The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The questions that arise for the observer of Goethe's scientific writings were not easy to answer from the material available so far. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that only in the field of color theory do we have to do with a fully elaborated work by the poet from the field of natural science, complete in all respects. From the other parts of it we have only more or less elaborated essays which comment on the most varied problems, but of which it cannot be denied that they present contradictions which are apparently difficult to reconcile when it is a question of gaining an all-round comprehensive view of Goethe's significance in this field. The most important points that come into consideration here have therefore been interpreted in the most diverse ways imaginable by the researchers involved in the matter. Was Goethe a theorist of descent? Did he assume a real transformation of species, and to what causes did he attribute it? Was he thinking of a sensuous-real being or an idea in his "type"? These are questions to which we have heard completely contradictory answers from various quarters in recent decades. From the assertion that Goethe was only thinking of an abstract concept in the Platonic sense with his "type", to the assertion that he should be regarded as a genuine predecessor of Darwin, all intermediate stages have found their representatives. While some disparaged him as a man who merely fantasized about nature, others praised him because he was the first to take that direction in natural science which today is regarded as the only one leading to the goal.

It must be admitted that the defenders of all these views were able to provide sufficient evidence from Goethe's works for their respective arguments. Of course, it should not be overlooked that in each case only the most appropriate passages were selected and other passages that would justify a contrary opinion were simply ignored. We are far from reproaching anyone for this; rather, we are convinced that what has been presented so far has made it extremely difficult to arrive at a consistent view of the matter, even if we cannot admit the impossibility of doing so.

For all those who have an interest in this aspect of Goethe's work, the question must have arisen at the moment when the treasures of the Goethe Archive became accessible: do the papers left behind by the poet offer a supplement here? The writer of these lines now finds, on studying them in detail, that they provide us with the most surprising information, especially with regard to the above-mentioned points of view, which are quite suitable for bringing about complete satisfaction in this direction.

The high owner of the archive, the Grand Duchess of Saxony, has graciously allowed me to use the available materials for the purpose of a preliminary orienting work in this field, and so this essay has been written, for which the necessary evidence was selected from the treasures of the archive with the continued loving assistance of the director of the Goethe and Schiller Archive, Prof. Suphan.

For the time being, we will leave aside the color theory and the geological and meteorological writings and limit ourselves to the morphological works, which are the most important for the problems outlined above. The purpose of our remarks is to show in general outline what we can expect from the publication of Goethe's as yet unprinted essays and fragments in this field for the clarification of the poet's significance in the field of the science of the organic. We will avoid as much as possible going into contemporary views on these matters and refrain from any polemics. For now, it will suffice to present Goethe's views purely in themselves, without any sideways glances at others.

Above all else, however, we must reject an error that is deeply rooted and with which Goethe already had to struggle many times during his lifetime. It culminates in the assumption that the poet did not arrive at his scientific results through methodical, logical thought, but "in passing", through a "happy idea". Goethe described the "History of his botanical studies" in detail mainly because he wanted to "illustrate" how he "found the opportunity to devote a large part of his life with inclination and passion to nature studies".¹

No better illustration of this last sentence can be imagined than the sheets preserved in the archives, which give us an insight into the course of Goethe's botanical work during his Italian journey. We can see from them how, through countless observations and conscientious considerations of the natural objects, he came to final clarity. These are records which point to the opposite of random ideas or a fleeting rush, but rather to careful and deliberate step-by-step striving towards the predetermined goals. Goethe is tireless in his search for plant specimens that are in some way suitable for introducing us to the laws of growth and reproduction. Particularly characteristic features are drawn in order to discover the secrets of nature's efficacy in vivid reproduction. We find observations made with great care about the importance of the individual organs, the influence of the climate and the environment of the plants. If Goethe thought he was on the trail of some law, he first set it out in hypothetical form in order to use it as a guide for further observations. In this way, it should either be confirmed or refuted. He assigned such hypotheses a very special task in scientific research. We take the following from an unpublished note: "Hypotheses are scaffolds that are erected in front of the building and taken down when the building is finished; they are indispensable to the worker, but he does not have to regard the scaffolding as the building."

These words indicate his scientific attitude, which is wary of taking a passing remark for a law of nature.

The sheets on which Goethe made his scientific notes during the Italian journey belonged to small notebooks, which were found torn apart, like other papers with notes from the same period, for example those on "Nausikaa". The latter were always arranged by Prof. Suphan for the respective purpose; the same has now been done with those belonging to natural science.

Goethe often remained in the dark for quite a long time with his observations, and he wanted this in order to gain as broad a basis as possible for his theoretical construction. He studies the processes of germination and fertilization, observes the various forms of organs and their transformations. We can see sentences that later became integral parts of his theory of metamorphosis here in these papers in their first form, as he reads them directly from the natural processes, for example: "The plant must have a lot of aqueous moisture so that the oils and salts can combine in it. The leaves must draw off this moisture, perhaps modify it." Or:

"What the soil is to the root, the plant later becomes to the finer vessels, which develop upwards and suck the finer juices out of the plant."

"Aloe... the leaves are expanded by the air and displace the interstices ... underground, the leaves are small, the interstices larger."

After Goethe had worked his way through a series of observations in this way, his later view suggested itself to him as a hypothesis. We find the following note on a leaf: "Hypothesis. Everything is a leaf and this simplicity makes the greatest diversity possible."

He now pursues this hypothesis further. Where a case of experience leaves him unclear about something, he conscientiously notes it down in order to obtain the necessary information from a more favorable one. We very often encounter such questions that have remained unclear and have been saved for future observations. In any case, these sheets provide proof that Goethe had put a great deal of thought and a considerable amount of experience behind him when he finally became firmly convinced of the hypothesis of the primordial plant in mid-1787. I have described in detail in the introduction to my edition of Goethe's scientific writings (Goethe's Works, in Kürschner's "Deutsche NationalLiteratur", Volume XXXIII) how he pursued it further, extended the approach he had adopted to other organisms and published the first attempt in this direction in 1790.

At this point, let us immediately turn to the question: what does Goethe mean by "Urpflanze"? On 17 April 1787 in Palermo, he wrote the following words about it: "There must be such a plant; how else would I recognize that this or that structure is a plant if they were not all formed according to one pattern." ² This sentence provides the proof that the primordial plant is to be understood as that something which confronts the human mind as the same in all the plant forms that are different for the sensory perception. We would not be able to recognize that all these forms belong together, that they form a kingdom of nature, if we could not grasp the "primordial plant".

If we visualize this, we can immediately get an idea of what Goethe meant by experience. He not only wanted to carefully observe that which is accessible to sense perception, but at the same time he strove for a spiritual content that would allow him to determine the objects of this experience according to their essence. He called this spiritual content, whereby a thing emerged from the dullness of sensory existence, from the indeterminacy of external perception, and became a definite thing (animal, plant, mineral), an idea. Nothing else can be read from the above words, and we are also able to substantiate our assertion with the following previously unpublished statement: "Time is governed by the swing of the pendulum, the moral and scientific world by the alternating movement from idea to experience."

What did Goethe mean by these words, if not that science cannot be content with experience, but must progress beyond it to the idea? The idea is supposed to determine what the object of experience is; it cannot therefore be identical with it. The fact that Goethe ascribed an essentially active role to the spirit in the production of ideas emerges from the following interesting classification of types of knowledge:

"In order to orient ourselves to some extent in these different kinds ³ let us divide them into: Users, Knowers, Viewers and Comprehenders.

1. the users, those who seek benefits, those who make demands are the first to outline the field of science, as it were, to grasp the practical. Consciousness through experience gives them security, the need a certain breadth.

2 The inquisitive require a calm, disinterested eye, a curious restlessness, a clear mind and are always in relation to them; they also only process in a scientific sense what they find.

3. the contemplators already behave productively, and knowledge, by increasing itself, demands contemplation without realizing it, and passes over to it, and however much the knowers crucify and bless themselves before the imagination, they must, before they know it, call upon the productive imagination for help.

4 The comprehensive ones, who in a proud sense could be called the creators, behave in the highest degree productively; namely, by starting from ideas, they already express the unity of the whole, and it is to a certain extent afterwards the matter of nature to fit into this idea."

What at the highest level of cognition should actually first lead into the riddles of nature, the spirit must creatively bring to the things of sense perception. Without this productive power, our cognition remains at one of the lower levels.⁴

Goethe thus conceives of the primordial plant as an entity that cannot become present in our spirit if it merely behaves passively towards the outside world. But what can only appear through the human spirit does not necessarily have to originate from the spirit. Here an erroneous view is very obvious. It is impossible for the majority of people to imagine that something, for the appearance of which subjective conditions are absolutely necessary, can nevertheless have an objective meaning and essence. And the "original plant" is precisely of this latter kind. It is the essential objectively contained in all plants; but if it is to gain apparent existence, the human mind must construct it freely.

But basically this view is only a further development of the view that modern natural science also holds in the field of sensory perception. Without the constitution and effectiveness of the eye there would be no perception of color, without that of the ear no sound. Nevertheless, no one would want to claim that color and sound do not have their absolutely objective meaning and essence. How one wants to imagine this in more detail: whether, as a supporter of the undulation hypothesis, one regards vibrations of the body parts and the ether or the air as the objective essence of color and sound, or whether one leans towards a different view, is irrelevant here. We only attach importance to the fact that, although the modern physiologist is convinced that sensory perception can only enter into apparent, perceptible existence through the activity of the corresponding sense organ, he will not for a moment assert that color, sound, warmth and so on are merely subjective, are without a corresponding correlate in the realm of the objective. But Goethe's idea of the organic type is only the logical extension of this conception of the subjective production of phenomenal existence to an area in which mere sensory perception is no longer sufficient to arrive at knowledge.

The matter only presents difficulties of understanding in this area because consciousness already begins at that stage of the human faculty of perception at which ideas are generated. We now know that we play an active part in the apprehension of ideas, while the activity of the organism, where it mediates sense-perception, is a completely unconscious one. But this circumstance is quite irrelevant to the matter itself. Just as color, sound, warmth and so on have an objective meaning in rerum natura, although they cannot acquire a meaning for us without the subjective activity of our sensory instruments, so ideas have an objective value, although they cannot enter into it without the mind's own activity.

It is absolutely necessary that everything that is to appear in our consciousness first passes through our physical or psychic organism.

Given this, we recognize that, in Goethe's way of thinking, there must be a constant alternation between the influx of material supplied by the senses and the typical created freely by reason and an interpenetration of these two products in the mind of the researcher if a satisfactory solution to the problems of natural science is to be possible. Goethe compares this alternation to a systole and diastole of the mind, the continuous merging of which he presupposes in every true natural scientist. He says: "In the mind of the true naturalist, it must always alternate like a systole and diastole moving in equilibrium."

What has been said so far now also provides us with the opportunity to decide whether it is in accordance with Goethe's view to identify the primordial plant or the primordial animal with any sensory-real organic form that occurred at a certain time or still occurs. The answer to this can only be a decisive "no". The "original plant" is contained in every plant and can be obtained from the plant world through the constructive power of the spirit; but no single individual form may be addressed as typical.

Now, however, the "original plant" (or the "original animal") is precisely what makes each individual form what it is; it is the essence. We must keep this in mind if we want to fully penetrate Goethe's intentions.

The lawfulness of the organic must not be sought in the same field as that of the inorganic. In the science of inorganic nature, I have completely fulfilled my task when I have succeeded in explaining what I perceive with my senses according to its causal connection. In the organic, I must subject to explanation those facts which are no longer perceptible to the senses. Anyone who only wanted to look at a living being and use as an explanation what he perceives about it with his senses was not sufficient in the forum of Goethean science.

It has often been claimed that the organic can only be explained if the laws of the inorganic are simply transferred to the realm of the animate. Attempts to establish a science of living things in this way are still on the agenda today. But it was Goethe's great flight of thought that made him realize that one need not doubt the possibility of an explanation of the organic even if the inorganic laws of nature should prove inadequate for this purpose. Should our ability to explain only extend as far as we can apply the laws of the inorganic? What Goethe wanted was nothing other than to banish all dark and unclear ideas such as the life force, formative instinct and so on from science and to find natural laws for them. But he wanted to find laws for organics that had been found for mechanics, physics and chemistry, not simply adopt those existing in these other fields. He would destroy the realm of the organic if he simply allowed it to merge into that of the inorganic. Goethe wanted an independent organic science that had its own axioms and its own method. This idea became more and more firmly established in his mind, and "morphology" gradually became for him the epitome of everything that must be applied to a satisfactory explanation of the phenomena of life. As long as one could not derive all phenomena of motion from natural laws, there was no mechanics; as long as one was not able to summarize the individual places occupied by the celestial bodies by legal lines, there was no astronomy; as long as one was not able to grasp the manifestations of life in the form of principles, there was no organics, Goethe said to himself. He envisioned a science that would grasp the organic at its core and reveal the laws of its various forms. He did not want to grasp the forms of the organs alone, nor the metabolism and its laws in isolation, nor the anatomical facts in isolation; no, he strove for a total conception of life from which all those partial phenomena could be derived. He wanted a science to which natural history, natural science, anatomy, chemistry, zoonomy and physiology were merely preparatory stages. Each of these sciences deals with only one side of the body of nature; but all of them together, considered merely as a sum, do not exhaust life. For life is much more than the sum of its individual phenomena. Anyone who has grasped all sides of organic being with the help of the individual sciences mentioned is still missing the living unity. According to Goethe, grasping this is the task of morphology in the broader sense.

The natural history has the task of conveying the "knowledge of organic natures according to their habitus and according to the difference in their form relationships"; the theory of nature is responsible for the "knowledge of material natures in general as forces and in their spatial relationships"; anatomy seeks the "knowledge of organic natures according to their internal and external parts, without taking into account the living whole"; chemistry strives for "knowledge of the parts of an organic body, in so far as it ceases to be organic, or in so far as its organization is regarded only as producing matter and as composed of matter"; zoonomy requires: "the consideration of the whole, in so far as it lives and a special physical force is subordinated to this life"; of physiology, "the consideration of the whole, in so far as it lives and acts"; of morphology in the narrower sense, "the consideration of the form both in its parts and as a whole, its correspondences and deviations without all other considerations". Morphology in the broader and Goethean sense, however, wants: "Observation of the organic whole by visualizing all these considerations and linking them through the power of the mind." ⁵

Goethe is fully aware that he is putting forward the idea of a "new science" according to "view and method". However, it is not new in terms of content, "for the same is known". But this means nothing other than that it is, taken purely as a matter of fact, the same as that set out in the previously characterized auxiliary sciences. What is new, however, is the way in which this content is placed at the service of an overall understanding of the organic world.

This is again important for the definition of Goethe's "type". For the type, the lawful in the organic, is the object of his morphology in the broader sense. What the seven auxiliary sciences have to achieve lies in the realm of the sensually attainable. Indeed, precisely because they remain in the realm of the sensually attainable, they cannot go beyond the knowledge of individual sides of the organic.

So we are forced to recognize that Goethe ascribed a lawfulness to the organic world that does not coincide with that which we observe in the phenomena of inorganic nature. We can only visualize it through a free construction of the mind, since it does not coincide with what we perceive in the organism through our senses.

The question now arises: how does Goethe relate to the diversity of organic species under such conditions?

This question cannot be answered without first establishing the relationship between the type (original plant, original animal) and the individual. "The individual is not a single entity, but a majority." ⁶ And indeed a majority of details that are outwardly quite different from one another. How is this possible? How can the different be a unity? Or more specifically: how can one and the same organ appear as a stem leaf, then again as a petal or as a stamen? Anyone who conceives of unity in terms of an abstract concept, a schema or the like cannot, of course, grasp this. But that is not what it is in Goethe's sense. There it is a lawfulness which, as such, leaves the form in which it expresses itself for the sense world still completely undefined. Precisely because the actual core, the deeper content of this lawfulness does not merge into that which becomes perceptible to the senses, it can express itself in different sensual forms and yet always remain the same. Rather, an infinite field is open to organic lawfulness in its appearance as external manifestation, as is possible. But since the substances and forces of inorganic nature must enter into the service of this lawfulness if real organisms are to arise at all, it follows of itself that only those forms are possible which do not contradict the conditions inherent in those substances and forces. And in this respect, the forces and substances of inorganic nature are negative conditions of organic life. The latter asserts itself through them and in their forms as well as they allow. This, however, already implies the necessity of an infinite diversity of organic forms. For this outwardness of existence is not something that stands in a clear connection with the inner lawfulness; indeed, from this point of view one can even raise the question: how is it that there are species at all, that not every individual is different from every other? We will come back to this later. In any case, it is certain that Goethe's characterized view cannot speak of constant forms of the organic, because that which gives a form its constancy does not flow from that which makes it an organic form. Only those who see something essential in this form can assume a constancy of form.

What is not essential to a thing, however, does not necessarily need to be retained. And thus the possibility of transforming existing forms is derived. From Goethe's point of view, however, nothing more could be given than a derivation of this possibility. Darwin provided the empirical observations for this. That is always the relationship between theory and experience, that the latter shows what is and happens, and the former shows the possibility of how such things can be and happen.

In any case, on the basis of the material available in the Goethe Archive, it is impossible to think of anything other than this relationship between Goethe and Darwin.

However, anyone who considers organic forms to be mutable is faced with the task of explaining the forms that actually exist at a given time, that is, of indicating the reasons why certain forms develop under the conditions he presupposes and, furthermore, of explaining the relationship between these existing forms. This was completely clear to Goethe, and we can see from the papers he left behind that he was thinking of shaping his views in this direction in the intended continuation of his morphological work. A scheme for a "Physiology of Plants" contains the following:

"The metamorphosis of plants, the basis of their physiology. It 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.

Botanical science makes us acquainted with the manifold formation of the plant and its parts, and from the other side it seeks out the laws of this formation.

If, then, the efforts to organize the great multitude of plants into a system deserve only the highest degree of applause, if they are necessary to separate the unchangeable parts from the more or less accidental and changeable, and thereby bring the nearest relations of the different sexes more and more into light: the efforts are certainly praiseworthy which seek to recognize the law by which those formations are produced; and though it may seem that human nature can neither grasp the infinite variety of organization, nor clearly comprehend the law by which it operates, yet it is well to exert all our powers, and to extend this field from both sides, by experience as well as by reflection. "

According to Goethe's conception, every particular plant and animal form can therefore be explained by two factors: the law of inner nature and the law of circumstances. But since these circumstances are given in a certain place and at a certain time, and do not change within certain limits, it is also explicable that the organic forms remain constant within these limits. For those forms which are possible under those circumstances find their expression in the beings once they have arisen. New forms can only be brought about by a change in these circumstances. But then these new circumstances not only have to submit to the laws of the interior of organic nature, but also have to reckon with the forms that have already arisen and which they confront. For what has once arisen in nature, henceforth proves to be a contributing cause in the context of facts. From this, however, it follows that the forms that have once arisen will have a certain power to maintain themselves. Certain characteristics, once adopted, will still be noticeable in the most distant descendants, even if they cannot be explained by the living conditions of these beings. This is a fact for which the word inheritance has been used in more recent times. We have seen that a conceptually strict correlate for what is connected with this word can be found in Goethe's way of looking at things.

However, the way in which Goethe conceived of the reproduction of organisms in connection with their other principles of development throws a special light on this view. For he imagined that the inner developmental capacity of an organic being is not yet complete with what we assume to be an individual, but that reproduction is simply the continuation and a special case of this developmental capacity. That which expresses itself as growth at a lower level is reproduction at a higher level. Goethe already held the view that procreation is only a growth of the organism beyond the individual.

This can also be proven from his own notes: "We have seen that plants reproduce in different ways, which species are to be regarded as modifications of a single species. Reproduction, like the continuation that occurs through the development of one organ from another, has mainly occupied us in metamorphosis. We have seen that these organs, which themselves change from external sameness to the greatest dissimilarity, have an internal virtual sameness..."

"We have seen that this sprouting continuation in perfect plants cannot go on to infinity, but that it leads step by step to the summit and produces, as it were, at the opposite end of its power, another kind of reproduction, by seeds."

Here, then, Goethe sees the continuation from limb to limb in one and the same plant and reproduction through seeds as just two different types of one and the same activity.

"In all bodies that we call living, we notice the power to produce their own kind," says Goethe; but this power also completes its circle, as it were, several times during the growth of an individual, for: Goethe wants to provide "proof" that "from node to node the whole circle of the plant is essentially completed"; when we then "become aware of this power divided, we designate it under the name of the two sexes". Based on this view, he outlines the course of his lecture on growth and reproduction as follows:

"In considering the plant, a living point is assumed, which eternally produces its own kind.

And it does so with the smallest plants by repeating the same thing.

Furthermore, in the more perfect ones, through progressive development and transformation of the basic organ into ever more perfect and effective organs, in order to finally produce the highest point of organic activity, to separate and detach individuals from the organic whole through procreation and birth.

Highest view of organic unity."

This also shows that Goethe does not see reproduction as an essentially new element of plant development, but only as a higher modification of growth.

The passage quoted is also remarkable in another respect. In it, Goethe speaks of an "organic whole" from which the individual parts separate and detach themselves. He calls understanding this the "highest view of organic unity".

This describes the sum of all organic life as a unified totality, and all individual beings can then only be described as members of this unity. We are therefore dealing with a consistent kinship of all living beings in the truest sense of the word. And this is an actual kinship, not a merely ideal one. The "organic wholeness" is a unified one that has the power to produce its own kind in perpetual external change; the diversity of forms arises by continuing this ability to produce not only beyond individuals, but also beyond genera and species.

It is only in the exact sense of Goethe's explanations if one says: the force by which the various plant families arise is exactly the same as that by which a stem leaf is transformed into a flower petal. And this force is to be conceived of as a real unity and the emergence of one species from another in a real sense.

The organic species and genera are to be traced back to a true descent under continuous change of forms. Goethe's view is a theory of descent with a deep theoretical foundation.

But one must by no means think that the following forms of development are already implied in the earlier ones. For what runs through all forms is precisely the ideal organic lawfulness, in which one cannot speak of those forms at all. Precisely because the essence of the organic has nothing to do with the way it appears in forms, it can realize itself in them without winding them out of itself. The organic essence does not form the form out of itself, but into it. For this reason, these forms cannot have any pre-existence, not even in terms of their disposition. Goethe was therefore an opponent of the theory of nesting, which assumed that the entire diversity of the organic is already contained in the germ, but hidden.

"To think of this many ⁷ in one successively and as a nesting, is an imperfect conception, not suited to the imagination or to reason, but we must admit a development in the higher sense: the many in the individual, in the individual; and (thus) no longer embarrasses us."

Development consists precisely in the fact that a unity continues to develop and that the forms it assumes in the process appear as something completely new in it. This is because these forms do not belong to the unified principle of development, but to the means which it uses to manifest itself. The forms of development must all be ideally explicable from the unity, even if they do not really emerge from it. That Goethe was only thinking of this ideal containment is proven, for example, by the assertion that "these different parts arose from an ideal primordial body and are thought to be gradually formed in different stages..."

The next thing that must force itself upon us after the above propositions is to find out how the two factors: internal principle of formation and external conditions are involved in the formation of an organic form. For only if the rightful share is given from both sides can one speak of an actual explanation of such a form.

There is no doubt that the external conditions must first of all be known according to their actual reality through experience. Goethe lists among these conditions: Temperature of a country, quantity of sunlight, constitution of the air of the surroundings, and others. Observation shows us that a certain form is formed under the influence of a certain series of facts. Goethe says that the type undergoes a certain "restriction". But once we have recognized in this way that some form arises under certain external influences, then we are faced with the problem of explaining it, of saying how it could arise. And here we must take the idea of the type as a basis for explanation. We must be able to derive this particular form from the general form of the type. If we are not able to say: how the particular case is connected with the general one of the type, if we are not able to say: through this or that form of action the type has developed in the individual way, then the knowledge of the external conditions is worthless.

These conditions give the occasional cause that the organic appears in a certain way; the knowledge of the inner lawfulness gives the explanation of how this particular form of reality could arise. Goethe says, in a way that should not be misunderstood, that the form of an organism can be explained by "the interaction of the living parts only from themselves". And as a method of explanation he very often recommends in the most definite manner: to take cognizance of the external circumstances and then to inquire into the internal conditions which appear as a principle of form under the influence of the same.

An explanation that would only accept external influences as the cause of organic transformations would therefore have to be decisively rejected by Goethe.

We have limited ourselves to simply stating Goethe's view. How it relates to Darwinism in its present form: we leave it to the reader to form an opinion on this. ⁸ We will only conclude by saying a word about the method by which Goethe arrived at his results. Goethe's scientific views are based on idealistic research results, which rest on an empirical basis.⁹ The type is such an idealistic research result. We know from that much-mentioned conversation with Schiller that Goethe decidedly emphasized the empirical character of this "type".¹⁰ He became angry when Schiller called him an "idea". It was at a time when he was not yet fully aware of its ideal nature. He was only aware at the time that he had arrived at his "original plant" through careful observation. However, he did not yet realize that he had arrived at an "idea" in this very way. He still held on to the view of the one-sided empiricists, who believe that the observable is exhausted in the objects of external sensory perception. But it was Schiller's remark that prompted him to reflect further on this point. He said to himself: "If he considered what I expressed as experience to be an idea, then there must be something mediating and related between the two! The first step had been taken." ¹¹ Namely, the first step towards arriving at a satisfactory solution to the question through further reflection: how are the ideas of the type (primordial plant, primordial animal) to be retained if one wants to remain strictly on the ground of observation, of empirical science? How can harmony be achieved between the method and the basic character of the result? By ordinary observation of things we only arrive at knowledge of mere individual details and not of types. What modification must observation undergo? Goethe had to be driven to a "theory of observation". It was to be established: how must one observe in order to obtain scientifically usable results in the above sense? Goethe had only one predecessor in this investigation, but his way of thinking was quite alien to his own: Francis Bacon. The latter showed how one had to confront the phenomena of nature in order to obtain not random, worthless facts, as they present themselves to the ordinary naive view, but results with the character of necessity and natural law. Goethe attempted the same in his own way. So far, the only known fruit of this reflection is the essay: "Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt".¹² Now, however, we learn from a letter Goethe wrote to Schiller on 17 January 1798, . January 1798,¹³ that the former enclosed an essay with his letter containing the principles of his scientific method of research. I assumed from Schiller's reply of January 19, 1798, that this essay must contain important information on the question of how Goethe had conceived the basic structure of natural science, and then attempted in the introduction to my second volume of Goethe's scientific writings ¹⁴ to reconstruct it according to Schiller's explanations. To my particular satisfaction, this essay was found in the Goethe Archive in exactly the form I had previously constructed. It actually provides detailed information on Goethe's basic views on scientific methodology and on the significance and value of different types of observations. The researcher must rise from common empiricism through the intermediate link of abstract rationalism to rational empiricism. Common empiricism remains with the immediate facts of experience; it does not arrive at an estimate of the value of the details for a conception of legality. It registers the phenomena according to their course, without knowing which of the conditions that come into consideration are necessary and which are accidental. It therefore provides little more than a description of the phenomenal world. He only ever knows what must be present for a phenomenon to occur, but he does not know what is essential. Therefore he cannot represent the phenomena as a necessary consequence of their conditions. The next thing is that man goes beyond this point of view by appealing to the intellect and thus wants to become clear about the conditions by way of thinking. This standpoint is essentially that of hypothesis formation. The rationalist does not seek the causes of phenomena; he conceives them; he lives in the belief that one can find out why a phenomenon occurs by thinking about it. This, of course, leads him nowhere. For our mind is a merely formal faculty. It has no content other than that which it acquires through observation. Anyone who strives for necessary knowledge on the condition of this knowledge can only grant the intellect a mediating role. He must grant it the ability to recognize the causes of phenomena when it finds them; but not that it can sense them itself. This is the standpoint of the rational empiricist. It is Goethe's own standpoint. "Concepts without views" are empty, he says with Kant; but he adds: they are necessary in order to determine the value of the individual views for the whole of a world view. When the intellect now approaches nature with this intention and assembles those elements of fact that belong together according to an internal necessity, it rises from the observation of the common phenomenon to the rational experiment, which is a direct expression of the objective law of nature. Goethe's empiricism takes everything he uses to explain phenomena from experience; only the way in which he takes it is determined by his view. Now we understand more fully how he could speak the above words about his intended morphology, that it contains the idea of a "new science" "not in content", but "in view and method".¹⁵

The essay in question is thus the methodological justification of Goethe's research method. In this respect, it complements everything Goethe has written about natural science, because it tells us how we should understand it.

With these remarks, we wanted to point out the pleasing fact that the material in the Archive sheds a brighter light on Goethe's scientific view in two respects: firstly, it fills in the gaps in his writings that have been noticeable up to now, and secondly, it sheds new light on the nature of his research and his entire attitude to nature.

The question: what did Goethe seek in nature and natural science, without the answer to which an understanding of the whole personality of man is not possible, will have to be answered in a completely different way after the publication of the "natural science section" in the Weimar Goethe edition than has often been the case to date.

• 1. See the end of the essay: "Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums", in Kürschner's "Deutsche National-Literatur", Goethes Werke, vol. XXXII, p. 84.
• 2. See Italienische Reise (Kürschners "Deutsche National-Literatur>), Goethes Werke, Vol. XXI, I. Abteilung,. 336.
• 3. of men according to the kinds of their knowledge and their behavior towards the outside world,
• 4. Although the above lines do not date from the time when Goethe began to pursue natural science, but probably from the end of the nineties, we can justifiably cite them here. For they were written at a time when the poet was already reflecting on his research, when he was becoming his own interpreter. They are therefore precisely suitable for showing how Goethe wanted his attitude towards nature to be conceived
• 5. These sentences are borrowed from a surviving manuscript, which outlines the idea of such a morphology in broad strokes and was apparently intended to serve as an introduction to it.
• 6. See: Goethes naturwissenschaftliche Schriften (Kürschners "Deutsche National-Literatur"), Goethes Werke, Vol. XXXII, p. 9.
• 7. the multiplicity of organs and organisms
• 8. We have explained this relationship in the introductions to Goethe's scientific writings (Kürschner's "Deutsche National-Literatur"), Goethes Werke, Volumes XXXIU and XXXIV.
• 9. The more detailed definition and proof of this sentence can be seen in Goethe's works (Kürschner's "Deutsche National-Literatur"), Volume XXXIV, 8. XXXVIff.
• 10. See the essay: "Glückliches Ereignis" (Kürschners "Deutsche National-Literatur>), Goethes Werke, vol. XXXILI, pp. 108-113.
• 11. See "Glückliches Ereignis", op.cit., p.112.
• 12. See Goethe's works (Kürschner's "Deutsche National-Literatur"), Volume XXXIV, pp. 10-21.
• 13. Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, 2. Band, 8.10 ff.
. January 1798,
• 13
• 14. Goethes Werke (Kürschner's "Deutsche National-Literatur"), vol. XXXIV, pp. XXXKX ff.
• 15. Cf. Goethe's letter to Hegel of October 7, 1820 (Fr. Strehlke, Goethes Briefe, Erster Teil, p.240 ): "We are not talking here of an opinion to be asserted, but of a method to be communicated, which everyone may use as a tool according to his own way."

According to an oft-repeated saying, it is incumbent on the philosopher to express the cultural content of his time in the form of pure thought. Just as the artist endeavors to express in a sensual, descriptive form the ideas, feelings and other contents of life that are present in the depths of the popular and contemporary consciousness, so the philosopher seeks to represent in a conceptual, thinking way the totality of everything that dominates and animates his time and his people. Kuno Fischer says in his witty work "History of Modern Philosophy": "If we want to compare a cultural system or an age with a pictorial pillar, then philosophy forms the sensing eye that looks inwards," Without this living reference to the age, without the urge to recognize that, without the urge to penetrate with calm clarity what takes place in life amidst to and fro struggles and in the restlessness of the day, in order to have a stimulating effect on it, the philosopher cannot escape the fate of leading a worthless existence on his lonely heights.

Few renowned philosophers have approached their task in the manner just described as brilliantly as our great contemporary Eduard von Hartmann. While on the one hand we see him wrestling with the deepest mysteries of world-building and the riddles of life, on the other hand he does not disdain to deal thoroughly with the pending questions of the day, with the aspirations of the parties and the interests of the state. The socio-political currents of the present, the errors of the liberal partisans, military and church policy issues, school and academic reform, national and democratic ideas occupied his interest no less than modern artistic endeavors, the women's question, and the literary events of our time. Indeed, he also spoke out openly and unreservedly on sensitive issues such as spiritualism, hypnotism and somnambulism; and when the Polish question came on the agenda in Germany, he was the first to write in favor of the solution that Bismarck later advocated as the right one. And yet, like so many philosophers, he did not intervene in the dispute of opinions with a preconceived template, but was always guided by the reasons that lay in the facts and emerged from a thorough study of the facts. To judge how Hartmann draws from the fullness of an almost immeasurable knowledge, what sum of knowledge he possesses, one must have had the good fortune to have met him personally. However, in the course of this essay we will show that this kind of work is only a consequence of his scientific conviction.

The consequence of this phenomenon, which is rare in the history of intellectual life, is also a quite incredible effect. E.v. Hartmann is now forty-nine years old, at the peak of his creative power and enthusiasm, still promising much (his first appearance was in 1868), and we already have a literature about him that is unmissable. The significance of a man is reflected differently in the consciousness of his contemporaries, and differently in that of posterity. The former can hardly find the right standard of judgment. The future historian of intellectual life in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century will have to devote a large chapter to Hartmann. We will first characterize the historical position of Hartmann's circle of ideas and then go into the individual main areas of his activity.

In the sixties of this century, German philosophy had reached a precarious point in its development. The confidence with which Hegel's students had appeared after the master's death (1830) had given way to complete discouragement in the field of this science. Starting from Hegel, they had hoped to spread a net of absolutely certain knowledge over all branches of knowledge, but the Hegelians were soon no longer able to deal with the abundance of the gradually accumulating material of actual results of research. They abandoned their doctrinal edifice piece by piece, tried to improve it here and there and to adapt the traditional doctrine to the new situation of empirical science. Most of them, however, tried to free themselves completely from the beliefs of their youth and, like the aesthetician Vischer, for example, regarded their Hegelian period only as a time for training their philosophical thinking. Complete confusion and perplexity prevailed in the cathedrals. While one group of professional philosophers gave up any prospect of success in the development of a world view for the time being and merely turned to the treatment of special questions, another group shifted to a rather unfruitful further development of Herbart's way of thinking, which had become stuck in antediluvian prejudices. The representatives of empirical science, however, looked down with contempt on all philosophy, which, in their opinion, only dealt with worthless fantasy. Finally, the great mass of educated people satisfied their philosophical needs from the world view of a thinker who had hitherto remained almost unnoticed and was in fact almost useless for a serious, thorough pursuit of science: Schopenhauer. The bad experiences that Schopenhauer had with his first work, the only one of his that was of any great significance for science: "On the Fourfold Root of the Theorem of the Ground", led him to take ever more precarious paths. He now turned personal views and subjective experiences into philosophical propositions and, in "Parerga and Paralipomena", completely sacrificed the truth to an ingenious style that captivated the audience. His explanations were gripped with greed because it was easy to obtain the phrases necessary for daily use from his writings, which offered nothing but philosophical trivialities in the appropriate form.

This was the state of philosophy when Hartmann came on the scene (1868). He did so with the indispensable self-confidence in the weapons of his thinking and in full possession of the knowledge of the individual sciences available at his time. He recognized that neither everything from Hegel could be accepted nor everything rejected. He peeled the lasting core of Hegel's world view out of its harmful shell and began to develop it further. He completely separated the method from the results of Hegel's philosophy and declared that the good in Hegel was found without, indeed against, his method, and that what the latter alone provided was of dubious value. In his view, the method needed a thorough reform. And it was here that he entered into an alliance with natural science. The demand to seek scientific results only by means of observation, which natural scientists were increasingly insisting on, also became his own in the philosophical field. "Metaphysical results according to the scientific-inductive method" became the motto of his main work "Philosophy of the Unconscious", published in Berlin in 1869. But he held the view that Hegel had also arrived at his truly valuable results using the same method, indeed that positive scientific propositions can only be arrived at in this way. Hartmann's strict consistency, however, prevented him from using this method to arrive at the one-sided views that characterize the natural sciences of the time. How can one claim that observation delivers nothing but what the senses perceive, what eyes see, ears hear and so on, he asked himself? Is not thinking an organ of perception that transcends all the senses? Should reality exhaust itself in the raw material? Open your senses to reality, but do no less with your rational thinking, he called out to the natural scientists, then you will find that there is a higher reality than the one you consider to be the only true one!

Hegel was no less thirsty for reality than a modern natural scientist, but his higher mind also revealed a higher reality to him. E. v. Hartmann also found himself in this position. He took the view that not everything we encounter in the world can be explained by causes that we perceive with our senses. Even when we see a stone fall to earth, we attribute the cause to the gravitational pull of the earth, which we can no longer perceive, but only grasp in our minds. And only when we follow an organism in its development from the egg to its completion! Who would want to satisfy his need for explanation without resorting to the view that forces are at work here which we can only visualize in our thoughts? It becomes clear to us from such a consideration of the organism that we must presuppose a unified mental basis if we want to satisfy our need for knowledge. We must add something to the perception in thought and out of thought if we want to understand the matter. What we add there can of course only be a thought, an idea. But just as we need an idea in our thinking in order to bring about the conception of an organism, for example, so there must also be something analogous in the thing itself that brings about the same thing in its reality. Hartmann calls the analog in reality, which corresponds to the idea in our consciousness, the unconscious idea.

However, this concept of the idea is not so very different from what Hegel calls the idea. Hartmann asserts nothing other than this: what works outside in the world as the cause of things and processes is expressed within our consciousness in the form of the idea. Thus he must regard the content of our world of ideas as that which lifts the veil of existence for us, insofar as the latter is possible for us at all. And Hegel says: grasp the world of ideas in your consciousness, then you have grasped the objective content of the world. So far there would now be complete agreement between the two thinkers. Whereas But whereas Hegel simply seeks out the world of ideas within us and thereby accepts their inner logical character as decisive, Hartmann says: the idea as logical, merely as it is in us, in thought, could at most again cause ideas in a logical way, but not bring forth things of reality. For this there must be a second element, a force, something utterly illogical. Of this second element of the highest reality I can, of course, only recognize the representative that it sends into my consciousness. But if I ask myself, what is the power in me that actually accomplishes that, that makes it a reality, what determines logic, then I find my will. Something analogous to this must also prevail in the external world in order to lend reality, saturated existence, to the otherwise powerless ideas. Hartmann calls this analog the unconscious will. However, unconscious idea and unconscious will together form the unconscious mind or the unconscious.

Hartmann does not claim that the unconscious idea or the unconscious will are present in the outside world in the same quality as their conscious representatives in our mind. Rather, he maintains that we know nothing about the quality of what corresponds to the idea and the will in the objective, but that for us only one thing is certain, that such analogs exist.¹

Through the latter assumption, through the unconscious will, Hartmann now essentially goes beyond Hegel. If the latter, according to his basic assumption, had to regard logical determinacy as the only thing that comes into consideration in the idea, and see the highest laws of the world in logical laws, then Hartmann claims that everything we become aware of in the world is the ideal realized by the will. Since the will is, of course, a force that knows nothing of the laws of logic, the laws of the world are not logical laws either. So if I merely look into myself and observe my world of ideas in their logical connections, I will not reach any goal. I must look out and investigate through observation what creatures the will spouts forth from the eternal source of being. What I observe there, what I ultimately gain as a result, is an idea, but an idea borrowed from reality.

Hartmann reproached the natural scientists for simply not having the ability to observe ideas and therefore stopping at mere sensory perception. The natural scientists, however, dismissed the philosopher by declaring his "Philosophy of the Unconscious" to be the work of a fantasist who wanted to discuss scientific questions in a completely amateurish manner. Soon after the "Philosophy of the Unconscious", a series of counter-writings from a scientific point of view appeared, including one by an anonymous author. The natural scientists declared it to be a very meritorious booklet, which refuted Hartmann's frivolous statements from the standpoint of true empirical science with genuine expertise. The book went through a second edition, but now the author put his full name on the title page. It was - Eduard von Hartmann. The philosopher had had the fun of thoroughly demonstrating to his opponents that one can already understand them if one only wants to stand down on their point of view. He succeeded brilliantly in showing who contradicts because they don't understand their opponent.

The success of the "Philosophy of the Unconscious" was the greatest imaginable. To date, ten editions have been published and translations have been made into all European cultural languages. Encouraged by this, Hartmann devoted all his energy to expanding his world view. He sought not only to illuminate the ever-increasing experience of natural science from the point of view of his philosophy,².

Hartmann's ethical views can mainly be found in his book "Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness". His basic views in the field of ethics are also reflected in his position on politics and the cultural issues of the day.

The unconscious idea is realized through the unconscious will. This is the essence of the world process. And the histotic process of development is only a part of this process. But as such it is again a whole, and the individual cultural systems and moral views of peoples and ages are only its parts. He who recognizes this cannot seek the purpose of his existence in a single act, but only in the value which his particular existence has for the cultural process of the whole of humanity and indirectly thereby for the whole course of the world. Only in selfless devotion to the whole, in being absorbed in humanity, can the individual find his salvation. In addition to this insight, Hartmann seeks to provide empirical proof that no pleasure in the world can grant us an unrestricted feeling of happiness. Wherever we may look, if we become attached to individual, temporary things, the deprivation will be greater than the satisfaction. We must imbue ourselves with this conviction and then dedicate ourselves all the more joyfully to the ideal life task described above. If you want to call this ethical view pessimism, then you may do so. But beware of confusing this Hartmannian view with Schopenhauer's pessimism.

The latter is convinced that the will in its lack of reason is the only world principle and that the idea has no objective meaning at all, but is merely a "brain product". He therefore finds the world unreasonable and bad. A realization through the irrational will could only produce a worthless existence. There would be nothing worth living for in the world. Since we can achieve nothing in such a world, non-action is preferable to action for human beings. As you can see, Schopenhauer's ethics ends with the recommendation of complete inaction.

Compare this with Hartmann's ethics and you will see that it leads to a completely opposite result, that it seeks satisfaction precisely in selfless, devoted action, which selfish enjoyment could never offer us. The fact that both world views are nevertheless constantly thrown together, despite repeated protests on the part of E. v. Hartmann, proves the power that slogans have even over the educated public.

But where should we take the principles for our respective actions from, asks Hartmann. We work most effectively when we grasp our task most correctly in the place where history has placed us. What is good today was not good in the Middle Ages and will not be good centuries later. What a man has to do must result from what his predecessor has done. This is where he must pick up the thread and develop it further. Only those who know their tasks for the present from the past, from historical development, can create something good. We must not enter the arena of action with abstract, template-like concepts, but equipped with knowledge of the true needs of actual reality.

Because the liberal parties want to rule the world from the outside, from theory, disregarding these needs, Hartmann is an opponent of them. He wants party principles that follow from the study of reality. He is conservative in the sense that he wants reform efforts everywhere to be linked to what already exists, but not at all in the way of many conservatives who would like to put all kinds of restraints on development or preferably even order it to stand still. Hartmann wants progress, but not in the way that liberalism sees it, but as a continuous approach to the great cultural goals of mankind. For him, each cultural epoch is only the preparation for the next. No branch of culture is excluded from this development.

Hartmann has explained how religious needs are also subject to this general law in his two works: "Die Selbstzersetzung des Christentums und die Religion der Zukunft" and "Das religiöse Bewußtsein der Menschheit im Stufengang seiner Entwicklung". We are living in a time in which the old religious forms have become rotten everywhere and must make way for new ones. Christianity is not an absolute religion, but only one phase in the religious development of mankind, and there are already enough signs of the new view that will replace it.

It would be a serious prejudice to believe that Hartmann's philosophical discussions are worthless for practical life. I would just like to point out a few things that could refute this. Hartmann theoretically called for the German-Austrian alliance and the current constellation of European states long before they actually materialized. The party formations that we have seen emerge in Germany in the second half of the past decade were previously presented by Hartmann as a necessity. We have already mentioned the Polish question. We must not forget that our philosopher is far from claiming that what he describes as necessary in this way is also the best. To demand the best is, in his view, an empty demand; one must see what can arise according to the motives at work in people and in time and offer one's hand to this. Hartmann is a real politician in the most eminent sense.

For some time now, people in German-Austria have not spoken well of Hartmann because in an essay in 1885 he spoke of a "regression of Germanism in the Austrian lands". If one were to examine the content of this essay closely, one would probably come to a different conclusion. For apart from a few remarks which make the situation of our fellow tribesmen appear sadder than it really is, and which must be set against the fact that Hartmann must have gained his knowledge in part from newspaper reports and brochures which falsify the matter, one will find in that essay only the views represented which today the most national Austrian politicians have written on their banner. Hartmann explained to the Germans in Austria that they must sink below the level of influence they deserve if they continue to lose sight of the real tasks of their nation and the Reich over liberal party programs. In his view, they must rely on the power of the people and their higher education in order to achieve what they can never achieve by making pacts with "immature nations" and through liberal phrases, namely to steer "the state of Western Austria". To accuse Hartmann of even the slightest anti-German sentiment because of this essay is unacceptable when you consider how deeply his entire world view is rooted in Germanness and how he honors this Germanness when he says, for example, that the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War "has shown so clearly that Germany will essentially have to forever renounce being understood by anything other than German blood".

The significance of Hartmann's view of the political situation will only be fully appreciated when one of his main ideas - the "complete separation of all political parties from economic and religious-church parties" - has been realized and when the Central European Customs Union he called for in 1881 becomes possible. It will then be seen that Hartmann's views are nothing but the moral, political, religious, economic, etc. forces of the. of the present. He tries to eavesdrop on the direction in which they are striving, and according to this direction he tries to show the way for practical reforms.

Recently, Hartmann gave us a two-volume "Aesthetics". The first volume seeks to give a historical account of the development of German art history since Kant; the second endeavors to build its own independent edifice of the "science of beauty". In the first part, we admire the all-round approach, which deals with every phenomenon and provides not only a historical development of the basic views of the individual aestheticians, but also an account of the progress of the individual basic aesthetic concepts, such as: beautiful, ugly, comic, sublime, graceful and so on. The fact that the often misunderstood Deutinger and the completely lost but highly significant Trahndorff find their just appreciation in the book is not one of its least merits. Anyone who wants to learn in detail how views on art have developed from Kant up to the present day must turn to this book.

In the "Science of Beauty" Hartmann, true to his principle, seeks to find that area in what actually exists in which beauty, that which is created by art, has its seat. He rejects the abstract idealism of the Schellingians, who seek beauty not in the object of art itself but in an abstract sphere and claim that every single beauty is only a reflection of the supernatural idea of beauty that never appears in its perfection. Hartmann counters this "abstract idealism" with his "concrete idealism", which seeks the reason and the root in the aesthetic object itself, in short, which also applies the observing, contemplating, not the constructing method here. What is actually the object in which the "beautiful" is realized? asks Hartmann. Neither merely the real work that we have before us, as the realists want, nor merely the harmony of feelings and sensations that it produces in us, as the idealists want, are the seat of beauty, but the appearance of reality, for the production of which the real product serves the artist only as a means. Anyone who is unable to disregard the real effects exerted on him by the art product and can only indulge in the impression of the "aesthetic appearance" detached from all reality is not yet capable of true enjoyment of art. A person who commits a crime in reality creates a real feeling of revulsion in us through his actual deed. He affects us through what he is. The actor who portrays the criminal only has the right effect on us if, denying his real being, he only arouses feelings and emotions in us through what he appears to be, through his representation, which is exhausted in appearance and behind which there is no reality. "Whoever has not yet stripped away the last trace of realistic velleities from aesthetic appearance and the content hidden in it has not yet penetrated to a purely aesthetic conception, but has more or less remained stuck in an amalgamation of aesthetic with theoretical or practical conception." (Wissenschaft des Schönen, p.21.) Only those who are able to emancipate themselves completely from the real meaning of the object in front of them and devote themselves only to the enjoyment of what it seems to be are capable of aesthetic contemplation. And now Hartmann shows us just as much how the appearance detached from reality expresses itself in individual forms of artistic creation, in the sensually pleasing, in mathematical relationships, in organic formations and so on, as he also shows us how the individual arts can evoke the "aesthetic appearance" with the means at their disposal. We ourselves have published an essay in these journals that takes as its starting point basic views that do not entirely coincide with Hartmann's. In particular, we believe that aesthetics should not neglect to say what it is in "aesthetic appearance" that actually has an effect on us. It is just as certain that he who is influenced in his aesthetic contemplation "by accidental knowledge of the private life of the actor Schultze and the dancer Müller in the judgment of their mimic artistic performances" does not arrive at the true enjoyment of art, as it is true that I must remain aesthetically unaffected even in the pure contemplation of appearances if I have no feeling for what speaks to me precisely through the aesthetic appearance. Certainly, the artist can only have an effect on me through appearance, but it is not the character of the appearance that constitutes the nature of the work of art, but the content in the appearance, that which the artist embodies in the appearance. Whoever has only a sense for appearance and none for what is expressed in appearance remains insensitive to art. Appearance is only necessary because art has something to tell us that cannot be said to us by immediate reality. It is a necessary auxiliary to art, a consequence of artistic creation, but it does not constitute the latter. These are objections of principle, however, and we would be unjust if we did not counter them with the fact that we have rarely read a book with such satisfaction, with such great benefit, as Hartmann's Aesthetics. Everyone can learn from it through the thorough knowledge of technique in the individual arts that characterizes the author, through the views on life that testify to Hartmann's genius and the great style with which he grasps the sum of all cultural expressions, and finally through the fine taste that underpins all his judgments on art.

We are rarely as pleased as when we read the announcement of a new work by Hartmann, because then we always know that a great treasure is being added to our minds. And we wish time good luck for everything that will come from Hartmann, because, as we have already mentioned, he is at the height of his creative powers. He has almost completed his system. We do not know what area his work will now focus on. But we do know this: everything we can still expect from him will have the character of greatness and significance.

• 1. Hartmann describes the relationship of something existing in consciousness to something beyond it, something unknown to us, as transcendental. This is why he calls his world view, which assumes such a reality and relates the content of consciousness to it, transcendental realism.
• 2. but also to draw the consequences for ethics, religious studies and aesthetics.

  A supplementary volume to the first to ninth edition of the "Philosophy of the Unconscious" (Leipzig, Wilhelm Friedrich) was published in 1891, which deals with the latest results of natural science.

It is one of the peculiarities of genius that it sketches out in broad outline the plan of the development of culture, the details of which are left to the following generation. Long periods of time must often elapse before the world arrives in a roundabout way at a full understanding of what an individual has created at the height of his intellectual culture. And whenever a seed planted by a leading genius of education is ripe to bear fruit for posterity, the latter returns to that leader to confront him once again.

The numerous proclamations that continually emerge from all parts of educated Europe with regard to Goethe are to be understood as such disputes. It is increasingly felt that the further one has come in education, the more one has to learn from Goethe. The branch of culture that has demonstrated this most vividly in recent decades is probably natural science. Numerous researchers who had arrived at some truth literally felt their consciences relieved when they found a clue that Goethe's view of the question they had raised was similar to their own. The chapter "Goethe and Natural Science" has been on the agenda for a long time and would undoubtedly remain so for an unforeseeable period if it were not for the extraordinary circumstance that the publications of the Goethe Archive have now considerably enriched our knowledge in this field. Since the latter is to a large extent the case, however, the discussion of the relevant questions will enter a new stage in the near future.

The author of these lines already drew the attention of the readers of the Goethe Chronicle some time ago to the expected enrichment of our knowledge of Goethe in this direction. The studies he resumed a few months ago in the Goethe Archive have not only strengthened his conviction, but have also increased his experience in this field by many a valuable piece. The high owner of the Goethe treasures, the Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony, has now graciously allowed him, in agreement with the director of the Goethe and Schiller Archive, Prof. Suphan, to use the results of his research for the preliminary orientation of the public, which circumstance also makes this essay possible.

The maxim on which contemporary natural science places particular emphasis is that it wants to obtain all its results by means of observation. Nothing should be considered true that does not owe its origin to experience, to empiricism. It is not the place here to go into a comprehensive examination of the correctness of the viewpoint thus characterized. However, we must draw the attention of our readers to one thing, because it is of fundamental importance for the assessment of Goethe's scientific way of thinking. We mean the precise answer to the question: what actually is observation? What is experience? - If I present any proposition of science as the result of experience, I have not thereby indicated an objective characteristic of this proposition, but only the way in which the researcher arrived at it. I have said nothing about the thing itself, but only something about the relation of the observing man to things. He who recommends to me the strict observance of the principle of experience tells me nothing more than how I should act in order to arrive at correct results. He must leave the nature of these results themselves completely undetermined. For it lies in his demand that I should obtain information about their nature from the things themselves, that I should open my faculty of perception freely to the influence of the world and allow the objects to approach me. Then they themselves should reveal to me what is recognizable to me in them.

This principle is immediately contradicted if one claims, based on the demand of strict empirical science, that because the world is only recognizable through experience, it must therefore have these or those properties. Anyone who allows the principle of experience to push them towards materialism, atomism and so on is overstepping the boundaries they have set for themselves.

Among those researchers who have kept strictly within these boundaries is Goethe. But how is it that his views often differ considerably from those of the so-called pure empiricists? The latter, after all, reject the standpoint of idealism, and this is Goethe's standpoint. Is the demand of experience at all compatible with idealism? We answer: yes, if the empiricist knows how to observe not only with the senses of the body, but also with those of the mind. Just as the eye produces colors and forms, just as the ear produces sounds, so the mind produces ideas as results of experience.

This is a contradiction, we hear from the empiricists. Ideas can never be the object of experience, because they are not contained in the outside world, but only in us, in our soul. So say the representatives of experience, without realizing that they are committing a tremendous inconsistency. What entitles me to say that only that which can be perceived with the external sense organs belongs to the things of the external world? The objects can never reveal themselves to me in their entire content if I prescribe to them that they may have no other qualities than those which my physical organs allow me to recognize. The principle of experience demands that I hold up everything that is in me to the objects in order to explore their essence in all its aspects. But the sensory faculty of perception is only one side of man's being. And Goethe cannot accept as a true researcher someone who condemns himself from the outset to knowing only half of things because he claims that only half of his being provides him with the truth. Only in the unfolding of all our powers of cognition does the essence of things reveal itself to us, in Goethe's view, insofar as it is recognizable to us at all.

Whoever devotes himself in a one-sided way merely to thinking, to the development of our conceptual faculty, his scientific views are empty, devoid of content, they bear the character of the superfluous, because they flee the very area into whose riddle they are supposed to introduce us; He who trusts only in the senses, who seeks nothing but what they deliver to him, suffers from spiritual blindness; he gropes around at the objects without knowing the thread that leads him into the interior, where the apparent lack of rules reveals itself to him as lawful order. For Goethe, the true scientific spirit manifests itself in the fact that it continually alternates between sensual perception and thinking reflection. Just as inhalation and exhalation sustain life, so the to and fro movement of the mind between spreading out over the mass of the sensory world and drawing it back to the lawful sources of this multiplicity sustains proper research. Indeed, all scientific activity is ultimately only comprehensible to Goethe as such a vital human activity. Theories and hypotheses are dead in themselves; they only gain life when they dominate the mind like systole and diastole.¹ Goethe is not concerned with the results, but with coming closer to creative nature through the living power of the spirit. This cannot be achieved by those who are content with finished, dead knowledge, but only by those who creatively bring this dead material to life within themselves and thus bring forth within that which, apart from themselves, nature can become. For Goethe, the highest thing is not what man is able to gather from the world, but how he comes to terms with it in order to fill his spirit with true-to-life world content.

Whoever does not succeed in allowing things to affect him in such a way that the world within him is as alive, as active and thoroughly effective as the world outside us, where there is no part that is not affected by innumerable forces, has not done enough in Goethe's sense of the principle of experience.

What appears to be at rest in the world, to have become, to have solidified, is empty appearance, is only the superficial result of eternal becoming and working. But this apparent rest is the object of the senses, this becoming and working is revealed in the idea.² And so the idea is the result of experience. Of course, it only reveals itself to those who are not satisfied with superficial experience. Goethe never had any other view of the results of his scientific research than that he arrived at them by way of observation. But from the moment when he was urged by Schiller to reflect on the character of his experiences, it became ever clearer to him that his whole endeavor was only a search for ideas as the highest forms in which reality expresses itself. ³ This conviction became more and more apparent to us as we tried to visualize the path that this genius took in the scientific field by means of Goethe's papers that he left behind. No observation remains isolated; other related observations are always added to it in order to move beyond the "what" to the "how", beyond the individual to the whole, to ascend from knowledge to perception. Goethe is never directly interested in experiences as they are in themselves, but always as a question to nature. Anyone who immerses themselves in these notes will see an idea behind every single note, which in Goethe's mind always works its way out of the indeterminate into the more definite.

Those who thus follow the signs on the paper, which express clearly enough how ideas arise in Goethe through constant contact with the world, will also understand what it means: idealism is entirely compatible with empirical science. For idealism is nothing other than the whole of experience, the sum of all that it is possible for us to know of things, whereas what empiricists usually make the object of their science is only half experience, the summands without the sum. Francis Bacon, the famous English philosopher, once said that scientific research is a task of addition; but he did not get any further than an instruction on how to set up the individual items; how to find the sum remained hidden from him because he considered the senses to be the only mediators of experience and did not know that reason has the same claim to this title. Goethe also established the latter in its rights and thus fulfilled a high mission. The senses are wonderful messengers of the external world when the spirit understands the manifestations of their ideal meaning which they bring it; but their writings are worthless if we merely stare at what we should read. Anyone who claims that there is nothing to read will be answered by all those who went to school with Goethe: don't look for the reason in the things of this world, but in yourself.

• 1. During the preparation of this essay, Prof. Suphan drew my attention to a passage in Biedermann, Goethes Gespräche, VII, 5. 122, which provides important evidence for my above remarks: "Thus he (Goethe) emphatically replied to Mr. Vogel's assertion that theory must always precede practice, that it always goes together with practice: "for it is impossible for men to create disembodied souls."
• 2. For the first time, the peculiarity of the greatest German poet, characterized by this and appearing in full light for his scientific activity through Goethe's legacy, was made an aesthetic principle in the overall conception of the same by K. J. Schröer. (See Goethe's "Faust" I and II with introduction and continuous explanation and dramas, Kürschner's "Deutsche National-Literatur", 6th to 11th volume.)
• 3. We find here transferred to the theoretical-scientific field the view that led Goethe in the moral sphere to his high conception of love, as selfless devotion to the object. (See Schröer, Goethe und die Liebe, and its introduction to the 3rd volume of Goethe's dramas, in Kürschner's 'Deutsche National-Literatur'.)

In philosophical circles one often hears complaints about the decline in interest in philosophy among the educated of the present day. However, the opinion expressed in this complaint cannot be upheld in general. A number of phenomena speak against it. Just think of the influence that Eduard von Hartmann, currently Germany's greatest thinker, has exerted on our contemporaries. His "Philosophy of the Unconscious", first published in 1868, has gone through ten editions to date. And the literature dealing with this philosopher's world view has grown immeasurably. Furthermore, what an impact Richard Wagner's aesthetic treatises have had on the contemporary view of art! The teachings presented here were enthusiastically received, especially by the younger generation. The eagerness with which Friedrich Albert Lange's "History of Materialism" was read for a time must also be mentioned here. No less important is the way in which very shallow writings, which nonetheless dealt with basic philosophical problems, such as Ludwig Büchner's "Kraft und Stoff" ("Force and Substance") and Carl Vogt's "Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft" ("Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft"), were devoured. Darwin's and Haeckel's writings on the history of development found a large audience. Finally, Friedrich Nietzsche, this tragic hero of thought, who approaches the highest problems of the human spirit, but without a logical conscience, without discipline of thought, merely rummages in the realm of ideas, as it were, is causing a tremendous stir in our time. On the one hand, he has aroused enthusiasm, which is, of course, as unclear as possible about its actual content, and on the other, he has annoyed, outraged and challenged to the sharpest contradiction. However, he has probably left few of the large number of people who have engaged with his bold thoughts cold; a clear indication that philosophical interest in our time is nevertheless conducive to stimulation on a large scale.

In one broad area, however, philosophy seems to have lost its power and influence. This is that of the individual sciences: cultural and, in particular, literary history, history and the natural sciences. This is most noticeable in the history of literature and the natural sciences. The way in which the creations of our classical poets are treated in literary-historical monographs, especially those of the Scherer school, is truly deplorable. They often lack the slightest knowledge of philosophical concepts and views. And how erroneous is the belief that the latter can be dispensed with when judging the artistic achievements of our classical period! Above all other things, it is necessary to have a complete command of the circle of views and ideas of the person whose artistic creations one wishes to appreciate. The works of our classics, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Schlegel and others, reflect the philosophical content of the great age in which they lived. And anyone who has no understanding of this element of content in their works is also unsuited to an aesthetic appreciation of their form. But even when dealing with other epochs of our literature, we can observe that scholars are truly horrified by philosophical treatment.

The situation is almost worse in the natural sciences. Here we find an accumulation of infinite details that are almost nowhere accompanied by guiding points of view or broad perspectives. Anyone who wants to exploit a characteristic individual experience in order to penetrate deeper into the context of natural things is immediately regarded as an enthusiast. The most thoughtless registration work is prevalent here. And when Richard Falckenberg says in his witty inaugural address "On the Present State of German Philosophy" (Leipzig 1890,.6) that "the time has yet to come when the character of an unphilosophical mind will be counted among the titles of honor", we would like to claim that in some scientific circles, this time has already come.

The above-mentioned phenomena show that the accusation of a lack of interest in the philosophical approach can be made against the representatives of the individual disciplines, but not against the educated reading public in general.

In view of these phenomena, the question is probably justified: what are the reasons for this emancipation of the individual sciences from philosophy?

Not in the slightest part do they lie in the historical development of philosophy in Germany. There is no doubt that the great philosophers of our people: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, for all their genius and the truly admirable tendency towards greatness that was characteristic of all of them, lacked one thing: the gift of making themselves easily understandable. It requires either an unusual dexterity in the execution of thought operations, so that thinking happens with the ease of playing, or else a great self-conquest in order to rise to the spheres into which those philosophers lead us. For those who are not capable of the one and do not have enough good will for the other, penetration into the teachings of our actual philosophical age is an impossibility. In this we must also seek the cause of the misunderstanding of Hegel. This philosopher who was hostile to metaphysics, who strove with an insatiable thirst for knowledge of the real, this most resolute of all representatives of positivism and empiricism, is strangely enough usually portrayed as a thinker of empty conceptual schemes who, denying all empirical knowledge, lose themselves in an insubstantial philosophical cloud-cuckoo land. One does not realize that Hegel's aim is to take everything that is to be used to explain a phenomenon completely from reality. Nowhere does he want to call upon elements to help him explain our world. Everything that constitutes it must lie within it. Thus his view is a strict objectivism. The mind should not draw anything from itself in order to graft it onto phenomena for the purpose of deciphering them. Hegel would vigorously reject scientific tendencies such as modern aromatism, which presupposes a whole world behind our world of appearances.

What lies objectively in the world process should, according to Hegel, become the content of philosophy, nothing above it. And because he could not merely recognize something material as the objective content of the world, but rather counted the laws of existence and events, which are also truly present in reality, as part of the content of the world, his teaching is idealism. What distinguishes Hegel from the modern positivists is not the type of research, not the belief that only the real can be the object of science. In this he is in complete agreement with them. He differs from them, however, in the view that for him the idea is also real, or conversely, that the real is real and ideal at the same time. This character of Hegel's philosophy was first understood again by Eduard von Hartmann, and he carried out the treatment corresponding to it in his exemplary historical works: "Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness" and "The Religious Consciousness of Mankind in the Stages of its Development". However, Hartmann has also understood how to avoid the difficulties of understanding Hegel in wider circles, which we mentioned above, and how to unite Hegelian sentiment with a comprehensible style of presentation that is also accessible to the less philosophically trained. In his historical works, Hartmann seeks the real with the same rigor as his contemporaries who call themselves historians, but unlike them he does not only find the bare facts, but also the ideal context of historical phenomena. And it is very regrettable that he did not gain a similarly authoritative influence on literary historians and historians from this side as he did on educated laymen through his "Philosophy of the Unconscious". Hartmann is to be regarded as the real continuator of that philosophy of great style which, through Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, has powerfully gripped the whole nation.

But why was he also able to have so little influence on the actual discipline? In our opinion, this question can be answered quite simply. The reason lies in the mistrust and lack of understanding that was shown to him by the officially appointed representatives of his science and which has only recently and only very slowly given way to better relations.

This lamentable relationship between the official philosophy on the one hand and Hartmann on the other has a deeper reason. As soon as Hartmann embarked on his philosophical studies, he tackled the central problem: how does consciousness relate to the unconscious in the world, and what role does the unconscious play in nature and the mind? From there, his thinking extends to all the more important questions of philosophy, so that he appears before the public with a self-contained circle of views from his very first appearance. School philosophy, however, does not like this - with some notable exceptions. It only likes to deal with individual problems and even prefers that timid skepticism which behaves as cautiously as possible towards the great questions naturally posed by every human being. For the most part it is rather contrived and self-made problems to which professional science adheres, while in contrast to what everyone wants to know, it regards only the expression of the doubter as that due to the true researcher and immediately has the accusation of dilettantism at hand when it sees a bold approach to such things, Thus school philosophy has gradually isolated itself completely from the other scientific enterprise, its results are no longer important and interesting enough to gain power over the individual sciences. While it would be right for the philosopher to characterize the general points of view, the leading ideas for the individual sciences and to take up the results of the latter in order to use them further in the sense of an overall view of things, the present philosophical specialist sees himself as an individual researcher alongside others. He walks alongside the specialists instead of engaging in lively interaction with them. Only Hartmann understood his profession as a philosopher in the ideal sense described above. He was not taken seriously for this for a long time and is still not taken seriously by many school philosophers today.

As we can see, the position that philosophy occupies in contemporary life and culture is by no means the one we would wish for. It is therefore with great pleasure that we welcome a book that has just been published and which seems destined to spread clarity about the tasks and goals of philosophy. We are referring to Johannes Volkelt's "Lectures as an Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy". Held in Frankfurt a.M. in February and March 1891, the book is suitable for reaching the widest circle of readers and showing what philosophy actually wants and is capable of achieving for life and culture. Volkelt, although a scientific philosopher in the best sense of the word - he and Johannes Rehmke have written the best books on epistemology. He and Johannes Rehmke wrote the best books on epistemology - has always had a free, open eye both for the far-reaching tasks of human life and for its most intimate phenomena. The former is demonstrated by his speech in Vienna: "Kant's Categorical Imperative and the Present" and his inaugural speech in Basel: "On the Possibility of Metaphysics", the latter by his book on "The Dream Fantasy" and his presentation: "Franz Grillparzer as a Poet of the Tragic". In these lectures Volkelt first presents the contrast between the philosophy of the present and that of the beginning of the century. He shows how everything intuitive, personal and bold has disappeared from this science and has given way to an intellectual, impersonal, skeptical approach. Whereas in the past people fearlessly inquired into the causes of phenomena, they are now anxious to first test our cognitive faculty to see to what extent it is capable of penetrating the secrets of the world. Philosophy has taken on a predominantly epistemological character. It has become hostile to all metaphysical activity. The author, however, emphasizes both the necessity and the possibility of metaphysics. He only thinks that it will not be able to go for its goal with the boldness and certainty that was previously believed. He is of the opinion that, instead of showing off with real solutions, it will often have to be content with indicating the direction in which certain problems are to be pursued, formulating the questions precisely, bringing forth the material that can lead to the results, indeed in some cases it will be able to do nothing more than indicate the various possible solutions. Volkelt also proves the necessity of those branches of philosophy that are usually referred to as natural philosophy and philosophy of mind, and to which he includes psychology, ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of religion. In all individual sciences, one ultimately arrives at the highest principles, ultimate results, which cannot be pursued further within the science in which they are obtained. They form the content of these particular philosophical sciences, from which they are combined to form a whole world view. Furthermore, Volkelt shows in the most beautiful way how, even if not scientific philosophy, at least the attitude that springs from a philosophical mental disposition permeates the entire human personality and becomes the ethical, religious basis of life, especially for those people for whom the positive religions have lost their compelling power of faith. Finally, in Volkelt's view, philosophy will be the power which, by transforming revealed religion into a religion of reason, will bring about a development of Christianity which will enable it to become a truly culturally friendly element in the life of modern peoples. Finally, the author devotes his consideration to the influence that philosophy will have on the modern progress of our culture. It must play an important role in the present and the future, if only because we have passed the stage where all culture springs only from a quasi unconscious working of temperament and feeling. We are consciously striving towards our cultural goals out of rational deliberation. Philosophy is particularly well-suited to serve this purpose.

The author of these lines does not agree with Volkelt on everything. In particular, he takes a different position on epistemology. He may perhaps refer to his own writing on epistemology. Nevertheless, he would like to recommend Volkelt's book to the attention of all circles.

We are undoubtedly facing some upheavals in the way we think about and value human actions. Philosophy will have a strong say in the reorganization of the situation. Writings such as Volkelt's are particularly suitable as preparation. I will deal with the second part of my topic in a future article.

A turn for the better will only occur in philosophical life when the urge to test the power of thought on the central problems of existence awakens again. This drive is currently paralyzed. We suffer from cowardice of thought. We cannot believe that our ability to think is sufficient to answer the deepest questions of life. I have often heard it said that our task at present is to collect building block after building block. The time is over when we proudly and arrogantly put together philosophical doctrines without having the materials at hand. Once we have collected enough of this material, the right genius will emerge and carry out the construction. Now is not the time to build systems. This view arises from a regrettable lack of clarity about the nature of science. If the latter had the task of collecting the facts of the world, registering them and organizing them systematically and expediently according to certain points of view, then one could speak like this. But then we would have to renounce all knowledge altogether; for we would probably only finish collecting the facts at the end of days, and then we would lack the necessary time to carry out the required scholarly registration work.

If you only once realize what you actually want to achieve through science, you will soon see the fallacy of this demand, which requires an infinite amount of work. When we confront nature, it initially stands before us like a profound mystery, it stretches out before our senses like an enigma. A mute being looks out at us. How can we bring light into the mystical darkness? How can we solve the riddle?

The blind man who enters a room can only feel darkness in it. No matter how long he wanders around and touches all the objects: Brightness will never fill the room for him. Just as this blind man faces the furnishings of the room, so in a higher sense man faces nature, who expects the solution to the riddle from the contemplation of an infinite number of facts. There is something in nature which a thousand facts do not reveal to us if we lack the power of sight to see it, and which one single fact reveals to us if we possess this faculty. Every thing has two sides. One is the outside. We perceive it with our senses. But then there is also an inner side, which presents itself to the spirit when it knows how to look. No one will believe in his own inability in any matter. Whoever lacks the ability to perceive this inner side would prefer to deny it to man altogether, or to disparage as fantasists those who pretend to possess it. Nothing can be done about an absolute inability, and one could only pity those who, because of it, can never gain insight into the depths of the world. The psychologist, however, does not believe in this inability. Every person with normal spiritual development has the ability to descend to those depths up to a certain point. But the convenience of thinking prevents many from doing so. Their spiritual weapons are not blunt, but the bearers are too lazy to wield them. It is infinitely more convenient to pile fact upon fact than to seek out the reasons for them by thinking. Above all, such an accumulation of facts rules out the possibility of someone else coming along and overturning what we have advocated. In this way we never find ourselves in the position of having to defend our intellectual positions; we need not be upset that tomorrow someone will advocate the opposite of our current positions. If you only deal with actual truth, you can lull yourself into the belief that no one can dispute this truth, that we are creating for eternity. Yes, we also create for eternity, but we only create zeros. We lack the courage of thought to give these zeros a value by placing a meaningful number in front of them in the form of an idea.

Few people today have any idea that something can be true, even if the opposite can be asserted with no less right. There are no unconditional truths. We drill deep into a thing of nature, we bring up the most mysterious wisdom from the most hidden shafts, we turn around, drill in a second place: and the opposite shows itself to be just as justified. That every truth is only valid in its place, that it is only true as long as it is asserted under the conditions under which it was originally fathomed, that is what Hegel's genius taught the world. Little has been understood.

Who today does not cringe respectfully when the name Friedr. Theod. Vischer is mentioned. But not many people know that this man considered it the greatest achievement of his life to have learned from Hegel the above-mentioned conviction about the nature of truth. If they knew, then a completely different air would flow towards them from Vischer's magnificent works, and one would encounter less ceremonial praise, but more unconstrained understanding of this writer.

Where are the days when Schiller found deep understanding when he praised the philosophical mind over the bread scholar! The one who digs unreservedly for the treasures of truth, even if he is exposed to the danger that a second treasure digger will immediately devalue everything for him with a new find, compared to the one who only ever repeats the banal, but absolutely "true": "Two times two is four".

We must have the courage to boldly enter the realm of ideas, even at the risk of error. Those who are too cowardly to err cannot be fighters for the truth. An error that springs from the mind is worth more than a truth that comes from platitude. He who has never asserted anything that is in a sense untrue is not fit to be a scientific thinker.

For cowardly fear of error, our science has fallen victim to bareness.

It is almost hair-raising which character traits are extolled today as virtues of the scientific researcher. If you were to translate them into the area of practical living, the result would be the opposite of a firm, decisive, energetic character.

A recent book has attempted to expose these shortcomings in our intellectual life: "Rembrandt als Erzieher. From a German." It is bad enough that this book has been so widely read. It is not difficult to see shortcomings and attack them, but it is difficult to find their origin. Go to an inn every evening for two weeks, where educated German beer-philistines are sitting, sit aside and listen to their critical remarks. Then you go home, carefully note down what you have heard and add a quotation from a well-known writer to each sentence. After a fortnight, send this "collective work" to the printers and a second book will grace the German book market, which will be in no way inferior in value to "Rembrandt as Educator".

The author of this book fights specialism in science. This is his fundamental error. The mistake is not that researchers devote themselves to special tasks, but that they cannot work the universal spirit into the world of details. It would be a bad thing if we were to replace the study of individual entities with the spinning out of abstract generalities and gray theories. Study the grain of sand, but find out to what extent it is part of the spirit.

It is not mysticism that we want to advocate here. Anyone who seeks the spirit of the things of this world in clear, transparent ideas is by no means a mystic. There is nothing that excludes mystical chiaroscuro more than the crystal-clear world of ideas, with its sharp contours down to the last ramifications. He who enters into this world with human acuity, with strict logic, will have nothing in common with the mystic, who sees nothing, but only suspects, who does not think out the world of reasons, but only conjures it up, in the awareness that he sees through his spiritual realm in all directions. The mathematician is the model for the mystic-free thinker.

So our task is not to endlessly collect individual facts, but to sharpen our mental faculties for seeing the depths of nature.

Our reason must once again become aware of its absoluteness; and an end must be put to its cowardly, slavish subordination to the oppressive power of facts. It is unworthy that a higher being, which reason is after all, should yield itself to a mere collector of things of lower value. If the world consisted only of sensually perceptible things, then reason would have to abdicate. It only has a task if there is something in the world that it is able to grasp. And that is the spirit.

To deny it is to retire reason.

Is there now any prospect that this legitimate ruler on the throne in the realm of science will soon be restored to his innate rights? The answer to this question will be the subject of the next installment of this article.

When Knebel read the fragment "On Nature" in the 32nd edition of the Tiefurt Journal at the beginning of 1783, he wrote in his diary: "Goethe's fragment on nature made a deep impression on me. It is masterly and great. It encourages me in love." Like the other contributions to the journal, the essay was published without the author's name. Knebel was only able to attribute the ideas set down in it to Goethe. Other readers of the journal would probably have thought the same. Goethe himself opposed this opinion. He wrote to Knebel: "The essay in the Tiefurt Journal, which you mention, is not mine, and I have so far made a secret of who it is by. I cannot deny that the author has dealt with me and has often spoken to me about these matters... He has given me much pleasure himself and has a certain lightness and softness which I could perhaps not have given him." And Frau von Stein wrote to Knebel on March 28, 1783: "Goethe is not the author, as you believe, of the thousandfold picture of views of nature; it is by Tobler; sometimes it is not charitable to me, but it is rich!" If these passages from the letter had not existed, it would seem almost impossible today to raise the questions: "Is Goethe the author of this essay?" or "To what extent do the thoughts expressed in it belong to him?". If we are to say in a few words what has so far forced the conviction of Goethe's authorship on every connoisseur of Goethe's scientific development, it is the fact that the latter must necessarily have passed through the stage recorded in the essay in his progress towards his later views of nature. When Ernst Haeckel wanted to place a particularly characteristic work by Goethe at the head of his "Natural History of Creation" to prove that he was one of the first prophets of a unified (monistic) view of nature, he chose the essay "Nature". However, this is nothing other than what Goethe himself considered to be the right thing to say at a very old age, when the essay, which had long since disappeared from his memory, was presented to him. In 1828, he received it from the estate of Duchess Anna Amalia. He had no hesitation in describing the ideas expressed in it as his own, even though he could not actually remember writing it. In an explanatory note to the fragment, which he wrote in 1823, we read: "I do not actually remember writing these reflections, but they certainly correspond to the ideas my mind was forming at the time." And further above: "It is written by a well-known hand, which I used to use in my business in the eighties." This hand is that of Seidel, who also wrote the other Goethe contributions to the Tiefurt Journal. These historical testimonies also include a leaf that is in the Goethe Archive among Goethe's scientific manuscripts and is probably a note by Chancellor von Müller. (Written in pencil at the top in the margin in Eckermann's hand: Probably refers to the essay: Die Natur, in G. Werke 1890, vol. 40, We lift out the following passages from it: May 25, 1828. " The above essay, no doubt by Goethe, probably intended for the Tiefurter Journal, marked by Einsiedeln as No. 3 and thus dating from about the first eighties, but written before the metamorphosis of plants, as Goethe himself told me, was communicated to me by him on May 24, 1828. As he will have it printed, I have found no hesitation in copying it for the time being." ... May 30, 1828: "After a conversation, Goethe did not fully admit to it with complete conviction; and it also seemed to me that it was indeed his thoughts, but not written down by himself, but per traducem. The manuscript is Seidel's, the subsequent rent officer, and since he was privy to Goethe's ideas and had a tendency towards such thoughts, it is probable that those thoughts were written down by him collectively as coming from Goethe's mouth." The view that Seidel had a real share in the authorship will probably not be upheld by anyone; the quite unique harmony between the thoughts of the essay and the form in which they are expressed speaks against this. These are not transformed thoughts, they are thoughts that must have been conceived entirely as they are. In almost no sentence can one imagine that the content could be formulated more precisely or more beautifully. If the essay was not dictated by Goethe, but written by someone else after an oral communication, then it could only have been written by someone who was at such an educational level that he was able to grasp Goethe from all sides and write down his thoughts almost verbatim from memory in their artistically perfect form. Now the G. Chr. Chr. Tobler, mentioned by Frau von Stein, does indeed seem to have been such a man; Frau Herder wrote of him to Müller: "He was greatly honored and loved in this circle (of Goethe and the princely persons) and elevated as the most philosophical, most learned, most beloved man; in short, they spoke of him as a man of a higher kind." And J. G. Müller wrote in his diary when he met Tobler with Passavant in Münden in April 1781: "Tobler is entirely of Greek blood, his only ambition is to become more and more human, full of health and virility like a young tree; whom he loves, he loves completely. He does not have enough of the simple light sentences of Christianity. He is soon a Christian, soon a Greek..." Tobler only spent the summer of 1781 in Weimar. He stayed with Knebel, and Goethe spent a lot of time with him. In a letter from Goethe to Lavater dated June 22, 1781, the former says that he "grew very fond" of Tobler, and the diary contains the remark under August 2: "With Tobler about history on the occasion of Borromeo." This is evidence that intimate conversations about general views may have taken place between Goethe and Tobler, and that the latter may have put down on paper a version of Goethe's work that coincides with the fragment "Nature".

Tobler, however, could have played no other role than that of a reporter who adhered as closely as possible to the wording of what he had heard, and there are important internal reasons for this, which emerge from a consideration of the relationship of the essay in question to Goethe's later works on natural science. He himself says in the explanatory remark already quoted above: "I would like to call the level of insight at that time a comparative, which is urged to express its direction against a superlative that has not yet been reached. One sees the tendency to a kind of pantheism, in that an inscrutable, unconditional, humoristic, self-contradictory being is conceived as the basis of world phenomena, and may well be regarded as a game that is bitterly serious.

The fulfillment that it lacks, however, is the view of the two great driving wheels of nature: the concept of polarity and of increase, the former belonging to matter insofar as we think of it materially, the latter to it insofar as we think of it spiritually."

Goethe's scientific development presents itself to closer scrutiny as a progressive shaping of the maxims expressed in the essay "Nature". These propositions set out the general requirements according to which thinking must proceed in the exploration of particular areas of nature. All natural events correspond to these principles. Goethe later tries to find out how this happens in detail in various areas. The essay in question is a kind of life program that underlies all of Goethe's thinking about nature.

Wherever we start looking at Goethe's research, this is confirmed. In geology, Goethe, independently of other researchers, establishes the principle that the same laws that currently determine the formations taking place on the earth's surface were also valid in past epochs and that they have never suffered a violent interruption through exceptional upheavals and so on. This principle points back to the passage in the fragment: "It (nature) is forever creating new forms; what is there has never been, what was there will not come again - everything is new and yet always the same." "Even the most unnatural is nature. If you can't see it everywhere, you can't see it properly anywhere."

Almost like the plant from the seed, the doctrine of metamorphosis has developed from the following sentences in the fragment: "There is an eternal life, becoming and movement in it, and yet it does not move on. It transforms itself eternally, and there is not a moment of stasis in it." "It seems to have designed everything for individuality and does not care about individuals." "It has few driving forces, but they are never worn out, always effective, always manifold." In the first sentence the beginning of the idea of the transformation of the individual organs of a living being and the progressive development of the same is already made quite clear. One need only compare the following passage from "Metamorphosis" (1790) for proof: "If we look at all forms, especially the organic ones, we find that nowhere is there anything existing, nowhere is there anything at rest or closed off, but rather that everything fluctuates in constant motion." The above sentence on "individuality" is the germ of the idea of the type, which we encounter in Goethe's osteological works. In the "Lectures on the Type" (1796), Goethe says: "We have thus gained the right to assert without fear that all perfect organic natures, among which we see fish, amphibians, birds, mammals and, at the top of the latter, man, are all formed according to one archetype, which only in its very constant parts moves more or less back and forth and is still being formed and reshaped daily through reproduction." But this means nothing other than: nature creates individuals, but all individuality is based on the type; this is what ultimately matters and not the individuals. Indeed, the way in which nature proceeds to create a particular form out of the general form of the type is also indicated in the fragment. This way consists in the fact that one organ or one group of organs is particularly strongly developed, and the other parts of the type have to take a back seat, because nature has only a certain budget for each living being, which it must not exceed. Depending on the development of one or the other part of the type, one or the other form of living being is created. In the essay on the dispute between Geoffroy de Saint Hilaire and Cuvier in the French Academy, Goethe summarizes this rule in the words: "...that domestic nature prescribes for itself a budget, a budget in whose individual chapters it reserves to itself the most complete arbitrariness, but in the main sum remains completely true to itself, in that, if too much has been spent on one side, it deducts it from the other and places itself in the same position in the most decisive way." The fragment contains exactly the same concept: "If it (nature) gives one (a need) more, it is a new source of pleasure; but it soon comes into balance." The following are also two parallel lines of thought. Fragment: "She (nature) is the only artist, from the simplest material to the greatest contrasts"; and in the osteological lectures: "If we consider the various parts of the most perfect animals, which we call mammals, according to that type which has only been established in the most general way, we find that the circle of formation of nature is indeed limited, but that because of the quantity of parts and because of the multiple modifiability, the changes of form become possible to infinity." Even the core point of the theory of metamorphosis, that the infinite diversity of organic beings is based on a single primordial organism, can be found in the idea alluded to in the "Fragment": "Each of its (nature's) works has its own essence, each of its phenomena the most isolated concept, and yet everything is one."

No less remarkable is the fact that the point of view from which Goethe later viewed the deformities of organisms is already taken up in our essay. According to this assumption, the deviation from the normal form of a natural being is not a deviation from the general laws of nature, but only a mode of operation of these laws under special conditions. "Nature forms normally when it gives the rule to innumerable details, determines and conditions them; but the phenomena are abnormal when the details prevail and stand out in an arbitrary, even seemingly random way. But because the two are closely related and both the regulated and the irregular are animated by one spirit, there arises a fluctuation between the normal and the abnormal, because formation and transformation always alternate, so that the abnormal seems to become normal and the normal abnormal." This is the thought from the fragment in a more mature form (the essay to which the sentence belongs was written with regard to Jäger's work "Über die Mißbildung der Gewächse", which appeared in 1814): "Auch das Unnatürlichste ist Natur."

If we disregard Goethe's principles relating specifically to the realm of inorganic nature, we find Goethe's entire thought structure already prefigured in the fragment "Nature". In the general, abstract way in which these ideas are presented here, they appear like the proclamation of a new world view. They can only be ascribed to a spirit that wanted to find its own, new ways of explaining phenomena. The fulfillment of this proclamation is Goethe's special works on scientific subjects. Only here do those general propositions acquire their full value, their real meaning. In fact, we only fully understand them when we see them realized in Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, in his osteological studies and in his geological observations. If we had these latter without the general theoretical principles, we would have to supplement them ourselves. We would have to ask ourselves: how did Goethe conceive of nature as a whole in order to be able to form his own ideas about the plant and animal world? The answer to this question, however, can be given with nothing better and more satisfying than with the contents of the fragment "Nature". Goethe says in the "History of the Theory of Colors": "How anyone thinks about a certain case can only be fully understood when one knows how he thinks at all." We will only fully know what Goethe thought about an individual case in nature when we have learned from the fragment under discussion what views he had about nature in general.

This relationship seems more important than the question of whether the person who wrote the essay provided a direct dictation or a more or less literal report from memory.

People with a comprehensive, worldly spirit often find the redeeming word for a matter that scholars sitting in a room have racked their brains over for a long time in vain.

What is philosophy supposed to do alongside and above the individual specialized sciences? The representatives of the latter are probably not averse to answering this question simply as follows: it should do nothing at all. In their view, the entire field of reality is encompassed by the special sciences. Why anything that goes beyond these? The person who used the most succinct expression for this was the labor apostle Ferdinand Lassalle. "Philosophy can be nothing but the consciousness which the empirical sciences attain about themselves." These are his words. You could hardly find a better formula for the matter.

All sciences regard it as their task to investigate the truth. Truth can be understood as nothing other than a system of concepts that reflects the phenomena of reality in their lawful context in a way that corresponds to the facts. If someone stands still and says that for him the network of concepts, which represents a certain area of reality, has an absolute value and he needs nothing about it, then a higher interest cannot be demonstrated to him. However, such a person will not be able to explain to us why his collection of concepts has a higher value than, for example, a collection of stamps, which, when organized systematically, also depicts certain connections in reality. This is the reason why the argument about the value of philosophy with many natural scientists does not lead to any results. They are lovers of concepts in the same sense as there are lovers of stamps or coins. But there is an interest that goes beyond this. This interest seeks, with the help and on the basis of the sciences, to enlighten man about his position in relation to the universe, or in other words: this interest leads man to place himself in such a relationship to the world as is possible and necessary according to the results obtained in the sciences.

In the individual sciences, man confronts nature, he separates himself from it and observes it, he alienates himself from it. In philosophy, he seeks to reunite with it. He seeks to make the abstract relationship into which he has fallen in scientific observation into a real, concrete, living one. The scientific researcher wants to acquire an awareness of the world and its effects through knowledge; the philosopher wants to use this awareness to make himself a vital member of the world as a whole. In this sense, individual science is a preliminary stage of philosophy. We have a similar relationship in the arts. The composer works on the basis of the theory of composition. The latter is a sum of knowledge that is a necessary precondition for composing. Composing transforms the laws of musicology into life, ın real reality. Anyone who does not understand that a similar relationship also exists between philosophy and science is not fit to be a philosopher. All real philosophers were free conceptual artists. With them, human ideas became artistic material and the scientific method became artistic technique. Thus the abstract scientific consciousness is elevated to concrete life. Our ideas become powers of life. We have not merely a knowledge of things, but we have made knowledge into a real, self-controlling organism; our real, active consciousness has taken precedence over a mere passive assimilation of truths. This is where I seek the meaning of Lassalle's words.

This conception of philosophy should be penetrated in particular by those who want to present the historical development of philosophy in writing or in academic lectures. In the face of many an unpleasant phenomenon in this field, we welcome with pleasure a recently published book: "Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie in ihrer Entwicklung und teilweise Lösung von Thales bis Robert Hamerling. Lectures, held at the K.K. Vienna University by Vinzenz Knauer (Vienna 1892)."

From the presentation of the history of philosophy by the same author (Geschichte der Philosophie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Neuzeit. Second improved edition. 1882) we got the impression that in Vinzenz Knauer we are dealing with a philosophical nature in the truest sense of the word. It is not an external observer, but a man living in the world of ideas who describes the phenomena of philosophy in ancient and modern times. And the new book has only strengthened this conviction. The lectures are highly suitable for stimulating philosophical thought. We are not dealing with a historian who gives a lecture on one system after another and then adds a critique from any point of view - J. H. Kirchmann, Thilo and others have practiced such arts ad nauseam - but with a philosopher who develops the problems vividly for his listeners and readers.

There are people who think it is objectivity to be as external as possible to the problems they deal with. They want to see everything from a bird's eye view. Such so-called objectivity, however, does not achieve a true visualization of its subject. Knauer has a different, genuine objectivity; he penetrates so deeply into the ideas of a philosopher that he resurrects them before our minds in the most unadulterated way possible. He knows how to revive the dramatic element that characterizes the ideas of every true philosopher. Where we so often only feel "the master's own spirit", Knauer really introduces us to the "spirit of the times".

Of course, all this is only possible with the high degree of mastery of the material that we admire in Knauer. Every sentence testifies to a long, thorough immersion in philosophical world views.

I would like to award this praise unreservedly to the first part of the book, which I extend to Thomas Aquinas. From Thomas Aquinas onwards, Knauer's inclination towards dualistic and pluralistic ideas seems to me to impair the free historical presentation. I personally felt this painfully in the second part. I consider Knauer's presentation of Aristotelian philosophy to be one of the clearest, most transparent and most correct there is; his treatment of modern philosophy does not yet seem to me to be so free of scholastic concepts as to be able to do justice to monistic philosophy. Knauer fails to recognize the difference between abstract and concrete monism. The former seeks a unity alongside and above the individual things of the cosmos. This monism is always embarrassed when it is supposed to derive the multiplicity of things from the absolutized unity and make it comprehensible. The consequence is usually that it declares the multiplicity to be illusory, which results in a complete evaporation of the given reality. Schopenhauer's and Schelling's first system are examples of this abstract monism. Concrete monism pursues the unified world principle in living reality. It does not seek a metaphysical unity alongside the given world, but is convinced that this given world contains the moments of development into which the unified world principle divides and separates itself.

This concrete monism does not seek unity in multiplicity, but wants to understand multiplicity as unity. The concept of unity on which concrete monism is based conceives the latter as substantial, which sets the difference in itself. It is contrasted with that unity which is generally indiscriminate in itself, i.e. absolutely simple (Herbart's reals), and with that which, of the equalities contained in these things, combines the former into a formal unity, just as we combine ten years into a decennium. Knauer only recognizes the latter two concepts of unity. The former, since it can only explain the distinct things of reality from the interaction of many simple realities, can lead to pluralism; the latter leads to abstract monism, because its unity is not immanent in things, but exists alongside and above them. Knauer tends towards pluralism. He overlooks the concrete-monistic elements of recent philosophy. That is why this part of his lectures seems deficient to me.

I am committed to concrete monism. With its help, I am able to understand the results of recent natural science, namely Goethe-Darwin-Haeckel organicism. If Knauer had taken the science of the organic into account in his arguments in the same way as he rightly does with that of the inorganic (heat equivalent, conservation of force, second law of mechanical heat theory), he would have seen through the difficulty of applying pluralism. It is impossible to apply the theory of development (and its consequences: Heredity Theory, Adaptation Theory and Basic Biogenetic Law) by means of the interaction of distinct simple reals without contradiction.

However, these objections should not prevent me from recognizing the great importance of the second part of Knauer's book. In addition to the clear, original discussion of Herbart's thought processes, I see this significance in the comprehensive and fair treatment of Hamerling's philosophizing. The fact that Hamerling appears in such an unprejudiced, unreserved manner in the ranks of philosophers is a merit that cannot be overestimated, which Knauer has earned through these lectures. As a historian of philosophy, he has spoken a word first. He who merely compiles and develops the philosophical systems recognized by everyone in a new way cannot be compared with the one who first recognizes the significance of a phenomenon. The fact that I myself have a completely different attitude to Hamerling than Knauer does not prevent me from recognizing this in these lectures. I appreciate the poet-philosopher's philosophical view because of the many monistic elements it contains, despite its tendency towards a dualistic and pluralistic world view. In my opinion, this circumstance cannot be judged correctly as long as German philosophy remains completely dependent on Kant, which completely obscures the free view of world conditions. Kant's philosophy is a dualistic one. It bases dualism on the organization of the human cognitive organism. And the fact that the propositions which Kant put forward for the subjectivity of cognition are inviolable in a more or less modified form is regarded today as the basic dogma of philosophy, so to speak. Anyone who doubts this is declared by many to be unsuitable for philosophical thinking. Anyone who has their own opinion, regardless of this prejudice, can have bad experiences today. I recently experienced it myself. When a "Society for Ethical Culture" was formed in Germany last year along the lines of similar associations in England and America, I took the opportunity to publicly express my opinion about such a backward foundation (e.g. in the "Literar. Merkur", Vol. XII. 1892, No. 40, and "Zukunft", 1892, Vol. I, No. 5). My views in this regard are rooted in my epistemological convictions, which I last substantiated in my essay "Truth and Science". The latter represent an epistemology that is independent of Kant and has grown out of the doctrines of modern monism. They provide full proof that I arrived at my views quite independently of Nietzsche. Nevertheless, I was simply accused of Nietzscheanism by German philosophers who were supposed to know something about the matter, and I was accused not only of lacking intellect but also of having an immoral attitude. That doesn't bother me any more. Some people think differently about my intellect than the gentlemen of the "ethical culture"; and as far as my morals are concerned: in my school reports it says: "exemplary", later it said: "perfectly in accordance with the academic laws"; since then, every authority I have called upon has given me a good moral certificate. So it seems that I have done nothing that should prompt a German scholar to call me before a "moral judgment seat" (cf. Ferd. Tönnies, "Ethische Kultur und ihr Geleite"). Or is it one of the insights of the new "ethical culture" that one is morally condemned because of one's theoretical views?

The phenomena of hypnotism and suggestion, in which research is currently taking a lively interest, are of such a nature that the representatives of the most diverse intellectual fields feel the need to deal with them. Hypnosis seems to provide the physician with a means of distinguishing functional from organic diseases, and at the same time the possibility of curing the former by suggestive intervention. The legal scholar will not be able to avoid taking into account the effect that auto-suggestion and external suggestion have on a person in questions in which free will and personal responsibility come into consideration. Judicial practice will always have to be mindful of the fact that suggestive influence can cause the statements of both the accused and the witnesses to take on a form that deviates more or less from the truth. In the field of religious and cultural history, many things can be better explained with reference to hypnotism than without it. That from here an explanatory light also falls on the phenomena of artistic imaginative activity seems to me undoubted. And this brings me in an informal way to that science which is interested in the question of hypnotism above all other fields, namely psychology. I must agree with Hans Schmidkunz (Psychologie der Suggestion,.5) when he seeks here an important addition to our existing psychology. And it is highly regrettable that a researcher like W. Wundt is guilty of the most incredible distortions of individual assertions in Schmidkunz's book in his assessment of it. Wundt has rendered great services to psychology through his experimental investigations and has earned a high reputation among his philosophizing and philosophically educated contemporaries. We do not wish to deny the former, nor rebel against the latter, when we count his recently published work on "Fypnotism and Suggestion" among those that create confusion rather than enlightenment in the field of psychology. The one-sided, in a certain sense purely mechanical way in which Wundt views the life of the soul makes him completely misjudge the value which, for example, the assumption of a double consciousness (superconscious and subconscious) has for the elucidation of the facts in question. He finds in it "a pronounced example of that kind of psychological pseudo-explanation which consists in introducing a new name for the things to be explained" (p. 36). Wundt overlooks the fact that such theories, even if they are not called upon to speak the last word about the facts, nevertheless keep the real moments that continually flow into one another in reality conceptually sharply apart, which is the first step towards a real explanation. Wundt's own views seem completely inadequate to me. He wants to derive all the facts under consideration from a functioning of the ordinary mechanism of imagination that differs only gradually from the normal one. But I cannot see how this can explain the behavior towards the outside world that we observe in hypnosis. It only seems comprehensible to me if in hypnosis such a modification of our conscious functions occurs that we enter into an interaction with our surroundings which is one step closer to the purely physical relationship than that of our ordinary mental life. This interaction is concealed by our higher spiritual life like a weaker light by a stronger one; but it makes itself felt when the normal consciousness is obscured. In the latter case we descend one step on the ladder of world effects; we are in intimate contact with purely physical nature. The processes of the latter affect us without passing through our higher consciousness. Without giving the matter this turn into the universal philosophy of nature, we will not get any further.

I would like to summarize my view of Wundt's writing as follows. When I consider the concept that this psychologist has of consciousness, it does not seem to correspond at all to what emerges from an exhaustive immersion in the life of the human soul. If Wundt's concept of consciousness were correct, then man would always be in hypnosis, and our states of consciousness would be suggested to us by the mechanically operating mechanism of imagination. It is only because Wundt's psychology does not rise above that level of consciousness which receives its content more or less by way of suggestion that it does not see the profound difference between a suggested and a mass of imagination received by the waking consciousness.

In physiological terms, I find the explanation most acceptable that they serve subcortical brain centers to mediate those functions which take place in the state of hypnosis, and this by switching off the cerebral cortex, which is only active during waking consciousness.

In addition to Wundt's work, I have a number of others on the same subject. If you are looking for an easy-to-follow guide through the entire field of these phenomena, I recommend H. Schmidkunz: "Der Hypnotismus".¹ Appearances, application, views and dangers of hypnotism are clearly presented by a knowledgeable hand. An inserted somnambulistic case history and an excellent chapter on the history of hypnotism further enhance the value of this book, which is excellent in every respect, Anyone who wants to learn about a typical case of hypnosis (with four modifications of consciousness) and the views of an eminent clinician on this field must consult the book by v. KrafftEbing ² reach. In the "Zeitfragen des christlichen Volkslebens" is by C. Ziegler ³ A treatise appeared which takes the standpoint of the so-called "great hypnotism" of the Paris school. The latter (with Charcot at its head) sees only special cases of hysteria in the phenomena in question. The author's view is somewhat clouded by this, but the book seems to me to be worth reading because of the good compilation of the phenomena. I have similar things to say about a brochure by Dr. Karl Friedr. Jordan.⁴ What is confusing here is the fact that the author is a follower of Prof. Gustav Jäger's theory of the life agent. According to Jordan, a quantity of this agent in excess of the usual amount flows from the hypnotist to the person being hypnotized and causes the somnambulistic state in the latter. Leaving aside this view, which is not supported by observation, this book also provides a good summary of what is relevant to hypnotism.

A study on hypnotism by Otto von Berlin seems to me to be confused and unclear.⁵ It is, however, to be taken more seriously than the latest publication by Dr. F. Wollny.⁶ We are dealing here with a very strange gentleman. Wollny senses secret societies which have the power to exert a magnetic influence on the individual as well as on whole masses of people and to induce them to all kinds of actions. The author has already expressed the same in a number of earlier writings, and has even made a petition to the imperial authorities to prosecute the alleged mischief. I believe that Wollny suffers from the kind of partial insanity that we often have occasion to observe. His writing is therefore only of pathological interest.

Following on from these remarks, I would like to say a few words about a question which, with regard to the experience of hypnotism, interests the philosophical thinker above all others. things. I mean that of the relation of suggestion to the conviction gained by logical means. There can be no doubt that, despite the qualitative difference between the hypnotic and the normal consciousness, auto-suggestion and external suggestion also play a great part in the latter, and that a large part of what we believe and consider to be true has taken root in us in a suggestive way. However, a complex of ideas that has come about through suggestion must never claim the value of a conviction. It is therefore all the more important to keep the designated areas strictly separate. After all, only that which is a logically acquired conviction can have scientific significance.

How does a judgment come about? We would never be able to connect ideas logically if the real unity of the universe did not appear to us as a multiplicity of ideas. The reason for the latter lies in our mental organization. If we were organized differently, we would see the entire (physical and spiritual) cosmos with a single glance. There would be no scientific thinking. The latter consists precisely in uniting the separate elements of the world through conscious activity. Through the development of this activity we approach more and more that overview of the world with a single glance. If this unification is to be a truly logical one, then two things are necessary. Firstly, we must see through the elements of world phenomena in their separate state exactly according to their content; secondly, from this content we must find the way in which we can objectively integrate the separate details into the unified whole of the world. Only if the world elements given to us behave completely passively in this unification and this only comes about through our "I" can the result be given the name of a conviction.

But there is no question that the same union of ideas which is brought about by our "I" can also take place independently of it merely through the attraction of the ideas themselves. This will happen if the "I" is switched off in some way, put into inactivity. The human psyche unites two moments: it takes in the world as a multiplicity, as a sum of details, and at a higher level it combines them again into the unity from which they originate. Because they belong to such a unity, they will strive for unification even if they are present in consciousness and the "I" does not confront them as a regulating factor. If this is the case, then we are dealing here with suggestion in the broadest sense. For a monistic view of the world, the latter is completely understandable. What is rooted in a unity strives for connection when it appears somewhere as a multiplicity. Since the totality of a person's life phenomena is always the result of the forces active in his consciousness, it can assert itself in two ways. If the process of imagination is regulated by the "I", then the phenomena of the personality can only be derived from its activity; if, on the other hand, the "I" is extinguished, then the cause of what takes place in and with the personality must be sought outside it. Every complex of imagination or every action of the latter kind is to be regarded only as a suggestion. There is only a gradual difference between the person acting in deep hypnosis and the scholar whose method is not based on considerations of his own "I" but on those of the head of the school. Only he who sees through the connections of the world in such a way that his judgment becomes completely independent of any external influence, raises the content of his imagination above a sum of suggestions. We can tell how so many people will act or think in a given case because we know the suggestions under whose influence they are. A person living under the influence of a suggestion is integrated into the chain of lower natural processes, where the causes of a phenomenon must always be sought not in it but outside it. Only the "I-consciousness" lifts us out of this chain, breaks the connection with the rest of nature in order to close it again within consciousness. To have given this central position to the "I" in the field of science is a merit of Joh. Gottlieb Fichte that cannot be appreciated enough. In this thinker, the development of human reason made a leap forward that cannot be compared with anything else. It is characteristic of contemporary German philosophy that it has no idea of this leap. The man who rises to the understanding of Fichte must experience a change in himself, like a man born blind who is given sight by an operation. All aberrations, both those of spiritualism and those of physiological psychology, can only be judged by those who know Fichte. It would never occur to Du Prel to place the action of a somnambulistic person higher than that conditioned by "ego-consciousness" if he had grasped the latter in a more intimate view. He would then know that everything that is not conditioned by the "I" is one step closer to physical nature than that which is. By making the suggestions of the consciousness alienated from the "I" the content of their teachings, the spiritualists make a mockery of science, since this can only consist of the judgments carried out by the "I". They place themselves on the same level as the believers in revelation, who also make the suggested contents of the imagination from outside the content of their views. It is quite characteristic of the dullness and cowardice of thinking reason in our time that the tendency to gain a view of the world with the exclusion of thought appears every moment.

• 1. Der Hypnotismus in gemeinfaßlicher Darstellung. With a somnambulistic case history. By Dr. Hans Schmidkunz. Stuttgart 1893 (VI, 266 p.).
• 2. An experimental study in the field of hypnotism together with remarks on suggestion and suggestion therapy. By Dr. R. v. Krafft-Ebing. 3rd ed. Stuttgart 1893 (108 pp.).
• 3. Der Hypnotismus. By C. Ziegler (Zeitfragen des christlichen Volkslebens, XVI, 1). Stuttgart 1892 (63 pp.).
• 4. The riddle of hypnotism and its solution. By Dr. Karl Friedr. Jordan. 2nd ed. Berlin 1892 (IV, 79 p.).
• 5. Kaleidoscopic study on hypnotism and suggestion. By Otto von Berlin. Freiburg 1892 (73 p.).
• 6. In Sachen der Hypnose und Suggestion. A Vademecum for Herm Prof. Wundt. By Dr. F. Wollny. Leipzig 1893 (24 pp.).

Today's German physicists agree that it is the greatest among them who closed his eyes forever on September 8, 1894. For decades, wide circles of educated people have become accustomed to turning primarily to the writings of two outstanding contemporaries when they need advice on the two most important questions that the contemplation of nature awakens in every thinking person. Those who thirst to learn something about how living beings, including man, have come into being and developed, should consult the works of Ernst Haeckel; those who ponder the effects of nature on man's senses will find the most varied inspiration in the works of Hermann Helmholtzens. These two men are the embodiment of our current understanding of nature. The one endeavored to solve the riddle of the becoming of living beings; the other immersed himself in what had become and traced the laws of its action. Few researchers have succeeded in having their achievements recognized to such a high degree during their lifetime as Hermann Helmholtz. Tributes and awards poured in from all over the world when he celebrated his seventieth birthday three years ago. Such a rare success is astonishing when one considers the difficulties with which the pioneers of science often have to struggle, especially when, like Helmholtz, they disdain to step out of the circle of their scientific work and take part in branches of public life in which there is more interest than in strict science. The astonishment disappears as soon as one takes a look at the historical position of the deceased researcher within the scientific development of the last century. Helmholtz's youth was a time that was richer than any other in burning scientific questions. He found a myriad of tasks that were in such a state that the solution could be expected any day. The methods of research were so well developed that in many cases only a small step was needed to achieve epoch-making discoveries on the paths already taken. The great stimulus in the field of natural science in Germany is Johannes Müller, the teacher of Helmholtz and Haeckel and many others with whose names the modern view of nature is associated. All those who were present at the celebration of Ernst Haeckel's sixtieth birthday in Jena on February 17, 1894, will never forget the enthusiasm with which this researcher spoke the words with which he described the influence that Johannes Müller had exerted on him: "I had already heard comparative anatomy ... and came, so well prepared, to the lectures of Johannes Müller, a man whose extraordinary greatness and majesty are still vivid in my mind today. Now, when I occasionally tire at work, I need only look at the picture of Johannes Müller hanging in front of me in my study to gain new strength. ... He taught comparative anatomy and physiology. ... I had such reverence for his formidable personality that I did not dare to approach him. ... It happened to me several times that I wanted to ask him for advice. My heart pounding, I climbed the stairs, touched the doorbell, but didn't dare ring it and turned back." This is how his students describe the man who initiated the scientific movement within which Helmholtz achieved his great successes. Johannes Müller purged science of a whole series of prejudices in order to clear the way for a sober, but unbiased view of the processes in the animal and human organism. He took up the fight against the short-sighted view that assumes two fundamentally different explanatory principles for inorganic and organic nature, between which mediation is supposed to be absolutely impossible. To explain inorganic nature, this view assumed the mechanical, chemical and physical forces; to elucidate the phenomena of organic life, it believed that a special "life force" was required, of which, however, a clear conception is impossible. The extension of the physical approach and its methods to the study of living nature forms the basic feature of the so-called "scientific age", which began with Johannes Müller. Helmholtz's research results bear the hallmark of this age in the most perfect way. Any scientific assumption that contradicts the laws of mechanical physics is unjustified: that was the end of his thinking. Whoever speaks of a "life force" turns the organism into a perpetual motion machine, a self-moving mover. He makes the force necessary for organic movement spring from nothing. This is impossible. Every form of force can only arise from another through transformation. There is one unchangeable quantity of force in the universe, and all kinds of forces, organic as well as inorganic, can only be forms of this one force. Where force arises, it must emerge from the transformation of a corresponding quantity of a different kind of force. This is the now famous "law of the conservation of force", which Helmholtz defended before the members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1847. The fact that the establishment of this law was in the truest sense of the word a requirement of the view of the times is proven by the fact that it was also discovered at the same time by Julius Robert Mayer from Württemberg. The application of the physical research method to the processes of organic life led Helmholtz to the idea of determining the speed at which a stimulus exerted on a nerve propagates in the organism. The fact that he succeeded in this was a success for the physical school of thought. It was proof that the processes inside and outside the organism could be measured.

Helmholtz also used the same physical method to research the laws according to which our senses convey our perception of the outside world. Johannes Müller had also paved the way in this field. He was the originator of the view that the type of sensation that an external impression makes on us depends on the sensory nerves through which it is conveyed. If the optic nerve is stimulated, the sensation of light arises, regardless of whether light or electric current or pressure acts on the eye. This theorem drew the attention of natural scientists to the mechanism of the sensory organs. Helmholtz found a fruitful field of work here. A momentous invention in this field made him a famous man in one fell swoop. It is the ophthalmoscope, through which the images on the retina in the eye and parts of this retina itself can be observed. Helmholtz also found everything ready for this invention. Brücke, also a student of Johannes Müller, had been working on the theory of ocular luminosity, which is based on the fact that part of the light that falls on the retina is reflected back outwards. Brücke had only neglected to ask himself which optical image the light returning from the eye belonged to. Helmholtz came across this question when he was considering how he could best teach his students Brücke's theory of ocular luminosity. The answer to this question also provided the instrument that would allow us to look inside the human eye and thus open up new avenues in ophthalmology. Helmholtz thus proved that modern natural science must also satisfy those who agree with Bacon of Verulam, the father of empirical science, and believe that science should draw its knowledge from life in order to make it practically applicable to life. The construction of the eye mirror was decisive for his external position in the world. He now found no obstacle to carrying out his great plans concerning the physiology of the sensory organs. He set out the functions of the eye and the ear in two extensive works. He shed new light on long-known facts and improved inadequate methods. When it came to filling gaps in research left open by his predecessors with new equipment, his ingenuity never let him down. In this way, in his "Physiological Optics" and in his "Doctrine of the Sensations of Sound", he produced works that have become fundamental to the fields of knowledge to which they belong. He subjected the processes in the eye under the influence of external objects and after the removal of the external influence to a precise investigation; for the perception of colors and color nuances he devised ingenious hypotheses based on the views of Th. Young. Some of his explanations are no longer tenable in the light of our present experience; but everyone who enters this field of research first seeks to gain a position in relation to Hermann Helmholtz's views. Proof of this is the recently published "Theory of Color Vision" by Ebbinghaus. No one contradicted Helmholtz without first expressing their appreciation of his achievements.

Helmholtz's explanation of the nature of timbre in his "Theory of the Sensations of Tone" had the effect of enlightenment. Helmholtz had deduced from observations first made by G. S. Ohm that the so-called tones of the violin, piano and so on, and even those of the human voice, are not simple tones at all, but sound phenomena composed of one tone with its numerous overtones. By taking into account the experience that microscopists had gained about the structure of the ear, he succeeded in gaining an understanding of how the organ of hearing breaks down the composite elements back into their constituent elements and in this way conveys the perception of timbre to consciousness. Helmholtz explains the appearance of chords by the occurrence of so-called beats when two tones of different pitches are sounded simultaneously, which consist in the alternating rise and fall of the tone strengths. With this work, Helmholtz wanted to provide a physiological basis for music aesthetics. How well he knew that aesthetics had an independent field alongside natural science, which he himself did not want to enter, is demonstrated by his words in the final chapter of the book, where he says with regard to the questions that lie beyond physiology: "Admittedly, the more interesting part of musical aesthetics only begins here - after all, it is a matter of finally explaining the wonders of the great works of art, of getting to know the expressions and movements of the various moods of the soul. However tempting the goal may be, I prefer to leave these investigations, in which I would feel too much like a dilettante, to others and remain myself on the ground of natural research to which I am accustomed." These words should be heeded by those who believe that all salvation must come from natural science, and for whom all intellectual courage immediately fades if they do not have the solid ground of experimental facts under their feet.

The inner circle of mathematical physicists and mathematicians also regarded Hermann Helmholtz as a leading spirit in his field of knowledge. He succeeded in solving problems on which Euler and Lagrange had tried their ingenuity in vain. He found answers in many things where others only clearly recognized that there was a question. He who works in this way satisfies many, because he frees them from the nightmare of agonizing riddles. Some of Johannes Müller's enormous demands have been fulfilled today. Helmholtz is the greatest of those who have worked on this fulfillment. He was one of the best of his time because he understood his tasks like few others. His views on art were rooted in the soil of classicism. In his "Doctrine of the Sensations of Sound", he wanted to create a scientific basis for classical music. This did not prevent him from fully understanding Richard Wagner's genius. We younger people need not be deceived by the fact that we can no longer share Helmholtz's views in many areas. A new view of art, a new philosophy fills us, and these will also have a new view of nature in their wake, which will break with much that is associated with Helmholtz's name. But every view of the times gives rise to achievements that are everlasting, and these include those that Helmholtz incorporated into science out of the character of his time.

I

Wilhelm Preyer was a bold researcher, a fertile thinker full of stimulating ideas, a tireless seeker of new paths and goals in science and cultural life. Physiology was at the center of his work. His comprehensive mind was at home in all areas of natural science. His thoughts and facts flowed from everywhere, which he processed into the great body of ideas that he envisioned as physiology in the broadest sense of the word. His writings open up broad, spiritual vistas. It was quite impossible for him to tread well-trodden paths. What he attacked became something new through his work, through his thinking. He had a clear, unclouded view of everything significant that has occurred in the intellectual life of recent decades. He always knew what had a future. Ernst Haeckel says in the preface to Preyer's recently published biography of Darwin: "Like me, you belong to the small number of neuroscientists who, immediately after the publication of Darwin's epoch-making work on the origin of species, were convinced of its tremendous importance and who had the courage to firmly defend its fundamental views at a time when the vast majority of their peers were still hostile or dismissive." Preyer was not one of those scholars and thinkers who are happy in their narrowness, who acquire a sum of convictions through tradition and then take a few steps further themselves in the direction that is thereby marked out for them. The belief that they are following a safe path makes such scholars unsuitable for committing great errors. They do not take bold risks in science. Preyer dared a great deal. Some of his ideas are regarded as aberrations by his peers. Much of what he held as his view will prove to be untenable in the course of time. But he was more inspiring as an erring man than the others, who could not fail to be so, because great errors cannot be made in the circulation of small scientific coins. It is said of Lombroso that he liked the new in intellectual life simply because it was new. Something similar is true of Preyer. He liked to immerse himself in areas of science that were young. Hypnotism, graphology, the question of whether Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays, occupied him and inspired him to write writings and essays that are valuable and original, even though their content must meet with strong doubts. Preyer turned his work and his thoughts to things that seem so absurd to some that he does not even want to talk about them seriously. The scientific study of manuscripts was his favorite occupation in recent times. Finding the soul of man, his essence, his character in his handwriting was considered by him to be the task of scientific graphology. Scientific prejudices and a certain type of scholarly education have led many people to believe that it is unscientific to get involved in certain things. The majority of our scientific contemporaries are of the opinion that such things as graphology are incapable of scientific treatment. They arrive at such an opinion because they have formed very definite ideas about what is possible in nature and what is not. They simply reject what does not correspond to these ideas. Minds like Preyer cannot allow themselves to be captured by such ideas. They know how tenuous the "truths" are that make up the content of our sciences. They know how uncertain, how hypothetical much of what the majority of scientifically educated people regard as absolutely certain is. That is why they are convinced that even things that at first seem very doubtful can provide important insights and experiences. Nothing in spiritual life is so certain that one can say: because we recognize these or those laws about one area of nature, something else can only be counted as an impossibility. Everything must be tried, everything must be thought through: this was Preyer's leitmotif. It led him to his immensely interesting investigations into "The Soul of the Child". In the book he wrote on this subject there are more and more significant psychological experiences and ideas than in the writings of the exact fashionable psychologists who want to get close to the human soul through experimentation in the laboratory. Preyer has a keen eye for the intimate aspects of a child's life and a tremendous gift for deduction. His observations come together in an admirable way to form a great scientific edifice. Preyer is both a master of detailed work and an ingenious discoverer of great connections. His biography of Darwin is a masterpiece in terms of penetrating the subject matter with great effective ideas. In a few meaningful strokes, Preyer outlines the contribution that Darwinism has made to all areas of modern intellectual life.

Preyer is never interested in knowledge alone. He wants to put what he has gained through scientific observation at the service of life. His book "The Soul of the Child" not only has the task of exploring the human soul, but also the other task of creating a solid psychological foundation for education. "The realization that psychogenesis is the necessary foundation of pedagogy is becoming more and more apparent. Without the study of the development of the young child's soul, education and the art of teaching cannot be founded on solid ground. ... The art of making the young child become is much more difficult than that of training it prematurely," he says in the preface to the aforementioned work. The views he expressed on the necessary reform of the secondary school system flow from the same source. Preyer is radical here. He wants the classical grammar school education to be replaced by one in the spirit of the modern scientific approach. The knowledge that moves our time should be passed on to young people by the grammar school. One need only have the courage to think in the spirit of our time and one must agree with Preyer's ideas. Only despondent spirits who are averse to any reform can disagree here. Such spirits are afraid of any upheaval. They see how the old works; they cannot or do not want to imagine how the new will work. They want the old because it is comfortable. Lively minds like Preyer hate stagnation as such. They will always carry reformatory ideas with them because they want all things to always be in a state of becoming, in flux.

II

Preyer emphasizes that "every physiological system that claims to be complete is forced to fill numerous and large gaps with conjectures. And because these are always subjective, there is no physiological doctrine that enjoys general approval. The energetic thinker made extensive use of the right to make such assumptions. For he knew that facts usually only reveal their nature to the researcher when he has first formed hypothetical ideas about their connection. The law that ultimately proves to be the correct one can be very different from the one expressed in the form of a conjecture; after all, the latter first pointed the way that led to the former. Preyer made a bold assumption about the origin of life. His courage of thought did not allow him to stop at this fundamental question of all physiology. Many contemporary physiologists do not dare to say a word about this question because science does not seem to be far enough along for them. Others are of the opinion that in the not too distant future it will be possible to solve the riddle of the origin of life by artificially producing living matter from carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salts in the laboratory. This, they believe, will prove that living things in nature once developed from inanimate things through primordial generation. The organic processes will then only appear as complicated mechanical, physical and chemical processes, and it will be possible to explain them with the help of the laws of physics and chemistry, just as the phenomena of inorganic nature are explained today. A third type of researcher, however, considers this to be completely impossible. Bunge, for example, explains: "The more thoroughly, versatilely and thoroughly we strive to investigate the phenomena of life, the more we come to the realization that processes which we had already believed we could explain physically and chemically are of a far more complex nature and for the time being defy any mechanical explanation. ... All processes in our organism that can be explained mechanistically are just as little phenomena of life as the movement of leaves and branches on a tree shaken by a storm, or as the movement of pollen blown by the wind from the male poplar to the female." The latter is also roughly Preyer's opinion. He did not admit that living things could ever have arisen from inanimate things, because the organic law seemed to him to be of a higher order than the inorganic law. Either it took place in earlier epochs, which lie far behind us in the past, and no longer takes place today, or it took place in the past and is still taking place today. In favor of the former case, it is argued that during the rapid cooling of the earth's surface there were completely different conditions than now, different air and light, different distribution of solids and liquids, different chemical compounds and different temperatures of the oceans. It is therefore possible, according to well-known researchers, that the peculiar, non-recurring process of primordial generation could have taken place under such peculiar, non-recurring conditions until the earth's surface, gradually becoming more similar to the present one, had changed to such an extent that living bodies existed, but could no longer come into being without the interposition of living bodies." Preyer believes that this view is based on weak foundations. "It is incomprehensible what, once the conditions for the combination of dead bodies into living ones were in place, whereupon life arose and persisted, should change so that it could continue in its lowest forms and develop further, but could no longer renew itself through primordial generation, but only through procreation. There is no reason why, if once self-generation took place, it should not also take place now." The conditions that are necessary for life today must have already existed at the time of the primordial generation, otherwise the generated life could not have survived. The change in these conditions of life can therefore not be a significant one. If procreation was possible in prehistoric times, it must also be possible today. But all attempts to artificially produce living things from lifeless things in the laboratory have failed. "It is true," says Preyer, "that in the next few years more such experiments will be made, and in particular efforts will be made to produce artificially in the laboratory the conditions which alone are realized on the deep seabed, but no cogent argument can be advanced in favour of the view that a positive result can be obtained at all. The number of chemical elements that can be used for such experiments is small, and even if the quantitative ratios, the absolute quantities, the degrees of pressure and the temperatures of the individual ingredients are highly variable, the possibilities of mixing in experiments remain confined within relatively narrow limits, particularly with regard to the thermal limits that are conducive to protoplasmic movements alone."

Those who deny that living matter has developed from inanimate matter in the course of time, and yet wish to remain on the basis of today's natural science, must assume that living matter is uncreated, eternal. Eberhard Richter decided on this view. In May 1865 he defended the opinion that the germs of life are eternal. However, since they could not thrive on the earth when it was molten, they must have reached our planet from other celestial bodies later, when the cooling was sufficiently advanced. Richter says: "Astronomy shows that masses of fine substances float in space; from the almost disembodied comet tails to the meteor stones that glow in our atmosphere and frequently fall to earth. In the latter, chemistry has detected remnants of organic matter (coal) in addition to molten metals. The question of whether these organic substances, before they were destroyed by the incandescence of the aerolite, consisted of shapeless primordial ooze or of formed organic structures, is to be decided in favor of the latter, because we have corresponding experience of this in our atmosphere." After Richter has spoken of the fungal germs and infusoria present in the earth's air, he says: "But if microscopic creatures float so high in the earth's atmosphere, they can also occasionally, for example under the attraction of passing comets or aerolites, reach outer space and then be caught on another world body that has become habitable, i.e. that enjoys the appropriate warmth and humidity, and develop again through self-ascending activity." Richter links his basic idea to all sorts of things that are untenable. Nevertheless, it cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. It is a fact that numerous organisms, germs and eggs on earth can retain their viability for centuries without showing the slightest sign of life. Such living substances fall into a lifeless state when deprived of the necessary conditions of life, but they can be revived if the right conditions are created. They are called anabiotic. It could therefore be that the bodies that fall to earth from outer space contain substances in which there is dormant life that can be awakened on earth under suitable conditions. In this way, the once dead Earth could have been populated with life. This hypothesis is so unadventurous that Helmholtz and Thomson have spoken out in favor of its scientific justification.

Preyer nevertheless quite rightly describes it as inadequate. It achieves nothing. She says that life did not originate on Earth from something lifeless, but came to it from other world bodies. The same question is repeated for the other world bodies. Did it originate there from inorganic matter or was it eternally present? Preyer resorts to another hypothesis. Why should not the living, the primordial, be the first and the inanimate have developed from the living alone that was present at the beginning? Preyer finds the view quite justified that "through life processes alone, which were already present before the formation of the earth, everything inorganic came into being through excretion, solidification, decomposition, cooling of living bodies, as is also the case today". Preyer finds that the difference between the inorganic and the organic is often shown by natural scientists in a completely false light. Some inorganic processes can be seen as transitions from the inanimate to the living. They represent analogies of life activity, if one looks closely. "An obvious example is the sea, which breathes in the same air as we do, takes in many things as its daily food and assimilates them by dissolving them so that they become constant marine components. The sea as such - like an organism - can only exist within narrow temperature limits, because if it solidifies when it cools down too much or evaporates when it gets too warm, its life dies out. The oceans also show currents in their interior. Rivers carry water to them like veins carry the nourishing juice to the body parts. The ejecta of the sea, its dead parts, the ice, reactants and products of its metabolism are thrown onto the beach. It produces heat through the friction of its water masses against each other, and if it is colder than the air, it swallows up its heat. It constantly generates itself anew, like protoplasm... Fire, too, can generally be called alive. It breathes the same air that we breathe, and suffocates when we deprive it of it. It consumes with insatiable greed what its lambent organs seize and feeds on its prey. It grows with slow movement, beginning in the dark, like the germ imperceptible, then it glows, unfolds ever more rapidly, growing into a heaven-aspiring blaze and propagates itself with terrifying haste, sending sparks everywhere, giving birth to new fires." Imagine these phenomena, reminiscent of life, heightened to full vitality, and you have that state of the once living earth mass from which both the presently living and the presently lifeless have separated. Preyer does not assert that the simplest life-substance we know today was present from the beginning of the formation of the earth, but that the beginningless movement in the universe is not a merely mechanical or physical one, but that it is a living one, and that the simple life-substance must necessarily have remained after the bodies now called inorganic had been separated out by the life-activity of the glowing planet on its surface. "The heavy metals, once also organic elements, no longer melted and did not return to the cycle that had excreted them. They are the signs of the rigor mortis of premature gigantic glowing organisms, whose breath may have been luminous iron vapor, whose blood was liquid metal and whose food may have been meteorites."

A similar idea to Preyer was later put forward by G. Th. Fechner in his "Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen". He also conceived of the universe as originally animate.

Preyer's view must attract philosophical minds. They will never be able to understand how the phenomena of life can be explained by the summation of mechanical, physical and chemical processes. That living things transform themselves into inanimate things is quite understandable and proven by daily experience; that living things develop from inanimate things contradicts all observation that penetrates into the essence of things. The inorganic processes are present in the organic body in a heightened form, in a form that they do not have within inorganic nature. They cannot increase themselves into organic activity, but must first be captured and appropriated by an organism in order to serve life.

In contrast to the hypothesis of primordial generation, Preyer's is the more philosophical one. More refined minds will agree with Preyer when he says: "It is indeed reasonable to assume that the life and warmth of celestial bodies and organisms in the narrower sense are not merely inseparably bound together by the same great laws, but in the last instance originate from the same source. The sun lives the most intense life. And even if our earth is only its satellite, it still has light from its light, warmth from its warmth and in its 'womb life from its life: and it is no mere fantasy to think that we humans also originally come from the fire in the firmament."

III

Preyer derives the lifeless from the living. For him, the universe is a large, all-encompassing organism. From this view, it is only one step to the further step of imagining the world as an animated, spirit-filled organism. Preyer has also taken this step. He regards the propositions of mechanics, "matter is dead; it does not feel", as an aberration. He assumes that even the smallest, apparently dead body particle is endowed with sensation, i.e. with spirit. It corresponds to the facts to assume that "nowhere is there a sharp boundary between sentient and insentient beings, but that all matter has a certain capacity for sensation, which, however, can only give rise to sensation in a certain, extremely complicated arrangement and movement of the particles. Hence the simple substances, the dead bodies, even if they are in part very easily changed by slight influences, cannot, in spite of their dark sensory faculty, feel perceptibly, but as soon as they become components of the gray matter of the brain or only of the living protoplasm (through the ingestion of food), together with others, in an incalculably complicated movement, the sensation arises explosively, if an impression is now exerted on them."

The spirit originally slumbers in matter, but it is active in this slumbering state, it shapes matter, it organizes it until it has assumed such a form that it can itself appear in a manner appropriate to it. This is the leitmotif that Preyer is guided by in all his. Preyer's observations and thinking in physiology and psychology. He did not want to follow organic development merely to see how one form emerges from the other. He sought in the activity, in the function that an organ ultimately has to perform, the reason why it develops in a certain way. "What determines the final form in the development of the stem? I answer: the function. Only when this is activated does the differentiation of the substrate of the original beings begin. It is not the organ from which the function has to derive its origin, but originally the reverse is the case. The functions create their organs. Or, to avoid an expression that is difficult to define, one can say: the need determines the organic form, which is then inherited and only precedes the function in the embryo of higher animals, at least in the disposition." For Preyer, the highest, the last thing that comes into being is the creator of the first, of what precedes it in time. "Every single function of man must be traced step by step, once in individual life back to its first appearance in the living egg and then in the series of animals that are still close to his ancestors, and from these further on to the protoplasm, which is no longer animal, nor plant, but only living. Then one will begin to know where the higher and lower functions, for example speaking and seeing, as well as breathing and growing, come from, and how they have become what they are." The need to speak causes certain organs to undergo such a development that they ultimately become organs of speech. To anyone who views organic development in this way, the endeavor to explain the processes of life and soul mechanically can only appear as a historically strange aberration. "If physiology were really nothing other than physics and chemistry applied to the processes of life, then it would not be a science in itself, it would resemble technology and mechanical engineering and other applied disciplines," says Preyer, and he continues: "The fact that it could even come to be regarded and defined as the physics of organisms or the science of the mechanism and chemistry of living bodies is a historically important fact. The great error arose from the physical explanations of individual phenomena of life that have only become more frequent in this century, especially in recent decades, and from the many artificial reproductions of chemical products of animal and plant metabolism. ... No one doubts that research into the processes of life cannot progress without the continual utilization, application and development of physical and chemical principles and theories. But this does not mean that the science of life is nothing more than the physics and chemistry of living bodies... There are so many processes in the healthy organism which, remaining incomprehensible to physicists and chemists, do not even come within the scope of their investigations that the extension of physical-chemical explanations to them must also be called inadmissible, unscientific, arbitrary. This is a case of misguided induction, as is often observed in childhood: because many things taste good that end up in the mouth, everything must be put in the mouth."

Preyer has made a number of interesting observations in the field of sensory physiology and psycho-physiology and published the results of these in writings that are exemplary in their sharp formulation of what is presented. In my opinion, these works are also influenced by the idea that it is the mind that shapes the organism. What is the interaction between mind and body? How do the senses work to provide the spirit with what it needs to maintain itself? These are questions asked by those who believe that the spirit creates such an organic form for itself that it can manifest itself in a manner appropriate to its needs. Preyer made the dependence of muscle contraction on the strength of the stimulus exerted on the muscle on the one hand and the dependence of the movement triggered in the muscle on the stimulus on the other (the myophysical law) the subject of an important treatise (1874). He also investigated the nature of sensations ("Elemente der reinen Empfindungslehre", Jena 1877) and made observations about which vibrations are perceived as sound and which no longer manifest themselves as sound because they are too slow or too fast ("Über die Grenzen der Tonwahrnehmung", Jena 1876). His research into the nature of sleep, hypnosis and mind-reading all have the same origin: he wanted to recognize the intimate relationships between the spiritual and the physical. And his endeavors in the field of graphology are no less rooted in his basic idea. He wanted to recognize in the written word the spirit that had created its own body.

The intellectual life of the present would have a completely different physiognomy if two books had not been published in this century: Darwin's "Origin of Species" and Lyell's "Principles of Geology". The professors in the lecture halls of the universities would be talking about many things differently than they do, the religious consciousness of educated mankind would be different from what it is, Ibsen would have embodied other ideas in his dramas than those we hear from them: if Darwin and Lyell had not lived. Dramatic and narrative literature would have lived a different life if we had not had these books. The content of these books is an important part of the intellectual air we breathe. We cannot easily imagine how we would think if Darwin and Lyell had not inoculated their thoughts into the mental organism of mankind. One need never have read a line in the "Origin of Species" and in the "Principles of Geology", and yet one is under the influence of these books. Not only our thinking, but also our emotional life has received its characteristic imprint from them. A young person who reads these books today believes he will find nothing in them that he does not already know. Many of us grow up with the ideas of Darwin and Lyell before we know more than the names of these great observers of nature. Many of us have to speak a very different language to people who have not grown up with these ideas than the one they are used to. We begin to look at people who don't understand our language as beings who are remnants of a past historical era. How many of them think this way is not important. The main thing is that we see in ourselves, who think this way, the real and true people of the present. We know that we are the young and others are the old. We look forwards, the others look backwards. The future cultural historian will have to let our ideas begin a new epoch of thought. The thought of the future evokes joy and delight in us, because those to come will regard us as their forerunners. These future people will know more and be able to do more than we do, but they will have feelings that are similar to ours. We are closer to these people than to the pulpit orator who was born at the same time as us. The first, the greatest, the leaders among us are Lyell and Darwin. We are infinitely grateful to them, because we believe that without them we would belong to a dying part of humanity. Our sentient life canonizes them. We shudder at the spiritual experience we would have lived if they had not preceded us. We have even lost the "right judgment" of the greats of older times, because they are the most important to us. We do not grieve about this. We do not want to take things objectively as they are; we want to live, and we want our life to become something; it should carry the forces of growth within it. We would rather look at what has not yet been done than lose ourselves in contemplations about what has happened. If we were more just, we would be less fruitful. We have the injustice of the son who loves his parents more than others who are far away from him. We love Darwin more than Aristotle, Lyell more than Plato, because Darwin and Lyell are our well-known fathers, Plato and Aristotle are ancestral images that we have hung up in our mental castle. When we read Lyell and Darwin, it is as if someone were giving us a warm hand; when we study Plato and Aristotle, it is as if we were walking in a hall of ancestors. We live with Darwin and Lyell, we learn about Plato and Aristotle.

We do not always agree with Darwin and Lyell, we disagree with them on many things, but we feel that they speak in our language even when we disagree with them. We count among our own some who oppose Darwin and Lyell in the sharpest terms, but we know that even our opposition, if it is fruitful, could only have been so through those two minds. Great minds also produce their opponents, and together with their opponents they move humanity forward. Even if future mankind should come to substantially different ideas than Darwin and Lyell had, these sons of the future will still have to honor their fathers in these two men.

Lyell gave a new character to thinking about the formation of the earth. Before him, this thinking was dominated by ideas that seem childish to us today. We do not see why the enormous mountain formations should have been caused by forces other than those that still prevail today. Lyell saw that in the course of verifiable periods of time, the flowing water detaches the rock masses from the mountains and deposits them elsewhere. As a result, formations disappear in one place and others reappear in another. This happens slowly. But if we imagine such effects continuing over immeasurable periods of time, we can imagine that the entire surface of the earth has taken on the shape it has today as a result of these forces that still prevail today. In addition, there are the transformations that the earth's surface is undergoing today through floating icebergs, through moving glaciers that carry debris and boulders with them. Think also of earthquakes and volcanic phenomena that raise and lower the ground, think of the wind that raises dunes and the slow, gradual weathering of rocks. Everything that has happened up to now to form the earth may have happened in such a way that these effects were present over long periods of time. Today we have no doubt that this is the case. But before Lyell, people thought differently. They believed that the mighty mountain formations were caused by extraordinary forces acting instantaneously. When a form of the earth's surface was ripe for destruction, the creative power intervened anew to give our planet a new face; so thought our ancestors. When we examine the earth's crust, we realize that a number of earth epochs have been there and have perished again. We find the submerged earth epochs as layers of the earth's crust piled on top of each other. In each layer we discover fossilized animal and plant forms. Our ancestors assumed that over and over again the creative power had caused the life of an epoch to perish and put a new one in its place. Lyell showed that this is not the case. Through the gradual action of the forces which are still active today, one epoch has developed from another; and in each succeeding epoch those living beings have lived which have survived from the previous one and which have been able to adapt themselves to the new conditions of life. The creatures of the more recent periods of the earth are the descendants of those who lived in older ones.

This idea was of infinite fertility for Darwin. He recognized that animal species can change over the course of time. That animal species are not each created separately, but that they are related to each other, that they have diverged. If this realization is taken together with Lyell's thoughts, it becomes clear that all life on earth, past and future, forms a great natural unity. The processes that we see today with our eyes and understand with our minds have always taken place. No others have ever been there. What is happening today is happening without miracles and without supernatural influences. Darwin and Lyell have shown that it has always been so miraculous on earth. This makes them the creators of a whole new world view, a whole new way of feeling, a new way of life.

They have the greatest influence on our ethical life. They have freed us from the feelings we should have towards beings that dwell in the wind and weather. Those who see the approaching God in the thunderstorm feel differently than those who believe that thunderstorms and earthquakes are as natural as the effect of a stone falling to the ground. Those who believe in the ideas of Darwin and Lyell have a different attitude to the forces of nature than those who believe in the supernatural gods. The gods can no longer help him, they can no longer harm him, they cannot reward or punish him. He has become free of fear and hope in the face of inscrutable powers. The natural is the universe to him, and the natural can be explored. It can also be conquered and placed at the service of human ideas. One can consciously make oneself master of the earth. Reverence diminishes, but pride increases. One wants to rule wisely, but no longer humbly obey and submit to impenetrable counsels. Darwin and Lyell have replaced the world view of pride, of self-confident man, with the world view of humility, of submissiveness. They have done unspeakable things for the liberation of mankind. They taught us not to erect an altar to the "unknown god", but to offer our services to the known spirit of nature. They taught man not to regard himself as a dwarf, but to act as a hero. They have created a free path for action, for will, because they have freed it from the heavy weight that is attached to it by the will working on the other side. They have shown knowledge where it has its field, and have thus given it real power. It is only since Lyell and Darwin that it can be perceived as truth that knowledge is power. Before Lyell and Darwin, people had to tell themselves to submit to what they were destined to do; today they can tell themselves to do what they realize is valuable.

All relapses into an old world view will not be able to stop the development described. What Ernst Haeckel said at the founding of the Ethical Society in Berlin, that modern morality, modern religiosity and modern action are based on the modern world view: it is an incontrovertible truth. I cannot speak of Lyell or Darwin without thinking of Haeckel. All three belong together. What Lyell and Darwin began, Haeckel continued. He developed it in the full awareness that he was not only serving the scientific need, but also the religious consciousness of mankind. He is the most modern mind, because his world view is free of old prejudices, as was the case with Darwin, for example. He is the most modern thinker, because he sees the natural as the only field of thought, and he is the most modern perceiver, because he wants life to be organized according to the natural. We know that he celebrates Lyell's birthday with us as a feast day, because for him it must be the day that brought the one founder of the new world view. The feast day dedicated to Lyell makes us realize that we belong to the Haeckel community. When Haeckel talks to us about the processes of nature, every word has a secondary meaning for us that is related to our feelings. He is at the helm; he steers powerfully. Even if we don't exactly want to go past some of the places he leads us to, he still has the direction we want to take. He got the helm from Lyell and Darwin's hands; they couldn't have given it to anyone better. He will hand it over to others who will lead in his direction. And our community sails swiftly forward, leaving behind the helpless ferrymen of the old worldviews.

These are the ideas that November 14, when Lyell's birthday returned for the hundredth time, stirred in me.