The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Goethe

[ 1 ] A vast span of time must be bridged if the spiritual gaze is to turn from that great figure—Zarathrustra or Zoroaster, who was the subject of the last lecture in this cycle—to those three great figures who will form the basis of our reflections today. From events that lie millennia before our Christian era—and which we could only understand by assuming that people in those times possessed entirely different states of mind—we move forward to the sixteenth, seventeenth centuries of our era, in which the spirit that has remained active and dynamic right up to the present in all of humanity’s forward-moving cultural currents first shone forth. We shall then see how this spirit, which shone so powerfully in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through figures such as Giordano Bruno and Galileo, subsequently found, in a certain sense, a comprehensive expression in a figure as close to us as Goethe. Galileo and Giordano Bruno are the two names we must mention when we reflect on the beginning of that epoch in human development in which the natural sciences stood at the same turning point at which the spiritual sciences stand today. What was accomplished back then in such a powerful way for scientific thinking must, in a certain sense, happen for spiritual scientific thinking in the course of the coming times. This will become particularly clear to us when—in order to understand Galileo and Giordano Bruno in the fullest sense of the word—we turn our gaze to the entire way of thinking and feeling of humanity during the period in which Galileo and Giordano Bruno lived, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

[ 2 ] Here, however, we must look back on what was initially a rather peculiar representation of what, for the preceding centuries—roughly from the eleventh to the fifteenth century—was broadly referred to as science. One must realize that for these centuries, the popularization—the general dissemination—of scientific knowledge must have taken a very different form than it did later in our time. For we are speaking here of centuries in which printing did not yet exist, in which the vast majority of people were dependent on receiving as their intellectual life only what was conveyed through the spoken word in churches, schools, or similar institutions. That is why it is particularly significant for that period to form a picture of what scholarly and scientific activity was like. In the times that preceded the era of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, scholarly activity can be difficult for people today to comprehend; one can understand it only if one is able to immerse oneself in something entirely different from what is commonplace today. Back then, one could have walked into any lecture hall—anywhere where science was being practiced—say, the natural sciences in this or that field, including medicine and so on—and one would have heard that whoever wished to present something from the science of that time did not, for example, rely on what had been observed at that time in this or that institute, as is the case today where scientific methods are followed, but rather on something that underlay everything that had been presented and all scientific endeavor—namely, the ancient writings of Aristotle, who was indeed of immeasurable significance for his time. Aristotle towers like an intellectual giant when one considers the progress of humanity from a historical perspective. What he accomplished in his time is of immeasurable significance. What interests us now, however, is that Aristotle’s books were often not read at all in the form in which they existed in the original language; rather, the traditional interpretation was taken as the basis everywhere—that set the tone. Whatever was discussed—whether it concerned a principle, a fundamental tenet, or anything that could in any way be considered a truth—people would say: “Aristotle thought such-and-such about this subject.” “That’s what it says in Aristotle!” — Whereas today’s researcher, or anyone who merely presents science itself—or even presents it in a popular style—cites the fact that this or that has been observed here or there, in the centuries of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, people relied on the fact that so many centuries ago, the influential Aristotle had made this or that assertion about this or that subject. Just as today, with regard to spiritual matters, people rely on religious texts and their tradition rather than on direct observation, so too in the sciences of that time people did not rely on nature and its observation, but on tradition—on Aristotle.

[ 3 ] It is extraordinarily interesting to immerse oneself in such a university lecture to see how medical scholars everywhere based their lectures on Aristotle’s theories. Aristotle, however, was an intellectual giant. And even if one were to say that even such an intellectual figure should no longer be presented unchanged after centuries, one can, on the other hand, rightly think: since Aristotle achieved something so significant and magnificent, people must surely have absorbed something meaningful into their minds—even if they had learned nothing new—by having the millennia-old teachings of Aristotle presented to them time and again; for it must have been significant and useful to receive Aristotle’s profoundly illuminating teachings and theories. Yet that was not the case, and the reason was that those who presented these teachings at the time and proclaimed them everywhere in the name of Aristotle generally understood nothing of Aristotle; for, in essence, it was an incredibly misunderstood doctrine that was presented and taught everywhere as “Aristotelian” before Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Today, from the standpoint of spiritual science, I wish to highlight just one point that is intended to show how Galileo and Giordano Bruno had to position themselves within the spiritual life of their time. I have often mentioned this matter—which is not an anecdote but a truth—and therefore wish to draw attention to it once more.

[ 4 ] Among the many scholars who swore by Aristotle was one who was himself a friend of Galileo. Galileo—like Giordano Bruno—was an opponent of the Aristotelians, not of Aristotle himself, and for good reason. Galileo pointed out that one should turn to the great book of nature, which speaks to humankind, and not merely derive from Aristotle’s books what the mind means in nature. Now, the Aristotelians had advocated a peculiar doctrine at that time: that the nerves—the entire human nervous system—originated in the heart, and that from the heart the nerves extended upward to the brain and spread throughout the entire body. That, it was said, was what Aristotle had taught, and that was the truth! Galileo, who wanted to point not to old books and old traditions but to what one sees when examining the human body, pointed out that the nerves originated in the brain, and that the most important nerves had their origin in the brain. Galileo then told his friend that he should see for himself how the nerves originated in the brain. “Yes, I’d like to see that,” said the man in question, and had it demonstrated on a human body. Then this scholar, who believed himself to be a good Aristotelian, was greatly astonished and said to Galileo: “It almost looks as if the nerves originate in the brain, but Aristotle says that the nerves originate in the heart, and if there is a contradiction here, I believe Aristotle and not nature!”

[ 5 ] These were the remarks Galileo heard at the time. Aristotle was invoked in connection with anything that could even remotely be considered science. For example, a scholar with pro-church leanings once wanted to write about the question of immortality. How did people write back then? They took what they wanted to advocate from church doctrine and added what they believed they could cite from Aristotle in order to prove the question at hand one way or another, just as they wanted to prove it. So this man, who was a member of the clergy, had cited all sorts of passages with the intention of piecing together what he believed to be Aristotle’s correct view on the question of immortality. Now, here is another truth: since the clergy were required to submit their books to their superiors, this superior told the man in question: “It is dangerous; it will not be approved, for the excerpts from Aristotle could just as easily prove the opposite.” — The author then wrote back: “If the only issue were to prove even more clearly that Aristotle meant something acceptable, then I would substantiate it with another quotation. For that, too, could be done!” — In short, Aristotle was used and abused in every possible way.

[ 6 ] Building on this, let us examine how Aristotle was misunderstood in the period before Giordano Bruno and Galileo, and let us take precisely this example—the origin of the nerves from the heart—to illustrate this point. One can only understand what lies behind this if one knows that Aristotle, who stood at the end of ancient Greek culture, also stood at the end of that era in which the ancient clairvoyant consciousness had reigned. And as Aristotle looked back to his own past, he had inherited a science that had been born out of a clairvoyant consciousness which looked beyond the sensory world into the spiritual world. This consciousness had brought about the ancient sciences. And what was ancient science—what had also been passed down through Greek civilization as ancient science—Aristotle, who was no longer able to develop such clairvoyant consciousness himself and possessed only an intellectual consciousness, had recorded as its final manifestation. This is something to reflect upon. For it is not without reason that Aristotle is regarded as the founder of logic in history! He is so regarded because intellectual, deductive thinking became the dominant mode of thought. Aristotle was thus the one who took up ancient teachings and organized them into a logical system in his writings, so that we can understand many of his ideas only when we know what is actually meant by them. And when Aristotle speaks of nerves, we must not take this word in the same way our age does, nor in the way it was understood in the age of Galileo and Giordano Bruno—which is, after all, quite similar to our own—but we must understand the following. When Aristotle speaks of the course of the nerves, he has in mind what we today recognize as the supersensible component of human nature most closely connected to the physical body: the human etheric body. This is something that, with the advancement of human consciousness, has gradually been lost from what the human being can perceive. Aristotle could no longer see it either, but he adopted this view from the times when clairvoyant consciousness perceived not only the physical body but also the etheric aura—the etheric body—which is the actual builder and source of strength for the physical body. Aristotle drew his teaching from the times when people perceived the etheric body just as the eye now perceives colors. And if one looks not at the physical body but at the etheric body, then the starting point for certain currents—which Aristotle took as the basis for what we usually associate with the term “nerve”—is indeed not the brain but the region of the heart. Thus, Aristotle was not referring to our modern-day nerves, but rather to thoroughly supersensible currents, supersensible forces that emanate from the heart, flow toward the brain, and radiate in various directions throughout the human body. These are things that spiritual science alone can make comprehensible again through the knowledge of the supersensible parts and members of human nature.

[ 7 ] Now, since people were not capable of seeing with their inner senses, even in the times preceding the era of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, they no longer had any idea that Aristotle was referring to etheric currents; they believed he was referring to the physical nerves, and therefore claimed: Aristotle said that the physical nerves originate in the heart. That was the view of the Aristotelians. But those who knew what was written in the Book of Nature could not concede this to the Aristotelians. Hence the great controversy between Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and the Aristotelians, since no one understood the true Aristotle—not even, of course, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, who made no effort to delve into the original Aristotle. Nevertheless, they were the great bearers of culture for their age and pointed beyond book learning to the great Book of Nature—Nature, which is spread out before us all.

[ 8 ] A man—as I have mentioned before—whom I hold in high esteem as a philosopher, who served as rector of the University of Vienna in 1894 and delivered an inaugural address on Galileo, Laurenz Müllner, pointed out in that speech that Galileo, in his immense greatness, used his intellect to fathom the great laws of mechanics and the effects of space—the very things that strike us most and speak to our hearts when, for example, we behold St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. When this mighty structure makes an impression on us, then indeed everyone experiences something that we can understand. I would like to illustrate this with a small fact that is, after all, indicative of this point.

[ 9 ] Once, the Viennese cultural columnist Speidel and the sculptor Natter were traveling to the Rome area. As they approached Rome, Speidel heard a very strange remark from Natter, who was, in a certain sense, a brilliant mind. Suddenly, Natter jumped to his feet, and his friend had no idea what was actually going on with him; he only heard the words: “I’m getting scared!” It wasn’t until later, when Natter fell silent, that he realized Natter had seen the tower and dome of St. Peter’s Basilica from a great distance.

[ 10 ] A sense of wonder at the spatial distribution of forces—which sprang from Michelangelo’s genius—can overcome anyone who sees this unique structure. Laurenz Müllner then drew attention to the fact that, thanks to Galileo—that great thinker—humanity has been given the ability to conceive, through mathematics and mechanics, such spatial distributions as we encounter in the beautiful structure of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. At the same time, however, it must be emphasized that Galileo, who discovered the laws of mechanics, was born almost at the very hour of Michelangelo’s death—the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica. In other words, it was from Michelangelo’s intellectual powers that the distribution of spatial forces arose, a concept that only later became intellectually accessible to humanity.

[ 11 ] This example helps us understand that what we might call rational, intellectual knowledge can come much later than the arrangement of these things in space. If such a thing is ever truly considered from a philosophical perspective, then people will be more inclined to believe that human consciousness has undergone a change: that people once possessed a certain clairvoyance, and that the mode of thinking through the intellect does not go back that far at all, but rather that, due to very specific historical necessities, this mode of thinking could only emerge during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. And minds such as Galileo and Giordano Bruno were the first to set the tone for what was to come. Hence their strong opposition to the Aristotelians and, in particular, to those who first misinterpreted Aristotle—who could be seen as an expression of ancient science—and then applied him to nature in this way. This also defines Galileo’s place in the world. Oh, Galileo was, in the highest sense of the word, the one who first introduced to humanity that kind of rigorous scientific thinking—one might say, that kind of relationship between natural science and mathematics—which has set the tone for the entire subsequent period right up to our own time. What is unique about Galileo? Galileo—entirely a child of his time in this regard—was the first to say the following to himself with bold courage. I assure you, such words can describe the feeling Galileo had, for to grasp the whole soul, the whole disposition of Galileo’s mind, one must describe what he felt something like this: Here we stand as human beings on Earth. Nature spreads out before us with everything it can offer our senses and our intellect, which is bound to the instrument of the brain. Through nature—as Galileo says in countless passages of his writings—a divine-spiritual force speaks. We humans look at nature with our eyes and perceive it with our other senses. But what our eyes perceive there, what is sensed through our senses, has been thought into nature by divine-spiritual beings. First come the thoughts of the divine-spiritual beings; then—emerging from the thoughts of these divine-spiritual beings—come the sensory phenomena of nature as revelations of God’s thoughts; and then comes our faculty of perception, above all our intellect, which is bound to our brain. Then we stand there to decipher how the letters form a book and how what the author intended—that is, what the divine thoughts expressed in nature—comes into being.

[ 12 ] Galileo certainly shared the view held by all the great minds in the history of human development, namely, that natural phenomena and facts contain something like letters that express the spirit of divine-spiritual beings. The human spirit, then, exists to read what the divine-spiritual beings have inscribed into the forms of minerals, into the course of natural phenomena, and even into the course of the movements of the stars. Human nature exists to read what the divine spirit has conceived. The only difference between the divine spirit and the human spirit, in the sense Galilei meant, is that for the divine spirit, everything that exists to be thought is conceived at once, unlimited by space and time, in a single instant.

[ 13 ] If we consider just one field—the field of mathematics—we will already see how peculiar this idea was. Just imagine: if someone were to use all of mathematics, as far as it has already been studied by humans, they would have to struggle for a long time before mastering it. Those sitting here will know how much the human understanding of mathematical concepts depends on time. Now Galileo thought to himself: What humans grasp over the course of long periods of time is present to the divine mind in an instant; it is not limited by space and time. The human mind—he thought—must above all not believe that, with its intellect—which is bound by space and time—it can quickly grasp the divine mind; rather, it must strive to observe step by step, to observe the individual phenomena with clarity. It must not believe that one can skim over the individual phenomena, that one can skip over what God has conceived as the foundation of these phenomena. Galileo said to himself: It is a sorry state of affairs when thinkers do not wish to arrive at the truth through rigorous observation of what nature spreads out before our minds, but instead seek to arrive at the truth quickly through speculation, by skimming over the individual things. — But Galileo said this for reasons other than those for which it is often said today. For Galileo did not wish to limit the human spirit to observations because he denied that the great Spirit stands behind them with “preconceived ideas,” but because this divine Spirit appeared to him so great, mighty, and sublime precisely because everything that exists in terms of “preconceived ideas” exists is present in an instant, whereas the human mind needs an infinite amount of time to lovingly decipher the letters in order to gradually get to the bottom of the individual thoughts. Out of humility regarding how far the human mind falls short of the divine mind, Galileo admonished his contemporaries: You can no longer see beyond the surface of things—not because humans are incapable of doing so, but because the time for that has passed. Observation, experience, and independent thought were what Galileo held up as the guiding principles for his contemporaries. He was able to do this because, in a certain sense, his mind was entirely mathematically ordered, because he possessed such a truly mathematical way of thinking. It is truly marvelous, for example, when we hear how Galileo learned that something like telescopes had been discovered in Holland—devices through which one could gaze out into the farthest reaches of the heavens. One must bear in mind that there were no newspapers back then. Galileo heard travelers recount that something like telescopes had been discovered in Holland. When he heard such a thing, the idea came to him on its own—it wouldn’t leave him alone—and he invented a telescope on his own. It was this telescope with which Galileo made his great discoveries, which fit into what had recently come about through the Copernican system of the world. To truly understand this period, one must consider two things together: the first was that people no longer understood anything of the old supernatural science, and that Galileo was a pioneer of the new science. And the second was that, with regard to the stars, it was significant that Copernicus had, immediately prior to this, given the worldview a new face through his abstract thinking about the movements of the planets around the sun. One need only put oneself in the position of the people of that time and into the minds of those who, for millennia, had believed as human beings: Here—with this Earth—we stand firmly in space! And now this way of thinking had been turned completely upside down: the Earth moving around the Sun at tremendous speed! That was a thought that literally pulled the ground out from under people’s feet. It is no wonder that such an idea made such a tremendous impression; indeed, it had a profound effect on everyone—whether they opposed it or agreed with it. For minds like Galileo’s, the reason why Copernicus had arrived at this view was particularly decisive. Let us consider why Copernicus had arrived specifically at this view of the planets’ motion around the Sun.

[ 14 ] Until then, a cosmological system had prevailed that people had not understood either, because it was actually meant to be conceptual. As people understood it, it was a completely impossible idea: this Ptolemaic cosmological system. For one had to imagine that the planets described highly complicated movements—circles within circles within circles. It was especially the immense complexity of the concepts that one had to embrace. That was what such minds could not quite come to terms with. Copernicus, in essence, did not make any new astronomical discovery either. He simply said to himself: Let’s take the simplest idea of how we can explain the motions! — He placed the entire worldview within the simplicity of this idea. It was something magnificent when the Sun was placed at the center, and the planets moved around it in circles, or, as Kepler later demonstrated, in ellipses. The entire worldview was magnificently simplified! That was what particularly convinced Galileo. For he always emphasized: It is fitting for the human mind to recognize the truth in simplicity. It is not complexity, but simplicity that is beautiful—and the true is beautiful!

[ 15 ] Because of its beauty and the beauty found in its simplicity, the Copernican model of the universe was widely accepted at the time. And Galileo found, in particular, the simplicity and beauty he sought in Copernicus. Now he stood there, seeing what people could scarcely bring themselves to believe: he saw Jupiter’s moons! Yes, Galileo’s eye was the first to see Jupiter’s moons, which orbit Jupiter just as the planets orbit the Sun—a small solar system: Jupiter with its moons, just as the Sun has its planets. This served to confirm a cosmological system built entirely on the concept of the sensory world. Thus it was Galileo who, in particular, viewed Copernicus’s ideas on a small scale within the sensory world. This made him, in particular, a pioneer of modern science. It was he who first had a hunch that there were mountains on the Moon, that there were sunspots, and that what appears as a streak of nebula passing over the stars is a world of scattered stars. In short, all that emerged was what one might call an “informed” manifestation of divine wisdom expressed within the sensory world. That was what had such a profound effect on Galileo. The era that sought to be wholly absorbed in the contemplation of the sensory world held something very special for Galileo and his mind, which was grounded in mathematics. And so Galileo became the one who, in a sense, gave humanity the first impulse to say: We cannot, at least for now, see beyond this sensory veil with our ordinary consciousness. The supersensible is not accessible to any human sense, nor to the human intellect. The divine intellect encompasses it outside of space and time. The human intellect is bound to space and time. So let us hold fast to what is given to the human intellect within space and time!

[ 16 ] Since Galileo was able to accomplish so many great things, he is in fact—if we may put it that way—one of the most important pioneers of humanity’s modern intellectual development. Is it any wonder, then, that we see in Galileo the spirit that sought to clarify for itself how sensory phenomena actually relate to human beings and their inner lives? Indeed, popular accounts often claim that Kant was the first, so to speak, to point out that the world around us is merely an appearance, and that one cannot penetrate to the “thing-in-itself.” In a slightly different way than Kant, Galileo had already pointed to this idea, except that he saw the all-encompassing idea of the divine-spiritual behind all sensory phenomena and assumed—out of humility, not on principle—that human beings could only approach it over the course of long periods of time. But Galileo said: When we see a color, it makes an impression—for example, red. Is the red in the things themselves? — Galileo used a very telling analogy that simultaneously reveals how false the idea is; but that is not the point; rather, the point is to grasp the idea as a concept of time. He said: Take a feather and tickle a person on the sole of the foot or the palm of the hand: the person then feels a tickle. “Is the tickling sensation in the feather?” he asked. “No, it is something entirely subjective. There is something entirely different in the feather. And just as the tickling sensation is something subjective, so too is the red that exists out there in the world.” — Galileo compared colors—and even sounds—to the tickling sensation produced by the feather on the sole of the foot.

[ 17 ] If we consider this, we can see that even in Galileo there is already a glimpse of what has come to be known as modern philosophy, because modern philosophy doubts the possibility that human beings could in any way penetrate beyond the veil of the sensory world.

[ 18 ] If we see in Galileo the calm, firmly grounded trailblazer, then in the slightly older Giordano Bruno—Galileo was born in 1564— Giordano Bruno in 1548—we encounter a man who, in his very personality and in his wholeness, directly reflects everything that drew the human souls of that era—in Copernicus, in Galileo himself, and indeed in the great truths of the time—toward the great truths. From the spirit of Giordano Bruno, all of this is reflected back to us as if in a powerful, all-encompassing philosophy of mood. How did Giordano Bruno relate to the world—perceiving it, entirely from the spirit of his time, as his own deepest essence?

[ 19 ] Giordano Bruno, for example, said to himself: Aristotle—namely, as he knew the misunderstood Aristotle—had also said that there was a sphere extending up to the moon, then the various stellar spheres, followed by the sphere of the divine-spiritual, and that the moving God was to be found outside the stellar spheres. — Giordano Bruno thus envisioned—in the Aristotelian sense—first the Earth, then the sphere of the Moon and the stars, and only then, beyond this world and beyond that in which human beings live, the divine Spirit, causing this world to revolve and turn in the greatest circle—literally turning within the rotations and movements of the stars. This was a thought that Giordano Bruno could not reconcile with what humanity was now experiencing. What the human senses now perceived—what the mind saw when it looked upon plants, animals, and human beings, when it beheld the mountains, seas, clouds, and stars—appeared to him as an admirable manifestation of that which lives within the divine-spiritual itself. And he wanted to see in what moved there as stars, what drifted through the air as clouds, not merely a manifestation of the divine being, but something that belongs to the divine being just as the fingers or other limbs belong to us. Not a God who acts upon the sensible world from the outside, from the periphery, but a God who is within every single sensible thing, whose body, whose formed form, is the sensory world: that was Giordano Bruno’s fundamental idea. If we wish to understand how he arrived at such a fundamental idea, we must say: It was the delight, the bliss of that entire new era at the time! It had been preceded by a period in which people had merely pored over the old ideas of Aristotle. The leading scholars, when they walked through woods and fields, had no eye for the realms of nature and its beauties, but only an interest in what was written on the parchments, what came from the ancient Aristotle. Now a time had come when nature spoke to humankind—the age of great discoveries, when such mighty minds as Galileo were driven to recognize, face to face, the divine in nature itself. All the delight in this divine aspect, in contrast to the de-divinized nature of the Middle Ages—that had arrived! That was what lived in every fiber of Giordano Bruno’s being.

[ 20 ] “Spirit is everywhere,” he said, "as sensory research shows us, and therefore wherever something sensory presents itself to us, something divine reveals itself to us! There is only one difference between the sensory and the divine: that the sensory—because we are, after all, human beings with limited capacities—appears to us in space and time. — But for Giordano Bruno, behind the sensory lies the divine Spirit—not as he believed it had stood for Aristotle or for the people of the Middle Ages, but independently, except that nature was its body, proclaiming all its glories. Yet human beings cannot grasp the whole Spirit in nature; rather, they see only a fragment here and there. Yet the divine spirit is present in all things, throughout all time and space. That is why Giordano Bruno says: Where is the divine? In every stone, in every leaf—the divine is everywhere, in every form, but especially in those beings that possess a certain degree of autonomy in their existence. — He called such beings, which perceive their autonomy, monads. For him, a monad is that which, as it were, swims and revels in the sea of the Divine. Everything that is a monad is at the same time a mirror of the universe. Thus, Giordano Bruno conceived of the Universal Spirit as fragmented into many monads—in each monad, which was an independent spirit, there was something that perceived the universe like a mirror. One such monad is the human soul, and there are many such monads. Even within the human body there are many monads, not just one. Therefore, if we were to speak the truth about the human body according to Giordano Bruno, we would not see in it the human body as a physical entity, but rather a system of monads. We simply do not see these monads clearly, just as we do not see the individual mosquitoes in a swarm. If we could see clearly, we would perceive the human body as a system of monads, and the principal monad is the human soul. — Regarding life, when it comes into being for the human soul through birth, Giordano Bruno says that the other monads belonging to the soul then gather together, thereby making possible the experiences of the principal monad, the soul monad. When death occurs, the secondary monads are released by the principal monad and disperse. Birth is the gathering of many monads around a principal monad. For Giordano Bruno, death is the separation of the secondary monads from a principal monad, so that the principal monad can assume another form. For every monad is called upon to assume not only the one form we recognize here, but all forms that are possible in the universe. Giordano Bruno envisions a passage through all forms. In this way, he comes as close as possible—born solely out of enthusiasm—to the idea of the reincarnation of the human soul.

[ 21 ] And with regard to the conception of reality as a whole, Giordano Bruno says: Human beings initially encounter this reality through their normal consciousness. What first confronts them are sensory impressions. This is the first faculty of cognition. But there are four of them, said Giordano Bruno. The first means by which a person can gain knowledge is sensory impressions; the second is the images we form in our imagination when we no longer have the sensory impressions before us but merely recall them. Here we are already delving deeper into the soul, and the sensory impressions themselves are transformed. He calls this second faculty of cognition the “power of imagination,” though one must not think of the meaning of this word in its modern sense, but rather in the sense intended by Giordano Bruno: After a person has absorbed what the sensory impressions can give them, they project themselves—it is a process of “standing within”—into the impressions. It is a turning from the outside toward the inside—not something dreamed up, but something “impressed” from the outside inward. Giordano Bruno then develops the idea that by internalizing things in the mind and proceeding further, a person comes closer to the truth through this very process rather than moving away from it. Therefore, Giordano Bruno recognizes the intellect as the third faculty of cognition. In doing so, he has in mind precisely that moment when we rise above sensory objects and engage in thought, as something higher—something truer than sensory impressions—flows into us from the supersensory world. For Giordano Bruno, the fourth stage is reason. For him, reason is once again a living and active process within the purely spiritual realm.

[ 22 ] Thus, for Giordano Bruno, there is a sequence of four stages of knowledge. However, he does not distinguish between them in the way you might find described, for example, in the book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* as concrete knowledge, imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge, and intuitive knowledge; rather, he distinguishes them in a more abstract way. Therefore, we must understand this to mean that Giordano Bruno stands precisely at the starting point of an era that challenges cognition through sensory perception and thus employs terms that remind us more of the language of ordinary knowledge concerning the sensory world than of that concerning the higher world. But we can see how Giordano Bruno looks up into the spiritual world from his powerful emphasis in the fact that he says: The divine Spirit, which lives in everything, which has its body in everything, possesses what we have as concepts—as the ideas to be contemplated prior to things. What is the world like in God? “How is the spirit in God?” he asks, and says: “The spirit is in God as an idea, as a preconceived thought of the world.” — And how, for him, is the spirit in nature? As form, he says, and by this Giordano Bruno means that what exists in the divine spirit as ideas is present in the crystal, which has a form; in the animal, which has a form; and in the human body, which has a form. And what exists in the things around us as form is present in the human soul as concepts. Indeed, Giordano Bruno puts it even more precisely: The things of nature are the shadows of the divine ideas; and our concepts are the shadows of the divine thoughts! — Mind you: Our concepts, he says, are not the shadows of things, but the shadows of the divine thoughts. —- So when we have the things of nature around us and find in them the shadows of the divine ideas, our concepts are thereby nourished once again. As we conceptualize, the divine Spirit intervenes with its ideas, so that we have, one might say, a current that connects us to the divine ideas. If one looks at scientific theories—what is today asserting itself as monism in such an un-Giordano-Bruno-like manner, what is so glaringly obvious—it is that these theories would have to say, if they were to be consistent: We do not speak of divine thoughts at all! But that is not what Giordano Bruno says. He is a spiritualist in the most eminent sense of the word. What he has to say, born of the genuine enthusiasm of the Renaissance man, concerns the monad—its contraction through birth and its expansion through death—what flows into the world of the imagination from the divine thoughts, and that one single statement: Human thoughts are the shadows of divine thoughts! If one understands this, one has grasped something of Giordano Bruno’s spirituality. But one thing is necessary for this: the call to move beyond the misunderstood Giordano Bruno toward who Giordano Bruno truly was. He was the spirit who, out of exuberant enthusiasm, conveyed to his contemporaries what Galileo had contributed more intellectually to scientific thought. That is why what comes from Giordano Bruno sounds so powerful—as if all the joy, all the rapture of the spirit of that age, which wanted to see how nature weaves and lives in the sensible world, were rejoicing in the spirit of Giordano Bruno. This exultation becomes philosophy in and of itself, because the divine spirit that lives everywhere outside has consciously shone forth in the soul of Giordano Bruno. That is why we understand such words—which rightly deserve special emphasis in Giordano Bruno’s work—as sounding like something nature itself had to say to the people of that time. Let us cite just a few of them.

[ 23 ] How great and wonderful it is when Giordano Bruno expresses this thought in contrast to Aristotle: Not out there, outside the sensory world, but everywhere we look, there is the Spirit, the Spirit of divine intelligence. It is not divine intelligence in something external, not in something of which one might then say: “Something is moving in a wide circle”—it cannot be something that moves about in a circle, but it is more worthy of the divine to be an inner principle of movement that can be seen in everything that exists in nature itself. — That was the language that resounded in that era, speaking from Giordano Bruno’s very soul.

[ 24 ] How can we best convey what has just been said so that it truly speaks to our hearts? A certain thinker has already drawn attention to this fact—though he had to put up with being called an overly enthusiastic admirer of Giordano Bruno—Hermann Brunnhofer—who demonstrated what “results when one expresses, word for word and set only to beautiful verse, what Giordano Bruno says:

Non est Deus vel intelligentia exterior
circumrotans et circumducens;
dignius enim illi debet esse
internum principium motus,
quod est natura propria, species propria,
anima propria,quam habeant tot quot in illius
gremio et corpore vivunt
hoc generali spiritu, corpore,
anima, natura animantia,
plantae, lapides quae universa ut
diximus proportionaliter cum astro
eisdem composita ordine, et eadem
contemperata complexionum, symmetria,
secundum genus, quantumlibet secundum
specierum numeros singula distinguuntur.

What would a God be who merely pushed from the outside,
Making the universe run in a circle on His finger!
It befits Him to move the world from within,
To cherish nature within Himself, and Himself within nature,
So that what lives, weaves, and is within Him,
Never lacks His power, never His spirit!

[ 25 ] Translated line by line, this poem by Goethe offers a poetic rendition of Giordano Bruno, born of Goethe’s own spirit! One cannot be Goethe—and, say, have Giordano Bruno lying beside one—if one wants to write these verses; something must have been at play here that could never have been at play if Goethe had merely recast what Giordano Bruno said into poetic form. Here we see how Giordano Bruno’s spirit has come fully to life in Goethe.

[ 26 ] But we must not only go back a few centuries—from Galileo and Giordano Bruno—if we want to let Goethe speak; we must also, so to speak, acknowledge that what sprang from Giordano Bruno—as if from that first great enthusiastic mood, from that philosophical mood toward nature— in Goethe awakens that mood which now moves with full devotion from thing to thing and carries the God—whom man has now learned to feel in nature—back into the things of nature. In Goethe, the spirit of Giordano Bruno has, in fact, become a spirit of its own, born, as it were, with him. It was there when the seven-year-old boy took his father’s music stand, set it down, placed minerals from his father’s collection on it—to have natural objects—as well as plants from his father’s herbarium, placed a small incense stick on top, and then took a magnifying glass to ignite the incense stick with the rays of the rising morning sun—thus offering a smoke sacrifice to the God who lives in the minerals and plants and for whom he had erected an altar, a sacrifice kindled by the very forces of nature itself. Thus does Giordano Bruno live on in Goethe at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—but in such a way that what lives there as the innermost state of the soul, Goethe carried into every detail of nature. It was precisely out of this spirit that Goethe could not comprehend how—according to the natural scientists of that time—a material characteristic could be attributed to human beings in such an external way as to distinguish them from animals. It was such a thoroughly materialistic way of thinking when the natural scientists of the eighteenth century said that human beings lacked that small bone found in the upper jaw of animals—the intermaxillary bone—which holds the upper incisors. Animals had it—and that, they claimed, distinguished human beings from animals. Indeed, it would not have to be a God who is the inner, moving principle of nature, but rather a God who acts from the outside—the one of whom Giordano Bruno speaks as “circumrotans et circumducens”—who first created the animals and then placed humans alongside them and—as if to affix a label indicating that humans are something else entirely—declared: animals have the intermaxillary bone, humans do not! Thus Goethe becomes the great naturalist who sets out to show how that which lives in nature through form can undergo an elevation, so that one cannot in fact find the difference between humans and animals in something as external as the intermaxillary bone, but rather that something lives within humans which, with the same bones and muscles as those of animals, constitutes the higher human spirit. This is why Goethe so wonderfully reveals not only the intermaxillary bone and how it is fused in humans—since it is merely a subordinate bone—but also how the vertebrae can be expanded when the spirit, which seeks to be active in the brain, requires it.

[ 27 ] Truly: it always struck me as quite marvelous when, after working for a long time with Goethe’s scientific writings, I tried to grasp a principle such as the one in which Goethe simply conceives of the skull bones as transformed vertebrae, expanded to form the cranial cavity. It occurred to me then—and I could not think of it any other way—that Goethe must also have conceived the idea that the brain itself is a spinal cord transformed by the spirit, so that not only the covering but also the brain itself, elevated to a higher level, is what is present in the vertebrae and the spinal cord at a lower level. And it was a wonderful moment for me when, in the 1890s, I found written in pencil on a small piece of paper by Goethe—which was later reported by Professor Bardeleben in the *Weimar Yearbook* in an essay titled “Goethe as an Anatomist”—that: “The brain is, in essence, merely a transformed part of the spinal cord.”

[ 28 ] Thus, in Goethe, we see the sentiment that we first encounter in Giordano Bruno applied to the individual members of the natural world; we see how Goethe practically attempts to introduce the spirit of Giordano Bruno—to whom he himself is, in his own words, so closely aligned—into all thinking about nature. That is why it was so significant for Goethe to see a transformation of the primordial plant throughout the entire plant world. And alongside what Goethe, the artist, accomplished stands, great and mighty, what Goethe accomplished as a natural scientist; for in a certain sense, the same spirit that had descended from clairvoyant realms to sensory perception was embodied in Goethe as a personality who, in his observations, devotedly carried the spiritual back into the details everywhere. What did Goethe see in the individual plant? The expression of the primordial plant. And what was the primordial plant to him? The spiritual, the mental, in the individual plant forms. Significant here is that conversation between Schiller and Goethe, when both had attended a meeting of the natural history society in Jena. Schiller then stepped outside and said to Goethe, “Everything that’s being said about the plants there remains so unsatisfying,” to which Goethe replied, “Perhaps one could approach it differently, so that we actually perceive not only the parts that remain in one’s hand, but also the spiritual bond.” — Goethe then took a sheet of paper and, with a few strokes, sketched a plant form in front of Schiller. He was clear about this: it is not merely present in the lily, the dandelion, or the buttercup, but in all plants—though manifested in diverse ways in different plants. Schiller, who could not comprehend this form of the primordial plant, then said, “That is not reality; that is an idea!” Goethe was perplexed and simply remarked: “That would be very dear to me if I had ideas without knowing it, and could even see them with my own eyes!” For Goethe saw the spiritual essence that pervades all plants; he saw it so clearly that he could even draw it. And the same was true of the primordial animal in all animals.

[ 29 ] Thus Goethe sought the God who does not act from without, but who moves everything from within; he sought the divine spirit that weaves and lives in all things—very concretely from plant to plant, but also through leaves, blossoms, and fruit; likewise from animal to animal, but also from bone to bone, from one animal form to another. And it is interesting that Goethe was little understood by his contemporaries, that people did not know—just as they did not know Schiller either—what Goethe actually intended. But little by little, the Goethean spirit will take root, even in the philosophy of nature. Then people will recognize that the Goethean spirit, too, was once again a step beyond Giordano Bruno; that Giordano Bruno spoke of the God who, in a pantheistic sense, is to be found everywhere—in stones, plants, and animals—but that Goethe, while also seeking the God who does not impose Himself from without, went on to say: We must not look only at the general, but we must also turn to individual phenomena and seek the spirit in the particular. — For the spirit lives differently in a plant, differently in a stone, differently in this bone, and differently in that one. The spirit is the eternally moving force that shapes the individual parts of matter. Matter follows the moving spirit. One can express this from a spiritual perspective, as Giordano Bruno does; but one can also seek it out in all its details with devotion, as Goethe does. In this way, human beings come ever closer to truly approaching what the spread-out tapestry of nature contains in terms of spirit, so that the spirit within it gradually reveals itself to them.

[ 30 ] When we reflect on the progression of such minds as Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Goethe, we will finally grow accustomed to appealing to the very essence of such minds, rather than dwelling on commonplace notions; for even when it comes to great minds, people are all too fond of hearing clichés. With regard to Galileo, who—with his great divine idea—spanned the whole of life in that moment, transcending space and time, one might well ask: What do people of our time actually know about the true significance of Galileo—often far more than that one single thing, which is certainly not correct, namely that he is said to have declared, “And yet it moves!”? This is certainly a beautiful phrase, but—as you can see from the research of the Italian scholar Angelo de Gubernatis—it is something that is most certainly not true. And how often is Goethe quoted, time and again, as having said that his last words were: “More light!”—the one thing he did not say. Therefore, it is necessary that spiritual science shed light into the minds of such personalities as well, and that it not merely be our own spirit—as we would so much like it to be—that is carried into the various eras. These three spirits, who form a wonderfully harmonious triad at the starting point of our modern era—who stand like a dawn in Galileo and Giordano Bruno, which then became the sun in Goethe— can best be characterized, perhaps, by recalling a statement by Goethe himself, which so aptly shows us how, from within the spirit of the modern era, he felt that even the smallest atom of matter cannot exist at all without the spirit behind it that brings it into contact with the other. Here we can recall the situation described by Goethe himself, when—many years after Schiller’s death—as his remains were to be transferred to the Princely Crypt, he believed he recognized Schiller’s genius in a skull of a particularly distinctive shape. He believed he recognized Schiller’s skull in a very distinct skull shape, which was then also transferred to the Princes’ Crypt. And it became clear to him, just as we saw with Galileo, that one must find the spirit through humility and mathematics. It still stands today, the old church lamp in the Cathedral of Pisa, which has swung back and forth for countless souls. But when Galileo once sat before it, he measured the regularity of the lamp’s oscillations against his own pulse and thereby discovered the law of pendulum oscillations—so important today—which to him was a revelation of the divine. And so much more. At Schiller’s grave, a thought dawned on Goethe that had lived within Giordano Bruno out of his philosophical enthusiasm: Spirit is in all matter, everywhere, but not pushing and pulling about, rather as a spirit that lives within the smallest atom! This spiritual aspect of Giordano Bruno also arose anew in Goethe’s soul when he held Schiller’s skull in his hand and—as if water had frozen into ice—Schiller’s spirit appeared to him in the shape of Schiller’s skull. Goethe’s entire spiritual foundation stands before us when we consider the beautiful poem he wrote after contemplating the shape of Schiller’s skull, and especially those lines that are so often misquoted, which can only be grasped in context by imagining that Goethe vividly beheld Schiller’s individuality as if congealed before him and then spoke as he had to, in accordance with the nature of the spirit shared by Giordano Bruno and Goethe:

“What more can a person gain in life,
Than for God-Nature to reveal itself to him,
How it transforms the solid into spirit,
How it preserves what the spirit has created!”