The Rudolf Steiner Archive

16. On the Development of German Thought: A Forgotten Quest for Spiritual Science Within It

Ladies and gentlemen!

[ 1 ] As on my previous visits here in Munich, I would like to take the liberty, on one of the two days of lectures, to speak on a topic that does not strictly belong to the field of the humanities, but rather touches upon German intellectual life in general. In these fateful times, this will surely be considered particularly appropriate.

[ 2 ] And the day after tomorrow—on Sunday—the topic will once again be a reflection from the narrower field of spiritual science, as I myself have had the privilege of presenting here for years.

[ 3 ] However, it is not merely out of—I would say—immediate, present-day feelings brought on by the significant, profoundly transformative events of our time that I wish to speak on the subject of today’s topic, but because I do not, in fact, base my views on purely national sentiments, but — as I believe — from a conviction grounded in the facts that precisely what is represented here as a spiritual-scientific worldview is most intimately connected with very specific currents and aspirations of German intellectual life.

[ 4 ] Not, esteemed audience, to resort to the tone into which Germany’s opponents—the opponents of German national character—are now sinking, by not only accusing but also slandering that which German intellectual life has produced; not to resort to this tone—which, I believe, is unnecessary within German intellectual life— but rather I wish to offer this reflection because our time calls for a kind of self-reflection on what constitutes the very essence of the ever-evolving German national spirit, including with regard to the attainment of an intellectual worldview; because self-reflection on this aspect of German intellectual life must emerge as a kind of fundamental need for the soul currently immersed in this intellectual life.

[ 5 ] But when one undertakes such a consideration, one’s mind naturally turns first to the three great figures I spoke of during my last visit here. And by way of introduction—though only by way of introduction—I would like to say a few words once again about these three great German thinkers and philosophical figures, whom I had the opportunity to discuss the last time I was here, even at the risk of having to repeat some minor details that were already mentioned then.

[ 6 ] First, our spiritual gaze must turn to that figure who grew so entirely out of German intellectual life—a figure who, even in one of the most difficult periods of German history, found the words capable of inspiring the entire nation to a enthusiasm that was necessary for the course of world history: our spiritual gaze must turn to Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

[ 7 ] Fichte—I believe one must say of him: Upon closer, more thorough examination of his nature, one cannot help but notice how profoundly true it is—as he himself expressed in various ways—that the best he has to say in the realm of his worldview arose in his soul from an intimate dialogue that he repeatedly and continuously conducted in his mind with the German national spirit itself.

[ 8 ] I do not wish to present this as an external judgment, but rather as something that Fichte himself felt in his innermost being. And how, then, can this innermost path of Fichte’s striving be described? I believe it can be described as a well-founded conviction: to strengthen the innermost core of the human soul—the center of the human spirit-soul-being— to animate it so deeply that, in this elevated experience of the innermost life of the soul, there resounds that which, as the divine-spiritual, interweaves and permeates the world—that one enters into the deepest essence of being through this conviction by striving to make one’s own innermost life as strong as possible, so that what one —not in everyday life, but in the solemn moments of life—can be experienced inwardly, so that it merges with the divine-spiritual current itself, which, however, is not merely within us, but can also be found pulsating throughout the entire world, in all of nature, and in all spiritual and outwardly manifest spiritual life.

[ 9 ] With Fichte, it is as if something were revealing itself from a particular aspect of the soul—something that had taken root within him through a spiritual force that was particularly strongly developed in him, that spiritual force which might perhaps be described as follows: Of the three powers of the human soul—thinking, feeling, and willing—he perceived, above all else, the power of willing. And he himself perceived the “I” in such a way that the most essential aspect of the experience of the “I” is that a person can indeed come to say to himself: The “I” actually consists in the fact that one can will it, and can will it anew again and again; and its eternity is guaranteed by the fact that one feels within oneself the justification for willing it anew again and again; and that what one feels, in the deepest sense, as a duty to life and the world penetrates this willing; that in this duty to life and the world one can simultaneously sense something that strikes into one’s own being from divine-spiritual expanses. So that one can say: The highest thing one can experience is the duty revealed to one’s own soul in the totality of the world, which strikes into one’s own being and gives one the certainty—because one has woven oneself into what passes through the world as a duty-bearing will, as an eternally duty-bearing will—that one stands within this world as an eternal being.

[ 10 ] From such an experience—from the experience of such a relationship to the world—arose, in essence, Fichte’s entire—one cannot even say “worldview,” but rather his entire—way of thinking about, feeling, and speaking about the world.

[ 11 ] But it did not follow from his very nature that one could speak of this from a theoretical standpoint, from a theoretical perspective. It emerged from his very nature—and this was precisely what he always perceived as the German aspect of his way of thinking about the world—it emerged from his very nature in such a way that precisely what was like a general sense of the world, a worldview, was the most immediate, personal force of his being. Thus, it was the most immediate force of his being that, in essence, had already emerged when Fichte was very young, still a boy.

[ 12 ] And so please allow me to describe certain traits that characterize precisely this personal relationship to the world: There we see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the son of poor people, at the age of seven—he was already a schoolboy—; there we see him one day standing by the stream that flowed past his father’s little weaver’s cottage, and he has thrown a book into the stream. He stands there crying; his father comes over.

[ 13 ] What had actually happened? As mentioned, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was already a schoolboy at the age of seven; and since he had often been praised for his good grades, people now noticed that—ever since his father had given him this book, which he had just thrown into the stream—he was no longer as attentive or as diligent in school as he had been before; he had been reproached for this on several occasions. This book was, in fact, an account of the exploits of “Siegfried the Horned.” And when little Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who could already read, got his hands on this book, he became absorbed in these great heroic deeds; his attention to his schoolwork waned somewhat, and he was reprimanded for it.

[ 14 ] But then the deepest trait of his nature immediately revealed itself in his soul.

[ 15 ] No matter how much your inclination might want to speak, no matter how much your enthusiasm might want to be stoked by the figure of “Siegfried with the Horn”—he thought to himself—that must not be; duty is supreme. Because he does not want to compromise his duty in the slightest, he throws the book into the water—as a seven-year-old boy! Thus, what would later become the fundamental tone of his relationship to the wider world was already alive in the boy: this interweaving of the human soul with the duty-driven will, which he later came to perceive as the fundamental force of the entire universe.

[ 16 ] And two years later, the nine-year-old boy Fichte—let us consider him, for example, in the following: The neighbor from the estate—who later became Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s benefactor—had set out to hear the sermon in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s hometown one Sunday; but this neighboring landowner had arrived too late. The sermon was already over. The neighbor was a little sad; he would have liked to hear the sermon. And while they were talking about this, it occurred to them that there was a boy living there who knew how to listen to sermons so well—even though he was only nine years old—that he was able to repeat them faithfully. They went to fetch the young Johann Gottlieb Fichte; he stepped forward in his blue peasant smock, at first behaving rather awkwardly, then coming into his own: repeating the entire sermon; but not merely reciting it without inner feeling, but in such a way that one could see—and this, as mentioned, had such a profoundly significant effect that the neighboring landowner later became Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s benefactor—so that one could see: This entire boy’s soul was interwoven with every word, and with what lived within every word, and, reawakened, he was able to deliver the entire sermon as if it were his own spiritual creation!

[ 17 ] Weaving this—the surroundings, the “why,” the act of observation—into the very core of one’s own inner experience in the soul: this is the defining characteristic that Johann Gottlieb Fichte always perceived as the fundamental trait of an education rooted in the specifically German worldview. He was deeply convinced that it is only by drawing strength from this inner self—by experiencing what lies in the deepest recesses of the soul—that one can also experience what, as the divine-spiritual, permeates and interweaves the world.

[ 18 ] Something like this was evident, for example, in a fundamental trait described to us by the profound Steffens, who himself experienced it in Jena when Fichte was already a “professor.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte stepped before his audience and said: “First of all, gentlemen, imagine the wall!” — He did not merely wish to speak to his audience in a way that conveyed content to them; rather, he sought to create a living bond between his soul and theirs. They were to participate in a mental process that he allowed to unfold before them: “Think of the wall!” — Well, the people could do that. After he had let them think of the wall for a while, he said: “Now, think of the one who conceived the wall!” — That was even more perplexing; they were no longer fully engaged in the activity he demanded of them. But he immediately pointed to this grasping and comprehending within the soul of that which acts and lives in the world.

[ 19 ] That is why the entire manner in which Johann Gottlieb Fichte presented his lectures was so unique. People who heard him speak describe how his speech flowed like rolling thunder, and how individual words struck like flashes of lightning. Indeed, we are told that he came across as a person who not only inhabits the supersensible realm of ideas but also reigns directly within it. And it was his devoted listeners who coined this phrase to describe him.

[ 20 ] Such a saying has indeed been preserved among them as well. One can trace—if one has a knack for following history even in its more intimate currents—one can trace what became of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s students and how such a phrase has been preserved. People who understood him said: He does not merely want to educate good souls; he wants to educate great souls!

[ 21 ] This is meant to convey, roughly, the depth of the approach that Johann Gottlieb Fichte adopted; for when he stood before his audience, his aim was not really to say this or that, nor was it merely for the audience to take in this or that word from him; he did not prepare the exact wording at all, but rather sought to embody what he wished to convey to his audience—to live within it with a living, inner part of his soul. Then he stepped before his audience. And, as I said, his concern was not that they take in this or that word, but rather what he experienced by wanting, above all, to express the world’s will in what he said, so that the world’s will might live on in his words. His aim was for this to surge and pulse toward the souls of his listeners—to convey this Will, which, according to his view, felt so vividly alive within the very foundation of the world.

[ 22 ] That is why he was able to find those captivating words to characterize German national character—words he found in his “Addresses to the German Nation”—which no one can understand in their true essence unless they are able to grasp the profound hardships from which they sprang, as they relate to Fichte’s soul. One might say: What the German spirit had to say to the world—through Fichte’s personality, it found its full expression on the side of the will.

[ 23 ] When we consider the second figure—the figure of Schelling, who follows in Fichte’s footsteps—we again see a completely different side of the German character. With Fichte, it is as if the element of will itself were rolling through his words when he speaks. This was not how Schelling appeared to his listeners. Even when he stood before his audience in Jena as a very young professor—a young man among young men—he—Schelling—spoke captivatingly, in a way that perhaps no one before or since has ever achieved through a strictly academic discourse.

[ 24 ] Why does Schelling have this effect? While one might say of Fichte that what he communicated to the world lived in the will—with Schelling, everything springs from the mind, from that mind for which only the German language has a word, from that mind that seeks to convince through love, even as it recognizes that it wishes to immerse itself in love in the things to be attained. Thus, for Schelling, what constitutes natural existence—into which he seeks to immerse himself with love—converges in such a way that all of nature becomes for him like the outward face of his hidden spiritual life: spirit in nature. He went so far as to utter this one-sided statement: “To know nature is to create nature.” Certainly a one-sided statement, and in this one-sidedness entirely untrue; but it points us precisely to what is essential in Schelling—to this creating and weaving of the spirit that lives behind nature, and in which the human spirit seeks to grasp itself in order to know itself as one with all of nature and all of spiritual existence.

[ 25 ] Because he had such an effect, he appeared to his listeners as one who saw with clairvoyant insight, so that, while he spoke, Schelling—the spirituality of which he spoke—could flow around him and carry him away. While Fichte conveys the will, with Schelling it is as if he were speaking as a seer, directly expressing what he beheld as he spoke.

[ 26 ] One learns such things best—I would say—from direct, traditional observation. Therefore, allow me to share the impression that a truly profound mind—Schelling’s friend and first listener, Schubert—had of him; for it is indeed good to immerse oneself directly in what took place during a specific period of German intellectual development.

“What was it?”

[ 27 ] says Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert —

“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?”

[ 28 ] That wasn't all.

“In his lively words lay”

[ 29 ] however

“a compelling force that, wherever it encountered even a modicum of receptivity, none of the young souls could resist. It would be difficult for a reader of our time”

[ 30 ] In 1854, Schubert wrote down his experiences with Schelling in the 1790s

“who, unlike me—a young, enthusiastic listener—could not grasp how, whenever Schelling spoke to us, I often felt as though I were reading or hearing Dante, the seer of an otherworldly realm open only to the consecrated eye.” The powerful content contained in his speech—measured out with mathematical precision in a lapidary style—seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds it is the task of the understanding mind to loosen and from whose hand to receive the inextinguishable fire.”

[ 31 ] It must all have been enchanting. I myself knew people—I met people—who had listened to Schelling when he was already an old man [...] because he conveyed to his listeners what he expressed—like a gleam from the spiritual worlds—in such a way that — as the people who saw and knew him back then say — it was not merely that he spoke to them, but that his words, just as he intended to convey them, seemed to pour out of his eyes toward them. That was still the case in his old age; just imagine what he must have been like as a young man! — Then Schubert says:

“But neither the personality nor the inspiring power of oral communication alone could have been what, shortly after Schelling’s philosophy became publicly known through his writings, aroused such interest and excitement—both in favor of and against its direction—as no other literary phenomenon of a similar kind has been able to do before or since over a long period of time. ... When it comes to things perceptible to the senses or natural phenomena, one can immediately tell whether a teacher or writer draws upon his own observation and experience”

[ 32 ] from the spiritual world

“speaks or merely talks about what he has heard from others, or even what he has imagined based on his own self-made ideas ...”

[ 33 ] Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think we can safely say today that it would be a childish view of the world to believe that, when describing such minds, one would expect to be addressing either supporters or opponents. Supporters and opponents are irrelevant in such matters. One need not endorse a single word that Fichte or Schelling wrote or spoke, nor does one need to oppose a single word. The content is of lesser importance here. The content of worldviews is in a state of living development.

[ 34 ] In particular, the day after tomorrow we will have some discussion about its dynamic development and what these concepts are all about. The point is not to advocate here for this or that idea that Fichte or Schelling held, but rather to examine the lives of these figures—to see how they were situated within the broader context of German intellectual life.

[ 35 ] It is something of immense significance when such minds attempt to discern what nature is and what historical life is; so that—as Fichte himself was fully aware—they grasp what surrounds them in a living way, immersing themselves in things through their own understanding. And that was what these minds were striving for.

[ 36 ] But because of this—and there is really no need to speak from a narrow-minded sense of nationalism here; rather, one can speak entirely on the basis of facts; as I said—we need not resort to the tone that our enemies resort to today! This illustrates, as Fichte also emphasized, the vitality of the German worldview in contrast to—let us say, for example—the Western European, French, or British worldview.

[ 37 ] Last time, I pointed out what an enormous difference there is between this approach of Fichte’s and Schelling’s and—no matter how much one may oppose their content—[what an enormous difference there is] between this approach of Fichte’s and Schelling’s in penetrating to the depths of things, where the entire external world lives, and where knowledge itself gains life—to what Fichte calls the “dead worldview,” the worldview of the inanimate among Western European thinkers [; where the world] of the inanimate takes its beginning, let us say, within French culture at the beginning of the seventeenth century with Descartes or Cartesius. But then it develops further, and one finds it expressed in a particularly significant way for a short time—before Fichte and Schelling, as has been described, before the German people stepped forward—one finds it over there in France, this worldview of the dead, oriented solely toward the material and the mechanical; one finds it expressed, for example, in de La Mettrie.

[ 38 ] The intention here is not to oppose this worldview, as found, for example, in de La Mettrie—this “father of materialism,” of modern materialism—; the aim is merely to point out how French folk culture, in contrast to German folk culture, tends toward the lifeless and the mechanistic. We see this in Descartes, in Cartesius, already in the fact that for him not only minerals and plants, but also animals are merely moving machines. For de La Mettrie, the world ultimately becomes what he was able to set forth in his book: “Man a Machine.”

[ 39 ] Well, of course, ladies and gentlemen, it is easy to find materialistic and spiritualistic elements in every people, and so on. But I am well aware that I am not resorting to this convenient form of expression, but rather that I am highlighting precisely those characteristics that are connected to the national character, and that for German national character, Fichte and Schelling, in their aspirations—though perhaps not in their intentions, as we shall see shortly—are just as characteristic and significant as de La Mettrie—which could be proven in detail—is for French national character.

[ 40 ] Everything is explained in such a way—and rightly so, since it goes without saying—that one can see how human beings are dependent even on the material forces at work within them.

[ 41 ] De La Mettrie does indeed make some strange claims when he attempts to prove that everything that exists depends on what is ingested through food. Perhaps it is not entirely unnecessary, after all, to draw attention to a passage in de La Mettrie’s book— *Man a Machine*—and to highlight this passage from the Frenchman de La Mettrie’s book, especially in our current context. Of course, we do not need to endorse this passage in the manner in which it is cited here. We do not wish to think such terrible things about a nation that is currently at war with us, as the Frenchman de La Mettrie did back then. But it may nevertheless be interesting to quote what he says in order to demonstrate how an entire nation, by consuming its food in a certain way, acquires very specific qualities—including psychological and spiritual ones—and through this, he seeks to deduce the dependence of the soul and spirit of an entire nation on what is taken in materially through eating and drinking. So de La Mettrie says in his book *Man a Machine*:

“Raw meat makes animals wild; humans would become so if they ate the same food. Just how true this is can be seen in the fact that the English nation, which cooks meat less than we do and eats it completely raw and bloody, exhibits greater savagery—a trait produced in part by that diet, and in part, of course, by other causes that only education can suppress. This savagery gives rise in the soul to arrogance, hatred, contempt for other nations, unruliness, and other feelings that corrupt the character, just as coarse food produces a sluggish and dull mind in a people whose main characteristics are laziness and stupidity.”

[ 42 ] As I said: We have no need to endorse this harsh judgment of the English made by a Frenchman; but it may be interesting to recall this, especially in our time, when so many other things are being said and trends are moving in different directions from this perspective toward our current English allies.

[ 43 ] The third figure, esteemed audience, whom we must draw your attention to—because he embodies the third aspect of the German spirit—and of the spiritual essence in general—is Hegel.

[ 44 ] Certainly, when people talk about Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel today, the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind is: “Yes, but you really can’t expect people to study Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel!” And most people, in fact, will close a book as soon as they open it because they find it too difficult.

[ 45 ] But, distinguished guests, anyone who is familiar with the more intimate aspects of spiritual life will not entirely disagree with me when I say: A time will come when people will grasp these three spirits in their striving to such an extent that they will be able to vividly portray them in the modern era, so that the essence—which, admittedly, had to first emerge in a language that was difficult to understand—will become comprehensible to everyone. And this treasure, which lies within these three thinkers, will once again bear fruit for every German child—bear fruit—provided that people are no longer too casual or too lazy to immerse themselves in the greatest treasures of the spirit.

[ 46 ] The third, as mentioned, is Hegel. Whereas for Fichte it is the will in which he seeks that which weaves and flows through the entire world; [whereas] for Schelling it was the spirit, through which one seeks the love capable of recognizing all that is external as living—so for Hegel, the conviction is that when human beings rise to a thought that is not permeated by sensibility, when they rise humanity, to the thought free from sensibility, and allows this thought free from sensibility to grow and live within itself—that this thought, which the soul now experiences within itself, is a flow within the soul in which the divine-spiritual thoughts, out of which the entire universe itself is created, act and weave. Divine Being acts within the soul as the soul thinks free from sensibility.

[ 47 ] Even if this is incorrect in terms of content—and you can read more about it in my book *The Riddles of Philosophy*—even if it is incorrect in terms of content: there is something significant underlying it, which in turn resonates with the most intimate trait of German intellectual life: Mysticism as a striving, but not a mysticism that attempts to solve the world’s riddles in darkness and confusion, that seeks to reject all ambiguity—as is so often the case with mysticism, namely dilettantish mysticism, the confused mysticism we intend to discuss the day after tomorrow. [Hegel’s] striving is mystical, namely: to unite the soul with the very fabric of the world itself. But the goal is to attain this mystical experience not in a dark chaos of feelings or in a dark, inner, visionary chaos, but in the full clarity of the world of ideas, in the wholly spiritual clarity of the world of ideas.

[ 48 ] And this mystical union in clarity—that is one of the deepest traits of the German character. As a German myself, one almost hesitates to identify such a connection within the German character or to emphasize its significance for the German character. Therefore, let me present another characteristic of the German character to you, distinguished audience. In 1877, someone wrote the following in his “Diary”:

“Perhaps it is unique to the Germanic spirit to think independently, to search for the origin of things. The Slavs and Romance peoples are more strongly subject to 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 one imposed upon them. The German seeks to penetrate to the very essence of nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, and the Russian stop at convention.”

[ 49 ] So that no one can accuse me of characterizing things based on a one-sided nationalist sentiment, I present to you this characterization, which was written from a soul torn by pain, and which—dear [those present]—was not written by a German, but by the French-speaking Swiss Amiel, in 1877! I think it is more fitting for us to look to others, who may have even greater justification, based on their own feelings and observations, to speak about the relationship between the German spirit and the spirits of other European nations. And this same Amiel wrote in his “Diary” in Geneva in 1875:

“The thirst for truth is not a French passion. Appearance matters more than substance, the shell more than the core, form more than content, the glittering more than the fruitful, public opinion more than conscience.”

[ 50 ] That is how a French-speaking Swiss person would write it; as I said, as a German, I wouldn't say it that way off the top of my head.

“Appearance matters more than substance, the shell more than the core, form more than content, 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 turns them into 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 back to an exaggerated sociability, which stifles within the soul the courage to resist, the capacity for independent judgment, personal conviction, and the cult of the ideal.”

[ 51 ] So says the Frenchman Amiel about what struck him—though he is a Frenchman who became acquainted with German intellectual life. Indeed, Amiel himself said as early as 1862:

“I feel a kinship with Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Leibniz—who are, after all, quite different from one another—while the French philosophers, eloquent orators, or mathematicians, despite their great qualities, leave me cold, because they do not embody the sum total of general life, do not master the whole of reality, and either stifle me or make me distrustful. What the French lack is an immediate understanding of living unity, a sense of the sacred, a feeling for the mysteries of being; what they excel at is the establishment of specialized sciences, the art of writing a book, it is style, courtesy, grace, a spirit of order, didactic art, discipline, elegance, truth in the particular, staging, zeal for conversion, and strength in practical conclusions. But for the journey through Inferno and Paradise, one needs other guides; they are rooted in the earth, in the realm of the finite, the changing, the historical, the limited. Mechanism and dualism are the pinnacles of their flight of thought. To break out of this circle, they must exert force upon themselves.”

[ 52 ] One could proceed in the same way with other Western European cultures. But it is more important to take a closer look at these three thinkers, who created a German worldview that serves as the backdrop to what German intellectual life—in Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Herder, and others of their ilk—has produced as a flowering of humanity’s spiritual experience, comparable only to the flowering that existed in ancient Greece. But when one considers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in particular—when one views them in this context—one is overcome by a special feeling; one might think that something entirely different, something higher than what is expressed in each individual personality, still speaks through all three of them. One conveys more than a mere image by expressing this feeling: how the German national spirit expresses itself through these three personalities. And this is perhaps the solution to a riddle that must present itself to us when we consider the German intellectual life associated with these three personalities—a life that has indeed largely faded away and been forgotten—to which I now wish to draw attention in a few characteristic strokes.

[ 53 ] Here we witness something quite special. They emerge from a more or less faded, forgotten current of German intellectual life that stretched throughout the nineteenth century and continues to the present day—though little attention has been paid to this faded current until now— there emerge minds who, in terms of their intellectual disposition, in terms of the scope of their knowledge and abilities, and in terms of the scope of their genius, stand far below the leading figures Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; yet, curiously enough, when one considers what must be strived for today through spiritual science, they have, curiously enough, created something greater—and something more in line with spiritual science—than the great inspirers: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

[ 54 ] The lesser minds that come after achieve greater things than the great minds that preceded them. It is a striking phenomenon. It need not be all that surprising, for it goes without saying: the one who comes after has it easier; as a lesser mind, he may, under certain circumstances, achieve greater things than the one who preceded him. In the extreme, this can be expressed in the fact that any schoolboy can understand and grasp the Pythagorean theorem—yet Pythagoras himself was necessary for its initial discovery.

[ 55 ] Thus, the great ones had to come; they are already the wisest, pointing the way into the spiritual world. But that which emerged from the German national spirit through them lives on. Even if it is still spiritually constrained in many ways and intellectually encircled—one might even speak of spiritual encirclement—it nonetheless forms the vanished, the faded tone in the worldview of which I would now like to speak.

[ 56 ] There, dear audience, we immediately find the son of the great Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Immanuel Hermann Fichte, who was influenced by his father. But we find that, in essence, he is able to penetrate deeper into spiritual knowledge than his father, even though he is a much lesser spirit than his father. Immanuel Hermann Fichte already speaks of the fact that human beings, on the one hand, [have] this physical world of theirs. He, Hermann Immanuel Fichte, refers to as “physical” the substances and forces that also constitute the outer physical world of the Earth. Through this physical world, human beings are connected to the physical substances and forces of the Earth; they are connected to what initially appears within them as something of the past. But behind this physical body, for Hermann Immanuel Fichte, lies what he calls the etheric body; and just as the physical body contains within itself substances and forces, so the etheric body contains substances and forces of a supersensible nature that connect this inner human being—this supersensible spiritual human being—to the great world of the spirit and place him within it.

[ 57 ] Thus, Immanuel Hermann Fichte sees behind the other human being the etheric human being, which for him is a reality, not merely an image. And everything that spiritual science has to say—in the sense often alluded to in these lectures—about the etheric body and these supersensory forces of human nature can be found very beautifully expressed in the works of Immanuel Hermann Fichte.

[ 58 ] But one might say: Even with regard to the path that has often been described here, an infinite number of ideas already exist in embryonic form in another thinker who is destined to carry on the legacy of the great era of German Idealism in terms of worldview: there we see, for example, Troxler. Who knows Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler today? Who reads Troxler? Who today—even among those who write the history of philosophy—cares about Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler any more than to jot down five or six lines that say nothing about Troxler! Who is Troxler?

[ 59 ] Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler is indeed a spirit who—even if he has not yet fully mastered spiritual science, for which the time has only now come—is nonetheless a personality who is on the path toward this spiritual scientific research. There we see how Troxler coins remarkable phrases that reveal that something of the vitality of spiritual science itself lives within his soul. Troxler coins remarkable phrases such as “supersensible spirit” and “superspiritual sense.”

[ 60 ] “Supersensible spirit”—this is still relatively easy to understand; well, “supersensible spirit” is precisely what Goethe calls “contemplative power of judgment.” For—Goethe stands firmly on the same ground in his actual worldview— for “supersensible spirit” is precisely that power of the human soul which unfolds in such a way that, without the aid of the body, without the external senses, and without the sense bound to the brain, the human being [beholds] the spiritual world as directly as spirit itself— “supersensible spirit.”

[ 61 ] But “super-spiritual sense”? By speaking of the “super-spiritual sense,” Troxler shows that he truly already has the essence of spiritual science before his eyes. I have also mentioned on several occasions how there are indeed people—idealistic philosophers—who say: Yes, certainly, that’s quite clear: The physical world is not the only one; spirit exists behind the physical world. Spirit, spirit, and spirit again and again—they say. And out of that emerges that pantheism, that worldview which, you see, spreads such a general spiritual sauce—it doesn’t specialize, it’s nothing; perhaps today one would have to say “slop” instead of “sauce”—, [that results in that worldview which] is thought to spread such a general slop over everything that appears before people as physical objects and physical facts, isn’t it?

[ 62 ] But that was not the case with Troxler! Troxler would have said: Those who speak only in a pantheistic way of spirit, spirit, and yet more spirit—they strike me as if they were saying: Why should we even speak of tulips or lilies, or snowdrops, for example? Nature, nature is everything! And why should we even talk about individual experiments in the laboratory? Nature, nature is everything. Those who speak of naturalism in this way should just as well /gap in the transcript]

[ 63 ] But what matters is not merely to talk in general terms about the spiritual, but to be able to point out that a spiritual world surrounds us, one that consists of individual beings and individual facts just as much as the physical-sensory world does.

[ 64 ] Therefore, because he knows this, Troxler speaks of the “super-spiritual sense”—which is, of course, a metaphor, but one that testifies to the fact that one can truly look into the spiritual world, is capable of looking into it, and must contemplate and observe it in its details—not merely as a “general haze of the spirit.”

[ 65 ] And in another way, Troxler—in his 1835 “Lectures on Philosophy,” he speaks very beautifully about all these things—and in another way, Troxler speaks of a kind of spiritual-scientific path that he has already embarked upon. There he says: The most beautiful powers of the soul that govern human beings here—insofar as they live in their physical bodies—and that human beings can make their own, insofar as the soul expresses itself through the physical body, these powers are those of faith, love, and hope. But now—Troxler argues—faith, love, and hope, as great and significant as they are for the life the soul spends in the physical body, are—this faith, this love, this hope—the outer shell for the soul’s spiritual powers that lie behind them and that the soul will experience once it has cast off the body and passed through the gate of death.

[ 66 ] As the soul lives within the body, it first and foremost manifests—through the body’s organs, and of course through the body’s finer organs—the power of faith. [But, says Troxler, this power could be experienced not merely as the power of faith, but—as Troxler believes—as spiritual hearing, as a spiritual sense of hearing, in such a way that the power of faith becomes the outer, physical shell for the soul’s spiritual hearing; this organ could be experienced as existing independently of the body—a wonderful, grand idea.]

[ 67 ] And love—this blossom of outer, physical earthly life, this highest unfolding of outer, physical earthly life—insofar as the soul lives in the physical body during its earthly existence: For Troxler, this love—this power of love, one might say—is, in turn, the outer shell for something the soul possesses within, something that has enveloped itself in this physical form. And what Troxler now refers to as spiritual groping, spiritual feeling—just as we perceive physical things with our physical senses today—lies behind the power of love. When the soul is able to free itself from the body or passes through the gate of death, then its spiritual organs unfold. And just as it hears, through what lies behind the power of faith, the facts that resound throughout the spiritual world, so too can it perceive spiritual facts and beings through its [“tactile”] spiritual organs, which the soul extends from within itself. Whereas, when it lives in the physical body, the spiritual powers of feeling and perception manifest themselves as love.

[ 68 ] And in a similar way, behind the power of hope—the power of an expectant confidence in something—lies, for Troxler, what he calls “spiritual vision.”

[ 69 ] Thus Troxler knows that within the physical body of a human being dwells a soul endowed with spiritual hearing, spiritual touch, and spiritual sight; a soul that, equipped with these three powers, passes through the gate of death, but which is also capable of experiencing—when it frees itself from its bond to the body—that which spiritually envelops and surrounds us.

[ 70 ] And, for example, Troxler expresses his thoughts—and I would like to share them with you right away in his own words—while also pointing out that he has certain comrades who share this view of the world. He refers to this or that thinker. I would like to read one of these passages to you verbatim. 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 they regarded as the inner, higher human being. [Most of the early 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 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 vein; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about Bonn’s “little underskirt” and Platner’s “soul corset”—which are supposed to be tucked inside the coarser physical overcoat 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 breaking free with ethereal wings?] “The inner man,” he even says in another passage, “this ‘God veiled in nature,’ is not himself made of stone, like these.” “In the stony limbs”—of man—“his living ones grow and mature according to a way of life unknown to us. We could”

[ 71 ] Troxler goes on to say

“I could cite countless other similar ways of thinking and expressing thought, which are ultimately nothing more than different perspectives and conceptions in which [the one evangelical-apostolic idea is revealed that 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, unique doctrine of the individuality and immortality of man.’

[ 72 ] And now a strange—I would say—profound thought occurs to Troxler. He thinks something like the following. This becomes quite clear when one allows his various writings to sink in, especially his lectures on these subjects, which he had already written and delivered as early as 1835. The following thought arises in Troxler’s mind: There is an anthropology, a knowledge of the human being, he says. How does it arise—this knowledge of the human being? The human being comes to know it by observing what can be perceived about the human being through the senses and through the intellect, which is bound to the brain—that is how anthropology arises. But within this human being, who perceives with the senses and observes through the intellect—within this human being lives the higher human being. And we have seen how clearly Troxler knows how to speak about this higher human being. This higher human being, with his “super-spiritual sense” and his “super-sensory spirit,” is now also able to perceive what is super-spiritual and super-sensory in another human being. Then, just as anthropology arises on a lower plane, a higher science arises: the science of the spiritual human being—anthroposophy. And Troxler expresses his views on this as follows:

“While it is indeed most gratifying that the latest philosophy—which [we have long recognized as the one that underlies all living religion and] must reveal itself in every form of anthroposophy, that is, in poetry as well as in history], it must nevertheless be recognized 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.”

[ 73 ] Troxler speaks of the establishment of “anthroposophy” as opposed to “anthropology”!

[ 74 ] And one therefore has the right to speak of the seeds of that which must now be incorporated from the cosmos into the spiritual development of humanity as spiritual science. One has the right to speak of it in such a way that it exists as a seed within these personalities. These seeds, however, esteemed audience, are firmly anchored in German spiritual life, entirely by its very nature. I can only hint at how firmly anchored these things are in German spiritual life. And how German spiritual life, through its innermost unfolding of being, cannot help but bring such things forth. Everywhere, when we look back, we find how firmly rooted in this German spiritual life is that which we must hope can be incorporated into the spiritual science of humanity’s future development.

[ 75 ] Such a tone has often been forgotten; it has faded away. But, ladies and gentlemen, it still exists nonetheless! And it has flourished in a wide variety of fields. Not only does it live, so to speak, in the spiritual realms, but wherever there was spiritual striving, there were also endeavors such as these. And the time must come when people will once again gain an understanding of what the deepest essence of German striving is, and that this must be brought back to the fore.

[ 76 ] Much has obscured precisely this innermost essence of the German spirit! This becomes clear when one attempts to seek out the German spirit in very specific, concrete areas. For thirty-three years, ladies and gentlemen—please forgive me for adding a personal note here— for thirty-three years I have been striving to show the significance of Goethe’s Theory of Colors for a true understanding of nature that penetrates to the essence of things, and the significance of Goethe’s dispute with Newton, who is rooted in British folklore!

[ 77 ] But—as I said—it is not merely external political life that has been encircled; rather, deeply, deeply influenced by a foreign scientific mindset that can only be described as brutal, things have reached the point where it is still considered a laughingstock today for a physicist to speak of the validity of Goethe’s theory of colors! But once a deeper understanding is gained in this field, the time will come when the chapter “Goethe Was Right Against Newton” will be revived precisely on the basis of a spirituality rooted in the most authentically German essence; and it will be revived in a completely different way than one might even dare to imagine today.

[ 78 ] One must then be able to accept that, in full awareness of what must eventually come to pass—what must eventually be recognized—one will be regarded as a fool if one advocates it in advance. But, as I said, the aspiration just described lives not only in the intellectual spheres but also, in many ways, in the German character. I could cite hundreds and hundreds of examples to support this; let me cite one to represent many, since we do not have time to cite many. Let me cite one to represent many: I would like to point to a small booklet published in 1856 by a simple pastor named Rocholl in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck—a small booklet. It was published in 1856 and is titled “Contributions to the History of a German Theosophy.” Today, one might find much of what is written in this little book fanciful; one might even be quite right in many respects in calling the little book fanciful. But this little book, published in 1856, reveals Pastor Rocholl immersed in an alert, genuine spiritual quest that seeks, at the very least, to penetrate the phenomena of the world with a “super-spiritual sense” and a “super-sensory spirit.” And through broad, spiritual perspectives, it attempts to characterize how natural life, spiritual life, and sensory life are one and the same; how divine-spiritual forces weave and work; and how human beings have the potential to rise up to them.

[ 79 ] The height of education, the depth of knowledge—these are the qualities that come to light in such phenomena—which, as I said, can easily be ridiculed. But we encounter this in other fields as well, in other personalities. Above all, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to draw your attention to a mind who, alas, alas, has been all too forgotten: Christian Karl Planck.

[ 80 ] After Schwaben-Vischer—the V-Vischer—had drawn attention to him in an essay, I tried again in more recent times, as early as the first edition of my *Worldviews and Philosophies of Life in the Nineteenth Century*, to draw attention once more to this quintessentially German philosophical figure, Christian Karl Planck. But what good does that do anyone today? People generally have other things to do than to consider what is connected with the German essence—or, indeed, with the most quintessentially German essence.

[ 81 ] I can only briefly describe here what Planck’s quintessentially German nature was. And in his case, what he portrayed was most certainly grasped from within his German nature. We will see shortly just how consciously he understood the foundation of his worldview. I would like to illustrate this with an example.

[ 82 ] When people today view the Earth as natural scientists, they see it—let’s say—much as a geologist would. — The Earth is viewed in terms of how it is built up from mineral forces, as has been understood from geology. For Planck, such a view of the Earth would not have been conceivable without considering broader philosophical questions. For him, that would have been like looking at a tree and acknowledging only the wood and the bark, but not the leaves, the flowers, and the fruits! It is clear to him that the leaves, flowers, and fruits are connected to what constitutes the essence of the tree, and that anyone who were to consider only the wood, the bark, and the roots would not be observing the tree in its entirety. To Karl Christian Planck, this appeared to be a view of the Earth that is held solely in the spirit of geology.

[ 83 ] For Planck, the complete view of the Earth is not only an animated being but also a spiritual-soul being. And human beings, as they walk the Earth as physical beings, belong to the Earth, to the essence of the Earth—which one must seek if one wishes to come to know the Earth—just as one must view the essence of the fruits, blossoms, and leaves together with the essence of the tree if one wishes to understand the tree in its essence; a worldview—I would say—that is truly in keeping with the spirit and truly interwoven with life.

[ 84 ] Christian Karl Planck wrote many books in an attempt to gain recognition; he did not succeed! In 1864, for example, he wrote a book, his *Grundlinien einer Wissenschaft der Natur* (Fundamentals of a Science of Nature). And I would like to read a passage from this book to demonstrate just how much Christian Karl Planck belongs to that forgotten, faded tone of German intellectual life—that development of the German spirit which was consciously recognized by some of the figures who influenced him, just as creative work springs from the primal force of German folk culture. In 1864, Planck wrote:

“The power of deep-rooted prejudices, as seen from the current perspective”

[ 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 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.”

[ 86 ] People who have different ways of thinking initially regard it as sheer folly—but then it becomes a matter of course. This was also the case with the Copernican worldview; this was the case with everything that is part of the development of humanity’s worldview. And Planck’s words demonstrate how he consciously arrived at his worldview, in keeping with the German spirit. And he goes on to say:

“What our medieval poetry had already foreshadowed in a profound, unconscious intuition will finally be fulfilled in our nation as the times come of age. The impractical introspection of the German spirit, plagued by harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his *Par sifal*)”

[ 87 ] Written in 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—the dominion over which its hero triumphs—finds, conversely, its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring understanding of nature and the spirit itself.”

[ 88 ] Karl Christian Planck wrote this in 1864; he died in 1880. In his final years, he had written his *Testament eines Deutschen* (*A German’s Testament*), in which he summarized all the individual aspects of his worldview. In 1912, the second edition of this “Testament” was published; people did not pay it much attention or give it much thought. After all, they were preoccupied with other works that had been published by the same publisher at the time! For example, they had to grapple with a worldview that truly did not stem in any way from the German spirit or even bear any relation to it! You can read more details in my *The Riddles of Philosophy*. The passage in question, however, was not written under the influence of the war; rather, it had long been written before the war. People back then, in 1912, were too preoccupied with Henri Bergson—yes, he is still called Bergson today—he is still called Henri Bergson—to concern themselves with this Henri Bergson, who, as I already mentioned last time, tells his Parisians all sorts of slanderous nonsense from a prominent position in intellectual life! Next, he will do the same in Sweden.

[ 89 ] If we consider Bergson: Let us highlight just one aspect of his philosophy—one that does, however, resonate with something we can truly recognize today; namely the aspect where he says—though I could, of course, highlight many other things as well—that beautiful sentence which has been so widely admired throughout Europe: that one can only understand the spiritual if one grasps it in its duration, and specifically the statement regarding the nature of the soul: “Duration endures.” — I have had to read an infinite amount about this infinitely witty sentence by Henri Bergson: “Duration endures.” I have never been able to see it any differently than if one were to say “Wood is wood” or “Money is money.” But let us set that aside.

[ 90 ] One could only come to terms with a worldview that is, after all, fruitful, not by proceeding in an abstract manner—as do some who refrain from actually starting with the most imperfect beings and working their way up to the most perfect, believing they have arrived at a perfect derivation—but rather by starting with the most perfect, with human beings, and placing human beings at the origin, and then consider the other kingdoms—animals, plants, minerals—and view them as if they had arisen like byproducts from the overall flow.

[ 91 ] Certainly, a good idea. But Henri Bergson presents it in a somewhat simplistic manner. And what is essential is this: Long before Bergson articulated it—as I point out in the second volume of my *Riddles of Philosophy*—this idea had already been expressed—as early as 1882—by the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, most recently in his book *Spirit and Matter*, but also in earlier works! There we find this idea forcefully articulated from the very foundation that I have just characterized as the very foundation of the German spirit.

[ 92 ] One can now assume two things: Bergson, who later expressed this idea—and who may not have known Heinrich Preuss—which is just as unforgivable for a philosopher as if he had known him and failed to mention that he derived this idea from that source—one might well believe the latter, now that it has come to light that entire pages of Bergson’s books were copied from Schelling or Schopenhauer! However—it’s a defining trait of the times, isn’t it, to take a stand against German culture, which seems “mechanistic” to him, and which he says has fallen from its great heights and now produces nothing but mechanistic works.

[ 93 ] I’ve said it before: He must have expected that when the French were firing shotguns and cannons, the Germans would come running and quote Novalis and Goethe! Surely he couldn’t have assumed that, could he? But he speaks of “mechanistic culture.” I’d like to know: Is that the antithesis of the “mechanical”—when one copies entire pages from German philosophers and then slanders them afterward!

[ 94 ] Yet we do learn quite a bit in this area, and one really has to come to terms with these things. But it is precisely through this process that one can come to terms with them, dear friends, by striving—as people living in Central Europe today—to delve deeply into that which, from a certain perspective, is capable of unfolding the Central European and, above all, the German essence: the force that must be present today in an outward form in the physical world so that, in our fateful time, the German spirit may hold its ground against all the enemies closing in. This very same force lives on—albeit expressed in a different way—in the German spiritual essence. The two are intimately connected. They cannot be completely separated. History will surely have to address this in times to come, when one will assess precisely the present, fateful situation of the Central European German people within this fateful era.

[ 95 ] One need only consider a few figures, ladies and gentlemen—figures, however, that will speak to the most distant ages, figures that must come to mind when we ask the following questions: What, in fact, stands in contrast to what is unfolding in Central Europe with the spiritual content just described? Not even counting smaller nations: 741 million people surround the 150 million people in Central Europe! And do these 741 million people, who stand opposite the 150 million, have any reason to envy the ground on which these 150 million stand?

[ 96 ] One need only recall that this population, which surrounds Central Europe, occupies 69 million square kilometers of the Earth’s surface—compared to the 5 to 6 million square kilometers occupied by the population of Central Europe! 69 million square kilometers compared to 6 million square kilometers in Central Europe! 9.5 percent of the Earth’s population stands against 47 percent of the Earth’s population! In short: Half the world is arrayed against Central Europe. This will one day be recorded in simple numbers in the annals of history!

[ 97 ] And how does this surrounding population—which does not even rely on direct combat, but rather on starvation—how does this surrounding population view, particularly through its intellectual representatives, this population, this Central European culture, of which it is said—to put it as mildly as possible—: “The spirit—this spirit that surrounds us—is fighting against the raw matter at the center!”

[ 98 ] And we find this perspective, albeit in a somewhat modified form, when we look eastward. There we see how, throughout the nineteenth century—one might say emerging from the simple Russian people, who are predisposed to something quite different— — you can read the details in my little book *Thoughts During the War*, which will soon be available again; it is currently out of print — there we find how, from among this Russian people, a Russian intelligentsia developed—though one could also trace the development in other areas—which rose to very, very peculiar views. One would have to repeat much of what is written in my little book *Thoughts During the War*—and one would have to add much more to it if one were to even begin to characterize that trait that runs through Russian intellectual life, the intellectual life of the intelligentsia, which draws on the belief that Central Europe in particular, but also Western Europe, essentially possesses a culture that has grown old and senile, and that this must be replaced by the culture of the East—that this culture of the East is young and fresh and must be brought into Europe, because everything within Europe has become senile.

[ 99 ] There, for example—just to mention a few things; I could, of course, talk about this subject for hours on end—there, for example, we find that as early as 1827, Kireyevsky set a tone that one then encounters again and again. However, various measures have been taken to ensure that the good Germans, in particular, do not take notice of this tone; sometimes strange methods have been sought to prevent the Germans from taking notice of this tone. One of these methods is this: Based on the lectures I have given in various places on Tolstoy, no one will accuse me of not regarding Tolstoy as a mind of the very highest order; but it is precisely in minds of the very highest order—which one need not combat as such—that one can find the characteristic peculiarities that develop within them out of their folk traditions. Now, even in Tolstoy’s works of fiction, one finds this very tone—this air of lifelessness and senility characteristic of Central and Western European intellectual life. But, you will say: We have read Tolstoy’s works; we cannot possibly recall having found that in them!

[ 100 ] There is, in fact, something peculiar about this. Until Raphael Löwenfeld published his complete edition—which is faithful—of Tolstoy’s works in the late 1890s, all earlier translations had omitted those passages in the translated works that were critical of German culture! All the works translated before Löwenfeld’s complete edition—and who actually had Löwenfeld’s complete edition in hand?—all of Tolstoy’s works previously translated by others were presented to the German people in this manner!

[ 101 ] In 1829, Kireyevsky said:

“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.”

[ 102 ] You can see what the underlying motive is here—to make Europe Russian and then magnanimously assign to the individual whatever one wishes to assign to him. And in all seriousness: This tone pervades the entire Russian intellectual life. And in a curious way, it does indeed appear in various places in more recent times. For example, in [Mikhailovsky] there is a Russian thinker who takes this—as he sees it—strangely senile, crippled, and brutalized intellectual product of Central Europe, Goethe’s *Faust*, and says: What, exactly, is this Goethean *Faust* as a personality? Well, just as people in Central Europe strive for metaphysics, so does Faust strive metaphysically. — This Mikhailovsky certainly has a way with words: a metaphysician, he claims, is simply a person who has gone mad from eating too much fat! I don’t know how many metaphysicians one has actually encountered with precisely this characteristic?! But he regards Goethe’s Faust as just such a metaphysician, one who has become alienated from all human life.

[ 103 ] But let us turn to the end of the nineteenth century; there we find a figure like Sergius Yushakov; he wrote a book in 1885; it reflects much of what is at the heart of this Russian intellectual life: He despises Western Europe as something senile! Yushakov says: Let us look over to Asia; there we find the fruits of European culture, which must be eradicated by Russia and replaced by something else. Let us look across to Asia; there we find these Western and Central European fruits of culture. There we find these Asian peoples, and this reminds Yushakov of an Asian legend that truly expresses what lies at the heart of the development of the Asian peoples. He says: These Asian peoples have themselves expressed their destiny by speaking of Ormuzd and Ahriman. There are the Iranian peoples, which include the Persians and the Hindus; they have had to struggle against the Turanian peoples, who are under the leadership of Ahriman. And as Ormuzd’s people, the Iranians—including the Persians and Hindus—have secured what Ahriman, at the head of the Turanians, sought to wrest from them—because he wanted to force them into hardship and misery—what they have attained materially and spiritually through their culture, they have attained through the goodness of the good spirit Ormuzd against the evil Ahriman.

[ 104 ] But then, according to Yushakov, the evil Europeans came, and instead of helping the Asians to continue their Ormuzd culture, they came to take away from them what they had received under Ormuzd and to subject them to all the bondage and dangers of the Ahriman culture. That is why Russia must stand up against this unrested, unloving Western European culture. That is why Russia must turn, says Yushakov, toward Asia and unite with the Asian peoples languishing under Ahriman, in order to save them from the parasitism of Western European culture.

[ 105 ] Two powers, says Yushakov, will unite—two powers that embody the greatest, most significant, and strongest cultural forces of the future. It will be two powers that will look out from Russia toward Asia—I am not saying this; Yushakov says it; so if it sounds strange, read Yushakov!—these two powers are: the simple Russian peasantry will unite with the greatest bearer, with the noblest bearer of spirituality, with the Cossacks! Peasants and Cossacks will rescue the Asian population and the ancient Asian culture from the clutches of the Western Europeans. The world will one day owe this to Russia and its mission, which is composed of the deeds of the peasants and the noble Cossacks.

[ 106 ] The book written by Sergius Yushakov in 1885 is titled: “The”—yes, it is titled “The Anglo-Russian Conflict.” And he characterizes the Asian peoples in terms of what they have suffered at the hands of Western Europeans. For example, he says: These Asian peoples are viewed by Western Europeans—he couldn’t very well single out the Germans; so he didn’t single out the Germans—these Asian peoples are viewed by Western Europeans, he says, as if they were there solely to,

“to dress in English fabrics, to fight one another with English weapons, to work with English tools, to eat from English vessels, and to play with English tinsel.”

[ 107 ] And then Yushakov goes on to summarize what he sees as a grand, pan-Asian ideal; in summary, he says:

“England exploits millions of Hindus, yet its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I wish nothing of the sort for my homeland—I can only be glad that it is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as splendid as it is sad.”

[ 108 ] “I would not wish anything like that upon my homeland,” said Yushakov, a leading Russian figure, in 1885—speaking about England! One will probably have to look in this direction for that strange consequence of world history—the forging of the alliance between Russia and England! For at first, little attention was paid to the movement, the mission toward Asia, which was supposed to have come about under the influence of the peasants and Cossacks. For now, it suffices to note that Russia has allied itself with England and France—the latter of which have, in effect, betrayed European culture! It has allied itself, well, to eradicate that outdated, senile Europeanism root and branch—at least, that is what was said.

[ 109 ] Ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed necessary—as I said, without succumbing to the tone that is being set all around us—and anyone who is even slightly familiar with that tone knows that the tone being set today is not the same as that adopted by the English, the French, or the Russians—without succumbing to that tone being struck all around us today—and, by sticking strictly to the facts, draw attention to what lies within German intellectual life for the sake of self-reflection. After all, it is indeed [the case that what lived in minds such as Troxler, Planck, Preuss, and so on—and in the others—what was a seed will also blossom and bear fruit]!

[ 110 ] However, dear audience, this tone of German intellectual life—which still resonates today—must bring one thing to mind: Namely, an understanding of how intellectual observers of the world are not the impractical types that very clever people—and especially very practical people—so often portray them to be. For that is, after all, isn’t it, the general sentiment: Well, people like Planck, Troxler, or Preuss, and so on, may have quite nice ideas—but they have absolutely no grasp of practical life. That’s where the practical people come in—those practical people who, in their own opinion, have absorbed practical insight into practical life as easily as eating with a spoon. For the others—they are those impractical idealists!

[ 111 ] Well, yes, but I could truly cite hundreds and hundreds of examples to refute this statement. Take Karl Christian Planck—one of the most German of Germans—Karl Christian Planck himself: he died in 1880, filled with bitterness. And the narrow-minded will certainly say: In the last things he wrote, there is sometimes a hint of megalomania—after time itself had driven him to a certain nervousness, because he could not at all get through to his contemporaries with what filled his heart. The narrow-minded will even say: He became megalomaniacal. But: he died in 1880, and his *Testament of a German* was already in print by 1881. It contained words that I now wish to read to you. So they had already been written by 1880. Planck—about whom quite certainly very practical diplomats, politicians, and those who know everything about practical life will speak poorly—Christian Karl Planck spoke of the current war, of this war in which we now find ourselves. He spoke the following words—they had already been written in 1880, these words of the “impractical idealist,” who was, however, a very practical thinker, and whom one should probably have placed in a practical position, precisely because that force which weaves through intellectual life also knows how to judge practical life correctly. This “impractical” Planck wrote the following words in 1880 about the present war, which he knew was 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 was not possible to give it a free hand in everything, but it was necessary to set a specific goal. And should battle eventually break out, even though we must fight it for the good of Europe, Europe will not stand by our side; rather, just as in the East, we will have to defend ourselves simultaneously in the West and in the South; on all sides, hostile national jealousy will rise up against the new empire placed in their midst.”

[ 112 ] I ask you, how many diplomats—you can point them out one by one—believed much later, indeed quite a long time later, that Italy might still be dissuaded from participating in the war. I just want to point out this one thing. — But those are the “practical” people; they’ve had a hand in the business from the very beginning. Yet the impractical Christian Karl Planck, in 1880, characterized what would happen in 1914, 1915, and so on, in such a way that what he said back then reappeared exactly as it was in the actual, real facts!

[ 113 ] Oh, one should listen to what such a man of the spirit—creating from the very depths of the German essence—would be capable of creating once this German essence stands fully and consciously on its own two feet—figuratively speaking.

[ 114 ] But for this to happen, the current moment—which is of great importance in world history—must provide the sign. For this, too, will one day reveal the German essence to the world: that it is from this German essence that one must understand what it means that, in so many parts of the world, power—the power of the incompetent, which suppresses so many justified aspirations—is in fact the ruling force! It is precisely in this area that the German spirit will have to exert a healing influence. One may well—without wishing to flatter nationalism in any way—emphasize this in the present, fateful times based on the facts themselves.

[ 115 ] In conclusion, let us point out, esteemed audience, how those who were immersed in this German spirit—who know how to grasp it with their whole soul and their whole heart—how they have always experienced what has now come to pass. Since I have spent nearly thirty years of my life in Austria and, precisely at the end of those thirty years, was caught up in the struggles that German identity was then forced to wage there—[since, during those final years,] I stood right in the midst of these difficulties of the German spirit— I may point out how naturally this lived in a spirit such as Robert Hamerling’s—one of Austria’s most German spirits, one of the finest spirits in all of Central Europe—and how beautifully he expressed what lived within him: “Austria is my fatherland; Germany is my motherland!” In these words lies the living sense of that spiritual essence which, out of the necessities of this Central Europe—Germany and Austria—has forged them together in these difficult times. But minds such as Robert Hamerling’s knew not only how to grasp such a matter in its depth, in its very depths, but also how to experience it, esteemed audience. This becomes particularly evident when one looks at Robert Hamerling—not, of course, in the poem that has been circulated, and which so many have fallen for—even quite intelligent people have fallen for it; it is, of course, a forgery, that prophetic poem that has now been so widely published in the newspapers—so, of course, I am not referring to something like that! Anyone who knows Robert Hamerling even a little bit can tell right from the first lines that it’s a forgery. But with Robert Hamerling, there are plenty of clues to see how this “Central Europe” lived within him! In 1862, he wrote his “Germanenzug.” Let’s single out the “Germanenzug” from among his many works. In 1862, he wrote in his “Germanenzug” about how the ancestors of the Germans migrated from Asia among the Germanic peoples—this is described to us in a wonderful atmosphere, how they are encamped there—it is evening—how they are encamped there, still over in Asia; it is a beautiful evening scene: the setting sun, the rising moon, the migrating Teutonic people are asleep. Only one is awake: the blond Teuton. And above him appears the genius of the future Germans and speaks to him. And that which must truly be cited as a fundamental trait of the German quest for knowledge—the genius speaks to him, to the blond Teuton, of this German future—Robert Hamerling has the genius of Germanhood express to the blond Teuton. I would like to say: This fundamental German trait already emerges so beautifully in the “Philosophus teutonicus,” in Jakob Böhme, where Jakob Böhme regards all knowledge in such a way that this knowledge, insofar as it arises from the German spirit as knowledge, is at the same time a kind of worship. There Jakob Böhme says so beautifully:

“If You Feel the Depth”

[ 116 ] he is referring to the depth of the blue sky

“When you look at the heavens, the stars, and the earth, you see your God, and you live in Him, and you are Him as well. And that same God reigns through you and also reigns over you.” “You are created from this God and live within Him. All your knowledge also resides in this God, and when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

[ 117 ] This sentiment was also alive in Robert Hamerling when he had the Genius of the German Spirit speak to the blond Teut at that time:

“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 blue of the heavens
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?”

[ 118 ] This mission of the German spirit—it was already before Robert Hamerling at the very time he was writing his *Germanenzug*.

[ 119 ] To truly grasp the full, all-encompassing significance of this German essence in the context of world history—one can indeed look toward Asia in a different way than Yushakov did: There one sees these Asian peoples, how they once, in primeval times, aspired upward toward the spiritual worlds. They drew it from India; they did so by immersing and subduing everything that constitutes the human “I”—the very center of the human being—into a kind of dream life. And by subduing the “I,” they allowed something to arise within themselves, as if in a dream life, which introduced them to the spiritual realm that interweaves and permeates the entire world. This world can no longer and must no longer rise again as it has remained, as a witness to what has survived from ancient times over in Asia; for after the greatest impulse that earthly humanity could experience—the Christ impulse—had burst into the development of earthly humanity, something other than this former ascent into the spiritual world had to take its place.

[ 120 ] And this Other—with the same inwardness, that deep inwardness with which the spirit was once to be experienced in the ancient Orient—with that same inwardness it is to be experienced again through this Other; but this Other is to develop in exactly the opposite way: The “I” is not to be weakened; it is to be strengthened, it is to be empowered—precisely by rising up, by living itself out so fully—this is what Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel desire, what the other minds rooted in the very depths of German spiritual life seek to ascend into the spiritual world: And so this German essence is to be precisely that which the East once provided in terms of profound inner life in pre-Christian times; in a new way, the German essence is to provide what must be provided in the post-Christian era.

[ 121 ] This was already evident before Robert Hamerling, when he had the German spirit speak through the blond Teut, the leader of the Germanic peoples, in his *Germanenzug*. Here Robert Hamerling points out how, indeed, all knowledge for the German should be a kind of worship, how the German, through his very nature, seeks to know himself in such a way that he knows he is born of the divine-spiritual powers, lives within the divine-spiritual powers, and will be buried once more with the divine-spiritual powers.

[ 122 ] That is why Robert Hamerling has the “Genius of Germanness” speak these beautiful words to the blond Teut:

“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 in the depths of your soul
Remain with you and guide your course!
You strive only because you love: your boldest thought
Will be devotion, seeking to sink into God.»

[ 123 ] Thus, the person who, as a Central European German, feels at home in the intellectual life of Central Europe—which I have attempted to characterize today—even in one of its faded tones, in one of its forgotten intellectual currents, but precisely in the intellectual current that reveals which seeds, which roots of a striving for the real, for the true spirit, are anchored in German intellectual life.

[ 124 ] The realization that this is so will always give those who recognize and feel the German spirit within themselves the well-founded conviction that: Whatever may arise from the 68 million square kilometers all around, in opposition to that which lives on the 6 million square kilometers—whatever has such roots, such seeds—will, in the face of all enemies, bear its blossoms and its fruits in the manner inherent in it! This hope, this confidence, and also this love for the German essence—these are possessed precisely by the one who recognizes this German essence.

[ 125 ] Let me now summarize—in four simple lines, once again from Robert Hamerling—after I have attempted to characterize for you this Central European spirit; let me summarize what can arise in the soul today from an objective contemplation of the German essence and immersion in that German essence, in the face of our grave, fateful events.

[ 126 ] I believe that these four simple lines, with which I would like to conclude today’s reflection—these four simple lines by Robert Hamerling, which state that it is true, that one may say this not merely out of national fervor, but out of objective insight:

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