The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A Christmas memory

Almost forty years ago, about two or three days before Christmas, my dear teacher and fatherly friend Karl Julius Schröer told me in his small library room on Vienna's Salesianergasse about the Christmas plays that he had attended in Oberufer in western Hungary in the 1850s and published in Vienna in 1862.

The German colonists of this area brought these plays with them from more western regions and continued to perform them every year around Christmas in the old manner. They preserve true gems of German folk theater from a time that predates the very first emergence of the modern stage.

There was something in Schröer's narrative that gave an immediate sense of how, in the sight of the plays, a piece of sixteenth-century folklore stood before his soul. And he described it from the full. He had grown fond of German folklore in the various Austro-Hungarian regions. Two areas were the subject of his particular study. This folklore and Goethe. And when he spoke about anything from these two areas, it was not a scholar who spoke, but a whole person who only used his erudition to express what connected him personally to it with all his heart and intense sense of purpose.

And so he spoke at the time about the rural Christmas games. The poor people of Oberufer, who trained as actors every year around Christmas time for their fellow villagers, came to life from his words. Schröer knew the nature of these people. He did everything he could to get to know them. He traveled around the Hungarian highlands to study the language of the Germans in this area of northern Hungary. He is the author of a “Dictionary of the German Dialects of the Hungarian Highlands” (1858) and a “Description of the German Dialects of the Hungarian Highlands” (1864). You don't have to particularly enjoy reading dictionaries to be captivated by these books. The outer garment of the presentation has nothing attractive at first. Schröer seeks to do justice to the scientific approach of German studies of his time. And this approach also appears quite dry at first in his work. But if you overcome this dryness and engage with the spirit that prevails when Schröer shares words, expressions, puns, and so on from the vernacular dialects, you will perceive revelations of the purest humanity in truly charming miniature images. But you don't even have to rely on that. Because Schröer precedes his dictionaries and grammatical lists with prefaces that provide the broadest cultural-historical outlooks. A rare and sensible personality falls in love with popular customs, interspersed with other popular customs and on the verge of extinction within the same, and describes them as one would describe a dusk.

And out of this love, Schröer also wrote a dictionary of the Heanzen dialect of western Hungary and one of the very small German language island of Gottschee in Krain.

There was always something of a tragic undertone when Schröer expressed what he felt when he looked at this declining folk life, which he wanted to preserve in the form of science.

But this feeling intensified to an intimate warmth when he spoke of the Oberufer Christmas plays. A respected family kept them and passed them on from generation to generation as a sacred treasure. The oldest member of the family was the teacher, who inherited the art of playing from his ancestors. Every year, after the grape harvest, he selected the boys from the village whom he considered suitable as players. He taught them the game. During their apprenticeship, they had to endeavor to live up to the seriousness of the matter. And they had to faithfully submit to everything the teacher prescribed. For in this teacher lived a time-honored tradition.

The performances that Schröer saw were in an inn. But both the players and the audience brought the warmest Christmas spirit into the house – and this mood is rooted in a genuine, pious devotion to the Christmas truth. Scenes that inspire the noblest edification alternate with bawdy, humorous ones. These do not detract from the seriousness of the whole. They only prove that the plays date from a time when the piety of the people was so deeply rooted in the mind that it could perfectly well coexist with naive, folksy merriment. For example, the pious love with which the heart was given to the baby Jesus did not suffer when a somewhat clumsy Joseph was placed next to the wonderfully delicately drawn Virgin; or when the intimately characterized sacrifice of the shepherds was preceded by their rough conversation and droll jokes. Those who originated the plays knew that the contrast with coarseness does not diminish, but rather increases, the heartfelt edification of the people. One can admire the art that draws the most beautiful mood of pious emotion from laughter, and precisely by doing so keeps away dishonest sentimentality.

In writing this, I am describing the impression I received after Schröer, to illustrate his story, took out the little book from his library in which he had shared the Christmas plays and from which he now read me samples. He was able to point out how one or the other player behaved in facial expression and gesture when saying this or that. Schröer now gave me the little book (“Deutsche Weihnachtspiele aus Ungern”, described and shared by Karl Julius Schröer. Vienna 1862); and after I had read it, I was often able to ask him about many things related to the folk's way of playing and their whole conception of this particular way of celebrating Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany.

In his introduction to the plays, Schröer writes: “Near Pressburg, half an hour's drive away, on an island off the island of Schütt, lies the village of Oberufer, whose lords are the Palfy family. Both the Catholic and Protestant communities there belong to the Pressburg parishes and have their services in the city. A village schoolmaster for both communities is also a notary, and so all the honorifics of the village are united in one person. He is hostile to the games and despises them, so that to this day they have been ignored and completely isolated from all “intellectuals” by farmers and performed for farmers. Religion makes no difference, Catholics and Protestants take equal parts, in the presentation as well as in the spectator seats. The players, however, belong to the same tribe, known as the Haidbauern, who, in the 16th or early 17th century, immigrated from the area around Lake Constance” – in a footnote, Schröer points out that this is not entirely certain – ”and were said to have been still entirely Protestant in 1659.” — “In Oberufer, the owner of the games has been a farmer since 1827. He had already played the angel Gabriel as a boy, then inherited the art from his father, who was then the ‘master teacher’ of the games. He had inherited the writings, the clothing and other equipment purchased and maintained at the expense of the players, and so the teaching position was also passed on to him.” When the time for practicing comes, “they copy, learn, sing day and night. In the village, no music is tolerated. When the players go across the country to play in a neighboring village and there is music there, they move on. When the village musicians were once played in one village in their honor, they indignantly asked if they were considered comedians?” “The plays now last from the first Sunday in Advent to Twelfth Night. There is a performance every Sunday and holiday; every Wednesday there is a performance for practice. On the other weekdays, the players travel to neighboring villages to perform.” — ‘I consider it important to mention these circumstances because they show how a certain consecration is still associated with the event today.’

And when Schröer spoke about the plays, his words still had an echo of this consecration.

I had to keep what I learned from Schröer in my heart. And now members of the Anthroposophical Society have been performing these plays at Christmas time for a number of years. During the war they were also allowed to perform them for the sick in the military hospitals. We have also been playing them every Christmas season at the Goetheanum in Dornach for many years. This year will be no exception. As far as possible under the changed circumstances, strict attention is paid to the fact that the way the plays are performed and presented gives the audience a picture of what it was like for those who kept these plays in the folk mind and regarded them as a worthy way to celebrate Christmas.

Almost half a century has passed since the Austrian literary historian Karl Julius Schröer wrote his book “Die deutsche Dichtung des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts” (Nineteenth Century German Poetry). In it, he summarized a phenomenon that manifested itself in a number of poets under the name “Gelehrte Lyrik” (Scholarly Lyricism). The poets who gave him cause to do so were: Hermann Lingg, Wilhelm Jordan, Robert Hamerling, Victor Scheffel. It is not a negative assessment of these poets that Schröer wanted to express with this. This will be admitted even by those who disagree with this assessment in many ways.

But what Schröer wanted, he expresses sharply in the following words: “If the poets whose works I allowed to be called erudite lyric almost seem to us like testimonies to an age suffering from over-education, it cannot be denied that among the ones mentioned, Hamerling is certainly the one who still has the most in him of the true poet. Indeed, in its seeds, the new education and learning sprout with the last lyric poet we have to deal with, with Victor Scheffel."

Schröer sensed the pressure that “erudite education” exerted on the free momentum of poetic imagination at the time he was writing his observations.

One certainly cannot say that Victor Scheffel wanted to embody “erudition” in his poetry. Nor would one necessarily find it in the other poets mentioned. Least of all in Robert Hamerling.

But Schröer nevertheless points to something that is significant for the past fifty years.

The phrase “for an age suffering from over-education” is particularly striking. It refers to an age in which the forces of decline are already present, and under whose influence humanity must live in the present. And it is precisely these seeds that Schröer senses when he speaks of “over-education”. He senses that there is something in the direction that intellectual education has taken that separates man from the inner sources of life and the world. In saying this, he points back to Goethe, who still carries nature and the world close to his heart.

It is the pressure that arose from the striving for knowledge of that time that puts the words on Schröer's tongue. What has often been said in this weekly magazine may be repeated from a different point of view. One can fully recognize the great achievements of natural knowledge, which that time mastered without limitation; but this must not scare away the insight that the way of thinking that has emerged with these achievements in the development of humanity includes forces of decline. And Schröer sees this when he speaks of the suffering of his time due to “over-education”. He sees how there is only more trust in that activity of the soul that directs the mind to natural processes, insofar as these natural processes reveal themselves through the senses. This results in a content of the soul that, in Schröer's opinion, paralyzes the power of poetry.

Of course it does not have to be that way. And anyone who says, “Yes, should we then, in order not to disturb the poets, renounce the ‘objectivity’ of true knowledge?” is quite right from his point of view. But the thinking that resulted from this “true knowledge” pushed everywhere to recognize its own limitations. “Objectivity” was only found when one adhered to the ‘limits of the knowledge of nature’. Whoever says: this is how much science can recognize, and whoever strives for more is seeking ways beyond the ‘limits of the knowledge of nature’ and will have a beneficial effect. But whoever decrees: knowledge of nature must be accepted unconditionally; it has a right to determine the limits of knowledge in general, brings about ideas through this way of thinking that affect the soul habits of man. And this effect is one that extinguishes everything that arises freely from the soul to reveal itself in human creations of the spirit.

But it is these free human creations that are connected with the nature of man himself. They are the powers transformed into the spiritual, which work in the growth, in the shaping, in the whole formation of the physical man as well. In the free creation of the spirit, man lets that which the world powers bring to life come forth from his soul in a different form, by letting him himself emerge from the mother soil of existence into manifestation. Man can never understand his own nature if he sees in himself a collection of what nature itself allows him to recognize.

The response that is often made is not justified. Those who have adopted the common orientation towards mere natural events believe that they are approaching human beings in order to view them as impartially as nature. But he has not. He has taken into his soul the ideas of nature with their limitations as habits of thought, and these he transfers to man. He believes he is looking at the latter; in truth, the hallucination of a spectre stands before his soul, which he has composed of natural substances and natural forces; and the true human essence falls away from view.

With this hallucination before his soul, man finds himself hampered wherever he would let his free spiritual power rule. He would also like to unfold spiritually in his soul what works in the depths by his own being arising; then “true knowledge” comes and whispers to him, you may do that; but you are in the airy realm of the unreal. One can now theorize that a “true insight” must be based only on itself; that imagination must go its own way, regardless of what “science” determines. But this science does flow into the soul. And it causes what Schröer calls the suffering of “overeducation”. This overeducation lies in the belief that the knowledge of nature that developed in the nineteenth century, with its orientation towards ideas, can approach the human being.

This overeducation becomes undereducation in the intellectual realm. It would be highly misleading if one had to say in truth: anyone who wants to let the human spirit rule freely is obliged to do so regardless of the “findings” of knowledge. If one then sees that free creativity is nevertheless fettered by this, one would have to assume a tragic conflict in the nature of man. One would have to believe that he can only gain knowledge if he stifles his own nature. If this were really the result of conscientious, “exact” research, man would have to resign himself to it. Anthroposophical spiritual knowledge attempts to show that this is not the case. However, it does not take the view that it must be accepted for the sake of humanity, as a kind of hypothesis. Instead, it approaches the spiritual being in the same way that science approaches the natural being. It is not a prerequisite for spiritual science that man should find harmony within himself, for the sake of which it surreptitiously gains its results; but spiritual science gains its results spiritually, just as natural science gains its results naturally. And from these results it may then look up to the harmony within man and cherish the hope that it may also be able to act on this harmony through its impulses.

The creations of Goethe and Schiller during their time as friends are among the most beautiful blossoms of human intellectual life. However, this friendship only came about because both men overcame serious inner obstacles that kept their souls apart. These obstacles can be seen in the conversation reported by Goethe, which the two had when they had once come from a lecture on the plant world that had taken place at the Naturalists' Society in Jena. Schiller found that the lecture was unsatisfactory because the individual plant forms were juxtaposed without the context becoming apparent in the consideration. Goethe replied that he had such a context in mind in his Urpflanze (primordial plant), which contains what lives as the essence in all individual plants. This “Urpflanze” does not resemble a single plant; but it makes every plant understandable from this primordial form that underlies the entire plant kingdom. Goethe sketched this primal form with a few characteristic strokes in front of Schiller's eyes. Schiller replied: but that is not an experience, that is an idea. Goethe, however, insisted that for him such an idea was at the same time an experience (observation), and that if one called such an idea an idea, he perceived his ideas with his eyes. From Goethe's description of the conversation, it is clear that the two of them had not yet been able to reconcile their opinions.

Goethe felt justified in addressing what formed itself in his mind about the things of nature in the form of ideas, as a result of observation, as he did, for example, about the red color of the rose. For him, science was spirit-filled and yet at the same time the objective result of observation. Schiller could not come to terms with such a view. For him, it was clear that man must first form the ideas out of himself if he wanted to combine the results of observation, which were only given as details. Goethe felt at home in nature with his spiritual content, while Schiller felt out of touch with nature with the same content.

Anyone who follows the course of their friendship from their correspondence will see how it deepened as Schiller came to understand Goethe's way of looking at things. He came to accept the objective rule of the spirit in the creations of nature, which was something that Goethe took for granted. It may be said that Schiller was the first to separate from Goethe the view that man stands outside nature and that when he speaks about nature, he adds something to it. Goethe was never unclear about the fact that in man nature expresses its essence as spiritual content itself, if man only puts himself in the right relationship to it.

For Goethe, the essence of nature lives in man as knowledge. And human knowledge is for him a revelation of the essence of nature. For Goethe, the process of knowledge is not merely a formal reflection of a hidden essence in nature, but the real manifestation of that which would not exist in nature at all without the human spirit. Nevertheless, for him, the spirit is the true content of nature itself, because he conceives of knowledge as the human soul immersing itself in nature. Schiller initially found it difficult to reconcile this with his Kantianism. And he had adopted this Kantianism; Goethe never found anything in Kant's view that could come close to his way of thinking.

In the feeling of Goethe's artistic creations, Schiller found himself in his way of thinking and approached Goethe more and more. In the “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” one sees Schiller's striving to bring Goethe's artistic experience to full understanding. After he had reformed himself in this direction, he came to recognize in the artistic experience of the world the only human state of mind in which one could be a true human being in the full sense of the word. And so, for him, science became a way of experiencing the world in which man could not reveal himself in his entirety.

Goethe, on the other hand, wanted a science that, in its own way, would bring out the whole person just as art does in its own. Schiller first had to work his way towards such a view. He did so, and in doing so, his spiritual community with Goethe was placed on the right footing. Goethe, in turn, approached Schiller in that Schiller provided him with the intellectual justification for his way of thinking. He himself could not have arrived at this, for he lived in this way before the bond of friendship, as in something self-evident, which had not even occurred to him as a problem. Schiller was able to enrich Goethe's soul by showing him how it could become a self-aware mystery and search for the solution to it.

Schiller gave Goethe the incentive to continue his Faust. The “Prologue in Heaven” was created directly from this stimulus. If you compare this with one of the oldest Faust scenes, where Faust turns away from the spirit of the great world and towards the spirit of the earth, you can see the turnaround in Goethe. Before, the turning away from the intellectual content of the great world; after, the pictorial representation of the same. In the stimulus of thought that Schiller had given, lay for Goethe the germ of the artistic image of man's life in the world-spirit before the eye of the soul. Before, he was unable to do this because he accepted this life as something only felt as a matter of course, without forming it inwardly.

For posterity, it will always be significant to be able to learn to see Goethe's essence with the eye of the soul through Schiller; to see Goethe's essence fully unfold in a certain period of his life in the stimuli that emanate from Schiller.

The sense of the obstacles that both had to overcome in order to come together, and the other of the way in which they ultimately complemented each other, provides an impulse for the deepest soul observations. In doing so, however, he also penetrates to one of the most important points in the workings of the spirit in the development of humanity.

The Kommende-Tag-Verlag has republished FTenrik Steffen's “Anthropology”, which was first published a hundred years ago.

This brings a work back to the public that vividly reveals the life of scientific knowledge in Goethe's time. It cannot be said to reflect the generally accepted view of nature in this period. Steffens was far too individual and original a personality to capture the spirit of the times in a book in this way. But what such a personality gains from the knowledge of nature in the spirit of his time in order to approach the riddles of man comes to light.

Henrik Steffens is a Norwegian. He started out by studying mineralogy. At the age of twenty-four, he went to Germany, to the intellectual atmosphere in which Goethe had breathed the creations of his soul. Goethe's spirit became the awakening force for Steffens.

Steffens continued his studies in Jena, where philosophy in one form or another had reached the heights that Goethe sought to scale by other means. Schelling, who expounded natural philosophy as a creative spirit, for whom the comprehension of nature was followed by the comprehension of its secrets, had a profound influence on him. Werner, the geognost, whom Goethe also followed to a certain point, became his guide. Steffens' soul was carried by Fichte's and Schiller's philosophical ideas, and inspired by Novalis' bold penetration into the spirit of natural activity.

And so all the impulses that were at work in German intellectual life at that time converged in this soul. From them he wanted to bring light into the natural scientific insights that had received such powerful stimuli at that time from the burgeoning science of chemistry, from the theory of electricity and much more.

Anyone who allows Schelling's natural philosophy to take effect on them has the impression that a personality is speaking that wants to soar in a daring flight of ideas to the ultimate riddles of existence, and that, in its flight, takes with it, interpreting and combining, whatever scientific results can be grasped from left and right. It seeks to obtain from nature justifications for the flight of ideas. Nature must serve the architectonics of ideas.

Fichte is so completely absorbed in the flight of ideas that he has no eye or interest in natural science at all.

Goethe, with vivid and vivid power of thought, recreates the details of natural things and processes in thought; he will not be moved to a final summary; his respect for the depth of the world's secrets is too great for that.

Novalis strikes sparks of genius out of nature, which he wants to bring together to form his “magical idealism”. He dies much too young to complete the whole of the powerful ideas he has in mind.

All these minds have the one-sidedness that often occurs in people who carry strong a&five souls within them.

In Steffens, the passive, the devoted receptivity of the soul predominates. He absorbs what emanates from Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Novalis; and he develops versatile abilities in which the powers of these spirits flow together. In this harmony of abilities, he approaches natural processes with unlimited love. He gives back to nature in recognition of what he has learned from his great role models in spiritual striving, in that they wanted to rise above nature to the sources of existence.

And so he follows mineralogically and geologically what slate formations and what limestone formations the earth carries in its rock structure. He seeks to fathom the harmony of magnetic and electrical processes. He endeavors to guess the riddles of gravity and light. And from all this he wants to gain a picture of how the earth is born out of the cosmos under the influence of gravity and light, of magnetism and electricity. How these forces shape its slate-limestone-porphyritic body. And in this cosmic birth, which then develops further, he seeks the formative elements of living beings up to the human being.

Thus, in his soul, “anthropology” is born.

This becomes a comprehensive edifice of ideas. The earth's formations form the basis. The unraveling of the human existence forms the uppermost storey. The formations of the human sensory tools are treated with just as much spirit as the gneiss that helps shape the mountain structure. This consideration of 'anthropology' does not stop at the point where the natural foundations of the human being are grasped by the soul and spirit. It penetrates to the temperaments, to the life of love.

Indeed, in this consideration it seems self-evident that the cognitive revelation that man receives from nature leads to the religious state of mind. And so we read on the penultimate page of this “Anthropology”: “This revelation of the eternal personality of God, the Son from eternity, the true archetype, the inner fullness of all law, from the very beginning, was the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. His veiled personality was from the beginning and looks out of nature as a hint of future bliss.”

And for Steffens, it “looks out of nature” because he shapes science in such a way that knowledge is the unveiling of the spirit hidden in nature. He does not anthropomorphically place the spirit into nature; he lets nature itself express its spirit. But this spirit ultimately reveals itself in the way Steffens suggests.

It is certain that this “anthropology” cannot be read like a book written today. Steffens would also write differently according to the scientific discoveries that have been made since then.

But one should read about the relationship between the human soul and nature and its work a century ago in one of its brilliant representatives. One may feel that Steffen's description is outdated, but one should also have a feeling for the fact that the saying should also become outdated: these natural philosophers constructed only out of thin air, without any basis in experience. And it is fortunate that they have been “overcome” and “forgotten”. — One should rather see how these “overcome” and “forgotten” still have a great deal of vitality in them that could also benefit the present and the near future.

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the abundance of what had been discovered in the world of the senses had caused thinkers to lose the courage to seek the spirit in nature. But in return, they have conjured up a state of the sciences, through which they have completely lost sight of the essence of man. For a science that stops at the spirit must lose the human being himself, because nature lives in man as the spirit shapes it.

Steffens has just endeavored to gain a real “anthropology” in which the essence of man lives. He was able to develop such an understanding because he created a natural foundation in his knowledge, into which the human spirit can intervene and continue its laws. But the newer ones have gained such a “nature” from their knowledge that should shape the human being itself, if it wanted to have him. It cannot do that because the human being is not “nature”.

Thus it may well be seen as something that justifies itself, that one of the most brilliant works on man, which was written a century ago, is being brought to mind again today. It will become clear to many as they read that, in response to those who say that a personality like Steffens has been “forgotten” because science has passed him by, one must assert the opposite: No, Steffens must be brought back to memory because he has much that science has lost by stepping over him.

From the book by Croce, one can clearly see how the way of thinking in the present day still prevents even outstanding minds from gaining the right access to Goethe's work. Among the various obstacles that arise for such minds, the misunderstanding of Goethe's relationship to mathematics is one of the most effective. From this it can be seen that Goethe had no skill in the treatment of mathematical problems. He himself admitted his inability in this respect sufficiently strongly. In his scientific works, therefore, one never finds the problems worked out in those areas in which a mathematical treatment is required by the nature of the subject.

Now, in the period that followed Goethe, mathematical treatment was regarded as essential for those parts of knowledge of nature that are considered to be truly exact. It was under the same impression that Kant had been under when he expressed the view that there is only as much real science in any knowledge as mathematics is contained in it. For this way of thinking, the rejection of Goethe's scientific approach is sealed from the outset.

But when it comes to assessing Goethe's relationship to mathematics, something quite different comes into play.

The study of mathematics gives a person a special position in relation to the penetration of the cognitive tasks themselves. In mathematical thinking, one deals with something that arises within the human soul. One does not look outwards, as in sensory experience, but builds up the content of thought purely within. And by thinking one's way from one mathematical structure to another, one does not have to rely on the evidence of the senses or of external experimentation, but remains entirely within one's inner soul life; one is dealing with an inner, conceptual view. One lives in the realm of the freely creative spirit.

Novalis, who was equally at home in the field of mathematics as in that of the free creative poetic imagination, saw in the former a perfect imaginative creation.

In more recent times, however, this trait has been denied in mathematics. It has been thought that this field of knowledge also borrows its truths from sensory observation, like an external experimental science, and that this fact is merely beyond human attention. It was only believed that one formed the mathematical forms oneself because one did not become aware of the borrowing from external observation. But this view has arisen only out of prejudice, which refuses to admit any free activity of the human mind. We are willing to accept scientific certainty only where we can rely on the statements of sense observation. And so, because the certainty of its truths cannot be denied, mathematics is also said to be a sense science.

Because in mathematics we live in the realm of the free creative spirit, its essence can be most clearly seen in inner self-knowledge. If one turns one's attention away from the structures that one works out in mathematical activity and back to that activity itself, one becomes fully aware of what one is doing. Then one lives in a kind of free creative spirituality.

One must only then summon up the flexibility of soul to extend the same creative inner activity that one unfolds in mathematics to other areas of inner experience. In this flexibility of soul lies the power to ascend to imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge, of which this weekly journal has often spoken.

In mathematics, every step one takes is inwardly transparent. One does not turn to the outside with the soul in order to determine the being of the other through the being of the one. One does, however, remain in a realm that, although created inwardly, relates to the external world through its own nature. Mathematics originates in the soul, but relates only to the non-spiritual. When the freely creative activity of the spirit ascends to the types of knowledge mentioned, however, one comes to grasp the soul itself and the realm of the world in which the soul lives.

Goethe's spiritual nature was such that he felt no need to cultivate mathematics himself. But his way of knowing was of a completely mathematical nature. He took in what concerned external nature through pure, refined observation, but then transformed it in his inner experience so that it became one with his soul, as is the case with freely created mathematical forms. Thus his thinking about nature became, in the most beautiful sense, a mathematical one. As a thinker of nature, Goethe was a mathematical spirit without being a mathematician.

He was just as open about his lack of knowledge of mathematics as he was about the mathematical direction of his way of looking at things. You can read about this in the essays that conclude his works on natural science under the title “On Natural Science in General. In this work he also stated that in all knowledge one must proceed as if one owed an account of one's findings to the strictest mathematician.

Through this direction of his quest for knowledge, Goethe was particularly predisposed to introducing a true scientific method of research into those scientific fields that cannot be determined by measure, number and weight because they are not quantitative but qualitative in nature. The opposing view wants to limit itself to what can be measured, counted and weighed, and leaves the qualitative as scientifically unattainable. It denies Goethe scientific validity because it does not see how he extends the rigor of research, which it demands where actual mathematics is applicable, to fields of knowledge where this is no longer the case.

Only when Goethe's methods of thought can be truly understood in this direction will it be possible to gain an unbiased judgment of the relationship between his knowledge and art. Only then will it be possible to see what the further development of his way of thinking can bring, both for art and for science.

On March 17, 1917, Franz Brentano died near Zurich at a ripe old age, after a philosopher's life that had gone through changing fortunes. But the inner walk on earth of this personality was much more eventful. This life was dedicated to the search for truth in the most serious sense. Franz Brentano's uncle was Clemens Brentano, the German poet of Romanticism. The family was devoutly Catholic. Clemens Brentano was the son of Maximiliane Brentano, a friend of Goethe. The great poet immortalized the high-minded figure of Maximiliane in his Werther as “Fräulein von B.”

Franz Brentano was influenced by the intellectualism and Catholicism of the Brentano family. But the effect was a very peculiar one. He had a flair for the intellectual world; but he lacked the romantic lightness to live in these worlds, beyond the bounds of logic, on the wings of fantasy, like his uncle Clemens. And he had a deep love for devotion to knowledge that arises from pious feeling; but his scholastic-Aristotelian training prevented him from receiving the truth in the form of revelation; his heart longed for religion; his mind longed to see through the content of the truth.

He first became a Catholic priest, not only because of the external circumstances of a Catholic family, but out of a genuine inner calling. And he was a priest in his youth, also in the sense that he considered the use of the intellect for one's own purposes to be sinful compared to belief in revelation. But he was also a zealous theologian. His keen intellect was developed in the most brilliant way by scholasticism and Aristotelianism. The romantic heritage of his family seems to have been transformed in him entirely into logical conceptualization and connected with the highest conscientiousness for the truth. Unconscious, half-conscious doubts rummage in the depths of the soul. The pious Catholic does not allow himself to give in to them.

So the declaration of the dogma of infallibility hits him. He had to prepare that famous memorandum on the dogma for Bishop Ketteler, which the bishop then presented at the bishops' conference in Fulda. Brentano had been inwardly disillusioned by the writing of this memorandum on the Catholic Church. His devout Catholic sense would have forbidden him even to think of a dogma that already existed. But the dogma of infallibility did not yet exist when he found himself called upon to examine it. He was allowed to examine it – and after the examination he found that in his heart he could no longer find his way back to the Catholic Church. The Church had accepted the dogma that he, out of his Catholicism, had to reject.

Franz Brentano left the Church and became a freelance philosopher. He brought to philosophy the art of strictly logical conceptualization. Aristotelianism, with its ascent from the observation of the senses to the comprehension of the spiritual in ingeniously formed concepts, had become second nature to Brentano. — Thus, as a philosopher, he wanted to find his way into the age in which knowledge of nature had become the guiding principle in all scientific methodology. One of his first philosophical writings was the one in which he propounded the proposition that true philosophy must make use of no other methods than those of genuine natural science. It was with this attitude that he set out to write a psychology in the 1870s. It was intended to be a work in several volumes. But only the first volume appeared. In my book Von Seelenrätseln (Dornach 1960, page 95), I have attempted to explain the reasons why Brentano was never able to complete, or even continue, his psychology. There one finds the view developed that the soul phenomena are precisely those that a person who truly understands the essence of the scientific method will want to observe through a kind of knowledge developed through spiritual vision. At first he will adhere to this method within the limits of the natural field, but by its very application he will convince himself that the soul in its activity and essence can only be recognized when the ordinary consciousness, going beyond itself, develops the faculty of exact vision. To this vision the processes of soul and spirit open themselves. Brentano did not want to proceed to such vision. He wanted to penetrate into the realm of mental phenomena using the methods of natural science. In doing so, he only got as far as elementary mental processes. But in his own opinion, a psychology that only gets as far as the formation and concatenation of ideas, the shaping of attention and memory, and so on, is worthless. True psychology must arrive at the knowledge of that which remains as man's better part when the body decays. But such a psychology can only be arrived at through exact observation. Brentano did not want this, and so he was unable to find any content for the higher parts of psychology. He could not find it by using the scientific method. His highly developed scientific and intellectual conscientiousness did not allow him to merely provide formalism.

Throughout his life as a philosopher, Brentano wrestled with the riddles of the world, which only yield to knowledge through exact observation. His struggle was a magnificent one. Anyone who followed his writings during his lifetime was deeply drawn to the tremendous work of knowledge of this philosopher, if they had the organ for it.

According to his devoted students, a rich legacy of Franz Brentano's work now exists. It is to be published in the course of time. His students will be most gratefully indebted.

The first publication from this estate gives us an idea of what we can expect from it. It contains – with an excellent introduction by Alfred Kastil – Brentano's “The Teaching of Jesus and its Permanent Significance, with an Appendix: A Brief Presentation of Christian Doctrine” (Leipzig, Felix Meiner publishing house, 1922).

The beginning and end of Brentano's work of knowledge are before the soul of the reader through this writing. What the philosopher has to say about the teachings of Jesus emerges from two foundations: from an intimate understanding of the Gospels and from a conscientious striving for knowledge that is directed towards the sharp formation of ideas. Through the interaction of what he builds on these two foundations, the following emerges in Brentano's soul: i. Jesus' moral teaching; 2. Jesus' teaching about God and the world and about his own person and mission; and 3. a “Concise presentation of Christian doctrine.” In the same way, what he presents as a detailed critique of Pascal's presentation of Catholicism arises for him.

The same break in Brentano's world view that was established in his treatment of psychology can also be found in his position on Christianity. The conviction towards scientific thinking that arose from his research using the scientific method became the hallmark of his entire world view. And so he also struggles with the person of Jesus, in whom he cannot find the divine presence of the Christ. How strongly Brentano's words resonate with a view that approaches the secret of Christ with exact observation and discovers in Jesus the Christ as a supernormal, supermundane divine being (page 37): “The world-view of Jesus was therefore not only geocentric centric, but also Christocentric, and in such a way that not only the whole history of the earth, but also that of pure spirits, both good and bad, is organized around the person of the one man Jesus, and in every respect can only be understood through the purposeful relationship to him. The world is a monarchy not only in view of the one all-powerful God, but also in view of the creature that before all others bears his image.” And yet, the ideas that Brentano develops of Christ Jesus do not culminate in such a spiritual form that can be felt as reality. This can only be the case with a world view that rises from natural science to a spiritual science, from a historical knowledge of external events to an exact view of the supersensible activity of the spiritual realm in historical life. Jesus can be found through a knowledge of history modeled on natural science; the Christ can only be found through a genuine spiritual knowledge. (This does not mean, of course, that the devout Christian does not find the Christ. He finds him in his emotional experience. But knowledge of the Christ can only be gained in the way described. And it was this way that Brentano was striving for.) Through his attitude toward natural science thinking, the philosopher Brentano blocked the way into the spiritual region to which he was, after all, directed.^{1In the circle of Brentano's students, my view of Brentano's difficulties with psychology has been challenged. I would gladly admit that those close to the philosopher may know more about this than I do; but I am now substantially strengthened in my judgment of Brentano's work, particularly by his “Lehre Jesu” (The Teaching of Jesus). He has therefore not completely rediscovered the path to Christ, which he lost through his confrontation with Catholic dogma. It is precisely through what a venerable seeker of truth could not find that Brentano is one of the most important philosophical phenomena of the present day.}

Among the people who were particularly characteristic of the intellectual life at the end of the nineteenth century, we must mention the philosopher Franz Brentano, who died in the spring of 1917. (I have spoken of him in this weekly journal on the occasion of the publication of his book on Christ and in an obituary that forms the third section of my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Puzzles of the Soul).

Franz Brentano wanted to gain a philosophy from the science of the soul. He only allowed the first volume of his grandly intended psychology to appear. He wanted to build up the science of the soul according to a method that should be oriented towards the ideal of natural science. Everything he devised in a fine and ingenious way about the phenomena of the soul goes in the direction that is characterized here in this weekly journal as “anthroposophy”. The natural science in which Brentano had been trained, and to whose methods he clung, regards any penetration of the real spiritual world as fantasy. And Brentano could not understand a “spiritual science” that proceeds from an intuitive perception of the spirit but is as rigorous as modern natural science. He could not consciously rise to the level to which all his trains of thought pointed. So his work remained unfinished.

But it is precisely through this struggle that the soul of this “soul researcher” becomes an apparition that repeatedly and powerfully attracts the spiritual-scientific soul observer. The smallest gift of his literary achievements offers unlimited interest.

There is now a small booklet “Aenigmatias” (New Riddles by Franz Brentano, 2nd edition, Munich 1909) by this philosopher. He says himself in the preface that the numerous riddles he has created and communicated in this booklet are “really products of the occasion”. “I repeatedly found myself in circles that liked to entertain themselves with such games of wit; and it is only to my desire to please them that my riddles owe their creation."

And yet, if you look at these puzzles with affection, you can see the special character of this thinker in them. Brentano's strict scholastic training led him to a sharp treatment of thought. Asking questions about life and the world became the finest art of the soul for him. Formulating clear, luminous concepts was his in an unlimited field. But in his immersion in the natural science of his time, he came upon a spiritual experience that did not seek to grasp the essence of things; for him, the “limits of knowledge” coincided with a mind driven to infinity. And so he could only feel about the things and processes of the world with this acumen like someone who has something in a light covering in his hands and who now tries to guess what this covering encloses.

Those who have an ear for the undertones that resonate from a person's thoughts can discern the “enigma seeker” everywhere in Brentano's profound books and treatises. The riddles of nature and the mind arise in a special way in him because there is something tentative in his questioning that does not want to approach things because it believes that grasping too carelessly is to perceive reality too crudely. This ultimately becomes the prevailing mood of all of Brentano's thinking.

And such thinking may, without being untrue to itself, withdraw for recreation into the playful regions, where questioning becomes the witty wrapping of what is intended. This is how one feels about Brentano's riddles. For with him the same state of mind is at work in a light-hearted way when he sets riddles for people, which is elevated to the utmost seriousness when he ponders the “riddles” of existence. One notices the subtlety of thought when Brentano sets the riddle:

"Sweet am I and delight to children's hunger;
There I swiftly vanish like snow in the sun's ray.
But when the young fantasy spreads its wings,
Then I swell, grow above all hills
And bar the paradise of fantasy as a broad bolt.

And one can feel the same subtlety when Brentano classifies the expressions of the soul.

When this philosopher wants to entertain people humorously, he does so by casting the spirit of his philosopher's impulse into the joke. And if the philosopher feels how thinking is such a remarkable alchemist that makes a profound world riddle out of the smallest event, Brentano, through a similar transformation, manages to express a joke in such a way that it is enveloped in a “tragedy in words”:

"Whom did they throw into boiling water?
Whose belly was slit with a knife?
(His innermost entrails were now hanging out;)
Whose soul was torn from his body?
Whose tail was cut off to make a sad stump?
Whom did they push down into the quagmire swamp?
Whom did they drag away, mutilated in his body?“
“Me, who describe it all.”

(Brentano says of many of his riddles: “If one often encounters great difficulty in solving them, it is the fault of the skill of those for whom they were intended. The finest and most whimsical tasks wade through their dearest ones, and none remained unsolved.” But since I cannot assume that the readers of this weekly publication are any more skilled, I omit the solutions in the examples. Brentano does not provide any in the book either).

Sometimes it is appealing how the philosopher introduces something into the riddle that almost has the weight of the world of a philosophical question, for example:

“I am a sea, an ocean
That half the world covers,
A grave that thousands embrace
In equal peace.”

I am a witch who
Weaves you a web of deception,
I am the earnest teacher
Who lifts the veil of creation for you.

The enigma shows that a tiny thing can be meaningfully enveloped in an almost dialectical torrent of words:

"Because a small, inconspicuous thing,
If you often pay little attention to it,
What created confusion.
When it floats in the air,
The hissing stops, and it lifts
The call of wonder.

Yes, a wise scholar (Hegel)
Did not hold his breath,
Spoke the great word,
In the well-ordered state
Is the prince, which in fact
This in his place.

Brentano became a riddle writer because, at the bottom of his mind, he had much more power than he could live out in his philosophy; but he was such a great philosopher that he remained one even when he was making jokes. His riddles are of the most diverse kinds: charadoids, doubling charades, filling riddles, and so on, are among them; but all are such that one feels: it is the spirit itself that becomes the joker.

In the previous essay, with reference to Herman Grimm's thoughts, I drew attention to the fact that today people are going through the transition from directly experienced “present” to “history” more intensely than in many other ages. This can be particularly noticeable when one looks at the description that Herman Grimm gives in his Goethe lectures of Goethe's entry into Rome. In observing the feelings that arise in Goethe's soul when he enters the “capital of the world” - in his own expression - a great world-historical perspective stands before Herman Grimm's mind. He traces the inner course of the human spirit back, from the present into the past. He finds that the man of the present can only reach back with full inner understanding to the time of Roman development. The Roman doers, the Roman thinkers and artists can still be understood in this way. For their expressions of life arise from a state of soul that, despite the development that has been undergone, has an inner affinity with the present one. But if one goes further back, there is a gulf before what has been handed down historically. The Greek personalities act out of impulses that are foreign to the present souls. When their story is told, one feels more in a fairytale mood than in the atmosphere of the rough reality that begins with Roman times and in which present-day people still breathe.

Alkibiades or Solon are in their historical element the pure fairytale figures in contrast to Caesar or Brutus, who are felt to be very down-to-earth.

Herman Grimm wrote a book about Homer's Iliad. He wanted to use the style and tone of the entire book to lead the reader into a realm that can be entered without hesitation, leaving the earthly ground and using the wings of fantasy. For in the life of the earth, according to Herman Grimm's opinion, today one no longer has the prerequisites for coming to this distant Greek land. One would become a greater fantasist if one wanted to reach Achilles or Agamemnon with ideas that are “really” called today than on the paths of the world-replicating imagination.

Herman Grimm wrote books about Michelangelo and Raphael. In them, he attempts to use the ideas that people in contemporary life have acquired to penetrate to the historical circles in which the Renaissance artists live. Grimm even takes an orientation that is gained from the present day as far back as Giotto and Dante. Yes, he goes back as far as Augustine; and it would have been natural for him to do so if he had spoken of the events of the Roman Republic. He stops at Greek history. There the spiritual ground on which Romanism has been led into the present must be abandoned; there one must enter into a fairy-tale mood.

With such sentiments, Herman Grimm looks to Goethe as he enters Rome. He believes that Goethe perceived Rome as the “capital of the world” because in this place he found most intensely expressed what the Roman era brought to humanity. This age, which was preceded by the age of Greek fairy tales and will be followed by the one that present humanity is just entering. Herman Grimm, in his own way, very strongly emphasizes how he feels himself at the dawn of this new age and how he judges Goethe's premonition of it. But here we come to the point where we feel quite clearly that we cannot carry Herman Grimm's thoughts into the present any more, any more than we could a short time ago. He believed he was touching on Goethe's feelings in Rome when he spoke of his own in the Goethe lectures as follows: “I myself believed I was still allowed to experience a very last glimmer of the sunset in which Goethe saw Rome.” “The Romans... are completely lacking in the fairytale-like. They have no trace of mythical descent and are understandable from the first moment as politicians, legal scholars, soldiers, officials, merchants. Their virtues and vices are openly displayed and without poetic gloss.” In contrast to this, Herman Grimm describes his feelings towards the Greeks as follows: “No matter how close Homer and Plato, even Aristotle and Thucydides, or Phidias and Pindar may appear to us, a small moon in the nail reminds us of something like ichor, the blood of the gods, of which a last drop flowed into the veins of the Greeks.”

But more powerfully than all this, which Herman Grimm says as if it were also a decisive statement about Goethe, his own words penetrate the soul today. Goethe looks at the artistic works that are accessible to him in Italy. Through them he seems to feel the essence of Greek art. And he expresses his belief that he has come upon the secret of this art by seeing how the Greeks, in creating their works of art, followed the same laws that nature itself follows, and which he wanted to follow. There is no urge in Goethe to move from the level of Roman earthly reality to a Greek fairy-tale world. Rather, there is the completely different urge to work one's way through the contemplation of Greek works of art to a higher, truer reality, to a spiritual reality of which even the fairy-tale-creating imagination is only a daughter.

Herman Grimm did not want to penetrate to this reality. Where he felt that he no longer had earthly reality under his feet, he wanted to float away into the realm of creative fantasy.

One feels: today one can no longer go along with this. One must enter into spiritual reality with soul forces that can be experienced as precisely as those that penetrate into the realm of natural existence. In doing so, one may quote Goethe's thoughts as if they were spoken in the present. Herman Grimm also spoke about Goethe in the way that the time was allowed to speak when it still believed that without a real spiritual vision it could bring humanity to recognize the mere ideas of the spirit. Herman Grimm was one of those who dreamt this dream most beautifully. He wanted to get by saying: “Everything Greek, right up to the most firmly established historical times, retains something fairytale-like for our gaze... Alkibiades is the pure prince of fairytales, compared to Caesar.” Today, we are no longer allowed to speak in this way. Reality on earth has become so harsh that anything spiritual, which we only see in fairy tales, is immediately consumed by it. Today we must recognize the essence of man in such depth that Alcibiades does not appear as a “fairytale prince”, but as real as Caesar, even if he comes from a different reality.

In a subsequent essay, I would like to elaborate on the idea that personalities like Herman Grimm remain alive for human observation precisely because they are viewed in the light of the “present” at the right moment and in that of “history”.

For the way in which characteristic forces in the intellectual life of recent times, which so quickly transform “present” into “history”, have affected an idealistically minded soul, many things in Herman Grimm are - I would almost say - alarmingly indicative. I have experienced many such “alarming” moments while reading Herman Grimm. I would like to highlight a few of them.

In the essay volume Aus den letzten fünf Jahren (Gütersloh 1890), Herman Grimm had the lecture printed that he gave on May 2, 1886 at the first ordinary general assembly of the Goethe Society in Weimar. The title is Goethe in the Service of Our Time. At first, one follows each sentence with deep interest. It comes across ingeniously how Goethe's contemporaries knew little of what people educated in Goethe knew about him in 1886. But the change of feeling is also presented to the soul, which is due to the fact that for the contemporaries, Goethe was a living person, but for those later, he is not. There are sentences such as: “One never needed to have met Goethe or read more of him than was contained in his most distinguished works: the mere knowledge that he was alive filled one with the knowledge of his value and with the feeling of personal connection. ... I have wondered whether what has taken the place of this feeling in us today corresponds to what it could be. It seems to me that, despite the masses of material about Goethe's external and internal experiences that are available to us, our sense of spiritual connection with him is less effective than it should be.

And from such thoughts, Herman Grimm moves on to a discussion of Goethe's relationship with Winckelmann. During the period that can be called the pre-Goethean period, Winckelmann had struggled from a narrow intellectual background to a great, pure enthusiasm for art that drove him to Italy. He ultimately met a tragic death by being murdered. Now, in his writings, Winckelmann has literally resurrected ancient art for the understanding of people. Goethe has now experienced this revival in his own soul in Italy. He relived in his own way what Winckelmann had felt before him. This led him to create not only a literary monument to Winckelmann in his book 'Winckelmann and His Century', but to bring his figure, his entire intellectual activity to life, formed out of his own soul. Herman Grimm has the idea that it is Winckelmann, as created by Goethe, who now lives on in the development of the mind. Without Goethe, the world would have had the memory of the mortal Winckelmann; through Goethe, Winckelmann has been resurrected in such a way that he, as awakened by Goethe, has attained earthly immortality. Now Herman Grimm says that this is how those who seek the right connection with Goethe should do it in relation to him. “Goethe places him (Winckelmann) as a living, active element in the service of the present day of 1805, and it is Goethe's work if Winckelmann still stands among us today, alive and bestowing life. — This is what must now happen to Goethe himself on a larger scale if we are to draw from him what he contains for us."

All this and more of Herman Grimm's lecture is read with increasing excitement. One surrenders to the thoughts of a personality who, steeped in the spirit of her soul, experiences the question: what should happen so that people of the present go the right way in the further development of humanity. One reads by experiencing the emotional heartbeat of the writer. One feels immersed in the atmosphere of a soul striving joyfully towards the spirit.

Then you come to page 7; and you are suddenly as if torn out of the whole mood. There Herman Grimm writes: “No one, as far as I know, believes in Goethe's color lights today: for us today, the content of this book lies in Goethe's explanations of how opinions about the relationship between the human eye and colored phenomena are related to the whole way of life and thinking of those who hold them. Take Goethe's fight against Newton. Note how Goethe begins with the history of natural science in England. Note how he seeks to determine the position that Newton occupied within it. Note how he grasps what he calls Newton's error as a necessary consequence of these external circumstances in connection with his personal character! The achievement as a historical work is so brilliant that it makes the question of whether Goethe was mistaken here a minor matter.

You are on solid ground before you get to this point in the lecture. But then the ground begins to shake. One wonders: can someone treat as a secondary matter what he must make the basis of the judgment that Goethe has done a work of genius historically? One can state that there are two points of view in the theory of colors: Goethe's and Newton's, and can leave undecided which one one considers justified. If one then claims that Goethe has accomplished a work of genius on his, then the matter is quite understandable. But is it also somehow understandable when someone says: I don't care whether Goethe's point of view is erroneous; in fact, I must say that all authoritative people consider it to be such; but Goethe has ingeniously advocated the error? One can only say that if, instead of stopping to talk about the matter, as Herman Grimm does, one now begins to characterize how a genial error was possible with Goethe. And how can one, with such “indifference” to Goethe's genius, find the connection with him “as it should be,” since Goethe himself said in all seriousness that he had achieved much in the poetic sphere, but that he did not value this as highly as the fact that in certain areas of knowledge of nature he alone of his contemporaries knew the right thing?

For someone who admires Herman Grimm as much as I do, the question arises: did this outstanding personality not find that, within the intellectual life of his time, he could only present the spirituality to which he aspired to himself before the eye of his soul, as if it were an illusion, under a certain condition? This condition was that Herman Grimm did not concern himself with those elements in the intellectual life of his time which, if he had taken them seriously, would have had to be rejected by him if he wanted to maintain his own point of view. He did not reject them. He wanted to live with them in peace. But this meant that he was forced to live with his own opinions as if on an island, on which he erected idealistic buildings while the devastating waves of mechanistic-“positivistic” worldviews roared all around. — And if today we cast our eyes on Herman Grimm's “island of ideality,” in its often enchanting beauty, it immediately disappears from this gaze. The “mechanistic-positivistic” sea engulfs it. Such are the paths of the spirit that were trodden by a few select personalities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their spirituality was abstract even when they appeared as soulful and heartfelt as Herman Grimm. The period that followed demands a new relationship between man and “spiritual reality”.

In the next article, we will continue to follow what may “startle” Herman Grimm's admirers when they come across individual passages in his writings, and what reveals the change in spiritual demands in today's world.

From ^{1890 to 1897, I lived in Weimar. I had work to do at the Goethe and Schiller Archives. Herman Grimm came there repeatedly for short visits. For me, these days were special holidays. I had the feeling that when Herman Grimm was in Weimar, one understood the “Weimar of Goethe's time” better than usual. He brought a part of Goethe's soul to life. The smallest detail of these visits became important to me. I still vividly remember how Herman Grimm once talked about Goethe's Iphigenia in the archive. And so much more. Apart from the content of his speech, the way he spoke was always captivating. One could have the feeling that behind it lay spiritual connections that he had experienced and from which his words came.}

In 1894, however, his figure appeared before me in a very peculiar way in the archive, in his absence. The preface to the fifth edition of his Goethe book had just been published. In it, Herman Grimm had discussed how, while working on these lectures and also afterwards, he was in friendly contact with personalities whose interest was particularly focused on Goethe. They were the literary historian Julian Schmidt, who wrote the witty book on the history of modern German intellectual life, Gustav von Loeper, the meritorious editor of Goethe's works, and Wilhelm Scherer, the professor of German literary history at the University of Berlin. Herman Grimm felt completely in harmony with the first two, although he and each of the other two took different approaches to Goethe. It was different with Scherer. He maintained a friendship with him in public. After Scherer's untimely death, he wrote in this preface, after assuring us how well he had gotten along with Julian Schmidt and Loeper: “It was only much later that Wilhelm Scherer, called from Strasbourg, permanently settled in Berlin. He was decades younger than the three of us from northern Germany. Coming from Vienna. Due to his position as officially appointed professor of German literature, he was also our superior when it came to matters specifically concerning Goethe. A youthful, aggressive, ruthless spirit who, in contrast to the three of us, was most familiar with the teachings of the Lachmann-Hauptian school, not only applied the so-called 'scientific method' of this school with ease, but was also willing to defend it vigorously. The three of us older ones took as our starting point Goethe's personality, Scherer the manuscripts and versions of his works. Above all, Scherer demanded a 'clean text'. 'Every text', was his teaching, 'is corrupted: it is a matter of editing it so that it can be relied upon'. There were means to effect this editing, and he knew them well. The three of us didn't care about them."

This characterization of Wilhelm Scherer was the subject of discussion one day immediately after the publication of the preface, in the presence of several personalities who were visiting the archive at the time and who were mostly unconditional admirers of the literary historian in question. Erich Schmidt, Scherer's most celebrated student and his successor as a teacher in Berlin, was also present. It was quite a heated scene. Everyone was extremely annoyed. “Every text is corrupted: it is important to edit it in such a way that it can be safely relied upon.” That was supposed to be Scherer's teaching. People felt that this was nonsense and called it that. Well, in terms of content, there was really hardly anything to be said against what Erich Schmidt and the others said. They were right – not only from their point of view.

For me, the hour was painful. In my mind's eye, I saw the figure of Herman Grimm, the brilliant, spirited art historian, the creator of luminous ideas that I so loved. He had written something here that was rightly called “annoying nonsense”.

But what was actually at issue? A school of thought had developed in literary history that viewed poetic creations in their historical context in such a way that the “positivist-scientific” method, which had been so successfully developed at the time, was applied. A peak in human intellectual development was to be explored as one had become accustomed to doing in the natural sciences. Wilhelm Scherer was the most energetic representative of this research. Natural science was on the way to completely losing the spiritual in its statements; now the study of the human spirit was to follow its ideal. The research in literary history could only have to do with facts that were outwardly related to the true becoming of the human spirit. This was a path that could only be uncanny to Herman Grimm. He wanted to follow the development of the spirit, even if only in a way related to abstract idealism. But this way, like all abstract idealism, was unable to withstand the onslaught of the unspiritual methods of natural science. This was expressed in Herman Grimm's personal behavior. He could find no effective words to express his instinctive aversion to Scherer's method. He only had the feeling of something bad. And so he characterized Scherer's “teaching” by saying something absurd. As if he had wanted to say: I don't know what actually underlies it; but it seems to me so absurd, as if one had to make the poet's texts through all sorts of critical methods.

This is the attitude of the spiritual researchers of the second half of the nineteenth century towards a spirit-denying science. These spiritual researchers did not have the living spirit, but only its ideational thought-shadows. With this they could still talk about art, history and so on, but they could not form a thorough judgment about the value of the current science. A representative of this “current science” once said to me: Herman Grimm is not a serious scientific worker, but a spiritual walker.

Only a spiritual science that strives for the living spirit can rediscover the spirit in the study of nature and then also give it back to the study of art, history and so on.

With the beautiful, luminous shadow-form of thoughts, Herman Grimm stood, as if spellbound, between a spiritual and a spirit-denying world view.

In the chapter of his Goethe book in which Herman Grimm discusses Goethe's relationship to knowledge of nature, we find the revelation of this perplexity. He says: “The Mosaic story of creation culminates in man, who enters as the beneficiary of everything that has come before... and Christianity elevates man to the purpose of creation in such a way that without him the world would be meaningless. The natural sciences rose up against this view. Astronomy opened the fight by recognizing the Earth, which was thought to be the center of the world system, as only a secondary star, thereby degrading its ruling inhabitants... Herman Grimm only manages a kind of aesthetic indignation at the scientific way of thinking. He says of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis: “From the rotating nebula - which children already learn about at school - the central drop of gas forms, from which the Earth will later develop, and, as a solidifying sphere, goes through all phases, including the episode of habitation by the human , to finally plunge back into the sun as burnt-out cinders: a long process, but one that is perfectly 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 maintain the sun at the same temperature. No more fruitless prospect for the future can be imagined than the one that is supposed to be scientifically necessary for us today. A carrion bone that a hungry dog would go around is refreshingly appetizing compared to this last excrement of creation, as which our Earth would finally fall back to the Sun...

Not so long ago, one was entitled to the opinion that the contemplation of nature could receive an impetus towards the spiritual through the further development of a way of thinking like that of Herman Grimm. Today, however, it is clear that the power of this way of thinking is no longer alive anywhere. And if Herman Grimm were still alive today, he would have to realize that not only natural science must be pursued to the point of contemplating the spiritual, but that all historical considerations must also be pursued from the mental shadows of the spirit to the living and active spiritual entities.