The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Let us think of the human etheric body as it is connected with the physical body. We shall sketch it thus:

representing it entirely diagramatically, and we shall sketch the physical body as a kind of rind of the etheric body, though it must be understood that in reality it interpenetrates the whole human etheric body except the most external part of the latter. Let this then be the etheric and physical body, and there, belonging to them, as is understood, in the whole system of man, his astral body and ego. Let us now recall that the etheric body of man naturally consists of the different kinds of ether which we have learnt to distinguish. We recognise these as consisting of warmth-ether, light-ether, chemical-ether (by which the music of the spheres is communicated) and life-ether.

Let us turn our attention to the light-ether. It is true that the whole etheric body consists of an inner blend—an inwardly organised blend of the four kinds of ether, but we shall only consider today that part of the ether body which is light-ether; and in order to fix our attention on that part of the ether body which we call the light-ether, we have sketched it above. Now I have often said that man really only gains consciousness of things from being actually within them with his ego and soul being. It is in the daytime, when we are awake, that the astral body and ego are within the physical and etheric bodies; one may add, as regards that part of them which is not within things. Keeping this in view we say that we have sense perceptions. The cause of this is that the human ego and astral body first receive a revelation of things, and this revelation which remains unconscious, is then reflected on the instruments of the senses and their nerve extensions in the physical body. This has often been explained.

Now we shall enquire today: How does memory come about? How is it that we have remembrance of many things, of objects and experiences that we have passed through? How does it come to pass that we have memory?

Take this case. We meet a man today, whom we first saw five days ago. We remember that we saw him five days ago, that we spoke with him, that he told us his name. We say: we recognise this man. What is it that really takes place in us when we thus remember a man and our former meeting with him?

This is what occurs; the first thing we have to take into consideration is this, that when we met the man five days ago our etheric body experienced certain movements. It is the fight part of the etheric body that we are now considering; of course, the other members of the etheric body—the heat, chemical and life parts also vibrate in sympathy, but it is the light part that we are considering today; I will speak of it therefore as the light-body. Our etheric body, then, experienced certain movements, for the thoughts evoked by the man whom we met, revealed themselves within our light-body as movements—as inner light-movements; so that apart from our having perceived the man with our senses, we received impressions (not communicated through the senses) that gave rise to movements in our light-body. Thus the whole result of our meeting with the man consisted in our light-body experiencing all kinds of movements. Picture this vividly to yourselves. While you stood before the man and spoke to him, your etheric light-body was in continual movement. What you said to him, what you felt and thought regarding him, is all disclosed in the movements of your light-body. When, several days after, you see this man again, the fresh sight of him stirs your soul, and this movement causes your etheric body, purely because of its laws of continuity, to reproduce the movements it experienced five days before, when you met the man and exchanged thoughts with him. Very well, we encounter this man again after five days. The etheric fight-body, stirred by this meeting, experiences again the same movements which it did at the first meeting; and because man is always with part of his astral body and ego in the outer ether, he feels the movements which stir the outer ether, and thus because of its law of continuity (or persistence) he again becomes aware of what he experienced previously. We have really to picture to ourselves, that during the waking state we are both with our ego and astral body within the outer light-ether; sleep only consists in that part of the astral body and ego, which during the day, when we are awake, is within the physical and etheric body, also withdrawing into the outer ether. Remembrance is this: the perception from the outer ether of inner etheric movements; the perception from the outer light-ether of movements in the inner light-body: this is, to remember.

Suppose for example, that you see two men meet each other. Perhaps the one merely sees the face of the other, but because of this certain movements arise in his etheric body. Then he goes his way. The etheric body retains the tendency to repeat these movements if stirred to do so. Five days later these two men meet again. They perceive each other, the one whose light-body made the movements is aware of the other and his light-body is stirred to make the same movements which it made when he saw the other’s face before. This is expressed in his consciousness when he says: I have seen this face before. That is: consciousness perceives the inner movements of the light-ether from the outer light-ether. This is remembrance purely as an act of perception. We can say: in the external light one perceives the movements taking place in the inner light-body. But we do not see them as light movements. Why do we not see them thus in ordinary life? We do not see them as light movements, because this light-ether body is seated within the physical body, and therefore the movements of the light-ether body impinge everywhere on the physical body. Through these impacts, the light movements of the etheric body are transformed into memory pictures. These light movements are not perceptible, it is only through what the memory presents to us through contact with the physical body that we are aware of them.

When the physical body is not there, that is when the body has passed through the gates of death, the ego and astral body are naturally at first far more intensely within the outer ether, till after a few days they leave the outer ether. The inner light-body is then no longer stirred by impacts on the physical body to conceptions that are only possible in the physical body. Therefore the dead see everything that they have experienced, which the etheric body, now freed from the physical body and no longer restrained by it, throws off and allows to pass before it. During the first few days after death man sees everything pass before him; for the etheric has the tendency continually to repeat and to reproduce from within itself all those movements which the experiences of the physical body had at one time aroused in it. The man’s whole life passes before him, set in motion by the vibrations of the ether body. It is seen projected as a mighty picture—one may say that all the etheric movements reflect, as in a panorama, the life just passed on earth.

If it were possible for us always so to control the physical body if we could make ourselves so independent of it—not letting it disturb us—that the etheric body also were set free (as can be done by certain meditations connected with the process described in my book Knowledge, of Higher Worlds) it might be that even in life we might see, not the results of memory—not what arises through the impact of the etheric body on the physical body, but the actual swayings and movements of the etheric body itself. We should be then in the outer ether and look at the movements of our light-body.

Why can we not do this in ordinary life? Why in ordinary life does it happen that when Miss A. meets Mr. B., for example, and recognises him; she remembers him—that is, she recalls the memory-picture of him, but she does not in ordinary circumstances, leaving clairvoyance out of the question, see what she otherwise could: the inner movements of her ether body which would give her the inner experience: ‘Thus has my etheric body always been stirred on meeting Mr. B.’ Light would then perceive light, that is, the outer world perceive the inner—because the astral body and ego of Miss A. would perceive the tendency to continual movement of her own light-body, and would know how to interpret them so as to say: ‘These are the movements my light-body always experiences when I meet Mr. B.’ The phenomenon would then occur, that through dwelling in the ether—which is what we are always doing with a large part of our ego and astral body—through dwelling in the ether, through perceiving the weaving and flowing in the light-ether, we see our own little organised etheric body with its movements. We perceive light by the light, the light that is ourselves. Why can this not be done in ordinary life? Why is it that we first perceive the results of the impacts of the etheric body on the physical body?

It is because Ahriman and Lucifer are bound up with the earthly world, because Ahriman has shackled the physical body so firmly to the whole being of man, that the etheric body cannot easily free itself; because he has so densely compressed the physical body to the etheric body; and because the spirits that serve Ahriman are always present, they bring it to pass that when man is in the light, his light-body with its movements are darkened, so that he cannot behold them. Demons continually keep the fight-body of man in darkness. This is because the organisation of the physical body and etheric body is brought about by Ahriman. We can therefore say (and I shall write this sentence on the blackboard, for it is of great importance): ‘When from out of and by light the human soul is capable of observing what takes place in its own light-body, it has liberated itself from the Ahrimanic forces which otherwise obscure what takes place therein.’

What might a soul wishing to attain this long and pray for? It might thus address certain powers that are in the spiritual world and which it recognises.

‘Oh, ye Powers in the spiritual world, let me in my physical body be conscious in the world of Light, let me be in the Light so as to perceive my own light-body, and let not the power of the Ahrimanic forces be too strong for me, so as to prevent me from beholding what takes place in my light-body.’

Once more I will repeat what a soul by whom these Powers are to some extent recognised in the spiritual world, might say in longing, in a kind of prayer:

‘Oh, ye Powers, let me consciously, in the light, from out of and by the light behold the occurrences within my own light-body; weaken and take away the power of the Ahrimanic forces which obscure them. Let me consciously by the light perceive my own light, and remove the force that hinders me from seeing the light from out of and by the light.’

What I have just repeated to you is not simply an invented prayer, but it was thus that Christ taught those to pray who were able to understand Him after he had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, during that time when He still lingered among His most intimate disciples.‘

This belonged to the understanding, to the Gnostic understanding that such disciples of Christ could still evoke at that time and which, as I have explained to you, disappeared about the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

Those souls which were so intimately associated with the Christ could raise their eyes to this power—who for them was the Christ—and pray Him that it might be possible for them by the light to perceive their own light-essence; pray Him to restrain the opposing Powers of Ahrimanic nature, that their vision might not be obscured and darkened, and that they might see the light-movements of their light-body. These things were learnt by the intimate disciples of Jesus Christ during the time I have indicated. They were well aware how all things I have mentioned were brought about, and were instructed in all these matters during the time that Christ held intercourse with them after the Mystery of Golgotha.

Among the fragments that remain of ancient Gnostic wisdom I have mentioned the Pistis-Sophia script. I shall now read you an extract from it as follows:

‘I will extol thee, O Light, for I desire to come to thee.’
‘I will extol Thee, for Thou art my Saviour.’
‘Leave me not in chaos (when I am withdrawn from the physical body).
‘Leave me not in chaos, O Light of Heaven, for it is Thou whom I have glorified.’

‘Thou hast endowed me with thy Light and saved me; Thou hast led me to the upper Gods of Chaos (consciously, when out of the physical body). May the offspring of evil now be driven out (of Ahriman, but Ahriman is not written there), who follow me, and may they sink down among the lower Gods of Chaos; and let them not come near the upper Gods, that they may behold me. May great darkness cover them and black darkness come over them; and do not let them behold me in the Light of Thy Power, which Thou hast sent me to save me, so that they may not again have power over me. The determination that they have made, to take my strength, let it not take effect nor let them gainsay me to take from me my fight. Take theirs rather than mine. They have desired to take away all my light, and have not been able to do so, for Thy Light-force was with me. Because they decreed, without Thy command, to take away my light, Thou has not allowed them to take it. Because I have believed in the Light I shall not fear. The Light is my Saviour, I shall not be afraid.’

When we fear we must think of Ahriman as we saw him in one of the Mystery Plays.

Look at this fragment of the Pistis-Sophia. Does it not appear as if it had been saved on purpose to enable us to speak somewhat as follows: Behold, you opponents of the new Spiritual Science. Does not this new Spiritual Science say: that by the light the light-movements of the light-body can be seen, when the opposing Ahrimanic demons do not prevent it. There was once a time when this was already known; and the Pistis-Sophia presents a physical evidence of that time. For what I have read to you really speaks of nothing else than that power that I have interpreted for you from the activities of the light-body, and the sojourning of the soul within this light-body. It is not possible to understand this fragment of the Pistis-Sophia unless you understand what I have just explained to you. Therefore those who come across this script of the Pistis-Sophia and attempt to read it have to admit to themselves that they do not understand it at all. They are not humble enough to be able to do so.

This is something, however, that we must possess—this humility, this great modesty as regards the things contained in it, so that we feel constrained to say to ourselves: ' Here is a fragment of the Pistis-Sophia, which says, “I will extol Thee, 0 Light! for I desire to draw near unto Thee. I will extol Thee, O Light, for Thou art my Saviour.” Reading it thus I do not understand it’—but one must have such humility, such modesty, that one will not desire to understand it until one has called forth in one’s self the possibility of understanding it. It is precisely in our age that such humility is hardly to be found. The explorers who discover such writings among ruins and wreckage are frequently the least endowed with this modesty. They either explain what they find in the most trivial way saying, ‘The fight spoken of here is a nebulous conception intended to be taken allegorically.’ Or else they say: ‘Those who wrote this long ago were at a childish stage of human evolution; we have made splendid progress since then I (You will remember what I said of this yesterday) We have indeed made such magnificent progress that it is easy for us to realise that these forefathers of ours with all their wisdom, were but at a childish stage!’ It is not so much a question in our day of not being able to understand, but above all that we cannot so easily come by a certain attitude of soul, which is necessary if spiritual knowledge is really to be attained.

This attitude of soul is that which existed in the Mysteries, and it consisted in a man’s developing within him the feeling that it is not possible for a matter to be understood without first preparing the soul for it—without preparing oneself for the understanding of it. In our day a far more prevalent attitude of soul is that a clever man (and in his own opinion every grown man is very clever today) that the clever man can form an opinion regarding any matter. But the world is profound; and all that is connected with the hidden things of the world is also profound. Because of this belief in his own cleverness which every grown man has today, he simply ignores the most profound problems of the world; and when these mysteries are mentioned or written about they are treated with scorn, are flung aside into the obscurest comer and labelled—fanaticism and superstition, or even worse.

It is needful to see these facts clearly, for it is very important to recognise how at present those who do not desire to understand spread scorn and derision on all that can only be reached by a soul that has first prepared itself with meekness and humility—with meekness and humility as regards knowledge. It is not only the knowledge of spiritual truths that is primarily wanting in our time, but rather that attitude of soul which shows true striving after knowledge.

The world now knows, however, that there are a few men—who will be more and more numerous—who recognise this very clearly, and note carefully and with interest, that therein lies the main driving force of true progress. One must first know what must happen and recognise clearly and without any illusion, that those who have already covered all true effort after knowledge with scorn and ridicule will attempt to interfere with everything that still has to enter into the spiritual development of mankind. It is now sought to fill mankind from childhood with materialistic ideas. This materialistic training lords it even over the tender souls of young children; materialistic schools are forced upon them, which, less through the content of their teaching than through their whole nature, imbue the children’s souls with materialism.

In accordance with the illusion of the times, people veil this domination by saying: This is demanded by the age of liberty and freedom! What people call freedom in the age of materialism is the very opposite of all freedom; but things are so arranged that people hardly notice it. Those who have some insight into how things are do no more than combat this bondage by that which is like to it, only approaching it from the other side. Some say, this or that must be forbidden, others again cast sheep’s eyes at those in power and seize in their grasp everything that ought to be as free as the flowers that grow in the fields.

It is necessary that we should possess that really fine attitude of mind that can only come from Spiritual Science. Then before all else it is clear to us that what should be inculcated during the tender years of childhood into the human soul, is not to be found on the path followed by the methods of thought of the outer materialism of today. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by words, this we must understand. Further, it is necessary that we should free ourselves from the whole ‘aura’ of prejudice met with everywhere; that we should feel truly within us that attention of mind which springs from Spiritual Science and frequently ask ourselves what is within our souls from the whole essence of Spiritual Science and what is to be found there merely because we have received those forms of thought prevalent in the world today?

Perhaps as yet we can do nothing in our age to stem the course of the unfree materialistic tone of the day. But at least we must learn to feel it a bondage. Here it is that a beginning must be made. We must not be taken by illusion. For, if the world proceeds in its evolution according to the wishes of this materialistic impulse we shall gradually enter an evolution in which not only will anyone be forbidden to do anything for the health of humanity unless he is certificated, but no one will be allowed to say a word regarding science of any kind, except one who has taken a vow to speak only of such things as are patented with the stamp of the materialistic order of thought. At present the constraint of the things forbidden is not much felt. But a time is coming when, just as every effort for the healing of mankind that is not stamped and certificated will be forbidden, so every word will be forbidden that is said otherwise than in the form patented and guaranteed by the materialistic powers.

If people do not perceive the whole course of what is coming about, they will enter full-sail into this future ‘freedom.’ This will consist in promulgated laws forbidding people to teach differently from what is taught in a recognised school. Everything will be forbidden that recalls in the most distant way what, for instance, is taking place amongst us here. Because people do not see how the course of evolution is tending, they do not realise this.

It is true very little can be done in our day; but in our thoughts we must make a beginning by realising the trend of events—wherever we can, we must make a beginning. No matter how such remarks as these are received, I had to give expression to them at this turning point of the year; for the Festival of the New Year is a kind of sign marking the progress of time generally; and at this season we can best be made aware of what is contained in time as it runs its course. It cannot be sufficiently, or too frequently impressed on you, how dependent man is today on the opinions that whirl around him—that whirl about more especially when they are made permanent with foul printers’ ink in the newspapers, and this printers’ ink possesses infinitely active magical powers as regards all that is believed by people throughout the world. It is interesting to note what takes place when these gentlemen are not quite united among themselves. For then there occurs what overwhelms all thinking souls, things are called into being by this black printers’ ink which work dreadful magic in the masses of mankind today. Naturally there are always some who believe what one paper says, and others again who hold as irrefutable what is scribbled in another paper. They are divided among themselves. It is thus easy to see where the real fault and blame should lie. I will not say much on the subject, myself. You can read in Dr. Ed. Engel’s book on the Psychology of Newspaper Readers what he has to say on this matter. He says: ‘The reader of newspapers is a much muddled person. His countless valuable qualities disappear behind two: He believes everything and he forgets everything. On these two principal qualities, possessed by all newspaper readers, is founded the secret of the daily press as it exists today. Most people read but one paper, and believe what they see there. Their ideas regarding the world in the evening are the creation of what they read in the morning. When they meet other people who have read other papers and who put forward their opinions, they consider them either mad or paradoxical. Newspaper editors thoroughly understand the soul of their readers, they nurse the beliefs of their readers with tender care. A newspaper never brings to the mass of its readers a proof of what it has to communicate; even in the not uncommon case of a false presentation of facts having led to the publication of something completely foolish, they defend themselves, sheltering themselves behind the infallibility of their paper. They are, of course, obliged to publish the truth a few days later. The second quality of their readers, that of forgetfulness, then comes in usefully!’

When we come to think what a power newspapers have in the nineteenth century and the large share the belief in them has had in the decline of our culture, it is quite time the whole wretched business was put clearly before you. What often depresses one is, that the method of communication that we have chosen, and which should be a very different one, has to be preserved by printing. This indeed cannot be otherwise, for the Black Art is present there, and the White Art must of course reckon with this Black Art which finds expression in printed matter. We must have books, and lectures, but we ought to be awake to the fact that care must be taken that things which are now entrusted to print should not be cast abroad in the world in the same way as that which whirls through the minds of mankind on the wings of the newspapers of today.

I wish to make you realise that this is a serious matter. That is why I have permitted myself to join these observations to what I said today and yesterday in connection with great mysteries of existence, such as that of the human Earth-year, and the possibility of beholding the Light of man by the Light.

It will be a hundred years on 9th May, 1905, since Schiller died, and the educated world in Germany will certainly celebrate the memory of this event. Three generations lie between Schiller and us; and so our first task would appear to be to survey the meaning of Schiller to us today. The last great Schiller festival took place in 1859, but with quite a different significance from what ours can have today. Times have changed enormously. The pictures, problems and thoughts which occupy our contemporaries are quite different. The celebration held in 1859 was something which penetrated deep into the heart of the German people.

In 1859 there were still men who themselves lived wholly in the ideas which had been brought out by Schiller's poetic power. It may be that this year we shall see more exuberant festivities; but no such participation from the depths of the soul is any longer possible.

The question therefore forces itself on us, what has happened since then? and how can Schiller still mean anything to us? The grand pictures (and ideas) of the Goethe-Schiller period have vanished. In 1859 these ideas were still incorporated in individuals with whom the older among us became acquainted when we were young. These leading spirits, who were rooted completely in the traditions of the time, are now with the dead. The youngest among us have no longer any knowledge of them.

In the person of my teacher Schröer, who put the Goethe period before us in enthusiastic fashion, I had been privileged to know a man who was rooted wholly in that period. In Herman Grimm the last example died of those whose souls were completely at one with that period. today, all that is past history. Other problems concern us. Political and social questions have become so pressing that we no longer understand that intimate artistic attitude.

Men of that period would have a strange effect on us; we have lost their deep, “soulful” attitude to art. That is no reproach; our times have become hard. Let us take three leading thinkers of the present and see how differently they talk of the movements of their time.

First, Ibsen: we see how he deals comprehensively with the problems of our modern culture, how he has found the most penetrating melody to suit the modern heart and a civilisation which is passing into chaos. Then, Zola: What is to be the relation at the present between our art and a life which is threatening to explode in social struggles—that is the question he thrusts upon us. That life appears to us rigid and impenetrable, decided by quite other forces than our fantasy and soul. Lastly, Tolstoi, who started from art, and only later became a preacher and social reformer. today such a purely aesthetic culture as Schröer depicted to us for the Goethe-Schiller period seems quite impossible.

At that period the decisive problem of life was what we might call the aesthetic conscience. Beauty, taste and artistic sensitivity were regarded as problems quite as serious and pressing as politics and freedom are today. Art was regarded as something which must have its part in the machinery of culture. But today, Tolstoi, who has created masterpieces in the sphere of art, deserts his art and looks for other means of speaking to the sensibility of his contemporaries.

Schiller therefore is not to be judged in our times as he was in the Eighteenth Century. But what has remained, is the impressive depths of his “Weltanschauung” (worldview). Quantities of questions receive a wholly new light as a result of Schiller's view of the world. Our business in these lectures is to try to look at them from this standpoint.

In dealing with the various problems of our times and our culture, in science as in artistic effort, there is nowadays great confusion and obscurity. Every youthful author thinks it his business to establish a new philosophy; literature is choked with books on questions which have been long ago solved. Questions are unfolded which, in the form we see, reach no conclusion because those who are trying to solve them have not really occupied themselves with the problems. Often indeed, the questions are not even asked properly, so that the problem really lies in the way in which the questions are put.

There are two currents out of which we can see the personality of Schiller growing up:—on the one side the growth of materialism, on the other the longing for the assertion of the personality. What we call “Illumination” Aufklärung has its roots in these two currents.

Age-old traditions were tottering during the Eighteenth Century. In the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries the deepest questions of the human spirit were solved on the basis of tradition; and no shocks were dealt to man's fundamental relationship with the world and its deepest foundations.

Now came a difference; it was impossible to solve the basic problems dealing with the human life of the spirit in the same sense as had been done for centuries. In France, stimulated by English “Sensationalism,” a rationalistic, materialistic philosophy was growing up. The soul was beginning to be deduced from material conditions; everything was to be explained out of the physical. The Encyclopaedists made spirit originate in matter. The ups and downs in the world around us were a whirl of atomic movement. “Man is a machine”—that was more or less the form in which La Mettrie formulated his materialistic creed. Goethe already complained, when he grew acquainted with the writings of these French materialists (Holbach's Système de la Nature), and was indignant at men's presumption in trying to explain the whole world by a few barren ideas.

By the side of this was a second stream which derived from Rousseau. Rousseau's writings made an enormous impression on the most important men of the time. There is a story about Kant, who was a great pedant, and took his daily walk so punctually that the inhabitants of Königsberg could set their clocks by him. But there was one occasion when to the astonishment of the inhabitants the philosopher did not appear for some days: he had been reading Rousseau, whose writings had gripped him so hard that he had forgotten his daily walk.

The foundations of a whole civilisation had been shaken by Rousseau. He put the question whether mankind had risen as a consequence of civilisation; and his answer was a negative. In his view men were happier at a stage of nature than at their present stage when they allowed their personality to decay in itself.

In times when men, basing themselves on tradition, still believed they knew something of the relationships of the world, they were not so intent on the personality. Now, when the personality had cut asunder the bonds between itself and the world, men began to ask how that personality was to establish itself firmly in the world.

They believed that it was impossible to know anything about the deepest foundations of the world and the soul. But if, as a result, there was nothing any longer secure in the world, the longing towards better material conditions was bound to increase in everyone. The revolutionary efforts of the Eighteenth Century had their origin here; connected with the materialistic current. A good Christian of the Seventeenth Century could not have spoken thus of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. This striving after liberty (freedom) must be regarded as the fundamental current of the time.

Schiller was young when these ideas of freedom were ripening. Rousseau's ideas had, as we have just said, a colossal influence on the most important men in Germany, like Kant, Herder and Wieland. The young Schiller was also fascinated; and we find him, even at the Karlsschule, engaged in reading Rousseau, Voltaire, etc.

The age had reached a dead end. The upper classes had lost all moral soundness. An external tyranny dominated in school as well. In Schiller there was a peculiar depth of temperament which appeared, even in boyhood, as a tendency towards religion. For that reason he had, moreover, originally intended to study theology; his whole disposition urged him to the deepest problems of existence. The peculiar form taken in Germany by this striving for freedom was in the union of piety with an infinite longing for emancipation. The urge towards the freedom of personality, and not merely religion, is also the atmosphere of Klopstock's Messiah: it is in his religious feeling that the German wants to be free. The Messiah made a great impression on Schiller.

Schiller chose the faculty of medicine; and the way in which he tackled the subject, is related to the questions which were particularly occupying him. He tried to reach some conclusion on these questions by a serious study of nature. The teaching in the Karlsschule was to have a deeply comprehensive and all-round effect on him. The weaknesses to be seen in modern secondary education did not exist in that school. The natural sciences were studied thoroughly; and the centre of study was philosophy. Deepest questions of metaphysics and logic were discussed.

Thus Schiller entered on his medical studies with a philosophic spirit. The way in which he took them is important and significant for his life. We cannot understand Schiller wholly if we do not read the two dissertations which he wrote after finishing his studies. They deal with the questions:

What is the relation between spirit and matter?

What are the relations of the animal and spiritual natures in man?

Of the first only little survives. In the second Schiller puts to himself the question how we have to understand the working of the material in the human body.

For Schiller, even the material body has something spiritual. There are men who see in the body only something low and animal. There is no depth of content in a view which thus lowers and abominates the body; nor was it the view of the young Schiller. For Schiller the body is the temple of the spirit, built by wisdom, and not to no purpose possessing influence on the spirit.

What is the significance of the body for the soul? that is the question which Schiller, who felt the physical also to be holy, sought to solve. He describes, for example, how the quality of soul expresses itself in gesture and in feeling. He seeks to explain to himself, in fine and illuminating fashion, what remains permanently of the movement of soul thus expressed. He says at the close of his dissertation:—

Matter breaks up again, at death, into its ultimate elements, which henceforward wander through the kingdoms of nature in other forms and relationships, to serve other purposes. The soul departs, to exercise its power of thought in other spheres and to observe the universe from other sides. We may say, of course, that it has by no means exhausted the possibilities of this sphere, that it might have left this sphere more perfect; but do we know that this sphere is lost to it? We lay aside many a book which we do not understand, but which we may perhaps understand better some years hence.

This is how Schiller tries to make clear to himself the eternal of the spirit in its relation to physical nature—without however under-estimating the physical. That remained the central problem for all Schiller's life: How is man born from out the physical and how does his soul and the freedom of his personality stand towards the world? How is the soul to find its centre now that the old traditions have gone?

After having in the dramas of his youth thundered forth all his passion for emancipation, and won over the heart of his people, he busied himself with history and philosophy, and we touch the deepest problems of the history of civilisation or cultural history when we study the dramas of Schiller. Everyone had a piece of Marquis Posa in himself, and so Schiller's problem took on a new feature. The deepest questions in relation to the human soul and the meaning of life were discussed. He saw how little had been achievable on the external plane. In Germany the effort was being made to solve the problem of freedom in an artistic way; and that resulted in what we may call the “aesthetic conscience.” Schiller, too, had put the question to himself in this way; and he was sure that the artist could give man of the highest. He dealt with this problem in later years. In his “Letters on the aesthetic Education of Man” he says: Man acts unfreely in the external world from necessity; in the world of reason he is subject to necessity, to logic. Man is thus hedged in by the real world and by his ideal of reason. But there is another, middle condition between reason and the sense world, the aesthetic. Anyone who has artistic sensibility, appreciates the spirit in the sensible; he sees spirit enwoven in nature. Nature is to him a beauty-filled picture of the spiritual. The sense world is therefore only the expression of the spirit; in a work of art the sensible is ennobled by the spirit. The spirit is removed from the kingdom of necessity. In beauty man Eves as in freedom. Art is thus the intermediary between the senses and reason in the realm of freedom.

Goethe felt the same in presence of the works of art in Italy. In the beautiful the impulse of mankind towards freedom finds its satisfaction; here he is raised above iron necessity. Not by force or state-laws. In aesthetic enjoyment Schiller saw an education into harmony. As man, he feels himself free through art; and so he would like to transform the whole world into a work of art.

Here we see the difference between that time and our own. today, art is kept in a corner; then, Schiller wanted to give life an immediate impression through art. today Tolstoi has to condemn art, while Ibsen, in his art, becomes the critic of social life. At that time Schiller wanted to interfere direct on life by means of art. When he wrote his pamphlet on “The Stage as a moral Institution,” during the period when he was acting as reporter at the Mannheim theatre, he did it because he wanted to give a direct impulse to civilisation by means of art.

We have seen how Schiller grew up out of the ideas of the Eighteenth Century and how the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment had taken root in his soul. They had already assumed their peculiar form when he left the Karlsschule and wrote the above-mentioned theses.

If we want to describe these ideas in a word, we may say that the main problem was the emancipation of personality. This liberation from age-old tradition goes still further. When medieval man before the age of “Illumination” thought about his relation to himself, to nature, the universe and God, he found himself ready established within the universe. He worshipped the same God without, who dwelt within his own soul; the same forces which were active in the world without, were active in man's own soul; there was a certain unity to be seen in the laws of the universe and in the nature of man. We need only think of men like Giordano Bruno: This monistic conviction of the relationship of nature to man can be found in his writings.

There was thus no gulf between what we may call the moral claim and the objective laws in nature. This opposition only arose later when man excluded nature from divine influence. The attitude which has grown up in materialism, knew no relation between nature and moral feeling or what man develops within himself as a moral claim.

This was the origin of Rousseau-ism, which is fundamentally a revolutionary feeling, a protest against the whole line of development hitherto. It teaches that when we observe man's demand for freedom and his assertion of morality, a harsh discord appears. It asks whether there really can be such a difference between the objective world and human nature, that men must long to get out of it, to escape from the whole of their civilisation.

These spiritual struggles found expression in the temperament of the young Schiller; and in the three dramas of his youth this longing receives a new form. In the “Räuber,” in “Fiesco” and “Kabale und Liebe” we see depicted concretely, with a vast pathos, the demand that man must do something to produce this harmony. In the figure of Karl Moor, we see the creation of a man who bears in himself the opposition between the objective order and the demand made by his humanity, and feels called upon to produce some harmony between nature and himself. His tragedy arises because he believes that he can restore the law by lawlessness and arbitrariness. In “Fiesco” the longing for freedom crashes on the rock of ambition. The ideal of freedom fails through this disharmony in the soul of the ambitious Fiesco, who cannot find his way so far as to put order into the moral ideal. In “Kabale und Liebe” the demand of human nature in the uprising middle-classes stands opposed to the demands of the world as they were expressed in the ruling classes. The relation between moral ideals and general ideas applicable to the world had been lost. The discord echoes grandly, for all their youthful immaturity, from the first dramas of Schiller.

Such natures as Schiller's find themselves less easily than the one-line, simpler and. unsophisticated type, just as we see in natural evolution that lower creatures require shorter periods of preparation than the more highly developed animals. Great natures have to pass through the most varied phases, because their inmost qualities have to be fetched up from the deepest levels. Anyone who has much in him and comes into the world with a claim to genius, will have a hard path, and will have to work through many earlier stages—as the analogy of the embryonic development of higher animals shows us.

What Schiller lacked was knowledge of man and of the world. His first plays show him with all the defects which arise from that fact, but with all the merits which hardly appear again later so clearly. This judgment is made from a fairly high level; we have to realise what we owe to Schiller's greatness. But things could not remain thus for long. Schiller had to rise beyond this limited horizon; and we see how in his fourth play, Don Carlos, he works his way to another standpoint. We may look from a double angle, first from that of Don Carlos, second that of Marquis Posa. Schiller himself tells us how his interest at first lay with the youthful fiery Carlos and then passed to the cosmopolitan Posa. That indicates a deep change in his own personality.

Schiller had been summoned by his friend Körner to Dresden, so that he might work there in peace. There he grew acquainted with a philosophy and view of the world which was to have a great influence on his own personality. Kantianism was a necessary study for a person like Schiller, and we shall understand his standpoint yet more deeply if we delay a moment over what was then working upon him.

At that time, we can see two quite definite currents in German intellectual life. The one is that which finds most definite expression in Herder's Ideas for the history of the philosophy of mankind; the other the Kantian philosophy. In Herder we have the passion to put man into relation with the whole of nature and to understand him in that relation. It is this striving for unity which makes Herder appear so modern a man. ... Arguments brought now-a-days against Kantianism with its dualism (which is still regarded as only an academic philosophy), exist already in Herder's Metacritic. The whole embraces a mass of great ideas; there is a striving after the unification of nature and man. From the lowest product of nature right up to the thought of man there is one law. What is seen in man as the moral law, is in the crystal the law of its form. One fundamental evolution runs through all that is, so that that which forms the flower in the plant, develops in man into humanity. It is the world-picture which appeared in Goethe also and which he expressed in Faust in the words:

How all weaves itself to a whole; one thing works and lives in the other,

and which he describes in his Hymn to Nature.

Goethe is wholly permeated by this striving for unity, as it found expression in Giordano Bruno, the Pythagorean. He stands completely within the stream:

What were a God who only touches from without,
And lets the All run past in cycles?
His task it were to move the world within,
To foster nature in himself, himself in nature.

That is the monistic stream, to which Schiller at that period still was a stranger. For him there was still a two-ness, a dualism.

In his Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason Kant had set a definite limit to human knowledge. Man's capacity for knowledge extends as far as reason goes. It can only give him the external, and cannot pierce to the real being of things. That which is the thing-in-itself, is hidden behind the appearance; man cannot even speak of it. But there is something within man which cannot be mere appearance. That is the moral law. On the one side—the world of appearance; on the other—the moral law, the categorical imperative, the “Thou shalt,” which may not be doubted, which rises above knowledge and cannot be taken as appearance. Thus in Kant's philosophy we have not merely a duality such as we saw before, but the whole world of human spiritual life is divided into two halves. That which is to be superior to all criticism, the moral law, is not knowledge at all, but a practical belief, which contains no limits of knowledge but only moral postulates. Thus Kantianism appears as the .most abrupt exposition of dualism.

Before Kant there was a science of external appearance, and then a science of reason which could penetrate by innate activity to God, soul and immortality: that is the form of the Wolffian philosophy. Kant, who had studied the English Sensationalists, Hume and Locke, was at this juncture led to have doubts: how shall we get anywhere if we have always to test the highest ideas of God, Freedom and Immortality by their reasonableness. He says in his introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason “I had to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Because we must believe, and in order that we may believe, he thrust down knowledge from her throne. He wanted to start from foundations which left no room for doubt. Knowledge cannot ever reach to these things, but the “Thou shalt” speaks so decisively that the harmony which man is unable to discover, must be accomplished by God. And so we have to postulate a God. As physical beings we are enclosed in barriers, but as moral beings we must be free. This gives an unbridgeable dualism; there is no balance between man and nature.

Schiller, who in accordance with his temperament still held to the opposition between nature and man, pictures in Don Carlos the growth of man beyond nature to his ideals. He never puts the question of what is possible, but only the question of the “Thou shalt.” In Don Carlos it is not a criticism of court-life that we have: That passes into the background behind the practical moral postulates. “Man, be such that the laws of your action could become the universal laws of humanity.” That was Kant's demand; and in Marquis Posa, the cosmopolitan idealist, Schiller sets up a claim for the independence of the ideal from all that comes from nature.

When he finished Don Carlos, Schiller stood in the completest possible opposition to the view of Goethe and Herder, and therefore at the beginning of his life at Weimar no contact with them was possible. But Schiller became the Reformer of Kantianism: he strove for a monistic view, but could find the unity only in the aesthetic sphere, in the problem of beauty. He shows us how man only lives fully when he both ennobles nature up to his own level and draws morality from above into his nature. The categorical imperative does not subdue him to its sway, but he serves willingly what is contained in the “Thou shalt.” Thus Schiller reaches the heights and rises above Kant. He opposes Kant who makes of man not a free being but a slave, bowed beneath the yoke of duty. He saw clearly that there is something in man quite different from this bowing beneath the yoke of the “Thou shalt.” In monumental phrases we find expressed his approximation to the essential of Goethe's and Herder's attitude: “Gladly serve I my friends, yet alas I do it with pleasure; thus it irks me to find that there's no virtue in me.”

Kant had degraded what man does willingly from his own inclination, and set on a higher level what he did from a sense of duty. Kant apostrophises passionately the stern duty which has nothing attractive in her. Schiller raises man from his own weakness, when he makes the moral law a law of his own nature. Through the study of history, through honest inclination and devotion to human life he reached the harmony that had been lost and thus to an understanding of Goethe. Schiller describes in splendid words in the memorable letter of 23rd August 1794, what was Goethe's way:

“I have for a long time, even though from a distance, observed the course of your spirit and with ever new wonder noted the path you have traced out for yourself. You seek for the necessary in nature, but you seek it along the hardest path, from which all weaker forces would shrink. You take all nature as a whole in order to illuminate a part; and in the totality of their appearances you seek the basis of explanation for the individual.”

Here Schiller had reached the height to which he had to evolve. Though he had started from a dualism, he had now reached the unity of man and nature.

Thus he attained to that form of creation which was peculiarly his in the latest period, from the middle of the nineties onward, and to friendship with Goethe. It was a historical friendship because it did not look only for the happiness of their two selves but was fruitful for the world and for humanity.

In this friendship of Goethe and Schiller we have not merely Goethe, and Schiller, but a third something: Goethe plus Schiller. Anyone who follows the course of the spiritual life, will discern in it one being, which could only exist, because in their selfless friendship and mutual devotion something developed which stood as a new being above the single personality. This mood will give us the proper transition to Goethe and to all that he meant to Schiller.

We come today to one of the most important chapters in German cultural and intellectual history, the relationship between Goethe and Schiller. The attitude of the two of them is unique in the history of the world.

They approached each other from different sides. Goethe came from the side of Herder and all that could be associated with the unity of spirit and nature, while Schiller came from the Kantian philosophy and dualism. Besides that, Goethe's and Schiller's natures were fundamentally different.

If we take Goethe's Faust, we see how he tries to penetrate into nature, finding himself unsatisfied when he grasps something spiritual in abstractions and striving to create it immediately out of nature. To Schiller nature was at first something low; the ideal was something peculiar, born from the spirit and in opposition to the real. Both men were deep in quality and could only find themselves with difficulty. And thus, at the beginning of their personal meetings these two great geniuses were quite incapable of understanding each other. In fact, when Schiller came to Weimar, he felt himself repelled by what he heard about Goethe, and even a personal meeting could not alter things.

In 1788 Schiller could still write an unfavourable criticism of Egmont, that fruit of a mature artistic thought. He could not understand how Goethe could represent Egmont, not as a heroic enthusiast as Schiller himself would have done, but as a weakling who could be guided by given circumstances.

The Iphigenie too was beyond Schiller's comprehension.

At one point, Goethe and Schiller did almost touch. In an essay on Bürger's poems Schiller had said that Bürger's lack of idealism did not appeal to him; and Goethe was so much in agreement with the essay that he remarked that he would like to have written the essay himself. But there is still evidence how different the two courses ran, in Schiller's essay on Charm and Dignity. This essay shows us Schiller's whole striving after freedom. In what is necessary he can find nothing of charm; a work of nature cannot give any impression of charm. It is only in the work of art which is a symbol, a concrete picture of freedom, that we can speak of charm. And dignity is a word which we can only apply to the higher spiritual realm. Everywhere we see the old tendency to grasp the ideal as something opposed to the natural.

Even the professorship which Goethe got for Schiller at Jena is not to be taken as a service of friendship. This step was of great importance for Schiller. The study of historical character gave him a deep insight into the evolution of the spirit. Moreover, it made it possible for him to marry Charlotte von Lengefeld and start a household. History was just the subject which could help Schiller to reach maturity, as in his inaugural lecture “How should we study history in a universal sense?” In this way Schiller grew more and more into reality.

From 1790 onwards, after a visit to Körner who acted as intermediary between them, Goethe must have got a quite different idea of Schiller. But their friendship was not to mature by the ways in which average people come to feel sympathy with each other. This joint relation was destined never to come into being on the basis of personal interests. Nor, considering the difference of their personalities would their friendship have ever been of such a world-wide importance, if it had been based on that.

It was after a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in 1794—probably in July—that Goethe and Schiller began to discuss the lecture they had just heard, on the way home. Schiller said that he had only a mass of isolated and unrelated impressions; whereupon Goethe remarked that for himself he could imagine another form of natural observation. He then developed his views about the relation of all living things—how the whole plant kingdom was to be regarded as in continual development. With a few characteristic strokes Goethe drew the archetypal plant, as it appeared to him, on a piece of paper. “But that is not reality,” objected Schiller, “that is only an idea.” “Well, if that is an idea,” replied Goethe, “I see ideas with my eyes.” In this meeting the nature of both their thought can be seen. Goethe saw the spirit in nature. For him that which the spirit grasps intuitively was as real as what is sensible; for him nature embraces the spirit.

Schiller's true greatness as a man shows itself in the way in which he tried to discover the foundation on which Goethe's spirit was based. He wished to find the right standpoint. In unenvious recognition of all that thus came towards him, Schiller began the friendship which was to unite the two. The letter which Schiller wrote to Goethe after he had sunk himself in Goethe's method of creation, the letter of 24th August 1794, is one of the finest of human documents.

“For a long time I have, even though from a distance, observed the course of your spirit and with ever new wonder noted the path you have traced out for yourself. You seek for the necessary in nature, but you seek it along the harder path from which all weaker forces would shrink. You take all nature as a whole in order to illuminate a part; and in the totality of their appearances you seek the basis of explanation for the individual.”

In this way Schiller did Goethe honour, as soon as he had recognised him. There is no deeper psychological characterisation of Goethe. And so it remained till Schiller's death. Their friendship was impregnable, though envy and ill-will used the lowest means to separate them. They worked together in such a way that the advice of the one always had a fruitful influence on the other. Schiller, with a magnificence which has not been surpassed by any other aesthetic writer, by asking how this or that idea harmonises with Goethe's spirit, came to a realisation of the various forms of artistic creation, which he put down in his essay on “Naive and sentimental art.” An artist who still stands in relation to nature, who is himself still nature within nature, creates naively. That is how the Greeks created. An artist who longs for a return to nature, after being torn from her, creates sentimentally. That is the quality of modern art. There is something grand in the way in which these two conceived of art. An old doctrine which still lives in eastern wisdom, of the transitoriness of all appearance, of the veil of Maya, finds expression here. Only he lives in reality who rises above illusion to the region of the spirit. The highest reality is not external.

In every way these two men were forced to inner activity. Goethe, it is true, made his Faust say that “in the beginning was the deed.” But in Germany at that time things were not so far advanced as in France where they could produce external effects; there was only the longing for freedom. And so these two sought their deeds in the sphere of the beautiful, of the work of art. They aimed at a reflection of higher reality, of nature within nature, in life by means of beautiful appearance. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is of this type. Wilhelm Meister is to take us beyond what is illusion in our everyday life, to the fulfilment of personality. Thus it becomes the finest novel of education, to which Schiller's motto might be applied: “Only through the dawn of the beautiful can you penetrate to the land of knowledge.” The spirit out of which we act is the highest. In that period, it was not possible to show that the world of the spirit is born from within. Thus in Wilhelm Meister the liberation of the world had still to be expressed in the form of artistic beauty.

The continual collaboration and advice of Schiller helped to eradicate the personal element in Wilhelm Meister. On the one side we see what must be regarded as the deeper “cause” in man, what a newer spiritual science calls the “causal body”; on the other side we have the external influences. Nothing can be developed that is not there in the seed; but it needs the influence from without. This collaboration is seen also in Schiller's creative activity. His ballads and his Wallenstein would have been impossible but for Goethe's fertilising influence.

There was a sort of modesty, but combined with a real greatness, in the relation in which they stood to each other. They only became a whole by the completion of their separate natures, and as a result something of new greatness came into being. The depth and strength of their friendship drove all philistinism into opposition against them. They were pursued with envy and hatred, for the small has never been able to understand the great. It is hardly credible today what attacks were launched by pettiness against them. The Annals of Philosophy, for instance, spoke disparagingly of them, and someone, called Manso, described them as the “sluts of Weimar and Jena.”

They had to defend themselves against all these attacks and the “Xenien” of 1796 form a fine memorial to their friendship. In the Distichs, which were a sort of historic prosecution of all those who had offended against them or against good taste, we cannot always distinguish those that are by Goethe and those by Schiller. Their friendship was to make them appear as one person. Schiller and Goethe provide us with an example how greatness can defend itself against the everyday, and show us what should be the true attitude and bearing of a friendship which rests on the spiritual. And both were searchers after truth; Schiller in the heart of men, Goethe in the whole of nature.

We cannot talk of Schiller's view of life as we can of that of other men, for it is in continual flux and continual process of ascending. Lesser personalities find it easy to reach a view of life; greater struggle through with difficulty. This is because lesser personalities are incapable of seeing into the great riddles. For the greater every experience provides a new riddle; a new basis is given for the philosophy, which has to take on a new form. This was Goethe's experience all through his life and with Schiller it was the same. Schiller himself remarked that fundamentally he knew very little of the sphere of his own development; but his spirit worked incessantly to deepen and harmonise his ideas and experience of life. Very characteristic is the way in which Schiller carried on a conversation; in which he was the antithesis of Herder; and we can get a conception of his nature by that antithesis.

When Herder was in the society of interested people, he used to develop his own views, and there were seldom any objections; his position was so firm and clear that he could not have gone any deeper into a problem by a dialectic conversation. Schiller was quite different. With him every conversation became alive; he took up every objection, every aspect was touched on, and consequently the conversation went along all sorts of side-paths; everything was illuminated from every side. In his conversation, in the personal life that existed round Schiller, we can see best how his views were in a continual flux. There is the same striving after truth which is expressed in Lessing's words: “If God stood before me, the truth in one hand, in the other the striving after truth, I should beg of him: Lord, give me the striving after truth, for the whole truth indeed exists for God alone.”

We see similarly how Schiller, in all periods of his life, is engaged in a continual struggle for a higher view of the world; how he was driven, when he took up his professorship at Jena, to make his ideas living, how he strove to grasp the great forces which are effective in the world and to fructify them in really vivid lectures. The smaller essays on subjects of world history show us how he wrestled with these ideas. Apart from the above-mentioned essay on “What is, and how should we study history universally?” he tried to describe the significance of a law-giver like Moses. Then he dealt with the period of the Crusades; and perhaps, there is nothing finer and more interesting than the way in which Schiller depicts the conditions of ownership and vassalage in the Middle Ages. From his account of the Netherlands' struggle for freedom we can learn on what inner principles historical development moves. Then he comes to the Thirty Years' War, in which he is already particularly fascinated by the figure of Wallenstein, a man with the law of his will within himself, firm in his own person but fettered by a petty ambition, unstable in his aims and in the confusion of his ideas concerning himself with the message of the stars. Later on he tried to disentangle this puzzling character in poetry. But before then he had to clear things up by studies in the work of Kant. Nor did he approach Kantianism without philosophical preparation. There was something in him which could only come out by reference to Kant.

We have to understand this point in Schiller thoroughly if we wish to understand the greatness of his personality aright. There is a series of letters, “Philosophical Letters” between Julius and Raphael; and the philosophy which he develops there is something that is born in himself. The view which grew out of the depths of his personality, is represented by the man called Julius, while in Raphael we have to imagine a man like his friend Körner who had reached a certain completeness, even if without the same depth. For in life the less often appears the cleverer and the superior over against one who struggles higher. This struggling (philosopher) who is still living amid disharmonies, outlines his view, in the “Theosophy of Julius” somewhat as follows: “Everything in the world derives from a spiritual basis. Man also originated here; he represents the confluence of all the forces in the world; he is the epitome and unification of all that is extended in nature; all existence apart from him is only the hieroglyph of a force which is like him: thus in the butterfly which rises into the air with its youth renewed from the caterpillar stage, we have a picture of human immortality. Satisfaction is only attainable if we rise to the ideal planted within us.” This view he calls the “Theosophy of Julius.” The world is a thought of God, everything lives only in the infinite love of God; everything in me and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of the highest being.

As Goethe in his Prose Hymn to Nature had put it, that man is set by nature, unasked and unwarned, into the cycle of life, that nature herself speaks and acts in him, so Schiller comes in this theosophy of Julius, to some extent, to a similar standpoint. But he is still unsatisfied, for none but God could, he feels, regard the world from this standpoint. Is it really possible for the human soul, so small and limited, to live with such a picture of the world?

From Kantianism Schiller got a new world-picture which lasted till the middle of the nineties. The problem of the world has become a problem of man, and it is the problem of freedom which now concerns him. The question that now demands answer is how man can reach his perfection. Schiller's view of things appears before us in its clearest and finest form in his “Aesthetic Letters”: on the one hand man has a lower nature and is subjected to animal impulses; and nature is thus far necessity in the things of the senses which press upon him. On the other side there is an intellectual necessity in man's thinking; and it is logic to which he must subject himself. He is the slave both of necessity in nature and of the necessity of reason.

Kant answers this contradiction by depressing the necessity of nature in favour of intellectual necessity. Schiller seized upon this gulf between the two necessities in all its depth. To him it was a problem which extends over all human relationships. The laws which control men have come partly from the necessity of nature, the dynamic forces which are active in men, partly from asserted. That was not the case, especially with his Wallenstein. Schiller started from an inner musical mood, as he called it, not from ideas. The stream of complex forces in man appeared in his inner being as melody, and solved themselves in a harmony or collapsed in disharmony. Then he looked for the thoughts, the characters, the single moods; and thus there appeared before his eyes the conflicting soul-forces of Wallenstein which led him of necessity to a vast catastrophe. Unfortunately, we cannot reproduce this mood except with intellectual means.

There may be in one case a personality built upon itself which suffers tragic collapse. But the effect is truly tragic only if it collapses upon itself. What Hebbel demanded as the necessary pre-supposition of tragedy, “That things had to happen thus,” that nothing can be tragic which might have happened otherwise, was grasped intuitively by Schiller, though he never puts it thus in words. But there is another tragic idea under the influence of which Schiller stands which does not admit of solution and which was expressed particularly in Wallenstein. This is the consciousness that there is something higher acting within human life which cannot be solved within this framework. Not till the world's end when men have reached perfection, will man's eyes be able thus to survey their destiny. Till then there must always be errors, something insoluble, for which Wallenstein looks for the solution in the stars, something imponderable in his heart.

Wallenstein believes that he can read his destiny, firmly pre-established in the stars and yet he has to see how Octavio, contrary to the oracle of the stars, deceives him.

But man's freedom still remains the highest; an inner necessity makes him search for the solution in the stars: so he faces a new riddle:—that the stars have lied.

Yet again, the stars cannot lie; man, who offends against the most sacred laws of feeling and the heart, brings the harmony of the stars into disorder.

There can be no order in nature which opposes the laws of the human spirit.

If we look at the character of Wallenstein in this way, we shall see Schiller's own personality shining through the person of Wallenstein. Schiller wanted to look this contradiction in the face and show how man lives with it. There must be a truth in the world, he tells himself, and he has sought it as he does in the letters of Julius.

The contradiction lies in the single appearances; and here Schiller reaches to the knowledge, to what the old Indians and other wise men recognised as illusion.

He wanted to live in truth, and he regarded art as a gateway through which man must travel so as to reach the dawn of beauty and freedom. In his poem “Der Künstler” he calls on artists to take their place in the world-scheme and to help in the realisation of the ideal. He cries to them: Human dignity is in your hands. Preserve it.

The period at which Schiller wrote his Wallenstein, was for him a period of transition, a refining period in which he was trying to rise above his earlier “Weltanschauung” to the grasp of what he called the purely artistic. We have seen how Schiller found in the beautiful and artistic something which could raise man's forces of soul, bring them into a harmony—so that it is artistic creation which gives man freedom. Thus for him, as he wrote to Goethe à propos of his Wilhelm Meister, the artist was the only true man and the philosopher, compared to him, only a caricature. Here was a vital turning-point which reflected what Schiller had then experienced.

In Fiesco, in Kabale and Liebe, in Don Carlos some of the characters are sympathetic to him, others antipathetic. But at the height of his art he wished to get rid of such moral judgment and valuation; he wished to treat a wrong-doer with the same loving care as he did the hero; his work was no longer to be associated with what he himself felt as sympathy or antipathy. When the objection was made to Wilhelm Meister, that many of the figures offended against moral feeling, he wrote more or less like this to Goethe: “If one could show you that the non-moral originated in you and not in the characters, one might have some ground for objection.” For Schiller Wilhelm Meister is an education in aesthetic.

Schiller, having had a vision of human personality in its true autonomy, tried to raise himself to the sunlit heights of pure art. Hence comes a new form of participation of the artist in his art; we can see it already in Wallenstein. He was not going to have a personal part any more, nor judge and value morally; he was simply to be an artist.

This conception reminds us of a conversation of his with Goethe in which they were discussing architecture, and in which Goethe made a remark of deep significance, though it might sound at first somewhat of a paradox. Goethe demanded of a beautiful building that it should make an impression of harmony not only on the eye but on a man who might be led through it with bandaged eyes. When everything sensible has been abstracted, it is still possible to put oneself into it by the spirit. It is not fitness for a purpose that he demanded, but the ideal quality of the spirit. At first sight it may seem paradoxical: it was created out of the lofty view of art which Goethe and Schiller held. Round them there grew up a circle of artists whose judgments were similar: e.g., Wilhelm v. Humboldt, a fine connoisseur, whose aesthetic essays are important for the contemporary intellectual atmosphere. In this way Schiller was led into opposition to his earlier artistic views and to Kantianism, which practically only admits the supersensible where the moral is concerned. No artist could see like that; and in his return to the artistic Schiller found Kant inadequate.

Schiller's conception of the tragic conflict was that later formulated by Hebbel when he said that only that is tragic which is inevitable. That was Schiller's feeling, and that was what he tried to carry out in his Wallenstein; that was the way in which he wanted to depict the tragic. In Shakespeare's Richard III he saw fate breaking in with such inevitability; but before then he had had an earlier love for the Greek drama. In the Shakespearean drama the person of the hero takes the central place, and it is from his character that the inevitable development arises. Greek drama is quite different: there everything is predestined, and complete. Man is set in a higher spiritual order, but simultaneously, because he is a material sense-being, he is shattered by it. The decisive element is not the character or personality of the hero but the superhuman destiny and fate.

The Erinyes of Greek tragedy are not originally avenging Furies but represent the vague foreboding something which is not wholly soluble and shines dimly into human destiny. In his return to the artistic Schiller reached this conception of the tragic. If we are to feel tragedy in this sense, we must eliminate the personal and separate it from the merely human. Only then can we really understand Wallenstein.

There is something super-personal that has grown beyond the personal which hovers over Wallenstein. Man belongs to a higher order, a higher spiritual world—that is for Schiller the meaning of the stars which guide man's destiny. It is in the stars that Wallenstein is to read his destiny. Carlyle indicates this super-personal, when he points to the parallelism in the character of the separate personalities in Wallenstein's camp, which hints at the personalities of the leaders. Thus the Irish Dragoon, who puts his trust in the luck of war, points to his chief, Buttler; the first Cuirassier who reflects the finer side of life in war, to Max Piccolomini; the Trumpeter in his complete devotion, to Terczky; while the Sergeant Major, who quotes the sayings of his general, appears as a caricature of Wallenstein.

We have here then a great law which goes beyond the merely personal. The whole composition of the poem shows us the standpoint which Schiller believed he had achieved. We have first, the camp where Wallenstein does not appear at all; second, the Piccolomini scenes where Wallenstein practically does not enter but learns what has happened from Max Piccolomini and hears from his wife what is happening in the Viennese court. He allows events to take their course so that his generals unite and sign the famous document. The action takes place round about him. In the same way the idea of treachery is only grasped lightly, and then takes possession of his soul. Thirdly, Wallenstein's death; here he is driven into events by his own thoughts which have taken on an objective life, he is forced into a super-personal destiny. A monumental language marks the situation. He is set within an iron necessity; the personal—which has nothing particular to do with the great lines—is thrust into a corner. It does, no doubt, express itself in stirring tones, as, for instance, in the conversation with Max Piccolomini:—

Wallenstein (with eyes silently fixed on him and approaching him): Max, stay with me; leave me not, Max. When they brought you to me in my winter camp at Prague, into my tent, a delicate boy, unused to German winters, your hand was frozen to the heavy standard which, like a man, you would not let go. Then I took you in, covered you with my cloak; myself was your nurse, nor was ashamed, of the smallest service; I tended you with a woman's careful thoughtfulness, till you, warmed by me, felt the young life again pouring through you. When, since then, have I changed? Thousands I have made rich, given them lands and honours—you, I have loved. I gave you my heart, myself. They were all strangers, you the child of my house. Max, you cannot leave me. It cannot be, I will not, cannot believe my Max can leave me.

But it does not specially fit into the plot. Schiller's great achievement in this drama was that he kept the tragic and the personal apart, that he has shown how Wallenstein, after letting the thoughts play freely about him, simply cannot but stride onwards to the deed. He shows us how out of freedom there grows a kind of necessity; and this whole style of thought contains ideas of the moment which have only to be fanned to life in order to become fruitful.

The next play, Maria Stuart, is conceived in the same vein. Practically everything has already happened at the beginning, and nothing occurs but what has been long prepared. It is only the character, the inner life, which unfolds itself before us, and this inner life again acts as a necessity. In his later plays Schiller tried more and more to give form to the idea of destiny. Thus in the Maid of Orleans something super-personal is expressed in the visions in which her demon-spirit appears, calls her to her mission and opposes her when she is untrue to the command, until by repentance she redeems it. In the Bride of Messina especially he almost tries to give the Greek drama once more a place in modern life. There he expresses the super-personal by introducing the chorus.

What did he want with the chorus? Schiller was looking to the origin of tragedy, which arose from religion. In the primitive drama it was shown how Dionysos, the suffering God, finds redemption in humanity. (More recent research has revealed the truth of this.) When the Greek Mystery drama was secularised, there arose the first beginnings of dramatic art. Thus in Aeschylus we still have the echo of that out of which art had arisen, of the Mystery cults within which the world-drama of world-redemption was depicted. Edouard Schuré has described these Eleusinian Mysteries in his Sanctuaires d'Orient, a first example of the religious and artistic solution of the world-riddle. The world-embracing action of this original drama could not find in speech its proper instrument; for speech is too much the expression of personal relations. When drama began to use the word, it dealt with more personal relations, as in Sophocles and Euripides. There was a passage from the representation of the typical to the personal. Hence the old drama used a super-personal speech which was akin to music, and given by the chorus which accompanied the action represented in mimicry. Thus the musical drama developed into the later speech drama. Nietzsche has developed these ideas further in his Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.

For him the word drama is a sort of decadence; and hence comes his reverence for Wagner who wanted to create a new religious art, born out of the world of myth. Wagner was keen, not on the personal, but the super-personal; and so he took for the foundation of his dramas not historical, but mythical action; and where he has to represent the super-personal he does not employ the usual language but a language sublimated by music.

Schiller felt what was only discovered by research after his time, and developed Greek tragedy along those lines. He wanted to introduce a lyric element, so that, as he says in the preface, he might raise art to a higher level by means of the mood. Thus there already lies in Schiller what was worked out more radically in the Nietzsche-Wagner circle—except that those men did not deal with it so clearly as Schiller had done.

In Schiller we have already the great conception of leading mankind back to the source from which the spiritual sprang, of leading art back to the original basis from which religion, art and science all grew up. To him beauty was the dawn of truth. Even today we can find in Schiller what may guide us to the best we may hope, for the present and the future. And so he may be a prophet for us of a better future.

We have seen how Schiller tried, in each one of his later plays, to solve the problem of the dramatic. There is something sublime in observing how, after every success—and the success was considerable (he was recognised by the best men of his time, even though there was not a complete absence of hostility)—he tried with each new play to climb to greater heights. All the later plays, Tell, the Bride of Messina, the Maid of Orleans, Demetrius, are simply efforts to attain to the problem of the dramatic and the tragic in a new form. He never rested satisfied in a belief that he had exhausted psychology. In Maria Stuart we have seen him treating the problem of destiny, creating a situation complete in itself in which only the characters have to unfold themselves. In the Maid of Orleans, he dug still deeper into the human soul. He plunged into the depths of human psychology and set out the problem, in the sense that Hebbel meant, when he said that tragedy must have some relation to the irrational. Thus, in the Maid of Orleans we have the effects of dark soul forces: the Maid is almost like a sleep-walker, under the influence of what we may call the demonic and is carried forward by it. She is to stand far above humanity, and only because she is a maid, has she the right to pass through the ranks of her enemies, for her country's sake, like a destroying angel.

In the Bride of Messina, Schiller tries to get a still higher conception of the drama and to reach back to the primal drama—that drama, which came even before Aeschylus and was not merely art but also an integral constituent of a truth which included religion, science and art; that Dionysos-drama which put the suffering, dying and resurgent god on the stage as representative of all humanity. In such cases the action was not what we should nowadays call poetry. It was the world-drama that was set before man's eyes, the truth in beautiful and artistic form; it was meant to elevate man and fortify him religiously. Thus the Mystery drama contained, for the spectators, what developed later, in separate form, as religion, art and philosophy.

This line of thought which Friedrich Nietzsche developed in his Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, in which he regarded the primal drama as the higher form, was already alive in Schiller. Schiller's idea of raising the beautiful to higher levels by re-introducing the musical element, was taken up again by Wagner and received monumental expression in his musical dramas: Wagner harked back to the myth and chose music, so as to express himself, not in everyday but in elevated language. The direction which art followed in the Wagner circle was indicated by Schiller. In his short introduction to the Bride of Messina he gives it plastic and pregnant expression. True art must give a freedom of the spirit in the living play of all its forces. That shows what there was in Schiller.

We have seen how Schiller's spirit climbed upward by help of Goethe. He himself called Goethe's mind intuitive, his own symbolical; and this a significant saying.

Schiller always thought of men fundamentally as representatives of a type; he thought of them in a sort of symphony. We can see the drama growing out of a sort of musical mood, and hence comes that symphony of human characters, acting and suffering. So it became necessary to make single traits into symbols of great human experience. Hence Schiller became the poet of idealism: he used experience to bring the ideals to earth and to clothe them in his characters. The problem of the human I, the question how man works in his environment, was, for him, the central point.

In the Bride of Messina, he wanted to produce the Greek tragedy of destiny in a new form. There must be something in the human soul which makes men take their decisions not reasonably—else they would act more intelligently—there must be something dark in them, something like the “daimon” of Socrates. That must be working from the spiritual world. It is this something which the reason cannot grasp, which Schiller allows to play into his tragedy; and the way in which he does it shows him as quite a modern. The action begins with two dreams: The Duke of Messina dreams of a flame which destroys two laurel bushes. The dream is interpreted by an Arabian astrologist as meaning that the daughter, born to him, will bring destruction on his sons; and he orders her death. But the Duchess has dreamed at the same time of a child by whose side an eagle and a lion lie nestled together; her dream also is interpreted; a Christian monk tells her that her daughter will unite the two disputing brothers in love for herself; and so she saves the child.

In this way the dark and undetermined enters at the very beginning of the action. It is a fine point that the first dream should be interpreted by an Arabian, the second by a Christian; but Schiller does not take sides. If we take out all that is mystical and dreamlike, there remains only the quarrel of the brothers; and this rational action is still dramatic. The stroke of genius and of special art is that each element is a whole; even without the mystical the action is a unity. Thus Schiller has put into this with skill and art something which goes beyond human consciousness.—In this way he had reached a still higher answer to his question.

He uses the same human psychology in Tell. I am not going to analyse the drama, only to show what Schiller was to the Nineteenth Century and what he will still be to us. It is not to no purpose that he sets Tell apart from the general structure of the drama:

“Yet, what you do—leave me apart from your councils. I cannot ponder long, or choose. But if you need my too-determined deed, then summon Tell and he will not fail you.” He acts, not like the others, under the impulse of the idea of freedom, but from purely personal feeling, offended paternal sense. Two lines run together, the one which concerns Tell alone, the other felt by the whole Swiss people. Schiller wanted to show how things do not run, in man, always along the one line. We can see the same thing in Hebbel's Judith where her country's needs fall together with her wounded woman's feelings; the poet requires something which grows immediately from out of the human heart.

Schiller has no use for the merely moral or the merely material; the moral must descend and become a personal passion. Man only becomes free when he controls his personal feeling in such a way that it unites with the universal. He worked, step by step, on the completion of his psychology, and his idealism becomes more and more clarified. That is the magic which lives in Schiller's plays. His deep aesthetic studies were not in vain; not in vain his absorption in these problems.

Now all the writings in the Nineteenth Century of men like Vischer, Hartmann, Fechner, etc., important and true as they may be, always put the beautiful outside man. But Schiller always studied what went on within the human soul, how the beautiful acts upon it. For that reason, we are moved so deeply and intimately by what he says, and we can read his prose works with delight again and again. It would be a worthy way of celebrating the Schiller anniversary if these writings were published and read far and wide; they would contribute much to deepening the human spirit in an artistic and moral direction. We might also make a selection for purposes of education from his Aesthetic Letters; and a wholly new attitude would come into our pedagogic system. If we are to understand Schiller's plays, we must breathe the fine air of real education that lies in his aesthetic works.

If we want further insight into the way in which Schiller penetrated deeper and deeper into the human heart, we can get in by a study of the—unfortunately uncompleted—Demetrius. This might have become a play than which even Shakespeare could not have written anything more powerful and affecting. Many attempts have been made to complete the work but no one has proved equal to the task.

The wholly tragic conflict—though there is plenty of action, such as that for instance in the Polish Parliament—is centred entirely in the ego; that is the significant thing. We cannot say that our senses, perceptions and feelings are our ego; we are what we are, because the thinking and feeling of the world around us, press upon us. This Demetrius has grown up without himself knowing what his ego is. During a significant action for which he is to be executed, a certain token is found on his person. It appears that the inheritance of the throne of the Czars is his. Everything points in this one direction, and he cannot but believe that he is the heir to the Russian throne. He is thus driven to a definite configuration of the ego; threads, spun without, drive him onward. The movement is victorious; Demetrius develops the character of a Czar. But then, when his ego is concordant with the world around him, he learns that he has been mistaken; he is not the true heir. He is no longer the person as which he had found himself. He stands in the presence of his mother, who honours him; but so strong is the voice of nature that she cannot recognise him as son—while he has become that which he had imagined to himself. He can no longer throw it from himself; yet the preconditions of this ego fall from him.

Here is an infinitely tragic conflict. All is centred on a personality which is drawn with infinite art, and which we may believe “will not lord it over slaves.” The external also was added with all the skill of which only Schiller was capable. Thus Sapieha, Demetrius' opponent, indicates prophetically the character of Demetrius. Here also the symmetry is striven after which is achieved in the Wallenstein. The drama was never finished; death intervened. There is something tragic in Schiller's death; all the hopes that were centred on him found expression in the letters and words of his contemporaries. Deeply affected by the loss of one from whom so much more was hoped, men like W. v. Humboldt, for instance, allowed their feelings to find utterance:

“He was snatched from the world in the ripe maturity of his spiritual powers; there is infinitely much more he might have accomplished. For many years more he might have enjoyed the bliss of poetic creation.”

That is the tone which makes his death tragic—for in the ordinary course of things death does not bear this irrational quality. In such mood Goethe found for his dead friend the following words in his Epilogue to Schiller's Glocke:

Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

Behind him lay in unessential feint
What holds us all in bondage, the common trivial.

This mighty strain of idealism can be seen continuing through the Nineteenth Century. Men began to realise that Schiller's spirit was sublime enough to work as consolation and example to his people in all their struggles.

This continued activity of Schiller's idealism in the spiritual quality of Germany was described effectively by C. Gutzkow in his speech during the Schiller celebrations at Dresden on 10th November 1859:

“Here lies the secret of our love for Schiller. He lifts up our hearts; he gives us courage for action, a never-failing help which the nation finds in every circumstance of its life. Our memories of Schiller arouse in us courage and gladness. Deep, rich, intimate and delightful Goethe may charm us all in his creation which reminds us of home manners and custom, is like ivy which welds itself to the past, sadly and dreamily. But in Schiller everything lies in the future, the waving of flags or crowning with the laurel. For this reason, it is that we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his name, ringing and echoing like a blow on a shield of bronze. All honour to the poet of action, the bulwark of the German fatherland.”

I want to speak today of the way in which Schiller's influence was active during the Nineteenth Century and then to pass over to his significance for the present and finally to what he may yet be to the future. In my last lecture I will give a sort of summing-up of Schiller.

If we want to describe Schiller's place in the Nineteenth Century, we can certainly not go into details; and so we shall not pause over single incidents if they are not of symptomatic importance. Our business is with the whole cultural life of the century and Schiller's place within it. In general, it is very difficult to decide what is Schiller's influence on individual periods; we cannot follow each path in detail. Schiller's influence may be compared, in a way, to that of Herder at the beginning of the century when Goethe said in a conversation to Eckermann: “Who nowadays reads Herder's philosophical works? And yet everywhere we meet the ideas which he has sowed.” That is a more intense influence than one which is associated only with a name; and it is the case with Schiller also.

His influence cannot be separated from that of the great classical period. One thing we may emphasise, that his influence and the recognition expressed by the national celebration on 10th November 1859, did not come into being easily and unopposed. Schiller did not establish his position so smoothly. Much was necessary for the spirit of Schiller to have its effect, quite imperceptibly, on the young especially. Thus the Glocke (“Song of the Clock”) produced at first the most violent opposition in romantic circles. Caroline v. Schlegel, wife of W. v. Schlegel, called it the poem of a provincial Philistine.

But not only in those cases which we meet in the Xenien, but in general in the so-called romantic circles, we shall find active opposition to Schiller. The Romantics found their ideal in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and had raised Goethe to a pinnacle, at the cost of that friend of his, to whom Goethe had cried after his death:

Weit hinter ihm im wesenlosen Scheine
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

Schiller's great gift, to be able to raise the moral and the ethical to such heights, found no sympathy with them. Hard words were uttered by the Romantics against Schiller, “the provincial moralist.” People who have grown up in an atmosphere of reverence for Schiller, will hardly understand remarks like that of Friedrich v. Schlegel in his essays on Goethe and Schiller. He called Schiller's Imagination disordered. Here there is no sign of the quality which attracted all hearts to Schiller. About the end of the 1820's there appeared the Goethe—Schiller correspondence, that memorial set up by Goethe to his friend and their friendship. We can learn much from it and its importance for the understanding of German art is immeasurable. Here also the Romantics were bitterly contemptuous and cold. We can gather how hard it was for Schiller to establish his fame when we realise the megalomania of the chief people who were his opponents. A. W. Schlegel, the excellent translator of Shakespeare, wrote a sonnet about himself, which shows what his own view was of his importance in German literature; he talks of his poetic significance with a pride which strikes us very strangely:

What name the future's lips shall give to him Is still unknown, this generation recognised him His name was August Wilhelm Schlegel.

Nor does he present a unique phenomenon; he is typical of the romantic theory; we can only understand him if we can understand what the romantic school was after. The Romantics aimed at a new art, a comprehensive view of all art. Their theory had as a matter of fact grown out of what Schiller had said in his aesthetic essays; but it was a caricature. Schiller's aphorism that man is only truly man when he is playing, became a sort of motto of theirs. This was the origin of their romantic irony which turned everything into the play of genius. People almost began to believe that it lay in the power of a man's will to turn himself into a genius.

But when Schiller called art play, he meant the word “play” in full seriousness. The true secret of a master lay, said Schiller, in the conquest of the material by the form; but the romantics despised the form and demanded of the matter in itself that it should have artistic effect. This attitude, which I am not criticising but only stating, was fundamentally opposed by Schiller. Hence the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller was regarded by them as very tiresome; the art-rules there discussed they took as naive. A. W. v. Schlegel, under the stimulus of the correspondence, wrote some bitter epigrams. Among themselves the Romantics thoroughly admired one another.

All this will show how in the first decades of last century Schiller's life-work was greeted with bitterest opposition. On the other hand, his personality was so powerful that even among these men he received his due of recognition and admiration: for instance, Ludwig Tieck wrote, with understanding and respect, of Schiller's Wallenstein. Schiller more and more acquired his influence and made a home for himself in the hearts of his people. Theodor Körner is the most important, though not the only, instance of a man who lived wholly in the spirit of Schiller:—and he died, moreover, a hero's death filled with the ideals planted in him by Schiller. He seemed dedicated to it by the personal friendship which united his family and Schiller's. A close friendship existed between Körner's father and Schiller, who was godfather to Theodor Körner and bought him the “Tyre” which accompanied Körner everywhere. Schiller made his way slowly but surely into the hearts of youth.

If we follow out the development of style in these opposing romantics, we find the influence of Schiller even in the words he had coined.

It was thanks to Schiller that there was formed what we may call the German culture of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. It was permeated by the special note that was given to the soul by Schiller. Things which had their origin in Herder and the other classicists, made their way into the people by the pictures and didactic applications of Schiller. However, much men might bristle at the heights of aesthetic culture, Schiller has established his position increasingly. His influence grew steadily, and on the centenary of his birth, it is the best men in the nation who honour him. The speeches made at the time have been collected, and among those who spoke we find famous names like those of Jacob Grimm, Th. F. Vischer, the great aesthetic thinker, Carl Gutzkow, Ernst Curtius, Moritz Carriere and many others. The seed had grown which Schiller had planted.

Nevertheless, the language held at the celebrations in 1859 was quite alien to the new ideas which were appearing at the time. To emphasise Schiller's ideals in 1859 fitted strangely in with the other ideas which saw the light that year. There are four things of special importance which I want to mention that appeared in them. In 1859 there appeared Darwin's Origin of Species; and secondly, Fechner's Prelude to Aesthetic. Fechner has acquired considerable influence on one of the lines of modern thought. He started from the ideas of Hegel, who had himself defended Schiller against the Romantics. Vischer, who had begun his work in the Goethe—Schiller period and whose aesthetic was of idealist type, found himself forced into opposition to his own earlier views; and Vischer's mode of thinking was completed by Fechner, who wrote a sort of aesthetic “from below,” whereas until then the ordinary aesthetic had been one “from above.” The attempt was now being made to grasp the essence of the beautiful from below, from the small symptoms.

The third work, which treated of space conditions, was in a sense opposed to Schiller's manner: he had spoken as follows in his epigram to the astronomers:

Do not chatter, I pray you, so much of nebulae and suns.
Is no greatness in nature, save that she gives you to count?
What you deal with, my friends, in space is truly sublimest;
But the sublime has not its dwelling in space.

This third work was the Spectral Analysis of Kirchhoff and Bunsen, by means of which the sun could be seen in its constituent elements, and an analysis of the most distant nebulae was made possible.

The fourth work was Marx's Critique of Political Economy. There was a marked contrast between the thoughts developed at the Schiller celebrations and the ideas which were germinating at the time. It was a unique standpoint which Schiller, and the classicists generally, held towards world culture. We cannot picture Raphael or Michelangelo out of relation to their own times, in which they were born and worked. In the same way Homeric art is in intimate contact with something that lived in everyone; Homer had only to give form to something which permeated all his contemporaries as feeling and thinking. But with the German classicists it was quite different. Homer, of whom did he tell? Of Greeks he spoke to Greeks. Similarly, Dante, Michelangelo, even Shakespeare, stood wholly within their times. But not so our classicists. Lessing was enthused by Winckelmann and formed his artistic ideas out of Winckelmann's essays; he also went back to Aristotle. Schiller and Goethe faithfully with Lessing studied Aristotle. Hence came that abstracted ideal of beauty, an art so cut off from the life of the times, particularly as the poets grew older. For Schiller's earlier plays, the Räuber, Kabale und Liebe are still connected with his own life. Goethe had developed particularly in Italy. Art had become an end in itself, abstract and isolated from everyday life. Goethe and Schiller had become neutral toward their subject matter: thus Schiller looks for his material all over the world, he has risen from the world around him and established himself on his own feet. Nothing describes Schiller's influence so well as the fact that he was followed by Romanticism which assimilated everything foreign. Translations from every sphere of world-literature are one of the chief services of the romantic school.

Schiller's attitude to art is something which had decisive influence on his relation to the Nineteenth Century.

We must not overlook the fact that the relationship of the general public to Schiller was bound to become something quite different in the second half of the Nineteenth Century from what it had been in the first: if only because of those facts which I have mentioned. Schiller's feeling towards Truth was expressed by his saying that “through the dawn of the beautiful you may pass into the land of knowledge.” To him truth was the beautiful; a work of art was to give form to the idea, the idea by which the world as a whole is to be imagined as being permeated. It was an idealist view of the world, a fine and subtle view which can only be grasped by a man who can rise to subtle spiritual heights. To understand Schiller requires very definite conditions.

For this reason, there is something less intense in the second half of the century, in the honour done to Schiller; the growing natural science produced a cooler attitude in men. Truth was now seen only in what was tangible: which is what Schiller never did. His ideal was always truth, but truth on a spiritual basis. We can no longer grasp as true reality what lived at the time in men's feelings. Schiller had grown up out of the greatness and breadth of his spiritual horizons: the world of Goethe, Lessing, Herder and Winckelmann. When external reality thrust forward its harsh demands, there was no real relationship left between the true and the beautiful.

A man like Ludwig Büchner has been able to build up a purely materialistic philosophy on the basis of natural science; but Schiller is not for a materialistic age, and if we appeal to his views in such an age, we are only playing with words. Thus Schiller dropped into the background. Goethe could still mean something to the second half of the century because in him the artistic can be separated from a world conception (Weltanschauung): even Herman Grimm concentrates his eulogy on Goethe as the artist. True, if we are dealing exactly with Goethe, we shall see that in his case also it will not do to separate the Weltanschauung from the man; still a purely aesthetic view is possible with him, whereas with Schiller it is not. Nowadays art is regarded as something that deals with the realm of phantasy. That, in itself, is a rejection of the world-conception, Weltanschauung.

A gulf has grown up between the spirit of the age in which Schiller lived and that of our own age:—indeed a recent biographer of Schiller, Otto Brahm, could begin his book with the words: “In my youth I hated Schiller.” He only fought his way to an understanding of Schiller by his learning and the increase of knowledge. Schiller has had many learned biographers, but the feeling of the age has become a stranger to the truly Schillerian problems; nor can it understand how what we nowadays call knowledge can be brought into harmony with what Schiller stands for. As I said, the artists of an earlier age, a Raphael or Michelangelo, grew up out of the life of their time. That was no longer the case after Goethe's death. An artist, for instance, like Peter Cornelius, creates wholly out of his thoughts, being no longer in any relation to the spiritual content of his time. He felt himself especially a stranger in Berlin; attracted towards Catholicism in which he believed that he saw the basis for his artistic ideal, he stood face to face with the life of his time, unable to take any part in it.

The gulf between life and art becomes ever greater. And so Schiller becomes more and more a stranger to the life of the Nineteenth Century. Men like Jacob Minor may write large tomes about his youth, but everything shows really how Schiller's views have become out of touch with our times.

What we recognise as true nowadays, has grown up out of the attitude of natural science. Aesthetics also have passed from an idealist to a realist attitude. Indeed, this revolution was so violent that Vischer could not make up his mind to publish a second edition of his Aesthetics which he had written from an idealist standpoint:—the very views he had formerly supported had become unintelligible to him. The ideas of the first half of the century had become so foreign to the leading thinkers of the second half that we find men criticising themselves like that.

After such a development we shall understand how Schiller stands in the present. E. du Bois Reymond, for instance, who after all derived his diction wholly from Schiller, was able to say in a speech about Goethe's “Faust,” that it was really a failure, and that really Faust ought to have married Gretchen, made some valuable discoveries and led a useful existence. The real significance of “Faust” was thus unintelligible to an important thinker of the Nineteenth Century.

This attitude was the dominant one, and no one dared to oppose it or to emphasise the rights of the ideal. Even art called itself realist. Any idealist tinge failed to find approval with the public. It was only honest for men to admit that they felt no liking for Schiller. It was no longer admitted that the beautiful was an expression of the true; for the truth was regarded as that which can be seen by the eye or touched by the hand. Schiller had never believed that; he had always found the truth in great ideal laws. Art was for him the representation of the spiritual hidden in the actual, not of the everyday things. The true which Schiller sought is recognised nowadays neither by science nor by art; no one understands nowadays what Schiller understood by the true. Hence comes that opposition; for we understand by the true what Schiller called the indigence of the sense-world. It was in the harmony between the spiritual and the poverty of the sense-world that Schiller looked for the ideal of Freedom. What we call “artistic” nowadays can never be called so in the sense in which Schiller talked of it.

There is a further gulf between present-day views and those of Schiller. Our age has lost the intense passion to penetrate into the world's inner core. This deep seriousness which broods over all Schiller's views no longer exists. Hence in our times we try to compare, quite superficially, two so fundamentally different men as Tolstoi and Nietzsche.

Materialism has become a world philosophy, a gospel, an integral element of our times. Particularly, it is the great masses of people who think like that and admit no other philosophy; they will only admit as true what natural science allows them to call so. Let me tell you a little story to illustrate what that leads to: It was the last time when a philosophy appeared, which though pessimistic, had an ideal colouring; Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. The book was attacked a good deal; and there was one particularly effective criticism under the title of The Unconscious from the point of view of the theory of descent and of Darwinism. This book was anonymously published. The scientists welcomed it as the best refutation of Hartmann's work. In the second edition the author's name was given: it was Eduard v. Hartmann. He wanted to show that it is easy to drag oneself down to the materialistic view when one has reached a higher view. Men at a higher level can understand a lower level, but not vice versa. You will always find that men whose standpoint is that of idealism are ready to admit the materialistic view to a considerable extent. A man whose standpoint is that of Schiller can judge modern art in its materialist view, but the materialist cannot, contrariwise, understand the idealist.

Schiller was a believer in the ideal. There is a deep saying of his: “What religion do I subscribe to? None of all those that you name. And why none of them? Because of religion.” That is the greatness in the man, that his aesthetic creed is also his religious and that his artistic creation was his form of religious worship. The fact that his ideal lived in this way within him is part of his greatness. We should not ask if Schiller can mean anything to us nowadays; on the contrary he must come to mean something for us again, because we have forgotten how to understand what goes beyond the purely material. Then we again shall be able to understand an art which seeks to unveil the secrets of existence.

But there is a new ideal of freedom we can learn to understand through him. We hear a good deal of talk just now about freedom, and we all want to be free from political and economic bonds. Schiller looked at freedom in a different way. How can man become free in himself? How is he to become free from his lower desires, free from the necessities of logic and reason? Schiller—who wrote about the State and life in society—found a new aim and a hint of new ideals, which still he in the future. If we want to claim with justice, at the present time, that the individual should develop freely, we must understand harmony in Schiller's sense, het us measure the demands of today with Schiller's; let us compare what we expect nowadays with what Schiller demanded; take two instances, Max Stirner and Schiller. What could be more unlike, more diametrically opposed than Stirner's The Individual and his Property and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters: When Schiller's influence was declining, Stirner's was increasing. Stirner had remained neglected all the time until he was re-discovered in the 1890's and his work became the foundation of what buzzes about as individualism. There is a good deal of justification in this attitude of today, but the particular form which it takes must strike us as immoderate. In Schiller's Aesthetic Letters the demand for the liberation of human personality is put forward still more radically. Schiller's ideal was much less provincial than Stirner's. The ideal of men working together who have become inwardly free, appears to others as an exhortation. When men live in such freedom there are no laws and commandments.

Nowadays we seem to think that chaos must result where men are not hemmed in by police regulations; yet we must remember that an enormous proportion of things goes on without laws. Every day you can see how men make way for each other in the most crowded streets without our having to have a law about it. Ninety-eight per cent, of our life goes on without laws; and someday it will be possible to get on completely without law and force. But for that man must be inwardly free. The ideal which Schiller puts before us is one of infinite sublimity. Art is to lead man to freedom. Art, growing out of the substance of our culture, is to become the great educator of the world. Artists are not to provide us with photographs of the external world, but to be the heralds of a higher spiritual reality. Then artists will once more create, as they did formerly, from, out of the ideal. Schiller wanted to lead men through art to a new comprehension of reality; and he meant it very seriously.

If this age of ours is to understand Schiller properly, it must unite all that it has won of knowledge, into a higher idealism which shall in time raise that knowledge to spiritual reality. Then there will be men who can speak in the spirit of Schiller from the depths of their hearts. It is of little use to open the theatres in Schiller's honour if the people who sit in them have no understanding for him. Only when we have attained to such an understanding of Schiller will there be men, who, like Herman Grimm about Goethe, will be able to speak about Schiller from the depth of the heart.

In this last lecture I want to deal with a particular question which connects up with the lecture in which I discussed Schiller's influence on the present. The problem of aesthetics in Germany comes in here because Schiller stands in close relationship to the establishment of aesthetics as a science—the science of the beautiful.

We have seen what Schiller's attitude was to the beautiful at different periods of his life. Schiller saw in the beautiful something which had a peculiar cultural value. Now a science of aesthetics such as we know today is only 150 years old. It is true that Aristotle had written on Poetics, but for centuries these views remained stationary. We know that even Lessing harked back to Aristotle. No real advance was made until the Eighteenth Century when Baumgarten grew up in the Wolffian philosophy and wrote a book on the beautiful called Aesthetica in 1750. He distinguishes the beautiful from the true in that, as he says, the true contains a clear idea, while the beautiful exists in unclear and confused ideas. It was only a few years before Schiller's time that ideas like this could occur.

We have a sort of aesthetics even in Kant's Critique of Judgment, but in him we have nothing but theory; he never had a living idea of what beauty is, and never got three miles away from his birthplace at Königsberg, and never saw any important work of art; and so could only write from the standpoint of abstract philosophy. Schiller, in his Aesthetic Letters, was the first to grasp the problem in any living way.

What was the position at the time? Goethe looked longingly to Greece, and Winckelmann also cast a regretful glance back at the age when men copied the divine in their art. Schiller felt the same regretful longing during his second period, as we can see from his Götter Griechenlands. Again, in Greek drama, what is it but a religious feeling that lies at the back of it. It is based on the mystery, the secret of God who becomes man, who suffers as man, dies and rises again. What happened in the soul was regarded as a purification; and even through the Poetic of Aristotle there still passes a faint breath of it. The tragic was to consist in the “production of an action which aroused pity and fear and aimed at the purification of these feelings.” It was difficult to understand what was meant by that; and Lessing meditated a good deal about it. In the Nineteenth Century a vast literature grew up around the problem, and whole libraries could be filled with books dealing with Katharsis. The idea was not understood because men did not understand from what it had grown up.

In Aeschylus we can still see something of this “drama of the God.” In the middle of the action stood Dionysos as the great dramatic figure, and the chorus round about him accompanied the action. This is how Edouard Schuré has recreated for us the mystery drama. The dramatic cult-action had the definite object of leading man to a higher level of existence. It was seen that man is gripped by passions, that his lower life makes him kin to them; but he can rise above them if the higher that lives in him is purified; he can raise himself by looking at the divine pattern. This type of representation was meant to bring man more easily to ennoble himself than could be achieved by teaching. As Schopenhauer said, it is easy enough to preach morality but very hard to establish it. It was only at a later age of humanity that Socrates' view grew up that virtue is teachable. But virtue is something that lives in man and is natural to him, as eating and drinking are; he can be led to it, if the divine is awoken within him, by the picture of the suffering god. This purification by the divine pattern was called Katharsis. Pity and fear were to be called forth; ordinary sympathy which is connected with the personal was to be raised to the great impersonal sympathy when the god was seen suffering for mankind. Then the dramatic action was humanised, and in the Middle Ages we can see how morality separated off and appeared independently. Thus in Christianity there was produced partially what lived incarnate in the Mysteries. The Greek looked with his own eyes on the god who rose again from humiliation. In the mysteries virtue was not merely preached but put before the eyes of men.

Schiller felt very intensely the desire to give men back this knowledge to unite the sense-world and the moral. The core of his poetry is the longing to reconcile these two—the senses and morality, that morality which Kant had interpreted so rigidly that duty led men away from everything which appeared as natural inclination. Schiller, on the contrary, demanded that duty should coincide with inclination; he wanted passion to be so cleansed that it could become identical with duty. This is why he revered Goethe so much, for in him he saw a perfect union of the sense-world and the moral.

He looked for this unification in the beautiful. And since Schiller possessed to an unusual degree the German quality of an aesthetic conscience, he wanted to make art a means of raising man to a higher level of existence. During the classical period there was a strong feeling that the beautiful did not exist merely to fill up idle hours but that it was the bridge between the sense-world and the divine. Schiller pushed far enough to find freedom here. Inclination is no longer to be suppressed: he remarked that a man must be very low in the scale if he has to be virtuous in opposition to his own inclinations. His inclination must be developed so far that he acts virtuously of himself. Earlier in his The Stage as a moral Institution he had preached something very like the severe Kantian morality.

“In the conquest of the matter by the form lies the secret of the master.” But what is, in fact, the material of the poet? In what attitude can we find the right view of the beautiful? As long as we are interested only in a single face, we have not yet got the true artistic view; there is still a clinging to matter. (“Heed the `what' but heed more the `how'!”) As long as a poet shows that he hates a villain, as if this were a personal interest, he still clings to matter and not the form; he has not yet reached the aesthetic view. He only attains that if the villain is represented in such a way that the natural order, and not the poet, inflicts the punishment. Then the “world karma” is accomplished; world-history becomes a world-judgment. The poet disregards himself and looks at world history objectively. This means moreover that what Aristotle said is realised, that poetry is truer than history. In history we cannot always survey the whole event; it is only an extract that lies before us so that we often get an impression of injustice. In this way a work of art is truer than history.

Thus was created a pure and noble conception of art; the purification, the Katharsis, stands beyond sympathy and antipathy. The spectator should stand before a work of art with a pure, almost godlike feeling, and see before him an objective, divine image of the world, and create for himself a microcosm. The dramatist shows us within a limited framework how guilt and atonement are connected, shows us in detail what the truth is, but gives this truth universal currency. Goethe means the same thing when he says that the beautiful is a manifestation of natural laws which, without the beautiful, would never find expression.

Goethe and Schiller looked for a realism, but it was an idealistic realism. Nowadays we think that we can get realism by an exact copying of nature. Schiller and Goethe would have said that that is not the whole truth; the sense-world only represents a part of what is perceptible and lacks the spiritual; nor can we regard it as truth unless we bring the whole tableau of nature simultaneously into a work. The work of art is however still only an extract of the real. In that they strove for truth, they could not admit the immediate truth of nature.

In this way Schiller and Goethe laboured to awaken an idealism, which had actually existed in earlier times. In Dante we have got a representation not of external reality but of what passes in the human soul. Later on, men demanded to see the spiritual in external form. Goethe showed in Grosskophta how anyone who materialises the spirit becomes subject to delusions; Schiller also occupied himself with this materialisation of the spiritual. At that time, there was a good deal of investigation along these lines; and much of what we nowadays call spiritualism engaged men's attention. In this, lies the occasion of the Geisterseher, which treats of these things. Before he had struggled upward, by the help of Kantianism and the artistic, to higher views, Schiller depicted the dangers to which anyone who seeks the spiritual in the external world instead of in himself, is subject. That is the origin of the Geisterseher.

A prince whose faith has become alien to him and who is not strong enough to waken the spiritual in his own soul, is greatly excited by a strange prophecy which a mysterious stranger announces to him and which is shortly afterwards fulfilled. In this mood he falls in with some tricksters who skilfully employ certain circumstances to bring him into a state of mind in which he will be receptive for the appearance of a spirit. The business is proceeding when suddenly a stranger interrupts and unmasks the trick; but himself produces an apparition in place of that of the trickster, and this apparition makes an important pronouncement to the prince. The prince is torn by doubts, for this stranger is none other than the man who had just prophesied to him; and he soon begins to think that both parties are concerned in the plot since the trickster, though he had been locked up, soon escaped. New and inexplicable incidents make him strive for an explanation of all the secrets; as a result, he comes into complete dependence on an occult society, losing all moral stability. The novel was never finished. In it the struggles of a seeker after spirits are represented in a terrifying fashion; we see how the longing for the spiritual leads men downwards when he looks for it in the external. No one who clings to the material, even if he only seeks to find the spiritual appearing in sensible form, can penetrate to the spiritual. The spiritual has to unveil itself in the soul of man.

That is the true secret of the spiritual; that is why the artist sees it first as beauty. The beautiful, conquered and permeated by the spirit, is made real in a work of art. Hence it is the worthy material of the spiritual. At first the beautiful was the only means for Schiller by which it could reveal itself. He looked with longing back to the time of the Greeks when there existed another means for the awakening of the spiritual: when man raised himself to the divine while bringing god down, making god into man and raising himself by god's means. Mankind must now rise once more to the divine by conquest over the material. Schiller in his plays was always striving higher until the physical fell away more and more until the

Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.

which Goethe cried to him after his death, became the full truth. The word “gemein” is not used here in any low, contemptuous sense; it is the common humanity, the common fashion of men that is meant, above which Schiller had raised himself. He had raised himself, as a true seer, to the vision of the spiritual.

He must stand as a pattern before us. That has been the whole object of these lectures; so far as it was possible in a few hours, to trace out this struggling soul of Schiller's, as it rises to greater and greater heights of spiritual insight, and seeks to grasp the spiritual, so that he may impress it upon the sense world. In this struggle we really get to know Schiller, and in him Goethe's words are in truth fulfilled:

Nur der verdient die Freiheit und das lieben
Der Täglich sie erobern muss.

Only he deserves freedom and life
Who daily must conquer them anew.

In this way Schiller fought his way upward, till he became the master of an etheric spirit-permeated form.