The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Before I enter into the factual content of Dr. Horneffer's remarks, I must characterize the "love of truth" that currently prevails in the Nietzsche Archive. Dr. Horneffer says in his essay above: "Steiner holds out the prospect that Koegel will still defend himself." Any unbiased reader who does not reread my essay published on February ıo. February, this sentence must give the impression that I made my attack on the Nietzsche Archive and its current management in agreement with Dr. Koegel. However, this is completely incorrect. I literally wrote in my essay: "I do not have to defend Dr. Koegel. He can do that himself." In truth, Dr. Koegel knew not the slightest thing about my attack before it was printed. I have given the reasons for this attack myself at the end of my essay. There are none other than the purely factual ones given there. When I received Dr. Horneffer's manuscript, I thought the assertion that I held out the prospect of defending Dr. Koegel was based on a cursory reading of my attack. Since I wanted to avoid any unnecessary discussion in public, I wrote to Dr. Horneffer that his assertion was based on a complete error, that I could not have held out any prospect of Dr. Koegel when I wrote my essay. He would now have had the opportunity to delete the incorrect sentence in the proof sent to him later. He did not ask for it. Dr. Horneffer thus claims that I acted in agreement with Dr. Koegel, despite the fact that this assertion was described to him as untrue.

Secondly, Dr. Horneffer writes: "The motives for Steiner's appearance are completely visible. Steiner has already recognized the flawed nature of Koegel's compilation; however, he does not want to let this fact arise."

"That he had recognized the flawed nature of Koegel's work is clear from the following reasons: When reading Koegel's printed manuscript aloud, Steiner skipped over the things that did not fit in. Steiner, who admits this fact, explains that this was pure coincidence! However, Dr. Förster-Nietzsche will publish a passage from Steiner's letter in which he himself vividly laments the inadequacy of Koegel's work. No, Steiner had already recognized the untenability of Koegel's work at that time, but, threatened and intimidated by Koegel - evidence of this will also be provided - he did not have the courage to say so openly, which could have prevented this unfortunate publication." These accusations by Dr. Hornefler against me are of course based on allegations made by Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche. And I therefore feel compelled to return to the latter's letter to me dated September 23, 1898, which I already mentioned in my essay of February 10 of this year. In this letter you will find, among other assertions, the following, which now recur in Dr. Horneffer's essay: "I gave you the manuscript on the Second Coming in October 1896 for examination because I was so concerned about it. You yourself have repeatedly noted the incoherence of the content and justified and increased my concern. Nevertheless, you did not say a word to Dr. Koegel about your doubts about the composition of the manuscript, but on the contrary praised him for it. If you had had the courage to express your doubts to Dr. Koegel, a revision of the entire manuscript would have been unavoidable. But since you did not have this courage, I had to let things take their course. I lacked the scientific language to prove the errors." It must be said very clearly for once: ı. It is not true that Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche gave me the manuscript on the Second Coming for examination in October or at any other time. 2. it is equally untrue that I have stated the incoherence of the content on various occasions. Both assertions are an invention of Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche. Furthermore, it is untrue that I have been intimidated in any way by Dr. Koegel. Dr. Koegel did nothing more to me than write a letter after he had received the information mentioned in my attack through his sister, which he could not understand as anything other than proof of an intrigue on my part. On the contrary, it must be emphasized that I have never been in a position to undertake any "examination" of Koegel's work. If Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche intended such an examination - which, after all that has happened, I cannot assume - then it can only have been she who did not have the courage to have one carried out. I had to shed some light on the fairy tale of "intimidation", which was invented to cast a dubious light on my correct attitude in what was a very delicate situation at the time. How Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche intends to prove that I was threatened and intimidated by Koegel: let us wait and see, and then talk further; likewise the publication of the letters in which I vividly describe the inadequacy of Koegel's work. Koegel's work. I can wait and see; for I can only wish for full clarity on this matter, in which I am not aware of any wrongdoing.

I come to a third assertion, which Dr. Horneffer faithfully parrots from Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche: "Dr. Rudolf teiner, who lived in Weimar at the time and was envisaged as co-editor of the Nietzsche Archive, as a philosophical complement to Dr. Koegel, a project that later came to nothing...". If "in prospect" is somehow supposed to imply that I would have agreed to such a proposal, then I must reject such an implication in the strongest possible terms. This "prospect" existed only in Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's imagination. When she spoke to me of such a thing, I never said anything other than what can be summarized in the words: "Even if I wanted to - because I never wanted to - it would be impossible to stage such a co-editorship", because according to the existing contracts between Nietzsche's heirs and the Naumann company (the publishers of Nietzsche's works), this was impossible at the time. I could never be considered as Dr. Koegel's co-editor. And at that time it was merely courtesy against Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche that I listened to her fantasies, which went off into the blue. She then used the fact that I had listened to her to involve me in a completely improper manner in the matter, with which I officially had nothing to do whatsoever.

And because I had nothing to do, because I had no mandate from anyone to examine Koegel's work, no such examination ever took place. There could never have been any official collaboration with Dr. Koegel for the very reason that I explained in my attack (dated 10 February) with the words: "I do not agree with him on some points, and we have had many a controversy." I also expressed myself quite clearly in the sentence: "Someone else might have made the arrangement somewhat differently than Dr. Koegel." Well, it is probably not difficult to guess that by such an other I also mean myself. I cannot know what would have become of the "Wiederkunft des Gleichen" if I had been the editor; probably not quite the same as what it has become through Dr. Koegel.

I just don't understand one thing. I could now boast so wonderfully that, without seeing Nietzsche's manuscripts, I recognized the flawed nature of Koegel's work. I need not have feared the objection that I should have prevented the publication. For I had no possibility of such an objection in my relationship with the Nietzsche Archive, which was as unofficial as possible. Dr. Koegel and the Naumann company could have forced the publication of Koegel's work at any moment. I could therefore rest happily on the laurel that would be woven for me by the untruth that I had recognized the badness of Koegel's editorship if I wanted. Now I prefer the truth and leave the representation of untruth to others.

When I heard in the spring of 1898 that the volume with the "Return of the Same" had to be withdrawn from the book trade because of the inadequacy of Koegel's work, I thought: this assertion was well-founded. I remembered that during the lecture for Dr. Servaes I had skimmed over some of Koegel's manuscript. I openly confess that I now had the feeling that my skimming had sprung from a correct view of the matter at the time. I believed this until Dr. Horneffer's paper appeared. It was only this paper that taught me that Dr. Koegel's errors were not as substantial as had been proclaimed by the Nietzsche Archive. And this brings me to Dr. Horneffer's above reply. First, he accuses me of not having looked at Nietzsche's manuscripts before I made the attack, but I did not need to see the manuscripts for what I had to say. In order to prove to Dr. Hornefler that he misinterprets Nietzsche's aphorisms, an inspection of the manuscripts was of no use to me. For I do have the wording of these aphorisms. I will now turn to aphorism 70 (in Koegel's edition), which Dr. Hornefler mentions in his reply. It reads: "The essence of every action is as unpalatable to man as the essence of every food: he would rather starve than eat it, so strong is his disgust for the most part. He needs seasoning, we must be seduced to all food: and so also to all actions. The taste and its relation to hunger, and its relation to the needs of the organism! Moral judgments are the condiments. Here as there, however, taste is regarded as something that determines the value of nourishment, value of action: the greatest error! How does taste change? When does it become indolent and unfree? When is it tyrannical? - And likewise with the judgments of good and evil: a physiological fact is the cause of every change in moral taste; but this physiological change is not something that necessarily demands what is useful to the organism at all times. Rather, the history of taste is a history in itself, and degenerations of the whole are just as much the consequences of this taste as progress. Healthy taste, diseased taste, - these are false distinctions, - there are innumerable possibilities of development: whatever leads to one is healthy: but it may be contrary to another development. Only with regard to an ideal that is to be attained is there a sense of "healthy and "ill". The ideal, however, is always highly changeable, even in the individual (that of the child and the man!) - and the knowledge of what is necessary to achieve it is almost entirely lacking." What are we talking about here? It is said that our taste does not choose that which is useful to the organism for physical reasons, but that which is made pleasant to it by seasoning. Moral judgments relate to the actual natural impulse of human action in the same way that condiments relate to the natural needs of the organism. We need seasoning so that we choose this and not that food. We need a moral judgment in order to perform this or that action. But it is the greatest error if we believe that this moral judgment determines the advantageousness of the action. It is also the greatest error to believe that the good taste caused by seasoning determines the nutritional value of

food is decisive. The history of morality, like the history of taste, is a story in itself. Just as we indulge in basic errors in order to master reality, we indulge in moral errors in order to do this or that. If some impulse leads me to accomplish something, and I believe that I am doing it because I am obeying a certain moral precept, I have committed an error in the sphere of action, of affects, just as I have committed an error when I look at two things, which can never be quite the same, from the point of view of equality. Just take a look at aphorism 21 of the "Joyful Science": "For the education and incorporation of virtuous habits, a series of effects of virtue are brought out which make virtue and private advantage appear to be conjoined, - and there is indeed such a conjoining! Blind industriousness, for example, this typical virtue of a tool, is presented as the path to wealth and honor and as the most salutary poison against boredom and passions: but its danger, its supreme peril, is concealed. Education proceeds in this way throughout: it seeks to determine the individual through a series of stimuli and advantages to a way of thinking and acting which, when it has become habit, instinct and passion, prevails in him and over him against his ultimate advantage, but "for the general good"." Take aphorism 13 of the same "happy science": "It depends on how one is accustomed to seasoning one's life ... one always seeks this or that seasoning according to one's temperament." It must be clear to anyone who really delves into the matter that these are related trains of thought. In the "happy science" written in January 1882, many a thought is taken from the manuscript of August 1881. All these thoughts represent how the incorporation of habits, instincts, passions happens with the help of moral errors. Dr. Hornefer puts the matter simply: this aphorism 70 says: "that morality can only be understood physiologically. All moral judgments are judgments of taste. There is no such thing as healthy and sick taste, it depends on the goal" and he adds to this banal interpretation: "I am at a loss to understand how this can be brought under incorporation of the passions." (Cf. E. Horneffer, "Nietzsche, Lehre von der Ewigen Wiederkunft" p. 38.) In the above reply, however, he accuses me of "raping" Nietzsche's thought, which he cannot go along with. But I say to him that anyone who sees nothing different from Horneffer in Aph. 70 is quite incapable of interpreting Nietzsche. It is simply dullness to see nothing here but "On the whole it is a matter of morals and moral judgments." No, it is about the extent to which morality inculcates fundamentally erroneous passions, instincts and habits.

I am actually reluctant to get involved in anything further with such an incompetent opponent, especially as he, like all people who are incompetent, suffers from an excessive scholarly conceit. But he should not be able to say again: I am concealing some of his inanities. He distorts and twists what I have said in the most incredible way. I have maintained that the disposition entitled "The Return of the Same" cannot be a disposition on Zarathustra, "for it does not contain the main idea for the sake of which Zarathustra is written: the idea of the superman." And I say that if Nietzsche, in a letter to Peter Gast on September 3, 1883, brings this disposition into a closer relationship to Zarathustra than it can be brought in terms of its content, he is mistaken. Whoever does not admit that Nietzsche is often inaccurate when he makes statements about his works after some time is not to be argued with, for such a one denies indisputable facts. In "Ecce homo" Nietzsche makes statements about earlier works that do not at all correspond to the intentions he had when he wrote them. I have said quite precisely how I think that the plan to write a work on the "Second Coming" developed into the other Zarathustra. At the beginning of August, Nietzsche was planning a work on the "Second Coming of the. Same". The disposition, which bears the title "The Second Coming of the Same", corresponds to this writing. The aphorisms that Nietzsche wrote down are preparatory work for it. What of these aphorisms would actually have been used, whether any of the notes would have been used at all, we can know nothing about that. Of course, if Nietzsche had completed the writing on the "Second Coming", it would have had a different form than an editor can give it from the first preliminary works, but Nietzsche departed from this writing. Very gradually, the idea of the "superman" came to the fore. Zarathustra came into being. You see: this assumption of mine does not even contradict what Nietzsche says: "The basic composition of the work (i.e. of Zarathustra), the eternal idea of return, this highest formula of affirmation that can be achieved at all - belongs to August 1881". This basic composition has become a completely different work from what it was originally intended for. I would like to ask Dr. Horneffer whether it is "preserving scientific decency" to make what you want out of your opponent's assertions. To find an opponent's serious objections "ridiculous" is arrogant - but is it also "decent"? Dr. Horneffer, for example, says that he finds it "ridiculous" to state a contradiction in his assertion: "that Nietzsche's plan to write a prosaic treatise on the return of the same can only have existed for a very short time, that it did exist." Well, I will tell him that I presented this monstrosity of an assertion to very thoughtful readers. They did not quite agree with me, but they all agreed that a master of style did not write this sentence.

Unfortunately, I do not have the space today to respond to Dr. Hornefler's claim: "If you want to refute me, you have to refute my reconstruction of the sketch or draft on which Koegel based his book." This "reconstruction" will be illuminated in the next issue. Then there will also be an opportunity to uncover the underlying true reasons for the whole campaign of return. Because there are such things.

Dearly beloved! Although the great riddles concerning fate and death must always inspire people to reflection, this is especially the case in our fateful days, when the question of fate and the riddle of death are awakened directly or indirectly in so many souls by the immediate events of the day. In the lectures I have been permitted to give on this subject from the standpoint of spiritual science, I have often pointed out that in our time, in view of all the indications of our time, questions such as those concerning fate and the nature of death must gradually change from an old way of looking at and feeling to a truly scientific way of looking at and perceiving them.

Just as two or three hundred years ago a wave of human development brought the newer scientific view, we perceive how it lies in the impulses of the time in the present, that spiritual science, science about the questions of spiritual life, is moving into the cultural development of humanity from our time on. But now it must be emphasized that precisely when spiritual questions and spiritual enigmas are to be examined in the light of science, scientific research and work must take on a completely different character than scientific work and research into the external life and facts of nature.

And that, honored attendees, is what still arouses the harshest prejudices in so many circles, one might say, in general today, against what spiritual science has to say. Not only do the general prejudices exist, which assert themselves against every new cultural movement, which have asserted themselves even in the widest circles when the dawn of the new natural science appeared, but there is something quite special about it, that in a much higher degree humanity will have to relearn with regard to spiritual science, as it has to in relation to natural science. And although it was inconceivable to mankind only a few centuries ago that contrary to all appearances of the senses, it should be assumed that the earth does not stand still and that the sun does not stand still, but that the sun stands still and the earth moves around it, it is even more fundamentally inconceivable to these people, given their present state of development, to assume that the life of the spirit, the results of spiritual science, in the most eminent sense, must fundamentally contradict all that the outer senses present, and that the very nature of research to assume, according to their present course of development, that the life of the spirit, the results of spiritual science in the most eminent sense, must fundamentally contradict all that the outer sense appears to offer, and that the very nature of research into spiritual realms must take a different form from that of outer scientific research.

Let us try to recall the most elementary, most primitive character of external scientific research and observation! It consists in the fact that man first directs his senses and also his mind, insofar as it is bound to the brain, to the external world, receives impressions of the external world and forms ideas, thoughts, concepts about this external world. In these ideas, thoughts and concepts that he forms, he then has to experience within himself what are usually called the laws of nature. Two things can be pointed out in this external research if one wants to emphasize the difference between this research and what spiritual science wants.

On the one hand, it can be said that this research is based on what is real, spread out before it externally; and from this external reality, the human spirit progresses, the human view of the soul progresses to what it wants, to what it wants to achieve, so that science of this external nature is, so to speak, a consequence, a consequence of the experience of external real reality in this field. The other thing that is obvious to anyone who takes a little time to consider the soul's attitude to this outer research is that in this research, in this progression from looking at the outer world to the concepts, ideas and notions we form, we we make for ourselves, we proceed, as it were, from the fully-juicy reality, from the reality full of content, to that which is then, in our thoughts, images, concepts, in a sense, ethereal, thin compared to the full-bodied nature of external reality. We feel it: when we face reality with our senses, we stand in the full life of it. By forming knowledge and insight about external reality, we distance ourselves from this fully tangible reality. It has often been emphasized: we move away to a kind of gray inner experience, to a thin “ethereal”.

Now the spiritual researcher has to take the opposite path to that of the researcher in external nature in the way described. The researcher of external nature has this nature before him and he finally arrives at the content of his knowledge, his science, which lives in his soul. The spiritual researcher must start from what lives in the soul, and everything that can be called knowledge, science, inner imagination, inner experience in thoughts and concepts, which is the result and consequence of external research, is the preparation for the spiritual researcher. The spiritual researcher cannot start from something that is given to him externally; he must start from the inner, powerful experience, and that which is otherwise the content of science is only the preparation for that which the spiritual researcher can bring to life in his soul when he turns his gaze away, turns his attention away from all outer sense perceptions, from all that the intellect can think under the influence of outer reality.

The preparation for his research lies in what the spiritual researcher experiences here, when he excludes external reality and directs his gaze purely to inner thoughts and imaginative experiences, when he turns his attention entirely to his inner being. What happens in his inner being is what it is all about. What is going on in his mind, the extent of his inner experiences, can all be characterized by saying: The path of the spiritual researcher is through the concentration of thought. But this concentration of thought must be imagined as something quite different from what is called concentrated thinking in ordinary life. Not that it is something different, it is basically only an intensification of what we otherwise also call attention in our external life; but it is an unlimited intensification of this attention.

The point is that one takes up images, which initially need have nothing to do with an external reality, that one takes up symbolic images, ideas, not in order to reflect on these ideas as such in terms of their content, but in order to concentrate all the soul's inner forces, which would otherwise be scattered over external reality, onto one inner point, the point that one has steered into the center of the soul's life with an image. Then one is completely within oneself; but one is not calm within oneself. Then one is inwardly actively experiencing. Whoever continues such an inner concentration of thoughts for a sufficient length of time – a sufficient length of time does not mean a few hours, but weeks, years, in repeated inner activity – whoever continues this for a sufficient length of time, walks a path in his soul that ultimately leads him to experience a reality. Just as in ordinary observation one starts from reality and progresses to soul experience, so in spiritual research one starts from concentrated inner experiences and arrives at a new spiritual reality. This new spiritual reality cannot be made inward. What can be made inward is merely preparation for spiritual observation. This spiritual reality must approach man at the end of the path of preparation. While knowledge is otherwise acquired as a result of looking at external reality, in spiritual research reality is attained on the basis of inwardly working, inwardly active knowledge. No one can somehow inwardly do in the spirit what he then comes to. What he can do in the spirit is go the way that leads there.

What I am characterizing here is felt, for example, by a mind like that of the one I spoke of yesterday, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in terms of what he could already know, intuit, of the knowledge of real spiritual science. He spoke beautiful words in this regard:

The natural man is not able to rise to the supernatural by his own power, he must be raised to it by the power of the supernatural itself.

That is to say, the human being must approach the supernatural, and this supernatural must accept him. That is what it is about. From the ethereal, from the thin of the inner soul experience, we start and arrive at the full content of spiritual reality.

Of course, dear attendees, the objections that can be made from a time-consciousness against such spiritual scientific research are natural, I would say self-evident; in particular, the objection is self-evident that will be raised again and again that what the spiritual researcher experiences cannot have any general objective value, but that they are subjective experiences, that if a person wants knowledge, he must, in principle, define the limits of the cognitive faculty and admit that the supersensible is based on subjective experiences. This objection is very justified because it really applies to the beginning of the path, because the beginning of the path, as long as it is this preparation, involves inner struggles, inner battles, inner soul tragedy that are subjective, that basically only concern the person going through them. But it is quite another matter when one finally arrives at something that one does not evoke from one's own inner being, but which one encounters and which one accepts. Just as one can ascend a mountain by many different routes to reach the summit, but it is only from the summit that one can see all sides, so it is with the spiritual researcher: as long as the spiritual researcher is on his way, things only concern him personally; But when he has confronted spiritual reality, then he stands before an objective, before a real, which is supersensibly so full of content for the spiritual researcher, as the sensible is full of content for the outer observation.

But now there is one thing that must be taken into account as particularly characteristic when the spiritual researcher goes through the path just characterized. Let us recall once more what this path consists of: it consists in the fact that, with distraction of attention from all external sense world, with the most intense attention, increased to the unlimited, one only lives in perceptions and concepts that one's own soul can awaken in itself. In this way, one gradually enters into an inner life that has been intensified and concentrated in this way. Now the strange thing is: the more one succeeds in driving this inner concentration to a certain point, the more one comes to experience inner tension, in which one says to oneself: “You are now completely absorbed in what you have set out to do, you have forgotten your entire physicality and environment, you live only in your concentrated thoughts, the more you notice from a certain level on - because before this the inner thought life becomes stronger and stronger - you notice that this inner thought life undergoes an extinguishing in itself, it becomes less and less intense. And a peculiar experience occurs, which could be described as follows: It is as if the thought on which one has concentrated takes one with it with all one's soul forces and dissipates into the general ether of the world. This is the result of this tense, heightened, one might say technically conducted, increase in inner concentration and attention.

If you want to use an image, you could say that you have to take your inner concentration of thought so far for the purpose of spiritual research that the thought first becomes stronger and stronger and then, as it unfolds its life in the soul, it increases to such an extent that it dies and you, so to speak, die with it in your soul feeling. Thought must first die in the soul, if man is to be transported into the spiritual world.

When one has attained a certain level of spiritual research activity, one has, as it were, achieved what could be called an inner spiritual feeling and sensing in the world. The spiritual researcher knows at this moment, when the thought begins to die, that he is now entering a sphere of experience, of inwardly strong experience, where the thought ceases, but where the life forces are experienced in a concentrated way. The spiritual researcher knows that at this moment, with what he experiences inwardly, he is not within the confines of his brain; he knows this through the direct experience. He knows: You are now experiencing yourself outside of your body. And in this experience, which becomes intense, consciousness dies, so to speak. And in this dying, an inner experience occurs, an inner experience that is extraordinarily significant, that is shattering when it is experienced for the first time. The experience that occurs is this: that one gets a feeling: living in the spiritual world is something completely different than living in the outer physical world.

And here it is necessary to emphasize that it is so difficult to disseminate correct concepts about the spiritual world because most people, according to the currently prevailing conception, actually have to imagine this world differently than it is. While one faces the physical-sensual world in such a way that one can say: It is out there, you look at it, you take it in through your senses and your mind, is it with the spiritual world and everything that is of such a nature that it stands before you, so to speak, all thinking fades and something else occurs. It happens that you feel as if you have been taken in by a world, that you feel towards this world as you would feel towards the plant, the stone outside, at the moment when you could recognize them: you are now being taken up by the knowledge, the imagination of a human being. Just as our thoughts, streaming in from the outside world, feel accepted by us, so the person who, in true spiritual research, with his whole being, feels the imagination within him dying, is absorbed in the New, feels accepted by a world. That is what matters.

The way we grasp our thoughts and accept them and then have them within us is how we experience the destiny of thoughts, so to speak. We ourselves become thoughts, we can say, and feel as if we were a thought and were grasped by supersensible beings, as otherwise our thoughts are grasped by us, and as if we were now resting in these supersensible beings. We are within these beings. When we come to this stage, we realize that an invisible world is above us, but that we cannot experience it as some imagine it; rather, it must be experienced in such a way that everything [thought-like] ceases and we enter into a supersensible world. For a moment it is as it would be for someone who strained his face and hearing harder and harder, and with increased face and hearing, became blind and deaf. So one becomes, as it were, blind and deaf to the presentation of thoughts, because one feels: You are now accepted by the spiritual world. Not: one experiences, but one feels, one is being experienced. It must be emphasized again and again: the ascent into the spiritual world has a character opposite to that of penetrating into the outer, sensual world.

It is not about penetrating into a ghostly world, but about an experience in a different sense than the ordinary experience. That is what it is about. So you are inside, - that is all you know at this stage - so you are inside a spiritual world. So you know: spiritual beings hover over this sensual world, as it were, and you can be taken up by them, as your thought is taken up by you. But one feels as if one were blind and deaf, for thinking, knowledge, has died. Ordinary science must first die before one can penetrate into the spiritual world. One feels as if one were blind and deaf, but groping in the spiritual world. The life forces that one feels within are strained, and one feels groping.

But one does know what it means to be outside one's body. The fact that one is aware of this brings about a change in the entire human experience. And this change can best be characterized by drawing attention to something that has often been pointed out from this place, namely the changing consciousness of the human being – for every normal person probably within 24 hours – the changing consciousness of sleeping and waking. By going through what has been described, the spiritual researcher learns to recognize through direct inner experience that the human being's actual inner being can be experienced in and of itself, above all physical aspects. He learns to recognize – by experiencing the strength that in himself, he learns to recognize that he can live through the experiences that would otherwise remain completely unconscious in sleep, that are unconsciously experienced in the human soul, with the power that he has thus gained.

Not that the spiritual researcher does not need sleep; he does need it. But he can artificially induce states in which he is able to experience as otherwise only happens to a person from falling asleep to waking up. For the spiritual researcher knows, by experiencing the following: You are outside your body, you develop an activity that is not dependent on the brain and nervous system, and he comes to understand through actual experience what is experienced from falling asleep to waking up. He comes to recognize that in fact the human being's actual spiritual-soul entity is outside of the body, that when a person falls asleep, he leaves his body with his spiritual-soul entity and when he wakes up, the spiritual-soul entity once again enters the body.

But now the spiritual researcher, by means of experiential knowledge, can recognize what is actually outside the body during sleep. He can also see from this spiritual-soul that has been illuminated, from this spiritual-soul that is, as it were, revealed before the spiritual eyes, he can recognize why the soul is unconscious from falling asleep to waking up, why darkness and gloom spread around it. From the moment of falling asleep until waking up, something lives in the soul that, as already mentioned, can be perceived by the spiritual researcher. It can be called the desire, ever present in the soul during the entire physical experience between birth and death, to return to the physical body. This life of desire always fills the soul in the ordinary experience between falling asleep and waking up. The soul always wants to return to its body and, through this will, feels itself with this will, and this experience, this development of this desire, clouds what would otherwise be there in the spiritual-soul experience between falling asleep and waking up. And only when the soul submerges into the physical body, when this desire is fulfilled, can it develop its supersensible activity and then it stimulates the physical body so that it becomes a mirror of external expression.

In that the spiritual researcher learns to recognize what can actually be experienced in the soul, in the soul free of the body, he perceives directly that which otherwise extinguishes in sleep. But with the power he has gained, he is able to illuminate and clarify the soul's spiritual content. But if man wants to achieve this illumination and clarification, then something else must occur in the spiritual researcher that characterizes him. For we have seen that basically the intensity of thinking fades, basically man feels mentally blind and deaf and only as if groping in the spiritual world. What must be added in order for him to enter into spiritual vision and hearing again lies in another sphere. Something must be developed that is the second element of spiritual research, which otherwise remains dormant in life. And to realize what must be developed, one can direct one's spiritual gaze to the following.

Consider what is usually called fate. How do we stand in its current? We stand in it in such a way that - well, as we often say - the events of fate approach us by chance and are experienced by us. We feel separated in our inwardness from what befalls us as experiences of fate. In order to fulfill the second element, the spiritual researcher must take a completely different approach to these fateful experiences than the ordinary person does. To understand this, just look back at what you experienced in your youth, at the vicissitudes of fate, and then look at yourself today, at what you actually are in relation to your true self. You can realize that you would not be what you are, would not be in every detail, if you had not already experienced this or that stroke of fate, good or bad, in this ordinary life. That you take this or that approach at a certain moment, that you relate to it in this or that way, depends on the fact that you have experienced this or that in your destiny. If you really ask without prejudice, what are you actually? Then you have to say to yourself: you are the result of your destiny. The content of the soul, what you can do or want, is the result of your destiny.

What lies in these thoughts can now be used, as it were, for another soul exercise. The first soul exercise has made us strong in concentrated thinking; the second is one that relates to the feeling will, to the inner soul impulses, to what one actually is as an I. And one can call what the spiritual researcher has to go through as a second exercise, initially, meditation on the vicissitudes, well, let's say initially of one's own destiny. Not in theory, but in real inner experience, one realizes how one has actually become what one is now, by going through this or that, one grows into one's destiny, one grows together with it. You grow out of your ordinary self, which believes in coincidence, you weave yourself into the stream of destiny, become estranged from your own inner self, merge into destiny and know yourself flowing with destiny.

When this inner meditation bears fruit, then something very special occurs in the mind of the spiritual researcher. Namely, the spiritual researcher can notice when he has gone through this path of concentrated thinking, through the dying away of thinking, the feeling into higher, supersensible entities - which, as it were, absorb him, as we absorb a thought. When the spiritual researcher has gone through all this, then he experiences within himself, or rather observes within himself, something like an inner protest, like an inner opposition to what he himself has done with his entire spiritual research journey. And this protest can be expressed in such a way that one says: the spiritual researcher, through his concentrated thinking, arrives at a point where he feels that he has dissolved with his soul life. And he struggles against this dissolving. This inner protest, which is again a harrowing experience, lessens, stops, is overcome when the exercise of taking hold of fate is done, when one becomes immersed in fate. And just as one can say that the thought dies in concentrated thinking when it has reached its highest energy, so one can say: one perceives by entering into the stream of fate, one perceives how the will itself, which is otherwise within the human being, is grasped by the stream of fate. While we usually see the external world of fate as something standing opposite us and our will as something within us, we experience our own will in what we encounter as fate. We learn to see in our will that through which we shape ourselves in life. Our will is awakened and gradually pours over our entire destiny. When one has undergone such an exercise for a long time, one experiences to the full what the second element of spiritual research development is. The second element is the awakening of the sleeping will in our destiny. We wake up ourselves outside of us in the stream of our destiny, we enter with what we are into what we otherwise call the external.

By going out of ourselves in this way, new soul forces arise in us. This can be characterized by saying that whereas we used to kill our thinking life by concentrated thinking and then felt blind and deaf in the spiritual life, only groping our way as we entered the supersensible worlds, we now begin to live in these worlds as a self, we begin to feel a strong, higher consciousness in higher beings. We now feel not only accepted as a thought would feel accepted in us, remaining unconscious in us, but we enter a world, into supersensible entities, become like their thoughts, but in such a way that we are living thought-beings in them, developing self-awareness in them.

And with this higher consciousness, something occurs that may now be called an expansion of the soul's power, which is already present in ordinary life, but which in ordinary life extends only to the ordinary experiences of memory. We remember what we have experienced in ordinary life from a certain point in time after our birth; we can recall these experiences in our soul, we can also say to ourselves: If we could not remember, we would not be what we are. We owe our memory to what we appear to be. We must be able to look back on our lives. This ability to look back on our lives is expanded and intensified by the meditation on fate, but it must be taken so far that we really feel in our deeds our fate as we otherwise feel in our body. Then a new power of the soul arises for us outside of our body, which goes back behind our birth. We now, as we do through the memory of the events since a certain point after the birth, envisage events that lie before birth, that we have lived through in a spiritual life that preceded our birth, and we know that, as we make ourselves what we are in ordinary life, through what we have already gone through in this life, that we have made ourselves out of the spiritual world, through those prenatal experiences, into the whole man of destiny and temperament that we are.

In other words, through meditation on destiny, we expand our soul power into the power of remembering a life that we have experienced outside the body. And with this experience, which we have had outside of the body, we simultaneously gain insight into the entire nature of this life outside of the body that we have undergone before birth. It is simply one of the experiences that this expanded memory has that it sees through why it has sought out this earthly existence through birth. It has sought it out because it must incorporate this soul life as an effect of earlier earthly experiences into this one, and it arises as an immediate inner experience, which from the marked point of development is experienced in the same way as color is for the sensual person, it arises what can be called : the realization of repeated earthly lives, that realization of the complete life of a person that allows him to be portrayed as undergoing repeated earthly lives and, between death and rebirth, lives in the spiritual world over and over again, in which the experiences on earth are processed.

It cannot be said that this spiritual experience, of which this is spoken, this spiritual science, has not always been dormant in the best minds of human development; our time only seems to be called upon to highlight what has been dormant in the best minds as real knowledge. If you want to be a truly enlightened person, you can look to a man like Lessing, admire him and say: Well, he has achieved extraordinary things, but even at the end of his life, like his spiritual testament, he also wrote “The Education of the Human Race”, and in this ‘Education of the Human Race’ he also put forward the hypothesis that man not only lives on the physical earth once, but goes through this life in repeated earthly lives. There he has grown old, one can say, there he has already become weak. Of course, one can feel very enlightened in such an assessment; but as natural as such an assessment may still be in our time, it is no different from the progress of humanity than the judgment that was held before Copernicus: the earth stands still, the sun moves around it and must move, and that was brought to Copernicus as a prejudice.

The prejudice that is repeatedly asserted against the idea of repeated earthly lives is no different than this prejudice, which lay dormant in people for a long, long time. And just as scientific progress has defeated all prejudices against it, so will spiritual scientific progress defeat all prejudices that are asserted against it. Lessing will be proved right with his work when he says: Should this hypothesis of repeated lives on earth - for spiritual science it is no longer a hypothesis, but something that can be experienced in the sense of today's discussions - should it therefore, because it is found at the bottom of the knowledge of the oldest of the primitive peoples, because it has arisen in the human mind before it was darkened and distracted by the sophistry of school, should it therefore be rejected, because it is opposed to the repeated lives on earth today? - should it be less valuable than another because it is found at the bottom of the knowledge of the oldest of the primitive peoples, because it has arisen in the human mind before it was darkened and distracted by the sophistry of school? One will recognize that what Lessing said - really what I yesterday called brave [science] - that this can really be raised to the rank of genuine science.

Then, when what has been hinted at here is truly grasped by people, then people will think differently about the fateful question than they do today. Then they will take what fate brings as intimately related to their being, then they will know that they are placed into the higher spiritual world by fate as conscious beings. With fate, people will grow together in their entire world view; fate will be seen as something that is there to lend a higher self to man, just as our body gives us the ordinary self of everyday life that we need to be a personality.

And then, when the human being has grown together with his destiny, little by little it will no longer seem incomprehensible to him what spiritual science has to say about death and its riddles. It is not without reason that the experience attained by the spiritual researcher, when on the one hand he grasps concentrated thinking and feels it dying away and when on the other hand he finds the awakening of that which what otherwise only lives in the human being in the whole stream of fate — the experience he undergoes has not been called in vain in the true mystical worldviews: approaching the gate of death.

For in fact, what the spiritual researcher experiences, even if not as direct reality, is in the image of experiencing death. When the spiritual researcher, by means of his two elementary preparatory experiences, is able to clarify and illuminate the spiritual and soul life within himself, he experiences it in such a way that he has to say to himself: 'You have left your physical body, you are looking at this physical body, you know what it means to live outside the body'. What the spiritual researcher experiences in his mind's eye when he approaches the gate of death in recognition is what every human being experiences when he passes through the gate of death: the body takes itself away from the soul and spirit, as it were. And through this experience, what is otherwise always present in the soul and spirit is extinguished.

For the spiritual researcher recognizes: When the human being is outside of his body from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up, he still has a craving for his body. He recognizes at the same time, by approaching the gate of death in the sense indicated, how through the actual experience of passing through the gate of death, how through this actual experience of death, through this dissolution, through this acceptance of the body, this desire for the body is gradually eradicated in the soul. And as it is extinguished, it is as if a mist permeating the body were to leave the body and it were to become light. Man is truly absorbed into the sphere of the beings that are otherwise supersensible and invisible; man is accepted as thoughts are by man, and dying means being accepted by the spiritual beings.

But this moment of death, as it is experienced when the person looks back on the taking away of the body, is an experience that has a consequence. Just as the spiritual researcher experiences an expansion of his memory as he grows into his destiny, so the human being in general experiences an expansion of his memory when he passes through the gate of death, looking back on the life he has lived in the body. What presents itself at the moment of death triggers certain soul forces within him when he is accepted by the higher beings that embrace him.

And now something special occurs. To understand this, we have to draw attention to something. How do we have this self-awareness in our ordinary lives, this kind of consciousness, whereby we address ourselves as I? From the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, we do not address ourselves as I; we have to submerge into our spatial body in order to address ourselves as I. Basically, it is the case that every morning, when we submerge into our body and use our eyes, ears and other senses, we first become aware that we are an I. It is in our spatial body that we attain self-awareness. The spiritual researcher can observe this in himself by going outside of his body and going through all the struggles of deadening and suppressing the desire for the body; he knows what higher powers of remembrance he must use to be a self, how he must grow together with his destiny. What he experiences is otherwise experienced through the sight of leaving the body.

And another power comes into play: we can no longer enter a body. But what happens now is the memory that we were in the body. That is the significant thing. We would not come to an ego [consciousness] in the time between death and a new birth if we were merely thoughts of the higher beings, so to speak; only because we can always look back into our past earthly life, because we have a time body instead of the space body in the ordinary life after death, only because of this do we have self-awareness. In perpetually looking back at our temporal life, we remember this temporal life and thereby ignite our self-awareness. While in ordinary life our self-consciousness is kindled in the spatial body, after death it is kindled by what we call the heightened memory of what we were in the time between birth and death. Instead of space, time enters into the circumstances described after death. Thus we see how death, by its very nature, has an awakening power for the supersensible being of man, how what we experience in death gives us the ability to develop self-awareness after death. Just as thought dies in us and our self must be kindled by merging with fate, so man will kindle his self-awareness after death by looking back on his life on earth.

In this way, we gain a very real idea of what is otherwise called the soul and spiritual inner life in man; in this way, we come to a feeling for the living, soul and spiritual core of the human being, the core of the being that Johann Gottlieb Fichte, as far as he could in his time, felt as [I shared from him yesterday]. In addition to yesterday's passage, today I would like to add the other one where he, in his writing on the destiny of the scholar, talks about how the soul feels when it is truly able to grasp its spiritual-soul essence, grounded in the eternal super-sensible. There Fichte says: “And if you all, rocks and mountains, that you have piled up, fall down on me...” /gap in the text].

The task of spiritual science is to elevate to the level of scientific knowledge that which has been sensed by the best minds. Now one can say: Of course, not everyone in our time can go through such experiences that lead them to an immediate grasp of the spiritual world, as described. But that is not at all necessary. These inner experiences are necessary so that what can be said about the spiritual world is brought up out of the abyss into which it would otherwise be sunk. These powers are necessary for the bringing up; but when what has been said about the connection between human destiny and death is formed into ideas and brought into the language of human conceptions, then these soul experiences not be necessary, but one recognizes approximately what has been brought to light by the spiritual researcher, so through the inner ability to perceive the truth as correct, as one perceives mathematical judgments when they are formulated and presented to us. For it must be said again and again: Every human being, without exception, is called upon to go through what has been described today in order to see the spiritual world directly and to recognize the human being in his or her eternity. But not every human being needs to do so. Every human being, however, can truly recognize and correctly understand what spiritual research says, provided they do not throw obstacles and prejudices in their own way. It is not contradicted by the fact that today the majority of people still say of the results of spiritual research: It is a vain fantasy, pure nonsense, the brainchild of a few thinkers. The human being does not decide on the basis of reasons in reality, does not prove in reality, but the human being decides according to habitual thinking. And today's thinking habits are the result of that thinking, that imagining, which had the very purpose of penetrating into the outer, sensual reality, which became accustomed to adhering to this outer sensuality.

It is natural today that the majority of people, precisely because they have risen to this natural thinking, cannot approach the law of development. But as natural as this is, the time is coming when the bow of materialistic thinking will be so taut on one side that it will have to break on the other. And everywhere there are signs that humanity is about to grasp spiritual scientific thinking in the same enthusiastic way that it has embraced natural scientific thinking. Today, all kinds of objections are still being raised against spiritual scientific thinking; but I would like to say that the best minds in human development have also had the right feeling about this. And Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whom I tried to present yesterday as an exemplary guiding genius, has, as far as he could in his time, refuted an objection that is so easily raised against the presentation and consideration of the spiritual world, with the following words. He says: “The doctrine of a spirit, by no means arbitrarily assumed, in whose higher power we all live, which unintelligent people believe to have been sufficiently struck when they call it mysticism, this is by no means enthusiasm; for it goes to the root of the matter, and indeed to the most intimate spirit, which is to animate all action. It would only become enthusiasm if it were added that this view emerges from a mysterious source of light that is granted only to a few chosen ones. In which approach the actual mysticism consists. If this pretense is pride in sensual [gap in the text]."

As I said, Fichte did not yet have spiritual science, but he had the seeds, and by developing these seeds, spiritual science comes into being – through a science that does not appeal to mere passive external observation, but to the inwardly active powers of the soul, through a science that wants to be experienced science. But that which this spiritual science wants to bring to humanity should also be a real force for the future and progress of humanity, a truly real force. Through spiritual science, fate and death will be placed in the context of life as belonging to the whole human experience. Just as we look at the processes of external nature and see how what the human being is in this external nature is formed at the highest peak of these processes, so humanity will gradually come to understand, precisely through spiritual science, that what the human being is in his innermost spiritual-soul core of being, what he is in that through which he is connected to the eternal, that this rests in the forces that otherwise confront us externally incomprehensibly in fate and in the riddle of death.

And then one looks at this spiritual-soul core of the human being as at a real one; one sees the outer life not as the cause, but as the creature of this real spiritual-soul core within the human being. One sees how what connects the human being to the eternal forms his bodily exterior, shapes everything one sees in the outer life. And then, through spiritual science, those riddles of life that are otherwise so difficult to solve do not appear as riddles, but as something that sustains life, that gives strength in the blissful moments of life, but also comfort in the bitter moments of life. Therefore, because this is so, I do not want to shrink back at this moment from stating, as it were, a special result of spiritual research, which may interest us particularly now.

We see people dying in the prime of their lives; we see the outer body detach itself from the person – compressed into a short moment in time – how the outer body detaches itself from the soul, which we must assume would otherwise have had years of strength to prevail over this physical life. And as we contemplate the essence of the human being as revealed to us by this spiritual-scientific portrayal, we ask ourselves: What is it like for a person who lays down his physical body in the prime of life, that is, in the spiritual world, where the experience of self comes about through memory? What does this early death mean for the core of a human being who would still have had the strength to permeate physical life for many years? How does fate present itself here? I believe that we can best come to terms with this if we compare those who sacrifice themselves for their fatherland - which current events demand - with those who sacrifice their body, with an ascetic who also sacrifices the physical in a certain way.

I have often pointed out here that spiritual science, when it is properly understood, is not an enemy of life, does not lead away from life, but precisely because it grasps the full reality, is life-promoting, that the spiritual researcher, precisely because he points to the spiritual world, wants to say: In these spiritual sources lie powers which enrich life, which would be poorer without them and without the directing of thoughts to them. Spiritual research does not lead a person to despise the life of the body, but to spiritualize it, to control the body. In this way, however, it is also able to indicate the wrongness of a false asceticism, the asceticism that believes it is living its way up into the spiritual through the killing or paralysis of the body, which is caused by certain powers of the spiritual and soul. Of course, one attains all kinds of things by mortifying or paralyzing the body, just as everything that happens in the world has consequences. One attains many things; but what does one attain through such asceticism? True spiritual experience seeks to penetrate into the spiritual worlds; false asceticism impoverishes life by only developing what is already present in the spiritual and soul core of our being, because it does not ascend to new powers, but kills and paralyzes the body through already existing powers. What does one attain through this? One attains a certain strengthening of inner powers, the possibility of experiencing the soul-spiritual core of one's being in a richer, more meaningful way. But one attains this in and through the body, even if one attains it by killing and paralyzing the body, but precisely by overcoming these bodily powers in the body. But as a result, what the in a sense wrong ascetic attains, refers to his personal, individual life, that when he goes through the gate of death, he then has a stronger soul-spiritual core, that he uses all the powers he has acquired to look in a personal, individual way at what his life on earth was. He acquires a heightened sense of self-awareness for his own personality, and, as it were, cultivates a supersensible egoism through his asceticism.

On the other hand, let us consider - I cannot help but say that I would like to draw attention to the objective results of spiritual research without any sympathy or antipathy - let us consider the person who is not an ascetic but who sacrifices his body, sacrifices for his country and people, sacrifices in the prime of youth and carries within him a spiritual-soul core that could live in the body for a long time; he experiences, through all the circumstances surrounding his death, namely through the circumstances that make his death a conscious death of the victim, a strengthening of these inner forces that lead to self-awareness . But now, after death, these strengthened powers are not merely strengthened when looking back at one's own body, they are not merely a strengthening of personal self-awareness, but rather a strengthening of the powers that are less inclined to be bound to bodily life; the strengthened powers are, as it were, diverted from bodily life. The self-awareness that is strengthened in the ascetic more in relation to the supersensible-egoistic, is strengthened in the person sacrificing himself on the battlefield for a great cause in such a way that the volitional impulses, the flowing impulses of feeling, are strengthened. Everything that is less selfish is strengthened. And so it happens that those forces that such a person brings through the gate of death have strengthened the selfless in him, and these remain with the national community for which the person in question sacrificed himself, or with the cause for which the person in question sacrificed himself. The ascetic basically spends the strengthened powers he has acquired on himself; the one who sacrifices himself in the prime of youth on the battlefield or for the greater good spends what fate demands of him for the sake of humanity, for the human community.

This is also something that gives us answers to the riddles of fate and death in a specific case, and this is what spiritual science will bring in general: it will create a worldview in the consciousness of human beings that comes to terms with the events between which the human soul, emerging from the dark mysteries of the world, must now walk. Certainly, everything that man can experience about the riddle of death and fate, he experiences in his entire life. All live in the spiritual, in the supersensible world, when they go through the gate of death; but as everything happens and would happen in nature outside, even if man knew nothing about it, it is still necessary for human progress that what happens outside in nature is taken into knowledge; because that brings man forward. Processes, objective realities, facts are all that the spiritual researcher explores, but what takes place in the spiritual world must become knowledge. And just as nature entered into progress in a moment of development, so spiritual knowledge must enter into cultural development from our time onwards.

When man assimilates into his knowledge that which exists without him, he advances his race. It can be said that anyone who has a sense for such spiritual knowledge will naturally do their part to promote progress in the sense of this spiritual science. I said with the first words of our reflection today that what is happening in the East and West makes it particularly important for us to ask about the riddle of fate and death. And if we look at it in such a way that we can say this about the connection between fate and death with the sacrificial life of the one who sacrifices himself, then we can say: We live in a time in which a large number of spiritual-mental cores of being, which could still awaken life, could promote physical life, go up into the spiritual world. There they will be.

In physical science, one speaks of the conservation of forces, of the fact that no force is lost; through spiritual science, one will increasingly speak of the conservation of spiritual forces, of their not being lost. These powers are there, these powers belong to the world's effectiveness. Not only the souls of those who go through the gate of death in a sacrificial death live on in the supersensible world, but what lives on as a sum of special powers is what has gone out of the bodies as soul nuclei and what could still have lived in these bodies. And when we spoke yesterday of the survival of the leader-geniuses, not only through tradition but in a real sense, as if these leader-geniuses radiated something into the descendants of their people that lives in the ranks of this people when this people is called upon to act, we can also say the same of all these spiritual and soul-like cores of being that had to prematurely complete their lives under the demands of the time.

Doesn't it seem to us as if the events of the immediate present, as if this most terrible struggle that humanity has experienced, is not the beginning of something completely new? I believe that anyone who feels the power and violence of what is currently happening will have to say to themselves: It is the introduction of something that must come as something completely new, in which those who will not have been forced to leave life and experience for the physical world, who will enter the future without having attained death and without the pain of being wounded, will participate. But this time that is to come will also be marked by all the forces that have passed into the spiritual world in the way just described. One will have to say: Whatever may come, the forces that have ascended from the physical world into the supersensible world without being exhausted will speak in the souls of the survivors and those born later in such a way that they will appear as challenges.

In a sense, one will have to say: Those who look up to these forces will demand a completely new life, and those who look at the signs of the times, at what can be said from the feelings of spiritual research about the signs of the times, if one considers this properly, will say: What is required of the living and dead, is that the materialistic, purely naturalistic view of the world is joined by a living grasp of the spirit and the spirit permeating human deeds, and that what goes up to the spiritual world in the form of unspent human cores will understand these forces, what is happening below. Only when that which is happening below feels the duty to cultivate the spirit, only that will be understood by those who, so to speak, have newly fertilized the field in which the survivors have to work with their blood, have newly revived it through their death.

And I mean more than an image when I say: spiritual science will [in the future be a confrontation] with these sacrificed forces, will be able to be felt as an obligation towards the sacrifices that are now being made and that will only have meaning if they usher in a new age. Therefore, it is as if all those who now pass into the other world through sacrificial death speak the word in a very special way, as a warning to humanity about a spiritual awakening, which Robert Prutz once spoke to Jacob Grimm, perhaps on much lesser occasions, with reference to [gap in text] relations /gap in the text] – now it is as if it were sounding as a reminder of those forces that have prematurely passed into the spiritual world through sacrificial death and are allowed to sound to urge on the fulfillment of duties with regard to spiritual life, [gap in the text].

It is for the coming generation,
It is for the dawn of the future.
It is for freedom and for the right,
It is for life and for death.

Yes, what can be achieved in the present through spiritual science is what counts for the future dawn, and what can be explored through spiritual science about the riddle of fate and death is what counts. It is not just about the life that can be perceived by the senses, it is about life and death and the life that emerges from death, and about death, which itself awakens life.

Dear attendees, for some time now, I have had the honor of speaking here in this city about topics in the humanities. Since our friends have also requested such reflections this year, I will try to offer such reflections here in these fateful times. But it will be understandable, dear attendees, that at least today's introductory reflection is directly related to what is happening in our fateful times, which touches our soul and our heart so deeply. In our time, we do not want to avert our attention from all the immense sacrifices that have to be made, the duties and the high demands that this time places on us. We do not want to say a word that cannot be spoken with this nuance of feeling and that can be spoken with certainty to those those who are fighting on the fields, where today it is not spoken by words, where it is spoken by actions, by suffering and blood, by the commitment of the whole person, one would not want to speak a word that is not spoken to those in spirit who have to stand up in these fields for the great events of the present!

For today's lecture, I have chosen a question, esteemed attendees, that may arise when one allows oneself to be influenced by the many things that confront the Central European people today from all sides, one might say not only from Europe but from the world: The question is raised: Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”?

But – and this is the point of my remarks – my concern is not so much to answer this question in front of you here in great detail, but rather to show how this question arises in our present day; or rather, how it is possible that this question arises. For it may be [made] clear from my remarks that it is not up to us here in the middle of Europe to answer this question, but it is very much up to us to feel this question so deeply, for coming times, like a warning to history, to feel it from the core of our Central European being.

It is said of the great battles fought by the ancestors of the Central European peoples and the peoples of antiquity that the peoples went into battle singing, which were meant for the great ancestors, [who] were therefore meant for the great ancestors because these peoples had the deep-seated conviction that the spirit of the ancestors was directly present in the atmosphere in which the peoples breathed. In such a way, wherever human feeling was originally incorporated into the world view, the question of inheritance, which is now so much discussed in material science, was always understood in the spiritual sense. If one speaks of heredity in materialistic science as if only the characteristics of living beings were inherited by their physical descendants through physical means, then one must, where the great moral and spiritual events take place in the course of human development, one must speak of the fact that not only are the qualities of the ancestors present in the following times, but that the spiritual and moral aspects are also alive and well among the descendants, and that what has been passed down from the ancestors to the culture of the descendants is something that the later generations have to do.

Of course, we cannot talk here about all the ancestors, including those of our own time, who come into consideration when we are dealing with German, Central European nature. We would like to highlight two spiritual ancestors of German development, Schiller and Fichte.

One of these personalities comes directly from the country in which we find ourselves here; the other connects original German intellectual life from more northern regions, also in personal and human friendship, with what the great Württemberger Schiller achieved; the other personality we want to choose today to let their impulses work on us a little more sensitively, is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. And, dear honored attendees, I have not chosen this starting point to stir up sentimental feelings, that is far from my mind, but because I believe that there is indeed something like a spiritual magic that emanates from the last moments of the earthly lives of these two spiritual heroes. For this reason, not for sentimental reasons, we can look back on the last moments of Schiller and Fichte's earthly lives through the intimate way of contemplating German spirit, and I would say with such familiarity, especially with these two personalities, who spent their soul in the physical human body.

The younger Voß tells us what Schiller's last days and last moments were like. There he stands before us, this death of Schiller, this death of which we are convinced when we look at the course of Schiller's life, that despite having occurred early, it occurred so late only because Schiller's strong soul, because his powerful spiritual impulses wrested this death from the decaying body over the years! And we can follow him from the descriptions we have - this Schiller - of how he is still present in the last days, even spiritually and emotionally, how his body already bears the marks of death. We follow him into this hour of death according to the descriptions of Voß and with deeply moved hearts we follow how Schiller's spirit, fighting with the darkening forces of the body, repeatedly looks through the once so fiery eyes; how he then let himself be - Schiller - his youngest young child, how he, from the depths of his soul, through his spirited eyes that have now died in death, turns his last glance to this little child, as if he had something important to say to him; how he then returns the child, turns away, turns his face to the wall. We, the honored attendees, get the feeling that we have to identify with this child to some extent. The person who described this scene says: “It was as if Schiller still wanted to say to this child, ‘I couldn't be enough of a father to you; I still had so much to do for you’.”

One would like to say: the whole German nation can feel this way, as Schiller's child, and can relate these words to itself. Schiller died as if he still had much, much to say to his people. And the feeling arises from this, from contemplating such a scene, as it is necessary for this German nation to immerse itself in the impulses that emerged from Schiller's spiritual power and that are to be taken up in every age in order to to the goals of human evolution in the way that the German people are predisposed to do: to bring forth more and more of the fruits that were contained in the blossoms that Schiller once gave them.

And when we look at the other personality, at Johann Gottlieb Fichte's last days, we might say that the contemplation of his last days penetrates us just as deeply, just as directly into our hearts and souls. He often considered – Fichte, the great philosopher of humanity and at the same time the great philosopher of his people – whether he should take a direct part in the great struggle for Germany's freedom that had to be fought in his last years, whether he should take a direct part in this great struggle as a fighter. He then believed that he could achieve more through his mental strength than through physical strength. But Fichte's wonderful and equally talented wife devoted herself to caring for the sick and brought the military hospital fever home to him. He had to care for his wife. She recovered, but the illness passed to Fichte. And so, in a sense, he became an indirect victim of the German struggle for freedom.

But now he stands before us, the man who, out of the strength of his will, gave birth to a world of the spirit, as he was in his last moments. His thoughts were focused only on what had been achieved by the German armies fighting in the west. And when he had to lie down and the feverish dreams mingled with the ideas that had been so energetically clear throughout his entire life, these feverish dreams were filled with images of the battles he heard about; he, the philosopher, felt himself in the midst of the fighters. The philosophical thoughts that he had felt sprouting in his soul immediately merged with these, one might say, so real, in relation to the real phenomena of the time, and the philosopher saw himself, even in his feverish thoughts, deeply connected with what was moving his time.

His son approached his deathbed and a medicine was brought to him. He felt so abandoned in his feverish dreams, so united with the great task of his time, that he said, “I do not need any medicine,” and pushed the medicine back with his hand, “because I feel that I will recover.” He recovered – albeit to his death – but his spirit lives among us. And, as it may seem, one gets a good insight into the nature and essence of the people they now call a “barbarian people” if one turns one's gaze a little to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. At the time when the German people had to fight for their recognition from the depths of their humiliation, it was Johann Gottlieb Fichte who, not only from a theoretical-philosophical basis, but also from the connection he felt between his own soul and the soul of the German people, sought to provide clarity for himself and this people about this German people's very essence.

And we are immediately pointed to one character trait, of this people in its deepest essence, when we consider how Fichte, at one of the most difficult times for the German spirit, held his significant “Speeches to the German Nation,” and how he made three questions the starting point of his reflections. And we are strangely touched by these three questions that Fichte raised in his “Speeches to the German Nation” at the time. The first is: “Whether it is true or not true that there is a German nation and that its continued existence in its peculiar and independent essence is now in danger?”

Today, esteemed attendees, we hardly want to raise this question again, given what the German essence has become, especially through the Schiller-Fichte period, but the final sentence still goes deep into our hearts; and we too can say of our present: “whether this nation in its peculiar and independent essence is currently in danger?” The second question is: “Whether it is worth the effort to maintain it or not?” The answer is given by what the German spirit achieved in the nineteenth century for the development of the world. The third question, which Fichte develops out of his view of the world in particular, was this: “Whether there is any sure and effective means of this preservation, and what this means is?” Fichte then linked these three questions to the considerations that form the content of his “Discourses to the German Nation”.

World history is moving fast in our present times, and we must also count the past century as such. It is impossible, after all that has emerged in intellectual life from the seeds sown by the Schiller-Fichte period, to still profess, to directly profess the answers that Fichte himself gave to these questions. But all the more one feels related when one lets oneself be imbued by the Central European, by the German essence, with the way Fichte at the time gave his answer in his “Discourses to the German Nation”, namely to these three questions.

Fichte tried, so to speak, to put together this answer of his from two parts, first from a consideration of the essence of the German people. Because, after all, he wanted to speak to the German people. Fichte tried – admittedly, we will not try this in the Fichte way today, but we have to answer such questions [with the powers that we have in turn received from this Fichte way] – he tried to answer these questions by examining the peculiarities of the German language. He believed he could see how this language differs in its folklore from the languages of those peoples who were then in conflict with the German peoples. And he believed that he could deduce the essence of this from the fact that the German people, from the very roots of their development, had connected themselves with the source of their language, that they had developed this language directly from these roots of the language in an uninterrupted sequence and had remained with this language, and that they had embodied in this language what they had to develop out of their soul.

While the Romance peoples, according to Fichte, suffered a break in their development, they had gone along with that feeling and sensing embodied in the German language up to a certain point of this development, but then adopted a foreign language and now in a foreign linguistic body, live the mental peculiarities, whereby a break in development has occurred and what Fichte seeks in the meaning of the German essence, the original freshness and immediacy with which the national essence expresses itself, has been lost.

What we can fully acknowledge today is not what Johann Gottlieb Fichte believes he has gained in knowledge by this path, because this scientific consideration has passed over it, although these insights are true in their root, in one direction. But that is not what Fichte arrived at. Rather, what we still find fruitful today is the way in which Fichte approaches the essence of his people.

For what did Fichte want? He wanted to recognize the nature of the German people by visualizing this nature as emerging from the innermost, most secret roots of the human soul without any break in development. He believed that such a people were secure in their future, indeed in their eternity, that they were in uninterrupted development and in connection with the roots of inner life, as he repeatedly expressed, with the deepest essence of soul life.

But that, dearest present, is basically also the keynote of all the spiritual-scientific reflections that I have been allowed to present here in this hall for years. In this respect, this spiritual-scientific reflection is connected in its innermost essence with the nature of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

To what extent these roots of the human soul lead to spiritual knowledge – we will have to talk about this tomorrow, to what extent what is being sought here really points to Fichte in the true, right sense – only a few words will be said about this now.

From all the considerations that I have been allowed to present here, it has emerged that this spiritual science wants to be – in contrast to a merely external science that reflects on the senses and the mind bound to the brain – that this spiritual science wants to be a science that arises directly from the activity of the innermost human core, from the realization that this human core – which, in contrast to the mortal body, is the eternal and imperishable part in man, can be detached from the ordinary view of the outer senses and the intellect during the life of the body by means to be discussed tomorrow, so that it can be active free of the body and able to look into the spiritual world, so that one's own spiritual essence becomes an immediate reality.

In the deepest sense, spiritual science seeks to appeal to this human self-core, which stems from the source of spiritual life. In this respect, spiritual science is in complete contrast to science, which merely passively surrenders to external impressions and merely allows itself to be approached by what external observation and dissection of the intellect can yield in relation to this observation. Spiritual science stands in contrast to the mere passive reception of a science! Spiritual science wants to be - if the word may be used without arrogance - a valiant science that does not arise from passivity, but from activity, from appealing to the roots of life, from drawing on this innermost source of the roots of life.

And when these roots have been unearthed by appealing to spiritual vision, which confronts a spiritual world in such a way that it first produces the spiritual sense organs – to use a Goethean expression, the spiritual eyes and ears – out of itself, in order to direct them into the spiritual world and to perceive this spiritual world as real as physical eyes and ears can perceive the sensual world as real, as truly, then spiritual science may feel that it is a disciple of that which Johann Gottlieb Fichte sensed, that he willed.

And just when one considers, esteemed attendees, the way in which Fichte knew he was connected to the whole idiosyncrasy and nature of the German character, then one can know that the special dispositions for letting the spirit ascend to the spiritual heights really do exist in this German character. “What kind of philosopher one is” – Fichte once coined a phrase – “depends on what kind of person one is.” And he showed that he wanted to be a German human being. That is why he became the German philosopher that he was. So what kind of philosopher was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? The one who incessantly appealed from the mere world of the senses to the spiritual world and emphasized what was so beautifully expressed in his lectures at the University of Berlin in 1811 on the “Facts of Consciousness,” where he said: “What I have to say to you presupposes a special spiritual sense. Those who only want to accept what the external senses perceive will not understand me. For them, I speak as a single seer among a crowd of the blind-born.

Fichte's striving was directed towards the contemplation of the spirit, towards the experience of the spiritual weaving and essence in the world and in the human soul, and he felt that it welled up from the innermost stirrings of his people's lives. And so we see, not in the striving towards the spiritual, but in the deep disposition of this spiritual research and search with the innermost sources of the personality, to connect the innermost stirrings of human life; in this we see in Fichte the core, the expression of the Central European people, the German people.

Therefore, we find that Fichte emphasizes this concisely, which, as a worldview, must be based on the contemplation of the spirit. One needs only to say a few words, [dear attendees], about what Fichte used to express something of the innermost part of his research and striving, which he knew to be identical with the striving of the German national spirit; and one gets a characteristic of what is actually meant by it.

Thus Fichte's wonderful words, spoken by himself in the “Speeches to the German Nation”, are just as much a characteristic of the deepest human striving as they are of the deepest spiritual inclinations of his people, and he characterizes both when he says:

Time and eternity and infinity beholds them

– he means the philosophy that he sought [from the innermost roots of the vital impulses of his people] –

in its origin from the appearance and becoming visible of that One, which is in itself absolutely invisible and only in this invisibility of His is grasped, truly grasped.

All persistent existence that appears as non-spiritual life is only an empty shadow, cast out of seeing and mediated many times over by nothingness. In contrast to this, and through the recognition of this as a manyfold mediated nothingness, seeing itself is to rise to the recognition of its own nothingness and to the acknowledgment of the invisible as the only true.

But, dear honored attendees, Fichte did not express what he felt was the innermost essence of his quest only in such abstract words. Our spiritual scientific observations have often led us to show how spiritual science can establish in man a conviction based on good foundations, that the eternal core of being can be experienced in man, that consciously passes through the gate of death in order to enter into a new existence in the spiritual world after a time of purely spiritual experience. And spiritual science, which is an active science, which wants to be a brave science without arrogance, wants to be a science based on the active powers of the soul, does not speak in an indefinite way about life after death, it seeks to grasp the peculiarity of the human being in order to show how it progresses into the spiritual world. There it also knows how to speak of it, not merely in an abstract way, but in a concrete way, as the soul knows itself as living, as living can know through those cognitions that we will talk about tomorrow, which the soul can gain when it is outside the body, when it looks outside the body at this body, as if it were an external object, as if it were something external.

Just as the other science speaks of the things of the sensual world, of the things that are seen through the senses, so spiritual science speaks of that seeing that looks back from the spiritual world at the physical world and is able to bring it into a relationship.

Where Fichte attempts to approach the second part of the third question he raised, which is this means for the development of his people, he makes a peculiar remark. Fichte seeks this means in a radical national education that changes the view that lies before him. We cannot speak today - [since time truly does not permit it] - about the details of Fichte's ideas; but in a radical change of all educational principles, Fichte seeks to see that which, in his conviction, is most conducive to the development of his people. An education that does not merely go to externals, but goes to the deepest “roots of the stirrings of life”. And here Fichte feels, when he speaks of it, that this educational ideal differs greatly from what people, according to previous views, had to consider possible in education. He now puts himself in such a position as if he were looking from his horizon, into which his ideal really shines, and wants to look down on what he considers to be outdated [old educational principles]. And he now describes how that which has become obsolete appears to him. He describes it again in the characteristic words of his 'Addresses to the German Nation', words which are easily overlooked but which must strike a deep chord in anyone who has absorbed the more recent spiritual science. Fichte says:

Time appears to me

- the time, namely, in which the old educational principles have prevailed -,

seems to me like a shadow that stands over its corpses, from which an army of diseases has just driven it out, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already taken her in and are surrounding her with a warm breath of love; the secret voices of her sisters are already joyfully greeting her and welcoming her; she is already stirring and expanding within all directions, to develop the more magnificent form into which she is to grow; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or, if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

Now, dear readers, if we take the insights of spiritual science as they can be developed in our time, and if we try to symbolize, from the way spiritual science shows it, this way in which man looks back at his body after death, how he feels about this body, if one wants to create a symbol for something that one wants to evolve from, then one cannot develop a better symbol than that which Fichte has developed. Must we not say:

In the best that we seek, lives that which was absorbed in Fichte, which lived in its great ancestor. For was he not truly with the best that we seek, that must be sought in the transition of human development to a spiritual life? And does it not mean something that Fichte brings this search into intimate connection with the German essence? Precisely what the German essence is becomes so vivid when one - not in abstract theory, but in human, living feeling - takes in what Fichte gives in his “Addresses to the German Nation” and allows oneself to be somewhat influenced by it.

It is very remarkable that in Fichte we have one of the philosophical representatives of the German nation in a period of this nation's development, [at a time] when it was indeed facing a tough test, when it had already gone through centuries of development, questioning the innermost essence of this nation, posing the great inner question of destiny: “What is a German, actually?”

With that, dear attendees, we have something that is truly characteristic of the German character. One is English, French, Italian through that which is imprinted in one through national peculiarity. One is English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian at some point in time. But, as can be seen from Fichte's words, one is never German, one becomes German continuously; because Germanness stands before Germanness as a lofty ideal. And the German looks up humbly at this ideal and asks himself: How do I become German?

And so, in this becoming German, the impulses of becoming human basically come together. Part of developing what characterizes the German character is – one would almost like to say, if the word were not absurd – the elevation of the national feeling of the German to general humanity in the sense of the word coined by Schiller for something else: “To which nation do you profess yourself?” And the answer could be: “To none of the existing ones.” And why none of the existing ones? “Because of German nationality!” For that is the characteristic difference of German nationality, and that emerges precisely from Fichte's so annoying words: it is the essence of Germanness to strive for the essence of the universally human, to search relentlessly: How do you become human? How to become a human being in the most universal sense of the word? There is an apparent contradiction in this; but the contradiction is in everything that is alive; the contradiction is the characteristic of the living. And this – what could be called a characteristic of Germanness, which lies in an eternal striving for [universal] humanity – this becomes clear to us again so beautifully in Fichte's words.

Fichte wants to provide an answer to the question of who can actually be considered a German. And he says in the “Addresses to the German Nation”, which can be described as one of the most German of German intellectual products:

[...] whoever believes in spirituality and freedom of this spirituality, and wants the eternal further development of this spirituality through freedom, that, wherever it is born and in whatever language it speaks, is of our race, belongs to us and will join us.

In this, we also have something of the universal striving that is expressed when one considers German striving in its truly inner sense, or - to use this word of Fichte's again - at the “roots of the stirrings of life”.

And basically, dear attendees, all the strength that can arise from such a view of life lies in every word that Fichte spoke, but especially in those words that he spoke to express the consciousness that arose from this view of the world, which was precisely suited to his nature. One is tempted to say: Just as the soul forces express themselves as spirit and at the same time as will, and express themselves as eternal inner becoming, so it sounds to us when Fichte - not from a theoretical consideration, but from the context of all human soul forces - expresses himself about the immortality of man, how he now turns his gaze to the countless stars that are in the cosmos, [and suns] and the planets that move when he turns his gaze to high mountains, to the rocks, the clouds that surround them, to the forests and rivers, when he turns his gaze to the three realms of nature, and then turns back to the human soul, and that which expresses itself to his consciousness, expressed something like this in a speech he gave to his Jena students:

And you stars [and you clouds and you rocks], you mountains all, when you all collapse once, when lightning flashes through you, when the elemental forces crush you, so that not a speck of dust of you remains, you tell me nothing about the nature of my own soul. This defies your power, this is eternal, as you are not eternal.

Spiritual science today must speak differently about these things because it draws the appropriate conviction from sources of knowledge. But in Fichte's starting points, a disposition for spiritual science arises from a knowledge that is at the same time a will, from a will that is at the same time knowledge, a willing knowledge that the eternal human soul, which passes through birth and death, is grasped in the immediate becoming and in the coexistence with this eternal life of the human soul knows the personality as connected with eternity.

And the tone that arises from such consciousness pervades as a fundamental tone the discourses that Fichte gave in order to make his people aware in fateful times of what they have to defend, what they hold as their richest treasure in the depths of their souls, and what they have and must defend against all the world. It is the striving for universal humanity – arising out of the essence of his people.

And, as if to confirm what Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher, expresses, stands Schiller, the great, urgent poet, who, from the mystically deep essence of the South German, especially the Swabian spirit, and who had also been uplifted by Goethe's ideas to that striving which, arising from the striving of a single nation, seeks to give birth to the most universal of all human strivings.

Today, Schiller is not sufficiently appreciated for the way he raised his people to a [level of education] when he created a work that is particularly great because of the level of education, the nobility of education and the intellectual atmosphere from which the work arose. I am referring to the work that is most easily overlooked, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. One could also say that Schiller tried to answer the question for his people through this work: How does man achieve freedom? And in the highest style, he approaches the riddle of human freedom. I would like to say: There is no intellectual height, there is no human-filled, feeling-filled depth from which Schiller does not want to draw the means to answer the question: What is human freedom?

Schiller says to himself that human freedom can be compromised in two ways in the highest style. First, there is that to which man must submit in logical necessity if he is to follow his reason, which chains conclusion to conclusion.

Man may feel outwardly free in such logical activity, inwardly he is not free, for he is a slave to logical necessity; and in submitting to it, he is not free, man. Nor is he free when he has to submit to the senses driving feeling, the natural necessities of nature's necessity.

Man can become unfree in these two ways.

But how does he become free? Oh, he becomes free in the manner of Schiller when he succeeds in detaching from his inner depths that which rests hidden as the core of his being, that which is not directly perceived between birth and death, that which can only be perceived when it is detached from its hidden existence and when the being ascends on the one hand into the spiritual region, in order to develop such inner impulses there, whereby the soul becomes master in the world, where it would otherwise be a slave, when it can ascend into the realm of spirituality and freely interact within it, as a child freely interacts in its play.

Then the soul feels free in spirit and when it can descend again into the body, but does not lose the spirit, but descends with the spirit into what is necessary for the senses, and handles the senses in such a way that what the eye sees, what the ear hears, that the hand seizes, that in the sensual the spirituality is seen through, everything spiritual is sensually experienced, everything sensual is spiritualized, that the higher self in the self, for which Schiller strove by writing these letters, is experienced.

One may ask, does it not signify a high flowering of human development when, out of the forces of a people, not a philosophical-theoretical answer to the highest human questions is given, but an answer from the full range of human feeling, as Schiller gave it? It was then that Schiller also raised the significant question: What are the aberrations of humanity and humanity?

On the one hand, there is the “barbarian”; the “barbarian” in whom the case arises that he is overwhelmed by his instincts and human impulses due to his principles. Man cannot become such a “barbarian,” because he must come to love his principles so that he is not enslaved, but carries his drives up into the spiritual world of his principles, so that he wants to do what he must do because he loves it. And a savage is the person – [that is the other aberration] – when he lets his instincts overwhelm his principles.

Thus there came a point in deepest German sensibility when the question was raised: How does man find true humanity between the realms of the wild and the “barbarian”? So that which is in the highest sense spiritual-idealistic conscience in the German people has sought the true human.

Can they call the members of a people who have sought the true human being between the cliffs of “barbarism” and savagery, can they call this people “barbarians”?! This question could arise from many things like a refrain and keep coming back to us: Why do they call this people [Schiller's and Fichte's] a “barbarian people”? Does it depend on what means this war must seek today? [Everyone could have known that before it began!] It is childish to talk about what means the war must seek; it is worthy of a true observer of human development to ask: what must be defended?

And we have sought a little what needs to be defended by presenting to our minds, if only in a few strokes, the legacy of Schiller and Fichte. And truly, these great men of ours felt this way about the connection of the German essence with what they themselves wanted in the sense of the most general human striving. And what became known long after Schiller's death as words that can be considered a legacy shows how Schiller, with what has been somewhat characterized here, places himself in the essence of his people. In this time, let us bring to mind the words that he spoke in view of what the Germans have to do to stand up to a world of opponents.

He who forms the mind must ultimately prevail,
because
finally, at the goal of time, if the
world has a plan, if human
life has any meaning at all, finally
must prevail custom and reason,
the brute force of form succumb
and the slowest people will catch up with all
the fast fugitives.

Ihm

—dem Deutschen —

ist das Höchste bestimmt,
und so wie er in der Mitte von
Europens Völkern sich befindet,
so he is the core of humanity,
the flower and the leaf are the people.

He is chosen by the world spirit, during
the struggle of time
to work on the eternal construction of human education
to preserve what time brings,
therefore he has appropriated what was previously foreign
and preserved it within himself.
Everything that was valuable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with time,
he has preserved;
the treasures of
centuries are not lost to him.
Not to shine in the moment and
to play its role, but to win the great
process of time. Every nation
has its day in history, but
the day of the German is the harvest of

all time.

Schiller spoke such words of legacy for his people, no doubt from a deeply moved heart, from a heart that felt the pulse of his nation.

We, the soul behind what is, as the war was, so cruelly necessary, cruelly necessary for that which truly did not arise from the German spirit, but rather arose to a great extent from that which is not of the German spirit.

The childish saying that the German has a particular penchant for militarism does not need to be discussed in particular in our country; but perhaps - when we are repeatedly confronted with the refrain: “Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a ‘barbarian people’?” - perhaps this question may be transformed to some extent into the other. Could anyone believe that when a world at war is advancing against Germany with a strength of two and a half to one, as if against a fortress, that the Germans would fight by reciting Schiller's poems or Fichte's philosophy to the cannons? Only those who expected this can speak of what is now being spoken of so often in the world.

But is everything that is said true? I will merely hint at the way in which a great mind, an outstanding mind of modern times, has thought about the German character, about the character that we are trying to conjure up in our minds through some of the traits of the Fichtean and Schillerian way of thinking. This way of thinking is connected with everything that the universal spirit, as manifested in Goethe, has brought before our eyes, and which is, after all, the center of German development for the time being. Now, what Fichte and Schiller have become is at the same time the Goethean essence. I would say that what the American Emerson speaks of is not only the essence of Goethe, but also of Schiller and Fichte.

And I cite a non-German critic of the German character, which developed in the nineteenth century from the seeds germinated by Schiller, Fichte, and Goethe; I quote the words of a thinker who was at the height of American intellectual life [and who spoke these words not in German but in English] – Emerson – to raise the question: how did the “barbarian people” and their culture affect the people of the nineteenth century who understood something of German culture?

Emerson, the great American, says:

One quality in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.

Thus the American sees the German essence represented by Goethe, concentrated in Goethe, that the German essence is that everything is based on truth!

Emerson continues in English:

In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of their conviction. In France, people are delighted to see brilliant ideas, wherever they may lead. In all these countries, however, talented men write within the limits of their talents. If what they write stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours.

Not a single German says this, as I said!

The German mind has neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's practical understanding, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. What it does have, however, is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands that a writer stand above things and simply express himself on them. There is intellectual activity, so what is it advocating? What is the man's opinion? Where does it come from? Where does he get all these thoughts?

I am quoting an English speaker!

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

Written in English!

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

For this reason, the terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and points of view with a certain superficiality.

- written in English! —

and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they are and with the way in which they express themselves, Goethe speaks

— whom Emerson regards as the representative of the German nation —

the head and content of the German nation, not because he has talent, but because truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. No matter how excellent what he says is, he has something else in mind that is even better. [...] He has that fearsome independence that arises from dealing with the truth.

So, dear attendees, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the most enlightened minds of the nineteenth century could think and speak about German nature. Why do they call the people, about whom such talk must be had, a “barbarian people”? It sounds to us again and again as a refrain [against]. We do not need to answer the question, in view of the fact that we only need to raise it.

Another thing, ladies and gentlemen, very briefly, one would like to say: months before the war, lectures were held in one of the southern cities of Great Britain about the German spirit, lectures about the German spirit and intellectual life, in order to make this German intellectual life - the lectures have also been translated and are available in book form in German – to make this German intellectual life, as it is said in the preface of the book, a little more accessible to people who, as the English author says, know all too little about this intellectual life. He explicitly states which people he means – he speaks of English journalists. I don't know how much they have learned from these lectures, the journalists, after the trials we are now experiencing in their judgment of the German character.

But perhaps the words of a directly English, not an American, man, spoken not long before the war [in university lectures intended to educate English journalism] and intended to educate journalism about German nature, perhaps these words may also be given a little consideration. What is communicated here is not said in America by Emerson, but in England, in English, about German nature, German intellectual life:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen knew the spirit of science unquestioningly; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, primarily by thousands of German researchers.

One almost feels embarrassed, but it was first spoken in English.

Imagination, feeling, will asserted their right to be heard beside or beyond reason, and under their transformative pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful. The irrational was recognized as a source of enlightenment; wisdom was drawn from the child and the flower; science, philosophy and poetry came close together. In England, this revival of the imagination gave birth to noble poetry, but left science and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the period is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical, and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a reflection of present-day Germany, the Germany of restless, bold will and action, and we can understand all the better why the great citizen of the world, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable place as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

And in these lectures, in which, one would like to say, the spirit is so thoroughly discussed, including Hegel, who summarizes German essence in the most crystal-clear thought-images – Hegel, whose memorial tablet we see on the house across the street – there we also find the words.

[Dear attendees], yes, I am only saying this because I have not completely forgotten Goethe's dictum: People say that self-praise stinks; but they don't like to talk about what someone else's censure smells like. It is difficult to rise above such words, but, aren't they, if the words have been said in English, perhaps an excuse if they are repeated in Germany. Months before the war, they were spoken at the same university in Manchester: “No German words are more deeply imbued with the juice of national ethics than those that describe these things: true, thorough, loyal.” “True, thorough, loyal.” One could almost be proud of this characteristic from across the Channel, [dear lady present]. But in the short time available to us for today's reflection, let us add something that relates to these words.

I speak to you as someone who spent his youth in Austria, among a group of people who, coming from very different circumstances, longed for the moment when, in a great deed or in some larger context Austrian culture could merge with German culture – in other words, a group of people who sensed something of what is now so moving our Central European souls, [sensed something of the pulse of the times]. And I remember a word that used to resonate a lot in the ears of those who only felt something of the pulse of the times: I remember a word, the word “Herbstzeitlose”. And where did the word “Herbstzeitlose” come from? I will hint at it very briefly.

In the 1970s, there was a liberal party in Austria [after the Parliamentary Congress], a party made up of talented individuals, led by [Eduard] Herbst. He represented a certain abstract liberalism, a liberalism tailored to the pattern of English parliamentarians. At the Congress of Berlin, under the predominant influence of the English statesmen of the time, Austria was given the mission of working down to the southeast, which then found expression in the occupation and later annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and all that Austria understood to be its mission.

At that time, Austria incurred the wrath of the Russian Pan-Slavists, precisely because of British influence; for Britain sent Austria against the aspirations of Russian influence on the Balkan Peninsula. Those in Austria who were Herbstians at the time opposed this mission. But Bismarck knew how this was connected with the whole of modern development, how, under the influence of England, the Russian resentment was rekindled. At that time, a certain impulse of Austrian politics arose towards the southeast, and Bismarck knew that this had to happen. He found that those who did not understand this in Austria, under the influence of [Eduard] Herbst, were the “Herbstzeitlosen” (literally: “autumn crocuses”). And just as a witty man who understands his time can be devastating, so the Herbst party destroyed the dictum of the “Herbstzeitlosen”. Words formed by personal power that act like personal forces in the world.

So what were the Central European people like? They accepted the fact that they were 'barbarians' in those days, that they were understood in England as part of a southeastern mission. They held on to it until 1914. They did everything they could. They were thorough and loyal to what the English statesmen had instructed the Central European peoples to do at the time: they were true, thorough and loyal, these Central European peoples!

We need only state this, and then the fact, [dear ladies and gentlemen], that England is now on the side of the power whose resentment against both Germany and Austria led it to set them against each other. [And I have to ask]: Is leaving the ground on which it once stood also true, thorough and faithful? If today's events follow from what was thus determined, why do they call the people who carried out what once seemed right to them a “barbarian people”? The question sounds to us again and again as a refrain from current events!

Now, esteemed attendees, I do not want to make an assertion, but rather pose a question: Could it not be related to the very essence of the German world view that what sometimes seems so terribly significant to others is illuminated differently in the light of the world view of Schiller, Fichte and Goethe?

One point should be made – I know that this can be addressed as a rather questionable point – but that is not the issue, but rather to remain “true, thorough and faithful”, to remain true, thorough and faithful to the world view of Goethe, Fichte and Schiller.

Although the destruction of the cathedral of Reims is not as bad as one might see – I myself saw this cathedral in 1906 in a rather fragile state, I am one of those who will not let anyone in their admiration of the cathedral – nevertheless, in view of what is available as an expensive legacy to the people of Schiller, Goethe and Fichte in the form of a worldview, the following may be said:

It is deeply true for this people in a certain respect that beauty pulses through the entire structure of the world, that beauty lies in the construction of the entire structure of the world. And one feels deeply a word that Goethe spoke and Novalis, [the great poet], spoke again in a similar way, a word that, in the Goethean style, goes something like this:

What would all the eons of stars be, all the suns, all this beauty, if they did not ultimately shine into a human eye, and out of a human eye looked spiritualized and ensouled!

And in Novalis: “From such a worldview comes the thought of how all that takes place in the cosmos is integrated and combined and organized and together makes the soul and spirit in what ultimately is the human being. That is why Novalis calls this human structure, that which we encounter in the human being in its structure, a holy temple. And the contact with this holy temple itself, he describes as something that must arouse the most sacred feelings in the human soul. The temple of the highest is the human body.

The human body is the highest physical expression of the spirit for such a world view as that of Fichte, Goethe and Schiller.

And our fateful time, like every difficult time of war, makes it necessary to ruthlessly destroy thousands upon thousands of works of art that must be the highest works of art for the worldview of Goethe, Schiller and Fichte: human bodies! The German Weltanschauung has a sense not only for human works of art, but for the highest, at least earthly-highest divine work of art, for man himself. And the German Weltanschauung asks: May one not, in the face of the highest reverence, may one not cry out when human works of art have to be damaged in a time when thousands of them are being mowed down?

I know that this is a thought that is not understood everywhere. [But I also know] that once all the fruits of Goethe's, Schiller's, Fichte's conception of the world have ripened, this thought will stand as a thought, not of a “barbarian culture,” but as a thought of a spiritual high culture.

There is much hatred and rejection of the German character in our day! And when the question is raised, “Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a ‘barbarian people’?” when you look at this German character, you will not find the answer in this German character. Then this question changes into another question: Is it perhaps the case that what is hurled at the people – who are besieged like people in a fortress, what is hurled at the people, who are to be starved out – is The insult of “barbarism” is hurled at this people, therefore, in order to cover up what one is ashamed to say about the true causes of the situation in which one stands in relation to the besieged people whom one wants to starve?

Of course, esteemed attendees, there is also much within this humanity, besieged on all sides, that can be called hatred, that can be called antipathy; but let it be said frankly and freely: I do not believe that the roots of German life are connected with this antipathy, this national hatred, in the long run. I do not believe it in a nation that was capable of loving the English genius of Shakespeare more than the English people themselves, I do not believe it in a nation that was capable, in its prime, and as a poet must be recognized, I do not believe that a people could turn to one of the English poets of more recent times, to Byron, and, in the second part of Faust, produce a character who was inspired by Goethe as a result of his study of Byron. Byron appears to him – [Goethe took up this idea] – as Euphorion, the child who was the child of Faust and Helena, who emerged from the marriage of the highest cultural blossoms for Goethe.

But [is it not something that resounds there and offers us purely contemporary] as a characteristic of this Euphorion, does it not correspond intimately to us, do we not feel from what Byron-Euphorion is for Goethe, what the right word is at the time? [Goethe has Euphorion say]:

No, I have not appeared as a child
The youth arrives in armor;
He has joined the strong, the free, the bold
In spirit, already.

And do you hear the thunder on the sea?
There, valley after valley thunders back,
Army after army in dust and waves,
In urge upon urge, to pain and agony.
And death
Is the command [...]
That is simply understood.
Should I look on from afar?
No! I share the sorrow and the need.

When the German Goethe wanted to express something that was so close to his heart, his love led him to take the foreign model!

No, one cannot believe, need not believe that there is anything else that is German than the search for the noblest human spirit and that it is only this search of the German soul [for the noblest human spirit] that is often spoken of in today's style, that one does not understand; and because one does not understand it, one hates it.

Schiller, too, was never deceived about it. He, who not only said but also did what he expressed in the words I quoted, who knew how to transform all human nature, wherever he encountered it, into German nature – artistically and spiritually – he, Schiller, never deceived himself. His words are beautiful, showing us how he had no illusions when he looked to France and England:

Two mighty nations wrestle
For sole possession of the world;
To swallow up all countries' freedom,
They brandish the trident and the lightning.

Gold must every landscape weigh for them
And, like Brennus in the rough times,
The Frank lays his brazen sword
In the scales of justice.

The British extend their merchant fleets
Greedily like polyp arms;
And the realm of the free Amphitrite
He wants to close, like his own house.

No, Schiller did not fool himself, but in the German striving he saw general human striving:

The world loves to blacken what is radiant
And drag the sublime into the dust.

He says this in particular about the [heroic] spirit in the Maid of Orleans, who expresses it in such an epoch-making way in the human being. And how did she stand up, this French national heroine, [the Maid of Orleans], who had to defend France against England's claims? How did she, who was spat upon and reviled by Voltaire and is still not treated nicely by Anatole France [in the present day], how did she stand before Schiller's spirit, and how did he embody her in German poetry, which has become so dear to us?

Being German does not mean rebelling against anything national in the world; but this German identity carries with it the duty to embody with all means what the German soul is in the German body.

It has already been pointed out [dear attendees] that after all, one really does not need to be German to express words that suggest how the German essence is integrated into the essence of the world.

Yes, I know a man who once tried to visualize the highest that earthly culture can produce, using three brilliant thinkers. The third of these brilliant thinkers, on whom this man climbs, was Novalis, the profound German poet. The man I mean contemplated Novalis and he said the following to himself – he expressed beautiful thoughts – he said to himself – one does not need to go along with what he said – he said: Yes, what Sophocles has his characters act out, is ultimately all human action. And if a spirit were to descend from another planet [and come to Earth], it might be that it would not be at all interested in these people, [in what the characters of Sophocles do or] what Ophelia, Desdemona, or Hamlet himself accomplishes; [because] these are earthly matters that do not interest a genius from another planet. But there is something – [so this man opined] – on Earth among people that would most certainly interest the geniuses of other planets, [if they could descend]. The human soul has also soared up to that, the man opined. And he cites Novalis, the quintessentially German poet, as an example of such a soul that has produced something that would interest geniuses. He has spoken beautiful words in reference to Novalis and to what Novalis can be for humanity. Listen to the beautiful words he said about the quintessentially German poet Novalis:

But if he needed other proof, it would lead him among those whose works almost stir to silence. It would open the gate of the realm where some loved it for its own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are only in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, for a moment, humanity has ruled, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm.

So says the man. What Novalis says belongs to the lights by which the earth announces itself to the spiritual realm.

Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; [but the people I am talking about have come out of the little village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong [to] the earthly community.

So, a German once lived after this man, who produced writings that are not only valuable for souls on earth, but for souls that are not of this earth. In Novalis, the German, such a soul lived for the man. Who is the man who spoke such words about Novalis? Yes, I have to say it: Maurice Maeterlinck!

You, esteemed attendees, know what he – [Maeterlinck] – has since said about the German “barbarians”: the question resounds again like a refrain: if things are as you say they are, then why do you call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”? For if we look at what is sacred to us, if we pay attention to what Schiller and Fichte are not only for us, but what they impose on us as an obligation, to all that we must defend in their souls and out of their souls, as German essence, then we arrive at a conviction, [which is only a paraphrase of what I have said]: one becomes German ceaselessly, and Germanness stands before our soul like an ideal. Indeed, we then feel something of the fact that it is ultimately the [innermost] “roots of life's impulses” that lead to those highest fruits of the spirit, which are expressed in Schiller's valiant poetry, in Fichte's valiant wisdom, which now stand at the walls of Germany, which are now defended by cannons and swords [and other things] around German territory; so we confidently feel the necessity of the life of the German spirit, feel with the times and in time and feel above all with the troops in the west and east, who defend the German spirit with their fresh youth, and we feel justified in this defense of the German spirit, of which we feel that it was not only something, but that it contains the potential for what it is yet to become: an ever higher and higher quest for the spiritual and ever more spiritual. And if they want to cut off the German spirit's lifeline today and take away its light, if they want to oppress it to the point of affecting its physical substance, the German knows that the German spirit has not yet reached completion, that what it has achieved is only the beginning.

And when we hear the word “barbarians” used to describe “German culture that has grown old” [das alt gewordene Deutsche Kultur], which only had to embody itself for a time in that in which the whole world now embodies itself, but which has the highest spiritual goods to defend, then we once again ask ourselves the question: why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”? And then we answer, not by trying to give a direct answer to this question, history will give that answer, and we can await that answer from history in peace. But some of what can be said with regard to German striving with regard to spiritual science will be said tomorrow; [also in connection with our Zeitgeist].

But to the question that was raised, we answer with the feeling that tells us: This German spirit has not yet been fully realized. It still has work to do, and it must retain the light and air of life. So we do not answer theoretically, not abstractly, so we answer, I think, dear ladies and gentlemen, from the depths of our hearts to all that lives in this fateful, fateful time – we answer with the words:

The German spirit has not yet achieved its purpose.
It lives in hope for the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life;
In the depths of its being, it feels a mighty
Secret that must still mature to be effective.
How can the desire for its end arise in the power of the enemy
The wish for his end may arise without understanding:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
Which holds him in the roots of being?

Dear attendees! There is no doubt that it is always important for people to devote themselves to the necessary reflections on the great question of the soul and human destiny. And basically, it is these questions that should also form the basis for tonight's reflection. But in our fateful times, when death and fate itself are taking such a powerful and tragic hold on the world, it seems particularly appropriate to incline the human heart, incline the perceptions and reflections, towards this enigma, which is so incisive in the life of the human soul.

Now, as I have often been allowed to make such observations from the field of spiritual science here, it has been pointed out that the nature and aspects of spiritual science still go against what has been recognized and thought possible in our time through centuries-old habits of thinking and feeling. Spiritual science still finds no support in what is today external science, and especially not in what has developed out of this science in the broadest circles as a kind of creed. For all habits of thought, all [research practices] that have developed in the way indicated seem – I say expressly, seem – to directly oppose what spiritual science has to say about the great riddles of human existence.

However, as has been mentioned here often, the change that has to take place in human thinking from the present point of view to that of spiritual science will be no greater, relatively speaking, than that which had to take place when the dawn of the natural scientific way of thinking arose; when, so to speak, all concepts, all ideas and notions that people had about the structure and interconnection of the world and the nature of the human soul and the weaving of human destinies were subjected to transformation. Just as it certainly seemed to many people at that time, how the solid ground of the life of ideas on which they stood was shaken, so it may be for many people in our present time with regard to spiritual scientific ideas. But the human soul is changeable, the human soul is born for progress. And just as the scientific point of view has become interwoven with human development, so the spiritual scientific world view will become interwoven with it.

Now, it must be said that, when considering the question of what is immortal in the human being, the habits of thought in the present day resist in the most diverse ways the recognition of the truths that spiritual science has to give from its foundations. Above all (and we shall find further confirmation of this in the course of today's lecture), the whole character of those truths that relate to the immortal human being is quite different from the character of those truths that relate to external, sensual things and to the scientific summary of these sensual things. Man has become so accustomed to ascribing reality to that of which he can say: the matter has been confirmed to me by something outside of my soul life. But spiritual-scientific truths cannot be recognized in this way. It is impossible for them to invoke something, as scientific truths do, that gives the impression of truth from outside and to which we only have to surrender, so that we can say: the matter is true because it presents itself to us in this way in our observation, independently of our soul life. That which presents itself as spiritual scientific truths, especially as truths about the immortal human soul, must be grasped inwardly. And for this grasping there are no external points of reference, there is no relying on anything that proves itself independently of the human soul.

Therefore, as was already mentioned yesterday, spiritual science must say without arrogance: it must be a kind of brave science; a science that courageously dares to experience the impulses of truth not through intuition but through inner experience. Therefore, spiritual science cannot passively indulge in world contemplation, but must arise as the soul actively develops hidden powers within itself, as it brings up from the depths that which is hidden in its depths, that which the power of truth includes within itself. This is one of the reasons why spiritual truth is so opposed to current ways of thinking.

The other, esteemed participant, is even closer to the contemplation that is to be undertaken today. We shall see that spiritual science, as something immortal in the human soul, presents something that is so fundamentally different from all that the senses convey to us, from all that we think, feel and want in everyday life, so fundamentally different from all that, that in this everyday life, man actually carelessly passes by what is eternal and immortal in him. And he passes it by all the more carelessly for the reason that he is inclined not to ascribe reality to what confronts him just as the being in his own inner being, which finds the way through the eternities and through births and deaths. There is something so light and fleeting in everyday life that is immortal in us that we are not at all inclined to ascribe the most intense reality of life to this very light and fleetingness.

How this immortality is found in the human soul has been the subject of my frequent discourses here. However, this search for the immortality of the human soul must be discussed again and again and from different points of view for the simple reason that the spiritual-scientific investigations are more complex and diverse. And only when they are characterized from the most diverse points of view is it possible to gain a true understanding of them.

If one now says that what is immortal in the human being must be grasped through the development of such soul forces, which are initially hidden in the deepest interior of the human being and in the inner soul [experience], if one says this, then the person of the present has the belief that basically only something subjective, something that has personal value, can be achieved.

The beginning of spiritual research is indeed subjective; it is an inner experience and inner development of otherwise hidden powers in the soul. It is a process of overcoming, an inward journey, a working of one's way out of darkness and into the light, which must be experienced by people's souls in a wide variety of ways. It is certainly subjective at first. But this belief can only exist because most people do not have the patience to go far enough with the spiritual researcher. For even if all beginnings of spiritual research are steeped in subjectivity, so that they develop out of the most personal of personal things, it is precisely through inner conquest, through inner struggle, that the soul is driven to overcome the inner itself within. And by inwardly working out an objective element that lies within it, it can gain entry into a new world, which, alongside our own, arises as if, roughly speaking, a new sense were to awaken in our physicality, and a completely new area of the external sensory world were to open up for us. But the urge from the subjective to the objective in spiritual struggle and spiritual research is an intimate one; it is such that it makes it necessary for the human being to acquire soul habits within himself that otherwise do not occur in everyday life. I have also already emphasized that inner activity of the soul which so transforms and transforms this soul that it can make its way into the spiritual worlds, which always surround us and which remain hidden only to the unprepared soul.

The first thing that the soul must practise in order to get to know its own nature truly and scientifically, not merely by faith, is what can be called technical sharp concentration of thought, such concentration of thought that does not merely appeal to the inner power of thinking, but which appeals to the application of inner willpower in thinking and imagining. Those thoughts that come to us as a result of the external world making an impression on us, and that are fixed in us as a result of them entering us through the senses, that they arouse a sensual process in our body and that this sensual process fills us in our inner being , that reality is guaranteed by these thoughts, which are carried as reality through the effects of the external sensory world within our own body, so that we believe in their reality. These thoughts cannot help us if we are seeking the immortal essence of the human soul.

These must be other thoughts, thoughts that are basically quite similar, at least superficially similar to such spiritual images, such inner experiences, ladies and gentlemen, which all too easily succumb to a very special inner fate, the fate that they come and go as quickly as dreams, which easily succumb to the fate of being forgotten. We know this fate of being forgotten in a general human experience, in the experience of dreams. We know that what flits through our soul as a dream experience is quickly forgotten. Why? Because the dream takes hold of our whole physical being in a much less intense way, and thus creates much less within this physicality the conditions by which we inwardly sense, sense reality precisely in the embodiment of thoughts, and then also permanently retain reality. In a sense, the thought experience does not pass over into the physical one and therefore flits by.

It is similar with thoughts that we, as it were, allow to be drawn by the soul as thoughts that we have formed independently. We often observe them and call them daydreams; they are quickly forgotten and quickly fade away. And yet, the further one progresses, the more thoroughly one trains oneself to unfold precisely those powers within oneself that can receive formed thought experiences in the soul, as otherwise only appearances based on external sense impressions are received, the more one progresses in this unfolding of soul activity within the soul, the better one trains oneself for spiritual research. This is the basis of what is called thought concentration in the true spiritual sense of the term.

The thoughts that are least suitable for this concentration are those that are images of external, sensory reality. Images that we form ourselves, that do not directly depict anything, but that we freely form in our minds, and to which we then surrender, are most suitable. I have described such [meditative inner soul processes] in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, [for example]. If one wants to hold on to such thought-forms, which are freely created spiritually, one must apply a stronger, more powerful inner will to hold on to them than one usually has in one's outer life.

In the external world, we have a firm support in the life of the soul precisely because thoughts cause a real material process, make an impression [and cause real changes in the body]. Based on these changes, the experience is so strong that we need to muster little will, little inner soul will, to hold on to such thoughts. But to form thoughts freely, without being forced to do so, and to recognize them from the point of view that we simply give ourselves to them to strengthen our inner soul power, to hold on to such thought-forms or feelings or even impulses of will, requires a strong tension of the inner power of the soul, requires a far stronger will than for everyday thinking. But it is precisely on this that the schooling of the spirit is based, which is necessary for [exploring the spiritual worlds,] that inner strength and inner energy are released, as it were, which would otherwise remain unused in everyday thinking.

This is why people who need the aforementioned support for their thinking all too soon tire in this concentrated thinking, all too soon fall into a state not unlike falling asleep. But only by tensing the inner forces of will, which relate only to the inner movement of thoughts, do we attain the stronger forces that we need in the soul to grasp not only the transitory but also the immortal of the human soul.

And now it becomes apparent when a person, one might say, has developed thinking and feeling through faithful inner schooling for a long time, that the person is then in a position to have a truly inner experience of imagination, that he is completely absorbed in this inner experience of imagination, that all his powers are gathered in this experience of imagination and the rest of his life seems to fade away. The spiritual researcher must bring it about that the world is, as it were, distracted on all sides and the soul becomes completely one with something that it has placed at the center of its soul life in the healthiest way, [as I would like to emphasize]. All willpower must be directed towards that which is at the very core of the soul's life. Only then does a person realize what the power of thought is and how thought, if it is to be allowed to rule freely in the life of the human soul, must be supported by strong willpower.

And then, [my dear audience], the spiritual researcher makes a very specific discovery, one that we must indeed bear in mind. The experience comes at a very specific point. The exercise I just discussed must be carried out for long months, for years. Again and again, we have to come back to it, just to evoke thoughts and ideas in our consciousness through the inner willpower of our soul. And again and again, we have to develop this direct thought life. Then, after some time, we have a certain experience based entirely on this experience. At first, the spiritual researcher is able to concentrate his thinking [ever more brightly and clearly], ever more intensely and ever more intensely, to be in the thought experience within it. And he notices that the thought experience intensifies, becoming ever more powerful and mighty. Indeed, he feels how his entire consciousness of being, in uniting, in generally uniting and becoming identical with the concentrated thinking, is increasingly shaken and shaken.

But then there comes a very definite critical point, which consists in the fact that just when we have arrived at the experience of the strength of the thought, this thought shatters as if within itself in our soul, dissolving as if within our soul. One would like to say that the critical point occurs when the thought, when it is carried to its highest energy, darkens, darkens, ceases to be present for us. And we, who have followed thought, as it were, identified ourselves with thought, we feel how something, how our whole being goes along with thought. And that is a significant, an extremely significant experience.

When you put it that way, it might seem simple; it is not simple, the experience I am talking about. It is an experience that shakes up all the human powers of the soul, that calls into question everything that one has felt until then, everything that one has acquired as valuable for the soul in this or that sense. And what particularly resists moving closer to this experience, what repeatedly and again stands in our way, getting stuck earlier, not going so far that this experience arises, which, as it were, does not allow us to approach this last experience, these are the forces of human egoism associated with the depths of the soul.

What is meant, esteemed listeners, is that if we do not harness all our energies, all our inner willpower, we will simply get stuck sooner, we will not get to where the thought, as it were, splinters. We do not do this consciously, but it happens entirely through unconscious volition. It does not let us go because we are afraid, inwardly afraid, without being conscious of it, that something much worse than even physical death could happen to us.

When I speak of this fear, it is of course a small thing for someone who wants to hold on to materialistic ideas to say: Well, the experience will not be as bad as physical death. But it is indeed an experience that does not enter into ordinary consciousness, but it does take hold of the soul's life as a force, as an impulse, as an impulse that acts like unconscious fear: not only of the destruction of the body, but of the absorption, of the outpouring of one's entire being into the cosmos, into the whole environment. You don't want to pour out like that. (You haven't consciously felt that in your soul, but you don't want to approach the experience.)

If you overcome all the inexpressible feelings, which can, however, be called feelings of fear, if you overcome all that, then, dear attendees, there comes a time when you know exactly, know through inner experience: now you are drawing something out of your body through those powers that you have developed in this way through concentration of thought. But precisely this drawing out of a spiritual being that otherwise - as we now know - permeates the body, this drawing out always seems particularly dangerous: because this drawing out is precisely connected with the feeling of having to dissolve and of something is stuck in us that we cannot draw out in this way, but which must be drawn out of us if it is not to fall prey to the dissolving Nothing that is to be drawn out in the way described. We have the clear consciousness: Now, something else must be drawn out of us, [if we want to draw the whole inner man out of us.] It is not enough with the concentration of thought alone. That draws out a part of us. We have the clear consciousness.

Now, dear audience, if you want to understand why it is so difficult for a person to have experiences like the ones I have described, then you can start from everyday experiences that are not noticed at first. What has been described exists in a relationship of attraction that a person has to himself. It presupposes that the human being has the inner strength to approach his own nature, so to speak. But nothing is as questionable in ordinary life, esteemed attendees, as a person's relationship to himself. In ordinary self-knowledge, this relationship of the human being to himself is only expressed very, very imperfectly, even in everyday life.

I would like to give an example that seems to have been taken from something quite different to the things I have been talking about. A well-known contemporary philosopher wrote a book about the “Analysis of Sensations”. On the third page, he talks about a strange experience that he had twice. He was a philosopher and a university professor. In his own way, he had also struggled for a worldview: Dr. Ernst Mach.

He says:

As a very young man, I was once walking down the street when I saw a man coming towards me with a face that I found extremely unappealing, even repulsive. I was quite shocked when I realized that it was my own face in profile, which appeared to me because I had passed a set of mirrors and the mirrors were placed against each other in such a way that I saw my own face.

Not only the man, but even the philosopher, knows his own figure so little! But there is a second, similar experience, which happened to the person concerned not as a very young man, but in very mature years, he says. He says:

Not so long ago

- in the nineties -

I got on a bus after a very exhausting train journey, very tired, and noticed that a man was also getting on the bus from the other side, and I thought to myself: what kind of down-at-heel schoolteacher is getting on there? It was only then that I noticed a large mirror on the back wall that showed me my own image!

He adds:

So the habitus of my class was more familiar to me than my own personal habitus.

He knew so little about himself that he was amazed at his own appearance. [Well, he knew what a down-at-heel schoolmaster looked like, but he didn't know exactly what he looked like himself.]

[Yes, my dear attendees], it is of course very easy to laugh at such things, but they are deeply, deeply significant if you want to get an idea of how questionable the relationship is that a person has with themselves in ordinary life. But what prevents us, esteemed attendees, from coming into a relationship with ourselves in our ordinary lives that leads to self-knowledge, all of that is at the same time a sum of forces that prevent people from bringing their concentration of thought to such a development, as described above, to the point of bringing out a second person inside the person. One sees that the forces that prevent man from detaching himself from his inner self, from what this inner self is connected with from birth to death, are stored up in the very existence of man. But this detachment succeeds through what has been described. But in such a way that we are not so far through this obstacle that we bring our whole being out of ourselves. Something else must be added to the concentration of thought. Not only must we develop a more energetic relationship to our thoughts than is the case in our everyday life, but we must also develop a completely different relationship to our destiny, to the destiny in which we live, than we do in our everyday life.

How do we relate to our destiny in our everyday life? We see what we call our experiences of destiny as they come at us, whether we like them or dislike them. They affect us as “coincidences of life”, as we say. We regard what befalls us as fate as something external, as something external to our being, and we grow up and develop from birth to death with the idea that fate befalls us in such a way that it is something external to us. But even a simple reflection, one that extends only over the life between birth and death, can teach us that what must be called fate is by no means something so external to man.

If we look at ourselves at any time in our lives, at a later, more mature age, and take a look at what we are, what we can do in life, then, if we do not want to close ourselves off from a real knowledge of human nature, then we will come to the conclusion, dear Dear attendees, we would say to ourselves: Yes, I would not be able to do this or that now if this or that had not happened in my life eighteen, twenty, thirty, thirty-five years ago, if I had not had to go through this or that to encounter this and that. I am the result of what happened to me in my life as an experience of fate, and if it had not happened, I would not be the me that I am today.

And if we take this whole bundle of talents, strengths, habits, and the nature of our soul life, we can see how it develops between birth and death from the fateful experiences that have affected us, how we would be quite a different person if fate had not made us what we are. We are already our coiled, twisted fate in ordinary life. One does not look at oneself abstractly, but concretely in all that one has become as a fifty-year-old person; and one wonders what one can do, what one is, coiled up from the experiences of fate, whether one can trace the whole tangle [that is coiled up there] back to the experiences of fate.

[But what happens when you take such a contemplation seriously, that seriousness that is truly not all that common in everyday life, but which, when developed, becomes a second means of spiritual research. When one takes such a contemplation seriously, one comes to say to oneself, yes, fate is not something external to me at all; I am immersed in fate. The experience that has approached me has now become my self. And when I survey my entire fate, my self is in it. I step out of myself, as it were, with my consciousness and pour myself out into the whole stream of my fate. But this must be considered in a deeply serious way, it must become methodical, so to speak. Then, through such an activity of the soul, the opposite of what has occurred through the concentration of thought occurs, so to speak. With our thinking, we are otherwise inwardly absorbed. We usually have thoughts that are based on external impressions and that therefore have their basis and their power in complicated inner relationships. But when we concentrate our thoughts, we go out with our thoughts so strongly that our inner being goes with them and we believe we are losing ourselves there. When we immerse ourselves in our destiny, we undergo the opposite process. Then we go out of ourselves, but into something that we [otherwise] believe in the external, that we believe flows to us from the outer stream of life. We step out of ourselves and into something that we only now recognize: [this is what generates and makes us; we grow together with something that we believed externally].

If we do this with intense seriousness, if we go out of ourselves with our will and know how to say: what I have experienced as fate, I am already in it, I have brought it about myself, because I am connected with my ego in it. [When we make this a habitual inner activity], then we come out of ourselves again, but in such a way that we draw out the other part of our inner being, which is as it were torn off, that which has not been brought out [is] through the concentration of thought , that we now follow up on that and that it connects with what has been brought out first, and now a whole, initially hidden inner man is drawn out of us, an inner man in whom we then know ourselves to be alive, in whom we know ourselves to be so alive that we now look at this outer, this physical man, as we otherwise look at the outer surroundings, tables and chairs.

I have thus indicated to you two means that are just as much technical means of real spiritual research as the work of the laboratory or the physics cabinet or the clinic are strictly distinguishable means for external natural science research. The only difference is that when one wants to research the spiritual, one cannot do external [experiments] but only inner soul experiences, which bring about a transformation so that the soul withdraws from its body in its essence.

Not even in the abstract does spiritual science today need to speak of the fact that man's spiritual being is something real that separates from the body; but, one would like to say, through spiritual experimentation, spiritual science today knows how to separate the physical and the soul, just as one separates oxygen from hydrogen, in order to show that the oxygen is contained in the [water]. And the spiritual-soul substance is in it and can be drawn out through strictly observed procedures. Only, however, while we are experimenting in the laboratory, we face things externally with a certain indifference.

The tasks the spiritual researcher has to undergo are such that they represent, as it were, inner soul tragedies, overcoming and inner wrestling, inner bliss, inner disappointment, inner standing on firm ground, and again feeling like the bottomless; all this in often gruesome, often blissful concreteness of the inner soul experience. But then, when the spiritual researcher has succeeded in separating the real inner self from the physical body, he knows that the physical body, which he now observes with the being that is now outside the body, contains all the forces that begin with birth, or let us say with the birth and which are handed over to the earthly element at death, and he says to himself, that what he has withdrawn is working on this earthly-physical body, that he has grasped the eternal soul core in what he has withdrawn from the human being, and that he has grasped it simultaneously with fate. Now he knows that what separates from the physical body remaining in bed every night when falling asleep is this eternal essence, which is in the spiritual world from the time of falling asleep until waking up and can only not perceive itself because in ordinary life the person does not have the inner has the inner strength to bring about this interpenetration and interweaving of the soul that is outside the body, and also to make it shine and resound – spiritually speaking – so that one perceives it for oneself and has the strength to look down again [at the external, bodily level].

[But then, having explored what lives in the body, one has at the same time grasped that which goes through birth and death. And by grasping the soul as united with its destiny, one has grasped that which was present in the spiritual world before the human being was born or conceived, which represents the sum of the forces that themselves first sink to that which is given through the father and mother as a physical body, and become incorporated into it, in order to use the body as an instrument, to be the inner formative power through life, to work in the material world and also to wear away the body in the process, and to become stronger and stronger inwardly, in order to then pass through the gate of death back into the spiritual world, in order to prepare oneself there for a new bodily life.

Something else comes to life for the spiritual researcher: he is able to explain why this eternal, immortal core of being is not perceptible in ordinary life, why we know nothing of it. When we live between birth and death, we do indeed work all the experiences of life, [all sensations, feelings and thoughts], everything that life offers into this immortal core of being. But because we are accustomed to perceiving and working with the two eyes of the body for our daily lives, the labor of the physical body continually obscures these inner educational forces, which are immersed in the body and, when they are worked in the body, , but instead of being able to become the power of knowledge, they are eternal formative forces of the body, used for something else, similar to what the development of the outer physical existence represents. But we get to know this power so that the present body, which we carry between birth and death, is not its cause, as materialism believes, but on the contrary is its effect: [As it presents itself in life, it is the effect of that which has descended from the spiritual world, indeed, that which carries within itself the fruit of previous earthly lives. That which emerges from him, that which has descended from the spiritual world, indeed, that which bears within it the characteristics of previous earthly lives. For as soon as one comes to observe that which lives in the body and can be lifted out of the body in the manner described, one knows at once that that which lives in the body is as it is now because it is not the first time that it has lived in the body; one sees spiritually that it bears within it fruits that it has acquired in previous earthly lives. And in direct vision, the entire life appears to the spiritual researcher in such a way that it is composed of what has been achieved in the spirit, and this is transformed in such a way that it can in turn form a new life.

Thus spiritual research, dear attendees, does not arrive at the eternal, indestructible core of a person's being, how it goes from earthly life to earthly life and forms destiny, through fantasy or by making some kind of vague philosophical-abstract considerations, but rather in a spiritual experimental method that is actually modeled on natural science, so that one can say: What you are experiencing now, what is penetrating you now, will become strength in your immortal self, will pass through the gate of death, will transform itself so that in your next life it will enrich your self, your self working in your destiny. It is you yourself who, in your destiny, has brought over from a previous life and carries into the now; it is you yourself in your immortal essence.

Of course, esteemed attendees, it will take a long, long time in the development of human spiritual culture before a larger number of people will participate in spiritual science, which is described here as something positive. But this spiritual science will become a truly real part of spiritual human culture, just as chemistry or physics, or any other branch of external natural science. And just as the external natural sciences have brought progress to man in the external material sphere, so to speak radically transforming earthly life as far as man and his circumstances were concerned, so spiritual research will intervene in human life. And spiritual science will intervene in a transforming way in that which is moral impulse, in man's consciousness of his own essential being, in life in its true essential being, when only once those prejudices are overcome that today quite understandably still stand in the way of this spiritual science. These prejudices will be overcome as truly as the prejudices against natural science were once overcome.

Anyone who believes that spiritual science, as described here in a small part, is something completely dreamt up, fantastic, knows that those who are able to grasp the inner essence of this spiritual science live in the same error as he who belonged to those who said that this fool, Copernicus, imagined that the Earth revolved around the Sun, whereas everyone with healthy five senses could see that the Earth stood still and the Sun revolved around it! People in those days said, “Anyone with healthy senses cannot believe the fool Copernicus, that both of them of the external cosmic world contradict the appearance of the healthy five senses.” So, of course, people today must also say: anyone in possession of their right five senses cannot truly believe that one can develop one's thinking to such an extent that one first draws something like a piece of the inner human being out of oneself and then pulls the other after it by immersing oneself in destiny. But human history strides beyond such prejudices. And if humanity has already learned not to trust appearances with regard to the course of the stars, it will have to learn not to trust appearances with regard to what passes through the human soul through birth and death, and withdraws from appearances again when it leaves the realm of appearances through the gate of death.

There is, dear honored attendees, a stronger power of holding something to be true than the one that many still invoke today – and rightly so, when one considers contemporary history and conditions – and the one that those who refer to the so-called healthy five senses and to research recognized as valid today draw upon. There is a stronger force. But this force is connected with the deepest impulse of all human progress towards truth. And this must be developed within oneself to some extent if one wants to profess spiritual science today: this trust in the progress of truth of humanity. But this trust is also something that impresses a strong moral force into our soul. And just in this lies a gain in life, that man is able to bring himself to appeal to the powers of realization within him, which he must bravely bring forth through the strength of his soul, and which carry the truth through the world on their own wings, and do not merely need to borrow it from what presents itself to the external senses. But it is the strong inner experiences of fate that the human soul must undergo if it wants to deal with the immortal core of being, which, one might say, is naturally ignored in everyday life. With that, it may be said that today we have reached the point in the development of humanity where science must become what could not previously be science.

Of course, dearest ones present, what the spiritual researcher, as it were, distills out of the human being and presents to the intellect is always within the human being; it is the immortal within the human being. The spiritual researcher does not grasp it; the spiritual researcher only calls it forth into the horizon of knowledge.

And of course one can raise an objection here, an obvious objection, which is particularly obvious because it is so closely connected with our inner soul life, with our inner soul laziness. One can say: Why make an effort for this eternal core of our being? We will come to it in eternal life when we have discarded our body. Why make the effort for it? [It is eternal, after all, we will see after death!] We can quite calmly abandon ourselves to life and, for the rest, leave to the world spirits what they want to do with our immortal core! Two things must be said against such a cheap objection.

Firstly, it is about the fact that people need to be active, not just to know this or that, to see this or that, but to be active in order to advance the general process of evolution and development of humanity on Earth. Just as the laws and ideas of natural science were once unknown and had to be brought out of the [unknown] darkness into the light of knowledge, so most truths are first unknown and must be brought out of the unknown into the known. All human progress is based on this bringing out of what was previously unknown. And anyone who does not want to participate in this human progress, so that spiritual truths are also incorporated into this human progress in the future, just as natural science had to be incorporated in the past, should just admit that he is basically indifferent to all human progress, in which he is, after all, involved. That is the more abstract path, even if it is important.

But the other is that not only such abstract progress takes place in the development of humanity, but a very, very concrete progress takes place. It is only a superficial consideration of human development on earth to believe that as long as there have been people on earth, they were essentially the same. They were not essentially the same at all. We allow ourselves today to judge a Greek soul, a Roman soul, a soul originating from ancient Persian history, because we have no idea how much the souls of people in ancient times were different from those of people in the present. When we look back into ancient times, we find [at the bottom of the soul, everywhere] an inner, clairvoyant consciousness that originated in primeval times and ancient regions, through which the souls had their connection within themselves with the divine-spiritual forces of the world. But the very fact that human beings have the ability to withdraw to freedom in the course of developmental history, to extract themselves from this original dream-like clairvoyance, is precisely what constitutes their independence. The possibility of today's purely external knowledge is also based on this, and now, however, after man has attained the stage of detachment from spiritual life, he must in turn be grasped by spiritual life, the substantial spiritual life must be poured into his soul through spiritual science.

Today, however, we as human beings are still mostly at the stage where we can say that we still have so much inherited strength that our soul will not be darkened and [dawned] when it passes through the gate of death. But man, as he progresses from life to life, undergoes a development. The inner spiritual powers are being tested and tempered. And when a person passes from the present into the future course of life, he is dependent on developing within himself, consciously and out of inner freedom, that which fills him with conscious connection with the astral world , with such forces that can only be released in the soul itself, so that he does not go through the time between death and a new birth in dullness, but in bright inner feeling and experience.

The fact that spiritual science is currently entering our human development is connected with the whole meaning of earthly development; it is connected with the fact that man could only become free by, in a certain way, breaking the thread that bound him to the spiritual worlds. But out of freedom, out of free consciousness, he must now tie this bond again, which holds him together with the spiritual worlds. It is impossible that little by little, from the present time on, more and more people will not recognize the necessity of incorporating knowledge of the spiritual world into consciousness, knowledge of the eternal essence of the human being.

Therefore, where spiritual life has become more intense in recent times, where it has felt more dependent on gaining certainty of life and destiny from within, the idea of repeated earthly lives arises. It comes to us, for example, in the eighteenth century through one of the leading spirits of German intellectual life, Lessing. I have already mentioned here that Lessing left his most mature work, 'The Education of the Human Race', as a testament to humanity. And the basic idea of this most mature work of Lessing's, this testament of Lessing's, is the idea of repeated earthly lives and the intervening purely spiritual lives. I have already mentioned that very clever people today still treat spiritual science in such a way that they say: A person with his healthy five senses cannot understand it, such people say: Well, Lessing was a great man; throughout his life he really wrote reasonably or ingeniously; in his old age he just got a little weaker, and then he had the complicated idea of repeated lives on earth.

It may well be that these very clever people today can still feel a right to rebel against such a seeker as Lessing was, who felt something of the time that needs stronger soul power than the mere passive of external natural science. What has thus been established in German intellectual history by a mind like Lessing's, in turn, forms a kind of predisposition that must be developed; and in particular, it must be felt in all that lies within the realm of the German national soul - it will be felt - and which will lead to the fact that, in particular, from the realm of the German national soul, [not ] from some Central European culture, that which is also developed by such a clear mind as Lessing, in order to slowly enter into the stream of spiritual scientific research, which sheds light on the nature, on the true nature of the immortal human soul, as has been hinted at today.

This concept, however, was deeply rooted in what was said yesterday, that Johann Gottlieb Fichte perceived as the actual source of Germanness. Today, we would like to draw your attention once again to something that Fichte emphasized time and again, and always succinctly.

Fichte said: Not only after we have gone through death do we become immortal living beings.

In Fichte, we see clearly before knowledge what spiritual science is to elaborate on today and must elaborate on more and more in the future. What does Fichte talk about? Fichte says that in this mortal human body, which [grows] and develops, precisely through the immortal soul between birth and death, that in this mortal human body can be grasped - if only the right, the suitable inner strength is released from the soul - can be grasped, even the immortal, that immortal, that man in his mortality can already become aware of the immortal and that he does not have to wait for the recognition of immortality in death, but that he can find within himself that which goes through births and deaths, through eternities, with the powers of knowledge suitable for this.

This spiritual science is particularly present in those personalities of spiritual striving whose time first had to be characterized a little, and it is present there in such a way – and that is the essential thing, because naturally things occur in the most diverse places in their direction towards us - but it is so disposed there that we can, so to speak, draw a straight line between what is beginning to bear spiritual fruit and what must now develop. And one would like to say, dear ladies and gentlemen, that never again in the stream of German, of Central European intellectual life has this awareness of the immortal core of man been lost in a scientific way. It was always there, again and again. I could list many, many things that have emerged in the course of the nineteenth century to the present day. I would just like to draw attention to one thing that should show how there was indeed an awareness, albeit a delicate awareness, or rather, one that only wanted to arise delicately, of what has just been developed here today.

One of those minds, belonging to the second half of the nineteenth century, who also stands on the ground of the Goethe-Schiller-Fichte worldview, who has developed this worldview in his life in uninterrupted progress, is the late, excellent art historian Herman Grimm, who has also been mentioned by me here several times.

This art historian Herman Grimm also wrote novellas. In his volume of novellas, one of the first novellas is this one, entitled: “The Songstress”. In it, he describes how a certain relationship develops between two people, a songstress and a man. He describes how the two people are then driven apart by life's circumstances and character. And he describes how the man commits suicide out of grief, how the singer learns of it, and how it affects her. And now, in the 1860s, Herman Grimm vividly describes in his novella 'The Songstress' how the detached etheric form – a part of what, when a person passes through the gateway of death passes into the spiritual world - appears before the singer, so that after the death of the man she spurned in life, one might say she is looking at the epitome of his immortal being. If I were able to describe this to you in detail, I would also be able to justify why I am referring to this novella in particular. Of course, it can be retorted that the poet is able to exaggerate and misrepresent everything. That is not the point. Rather, the spiritual researcher has the direct impression: here a poet is accurately [reproducing] what is known to be the way the matter unfolds, [he is] giving an account of the life after death.

Herman Grimm has written a novel that should be read thoroughly for other reasons as well: “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces). The story of the novel takes place during the war, in 1866. The interplay of European and American cultural relations is described in this novel in the same masterful way. And from this background, the fate of various people arises; towards the end, the description of the death of the heroine. At the end of the novel, we find that the poet Herman Grimm describes something very strange to us. He describes death very vividly, and he describes death in such a way that what I have described today, how it stands out, I would say through spiritual research experimental art from the body in death. [Gap in the text]. In the 1960s, the time had not yet come to pursue spiritual science, but those people who, through the special structure of their soul life, had a connection with the spiritual, were immersed in this spiritual and felt the need, even when describing forces, to show not only the external sense world, but also that which is the eternal part of this sense world.

People developed out of that spiritual beginning of culture who knew that if one wants to describe true reality, one has to describe more than the physical, external sense appearance, who knew that he who denies this speaks like one who has a strongly magnetic horseshoe in front of him and says, “You are a fantastic fool. It has no invisible powers in it.” The whole sensory world is as it is here in the rough. But people knew this, who, especially out of the deepening of German idealism, learned to feel the spiritual reality. This is the path of human development, dear honored attendees, out of mere idealism, which constitutes the greatness of a bygone and particularly German epoch, to develop a genuine spiritual-scientific worldview. This can be clearly felt by objectively and impartially observing German intellectual life. It is truly a mission of German idealism to concretize itself, to fulfill itself inwardly, so that it can advance from the ideal recognition of intellectual life, as we have it with Fichte, with Schelling, with Hegel, [can advance] to the real view of intellectual experience with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, of which Goethe spoke.

And again, it is very remarkable, dear honored attendees, that enlightened minds of the nineteenth century, right where they turn their gaze to German intellectual life – [in particular, Goethe] – that they come to the conclusion that a kind of hope for humanity is connected to the development of precisely this intellectual life. One would like to say that, if so, today in these fateful times of ours, perhaps precisely from what is happening between the lines of life – forgive the foolish but perhaps apt expression – , if one examines [with sharpened powers of soul], one feels something of how, through the further development of spiritual life from the roots of German idealism, the world can come to grasp the spiritual. One can feel this without being filled with particular arrogance in relation to one's own German spiritual life. One does not need to be filled with pride, one can really feel today in some phenomena how that which has placed itself in the world as a great thing in the Goethe-Schiller-Fichte era was the beginning of a great spiritual development that is to be defended [in Central Europe].

I would not want to do otherwise than to present, if I may say so, out of a “tragic” feeling, two images that have personally come to mind; I would like to present these two images not out of some national subjectivity, but because they are related to certain feelings of our fateful time.

We experienced them, the first days of August last year – 1914 – and we experienced them in such a way that we received reports of how they were being experienced in the various European countries. I would like to present just two images. The first image: one is confronted with a great event, the magnitude of which one cannot even begin to comprehend! The German Reichstag convenes. I do not want to go into the details, because, as Bismarck famously said, I do not want to mix up what wants to remain in words with what should be decided by action. I do not want to go into the details of the immediate day-to-day politics, or what of this day-to-day politics is connected with the political events. But one image stands out vividly in my mind: there they stand, the representatives of the various political parties, and they are silent, silent! And this silence makes a tremendous impression; an impression, esteemed attendees, as if it were the herald of what was to happen afterwards. And in this silence lies the word of a great truth that has been murmuring throughout world history.

One can avert one's gaze, but actually I should turn it to the other place, more to the east. I would like to say, really, no, I have to say it with a kind of inner weeping, the image that then presented itself during the same days in the assembly of the Gossudarstwennaja Duma. There was no silence, everyone was talking. The people of the various party organizations. And they spoke in such a way that these speeches seemed to form the impression that one was dealing with a staged, world-historical theater performance – one would forgive the expression where one does not want to forgive it, because, as I said, one could only look at it with inner weeping. The dizzying intoxication of a false enthusiasm contributed to what was much talked about in the Duma, in contrast to the silence that prevailed further west.

If you no longer want to merely research external appearances, but want to delve into the inner moods of world history, you will want to grasp spiritually what the development of humanity is murmuring, to look for such moods. There is something in this silence that in turn gives confidence in an inner strength, that gives us a sense that spiritual truth and spiritual strength are well preserved in the bosom of Central European culture and that, as it rests there, it must be defended.

This is what lifts the soul above the [pervaded] pain that enters us from death and heavy fate when we survey Europe and the world of the present. And then you realize that it is still alive in the German character today, which in turn was noticed by a non-German mind, Emerson, the great American, when he wanted to describe Goethe and, starting from Goethe, wanted to point out the mission that the Goethe culture in particular has for the future of humanity.

The American Emerson says it from his time, the time of the nineteenth century, but from the time that is also ours:

The world is young, great men [of times past] call to us with friendly voices.

And these are now Emerson's own words:

We must write [holy] scriptures,

- that tell of the eternal -

to reunite heaven and the earthly world. The secret of genius is not to tolerate a lie

— Emerson is referring to the lie that there is no spiritual reality behind the sensual —

to make everything of which we are aware a truth, to inspire faith, determination and trust in the refinement of modern life, in art and science, in books and in people, and to honor every truth by not only recognizing it but also making it a guiding principle for our actions, both at the beginning and at the end, in the middle of the path and for [endless] times.

When spiritual science approaches the contemplation of what is immortal in the human being, it does nothing other than make true what the geniuses guiding humanity have felt to be the task of our time and of the coming time.

And in our fateful days, do we not feel it so clearly from the voices of death and fate that are so close to us every day, do we not feel that a bright sun is emerging from the twilight of the events of the time that surrounds us, that peace for the sake of humanity must develop out of this terrible war? But do we not also feel that all those who have to endure, who have to risk life and limb for the great destiny of our time, that these, by making the sacrifice of their lives, are a warning to those who will live later? Can we not feel today more than ever what significance there is in the union of earthly and spiritual life when we look at the immortal core of man's being, when we see a kind of spiritual detachment, as in death it detaches itself from the physical body. Then we say to ourselves: There, there they go, many of those human beings who still carry unspent human forces within them, who could still have worked, lived, worked, recognized and perceived here on earth for many more decades of their lives. This is possible because they pass through the gate of death, out into the spiritual world, still full of strength. Humanity will recognize that the law of conservation, of non-disappearance of forces, rules in the spiritual world just as it does in the physical world.

Mankind will know that that which apparently is unused, in which so many people must pass through the gate of death in full bloom of life, will not disappear. In the future, people will not only believe, they will know. This world is connected to a spiritual world; and in that spiritual world, all the forces that now had to leave the physical body unused are real. They will radiate on the horizon of earthly activity in future times; they will be real powers for those people who will become aware of the connection between the physical and the spiritual world. Gone will be the gulf that makes one forget what is only seemingly lost. In physical life, one will know that one has been permeated by those who have made the sacrifice of death for the sake of human goals and human progress.

Widows, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and all those who are connected with dear dead ones will know themselves to be really concretely connected; and one will become in the future the world in which the human mortal body lives, but also the world in which the human immortal essence lives. And truly, the human being will not become weak in view of the physical world but rather in view of the spiritual one. Just as we only discover the forces that live in iron when we know that it is magnetic, so we will only find true human strength, elevation, enhancement, enrichment of life when we carry the other part of true reality, when we carry the spiritual part of reality within us.

This is what spiritual science wants to gradually bring from the immortal core of man into human culture. In this way, it wants to work in a concrete way for life. So that we can now summarize in the final words what has been developed. I would like to summarize it, somewhat transforming a German poet's words, who was just trying to express his hope for the human world view of the future in such words: spiritual science [wants] to fathom a knowledge of the human being that does not merely extend to the short present between birth and death, but which envisages that which passes from life to life through eternities and elevates that which is thus discovered from spiritual eternity to the throne of truth, where it shall reign for the true liberation of human beings, the souls within human beings.

Dear attendees! Every year I have had the privilege of speaking here in this city about topics in spiritual science. Our friends in the spiritual science movement here were of the opinion that this should also be done in these fateful days. Now it will seem understandable that these days of ours require a very special kind of consideration, even for those striving in spiritual science. After all, all our feelings and emotions are intimately connected with what is happening in the East and the West in these fateful days. We must look with heartfelt sympathy at those who are faithfully obeying the demands of duty, who are giving their all, body and soul, for what has become so deeply embedded in the course of European and indeed human development. In all our thoughts, in all our reflections, there must be a connection to the great arena in which decisions are not made and judgments are not passed in words, in concepts and ideas, but where decisions are made and judgments are passed through deeds, through life, through blood, through death.

What I would like to consider before you this evening, dear attendees, is said to be so connected with the great events of the times that the question is asked, as it were, from these events themselves: What impulses, what forces, what powers in the course of human development have led, could lead to the fact that the bearers of Central European culture, that the bearers of Central European spiritual life are now enclosed as in a mighty, enlarged fortress on all sides, have to defend themselves on all sides; not only have to defend themselves, but are burdened from all sides with all possible insults, yes, defamations. Perhaps spiritual scientific conceptions, perhaps perceptions that arise from spiritual scientific feeling, are suitable for characterizing, at least in some strokes, the larger connections that have led to our fate-shaking events in the world's development up to our time.

Among the things that the materialistic age has particularly laughed at can be mentioned the idea, the concept of the folk soul, which I tried to present in my book “Theosophy”. For the spiritual scientist, this folk soul is not just an abstract, empty concept, not just an abstract summary of the characteristics of some people. This folk soul is a living, real thing.

For spiritual science – as has often been emphasized here – the concept of reality, and also the concept of personal and individual reality, does not end with the visible. Behind the visible, everywhere, the invisible reigns. If we approach nature spiritually, then, behind what nature reveals to us externally, we find spiritual entities that are effective not only for a superstitious, traditional worldview, but for real spiritual scientific research. Behind all that we ourselves are, behind all that develops in us between birth and death, there reigns that eternal, immortal self, which, however, presents itself to man in forms and entities that he ignores in everyday life. The supersensible self rules in us, passing from birth to birth and from death to death on earth. And in all historical development, invisible, supersensible, but as real as the external beings of the animal and plant world, there are real, personal, individual beings. The spiritual researcher speaks of such real, ruling spiritual beings when he speaks of the soul of a nation. And he tries to grasp the nature of these folk souls on the basis of his knowledge; he tries to penetrate into what these folk souls are, in order to gain an understanding from this penetration of how the folk souls prevail in the folk souls, in the feelings and impulses of the folk souls, and how the folk souls relate to each other through this rule.

First of all, I would like to hint at how the spiritual researcher arrives at speaking of such higher spiritual beings, including in the sense of folk souls, which would be far too involved to explain in detail. In our material life, we relate to the things of the external world, to the things of the mineral, animal and plant kingdoms; we look at what is around us within the horizon of these kingdoms; we form ideas and thoughts about them and absorb them. We know that our soul lives within us, and when we form thoughts, images and ideas, then these thoughts, images and ideas relate to beings outside of us.

What we can draw from the beings, we acquire, so to speak; we then carry this further into ourselves from the mineral, animal and plant world that extends around our senses. We form images, thoughts and ideas about the world that is below us as human beings. Spiritual research shows us – I can only hint at this today with a comparison; listeners who have heard me here often know that this is not just a comparison but a result of spiritual research – spiritual research shows us how we as human souls relate to external reality. Thus, in the invisible, there is a spiritual world above us; and what the things of the mineral, animal and plant worlds are for us, we ourselves are as souls for a spiritual world. We can say comparatively: just as the things of the sensory world become thoughts for us, so we become thoughts, so we become perceptions and ideas for the spiritual world. And the folk soul is one of the beings in the spiritual world that are closest to us. And just as we humans can relate to the external world by simply surrendering ourselves to it with our senses, giving it little thought and rarely rising to the realm of the ideal, so the folk soul can relate to the individual people of a nation by living itself out completely in the individuals, entirely [with its will impulses] – and with the folk soul it depends on will impulses – that it expresses itself entirely in the individuals, that this folk soul rises little into a spiritual realm, but rather submerges more and leads a life in the folk individuals themselves. From a spiritual-scientific point of view, we find such folk souls more among the western peoples of Europe. We find that folk souls there rise little into a spiritual realm; on the other hand, we find that they intervene decisively, tyrannically and dogmatically in the individual soul life of the members of the Western European peoples.

Another thing is conceivable and is actually in the character of the folk souls. This can be compared to when a person is more of a dreamer, when he has little eyes and little sense for the outer world; when things pass by him unnoticed, as it were, and he lives more in his own ideas. The behavior of the individual human soul towards external things can be compared to the Russian folk soul. It hovers, as it were, nebulously over the individual members of the people, does not enter into the individualities of the people; cares little about them; is only loosely connected with them.

Then there are people, and we have a representative person of this kind in the history of the development of Central Europe, who on the one hand lovingly contemplates the outside world with all his senses, but then again does not get stuck in this outside world, but develops a full ideal, spiritual-soul life, and with this spiritual-soul life plunges into what the senses around him offer and reveal. In the most eminent sense, Goethe is a representative of this kind of mind. Goethe, whose way of thinking has been called “a concrete thinking” by an important psychologist of his time, because this remarkable Goethe soul connects lovingly with everything outside through the senses, and at the same time rises so strongly to ideas. Schiller could not quite understand this in a conversation he had with Goethe, so that Goethe had to claim that he saw his ideas with his eyes. His intellectual and spiritual life was so highly developed, as was his life of the senses and outer life. The German national soul is a type of national soul that can be compared with this disposition of the individual human soul. The German national soul has proven itself as such over the centuries and millennia of German development in Central Europe.

This German national soul appears to us, on the one hand, as intimately and intimately concerned with the individual human being. On the other hand, we see how it was able to withdraw into the spiritual realms in order to open up new sources of spiritual life there, and then to go down again to the individual human beings in the German nation. A folk soul that lives in the spiritual and in the individual at the same time, that appears to us in the succession of time as if it were coming down among the people; [it appears as if it were coming down rhythmically], we see it in the decisions in which our ancestors assert themselves as opponents of the Roman development. We see how this folk soul, even then, was permeating the individual human personalities in Central Europe, how it imbued them with strength so that they could oppose in a very specific way what was intruding on them as Romanism. We then find how this folk soul withdraws, then breaks out again, submerging itself in the individual personalities, even producing a supreme one at the time of Walther von der Vogelweide [Wolfram von Eschenbach]. We find, as later when Germany was crushed from left and right, from north and south, during the Thirty Years War, this national soul gathers strength in the unseen, and then in a heyday of German spiritual development at the turn of the eighteenth, nineteenth century, it in turn submerges into the individuals.

If we observe history in its rhythmic course, we see it as alternating between the submergence of the national soul in the individualities and a return to the spiritual. And it is from this return to the spiritual that the rejuvenating forces of German development come.

If we consider the fundamental feature of this familiarity on the one hand and the soaring flight on the other of the German national soul, we understand how, within the development of German culture, what is produced as the highest , what reaches to the heights of art and intellectual life, is rooted in the simplest impulses, in the primitive of the national soul; how it was unthinkable in Germany from time immemorial that Germany's high culture was not at the same time popular culture.

And so, in these fateful times, I would like to invoke two personalities in their last moments, their dying moments, so to speak, and characterize something.

How did that which Schiller was able to be for his people settle into German hearts and minds? What worked in Schiller's mind itself? The rejuvenating powers of the German national soul! He knew himself connected to these deeper powers of the German national soul. Through one of his friends, Heinrich Voß, the son of the translator of Homer, Voß, we are led into Schiller's death chamber, as it were, and get to know Schiller's last days and last moments. There we get to know him, this Schiller, as he, so to speak, already died physically in his last days, but as he, gathering all the powers of his soul, nevertheless took part in what surrounded him. There you can see how the spirit prevailed over the worn-out body, which showed a dried-up heart at the autopsy, but in which there was a warm glow. We see that this worn-out body was maintained solely by the strong soul forces that dwelled in it.

We are told how difficult Schiller's last moments were. It is touching to see how, in these last moments, he still made an effort to say this or that, which he believed he still had to communicate to those around him so that it could be passed on to posterity. We are told how Schiller had his last, his youngest child brought to his bedside, how he looked the child in the eye for a long, long time. How he then turned to the wall. And young Voß recounts that he believed – and rightly so – that Schiller looked at his child as if to say: Yes, it would be necessary for me to be your father for much longer, because I still have so much to tell you.

And it may be said that the entire German nation can imagine that the feelings that turned to the child in these last moments were turned to the entire German nation itself; as if the German nation must feel what Schiller still had to say to it. For in Schiller, the German nation can feel how he was carried in everything by the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul.

Let us recall the words that have been quoted frequently in recent times, which Schiller, so to speak, left as a legacy, and which show how he felt connected to the German people. These words only came to light long after his death. But they show us how Schiller himself felt carried by the forces of the German national spirit.

He who forms and rules the spirit

must ultimately gain mastery, for

finally, at the goal of time, if the

world has a plan, if human

life has any meaning, finally,

custom and reason must triumph,

the brute force of form must succumb

and the slowest nation will overtake

all the fast, fleeting ones.

[...]

Him

– the German –

is destined for the highest,
and just as he is in the center of
Europe's peoples,
he is the core of humanity,
those are the flower and the leaf.

He has been chosen by the world spirit, during
the battle of time
to work on the eternal construction of human education
and to preserve what time brings,
therefore he has appropriated what was previously foreign
and kept it within himself.
Everything that was valuable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with the times,
he has preserved,
it is not lost to him, the treasures of
centuries.
Not to shine in the moment and
play his role, but to win the great
process of time. Every people
has its day in history, but
the day of the German is the harvest of
all time.

Thus Schiller knew himself connected with the power of the German national soul.

Now we turn our gaze to another German, to a German who has risen high, one might say, into the often seemingly cold philosophical regions; we turn to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. But Fichte, who in Germany's most difficult times, when Germany was depressed from the west, tried - as he himself put it - to hold his “Discourses to the German Nation” from the innermost “root of the stirrings of life” of his people. He, the philosopher, who perhaps put forward the most vigorously willed thoughts to humanity, he who shaped the sharpest thoughts, he knew himself as being connected to all the primitive sources of the German people, and it was out of this consciousness that he delivered his “Speeches to the German Nation” at that time. But he also felt connected to everything that came from the German people and determined Germany's fate. And again this shows itself to us – we can look at it without sentimentality – it shows itself symbolically in his last moments.

He often deliberated with himself, Fichte, whether he should personally go to war. Then he told himself that he had to work through the power of his mind. His wife worked as a nurse in a military hospital in Berlin. She brought the military hospital fever home with her. She recovered, but Fichte was infected by this fever. And in his last moments – and this was strangely characteristic of this seemingly abstract and at the same time most popular philosopher – in his last days, when his crystal-clear, life-energetic thoughts feverish fantasies, he was outside with the German armies, at Blücher's crossing of the Rhine, he took a faithful part in the fighting, and felt himself in the midst of the battle. Thus, even in the feverish fantasies of the dying philosopher, the strongest German philosophy led to intimate communion with the deeds of his people. His son offered him a medicine. He pushed it away with his hand and said, letting his thoughts wander from the most human philosophy to the way he felt on the battlefields, he said: “I do not need medicine because I feel I will recover.” He recovered to death.

Such examples, esteemed attendees, show us how the forces of the German national soul were at work, where the individual souls that belong to this nation are making the way that they must describe as the most humane, as the one leading to the highest goods of humanity.

And everywhere it is shown how this German national soul does not rule over the individual in a tyrannical way, how it does not pour some kind of collective, dogmatic world view into souls; how it is experienced in the individual souls, how the individual soul feels it as its own power. And how, nevertheless, the highest developments of the supersensible spiritual life are brought into these individual souls. And again and again we see the individual soul seized afresh in all that it has to accomplish on earth, carried down from the spiritual heights by the soul of the nation.

How did this Central European people once receive Christianity! So that it was felt like the most personal impulse. We read the retelling of the Gospel stories [in Heliand, the work of the Saxon monk], we read them as something that arose directly from the most personal spiritual life, but was nevertheless the revelation of a supreme being.

And we move on. We see how later on the individual German soul is seized; so seized is it by that which encompasses the whole soul of the people, that this German soul in German mysticism in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth century feels God so that this God lives directly in all that the individual can will, feel and love, what the individual soul feels directly within itself as the eternal-living. How the words of Master Eckhart resound in us: “If you love God, then you can do whatever you want, [for then you will only want the eternal and the one, which God also wills. I will not ask God to give himself, I will ask him to make me pure, then he will flow into me of his own accord. God is a pure good in Himself and therefore does not want to dwell anywhere, for He may pour Himself entirely into a pure soul. When it is so pure that it sees through itself, then it need not seek God in the form, but it sees Him in itself and enjoys all creatures in God and God in all creatures, and whatever it does, it does in God and] God does in you.” That is to say, they maintain a familiar dialogue not only with what they are as individuals, but also with what, as the soul of the people, whispers and rests through all the minds of the people.

And think of Angelus Silesius, who lived in the seventeenth century. How he empathizes with the individual soul of the human being with the whole soul of the people. How we read there - I will quote only one saying - how Silesius, the “Cherubic Wayfarer,” has made countless such sayings.

I neither live nor die. God himself dies in me, and what I am to live, he also lives for and for.

This means feeling at one with the spirit that lives and breathes in the world. At the same time, it means carrying within oneself a supreme consciousness of immortality. When a person feels connected in their soul to the divine source of existence, they say: “I neither die nor live. God himself dies in me.” There is the certainty that God does not die; but that it is God who goes with me through death. There I feel so connected with God that through this my immortality is granted. There you see the peculiarity, how intimately the soul of the people lives with the individual mind of the people.

When we look at the human soul from a spiritual scientific point of view, then we see – not by dividing it up in the abstract, but by looking at this soul in a truly scientific way, and this is not what science does today, but it is something that the science of the future will certainly do – we see that we can distinguish three soul elements, three soul expressions in the human soul. Just as one can distinguish the different color shades in the spectrum, so one can and must distinguish quite scientifically in the human soul: the sentient soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. And within each of these there is that which is called the human being's ego, the actual self of the human being. Just as light reigns in the reddish-yellow, greenish, and blue-violet parts of the rainbow, so the power of the self, of the ego of man, reigns through the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul.

Now the peculiar thing about trying to understand the peoples of Europe from a spiritual scientific point of view is that it shows that the soul of a nation, for example the Italian soul, relates primarily to the individual human being in such a way that the soul of the nation stimulates the sentient soul and works through the sentient soul. In the case of the French nation, the soul of the nation works through the intellectual or mind soul. In the British nation, the folk soul works through the consciousness soul. In the Russian nation, the folk soul hovers over the soul forces, leaving the soul forces in a kind of [anarchic] state. The German folk soul directly stimulates the I. It does not express itself in a particular part of the soul, but by taking hold of the whole soul; hence its rejuvenating power. Hence the possibility for the German, when seized by the power of his folk soul. [At a certain time, it lovingly seized what was offered in Italy, France, and England, but always rejuvenated it, elevating it within itself to an independent existence.] How lovingly did the German spirit of his time take hold of what was offered to humanity by Eckhart and Tauler! But how did it rejuvenate it by stimulating the whole self through the whole spectrum! How did it raise it to the most independent, personal and inward existence! How was he, with his ever-rejuvenating power of the I-seizing folk soul, how was the German in the present able to present that which encompasses the whole human being as the highest representative of humanity. No other nation could have produced a work of literature like Faust, because no other nation is so deeply moved in its immediate self by the national soul, through all the elements of the soul's spectrum. But that is also why this German essence is so little understood and so misunderstood in all directions.

If we look to the West, we see how everything that arises most deeply from the German soul, what is present there in a completely undogmatic way, always stimulating striving, is expressed in a crude way through language; how it is often not understood and is either rejected emotionally or critically. One is tempted to say: the best that the Central European folk soul instills in the people of Central Europe is “understood” in the West, even when it is tried to be understood, in such a way that precisely the immediate invigoration is lost. And this extends even to the contemplation of the figures.

We can learn a lot about the peculiarities of European cultures by considering how much is understood in the West when it is understood through the Western European strength of the national soul. Herman Grimm, the art historian, once said quite rightly [about a book about Goethe by the Englishman Lewes]: “A certain Mr. Lewes in England has written a book about a person who was born in August 1749 in Frankfurt, who died in March 1832 in Weimar, to whom Mr. Lewes attributes [“The Sorrows of Young Werther”, “Clavigo” and so on], such fates, which we know Goethe experienced. To whom he also attributes the writing of Goethe's works. But everything he describes about this man is only coincidentally connected to the man who was born in 1749 and died in 1832. For that which connects Goethe's work with the life of the Central European folk soul has not been transferred, not even in the slightest, into the book that Mr. Lewes has written about a certain Goethe, who is not, however, the creator of Faust for the Central European in reality. One can grasp the external, the coarse, that through which the other appears. But that which lives in the folk soul, animating the individual soul, is lost, one does not see it. This is perhaps a little too radically expressed in Herman Grimm. But it shows what it is about.

And so we must also find that in the way German essence is understood by French essence, there is something that proves to us that the French soul of the people is such that it enters into the soul of the mind, determining the mind's soul, directly tyrannizing the soul of the mind, so that the soul of the people thinks in the individual and radiates through the impulses of the will of the individual. While the German folk soul becomes the confidante of the individual human being.

And if we now look over to the East, to the Russian people. In Russia, much attention has been paid to Kant, to Hegel, Belinsky. But all this shows a very particular peculiarity: the thoughts of Central Europe become strangely ghostly in the East. They are felt and experienced not in the soul-elevating sensation, but like thought ghosts, conceptual ghosts; like what lives in the secular of the national groupings that lives above the individuals.

In saying this, I am expressing something that is just as much a part of the strict body of knowledge as the physical, chemical and biological truths are. Even though it is more difficult to talk about these things because people are indifferent to physical, chemical and biological truths, whereas the truths presented here are related to the fate and nature of man. But we live in a time in which the human soul must rise above that which impairs the human [...] and we live in a time in which such things must be spoken, in which we must gain understanding for the impulses that are going through the world and that have brought about what is now there.

It is rightly said that the two Central European peoples have been surrounded and enclosed in the last decades, as if with iron clamps, the Central European states. But for the spiritual researcher, this encirclement begins much earlier. And the outer, one might say materialistic encirclement, which had its main organizer in Edward VII, this materialistic encirclement is the last [representative] of an ancient encirclement that began in the year 860 of our era. These connections must be borne in mind. In 860, on the one hand, the Normans were standing outside Paris and, on the other hand, the Varangians came down [outside Novgorod and Kiev] and threatened Constantinople, and then, when they pushed into the Slavic area across Russia to Kiev, to Constantinople, on the other hand, parts of the Normans pushed in [into the Romance element], and we have a coiled snake in Central Europe. Those who remained Central Europeans were to be surrounded and encircled. And in the West, we have the nations pushing in and becoming permeated by a folk soul, pushing into the Romance element, which then, from south to northwest, becomes the substance of the folk soul's nature, so that thinking becomes dogmatic, so that on this side everything must be taken dogmatically, so that we see how what is directly human, what arises from the intimate contact of the human soul with the folk soul, is taken dogmatically in the West by the intellect soul, which is permeated by the traditional Romanism. [Thus Central Europe is isolated. This must be taken dogmatically. If the world is not taken in this way, the folk soul, which is permeated with the old Romanism, will not be individualized.]

On the other hand, in the East we see how a folk soul comes into being when the Varangians, who are related to the Normans, merge with the Slavs, are permeated by the Slavs, and are permeated racially by the Byzantines in religious terms. And we see that what arises there remains at the level of the racial personality, as something aloof and unapproachable, which never comes down. Thus in the East one is dealing with that which directly asserts the racial element. Towards the West, with that which is an ancient and renewed feeling, which dogmatizes the individual. They see that one can only understand what human souls produce by doing so.

In the center we see that which is encircled and enclosed from all sides, which always wants to bring forth something new and wants to offer on the altar of human development that which can arise from the intimate connections of the individual souls with the folk soul.

Thus we experience the remarkable phenomenon that to this day, even in our most painful days, what emerges in Central Europe is observed by the West, but in observing it, it must necessarily be misunderstood because it is measured not by human experience but by one's own dogma; by what the soul of the people tyrannically commands from the soul of reason. We are experiencing some very characteristic phenomena in this regard. On the surface, people want to acknowledge that the Germans have achieved a great deal, that they have attained a high level of culture in thought, in philosophy, in poetry, and in other branches of art; but then, when a man has sipped a little and even translates it quite ingeniously into the realm of Western popular culture, as Henri Bergson did, when a man surveys something ingeniously, it is still German conceived in the French manner, German translated into the way of the West. And now he feels compelled – we had to read this around Christmas, how he spoke in the so-called [Academy of Moral and Political Sciences], we had to read it, how he tries to characterize the German character. And this German essence appears to him as if it only wanted to be embodied in cannons and rifles, in what the silly chatter calls “German militarism”; that militarism to which Germany has been forced, not by itself, but by those who surrounded it. One would like to ask such a man what he actually expected Germany to put up against its enemies other than rifles and cannons. Did he perhaps imagine that Novalis or Schiller or Goethe would be recited to the armies of Germany?

The question is: What does the Central European have to defend? What he has to defend can be seen from a consideration of what the German national soul is to the individual German. But such considerations will only become important when they can take hold of and find an echo in the reasonable people of the world within a somewhat broader horizon. Today logic is not exactly what is being whispered throughout the world. We have even had to hear that when there was a manifestation from the German side, the response from the left and right in Europe was: We did not want this war. They did not want it. Yes, from a logical point of view; that is quite correct, from a logical point of view. You can believe it. It is just as right as when a number of people surround the house of another person. He sees that he is locked in his house. He goes out and beats those who surround him. And then they say: We did not want the beating. The logic is exactly the same in both cases. Logic does not whisper today through what is called the “intercourse of nations”, especially through the newspapers. It can be seen everywhere through facts: what the German national soul says to the individual German can be grasped in the West, it can be heard, but it cannot be effective for the reasons just given.

We are experiencing strange phenomena. This power of the German national soul - in enlightened minds, in minds that want to deal with it, something of it has come to light after all. It is not exactly pleasant to speak characteristically about the Central European people in the midst of them. And so I will choose a different approach. I would like to raise the question: Has this German character really always been misunderstood, as it is now, even outside the German-speaking areas? There is a man who certainly belongs to the most important minds of the nineteenth century. And I would like to read to you a passage from a book about Goethe, who appears to him as the representative of the German character, [Emerson]. He says, a man who lives far away from Central Europe, he says about Goethe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public.

- [A trait] is mentioned that Goethe shares with his entire nation:

that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America, people respect talent, but they are satisfied only when it works for or against a party in line with its convictions. In France, one is delighted to see brilliant ideas, wherever they may lead. In all these countries, however, talented men write within the limits of their gifts. If what they write stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind has neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed to practicality, nor, finally, the American adventurousness, but what it does have is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself about them. There is intellectual activity, so what is it expressing? What are people's opinions? Where do they come from? Where do they get all these ideas?

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

[We see that the rejuvenating effect of the German national soul has not always been recognized.

For this reason, the terms of distinction used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, view their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, even though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says may be, he has something else in mind that is even better. [...] He has that awe-inspiring independence that springs from contact with the truth.

Thus, one felt what the German could achieve in contact with the truth, that is, in contact with his national soul, where one wanted to feel it.

Now one could say: That was a long time ago. And it has been said. The Germans have changed since then. Instead of poetry, they have made cannons. Now, so that this too can be countered, the saying of another man should be mentioned here, who in his way must have touched - we will soon see why - to the west that which is the German national character.

The source of the stream of

— Germany's —

spiritual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient Greece, the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany today is to a large extent practical and material.

And elsewhere the same man says:

Only the influence of true knowledge can dispel the clouds of suspicion and free us from the need to prepare for attacks that no one really has in mind.

Who said that? Well, Lord Haldane said it. You may remember how he said some other things a few months ago! Not so long ago, just a few months before this war broke out, a lecture was given in Manchester by a few Englishmen who were supposed to educate English journalists about the German character. From the newspapers that are now appearing, one can see what fruit this has borne, what use it has been. But we will soon see what was said in Manchester, in England, about the German character.

Woods

- the Englishman –

essay was the forerunner of the even more epoch-making Homeric research of Wolf; and the Greek ideals of art and life became for Goethe and Schiller at Weimar, as in the case of Herder, the ideals of [primeval] song, the instruments on which the German spirit played itself up to a music that was new and yet at the same time, in the deepest sense, its own.

Now come some remarkable words:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen knew the spirit of science unquestioningly; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, mainly by thousands of German researchers.

Spoken in Manchester to enlighten English journalists; that's why they are so enlightened now!

Imagination, feeling, will asserted their right to be heard beside or above reason, and under their transforming pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful. The irrational was recognized as a source of illumination; wisdom was sought from the child and the flower; science, philosophy, and poetry drew near each other. In England, this revival of the imagination gave birth to noble poetry, but left science and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the period is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical, and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a portrayal of present-day Germany, the Germany of restless, bold will and action, and we can understand all the better why the [great] citizen of the world, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable place as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

And now a very curious thing. The following was also said in the same lecture cycle in Manchester shortly before the outbreak of the war:

On the whole, there is no question that the establishment of the German Reich has contributed to world peace. This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is for history to shed light on the tangled web of the present, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For when we look to the past, we find that our ancestors looked at France with far greater fear than the wildest rabble-rousers today fear Germany. And the fear of our ancestors had good reason.

So says an Englishman!

To sum up, it can be shown that the founding of the German Empire was an asset for Europe, and therefore also for Great Britain. Because the events of the years 1866-1871 once and for all put an end to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the previously unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed a temptation to war

- in this he was, however, mistaken -

which in earlier centuries had so often lured France onto the wrong track;

- that has been said, not in Berlin and not in Hanover, but in Manchester. -

they put the German people in a position to develop their previously stunted political abilities, and they helped to build a new European system on a secure foundation that preserved peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved in one fell swoop what Great Britain, despite all its expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to achieve, namely to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a major war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

This was said in Manchester, a year before the war. The matter speaks for itself, we hardly need to add anything.

We see, then, that people have sometimes known what the Central European nation has to contribute to the overall culture of humanity. Yes, sometimes they have even known it quite thoroughly. Here is another example of how thoroughly they have known it. There was a certain man, also over there in the West, who was closer to us than the others we have just spoken of; a certain man whom the world calls a mystic. The man has undoubtedly written very brilliant works. Once he expressed himself about where the deepest thoughts of his soul came from, and he cited three world-historical phenomena. The third is the German poet Novalis. When we hear his poetry, we have the immediate feeling that the rejuvenating power of the folk soul speaks intimately to his soul, so that it can express what the folk soul is telling him. Now, what does this man feel about Novalis? He says:

What people describe on earth, what poets say, a Sophocles, a Shakespeare, what these Desdemona, Ophelia, what Hamlet and so on experience, it all happens between people. But if a spirit from a different plane were to descend to earth, could this spirit of a different plane find something on earth that also interests him, the spirit who is not of the earth?

And the man now finds that what the German poet Novalis expressed could also interest a spirit who descends from another plane as a genius. He finds that Novalis touched on secrets of the human soul, which the soul must often keep silent about, because it can only find the right words in the solemn moments of life to express these secrets, these supersensible secrets of life. So says the man. And we want to write these words very deeply into our souls, for they are beautiful, these words that he says in reference to his experience of Novalis. He says:

On these heights alone are memories that the soul can form, and images that resemble it and are as compelling as itself. There, humanity ruled for a moment, and these dimly lit peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the spiritual realm to the earth.

- and of those lights, says the man, Novalis has lit many. And he continues –

but in their works, the aforementioned people

- including Novalis -

left the little village of passions and said things that are also of value to those who are not of the earthly community.

Thus one speaks of one of the most German of Germans, Novalis. A man speaks thus, and we could assume that this man, who obviously loves the spiritual, would instruct all those who now speak of the German “barbarians” with the words: For these words, which I have now read, are also from the man of whom I will read something else:

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to hear its weak, childlike voice amidst the useless cries that surround it.

Yes, it can be said that in the midst of the useless shouting that is now speaking of Germany's “barbarism,” such words as those of the man can hardly be heard. But who said all this? Maurice Maeterlinck. Well, you know how Maeterlinck himself has gone among the useless shouters in recent months. We don't need to add anything to that either.

But then, when we hear such voices, we say to ourselves: They are proof that what wells up from the German national soul into the individual German souls is already penetrating across the borders, but it cannot come into effect. And it cannot come into effect properly even where it seems ghostly. I have shown that it has a ghostly effect in the East. Yes, if one asks: What is it that people feel from this participation of the German national soul in German culture, even those who speak of Western European culture in the East? One can often hear something like the words I would like to read to you now. When Herman Grimm speaks of the alleged Goethe of Mr. Lewes in the way I have mentioned, we notice a coarsening in this Mr. Lewes; but how what one wants to absorb but cannot absorb becomes ghostly towards the East is shown to us by words that Mereschkowski spoke about Goethe. He says:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed and shriveled into a dwarf by an evil spell; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German burgher and – if the shadow of the Olympian will have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a decent son of the decent Frankfurt shopkeeper.

Thus Mereschkowski speaks of the poet of Faust. Nor should one be deceived by the words which Mereschkowski says about Goethe in the final sentence of his essay. If one reads the foregoing, which is inspired throughout by the same spirit, one sees that Mereschkowski cannot rise up to Goethe, that he sees him only as a ghost. And much of this kind could be cited. But of course, when one of the leading spirits of the East, about Chekhov, Mereschkowski himself has to say:

No era, no people, as if in the midst of eternity there were only the end of the nineteenth century and in the world only Russia. Infinitely sharp-eyed and bright-eared [for] everything Russian and contemporary, he is almost blind and deaf to the foreign and the past. He saw Russia more clearly than anyone else, but overlooked Europe, overlooked the world.

One can find it understandable, must find it understandable, that Central Europe is currently only a specter for the East, which is transferred up into the national soul hovering over the individual. There is not enough time to prove this in detail, but it could be proven. On the other hand, it can truly be said that what can be called “the rejuvenating power of the German national soul” not only gives us insight into the nature of the German national soul in the past, but also gives us strength, faith and hope for the German national soul in the future.

Indeed, the German knows how to take Goethe somewhat differently than the others. And for this I may cite a saying that Herman Grimm in turn has done about Goethe. This saying has been done in lectures on Goethe, in lectures that speak differently than the one whom Herman Grimm himself has dismissed in the manner indicated, Lewes. Herman Grimm perceives Goethe as a confidant of the German people themselves; but also as an impulse, as a force that works and will continue to work within German culture, just as cosmic changes in the earth must work in relation to physical conditions. Herman Grimm says of Goethe:

Goethe has worked in the spiritual life of Germany as a powerful natural phenomenon would have worked in the physical. Our coal deposits tell of times of tropical warmth when palm trees grew in our country. Our opening caves tell of ice ages when reindeer were native to our country. Over vast periods of time, dramatic upheavals took place on German soil, which in its present state gives such an appearance of eternal immutability. The comparison can be drawn that Goethe's influence on the intellectual atmosphere of Germany was roughly equivalent to a telluric event, which increased our climatic warmth by so many degrees on average. If something like that happened, a different vegetation, a different operation of agriculture and with it a new basis for our entire existence would occur.

This is how Herman Grimm feels Goethe within German intellectual life. Gradually, a different intellectual vegetation, a different intellectual climate, will occur through Goethe, says Herman Grimm.

This same Herman Grimm, in a manner that brought out the whole character of the German spirit, spoke of how the German folk soul has worked in German culture to arrive at views that seek the universal in the particular national spirit. Thus Herman Grimm demonstrated the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul by showing how he himself was attuned to the course of the world spirit at the end of the nineteenth century. For in 1895 the beautiful words were spoken that express the mood of a German who knew himself to be one with the living and breathing German national soul. Herman Grimm said:

The solidarity of the moral convictions of all people today is the church that unites us all. We are seeking more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious endeavors of the masses have only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that no national difference can be maintained in the face of the ethical worldview.

Herman Grimm continues:

We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland,

he says, and then the significant words follow:

But to long for or to hasten the moment when this could happen through war, we are far removed. The assurance that peace is our most sacred desire is not a lie. “Peace on earth and goodwill to men” permeates us.

But the fact that Herman Grimm saw through his time, that he was not a dreamer, that he was able to grasp reality under the guidance of the German soul, is attested by what he now says:

As a totality, men acknowledge themselves as subject to an invisible court enthroned as it were in the clouds, before which they consider it a misfortune not to be allowed to exist, and to whose judicial procedure they seek to adapt their internal dissensions. With anxious eagerness they seek their right here. How the French of today are at pains to present the war against Germany that they are planning as a moral imperative, demanding that other nations, and even the Germans themselves, recognize it.

You see, in 1895 Herman Grimm had a clear view of how things stand. Those who are accustomed to seeing things this way do not let themselves be called out: Who wanted the war!

Among the hundreds and hundreds of testimonies I could present, here is one more. A person who is not particularly fond of Germanic nature writes the following words:

As far as I am concerned, I am in no doubt for a moment that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic world is imminent, that it will be ignited either by the Orient, especially Turkey, or by the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps by both, and that Russia will take the lead in it on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spewing fire and brimstone against Germany. [...] The German press is already sounding its warning cries. Since the Crimean War, a long time has passed and, it seems, it is now considered appropriate in St. Petersburg to take up the Oriental question again.

Yes, my dear attendees, these words were not spoken just a few months before the war. They were written in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. Even those who saw things clearly never realized that the nations pushed into the middle of Europe would be locked up like in a fortress by those who misunderstood and do not understand them on all sides.

It is curious when, in the face of such words, one tries to express the opinion that the Germans wanted this war. I would like to use the few moments remaining to me for this lecture to present something about this “the Germans wanted this war” that may speak volumes to anyone who wants to see clearly.

Let us assume that someone had observed what was going on in the weeks before the outbreak of war - in the spring of 1914, when the press was perhorresziert the political horizon - and he wanted to express that; what would he have had to say in 1914, after the events that took place? He would have had to say something like the following:

[One could see how a press campaign was gradually beginning in St. Petersburg, how strong pressure was being exerted on Austria that, if accepted, would have resulted in Austria and Germany becoming dependent on Russia. And yet one could not have contradicted the Russian friends when they said that there was no reason for a war between Russia and Germany.

Not true, in 1914, in July, it could have been expressed quite well, and it could have been applied to the immediate events of the present. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have not read you anything that was said in July 1914, but, with some modification, the words that [Bismarck spoke on February 6, 1888 in the Reichstag] to justify the military bill. And now I read his own words, so you can see that I have not only the words, but only the time somewhat rectihziert:

[...] how a kind of press campaign gradually began in St. Petersburg, [through which German politics was attacked], I personally was suspected in my intentions. These attacks increased during the following year until 1879 to strong demands for pressure that we should exert on Austria in matters where we could not readily attack Austrian law. I could not lend my hand to this, because if we estranged ourselves from Austria, then we would necessarily become dependent on Russia if we did not want to be completely isolated in Europe. Would such a dependency have been tolerable? I had believed earlier that it could be, telling myself: We have no conflicting interests; there is no reason why Russia should ever break off friendship with us. At least I had not directly contradicted my Russian colleagues who explained such things to me. The incident at the Congress disappointed me, and showed me that even the complete subordination of our politics (for a certain time) to the Russian politics would not protect us from coming into conflict with Russia against our will and against our aspirations.

However, if things are as they have been presented, if the national soul in the West and in the East must behave in relation to what the strength of the German national soul is, then it will be a mistake to believe that this war was wanted by Central Europe in 1914. For it has been clear for decades how everything has been done to bring about the current events.

Not only the subtle Herman Grimm spoke of the will for peace in Central Europe. It may also be recalled that not only where, like Herman Grimm, as a man ethically on the heights of his time, was in touch with the German national soul, but also where one was politically inspired by the German national soul, one spoke in a similar way.

In 1888, in Berlin, again Bismarck spoke in such a way that no desire for war was expressed. Bismarck said:

With the powerful machine that we are training the German army to be, one does not attack. If I were to stand before you today and tell you - if the circumstances were different from what I am convinced they are: We are seriously threatened by France and Russia; it is foreseeable that we will be attacked; I believe it as a diplomat after military intelligence about this, it is more useful for us to use the advance of the attack as a defense that we are now about to launch; it is more advantageous for us to wage a war of aggression, and so I ask the Reichstag for a loan of one billion or half a billion to wage war against our two neighbors today. Yes, gentlemen, I don't know if you would have the confidence in me to grant it. I hope not!

One day, my dear audience, we will come to feel, not only from reason but also from our instincts, something of the real causes of this war and the driving forces that led to it. One will sense something of the will that concentrated against Central Europe in order to stop the eternally rejuvenating German national soul in its element.

The images that can be gained by surveying the workings and weavings of European national souls in recent decades show how the storm is looming. Can we not say the following: If one wanted to delve into the goings-on and workings of the German national soul as they were in the times before this war broke out, could one not come to the following thoughts? Allow me to read this to you as well. You will see in a moment that I also have a certain idea:

German literature, German religion, German philosophy are books with seven seals for us. What we do know is how many dreadnoughts Germany has and how much its trade has increased. What is really important is not the dreadnought, but the brain of its builder, the courage and talent of its commander. What is really important is not the increase in sales, but the human qualities that prompted it. [...]

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence, and it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany is already at its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined fight against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago. [...]

Across every border and across the water sit the adversaries, commercial and political, waiting anxiously for the moment when Germany slackens just a little, to pounce and overwhelm, and Germany knows it.

[This is how Mrs. Wylie wrote in her book “Eight Years in Germany,” which was published about two years before the war. It is quite good when such people try to delve into the German national soul.

So, these are the things that are awakened as an echo when one tries to understand what the German seeks in intimate dialogue with his national soul. And what was it that the German always tried to find in his dialogue with his national soul? It was always that which should enable the individual human being, the individual human soul, the individual human spirit to find its way to the spiritual heights of the world, where all things have their source and origin, where the eternal part of the human soul itself also has its source and origin.

Spiritual science, precisely because of its sources, must believe in the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul; believe because it is aware that in the course of world history this German national soul has always ascended to spiritual heights , descended to the human selves in order to convey to them the truth of their eternity. Spiritual science has its roots and its source in German idealism, and we can prove that spiritual science is closely related to this German idealism.

What does spiritual science say, not in the abstract but in concrete terms, about the future of the human soul? That in this body lives an immortal self that goes through births and deaths again and again; that when spiritual initiation is attained, when spiritual knowledge and spiritual reality are attained through research, the soul is grasped outside of the body; that it looks back at this body as if at an external object, so pre-sensing that which the human soul experiences when it has passed through the gate of death. Spiritual science does not speak in general terms that the human soul is eternal, but in such a way that it clearly points to what, after death, looks back on what lived in the body. Spiritual science describes this very specifically. And only today can it do so.

And true spiritual science, as we in Central Europe consider it to be, is aware that it owes the powers of research only to the connection of the German national soul with the German philosophers. If someone who professes spiritual science today wants to use a comparison in the truest sense of the word for something that has passed and must find its future, if someone who is a true believer in spiritual science wanted to say: I think something completely new must be introduced into humanity, something that is still met with many prejudices today; but to me, these prejudices seem like what the soul of the corpse feels when it looks back at the corpse after death.

One might think that only a spiritual researcher could make such a comparison, because only recently has spiritual research been able to confirm that the soul really does this after going through death. I will present such a comparison to you:

Time appears to me like a shadow that stands over its dead, from which an army of diseases has just driven it out, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed spirit has entered, have already taken her up and surround her with a warm breath of love; the secret voices of the sisters already greet her and welcome her; she is already stirring and expanding within herself in all directions, to develop the more glorious form into which it is to grow; but it has as yet no feeling for these breezes or hearing for these voices, or, if it had, it is absorbed in pain over its loss, with which it believes itself to have been lost at the same time.

Today, one really believes that only a spiritual researcher could speak in this way. It is Fichte who spoke in this way in his “Speeches to the German Nation”; addressing the corpse as he would a corpse in what he wants to replace the old German education with a new education.

Thus, whatever can be desired today is rooted in the germs that German idealism sought from the union with the German national soul, from these rejuvenating powers of the German national soul.

And if we want to have confidence that spiritual science can really unfold as a new fruit on the tree of German development, we need only look at what can be seen as the true essence of the German national soul, as the rejuvenating power of the German national soul. The true essence of the German national soul is precisely this ever-rejuvenating power.

And when we look at the fateful events of today, we feel them like a twilight. But we look into the future and want to understand that a horizon warmed and illuminated by the sun must arise from this twilight; that the German national soul will have the strength to rejuvenate German character and German striving. And whatever is undertaken against this German essence, against this German striving, will not be able to rob it of its breath of life, because that which is present as the highest life in the German essence is the ever-rejuvenating powers of the German national soul. If it has produced so many rungs in German culture, it must also produce new fruits. That is our hope, and that is not something vague, that is something well-founded! We look hopefully towards the horizon, which will show us precisely one of the fruits of German development: a spiritual-scientific worldview that will flow through all hearts and souls and will connect spirit and body. When people see the spiritual as a reality, when they know how the spiritual passes through the gate of death, when they look at the spiritual as science today looks at the external physical forces, when they know that nothing is lost, then they will know that the countless spiritual parts that now pass through the gate of death from young bodies cannot be lost. They, these soul-like human faculties, which could have continued to serve the body for decades to come, will not only be felt in the abstract sense as something eternal in the future, as was possible according to ancient knowledge, but they will be felt as something that lives on, that those who have followed the duties of the time through the gate of death or suffering have incorporated into the spiritual stream of existence.

And they will feel a concrete connection when times of peace come again out of this twilight of war. Those who have borne the best fruits of the German character will feel a special connection with all those who have gone through the gates of death.

So it can be said, summarizing what I have tried to express before you today: Yes, this German spirit has not yet fully accomplished what its mission in the world was. It is connected with the rejuvenating power of the German national soul. And if you look at the true nature of the German national soul, then you know: the driving forces are there, the invisible forces of German life are unchanged among us. And to all those who today speak of Germany's weakness or of a weakening or destruction of the German character, to them the one who objectively recognizes what the rejuvenating power of the German national soul whispers to individual Germans, to them he calls out into the world the meaning that he perceives from the work of the German national soul:

The German spirit has not completed

what it is to accomplish in the course of the world.

It lives in the future, hopeful,

It hopes for future deeds full of life;

In the depths of his being, he feels a mighty

secret that is still to take effect as it matures.

How can a mind, uncomprehending,

Wish for its end to come:

As long as life reveals itself to him,

Which holds him in the roots of creation?

During each winter in the past years, I was allowed to give a lecture here on a spiritual-scientific topic. The local friends have also requested such a lecture for this year. And it will seem understandable that in these difficult, fateful and destiny-bearing times, such a reflection may lead to that which fills us all deeply, deeply in our hearts and souls. Our thoughts and feelings are directed towards the East and the West, to where the great events of our time are unfolding in such a significant, grand, powerful, and painful way; where the fate of humanity is not discussed with words, but with deeds, which find expression in courage, confidence, bravery, in death and suffering, but also in all the uplifting sacrifices that are so abundant in the time when something so significant is also happening for our Central European humanity.

What can be stimulated in our present time regarding the relationship between the European national souls may be the subject of today's spiritual scientific reflection. It may be the subject of this reflection in the way that spiritual science can illuminate these very conditions. This spiritual science, which has indeed found little, truly little, favor and acceptance among the majority of contemporary people, but which, for those who are imbued with its innermost meaning, its innermost spirit, presents itself that it must take its stand for the whole movement for the whole life of the human spirit in the cultural movement for the present and the near future, just as the scientific movement for several centuries has taken its stand in cultural life. And it is precisely in the face of the deeply moving questions of life that spiritual science must prove itself.

Among the concepts that have provoked the most ridicule and opposition in my first fundamental spiritual science book - in my “Theosophy” - is the concept of the folk soul not as an abstraction, as a mere idea and sum of characteristics that hold a group of people together, but as a real, active being. We have already reached a point where the habits of thought that have been formed over centuries no longer want to go along with spiritual science.

Just as human beings, as the highest of earthly beings, stand in relation to the entities of the other natural kingdoms, just as the entities of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms find their physical, sensory culmination in the human being, so spiritual science must show - however unusual it may be for present-day ideas - that the realms of beings are not limited to the visible, that there are other realms above the human being, which cannot be reached with the mind that is bound to our brain, or with our physical, sensory eyes and ears, but which can be reached with what Goethe called spiritual vision, spiritual eyes and ears. This is not said comparatively, but to express something that is as certain for anthroposophy as, for example, the biological results are for the external science.

Spiritual science says that the way a person, with their soul, faces the things and entities of external nature, and how they form concepts and ideas about them, so there are truly real spiritual beings, invisible to the physical eye, above the human being, and for these beings, the human being with their soul is as much a thought, as it is an idea, as the objects of external nature are for the human being. Thus we are permeated and held by these spiritual beings. And to one of the next classes of these beings, spiritual science must count what for many is only the coincidence of the characteristics of a people: the folk souls.

What matters is the relationship of the folk soul to the individual human soul. Spiritual science does not look at the soul like popular psychology. It regards it not as a product of the outer organization, but as the real creator of the outer organization. And not to make an easy classification, but out of the nature of things, the spiritual scientific researcher distinguishes three essential parts of the soul with the same justification - only of course transferred to another area - as one distinguishes in the rainbow spectrum the red color on one side, the green in the middle, and then the blue color. And just as one cannot grasp the interaction of light and colors without taking this structure, which is most clearly seen in the rainbow spectrum, so one cannot understand the human soul without the threefold nature that we describe as the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. Just as the rainbow has the color red on one side, so the human being has the sentient soul on one side; in the middle, the human being has the mind or emotional soul; and just as the rainbow has the color blue, so the human being has the consciousness soul. As I said, this does not arise from arbitrariness, from a desire to classify, but is connected with the innermost nature of the soul.

Let us first take the sentient soul: just as the red part of the spectrum primarily contains warmth, so the sentient soul contains more of the desires, the passions, the passionate forces of the soul, but at the same time, when the soul goes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, [withdraws into] that which are the eternal forces of the soul, which mysteriously hide behind the drives, the passions, the desires, which at the same time are what imprints the soul with the eternal character. But what exists in the soul as the mediation of the eternal self of the human being with the temporal-spatial human being corresponds to the green color, which primarily serves the light, just as the mind serves the spiritual, mediating the human being's relationship to his eternal and temporal.

And the consciousness soul is what consumes the eternal between birth and death to work on the temporal; it is most turned towards the material world. The consciousness soul is what contains the soul powers that are least carried through the gate of death, that are least connected to the eternal self of man.

In all that we distinguish as nuances of the soul life, the actual I of the human being lives as light lives in the nuances of the spectrum. As there is light in every color, so there is I in every part of the human soul; but at the same time, what permeates the human being like an invisible entity passes through the I into the soul's members: the soul of the people to which he belongs. The relationship between the national soul and the individual human soul varies greatly, and nations differ according to the nature of the relationship between the national soul and the individual human soul. There is not enough time in the world if I were to attempt to develop in full, on the basis of spiritual scientific research, the nature of the relationship between the national soul and the human soul. A comparison can be enlightening here, but it should be more than just a comparison; it should give a genuine spiritual-scientific result.

If we look at a person in relation to the mineral, plant and animal world, we can distinguish three types of people. Firstly, there are people whose whole being is inclined only towards the external sense world, who cannot sharply concentrate their attention on something that withdraws from the sense world, who always need the impression of the outside world. They fall into indifference and inattention when they are supposed to have ideas that do not adhere to the outside world.

There is another relationship to the environment that we encounter more in inward-looking, sensible natures, who go through the world in such a way that their senses are little attracted by external nature, who produce inwardly, who bring forth from the life of the soul what they experience. They go through the world of the senses raving and dreaming. These are very different types of people because the soul relates to itself and to the outer world in different ways.

A third type is the one who has placed himself in history primarily through the representative of Germanness, through Goethe. A great thinker of his time called his thinking “representational thinking”. By this he meant that Goethe had the peculiarity of being just as oriented towards sensual things as he was, and that he could immerse himself in the spiritual that he was able to experience in and with things. The ideas of “spirit and body” were intimately interwoven in his soul. His thinking was objective and did not stray far from the objects, and when it did go to the objects, it did not stray from itself.

Corresponding to this threefold relationship of man to the world around him, we also have three types of relationship of the folk soul to the individual human soul. For just as the human being relates to nature, so the folk soul relates to the individual human soul. There are folk souls that relate to individual souls in such a way that they are completely devoted to the individual human beings, as it were, that they completely slip into them and permeate them, that the individual soul is something that is the imprint of the folk soul.

This is the preferred relationship for the souls that inhabit the west and south of Europe: the French, Italian and British people. The relationship is different for the Russian people. There we find that the folk soul remains, as it were, above the individual souls, that it does not enter into the being of the individual human being, which is expressed by the fact that the Russian people still have today - like a cloud spreading over the whole nation - the Byzantine religion, which does not connect with the individual soul. Such is the relationship of the folk soul to the individual Russian person.

[Where, as in Western Europe, the national soul takes hold of the individual souls, it dominates the individual souls so that the individual soul is something like an imprint of the national soul. Just as the national soul in the West is within the individual soul, so the relationship of the Russian national soul is such that it does not descend.

Like the person who lives only in his or her own soul, the national soul does not descend to the individual soul; the national soul, as it were, raves over the people. The Russian souls are not seized by the folk soul, but rather they are in anarchic confusion. Even when one thinks of the excellent representatives of the Russian people, of Tolstoy and so on, one sees how the folk soul hovers over them like a cloud and that the individual soul forces are not seized by it, but are in anarchic confusion.

Let us now turn to the center of Europe: here we find such a relationship between the soul of the people and the individual soul that we can compare this relationship with Goethe's objective thinking. We have the soul of the people lovingly and intimately entering into the individual souls and yet, at the same time, rising above itself and being transported into the spiritual worlds in order to draw new strength and carry it down from the spiritual worlds. We have here the life of the soul of the people above the human being in the spiritual heights, and then again in the individual human souls.

One can say: When you look at the people of Western Europe, a particular soul force is always taken hold of and ruled by the folk soul: in the Italians, the sentient soul; in the French, the mind or mind soul; in the British, the consciousness soul. All the qualities that the members of these nations have [precisely as members of these nations] immediately become clear and understandable when viewed from this perspective of the nature of the facts, which can be found through spiritual science. How powerfully passionate, how completely immersed in instinct, all of Italian life appears, right up to the greatness of Dante, who drafted his Divine Comedy from the images of the sentient soul. The Italian people become understandable when one knows that it is the folk soul that takes hold of the sentient soul here.

The French nation becomes understandable when one recognizes that the folk soul directly takes hold of the intellectual soul. I read how a psychological society in a German city tried to explain the French national character. The result was: That is their mathematical disposition. This disposition becomes immediately understandable when one knows that the folk soul directly takes hold of the powers of the intellectual soul. Everything in this western nation is illuminated when one knows that it tends to take things in such a way that, despite all striving for personal freedom and national freedom, it is inwardly dogmatized and systematized to the point of artistic activity, to the point of the details of artistic activity. And we also find the other side there. I would like to say the negative pole of the dogma: that is criticism, the dissolving element. On the one hand, the rational soul wants to see everything in a system of dogmas, and if it cannot, it rebels against it, and so we have either dogmatism or Voltairism. The starting point of Descartes' philosophy is doubt down to the last detail. You can understand what is happening in the French people if you know this.

I note that a number of prominent figures are sitting here who know that I have been dealing with these things for years and that they have not been formulated by the occasion of the present. But I believe that they can be enlightening for what we are now experiencing, which is so great, so meaningful and so painful.

Now to the consciousness soul. The part that is most inclined towards the outer life and carries least into the eternal part of the human being is the consciousness soul, and in the British people it is most seized by the folk soul. The character of the British people as a trading nation and also the character of Shakespeare immediately becomes clear. For what is his greatness based on? That he has portrayed the individual human being in such a sharp characteristic, that they stand firmly on the physical plane, that he characterizes them in what does not pass through the gate of death. He is so great because he has succeeded in characterizing so sharply what is human in man that is not eternal about them, but what they develop for the physical world between birth and death.

Now, the German national soul, or, as I could also say, Central European culture, is characterized by the fact that it does not take hold of the soul directly, but descends to the soul and takes hold of it in its entirety, as it were with that which flows from the sources of the spiritual world, for it has the gift of withdrawing into the spiritual worlds and drawing strength from there. Hence the peculiarity of the German soul to experience that which has the power of the eternal, which directly flows from the eternal into the individual souls. The individual soul must be able to feel that something in your soul lives through the national soul, which sinks into you, which is carried into you, and through which you are directly connected to what lives in spiritual heights. Hence the idealism, hence the ever-rejuvenating power of the German national soul.

One can go through the products of German intellectual life and obtain the evidence that, in contrast to other nations, the German has this peculiar relationship to the folk soul: not the individual soul elements are seized, as in the western and eastern nations of Europe, but the ego, of which the German seems to be less developed. One is a Briton, a Frenchman; a German is to be made.

It is an ideal because not a single power of the soul, but the whole soul is seized in the most profound life in the constant emergence of the different sides. Let us look back to the times when Christianity penetrated into the young, developing Germanic nation. How was it received? We can see this from the Old High German poem “Heliand”. What the individual - here the poet of “Heliand” - feels about the events, his personal experience, is directly related to the forces that surround him. What was only handed down to the Romans is reborn from the youngest germinal forces of the poet.

And in other poems we find how Christianity not only becomes part of the German people, but is born out of the individual human being, as it becomes a personal matter for the individual. It is the soul of the people that does not allow what comes to the people to grow old, but rejuvenates it so that it lives like a plant in the soul and rises again.

Furthermore, we see how a world view develops in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries that is called German mysticism, for example in the works of Tauler, Meister Eckhart, the unknown author of Theologia Deutsch, and so on. We see how the minds work in a peculiar way, how they relate to the spiritual world. The mystic Eckhart is convinced that the spiritual world must be experienced directly in the soul, that it must be left entirely to itself, that it must not move out of its own arbitrariness, but must give itself to the forces that are weaving and ruling through the world. Then something ignites in it, which is a spark, but in this spark lives God, the divine weaving and being.

The place where God lives within, [where Christ is born within, which suffers] and dies when the individual soul goes the way of suffering and passion, / gap in the text] is where Meister Eckhart coined the word “Gemüt”. In the mind, the world is spiritually revived, and it is aware that what a person thinks, the Godhead thinks, what a person feels, the Godhead feels, what a person wills, the Godhead wills, if only he gives himself to his God. There we have something of the intimate coexistence of the individual with the German folk soul.

And in the author of Theologia Deutsch we find a rejuvenation of the German Weltanschauung through a rhythmic beat of the life of the German national soul with the individual representatives of the German national soul. What in earlier times led to the resurrection of the life of Jesus, as if Jesus had wandered through Germany's countryside with his disciples as his servants, which so personally depicted the life of Jesus, which rejuvenated Christianity, that rejuvenates the worldview in German mysticism. And it is wonderful how deeply the German national soul intervenes in personal life! This becomes clear when we look at one of the disciples of mysticism, at Angelus Silesius, when we share a saying of this mystic, one of the deepest of the numerous sayings:

I neither die nor live. God Himself dies in me,

And what I am to live, He also lives for and for.

Oh, what depths, we say, only in relation to the thought of immortality! He who has done this feels the ruling divinity. When I die, it is just as much an act of the divinity as when I live, it is the divinity that lives in me. By letting God experience death in me, I am aware of my immortality.

One can say: such ideas of immortality, which point to an immortal power in the human soul that is not grasped by reflecting on what lies beyond death, but is already grasped by it in life, are demonstrated by Jakob Böhme, the simple cobbler from Görlitz, the profound philosopher, who was fully inspired by the German folk spirit. He directed his enlightened gaze to that which is of the divine worlds in his own soul. He saw the courage of human striving on earth in the fact that the individual human soul, which is otherwise given over to emotional impressions, to those of the intellect and so on, always knows itself connected with its immortal core, with that which lives in death, that knows how to die by living out of direct knowledge.

Jakob Böhme's goal was to experience death directly in earthly life, and that this is the seed for the experiences of life. An expression that appears to be the utterance of the German national soul through a single person is the following:

He who does not die before he dies,

He perishes when he dies.

Those who do not grasp during their lifetime what lives in the soul as an immortal and thus pass through the gate of death, those who do not grasp death as the source of spiritual life, perish when they die. We see the highest philosophical view, but one that is also imbued with elemental soul power, rising to the highest heights of the spiritual.

When we see such figures of German nationality before our minds, we perceive how the German national soul has a rejuvenating effect again and again, so that it must always take hold of spirit and soul as a fresh germ in order to go up the whole ladder, to go to the highest heights of spiritual fruit.

And after the scorching and burning devastation of the Thirty Years' War, we see the German soul's strength once again intervening in the life of the people.

This is also the case with Herder, who provided a broad overview in his “History of Mankind”, encompassing the entire nature of the soul, from the most elementary soul forces to the highest philosophical powers. There are many, many ways in which the soul of a nation lives in Goethe's soul. It is remarkable that we realize that in turn a poetic work could arise in him that could not have arisen within any other culture. If the German folk soul has the peculiarity of grasping not the individual soul forces but the whole soul, then it grasps the immortal in the mortal, and the personality becomes the bearer of the eternal. Therefore, Goethe's “Faust” could only arise within German culture. It contains everything in the human soul, all the striving for the very beginnings of spiritual life, which are consciously sought again after all tradition has been cast off. How is this presented?

Let us compare how the German soul power inspires the German people in relation to the French people. In both, the Greek is reviving. But how does it revive with the French poets? It is studied, the rules are adopted and so on. But how is it with Goethe? Even in “Iphigenia” the Greek is not adopted, but reborn anew, rejuvenated. And in “Faust” we have the union with what he regarded as Greek: Helen is reborn for Faust. He becomes young in order to unite with the representative of Greek culture. Faust, who has grown old, throws off the old and seeks the rejuvenating potion. What is historically given must be brought into connection with Faust in a rejuvenated form. This demands the full strength, the rejuvenating strength of the German national soul.

We can trace it everywhere in all the details of German intellectual life! This is what comes to consciousness through an immersion in the substance of the German national soul. One sees, feels and senses an ever-renewing power in it. However present culture may change, this renewing power will remain, because its magic breath will be breathed again and again in different epochs. This is a peculiarity of Central European culture. This hope and confidence, which immediately becomes strength, is the basis not for superficial but for profound optimism in the German, which is also connected to idealism in all philosophies. Whoever is truly capable of approaching what the German national soul has produced cannot despair of humanity, but always comes to a belief in humanity, and indeed to a spiritual belief in humanity.

This becomes very significant when one looks at spirits who turn their gaze to humanity in search of something that can give good hope for the further development of man, and who can find nothing, who believe that European culture has died out. No one can regard European culture as having grown old; they can understand the relationship between the soul of the people and the individual German soul. Anyone who considers European culture to be old does not understand that.

That is why we have a Russian intellectual who has searched for what can make humanity happy and cannot find anything that has grown out of this culture of the national soul. He looks everywhere and finds nothing. I am talking about Herzen, the great Russian who became so small in his own eyes when he wanted to understand Central European culture. The following saying of Herzen immediately sheds light on the way the Eastern European, anarchic soul views desolation where flourishing life can be seen by those who can understand Central European soul life. He enters into an intellectual alliance with an Englishman, with Stuart Mill, and says:

Mill is not exaggerating when he speaks of the narrowing of the mind, of the constant flattening of life, of the reduction of life to commercial culture. He says that England will become like China, and we add that England will not be alone.

That is what Herzen says, who has no understanding for what must fill the Central European with the highest vitality. And further he says:

Perhaps a coincidence will save us from Chinese desiccation.

If he had understood Goethe, such a statement would be impossible! Further Herzen says:

Where is the highest thought, that is, hope, which hardens the hearts so that they feel neither pain nor suffering. Look around you, what can uplift the hearts.

That the same force that brought forth the highest poetic and philosophical blossoms in Goethe is the same force that today brings forth countless victims, victims of death and suffering, that is what presents itself to us at the same time from the whole context of German life.

And has German life always been so misunderstood in the world as it is now, when it is being shouted at from all sides that it is a life of “barbarians”? Not only is Central Europe being surrounded like a large fortress with the intention of starving it out, no, it is also being scolded and reviled from all sides. Here and there, friendly voices are raised, for example, by a Romanian who exclaims:

All those who have studied in France and lived among the French people have rushed to fill the columns of newspapers with all kinds of praise. Why don't you, who have enjoyed German hospitality, respond to these people by saying that these barbarians have the best schools, clinics, universities and so on? That you were welcomed everywhere with open arms! Why don't you respond by saying that these barbarians, who were your teachers, are incapable of committing such crimes? [Why don't you respond?

These voices were not always so rare. It is uncomfortable for a Central European to characterize the German essence in value judgments. What I have said, I know, is as certain a result of spiritual scientific research as the laws of the solar spectrum are a scientific research result. But it is uncomfortable for a German to make value judgments about the German character, so let us first hear from others. First Emerson, the great American teacher. In his reflections on Goethe, he wrote as if there were some awareness of how the German national character relates to the individual soul, and of the difference between Eastern and Western Europe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of its conviction. In France, one is already delighted to see brilliant ideas going wherever they may. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts will take them. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind has neither the French liveliness nor the Englishman's understanding, honed for practicality, nor, finally, the American

— as I said, an American writing in English —

All he has is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands that a writer stand above things and simply express himself. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it advocate? What is the man's opinion? Where does it come from? Where does he get all these thoughts?

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

There is something alive in these words that can seem like an echo of what can arise from the intimate association of the soul of the people with the individual human being. And Emerson continues:

That is why the distinguishing terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality, and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something even better in mind. He makes me curious. He has that fearsome independence that comes from dealing with the truth.

You could say: Well, that was said by Emerson, who lived far away in America. We have had to listen to it: the Germans who live now are not the same as they were. Even the French philosopher Bergson said how the Germans have become mechanical. It is strange how, in this day and age, a man who wants to be a philosopher wants to come to his judgment: He certainly longs for judgment! He knows that Germans have had great thoughts. He seems to feel that when cannons and rifles are turned against Germans from all sides, they should then recite poems by Novalis or Goethe in response.

Strange logic is going around the world today. When people say, “Who wanted this war,” and the English, French, and Russians claim, “We didn't want it,” one could say, “Yes, we believe that too!” But it does not depend on what one says, but on whether one can say the relevant thing. If five people stand threateningly around a house, and the person who lives in it sees this and tells them to go away, and they then, because they do not leave, are beaten up by them, the five can also say: “We did not want the beating!”

One cannot say that Emerson's judgment of the German “barbarians” is already outdated, but one would think that those who have immersed themselves in German intellectual substance can judge better.

A few years before the war, a book was published by an Englishwoman entitled “Eight Years in Germany”. She visited German schools, clinics and so on and, having got to know the German character, wrote the following:

We read a lot about the new Germany and the new German spirit. Is what exists now the mature work of generations? Blinded by the splendor of Germany's wealth, we are inclined to forget that it has never occupied any place but the very forefront except for prosperity. In literature, it has always provided the impetus; in science, it has always shone; in music, it has always dominated.

And now the following. I don't know if she would have written it now, but about two years before the war she did:

Forty years ago Germany was fighting for her existence, and she is still fighting for it today. It is entirely wrong to believe that Germany has already reached her zenith. She is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals, whose power and experience was gained generations ago. [...]

On every border and across the water, opponents sit, commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, to pounce on it and bring it down.

The reasons why the German national character is so little understood can be grasped. Something can penetrate into the West from the German soul — less so into the East — but it is repelled in the West because it does not want to know anything about the dogmatic character of what wants to live actively in the whole soul. There is a certain understanding, but at the same time a reluctance to let it grow completely into the soul.

About a year and a half before the outbreak of the war, lectures were held in Manchester. They have been published and were very interesting, and the scholars explain in the preface why they are holding them: English journalists should be better informed about German conditions. About the immediate present, the scholar Herford said that on the whole it is out of the question that the creation of the German Reich has been beneficial to peace. [Gap in the text] History should be something more than a cinematograph and shed the higher light on things:

On the whole and in the big picture, there is no question

- it says -

that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace. This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is fitting for her to let the light of the past shine on the present confusion, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For if we look to the past, we find that our ancestors looked at France with far greater fear than the wildest rabble-rousers today fear Germany. And the fear of our ancestors had good reason. [...] So, to sum up, it can be shown that the founding of the German Empire was an asset for Europe and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 once and for all put an end to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the hitherto unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed an inducement to war which in earlier centuries had so often tempted into the wrong channels; they put the German people in a position to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved at a single blow what Great Britain, despite all her expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to accomplish, namely, to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a great war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

When one is confronted with these things and wonders what lies in the souls of those who wrote them, one must have some understanding of the peculiarity of the European national psyche to grasp why one can understand [it] so little outside of Germany. Only enlightened minds can do that.

One mystic who has written beautiful things should also be mentioned. He confessed that he had great experiences with three mystics. One of them is Novalis, who gained so much from his intimate contact with the German folk soul. He uses beautiful words to characterize him. He says: “So much is going on on earth that can only interest earthly souls, such as what Shakespearean characters do. But if other beings from other planets could look down, what could interest them?” And he wonders if there is something that can interest other spirits as well, and in Novalis' writings he finds something that interests not only earthly souls but also beings that come down from heavenly heights. What the human soul can hardly bring forth in words is what he speaks of, what one would rather remain silent about, where true nature begins. He says:

But if he needed other proof, it would

— that is, presumably, the soul —

lead him among those whose works almost move one to silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises by one level and where all those who are filled with restlessness about themselves attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone, there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a strange reason; but [the people I am talking about] have come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community.

This is how this enlightened spirit assessed Novalis. Who is it that speaks in this way? Is it someone who calls to account the self-righteous critics who are now railing against German “barbarism”? Is it someone who will take a stand against words such as:

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to discern its weak, childlike voice amidst the useless clamor that surrounds it.

The words written by the enlightened man about Novalis are by Maeterlinck. And the words about the bawler are also by him. We are now experiencing such things; they characterize our time directly through themselves, without the need to add anything in particular.

The lectures mentioned, which were held in Manchester, have been published and also translated into German. In the preface there are some words that can also be read in English:

The source of the stream of his intellectual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient Greece, the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany today is to a great extent concrete and practical.

The one saying this is Lord Haldane.

If we consider how different the European center and the European east must be in terms of the overall character of the people, it can be understood that a powerful confrontation was bound to occur there. This confrontation was seen by people who wanted to see clearly. Today we hear from all sides: The Germans wanted this war. Who wanted it, who, because of the special character of their national aspirations, had to want it for a long time, was always seen by reasonably enlightened minds. A man who is not particularly inclined towards Germanic nature writes:

As for me, I am in no doubt that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic worlds is imminent, that it will be ignited either by the Orient, especially Turkey, or by the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps by both, and that Russia will take the lead in it on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spewing fire and flames against Germany. [...] The German press is already sounding its warning cries. It has been a long time since Russia gathered itself after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now considered appropriate in St. Petersburg to take up the Oriental question again.

If, according to the more pompous than true expression, the Mediterranean Sea should once become “a French lake”, Russia has the even more positive intention of making a Russian lake out of the Black Sea and a Russian pond out of the Sea of Marmara. That Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia is a fixed goal of Russian policy, which finds its levers of support in the common religion and in Pan-Slavism.

Thus, the minds that wanted to see it, saw how the forces at work in Europe gradually brought about this time. This was written in 1870!

The antagonism between Eastern Europe and Central Europe has always been there, so that the logic of the question, “Who wanted this war?”, is the flimsiest, because the people, whose soul hovers like a cloud over it, has a desire for expansion, and because there is not the slightest understanding for what has been achieved in Central Europe. It was received in Russia, but the way it happened is again quite characteristic.

It is true, as Herman Grimm says, that the Englishman Mr. Lewes wanted to write an important book about Goethe. But he only told of a man who happened to be born in Frankfurt am Main and happened to die in Weimar, who had this and that experience and wrote these and those works. But the soul of Goethe does not live in it, because his soul slips through his fingers. He only sees what he can dogmatize; he only sees the Goethe that stands firmly on the ground – the dates of birth and death and so on. He knows the titles of the works and so on. But what Goethe really was, that he was the representative of the dialogue between the individual German and the German national soul, he does not sense.

Just as the phenomenon has the effect in the West that the inner passions rebel against it and translate it into the rough, but into the dogmatic, so that which is directly experienced by the Germans has the same effect in the East – as I said, they have often willingly accepted it – in the East it becomes a web of thought. Because the Russian feels that it must be carried up into the cloud that hovers over him, it becomes ghostly, shadowy.

Even the great philosopher Soloviev floats in this cloud. He borrowed his generous philosophy from German culture – but what lives with full life in the German soul seems ghostly to him, and it causes the confusedly fluttering thoughts that the German, who is accustomed to the intimate association with the folk soul, cannot follow as an image of truth. One must even experience it, [that an intellectual in Russia makes Goethe] into a ghost in yet another way, one who, however, once called another people “barbarians” before the war: Mereschkowski. He speaks of Herz's last vision of death:

The last vision of death in Herz is - Russia as a “land of free life” and the Russian peasant community as the savior of the world. He exchanged his old love for a new faith, but it seems that he realized in the last hour that this last faith was also an illusion. Even if faith deceived him, love did not deceive him; there was a certain correct outlook in his love for Russia: not the peasant community, but the Christian community will perhaps in truth become the faith that the young barbarians are to bring to ancient Rome.

So he says from the heart.

Meanwhile, however, he dies - without any faith: Farewell, corrupt Rome! ... Farewell, native land!

But let no one be deceived by what he says about Goethe in his latest book; the whole of Goethe has become a spectre there. That he does not understand the soul of the people, which has rejuvenated everything, that he cannot look at what Goethe is as a force of the soul of the world, is shown by the fact that he says that he dares to say such words of Goethe as:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German citizen and – if the shadow of the Olympian will have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a respectable son of the respectable Frankfurt merchant.

That about the “Faust” poet!

One understands what needs to be understood in the middle of Europe, and the extent of the understanding that is shown for the German national soul from both the left and the right speaks for this. One day, world history will not only be judged by archives, by what has been printed and written, but also by more subtle characteristics! It was actually with a heavy heart, through tears, through inner tears, that I realized something like an image in front of my soul, the way the forces of Europe stand, because it is so far from the original forces through which the individual outgrows the cosmos.

It is precisely [what that alliance of grand duchy and mendacious Pan-Slavism has done] to the Russian people that this image stands before me. We saw those first August days approaching. I will mention only three images from that time: In Central Europe, the Reichstag. Something characteristic is heralding the coming deeds; it is a purest expression of something infinitely youthful in the forces of the German national soul: the people are silent! There is something monstrous about this. Let us look instead to the west, to the French parliament; look at the speeches that have been made there, and how all these speeches flow out of the power of tyranny. And then we turn to Russia, where we are accustomed to seeing the best of the Russian man in silence: in the Duma, speeches rush, and they all talk in such a way that the words are phrases and everything looks like an arranged theatrical performance of speeches.

And so the European powers confront each other, and I am aware of the objectivity in which I have painfully allowed them to affect my soul. The silence in the middle is a symptom of something that is connected with the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul; from epoch to epoch, it has held dialogues with the most outstanding representatives of Germanness, and the most beautiful products can be traced back to this. The striving of the German people for the spirit has also been carried out in what has happened in our time.

That has always been the nature of German striving. But if you look at it and try to discern the fundamental character, you have to say: this German spirit has not yet exhausted the forces and possibilities for development that lie within it. The soul of the German nation has a rejuvenating power and will always rejuvenate it again and again. How rejuvenating is Fichte's philosophy! Like a stream of folk lore, it flowed into the times of “Speeches to the German Nation”. What brings his ideas to life in a strange and symbolic way is what a new education wants to give people as reality. Fichte knows how reluctant people are to accept the new, and needs a peculiar comparison. It is highly characteristic of his way of thinking.

But spiritual science, from which the attitudes flow that can be used to understand the conditions of the soul of the people, wants to be an active science that courageously and bravely extracts its results. It speaks of the eternal, not merely in abstract words, but as it speaks when the human spirit lives from incarnation to incarnation, so it speaks as it must speak today, about the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul.

Fichte says:

Time appears to me as an empty shadow, which stands over its corpse, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the deceased has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm breath of love; friendly voices of the sisters already greet her and welcome her; she is already stirring and expanding within her in all directions, to develop the more glorious form to which she is to awaken; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or, if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

We can have confidence in the successful striving of the German spirit towards intellectual life, because we see what the German spirit has achieved. This is in the process of becoming and is not yet complete. It is as much a germ as it is a fruit. No matter how unintelligently people speak about Germany, it is not complete and must carry its inner strength out into the world. It is this strength that it has to defend. The time for what the German spirit has to defend will be seen to come. It may be expected. The souls who make the sacrifice of death today will, when those born later understand what the national soul can be for the German individual, they will be able to look down in the days to come on a time that will transform into [human salvation] and progress that which has been bought with such great sacrifices, [with courageous but painful sacrifices]. Truly recognizing the driving forces, it may be said that the German spirit has not reached perfection but will continue to develop:

The German spirit has not reached perfection
What it is to create in the world's becoming.
He lives hopefully in future worries,
He hopes for future deeds full of life; -
In the depths of his being, he feels mightily
Hidden things that must still mature and work.
How can, in the power of the enemy,
The wish for its end may uncomprehendingly revive:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
That holds him in the roots of being, creating?

Dear attendees! For many years now, I have been able to give spiritual science lectures in this city every winter. Even in these fateful times, our friends in the spiritual science movement have asked me to give this lecture today. Now it will seem understandable that in this time, in which such tremendous but also such painful things are happening, in which something so immeasurably significant for European and world history is preparing, that in this time I want to tie such considerations to what moves us all, to that which those who stand in the East and West and who have to stand up for what the great duty of the time demands through blood and death. In such a time, words also want to be directed where feelings and emotions take them, where blood and death defend the great goods of Central Europe, where tremendous decisions must be made. And so today my words are dedicated to the contemplation of that which is being defended in our present time, which is being attacked, defamed and reviled from all sides in this our time. I would like to begin by touching on what I would call the basic principle and aspiration of spiritual science, and then show how this basic aspiration, this innermost impulse of spiritual science – which wants to be a motive that penetrates into the spiritual cultural movement of the present and into the future – how these spiritual scientific impulses are firmly anchored in the supporting forces of the German spirit. And then some highlights will be thrown on the way in which Germany's enemies today disparage, misunderstand and more of this kind this German spirit, this German nature, this Germanness in the east and the West.

I have often had the opportunity to explain here how spiritual science wants to be the true successor of the scientific world view, but that it is in turn the opposite pole of this scientific world view in that it wants to approach the worlds of spiritual life with a truly scientific character. For the spiritual-scientific world view, spirit is not just something that can be grasped in terms, ideas, or abstract concepts. Rather, for spiritual science, spirit is that which reigns in a world that is behind our sensory world, that contains the reasons and driving forces for everything that our sensory world and life, including historical development, offer us, and that takes place within the sensory world. As I said, I can only touch on this today and must refer you to the reading.

Spiritual science prepares the human soul, if he wants to prepare himself for it, so that a realization, a real experience of this soul takes place, which is not bound to the forces of the body, is not bound to the senses, not bound, like the ordinary mind, to the brain, but spiritual science prepares the soul for a body-free cognition through what has been mentioned here more often: meditation, concentration of the life of thought. You can find a more detailed description in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds?” or in the second part of the book “The Secret Science” or in the book “Theosophy”. These books describe the paths that lead people, through inner activity and inner experience, to free the soul-spiritual from its bondage to the body, so that it can dwell in the life and activity, in the reign and work of the spiritual world. What still appears to many people today as fantasy, as absurdity, is to be introduced into today's culture precisely through spiritual science. It is understandable that people say: spiritual science contradicts everything that the five senses comprehend.

It is understandable that people who speak in this way regard spiritual science as a form of dreaming or fantasizing. But people once also regarded the Copernican worldview as a form of dreaming and fantasizing, which, it was said, should also contradict the five senses and their statements. Just as people's thinking habits have become accustomed to accepting the Copernican worldview, so people's thinking habits will also find it increasingly more and more soul-satisfying, a necessary soul experience, a necessary soul harmony to accept spiritual science , which shows how the soul can truly penetrate into a spiritual world in a body-free knowledge, a spiritual world that is not merely a sum of concepts and ideas, but something very concrete, a real spiritual world, a living spiritual world. Thus, as a spiritual researcher, one looks at something that must come, as Copernicanism once entered into human development.

When we take a good look at this view of the living spirit and the relationship of the human soul to it, and then look at what has been prepared over many centuries in the development of the German people and the German character, we may say that all the forces that the German character has applied over the course of many centuries are ultimately aimed at leading to this spiritual science. There is nothing that spiritual science could not find as a germ of itself in what the German spirit has striven for over the centuries. Let me first present you with a characteristic example from more recent times.

The German essence, which for example in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Lessing, when Herder entered the horizon of this German essence, could not be satisfied with a spirit that is only an abstraction, only a sum of ideas. Herder, the great pioneer of the German intellectual world, once called out to Voltaire: “Ideas can only [bring forth ideas].”

For Herder, it was about man finding a way in his soul to experience a truly living, vibrant and vital spiritual world through inner development, just as he lives in the world of the senses through his eyes and ears. And history was not to be understood in such a way that one could speak of history being dominated by ideas, but for Herder history was such that real spiritual beings are active within historical activity, to whom man can look up as to beings of a supersensible world, just as he looks down into the realms below him to the sensual beings of the three natural kingdoms. And so convinced was Herder, the great predecessor, indeed one can say, the teacher of Goethe, that true science of the spirit comes to a real spirit and that humanity is aiming to find such a spiritual science, that he himself, Herder, expresses with beautiful words: [“The human race will not pass away until everything has happened! Until the genius of enlightenment has traversed the earth!”]

By enlightenment he means that knowledge which the German mind has always sought, not through the outer senses and the intellect, but through the inner experience of the soul, which, however, takes one further than happens in everyday life. In his way, Herder took up again what we encounter centuries earlier in the German mystic who stood at the dawn of modern times. In the moment when Angelus Silesius speaks in his images, in which he gives instructions for the path of the soul into a spiritual world. He expresses in one of his images: “It is not I who live and die, but the God-spirituality reigns in me, it is born in me, it lives and dies in me.

The German soul has always sought such a connection with the living spirit. And so the soul's intimate search for this connection with the active spirit was so intense that even the idea of immortality for Angelus Silesius follows directly from the spiritual inner knowledge, the spiritual inner life. For in that he was conscious that the eternal God reigns in me, he also knew that this eternal God is in my soul at the moment of death, where the eternal God cannot die. Since that which lives in the soul is at the same time experienced by God, the idea of immortality is experienced from the spiritual. The idea of immortality, of merging into a spiritual world, is an experience for Angelus Silesius.

As the soul becomes aware of the God within it, it knows that this God cannot die, that death leads into the spiritual world.

And let us think of the great mystic at the beginning of the modern era of German intellectual life, Jakob Böhme. Not to preach a false allegorical activism, but to point out that the life of the senses is only understood when man comprehends that which is not only alive between birth and death, but which passes through the gate of death, I would like to quote Jakob Böhme. He realized that man must penetrate the secrets of death during life. That his powers are kindled when he knows what calls him to a new life in dying, that these powers must already be recognized in this life. That is what the wonderful saying of Jakob Böhme means:

He who does not die before he dies;

He perishes when he dies.

When such words resound from the German spiritual life, one feels how the best souls of German development are permeated by the living supporting forces of the spirit. For it is the supporting power of the German spirit through which the soul, in its highest striving, knows itself to be inwardly and vitally connected with the spirit, so that it experiences that what it can do as the highest, the spirit itself does in it. The soul feels carried by the concrete spirit, not merely by ideas and concepts, which are an abstraction of the human mind and reason and which do not vividly represent the spirit that truly prevails in life. This spirit therefore develops its carrying capacity for the whole of German intellectual life.

And when we look at our best intellectuals, one can see how this sustaining power of the German spirit works in their hearts and souls, how they demonstrate it everywhere in their lives and in their intellectual endeavors.

Truly not to evoke sentimental feelings in you, esteemed attendees, but to show how the sustaining power of the German spirit works in the best German minds right down to the most immediate life, two great minds are taken as the starting point for today's reflection. And these two great minds, let them be considered at the moment of death, Schiller is the first.

We can look into the last days of our Schiller, right into his death chamber, through a friend, the son of the translator of Homer, Voß, the so-called younger Voß. There you see how this Schiller, as his last weeks approach, one could say, already walks around as if he were almost dead, but still participates in all that can be called intellectual interests in his Weimar residence. You can literally see how the strong cohesive forces within him carry him through his last weeks and days with intellectual life. Then we are led into the death chamber. We experience with the description of the young Voß, how Schiller can hardly look out of his eyes, which always looked so benevolent, so loving, so spirited. He has his youngest child brought to him. Voß describes how his eyes, from which on one side death, but also still the mighty soul of fire, how his eyes look at the child. And we can believe that Voß is right when he says in his description that something like the thought spoke from these eyes: “You, my child, I have to leave you so small, I should have been a father to you in so many ways.” Then the dying Schiller handed the child back and turned away, towards the wall.

In reliving these moments, we as a German nation feel as if we could relate to Schiller as this child did. We feel that the sustaining power of the German spirit, which Schiller carried into death, lives on in the German people. But looking up at such great minds, we have to say: Not only much that is great, much that is powerful has been achieved by them, but also much that is embryonic and has yet to be developed. Schiller's thoughts also apply to the German people, that he could still have given them much. But how was Schiller also connected to what can be called the fundamental power of the German spirit? We have a remarkable document that was only found long, long after Schiller's death. In this document, Schiller expresses the following beautiful words about the spirit that the one who gets to know it feels as its supporting force.

He who forms and rules the mind
must ultimately become master, because
finally, at the goal of time, if the
world has a plan, if human
life has any meaning at all, finally
must custom and reason triumph,
the brute force of form succumb
and the slowest people will catch up with all the
fast, fleeting ones.
[...]
Him

– the German –

is destined for the highest,
and just as he is in the middle of
Europe's nations,
he is the core of humanity,
they are the flower and the leaf.
He is chosen by the world spirit, during
the struggle of time
to work on the eternal construction of human education
, to preserve what time brings,
therefore he has appropriated what was previously foreign
and preserved it within himself.
Everything that was estimable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with the times,
he has preserved;
the treasures of
centuries are not lost to him.
Not to shine in the moment and
to play his role, but to win the great
process of time. Every nation
has its day in history, but
the day of the Germans is the harvest of
all that time.

Thus Schiller felt connected to what can be called the driving force of the German spirit.

And if we now turn our gaze to another great mind, to a mind that, so to speak, has summarized all the power of the German mind, a philosopher who, out of a strong humanitarian character, has created a philosophy of dramatic clarity, we turn to the speaker of the “Speeches to the German Nation,” we turn to Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Let us also look to him for the driving force of German intellectual life, with which Fichte felt so connected that he knew how to inspire German hearts in a rare way through his speeches during one of Germany's most difficult times. Let us see how the driving force of the mind had an effect on his immediate, everyday life. When Germany took up its great struggles against Western foreign domination, Fichte consulted with himself as to whether he was called to help in any way, and in the end he knew that he could achieve the most through intellectual activity. His wife, however, devoted herself to nursing. She was the one who brought the fever home from the military hospitals, but she recovered. But Fichte was infected by his wife's illness. And as he lay there sick, it was remarkable how, in the last days, his philosophical thoughts, which are among the strongest of this kind in the development of mankind, among the most luminous, how they merged into the feverish fantasies of the dying man. And strangely, Fichte, the clear-thinking, diamond-bright philosopher, he guided in his soul, which was completely occupied with the spirit that reigns through the German being, his philosophical thoughts in such a way that he believed himself outside on the battlefields, in the midst of the armies, as Blücher's Rhine crossing took place.

Thus we see a confluence of the highest intellectual development even in the feverish fantasies of a dying German. His son brought him a medicine. Fichte felt as if he were connected to the power of the German spirit, which he firmly believed would lead the German people to victory. He pushed the medicine away and said, “I do not need medicine, for I feel that I shall recover.” Then he died. These were, so to speak, his last moments. This is the Fichte from whose soul the sustaining power of the German spirit speaks in such a way that one sees how, in his case, knowledge is directly grasped by the will that rules in his soul, so that one can say: In every word of Fichte we feel this power of the German spirit penetrating through, which cannot but confess that the spirit is not an abstraction, but something that permeates and flows through the world and works in it, and in which the soul knows itself, can experience itself. How beautifully Fichte expresses something like this when he says:

There is no doubt about it, it is the most certain thing there is, [indeed the basis of all other certainties, the only absolutely valid objective, that there is a moral world order, that every rational individual is assigned his or her specific place in this order and counted on for his or her work.

That is the confession of the spiritual world made by the sustaining power of the German spirit. And so closely does Fichte feel connected with this spiritual world that he once said the following to his students in words that are as much thoughts as they are the will welling up from the whole soul: “You stars that walk above me, you mountains all, ... if you all collapse at once, when lightning strikes you, when the elemental forces crush you so that not a speck of dust remains of you, you tell me nothing about the nature of my own soul. This defies your power, this is not eternal, as you are not eternal.” Thus Fichte spoke out of the direct power of connection with the spiritual world in his own soul. This is not mere philosophical speculation, these are not just thoughts, but this is inner soul life, a confluence of the soul with the spirit. This is the result of the sustaining forces of the German spirit.

And as a spiritual scientist today, one can truly refer to Fichte. One example among many that can prove how one can refer to Fichte today with today's spiritual science: It is written in the “Addresses to the German Nation”, and many may perhaps overlook it, but it is important for those who do not want to grasp Fichte merely on the surface of his words, but want to penetrate into the depths of his views. Fichte held the “Addresses to the German Nation” before his people, for his people, through which he wanted to stir up the German spirit in the German hearts, so that the German essence would triumph in Europe. And the means he recommended at the time was a completely new kind of education. Regardless of one's opinion of his plan today, one must admit that it was a grand and bold idea, an idea that truly contained something of the fundamental strength of the German spirit. But Fichte knew that by expressing this before an audience that was indeed willing to receive the word dedicated to the service of humanity, by expressing what characterized his plan, he was saying something that had to permeate all ideas about the education and development of the human being. In doing so, he demanded something completely new of people. And so he made a comparison between what he thought of as something new for previous habits of thought and what they had already grasped as a /Lücke im Text>.

And now we ask ourselves: How could spiritual science, which is a science of the spiritual life, how could it use a comparison if it wanted to characterize what it wants, what it strives for? After all, spiritual science wants to lead to a real inner enlightenment, so that the soul outside the body looks at the body with its physical experiences in the same way as one looks at an external object. In this way the spiritual researcher gains knowledge of how this soul behaves after death, how the soul looks at the body with spiritual eyes, how it surveys it like an external element. And so today, by standing firmly on the ground of this spiritual science, the spiritual scientist comes to say: this new thing behaves like a soul that leaves the body and looks back at the body. One would take a symbol that today, however, people still see as a reverie. But let us ask what symbol Fichte himself chose when he wanted to characterize the new of his education system in relation to the old.

[Time seems to me like a shadow that stands over its corpse, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the once so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm breath of love; the secret voices of her sisters already greet her joyfully and welcome her; she is already stirring and expanding within all directions, in order to develop the more magnificent form into which it is to grow; but as yet it has no feeling for these breezes or hearing for these voices, or, if it had, it is absorbed in pain over its loss, with which it believes itself to have been lost at the same time.

That is the living Fichte! Must we not say that what today's spiritual science wants to unfold and recognize out of a real knowledge of the spirit, we encounter it where Fichte abandons himself to the deep intentions of his spirit and chooses a comparison that is deeply rooted in the supporting forces of the German people. It is the confession of the real, living, flowing and weaving spirit. And so it is rooted in the best of this German intellectual life.

And do we not see how these supporting forces of the German spirit also work in Goethe? Is it not already apparent from the fact that Goethe, even in his youth, had to declare himself unsatisfied with everything that can only enter the human soul as concepts and ideas through speculation of the intellect, as a reflection of the external world of the senses, that he felt something like the Faustian urge not only to indulge in abstract concepts and sensual perceptions, but to unite with the innermost powers of the soul with the spirit that rules the world. And it was out of this urge, which then sought to express itself artistically, that Goethe created what he presented in his Faust; in that Faust, which in its entirety represents a work of art that no other nation can have. For everything that man can strive for through the deepest powers of his soul on the path to the spiritual world is to be seen in this Faust. Do we not see how Faust, after feeling unsatisfied in the outer world of the senses, wants to reach the sources of life? How he passes through error and overcoming, through temptation and seduction, and how he first stands and recognizes in the spirit that seizes him in his innermost self, at the same time, what surges and weaves as spirit through the world. Thus, in the first part of the drama, Faust comes to recognize this spirit that reigns not only in nature but also in the human soul. He feels a connection to this spirit, which he perceives as a living entity truly rooted in German intellectual life, in the following words, which could be quoted again and again:

[Exalted Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature for a kingdom,
the power to feel and enjoy it. Not
only dost thou allow cold-eyed visitors,
allow me to look into her deep chest,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
past me, and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce toppling neighbor branches
And neighbor trunks squashing down
And the hill muffled hollow thundering,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then myself, and my own chest
Secret deep wonders open up.]

How these sublime words express how man, when he has found the sustaining powers within himself, also wants to find them in all that is sensual. And how Faust is then led back, after he has thus recognized the spirit, to the rule of the spirit in his own breast.

Then You lead me to the secure cave, and then You show me myself, and in my own breast deep, secret wonders are revealed.

We can call this: the weaving of the spirit in the spirituality of the world, in which beings are of a supersensible nature, as in the sense world there are beings of the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom. And so we see how this spirit reigns and works in our greatest and sustains them.

But we also see how, in German spiritual culture, efforts are being made to truly unite with this spirit, to penetrate with it in a living way, to marry with it. One could point to hundreds of important historical events to show how in German intellectual life the longing arises to unite with the spirit that has carried the German essence through the centuries; to seek how it works not only in the present, but how it has worked through all the times of development. And wherever a German can find something, wherever the spirit confronts him as a figure, wherever he has encountered it, there you can see how fervently the German is able to grasp the German spirit that can carry him. I would like to give an example, an event during Goethe's lifetime.

A world view of German intellectual life emerged, the so-called Romanticism; a view that wanted to go back to an earlier stage of German intellectual life, because something occurred, so to speak, in which the German spirit appeared before the German soul in a form in which it wanted to grasp the German spirit with religious fervor. That was the case when, after the republican masters of the West, of that West that claims today that it had to fight against the German “barbarians”, when these masters, just as the masters of the West today - of course, they did it in their opinion back then and they also do it today for the freedom and for the rights of the people - went to war. These gentlemen invaded the Lower Rhine region and the Dutch territories. We can see these gentlemen ravaging palaces, churches, monasteries, and everything in their path. As in those days, the devastation was immense and incalculable, and the finest works of art in these regions were scattered and looted all over the world. Of course, the gentlemen said at the time that they were fighting for freedom, justice and humanity. And then you could see how the remains of these devastated works of art turned up again, of course only sparse remains, fragments in the Rhenish cities. The broken, the devastated, then came into the hands of a number of people, including the brothers Boisserée, who professed the worldview of the young Romantic school. And at that time something emerged in this school that can be called /gap in the text]. Something emerged for these younger German Romantics that they perceived as the divine rule of the German spirit itself, which they tried to introduce into life. And if we were to study the development of art in Central Europe in the nineteenth century, we would find how that which emerged from the devastated ruins, from the sustaining forces of the German spirit, continued to work in poetry and in the best works of art. We would find it everywhere.

But not only did this power impress itself on the soul of what was already there, the souls were also prepared for such a seizure. And even if he does not belong to the younger, but to the older Romanticism, one of those German poets is - one may believe it, more and more he will be appreciated in his wonderful way of thinking - I mean Novalis. He is one of those in whom the sustaining power of the German spirit reveals itself so clearly that in much of what he has left us, in part fragmentarily, we see something that emerges from the unconscious of his soul, but which only needs to be developed in order to lead to what humanity will one day have to grasp as spiritual science.

And one can say: the world has already grasped to some extent what Novalis developed out of the sustaining power of the German spirit. This is even being grasped not only by the “barbaric Germans,” as the enemy nations are now expressing themselves, but even by some French writers who understand something of the nature, even among those who today so revile the German essence and decry it as “barbaric.” We know, of course, how not long after the outbreak of the war Maurice Maeterlinck could not find enough words to revile and insult German “barbarism”.

Now one would like to point out to Maeterlinck another, perhaps a different French spirit, who has delved into what Novalis can give of himself, who has written about what Novalis has inspired in his soul. And this French poet, philosopher and artist, what did he find in Novalis, in the now so despised, let us say in Maurice Maeterlinck, so despised German “barbarism”? He felt compelled to say: Yes, what Sophocles, even Schiller and other poets have produced, what the figures of the poets do, Hamlet and so on have to do with each other and with their surroundings, these are certainly feelings and sensations that interest earthly souls. But, as this French writer says, one must assume that if beings were to gaze down from the cosmos, they could not be interested in what Schiller, Sophocles and others created, and what these figures have to do with each other. But Novalis would be a person – so this French poet-philosopher believes – who has something to say from his soul about things that could not only interest earth people, but that must interest even spirits who visit the earth from heavenly spheres.

He speaks such words in connection with Novalis, in reference to what he experienced with Novalis. We must call these words literally before our soul:

But if he needed other evidence, it would lead him among those whose works almost touch silence. She would open the gate of the kingdom where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of her body. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances to our higher worlds. She would go with him to the boundaries of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be constantly on his guard.

He is always talking about Novalis. He wants to turn to areas where Novalis dwells, to worlds for which human words are no longer sufficient to characterize them. That is why he says “their works almost border on silence”. He then continues:

On these heights alone are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and images that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly lit peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; but [the people I am talking about have] come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community.

So this French poet-philosopher on Novalis, on that which Novalis has inspired in him. This Novalis, who is borne entirely out of the primal power and destiny of the German genius. Would this poet-philosopher not hurl at Maurice Maeterlinck when he comes and speaks of “barbarism”: Look to Novalis, whose works are so sublime that they “almost touch silence”.

One might think that these words, coming from the philosophical poet, would be hurled at Maurice Maeterlinck. But the fact of the matter is that these words I just read were actually written by Maurice Maeterlinck himself! Admittedly, by the Maurice Maeterlinck who lived years ago and allowed the German spirit to influence him; not by the Maurice Maeterlinck who now calls the Germans a “barbarian people”.

Such are the experiences of Germanness in European culture today, besieged as it is in a great fortress. It may be said that this Germanness, so misunderstood today, has truly not always been misunderstood in this way in the world. The world has felt the sustaining power of the German spirit. And one can present evidence of how this German spirit has been regarded in the world. It is somewhat uncomfortable to express certain sympathetic, I would even say emotional judgments about the German spirit in German. So then another way must be chosen. Let us first consider what a leading English thinker of the nineteenth century in America had to say about the German essence. Emerson, a great and characteristic personality, once brought the German character before his soul. And to show how the sustaining power of the German spirit has been felt and sensed, Emerson says, speaking of Goethe – and we shall see from the words themselves how he sees in Goethe almost the representative of the newer German spirit – Emerson says:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America

— please, it is not in German, but written by an American, an American Englishman in English —

in England and America, talent is respected, but one is only satisfied when it is working for or against a party of one's convictions. In France, one is already delighted when one sees brilliant thoughts, no matter where they want to go.

And it was not a German who said this; it was said by an English American to characterize the Germans, the German character!

In all these countries, however, talented men write to the extent of their gifts. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind has neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed by practicality, nor, finally, the American spirit of adventure. But what it does have is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?”

One might think that it was said by a German, it would be vainly oriented.

The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself about them. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it stand for? What is the man's opinion? Where does he get all these thoughts from?

The English [...] always see only the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

Consider, not a German is saying this!

For this reason, the terms of distinction used in high-level conversation are all of German origin. While the English and the French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks, not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, even though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something even better in mind [...] He has that awe-inspiring independence that arises from dealing with the truth.

Now, of course, one could say that Emerson has been dead for a long time, and that this is a characteristic that was already given about the German character a decade ago. After all, such minds as the one who is regarded as the most important French philosopher today [gap in the text], after the speech he gave in which he portrayed the Germans of today as devoid of everything that lived in them during their great era. One also finds in him, in this French philosopher with the name that sounds so beautifully French, at least before the war, one also finds in him an emphasis on how these Germans have become so different in recent times.

And so it is that we also look again at what is being said on the German side, but instead listen to an English voice. And now we will even choose critical voices that were uttered not long ago, barely two years before the war; voices characterizing the German essence. Lectures were held in Manchester under the title “Germany in the Nineteenth Century.”

The preface emphasizes why these lectures on the German character were given in Manchester. It is said that the newspaper people in England should learn something about the German character. Perhaps two things can be seen from this introduction, this preface: that at the time, those who gave these lectures as learned Englishmen considered the newspaper people to be in need of such an education. But the other thing can also be seen; I can leave it to your judgment whether what was said to the newspaper people was of much use, based on today's experience. But what was said to the English newspaper people back then? As I said, the lectures were not given in German in Leipzig or Berlin or Hamburg, but in English for the English foreigners. There it was said:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen knew the spirit of science unquestioningly; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, mainly by thousands of German researchers.

As I said, not spoken in Berlin or Leipzig, but in Manchester!

Imagination, feeling, and will asserted their right to be heard alongside or beyond reason, and under their transformative pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful. The irrational was recognized as a source of enlightenment; wisdom was sought from children and flowers; science, philosophy, and poetry came close together.

This was how the German essence was characterized in Manchester.

Over here in England, this revival of the imagination gave birth to noble poetry, but left the sciences and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the whole period is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a portrayal of present-day Germany, a Germany of restless, daring will and action, and we can understand all the better why the great citizen of the world, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable position as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

Thus, the German character was characterized by English scholars in Manchester.

You will have come across a name that, after the outbreak of war, could not find enough words to describe the high morality that guided the British government in declaring war on the German Reich: Haldane. He wrote the preface to the lectures that were collected and in which you can find what I have just read. And that Lord Haldane wrote the following in the preface, although it was some time before the war:

The source of the stream of

— Germany's —

spiritual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient Greece, the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany today is to a great extent practical and concrete. [...] Only the influence of true knowledge can dispel the clouds of mistrust and free us from the burden of arming ourselves against attacks that in reality none of us has in mind.

Thus spoke this leading English intellectual. You know how he spoke after the outbreak of the war. The same scholar who spoke the words that were read out spoke even more words back then in Manchester to enlighten the newspaper people. He said:

On the whole, there is no question that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace.

Spoken in Manchester.

This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is for history to shed light on the tangled web of the present, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For if we look to the past, we find that our ancestors looked at France with far greater fear than the wildest rabble-rousers today fear Germany. And our ancestors had good reason to fear them. [...]

To sum up, it can be shown that the founding of the German Empire was an asset for Europe and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 put an end once and for all to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the previously unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed a temptation to war that had so often often tempted into the wrong channels; they put the German people in a position to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved in one fell swoop what Great Britain, despite all her expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to accomplish, namely, to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a great war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

It is fair to say that these words were spoken in praise of the sustaining power of the German spirit, indeed, one might even say of the soul-sustaining power of the German spirit for Europe. Can one say more than this Englishman said in Manchester to the newspaper people, with whom it then had such a good impact!

And right up to the most recent days, we can follow such phenomena. We have seen how Emerson expressly emphasized how little the English can actually understand of what is the fundamental force of the German character. But once they have really got to their feet and got to know this German spirit, they have learned to think differently about it. Just a few words should be mentioned, which an Englishwoman wrote down shortly before the outbreak of the war, after spending eight years in Germany. She did not get to know it in the way that most English people get to know Germany, but she was in schools, clinics, she got to know philosophy and other lecture halls. I could now quote many words that are deeply characteristic, but I will just read one passage that was written by an English expert on the German character. Miss Wylie writes the following words:

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence. And it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany has already reached its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago. (...]

At every border and across the water, opponents sit, both commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, so that they can pounce on her and bring her down.

There is truly no need to boast about the sustaining power of the German spirit; one need only listen to what people have to say when they are speaking out of consciousness, and not out of unconsciousness, if that is said by the countries whose objectivity has been proven. If you look around, you will find many judgments similar to these about the German character and its sustaining power. This sustaining power of the German spirit is demonstrated precisely by the fact that this German spirit, in every soul of the German being that seeks the path to the spirit, has an illuminating effect on these souls, so that it can indeed be said: In what emerged as German idealism at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth century lie the seeds for an ever-more-vibrant and vibrant spiritual experience. And so it came about that not only in the course of the nineteenth century, through spirits who in later times would play a great role, Troxler and Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, great beginnings of today's spiritual science can be found; of that which we ourselves can bring out of the spiritual world again. These fundamental forces of the German spirit can be found in the entire development of German intellectual life. And here again is a case in point, the case of one of the best, the deepest, the most German of Germans from the second half of the nineteenth century: Herman Grimm.

Herman Grimm is an extraordinary art historian who has written about many artists and works of art with inner experience. One often has the feeling: where does Herman Grimm get what he has to say about art and works of art not from ordinary evidence but from direct experience of aesthetic judgment? Then one must go to the artistic and poetic works that he has produced. There one finds in his novellas that the sustaining power of the German spirit is also evident in them, which is transferred there, albeit not as spiritual science, but into the artistic. Of course, one cannot cite artistic products as evidence for the results of spiritual science. But if the spiritual scientist can say that the sayings in the work of art are almost expertly correct for the described spiritual experiences, then it is permissible to point to such an occurrence, as is to be done today.

Herman Grimm always wants to point out that one can only understand the world if one is able to look not only at what [gap in the text], but also at what protrudes from the supersensible into the sensual. He then presents spiritual processes that show how he strives to show that the world is more than just the sensual world. There he wrote a novella: 'The Songstress'. He describes the fate of a somewhat flirtatious songstress who is nevertheless endowed with a deep soul. There is a man who loves the songstress, but she rejects him. The novella continues in an extremely meaningful way until the songstress's death. A friend leads the singer straight to the house where her lover, whom she rejected, committed suicide. The suicide occurs the moment she enters. She is consumed by guilt and is unable to sleep from that hour on. The friend, the owner of the house, has to watch over her. Now Herman Grimm describes how the singer sees the spirit of the deceased rising up in bed and approaching her. And Herman Grimm presents this in such a way that it is clear from this description that he does not want to reflect on an imagination; rather, in a spiritual experience that the guilt-ridden singer has, he wants to show how forces are effective beyond death, and wants to point to the fate that works beyond death. The singer dies after her beloved; she is, as it were, taken. Spiritual science would say: what can be announced as the next phenomenon to appear to a person after they have passed through the gate of death is presented to the soul of the singer: the appearance of the etheric body, which has to bear the fate that is to be borne beyond death.

But this is not the only case with Herman Grimm. He has written a cultural-historical novel: “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces).

The most important thing is: the young heroine Emmy is portrayed. Emmy is also brought to the point where the fate of the beloved dead man affects the living, not only through the inner forces of the soul, but in such a way that this effect is meant by the soul - after passing through the gate of death - still having a real effect on life. Herman Grimm describes how Emmy, as it were, dies after her beloved. And we find a wonderful scene at the end of the novel 'Unüberwindliche Mächte' (Insurmountable Forces). Emmy dies, and Herman Grimm describes how a figure rises out of the dying Emmy, out of the physical body, a figure with arms similar to the physical arms, with a face similar to Emmy's face, which disappears over and into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm is able to grasp the moment of death artistically, just as spiritual science can grasp it in a living vision.

One can see that the sustaining power of the German spirit also works in this poet's soul, which comes from German idealism to grasp the living spirit life. The fact that Herman Grimm can present the matter in a novelistic way, but in the fullest reality, that he is capable of doing so, is the power of spiritual life that prevails through the German spirit. Herman Grimm felt - he had, after all, grown up entirely in what had entered into German intellectual life from Goethe's intellectual life - he felt with all his soul in the stream of German intellectual life. He knew this German spiritual life because every phase of this German spiritual life was a phase of his own life. And how did Herman Grimm characterize this mood of the German being in 1895, shortly before his death? Anyone who knows German life knows that this description is true; what I am about to read from Herman Grimm is true as words that are intended to represent the mood of the German being. He wants to express – he who has so often pointed out how dear to him repeated lives on earth are – he wants to express how German spiritual life aims to recognize the spiritual world, but not to develop a nationality in a one-sided way, but to absorb the most general human element. The words are beautiful, but also deeply significant for the characterization of German intellectual life, which Herman Grimm spoke in 1895.

The solidarity of the moral convictions of all people today is the church that unites us all. We are seeking more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious endeavors of the masses have only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that no national distinction applies to the ethical worldview.

Then he continues:

We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland; but we are far from longing for or bringing about the moment when this could happen through war. The assurance that keeping the peace is our [all] most sacred wish is not a lie. “Peace on earth and goodwill towards men” permeates us.

This is how Herman Grimm describes the mood in Central Europe. But then he shows that he is not a dreamer, but that he can judge the situation well. For he continues:

Recognizing people as a totality, they see themselves as subject to an invisible court enthroned in the clouds, before which they consider it a misfortune not to be allowed to exist, and whose judicial proceedings they seek to adapt to their internal disputes. With anxious eagerness they seek their right here. How the French today are trying to present the war against Germany, which they are planning, as a moral imperative, demanding recognition of it from other nations, even from the Germans themselves.

Anyone who is familiar with the mood in Central Europe will know that Herman Grimm spoke the truth at the time. And they will then be able to judge what is actually meant when those who today want to assert this truth from Central Europe are repeatedly called out from left and right, from west and east: “Who wanted the war?” One must say that this “who wanted the war” comes across as if a number of people with threatening gestures are standing around a house and the master of the house sees that they want to attack the house, and he then goes out and can't help but beat them up. And then the question would be: “Who wanted this beating?” It is the same logic. Yes, one can even say many things about this logic that prevails in the world today. One can even say: this logic is - one is almost embarrassed to say it, because it is so flimsy when it is said: “We did not want the war, but in Central Europe it was wanted.” it is the same logic as when it is said: “Yes, we could not wage war if the Germans had not invented gunpowder, because then there would be no war; so who wanted the war?” It would be the same logic if the people in Central Europe wanted to blame us for using printing ink to accuse the German people of being “barbarians”. The Germans, after all, invented the process of printing with printing ink on paper. But with this intention it does indeed look strange to those who not only look at what has happened in the last few months before the war, but look at what has been preparing for decades as the driving impulses. Those who have really been able to look with open eyes at what is going on in Europe, who have wanted to see it, have already seen how this war, so to speak, in its basic impulses, was preparing itself from the East. And the one who would correctly ask the question today: Who could have prevented the war? will of course have to point to Russia. But those who saw clearly knew that. We see this in the words that were spoken long before the war.

As for me, I am in no doubt for a moment that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic world is imminent, that it will ignite either through the Orient, specifically Turkey, or through the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps both, and that Russia will take the lead in it on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spewing fire and brimstone against Germany. [...] The German press is already sounding its warning cries. It has been a long time since Russia gathered itself after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now considered expedient in [St. Petersburg] to take up the Oriental question once again. If the Mediterranean Sea was once to become a “French Sea”, according to the expression that was more pompous than true, Russia has the even more positive intention of making a Russian lake out of the Black Sea and a Russian pond out of the Sea of Marmara. It is an established goal of Russian policy that Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia, which finds its lever of support in the common religion and in Pan-Slavism. The Danube would then be closed at the Iron Gate by the Russian turnpike.

But this was not said recently, but in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War; and it was said by those who were not speaking off the top of their heads, but who knew how forces were gradually gathering from the east , how the Austrian soul was permeated with distorted Slavophilism, in order to finally lead to what led to the war today and which the Western powers fell for.

I would like to read you one more passage that can show you how the connection with the active forces and impulses presents itself to those who really want to see them. When looking at what happened in the summer of 1914 and what then led to the war from the eastern side, could one not use the following words - I will read out words that could be coined for the time in the first half of 1914:

[...] a kind of press campaign gradually began in St. Petersburg, [...] I was personally suspected in my intentions. These attacks increased during the following year, 1879, to strong demands for pressure to be exerted on Austria in matters where we could not readily attack Austrian law. I could not lend my support to this, because if we alienated Austria, we would necessarily become dependent on Russia if we did not want to be completely isolated in Europe. Would such dependence have been tolerable? I had previously believed it could be, telling myself: We have no conflicting interests; there is no reason why Russia should ever break off friendship with us. At least I had not directly contradicted my Russian colleagues who explained such things to me. The incident at the Congress disappointed me, and showed me that even the complete subordination of our policy (for a certain period) to the Russian one would not protect us from coming into conflict with Russia against our will and against our aspirations.

What has happened, however, shows that the European center can save itself from such an attack. The words I have read to you could be a characteristic of the forces that played in 1914. But I have in fact only changed a few words that were not written or spoken in 1914, but were said by Bismarck in the German Reichstag on February 6, 1888. And I will now read them to you in their true form. You will see how they correspond to what I read to you as being appropriate for the spring of 1914. Bismarck said these words when he spoke out against the military bill in the Reichstag:

[...] a kind of press campaign gradually began in St. Petersburg, attacking German politics and personally suspecting me of ulterior motives. These attacks intensified during the following year, until in 1879 there were strong demands for pressure to be exerted on Austria in matters where we could not readily challenge Austrian law. I could not lend my hand to this; for if we estranged ourselves from Austria, we would necessarily fall into dependence on Russia if we did not want to be completely isolated in Europe. Would such dependence have been tolerable? I had believed earlier that it could be, saying to myself: We have no conflicting interests, there is no reason why Russia should ever break off friendship with us. At least I had not directly contradicted my Russian colleagues who had explained this to me. The incident at the Congress disappointed me, and showed me that even the complete subordination of our policy (for a certain period) to the Russian one would not protect us from coming into conflict with Russia against our will and against our aspirations.

So one can say: The balance of power between the European East and the Center had to be characterized in 1888 in exactly the same way as for the year 1914. One dares to say again that people were living in Central Europe in 1914 who brought about this war. Anyone with a healthy sense of fact will not be able to make such an assertion. One must, however, have a healthy sense of facts. How was the mood prepared in this European East, which then led to the fact that this firebrand, through the connection of the East with the West, finally led to the present-day siege of the European center - what was prepared there in the European East?

We saw, among other things, the mood of Slavophilism emerge in the nineteenth century. Among these Slavophiles there were idealists, but there were also people who later transformed the Slavophile sentiment into complete absorption and idolization of what is now present in Russia; they did not see Russia's mission in pursuing the inner soul forces of the Russian people, but in the power and might that now prevails there. And those who are the best among these Slavophiles have worked in such a way that the conviction has spread widely that the culture of Western Europe, and especially of Germany, is a culture of decline and that a rebirth of European life must come from the East. This has become a dogma. And this dogma has slowly and gradually become established in what can be called Russian life. Certain perceptions of this Russian life are completely imbued with it. The best minds, by being interwoven with Russian life, are also interwoven with this idea of Slavophilism.

Even the great Soloviev had a time in his life when he was a Slavophile, when he believed, albeit in a different way than [Aksakov, Katkov and Danilevsky], that something could already be in Russian life that had the mission to cover all of Europe, so to speak, with a new culture. But then he became more and more familiar with what had become of Slavophilism in present-day Russia. He learned to consider how what had become of Slavophilism in present-day Russia would have to affect the European center, the European West. And there it was, at the time when he said the following to himself – these are Soloviev's, the Russian philosopher's, own words; he says that Slavophilism had become a “commodity of the fair trade” that “filled all the dirty streets, squares and alleys of Russian life with wild, animalistic shouting”. These are Solowjow's own words. At the time when Solowjow was faced with the question of conscience that it is important to ask yourself from time to time; that question of conscience that goes like this: “Why doesn't Europe love us?”

He actually wanted to raise the question: What must Europe see when it looks at us? And Solowjow, the great philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century, answers this question from the Russian spirit:

Europe [...] looks at us with apprehension and with displeasure, [since the elemental power of the Russian people is dark and mysterious, its spiritual and cultural powers inferior, but its demands] clear, definite and great.

These are not the words of a German, but of a Russian, about the forces that have been at work for decades and that have now been expressed with the firebrand. Solowjow continues:

[The clamor of our nationalism can be heard loudly in Europe, which wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, beat the Germans, conquer Constantinople and, if it succeeds, India as well. But if we are asked what we will do for humanity after taking and destroying all of that, we can only remain silent or babble senseless phrases.

"Thus [...] the most essential, indeed the only important question that an honest and reasonable patriotism should address is not Russia's power and mission, but Russia's sins.]

Thus the great Russian on Russian character. Must not then the question be put from the center of Europe to the east: “What do you want?” If you could somehow get the center of Europe in your hands, what do you want?” The best, the most significant, the most beneficial Russian of the nineteenth century answers:

If we are asked [what we will do to benefit humanity after conquering and destroying everything, we can only remain silent or spout meaningless phrases.

Then we see what it is that needs to be defended, what the forces that have taken up the defense of the German character to the left and to the right have to defend in reality.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is no wonder that this German essence, this fundamental force of the German spirit, is misunderstood everywhere. It arises, one might say, from the intimate association of the individual German with the German spirit, which the individual German must feel to be a living one. And from this arise those misunderstandings that we encounter everywhere when we ask people who are not as enlightened as we have come to know them today among other nations. We sometimes hear that what Herman Grimm, who also knew Goethe well, said about the German character with reference to Lewes' biography of Goethe is true; what Herman Grimm said about this book is true: Lewes wrote a book about Goethe, that is, he wrote a book about a man who was born in Frankfurt, to whom he attributes Goethe's works, and who he claims died in 1832. But the way he describes him, what he presents as the soul of the man in the book, bears no resemblance to the feelings of anyone who feels connected to Goethe in German intellectual life.

And so, wherever we try to find a relationship to the German spirit, we only find misunderstandings. Finally, I would like to mention something that may be a more or less inconsequential but perhaps interesting episode.

The movement to which we belong had some connection with the movement that started from Adyar. [Our friends could no longer go along with it because of their lack of involvement in German intellectual life and its supporting forces] when English materialism, masquerading as Theosophy, went so far that the absurdity was believed by some that the spirit of Christ had revealed itself in a little Hindu boy. We know under what guises all this was practiced. It was then that the German sense of truth arose and the German mind had to turn away from those activities calling themselves theosophical. Now, however, the president of that movement has the following to say, inspired by the English spirit, about the connection between the separation of the German spiritual-scientific movement, which is united in the Anthroposophical Society. The following was truly written in England. Please excuse me for bringing my insignificant person into the whole context, but this was written months after the war had broken out.

Now, looking back in the light of German methods as revealed to us by the war, I realize that the long-standing efforts to capture the Theosophical Society and place a German at its head, the anger against me when I frustrated these efforts, the complaint that I had spoken of the late King Edward VII as the protector of European peace instead of giving the honor to the Kaiser - that all this was part of the widespread campaign against England, and that the missionaries were tools, cleverly used by the German agents here to carry out their plans. If they could have turned the Theosophical Society in India, with its large number of officials, into a weapon against the British government and got them to look up to Germany as their spiritual leader, instead of standing up, as it has always done, for the equal alliance of two free nations, then it could gradually have become a channel for poison in India. To achieve this, it was first necessary to overthrow her president, who, as is well known, has stood for the alliance of the two peoples for the last twenty years.

So, we are supposed to have been annoyed that she did not present the German Kaiser, but Edward VII, as a stronghold of peace, and therefore broke away from her, while the break occurred because we could not go along with what was said on that side about the Christ presence. But then she gives us far too much honor by mentioning all that the German spiritual science movement is said to have done to initiate the present war; that is, those who spoke on the other side about our spiritual science movement. Now we are learning about their plans from an English point of view. It is remarkable what we are said to have done, what we are said to have intended. One can see how this is viewed from this side, which necessarily had to happen for the sake of the German sense of truth, the German sense of truth, for the sake of what feels like being within the supporting power of the German spirit. Then one must say: When one sees how this German spirit with its supporting power has worked in hundreds and thousands, how it has brought German idealism, which contains the seeds for grasping and experiencing the living spirit , then one must say that Goethe's words, which Friedrich Lienhard also cites in his pamphlet 'Germany's European Mission', are deeply true. Goethe spoke these words in 1813 in a conversation with Luden:

The destiny of the Germans is not yet fulfilled. If they had had no other task than to break up the Roman Empire and create and organize a new world, they would have perished long ago. But since they have continued to exist, and in such strength and efficiency, I believe that they must still have a great destiny.

This conversation of Goethe's is still valid today. And if we now live in these fateful times, we, dear attendees, feel that everything that has to do with the great historical development of the German character, which stands before us as a living organism. If we look at what has lived in the German spirit, what has lived in a Wolfram von Eschenbach, in Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and in Herman Grimm, we see what has been achieved by the German spirit in terms of spiritual and intellectual power, as if from a single source. This is the driving force of the German spirit.

Now the German spirit has another task. It must flow into the sacrificial deeds that must be accomplished through death and blood in defense of what we wanted to contemplate with these admittedly insufficient words today. But what this shows us is that the German spirit, as it has emerged, has not yet fulfilled its task in the world, that it is to be defended, because it has a mission for the world that it must still fulfill in order to fully grasp the living spiritual life. And so, when we consider the fundamental strength of the German spirit, we can draw hope and confidence for the future of Germany. But all of this also speaks to our feelings and emotions, which on the one hand make us look wistfully, but also consolingly, but also with the greatest admiration, at what Germany has to do now in this fateful time. Our feelings and sentiments are with all those who bleed and suffer, but who also accomplish great deeds in the East and the West, when we see in all this only another expression of the German character. And those who, as mothers and fathers, as brothers and sisters, lose a dear relative, they know that they lose him for that which must be worked out as German spirit, as German future, as the whole German essence that still has something to do in the world, to which one must look as to an essence that has not yet been completed.

And so let us summarize, in terms of feeling and sentiment, the impulses that arise from this contemplation, in the words: Yes, this German essence, we see it growing, and only a lack of understanding can speak of a decline of this German essence. Rather, something else is true. What is true is what I, in summary, would like to express the thoughts of this evening in words that express how what can be observed in the German character ultimately comes together in our minds in a hope, a confidence, a certainty of the further development of the German character:

The German spirit has not yet accomplished
What it is to bring to the world.
It lives in hopes for the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerful
Hidden things that must still mature.
How can a wish for his end arise in the power of the enemy without understanding, so long as life reveals itself to him, which holds him in the roots of his being?

Dear attendees! For a number of years now, I have been privileged to give lectures here in this city in the field of spiritual science. Since the friends of our spiritual science movement have also requested such lectures here for these fateful times, I would like to present you with a reflection that takes more of an attitude of spiritual science as its starting point today; and tomorrow we will then delve deeper into questions of spiritual knowledge that move the heart and soul. It will be understandable that this introductory lecture is being held today, since everything that can move us today, especially when it is close to the heart and soul, must really be carried out after the fateful events in the midst of which we stand.

One could say that the nations of Central Europe are locked in a fortress, a large, mighty fortress. And in the east and west, the existence of this Central Europe is, so to speak, being called into question. And what a sum of courage, sacrifice and devotion have we seen in the months since the beginning of the war; and how much suffering and pain have we had to witness! How the days of suffering and pain, with their events, affect families, how fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters are connected with them!

Therefore, it must be important to us to introduce our reflections on the spiritual development and spiritual hopes of humanity with a few thoughts and feelings that are directed towards the difficult situation of our time. We hear this Central European culture vilified from all sides, reviled. We hear all sorts of things today from the east and west and from all sides about this Central European culture. We may undoubtedly, my dear attendees, see the significant deeds of our people and see them as related to the whole essence of our people's organism. I would like to say: what is happening today is happening through the arms of this organism. But it befits the very essence of the German people to consider the arms, the essence of the spirit, the essence of the soul of this organism. And what better way to do that than by remembering, at such a fateful and fateful moment, the significant and important deeds of the soul and spirit of the German people, and by drawing strength from them for our hopes and goals for the future.

And I would like to take the starting point of what we, as the essence of the German people, can envision from two outstanding geniuses of this people: Schiller and Fichte. Within the German essence, has it always been the custom, in difficult times, to draw strength from those who, as great ancestors, can provide this strength? And I would like to make this connection today, truly not to stir up emotional feelings in you, but because I believe that such a connection can be meaningful in our days, the connection to the days of the death of these two mentioned geniuses. It is possible for us – as I said, not to stir our emotions, but because I believe that this point of view is particularly close to our hearts and souls in these days – it is possible for us to look at the last days, yes, the hours of Schiller's and Fichte's death very intimately, very confidentially.

Schiller's death was described to us by his then young friend, the son of Johann Heinrich Voß, Heinrich Voß, the so-called younger Voß. And we can follow him, our Schiller in the last days of his life, as he is already dying, sustained solely by the powers of the spirit that prevail in him. Yes, with Schiller we can say that basically the body was long since doomed to die, while the strong, energetic spirit still prevailed and just dragged the body along. For, as this body was so completely decrepit, Heinrich Voß shows us, so to speak. He leads us into Schiller's death chamber, and we take part in the last hours of the great spiritual hero. We are told how Schiller, in these last hours, with his body already completely subject to death, with a yellowed face, with extinct eyes, still strong in spirit in these moments, how he had his last, his youngest child come to him in these last hours, how he looked the child long in the eye and then sent thoughts out of these eyes, one would like to say into the eyes. The younger Voss wanted to divine these thoughts, and we can say that, as he tells us, they will be correctly divined. It was as if Schiller wanted to say to the child – what he could only express in these rasping words: I should have been your father for much longer, I still have much to do for you. Then he handed the child back, turned away and looked at the wall again.

Do we not feel, my dear audience, as if the whole German nation, the soul of the whole German nation, could recognize itself in this child? Schiller, who died young, could also have said to our nation: I could have been much more to you, I have left much unsaid and undone for you. But he dies fully imbued with the inner energy of that which he felt to be the German spirit, that spirit which carried him through life, inspired him to his creations, sustained him as his body wasted away, that spirit whose world-historical mission he himself described in such moving words that we may well bring these words before our souls in these times. These words only became known long after Schiller's death, but they bear witness to how Schiller thought about the spirit of his people:

He who forms the mind, rules,
must ultimately become the ruler, because
finally at the goal of time, if the
life has any meaning at all,
must custom and reason triumph,
the brute force of form succumb
and the slowest people will catch up with all
the fast fleeting ones.
[...]
Him

– the German –

is destined for the highest,
and just as he is in the center of
Europe's peoples,
he is the core of humanity,
those are the flower and the leaf.

He has been chosen by the world spirit, during
the battle of the ages
to work on the eternal construction of human education,
to preserve what time brings,
Therefore, he has so far appropriated what is foreign
and preserved it within himself.
Everything that was valuable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with the times, he has preserved;
he has not lost the treasures of
centuries;
Not to shine in the moment and
play a role, but to win the great
process of time. Every people
has its day in history, but
the day of the Germans is the harvest of
all time.

And today, in these fateful days, we may well remember the spirit that Schiller believed must be the harvest of all time, the harvest of the cultural development of mankind.

And if we turn our attention from Schiller, the great poet, to his friend, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, we see no less of the German spirit in the soul of a human being when we look at Fichte's last hours on earth. Schiller was often able to tie in what he had to say to his people in a work, which will be discussed shortly, with Fichte's strong, forceful philosophy. Yes, Fichte's philosophy is energetic and powerful. It is as if, from the whole scope, the universality of the genius of the philosopher Fichte, he wanted to extract everything that this German mind has of load-bearing capacity, to draw out everything that can affirm the strongest will in the strongest thought. And so, as Fichte spoke the beautiful word: “What kind of philosophy you have depends on what kind of person you are,” it can be said that we see this word proven in truth in Fichte in particular; because he felt connected to the German spirit, which was so dear to him, Fichte felt at the same time connected with the rule and weaving of the whole world spirit, felt in every word he spoke, carried by the spirit that permeates and flows through the world. But this philosopher did not live only in the abstract spirit. When Germany was going through the difficult times at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Fichte, the philosopher, often considered whether he should not take part as a warrior in the fateful events of the time. But then he found that he could do more for his nation through his intellectual work. So it happened that at first only his wife took part in the military hospital service in Berlin. But she brought illness into his house by contagion. She recovered, but he himself, the philosopher, was carried off by the military hospital fever.

And now we see how Fichte, who presented the diamond-bright, crystal-clear thoughts of the most German philosophy to humanity, lay on his sickbed in the last days of his life, waiting for news of Blücher's crossing of the Rhine and everything that the people in the west had to undertake. We see how he, who had decided not to be physically among the fighting because he wanted to serve his people and humanity with his mind, we see how he took part in the warlike events of his time in his feverish dreams in his last hours. And we experience the wonderful interplay of a worldview with life even in illness and even in the death rattle when we see how Fichte allowed everything that he wanted to give to the German people through his powerful philosophy to flow into his feverish dreams. We see how he feels in his dreams in the midst of the struggling, and how he feels at the same time as resting securely with his soul in the spiritual world. The dying philosopher Fichte, without fear and full of hope for his people, said when they wanted to give him medicine: “I do not need medicine, because I know I will recover.” Shortly before, he had been given the news of Blücher's crossing of the Rhine. Thus, in the life of the man who is fully immersed in German intellectual life, this intellectual life and the immediate life of the surroundings interact. For this German intellectual life is not an idealistic, dreamy one, but one that always enters into all the individual achievements of its German people. And today, we can justifiably claim that everything achieved in the face of blood and death, pain and suffering, is sustained by the power that permeates our intellectual experience.

And so we see this Fichte, imbued with the best power of the German spirit! Today, we can only sketch out some of the characteristics of what lived in Fichte's mind. In one of Germany's darkest hours, when Germany had been brought to its knees by the western conqueror, Fichte spoke his “Speeches to the German Nation”. Certainly not everything that Fichte spoke at the time can be agreed with today, word for word. But the spirit that inspired him must also be ours. Just as Fichte assumed at the time that the German language is a primal language that developed like an organism from the starting point of German history in Europe, while the Romance languages of the West and South suffered a break in their development, while they originally started from something Germanic, but adopted something foreign that they put over the folk essence in the Romance essence.

If Fichte infers something from the character of this original language, which developed out of the essence of the German and grew like an organic force, then today this may be contestable from a linguistic point of view. But what inspired Fichte, what constitutes the fundamental character of his philosophy of will and thought, is that Fichte reflected on what is most original in man, what is connected in man with all the sources of life in the soul. Fichte sees flourishing and truly authentic destiny hopes only where the soul is able to bring forth from itself what lies in its depths. Fichte saw an emblem of the fact that the German spirit aspires to this in the German language. But even if we can no longer go into the details of Fichte's point of view today, we must still look at how what he then expressed in accordance with his time was formed in Fichte.

What did Fichte strive for in his philosophy? We need only recall what spiritual science actually wants to be. It wants to be a knowledge that does not passively surrender itself merely to the phenomena of the external world, that does not merely allow itself to be passively stimulated with reference to the mind that is bound to the brain, but spiritual science wants to be, if we want to use the expression in all humility, a brave science. It wants to be a science that comes about through the development of the higher human being in man, as Schiller said, the actual spiritual human being, through the development of that which is connected in man's own being with the great spiritual being of the world, which lives in man in such a way that when man recognizes it, he at the same time knows himself to be living and weaving in the divine-spiritual world being itself. But this is what Fichte was constantly seeking. And so he feels connected to the most spiritual part of the world through the knowledge that he sought to acquire from the human soul. Or how could one express the spiritual certainty that man can attain more forcefully than when Fichte uses the words:

There is no doubt about it, it is the most certain thing there is, indeed, the basis of all other certainties, the only absolutely valid objective, that there is a moral world order, that every rational individual is assigned his specific place in this order and counted on for his work.

Thus Fichte's most German philosophy brought about the realization that it was the most certain thing for Fichte to know that he was a single soul in the entire spiritual world, that there is such a world order into which the individual is woven.

Fichte merely renewed in a manner appropriate to modern times that which has always prevailed in the German spirit: the striving for knowledge that arises from the powers of the human soul, which cannot end with death. And when we hear such words as those just quoted from Fichte, we are reminded of the words of the great German mystic Angelus Silesius: “It is not I who live and die in me, but God Himself who lives and dies in me.”

This striving for knowledge not only gives the soul a sense of security in the world spirit, but at the same time certainty with regard to its immortality. For how could one, in the soul experiencing and knowing God in the soul, not be aware of this immortality? For if the God in the human soul dies, then death is precisely a new resurrection. The German spirit constantly strove for such knowledge, which conquers death, for knowledge of the soul, so that this soul recognizes itself not only through the instruments of its body, but through purely spiritual instruments, so that it faces its bodily experience, its own body, in a body-free state, in brave science, as it were, just as one faces external objects in the body. But from such knowledge there arose such a wonderful saying as that of Jakob Boehme, in which is summarized, as it were, all that the German spirit has to say about the great riddles of life in their connection with the destiny of the human soul: “He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies.”

But that means nothing other than Jakob Böhme wants to suggest that a knowledge of the nature of the soul can be gained in life, of the soul as it will be once it has passed through the gate of death and looks back at its body. Because the one who does not acquire such knowledge before he dies will, in Jakob Böhme's view, perish when he dies.

And so spiritual science today not only seeks knowledge of the spiritual, which is, so to speak, an increase of ordinary knowledge in the body, but spiritual science seeks knowledge in the soul, insofar as this soul, between birth and death, ing can forces that it will also have after death, when it will look back on the body and the bodily life, where the body and bodily life will again be not subject but object, as in everyday life. And if today a spiritual scientist wants to use, so to speak, what German spirit can bring us today to make a comparison for something that Fichte wanted to say in his time, then he could take this comparison for a particular case from this spiritual science. I will develop this particular case before you.

Fichte, when he was thinking about what he wanted to say to his people, about how they could realize their hopes and find their goals in these fateful times, pointed to a completely new education that goes to the source of the stirrings of life in the soul, to the higher human being in the human being. Fichte knew at the time that what he wanted to present to his nation with this education – we can no longer think in this way today, but we can look to Fichte's intentions, perceptions and feelings – was probably clear to Fichte's soul as the salutary for the future, but when he compared it with what had been regarded as the essence of education up to his time, it could appear to him as something completely new that must wriggle out of the old, so that this new has no longer any similarity with the old. Then the more recent spiritual researcher could say, precisely on the basis of spiritual science, which Fichte did not yet have: “Now, I compare this new, this completely new education with the soul that has wrestled itself free from the body at death and now looks back on it.

And the spiritual researcher today could describe how the soul looks back on the body and the life of the body after death. There is a passage in Fichte's “Addresses to the German Nation” that is particularly significant in this regard. It is a passage that one might easily overlook, but it is good to bring it to mind today. Fichte himself sought a symbol for the relationship between his new education and the old one. And he says: “What I am putting forward as a new educational plan appears different from everything that has been thought to be right, so that it will not be easy for anyone to understand me.” And when Fichte seeks a symbol for the relationship between this new education and the old one, he uses the following image:

Time appears to me as an empty shadow that stands over its corpses, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the once-so-beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already taken her in and are surrounding her with warm, loving whispers; the secret voices of the sisters are already greeting her and welcoming her; she is already stirring and expanding within all directions, in order to develop the more glorious form to which she is to awaken, but she still has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

We see from this, my dear attendees, that Fichte himself uses the image that we use today from a spiritual scientific consciousness. Fichte uses it from what he feels as the depth of the German spirit weaving within him and what he wanted to present to his people at the time. How deeply this awareness of the interweaving of the soul with the All-Spirit is linked to German spiritual life, when we see that what is being sought today and achieved in spiritual science is working its way out of the great philosopher of the German people like an energetic presentiment.

And if we go back from him to Schiller, we can see how the search for the most spiritual part of the soul runs through one of his most intimate, most beautiful, most magnificent prose works, one of those prose works in which man perceives what he sees with his eyes and hears with his ears, not only in terms of external sensuality, but experiences the spiritual in it through the deepening of the soul within himself, and this is so full of life in him that he experiences it pictorially artistically or, as one would say today, spiritually scientifically as reality. There the human being is free, there the human being gives birth to his higher self.

Schiller's highest aspiration is to seek the higher human being within himself. And here, ladies and gentlemen, we can see how basically everything that the German mind has achieved at its highest levels is connected with its universal striving towards spirituality, towards the intimate coexistence of the soul with the spirit. With Schiller, with Fichte, with Goethe, the same striving is everywhere to be found. And for these minds, the most characteristic thing is that being German coincides with being human in the right sense, in the striving for the highest human ideal. And with a mind like Goethe's, in particular, we see this once again, and the most beautiful expression of this is his “Faust”.

It is precisely in these minds that we see how being German is something different from being Italian, French, British or Russian. Here we have to use the word: you can be Italian, you can be French, British or Russian, but you become German. You are constantly becoming German. Then one is best of all Germans, when Germanness floats before one like a higher ideal, or one could say like a living spiritual goal in the distance, which one has to approach more and more. Therefore, the word that Lagarde spoke in more recent times: “Being German lies not in the blood, but in the mind.” — is extremely true precisely for these minds.

Therefore, it is difficult to make those who live around this Germanness understand it, and on whom this Germanness of Central Europe has to send its rays of influence. And from Fichte's mouth we hear an important and significant word about being German, and again in the “Speeches to the German Nation”:

[...] whoever believes in spirituality and freedom of this spirituality, and wants the eternal development of this spirituality through freedom, that wherever it is born and in whatever language it speaks, it is of our kind, it belongs to us and will join us.

This is the universal position of the greatest Germans with regard to what they felt as Germanness, as Germanity. This is how Germany's great philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte spoke in his “Speeches to the German Nation”, which he, as he said in one of the first speeches, wanted to hold by Germans per se to the German per se.

I said: Everything that asserted itself as the striving for spirituality, as the essence of Germanness, is concentrated, as it were, in what Goethe was to his people. And now we might ask ourselves: Has anyone in the world tried to form a correct idea of this essence and this striving of the German people? There were times when one could hear one or another European nation praising the German essence and emphasizing it in one way or another. But in many cases one has to say: the experiences of today in particular show us how little reason, how little inner truth there was in what was felt about the German character in the world. Indeed, there are people like the French philosopher Bergson – one does not know whether he will still call himself Bergson now that St. Petersburg is no longer called St. Petersburg but Petrograd – this French philosopher Bergson, he found that the he had to give to philosophy in our time, basically borrowed it entirely from the philosophy of German idealism. In German idealism, it appears comprehensive and universal, but in Bergson's work, it appears meager and threadbare. But he, who should know the German character, pointed out in a chauvinistic speech he gave last Christmas how the Germans had forgotten everything they had achieved in the way of spirituality. How the Germans once had something like spirituality, but now they only show themselves to be purely mechanistic. One need only point to what the Germans are now producing: mechanistic cannons, rifles, machines, everything has been transformed into mechanism.

One must be truly amazed at the logic that is going around the world today. After all, is it logical to speak as Bergson does? Even if one admits that the Germans once had Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, what, one might ask, did Bergson expect with his French logic? Did he expect that when the Central European peoples were threatened from all sides, threatened by a superior force two and a half times as strong, that they would then confront their enemies reciting Goethe and Schiller or declaiming Fichte's philosophy? Because they do not do this, the philosopher Bergson finds that the Germans have become a mechanistic people because they face their enemies with guns and cannons. Well, and from this French philosopher to that Monsieur Richepin, it is a straight line between what all the ranting and raving about the German people, the German essence can be heard. All the nuances of the ranting can be found. Richepin could not avoid saying that the Germans are wild, crazy, dirty beasts that must be strangled like wild pigs, all of them. There is a scale from the philosopher Bergson to such vilifications of the German people, which today vibrates throughout Europe. But then we may well ask ourselves: Has one always thought so about the German essence? About that German essence, which under today's conditions can naturally show nothing but its armies, but that German essence, which certainly only has to defend itself with its armies, but which has its foundation only in spirit and soul. It is interesting to contrast what is pulsating through the world today with this German essence in terms of its world position and its mission in the world. And here it is certainly no pleasant task to praise oneself, as it were, for that to which one is attached. So let us choose a different path, the path of looking around to see whether this German essence has always appeared “barbaric” to those who call it “barbaric” today, to those who have tried to understand it.

There is a thinker, a great thinker of the nineteenth century, an American thinker who spoke and wrote in English, Emerson. Since we do not want to judge German character ourselves, let us hear what a non-German, speaking English, Emerson in America, has to say about the nature of the German and his mission. Emerson ties in with Goethe, who is for him the representative of the German character, Goethe, in whom is summarized that which must also appear to us as the essential in Fichte and Schiller.

One phenomenon in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of its conviction. In France, people are delighted to see brilliant ideas going wherever they want. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts reach. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind possesses neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed to practicality, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. But what it does possess is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself about them. There is intellectual activity, well and good: what is it in favor of? What is the man's opinion? Where does he get [–where] all these thoughts?

The English [...] see only the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

It is true that one would be cautious if one had to coin such words oneself, but they were first uttered by an English American in English. Then he continues, looking at what the German mind has to give to world development:

For this reason, the terms of distinction used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are praised for their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and points of view with a certain superficiality, and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something even better in mind. [...] He has that awe-inspiring independence that arises from dealing with the truth.

Now, one could say that these are old stories. Emerson has been dead for a long time, and the Germans have changed according to those who judge them now in their lack of reflection caused by the passage of time. Perhaps we may look at something else that was said not decades ago, not a few months before the outbreak of the war, not by a German, not in Germany, but by an Englishman in Manchester. These words have also been translated into German and published under the title “Germany in the Nineteenth Century”.

In the preface, we are told that the lectures were given to provide journalists and other people with a little insight into the German character. You can judge for yourselves how well this has been received from what you now read in English newspapers about the German character and how it is viewed in England. But at that time the following was said, and not in German, but in English and in Manchester, in the British Isles themselves:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen

- that is, the English [and French] —

the spirit of science was unquestionably known; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, mainly by thousands of German researchers.

Imagination, feeling, will asserted their right to be heard beside or above reason, and under their transforming pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful.

It is strange what these Englishmen in Manchester know about the German character.

The irrational was recognized as a source of illumination; wisdom was sought from the child and the flower; science, philosophy and poetry drew near each other. With us in England this revival of the imagination created a noble poetry, but left the sciences and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the whole period

- please note that an Englishman is saying this –

is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a portrayal of present-day Germany, a Germany of restless, bold will and action, and we can understand all the better why the [great] cosmopolitan, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable place as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

Yes, my dear attendees, one can only say: Yes, why do your fellow countrymen now call the people of Schiller and Goethe a “barbarian people”? This question will be asked by history about the development of these peoples for a long, long time, since they could know better. For I did not begin this consideration in order to answer the question: Why do they call the people of Fichte and Schiller a “barbarian people”?, but rather to show that this question will be asked for a long, long time [in the histories of Germany's enemies], and they, these other peoples, will have to answer it.

In these lectures, which these Englishmen gave to Englishmen, there is something that a German would truly not say in Germany; but it is not meant to be said here, only quoted: “No German words are more deeply imbued with the juice of national ethics than those that describe these things: true, thorough, faithful.”

Now, why then call the German people a “barbarian people”? And about the German Reich, the following was said in the same lectures:

On the whole, there is no question that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace. This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is fitting for it to let the light of the past shine on the confusion of the present, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For when we look to the past, we find that our ancestors

- he is, of course, referring to his English ancestors -

that our ancestors regarded France with far greater fear than the wildest noisemakers fear Germany today. And the fear of our ancestors had good reason. [...]

To sum up, the founding of the German Empire was a gain for Europe, and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 put an end once and for all to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the previously unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed a temptation to war that had so often often tempted into the wrong channels, they enabled the German people to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved in one fell swoop what Great Britain, despite all its expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to achieve, namely to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a major war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, if that is the case, why do they call the people of Central Europe a “barbarian people”? There is a strange preamble to the lectures from which I have quoted. You will have heard the name of Lord Haldane mentioned in an unpleasant way in the early weeks of the war. But it was this same Lord Haldane – who also spoke of the fact that the English, out of an overabundance of morality, could do nothing but join the other enemies of Germany to attack the Germans – well, this same Lord Haldane wrote a preface to the lectures, from which I would like to share a sample with you. In this preface, the Lord, who now claims that England could not help but punish Germany, says:

The source of the stream of its

- that is, Germany's -

intellectual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient [Greece], the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany to-day is to a high degree concretely practical.

Yes, it is almost shameful to hear such a thing said. But I am not saying it, I am merely quoting it. Then Lord Haldane says:

Only the influence of true knowledge can dispel the clouds of mistrust and free us from the need to prepare for attacks that none of us really has in mind.

And a woman who spent eight years in Germany, an Englishwoman who visited hospitals and lecture halls and studied schools and everything she could get her hands on in Germany for eight years, she differs from the other Englishwomen in terms of her knowledge in that she really got to know the Germans and their institutions. She published a book called “Eight Years in Germany” by Miss Wylie. This book appeared very recently, just a few weeks before the outbreak of war. Miss Wylie has described some of the things she has learned about the German character here in Germany. I will share just a few words from her book with you, and you will see how the question that is the subject of our discussion today must be put.

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence. And it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany is already at its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined fight against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago. [...]

On every border and across the water

- that is, over the Channel –

its opponents are sitting, both commercially and politically, and are waiting anxiously for the moment when Germany slackens up just a little, so that they can pounce on her and overwhelm her. Germany knows this [too] only too well.

We see that the German character was not entirely unknown to other nations. Therefore, we must consider the question of today's consideration as the question that will be asked of these nations by later history.

But at the same time, there is a complete lack of understanding of what is most deeply rooted in the German character, of what is most spiritual about it! Herman Grimm, the great art historian, was the one who uttered a wonderful word. He, this Herman Grimm – one can almost feel him as Goethe's governor in the second half of the nineteenth century – he, who was completely immersed in the German essence and was spiritually and emotionally connected to it, he spoke a very significant word about Goethe's biography, which the Englishman Lewes wrote. Lewes tried to weaken the old prejudices of the English with regard to Goethe. Because up until Lewes, every Englishman believed that the Germans revered a man, Goethe, who was actually a completely immoral fellow, despite having produced some beautiful things. With regard to Goethe's ethical nature, Mr. Lewes has achieved something. But Herman Grimm is right: when you read Lewes' biography, which is entitled “Goethe: His Life and Work”, you get the feeling that Lewes is writing about a person who was born in Frankfurt in 1749, a person to whom Goethe's life story is attributed, to whom Goethe's works are ascribed, and who died in March 1832. But what the German has in his Goethe is not even hinted at in Mr. Lewes' biography.

That is precisely what is so deeply ingrained in the German soul: universality, the desire to merge into that flowing spirituality and to transform the stream of spirituality into one's own being. That is what the peoples around Germany lack, and what they have basically still taken in very little to this day. And so one can say: What Herman Grimm once said with reference to the people of the East is true and right. There, he said, there was a Russian who had also written a biography, the biography of Beethoven. Nothing of what Beethoven really is lives in the biography.

Just compare the selfless, devoted way in which the German mind, always wanting to become, wants to delve into what is spread throughout the world, how it, disregarding its own character traits, knows how to find its way into those of others. How the German spirit has united Shakespeare's spirit with its own. When something like this is experienced in a nation, then a Herman Grimm is justified in saying this with reference to Mr. Lewes' alleged biography of Goethe. And when one sees how little heart and mind were actually present in those who have often called themselves the leaders of other nations, one understands a lot. One understands a lot when one really delves into what one can experience together with the German spirit. One can say: There really is something in this German spirit of that Faustian mood, which on the one hand has hidden life's great riddle in: “All that is transitory is only a parable,” but on the other hand says: “Whoever strives can be redeemed.” And in the German spirit lives something that must lead beyond all pessimism, something that establishes a true foundation for future security and future hope. But how little this has basically entered into the hearts and souls of those who, with some sincerity, seek in other nations what can liberate the spirit and bring harmony to the liberated human soul.

I would like to characterize for you how one of the most important Russians, Alexander Herzen, established a kind of spiritual entente with the Englishman Stuart Mill; how one of the best Russian minds, Herzen, immersed himself in the philosophy of the Englishman Stuart Mill, in that basically entirely materialistic world view, that he found, looking across Europe, that basically this culture of Europe can give no consolation, no hope for the future of humanity. It is the characteristic words of this Russian that really illuminate in a flash what has been confronting each other in Europe for a long time, and what now had to be expressed in these terrible flames of war. Herzen says of Stuart Mill:

[He was not exaggerating when he spoke of the narrowing of the mind, of energy, of the polished nature of personalities, of the constant flattening of life, of the constant exclusion of general human interests from life, of the reduction of the same to the interests of the commercial office and of bourgeois prosperity. Mill speaks openly about the fact that in this way England will become China – and we add: and not only England.

And we add: Not only England! For Stuart Mill believes that with England, the whole of Europe must become China. We only get the answer to the question: How could such an opinion arise even in the heart of an aspiring person? We get the answer when we see how he passes by that striving of which Goethe says in his Faust: “Whosoever strives, we can redeem him.” He also passes by what Fichte, Goethe and Schiller can mean for the whole of modern development. Those who speak thus do not know the German spirit, that German spirit of which we shall say in our fateful days: in it lives the power which, though not, as the Russian thinks, to the scaffold and the stake, yet to pressure and death, to infinite pain and suffering, goes to defend what the German soul and its mission in the world is.

However, if Emerson sees in Goethe the very representative of the German spirit, and one of the present-day intellectuals of Russia finds the following words about Goethe, Mereschkowski, who even claims to revere Goethe - one should not be deceived, one should not be deceived in his “Leading Spirits,” which have now been translated into German, for anyone who truly recognizes Goethe cannot utter such words about Goethe, the representative of modern intellectual life, as the Russian Mereschkowski has done. He says:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German bourgeois and – if the shadow of the Olympian will have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a respectable son of the respectable Frankfurt shopkeeper.

Let us assume that Goethe would appear to Mereschkowski in certain situations in his life; but anyone who recognizes Goethe and what he is to humanity would not say such a thing. For it does not merely depend on whether one considers something to be right, but whether one has enough spirituality to say it or not. There is something in these words that the world has yet to learn from the German spirit.

But when we now see how what is German spiritual life is to be trampled underfoot from the east, how this German spiritual life, in alliance with the western peoples, is to be trampled underfoot from the east, then we may ask: What about the understanding and the possibility of understanding on the part of what is there in the east, with regard to the German essence?

Now, esteemed attendees, once again it is not a German speaking, once again I do not want to speak myself, but I let a member of the Russian people speak for himself, the philosopher Solowjow, who is basically not just a philosopher, but a seer, who is regarded by the most excellent Russians themselves as a representative of Russia. Let us ask him. How does he, who has been vilified for decades by Russian intellectuals and other seducers of the Russian people, how does he judge this deification of the race principle to the exclusion of the education principle, how does he judge this brute force in relation to Europe? Let us hear him, not ourselves; let us hear the Russians about the Russians, not about the intimate forces of the Russian people, but about the forces that have come about through the conspiracies of mendacious Pan-Slavism and mendacious grand duchies. Let us hear the Russians talk about all that has been in preparation for a long time. He says: “Why does Europe not love us?” And he answers:

Europe [...] looks at us with apprehension and dislike, because the elemental power of the Russian people is dark and mysterious, its spiritual and cultural powers inferior, but its demands clear, determined and great.

The clamor of our rationalism, which seeks to destroy Turkey and Austria, to beat the Germans, to conquer Constantinople and, if possible, India, is loudly heard in Europe. But if we are asked what we will do for humanity after taking and destroying all of that, we can only remain silent or spout meaningless phrases. [...] Thus [...] the most essential, indeed the only important question that honest and reasonable patriotism should address is not Russia's power and mission, but its sins.

Because the subject that the Russians themselves must discuss has been introduced by the powers that I have just mentioned, for decades preparations have been made for what is now devastating Europe with such terrible storms, coming from the east. For if the question is raised from so many sides: “Who wanted the war?”, then the question needs only to be transformed into another: “Who could have prevented the war?” And there is a clear answer to this question, which history must also provide: only Russia could have prevented the war. Of course, the Western powers will also have to bear the consequences, because without them Russia would have avoided the war, at least for now. But only hints can be given about this. For the German who allows what I have been able to sketch with charcoal to take effect in his soul, what is now to be fought for in the East and West, at such unspeakable cost, must be something that opens our eyes, that shows us how much we need to reflect on ourselves, to reflect on that which allows us to find the strong forces of the German character. By the number of his enemies, the German can gauge the necessity of this search for his own strength, which depends on himself. In this respect, many things can be instructive for us.

We believed that an understanding would dawn, especially among the French, for the German way of being. Strangely enough, even shortly before the war, there were people who believed that an understanding could be found for the German way of being in youthful France. I must, in conclusion, shed some light on this matter. Some of our best Germans were amazed that a Frenchman, Romain Rolland, who was one of the first to join with Verhaeren and others in directing the bitterest invective against German “barbarism,” found in Romain Rolland a mind that understood the German essence, that understood Germany. Why did they find this? Yes, the question is difficult to answer, very difficult. This Romain Rolland has written a novel. In this novel, a German, Jean-Christophe, plays a role. I am well aware that I am passing judgment, and that my judgment can stand up to any aesthetic, and I am prepared for those who find the judgment I am passing “barbaric”.

So Romain Rolland wrote his novel “Jean-Christophe”. The hero is German, but he is concocted in such a way that a wild chaos results. This character is concocted from Beethoven's youth, the fates of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. All this is concocted in a jumble in this character. A character is shaped out of this, which in an artistic-aesthetic sense is basically repulsive to anyone who really has an appreciation for characterizations. And this Jean-Christophe – in German, this Johann Christof Kraft – is presented to us as he is placed in the terrible German circumstances. He spends his youth as a German among Germans, but he cannot stand these German circumstances. He has to get out of these German circumstances; he is not recognized in Germany. He does find some admirers, but he just can't stand the German way of doing things. He then goes to France. It is only in Paris that he finds what makes him a complete human being. This is described, along with other things, which are basically quite chaotic, just like Jean-Christophe himself.

And we have even been told by critics that this novel is one of the most significant achievements in the reconciliation of the German and French minds after 1870. And someone said the following about this novel:

I find myself at a loss as to how many times I should actually thank you. The human, the bon vivant, the artist, the German, the [worldly] side of me, each wants to come forward and say a word. But another time the artist should talk about this novel, another time the bon vivant, and the human wants to wait until he can shake your hand again. Today only the German should say thank you; for I have the feeling that French youth has become closer to us through this book, which has done more than all the diplomats, banquets and associations.

Someone printed this review as a letter to Romain Rolland.

In this book – forgive me for emphasizing this passage, but I can emphasize it without violating any artistic principle, simply because in Romain Rolland's work, which is a poor novel, you can hear Romain Rolland himself through his characters. When he gives his characters traits that are pleasing to him because he wants to talk about this German essence that he “knows so well”. It depends on what nuances are apparent to this young Frenchman, since he is supposed to understand the German essence so well. So we read the following, which comes about during a conversation with a visitor:

Since the German victories, the Germans did everything they could to compromise, to bring about a disgusting mishmash of new power and old principles. They did not want to abandon old idealism: That would have been an act of frankness that one was not capable of; in order to make it subservient to German interests, one had contented oneself with falsifying it. One followed the example of Hegel, the cheerfully duplicitous Swabian, who had waited for Leipzig and Waterloo to adapt the basic idea of his philosophy to the Prussian state

— In 1806, under the thunder of the guns at the Battle of Jena, Hegel wrote his fundamental work, which contains the basic outlines of all his later works. The Frenchman, who has not read Hegel either, or if he has, then without understanding, says that Hegel “waited for Leipzig and Waterloo”. And further.

and now, after interests had changed, it also changed its principles. When one was defeated, one said that Germany's ideal was humanity. Now that one was beating the others, it was said that Germany was humanity's ideal. As long as the other countries were the more powerful, one said with Lessing that love of one's country was a heroic weakness that one could very well do without, and one called oneself a citizen of the world. Now that victory had been achieved, there was no lack of contempt for “French” utopias: world peace, brotherhood, peaceful progress, human rights, natural equality; it was said that the strongest nation had an absolute right over the others, while the others, as the weaker ones, had no rights over it. It seemed as if the living God and the incarnate spirit, whose progress was achieved through war, violence and oppression.

That's how well the Frenchman understood the Germans!

Power, now that it was on his side, was canonized. Power had now become the epitome of all idealism and all reason.

To give honor to the truth, it must be said that Germany had suffered so much for centuries from having idealism without power that after so much trial she was well excused for now making the sad confession that she needed power above all, however it might be constituted. But how much hidden bitterness lay in such a confession of the people of a Herder and a Goethe! And what renunciation, what humiliation of the German ideal lay in this German victory! - And oh, this renunciation found only too much compliance in the lamentable tendency of all the best Germans to subordinate themselves.

“What characterizes the Germans,” said Möser more than a century ago, “is obedience.”

And Frau von Stael: “They obey properly. They use philosophical reasons to explain the most unphilosophical thing in the world: respect for power and the habituation to fear, which transforms respect into admiration.”

Christof found this feeling in the greatest and the smallest in Germany

- that is why he has to leave Germany -

from Wilhelm Tell onwards, the thoughtful, little bourgeois with the porter's muscles, who, as the free Jew Börne says: “to reconcile honor and fear, walks with his eyes downcast in front of the post of the tyrannical Mr. Gessler, so that he can invoke the fact that he did not disobey, who did not see the hat,” up to the honorable seventy-year-old Professor Weiße, one of the most respected scholars in the city, who, when a lieutenant passed him, quickly left the footpath to him and went down to the road.

Germany

— so says this good German-understander of France at another point,

Germany really bears the main burden of sin in Europe. If you have won the victory, you are responsible for it: you have incurred a debt against the vanquished; you have assumed the tacit responsibility of stepping forward and showing them the way. The victorious Louis XIV brought the world the splendor of French reason. What light did Germany of Sedan bring to the world?

Well, my dear audience, you may not find it wonderful when you have heard this that this Frenchman was among the first to weep with the others in the “Matin” over German “barbarism”. But you will find it wonderful that this book, this novel by Romain Rolland, was believed to be one of the most significant acts since 1870 in bringing about peace. It was quickly translated into German. The first three volumes were published shortly before the war. But this Frenchman wants to know the Germans, he also wants to describe them, where he finds characteristic moments in these Germans. As I said, he practices the technique of bad novelists, who are always audible when they let their characters speak. So this Frenchman, who is particularly surprising when he blows into the horn of the “Matin” et cetera, describes something that he really likes about the Germans. He describes how an admirer found Jean-Christophe a professor in Ulm. He visits him. Then the Frenchman describes what he calls a “German meal.” It was so good, the German meal, that even the cook Salomé peeks through the door to see how the gentlemen sitting with Jean-Christophe like it. That's when the Frenchman finds the “greatness” of Germany.

It was an exhibition of unforgettable, honest, unadulterated German cuisine with its aromas of all herbs, its thick sauces, its nutritious soups, its exemplary meat dishes, its monumental carp, its sauerkraut, its geese, its homemade cakes, its aniseed and caraway breads.

He describes something that he wants to depict as good about the Germans. But now, among those who came to see the German professor back then, there is one man who can sing well and who is truly not described in an outstandingly beautiful way by the Frenchman who understands Germans so well. And Romain Rolland loves music. His critics said that his novel was “the novel of modern music”. And he himself had grown to love Germany precisely because of music. So he describes someone who can sing. And he describes him in such a way that you can see that he, Jean-Christophe, wonders why a German can sing.

That is because the Germans do not know how to sing. They are seized by the power of song and the song works through them as if through an instrument. The spirit of the songs takes hold of them and they obey it. Because the soul of the German must do that. This soul obeys the song as the soldier obeys the general.

This is roughly how the Frenchman, who understands the Germans so well, describes the [German] art of singing.

And then he also gives us some insights into what the person who sings like this looked like. And so that you also have something good from the Frenchman's book in this area, I will also tell you that he describes this singer, who he admits sings excellently, for the reasons I have given, as a fat person who always sweats when he takes steps, but especially when he makes sounds. He describes his nature, his whole figure. Then he says: He looked like a Bavarian, a particular variety of German. He thinks that there are quite a few of these Bavarians, because they have the secret of preserving this human race, which “has come about through a system of noodles similar to that used to fatten poultry”.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I could tell you many more things about the characteristics of what is behind what is now physically expressed. Particularly when one considers the contrast between Frenchness and Germanness, as expressed so clearly in the fact that, driven out of their minds by the eternal desire for revenge, the French have done something that they will only realize in the future: they have allowed themselves to be dragged eastwards, about which we have even heard a Russian speak. When one considers this antagonism between Central Europe and the immediate West, then words such as these might come to mind – truly, when one looks at everything that has been produced on the other side of the Rhine, when one summarizes it all – words like this might come to mind:

To the best of my knowledge, there is no natural law and no heavenly parliamentary act on the basis of which France alone, among all earthly beings, does not have to give back some of its plunder if the plundered owner can take it back. Nobody except France itself at this moment can believe that there is such a natural law. Alsace and Lorraine did not come to France in such a providential way that they could not be taken away from it. Richelieu's cunning, Louis XIV's grandiose saber; these are France's only legal titles to the German lands. Richelieu unscrewed them. And General Turenne happened to be unscrewed at the same time. Because Turenne was a real German by blood and nature. But Francis I had set his ancestor, the little Duke of Bouillon, on the path we saw above, and he gradually made him French.

And so on. And further:

For me, the saddest symptom in France at present is the figure its geniuses are now making, its highest literary voices, which should be its prophets and seers and which this figure has in fact been making for a generation. These voices apparently believe that new heavenly wisdom is radiating from France over all other peoples, who are sitting in deep shadow. France is the new Zion of the universe. And all the sad, dirty, half-crazed and in large part positively infernal stuff that French literature has preached to us in the last fifty years is a true gospel from heaven, full of blessings for all the children of men. Ah, one understands that France made its great revolution; that it raised its terrible voice of destiny against a world of human illusions, proclaiming with the trumpet of the Last Judgment: There shall be no more illusions!

These words were not coined by Germans! Rather, the words that I have just read were translated by the Würzburg professor of psychiatry, Rieger, from a letter that was indeed published in the Times on November 18, 1870 and that was written by Thomas Carlyle about France and the French way of life, French greed, and the claims to Alsace-Lorraine. It is a rather nice symptom that a psychiatrist found this letter and translated it, because there will be many a psychiatric chapter in world history when everything that is now being brought into the world from the east and the west about the German character has to be judged.

But if, on the other hand, we allow ourselves to be influenced by this German essence in the way that not pride but humble self-awareness has done, if we see what Germany's best minds have achieved in the German spirit, if we see how intuitions of spiritual science, spiritual insights have emerged in Schiller and Fichte, so that we have to say to ourselves: In this German essence lie seeds that oblige us to develop them further into blossoms and fruits, then we must fill our soul with the right future securities and future possibilities. And we will know that when our fateful and destiny-laden days are again replaced by such days in which history again speaks objectively, that then the question will hang over the enemy nations like one of the most terrible questions: Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”?

And in answering this question, one will feel how the German spirit has not completed its tasks in the world as a whole, in the development of humanity. One will feel how right Goethe was when he said to Luden, even in a fateful time:

The destiny of the Germans is not yet fulfilled. If they had had no other task than to break up the Roman Empire and create and organize a new world, they would have perished long ago. But since they have continued to exist, and in such strength and efficiency, I believe that they must still have a great destiny.

When one feels the German essence, one will feel how it has to defend itself today as if locked in a great fortress – even the enemies who do not understand it and want to trample it underfoot – and one will find that this German essence has not yet reached completion, that this German spirit must fight for its existence not only for its own good but also for the good of the development of the earth. And today we may summarize what this reflection could only contain in hints, we may summarize it in words that point out how, even if the German spirit has already achieved great things, what it has achieved must appear in the present as the germ of future blossoms and fruits. And one would like to call out to those over whom the question will hover as historical fate: Why do they call the people of Fichte and Schiller a “barbarian people”? In answer, one must call out to them what we want to conclude today's reflection with:

The German spirit has not completed
what it is to bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in future concerns,
It hopes for future deeds] full of life; -
In the depths of his being, he feels mightily
Hidden things that must have their effect as they mature.
How can a mindless enemy
Wish for his end to come:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
Which holds him in the roots of his being?

Automated Translation

According to incomplete, summary notes

Dear attendees, there is no need to dwell on the reasons why these two lectures are dedicated to the consideration of German intellectual life in these fateful times. Our feelings must naturally be directed towards what the German people have to defend, locked inside a great fortress. Not only do our enemies today talk about their own bravery in such a way that they not only count on their weapons, but also on the hunger over which they believe they have power. They are also trying hard to persuade themselves and others that the German people have a spiritual essence within them that is not worth preserving. We are like being locked in a fortress, not only surrounded by the roar of weapons, but also, in a cowardly manner, by hunger. The question arises as to what the German essence, the German spirit is, which is to be defended in the face of the changing winds. It goes without saying that spiritual science can only be expressed as a result, as an attitude. What was most attacked before spiritual science emerged in modern culture was something that modern culture had more or less lost. The concept of the folk soul is not abstract for certain character peculiarities, but it is a real entity for the spiritual eye, so that, as we allocate the entity of outer nature to the four realms, we recognize beings with individuality in spiritual science, beings with individuality. Therefore, we speak of different folk souls of the individual peoples, as one speaks of what is in reality of the outer senses. Only when one tries to see the German national soul within the German nation does one get a true idea of spiritual science. However, one must then also speak of the soul of the individual. Psychology speaks of it, but in such a way that it sees a chaotic jumble of will impulses and thoughts. Spiritual science cannot speak in this way.

The world will increasingly recognize that a genuine scientific consideration of the soul must take into account the threefold nature of the soul. Just as a physicist distinguishes the rainbow shades of yellowish-reddish, green, and blue-violet in light, so too, in the same genuine scientific sense, spiritual science will have to acknowledge that the soul expresses itself in three forms: as a sentient soul, inasmuch as it encompasses everything instinctual that does not arise from the brightness of thought, as in the reddish-yellowish. In green, the soul of reason reveals itself. As the blue-violet is in the light, so is the human soul, which can be called the soul of consciousness. This distinction is not arbitrary, but arises from a closer examination of what it means to be human, what is connected to the human spirit through the noblest core, what goes through birth and death, the eternal, where it all leads to, what is in the subconscious, even in the dream-like: the eternal core of being. The intellectual soul stands in the midst of the soul's nuances, like the color green in the midst of light. Through ideas and concepts, it is connected to the eternal and pours out onto the outside with the temporal and the transitory. In the present, it lives out with all the qualities that keep the human being firmly grounded, but which are also the temporary ones that only reveal themselves between birth and death. This structure is something truly real. The light lives in all color nuances, and so the human ego lives as the actual self-grasping in all three soul nuances.

The folk souls in the sense of spiritual science differ in such a way that one folk soul, for example, preferably takes hold of the individual in the scale of feeling. Of course, the individual human being can rise above the popular to the general human. What I say applies as long as he experiences himself in his nationality. The way in which the human being stands in his nation offers, as it were, a relationship between the sentient soul and the national soul. What works in will take hold of the drives and passions. We have this in the Italian nationality. In a second case, when the national soul works in the intellectual soul, permeating the views, thinking, concepts and ideas of individual nationalities, we can observe this within the French nationality. And where the national soul works in the consciousness soul, which is currently the most transient and is completely bound to the physical world, we can observe this in the British people at the present time.

I am aware that what I am saying is not based solely on observations of the present. Many here know that I have been saying this for years. On the other hand, I know that it will gradually become part of human knowledge, just as light in its various colors is part of physical science. Since a direct relationship to the folk soul is expressed in all three soul-members, to the whole rule and weave of the soul within the human being, we have considered the relationship of the individual German, insofar as he belongs to Germanness, to his folk soul. In this way, one can gain insights into the peculiar national cultures of the individual peoples. One can say even more for the sake of enlightenment.

The Western nations had a special link to the collective soul of the folk soul. They added this to the culture in such a way that they participate in a folk age that is different from that of the Germans. They tie in with what comes from Greco-Roman and earlier cultures. So they tie in with what emerged as a current from ancient times, which appears as an immature age of nations compared to the German one, where the individual grasps himself as a special thinker, where he does not listen to mythologies, to something coming from outside, but seeks to arrive at a worldview through his own judgment. The German entered European culture in manhood. Thus, one people can be understood while another people is going through a completely different age. One must know that all peoples went through a clairvoyant age before that. I have mentioned how Ludwig Laistner has not yet fully recognized that all myths, all pictorial narratives, come from a time when people still had clairvoyance, not a dream state, but not fully awake, a state that shows reality, but in images. What the Greeks, the Romans, the peoples of Europe depict in their myths and legends is only one expression of what the individual peoples have really experienced. This has already been done in the “Riddles of the Sphinx”. It depends on how a people goes through the transition from ancient clairvoyance to later clairvoyance, one could say to scientific knowledge. We find everywhere that the world view of the German goes into the whole disposition, while the others were still in a less mature state of mind when they came out of ancient clairvoyance. Their world view has formed itself as if [instinctively]. Their self was not fully present. Even Christianity is still felt as if it were brought from outside. When one sees pictures, one says, they are there, so say these peoples, the world view is there.

The German people are different. They confront us as they experience the great clash with the Romance peoples of the south; there they are already beyond the stage that we have in the oldest stories, myths, the personality is what is emphasized. We feel in the “Nibelungenlied” that everything depends on the human personal qualities playing out, courage and so on, what the human being can suffer. The other people are confronted with what they are looking at. In the “Nibelungenlied”, the German is personally linked to what he has had depicted. When the “Nibelungenlied” was already overcome, a figure from it was used by Richard Wagner; Brünhilde, Hagen, Siegfried. In the “Nibelungenlied” we see how the Central European Germanic peoples connected with other cultures. It was necessary for the Germanic peoples to form a worldview through their own efforts. It had to differ from that which was unfolding all around them. What appeared at the height of Italian art in Dante must be compared with Wolfram von Eschenbach's “Parzival”. In Dante's “Divine Comedy”, a sum of images leads up, connected at the top with medieval scholasticism. And how Dante's personalities are shaped by the passions. How isolated Dante's “Divine Comedy” is from the human. In “Parzival,” the portrayal of the human soul is such that the soul itself is present with everything that lives in it, that the soul only progresses through that with which it lives in its most intimate. Then we see that the German spirit cannot go to a worldview that is presented to it as a revelation, but that it wants to have it as an intimate experience of the soul, as every concept wants to be experienced.

One must see in the time of German mysticism, Meister Eckhardt, Tauler, how they describe the coexistence of the individual human souls with the spirit. It is, as it were, a dialogue between the individual German and the spirit of the people, in which the soul is present with all its sufferings and bliss. The soul must become very still, throw out what it is itself, and be only in its secret closet, then it is with its God, experiences what pervades it as the divine. The mood that it can undergo is wonderful, what rules and moves in the universe, when it lets God rule in it. Later, in Angelus Silesius, this intimate togetherness is expressed in dogmatic sayings. He mentions:

I neither die nor live. God himself dies in me,

And what I am to live, he also lives for and for.

I die and live God: if I want to live for him forever,

Then I must also give up the ghost for him forever.

The soul is filled with the divine spiritual, but since God cannot die, death is only an appearance. Thus, someone like Jakob Böhme, who is very popular in German spiritual life, feels the soul, which does not pass through the vital organs but is the eternal core of being within the body, still fully conscious in the body.

Dying is a new birth: “He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies,” that is, he who does not turn his attention to what passes through the portal of death. Wherever we look, we can see the German spirit's world view in such a way that nothing shines forth from the old point of view into the time when he wants to gain a new world view. His self is firmly established in carrying all his strength and efficiency into the outer world of sense. We see, when in the Romanic culture the nations accepted Christianity, how a strong ascetic current emerges, how the human self separates, its thinking separates. But the German cannot so easily cast aside what is his own self, and so he will carry this into many views of the spiritual and divine in nature, just as in the Song of the Nibelungs, lamentation is derived from bliss and sorrow from suffering. Nature cannot fully satisfy the soul; if it does not see the supersensible in it, it must appear tragic until one sees through the veil of nature that by which one does not perish. Therein lie the roots of German spiritual life.

What was produced later produced the flower in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which leads to a worldview. Always in the national, not in the individual, we see everything in Italy coming out in relation to the passions, in France that which stimulates the mind, that which encourages abstract ideas-tendencies. All schematizing, all bringing into a system, behind which the self runs. They say there that rhymeless verses are not poetic, that there is no rounding off. It is the same everywhere, especially in relation to rationalism. It is the same in all fields, one cannot see beyond it, one must elevate oneself with the self to what is schematized. The German essence should live intimately in what it unfolds as experience up to the supersensible. In alliteration, the soul's immediate feeling passes over, there it is striven for by the intimate progression of the soul itself, not by rhyme.

Within British nationality, that which relates to the transitory, to the external sense world, would be. It is empiricism, as rationalism is in French nationality. Idealism is basically the original field, which becomes the direct roots of German intellectual life. From this it can be understood how Darwin's system of nature was able to pursue the purely material from the British mind, as with the philosopher Locke, and to glimpse the religious aspect alongside it, without grasping it through experience, as the German mind does.

The English mind was prevented from making the same radical mistake by its adherence to matter that Haeckel made out of the merits of the German mind: to make a monistic world view out of Darwin's system of nature. Little by little, spiritual science must unfold in such a way that it not only has idealism, but also imbues it with spiritual weaving. It is uncomfortable to live up to the great German philosophers in terms of what they experienced at the full sap of their thoughts. One sees how this includes the fruit of real, actual spiritual realizations. The German spirit has advanced from the root to the flower, which includes the hope that the fruit, the spiritual realization, will come from it. This German spiritual insight will still have much to say about the development of the world as a whole. It concerns us, and it is this that will have to be defended against the enemies who rail and revile, who go so far as to fall prey to mental illness over the German essence.

In the prime of German intellectual life stands Lessing. I would like to draw your attention to his testament, “The Education of the Human Race.” He sees himself forced to assume that the soul must pass through life not just once, but repeatedly. Clever people say that Lessing was already growing old at the time. One can move from Lessing to Herder, who, in opposition to Voltaire's rationalism that ideas should live out in history, said that it is not ideas, but behind them are weaving, real entities, concrete spirit. He already points to spirit-cognition, says that the culture of the earth will not perish before enlightenment has occurred.

One flowering of this intimate coexistence of the individual soul with the spiritual, of the striving for a worldview from within the real personality, is “Faust”, which no other nation can match. It is not artistically rounded off, and the second part is aesthetically contestable in many ways. But the striving for a popular worldview becomes in it a continuous experience of the self, of the I. Faust strives to go beyond what can be given from the outside, to enter into dialogue with the concrete spirit. He really has it around him in all reality, and when he wants to lead it to the sources of life, his counterpart Mephisto comes to meet him. Faust calls out to him: “In your nothingness, I hope to find the All”. This is a truly German saying, it does not lead to nothingness, but to the source of existence. Through pain and suffering, Faust seeks what is inadequate for the merely external. Those who immerse themselves in the intimate striving of the German spirit are left with the impression of madness, as expressed by the world in a journal that has indeed gone mad: “Robbery was the slogan of the German race at all times”.

That is how far the European world has come in its judgment of the German spirit with the unilluminated intellectual! Hebbel said: “Everyone basically hates the German essence - that was a long time ago - as the bad hate the good. If they would succeed in eradicating it, they would have to scrape it out of the grave with nails afterwards.”

The moods that are now coming from abroad as pathological phenomena have long since been formed as intellectual currents from the passions present in the nationalities, to which only one image of the soul is assigned, while the German must sacrifice the whole soul on the altar of intellectual existence. Only the sacrificed soul gives back what arises from the sacrificial fire. The others seek only through individual shades of the soul. This may now be emphasized, where the German essence is so reviled.

Is there not some truth in the words of someone who says: “Germany made [the most significant revolution of modern times], the Reformation.” This is a proud word about the German essence, which relates to the others as higher mathematics relates to elementary mathematics. It was said in Paris in 1870 by Ernest Renan. In the same letter, when compared with it, one can see what a contrast there is between what Central Europe strives for in terms of world view and how it wants to live it out, and how it is in the West, even when tackling the highest problems such as “The Life of Jesus”.

We always have to hear that Central Europe wanted the war. But let us listen from France to Germany. He – Renan – believes that the Germans should be careful not to take land from the French, and that the French would then improve and realize that they had started the war unjustly. David Friedrich Strauß, to whom the letter was addressed, replied that Renan should forgive him, but that he could not see Gaul as a penitent Magdalene. Renan then says that there is a current in France that says that if France's integrity is saved, we – the French – will make up for the mistake of the previously stolen Alsace-Lorraine, not through revenge; it is different if they have to cede Alsace-Lorraine, then there will be hatred, and the eternal goal will be the destruction of the German race.

Rationalism is capable of saying: just as in higher mathematics, annihilation follows from the alliance with anyone who offers himself. Such logic is a bitter pain, a contradiction that mocks everything that is natural feeling. There is no need to sing the praises of self in order to characterize what has become of the German people through the pursuit of an intimate worldview.

In the West and Northwest, among the British people, there is no understanding; it is impossible for them to even absorb the basic nerve of the German being, nor in the East. Slavophilism has developed there, and it is imbued with the idea that what lives in the West as culture is rotten and must be replaced by what it itself has. And we are in the West of Russia! The individual Russian person is so attached to his or her national soul that it does not yet have an effect on them, that it has not yet taken hold of either the individual soul nuance or the whole self, but rather it hovers like a cloud over what the individual person experiences. The individual soul is not yet reached by it.

In what Italian culture produces in the way of emotional culture, in French rationalism, in British empiricism, we can see the popular soul coming to life. With the Russian people, it hovers over the experience, which is why the Orthodox religion, which has become completely rigid, is allowed to spread over the individual, who bows down under it but is not seized by it. He does not strive to receive spiritual life, but humbles himself under the yoke, bending from the outside. It is a saddening impression to attend such an Orthodox service at the Österfeiern, as the individual behaves quite impersonally towards what is happening, taking in nothing personal. It is precisely in this that superiority to the West is sought. In what is produced as a necessary result of the whole Central European spirit, salvation could be found there in the east, but in Slavophilism they resist developing the mind, absorbing something of what should have been incorporated into the soul of the Russian people. Those who have risen above the level of brutal Slavophilism, who have brought the torch of war and brutal warfare, have realized this.

One of these discerning minds was Solowjow. He is not a Faustian soul, but wants to look up in humility. Therefore, what remains in him is what lives in the individual Russian soul, an anarchy of the soul. We can follow it up to Solowjow, despite his tremendous greatness. [...] Solowjow had to ask himself: What can we offer from here in Central Europe? There is a deep misunderstanding between the East and Central Europe. Why is Central Europe hated by Eastern Europe? He says: When Europe looks at our pretensions and demands, it is heard that it is something great, but what we can offer from the substance of our people, we can only babble phrases.

Even where the German spirit is fully experienced, there is everywhere such hatred, which had been preparing for a long, long time, as it is now, one can say, in a morbid way. What presents itself as a sign in this fateful time is an admonition to the German soul to become truly aware of its mission. This war can be a kind of warning for many. We will have to unlearn many things if we are to become aware of the German spirit.

It was possible that this man was admired as one of the reconciling spirits between Germany and the West. The novel was celebrated as a work of art, as if born out of the spirit of music itself, according to the critic Stefan Zweig of the “Berliner Tageblatt”. Then people were amazed that Romain Rolland joined the chorus of vilification against Germany. There we see how the events that are now unfolding have been prepared.

One can only say that from all that this time will and must bring, from the sum of blood, suffering, death, but also of courage and bravery, a warning must arise for everyone to become aware of what that body, which can be called the German people, holds in its striving to grasp the spiritual world, to grasp that which can enlighten people about their destiny. Nothing can be emphasized sharply enough in the present to lead to a deepening of that which has emerged from the roots over the centuries to flourish, and which now gives the hope of also bearing fruit. Anyone who takes spiritual science concretely and not just as an abstract hope can say that the individual person can die, but that a nation must not die before it has fulfilled its task. It is therefore feelings of hope and confidence that this event can awaken in us if we immerse ourselves more and more in the roots and blossoms of German intellectual life.

I will not choose my words to summarize, but rather a poem from the collection of an Austrian poet, Fercher von Steinwand, “German Sounds from Austria”: “Kyffhäuser Guests”. Each person in this poem expresses in his own way how the German spirit works, but one person expresses very deeply and powerfully what the German people can express when they draw from the roots and blossoms of the German spirit: what springs from the riddles of this earth,

what finds hearts, what masters minds,
What flows eternally speaking from the stars
And discloses an inimitable God;
What seemingly has been lost from time and world
And yet shoots around us in a thousand streams:
That is the primal power inherent in the German spirit,
To speak this out clearly, he has consciously sworn!