The Rudolf Steiner Archive

According to the latest publications of the Goethe Archive

[ 1 ] Once before, a celebration of Goethe's birthday prompted a man here in Frankfurt to openly confess that he also saw in Germany's greatest poet a spirit who was one of the first to be considered when speaking of the pathfinders in the field of natural knowledge. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote an article in the Goethe album that greeted August 28, 1849, which was as full of strong words of anger at the opponents of Goethe's Theory of Colors as the philosopher's soul was full of enthusiastic appreciation for Goethe the naturalist. "Not crowned monuments, nor canon salutes, nor the ringing of bells, let alone banquets with speeches, are sufficient to atone for the grave and outrageous injustice Goethe suffers in regard to his color theory." Far be it from me to draw your attention today to this particular point of the poet's scientific activity. The time will come when the scientific prerequisites for an understanding between researchers will also exist for this question. At present, physical research is moving in a direction that cannot lead to Goethean thinking. Goethe also wants to bring the consideration of purely physical phenomena as close as possible to the human-personal. To him, man is "the greatest and most exact physical apparatus that can exist", and this is - in his opinion - "precisely the greatest misfortune of modern physics, that one has, as it were, separated experiments from man and merely wants to recognize nature in what artificial instruments show, indeed, to limit and prove what it can achieve". In their anxious avoidance of everything subjective and personal, however, the physicists of our time go much further than those whom Goethe intended to target with these words. The ideal of our contemporaries in this respect is to trace all phenomena back to as few inanimate basic forces as possible, which act according to purely mathematical and mechanical laws. Goethe's mind was directed elsewhere. In his view, what is only hidden in the rest of nature appears in man in his very own form. For Goethe, the human spirit is the highest form of the natural process, the organ that nature has created in order to reveal its secret. All the forces that tremble through the world penetrate the human soul in order to express what they are in essence. Goethe could not conceive of a nature separate from man. A dead, spiritless matter was impossible in his imagination. He rejected an explanation of nature with principles from which man could not also be understood in terms of his existence and essence.

[ 2 ] Just as understandable as the opposition of the physicists is the approval that Goethe's view of nature found among some of the most outstanding investigators of the phenomena of life, especially the most intellectual natural scientist of our time, Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel, who has given Darwin's ideas on the origin of organisms a perfection appropriate to German thoroughness, even attaches the greatest importance to recognizing the harmony of his basic convictions with those of Goethe. For Haeckel, Darwin's question about the origin of organic forms immediately became the highest task that the science of organic life can set itself, that of the origin of man. And he was compelled to assume such natural principles in place of the dead matter of the physicists that one need not stop at human beings. In his recently (1892) published work "Monism as a Bond between Religion and Science", which I am convinced is the most significant manifestation of the latest natural philosophy, Haeckel expressly emphasized that he could no more conceive of an "immaterial living spirit" than of a "dead spiritless matter". And Goethe's words that "matter can never exist and be effective without spirit, spirit never without matter" are entirely consistent with this.

[ 3 ] In contrast to the stubborn resistance of physicists, we find here a conception of nature that proudly claims Goethe's ideas for itself.

[ 4 ] For those who set themselves the task of fully appreciating Goethe's genius in a particular field, the question now arises: Does the direction of modern natural science that we have just characterized do full justice to Goethe? Those who are only concerned with this natural science will of course simply ask: to what extent does Goethe agree with me? He regards Goethe as a forerunner of his own direction with regard to those views which the latter has in common with him. His yardstick is the contemporary view of nature. Goethe is judged by it. My point of view in the following arguments is towards these judges: How would Goethe have behaved towards those naturalists who today speak approvingly of him in their way? Would he have believed that they had brought to light ideas that he had only anticipated, or would he rather have thought that the form they had given to natural science corresponded only imperfectly to his beginnings? How we answer this question and how we ourselves then relate to Goethe's world view will determine whether we see Goethe, the natural scientist, as merely a more or less interesting phenomenon in the history of science or whether we also want to make his creations fruitful for our knowledge in the field of natural science and, to use Herman Grimm's phrase, place him in the service of the times.

[ 5 ] The point is to penetrate the spirit of Goethe's view of nature from his own way of looking at and thinking, not from an external comparison with scientific ideas of the present. If we want to understand Goethe correctly, the individual achievements in which his rich mind laid down his scientific thoughts are less important than the intentions and aims from which they emerged. Outstanding men can become epoch-making for mankind in two ways. Either they find the solution to questions that have already been asked, or they find new problems in phenomena that their predecessors carelessly passed by. Galileo, for example, influenced the development of science in the latter way. Countless people before him had seen a swinging body without noticing anything remarkable about it; this phenomenon revealed to his gaze the great task of learning the laws of pendulum motion, and he created entirely new scientific foundations in this field of mechanics. In spirits of this kind, needs that their predecessors had not yet known arise for the first time. And the need opens the eyes to a discovery.

[ 6 ] A need of this kind awoke in Goethe at an early stage. His research instinct was initially ignited by the diversity of organic life. He saw the abundance of forms in the animal and plant kingdoms with a different eye than his scientific contemporaries. They believed that they had done enough by observing the differences between the individual forms, identifying the peculiarities of each particular species and genus and, on the basis of this work, creating an external order, a system of living things. Linné, the botanist, in particular, was a master in this art of classification. Goethe became acquainted with this man's writings in 1782, as we know from his correspondence with Frau von Stein. What was the most important thing for Linné, to precisely determine the characteristics that distinguish one form from another, was initially not even a consideration for Goethe. For him, the question arose: what lives in the infinite abundance of the plant world that unites this diversity into a unified natural kingdom? He first wanted to understand what a plant actually is, and then he hoped to understand why plant nature manifests itself in such an infinite number of forms. He himself later said of his relationship with Linné: "That which he tried to keep apart by force had to strive towards unification according to the innermost needs of my being." That Goethe was on the right path to finding a law of nature here can be seen from a simple observation of how natural laws express themselves in phenomena. Every natural phenomenon emerges from a series of circumstances that determine it. Let's take something very simple. If I throw a stone in a horizontal direction, it will fall to earth at a certain distance from me. It has described a very specific line in space during its flight. This line is dependent on three conditions: the force with which I push the stone, the attraction that the earth exerts on it, and the resistance that the air offers it. I can explain the movement of the stone to myself if I know the laws according to which the three conditions act on it. That phenomena of inanimate nature must be explained in this way, that is, by seeking their causes and their laws of action, was not doubted by anyone concerned with the history of science at the time of Goethe's appearance. into consideration. But the situation was different when it came to the phenomena of life. Genera and species were seen before us and within them each being was equipped with such an arrangement, with such organs, as corresponded to its vital needs. Such a regularity was only considered possible if the organic forms were designed according to a well-considered plan of creation, according to which each organ received the formation it must have if it is to fulfill its intended purpose. Thus, while one sought to explain the phenomena of inanimate nature from causes that lie within the world, one believed that one had to assume extra-worldly explanatory principles for organisms. The attempt to attribute the phenomena of life to causes that lie within the world we can observe was not attempted before Goethe; indeed, as late as 1790, the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant called any such attempt "an adventure of reason". One simply imagined each of Linnaeus' species to have been created according to a certain preconceived plan and thought one had explained a phenomenon when one recognized the purpose it was supposed to serve. Such a way of looking at things could not satisfy Goethe. The idea of a God who leads a separate existence outside the world and directs his creation according to externally imposed laws was alien to him. Throughout his life, he was dominated by the thought:

"What would a God be who only pushed from the outside,
Run the universe in circles on his finger?
It befits him to move the world within,
Nature in itself, to nurture itself in nature,
So that what lives and weaves and is in him,
Never misses its power, never misses its spirit."

[ 7 ] What did Goethe have to look for in the science of organic nature in accordance with this attitude? Firstly, a law that explains what makes a plant a plant and an animal an animal; secondly, another that makes it comprehensible why the common underlying principle of all plants and animals appears in such a diversity of forms. The basic essence that expresses itself in every plant, the animality that is found in all animals, that is what he sought first. The artificial partitions between the individual genera and species had to be torn down, it had to be shown that all plants are only modifications of an original plant, all animals of an original animal. Kant had declared it impossible that we could recognize the original form that underlies all organisms and that we are able to find the lawful causes within our world of appearance that cause this original form to appear once as a lily and another time as an oak. Goethe undertook "the adventure of reason" and thus accomplished a scientific deed of the first order. Goethe thus set out to form an idea of that original form and to seek the laws and conditions that explain its appearance in its manifold forms. In his opinion, however, science must do justice to both of these requirements. He who has no concept of the original form can indeed state the facts under whose influence one organic form has transformed itself into another, but he can never arrive at a real explanation. That is why Goethe considered it his first task to find the original plant and the original animal or, as he also called it, the type of plants and animals.

[ 8 ] What does Goethe understand by this type? He spoke clearly and unambiguously about it. He says that he felt the need to "establish a type against which all mammals could be tested for similarity and difference, and just as I had previously sought out the original plant, I now sought to find the original animal, which ultimately means: the concept, the idea of the animal". And another time with even greater clarity: "But once you have grasped the idea of this type, you will realize how impossible it is to establish a single genus as a canon. The individual cannot be a pattern of the whole, and so we must not seek the pattern for all in the individual. The classes, genera, species and individuals behave like the cases to the law: they are contained in it, but they do not contain or give it." So if Goethe had been asked whether he saw his archetype, his type, realized in a particular animal or plant form that existed at some time, he would undoubtedly have answered with a resounding no. He would have said: Just like the domestic dog, even the simplest animal organism is only a special case of what I understand by type. The type is not realized at all in the external world, but it arises as an idea within us when we consider what living beings have in common. As little as the physicist makes a single case, a random phenomenon, the starting point of his investigations, as little may the zoologist or botanist address a single organism as a primordial organism.

[ 9 ] And here is the point at which it must become clear that the newer Darwinism falls far short of Goethe's basic ideas. This scientific current finds that there are two causes under the influence of which one organic form can transform itself into another: adaptation and the struggle for existence. Adaptation is understood to mean the fact that an organism undergoes a change in its vital activity and in its form as a result of influences from the outside world. As a result, it acquires characteristics that its ancestors did not have. In this way, therefore, a transformation of existing organic forms can take place. The law of the struggle for existence is based on the following considerations. Organic life produces many more germs than there is room on earth for their nourishment and development. Not all of them can reach full maturity. Each developing organism seeks the means for its existence from its environment. It is inevitable that with the abundance of germs a struggle will arise between the individual beings. And since only a limited number can find a livelihood, it is natural that this consists of those who prove to be the stronger in the struggle. These will emerge victorious. But which are the strongest? Undoubtedly those with an organization that proves to be adequate to provide the means of life. The creatures with inappropriate organization must succumb and die out. Therefore, says Darwinism, there can only be functional organizations. The others have simply perished in the struggle for existence. Taking these two principles as a basis, Darwinism explains the origin of species in such a way that organisms transform themselves through adaptation under the influence of the outside world, transplant the new characteristics gained in this way to their descendants and, of the forms transformed in this way, always preserve those that have assumed the most appropriate form in the transformation process.

[ 10 ] Goethe would undoubtedly have no objection to these two principles. We can prove that he was already familiar with both. But he did not consider them sufficient to explain the forms of organic life. For him they were external conditions under the influence of which what he called type takes on particular forms and can transform itself in the most varied ways. Before something transforms, however, it must first exist. Adaptation and the struggle for existence presuppose the organic, which they influence. Goethe first sought to obtain the necessary precondition. His essay "An attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants", published in 1790, pursues the idea of finding an ideal plant form that underlies all plant beings as their archetype. He later attempted to do the same for the animal world.

[ 11 ] Just as Copernicus sought the laws for the movements of the limbs of our solar system, Goethe sought those according to which a living organism is formed. I will not go into the details, but will gladly admit that they are in great need of improvement. However, Goethe's undertaking represents a decisive step in exactly the same way as Copernicus' explanation of the solar system, which was also significantly improved by Kepler.

[ 12 ] I have already in 1883 (in my edition of Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschners Nat. Lit, 1.vol.), I endeavored to show that the newer natural science has only brought one side of Goethe's view to fruition.¹ The study of the external conditions for the transformation of species is in full swing. Haeckel ingeniously sought to determine the degrees of relationship of the forms of the animal world. Virtually nothing has been done to discover the inner laws of organism formation. Indeed, there are researchers who regard such laws as mere figments of the imagination. They believe they have done all that is necessary when they show how the more complicated living beings have gradually built themselves up from elementary organisms. And these elementary organic entities are to be explained by the mere lawful combination of inorganic substances in the same way as the formation of a chemical compound is explained. Thus one would have happily accomplished the feat of explaining life by destroying it or, rather, by thinking of it as non-existent. Goethe would never have agreed with such an approach. He sought natural laws for the living, but nothing was further from his mind than the attempt to simply transfer the laws of the inanimate to the animate.

[ 13 ] Until the opening of the Goethe Archive, some of my assertions could perhaps have been disputed, although I believe that for anyone who reads Goethe's scientific writings in context, there is no doubt about the way their author thought. But these writings do not form a coherent whole. They do not represent an all-round view of nature, but only fragments of such a view. They have gaps which anyone who wants to gain an idea of Goethe's world of ideas must fill in hypothetically. Goethe's handwritten estate, which is in the Goethe Archive in Weimar, now makes it possible to fill in numerous and important gaps. It has given me the gratifying certainty that the ideas I had previously formed about Goethe's scientific thinking, which I have just characterized, are completely correct. I had no need to modify my concepts, but today I can substantiate with Goethe's own words many things that I was only able to represent hypothetically before the opening of the archive.²

[ 14 ] We read, for example, in an essay published in the Weimar edition of the sixth volume of Goethe's scientific writings: The metamorphosis of plants "shows us the laws according to which plants are formed. It draws our attention to a double law: 1. to the law of inner nature, by which plants are constituted, 2. to the law of external circumstances, by which plants are modified."

[ 15 ] It is particularly interesting, however, that we can follow the train of thought step by step through which Goethe sought to recognize this law of inner nature, according to which plants are formed. These thoughts developed in Goethe during his Italian journey. The notepads on which he jotted down his observations have been preserved. The Weimar edition has included them in the seventh volume of his scientific writings. They are a model of how a researcher seeks to fathom the secrets of nature with a philosophical eye. With the same deep seriousness with which he pursued his artistic interests in Italy, he endeavoured to recognize the laws of plant life. These sheets provide full proof that a long endeavor lay behind Goethe when, around the middle of 1787, he elevated the hypothesis of the primordial plant to a decisive scientific conviction.

[ 16 ] The poet devoted even more time and effort to applying his ideas to the animal kingdom and human beings. As early as 1781, he began the serious study of anatomy in Jena. In this field, Goethe found a scientific view that his whole nature resisted. It was believed that there was a slight difference between humans and animals in terms of anatomical structure. Animals have a small bone (intermaxillary bone) between the two symmetrical halves of the upper jaw, which contains the upper incisors. In humans, it was believed, there was no such bone. This view must have immediately appeared to Goethe to be a mistake. Where there is such a similarity of structure as in the skeleton of man and that of the higher animals, there must be a deeper natural law underlying it, where such a difference in detail is not possible. In 1784 Goethe succeeded in proving that the intermediate bone is also present in man, and thus the last obstacle that stood in the way of establishing a uniform type for all animal organizations up to man was removed. As early as 1790, Goethe set about following up his essay on the metamorphosis of plants with a similar essay "On the Form of Animals", which unfortunately remained a fragment. It can be found in the eighth volume of the natural scientific writings of the \Weimar edition. Goethe then set about realizing this intention again in 1795, but this time he did not finish it either. We can recognize his intentions in detail from the two fragments; the execution of the enormous idea would have taken more time than the poet had available given his wide-ranging interests. However, these endeavors are followed by a single discovery that clearly shows us what they were aimed at. Just as Goethe sought to trace all plants back to the original plant and all animals back to the original animal, he also strove to explain the individual parts of one and the same organism from a basic component that has the ability to transform itself in a variety of ways. He thought that all organs can be traced back to a basic form that only takes on different shapes. He saw an animal and a plant individual as consisting of many details. These details are identical in structure, but identical or similar, dissimilar and dissimilar in appearance. The more imperfect the creature is, the more the parts resemble each other and the more they resemble the whole. The more perfect the creature becomes, the more dissimilar the parts become. Goethe therefore strove to find similarities between the individual parts of an organism. In the case of the animal skeleton, this led him to an idea of far-reaching significance, that of the so-called vertebral nature of the skull bones. We are dealing here with the view that the bones that surround the brain have the same basic shape as those that make up the spine. Goethe probably suspected this soon after beginning his anatomical investigations. It became a complete certainty for him in 1790, when he found a sheep's skull on the dunes of the Lido in Venice, which had fallen apart so happily that Goethe believed he could clearly recognize the individual vertebral bodies in the pieces. Here, too, it has been claimed that Goethe's discovery was much more of a lucky idea than a real scientific result. It seems to me, however, that it is precisely the latest work in this field that provides full proof that the path Goethe took was the right one. In 1872, the outstanding anatomist Carl Gegenbaur published studies on the head skeleton of the Selachians or prehistoric fishes, which show that the skull is the remodeled end part of the backbone and the brain is the remodeled end part of the spinal cord. One must now imagine that the bony skull capsule of the higher animals consists of remodeled vertebral bodies which, however, in the course of the development of higher animal forms from lower ones, have gradually assumed such a shape and have grown together in such a way that they appear suitable for enclosing the brain. Therefore, the vertebral theory of the skull can only be studied in connection with the comparative anatomy of the brain. That Goethe was already considering this matter from this point of view in 1790 is shown by an entry in his diary, which was recently found in Goethe's archive: "The brain itself is only one large main ganglion. The organization of the brain is repeated in each ganglion, so that each ganglion is to be regarded as a small subordinate brain."

[ 17 ] From all this it is clear that Goethe's scientific method is equal to any criticism and that in the pursuit of his natural philosophical ideas he made a series of individual discoveries which today's science, albeit in an improved form, must also consider to be important components of knowledge of nature. However, Goethe's significance does not lie in these individual discoveries, but in the fact that his way of looking at things led him to completely new guiding points of view on the knowledge of nature. He was fully aware of this himself. On August 18, 1787, he wrote to Knebel from Italy: "After what I have seen of plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, if I were ten years younger, I would be very tempted to make a journey to India, not to discover new things, but to look at what I have discovered in my own way." These words express Goethe's view of scientific knowledge. Faithful, sober observation alone cannot lead to the goal. Only when we find the appropriate point of view from which to look at things do they become comprehensible to us. Through his way of looking at things, Goethe destroyed the great dividing wall between inanimate and animate nature; indeed, it was he who first elevated the doctrine of organisms to the rank of a science. Schiller expressed the essence of this approach in meaningful words in a letter to Goethe on August 23, 1793: "I have long watched the course of your mind, albeit from quite a distance, and have noted the path you have marked out with ever renewed admiration. You are looking for the extraordinary in nature, but you are looking for it in the most difficult way, which any weaker force would be wary of. You take the whole of nature together in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the ground of explanation for the individual. From the simple organization you ascend step by step to the more intricate, in order finally to build the most intricate of all, man, genetically from the materials of the whole edifice of nature. By recreating him from nature, as it were, you seek to penetrate his hidden technology."

[ 18 ] From this school of thought, a view of nature had to develop that was equally far removed from crude materialism and nebulous mysticism. For them it was self-evident that the particular could only be recognized through experience, the general, the great lawful connections of nature only by ascending from observation to the idea. Only where both interact: Idea and experience, Goethe sees the spirit of true natural research. He expresses this aptly with the words: "Time is governed by the pendulum swing, the moral and scientific world by the alternating movement from idea to experience" (Goethes Werke, II. Abteilung, 6. Band, p. 354). Goethe believed that only in the idea could he come close to the secret of life. He found causes at work in the organic world that are only partly perceptible to the senses. He sought to recognize the other part by attempting to recreate the laws of nature in images. Although life expresses itself in sensory reality, it does not exist in it. That is why it cannot be found through sensory experience. The higher spiritual powers must intervene. It is popular today to recognize only the intellect as having a right to speak in science alongside sober observation. Goethe believed that he could only come into possession of the truth by exerting all his intellectual powers. That is why he never tired of putting himself in relation to the most diverse types of scientific endeavor. In the scientific institutes of the Jena University he sought to acquire the factual knowledge for his ideas; from its famous philosophical teachers and from Schiller he sought information about the philosophical justification of his school of thought. Goethe was not a philosopher in the true sense of the word, but his way of looking at things was philosophical. He did not develop any philosophical concepts, but his scientific ideas are based on a philosophical spirit. By his nature, Goethe could neither be a one-sided philosopher nor a one-sided observer. Both sides worked harmoniously together in him in the higher unity, the philosophical observer, just as art and science are united again in the comprehensive personality of Goethe, who interests us not only in this or that branch of his work, but in its entirety as a world-historical phenomenon. In Goethe's mind, science and art worked together. We see this best when, in view of the Greek works of art in Italy, he wrote that he believed that the Greeks followed the same laws in their creations as nature itself, and he remarked that he believed he was on the trail of these laws. He wrote this at a time when he was pursuing the idea of the primordial plant. There can therefore be no doubt that Goethe thought of the artist's work as being guided by the same basic maxims that nature follows in its productions. And because he suspected the same basic essences in nature that guided him as an artist in his own work, he was driven by a scientific knowledge of them. Goethe professed a strictly unified or monistic view of the world. He saw unified fundamental powers ruling from the simplest process of lifeless nature right up to the imagination of man, from which the works of art spring.

[ 19 ] Rudolf Virchow emphasizes in the remarkable speech he gave on August 3 of this year to celebrate the birthday of the founder of Berlin University that the philosophical era of German science, in which Fichte, Schelling and Hegel set the tone, has been definitively over since Hegel's death and that we have been living in the age of the natural sciences ever since. Virchow praises this age for the fact that it increasingly understood that natural science could only be understood by studying nature itself: in museums, collections, laboratories and institutes, and that no information about natural processes could be gained from the study rooms of philosophers. This is the expression of a widespread prejudice of our time. The advocate of a strictly scientific view of the world would have to say to himself that what belongs to external nature and what we alone can accommodate in scientific institutes is only one part of nature, and that the other, certainly no less essential part, is not to be sought in the study, but certainly in the mind of the philosopher. This is how Goethe thought, and his thinking is therefore more scientific than that of modern natural science. The latter leaves the human urge for knowledge completely unsatisfied when it is a matter of something higher than what is accessible to sensible observation. It is therefore no wonder that Virchow has to complain at the same time about the worst intrusions of mysticism into the field of the science of life. What science fails to do, a deeper need seeks in all kinds of mysterious forces of nature, namely the explanation of facts once they exist. And Virchow also admits that the age of natural science has so far been unable to explain the essence of life and the human spirit.

[ 20 ] But who can hope to see thought with his eyes, to perceive life with a microscope? The only way to achieve something here is to go in the second direction, through which Goethe sought to reach the primordial organisms. The questions that modern natural science cannot answer are precisely those that Goethe undertakes to solve in a way that people today do not want to know about. This opens up a field in which Goethe's scientific work can be put at the service of the times. They will prove effective precisely where the current method proves impotent. It is not only a matter of doing justice to Goethe and assigning his research the right place in history, but also of continuing to cultivate his way of thinking with our more perfect means.

[ 21 ] He himself was primarily concerned that the world should recognize what his view of nature meant in general, and only secondarily what he was able to achieve with the help of this view with the means of his time in particular.

[ 22 ] The scientific age has torn the bond between experience and philosophy. Philosophy has become the stepchild of this age. However, the need for a philosophical deepening of our knowledge has already arisen in many cases. For the time being, this need is still trying to satisfy itself in a number of misguided ways. The overestimation of hypnotism, spiritualism and mysticism are among them. Raw materialism is also an attempt to find the way to a philosophical overall view of things. Injecting a little philosophy into the scientific age is a desirable goal for many today. May we remember at the right time that there is a path from natural science to philosophy and that this is mapped out in Goethe's writings.

• 1. My "Introductions to Goethe's Natural Scientific Writings" included in the Kürschner edition attempt to present in detail the scientific significance of these writings and their relationship to the present standpoint of science
• 2. A complete, systematically organized whole of Goethe's morphological and general scientific ideas will form volumes 6-12 (6, 7, 8, 9 have already been published) of the second section of the Weimar Goethe Edition. The arrangement of the material is in agreement with the editor of the volumes, Prof. Suphan, and with his continued active participation by myself and (for the 8th volume) by Prof. Bardeleben in Jena, as editor of these writings.

On the occasion of his hundred and fiftieth birthday: August 28, 1899

[ 1 ] When Johann Gottlieb Fichte sent Goethe the work in which bold intellectual power and the highest ethical seriousness found an incomparable expression, the "Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre", he enclosed a letter containing the words: "I regard you, and have always regarded you, as the representative of the purest spirituality of feeling at the presently attained stage of humanity. It is to you that philosophy rightly turns: your feeling is the same touchstone." These sentences were written in 1794. Like the great philosopher, the bearers of the most diverse intellectual currents could have written to Goethe at that time. The poet and thinker Goethe was at the height of his life at this time. Albert Bielschowski, the biographer who most lovingly immerses himself in this personality and provides us with the most intimate picture of him, already felt the same way about Goethe's contemporaries in the 1990s: "Goethe had received a dose of everything human and was therefore the 'most human of all men'. His figure had a great typical character. It was a potentized image of humanity itself. Accordingly, everyone who approached him had the impression that they had never seen such a complete human being before."

[ 2 ] This was Goethe's relationship to his spiritual environment when he entered his fiftieth year one hundred years ago. He stood there as an accomplished man. The study of antiquity had given his artistic work the degree of perfection that was demanded by the innermost essence of his personality and beyond which there was no further progress for him; his insight into the workings of nature had come to an end. From then on, all that remained for him was to carry out the ideas of nature that had taken root in his mind. At that time, the "most human of all men" had a completely mature effect on those around him.

[ 3 ] Schiller expressed this in eloquent words in the letter he addressed to Goethe on August 23, 1794: "I have long watched the course of your mind, although from quite a distance, and have noticed the path you have marked out for yourself with ever renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it in the most difficult way, from which any weaker force would be wary. You take the whole of nature together in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the ground of explanation for the individual... If you had been born a Greek, indeed only an Italian, and had been surrounded from the cradle by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. Already in your first view of things you would then have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now that you were born a German, since your Greek spirit was thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but either to become a Nordic artist yourself, or to replace your imagination with what reality withheld from it through the help of the power of thought, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within, as it were, and in a rational way." Goethe replied on the 27th: "For my birthday, which comes this week, no more pleasant gift could have been given to me than your letter, in which you, with a friendly hand, draw the sum of my existence and encourage me through your participation to a more diligent and lively use of my powers."

[ 4 ] We can expand on this sentence and say: Goethe could not have received a more meaningful gift in the time of his maturity than Schiller's devoted friendship. The latter's philosophical sense led Goethe's pure spirituality of feeling into new spiritual regions.

[ 5 ] The beautiful similarity between the two spirits that developed is characterized by Schiller in a letter to Körner: "Each could give the other something that he lacked and receive something in return. Goethe now feels the need to join me in order to continue on the path that he had previously taken alone and without encouragement, in community with me."

[ 6 ] Around the time his friendship with Goethe began, Schiller was preoccupied with the ideas expressed in his "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man". He reworked these letters, originally written for the Duke of Augustenburg, for the "Horen" in 1794. What Goethe and Schiller discussed orally at the time and what they wrote to each other was always linked to the ideas in these letters. Schiller's reflections concerned the question: What state of the soul's powers corresponds in the highest sense of the word to an existence worthy of man? "Every individual human being, one can say, carries within himself a pure, ideal human being by disposition and destiny, with whose unchanging unity in all his variations it is the great task of his existence to agree," it says in the fourth letter. A bridge is to be built from the man of everyday reality to the ideal man. There are two instincts that hold man back from ideal perfection if they are developed in a one-sided way: the sensual and the rational instinct. If the sensual instinct has the upper hand, man is subject to his instincts and passions. His actions are the result of a lower compulsion. If the rational instinct predominates, man endeavors to suppress instincts and passions and to pursue a purely spiritual virtue. In both cases, man is subject to compulsion. In the former, his sensual nature forces his spiritual nature into submission, in the latter, his spiritual nature forces his sensual nature into submission. Neither the one nor the other can justify a truly humane existence. Rather, this presupposes a perfect harmony of both basic drives. Sensuality should not be suppressed, but ennobled; instincts and passions should be raised to such a high level that they work in the direction prescribed by reason, the highest morality. And moral reason should not rule like a higher law in man, to which one submits reluctantly, but one should feel its commandments like an unconstrained need. "If we embrace with passion someone who is worthy of our contempt, we feel embarrassed by the compulsion of nature. If we are hostile to another who compels our respect, we feel the compulsion of reason. But as soon as he interests our affections and earns our respect, both the compulsion of feeling and the compulsion of reason disappear, and we begin to love him" (Letter 14). A person who experiences no coercion from either sensuality or reason, who acts out of passion in the spirit of the purest morality, is a free personality. And a society of people in which the natural instinct of the individual is so ennobled that it does not need to be restrained by the power of the whole in order to make harmonious coexistence possible is the ideal state towards which the state of power and coercion must strive. Outer freedom in living together presupposes inner freedom of the individual personalities. In this way, Schiller sought to solve the problem of freedom in human coexistence, which was on everyone's mind at the time and which sought a violent solution in the French Revolution. "To give freedom through freedom is the fundamental law" of a humane empire (27th letter).

[ 7 ] Goethe found himself deeply satisfied by these ideas. He wrote to Schiller about the "Aesthetic Letters" on October 26, 1794: "I immediately read the manuscript sent to me with great pleasure; I slurped it down in one go. Just as a delicious drink, analogous to our nature, slips down willingly and shows its healing effect on the tongue through the good mood of the nervous system, so these letters were pleasant and beneficial to me; and how could it be otherwise, since I found what I had long recognized as right, what I partly lived and partly wished to live, presented in such a coherent and noble way."

[ 8 ] This is the nature of the circle of ideas that Schiller stimulated in Goethe. Out of it has now grown a poem by the former, which, because of its mysterious character, has experienced the most varied interpretations, but which only becomes completely clear and transparent if one understands it from within the circle of imagination described: the enigmatic fairy tale with which Goethe concluded his story "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten", which appeared in the "Horen" in 1795. -- What Schiller expressed in philosophical form in his "Aesthetic Letters", Goethe portrayed in a lively fairy tale filled with rich poetic content. The humane state that man achieves when he has attained the full possession of freedom is symbolized in this fairy tale by the marriage of a young man to the beautiful lily, the representative of the realm of freedom, the ideal man that the man of everyday life carries within himself as his goal.

[ 9 ] The largest number of attempts at interpretation undertaken to date can be found in the book "Goethes Märchendichtungen" by Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck (Heidelberg 1879, Carl Wintersche Universitätsbuchhandlung). I have found that these attempts at interpretation give nice suggestions and are in many respects correct, but that none of them is completely satisfactory. I have now sought the roots of the explanation in the soil from which Schiller's "Aesthetic Letters" also grew. Although my interpretation has had a convincing effect on many listeners in several oral lectures - the first time on November 27, 1891 at the Goethe-Verein in Vienna - I have so far hesitated to submit it to print. Nor have I yet added it to my book "Goethe's Weltanschauung", published in 1897. I felt the need to allow the conviction of its correctness to mature in me over a longer period of time. It has only strengthened to this day. The following cannot follow the course of the fairy-tale plot, but must be arranged in such a way that the meaning of the poem is revealed most comfortably.¹

[ 10 ] One person who plays an outstanding role in the development of the events in the "fairy tale" is the "old man with the lamp". When he comes into the crevices with his lamp, he is asked which is the most important of the secrets he knows. He replies: "The revealed one." And when asked if he would not reveal this secret, he says: "If he knows the fourth. But the serpent knows this fourth secret and says it in the old man's ear. There can be no doubt that this secret refers to the state that all the characters in the fairy tale long for. This state is described to us at the end of the poem. We must assume that the old man knows this secret, for he is the only person who always stands above the circumstances, who directs and guides everything. So what can the serpent tell the old man? He is the most important being in the whole process. By sacrificing himself, he achieves what ultimately satisfies everyone. The old man obviously knows that he must sacrifice himself in order to bring about this satisfaction. What he does not know is when she will be ready. Because that depends on her. She must come to the realization of her own accord that her sacrifice is necessary for the common good. That she is ready for this sacrifice is the most important secret, and she tells the old man this in his ear. And now he can utter the great word: "It's time!""

[ 11 ] The desired goal is brought about by the revival of the youth, by his union with the beautiful lily and by the fact that both realms, the one on this side and the one on the other side of the river, are connected by the magnificent bridge formed from the sacrificed body of the serpent. Even if the serpent is the author of the happy state, he alone could not bestow on the youth the gifts by which he rules the newly founded kingdom. He receives them from the three kings. From the bronze king he receives the sword with the order: "The sword on the left, the right free!" The silver king gives him the sceptre, saying: "Feed the sheep!" The golden one presses the oak wreath on his head with the words: "Recognize the highest! " The three kings are the symbols for the three basic powers of the human soul, and the words they speak indicate how these three basic powers should be expressed in the perfect human being. The sword denotes will, physical strength and power. Man should not hold it in his right hand, where it signifies readiness for conflict and war, but in his left hand for protection and to ward off evil. The right hand should be free for acts of noble humanity. The handing over of the sceptre is accompanied by the words: "Feed the sheep!" They are reminiscent of Christ's words: "Feed my lambs, feed my sheep!" This king is therefore the symbol of piety, of the noble heart. The golden king imparts the gift of knowledge to the young man with the oak wreath. The will, which expresses itself in power, in violence, piety and wisdom in their most perfect form are bestowed on the youth, the representative of a humane existence. These three powers of the soul are symbolized by the three kings. Therefore, when the old man speaks the words: "There are three that reign on earth, Wisdom, Appearance and Violence", the three kings rise up, each at the mention of the soul power of which he is the symbol. There seems to be an ambiguity in the fact that the silver king is presented as the ruler in the realm of appearances, while according to his words he is to signify piety. This contradiction is immediately resolved when one considers the close relationship Goethe establishes between aesthetic feelings - which the beautiful appearance of artistic works creates - and religious feelings. Just think of sentences from him like this: "There are only two true religions: the one that recognizes and worships the sacred that dwells in and around us, completely formless, the other that recognizes and worships it in the most beautiful form." Goethe sees art as just another form of religion. When he was struck by the beauty of Greek works of art, he uttered the sentence: "There is necessity, there is God."

[ 12 ] From the meaning of the kings, we can infer other things in the fairy tale. The king of wisdom is made of gold. Where we usually encounter gold in fairy tales, we will therefore see in it the symbol of wisdom, of knowledge. This is the case with the will-o'-the-wisps and the snake. The former know how to acquire this metal easily and then throw it away lavishly and arrogantly. The serpent comes to it with difficulty, but absorbs it organically, processes it in its body and permeates itself completely with it. In the will-o'-the-wisps we undoubtedly have before us a pictorial representation of personalities who gather their wisdom from all sides and then give it away proudly and carelessly without having sufficiently imbued themselves with it. Unproductive spirits are the will-o'-the-wisps who spread undigested knowledge. If their words fall on fertile ground, they can bring about the very best. A person can impart teachings that he himself has no deep understanding of to another, and this other person can recognize a deep meaning in them. The serpent represents the solid human endeavor, the honest striding along the path of knowledge. For her, the gold squandered by the will-o'-the-wisps becomes a precious commodity that she keeps within herself. For Goethe, the thought of someone giving away the wisdom he had absorbed as a teacher was an uncomfortable one. In his opinion, teaching easily leads to appropriating science in order to be able to spend it again. He therefore considers himself fortunate that he can devote himself to research without having to hold a professorship at the same time. Only those who are in the latter position - apart from exceptions, of course - will truly immerse themselves selflessly in things and serve true humanity. Those who acquire wisdom for the sake of teaching easily become false prophets or sophists. The false lights are reminiscent of these. But only selfless knowledge, which is completely absorbed in things and which is visualized in the serpent, can come to the insight that the highest can only be reached through selfless devotion. The man who lets his everyday personality die in order to awaken the ideal man within himself reaches this highest. What a mystic like Jakob Böhme expressed with the words: death is the root of all life, Goethe expressed with the sacrificing snake. In Goethe's view, those who cannot free themselves from their small ego, who are unable to develop the higher ego within themselves, cannot reach perfection. Man must die as an individual in order to revive as a higher personality. The new life is then only the most humane, the same life that, to use Schiller's words, feels no coercion from either reason or sensuality. In "Divan" we read Goethe's beautiful words: "And as long as you do not have this, this: Die and become! You are but a dreary guest on the dark earth." And one of the "Proverbs in Prose" reads: "One must give up one's existence in order to exist." The snake gives up its existence in order to form the bridge that connects the two realms, that of sensuality and that of spirituality. The temple, with its colorful bustle, is the serpent's higher life, which it has purchased through the death of its lower nature. Her words that she wants to sacrifice herself voluntarily in order not to be sacrificed are just another expression of Jakob Böhme's sentence: "He who does not die before he dies, corrupts when he dies"; in other words, he who lives without killing off the lower nature within him, dies in the end without having any idea of the ideal man within him.

[ 13 ] The youth is driven by an indomitable desire for the realm of the beautiful lily. Consider the characteristics of this realm. Although people have the deepest longing for the realm of the lily, they can only enter it at certain times. At midday, when the serpent forms a bridge over the river; then in the evening and morning, when the giant's shadow spreads across the river. Anyone who approaches the ruler of this realm, the beautiful lily, without having the inner aptitude for it, can damage his life in the most serious way. Furthermore, the lily itself has a desire for the other realm. Finally, the ferryman can take anyone across, but no one across. So what does the realm of the beautiful lily mean? Goethe says in "Proverbs in Prose": "Everything that liberates our spirit without giving us dominion over ourselves is pernicious." Only those people who are allowed to abandon themselves unreservedly to their inclinations have mastery over themselves, because these are only effective in a moral sense. "Duty, where one loves what one commands oneself", is a saying by Goethe. Those who seize freedom without having control over themselves are like the young man who was paralyzed by the touch of the lily. The realm of the one-sidedly acting instinct of reason, of purely spiritual morality, is that of the lily. That of one-sided sensuality is on the other side of the river. In the still imperfect human being the harmony between sensual instinct and rational instinct is generally not established. Only at certain moments does he act out of passion in such a way that this action is also moral in itself. This is symbolized by the fact that the snake can only form a bridge over the river at certain moments, at midday. The fact that the lily longs for the other realm expresses the fact that the rational instinct only fulfills its nature when it does not act like a strict legislator beyond the desires and instincts and restrains them, but when it penetrates them, connects with them. The ferryman can bring everyone across, but no one across. Men come from the realm of reason without having done anything themselves, but they do not return from the realm of the passions to their true homeland without their intervention. Except in those moments when man reaches the ideal state of life by balancing reason and sensuality, he also seeks to attain it by force, by arbitrariness, which finds expression in political revolutions. Goethe brings the giant and his shadow for this kind of combination of both realms. In revolutions, the urge for the ideal state lives itself out dully, just as the shadow of the giant lies across the river at dusk. There is also historical evidence that this interpretation of the giant is correct. On October 16, 1795, Schiller wrote to Goethe, who was on a journey that was to extend to Frankfurt a. M.: "It is indeed dear to me to know that you are still far away from the Main River. The shadow of the giant could easily touch you a little roughly." What the arbitrariness, the lawless course of historical events has in its wake is thus meant by the shadow of the giant.

[ 14 ] Reason and sensuality interpose themselves so that the still imperfect human being is prevented from destroying morality through his passions: Custom, all that is social order of the present. This order finds its symbol in the river. In the third of the "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" Schiller says of the state: "The compulsion of needs threw man into it before he could choose this state in his freedom; necessity arranged him according to mere natural laws before he could do so according to the laws of reason." The river separates the two realms until the serpent sacrifices itself. The ferryman wants to be rewarded by every wanderer with the fruits of the earth; the state and society impose real duties on man; they can no more use the phrase-like chatter of false prophets and people who merely pay with words than the ferryman can use the gold pieces of the will-o'-the-wisps. The old woman confesses herself a debtor to the river and clings to it with her body; her form disappears because she is a debtor. Thus the individual confesses himself a debtor to the state; he is absorbed in the state, surrenders a part of his self to it. As long as man is not at such a height that he acts freely out of himself morally, he must renounce to determine a part of his self of his own accord; he must commit himself to the state.

[ 15 ] The lamp of the old has the property of shining only where another light is already present. We must remember the saying of an old mystic repeated by Goethe: "If the eye were not sunny, how could we see the light? If God's own power did not live in us, how could the divine delight us?" Just as the lamp does not shine in the dark, so the light of truth and knowledge does not shine for those who do not have the appropriate organs, the inner light, to meet it. But it is this light of wisdom that leads man to his goal; it brings him to establish the harmony of his instincts. This light allows him to recognize the laws of things. What for him is dead matter is transformed through knowledge into a living thing that is transparent to our spirit. The world stands differently before him who has recognized it than before him who lives without knowledge. The transformation that all things undergo for our spirit when they are illuminated by the light of knowledge is symbolized by the transformation that things undergo through the light of the lamp. This light transforms stones into gold, wood into silver and dead animals into precious stones.

[ 16 ] Through the sacrifice of the serpent, the realm of the fourth king, who chaotically carried gold, silver and ore, comes to an end. The harmonious interaction of the three metals that make up the other three kings begins. Through the awakening of the ideal man, the forces of the soul cease to work chaotically and one-sidedly, they achieve perfect harmony. The will-o'-the-wisps lick up the gold of the fourth king. Once the humane state has been reached, the unproductive spirits have the business of scientifically processing the past, in which the imperfect still prevailed, as history. The figure of the pug also sheds light on the nature of the will-o'-the-wisps. They throw him their gold and he dies from eating it. Thus perishes he to whom false prophets and sophists teach their indigestible doctrines.

[ 17 ] The temple is erected on the river in which the marriage of the young man with the beautiful lily takes place. The free society will grow out of the coercive state, in which everyone can abandon himself to his inclinations, because they only work in the sense that noble coexistence of people is possible. Then man will no longer experience the satisfying state only in moments, he will no longer seek to attain it by revolutionary force, it will be present for him in every moment. At the end of the fairy tale we find the poetic image for this truth: "The bridge is built; all the people continually cross over and over, to this day the bridge teems with wanderers, and the temple is the most visited on the whole earth."

[ 18 ] If one accepts this basis of interpretation, then every event, every person in the fairy tale is self-explanatory. Take the hawk, for example. It catches the sun's rays in order to reflect them back to the earth before the sun itself is able to send its light directly onto the earth. In this way, human intuition can also predict the events of a not-too-distant future. In the servants of the beautiful lily one can see representatives of those happily inclined human beings to whom the harmony of sensuality and reason is given by their nature. They will live on into the new realm without noticing the transition, just as the servants slumber during the moment of transformation. - The fact that the symbol of brute force, the giant, finally plays a role as an hour hand, I would like to interpret as meaning that unreason can also fill its place in the workings of the world, if it is not used for activities that befit the free human spirit, but is brought to unfold its power within strict natural regularity.

[ 19 ] So Goethe was inspired by Schiller to express his ethical creed in his own poetic way, as Schiller himself did in a different way in the "Aesthetic Letters". In the letter in which he announces the receipt of the manuscript, Schiller refers to the discussions that took place about these ideas in the period in question: "The "fairy tale" is colorful and funny enough, and I find the idea you once mentioned: "the mutual assistance of forces and the rejection of each other, quite well executed."

• 1. In my lectures I have often been asked by listeners whether the "Fairy Tale" is included in the Goethe editions. I therefore expressly note that it is included in every Goethe edition and that it forms the conclusion of the stories "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten".

[ 1 ] One cannot achieve a full understanding of Goethe's inner life, his view of the world and of life, merely by commenting on his works from the outside. Rather, one must go back to the philosophical core of his entire being. Goethe was not a philosopher in the scientific sense, but he was a philosophical nature.

[ 2 ] I would like to capture this nature here with a few thoughts in order to then characterize Goethe's position on Christianity. In our reactionary present, it seems to me not unjustified to reflect on the relationship of this leading spirit to religious questions.

[ 3 ] Man is not satisfied with what nature voluntarily offers to his observing mind. He feels that in order to bring forth the diversity of her creations, she needs driving forces which he himself must acquire through observation and thought. In the human spirit itself lies the means of revealing the driving forces of nature. From the human spirit arise the ideas that shed light on how nature brings about its creations. How the phenomena of the outer world are connected is revealed within the human being. What the human spirit conceives of the laws of nature: it is not added to nature, it is nature's own essence; and the spirit is only the arena in which nature makes the secrets of its workings visible. What we observe in things is only a part of things. What wells up in our spirit when it confronts things is the other part. It is the same things that speak to us from the outside and that speak within us. Only when we hold the language of the outside world together with that of our inner world do we have the full reality.

[ 4 ] The mind sees what experience contains in a coherent form. It seeks laws where nature offers it facts.

[ 5 ] Philosophers and artists have the same goal. They seek to create the perfect that their minds see when they allow nature to work on them. But they have different means at their disposal to achieve this goal. A thought, an idea, lights up in the philosopher when he confronts a natural process. He expresses it. In the artist, an image of this process emerges that shows it more perfectly than it can be observed in the outside world. The philosopher and the artist develop observation in different ways. The artist does not need to know the driving forces of nature in the form in which they reveal themselves to the philosopher. When he perceives a thing or a process, an image immediately arises in his mind in which the laws of nature are expressed in a more perfect form than in the corresponding thing or process in the outside world. These laws in the form of thought need not enter his mind. Cognition and art are, however, inwardly related. They show the laws of nature that prevail in it as facts.

[ 6 ] If, in addition to perfect images of things, the driving forces of nature also express themselves in the form of thoughts in the mind of a true artist, then the common source of philosophy and art becomes particularly clear to us. Goethe is such an artist. He reveals the same secrets to us in the form of his works of art and in the form of thought. What he creates in his poetry, he expresses in the form of thought in his essays on the natural sciences and the arts and in his "Proverbs in Prose". The deep satisfaction that emanates from these essays and sayings is due to the fact that one sees the harmony of art and knowledge realized in a personality. There is something uplifting about the feeling that arises with every Goethean thought: here is someone speaking who can at the same time see in the picture the perfection that he expresses in ideas. The power of such a thought is strengthened by this feeling. What comes from the highest needs of a personality must belong together inwardly. Goethe's wisdom teachings answer the question: what kind of philosophy is in accordance with genuine art?

[ 7 ] What springs from the human spirit when it confronts the outside world in observation and thought is truth. Man can demand no other knowledge than that which he himself produces. He who still seeks something behind things that is supposed to signify their actual essence has not brought himself to realize that all questions about the essence of things arise only from a human need: to penetrate with thought that which one perceives. Things speak to us, and our inner being speaks when we observe things. These two languages come from the same primordial being, and man is called to bring about their mutual understanding. This is what is called knowledge. And this and nothing else is sought by those who understand the needs of human nature. Those who do not attain this understanding remain strangers to the things of the outside world. He does not hear the essence of things speaking to him from within. He therefore assumes that this essence is hidden behind things. He believes in an outer world still behind the world of perception. But things are only alien to us as long as we merely observe them. For man, the contrast between objective outer perception and subjective inner world of thought only exists as long as he does not recognize that these worlds belong together. The human inner world is a part of the world process like any other process.

[ 8 ] These thoughts are not refuted by the fact that different people have different ideas about things. Nor by the fact that people's organizations are different, so that one does not know whether one and the same color is seen in quite the same way by different people. For what matters is not whether men form exactly the same judgment about one and the same thing, but whether the language which the inner man speaks is precisely the language which expresses the essence of things. The individual judgments differ according to the organization of man and the standpoint from which he views things; but all judgments spring from the same element and lead to the essence of things. This may be expressed in different shades of thought, but it remains the essence of things.

[ 9 ] The human being is the organ through which nature reveals its secrets. The deepest content of the world appears in the subjective personality. "When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as part of a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when harmonious pleasure grants him a pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being" (Goethe, Winckelmann: Antikes). Modern natural science expresses the same idea through its means and methods. "But man stands so high that the otherwise unrepresentable is represented in him. What is a string and all its mechanical divisions compared to the musician's ear? Indeed, one could say, what are the elementary phenomena of nature itself compared to man, who must first tame and modify them all in order to be able to assimilate them to some extent?" (Goethe, Proverbs in Prose.)

[ 10 ] If a thing expresses its essence through the organ of the human mind, then the full reality only comes about through the confluence of observation and thought. Neither through one-sided observation nor through one-sided thinking does man recognize reality. It does not exist as something finished in the objective world, but is only brought about by the human spirit in connection with things. Those who praise experience alone must reply with Goethe that "experience is only half of experience". "Everything factual is already theory" (Proverbs in prose), that is, a law is revealed in the human mind when it observes a fact. This view of the world, which recognizes the essence of things in ideas and understands knowledge as a living into the essence of things, is not mysticism. What it has in common with mysticism, however, is that it does not regard objective truth as something existing in the external world, but as something that can really be grasped within man. The opposite view of the world places the causes of things behind appearances, in a realm beyond human experience. It can now either indulge in a blind faith in these reasons, which contains its content from a positive religion of revelation, or it can put forward intellectual hypotheses and theories about how this otherworldly realm of reality is constituted. The mystic as well as the confessor of Goethe's world view rejects both the belief in an otherworldly realm and the hypotheses about such a realm and adheres to the real spiritual realm that expresses itself in man himself. Goethe writes to Jacobi: "God has punished you with metaphysics and put a stake in your flesh, but blessed me with physics... I hold firmly and more firmly to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave to you everything that you call and must call religion. You hold to faith in God, I to seeing." What Goethe wants to see is the essence of things expressed in his world of ideas. The mystic also wants to recognize the essence of things by immersing himself in his own inner being; but he rejects the world of ideas, which is clear and transparent in itself, as unsuitable for the attainment of a higher knowledge. He believes that he must develop not his faculty of ideas but other inner powers in order to see the primal causes of things. It is usually vague sensations and feelings in which the mystic believes he grasps the essence of things. But feelings and sensations only belong to the subjective nature of man. They do not express anything about things. Only in the ideas of natural law do the things themselves speak. Mysticism is a superficial view of the world, even though the mystics give themselves much credit for their "depth" compared to rational people. They know nothing about the nature of feelings, otherwise they would not regard them as expressions of the essence of the world; and they know nothing about the nature of ideas, otherwise they would not regard them as shallow and rationalistic. They have no idea what people who really have ideas experience in them. But for many, ideas are just words. They cannot assimilate the infinite abundance of their content. No wonder they find their own unimaginative words empty.

[ 11 ] Those who seek the essential content of the objective world in their own inner being can also only relocate the essence of the moral world order in human nature itself. Whoever believes that there is an otherworldly reality behind human nature must also seek the source of morality in it. For the moral in the higher sense can only come from the essence of things. The believer in the beyond therefore accepts moral commandments to which man must submit. These commandments either come to him by way of revelation, or they enter his consciousness as such, as is the case with Kant's categorical imperative. Nothing is said about how this comes from the otherworldly "in itself" of things into our consciousness. It is simply there, and we have to submit to it.

[ 12 ] Goethe allows the moral to emerge from the natural world of man. It is not objective norms or the mere world of instinct that guides moral action, but the natural instincts of animal life that have become moral ideas, through which man gives himself direction. He follows them because he loves them as one loves a child. He wants their realization and stands up for them because they are part of his own being. The idea is the guiding principle; and love is the driving force in Goethe's ethics. For him, "duty is where one loves what one commands oneself" (Proverbs in prose).

[ 13 ] Action in the sense of Goethean ethics is naturally conditioned, but ethically free. For man is dependent on nothing but his own ideas. And he is responsible to no one but himself. In my "Philosophy of Freedom" I have already refuted the cheap objection that the consequence of a moral world order in which everyone obeys only himself must be the general disorder and disharmony of human action. Anyone who raises this objection overlooks the fact that people are similar beings and that they will therefore never produce moral ideas which, due to their essential differences, will cause disharmony.

The position of our cognizing personality in relation to the objective world also gives us our ethical physiognomy. What does the possession of knowledge and science mean to us?

The innermost core of the world is expressed in our knowledge. The lawful harmony that governs the universe manifests itself in human knowledge.

It is therefore part of man's vocation to transfer the basic laws of the world, which otherwise dominate all existence but would never come into existence themselves, into the realm of apparent reality. This is the essence of knowledge, that it extracts from objective reality the essential lawfulness on which it is based. Our cognition is - figuratively speaking - a constant living into the ground of the world. Such a conviction must also shed light on our practical view of life.

The whole character of our way of life is determined by our moral ideals. These are the ideas we have of our tasks in life, or in other words, the ideas we have of what we should accomplish through our actions.

Our actions are part of general world events. It is therefore also subject to the general lawfulness of these events.

If an event occurs somewhere in the universe, a twofold distinction must be made between it: the external course of it in space and time and the internal regularity of it.

The realization of this lawfulness for human action is only a special case of cognition. The views we have derived about the nature of cognition must therefore also be applicable here. To recognize oneself as an acting personality thus means: to possess the corresponding laws for one's actions, that is, the moral concepts and ideals as knowledge. If we have recognized this lawfulness, then our actions are also our work. The lawfulness is then not given as something that lies outside the object on which the action appears, but as the content of the object itself that is conceived in living action. In this case, the object is our own ego. If the latter has really penetrated its action in a recognizing way, then it also feels itself to be the master of it. As long as this does not take place, the laws of action confront us as something alien; they dominate us; what we accomplish is under the compulsion they exert on us. Once they have been transformed from such a foreign entity into the very own action of our ego, this compulsion ceases. The categorical imperative is to human action what the expediency ideas of teleology are to the science of living beings. The ideas of expediency hinder research into the purely natural laws of organic beings; the categorical imperative hinders the living out of purely natural moral impulses. The imperative has become our own nature. Lawfulness no longer rules over us, but in us over the events emanating from our ego. The realization of an event by means of a lawfulness that is external to the realizer is an act of bondage; the realization of an event by the realizer himself is an act of freedom. To recognize the laws of one's actions means to be aware of one's freedom. The process of cognition is, according to our explanations, the process of development towards freedom.

The following circumstance shows how little understanding there is in the present day for Goethe's ethical views and for an ethic of freedom and individualism in general. In 1892, I spoke out in favor of an anti-teleological monistic view of morality in an essay in "Zukunft" (No. 5). Mr. Ferdinand Tönnies in Kiel responded to this essay in a brochure entitled "Ethische Kultur und ihr Geleite. Nietzsche fools in the future and present" (Berlin 1893). He put forward nothing but the main propositions of philistine morality expressed in philosophical formulas. But he says of me that "on the road to Hades I could not have found a worse Hermes" than Friedrich Nietzsche. It seems truly comical to me that Mr. Tönnies, in order to condemn me, brings up some of Goethe's "sayings in prose". He has no idea that if there was a Hermes for me, it was not Nietzsche, but Goethe. I have already explained the relationship between the ethics of freedom and Goethe's ethics in the introduction to the 34th volume of my edition of Goethe's scientific works. I would not have mentioned Tönnies' worthless pamphlet if it were not symptomatic of the misunderstanding of Goethe's world view that prevails in some circles.

Not all human action has this free character. In many cases, we do not possess the laws for our actions as knowledge. This part of our actions is the unfree part of our actions. On the other hand, there is the part where we are fully immersed in these laws. This is the free area. Insofar as our life belongs to it, it can only be described as moral. The transformation of the first area into one with the character of the second is the task of every individual development, as well as that of humanity as a whole.

The most important problem of all human thought is this: to understand man as a free personality based on himself.

Goethe's views do not correspond to the fundamental separation of nature and spirit; he only wants to see a great whole in the world, a unified chain of development of beings, within which man forms a link, albeit the highest. "Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by it - unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries us along until we are tired and fall from her arms." Compare this with the above-mentioned statement: "If the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, if he feels himself in the world as part of a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, if harmonious pleasure grants him a pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being." Herein lies Goethe's genuinely far-reaching transcendence of immediate nature, without distancing himself in the slightest from what constitutes the essence of nature. What is foreign to him is what he himself finds in many particularly gifted people: "The peculiarity of feeling a kind of shyness towards real life, of withdrawing into oneself, of creating a world of one's own within oneself and in this way achieving the most excellent inwardly." (Winckelmann: entry.) Goethe does not flee reality in order to create an abstract world of thought that has nothing in common with it; no, he immerses himself in it in order to find its immutable laws in its eternal change, in its becoming and movement; he confronts the individual in order to see the archetype in him. Thus arose in his spirit the primordial plant, thus the primordial animal, which are nothing other than the ideas of the animal and the plant. These are not empty general concepts that belong to a gray 'theory, these are the essential foundations of organisms with a rich, concrete content, full of life and vivid. Vivid for that higher faculty of perception which Goethe discusses in his essay on "Visual Judgment". Ideas in Goethe's sense are just as objective as the colors and forms of things, but they are only perceptible to those whose faculties are equipped for them, just as colors and forms are only there for the sighted and not for the blind. If we do not approach the objective with a receptive spirit, it will not reveal itself to us. Without the instinctive ability to perceive ideas, they will always remain a closed field for us. Here, Schiller looked deeper than anyone else into the structure of Goethe's genius.

On August 23, 1794, he enlightens Goethe about the essence that underlies his spirit with the following words: "You take the whole of nature together in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the ground of explanation for the individual. From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more complex, in order finally to build the most complex of all, man, genetically from the materials of the whole structure of nature. By recreating him from nature, as it were, you seek to penetrate his hidden technique." In this re-creation lies a key to understanding Goethe's world view. If we really want to ascend to the lawful in eternal change, then we must not look at what has been created, we must listen to nature in its creation. This is the meaning of Goethe's words in the essay "Anschauende Urteilskraft": "If in the moral sphere we are to elevate ourselves to an upper region through faith in God, virtue and immortality and approach the first being, then it should probably be the same case in the intellectual sphere that we make ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in its productions through the contemplation of an ever-creating nature. Had I after all ... had restlessly insisted on that archetypal, typical thing." Goethe's archetypes are therefore not empty schemas, but the driving forces of phenomena.

This is the "higher nature" in nature that Goethe wants to seize. We see from this that in no case is reality, as it lies spread out before our senses, something with which man, having arrived at a higher level of culture, can stop. Only when the human spirit penetrates this reality by thinking does it realize what holds this world together in its innermost being. We can never find satisfaction in individual natural events, only in the laws of nature, never in the individual individual, only in the generality. Goethe presents this fact in the most perfect form imaginable. What also remains with him is the fact that for the modern spirit, reality, mere experience, is reconciled with the needs of the cognizing human spirit through thinking.

Goethe's attitude to nature is intimately connected with his religion. One might say that his concepts of nature were so high that they themselves put him in a religious mood. He did not know the need to draw things down to himself, stripping them of any sacredness, which so many have. But he has the need to look for something worthy of reverence in the real, in the here and now, which puts him in a religious mood. He seeks to gain a side to things themselves that makes them sacred to him. Karl Julius Schröer has shown this mood bordering on the religious in Goethe's behavior in love (cf. his spiritual work "Goethe und die Liebe", Heilbronn 1884). Everything frivolous and frivolous is stripped away, and love for Goethe becomes piety. This fundamental trait of his nature is most beautifully expressed in his words:

"In our pure bosom a striving surges,
To a higher, purer, unknown
To surrender voluntarily out of gratitude.
--------------------------------------
We call it: being pious!"

This side of his nature is now inseparably connected with another. He never seeks to approach this higher side directly; he always seeks to approach it through nature. "The true is God-like; it does not appear directly, we must guess it from its manifestations" (Proverbs in Prose). In addition to the belief in the idea, Goethe also has the other belief that we gain the idea through the contemplation of reality; it does not occur to him to seek the divinity elsewhere than in the works of nature, but he seeks to extract their divine side everywhere. When, in his boyhood, he erected an altar to the great God who "stands in direct connection with nature" (Dichtung und Wahrheit, I. Teil, 1. Buch), this worship arose decisively from the belief that we can attain the highest we can reach by faithfully cultivating our contact with nature. Thus Goethe's way of looking at things, which we have justified in terms of epistemology, is innate. He approaches reality with the conviction that everything is only a manifestation of the idea, which we only gain when we elevate sense experience into a spiritual contemplation of eternal, causal necessity. This conviction lay within him; and from his youth he viewed the world on the basis of this presupposition. No philosopher could give him this conviction. So that is not what Goethe was looking for in the philosophers. It was something else. Even if his way of looking at things lay deep in his being, he still needed a language to express it. His nature was philosophical, that is to say, it could only be expressed in philosophical formulas, could only be justified from philosophical premises. In order to make himself clearly aware of what he was, in order to know what his living activity was, he looked to the philosophers. He looked to them for an explanation and justification of his being. This is his relationship with the philosophers. To this end, he studied Spinoza in his youth and later became involved in scientific negotiations with his philosophical contemporaries. Even in his youth, Spinoza and Giordano Bruno seemed to the poet to express his own nature. It is curious that he first became acquainted with both thinkers through their opposing writings and, despite this, recognized how their teachings related to his nature. His relationship to Giordano Bruno's teachings in particular confirms this. He gets to know him from Bayle's dictionary, where Bruno is fiercely attacked. And he received such a deep impression from him that we find linguistic echoes of Bruno's sentences in those parts of "Faust" which, according to their conception, date from around 1770, when he was reading Bayle (see Goethe Yearbook, Volume VII, 1886). In the "Tag- und Jahreshefte", the poet tells us that he studied Giordano Bruno again in 1812. This time, too, the impression is a powerful one, and in many of the poems written after this year we recognize echoes of the philosopher of Nola. But all this is not to be taken as if Goethe had borrowed or learned anything from Bruno, he merely found in him the formula for expressing what had long been in his nature. He found that he expressed his own inner self most clearly when he did so in the words of this thinker. Bruno regarded the universal world soul as the creator and director of the universe. He calls it the inner artist that forms matter and shapes it from within. It is the cause of everything that exists; and there is no being in whose existence it would not take a loving interest. "Be the thing ever so small and tiny, it has in itself a part of spiritual substance" (see Giordano Bruno, "Von der Ursache etc.", published by Adolf Lasson, Heidelberg 1882). This was also Goethe's view that we only know how to judge a thing when we see how it has been placed in its place by the eternal harmony of the laws of nature - and nothing other than this is the world soul for him - and how it has become precisely what it appears to us as. If we perceive with the senses, that is not enough; for the senses do not tell us how a thing is connected with the general world-idea, what it has to mean for the great whole. We must look in such a way that our reason creates for us an ideal ground on which then appears to us what the senses deliver to us; we must, as Goethe expresses it, look with the eyes of the spirit. He also found a formula for expressing this conviction in Bruno: "For just as we do not recognize colors and sounds with one and the same sense, so we also do not see the substrate of the arts and the substrate of nature with one and the same eye", because we "see that with the sensual eyes and this with the eye of reason" (see Lasson, p. 77). And it is no different with Spinoza. Spinoza's teaching is based on the fact that the Godhead has merged into the world. Human knowledge can therefore only aim to immerse itself in the world in order to recognize God. Any other way of reaching God must appear impossible to a person who thinks consistently in the sense of Spinozism.

The idea of a God who led a separate existence outside of the world and directed his creation according to externally imposed laws was alien to him. Throughout his life, he was dominated by the thought:

"What would a god be who only pushed from the outside,
Run the universe in circles on his finger?
It befits him to move the world within,
Nature in itself, to nurture itself in nature,
So that what lives and weaves and is in him,
Never misses its power, never misses its spirit."

What did Goethe have to look for in the science of organic nature in accordance with this attitude? Firstly, a law that explains what makes a plant a plant and an animal an animal; secondly, another that makes it comprehensible why the common underlying principle of all plants and animals appears in such a diversity of forms. The basic essence that expresses itself in every plant, the animality that can be found in all animals, that is what he sought first. The artificial dividing walls between the individual genera and species had to be torn down, it had to be shown that all plants are only modifications of an original plant, all animals of an original animal.

Ernst Haeckel, who perfected Darwin's ideas on the origin of organisms in a manner appropriate to German thoroughness, attaches the greatest importance to recognizing the harmony of his basic convictions with Goethe's. Haeckel's view of nature also becomes the basis of religion. The knowledge of nature communicates itself to feeling and lives itself out as a religious mood. For Haeckel, Darwin's question about the origin of organic forms immediately became the highest task that the science of organic life can ever set itself, that of the origin of man. And he was compelled to take the place of the dead matter of the physicists in assuming such principles of nature with which one need not stop at man. In his essay "Monism as a Bond between Religion and Science", and in his "Welträtseln", which appeared recently and which I believe to be the most significant manifestation of the latest natural philosophy, Haeckel expressly emphasized that he could no more conceive of an "immaterial living spirit" than of a "dead spiritless matter". And Goethe's words that "matter can never exist and be effective without spirit, spirit never without matter" are entirely consistent with this.

* One of the most interesting facts in German intellectual history is how Schiller, under the influence of Goethe, formed an ethic from Goethe's world view. These ethics arise from an artistic and liberal view of nature. But these letters are often not taken as sufficiently scientific by systematizing philosophers, and yet they are among the most important things that aesthetics and ethics have ever produced. Schiller takes Kant as his starting point. This philosopher defined the nature of beauty in several ways. First, he examines the reason for the pleasure we feel in beautiful works of art. He finds this feeling of pleasure to be quite different from any other. Let us compare it with the pleasure we feel when we are dealing with an object to which we owe something useful. This pleasure is quite different. It is intimately connected with the desire for the existence of this object. The desire for the useful disappears when the useful itself no longer exists. It is different with the pleasure we feel towards the beautiful. This pleasure has nothing to do with the possession, with the existence of the object. It is therefore not attached to the object at all, but only to the idea of it. Whereas in the case of the practical, the useful, the need immediately arises to transform the idea into reality, in the case of the beautiful we are satisfied with the mere image. This is why Kant calls the pleasure in beauty a "disinterested pleasure" that is uninfluenced by any real interest. It would be quite wrong, however, to think that this excludes expediency from the beautiful. This only happens with the external purpose. And from this flows the second explanation of beauty: "It is a thing formed purposively in itself, but without serving an external purpose." If we perceive another thing of nature or a product of human technology, our mind comes and asks about its use and purpose, and it is not satisfied until its question about the why is answered. In the case of beauty, the why lies in the thing itself; and the intellect does not need to go beyond it. This is where Schiller comes in. And he does this by weaving the idea of freedom into the line of thought in a way that does the highest honor to human nature. First, Schiller contrasts two incessantly asserting human drives. The first is the so-called material instinct or the need to keep our senses open to the inflowing outside world. A rich content penetrates us, but without us being able to exert a determining influence on its nature. "Everything happens here with absolute necessity. What we perceive is determined from outside; here we are unfree, subjugated, we must simply obey the dictates of natural necessity. The second is the form instinct. This is nothing other than reason, which brings order and law into the confused chaos of perceptual content. Through its work, system comes into experience. But even here we are not free, Schiller finds. For in this work, reason is subject to the immutable laws of logic. As there under the power of natural necessity, so here we are under that of the necessity of reason. Freedom seeks a refuge from both. Schiller assigns it the realm of art by emphasizing the analogy of art with a child's play. What is the essence of play? Things from reality are taken and changed in their relationships in any way. This transformation of reality is not governed by a law of logical necessity, such as when we build a machine, for example, where we have to strictly submit to the laws of reason, but rather serves a subjective need. The player puts things into a context that gives him pleasure, he does not impose any constraints on himself. He does not respect the necessity of nature, for he overcomes its constraint by using the things handed down to him entirely at will; but he does not feel dependent on the necessity of reason either, for the order he brings to things is his invention. In this way, the player imprints his subjectivity on reality; and in turn, he lends objective validity to the latter. The separate action of the two drives has ceased; they have merged into one and thus become free: the natural is spiritual, the spiritual is natural. Schiller, the poet of freedom, thus sees in art only a free play of man on a higher level and exclaims enthusiastically: "Man is only fully man where he plays, ... and he only plays where he is human in the full meaning of the word." Schiller calls the instinct underlying art the play instinct. This produces works in the artist that satisfy our reason in their sensual existence and whose rational content is simultaneously present as sensual existence. And the nature of man works at this stage in such a way that his nature is at once spiritual and his spirit natural. Nature is elevated to the spirit, the spirit immerses itself in nature. The latter is thereby ennobled, the former is moved from its inconceivable height into the visible world.

In Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" - in this gospel of humanity liberated from the barriers of both natural compulsion and the logical necessity of reason - we read Goethe's ethical and religious physiognomy. These letters can be described as Goethe's psychology drawn from all-round personal observation. "I have long watched the course of your mind, albeit from quite a distance, and have noted with ever renewed admiration the path you have marked out for yourself." This is what Schiller wrote to Goethe on August 23, 1794. Schiller was best able to observe how Goethe achieved harmony in his mental powers. These letters were written under the impression of these observations. We may say that Goethe sat as a model for the "whole man who reaches perfection through play". Now Schiller writes in the letter containing the words quoted: "If you had been born a Greek, indeed only an Italian, and had been surrounded from the cradle by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. Already in your first view of things you would then have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now, since you were born a German, since your Greek spirit was thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but either to become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace your imagination with what reality withheld from it through the help of the power of thought, in order to give birth to a Greece, as it were, from within and in a rational way." Since this is true of Goethe, it is understandable that he felt the deepest satisfaction of his being when, in front of the Greek works of art, on his Italian journey, he could say to himself that he felt that the Greeks, in producing their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws that nature itself follows and that he is on the trail of. And that he found in these works of art what he called the "higher nature" in nature. He says to these creatures of the human spirit: "There is necessity, there is God."

Nature service is Goethe's service to God. He cannot find traces of God anywhere other than where nature reigns in creation. He is therefore unable to speak about his relationship to Christianity in any other way than by sharply emphasizing his way of thinking that merges with his view of nature. "If I am asked whether it is in my nature to show adoring reverence to Christ, I say: Absolutely! I bow before him as the divine revelation of the highest principle of morality. If I am asked whether it is in my nature to worship the sun, I say again: Absolutely! For it is also a revelation of the Highest, and indeed the most powerful that we children of the earth are granted to perceive. I worship in it the light and the generative power of God, through which alone we live, weave and are, and all plants and animals with us. But if I am asked whether I am inclined to stoop before a thumb bone of the Apostle Peter or Paul, I say: spare me and stay away from me with your absurdities."

Everything has been said about Goethe's position on Christianity. It is a long way from the church historian Nippold's assertion that he resolutely upheld the "Christian idea of God" to that of the Jesuit priest Alexander Baumgartner, who speaks of Goethe's "insolently anti-Christian spirit". There will hardly be a station on this path where some observer of Goethe's religious views has not settled down. And statements by Goethe that support one or the other assertion will always be available to the gentlemen. But when referring to such sayings of Goethe, one should always bear in mind what Goethe said of himself. "I for myself, with the manifold directions of my nature, cannot have enough of one way of thinking; as a poet and artist I am a polytheist, but as a naturalist I am a pantheist, and one as decidedly as the other. If I need a god for my personality, as a moral man, then that is already taken care of." Since Goethe himself said this, can we still be surprised when we are told from one side that Goethe is a confessor of a personal God? An interpreter of Goethe need only quote the following statement by Goethe, and he has constructed Goethe the believer in the personality of God: "Now Blumenbach gained the highest and ultimate expression, he anthropomorphized the word of the riddle and called what was being spoken of a nisus formativus, a drive, a violent activity, through which the formation - of living beings - should be brought about... This monstrosity personified confronts us as a god, as creator and sustainer, whom we are called upon to worship, adore and praise in every way."

If I liked sleight-of-hand tricks of the mind, I would be able to prove one after the other that Goethe was a polytheist, theist, atheist, Christian and - what else do I know? But it seems to me that it is not important to interpret Goethe according to a single statement, but according to the whole spirit of his world view. He imbued his entire emotional life with this spirit; it was in this spirit that he proceeded when he sought to investigate the laws of nature and made important discoveries in this field; it was out of this spirit that he organized his entire attitude towards art. In art he saw a "manifestation of secret natural laws"; and nature was for him the revelation of the only God he sought. It is in this sense that a word like this should be understood: "I believe in one God!" This is a beautiful, praiseworthy word; but to acknowledge God, where and how he reveals himself, that is actually bliss on earth" (Proverbs in prose). And this is also significant: "The true, identical with the divine, can never be recognized by us directly, we see it only in reflection, in example, symbol, in individual and related phenomena; we become aware of it as incomprehensible life and cannot renounce the desire to comprehend it nevertheless." But Goethe was not one of those who saw the great, otherworldly unknown in the true, the divine. He does not call the essence of things incomprehensible because human knowledge does not reach this essence, but because it is basically absurd to speak of an essence in itself. "Actually, we undertake to express the essence of a thing in vain. We become aware of effects, and a complete history of these effects would at best encompass the essence of that thing. In vain do we endeavor to portray the character of a man; but put together his actions, his deeds, and a picture of his character will present itself to us." We are probably speaking entirely in Goethe's spirit when we add: In vain do we endeavor to portray the essence of God; put together, on the other hand, the phenomena of nature and its laws, and an image of God will confront us.

I have described Goethe's way of conceiving the world from these points of view in my book "Goethe's Weltanschauung". I described the starting points that such an examination must take with the words: "If one wants to understand Goethe's world view, one must not content oneself with listening to what he himself says about it in individual statements. It was not in his nature to express the core of his being in crystal-clear sentences... He is always anxious when it comes to deciding between two views. He does not want to rob himself of his impartiality by giving his thoughts a sharp direction... Nevertheless, if you want to see the unity of his views, you have to listen less to his words than to his way of life. One must listen to his relationship to things when he investigates their essence, and add to what he himself does not say. We must look into the innermost part of his personality, which is largely concealed behind his utterances. What he says may often contradict itself; what he lives always belongs to a consistent whole."

If you delve into Goethe's personality, then you can evaluate his statements in the right sense. This becomes most necessary when talking about his relationship to Christianity. Where Christianity confronts him with all its dark sides, as for example in the person of Lavater, he speaks out openly. He writes to him (August 9, 1782): "You hold the Gospel, as it stands, to be the most divine truth; I would not be convinced by an audible voice from heaven that the water burns and the fire is quenched, that a woman gives birth without a man and that a dead man rises from the dead; rather, I consider these to be blasphemies against the great God and his revelation in nature... I am as serious about my faith as you are about yours." And when he speaks out in favor of Christianity, he reinterprets it in his own way. Nothing is more indicative of his way of reinterpreting than the sentence in which he turns Spinoza, who was decried as an atheist, into a Christian: "Spinoza does not prove the existence of God, existence is God. And if others scold him for this, I would like to call him thesssimum, indeed christianissimum and praise him." We must not forget that he calls himself "not an anti-Christian or unchristian, but a decided non-Christian".

And if he wants to make the full truth clear to himself in a decisive manner, then he does so with such distiches as those found in the diary of the Silesian journey (1790), which are what caused the Jesuit priest Baumgartner such horror at the "insolent anti-Christian spirit":

"To endure it is good to be a Christian, not to waver:
And that's how this teaching first came about."

"What is true of Christianity is true of the Stoics, free
It is not fitting for people to be Christians or Stoics."

These verses are sharply illustrated when put together with the religious sentiments that Goethe found in himself:

"What more can man gain in life,
than that God-nature reveals itself to him,"

or:

"There is also a universe within,
Hence the peoples' laudable use,
That each one the best he knows,
He names God, even his God,
Surrender heaven and earth to him,
fears him and perhaps loves him."

"Goethe had the same effect on the intellectual life of Germany as a powerful natural phenomenon would have had on the physical."

"...The comparison can be made that Goethe had an effect on the spiritual atmosphere of Germany like a telluric event that increased our climatic warmth by so many degrees. If such a thing happened, a different vegetation, a different way of farming and thus a new basis for our entire existence would occur."

"Goethe created our language and literature."

These sentences by Herman Grimm (see his "Goethe Lectures") express what the educated world is becoming more and more convinced of with every passing day. Goethe has left his mark on our epoch. That which distinguishes it from other epochs in the spiritual development of mankind is largely due to Goethe.

In this picture of the most devoted veneration of the great genius, however, we still see a dark spot that stands in disturbing disharmony with the remaining brightness of the same. It concerns Goethe's natural scientific writings.

However, here too - with the exception of the physical part of the theory of color, which is still considered a monstrous error today - the absolute rejection has been abandoned. Many people today believe that Goethe's view of nature is based on ideas that also dominate modern natural science. But if one compares the recognition of this direction of Goethe's spirit with that accorded him in other areas, one finds that it rests on a completely different basis. Our poetry, our aesthetic view of the world, indeed our style, have become what they are today because of Goethe. He is the creator of a completely new current of the times; his scientific direction, however, is seen only as a prophecy of a new epoch, the latter itself having been created by others.

The reason for this fact is sought in the fact that Goethe lacked the principles that made the modern view of nature a scientific conviction. Because he lacked these principles, his achievements have remained without influence on the shaping of modern science. It would be what it is today even if Goethe had never turned his attention to it. What is the basis of recognition in other areas of intellectual life, the creation of a new era, is not conceded to Goethe in the field of science.

Under these conditions, however, the value of Goethe's scientific activity dwindles to nothing. For it must be admitted that a scientific view has not the slightest value if it lacks the principles on which it could rest as a firm foundation. It is then nothing more than a series of arbitrary assumptions whose power to convince must remain undecided. If Goethe's scientific views lack principles, then they cannot be upheld, no matter how much foreshadowing of the future they may contain. Science must not be based on random ideas, but on principles.

Before making this assumption, however, one is forced to ask the question: How is Goethe's inherently unfinished scientific view possible with the harmonious interaction of all his intellectual powers, in which, after all, a precondition of his mission is seen everywhere today? This question has never actually been posed with any degree of acuteness and even less has an attempt been made to answer it. Anyone who considers it in depth will arrive at a view of Goethe's scientific outlook that is very different from the one generally held today. In this context, reference may perhaps be made to the recently published edition of Goethe's scientific writings¹ in Spemann's "Deutsche National-Literatur", in which an attempt is made to explain Goethe from within himself and to prove his rights. Professor Dr. K. J. Schröer, in the preface to this edition, has emphasized the importance of such a change in the view of. Goethe's scientific works for the recognition and appreciation of Goethe's nature. Here I can only speak very briefly about one main point of view.

Those who demand nothing more from science than that it provide the most faithful possible photograph of reality will certainly not be able to come to terms with Goethe's scientific method. But one must bear in mind that the directly given reality contains moments that do not satisfy the demands of a reasonable coherence of things. These moments cannot be traced back to principles; they arise from the contingency contained in reality. This is also the reason why reality satisfies our minds so little, why ideal natures so often come into conflict with it. Goethe felt the unsatisfactory nature of these conflicts more than anyone else. He often speaks of the "vile" chance that destroys what develops from a being with inner necessity. Completely stripping reality of its randomness and focusing solely on its underlying rational core is his artistic mission, but it is also his scientific mission. "Real life often loses its luster in such a way that it sometimes has to be refreshed with the varnish of fiction" ("Dichtung und Wahrheit", II, 9th book), says Goethe, thereby hinting at his poetic mission.² At the same time, however, he never goes beyond what is given to man in poetry, so that Merck could say to him: "Your endeavour, your undistractable direction is to give the real a poetic form; the others seek to realize the so-called poetic, the imaginative, and that gives nothing but stupid stuff" ("Dichtung und Wahrheit", IV, 18th book). Nothing is further from Goethe's mind than the arbitrary creation of empty fantasies that are not rooted in reality. He only seeks the core of this reality that can only be reached by the mind, its inner essence, which we must presuppose if it is to be explainable to us.

To grasp this essence requires the productivity of the mind. This requires even more than the observation of the randomness of individual cases. The laws belong to reality, but we cannot borrow them from it; we must create them by means of experience. This creative faculty of the mind was characteristic of all pioneers in the field of narrower science. The phenomena of pendulum motion and falling were only comprehensible when Galileo had created the laws of these phenomena. Just as Galileo founded mechanics through his laws, so Goethe founded the science of the organic. That is his true relationship to science. Goethe's organic science is just as much a reflection of the phenomena of the organic world as theoretical mechanics is a reflection of the mechanical phenomena of nature. Organic science can discover new facts ad infinitum, even expand its scientific basis; the turning point at which it rose from an unscientific to a scientific method is to be sought in Goethe.

None other than this spirit, however, also dominates the physical chapter to which Goethe's efforts were directed: the theory of colors. This is the only way to approach this remarkable work. The fight against Newton was only the main thing for Goethe in the beginning, was only the starting point, not the goal of his optical work. The aim was none other than to reduce the rich diversity of the world of color to a systematic whole, so that every color phenomenon becomes as comprehensible to us from this whole as any connection of spatial quantities becomes from the system of mathematics. The centuries-long, well-structured, self-supporting structure of mathematics was the ideal Goethe had in mind when constructing the Theory of Colors. If one overlooks this lofty goal and places the dispute with Newton in the foreground, one only arouses misunderstandings from the outset. For the matter then appears as if Goethe had fought against a fact found by Newton, whereas his endeavor had nothing other in mind than a self-misunderstood method of correcting a hypothetical explanation of a fact. The fact that, viewed in this way, the contradiction in question takes on a completely different meaning than that usually attributed to it has been repeatedly recognized by intellectual thinkers such as Joh. Müller and Karl Rosenkranz. Newton's assertions actually have the character of the aphoristic in themselves. They extend only to a part of the theory of color, to the colors produced by the refraction of light. They immediately modify themselves when they are inserted into the system that deals with the totality of color phenomena. What is difficult to see here is actually only that it is not assertion against assertion, but a whole against a single chapter. In a harmony, one does not merely have to mechanically assemble the whole from its parts, but the parts are also determined by the nature of the whole.

A closer look at Goethe's view of nature reveals that it has one origin with all the other branches of his work. One can say that only this view was possible in his intellectual direction, and again: his poetic mission presupposed such a view of nature as he had. The principles of Goethe's view of nature lie where the foundations of his art lie.

Only those who fail to recognize these connections can call Goethe's theory of nature unprincipled. However, it has the key to its understanding in Goethe's nature and carries the guarantee of its truth within itself. It must succeed in satisfying mankind's need for science not through laws found later, but through the power inherent in it. Whether this will really be the case one day and whether it will one day be granted the opportunity to exert a more fruitful influence on the development of the human spirit than has been the case to date is, of course, left to the future.

• 1. "Goethes naturwissenschaftliche Schriften", edited by Rudolf Steiner, with a foreword by K. J. Schröer.
• 2. K. J.Schröer: Ausgabe von Goethes Dramen, Band I, Spemanns "Deutsche National-Literatur>.

It was at the beginning of this century that a powerful intellectual endeavor arose among the German people and sought to penetrate the deepest secrets of world building through the power of human thought. An original science emerged that emancipated itself from all practical activity and, hovering in the highest spheres of idealism, sought only to satisfy the needs of the spirit. It was the deepest German trait, imbued with moral high-mindedness, that animated this striving,

If we look at German poetry from that time, we must say that it too is filled with that magical juice that flowed from the German thinkers' striving for the most intimate fraternization with the world spirit. In this respect, both research and artistic creation had a religious trait, because they fulfilled the first basic condition of religion, to lift man away from the everyday and the ordinary into a higher, purely spiritual region.

It was a break with old traditions, but it was a different kind of break from the almost simultaneous French Revolution. The Germans rebelled against the traditional, against the outdated forms of religion, art and science, because a new world was opening up within them, because the real, the inner truth, was replacing appearances. In the case of the French, it was nothing other than the clever mind, the emptiness of the Enlightenment, for whom the old was not enough, and that is precisely why the liberality of the French so easily turns into frivolity. This cultural height on which the Germans once stood seems to us today to be nothing more than a thing of the past; we disciples look back with melancholy on those better times; after all, we seem to have been left with almost nothing other than the less comforting task of being the gravediggers and monument-setters of those great spirits who brought about that mighty epoch.

What do we achieve that could even remotely compare with those achievements? The power to create something original seems to have long since vanished and our entire art consists of creating biographies of our great ancestors and commentaries on their works. Where is the German power that once gave birth to Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Jean Paul?

It could almost seem as if the mighty Germanic giant is sleeping in the midst of Europe. But on closer inspection, the gloomy picture gives way to a still highly pleasing one, and we gain the conviction that we need not despair of the present at all, but can in many respects rejoice in it.

When we look at the intellectual life of Europe, it resembles a system of threads that are intertwined in many ways, but no matter which of these threads we follow, we still come to Germany as the crossroads where they all meet. The scientific, artistic and economic-social life of Europe is a connection of forces that all have their center in Germany.

If we want to prove the truth of this sentence, we need only consider two different interests, one dominating the scientific and the other the economic and social aspirations of the present day.

By the first point we mean Darwinism, the scientific doctrine that all animal forms now living are only descendants of some or of a single basic form which has been perfected in the course of very long periods of time, and that man is only the most perfect, most developed animal form, that his ancestors are to be sought nowhere else than where those of the other mammals are to be found. This doctrine is of English origin. But as it emerged from the head of the Englishman Darwin around the middle of our century, it was a vague, inherently unclear view; neither the moral consequences had been drawn, nor was the necessary all-round scientific development available. In the middle was a number of observations, experiences and undoubted truths, but the beginning and end were completely shrouded in mist.

Then, at the beginning of the sixties, German scholars took hold of this view; German profundity, German thoroughness and deep moral seriousness struck like lightning into the tangled fabric. The whole was thought through and carried through to its final consequences with all the power of the mind, and under the care of German researchers a scientific structure soon emerged, firmly established and well-founded in all its parts. What the Englishman Darwin had begun, the German Haeckel completed in a wonderful, monumental way. What the latter created is a perfect edifice of the mind, executed in every detail with admirable ingenuity. A mysterious document of nature had been found in England, but there was a thick veil over it, then a German came and tore away the veil, and only now did the world know what was written on the mysterious document. But it did not stop there. The moral high-mindedness of the Germans also had to consider the necessary consequences of the new doctrine with regard to morality and public life. And numerous are the writings of German researchers who, with more or less luck, either want to show the harmony of Darwinism with a pure morality or the endangerment of the latter by the former. In doing so, they also recalled the pinnacle of German culture, German idealism and its greatest exponent: Goethe. There was a need to harmonize the ideas of this great genius with the new teachings. And it is not to be slight that the German is so imbued with that ideal world that any disharmony of new views with this world is embarrassing to him. The striving of German scholars to harmonize the results of the modern world view with Goetheanism is the reaction of the German conscience to the scientific fashion, the will of the German that only the ideal must find its way into life, finally the belief that idealism must be true.

It is a specifically German phenomenon that pessimism in its deepest form arises as a consequence of Darwinism. The number of sincere, thoroughly good and highly gifted souls who despair of the world and life because of the new doctrine is not small. One must have as deep a mind as the German has, one must be as far removed from every kind of frivolity and frivolity as he is, one must possess his striving for the divine, and one will not easily escape pessimism if one fully thinks through the nullity of man and his race, as it follows, if one accepts Darwinism in its full extent. This gives rise to a line of thought that could probably be continued for a long time, but we have seen that the most powerful force moving the scientific world today points us to Germany. The West has posed a problem, Germany is trying to solve it. And if redemption is ever to come from the spell of the immense one-sidedness of the modern world view, it can only come from Germany. It will be the power of the German spirit which will show what is true about Darwinism, and which will at the same time show that, applied beyond a certain degree, it is inwardly untrue, shallow and shallow; it will overcome it by limiting its sphere of power, by understanding it.

The second phenomenon we want to point out is the striving of the European peoples to find that form of state in which the moral dignity and freedom of each individual citizen is most fully realized. Again, it was the West, France and England, where this aspiration first asserted itself. Arbitrariness was to be replaced by the necessity of reason, privilege by equality, and bondage by freedom. But it is probably not too bold to claim that the first truly viable seeds for replacing the state, in which chance and subjective arbitrariness rule, with one in which reason reigns supreme, have just been laid in Germany. The state must ensure that the happiness of the individual does not depend on chance or arbitrariness, but that the whole, built according to the principles of reason, secures the welfare of the individual to such an extent that the latter can develop freely in physical and spiritual directions. The state cannot make men free, only education can do that; but the state must ensure that everyone finds the soil on which his freedom can flourish. The fact that today the watchword has been given for a development in this respect from the steps of the throne once occupied by Frederick the Great, that in Germany the leadership of the state is incumbent on a man who is deeply imbued with that mission of the state, will one day be recorded by history as one of the greatest of its political facts.

And now one more thing: there are Germans who are not called upon to participate in the great social work that the German people are accomplishing today. We are speaking to a large number of such Germans here. But we would not call it a misfortune that this is the case. For perhaps it is precisely to these Germans that the most insignificant part of the common cultural work of our people falls today. We accept the present conditions with unfeigned resignation and assert that it is highly desirable that it should be so. We must not forget that above the great economic problems of the present, the German people in the empire today have often lost the ideal impetus for higher spiritual matters; we must not ignore the fact that even the German youth, once the proven guardian of German idealism, forgets the latter over social reformist thoughts, and we will realize that the German essence in its most beautiful development needs a refuge precisely with those Germans who live outside the German fatherland.

This opens up a beautiful perspective for these latter German tribes. We know of a people who have always adhered to this principle and who are therefore on a par with all German tribes - and much ahead of many in culture and education: the Saxons in Transylvania! May this journal contribute to the continued growth of this culture and education, may it succeed in speaking to a German people in a non-German country in the sense indicated.

When Rosenkranz completed his biography of Hegel in 1844, he wrote the meaningful words in the preface: "Does it not seem as if we are today only the gravediggers and monument-setters for the philosophers whom the second half of the last century gave birth to in order to die in the first half of the present century? Kant began this death of German philosophers in 1804. Do we see an offspring for this harvest of death? Are we capable of sending a holy crowd of thinkers into the second half of our century?" Four decades have now passed since the intellectual and jovial Hegelian posed this question. Let us look around us! What answer does our time give us? Now they must have become the men of whom Rosenkranz asked: "Are there any of our young people alive to whom Platonic enthusiasm and Aristotelian industriousness inspire the mind to immortal effort for speculation?" A fairly superficial knowledge of the intellectual life of our time is sufficient to realize that the answer to the above question will not be a very pleasant one. The group of philosophers who are enthusiastic about speculation today is small, very small, but the group of those who shrug their shoulders and look down on the entire philosophical age of the German people is large. It almost seems as if we have buried German philosophy with the German philosophers.

What did philosophy mean to the Germans at the beginning of our century, what does it mean today? At that time it was the watchword of the day; the philosopher could count on the participation of every educated German, his words were not only listened to by an enthusiastic audience in the lecture halls, they penetrated everywhere where there was any intellectual interest at all. Today, philosophy professors read - in front of empty benches. For a time, philosophical questions were the issues of the day; they were treated in the same way as political, national or economic issues are treated today. Having a world view seemed to be a necessity for every thinking person. Philosophy seemed destined to carry the torch ahead of all other sciences, to determine their direction and goal. The full energy of human thought awoke, and with this energy came the fullest confidence in human reason. The deepest need to penetrate into the secrets of the mystery of the world awoke in the heart, and at the same time the spirit considered itself capable, supported by its own power - without revelation, without experience - of doing justice to this endeavor. How different things are today! We have completely lost confidence in our thinking. We regard it solely as a tool of observation, of experience, just as we once regarded it only as a tool for interpreting the dogmas established by the Church. We do not even try to solve the great riddles that nature and life pose to us. We have Aristotelian industriousness, but we lack Platonic enthusiasm. We waste endless effort on detailed research, which is of no value without great guiding principles. The only thing we forget is that we are on the best way to a point of view that we consider to have long been overcome: on the way to blind dogmatic faith.

The rejection of sovereign thinking, combined with the insistence on the sayings of experience, is quite the same for a deeper understanding as the blind faith in revelation of a dismissed theology. Theology is handed down truths that it must accept without being allowed to ask why, without being able to use its own thinking to work out why what it believes to be true is true. It hears the message and must believe it. Thinking has nothing to do but to bring the finished truth into a form suitable for man. It is no different with mere empirical science. In its view, nothing is true except what the facts proclaim. We should observe, organize, collect, but refrain from all reflection on the inner driving forces of the events we encounter. The truths of experience are also transmitted to us from the outside. The Church demanded that thought submit to revelation; empirical science demands submission to the random statements of the factual world.

And in the field of practical philosophy, where have we got to? The common thread that runs through the thinking of all minds of the classical period is the recognition of man's free will as the supreme power of his mind. This recognition is sometimes taken very lightly. Few realize that, grasped in its full depth, it forms the seeds of a religious view of the future. Whoever recognizes man's free will in the highest sense of the word must deny any inner or outer worldly influence on the actions of his spirit. He must refer him entirely to himself, to his own personality. No "divine commandments", no "thou shalt", as the religions have it, can he allow to apply to the moral life of man. Man must draw the goal and purpose of his existence from himself.

His destiny is not that which an "eternal counsel" of God assigns to him, but that which he gives to himself. He recognizes no master over himself. This view increases the awareness of human dignity infinitely. In order to cherish it, however, we need that trust in our own reason which we no longer have, or at least not to the same extent as in the classical epoch of our philosophy. This view must give up finding consolation in religion or in the consciousness of being a child of God in general; it must seek consolation in man's own breast. It must give up leading a life pleasing to God and recognize only its own reason as its guide. Only with this view does man feel completely free. It was a tremendous step forward in the education of the human race when the German philosophers proclaimed this truth in all its forms. Who recognizes it as such today? We no longer believe that we are capable of setting ourselves the goal and purpose of our lives. We believe ourselves to be under the sway of an iron necessity of nature, just as an outdated humanity believed itself to be under the sway of divine wisdom. Anyone who also has a sense of the miserable situation we would be in if this view were true becomes a pessimist. And so today, pessimism is considered the attitude of noble spirits. Our ancestors, who were strong in faith, were not pessimists only because they believed that the Creator was all-good and all-wise and that everything would ultimately work out for the best. Of course, such an assumption cannot apply to the blind necessity of nature.

Only free philosophical thinking, which is capable of the highest development, can rise above this view. And such was the thinking of our classical epoch.

Our German philosophy is not the deed of an individual, it is the deed of the German people. The German people brought their best, their lifeblood to the surface, and that is what we call German philosophy. The men who appeared at the turn of the century and in the first decades of ours proclaimed a message that arose from deep within the soul of the people. And not only the philosophers, but also the poets proclaimed the same message. For the epoch of our classical literature does not signify a one-sided upswing in poetry, but a deepening of the entire German essence. The basic character of all the creations of our greatest age is a philosophical one. Our greatest poets had to come to terms with the philosophical views of the time. Schiller considered himself fortunate to live at the time when Kant was bringing the greatest world problems into flow, and there are philosophical truths that no one has grasped more deeply than Schiller to this day.

If we ask for the reason for this phenomenon, we must look for it in the depth and peculiarity of the German essence. This essence is best grasped when it is linked to ancient Greekness. The cultural historian of the future will certainly attribute to the German spirit the same significance for the formation of modern times as today's historian does to the Greek spirit with regard to the formation of antiquity. The Greek spirit was directed outwards, it urged the shaping of the world of the senses in order to reproduce a small world in individual works of art. The Greek artist sought to imprint on his creation that which in nature is distributed among a multiplicity of beings, so that one might say that the Greek sought to unite all the laws of nature in a single work of art. When Goethe recognized this basic character of Greek masterpieces in Italy, he said that the Greeks followed the same laws in their work that nature follows and that he was on the trail of. This immediately expresses the contrast and similarity between the German and Greek spirit. The Greek seeks to imprint the idea of creation on matter, the German seeks to grasp it by thinking and to shape it as a world of ideas, to which he withdraws. Plastic sense is at home with the Greeks, plastic spirit with the Germans. It has been repeatedly stated what the Germans want with their philosophy. He wants to recreate in his mind the order according to which the world around us is assembled.

Only the German has grasped philosophy in this bold sense. All other worldly wisdom is merely a premonition, a foreshadowing of what became a world-historical phenomenon in the German spirit. Philosophy in the German people was transformed from a scholarly matter into a matter of humanity. It was with this awareness that Hegel was able to say, when he delivered his inaugural address on October 22, 1818: "This science has taken refuge with the Germans and lives on in them alone. We have been entrusted with the preservation of this sacred light, and it is our duty to nurture and nourish it and to ensure that the highest thing that man can possess, the self-consciousness of his being, does not go out and perish." This also explains why it had to be a philosopher who best showed the Germans their own nature in the mirror of the idea. The basic trait of German nature is precisely a philosophical one and can therefore be grasped most deeply by philosophical reflection. The "Speeches to the German Nation", which Fichte delivered in Berlin, surrounded by the armies of the enemy, are a treasure of the German people.

If the philosophical current is currently being pushed back in our nation, we must not be unfair. Today, we are too absorbed by political, economic and national interests. But the spirit of German philosophy continues to have an unconscious effect on the social reforms in the empire. We need only recall the idea of the "closed commercial state" advocated by Fichte. We surrender to the belief that in the not too distant future our people will completely reconnect their present with their past. It must, because it denied itself when it denied its philosophers. Our western neighbors have mocked us for our idealism. We were able to bear the mockery, because idealism can only be appreciated by those who have it. Things are different today anyway. While French chauvinism preferred to turn its weapons against our people, today French scholarship is immersed in German thought, and the English are competing with the French. Tying the present to the past: in this sign we shall triumph, and our best victories will be those of the spirit.

"Honor your German masters, then you will banish good spirits", Richard Wagner aptly calls out to us. Unfortunately, we still follow this call in a rather one-sided way. However, while we strive to create ever clearer and more complete images of the deceased greats of German intellectual development, we are often unfair to the living.

Without wishing to object in the slightest to the just appreciation of past cultural periods and to the ever-increasing immersion in the study of Schiller, Goethe, Herder and so on - on the contrary, we fully recognize the necessity of this - we cannot deny ourselves the insight that we usually lack the good will to come to a judgment about the greats of the present. Admittedly, it takes less courage to express one's admiration for Goethe and Schiller over and over again, whereby one can meet with no contradiction anywhere in the educated world, than to stand up for a living person and to speak a ruthless word here for once.

Since we believe that a newspaper is preferably called to serve the present, we would like to record our judgment on one of the most sympathetic German thinkers, Johannes Volkelt.

We want to start from a fact that will still be vividly remembered by many who studied in Vienna in the seventies. On March 10, 1875, Johannes Volkelt, a 27-year-old scholar at the time, gave a lecture at the "Reading Association of German Students in Vienna" which must be regarded as the most significant contribution to the cultural history of the present day.

In every sentence, Volkelt shows how deeply he has delved into the history of his time. There is an astonishing wealth of spirit in this lecture, and indeed of genuine German spirit.

Of course, this is not the light, French-style wit of Ludwig Speidel, Eduard Hanslick, Hugo Wittmann or even Oppenheim and Spitzer, who supposedly speak about some important subject, but in reality entertain their audience with stale quips and thoughtless phrases. No, Volkelt's speech was witty in the sense that it found the right word at the right moment, the genuine, pithy German word that always entertains us because it lifts us spiritually.

In this lecture, Volkelt measures our time against Kant's high concept of morality, which is deeply rooted in the essence of the German people. Kant makes the morality of an action solely dependent on the attitude from which it emerged. An action that complies with all existing laws, that is of incalculable benefit to others and posterity, is not moral if it does not flow from the good mindset of its author. If two do the same thing, one out of selfishness, the other out of duty, the first acts immorally, the second morally. Volkelt now asks: What is the attitude of our time to these views of the Königsberg sage? He comes to a sad answer. The view seems to have become almost universal: you don't get anywhere with a moral attitude, you don't build railroads with it, you don't found industrial enterprises with it. People believe they have done enough for morality if they do not come into conflict with the criminal law. Being good at heart is seen as a prejudice that children have to be taught at school, but which is of no use in life. There are circles today that have adopted ways of life that are immoral at their root. "It seems to me," says Volkelt, "that hardly any expression characterizes the moral life of our time as aptly as the word 'beguem'. Cool laxity, genteel comfort is part of the good tone."

There was a time when man had to wring the least he needed for his sustenance from nature. Hard work, a struggle in the truest sense of the word, was required to eke out an existence. Today things have changed. Conquering nature is easy for us. We have machines and tools that do what our ancestors had to do with their own hands. Like any sensible person, we naturally recognize this as progress. But we also do not fail to recognize that this very progress goes hand in hand with a decline in character and morals. The toil and labor that man once had to perform in order to wring a living from nature were for him a high school of morality. Today, all we have to do is lift a hand and the whole social apparatus works to satisfy our needs. As a result, the latter increase to the point of exaggeration, people lose the desire to walk the straight and hard path of duty, preferring instead the easy path of comfort. This results in a paralysis of personal strength of character, of the ability to work.

A large part of our society suffers from marrowlessness and softening of the bones in spiritual terms.

"We live in a time of general upholstery," says Volkelt aptly, and adds: "You will find out how right I am when you look around your comfortably furnished room, when you take a walk through the streets, when you go on a journey. Even the most remote mountain valleys are no longer safe from railroads and modern hotels. You experience it as often as you allow yourself to be served in a pub by the slickly combed waiters, those poetry-less machines; as often as you have to move about on a mirror-like saloon floor in tails and gloves. You experience it with every legal transaction you get into, with the simplest business you are supposed to handle. Even war today has an impersonal, prompt machine character." This is the age in which there are few who have an ideal goal in mind and, without a sideways glance to the right or left, head ruthlessly towards it; no, where everyone just abandons themselves to the blind hustle and bustle of the world and, playing a frivolous game with happiness and life, tries to get as much out of the social machine as they can. Everywhere the comfortable is preferred to that which requires the use of the whole personality. Who reads a systematic book today that has been produced by years of hard work? No, people prefer to take note of the issues of the day from "elegantly" written feuilletons or "popular", i.e. shallow lectures. The former is tedious and requires rigorous thinking, the latter is comfortable. In the theater, the audience is offered the lightest, meanest, even the most stupid stuff. They sip it with pleasure, because the enjoyment of something higher also requires mental effort. Political party life everywhere reveals only half-measures and opportunism. Almost no one can be found who utters a sincere, ruthless "That's what I want!"

The firmness of character has perished in the staggering life of pleasure. Volkelt recommends reading Kant's writings to all those who are corroded by the evil spirit of our time. For they are a school for the weak in character. In particular, Volkelt addresses his admonition to journalists. It is precisely this profession that most degrades the dignity of man in his own person, when he surrenders himself to the will-less tool of his financial backers. The journalist turns his person into a thing by selling himself.

It is curious that Volkelt, in view of the outcome of the Ofenheim trial in 1875, had already bluntly exposed the damage done to the Viennese press. He chose an example from the series of papers that do not want to know anything about morals and sentiment when it comes to large-scale undertakings, for which the only decisive factor is whether more or less can be gained from something. Irrespective of the fact that you risk a lot when you make enemies of the powerful, our thinker chose the "most respected" newspaper in Vienna, the "Neue Freie Presse", as the object of his attack. He was right, because although this newspaper lives only from the phrase, it still impresses many. One must first remove its mask. The other leaves of this character are not even worth this effort. Volkelt says: "After the acquitting verdict of the jury - in the Ofenheim trial - one should have confessed with moral sorrow: Our penal law is unfortunately so imperfect that it cannot catch the immorality of those people in its snares. But what happened instead? The next morning, an editorial appeared in the "Neue Freie Presse" that must make every simple and healthy-minded person nauseous. If the Ofenheim spirit was not adhered to in industrial undertakings, we would fall into an "era of dull, despondent resignation". This paper goes so far in its forced, artificially incited enthusiasm that it regards acquittal as the highest achievement for the 'conscience', for 'ethics'. The same conflation of legal right and morality can be found in the next editorial. In order to present its lapchild Ofenheim as completely morally rehabilitated, the 'Neue Freie Presse' seeks to scandalize morality in general. It has the temerity to declare that there is 'no earthly tribunal' for morality at all.

I ask: does not a voice of judgment live in the people, does not a voice of judgment live in every man's breast, urgently proclaiming his moral guilt and innocence? The 'Neue Freie Presse', which describes morality, which is different from law and justice, as an 'insubstantial abstract' and wants us to believe that every person's breast is as arid and paragraph-like as that of its followers, should take a lesson from the old Kant that acting in accordance with the law is legal, but not yet 'moral'. But the "Neue Freie Presse" probably knows this itself. Only the oppressive feeling of having once stood up for something morally hollow could give it the sentence: "If justice and the law have spoken, then morality has also been satisfied." While she usually loved to dress herself with a certain idealistic verve, she now displays a moral dullness and moral nakedness. In her eyes, all those who are morally indignant are hypocrites, sycophants, people with a crude attitude."

These were strong words. Volkelt had said what moved hundreds of people. Anyone who heard his words had to recognize the German man in Volkelt and agree with him wholeheartedly. And he has so far proved himself to be an energetic, fully German man. He leads a life of thought in the German sense and strives to solve the highest world problems. His works definitely bear the trait that is imprinted on them by his harmonious, indomitable personality.

Mind and thought are equally present in this man. If you want to see this for yourself, read his book: "Dream Fantasy."

Just as astronomy developed from astrology and chemistry from alchemy, a science of the dream world will develop from dream interpretation. Man always wants to exploit the realms of reality for his personal desires first and will only penetrate them later with the selfless research of science. In his book, Volkelt has eloquently compiled all the elements we have today for a future 'dream science'. Anyone who goes through the book will soon realize that this intimate field, this world of fairy tales, could only have been treated so favorably by a German.

Volkelt's writings: "The Unconscious and Pessimism", "Individualism and Pantheism", "The Concept of Symbol in the Latest Aesthetics", show us everywhere the highly gifted, thorough thinker who finally appears at his full height in his last writings: "Kant's Epistemology" and "Experience and Thought".

Volkelt is an original researcher who builds on Kant in his own way. Kant argued against the scientific "groping around in the dark" that we must first test our own cognitive faculty to see whether this instrument is also suitable for understanding extraordinary things such as God, the soul and the like. And he believed he had proved that we can understand nothing but the experience that is spread out before our senses. Everything supernatural remains uncertain. Volkelt is also of the opinion that we only have certain knowledge of that which is given to our eyes and ears and so on. However, he believed that by logical reasoning we could also gain knowledge of the active causes lying behind this sensory world, but that this knowledge had no character other than that of probability. He wanted to unite the "cautious criticism", which he had adopted from Kant, with a "highly aspiring idealism". It is true that the latest phase of his thought is not entirely free of the lack of courage and energy that generally prevails in thought today, but his healthy nature and his German sense will hopefully not allow him to fall into the error of thinking that our research is a futile struggle. We hope to see the disappearance from his philosophy of that which he regards as necessary today: "A going forward, which again partially recedes, a yielding, which again to a certain extent takes hold." We demand that the philosopher also be inspired by Hutten's spirit and speak a strong and resolute "Through!"

We would have liked this German thinker, who was born in Austria, to have found an appropriate place for his work here too. His bold, free spirit made him impossible in his homeland. Truly, he would have become a role model for the academic citizenry here in the upholding of our ideal goods and in the hatred of all that is bad and half-baked. Not everywhere, however, people love a free, unrestrained demeanor, and so Volkelt had to wander. He first found a place to work at the University of Jena, then in Basel, where he lives today.

Neither the future historian of philosophy nor the cultural historian will be able to deny Volkelt's name a place of honor.

With a shrug of the shoulders, our present-day generation remembers the time when a philosophical wave swept through the whole of German intellectual life. The powerful current of the times, which seized the minds at the end of the last century and the beginning of this century and boldly set itself the highest conceivable tasks, is currently regarded as a regrettable aberration. Anyone who dares to contradict the "fantasies of Fichte" or the "insubstantial thoughts and word games" of Hegel is simply portrayed as a dilettante "who has as little idea of the spirit of modern natural science as he does of the solidity and rigor of the philosophical method". Only Kant and Schopenhauer find favor with our contemporaries. The former succeeds in seemingly deriving from his teachings the somewhat sparse philosophical chunks on which modern research is based; the latter, in addition to his strictly scientific achievements, also wrote works in a light style and about things that need not be too remote even for people with the most modest intellectual horizon. But for that striving for the highest peaks of the world of thought, for that impetus of the spirit that paralleled our classical artistic epoch in the scientific field, there is now a lack of sense and understanding. The alarming aspect of this phenomenon only becomes apparent when one considers that a permanent turning away from that intellectual direction would be for the Germans a loss of their self, a break with the spirit of the people. For that striving arose from a deep need of the German essence. It does not occur to us to want to deny the manifold errors and one-sidedness that Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Oken and others committed in their bold undertakings in the realm of idealism, but the tendency that inspired them should not be misjudged in its grandeur. It is so appropriate to the people of thinkers. Not the lively sense for the immediate reality, for the outside of nature, which enabled the Greeks to create their magnificent, imperishable creations, is characteristic of the Germans, but instead an unrelenting urge of the spirit for the basis of things, for the seemingly hidden, deeper causes of the nature that surrounds us. While the Greek spirit lived in a wonderful world of forms and shapes, the German, who withdrew into himself and had less contact with nature and more with his heart, with his own inner being, had to seek his conquests in the realm of pure thought. And that is why it was German how Fichte and his followers approached the world and life. That is why their teachings were so enthusiastically received, that is why the whole life of the nation was gripped by them for a time. But that is also why we must not break with this school of thought. Overcoming the errors, but natural development on the foundation laid at that time, must become our watchword. It is not what these minds found or thought they found, but how they faced up to the tasks of research that is of lasting value. They felt the need to penetrate into the deepest secrets of the mystery of the world, without revelation, without experience limited to chance, purely through the power inherent in their own thinking, and they were convinced that human thinking was capable of the impetus necessary for this. How different are things today? We have lost all confidence in thinking. Observation and experience are regarded as the only tools of research. What is not tangible is considered uncertain. There is no understanding for the fact that our thinking can look deeper into the workings of the world than all external observation is capable of, without hanging on the shackles of the senses, relying purely on itself. One renounces any solution to the great riddles of creation and wastes endless effort on detailed research, which is of no value without great, guiding points of view. The only thing we forget is that with this view we are approaching a point of view that we believe we have long since overcome. For the rejection of all thought and the insistence on experience is, more deeply understood, quite the same as the blind faith in revelation of the religions. For what is the latter based on? But only on the fact that truths are handed down to us ready-made, which we must accept without having to weigh up the reasons in our own thinking. We hear the message, but we are denied insight into the reasons. It is no different with blind faith in experience. According to the naturalists and the strict philologists, we should merely collect and organize the facts and so on, without going into the inner reasons. Here, too, we should simply accept the finished truths without any insight into the forces behind the phenomena. Believe what God has revealed and do not search for the reasons, says theology; register what takes place before your eyes, but do not think about the causes behind it, for that is in vain, says the latest philosophy. And only in the field of ethics, where have we got to! The common thread that runs through the thinking of all the minds of the classical period of our science is the recognition of free will as the supreme power of the human spirit. This recognition is what, properly understood, makes man alone appear to us in his dignity. The religions which demand of us submission to the commandments which an external power gives us, and which see in this submission alone the moral, diminish this dignity. It is not appropriate for a being at the highest stage of organic development to submit without volition to the paths marked out for it by another; it must prescribe for itself the direction and goal of its activity. To obey not commandments but one's own insight, to recognize no power of the world that would dictate to us what is moral, that is freedom in its true form. This view makes us the masters of our own destiny. Fichte's meaningful words are borne by this conception: "Break down all upon me, and you earth and you heaven, mingle in wild tumult, and all you elements, - foam and rage, and in wild struggle wear away the last little sun-dust of the body which I call mine: - my will alone with its firm plan shall hover bold and cold above the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more lasting than you; it is eternal, and I am eternal like it." What was the basis of German idealistic philosophy: breaking with dogma in the field of thought, breaking with commandment in the field of action, must be the unalterable goal of further development. Man must create happiness and satisfaction from within himself and not let it come to him from outside. Pessimism and other similar diseases of the times arise purely from the inability to rely on an energetic self and to work powerfully from there. One does not know how to set oneself specific tasks in life that one could cope with, one dreams oneself into vague, unclear ideals and then complains when one does not achieve what one actually has no idea about. Ask one of today's pessimists what he actually wants and what he despairs of? He does not know. Don't think that I'm referring to Eduard von Hartmann's pessimism, which has nothing in common with the usual lamentation about the misery of life. (How highly I regard Hartmann's world view can be seen from the introduction to the second volume of my edition of Goethe's scientific writings. Kürschner's German National Literature.)

In spite of all the progress we have made in the most diverse fields of culture, we cannot deny that the signature of our age leaves much, very much to be desired. Our progress is for the most part only in breadth and not in depth. But only progress in depth is decisive for the content of an age. It may be that the abundance of facts that have penetrated us from all sides makes it seem understandable that we have momentarily lost our view into the depths over the view into the breadth; we only wish that the broken thread of progressive development will soon be tied up again and that the new facts will be grasped from the spiritual height once gained.

The number of writings and treatises currently appearing that set themselves the task of examining Goethe's relationship to the individual branches of modern science and to the various expressions of our intellectual life in general is overwhelming. This reflects the gratifying fact that ever wider circles are becoming aware that in Goethe we are confronted with a cultural factor with whom all those who wish to participate in the intellectual life of the present must come to terms. He who does not find the point where he can link his own striving to this greatest spirit of modern times can only allow himself to be led by the rest of humanity like a blind man; he cannot consciously, with full clarity, head for the goals which the cultural development of the time is taking. But science in particular does not do justice to Goethe everywhere. It lacks the impartiality necessary here more than anywhere else to first immerse itself in the full depth of Goethe's genius before sitting down in the critical chair. One believes oneself to be far beyond Goethe, because the individual results of his research have been overtaken by those of today's science, which works with more perfect tools and a richer experience. But we should look beyond these details to his comprehensive principles, to his great way of looking at things. We should adopt his way of thinking, his way of posing problems, so that we can then continue to build in his spirit with our richer means and our broader experience. Goethe himself illustrated the relationship of his scientific results to the progress of research in an excellent image. He describes them as stones with which he had perhaps ventured too far on the chessboard, but from which one should recognize the player's plan. This plan, with which he gave new, great impulses to the sciences to which he devoted himself, is a lasting achievement to which one does the greatest injustice if one treats it from above. But it is peculiar to our time that the productive power of genius seems almost insignificant. How could it be otherwise in an age in which any going beyond actual experience in science is frowned upon by so many! For mere observation, you need nothing but healthy senses, and genius is a rather dispensable thing.

But true progress in the sciences as well as in art has never been brought about by mere observation or slavish imitation of nature. If thousands and thousands pass by a fact, then someone comes along and makes the discovery of a great scientific law. Many people before Galileo may have observed a swaying church lamp, but it was up to this brilliant mind to discover the laws of the pendulum, which are so important for physics. "If the eye were not sunny, how could we see the light!" exclaims Goethe, and by this he means that only those who have the necessary dispositions and the productive power to see more in the facts than the mere facts are able to see into the depths of nature.

Based on these principles, purely philological and critical Goethe research, which it would be foolish to deny its justification, must be supplemented. We must go back to the tendencies that Goethe had and continue to work scientifically from the points of view that he showed. We should not merely research about his spirit, but in his spirit.

The aim here is to show how one of the youngest and most controversial sciences, aesthetics, must be developed in the spirit of Goethe's world view. This science is barely over a century old. In 1750, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten emerged with his "Aesthetica" with the certain awareness that he was opening up a new scientific field. What had previously been written about this branch of thought cannot even be described as an elementary approach to a science of art. Neither the Greek nor the medieval philosophers knew what to do with art scientifically. The Greek mind found everything it was looking for within nature, there was no longing for it that was not satisfied by this good mother. It demanded nothing beyond nature, so art did not need to offer it anything beyond that; it had to satisfy the same needs as nature, only to a greater degree. One found everything one was looking for in nature, therefore one needed to achieve nothing in art but nature. Aristotle therefore knows no other principle of art than imitation of nature. Plato, the great idealist of the Greeks, simply declared the fine arts and drama to be harmful. He had so little concept of the independent function of art that he only gave music the benefit of the doubt because it promoted bravery in war. - It could remain so only as long as man did not know that a world at least equal to external nature lived within him. But the moment he became aware of this independent world, he had to free himself from the fetters of nature, he had to face it as a free being who no longer had to create his desires and needs. Whether this new longing, which is not generated within bloße nature, can still be satisfied by the latter remains questionable. Thus the conflicts of the ideal with reality, of the desired with the achieved, in short everything that leads a human soul into a true spiritual labyrinth. Nature stands before us soulless, devoid of everything that our inner being announces to us as divine. The next consequence will be a turning away from all reality, an escape from the immediately natural. This flight shows us the world view of the Christian Middle Ages; it is the exact opposite of Greekism. Just as the latter found everything in nature, this view finds nothing at all in it. Even now, a science of art was not possible. After all, art can only work with the means of nature, and Christian scholarship could not grasp how works could be created within godless reality that could satisfy the spirit striving for the divine. But the helplessness of science never hindered the development of art. While the former did not know what to think about it, the most glorious works of Christian art were created.

For the emergence of aesthetics, a time was necessary in which the spirit, free and independent of the bonds of nature, sees its inner self, the ideal world, in full clarity, and the idea has become a necessity for it, but in which a union with nature is also possible again. This union cannot, of course, refer to the sum of coincidences that make up the world that is given to us as the world of the senses, and of which the Greek was still completely satisfied. Here we find nothing but facts, which could just as well be otherwise, and we seek the necessary, of which we understand why it must be so; we see nothing but individuals, and our spirit strives for the generic, the archetypal; we see nothing but the finite, the transient, and our spirit strives for the infinite, the imperishable, the eternal. If the human spirit, alienated from nature, were to return to nature, it would have to be to something other than that sum of coincidences. And this return means to Goethe: return to nature, but return with the full richness of the developed spirit, with the educational height of the new age. Goethe's view does not correspond to the fundamental separation of nature and spirit; he wants to see a great whole in the world, a unified chain of development of beings, within which man forms a link, albeit the highest. It is a matter of going beyond the immediate, sensuous nature without moving away in the slightest from what constitutes the essence of nature. It approaches reality with reverence because it believes in its ideal content. To survey nature from a unified center of development as a creative whole and to recreate the emergence of the individual from the whole in the spirit, that is the task. What matters is not the finished individual, but the law of nature, not the individual, but the idea, the type that makes it comprehensible to us in the first place. In Goethe this fact is expressed in the most perfect form imaginable. But what we can learn from his attitude towards nature is the incontrovertible truth that for the modern spirit immediate nature offers no satisfaction, because we do not already recognize the highest, the idea, the divine in it, as it lies spread out before our senses as a world of experience, but only when we go beyond it. In the purely ideal form, detached from all reality, the "higher nature in nature" is now contained in science. But whereas mere. While mere experience cannot come to a reconciliation of the opposites of the ideal and the real world because it has the reality but not yet the idea, science cannot do the same for the reason that it has the idea but no longer the reality. Between the two, man needs a new realm, a realm in which the individual, and not the whole, already represents the idea, in which the individual, and not the species, is already endowed with the character of necessity. But such a world does not come to us from outside, man must create it for himself; and this world is the world of art, a necessary third realm alongside that of the senses and that of reason. The task of aesthetics is now to understand art as this third realm and to understand the endeavors of artists from this point of view. It is to the credit of Kant's "Critique of Judgment", published in 1790, that the problem was first raised in the way we have indicated and that all the main aesthetic questions were thus actually brought into flow. The ideas expressed therein, in conjunction with the magnificent elaboration they received from Schiller (in the "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man"), are the cornerstone of aesthetics. Kant finds that pleasure in an object is only purely aesthetic if it is uninfluenced by interest in the real existence of the object, so that the pure pleasure in beauty is not clouded by the interference of the faculty of desire, which only asks for purpose and utility and judges the world according to these. Schiller now finds that the intellectual activity that lives itself out in the creation and enjoyment of beauty is characterized by the fact that it is neither bound by a natural necessity, to which we must adhere when we simply allow the world of experience to affect our senses, nor is it subject to a logical necessity, which immediately comes into consideration when we approach reality for the purpose of scientific research or technical exploitation of the forces of nature (for example, in the construction of a machine). The artist obeys neither the necessity of nature nor the necessity of reason unilaterally. He transforms the things of the outside world in such a way that they appear as if the spirit were already inherent in them, and he treats the spirit as if it had a direct natural effect.

This gives rise to the aesthetic appearance, in which both the necessity of nature and the necessity of reason are suspended; the former because it is not without spirit, and the latter because it has descended from its ideal height and acts like nature. The works that result from this are of course not true to nature in the usual sense of the word, because in nature idea and reality nowhere coincide, but they must be appearance if they are to be true works of art. With the concept of appearance in this context, Schiller is unique as an aesthetician, unsurpassed, indeed unrivaled. This is where aesthetics should have taken up and built on from there. Instead, Schelling entered the scene with a completely misguided basic view and thus led aesthetics astray, so that it has never found its way again. The doyen of our science of beauty, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, held on to his conviction until the end of his life, despite having written a five-volume aesthetics: Aesthetics is still in its infancy. Like all modern philosophy, Schelling found the task of the highest human endeavor in grasping the eternal archetypes of things. All truth and beauty is contained in them. True beauty is therefore something supersensible and the work of art, which aims to achieve beauty in the sensual, is only a reflection of that eternal archetype. According to Schelling, the work of art is not beautiful for its own sake, but because it depicts the idea of beauty. Art has no other task than to objectively embody and illustrate the truth as it is also contained in science. What matters here, what our pleasure in the work of art is linked to, is the expressed idea. The sensual image is only a means of expression for a supersensible content. And in this, all aestheticians follow the idealizing direction of Schelling. Neither Hegel and Schopenhauer, nor their successors, have made any progress on this point.¹ When Hegel says: "The beautiful is the sensuous appearance of the idea" and even more clearly: "The hard bark of nature and the ordinary world make it more sour for the spirit to penetrate to the idea than the works of art", it is quite clearly expressed therein that the aim of art is the same as that of science, namely to grasp the idea, only science wants to present it to us in pure thought form, but art in a sensuous way through a sensual means of expression. And in the same sense, Vischer defines beauty as "the appearance of the idea". This aesthetic cannot grasp the independent significance of art. What it offers, in its view, can also be achieved in a purer, more unclouded form through thought. And that is why the idealizing science of art has proven to be unfruitful. But it is not to be replaced by a physiology of taste, not by an unprincipled, mere history of art, but by following Goethe's conception of art. Merck once characterized Goethe's work by saying that the latter sought to give a poetic form to the real, while the others sought only to embody the so-called imaginative, which produced stupid things. This alludes to a principle of art that Goethe expresses in the second part of Faust with the words: "Consider the what, consider more how." This clearly states what art is all about. It is not about embodying the supersensible, but about transforming the sensual, the actual. The real should not be reduced to a means of expression, no, it should remain in its independence, only it should be given a new form, a form in which it satisfies our need for the necessary, the archetypal. It is not the idea in the sensual that should be the reason for our pleasure, our elevation in the work of art, but the fact that a real, an individual thing appears here as as the idea. In nature, objects never appear to us as they correspond to their idea, but inhibited, influenced from all sides by forces that have nothing to do with the germ within them. The external does not coincide with the internal, nature does not achieve what it intended. The artist now eliminates all these causes of imperfection and presents the individual thing to our eye as if it were an idea. The artist creates objects that are more perfect than they can be according to their natural existence, but it is only the perfection of the being that he visualizes, brings to representation. The beauty lies in this transcendence of an object beyond itself, but only on the basis of what is already hidden within it. Goethe can rightly say: "Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would have remained hidden from us forever without its appearance", and "To whom nature begins to reveal its open secret, he feels an irresistible longing for its most worthy interpreter, art". The beautiful should not embody an idea, but rather lend such form to the real that it appears before our senses as perfect and divine as an idea.

Beauty is appearance because it conjures up a reality before our senses that presents itself as such, like the world of ideas itself. The what remains a sensual, but the how of its appearance becomes an ideal. Science provides us with a world of ideal perfection; however, we can only think this; a world endowed with the character of the same perfection, but which is visual, confronts us in the beauty. Eduard von Hartmann, the most recent editor of aesthetics, who has created a very commendable work in his "Philosophy of Beauty", says quite correctly that the basic concept from which all contemplation of beauty must start is the concept of aesthetic appearance. But the world of ideas as such can never be regarded as appearance, regardless of the form in which it appears. It is a real appearance, however, when the natural, the individual, appears in an eternal, imperishable form, endowed with the characters of the idea, for the natural as such is not entitled to such a form. The aesthetics that proceeds from this view does not yet exist. It can certainly be described as the "aesthetics of Goethe's world view"; and it is the aesthetics of the future.

• 1. Even Eduard von Hartmann's comments on Hegel in his large-scale, intellectual aesthetics cannot shake me in this conviction, and the quotations cited in the text certainly speak for me.