The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When Goethe in ripe old age looked back upon the whole development of his life, he named three men who had had most influence upon him; Linné, the Naturalist, Spinoza, the Philosopher, and Shakespeare, the Poet.

To Linné he placed himself in opposition and through this reached his own point of view regarding the forms of plants and animals. From Spinoza he borrowed a mode of expression which enabled him to give out his ideas in a thoughtful language which was deeper and richer than that of Philosophers. In Shakespeare he found a spirit that fired his own poetic gift according to the inmost demands of his own being.

Anyone who can gain an insight to the soul strivings of Goethe as these comes to light in his Götz and Werther, where he reveals what he had gone through inwardly, can also see what took place in him when first he absorbed himself in Hamlet.

A vivid impression of this is to be obtained from his statement that Shakespeare is an interpreter of the World-spirit itself. Goethe holds that Shakespeare's genius openly reveals what the World-spirit hides within Nature's activities. His whole attitude towards Shakespeare is expressed in this statement.

It is only within the last five hundred years that what we to-day call Intellectualism has taken possession of our soul life. In the outlook which obtained earlier the soul of humanity was active in a different way. Understanding through thinking played a secondary part.

A battle against the overlordship of thought is visible in Goethe's soul. He still wishes to experience the world inwardly with different soul forces. But the mental life which surrounds him makes thought the basic element in the activities of the soul. So Goethe asks himself: Can one get into intimate touch with the surrounding world through thought? Such a possibility stirs him deeply and out of the overwhelming effect it has upon his soul, his Faust is born.

Goethe presents Faust to us as a teacher who had worked for ten years in a period which saw the advent of Intellectualism. As yet however Intellectualism had only a slight hold upon human nature, and in Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine and Theology Faust does not as yet recognize it as a power which could carry conviction. He could, as a man of science, fall back upon the understanding of an earlier time when men realized spirit in Nature without the intermediary of intellectuality. He wishes to obtain direct vision of spirit. What Faust went through in vacillation between thinking experience and spiritual vision became for the young Goethe an inner battle.

Hamlet and other Shakespeare characters arose before Goethe's soul as he passed through this inner battle. Hamlet, who obtains his life's tasks through soul experiences which appear to him as expressive of relationship to the Spiritual world and who not only is thrown through doubt into inaction, but also through the power of his intellect. The deep abyss of the soul life is contained in Hamlet's words:

The native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

The youthful Goethe had often looked into this abyss and the glimpses he had caught of it intensified his sympathy with Hamlet's character.

By following the soul life of Goethe one is led from the Hamlet frame of mind to that of Faust and thus one can experience a bit of Goethe biography. It has not got to be proved through documents, neither need it be historic in the ordinary sense of the term. And yet it will reflect history better than what is usually so named.

One gains a picture of Faust as he lived in Goethe, as the teacher born out of a soul condition which oscillates between intellectualism and spiritual vision. During ten years Faust instructs his pupils under these conditions of wavering and one can well imagine to oneself Hamlet as one of these pupils; not the Hamlet of the Danish Saga but Shakespeare's Hamlet. For Goethe has represented in his Faust the teacher who could have Hamlet's 'native hue of resolution sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought.' In this light Shakespeare is the poet who has before his soul a character born out of the waning of consciousness of the Middle Ages and a New Age. Goethe is the one who wants to penetrate into that world outlook in which such characters develop fully.

In many Shakesperian characters Goethe could feel the reflection of this waning consciousness. This brought Shakespeare so near to him, for it was connected with his feelings for Art. Into this feeling for Art Spinoza's intellectualism penetrated and in Spinoza there existed already that mental activity which gives the thought life of modern humanity its soul bearings.

This 'Spinoza-ism' became tolerable to Goethe only when he came to stand before Italian works of art and could feel in these works as an artist that necessity of material creating which Spinoza could clothe only in pure thought.

Together with Herder he had adopted Spinoza's philosophy but only in Italy could he write from the aspect of art what was impossible through reading Spinoza; 'There is necessity, there is God.'

In order to feel on sure ground in Art, Goethe realized the need of an outlook upon the world, but this outlook would have to include Art as one of its most important elements and not relegate it to an inferior place. The creative spirit in the world revealed itself to Goethe in Nature but he found in Shakespeare the artist who revealed the Spirit in his own creation.

Goethe felt deeply how from his inmost being man must strive toward scientific knowledge, but he felt no less deeply how in this striving thought can wander away in error. He felt himself thus in danger with Spinoza. With Shakespeare he felt himself within the world of direct, artistic outlook. Goethe has himself spoken of his relation to Shakespeare in these words: 'A necessity which excludes more or less or entirely all freedom, as with the ancients, is no longer endurable to our way of thinking; Shakespeare came near this however, for he made necessity moral and thus joined the old world to the new world to our joyful astonishment.'

In his youth Goethe found the way to the 'New World' through Shakespeare because Shakespeare understood in his dramatic characters how to hold the balance between the impelling necessity of Nature's activities in man and his freedom in his thought life. The mutual relationship of these two elements must be experienced to-day if we do not want to loose hold of reality through our life of thought.

NOTE BY EDITOR: In the last lecture of the recent course on dramatic art¹ Dr. Steiner put before us an interesting point of view regarding the representation of Hamlet's character on the stage.

It has always been the custom to make of Hamlet a deeply philosophic character and in rendering the great soliloquies this side of his being has always been brought into evidence. But Dr. Steiner in a reading which he gave of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, showed a new aspect of the Hamlet mind which amplifies what he has written in the above article. Hamlet's mental penetration was not that of a New World philosopher. He did not 'reason out' as a modern thinker does. His thoughts oscillate as do his feelings and it is an error to attribute ponderous weight to the statements in this particular speech where the man himself was merely reflecting his passing, changing feelings and ideas. A modern thinker would never have spoken of death as 'the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns,' when but a few moments previously he had encountered and spoken with his dead Father.

Hamlet is typical of a transition state when the ascendancy of logical reasoning over inner feeling as a perceptive faculty was not established as it became in times nearer our own.

Dr. Steiner's rendering of the speech in what one might name a 'homely' way would probably offend such actors who only see the philosopher in Hamlet, but it is true to the historic aspect of human development in which Hamlet stands as a remarkably complete symbol.

The full significance and true aspect of Hamlet's outlook therefore can be grasped through Anthroposophy.

• 1. Speech and Drama, 19 lectures, Dornach, 5th to 23rd September, 1924.

Men could not reject a spiritual knowledge such as Anthroposophy, if they would but observe with the necessary attention the everyday phenomena of their own mental life. For these phenomena are eloquent witnesses to its reality.

On the one side, looking towards the inner life of man, there stands the fact of Memory. In memory, the experiences man has with the things of the world are preserved in the soul. On the other side is external Perception, behind which the thoughtful human soul feels irresistibly impelled to surmise and seek the inner secrets of the World of Nature.

In both directions, the conscious experience of man comes up against a 'nothingness.'

That which comes to us in memory is no longer there in the outer world. External perception can indeed stimulate, but it cannot bring forth the memories of past experience. On the other hand, careful observation will shew that for the experience of memory man is in every case dependent on his own bodily nature. We feel the memory rising up into consciousness from an exercise of our bodily nature. Science can indeed confirm this, but the feeling is sufficiently certain even without it. Science will shew for instance how memory is impaired by a diseased condition of certain parts of the body. These proofs however only corroborate what is directly evident to the naïve consciousness of man,—provided this be combined with accuracy of observation, which may very well be the case, for the naïve feeling need not be superficial; it is quite able to perceive deeply and truly. Thus in the act of memory man feels how there arise out of his body the forces which—as though with unseen spiritual hands take hold of facts which are no longer there in the world of external Nature. This experience is certainly more delicate, less tangible than others which we have through the immediate sense of life. Yet in its way its evidence is no less certain than that of pains or pleasures, for example, where we know with the sureness of a direct experience that their source is in the body.

On the other side we have our perceptions of the outer world. The life of the soul comes up against these perceptions; it cannot penetrate through them to that which they reveal. Impelled as it is to surmise that something is there revealing itself,—with its own activity it can go no further. Here it has reached its 'nothingness.' It cannot but surmise that it stands at the frontier of a world full of inner content, and yet, as it seeks to penetrate through the perceptions, it feels itself—spiritually—reaching out into the void.

We need only take one more step in this reflection. Behind Memory there begins the region where our own body—for the ordinary consciousness—vanishes into the unknown. Behind Perception, external Nature does the same. The relations of these two to the conscious inner experience of man are of the same kind. Now in Memory, with its foundation in a bodily activity, there arises Thought. For it is in thought that our memories of past experience come forth into conscious life. But thought is also kindled by outward Perception. That which manifests itself to us from without, is brought home to our inner consciousness in thought. Thus do the inner life of Man and the external world of Nature meet in the element of Thought.

And is not this a meeting as it were of old acquaintances? With what a happy sense of kinship does the soul contrive to understand new things perceived in the light of old experience remembered. The strongest sense of the reality of life comes to the soul when it can do this. The inner life of memory, the outer world in perception, meet not as strangers but as friends, who have something to tell one another upon a common subject.

Now the inner force which lives in memory can be intensified. By working upon his soul, man can strengthen the force that shews itself in memory. This possibility, and the way in which it can be realised, are subjects which have frequently been dealt with in these columns.

In doing this, man strikes and penetrates into his bodily nature more deeply than in the process of ordinary consciousness. With the deepened, strengthened force of memory he now perceives himself to be discovering those bodily activities which—as we saw—are always involved in the normal memory process. Indeed, lie not only approaches but penetrates right into them. Vet it is nothing of a bodily nature which comes before the soul at this point. We must picture it as follows. It is as though a shadow-figure, seen against a wall, were suddenly to come to life and step towards us. It is familiar to its because thought is familiar. For it stands there in the soul in just the same way as a thought in ordinary consciousness. But while a thought is not alive, this is alive. It is an 'Imagination.' Like a thought, it is justified by its relationship to a reality. It is therefore not in the least what we should ordinarily call a fancy or imagination. For we perceive at once that it relates to a reality,—in the very same way as the thought in which we hold a memory relates to a reality.

But there is this difference. The thought refers to a reality which was once there in our experience and is now no longer there. The Imagination—though in the very same manner—brings before our soul a reality which in the ordinary experience of life has never yet occurred to us. We have in fact entered a sphere of spiritual perception.

We have penetrated into our own body, yet it is not' Body' but 'Spirit' which we have struck here. It is indeed the Spirit which underlies the Body. We take hold of it 'with spiritual hands,' in the same way as we take hold of past experiences when they arise in ordinary memory.

And as in Thought external Nature meets the inner life of Man, so in Imagination the Spirit of Nature meets the human Spirit. The Spirit that is in Man, taken hold of in Imagination, goes out to meet the Spirit that is in Nature, and this Spirit too reveals itself now in Imagination. To the ordinary consciousness, Thought arises in the act of Memory and kindled by Perceptions from the outer world. To the strengthened consciousness, Imagination arises in the living inner experience of the soul itself, and kindled by a no less living experience of the outer world.

All this can be achieved in the full light of consciousness, where self-deception, suggestion, auto-suggestion and the like are quite impossible. Anyone who reaches true Imagination, lives in it as he lives in the most certain thought, the reference of which to a reality is unmistakable. When we have ceased to allow the slightest vagueness or unconscious element in our experience of the relation of our thoughts to reality, we shall certainly not fall into illusions in our experience of Imagination.

Herein lies the reason why the man who has attained true 'Imaginative Experiences' can speak of them to one who has not yet done so, while the latter can accept his statements with full conviction without giving himself up to any blind belief in authority. In effect, he who tells of Imaginations is only speaking of what is there in the listener himself—beneath the level of his memories—as his own reality of Spirit. In every-day life when a memory is recalled to a man, not by his own thought alone but by another man in conversation with him, he will say to himself, 'I certainly did have that experience in the course of my life, in my ordinary consciousness.' So when he listens to a statement of Imaginative Experience he can say, 'That is I myself in my spiritual perceptions, hitherto unknown to my ordinary consciousness. The man who tells of true Imaginations has only helped me to call up into consciousness what my consciousness had not yet called up for itself. My relation to him is of the same kind as my every-day relation to a man who might remind me of something that had slipped my memory.'

The World of the Spirit, in effect, is simply a thing 'forgotten' by the ordinary consciousness, which—strengthened and intensified—can rediscover it like a returning memory of past experience.

This article was written in 1923 and is included in the volume Der Goetheanum-Gedanke inmitten der Kulturkrisis der Gegenwart.

In the article published in Das Goetheanum weekly on October 7, 1923, in which I discussed Michael's fight with the Dragon, I was obliged to draw attention to the constitution of the human soul in the comparatively recent past. I pointed out that in the XVIII century certain ideas were still current which were regarded as a basis of knowledge. Today they are relegated to the realm of fantasy.

Goethe's Weltanschauung will only appear as a living reality in the eyes of our contemporaries if this fact is given due consideration. The seventies and eighties of the XVIII century were the years in Goethe's life when his Weltanschauung took the direction which determined its future fruitful development. By infusing scientific knowledge into his mode of thinking Goethe provided that inner impulse which is so characteristic of his thought. It was not by rejecting a genuine study of nature, but by working in harmony with nature, that he wished to reach the heights of a spiritual conception of the universe. We shall only understand this inner impulse aright if we follow the movement of ideas in his epoch, and if we realise that within this cultural environment Goethe's aims and ideas met with no response. Many phenomena confirm this; the following is perhaps not the least important.

In the year 1782 there appeared the translation of the book ‘Des Erreurs et de la Vérité’ by the worthy Matthias Claudius. It was the work of Saint-Martin, the so-called Unknown Philosopher, and describes the attempt to arrive at a satisfactory Weltanschauung by returning to the primordial traditional wisdom of mankind. It showed at the same time that those who thought along these lines saw no possibility, from the conclusions derived from scientific thinking, of arriving at a form of cognition that was inwardly satisfying. It was Goethe's heartfelt wish to attain this knowledge.

The fact that Goethe's contemporaries could feel a need for the ideas adumbrated by Saint-Martin is a circumstance or phenomenon which may be of particular interest today.

The scientific mode of thinking strove for a conception of the world which totally excluded moral impulses as irrelevant for the purpose of true knowledge. In the eyes of natural science moral ideas are simply something that dawns in the human soul independently of the ideas of nature. In accordance with its character the physical evolution of the world to which man directs his attention must be envisaged, both in respect to its origin and its end, without the impact of moral ideas. In the cosmic nebulae from which worlds emerge and which in their turn ultimately give birth to man, no moral impulses are at work.

There could still be found amongst Goethe's circle those who rejected this conception of nature, but who hankered after something akin to what Matthias Claudius wanted to give through his translation of Saint-Martin's work. Goethe however was wholly committed to a scientific approach to nature. Others wanted to unite the knowledge of man and moral world order independently of the kingdom of nature; Goethe wanted to find this union within the realm of nature.

Saint-Martin speaks of a serious primordial dereliction, of an original sin. Man had originally been fashioned in his true being by a supersensible world. This no longer applies, he is no longer the same being: he shows he has now become another being. He has lost his original innocence and has clothed himself with the substances of the sensible world in a manner unbefitting his original being. This fall from grace extends even to the different manifestations of life—one of these manifestations is language, for example. The kind of language now spoken in the different countries of the world no longer suffices to express by means of words the fundamental nature of things. Man is obliged to confine himself to their external aspect. To pre-lapsarian man was assigned original language which was integrated with the creative forces acting in world events.

In these ideas the natural order is associated with the moral order. In a world where natural law reigns there is no place for this moral order.

For the followers of Saint-Martin all knowledge consisted fundamentally in acquiring once again man's original disposition of soul by actively developing the inner life.

It is this desire, this tendency which pervades the books of Saint-Martin. They could only satisfy those who saw in scientific knowledge an aberration, a consequence of man's fall. His disciples could not choose but think that this knowledge was the product of original sin; true understanding, they felt, can only be acquired independently of natural science, of a scientific perception of nature.

This attitude of mind lends to his works something which is alien to our modern mentality. And Goethe must have felt the same. How far he was familiar with the work of Saint-Martin is not important; what matters is that in Goethe's day there were men whose spiritual needs could be satisfied by a predilection for Saint-Martin. This characterises the state of mind of many of Goethe's contemporaries whose opinions he was obliged inwardly to disavow.

Goethe himself was unable to stand aloof from the scientific observation of nature. He could only arrive at an understanding of the spirit if observation of natural phenomena revealed this spirit to him. For Goethe, man has not lost his state of innocence, he still bears it within him, though at first he is not aware of it. But it is precisely because he is unaware of it in early life that man is able to acquire by his own persistent efforts an understanding of his true being. Insight into nature for Goethe is not the consequence of man's fall but the means of self-realisation which is possible at every moment. In this way Goethe has incorporated in his Weltanschauung the true idea of inner freedom. It is nowhere explicitly stated in his works, but it is implicit in them. He who seeks will find it if he opens himself to the Goethean way of thinking. We shall only see Goethe today in the right perspective if we are aware of this. In the eighties he felt an irresistible longing to escape from his cultural environment. In Italy, it was not Italy he sought. As a result of his experiences there he found himself, his true being. If we follow Goethe during his Italian journey, we see the progressive development of the Goethe to whom the world owes so much.

It is in man's true and sincere striving that the element of freedom is to be found. In Goethe we see the new outlook, the new horizon that mankind owes to his influence. And it is this also which unites him within the Michael impulse. He was unable to achieve this union in an environment which was alien to him, but he found it, however, by a form of contemplation which was peculiarly his own.

For this reason Goethe is so near today to those who are seeking knowledge of the spirit. He often felt himself a stranger to his age; every seeker after the spirit feels himself perfectly at home with him today.

Anyone knowing Benedetto Croce's Aesthetic as Science of Expression will look forward with eager anticipation to the study on Goethe by this distinguished man, published first in 1918 and available since 1920 in the delightful German rendering by Julius Schlosser.¹

The perusal of this book may perhaps be described as an experience of a dramatic nature. We pass from the Author's Preface through the chapters on 'Moral and Intellectual Life' and 'The Life of the Poet and Artist,' and come to the description of Werther. Throughout this portion of the book we are filled with expectation. Every page seems fraught with the promise: there will arise before us a highly individual and attractive picture of Goethe, conceived with open-hearted sympathy, portrayed with artistic skill.

The opening words already raise our hopes:—'During the sad days of the world war I re-read Goethe's works and gained deeper consolation and greater courage from him than I could have gained perhaps in equal measure from any other poet. This inspired me with a desire to write down certain critical ideas which suggested themselves again during my reading of his works and which had always led me to a true understanding of them.'

Croce would like to enter into Goethe without that heavy burden with which, alas, inartistic learning has so long encumbered him. How few among our Goethe students seem to be aware that he too has the right to be seen in the picture which emerges from his Works—from the real gift of his spirit to the world. In the prevailing Goethe literature the Works are too often eclipsed behind the Life, with all the mass of biographical detail which is available in his case. In this matter Croce preserves his clarity of vision. 'He who said that if Goethe had not been a great poet in verse, he would yet have been a great artist in life, made a statement which cannot be defended in the strict sense of the word, as it is impossible to imagine the life he lived without the poetry which he produced.' Croce recognises that in Goethe above all the Work of the poet and his Life must be seen as one; for Goethe himself incessantly brings life and freshness, from a deep self-observation, to his great vision of the World. 'Nevertheless,' continues Croce, 'the author of the statement has traced in a rather picturesque manner the relation of Goethe's life to his poetry, a relation which is like that of a whole to one of its parts, a very conspicuous part. For is it not true that the greater number of volumes of Goethe's works (even omitting his letters and his "conversations ") consist of reminiscences, annals, diaries, accounts of his travels, and that several other volumes contain autobiographical matter interspersed or concealed, to which critics are still endeavouring to discover the keys?'

By the splendid clearness with which he sees this twofold aspect, Croce is enabled to place the picture of Goethe in such a light that we feel at first: Here we have Goethe's position in the history of culture most pregnantly expressed. 'His own biography, together with his works, offer us a complete and classic course in noble humanity, per exempla et praecepta. It is a treasure which in these days deserves to be used to a much greater extent by educators, and by those who would educate themselves.'

Croce would eliminate from his portrait of Goethe the 'wildness of genius' which is read into him by the fertile imaginations of some people.

For they, wishing to 'live' as they conceive it, scorn the 'banality' of real life—which, as it happens, cannot be without gravity and earnestness. '… the personality of Wolfgang Goethe consists of calm virtue, earnest goodness and justice, wisdom, balance, good sense, sanity, and, in a word, all those qualities which are generally laughed at as being "bourgeois." . . . He was deep but not "abysmal," as some critics of to-day would wish to consider him. He was a man of genius, but not diabolical.'

The fulness of an all-round human nature, to which Goethe in his whole life and work inclined, is powerfully stressed by Croce:—'And what, in substance, did he teach? To be above all, whatever else one may be, thoroughly and wholly human, ever working with all one's faculties in harmony, never separating feeling and thought, never working on externals or as a pedant; a task which, in the turbulent years of youth and fascinated by eccentric minds like Hamann, Goethe may have conceived in a somewhat material or fanciful sense, but which he immediately deepened, and therefore made clearer and corrected, rendering concrete its mystical and ineffable totality by determining it more closely.'

Goethe in Croce's description comes before us as the man who would educate himself 'not to desire and to dream, but to will and to act.' And as Goethe stands before him in this light, Croce is able to place Werther, in a masterly way, both in relation to Art and Life. The life which Werther lives is far removed from that of the poet who creates him. Werther is ill. Goethe feels how possible it is for the Werther illness to take hold on life. For him it becomes a question of feeling the illness truly, and of truly describing it. It is as a healthy man that he undertakes the task. Croce calls Werther, in relation to Goethe's own state of soul, 'a vaccination fever rather than a real malady.' With clear discrimination Goethe's own inner condition is removed from all that drives Werther into the calamity. 'This explains the childishness which makes us smile and almost feel embarrassed when we read the account of, and the documents concerning, the relations of young Goethe with Charlotte Buff and with her betrothed and husband, excellent, patient Kestner. These are matters which biographers and anecdote-writers have in truth emphasized in much too gossiping a fashion, usually misunderstanding their psychological meaning and yielding to the bad advice of immersing again and drowning the work of art in biographical material, by exaggerating and perverting the legitimate ethical interest which Goethe's person arouses. . .

In Croce's eyes the creation of Werther takes place in Goethe's life as an artistic, ethical catharsis. Goethe wished to make the Werther fever an inner artistic experience, so that he might by this very means thoroughly cure himself of all attacks. 'Werther—"unhappy Werther"—was not an ideal for the poet as he was for his contemporaries. Goethe immortalises in Werther neither the right to passion nor nature versus society, nor suicide, nor the other ideas we have just mentioned; that is to say, he does not depict them as mental conditions which, at that moment, predominate in him. But he depicts the "sorrows," as the title expresses it, the sufferings and, finally, the death of young Werther; and just because he looks upon Werther's fate as sorrow, barren sorrow, and its unfolding calculated to lead not to the joy and delight of feeling oneself superior to and rising high above others, but to self-destruction, the book is a liberation or a catharsis…'

Unlike so many others, Croce will not see in Werther 'a sublime legend of love.' On the contrary, to him it is 'a book of malady,' and the Werther way of loving is 'an aspect or an acute manifestation of the malady.' When his mother and his friends urge him to bestir himself and take up fruitful work, Werther replies, 'But am I too not active now? And after all is it not all the same whether I count peas or lentils?' It is the answer of a man given to 'idling, day-dreaming, nay to passionate raving.' Goethe—as Croce very properly remarks—confronts this 'hero' of his book, not as one having ought in common with him, but as a calm and clear observer seeking the cure for a disease. Werther is 'the work of one who knows, of one who understands, and who, without being Werther, discerns Werther completely, and, without raving with him, feels his heart throb with his.'

When we have read thus far in Croce's book, our experience in thought has been not unlike the opening of a drama. With anticipation growing more tense from page to page, we ask ourselves, what will the author eventually have to say on Goethe?

Then comes the chapter 'Wagner the Pedant'—a real surprise, quite in keeping with the quality of drama. For Croce comes forward with a kind of vindication of Wagner's character in Faust. It is as though he had been annoyed once too often by the literary pedants who mock at Wagner in the words of Faust, and feel themselves, no doubt, with quite a touch of genius, nay of the Faust-nature, as they do so. Against these pedants wearing the mask of 'the Free,' Croce comes out with a kind of apologia for Wagner. 'I confess that I cherish a certain tender feeling for Wagner, the famulus, Dr. Faust's assistant. I like his sincere and boundless faith in knowledge, his honest ideal of a serious student, his simple straightforwardness, his unaffected modesty, the reverence which he shews … towards his great master.'

Indeed, a strange antithesis shines through in Croce's description. Faust with his whims and worries, his fancies, his indeterminate spiritual longing, seems like a half-unsteady dreamer and complainer beside the sterling Wagner who steers straight forward to the certain goal of his scholarship. And a curious touch of thought suggests itself to Croce:—'Be careful what you do, when you resolve to take a wife: lest, if you do not happen to choose one of those timid silent creatures, such as Jean Paul frequently places beside his erudite maniacs, but there fall to your lot as a companion a Faust in petticoats, a female Titan, a Valkyrie, you receive no longer merely biting philosophical lashes, but find yourself the object (and this you hardly deserve) of aversion, hatred and nausea…'

Croce does not wish the tenderly loved Wagner so terrible a fate. 'For Wagner's ideal is neither more nor less than the humanistic ideal … the admiring study of ancient histories in order to deduce from them prudential maxims and rules, … and the search for the laws of Nature in order to turn them to social utility.'

Is this 'vindication' of Wagner no more than a dramatic interlude; will it but serve to reveal Goethe's Faust in his real greatness?—The reader feels impelled to ask the question. Great is the tension at this point.

The thickening of the plot—and the catastrophe—these I would describe in the next number.

• 1. English Version: Goethe, by Benedetto Croce, with an Introduction by Douglas Ainslie, Methuen, 1923.—The passages which we take from this translation do not always convey quite the same shade of thought as in the rendering from which Dr. Steiner quotes.

Having found in Croce's 'Goethe' the clear and penetrating thoughts about Werther, and reading on, we come to the chapters where he deals with Faust. At this point our deep enjoyment of the book first turns into confused astonishment. Portrayed in Croce's thought, the earlier scenes still have the charm of Goethe's living poetry. But his further creations in Faust appear like abstract schemes of thought in Croce's description. We lose our breath, in our artistic feeling, as we follow it.

Croce's peculiar insight, which he applied so well to Werther, still guides him through the scenes of Faust written by Goethe in his youth. He says: 'Goethe, when he presented Faust in the manner in which he presents him in these early scenes, had not yet become a conscious critic of "Faustism," but rather agreed with it; and for this part, too, his true and effective criticism (if it may be called criticism) is entirely poetical, similar to that which we have already noticed in the case of Werther and Wagner, consisting, namely, in the very sincerity and fulness of the representation.'

But all that flowed from Goethe's spirit into Faust when he lifted his humanity stage by stage to an all-embracing outlook on the world,—all this, for Croce's way of thought, loses its life and inner substance. Discerning as he is, this escapes him and falls away into a realm of lifeless, threadbare concepts.

Goethe himself, when he left the spheres of existence accessible to outer experience, did not fall into kingdoms of cold allegory or remote symbolism. His sure and certain instinct carried him into the real spiritual world, wherein alone Man in his full and true manifestation is to be found. He succeeded in portraying with poetic vitality and substance not only the external life, but the inner world of Man. When he did this, the result was no shadowy phantom-world of ideas, but the creative reality of the Spirit—able to make manifest even in the outer picture the fulness of its inner content. Such was Goethe's power. His poetic genius did not desert him when he ascended into spiritual realms. Thus his Faust remained alive and real, when—time after time as he returned to this work—he raised him one stage higher into that World which is revealed to seership alone.

Into these high regions Croce will not follow Goethe. So the full life in Goethe's Faust creation eludes his grasp. He sees cold allegories where Goethe presents living reality of Spirit. To Croce, only the part of Faust composed in Goethe's youth is a vital work; not so the portions created by the poet in his later life. This alone makes it possible for him to say: 'The sublime Faust of titanic strivings is quite forgotten in the new character, and hardly the identity of the name is sufficient to call him to mind. We might call him "Heinrich," as. poor Gretchen called him, some kind of Heinrich or Franz. And such he is and had to be for the greater unifying force of the tragedy which he causes, but of which he is not the protagonist.'

We are driven to ask, why is it that Croce's Goethe leads us to this dramatic entanglement in thought. It is that Croce lacks the power to penetrate to a full grasp of Goethe's nature. How did Goethe himself rise to the height of what Poetry—and all Art—was to him?—He carried his search for knowledge in the realm of Natural Science to the point where he could exclaim: Art is a making manifest of hidden Laws of Nature—Laws which would remain unmanifest for ever, but for the creative work of the Artist. By this perception, Goethe became the founder of a Science of Nature worthy of spiritual standards. True, this brought him into conflict with the 'recognised' Science which has become established in the last three or four centuries. Yet it was this his insight into Nature which carried him into lofty spheres of creation, where the Poet freely lives and moves in the World of the Spirit.

Here Croce does not follow Goethe. Wherever he meets him as scientist, in his researches into Nature, he finds him wanting. Croce is still entangled in the commonly accepted view of Nature. In this respect he says of Goethe: 'It may be (or rather it is certain) that in his idea of a Science of Nature which in the various species of phenomena should search for the primitive phenomenon (Urphänomen), which is an idea that can be thought and seen at the same time, he was wrong and did little honour to either science or poetry, as was the case, moreover, with all contemporary "natural philosophers." It may be (and it certainly is) that he was much mistaken in his bitter criticism of Newton, and in rejecting the use of mathematics in physical sciences The man who speaks thus cannot really fathom the depths of understanding where Goethe leads his Faust. Indeed from these passages we begin to understand why Croce feels 'a certain tenderness' for Wagner the famulus, while he inclines to criticise the character of Faust so harshly.

The sureness of touch which Croce shews in his treatment of Werther leaves him already when he comes to Goetz von Berlichingen. 'When dealing with Goetz too,' he says, 'it is necessary to set aside the prejudices handed down to us by the passionate utterances of Goethe's contemporaries… Goetz is very different from the Räuber of Schiller. Goethe could not breathe into his work the thrill of political passion and rebellion which he always lacked even when he was young and enthusiastic. He read the autobiography of this small feudatory and soldier who lived in the time of the Reformation, became fascinated by the events and customs described in it, and set himself to reproduce them by a process of condensation and dramatisation, following the method used by Shakespeare in the latter's historical English dramas.'

Croce fails to see that in dramatising the life-story of Gottfried von Berlichingen Goethe was striving for a dramatic style according to his own vision of the world. Indeed, the wrestling for adequate forms of style in Goethe's creation remains a hidden world to Croce. Hence he fails to do the poet justice where with all the power of his striving Goethe cannot bring his work to full formal perfection,—as in the case of Wilhelm Meister. To anyone who really enters into Goethe's nature, his efforts in form are all the more significant where for their very greatness the aims he sets himself are unattained. But to appreciate so 'Faustian' a striving in the poet, Croce has after all too much tenderness for Wagner the famulus.

If we were thus thrown into dramatic perplexity of thought while reading the middle parts of Croce's 'Goethe,' we find ourselves in the very catastrophe of the tragedy when we come to the chapter on the Second Part of Faust. Be it granted unreservedly:—Croce maintains throughout the book his greatness of style, which makes it a certain pleasure in the reading even where he drives us to exasperation. But our annoyance however gracefully evoked may none the less grow strong, when the scenes, where in the ripeness of old age Goethe leads his Faust on to the loftiest heights of humanity, are thus described: -' What was this? The play of imagination of an old artist, … master of innumerable figures and situations drawn from reality and from literature, who is glad to make them pass through his mind again, toying with them; and the wisdom of the mail, experienced in the world and human thought, who has already witnessed so many mental and moral vicissitudes, and without for this reason becoming sceptical or callous, has rather saved for himself a strong faith of his own. He is no longer roused to excessive enthusiasm or to violent contempt. His wisdom is often softened by a smile. Even his faith he expresses discreetly, sometimes borrowing a jesting tone… Neither must we think that there is, on the other hand, great philosophical depth in Faust II…' And from this height of his criticism, Croce recommends us thus to read the Second Part of Faust: 'After having gained some familiarity with Faust II, by means of a first reading, which should partake of the nature of a study of the text, it is advisable, when re-reading it, not to read it from beginning to end, as one does in the case of Werther or the story of Gretchen, but to open it here and there, in order to witness a phantasmagoria, to enjoy a little picture, to smile at a satirical description…'

I on the other hand would say: Having read Croce's book to the end, turn to Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,' that you may bear the calamity.

Anyone looking beyond the immediate interests of the day feels that mankind is confronted by tasks such as have appeared only at important turning points in historical evolution. These tasks concern all people and touch all spheres of life. There are persons in the world who are inclined to perceive the seeds of decay and death everywhere in spiritual life, and who see a possibility of progress only in a rebirth of spiritual forces. To others, the decay proceeds only from the fact that there are widely extended groups of people who have turned away from well-tested traditions. But these are convinced that the old will have to seek new paths in order to lay hold of the heart and mind of man.

Social conditions have assumed a form which has led to shocking catastrophes and which conceals germs leading to new and overwhelming calamities. In consequence, for millions of people a material distress has resulted which words are powerless to describe, and only those who believe in the possibility of new methods in world economy can hope for alleviation.

A great conflict between the Occidental world and the world of the Orient is imminent. Many individuals are looking with anxious eyes at the possible consequences of the significant call sounding forth from America. How will that country, how will England, play the leading roles which have devolved upon them? How will the summons of these western powers be answered by what is to them the mystically dark Asiatic soul of the Japanese?

These are problems upon the solution of which depend, in the nearest future, the weal and woe of mankind; problems which involve the most commonplace every day experiences as well as the highest spiritual interests.

What is stated here contains something many people feel to be true. Confronting this, however, stands something else. Although we confess that a great deal ought to happen, a great weariness has invaded human souls; a lack of faith in human fortitude.

Much is being proposed from many sides; a belief that something might alleviate the great distress of the times gives no solution. In many quarters, indeed, people believe they know quite well what is needed; but such certainties have no effect upon the wills of human beings.

Before the great European catastrophe overtook the world, what eulogies could be heard about the spiritual and material progress of mankind! In view of the chaos which has engulfed the civilized world, how powerless does all that once lived in this progress now appear!

This experience might bring about a painful disillusionment, and yet we would doubt the human being himself if we halted before such a disillusionment. Indeed, many of the eulogists of the progress of the modern age have believed in the power of the spirit, since faith in the power of the human spirit lives even in materialism. Those who consider materialism the only sane thing believe that they have attained to their viewpoint through the power of the spirit.

We should feel in its full significance the fact that the materialistic paths travelled by this power of the spirit have led to a precipitous downfall of civilization; that world happenings have taken a course and brought results with which human beings cannot cope. It is only a step from the correct perception of this fact to a recognition of the necessity for this human spiritual power to seek other paths, paths leading deeper into reality.

Anyone who talks in this way encounters, as a matter of course, strong opposition. “What do you hope for now,” someone asks, “from a revolution in the spiritual life? Tell us how the world is to be relieved of her economic distress? First of all, people need bread; when this is provided, the way to the spirit will be found.”

Such a remark appears self-evident; and, on account of its “apparent” self-evidence, it evokes considerable applause. Yet it is only an illusion, not reality. For all economic conditions in human life are, in the final analysis, the result of spirit- borne human work. If the consequences are bad, the blame rests upon a spirit unequal to its tasks.

We shall understand this truth in its present significance only when, in spite of the turmoil of the age, we refuse to indulge in a blind criticism rejecting modern spiritual progress; that is, only when we recognize the good in modern progress. It is thus that we shall arrive at a direct insight into the reasons why this human progress is, in certain spheres, not commensurate with the course of cosmic progress.

Human progress is evident largely in the sphere of nature knowledge, and in the mechanical and technical sciences controlled by nature. Humanity has acquired sufficient power of thinking to engage in a study of mechanics, botany, archaeology, and so forth. The justification of this thinking power then operating in its own proper sphere should not be denied. But it uses the human spirit in order to master what lies outside the spirit. It comprehends nature through the spirit, while forgetting the spirit itself. Thus, science never grows weary of emphasizing that it presents nature to the human being the more faithfully the less it encourages him to color his ideas about nature with his spirit. It is not possible here to speak of the value of a knowledge of nature gained this way. But a humanity which educates itself largely by means of this soul activity is not able to produce ideas which have the sustaining force of the will. Will works in the human being by means of the spiritual force pulsating through it. And a spirit which is directed only to the unspiritual loses the sustaining power of its own being. The spirit which busies itself with nature can be strengthened in its own power, but cannot, in this manner, give itself a sustaining content.

Those who wish to place an independent spiritual conception on a par with a conception of nature believe themselves compelled to take this equality as a starting point. They do not mean by this a spiritual conception which continues to spin out what has been acquired from nature, but a spiritual knowledge which recognizes the spirit and its world as a living world, just as eyes, ears, and an intellect based upon them recognize nature as an unspiritual reality.

But the present-day world is able to speak of the living spirit only because of the traditions of the past. In bygone ages people were convinced that not only visible beings walk this earth and fashion the world's historical existence, but they were aware of the presence of active invisible spiritual beings in this world. They were aware by direct experience not only of living in a world of nature, but of living in a world of spirit. The modern human being has substituted an unreal thought experience for this spiritual experience. He is aware only of a world of thought; he is no longer directly conscious of the living events of the spirit. Indeed, the human being who has been educated in natural science rejects all knowledge of the spirit, and thus is dependent solely upon what of spiritual knowledge has been handed down from bygone ages. That, however, gradually fades away, loses its sustaining power in the human soul.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy believes itself capable of acquiring a knowledge of the living spirit. It speaks of a spirit which lives in the human being, and not solely of thoughts which lead a picture existence in him. The fact that spirit reveals itself in the human being is for this spiritual science a result, just as in present natural science that which the intellect understands, based upon sense perception, is a result. This spiritual science does not speak of a nebulous spirit into which only the abstract intellect is interjected, but of a real spirit world with individual beings and facts; just as natural science speaks of individual plants, individual rivers, and other individual facts of nature.

This spiritual science believes that it may approach present- day tasks from two sides.

One approach is the cognition that spiritual science is knowledge and can be felt as such by all who permit themselves, through a healthy power of judgment, to be stimulated toward a satisfactory human relationship with the world and life; that, consequently, spiritual science does not bear the character of those methods of modern science which lead into this or that branch of knowledge, without the possibility of the human being gaining from that particular branch thoughts about his own nature and destination, or of his coming to a vigorous unfolding of his will. Spiritual science believes itself able to illumine thoughts, shape feelings full of devotion, and fashion a will filled with spirit. It speaks to the soul of every individual human being without considering the difference in degree of his education, because it seeks, indeed, its source in the pure spirit of science. Moreover, it reaches results to which every soul can respond with appreciation, out of a healthy judgment of human nature.

The other approach is fruitful for various fields of science and art, and for the religiously and socially inclined life.

The various sciences have, through their mode of research, arrived at a point where they need to be permeated by a living spiritual essence. The arts have their naturalistic epoch behind them; only out of the spirit can they again acquire a content which is not merely a superfluous imitation of nature. In the practical consequences of the Marxian mode of thought, social mass impulses have proved themselves impossible. They need the social forces which the individual human being discovers on his path to the spiritual life. Spiritual science will open the soul depths to religious experience, which otherwise would wither. By its very nature, spiritual science cannot itself create religion. We misunderstand spiritual science if we ascribe to it such intentions. But to the human being who can no longer discover religion in ancient spiritual movements, it will prove again that religion is the wellspring of a true humanness.

Spiritual science would give humanity what it needs, in order that ideas should again follow the course of world events. With such thoughts we shall certainly expose ourselves today to the easy reproach that we wish to say: Whoever would find his way into the needs encompassing all present-day people and life conditions has only to ask the Anthroposophists; they know how to solve all problems. Anyone who really knows how to live in the spirit of Anthroposophy, in the way intended by those who live at the Goetheanum [At Dornach, Switzerland], really does not suffer from megalomania, nor even from a lack of modesty; but would, quite modestly, point to what is lacking in the activity of modern mankind, and what must be sought in order that spiritual force, imbuing not only the head but the whole human being with soul force, may contribute to the great tasks now felt by many to be urgent. To be sure, such a mode of thought leads to something different from what is still expected by many people who place these tasks before their soul. Thus, the Occident and the Orient will come to a proper understanding only out of a spirit-imbued life, and not upon the bases upon which men build today. Nor will economic needs be alleviated until the right spirit points our direction.

An article from Das Goetheanum, Volume 2, Number 17, Bn 36.4.08, GA 36. From a lecture on pedagogy during the French course at the Goetheanum, 16/17 September, 1922.

The present is the age of intellectualism. The intellect is that faculty of soul in the exercise of which man's inner being participates least. One speaks with some justification of the cold intellectual nature; we need only reflect how the intellect acts upon artistic perception or practice. It dispels or impedes. And artists dread that their creations may be conceptually or symbolically explained by the intelligence. In the clarity of the intellect the warmth of soul which, in the act of creation, gave life to their works, is extinguished. The artist would like his work to be grasped by feeling, not by the understanding. For then the warmth with which he has experienced it is communicated to the beholder. But this warmth is repelled by an intellectual explanation.

In social life intellectualism separates men from one another. They can only work rightly within the community when they are able to impart to their deeds—which always involve the weal or woe of their fellow beings—something of their soul. One man should experience not only another's activity but something of his soul. In a deed, however, which springs from intellectualism, a man withholds his soul nature. He does not let it flow over to his neighbour. It has long been said that in the teaching and training of children intellectualism operates in a crippling way. In saying this one has in mind, in the first place, only the child's intelligence, not the teacher's. One would like to fashion one's methods of training and instruction so that not only the child's cold understanding may be aroused and developed, but warmth of heart may be engendered too.

The anthroposophical view of the world is in full agreement with this. It accepts fully the excellent educational maxims which have grown from this demand. But it realises clearly that warmth can only be imparted from soul to soul. On this account it holds that, above all, pedagogy itself must become ensouled, and thereby the teachers' whole activity.

In recent times intellectualism has permeated strongly into methods of instruction and training. It has achieved this indirectly, by way of modern science. Parents let science dictate what is good for the child's body, soul and spirit. And teachers, during their training, receive from science the spirit of their educational methods.

But science has achieved its triumphs precisely through intellectualism. It wants to keep its thoughts free of anything from man's own soul life, letting them receive everything from sense observation and experiment. Such a science could build up the excellent knowledge of nature of our time, but it cannot found a true pedagogy.

A true pedagogy must be based upon a knowledge that embraces man with respect to body, soul and spirit. Intellectualism only grasps man with respect to his body, for to observation and experiment the bodily alone is revealed. Before a true pedagogy can be founded, a true knowledge of man is necessary. This Anthroposophy seeks to attain.

One cannot come to a knowledge of man by first forming an idea of his bodily nature with the help of a science founded merely on what can be grasped by the senses, and then asking whether this bodily nature is ensouled, and whether a spiritual element is active within it. In dealing with a child such an attitude is harmful. For in him, far more than in the adult, body, soul and spirit form a unity. One cannot care first for the health of the child from the point of view of a merely natural science, and then want to give to the healthy organism what one regards as proper from the point of view of soul and spirit. In all that one does to the child and with the child one benefits or injures his bodily life. In man's earthly life soul and spirit express themselves through the body. A bodily process is a revelation of soul and spirit.

Material science is of necessity concerned with the body as a physical organism; it does not come to a comprehension of the whole man. Many feel this while regarding pedagogy, but fail to see what is needed to-day. They do not say: pedagogy cannot thrive on material science; let us therefore found our pedagogic methods out of pedagogic instincts and not out of material science. But half-consciously they are of this opinion.

We may admit this in theory, but in practice it leads to nothing, for modern humanity has lost the spontaneity of the life of instinct. To try to-day to build up an instinctive pedagogy on instincts which are no longer present in man in their original force, would remain a groping in the dark. We come to see this through anthroposophical knowledge. We learn to know that the intellectualistic trend in science owes its existence to a necessary phase in the evolution of mankind. In recent times man passed out of the period of instinctive life. The intellect became of predominant significance. Man needed it in order to advance on his evolutionary path in the right way. It leads him to that degree of consciousness which he must attain in a certain epoch, just as the individual must acquire particular capabilities at a particular period of his life. But the instincts are crippled under the influence of the intellect, and one cannot try to return to the instinctive life without working against man's evolution. We must accept the significance of that full consciousness which has been attained through intellectualism, and—in full consciousness—give to man what instinctive life can no longer give him.

We need for this a knowledge of soul and spirit which is just as much founded on reality as is material, intellectualistic science. Anthroposophy strives for just this, yet it is this that many people shrink from accepting. They learn to know the way modern science tries to understand man. They feel he cannot be known in this way, but they will not accept that it is possible to cultivate a new mode of cognition and—in clarity of consciousness equal to that in which one penetrates the bodily nature—attain to a knowledge of soul and spirit. So they want to return to the instincts again in order to understand the child and train him.

But he must go forwards; and there is no other way than to extend anthropology by acquiring Anthroposophy, and sense knowledge by acquiring spiritual knowledge. We have to learn all over again. Men are terrified at the complete change of thought required for this. From unconscious fear they attack Anthroposophy as fantastic, yet it only wants to proceed in the spiritual domain as soberly and as carefully as material science in the physical.

Let us consider the child. About the seventh year of life he develops his second teeth. This is not merely the work of the period of time immediately preceding. It is a process that begins with embryonic development and only concludes with the second teeth. These forces, which produce the second teeth at a certain stage of development, were always active in the child's organism. They do not reveal themselves in this way in subsequent periods of life. Further teeth formations do not occur. Yet the forces concerned have not been lost; they continue to work; they have merely been transformed. They have undergone a metamorphosis. (There are still other forces in the child's organism which undergo metamorphosis in a similar way.)

If we study in this way the development of the child's organism we discover that these forces are active before the change of teeth. They are absorbed in the processes of nourishment and growth. They live in undivided unity with the body, freeing themselves from it about the seventh year. They live on as soul forces; we find them active in the older child in feeling and thinking.

Anthroposophy shows that an etheric organism permeates the physical organism of man. Up to the seventh year the whole of this etheric organism is active in the physical. But now a portion of the etheric organism becomes free from direct activity in the physical. It acquires a certain independence, becoming thereby an independent vehicle of the soul life, relatively free from the physical organism.

In earth life, however, soul experience can only develop with the help of this etheric organism. Hence the soul is quite embedded in the body before the seventh year. To be active during this period, it must express itself through the body. The child can only come into relationship with the outer world when this relationship takes the form of a stimulus which runs its course within the body. This can only be the case when the child imitates. Before the change of teeth the child is a purely imitative being in the widest sense. His training must consist in this: that those around him perform before him what he is to imitate.

The child's educator should experience within himself what it is to have the whole etheric organism within the physical. This gives him knowledge of the child. With abstract principles alone one can do nothing. Educational practice requires an anthroposophical art of education to work out in detail how the human being reveals himself as a child.

Just as the etheric organism is embedded in the physical until the change of teeth, so, from the change of teeth until puberty, there is embedded in the physical and etheric a soul organism, called the astral organism by Anthroposophy. As a result of this the child develops a life that no longer expends itself in imitation. But he cannot yet govern his relation to others in accordance with fully conscious thoughts regulated by intellectual judgment. This first becomes possible when, at puberty, a part of the soul organism frees itself from the corresponding part of the etheric organism. From his seventh to his fourteenth or fifteenth year the child's life is not mainly determined by his relation to those around him in so far as this results from his power of judgment. It is the relation which comes through authority that is important now.

This means that, during these years, the child must look up to someone whose authority he can accept as a matter of course. His whole education must now be fashioned with reference to this. One cannot build upon the child's power of intellectual judgment, but one should perceive clearly that the child wants to accept what is put before him as true, good and beautiful, because the teacher, whom he takes for his model, regards it as true, good and beautiful.

Moreover the teacher must work in such a way that he not merely puts before the child the True, the Good and the Beautiful, but—in a sense—is these. What the teacher is passes over into the child, not what he teaches. All that is taught should be put before the child as a concrete ideal. Teaching itself must be a work of art, not a matter of theory.

This article was written during 1919. In the Collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's works, the volume containing the German texts is entitled, Der Goetheanumgedanke Inmitten der Kulturkrisis der Gegenwart. Gesammelte Aufsaetze aus der Wochenschrift “Das Goetheanum” 1921 – 1925 (Vol. 36 in the Bibliographic Survey, 1961). Published in Anthroposophy: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Scienceby kind permission of Frau Marie Steiner, from Das Goetheanum, July 23rd, 1922.

People talk of the ‘spirit of a language,’ but it could hardly be said that there are many at the present day for whom the conception, so expressed, presents any very clear picture to the mind's eye. What they mean when they use these words, are general characteristic peculiarities in the formation of words and sounds, in the turn of sentences and the handling of imagery. Whatever ‘spirituality’ there may be exists in their minds alone and never goes beyond abstractions. As for anything worthy of the name of ‘Spirit’—they never get so far as that.

There are, however, two ways we can take to find the ‘Spirit’ of language to-day in all its living force. One of these ways is discovered by the soul which pushes on beyond mere conceptual thinking to that seeing which reveals the life and being of things. This kind of sight is an inner experience, an inward realisation of a spiritual actuality which must not be confounded with any vague, mystic sensation of a general ‘something.’ It is an actuality that contains nothing sensibly perceptible, but is no less ‘substantial’ in the spiritual sense.

In this kind of sight the seer travels far away from anything that can be expressed in language. What he sees cannot directly find its way to the lips. He clutches at words and has at once the feeling that the substance of his vision is changed. And—if he is bent on telling others about it—now begins his battle with the language. There is no possible form of speech that he does not press into his service to make a picture of what he has seen. Chimes and reminiscences of sounds, turns and twists of phrasing—he leaves nothing unexplored within the realms of the sayable. It is a hard inner struggle. And finally he has to say to himself: ‘This language is obstinate and has a will of its own. It says every conceivable thing in its own fashion. You will have to “give in” to it and humour it if you want it to accept your observations and receive them into itself.’ When we come to mould in speech what we have seen in spirit, then we find that we are dealing, not with a mass of soft wax that allows itself to be modeled into any form, but that we have to do with a living Spirit—the Spirit of language, the ‘Speech-Spirit.’

And, if it is honestly fought out in this manner, the battle may end excellently, indeed quite delightfully. For there comes a moment when we feel: ‘The Spirit of the language has laid hold of what I saw, has taken it up!’ The very words and turns of phrase in themselves take on something of a spiritual nature. They cease to be mere signs of what they usually ‘signify’ and slip into the very form of the thing seen. And then begins something like living intercourse with the Spirit of the language. The language takes on a personal quality. We feel that we can, as it were, discuss things with it, come to terms with it, as we should with another human being.

That is one way by which we may begin to feel the Spirit of language as a living being. We come to the second way, as a rule, by going through the first. But this is not necessary and we can quite well take it independently. We are well on this second path when we realise the original, concrete significance of words and idioms that have come in the present day to have a merely abstract character, and feel them in all their first, fresh, visual meaning. We speak to-day, for instance, of an ‘inborn conviction,’ and say also that a conviction is ‘born in upon’ us. When we say in the present day, ‘I have an inborn conviction,’ we feel that the soul is already in the position of having laboured through to the inner verification of a thing. We have already learnt to feel ourselves detached from and ‘outside’ words.

But if we feel our way back into the word again, there rises up, as a similar process on different planes, the bringing-to-birth in the body and the bringing-to-birth in the soul. We have visibly before us what actually goes on in the soul when a conviction is ‘born in’ upon it. Take another instance. We say of a person who is affable and obliging, that he is ready to ‘fall in’ with others. Such expressions open up a wealth of inner life. A person who is prone to falling loses his balance, takes leave of his consciousness. And one who is ready to ‘fall in’ with others lets himself go for the time being, sinks his own consciousness in that of the other. He goes through inwardly, something not altogether remote from what is meant by ‘falling down in a faint.’

If we have a healthy sense for such things, if we feel them in a genuine, matter-of-fact way and are not merely playing a clever game with words or trying to find ingenious arguments for debatable theories, then we are driven finally to admit to ourselves that in the formation of language there does dwell Intelligence, Reason, Spirit. It is not a Spirit that has been put there first by man's consciousness, but a Spirit that works in the subconsciousness and that man finds already there before him in the language as he learns it. And by this road man can really come to understand how their own spirit is a creation of the Spirit of language, of the ‘Speech-Spirit.’

On this road, the necessary conditions for getting to the Speech-Spirit are all there. The results of modern research contain everything requisite. And a great deal indeed has already been done. What is needed now is the conscious construction of a psychological science of language.

It is, however, not so much our concern here to point out whatever may be needed in this direction, as to indicate things that have a practical bearing on life. Anyone who considers such facts as the above and looks at them all round, must come to recognise that deeply hidden in language there is something that leads out and beyond it to something higher, something that is over language—to the Spirit itself. And this Spirit is not such that in the manifold languages it too can be manifold. It lives within them all as a single unity.

This spiritual unity amongst the languages is lost when they shed their first native, elemental vitality and are seized by the spirit of abstraction. Then comes the time when a man in speaking no longer has within him the Spirit, but only the verbal clothing of the Spirit. It is quite a different matter for a man's soul whether, in using such expressions as the above, he feels within him the picture of what actually takes place between two people when one, let us say, ‘falls in’ with the other—or whether he only attaches to the phrase a conventional, abstract notion of the relation between them.

The more directly abstract men's sense of language becomes, the more their souls become cut off from one another. Whatever is abstract is peculiar to the individual. He elaborates it for himself and lives in it as in something identified with his own private ego. This element of abstractedness, it is true, is only perfectly to be achieved in the world of concepts; but to some degree a very near approach to it has been made in words and phrases as actually sensed and used, especially in the languages of civilised nations.

But in the age in which we are now living, in face of all that tends towards the disseverance of men and peoples, every bond that links them together must be consciously fostered. For even between men who speak different tongues, that which divides them falls away when each sees and feels the visible reality imaged in his own form of speech. To awaken the slumbering ‘Speech-Spirit’ in each language should be an important element in all social education.

Anyone who turns his mind to such matters must find how much the prosecution of any movement—of what people to-day call social movements—depends on watching the living process of men's souls, not on mere thinking and studying over external institutions and schemes. In face of the tendency towards the separation of peoples into languages it is one of the most urgent tasks of the times to create a counter-tide towards understanding each other.

There is much talk about ‘Humanism’ in these days, and of cultivating the genuine human principle common to all men. But, for any such tendency to become quite genuine, it needs to be applied seriously to the different concrete provinces of life. Think what it means for anyone who once has felt words and phrases invested with an absolutely distinct and visible reality. How much fuller and keener is the sense a man then has of his own human nature than when language is merely felt in its abstraction! We need not think, of course, when a person sees a picture and says, ‘How delicious!’ that, whilst looking at the picture, he must at the same time have a vision of his joints being loosened until he is in a state of such complete ‘delectation’ that he begins to feel as if his being were dissolved! Still, anyone who has once vividly felt the corresponding picture in his soul, will—when he speaks such words—have a quite different inner experience from one who has never known them as anything but an abstraction.

In the conventional and scientific language of the day, the overtone in the soul must of necessity be abstract, but the undertone should not be abstract too. In primitive stages of civilisation men had a visual sense of language. In its more advanced stages this visual sense of language must be provided by education in order that it may not be wholly lost.

In his book The Three Crises; an Inquiry into the Present Political World Situation, J. J. Ruedorffer offers an exposition of world events which could only be the work of a man whose experience has enabled him to develop an opinion in conformity with facts. From the author's description, it is on every page apparent that he has for long years lived deeply with his ideas in the events taking place around him. He remarks in his Introduction: “This Inquiry was written in May 1920 as a supplement to an enlarged, new edition of my Basic Trends in World Politics. But in accordance with the wishes of my publisher it is now issued as a separate book.”

We may read this book as the confession of a man who asks world history what it has to say concerning the present state of the world. Without any political party prejudices, he seeks a reply to this question. But his opening words express only despair: “Without comprehension my contemporaries stand confronting world events. What is happening, from what causes, and to what end? This best of all worlds was, to be sure, intelligent up to the present, and has now fallen into a state of insanity. Revolution follows revolution, and peoples rage against themselves. No! the world was neither intelligent until recently, nor has it now suddenly fallen prey to insanity. Civilization has been cleft from the beginning by a gaping abyss. There are periods of history which conceal it under all sorts of underbrush. There are human generations which either walk along its edges carefree or try to deny its existence by closing their eyes; and there are other generations which, when compelled to gaze into its depths, wish to turn away, shuddering, yet are unable to do so. From an age of the first kind we have entered an age of the second.”

Three present-day crises are described by the author. Evidence of the first he sees in the position into which nations—especially the European—have been forced, and in which they find it impossible to arrange their mutual relationships without clashes. A second crisis is evident to him in the fact that the governments of the various states have gradually lost their power to the contending political parties, so that what happens does not depend upon the governments, but upon the mechanism in the play of party-influence. A third crisis is apparent in the sum total of the social strivings which press up to the surface from the subconscious depths of the masses, who have no insight into the results of their own efforts, indeed, who, in their very desire to bring about an improvement in the present conditions of life, themselves destroy the possibility of a general social community of human beings.

At the conclusion of each one of the three chapters dealing with these three crises stands a confession of despair, summarizing the content of the author's research. The first chapter concludes thus: “The untenable condition of Europe before the war has now become, through war and peace, a hundredfold more untenable. At that time a grand but thoughtless state of prosperity—in danger of being wrecked one fine day because of the instability of the European balance of power—was threatened with being swallowed by a world war. It was to the common interest of the European peoples to avoid this world war. Lack of insight into their common interest, lack of cool political leadership—independent of demagogues, and able to survey the common danger—finally permitted it to break out. The war is now over; it has ruined every single nation on the European continent and to the last degree disorganized the whole. The peoples of Europe, unable under present conditions even to live, to say nothing of healing the wounds of war, are individually and collectively confronted with a choice either of finding and following with determination new ways, or of perishing completely.”

Of the second crisis he says the following: “This sickness of the political organism deprives the reasonable of leadership and permits the handing over of political decisions to manifold.

irrelevant, subordinate, and private interests. It limits the freedom of movement, disperses the political will, and, besides this, is followed in most cases by a dangerous governmental instability. The period of unruly nationalism before the war, the, war itself, the condition of Europe after the war, have all placed enormous demands on the reasoning ability of the states, on their calmness, and on their freedom of movement. The fact that, with the increase of their tasks, the nations' ability to master them did not also increase but decreased, has completed the catastrophe. If democracy is to endure, it must be honest and courageous enough to state the facts, although by so doing it appears to testify against itself; Europe stands face to face with ruin!”

In the third chapter we find the following: “It is a profound tragedy how every attempt at a better handling of affairs, every word of reform, is caught in the meshes of this catastrophe and over and over ensnared, so that it finally falls to the ground without effect; how the European bourgeoisie, either thoughtlessly clinging to a false notion of the age—continued progress of mankind—or just plodding along the customary road, lamenting their lot, do not see and do not want to see that they are nourished by the stored up energy of previous years, and scarcely capable of recognizing the infirmities of the present world-order, to say nothing of bringing forth out of themselves a new one; how, on the other hand, the proletariat, becoming in nearly all countries ever more radical, convinced of the un- tenability of the present state of affairs, and believing themselves the bringers of salvation by sponsoring a new world order, are in reality, only the unconscious instruments of destruction and ruin, including even their own. The new parasites of economic disorganization, the complaining opulent of yesterday, the petit-bourgeois sinking to the level of the proletarian, the credulous worker laboring under the delusion that he can establish a new world-order, all seem embraced by the same catastrophe, all seem to be blind men digging their own graves.”

We would not turn aside from this confession so distressed, did the writer's style and attitude betray the literary observer, rather than the practical man who wants to write factually because he feels himself standing in the midst of events. After one has read the three chapters speaking of the downfall of civilization, the anxious soul asks: how does the author of such an exposition think about the question: What ought to happen?

In answer we read: “Only a change of the world's mind, a change of will in the participating Great Powers, can create a Supreme European Council based on reason.”

There is no indication how this “change of mind,” this “change of will,” is to be accomplished. Even after such a stirring insight into the impossibility of continuing with the old ideas, there is no evidence of the courage required to seek the conditions upon which recovery depends. If we seek these conditions, we come to what has often been expressed in this magazine [The Goetheanum]: The social organization of mankind has at all times received its nourishment from the spiritual content of the human evolutionary stream. Ideas which should sustain the social organization, as well as the economic life, must stem from the union of men's souls with an actual spirit-world. Otherwise these thoughts are merely intellectual. But the sense for such a union with the spirit-world is lacking in just such a personality as the author of the Three Crises. He is able to think about what his senses perceive, and about what his intellect can combine from those perceptions. Beyond this—only a blank. For after this negative confession another confession should come forth; namely: old ideas were created out of living spirit, and have, indeed, fulfilled their mission; we cannot continue to be nourished by the “stored up” ideas of earlier periods. New ideas must be born; to accomplish which, a union with the spirit-world is a necessity. But to such a continuance of the confession belongs the courage not only to speak of “change of mind” and “change of will,” but to acknowledge that mankind's turning away from a vivid experience of the spirit has led to the impossibility of recognizing in full consciousness the reasons for the catastrophe that threatens, although these are seen. Mr. Ruedorffer sees clearly enough; but he does not understand what he sees. Only the sustaining power of ideas born of the spirit, ideas which permit warmth to flow into human souls, which permit the human being to look upward from earth-bound daily labor to his world mission, to his relationship with the universe, only the sustaining power of such ideas will guide his hand to fruitful work and enable him to establish a human brotherhood. Today the world disdains those who speak thus of the spirit. Civilization, however, will recover its health only at the cessation of this disdain.

We may speak of a “three-membering” of the physical human organism: the nerve-sense organism, the rhythmic organism, and the metabolic-limb organism. We must acknowledge that the two other organisms decay when the metabolic organism no longer brings real substances to the whole. In the social organism a reversed condition prevails. This organism is composed of the economic, the politico-rights, and the spiritual organisms. The other two decay when the spiritual organism does not receive real ideas, born of spiritual experience, and impart them to the other two. Just as the human body needs real substance to sustain it, so does the human social organism need real spirit.

There are still people of the present day who confess something like fear of the spirit. These people are inclined to scent superstition, sentimental enthusiasm, lack of scientific method, when someone speaks of the spiritual world, not just in superficial phrases, but in a manner that indicates its real content—an accepted procedure when speaking of nature and history. Only when this secret fear is overcome can we know what really is contained in present world events. If the conquest is not achieved, we stop short at mere seeing. The book in review speaks only of this sort of seeing.

For decades it has been the conviction of many people that scientific materialism must be superseded. When opinions are expressed on this subject, they usually refer to the mode of thought current in the 19th Century, which was considered inseparable from a true scientific attitude. To this mode of thought any mention of spirit and soul as beings who may be observed independent of their material conditions was unscientific. Only when the human being was observing material processes did he feel himself standing on solid scientific ground. The development of spirit and soul was seen in connection with material processes; and, by pointing to these material processes which take place during spiritual and psychic phenomena, people believed they did the only thing scientifically possible.

There have always been thoughtful people who did not believe it possible to gain knowledge of the spirit and soul by means of the mode of thought characterized above. There were many, however, who could not concede that science as such can speak of anything but the material conditions of the spiritual and psychic. Under this trend of thought, psychology slipped into the habit of merely describing the processes in the nervous system. Thus, what can be observed by means of the senses was made the basis for gaining knowledge concerning the soul.

Today there are many who hold that by this method of consideration the soul is lost to human perception. It is felt that in observing the life of the nerves we are confronted with the merely material, and that the latter cannot give answers to questions which spirit and soul must ask about themselves.

There are today scientific thinkers, worthy of being taken seriously, who as a result of such feelings forsake the materialistic point of view and come to the conviction that the spiritual must be thought of as effective within the material.

In the middle of the 19th Century it was the common belief that, by overcoming the old conception of “life-force,” great scientific progress had been made. According to this conception, a special force is active within the life processes, capable of drawing into its sphere physical and chemical agencies in such a way that life is called forth. This conception was rejected. The physical and chemical were thought to be so constituted as to be able—in their complicated formations—to reveal themselves as life. There was the sustaining hope that gradually clear concepts of these complicated formations might be evolved

The thinkers of today who again hold that underlying, file there is something special, which employs the physical and chemical for the purpose of higher activity, find themselves dis appointed in this hope.

New hope is linked to what is undertaken in regard to the problem. The unprejudiced observer, however, must oppose this with the same reasoning which in the 19th Century led to discarding the prevalent conception of a “life-force.” The reasoning ran thus: The kind of thinking which permits the clear survey of relationships in the physical and chemical spheres loses itself, when it speaks of “life-force,” in the unclear and nebulous. It was recognized that the approach which leads to physical and chemical relationships cannot lead to the “mystical” life-force.

What was thus recognized was thoroughly justified. And when those entertaining new hopes in the sense indicated will have gained full clarity in the matter, they will have arrived at the same conclusions which in the 19th Century led to a rejection of “life-force.”

A healthy development is possible in this connection only it we recognize that the mode of thought fully justified in the realm of the physical and chemical must be transformed when we advance to a consideration of the regions of life, soul, and spirit. The human being must first transform his thinking, it he would acquire the right to speak about these regions scientifically.

Anthroposophy rests upon this basis. It does not, therefore, feel compelled to destroy the scientific edifice of physics and chemistry in order to build with the same thought-methods something different. It holds that this edifice of science has been established on secure foundations, but that within it must not seek life, soul, and spirit.

If this be true, say those passing superficial judgment, then Anthroposophy places itself outside of science and may claim for itself, at best, certainty of belief.

Anyone who talks that way is not turning vigorously from a consideration of nature back to a consideration of the human being. At the present time, our manner of observing the physical and chemical is based upon a particular constitution of the human soul. And scientific certainty is not the result of something revealed by nature, but of an inner experience of observation. What is experienced by the soul while observing nature gives certainty. Anthroposophical knowledge advances from this to other soul experiences which may be ours if thinking, trained in physical and chemical science, has transformed itself and acquired the faculty of imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive perception. And the latter experiences of the soul permit a similar certainty to gleam forth.

Those who deny the certainty of these other forms of knowledge fail to tell us why they admit the certainty of physics and chemistry. From habit they give themselves up to the latter and reject what has not become a fixed habit. Anthroposophy asks: Why do we accept as certain the knowledge of physics and chemistry? It sees the reason in a particular mode of soul experience. It acquires this mode as a guiding line for knowledge. And it does not deviate from it even when, through transformed thinking, it tries to gain truths concerning life, soul, and spirit.

For this reason, Anthroposophy is fully able to acknowledge the mode of thought which in physics and chemistry has led to the most significant results in the modern age. It is even obliged to credit materialism with the development of that mode of human perception which leads to sound judgment in the sphere of the non-living. But it is likewise obliged to consider it impossible for this mode of perception to establish anything but physics and chemistry. But whoever takes pains to make clear to himself how such a mode of perception comes into being can see that, with the same inner certainty, other modes are possible: those for the regions of life, soul, and spirit. The person who does not treat science as something external to which he accustoms himself, but experiences it in inner clarity, cannot stop short at the physical and chemical realm; for to him the metamorphosis of sensuous and intellectual knowledge into the forms of imagination, inspiration, and intuition is nothing bill an advancement of the child's form to that of the adult The same forces are active in the adult as in the child. The same scientific method is employed in the knowledge of life, soul, and spirit as in physics and chemistry.