The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. The Worldview of German Idealism

[ 1 ] As a sort of introduction to the worldview I would like to outline tomorrow from the perspective of spiritual science, I would like to begin today with a characterization of the worldview of German Idealism.

[ 2 ] It is possible to speak of such a worldview of German Idealism when one attempts, as it were, to draw out from the innermost essence of the German national soul that which—in terms of spiritual life—this national soul sought to achieve during its golden age in order to approach the world’s enigmas and mysteries. If one sees that which this national soul absorbed at that time as impulses—as forces, so to speak—continuing to have an effect even in the second half of the nineteenth century and right up to the present day, where this worldview of German Idealism has taken a back seat to other endeavors, where it has lived on, as it were, hidden yet as a driving force in the development of the national spirit, then one can certainly speak of such an effective worldview even in the present. However, one must bear in mind at present that, due to various factors that have arisen in our spiritual life and have come to dominate it for the general public, this—I would say—“most quintessentially German” spiritual construct of German Idealism has receded into the background. But especially in these days, we may well express our hopes that this worldview of German idealism will resurface and that its power will be incorporated into the general course of human development.

[ 3 ] In my lectures this winter—and on earlier occasions as well—I have often mentioned a name associated with one of the most quintessentially German minds of the second half of the nineteenth century; I have mentioned the name Herman Grimm, the great art historian. And it is fair to say: even what I have taken the liberty of alluding to here regarding Herman Grimm can—especially when one considers what Herman Grimm accomplished as an art scholar, as an art critic, and in every other aspect of his literary work—serve as proof that it springs directly from German sentiment, from German thought, in short, from the innermost impulses of the German national soul. When Herman Grimm sought to elevate his soul to what presented itself to him—more in accordance with his feelings than through philosophical reflection—as the worldview of Goethe’s philosophy, he was compelled to juxtapose this worldview with that other one, which in more recent times has found the widest dissemination and the greatest interest; that worldview whose adherents and believers claim, time and again, that it is based on the genuine and correct premises of the natural sciences. This worldview, which in a certain sense dominates the souls of many today, Herman Grimm sought—based on his own feelings—to place alongside the one that presented itself to his imaginative mind more intuitively than the worldview that underlay Goethe’s entire life’s work and creative output. I have already mentioned here once before the conclusion Herman Grimm reached when he undertook this endeavor. He said:

[ 4 ] “Long ago, even in his”—Goethe’s—“youth, the grand Laplace-Kantian conception of the origin and eventual demise of the Earth had already taken hold.” Herman Grimm wanted to suggest that if Goethe had wished to profess his belief in this Laplace-Kantian worldview, he would have had ample opportunity to do so, since it had already taken root in his youth. And now Herman Grimm continues:

[ 5 ] “From the self-rotating cosmic nebula—the children already learn this in school—the central gas droplet forms, which later becomes the Earth, and, as a solidifying sphere, undergoes all phases over inconceivable periods of time, including the episode of human habitation, only to finally plunge back into the sun as burnt-out slag: a long process, yet one that is entirely comprehensible to today’s audience, the occurrence of which now requires no further external intervention other than the effort of some external force to maintain the Sun at a constant temperature.”

[ 6 ] Herman Grimm alludes to the worldview so widespread today: that once there was nothing but extraordinarily thin matter, that this thin matter coalesced, began to rotate, and moved in a circular motion, that the structure of the universe gradually took shape from this, the planets split apart, and that then on Earth — one of the planets that had split off from the central gas drop — the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms developed from the gas over the course of time, and that the entire course of evolution then took on the form that presents itself to us as human “history.” But then, later on, a time would come again in which all living beings would have to wither and perish, when everything would fall back into the sun, causing all that is alive to sink back into lifeless matter. — Many believe that this worldview is the only one that can be attained on the solid ground of natural science. And I have already hinted at how easy it is to make this worldview—Herman Grimm says of it: “Children already bring it home from school”—understandable. One need only slide a carefully cut sheet of paper gently through a drop of oil floating in a liquid, pierce it from above with a needle, and set the whole thing in rotation by turning the needle; then smaller droplets split off from the larger oil droplet and move around it. There, one has quite “obviously” the formation of a small world system before one’s eyes, and from this one concludes that the formation of the great cosmic structure must have taken place in exactly the same way. However, I have always pointed out how obvious it is even to a child that the world could not have come into being in any other way; yet in this experiment, one thing is usually always overlooked—and one ought to maintain perfection when demonstrating something. For it is usually not taken into account that the “teacher” or the “professor” is standing there, turning the needle and setting the whole thing in rotation, and one must not forget oneself when conducting an experiment. Therefore, if one were to accept the aforementioned experiment as proof, one would have to place a gigantic teacher or professor into outer space as well.

[ 7 ] Herman Grimm goes on to say:

[ 8 ] “No more fruitless prospect for the future can be imagined than the one that is being imposed on us today as scientifically necessary in this expectation. A scrap of carrion that a hungry dog would go out of its way to find would be a refreshing, appetizing morsel compared to this excrement of creation, as which our Earth would ultimately fall back to the Sun, and it is the thirst for knowledge with which our generation accepts such notions and presumes to believe them—a sign of a sick imagination—that scholars of future eras will one day devote much insight to explaining as a historical phenomenon of our time. Goethe never gave such desolation a foothold.”

[ 9 ] So said Herman Grimm. In contrast, one may point out that the entire era of German idealism, in its quest for a worldview, was fundamentally a protest against the very incorporation of this worldview—with its most fruitless perspective—into the culture of the time; and one may further point out how it actually came to be that such a worldview was able to take hold. To do so, however, it is necessary to shed some light on the manner in which, so to speak, popular thought—the contemporary worldview—came into being. And since it can be observed time and again how little account is taken of all the circumstances that are invoked in these debates, I would like to point out that what I have to say in this regard is truly not merely prompted by the impact of this war, nor is it said merely because we are living today in these fateful times; but rather, as many of those present here know, it has been stated and advocated time and again, not only in Germany but also outside of Germany. I would like to emphasize this in particular because it would be very easy to form the opinion that these debates lack objectivity precisely because, in these fateful times, they draw attention to what can help direct the German soul toward that which is rooted in the deepest depths of the German national spirit.

[ 10 ] If we wish to understand the origins of our more recent worldview, we must — without going any further back — go back at least to the point in time when, under the influence of powerful external discoveries concerning the structure of space and also the structure of time, humanity began to work on renewing its worldview as well, just as it must present itself to the human spirit. It must be emphasized time and again how the work of Copernicus—and what was accomplished in its wake by minds such as Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo—essentially provided the initial impetus for the worldview that continues to influence contemporary thought. Today, I shall focus my attention on the extent to which Europe’s individual nations and peoples have contributed to this worldview, which thus surrounds us today in the consciousness of the majority of thinking people; and how, on the other hand, the worldview of German idealism has become interwoven with what the peoples of Europe have contributed to this shared worldview.

[ 11 ] The figure who may appear to us as particularly characteristic of the—I would say—reshaping of the worldview of modern times is Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600. In referring to Giordano Bruno, we must also highlight the contribution that Italian culture, Italian thought, and the Italian quest for a worldview have made to world culture as a whole. — In earlier lectures, I have pointed out that a true spiritual science can view the human soul life and the soul’s striving in three forms of expression: as the soul of sensation, as the soul of understanding or feeling, and as the soul of consciousness; and that within this interplay of inner experience—which arises under the influence of the forces of the soul of sensation, the forces of the soul of understanding or feeling, and the forces of the soul of consciousness—the human self itself acts as the unifying factor. I have also mentioned that one might certainly mock this division today as arbitrary, but that spiritual science will make it clear in the future that the division of the human soul into a sensory part, an intellectual part, and a conscious part is just as “scientific” as the classification that physics employs to divide light into seven colors or—we might also say—into three color groups: the yellowish-reddish part, the greenish part, and the blue-violet part. Just as one studies the colors of light in this threefold division not out of arbitrariness but out of the inner nature of the matter itself—if one wishes to arrive at a result at all—so must the human soul in its entirety be studied in these three “color nuances”; and it is only because people today are not accustomed to approaching the soul in the same way that they approach the nature of light in physics that the very same mental operation, which is accepted in physics, is regarded as mere daydreaming in spiritual science. I have also pointed out that the essence of national impulses—insofar as they affect the human soul—consists, for example, in the case of the Italian people, in the fact that the impulses flowing from the Italian national soul into the soul of the individual Italian affect his sensory soul, but not in the sense that he is considered as an individual, but rather as a member of his people; so that a person who strives for a worldview within Italian culture will do so while being permeated by the force that works through his or her feeling soul. And do we not see—we could point here to Campanella, Vanini, and other thinkers in the modern era of Italian culture, but Giordano Bruno is the thinker who expresses this aspect most vividly—do we not see how Giordano Bruno, at the dawn of the modern era, with the forces of which we say, are the forces of the sensory soul—seizes upon what Copernicus had brought forth as a spatial worldview?

[ 12 ] Let us consider the medieval worldview. It was the space that human beings could survey, bounded by the celestial vault in which the stars were set: the so-called crystal sky. Then there were the spheres of the individual planets, along with the spheres of the Sun and the Moon. Such a worldview corresponded to sensory perception. However, it was compatible only with that conception of the spatial world which preceded Copernicanism. As Copernicanism—I might say—sank into the infinite capacity for enthusiasm of Giordano Bruno’s soul, which perceived the world with all the depths of feeling, this view arose within him: What was called the celestial vault up there is not really up there at all; it is not a real boundary, but merely a boundary up to which the human conception of space extends. The world extends into infinity! And embedded within infinity are countless worlds, and ruling over these countless worlds is the World Soul, which, for Giordano Bruno, permeates this universe as he perceived it, just as the individual human soul permeates the individual human elements that make up our organism. One need only read a single page of any of Giordano Bruno’s writings to realize that the enthusiasm kindled in his soul by Copernicanism led him to direct his hymns—for hymns are what are revealed in his writings—toward the infinite cosmic edifice permeated by the World Soul. And so it is with the others who, like him, were inspired in their striving by their folk culture. Thus we see how, in Giordano Bruno, a worldview confronts us that not only sees the material and spatial aspects of the world everywhere, but also sees everything material and spatial as simultaneously imbued with spirit and soul; how the individual human soul is for him merely an image of the entire world organism, which is permeated by the world soul just as our individual organism is permeated by our soul.

[ 13 ] This worldview of Giordano Bruno stands before us—I would say—formed from the same emotional foundation as Dante’s earlier worldview; except that Dante’s worldview incorporated into his poetic work what had been handed down from earlier times and carried it out into the infinite—but into the infinite supernatural. — I have already pointed out how one could learn precisely from Giordano Bruno what is so necessary to learn in relation to modern spiritual science. For, first of all, it is always objected to this modern spiritual science that it asserts something that contradicts the “five senses” of human beings. Well, nothing contradicted human beings’ five senses more than Copernicus’s worldview, which made the impression just described on Giordano Bruno; nevertheless, Copernicus’s worldview has, albeit gradually, become part of humanity’s way of thinking. But other ideas, too, have become part of people’s way of thinking. Just as Giordano Bruno called out to his contemporaries: “You imagine space to be bounded by the blue vault of heaven; but this blue vault of heaven does not exist, for it is merely the limit of your perception,” so must modern spiritual science speak in response to what the older worldview sees in birth and death as the boundaries of the worldview. For what appears in birth and death as the boundaries of the temporal realm is just as little really present outside human perception as the blue vault of the sky is really present outside human perception in the case of spatial perception. Rather, it is only because the human perception of space extends only as far as the blue vault of the sky appears that such a vault is assumed to be the boundary of the spatial realm. And because, with regard to the temporal, human perception extends only as far as birth and death, birth and death are assumed to be the boundaries of the temporal; and today, with spiritual science, we stand in regard to birth and death at the same point where Giordano Bruno stood in his time.

[ 14 ] I would like to say: in order to effectively imprint what emerged as his worldview on the culture of his time, this included the impulses arising from the sensuous soul, which Giordano Bruno imbued into this worldview. Giordano Bruno speaks as if what he has to say about the world did not in the least call upon his intellect or in any way trouble his reason—one need only read a single page of his work to find this confirmed—but rather as if everything arose for him from the most immediate sensation. Thus, at the dawn of the modern era, what had to be grasped—because it was so profoundly significant for human progress—was embraced: the Copernican view of the external world. And so we can say: the “nuance of sensation” in the life of the soul is clearly pronounced in the worldview of Giordano Bruno and also in that of those who, like him, drew their most significant impulses from the Italian national soul. For this is precisely what is significant, what has come from this side right up to the present day: that all philosophizing, all the gathering of thoughts into a worldview, has flowed from this most immediate life of feeling. What warms the worldview from within as a force comes from this source. Therefore, we may say: to the extent that the individual Italian immerses himself in his national character, the soul capable of enthusiasm speaks through him when he seeks to develop a worldview.

[ 15 ] If we now turn our attention to another movement—one of those movements that ultimately led to the modern worldview: the French movement—we find there, too, an outstanding mind standing at the starting point of the modern worldview movement; but if we look closely, we see that he faces the emergence of a worldview under conditions quite different from those of Giordano Bruno: Descartes (Cartesius). He, too, is a thinker who, like Giordano Bruno, belongs to the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he proceeds from entirely different premises. Let us consider these premises as they are embodied in this outstanding mind. What is it from which he proceeds, in contrast to Giordano Bruno? In Giordano Bruno, we see how he is seized by an ever-increasing enthusiasm for what provides him with the foundations of the modern worldview. With Descartes, we see the opposite: we see how he begins with doubt, how he makes it clear to himself that one can doubt everything that presents itself to a person—whether from the external world or from within the soul—as knowledge, as insight, or as experience; one can doubt whether it is real, whether it is valid, or whether it has any more validity than a fleeting dream image. Descartes comes to doubt everything; but he seeks knowledge—to know through inner powers. So he first looks for the characteristics that knowledge must possess in order to be valid for the soul; and for him, this characteristic is clarity and distinctness. Whatever can present itself to the soul most clearly and most transparently bears the mark of certainty. I would say: in the sea of doubt in which he initially finds himself, it dawns on him that he must seek something that presents itself to him with clarity and distinctness, with transparency; for only that can count as certainty for him. Thus, it is not the initial enthusiasm that drives him, but the pursuit of clarity, distinctness, and transparency. From this it follows that he says to himself: And even if I doubt everything, even if everything I could perceive in the external and internal world were merely a dream image: I cannot doubt that—whether it be a dream or not—I am thinking this; and even if everything that unfolds in the sea of experiences, and about which I can doubt, does not exist—this stands out with clarity above all else: I think—therefore I am! And from this clarity and distinctness springs the thought: everything that presents itself to the soul as clearly and distinctly as this model of clarity and distinctness has validity; thus one may think of the world as one must grasp this: I think, therefore I am. — And now, starting from this point with Descartes and his successors, we see how a worldview emerges that thirsts for clarity and distinctness. This clarity and distinctness was preformed in Descartes’ mind because he was a great mathematician—and above all, a unique thinker grounded in geometry. He demands mathematical clarity for everything that should belong to this worldview. He and his successors then went on to say: Regarding the spatial world and everything that moves within it, one can attain clarity and distinctness; one can form a picture that is as clear and distinct internally as mathematics itself is clear and distinct. But I would like to say that what is truly spiritual slipped away from this worldview. Not that Descartes denied the spiritual, but by taking the certainty “I think, therefore I am”—he did not take it in such a way that one would get the impression he delved into the spiritual as deeply as he delved into the external spatial world, into what happens externally. What happens externally in space gives him the ability to survey the details and also to grasp the connections between them; but the inner realm remains more or less obscure. He told himself: Certain ideas that arise in the soul are, after all, clear and distinct; these are “innate” ideas; by arising clearly and distinctly, they structure and organize the soul internally. But he could not discern a connection between the inner, soul-related realm and the outer, spatial realm; they stood side by side like two separate worlds. Consequently, he was also unable—unlike Giordano Bruno, who conceives of everything as permeated by the world soul and imagines this world soul pouring its spiritual impulses into everything—to arrive at the point of conceiving the spiritual as present in all spatial phenomena as well. He said to himself: When I look at an animal, a spatial form presents itself to me; I can observe it just as I would any other spatial form; yet it reveals nothing other than these spatial forms; therefore, it appears like a moving automaton. He did not find in animals that which moves them. He found it only within himself. Therefore, he attributed a soul only to human beings, not to animals. He called animals “living automata”—and with that we have the beginning of a mechanical worldview. People were not bold enough—neither Descartes nor his students—to deny what existed in the old heritage as religious tradition, this inner, spiritual aspect, but they sought only to regard it as belonging to human beings; and in the case of animals, it was viewed in such a way that it presents its forms to the soul in the same manner that mathematical forms present themselves to the soul.

[ 16 ] Do we not see clearly and distinctly, in the pursuit of clarity and precision—which has increasingly come to characterize all work on worldview in France—the workings of the intellectual or emotional soul, the middle soul? Right up to modern times, this has remained the fundamental trait of the movement that has worked from this perspective toward the construction of a general worldview. One might say: everything in a worldview that is mathematically transparent, that can be expressed in mathematically clear thoughts, that can be presented in such a way that one element follows mathematically from another—all of that has come from this worldview—right up to the worldview created by Auguste Comte, in which everything—from the simplest phenomena of nature to human social life — is to be presented as in a grand, majestic painting, just as one theorem always follows another in mathematics. It would be interesting to show how this nuance of the intellectual or emotional sphere, of the systematizing soul, permeates this entire culture, how it forms the innermost nerve of this culture.

[ 17 ] And when we now turn to a third movement, one that also exerted the greatest conceivable influence on our intellectual culture and on our intellectual worldview in the second half of the previous century—when we turn to British culture—we find as the leading figure, in whose footsteps all other leading minds of England still follow, Bacon, Bacon of Verulam. And how does he assert what he has to say? He told himself: Humanity has lived for far too long in mere ideals, has occupied itself for far too long with mere ideals and mere words, and must now turn its gaze to external things, to the things themselves—that is, to those things that present themselves to external observation; one could arrive at a true picture of the world only by directing one’s eyes and other senses outward toward what takes place in the external world, and by accepting “thoughts” only to the extent that they bring what is happening outside into a coherent whole. Bacon became the philosopher of experience, of the picture of the world based on experience—that picture of the world which serves to synthesize what takes place externally. Hence, as this intellectual current progresses, we see how an outstanding mind such as Locke denies the possibility that the soul can gain any knowledge from within itself; all it can do is stand by and observe the course of the world; then what it can observe will be inscribed upon the soul’s blank slate. The soul itself, in this sense, is a blank slate, a tabula rasa; unlike in Descartes, no innate ideas arise that are connected to the essence of the soul. Locke eliminates all innate ideas. For him, the worldview arises solely through the human soul turning toward its surroundings, analyzing, synthesizing, and reflecting on what is happening outside. This current of thought extends right up to modern times. People such as John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and others are influenced by the kind of impulse just described. One might say that such a worldview rejects everything the soul could attain by developing inwardly and drawing forth what it does not yet possess when it is naturally placed within the world; thus, it must remain confined to whatever is presented externally and devote all its spiritual energy to synthesizing what is presented from the outside.

[ 18 ] When, about fifteen years ago, I first sought a term or concept to describe this type of English philosophy—particularly that of John Stuart Mill—as outlined in my *Worldviews and Philosophies of Life in the Nineteenth Century* —I struggled to find a telling expression to characterize John Stuart Mill’s worldview; and even then I had to characterize this worldview in such a way that I said: This standpoint is that of the “observer of the world”; it is not the standpoint of a soul that works inwardly upon itself with the belief that this inner work will lead to a deeper understanding of the inner connections between things. John Stuart Mill also stands at this spectator’s standpoint, for Mill was one of the successors of Locke and Bacon, and he approaches the world in such a way that he stands before what presents itself externally to the senses and what can be organized in thought, just as thoughts are organized and resolved in everyday life.

[ 19 ] Now we see how, in a different way than Giordano Bruno, Descartes, and Bacon—who worked on the development of a worldview in the manner described—the German and Central European intellectual culture is working on the emergence of a worldview; we see how, in solitude, a profound German mind seeks to arrive at a worldview drawn from the deepest nature of the national soul. One can, of course, misunderstand this thinker, who strives for the highest insights possible to human beings, and can easily mock him; but attention must be drawn to this one individual when speaking of German intellectual life: to Jakob Böhme, who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Certainly, he can easily be misunderstood, this simple cobbler from Görlitz; for he did not speak like Copernicus or like Giordano Bruno, who devised a worldview based on his elemental sensibilities; nor did he speak out of a striving for clarity and precision, as we find in Descartes; and he spoke even less like Bacon, who sought to summarize what presents itself externally to the senses. Rather, he spoke in such a way that, when he delved into his soul or was at one with nature, something was there that had not been there before; he spoke of how an inner journey is undertaken, one that leads into the innermost mysteries of existence. He spoke of what had been kindled within him, of how, as a shepherd boy, he once looked into a hole in the ground at the summit of a mountain and saw, in the hollow, a metal vessel filled with gold, and how this experience kindled something within him, about which he wanted to say: A spark has ignited in my soul, kindled by the Spirit weaving through the world; I felt connected to the Spirit living in the world. And he goes on to tell us how he pursued this experience in his soul and, for seven days, lived in a state of mind estranged from everyday life, how he had passed through a “paradise and realm of joy,” how he felt no connection to reality through his senses, nor through his intellect to what the senses present, but how he felt connected through his soul to what reigns supersensually and invisibly within things. But when he told this to his master, with whom he was apprenticed at the time, the master told him to get lost, for he had no use for young self-proclaimed prophets! And just as this master spoke, many still speak today; in this regard, people have not become any wiser.

[ 20 ] But when we delve into the work of Jakob Böhme, we see how he seeks to connect his soul to that which pulses through the soul on a spiritual and psychological level. While Giordano Bruno directed the soul outward in order to perceive the “world soul” everywhere—which he had posited—Jakob Böhme, on the other hand, seeks only to shape and form his soul inwardly; he does not wish to observe the world soul externally, but rather immerses himself in it, so that he participates in the life of this world soul. Participates, I said. This provides a starting point for worldviews born of a dark urge to create; for Jakob Böhme works without external erudition, drawing solely from his soul. It marks the beginning of the striving of a soul that derives its impulses from the impulses of the German national soul: this standing within that which is otherwise merely observed or presented with clarity and distinctness. Jakob Böhme would not have understood what Descartes was striving for; for Descartes was not concerned with clarity and distinctness, but rather with allowing the soul to participate in the life of the great world soul. And if he could do that, then it did not matter to him whether it was clear and distinct, for “it is simply experienced!” And this “it is experienced” has remained like an impact, like a leaven within the striving of the German national spirit. Those thinkers I discussed in my lecture eight days ago are, after all, the continuators of that first seed planted in Jakob Böhme; one can still see in them how they strive, with clarity, for what was already present in Jakob Böhme’s striving—which can be expressed by saying: He simply wanted to experience the mysteries of the world—not merely to observe them!

[ 21 ] Now, however, we must consider a second starting point for this more recent quest for a worldview if we are to recognize all the forces at work within it. This other starting point is often admired today—especially by those who are seeking a worldview—even more than Jakob Böhme’s; it is the one found in a German mind—and again in an eminently cosmopolitan mind—namely Leibniz. His worldview is similar to that of Giordano Bruno, but rendered in a German worldview nuance. If we wish to characterize the Italian worldview, we must say: it is born out of the sentient soul. In the same sense, the French worldview is born from the intellectual or emotional soul; this becomes particularly evident when studying Descartes. The British worldview is born entirely from the conscious soul—that conscious soul which, particularly in its observational state, is capable of directing its gaze toward what is external and what the intellect can bring to consciousness from it. The German worldview arises from the “I” itself, from the innermost workings of the soul. And just as light is present in both red-yellow and green and blue-violet, so is the “I” present in the sensuous soul, in the intellectual or emotional soul, and also in the conscious soul, interplaying with everything, but is therefore also a constant back-and-forth striving—sometimes tending toward the sensory soul, as in the case of Jakob Böhme, sometimes leaning more toward the intellectual soul, as in the case of Leibniz. What Jakob Böhme inwardly strives for—as a living-on-into the world soul—Leibniz strives for through the intellect, but not, as is the case with Descartes, as a mathematical mind, but as a soul that has a clear awareness of this: that human beings, in their very essence, are a part of the whole world. And so Leibniz said to himself: What I am as a soul—a thinking being—is, in essence, the underlying foundation everywhere, throughout the entire world. What we see in space is not merely a spatial construct; rather, the reality is that everything that is real outside is of the same nature as what is within myself; it is only that my soul, as it were, attains a waking consciousness. In the beings out there that are not human, there also live such fundamental constituents as those found in humans. Leibniz calls them “monads.” What is “truly” within them is consciousness. However, the monads of the mineral and plant kingdoms possess something like a dormant consciousness; they then become increasingly conscious until they finally attain self-consciousness in the human kingdom.

[ 22 ] For Leibniz, the world is entirely composed of monads, and if one does not see the world as monads, it is because one sees it indistinctly—just as with a swarm of mosquitoes, which, when viewed from a distance, appears indistinct and looks like a cloud, but dissolves into individual mosquitoes as soon as one gets closer. For example, the table here in front of me consists of monads, but these monads are perceived as clustered together, just like the individual mosquitoes in a swarm. Thus, for Leibniz, the entire world consists of individual monads, and just as the individual monads are reflected in the world as a whole, so they form a microcosm within the macrocosm. One must imagine that the entire world is reflected in every single monad, and that a harmony implanted by the primordial monad spreads throughout the whole.

[ 23 ] If one wishes to characterize what is most striking about this Leibnizian worldview, one must say: What is most striking about it is its abstractness, its intellectual nature; and indeed, this abstract, intellectual quality becomes immediately apparent when one examines it more closely. For what good would it do if, as Leibniz does with regard to the individual monads, one were to focus solely on a clock and say: the individual link, the individual cog, is effectively one with the entire clock—it is, so to speak, a “little clock”—and all the clock’s functions are expressed in it? Certainly, anyone familiar with the clock’s construction can explain how its individual parts are connected. But what difference would it make if one were to say: “The true defining characteristic of the clock is its harmony”? One encompasses it with an abstract concept. Today, however, people are usually satisfied if they can assign an abstract concept to something; but even a clock cannot be understood through the mere concept of harmony alone. In this, one can sense the contrast between an intellectual, abstract worldview, such as Leibniz offers us, and an ever-deepening, humble immersion into the workings and weaving of the World Spirit, as it first appears to us in Jakob Böhme, albeit in a more intuitive form.

[ 24 ] Just as Descartes sought to incorporate the mathematical ordering of thoughts into his worldview, so too did Spinoza strive for a worldview that is as comprehensible as a mathematical system; but at the same time, he sought to structure it in such a way that, as one ascends from concept to concept, an ever higher and higher experience of the human soul emerges. Characteristically, he calls his mathematical worldview “Ethics,” because as he strings concept after concept together, each successive one draws the soul ever deeper into the mysteries of existence, until the soul—by immersing itself more and more in the concepts that progress from one mathematical level to the next—can feel at one with the unified substance of the world, with the unified universal spirit of the world. With Spinoza, it is an inner progression, a process of self-development. Therefore, Spinoza stands alone in his quest for a worldview. He was influenced by Descartes; but he incorporated that influence into his worldview, deepening it through what only he could contribute.

[ 25 ] All the elements that have now been mentioned have, in a certain way, helped shape what has become the worldview of the nineteenth century. But one can say: The flourishing and development of what was called “German idealism” here eight days ago was a protest—one that never quite achieved its full effect—against the worldview evolving into what Herman Grimm described as: “A bone from a carcass that a hungry dog went out of its way to find would be a refreshing, appetizing morsel compared to this excrement of creation.” And it was always precisely among the most outstanding minds—those who stood true to their essence within the development of the German people—that there existed the aspiration to incorporate all the impulses necessarily involved in the spiritual development of humanity into the structure of their worldview, but to shape this worldview in such a way that the pursuit of a worldview is not merely contemplation, not merely “watching,” but an inner experience. Thus we see that, fundamentally, in the characteristic spirit of German striving—in Goethe—the individual elements, the various parts of the currents of worldview, are incorporated . In Goethe’s *Faust*—which in this regard is a reflection of his own striving—we can see how his Faust develops out of the details of external perception, how he seeks to arrive at a holistic sense of what interweaves and animates the world. This truly embodies the spirit of Giordano Bruno. In this, and in the fact that Goethe later would not rest until he could fully immerse himself in Italian art, we see everywhere a hint of that nuance of feeling in the soul that seeks to expand the individual self into the self of the world. And this already permeates the earliest sections that Goethe wrote of his *Faust*.

[ 26 ] In contrast, we can see how the second philosophical movement—which, in Descartes, took the form of the pursuit of clarity and distinctness—came to take on a characteristically materialistic form in Europe. Goethe had already encountered it as a young man, while he was in Strasbourg, in Holbach’s *Système de la nature*. I have already hinted at how Descartes, in his worldview, portrays animals as animated automata that are not imbued with a soul. From what underlay this Cartesian worldview—and, by extension, the British worldview that spread to the European mainland via Voltaire—which fully embraced the aforementioned rejection of what the soul can attain inwardly through inner striving, in order to accept only that which can be systematized in space: from this arose the worldview that Goethe opposed in Holbach’s *Système de la nature*, which recognizes only moving atoms that group together into molecules, and through whose agglomerations everything visible in the world is said to arise. That worldview, which seeks to reduce everything to the effects of moving atoms and molecules, possesses clarity—the highest clarity—and distinctness; a clarity and distinctness that cannot be surpassed in such a worldview. But everything that is spiritual and soul-related must fall outside the scope of such a worldview. There is no room in it for what is spiritual and soul-related.

[ 27 ] Goethe was thus confronted with such a worldview as early as his youth. He rejected it, commenting:

[ 28 ] “Matter should exist from eternity and be in motion from eternity, and should now, through this motion—to the right and left and in all directions—effortlessly bring forth the infinite phenomena of existence. We would even have been satisfied with all of this if the author had truly constructed the world before our eyes out of his moving matter. But he knew as little about nature as we do; for, having established a few general concepts, he immediately abandons them in order to transform that which is higher than nature—or that which appears in nature as a higher nature—into material, heavy nature that is, indeed, in motion but nonetheless directionless and formless, and thereby believes he has gained quite a great deal.”

[ 29 ] Goethe finds this worldview “cold and bleak.”

[ 30 ] And now we see how Goethe, summarizing everything that is in his soul and evoking clarity and distinctness in a way different from that found in Descartes, seeks to combine clarity and distinctness with immediate experience. This is the defining characteristic that entered the German worldview in Goethe’s time. — How do we see the pursuit of clarity and distinctness in Descartes? In such a way that what one observes, what one thinks about, must present itself clearly and distinctly. It must reveal itself to the observer with clarity and distinctness. Goethe is aware that one gains no insight at all if one merely sees things presented clearly and distinctly before one; yet he is also clear—even if he does not wish to remain at the level of Jakob Böhme’s mere intuition—that: If one wishes to gain a true worldview that corresponds to reality, one must immerse oneself in things, must witness the formation of the crystal by, as it were, placing oneself within the forces that form the crystal; and likewise, one must enter into the plant, must witness the forces that make the plant a plant, must immerse oneself in all beings. Goethe does not want an abstract worldview cobbled together from monads and harmonies, but rather a worldview that is experienced. Yet not, as with Jakob Böhme, merely through intuition, but one that immerses itself in all things in the world—and through this immersion, the human being traverses the path by which it draws ever closer to the innermost sources of existence. That is why the worldview that presented itself to Goethe in Spinoza’s philosophy was able to influence him. Spinoza never felt the impulse to immerse his soul in the real external world. As impressions from the world arose before him, Spinoza sought to link them together one by one; but this was to happen in such a way that the soul undergoes a transformation in the process. Not that Goethe was ever a devout adherent of the Spinozist worldview; only those who actually know nothing about Goethe could say that. Rather, the fact is that Goethe sensed in Spinoza—and found in him—the way in which he himself sought to find his way into a worldview. The only difference is this: What Spinoza sought through abstract means, Goethe wanted to seek in a concrete way. Just as Spinoza moves from concept to concept, so Goethe wanted to move from plant to plant in order to experience in this way what the plant experiences. What the soul could attain by immersing itself in this way into the plant world, Goethe called the “Utrpflanze”; and what the soul experienced by immersing itself in the same way into the animal world and empathizing with it, he called his “Urtier.” Thus, for Goethe, the pursuit of a worldview became a shared experience, but not a dark one as with Jakob Böhme; rather, the experience itself was to unfold with clarity and distinctness. This is evidenced by Goethe’s short treatise on the “Metamorphosis of Plants,” in which he describes how the plant develops from root to leaf to flower through a process of continuous transformation. But one must always understand that Goethe sought to achieve what he desired by immersing himself in the essence of things. While Descartes, in his worldview, expelled everything spiritual from nature—for example, from animals—and turned them into living automatons, Goethe allows his own soul to flow into the plants, into the animals, into the entire world, in order to unite with them in his soul and perceive them clearly. Clarity and distinctness in experience—that is what entered into the worldview of German Idealism during Goethe’s time. — What Descartes makes an external feature of knowledge—which he sets before himself and observes as a spectator—Goethe connects with inner experience. And what bursts forth from Jakob Böhme’s soul with a dark, elemental force and stammers its way into expression through his words is also present in Goethe; but when it manifests itself in him, we find it in clarity and distinctness.

[ 31 ] But now we see in Goethe what the three great thinkers—who were cited as representative of German Idealism—also strove for.

[ 32 ] Let us consider Fichte. Eight days ago, we described how he strives to develop a worldview by seeking certainty solely from the impulses of the innermost part of the human being—the “I.” And if one wishes to fully understand Fichte—what, then, governs his worldview? One might put it this way: What prevails in him is everything that a human being—without directing any attention to the external world—can develop within himself by gaining consciousness of himself. This is a welling up and flowing forth from the innermost depths of the soul’s will. I have often characterized it here as well: anyone can name any external thing exactly as the name expresses it; but we can name the “I” only in this way—if it is to denote our very being—by allowing it to resound within ourselves. Fichte did not state this explicitly; yet it underlies his entire worldview as an impulse, and he assumes that the “I” exists only when it places itself into the world. A resolution of the will, then, is what Fichte seeks as the center of the development of a worldview. And regarding the “I,” he states—and this alone characterizes Fichte’s worldview—that it can discover within itself what its mission is. For Fichte, this is the moral worldview. And the national world exists only to act morally. Thus, for Fichte, everything is permeated by what is divine in human beings. Everything else is merely an illusion, created solely so that the moral world order can act. The will, which takes hold in self-consciousness—at the point of self-consciousness—and radiates from self-consciousness, perceives itself as a part of the world soul.

[ 33 ] The very way in which Fichte brings this out shows us that, in a certain sense, he proceeds from full self-consciousness. Just as light appears in every single shade of color—to return once more to this analogy—so he proceeds from the “I” that appears in all three members of the soul; but he allows it to operate in such a way that it works through the conscious soul. And in this regard, we find in Fichte—I might say—the thinker who is the antipode, the opposite pole, of the British spirit. While the British spirit essentially emphasizes what can prevail in the soul of consciousness in terms of soul impulses, Fichte radiates everything that lives in the “I” into the soul of consciousness. Hence, in more recent times, the British spirit, as embodied in Spencer, has come to expect the world’s blessings above all from the establishment of an external order in which the entire external world is organized in such a way as to yield the greatest possible benefit for humanity’s external needs. What the industrialization of humanity can offer stands as an ideal in Spencer’s worldview; and to him, every element in a social order that is incompatible with the industrialization of society appears to be a curse; for the industrialization of society and the state brings eternal peace and, according to Spencer, works toward the eradication of everything that threatens peace. Thus, the principle of maximum utility is woven into this worldview.

[ 34 ] In Fichte, we see that he is a man of no less practical spirit. We have been able to highlight how he exerts a direct influence on the developments of his time—for example, through his “Addresses to the German Nation”—how he stirs people’s hearts, how he arouses enthusiasm, and how his entire body of work is geared toward—as is evident in his university lectures— to capture people’s hearts and souls, but to do so not from the standpoint of what is of the greatest benefit to humanity as viewed from the external world, but rather from what is to be established as the deepest ideals of the soul within the moral world order. Thus, we see how Fichte works from the nuance of the conscious soul and, in a sense, brings about the antithesis of the British spirit.

[ 35 ] Flegel is a thinker who, within German idealism, places at the center of his worldview that which the soul can experience within itself, but who, through the way he processes this, is infinitely close to the French spirit. Yet Hegel is one of the most German of thinkers because he—I would say—achieves, from the opposite side, what is the distinctive characteristic of the French spirit. Clarity and precision, systematic order in the observer’s perspective—the perspective gained simply by confronting the world: this is what, from Descartes to Bergson, has emerged as the defining characteristic of the French worldview. Hegel wants the worldview to be an experience; but he can absorb from this worldview only what is as clear and precise as, once again, a mathematical concept. That is why Hegel’s worldview appears as clear as a mathematical concept. That is why people have a “cold feeling” toward it, as I have explained. But it is not a mere collection of mathematical concepts; rather, it is conceived in such a way that it touches the soul in its deepest core. And as the soul is thus grasped in its innermost depths, it finds itself elevated above all that is unclear and ambiguous in external perception. But what remains for it, after all that is unclear and ambiguous has fallen away, is the clarity of full being—up to the gnostic and philosophical concept. What characterizes Hegel’s worldview is this: even if his worldview contains only external abstractions, these abstractions are experienced—experienced directly. That, however, makes a great difference. First of all, it means that it is actually unthinkable for anyone to become a “true Hegelian.” One cannot, in essence, become a true Hegelian; that is an impossibility. For the idea of continuing to spin out these external abstractions holds no real appeal for anyone else, and one always has the feeling that the fact that one person has already done this is enough in the world. What matters is the striving to see, at least once, how the human soul can be experienced when one experiences only concepts, when one feels as an inner, immediate experience only what is a clearer—but also entirely more abstract—concept. The striving for such a worldview is what is admirable about Hegel; to observe him as he strives—that is what matters. Especially when one can immerse oneself in a work such as his *Phenomenology of Spirit*—though very few will, of course, be able to immerse themselves in it—one encounters a web of pure abstractions, of the most formidable abstractions; yet it has life, it has a soul. It is a characteristic sign that the German spirit, in its search for a worldview, once went so far in its experience that it said to itself: I find clarity and distinctness nowhere; I will see for myself, in order to experience it, what results when I allow one concept to emerge from another. While Fichte allows the divine essence of the world to merge into “God as the moral world order,” for Hegel God is the “Thinker of the World”; and the individual soul can deepen itself through the most abstract logic by reflecting on the divine thoughts. This is certainly the immensely sobering and cold aspect of Hegel’s philosophy: that, once one engages with it, one cannot help but conclude that the divine world order was concerned solely with “thinking,” and that everything else was presented solely to represent that thinking. A moral worldview warms the heart; a moral worldview also places us, so to speak, within everyday life. Thinking allows us only to “contemplate” the world, and in this sense, contemplation in Hegel is also an experience. And because experience is what matters in shaping the worldview of German idealism, we see how this bears fruit in Hegel’s work in that he does not lose himself in the most external abstractions, but rather holds fast to the ideas that the divine order of the world allows the human race to experience by having it pass through history. The human soul is, so to speak, set on the path to pass through history in order thereby to participate in the course of the divine world order. This “participation” in the world, which I alluded to in Goethe in a much more universal sense, presents itself to us in Hegel with regard to history. Just as these ideas unfold in relation to history, so do they contribute to a worldview of history. But in this experience of the logic of the world, history becomes for him what it must become—a two-part whole: the entire old history up to the appearance of Christ on earth is one part; and the appearance of Christ is a momentous event, the most powerful thing to strike the history of the earth, introducing from that point onward something entirely new into human development—something that was not previously connected to the earth and that now guides earthly development. The idea of Christ connects in the manner described with the historical worldview that German development has produced. For Hegel, all of history is a progression, conceived by the divine government of the world in such a way that it presents itself as an education of humanity toward freedom. And the greatest educator—who, however, divides the entire progress of earthly development into two parts—is the Christ-being, who has entered into earthly development from outside—also in Hegel’s sense. And what is characteristic is this: with the clarity and distinctness that Descartes demands—but with which all experience is also connected in Hegel—the soul can immerse itself in the entire course of history; there it immerses itself in the stage in which the event of Golgotha took place, experiencing within itself, as it were, in a microcosmic way, what the entire development of the Earth has gone through, in that Christ has incorporated himself into the development of the Earth.

[ 36 ] Thus, Hegel grounds his worldview in the rational soul, and in doing so becomes the opposite pole of Descartes’ worldview, just as Fichte is the opposite pole of the British worldview.

[ 37 ] The situation is different when we turn to the third of the thinkers mentioned, Schelling. One could say of him that even in his external thinking, it is evident how he can be related to the southern worldview—the Italian one. I have already noted how, drawing on a heightened imagination, he seeks to give form to what underlies all natural and historical becoming. In this regard, Schelling’s outward appearance is physiognomically significant: his eyes, which sparkled throughout his entire life, bore witness to an inner fire; his powerful forehead, his sardonic laugh, and that inner fire made him a spirit akin to Giordano Bruno. While in Fichte we find the point where the German spirit tends toward the same nuance of the soul as the British spirit, yet—in stark contrast to the latter—seeks to grasp world events from within—and while in Hegel the German spirit produces something that is still opposed to the French spirit, yet is already more similar to it—in Schelling the German spirit —because Schelling acts precisely in accordance with the soul’s nuance of feeling, just as Giordano Bruno does—something quite similar to Giordano Bruno. Except that Schelling constructs his worldview throughout all of nature and history in a somewhat different way than Giordano Bruno. And while in Fichte the world spirit that permeates the world appears as the moral world order, and while in Hegel we see this world spirit as the clear and distinct logical thinker of the world, in Schelling—much like in Giordano Bruno—we have before us the supreme artist, art itself, the artist who creates everything in the world according to artistic principles. But when we compare Schelling, in his unique striving, with Giordano Bruno, we again see the difference between the workings of the Italian national soul, which springs from the soul of feeling—and the workings of the German national soul, which springs from the “I.” With Giordano Bruno, everything is, so to speak, cast from a single mold; everything bears a communal character. I would say: Giordano’s worldview stands there as if fired from a pistol. With Schelling, we see how he sets out from the worldview of his youth, how he laboriously seeks to sense something of it—how one can experience a spark of the life of the world in nature. And he arrives at the insight: What lives in my spirit as soul also lives in matter; matter is enchanted soul; I must redeem it from the enchantment, must disenchant it; the experience of all that is in nature is an experience of the soul. — While Giordano Bruno attempts to arrive at his worldview as if in a single stroke, Schelling sets out “on the path.” And I would like to say: from year to year, we can observe how he seeks to immerse himself ever more deeply into the mysteries of the world’s existence. He traverses the path of development. Indeed, he had to traverse it in such a way that, in his youth, he was still understood in the manner in which the inner nature of the “I” had dawned upon him; later, when he sought to reveal the “I” within the moral world, he was no longer understood, and ultimately he was ridiculed and mocked.

[ 38 ] The worldview of German Idealism is, above all, a path into the deeper foundations of human existence in the world. If I may use an analogy, I would say: The British worldview is like a person standing inside a house and looking out a window. What they see there, they take as a description of the world; and so they take what they see through the house’s features as the world itself. German idealism is set on a path to seek a shared experience with the world spirit. If, however, we follow this path, we see how, even while living in a house, it comes to terms with its inner self. In Schelling, Hegel, and Fichte, we see that German idealism seeks to make itself at home within the house; it sees meaningful images everywhere in the house, and these “images” already express external entities; and because it wants to decipher the images, it seeks a worldview. Fichte seeks it in the moral soul: a worldview conceived within the house, not created through the windows. Hegel explains the images found within the house, which reflect nature and humanity. Schelling, in turn, deciphers yet another part—or rather: with Schelling, “house music” is made, and in this he sees an imprint of what is happening outside. Hegel sees what has been painted about what lies outside. All these minds have a worldview “created within the house” but intended to decipher what is inside the house. What they did not, however, achieve—I would say—is to step through the door of the house—to go out so that, upon passing through the gate, they might merge the image with reality and experience it directly.

[ 39 ] Goethe did, in fact, set out on this path—through the gate. But he also endured all the difficulties of this path. He showed us how endlessly one must struggle to find an expression for what one experiences when one truly sets out on the path of experience. Thus, he passed through the experience with all its struggles and difficulties—just as one who seeks development must pass through life. We see how Goethe captured a certain stage of his life in the 1797 *Faust*, which he characteristically calls a “barbaric composition,” and of which he is convinced that, at a new stage of his life, something entirely new must enter it. It is characteristic of the German worldview that, fundamentally, it can never be “finished.” That superficial judgment, which finds the great “great” only when it is deemed “flawless,” is not a judgment befitting the hero of human striving. Anyone who were to believe that we can have in *Faust* a work of art as perfect as the one Dante produced in his *Divine Comedy* would be mistaken. There, in Dante’s work, everything is magnificently perfected, as if from a single mold; with Goethe, the individual parts were written one by one in succession, with individual sections set aside for years, then taken up again, and so on. It is truly, as he himself says, a “barbaric composition.” Goethe’s *Faust* is certainly imperfect as a work of art, for the reason that it could not become a cohesive composition cast in a single mold, because it always evolved alongside life. But the point is not that we say: the Faust of 1797 is a barbaric composition, a “Tragelaph,” as Goethe put it, but rather that we adopt Goethe’s perspective and try to understand to what extent it can be a barbaric composition; only in this way do we free ourselves from blindness, whereas with the abstract term one can speak only “of recognition.”

[ 40 ] Thus Goethe walks through the gate, aware that one can walk out through it, and differs from the philosophers in that he tries to go further. But at the same time, he knows: Whatever a person can conceive of himself, whatever image he can form of himself: it cannot stand before his own soul, as Fichte placed it in his philosophy; it cannot stand before his own soul, as Schelling or Hegel placed it; otherwise, one ends up with nothing but abstractions, an abstract moral world order, and the like.

[ 41 ] What, then, in Goethe’s sense, is it that a human being can gain only as a conception of himself? It is the homunculus, as he portrays it in the second part of *Faust*—the little human being, the homunculus, an artificial construct of what a human being can know about himself. This must now first be immersed in living nature. And Goethe, in turn, depicts how that part of a human being which he carries within himself must immerse itself in living nature. “You must begin at the very lowest stage of becoming,” the homunculus is told.

[ 42 ] Goethe thus presents evolution in its entirety. For example, when he speaks of the passage through the plantless stage, he uses the words: “It grumbles like that.” He exhorts the homunculus to immerse himself in the entire course of evolution; he even admonishes him: “Do not strive for higher places”—it must read “places,” not “orders,” as it always appears in the Goethe editions; because Goethe spoke with an indistinct Frankfurt accent, the transcriber wrote a “d” instead of a “t”; and Goethe commentators have pondered at length how the homunculus might come to attain all manner of orders. And then it goes on to describe how, by becoming acclimated to the world, he can come to appear as Helena; for what appears in *Helena* is the human representation of what passes through the mysteries of the world.

[ 43 ] Thus, in Goethe, we see the setting out in search of a worldview. The German spirit is aware: I must go out through the gate to what exists in living nature; then, through continuous development, a worldview will take shape within my soul. This worldview, however, demands what is meant by “experiencing the world.” The patience for this was not yet present in the second half of the nineteenth century. Consequently, the quest for a worldview, as inaugurated by Goethe, was held back. Thus it came to pass that in the second half of the nineteenth century—most notably in Karl Vogt, Büchner, and Moleschott, who are referred to as the “materialists” (Haeckel himself could be included among them)—what the British worldview had brought about was revived. One could say: the British worldview was assimilated by the German spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century. The tragedy of Haeckel is that he must now turn against the British worldview, even though it had found its way into German thought through the development described above.

[ 44 ] But this, too, is another way in which the German worldview differs from the British one: the British are content to pursue ideas that merely summarize the external sensory world, and alongside the external worldview they believe in—as a “scientific” worldview—they allow “faith” in some kind of spiritual world to exist for the sake of emotion. Thus, for Darwin, this “faith” can emerge, as he expressed it in his principal scientific work, when he says: “We have thus traced the life of organisms back to a few to which—as he puts it—the Creator breathed life!” Indeed, the curious thing is that the German translator even omitted this very sentence at first! For the German mind, everything must be capable of serving as the foundation for a worldview; for the British mind, this requirement need not be met, because it does not have the necessity to expand its worldview to the point where everything becomes material for its worldview. It can afford to practice “double-entry bookkeeping”: the scientific world provides it with the building blocks for what it considers scientifically correct; faith takes care of the rest. For the German mind, double-entry bookkeeping is not an option. That is why German idealism was overwhelmed by English empiricism. That is why we see strange phenomena in the German quest for a worldview. I need only cite Du Bois-Reymond: in him lives an admiration for the Cartesian-Laplacian spirit, which conceives of the world as a great mathematician might have constructed it from atoms and forces. But: Ignorabimus! We can never know anything about the spiritual and psychological realms. Descartes and Giordano Bruno did not need to go that far. But Du Bois-Reymond goes so far as to say: “... that where supernaturalism begins, science ends.” Descartes does not say this; but Du Bois-Reymond says it, at a time when we find the German spirit overwhelmed by Descartes. — And so one can further demonstrate how the Italian spirit of Giordano Bruno has flowed into numerous endeavors of the German quest for a worldview. Thus, we already find many today who show how a plant has a “soul” and how everything is animated. We need only think of Raoul France. But we could cite many of his contemporaries as well, even Fechner himself, who ascribes a soul to everything: a resurgence of the spirit of Giordano Bruno. But something is missing. What is missing is precisely what lived within Giordano Bruno. That is why I have often pointed out: if someone like Raoul France were to come along and say, “There are plants—when certain animals come near them, the plants attract them, lure them in; once the animal has crawled inside, the plants close a gap and suck it dry…,” do we not see a spiritual life in the plant? We must say: if one were to read the same thing in Giordano Bruno, one would fully understand it because it is imbued with the impulse of the sensuous soul. But when it appears as it has been filtered through the clarity and precision of German idealism, then what I have often pointed out applies: there is something which, by the very nature of its constitution, attracts small animals, takes them in—much like the Venus flytrap does—and then even kills them. It is the mousetrap. And just as one explains the animation of plants in the spirit of Giordano Bruno, so too can one attempt to explain the animation of a mousetrap.

[ 45 ] Because certain ideological impulses flowed into the worldview of German Idealism—which is a protest against any externalization of the worldview—something took place of which one can say: German Idealism has, for a time, receded from the German soul and mind. And today we see it only as an ideal of struggle, of inner strength; we see how, transformed into outward action, it can once again fill souls with hope, confidence, and strength. But we must be clear that this strength is the very same that once sought an inner worldview through inner struggle on the path toward the worldview of idealism, and that this worldview of German idealism is, in truth, what the German spirit must seek as lying on its path—its predestined path. And our fateful times contain many, many warnings, but undoubtedly also this one: that the German spirit must struggle to bring forth once more what lies in its deepest foundations, so that it may become a manifest component of all its striving, of all its work.

[ 46 ] I do not believe that the German spirit becoming aware that it must become the bearer of a worldview rooted in inwardly experienced idealism could in any way—even in the slightest degree—lead to a diminished understanding of the distinctive characteristics of other peoples. On the contrary: the more the German brings forth into the world what lives in his soul as his deepest essence, the more he will be respected in the world. People will understand us all the more the more they bear in mind Goethe’s words:

[ 47 ] “The German people run no greater risk than that of rising to greatness through and alongside their neighbors; perhaps no nation is better suited to develop from within, which is why it was to their great advantage that the outside world took notice of them so late.”

[ 48 ] And to this day, she has paid so little attention to the matter that it has been possible to pass such judgments on the German character as we have heard.

[ 49 ] This is what German idealism, as a voice of warning, calls out to us in these fateful times: May the self-awareness of the German national soul awaken within our own souls! This German idealism was destined to produce a moral, logical, and artistic worldview within the home, since it already reigned, I might say, within the home; it had the gift of perceiving the world—in the paintings within the home. And it must find its way through the gate into the surrounding world. And it must recognize what this path—unlike others—looks like, a path that leads not merely to viewing the outside world through windows, as is the case with the British worldview, but to reaching that world through the gate, to lovingly embracing everything in the world by becoming one with it. If German idealism has prepared itself through the contemplation of worldviews of the microcosm—the human body—then it will also find the gate leading out of the body onto the path that Goethe has already hinted at, a path that leads—in place of the merely imagined, conceived, and inwardly struggled-for worldview— — to seek the worldview experienced through things, which is contained in its first intuitive outlines in Jakob Böhme, which began to take clear shape in Goethe and shines before us as a future ideal, which not only remains with what inspired the viewers of the paintings in the house — Fichte, Schelling, Hegel — but one that can also find its way through the gate to unite the living human soul with the living soul of the world.