The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Hegel's Philosophy and its Relevance to the Present

[ 1 ] Today we will undertake not an anthroposophical, but a purely philosophical examination. But it can be cultivated within an anthroposophical circle because, although the subject matter of Spiritual Science is to be drawn from experiences in the supersensible world, the synthesis of these experiences into a comprehensive, systematic worldview requires sharp, conscientious, and well-trained thinking in every single detail. And while untrained thinking causes quite a bit of harm in the external sciences, even more harm is caused within the anthroposophical movement—more so than through incorrect observations—by the fact that, for many, an interest in supersensible matters does not go hand in hand with an equally strong interest in logical thinking. And this purely logical thinking can be trained particularly well through a study of the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. From such a study, a certain light can also be shed on our present time, in which people do indeed speak now and then of a return to Hegel, but of which it cannot be said that its intellectual presuppositions would facilitate an understanding of Hegel. Hegel, with his entire body of thought, emerged from an era that was intensely interested in deriving the foundations of all knowledge and all being from certain highest perspectives. And it is no coincidence, but rather a profound necessity, that Hegel lived in a time when these highest foundations were being sought in the most diverse fields.

[ 2 ] Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart. He entered the Tübingen seminary, which was so crucial to the development of German intellectual life at that time (1788–1793), where he was a classmate of Schelling—who for a long, long time far surpassed and outshone him—and of Hölderlin, a man of profound disposition who soon—though not exactly because of that profound disposition—sank into mental derangement. They formed, so to speak, a cloverleaf: the deeply sensitive Hölderlin, searching in mystical chiaroscuro; Schelling, gifted with sharp intellectual energy and an effervescent imagination; and the somewhat ponderous Hegel, who laboriously drilled his thoughts from his soul. Schelling and Hegel later worked together again at the University of Jena, which was at that very time a hotbed of intellectual life. Schelling captivated his audience with the tremendous intellectual vigor with which he addressed philosophical problems; he also captivated those who did not seek to penetrate the questions of existence through feeling and emotion. Schelling pointed to something in human cognition that transcends all thought—what he called “intellectual intuition,” which he held to be an innate capacity to peer into the depths of existence. Hegel was his colleague as a lecturer (1801–1806). Even then, his thinking was still ponderous, because every thought of his was meant to be shaped in such a way that it never encompassed more than it was intended to signify. And because of this slow, probing ponderousness of thought, Hegel is not easily understood at first.

[ 3 ] Then came the sorrowful period of 1806. During this time, Hegel, as he himself put it, undertook the truly great voyages of discovery of his mind. Amid the thunder of cannonfire at Jena, he then completed his first work to emerge from a thorough and immensely profound contemplation of the mind, the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is a work unlike any other in the entire history of world literature. Through it, Hegel sought above all to clarify for himself what experiences the soul can have when it ascends from, so to speak, subordinate perspectives to the highest—to what Hegel calls the spirit’s self-realization within itself. At first, one lives in a dull, unresponsive connection with the external world, where every this or that—every tree and every house—is something with which one coexists, and every opinion is something in which one lives. Only when one reflects on these various things does perception arise. From perception, we then proceed through thinking to a sense of self—at first, a vague intuition of the self. Only then do we arrive at the first glimmer of true consciousness. But here the “I” is, so to speak, still enchanted by its surroundings. It works its way out of this enchantment through the content that it is to draw solely from within itself, by increasingly setting aside whatever has to do with the external world, whatever is connected to it. Thus self-consciousness comes into being, and with it the interpenetration, the interweaving of self-consciousness with the spirit. It becomes Spirit itself, grasping itself within itself; it becomes Spirit that becomes conscious within itself. And when the human being now looks back, he recognizes what is grasping itself as Spirit within him; he recognizes the Idea that he has, as it were, extracted from the enchantment of the external world. He recognizes that he was previously caught in the contradiction between subject and object, but that he now, in the overcoming of subject and object, finds within the self-comprehending idea—which is neither merely subject nor merely object—what Hegel calls the Absolute Idea. Thus, through an immense effort of thought, Hegel had arrived at the foundation of what is known as absolute idealism.

[ 4 ] Hegel’s life took many twists and turns after his tenure as a lecturer in Jena. He worked for a time as a political editor in Bamberg (1807–1808), then as a high school teacher and principal in Nuremberg (1808–1816), and through these diverse external experiences became the realistically minded thinker we later encounter. From Nuremberg, Hegel was appointed for a short time to the University of Heidelberg, where he published his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in 1817. Regarding the reception of the work, Hegel could well have said what legend attributes to him as a remark he is said to have made shortly before his death: “Of all my students, only one understood me, and he misunderstood me.”

[ 5 ] It is indeed a most strange feeling to have plunged something so immensely profound into the current of the world and, at the same time, to see how completely all the prerequisites for grasping that profundity were lacking. Only from Hegel’s standpoint can something like a framework of what this “Encyclopedia” was meant to be be sketched out. But I ask that, even as I speak now in Hegel’s spirit, I not be regarded as a Hegelian. Hegel’s aim was to elaborate—if I may put it this way—the standpoint he had reached in the Phenomenology of Spirit by placing himself beyond subject and object onto the standpoint of the Idea, in order to survey from that vantage point the entire scope of human thought and action.

[ 6 ] According to Hegel, the Absolute Idea must not contain the concepts of subject and object, of cognition and opinion, and the like. The Idea transcends all these opposites. Hegel seeks to grasp this Idea as if it were presented in its purity—this Idea, which, while operating in both subject and object, transcends both. This Idea may well be found in human beings, in the external world, in spirit, and in nature, but it transcends both; it lies beyond spirit and nature. Therefore, in Hegel’s view, one must not initially conceive of the Idea in abstract terms, such as an abstract point. Rather, it is a self-contained whole that, as an Idea, brings forth a rich content from within itself, just as, for example, the entire plant with all its individual parts lies implicitly within a plant seed. Thus, according to Hegel, the Idea is to bring forth from itself a content that is independent of mind and nature—a content that, when applied, must therefore be applied to both. Thus, before engaging with the meaning of spirit and nature, one gains a vantage point above both and then sees in nature a manifestation of the Idea, just as one sees the Idea coming to life in the spiritual realm. We must therefore gain a vantage point from which the Idea is developed as if human beings were not involved at all. Humanity then surrenders itself to the intrinsic process of the world of ideas, which develops within itself and out of itself. This standpoint yields what, in Hegel’s sense, can be called the Science of Logic. Here, one is not dealing with a subject and an object, as in Aristotelian logic, but with a self-movement of the Idea that stands above subject and object.

[ 7 ] For any mode of thought that wishes to confine itself solely to the things of the external world, it is difficult to find one’s place within the strictly ordered ranks of Hegel’s concepts. One then feels something like violence being inflicted upon oneself; one feels thrust into a system of ideas that has absolutely nothing in common with ordinary, everyday rational thought. The idea is supposed to think, not me: that is the feeling one has. That is why most people do not engage with Hegel’s world of ideas at all. But if one does engage with it, well, one might correct Hegel here and there—which is particularly easy when it comes to Hegel—but that is not the point; rather, the point is that, through the study of Hegel, one undergoes an immense discipline of thought, because nowhere can one learn as much as in Hegel’s logic about where a system of human concepts—or indeed any concept at all—is permitted to appear. A concept can be grasped in its full scope only if one can conceive of it solely at a specific point within an entire web of concepts. To make this clear, Hegel begins with the emptiest concept, the concept of Being, which is usually posited without one actually realizing where it is being placed. Now, this concept is supposed to be completely empty in Hegel’s work. We must therefore, right from the outset of Hegel’s logic, set aside all later meanings that this concept has acquired—that is, we must already exercise great self-discipline in our thinking at this very point. Thus, the concept of Being is not actually established by human beings; rather, it presents itself to human beings after they have cast all other concepts out of it.

[ 8 ] Now Hegel seeks to discover the method of conceptual development; that is, one concept must develop from another. Thus, if we consider it properly, the concept of Being must immediately transcend itself. When we apply the abstract concept of Being to a thing, it is already no longer pure. It then already refers to this or that. Thus we come to recognize that Being is a Nothing—mind you, only within the concept itself. Through the dialectic that lives within itself, the concept of Nothing has thus been drawn out of Being.

[ 9 ] Once one has disciplined one’s own thinking, one has already, at this point in Hegel’s Logic, cultivated a mode of thinking that, in Hegel’s subsequent discussions of Being and Nothing, is always applied precisely as it has just emerged. Being and Nothingness now give rise to a third: this is Becoming. But in order for us to grasp Becoming, it must be brought to a standstill. Thus, in fourth place, the concept of Existence springs from the concept of Becoming. Only in this way may the concept of existence be used in Hegel’s subsequent Logic—as a Being that has turned itself into a Nothing, which, together with the latter, has produced Becoming, which, once brought to a standstill, has generated existence. And Hegel continues along this line of reasoning. He arrives at the concept of the One and the Many; he arrives at the concept of quantity and quality, of measure, and so on.

[ 10 ] Thus, in the first part of Hegel’s “Encyclopedia,” we have an organism of the Idea. Only after we have grasped everything else can we then arrive at the concept of purpose, which stands at the end of Hegel’s Logic. Through such absolute logic, an immense self-discipline of the mind is indeed achieved, which must at least be set before us as an ideal. Through this, one learns to articulate a concept only when one has its content fully in one’s consciousness. One must then include in one’s concepts nothing other than what one has at some point in life made clear to oneself as the development of that concept. Within Hegel’s Logic, the concepts of subject and object, cognition, essence, and causality—which one has now made clearly conscious—reappear as later concepts.

[ 11 ] Having thus established the complete system of concepts, Hegel was able to show how concepts manifest themselves, so to speak, in enchantment. The concept cannot exist solely within the subject, for then all talk of nature would be meaningless. Rather, our concepts underlie natural phenomena; they have brought them into being. Thus, for the concept, it is irrelevant whether it appears externally or internally. It conceals itself from us externally. Nature is the concept or the Idea in its otherness, as Hegel says. Anyone who asserts anything else about nature goes beyond what they know for certain. Thus, a philosophy of nature and a natural science emerge that seek the development of the idea externally, after it has first been sought in itself, in its purer existence, in logic.

[ 12 ] The idea initially manifests itself in subordinate phenomena, precisely where the concept is most concealed, so that we might be tempted to speak of natural phenomena devoid of ideas altogether. This is what happens in mechanics. But even within mechanical phenomena, Hegel’s discipline of thought introduces a twofold distinction. He distinguishes ordinary mechanics—as it underlies the phenomena of impact, force, and matter, which he calls “relative mechanics”—from “absolute mechanics”; that is, he considers it inadmissible to apply the ordinary concepts of relative mechanics to celestial bodies. Only when one develops the concept of absolute mechanics does one find the Idea that underlies celestial mechanics. Yet this distinction is nowhere to be found in contemporary science. Hence Hegel’s polemic against Newton, who, more than anyone else, unhesitatingly transferred the concepts of relative mechanics to those of absolute mechanics.

[ 13 ] From the concept of absolute mechanics, Hegel moves on to the concept of the real organism. He identifies three parts of the organism:

[ 14 ] First, the geological organism. In his view, this means that the Earth as a whole should not be understood in such a way that the laws of a small region are extended to the entire globe, as modern geology does. Hegel sees in every mountain range, in every geological formation, as it were, an organism that has become rigid.

[ 15 ] Second, the plant organism, in which the concept manifests itself, as it were, in indifference to the idea and in uniformity with respect to the idea.

[ 16 ] Third, the animal organism, which in a certain sense already represents the existence of the idea in the external world.

[ 17 ] Thus, the radiance of the idea—the enchanted idea, as it were—is exhausted in earthly existence. Humanity now grows out of these enchanted ideas. It must first be understood in terms of its natural characteristics. This is the subject of anthropology. In his perception, man finds himself, as it were, dulled by external existence; but when he attains consciousness, and from there self-consciousness, he in a certain sense breaks free from external existence. Here, following anthropology, the “Phenomenology of Spirit” comes into play. Within this phenomenology, human beings finally grasp themselves as spirit. In doing so, they recognize themselves as subjective spirit by first wrestling themselves free from the enchantment of nature. Little by little, the Idea itself reappears to them. That which it was in the first, very first concept of Being now springs forth. Having thus recognized the Idea in its “in-itself” being in logic—in this “out-of-itself” being in nature—human beings now grasp it where it is “in and for itself.”

[ 18 ] Now this initially subjective spirit transforms itself into objective spirit. The Idea reveals what it is in itself through the institutions of the spirit: marriage, family, law, and custom. All of this converges in the state. What manifests itself in the state as the objective Spirit—as the realization of the Idea—and what is found in the interplay between states—that is world history. Thus, world history is the existence of the Idea following its passage through the subjective Spirit.

[ 19 ] And the question arises: Can we ultimately come full circle, like a snake biting its own tail—that is, can we return to the absolute Idea, to a realization of the Idea in which it once again overcomes both the subjective and the objective? The Absolute Idea, in its absolute reality, may initially appear in a preparatory form, so that it is not enchanted or hidden as in nature, but rather shines through the phenomenon. This is the case in art. Beyond world history, then, Hegel creates the first realization of the absolute idea in art. But here it still retains something of an objective, external nuance. It can, however, also have the effect of no longer possessing a nuance of the external, but rather a nuance of the internal. This is the case in religion. It is thus the realization of the absolute idea at the second stage.

[ 20 ] But the idea can also overcome the nuance of externality that it still possesses in art, and the nuance of interiority that it still possesses in religion. It does so by grasping itself—where it captures itself within itself—in philosophy in the Hegelian sense.

[ 21 ] Thus, the circle is complete. There is nothing in the entire realm of history that is as self-contained as Hegel’s system.

[ 22 ] He later elaborated on individual parts in greater detail; for example, the philosophy of law (1821), a field in which strictly disciplined thinking has a particularly beneficial effect. And in the preface to the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel makes a curious statement: When reason grasps the Idea, everything must be understood by seeing the Idea—that is, the workings of reason—in things. — Everything real is therefore rational in the Hegelian sense. This statement can, of course, be immediately refuted by the arbitrariness of ordinary reasoning if one does not take Hegel’s context of thought into account.

[ 23 ] When we sketch out Hegel’s philosophy in our minds, we recognize the fundamental essence of his philosophy in his extraordinarily disciplined thinking.

[ 24 ] Hegel then taught this philosophy from 1818 to 1831 in Berlin, where he died on November 14, 1831—the anniversary of the death of Leibniz, who had once put forward the exact opposite philosophy. In Hegel’s philosophy, the Idea—which remains entirely within itself—takes center stage. In Leibniz’s philosophy, the Idea disperses into the immense sum of monads. However, a single monad—the one containing the preestablished harmony—would, if it developed, have to follow the path of Hegel’s absolute Idea. Thus, Hegel’s system lies in the development of a single monad. Hegel established the strictest monistic system, while Leibniz established the strictest monadological system. As long as we remain within Hegel’s train of thought, we are in a strictly closed cycle of the mind. We go beyond it when we measure Hegel’s system against monadology. Indeed, one thinker found that Leibniz’s monadology shattered Hegel’s monism. This was the case with Schelling.

[ 25 ] After remaining silent since 1814, he was appointed to Berlin in 1841—ten years after Hegel’s death—and now sought to go beyond Hegel, with whom he had previously collaborated and edited the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie from 1802 to 1803. The lectures he now delivered in Berlin were quite unique.

[ 26 ] There is only one way to move beyond Hegel: by drilling a hole from the outside right where, in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” the “I” grasps itself. But one also gets stuck in Leibniz’s monad if one does not drill a hole in the same place there as well. If one starts here, then one emerges beyond the “I” that grasps only itself; then one arrives at supersensible experiences that truly go beyond what Hegel comprehends in his system. And this is indeed what Schelling did. He began to teach “theosophy”—true “theosophy,” albeit in abstract form—and he enjoyed the same success that a person today would have if they wanted to teach “theosophy” at a university.

[ 27 ] Schelling taught a triplicity of the foundation of the world, a threefold power: first, the potential for being; second, pure being; third, synthesis. In this way, he foreshadowed what is sought today in the threefold Logos. And now, in his Philosophy of Mythology, Schelling sought to uncover the secrets of the ancient mysteries. He sought to teach what we are now exploring—enriched by the supersensory experiences that have since become possible—such as what is said about the ancient mysteries in my book Christianity as a Mystical Fact. Schelling then sought to honor the Christian mysteries in his “Philosophy of Revelation,” which endeavors to illuminate Christianity in a theosophical sense. Schelling was able to deliver these lectures only because he had previously stood at a lectern expounding other views. This made the backlash against Schelling all the more fierce. Today, Schelling’s final “theosophical period” is portrayed with great horror in all textbooks and other histories of philosophy, in which—having already previously established the madness of his “intellectual conception”—he now went completely mad—or so they claim.

[ 28 ] With this transition from Hegel to Schelling, however, an era had simultaneously dawned that was entirely under the spell of the natural sciences. And ever since then, we have been witnessing a remarkable spectacle, the observation of which will reveal to us why theosophy and Spiritual Science must be received today exactly as they are.

[ 29 ] No one can surely admire the findings more than I do, and yet the following must be said. The discovery of the plant and animal cell by Schwann and Schleiden in the 1830s was a great achievement, but it was followed by narrow-minded views. Then came the theory of force and matter, which regarded everything spiritual as nothing more than bubbles of physical processes. The worst manifestation of this way of thinking was the rigorous system in which Büchner formulated theoretical materialism in his book Force and Matter. Büchner’s bold courage, of course, remains admirable. The other researchers simply did not have the courage to think their ideas through to their logical conclusion.

[ 30 ] But even more refined minds took paths different from those of Hegel and Schelling under the influence of the natural sciences; for example, Hermann Helmholtz, who made truly great contributions in the fields of psychophysics, sensory physiology, physiological optics, and the theory of sound. His discoveries led him—not through reasoning, but through the unique nature of the experiments and the suggestive power of the experiments themselves—to reject Hegel, so that he said: “When I open Hegel and read a few sentences from his ‘Philosophy of Nature,’ it is pure nonsense.”

[ 31 ] And once again, a refined mind, well-trained in the art of thought, was misunderstood—Julius Robert Mayer, who discovered the law of conservation of energy. His law did indeed have tremendous physical significance, and this was also recognized. But Mayer’s lines of reasoning regarding the mechanical equivalent of heat in his treatise on “Organic Movement in Its Connection with Metabolism” (1845) were never understood. People preferred to read Helmholtz; he was much easier to understand. Thus, people preferred to read his treatise on the “Interactions of Natural Forces” (1854), in which he demonstrated the validity of Mayer’s law, starting from the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine.

[ 32 ] Added to this were the achievements of Darwinism, and a mind as bold as Haeckel’s—who, however, was averse to any form of intellectual culture and who, consequently, could see nothing in Hegel’s philosophy but a thicket of concepts—such a courageous mind was thus called upon to expand upon the scientific facts in the spirit of an external, material history of development. Thus he became the founder of the materialistic Darwinism of the 1860s and 1870s. No philosophical school of thought rose up in opposition to this. At that time, the world could no longer be grasped by philosophy; for philosophy, there was nothing but an interrelationship between philosophy and the natural sciences.

[ 33 ] Thus, a thinker as significant as Eduard von Hartmann—who, in his Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), brought materialistic Darwinism, so to speak, before the forum of a spiritual philosophy—was denounced as a dilettante who had no understanding of the natural sciences. Many counter-writings appeared, including a highly insightful anonymous one: The Unconscious from the standpoint of Philosophy and the Theory of Descent (1872). Haeckel said of this work that it was so excellent and so thoroughly exposed the errors in Eduard von Hartmann’s philosophy that he (Haeckel) himself could have written it, and Oscar Schmidt, Darwin’s biographer, deeply regretted that his esteemed colleague would not emerge from anonymity. Then a new edition of this work was published, and Eduard von Hartmann identified himself as the author.

[ 34 ] Thus, philosophy had once provided, in the crudest possible way, empirical proof that it is quite capable of understanding the natural sciences, even if a well-trained mind leads it to conclusions entirely different from those of materialism. This struggle is by no means merely a matter of one proposition pitted against another, but rather of cultural forces standing in opposition to one another.

[ 35 ] More refined minds always retained an appreciation for both philosophy and the natural sciences. But due to the dominant influence of the natural sciences, they could only be heard within the narrowest of circles. Thus, Vincenz Knauer’s extraordinarily subtle work on the history of philosophy, The Main Problems of Philosophy, which offered broad perspectives, could be understood only by a very small circle. Indeed, not even the arguments put forward by the narrow Herbartian philosophy against external materialism were able to make an impact. Thus it came to pass that a strictly logical mind—albeit one schooled in scholasticism—which sought to build within itself a bridge to the scientific method, was unable to do so even within itself. Such was the case with Franz Brentano, who sought to combine the scientific method with strictly logical thinking in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, the first volume of which appeared in 1874. But his intellectual self-discipline did not prevail; inwardly, he remained too much under the sway of scientific materialism. He could not come to terms with himself, and so the second volume, announced for the fall, did not appear at first. And today Brentano lives as an elderly gentleman in Florence, and the second volume has still not been published.

[ 36 ] I myself witnessed just how terribly this inner conflict could manifest itself in the individual soul. I saw how the methodological approach to training the mind was virtually rendered powerless by the influence of the natural sciences. It was during a ceremonial session of the Vienna Academy in the 1880s, at which I was present, that Ernst Mach delivered a lecture on economy in the understanding of natural phenomena. He was, in fact, unable to find a way to incorporate natural phenomena into his method. With every sentence, one felt painfully how all method of thought vanished, how everything shrank to the principle of the least expenditure of effort in the understanding of nature. Thus, thinking was pushed down from the position of heart that it had held with Hegel to the conceivably lowest level of economic significance.

[ 37 ] Thus Hegel himself remained, as it were, an enchanted spirit, and not even Kuno Fischer could redeem him. The truth of what Rosenkranz had said in the introduction to his biography of Hegel was confirmed: “We philosophers of the second half of the 19th century are, at best, merely the gravediggers of the philosophers of the first half of the 19th century.” And by that he meant—biographers.

[ 38 ] The works of Otto Liebmann, Zeller, and others, which drew on Kant, then seemed to bring about a new surge in the method of thought. Liebmann wrote one of the most incisive treatises ever written in the field of epistemology. He tried by every means to establish a transcendental epistemology, but in the end he arrived at a kind of epistemology that can be roughly described as something resembling a dog running in circles. He never made it past the starting point of his epistemology.

[ 39 ] And so the current state of affairs gradually emerged. Clausius’s seminal formulation of the theory of heat had an impact on the physiology of the senses, which in turn ultimately influenced the theory of knowledge. Here, too, philosophy once again exerted its influence on the natural sciences.

[ 40 ] Thus, those who spoke in the tradition of the old school of thought were not given a voice. It is true that in the 1880s a researcher attempted, building on Kant, to truly advance the theory of knowledge, but he was not heard. Thus, under the pressure of circumstances, he abandoned this field entirely and turned to aesthetics. It was not until 1906 that he—Johannes Volkelt—published another short epistemological work on “The Sources of the Certainty of Our Knowledge.” The conditions for a true epistemology were just as lacking as those for a true understanding of Hegel.

[ 41 ] Our age finds itself far more satisfied, for example, with a Spencerian encyclopedia that goes only a little way—and only superficially—beyond the natural sciences. And when the concept of the smallest economic unit—as Mach had introduced it—returned from the New World in the pragmatism of William James, it was enthusiastically received as something new. However, the rigorous framework of Hegel’s absolute logic and the entirely unphilosophical reasoning of pragmatism make for a rather peculiar combination.

[ 42 ] But goodness cannot be completely suppressed; it can only be suppressed temporarily. Where a misunderstood Kantianism could not settle upon thought like mildew—arising, so to speak, from the very strength of the people—healthy thinking began to take root. Thus, the Russian philosopher Solovyov did indeed introduce significant new methodological approaches by drawing on a young popular force—one that, if you will, had not yet developed into a true culture—rather than on an old one, as Franz Brentano did. The Frenchman Boutroux, too, introduced a new and useful concept into the history of development. But such efforts go unacknowledged. Beneath the ashes, the truth continues to smolder, as it were. It may be overgrown by prejudices and impotence, but as self-discipline of thought, it nevertheless continues to work secretly. And it is precisely the one who believes he must champion Spiritual Science who must hope that this self-discipline of thought will pave the way for Spiritual Science. He must find the path to Hegel’s strictest logic; only in this way can he firmly ground, upon the foundation of thought, that which he must draw down from higher spiritual worlds in often loose forms. Thus, in the realm of the supersensible—if we may put it that way—there is nothing that strictly trained thinking would have to reject. Sharper, self-disciplined thinking will find the transition, the bridge, that leads from the ultimate, highest product of the physical plane—thinking—across to the supersensible.