The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If it must always be close to the human soul and the human mind, and must be one of its most intimate concerns, to raise the question that is to be the subject of today's reflection, — in our time, when so many, many have to go through the gateway of death at a young age, it must be even more important for the soul to direct one's feelings and thoughts to that which is immortal in the human being. Admittedly, in our time, a consideration such as the following is met with prejudice after prejudice, especially those prejudices that come from those who, from their firm ground, as they say, of the scientific world view, regarding this question, either considering it as something that transcends the limits of human knowledge, or regarding it as something about which anything that is said must be in clear contradiction to the achievements of the scientific way of thinking. If there were to be a sentence tonight that could not stand up to the strictest criticism of the scientific world view, I would prefer to leave this consideration unsaid. For what natural science has to say about this question from its point of view must, from the point of view of the spiritual-scientific world view, from which this is spoken, - it must not only be anticipated by him, but, insofar as it proves to be justified in our time from the point of view of current science, it must also be recognized as fully justified. But those who raise objections to expositions of the following kind from a standpoint that appears to be a natural-scientific world view, always proceed from the assumption that even in our time one can still make do with the thoughts and ideas, or, better said, the thought habits of a world view that is drawing to a close, in the face of advanced spiritual science. And it is still extraordinarily difficult for people today to understand that anyone who wants to talk about such questions of spiritual world view must appeal to insights into the human heart, the human soul, the human spirit, that go beyond what natural science is able to produce, that, so to speak, enter the terrain of a completely different field of knowledge, but that, alongside and above natural science, can exist as fully as natural science. The spiritual-scientific world view wants to let that which it has to say flow into the spiritual development of humanity, just as that which we today call the natural-scientific world view flowed into this process of development three to four centuries ago. And just as this natural scientific world view was at that time contrary to the thinking and prejudices of a wide circle and yet found its way to the human sense of truth, so spiritual science will take this way to the human sense of truth, even if today, quite understandably — I say it explicitly — it must still meet objection after objection; and if something like what has to be said today must, quite understandably, be seen by many as a flight of fancy, as a fantasy.

Because that which can answer the question: What is immortal about the human being? can be answered, must first be drawn from the hidden depths of the human soul. A research method is needed that is based on intimate inner soul work, that rests deep within the human soul, that reaches for nothing but what is present in every human soul, but what eludes observation and the attention of this human soul in the everyday life of this human soul. What a person carries through the gateway of death, what they carry up into a spiritual world in which they find themselves when they have laid down their bodies, cannot be grasped with everyday powers, cannot be grasped with the powers of knowledge that one has for everyday life as a way of observing the world. A more intimate inner work of the soul is necessary for this. Already on repeated occasions have I been allowed to speak here in this city about this intimate inner path, the purely spiritual-soul path that man has to go through if he wants to enter the field of spiritual entities and spiritual realities. From a particular point of view, this path of the soul to the spiritual will be illuminated again this evening.

We cannot recognize from the everyday life of the person standing before us what belongs to the spiritual world about this person. Nor can we recognize this as we can see from the water that the hydrogen, which is quite different from water, is contained in this water. First chemistry must come and separate hydrogen from water by its laboratory method; then one obtains something that can come out of water and which shows quite different properties from those of water. While water is liquid, hydrogen is gaseous; while water extinguishes fire, hydrogen burns. But no one who only has water in front of him can know what the properties, the peculiarities, the essence of hydrogen are. Chemistry must first come and separate hydrogen from water. Just as little can one recognize in the human being who stands before us in everyday life what lives in him for eternity, for immortality. One would like to say that the spiritual-scientific method must come like a spiritual chemistry and separate from the body that which cannot appear in connection with the body. And however fantastic and dreamy, perhaps even foolish it may still appear to some today, there will be a science of the future that is clear about the fact that there are spiritual-soul methods that bring the spiritual-soul of man, the immortal part of man, out of its connection with the body, so that man can really know: “I now live with my soul outside my body; I experience myself in the soul outside the body!” And only through this research, which leads to a knowledge whereby the soul experiences itself cognitively outside the body, can one enter the realm in which the soul has its immortal members. But it is not external methods, not tangible methods, such as those used by external natural science, that can serve to, so to speak, chemically separate the soul from the mortal body, if the crude expression may be used, but rather intimate soul methods, inner soul experiences. Of these soul methods, these inner soul experiences, we want to present two in particular today.

The first method is called, I would say, using a technical term from spiritual science: the concentration of the life of thought, of feeling, of the life of will impulses. When described in this way, this concentration of the life of thought, of feeling, of the life of will impulses seems easy; but, to quote Goethe's Faust, “Yet the easy is difficult!” And what I have to describe concerns the soul's experiences of tremendous inner impact, experiences in the face of which we stand in recognition of a much greater inner tragedy, I would say, than one can ever stand in the face of physical death. That is why those who have been close to spiritual science at all times have always emphasized that the path into the spiritual worlds, the path into spiritual knowledge, leads to the gate of death. It seems simple — but this simplicity must be grasped with all intensity, with all energy — what one has to do to free the soul from the experience with the body. A thought, a feeling or a series of thoughts, a series of feelings, must first be fully grasped with the soul, making them fully present in the soul, then placing them at the center of consciousness, so that nothing but these thoughts and feelings, placed at the center of our consciousness at will by our soul, stand in this consciousness; that, as it were, the whole world around us, with all sensory impressions, with all other sensations and thoughts; and only that which we place at the center of our consciousness through our free will must merge completely with the soul and its powers, the soul must know itself to be completely one with that which it thus places at the center of consciousness.

This is a task for a long, long time. Depending on the person's aptitude for it, it may take weeks, months, years; even if he only devotes a few minutes to it during the day, it will take a long time to evoke in the soul that inner faculty capable of rejecting all other thoughts and perceptions, all other feelings and volitions, and of placing only a certain kind of thought at the center of consciousness. It does not matter so much what the content of the thoughts is, but it does matter that they place a clearly perceived sensation or thought at the center of our consciousness in such a way that we actually live only in what we are thinking or feeling, that we forget ourselves in doing so, that we know ourselves to be completely one with it. In this way we concentrate all the powers of the soul on this single sensation, this single thought. At first, however, a person must be clear about the fact that, as already mentioned, this seems easy; but the easy is difficult. Various things are important when practising the concentration of thought. Above all, it is important that we place such a thought at the center of our consciousness that we can fully comprehend it. With most of the thoughts we have, all kinds of inner sympathies and antipathies, all kinds of feelings, memories, play a role; they color our thoughts, so that we usually do not even know what is going on in our soul when we have a thought in everyday life and concentrate on it. Anyone who is grounded in psychiatry or psychology or modern science today naturally has a cheap objection to all this. He will say: When the spiritual researcher concentrates on a thought, he cannot know what is playing out in this thought from the subconscious depths of his soul and how he then lives in self-suggestion and fantasies. It is certainly quite understandable that such objections are raised from a scientific point of view; they are seemingly fully justified in a certain way, and the spiritual researcher can well see that they have to be made. However, what usually has to be observed in all these things is not taken into account. You will find a detailed and careful compilation in the two books: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science”. But often one passes by what should be fully observed. It is important to place a thought or feeling at the center of one's entire soul life that can be easily surveyed, that cannot remind us of anything, that cannot evoke anything from the subconscious depths of the soul. Therefore, it is even better not to place in the center of one's consciousness an idea that is taken from some external reality, an idea that depicts something, but rather an idea that is purely allegorical, purely symbolic , in which it is only important that we concentrate the soul forces, that we focus all the work of the soul forces on detaching ourselves from everything else in order to concentrate purely on this one point. I will give a very simple example. Someone can immerse themselves in the idea:

And one would not be able to follow, one would feel how the soul, as it were taken out of the body, unites with the general spirit that blows and works through the world. One would feel estranged from oneself. Therefore, the exercise that is implied by this must be modified by another, which must proceed simultaneously with it. And anyone who takes the path to spiritual research as I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” will thereby receive the individual rules by which he can really modify what I have just described, so that it does not happen that we feel, as it were, wrenched from the best part of ourselves. Something else must therefore be added. The first thing that separates the soul from the body was the concentration of thought, the intensification of the life of thought. Through this intensification of the life of thought, we are, as it were, snatched from ourselves.

The second contradicts the first, so to speak; it is something opposite, the other pole; but life proceeds in polar fashion, passing through opposites. Therefore, if one has a realization that is not to be a realization in abstract terms, but a realization of the laws of nature, of life, one must move through opposites. The second is what one might call a complete surrender of the will to the ruling, present, and active world powers. Just as, in the first case, we bring our sensory perception, our intellect, which otherwise plays according to the guidance of external sensory perception, to a standstill, so in the second case we must bring to a standstill every inner stubborn will, in a sense, everything in us that is will. Now there is a certain means by which one can develop the strength within oneself to make one's own will truly subservient to the general weaving of the world: this is when one acquires a completely new attitude towards what we call our destiny. How do we experience our destiny in our ordinary existence? Well, we experience our destiny in such a way that we regard what befalls us as fate in good and evil as something that befalls us; that we encounter it with sympathy or antipathy, so that we regard what is, so to speak, what befalls us, what happens to us, as something that comes to us, so that we stand outside of it, we see ourselves as the I-, the self-being, on which fate has an effect, to which it comes.

Even in ordinary life, it can be seen through truly rational reflection that we basically cannot relate to fate at all. If you look at yourself at a particular point in time in your later experience, you will say to yourself: what you are then, what you experience in your inner being, what you can do and achieve, is inconceivable without the ordinary destiny of life between birth and death. Just think about it carefully. Everything we can do in the present moment – if we trace it back to our ordinary life between birth and death, we have to say to ourselves: it is connected to something we went through earlier. The fact that I can do something now may be connected to the fact that the person who was responsible for my education once brought me into this or that sphere. What happened to me then united with me, became strength in me; now it is my ability. Whenever you really think deeply, “What am I actually, what is there in me?” you will see that what is in you or in other people at the present moment is woven together out of fate. And if one pursues this thought properly, one might say in one's soul, one comes to understand how one must, as it were, grow ever more together with one's destiny, how one must recognize that which one calls one's self as a weave of destiny. What one otherwise speaks of as a coincidence is now found within oneself, interwoven within oneself; one finds oneself as the result of fate. One grows so close to fate that one identifies with it. Just as in the earlier way of spiritual research one identified with a thought or a feeling, so now one must recognize oneself as identical with one's destiny through the circumstances themselves. What I am saying now must not remain merely theoretical, it must not be just an abstract consideration, but it must be lived through inwardly, felt in one's innermost being. Then we feel how we gradually see our will streaming out into our destiny, and we see how we say to ourselves: “You have so far regarded something as a twist of fate, but it was you yourself. That which is in you has brought this twist of fate upon you, otherwise you would not be this being, this I!

In essence, when one meditates on one's destiny for weeks, months or years, depending on one's disposition, one experiences an emotional surrender to fate. One learns to recognize that one must go out of oneself from the little room in which one has previously felt locked up. One learns to flow with the stream of one's destiny. When one thus recognizes how the self, the I, actually lives outside, how in what we call “happens” to us, in truth our will rests, how the I flows along in destiny, then this will is torn out of us again with us, as we surrender ourselves to our destiny. And that is the second. But it must be achieved, must be achieved in inner emotional and mental experience. It must fill the whole person, that is, it must be surrendered emotionally to fate. Then one feels how one grows together with fate and with spiritually effective world forces that permeate and interweave the external world. What seems to flee from us in the concentration of thought, what seems to take away our selfhood, is then followed — that is, the thought is followed — by an element of will, an emotional element of will. While we feel the thought flowing out of our head in the way indicated earlier, we now draw something out of our whole being. We sacrifice the will to the thought. And then the soul, the thinking, the feeling, the sensing, the willing steps out with the thought and we go with it.

What I have described is a real process, an actual stepping out of the soul from the body. It is something that can be experienced just as truly and intensely and really — one might say experimentally — as the hydrogen leaving the water, the hydrogen detaching from the water. It is like the soul detaching from the body, which then remains behind so that this body, with all its outer experiences, becomes an external object; the soul has stepped out of the body. As one otherwise regards the table or the chair in the sense world, so the soul regards its body, which it has left. And what is most important, it does not just experience itself in the abstract, but as truly as it develops an inner experience in the body, so truly it develops an inner experience outside of the body, of which it knows it is a spiritual-soul experience. Fully in the inner experience, so the soul experiences itself. And truly, just as people did not know for a long time that oxygen could be separated from hydrogen and had to learn it first, so the spiritual culture of humanity will learn that the spiritual-soul can be separated from the physical, however baroque, foolish, and absurd this may still appear to present-day humanity. A real spiritual science is that which the future will have - and through which the future of the human soul will bring that knowledge which the human soul needs when the forces that have been there from time immemorial have matured in it for such things. We await such a time. Only he can deny it who misjudges the signs of the time, who does not know the deepest longing that lives today in numerous souls, consciously in some, unconsciously in others, and that will take hold of all mankind: the longing to know about the spiritual. But when the soul seizes itself in the actual experience free of the body, then it becomes acquainted with powers within itself, which one does not have in everyday life, which one cannot unfold in the body. One power becomes known to us, which may be described in the following way:

When we live through our everyday life, in which the soul develops the power of imagination, feeling and will, we come to what is ultimately called memory. And anyone who reflects a little on memory knows what this memory means for the whole cohesive being of the human being. We could not develop a sense of self if we did not remember the experiences we have gone through since a certain point in time after birth. It is only because the stream of memories does not break off, because we know that it was we who have lived through this stream, that we are a self, a self. Even world views can only work with memories that the soul stores and can then bring these memories into a harmonious or logical context. We can therefore understand what the soul has before it in everyday life as its final experience, as memory. What is the basis of remembering, of memory? Well, from an external point of view, we can say that when we go through experiences, we form ideas, we feel this or that about the experiences. Then we have a picture stored in our soul, and when we have long since moved beyond the experience, we know that we can look back on the picture in our inner experience; the experience itself is not there, but only the inner picture is there, something is there that our soul is just weaving. In order to approach this image, to approach the essence of memory in general, we can now consider the following – I can only sketch it out in broad strokes, as it were, with charcoal lines, which you can then follow in detail in the literature of spiritual science.

If we want to approach this memory, we find that in the first period of life after birth, after entering the world, this memory is not yet alive. This memory only occurs in the earliest childhood; up to a certain point in early childhood, we remember back later. What happened before that must be reported to us by our environment, but we do not remember back. What is the basis for remembering back? It is based on certain powers that the soul can use to retain images, powers that enable the soul to store these images within itself. These powers were already there before the memory was there, they were already present immediately after birth, but they had a different task then. They had the task of still working on the delicate organs of the human being, on the nervous system and the brain of the human being; on the nervous system and brain they have to work plastically. They were still formative forces of the human organism, of that which is still soft, so to speak – roughly speaking, but it means a reality – that which must first be formed so that the human being is this particular human being. As formative forces, these still run into the physical organization in the earliest childhood. And when this organization has hardened — again, this is a figure of speech — so much so that these formative forces no longer flow into it, then they are reflected back from the physical into the soul. The physical works like a mirror. And what we then experience in our soul, especially what is stored up in our memories, are mirror images reflected back from our physical life. In truth, we remember because our body is a mirroring apparatus. Science will fully understand this when it continues on its path. Then it will also see through the contradictions that it still raises when such things are presented. It is as if one mirror were hanging on the wall after the other and we were passing by, we would only see ourselves as long as we were standing in front of the mirrors. The mirror reflects our own image. It is the same with our inner spiritual experience. The body is a mirroring apparatus; it reflects what the soul experiences. Through this, the soul itself experiences what were previously formative forces in the most tender childhood, what was used, so to speak, to build the mirror in the first place.

A further stage is this: Imagine the following – I present it to you as a comparison, but it means something very real – imagine standing in front of a mirror that gives you the opportunity to see yourself, to see what you yourself send to the mirror as a ray of light. You see yourself because the mirror reflects your physical image. In the same way, your body reflects that which is in the soul. But now imagine, if — in the soul — you were to acquire the strength to dispense with the mirror altogether, you would develop such great strength that you would, as it were, look into space at that which the mirror otherwise reflects as your own image. But this happens through the soul exercises that I mentioned: concentration of thought, immersion in the will - surrender to the order of the world, you could also say. In this way the soul powers are so strengthened that what would otherwise be reflected back from the body, which is only like a mirror image, emerges as one's own inner, soul experience, that it becomes inwardly alive through the soul's own power. Therefore, what the spiritual researcher experiences inwardly when he has separated his soul from his body is a higher developed, active memory work. While in ordinary life we only go as far as memory, for which we depend on the reflection of the body, the exercises suggested here now give us the ability to develop inner soul forces and to make our soul's inner life actively engaged, so that it radiates an inner reality.

When the soul reaches the point where it creates its inner forces, as it were, but in truth draws them from the deepest inner being, then it will notice that it not only unfolds these forces, but that with the unfolding of these forces, with the creation of the inner mirror image, so to speak, something else takes place that we can call: perception, direct grasping of a spiritual world. However, this perception is quite different from the perception of external sensory reality. When we perceive external sensory reality, we look at objects with our eyes, we listen to sounds with our ears, and we touch external objects with our hands. In this case, it is the object that we approach that has an effect on us from the outside. But when we develop what I have described as the inner powers of the soul, which really come to life so that the soul knows itself outside the body in a system of inner forces, then what is spiritual essence, spiritual reality, flows into these forces. I will use another comparison: When I touch this corner here with my hand, perceive it through the senses, the corner is outside of me; the corner touches my hand from the outside. It is not the same in spiritual perception, but rather, if this were a soul power, which the hand now represents, and if I do not let it work, then the spiritual flows into the hand from the rear, as it were. While the physical touches things from the outside, the spiritual does not touch from the outside; the spiritual flows into the soul forces, so that we have to acquire completely new concepts if we want to speak of this spiritual recognition and perception. We perceive external things; in order to enter into a relationship with the spiritual, it is necessary that we develop powers into which this spiritual world flows. That means that we must say: through soul development we experience the great and powerful that the spiritual world perceives us, that we become something like a thought, like a will impulse of higher spiritual beings that invisibly and supersensibly stand above us. The spiritual researcher must speak of these spiritual beings, which are invisible and supersensible in relation to the cognitive powers of the soul just discussed, in the same way that the natural scientist speaks of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and the physical human kingdom, as the four natural kingdoms that are outside of us. And just as we, when we stand before these beings of the four kingdoms, say: We perceive, we reflect on these entities - they are outside, and we make sensory images of them - so we must say: as we go out of our body with our soul we ourselves become — but in a much higher, in an inner liveliness and essentiality — we ourselves become thoughts, feelings, and volitional impulses of the higher spiritual beings. We are perceived, we experience ourselves being perceived by the higher spiritual beings.

From this you can see that anyone approaching the question, “What is immortal about the human being?” cannot ask themselves the question in the way that people still so often do today. They approach such a question and say: Well, I have acquired this or that concept. How can I be proved the immortality of the soul? Yes, with these concepts, which one has acquired in the outer life and in science, one cannot prove it; because these concepts relate to what the soul experiences in everyday life and what is only an inner reflection. Just as a mirror image does not remain when the mirror is no longer there, what the soul thinks, feels and wills in everyday life does not remain either, because it is only a mirror image of the body; even the memory in which it is stored is a mirror image of the soul. He who would prove the immortality of the soul by thinking, feeling and willing is on the same path as he who would prove the permanence of the mirror image from the picture in the mirror. Everything that is a mirror image must be admitted to the natural scientist — and nothing else is presented to him. All that which in ordinary life we call the soul does not pass through the portal of death. But the soul contains something — for what spiritual science brings up is contained in the soul — that passes through the gate of death, and passes through the gate of death in such a way that it can only be grasped in concepts and ideas that one does not have at all unless one first develops them. While for ordinary experience one must say that the human soul perceives, for spiritual experience one must say: the soul is perceived by higher beings. While in sensory experience one perceives oneself, for spiritual experience one must say: after death, the human being is received by the higher spiritual beings. When man incorporates his thoughts from external natural things into his soul, then the entity that rules over him supersensibly incorporates itself into him; he is remembered, he is carried away into the spiritual world. That is why it is so difficult to answer the question: What is immortal about the human being if you want to answer it with the ordinary concepts of the day, which do not apply to it at all.

And all philosophers who have tried to approach the immortality of the human soul, to answer the question of the immortality of the soul, have always come back to saying: there must be something fine and substantial that goes beyond death. We have seen that nothing of the substantial remains, but that the soul's powers are themselves a highly developed memory life, that it is a being perceived, a being born in the spiritual world. They all know that such processes in the life of the senses even have their symbols, their analogies. When one billiard ball strikes another, the physicist says: the state of motion of the first ball passes into the second. What has passed from one ball to the other? It is not the substance of the first that has passed into the second, but only the force passes.

Those who have thought about the immortality of the soul have always thought of it as something that is in ordinary life and passes through the gate of death; while what passes through the gate of death must first be sought, because it lies so deeply hidden in the soul that it is not noticed at all, that attention is not focused on it in ordinary life; but it is there after all. And when someone who has so truly, chemically, as it were, separated the soul and spirit from the body, then experiences this soul and spirit as it is sheltered in a supersensible world of spiritual beings that stands above it, then he also knows that in this of the soul — just as hydrogen is hidden in water —, that in this he has something that works very secretly, so to speak between the lines of life; which absorbs the finest powers of the soul, of experience, of the moral abilities of the human being, just as the small plant germ absorbs the forces from the whole plant in order to concentrate them. And just as, after withering, after the leaves wither and the blossom dies, the plant carries over into the following plant as a small germ what lived in the previous plant, what the plant has saved as a germ — so it is in the human soul. If you distill it out in this way, you realize that, in every moment of life, waking and sleeping, this human soul works in the depths of everyday life, working out everything we acquire in terms of abilities acquires is permeated, deeply permeated, by what it has done in the way of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness. And then one knows that what lives hidden in the soul goes through a life between death and a new birth – and then returns to earthly life. In the life between death and a new birth, man gathers strength from a spiritual world, but these become formative forces so that through a new birth he can unite with what he has received from his father and mother and from his line of ancestors. Thus the human soul does not live through one earth life, but successive earth lives.

The complete life on earth therefore consists of a succession of lives that take place between birth and death, and of the life between death and a new birth, which are longer than the lives on earth where the soul dwells in purely spiritual spheres, where it is active and occupied there – where it has grown together with the spiritual world just as it has here with the physical world. That the human soul experiences repeated lives in its universal, that each subsequent life on earth is the effect of previous lives on earth, is what spiritual science will gradually incorporate into the spiritual culture of humanity, just as the Copernican worldview has been incorporated into external culture. It is certainly still the case today that people often say: Yes, what you are telling me, contradicts what the five senses consider to be true! Well, people have even had to experience quite different things that contradict their five senses. For thousands of years, people believed according to their five senses that the sun and the starry sky moved around the earth. That it is the other way around, that the earth moves around the sun, he had to believe despite the contradiction of the five senses. Thus, what must now contradict the five senses, that man goes through repeated earth lives, will also enter into the thinking habits of men. But then man will speak out of a real science about what is immortal in the human being. He will seek this immortal, as it were, between the lines of ordinary experiences, will know within himself an inwardly working being, which is sheltered in a spiritual world, just as the thinking being is sheltered in the sensual outer world in our ideas and thoughts and sensations.

Then the human being will know himself connected with his eternal, his immortal, connected with the spiritual world. This is the destiny of the evolution of humanity. And we may truly remember this in our time, in the time of difficult but also glorious trials; we may remember how precisely German spiritual life — you will not find it incongruous if I mention this in the last part of my discussion — how precisely German spiritual life has been working for a long time to gain such a science. We need only recall Lessing, the great standard-bearer of modern German intellectual life, and consider the store of enlightened ideas for him and for humanity that he gathered in his soul. He summarized them, as if in a testament, in his beautiful essay 'The Education of the Human Race'. Of course, many people today, especially the very clever ones, say: Well, Lessing! He wrote and said many things throughout his life, then he grew old, his mental powers weakened, and then he also wrote such complicated stuff, in which he advocated something like the doctrine of repeated lives on earth, of intermediate lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual world! People consider it a crazy idea, and they forgive the great minds if they also come up with such complicated ideas, which are not seen as such in ordinary life, which can be grasped with the five senses. But Lessing said something very significant at the end of the work: 'There have always been people in the most ancient times who, through ancient clairvoyance, through ancient abilities of the human soul that were still closer to the spiritual forces of the world, knew something about repeated earthly lives. And Lessing says: “Is it to be denied that the soul of man has achieved something through original powers, before it was corrupted by the sophistry of school?”

Lessing was right. Spiritual science will show humanity that what was effectively there at a primitive stage of development will come at the highest level of truly developed scientific knowledge, when science has progressed to the point where it not only chooses as its tools not only external, tangible methods that can be grasped with the five senses, but when it allows spiritual-soul experiments as such methods — which has just been described as a kind of spiritual chemistry. And it is precisely German spiritual life that has always pointed to this intimacy of the soul life, through which the soul comes beyond itself into a higher life of feeling, which is not a mere life of memory but an immersion into spiritual reality. A higher life of thought, a higher life of feeling, a higher life of will. To achieve this, to strengthen the soul's powers so that it can leave the body, has always been the aim of German spiritual life; and this is one of the germs of German spiritual life to which I referred yesterday, which has yet to come to fruition as the blossoms and fruits of this German spiritual life.

We see, of course, how very remarkably inward-looking minds, such as the wonderful Novaks, how these German minds always and again, through the inner living contemplation, through the contemplative experience of their soul, arrive in direct contemplation at the knowledge that this as an immortal soul through the portal of death; and how they then arrive at concepts that seem foolish to ordinary experience, but which, because they do not fit ordinary experience, are precisely suited to an experience that goes beyond ordinary experience. He who in spiritual science wants to find only the ordinary concepts cannot come to it. This spiritual science requires an inner mobility, an elasticity of mind, so that one can come to new concepts. Most people would like to spare themselves this out of inner laziness. They believe that the spiritual world must be something like a finer copy of the sensual world; they imagine the spiritual world to be material and substantial again. But when you experience the world spiritually, nothing of what you are accustomed to remains in it; instead, something completely new awakens that you have not yet known, but with which you must enrich your soul in order to experience within yourself what is immortal in the human soul.

So when such people speak of the spiritual world, to which the soul belongs in the immortal, they must first form the words, the concepts. That is why I have to apologize to you, so to speak, for today's lecture. In a lecture like this, where one speaks of the spiritual world but in words that are coined for ordinary life, one has to struggle with the words. One has to demand that one's formulations use words that are uncomfortable for those who want to stick to the familiar. Time and again, critics come along and say: What you have said does not even exist! I know that. Of course, these gentlemen know an infinite amount, but when they apply their old concepts to something that must have completely new concepts, then their criticism does not apply to what they want to characterize. But in German intellectual life we have minds – Novalis is one of them – who know how to speak in a language that is indeed the German language, but which seems like a wonderfully living essence distilled from the German language to show something that is as real as the sensory world, that is the reality into which the soul passes when it walks through the gate of death. What such people say can have an effect on those who are receptive to it.

And now I will give you a remarkable example; it is too beautiful for me to withhold from you, because it shows how Novalis has worked. I will purposely relate to you his effect on a Belgian-French poet-philosopher who studied Novalis, who, as he claims, immersed himself completely in Novalis, and who received an impression that he describes in the following way.

Before I present this, I must say that another Franco-Belgian poet and philosopher, Maurice Maeterlinck, immediately after the outbreak of the war and repeatedly, found particularly harsh words about the German barbarians and launched a most outrageous attack on this barbaric culture. That is Maurice Maeterlinck, for whose fame in the world German intellectual life has done more than French. But gratitude is not something that needs to be demanded in this day and age. He really did insult and revile these German barbarians, much as the others I mentioned yesterday.

In contrast to this, there is another Belgian-French poet-philosopher, Novalis, who has allowed himself to be influenced by one of the most German of German poet-philosophers, with all that he has to say about what is immortal in the human being, and he then talks about this influence. He cannot but say: When one reads Sophocles and Shakespeare in this way, when one sees what Sophocles' figures, what Shakespeare's characters experience, what Hamlet even experiences, then what these people do and suffer is entirely earthly; it only interests the earthly human being. But if – so the Belgian-French poet-philosopher believes – a spirit were to descend from another planet, it would not be able to take an interest in what the characters of Sophocles and Shakespeare experience; these are only earthly matters. But in Novalis, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher finds a soul that has something to say that would interest even spirits who would descend from the universe to pay a visit to Earth; because Novalis speaks of the eternal of the human soul, which not only interests the human souls insofar as they live in the body, but must interest all beings that belong to the extra-terrestrial world. And with beautiful words, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher speaks of what he has experienced in Novalis, the German poet-philosopher:

“But if other proofs were needed, they would lead him among those whose works almost touch silence” – he means, the ordinary language of the day is for what is transitory; but what is immortal, one should actually remain silent about it or find another language for it —, “she would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without caring about the little gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness is heightened by a degree, and where all those who are plagued by restlessness about themselves attentively circle the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. It would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. Only at this level are there thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble it and are as compelling as itself. There, humanity has ruled for a moment; and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth 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 foreign 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!"

Such are the words of the Belgian-French poet-philosopher. If he were to hear Maurice Maeterlinck railing against the barbarians, the same barbarians who gave rise to the subject of the Belgian-French poet-philosopher's words, would he not call him a useless brawler? Yes, but there is a catch, because the words were written by Maurice Maeterlinck himself – before the outbreak of the war, though!

These are the things we experience today; that is why I said yesterday: what we are experiencing in the world today is a characteristic chapter of psychiatry. For what follows from the incredibly paradoxical fact that the same Maurice Maeterlinck utters these words about the German Novalis – and then goes on to revile and curse the entire German people as barbarians? What follows from the fact that what he said years ago and what I have read to you is deeply untrue and false? It is indeed a peculiarity of our present culture that because it is so full of what has been accumulated through language and external influences, the soul can also produce very beautiful words, words that sound beautiful but which may be false on the inside. But it is precisely one of the soul's paths that lead to the spirit in the way I have described, that everything the soul produces and experiences is profoundly true, truly true, shockingly true. If only a single phrase, only a single lie is in the soul on the way into the spiritual world, then one cannot find this way into the spiritual world. This path of truth is a following of the one who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life!” — that is, the connection of the three. Such a path of imitating the one who said this is this path of truth. And if he is only a phrase, however beautiful a phrase may sound, he will not find the truth; he will only find the great deception, which can also penetrate into the soul where the soul wants to find that with which it is connected as with its immortal part. Inner truth alone connects the soul with what, as the Divine, permeates and permeates the world.

And when, again, the German spiritual life gives voice to the beautiful and profound words of Meister Eckhart, the philosopher, that there is a spark in the mind that ignites that which of the divine in the individual can live of the Divine in the individual human soul, one must say that the human soul can only experience authentically what is to be kindled like a spark in the mind if it is deeply inwardly true.

This, however, requires self-knowledge. But this self-knowledge is difficult to achieve in life. When a person, as I have explained, manages to rise out of the physical with his soul and spirit, then he has his ordinary earthly self before him, as he otherwise has external things before him. But he must be able to see his earthly self and, before he begins this spiritual path, must be able to acquire self-knowledge as an inner habit. But how difficult it is, a comparative example to illustrate: a rather famous contemporary professor, the Viennese philosopher Dr. Ernst Mach, who wrote various books that are highly esteemed today, gave a sample on the third page of his book 'Analysis of Sensations' of how difficult it is to come to self-knowledge, even in terms of one's physical form. He recounts: “As a young man, I once saw a face in profile in a shop window where two mirrors faced each other as I was walking down the street. I thought: what a person with a repulsive, even revolting face do I encounter here; and I was not a little surprised when I discovered that I had my own image in front of me, which was shown to me by the fact that the mirrors were arranged in this way.” And as a second example, the same professor tells the following story on the third page of his book: “Once, when I arrived quite tired from a journey, I got into a bus. I saw a man getting in from the other side, and I thought” — he says, he admits it, he is completely honest — “what a run-down, unpleasant schoolmaster is getting in there. And again I saw: it was myself.” And he adds: ‘So I knew the habitus of the species better than my own.’ A lady who had heard this, after I had said it in other lectures, related an example of such a lack of self-knowledge with regard to appearance, which she had observed in a relative. This relative went into a restaurant in a strange city. She did not know her way around. Then, as she walked towards the wall, she saw a lady coming towards her from the other side. “Well, what kind of ugly country girl is that?” she thought. She was a very elegant city woman. It was only when she spoke to the lady and the lady did not answer that she recognized herself.

These are examples that I would say are taken from the coarsest external sensuality. But if a person has so little insight into his external physical sensuality, he has even less insight into the soul in ordinary life. But this possibility of looking at oneself, of knowing oneself as an external object, is part of the real grasp of what is immortal in the human being. And anyone who really immerses themselves in the spiritual world and can then also follow what is real in this spiritual world, who can therefore follow the human being not only in their life between birth and death, but beyond death, knows that when he communes with the soul, the soul looks back at death, precisely in that it looks back at itself in self-knowledge, at what one has experienced between birth and death. Self-knowledge is, as it were, the eye of the immortal spirit. Through self-knowledge we must see the whole spiritual world in the time that we live through spiritually between death and a new birth. All this is really so that we can say: the seeds that must come to further development and evolution are contained in German intellectual life, and these must be grasped vividly in the course of time. Then real insight and real spiritual comprehension will emerge from this German intellectual life in the future.

If you take a brief look at the intellectual cultural history of modern times, you will also be led to recognize how the German spirit, in particular, is called upon to develop its idealism, which it has developed in its great philosophers, into spiritualism, into spirit-cognition, into spirit-experience, into scientific knowledge. One is tempted to say that the German spirit was pressed, suppressed and suppressed by the foreign spirit. We see how Goethe, who is rooted entirely in the German spirit, sighs under what is coming from France, especially in his time. While the German mind is actually geared to recognize more and more intimately the spirit that pervades and interweaves the world, the French mind is more geared to grasp everything that can be grasped by the intellect, to rationalize. This can even be seen in the peculiarity of French poetry. Reason, however, being bound to the brain, is basically only capable of developing materialism. Therefore, materialism is basically a genuine French product. Materialism is not inherent in the German character when it comprehends itself in its deepest intimate interior. This inner Frenchness, this inner materialism, must also be defeated by the German spirit in the course of time.

And if we follow a characteristic phenomenon of the development of world views in the British Isles, precisely in terms of the leading philosophy that comes from there, we can summarize it as follows: The British philosopher – and this can be proved in detail everywhere – starts from the same point as Locke, Hobbes and so on: only to accept what the senses perceive and what is combined from them, and to make the intellect only a servant of sense perception. This leads to external empiricism or to skepticism, to a search for doubt. But this has also deeply influenced the German mind, and that is also something from which it must free itself. After all, we are experiencing many things in our time, just below the surface of our soul. While England, with its world-view, was called upon to swear by mere sensory appearances, and France was called upon to cultivate man from out of rationalism, out of the intellect, to the point of the sentence 'Man as a machine', the German spirit, after it had emancipated itself from France, cultivated idealism, which is the predecessor of spiritualism, of the actual spiritual science. Idealism does not seek to stop at materialism, which is tied only to the intellect; it does not seek to stop at the empiricism of Englishness, which wants to hold only to the senses, nor at the rationalism of Frenchness, but seeks to grasp what lives in the soul. But by liberating himself from foreign influences, by the German fully relying on himself spiritually, German idealism will incorporate the living spiritual knowledge of the culture of the future.

If you try to do something for this living spiritual knowledge today, you will, however, initially encounter a great deal of resistance. If I may mention this here in a personal capacity: since the 1980s, I have been striving to establish Goethe's theory of colours and its depth against the materialistic English Newtonian physics. It is easy to understand why physics objects to Goethe's theory of colours; one can easily list all the objections. But the Goethean Theory of Colors is itself a living penetration into the physical reality of colors as a scientific product; and as spiritual knowledge will take hold of human culture, it will be realized how infinitely higher this Goethean Theory of Colors stands than the English one. Today, however, one is still talking to deaf ears; the corresponding writings are not yet being read – or only by a small circle. But it is always like that.

As the ancestor of true spiritual science, Goethe established a naturalistic world view of the development of living beings. I have been writing about this since the 1880s in an effort to show how this Goethean theory of development is a spiritual view. It is based on the fact that Goethe was able to make true what he was able to emphasize to Schiller, that he already sees the idea in reality. But here too, one still preaches to deaf ears; for the other is more comfortable. This Goethean teaching was inconvenient for humanity to accept. And when Darwin came along and presented all of this in a way that was more comfortable for the senses, in an outwardly sensual way of looking at things, in a way that the English mind so relishes, it was accepted, it flooded the world; and the difficult, uncomfortable, but spiritual Goethean teaching was ignored by people. When Darwin conveniently brought the theory of evolution, it was accepted.

And the great philosopher Hegel, who also has a lot to do with this city, has shown another example. He has shown how the German astronomical philosopher, philosophical astronomer, to whom science owes so much, Johann Kepler, has achieved great things in terms of understanding the world's context. Yes, it was indeed the case that Kepler was affected by Kästner's famous epigram, because he saw through the course of the stars, because he saw through all of this and expressed it in wonderful formulas, he had to lead a life of which the epigrammist Kästner says:

No mortal had ever risen higher
than Kepler rose – and died of starvation.
He knew only how to amuse the minds,
so the bodies left him without bread!

But Hegel goes even further and shows that Newton's famous theory of gravitation, on which, as every physicist says, modern physics is based, is nothing more than what the Swabian Kepler achieved, expressed in mathematical formulas. The real thing is Kepler's. One is faced with a historical lie when one speaks of the justification of Newtonism.

The German spirit will have to stand on its own. This will stand out from the many sad but also glorious events of our time as a marker of the historical development of humanity. However, what has worked so thoroughly from the west and northwest has worked on human souls in such a way as to make the path I have described, the path into the spiritual world, more difficult.

I will now say something, forgive me, that many will consider very stupid; but I know that it is a truth. Perhaps the time will come when this truth can be shown in detail. All that is needed is time. I can only state the fact that the opportunity for the free development of the powers of the soul, as indicated, to pave the way to the spiritual world, has been thoroughly lost to souls from childhood on. As a result, for example, the path has been lost – I am not speaking out of national chauvinism, I am speaking out of psychological, cultural-historical knowledge – the path has been lost because the poison of Robinson by Defoe still poisons and contaminates the lives of many boys and girls; and in this lies that which takes root in the soul in order to imbue it with the empiricism of Englishness.

Many internal victories, which are in the interest of German culture, will still have to be fought. But what is happening now is the great, bloody, but also glorious harbinger. And those who now go through the gate of death as heroic souls – especially the spiritual scientist must point this out, because he knows how souls go through death as realities and how those who are dead only live on in a different form – they will be among us in a high sense with their unspent powers. For in their soul-spiritual there is something that could have supplied the body with formative forces for decades to come — after all, these are young, flourishing human lives that are leaving the earth in our time —, that could have supplied the body with formative forces for a whole long life. But this will still weave and live in its immortal soul; it will be there in the spiritual sphere; it will be there and will help when humanity approaches it with understanding in the creation of a truly spiritual worldview, a worldview that is spiritual through and through, that is scientific in the fullest sense, in the strictest sense of the word. Spiritual science will thus be able to be something very much alive and real. For the spiritual scientist knows that when what he has to give as the result of research comes to life in souls, then these souls will become so immersed in earthly life that the great gulf, which today gapes as a materialistic world-view between the physical and the supersensible, will be bridged. In a much more real sense than one suspects today, people will live into a world view that, in addition to the directly present earth citizens, will also show them people in their effectiveness who have passed through the gate of death. But this is a world view that at the same time admonishes us for the large number of deaths that our fateful time has brought upon us. Much blood, much death, much adversity, much suffering and pain, much courage, much willingness to make sacrifices, tremendous greatness rushes and weaves through that which surrounds us in our fateful, momentous, and historically significant present. But it is particularly appropriate in this present time to point to that which points beyond all death, beyond all mere temporal life, to the hidden, to that which is immortal in the human being.

Not everyone will be able to become a spiritual researcher, just as not everyone can become a chemist. But times will come when just as what the few chemists have to give will be made fruitful for all, so too what the individual spiritual researchers have to give will benefit all of humanity and its coexistence. One need not be a spiritual researcher oneself to find the truth of what spiritual researchers discover; one need only be free of the prejudices that today's habits of thought put in one's way, and the things that have been hinted at today, spiritual science, can be understood. In order to discover the facts for oneself, to give just one example of what formed the main subject of today's discussion, one must follow the path of spiritual research oneself. In order to penetrate into the spiritual world, where divine spiritual beings, just as real as the things and beings of the physical world, dwell, in order to speak of these worlds appropriately, in order to really bring messages from this world and these beings, one must go the way of spiritual research oneself. To understand what is brought from the spiritual worlds, one really needs only to approach the matter with an unprejudiced sense of truth. People who are unable to believe this sense today, combined with what spiritual research says, do not realize that it is not the sense of truth, but the habits of thinking caused by prejudice. But when these habits of thinking have been done away with, as the old habits of thinking were done away with in the face of the Copernican world-picture, then spiritual science will bring something infinitely more fruitful for the soul and spiritual life than natural science has brought for the outer life. For what natural science brings relates to what surrounds us, to what we build for ourselves, to many things by means of which we make our life comfortable and pleasant, what is useful to us. But what spiritual science has to give is something that every soul desires, if only it becomes aware of the powers of this desire in the spiritual and soul; that which gives people the opportunity to develop in such a way that desolation, loneliness, disharmony of life, but what strengthens the soul so that the soul can also face life strongly, and that will demand more and more of the soul in the future. Spiritual science will incorporate something of the spiritual development that will evoke a living consciousness in the soul of what is immortal in the human being. And in this coexistence with the immortal part of the soul, man will become more aware that the world is more comprehensive than what the senses see, than what one experiences in time. The knowledge, which will not remain abstract or theoretical, will be concentrated in certain feelings that will inwardly gladden and uplift the soul, but will also make it industrious, strong and capable.

In conclusion, I would like to summarize in a few words what can be awakened in the soul through spiritual science. These words may fade away what I, as I said, could only say in brief strokes, like a charcoal drawing, about the question today: What is immortal in the human being? This may fade away into the words that are, so to speak, the residue of feeling of spiritual scientific knowledge and of the spiritual scientific confession in relation to the question of today's contemplation:

The senses of man speak:
The things in the vastness of space;
They change with the course of time.
Awakening itself, the human soul awakens
From the vastness of space
And unperturbed by the course of time
In the stream of becoming in eternity!

In the course of these lectures, I have often emphasized that it is quite natural, as a matter of course, that from the point of view of the majority of people today, objections about objections must be raised against spiritual science. But I also emphasized in the lecture I gave here on the question of immortality from the point of view of spiritual science that genuine. Spiritual Science wants nothing to do with what is all too often done in its name, but that it is in complete harmony with natural science. But it is also in complete harmony with what a healthy philosophy has to say. Since this is noteworthy for our consideration today, I would like to emphasize this harmony with philosophical thinking in a few introductory remarks.

What spiritual science always has to assert is not based on philosophical speculation, but on what has been called the inner experience, the inner experience of spiritual facts; it has to assert the independence, the self-contained nature of the human soul — to put it more popularly: that the human being has a spiritual-soul existence that goes beyond the physical-bodily. I said that this is entirely consistent with a healthy philosophy based on scientific principles, because many people, from the way of thinking of our time, perceive such an assertion as the extreme of all unscientificness. It is easy to say from a scientific point of view: How can one speak of the human soul as something independent when physiologists show that everything is dependent on what develops physically in the human being. We see how, when a part of the brain is injured, disturbances occur immediately due to the loss of a part of the brain functions. Must we not be led to the thought that the soul activities lie in the normally behaving nervous system or brain? One can point out how mental abilities grow with the adolescent human being, how in old age, when the external system withers, hardens, mental abilities decrease and so on. On the basis of such observations, many a train of thought could be formed that would have to suggest the idea that spiritual experience basically consists in nothing other than the activity of the nervous system and the rest of the organism. Let us hear what an astute philosopher, Otto Liebmann, whom I have mentioned in my book “Riddles of Philosophy,” has to say about this. He is not one of those who make assertions based on superficial thinking, but rather he states what the facts of the analysis of human thought are capable of providing. He deals with the belief that the human soul exists only in the physical, and says remarkable words, corresponding to a sharp-witted philosophy that coincides with the current state of natural science. In summary, he says: It is by no means certain what Munk and others have established regarding the dependence of mental activity on the brain, because, for example, an injured part of the brain can be replaced by other functions. But if we had reached our goal, then in principle nothing would have changed. That is to say, modern philosophy says that no matter how far one advances in the study of the connection between the soul and the physical, one can only know that one must use certain internal organs in order to think, feel and will. We can draw the parallel that we need certain parts of the brain for the soul, just as we use the hand to grasp. But when we use this hand to grasp, the mechanical action of the hand is added to the soul. We cannot speak of the soul actions of the brain in this way. However, this is only because the investigations of natural science are not complete. As it moves forward to prove the connection between the physical and the soul, it will find that there is a different connection between thinking, feeling, willing and the nervous system than between the hand and grasping. It will find that they are connected in the same way as the imprints that feet make in soft soil are connected to the soil.

What specifically can be found in the brain can be derived from the soul's activity, just as footsteps can be derived from feet on the earth. Just as there could be no connection between walking and footprints without solid ground, so it is with everything that is done in the physical body. Everything that a person thinks and wills leaves an imprint in the nervous system in the physical body; but it does not emerge from it, any more than footprints emerge from the earth. One needs the physical body as a surface for resistance, just as one needs solid earth to walk on. Therefore it is self-evident that one must find imprints. It is a scientifically legitimate endeavor to find them; but it is unscientific to want to extract from the physical what has been impressed by the soul-spiritual. In this respect, Liebmann's assertion is false. The imprint is only the accompanying phenomenon of the soul-spiritual. It is precisely this that natural science will prove in the most eminent sense by its means; it will show how one can follow the traces, but will not want to explain them from within the organism. Natural science is already on this path; today, full-fledged proof of this could be provided. Spiritual science does not dispute any of the facts of natural science; spiritual science fully recognizes natural science. It only rebels against the unwarranted claim of the natural scientists to be doing something that they themselves do not know about — against the despotism of the scientists. This goes even further. One could almost grasp how they are driving individual philosophers into what spiritual science wants to present, following on directly from the example already given by Otto Liebmann. What he says is exemplary in terms of acumen and dissection. He says that someone might say that a hen's egg contains not only egg white and yolk but also a ghost; that it embodies itself, pecks open the shell, runs out and immediately pecks up the scattered grains. One could understand that someone would take this as a joke. But Otto Liebmann certainly does not mean it as a joke. He continues by saying that there is no reason to object to this, except that the preposition “in” must be understood not spatially but metaphysically. Understood in this way, it is quite correct, says Otto Liebmann. The fact is that an astute philosopher must admit: one cannot object to the statement that a chicken egg contains not only yolk and egg white, but also an invisible ghost that materializes. Otto Liebmann does not believe, however, that one should form a worldview immediately after reading a few books, but wants to carefully consider how one sets one's thinking in motion. From the spiritual science lectures, one can see how what Otto Liebmann addresses here as a “ghost” that materializes is present in the human being himself as a supersensible being.

Today I cannot talk about the methods that are used to detach the soul and spiritual from the physical and bodily, and to discover something in thinking of which one knows nothing in ordinary life; likewise to discover something underlying the will and feeling, of which the will and feeling are only an impression. For the spiritual researcher, what Otto Liebmann describes here in theory in regard to the chicken egg can become an inner experience for the human being. Spiritual science will not claim that it can present it ghost-like, for instance in a halo of light, to the physical eye; if it did so, it would be a physical and not a spiritual experience. But it can be realized consciously, just as the experience is mediated by the bodily in everyday life, but only by detaching oneself from the bodily. Otto Liebmann sensed that the bodily is based on a spiritual. Spiritual science proceeds by showing how the spiritual-soul methods lead to developing the consciousness of what Otto Liebmann speaks of. This consciousness can be developed. Just as the outer, sensory world becomes an object for ordinary consciousness, so too, when a person frees their soul and spirit, they become an object themselves: they look at themselves from the outside.

It could be objected that one would then claim to be in harmony with philosophy, but it remains to be seen whether Otto Liebmann would accept these musings or declare them to be just that – musings. But suppose that in the time when the telephone was yet to be discovered, one physicist had spoken to another about it, and the other had said that it was impossible. Does that mean that the telephone as we know it today is not in line with what physics was at that time? This is how it is with spiritual science. With a way of judging as suggested, one would be forced to fight against all human progress from the prejudices of a once adopted point of view.

Man can truly free himself from the physical body. From this point of view, some light will be shed on the mysteries of sleep and death. When man frees himself from the physical body, he enters a state in which he can see through his entire humanity as it is in the physical world. Only now is true self-knowledge possible. Only now do you become an object, like the hydrogen that is otherwise in the water only becomes an object when it is released by the chemist. Now you are able to relate this new insight to states of consciousness that cannot be related to each other in ordinary everyday consciousness: the experience of being awake in relation to the experience of being asleep.

When a person is absorbed in sleep, the spiritual and mental have stepped out of the physical. Otto Liebmann's “ghost” temporarily detaches itself from the physical, and a purely spiritual-soul relationship is established between the state as one gains it through spiritual development and the state of sleep; a relationship as between what I am now experiencing and a memory of what I once experienced. As I look at what I once experienced, so I look at the state of sleep and find that the spiritual and soul-life is outside the physical and bodily from the moment I fall asleep until I wake up. One must connect with it spiritually and mentally. So one overlooks the two parts of human nature, the physical body that has remained in bed and that which has left, just as one overlooks hydrogen and oxygen when they have been separated from water. But even more: one sees that what has remained as corporeality is indeed a duality, namely the physical body and that which prevents it from following its own chemical laws, which makes it a living being; this is the etheric body – the word is not important – a finer body of forces. The word etheric body should not be pressed; it has nothing to do with what is called ether in physics today.

What goes out during sleep, namely the word used for it, can be ridiculed. Let people ridicule. What goes out is the astral, the actual soul body and the I. So we have the fourfold human nature before us: on the one hand the bodily and the etheric, on the other the soul, in which the I-nature is embedded, as it were. In ordinary sleep, the I is not able to produce consciousness because, at the present stage of humanity, it is developing its I-activity in connection with the bodily-physical. You can't walk on air either, and just as little can the I-consciousness develop without the resistance of the bodily-physical; it develops from it. In sleep it does not find this resistance and therefore cannot come to consciousness. It develops a dull consciousness; but this is only a paradoxical expression, since it does not come to consciousness.

Likewise, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, the soul body is continuously active. We could compare it to the way we are active when we think about something that happened some time ago. Its activity is a reverberation of what it has experienced in the etheric and physical body. We can imagine the meaning of this reverberation as follows: We think, feel and want in our waking hours with our etheric body, which offers resistance within the physical body. That is, only the thoughts that reflect the effect of the etheric body resonate. Because we are so active in the etheric body, we imprint the after-effects on it: what we think during the day is impressed on it. But the ether body offers resistance; it has its own inner movements. It is these that constitute the life that permeates the physical body. By forcing into it what is carried out in our thinking, we impose something alien on it; after all, its primary purpose is to convey life. Because of the tensions that arise between the ether body's two activities, the astral body cannot absorb what has been imprinted on it. During sleep, it resonates with what we ourselves have pushed into our ether body during the day; it is like a memory of what we have thought, felt and willed during the day. Thus we can say that the human being cannot develop consciousness in relation to his ego during sleep, but that the astral body resonates with everything that has taken place in us during the day through the activity of the soul. This activity of the astral body cannot come to consciousness either; for if it continued for a long time, it would intensify to such an extent that we would become fully conscious of it every morning, with a clear memory of what had been forced into the astral body. We do not have to visualize all the individual acts we have performed during the day, but rather the activity of thinking, feeling and willing. By exercising these, we give the astral body a structure, a general imprint – not through the individual acts – in which it resonates. Then, in the morning, we have, in the image suggested, we can say, in what we experienced the day before, not in thinking, feeling, willing, something new. We would overlook this if the astral body did not have to develop the urge to return to the physical and ether bodies, that is, to wake up. The highest tension leads us to submerge into the physical body. Otherwise, one should be able to draw out, at least for a very short time, the force that one has to leave behind in the physical body and in what is called the etheric body during sleep. In what can be called the real, spiritual view, one actually revives what can be called the unconscious power of the etheric body, making it flash. One must then wait for the moments when the etheric body also detaches itself during waking life; it is like a blood pulsation: the etheric body is first more intimately connected to the physical body – and then withdraws. By using such moments, one gains consciousness of the etheric body for a brief moment. Then the supersensible consciousness flashes: one is in the spiritual world and can ask questions in it.

We see what an intimate process underlies it. What really happens is like something that flits by. If you want to put it into scientific forms, what remains is like a memory, like a memory of dreams that flit by. Therefore, in spiritual science one does not arrive at success by stringing together conclusion after conclusion on what one already has. It is not a logical recollection, not a thinking, but a growth arises through such fleeting moments. Therefore, the spiritual researcher, when writing down what he gains in this way, cannot proceed as one who describes from memory. He cannot, for instance, claim that a lecture he is giving for the twelfth time will be easier because it is fixed in his memory. If one really wants to be honest, in spiritual science one cannot allow anything to become fixed in one's memory; rather, one must always speak anew out of the inner work of the soul, not out of memory. That is why a lecture is as new the fourteenth or fifteenth time as it was the first time. It is much more a deliberate performance, a continuous active process in the soul that develops activity. Therefore, in the case of an honest spiritual presentation, the person who presents something from direct contact with the spiritual world will try to shape the words anew each time. It is precisely for this reason that only inner, genuine honesty can lead to the presentation of spiritual science. It is said that anyone who wants to lie must have a good memory. The spiritual researcher, on the other hand, must be imbued with honesty to the highest degree. He must not color; then what he says will already correspond to what he does not need to remember in the ordinary way. But the way of remembering of ordinary consciousness cannot be applied. |

Through such insight into the structure of the human being, one sees through the nature of sleep. In Vienna, I described this process as the separation between the physical and etheric bodies on the one hand, and the astral body and the I on the other. This is only to be understood relatively; relationships remain and are established. While the astral body, as it were, resonates in its feeling back, it encounters the ether body in its ordinary experience, and in this way, what it would experience purely is mixed with what happens in ordinary life, and dreams arise. They are chaotic or more or less lawful, even prophetic, mixed with what can happen in ordinary life. If Schopenhauer had not judged merely from the ordinary philosophical point of view, he would not have seen the world merely as will and representation; but he would have seen that the representation can be condensed in itself, that one can soul-spiritual can be consciously experienced in it as spiritual, and that what he sees as will in the human organism pours out into the whole environment and is revealed for the spiritualization of the entire world. In the astral body, that which makes a person more at the end of the day than at the beginning resonates. The same occurs in all of life. To understand this, let us think of a plant and the ripening seed; let us let this image take effect on us. But that remains in the etheric body; the astral body only resonates. But it takes the ether body with it through the gate of death: and now, drawn out of the physical body, the astral body can develop full consciousness together with the ego; it is now suddenly imbued with the life-force of the ether body, and consciousness emerges. But then, when it is so animated – because the etheric body is actually the provider of life for the physical body and cannot serve for more – when the extract is drawn from it, so to speak, what only maintains the life functions is expelled into the rest of the etheric world. Through the spiritually held consciousness, which arises from the impetus of the astral body and the ego on the extract of the ether body, the human being must first struggle until he comes to the use of the new consciousness, in which he spends the time between death and a new birth. During this time, the human being accomplishes a great deal. We can only gain insights into the length of time that passes if we consider the individual human life in the context of all earthly lives. Then we can see what attracted him to the earth, what led him from the spiritual realm to this life; the forces that led the human being down have thus found their conclusion, their goal. Meanwhile, the earth must have changed so much that the person can experience something new. Therefore, it takes centuries for a person to gather his strength to descend into a new life on earth.

In the time between death and a new birth, one must also imagine two alternating states of inner experience. In everyday life we have waking and sleeping; in the time between death and a new birth, there are alternating periods, successive states of inner activity and of isolation from the spiritual environment, where one knows nothing of the spiritual environment but inwardly lives out what one has previously absorbed in it. These experiences are like a mighty inner image arising from within oneself. Then again, one is completely absorbed in the spiritual worlds and incorporated into them.

One can assume a spiritual center in the time between death and a new birth. In the first half, what has newly begun in the last life on earth is processed; in the second half, what is taken up is what makes the spiritual-soul permeate the physical person in a new life on earth.

What is presented as spiritual science only appears to contradict natural science. In the future, spiritual research into the values of human life will advance in the same way as the physical sciences do in their own field. Spiritual science still appears to many to be a fantasy because they shrink from the strict mental work and mental discipline it demands. Many would like to arrive at spiritual science by easier means than are possible. They do not want to take the difficult step, which consists in a further development of consciousness. The progress of chemistry can be utilized without being a chemist; in the same way the results of spiritual research can be appropriated. And even if one cannot engage in spiritual research oneself, one should at least endeavor to cast aside one's prejudices. But many would like to arrive at spiritual science by a more comfortable route than by overcoming their prejudices, and then use it primarily for their own benefit in life. Misunderstanding of spiritual science is the result of such an attitude.

Natural science will increasingly reveal itself not as the source of answers but as a field that poses questions in new ways. The answers will then come from spiritual science – the answer that Faust craves:

Mysterious in broad daylight
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force from her with levers and with screws.

You cannot penetrate its inner workings with levers and screws. You have to illuminate it with the light and power of the soul.

I would like to take the liberty of outlining tomorrow a world view from the perspective of spiritual science. Today, as an introduction, so to speak, I would like to precede it with a description of the world view of German idealism.

It is possible to speak of such a world view of German idealism if one attempts to extract from the innermost being of the German national soul, so to speak, what has been attempted by this national soul in the greatest period — in terms of intellectual life — to get closer to the riddles and secrets of the world. If we consider the impulses and forces assimilated by the national soul in those days as still active in the second half of the nineteenth century and continuing into our own time, when the world picture of German idealism has receded in the face of other endeavors, where it has lived hidden, as it were, as an urging force in the development of the national spirit, then one can also speak of such an effective world view in the present. However, we must bear in mind that, due to many things that have arisen in our intellectual life and have become dominant for the generality of this intellectual life, this – I would say – most “original German” intellectual construct of German idealism has receded. But especially in these days we may express our hopes that this world picture of German idealism will again come to the surface and incorporate its strength into the general process of human development.

In my lectures this winter, but also earlier, I have often mentioned a name that was borne by one of the most German minds of the second half of the nineteenth century; I have mentioned the name Herman Grimm, the great art historian. And it may be said that what I have ventured to suggest here about Herman Grimm can, especially when one considers what Herman Grimm achieved as an art historian, as an art observer and in other ways through his entire literary work, be proof that it is born directly out of German feeling, out of German thinking, in short, out of the innermost impulses of the German national soul. When Herman Grimm tried to lift up his soul to that which presented itself to him—more from his feelings than from philosophical reflection—as the world view of the Goethean worldview, he had to place this world view alongside the other which in modern times has found the widest dissemination and the widest interest; that world view, of which its adherents, its believers, repeatedly claim that it is based on the genuine and correct assumptions of science. This world-picture, which in a certain sense now holds sway in the minds of many, Herman Grimm, moved by his intuitive perceptions, desired to set beside the other, which presented itself to his imaginative fancy as the world-picture on which all Goethe's work and activity was based. I have already mentioned the conclusion which Herman Grimm arrived at when he made this attempt. He said:

“Long ago, in his” — Goethe's — “youth, the great Laplace-Kantian fantasy of the origin and the former destruction of the globe had taken hold.” Herman Grimm wanted to suggest the idea that if Goethe had wanted to profess this Laplace-Kantian world view, he would have had plenty of opportunities to do so because it had already taken hold in his youth. And now Herman Grimm continues:

"From the rotating nebula – which children already learn about at school – the central drop of gas forms, which later becomes the Earth, and, as a solidifying sphere, goes through all phases, including the episode of habitation by the human race, over inconceivable periods of time , and finally to plunge back into the sun as burnt-out slag: a long process, but one that is completely comprehensible to today's audience, and one that no longer requires any external intervention to come about, except for the effort of some external force to keep the sun at the same temperature."

Herman Grimm alludes to the world view that is so widespread today: that once upon a time there was nothing but extraordinarily thin matter, that this thin matter clumped together, began to rotate, to move in circles, that from this the world building gradually formed, the planets split, that then on the earth – the one of the planets split off from the central gas drop – in the course of time the mineral, the vegetable and the animal kingdom developed from the gas, and that then the whole course of evolution took on that form which presents itself to us as human 'history'. But then, later on, there would come a time when all living things would have to wither and dry up, when everything would fall back into the sun, and with it all life would sink back into inanimate matter. Many people believe that this world view is the only one that can be achieved on the solid ground of natural science. And, as I have already indicated, it is easy to make this world view comprehensible. Herman Grimm says of it: children already learn it at school. You just have to carefully slide a cut-out card through a drop of oil floating in a liquid, stick a needle through it from above and turn the needle to set the whole thing in motion; then smaller drops separate from the larger oil ball and move around the larger one. And so, there you have, quite “evidently,” the origin of a small world system, and from that you draw the conclusion that the origin of the great world system must have occurred in just the same way. However, I have always pointed out how obvious it is, even to a child, that the world could not have come into being any other way; but in this experiment, people usually forget one thing – and one should maintain perfection when demonstrating something. For it is usually not taken into account that the “Mr. Teacher” or the “Mr. Professor” is standing there, turning the needle and setting the whole thing in rotation, and one must not forget oneself in an experiment that one does. Therefore, if one wanted to accept the experiment cited as proof, one would have to place a giant Mr. Teacher or Mr. Professor into outer space.

Herman Grimm continues:

So said Herman Grimm. In contrast to this, it may be pointed out that the entire period of German Weltanschauungsidealismus in its striving for a Weltanschauungsbilde was basically a protest against the fact that the culture of the time incorporated precisely this world view with the most fruitless perspective; and it may be further pointed out how it actually came about that such a world view could take hold. But to do this, it is necessary to point out a little of the way in which, so to speak, popular thinking, the world-view thinking of the present day, has come about. And since it can be noted again and again how little account is taken of all the circumstances that are drawn upon in these arguments, I would like to point out that what I have to say in this regard is really not only of this war and is not said merely because we are living in these fateful times; rather, as many of the listeners here present know, it has been said and advocated again and again, not only in Germany but also outside of Germany. I would like to emphasize this in particular because it could very easily be thought that these discussions lack objectivity precisely because, in our fateful times, they draw attention to what can help to guide the German soul to what is rooted in the deepest depths of the German national spirit.

If we want to grasp the development of our newer world view, we have to go back – to not go further back – at least to the point in time when, under the impression of powerful external discoveries about the world building of space and also about the world building of time, humanity began to work on the renewal of the world view as well, as it must present itself to the human mind. In this context, it must be pointed out time and again how the work of Copernicus and what was achieved by minds such as Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Galileo in the wake of this work, basically provided the first impetus for the world view under the influence of which present-day education still stands. Today, I would like to focus on the extent to which Europe's individual nations and peoples have worked towards this world view, which now surrounds us in the consciousness of most thinking people; and how, on the other hand, the world view of German idealism has been incorporated into what Europe's peoples have contributed to the common world view.

The spirit that can appear to us as particularly characteristic in the — I would like to say — reshaping of the world view of modern times is that of Giordano Bruno, who was burned in 1600. By pointing to Giordano Bruno, we must point out the contribution that Italian culture, Italian thinking, and Italian striving for a world view has made to general world culture. In earlier lectures I pointed out that the life and striving of the human soul can be seen in three forms of expression by a true spiritual science: as sentient soul, as mind or emotional soul, and as consciousness soul. and that in this surge of inner experience, which comes about under the influence of the forces of the sentient soul, the forces of the mind or emotional soul and the forces of the consciousness soul, the actual self of the human being acts as the all-uniting element. I have also said that today one can certainly scoff at this classification as an arbitrary one, but that in the future spiritual science will make it clear that the division of the human soul into a part of feeling, a part of understanding and a part of consciousness is just as 'scientific' as the division undertaken by physics in order to divide light into seven colors or — we could also say — into three color groups: into the yellowish-reddish part, into the greenish part and into the blue-violet part. Just as one will study the colors of light in this threefold division, not out of arbitrariness but out of an inner nature of the thing, if one wants to come to a result at all, so the human soul in its wholeness must be studied in the three “color nuances” . The reason why the same mental operation that is accepted in physics is regarded as mere speculation in spiritual science is that today we are not accustomed to approaching the soul in the same way that we approach the nature of light in physics. I have also pointed out that the essential thing about the national impulses, in so far as they take hold of the human soul, consists, for example, in the case of the Italian people, in the fact that the impulses which play from the Italian folk soul into the soul of the individual Italian ripen the soul of feeling in the latter , but not in the sense that he is considered as an individual, but as a member of his people; so that a person who strives for a world view within Italian culture will do so as a person pulsating with the power that works through his sentient soul. And if we look at Campanella, at Vanini, and at other spirits in the newer age of Italian culture, we see that it was Giordano Bruno who most vividly expressed this aspect. Bruno, in the dawn of modern times, seizes with the powers, which we say are the powers of the sentient soul, that which Copernicus has brought up as a spatial world view?

Let us take the medieval world view. Man could see no further than the sky, which was bounded by the vault of heaven, in which the stars were set. Then there were the spheres of the individual planets, with the spheres of the sun and moon. Such a world view corresponded to the senses. But it was only compatible with the view of the world of space that preceded Copernicanism. As Copernicanism — I might say — descended into the infinite capacity for enthusiasm of the soul of Giordano Bruno, who with all the depths of his sensibility recognized the world, this view arose in him: What was called the vault of heaven up there is not up there at all; it is not a real boundary, but only a boundary up to which the human view of space comes. The world extends into infinity! And embedded in infinity are innumerable worlds, and dominating these innumerable worlds is the world soul, which, for Giordano Bruno, permeates this perceived universe in the same way that the individual human soul permeates the individual human elements that make up our organism. One needs only to read a page of any of Giordano Bruno's writings to realize that the enthusiasm kindled in his soul by Copernicanism led him to direct his hymns – for that is what his writings on revelation are – to the infinite world building permeated by the soul of the world. And so will others who, like him, have been inspired in their quest by his folk culture. Thus we see how in Giordano Bruno we are confronted with a world picture which everywhere sees not only the material and spatial in the world, but sees everything material and spatial at the same time spiritualized, ensouled; how the individual human soul is for him only an image of the entire world organism, which is permeated by the world soul just as our individual organism is permeated by our soul.

This world view of Giordano Bruno stands before us — I would like to say — formed from the same basis of feeling as the older world view of Dante; only that Dante's world view took up in its poetic creation what had also been handed down from earlier times and led into the infinite, but into the infinite supersensible. I have already pointed out how Giordano Bruno can teach us lessons that are so necessary to learn in the face of the newer spiritual science. For, in the first place, this newer spiritual science is always objected to on the ground that it asserts something that contradicts the “five senses” of man. Now, nothing contradicted the five senses of man more than the world-picture of Copernicus, which made on Giordano Bruno the impression just characterized; nevertheless, the world-picture of Copernicus has entered, if gradually, into the thought-habits of mankind. But other things have also become part of people's thinking. Just as Giordano Bruno called out to his contemporaries: “You imagine space as being limited by the blue vault of heaven; but this blue vault of heaven does not exist, because it is only the limit of your perception,” so the newer spiritual science must speak in the face of what the older world view sees in birth and death as the limitation of the world view. For what appears in birth and death as the limits of the temporal is just as little really there outside of human perception as the blue vault of heaven is really there for the spatial perception outside of human perception. It is only assumed as the boundary of the spatial because the human spatial view only extends as far as the blue vault of heaven. And because in relation to the temporal, human perception only extends to birth and death, birth and death are assumed to be the limits of the temporal; and today, with spiritual science, we stand at the same point in relation to birth and death as Giordano Bruno did in his time.

I would like to say: in order to effectively impress what emerged as his world view on the culture of the time, the stirrings arising from the sentient soul that Giordano Bruno gave to this world view were needed. It is as if what he has to say about the world does not in the least engage his intellect, does not in any way trouble his reason – one has only to read a page of his work to find confirmation of this – but as if everything emerges for him from the most direct intuition, that is how Giordano Bruno speaks. Thus, at the end of the Middle Ages, the Copernican world picture was accepted, which was bound to be accepted because it was so deeply significant for human progress. And so we can say: the “nuance of feeling” of the soul's life is clearly pronounced in the world picture of Giordano Bruno and also in that of those who, with him, received their most significant impulses from the Italian soul. For that is the significant thing that has come from this side to the present day: that all philosophizing, all the gathering of thoughts into a world-view, has flowed out of this most direct life of feeling. What warms the worldview with inner strength comes from this source. Therefore, we may say: insofar as the individual Italian places himself in his nationality, the enthusiastic soul speaks out of him when he wants to work out a worldview.

If we now turn to another current – one of those currents that then led to the modern world view: to the French current, we also find an excellent spirit at the starting point of the newer world view current; but if we look closely, we see him facing the origin of the world view under completely different conditions than Giordano Bruno: Descartes (Cartesius). He is also a spirit who, like Giordano Bruno, belongs to the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he starts from completely different premises. Let us take a look at these premises as they present themselves in this outstanding mind. What is it that he starts from, in contrast to Giordano Bruno? In Giordano Bruno, we see how he is seized by an ever-increasing enthusiasm for what gives him the foundations of the modern world view. With Descartes, we see the opposite: we see how he starts from doubt, how he realizes that everything that arises from the external world or from within the soul as knowledge, as insight, as experience, can be doubted as to whether it is a reality, whether it is justified, whether it has more justification than a passing dream image. Descartes comes to doubt everything; but he seeks knowledge, to know with inner powers. First of all, he looks for the characteristics that knowledge must have in order for the soul to accept it; and for him, clarity and distinctness are these characteristics. What can present itself most clearly and distinctly to the soul bears the mark of certainty. I would like to say: in the sea of doubt in which he initially finds himself, he realizes that he must seek something that presents itself to him with clarity and distinctness, with transparency; for only that can count as a certainty for him. So it is not the original enthusiasm that drives him, but the striving for clarity, for distinctness and transparency. From this it then follows that he says to himself: And even if I doubt everything, even if everything I could perceive in the external and internal world were only a dream image: I cannot doubt that – whether it be a dream or not, I am thinking this; and if everything that takes place in the sea of experiences and that I can doubt is not, and this is established with clarity above everything: I think – then I am too! And from this clarity and distinctness, the thought arises in him: everything that presents itself to the soul as clearly and distinctly as this model of clarity and distinctness has legitimacy; one may think about the world as one must survey it: I think, therefore I am. And now let us see from this starting-point with Descartes and his followers how a world-picture comes into being that thirsts for clarity and distinctness. This clarity and distinctness was prefigured in Descartes' soul in that he was a great mathematician, and above all a special thinker on the basis of geometry. He demands mathematical clarity for everything that should belong to this world-picture. He and his successors then went on to say: About the world of space and about everything that moves in space, one can gain clarity and distinctness, one can form an image that is inwardly as clear and distinct as only mathematics itself is clear and distinct. But I would like to say that the soul-life actually escaped this world-picture. Not that Descartes denied the soul, but by taking certainty: I think, therefore I am —, he did not take it in such a way that one would get the impression that he delved into the soul as he delved into the external world of space, into what happens externally. What happens externally in space gives him the opportunity to survey the details, and also to survey the context of the details; but the interior remains more or less obscure. He said to himself: “Certain ideas that arise in the soul are clear and distinct; these are ‘innate’ ideas; by arising clearly and distinctly, they structure and organize the soul internally. But a connection between the inner-spiritual and the outer-spatial did not arise for him; they stood side by side like two worlds. Therefore, he could not — like Giordano Bruno, who thought of everything as inspired by the world soul and of this world soul pouring its spiritual impulses into everything — come to think of the soul in everything spatial as well. He said to himself: When I look at an animal, a spatial structure presents itself to me; I can look at it like another spatial structure; but it does not show anything other than spatial structures; therefore it appears like a moving automaton. He did not find in animals that which moves the animal. He found it only in himself. Therefore, he ascribed a soul only to human beings, not to animals. He called animals “living machines” — and with that we have the beginning of a mechanical world view. They were not so bold – neither Descartes nor his disciples – to deny what was present from the old religious tradition, this inner soul, but they sought to consider it as belonging only to humans; and in animals, they considered it as presenting its creations to the soul in the way that mathematical creations present themselves to the soul.

Do we not see clearly and distinctly the working of the intellectual or mind soul, the middle soul, in the striving for clarity and distinctness, which has increasingly become the characteristic of all work on a worldview in France? Until recently, this remained the basic feature of the current that worked from this perspective on the construction of a general world view. One might say that everything in a worldview that is mathematically transparent, that can be expressed in mathematically clear thoughts, that can be presented in such a way that one thing mathematically follows from another, came from this worldview – up to the world view created by Auguste Comte, where everything – from the simplest phenomena of nature to human social coexistence – is to be presented as in a large, powerful painting, with one sentence always following another in mathematics. It would be interesting to show how this nuance of the mind or soul, this systematizing soul, permeates this entire culture, how it forms the innermost nerve of this culture.

And if we now turn to a third current that also had an enormous influence on our intellectual culture, on our intellectual world view of the second half of the last century, if we turn to British culture, we find Bacon, Baco von Verulam, as the dominant spirit, in whose footsteps all of England's other leading spirits still follow. And how does he assert what he has to say? He said to himself: Mankind has lived for too long on mere ideals, has busied itself for too long with mere ideals and mere words, and it should now turn its attention to external things, to the things themselves, that is, to those things that present themselves to external observation ; one could only arrive at a true picture of the world by directing one's eyes and other senses to what is taking place in the external world, and only allowing “thoughts” to be valid insofar as they bring what is happening outside into a context. Bacon became the philosopher of experience, of the world view of experience, the world view that serves to summarize what is happening externally. Hence we see how, in the course of this school of thought, an outstanding mind such as Locke denies the possibility that the soul can gain any knowledge from itself; all it can do is to stand and observe the course of the world; then what it can observe will be written on the soul's blank slate. In this sense, the soul itself is a blank slate, a tabula rasa; not as with Descartes, innate ideas arise that are connected with the essence of the soul. Locke crosses out all innate ideas. For him, the world view arises only from the fact that the human soul focuses on its surroundings, that it analyzes, synthesizes and reflects on what is going on outside. This current extends right up to more recent times. People like John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and others are influenced by an impulse such as that just mentioned. One would like to say: with such a world view, everything that the soul could achieve by developing inwardly and bringing up what it does not yet have when it is placed in the world in a natural way, is rejected, so that it must stop at everything that presents itself externally and apply all the soul's strength to summarizing what presents itself from the outside.

When I first tried to find a concept, an idea for this kind of English philosophy, especially for John Stuart Mill, about fifteen years ago – this is presented in my “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century” – I struggled to find a suitable expression to characterize John Stuart Mill's world struggled to find a fitting expression to characterize John Stuart Mill's world view; and even then I had to characterize this world view in such a way that I said: This point of view is that of the 'spectator of the world', it is not the point of view of a soul that works inwardly on itself with the belief that it can advance in the knowledge of the inner connections of things through this inner work. John Stuart Mill also takes this standpoint as a spectator, for Mill was also one of the followers of Locke and Bacon, and he faces the world in such a way that he stands before what is presented to the senses externally and what can be joined together in thoughts, just as thoughts are joined and dissolved in everyday life.

Now we see how, in yet another way, Giordano Bruno, Descartes and Bacon in the way they are characterized work on the creation of a world view, in German, Central European intellectual culture on the emergence of a world view; we see how, in solitude, a profound German mind seeks to gain a world view from the depths of the national soul. It is easy to misunderstand this thinker, who strives for the highest possible insights for a human being, and to ridicule him; but when we speak of German intellectual life, we must draw attention to this one man: Jakob Böhme, who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is certainly easy to misjudge this simple shoemaker from Görlitz, for he did not speak as did Copernicus or Giordano Bruno, who drafted a world picture out of his elementary intuitive perception; nor did he speak out of a striving for clarity and distinctness, as we find in Descartes, and he spoke even less like Bacon, who wanted to summarize what presents itself outwardly to the senses. Rather, he spoke in such a way that when he delved into his soul or was with nature, something was there that had not been there before; he spoke of how an inward path is traversed that leads to the innermost secrets of existence. He spoke of what ignited within him when, as a shepherd boy, he once looked into a hole in the ground at the top of a mountain and saw a metal vessel full of gold in the recess. He said that this experience ignited something within him, and he wanted to say: A spark has been kindled in my soul, which has been ignited by the spirit that is weaving in the world; I felt connected to the spirit living in the world. And he goes on to tell us how he pursued this experience in his soul and also lived in a state of soul alienated from everyday life for seven days, how he had gone through a “paradise and realm of joy,” how he did not feel connected to reality through his senses, nor to what the senses presented through his mind, but how he felt connected through his soul to what invisibly and supersensibly reigns in things. But when he told this to his master, with whom he was then apprenticed, the latter told him to get out of there, because he could not use any young house prophets! And many still speak like this master today; in this respect, people have not become more understanding.

But if we delve into Jakob Böhme, we see how he wants to tie his soul to what pulses through the soul spiritually and emotionally. While Giordano Bruno directed his soul outwards, in order to see the 'soul of the world' everywhere, which he assumed, it is the case with Jakob Böhme that he only wants to form and shape his soul inwardly, that he does not want to look at the soul of the world outwardly, but rather immerses himself in it, so that he participates in the life of this soul of the world. Participates, I said. This is the starting point for world views that arise from a dark urge, for Jakob Böhme works without external scholarship, only from his soul. It is the beginning of the striving of a soul that draws its impulses from the impulses of the German national soul: this immersion in what is otherwise only observed or what is presented in clarity and distinctness. Jakob Böhme would not have understood what Cartesius strove for; for him it was not a matter of clarity and distinctness, but of allowing the soul to live the life of the great world soul. And if he could do that, then it did not matter to him whether it was clear and distinct, because “it is simply experienced!” And this “it is experienced” has remained like an impact, like a ferment within the striving of the German national spirit. Those spirits whom I mentioned in my lecture of eight days ago are the continuers of that first germ which was in Jakob Böhme; one can still see in them how they only want to strive clearly for what was already in Jakob Böhme's striving, which can be expressed by saying that he wanted to experience the secrets of the world — not just look at them!

Now, however, we must look at a second starting point for the more recent striving for a worldview if we want to recognize all the forces that are inherent in this newer striving for a worldview. This other starting point is often more admired today by people who are striving for a worldview than the starting point of Jacob Boehme; it is the one that is also found in a German mind, and again in an eminently cosmopolitan mind, namely in Leibniz. His world view is similar to that of Giordano Bruno, but expressed in a German world view nuance. If we want to characterize the Italian world view, we have to say: it is born out of the sentient soul. In the same sense, the French world view is born out of the mind or mind soul; especially when studying Cartesius, one notices this to a very special degree. The British world view is born entirely out of the consciousness soul, out of that consciousness soul which, especially in the stage of observation, is able to focus on what is external and what the mind can bring to consciousness from it. The German view of the world emerges from the I itself, from the most intimate inner workings of the soul. And just as light is present in both the red-yellow and the green-blue-violet, so the I is present in the sentient soul, in the mind or emotional soul and also in the consciousness soul, , but is therefore also a continuous back-and-forth striving, sometimes striving for the sentient soul, as with Jakob Böhme, sometimes more inclined towards the intellectual soul, as with Leibniz. What Jakob Böhme strives for inwardly as a way of living in the soul of the world, Leibniz strives for through the intellect, but not, as is the case with Descartes, not as a mathematical mind, but as a soul that has a clear awareness that man in his essence is a part of the whole world. And so Leibniz said to himself: What I am as a soul, a conceiving being, is basically everywhere, underlying the whole world. What we see in space is not a mere spatial construction, but the reality is that everything that is reality outside is of the same kind as that which is within me; only my soul comes to an alert consciousness, as it were. In the beings outside, which are not human, there are also such basic components as are present in humans. Leibniz calls them “monads.” What is “really” in them is consciousness. Only the monads of the mineral and plant kingdoms have something like a sleeping consciousness; then they become more and more aware and aware, to finally come to self-awareness in the human kingdom.

For Leibniz, the world is composed entirely of monads, and if you do not see the world as monads, it is because you see it indistinctly – as it is with a swarm of mosquitoes, which, seen from a distance, appears indistinct and looks like a cloud, but as soon as you get closer, it dissolves into the individual mosquitoes. So, for example, the table in front of me consists of monads, but these monads are seen pushed together like the individual midges in a swarm. Thus, for Leibniz, the entire world consists of individual monads, and just as the individual monads are mirrored in the whole world, so they are a microcosm in the macrocosm. One must imagine that the entire world is mirrored in every single monad, and a harmony implanted by the original monad spreads throughout the whole.

If one wants to characterize the salient feature of this Leibnizian world view, one must say: the salient feature is its abstractness, its thoughtfulness; and this abstract-thoughtfulness is indeed immediately apparent when one looks at it more closely. For what would be the use of it if, as Leibniz does with regard to the individual monads, one were to dwell only on a clock and say: the individual link, the individual cogwheel would be effective with the whole clock, would thus be a “little clock,” and all the effects of the clock would find expression in it? Certainly, anyone who has knowledge of the composition of the clock can say how its individual parts are connected. But what would it matter if one were to say that the real characteristic of the clock is its harmony? One encompasses it with an abstract concept. Today, however, people are usually glad when they can put an abstract concept for something; but one cannot grasp a clock through the mere concept of harmony. In this we can feel the contrast between a rational, abstract world view, as offered to us by Leibniz, and an ever-increasing immersion in the workings and weaving of the world spirit, as first presented to us by Jakob Böhme, albeit more in the form of a hunch.

In a similar way to Descartes, who sought the possibility of mathematically subordinating thoughts to the world view, Spinoza also strove for a world view that is comprehensible like a mathematical system; but at the same time, he wanted to shape it in such a way that, as one ascends from concept to concept, an ever higher and higher experience of the human soul results. He characteristically calls his mathematical world picture 'ethics' because, as he strings concept to concept, each successive one leads the soul ever deeper into the secrets of existence, until the soul, by becoming ever more absorbed in the concepts that lead from mathematics to mathematics, can feel at one with the unified substance of the world, with the unified spirit of the universe. It is an inward progression, a self-development in Spinoza. Therefore Spinoza stands alone in his striving for a world view. He has the impact that he was able to get from Descartes; but he has brought it into his world view in a deeper way through what he himself was able to get.

All the elements that have now been mentioned have influenced, in a certain way, what the world view of the nineteenth century has now become. But one can say: the blossoming and development of what was called “German Idealism” here eight days ago was a protest — which only never came to full effectiveness — against the fact that the world view developed into what Herman Grimm said: “A carrion bone that a hungry dog would avoid would be a refreshing, appetizing piece compared to this excrement of creation.” And it was always the case with the most outstanding minds, who stood with their natures within the development of the German people, that they endeavored to take up all the impulses that necessarily entered into the spiritual development of humanity in the construction of their world view, but to shape this world view in such a way that the striving for a worldview is not merely looking, not merely “watching”, but inner experience. Thus we see that in the characteristic spirit of German striving — in Goethe — the individual members, the various parts of the currents of world-view, are absorbed. In Goethe's 'Faust', which in this respect is a reflection of his own striving, we can see how his Faust develops out of the details of external observation, how he wants to arrive at an overall feeling for what permeates and animates the world. This is truly the spirit of Giordano Bruno. In this, and in the other, how later Goethe did not rest until he could fully immerse himself in Italian art, we see everywhere something of that nuance of feeling of the soul that seeks to expand one's own self into the world's self. And this already flows through the first parts that Goethe wrote down of his Faust.

On the other hand, we can see how the second world-view current, which in Descartes took the form of the pursuit of clarity and distinctness, has taken on a characteristically materialistic expression in Europe. Goethe was already aware of this as a young man when he was in Strasbourg, in Holbach's “Systeme de la nature”. I have already indicated how Descartes, in his world view, presents animals as animated automatons that are not ensouled. From what this Cartesian world view and, later, the British world view, which spread to the continent through Voltaire and fully embraced the aforementioned rejection of what the soul can inwardly achieve in inward striving, in order to accept only that which can be space can be systematized: from this arose the world view that Goethe opposed in Holbach's “Systeme de la nature,” which knows only the moving atoms that group themselves into molecules, and through whose agglomerations everything that can be seen in the world is said to arise. That world picture, which seeks to resolve everything into the effect of moving atoms and molecules, has clarity, the greatest clarity, and distinctness, a clarity, a distinctness that cannot be increased in such a world picture. But everything of a spiritual-soul nature must fall away from such a world picture. There is no room in it for anything of a spiritual-soul nature.

Goethe was already confronted with such a world view in his youth. He rejected it by saying:

Goethe finds this world view “cold and barren”.

And now we see how Goethe, summarizing everything that is in his soul, wants to combine clarity and distinctness with direct experience, in a way that was not present in Descartes. This is the characteristic that enters into the German world view during Goethe's time. How do we see the striving for clarity and distinctness in Descartes? In such a way that what one looks at, what one thinks about, must show itself clearly and distinctly. It must show itself clearly and distinctly to the observer. Goethe is clear about the fact that one does not gain any knowledge at all by merely seeing things clearly and distinctly placed before one; but he is clear about it, even if he does not want to stop at the mere inkling of Jakob Böhme: If one wants to gain a real world view that corresponds to reality, one must immerse oneself in things, to witness the forming of the crystal by placing oneself in the position of the forces that form the crystal; and in the same way, one must enter into the plant, witness the forces that make the plant a plant, and immerse oneself in all beings. Goethe does not want an abstract world view, cobbled together out of monads and harmonies, but a world view that is experienced. But not, as with Jakob Böhme, only intuitively, but by immersing oneself in all the things of the world, and through this immersion, the human being undergoes the path by which he or she approaches more and more the innermost sources of existence. That is why the world view that presented itself to him in Spinoza's work was able to have such an effect on Goethe. Spinoza never had the impulse to immerse his soul in the real external world. He sought to string together the impressions of the world in front of him, one after the other, but in such a way that the soul would undergo something in the process. Not that Goethe was ever a devout follower of Spinoza's world view; only those who know nothing about Goethe can say that. Rather, it is the case that Goethe felt the way he wanted to find his way into a world view with Spinoza, found it with him. The only difference is that what Spinoza strove for in an abstract way, Goethe wanted to seek in a concrete way. Just as Spinoza moves from concept to concept, Goethe wanted to move from plant to plant in order to experience what the plant experiences. Goethe called the soul's attainment by immersing itself in the plant world the “Utrpflanze”; and what the soul experienced by immersing itself in the animal world in the same way, he called the “Urtier”. Thus for Goethe the striving for a world-picture became a participation, but not a dark one as in Jakob Böhme; but the experience itself was to proceed in clarity and distinctness. This is witnessed to by Goethe's little essay on the “Metamorphosis of Plants”, in which he describes how the plant develops from root to leaf and to flower, with constant transformations taking place. But we must always bear in mind that Goethe sought to achieve his goal by immersing himself in the essence of things. While Cartesius, in his world view, threw everything of a spiritual nature out of the essence, for example out of animals, and turned them into living automatons, Goethe allowed his own soul to flow into plants, into animals, into the whole world, in order to connect with it in his soul and to recognize it clearly. Clarity and distinctness of experience is what entered the world-view striving of German idealism in Goethe's time. What Cartesius makes an external characteristic of knowledge, which he presents and behaves as a spectator, Goethe connects with the inner experience. And what is wrested with dark, elemental power from the soul of Jakob Böhme and expressed in his words, is also present in Goethe; but in that it shows itself in him, we find it in clarity and distinctness.

Now, however, we see in Goethe what the three great minds also strove for, which were cited as characteristic of German idealism.

Let us look at Fichte. Eight days ago, we characterized how he strives to gain a world view by seeking certainty entirely from the impulses of the innermost part of man, the I. And if we want to see through Fichte completely, what then dominates in his world view? We might put it this way: what dominates in his world view is everything that a person can develop within themselves, without directing any kind of gaze to the outside world, by gaining self-awareness. This is a welling up and flowing up from the innermost depths of the soul. I have often characterized it here: every external thing can be named by everyone in the same way as the name expresses it; but we can only name the I in such a way, if it is to express our being, by letting it resound within ourselves. Fichte did not express this; but it underlies his entire world view as an impulse, and he starts from the assumption that the I is only there when it places itself in the world. A volitional decision, then, is what Fichte seeks as the center of the development of his worldview. And he asserts of the ego — and this already characterizes Fichte's worldview — that it can find out of itself what the mission of itself is. For Fichte, this is the moral worldview. And the national world exists only to engage in moral activity. Thus, for Fichte, everything is permeated by the divine within man. Everything else is only appearance, is only created so that the moral world order can be active. The will, which is grasped in the consciousness of self, in the point of self-awareness, and radiates from the consciousness of self, is grasped as part of the soul of the world.

The way in which Fichte presents this shows us that, in a sense, he starts from full self-consciousness. Just as the light appears in every single color nuance – to return to this comparison – he starts from the self that appears in all three soul members; but he lets it prevail in such a way that it works through the consciousness soul. And in this respect, I would say that in Fichte we have the thinker who is the antipode, the opposite pole, of the British spirit. While the British spirit essentially brings to bear that which can prevail in the soul impulses in the consciousness soul, Fichte radiates everything that lives in the I into the consciousness soul. Hence the British spirit in Spencer's more recent work has come to expect the blessing of the world above all from the establishment of such an outer order, whereby the whole outer world is so arranged that the greatest possible benefit for outer human needs arises. What industrialization can offer humanity stands as an ideal in Spencer's world view; and to him, every link in a social order that is incompatible with the industrialization of society appears to be a curse, because the industrialization of society, of the state, brings eternal peace, according to Spencer, and works to eradicate everything that endangers peace. Thus the ultimate principle of utility has been incorporated into the world view.

With Fichte, we see that he is no less a practical mind. We have been able to emphasize how he directly influenced the development of his time, for example through his “Speeches to the German Nation,” how he stirred hearts, how he awakened enthusiasm, how his entire work is aimed at , but to take hold of what is not from the point of view of the external world of the highest benefit to mankind, but what is to be placed as the deepest ideals of the soul in the moral world order. So we see how Fichte works out of the nuance of the consciousness soul and, as it were, brings about the counter-image of the British spirit.

A spirit that places at the center of his world view what the soul can experience within itself, but which, through the way in which he processes this, is infinitely close to the French spirit, is Flegel. Hegel is one of the most German thinkers because he accomplishes from the opposite side what is peculiar to the French mind. Clarity and distinctness, systematic order in the spectator's point of view, in the point of view that is gained when one only confronts the world: that is what has emerged from Cartesius to Bergson as the characteristic of the French world view. Hegel wants to have the world picture as an experience; but he can only absorb from this world picture that which is as clear and distinct as a mathematical concept. That is why Hegel's world picture seems as clear as a mathematical concept. That is why one has the “cold feeling” towards it, as I have explained. But it is not a system of mathematical concepts that has been picked up, but it is conceived in such a way that it touches the soul in its deepest innermost being. And by touching the soul in its deepest innermost being, it finds itself elevated above all that is unclear and indistinct in the external view. But what remains for it, after all that is vague and indistinct has fallen away from it, is the clarity of the full being — to the point of the Gnostic and philosophical concept. What characterizes Hegel's world picture is this: even if it contains only external abstractions, these abstractions are experienced, directly experienced. That makes a great deal, to be sure. First of all, it makes it unthinkable for someone to become a “true Hegelian.” Basically, one cannot become a true Hegelian; it is an impossibility. Because thinking, continuing these external abstractions, really has no appeal for anyone else, and one always has the feeling that once someone has done this, that is enough in the world. What matters is the endeavor to see how the human soul can be experienced if one only experiences concepts, if one only feels as inner direct experience that which is a clear but also completely abstract concept. The pursuit of such a world view is what is admirable about Hegel; looking at him as he pursues it is what matters. Particularly when one is absorbed in a work such as his Phenomenology of Spirit (though admittedly very few people will be able to immerse themselves in it), one has a web of nothing but abstractions, of the most terrible abstractions; but it has life, it has soul. It is a characteristic sign that the German mind has once gone so far in its experience of a world picture that it said to itself: I find no clarity and distinctness anywhere; I will see what happens when I let one concept arise from the other. While Fichte allows the divine essence of the world to merge into “God as moral world order,” for Hegel God is the “world thinker”; and the individual soul can immerse itself through the most abstract logic by reflecting on the divine thoughts. That is certainly the tremendously sobering and cold thing about Hegel's philosophy, that if you get involved with it, you must get the thought: the divine order of the world was only concerned with “thinking,” and in order to represent thinking, everything else was represented. A moral worldview warms us; a moral worldview also, so to speak, places us in everyday life. Thinking only allows us to “behold” the world, and in this respect, beholding is also an experience with Hegel. And because it is the experience that is important in forming the world view of German idealism, we see how it is made fruitful by Hegel in such a way that he does not lose himself in the most external abstractions, but adheres to the thoughts that the divine order of the world allows the human race to experience by letting it go through history. The human soul is, as it were, directed to go through history in order thereby to take part in the course of the divine world-order. This “taking part” in the world, which I indicated in a much more universal sense in Goethe, is what we encounter in Hegel in relation to history. The way in which the thoughts run in relation to history, so they contribute to a world-picture of history. But in this experience of the logic of the world, history becomes for him what it must become: a twofold one. The whole ancient history up to the appearance of Christ on earth is the one part; and the appearance of Christ is a mighty impact, is the most powerful impact on earth-history, in order to bring something completely new into human evolution, which was not previously connected with the earth, and which now guides earthly evolution. The Christ-idea connects in the characterized way with the historical world picture, which the German evolution has brought forth. For Hegel, the whole of history is a progression conceived by the divine world government, so that it presents itself as an education of humanity to freedom. And the greatest educator, but one who divides the entire progress of earthly evolution into two parts, is the Christ-Being, which has come into earthly evolution from without — also in Hegel's sense. And the characteristic feature is this: with the clarity and distinctness that Cartesius demands, but with which all experience is also connected in Hegel, the soul can live itself into the whole course of history; there it immerses itself in the stage in which in which the event of Golgotha took place, and experiences in microcosm what the whole development of the earth has gone through, in that the Christ has incorporated Himself into the development of the earth.

Thus Hegel anchors his world picture in the soul of the intellect, and thereby becomes the opposite pole to Descartes' world view, just as Fichte is the opposite pole to the British world view.

The case is different when we come to the third of the thinkers mentioned, Schelling. One could say of him that his outer thinking already expresses how he can be brought into a relationship with the southern world view, the Italian one. I have already mentioned how he seeks to shape what underlies all natural and historical becoming out of a heightened imagination. In this regard, Schelling's outward appearance is physiognomically significant: his eyes, which sparkled throughout his life, bore witness to inner fire; the powerful forehead, his sardonic laughter and the inner fire made him a spirit similar to Giordano Bruno. Whereas in Fichte we have the point where the German mind tends towards the same nuance of soul as the British mind, but in complete contrast to it, and wants to grasp world events from within—whereas the German mind produces in Hegel something that is still opposed to the French mind , but which is more similar to it, the German spirit produces something in Schelling that is completely similar to Giordano Bruno, because Schelling works in just the same way as Giordano Bruno according to the nuances of the soul. It is only that Schelling builds his world view in a slightly different way than Giordano Bruno in all of nature and history. And while in Fichte the world-spirit pervading the world is the moral order of the world, while in Hegel we see this world-spirit as the clear and distinct logical thinker of the world, in Schelling — similarly to Giordano Bruno — we have before us the highest artist, art itself, the artist who creates everything in the world according to artistic principles. But if we compare Schelling's unique quest with Giordano Bruno's, we see again the difference between the work of the Italian national soul, which comes from the soul of feeling, and the work of the German national soul, which comes from the ego. In Giordano Bruno, everything is, as it were, of a piece, everything bears a common character. I would like to say: Giordano's world view is as clear as a shot. In Schelling, we see how he starts from the world view of his youth, how he laboriously searches to feel some of it, how one can experience a spark of world life in nature. And he arrives at the view that whatever lives in my spirit as feeling also lives in matter; matter is enchanted feeling, I must release it from the enchantment, must disenchant it; the experiencing of everything that is in nature is an experiencing of feeling. While Giordano Bruno attempts to gain his world-picture as if in a single bound, Schelling sets out on a journey. And I might say that from year to year we can follow how he seeks to penetrate deeper and deeper into the secrets of the existence of the world. He is passing through the path of evolution. He had to go through it in such a way that in his youth he was still understood in the way the inwardness of the I had opened up to him; later, when he still wanted to show the I in the moral world, he was no longer understood, and in the end he was laughed at and ridiculed.

The world view of German idealism is above all a path into the deeper foundations of world existence. If I may use an image, I would say: the British world view is like a person who is in a house and looks out of a window. What he sees there, he takes as the description of the world; and so he takes what he sees through the tools of the house as the world itself. German idealism is pointed in the direction of seeking to experience the world-spirit together with it. If we follow the path, however, we see how he, also living in a house, grasps himself inwardly. In Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, we see that German idealism seeks to make itself at home in the house; it sees meaningful images everywhere in the house, and the “images” already express the external entities; and because it wants to decipher the images, it seeks a world picture. Fichte seeks it in the moral soul: a world picture, sketched in the house, not created through the windows. Hegel explains the pictures in the house that represent nature and humanity. Schelling, in turn, deciphers another part, or rather, Schelling makes “house music,” and in it he sees an imprint of what is going on outside. Hegel sees what has been painted about what is outside. All these minds have a world picture ; but they have created a home in order to decipher what is in the house. What they have not come to, however, is, I might say, the door of the house – that they might go out, so that when they had come through the gate they might fuse the image with reality, might experience it directly.

It is true that Goethe took this path – through the gate. But he also went through all the difficulties of this path. He showed us how we must struggle endlessly to find an expression for what we experience when we really set out on the path of experience. Thus he went through the experience with its struggles and difficulties, which such an experience must go through, just as one who seeks development must go through life. We see how Goethe defined a certain stage of his life in Faust of 1797, which he characteristically calls a “barbaric composition” and of which he is convinced that something completely new must come in at a new stage of his life. That is one of the characteristics of the German view of the world: it can never be “finished”. That superficial judgment, which finds the great only “great” when it is “flawless,” is not a judgment suited to the hero of human endeavor. Anyone who might entertain the opinion that we can have a work of art in the Faust that is just as perfect as that given us by Dante in his Divine Comedy would be mistaken. In Dante's work, everything is magnificently complete, as if cast from a single mold; in Goethe's, the individual parts are written piece by piece, one after the other, with each one left lying around for years, then taken up again, and so on. It really is, as he himself says, a “barbaric composition.” Goethe's Faust is certainly incomplete as a work of art, for the reason that it could not become a unified composition from a single mold, because it always went along with life. But the point is not that we say: Faust of 1797 is a barbaric composition, a “Tragelaph”, as Goethe put it, but that we take Goethe's point of view and try to understand how it can be a barbaric composition; only in this way do we escape blindness, while one can only speak of recognition with the abstract word.

Thus Goethe goes the way through the gate, knowing that one can go out through the gate, and differs from the philosophers in that he tries to get ahead. But at the same time he knows: whatever man can imagine of himself, whatever picture he can make of himself, it cannot be what Fichte presents in his philosophy, nor what Schelling or Hegel present; otherwise one arrives at nothing but abstractions, at an abstract moral world order and the like.

What then is it in the Goethean sense that man can only gain as an idea of himself? It is Homunculus, as he presents him in the second part of Faust, the little man Homunculus, an artificial product of what man can know of himself. This must now first be submerged into living nature. And how that which man bears of himself must merge with living nature, that Goethe presents in turn. In the lowest becoming you must begin, Homunculus is told.

Thus Goethe presents the process of development in its entire becoming. For example, when he speaks of the passage through the plant stage, where he uses the words: “It grunet so.” He admonishes the homunculus to immerse himself in the entire process of development; he even admonishes him: “Do not strive for higher places” - it must be “places”, not “orders”, as it because Goethe spoke in an unclear Frankfurt dialect, the transcriber wrote a “d” instead of a “t”; and the Goethe commentators have thought a lot about how the homunculus should come to all kinds of medals. And then it is further explained how, by becoming part of the world, he can come to appear as Helen; for what appears in Helen is the human reproduction of what passes through the secrets of the world.

Thus, in Goethe we see the setting out for a world picture. The German spirit is aware: I must go out through the gate to what is present in living nature; then, in the continuous development of my soul, a world picture will come about. This world picture, however, demands what it means to experience the world. Patience for this was not yet present in the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the striving for a world view, as it was inaugurated by Goethe, is being held back. So it could come about that in the second half of the nineteenth century — characteristically in Karl Vogt, Büchner and Moleschott, who are referred to as the “materialists,” Haeckel himself could be mentioned in this context — that which the British world view has brought has been resurrected. One can say that the British world view was absorbed by the German spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is Haeckel's tragedy that he must now turn against the British world view, even though it has entered into the German striving through the characterized development.

But in this respect, too, the German conception of the world differs from the British one: the British conception is satisfied with the pursuit of ideas that merely synthesize the external sense world, and it allows “faith” in some spiritual world to coexist with the external conception of the world in which it believes, as a “scientific” conception of the world. Thus, for Darwin, faith can arise as he expressed it in his main scientific work, saying: “Thus we have traced the life of organisms back to a few to whom – as he puts it – the Creator has breathed life!” Yes, the remarkable thing happened that the German translator even left this sentence out at first! For the German mind everything must be capable of furnishing the basis for a Weltanschhauung; for the British mind this demand need not be satisfied, because it does not have the consistency to build up its Weltbild to such an extent that everything becomes material for its Weltanschhauung. It can afford a “double entry”: the scientific world provides it with the building blocks for what it considers to be scientifically correct; for the rest, there is faith. For the German mind, no double-entry bookkeeping is good enough. That is why German idealism was overwhelmed by English empiricism. That is why we see strange phenomena in the German pursuit of a world view. I will cite only Du Bois-Reymond: in him lives the admiration for the Descartes-Laplacean spirit, which thinks the world as a great mathematician might have put it together from atoms and forces. But: Ignorabimus! We can never know anything about the soul and spirit. Cartesius and Giordano Bruno did not need to go so far as this. But Du Bois-Reymond goes so far as to say: “[...] that where supernaturalism begins, science ends.” Descartes does not say this, but Du Bois-Reymond does, where we find the German spirit overwhelmed by Descartes. And so one can show further how the Italian spirit, that of Giordano Bruno, has flowed into numerous endeavors of the German striving for a world view. Thus today we already find many who show how the plant has a “soul” and how everything is ensouled. We need only think of Raoul France. But we could also mention many of his contemporaries, even Fechner himself, who says that everything has a soul: a revival of the spirit of Giordano Bruno. But something is missing. What is missing is precisely what lived in Giordano Bruno. That is why I have often been able to point out: when someone like Raoul France comes and says: there are plants – when certain animals come near them, they attract them, lure them; once the animal has crept into them, they close up a gap and suck it dry... don't we see a soul life in the plant? We have to say: if you read the same thing in Giordano Bruno, you would fully understand it because it is imbued with the impulse of the sentient soul. But when it occurs, as it has done through the clarity and distinctness of German idealism, then what I have often stated applies: there is something that, by the very nature of its being, attracts small animals, absorbs them – very much like the Venus flytrap – and then even kills them. It is the mousetrap. And just as one can explain the ensoulment of plants in the sense of Giordano Bruno, so one can also want to explain the ensoulment of a mousetrap.

The fact that certain ideological impulses poured into the worldview of German idealism, which is the protest against all externalization of the worldview, means that something has taken place that can be said of: German idealism has retreated for a while into German souls and minds. And today we see it only as an ideal of struggle, of inner discipline; we see it as transformed into outer action, again filling souls with hope and confidence and with strength. But we must realize that this power is the same power that once sought an inward world-view through an inward struggle on the road to the world-picture of idealism. And this world-picture of German idealism is in reality that which the German spirit must seek as lying on its own predetermined road. And our fateful time contains many, many admonitions, but undoubtedly also the admonition that the German spirit must struggle to bring forth again that which is in its deepest depths, so that it may be an obvious part of all its striving, of all its work.

I do not believe that this could lead to a lesser understanding of the peculiarities of other nations, that the German spirit will become aware that it must become the bearer of the world view of inwardly experienced idealism. On the contrary: the more the German brings to the world that which lives in his soul as his deepest being, the more he will be valued in the world. We shall be all the more understood if we bear in mind the words of Goethe:

“The German runs no greater danger than that of rising with and by his neighbors; perhaps no nation is better suited to develop out of itself, because it has been to its great advantage that the outside world took notice of it so late.”

And indeed, it has taken so little notice to this day that it was possible to make such judgments about the German character as were heard.

This is what German idealism calls to us as a warning in our fateful time: may the self-confidence of the German national soul awaken in our souls! This German idealism had to produce a moral, logical, artistic world view in the house, since it already reigned, I might say, in the house; it had the gift of recognizing the world – in paintings in the house. And it must find the way through the gate into the surrounding area. And he must recognize what this path looks like, in contrast to others, which leads not only to looking at the surroundings through the windows, as is the case with the British world view, but to reaching these surroundings through the gate, to lovingly reach everything in the world by becoming one with it. If German idealism practised itself by contemplating the world pictures of the microcosm, the human body, it will also find the gate out of the body to the path already indicated by Goethe, and which leads to seeking the world view experienced with things instead of the merely conceived, devised, inwardly fought world view. is contained in the first ominous lines of Jakob Böhme, which in Goethe's work have taken on clear contours and shine forth as an ideal for the future, and which does not remain limited to the ideas suggested by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who were looking at the paintings in the house, but which can also find its way through the gate to connect the living human soul with the living soul of the world.

The first thing the soul needs to get to know its own nature scientifically, not just by faith, is a sharp concentration of thought that appeals not only to ordinary thinking but also to the application of inner willpower in imagining and thinking. The thoughts that penetrate us from the external sense world cannot help us with this. If we seek the immortality of the soul, we must think differently. Outwardly these thoughts resemble those mental images, those inner experiences that are destined to be forgotten. We can see this in the experience of 'dreaming'. Why? Because the dream engages the physical body in a much less intense way and thus creates less opportunity to feel and experience the dream as reality. It is the same with our free thoughts, which we let pass through the soul; we call them musings and quickly forget them. But the more one trains oneself to unfold the power of retaining freely formed thoughts, as otherwise only experiences supported by memory, the more one approaches the concentration of thoughts. Thoughts as images of external reality are least suitable for this. In the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have set forth thoughts that are suitable for concentration.

If one wishes to hold fast to such freely-generated thought-images, one must exert a stronger will than in ordinary life. The experiences of everyday life are so coarse that they cannot serve as a basis for comparison. What spiritual science reveals as immortal is fundamentally different in its meaning from what we feel and want in everyday life. Man passes by heedlessly, all the more heedlessly because he is inclined not to ascribe reality to that which confronts him as the being within himself, which finds the way through birth and death.

It is easy to see that this inner being exists, but it is not easy to ascribe the most intense reality to it. One must speak again and again about immortality from different points of view, because only when one has characterized it from the most diverse points of view is it possible to gain a true idea of it. The reality of immortality must be grasped by soul forces that are brought forth from within. Now you might say that I maintain that only subjectively something can be achieved! — The beginning of spiritual research is indeed subjective: an inner overcoming, a working one's way up from darkness to light. This is certainly subjective, because most people lack the patience to go far enough with spiritual research and to develop themselves out of the most personal of personal realms. It is precisely through this inner struggle that the soul is driven to work itself out of this realm; then it can enter into a world that is revealed to it. But the path from subjective to objective spiritual research is an intimate one, which makes it necessary for the human being to acquire soul habits within himself that otherwise do not occur in everyday life. We have to develop little willpower in our everyday life to hold on to it, but the other requires a strong tensioning of the soul's inner powers. They have to be drawn from the deeper soul life. These are strong inner energies that otherwise remain untrained in everyday life. People who need the support of sensory experience soon become exhausted and fall into a state not unlike that of falling asleep. When a person has developed thinking united with the will over a long period of time, when they have strengthened their inner life of imagination to such an extent that they are completely absorbed in it, when the rest of the soul life sinks away, the world flows away on all sides, the soul becomes completely one with what it has attained in a healthy way through practice: only then does man realize what the power of thought is, and how it must be supported by strong will if it is to rule freely in the inner life. Then, after months and years of practice, certain experiences begin to occur. At first, he succeeds in concentrating more and more brightly, clearly and intensely. He notices that the thought-experience grows ever stronger, and he feels that his whole consciousness is heightened as it merges with the thought.

Then comes a critical moment when he has arrived at the experience of the full strength of the thought. The thought fragments and dissolves in the soul, darkens and ceases to be present for us. We feel our whole being going with the thought. This is not easy. This experience shakes up all the human soul forces, calling into question everything one has previously held to be valuable. One resists coming to terms with this experience. Human egoism does not allow the forces associated with the depths of the soul to enter into consciousness. If we do not exert all our willpower, we will not be able to do so. In the subconscious, we fear that something much worse could happen to us than physical “death”. The materialist says: compared to physical death, the experience would not be so bad after all! But it does not enter into ordinary consciousness in this way; it takes hold as an impulse of an elevated consciousness compared to the ordinary life of the soul. It is not fear of the destruction of the body, but of the outpouring of one's own being into the cosmos. These are unspeakable feelings, yet they can be called feelings of fear. If one overcomes them, then an experience comes that could be described as follows: By developing these forces, you pull something out of the body. This seems particularly dangerous. It is a feeling as if something were being pulled out of us, as if it remained in us and yet had to be pulled out. There is a clear awareness that something else must be pulled out, that it is not possible with thought concentration alone, that this only pulls out a part of us.

If we want to understand how a person arrives at these descriptions, we must start from everyday experiences. The person must enter into a new relationship with themselves, develop a much more precise self-knowledge. In ordinary life, nothing is as questionable as a person's relationship with themselves, the opinion they have of themselves. How inadequate man's self-knowledge is can be seen in numerous examples, such as in the story of the philosopher Mach: when he got on a bus and saw his face in a mirror, he wondered what kind of ugly schoolmaster it was, until he realized that he was seeing himself.

It is easy to laugh at such things, but they are deeply indicative of man's questionable relationship to himself. Man must seek to come into a relationship of self-knowledge with himself. He has accumulated the forces that prevent him from detaching himself from what is connected with his inner life throughout his entire life. But this must be added to the concentration of thought: that we gain a completely different relationship to what constitutes our destiny. In everyday life we see fate approaching us. It strikes us as sympathetic and antipathetic coincidences; we regard what happens to us as something external. Even ordinary reflection can teach us that so-called coincidences are not so external. If we look at what we are at any given time in our lives, such a look will be able to tell us, if we do not want to close ourselves off from real knowledge of human nature: that we would not be able to do this or that if this or that had not happened to us eighteen or twenty years ago.

We see how the whole bundle of our talents, gifts and habits of soul life grows out of our destiny. We look at ourselves concretely as a fifty-year-old person and try to follow the whole tangle of experiences of destiny. If one is serious about this, which does not happen too often, then one must say to oneself: Destiny is not external; I am in it, my I is in it, I go along with my consciousness and pour myself out into the stream of my destiny. — This must become a method, it must be added to what has been achieved through concentration of thought. We are within ourselves in our everyday thoughts; through thought concentration we go out of ourselves and believe we are losing ourselves in it. The reverse process occurs when we identify with fate: we go into something that flows to us in the outer stream; we grow together with something that we believed was outside us. What I believed to be experiencing as external fate, I was already in it; I brought it about myself. When such considerations have become habitual, we come out of ourselves again, draw our soul after us; a very hidden inner man is drawn out of us. In that in which we know ourselves to be living, we look as we usually look at tables and chairs in the outer life. In this way, we have two means of experimenting here that we would otherwise use in a physics laboratory or in a clinic; but these are not external experiments, but rather activities that relate to inner soul experiences.

Anthroposophical spiritual science does not speak in a general, abstract way about the fact that one can separate from the body, but speaks experimentally, as one speaks of the fact that oxygen can be separated from hydrogen by showing that oxygen is in the water. In the laboratory we can be relatively indifferent to the things we are dealing with, but it is not the same with the tragedies of the soul, with the struggles, with the inner disappointments when we are on shaky ground or have lost our footing. This is often dreadful, often blissful. Then, when the inner soul is separated from the body, it knows that what is now outside of it contains all the forces that begin with birth and are given back to the earth with death. It has grasped the eternal core of the soul at the same time as the destiny of man. She knows that what separates from the physical body every night is this eternal soul core, which just does not perceive itself in ordinary life because it does not have the powers to do so. At the same time, she has grasped what goes through birth and death and has united it with destiny, with what was given in the spiritual world and then flows through the forces of heredity through father and mother and through the formative forces into the physical body, what has been prepared in the spiritual world for new bodily life. The immortal life core, which is otherwise imperceptible, becomes more and more concrete and alive. In everyday life, one works all this into the life core, but continually darkens the formative forces if they remain the formative forces of the body and cannot be used as powers of knowledge. The body is not their cause, but their effect, which has descended from the spiritual worlds. It bears within itself the character of previous earthly lives. This is how it is now because it is not the first time that one has lived in the physical body.

Spiritual research does not pursue the eternal essence through abstract theories, but through a spiritual experimental method, which, from one earthly life to the next, is subject to fate. It will take a long time before a larger number of people will take part in spiritual science, but it will become a truly real part of human spiritual culture and will intervene in human life and in what moral impulses are, in the life of consciousness in one's own being. Then spiritual science will intervene when the prejudices that now still seem comprehensible will have been overcome. They will be overcome as radically as the former prejudices against science. People believed that what they dreamt up was reality, and they called it an error. They called Copernicus a fool because he said that the Earth revolved around the Sun, whereas common sense told them that the Earth stood still. Today, the five senses do not want to believe that by grasping the heightened thinking, one can draw out a piece of the inner man and draw the other piece by entering into destiny. Humanity will have to learn to no longer trust the senses. There is a stronger power of holding for true than relying on the five senses and the mind. This power is connected with all impulses of human wisdom progress. One must develop trust in this by kindling a strong moral power in the soul. When man appeals to the powers of realization in himself, he will carry himself courageously through the world, not merely trusting in what he can experience through the outer five senses. Today, we have reached the point in the development of humanity where science must become what it could not become before. What the spiritual researcher distills out was always in man: he does not create it, he only calls it into spiritual knowledge.

An obvious objection, which comes from mental laziness, is: Why do we care about the eternal soul core at all? He is eternal, we will live in it again. — That is too cheap a thought. Two things must be said against it. Firstly, it is not only important to man's moral sense that he knows this or that, but that the process of development on earth progresses from natural science to spiritual truths, which were first unknown and are now being brought out. All human progress is based on this. Those who do not want to take part in this should admit that they are indifferent. This point is important, but more abstract. Secondly, however, there is a very concrete progress. In ancient times, people on earth were essentially not the same as they are today; their souls were different from today's. We find there a clairvoyant consciousness originating from primeval times, from ancient epochs, in connection with the divine-spiritual forces of the world. Today, man has lost this; but he is taking his independence out of this earthly world to which he has connected himself. Now that man has attained the stage of detachment from earthly thinking, he must again be seized by spiritual life, must again enter through spiritual science. Today, however, we can say that we still have so much inherited strength that the soul's life after death cannot be stopped. But man must develop in such a way that he does not go through life between death and a new birth in dullness, but in clear experience. Man became free by breaking the thread that connected him to the spiritual world. Now he must tie it again. From the present time on, there is more and more necessity to recognize spiritual life. Therefore, where spiritual life has become more intense in recent times, repeated earthly life as a teaching occurs. For example, in the eighteenth century, in Lessing's 'Education of the Human Race', which he left behind as a testament to humanity, the basic idea of repeated earthly lives and a purely spiritual life in between occurs. There are those who say that Lessing had grown old and weak and that is why he had this complicated idea.

What was established by a mind like Lessing's forms a kind of predisposition that must be further developed in the German national soul, in order to flow into the stream of spiritual scientific research, in order to become real science, as was indicated today. This lies deeply as a predisposition in what Fichte felt to be the original source of German uniqueness. Fichte's idea is a wonderful one, in the sense that Not only when we have passed through death do we become immortal; already in the body we can perceive what is immortal and forms the body. Only in grasping this actual immortal do I recognize the meaning of life, for the sake of which everything in this mortal body may live itself out. What spiritual research is to carry out scientifically is present here as a predisposition. Fichte expresses it: if only the right powers are released, then the immortal can be grasped. Spiritual science is particularly present in the personalities of spiritual striving, which I characterized yesterday.

We encounter glimpses of it in the most diverse places, but here it is a straight line from German spiritual striving to what must develop into spiritual science. In the stream of Central European spiritual life, consciousness in grasping the spiritual core has never been completely lost. I will now draw attention to just one example of this consciousness, which only wanted to be given in a delicate way. Herman Grimm, an art lover and one of the intellectual giants of the second half of the nineteenth century, who stood firmly on the ground of Schiller's and Goethe's world view, expressed it in his novella “The Songstress”. In the 1860s, the time had not yet come for spiritual science, but the people who were immersed in it at that time felt the need to describe not only the sensory world but also the other part of the world. They knew that if you want to describe true reality, it is not enough to describe the sensual world. Take, for example, a horseshoe that has become magnetized, which still looks like an ordinary horseshoe. Man belongs to the spiritual world with his spiritual part, just as he belongs to the world of sense with his physical part. Out of the deepening of German idealism, these people knew how to develop a genuine spiritual worldview. They did this by objectively and impartially observing German intellectual life, which has a mission that should be fulfilled from within, out of an idealistic appreciation of intellectual life: to penetrate to the spirit as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel did, but to do so by still perceiving the world with the real spiritual eyes and ears that Goethe spoke of.

Where the view is directed towards German spiritual research, especially towards Goethe, a kind of hope for humanity is connected with the development of this spiritual life. If one reads between the lines of German spiritual life, one can often find a concise expression of how the world can come to an understanding of spiritual life precisely through the development of the German being. There is no need to be seized by pride, but one can feel how what the Goethe-Schiller era produced can be defended in Central Europe today so that it can develop.

Based on this fateful sense of time, I would like to present two images: We learned in the first days of August 1914 how the news of the coming event was received in the various countries of Europe. First in Germany. One stands before the great event – the Reichstag is convening – I do not want to go into day-to-day politics, not into what is related to the military events – the representatives of the various party directions stand there – and remain silent. That is a powerful impression, as if it were the herald of what was to come, before a great coming truth.

With a kind of inner weeping, one looks at the other picture, at the meeting of the State Duma. There was no silence: they all spoke – so that one gets the impression that it was formally convened, like a historical theater performance. The frenzy of false enthusiasm was spoken by many, in contrast to the silence further west. If you want to explore history, what runs through humanity, you will have to look at such moods. In this silence lies the confidence that trust can be placed in spiritual power, in spiritual truth, that it must be well guarded, that it must be defended – a confidence that carries the soul beyond death and destiny.

Emerson wants to describe Goethe and points out what Goethe culture means for humanity. Referring to him, he says: “The world is young. Great men of the past show us the way with the words: ‘We must write scriptures that bear witness to the eternal. It must not be that a lie remains for us.’ Emerson means that lie that there is no spirit behind the external world.

A bright solar horizon must develop out of the twilight of current events, heralding a lasting peace for the good of humanity. All that those who make the sacrifice of their lives have to endure in body and soul must become a warning for those who remain behind. The unspent forces of those who must leave their young lives before their time will help: the law of conservation of forces also applies in the spiritual world. In the future, we will know that this world is connected to the spiritual world. These unspent forces will be real forces for people who will have an awareness of the spiritual world.

The spirit world will remain closed to you,
unless you recognize within yourself
the spirit that shines in the soul
and can become a bearer of light for you
in the depths and heights of the world.

then the wonderful words in it:

“She has thought and continues to think; but not as a
human being, but as nature.”

That is to say, Goethe is clear about one thing: spinning a mechanical web of concepts about nature does not provide an understanding of nature. Only such a deeper search in the existence of nature creates knowledge of nature, through which the human soul finds in the depths of this natural existence that which is related to what it can seek out in the depths of its own being when it penetrates into them.

We may now ask: Is such striving, as it can be characterized by Kant, can be characterized by the ideal figure of Goethe's Faust, - is this striving a solitary, a merely individual one, or does it have anything to do with the overall striving of the German national spirit, the German national soul? Even if we consider Kant, the abstract philosopher, who hardly ventured a few miles beyond Königsberg and spent his whole life in abstract thought, we clearly see, especially in the way he worked his way from his earlier world view to his later one, how he, despite his reclusiveness, developed out of everything all that in the German national spirit aspired after certainty, and how, owing to this national spirit, he did not come to a narrowing of the human soul to the sphere of mere human thinking, but was led up to the horizon on which the whole range of ideas and ideals appeared to him, which give man impulses in the course of his human development.

One might say that what was later expressed by the most German of German philosophers, Fichte, already lives in Kant; what has become so dear to the German worldview, especially from the eighteenth century onward, already lives in Kant. This German world view came to value having a view of the world that does not need to be disconcerted by what presents itself to the senses, for the absolute validity of that which is man's duty, love, divine devotion, moral world. overlooks the world and looks at the way in which he is placed in the world, he sees himself surrounded by the field of vision of sensual impressions and what he can divine behind them; but he also sees himself placed in such a way that he world without this second aspect of the world; he sees himself so placed that behind him, in his soul, the divine ideals are at work, which become his duty and deed, and these ideals do not bear the coarse sensual character that the world of external movement and external revelation has. One might say that when the German mind looks at the stiffness and smoothness of natural existence, to speak symbolically, at the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, it feels the need to recognize: How can we become immersed in that which is so indifferent in nature, that which appears in ideals as a demand, as a duty, as a moral life? How can we become immersed in that which appears as the highest value of life, as a moral ideal? How does the reality of moral ideals relate to the reality of external nature? This is a question that cannot be answered lightly, but which can also be found in tremendous depth, heart-wrenching. And so it was felt in the best German minds at the time when Kant's world view was forming. Sensuality had to be presented in such a way that it was no obstacle to the moral world flowing into the world through human beings. Morality could not be a reality that presents itself indifferently, and against which moral ideas must rebound. When moral ideas from the spiritual world are put into action through human beings, they must not be repelled by the rigid materialistic barrier of the sensory world. This must be taken as a profound insight, then one understands why Kant wants to dethrone ordinary knowledge so that a real source can be thought for the moral idea. Then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical , but which arose from deep German striving: “All sensuality, everything we can see and feel outside and think about the external world, is only the sensualized material of our duty.” The true world is the world of the ruling spirit, which lives itself out as man perceives it in ideas and ideals, and these are the true reality, they are what pulses through the world as a current, what only needs something to which it can apply itself, to illustrate it. Sensuality has no independent existence for Fichte, but is the sensitized material for human fulfillment of duty.

From a philosophy that seeks to validate everything spiritual, that must be sought from a natural disposition towards idealism, such words emerged; and one may find such words one-sided, but that does not matter when such words are made into dogma. But to take them as symptoms of a striving that lives in a people, that is the significant thing; and to recognize that such minds, which create in the sense of such a word, precisely because of the idealistic character of the German national soul, elevate Germanness to the arena of thought. In order to give thought its vitality, human knowledge and striving must go beyond what Cartesius could merely find. And Goethe's Faust, this image of the highest human endeavor, this image that one must first struggle to understand by allowing many German cultural elements to take effect, from what did it emerge? — It is truly not invented, did not come about in such a way that a single person created it out of themselves; rather, it emerged from the legends, from the poetry of the people themselves. Faust lived in the people, and Goethe was still familiar with the “puppet show of Dr. Faust”; and in the simple folk character, he already saw the traits that he only elevated to the arena of thoughts. Nothing is more vivid than Goethe's “Faust” to show how something supreme can emerge from what lives most deeply, most elementarily, most intimately in the simple folk being. One would like to say: not Goethe and Goethe's nature alone created Faust, but that Goethe brought Faust forth like a germ that lay within the German national organism, and gave it its essence, embodied it in such a way that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the highest striving of the German spirit for the arena of thought. Not the striving of isolated personalities out of their own nature, but precisely when it confronts us in its greatness from the whole nation, it is the result of German idealism.

And how does thought work within this German idealism? One comes to an understanding of how it works precisely by comparing this German idealistic striving of thought with what is also a striving of thought, let us say, for example, in Descartes. In Descartes, thought confines man within the narrowest limits; it works as a mere thought and remains as such confined to the world in which man lives directly with his senses and his mind. Within German idealism, the personality does not merely encounter the thought as it enters the soul, but the thought becomes a mirror image of that which is alive outside the soul, that which vibrates and permeates the universe, that which is spiritual outside of man, that which is above and below the spirit of man, of which nature is the outer revelation and the life of the soul is the inner revelation. Thus, thought becomes an image of the spirit itself; and by rising to the level of thought, the German wants to rise through thought to the living spirit, wants to penetrate into that world that lives behind the veil of nature in such a way that by penetrating this veil, man not only visualizes something, but penetrates with his own life into a life that is related to him. And again, since man is not satisfied with what he can experience in his soul, he seeks to penetrate into what lies behind thinking, feeling and willing, for which these three are outer shells, for which even the thought is only an inner revelation, in which man lives and works, in which he knows himself as in a living being that creates the scene of thoughts within him. And so we can see how, especially in those times when the German mind, seemingly so detached from external reality, from external experience, strove for a world view, this German mind felt itself entirely dominant and weaving within the arena of thought. And there is first of all Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who regards external nature only as an external stimulus to that which he actually wants to seek, to whom, as already mentioned, the whole of the external sense world has become only the sensitized material of our duty; who wants to live only in that which can penetrate from the depths of the world in a mental way and can be directly realized before the human soul. That is the essence of his world view, that only what emerges in a contemplative way from the deepest depths of the soul and announces itself as emerging from the deepest depths of the world is valid for him.

For his successor Schelling, the urge for nature, the Faustian urge, becomes so vivid within him that he considers the knowledge of nature, which only wants to express itself in concepts about nature, as nothing. Only when the human soul comes to regard all of nature as the physiognomy of man, only when nature is regarded in such a way that nature is the physiognomy of the spirit that rules it, only then does one live in true knowledge of nature; but then, by penetrating through the bark, one feels creative in nature. And again, a paradoxical but appropriate word for the essence of Germanness comes from Schelling: To recognize nature is actually to create nature! Admittedly, this is at first a one-sided saying; but a saying that represents a one-sidedness need not remain so; rather, if it is rightly recognized, this creative knowledge of nature will lead the spirit to reflect inwardly, to awaken slumbering powers within itself, which penetrate to the spiritual sources of nature. The source, the germ of that which can be true spiritual science, we can find it precisely within this world picture of German idealism!

In the third of the German idealistic philosophers, in Hegel, who is difficult to understand and who is so far removed from many, this lively character of the scene of the thoughts within German idealism appears in the same way. In our own time, when the abstract is so much decried and mere thought is so little loved, this world-view strikes us as strange. And yet Hegel feels himself closely connected with the Goethean direction of nature towards the spirit. The content of his world-view – what is it if not mere thinking, a progression from one thought to another? With his world-view we are presented with a thought organism; necessity is created for us, so that we stand face to face with a mere thought organism, which we can only create by thinking it, as we would with any other organism through our senses. But behind this presentation of a thought organism there is a consciousness, a certain attitude. This attitude consists in stripping away all sense perceptions, all perceptions of the senses, for a few moments of world-gazing, stripping away everything that one wants and feels as an individual, and surrendering to what as if the thought itself were taking one step after another, — that man then immerses himself in a world that is a thinking world, but no longer his thinking world, so that he no longer says to this world: I think, therefore I am! but: “The spirit of the world thinks in me, and I give myself to the spirit of the world as a theater, so that in what I offer as soul to the all-encompassing spirit of the world, this spirit can develop its thoughts from stage to stage and show me how it bases its thoughts on world-becoming. And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience in the soul only what that soul can experience when it surrenders all its own being to the thinking that thinks itself within it. One must also see this Hegelian philosophy, this so idealistic excerpt from the German essence, in such a way that one does not take it as a dogmatics, on which one can swear or not, but as something that, like a symptom of German striving in a certain time, can stand before us. In Hegel's philosophy, the world spirit appears as a mere thinker; but while it is true that much more than mere thinking was needed to shape the world, it is nevertheless true that the path that once led to it, to seek logic, is one which produces in man the attitude towards the living that reigns behind existence and which leads man to the scene not of abstract, intellectual thought, but of living thought, which in the experience of thought has experience of the world.

The three idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, sought to elevate the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different directions: Fichte tried to shine a light into the depths of the human ego and did not say, like Descartes, “I think, therefore I am!” For Fichte, if he had only been able to arrive at Descartes' thought, would have said: “There I find within me a rigid existence, an existence to which I must look. But that is not an ego. I am only an ego if I can secure my own existence myself at any time. Not through the act of thought, not through mere thinking can I arrive at my ego, but through an act of action. That is a continuous creative process. It does not depend on looking at its being; it leaves its previous being; but by having the power to create itself again in the next moment, out of the act of doing, it is constantly being reborn. Fichte does not grasp the thought in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the scene of the thought itself, where he creates vividly and lives creatively. And Schelling, he tries to recognize nature, and with genuinely German feeling he lives into the secrets of nature, even if, of course, his statements, if you want to take them as dogma, can be presented as fantastic. But he immerses himself in natural processes with his deepest emotions, so that he does not feel merely as a passive observer of nature, as a being that merely looks at nature, but as a being that submerges itself in the plant and creates with the plant in order to understand plant creation. He seeks to rise from created nature to creative nature. He seeks to become as intimate with creative nature as with a human being with whom he is friends. This is an archetypally German trait in the Schellingian nature. Goethe sought to approach nature in a similar way from his point of view, as his Faust expresses it, as to the “bosom of a friend”. There Goethe, to describe how far removed every abstract observer is from a contemplation of nature, there he calls what he, as an external naturalist, is to the earth, his friendship with the earth. So human, so directly alive does the German spirit feel itself in Goethe to the spirit that reigns in nature in the striving to be scientific, in that he wants to raise science itself to the arena of thoughts. And Hegelian logic – abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel – what becomes of it? When one considers how mere logic often appears to man, and compares this with what prevails in Hegel's idealistic world-view, then one gets the right impression of the world-importance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel's work, what appears to be the furthest thing from mysticism, the clear, crystal-clear, one might say, crystal-cold thought itself, is felt and experienced in such a way that although the thought , but that what the soul experiences in terms of thought is direct mystical experience; for what Hegel experiences in terms of thought is a becoming one with the divine world spirit, which itself permeates and lives through the world. Thus, in Hegel, the greatest clarity and conceptual sobriety become the warmest and most vibrant mysticism. This magic is brought about by the way in which the German mind rises from its direct and living idealism to the realm of thought. In doing so, it proves that what matters is not the individual expressions that are arrived at, but the soul foundations from which the human soul seeks a worldview. Hegel is said to be a dry logician. In answer to this it may be said: He who calls Hegel's logic by that name is himself dry and cold. He who is able to approach this logic in the right way can feel how it pulsates out of German idealism; he can feel in the apparently abstract thoughts, which in Hegel's system are so spun out of one another, the most living warmth of soul that is necessary to strip away all individuality and to connect with the divine, so that in Hegel logic and mysticism can no longer be distinguished; that although nothing is nebulous in it, a mystical trait prevails in all its details.

Even in our time, the German mind, even the opponents of German idealism, has endeavored time and again to fathom the fundamental idealism of this German nature in its significance as a riddle. And the best German minds, even those who are opponents of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, if we turn our gaze to them, we still find that the development of Germany consists in absorbing more and more of the basic impulses of this idealism.

How these fundamental impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has often been discussed and will be discussed more often. Attention should only be drawn to how – one might say – German idealism, after it had reached one of its high points in the German world view, then continued to have an effect on German intellectual life as a different impulse. There was a period in this German intellectual life, and it was lived out in minds of the very, very first order until the middle of the 19th century, until the last third of the 19th century, when the view was that such creative work as is expressed, for example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought really takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creativity, was only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, in the sphere of natural science, the same process of thinking can be observed that is expressed in Goethe's Faust. example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creation, is only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, music has a different area; that music is, as it were, the field that does not seek to grasp the highest in man by the detour of a work of fiction such as Faust, but that music is the field in which sensuality must be grasped directly. For example, the contrast between the legend of Don Juan and that of Faust has been cited, with a certain amount of justification after the experiences that could be had within the development of humanity, how mistaken it is to legend on the same level as the Faust legend; it has been asserted that what this other legend, which shows man completely absorbed in sensual experience, can be correspondingly portrayed only within music that directly evokes and seizes sensuality. — The way in which the German does not rise to the scene of thought in the abstract, but in a lively way, has also brought the refutation of this view. In Richard Wagner, we have in modern times the spirit that has triumphed over the merely external, emotional element in music, that has sought to deepen the setting of the thoughts so that the thought itself could take hold of the element that was thought to live only in music. To spiritualize music from the standpoint of the spirit, to show that, was also only possible for German idealism. One can say: Richard Wagner showed that in the most demure element for thought there is nothing that could resist or be opposed to the strength of life that dominates the German spirit. If, through his philosophy and his contemplation of nature, the German has tried to present nature to his soul in such a way that the seemingly mechanical, the seemingly external and rigid loses its mechanical aspect and what would otherwise appear in a formal way comes to life and moves as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself , on the other hand, the element that flows in the immediate sensual sequence of tones has been allowed to seek its connection, its marriage, with that which leads the human soul to the highest heights and depths in the realm of thoughts, in Wagner's music, which has thus effected an elevation of an artistic-sensual element into a directly spiritual atmosphere.

This aspect of German idealism, which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the scene of thought – I wanted to characterize this aspect today with a few strokes. This trait of German idealism, this living comprehension of the otherwise dead thought, is one side, but a remarkable side, of the nature of the German people, and will appear as a remarkable phenomenon to anyone who, I might say, is able to place themselves within the German people in a way that revitalizes thought within themselves. Indeed, the German cannot arrive at the fundamental trait of his people's character other than by penetrating ever deeper into the self-knowledge of the human being. And this the German may, as it seems to me, feel so rightly in our immediate present, where this German essence really has to defend itself in a fight imposed on it, where this German essence must become aware of itself by having to wage a fight, which it feels is due to it from the task that appears to it as a sacred one, entrusted to it by the world forces and world powers themselves. And although today, in a different way than in the times of which we have mainly spoken, the German must fight for his world standing, his world importance, it must still come to life before our soul, for which the German today enters into a world-historical struggle. A future history will have to establish more and more the deeper connection between the German soul, struggling through the course of the world, and the bloody events of the times, which, however, bring us bliss out of pain and suffering. I wanted nothing with today's reflection but to show that the German has no need to speak out of hatred or outrage when he wants to compare his nature with that of other nations. We do not need to point out the nature of the German soul in order to exalt ourselves, but in order to recognize our duties as they have been handed down to us by world history, we may point this out. And we do not need, as unfortunately happens today in the camp of our enemies, to invent all sorts of things that can serve to belittle the opponent, but we can point out the positive that works in the German national substance. We can let the facts speak, and they can tell us that the German does not want to, but must, according to his abilities, which are inspired by the world spirit, his nature, his abilities – without any arrogance – in comparison to the nature of other peoples.

From this point of view, we do not need to fall into what so unfortunately many of our opponents fall into. We look over to the West. We certainly do not need to do as the French do, who, in wanting to characterize German nature in its barbarism, as they think, in its baseness, want to exalt themselves; truly, the French needed, as they believe, a new sophistry to do so. And minds that spoke highly of the German character just before the war, even at famous teaching institutions, can now, as we can see, find the opportunity to advocate the view that, given the nature of his world view, the German cannot help but conquer and , as Boutroux says, to assimilate what is around him; for the German does not want to ascend to the sources of existence in a modest way, as Boutroux thinks, but claims that he is connected to these sources, that he carries the deity within himself and must therefore also carry all other nations within himself. This German world view is certainly profound; but it is not conceived immodestly.

Nor perhaps does the German need what is sought today from the British side when German character is to be characterized. The British, in emphasizing the peculiarities of their own national character, have never taken much interest in penetrating the German national character. When the forties in Germany were passing through a period of development, it seemed to me that the German mind was so fully occupied with the sphere of ideas that the way Hegel's disciples thought was felt by Schelling , who was still alive, and by his students, was felt to be too abstract, too logical, and that on Schelling's side, efforts were made to gain a greater liveliness for the thoughts themselves on the stage of thoughts. Whereas in Hegel one sensed that he allowed one thought to emerge from another through logical rigor, Schelling wanted people to sense the thoughts as active, living things that do not need to be proven in logic, just as what happens from person to person in living interaction cannot be encompassed in logic. He wanted to grasp it in something that is more than logic, wanted to grasp it in a living way, and that is how a great dispute arose on the scene, which the German tries to illuminate with the light he wants to ignite from his living knowledge. The English observed this dispute that arose. A London newspaper wrote what seemed to them a clever article about this dispute, in which it was said: These Germans are actually abstruse visionaries. Many are concerned with the question of who is right: Schelling or Hegel. The truth is only that Hegel is obscure and Schelling even more obscure; and the one who finds this is the one who will most easily come to terms with things—a piece of wisdom that roughly corresponds to the point of view of studying the world not when it is illuminated by the sun but at night, when all cats are black or gray. But anyone who today surveys the British judgment on the necessity of what is happening within the German character will perhaps be reminded of such “deeply understanding” words, especially when these words are used primarily to conceal what is actually taking effect and what one does not want to admit even to oneself. The present-day British really need a new mask to characterize their relationship to the Germans, and the foreign philosophers need a new sophistry to disparage Germany – a new sophistry that they have found since the outbreak of the war.

And the Italians? They also need something to reassure them about their own actions at the present time. Without arrogance, the German may say: it will uplift him within the difficult world situation when he thinks of the duty the world spirit has assigned to him, as he gains self-knowledge and this becomes knowledge of the German essence. What he should do will flow to him as realization from the realization of the German essence. When D'Annunzio spoke his resounding words before the Italian war broke out, he truly did not delve as deeply into Italian national character as he could have. But it is not for us Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in what the Roman spirit has created, to believe that d'Annunzio's hollow words really come from the deepest essence of Italian culture; but that they come from the motives that d'Annunzio needs to justify himself. The others needed sophistry, masks, to remove the causes of the war from their own soil, so to speak. The Italian needed something else, a justification that we have already seen emerging in recent years, a strange justification: he needed a new saint, a saint appointed from within the ranks of the profane, “holy egoism”. We see it recurring again and again, and it is to this that we see the representatives of Italian character repeatedly appeal. A new saint was needed to justify what had been done.

Perhaps it will lead the objective, unbiased observer of the German character to a position within today's historical events; because German character does not arise from such sophistry, such masks, nor from the “appointment of a new saint”, but from human nature, from what this human nature allows to be expressed, from what the national spirit of the German people has revealed to the best minds of this people have revealed to this people, but also what these spirits hoped for the people, because that is also a peculiarity of this German nature, which can be described by saying that the German always sought to direct his soul's gaze to what was aroused in him from the scene of thoughts, and from this he also wanted to recognize what hope he could harbor for what his people could achieve.

And today, when we need to develop love, a great deal of love, for what the ancestors of the German character have established within the German national soul and national strength, in order to place ourselves in today's historical events through this love, today, when we need faith in the strength of the present, today when we need confident hope for the success of that which the German character must achieve in the future. Today, we can look at what Germans have always loved, believed, and hoped for in the context of their past, present, and future. And so let us end with the words of a man who is indeed unknown today in the widest circles, but who in lonely thought wanted to fathom the popular and the intellectual of Goethe's Faust in those years of German life in which Germany had not yet produced the German state in its modern form. In those years, which preceded the deeds of the German power, in the sixties, a lonely thinker was concerned with the idea: in imagination, in the life of the soul, in idealism, the German wanted to rise to the highest that can only somehow be sensed by him. He had to develop a strength that must lie in his nature and that gives us hope that this strength will be fruitful, victorious in action. A simple German Faust observer, an observer of poetry that truly shows that German nature holds future forces, is quoted with his words. By pointing to words that Goethe himself, intuitively placing himself in the German future, spoke as a 65-year-old old man, he ties his own words to them and says:

"The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
the primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through rocks as through books.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
will never live in the scholarly hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken her,
She has taken the glass from the hothouse with her.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
A mild light will still pour forth,
From whose reflection of those stars
The late grandchildren will learn to see,
To report in prophetically higher visions
Of God and humanity higher things.»

And the Faust viewer from the sixties continues:

"Let us add the wish that the Master's word, which looks down on us from better stars with a mild light, may come true in its people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and urge, but with God's will, with indestructible strength, and that in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of Faust expects of the coming centuries, German deed too may no longer be a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!

We believe that such hopes, expressed by the best of Germans from the deepest German national sentiment, may be fulfilled in our own day, out of the blood and the creative energy of our courageous and active people. We believe that in these difficult days the German can develop to his strength, over which the atmosphere of hatred spreads, still another: that he can vividly grasp to strengthen his strength the love for what has been handed down in spirit and strength, in the life and work of his fathers as a sacred legacy, because he can be convinced that he, by permeating himself with this love for the past, he will find the strength to believe; because in this faith and this love he may find the hope for those fruits that must blossom for the German people out of blood and suffering, but also out of the blessed deed of the present, which the German performs not out of bellicosity but out of devotion to a necessity imposed on him by history. Thus, in the present difficult times, what may support, uplift and guide the German through the difficult struggle in which he finds himself is integrated into German life, German work, German feeling and sentiment: love for the German past, faith in the German present, confident hope for the German future.

For many years now, I have been giving the lectures on spiritual science during the winter season from this very place. I have always tried to begin these lectures with a consideration of the connection between the particular view of the spiritual world that is represented within this spiritual science, as it is meant here, and the general spiritual life. And already last winter, I tried — which must be particularly obvious in our present fateful time — to turn my attention to the feelings that are currently living within the German people, to that time of German spiritual development in which, out of the very core of the German being, a connection, a living together with the spiritual world, was sought in a truly idealistic form. In our time, in which the German nation must defend itself against a world of enemies in its existence, in its hopes for existence, it must be particularly obvious to look to the time of which one of the most popular historians of the German nation says: it is the time in which the idealistic spirits of this German nation have shown that even in times of extreme distress, in times of extreme hostility, the German character is able to salvage that greatness which can be saved by cultivating the spiritual life, as it appears to be inherent in the very deepest characteristics of this nation. We need not fall into the error of our opponents, who today believe, in such a strange and peculiar way, that they must particularly characterize the importance of their own nation by belittling the nature of the opponents. We need not fall into the error, for example, of those of whom we now hear that the German Weltanschauung itself must have seduced them into leading the German people into the most savage warfare. We can, without making the mistake of belittling our opponents, turn our attention to what the German people believe, must believe, according to their very nature: that their world-historical task is rooted in the deepest inwardness of their nature. And there is no need, as so many of Germany's enemies do today, to form an opinion about the popular, be it one's own or that of another people, out of direct hatred and antipathy in the present.

And so let us take as our starting-point for today's consideration an idea which an outstanding mind, relatively calm, was able to form in a time long before our own fateful time. This idea was formed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller's great friend, who was able to delve so wonderfully into the essence of the development of humanity, who knew how to depict the needs of man within the development of world history in such a subtle way, In 1830, when Wilhelm von Humboldt looked back on what Schiller's friendship meant to him, but also on what Schiller's significance for the development of the German people was, on what Schiller's entire intellectual development was, he expressed himself in the following way about the German essence:

Thus someone who has devoted much thought to the feelings that go with knowing this points to what he had to believe lies in the task and the immediate destiny of the German people.

And when we look at what has shaped the German character from the spiritual side in the great age when German idealism raised Germanness to the stage of thought; and when we point to the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century with all what had developed up to the immediate phase of development of our time, then we see something that cannot be grasped by the certainly significant but not very lofty concept, let us say, of the internationality of science and the like, which, insofar as it concerns science, is self-evident. But what emerged so powerfully in Germany's greatest periods in terms of intellectual development was that at that time, through those minds that felt so intimately connected to German nationality, such as Fichte, for example, the question of the whole significance of knowledge, of what man can achieve through the knowledge that he develops as science; the question of the relationship of this knowledge to the secret of the world, to the eternal-working, eternal-spiritual in the world itself. That knowledge has been called into question, that knowledge itself has become a mystery, and that it is precisely through this tendency towards the mysteriousness of knowledge that man has had to make the matter of this knowledge a personal and yet objective and factual human interest, that is the tremendously significant thing is how one can feel connected in every fiber of one's being to what man can achieve through an ideal in his striving, through the pursuit of knowledge; how one can strive for knowledge full of light and yet still raise the question: Can one go beyond this knowledge, or rather must one go beyond this knowledge if one wants to arrive at the deepest thing that connects man to the eternal sources of existence? And the reason why this riddle could present itself to the German soul in its best minds in a particularly intense way lies in the fact that during the period of German idealism, the striving asserted itself to have knowledge not only as something that something that teaches you about the world in terms of concepts, something you can stand coolly opposed to in your desire to dissect the phenomena of the world, but to have knowledge as something that lives in the whole soul and sustains the human being. It was precisely out of this yearning for the vitality of knowledge, out of this intimate feeling of connection with knowledge, that the great riddles of knowledge arose. It seems as if one only wants to have knowledge, only wants to cultivate a science, if this science can really live in such a way that one can also find the way to the sources of existence in the experiencing of knowledge.

It is appealing to see how German minds want to live in their knowledge, in their science, in a much higher sense than is usually meant when one speaks of the connection between life and science. Last winter, in a similar context, I tried to characterize Fichte's idiosyncrasy, this noble German spirit who, in one of the most difficult times in the development of the German people, placed his spiritual striving entirely at the service of his people, who, from the depth of his spirit, found the most wonderful words of power to inspire German enthusiasm. The way in which he felt connected with the pursuit of knowledge, and how he strove to rise to German idealism, is part of what Fichte was able to be to his people. A picture that has been preserved for us can illustrate this beautifully. Forberg, who heard Fichte speak when he tried to bring to life, from the depths of his striving for wisdom, what he saw as his connection with the weaving, ruling world spirit, said the following beautiful words about Fichte's way of speaking about spiritual matters:

And if one wants to characterize Fichte's German nature, one must point out how, by wanting to rule in the realm of concepts, he sought within this realm of concepts something that was more than what is often called concepts and ideas, something that was a revival of those forces of the human soul, which are one with the creative powers of all existence, those creative powers that live outside in nature, that have placed man himself in nature, that guide and direct historical life, that interweave and permeate all existence. But in order to gain such a view in full vitality, Fichte could not stop at the abstractness of the concepts, at concepts that are only views. For this he needed concepts that were directly experienced and imbued with soul by an element of activity that not only illuminates the human soul, but also strengthens it, so that this human soul, by first withdrawing from the external world, feels connected to the very innermost part of reality. And so Johann Gottlieb Fichte directed his contemplation to something living in the human soul, something that is being willed into existence. And what he sensed there, as flowing into his will, he experienced as if the divine spiritual forces that permeate and interweave the world were entering the soul, and the soul itself felt at rest within the divine experience. If one wishes to call this trait in Johann Gottlieb Fichte mystical, then one must remove from this expression everything that brings any kind of nebulousness into the world view; one must then bring this concept together with everything that is the highest energy of knowledge in Fichte's entire striving. Then German idealism appears as if compressed into a focal point, not only when Fichte talks about German nationality, but especially when he speaks of the highest matters to which his thinking and, one might say, his inner experience turns. In his attempt to visualize the ruling will in his own soul and to make it come alive before those to whom he speaks, he speaks about this will as if he were aware that the innermost essence of the whole world lives in this will. He speaks as if he himself felt the exalted will of the world pulsating in the human soul's own will, when this human soul, in its striving for knowledge, goes back to the innermost outflow and activity of the will itself. Fichte speaks wonderful words here:

Thus Fichte addresses what he senses as the will of the world by deepening his quest for knowledge, so that it may find what, in the innermost part of the soul, holds that soul together with the sources of existence; that from which the soul must create if it wants to feel that its creation in harmony with the historical and eternal powers that guide all existence itself. That science, through an idealistic consideration of life, must lead to such a grasp of human inwardness that in this inwardness, at the same time, the innermost of the world's existence in human striving is embraced, that is the basic feature of German idealism. And with this idealism, Fichte's philosophical comrades basically also face the great riddles of existence. |

From a certain point of view, I tried last winter to present this very arena of thought within German idealism and the world view of this German idealism. I undertook to show how Fichte tried to grasp the world through the experience of the innermost nature of the human will itself, by wanting to grasp the human soul where the will can delve into it. I wanted to show how Fichte, in his attempt to penetrate to the human ego in its essence, could not be satisfied with grasping this ego in being or in mere thinking, in the sense of Descartes with his “I think , therefore I am”, but how Fichte wanted to grasp the self, the innermost essence of the human soul, in such a way that there lies in it something that can never lose its existence because it can create this existence anew in every moment. Fichte wanted to show the living, ever creative will as the source of the human ego; not by a judgment of the kind: I think, that is something, therefore I am — not by that did Fichte want to find the essence of the ego, but by showing that even if this ego were not in any given moment, or if it could be said of it, on the basis of some evidence, that it were not, then this judgment would be invalid on the grounds that this ego is a creative one, because it can, in every moment, generate its existence anew out of the depths of this ego. In this perpetual re-creation, in this continuity of the creative, in this connection with the creative of the world, Fichte tried to recognize the essence of the ego in the will, to preserve it in the will, to shape the striving for knowledge in a living way.

And Schelling, Fichte's philosophical companion, who in many respects went so far beyond him, placed himself before nature in such a way that nature was not for him what it otherwise is in many respects for external science: a sum of phenomena that one dissects; rather, for Schelling, nature was to the human spirit in its nature, except that the human spirit stands in the present, experiences itself, but nature has lived through this spirit, so that it now rests enchanted in it, so that it hides behind its veil and reveals itself through its external appearances. Just as one regards a person in relation to his physiognomy, not only describing this physiognomy formally like a statue, but looking through the physiognomy to what is the living soul life, what looks through the physiognomic features, what spiritualizes and warms the outer form. Through the outer phenomena of nature, through the outer revelations as through the physiognomy of nature, Schelling wanted to go back to what is spiritual in nature, to unite the spirit in the soul with the spirit in nature. And from this arose in him that one-sided but bold way of striving for knowledge, which is expressed in Schelling's saying: “To comprehend nature is to create nature!” That in the human soul there could be something that only needs to be dragged into creative, living existence, and by so doing, not creating the outer phenomena of nature, but creating images that are the same as what lives behind nature, is expressed in the words: “To understand nature is to create nature!” Today, there is truly no need to take this philosophy of German idealism dogmatically; one need not be a follower of it, that is not the point. What is important is to get to know the power and inner soul from which such a direction of spiritual life arises. And so someone could be an opponent of the dogmas of German idealism in the fullest sense of the word, but find something resiliently alive, something that carries the future, in the way the human soul wanted to penetrate into the deepest secrets of existence back then.

And in this context, we may refer to Hegel, the third in this series, who was not afraid to ascend into the coldest realms of pure thought. For Hegel believed that when the soul withdraws from all the warmth of external observation, from all direct resting in natural existence, when it is all alone with the concepts that live in the soul in such a way that this soul is no longer present with its arbitrariness in the thinking of the concepts, but the soul abandons itself to the process of how one concept arises from the other, how concepts prevail within her, without her turning in any way to anything other than to these prevailing pure, crystal-clear and transparent concepts, which she lets prevail and weave within her as they themselves want, not as the soul wills, - then, Hegel believed, in this process, in this flowing of concepts, a union of the soul with the ruling world spirit itself, which lives out itself in concepts, which, through the millions of years, by sending its concepts commanding through infinity, allowed the outer world to emerge from the condensation of these concepts and then placed man into it so that man can awaken in his soul these concepts from which the world itself emerged. Is it really one-sided, the way Hegel delves into the world of existence by trying to penetrate to the sources of existence by squeezing out all other reality from the pure world of concepts? Is it one-sided in the sense that the World-Spirit, which flows and weaves through the world as if it were a mere logician, conjure up the world out of pure logic, this striving, which arises directly from the German essence and German nature, also shows how the German spirit, in its striving for knowledge, by its very nature seeks to connect with that which lives in the soul, that which can be directly beheld in the soul in its inwardness and which, by being thus beheld, simultaneously seizes the spirit flowing in the world. The fundamental principle of this striving is the seizing of the world-spirit by the spirit developed in the soul. And even if the right way of relating to world-life and its knowledge can only be solved by the human soul in a reasonably satisfactory way in the farthest, farthest future, the way in which it has been attempted within German idealism , this way of seeking the world spirit is so intimately connected with the German essence and at the same time it is the way in which, in our time, the eternal must be sought in the temporal human soul.

One can see how closely interwoven with German striving this kind of knowledge is when, at the dawn of the newer spiritual striving, one looks at how two phenomena confront each other at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century; that is, the time when those forces first emerged that gave the newer world view the impulses for European development. It is interesting to see how the German soul relates to this dawn of intellectual life, for example, by juxtaposing two images from the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Regardless of one's own opinion of this remarkable spirit, let us consider him only in the context of the development of modern spiritual striving, if one places Jakob Böhme and compares him with a contemporary striving spirit in Western Europe, with a spirit who is also characteristic of his people, as Jakob Böhme is characteristic of his people, with Montaigne.

Montaigne is also a great and important figure, expressing one of the elements that arise at the dawn of the modern intellectual life. He is the great doubter. He is the one who, from within French culture, receives the following impulse: Let us look at the world. It reveals its secrets to us through our senses. We will try to reveal these secrets through our thinking. But who can say, in any way, that the senses do not deceive; that what is revealed to the senses from the depths of the world can somehow have a connection, which can be visualized, with the sources of existence. And who can deny, this great doubter asks, that if one does not rely on the senses, but on judgment, on thinking, if one seeks evidence and each piece of evidence in turn demands evidence, and the new proof in turn demands another proof, that one can then proceed along the chain of proofs and must also proceed, because everything that one believes to have proven appears fleeting when one looks at it more closely. Neither thinking nor sensual observation can provide any certainty. Therefore, a wise man, according to Montaigne, is one who does not seek such certainty at all; who has an inner irony about the phenomena of the world and about the knowledge of the sources of existence; who knows that although one can reflect on and observe all things , but that one thereby acquires only a knowledge that one can just as well admit as reject, without having any hope of attaining anything else through spiritual striving than precisely such a thing to which one can only relate doubtfully and ironically.

At the same time, within the German being stands Jakob Böhme, who undertakes the journey into the depths of the human soul by means of mere inner development of soul powers, by mere immersion in what the soul can draw up from its depths. And in the fact that he finds these depths of the human soul in the way he believes he is able to find them, he was clear about it, he was convinced that by descending into the depths of the human soul, he at the same time hears the sources of all existence, natural and spiritual, of all comprehensive existence, flowing into these depths. For Jakob Böhme, descending into the depths of the soul also means reaching out into the divine spiritual life that governs the world. And so Jakob Böhme sought this path; that in this path there can be no question of doubt or of an ironic mood in the Montaignean sense, because Jakob Böhme in his way is clear about the fact that he lives in the spirit, because one cannot doubt that in which one lives, in which one co-creates by immersing oneself in it. And one would like to say: Only a revival of this endeavor of Jakob Böhme's in a higher form lies in what lives on the scene of German idealism through the spirits just mentioned. And these just mentioned spirits basically all turn their gaze to a personality who – however much this has been doubted from a narrow-minded point of view – in her entire being, in her entire nature, emerged from the deepest popular German culture, to Goethe. And Fichte, the philosopher who was only struggling for clarity, who was never satisfied if he could not express what he had to say in concepts with sharp outlines, Fichte, who could be considered a dry, sober man of knowledge — that was not his way, but that is what characterizes his striving characterizes – who could be thought of as far, far removed from Goethe in the nature of his being, – Fichte addressed beautiful words to Goethe in which he wanted to express how he tried to align himself with the highest that he strove to bring forth, with what Goethe was by nature. When Fichte had brought the first, most abstract, one might say coldest, most historical, form of his “Wissenschaftslehre” to print, he presented the book to Goethe and wrote to him:

“I regard you and have always regarded you as the representative (of the purest spirituality of feeling) at the present level of humanity. It is to you that philosophy rightly turns. Your feeling is the same touchstone!”

Words that each of the others could have addressed to Goethe in the same way, and indeed each of them did address to Goethe in one way or another, as history shows.

And when Schiller, in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”, which, as I allowed myself to characterize here last winter, have been far too little appreciated, tried to answer the question from the depths of Kantian philosophy: How must the human soul strive in order to truly come to live together with the spirit of the world in freedom in the harmonious interaction of all its powers? And when Schiller turned his gaze to Goethe, he saw in him something like the German spirit in one of its centers, seeking to bring forth before the world, out of the deepest inwardness of his being, the highest that he had come to. Schiller admired the pure, free humanity of the ancient Greeks, that pure, free humanity that, on the one hand, is allowed to turn to external nature, but which does not allow this nature to have such an external hold on it as the more recent spiritual striving, in which man becomes unfree in his striving in the face of the coherence of nature. This Greek nature, which on the other hand became so aware of itself in the depths of its soul that it sensed itself as nature itself, also in its innermost being, this Greek element, which stood before Schiller's soul like a model of all human striving and living, Schiller saw it shine anew in Goethe's nature and life in the face of the newer spirit of the people. And Schiller characterized this at about the same time as Fichte wrote the words just quoted to Goethe, in a letter to Goethe with the following words:

"For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have been watching the course of your mind and have noted the path you have set out on with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary for nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route, which any weaker force would do well to avoid. You take all of nature to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the explanatory basis for the individual. Step by step, you ascend from the simple organization to the more complicated, in order to finally build the most complicated of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature. By recreating him in nature, as it were, you seek to penetrate his hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea, which shows sufficiently how much your mind holds the rich totality of its conceptions together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would be enough for such a goal, but even just to embark on such a path is worth more than any other ending – and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad, between Phthia and immortality. If you had been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and if from your cradle you had been surrounded by a refined nature and idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. You would have absorbed the form of the necessary into the first view of things, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now that you have been born a German, now that your Greek spirit has been thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but to either become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace what reality withheld from your imagination by the application of your powers of thought, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way, so to speak.” The creative force that arises from the deepest inwardness, that not only creates the present, but that even gives birth to the past anew out of its own essence: the Goethean spirit. In this letter, Schiller selflessly characterizes it wonderfully, in which he truly laid the foundation for the friendship between these two minds, Goethe and Schiller; Schiller wonderfully characterizes this inwardness of the creation of the Goethean spirit. And truly, Goethe appears in the image of German idealism with all his striving.

Therefore, out of the striving of Goethe's personality, a poetic figure could arise that – I do not believe that one has to be prejudiced to say this – is uniquely placed in world literature and in the whole of world creation, the figure of Faust. How does he stand there, this Faust? As the highest representative of human striving, but still – after all, he is a university professor at heart – as a representative of the striving for knowledge, for knowledge! And right at the beginning of Faust, what becomes a riddle, what becomes a big question? Knowledge itself, the striving for knowledge becomes a question! Two elements come to life in this Faustian legend. And one must point out this living out of the two elements if one wants to understand the basic character of Goethe's Faustian creation on the one hand and, on the other hand, its connection with the innermost nature of German spiritual striving.

Of course, the term magic and everything connected with it is not exactly popular today. But Goethe was compelled to place his Faust before magic, after knowledge and insight had become a question, a riddle, for Faust. And the fact that today we are able to separate everything that is conventionally associated with the concept of magic from a deeper spiritual striving will be my particular task tomorrow in the lecture where I want to speak about the eternal powers of the human soul. But the way in which Goethe has Faust turn to magic can perhaps be thought of as quite separate from all the wild superstition and nebulous striving associated with the word magic and with magical striving in general. One can overlook secondary matters and look at the main thing, namely, the fundamental human striving as expressed in Faust. Why must Faust, who has really been involved in all human sciences, wanted to gain clarity in all human sciences about that which underlies existence as a source, why must Faust turn to magic, to a completely different way of interacting with nature than is the case with the ordinary pursuit of knowledge? Why? Because Faust has experienced everything that can be experienced in the pursuit of knowledge; because he has experienced everything that can be felt by a person who has a yearning for the depths of the nature of the world; everything that can be felt by a person when he feels alive in himself, which external science can comprehend. This science visualizes the laws of nature in concepts, in ideas. But do I exist with these concepts, or do I only have something in these concepts that weaves itself as a ghost in my own soul and that perhaps, with regard to this image, is clearly, but not with regard to its life, directly connected to the sources of existence? What forces itself into the soul as a question of this kind can be felt in different ways. It can be felt weakly, but it can also be felt strongly, so that the enigma that lives itself into the soul through these feelings becomes like a nightmare from which this human soul wants to free itself. For the soul can say to itself: All this knowledge is only something that one forms on the basis of existence. All this knowledge is something that has been subtracted from existence. But I must still descend into existence with what I experience in myself.

What one might say Schelling believed in his presumptuousness, Faust cannot believe: that by living in concepts, one creates in nature. Rather, he wants to descend into nature. He wants to seek out nature where it lives in creation. He wants to unfold an activity that is such that the human soul accomplishes it, but which, in that this activity is within the soul, is both creating nature and creating soul at the same time. Because Faust cannot do this in any other way, he tries to do it by seeking to invigorate within himself the path that ancient magicians have tried. Faust tries to have something in his soul that does not merely depict nature in terms within him, but that appears to him in what lives and creates behind appearances. He seeks to bring the spiritual in the creative power of nature, which flows and weaves through the world, which surges up and down in the tides of life and the storm of action, not only into knowledge, but seeks to connect with it in a living way. He seeks the path to it in such a way that the spiritual creation of nature stands beside him, as the soul of a human being stands embodied here in physical existence, so that one experiences existence, not just knows about it.

And in this way Faust stands before nature in the same way as—one need only point to a spirit like Jakob Böhme, in his own way, one need only look at that which underlies German philosophical striving in the idealistic period—Faust, yearning , yearning for knowledge, expecting certain achievements, to which he wants to rise, so in the face of nature, so next to nature, as befits the innermost life and weaving of the German spirit: to create nature in the soul and to let it become living science, living knowledge. That is why Goethe has to bring his Faust together with magic.

There is something else that Goethe brings together with his Faust, something that perhaps even more than the magical element that confronts us in the first scenes and then continues in what I would call a directly dramatic way, while it loses itself as a magical element – which seems perhaps even more wonderful than this magical element for this Goethean Faustian poem, which is now also intimately interwoven with the spiritual striving of the German people.

Let us try – as I said, without pronouncing dogmatically or in any way on the value – to place ourselves in the position of Jakob Böhme; let us try to bring to life before our soul one of the aspects of Jakob Böhme's striving. A great question confronts Jakob Böhme with regard to the riddle of existence, the question that arises from the contemplation of the world when one says: The world is governed by the World Spirit in its goodness, in its wisdom. He who is able to immerse himself in the spirit of the world senses the surging of the world's wisdom, the surging of the world's benevolence. But evil intrudes, evil in the form of suffering, evil in the form of human deeds. If we do not look at the abstraction of the thought, but at a striving for knowledge that is based on feeling and emotion, a striving for knowledge that takes hold of the whole person, we stand in awe at the way in which Jakob Böhme raises the question of the origin of evil. He cannot avoid saying to himself: the spirit of the world, the divine spirit of the world, must be thought of as connected with the sources of life; but one does not find the origin of evil by immersing oneself in the spirit of the world. And yet evil is there. — With tremendous intensity, the question of the origin of evil arises in the quest for knowledge of Jakob Böhme. He seeks to answer it by asking about evil, as one might ask about the origin of the deeds of light. What Jakob Böhme has developed in depth can only be illustrated here through this comparison, for the sake of brevity. For, just as one can never derive from the light that which appears as the deeds of light, but always needs darkness for this; just as one can never derive darkness, with which light must appear together, from the light itself, but rather one must go to this source of light if one wants to examine the deeds of light in external nature, Jakob Böhme attempts to find the essence, not merely the principle, of evil, not in the Divine either, but in that which takes its place beside the Divine, like the shadow, like the darkness beside the light, which one does not seek in the light, but for which one does not need reasons in the same way as for the light itself. He seeks to find it by undertaking the previously characterized journey into the depths of the soul and at the same time trying to grasp the existence of the world at its sources in the soul. Thus he does not confront evil as something that can be recognized in a concept, but as something that he tries to grasp in its reality. In his attitude towards evil as something that cannot be grasped conceptually but only in reality, Schelling is followed in his very significant treatise “Philosophical Investigations Concerning the Essence of Human Freedom and the Related Objects”, 1809. Schelling consciously follows Jakob Böhme in his search for evil.

Goethe, from the depths of the German soul, sensed this riddle of evil in a completely different way. Just think what a challenge it was to create a work of poetry in the way that Goethe did in his Faust. On the one hand, Goethe had to present a purely inward striving, which, after all, could only be expressed, one might think, by depicting a person who presents himself to the world lyrically. Goethe seeks to bring it to dramatic life as Faust stands before the world. He does this, however, by allowing what lives in the soul to shine through in such a way that it is inwardly alive in the soul and becomes external. The dramatic not only places the human being in the world as he stands in it lyrically, but also as he stands in it actively. This enables Goethe, as a dramatist must, to lead man out of subjectivity, out of the mere inwardness of the being into the outer world. But one should try to imagine what a challenge lay in what can be characterized in the following way. Now Faust is to strive, as man does when he lets the riddles of existence take effect on him, to go forward in the world, to become a fighter in the world. And yet such struggles, which arise from the riddles of knowledge, are inner struggles. As a rule, man stands alone in this, and as a rule nothing dramatic is connected with it. Dramas proceed differently, in that one simply lets the interior of the human soul unroll. What enabled Goethe to transform what is basically only an internal matter of the human soul into a vivid dramatic image? Simply by the fact that, just as he brings the human soul out into nature through magic on the one hand, on the other hand he brings this human soul out into the big wide world by trying to show that when one seeks out seeks out evil and wants to experience it in its reality, one cannot understand it merely as an inner principle and seek an inner explanation for it, but one must step out into life as it confronts one full of life. Therefore, Goethe cannot direct his attention to evil in such a way that he finds something in him that is mere philosophy, but he must direct his attention to the essence, to one who fights Faust, to one who is the embodiment of evil, who is as alive as the principle of evil as man is alive here in his physical body. And he must be able to feel and show that the fight against evil is not just an abstract, inward struggle, but that it is a struggle that is waged hourly, momentarily, in which man lives. In everything he does, he essentially encounters evil. Thus this obstacle was overcome. What is otherwise an abstract philosophical principle was brought into direct existence, into essential existence. Walking, changing, acting, fighting were brought about, which one otherwise speaks about. For these reasons, on the one hand, the magical element had to be revived in Faust, in that Faust tries to penetrate the shell of nature. On the other hand, evil had to be contrasted with Faust as something essential, something that is much more than what is usually called an idea or a concept; something that is usually conceived as living only within the soul had to be embodied, placed out into the world. And so in poetry, too, there was a need to resort to that deepening of the conception of evil which we find as such a wonderful fundamental trait of the German spiritual striving, from Jakob Böhme up through all the deeper German spirits who cannot satisfy themselves by seeking evil only in philosophical concepts, but who want to go out into the world. And in going out into the world, they encounter evil just as one encounters another human being in the physical world. In order to spiritually unlock the inner world, the striving had to connect with such a view of evil. That is to say, just as nature is to be sensed through magic to its sources, so spiritual life is to be placed in the context of human life by showing evil itself as a spiritually active being. Thus, as a poet, Goethe elevates man to the realm of the ideal, but of the living ideal.

And he was faced with a dilemma in yet another way: he, the great artist, of whom Schiller said that he could give birth to a Greece out of his own inwardness. He was faced with a dilemma in yet another way, one that we may only gradually come to see in its full significance. In Faust, we see the striving human being. Many commentators on Faust have emphasized the fact that Goethe did a great deed in having Faust redeemed, in not allowing Faust to perish, as was the case in earlier representations of Faust, but in having him redeemed, because, in accordance with the newer world view, one must assume that within man lie the forces that can achieve victory over evil. Yes, what this actually means for the overall view of the Faust epic is something that is not usually considered. One says, offhand: Goethe's Faust could only become what it is if Goethe had the idea from the very beginning to take into account the innermost nature of man in such a way that Faust could be redeemed. One imagines a drama, one imagines a work of art that takes place in time and that is supposed to be great, in such a way that one knows from the beginning what must come out in the end. And that is what it should actually be. For man, as one so often says, must bring with him his convictions from the highest riddles of life. Actually, nothing more and nothing less is expressed by this than that “Faust” should, by its very nature, be the most boring piece of writing in the world. After all, every pedant today knows, or at least believes he knows, that if man strives correctly, he should ultimately be redeemed. And now one of the greatest poets is to present a grandiose world poem in order to show this self-evident truth through all possible forms! And yet, Goethe has succeeded in embodying the thought just expressed, not in some abstract way, but in presenting living life before us through a long, long series of images. Why? Simply because he has shown how that which, when inwardly conceived in abstract thoughts, would be a mere truism, a matter of course, is set forth in life in a completely different way; because he attempts to extend life, on the one hand, in the direction of the magical , on the other hand, towards the spiritual side; because the striving for nature is not a striving for knowledge but a magical one; because the striving for evil or the recognition of evil is not just a philosophical matter but a matter of life. How does something become a matter of life that is otherwise only the soul's inner, abstract striving? It becomes a matter of life when the human being, when he stands before nature in the same way that Faust stands before nature in the sense of his striving, wants to go beyond abstract knowledge. He wants to go beyond that which can only live in concepts, which spins itself out as ideas, as concepts. He wants to enter into the sphere of nature, where there is creative life, with which the soul's own creative life connects, in order to go beyond nature's creation through mere abstract conceptual life.

But when you take hold of the matter in full life, you enter into that in man from which man in turn emerges by being able to acquire consciousness in his concepts. One need only go back to what, for example, the Greek Stoics strove for in their earnest quest for knowledge. They wanted a wisdom that would smooth the world, that would survey the world, and that would have nothing to do with human passion. Man should become dispassionate, dispassionate, in order to feel his soul absorbed in the calm conceptual grasping of the wisdom that pervades the world. Why did the Stoics want this? Because they felt that one comes out of a certain intoxication of life, out of a half-unconscious immersion in life, by coming to dispassionate understanding. Stoicism consists precisely in the search for a life free of intoxication.

Now, in the course of human evolution, the personality that is to be represented in Faust stands before nature in such a way that knowledge becomes a question for it, the very thing by which man tries to save himself from the intoxication of life. He can enter into the intoxication of life by immersing himself with the creative powers of the soul, but he does not absorb the same powers with which he has just risen, but rather he submerges himself seeking to connect the foundations of the soul with the foundations of nature. But from this arises what is now the error of Faust in the first part of the story, the submerging into sensuality, into sensual life, even into the outer trivial life, which he must undergo in his own personality because he is to connect what lives in his own personality, what lives in the depths of his soul, with what lives in the depths of world existence. The task of the first part of Faust and also of a large part of the second part is to present in a lively way the error by which man can be tested in his soul.

To what extent man, by wanting to grasp the world personally, the world in its power through knowledge, exposes himself to the danger of being submerged in the personal and being drawn into the whirlpool of life, is depicted in “Faust”. And that does not depend on some abstract doctrine, but on the will, on the character of this Faust. It is only through this that the poem becomes a poem. And on the other hand, since the human being strives for a real knowledge of evil and is not satisfied with a principal, conceptual understanding of evil, he must break through the ordinary life of the soul; for there he finds only concepts, ideas and feelings. He must go through this soul life, he must go to the place where man, without seeing the essential reality through the senses, perceives an essential reality through the pure soul experiences, from the spirit. This becomes the task of the one who wants to recognize evil in its reality through direct experience. This becomes the task of Faust in relation to Mephistopheles. But man cannot approach evil at all as he is at first. It is virtually impossible to approach evil as man is at first; for one must know the world, and one can only know it by knowing it in the soul. One must form concepts. One must have in one's soul that which can be experienced in one's soul. After all, as newer philosophers have so rightly and so wrongly asserted, one cannot transcend one's consciousness. But if one remains in consciousness, evil remains only an abstract concept, does not appear in essence.

Faust is faced with a great, so to speak, impossible task. But great, as it says in “Faust” itself, is “he who desires the impossible”. Faust is faced with the virtually impossible task of going beyond that which is the sole source of his consciousness, of going out of consciousness. This will be his further path, the path out of the ordinary consciousness of the soul. Tomorrow we will speak about the path of knowledge out of the ordinary consciousness to those realms where the spirit is grasped directly as spirit. This stands before Faust as a task. He cannot find evil in its essential nature in the field to which consciousness is initially directed. Therefore, he must again, and now not in a general, trivial, abstract way, come to find the reconciliation of man with existence, but in the way that he is able to do so as an individual human being. It must be shown how he finds his way out of ordinary consciousness to an understanding of life that now comes from deeper forces of the soul.

Thus we see Faust going, I might say, everywhere touching and feeling the existence of the world, feeling it inwardly, to see where he can find the gate through which he can penetrate into the inner being. Thus we see how he soars so high that, having transformed the soul and transformed it more and more, he really descends in experience to those depths towards which Jacob Boehme strove and which are then hinted at to us in the second part of “Faust” that Faust finds something widest, greatest, highest and at the same time deepest, which he had already striven for in his walk to the Mothers, in that his senses fail him, in that he goes blind and in his inner being inner bright light comes to life. Out of the ordinary consciousness, to a different consciousness, to a consciousness that slumbers in the depths of the soul, as the depths of the sources of nature slumber under the shell of nature that one sees with the outer senses, to a deeper consciousness that always accompanies man between birth and death, but that is not present in the ordinary field of consciousness. Faust must be guided in two ways through the strengthening of the spiritual life to the gates that lead from the abstractness of the idea to the livingness of spiritual existence itself: As a magician, Faust knocks at the gate of existence, which leads from mere observation of nature to co-creation with nature; in his dealings, in the living, dramatic dealings with Mephistopheles and with all that is structured by them, Faust knocks at the other gate, at that other gate that leads from the ordinary consciousness of the soul to a superconscious, supersensible consciousness, which opens up a spiritual world, from which evil also really originates, behind the ordinary existence of the soul, just as external natural revelation is only the expression of that which lives and moves entirely in nature.

Through the connection with what, one can say, is peculiar to the German national spirit, Goethe created a piece of writing that could only become a piece of writing in the most difficult sense. For the most non-sensuous, the most distant from the senses, the purely inward, was to be shaped dramatically. But this inwardness can only become dramatic if it is expanded in two directions. And Goethe sensed the necessity of this expansion in two directions. In doing so, he created the possibility of placing this unique poetry, which in a sense no one else in another nation would have conceived in the same way, into the world evolution.

If one has these thoughts, one can perhaps still raise the question: Yes, but did Goethe not actually create a work of art that requires a great deal of preparation to understand? It almost seems that way. For the commentaries that scholars, both German and non-German, have written about Goethe's “Faust” fill several libraries, not just one. But if one were to believe that a great deal of preparation is needed to understand the Faust epic, then the thought must arise: what did Goethe actually make this Faust epic out of? Was it the result of a philosophical quest? Was it speculation about the magical foundations of nature? Or was it speculation about the sources and origins of evil? No, truly not! He saw the puppet show, a pure folk performance, the folk play of Faust, which was presented to the simplest minds. He transformed what lives and breathes in it according to his own mind. The Faust legend, therefore, presents us with a work of art and a work of the spirit in the best sense of the words. If we look only at the most general aspect of its origin, it shows how this summit of German intellectual life has its source in the most direct folklore, that is, in the most elementary of the folk spirit, and how German idealistic intellectual striving is connected with the essence of the German folk spirit. It can also be proved historically from the origin of the highest poetry of mankind from the simplest folk drama. This is a significant world-historical drama, that a spirit that can delve so deeply into the folklore in its inner work, like Goethe, is able to create something supreme out of the most primitive folklore, something supreme that, as we have been able to show, is also connected to the most significant philosophical pursuit, to the philosophical idealistic pursuit in Germany's great intellectual period. In Faust — as I said, these things must not be taken dogmatically — we see the striving Fichte. How? Fichte does not seek to grasp being and the ego by bringing thought to consciousness, as Descartes and Cartesius did. Instead, Fichte seeks to grasp being and the ego by connecting with the world-creating powers that play into the inner soul, so that the ego creates itself in every moment. We see this, only translated into the dramatic will, into the directly living, flashing up again in Faust. Faust is not satisfied with the self that human striving for knowledge was able to convey to him, but he wants to experience his own self directly in the spiritual world. The whole progress of the dramatic action in 'Faust' consists in the fact that the ego, in its dealings with the world, creates itself anew, always elevating itself. Fichte lives in Goethe's Faust; Schelling also lives in Goethe's Faust, in that Faust, on the one hand, seeks to unite the truth of magic with his soul, but also seeks true striving in the depths of the soul seeks the true striving in the depths of the soul; in that which cannot be found in the ordinary life of the soul, in thinking, feeling and willing, he seeks it in his dealings with the representative of evil, as a direct spirit. Faust truly seeks out nature where it lives in creation. Schelling had, I might say, presumptuously explained it when he said: To understand nature is to create nature! Fichte stands on healthier ground when he says: To understand nature is to live with one's own creation in the creation of nature. But one can see how the power for a deeper striving for knowledge, for the sources of existence, also lives in Fichte. Hegel strove for the sober thought, and one cannot be more sober than Hegel. The world spirit with which the soul in Hegelian philosophy seeks to unite itself becomes a mere logical spirit. To think of the divine spirit of the world as a logical soul that only builds the world logically! It must not be taken dogmatically, but it must be taken as an expression of the striving that remains mystical even in the most extreme logic, that seeks a union of the deepest part of the soul with the summit of the whole existence of the world itself in nature and history. Hegel must also be taken in this way, that one cannot find one's own self in what the senses provide us, but only in what the human soul can achieve within itself when it comes out of the sensual world. This is also what Hegel's philosophy strives for. And Faust, after his eyesight has gone, is illuminated by a brighter light within. What Hegel seeks on the right path, only to fail to perceive as the right goal, is what Faust seeks: to let one's own self merge with the world-self, to unite with it, and thus to experience the world-self in one's own self.

As Wilhelm von Humboldt said, can we not say that this German striving has not only tried in a beautiful way to establish harmony between philosophy – if one wants to call the pursuit of a worldview such – and poetry, and art in general, but that the German spirit has also brought this striving to external expression in a very unique way in Faust? Is not the very essence of Germanness characterized in this harmonious blending of the creations of the imagination with the quest of the sense of truth? Is it not otherwise in the world, where one finds that the imagination creates in freedom, but in unreality? The sense of truth creates according to the necessities of existence, but it does not come to a real life through this, only to an objectification, to a representation of experience. To bring fantasy out of its unreality and to animate that which it is able to create in such a way that the created lives together with the living spirit, so that harmony, harmonious harmony between poetry and philosophy can also exist in a work of art for once – that is what Goethe attempts, out of the whole originality and the truly not at all philosophical nature of his being. And when he has achieved this harmonizing of poetry and philosophy, of imagination and philosophy, by connecting with the most popular sources of the German spirit, then we may say: just as this Goethean work (we might also show it in other of his works, but it is most clearly and explicitly shown in his “Faust” — shows itself in connection with what the idealistic German world view has sought; there it is, as it now stands before us, seemingly the spiritual heritage of a few who prepare themselves especially for it. One can also see that, basically, supporters and opponents have tried to come to terms with the paths taken in the Goethe, Schiller, Schelling and Hegel era in the further course of German intellectual life up to our time. Infinite efforts have been made to understand the paths taken at that time along which one can find the sources of existence. But anyone who delves deeper into the ideas of those who lived in the arena of German idealism may come to the conclusion that what was developed there need not remain the property of only a few, of only a few individuals. Of course, if today we want to delve into the world view as presented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel themselves, if we get involved in their books, it is understandable that we will soon close the books again if we do not want to make a special study of them. For it is understandable to say: All this is quite incomprehensible. Nor is there any criticism to be made of those who claim that it is incomprehensible and indigestible. But there is a possibility, and this possibility is actually offered by human development, that what appears to be an indigestible good for a few can become quite popular, can really find its way into the whole spiritual cultural life of humanity. In order to grasp the cosmic striving of man in the way it was grasped in German idealism, it was necessary that some people should devote themselves entirely to the particular formulation of concepts and ideas, that they should attempt this in a solitude of spiritual life that stands alone as such.

But it does not have to stay that way. It is possible to popularize that which lives in Fichte's thoughts, which are so abstract, so abstruse, and, as many might say from their point of view, so convoluted – I know that for many people I am saying something paradoxical, but time will teach that it is correct – if you live into the spirit and the way of thinking, to present it in such a way that it can be directly conveyed to the boy or girl in earliest youth; that it can be understood in the way one understands something that lies completely in the nature of human life if one wants to grasp this human life. And so with all the other spiritual heroes! It can be done just as it can with the Grimm fairy tales. It takes no more spiritual activity of the soul to recognize, feel and sense Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in the depths of their creations than it does to grasp a fairy tale in the right imaginative way, as it is in the Grimm fairy tales. But the path will first have to lead people to live with something that belongs to the highest that humanity has gone through in terms of knowledge and poetry. And that is the significance of this idealistic striving of the German spirit. If one can show how one can grasp the essence of the soul in a simple way by appealing to the creative powers that lie within everyone, if one can show how these powers can be accessed in the right way, then one can bring this to people in a simple, elementary and direct way, whereas Fichte, to find it for the first time, needed a particularly high level of intellect. The same applies to everything else. But is what I am saying really so incredible? I do not think that anyone who remembers how he learned to understand the Pythagorean theorem at school will find it so incredible. But that does not mean that he is inclined to consider himself a Pythagoras, although the spiritual level and power of Pythagoras was necessary to first discover the Pythagorean theorem. An intense stream of spiritual world experience will flow from what the best German minds have sought in lonely, abstruse thoughts within German idealism, down to the most ordinary aspirations and lives of human beings.

And there is much, infinitely much, in this ordinary striving of man, if he is able to relate to the ever-creative and to feel that the human ego is creatively creative in the infinite. It is only by merging with the creative forces of nature that the human soul will be able to experience and feel the great beauties of nature as it reveals itself. And in a similar way, this applies to the other elements of this German intellectual life.

One must feel this, then the right feeling comes over one for the connection of the German striving with the entire world striving. And to revive this feeling in our days, it seems certainly appropriate to our destiny-bearing time. And it already belongs to that in which the German soul finds its strength. In conclusion, an example of this.

Even before the unity of the German people, the new German state, came about out of the context of the world, out of history, an unknown spirit writes beautiful words in his contemplation of Goethe's “Faust”. It was in 1865. I only quote these words of an otherwise quite unknown interpreter of Faust because they express what countless others have felt in exactly the same way. Since the emergence of the elevation in German idealism, which we have spoken of again today, countless of the best German minds have felt the connection between the paths that the idea takes in idealism into the spirit of nature and into the deeper foundations of the soul-spiritual itself. They felt that there is a connection between what the German spirit at its height has created for thought, what it has given to humanity as the sum of thoughts and artistic creations, and a connection between all this and what can also live in the German deed, in what the German people have to do when they have to carry out their world struggles on a different stage than that of thought. The connection between German intellectual life and German action was most deeply felt by those who knew how to place German thought and German idealistic work highest in their way of thinking. And from the contemplation of the past of German idealism, with its ascent to the heights where thought introduces to the life of the spirit—from the contemplation of this sphere of German idealism, there has always emerged the most beautiful hope that the German people will find the impulse for action from the same source when they need it.

What could be shown by many can be exemplified by one – and deliberately by one who is little known, Kreyssig, an explainer of Faust. Kreyssig, in 1865, wrote a paper about Goethe's “Faust” in which he tried to clarify, in his own way, what Goethe actually wanted with his “Faust.” He concludes with the words:

“And so we would then also know the overall impression that the contemplation of this giant monument of our great educational epoch, which after all remained unfinished and fragmentary, leaves behind, here we cannot summarize it better than in the simple memory of a passage from the famous legacy of the then 75-year-old poet to the younger world, which was preparing to take on new paths.”

Kreyssig cites Goethe's own thoughts, where he envisages the way in which Goethe sought a path into the spiritual world into old age. Kreyssig states how the power that leads into this spiritual world seems to him to be connected with the power that German action is to create in distant, distant times, which Goethe, as an old man, could only guess at:

The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
The primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through books as readily as through rocks.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
Will never live in the learned hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken it,
It has taken the glass of the hothouse with it.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
a mild light will still pour forth,
from whose reflection of those stars
the late grandchildren will learn to see,
and in prophetically higher visions
to accomplish greater things for the world and humanity.

And the “Faust” interpreter adds - in 1865 -:

"Let us add the wish that the words of the master, who looks down on us with a mild light from better stars, may come true for his people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and struggle, but, God willing, with indestructible strength, and that “in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of 'Faust' expects from the coming centuries, German action too, no longer as a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!"

Thus thought a German personality in 1865 of the German idea in connection with the hoped-for German deed. How the disembodied souls of such personalities may look upon the field in which the German deed is called upon for its realization today!

But precisely in connection with the faith, love and hope of such personalities, and especially of those personalities who, either through creation or understanding, have stood within the world view of German idealism, it may be said: the German need not, if he wants to recognize the impulses that are to inspire him, disparage any opponent. He has only to reflect on what he must believe, according to the innermost part of his being, to be his world-task. He must therefore reflect that he looks up to the way in which it has been handed down by his fathers, his ancestors, to his time; how it has become a force for the present, and how from this force, which is before his eyes, which lives in his soul, from the present hope may spring into the future.

Indeed, in the context of the present with German idealism, one can say from the innermost feeling: By looking to the past of thought or to what he has striven for outside of thought, the German feels feel his world task; he may feel it in this fateful time, he may feel it out of his love for his past and out of his faith in the power of the present, which becomes his when he has the right love for what the past has brought him. And from this love and from this faith, from this dual relationship between past and present, will spring in the right way that which, transcending blood and pain, allows us to glimpse a blessed present: German hope for the future. Thus, by delving into the idealism of the German essence, we can create a triad of love for the German past, faith in the German present, and hope for the German future.

Reflections on the eternal forces of the human soul from the point of view of spiritual science, as this spiritual science is meant here, are naturally, one might say, quite naturally exposed to misunderstandings in our time. And it is quite natural for it to be refuted from this or that point of view, which is undoubtedly justified from a certain side. When such refutations take place, the following occurs: the person who supposes to refute such results of spiritual science puts forward these or those reasons and then thinks that what he wants to have is met, and that the spiritual scientist cannot agree with his reasons at all. Precisely such a consideration as is to be undertaken here today on the basis of the results of spiritual science is subject to the misunderstandings indicated, for the matter usually lies — yes, one can say, in the cases that have come to light the matter always lies — in such a way that the person who refutes brings forward things with which the spiritual scientist absolutely agrees. It is just that spiritual science has something to say that is not affected at all by such objections, by such objections, which the spiritual scientist often accepts to a much greater extent than the person making the objections.

This applies in particular to the question that is to be asked today, and to what is often said on the part of the scientific world view. I have often emphasized from this platform that the humanities scholar is in no way opposed to the scientific world view based on the great achievements of modern times, especially when it comes to questions of the human soul. Of course, there are many things that can be said about the eternal character of the human soul from the point of view of those who want to practice psychology, the study of the soul, in a sense that is still valid today. Then the natural scientist comes, and I say expressly, often with full justification, and says: There we see the human soul-expressions, man's thinking, man's feeling, man's willing, as they express themselves from birth or from the time when man can develop conscious ideas, until death. If we look at this life of the soul, then the representative of the scientific world view must say that it appears to be bound in the strictest sense to the bodily processes; and one can show how it is bound to the bodily processes, how the bodily develop little by little from the earliest childhood, and how, in strict parallel with these physical processes, the faculties of thinking, of perceiving, of understanding and perceiving, develop as these physical processes, as they say, perfect themselves. One can see, again, how, with the fading of the physical processes of the human being, the mental processes also gradually recede into the background, gradually recede, subside. Yes, one can show even more. One can show how, in the case of illness or the like, parts of mental life disappear due to the exclusion of some brain activity or some part of the nervous system; how inability takes the place of ability when organic functions are excluded. What has been stated could be multiplied ad infinitum. So it is justified to say: Is not everything that man develops with his thinking, feeling and willing bound to the physical processes that are gradually being discovered by natural science, just as the flame is bound to the fuel of the candle? And in fact, some of the so-called proofs that are presented for the existence of a soul-core within ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, they really resemble something that one would imagine by saying that one finds something in the flame that cannot perish if the material of the candle is somehow removed from the flame. It may be said that much of the ordinary teaching on the soul is so constructed, according to the reasons and the kinds of proof, that it corresponds exactly to the thought one would have in order to prove that what lives in the flame cannot disappear if the flame is deprived of its fuel.

Now it must be emphasized that with regard to all that has just been indicated, spiritual science stands entirely on the ground of natural science, and indeed, as we want to see in particular through today's consideration, it must place itself more intensely and more strongly on this ground of natural science than natural science itself can do according to the current state of its research. In its method, in the way it thinks and is minded, spiritual science also stands in the same direction as indicated for human research through the newer methods of natural science. But the way in which these newer methods of natural science have been applied to the life of the soul shows that they do not lead to those regions in which the real riddles of the human soul are to be found.

In order not to make merely general remarks, I would like to consider a specific case. One of the more recent scientists who wanted to place psychology entirely on the basis of the scientific way of thinking was the psychologist Franz Brentano, who has already been mentioned here in these lectures on several occasions. His scientific endeavors took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the natural scientific way of thinking quite rightly made a great, even overwhelming impression on the personalities of this age, so that no kind of scientific research wanted to escape what lay in the fertility of natural scientific observation. And one of those who went along with it completely and said, ” If strict scientific results are to be achieved, then they must be achieved by a method that is constructed according to the model of natural science, otherwise they are not truly scientific results. One of the personalities who took this position, both with regard to the study of the soul and to the study of nature, was Franz Brentano. His theses, which he formulated at the beginning of his teaching career in Würzburg in the 1850s, went something like this: The future of the study of the soul depends entirely on its moving in the same channels as the study of nature. Now, with regard to the hopes that the study of the soul can have for our age and the future, Franz Brentano is a characteristically strong personality. He has begun to write a “Psychology,” a book that has achieved a certain fame in the narrower circles of the soul researchers. When the first volume of his psychology was published, he promised that the second volume would appear before the end of the year in which the volume was published – it was 1874 – and then the third volume in quick succession. So far, only the first volume has been published! And this is characteristic precisely because Franz Brentano is one of the most conscientious and energetic of thinkers.

Franz Brentano sets out to pursue the science of the soul in the spirit of modern natural science. He begins by examining the soul life as it presents itself in the ordinary existence of man; by investigating how, as man lives within the ordinary physical world, thought follows thought; what are the laws that cause one thought to evoke another; what are the laws that give rise to this or that sensation of pleasure or pain in the human soul. In short, he endeavored to investigate in a natural-scientific sense the life of the soul as it takes place within the ordinary physical existence of man. The aim of psychology is already clear to this student of the soul, but he sees no possibility of doing anything to approach this aim in any way. A saying of Franz Brentano is characteristic here, and runs as follows: “For the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle, to gain certainty about the survival of our better part after the dissolution of the body, the laws of association of ideas, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the sprouting and driving of lust and love, would be anything but a true compensation.... And if it really meant... “– he means the newer natural scientific way of thinking – ‘the exclusion of the question of immortality, then [this loss] would have to be called an extremely significant one for psychology.’

Franz Brentano is quite typical of those representatives of newer psychology who, while wanting to stand on the ground of newer natural science, that is, wanting to observe mental life exactly as one otherwise observes external natural phenomena, but who, in the course of their observations, let slip precisely those questions that are important, significant, and intimately connected with human life. We can, as Brentano says, in the sense of modern natural science, come to an understanding of how ideas are linked, how opinions take hold in the human soul, how pleasure and suffering are mutually dependent, but one cannot comment on the important question of what the eternal forces of the human soul are from what one wants to achieve with this method. And so it must be said that in more and more writings and literature on psychology in recent times, the question of the eternal forces of human existence has disappeared. Just try to leaf through the literature on psychology and you will see how true what I have just said is.

Spiritual science now attempts to find its way to the riddles of the human soul by adopting the attitude of the natural sciences. But it is convinced that the way of thinking that is so fruitful for the observation and study of the secrets of external nature must be internalized and completely transformed if one is to pursue spiritual science from the same attitude from which one pursues natural science. Spiritual science shows that the processes of the soul life that take place in ordinary thinking, feeling and willing between birth and death really contain nothing that is not as bound to the physical body as the flame is bound to the candle's material. Spiritual science shows that one cannot get at what is present in the soul as eternal with those functions of the soul life that are completely suitable for ordinary life and are also completely suitable for ordinary scientific research. Spiritual science shows that the soul of man, as it is in everyday life and in ordinary scientific research, is bound to the physical functions of the body, and that one must first seek out what is eternal in the soul by seeking a way from the ordinary soul functions to where these ordinary soul functions do not reach, where they do not come when they only accomplish what is accomplished in everyday life and ordinary science. An inner development of the soul abilities to a point that is completely superfluous for ordinary life is necessary if one wants to find the eternal powers of the human soul.

In earlier lectures I have already spoken about this development of the soul abilities of the human being from certain points of view, to a different view than that of everyday life. Today, I want to put the question in a different light from a different point of view.

What is considered the most important thing in ordinary science, the most important thing in ordinary life, for example in thinking and imagining, comes into play in a completely different way for spiritual research than in this everyday life. In ordinary life, it is a matter of our recognizing something by thinking about something that initially approaches us from outside. We perceive what approaches us from outside; we perceive even that which is in historical becoming; we think about it, and in so doing we explore the laws of external facts and of historical becoming. Thought arises in us, and precisely because we can think, because our thoughts have a certain content, we know something about the external world. And so it is right for our everyday life. It is also right for the activities of ordinary science.

But if one wants to grasp thinking in such a way as it must be grasped in order to arrive at true spiritual-scientific results, then one must grasp it in the following way. I will show, by means of a comparison that I have already used here once before, the quite different way in which the spiritual researcher must approach thinking, imagining, as compared with the way in which a person in ordinary life or in ordinary science approaches it. I have already hinted at it: When we use our hands for some external work, it depends, first of all, on our doing this external work, that the results of this external work be there. What is realized in the outer world through our work is what is seen. But that is not the only result of the work. The outer world must look at this result, and it has a right to look at it. But by repeatedly doing this or that, man also strengthens the strength of his hands and arms at the same time, and not only strengthens them but also makes them more adept at doing this or that. One can say – if we may use the word, which is of course only correct in a relative sense – that man makes the dexterity of his hands and arms more perfect by working. In terms of external labor, this is perhaps a very small thing, if we look only at how the result of the work fits into the context of human life. In this respect, it is a secondary result that the human hand and arms become more skillful. But for humans, it matters a great deal. Or even if one did not want to accept that, it is precisely this that is there as a secondary result! But with this we can compare what man achieves in imagining, in thinking. In ordinary life and in ordinary science, it is important to form a certain content of thought. Certainly, that is also quite right. But in forming this content of thought, in thinking, something similar really happens to thinking as happens to the strength of the hand and arm when one works. Thinking undergoes something inwardly, and it is precisely this, which is really quite unimportant for ordinary life and for ordinary science, even in relation to their achievements, that spiritual scientific research must now turn its inner gaze to: to what happens in thinking. The soul must be directed not to the content of the thoughts, but to the activity. And not to the mere activity either, but to what happens in the activity of thinking — if I may use the expression, which has only relative validity, once more — in the direction of perfection, of the development of thinking.

The soul's gaze must be trained to do this. And it must be possible to do so in order to enter into regions where the eternal powers of soul life open up, to disregard the content of thinking and to direct the soul's gaze to the activity of thinking, to what one does by thinking. This is achieved systematically and methodically through an intimate inner activity, which could also be called an intimate inner soul experiment, and which I have often referred to here as meditation. The word meditation need only be taken in the sense in which it is used here, as a technical term for the striving to develop such an ability by which the gaze of the soul can be directed precisely at this development of thinking. And one can really achieve this setting of the inner soul forces in this direction through what is called meditation, if this meditation is practiced in the right sense. Of course, I can only give the principles here with regard to what meditation is. More details can be found in my books, especially in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” where the soul's activities, the inner soul experiments, as it were, that set the whole soul life on the path that is to be indicated here in principle, are discussed in detail. Thinking and imagining must often be brought into a possibility, so that it stands, as it were, as external things stand, that one can look at it, that one holds it, as it were, more firmly, in the inner soul capacity, than one is accustomed to holding it when one lets thinking proceed only in such a way that it serves one in understanding the external world. And to bring the soul into such a direction, one must again and again, now out of the most inner freedom and arbitrariness, give the thinking a direction, which one gives it only to really feel inwardly what has just been indicated, to experience it inwardly, to strengthen this thinking so that one can inwardly experience what has been indicated. To do this, one must bring into one's thinking, into one's imagination, thoughts, ideas, upon which one then draws one's entire inner soul life, so that one really forgets the world and everything around us, disregarding the whole course of the rest of one's soul life, in order to concentrate all one's soul powers on one point, on one thought content that one has placed at the center of one's imagination. It is a seemingly undemanding activity of the inner soul life, but with reference to what is meant here, as it is said in Goethe's “Faust”: “Although it is easy, yet the easy is difficult!” In general, it is easy to give thought a direction such as that indicated here. But in order to summon up the inner strength needed to observe thinking in its activity, the process must be repeated over and over again. Depending on the individual, it may take weeks, months or years before any result is achieved. So that most people, if they take such an inner path, have long since lost their patience by the time any result might come.

Then there is another factor to be taken into account: if we take any thought from our soul life, as it presents itself to our memory, then this thought, which we have thought often, and which is linked to this or that external stimulus, cannot help us much in the activity we have indicated. For when a person draws a thought from the depths of his soul, a vast number of other sensations and remnants of sensations that would otherwise have remained unconscious are associated with it; and one experiences many things through this thought that one would otherwise not experience in the ordinary course of life. We cannot know whether what we experience in these thoughts is not somehow a reminiscence, some hidden memory from ordinary life. And finally, when we take a thought that is linked to something external, we cannot be quite so sure either. For, although we form a thought from the external world, this thought does indeed enter our consciousness, but we are never fully aware of the impression that we still receive more or less unconsciously alongside it. For my part, one can bring into consciousness any thought of an external object that one has seen. And by concentrating all the soul's power on it, something that one did not bring to consciousness in an immediate contemplation can well emerge, and one can believe that one has somehow brought what one is experiencing up from unknown worlds, while one has only brought it up from one's own soul, from the part that otherwise remains unconscious. Therefore, it is best to form ideas that one can easily keep track of and that do not run the risk of conjuring up something from one's soul life and then making us believe that we are experiencing something that is nothing more than reminiscences of our own subconscious soul life. To prevent this from happening, it is good to form a thought or take a thought from the literature of spiritual science that one can survey, to which one has not yet attached any habits, so to speak, of which one knows how its individual parts are composed, of which one knows that it does not subconsciously evoke something from one's soul life that then presents itself to one's mind instead of one experiencing something new. I have therefore often said: Since it is not at all important to recognize anything external through these activities of the soul life, which one calls meditation, to visualize any external truth, it is good to to take symbolic images, about which one is clear from the outset: they express nothing external, they are only placed at the center of thinking in order to exercise the thinking, to strengthen the thinking. For everything depends on taking hold of the processes of thinking in a living way by performing them. Through free inner activity, one must place a content at the center of one's soul life and then limit oneself entirely to that content. Only a few minutes need be spent on the individual content for the individual exercise, because as a rule it does not depend on the length of time at all, but on how far one really succeeds in concentrating the soul power in such a way that it is directed at one point and thereby strengthens inwardly, so that this inner thinking activity does not go unnoticed, but occurs with such strength that one can feel it inwardly, that one can experience it inwardly. If one now, with sufficient patience and persistence and energy, repeatedly performs such an experiment on the soul, one finally comes to really place one's thinking, that which otherwise withdraws as an inner thought process, in front of one's soul, to really place oneself in relation to one's inwardness in a completely different way than one has otherwise related to this inwardness. One comes to discover something quite new in oneself. But it is only new for one's consciousness; it is always there in the person. The soul's processes that one has accomplished merely lead to noticing it. What one discovers is always present in every person. But as a new human being in man, as something of which we notice that it also fills us, which we did not know before - we can now grasp a new human being in man with the power that we have become aware of through the comprehension, through the inner energizing, strengthening of thinking. And if we practise this long enough, with sufficient intensity and patience, it really takes us beyond the realm of ordinary thought and imagination, leading us to a completely different way of looking at our soul from the one we are accustomed to. But at the same time we notice something that can only be noticed at a point where the human being really arrives at a result. One must patiently wait until what is now being related as a result comes about. One arrives at a shattering result. |

This shattering result is always reminiscent of an expression that has often been used in the course of human development. It has been used within those circles that have known something of the fact that there is such an expansion of soul life as that which is spoken of here. Now, in order to explain what is meant here, it must be said that spiritual science of the kind meant here has only become possible in our age. Humanity is evolving. What occurs in some form or other in a later age was not possible in an earlier one. The newer form of natural science, as it has developed since the time of Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus, was not possible in the earlier epochs of human evolution. But these earlier epochs had to precede the newer one. In these earlier epochs, attempts were made to penetrate to the innermost nature of things in a quite different way from that which is the case in the present epoch. Just as natural science in its newer form was not yet possible in the Greco-Roman period, for example – not possible in terms of purely external facts, not only in principle – so spiritual science, as it is meant here and is described here according to its method, is something that can only dawn upon our time within the evolution of humanity. But just as man delved into nature in the same way as the human faculties that lay closest to the surface in the evolution of humanity, so too did he seek to gain access to the eternal forces of the human soul and develop the soul faculties in the same way as in ancient times, so that they might see in the old way what is eternal in the development of the human soul. In days gone by, people often spoke of the goal of developing the inner life of the soul as I have just described. They said that in order to reach the eternal foundations of his soul life, man must approach the portals of death. The full significance of this saying, “to approach the gate of death,” is only realized when one has truly brought this inner experience, which has just been described as meditation, to a certain point. One comes to a point where one discovers within oneself a real second person, a person who can only be grasped through strengthened thinking, just as one grasps the ordinary physical person through ordinary comprehensive volition, through what one can otherwise do within oneself. One comes to this second man in oneself, who is felt inwardly, so to speak, by the invigorating thinking, but at the same time one comes to realize, to see through direct observation, how this second man is connected, not with constructive but with destructive forces of our human organism. One comes to realize that, basically, one carries within oneself the conditions of death since birth or, let us say, since conception; that certain processes in the human being are real, that they take place and that, when they reach a certain point, they must lead to death. Alongside that which animates the human being, alongside that which is the ascending life process, which of course cannot be seen with the ordinary soul powers either, stands that which is the eroding soul powers, which, I would say, are destructive soul powers. And with the highest development of these destructive soul powers, with that which rules and lives in man as, one may say, the cause of death, as the lasting cause of death, one sees most intimately connected with it that which is now this second man, whom one feels inwardly, as it were, with one's thinking. Indeed, only through an inner experience can one come to assert what I am now asserting. Just as little as someone who does not know that water is divided into hydrogen and oxygen in electrolysis can discern anything about hydrogen or oxygen , just as little can anything be recognized in the ordinary life of the soul that is similar to the experience that has now been hinted at and that has been expressed at all times with the words: one approaches the gate of death.

One experiences that just as there is something in water that cannot be seen directly when looking at the water, even though it can be seen as hydrogen and oxygen, there is something in man that is connected with his thinking, but at the same time with the forces that give him death. One looks within oneself at the human being who brings it about that one can have precisely the purest, most abstract thinking, the one that furthest advances one in ordinary life, between birth and death, but that one could not have it if the death-giving powers in man did not come to their highest flowering. And by discovering through the strengthening of thinking that which brings death, an experience is directly linked to it, an inner experiential knowledge — one cannot call it anything other than an inner experiential knowledge —, not something that could ever be reached by a conclusion of reason; just as little as looking at water externally can be reached by a conclusion of reason, that hydrogen and oxygen are in it. One gains the experience by saying to oneself: One now looks beyond the scope of what ordinary consciousness overlooks and gets to know the human being who, between birth and death, is connected to the forces that give birth. But at the same time, one gets to know oneself in such a way that, by looking through oneself, one gets to know in this second self that which was there before one entered into physical existence through birth or, let us say, conception. From this moment on, one comes to know that not only have the hereditary powers of the ancestors, of father and mother, placed the human being in existence, but that spiritual powers, which come from a purely spiritual world, have combined with what lies in the hereditary current.

In ordinary life, we are accustomed to calling only that 'knowledge' which is arrived at by pointing to certain facts that already exist before the knowledge is acquired. For spiritual facts, this way of thinking would be exactly the same as saying: I want to communicate something to someone, but I don't say it out loud, because by saying it out loud it is no longer an objective fact that is there; it has to come about by itself. Just as in speaking one produces something that is not exhausted in the content of what is spoken, so spiritual scientific knowledge is bound to an activity in which what is the content of knowledge is first realized, just as what is the content of speaking is first realized in speaking. And now we really come to realize that in spiritual fields there exists in a higher form that which natural science has been striving towards since about the middle of the nineteenth century: what is called the “transformation of forces”. Transformation of forces is, for example, in its simplest form: you press on the table, and the force of your pressure, the work of your pressure, is transformed into warmth. Your pressure force is not lost, but transformed. This law of the transformation of forces has indeed taken hold of the scientific mind and thus acquired great significance. The spiritual scientist who brings himself to the point I have indicated learns to recognize that what underlies all our thinking and what I have just called “the death-bringing forces” are in fact eternal life forces, but can only become active as eternal life forces if they take hold of an organism, a physical organism. If they are present in the purely spiritual world before birth or, let us say, before conception, they are eternal life forces. And they must lose the form of eternal life forces; they must transform themselves into such forces that build up the organ of physical thinking between birth and death. They have to do this in order to build up the organ of physical thinking. They can therefore only again occupy themselves with their spiritual character when the organ of the physical body, the organ of thinking, has been broken down. Therefore it is really impossible to find within the physical life that of which has now been spoken. For one could not think at all in the ordinary sense if one could find that of which has been spoken. One thinks in the physical life — this is particularly shown by spiritual science — with the organ of thinking. It is not the thinking that is created by the eternal activity and the eternal powers of the human soul, but the organ of thinking; this must always be there first, so that thinking can take place. This ordinary physical thinking would therefore have to cease if one wanted to look at the very thing that matters. It is not thinking that comes from the eternal powers, but the organ of thinking, which remains hidden behind thinking. And it is precisely this organ of thinking that must remain hidden so that thinking can come to the fore.

Therefore, as one progresses in this inner development of the soul, one has an experience that is, I might say, no less harrowing than that which has just been described by the traditional expression “approaching the gates of death”. One experiences: Yes, your thinking, you thus strengthen it; your thinking becomes stronger in itself, so that it can inwardly feel a second person who is within you. — But one thing applies above all to this thinking. All that I have said is meant only in the main, for the reason that, since one is developing in the inner life of the soul, a residue of ordinary thinking always remains; otherwise one would have to leap out of ordinary thinking and leap into the other. So what I say is always meant only comparatively, that is, not in the full sense, but only in the main.

What stands out as particularly characteristic, as particularly significant, in that thinking strengthens itself, is something that represents a certain importance precisely for the ordinary life of the soul and now for this life of the soul, which has actually ceased to exist as a result of the strengthening of thinking. It is possible to retain through ordinary memory, through the ordinary ability to remember, what one has thus attained through thinking. The convenience of ordinary life also ceases, that one simply transmits one's thoughts to memory and then has them and only needs to remember them; that too actually ceases. So, when one has strengthened one's thinking, one has, despite the strengthening, reached a point where, by placing oneself in this strengthened thinking, one is continually faced with the feeling that this thinking will soon be lost again as it arises. And that is precisely the difficulty, which causes a great many people to lose patience and never to develop such inner soul powers as are meant here. Someone who does exercises like the ones suggested may do them for a long time, but he does not realize that what one produces in this way is just as difficult to retain as it is sometimes to retain a dream. When you wake up, you know exactly what you dreamt, but you can't hold on to it, it disappears. And that's how it is with what you have achieved. It can only be incorporated into your ordinary memory with great difficulty.

That is why, when you present spiritual truths, they always have to be created in the moment; however strange or paradoxical it may sound, it is simply true that you cannot retrieve them from ordinary memory. And why is that so? It is because man, as he is in ordinary life, continually tends to let what he actually achieves through the formation, the development of the organ of thinking, what comes out of the eternal, slip down into the physical. No sooner has one attained what the eternal presents than it slips into the ordinary organ of thinking. That is, it passes over into the ordinary life of the soul and thereby loses its eternal form. One constantly sees that one grasps something as it arises, only to lose it again immediately. And only long practice is necessary to observe to some extent what arises and immediately passes away; to have in the soul that which arises and immediately passes away. Thus, one realizes that one actually needs a completely different consciousness than the consciousness that simply comes from the ordinary organ of thought. And one gradually comes to realize – which in turn is a harrowing experience of the soul – that yes, you do attain something through your soul development; but with the consciousness that you have there, which serves you in the most fruitful way in ordinary life, you cannot hold on to it after all. For this ordinary consciousness is organized in such a way that the eternal escapes from it, so that it may be efficient. The conviction finally arises: You need another consciousness, you need a consciousness that goes beyond the consciousness that is fruitful for your ordinary life, because with this consciousness you cannot hold on to the eternal.

Therefore it is necessary that such pure mental exercises, as they have been designated as a member of the meditative life, are supplemented by other exercises, which one can now call exercises of the will, of the feeling will It is not enough to exercise the power of thinking, of visualizing, inwardly in the indicated manner, for by this inward exercise alone one would arrive at a state where what arises continually ceases. Therefore, spiritual science must also advise us to treat the will in a different way than it is treated in ordinary life. In everyday life, the will functions in the soul life in such a way that, when we will, our attention is actually directed to that which is to happen, to that which flows out of the will into action, even if we only will inwardly, if it remains with the intention – with the inward presentation of the volition. Attention is always directed to that into which the will is lived, into which the will flows. If we apply the same effort to an inner cultivation of the will as can be applied in the manner indicated to the cultivation of imagination and of thinking, we can develop the will to such a point that we attain the possibility of developing the will that is necessary to reach the eternal powers of the human soul. To do this, however, it is necessary to practise the will inwardly in such a way that one really does establish a quite intense calmness of soul, that one quiets the surging and swaying of desires, the surging and swaying of the other impulses of desire that play a great role in life, so that one, as it were, establishes complete calmness in the inner life of one's soul and then reflects on what one may have wanted at some time. All the liveliness that the will is imbued with when it is directly present is, so to speak, taken away by placing remembered will in front of you, by looking back in the evening, for example, at what you willed during the day, and now letting this will work on you in such a way that you do not become an inner critic, but you look at this volition; you look at it now that it no longer directly tempts you to direct your attention to external deeds alone, but now that the volition has detached itself in your inner soul life from the external activity, you can direct your attention to what the soul life is and what it does in the volition. We also make progress in this field if we make an effort, I might say, again as an inner experiment, to will that which we have found good for this or that reason, to place it in the inner life of our soul, and then to visualize in a fine, intimate way: What do you experience when you place yourself in the position of your soul in wanting this? — whereby one completely disregards what is connected with the desired itself, but only places oneself in what the soul inwardly feels by undergoing the volition.

Again, long exercises in this direction are necessary if one wants to come to a conclusion; but one comes to a conclusion: namely, one discovers that during one's life one actually carries an invisible, an imperceptible spectator with oneself all the time. Again, one discovers a person, a new person, but a person who is always there, but who is not noticed. Just as the inner man, as characterized above, is not noticed in thinking, so the inner spectator is not noticed in willing, because attention is directed to something quite different. This inner man is now actually a consciousness that is unconsciously — if I may use the paradoxical expression — always in us, that is not raised into the ordinary consciousness, but that is there nevertheless.

It is difficult to talk about these things for the reason that one talks about things that are realities, but are actually unfamiliar to man; unfamiliar because they are not brought to consciousness in ordinary life. The spiritual scientist is not talking about anything new. He is not talking about anything that does not exist. He is only pointing out what exists in every human being. But in order to show it, it is necessary to approach it in such a way that one approaches it actively; that one does not merely point out facts that want to guarantee a being, but for which observation first brings forth what is, but what can only be shown through the activity.

And now, when one has progressed to a certain point in this field, something happens in the soul that can bring one to the deepest shock. One now gets to know something to a great extent, which one experiences in the outer life, namely within the intentions, the desires, the will that one has in the soul, but, I would say, only on the outside, only in bits and pieces. One experiences in a comprehensive way what one can call: the direct contemplation, the direct feeling of what suffering, what pain is. For basically, each piece of this attainment of consciousness, which otherwise remains unconscious, is connected with deprivation and pain. But the two experiences now come together. The one experience that led one to the perception, I would say, the flowering of the dying power in man, and the one that led one to the perception of an unconscious consciousness that is always present in man, that always watches man as an observer – these two experiences are linked together. From the first experience one realizes: This basically cannot be designated as such being as otherwise any being is designated. It cannot maintain itself in existence if it is not borne by consciousness, if, in other words, it is not remembered by a certain consciousness. And one makes a discovery - one of the most magnificent, powerful inner experiences that one can have on the path of knowledge at first: one makes the discovery that what you produce out of an energizing of your thinking is like a fleeting dream. It cannot approach the ability of ordinary consciousness to remember. But if you really strengthen that which lives in the will, as your observation, as your subconscious consciousness, then this is now the consciousness that can grasp the other, which otherwise cannot be remembered, and which can hold it.

And now one is at the experience, which in relation to the scientific attitude can be compared entirely with the way one does it in the outer natural life, how one observes the outer natural life. One looks at the plant. You see how it develops into the germ in the flower and how this germ, when it is planted in the earth, is the beginning of a new plant. The end is combined with the beginning to form a cycle, a circle. In the same way, but at a higher level, the end and beginning of the physical life of a human being is grasped. It is known that that which existed before birth, or let us say conception, has united from the spiritual world with that which lies in the physical line of inheritance, and which permeates and interweaves with the physical organization in the human being. We know that this lives itself out in such a way that it brings forth an organ, that this organ brings it to thinking, and that its outermost development brings it to memory; but that in so doing, having emerged from the spiritual world, it has has attained a form in this transformation that is, so to speak, a highest bloom, which must now be grasped by a consciousness that is of a completely different kind than that through which it first comes out of the spiritual world, is produced. This consciousness lies like a seed of consciousness, like something that underlies as will, but in ordinary will, because attention is not directed to it, does not become conscious. That which lies in man as death-giving unites, when man passes through the gate of death, with this seed of consciousness that lies in the volition. And the ordinary physical life is only a holding apart of the one and the other. We live physically so long as the one and the other are kept apart, so long as we place ourselves with our being in between. In the experience of death, the first is grasped by the second, the consciousness grasps the former and carries it through the gate of death back into the spiritual world.

Just as one can see from the plant seed in the flower that it will begin the cycle again if it goes through the necessary intermediate conditions, so one experiences that what was present before birth, what lies in man as the power to give birth, descends to a renewed earthly life when it has gone through spiritual conditions. By linking end and beginning in a way that is entirely in keeping with the spirit of natural science, one arrives at a confirmation of what has emerged in one of the most beautiful phases of modern spiritual life and — one might say — has emerged as if from the thinking of a great thinker: what was brought to light by Lessing when he concluded his most mature work, 'The Education of the Human Race', with the reference to the necessity of thinking of repeated earthly lives. At that time it leaped forward as if from a thinking that had struggled to an independent world-view. The more recent spiritual science strives to substantiate scientifically, but, as we shall see, inwardly scientifically, that which presented itself in Lessing's thinking, this teaching of repeated earth-lives! Today it is also regarded as something fantastic, as something dreamy; just as at a certain time, which is not far behind us, the doctrine was regarded: Living things can only arise from living things. — But anyone who has recognized such a view as truth also knows that truth has a difficult path to follow in humanity, but that it will also find this path!

It seemed fantastic and dreamy to most people when the more recent natural science-minded people came forward and said: Man thinks that a firmament above limits the space, while this firmament is nothing more than the expression of the end of the ability to see itself. What you see as the firmament is only brought about by yourselves; that is precisely what your gaze penetrates, that is precisely where your seeing penetrates! It is not externally present in nature, but externally in nature is the infinity of space, in which countless worlds are embedded! From the standpoint that was adopted at the time when the old concept of the firmament of space was to be overcome, spiritual science today stands, I would say, with regard to the spiritual firmament of the human soul between birth or conception and death. Man initially looks after conception, after birth, or to a point, to which his memory reaches, and to his death. But there is nothing that limits life, just as the firmament does not limit space. Rather, what man does not see expands behind it because he does not try to expand his capacity for knowledge, his capacity for thought, beyond this temporal firmament. Out there, beyond this firmament, lie repeated earthly lives and the intervening lives in which the soul lives in a purely spiritual world.

It is certainly even more difficult to become accustomed to the thought processes that are necessary to reach this spiritual firmament than it was to reach the removal of the physical firmament. But our time is quite ripe, out of a scientific attitude, I would say, to go beyond what the external natural science can achieve. And so I do not hesitate, even if it must lead to even worse misunderstandings than what has been said so far, to make the concrete application, the particular application of that kind of spiritual research that I have just characterized, in a particular case that can interest us at all times, but especially in our fateful time.

We speak and will speak more and more of the immortal forces of the human soul when we come to a true science of the soul. But we will also learn to speak again of what invisibly reigns in the visible, what imperceptibly reigns for the ordinary historical view in the course of human life. In connection with the eternal forces of the human soul, we have spoken of death, which is indeed a mystery, not only for those who say that they desire a life beyond the gates of death, but above all for those who must grasp life itself; for much of the understanding of life lies in the unraveling of the mystery of death. But in our time, death approaches us in a completely different way, in the midst of pain and suffering, but also in the midst of hope and certainty about the future. Death comes upon us in such a way that it seizes blossoming human life, not in the sense that the forces that give death internally expire, depending on how it is allotted to the person; this cannot be explained further today, but it could also be characterized in the sense of spiritual science. Death does not come upon us in such a way that these death-bringing forces from within, from the organic, take away the physical body from that which, as higher consciousness, unites with the Eternal in the life of the will, which is death-bringing, but which is one with the Eternal —, not only does death approach us in this way, but it also takes the physical human body away from the soul in the prime of life through violent interventions from the outside, let us say, through a bullet or otherwise. Although I shall be giving more exact details in a week's time in the lecture on 'The Human Soul and the Human Spirit', I would like to venture to simply relate here a research result that lies on the path just characterized.

It would take a great deal of time to fully explain how the same method that has just been demonstrated for ordinary, simple results also leads to the investigation of what is to be discussed now. But it is exactly the same method that, in the further course, also leads us to the knowledge of precisely the great connections in life.

We must bear in mind that no force is lost; it remains available, it transforms. If the physical body is taken away by an external influence, say by a bullet, in the prime of human life, then, based on the general human disposition, such forces are available that could have provided for the person for a long time in relation to his life in the physical world. These forces are not lost. The spiritual researcher must ask: where do these forces come from, and where do they go? A significant question arises before us. Last winter, in a lecture, I spoke from the point of view of how this force lives on in the present. Now I will speak about it in so far as these forces are linked to the historical course of humanity. The spiritual researcher must ask: Where do these forces, which cease to work in a person when his body is forcibly taken from him, reappear elsewhere? Just as one searches in natural science when some force is lost, how this force, transformed into other forms, reappears, so the spiritual researcher searches in the spiritual world phenomena to find what is lost on one side on the other. And it is precisely by seeking what is being discussed here that one comes to say: In the development of mankind, forces arise that we observe, for example, when we educate a human being. We observe how a person can become capable of thinking, doing or feeling this or that. We guide the abilities present in him in such a way that we know: we do nothing special when we develop human abilities in general. We know that when he is later able to do this or that, it is because this or that has been developed in him.

But besides all this, other forces arise in human life, forces that are called ingenious forces, forces that appear while one is educating a person. One can be much more stupid than the one one is educating: these ingenious forces still come out. They come to light, one speaks of a divine favor, of a coming forth of forces, without one being able to do anything about it. Of course, I am not just talking about the powers that the higher geniuses, the higher minds, show, but about the genius that is in every human being. Even the simplest person needs a certain amount of inventiveness in their most everyday tasks in order to really make progress. There is only a difference in degree between what is needed in ordinary life and the highest powers of genius. These powers of invention arise, one might say, out of the twilight of becoming; they arise in man as something that is bestowed on him by the world spirit, by the divine spirit that pervades the world, as one might say at first, without being able to claim that one has cultivated them, that one has nurtured them through education. And then the remarkable and surprising result emerges, that these powers, which thus come to light as powers of invention, as powers of genius, are transformed powers. Those forces are transformed into ingenious forces that disappear when a person's physical body is taken from him externally, which he would have been able to retain in the normal course of events if the bullet had not hit him. This is a surprising connection that emerges: The forces that a person carries into death by passing through the gate of death by force, by having their physical body taken from the outside, not by internal organic processes, these forces are not lost; these forces emerge, and not only in the later earthly life of the individual human being — that appears in a completely different way — but they emerge in the course of history, they emerge in completely different people. They become, so to speak, embedded in historical evolution, if I may use such a trivial, philistine expression. And what are the forces of a violent death in prehistoric times are transformed into forces of genius in an earlier or later post-historical period, which arise within the evolution of humanity.

If one follows spiritual science to such points, then for those who have practice in thinking, I mean inner practice in the paths that thinking must take in order to approach realities, true connections arise that come to light in the spiritual world — but which are no more wondrous than when mysterious natural connections occur, connections that only live in a higher sphere, and because they live in a higher sphere, they are all the more important for the elevation of our life, more important than how the soul feels in existence, how the soul can also permeate itself religiously with the cosmic connection, more important than mere external knowledge of nature. Spiritual science does not want to replace any religion; religious feeling has a completely different origin. But spiritual science is, if one can say so, suitable for deepening these religious feelings, for stimulating them even in those who have lost all religious feeling through the influences of modern natural science. Spiritual science shows connections within the spiritual life that arise entirely from the attitude of a scientific way of thinking. Not that all the riddles of the world will be solved, but what otherwise presents itself only as fact alongside fact is inwardly illuminated, in a similar way to how natural facts are illuminated when they can be traced back to the chain of causes and effects.

Now, in conclusion, I would like to say something that is not logically connected to the above as a final consideration of what has just been explained – I will have more to say on this next Friday – but rather something that is only is connected to it only through the logic of feeling, a logic of feeling that must be understandable to anyone who is connected to what permeates and moves us all in our time.

It is precisely this that we see: the people of Central Europe surrounded, beset, fighting for their existence. Yesterday I tried to show what spiritual endeavors are present within this circle of existence. I do not believe that I am forced, I might say, to serve the times in an outward way, to drag together what I have to say. Yesterday I tried to show how in German spiritual life, just as this German spiritual life was seeking its paths of knowledge in an idealistic way through its great philosophers, a path lies into the spiritual worlds. It must not be taken dogmatically, as I emphasized again and again yesterday, but rather in terms of the way of seeking, in terms of the way of striving. One must examine the direction in which the inner soul forces of the German idealistic philosophers moved. And if we follow, as I tried to do yesterday, the way in which, on the one hand, through abstract, sober thinking, and on the other hand, through energetic views of the will, as with Fichte, or through powerful poetic creative powers, as in Goethe, opened up Germany's idealistic path to the world, then one has an impression of how the soul of the nation itself, this German national soul as a whole, has immersed itself in meditation, the meditation of an entire national soul in the idealistic development from the end of the eighteenth century into the first third of the nineteenth century! He who sees in meditation, in the particular training of thinking, feeling and willing, the way into the spiritual worlds, may say, without having to forcibly wrench anything into such an assertion, what can truly be the most intimate conviction for the modern spiritual researcher: The progress of spiritual science can be depicted as the development of a germ that is rooted in German idealistic philosophy; it is present in all of German idealistic spiritual striving around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has continued to have an effect into our days, as I attempted to characterize yesterday. Indeed, in all that I have been able to speak about here in these lectures over the years, I have always been aware that what is now being presented as spiritual science is nothing other than Goetheanism, German idealism. I mean this specific idealism as it emerged at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the German mind, transferred to our time; not simply viewed historically as it was at that time, but grasped in a living way in our time! And I was aware that, in essence, I was never presenting anything other than Goetheanism by presenting spiritual science in the sense in which it can be in our time. However strange it may sound to some people today, if one looks at it from this point of view, one finds that striving for the spiritual world is firmly anchored in what German spiritual striving has once risen to as its highest peak, as a highest inner peak.

And when this connection is allowed to work in one's soul, one can place oneself in our fateful days in such a way that what the German people sought on the one hand in the most extreme development of their spiritual efforts is only a different side of what must work in our time so that the historical task set for the German people in our days can be solved in the external fields of action. That is why everything the German people accomplishes is intimately connected with the deepest soul life, with what was great and significant at a time when, in relation to the outside world, the ground was pulled out from under the feet of the German people. Therefore, it may be said that, if, besides the external struggle which will be decided by arms and about which it is not proper for the spiritual observer to speak, because things will be decided not by words but by arms, if, besides this struggle, something has developed that strikes us as so strange that this German spiritual life is disparaged by opponents, so that one might believe that these opponents only find the possibility of letting their own intellectual life shine in a special light by disparaging German intellectual life, then a consideration of the inner significance, the inner world significance of German intellectual life leads precisely to the realization of how little the German needs to look at his own intellectual life in such a way that, in a comparison, the intellectual life of others would have to be disparaged. The German need only look at the task set for him from the innermost part of the world spirit to know what he has to do in the world, what he has to carry over into the future.

Therefore, one may say from the bottom of one's heart: This German national spirit, which reigns in the totality of German life, which reigns in German thought, in German meditation, as I have indicated, which reigns in German action, this German national spirit may point out when it is now being reproached in such an unintelligent way from here and there with having produced a world view that is based solely on force and power. It may point out how it can refute this strange talk through its connection with the spiritual. And when it is said that the German national spirit has played its part in historical development, then it follows that the germ of the highest spiritual life lives in the meditation of the German national spirit, as indicated above. One has only to imagine how these germs develop into blossoms and fruits, and how these blossoms and fruits must develop in the future. Then, through the genuine consciousness that flows from such thinking, from such feeling, and from such sentiment, it can be said: To those who today belittle this German national spirit or even want to deny it its spiritually fruitful powers for the future, to those, out of the consciousness of its spiritual and historical deeds and tasks, this German national spirit holds up the book of destiny, which it believes it can correctly decipher by considering the German task and the German spirit. And he says to all those who believe that they must take a stand against German intellectual life, not only with weapons but also with weapons of words, and prophesy its downfall: he believes that he can hold this up to them as a sure conviction, based on an understanding of the course of German intellectual life, a page from the book of fate of the development of mankind. And on this one page is written – no matter what may be said or maintained – the future of the German spirit, the future of the German national soul!

Consider what is to be the subject of today's lecture only as an insertion into the series of lectures this winter. It is perhaps justified precisely by our fateful time, in which the two Central European empires, so closely connected with each other, must approach the great demands of historical becoming in our present and for the future. I also believe I am justified in saying something about the intellectual life of Austria, since I lived in Austria until I was almost thirty years old and had not only the opportunity but also the necessity from a wide variety of perspectives to become fully immersed in Austrian intellectual life. On the other hand, it may be said that this Austrian intellectual life is particularly, I might say, difficult for the outsider to grasp in terms of ideas, concepts, and representations, and that perhaps our time will make it increasingly necessary for the peculiarities of this Austrian intellectual life to be brought before the mind's eye of a wider circle. But because of the shortness of the time at my disposal I shall be unable to give anything but, I might say, incoherent pictures, unpretentious pictures of the Austrian intellectual life of the most diverse classes; pictures which do not claim to give a complete picture, but which are intended to form one or other idea which might seek understanding for what is going on in the intellectual life beyond the Inn and the Erz Mountains.

In 1861, a philosopher who was rarely mentioned outside his homeland and who was closely connected to Austrian intellectual life, Robert Zimmermann, took up his teaching post at the University of Vienna, which he then held until the 1890s. He not only awakened many people spiritually, guiding them through philosophy on their spiritual path, but he also influenced the souls of those who taught in Austria, as he chaired the Real- und Gymnasialschul-Prüfungskommission (examination commission for secondary modern and grammar schools). And he was effective above all because he had a kind and loving heart for all that was present in emerging personalities; that he had an understanding approach for everything that asserted itself in the spiritual life at all. When Robert Zimmermann took up his post as a philosophy lecturer at the University of Vienna in 1861, he spoke words in his inaugural academic address that provide a retrospective of the development of worldviews in Austria in the nineteenth century. They show very succinctly what made it difficult for Austrians to arrive at a self-sustaining worldview during this century.

Zimmermann says: “For centuries in this country, the oppressive spell that lay on the minds was more than the lack of original disposition capable of holding back not only an independent flourishing of philosophy but also the active connection to the endeavors of other Germans. As long as the Viennese university was largely in the hands of the religious orders, medieval scholasticism prevailed in its philosophy lecture halls. When, with the dawn of an enlightened era, it passed into secular management around the middle of the last century, the top-down system of teachers, teachings and textbooks, which was ordered from above, made the independent development of a free train of thought impossible. The philosophy of Wolff – which in the rest of Germany had been overcome by Kant – in the diluted version of Feder, with a smattering of English skepticism, became the intellectual nourishment of the young Austrians thirsting for knowledge. Those who, like the highly educated monk of St. Michael's in Vienna, longed for something higher had no choice but to secretly seek the way across the border to Wieland's hospitable sanctuary after discarding the monastic robe. This Barnabite monk, whom the world knows by his secular name of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and the Klagenfurt native Herbert, Schiller's former housemate, are the only public witnesses to the involvement of the closed spiritual world on this side of the Inn and the Erz mountains in the powerful change that took hold of the spirits of the otherworldly Germany towards the end of the past, the philosophical century."

One can understand that a man speaks in this way who had participated in the 1848 movement out of an enthusiastic sense of freedom, and who then thought in a completely independent way about fulfilling his philosophical teaching. But one can also ask oneself: Is not this picture, which the philosopher draws almost in the middle of the nineteenth century, perhaps tinged with some pessimism, some pessimism? It is easy for an Austrian to see things in black and white when judging his own country, given the tasks that have fallen to Austria due to the historical necessities – I say expressly: the historical necessities – that the empire, composed of a diverse, multilingual mixture of peoples, had to find its tasks within this multilingual mixture of peoples. And when one asks such a question, perhaps precisely out of good Austrian consciousness, all sorts of other ideas come to mind.

For example, one can think of a German Austrian poet who is truly a child of the Austrian, even the southern Austrian mountains; a child of the Carinthian region, born high up in the Carinthian mountains and who, through an inner spiritual urge, felt compelled to descend to the educational institutions. I am referring to the extraordinarily important poet Fercher von Steinwand.

Among Fercher von Steinwand's poems, there are some very remarkable presentations. I would like to present just one example to your souls as a picture of this Austrian intellectual life, as a picture that can immediately evoke something of how the Austrian, out of his innermost, most original, most elementary intellectual urge, can be connected with certain ideas of the time. Fercher von Steinwand, who knew how to write such wonderful “German Sounds from Austria” and who was able to shape everything that moves and can move human souls from such an intimate mind, also knew how to rise with his poetry to the heights where the human spirit tries to grasp what lives and works in the innermost weaving of the world. For example, in a long poem, of which I will read only the beginning, called “Chor der Urtriebe” (Choir of Primeval Instincts).

In the boundless expanse
of our ancient mother Night,
hark! there seems to be a struggle
of the most mysterious power!
Do we hear foreboding stride?
Has longing awakened?
Has a flash of inspiration ignited?
Do dreams glide through the vastness?
How the forces of the forces intoxicate each other,
blissful exchange!
Sudden hurrying,
quiet lingering,
revelatory listening
alternates with waving
Amazed fear!
The charm of attainment
Rises, to sink,
Sinks, to hate,
White with the pale
Image of the embrace
Hatred not to grasp.
Dark ramifications
Sprouting affections
Seek for tendrils.
Heavy thoughts
Dawn and falter
Over the expanses,
Seem to guess
Or to guide.
What they prepare
Are they the seeds
Of mighty deeds,
Radiant times?
Who felt the stirred up
Creatively!
Who wandered through it,
Blissfully enjoying,
Or untangled it,
Opening up great things!
Up there it moves like a ghostly embrace,
We in warmth,
We also gain,
search and ponder,
see ourselves lifted,
highest endeavor
happily interwoven.
That blows around us,
arises in us:
“It is you, ideas! -—"

The poet sees how, as he seeks to delve into the “choir of primal urges” that are world-creative, ideas come to him. He seeks to rise up to that world that lived in the minds of the philosophers I had the honor of speaking of last week: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. But we may ask ourselves how it was possible for that intimate bond to be woven in Fercher von Steinwand's soul, which must have connected him – and it really connected him – between the urge of his soul, which awakened in the simple peasant boy from the Carinthian mountains, and between what the greatest idealistic philosophers in the flowering of German world view development sought to strive for from their point of view. And so we ask: Where could Fercher von Steinwand find this, since, according to Robert Zimmermann's words, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel were not presented in Austria during Fercher von Steinwand's youth – he was born in 1828 – since they were forbidden fruit during his youth there? But the truth always comes out. When Fercher von Steinwand had graduated from high school and, equipped with his high school diploma, went to Graz to attend the University of Graz, he enrolled in lectures. And there was a lecture that the lecturer reading it on natural law was reading. He enrolled in natural law and could naturally hope that he would hear a lot of all kinds of concepts and ideas about the rights that man has by nature, and so on. But lo and behold! Under the unassuming title “Natural Law,” good Edlauer, the Graz university professor, the lawyer, spoke of nothing but Fichte, Schelling and Hegel for the entire semester. And so Fercher von Steinwand took his course in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel during this time, quite independently of what might have been considered forbidden, and perhaps really was forbidden, according to an external view of Austrian intellectual life. Quite independently of what was going on at the surface, a personality who was seeking a path into the spiritual worlds was therefore immersing himself in this context with the highest intellectual endeavor.

Now, when one sets out to follow such a path into the spiritual worlds through Austrian life, one must bear in mind – as I said, I do not want to justify anything, but only give pictures – that the whole nature of this Austrian spiritual life offers many, many puzzles to those – yes, I cannot say otherwise – who are looking for a solution to puzzles. But anyone who likes to observe the juxtaposition of contradictions in human souls will find much of extraordinary significance in the soul of the Austrian. It is more difficult for the Austrian German to work his way up than in other areas, for example in German, I would say, not so much in education, but in the use of education, in participating in education. It may look pedantic, but I have to say it: it is difficult for the Austrian to participate in the use of his intellectual life simply because of the language. For it is extremely difficult for the Austrian to speak in the way that, say, the Germans of the Reich speak. He will very easily be tempted to say all short vowels long and all long vowels short. He will very often find himself saying “Son” and “Sohne” instead of “Son” and “Sonne”. Where does something like that come from? It is due to the fact that Austrian intellectual life makes it necessary – it is not to be criticized, but only described – that anyone who, I might say, works their way up from the soil of the folk life into a certain sphere of education and intellect has to take a leap over an abyss – out of the language of their people and into the language of the educated world. And of course only school gives them the tools to do so. The vernacular is correct everywhere; the vernacular will say nothing other than: “Suun”, quite long, for “Sohn”, “D'Sun”, very short, for “Sonne”. But at school it becomes difficult to find one's way into the language, which, in order to handle education, must be learned. And this leap across the abyss is what gives rise to a special language of instruction. It is this school language, not some kind of dialect, that leads people everywhere to pronounce long vowels as short vowels and short vowels as long vowels. From this you can see that, if you are part of the intellectual life, you have a gulf between you and the national character everywhere. But this national character is rooted so deeply and meaningfully, not so much perhaps in the consciousness of each individual as, one might say, in each person's blood, that the power I have hinted at is experienced inwardly, and can even be experienced in a way that cuts deep into the soul. And then phenomena come to light that are particularly important for anyone who wants to consider the place of Austrian higher intellectual life in the intellectual life of Austrian nationality and the connection between the two. As the Austrian works his way up into the sphere of education, I would say that he is also lifted into a sphere, in terms of some coinage of thought, some coinage of ideas, so that there really is a gulf to the people. And then it comes about that more than is otherwise the case, something arises in the Austrian who has found his way into intellectual life, something that draws him to his nationality. It is not a home for something that one has left only a short time ago, but rather a homesickness for something from which one is separated by a gulf in certain respects, but in relation to which one cannot, for reasons of blood, create it, find one's way into it.

And now let us imagine, for example, a mind – and it can be quite typical of Austrian intellectual life – that has undergone what an Austrian scientific education could offer it. It now lives within it. In a certain way, it is separated from its own nationality by this scientific education, which it cannot achieve with ordinary homesickness, but with a much deeper sense of homesickness. Then, under certain circumstances, something like an inner experience of the soul occurs, in which this soul says to itself: I have immersed myself in something that I can look at with concepts and ideas, that from the point of view of intelligence certainly leads me here or there to understand the world and life in connection with the world; but on the other side of an abyss there is something like a folk philosophy. What is this folk philosophy like? How does it live in those who know nothing and have no desire to know anything of what I have grown accustomed to? What does it look like over there, on the other side of the abyss? — An Austrian in whom this homesickness has become so vivid, which is much deeper than it can usually occur, this homesickness for the source of nationality, from which one has grown out, such an Austrian is Joseph Misson.

Misson, who entered a religious order in his youth, absorbed the education that Robert Zimmermann pointed out, lived in this education and was also active in this education; he was a teacher at the grammar schools in Horn, Krems and Vienna. But in the midst of this application of education, the philosophy of his simple farming people of Lower Austria, from which he had grown out, arose in him, as in an inner image of the soul, through his deep love of his homeland. And this Joseph Misson in the religious habit, the grammar school teacher who had to teach Latin and Greek, immersed himself so deeply in his people, as if from memory, that this folklore revealed itself poetically in him in a living way, so that one of the most beautiful, most magnificent dialect poems in existence was created. I will just, to paint a picture for you, recite a small piece from this dialect poetry, which was only partially published in 1850 – it was then not completed – just the piece in which Joseph Misson so truly presents the philosophy of life of the Lower Austrian farmer. The poem is called: “Da Naaz,” - Ignaz - “a Lower Austrian farmer's boy, goes abroad”. So, Naaz has grown up in the Lower Austrian farmhouse, and he has now reached the point where he has to make his way into the world. He must leave his father and mother, the parental home. There he is given the teachings that now truly represent a philosophy of life. One must not take the individual principles that the father says to the boy, but one must take them in their spiritual context; how it is spoken about the way one has to behave towards luck when it comes, towards fate ; how one should behave when this or that happens to one; how one should behave when someone does one good; how one should behave towards kind people and how towards those who do one harm. And I would like to say: to someone who has undergone his philosophical studies to the extent that he has become a theologian, this peasant philosophy now makes sense. So the father says to the Naaz when the Naaz goes out:

From the first song.
Teach your children on the road.

Naaz, iazn loos, töös, wos a ta so, töös sockt ta tai Voda.
Gootsnom, wails scho soo iis! und probiast tai Glück ö da Waiden.
Muis a da sogn töös, wo a da so, töös los der aa gsackt sai.
I and my mother were dreaming and dreaming, as you know, seeing nothing else.
What we see, work and worry about,
We do it for the children, what we don't do, is not good enough! —
If we are once a little pressed for time and are short of hands, take it easy, but find us a few decent places for the children, preferably under the shade of trees, where the fish spawn. —
If your luck turns around, so live not all the days,
Stay even, in the middle of the river, don't cut the rope too short.
Luck is round and round, so roll it back again soon.
If good luck and misfortune happen, it doesn't lie in sorrows.
Don't let anything get you down, don't let it get to the clouds.
If we're down, we'll pull through, I hope so, he'll do it again!
Mocka'r and hocka'r and pfnotten and trenzen with the kimt nix außa.
Kopfhängad, grod ols won amt' Heana s Prot häden gfressa:
Töös mochts schlimmi nöd guit, gidanka'r ös Guidi no pessa!
Look at the situation we are in, think about the future!
If you give us something, don't be stingy, take this and that: it's good!
Look, my dear, we realize: a little courtesy is not too much to ask for! —
It's getting more chivalrous, foreign people, it's a saying, a word of honor.
Don't be too proud, don't be afraid of a fool.
Don't open your coat, don't let your luck run out.
There are two weeks below and one above, so give an old one. If no one chips what is also often there, give a groden. Look after your health, health is allways good for the soul. What have we, who have everything in this world, if we are not healthy? Our friends and our comrades in arms! Olli, they may know us – and fools, fools is the best!

Translation:

A lesson from my father for the journey

Ignaz, now listen, what I say to you, your father says to you.
In God's name, because it has to be so, and you should seek your fortune in the wide world,
That is why I have to tell you this, and take to heart what I say to you.
I and your mother are old and have stayed at home; you know that you can't make anything out of that.
You slave away, toil, work hard and weaken yourself with worry. You do this for the sake of your children; what wouldn't you do to keep them from going astray. If you have grown weak and sickly later in life, and hard times come, they will also jump in lovingly, but you can find this in proper, righteous children, helping to provide the things that the state and life demand so that we can have some relief.
If you should ever be lucky, don't live like a cavalier.
Stay as you were, in the golden mean of the middle road, don't stray from the right path in life.
Luck is round like a ball; it rolls away from us just as easily as it comes to us. If something doesn't work out or you experience misfortune, don't talk about it to people. Stay calm; don't let anything show on your face; don't be timid; complain about everything to God only; ask him; I tell you, he makes everything better again! Acting sad, withdrawing, making sour faces, being whiny: none of this achieves anything. |
Hanging your head as if the chickens had eaten your bread:
This does not improve anything bad, let alone make the good even better!
Keep the possessions you take with you; plan for the future a little.
If someone gives you something, accept it without being ungracious and say, “May God reward you!” —
Pay attention, Ignaz; and remember this well: no one has ever been punished for being polite! —
Don't be contrary; being away from home makes people modest; that's a saying and it's true.
Don't be tempted into gambling; don't pay too much attention to the dance floor.
Don't have your cards read; and don't seek your destiny in the dream book.
If two paths go in different directions, and one of them is new, then go the old one.
If one of them is uneven, which is often the case, then go the even one.
Guard your health; of all goods, health is the better one.
Admit it: what in the world do you really possess if you don't have your health?
-----
If you come home one day and no longer find us old people in this little room,
then we will be where your grandfather and grandmother are joyfully awaiting us,
where our benefactors will find us and our deceased relatives. Everyone will recognize us immediately – and this, Ignaz, is a very beautiful thing. Now it says:

From the second song.
How the girl leaves her father's house and gives her father's home sorrow and tears.

Vodar and Muidar said: “Good luck for all we hope for,
We wish you a long life and good health!”
“As you wish,” said Muida and wiped the tears from my eyes,
“If you want respect and honor in this world, that's how we pray."
“People set it up earlier and people later,
I and your dad, we pray, child, that no misfortune befalls you.
Go to your niece and nephew and bring them to the Moata; stop by in Piasenrait, don't stay at the Moam's, you'll find a welcome, see everything beautiful, Naaz, and say hello a lot; When you come, we will be very happy to see you, when you come home!"
The old woman cries and gives him a Guglhupf cake, a soapbox and
, in addition, a white, newly washed cloth.
Hoamlih gives him three more in a paper bag.
The Vada gives him an extra two guilders, more can't be given.
“Money, Naaz, is a piglet that won't be viable at will, Naaz."
The door opens, and Naaz looks around the room,
“Main!” says Muida, ‘that's a terrible thing to say!’
He points to the gun rack hanging just inside the door:
“Gootsnom!” Muida says, makes a cross on his forehead with a damar – and then
-----
“I'm serious, Naaz, now goodbye, take care that all is well, Naaz!
Come on, let's go to the barn, so that we know right away
Where or when or what or said that something has fallen. If you come across the Graanitz, don't take a smudge pot full of ears
Drink from a watered well, it helps for the Hungarian crown!»
Godspeed once more and once more and go out into the world with trepidation.
Hunotmal doesn't ring, they look around and beckon to their father. “Look at your sign,” cries the father of the wide world, ‘it's not valid!” “Go to the Moam,’ cries the old mother, ‘we greet you, don't forget us.’

Narration:
How Ignaz leaves his father's house and his parents see him off.

Father and mother, I bid you farewell and God bless you for all the kindness you have shown me.
I hope with all my heart that you live a long life and stay healthy.
As God wills, says the mother and wipes her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief,
If the Lord calls us from the world, we are prepared for it.
For some people it is given up earlier and for some later.
I and your father pray, Ignaz, that no misfortune befalls you.
We will walk with you for a bit and accompany you to the image of the Mother of God.
Once you are in Piasenrait, stop by at your aunt's. You will be welcomed there.
Tell her all the nice things, Ignaz, and give her our warmest regards.
If she can come, we would be very happy if she visited us.
So speaks the old mother and wraps him a crumpet, a pastry, and also a piece of white bread in a freshly washed 'cloth'. She secretly gives him three shiny new twenties, wrapped in paper. The father gives him a two-guilder piece, more he cannot give. We don't have much money, Ignaz, take what you can with good will.
Before the door opens, Ignaz looks around and takes one last look at the room.
“Oh dear,” says his mother, ‘that's a bad sign, as if you'll never see it again,’
and she dips two fingers into the holy water font hanging next to the door.
In God's name, says the mother, and makes a cross on his forehead with his thumb – and they leave. Now it's getting serious, Ignaz, now God keep you, be well, Ignaz, Let us hear from you from time to time so that we always know how you are doing or if you are sick. When you come to Graanitz, take a handful of earth beforehand,
Austrian for: border. Drink it in diluted wine, it helps against fever.
They say goodbye to you, once and again, and part sadly.
A hundred times is not enough for them to look around and wave their hands.
“Mind your ID,” the father calls from afar, ‘don't lose it.” “Go to your aunt,’ the old woman calls, ‘we send her our regards, don't forget that.’

The entire philosophy of the farming community emerges before the friar, and so vividly that one sees how intimately he has grown with it. But he is also connected to something else: to that which is so fundamentally connected to the Austrian character, to the character of the Austro-German peasantry in the Alps: to the direct, unspoilt view of nature that arises from the most direct coexistence with nature. The description of a thunderstorm is owed to what comes to life again in Joseph Misson. It vividly describes how the Naaz now travels and how he comes to a place where heath sheep graze, which a shepherd, called a Holdar there, knows how to observe closely: how they behave when a thunderstorm is coming. Now he tells himself what he sees there:

When a cloud appears in the west and it doesn't come from below, it means a thunderstorm.
“One,” he thinks, ‘is coming, the other is going, now you have to decide which way you're going.’
Get on a donkey and look – now it thunders!
Immediately again – and how it rumbles over the Beringer!
It roars and rushes powerfully into the wood, that it is completely out!
“Oh, where this breaks out, our heaven be gracious!"
Then the Holdar, takes off his hat and ‘if only,’
he looks at the Guirkan, ‘if only it doesn't scare someone!’
“Just as we are,” he says, ‘two thunderstorms are coming together.’ (This convergence of two thunderstorms is now vividly described.)
And the dog sticks its snout up in the air and sniffs the air.
He points to a swallow, which flies quietly to the barn and drinks.
Then it is quiet and sultry and the air thickens.
The birds fall asleep in the nests and the sheep bow their heads.

Reproduction:
How Ignaz gets caught in the weather and doesn't know whether to

Listen, he says to himself, sit down for a moment and think about which way you will go.
He goes to the heath and looks around – suddenly there is a clap of thunder,
followed by another, and how it rumbles over the mountains!
It creaks and hisses mightily in the wood, as if it were completely dead. Well, may the Lord have mercy on anyone this happens to, says the lad to himself, taking off his coat, saying, looking at the clouds, just hoping it doesn't start raining. It seems to me, he says, like two thunderstorms mixed together. And the dog lifts its muzzle to sniff the air, then, sensing no danger, draws its tail between its legs, goes over to the lad and lies down beside him. Now it is quiet and sultry, and the leaves tremble in the trees, the birds sleep in their nests, and the sheep put their heads together.

The good Naaz is aware of all this, and then the poet, who has meanwhile described how the Naaz entered “a Lucka” - a rock cave, a stone cave - waits there until the worst is over. Then he hangs his boots on the other shoulder and continues on his way. But the adventure with the weather is not over yet. Naaz comes to a little stream; which has of course swelled due to the weather. Naaz sees that:

"Look, the stream is so big, now I can't go around! —
Töös owa», sockt a, «wiat toh wos sain? iozt kan ik nid umi!»
He looks like a fool, the stream is too big, now he cannot cross it.
But something like that, he says, what could it be? Now I cannot cross it!

Now, in such a way, Misson, this man who really created from the depths of the folk tradition, wanted to embody the figure of Naaz. When one takes on such a figure, one sees how deeply, deeply in the subconscious soul, I could say, Austrian nationality sits with those souls who have also worked their way up into a high sphere of education. And one sees from such an example what remains of nationality for the soul in the higher sphere of education when one looks at this Austrian nationality.

One must say: mystics, in the sense that the human soul really delves into its inner life, really tries to understand what lives and moves within man, such mystics are not really found in Austria. Mystics who deal a lot with the human ego cannot flourish there. On the other hand, to feel the mysterious forces of nature in a certain way, more than just poetically, I would say, to feel the gnomes, the goblins, the spirits of nature in their liveliness, also with a certain humor, so that at the right moment you do not feel compelled to admit the full reality, but to feel in the co-experience of nature that which lives and moves in nature as a higher spiritual being – that is Austrian again. Therefore, within the Austro-German national character, it is not easy to find mystics who could be successors of Eckhart, Johannes Tauler.

On the other hand, the remarkable peasant philosopher Conrad Deubler is a truly Austrian figure. He was born in 1814 in Goisern, in the middle of the mountains, and died there in 1884 as an innkeeper. He was and remained a true farmer; but a man who so he has grasped it vividly, has penetrated it with his peasant wisdom, with a certain, I would say, curt peasant wisdom, — Conrad Deubler, such a philosopher could flourish; a philosopher who did not get involved in lengthy justifications, but liked this doctrine, and now he took from the Austrian mind everything to make this teaching appear plausible. From a primitive, elementary, rustic understanding he brought about, I might say, a Darwinian conception adapted to the Austrian peasant, by means of which he was able to carry on a copious correspondence with the great theologian and writer David Friedrich Strauss, with Feuerbach, with Ernst Haeckel, and so on. To grasp the whole expanse of nature with the intellect is more to the taste of the Austrian soul than to mystically immerse oneself in it. Therefore, one finds individual people among Austrian farmers who know every little herb in the mountains, who are also spiritually connected to the inner workings of each little herb, who, for example, engage with philosophers such as Ennemoser and Eckartshausen, who want to give a certain deeper picture of nature in its entirety, and who also want to place the human being in this picture of nature. But within this Austrian peasantry and that which arises from this peasantry, one will not easily find a pure mystic who engages in the contemplation of the human soul, averting his gaze from the external world of the senses. For it is the direct connection with that which makes an impression on the senses that characterizes the Austrian mind in the broadest sense for anyone who sees it – the seeing of more than the sensual, but the direct seeing – the seeing that does not need to reflect, that seeing that, I might say, sometimes skips the mind and goes directly to the heart.

Therefore, it can be said that in Austrian poetry, the soul and the landscape resonate with each other directly, sometimes in a way that is so moving, as in the case of Lena; but in general, this absorption of the whole soul in what can be done directly by a person, what can be accomplished by him without it being related to immediate usefulness, - that is something that belongs to the emotional qualities of the Austrian.

I would like to say, on the one hand, on this side of the Leitha, in the Austrian mountains, in the Austrian regions, there is something that can be depicted in a picture, as I attempted with Joseph Misson. On the other side of the Leitha, you are immediately in touch with the wide-open spaces of the Hungarian steppes; but you also live with what resounds in the sensual, I would say, spiritually, which the sensual tries to exhaust spiritually as much as it can be exhausted. Anyone who has ever crossed over to Hungary and listened to a Hungarian band, with all that these people put of their souls into their simple and wonderful playing, in which pain rages demonically, the lust and the exuberance of life at the same time, understands a poem like that of the Hungarian Szäz, which refers to this direct coexistence with the sensual, but which is felt spiritually, deeply spiritually and emotionally:

Listen, oh listen to the violin's song.
How it laments and how it weeps;
So much sorrow in four strings,
So much pain and grief combined!

Like the nightingales' flutes
In the silent, shadowy forest,
How the sobs of the abandoned orphan

That is lament, that is sorrow,
Which oppresses and yet uplifts,
Which weeps for the past, yet hopefully
Lives for a beautiful future.

Listen, a curse is heard – and swords
Mix clashing into the But a little fiddle bow.

Hear, oh hear the violin sounds,
How it spurs and laughs and cries,
In four strings such feeling,
So much joy and pain combined! —

You have to look very closely to understand the relevant things, you have to look very closely at the intimate interweaving of the senses with the outside world, so that the senses, in their interweaving with the outside world within the sensual, can more easily see the spiritual than when this spiritual awakens intellectually in the mind. It can be said that when it comes to making a judgment directly from the heart, to criticizing or approving the world, the Austrian will, under certain circumstances, have a little confidence in himself. He will also, especially if he has learned something, like to move in abstract terms, he will like to give something to the culture of the head, but above all want to be rooted in the culture of the heart. But the way from the head to the heart, the way from the heart to the head, is just so long, and it is so difficult to find! Often one easily stops in the middle!

It is, in a sense, quite characteristic of what, for example, a good connoisseur of Austrian culture, a contemporary, said about an Austrian personality, the former director of the Burgtheater in Vienna, Max Burckhard: that despite all his energy, the most characteristic thing about this quintessentially Austrian man, Max Burckhard, was that he never really wanted to undergo the transition from feeling to understanding or from understanding to feeling. He wanted to keep them both separate. While Max Burckhard was director of the Vienna Burgtheater, Hermann Bahr recounts, and Wilbrandt's play 'The Master of Palmyra' was to be performed at the Burgtheater, a play that is considered by many to be particularly significant and that for many is something tremendously high-minded, Burckhard did not want to stage the play. He could not understand why something so significant was seen in it; he always rejected it. So it was that well-meaning people, that is, people who meant well by Wilbrandt and the “Master of Palmyra,” managed to at least get Burckhard to attend a lecture on the “Master of Palmyra” in a really high-level society. He knew the piece, of course, but it was not to be read to him, but all the beautiful, aesthetic passages, the treatises were to have an effect on him, which the invited real professors and asthetics had to present about the mastery of this piece. Well, Burckhard was really a very clever man who, when it came down to it, was able to dialectically stand his ground and get into the spiritual ideas. He listened to the lecture. He did not just listen to the lectures of the aesthetes and professors, who said that something had been created “from the depths of human nature that points to the highest regions of spiritual life”. He also listened to how the beautiful characteristics are to be understood according to all chapters of aesthetics. He was silent. He did not allow himself to follow these trains of thought in any way. He could understand them, of course. It would have been easy for him to refute the matter from his point of view, to get involved in it. On another occasion, he might have done so, getting involved in long-winded discussions about the matter. He remained silent, he said nothing. Then ladies, especially the lady of the house, approached him: didn't he at least want to say how he related to all the witty remarks about one of the most witty plays ever written. Was it not the duty of the Burgtheater to perform the epoch-making play? But he did not engage in a discussion. He said: “I'm not putting it on!” And why? Why? They wanted to hear from him, the witty man, how he related to all the things that had been discussed wittily for hours. He just said: “Because it's a Holler!” — “A Holler” is something that means the same in Austria as “quatsch” in Berlin. But he did not engage in a discussion. That is to be taken as characteristic. He relied on his immediate judgment of the heart, on what his mind told him, and he did not find it necessary to engage in discussions of dialectics and so on; his whole criticism was that it is a “Holler”.

And so it is interesting to see, actually, how at a time when the most wonderful and glorious discussions were being held within the rest of the German-speaking world about the significance, nature and essence of drama, discussions in which Goethe and Schiller participated in such a profound way – I am referring in particular to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century – how in this period a discussion of aesthetics, of the meaning and essence of drama, was also ignited in Austria. But how was the discussion of drama ignited there in Austria? In a very strange way, everything that was presented there for and against this way of thinking ignited in Austria; what was discussed in such a well-known profound way within the Schiller-Goethe circle and the broader circles of the whole of German intellectual life, all of this ignited in Austria in a very peculiar way, namely through dance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two types of dance were the subject of a very energetic and significant discussion there. At the turn of the century, Noverre was the master of dance; and his student was then Muzzarelli. Muzzarelli represented a dance, a style of dance, in which the main thing was to make beautiful movements, artificial movements, to intertwine artificial movements through their lines, where the external spatial image of presenting oneself was taken into account. Now, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an opponent of this 'dance form' emerged in the person of Salvatore Vigano. And for this dance form of Salvatore Vigano, whose wife in particular danced the dance form he represented in a masterly fashion, whole texts were written, which did not apply to any other dance form. Whole stories, whole narratives were clothed in the dance form, so that the situations, the gestures, the form of expression, the events, the content to be told, were expressed. And now one should just delve into the far-reaching, passion-stirring discussions that have arisen about which dance is artistically the right one.

There was the Austrian playwright Ayrenhoff, who had already grown old at the time, the author of a large number of plays, who was completely on the side of the Muzzarelli dance, who spoke out most negatively against Salvatore Vigano and against the impossibility of expressing inner feelings through dance in such an unchaste way. Ayrenhoff could not understand that they even wanted to dance entire pieces, such as 'Richard the Lionheart' or 'The Daughter of the Air'. Ayrenhoff had been educated in the appreciation of beautiful form, of the sweep of lines, and his dramas were also constructed in this way. The sweep of lines in the portrayal of characters, seeing how some situation dissolves into a joke, or the transition of a situation into a joke, that was what mattered. These extraordinary forms were what mattered. He saw this in Muzzarelli's dance as well. And he was an important poet for Austria at that time. His importance can be seen from the fact that he received extraordinary recognition from Frederick the Great, who otherwise had no interest in German literature of the time. And “The Stagecoach”, a comedy by Ayrenhoff, Frederick the Great called “the best comedy that is written at all except the comedies of Moliere”. Yes, Frederick the Great went so far as to once show himself at a parade of the field marshal lieutenant - because that was Ayrenhoff and at the same time a poet - because he, Frederick the Great, was so interested in him.

On the other side, on Viganos' side, was Heinrich Joseph von Collin, who came from Belgium; but in a sense, Belgium belonged to Austria at that time. He had written the tragedy “Regulus,” but also other plays. Collin now advocated expression in dance with great enthusiasm. And he now staged his dramas in such a way that they expressed inwardness in what was being portrayed; that it was not so much about the way situations and jokes followed one another, about the external forms, but rather that the inner nature of the human being was expressed in what happened on stage. And Robert Zimmermann, who is deeply rooted in Austrian intellectual life, has spoken very beautifully of this Heinrich Collin, showing that this Heinrich Collin, who is basically also completely forgotten in Austria, but who But who can lead us deep into the course of Austrian intellectual life, who knew nothing of Fichte, and in his dramas revived the same kind of soul-feeling that lay in Fichte's philosophical representations. To make matters worse, Heinrich Collin's brother, Matthäus von Collin, has explicitly shown how Heinrich Collin knew nothing of Fichte, how he arrived at Fichteanism, but in a poetic way, in his Austrian way, entirely out of a strange parallelism of intellectual life, in the way that I have just described.

Without reflecting on the intuition, without merging into the intuition, Fichte comes back to what I described eight days ago. He says: The outer sense world, that which man lives out in the sensual, outer existence, is the sensualized material of our duty. Now that duty confronts him in such a deeply objective way and at the same time becomes related to the divine weaving and being that permeates the world, Fichte comes to say: one must not think in such a way that external sensual happiness could be bestowed on the one who faithfully fulfills his duty, but — even if this is somewhat one-sided, in the way it is presented, the energy of a certain striving of German idealism expresses itself in it; things must not be taken dogmatically – but what Fichte says is: the one who is completely absorbed in his duty must not claim that the reward for it will somehow be found in the external world of the senses. Therefore, the truly tragic – and this was Fichte's conviction – will appear when duty does not find any reward, but rather finds misfortune in the external world.

Heinrich Collin presents the same tendency in his plays. He wants to embody in a dramatic way the human soul that is built upon itself, that can live within itself without combining the happiness of the sensual world with duty. And so a deeply ethical trait emerges, but one that is intimately connected with the direct contemplation of the world as it presents itself to the senses; one that has even emerged from an aesthetics that has been formed through dance.

This close connection with observation, this life in direct perception and also the placing of what the heart experiences in direct perception, the reluctance to seek the way from the head to the heart, must be seen as one of the characteristics that are really deeply connected with this Austrian intellectual life.

And so many things in this Austrian spiritual life appear to us in such a way that contradictions are present in it, but contradictions that, if one lets them take effect in the right way, seem understandable in people who, within Europe, are placed in difficult tasks, in the mediation of the West with the East, and, I would like to say, must feel this placing in every detail of their way of life.

One can say: Wherever we touch this Austrian intellectual life, it appears to us as follows: the innermost is directly fanned in the outer world, without the mediation of a mystical dialectic. And from this underground, a phenomenon as likeable as the Austrian philosopher Bartholomäus von Carneri can be explained – as I said, I only want to present images. He was born in Trento in 1821, the son of an Austrian civil servant; deformed from birth (he was a twin), he already went through a difficult, painful youth, and then, after he had familiarized himself with the diversity of Austrian intellectual life, he became acquainted with Darwinism. For Carneri, Darwinism is not something that he simply accepts, but rather, for him, Darwinism becomes a life riddle itself. That the world, in the sense of Darwinism, can be explained by the externally observable development, is understandable to him, despite the fact that he has immersed himself deeply in German idealism. But in a certain respect, Darwinism becomes a life riddle for Carneri, the Austrian philosopher: If Darwinism is correct, what about human morality, human ethics? And so Bartholomew of Carneri becomes, one might say, the greatest ethicist, the greatest moral teacher of Darwinism. He interprets Darwinism in such a way that he seeks within the purely natural development, how the forces of nature complicate up to man, so that he still sees a spiritualization in this complication of the forces of nature, as they configure themselves. He does not want a rift between nature and spirit, but he does not want to stop at nature. He wants to chase the spirit out of itself in the configuration of the forces of nature. At the same time, he wants to find the connection between human ethics and human moral life and the explanation of nature in terms of Darwinism. Thus, for Carneri, the necessity to create an ethic arises directly from the world that appears vivid to him through Darwinism. I would like to say that what the human heart wants and needs to set before itself must be directly connected to the secrets and mysteries of nature. And it is particularly interesting to see in Bartholomäus von Carneri how he now strives for a unified world view, for a world view that fully embraces Darwinism in the spirit of the times, in the spirit of nineteenth-century materialism, but can only embrace it if if spirituality springs and can spring everywhere in nature itself, but a spirituality that is grasped directly in feeling, that is not first brought down from some transcendental spheres, as with Fichte, but that appears to him directly during the experience of sensuality. It is remarkable how the characteristic of Austrianism appears precisely in such a personality, in a personality like Carneri, who, however, also wants to place himself uniformly in the world in a different way, who everywhere sets out to show how, on the one hand, nature reaches up to the spirit, and on the other hand, the spirit works down to nature, how a unity lives in everything. Carneri also sought to depict this unity in life. He sought to bring it into life. And so one of the personalities arises, who appeared in particular in the 1860s and 1870s in Austria as fine minds, one of the personalities who were then also politically active. Carneri was on the side of the intellectual Austrian politicians of the 1870s, Plener, Beer, Herbst, Berger and so on. But wherever he spoke – and he often spoke – his words were imbued with a lofty idealism, but precisely with an idealism rooted in Darwinism, which was aware of its roots in Darwinism: I may be an idealist because my ideals come to me directly when I immerse myself in the development of nature.

It is the same spirit, in another field, that then again held sway in Robert Hamerling. In Robert Hamerling, in whom, I might say, the Austrian German found expression in the fact that Hamerling's motto was: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland,” which combined good Austrian-ness with good German-ness. In this Hamerling everything that can be called the interpenetration of idealism with direct feeling and with intuition found direct expression. Even in Austria, where people might have been better able to understand it, Hamerling's vividly sensual images, I would say sensually imbued images, were often condemned, for example in his “Ahasver,” also in “Aspasia” and in “King of Sion.” But they did not understand that it was precisely Hamerling's idealism, which I would call Austrian idealism, that needed the sensory image to visualize itself in, so as not to suffer from the division of the world into the sensual on the other. And so for Hamerling the spiritualized sensual, the aesthetic idealism, became the goal toward which he directed his whole feeling, his whole perception and his whole thinking as a vision of the future. And in many respects it is precisely in the case of such intellectuals as Carneri and Hamerling that the difficulties of Austrian intellectual life come to light, difficulties which consist in the fact that one is placed in a multiform surging mass of humanity and has to find one's way. Hence the phenomena that so often occur within Austrian intellectual life, where a clear view of this or that remains with mere description and does not somehow find its way into action and then peter out in a certain pessimism. Hence certain phenomena are only possible in Austrian intellectual life.

Is it not really somewhat strange that there was an Austrian in the first half of the nineteenth century who was born near Znaim, who bore the typically Austrian name Karl Postl, who also became a clergyman at his mother's request, but then, like the Barnabite monk Karl Leonhard Reinhold, also cast off the robe of the order and disappeared? He has disappeared. Then a book appears: “Austria as it Is,” from America; it describes Austrian views. That was in 1828. Then, from this same Karl Postl, who called himself not Karl Postl but Charles Sealsfield, appear, for example, descriptions of the decline of the Native Americans, from which one can see how fundamentally sound this man's direct view of nature is. No one at that time had any idea that the simple Karl Postl from Austria was hidden in this Charles Sealsfield. All the stories that otherwise appear on similar subjects – just see for yourself – are written, so to speak, from the point of view of a certain education, written in a certain way, so that you notice the theory. These Postl stories are written in such a way that the eye immediately grows into what it sees; the whole soul grows together with direct perception. He then spends his lifetime from the age of thirty to the age of sixty in the canton of Solothurn in Switzerland, where he is also buried. He returns and describes the life of Germans in America in such a vivid way that it should still have a significant effect on the soul today, if only it were read.

A specifically Austrian phenomenon is also a personality, whom not only the younger, but perhaps the older members of the audience gathered here have met, those books that are written, as is modestly stated on the title page, “for maidens”; “Weihgeschenk für Jungfrauen” it says. A story, a wonderfully vivid story, steeped in a Goethean, one might almost say, Greek spirit. On the title page it says: “Weihgeschenk für Jungfrauen” by Christian Oeser, “Letters on the Main Subjects of Aesthetics.” Published in the first half of the nineteenth century in the first edition, these books experienced many editions. Those who read them today still get something from them that can expand the heart, that can warm the soul. Christian Oeser - yes, who is Christian Oeser? This Christian Oeser is the same man who, for example, had a drama published in Pressburg in 1839 that nobody knew the author of – “Life and Deeds of Emerich Tököly” “by A. Z.”, that is, from A to Z, so that all the letters between A and Z are included. Those who understood something about dramatic characterization saw in the figure of Tököly a Hungarian Götz. It is a portrayal that can be directly compared to Goethe's “Götz von Berlichingen”, which was born out of the struggles that took place in Hungary shortly before the drama was written and that moved many, many souls and the world. The drama went out into the world, and so did several others by the same author. No one knew who it was from. That remained so. In 1869, the German Schiller Foundation took a decision to pay the then support allowance to a Mrs. Therese Schröer in Vienna. The document with which the allowance was paid stated that it had been learned that the widow of one of the most worthy German writers was not living in circumstances befitting her and his merits, and that she was therefore being paid this annual allowance. It was the widow of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, the author of many plays, who had to remain unnamed, the author also of that “Weihgeschenkes für Jungfrauen”, which is imbued with the spirit of Goethe; a quiet man who was a secondary school teacher in Preßburg, but who, as such, wrestled with the highest problems of human life, who was poor and whom no one knew. Even in his own town no one could or might know that this man was the author of these dramas.

Many similar phenomena could be cited. They show that in order to get to know Austrian intellectual life, one must not consider it in terms of what, I mean, goes as a more or less Catholic, as a more or less Protestant current through the development of the times but how one must grasp this Austrian intellectual life where it works out of the root of the people and where it can appear directly in its great significance. One must not look at Austrian intellectual life through the lens of the fact that Austria is a more Catholic country. On the one hand, this Austrian intellectual life works its way to the roots of the nation, as we have seen with Misson; on the other hand, however, it works its way up to great heights in a remarkable way. Consider, for example, the following phenomena: When the Protestant pedagogue Friedrich Dittes, who was brought from Germany during the so-called Liberal Era of Austrian development and placed at the head of the K.K. When the Protestant pedagogue, who had been brought from Germany during the so-called Liberal Era of Austrian development, looked around for important pedagogues of the immediate past, he, the Protestant pedagogue who had been brought from Germany, found the Austrian Vincenz Eduard Milde to be one of the most important pedagogues of the immediate past. In 1811, Milde published an “educational theory”. In Misson, we have come to know a mind that, clothed in the robes of a religious order, worked its way up to what I would call the management of educational life, and then worked its way back down to the roots of folklore, creating his “Naaz”: peasant philosophy! In Milde we see another priest, a good Catholic; a Catholic in whom Friedrich Dittes, the Protestant pedagogue, finds one of his most important pedagogical predecessors. Spiritual life reaches out across the differences of confession in a wonderful way. Instead of a long further description, I would like to read you just one passage from Milde's theory of education, so that you can see how, in this book, published in 1811, educational work is understood in a soul-drenched way; how, in contrast to on, who worked his way down into the people, to the highest views, the most ideal views of general human activity through pedagogy, the Catholic priest Milde works his way up, how seriously, how dignified, how tremendously deep he takes the pedagogical profession. He describes how the teacher should behave in order to gain the right relationship with the pupil; first:

"1. Through diligent study of anthropology; 2. through reading well-written biographies and truthfully portrayed educational histories; 3. through thoughtful interaction with children, through unnoticed, quiet observation of them, especially of their behavior towards other children; 4. by remembering his own youth, by reflecting on the course, the reasons, the means and obstacles his own education, on the difference between his present and former way of thinking and feeling; 5. by reflecting on the success and failure of his efforts in educating the pupil; 6. by observing the methods of other educators and the success of their way of treating the children”; - finally - ‘7. by observing the course of development of nature left to itself.’

The meaning of life should be built on a healthy anthropology, that is, the study of man. Then the teacher should constantly consult with himself, as it were, meditating, in order to always find the way to the child's soul. A truly soul-filled educational vision is also poured out on this quite remarkable work, which arose, so to speak, in the quiet of Austrian intellectual life through a man who was a clergyman in the outer life, who rose to become Archbishop of Vienna and who, in his way, truly represents that Austrian intellectual life to which one attaches such great importance and to which one must attach such great importance; that Austrian intellectual life that is directed towards the general human and basically maintains the connection with the roots of the people everywhere. Yes, I say, in 1811 a leading work on education appeared in Austria that had a great impact and was also highly praised by the Protestant pedagogue Dittes in the 1860s and 1870s. It was published again very recently by the Austrian pedagogue Franz Tomberger in a short outline. One must only consider what that means. In 1811, it had only been a short time since teachers in very, very remote areas of the Austrian lands, namely the German-Austrian lands, had a very strange position, not only in the village but also in the city. Not only did the teacher not have a school building – in many areas, shortly before this “Erziehungslehre” was published, a school building was a rarity; the students gathered around the teacher, the teacher went from house to house, sometimes he was there, sometimes in the next house; wherever there was space, he taught. But that was not the only thing. For example, paying the teacher a salary, yes, that would not have been understood; that is something that must be given freely! But the teacher only needed to teach the students in winter; in summer, the children were needed outside in the fields anyway. Well, so that he doesn't starve, he is granted the right to herd cows during the summer, to be a “Holdar”. But that did not prevent all that I have just described from happening. And that did not prevent a work on the art of education from appearing after such a relatively short time in Austrian intellectual life that it was not only exemplary but also epoch-making. One has to familiarize oneself with this juxtaposition of contradictions that arise from the difficulties of Austrian life.

But this is also why the Austrian needs what appeared in the most diverse forms in Viennese life in the course of the nineteenth century. Actually, a piece of Viennese life is also what you were able to get to know here in Berlin some time ago, although it had been quite “de-Viennified” to a certain extent, as connoisseurs generally admitted – what you were able to get to know through the performance of “Alpenkönig und Menschenfeind” by Ferdinand Raimund, with the character of Rappelkopf, and, what is also well known from the same author, “Verschwender”. I do not want to speak of a well-known matter, but rather show how Austrian intellectual life can be illustrated here and there, as it were, by the splashing of a wave that makes visible in pictures what lives in Austria. Therefore, I want to speak less about Ferdinand Raimund than about the man who replaced him in the hearts of the Viennese in the 1830s and 1840s, when Raimund had become very much a part of their lives: Nestroy. And Johann Nestroy, as a folk dramatist, is, I would say, truly an Austrian product. Indeed, one has even had to hear from some clever people of the present day that Nestroy is even characterized by his fellow countrymen as not being a real Viennese, because in the early days of his career, in particular, he only told the Viennese rough truths, not only created folk plays where honest people are always right, but where he could really, forgive the harsh expression, give the people a piece of his mind. Plays like these made up the content of his first theatrical career. He actually created a great deal; in thirteen years, he wrote around seventy such farces. But they truly contain that Austrian spirit that those who know it recognize as being truly embodied in Nestroy. It is not true that the Austrians of that time wanted to hear honest portrayals of characters from the theater, of people who recognize the simplicity of life. No, that was then and Nestroy grew out of it – what was demanded was that one could say: Now he has given them what for again, that is, he has really given them a telling-off. And with such a scolding, Nestroy, himself playing at the Vienna Karl Theater, actually entertained the Viennese so much that one can say: one sees in the spirit that lives in these Nestroy folk farces, one might say folk city farces, the Austrian spirit that needs to, in the criticism of life as well as in the jokes about life, in the humor of life, to overcome many a difficulty; who needed to let his soul feel at ease after hard work in a light way, and yet in a way that was not entirely free of sympathy and antipathy. And so Nestroy is truly a typical figure of Austrian urban popular theater around the mid-nineteenth century. He had his view of life and of the events of life expressed by a character in the following manner: “I believe the worst of everyone, even of myself, and I have seldom been mistaken!” With this view of life, he, who was personally kind and loving, and who in personal dealings actually had only kind and loving words, really created character figures that easily illustrate the view of life of the Austrians in Vienna at that time , that Austrianness that wanted to be hard at work, but that wanted to build a philosophy of life from the heart, without much dialectic, that also had to have humor, that also should not exaggerate the seriousness of life too much. There was a lot in the way of facing life. So Nestroy created a character that kept reappearing under this name or under a different name; once he called him “Schnofer!” And this Schnoferl also had an attitude towards life. For example, he once talks about how he fared in life with love: “With love, things went splendidly for me, it was all right, but with dislike, things are always bad!” This same Schnoferl, who, as I said, cannot see the funny side of life, once said about what he saw in his own heart: “The pragmatic story of my heart falls into three miserable chapters: futile musings, failed attempts and worthless triumphs.” Those are the three miserable chapters. Nestroy portrayed such characters with great acuity, so much so that an important Viennese critic once said: “In Nestroy, you could see the demonic expression that could intensify to the point of being devilish when he let his eyes play from the stage into the audience.” And so Nestroy expressed well a certain Austrian view of life in need of humor in the years before 1848, or even from the beginning of the forties.

Then came a time when one could not bear this outpouring of good and evil, this Nestroyan world beyond good and evil, of good, over-good and evil people, for a while. One wanted more honest figures, one wanted to be moved more and sworn at less. One had had enough of swearing for a while, one wanted to be moved. Nestroy didn't really like that, and so he said: Yes, in the past people still knew something about what a life story is; in modern times, if you go by those who now create life stories for the stage, if there are only three jokes in it - in Nestroy's plays there was one joke after another - there are only corpses in their blood, gravediggers and blubberers. He didn't really want to go along with that. But then again, he was able to keep up with the times. And so Nestroy found a peculiar, I would even say humanly free point of view, especially during the difficult year of 1848. He was a liberal man, he was a man who was thoroughly on the side of the progressives, who did not depend on anyone in any direction, but at the same time he found the right words for many a cry for freedom, for those who only go so far. And so he managed to maintain Austrian humor even in these difficult times. Just look at this: in a play that was written during one of Austria's most difficult times, “Freedom in Krähwinkel” – he also played in this play himself – this Austrian describes how the mayor of Krähwinkel imagines freedom. He has the constable Klaus express it: “Freedom is something terrible. The Lord Mayor always says: the ruler is the father, the subject is a little child, and freedom is a sharp knife.” And one of those who, in a Nestroyesque way, understands this a little, who also understands the people of Krähwinkel in their pursuit of freedom, characterizes them in the same way: ”No, I know the people of Krähwinkel. I know the Krähwinkler, you just have to let them run riot; once the rapture is over, we'll catch them with our hand in it, and then we'll really tweak the people's nose.” In the role that Nestroy himself played, to which he gave the name ‘Ultra’, a freedom fighter now appears who is really portrayed in such a way that humor can once again take hold of him. Nestroy spoke the following through the Ultra: “Now that the fight that had broken out has ended happily, he proclaims freedom: 'I proclaim freedom of speech, of the press and other freedoms for Crowwinkel, indifference of all classes, free speech, free elections according to previous opinion, an infinitely broad basis, which will gradually extend in length, and in order to avoid all disputes in this matter, no system at all.” Then Ultra comes – one must always imagine him as presented by Nestroy himself – to an opinion about what reaction actually is. What is reaction? “Well,” says Ultra, ‘as it was on a large scale, so we have had it here on a small scale. Reaction is a spectre, but spectres only exist for the timid: so don't be afraid of it, then there will be no reaction at all.’

But in Nestroy's personality itself there is something like a thoroughly correct placing of his own personality in life. A person like Nestroy was thoroughly a personality who was accessible to the depths of the soul. But what he created, he wanted to create from direct life and for direct life. And so Nestroy is not at all inclined to reflect on the ego. Once, he came into contact with the profound, inestimably esteemed poet Friedrich Hebbel, the great poet Hebbel. But Hebbel and Nestroy were like the north and south poles. Friedrich Hebbel, outwardly impeccable in his suit, correct in every gesture, Nestroy naughty in every gesture, with a rustic suit that he wore with particular dignity! Now Nestroy became acquainted with a play like “Judith and Holofernes”, a play in which Hebbel has actually exhausted the infinite depths of the human soul and embodied them in dramatic form so that one must say: It is truly a wonderful struggle with the existential problems of life, reaching the heights of the human spirit, but not for Nestroy, one might be tempted to say, because it cannot be readily and directly taken humorously. But he took it humorously, precisely as a taunt, saying, “No, that's nothing!” He also thought, “That's a nonstarter!” I'll do a Holofernes now, Judith and Holofernes, that must be the right thing; that's not something that Hebbel did.” But now he wanted to create a character in Holofernes who was so completely turned inward, to his human ego. Nestroy was very good at creating a character who acted entirely out of the abundance of the soul's will and wanted something. But he only wanted into this ego in a genuinely Austrian way, so to speak. Yes, not through speculation, not through dialectics, not even through dramatic dialectics! So he presents himself as a figure of Holofernes, full of ego, full of the power of personality, so strong that he wants to see who is stronger, “I” – or, as he said – “I or I!” – so that he feels doubly. So he wants to wrestle with himself, so that he sees who is stronger, I or I. That becomes Nestroy's Holofernes. But he knows how to position himself in life just right. And when he hears that people say that he denies a purely artistic principle with his plays that are directly inspired by folklore, well, he says that he will not allow such an accusation, because people should consider what it actually means to write folk plays. Anyone who writes popular plays and even wants to compare himself to Goethe is just like someone who makes a Zwetschkenkrampus and wants to act as a rival to Canova. A Zwetschkenkrampus is a figure made out of dried plums on St. Nicholas' Day to look like a clown or Santa Claus.

We also need to be thoroughly familiar with this side of Austrian identity. Because it is deeply, deeply interwoven with what the Austrian soul seeks in a certain view of life, which I would characterize in the following way: Because of the difficulties of his life, the Austrian feels the need to rest in a view of life that makes one forget the seriousness of life and yet, in turn, brings strength in the subconscious soul to be prepared for life. Nestroy is certainly deeper than those who took over from him at the end of the nineteenth century. You cannot compare Nestroy's farces with those of Berg, who certainly wrote more in the same period, but had sunk to a much lower level. But this peculiar view of life, which in turn goes back to a general human one, is part of the overall shaping of this Austrian's soul. And this view of life also shows that in Austria something comes from much deeper human sources and shapes the life of the soul than all that which is usually conceived of as ideas that draw together human development. One must not think of the Austrian as being wrapped up in this or that prejudice, but to get to know him, one must consider Austrian national character. |

I have only been able to present it to your minds in a few images today; I have not really chosen them with the aim of making the Austrian lovable, but simply to describe him as he is. I did not want to summarize anything special, but only to show individual traits, of course very individual lost traits, but which can nevertheless illustrate this or that, illustrate above all how a special note, a special tone, lives in this Austrian character, over the whole of this Austrian culture, from such figures as I have described to you today, to the Magyar Emmerich Madách, the man who created the well-known “Tragedy of Man”. Out of a life of suffering, and truly out of a life of suffering, Madách rose to create a form of human philosophy that suited him. He shows the creation of man, Adam and Eve. He shows how Adam and Eve are placed in the world by the divine creator, perceiving this world as a mystery. Now Lucifer shows them what will follow. Adam is shown how he will live again, how he will return in Egyptian times, how he will live as an Egyptian, as a pharaoh; how Eve will be his slave. The Egyptian culture with all that it can trigger in the soul of the re-embodied Adam is presented by the poet. And further, we are led into the Roman period; Adam is reborn in the time of the Roman Empire. In the time of Christianity, in turn, in the time of the Franco-English culture, in the time of the German culture; at the end of the earth time, he is placed in an embodiment. The whole of human life is led past him.

As one can see, there are many paths that lead up from the depths of joy and suffering that can arise in the Austrian soul, up to the peaks of human world and life views. And it is a special note that one must say: It is precisely through the contemplation of this special note, this special 'tone in Austrian folklore that it already corresponds to an inner necessity that, for example, the German-Austrians were separated for a time from the general German intellectual life. It was precisely through this separation that they developed their innermost selves properly, that they emphasized what was truly their own in the right way. But such a separation does not destroy what connects the peoples. And what we see today, this interaction of the two Central European empires into a great overall concept of Central Europe, into an overall being of Central Europe, is firmly anchored in both the inhabitants of the one and the inhabitants of the other empire, if one looks straight into the depths of the soul. This can be seen in the depths of the national character, for example, where the will of Austria is realized, and again in the heights of Austrian achievement. When, as it seemed, a deep rift had opened up in 1866 between the hearts of the great German Empire and the hearts of the best Austrians, there was not a mood at the height of humanity after that year 1866 that cried out for revenge. There was not a mood that was later in other places, after a people had been defeated, where it was said that one must always and again and again bring the thought of revenge to life in one's soul. No, but an 'Address was delivered to the throne immediately after 1866 in Austria, which contained the words; 'It is not the secret thought of retaliation that guides our steps; a nobler satisfaction is granted to us if we succeed more and more in transforming disfavor and enmity into respect and affection through what we achieve and what we create.

These words also express the bond between the Austrian and German hearts that has been so beautifully realized today. That bond, which is expressed so beautifully in a poem by von Hamerling that truly springs from the Austrian soul: Germany is my fatherland, but in Austria I feel my motherland. I feel a sense of belonging to my mother country. This sense of belonging was so vividly experienced that it can be expressed in a few words that originated in Austria. These are strange words, perhaps not in a completely satisfactory form, but they are words that may be read aloud, especially in our time. I will say afterwards in which period these words were written. In a poem entitled “Austria and Germany” it says:

Let Russia and England prudently confer,
Perhaps not even unhappily find it,
If we here engage in a little battle,
If they try to take away our just rights!

You, German brothers, will not advise here –
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And among us every ambition will fade
Before the: One people in word and deed.

And if one among us has failed,
If discord has existed anywhere in German hearts,
There is only one thing that now inspires us:

What we have in common, our joys and our sorrows!
So let us also have in common:
A German war, if not a German peace!

They could be words written in our time. But they were written in April 1859 by the son of that Tobias Gottfried Schröer I mentioned, by Karl Julius Schröer, who worked in Vienna, having come from Zisleithania, in Austria. He worked in a way that can be said to have been suitable for, on the one hand, connecting the soul with what lives and weaves in the people and, on the other hand, carrying the souls up to the heights of spiritual life – Karl Julius Schröer, who first developed a beneficial activity as director of the Viennese Protestant schools and then as professor of German literature at the Technical University. I myself feel — please excuse this personal remark — deeply connected with this activity, because Karl Julius Schröer was once my dear teacher. This Karl Julius Schröer, on the one hand, he carried his popular research into the really deep foundations of folklore. First of all, he had Christmas plays printed that were performed among the farmers during the Christmas season but that had emerged from the people themselves. Then he was a dialect researcher, a researcher who studied the peculiarities of the Austrian dialect in the Gottschee region in Carniola, among the Germans of Spiš in Slovakia, among the so-called Heanz in western Hungary, who also researched the dialect of Lower Austria and everywhere pointed out the close connection between all Austrian intellectual life and its roots in the folk tradition; and who, on the other hand, carried the soul up to the heights of Goethe's world view through research into Faust, and in this sense again had a beneficial effect on his students. In 1859 this man expressed Austria's unity with Germany in this way. I have quoted his words to show how the Austrian national character leads to that beautiful and glorious ideal towards which we must strive today and which must develop out of the great demands and devoted deeds of our time: a Central Europe in which everything that has long been working together in our hearts will finally be united. And especially by considering the special tone that prevails in Austrian nationality and Austrian intellectual life, one can say that what should be achieved there in separation will be able to combine with the wider Germanic character in a more intimate way for the benefit and blessing of Central European development. And so we see, I would say, even if we look with an understanding of the essence of nationality at what is developing out of blood and suffering and pain in our time as a future ideal for Central Europe, we see that something is developing that must be created by the devoted and courageous deeds of arms, but which is firmly rooted, so firmly rooted that the guarantee of its durability can be seen in the hearts and souls of those who are drawing closer together and have joined forces for common action.

In conclusion, let me say: what is now coming together historically is not only coming together through external necessity, it is coming together through the inner bonds of the souls, the hearts of the peoples of Central Europe.

A continuation of my reply to E. Horneffer's essay "A defense of the so-called ‘Wiederkunff des Gleichen’ von Nietzsche”

Ernst Horneffer makes the following claim with regard to my refutation of his pamphlet "Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Eternal Return and its Publication to Date" printed in No. 6 of this journal: "The entire structure of Steiner's refutation is flawed. If you want to refute me, you have to refute my reconstruction of the sketch or draft that Koegel bases his book on". I do not believe that I have such an obligation to uphold the objections I have raised against Hornefler. For these objections do not refer to Hornefler's reconstruction, but to his false interpretation of individual Nietzschean aphorisms. And anyone who misunderstands Nietzsche as Horneffer does does not really need to worry about his reconstruction of the "return of the same". If I have now linked individual thoughts to this reconstruction, it is because the creation of fairy tales is one of the means of the "Nietzsche Archive", and it does not seem appropriate to me to add to the many other fairy tales the one about my capitulation to Horneffer's reconstruction.

Whoever wants to understand Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return of all things and its connection with the "Draft" "The Return of the Same" printed in the ı2nd volume of the Complete Edition, p. 5, must know the source of this thought. For there is no doubt that the essay that was planned with this draft is to be understood as follows: that the idea of the return of the same formed the occasion for it, and that everything else was added to this idea in order to support it.

How did Nietzsche arrive at the idea of the eternal return of all things? I have repeatedly pointed out the source of this idea in conversations with Mrs. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and with Dr. Koegel in 1896. I still hold the conviction I expressed then today: that Nietzsche conceived the idea on the occasion of reading Eugen Dühring's "Kursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung" (Leipzig 1875), and under the influence of this book. On p. 84 of this work this idea is expressed quite clearly; only there it is fought against just as vigorously as Nietzsche defends it. The book is in Nietzsche's library. As numerous pencil marks in the margins show, Nietzsche read it avidly. Incidentally, even without this we know that Nietzsche was an avid reader of Dühring. Dühring says: "The deeper logical ground of all conscious life therefore demands, in the strictest sense of the word, an infinity of entities. Is this infinity, by virtue of which ever new forms are driven forth, possible in itself? The mere number of material parts and elements of force would in itself exclude the infinite accumulation of combinations if the continuous medium of space and time did not guarantee an infinity of variations. From that which is countable, only an exhaustible number of combinations can follow. But from that which by its nature cannot be conceived as something countable without contradiction, the unlimited multiplicity of positions and relations must also be able to emerge. This unlimitedness, which we claim for the fate of the formations of the universe, is now compatible with every change and even with the occurrence of an interval of approximate persistence or complete self-sameness, but not with the cessation of all change. Those who wish to cultivate the idea of a being that corresponds to the original state should remember that temporal development has only one real direction, and that causality is also in accordance with this direction. It is easier to blur the differences than to retain them, and it therefore costs little effort to imagine the end by analogy with the beginning, ignoring the gap. Let us, however, beware of such superficial hastiness; for the existence of the universe, once given, is not an indifferent episode between two states of the night, but the only firm and clear ground from which we make our inferences and anticipations." As a mathematically trained mind, Dühring must fight the idea of an eternal repetition of the same world states. For only if the number of combinations were limited would the first one have to recur after all possibilities have been exhausted. Now, in the continuous space, not a limited but an infinite number of combinations is possible. New states can therefore enter into the infinite. Dühring also finds that a perpetual repetition of states has no appeal for life: "Now it goes without saying that the principles of the stimulus of life are not compatible with eternal repetition of the same forms." If we now accept the mathematically-logically impossible thought, if we make the assumption that a countable number of combinations are possible with the material parts and force elements, then we have Nietzsche's idea of the "eternal return of the same". We have nothing other than the defense of a counter-idea taken from Dühring's view in Aphorism 203 (Volume XII in Koegel's edition and Aph. 22 in Horneffer's writing: "Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Eternal Second Coming"): "The measure of the All-Power is determined, nothing "infinite: let us beware of such excesses of the concept! Consequently, the number of positions, changes, combinations and developments of this force is indeed immense and practically "immmeasurable", but in any case also determined and not infinite, that is: the force is eternally the same and eternally active: - up to this moment an infinity has already expired, that is, all possible developments must have already existed. Consequently, the momentary development must be a repetition and so that which gave birth to it and that which arises from it and so on forwards and backwards! Everything has been there countless times, insofar as the overall situation of all forces always returns ..." And Nietzsche's feeling towards this thought is exactly the opposite of that which Dühring has with him. For Nietzsche, this thought is the highest formula for the affirmation of life. Aphotism 43 (in Horneffer, 234 in Koegel's edition) reads: "the future history: more and more this thought will triumph, - and those who do not believe in it must by their nature finally die out! - Only those who consider their existence capable of eternal repetition remain: among such, however, a state is possible that no utopian has reached!" It is possible to prove that many of Nietzsche's thoughts arose in the same way as the idea of eternal return. Nietzsche formed the counter-idea to some existing idea. Ultimately, the same tendency led him to his main work: "Revaluation of all values."

In Dühring, one can see a thinker who consistently, if one-sidedly, represents the knowledge brought forth by Western intellectual development. Nietzsche could only be inspired by him in such a way that he contrasted his statements and values with the opposite ones. Anyone who compares Dühring's "Kursus der Philosophie" with Nietzsche's aphorisms on the "Wiederkunft" can also prove this in detail.

Dühring believes in the absolute validity of certain fundamental truths. "Just as one cannot ask of a mathematical truth how long it is or will be true, one cannot make the absolute necessities of the real dependent on a duration, but must, conversely, make the duration and its respective magnitude dependent on these themselves." From such irrefutable fundamental truths, Dühring deduces the impossibility of an eternal return of the same states. Nietzsche accepts this eternal return. He must therefore also deny the absolute validity of Dühring's fundamental truths. Why does Dühting profess these basic truths? Because they are simply true for him. For Nietzsche they cannot be true. Their truth cannot therefore be the reason why they are recognized by man. Man must need them, even though they are untrue. And he needs them in order to find his way in reality with them, to master it. What is recognized as true is not true, but it gives us power over reality. He who accepts the truth of knowledge needs no other reason to justify it; its truth in itself is reason enough. Whoever denies the truth must ask: why does man take these errors into himself, why does he assimilate them? Nietzsche wants to give the answer to these questions in the first four chapters of the work on the "Eternal Return".

I will now show how this work is to be understood from such points of view. I will also show why Nietzsche abandoned the plan to write it. In doing so, a hypothesis will emerge as to the reasons why the Nietzsche Archive views this publication with such a skeptical eye, why they speak of a "so-called" "return of the same". Hornefler's reconstruction will show what it is worth.

In the last article (No. 16 column 401 ff. of this journal) I believe I proved that Nietzsche's doctrine of the "eternal return of all things" is the counter-idea to Dühring's position on this idea in his "Kursus der Philosophie". I would also like to point out that Nietzsche himself spoke out about such a formation of counter-ideas. On page 65 of the 11th volume of the complete edition of Nietzsche's works we read the following "aphorism": "What is the reaction of opinions? When an opinion ceases to be interesting, one tries to give it a charm by holding it to its counter-opinion. Usually, however, the opposing opinion seduces and now makes new supporters: it has become more interesting in the meantime." I would like to mention a few more things that prove that Nietzsche understood this idea of the "eternal return" in no other way than natural science. Mrs. Lou Andreas-Salomé first made a statement in the journal "Freie Bühne", May 1892, and then in her book "Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken" (Friedrich Nietzsche in his Works), which is interesting for clarifying the facts, even though the entire book by this woman, who was in contact with Nietzsche for several months in 1882, gives a completely skewed view of his teaching. Mrs. Lou Salomé claims: "Even a superficial study soon showed Nietzsche that the scientific foundation of the idea of reincarnation on the basis of the atomistic theory was not feasible; he thus found his fear that the disastrous idea would be irrefutably proven to be correct not confirmed and thus seemed to be freed from the task of his proclamation, from this fate awaited with horror. But now something peculiar occurred: far from feeling redeemed by the insight he had gained, Nietzsche behaved in exactly the opposite way; from the moment the dreaded doom seemed to recede from him, he resolutely took it upon himself and carried his doctrine among the people; the moment his fearful assumption became unprovable and untenable, it hardened for him, as if by a magic spell, into an irrefutable conviction. What should become scientifically proven truth takes on the character of a mystical revelation, and henceforth Nietzsche gives his philosophy in general as the final foundation, instead of the scientific basis, the inner inspiration - his own personal inspiration." Nietzsche's friend of many years, Peter Gast, opposes this view of Lou Andreas-Salomé, that in Nietzsche's mind an initially scientific idea has been transformed into a mystical inspiration, in his truly excellent, profound introduction, which he wrote a few years ago to "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches". He condemns any overplaying of Nietzsche's views into the mystical and says that the doctrine of the Second Coming is a "purely mechanistic doctrine of the exhaustibility, i.e. repetition, of cosmic molecular combinations". Mrs. Lou Salomé thus admits for the first times in which Nietzsche represented the idea of the Second Coming that it was conceived "on the basis of the atomistic theory"; Peter Gast accepts the mechanical conception with the exclusion of all mysticism, through which Mrs. Lou Salomé then confuses the matter. The mechanical conception, however, is the counter-idea to Dühring's, and we must therefore assume that Nietzsche conceived the "Eternal Return" in this mechanical version in 1881. As soon as I received his copies of the manuscript of the Second Coming through Dr. Koegel in the summer of 1896, I was a staunch advocate of Peter Gast's view. I had to fight against some people who at that time professed a mystical view. But this mechanical idea of Nietzsche's does not fit in with the rest of our mechanical science. Anyone who thinks in terms of rational mechanics must, like Dühring, fight against the "eternal return". If Nietzsche wanted to defend it, he could not do so for this one mechanical conception alone, but he had to set up the counter-opinion for the whole mechanical view of nature. He had to show that this whole mechanical conception was not as irrefutable as it was held by people like Dühring. From there he arrived at the question of the value of truth. Why are generally recognized truths believed as such? That became his question. Dühring and others would have answered simply: because they are true, because they correspond to reality. Nietzsche said to himself that this is not the case at all. Where do any of our concepts correspond to reality? Nowhere. "Our assumption that there are bodies, surfaces, lines, forms, is only the consequence of our assumption that there are substances and things, persistent things. As certain as our concepts are fictions, so are the shapes of mathematics. There is no such thing; we can no more realize a surface, a circle, a line, than a concept." (Aph. 18 p.17 of the ı2nd volume of Koegel's edition.) But these concepts, these fictions are the things with which the sciences operate. So there can be no question of the absoluteness of scientific truths. Why do we accept them after all? Because we need them in order to orient ourselves in reality. There is no circle anywhere, no surface anywhere; but we use such fiction to orient ourselves within reality. It is not the truth, but the usefulness for life that is the reason for our belief in so-called truths. In order to become aware of this usefulness, however, we must experience the applicability of our conceptual fictions in our own bodies. We have to implore these fictions and try to live with them. Until now, mankind has only believed their so-called truths because it has incorporated them and found that it is possible to live with them. If one now wants to penetrate deeper into the structure of the world's being, one cannot stop at simply going along with this incorporation as it has happened so far. It could very well be that one could also live with completely different opinions. A proof against the "eternal return" only has the meaning that it shows that one cannot unite this idea with the fictions of which one has so far found that one can live with their incorporation. But if one wants to find out whether the "eternal return" has a possibility of life, then one must try to live with the counter-opinions of the previous ideas. One must return to the state of innocence, in which no opinions have yet been incorporated; one must make oneself an "experiment" in order to see how one can live with other ideas than the previous ones. Only in this way can we really test life to see whether it is worth living in its deepest depths. When we have cast off the heaviness that we feel in ourselves through the belief in absolute truths, when we "face up like children to what used to be the seriousness of life", then we can try out how we can live with opinion and counter-opinion. (Aph. 148 in volume ı2 5.89 in Koegel's edition.) The people of the past were burdened with the confidence that it was only possible to live with the incorporated fictions. One throws off this confidence; one casts off all belief in certain opinions; one experiments with all drives and passions and waits to see how far they can be incorporated, i.e. how far one can live with them. One must lighten one's life from all the incorporated heresies. At first, however, this will result in a degradation, attenuation of life. For we are equipped to live with the armor we have accumulated so far. If we discard it, we initially weaken ourselves. But it is precisely this that enables us to try the "new heavyweight" with the "eternal return" in contrast to the old heavyweight. Once again, as "individuals", we want to take up the struggle for life on a broader basis than with the fictions we have absorbed so far. "A play of children, on which the eye of the wise looks, have power over this and that state" (Aph. 148 in Koegel's edition). What must come out of such a trying life if life is to seem worth living to us, if we do not prefer to choose annihilation? "An absolute surplus must be demonstrated, otherwise the annihilation of ourselves with regard to humanity is to be chosen as the means of the annihilation of humanity". (In the same aphorism.) We have thus gained a standard for the incorporation of a new doctrine. So far we have only ever lived with the opposite doctrine; now we want to see whether the "doctrine of the Second Coming" gives a surplus of pleasure. "This establishes the connection between point 4 of the draft" of the "Eternal Return" and point 5. The first is called: "The innocent. The individual as experiment. The easing of life, humiliation, attenuation, transition." The last is: "The new emphasis: the eternal return of the same, etc." - These last two chapters would therefore have had to describe the task Nietzsche had in mind if he wanted to create a "new center of gravity". In contrast, the first three chapters should show how humanity has developed so far. It has fought its way through life with the help of errors (incorporation of basic errors). The erroneous beliefs were believed because they proved to be useful. But not only the beliefs by which we orient ourselves in reality are incorporated errors: instincts and passions, pleasure and displeasure are also such errors. What I experience as pain is not really pain. It is only a completely indifferent stimulus, initially without pleasure or displeasure. Only when I interpret it with the help of my brain does it become pain or pleasure. "Without intellect there is no pain, but the lowest form of intellect comes to light, that of "matter, of "atoms. - There is a way of being surprised by an injury (like the one who got a shotgun pellet through the cheek while sitting on the cherry tree) that one does not feel the pain at all. The pain is a brain product." (Aph. 47 in Koegel's edition). By evaluating life according to the impressions of pleasure and pain, we are therefore not moving in a realm of reality at all, but in a sphere of our interpretation. What matters in life is not how a stimulus affects us, but how we believe that it affects us. This belief is as much an inherited one as the belief in fundamental errors. Just as these are inherited, so are the assessments, the interpretations of the stimuli. "Without imagination and memory there would be no pleasure and no pain. The affects aroused in the process immediately have at their disposal past similar cases and the bad possibilities, they interpret, they interpret. Therefore, a pain is generally quite out of proportion to its significance for life - it is inexpedient. But where an injury is not perceived by the eye or touch, it is much less painful; there the imagination is untrained." (Aph. 50 in Koegel's edition). I will now give an example to show how profound Dühring's influence was on Nietzsche's thoughts in 1881. Dühring says in his "Kursus der Philosophie": if "sensations and feelings were simple, they would have to be decided by direct axiomatic judgment in a similar way as a mathematical principle"... "The kind of applause or attunement that a completely simple excitement would bring with it would also be a fact that could not be misunderstood and would have to be just as valid in its field as a geometric or physical necessity." (Kursus der Philosophie, page 165.) As you can see, Dühring claims that a stimulus can only have one consequence, i.e. that it is pleasurable or painful in itself. Here, too, Nietzsche contrasts Dühring's opinion with the counter-opinion: "Why does a cut finger hurt? In itself it does not hurt (whether it already experiences "stimuli"), he whose brain is chloroformed has no "pain" in his finger". (Aph. 48 in Koegel's edition.) The moral drives and passions are also based on an interpretation of reality, not on a true state of affairs, but on one that is believed to be true. "If we translate the qualities of the lowest animate being into our "reason", they become "moral" drives." (Aph. 64 in Koegel's edition.) "In the desire to please is refined lust for possession, refined lust for sex, refined exuberance of the secure, etc." (Aph. 95 in Koegel.) In our actions we do not have reality in mind: the lust for possession, the refined lust for sex, but the passion of benevolence incorporated into us, which is, however, only an interpretation of reality. We see how people arrive at "truths" and "passions". They interpret reality and assimilate the interpretations. The moment people realize that they do not possess reality, but rather their interpretations of reality, they begin to doubt these interpretations. Whereas up to now people have assimilated as true that which was conducive to life, regardless of whether it was true or false, they now question the truth as such. The life-promoting has been called "true". This gave "the true" a certain prestige, a value. People began to strive for "the true". But there was nothing else to do but to make a selection among the basic errors. For there was nothing else but these. A particularly select genre of fundamental errors was called "truths". There was even nothing but errors to establish what truth is. Where can such a striving come from? Only from the belief that truth enhances life (passion of knowledge).

This may well have been the ideas that went through Nietzsche's mind when he wrote the "Draft" of the "Return of the Same" in Sils-Maria in 1881. At least this was my impression of the situation when Dr. Koegel gave me his compilation of the individual aphorisms in the summer of 1896. Anyone who now reads the volume ı2 (which Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche had withdrawn from the book trade) will gain the impression that the aphorisms arranged under the individual chapters more or less elaborate and clarify the main train of thought in individual points. There is no doubt that Nietzsche wrote these individual aphorisms in an unconstrained order. It will therefore never be possible to find an absolutely correct principle for their arrangement. Even the question of whether one or the other aphorism could be left out or not will be answered one way by one editor and differently by another. Dr. Horneffer claims that only the 44 aphorisms listed by him in his brochure "Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Eternal Second Coming" are entitled to be included in the draft. I ask myself in vain why he omits the aphorism in this way (from Koegel's edition), the content of which is in line with the aphorisms that Koegel prints as 49 and 51 and which Horneffer himself recognizes as legitimate. I do not understand why aphorism ı19 should not fall under the draft, since it clearly speaks of incorporated errors. "The great things in nature, all sensations of the high, noble, graceful, beautiful, kind, austere, powerful, enchanting, which we have in nature and in man and history, are not immediate feelings, but the after-effects of countless errors that have been incorporated into us.... " Compare this aphorism with the 51st, which Dr. Horneffer again gives a place in the " Wiederkunft": "...Likewise, the measure of pleasure is not in proportion to our present knowledge, -- but it is to the "knowledge" of the most primitive and longest pre-period of humanity and animality. We are under the law of the past, that is, its assumptions and estimations." But why argue about the individual, since it is in the nature of these aphorisms that one person can arrange them one way and another another. What matters much more is this: I believe I have shown through my explanations that Nietzsche's idea of the "Eternal Return" is correctly what Peter Gast describes it as: "The purely mechanically understandable doctrine of the exhaustibility, i.e. repetition, of cosmic molecular combinations", and that Nietzsche, in order to keep this idea in contrast to Dühring, wanted to provide a kind of new theory of knowledge in the first four chapters. This should show that the way in which the previous "truths" have come about is no obstacle to opposing them with counter-opinions. If Dr. Koegel were really quite wrong and only the 44 aphorisms cited by Horneffer belonged to the "Eternal Return", then this idea would still remain, because nothing else follows from these 44 aphorisms either. So we are dealing with a doctrine to be understood mechanically and not with a "religious idea", as Dr. Horneffer believes. And it was precisely Mrs. Lou Andreas' mistake that she allowed the transparent clarity of this idea to be drowned in a mystical fog. Rather, this Nietzschean idea is conceived in such a way that we will only incorporate it if we find, in the "experiment" we conduct with it, that we can orient ourselves with it within the whole of nature in the same way as with the previous theory of nature. And when Horneffer asks: "How could he have had the idea of invoking physics and the natural sciences in general to support it?", the answer is: "He would have had to do so if he had wanted to implement the idea in the same way in which he had conceived it. Not, however, to prove the idea, but to show that it can be incorporated. The whole of natural science would have had to take on a different face under the influence of this idea. For feeling would never have tolerated that natural science should continue to operate in the old way and that religious feeling should resign itself to an idea that contradicted the knowledge of nature. Rather, a new competition of opinions should have been fought through. The "new emphasis" can only assert itself if it proves to be more life-promoting than the old scientific truths. Dr. E. Horneffer says on p. 26 of his book: "Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Eternal Second Coming": "I would like to mention that I do not believe that Nietzsche wanted to give his doctrine of the eternal second coming a broader, scientific basis. I doubt that he ever intended to prove it in more detail through empirical knowledge. ... For why the detailed proof that we need ideas that go beyond demonstrable experience, that we need errors if they have a favorable effect on life? Why the further proof that the eternal return is an idea which, whether true or false, must have a very favorable effect on life? Does this way of recommending philosophical ideas not presuppose the assumption that they cannot be proven empirically at all?" No, certainly, it does not presuppose this proof. But it does demand to decide by incorporation whether the new opinion has a more favorable effect on life than the old scientific opinions. Nietzsche could not and was not allowed to prove his "new emphasis" with the old scientific methods, but with this new emphasis he had to defeat the old methods themselves; he had to prove the greater strength of the new idea through experiment. And because he saw himself incapable of such proof, he initially dropped the new idea; that is why an idea increasingly came to the fore in his mind that was not directed against the old scientific truths, but which lay in their direction, the idea of the superman. For the superman is an idea that is entirely compatible with all other modern scientific ideas. Read "Zarathustra": "Man is a rope knotted between animal and superman. ... I love him who works and invents, that he may build the house of the superman and prepare for him earth, animal, plant: for thus he wills his downfall." These words are spoken entirely in harmony with the great modern developmental idea of natural science. "All beings up to now have created something beyond themselves: and you want to be the ebb tide of this great flood and would rather go back to the animal than overcome man? You have made the journey from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more ape than any ape." These words of Zarathustra were spoken by a man who was made a poet prophet not by the "Eternal Return", but by the great developmental idea of modern natural science. The fact that the plan for a work on the "Eternal Return" developed into that for "Zarathustra" has no other reason than that Nietzsche at that moment did not consider the "Eternal Return" but the idea of the superman to be more life-promoting. If the idea of the "Eternal Return" then reappears later, if we find it sporadically in the "Joyful Science", in "Zarathustra" itself, if he even presents it as the crowning glory, as the last positive thought, of his otherwise completely negative work "Revaluation of all Values", there can be no other reason for this than that the preparatory illness blunted his sense of how little life-enhancing this thought is, how little it can assert itself in the battle of opinions, and that Nietzsche had a certain weakness for the thought once it had emerged in him. I am not afraid of the scurrilous accusation that I am not a true Nietzsche admirer because I express my above conviction. I know how difficult it has become for me, this conviction that the preliminary stages of the illness play into the last phase of Nietzsche's philosophizing yet.

So it was a failed work, a work whose basic conception was untenable because it did not promote life. And Nietzsche felt that he could do nothing with this basic concept. That is why he did not complete the work. The editor of Nietzsche's estate could not produce anything other than an unsustainable work. Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche says in her introduction to Lichtenberger's book on "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche": "The then editor Dr. Fritz Koegel, without taking note of the later still undeciphered manuscripts, brought the contents of a written notebook by my brother from the summer of 1881 under a disposition that did not belong to it. ... The manuscript compiled by Dr. Koegel instilled suspicion in me from the outset and I had requested the assistance of an expert editor to examine it before it was published. ... I myself was first prevented by my mother's fatal illness and then by my own illness from examining the matter more closely; but after various critics, for example in the "Zukunft" and in the "Frankfurter Zeitung", had expressed their astonishment and displeasure at this strange and meagre publication, which must have disappointed every sincere Nietzsche admirer, I felt compelled in the fall of 1898 to have the publishing company withdraw the XIIth volume from the book trade. Volume from the book trade." Now the "paucity" of the publication was not due to the publisher, but to the fact that the work itself was a misguided one. And no sincere Nietzsche admirer could be in any way impaired in his Nietzsche worship by the fact that he saw how Nietzsche carried on for a few weeks with the plan for an unrealizable work. And Horneffer's attack on Koegel cannot change the fact that this is the case in the slightest. The 44 aphorisms that Hornefler has now published after sifting through the manuscript also prove that Nietzsche's idea of the "Eternal Second Coming" in 1881 was a scientific-mechanistic counter-idea to Dühring's view and that as such it is untenable, mistaken. The admission of this fact has now been and is being countered by the Nietzsche Archive. The scientific character and the scientific implications of this idea are denied. But no matter how many mistakes Dr. Koegel may have made in the publication: this fact is correct and, whoever is unbiased, will find it confirmed precisely by Horneffer's attack on Koegel. And any edition of Friedrich Nietzsche's works that conceals this fact will be an objective forgery. Because the idea of the "Eternal Second Coming" is scientifically untenable: that is why the Nietzsche Archive wants Nietzsche to have never conceived it scientifically. That is why Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche, when its untenability was made clear to her, began to claim that this thought would not only have been conceived later, but also in 1881, in the same way as Mrs. Lou Andreas-Salomé claims that it was later conceived by Nietzsche: as a mystery. See what Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche wrote to me in September 1898: "If this shattering thought could not be proven splendidly, irrefutably, scientifically, then it was better and more pious (sic) to treat it as a mystery, as a mysterious idea that can have tremendous consequences." It is not the mistakes Koegel has made that form the starting point of the whole battle; no, it is the fact that he, as editor, has not made a "mystery" out of the "idea of return". Just look at Mrs. Lou Salomé's book p. 225: "What should become scientifically proven truth takes on the character of a mystical revelation". Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche is thus not only marching in perfect harmony with Mrs. Lou Salomé, whom she otherwise fiercely opposes; no, she even surpasses her with regard to the doctrine of the Second Coming. What Mrs. Salomé claims only for Nietzsche's last period; Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche applies it to Nietzsche from the moment he conceived the thought. It is amusing for me, as I have often had the opportunity to notice Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's stormy opposition to Lou Salomé, to see how she leads Friedrich Nietzsche down the slippery slope - not of Eduard von Hartmann, but of Lou Andreas-Salomé. And Dr. Horneffer is in a position to lay a plan for the "Eternal Reappearance" work that also leads to these surreptitious paths of Mrs. Lou Salomé. After all, he says: "Nietzsche wanted to throw down his idea of the eternal return as a religious idea."

A reply to Dr. Seidl's “unmasking”

Dr. Arthur Seidl has felt compelled to defend Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche against the allegations I made in an article in "Magazin für Literatur" (No. 6 of the current 69th issue) by "unmasking" me. He uses the following means for this "debunking". He imputes dishonest, even impure motives to my statements. He asserts things off the top of his head about which he knows nothing other than what Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche told him. He accuses me of contradictory statements in my article. He falsifies an account of a fact given by me, either because he is unable to understand what I have written or because he deliberately wants to cast a false light on my actions by distorting them. He invents a new interpretation of the old Heraclitus in order to provide a metaphysical-psychological explanation of the fact that Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche calls red today what was blue yesterday. He talks about the errors he found in Koegel's edition of Nietzsche's works. In between he rants.

I will discuss these means of Dr. Arthur Seidl one by one. It is very characteristic of this gentleman's attitude that he accuses me of having written the article about the Nietzsche Archive and about Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche in order to help the "Magazin", which I published "with highly controversial success", by creating a "sensation". If anything within literary philistinism has caused the talk of "controversial success", it is precisely the fact that I run the "Magazin" with the greatest sacrifices, without resorting to journalistic tricks and "sensations", purely from a factual point of view. The philistines would, of course, find it more rational if I made use of all possible gimmicks. I have renounced all successes that could ever have brought me "sensations". Dr. Seidl insinuates, out of a genuinely philistine attitude, that in such an important matter as Nietzsche's I am out for sensationalism. At the end of my article I have clearly stated what my motives were. "I would have remained silent even now if I had not been driven to indignation by Horneffer's brochure and by the protection that Lichtenberger's book has received: In what hands Nietzsche's estate is." There are simply people who cannot believe in objective motives. They transfer their own way of thinking onto others. Nietzsche would say: they lack the most elementary instincts of intellectual purity. I will come back to other motives that Dr. Seidl imputes to me later on.

First of all, it is necessary for me to correct the facts that Dr. Seidl has distorted in the most irresponsible manner, insofar as they relate to the role that I am supposed to have played in the break between Mrs. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche on the one hand and Dr. Fritz Koegel on the other. In the fall of 1896, Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche moved with the Nietzsche Archive from Naumburg a.d.S. to Weimar. Around the time of her move, a large part of the German press reported that I was working on the Nietzsche edition together with Dr. Koegel. The author of this untrue note has never been discovered. I was highly embarrassed by it, for I knew Dr. Koegel's sensitivities in this direction. He attached great importance to being named in public as the sole editor of those parts of the edition which he really edited alone. Until then, he had edited the entire edition up to and including the tenth volume, with the exception of the parts edited by Dr. von der Hellen, the second volume of "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches" and the essay "Jenseits von Gut und Böse" in the seventh volume. He also assured me that when Dr. von der Hellen left the Nietzsche Archive, he had received a definite promise from Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche that he would be the sole editor of all volumes of the estate (following the eighth volume). I had every reason not to give the impression that I wanted to use my friendly relationship with Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche to smuggle myself into the editorship. And Dr. Koegel had lost his sense of trust, as he had had a large number of differences with Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche over the years, which had repeatedly led him to believe that his position had been shaken. It was necessary on my part to avoid any confusion about my completely unofficial relationship with the Nietzsche Archive. When I visited Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche in Weimar for the first time, at her request, I told her that the rumor that had arisen from the above newspaper article, as if I were to be employed at the Nietzsche Archive, must be firmly countered. Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche agreed and at the same time regretted that the matter could not be true. I had the feeling that Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche would have liked to see my employment at that time, but her definite promise to Dr. Koegel that he would be the sole editor in the future stood in the way. I would like to emphasize, however, that no mention was made of Dr. Koegel's inability to edit the edition alone. I have now sent to a number of German newspapers, with Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's consent, a correction of the above-mentioned note, which contains the words: "The sole editor of Nietzsche's works is Dr. Fritz Koegel. I have no official relationship with the Nietzsche Archive. Nor is such a relationship envisaged for the future." Dr. Koegel was on a vacation trip at the time. He had left behind in the Nietzsche Archive the printed manuscript of the " Wiederkunft des Gleichen" (Return of the Same) that he had compiled. He had already sent me this compilation in July of the same year. I then spoke to him several times about the thoughts contained in the printed manuscript. I never went through Nietzsche's manuscript. In October 1896, I also spoke repeatedly with Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche about the "Second Coming of the Same" and already then expressed the idea, which still forms my conviction today, that Nietzsche's main idea of the "Eternal Return" of all things arose from reading Dühring. In Dühring's "Kursus der Philosophie" this idea is expressed, only it is fought against there. We looked in Nietzsche's copy of Dühring's book and found the characteristic Nietzschean pencil marks in the margin where the thought is mentioned. At that time I told Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche many other things about the relationship of her brother's philosophy to other philosophical currents. The result was that one day she came out with the plan: I should develop my views and results for her in private lessons. Of course, even then I had the feeling, with which Dr. Seidl was now crawling, that these lectures should first be given by the editor of Nietzsche's writings; and I explained to Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche that I could only agree to give the lectures if Dr. Koegel agreed. I talked it over with Dr. Koegel, and the plan with the private lessons was realized. When Dr. Seidl claims in an outrageously scolding tone that I have no right to call these lectures on the "philosophy of Nietzsche", I reply that I have no name for such an untrue assertion, for which he cannot provide the slightest proof. For it is simply a lie to call these lectures by any other name. I must surely know what I dealt with in the lessons. Dr. Seid] knows nothing about it. I dealt with Nietzsche's view of Greek philosophy, his relationship to modern philosophy, especially Kant's and Schopenhauer's, and the deeper foundations of his own thought. Dr. Seidl interprets the reasons why Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche took lessons from me in a - I really cannot say otherwise - childish way. But if what he says about it is true, then he would have done Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche the worst possible service by revealing these alleged reasons. He is imposing on her a deceitfulness and a frivolous game with people that, despite everything I know about her, I would not expect her to play. When she asked me for the lessons, she should not have wanted to learn something, but to examine me to see whether I was fit to be a Nietzsche editor. There can be no doubt that if I had had the slightest inkling of such a plan, I would have indignantly left Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche, never to return. Dr. Seidl is of the opinion that this woman has caught me with such a plan in ambush under all kinds of pretexts. Anyone who does such a thing is acting frivolously. I leave it to Dr. Seidl to argue with Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche about this interpretation of her conduct.

I continue with my account of the facts. Everything went pretty well until Dr. Koegel's engagement, which, if I remember correctly, took place at the end of November 1896. An error of memory on my part could only refer to a few days at most. Dr. Seidl finds himself compelled to accuse me of the "equally malicious and simple-minded insinuation" that I had made a connection between Dr. Koegel's engagement and the "enlightenment". engagement and Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's "enlightenment" about Koegel's talent "& tout prix". I believe that only a not entirely pure imagination can see a malicious insinuation in my sentence (in the "Magazin" essay). I said nothing more than: "Soon after Dr. Koegel's engagement, Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche used my presence in the Nietzsche Archive during a private lesson to tell me that she had doubts about Dr. Koegel's abilities". Let us hear what a certainly classic witness says in this regard, namely Mrs. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche herself. In the unsolicited letter to me of September 1898, also mentioned by Dr. Seidl, she writes: "Dr. Koegel was not only to be the editor, but also the son and heir of the archive. But the latter was only possible if I had a sincere mutual friendship with Dr. Koegel. I also felt this lack and had hoped that we could become better friends through his marriage. But since I was completely mistaken about the bride, the lack of friendship and trust became much more noticeable after the engagement than before." Dr. Arthur Seidl! You dare to call me a "knight of the sad figure" because of my conduct towards Dr. Förster-Nietzsche. Look at you: how you fight! What you call a "malicious" and "simple-minded insinuation" of mine is nothing more than a reproduction of a passage from a letter by the "lonely woman" for whom you so "bravely" stand up, you knight in shining armor.

The fact is that almost immediately after the engagement a profound difference arose between Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche and Dr. Fritz Koegel. For me, this difference became more noticeable and more embarrassing with each passing day. As often as I met Dr. Koegel, he talked excitedly about scenes with Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche and remarked that every day he felt more and more that she wanted to be rid of him. When I came to Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's lessons, she brought up all sorts of things against Dr. Koegel. It is characteristic how her objections to Koegel's suitability as editor changed. At first she acted deeply offended that Dr. Koegel had neglected to put "Archivist of the Nietzsche Archive" on his engagement announcements. Soon afterwards, a new motif appeared on the scene. The family in Jena into which Dr. Koegel married was a pious one; Dr. Koegel would not be able to combine his position in the Nietzsche Archive with such a relationship. It would be bad if the Nietzsche editor had to get married in church and have his children baptized. As a light-hearted intermezzo, something else came in between. Dr. Koegel was reading the proof sheets of the French edition of Zarathustra because the Nietzsche Archive wanted to check this edition for accuracy. Koegel's bride was present at the reading of one of the sheets in the Nietzsche Archive. There was a discussion about the French translation of a sentence, and Dr. Koegel agreed with his bride about the correct French expression of a thought, contrary to Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's opinion. She then complained to me that she was no longer the master of her archive. Gradually, such objections to Dr. Koegel gave rise to others, all in successive development. Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche began to doubt Koegel's philosophical expertise. The matter was at this stage when, on December 5, Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche attempted to involve me in the matter. The whole behavior of this woman, with all the dodges in which it was so rich, simply gave me the impression that she no longer wanted Koegel and was looking for all kinds of reasons. Dr. Arthur Seidl, in his comic chivalry, has an expression for this: "What at that time was still a certain unprovable instinct in her, subjective feeling and a dark sensation that the matter was not quite right, that something was not in order, was soon to prove... as a serious objective error and as scientific untenability". Strange, most strange: Mrs. Elisabeth Förster Nietzsche's instinct that something is scientifically wrong is expressed by the fact that she acts offended when her editor does not identify himself as "Archivist at the Nietzsche Archive" on his engagement announcements, or in the fear that he will get married in church.

If I were to characterize the role I had played in the whole affair up to that point, I could not say otherwise than that I acted as an "honest broker". I tried to present Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche with all the reasons I could find for retaining Dr. Koegel as editor. I tried to calm the sometimes highly agitated Dr. Koegel. Then came December 5. I had a lesson with Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche. She had already indicated to me the day before, by a card she gave me, that she had important things to tell me the next day. This card was, of course, quite superfluous, because I would have appeared at the lesson that Saturday in any case. As soon as I arrived, the conversation turned to Dr. Koegel. He was an artist and an aesthete, but not a philosopher. He could not publish "The Revaluation of All Values" on his own. I have never denied that Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche tried to persuade me at the time that I should become editor alongside Dr. Koegel, that she made all sorts of nebulous remarks about modes of collaboration, and so on. I made no secret to Dr. Koegel of this gossip of hers. Only at that moment did the mutual bitterness between Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche and Dr. Koegel run too high. I foresaw that the mere announcement that Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche was planning to make a change in his position would provoke Dr. Koegel to the extreme. But Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche

I had to listen to her out of courtesy. I told her that with Dr. Koegel's present irritability, it was highly inadvisable to let him know anything about her plan. I myself never gave my consent to this plan. Everything I said can be summarized in the conditional sentence: "Madam, my consent is irrelevant; even if I wanted to, such a will would be without consequence". - Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche could not take these words to mean that I would have wanted to, but only as a conditional acceptance of her plan, not to agree, but to reduce it to absurdity. I wanted to make her understand: firstly, that she could not change Dr. Koegel's position now, after she had promised him sole editorship; secondly, that Dr. Koegel would never agree to work with a second editor. That was all that happened on my part. As you can see, I wanted nothing more than to continue playing the "honest broker" role. If Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche now believes that she can dispose of me as she pleases, it is only due to her peculiarity that she believes she can place people wherever she wants like chess pieces. For my part, I had not the slightest reason to take Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's word for not talking about her plan. It was absolutely her wish. I believe I even expressly remarked that, given my relationship with Dr. Koegel, I had to tell him something like that. Very well: we agreed not to talk about one of Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's plans, the absurdity of which I had explained to her. Dr. Arthur Seidl has the audacity to present this as follows: "he made the request to the lady mentioned, to whom he must (or should) have felt a warm obligation, to protect his person in the event of any harangue her person from another side and then to deny a de facto consultation with his mouth - to put it nicely: the imposition of a lie". This is where Dr. Seidl commits an objective falsification. At the express wish of Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche, I gave her my word not to speak of her plan to Dr. Koegel, and then naturally asked her to do the same. Because I knew what would come out if she said anything. Where on earth can one speak of the imposition of a "lie"? But Dr. Seidl wants to say something completely different. He wants to create the impression that, after Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche had broken her word, which was not given because of me but because of her, I would have expected her to deny something. I will tell you in a moment how things stand with this supposed denial. But first I must tell Dr. Seidl that he is either incapable of understanding the account I have given (in the "Magazin" article), or that he is deliberately falsifying it. He has to choose between two things, either he has to confess that he does not understand a clearly formulated sentence, or the other, that he deliberately commits a falsification in order to slander me. In the former case, the impression of his comic knighthood increases for me; in the latter, however, I must tell him what Carl Vogt said to the Göttingen Court Councillor in the famous materialism dispute:

"To a rough block a rough wedge,
To a rascal one and a half!"

Sunday followed Saturday. On this day, Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche had arranged an engagement dinner for Dr. Koegel at the Nietzsche Archive. Various gentlemen from the Weimar Goethe Archive were invited, as well as Gustav Naumann, who together with his uncle ran the publishing house where Nietzsche's works were published, myself and others. Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche gave a speech during the meal in which she praised Koegel's services to the Nietzsche edition in words of appreciation. After the meal, she took Gustav Naumann aside and told him: Dr. Koegel was not a philosopher; he could not do the "revaluation of all values" at all. Dr. Steiner was a philosopher, he had read her philosophy splendidly; he can and will do the revaluation. Mr. Gustav Naumann believed he owed it to his friendship with Dr. Koegel to inform him of this conversation with Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche that very evening. Now Dr. Koegel's excitement, which I had wanted to avoid, had erupted. I met him that same evening. I calmed him down by telling him that I would do everything I could to keep him; I would never agree to become a second editor. I made no mention of my fruitless conversation with Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche on Saturday, because I was bound by my word; and even if that had not been the case, it would not have been necessary, for why waste words on Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's talk, since it could lead to nothing without my consent. On the following Wednesday I received a letter from Dr. Koegel, who had gone to Jena to visit his future parents-in-law, in which he informed me that on Tuesday Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche had told Koegel's sister (whom she used at that time as an official intermediary between herself and Dr. Koegel, although she could always have spoken to him herself) that I had declared that a collaboration between myself and Dr. Koegel would be excellent, and that I would be happy to agree to it. Both were incorrect, as can be seen from my explanation of the facts. (Dr. Seidl, of course, has the audacity to claim a priori that it is correct. Another philosophical principle: what you cannot prove, you assert a priori). This Wednesday I had to go to Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's class again. I now confronted her. I explained to her that she had put me in a fatal situation with her incorrect information. Dr. Koegel could not possibly explain the matter in any other way than that I was playing the role of an intriguer who was pretending other things than were going on behind the scenes. I told her in the most definite terms that I would clarify the matter in a preliminary letter to Dr. Koegel, and that I must demand that she herself set the record straight before Dr. Koegel and myself. I said at the time that I found it almost unbelievable that she should appear to be an intriguer, when I had made every effort to see that the facts of the case were absolutely clear. At the same time I remarked, in order to make clear to Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche the full extent of the inconvenience she had caused me: I would rather shoot myself than gain a position through intrigue. Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche then twisted these words in such a way that she later often claimed that I had said I would have to shoot myself if she did not retract her false statements. Dr. Seidl also rehashes the nonsensical duel tale. Never did Dr. Koegel threaten a duel. He did, however, write to Naumann that if what Mrs. Förster had said about an intrigue of mine turned out to be true, he wanted to challenge me. This passage from Dr. Koegel's letter became known to Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche; and she later, with the intention of riding me into enmity with Dr. Koegel, threw this threat, which was only uttered behind my back - to use Dr. Seidi's tasteful comparative language - "like a sausage at a ham". She could not bring this threat of a duel to my ears and eyes often enough, both verbally and in writing. Dr. Seidl had the audacity to say that I had "imploringly asked" Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche to "lie my way out of it". If Dr. Seidl, as such a comical knight, did not faithfully parrot everything he was told: one would truly have to take him for a rogue. Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche now claimed in the conversation just discussed that she had written me a letter the previous day - that is, on Tuesday - in which I would find the explanation for her behavior. I said I wouldn't have cared about such a letter, but I never received one. And strangely enough, on Wednesday afternoon, a few hours after the conversation with Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche, I found a letter from her in which she wrote the following: "So today, for certain reasons, I was compelled to tell Miss Koegel that I had asked you whether, in the event that I asked you to publish the revaluation with Dr. Koegel, you would be inclined to do so and whether you believed that you would both be finished with it in a year; - you would have answered in the affirmative. You also said that Dr. Koegel had already told you of similar intentions on my part. This was all on Saturday. I will let you know quickly so that you are informed." So Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche believed that she could dispose of me in any way she liked; she only had to give the order: I say you have done this and then it is so. "I'll let you know quickly so that you are informed." It was also urgently necessary, this instruction. It's just a pity that I only received the letter after Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche had already wreaked havoc. Otherwise I would have told her beforehand: "If for certain reasons you feel compelled to say false things about me, then for certain reasons I will feel compelled to accuse you of untruth. On December 10, Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche made a definite statement to Dr. Koegel, myself and two witnesses that what she had said to Koegel's sister about me was not true. The next day she was already sorry again that she had made this statement, and she tried to turn the matter around in the following way. She insisted that there had been a conversation between her and me on the Saturday in question. I had to admit that. I explained to her on the Saturday of ır. December: it didn't matter that there had been any conversation at all, but only that the information she had given Koegel's sister was incorrect. For me, the matter was now closed. I can prove that I never demanded of Frau Förster that she should deny anything; rather, from the moment I heard of her incorrect statements through Dr. Koegel, I was quite certain that I also reproached her for this incorrectness. On Sunday, December 2, she wrote me a letter from which it is clear that I never asked her to lie to me, but that I always asserted the incorrectness of her statements to her face. In this letter she writes: "It is a pity that we have never spoken properly about the whole matter. Think that I was indeed firmly convinced that you knew as well as I did that the much disputed conversation had really taken place. Now you think that yesterday it suddenly dawned on me that you are really and truly convinced that you have heard nothing of the things I remember exactly." So Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche built golden bridges for herself by claiming to remember exactly. I allowed her the pleasure. I have no interest in the way she makes things up. But she admits here that I never - as Dr. Seidl now "chivalrously" babbles - "implored" her to lie, but that I told her frankly and freely: it is not true that I gave my consent. Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche goes on to describe the matter quite nicely: "What a boundless pity that I was not convinced sooner, for then the whole thing would have gained a much more cheerful and natural appearance. It was nothing more than one of those cases of absent-mindedness that so often occur, especially among scholars: one person talks about certain things in a vague way, the other listens distractedly, says yes and makes friendly faces, and then forgets the whole thing in the subsequent philosophical lecture." Now Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche may rest assured that I would certainly not have forgotten a promise on my part. But what she said was meaningless and actually irrelevant to me.

So. Now I come back to you, Dr. Arthur Seidl. I have proved to you that you were reckless enough to repeat things whose incorrectness is easy to demonstrate. Before I show you the flimsiness of your assertions about my alleged contradictions, I will ask you two more things. I. You write: "And it must not be overlooked that in the whole battle that broke out, the selfish and personal motives were entirely on the side of her (Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's) opponents, who as Nietzsche's publishers wanted to create pecuniary advantages for themselves." Since you speak of Nietzsche publishers in the plural, you imply that I have ever sought pecuniary advantages in this matter. I was never a Nietzsche publisher; I never wanted to become one, so I never wanted to gain pecuniary advantages. You will not be able to provide proof for your assertions. You are therefore putting slander into the world. 2. you claim: I should have felt a warm obligation towards Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche. I challenge you to tell me the very least that entitles Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche to claim any special thanks from me.

But now to your "logical contradictions" in my essay. You, Dr. Arthur Seidl, claim that it follows from my account that Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche must have been convinced in the autumn of 1896 that the volumes ııı and ı2 were erroneous, since she claimed that Dr. Koegel could not publish the "Umwertung". You say: "Well, I think that in such a case one can only feel doubt and anxiety on the basis of existing samples and work already done, which must have been available from Dr. Koegel up to and including volume 12." If there is even a milligram of sense in this reply, then I want to be called "Peter Zapfel". I declare on the basis of the facts that Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche knew nothing of errors in the ıı. and ı2. volumes in the autumn of 1896 and conclude from this that she based her assertion that Dr. Koegel could not publish the "Umwertung" on nothing; and the Dr. Seidl comes and says: Yes, it is precisely from the fact that she declared him incapable of publishing the "Umwrertung" that one can see that she must have recognized the flawed nature of volumes 11 and ı2. Think of this philosopher Seidl as a judge. The defense lawyer of a defendant proves that he could not have committed a murder that demonstrably took place in Berlin at ı2 o'clock because the defendant only arrived in Berlin at ı2 o'clock. The judge, Dr. Seidl, throws himself on his chest and says: "Mr. Defense Attorney, you are not a logician: if the defendant only arrived in Berlin at ı2 o'clock, then the murder can only have happened after one o'clock. Well, after this rehearsal, I won't get any further into Dr. Seidl's logic. It seems too unfruitful. It is the height of nonsense that old Heraclitus has to be used to justify Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche calling red today what was blue yesterday. "Everything flows", says the good Heraclitus; therefore, Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's statements about one and the same object may also "flow". "Yesterday's blue color can indeed take on a reddish hue in our eyes, depending on today's lighting." Certainly it can, wise Dr. Seidl; but if you claim that the color that only took on a red hue today already had it yesterday, then you have simply lied, despite your ingenious interpretation of Heraclitus. You are no different to old Heraclitus than you are to me: you know quite as much about both: namely nothing.¹

I am not arguing with you about the value of Lichtenberger's book, Dr. Seidl. For you are just as happy with the justification of this book from Nietzsche's sentence . with the "light feet" as you are with the derivation of "Today blue, tomorrow red" from Heraclitus' "Everything flows". Certainly, Dr. Seidl, light feet are a great advantage; but in such cases as the one we are dealing with here, they must carry a spirit-filled head. Zarathustra is a dancer, says Nietzsche. Dr. Seidl quickly re-evaluates this Nietzschean value: every dancer is a Zarathustra. What you can learn in Weimar today!

You are forgiven, Dr. Seidl, for tearing down my booklet "Nietzsche, a fighter against his time". By the way, you can believe me that I know the weaknesses of this book, written five years ago, better than you do. I would perhaps write some things differently today. But it has one advantage over many: it is an honest book in every line. That is why it has not only found praise among Nietzsche followers, but a fierce opponent of Nietzsche recently found that I am the only one among Nietzsche's followers who "can be taken seriously". Dr. Seidl claims that in "Zarathustra" it is not the idea of the "superman" that is important, but the "eternal return". He puts forward a reason for this that is truly "godly". This idea occurs no less than three times in Zarathustra. Now three times some other thoughts also occur in Zarathustra. According to Mr. Seidl's logic, they could therefore just as well be placed above the "superman" thought, which does not occur three times, but runs like a red thread through the whole. And that "the whole" boils down to the idea of the Second Coming is simply not true. Dr. Seidl also seems to sense the flimsiness of his logic; in order to prove more than he is capable of, he invokes the fact that Richard Strauss turned the "nuptial ring of rings" into the "light-footed" ring dance of an ideal waltz rhythm. This is how I recognize Dr. Arthur Seidl. I have the honor of knowing him from Weimar. It was always like this with him: wherever concepts were lacking, he always found the right music at the right time.

A logical snippet from Dr. Seidl, which, however, seems to point to the current school in the Nietzsche Archive, I would like to mention at the end. With all kinds of sources, Dr. Seidl claims that Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche has "so far made the right decision in all decisive points concerning the organization of the complete edition". Now she and the current editors claim that on the most important point so far, with regard to Dr. Koegel's editorship, she has made the wrong decision. As the logic goes: "All Cretans are liars, says a Cretan. Since he himself is a liar, it cannot be true that all Cretans are liars. Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche has always hit on the right thing, so she also hit on the right thing when she claimed that she had hit on the wrong thing with Dr. Fritz Koegel. That is Nietzsche editor logic.

Now I would like to say a few words about your brazen assertions at the end of your essay. Dr. Seidl, it is you, not me, who is pulling the wool over the eyes of uninformed people. For I have admitted from the outset the errors which you reproach Koegel's edition with and about which you do not know enough "morality tales" to tell. I have even conceded that an edition with such errors may be withdrawn if the opportunity arises. It is not these errors that matter. I believe them, too, without first checking them again, as you do with Dr. Koegel. The main point of my refutation of Horneffer's brochure consists in proving that the aphorisms compiled by Dr. Koegel in volume ı2 do indeed give an idea of the form of the "Eternal Reappearance Doctrine" that this doctrine took in Nietzsche in August 1881. In order to provide such proof, one need only have the aphorisms printed in volume ı2 in front of one's eyes. The reading errors made by Koegel do not change this. Dr. Seidl avoids a reply to this proof of mine with the completely meaningless suspicion: I judge without having seen the manuscripts. No, I have not seen them; but I do not need to have seen them for what I am claiming. I lack the space here to substantiate my conviction regarding Nietzsche's idea of the "Eternal Second Coming" in greater depth. I will do so elsewhere. The fact is - as can be asserted with a probability almost bordering on certainty - that Nietzsche took up the idea of the "Eternal Second Coming" from Dühring and initially envisaged it as the opposite view to the generally accepted one, which was also held by Dühring. The "draft" that Koegel communicated in the ı2nd volume belongs to the time when Nietzsche had such a plan. However, he soon dropped the idea because he felt that the "draft" of 1881 could not be realized. Later it only appeared sporadically, as in Zarathustra, and at the very end of his work it reappeared, as I now believe, as one of the symptoms of the madness that had previously announced itself. What Dr. Koegel published in the ı2nd volume could therefore only be a flawed work, simply because the insertion of the idea of reincarnation into Nietzsche's system of ideas was a flawed one. And some critics, e.g. Mr. Kretzer (in an article in the "Frankfurter Zeitung"), felt this deficiency. And it was around this time that Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's earlier "dark feeling" began to become an "objective error" on the part of Dr. Koegel. In the aforementioned unsolicited letter to me, she wrote: "If this shattering thought could not be proven splendidly, irrefutably, scientifically, it was better and more reverent to treat it as a mystery than as a mysterious idea that could have tremendous consequences. The scientific proof would have come! It is clear from all my brother's notes that he wished this idea to be treated in this way: "Don't speak! Dr. Koegel's poor, misguided, falsified publication murdered this tremendous idea! I will never forgive him for that." I believed: here we have the crux of the matter. The core. Nietzsche's work on the "Eternal Return" from 1881 is untenable. Nietzsche abandoned the plan because it was untenable. Dr. Koegel, as editor of the estate, had to give an idea of this untenable work. That is his main crime. What is untenable in Nietzsche is to be explained as a forgery by the editor. Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche claims on $. LXIV of her introduction to Lichtenberger's book that "this strange and meager publication must disappoint every sincere Nietzsche admirer". Well, the sincere Nietzsche admirers cannot be disappointed when they see that the revered man conceives a flawed plan and then puts it aside because he recognizes its inadequacy. Whoever is of the opinion of Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche that these embryonic developments of thought should have been published with the addition of the later ones that perfected them (see introduction to Lichtenberger p. LXIV): precisely he has the tendency: the form of the idea of reincarnation, as Nietzsche had it in 1881, should have been falsified by the addition of later thoughts.

I have never disputed the merits of Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche, which she really has. I even remember a certain letter that I wrote to Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche, although not unsolicited at the time, in which I wrote about these real merits, because Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche needed something like that at the time. She wrote me a letter on October 27, 1895, in which she thanked me for my letter: "Your manifesto against the unbelievers and the uninstructed pleases Dr. Koegel and me extraordinarily and we read it with great edification. Thank you very much for it." But there was nothing to entitle Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche to draw me into a matter that was none of my business, into which I did not want to be drawn. And when this involvement then had consequences that Dr. Seidl calls "more brutal than particularly effective", I was again the first to regret that such scenes had been made necessary. But no one else made them necessary than Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche.

If only the "lonely woman" in Weimar had not been treated worse by anyone than by me! Right up to the point when she provoked me in an outrageous way, of course. I wonder if she gets along better with knights of comic stature like Dr. Arthur Seidl!

• 1. Dr. Seidl endeavors to explain the contradictory nature of Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's behavior in anthropological terms; now I think I would have said in my essay, in order to ward off any moral accusations against her: "I expressly emphasize, however, that I have never suspected Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche of deliberately distorting facts or deliberately making untrue assertions. No, she believes what she says at every moment." To use the pompous word "anthropological explanation" for this interpretation of Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's mental characteristics in the style of Dr. Seidl goes against my taste.