The Rudolf Steiner Archive

10. A Forgotten Quest for Spiritual Science Within the Development of German Thought

[ 1 ] The humanities, as understood here, have been characterized by me on several occasions in these lectures. It aims to be a true continuation of the scientific worldview—indeed, of scientific research itself—by drawing upon those forces of the human soul which, when a person faces the external sensory world and makes use of their senses and the intellect bound to the brain, are initially at work—that is, by drawing upon these forces, which all external science also makes use of, adds those forces that lie dormant in the soul in ordinary life and in the work of ordinary science, but which can be drawn forth from this soul, can be developed, and thereby enable human beings to enter into a living relationship with that which, as spiritual laws and spiritual beings, interweaves, permeates, and permeates throughout the world, and to which the human being, with his innermost being, indeed also belongs—belongs with those forces of his being that pass through births and deaths, which are the eternal forces of his being. In its entire outlook, in its scientific outlook, this spiritual science seeks to be a true successor to natural science. And that which distinguishes it from natural science—and which has just been characterized—must be present in it for the very reason that, precisely when one wishes to penetrate the spiritual world—to penetrate it in the same way that natural science penetrates the natural world—one needs different powers for the spiritual world. One needs to uncover the cognitive faculties within the human soul—cognitive powers that are attuned to the spiritual world.

[ 2 ] Today I would like to show, in particular, that this spiritual science—which seeks to emerge in the present as the starting point for the spiritual development of humanity’s future— is not merely arbitrarily extracted from spiritual life or inserted into it, but is firmly anchored in the most significant endeavors of German spiritual life—even if these have perhaps been forgotten due to the circumstances of more recent times. And there we will encounter time and again—and they must be mentioned today as well, even though I have repeatedly described them in the lectures I gave here last winter and this winter—we must encounter them time and again when we speak of the German people’s greatest spiritual upsurge, of the very pinnacle of their spiritual life: the three figures: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

[ 3 ] I took the liberty of characterizing Fichte—given his firm place within German intellectual life—in a special lecture in December. Today I would like to draw particular attention to how Fichte, by ceaselessly seeking a fixed point within his own inner being—a living center of human existence—is, in a certain sense, a starting point for endeavors in the science of the spirit. And at the same time—as was mentioned in particular in the Fichte lecture here—he is the thinker who, I would say, out of a deep sense of feeling, himself perceived what he had to say as having been received through a dialogue with the German national spirit. I have pointed out how Fichte, in contrast to Western philosophy, for example, or the Western worldview, is above all concerned with attaining the source of a higher human conception of the world through an unveiling of the inner human forces, the forces of the human soul. For Fichte, the human “I”—the center of human soul-being—is something that continually creates itself within the human being, so that it can never be lost to the human being, because the human being participates not only in the being of this center of human existence but also in the creative powers of this human being. And how does Fichte conceive of this creative aspect in human beings as being anchored in the all-creative nature of the world? As the highest reality to which a human being can initially attain when attempting to attune oneself to that which weaves and flows through the world as the divine-spiritual. Fichte recognizes as this supreme Divine-Spiritual that which is volitional—that which, as the World-Will permeated by the World-Duty, pulsates through everything, permeates everything, and flows through the human soul itself; yet within this human soul, it is grasped not as Being but as the Creative. Thus, when a person articulates his “I,” he can know himself to be one with the World-Will at work in the world. The Divine-Spiritual, which the world—outer nature—has placed before humanity, seeks, as it were, to enter the very center of human being. And the person becomes aware of this inner volition, addressing it as his self, as his “I.”

[ 4 ] And so Fichte felt at rest with his “I,” but at the same time—and this contradiction is entirely intentional—he was deeply moved by the creative will of the world. From this he draws the strength he exercised throughout his entire life. From this he also draws the strength to regard all that is external and sensuous, as he puts it, as a mere materialized instrument for human duty, which pulsates within his will. Thus, for Fichte, what is truly spiritual is that which flows into the human soul as will. For him, the external world is the sensed material of duty. And thus we see him, time and again throughout his entire life, seeking to direct people’s attention to the source, to the living source within their own inner being.

[ 5 ] In my lecture on Fichte, I drew attention to how Fichte addressed his audience—for example, in Jena—and sought to touch each individual listener in their soul, so that they might become aware of how the all-creative force lives spiritually within them. So he said to his listeners: “Imagine the wall!” Then the listeners looked at the wall and were able to imagine it. After they had imagined the wall for a while, he said: “Now imagine the one who imagined the wall.” At first, the listeners were somewhat taken aback. They were to grasp themselves—each one themselves—inwardly, spiritually. But at the same time, it was the way to direct each individual toward their own self, to point out to them how they can only grasp the world if they find themselves in their deepest inner being and discover there how that which the world wills flows in, and how it rises within their own will as the source of their own being. Above all—and I do not wish to repeat myself today with regard to the lecture I gave here in December—one sees how a worldview of power lives within Fichte. That is why even those who listened to him—and many have spoken in a similar vein—could say: His words roared “like a thunderstorm discharging its fire in individual flashes.” And Fichte, by thus directly seizing the soul and bringing to it the divine-spiritual will that permeates the world, sought not merely to educate good people, but great ones. And so he immersed himself in a living communion of his soul with the soul of the world, viewing this precisely as the result of a dialogue with the German national spirit, and from this consciousness he found those powerful words with which he encouraged and strengthened his people during one of Germany’s most difficult times. It was precisely from this awareness that he found the power to act in the way he was able to speak in the “Addresses to the German Nation,” greatly inspiring his people.

[ 6 ] Just as Fichte’s follower, Schelling now stands there—precisely in his best light—one might say, much like Fichte, more or less forgotten. If Fichte stands there more as the man who seeks to grasp the will—the will to the world—and to let that will to the world roll on in his own words, if this Fichte stands there as the man who, so to speak, commands concepts and ideas, then Schelling stands before us just as he stood before his enthusiastic listeners—and there were many such listeners; I myself have known people who knew the elderly Schelling very well—he stands there before us, not like Fichte, the commander of the worldview; he stands there like the seer, from whose eyes sparkled what he was inspired to convey in words about nature and spirit. This is how he stood before his audience in Jena in the 1790s—at what was, in a sense, the central university of the German people at that time—and this is how he stood later in Munich, in Erlangen, and in Berlin in the 1840s: everywhere radiating something of a seer, as if surrounded by spirituality, as if speaking from within that spirituality.

[ 7 ] To give you an idea of how such a figure appeared before people who were attuned to him during that golden age of German intellectual life, I would like to share with you a few words about the lecture, as recorded by a listener—a faithful listener, since he frequently met with Schelling: Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert. I would like to read to you the words Schubert wrote about the way Schelling stood before his audience—“already as a young man among young men”—back then in the 1790s in Jena. Schubert, who was himself a deeply intellectual man—a man who delved wonderfully into the mysteries of nature, who sought to trace the mysterious workings of the human soul all the way into the world of dreams and the abnormal manifestations of the soul’s life, but who was also capable of ascending to the highest heights of human intellectual life—writes about this. This Schubert writes about Schelling:

[ 8 ] “What was it that drew young men and mature men alike, from near and far, so powerfully to Schelling’s lectures? Was it merely the man’s personality, or the unique charm of his oral presentation, that held this alluring power?” — Schubert believes it was not that alone, but rather: “In his lively speech lay a compelling force which, wherever it met even a modicum of receptivity, no young soul could resist. It would be difficult to make a reader of our time”—Schubert wrote this in 1854, already an old man—“who was not, like me, a youthful and attentive listener, understand how, when Schelling spoke to us, I often felt as though I were reading or hearing Dante, the seer of an otherworldly realm open only to the consecrated eye. The powerful content contained in his speech—measured out in a lapidary style with almost mathematical precision—appeared to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds it is the task of the understanding mind to loose and from whose hand to receive the inextinguishable fire.” — But then Schubert continues: “Yet neither the personality nor the enlivening power of the oral communication alone could have been what, as soon as Schelling’s philosophy became publicly known through his writings, aroused such interest and excitement—whether for or against its direction—as no other literary phenomenon has been able to do in a similar way, either before or since, for a long time. When it comes to things perceptible to the senses or natural phenomena, one can immediately tell whether a teacher or writer is speaking from his own observation and experience or merely discussing what he has heard from others—or even what he has concocted based on his own imagination. Only what I myself have seen and experienced holds certainty for me; I can speak of it with conviction that also triumphantly communicates itself to others. The same applies to inner experience as to outer experience. There is a reality of a higher order, the existence of which the discerning mind within us can experience with the same certainty and assurance as our body experiences the existence of outer, visible nature through its senses. This reality of physical things presents itself to our perceiving senses as an act of the very same creative power through which our physical nature itself came into being. The existence of the visible is just as much a real fact as the existence of the perceiving sense. The reality of a higher order has also approached the knowing spirit within us as a spiritual-physical fact. It will become aware of this reality when its own cognition rises to a recognition of that from which it is known and from which, according to a uniform order, the reality of both physical and spiritual becoming arises. And that realization of a spiritual, divine reality, in which we ourselves live, move, and have our being, is the highest gain of earthly life and of the quest for wisdom... “Even in my day,” Schubert continues, “there were among the young men who heard him some who sensed what he meant by the ‘intellectual insight’ through which our spirit must grasp the infinite source of all being and becoming.”

[ 9 ] Two things stand out in these words by Schubert, a man of profound sensitivity and great intellect. The first is that he sensed—and we know that others who listened to Schelling felt the same way—that this man speaks from immediate spiritual experience; he shapes his words by looking into a spiritual world and thus, from immediate spiritual experience, articulates a wisdom that deals with this spiritual world.

[ 10 ] This is what is significant—what is infinitely significant—about this great era of German idealism: that countless people who were then on the margins of society heard figures such as Fichte, Schelling, and, as we shall soon see, Hegel, and, through the words of these figures, heard the voice of the Spirit, into whose realm these geniuses of the German people gazed. Anyone familiar with the intellectual history of humanity knows that such a relationship between the spirit and the times existed only within the German people—and could exist only because of the nature of the German people—and that this is a unique outcome of what is deeply rooted in the very foundations of the German spirit itself. That is one thing that can be seen in this.

[ 11 ] The other point is that this era gave rise to individuals who, like Schubert, were able to draw inspiration for their own relationship to the spiritual world from these great, significant, and impressive personalities. From such a state of mind emerged, in Schelling, a way of thinking about nature and a way of thinking about soul and spirit that, one might say, bore the character of the most intimate vitality, but also bore a character of which one can say: it shows how human beings are ready to immerse themselves with their souls in all of being—and within all of being, above all in the being of nature, and then also in the being of the spirit—to seek life, immediate life. Under the influence of this way of thinking, knowledge becomes something quite special: knowledge becomes an inner experience, a shared experience with things.

[ 12 ] I find myself having to say this again and again: What matters is not that one today, in any dogmatic way, takes a stand based on the actual content of what these thinkers said. One does not have to agree at all with the content of what they said. What matters is the nature of their striving, the way in which they seek paths into the spiritual world. Schelling felt so intimately connected—even if he expressed it one-sidedly—with what lives and weaves within nature that he was once able to say: “To know nature is to create nature.” Certainly, when it comes to such a statement, the shallow superficial person will always have the upper hand over the genius who, like Schelling, utters such a statement from the depths of his being. Let us concede the point to the shallow superficial person, but let us be clear: even if one can only recreate nature within the human soul—for Schelling, the statement: “To know nature is to create nature” signifies an intimate interweaving of the entire human personality with the existence of nature. And for Schelling, this becomes one revelation of the divine-spiritual, while the human soul becomes the other revelation. They stand opposite one another; they correspond to one another. The spirit first created, as it were, the ground in which the soul can then flourish—in soulless nature, which gradually became animated, rising from the plant kingdom to the animal kingdom and on to humanity—so that the soul may experience the spiritual directly within itself, in immediate reality.

[ 13 ] How different, when properly understood, does what is alive here appear as a sought-after spiritual understanding of nature, as that which, let us say, emerges from Romanic folk culture. Within the development of the German spirit, there is no need to resort to the tone now adopted by Germany’s enemies when characterizing the relationship between German spiritual life and other spiritual lives in Europe. One can certainly remain grounded in reality. Therefore, what is about to be said is not motivated by narrow national sentiments, but by reality itself. Compare this desire to penetrate nature, as found in Schelling, where nature is to be grasped in such a way that the soul’s own life submerges into that which lives and weaves outside. Compare this with what is characteristic of the Western worldview, which reached its zenith with Descartes in the early seventeenth century but has continued to the present day and is just as characteristic of Western culture as Fichte’s and Schelling’s aspirations are of German culture. Like Fichte and Schelling later, Cartesius, too, positions himself in opposition to the natural world. He first adopts a stance of doubt. He also seeks within himself a central point through which he can arrive at certainty regarding the existence of the world and of life. His famous “Cogito ergo sum” is well known—“I think, therefore I am.” On what does he base this? Not, like Fichte, on the living “I,” from which one cannot take away its being because it continually creates itself out of the will of the world. He bases it on thought, which is supposed to already be there, on that which already lives within the human being: “I think, therefore I am”—which can easily be refuted by every night’s sleep a person experiences, for then one might just as well say: “I do not think, therefore I am not.” Nothing particularly fruitful follows from Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” But just how ill-suited this worldview is to immersing one’s own soul in nature is best illustrated by citing a single external characteristic. Descartes attempted to characterize the nature surrounding the soul. And he sought to regard even animals as moving machines, as soulless machines. Only human beings themselves, he believed, could speak of themselves as if they had a soul. Animals are moving machines; they are soulless machines.

[ 14 ] The soul is so little enabled by this folk tradition to immerse itself in the inner life of external things that it cannot find any animacy within the animal world. Is it any wonder, then, that this continued right into the materialism of the eighteenth century and persisted—as we shall mention briefly later today—right up to the present day, just as in that eighteenth-century materialism, in that materialism which viewed the entire world merely as a mechanism, and which ultimately came to realize—particularly in de Lamettrie’s book *L’homme-machine*—that it had even gone so far as to view human beings themselves merely as moving machines. All of this is already present in embryonic form in Descartes.

[ 15 ] Goethe, drawing on his German consciousness, came to know this Western worldview, and he spoke out from that same German consciousness: “They offer us a world of moving atoms that collide and struggle against one another.” If only they were willing to derive the manifold, beautiful, great, and sublime phenomena of the world from these colliding, tugging atoms. But after they have presented this bleak, desolate picture of the world, they leave it at that and do nothing to show how the world emerges from these clusters of atoms.

[ 16 ] The third figure to be mentioned among those spirits who, in a sense, form the ideological backdrop from which everything sprang that the Germans achieved intellectually during that period through Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, and so on—the third figure to be mentioned is: Hegel; in him we see the third aspect of the German essence embodied. We see in him a third way of finding within the soul the point through which the human soul can feel itself directly at one with the entire world—with that which, in a divine-spiritual sense, pulses through, interweaves, and permeates the world. Just as we see in Fichte the will taking hold directly in the innermost core of the human being, and in Schelling—I would say—the mind, so in Hegel we see the human thought taking hold. But in Hegel’s attempt to grasp thought not merely as human, but in its purity, detached from all sensory sensations and perceptions—Hegel feels as though, by living within the life, the weaving, and the becoming of pure thought, he is at the same time living within the thought that not only lives in the soul but is meant to appear in the soul only because it reveals itself there as divine-spiritual thought permeating the entire world. Just as divine-spiritual beings, as it were, scatter their thoughts throughout the world—just as they think the world and continually shape it through thought—so this is revealed when the thinker, in solitude, allows pure thought to spring forth within himself: thought that is not borrowed from the external sensory world, but which man finds as thought sprouting from within himself when he surrenders to his inner self. Fundamentally, what Hegel seeks here—if one may put it that way—is a mystical will. But it is not an unclear, obscure, or nebulous mysticism. Obscure, unclear, and nebulous mysticism seeks to unite with the foundation of the world through the darkest possible feelings. Hegel also seeks the union of the soul with the foundation of the world, but he seeks it in the crystal clarity and transparency of thought; he seeks it in inner experience; he seeks the conceptual aspects of the world. In perfect clarity, he seeks for the soul that which one otherwise believes one can attain only through obscure mysticism.

[ 17 ] All of this shows how these three great thinkers, approaching the subject from three different angles, strive to lead the human soul—through devotion to the totality of reality—to experience that reality firsthand, and how convinced they are that something can be found within the soul that experiences the world in its depths, thereby yielding a satisfying worldview.

[ 18 ] In 1811 and 1813, Fichte spoke to his Berlin students about attaining such a worldview in a way that makes it clear: he was well aware that one must strive to develop certain powers of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul. Fichte then tells his Berlin students in those years: If one truly wants to possess that which must be sought in order to truly comprehend the world inwardly and spiritually, it is necessary for a person to find and awaken a sense that lies dormant within oneself—a new sense, a new sensory organ. Just as the eye develops in the physical body, so must a new sense organ be developed from the soul—in Fichte’s sense—if one is to look into the spiritual world. That is why Fichte boldly says to his listeners during these years—in which, as far as he could achieve in his relatively short life, his worldview reached its highest peak—: What I have to say to you is like a single sighted person entering a world of the blind. What he has to tell them about the world of light, the world of colors, will at first take them aback; at first they will say it is nonsense, because they cannot even begin to imagine it.

[ 19 ] And Schelling—as we can already see from Schubert’s remark about him—drew attention to intellectual intuition. What he expressed in his words—for which he formulated a wisdom—he sought to explore in the world by believing that he had developed the organ within himself for “intellectual intuition.” Speaking from this intellectual intuition, Schelling was able to exert the influence that has just been described.

[ 20 ] Hegel then, from his own standpoint, opposes this intellectual perspective. He believed that if one were to emphasize this intellectual perspective in particular, one would be seeking to identify exceptional individuals—people who, as it were, had become capable, through a higher disposition, of gaining insight into the spiritual world. Hegel was, rather, deeply convinced that gaining insight into the spiritual world is possible for every human being, and he wanted to emphasize this point thoroughly.

[ 21 ] Thus, these thinkers were at odds not only in terms of the content of what they said, but also in terms of their profound views. But that is not the point; what matters is the fact that, at heart, they all strive for what can truly be called spiritual science: the experience of the world through that which lies in the deepest recesses of the human soul. And in this, as Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling have often stated, they are in agreement with the greatest spirit to have emerged from the German people: Goethe.

[ 22 ] In a beautiful little treatise he titled “Anschauende Urteilskraft” (Contemplative Judgment), Goethe speaks of this contemplative judgment. What does Goethe mean by this contemplative judgment? The senses first perceive the external physical world. The intellect synthesizes what this external physical world presents to it. When the senses perceive the external physical world, they do not see the essence of things, Goethe argues; this must be perceived spiritually. Here, the faculty of judgment must do more than merely combine; the concepts and ideas that arise must not merely arise in order to represent something else; rather, the power that forms concepts and ideas must contain something alive from the World Spirit itself. There, the power of judgment must not merely think; there, the power of judgment must perceive—perceive spiritually, just as the senses otherwise perceive. Goethe is in complete agreement with those who, in a sense, have provided the backdrop for the worldview, just as they, in turn, feel in agreement with him. Just as Fichte, for example, when he published the first edition of his seemingly so abstract *Science of Knowledge*, sent it to Goethe in installments and wrote to him: “The pure spirituality of feeling that one sees in you must also be the touchstone for what we create.”

[ 23 ] There is, in fact, a wonderful spiritual connection between the three aforementioned intellectual figures and spirits such as Goethe; we could also mention Schiller, we could also mention Herder—we could name them all, those who, during such a great era, drew directly from the depths of German folk culture.

[ 24 ] It must be said that, in all that emerged in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and also in the others, there is something contained that is not fully expressed in any one of them: Fichte seeks to comprehend the spiritual world by experiencing the will as it flows into the soul; Schelling turns more to the mind, Hegel to the content of thought in the world, and others to other things. Hovering above it all, as it were, like a unity that manifests itself in three or so different ways, is what one can truly call the striving of the German national spirit itself—a spirit that cannot be fully articulated by any single personality, but which expresses itself, as it were, in three shades—for example, with regard to a worldview—in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Anyone who does not approach these figures as a dogmatic follower or opponent—we should have moved beyond such childishness today, that of wanting to be a follower or opponent of a spirit if one wishes to grasp its greatness—but who has a heart, a mind, and an open sensibility for their striving, will hear something in all their expressions that is like the German national soul itself, so that, as it were, what they say is always more powerful than what is directly expressed. That is the remarkable and mysterious aspect of these spirits. And that is why later, far lesser figures than these great, brilliant ones were able to arrive at more significant, more penetrating spiritual truths than these leading and influential spirits themselves. This is what is significant: through these thinkers, something expresses itself that is more than these thinkers themselves—namely, the central German national spirit itself, which continues to work, so that lesser figures could then emerge—those far less gifted—and in these far less gifted individuals the same spirit finds expression, but in a manner even more in keeping with spiritual science than in Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel themselves. They were the ones who, I would say, first set the tone and, for the first time, communicated something to the world, drawing it out from the source of spiritual life. This is difficult even for the most brilliant minds. But once the inspiration—the great, the mighty inspiration—had been given, lesser minds followed. And one must say: these lesser minds, in part, have grasped that which represents the path into the spiritual worlds even more deeply, even more meaningfully than those on whom they depended, who were their teachers.

[ 25 ] Thus, in the case of Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, we see how he strives, in his own way, toward a science of the spirit—namely, by seeking within the sensory human being standing before us, whom the external senses and external science perceive, a higher human being whom he calls an “etheric human being,” and in whom lie the formative forces for this physical human being—a being who is formed before the physical body receives its hereditary substance from the parents, and who endures as the sum of these formative forces when the physical body passes through the gate of death. Immanuel Hermann Fichte speaks of an etheric human being—an etheric human being inwardly empowered and filled with strength, who belongs to the eternal forces of the universe just as the human being here, as a physical human being, belongs to the physical forces of the hereditary stream—likely as a result of his relationship with his father, who was a good educator to him.

[ 26 ] And one is tempted to say: As if carried to greater heights, we find the Fichtean and Schellingian striving in a man who has become little known, who belongs, in fact, to the forgotten figures of German intellectual life, yet in whom is deeply rooted the very essence of the German national spirit—in Troxler. Troxler—who knows Troxler? And yet, how does this Troxler stand before us? Already under the influence of Schelling in particular, he wrote his profound *Insights into the Nature of Man* in 1811 and then delivered his lectures on philosophy in 1834. These lectures are certainly not written in a “piquant” style—to use a foreign word for something foreign—but they are written in such a way that they show us: Here speaks a person who does not merely wish to approach the world with the intellect—with which one can grasp only the finite—but one who wishes to devote the entire human personality, with all its powers, to the world, so that this personality, when it immerses itself in the phenomena of the world, it may bring forth an insight fertilized by shared experience—by the most intimate shared experience with the being of the world. And Troxler knows something of the fact that among those powers of the soul that are initially directed toward external nature and its sensuality, higher spiritual powers dwell. And in a remarkable way, Troxler now seeks to elevate the spirit above itself. He speaks of a super-spiritual sense that can be awakened in human beings, of a super-spiritual sense that slumbers within them. — What does Troxler mean by this? He means this: The human spirit normally thinks only in abstract concepts and ideas that are dry and empty, that are mere images of the external world; yet within the very same power that lives in these abstract concepts and ideas, there also lives something that a person can awaken as a spiritual entity. Then one perceives in supersensible images just as one can perceive external reality with the eyes. In ordinary cognition, the sensory image is present first, and thought is added in the process of cognition—thought that is not sensory or pictorial. In the spiritual process of cognition, the supersensory experience is present; this could not be perceived as such if it did not pour itself, through a power natural to the spirit, into the image that brings it to spiritual-intuitive sensibility. For Troxler, such cognition is that of the super-spiritual sense. And what accompanies this super-spiritual sense in Troxler’s view, he calls the supersensible spirit—the spirit that rises above the mere contemplation of the sensible and, as spirit, participates in what is unfolding and evolving out there in the world. How could I have failed to mention to those esteemed listeners who attended a lecture such as the one I gave the Friday before last that in Troxler’s “super-spiritual sense” and “super-sensible spirit” lie the seeds—albeit only the seeds, but still the seeds—of what I had to characterize as the two paths into spiritual science,

[ 27 ] But Troxler expresses it wonderfully in yet another way. He says: When a human being is first placed, as he is with his soul and his eternal self, within his physical body—when a human being is confronted there with the moral, the religious, but also with external, immediate reality—then he develops three forces: faith, hope, and love. These three forces, which he continues to develop, he cultivates throughout his life within the physical-sensory body. It is simply part of being human, as we exist in the physical-sensory world, that we live in faith, love, and hope. But Troxler says: What is inherent in the human soul as faith—as justified faith—here within the physical body is, in a sense, the outer expression of a deeper force that lies within the soul, a force that shines into the physical world through this faith as something divine. But behind this power of faith—which, in order to unfold, absolutely requires the physical body—lies a supersensible hearing; that is to say, faith is, in a sense, what the human being makes of this supersensible hearing. By making use of the physical instrument for supersensible hearing, he believes. But when he detaches himself from his physical body and experiences himself in the soul, the same power that becomes faith in sensory life gives rise to supersensible hearing, through which he can immerse himself in a world of spiritual sound phenomena, through which spiritual beings and spiritual realities speak to him.

[ 28 ] And the love that a person develops here in the physical body—which is the blossom of human life on Earth—is the outward expression of a force that lies behind it: spiritual feeling or sensing, as Troxler says. And when a person takes this same force—which lives here as the flowering of moral and religious existence on Earth—and deepens this love, delving into its depths, then he discovers within himself that the spiritually -soul-human being possesses organs of feeling through which he can touch spiritual beings and spiritual realities, just as he can touch physical-sensory realities with his sensory organs of feeling or touch. Behind love lies spiritual feeling or sensing, just as behind faith lies spiritual hearing.

[ 29 ] And behind the hope that a person has in one way or another lies spiritual vision—the ability to see into the spiritual world through the spiritual sense of sight.

[ 30 ] Thus, Troxler sees in what human beings themselves experience as the power of faith, love, and hope merely the outward expression of higher powers: spiritual hearing, spiritual feeling, and spiritual perception or vision. And then he says: When a person can devote themselves to the world in such a way that they give themselves over with their spiritual hearing, spiritual feeling, and spiritual seeing, then not only do thoughts arise within them that outwardly and abstractly reflect the external world in many ways, but—as Troxler puts it—“sensible thoughts,” thoughts that can themselves be felt—that is, that are living beings—and ‘intelligent feelings’—that is, not merely vague feelings in which one senses the existence of the world, but something through which the feelings themselves become intelligent. We know from the lecture just mentioned that it is actually the will, not the feelings; but in Troxler lies the very seed of everything that can be presented today in spiritual science. So when a person awakens at all to this seeing, this hearing, this sensing of the spiritual world, a life of thought awakens within this feeling, through which the person can connect with the living thought that weaves and lives in the spiritual world, just as thought lives within us in an essential, not merely abstract, way. This is how deeply Troxler felt his striving toward spiritual science. And I would like to read a passage from Troxler that will allow you to see just how profound this striving was in him. He once said:

[ 31 ] “Philosophers of old had already distinguished a subtle, noble spiritual body from the coarser physical body, or posited within the latter a kind of veil over the face—a soul that possessed within itself an image of the body, which they called a ‘schema,’ and which they regarded as the inner, higher human being... Even in recent times, Kant, in the *Dreams of a Spirit-Seer*, seriously yet playfully envisions an entire inner, spiritual human being who bears all the limbs of the outer body on his spiritual body.”

[ 32 ] Troxler then draws attention to others who, to a greater or lesser extent, had sensed—out of the depths of German intellectual endeavor—this other aspect of the nature of the world. Troxler goes on to say:

[ 33 ] “Lavater writes and thinks in the same way, and even when Jean Paul jokes humorously about Bonnet’s little petticoat and Platner’s soul-corset—which are supposed to be tucked into the coarse outer coat and torture smock—we still hear him ask once more: Why and from where were these extraordinary inclinations and desires placed within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut through our earthly shell? Why was I glued to this dirty clod of earth as a creature with useless wings of light, if I was to rot back into the soil of my birth without ever fluttering free with ethereal wings?”

[ 34 ] Troxler draws attention to such trends in German intellectual life. And then it occurs to him that a distinct science might now emerge—a science that is indeed a science, but which shares a commonality with poetry, for example, in that it arises from the human soul, not through a single faculty of the soul, but through the entire human soul devoting itself to experiencing the world,

[ 35 ] Troxler says that when one looks at human beings from the outside in this way, one comes to understand anthropology. Anthropology is what arises when one uses the senses and the intellect to examine what human beings present and what is revealed in them. However, this does not reveal the full essence of the human being. What Troxler, in the sense he describes, calls spiritual hearing, spiritual feeling, and spiritual seeing—what he calls the supersensory spirit and the super-spiritual sense—is necessary in order to perceive something higher in human beings. There is a science that lies before the human soul, one that arises not from the senses, not from mere intellect, but from this higher capacity for knowledge within the human being. And Troxler speaks very characteristically about this science in the following manner. He says—the following words were written by Troxler in 1835—:

[ 36 ] “While it is indeed most gratifying that the latest philosophy—which we have long recognized as the foundation of all living religion and which must manifest itself in every form of anthroposophy, that is, in poetry as well as in history—is now gaining momentum, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be a true fruit of speculation, and that the true personality or individuality of the human being must not be confused either with what it posits as subjective spirit or finite “I,” nor with what it sets against this as absolute spirit or absolute personality.”

[ 37 ] It was in the 1830s that the idea of anthroposophy first arose in Troxler’s mind—that science which, in the true sense of the word, seeks to be a spiritual science grounded in human power. If spiritual science is able to correctly understand the seeds that come to it from the ongoing current of German spiritual life, it can indeed say: Among Western peoples, for example, something comparable to spiritual science, something comparable to anthroposophy, can indeed arise; but there it will always arise in such a way that it runs parallel to the ongoing current of worldview, alongside what is considered science there, and therefore very, very easily tends toward sectarianism or dilettantism. In German intellectual life—and in this respect German intellectual life stands alone—spiritual science emerges as something that arises in a natural way from the deepest impulses, from the deepest forces of this German intellectual life. Even when this German spiritual life becomes scientific with regard to the spiritual world and develops a striving for spiritual knowledge, the seeds of what must become spiritual science are already present in this striving. Therefore, we will never see what flows in this way through German spiritual life fade away again.

[ 38 ] Or isn’t it simply marvelous that in 1856 a little book was published by a pastor from Waldeck—in Sachsenberg in Waldeck, where he served as pastor. In this little book—as I said, the focus is not on agreement or on the content itself, but on the endeavor—an attempt is made, in a manner entirely opposed to Hegel’s, to find something for the human soul through which this human soul, by awakening the power slumbering within it, can connect itself to the entire sublime, awakening spiritual world. And in an admirable way, this is presented by the simple pastor Rocholl in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck in his little book: “Contributions to a History of German Theosophy”—a small book, but full of genuine inner spiritual life, a spiritual life in which one can see that the person who sought it in his solitude finds the possibility everywhere to rise from the solitary inner experience of the soul to broad vistas of the world that lies hidden behind the sensory world and yet always sustains it, so that one sees only one side of the world when one considers this sensory life. One does not know what to admire first in such a little book, which certainly must make a fantastical impression today—but that is not the point—; whether one should admire more the fact that a simple country pastor finds his way into the deepest depths of spiritual inquiry, or whether one might admire more the foundations of the ongoing current of German spiritual life, which can bring forth such blossoms even in the simplest of people. And if we had the time, I could cite hundreds and hundreds of examples from which you would see how—admittedly not in the realm of what is outwardly recognized, but rather in the realm of forgotten spiritual tones, yet still vibrating with life—there are people everywhere who carry forward into our own time what might be called a spiritual-scientific pursuit within the development of German thought.

[ 39 ] Even when I was writing the first edition of my *Welt- und Lebensanschauungen* (Worldviews and Philosophies of Life)—which has now been republished under the title *Rätsel der Philosophie* (The Riddles of Philosophy) more than a year and a half ago—I drew attention to a little-known thinker: Karl Christian Planck. But what good did it do, at first, to draw attention to such minds? Such minds are best understood as an expression, as a revelation of what is alive today—what is not expressed in the conscious pursuit of science, yet nonetheless sustains and supports that pursuit in many ways. It is precisely from the deepest depths of the German spirit that such minds emerge, and Karl Christian Planck is one of them. Planck wrote a book titled *The Truth and Superficiality of Darwinism*, a very significant work. He also wrote a book on the understanding of nature. From this book, I would like to mention only the following, although, strictly speaking, every page is interesting:

[ 40 ] When people today speak of the Earth, they speak, I would say, in a geological sense. To them, the Earth is a mineral body, and human beings walk upon it as alien beings. For Planck, the Earth—with everything that grows on it, including human beings—is a great spirit-soul organism, and human beings are part of it. One simply has not understood the Earth unless one has shown how the physical human being must be present within the entire organism of the Earth through the external embodiment of his soul. The Earth is conceived as a whole; all its forces, from the most physical to the most spiritual, are grasped as a whole. Planck seeks to establish a unified worldview that is “spirit-based,” to use Goethe’s expression. But Planck is aware—and in this regard he is one of the most characteristic thinkers of the nineteenth century—that what he is capable of creating truly springs from the deepest core of the German national spirit. He expresses this in his work *Grundlinien einer Wissenschaft der Natur* (Fundamentals of a Science of Nature), published in 1864, in the following beautiful words:

[ 41 ] “He is fully aware of the power of deep-rooted prejudices—based on prevailing views—that stand in the way of his”—the author’s—“work; yet just as the work itself, despite all the adverse circumstances—which, due to the author’s overall situation and professional status” — for he was, after all, a mere high school teacher, not a university professor — “stood in the way of a work of this kind, it nevertheless fought its way to completion and into the public eye; so he is also certain that what must now first fight for recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in this, not merely his cause, but the truly German view of things will triumph over all still unworthy, superficial, and un-German conceptions of nature and the spirit.

[ 42 ] What our medieval poetry had already foreshadowed in an unconscious, profound intuition will finally be fulfilled in our nation as the times mature. The impractical, inward-looking nature of the German spirit—plagued by harm and ridicule (as Wolfram von Eschenbach depicts it in his *Parzival*)” —this was written in 1864, long before Wagner’s *Parsifal*!— “finally attains the highest through the power of its unceasing striving; it penetrates to the very core of the ultimate, simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry symbolized in a fantastical, medieval manner through the miracles of the Grail—whose dominion its hero attains—finds, conversely, its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring knowledge of nature and the spirit itself.”

[ 43 ] So speaks the man who went on to present a summary of his worldview under the title “Testament of a German,” in which he truly attempts—once again at a higher level than Schelling was able to achieve—to penetrate nature and spirit. In 1912, this “Testament of a German” was published in a new edition. I do not believe that many people have given it much thought. Those who deal with such matters professionally had other things to do: the same publishing house that released this “Testament of a German”—with its genuinely German worldview—also published the books by Bergson, by that Bergson—he is still called Bergson! —who uses the present time not only to denigrate but, in the truest sense, to slander what has emerged from German intellectual life; who has managed to characterize the entire current intellectual culture of the Germans as mechanistic. I have said here before: when he wrote that the Germans have fallen from the heights they once stood upon under Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Schelling, and Hegel—for now they are creating a mechanical culture—he probably believed that the Germans would recite Novalis or Goethe’s poems to their enemies as they advanced with cannons! But based on the fact that he now sees only cannons and rifles—or perhaps does not even see them—he reduces German culture to a thoroughly mechanistic one.

[ 44 ] Now, just as the other things I am speaking about at this time have been said time and again in the years before the war—even to members of other nations—so that they must not be understood as prompted by the circumstances of the war—I have, in the book that was completed at the outbreak of the war, namely the second edition of my *Worldview and Philosophy of Life*, I attempted to present Bergson’s philosophy. And in that same book, I also pointed out how—I would say—one of Bergson’s most dazzling ideas, infinitely greater, more profound, and more far-reaching—once again, we encounter such a forgotten “voice of German intellectual life”—had already appeared as early as 1882 in the work of the little-known Wilhelm Heinrich Preuß. For Bergson points out at one place in his books that, when contemplating the world, one should not start with the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and only then incorporate humanity into that framework, but rather start with humanity; how humanity is the primal source, and how, in the continuous flow in which it developed—while it was the first—it has cast off the other entities as less perfect, so that the other kingdoms of nature have developed out of the human realm.

[ 45 ] In my *Riddles of Philosophy*, I pointed out how Wilhelm Heinrich Preuß—a solitary, profound thinker, but also an energetic and powerful one—in his book *Spirit and Matter*, and, in fact, even before 1882, presented this idea in a powerful, courageous manner—the idea that one cannot make sense of Darwinism as understood in the purely Western sense, but that one must imagine: If one goes back in the world, one first encounters human beings. Human beings are the primordial beings, and as they continue to evolve, they give rise to certain entities—first the animals, then the plants, and finally the minerals. This is the reverse course of evolution.

[ 46 ] I cannot go into detail on this today—in lectures from previous years I have even addressed this idea on several occasions—but I would like to mention today that this spiritual worldview is fully articulated in the 1880s within the German spiritual movement in von Preuß’s book *Geist und Stoff* (*Spirit and Matter*). I would like to read to you a key passage from my book *The Riddles of Philosophy* so that you can see how, in weighty words, a compelling worldview—one that lies at the heart of the entire current I have described to you today—flows into the spiritual life of humanity. Preuß says there:

[ 47 ] “It is probably… time to formulate a… theory of the origin of organic species that is not based solely on one-sided propositions derived from descriptive natural science, but is also in full harmony with the other laws of nature, which are at the same time the laws of human thought. A theory, at the same time, that is free of all speculation and rests solely on rigorous conclusions drawn from scientific observations in the broadest sense; a theory that preserves the concept of species to the extent that is actually possible, but at the same time incorporates Darwin’s concept of evolution into its own domain and seeks to make it fruitful.

[ 48 ] The focal point of this new doctrine is humanity, the species that exists only once on our planet: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the earlier observers began with natural objects and then strayed so far off course that they failed to find the path to humanity—a feat that even Darwin achieved only in the most meager and thoroughly unsatisfactory manner, by seeking the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals — whereas the naturalist had to begin with himself as a human being, in order to return progressively to humanity through the entire realm of being and thought! ... It was no coincidence that human nature emerged from the evolution of all earthly things, but rather a necessity. Man is the goal of all terrestrial processes, and every other form that emerged alongside him has borrowed its traits from his. Man is the firstborn being of the entire cosmos... Once his seeds had emerged, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary power to produce further human seeds. Whatever else came into being became an animal or a plant...»

[ 49 ] 1882—a portrayal of what the human soul can experience spiritually, presented within the context of German intellectual life! Then Bergson comes along and presents the idea not in such a powerful, compelling way—one connected to the innermost life of the soul—but, one might say, in a somewhat abbreviated, fussy, and vague manner. And people are overwhelmed by Bergson and want nothing to do with Preuß. And Bergson apparently knows nothing about Preuß. But for someone who writes about worldviews, that is about as bad as if he knew something about it and didn’t say so. But let us not examine whether Bergson knew and did not say so, or whether he did not know, since it has now been sufficiently proven that Bergson not only borrowed ideas from Schopenhauer and rendered them in his own form, but also drew upon the entire philosophy of German idealism—for example, Schelling and Fichte—whose creator he seems to regard himself as. It is indeed a peculiar method to characterize the relationship of one culture to another in the way Bergson now constantly does with regard to the French, by portraying German scholarship and German thought as something particularly mechanical, after having first taken the trouble—which is probably not a very mechanical activity—to devote pages upon pages to describing these German thinkers. In retrospect, one realizes that Bergson could have remained silent altogether had he not built his worldview on the foundation of these German philosophical figures—a worldview that is, at its core, nothing other than Cartesian mechanism, the mechanism of the eighteenth century, rehashed with a touch of Romanic-style Schellingianism and Schopenhauerianism.

[ 50 ] As I said, one must characterize things appropriately; for we must keep this in mind so that, when we speak of the place of the German spirit in the overall development of humanity, we do not need to resort to the same method of belittling other peoples that is so widely employed today by our opponents. The German is in a position to point to what is factual, and from the severe trials of the present time, he will now also gain the strength to delve even deeper into this German essence with his soul—where he has not yet succeeded. The forgotten aspects of the pursuit of spiritual science will be remembered once more. I may say this again and again, having striven for more than thirty years to emphasize another aspect of the forgotten quest for German knowledge.

[ 51 ] From what arose entirely out of a perception of the British character directed solely toward the external world, we have the so-called Newtonian theory of colors. And the power of the British spirit—not only externally, but internally, spiritually—is so great that this Newtonian theory of color has taken hold of all minds that reflect on such matters. Only Goethe, drawing from that spirit that can be derived from German folk culture, has rebelled against the Newtonian theory of color in the realm of physics. Certainly, Newtonian color theory is—I might say—in a specific sense the same as what de Lamettrie’s *L’Hommemachine* can be for all the shallow, superficial people of the world. Only the case of color theory is particularly tragic. For 35 years, as I said, I have been striving to present the full significance of Goethe’s theory of colors—the entire struggle of the German worldview, which emerges in Goethe with regard to the world of colors, against the mechanistic conception rooted in British folklore as embodied by Newton. The chapter “Goethe Is Right Against Newton,” will also come to the fore one day, as that which does not always live on consciously but nevertheless remains vividly active—and which can always be perceived by those who wish to see—gains ever greater prominence. And it will come to the fore, precisely out of the trials of our time, the deepest awareness among Germans of the depth of their quest for knowledge.

[ 52 ] It goes almost without saying—and is therefore as easy to grasp as all superficial truisms—when people today say: “Science is, of course, international.” The moon is international, too! Yet what individual people have to say about the moon is by no means international. When Goethe was traveling, he wrote back to his German friends: “Based on what I have seen of plants and fish near Naples, in Sicily, if I were ten years younger, I would be very tempted to take a trip to India—not to discover anything new, but to view what has already been discovered in my own way.” Certainly, science is international. It is not easy to refute these statements, because they go without saying—just as everything superficial goes without saying. But as I said, science is as international as the moon. But what individual peoples have to say from the depths, from the very roots of their national character, about that which is international—that is what is significant; that is also what is effective; that is what advances human development through the way in which each individual people relates to what is to be recognized as international. That is what matters.

[ 53 ] To this day, however, one cannot yet say that precisely that which, in the deepest sense, constitutes the German essence has made a significant impression in subsequent times through the path of knowledge. Within the German essence itself, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were initially so influential that posterity was left in a daze, and that at first they brought forth only one or the other, one or the other aspect—to the extent that even un-German materialism was able to take hold within German intellectual life. It is particularly instructive, however, to see how that which is quintessentially German takes effect in other cultures when it becomes immersed within them. And Schelling, for example, is quintessentially German. Schelling had a profound influence, for example, within Russian intellectual life. Within Russian intellectual life, we see how Schelling is received—how his powerful conceptions of nature, but especially of history—for Russians have little appreciation for a conception of nature—are received. But we also see how precisely the essential element—the very thing that matters—cannot be understood at all in Eastern Europe. Indeed, it is particularly interesting—and you can read the details in my essay “Thoughts During the Time of War”—how this part of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century gradually developed a complete rejection of the intellectual life not only of Central but even of Western Europe. And one gains an impression of German spiritual life precisely when one sees how this essential aspect—which I have tried to elaborate on today—this inner living with the soul in the development of nature and spirit—cannot be understood in the East, where things are accepted merely on the surface. In this Eastern region, consciousness swelled tremendously over the course of the nineteenth century, particularly among the intellectuals—not among the peasants, of course, who know little about war, even when they wage it. The intellectual life of the East is, however, a curious phenomenon. I have already explained this once before: Slavophilism emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the 1830s, directly influenced by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; but it emerges in such a way that Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are taken only superficially—entirely superficially—so that one has no inkling of how Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—the instruments of the will, the mind, and thought—objectively coexist with that which, externally, interweaves and permeates the world. And so it came to pass that this Russian culture—which, in terms of its sense of knowledge, still lived deeply within a medieval sensibility—assimilated Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in such a way that, over the course of the nineteenth century, an almost megalomaniacal worldview took shape, which, in the realms of literature and knowledge, truly constituted a kind of transposition of—whether forged or not forged— — Political Testament of Peter the Great.

[ 54 ] What a profound impact the German worldview has had over there! In one of the lectures I gave just recently, I explained how Goethe’s *Faust* truly springs from what we have been able to allow to influence our souls once again today as the German worldview. But we need only listen to the words of Pissarev—who, as a Russian intellectual, was deeply influenced by Goethe—about Goethe’s *Faust*, and we will see how it is impossible to understand what is connected precisely with the most characteristic, the most essential aspect of the German national soul. Pissarev says, for example: “The small thoughts and the small feelings had to be turned into pearls of creation”—for in “Faust” he is referring precisely to the small thoughts and human feelings that concern human beings in this very way! — “Goethe accomplished this feat, and similar feats are still regarded as the greatest triumph of art; but such hocus-pocus is practiced not only in the realm of art, but also in all other spheres of human activity.”

[ 55 ] It is an interesting phenomenon how, in figures such as Ivan Vasilyevich Kireyevsky or Khomyakov, precisely that which lives as something great and significant in the inner world yet as clear inner life—continues to live on in such minds in a way that generates a darkened and nebulous sentimentalism, and we could cite an impressive list right up to the present day consisting precisely of Russian thinkers—how, in this Russian worldview, the conviction has generally taken shape: What exists to the west of us is a senile culture, a culture past its prime; it is ripe for extinction. The Russian essence is here; it must replace what exists in Central Europe—and by that they also meant Western Europe in the nineteenth century, specifically England—what exists in England.

[ 56 ] This is not something I have singled out on one point or another; rather, it is a consistent feature of Russian intellectual life that characterizes those who matter—those who set the tone. In Kireyevsky’s work, this culminated around 1829 in a statement that I will read aloud in a moment, and one will see from such a statement that what resounds from the East today did not just emerge today, but is deeply rooted in what has gradually accumulated there in the East.

[ 57 ] But first I would like to mention something else. The whole thing stems from Slavophilism—a seemingly scientific and theoretical exaggeration of the significance of the Russian people, who are supposed to replace the old, decrepit Europe, which has degenerated into nothing but abstract concepts and cold notions of utility. Yes, as I said, one finds this time and again in Russian intellectual life. But where does this Slavophilism actually come from; where does it actually originate? What is it that drew the attention of these people in the East to what they later repeated in all manner of variations: The people of Central and Western Europe have degenerated; they are senile; they have managed to banish all love and all emotion from their hearts and to live solely in the intellect, which leads to war and hatred among the various peoples. In the Russian Empire, love lives, peace lives, and a science that springs from love and peace also lives. Where, then, did these people get this from? They got it from the German worldview! Herder is, in essence, the first Slavophile. Herder was the first to articulate this—which was justified in his time and remains justified when one looks at the depths of the national character, which truly has nothing to do with today’s war or with anything that led to it. But one can point to what has led to the delusion of grandeur among the so-called intellectuals: We stand here in the East; over there, everything—everything—is decrepit; it must all be eradicated, and in its place must come the worldview of the East.

[ 58 ] Let us take such words to heart, as we find them in Kireyevsky. He wrote in 1829: “The fate of every European state depends on the unity of all the others; — the fate of Russia depends on Russia alone. But Russia’s fate is determined by its education: this is the condition and source of all blessings. As soon as all these blessings are ours, we will share them with the rest of Europe, and we will repay our entire debt to it a hundredfold.”

[ 59 ] Here you have a leading figure who has repeatedly served as a point of reference precisely for those minds that were most opposed to the prevailing current of Russian intellectual life. Here he stated it plainly: Europe is ripe for collapse; Russian culture must replace it. Russian culture embodies everything that is future-proof. So let us embrace it all. And when we have it all—well, then we will be generous; then we will share it appropriately with others. This is the literary program, established as early as 1829 within Russian society by a mind into whose immaturity and sentimentalism even Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had an influence.

[ 60 ] There is, in general, a peculiar way of thinking in the East. Let me elaborate on this in closing. For example, in 1885 a peculiar book was published by Sergius Yushakov—a peculiar book, as I said. This Yushakov believes that Russia has a great mission. In 1885, he saw this mission as directed even more toward Asia. Over there in Asia, he argues, live the descendants of the ancient Iranians—among whom he includes the Indians and the Persians—and the ancient Turanians. They have a long cultural history behind them, which has shaped them into what they are today. Westerners—as Yushakov stated in 1885—have intervened in this long cultural history, intervening with whatever they were able to bring forth from their fundamental sensibilities and their worldview. But Russia must intervene in the right way.

[ 61 ] A strange form of Pan-Asianism, articulated quite programmatically by Yushakov in a thick book in 1885! He says: In a beautiful myth—which is, however, true—these Asian peoples have depicted their destiny. There are the Iranian peoples over there who fought against Ahriman, says Yushakov, against the evil spirit Ahriman, who brings about barrenness, drought, and immorality against humanity—everything that disrupts human culture. They have allied themselves with the good spirit Ormuzd, the god of light, the spirit who bestows everything that benefits humanity. But after the Asians had, for a time, managed to receive the blessings of Ormuzd within their spiritual life, Ahriman grew more powerful. But what, according to Yushakov, have the European peoples of the West brought to the Asians? And that is quite interesting. Yushakov presents it this way: these Western peoples, with their cultural life—which, in his view, is stagnant and senile—crossed over to Asia, to the Indians and the Persians, and took from them everything that Ormuzd, the good Ormuzd, had enabled them to win. That was the purpose of the Western peoples. Russia will now cross over to Asia—it is not I who say this, but the Russian Yushakov—for in Russia, rooted in a profound culture, lies the alliance between the peasant, who cultivates all fertility, and the Cossack, who embodies all chivalry—as I said, it is not I who say this, Yushakov says it—and from the alliance of the peasant and the Cossack, which will cross over to Asia, something different will emerge than what the Western peoples have been able to bring to the Asians. The Western peoples have taken the Ormuzd culture away from the Asians; but the Russians—that is, the farmers and the Cossacks—will unite with poor Asia, which has been enslaved by the Westerners, and will fight alongside it against Ahriman and unite with it completely. For what the Asians, under Ormuzd’s guidance, have attained as a union with nature itself—the Russians will not take that away from them, but will unite with them to fight anew alongside them against Ahriman.

[ 62 ] And in 1885, this man describes in greater detail how these Western peoples actually behaved toward the Asian peoples plagued by Ahriman. There he describes—though he had little reason to do so at the time—not the Germans, but he, Yushakov, the Russian, describes the English. And he says of the English that, based on everything they witnessed, they believed the Asian peoples existed solely so that they could clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight one another with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels, and play with English trinkets. And Yushakov goes on to say, in 1885: “England exploits millions of Hindus, yet its entire existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I wish nothing of the sort for my fatherland—I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently removed from this state of affairs, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

[ 63 ] It was likely these sentiments—which arose in 1885 not only among Yushakov but among many others—that led Russia, at first, not to ally itself with the Asians to help them against Ahriman, the evil Ahriman, but rather to align itself with that “state as brilliant as it is sad” of England in order to trample “senile,” “mired” Europe into the ground.

[ 64 ] What world history will one day witness within this ring that encircles Central Europe can, in essence, be stated quite simply. One need only cite a few figures. These few figures are extraordinarily instructive, for they are reality. One day, history will raise the question—quite apart from the fact that this current struggle is the most difficult, the most significant, and the greatest that has ever occurred in the course of human history—and quite apart from that, simply looking at the numerical ratios: How will one judge, in the future, the fact that 777 million people form a ring around 150 million people? 777 million people in the so-called Entente stand in a tight ring around 150 million people and do not even expect the outcome to be decided by military valor, but rather by starvation. That is probably the “better” kind of valor, according to the views of those 777 million people! There is certainly no need to be envious of the ground on which a spiritual life developed, as we have described it, for here, too, the numbers speak for themselves. The 777 million people live on 68 million square kilometers, compared to the 6 million square kilometers on which the 150 million people live. History will one day take note of the fact that 777 million people are concentrated on 68 million square kilometers, encircling 150 million people on 6 million square kilometers. Germans need only let this reality speak for itself in this as well as in other areas—a reality that prevents them from succumbing to one-sided national ranting and raving and to hate-filled rhetoric, into which Germany’s enemies fall.

[ 65 ] I do not wish to speak now about those areas that do not belong here, that are decided by force of arms. But we can see all too clearly how, far removed from the battlefield, what we wish to cherish and uphold as German culture is today truly besieged—besieged by hatred and slander, by genuine slander, not merely by hatred; how our sad time of trial is being used to denigrate and condemn precisely that which, in this way, must take its place in world history, in the overall development of humanity. For what is it, actually, that confronts us in this German intellectual life, with all its conscious and forgotten tones? It is a great thing precisely because it is the second great flowering of knowledge and the second great flowering of art in human history. The first great flowering of art was Greek civilization. German development produced a flowering at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of which even a mind like Renan said, when—having taken everything else into account—he came to know German development through Goethe and Herder: “I felt as though I were entering a temple, and from that moment on, everything I had previously considered splendor worthy of the divine struck me merely as withered and yellowed paper flowers.” What German intellectual life has achieved, says Renan, comparing it to the other, is like differential calculus compared to elementary mathematics. Nevertheless, on the very same page where he wrote these words to David Friedrich Strauss, Renan points to that current of thought in France which, in the event of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, called for a “war of extermination against the Germanic race.” This letter was written in 1870.

[ 66 ] This German intellectual life has, after all, been recognized time and again. But today it must be misunderstood. For how else could the words spoken within the circle that surrounds us actually be found!

[ 67 ] Let us look across—not through Yushakov’s eyes this time, but with an unbiased gaze—toward that Asia. There we see a human culture that has grown old, one that also strove for knowledge, but which sought it in an ancient, pre-Christian way. There, one seeks to subdue the “I” in order to merge into the universe, into Brahman or Atman, through the extinction of the “I.” That is no longer possible. Now that the greatest impulse in human history—the Christ impulse—has taken root, the “I” itself must elevate itself, gain strength, and grow stronger; not by subduing itself as in Eastern spiritual life, but, on the contrary, by gaining strength and growing stronger so that, as the “I,” it may connect with the spiritual-divine in the world—that which pulses through, weaves through, and lives through the world. This is what is significant: how this is shining forth once more in German spiritual striving. And this—which is unique and which must be incorporated as one of the most essential tones into the overall development of humanity—is alive precisely within those 6 million square kilometers, as opposed to the 68 million square kilometers. Those who, as I said, do not fight with weapons but wage war with words and slander this Central European spiritual life—they must obscure this fact; they must shroud it in fog. They must not see it. We, however, must admit this to ourselves and try to explain how it is possible that these people can be so deluded as to fail to recognize precisely the depth of this connection between their own souls and the spiritual life out there in the world.

[ 68 ] Boutroux, who traveled around here in Germany for a very short time before the war—even giving lectures at universities on the spiritual kinship between Germany and France—is now telling his French audience how the Germans want to grasp everything on a deep, inner level. He even makes a joke: If a Frenchman wants to get to know a lion or a hyena, he goes to the menagerie. If an Englishman wants to get to know a lion or a hyena, he travels the world and studies everything related to the lion or the hyena on the spot. The German goes neither to the menagerie nor on a journey, but retreats to his little room, turns inward, and from within he creates the lion or the hyena. That is how he understands inner life. It’s a joke. One must even say, it’s perhaps a good joke. The French have always told good jokes, after all. It’s just a shame that this joke is by Heinrich Heine, and Boutroux merely repeated it.

[ 69 ] But now, when one observes how these people try to delude themselves, one does indeed come to various conclusions. One finds oneself asking: How do these people, depending on their national character, seek to deceive themselves about what the German essence actually is? For the Russians, it must always be a new mission. I have also described this in my little book: “Thoughts During the War.” They must be given the opportunity to replace Western European culture and Central European culture, because it is incumbent upon the Russian people—as they say in the East—to replace the abstract, purely rational culture built on war with Russian culture, which is built on the heart, on peace, and on the soul. That is the mission.

[ 70 ] As for the English—one does not wish to do them an injustice, truly; one wishes to remain entirely objective, for it really does not befit Germans to speak in a one-sided manner based solely on national sentiment. That is certainly not the intention; but when one hears, as has been the case in England in very recent times, that the Germans live by the maxim: “Power takes precedence over right,” then one must remind them that there is a philosophy by Thomas Hobbes—an English philosophy—in which it is first demonstrated in full that right has no meaning unless it springs from power. Power is the source of law. That is the whole point of Hobbes’s doctrine. Since an authoritative source has stated—there is also an unauthorized yet purportedly authoritative source, but it is nonetheless an authoritative source in the outside world—that the Germans live by the maxim “Power takes precedence over law,” and that they have come a long way by adhering to the principle “Power takes precedence over law,” I do not believe one is being biased when one counters that this is precisely an English principle that has become deeply ingrained in the English character. Yes, one might well say: They need a new lie. And that will hardly be anything other than a technical term.

[ 71 ] The French—what are they deluding themselves with? They are the last people one would want to wrong. And so let us take the words of one of their own poets, Edmond Rostand. The rooster, the crowing rooster, plays a major role in Edmond Rostand’s portrayal. It crows when the sun rises in the morning. Gradually, it comes to believe that the sun could not rise unless its crowing were the cause of the sun’s rising. People have grown accustomed—and this is surely also Rostand’s idea—to the notion that nothing in the world can happen without France. One need only recall the age of Louis XIV and all that “Frenchness” entailed until Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and others emancipated themselves from it, and one can already imagine how this delusion arises: “Ah, the sun cannot rise unless I crow.” Well then, we need a new delusion.

[ 72 ] Italy—I heard a rather prominent Italian politician say before the war: “Yes, our people have, when it comes down to it, reached a state so complacent, so decadent, that we need a breath of fresh air, that we need something to invigorate us.” A new sensation, then! It is also evident in the fact that the Italians, in order to delude themselves, have invented something entirely new, something previously unknown: a new saint, namely, *Sacro Egoismo*, holy egoism. How often was it invoked—this holy egoism—before Italy was driven into the war! So, a new saint—and his hierophant: Gabriele d’Annunzio. It is still impossible to gauge today how this new saint, Sacro Egoismo, and his hierophant, his high priest, Gabriele d’Annunzio, will live on in history!

[ 73 ] There, one can remain within the German essence, focusing on that which is truly interwoven with this German essence and which, on both sides of the Erzgebirge Mountains—among the Germans of Austria and the Germans of Germany—was unanimously perceived as the German people’s mission in world history—not in the Russian sense of “mission,” but in the most ordinary sense. And here I may well conclude with the words to which I have already drawn attention when, speaking of the kinship between Austrian intellectual culture and German intellectual culture, I also spoke of Robert Hamerling. In 1862, when Robert Hamerling, the German poet of Austria, wrote his “Germanenzug,” he envisioned the future of the German people, which he sought to express by having the genius of the German people articulate it as the Germanic tribes—harbingers of the Germans—moved across from Asia. They encamp at the border between Asia and Europe. Robert Hamerling depicts the scene beautifully: the setting sun, the rising moon. The Germanic tribes are encamped. Only one man remains awake—the blond youth Teut. A spirit appears to him. This spirit speaks to Teut, in whom Robert Hamerling seeks to portray the representative of the future Germans. He articulates it beautifully:

To whom will words one day burst forth from the depths of the soul
As they do to your people—so rich, so tender, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the sounds of the strings
His innermost being? To whom do the mind’s thoughts rise so magnificently
Into the sky-blue, granite hieroglyphs
Of the soul’s ascent and life’s confines?
Who, in the end, ties the strands
Of the searching mind to the stars
So boldly, striving and fighting on every path?
Whom does his urge, his intuition, lead so high, so deep?
Who grasps both the near and the far so faithfully?
Where does every zone of earth and sky
Reflect itself as in your thought, O Teuton?

[ 74 ] And what once lived over there in Asia—what the Germans brought back from that Asia like a legacy from their forefathers—stands before Robert Hamerling’s soul. It stands firmly before his soul—that which was like a glimpse into the world, such that the “I” is subdued, physicality is subdued, in order to see what lives through and weaves through the world, but which must emerge in a new form in the post-Christian era, in the form that speaks forth from the fully conscious “I,” from the fully conscious soul. This connection to the ancient era in the German people’s striving for the spirit—how beautifully Robert Hamerling also expresses this:

[ 75 ] Yet no matter how proudly you soar, among other swarms
Hovering high above, you will always preserve a flame
Of that ancient, sacred fire:
Within you will live on the dream-filled
God-intoxication, that blissful warmth of the heart
Of the ancient Asian homeland.
A tranquil presence
This sacred ray, a temple fire
For humanity, free from smoke, with a pure flame
Will continue to glow in your breast and in the depths of your soul
Remain with you and guide your course!
You strive only because you love: your boldest thought
Will be devotion that seeks to sink into God.

[ 76 ] In this way, the German-Austrian poet links ancient times to the immediate present. And indeed, it is precisely from this beautiful striving of the German spirit—which we have attempted to characterize today—that all knowledge and all endeavor sought to be what might be called a service of sacrifice to the divine-spiritual. Science, too, and the understanding of the spiritual, should function as a sacrificial service—so much so that Jakob Böhme could say: When one seeks spiritually, it is necessary to bring oneself to follow one’s own path:

Walking in God — And striving in God —
And dying in God — And being buried in God.

[ 77 ] Hamerling expresses this by having the German genius say “Teut”:

You strive only because you love: your boldest thought
Will be devotion that seeks to sink into God.

[ 78 ] The divine kinship of that which the German soul strives for is so beautifully expressed there. This shows us how deeply rooted true spiritual striving is in the German national character. But this also evidently gives rise in our souls to the thought—the powerful thought—that we can unite with this German national spirit, for in what it has brought forth in spiritual achievements—one current leading to the next—this German national spirit is at work. It finds expression in the great, immortal deeds being accomplished in the present. Let me conclude by summarizing in the four lines by the German-Austrian Robert Hamerling what emerges as German faith, German love, and German hope for the past, present, and future when the German unites with what is the deepest essence of his people. Let me summarize what is there as a force—a force that has the confidence that, where such seeds exist, they will eventually, even in the most distant times, powerfully blossom and bear fruit within the German people, despite all enemies—let us summarize what stands as a force in his soul in the words of the German-Austrian poet Robert Hamerling:

And if the day should ever prove hostile
To the German name,
From sea to sea
The German spirit will find its path!