The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. On the Development of German Thought: A Forgotten Quest for the Science of the Spirit Within It

Ladies and gentlemen!

[ 1 ] The great and momentous events in which the German people find themselves certainly justify the fact that I—who, after all, have been speaking on topics of the science of the spirit for many years, just as I have in other German cities, as well as in this city here, may not, this year—just as in the previous one—deliver a lecture on a narrower topic within the science of the spirit itself, but rather on something that is intimately connected with the spiritual life of the German people—something that is capable of revealing a great deal about the German people’s place within the overall development of humanity.

[ 2 ] When I do this, it is certainly not to give expression to mere emotional views—which are particularly close to the soul in this difficult, yet in a certain sense hopeful, time—but because it is based not on obscure feelings and sensations, but—as I believe—on real facts, facts of knowledge—that what has always been characterized here as spiritual science is rooted most deeply precisely in those expressions of German spiritual life that we can count among the pinnacles of that spiritual life.

[ 3 ] We, as Germans living in the present, have no need, esteemed audience, to express our feelings and thoughts by, above all else—as is also done by the most distinguished figures among our enemies—denigrating that which lies outside German life—as is currently being done by the other side with regard to the German character— or even to distort it slanderously; rather, we can adopt a purely factual perspective on that which is rooted in the German national character.

[ 4 ] Let me just briefly mention by way of introduction that spiritual science, as it is understood here, is indeed based on the premise that it is possible, from within the human soul—through processes of soul life that have already been described here in this city on numerous occasions, and which can also be found described in our literature—to develop within the human soul such forces that lead the human being to a realization of that which is not confined to the period between birth and death, but which transcends births and deaths and represents the eternal, immortal essence of the human being. That such a deepening of the spiritual life is possible, and such a strengthening of the powers of the spiritual life, that a person becomes aware within themselves, within their physicality, of that which has shaped this physicality from the spiritual world, and which, when a person passes through the gate of death, returns once more to the spiritual world—that such an insight is possible, and that such knowledge must gradually be incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity in our time—this is the conviction of spiritual science as it is meant here.

[ 5 ] And this conviction of the humanities—which, I believe, is true humanities—is embodied precisely in the most beautiful and most meaningful aspirations of the German people.

[ 6 ] Now, one might raise the following objection: This is supposed to be about the humanities—that which provides the mind with a form of knowledge similar to what the natural sciences provide for external nature—so it is supposed to be a science. People who take a certain superficial viewpoint will immediately object: “Yes, science is something entirely international!”

[ 7 ] This objection is so overwhelming to many precisely because it is so infinitely superficial—one might say, superficial to the point of being self-evident; for the moon, for example, is also something shared by all peoples across the globe. But what individual peoples have to say about the moon—what wells up from their souls to characterize it—differs from one people to another. And while one might say that this is limited to poetry, anyone who, in science, sees more than just the most external description of external things—that is, what can be known about things—knows that this arises from the foundations, from the fundamental forces and instincts of human beings, and is individual, just as human souls themselves are individual—that is to say, shaped so differently depending on how individual peoples are predisposed in various ways to the knowledge of the world. But these predispositions, these inner impulses of the individual people, are what propel humanity forward—not what one might call “international” in a sense so superficial as to be taken for granted.

[ 8 ] What immediately comes to mind when one seeks to characterize the German quest for knowledge are three figures—three great figures—who, however, are to be mentioned here only by way of introduction to our discussion today. Yet the development of German thought rests upon the foundation of what they created. Three figures who are perhaps rarely mentioned today in general German culture. But that is not the point. Rather, the point is that these three figures, in what they have created, are difficult to understand, and that these three figures will nevertheless play an ever-greater role in the development of German intellectual life in the future. And these three figures are: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—the three figures who, as creators of a worldview, formed a powerful backdrop, [who] drew from the depths of German folklore that which then gave rise to the great creations of German intellectual life, which we encounter in Goethe, Herder, Lessing, and Schiller, and which, after Greek culture, represented the greatest cultural flowering in the development of humanity.

[ 9 ] Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte—how do we perceive him? He, who is only seemingly a difficult philosopher to understand—who, on the contrary, felt that what he had to offer as so-called philosophy is, in the highest sense, truly the result of a dialogue he held with the German national spirit itself. And precisely when we approach Fichte, what does he show us?

[ 10 ] He shows us how a personality rooted in the essence of Germanness, precisely through its quest for knowledge, sets out to seek within the human soul itself that which enables this human soul, in its own inner experience, to grasp and intuitively perceive what, as the spiritual-divine, permeates and interweaves the world.

[ 11 ] In terms of the power with which this was expressed in Fichte’s soul, Fichte stands—one might say—almost entirely alone in the history of human development. How did Fichte attempt to bring into his own soul that which pulses through, lives through, and weaves through the world? He was clear that one could not achieve this through external observation, [not] through the senses, nor even through the intellect bound to the brain, but rather by summoning the soul’s deeper, hidden powers—to the point where [one experiences firsthand] that which permeates the world as its fundamental essence, permeating it with the divine and spiritual. And in this he reveals a fundamental trait of the German character: this growing together in the innermost depths of the soul with the mysteries of the world, this inability to be satisfied except by experiencing in the innermost depths of the soul what unfolds in the vast, wide universe as the most hidden, the most mysterious.

[ 12 ] One need only consider a few small traits—which I wish to mention because they are so characteristic of a figure like Fichte— to bring these small traits of Johann Gottlieb Fichte to mind, and one will see how we have in him precisely a personality to revere—one who, by his innermost nature, must strive to devote himself entirely, with his soul, to what he can call the experience of the mystery of the world. Fichte, the son of very simple people from a humble Saxon village, is seven years old; he was already in school and was a good student. As a reward, his father gave him a book for Christmas after his seventh birthday: *The Horned Siegfried*. After some time, it becomes apparent that he, who had previously been very eager to learn, is becoming careless in his studies. [As a result], this is brought to his attention. One day, his father finds him standing by the stream that flows past their humble little cottage: floating in the stream is *The Horned Siegfried*, which the boy had thrown into it.

[ 13 ] An exceptionally characteristic trait of the seven-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. What had gone through his soul? What had gone through his soul was that he told himself: By developing an almost insatiable interest in this grand, monumental subject matter of *Siegfried*, I have neglected my duty; yet duty is what must take precedence over everything else. Therefore, the book is thrown into the water! So that he might live to fulfill his duty.

[ 14 ] And here’s another story: Our Johann Gottlieb Fichte is nine years old; one Sunday, the neighbor from the estate comes over to the simple village to listen to the pastor’s sermon. He arrives too late. The neighbor is very sorry that he was unable to hear the village pastor’s sermon. Then he thinks it over and realizes that there is a nine-year-old boy who remembers well what the pastor said in the sermon. They call for the nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte; he steps forward, awkwardly, in his blue peasant smock; but he soon gets into the swing of things, so that he repeats the entire sermon with heartfelt devotion before the neighbor—not from a dead memory, but because his soul has become one with what he heard and what his ear then resonated with his soul.

[ 15 ] This, indeed, is the defining characteristic of this merging of Fichte’s own soul with that which is experienced. And so this develops more and more within Fichte, until, in the end, the entire universe is permeated by will. The Will of the World, the divine Will of the World, weaves and lives through all spaces and all times; it sends its currents into the very fabric of the human soul.

[ 16 ] And when this weaving of the soul has given itself over completely, the soul experiences within itself a flow of the infinite World Will. There, one is united with that which pulses through the world as the divine-spiritual. There, one is carried by that which flows, as if on the waves of the Will, as the duty of the world, which shines into our soul and is the highest thing Fichte seeks to grasp. Thus, his worldview emerges from the innermost essence of his personal character. This is the quintessentially German way: to seek out what is most personal and most objective at the same time. Fichte does not seek just any spiritual being that one is supposed to be able to prove, but a spiritual being that continually participates in the divine-spiritual creative power of the world—so that it is capable of creating itself at every moment. And in this inner creativity, which rests in the divine-creative, lies for Fichte the guarantee of the eternal—that which passes through births and deaths and lives on in the spiritual world, even after a person has passed through the gate of death.

[ 17 ] Regarding that which flows into the human soul from the divine power that pulses through the world—[that which] is permeated by eternal duty—Fichte speaks of this in his beautiful lectures delivered in Berlin in 1806, which he calls “Instructions for a Blessed Life”—Fichte says of this: People speak of how the immortal essence of man only asserts itself after death. Whoever truly comes to know the soul knows that immortality is to be grasped directly in life within this body; and such a person is therefore immediately certain that—even if this body decays into its elements—that which is grasped within it through true knowledge passes through the gate of death into the spiritual world.

[ 18 ] But Fichte is also convinced that the eternal spiritual must be grasped simultaneously within one’s innermost self. That is why, as a teacher at the University of Jena—which was so famous at the time because it was the cradle of Germany’s greatest men—that is why, as a teacher, he is fundamentally something quite different from any other teacher. He does not teach in order to convey a certain content, a certain set of propositions, to his students; rather, he prepares himself in such a way that what he has to teach is first and foremost an inner life within his own soul, so that he experiences what he wishes to allow to flow into the souls of his listeners.

[ 19 ] A listener who understood him well once put it beautifully: Fichte’s speech roars forth like a thunderstorm. What he had to say in words poured out of him as if in a roaring thunderstorm. It is clear: He does not merely want to educate good people; he wants to educate great souls. Hence, his aim was not merely to convey something to people, but to allow something to pass into them, so that these souls would [truly] become something different when they left than they were [before] they entered the lecture hall. And the following sentence so beautifully illustrates how he continually directed them toward the power of their own souls—toward the strength that resides within human beings themselves. In his lectures, there was always a striving for an immediate communion between his own inner life and that of his listeners; he sought to achieve this, for example, through such beautiful moments as this one. One listener—the naturalist Steffens—described it this way. During his lecture, Fichte urged the audience: “Think of the wall!” So they thought of the wall. He let that go on for a while—so said the man, Steffens. “And now think of the one who conceived the wall!” [was Fichte’s next prompt].

[ 20 ] There, human beings were left to their own devices. At first, the listeners were taken aback; they couldn’t quite make sense of it right away. But this was the way to direct people toward their own souls—and toward the strength that can arise from them—so that they might live in harmony with the divine-spiritual forces of the world.

[ 21 ] And so there he stands, this Johann Gottlieb Fichte—truly such that enthusiastic listeners could say of him: He lives in the realm of concepts as if in a supernatural world; but in such a way that he not only dwells in this supernatural world, but also masters it. And Fichte realized: What lived within his soul had unfolded in an intimate dialogue with the spirit of the German people itself.

[ 22 ] I am not describing this out of some kind of national narrow-mindedness, but rather as something that Fichte experienced firsthand as his own feeling—and through which he was able to exert such a profound and supportive influence on the German people during one of their most difficult periods.

[ 23 ] One need only compare what it means that a worldview such as Fichte’s could emerge from a particular national character with what stands as the pinnacle of the Romance worldview—a worldview that, in turn, arose entirely from the essence of the French national spirit. There, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, we find the French philosopher—one of the greatest and, indeed, one who most strikingly characterizes the French national spirit: Descartes or Cartesius.

[ 24 ] He, too, took as his starting point what lives in the human soul. He can therefore be readily compared to Fichte. His “I think, therefore I am,” the “Cogito ergo sum,” has become famous. But what does he mean when he says, “I think, therefore I am. — Cogito ergo sum”? — It is because thought lives within me that I can demonstrate that I remain myself. That which lives in the soul is deduced and proven through logical reasoning. Fichte seeks to grasp it in immediate experience; that is what sets him apart. This extends all the way into the realm of worldview. One can see this from a single detail.

[ 25 ] Ladies and gentlemen, you see, Descartes, who drew on French folklore in his work, comes to form a view of the world. What is this view? Yes, this view is that—I must single out an example, since we do not have enough time to characterize everything in detail—that he, for example, comes to regard not only external nature as—one might say—soulless, but also animals as a soulless world. Only humans have a soul, because they can experience it within themselves. As Descartes puts it: Animals are merely moving machines.

[ 26 ] This continued to influence the French worldview well into the eighteenth century, when human beings, too, were reduced to machines. When Goethe encountered this worldview, he said, speaking from his German consciousness: “Yes, they are offering us a worldview in which the entire world is a machine, nothing but atoms and molecules colliding with one another. And if they could at least explain to us how this beautiful, magnificent world arises from this mechanical jostling, then one might still take an interest in such a project.” But they simply present the world-machine without explaining anything about it. That was Goethe’s objection to what came from the French West as a mechanistic worldview.

[ 27 ] This, however, allows us to compare Fichte’s conception, which seeks to delve deeply and with clarity into every single creature and being, to experience everything fully, in order to recognize the will—the divine will—in all things. This immersion in the beings of the world—that is German.

[ 28 ] This tendency to set oneself against others, to see the soul only within oneself, to reduce everything to a machine—[and I say this not out of national narrow-mindedness]—is, for example, the French character.

[ 29 ] Now let us examine Fichte’s worldview from another perspective. For him, that which is revealed only to the senses is what he called a “material field for the fulfillment of duty.” Everything that is not the divine-spiritual will, which weaves through and animates all beings—that which presents itself only to the senses—is, as Fichte says, the material substance [for] duty to have an object upon which it can act. This, then, is the Great Thing that Fichte seeks to experience—the spiritual in one’s own soul—and he brings this spiritual in his own soul to the world, experiencing it also through other things.

[ 30 ] Let us compare this with what, for example, stands out within the English worldview, insofar as this English worldview has emerged entirely from English folk culture. Of course, this does not refer to the individual—the individual can always rise above his or her people—but rather to that which is connected with the national character. There we see how, not only in earlier times, the worldview of Bacon of Verulam focuses solely on the useful, solely on that which presents itself externally to the senses, for which the spirit, which experiences itself within itself, stands merely as ties that bind things together so that the spirit can find its way. Here, the spirit is merely the means of organizing the external sensory world into a system. There is no shared experience of what lives as the spiritual within all that is sensory. And this has persisted right up to the present day. We see pragmatism at work there. For pragmatism is a word for something that, when placed alongside Fichte’s worldview, truly stands out like darkness beside the light.

[ 31 ] What is this pragmatism? For this pragmatism, there is not a truth for its own sake—truth that is sought so that one experiences it in the soul as truth—but rather truth: Well, this is something that human beings form as a concept, as an idea, so that they can find their way in the external world. Thus, a person forms the concept of the “unified soul”; but it is not something like the unity of the soul that one desires within one’s soul, but rather [one forms a concept] because a person exhibits various manifestations of their nature, doing this and that. And one finds one’s bearings by adopting a concept such as “unified soul.” It is useful, in order to hold together the external sensory things, to invent something like truth. Truth exists only because it allows one to orient oneself within sensory things. And in what can be experienced at all, truth has no independent meaning.

[ 32 ] The exact opposite is present in Fichte’s quest for a worldview. There, that which is external and sensuous is certainly not underestimated; we are not dealing with a false, otherworldly understanding. Rather, we are dealing with a will for the soul to grow together with the world spirit and with an assertion of the truth, which is experienced in the spirit as the most primordial thing that lives and weaves within the world. For Fichte, things exist to reveal the world, not—as they do for pragmatists—as the only reality; whereas what is called truth exists only to provide the bonds and links with which to synthesize the outwardly coherent sensory world, so that the spirit may comfortably survey it.

[ 33 ] I am not exaggerating; this is simply how things are! And so, as Fichte continues to develop this perspective more and more, he stands before his Berlin students in 1811 and 1813 and tells them that whoever wishes to penetrate the world must look to the Spirit. He speaks of a new spiritual sense—Fichte—and by this he means that this sense can be developed; that, when one speaks of the experiences and perceptions of this sense, it is—in the eyes of those who refuse to acknowledge it—as if a single sighted person were speaking among a crowd of blind people! But Fichte strives to attain within the human being that which directly connects the soul to the spiritual world. And from this he also draws the strength that then flowed so profoundly into his “Addresses to the German Nation”—during one of the most difficult periods in the history of the German people—through which he sought to pour sustaining forces into the future of the German people, into their souls.

[ 34 ] Given the limited time, one can only characterize this extraordinary figure in these few words! Standing next to him is the even lesser-known Joseph Wilhelm Schelling. Yet it is precisely this that reveals the infinite versatility of the German spirit: Schelling, too, seeks to arrive at a worldview through the soul’s communion with the mysteries of the world, but—I would say—through entirely different spiritual powers. While Fichte is the powerful man who seeks to experience the will within himself and, in his own will, creates the will of the world—the eternal will of the world—Schelling creates from the depths of his soul. And through this creation from the depths of the soul, a worldview emerges for him in which nature and spiritual life wonderfully intertwine. Even if what Schelling created seems difficult to read today—it doesn’t really matter whether one accepts the content, but rather the striving itself—even if it is difficult to read: one need not accept it as a doctrine in the face of which one must become either a follower or an opponent. Look at the people who have striven in this way—who have striven from the very core of the German national character. Throughout Schelling’s work was this endeavor to immerse himself in every single being; to experience what acts within the being as spiritual existence. Through this, nature became for him like a physiognomic expression of the spirit. And the spirit was that which built itself up on the foundation of nature. Just as the present human soul builds itself up on the basis of its memories, so, in Schelling’s view, the human being, with his spirit, felt toward nature as if he had lived through all ages but had left nature behind. And as he now looks upon it, nature offers him the memory of what he had previously created in a state of unconsciousness, so that the foundation for his consciousness might then be in place. Thus, in Schelling’s view, soul and nature grow together.

[ 35 ] While Fichte had to be characterized by his contemporaries as the one who stood above them above all in German vigor, those who listened to Schelling and knew how to appreciate him characterized him as a seer—a personality who, as he spoke, was enveloped by what immediately revealed that he was shaping words while his spirit gazed into an entirely different world.

[ 36 ] Perhaps I may read aloud a passage written by one of Schelling’s students and friends, because it reveals—more than anything else—how those who knew him viewed him—Schelling. Even as a young man in Jena, Schelling made such an impression that the young men around him were immediately convinced that he not only had something to say to them that directly set their souls ablaze, but that, while he spoke, his spirit lived in the spiritual world, and he spoke from within it. That is why Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, a man who himself sought to descend into the spiritual depths of the human soul, says the following. He characterizes Schelling as follows:

“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 power of attraction?”

[ 37 ] No, says Schubert, that wasn't the only reason:

“There was an all-encompassing power in his lively words; wherever it met even a modicum of receptivity, none of the young souls could resist it. It would be difficult for a reader of our time,”

[ 38 ] — In 1854, Schubert wrote down what he had experienced with Schelling in the 1790s —

“who was not, like me, a youthful and engaged listener—to make it understandable how, when Schelling spoke to us, I often felt as though I were reading and hearing Dante, the seer of an otherworldly realm open only to the consecrated eye.” The powerful content contained in his speech—measured out with mathematical precision in a lapidary style—seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds must be loosened and from whose hand the unquenchable fire must be received—a task for the discerning mind.”

[ 39 ] Thus, ladies and gentlemen, it was once possible to speak to the German people in such a way that it made this impression of the spiritual world—that it was able to make this impression!

[ 40 ] Those who speak of Schelling—and I myself have known people who heard him speak even in his old age—say that what he had to convey was already evident in the gaze of his eyes, which still burned with intensity in his old age; so that one could see: It is the personality itself that seeks to merge with the world by offering a worldview.

[ 41 ] And the third among those who sought to arrive at a worldview rooted in the deepest German folk tradition is Hegel. Hegel—from whom those who are unwilling to make any effort when they are asked to take something in flee at the very first sentences—Hegel, what did he want?

[ 42 ] Schelling sought to create a worldview through the German spirit. To penetrate the spirit and the spiritual worlds—through the will: Fichte. Through that which is thought, through the pure thought that lives in the soul when that soul does not turn its gaze toward the external sensory world, does not wish to surrender itself to the external sensory world with mere reason alone—through that which lives in the soul as pure, crystal-clear thought—Hegel sought to merge within his own soul with that which is at work in the world. So he says: If I think the thought purely, if I devote myself to the life of thought—the life of thought free from sensibility—within my own soul, then the thoughts that live there are no longer my own arbitrary thoughts, but rather the thoughts that are the divinity itself within my soul. Then that which is there as light—and illuminates the entire world—kindles a small flame within one’s own soul, and through this flame the soul grows together in thought with the World Spirit. A resting of the soul in the world-thought. Here, in the German way, one strives for that which may be called mysticism—but not a mysticism that revels in, or seeks to revel in, dark and confused feelings, but rather a mysticism that, while striving emotionally for what all mysticism strives for—a coexistence of one’s own soul with the mysteries of the world— but it strives for this on the foundation of crystal-clear thinking.

[ 43 ] And this, in turn, is characteristic of the German spirit: that the highest is sought with complete spiritual clarity, not through confused, chaotic emotions. This is the worldview that lies in the background, and from which everything else has also sprung—from the same fertile soil—from which Goethe’s *Faust* and the other great works of art and literature of that time [have sprung]; they, too, have, as it were, sprung from this same soil. And Goethe, fundamentally speaking, stands on this same soil.

[ 44 ] And Goethe—in contrast to Kant—expresses this in a short, beautiful essay on the “contemplative faculty of judgment”: how he strives for a form of knowledge that, while arising from within the soul, is nevertheless a direct revelation of that which is to develop in the world from it. The soul does not limit itself to merely observing the external sensory world and judging it; rather, when the soul withdraws into itself, something is to awaken within that soul, so that the power of judgment itself becomes a form of intuition—so that one learns to see spiritually.

[ 45 ] Goethe speaks of the eyes and ears of the spirit, which look directly into the spiritual realm—just as the physical eyes and ears look directly into the physical world.

[ 46 ] And Fichte was right to say, when he published his seemingly entirely abstract trains of thought in 1794, that he could write to Goethe:

[“Philosophy has not yet attained its goal as long as the results of reflective abstraction have not yet harmonized with the purest spirituality of feeling. I regard you—and have always regarded you—as the representative of the latter at the stage of humanity we have now attained. Philosophy rightly turns to you. [Your feeling is its touchstone.”]

[ 47 ] There is a profound harmony between what has emerged as the greatest—including in poetry—from German intellectual life and what lives in the background as a worldview. Although in the period that followed—simply because the loftiness of this worldview was so astonishing—something else may have come to the surface within the development of German thought rather than a pure continuation of the powerful ideas of Fichte, Schelling’s, and Hegel’s—these ideas are nonetheless what lies at the very core of the German spirit, what will continue to develop—and indeed has continued to develop, as we shall see shortly—and what must lead to the most beautiful blossoms and fruits of the German spirit.

[ 48 ] When one places thinkers such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel before one’s soul, one realizes: From three different perspectives, they reveal that which can be gained as if through a different kind of dialogue with the German national spirit. But behind them, as if invisibly, the German national spirit itself is at work. And one is expressing more than a mere image when one says: Just as what emerges through Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is, in each case, a nuance of the German national spirit itself—just as what the German national spirit itself speaks is, in each case, a nuance—so too is that which comes to the surface through Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—as a nuance. And behind this, one senses that which sweeps through the currents of German intellectual life as an even more powerful wave.

[ 49 ] Consequently, the peculiar phenomenon may arise in which the great minds of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were followed by lesser minds, who were less gifted and who, in a certain sense, [sought] to present what those great minds had established as a goal throughout the development of German thought in an even more beautiful, even brighter light.

[ 50 ] It is indeed a curious phenomenon, isn’t it, that minds less gifted than these greatest ones had greater opportunities in later times, precisely because the German national spirit stood behind the great ones as well, and could then continue to exert its influence through those who followed—who had already been inspired by their predecessors. We see one such example in the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Hermann Immanuel Fichte.

[ 51 ] Immanuel Hermann Fichte puts it quite plainly: What the senses can perceive of the human being, what the intellect—which is bound to the brain—can recognize about the human being, and what science can discern, is merely the outer aspect of the human being; it comprises only those forces that hold the human being together in the earthly realm. But according to Immanuel Hermann Fichte’s view, within this physical human being lives an etheric human being who permeates this physical human being and whose powers are just as connected to the eternal forces of the universe as the powers that live within the physical human being are connected to the inherently transitory forces of the earth.

[ 52 ] That which has been described here in these lectures over the years as the spiritual background of the human being—as the etheric human being—and which is the subject of derision by conventional science, even when it has arisen within Germany, non-German scholarship—because it is influenced by foreign countries—this etheric human has also been referred to here in this city in the lectures over the years, pointed out again and again.

[ 53 ] But even higher, even more magnificent than Immanuel Hermann Fichte, we see the hint of that which Fichte viewed in the human soul as a power yet to come—a power that can, however, be brought forth so that these eternal forces may weave and live ever more fully. We see this emerge even more clearly, on an even grander scale, in one thinker—a thinker who has been almost entirely forgotten: Troxler—Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler. Who still knows him? Yet he stands on the shoulders of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel! And he delves even deeper into the spiritual foundations of the world than his predecessors, who were far greater than he in terms of spiritual endowments. He was simply able to draw inspiration from them.

[ 54 ] What do we see in Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler? In Troxler, we see that he clearly points out: when a person develops their soul—when they bring forth from their soul that which cannot exist in the external sensory life—then the human soul contains Spirit, that which Troxler calls, on the one hand, the “supersensory Spirit.” And by this he means that when a person develops what lies dormant in their soul, they are then able—when they turn their senses away from the external world—to experience not just the ordinary life of the soul, but rather a form of perception that transcends the senses can awaken—a supersensible spirit, a spirit that perceives spiritual processes in the world just as the senses perceive sensory processes and beings: a supersensible spirit. Even those who, as idealists—as abstract idealists—seek to grasp the world through ideas and concepts will admit this.

[ 55 ] Troxler goes even further, however. He speaks not only of the extrasensory mind, but also of the “supermental sense.” What is the supermental sense?

[ 56 ] When this spirit, which contemplates the world, comes to speak not merely of concepts, not merely of ideas, but when it can depict truly concrete entities—which it can describe just as one would describe a single animal—so that one ascends to a world of higher beings that cannot be seen with the ordinary senses, but which the “super-spiritual sense” can perceive — something that conventional science, in turn, can easily laugh at, but which, as a vigorous striving in that faded, forgotten tone of which I now wish to speak to you, confronts us in such a wondrous way within the development of German thought.

[ 57 ] This becomes even more wonderful to us when we consider the following from Troxler. Troxler says: When a person brings forth the most beautiful thing that can live in his soul—insofar as that soul lives within the body—when he draws forth from his soul the most beautiful thing, the most beautiful aspect of the soul that is bound to the body—when the soul becomes cosmic and is set before the world as a cosmic soul, then it develops into faith, love, and hope. But faith, love, and hope are, for Troxler, that which outwardly manifests itself—albeit as the blossom of earthly life—yet only for this earthly life. Behind faith, behind the power of faith that belongs to the soul insofar as the soul lives in any way, behind this power of faith there lives in the soul a higher power: the supersensible hearing—says Troxler. And faith is merely the outward manifestation of a supersensible hearing, through which one can hear—just as the physical ear hears physical sounds—the spiritual sounds of the spiritual world, the spiritual language of the spiritual world, the soul in its world, so to speak; for in place of such spiritual hearing, and because [the soul] lives in the body between birth and death, this spiritual hearing takes the form of faith in its physical embodiment. This faith is the outward manifestation of spiritual hearing.

[ 58 ] Love—this most beautiful, this most magnificent blossom of the soul’s life within the body—is, for Troxler, the outward manifestation of what he calls “spiritual touch,” “spiritual feeling,” and “spiritual sensation.” Just as one physically reaches out with one’s hand to touch physical objects, so too does the power of love conceal another power—a purely spiritual power—through which the soul can extend its spiritual feelers to sense that which lives as a concrete spiritual being [in] the spiritual world.

[ 59 ] In 1835, those beautiful lectures were published in which Troxler speaks so eloquently of the spiritual-soul human being who stands behind the believing, loving, and hopeful human being. And behind what is the power of hope, the power of confidence, lies, on a soul level, what Troxler calls “spiritual vision,” “spiritual perception.”

[ 60 ] As the soul enters the body, it transforms spiritual hearing into faith, spiritual feeling into the power of love, and spiritual vision into the power of hope.

[ 61 ] And when the soul passes through death, that which was the power of faith within the body between birth and death is transformed into spiritual hearing; that which was the power of light is transformed into spiritual touch; that which was the power of hope is transformed into spiritual seeing, into beholding, into seeing the spiritual world.

[ 62 ] Thus Troxler speaks of “sensitive thoughts”—where thoughts do not ordinarily judge the external world, but where thoughts are so deeply moved internally, so vividly moved, that one grasps the spiritual world directly through these thoughts. And he speaks of “intelligent feelings,” where—as Schelling once put it—thoughts do not merely pass judgment—which is, of course, quite natural, but great people have the flaws of their virtues—where the soul does not judge through the intellectual power of mere rational science, but where the soul truly judges in such a way that, through thought, it unites with the external world as it otherwise unites with it only through feeling, yet with clarity; Troxler speaks of “intelligent feeling.” Truly, this forgotten tone of the German worldview, of German intellectual development, is beautiful. One need not take offense at the fact that this wonderful, faded tone has not lived on in outwardly visible form; that does not matter, esteemed audience: What matters is that it exists and that, even though it has not become outwardly visible, it lives on in what German culture strives for and hopes for in the world, and that it will be revived once again right from the heart of this materialistic science; and that the German people’s place in the world, particularly in spiritual terms, is to lead humanity and its soul toward the Spirit in the manner inherent in this faded, forgotten tone—a tone forgotten only outwardly—of German intellectual development.

[ 63 ] Let us read a beautiful passage from Troxler’s book, in which he describes how he now conceives of the ethereal human being—the human being bound to the eternal forces—within the physical human being, who is bound to temporal forces. Troxler says:

“Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a subtle, noble spiritual body from the coarser physical body … a soul that possessed an image of the body within itself, which they called a ‘schema,’ and which represented to them the inner, higher human being … In more recent times, even Kant, in the dreams of a spirit-seer, seriously—or in jest—imagines an entire inner, spiritual human being who bears all the limbs of the outer body on his spiritual body; Lavater writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about Bonnert’s little underskirt and Platner’s soul corset—which are supposed to be tucked inside the coarser physical overcoat and torture smock—we still hear him ask once more, “For what purpose and from where were these extraordinary inclinations and desires placed within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, are slowly cutting through our earthly shell? ... In the stony limbs”

[ 64 ] human beings

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

[ 65 ] Troxler goes on to say

“I could cite countless other similar ways of thinking and writing, which are ultimately just different perspectives and ideas that … contain the true, sole doctrine of human individuality and immortality”

[ 66 ] is. — This is a tone from the history of German thought that has faded but continues to resonate nonetheless—and what a grand, powerful tone it is! If the German people today face the task of securing their place in the world through external forces, then what must be won by force of arms today is merely the other side of the same essence—hidden in the depths of the German soul—which, through its versatility, has been able to ascend to these heights of intellectual life. — And Troxler beautifully continues in another passage:

“While it is indeed most gratifying that the newest philosophy—which … must reveal itself in every form of anthroposophy …—is gaining momentum, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be the fruit of speculation, and that the true … individuality of the human being must not be confused either with what it posits as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it sets against this as absolute spirit or absolute personality.”

[ 67 ] Troxler is well aware that human beings have a higher being within them. And when this inner being begins to act, it is not anthroposophy that emerges first—it is anthropology, the study of humankind, that comes first, when the outer intellect observes human beings; anthropology comes first, according to Troxler. When the inner human being confronts itself and becomes acquainted with the higher forces—the spiritual forces and spiritual feelings—that is when anthroposophy emerges. One is therefore justified in referring to a science that has, in the truest sense, grown out of the deepest aspirations of the German people as anthroposophy.

[ 68 ] And, ladies and gentlemen, this must indeed be brought to light at some point, because it must not remain merely a forgotten and faded sound, but must find its way back into German folklore. And you will see—perhaps official academia will not accept these ideas, but it is merely a prejudice that they are too difficult to understand—there will come a time when people will realize that even the simplest person—it is precisely the simple souls who demonstrate this when they approach it in the right way—will come to see that these ideas can already be woven into every child’s upbringing! Then this child-rearing will also spring from the very depths of German folk culture.

[ 69 ] This must be mentioned because one truly does not need national narrow-mindedness to characterize the German’s place in the world and his role in the overall development of humanity; because one does not need to fall into the same tone as certain Frenchmen—such as, for example, influential thinkers like Boutroux and Bergson—yes, his name is still Bergson, even though it doesn’t sound very French—like Boutroux and Bergson, who are still spouting such nonsense to their fellow Frenchmen. One would hardly believe it! Take, for example, this German striving to merge with what lives out there in the world, with what the soul seeks to grasp within itself. Boutroux, who traveled around here in Germany before the war, was even allowed to teach and lecture at German universities, and who spoke of the fraternization of the German and the Latin, Romance natures—now, for example, he says: “The French have no word for ‘Schadenfreude.’” The Germans are characterized precisely by the fact that they have the word “Schadenfreude,” such a word; they therefore have Schadenfreude. On the other hand, they have no word for “generosity”—only the French do. So the Germans do not have that—generosity—only the French do. He also attributes other traits to the French. For example, the French are very prone to treating everything with a certain sense of humor.

[ 70 ] In this regard, it may not be unnecessary to read aloud the judgment on the French character. One might still harbor a tiny spark of belief that I, too, intended to speak here out of narrow-minded nationalism. Therefore, I wish to offer a different judgment—a judgment on the French character, on the French pursuit of knowledge:

“Thirst for Truth”

[ 71 ] the ruling states

“is not a French passion. What matters more than the essence is the appearance—the shell more than the core, the form more than the substance, the glittering more than the fruitful, public opinion more than conscience. This means that the Frenchman’s focus does not lie within himself, but in others, in the masses. Individuals are zeros; the digit that makes them a number comes from outside: that is the sovereign, the writer of the day, the most widely read newspaper—in a word, the current master of fashion. All of this can be traced to an excessive sociability, which stifles in the soul the courage to resist, the capacity for judgment, personal conviction, and the cult of the ideal.”

[ 72 ] Everywhere, it's exactly the opposite of what we saw today. ... it's suffocating everything!

[ 73 ] So these are not my words; they are not even the words of any German, but rather those of Henri Frédéric Amiel, the French-Swiss Amiel, who, as a French-Swiss, wrote these words on January 22, 1875. I have chosen the words of this man—this witty man who sought to understand life, Henri Frédéric Amiel—precisely because he is, in fact, a French-Swiss, and has come to know only German life, and can therefore compare it with what he knows of the French spirit. This is something the Frenchman cannot easily understand—this desire to grow together with the innermost essence that lives and weaves within the outermost sensory realm!

[ 74 ] That is why Boutroux gives a speech in which he mocks the German who wants to grasp everything from within: The Frenchman—he says—who wants to get to know a camel goes to the menagerie and gets to know the camel there. The Englishman goes on a journey and seeks out the camel in its natural habitat; indeed, he travels to distant lands to get to know the camel where it lives. The German retreats to his study; he neither goes to the menagerie nor travels to distant lands, but instead engages with the camel in and of itself, as he can perceive it from within his own soul.

[ 75 ] From this, Boutroux now draws the conclusion—yes, one can present this to the French today, to the Parisians—so from this, Boutroux draws the conclusion: The Germans delude themselves into believing that what they experience in their own souls is the entire world. That is what really matters. And that is why, Boutroux tells his French audience, the Germans also imagine that they are something in the world. And they do not look any further than that; rather, what they imagine themselves to be is immediately divine and spiritual. And to explain that, he then made this joke.

[ 76 ] As we know, the French are a witty people; but this joke that Boutroux made—well, it’s actually by Heinrich Heine! And so it didn’t even grow out of French soil—or the French intellectual tradition.

[ 77 ] Within German intellectual life, what I have called a “forgotten tone” is by no means something that perhaps manifests itself only at the heights of philosophical endeavor; rather, it is alive—truly alive. Isn’t it wonderful, truly wonderful, for example: in 1856 a book was published—a small treatise—by a simple pastor in Waldeck, in the countryside, in Sachsenberg, in the Principality of Waldeck; the man’s name was Rocholl, and he was a simple pastor; this little treatise is titled *Contributions to a History of German Theosophy*, which—I would say—shows how its author is completely immersed in a worldview that reveals itself as spirit to the spirit. Even if some things in this little book may [not] seem so simply true today, [but] merely fanciful, what matters is not whether one becomes a supporter or an opponent, but rather that one sees how the human striving toward the spirit of the world can truly reveal itself everywhere, precisely within German spiritual life.

[ 78 ] If I had the time, I could cite hundreds and hundreds of examples that would show how, indeed, in our time—but this was not so long ago, just a decade ago—through a foreign influence that has also taken over German intellectual life, [just as] through this foreign influence, in an unbelievable way, that which can live within German intellectual life has—at first—simply been forgotten; for it is precisely through this that the German people will have to take their great place in the eternity of historical development.

[ 79 ] And that is what must now hold its ground on the small—relatively speaking, tiny—territory of Central Europe against overwhelming odds. For how will history one day judge what is happening in the present? One can put it simply: 777 million people against at most 150 million people in Central Europe! History will one day record that 777 million people have encircled 150 million people, and are reviling and slandering the very spiritual life of these besieged people.

[ 80 ] These 777 million people certainly have no reason to be envious of the size of the land! For they—the 777 million people—have 68 million square kilometers, compared to the 6 million square kilometers possessed by the Central European powers—6 million square kilometers that are surrounded! That is what history will have to record. And it will add that these 777 million people, with their 68 million square kilometers, intend to defeat the 150 million people on the 6 million square kilometers not only through military prowess, but by starving them out.

[ 81 ] The German may sense what is currently alive in the soul of his people, and what significance this has in the overall course of human development. The German may look toward the future with calm and confidence, precisely because he becomes aware of the forces that dwell in the depths of his national soul. They have always endured; for what matters is not whether they have become famous, but rather that what is unknown on the outside nevertheless reveals itself inwardly as something significant and great.

[ 82 ] It is often difficult to bring to the fore what is truly the German spirit as opposed to a foreign spirit. For example—and I may mention this because I myself have been embroiled in a struggle over this issue for more than thirty years now—Goethe, drawing on his German scientific consciousness, turned against Newton’s mechanistic optics, a fact that is still not fully recognized today. But physics is so inundated with Western mechanistic thought that today every physicist still regards Goethe’s optics as nonsense. And for thirty-three years I have been striving to assert what might be called: Goethe’s right against Newton. It will take some time yet before people come to understand the nature of the chapter “Goethe in the Right Against Newton.”

[ 83 ] There have always been individual German minds who knew—despite everything that physics presented to Goethe as overwhelmingly self-evident—who knew who was right in this field! Starting with von Grävell, who wrote the beautiful book *Goethe im Recht gegen Newton* (Goethe Is Right Against Newton), to—and I think I may speak of this in this case, since it has remained sufficiently unknown—to what I myself have written about Goethe’s studies in physics and optics, and about his studies of color, we are dealing with something that, in terms of a true engagement with German spiritual life, is still reserved for the future. But that future will come.

[ 84 ] As early as the 1850s, a man emerged from the very same currents of the faded, forgotten tone of German intellectual life: Planck, Christian Karl Planck. He wrote beautiful works, seeking to view nature everywhere as itself imbued with spirit, forming the foundation for the spirit—beautiful works: “Truth and Superficiality of Darwinism,” “Outlines of a Science of Nature,” “Spirit and Nature”—wonderful works, arising entirely from—as he was well aware, fully aware—the very deepest power of German thought, German sensibility, and the German scientific spirit; this is what he called the German essence. I can highlight just one example: when people speak of the Earth today, how do they speak of it in the natural sciences, and how does the geologist speak of it? The Earth is merely a material sphere, and it is mentioned only in passing that human beings also walk upon it. For Planck, that is not what the Earth is. For Planck, the Earth is that to which all living beings belong. Christian Karl Planck seeks to develop a conception of the Earth that is roughly what one would have if viewing it from the outside, with all that it embodies spiritually. It is not merely an organism, but actually a spiritual being, and human beings are an integral part of the Earth in this sense. And to conceive of the Earth solely in terms of purely physical geology would, in Planck’s view, be like considering a tree only in terms of its trunk—a woody trunk—without seeing that what constitutes the tree’s innermost essence—its blossoms and fruits—is connected to it. Just as flowers and fruits belong to the tree by their very nature, so too, when one considers the Earth, one cannot be satisfied with a mere geological perspective. And this is how everything is with Planck.

[ 85 ] And so something finds its way into Planck’s worldview—something through which he wanted to make a powerful impact on his contemporaries, but was unable to do so because they were not yet ready to accept this worldview so directly. He wanted to say: By living with nature, one lives not only with external nature, but also with the spirit of nature. He wanted this—the religious consciousness of humanity—to be incorporated into moral consciousness and into the sense of justice. The era in which Christian Karl Planck lived had not yet had the opportunity to take a broader view of things. Ultimately, it branded him as an “overly nervous man.” Such a thinker can often stand alone, not only in life. Consequently, his last written work was published posthumously by his dear friend Köstlin under the title *Testament of a German*.

[ 86 ] All of this—which I have mentioned—led people to describe Planck as an overly nervous person; so much so that anyone who today has only a vague inkling of these things might speak of him as a megalomaniac. But he is a man who lives deeply and consciously within the forgotten tone of German intellectual life—so consciously, in fact, that in 1864 this Karl Christian Planck was able to write about what he sought as German science:

“The power of deep-rooted prejudices, as seen from the prevailing view of his”

[ 87 ] 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 only 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.”

[ 88 ] He goes on to write:

“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*)”

[ 89 ] 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 symbolized in a fantastical, medieval manner through 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.”

[ 90 ] Thus, in 1864, Planck, fully aware that he could develop a science of the mind and the universe based on German traditions!

[ 91 ] Now, there will certainly be many people, won’t there, who say: “Well, such a poor philosopher, lost in his dreams, doesn’t really know anything about what actually goes on in the real world!” Then there are the practical people, who know how to handle practical life in the right way and understand how to judge it. When such philosophers come along with their ideals: “But what do they know about reality?”—Well, I’d like to give you a little example from this very Christian Karl Planck. The man died in 1880; his *Testament of a German* was published as early as 1881—1881, ten years after the Franco-Prussian War had, in some respects, changed conditions in Germany. Let’s mark this point in time. How many Germans have, since then, held various beliefs about European affairs, have imagined what was to come—statesmen and non-statesmen, diplomats and non-diplomats—what have all these “practical” people, who know how things really work out there, imagined! What have they imagined! And how they must have smiled at the idealists, who, from their dreamy world of ideas, form such notions about the currents of the world! Well, the “impractical idealist” Christian Karl Planck wrote in 1880 at the latest—since he died in 1881—in his *Testament of a German*: A great European war is coming!

“No political wisdom, no love of peace on Germany’s part can prevent this hostile clash within the current, purely national order. For the nature of the circumstances is more powerful than all prudence; and even now, despite the friendly stance of Germany and Austria, the hostile sentiment of the Russian East is becoming all the more evident, precisely because it could not be given a free hand in everything, but a specific goal had to be set. And if a conflict should eventually arise, then—no matter how much we must fight it for the good of Europe—Europe will not stand by our side; rather, just as in the East, we will simultaneously have to defend ourselves in the West and the South; on all sides, hostile national jealousy will rise up against the new empire placed in their midst.”

[ 92 ] And now I ask you to listen carefully to these words:

“And if a battle should one day break out, even though we must fight it for the good of Europe, we will not find Europe on our side; rather, just as in the East, we will have to defend ourselves simultaneously in the West and the South; on all sides, hostile national jealousy will rise up against the new empire established in their midst.”

[ 93 ] This is the “dreaming philosopher” of 1881, who tells people: You will be able to do whatever you want; I no longer believe that today—he could not say it back then, but his words contain what sensible people still [believed] in 1913, 1914 [still believed]—namely, that Italy, for example, would be found fighting alongside the Central Powers. The “impractical man,” the “impractical philosopher” Christian Karl Planck had already stopped believing it as early as 1880! One need only become acquainted with that true reality as it is today, that true reality that lies in the depths of the spiritual being; the entire reality as it is today was written down by a philosopher—a German philosopher—in 1880. Anyone can read it! In 1912, the second edition of this “Testament of a German” was published by a publishing house that, admittedly, had far more on its plate at the time than dealing with the “Testament of a German”—a house that, as they say, preferred to focus on popularizing the numerous translated works of the French philosopher Bergson in Germany, —and I have also referred to Bergson in my *Outline of the Riddles of Philosophy in Its History*, as well as in the new edition of the work *Worldviews and Lifestyles in the Nineteenth Century*. But how difficult it has been—or, in fact, has not yet been—to convey the full significance of Christian Karl Planck, even though as early as 1900 in my *Worldviews and Philosophies of Life in the Nineteenth Century* —supplemented by a prehistory of Western philosophy and continued up to the present—I had already pointed out the full significance of Christian Karl Planck; just as it has not been possible to make Germans even aware of what lives in German folklore through the fact that a German philosopher can speak in this way, so too did it have no effect that I, back then, — having written it down even before the war — was able to draw attention to what, for example, is regarded by the uninformed as a particularly significant idea in Bergson, such as the famous sentence: “Duration lasts,” which could indeed be seen as nothing other than someone saying “Duration lasts,” saying, “The heart hearts,” but what could then be regarded as something else was, in Bergson’s view, the next thing a person must consider in relation to a worldview, [...] that he takes human beings as his starting point and places them at the forefront, while other beings, as it were, stem from human evolution—that human beings come first, and then, from the realms of minerals, plants, and animals, something arises that some will regard as madness, but which is, in fact, the true worldview—this has been admired and pointed out. One—perhaps one may say this in this case, for there is no full diversity even among those who have turned so enthusiastically to Bergson’s philosophy and regurgitate all sorts of things— felt somewhat disheartened when Bergson concluded his speech by saying that during the war the Germans had fallen so low—and what I already mentioned here last year, this acknowledgment that the Germans had fallen so far from their former heights, as they once stood in Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel—[as they] had in a Goethe—but [that the Germans] have now fallen so low that everything about them is mechanistic, [that they] want to reduce everything to machines and industry. Good old Bergson probably believed that the Germans would counter by reciting a Novalis, a Goethe, or a Schiller.

[ 94 ] But I was able to show you back then—this happened before the war—that what was so admired in Bergson as a more subtle idea had, in the work of the German Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss—specifically in works published as early as the 1870s, particularly in 1882— [that] had appeared and been presented in a much more powerful way in the work of the German Preuss!

[ 95 ] Here we see how Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, in his 1882 work *Geist und Stoff* (*Spirit and Matter*), cites as an example this entire faded and forgotten striving and flow of German intellectual life, and how he very emphatically points out that one must start from the human being. And only a view of nature that is completely unaware of the true connection between the human spirit and the spiritual realm can proceed from the lower beings and develop everything upward to the human being, while everything else appears as a fragmentation. Preuss says:

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

The focal point of this new theory is the human being, the species that appears 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 humankind—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 would have 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 not by chance that human nature emerged from the evolution of all earthly things, but by necessity. Man is the goal of telluric processes, and every other form that has appeared alongside him has borrowed its characteristics from him. Man is the first-born being of the entire cosmos ...

Once his embryos had formed, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary power to produce further human embryos. Whatever else came into being became an animal or a plant ...»

[ 96 ] We do not know whether Bergson actually knew Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss. That would be just as big a mistake as if he had known him and simply written down what belongs to Preuss without pointing out that it is by Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss.

[ 97 ] One could certainly imagine him doing that—even the latter; for it has now become sufficiently well known that Bergson—who accuses the Germans of having a mechanical worldview in order to prove how far they have fallen in the present—has himself taken a very peculiar path. It is well known that Bergson simply copied entire pages of his books—Bergson’s books!—from Schelling, Schopenhauer, and other German philosophers; he simply copied them—a non-mechanical way of writing his books! And to copy page after page from the works of the leading figures of a people—a people whom one reviles and slanders in such a manner! One simply copies, and thereby gains great fame and praise.

[ 98 ] These are things that are so easily forgotten in the present. Some people can already see how things are turning out! Henry Frederic Amiel, for example, once said:

“Perhaps it is unique to the Germanic spirit to think independently, to search for the very source of things. The Slavs and Romans are more strongly subject to the rule of convention, tradition, custom, prejudice, and fashion; and when they break free from these, it happens as an uprising and rebellion, without thereby recognizing from within themselves the law inherent in things—their true standard, not the written, arbitrary, imposed one. The German seeks to penetrate to the very essence of nature; the French, the Spaniard, and the Russian stop at convention. The root of the problem lies in the question of the relationship between God and the world: immanent or transcendent—this determines, step by step, the significance of everything else. If the spirit is outside of things, it need not adapt to them. If the spirit lacks truth, it must be supplied to it by the prophets. Then thought despises nature and is subject to the Church; that is the Latin world.”

[ 99 ] So wrote Henri Frédéric Amiel, the French Swiss, who jotted down these words about the Germanic spirit and the French, Spanish, and Russians in 1877 while staying in Ems.

[ 100 ] It is through such things, distinguished guests, that one comes to understand what actually lives on the six million square kilometers that are now not only being enclosed, but also slandered and reviled by the distinguished figures among those who inhabit and live on the 68 million square kilometers.

[ 101 ] But when one tries in this way to bring out the essence, the most significant aspects of the individual national spirits—as they are now forced to struggle against one another—well, one can truly say: If one looks at the Italian national soul—surely there are many listeners here who know that I have, for a long time, many years even before the war—not only to Germans but also to other European nations—so that these words are not merely a reaction to the mood of this war, but are based on an objective understanding of the situation—if one looks at the Italian national soul, one can find a simple word to characterize it. The Italian turns toward the world—of course, this does not refer to the individual, but rather insofar as he belongs to his people—the Italian turns toward the world; but he says: This world must be such that it pleases me! Entirely from this point of view—that is what national character is.

[ 102 ] The Frenchman also turns his attention to the world. But he says: This world must think nothing other than what I want, than what I conceive of as the world in my French terms. And if he encounters a different way of thinking anywhere, then it must be subordinated. Woe betide anything that exists which the Frenchman, by virtue of his Frenchness, cannot understand.

[ 103 ] The Englishman, the Briton, thinks: Yes, the world is certainly good; the world is quite, quite good; but it must be shaped in such a way that it serves the Briton, that the Briton can, above all else, assert his individuality in this world, and that, for the rest, it is organized to serve him. One can read about this in detail, particularly in the works of those who believed they were drawing from the depths of the English national spirit—historians, philosophers—and wherever one looks, one can find evidence of it.

[ 104 ] The German, in the development of his thought, reasons as follows: The world exists, and as I, a human being, face the world, I wish to develop my human soul in such a way that it becomes the threefold reflection of the great world. This is the essence of German thought and feeling.

[ 105 ] The Russian who thinks: The world as it is is worth absolutely nothing; it must be replaced by another. And the point is to put that world in place of this one, a world in which the Russian people can flourish. That is the Russian national sentiment.

[ 106 ] Henri Frédéric Amiel, the Swiss Frenchman, once painted a curious picture of what it would be like if Russian culture were to flood and dominate Europe—as it pleases, and as the entire Russian cultural movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has, in fact, portrayed it based on its own [impulses]. Henri Frédéric Amiel says:

“What terrible masters the Russians would be if they ever extended their rule over the countries of the South”—

[ 107 ] He refers to Russia as the country of the North, and he also counts France and Germany among the countries of the South —

“What they would bring us would be polar despotism, a tyranny the likes of which the world has never known—silent as fog, biting as ice, rigid as iron, yet with the loveliness of falling snow and its cold brilliance; slavery without compensation or relief. But they will likely gradually lose the virtues and flaws of their semi-barbarism. The centuries will mature these sons of the North, and they will enter the harmony of nations as something other than a threat or a discordant note ...”

[ 108 ] As we know, this time has not yet come for Germany and Austria, the nations allied with them. But just as the East—the Russian East—gradually came to understand the European West over the course of the nineteenth century—that is, what the European West meant to it, which included not only Central Europe but, in the nineteenth century, often Western Europe as well, including France and England—that which lies within the Russian people, incited by a misunderstanding of Western intellectual culture, particularly German intellectual culture, has flared up into a delusion of grandeur that truly manifested itself not only in the “Will of Peter the Great,” in the “Will of Peter the Great”—whether forged or not—but was also countered by the entire developmental principle of leading figures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia.

[ 109 ] You can read more details in my little book *Thoughts During Wartime: For Germans and Those Who Do Not Believe They Must Hate Them*; it is currently out of print but will soon be published in a second edition; it is therefore not available at the moment because it is out of print.

[ 110 ] It has been a curious development; more and more, one sees emerging from Russian literature—from the writings of Russian thinkers—a line of thought that states: Everything that exists in the West—namely, German intellectual life, these ideas that have emerged from Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the others—are abstract ideas that fail to grasp the depths of reality. It is all antiquated; it is a world that must be done away with. And in its place must come the Russian world—the world that the Russian people will create. Kireyevsky is one of those who pioneered this way of thinking. As early as 1829, this tone set the standard, then became a political movement, and now that the Russian steamroller was to be sent across Europe. This Kireyevsky writes:

“The fate of every European state depends on the union 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 good things. As soon as all these good things are ours, — we will share them with the rest of Europe, and we will repay our entire debt to them a hundredfold.”

[ 111 ] ... 1829! In other words: all of Europe’s wealth, as soon as Russia has expanded across the whole of Europe. This is not only the political program, but also the literary program—it is the artistic and aesthetic program—to possess all of Europe and then, out of goodwill, to share it as one sees fit—according to Kireyevsky.

[ 112 ] But Russian intellectual life did not immediately turn toward the West. As late as 1885, we find a book authored by Yushakov, in which he dreams of how the spirit deeply rooted in Russian culture must first exert its influence toward Asia—a kind of Pan-Asianism. Yushakov constructs a curious theory: He says that over in Asia there live peoples who once possessed a marvelous spiritual and economic culture. These Asian peoples themselves—in a marvelous yet realistic legend of Ormuzd and Ahriman—have captured what arose and developed within their own lives. They call Ormuzd the good god; Ahriman was always the evil god. But the Iranian peoples—which include the Indians and the Persians—have placed themselves in the service of Ormuzd. They have taken from the evil Ahriman that which stood in their way—so to speak, that which Ahriman left them, which the evil Ahriman left them—they have taken it from him. And in 1885, Yushakov looks specifically toward the West, toward the Western peoples of Europe, and in particular toward one Western European people: the English. How have they been robbed of their gifts from the good Ormuzd by these Englishmen, these Asians! These Englishmen have treated the Asian peoples in this way; they have intervened with whatever stemmed from their worldview. But what have they brought to these Asian peoples? — says Yushakov in his book *The Anglo-Russian Conflict*, 1885. Then these Englishmen came to the Asian peoples and assumed that the latter existed solely so that they might clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight one another with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels, and play with English trinkets.

[ 113 ] Then he moves on to say: Now the Russians must take the cultural blessings into their own hands. They will not take away from the Asians what Ormuzd has given them, but rather they will ally themselves with the poor people enslaved by Ahriman and will share their Ormuzd with them, so that they may work their way up together and gather Ormuzd’s gifts anew over in Asia. In their hearts, they will be with the hearts of the Asian peoples—it is not I who say this, but Yushakov. And so it will be that they will cross over from Russia—those from Russia who are the very archetypes of humanity’s future: the peasant and the Cossack, the greatest upholders of the moral world order, the greatest upholders of selfless humanity. From the alliance of the peasant and the Cossack will emerge that which will make Asia happy once more.

[ 114 ] And then he goes on to say, Yushakov, pointing once again to England—1885:

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

[ 115 ] England's very existence, then. And then he goes on to say:

“I Wish for My Fatherland”

[ 116 ] my Russian homeland

“Nothing of the sort—I can only be glad that it is sufficiently far removed from this state, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

[ 117 ] and has nothing to do with this dreadful England. This was said in 1885 by a Russian about England, who longs for a different state of affairs and is grateful that Russia is sufficiently far removed from what England brings to the world.

[ 118 ] It is in such matters that the reasons likely lie—not the logical ones, but perhaps the non-logical ones—which will then experiment on the world, which will then take the place where the Russian people have had relations with the Asians, who, in the view of these people, have been mistreated, and from whom they would have to be freed from Ahriman—that the Russians did not initially ally themselves with the Asians to fight the evil Ahriman, to destroy the evil Ahriman together with them, but that the Russians initially allied themselves with the evil Western peoples, with the evil English, to trample Europe underfoot. We need not fall into the [tone] into which so many have fallen today on the side of the opponents of Germanness [...], who, for warlike reasons, have also become opponents of the German essence and national character. With Christian Karl Planck, whom we characterized earlier, we can say:

“[Yet] it is not for nothing that the German spirit has devoted its deepest and most intimate strength to this; [it is not for nothing that it has even made its poetry a reflection of this indelible urge to comprehend itself and reality. That unbiased, purely objective, and universal sensibility—which alone has made it possible for Germans to fully appreciate even foreign cultures and nationalities, and which, in religious, moral, and artistic terms, bestows upon them a truly human consecration—also encompasses the recognition of the general natural law of things, as soon as, in the fullness of time, the spirit has become ripe for it.”

[ 119 ] That is why we prefer to look at what, from the perspective of world history and in terms of pure reality, the German spirit, with its aspirations, must be. There we look to something that existed as a spiritual aspiration—precisely over in Asia—long before Christ appeared on earth. There, people sought to unite in order to attain a culture—for no culture can be attained otherwise—to unite with the spirit that interweaves and permeates the world, the entire world. But how did they attempt to attain it in Asia! By lulling the ego to sleep, by dampening it, by extinguishing the ego as much as possible!

[ 120 ] This worldview must be a thing of the past now that the Christ impulse—the greatest impulse ever exerted upon the Earth—has entered earthly life, actually giving it spirit and meaning for the first time; thus, this Eastern worldview can no longer serve as the foundation for a true spiritual worldview. The “I” must not extinguish itself, but rather strengthen itself, elevate itself, and—through this elevation—grow into the spiritual universe, into the spiritual cosmos, precisely as the “I.”

[ 121 ] Thus, Pan-Asianism once presented this form of Hinduism, which had reached its pinnacle through the eradication of the “I.” Thus, in more recent times, under the influence of the Christ impulse, humanity has sought to attain absorption into the universe through knowledge—not by subduing the “I,” but by the “I” grasping and experiencing itself, so that its experience becomes an experience of the world. The German people regard this as their task; such a task has always been present in the depths of the German people’s quest for knowledge. And those who lived as Germans in Central Europe were united in this striving.

[ 122 ] And in closing, I would like to quote a few words from an Austrian German—an Austrian who says of Austria, “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland,” to express—as early as the 1860s—the words were written in 1862—to express how a shared spirit unites what later—for this only happened after Robert Hamerling’s death—what later became so firmly welded together by external bonds that Central Europe now stands as it does. Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German and Austria’s greatest poet of the second half of the nineteenth century, summed this up in the following words: “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland.”

[ 123 ] I, as a close compatriot of Hamerling’s, I, who myself have lived nearly thirty years of my life in Austria among Austrian Germans and have fought alongside them, am particularly qualified to point out this seriousness of the German character within the German-Austrian context. Robert Hamerling beautifully expresses precisely this trait—this trait of world history—in his *Germanenzug*—written, as I said, as early as 1862—where he depicts, as if in a dream, how the ancient Germanic tribes migrated from Asia to Europe—carrying within them, as if in a seed, the future Germans—and how they sought out their new European homeland. This is beautifully depicted: The moon rises; it is evening. The Germanic tribes settle down to sleep—these future Teutons migrating to Europe—but only one remains awake: the blond Teut. The genius of Teutonia, the genius of the later, the future Germany, speaks to Teut. He speaks of the spirituality that must rest in striving—that is, German striving. Then Hamerling says—that is, he has the spirit of the German people say this to the fair-haired Teut:

“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? Who carves his thoughts so magnificently
Into the sky-blue, granite hieroglyphs
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 it does in your thoughts, O Teuton?”

[ 124 ] This is truly the deepest knowledge derived from the tone of the—now cited, partly forgotten—tones emerging from the development of German thought. A tone that can never be anti-religious—the tone that will also encompass all knowledge within the human being in such a way that this knowledge is offered up, as it were, on an altar before the world spirit, before the spiritual, real world—that tone of which Jakob Böhme, the “Philosophus teutonicus” — as he was also called — spoke these beautiful words, hinting at the truly folk-like nature of German cognition:

If you, O man, the depth

[ 125 ] he means the depth of the sky, the blue

and when you see the stars and the earth,
then you walk in God,
then you strive in God,
then you die in God,
and then you will be buried in God.

[ 126 ] These are profound, German words.

[ 127 ] And Robert Hamerling, Austria’s great German, who knew how to empathize with every aspect of German identity, no matter how small—just as an aside, when a statue of Strasbourg was erected in Paris in 1884 and the German flag was burned in front of it, this touched Robert Hamerling so deeply that he wrote the following words:

“Do you believe in vengeance,
And in the victor’s wreath to come?

[ 128 ] He wrote this to the French

Do not hope to take it back<
A patch of German soil!
Though you may swarm like ravens
Around a statue in Alsace,
You will not have Strasbourg,

Strasbourg never again!”

[ 129 ] That was the sentiment coming out of Austria at the time, directed squarely at the French, as they danced around the statue in Strasbourg and burned the German flag.

[ 130 ] But Hamerling also knew how to remind us that the German spirit is the continuation of the greatest thing that once emerged in the world spirit in the ancient Orient—from which, after all, the ancient ancestors of the Germanic peoples originated; he was able to point out how, albeit in a pre-Christian manner through the attunement of the “I,” humanity sought to merge with the universe—and how this still lives on, elevated to a higher plane, within the Germanic essence, which is to bring to this world, in a new form appropriate to Christian development, the greatest thing the world once created in the Orient.

[ 131 ] This connection with the entire development of humanity—it comes to the forefront of Robert Hamerling’s mind—even in his *Germanenzug* —this fundamental principle: that everything the German comes to recognize must grasp his deepest essence and become one with his entire personality; yet at the same time, this is a mission in world history that ties in with humanity’s once-supreme aspiration. That is why the spirit of the German people once again speaks through Robert Hamerling:

“Yet no matter how proudly you soar, among the swarms
hovering high above, you will always 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.
In tranquil permanence
This sacred ray, a temple fire
Of humanity, free from smoke, with a pure flame
Will continue to glow in your breast and 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.”

[ 132 ] Today, we can and indeed must immerse ourselves in that which can make us aware of how deeply rooted a lofty spiritual aspiration truly is—one that must continue to influence the future for the benefit of humanity. This spirituality lives on in the finest expressions of German spiritual life across the 6 million square kilometers that are today threatened by people living across 68 million square kilometers.

[ 133 ] And one must speak not out of national sentiment, but out of objective insight, when discussing the global mission of the German people—a mission that must not be undermined by those who today—failing to understand it—not only revile it but also slander it.

[ 134 ] We Germans may look back to that which—and have done so today—became an integral part of the development of German thought during Germany’s greatest intellectual era, and which lives on within it and will flourish once more. And we may look upon what has been presented to us in such a way that we regard it as roots and sprouts. And by recognizing the root power and sprouting power of that which has passed, we have faith in the continuing influence of this past. And in this faith in what we must faithfully cherish and nurture—not only for the sake of the German people, but for the sake of humanity—we may love these roots of German culture and cherish the hope and confidence that what we have recognized as sprouts and roots will yet bear blossoms and fruit in the future! Despite everything and all that has risen up against it today, permeated as we are by the force that manifests itself, on the one hand, in German intellectual life—and which today must endure such trials in relation to external daily life—we look to the future and place our trust in this force, which must carry the German essence into the future, just as it has carried it in the past.

[ 135 ] Based on this, we can briefly summarize, intuitively, what was meant by these debates. Once again, in the words of Robert Hamerling, considering what is being advanced today against us—the Germans—and against our very name, and considering what the German essence must be in the development of humanity, what I wished to express today out of true, discerning feeling can be summarized in four short lines by Robert Hamerling, namely those of an Austrian German who sensed how deeply interconnected are the forces that have been forged together in Central Europe today by the same circumstances—circumstances so vast, so painful, and so full of trials and tests. He, Robert Hamerling, who sensed this, coined the beautiful words with which we wish to conclude this reflection:

“And if ever the day proves hostile
to the German name,
the German spirit will find
its path from sea to sea.”