else is pointless. The Kantian "thing in itself" does not follow from the character of the world given to us. It is invented.

As long as we do not break with such arbitrary assumptions as the "thing in itself", we can never arrive at a satisfactory world view. Something is only inexplicable to us as long as we do not know what is necessarily connected to it. But we have to look for this within our world, not outside it.

The mysteriousness of a thing only exists as long as we consider it in its particularity. However, this is created by us and can also be removed by us. A science that understands the nature of the human cognitive process can only proceed in such a way that it seeks everything it needs to explain a phenomenon within the world given to us. Such a science can be described as monism or a unified view of nature. It is opposed by dualism or the two-world theory, which assumes two absolutely different worlds and believes that the explanatory principles for one are contained in the other.

This latter doctrine is based on a false interpretation of the facts of our cognitive process. The Dualist separates the sum of all being into two areas, each of which has its own laws and which are externally opposed to each other. He forgets that every separation, every segregation of the individual realms of being has only subjective validity. What is a consequence of his organization, he considers to be an objective natural fact that lies outside him.

Such a dualism is also Kantianism. For in this worldview, appearance and the "in itself of things" are not opposites within the given world, but one side, the "in itself", lies outside the given. As long as we separate the latter into parts, however small they may be in relation to the universe, we are simply following a law of our personality; but if we regard everything given, all phenomena, as one part and then oppose it with a second, then we are philosophizing into the blue. We are then merely playing with concepts. We construct a contrast, but cannot gain any content for the second element, because such a content can only be drawn from the given. Any kind of being that is assumed to exist outside the latter is to be relegated to the realm of unjustified hypotheses. Kant's "thing-in-itself" belongs in this category, as does the idea that a large proportion of modern physicists have of matter and its atomistic composition. If I am given any sensory perception, for example the perception of color or heat, then I can make qualitative and quantitative distinctions within this perception; I can encompass the spatial structure and the temporal progression that I perceive with mathematical formulas, I can regard the phenomena according to their nature as cause and effect, and so on: but with this process of thinking I must remain within what is given to me. If we practise a careful self-criticism of ourselves, we also find that all our abstract views and concepts are only one-sided images of the given reality and only have sense and meaning as such. We can imagine a space closed on all sides, in which a number of elastic spheres move in all directions, bumping into each other, bouncing against and off the walls; but we must be clear that this is a one-sided image that only gains meaning when we think of the purely mathematical image as being filled with a sensibly real content. But if we believe that we can explain a perceived content causally through an imperceptible process of being which corresponds to the mathematical structure described and which takes place outside our given world, then we lack all self-criticism. Modern mechanical heat theory makes the mistake described above. If we say that the "red" is only a subjective sensation, as modern physiology does, and that a mechanical process, a movement, is to be assumed as the cause of this "red" outside in space, then we are committing an inconsistency. If the "red" were only subjective, then all mechanical processes connected with the "red" would also only be subjective. As soon as we take something from the interrelated world of perception into the mind, we must take everything into it, including the atoms and their movements. We would have to deny the entire external world.

The same can be said of the modern theory of color. It too places something that is only a one-sided image of the sense world behind it as its cause. The whole wave theory of light is only a mathematical picture which represents the spatio-temporal relations of this particular field of appearance in a one-sided way. The undulation theory turns this image into a real reality that can no longer be perceived, but rather is supposed to be the cause of what we perceive.

III The reasons for the reaction within science

It is not at all surprising that the dualistic thinker does not succeed in making the connection between the two worlds he assumes - the subjective one within us and the objective one outside us - comprehensible. The one is given to him experientially, the other is added by him. Consequently, he can only gain everything contained in the one through experience, and everything contained in the other only through thinking. But since all experiential content is only an effect of the added true being, the cause itself can never be found in the world accessible to our observation. Nor is the reverse possible: to deduce the experientially given reality from the imagined cause. This latter is not possible because, according to our previous arguments, all such imagined causes are only one-sided images of the full reality. When we survey such a picture, we can never find in it, by means of a mere thought process, what is connected with it only in the observed reality. For these reasons, he who assumes two worlds that are separated by themselves will never be able to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of their interrelation.

Whoever allows the actual real entities to exist outside the world of experience sets limits to our knowledge. For if his presupposition is correct, we would only perceive the effect that the real beings exert on us. These, as the causes, are a land entirely unknown to us. And here we have arrived at the gate where modern science can let in all the old religious ideas. So far and no further, says this science. Why shouldn't the pastor now start with his faith where Du Bois-Reymond stops with his scientific knowledge?

The follower of the monistic world view knows that the causes of the effects given to him must lie in the realm of his world. No matter how far removed the former may be from the latter in space or time, they must be found in the realm of experience. The fact that of two things which explain each other, only one is given to him at the moment, appears to him only as a consequence of his individuality, not as something founded in the object itself. The adherent of a dualistic view believes that he must assume the explanation of a known thing in an arbitrarily added unknown thing. Since he unjustifiably endows the latter with such properties that it cannot be found in our entire world, he sets a limit to cognition here. Our arguments have provided the proof that all things which our cognitive faculty supposedly cannot reach must first be artificially added to reality. We only fail to recognize that which we have first made unrecognizable. Kant commands our cognition to stop at a creature of his imagination, at the "thing-in-itself", and Du Bois-Reymond states that the imperceptible atoms of matter produce sensation and feeling through their position and movement, only to conclude that we can never arrive at a satisfactory explanation of how matter and movement produce sensation and feeling, for "it is quite and forever incomprehensible that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not be indifferent to each other. -atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move. It is in no way comprehensible how consciousness could arise from their interaction". This whole conclusion collapses into nothing if one considers that the atoms moving and lying in a certain way are a creature of the abstracting mind, to which an absolute existence separate from perceptible events cannot be ascribed.

A scientific dissection of our cognitive activity leads, as we have seen, to the conviction that the questions we have to ask of nature are a consequence of the peculiar relationship in which we stand to the world. We are limited individualities and can therefore only perceive the world piecemeal. Each piece considered in and of itself is a puzzle or, in other words, a question for our cognition. However, the more details we get to know, the clearer the world becomes to us. One perception explains another. There are no questions that the world poses to us that cannot be answered with the means it offers us. For monism, therefore, there are no fundamental limits to knowledge. This or that can be unresolved at any given time because we were not yet in a position in terms of time or space to find the things that are involved. But what has not yet been found today may be found tomorrow. The limits caused by this are only accidental ones that disappear with the progress of experience and thought. In such cases, the formation of hypotheses comes into its own. Hypotheses may not be formed about something that is supposed to be inaccessible to our knowledge in principle. The atomistic hypothesis is a completely unfounded one if it is to be conceived not merely as an aid to the abstracting intellect, but as a statement about real beings lying outside the qualities of sensation. A hypothesis can only be an assumption about a fact that is not accessible to us for accidental reasons, but which by its nature belongs to the world given to us. For example, a hypothesis about a certain state of our earth in a long-gone period is justified. Admittedly, this state can never become an object of experience because completely different conditions have arisen in the meantime. However, if a perceiving individual had been there at the assumed time, then he would have perceived the state. In contrast, the hypothesis that all sensory qualities owe their origin only to quantitative processes is unjustified, because qualityless processes cannot be perceived.

Monism or the unified explanation of nature emerges from a critical self-examination of man. This view leads us to reject all explanatory causes outside the world. However, we can also extend this view to man's practical relationship to the world. Human action is, after all, only a special case of general world events. Its explanatory principles can therefore likewise only be sought within the world given to us. Dualism, which seeks the basic forces of the reality available to us in a realm inaccessible to us, also places the commandments and norms of our actions there. Kant is also caught up in this error. He regards the moral law as a commandment imposed on man by a world that is alien to us, as a categorical imperative that he must obey, even when his own nature develops inclinations that oppose such a voice sounding from the hereafter into our here and now. One need only recall Kant's well-known apostrophe to duty to find this reinforced: "Duty! thou great and sublime name, who dost not hold in thyself anything that is pleasing and ingratiating, but dost demand submission", who dost "establish a law... before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly work against it." Monism opposes such an imperative imposed on human nature from the outside with the moral motives born of the human soul itself. It is a delusion to believe that man can act according to other than self-made imperatives. The respective inclinations and cultural needs generate certain maxims that we call our moral principles. Since certain ages or peoples have similar inclinations and aspirations, the people who belong to them will also establish similar principles to satisfy them. In any case, however, such principles, which then act as ethical motives, are by no means implanted from outside, but are born out of needs, i.e. generated within the reality in which we live. The moral code of an age or people is simply the expression of how adaptation and heredity work within the ethical nature of man. Just as the effects of nature arise from causes that lie within the given nature, so our moral actions are the results of motives that lie within our cultural process. Monism thus seeks the reason for our actions within nature in the strictest sense of the word. However, it also makes man his own legislator. Man has no other norm than the necessities arising from the laws of nature. He continues the effects of nature in the area of moral action.

Dualism demands submission to moral commandments taken from somewhere; monism points man to himself and to nature, i.e. to his autonomous being. It makes him the master of himself. Only from the standpoint of monism can we understand man as a truly free being in the ethical sense. Duties are not imposed on him by another being, but his actions are simply guided by the principles that everyone finds lead him to the goals he considers worth striving for. A moral view based on monism is the enemy of all blind faith in authority. The autonomous person does not follow a guideline that he should merely believe will lead him to his goal, but he must realize that it will lead him there, and the goal itself must appear to him individually as a desirable one.

The autonomous human being wants to be governed according to laws that he has given himself. He has only one role model - nature. He continues where the organic nature below him has stopped. Our ethical principles are pre-formed at a more primitive level in the instincts of animals. No categorical imperative is anything other than a developed instinct.

IV

The assumption of the limits of human cognition brought about by the "regression to Kant" has had a truly paralyzing effect on the development of an all-embracing way of thinking. An unprejudiced worldview can only thrive if thinking has the courage to penetrate into the last nooks and crannies of being, to the heights of entities. Reactionary worldviews will always find their reckoning when thinking clips its own wings. A theory of knowledge that speaks of an unknowable "thing in itself" can be the best ally of the most regressive theology. It would be interesting to pursue the psychological problem of the unconscious, secret longing of the theorists of the limits of knowledge to leave a loophole open for theology. Nothing is more characteristic of human nature than what can otherwise be noted as a great joy by excellent thinkers. It comes over them when they seem to succeed in proving that there is something where no knowledge can penetrate - where therefore a good faith may set in. With true delight one hears meritorious researchers say: see, no experience, no reason can get there; one may follow the pastor there.

Try to imagine where we would be today if we had not had the doctrine of all possible limits to knowledge in our higher educational institutions in recent decades, but rather the Goethean spirit of research, to penetrate as far as experience allows at every moment with our thinking, and not to present everything else as a problem as unknowable, but to leave it calmly to the future. With such a maxim, philosophy could have brought the dispute against theological belief, which began somewhat clumsily but not incorrectly in the 1950s, to a good conclusion today. Perhaps we would be ready today to regard the theological faculties with a smile as living anachronisms. Theologizing philosophers, such as Lotze, have caused unheard-of misfortune. The clumsiness of Carl Vogt, who was on the right track, made the game easy for them. Oh, that Vogt! If only he had chosen a better comparison instead of the unfortunate one: thoughts relate to the brain like urine to the kidneys. It could easily be argued that the kidneys secrete matter; can thought be compared to matter? And if so, must not what is secreted already be present in a certain form before it is secreted? No, Vogt the Fat should have said, thoughts relate to brain processes like the heat developed during a friction process relates to this friction process. They are a function of the brain, not a substance separated from it. Lotze, the bland philosophical Struwwelpeter, could not have objected to this. For such a comparison stands up to all the facts that can be established about the connection between the brain and thinking according to scientific method. The materialists of the 1950s waged a clumsy outpost battle. Then came the "regressives to Kant" with their limits of knowledge and stabbed the scientific progressives in the back.

The reaction in all areas of life is spreading again today. And knowledge, which can be the only real fighter against it, has tied its own hands. What use is it for the natural scientist to open the eyes of his students to the laws of nature in his laboratory and at his teaching pulpit if his colleague, the philosopher, says: everything you hear from the natural scientist is only external work, is appearance, our knowledge cannot penetrate beyond a certain limit. I must confess that under such circumstances it is no wonder to me that the most blind charcoal-burner's faith boldly raises its head next to the most advanced science. Because science is discouraged, life is reactionary. You should be fighters, you philosophers, you should advance further and further into the unlimited. But you should not be watchdogs, so that the modern worldview does not overstep the boundaries beyond which outdated theology goes at every moment. It is truly strange that pastors are allowed every day to reveal the secrets of that world about which the unprejudiced thinker should impose careful silence. The more cowardly philosophy is, the bolder theology is. And even the views that prevail about the nature of our schools. They may try to keep everything out of the classroom that natural science links to its established facts as a consequence of worldview, because unproven hypotheses - as they say - do not belong in school, only absolutely certain facts. But in religious education! Yes, Bauer, that's different. There, the "unproven" articles of faith can continue to be cultivated. The religion teacher who knows what the geologist "can't know anything about". The reasons lie deep. Just imagine that modern natural science had confirmed everything that the Bible taught; imagine that Darwin, instead of his evil theory of man's descent from the animals, had delivered a confirmation of the faith in revelation based on natural science: Oh, then we would hear the good Darwin's fame proclaimed from all pulpits today, then the religion teachers would be allowed to talk about it. Children would probably be taught that the seven books of Moses are fully justified by an English naturalist. But perhaps we would then have no theories about the limits of knowledge. It would probably be permissible to transgress the boundaries that lead to theology. However, it is a different matter if this crossing of boundaries leads to purely natural causes of world phenomena.

I

What is genius? No less than this question is posed in the book "Der geniale Mensch" by Hermann Türck. The realization of genius is probably also linked to one of the most important problems in the world. For genius is spiritual procreation. And anyone with a modern scientific point of view can see in spiritual procreation, in spiritual productivity, nothing other than a higher level of productivity in the physical world. How does a new individual arise from the mother organism? How does a new spiritual entity arise in the course of the spiritual development of mankind: a musical composition, a poem, a new tool, or shall we say only a new joke? These are related questions for the modern world view. Genius depends on the creative, on producing, on bearing witness. There is no need for genius to mentally process what already exists and pass it on. You can carry all the knowledge in the world around in your head - if you have no new thoughts, you have no genius. And you don't need to know much at all - if something occurs to you, even if it's just a new way of tying your tie, you have something genius about you. We must not fail to recognize that in the great geniuses on whom the progress of culture is based there is not a special mystical gift, but only an enhancement of that mental faculty which appears in every new thought. In this sense, genius is a general human quality. Everyone has genius to a certain degree. And those who are called geniuses in the true sense of the word only have higher degrees of this general human quality. The ingenious, productive capacity of the soul stands in contrast to the merely combinative gift of the intellect. This does not produce anything new, but only shows the thoughts that come from genius the right paths, gives them the place in the thought system that they have to occupy.

The witty poseur Franz Brentano correctly pointed out in an interesting little book "Das Genie" (Leipzig 1892) that genius is a general human gift. Unfortunately, however, he confuses the specific nature of genius, the procreative capacity, the productivity, with the merely combinative, i.e. actually impotent capacity of the mind. He says: "We have sampled the various areas where one speaks of genius. We have measured the great distance that separates the chess player from the poet and musical composer, and the answer was the same everywhere. We have seen no inspiration of a higher spirit in them; deeper investigation always leads to faculties which are found in all men in the same way, and to connections of ideas which take place according to the same laws as ours. There is no unconscious thinking which is added to conscious thinking in genius. On the contrary, we find genius in certain cases only less thinking, in that it is relieved of a part of the work, namely, of critical improvement, because of the excellence of the first thoughts. Thus the distance between genius and common talent proves to be less than is often believed. And indeed there is no gulf between the one and the other, but we find intermediate forms, and every major difference appears to be mediated by transitions" (p. 37). This remark is based on the observation that genius is a general human ability, not a mystical gift of particularly favored individuals.

An unbiased assessment of the phenomena under consideration here is only possible from the standpoint of modern science. As long as it was held that all human beings are created according to a certain ideal model, one could do nothing other than carefully search for the differences between the average person and the one who deviates in some direction from the average. Modern natural science knows no image of a perfect human being. For it there are no two perfectly equal individuals; and between health and disease, between genius and idiocy, between unselfishness and criminality, and so on, it knows no fixed boundaries, because these manifestations of mental life gradually merge into one another through innumerable intermediate stages. How difficult it is, for example, to say where healthy mental life ends and insanity begins, is shown by the fact that the need for a reform of the legislation on insanity is pointed out, because the principles according to which the lunatic doctors today decide whether a person is to be excluded from the rest of society because of mental illness are found to be inadequate. The healthy soul's life is gradually transformed by a modification of its powers into outright insanity. The simple sensory perception of a healthy person never quite corresponds to the observed facts, otherwise two people could not sometimes give quite different accounts of one and the same event that they have seen. There is a gradual transition from this alteration of the perceived facts by our sense organs to the obvious illusion, where our perception is quite different from the external impressions, and from there to the hallucination, where a sensory image is present without external cause. Illusions and hallucinations are pathological phenomena, but they can form part of an otherwise healthy mental life. Only when the illusions are no longer seen through by the human power of judgment, but are taken for reality, does madness begin. But this can only be temporary at first. There are people who, under the impression of violent emotional movements, show completely the manifestations of madness, while otherwise they must be considered mentally healthy. The same can be said of memory. In so-called aphasia, which is based on a disease in the anterior parts of the brain, speechlessness occurs because the person loses the memory of word concepts despite perfect health of the organs of speech and the power of judgment. There are all kinds of transitions from poor memory to the appearance of false memories that destroy our entire mental life; from fantasy to pathological obsession.

Just as there is no fixed boundary between the so-called normal mind and the insane, there is no such boundary between the average talent and the genius. Every joke, every idea that springs from an average mind proves that a person is not merely registering observations, but is productive. In the genius the gift of invention is only richer than in the average man. Genius creations only become perfect when the gift of invention is accompanied by a corresponding degree of talent, which ensures that the genius has control over his ideas. If it loses the latter, it is dominated by its own creations as if by foreign powers. Therefore, if the gift of invention is one-sidedly developed and is not supported by any registering, organizing power of the soul, genius can turn into madness. From the fact that outstanding people and the insane often show abnormalities in the formation of the skull, that climate, temperature conditions, race and heredity have a similar effect on both, Lombroso concludes that genius is related to insanity, indeed, he goes so far as to think of genius as a special manifestation of an epileptic disposition, because epileptics and geniuses suffer in the same way from fits of dizziness and outbursts of rage. On closer examination, however, it turns out that similarities with the insane can only be shown for the individuals described with a one-sided genius disposition, whereas in important people with a harmonious development of all mental powers, such as Raphael, Shakespeare, Goethe, one must assume not a pathological brain activity, but a higher degree of efficiency of the central nervous system. However, Lombroso does not explain genius, but only individual phenomena in the mental life of those individuals in whom talent and genius do not balance each other out.

Crime, too, can be understood from the standpoint of modern natural science. It cannot be a question of the individual crime, but of the criminal's entire mental life. In recent times it has been shown that criminals of all peoples share certain physical and mental characteristics. In these we have to seek the explanation for the criminal tendency. It seems wrong for individual researchers to attribute this tendency to a particular form of mental illness, moral insanity. For in people with a pronounced lack of moral concepts there are always defects in judgment and in their emotional life. Both criminal legislation and pedagogy will have to make use of this view.

I would like to look at Hermann Türck's book from this point of view.

It deals with the "man of genius" in the following sections: Artistic enjoyment. Philosophical striving. Practical action. Shakespeare's "Hamlet". Goethe's "Faust". Byron's "Manfred". Schopenhauer and Spinoza. Christ and Buddha. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon. Darwin and Lombroso. Stirner, Nietzsche and Ibsen.

II

As in the physical act of fertilization two principles unite, one male and one female, so also in the generation brought about by the human genius. The artist, the philosopher: they take their material from outside and add the artistic, the philosophical design, the form, from within themselves. With this sentence I believe I have not merely expressed an image, but something that is well founded in the context of natural phenomena. Monistic science will one day build a bridge from the observations that Hertwig made in Corsica about the fertilization processes of living beings to the phenomena that the problem of genius presents to the psychologist.

In the process of fertilization, the living being follows a physical instinct. Nevertheless, it does not concern itself with its own selfish business, so to speak, but with that of nature as a whole; its actions go beyond the sphere of its instinct for self-preservation. If we may speak figuratively, we can say that in the process of fertilization nature uses a trick. It places an instinct in man through which a selfless, non-selfish act is nevertheless carried out out of selfish desire. The lust of the fertilization process is the selfish satisfaction of an action that is not directed at the self, but at the whole world. We notice something similar in genius. Through its creation it satisfies itself to the highest degree. In this creation lies the highest spiritual pleasure. Nevertheless, the goal of this creation is not the advancement of the self, but the participation in the great necessities of existence of the world order. At this highest level of man's existence, in his work of genius, he is selfless out of selfishness. Here egoism and altruism coincide in a higher unity.

Hermann Türck overlooked this. Instead of pointing out the point at which egoism turns into selflessness in genius, he creates a contrast. He says that the contrast between genius and the common man consists in the selflessness of the former and the egoism of the latter. The man who does not devote himself to the details of life in selfish concern, but who, regardless of his selfish purposes, objectively immerses himself in the eternal course of things, is said to be a genius. "It is objectivity, love, purely objective interest, that leads the man of genius to immerse himself in an object, to devote himself entirely to its impression" ($.15). "Objectivity, love is the secret of genius, thus also of artistic intuition. The artist loves the object he looks at, he wants its existence, and consequently he does not look at it one-sidedly, not only for certain features that have a practical interest, but all-sidedly, in all directions that are essential for the existence of the thing itself. In the forest he does not, like the timber merchant, see only a concept, a sum of money, no, he loves the thing, the forest itself" (5.17 £.). "If genius is synonymous with objectivity or selflessness, then the practical behavior of the man of genius will aim at doing everything that is to be done with his whole soul, with full devotion to the work itself, be it what it may" (p.55). You can see that Hermann Türck makes the same psychological mistake everywhere. He has correctly observed one fact, namely that genius has the character of selflessness; but he does not see at the same time that this selflessness gives the genius a satisfaction that increases to the point of spiritual voluptuousness. The characteristic feature of genius is the height of its culture, which allows it to have as much interest in the higher necessities of nature as the timber merchant has in the amount of money his forest brings him.

I am deeply suspicious of people who talk a lot about selflessness and altruism. It seems to me that these very people have no real sense of the selfish comfort that a selfless act provides. The people who claim that one should not cling to the accidental, insignificant, temporal aspects of existence, but should strive for the necessary, essential, eternal: they do not know that the accidental and temporal are in reality no different from the eternal and necessary. And it is precisely this ingenious behavior that conjures up the necessary and significant everywhere from the accidental and insignificant. Türck says: "Where personal interest, where subjectivity, where selfishness comes into play, the truth goes to hell. So if selfishness, subjectivity and lies are allied, then the opposite of selfishness, love, pure objective interest, objectivity is most closely connected with the truth" ($.4). No, and three times no! Where the personal interest, the subjectivity, the selfishness of a man are so ennobled that he takes part not in his own person alone, but in the whole world, there alone is truth; where man is so petty that he is only able to attend to the great business of the world by denying his personal interest, his subjectivity: there he lives in the worst lie of existence.

Hermann Türck's error becomes very clear in his treatment of Goethe's Faust. In Faust, Goethe portrayed the genius personality. The devotion to magic is only a symbol for the devotion to the eternal powers of the world. As long as Faust feels this magical power of genius within him, Mephistopheles will not be able to help him. He is not concerned with the temporal worries of existence. He is absorbed in the eternal. Then worry approaches him. It makes him blind. Now he should no longer have any sense for the eternal powers, now he is absorbed in the temporal worries of existence. He finds satisfaction in an everyday activity. I fully agree with Hermann Türck that worry brings about the greatest possible change in Faust. Türck's interpretation is ingenious. But it proves exactly the opposite of what Türck wants to prove. Faust was completely unconcerned about all things temporal before worry came to him. He wanted to chase the eternal. When worry comes upon him, he learns to appreciate the value of the temporal, the immediate everyday goals of existence. The temporal now becomes the eternal for him. The immediate existence gains an infinite value for him. The trace of his days on earth cannot perish in eons. He no longer seeks an eternal beyond out of selfish desire; he now longs to satisfy himself in selfless, this-worldly work. When appearances no longer blind him, when he goes blind, the eternal is revealed to him in the finite. Most people are blind throughout their lives, Faust goes blind at the end. But Faust's blindness has a completely different meaning to that of most people. They cannot see the eternal throughout their entire lives because their egoism is too narrow, too limited to even penetrate to this eternal. In their blindness, they cling to the temporal. Faust does not cling to the temporal throughout his life because he is chasing after an illusion of the eternal; at the end of his life he clings to the temporal. So he seems to become like most people. He becomes blind. But the reason why he clings to the temporal is quite different from that of most people. He has learned to recognize the infinite value of this temporal, its eternal value. He used to believe that the whole world only had to be there for him in order to satisfy him. That is why he wants to rise to the highest pleasure through the power of magic. In the end, he finds that in doing for the world he finds the highest self-indulgence. Selflessness only satisfies his highly heightened selfishness.

Hermann Türck's approach is therefore one-sided. That is why he cannot appreciate people like Stirner. For him, Stirner's wisdom is antisophy. For him, Stirner's glorification of the one and only is an outgrowth of narrow-minded egoism. He does not even notice that it is precisely such spirits who strive to the highest degree for what he demands of genius: Love of truth. They do not want to cultivate the hypocritical lie of existence, as if man, at the highest stage of his existence, had completely emptied himself of his self in order to work selflessly. No, these people want nothing more than to be true, true to themselves and true to the world. Away with the lie, as if there were a self-emptying, a selflessness for its own sake. There are selfless people who lay down their lives in devoted love. But it is not true that they do this by giving up their self. They love because love gives them a supreme self-indulgence; they love because it is their pleasure to give themselves. And if a god had created the world out of love, he would have done so because in this self-emptying he would at the same time have felt a divine lust, a divine self-indulgence.

Türck's book is a highly commendable one. It stimulates. But only those who draw the opposite conclusions from those of the author are stimulated by it in the right way. The dualism of egoism and altruism, of the narrow-minded and the ingenious individual, which Türck represents, must be dissolved into a monism. Man should not become selfless; he cannot. And anyone who says he can is lying. But selfishness can rise to the highest world interests. I can concern myself with the affairs of all mankind because they interest me as much as my own, because they have become my own. Stirner's "own" is not the narrow-minded individual who encapsulates himself and lets the world be the world; no, this "own" is the true representative of the world spirit who acquires the whole world as his "property" in order to treat the affairs of the whole world as his own. Only expand your self to the world-self first, and then act egoistically all the time. Be like the farm wife who sells eggs at the market. Only don't do the egg business out of selfishness, but do the world business out of selfishness! "Our whole trick is that we give up our existence in order to exist," says Goethe. And Hermann Türck interprets this as follows: "Our whole art consists in the fact that we give up our selfish and personally limited existence in order to exist truly, in an elevated way." But I would like to interpret it as follows: "Our whole trick is that we give up our existence, which is only attached to and interested in narrow interests, in order to exist with the higher interests, to find our selfish satisfaction in them."

Now some will certainly come along and say: all this is just sophistry. I am merely reinterpreting selflessness into a higher degree of selfishness. That may be. But such a person should bear in mind that all progress in knowledge is based on the reinterpretation of facts that were previously regarded as false. Whoever wants to regard Darwinism as nothing more than a reinterpreted Bible may do so. He cannot be helped. But neither can he be counted on when it comes to true questions of knowledge. It is simply not true that any human being can be selfless. But it is true that his selfishness can become so refined that he becomes interested not only in his own affairs, but in the affairs of all mankind. Do not preach to men that they should be unselfish, but plant in them the highest interests, so that their selfishness, their egoism, may attach itself to them. Then you will ennoble a power that really lies in man; otherwise you will be talking about something that can never exist, but which can only turn people into liars.

In the last few months, we have seen an event unfold that has brought to the surface of the literary struggle opposites deeply rooted in the intellectual life of our time in their harshest form. The man who, almost four decades ago, developed Darwin's momentous ideas on the origin of living beings into a comprehensive world view with rare courage of thought, has come to the fore with a book entitled "Die Welträtsel, Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie" (The Enigma of the World, Studies in Monistic Philosophy). In this book, Ernst Haeckel wanted to provide a "critical illumination" of the scientific knowledge of our time for other educated circles and, on the basis of his rich research work, answer the question: "What stage in the knowledge of truth have we really reached at the end of the nineteenth century? And what progress towards our infinitely distant goal have we really made in the course of it?" ¹ A battle has now arisen over the explanations of the pioneer of Darwin's way of thinking, the most striking characteristic of which is that it is not conducted in a tone of calm, passionless debate, but in a bitter, stormy manner. It is not logical aberrations, not unproven assertions, not errors of knowledge alone that Ernst Haeckel has been accused of, but his scientific conscience, his moral sense, his capacity for scientific research in general. Darwin said of Haeckel's "Natural History of Creation": "Had this book appeared before my work (on the "Descent of Man") was written, I would probably never have finished it; I find almost all the conclusions I have arrived at confirmed by this researcher, whose knowledge is in many points much richer than mine" (introduction to the work "Descent of Man"). And now, as this researcher, once honored in this way by the great reformer of natural science, draws the sum of his life's work in a concluding work, we see him presented in the most exaggerated manner from many sides as the type of thinker that he should not be. For the direction in which the whole battle is being waged is characterized by the words used by one of his opponents, the widely respected philosopher Friedrich Paulsen, in the July issue of the "Preußische Jahrbücher". "It was not pleasure in the content, it was rather indignation that drove me ... indignation at the frivolity with which serious matters were dealt with here. The fact that it was a man of renown who was speaking here, a man whom thousands admire as a leader, who himself proudly claims to lead the way and show the way for the new century, increased the indignation, and it was not lessened but sharpened by the fact that I often saw thoughts worthy of me recurring here in all kinds of distortions... I read this book with burning shame, with shame at the state of general education and the philosophical education of our people. That such a book was possible, that it could be written, printed, bought, read, admired, believed by the people who possess a Kant, a Goethe, a Schopenhauer, is painful."

One wonders: what has the man done who has such accusations hurled in his face? Anyone who reads through the "Welträtsel" calmly and dispassionately, allowing their judgment to be determined solely by the scientific results of the last forty years, must say to themselves: Haeckel has, admittedly with unreserved sharpness, but appropriately presented the confession that he has formed from his tireless research work. He has made a clear distinction between the ideas of those who form their "faith" on the basis of the laws of nature and those who recognize other sources for this. He himself becomes passionate when it comes to disputing centuries-old prejudices against the view he holds, but his passion is that of a personality who clings wholeheartedly, with a deep and comfortable attachment, to what he believes to be correct. Everything that Haeckel presents in the "Welträtseln" is nothing other than the result of what he had done five years earlier in a strictly scientific manner in his "Systematic Phylogeny", in a work for which he received one of the most important scientific awards of the present day, the "Bressa Prize", which was to be awarded to the scholar by the Turin Academy of Sciences, who "during the quadrennium 1895-1898 made the most important and useful invention or published the most sophisticated work in the field of physical and experimental sciences, natural history, pure and applied mathematics, chemistry, physiology and pathology, without excluding geology, history, geography and statistics". In the wide range of all these intellectual fields, the Academy of Sciences in Turin was therefore unable to find a more "solid" work, or indeed an invention, for the years 1895 to 1898 that was more important and useful than Haeckel's "Phylogeny". - If Ernst Haeckel could content himself with presenting his insights, which encompass all the phenomena of life from the point of view of contemporary science, in a way that is recognized by the "strict science" of our time as an "exact" and "objective" method, one would probably limit oneself to making the verdict of the Turin Academy a general one and calling him the most important biologist after Darwin. But Haeckel's intellectual character does not tolerate half measures. Like so many of his naturalist contemporaries, he was unable to say: here scientific thinking - here religious faith. He demands strict harmony between the two. What his reason recognized as the fundamental nature of the world, his mind also wanted to worship religiously. For him, science has been transformed in the most natural way into a religious creed. He cannot admit that one can "believe" what is not thought in terms of science. That is why he wages a ruthless battle against beliefs that he sees as contradictory to science. He has no sympathy for those who, in Kant's sense, only want to assign a limited, this-worldly area to knowledge so that faith can establish itself all the more securely in the field of the unknowable.

Ernst Haeckel is a natural scientist, not a specialist philosopher. It cannot be denied that he sometimes does violence to philosophical concepts when he uses them. Of course, it is easy for a well-trained person well versed in the history of philosophy to prove Haeckel's errors with regard to the ideas of philosophers whom he agrees with - like Spinoza - or whom he opposes - like Kant. Paulsen then chides him for his misunderstandings with regard to Kant. Another philosophical thinker, Richard Hönigswald, has tried to prove in his book "Ernst Haeckel, the monistic philosopher" how little the terms "monism", "dualism", "substance" and so on used by Haeckel can pass the test of the usual philosophical disciplines. It is completely superfluous to get involved with such opposing arguments. All these gentlemen are right in a certain sense from their point of view. They have spun themselves into a certain conceptual web, and what Haeckel says is not correct. And he often does not exactly capture the meaning of philosophical ideas when he talks about them. But can it be the task of philosophical criticism at all to school a researcher who adheres strictly to observation from the point of view of traditional ideas? In all cases where Haeckel combats such ideas, he has a sure feeling that they are useless with regard to the real laws of nature. His attacks are not always logically correct. In such cases, however, the philosophers would have the task of understanding the naturalist in his sense, of showing how he uses the terms. Then they would sometimes find that one can say some things philosophically more sharply, more logically in the strict sense of the word than he can, but not that he is factually wrong.

One does not get a favorable idea of the official representatives of philosophy today when one sees how they misjudge their task. Haeckel calls his world view "monism". Would it not be a more worthy task to show in what sense Haeckel understands this word than to insist again and again that he assumes substance and force, i.e. a duality, and is therefore not a "monist"? Haeckel does not want any other methods of explanation for the organic world and for spiritual life than those which we apply to inorganic nature. He is of the opinion that with the same necessity with which hydrogen and oxygen combine under certain conditions to form water, carbon, nitrogen and other elements also become a living being under certain circumstances; and furthermore, that by the same kind of lawfulness by which the material world is governed, the "spirit" is also conditioned. If someone comes to him with a concept such as "raw, inanimate matter, which can never ever become spirit", Haeckel will reply: look at this matter, bring substances together under certain conditions in the retort and think logically, then you will no longer say: matter cannot become spirit, but your concept of "raw, inanimate matter" is precisely a false one, one that has no relation to reality. Unity in the whole explanation of the world: that is what Haeckel demands. And he calls this unity monistic. In view of the struggle we have witnessed in recent months, we can say that anyone who wants to understand the natural scientist must go to the natural scientist's country. It is not important that Paulsen, as he assures us, does not believe in any "special, immortal soul substance" or that "the world was once produced by a human-like individual being in a similar way to a product of human art". Rather, it is important to form such ideas about natural processes that the contradictory "special, immortal soul substance" and the "human-like being" really become dispensable within the explanation of nature.

And Haeckel presents such ideas in his book of confessions. He found himself compelled to settle accounts mercilessly with everything that belongs to other, contradictory ideas. Anyone who judges impartially must feel uplifted by the courageous consistency with which he carries out this reckoning in the chapter on "Science and Christianity". Perhaps one will not find everything in this section of the book tasteful, one will be able to admit that a different tone could have been found for many things, even that some things need not have been said at all in order to strengthen the monistic world view. But is there no longer any psychological sense in our contemporary philosophers? Is it so incomprehensible that one of the first proclaimers of a world view becomes too passionate in his explanations, that he is more than "objective", enthusiastic about a world of ideas that he has fought for step by step in tireless research and thinking? Anyone who does not find this incomprehensible will not be able to agree with Paulsen's outburst of anger at the "extremely embarrassing tendency (of Haeckel) to drag down what has been sacred for centuries into the dirt of ugly anecdotes and low jokes". However, such a person would be even less likely to have any sympathy for a writing such as that of the church historian Loofs in Halle: "Anti-Haeckel. A Replica and Supplements." Loofs takes a standpoint that has nothing whatsoever to do with Haeckel's world view, but which is as suitable as possible to divert attention from the main issue and, under the pretense that Haeckel had committed a serious injustice in a minor matter, to evoke the idea that he was a completely unscientific spirit that contradicted all true method. In his remarks on Christian church history, Haeckel relies on the work of an English thinker (Stewart Roß), which was published under the pseudonym Saladin and is available in German translation under the title "Jehovas gesammelte Werke, eine kritische Untersuchung des jüdisch-christlichen Religionsgebäudes auf Grund der Bibelforschung". Loofs presents the matter as if it were a desolate pamphlet against Christianity written by a complete ignoramus and dirty fellow, written to the exclusion of all knowledge of recent Bible research and church history. And what Loofs brings forward from the book and what he says about it is, however, only too apt to mislead those who do not take the Englishman's book to hand. They must believe that Haeckel, in his ignorance and recklessness, would really have gone so far as to refer to a diatribe of which Loofs assures us that it would be easier to "pick the fleas off a neglected dog than to collect the scientific follies contained in the book". But only those who do not know Saladın's work can make such a judgment. Anyone who reads only a little of it will soon find that he is dealing with an honest seeker of truth, even if he is not completely unimpeachable from the point of view of the opinions of church history that happen to be considered correct at the time, to whom everything else is closer than speaking in a frivolous manner about something that is sacred to people. Even if one might wish the book a more tasteful form of expression, one must nevertheless feel the deepest sympathy with the author, who wages a bold battle, which everywhere testifies to a deep mind, against ideas and institutions which he considers wrong, harmful and detrimental to human welfare. - One cannot be surprised enough that an opponent of Haeckel has been found who completely ignores the actual points of contention and who does not consider it inappropriate to attack a natural scientist in a way that would only make sense for a scholar who wanted to appear as a church historian.

At any rate, this whole battle has brought us full clarity about one thing. It has shown that our entire intellectual life is permeated far and wide with ideas that are incompatible with the honest and unreserved conclusions of the natural sciences. The lack of objectivity and passion with which the bearers of such ideas have fought this time is at the same time proof that their reasons have become weak. Even if it is to be expected that the future will correct Haeckel's thoughts in some respects, this correction will not come from those who are fighting him today. Even if he did not get it right everywhere, he has undoubtedly entered the path on which the education of the mind will continue to progress.

• 1. The author of this essay has already described the significance of Haeckel's world view and its position in contemporary intellectual life once before the publication of "Welträtsel" according to the state of affairs at that time in this journal. Compare my "Ernst Haeckel und seine Gegner" in L. Jacobowski's "Freier Warte", Vol. I (J.C. C. Bruns' Verlag, Minden i.W. 1900).

What would become of the moral order of the world if the conviction were to gain ground in the widest circles that man had gradually evolved from ape-like animals through purely natural forces? This question arose disturbingly in many minds when, after the publication of Charles Darwin's great scientific reform work "On the Origin of Species in the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms by Means of Natural Breeding", bold thinkers drew the necessary conclusion that the great scientist's conception should not stop at man, but that the idea of the animal origin of the most perfect living being should henceforth be regarded as a certain component of the world view. The number of far-sighted personalities who, in the course of the last four decades, have opposed the opinion that Darwinism is dangerous for the moral and social development of mankind with apt reasons is not small. However, the first person in German intellectual life to take a comprehensive view of the ethical world of thought on the basis of the new scientific insights was the Austrian thinker Bartholomäus Carneri.

Eleven years after Darwin's appearance, he presented the world with his book "Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus. Three Books of Ethics" (Vienna 1871). Since then, he has constantly endeavored to expand his basic ideas in all directions.¹ Today, when we have forty years of Darwinism behind us, we must confess to ourselves in an unbiased survey of the literature under consideration that no one has treated the field of ethics in the sense of the new school of thought so thoroughly, so flawlessly and so perfectly. If this is not yet sufficiently appreciated everywhere where it should be, it is for no other reason than that the minds are still too busy expanding the insights of Darwinism in the purely scientific field and securing them against attacks. They are therefore not yet able to give Darwinian ethics the full attention it deserves. However, there can be no doubt that in the not too distant future, when we no longer speak of the natural theory of Darwinism, but of its comprehensive world view, Carneri's achievements will be described as those which played an outstanding part in the foundation of this world view.

What enabled Carneri to place moral concepts on such a new foundation was the impartiality with which he confronted Darwinism and the intellectual acuity that immediately allowed him to recognize the full implications of the new views for human life. He did not allow any objections to deter him from his conviction that Darwinism was the direction in which thinking would have to move in the future. "Of course, everyone will always be free to behave like an ostrich towards Darwinism; if, apart from the head, he also has the stomach in common with his role model and can digest the food that is served to him daily from the kitchen of the so-called good old days, then we wish him luck with his position. But as long as we cannot think that man has rallied himself to walk upright, to bend down, we look the newest time full in the face; and the firmer our image becomes, the brighter its eye appears to us, the milder its smile. According to the same laws that man rose out of the animal world in the "battle for Daseim", we see the concept of morality rising on the horizon of humanity as a sun, before whose rays many a gaze too accustomed to darkness may shrink back, the brightest pride of vain selfishness may fade away as pale tinsel, but which announces the day to this earth, the fulfillment of the promise of that morning on which first an eye, in the elation of awakened self-consciousness, stripping off the painful rigidity that never leaves the face of the animal, - looked out laughing into the changing life" (Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus,. 14). Thus Carneri himself speaks about the way of thinking that led him to derive Darwinism from the field of natural science into that of the moral conduct of human life. - This impartiality was combined with a high degree of familiarity in Carneri's mind with the philosophical ideas of idealistic thinkers. Such a person was a rarity at the time in which his views matured - in the sixties. The "conceptual poetry" of Hegel and Spinoza was looked down upon with disdain and it was believed that one-sided observation of sensory facts alone could lead to certain knowledge. For Carneri, it is a firm basis of thought that matter contains within itself all the forces that produce all world events, from simple spatial movement to the most highly developed achievements of the spirit. But he is also perfectly clear about the fact that the laws of nature, which relate to physical, material processes, cannot explain spiritual processes. He is completely convinced that all life is a chemical process. "Digestion in man is such a process as the nourishment of the plant" (Morality and Darwinism, p.46). At the same time, however, he emphasizes that the chemical process must rise to a higher level if it is to become life. "Life is a chemical process of its own kind, it is the individual or chemical process that has become an individual. For the chemical process can reach a point at which it can dispense with certain conditions which it has hitherto required ... (Morality and Darwinism, p.14). "We conceive of matter insofar as the phenomena resulting from its divisibility and movement act physically, that is, as mass, on our senses. If the division or differentiation goes so far that the resulting phenomena are no longer perceptible to the senses, but only to the mind, then the effect of matter is a spiritual one" (Grundlegung der Ethik, p.30). The "inseparability of the spirit from corporeality" is thus fully recognized, but at the same time the spiritual, despite its origin from the corporeal, is assured of its independent significance beyond the material. Carneri thus preserves the right of the idealistic approach to the spiritual phenomena of matter alongside the materialistic approach, which is to be limited to that which is accessible to the senses alone. Only a thinker who drew his education from the idealistic view of the world, and who could therefore leave the ground of materialism in his contemplation even at the moment when the material process ascends to the spiritual, was called upon to develop the ethics of Darwinism. Carneri's conception of moral forces is an idealistic one, even though he does not seek the original root of morality anywhere other than where the origin of physical and chemical processes is to be found. "With the assumption of the inseparability of force and substance, spirit and matter, all free forces in the narrower sense are given up, hence also the spirit as something existing independently of the body; with this, however, the spirit is as little given up as force. Spiritualism is finished, but not yet idealism; this remains the field of philosophy, while natural science is at home in realism alone" (Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus,.8).

As a thinker, Carneri is an artist of the highest order. He has a rare ability to present the content of his concepts in a vividly perfect way. The way he rises from the simple natural phenomena that we perceive with our senses to the ideas of morality is a masterly achievement of this kind. We see the chemical processes individualize themselves in a conceptual and descriptive form on the basis of his arguments, becoming a living individual, which then no longer receives an effect from outside as an inorganic movement, but allows it to become a sensation. "The most important characteristic of all living things and unique to them is sensation. It is the form in which that which we call reaction in the rest of nature occurs in all living things. Sensation is actually only the ability to react, but to a higher kind of reaction... Sensation is to life in the narrower sense what divisibility is to matter" (Grundlegung der Ethik, p. 43). In an equally vivid manner, Carneri ascends to the further ideas that enable us to grasp the idea of life. "Sensation... is presented to the individual as a whole in the brain, as the organ in which the whole individual is centrally summarized. By thereby communicating a sensation to the individual, the sensation of the part is elevated to a sensation of the whole. This is why we call the conception a sensation of a higher kind. The individual feels it, it is a felt sensation or a feeling" (Grundliegung der Ethik, p.102). One sees the material gradually becoming spiritual along the lines of Carnerian concepts; one sees the material unfolding the spiritual phenomena out of itself. "Only with the awakening of consciousness does sensation become feeling, and only from then on does... the unfavorable become displeasure, the favorable becomes pleasure. Thus begins the life of the soul in its higher meaning" (Grundlegung der Ethik, p.123). The processes of nature reach the highest degree of individualization in human self-consciousness. The processes of nature have torn themselves away from their mother earth; they no longer look at an external process through the imagination; they look at themselves. This creates the appearance that the individualized natural process is an independent spiritual entity with a completely different origin than the other material processes. "What creates the appearance in mental activity as if man were a double being, as if the earthly body were glowing and illuminated by a supernatural spark, is a deception" (Grundlegung der Ethik, p.136). What we perceive within ourselves is a natural process like any other material process. And it is here - within this natural process that has been heightened to self-consciousness - that the world of the moral is born. The moral is only the continuation of purely natural processes. It can therefore not be a question of what man should recognize as moral. Such morality would have to be given to him from somewhere; and only then would the question arise: Can man obey moral commandments that come to him from outside by virtue of his natural powers? The question can only be this: What concepts of morality are born when the general natural process rises to the level of human self-consciousness? As little sense as it makes to say that a flower should be this way or that way, as little sense does it make to assert that man should do this or that. Carneri sharply contrasts his concept of ethics with that of other thinkers. "While moral philosophy lays down certain moral laws and commands them to be observed so that man may be what he ought to be, ethics develops man as he is, limiting itself to showing him what he can still become: there are duties, the observance of which penalties seek to enforce, here there is an ideal from which all compulsion would distract, because the approach is only by way of knowledge and freedom" (Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus,.1). That which man strives for when he rises above the level of animality, that on which everything else depends, is happiness. "The ideal of happiness is changeable and capable of continual refinement; but under all circumstances the pursuit of happiness is the basic impulse of all human endeavors. And nothing is more erroneous than the opinion that this instinct is unworthy of man, which places him on an equal footing with the animal. This instinct is alien to the animal: it knows only the instinct of self-preservation, and to elevate it to the instinct of happiness is the basic condition of human self-consciousness" (Grundlegung der Ethik, p.147). Where the bliss instinct awakens on the ladder of living becoming, the formerly indifferent natural process begins to be a moral action. All higher moral ideas have their origin in the striving for happiness. "The martyr who lays down his life here for his scientific convictions, there for his faith in God, has nothing else in mind but his happiness: the former finds it in his loyalty to his convictions, the latter seeks it in a better world. Bliss is the ultimate goal for all of them, and however different the image that the individual forms of it may be, from the crudest times to the most educated, it is the beginning and end of the sentient being's thinking and feeling. It is the instinct of self-preservation, whose innumerable emanations gather at this one point to reflect as many desires as there are individuals" (Grundlegung der Ethik, p. 146).

By breaking away from the mother earth of nature, man becomes an independent, a free being. It is proof of how deeply Carneri has settled into the spirit of Darwinism that he has given the concept of freedom a version that is compatible with scientific ideas. Is there still a place for freedom within the Darwinian worldview? Carneri answers "yes". It is true that everything that happens, including every human action, is subject to the eternal, iron laws of nature. But from the point at which man detaches himself from the rest of nature, the laws of nature become the laws of his own being. "His further development is his own work, and what kept him on the path of progress was the power and gradual clarification of his desires" (Grundlegung der Ethik, p.143). And the laws of nature, which man has made the content of his being, are his thoughts and ideas. They are nothing other than the highly heightened, fully developed processes of nature. Man is not free by the fact that he can or cannot obey arbitrary moral commandments taken from an unknown place, but by the fact that he continues the development of nature as his own work. Carneri expresses this view with perfect clarity: "Man is indeed bound by the laws of nature; but nature knows nothing of man and his laws. Only in man does she bring it to thought. It does not even care about man; and only because man is bound to the means he finds in nature to achieve his ends, and he paves his way to his goal accordingly, do some means look as if they had been brought to him by nature for this or that purpose" (Der Mensch als Selbstzweck,.89). If the laws of nature are to be effective in man, he must permeate himself with them, they must become the content of his thinking. Man can only continue the work of nature in his moral actions if he penetrates into the meaning of natural existence, if he strives for knowledge of natural phenomena. Carneri therefore seeks the basis of morality in knowledge. It is not some moral commandments hanging in the air, but only the truth that can lead man to act morally. Only thinking that agrees with "the truth, that recognizes things in their necessity and thereby makes the general law its own, elevates the intellect to reason, the will to freedom. Man wills only insofar as he knows. Hence the infinite value of true intelligence. We do not fail to recognize the greatness of the sacrifices which the new teaching demands of the human heart; but these sacrifices are no longer sacrifices as soon as we become aware of the greatness of the task with which the new teaching approaches the human spirit. The barrier that commanded thought like no other has fallen, and it is indeed a great bias to want to see in it an impairment of the demands of thought" (Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus, p. 13f.). The human being who sets himself goals and ideals for his actions cannot, however, stop at mere natural principles in his thinking. Otherwise his morality would not be a continuation, but a mere copy of natural events. As a moral thinker, man is at the same time a creator. Moral ideas arise from his thinking as new creations. In order for his thinking to become a moral force, it undergoes an enhancement. It becomes a fantasy that provides action with its goals. In the ethical imagination Carneri finds the new concept that must take the place of the old moral commandments. It is the imagination that "breathes living warmth into our thinking" and which "interacting with ideas, creates the ideal" (Grundlegung der Ethik, p.370f.).

In this way, Carneri reaches the highest human concepts, even though he takes the simplest scientific ideas as his starting point. He endeavors to preserve the character of the spiritual, the ideality of the moral, despite his strict adherence to Darwinism. He is an enemy of any ambiguity in concepts. This is why, in his essay "Sensation and Consciousness" (1893), he energetically protested against the vagueness of a world view that seeks to do justice to the connection between spirit and nature by saying: "No spirit without matter, but also no matter without spirit." Carneri counters the many erroneous interpretations of Goethe's sentence: "The conviction that there is no spirit without matter, that is, that all spiritual activity is bound to a material activity, with the end of which it also reaches its end, is based on experience; while nothing in this experience suggests that spirit is connected to matter at all." According to Carneri's view, spirit does not belong to matter as such, but to the substance organized into higher levels of activity. It is not matter that has spirit, but the organization that matter has assumed is the basis for the appearance of spirit. If one wanted to call matter animated, one would be misleading, like someone who ascribed the ability to tell time not to the mechanism of the clock, but to the metals that are worked into it. Even if one has to admit that Haeckel's writings contain an expression of the scientific way of thinking that should not be misunderstood in the way Carneri suggests, one may nevertheless describe the aforementioned short work as one of the most valuable contributions to Darwinism because of its exemplary formulation of important concepts. The height to which Carneri's view of life rose through his work on ethics can be seen in his writings "Der Mensch als Selbstzweck" (1877) and "Der moderne Mensch. Attempts at a way of life" (1891). The fruits of a conviction drawn from Darwinism appear here as the noblest ideas about the world and man. And anyone who listened to Carneri back then, when he was a member of the Austrian House of Representatives, giving his speeches full of content and imbued with a high ethos, will never forget the impression he must have made. The image of a fighter for the truth, which he had before him at the moment when the fighter wanted to introduce the truth into life, must remain unforgettable.

• 1. He has also published: Feeling, Consciousness, Will. Eine psychologische Studie (Vienna 1876); Der Mensch als Selbstzweck (1877); Grundlegung der Ethik (Vienna 1881); Entwicklung und Glückseligkeit (Stuttgart 1886); Der moderne Mensch. Versuche einer Lebensführung (Bonn 1891); Empfindung und Bewußtsein (1893).

The development of science in the last century could not wrongly be called a conquest of the scientific spirit over almost all areas of human cognition. The triumphant power of this procession can be seen nowhere better than in the character that research into the human soul has assumed in scientific circles over the last few decades. The modern psychologist, who tries to get to grips with the rising and falling phenomena of our inner being with his counting and measuring apparatus, bears little resemblance to the earlier soul researcher who merely wanted to look at his own soul with his mind's eye; he looks all the more like the physical or chemical experimenter. If one wants to characterize the nature of modern soul research, one will always have to refer to a word coined by the great thinker and writer Friedrich Albert Lange, the author of the "History of Materialism": "Psychology without a soul." It is a word that can easily be misunderstood. It had a good meaning as a battle cry. It was intended to say that anyone who wants to explore the soul must not have a preconceived notion of this "soul". And Lange made such an accusation against the older psychologists. They had certain dogmatic ideas about the soul. They imagined it to be a being with very specific characteristics. And when they then set about investigating the real phenomena of the soul, their view was clouded by these preconceived dogmas. For example, those who believe that the human will is absolutely free do not see the processes of the will impartially. They take on such an involuntary character in his observation that the opinion of "free will" can exist. Lange now demands that the soul-searchers give up all such opinions. Examine, he tells them, the processes of the will as they present themselves to you, and at first leave it completely undetermined whether the will is free or unfree. Whether it is, you cannot say beforehand, but that must first be the result of your investigation. A comparison with a historical fact suggests itself when you think about the term "soul science without a soul". Columbus once sailed westward with the intention of finding a known land. He found an unknown one. Psychologists should be aware that the right concept of the soul cannot be known before the investigation, but that it can only become apparent to them at the end of their voyages of discovery. Modern psychologists proceed accordingly. They seek ways and means of getting to know the phenomena of the soul in their context and are convinced that they will arrive at a concept of the "soul" at the end of their journey. Lange's word has the same meaning in relation to the question of the soul that one could associate with the similar one, "natural science without nature". The natural scientist, too, does not base his research on any preconceived notion of "nature". He investigates the phenomena of light, electricity and life and is convinced that a comprehensive concept of nature will only emerge from the totality of his research.

The researcher and thinker who brought completely new perspectives to the study of the soul was completely dominated by this way of thinking: Gustav Theodor Fechner. Using a method that Goethe, with his far-sighted scientific view, demanded for all natural research, Fechner showed the extent to which it can be applied in psychology. "When we deliberately repeat the experiences - these are Goethe's words - which have been made before us, which we ourselves or others make with us at the same time, and represent again the phenomena which have arisen partly by chance, partly artificially, we call this an experiment. The value of an experiment consists chiefly in the fact that, whether simple or compound, it can be produced again at any time under certain conditions with a known apparatus and with the necessary skill, as often as the conditional circumstances can be combined." To have given the experiment its right in psychology is the merit that Fechner has earned through the explanations of his work "Elements of Psychophysics" (1860). A problem that has occupied the human mind as long as it has been concerned with questions of knowledge, the relationship of the physical to the spiritual, appeared here for the first time in a sense that Goethe also characterized perfectly accurately with the words: "We have to learn from the mathematicians the thoughtfulness of only stringing together the next to the next, or rather to deduce the next from the next, and even where we do not make use of any calculation, we must always go about our work as if we were accountable to the strictest geormeter." This is how Fechner thought and acted in the area where the physical and the spiritual meet. A weight presses on my hand. I feel the pressure. A physical phenomenon - the pressure - causes a mental phenomenon, the sensation. I increase the pressure. My sensation also increases. Fechner asks: How can I use numbers to express the extent to which the sensation increases when the pressure increases? The dependence of the mental on the physical is determined as if one were accountable to the strictest geometer. Wilhelm Wundt, who continued to work in Fechner's spirit in this field, says of the founder of "Psychophysics": "Perhaps in none of his other scientific achievements does the rare combination of gifts that Fechner possessed emerge so brilliantly as in his psychophysical works. A work such as the "Elements of Psychophysics" required a familiarity with the principles of exact physical-mathematical methodology and at the same time a tendency to delve into the deepest problems of being, which only he possessed in this combination. And for this he needed that originality of thought which knew how to freely reshape the traditional tools according to its own needs and had no qualms about taking new and unfamiliar paths. E.H. Weber's observations, admirable for their ingenious simplicity but limited in scope, the isolated, often more accidental than systematic experiments and results of other physiologists - they formed the modest material from which he built a new science." Since Fechner's ingenious idea, a mathematical formula has told us how sensation increases with an increasing external stimulus, just as since Galileo's fundamental ideas a mathematical formula has told us how the speed increases when a ball rolls down an inclined plane. Psychology has become an experimental science. Its new character is clearly expressed in Wundt's "Lectures on the Human and Animal Soul" (1863). We read there: "In the following investigations I shall show that experiment is the main aid in psychology which leads us from the facts of consciousness to those processes which prepare conscious life in the dark background of the soul. Self-observation, like observation in general, provides us only with the composite appearance. Only in the experiment do we strip the phenomenon of all the accidental circumstances to which it is bound in nature. Through the experiment we create the phenomenon artificially out of the conditions that we hold in our hands. We change these conditions and thereby also change the appearance in a measurable way. Thus it is always and everywhere the experiment that leads us to the laws of nature, because only in the experiment are we able to see both the causes and the results." Simply immersing oneself in one's own inner self, self-observation, has lost much of its trust among specialist psychologists. Wundt turned against them in the sharpest possible terms. He asked: What has psychology gained from introspection? If an inhabitant of another world descended to our earth and wanted to deduce the nature of the human soul from the textbooks of psychology, he would probably come to the conclusion that the various descriptions of the psychologists, who all claim to have gained their views from self-observation, refer to beings of quite different worlds. "There is nothing special about imagining a person who observes some external object attentively. But the idea of such a person absorbed in self-observation is almost irresistibly comical. His situation is exactly like that of a Munchausen trying to pull himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail." This judgment is undoubtedly one-sided. But it is quite understandable in the case of the leader of experimental psychology. Kraepelin, the editor of "Psychologische Arbeiten", certainly characterizes Wundt's merits correctly when he says: "We are inclined to take the existence of physiological psychology as something so self-evident that in places it is already beginning to be forgotten what a tremendous influence Wundt's summarizing and stimulating work has had on the expansion of old and the emergence of new fields of psychological research." It is absolutely true that introspection is a rich source of errors. But it is equally undoubted that nothing is known to us more intimately and directly than our own inner self. Whatever else we may observe: it remains an exterior to us. We cannot penetrate into its core. In the circle of our psychic phenomena we stand in the middle. They are therefore closer to us than anything else in the world. Should this not also be the reason why we are exposed to so many errors when observing these phenomena? Objectivity and impartiality are certainly more difficult towards what is close to us than towards what is far away. Because self-observation is something so immediate, it is likely to be difficult. And it is possible that only those who are well trained in other fields of observation could practise sufficient self-observation. What Goethe said of nature in general: "And what it may not reveal to your spirit, you do not force from it with levers and screws", this saying must apply especially to the nature of the soul. But there are wide areas of the soul's life from which so much can be extracted with "levers and screws" that their laws confront us in strict mathematical formulas. - A sound impression acts on my ear. I feel it. My sensation sets my will in motion. I feel prompted by the perceived sound to perform an action. The psychological experimenter takes possession of this fact. He switches a clock into an electric circuit, the hands of which move as long as pressure is exerted on some device. Let two such devices be connected to the circuit. Then the hand only moves as long as pressure is exerted on both devices. An observer now does the following. He presses on one device until he perceives a certain sound. Then he lets go and presses on the second device at the same time. While he does this, the pointer moves. So there is a time when he presses on both devices. This is the time that has elapsed between the reception of the sensory impression and the action that follows this impression. It is found that one-eighth to one-sixth of a second elapses from the perception of a sensation to the moment when man can execute a movement in response to that sensation. By similarly ingenious precautions one can investigate the diminution of the strength of a memory with the time that has elapsed since an impression has been committed to memory; one can recognize how quickly a new conception attaches itself to an old one; one can also judge the influence of fatigue, of exercise on our mental life, and similar phenomena in inexhaustible abundance and variety. In an impressive series of volumes, Wundt published the results of such research as "Philosophical Studies", which he and his students carried out in the mother institute of experimental psychology, his Leipzig laboratory. A number of German and foreign universities have set up similar institutions based on the Leipzig model. Students from all parts of the educated world came to Leipzig to learn the new methods under Wundt's guidance. And they carried modern psychological research methods everywhere. In Copenhagen and Jassy, in Italy and America, experimental psychology is taught in the spirit of the Leipzig researcher. A number of important scholars can be named who have more or less independently pursued their psychological laboratory work and achieved fine results. Carl Stumpf in particular has made valuable contributions in the field of sound psychology, Hermann Ebbinghaus in the field of memory phenomena. Ernst Mach is particularly successful in combining experiment with intellectual explanation. Hugo Münsterberg, who worked in Zurich for a long time, was called to Cambridge to cultivate the new science.

It is impossible in a brief overview to mention all the perspectives opened up by experimental psychology. Among many things, the most important thing that pedagogy has to learn from this young branch of research will certainly not be the least important. The teacher, who has to direct the laws of the adolescent's mental life, will in future have to be guided by the experimentally established laws of this mental life. He will have to trust memory and practice only as much as these mental faculties can achieve according to the psychological results. - And Kraepelin makes the decisive demand on psychiatry to make use of the results of experimental psychology. For many years, this researcher has endeavored to answer the question of "in what way and to what extent" this is possible. He is of the opinion that the time has come when psychiatry can make no further progress with the observation methods in use up to now. These methods must be supplemented by those of the newly blossoming experimental psychology. - It is precisely Kraepelin's testimony that one likes to refer to when it comes to appreciating the new science. For this level-headed and intellectual researcher is not blind to the dark sides of this science, which some of its proponents are guilty of. "We must admit that among the flood of experimental work that the last decade has brought us, some of it does not meet the justified requirements, that the weeds have often sprouted abundantly along with the wheat." But Kraepelin's other words are just as true: "Nevertheless, we can expect with certainty today that the young science will survive this developmental disease without damage and will be able to permanently assert its independent place alongside the other branches of natural science and physiology in particular."

Herman Grimm died on June 16. Those who appreciated the nature of his spirit were overcome with the feeling at the news of his passing that with him one of the personalities has departed from us to whom those who have traveled their educational path in the last third of the past century owe unspeakable things. For us, he was a living link to the age of Goethe. Those who follow us will have no contemporaries who know how to talk about Goethe like Herman Grimm. Even though he was only four years old when Goethe himself died, Herman Grimm can be spoken of as a contemporary of Goethe. He was Bettina's son-in-law, who was completely absorbed in Goethe's world of ideas and of whom we have the beautiful book "Goethe's Correspondence with a Child". And Herman Grimm himself was completely at home within a world of ideas that drew its nourishment from a direct personal relationship with Goethe. He judged all things from this world of ideas, not just Goethe himself. The way he wrote his books about Michelangelo and Raphael could only be written by a man who stood by Goethe like Herman Grimm. One will also be able to judge these geniuses differently, and one will have to judge them differently from other perspectives on art and other needs of the time. But hardly any age will be able to come closer to them in their way of understanding than that of Goethe. The fact that they are written in the spirit of Goethe's age will forever give Herman Grimm's works an incomparable value.

Those who knew Herman Grimm personally felt to the highest degree as if Goethe himself were still speaking to them indirectly through this man. - This impression was also shared by those whose personal contact with Herman Grimm was as brief as that of the writer of these lines. I often think of the wonderful hours I was able to spend with him in Weimar. I have a particularly vivid memory of a conversation I had with him alone when he once asked me to join him for lunch in a Weimar hotel. He spoke of his History of the German Imagination as a work in which he summarized what he had thought about the development of the German people. How well he knew how to point to the characteristic passages in which the cultural content of an age was concentrated as if in focal points. One might think more or less differently about something than he did: the feeling that his point of view was in some way justified and highly significant and fruitful struck one in a flash with each of his remarks. I am of the opinion that nothing could make one see the true nature of German culture in the second third of the nineteenth century as clearly as hearing personalities like Herman Grimm speak. I got to know another man for whom something similar was true, my highly esteemed teacher Karl Julius Schröer. He died a few months ago in Vienna. It is my heartfelt wish to soon paint a picture of this misunderstood personality as it lives in my soul. In a somewhat different way from Herman Grimm, he too lived entirely in Goethe's way of thinking. It is in the nature of our age that those who are only eight or ten years younger than my contemporaries have to form a completely different picture of such personalities than we do. In a certain sense, Herman Grimm was far removed from the basic needs of our time. The social disturbances of our day were beyond his understanding, and the views of Darwin and Haeckel must have always made him feel shivery. But precisely for this reason - as paradoxical as it may seem at first glance to say so - his book on Goethe is a historical document like no other. No one will be able to write about Goethe like this again. Not our contemporary culture and no future culture will make that possible. Goethe's generation had to be followed by a generation that still had so much of Goethe that it was able to hold on to his image unperturbed by everything that followed. Herman Grimm belonged to this generation. Whatever else is said about Goethe, Grimm's "Goethe" cannot be overtaken. No one will ever be able to feel about Goethe the way he did; but it was in these feelings about Goethe that the age of Goethe was fully realized.

Those who call themselves scholars in the "true sense" did not want to count Herman Grimm among their number. They denied him the "strict method". He was allowed to smile about it. He did not want to be compared with these "scholars" and did not want to be counted among them. He knew too well what the "method" was all about. It is mostly a crutch for all those who cannot walk on their own two feet due to a lack of personal strength and who get nowhere by their own efforts. He knew that only those who "have nothing but method" can deny him method. His conviction was: "The personality of the individual within his limited circle will always remain the valuable thing."

Physiological-psychological study. Vienna 1884

This work is one of those philosophical publications that are becoming increasingly rare in our time, which attempt to solve a specific scientific problem not from the point of view of any school of thought, but independently and without presuppositions. The author sets himself the task of explaining the significance of physiological research into the brain mechanism for the understanding of the phenomena of consciousness. First of all, he refutes the view generally held in scientific circles today that the world given to us directly through the senses, this complex of colors, sounds, shapes, differences in warmth and so on, is nothing more than the effect of objective material processes on our subjective organization. The world of appearances is therefore basically a subjective appearance that only lasts as long as we keep our senses open to the impressions of material processes, whereas these processes themselves are saturated with a reality of their own that is completely independent of us and are thus the true cause of all natural phenomena. Wahle now shows that the processes in matter have no higher degree of reality than the subjective world supposedly caused by them. We must regard both as occurrences present to us, which confront us as belonging together (coordinated), without our being entitled to assume that one is the true cause of the other. It is just as we must regard day and night, for instance, as coordinated without one of them being regarded as the effect of the other. Just as here the necessary succession is due to the structure and processes of our solar system, so also the coordination of a material process and a quality of sensation, for example, sound, color, and so on, will be conditioned by some true fact; but at any rate not by the fact that the former causes the latter. Now, the interrelation of brain mechanism and consciousness is only a special case of such coordination. According to Wahle, we are only in a position to perceive that both are parallel occurrences; but we are not entitled to regard consciousness as a real consequence of the brain mechanism. Physiology is right when it seeks the material correlates of mental phenomena; but the materialistic fantasy that wants to make the mind the true product of the brain is given the farewell letter. Indeed, Wahle even works against it by showing that the phenomena hitherto regarded in psychology as independent acts of consciousness, such as recognizing, rejecting, loving, desiring, willing and so on, are nothing other than occurrences coordinated with each other or with others, which do not at all necessitate the assumption of a special subjective activity, which would be unfavourable to physiology. The author traces the phenomena of consciousness back to a general law, whereby a conception can be recalled into consciousness by one that is not wholly but partially identical with it. Thus it would only be the task of physiology to find the corresponding mechanical fact in the brain for this psychological finding, which is certainly easier than if this had to be done for each of the above-mentioned alleged acts of consciousness.

The main significance of this little work lies in having shown in clear contours what experience actually gives us and what is often only added to it. All that the individual sciences can find consists only in the statement of related occurrences, whereby we must presuppose that the affiliation itself is founded in some true fact. We consider the author's argument to be quite convincing, but we believe that he has not drawn the final conclusion of his views. Otherwise he would probably have found that those true facts themselves are given to us as experiential occurrences - namely the ideal ones - and that the negation of materialism leads logically to scientific idealism. If, therefore, we actually see the right thing in the progression from the absolutely solid foundation laid by Wahle to a higher level of knowledge, then we unreservedly admit that we see in this work an outstanding achievement that will have a decisive effect on the branch of science to which it belongs and that will certainly occupy a place in the history of philosophy.