The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. On the Development of German Thought: A Forgotten Quest for the Spiritual Sciences Within It

Ladies and gentlemen!

[ 1 ] Already last year, I took the liberty—unlike in previous years, when I was permitted to speak here in this city on topics in the humanities— to offer a reflection on such a subject in the humanities in the narrower sense, but rather on something connected with the spiritual development of the German people, who are currently facing, in one of the most momentous events in world history, historical realities that have no parallel in the entire history of modern times. And so, ladies and gentlemen, may this evening’s reflection be dedicated to such a subject: the examination of a certain current in German intellectual life—about which I believe, not out of some vague feeling but out of genuine spiritual-scientific conviction, that it embodies, in the truest and most authentic sense, the development of the German spirit and contains the seeds of that spiritual science as it was always intended, whenever I was permitted to speak about it here in years past.

[ 2 ] This spiritual science aims, in the best sense of the word, to be such a true science—a genuine, authentic continuation of the scientific worldview that has been emerging in the history of human development for the past three to four centuries. As a spiritual science, it seeks to penetrate the spiritual realm of the world, just as the natural sciences methodically penetrate it through the external senses and through the intellect bound to the external senses—the intellect bound to the human body—and through their observations.

[ 3 ] However, spiritual science requires a certain development of the human soul for its research. It is necessary for this research that what can lead to it first be developed from within the human soul. In a sense—to apply Goethe’s oft-quoted words once again today—the spiritual eyes and ears that lie dormant within human beings must first be awakened from within the human soul so that they may look into and listen to the spiritual world.

[ 4 ] Now, however, it might seem from the outset, distinguished audience, as if, when one speaks of science—and this is, after all, the opinion of some; some believe that one has no right at all to speak of anything other than that which belongs in common to all peoples. In certain circles, there is a view that one is already thinking unscientifically if one accepts the idea that even the scientific contemplation of the world has its origin in the essence of folk culture. However, as—I would say—superficially self-evident as this view may be, it is nonetheless only superficial when it comes to the deeper subjects of the spiritual sciences.

[ 5 ] The moon is also a common feature shared by all the peoples of the earth, but how different are the thoughts and feelings that individual peoples have associated with their experiences of the moon. One might say, of course, that this pertains to poetry. Yet when it comes to penetrating the deeper mysteries of the world, it is the various dispositions—present in different ways among individual peoples—that come into play. And depending on these different dispositions, people penetrate the mysteries of existence to a greater or lesser degree.

[ 6 ] Germans have no need to resort to hyperbole when speaking of the significance and value of the German national character for the development of the world and of humanity, as the opponents of Central Europe are currently doing by using this fateful time not only to denigrate the German character in the most hateful manner possible, but to outright slander it. Germans can objectively examine what has emerged in the course of their intellectual development. And it will become clear that this objective examination leads precisely to placing the German spirit and German intellectual life in their rightful place in the course of humanity’s development—not through self-assured arrogance, but by letting the facts speak for themselves.

[ 7 ] When one considers the events that deeply move us all today—events that have claimed so many, so many victims among humanity, and that fill us with many specific hopes and expectations—when one considers these events, then all that is really needed at first—to strike a chord that will resonate again and again in the future history of humanity—is to cite a single statistical fact: Today, surrounding Central Europe, standing united in a single ranks, are 777 million people, hostile toward 150 million. The 777 million people truly have no reason to envy the size of the territory in Central Europe inhabited by the other 150 million; for the peoples of the so-called Entente inhabit 68 million square kilometers, while the peoples of Central Europe inhabit only 6 million square kilometers of the Earth!

[ 8 ] But it is precisely these influential figures who have time and again managed, even from among the 777 million, to denigrate and insult even the best and most outstanding intellectual achievements of the 150 million.

[ 9 ] It is particularly fitting at this time for Germans to reflect on their spiritual life in such a way that they may come to see how this spiritual life is rooted in the very vital force of their national character.

[ 10 ] And there, ladies and gentlemen, we will be drawn time and again—though this is only to be mentioned in passing today—to the three great figures in the development of the German worldview, who today, unfortunately—one might say: unfortunately—are no longer regarded in the proper, profound way, yet whose essence nevertheless lives on to this very day, and whose essence seeks to rise again, [an essence] that must be among the most powerful forces shaping German intellectual culture in the future. We are directed to three figures: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—those personalities in the development of the German worldview who sought to elevate the German people, at that time, to the arena of intellectual development, to the highest and purest form of intellectual development, at a time when, from the depths of this national life, minds such as Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and all the others who belong to their circle had such an impact that what came from them—following the Greek flowering of humanity’s spirit—represents, for any impartial observer, a time of humanity’s highest spiritual flowering.

[ 11 ] And how does Johann Gottlieb Fichte first appear before the mind’s eye? That which lived in his soul as a feeling—he whom one might call one of the most German of men—made his worldview appear to him as something he had attained by having, in the solitude of his inner life, a kind of dialogue with the German national spirit itself.

[ 12 ] This state of mind was evident when he delivered his powerful “Addresses to the German Nation,” which were intended to reveal all the strength and all the potential for development inherent in the German national character, in order to give impetus to the further development of “Germanness,” as Fichte himself put it.

[ 13 ] But what is the essence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s striving? One might say: Everything that has been sought for centuries—in the best sense of the word—from the very heart of the German soul—reappears in Fichte in the most powerful way. Thus, Fichte sought to gain a thoroughly illuminated worldview, an energetic understanding of the world. What Fichte strove for was to immerse himself in the human soul, to experience its deepest powers inwardly—to experience them in such a way that, within this experience, the individual human soul simultaneously shares in what the world as a whole experiences and works through as a spiritual, world-creating entity. [What Fichte strove for was] to experience the spiritual, world-creating entity within his own soul in such a way that, by unfolding his own soul forces, a person would participate in what acts, lives, and exists in the innermost core of the world. That was what Fichte wanted: to participate in the spirit of the world by allowing [it] to be present in his own soul.

[ 14 ] For him, that was the true meaning of the word “knowledge.” For him, this was also the essence of all truth worth striving for—the truth that, for him, was the immediate expression of the divine spirit that permeates the world, such that knowledge, as truth, floods the human soul, enabling that human soul to grasp it through an inner, powerful experience. Through this, however, Fichte felt something as if the whole world were pulsating, lived through, and interwoven by the will of the world, by the divine will of the world.

[ 15 ] And as the human being comes to understand his innermost self—as he becomes, in the truest sense, a self-conscious being—an imprint arises within this self, a revelation of the World-Will pulsing through the world, which is entirely imbued with what Fichte calls “duties”; those duties that could never reveal themselves to anyone from a merely material world, but which penetrate from the world of the spiritual into the human soul, [which] encompass the will of humanity; so that, for Fichte, the external sensory, material world becomes that which, like the material-physical, spreads out before us in order to enable us to live out the duty-driven will and the duty imbued with will in relation to anything.

[ 16 ] It is not that Fichte’s approach diverted him from the external sensory world, nor is it as if he had wanted to take refuge in a one-sided, senseless world! That is not the case; but the fact is that everything which the eyes see externally and the hands can grasp became, for Fichte, the instrument, the means of the spirit, so that the spirit might manifest itself—[so that] the spirit interwoven with duty, the duty that human beings can grasp in their souls, might manifest itself in external materiality: a worldview that Fichte himself regarded, in the truest sense of the word, as a worldview.

[ 17 ] One may certainly say, distinguished guests, while remaining entirely objective: Nothing stands in such stark contrast, one might observe, as Fichte’s worldview, for example, does to the worldview born of the French-Romance spirit—as one of the greatest French philosophers, Cartesius or Descartes, sketched it out at the beginning of the seventeenth century as an embodiment of the French spirit itself—a philosophical embodiment. Descartes, the Frenchman—the Frenchman who, just as Fichte draws from and creates out of German folklore, draws so truly from French folklore—Descartes proceeds from the premise that human beings feel alienated from the external world, that human beings must begin in their souls with doubt. Doubt, in the sense that Descartes means it, cannot exist for Fichte; for his cognition is an immediate participation in that which weaves and flows through the world. Fichte does not place himself outside the spirit of the world when he cognizes, but rather seeks inwardly to unite himself with that spirit.

[ 18 ] Descartes stands in relation to the world as a mere observer, as one who observes from the outside. What kind of worldview emerges from this? One need only mention one thing that stands out as a consequence of the French Cartesian worldview. As I said, there is really no need to develop national biases; rather, one can remain objective when stating this. What emerges from the Cartesian worldview as a consequence? Well, one need only mention this one thing: that through his striving—which also stems from self-consciousness, but from a purely rational, intellectual self-consciousness, not from the living inner life, as in Fichte’s self-consciousness—this Cartesian worldview conceives of the world as a great machine, as a powerful mechanism. And for Descartes, animals themselves are moving machines—soulless, moving machines.

[ 19 ] Everything that later developed as a mechanism—as a mechanistic worldview—and that spread from France to other nations can, in essence, be traced back to this Cartesian starting point.

[ 20 ] One need only hold this contrast before one’s mind’s eye: On the one hand, the Romanic philosopher, who turns the world into a machine; on the other, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who, drawing from German folklore, seeks to pour out the soul itself over the entire world, so that this soul may experience everything spiritual, everything in the world pulsed by the will—and one has expressed something important about the relationship between the German national spirit and its Western neighbor.

[ 21 ] This Cartesian worldview then—I would say—gave rise to one materialistic offshoot after another. We see how, at the end of the eighteenth century, the worldview emerged that Goethe encountered from France, and of which Goethe, speaking from his German consciousness, said: Oh, how bleak, how desolate! There the philosopher shows us how atoms move about, collide, and jostle one another—a mechanism! And all of that is supposed to explain the rich abundance of the world in which we live?

[ 22 ] It is fair to say—again, purely objectively: Drawing on the richness and vitality of the German spirit, Goethe turned away from this purely mechanistic worldview, which had reached its peak in de La Mettrie’s *Man a Machine* at the end of the eighteenth century—a peak that can be a source of sheer delight to all those who wish to construct a worldview based on superficial nothingness, based on that very nothingness which, deep down, would be quite content if there were no human soul, but rather if—like a phonograph—the human mechanical thinking apparatus simply spouted out whatever a person has to say about the world. And this worldview continued to unfold well into the nineteenth century.

[ 23 ] We see it in [gap in the transcript], but we also see it in a spirit such as—yes, he is still not called by a French name today, but is still called Bergson—as in Bergson, who has found it most shameful, time and again, to revile and slander that which wells up from the German soul as a worldview. One might say: Because he can see nothing else in a worldview that is alive, that is filled with inner life, he believes he is entitled to denigrate it; he denigrates this German worldview as one that demonstrates—as he recounts time and again in his writings—how the German, from his lofty heights at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, has descended and completely degenerated into a mechanistic world machine.

[ 24 ] It’s just a shame that Bergson, who is so highly celebrated in France, did not merely sketch out a worldview—as I have explained in detail not only in my book *The Riddles of Philosophy*, written before the war —but also a worldview that was depicted much more powerfully and much more forcefully by a German thinker who has, admittedly, been little mentioned and has become little known—Preuss—for example, in his 1882 book *Spirit and Matter* [—of which Bergson either knows nothing, which is an equally grave error, or chooses to know nothing—]—but not only that; it has also come to light that entire passages in Bergson’s much-praised writings are simply copied from Schelling or Schopenhauer! —What a way to approach the intellectual life of Central Europe!

[ 25 ] This spiritual life stands in contrast to that of Fichte—a spiritual life that does not seek to understand the world as a lifeless entity, but rather seeks to understand the world as a living spirit, down to its smallest parts, and for which knowledge is nothing other than the experience of this spiritual vitality of the world. Just as the French worldview stands in contrast to Fichte’s vigorous embrace of the human “I”—through which he seeks to experience the world—so too does it stand in contrast to the truly English worldview, that English worldview which took its starting point from Bacon of Verulam, and which, one might say, has found its repulsive aspects, its repulsive one-sidedness, precisely in the most recent worldview that English intellectual life has produced—in so-called pragmatism—as seen in Bacon of Verulam. As Goethe, for example, very profoundly observes, one sees everywhere how [Bacon of Verulam] actually regards spiritual life in such a way that what otherwise [exists] in the human spirit as truth is really only there to summarize and shape the diversity of the world’s external materials and forces—those that can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands—and then to break them down again, and so on. A means of mastering the external physical world is, in the philosophy based on Bacon of Verulam, essentially everything that could be called philosophy. And this understanding has persisted right up to the present day.

[ 26 ] What, exactly, constitutes pragmatism? Within English intellectual life, something highly peculiar appears under the guise of pragmatism—Schiller, James, and other proponents of this pragmatism—for these proponents of pragmatism, for these pragmatists, truth is not something that a person experiences inwardly as an image of a god or spirit, something that — as in Fichte’s sense, flows into the human soul from the Spirit that pulses through, lives through, and weaves through the world — but rather, in the sense of this pragmatism, truth is actually nothing more than something that humans conceive in order to have a sense of direction amid the diversity of external phenomena.

[ 27 ] The soul, for example—this concept of “soul,” this unifying concept of the soul—after all, one cannot see the soul: What does it actually mean to pragmatism? The unifying concept of the soul, the unifying concept of the “I,” of self-consciousness—for pragmatism, it is nothing more than a means of holding together the manifold aspects of the life of the soul and its manifestations in the body, so that they do not fall apart when one contemplates them; so that one has, as it were, brackets and ties. One constructs concepts for the external, material world. How far removed is this from Fichte’s worldview, drawn from the depths of the soul, for which the spirit is the most primordial element of the world and reality—the spirit that flows into the individual human inner life. And as the human being senses this influx, he knows himself to be one with the Spirit of the world. And then the external world becomes for him—as Fichte put it—a field, so that the Spirit may unfold within this field. Exactly the opposite!

[ 28 ] Here, according to Fichte: The spirit is the supreme, the truly real, the highest form of life, for the sake of which the external sensory world exists, so that the spirit may find its means of expression in it. There: The spirit is capable of nothing other than creating connecting elements and links within its concepts and ideas, so that—and this is the main point—it may apply these concepts to the benefit of external material reality and ultimately find itself within that external material reality.

[ 29 ] It is indeed necessary, ladies and gentlemen, to view these connections precisely in this light. Only in this way can Germans arrive at a true, enlightened understanding of what is actually taking place in the depths of their national character.

[ 30 ] Then, during one of the most difficult periods in German history, Fichte attempted to express—in order to inspire, to strengthen, and to fortify his people—that which emerged to him as a power of consciousness from this spiritual force, which was interconnected with his inner life of will — as his “Addresses to the German Nation,” stating that the true man of worldview does not merely live in otherworldly reflections, but that these reflections can directly intervene in what the times demand and what humanity—I would say—[in fact] needs in order to be strengthened and invigorated in the soul.

[ 31 ] And a second figure appears before [us] alongside Fichte at just the right moment—a figure who was no less determined to grasp the very essence of the world with his own soul. Committing their entire being to the cause, these minds sought to grasp the entire, great world spirit with their own souls.

[ 32 ] When it comes to Fichte, I need only recount a few details from his life for you to see how closely what he experienced—I might say—on the icy heights of thought, which in his case were nevertheless permeated with purely human warmth, was connected to his personality and his immediate human nature. A picture of the very young Fichte: He was a good student, already diligently fulfilling his school duties as a six- or seven-year-old boy. His father rewarded the young boy by giving him the book *The Horned Siegfried* as a Christmas gift when he was seven years old. Fichte—the young Fichte, the boy—is completely captivated by what comes to life through the human personality embodied in a soul like that of *The Horned Siegfried*! And then it turns out that he now needs to be reprimanded because he is no longer as diligent in school as he had been. One day we see the boy in his blue peasant smock; standing by the stream that flows past his father’s house: Suddenly he throws *The Horned Siegfried*, which he was holding in his hand, into the water, and standing there in tears, he watches as the book floats away on the waves. His father comes over, at first displeased that his little boy had thrown the book he’d given him into the water. Then he learns that in this instance, what Fichte later made the very core of his philosophical work—the duty-driven will—was already alive in the young Fichte to such an extent that he could not bear to fail in his duty as a student because his attention was diverted by *The Horned Siegfried*! And everything he experienced was likely already [intertwined] with the innermost fabric and essence of the boy’s soul.

[ 33 ] And once, when Fichte was nine years old, the neighbor from the neighboring village came over to Fichte’s home. He wanted to hear the sermon, but he arrived too late. He could no longer hear the pastor preaching; the church bells had already rung. Then it occurred to them that the nine-year-old boy might be the one to recount the content of the sermon to the neighbor. And they sent for him. Young Fichte entered wearing his blue peasant smock; and after initially behaving somewhat awkwardly, he stepped before the audience and expounded on the ideas he had taken from the sermon with such sincerity that it was clear: he had not merely committed something to memory outwardly, but what he had heard had become one with his entire soul.

[ 34 ] Such was this personality—one might say—that—if I may use the trivial word—out of her own genius, she always absorbed everything that influenced her with her whole being, in such a way that everything that came from this person, on the one hand, bore the deepest human character, and on the other hand, rose again to the highest heights of world-historical contemplation.

[ 35 ] There is one admirable trait that must be emphasized time and again in this thinker—one of the most German of German thinkers—Johann Gottlieb Fichte: When Fichte later addressed his audience as a professor, he did not wish to speak like someone else who simply conveyed the content of what he had grasped to his listeners in an intellectual manner. Someone who knew Fichte well and had often heard him speak said of him that his words rushed forth like a thunderstorm discharging in individual sparks; [and he said] that he sought to attract not merely good people, but great ones.

[ 36 ] And in just such a way was the work—one cannot quite say—structured, the work of this German; for in the mind of this German thinker, there lived within this lecture something that was much more than what was being presented: When he stepped up to the lectern, he wanted to bring something up onto that lectern—a living essence that flowed from him into the audience—so that when the listeners, having listened attentively, left the lecture hall, they would take with them not merely content, not merely a lesson, but something that was more in their souls than what they had brought with them into the lecture hall—something that seized, permeated, and animated their entire humanity! And indeed, Fichte knew how to work upon and penetrate this very core of the human soul in such a way that, in direct communion with his listeners, he sought to lead them—these very listeners—to enliven within themselves that which truly united them—one might say—and immediately connected them with what the soul could experience of the spiritual force that permeates and interweaves the world.

[ 37 ] For example, he once said to his audience: “Imagine the wall.” — The audience turned their eyes toward the wall and thought: “That’s easy.” — After letting them imagine the wall for a while, he said: “All right, and now imagine the one who imagined the wall!” — At first, they were taken aback. Yet this was a means of directly engaging the listeners’ hearts and minds in the understanding of the world’s mysteries, as they can unfold within the human soul.

[ 38 ] And so, with his entire personality directly immersed in the life of insight, was Johann Wilhelm Schelling as well; those who had seen him—and I certainly knew such people! —those who had seen and heard him—not merely read his books and knew what was written in them—said that something emanated from his sparkling eyes that was like the very gaze of knowledge itself!

[ 39 ] This Schelling, too—that which lives in nature as spirit—wanted to experience it directly within his own soul. For him, the soul was, in essence, nothing more than the outward aspect of a spirit that lives through and permeates the world. And as the human soul approaches nature, it recognizes in nature that which it itself is as spirit and soul.

[ 40 ] Spirit permeates the world. It forms an external imprint by crystallizing nature around itself. In this way, it creates the ground upon which it can ultimately appear in its own form within the human soul. Thus, for Schelling, the spirit of nature and the spirit of the soul grew together into a unity. And with such a perspective, he knew how to rise to marvelous heights. He penetrated them only in seemingly dry concepts—incidentally, in concepts and ideas that at times rose to the most immense, vivid, and intuitive fervor. He spoke of nature only in seemingly dry terms, and [of] how [one can] know oneself to be in harmony with nature, [in harmony] with the spiritual world, and [how the concepts] emerge from nature and [one] can know oneself to be in harmony through cognition.

[ 41 ] Once he uttered that phrase—a phrase that is certainly one-sided: “To know nature is to create nature.” — Certainly, a one-sided statement; one can only recreate nature through cognition. But Schelling felt that what unfolds in human life was so closely related to what unfolds in nature that he could imagine himself living as if within the creative force of nature itself when he believed he had unleashed the proper cognitive impulses within the soul. And so, to Schelling, the human form appears, on the one hand, as the highest natural expression of the spiritual-soul forces of nature, and, on the other hand, as art, which embodies in its own form that which is the human expression of the striving of the spirit.

[ 42 ] One might say: Just as two halves that complement each other, so Schelling perceives the Supreme: what the artist is capable of creating in art, on the one hand; the human form, on the other, as the crown and flower of nature. And so we see how a worldview emerged in Schelling that is entirely born—indeed, appears itself to be a rebirth—from the rebirth of the human mind. The German spirit itself has become an organ of vision in Schelling, enabling him to perceive in nature and spiritual life that which speaks to the human spirit just as external sensory objects speak to the human eyes and ears.

[ 43 ] As a result, however, Schelling became the figure in German intellectual development who was able to elevate to immense heights that which, emerging from the Romanic worldview as a spiritual realm, could—as in the case of Giordano Bruno—inspire, but could do no more than inspire. Giordano Bruno’s worldview appears to have been passionately born out of the [Italian] perception of the world when compared to Schelling’s worldview—that calm worldview reborn from the German spirit.

[ 44 ] And the third is Hegel. Hegel, the third—I would say—the German philosopher most intimately connected with Goethe’s worldview; Hegel, who—I would say—sought, on the third of the paths that were possible from the German national character, to lead the soul to the place where it can directly grasp the spiritual workings, interplay, and essence of the world.

[ 45 ] In Johann Gottlieb Fichte, it is the will that pulses through the soul and finds expression in duty; in Schelling, it is the mind—the innermost essence of the soul—that grasps a natural will and gives it new life; so, in Hegel, it is the life of thought that is at work—the life of thought that Hegel perceives in such a way that, as the thoughts he allows to pass through his soul are moved and experienced by that soul, they appear directly as thoughts of the divine-spiritual life of the world itself, which permeates all spaces and all times. Thus, when a person—free from sensuality, uninfluenced by the external world—allows his thoughts to live within himself, he experiences in this very act of thinking the divine-spiritual thought of the world unfolding and revealing itself within him. However, this has made Hegel a thinker who created a worldview as if the entire world were constructed solely of logic—which is a one-sided view. But he has added to what Fichte and Schelling offered a third voice drawn from German folk culture.

[ 46 ] One could say: What makes Hegel appear to be a particularly German spirit is that he does not, like Descartes, for example—Rosenkranz, Hegel’s faithful student, wrote the fine book *Hegel as a German National Philosopher* —, [that which] makes Hegel appear to embody a distinctly German spirit is that he does not, like Descartes—who also builds everything upon thought but arrives only at a mechanistic worldview—experience thought as if it were something that rises up within the soul and is alien to existence; rather, the Spirit, the World Spirit itself, thinks itself within human beings. The World Spirit itself beholds itself through thought in human beings. In his thinking, Hegel feels interwoven with the thoughts of the World Spirit.

[ 47 ] One could say, in turn, that Descartes’ one-sided, bare worldview is brought to life—albeit only in thought—in Hegel’s worldview.

[ 48 ] Today, distinguished guests, there is no need to take a dogmatic stance in favor of the views of the three mentioned. We can move beyond that today; whether one is a supporter or an opponent, one may well regard everything these thinkers have expressed as one-sided. One need not take a dogmatic stance on this; one can regard them as offshoots of what weaves and lives within German folklore. In other words, something that has emerged like a stream of blossoms from German spiritual life, which, over the course of time, as it continues to bloom and bear fruit, will certainly change in many ways, but which can provide the deepest, most significant inspiration to those who strive for a spiritual understanding of the world—because a spiritual understanding of the world must spring from such a seed within German intellectual life, just as it was sought by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and has, in essence, grown directly out of the spirit of Goethe.

[ 49 ] What is peculiar about these three figures is that they essentially express, in three different shades, three different shades of something that hovers invisibly above them—something that was the collective expression of the highest flowering of German intellectual life at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries—and it is precisely in Goethe and others that the great fruits of this emerge in such a way that one is always led to avoid seeking an understanding of the world by simply applying one’s faculties to human beings as he stands, with his faculties, but rather to first attempt to awaken the human powers of cognition that slumber deep within the soul, and then, with the opened eye and ear of the spirit—as I said, these are Goethe’s words—with the opened eye and ear of the spirit, to look out into the world and life.

[ 50 ] This is how Goethe did it. That is why Goethe, following Kant, speaks of a “contemplative faculty of judgment,” which he attributed to himself. And indeed, the fruits of Goethe’s achievements sprang from this contemplative faculty of judgment. “Intuitive power of judgment”—what does Goethe mean? The ordinary power of judgment lives in human concepts. With this power of judgment, human beings confront things; they confront nature; they perceive it with their senses; and with their intellect, they judge what they have perceived through the senses. Goethe tells himself: If one can perceive the spiritual through the power of judgment itself, just as the eyes perceive the sensory, then one lives and weaves within the spiritual. — And this is how Goethe wanted to view plants and animals; this is how he wanted to view human life. And this is how he viewed it! And this is even how he wanted to engage in the field of physics.

[ 51 ] This brings us to a chapter that clearly shows how German folk culture must express something different from within itself—based on the external realities of physical life—than, for example, English folk culture. However, the time has not yet come when we are ready to see the connections in this area.

[ 52 ] For more than thirty years now, I have been striving myself—and I may say this without immodesty, because it is simply a fact—to show what Goethe actually intended, based on a spiritual view of nature and on intuitive judgment, as [he presented his] Theory of Colors, when he contrasted his view of color—as a philosophy of life—with Newton’s view of color, which is based on atomistic and mechanistic principles.

[ 53 ] Today, physics cannot yet understand this. But once German culture truly comes to its senses in the intellectual realm, people will come to realize how the German spirit, as embodied in Goethe, had to rebel—even in the field of color theory—against what was merely Newton’s mechanical, scientific approach.

[ 54 ] And the chapter “Goethe Is Right Against Newton”—this means that German science is right against mechanical, utilitarian English science. This chapter will resurface. And perhaps it is precisely in a chapter such as this that the relationship of the German soul—in its depth and in its deeper contemplation of knowledge—to the other judgments regarding the pursuit of knowledge in Europe will become apparent.

[ 55 ] And the place that the German national soul occupies within the overall development of German intellectual life is merely a single, particular aspect; but this particular aspect, this specific, distinctive element, is the expression of the universal that was alive in Goethe’s time and that lives on to this day—albeit, I might say, beneath the surface of consciousness—yet clearly present nonetheless in every deeper understanding of the spiritual in German culture: the search for the spiritual organ of knowledge.

[ 56 ] Fichte called it a “higher spiritual sense” when he spoke to his Berlin students between 1811 and 1813. Schelling called it “[intellectual] intuition”—the attainment of a higher organ of spiritual cognition—which is, of course, a difficult task, and one that a philosophy based solely on utility or mechanism, such as Roman or British philosophy, cannot achieve: to create an organ of cognition that is built from the spirit and can therefore look into the spirit; [which] does not, however, perceive the spirit in abstract, dry, or empty theoretical concepts, but grasps it as fully alive as the external senses grasp the sensory world.

[ 57 ] And because such a striving was so powerfully alive in the development of the German spirit, it was possible that even lesser minds who followed the Goethe era were seized and permeated by what was sprouting and taking root in embryonic form during the great era of German life just discussed, and that these lesser minds were even able to create something that resembles the paths—which are, in fact, the true paths—for the human spirit to grasp the spiritual essence of the world in a living way, to attain something that is even more akin to these true paths than what emerged in the works of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel. Because there is so much that is infinitely fruitful in this Fichte-Schelling-Hegelian worldview, it was able to have such a fertilizing effect even on lesser minds who—let us say—like Fichte’s son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, come to recognize how in what outwardly and sensually confronts the human being as a human-like form—even as a sensory animal form, though there it does not have the same significance—what appears to human beings as a human form, just as something lives in what is, as it were, a coarser physical organization alongside a finer physical organization, as we say in spiritual science: an etheric body alongside the coarse physical body; and just as the great world forces that give birth to the human being out of the Eternal [act] within this etheric body, so do the physical forces give birth to the human being physically out of the physical. That is to say: Hermann Immanuel Fichte is already seeking a path directly to the external physical world—not solely through thought, not solely through abstractions—but through a directly higher, spiritual-sensory apprehension, in order to recognize that which lies beyond birth and death in the human being.

[ 58 ] And then we see a remarkable thinker, little known to the public, who also walks this path—undoubtedly not as brilliant or as magnificently gifted as, say, Schelling and Fichte, but who has made greater progress on the true path of the humanities than they did, because he was able to live after them. Although he wrote his wonderful book in 1811—*Insights into the Nature of Man*—we can still say that Troxler—for it is he who is meant—is one of those who are truly immersed in a forgotten chapter of German intellectual life. Thus, because he lived later, Troxler was able to find true paths into the spiritual world even before his greater—greater than himself—predecessors.

[ 59 ] It is curious that Troxler, when he delivered his “[Lectures] on Philosophy” in 1835, he spoke of how a person could develop within their soul—if they so desired—something that stands in contrast to the purely intellectual conception of the world, which operates in theoretical concepts that, so to speak, merely gather individual concepts from observation; he spoke of how something could develop within the human soul that Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler calls a “super-spiritual sense.” “ “Super-spiritual sense”—this is a power of the soul to which Troxler refers as [one that] can only be developed in human beings, and which does not—I would say—grasp things merely conceptually, not as abstractly as ordinary abstract cognition, but rather grasps things so richly that they appear before human beings in a pictorial way, just like the spirit itself; so that human beings thereby perceive a spiritual world that is not exhausted in concepts—as even Hegel’s still are—but rather perceives spiritual reality just as the senses perceive sensory reality, so that the world is truly enriched by a new element of its essence: the spiritual. The spiritual, however, [consists] of concrete, full-bodied entities that coexist and interact with one another in the same way that sensible entities can be apprehended.

[ 60 ] “Super-spiritual sense” is one power of the soul. Troxler refers to the other as the “supersensible spirit.” Thus, one must see in this that which can be developed in the human soul as a special power, so that the soul is able to transcend the ordinary sensory realm without, however, falling into spiritual emptiness—as, for example, mechanical natural science does—but rather [that one arrives at] a state of being filled with the spirit.

[ 61 ] “Supersensible spirit,” “superspiritual sense”—these are two faculties of the human soul, according to Troxler. He spoke of these in 1835; and one can draw an immensely significant inspiration for what might be called “knowledge of the spirit” from these lectures by Troxler, which consciously sprang from the depths of German folklore. For it is this German folk culture that inspires us not merely to observe the world from the outside, but truly, again and again, in what the soul can experience most intimately, to simultaneously sense the permeation of the soul-spiritual essence of the human being and of the entire world itself. Through this, German folklore is called upon to develop something that otherwise could not have emerged within any folk tradition in the course of historical development.

[ 62 ] Let us now see how strangely—even when one characterizes, in a very one-sided way, that which is truly in the spirit of this folk tradition—it can find expression, and what can be demonstrated about these characterized spirits; let us examine what it is. Here we must say: We certainly see mysticism within other spiritual developments—within the spiritual development of France and England—but this mysticism stands alongside other forms of scholarship. It is thereby condemned either to lead a sectarian existence alongside that other scholarship or to isolate itself as a distinct spiritual current.

[ 63 ] German intellectual life—as demonstrated by its rise to the level achieved by Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, Troxler, and Immanuel Hermann Fichte—shows that one can remain, in the fullest sense of the word, committed to a scientific mindset and work precisely from that scientific mindset, and that what might otherwise be attained through mysticism is not placed alongside this scientific current, but can be directly and organically connected to it and emerge from it.

[ 64 ] Thus we see, for example, how in Hegel something emerges that lives in the purest clarity of thought—even if many dispute this, it is nevertheless so—but nothing exists in the purest clarity of thought that is merely a nebulous mysticism of feeling, or even a rambling discourse on all sorts of things that revels in mysticism; rather, it is something that, through crystal-clear thought, seeks at the same time to mystically grasp the concept of the world within one’s own thinking: we find a “thoughtful mysticism”—if the term may be used—in Hegel. And we then find this “thoughtful mysticism” spiritualized—because the life of thought is inwardly illuminated by the supersensible spirit, by the super-spiritual sense—in such figures as, for example, Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler.

[ 65 ] It is interesting to see how Troxler strives to describe that which is meant to lead to a worldview based on the powers of the soul—how this is revealed through what human beings know, yet lies behind what people actually rely on in ordinary everyday life to sustain and orient their lives. According to Troxler’s view, human beings have faith—the faith that, in the realm of religious belief, sustains humanity’s highest spiritual pillars, but which also plays a major role in the rest of human life: faith. Human beings possess this faith—I am not merely repeating Troxler’s words here, but speaking in the way one must think when one takes in what Troxler has said and weaves it out a little further—this faith is present in human beings’ inner life. This power of faith is something that the outer physical body must possess, something that, as it arises directly in the soul, can be grasped by the soul even without the development of higher powers of cognition. But behind this faith, hidden in the soul, lies [a higher organ of cognition, so that faith is, as it were, the living out of this higher organ of cognition in ordinary daily life. What lies behind faith, Troxler calls]: soul-hearing, the supersensible, the soul-hearing. Thus, in Troxler’s sense, one must, as it were, imagine faith as the beauty that floods in from an unconscious or subconscious spiritual aspect of the soul, bringing faith to the surface. But when it is developed on its own, it becomes a spiritual ear capable of hearing in the spiritual world. Spiritual hearing means perceiving in the same way that the physical ear perceives external sounds traveling through the air.

[ 66 ] Love, a power of the soul that we, in turn, find as if born from the soul-spiritual realm—the most beautiful power of outer human life—love—behind it, for Troxler—I would say: for Troxler’s devout sensibility—lies a spiritual, a soulful power of cognition. He calls it “soulful groping,” “soulful feeling.”

[ 67 ] Thus, faith is, as it were, the outward expression, the outward image of what lives within the full soul as hearing. Thus, love is the outward fruit of that which lives within the soul as spiritual groping, as spiritual feeling.

[ 68 ] For Troxler, hope is the outward expression of that which lives within the soul as a higher spiritual force, a higher spiritual sense, a super-spiritual sense—the inner spiritual eye.

[ 69 ] It is a wonderful image, but one that is not born solely of the imagination; rather, it is based on real facts of the inner life that everyone can develop within themselves. A wonderful image. There stands the human being, situated within the physical and spiritual worlds. There, in relation to what, as the divine-spiritual, permeates the world, and in relation to what flows toward him from human beings and other beings, he develops faith, hope, and love. He develops them because he carries within himself that which can stand opposite the spiritual world without a physical body—that which can hear, feel, and see spiritually. And because human beings have enveloped that which they are in their soul—for the time between death—or, let us say, until birth—with a physical shell— that is how what connects him—through spiritual hearing—to the world’s tonal harmony, to the spiritual tonal harmony of the world, what connects him to the world that, through grace, inclines toward him from the spiritual realm, is expressed through spiritual feeling; and what connects him through spiritual seeing, which is clothed for him in faith, love, and hope. [And so the soul forces that we encounter in everyday life and in ordinary soul education are, for Troxler, an expression of a soul-spiritual life,] which slumbers down there in the soul, which weaves and flows, and which, when developed, can enter into a direct connection with the spiritual-soul life of the entire world that surrounds us. There, Troxler feels himself deeply immersed in this—one might say—temporarily forgotten link in the development of German thought and spirit.

[ 70 ] He expresses this sense of belonging so beautifully—wonderfully beautifully—by speaking of his connection with other spirits who have sought something similar. There he says:

“Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a subtle, noble spiritual body from the coarser body [or posited within it a kind of shell of the spirit]—a soul that possessed an image of the body in itself, which they called a ‘schema,’ and which represented to them the inner, higher human being. [Most of the early great Church Fathers—such as Origen, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine—also adhered to this view, even if it is merely an explanation.] Even in more recent times, Kant, in the “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer,” seriously yet playfully envisions a complete, inner, spiritual human being who bears all the limbs of the outer body upon his spiritual body. Lavater writes and thinks in the same vein; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about Bonner’s “little underskirt” and Platner’s “soul corset”—which are supposed to be tucked inside the coarser outer body coat and martyr’s smock—we still hear him ask once again, “Why and from where were these extraordinary inclinations and desires placed within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, are slowly cutting through our earthly shell? [Why was I glued onto this filthy lump 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?] “The inner man,” he even says elsewhere, “this ‘veiled God in nature,’ is not himself made of stone, like these.” In the “stone limbs”

[ 71 ] of human beings

“grow and mature in a way that is unknown to us. We could”

[ 72 ] Troxler goes on to say

“I could cite countless other similar ways of thinking and writing, which are ultimately just different perspectives and concepts in which [the one Evangelical-Apostolic idea is revealed—the one Paul expressed to the Corinthians when he said: ‘A body animated by the soul is laid to rest, and a body animated by the Spirit rises again; for just as there is a body animated by the soul, so there is also a body animated by the Spirit.’ And therein lies] the true, sole doctrine of the individuality and immortality of man.”

[ 73 ] Troxler sought a science that approaches the world drawing on all the powers of human nature—not merely on reason and the ordinary, so-called cognitive faculties—but rather a science, a form of knowledge, that brings the whole personality into contact with the existence of the world, so that, in turn, the whole human personality, the whole human being, might recreate or relive the world within themselves. This is true not only in poetry, Troxler argues, but must also be the case in genuine knowledge. That is why Troxler spoke these beautiful words in 1835:

“While it is indeed most gratifying that the newest philosophy—which [we have long recognized as the one that underlies all living religion and] 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 the 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.”

[ 74 ] Thus, Troxler is confronted with the idea of an “anthroposophy,” as he calls it—an anthroposophy that, unlike anthropology, does not focus on what can be observed externally in human beings through the senses, and by the intellect from which these senses are, as it were, drawn; rather, a higher form of anthropology stands before Troxler’s eyes—before his spiritual eye—one that seeks to develop within the human being an organ that is, in essence, nothing other than the higher human being within the human being, who can then directly experience and perceive that which is also higher than all of nature—to use this expression of Goethe’s: the higher nature within nature.

[ 75 ] Then, when the whole personality presents itself to the world as an organ of cognition, as a super-spiritual sense organ, as a supersensory spiritual organ—as a “super-spiritual sense,” as a “supersensory spirit,” [as a] spiritual organ—so that the world comes to life within the whole personality, then, according to Troxler, “anthroposophy” comes into being!

[ 76 ] Thus, anthroposophy exists in its embryonic form as a forgotten aspiration within the development of the German spirit. Its blossoms and fruits will spring forth from this German spiritual life, provided one understands it correctly. And that it is intimately connected with this German spiritual life—I would say: every aspect, every trait of this German spiritual life reveals this to us. It is often the case in the world, esteemed audience, that individual elements that blossom in the course of human development must, for a time—I would say—continue to live on as it were beneath the surface; while the rest of the current reveals something else, something superficial; yet beneath the surface, the deeper reality continues to live on. And so it is with what now resounds to us as a fading note from German spiritual life.

[ 77 ] Or isn’t it wonderful—downright wonderful—when we see how, out of this spiritual life—it was in 1858, when a pastor, a simple pastor in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck—Pastor Rocholl—published a little book—yes, a truly marvelous little book—in which he seeks to explain how the human spirit must elevate and strengthen itself from within in order to be able to join itself to that which, as the world spirit, floods and permeates the world. This wonderful, though now forgotten, little book, which in the most eminent sense—I might say—is a document of the now-faded tone of German spiritual life, is titled *Contributions to German Theosophy*. Published in 1856 by a humble pastor, whose theosophical reflections sprang from his piety. But it is a little book about which one must say that it rises to a truly marvelous height of spiritual insight and spiritual perception of the world, even if it may seem fantastical in many respects in light of what spiritual science has to say today.

[ 78 ] One need not be either a supporter or an opponent of these things; rather, one can simply approach them by telling oneself: They are an expression of what lives on in German folklore. And so I could cite many, many examples, particularly specific ones from German intellectual life—everywhere one would find confirmation that this striving for spiritual science exists in German intellectual life, which today must stand as if half-forgotten—forgotten! And forgotten in such a way that it must be recognized in the course of time. After all, there is no harm in something like this being forgotten. Why is there no harm in it?

[ 79 ] Well, ladies and gentlemen, the mysteries of the universe that exist in nature do not simply present themselves in such a way that they do not first need to be explored! Why should we believe that the spiritual history of humanity does not also contain such mysteries that must first be explored? Why should we believe that only that which—I mean, that which has come to light through the favor of the times—is essential to the progress of humanity? In the depths of human development lies that which can only be discovered by those who come after; but this is true of the history of the human spirit, and it is also true of the history of nature.

[ 80 ] But fundamentally, all these thinkers were more or less aware—I have already used this image in reference to Fichte—that what lived within them, and what was to guide them in their souls toward the spiritual mysteries of the world, was, so to speak, a dialogue with the German national spirit itself.

[ 81 ] And now let me cite one more example. I should also mention the remarkable Karl Christian Planck, from whose posthumous writings *The Testament of a German* was published not too long ago. Karl Christian Planck, who, from a truly spiritual perspective, sought to place humanity within the context of the entire existence of the world. The time will come when such spirits—who drew from the depths of the German worldview—will be recognized, when people become fully aware that everything foreign must be eradicated — so that the German spirit can fully develop — even in the realm of knowledge, everything foreign that at times—such as Newton’s theory of colors—is more readily understood by the superficial human soul than the German, for which one must first prepare oneself.

[ 82 ] How does the Earth, for example, appear to a modern mind that is entirely afflicted by the Romanic-British-mechanistic approach to scientific thought—that worldview born entirely of reason, which Schelling in 1803 even called a “spiritual power”? How does the Earth appear to such a worldview? Well, the Earth appears just as external mechanical geology presents it: mineral-mechanical.

[ 83 ] Before Planck’s soul—this solitary thinker in Germany who published his first books in Ulm in the 1860s, speaking from the truest German essence, expressing the spiritual, yet finding recognition only among the finer minds—how does the earth appear before his spirit, before this consciously German spirit? Like a mighty organism! Yes, not merely as an organism, but as an animated, spirit-filled organism that, shaped by its own spiritual and soulful nature, brings forth its blossom: humanity itself! For Planck, humanity—with everything that lives and stirs within it—is an integral part of the Earth. One cannot fully comprehend the Earth unless one regards humanity as the Earth’s blossom. For Planck, viewing the Earth as a mere geologist would be akin to regarding a plant solely by its roots and refusing to consider its blossom. The Earth must be viewed in such a way that the potential for human development lives within the Earth itself; that the Earth carries within itself something that, out of its own powers and out of its very being, calls forth the human being as its blossom!

[ 84 ] Thus Planck’s worldview extends from his own mind out into the vastness of the universe. And what does he himself say? In 1864, in his “Grundlinien zu einer Wissenschaft der Natur” (Fundamentals of a Science of Nature), he wrote these wonderful words about the Earth:

“The power of deep-rooted prejudices, as seen from the perspective of his previous views”

[ 85 ] by the author

“He is fully aware that the text is controversial; yet just as the work itself—despite all the adverse circumstances that, given the author’s overall situation and professional standing, stood in the way of a work of this kind— it has 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.

What our medieval poetry had already foreshadowed in a deep, unconscious intuition will finally be fulfilled in our nation as the times come of age. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, plagued by harm and ridicule (as Wolfram depicts it in his *Parsifal*)»

[ 86 ] written as early as 1864, before Wagner's *Parsifal*!

“finally attains the highest through the power of her ceaseless striving; it delves to the very depths of the ultimate, simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry, in a fantastical, medieval manner, symbolized in the wonders of the Grail—whose dominion its hero attains—finds, conversely, its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring understanding of nature and the spirit itself.”

[ 87 ] One must be aware that such minds are deeply rooted in German intellectual life. After all, one does not gain much by pointing them out again and again; yet they live on, unconsciously, in the finest minds of German intellectual life.

[ 88 ] Karl Christian Planck—I had already referred to him in 1900 in the first edition of my *Rätsel der Philosophie* (The Riddles of Philosophy), which was then titled: “On Worldviews and Views of Life”—I had already drawn attention to this Planck; and now, once again, in the new edition of “The Riddles of Philosophy,” to demonstrate what he signifies within the entire development of German intellectual life. One can say, esteemed audience, that in such minds one can grasp how the German spirit possesses precisely this special capacity for insight: to experience the soul-spiritual within itself, to allow that which weaves and lives in the mysteries of the world—I would say—in the very core of nature and the spirit, to flow into it.

[ 89 ] For years, even—I might say—in its outward contours, this has not been recognized by those who now surround, as if in a hostile ring, those [who now] live on 6 million square kilometers as opposed to 68 million square kilometers, within which that which is truly German—German national character—is developing. How cheap are the taunts—steeped in hatred and truly slanderous—that can be heard from all sides, directed against German intellectual life, which is hated and slandered, and toward which people remain unaware of the position it must occupy in the world by virtue of its own inherent strength. One need only recall figures such as Emile Boutroux, who, not long before the war, was still traveling around Germany giving lectures on the beauty of German intellectual life and on the fraternization of the German and Latin intellectual traditions—and now he repeatedly brings this up with his fellow Frenchmen, so that they can hear time and again that this German spirit is averse to looking at the things of the world; this German spirit imagines that it carries everything within itself and is capable of bringing forth the entire world from its own inner being.

[ 90 ] And in one of his most recent speeches, Emile Boutroux did not hesitate to make the following hateful joke—and he apparently found an audience for it—about German intellectual life and its nature. He said: When the Frenchman wants to describe animals, he goes to a menagerie to look at them and then describe them; when the Englishman wants to describe animals, he travels around the world and describes what he can observe there; the German sits down in his study—neither does he travel the world like the Englishman, nor does he go to the menagerie like the Frenchman—but he sits in his study and draws from within himself, from what he can experience within himself, the image of the lion and the elephant, and so on.

[ 91 ] It’s just a shame—we’re used to thinking, aren’t we, that the French are a witty people— but it’s just a shame that this joke—as anyone familiar with the history of ideas knows—was first made by Heinrich Heine, that even this joke, with which the French seek to take aim at German intellectual life, actually originated on German soil!

[ 92 ] And if one were to take the joke seriously: The German would not go to the menagerie or into the desert, nor would he observe animals in the wild, but would create them from within himself. Brehm—just hold up Brehm’s book, with its observations of monkeys, to such an ignorant person, such a frivolous mocker who slanders the German people by claiming that they create not through world travel but from within themselves. [One should counter this by pointing out that the greatest work on world travel—which any impartial observer must acknowledge as the work through which America was first scientifically discovered—stems from Humboldt]: the German Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt!

[ 93 ] When it comes to living in harmony with nature and observing it, Germans truly have no need for a Romanic prompt. And what that curious Frenchman Boutroux—who has become a famous man in France thanks to a few well-crafted sentences—has to say about German inwardness is, in truth, quite far removed from what this German inwardness actually turns out to be when one examines it at its core, as we have attempted to do today in a few words.

[ 94 ] Well, ladies and gentlemen, when one tries to listen to other voices—for example, voices from the East—the matter becomes all the more clear. One must say: In Eastern Europe, on Russian soil—not only in spite of the great philosopher Soloviev, but precisely because of the unique nature of the great philosopher Soloviev—in Eastern Europe today there can still be no understanding whatsoever of this unique relationship between the human soul and the spiritual and essential life force that permeates the world; but over there, everything is such that there is still no understanding of the experience of the Spirit pulsing through and interweaving the world within one’s own inner soul; that one wants everything to be brought to oneself, that everything should come to meet one, that everything should be merely a revelation—albeit a spiritual revelation—from the outside. Thus, even the greatest Russian philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took a completely dismissive stance toward the very essence of Central Europe—and, incidentally, even of Western Europe.

[ 95 ] What the great minds of Russian intellectual culture have to say time and again—the Germans simply did not notice this because they merely accepted—I would say—the extraordinarily vivid depictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—the Germans did not notice this at all! Within Russian intellectual life, the prevailing view is essentially that this entire way of life—as expressed in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the other Western European thinkers—is appalling, is fundamentally repulsive, is an abstract intellectual life, something that does not speak to the heart and mind of the real human being. All of that must be replaced by what lives within the Russian people. Whatever is classified as political—whether ability or lack thereof—is irrelevant. The “Testament of Peter the Great” contains the entire spiritual philosophy of Russia; in the nineteenth century, philosophers strike the same fundamental note—a note that amounts to viewing Western and Central Europe merely as something appalling and obsolete.

[ 96 ] Megalomania is then the direct consequence of such a worldview that considers itself mature, but which is in fact based solely on immaturity. And so, for example, one can indeed observe the following. First of all—let me elaborate on this in closing—an outstanding Russian thinker of the nineteenth century, Yushakov, turned his gaze toward Asia in 1885, for he believed it was imminent that something would emerge from the same folk culture in the East—immediately, as a great, world-historical mission. But he maintained that this could never emerge from or arise out of the folk culture of Western or Central Europe. And so, in 1885, Yushakov wrote a remarkable book, the focus of which is initially directed toward Asia—a remarkable book!

[ 97 ] This book expresses, in essence, the following: When we look over toward Asia, we find there an ancient, wondrous world culture that is spreading and has only just come into its own. This world culture has sought to understand itself by setting two spiritual entities in opposition to one another: Ahriman and Ormuzd. Ormuzd is revered by these Asians—namely the Iranian peoples, which include, for example, the Indians and the Persians—as the spirit who brings forth the fruits of the earth; but who also instills spiritual aspiration into the human soul, elevates it, and enables it to experience the spiritual.

[ 98 ] Opposing him is Ahriman, who is connected to the spirit of the Iranians and the Turanians, and who led the Asians through evil in such a way that the blessed conditions of Ormuzd were thwarted by him. And there, as Yushakov observes, we truly see Ormuzd and Ahriman fighting their battle over in Asia, with humanity caught in the midst of it.

[ 99 ] 1885—dear friends here present, take note—this is what Yushakov writes! And he says: Oh, these poor Asians! What have those selfish, senile Europeans done to them? What have they turned them into!

[ 100 ] Thus, Yushakov presents the matter as if the Europeans, out of selfishness and senility, had taken away from the Asians what Ormuzd had brought them as a blessing. But the Russians, based on their worldview—which, in turn, must bring vitality, a revitalizing element, into all that senility—the Russians must come and help the Asians; [the Russians] must unite with the Asians. So says Yushakov. — As mentioned, the gaze is directed toward Asia.

[ 101 ] It is not I who say this; Yushakov said it in 1885. And Yushakov says something remarkable: The wonderful, blessed alliance of the peasants—the Russian peasants—and the Cossacks will spread across to Asia and unite with the poor Asians against Ahriman in order to preserve the blessings of Ormuzd.

[ 102 ] And who is Yushakov mainly targeting? In 1885—I must emphasize this again and again—he says: “Oh, these Asians—they have suffered terribly at the hands of that appalling Europeanism, which, in its most dreadful selfishness, sought to appropriate for itself what Asian civilization, under Ormuzd’s fruit- and blessing-bestowing influence, had created for humanity.” How did the Europeans view the Asians? And which Europeans does Yushakov have in mind? Yushakov, in 1885, has the English in mind; curiously enough. Let us hear what he says: “These Asian peoples are regarded by the English as if their sole purpose were to dress in English garments, to wear English fabrics, to fight one another with English weapons, to work with English tools, to eat from English vessels, and to play with English trinkets.” Then he continues—in 1885:

“England exploits millions of Hindus, yet its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula. I wish”

[ 103 ] says Yushakov — my Russian

“There is nothing like my homeland—I can only rejoice that it has emerged from this state, which is as glorious as it is sad,”

[ 104 ] which England created,

“is sufficiently far away”

[ 105 ] and has nothing to do with that dreadful England. So wrote Yushakov in 1885; this is how a Russian looked toward Asia in 1885.

[ 106 ] The reason for this likely lies in the fact that the Russians then allied themselves with England shortly thereafter—not, however, initially to help the Asians against Ahriman, but to destroy that which, stemming from such deep roots, can give rise to a spiritual life—alongside all other German characteristics—as has been described here.

[ 107 ] And so, from this place where 150 million people must hold their ground against 777 million, there must be a powerful awakening of the awareness of what the German spirit fundamentally means in the course of human development.

[ 108 ] Among those Germans whose gaze was turned toward the German spirit, there was always an awareness of it—an awareness on both sides of the Ore Mountains, in Styria as well as along the Rhine and in the far east of Germany. And just as that which is now being forged together in Central Europe by the great events—which, in essence, has always sought to unite those who understood it—is illustrated by a beautiful phrase from an Austrian German, a phrase written as early as 1862 by the Austrian German Robert Hamerling.

[ 109 ] I feel justified in pointing out precisely these conditions beyond the Ore Mountains, for the simple reason that I myself, as a German Austrian, have spent nearly thirty years of my life in German-speaking Austria and have taken part in the deliberations and struggles that the Germans within Austria have had to endure.

[ 110 ] It is this same Hamerling who expressed his attitude toward Austria and Germany in these beautiful words: “Austria is my fatherland, but Germany is my motherland”—words that live on in the hearts of every Austro-German who is able to look beyond external circumstances. I need say nothing about Robert Hamerling’s other intellectual achievements; I would only like to point out that in 1884 it was Robert Hamerling who, from Graz, called out heartfelt words to Germany upon learning that a statue of the goddess Strasbourg had been erected in Paris and that the German flag had been burned during a festival celebrating the goddess Strasbourg. At that time, it was Robert Hamerling who let his words resound from Graz across to Germany:

If you believe in vengeance,
And in the victor’s future wreath:
Do not hope to reclaim
A single patch of German soil!
Even if you swarm like ravens
Around a statue in Alsace,
You will not have Strasbourg,
Strasbourg never again.

[ 111 ] In 1862, in one of his earlier poems, *Germanenzug*, this same Robert Hamerling let the ancient Germanic peoples—the ancestors of the Germans—pass before his mind’s eye as they migrated from Asia. He has them encamped over in Asia, on the border of Europe. He beautifully depicts the evening scene—the setting sun overhead, the moon rising; then he describes how all the migrating Germanic tribes fall asleep, while only one remains awake, with blond curls and radiant eyes, filled with enthusiasm for the essence of his people: Teut. The Genius speaks to Teut, who wishes to speak of the future essence of German identity. Then, for example, the Genius of the German people addresses Teut with these words regarding the blond, representative youth of the Germanic peoples:

“To whom will words one day burst forth from the depths of the soul
As they did to your people—so rich, so tender, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the sounds of the strings
His innermost being? To whom does the mind so magnificently
Carve granite hieroglyphs into the azure sky
Of the soul’s ascent from life’s confines?
Who, in the end, ties the strands
Of the inquiring 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 the near and the far so faithfully?
Where does every zone of earth and sky
reflect itself as in your thoughts, O Teuton?”

[ 112 ] Hamerling then goes on to point out that what the Asian sought—and what the ancestors of the Germanic peoples sought over in Asia when they eradicated human individuality and suppressed the “I” in order to rise to the Spirit of the World—must reappear in a later form. This Asian way—even as it appears today in Indian culture—can no longer be the path for our present time. Because the Christ impulse has entered the world, the connection of the human “I” to the world spirit must be sought in a different way. The “I” must be elevated and strengthened, as we see in the three—Fichte, Hegel, Schelling—and others; the “I” must be strengthened; but in the way it must be, now that the greatest impulse has entered human development, now that the Earth has beheld the Christ impulse, in the way it must be—as the Asian striving must appear on a higher level—so it emerged from the deepest roots of the national being. And this is what Robert Hamerling seeks to express by also letting the Genius speak to the fair-haired Teuton, to the fair-haired representative of Germanness.

“Yet no matter how proudly you soar, above the other swarms
Hovering high, you will still preserve a flame
Of that ancient, sacred fire:
Within you will live on the dream-filled
Divine ecstasy, the soulful warmth of the heart
Of the ancient Asian homeland. A tranquil legacy
This sacred ray, a temple fire
Of humanity, free from smoke, with a pure flame
Will continue to glow in your breast and the depths of your soul
Remaining with you and guiding your course!
You strive only because you love: your boldest thought
Will be devotion that seeks to sink into God.”

[ 113 ] And that is precisely what emerges from all science, from all knowledge to which the German aspires: this act of offering even that which can be known as a sacrifice to the altar of a deified worldview itself. Spiritual science does not seek to be religion, nor does it seek to replace it; it seeks to stand alongside religion as a true science—it does not wish to impair religion in the least, but rather to allow it to stand on its own—like a current that presents itself as a true science, one that seeks only to support religion, not to replace it in any way. But what spiritual science can accomplish is at the same time offered—to use Böhme’s expression—in order to experience “divine intoxication,” that is, the experience of the spiritual aspect of the world within one’s own soul.

[ 114 ] This is what the German philosopher and mystic Jakob Böhme felt so deeply, and what may appear as a motto, a guiding principle of the German spirit itself, when Jakob Böhme says: “When you turn your attention to the profound phenomena of the world and gaze upon the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in Him you live, strive, and walk, and will be buried in this God.”

[ 115 ] This is a worldview—a spiritual worldview—based on German insight.

[ 116 ] And how does one confront it? Let us take one last, very brief look—let us say, at Russia. Russia—it needs a new delusion today: the delusion of Europe’s “senility.” It needs this new delusion about Europe’s senility to prove that this European intellectual life—and specifically Central European intellectual life—is outdated; a new delusion, just as Russia has always needed a delusion.

[ 117 ] France—yes, one would like to remain entirely objective, to do no one an injustice. The German has no need to join in the chorus of which his enemies are now making a spectacle. So perhaps we should listen to a French poet himself, who, not long before the war, created a portrait of his people in a dramatic work that is quite interesting: Over the centuries, the French have grown accustomed to everyone heeding them. They have come to regard themselves as the ones who set the tone in all aspects of external culture. And that is why Rostand himself—and the Frenchman himself—says this in his poetic portrayal. The Frenchman is like a rooster: when he crows in the morning, the sun rises. And so he gradually comes to believe: “Because I crow, the sun rises.” And he cannot imagine that the sun would rise even if he did not crow.

[ 118 ] The Frenchman needs a new delusion; he must be able to believe that nothing can happen in the world unless he crows. He needs a new delusion about his own nature. And when all is said and done—one need only truly let the historical events since 1870 take their toll on one’s soul, and one will see how this new delusion has gradually taken shape, and how it has never left the French national spirit. — You can also read what has been said about this in my little book: “Thoughts During the Time of War. For Germans and those who do not believe they must hate them.”

[ 119 ] The English—one really doesn’t want to do the English an injustice, either. But when one hears how one of the leading contemporary English politicians lets it be known to the Germans, across the Channel, that “power takes precedence over law” in their country, and that this is a German principle—then one must emphasize: The principle “power before law” is found as a truly legitimate one in the English writer Thomas Hobbes; that is where it is first cited. The phrase “power before law” is a specifically English product, and all law is rooted in power. And one could find many such examples; as I said, one does not wish to be unfair, but I must state the following: All these nations need something to numb themselves regarding what they are actually doing in the context of world history; to numb themselves to the way they act, they need something like a fog that shrouds the truth. England needs a new lie—this can be stated based on the facts themselves, without becoming in any way biased. And Italy? Yes, a not insignificant Italian politician told me before the war—for there were minds that were not so naive as to believe before the war that Italy would ever side with the Central European powers, and so it did not strike me as particularly remarkable—when a not insignificant Italian politician said to me: “We must have a war in Italy, for our people have become impotent, lazy, and complacent; strength can only return if they are able to wage war. We therefore need war—a new sensation, a new tremor of passion in the national soul—and that is why Europe is alarmed.”

[ 120 ] As I said, this is a statement by an Italian politician. Therefore, one might say: It will seem understandable that Italy, in order to numb itself to the actual truth of the situation, would have to appoint a new saint: “sacro egoismo,” or holy egoism—a new saint, albeit a peculiar one. And even more peculiar is its hierophant, the high priest Gabriel d’Annunzio.

[ 121 ] However, the image that will live on in the history of humanity—a reflection of these circumstances—will be forgotten; the German can look upon these matters with calm confidence, just as—let it be said once again—he has always done on both sides of the Ore Mountains. My dear teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer spoke the following words in Austria in 1859:

Let Russia and England consult wisely,
Perhaps they won’t find it unwelcome,
If we get into a little skirmish here,
If they seek to wrest our rightful claim from us
[You, German brothers, will not—advise us here,
The enemy’s attack will only unite us
And among us, all ambition will fade
Before this: to be one people in word and deed.

And if one among us has erred,
If there was discord in German hearts,
There is but one thing that now inspires us:
What we share in joy and sorrow!
So let it also be our common lot:]
A German war, if not a German peace.

[ 122 ] 1859 — spoken in Austria by someone who felt, deep in his soul, a kinship with what lives and thrives in German folklore. And then he, the same man, went on to say that

A spirit arises, a giant to behold
[The one who has long failed to muster his full strength
The German spirit rises, ablaze with courage
Wherever you look, throughout all German lands.

It has been called the spirit of many a master,
in art and knowledge, in the construction of systems,
once it is seen in its entirety,
then it is recognized by the world] all the more.

[ 123 ] I am reading these sentences aloud only so that you may see how what the German is capable of feeling about the source and roots of German national life did not arise merely today—as is amply evident among the esteemed listeners seated here, who know that I spoke in this way about the German character years and years before the war, and also about the relationship to other peoples. Germans need not succumb to the tone they now hear from those who regard them as encircled, as if in a great fortress. They may calmly look to what they can gain from an objective examination of the essence of their national character. For what he gains in this way reveals itself to him even where it [already] appears as a pure note in the ongoing development of German intellectual life, [such that it] first presents itself as a seed, as a root, [and will yet] bear blossoms and fruit. And so the best of what exists in German intellectual life—which, as we have seen, is not yet in bloom or bearing fruit, but is still only a root and a seed—will bear blossoms and fruit in the future.

[ 124 ] And with all his soul, the German turns toward the present time of severe trials, which fills us all with certain hopes and confidence; he turns toward the future with these certain hopes and confidence that fill him, his whole heart united in his gaze toward that future, toward what will unfold as the blossoming and the fruits of the German national character, of German life, and of German strength in general—despite everything that is said today with hatred and slander against this German essence—what will unfold, what reason may recognize as that which will unfold, because it must unfold!