The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! For a number of years now, I have been privileged to give lectures here in this city in the field of spiritual science. Since the friends of our spiritual science movement have also requested such lectures here for these fateful times, I would like to present you with a reflection that takes more of an attitude of spiritual science as its starting point today; and tomorrow we will then delve deeper into questions of spiritual knowledge that move the heart and soul. It will be understandable that this introductory lecture is being held today, since everything that can move us today, especially when it is close to the heart and soul, must really be carried out after the fateful events in the midst of which we stand.

One could say that the nations of Central Europe are locked in a fortress, a large, mighty fortress. And in the east and west, the existence of this Central Europe is, so to speak, being called into question. And what a sum of courage, sacrifice and devotion have we seen in the months since the beginning of the war; and how much suffering and pain have we had to witness! How the days of suffering and pain, with their events, affect families, how fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters are connected with them!

Therefore, it must be important to us to introduce our reflections on the spiritual development and spiritual hopes of humanity with a few thoughts and feelings that are directed towards the difficult situation of our time. We hear this Central European culture vilified from all sides, reviled. We hear all sorts of things today from the east and west and from all sides about this Central European culture. We may undoubtedly, my dear attendees, see the significant deeds of our people and see them as related to the whole essence of our people's organism. I would like to say: what is happening today is happening through the arms of this organism. But it befits the very essence of the German people to consider the arms, the essence of the spirit, the essence of the soul of this organism. And what better way to do that than by remembering, at such a fateful and fateful moment, the significant and important deeds of the soul and spirit of the German people, and by drawing strength from them for our hopes and goals for the future.

And I would like to take the starting point of what we, as the essence of the German people, can envision from two outstanding geniuses of this people: Schiller and Fichte. Within the German essence, has it always been the custom, in difficult times, to draw strength from those who, as great ancestors, can provide this strength? And I would like to make this connection today, truly not to stir up emotional feelings in you, but because I believe that such a connection can be meaningful in our days, the connection to the days of the death of these two mentioned geniuses. It is possible for us – as I said, not to stir our emotions, but because I believe that this point of view is particularly close to our hearts and souls in these days – it is possible for us to look at the last days, yes, the hours of Schiller's and Fichte's death very intimately, very confidentially.

Schiller's death was described to us by his then young friend, the son of Johann Heinrich Voß, Heinrich Voß, the so-called younger Voß. And we can follow him, our Schiller in the last days of his life, as he is already dying, sustained solely by the powers of the spirit that prevail in him. Yes, with Schiller we can say that basically the body was long since doomed to die, while the strong, energetic spirit still prevailed and just dragged the body along. For, as this body was so completely decrepit, Heinrich Voß shows us, so to speak. He leads us into Schiller's death chamber, and we take part in the last hours of the great spiritual hero. We are told how Schiller, in these last hours, with his body already completely subject to death, with a yellowed face, with extinct eyes, still strong in spirit in these moments, how he had his last, his youngest child come to him in these last hours, how he looked the child long in the eye and then sent thoughts out of these eyes, one would like to say into the eyes. The younger Voss wanted to divine these thoughts, and we can say that, as he tells us, they will be correctly divined. It was as if Schiller wanted to say to the child – what he could only express in these rasping words: I should have been your father for much longer, I still have much to do for you. Then he handed the child back, turned away and looked at the wall again.

Do we not feel, my dear audience, as if the whole German nation, the soul of the whole German nation, could recognize itself in this child? Schiller, who died young, could also have said to our nation: I could have been much more to you, I have left much unsaid and undone for you. But he dies fully imbued with the inner energy of that which he felt to be the German spirit, that spirit which carried him through life, inspired him to his creations, sustained him as his body wasted away, that spirit whose world-historical mission he himself described in such moving words that we may well bring these words before our souls in these times. These words only became known long after Schiller's death, but they bear witness to how Schiller thought about the spirit of his people:

He who forms the mind, rules,
must ultimately become the ruler, because
finally at the goal of time, if the
life has any meaning at all,
must custom and reason triumph,
the brute force of form succumb
and the slowest people will catch up with all
the fast fleeting ones.
[...]
Him

– the German –

is destined for the highest,
and just as he is in the center of
Europe's peoples,
he is the core of humanity,
those are the flower and the leaf.

He has been chosen by the world spirit, during
the battle of the ages
to work on the eternal construction of human education,
to preserve what time brings,
Therefore, he has so far appropriated what is foreign
and preserved it within himself.
Everything that was valuable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with the times, he has preserved;
he has not lost the treasures of
centuries;
Not to shine in the moment and
play a role, but to win the great
process of time. Every people
has its day in history, but
the day of the Germans is the harvest of
all time.

And today, in these fateful days, we may well remember the spirit that Schiller believed must be the harvest of all time, the harvest of the cultural development of mankind.

And if we turn our attention from Schiller, the great poet, to his friend, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, we see no less of the German spirit in the soul of a human being when we look at Fichte's last hours on earth. Schiller was often able to tie in what he had to say to his people in a work, which will be discussed shortly, with Fichte's strong, forceful philosophy. Yes, Fichte's philosophy is energetic and powerful. It is as if, from the whole scope, the universality of the genius of the philosopher Fichte, he wanted to extract everything that this German mind has of load-bearing capacity, to draw out everything that can affirm the strongest will in the strongest thought. And so, as Fichte spoke the beautiful word: “What kind of philosophy you have depends on what kind of person you are,” it can be said that we see this word proven in truth in Fichte in particular; because he felt connected to the German spirit, which was so dear to him, Fichte felt at the same time connected with the rule and weaving of the whole world spirit, felt in every word he spoke, carried by the spirit that permeates and flows through the world. But this philosopher did not live only in the abstract spirit. When Germany was going through the difficult times at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Fichte, the philosopher, often considered whether he should not take part as a warrior in the fateful events of the time. But then he found that he could do more for his nation through his intellectual work. So it happened that at first only his wife took part in the military hospital service in Berlin. But she brought illness into his house by contagion. She recovered, but he himself, the philosopher, was carried off by the military hospital fever.

And now we see how Fichte, who presented the diamond-bright, crystal-clear thoughts of the most German philosophy to humanity, lay on his sickbed in the last days of his life, waiting for news of Blücher's crossing of the Rhine and everything that the people in the west had to undertake. We see how he, who had decided not to be physically among the fighting because he wanted to serve his people and humanity with his mind, we see how he took part in the warlike events of his time in his feverish dreams in his last hours. And we experience the wonderful interplay of a worldview with life even in illness and even in the death rattle when we see how Fichte allowed everything that he wanted to give to the German people through his powerful philosophy to flow into his feverish dreams. We see how he feels in his dreams in the midst of the struggling, and how he feels at the same time as resting securely with his soul in the spiritual world. The dying philosopher Fichte, without fear and full of hope for his people, said when they wanted to give him medicine: “I do not need medicine, because I know I will recover.” Shortly before, he had been given the news of Blücher's crossing of the Rhine. Thus, in the life of the man who is fully immersed in German intellectual life, this intellectual life and the immediate life of the surroundings interact. For this German intellectual life is not an idealistic, dreamy one, but one that always enters into all the individual achievements of its German people. And today, we can justifiably claim that everything achieved in the face of blood and death, pain and suffering, is sustained by the power that permeates our intellectual experience.

And so we see this Fichte, imbued with the best power of the German spirit! Today, we can only sketch out some of the characteristics of what lived in Fichte's mind. In one of Germany's darkest hours, when Germany had been brought to its knees by the western conqueror, Fichte spoke his “Speeches to the German Nation”. Certainly not everything that Fichte spoke at the time can be agreed with today, word for word. But the spirit that inspired him must also be ours. Just as Fichte assumed at the time that the German language is a primal language that developed like an organism from the starting point of German history in Europe, while the Romance languages of the West and South suffered a break in their development, while they originally started from something Germanic, but adopted something foreign that they put over the folk essence in the Romance essence.

If Fichte infers something from the character of this original language, which developed out of the essence of the German and grew like an organic force, then today this may be contestable from a linguistic point of view. But what inspired Fichte, what constitutes the fundamental character of his philosophy of will and thought, is that Fichte reflected on what is most original in man, what is connected in man with all the sources of life in the soul. Fichte sees flourishing and truly authentic destiny hopes only where the soul is able to bring forth from itself what lies in its depths. Fichte saw an emblem of the fact that the German spirit aspires to this in the German language. But even if we can no longer go into the details of Fichte's point of view today, we must still look at how what he then expressed in accordance with his time was formed in Fichte.

What did Fichte strive for in his philosophy? We need only recall what spiritual science actually wants to be. It wants to be a knowledge that does not passively surrender itself merely to the phenomena of the external world, that does not merely allow itself to be passively stimulated with reference to the mind that is bound to the brain, but spiritual science wants to be, if we want to use the expression in all humility, a brave science. It wants to be a science that comes about through the development of the higher human being in man, as Schiller said, the actual spiritual human being, through the development of that which is connected in man's own being with the great spiritual being of the world, which lives in man in such a way that when man recognizes it, he at the same time knows himself to be living and weaving in the divine-spiritual world being itself. But this is what Fichte was constantly seeking. And so he feels connected to the most spiritual part of the world through the knowledge that he sought to acquire from the human soul. Or how could one express the spiritual certainty that man can attain more forcefully than when Fichte uses the words:

There is no doubt about it, it is the most certain thing there is, indeed, the basis of all other certainties, the only absolutely valid objective, that there is a moral world order, that every rational individual is assigned his specific place in this order and counted on for his work.

Thus Fichte's most German philosophy brought about the realization that it was the most certain thing for Fichte to know that he was a single soul in the entire spiritual world, that there is such a world order into which the individual is woven.

Fichte merely renewed in a manner appropriate to modern times that which has always prevailed in the German spirit: the striving for knowledge that arises from the powers of the human soul, which cannot end with death. And when we hear such words as those just quoted from Fichte, we are reminded of the words of the great German mystic Angelus Silesius: “It is not I who live and die in me, but God Himself who lives and dies in me.”

This striving for knowledge not only gives the soul a sense of security in the world spirit, but at the same time certainty with regard to its immortality. For how could one, in the soul experiencing and knowing God in the soul, not be aware of this immortality? For if the God in the human soul dies, then death is precisely a new resurrection. The German spirit constantly strove for such knowledge, which conquers death, for knowledge of the soul, so that this soul recognizes itself not only through the instruments of its body, but through purely spiritual instruments, so that it faces its bodily experience, its own body, in a body-free state, in brave science, as it were, just as one faces external objects in the body. But from such knowledge there arose such a wonderful saying as that of Jakob Boehme, in which is summarized, as it were, all that the German spirit has to say about the great riddles of life in their connection with the destiny of the human soul: “He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies.”

But that means nothing other than Jakob Böhme wants to suggest that a knowledge of the nature of the soul can be gained in life, of the soul as it will be once it has passed through the gate of death and looks back at its body. Because the one who does not acquire such knowledge before he dies will, in Jakob Böhme's view, perish when he dies.

And so spiritual science today not only seeks knowledge of the spiritual, which is, so to speak, an increase of ordinary knowledge in the body, but spiritual science seeks knowledge in the soul, insofar as this soul, between birth and death, ing can forces that it will also have after death, when it will look back on the body and the bodily life, where the body and bodily life will again be not subject but object, as in everyday life. And if today a spiritual scientist wants to use, so to speak, what German spirit can bring us today to make a comparison for something that Fichte wanted to say in his time, then he could take this comparison for a particular case from this spiritual science. I will develop this particular case before you.

Fichte, when he was thinking about what he wanted to say to his people, about how they could realize their hopes and find their goals in these fateful times, pointed to a completely new education that goes to the source of the stirrings of life in the soul, to the higher human being in the human being. Fichte knew at the time that what he wanted to present to his nation with this education – we can no longer think in this way today, but we can look to Fichte's intentions, perceptions and feelings – was probably clear to Fichte's soul as the salutary for the future, but when he compared it with what had been regarded as the essence of education up to his time, it could appear to him as something completely new that must wriggle out of the old, so that this new has no longer any similarity with the old. Then the more recent spiritual researcher could say, precisely on the basis of spiritual science, which Fichte did not yet have: “Now, I compare this new, this completely new education with the soul that has wrestled itself free from the body at death and now looks back on it.

And the spiritual researcher today could describe how the soul looks back on the body and the life of the body after death. There is a passage in Fichte's “Addresses to the German Nation” that is particularly significant in this regard. It is a passage that one might easily overlook, but it is good to bring it to mind today. Fichte himself sought a symbol for the relationship between his new education and the old one. And he says: “What I am putting forward as a new educational plan appears different from everything that has been thought to be right, so that it will not be easy for anyone to understand me.” And when Fichte seeks a symbol for the relationship between this new education and the old one, he uses the following image:

Time appears to me as an empty shadow that stands over its corpses, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the once-so-beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already taken her in and are surrounding her with warm, loving whispers; the secret voices of the sisters are already greeting her and welcoming her; she is already stirring and expanding within all directions, in order to develop the more glorious form to which she is to awaken, but she still has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

We see from this, my dear attendees, that Fichte himself uses the image that we use today from a spiritual scientific consciousness. Fichte uses it from what he feels as the depth of the German spirit weaving within him and what he wanted to present to his people at the time. How deeply this awareness of the interweaving of the soul with the All-Spirit is linked to German spiritual life, when we see that what is being sought today and achieved in spiritual science is working its way out of the great philosopher of the German people like an energetic presentiment.

And if we go back from him to Schiller, we can see how the search for the most spiritual part of the soul runs through one of his most intimate, most beautiful, most magnificent prose works, one of those prose works in which man perceives what he sees with his eyes and hears with his ears, not only in terms of external sensuality, but experiences the spiritual in it through the deepening of the soul within himself, and this is so full of life in him that he experiences it pictorially artistically or, as one would say today, spiritually scientifically as reality. There the human being is free, there the human being gives birth to his higher self.

Schiller's highest aspiration is to seek the higher human being within himself. And here, ladies and gentlemen, we can see how basically everything that the German mind has achieved at its highest levels is connected with its universal striving towards spirituality, towards the intimate coexistence of the soul with the spirit. With Schiller, with Fichte, with Goethe, the same striving is everywhere to be found. And for these minds, the most characteristic thing is that being German coincides with being human in the right sense, in the striving for the highest human ideal. And with a mind like Goethe's, in particular, we see this once again, and the most beautiful expression of this is his “Faust”.

It is precisely in these minds that we see how being German is something different from being Italian, French, British or Russian. Here we have to use the word: you can be Italian, you can be French, British or Russian, but you become German. You are constantly becoming German. Then one is best of all Germans, when Germanness floats before one like a higher ideal, or one could say like a living spiritual goal in the distance, which one has to approach more and more. Therefore, the word that Lagarde spoke in more recent times: “Being German lies not in the blood, but in the mind.” — is extremely true precisely for these minds.

Therefore, it is difficult to make those who live around this Germanness understand it, and on whom this Germanness of Central Europe has to send its rays of influence. And from Fichte's mouth we hear an important and significant word about being German, and again in the “Speeches to the German Nation”:

[...] whoever believes in spirituality and freedom of this spirituality, and wants the eternal development of this spirituality through freedom, that wherever it is born and in whatever language it speaks, it is of our kind, it belongs to us and will join us.

This is the universal position of the greatest Germans with regard to what they felt as Germanness, as Germanity. This is how Germany's great philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte spoke in his “Speeches to the German Nation”, which he, as he said in one of the first speeches, wanted to hold by Germans per se to the German per se.

I said: Everything that asserted itself as the striving for spirituality, as the essence of Germanness, is concentrated, as it were, in what Goethe was to his people. And now we might ask ourselves: Has anyone in the world tried to form a correct idea of this essence and this striving of the German people? There were times when one could hear one or another European nation praising the German essence and emphasizing it in one way or another. But in many cases one has to say: the experiences of today in particular show us how little reason, how little inner truth there was in what was felt about the German character in the world. Indeed, there are people like the French philosopher Bergson – one does not know whether he will still call himself Bergson now that St. Petersburg is no longer called St. Petersburg but Petrograd – this French philosopher Bergson, he found that the he had to give to philosophy in our time, basically borrowed it entirely from the philosophy of German idealism. In German idealism, it appears comprehensive and universal, but in Bergson's work, it appears meager and threadbare. But he, who should know the German character, pointed out in a chauvinistic speech he gave last Christmas how the Germans had forgotten everything they had achieved in the way of spirituality. How the Germans once had something like spirituality, but now they only show themselves to be purely mechanistic. One need only point to what the Germans are now producing: mechanistic cannons, rifles, machines, everything has been transformed into mechanism.

One must be truly amazed at the logic that is going around the world today. After all, is it logical to speak as Bergson does? Even if one admits that the Germans once had Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, what, one might ask, did Bergson expect with his French logic? Did he expect that when the Central European peoples were threatened from all sides, threatened by a superior force two and a half times as strong, that they would then confront their enemies reciting Goethe and Schiller or declaiming Fichte's philosophy? Because they do not do this, the philosopher Bergson finds that the Germans have become a mechanistic people because they face their enemies with guns and cannons. Well, and from this French philosopher to that Monsieur Richepin, it is a straight line between what all the ranting and raving about the German people, the German essence can be heard. All the nuances of the ranting can be found. Richepin could not avoid saying that the Germans are wild, crazy, dirty beasts that must be strangled like wild pigs, all of them. There is a scale from the philosopher Bergson to such vilifications of the German people, which today vibrates throughout Europe. But then we may well ask ourselves: Has one always thought so about the German essence? About that German essence, which under today's conditions can naturally show nothing but its armies, but that German essence, which certainly only has to defend itself with its armies, but which has its foundation only in spirit and soul. It is interesting to contrast what is pulsating through the world today with this German essence in terms of its world position and its mission in the world. And here it is certainly no pleasant task to praise oneself, as it were, for that to which one is attached. So let us choose a different path, the path of looking around to see whether this German essence has always appeared “barbaric” to those who call it “barbaric” today, to those who have tried to understand it.

There is a thinker, a great thinker of the nineteenth century, an American thinker who spoke and wrote in English, Emerson. Since we do not want to judge German character ourselves, let us hear what a non-German, speaking English, Emerson in America, has to say about the nature of the German and his mission. Emerson ties in with Goethe, who is for him the representative of the German character, Goethe, in whom is summarized that which must also appear to us as the essential in Fichte and Schiller.

One phenomenon in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of its conviction. In France, people are delighted to see brilliant ideas going wherever they want. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts reach. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind possesses neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed to practicality, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. But what it does possess is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself about them. There is intellectual activity, well and good: what is it in favor of? What is the man's opinion? Where does he get [–where] all these thoughts?

The English [...] see only the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

It is true that one would be cautious if one had to coin such words oneself, but they were first uttered by an English American in English. Then he continues, looking at what the German mind has to give to world development:

For this reason, the terms of distinction used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are praised for their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and points of view with a certain superficiality, and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something even better in mind. [...] He has that awe-inspiring independence that arises from dealing with the truth.

Now, one could say that these are old stories. Emerson has been dead for a long time, and the Germans have changed according to those who judge them now in their lack of reflection caused by the passage of time. Perhaps we may look at something else that was said not decades ago, not a few months before the outbreak of the war, not by a German, not in Germany, but by an Englishman in Manchester. These words have also been translated into German and published under the title “Germany in the Nineteenth Century”.

In the preface, we are told that the lectures were given to provide journalists and other people with a little insight into the German character. You can judge for yourselves how well this has been received from what you now read in English newspapers about the German character and how it is viewed in England. But at that time the following was said, and not in German, but in English and in Manchester, in the British Isles themselves:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen

- that is, the English [and French] —

the spirit of science was unquestionably known; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, mainly by thousands of German researchers.

Imagination, feeling, will asserted their right to be heard beside or above reason, and under their transforming pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful.

It is strange what these Englishmen in Manchester know about the German character.

The irrational was recognized as a source of illumination; wisdom was sought from the child and the flower; science, philosophy and poetry drew near each other. With us in England this revival of the imagination created a noble poetry, but left the sciences and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the whole period

- please note that an Englishman is saying this –

is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a portrayal of present-day Germany, a Germany of restless, bold will and action, and we can understand all the better why the [great] cosmopolitan, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable place as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

Yes, my dear attendees, one can only say: Yes, why do your fellow countrymen now call the people of Schiller and Goethe a “barbarian people”? This question will be asked by history about the development of these peoples for a long, long time, since they could know better. For I did not begin this consideration in order to answer the question: Why do they call the people of Fichte and Schiller a “barbarian people”?, but rather to show that this question will be asked for a long, long time [in the histories of Germany's enemies], and they, these other peoples, will have to answer it.

In these lectures, which these Englishmen gave to Englishmen, there is something that a German would truly not say in Germany; but it is not meant to be said here, only quoted: “No German words are more deeply imbued with the juice of national ethics than those that describe these things: true, thorough, faithful.”

Now, why then call the German people a “barbarian people”? And about the German Reich, the following was said in the same lectures:

On the whole, there is no question that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace. This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is fitting for it to let the light of the past shine on the confusion of the present, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For when we look to the past, we find that our ancestors

- he is, of course, referring to his English ancestors -

that our ancestors regarded France with far greater fear than the wildest noisemakers fear Germany today. And the fear of our ancestors had good reason. [...]

To sum up, the founding of the German Empire was a gain for Europe, and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 put an end once and for all to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the previously unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed a temptation to war that had so often often tempted into the wrong channels, they enabled the German people to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved in one fell swoop what Great Britain, despite all its expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to achieve, namely to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a major war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, if that is the case, why do they call the people of Central Europe a “barbarian people”? There is a strange preamble to the lectures from which I have quoted. You will have heard the name of Lord Haldane mentioned in an unpleasant way in the early weeks of the war. But it was this same Lord Haldane – who also spoke of the fact that the English, out of an overabundance of morality, could do nothing but join the other enemies of Germany to attack the Germans – well, this same Lord Haldane wrote a preface to the lectures, from which I would like to share a sample with you. In this preface, the Lord, who now claims that England could not help but punish Germany, says:

The source of the stream of its

- that is, Germany's -

intellectual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient [Greece], the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany to-day is to a high degree concretely practical.

Yes, it is almost shameful to hear such a thing said. But I am not saying it, I am merely quoting it. Then Lord Haldane says:

Only the influence of true knowledge can dispel the clouds of mistrust and free us from the need to prepare for attacks that none of us really has in mind.

And a woman who spent eight years in Germany, an Englishwoman who visited hospitals and lecture halls and studied schools and everything she could get her hands on in Germany for eight years, she differs from the other Englishwomen in terms of her knowledge in that she really got to know the Germans and their institutions. She published a book called “Eight Years in Germany” by Miss Wylie. This book appeared very recently, just a few weeks before the outbreak of war. Miss Wylie has described some of the things she has learned about the German character here in Germany. I will share just a few words from her book with you, and you will see how the question that is the subject of our discussion today must be put.

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence. And it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany is already at its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined fight against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago. [...]

On every border and across the water

- that is, over the Channel –

its opponents are sitting, both commercially and politically, and are waiting anxiously for the moment when Germany slackens up just a little, so that they can pounce on her and overwhelm her. Germany knows this [too] only too well.

We see that the German character was not entirely unknown to other nations. Therefore, we must consider the question of today's consideration as the question that will be asked of these nations by later history.

But at the same time, there is a complete lack of understanding of what is most deeply rooted in the German character, of what is most spiritual about it! Herman Grimm, the great art historian, was the one who uttered a wonderful word. He, this Herman Grimm – one can almost feel him as Goethe's governor in the second half of the nineteenth century – he, who was completely immersed in the German essence and was spiritually and emotionally connected to it, he spoke a very significant word about Goethe's biography, which the Englishman Lewes wrote. Lewes tried to weaken the old prejudices of the English with regard to Goethe. Because up until Lewes, every Englishman believed that the Germans revered a man, Goethe, who was actually a completely immoral fellow, despite having produced some beautiful things. With regard to Goethe's ethical nature, Mr. Lewes has achieved something. But Herman Grimm is right: when you read Lewes' biography, which is entitled “Goethe: His Life and Work”, you get the feeling that Lewes is writing about a person who was born in Frankfurt in 1749, a person to whom Goethe's life story is attributed, to whom Goethe's works are ascribed, and who died in March 1832. But what the German has in his Goethe is not even hinted at in Mr. Lewes' biography.

That is precisely what is so deeply ingrained in the German soul: universality, the desire to merge into that flowing spirituality and to transform the stream of spirituality into one's own being. That is what the peoples around Germany lack, and what they have basically still taken in very little to this day. And so one can say: What Herman Grimm once said with reference to the people of the East is true and right. There, he said, there was a Russian who had also written a biography, the biography of Beethoven. Nothing of what Beethoven really is lives in the biography.

Just compare the selfless, devoted way in which the German mind, always wanting to become, wants to delve into what is spread throughout the world, how it, disregarding its own character traits, knows how to find its way into those of others. How the German spirit has united Shakespeare's spirit with its own. When something like this is experienced in a nation, then a Herman Grimm is justified in saying this with reference to Mr. Lewes' alleged biography of Goethe. And when one sees how little heart and mind were actually present in those who have often called themselves the leaders of other nations, one understands a lot. One understands a lot when one really delves into what one can experience together with the German spirit. One can say: There really is something in this German spirit of that Faustian mood, which on the one hand has hidden life's great riddle in: “All that is transitory is only a parable,” but on the other hand says: “Whoever strives can be redeemed.” And in the German spirit lives something that must lead beyond all pessimism, something that establishes a true foundation for future security and future hope. But how little this has basically entered into the hearts and souls of those who, with some sincerity, seek in other nations what can liberate the spirit and bring harmony to the liberated human soul.

I would like to characterize for you how one of the most important Russians, Alexander Herzen, established a kind of spiritual entente with the Englishman Stuart Mill; how one of the best Russian minds, Herzen, immersed himself in the philosophy of the Englishman Stuart Mill, in that basically entirely materialistic world view, that he found, looking across Europe, that basically this culture of Europe can give no consolation, no hope for the future of humanity. It is the characteristic words of this Russian that really illuminate in a flash what has been confronting each other in Europe for a long time, and what now had to be expressed in these terrible flames of war. Herzen says of Stuart Mill:

[He was not exaggerating when he spoke of the narrowing of the mind, of energy, of the polished nature of personalities, of the constant flattening of life, of the constant exclusion of general human interests from life, of the reduction of the same to the interests of the commercial office and of bourgeois prosperity. Mill speaks openly about the fact that in this way England will become China – and we add: and not only England.

And we add: Not only England! For Stuart Mill believes that with England, the whole of Europe must become China. We only get the answer to the question: How could such an opinion arise even in the heart of an aspiring person? We get the answer when we see how he passes by that striving of which Goethe says in his Faust: “Whosoever strives, we can redeem him.” He also passes by what Fichte, Goethe and Schiller can mean for the whole of modern development. Those who speak thus do not know the German spirit, that German spirit of which we shall say in our fateful days: in it lives the power which, though not, as the Russian thinks, to the scaffold and the stake, yet to pressure and death, to infinite pain and suffering, goes to defend what the German soul and its mission in the world is.

However, if Emerson sees in Goethe the very representative of the German spirit, and one of the present-day intellectuals of Russia finds the following words about Goethe, Mereschkowski, who even claims to revere Goethe - one should not be deceived, one should not be deceived in his “Leading Spirits,” which have now been translated into German, for anyone who truly recognizes Goethe cannot utter such words about Goethe, the representative of modern intellectual life, as the Russian Mereschkowski has done. He says:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German bourgeois and – if the shadow of the Olympian will have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a respectable son of the respectable Frankfurt shopkeeper.

Let us assume that Goethe would appear to Mereschkowski in certain situations in his life; but anyone who recognizes Goethe and what he is to humanity would not say such a thing. For it does not merely depend on whether one considers something to be right, but whether one has enough spirituality to say it or not. There is something in these words that the world has yet to learn from the German spirit.

But when we now see how what is German spiritual life is to be trampled underfoot from the east, how this German spiritual life, in alliance with the western peoples, is to be trampled underfoot from the east, then we may ask: What about the understanding and the possibility of understanding on the part of what is there in the east, with regard to the German essence?

Now, esteemed attendees, once again it is not a German speaking, once again I do not want to speak myself, but I let a member of the Russian people speak for himself, the philosopher Solowjow, who is basically not just a philosopher, but a seer, who is regarded by the most excellent Russians themselves as a representative of Russia. Let us ask him. How does he, who has been vilified for decades by Russian intellectuals and other seducers of the Russian people, how does he judge this deification of the race principle to the exclusion of the education principle, how does he judge this brute force in relation to Europe? Let us hear him, not ourselves; let us hear the Russians about the Russians, not about the intimate forces of the Russian people, but about the forces that have come about through the conspiracies of mendacious Pan-Slavism and mendacious grand duchies. Let us hear the Russians talk about all that has been in preparation for a long time. He says: “Why does Europe not love us?” And he answers:

Europe [...] looks at us with apprehension and dislike, because the elemental power of the Russian people is dark and mysterious, its spiritual and cultural powers inferior, but its demands clear, determined and great.

The clamor of our rationalism, which seeks to destroy Turkey and Austria, to beat the Germans, to conquer Constantinople and, if possible, India, is loudly heard in Europe. But if we are asked what we will do for humanity after taking and destroying all of that, we can only remain silent or spout meaningless phrases. [...] Thus [...] the most essential, indeed the only important question that honest and reasonable patriotism should address is not Russia's power and mission, but its sins.

Because the subject that the Russians themselves must discuss has been introduced by the powers that I have just mentioned, for decades preparations have been made for what is now devastating Europe with such terrible storms, coming from the east. For if the question is raised from so many sides: “Who wanted the war?”, then the question needs only to be transformed into another: “Who could have prevented the war?” And there is a clear answer to this question, which history must also provide: only Russia could have prevented the war. Of course, the Western powers will also have to bear the consequences, because without them Russia would have avoided the war, at least for now. But only hints can be given about this. For the German who allows what I have been able to sketch with charcoal to take effect in his soul, what is now to be fought for in the East and West, at such unspeakable cost, must be something that opens our eyes, that shows us how much we need to reflect on ourselves, to reflect on that which allows us to find the strong forces of the German character. By the number of his enemies, the German can gauge the necessity of this search for his own strength, which depends on himself. In this respect, many things can be instructive for us.

We believed that an understanding would dawn, especially among the French, for the German way of being. Strangely enough, even shortly before the war, there were people who believed that an understanding could be found for the German way of being in youthful France. I must, in conclusion, shed some light on this matter. Some of our best Germans were amazed that a Frenchman, Romain Rolland, who was one of the first to join with Verhaeren and others in directing the bitterest invective against German “barbarism,” found in Romain Rolland a mind that understood the German essence, that understood Germany. Why did they find this? Yes, the question is difficult to answer, very difficult. This Romain Rolland has written a novel. In this novel, a German, Jean-Christophe, plays a role. I am well aware that I am passing judgment, and that my judgment can stand up to any aesthetic, and I am prepared for those who find the judgment I am passing “barbaric”.

So Romain Rolland wrote his novel “Jean-Christophe”. The hero is German, but he is concocted in such a way that a wild chaos results. This character is concocted from Beethoven's youth, the fates of Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. All this is concocted in a jumble in this character. A character is shaped out of this, which in an artistic-aesthetic sense is basically repulsive to anyone who really has an appreciation for characterizations. And this Jean-Christophe – in German, this Johann Christof Kraft – is presented to us as he is placed in the terrible German circumstances. He spends his youth as a German among Germans, but he cannot stand these German circumstances. He has to get out of these German circumstances; he is not recognized in Germany. He does find some admirers, but he just can't stand the German way of doing things. He then goes to France. It is only in Paris that he finds what makes him a complete human being. This is described, along with other things, which are basically quite chaotic, just like Jean-Christophe himself.

And we have even been told by critics that this novel is one of the most significant achievements in the reconciliation of the German and French minds after 1870. And someone said the following about this novel:

I find myself at a loss as to how many times I should actually thank you. The human, the bon vivant, the artist, the German, the [worldly] side of me, each wants to come forward and say a word. But another time the artist should talk about this novel, another time the bon vivant, and the human wants to wait until he can shake your hand again. Today only the German should say thank you; for I have the feeling that French youth has become closer to us through this book, which has done more than all the diplomats, banquets and associations.

Someone printed this review as a letter to Romain Rolland.

In this book – forgive me for emphasizing this passage, but I can emphasize it without violating any artistic principle, simply because in Romain Rolland's work, which is a poor novel, you can hear Romain Rolland himself through his characters. When he gives his characters traits that are pleasing to him because he wants to talk about this German essence that he “knows so well”. It depends on what nuances are apparent to this young Frenchman, since he is supposed to understand the German essence so well. So we read the following, which comes about during a conversation with a visitor:

Since the German victories, the Germans did everything they could to compromise, to bring about a disgusting mishmash of new power and old principles. They did not want to abandon old idealism: That would have been an act of frankness that one was not capable of; in order to make it subservient to German interests, one had contented oneself with falsifying it. One followed the example of Hegel, the cheerfully duplicitous Swabian, who had waited for Leipzig and Waterloo to adapt the basic idea of his philosophy to the Prussian state

— In 1806, under the thunder of the guns at the Battle of Jena, Hegel wrote his fundamental work, which contains the basic outlines of all his later works. The Frenchman, who has not read Hegel either, or if he has, then without understanding, says that Hegel “waited for Leipzig and Waterloo”. And further.

and now, after interests had changed, it also changed its principles. When one was defeated, one said that Germany's ideal was humanity. Now that one was beating the others, it was said that Germany was humanity's ideal. As long as the other countries were the more powerful, one said with Lessing that love of one's country was a heroic weakness that one could very well do without, and one called oneself a citizen of the world. Now that victory had been achieved, there was no lack of contempt for “French” utopias: world peace, brotherhood, peaceful progress, human rights, natural equality; it was said that the strongest nation had an absolute right over the others, while the others, as the weaker ones, had no rights over it. It seemed as if the living God and the incarnate spirit, whose progress was achieved through war, violence and oppression.

That's how well the Frenchman understood the Germans!

Power, now that it was on his side, was canonized. Power had now become the epitome of all idealism and all reason.

To give honor to the truth, it must be said that Germany had suffered so much for centuries from having idealism without power that after so much trial she was well excused for now making the sad confession that she needed power above all, however it might be constituted. But how much hidden bitterness lay in such a confession of the people of a Herder and a Goethe! And what renunciation, what humiliation of the German ideal lay in this German victory! - And oh, this renunciation found only too much compliance in the lamentable tendency of all the best Germans to subordinate themselves.

“What characterizes the Germans,” said Möser more than a century ago, “is obedience.”

And Frau von Stael: “They obey properly. They use philosophical reasons to explain the most unphilosophical thing in the world: respect for power and the habituation to fear, which transforms respect into admiration.”

Christof found this feeling in the greatest and the smallest in Germany

- that is why he has to leave Germany -

from Wilhelm Tell onwards, the thoughtful, little bourgeois with the porter's muscles, who, as the free Jew Börne says: “to reconcile honor and fear, walks with his eyes downcast in front of the post of the tyrannical Mr. Gessler, so that he can invoke the fact that he did not disobey, who did not see the hat,” up to the honorable seventy-year-old Professor Weiße, one of the most respected scholars in the city, who, when a lieutenant passed him, quickly left the footpath to him and went down to the road.

Germany

— so says this good German-understander of France at another point,

Germany really bears the main burden of sin in Europe. If you have won the victory, you are responsible for it: you have incurred a debt against the vanquished; you have assumed the tacit responsibility of stepping forward and showing them the way. The victorious Louis XIV brought the world the splendor of French reason. What light did Germany of Sedan bring to the world?

Well, my dear audience, you may not find it wonderful when you have heard this that this Frenchman was among the first to weep with the others in the “Matin” over German “barbarism”. But you will find it wonderful that this book, this novel by Romain Rolland, was believed to be one of the most significant acts since 1870 in bringing about peace. It was quickly translated into German. The first three volumes were published shortly before the war. But this Frenchman wants to know the Germans, he also wants to describe them, where he finds characteristic moments in these Germans. As I said, he practices the technique of bad novelists, who are always audible when they let their characters speak. So this Frenchman, who is particularly surprising when he blows into the horn of the “Matin” et cetera, describes something that he really likes about the Germans. He describes how an admirer found Jean-Christophe a professor in Ulm. He visits him. Then the Frenchman describes what he calls a “German meal.” It was so good, the German meal, that even the cook Salomé peeks through the door to see how the gentlemen sitting with Jean-Christophe like it. That's when the Frenchman finds the “greatness” of Germany.

It was an exhibition of unforgettable, honest, unadulterated German cuisine with its aromas of all herbs, its thick sauces, its nutritious soups, its exemplary meat dishes, its monumental carp, its sauerkraut, its geese, its homemade cakes, its aniseed and caraway breads.

He describes something that he wants to depict as good about the Germans. But now, among those who came to see the German professor back then, there is one man who can sing well and who is truly not described in an outstandingly beautiful way by the Frenchman who understands Germans so well. And Romain Rolland loves music. His critics said that his novel was “the novel of modern music”. And he himself had grown to love Germany precisely because of music. So he describes someone who can sing. And he describes him in such a way that you can see that he, Jean-Christophe, wonders why a German can sing.

That is because the Germans do not know how to sing. They are seized by the power of song and the song works through them as if through an instrument. The spirit of the songs takes hold of them and they obey it. Because the soul of the German must do that. This soul obeys the song as the soldier obeys the general.

This is roughly how the Frenchman, who understands the Germans so well, describes the [German] art of singing.

And then he also gives us some insights into what the person who sings like this looked like. And so that you also have something good from the Frenchman's book in this area, I will also tell you that he describes this singer, who he admits sings excellently, for the reasons I have given, as a fat person who always sweats when he takes steps, but especially when he makes sounds. He describes his nature, his whole figure. Then he says: He looked like a Bavarian, a particular variety of German. He thinks that there are quite a few of these Bavarians, because they have the secret of preserving this human race, which “has come about through a system of noodles similar to that used to fatten poultry”.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I could tell you many more things about the characteristics of what is behind what is now physically expressed. Particularly when one considers the contrast between Frenchness and Germanness, as expressed so clearly in the fact that, driven out of their minds by the eternal desire for revenge, the French have done something that they will only realize in the future: they have allowed themselves to be dragged eastwards, about which we have even heard a Russian speak. When one considers this antagonism between Central Europe and the immediate West, then words such as these might come to mind – truly, when one looks at everything that has been produced on the other side of the Rhine, when one summarizes it all – words like this might come to mind:

To the best of my knowledge, there is no natural law and no heavenly parliamentary act on the basis of which France alone, among all earthly beings, does not have to give back some of its plunder if the plundered owner can take it back. Nobody except France itself at this moment can believe that there is such a natural law. Alsace and Lorraine did not come to France in such a providential way that they could not be taken away from it. Richelieu's cunning, Louis XIV's grandiose saber; these are France's only legal titles to the German lands. Richelieu unscrewed them. And General Turenne happened to be unscrewed at the same time. Because Turenne was a real German by blood and nature. But Francis I had set his ancestor, the little Duke of Bouillon, on the path we saw above, and he gradually made him French.

And so on. And further:

For me, the saddest symptom in France at present is the figure its geniuses are now making, its highest literary voices, which should be its prophets and seers and which this figure has in fact been making for a generation. These voices apparently believe that new heavenly wisdom is radiating from France over all other peoples, who are sitting in deep shadow. France is the new Zion of the universe. And all the sad, dirty, half-crazed and in large part positively infernal stuff that French literature has preached to us in the last fifty years is a true gospel from heaven, full of blessings for all the children of men. Ah, one understands that France made its great revolution; that it raised its terrible voice of destiny against a world of human illusions, proclaiming with the trumpet of the Last Judgment: There shall be no more illusions!

These words were not coined by Germans! Rather, the words that I have just read were translated by the Würzburg professor of psychiatry, Rieger, from a letter that was indeed published in the Times on November 18, 1870 and that was written by Thomas Carlyle about France and the French way of life, French greed, and the claims to Alsace-Lorraine. It is a rather nice symptom that a psychiatrist found this letter and translated it, because there will be many a psychiatric chapter in world history when everything that is now being brought into the world from the east and the west about the German character has to be judged.

But if, on the other hand, we allow ourselves to be influenced by this German essence in the way that not pride but humble self-awareness has done, if we see what Germany's best minds have achieved in the German spirit, if we see how intuitions of spiritual science, spiritual insights have emerged in Schiller and Fichte, so that we have to say to ourselves: In this German essence lie seeds that oblige us to develop them further into blossoms and fruits, then we must fill our soul with the right future securities and future possibilities. And we will know that when our fateful and destiny-laden days are again replaced by such days in which history again speaks objectively, that then the question will hang over the enemy nations like one of the most terrible questions: Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”?

And in answering this question, one will feel how the German spirit has not completed its tasks in the world as a whole, in the development of humanity. One will feel how right Goethe was when he said to Luden, even in a fateful time:

The destiny of the Germans is not yet fulfilled. If they had had no other task than to break up the Roman Empire and create and organize a new world, they would have perished long ago. But since they have continued to exist, and in such strength and efficiency, I believe that they must still have a great destiny.

When one feels the German essence, one will feel how it has to defend itself today as if locked in a great fortress – even the enemies who do not understand it and want to trample it underfoot – and one will find that this German essence has not yet reached completion, that this German spirit must fight for its existence not only for its own good but also for the good of the development of the earth. And today we may summarize what this reflection could only contain in hints, we may summarize it in words that point out how, even if the German spirit has already achieved great things, what it has achieved must appear in the present as the germ of future blossoms and fruits. And one would like to call out to those over whom the question will hover as historical fate: Why do they call the people of Fichte and Schiller a “barbarian people”? In answer, one must call out to them what we want to conclude today's reflection with:

The German spirit has not completed
what it is to bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in future concerns,
It hopes for future deeds] full of life; -
In the depths of his being, he feels mightily
Hidden things that must have their effect as they mature.
How can a mindless enemy
Wish for his end to come:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
Which holds him in the roots of his being?

Dear Attendees!

For many years, I have had the privilege of speaking in other German cities, as well as here in Hamburg, about subjects related to the humanities, the science that is aware of being a true continuation of the scientific way of thinking for the knowledge of the spiritual life of man, which has developed within humanity for three to four centuries. Now it is not out of short-sighted feelings, but, as I believe, precisely out of the knowledge of this spiritual science itself, that the power to recognize the human being in a spiritual way, to recognize that in man which extends beyond birth and death, that the power for this must be sought for humanity from that which one is justified in calling the spiritual idealism of the German people, that idealism which has developed in the most profound and also in the sharpest way in the greatest period of German intellectual life from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, but which continues to have an effect into our own days. And I believe – just as this belief already underlay the reflection that I was allowed to make last year here in this city – I believe that it is well suited to the great facts and developmental impulses that we face in our time when the members of the German people immerse themselves in can bring in the deepest sense of the word knowledge of their own nature, which can then lead to an evaluation of this own nature in relation to the insults and slander that are without precedent - like these world events in the entire history of the development of mankind. I believe that it is more appropriate in the face of these insults and slander to pursue an objective course of thought that is more in keeping with the nature of the German people, to objectively clarify the significance that the German people could assume through their achievements in the overall development of humanity. Above all, attention must be drawn to a prejudice, one might say, if the word were not strongly taken out against the feelings in the present, above all attention must be drawn to a prejudice that repeatedly and repeatedly arises within the circles of our people, the prejudice that the newer intellectual life must, for the very reason that it wants to appear on scientific ground, have an international character from the outset. How often have we heard it said, and how matter-of-factly we accept it: science must be international. Certainly, to a certain limited degree that is absolutely true. But the question is whether it is really one of the fruitful perceptions and feelings that we should keep building on this saying over and over again when we want to express our thoughts about the relationship between individual nations. The sun is certainly international, and so is the moon. But how different are the ideas, the perceptions, the feelings that the various peoples are able to express about the moon and the sun. International is certainly the science; but is the way in which the individual peoples approach science international, and why do some approach it perhaps more superficially, while others delve into it? And is it not especially important for Germans to reflect on a word spoken by one of the greatest Germans, Goethe, when he had completed a great part of his journey to the south and had occupied himself not only with the contemplation of various art treasures, but had also occupied himself with the contemplation of the most diverse natural objects and natural facts, when he said: He would most like to make a journey to India, not to discover anything new, but to contemplate what has been discovered in his own way, that is, to see it again. viewing the most diverse natural objects and natural facts, he said: He would most like to make a journey to India, not to discover something new, but to view what has been discovered in his own way, that is, to see again in the external phenomena that which is alive in his soul.

It is not that which is internationally abstract that acts as a motivating and sustaining element in the forces of nations, but rather that which the individual souls of the individual nations are able to see in the [gap in the transcript]

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to approach the consideration from the point of view of spiritual scientific knowledge. And I firmly believe that the German may approach this observation of his relationship to other nations in this objective way. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, dear honored attendees, is still very young, even if, as we shall see, this spiritual science can develop in a very organic way out of German idealism. But regardless of this, it is all too easy to understand that this spiritual science still finds opponents everywhere today, and that what it has to say – has to say from a consideration that is just as thorough and profound as that [for science] – is still sometimes ridiculed and mocked as something paradoxical, perhaps even insane. But it is precisely such a question, as that about the souls of different peoples, that spiritual science attempts to grasp objectively in a certain sense.

If you look at the human soul in a spiritual scientific sense, it does not appear to you from this point of view as today's conventional soul science or psychology often believes. I would say that everything in the soul is mixed up.

Spiritual science must observe the soul as natural science observes any phenomenon. Just as the natural scientist must seek to recognize the essence of sunlight by observing its manifestation in the world of colors, so the soul researcher must seek the soul essence in its manifestations if he is to strive for an understanding of this essence. Sunlight reveals itself in reddish, greenish and blue-violet color shades. Just as the natural scientist distinguishes the reddish-yellow shade on the one side of the color spectrum of light, so the spiritual scientist distinguishes on the one side of the soul that which can be called the sentient soul. And just as the natural scientist distinguishes the greenish center as a phenomenon in sunlight, so it appears to the spiritual scientist, as it were, in the center of the soul being, that which can be called the intellectual soul; viewed from another side, this intellectual soul can appear as the soul of feeling. And as the other end of the soul rainbow, so to speak, appears that which can be addressed as the consciousness soul.

When one looks at the human soul in this way, from a spiritual science perspective, one comes to the conclusion that in the sentient soul, everything lives that emerges more from the subconscious depths of the soul, that lives out more in sensations, in will impulses, in a semi-unconscious, instinctive way. But at the same time it contains that which is first lived out in an indeterminate way within the soul, that which is the soul's share in the spiritual, in eternal life. The mind soul is that through which man comprehends the surrounding world in such a way that he brings concepts and ideas into everything, that he, so to speak, builds the world for himself like an external structure of natural laws. The consciousness soul contains that which is most closely related to what man recognizes as his position in the physical world, whereby he places himself most in the finite, in the interwoven nature of death.

This is how it is initially with the three – I would say rainbow – shades of the soul. And just as the light, the common light, lives in all colors, lives in the three color shades, so the I, the actual self, the eternal being of the human being that passes through births and deaths, lives in these three soul shades. And just as these three soul nuances are found in the individual human soul, so they show themselves in the different nations. So that in the soul life of nations - I now say explicitly: of nations, not of individuals within nations, not of individuals, but of nations as a whole - the soul of the different nations is expressed in the one national soul, especially the sentient soul, while the other aspects of the soul are more in the background: in the case of the other people, the intellectual soul is more in the background, in the case of a third people, the consciousness soul is more in the background, and in the case of a fourth people, what permeates and imbues the individual soul aspects: the I, the self. And, however paradoxical it may still appear to many today, one understands a part of European humanity only when one knows how these individual shades of soul are distributed among the souls of the individual nations.

Thus, when we consider the Italian national soul, we find that the soul of feeling predominates in this Italian national soul. In the French national soul, what must be called the soul of reason predominates in the most eminent sense. In the British national soul, what must be called the consciousness soul predominates. In the German national soul – and this is not spoken out of some particular feeling, but out of knowledge – what must be called the ego, the self, that which seeks to harmonize and unify the various soul nuances, that which radiates through the various soul nuances, predominates. And all the individual phenomena of life within the individual nations, even the way in which the different nations do not understand each other, all this follows from this knowledge of the national souls. If the German people in particular seems to me to be called upon to gain an understanding of what actually prevails between nations, based on an awareness of the nature of the soul, while the one-sidedness of other nations prevents them from truly gaining an understanding of the nature of each different nation. Can it not be grasped with one's hands – if I may use the image, ladies and gentlemen – that in the Italian national soul, unconscious, instinctive impulses live everywhere? Even when we go to the greatest, whose greatness should certainly not be belittled, we find the life of feeling prevailing everywhere. If you immerse yourself in the works of thinkers such as Giordano Bruno or Dante, you will find that it is the life of feeling that wells up from the unconscious and is given visual form, that which is not first sought after in a thought that justifies it, but which one simply wants to bring up from the soul and, I would say, let it speak.

And if you take the French national soul – not the individual Frenchman – if you take the national soul, then you have to say to yourself – and this is something that, for example, in an external relationship, not out of the knowledge with which we are dealing here, is recognized by many who think objectively, for example in neutral countries, for example, if you look at the French national soul, you will find wit everywhere; you will find what the intellect can crystallize; but you will especially find a certain constructive spirit, that understanding spirit that seeks to build the world in the way that the intellect can build the world.

And there is nothing clearer, dear attendees, than the way in which – I would say – one of the greatest minds, especially in the French world view, shows how reason works in the soul in particular.

The French are now calling one of their greatest philosophers – yes, I don't know, should we say 'fils de montagne'? He was called 'Bergson' until the war, and that's what I call him after the war, but they don't want us to call him that across the border. He is the one who, in the most incredible way, I would say, imagines his French world view into the German people, because, yes, he seems to have believed that when the French advance with cannons and rifles, the Germans will confront them with recitations of Novalis or Goethe or Schiller. And since they didn't do that, since they also have cannons, and bigger cannons than the French have, and have set them against the French, he talks about how all of German culture is mechanized, how everything is just like one big machine. And at a certain hour – you can read about it in foreign newspapers – he entertained his audience at a French academy by showing them how the Germans have degenerated in modern times from the heights they occupied under Goethe, Schiller, under Fichte, under Schelling, under Hegel and Kant and Schopenhauer, how they cling to everything, everything hang on to superficialities, how they are, in a hypocritical way, something like [gap in the transcript], how, in a hypocritical way, especially in the present, they refer again to Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, but how they understand them today in a very mechanical way and unite them with their soul in a very mechanical way. Admittedly, these Germans are unpleasant – but the French will perhaps only realize this when the borders are open again – [the Germans] are unpleasant, because they could prove that they have indeed recently been dealing more intensively with the aforementioned spirits, who drew their world view deeply from their essence, and thus sought to deepen the German essence. But something else could be proven. They could, for example, prove that Henri Bergson copied entire long pages almost word for word from Schelling, Schopenhauer and so on, and that basically his entire philosophy, which is certainly a sign of our time, is largely German plagiarism. That is non-mechanical appropriation!

And, esteemed attendees, if we now look, say, for example, across to the British national soul: just as the Italian national soul bears the main nuance of the sentient soul, and the French national soul bears the intellectual soul, so the British national soul bears the consciousness soul for our present time. The Italian feels, the Frenchman thinks, the Briton asserts himself in the physical world, that is, he seeks to develop his relationship to the physical world in some way. I am not speaking out of some national sentiment, but out of what can be proven down to the details. One might say: How Kant had to strive to deepen this view, which was only directed towards the physical world, in a conceptual sense. Kant's entire striving is, from a certain point of view, a working out of what he has become, for example through Hume, through Locke and other British minds. And it is fitting to take a good look at this aspect of the development of more recent spiritual life. Hume – let us single him out. What did he achieve?

He managed to say: Yes, when we look at the world, we actually find everywhere not the truth, not even cause and effect, no connections, but only that one phenomenon follows on from another. The most superficial of world views!

With regard to everything else, he arrives at what is called skepticism, a doubting of everything. Kant had to work his way out of this. But now, if we look at where this world view – insofar as it is now the expression of the soul of the people – has led, what has it led to? We see a remarkable world view developing in modern times, in the present, which has emerged precisely from the British national spirit, which is supported in this by the American national spirit. We have seen that out of this consciousness soul, which above all wants to assert the I in the world, in the physical world, what is called pragmatism has developed. We cannot speak about this objectively, because a number of Germans have also fallen for it – if I may use the trivial word – because they are philosophers, have fallen for this pragmatism. What is this pragmatism? Well, this pragmatism actually does no more or no less than say: Oh, truth, as it is supposed to develop out of the soul as truth, does not actually exist. What we summarize in individual judgments, in ideas that we then regard as truth, is only thought up by the human mind in order to prove useful out in the world. When you speak of the soul, soul is only a pragmatic concept. We see how there are individual phenomena in human life that fall apart and we cannot hold them together properly if we do not presuppose a unity. We only have it to grasp what is an external phenomenon. The truth must be something, an advantage that can be used in the external physical world. That is pragmatism. One must not believe that this is just a philosophical hair-splitting. It is deeply connected with the national spirit and with what creates out of this national spirit. In the 1880s and 1890s, [Robert Seeley], a professor of history, looked at English history – the relevant work was published in 1883 – and pointed out that it is actually a kind of prejudice – because that is the meaning of the history book – that in the nineteenth century, in Englishness, one has always regarded the struggle of Englishness for freedom and democracy as running through English history. He goes back a little further and tries to look at this English history and finds that what has happened can be summarized under the name “British expansion”; first Great Britain, then Greater Britain. The Italians were just parroting them, talking about “greater Italy.” And then the professor says, “But history is not just there to be learned from, to gain some truth that you now carry with you, so that you know something from history. Rather, history must be shaped, must be introduced into life.” And how is it shaped? It is characterized by the fact that one sees: Britain has expanded more and more over the last few centuries. So one must learn from it how to expand further. – The truth, as one can use it, as one can put it at the service of outer physical life!

I do not believe, esteemed readers, that I am presenting a one-sided view of these things, but rather that people have always been one-sided in their consideration of these matters because they have not been willing to consider the things in their real essence. In this context, it should always be emphasized how we Germans actually fared in the course of the nineteenth century in the spiritual realm with regard to the formation of a world view.

Goethe – I am in a position to speak about this because I have spent the whole of my life, thirty-five years, studying Goethe – Goethe tried to build a world view from the observation of external facts, which considers the relationship of external nature in detail. He tried to find the spirit in the development of beings. But basically, he made very little impression on the time. Then Darwin came along. He approached the task in an English way, truly in an English way, that is, he approached it in such a way that it is not particularly difficult to delve into his train of thought. And he gave everything that can be followed externally in the physical world, that can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands. That made an impression. And when it comes to Goethe, the world is still indebted to recognize – even if it is of course more difficult to find one's way into Goethe's theory of evolution – to recognize how much higher Goethe's theory of evolution is than that which arose in the nineteenth century on the basis of Darwinian research.

However, a Frenchman, a French philosopher, yes, I would almost say, of course, one who not so long ago before the war traveled around in Germany, even spoke at a German university about the deep friendship between the French and German mind, a Frenchman, he has tried to highlight the differences in recent weeks between the scientific world view that the German is seeking and that which the Frenchman and the Englishman are seeking. He told the French audience in Paris that if they want to get to know animals, want to have knowledge of animals, want to integrate their concepts of things into their world view, then they go to a menagerie and look at the animals. That's one way, certainly. The Englishman, said this French philosopher to his Parisian audience, the Englishman goes on a journey around the world, sees the animals in the various parts of the world and then describes what he has seen. And the German – he would go neither to the menagerie nor to the different parts of the world, but he would go into his room and delve into his own inner being to bring the essence of the lion, the essence of the hyena, and so on, to the surface from his own inner being. If you want to characterize the three peoples with a certain wit, which is certainly not to be denied the French, and perhaps also want to characterize them according to the proportion of thought and ideas present in their world view, then you can do that. Yes, but there is a catch to this story. The wit that the French professor has made out of his thoroughness is not his own, but Heinrich Heine's.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is clear to a certain extent that German intellectual life has always tried to avoid one-sidedness and to find something that can shine through the whole of the individual shades of the soul. To do this, however, German intellectual life had to penetrate again and again into the innermost part of the human soul. And in order to show – I would like to say – by the facts how the German tried to get to the essence of the world, to the essence of what the world springs from and wells up from, I would like to present three German figures today. Not because, dear attendees, I believe that one could somehow dogmatically accept what these three figures have created as a world view within German idealism, but because I believe that there are indeed three figures that have emerged from the innermost essence of German nationality, the German national soul. I would like to say: Today we can go far beyond regarding a figure that appears in the world history of the spirit in such a way that we accept what he has expressed as individual sentences, as individual ideas, as individual opinions, as if it were a dogma. We can look at people as they have striven, as they stand in their search for a world view. Here we encounter a German figure whom I tried to point out from a different point of view here in this city last winter, and who is much talked about now. First of all, we encounter the figure who was aware that what he had to say about a world view had been created entirely, as it were, through a dialogue with the German national soul itself: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I would like to give just a few traits of this Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to show that he is indeed a figure that could only have emerged from the wholeness of German intellectual life; for such a figure as Fichte really did arise out of German intellectual life. When we see Fichte in the blue peasant's coat, we can meet him as a seven-year-old boy standing on the bank of a stream, the stream that flows past his father's house, throwing a book into the stream, the Siegfried saga. His father comes along. The father is angry about it because he gave Fichte the Siegfried saga as a present last Christmas. But it turned out that Fichte, who had been a good student until then, became completely absorbed in the Siegfried saga and was now less inclined to study. He only needed to be made aware of his duty, and he would immediately say: “Duty must give way to everything.” And we can find the seven-year-old boy throwing the Siegfried saga, which has kept him from his duty, into the stream. The soul felt and sensed everything in the deepest, most intimate connection with this soul.

On a Sunday, a neighboring landowner came to the simple farming village where Fichte grew up. At that time, Fichte was a nine-year-old boy. The neighboring landowner had come to hear the sermon, but he was too late. The sermon was no longer being heard by the landowner. So they called for nine-year-old Fichte, because they knew how Fichte, even as a nine-year-old boy, knew how to connect what he heard with his soul. He came in his blue farmer's coat and repeated word for word the sermon he had just heard, with such inner fire that it was clear that every word he said had grown together with the innermost part of his soul. It was not just the soul of feeling or the soul of mind or consciousness that was at work, but the soul as a whole. In this sense, Fichte is – I would say – one of the most quintessentially German minds, but one that was also intimately connected with the whole mission, or rather, with the whole essence of German nationality.

I would say that one has to let one's gaze wander far and wide if one wants to characterize this essence of German nationality in just a few words.

Let us look across to Asia, where the Germans' relatives, their Aryan relatives, are to be found. There we find in these Aryan relatives the urge to find the divine and spiritual in the world. But everywhere we find this urge coupled with another: to tone down the self, to dampen it so that it feels extinguished in order to merge into the universe. The other pole has found expression in the German nature, in the German being's search for a world view. Do the Aryan relatives in Asia seek to pour themselves out into the universe and thus find a world picture by muting the ego, as they do in India, for example? The German, on the other hand, seeks to find within this ego that which pours the divine into this ego by elevating and strengthening, ensoulings and spiritualizing this ego within himself. So that it is not by being subdued, but by being elevated, by the elevated striving of the ego, that this ego is led up into that which, as the divine-spiritual, pulsates through, permeates and interweaves the world.

And so Fichte again confronted the human ego, the human self, with his whole being, in order to discover in the self the forces that give a world view. I would say that he does this not only by attempting to express through abstract theories and through all kinds of mere abstract ideas what a world view can constitute, but rather that it is his entire being, the totality of this being, through which he presents himself, whether to his students or to his people in general.

Someone who listened to him once said: When Fichte speaks publicly or even to his students, his speech rolls like a thunderstorm that breaks into individual fires. His imagination is not lush, but energetic; his images are not magnificent, but strong and powerful. And he reigns in the realm of ideas, so that it becomes apparent that he not only dwells in this invisible world of ideas, but can rule in it. But in this way of speaking, there was something in Fichte by which he tried to let his whole soul overwhelm his listeners. Therefore, a friend who knew him well could say: He sought not only to educate good people, but to educate great people. And he did not just seek to tell his listeners something, but he sought to make a living whole out of what he and his listeners together were.

Those people who prefer to just listen passively and accept what does not demand any thought of their own while listening would not have been particularly fond of Fichte, the quintessentially German mind. For example, he repeatedly did the following with his audience. He said: “Think about the wall!” And so the audience thought about the wall, tried to think about the wall. Of course they managed it quite well. — “So,” he said, “now try to think of the one who thinks the wall!” — Then you could see how many were stunned, how many were quite strangely affected. But by such an imposition, Fichte tried to reject the human being to that which wells up and overflows within himself. For he could not say like Cartesius: “I think, therefore I am,” but he regarded this I in its perpetual liveliness, in its perpetual arising. And only such an I did he allow, which continually generates itself, which has the power to arise anew in each moment, in each following moment. The will, the will prevailing in the I, became for him the fundamental power of the I. And in that the I grasps itself in the highest sense in its fundamental powers, it grasps the highest divine power, which weaves and undulates into the I.

For Descartes, the world view was such that he did not even admit souls in animals, but rather, to him, they were mechanisms, machines - the whole world a mechanism. Of course, Fichte also saw how the mechanical is present in the external physical world; but for him, this mechanical was not dismissed when it was observed. Rather, one could only find one's way into this mechanical if one found the divine-spiritual source of things, which, however, could only be found in the will nature of man.

And so for Fichte, the spiritual that permeates and flows through the world became, for Fichte, the moral order of the world - above a mechanical order of the world. The divine-spiritual appeared to him in the effect of duty, which pulsates into the human soul. And the mechanisms, the external products of nature, appeared to him in this way in relation to the whole of creation in his world view, as if the human being, who first and foremost wants to be morally active, makes individual machines for himself, in which he cannot ask to what extent they are moral, but which nevertheless serve the moral, the moral order of the human being. Thus, for Fichte, mechanical nature was only, as he says, the expression of the realization of duty, of the moral order of the world, that it was the sensitized material of duty. For Fichte, the mechanical nature is everywhere the world-moral world order, and everything that is not moral is there so that duty has tools to realize itself in the world. That is the power of the mind that prevailed in Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Today, you don't have to take Fichte's point of view. You don't have to accept what he expressed as his opinion. But that is not the point at issue. The point is what can be gained by allowing oneself to be inspired, as it were, by the way that a thinker like Fichte approached the spiritual world and formed one of the worldviews of German idealism on that basis. Strengthening of the soul, but also development of the soul, can be gained by not engaging dogmatically, but humanly, with the kind of striving that appears in Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Now we turn to his successor, the much-misunderstood Schelling. For him, external nature was not something soulless either. He could not stop at considering external nature only a sensualized material of the moral world order, but for him, external nature was a strengthened spirit. And the spirit was a nature endowed with soul. And in his world view, the two combined to form a whole. And the divine-spiritual that rules the world was for him the great artist who creates by bringing forth the world out of the divine-benevolent, because it is meant to stand as beauty in the face of the invisible spiritual. In this much-misunderstood Schelling, contemplation of spirit and contemplation of nature grow together in an intimate way. But in fact this man was a reflection of his whole personality, who in his old age still stood before his audience with sparkling eyes, from which, as if through the gaze of man, a deep contemplation of nature spoke naturally, a contemplation of nature that glowed with beauty. This man was such that we can say: he only represented the other side of German intellectual life, of the German national soul, so to speak. Fichte, too, could be said to represent something like the consciousness soul of the human being, but this consciousness soul is illuminated by the I. Schelling, too, represents something like the intellectual soul of the human being; but this intellectual soul is illuminated by the I, so that it has an effect on the human mind. Again, it is the exaltation, the strengthening of that which is always in the human soul that Schelling seeks. He goes so far as to make the following statement, which certainly cannot be substantiated: To know nature is to create nature. But this saying is still so fruitful that it should not be accepted as a dogma, but rather be recognized as coming from the soul of a man who wants to plunge with his whole soul into nature and seek the spirit in nature.

The third aspect of German national character is portrayed by the much-misunderstood Hegel. Only he presents this German folk-spirit with the greatest power. For him, that which reigns through the world as the Divine-Spiritual is thought everywhere. Man seeks thought. But man not only imagines thought, he draws thought out of all phenomena, because thought lives in everything. One may, of course, unreservedly acknowledge the one-sidedness. The spiritual-divine appears as a mere logician. The world recognizes Hegel as if it were only thought. Of course, one will never come to a different understanding of the world than to an understanding of the world as thought. But that is not the point; rather, the point is that one should be able to reflect, I would say, to reflect, in order to develop thought in such a fine way as Hegel developed it. And that is how he came to see, in terms of his world view, that we only know the world to the extent that we can recognize it as reasonable in all its aspects. Everything real is reasonable, and everything reasonable is real. You can scoff, but the sneer is cheap. You can even scoff at such passion and write it off, as Bergson does! But the sneer is cheap. That is not the point. The point is that this one-sidedness was bound to emerge from the very depths of German national character, because, by immersing himself in this pure, crystal-clear thought, which emerged through Hegel in the development of the spiritual being of humanity, because man thereby grows together in this pure thought with what, in turn, pulses and weaves through the world as pure thought. What matters is not the thoughts that Hegel produced, but the feeling that he associated with his thought life, this feeling: to know oneself as one with the divine thinking that permeates the world and that is reflected in the individual human soul. Everywhere it is the exaltation, the strengthening, the energizing of the self that is sought, in order to find, through this exaltation, energizing, strengthening of the self, that which can open up in the innermost part of the soul, can reveal itself as the most divine, which in the life of human beings, in the life of all beings, in the life of all nature, reveals itself.

These thoughts were too great, these aspirations were too comprehensive, which emerged from the three – I would say – most powerful world view personalities of the German people, to immediately gain a complete foothold. But they are there. And they should be considered not in so far as they said this or that, but in so far as the German essence can be recognized by the fact that such thoughts and feelings and possibilities of knowledge lay within it. Our intention cannot be to get to know Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, but to get to know the German essence in its revelations, in so far as they express this German essence. That is what matters.

Certainly, this world view of German Idealism, this tripartite world view, as I would call it, has passed its peak, the justified peak of the scientific world view. And so far, no one has been able to combine both, this scientific world view and this world view of German Idealism, in a living way. But they will become one. And it is my conviction that it is precisely through spiritual science that this becoming one can be made possible.

What does the Italian ask today — I mean, insofar as he grows out of his nationality, not as an individual — what does he ask, how does what he creates as a world view relate to religious feelings? What does the Frenchman ask about when he wants to develop a scientific world view? The Englishman asks more about it. But he asks about it in a peculiar way. We can study this with Darwin, but also with many others. This Darwin seeks a world view purely from the facts of the physical world. But he draws no conclusions from it. He allows to exist alongside the world view that is based only on convention, on external origin. And so we find that Darwin does not feel the need to somehow modify his convictions about spiritual matters by creating an external world view about the physical world - although, by immersing himself in German development, this does become a big, all-encompassing question. The German cannot see a mere mental image based on tradition alongside a natural image, because that would seem like a lie to him. And he would rather accept Haeckel's materialism than a British world view, which can place the most pious sentiments next to naturalism without motivation and without seeking a connection.

Therefore, we are witnessing such a tragic phenomenon, one that I would go so far as to call heartbreaking. Ernst Haeckel, who today, out of his German sensibilities, is vigorously turning against Britain, has become completely Germanized, and with stronger words than some others, because basically his entire world view is based on Huxley and Darwin. Anyone who can sense what can live in the human soul from the heights of a world view will see the tragedy in Haeckel's soul, the tragedy that is based purely on the fact that the German - Haeckel - could not, like Darwin, let a spiritual world view exist alongside a purely natural world because he strove for wholeness and did not have the strength, like Fichte, like Schelling, like Hegel, to get into the spirit, and therefore constructed a world view that was directed towards Darwinism, towards the contemplation of external nature.

But one should not think that what is now beginning to assert itself, where spiritual science begins, that what this spiritual science itself has to say, could basically be based on anything other than - I would say - the world view of German idealism. That is, so to speak, the root. And spiritual science will have to be its blossoms and fruits. In spiritual science, we speak of the fact that the human soul can be shaped in a certain way – and those of you who have listened to me here in the past year will know what these various methods there are for slowly freeing the soul, as it were, from the physical, from the bodily, so that it may, as it were, enter the spiritual world outside the body and truly see the spiritual world. We know that we really see the spiritual world when we undergo certain spiritual exercises in the soul. The spiritual researcher cannot conduct external experiments, but he conducts research in a higher, spiritual realm just as the natural scientist does. He brings his soul to the point where this soul can truly free itself from the tools of the body, and also from the thinking apparatus, and can face the spiritual phenomena of the world as a soul. Once these things are considered in a deeper sense, it will be found that what we call meditation and concentration of thought today, through which the soul attains liberation from physical existence, through which it recognizes within itself the eternal powers that pass through birth and death and remain present when man lays aside his physical body. It will be recognized that these exercises had their strongest beginning in the days when Fichte wanted to strengthen the will, Schelling the mind, and Hegel the thought; for it is essentially the strengthening of thinking, feeling, and willing that brings the soul to contemplate the eternal, whereby we also bring the soul to that objectivism by which it recognizes that it carries within itself an eternal essence, which has united with the physical body through birth, and which re-enters the spiritual world for other experiences of existence when the outer, physical body is discarded.

The world view of German idealism has not yet been able to lead to actual spiritual science, just as the root is not yet the flower and the fruit. But if one does not want to use materialism in its most real form to contemplate the spirit, where, for example, one uses external events, which can only exist in the sensual-physical world, to recognize the spirit, when one physical nature to recognize the spirit, but when one wants to recognize the spirit through the spirit, then one will find that one has the best guidance in what Fichte, Schelling, Hegel tried to do.

And when we speak today of the fact that man, completely absorbed in himself, is searching for the foundations of his soul, by having to live what we call meditation, and when we now turn our gaze again to the whole German national spirit, we cannot do so in that dreamy way, like the Asian-minded spirit, but in a lively way. Through the elevation and invigoration of the self, what Fichte, Schelling and Hegel sought has come about: a meditation of the whole German people, a striving for knowledge of the real spirit. And in this striving for knowledge of the real spirit, there really was a release of the soul from the body. And to prove this to you, I would like to read a few words from Schelling, where Schelling says:

“The soul in man is therefore not merely the principle of individuality, but that by which he rises above all selfhood, by which he becomes capable of the sacrifice of self, disinterested love, and, what is the highest, of the contemplation and knowledge of the essence of things.”

This liberation of the soul from the body is the goal of German idealism's world view. This world view is not a one-sided scientific one, it is not something that can be gained through an international science, but it is something by which the soul of man in all its powers, in its totality, makes itself inclined and suited to face the divine-spiritual of the world directly.

The depth of feeling cannot be conceived from this world view. And basically, something always weaves and lives in the deepest striving of the German for a world view of what Jakob Böhme expresses so beautifully:

"When you see the depth

he means the blue depth of the sky

“heaven and the stars and look at the earth,”

says Jakob Böhme

“See your God, and in the same you live and are also. And the same God reigns through you and also reigns you.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge stands in this God, and when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

This is the depth that is inseparable from German thought, and that can be sought within the West on the paths that are indispensable for the further development of humanity, that which the Aryan Indian seeks on paths that can no longer be the paths of the present, that must be abandoned must be abandoned for the sake of the present, what is sought as an experience of the Divine-Spiritual permeating the world in a world picture that does not exclude sensuality, but which also encompasses the spirit and includes sensuality, indeed, which recognizes sensuality itself as a spiritual one.

Such is the world view, dear attendees, such is the world view of German Idealism, sought on new paths of life in the Divine-Spiritual, but not by a damping down of the I, of the self, but by an upward forcing, so that the I and that which, as Divine-Spiritual, pulsates through the world, can become one, that is, can experience each other in each other. And so this striving for a world view in German Idealism actually places itself in the context of the entire more recent historical development, insofar as it is spiritual, and knows: because it is about a world view that has been experienced, that is why the German is so difficult to understand. For one would have to be able to identify with his experience, one would have to seek in his totality that which he seeks as a totality, and which the others can only see as one-sidedness.

And if we now turn our gaze away from Western and Central Europe and look towards Eastern Europe, we find a people living there in large areas who, above all, are characterized by the fact that the soul has not yet emerged at all , neither to the sentient soul nor to the consciousness soul nor to the mind soul, that it also does not grasp what can be experienced in the I, but that it still longs and wants to see, quite like an external being, what pulses through the world as its essence. The Russian people are a very peculiar people. They are a very peculiar people because, unlike the peoples of the West, they do not have within themselves the source from which a world view can arise. The longing to receive a world view from outside lives in this Russian people, but at the same time there is an unwillingness to receive this world view from the West. That is why in modern Russian literature we repeatedly encounter the view that all Western and Central European culture is rotten and dead, and that only from the young Russian spiritual life can arise that world view which can redeem humanity. Again and again it comes to us. I would like to say: It comes to us in such a way that one sees the enormous arrogance that lies in regarding everything Western as something decrepit and wanting to start the world over, but with the awareness that one is starting with something better.

And so we see in Russian minds, for example in Herzen, as in his - one only has to read his writing “From the Other Bank” - as in his, to be sure, a precise knowledge - let us say, for example, of Hegel, also of the other German achievements in relation to an idealistic world view - as he explicitly says: With that, nothing is done. All of this is in the world. What he finds particularly unappealing about Hegel is that he claims that reality is reasonable. He claims that reality is fundamentally unreasonable and foolish; and that the Russian must first come to bring something reasonable to the world. For the other thing that is considered reasonable in Europe, he says, is decrepit and ripe for extinction. “From the other bank” is the title of his book, because, he says, all these minds: Hegel and the rest, have all stood on the other side of the river in a hustle and bustle that must disappear, that only deserves to be viewed from the other bank.

But on the other hand, one must say that at least this Russian national soul understood something at the end of the nineteenth century, understood it while at the same time connecting it with a tremendous arrogance. As it were, the Russian national soul looked out over the vast expanse of Asia and saw that something there was also ripe for destruction and needed to be fertilized by the West. But what was to fertilize was seen as the Russian element. And this is expressed very particularly in a book by Yushakov published in 1885. It is an interesting book, a very interesting book. Let us first consider the positive part, for it is interesting to let the world picture of German idealism take full effect on us. If you take it all in, you can say that through the way in which the German, in this idealism, seeks a world view, he creates in modern times that which Pan-Asianism created in primeval times, which found expression in Asia, but at an earlier stage of human development.

How does the Russian Yushakov see the matter? Well, of course, he first finds a Russian mission, Russianizing all over Asia. Then he says: Well, in Asia one has seen how, over the course of long periods of time, two spiritual forces have confronted each other, so to speak. And the ancient Iranians – he says, Yushakov – saw quite correctly these two opposing spiritual forces as Ahriman and Ormuzd, in the Iranians, Persians, Indians and so on – Ahriman and Ormuzd. In the Iranians, Ormuzd was the predominant influence. Ormuzd worked in such a way that man sought to bring forth from nature everything that could be turned to his benefit. Work with nature could have made man rich, if the earlier Asiatic spirit had not been condemned from the start, by its suppression of the ego, to a kind of dream existence, and not to a certain degree of elevation. But in a way these Iranians, under the leadership of Ormuzd, were happy. Then came the Turanian spirit under the leadership of Ahriman, which devastated everything. Yushakov says that the Russians are destined to restore the balance between Ormuzd and Ahriman in Asia, in the whole of Asia, because the whole of Asia must be flooded and churned up by the way in which order and harmony can be created between Ormuzd and Ahriman from Russian spiritual life. After all, what have the Europeans done in Asia so far? What have they done that must arouse the disgust of the Russians in particular, that must show the Russians how they must be different in everything they accomplish? What have these Europeans done? They have discovered over the centuries that under the stimulus of the Ormuzd force, the Asians produce many, many material goods. They set out to snatch from the Asians what they had acquired under the beneficent influence of Ormuzd – so the Russian says; the Russians must come and join forces with the Asians in Asia, not out of selfishness but out of love, and they must help the Asians to defeat Ahriman. And now he goes on to explain how Russia has the task of liberating the Asians from Ahriman through selfless devotion to and coexistence with the Asian peoples; while the Europeans have so far only taken from them what they had acquired under the beneficent Ormuzd.

And it is quite characteristic of the Russian Yushakov to find in which European nation he can identify the one that has primarily stolen the Ormuzd goods from the Asians, and in which European nation he believes that it must be thoroughly and energetically opposed by the Russians. Yushakov calls the thieves of the Ormuzd culture of Asia the English, namely! I think that this is particularly interesting today, in our time, because we will find a remarkable connection in this alliance between Russianness and Englishness. In 1885, as I said, Yushakov wrote in his book “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”: “Ah, these poor Asian peoples, what they have become through the English!” These English have treated these poor Asian peoples as if these Asian peoples were there for no

“to clothe themselves in English cloth, fight with English weapons, work with English tools, eat out of English vessels, and play with English baubles.”

And further he says:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland - I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as glorious as it is sad.

Now, esteemed attendees, I would like to say that the Russian world view is still in the future, and that this has a truly irrepressible nature alongside, I would say, absolute passivity. This is where all the grotesque contradictions that confront us when we engage with this Russian world view come from. And yet, again and again in the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, we are confronted with the fact that what we have been able to characterize, and what we needed to characterize, of the outstanding Russian minds, really by stating the facts - and I have actually only tried to present facts in order to characterize the idealistic world view of the Germans - that this idealistic world view is presented as something decrepit, as something that must be overgrown by that which emanates from Russia. And especially at the end of the nineteenth century, it is not only the legacy of Peter the Great in the political sphere - anyone who takes my writing in hand, “Thoughts During the Time of War,” will see how this conviction lived in the most outstanding Russian minds, that Russianism must expand towards the West.

They soon abandoned the Pan-Asian dream and the European dream arose from the belief that the aging Western and Central European culture would have to experience salvation after the Russians conquered Constantinople, destroyed Austria, destroyed Germany and so on. Only deeply insightful Russians themselves were able to see through what this was actually about. And I cannot refrain from quoting what a reasonable Russian, Solowjow, said about this arrogance of the Russians from his Russian point of view. Solowjow wants to refute such a spirit, the Danilewski, who has so rightly pointed out how Europeanism must be eradicated root and branch and replaced by the Russian. And Solowjow replies. Danilewski has in fact brought to light the saying

“Why does Europe not love us?”

And Solowjow answers.

“Europe,”

says Danilewski,

“is afraid of us as the new and higher type of civilization, which is called upon to replace the decrepitude of the Romance-Germanic civilization.”

“Nevertheless,”

writes Solowjow,

“both the content of Danilevsky's book and his later admissions, as well as those of his like-minded friend,”

Soloviev means Strakhov,

“point to a different answer.”

And now Solowjow gives his answer from what he calls the Russian soul:

“Europe looks at us with hostility,”

says Solowjow,

"and with apprehension, because dark and unclear elemental forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural forces are poor and insufficient, but its demands are clearly and sharply defined. The calls for what the Russian people want as a nation resound powerfully out into Europe: that it wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, conquer Germany, conquer Constantinople and, if possible, also India. And when we are asked how we intend to make humanity happy after all the destruction and ruin we have wrought, what spiritual and cultural rejuvenation we will bring to world development, then we either have to remain silent or spout meaningless phrases. And if Danilevsky's bitter confession is true, that Russia is beginning to fall ill, then instead of dealing with the question “Why doesn't Europe love us?” we would have to deal with a different, more important question that is closer to us: “Why and how did we get sick?”

And now Solowjow answers the question of why Russia is sick. And from the answer he gives, I think you can see, dear attendees, that he thinks differently about how to cure this disease than those who are now leading Russia against Europe, who believe that sick Russia should be cured by stamping the corroded culture of Central Europe into the ground. But Solowjow says:

"Physically, Russia is still quite strong, as it showed in the last Russian war.

That was the war in the 1870s.

"So our suffering is a moral one. According to the words of an old writer, we are burdened by the sins hidden in the national character and not conscious of them - and so it is above all necessary to bring these into the light of clear consciousness. As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts can only harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question for true patriotism is not the question of power and vocation, but of Russia's sins.

And Solowjow himself tried to absorb as much as possible of Western European and especially Central European culture into his thinking. And to combine it with what the Russian people have as a result of their Orthodox faith. That is precisely what makes Solowjow great.

But he also became important for another reason. We have seen the revival – I would like to say, already in Central Europe, of the great period of German Idealism, which initially fell into a kind of dream but did not live on any less because of it. We have also seen a revival of intellectual Slavophilism there, which has now become a kind of intellectual Pan-Slavism. They tried to justify, almost with scientific ideological arguments, that the Russian spirit must come over Europe. Solowjow took a look at that, really immersed himself in the works of those who wanted to be completely original by showing the essence of the Russian world view, how it must come over Europe. And what did Solowjow find? Very strangely, he found only Western European ideas everywhere, and not exactly the best ones, those Western European ideas that are derived from the great ideas of the world view of German idealism as minor ideas. These have become interwoven, and from them they have justified their spiritual Slavophilism.

It is a very characteristic phenomenon, very characteristic in that what must happen in reality does happen, that the forces that come from the world-historical mission of the German people must work, that they are needed within the world views of the other nations.

That is what I have tried to put before you today, ladies and gentlemen, that this world view of German idealism, which lives within the German nation and which is destined to bring forth greater and greater things for the whole of humanity from the German nation in the development of the world Germanic people. One need only look at this world view of German idealism objectively, and not, as our enemies are doing, try to justify their actions and hatred of what the Germans have achieved in the intellectual field. Of course, the German could never help but look objectively at how the intellectual achievements of other nations compare with those of the Germans. The German always has that which he calls his Germanness more in mind as a duty, while the other nations really do not understand what the German actually means by his national principle.

Carneri, an important or perhaps even the most important Austrian philosopher of the nineteenth century, Carneri – the wonderful man who, from an ailing body, also tried to grasp world-view ideas on the basis of Darwinism but built pure, noble, ethical thoughts on the basis of this Darwinism, the German deepened this Darwinism – Carneri now also delves into a consideration of the different national souls of the European peoples. And with such a mind, which speaks not out of passion but out of knowledge, one can already see that what spiritual science creates out of its knowledge about the different national souls has already been instinctively recognized.

What has emerged in English pragmatism as a concept of truth is that one should actually only use the truth in order to find one's way in the world. Carneri says, not yet using the word “pragmatism”, which was only coined very recently: the English are certainly very often ahead: they are practical, practical. They can apply their practicality to anything they can think of, create and invent. But they are so practical that their practicality has even led them – Carneri says this, as I said, from a deep insight – to the fact that the insight that they produced the greatest playwright of all time, Shakespeare, had to be taught to them by the Germans. That is absolutely the case. For whoever has to write the history of the recognition of Shakespeare will have to write a chapter of the history of German intellectual life, not English intellectual life. Shakespeare was only recognized from the depths of the idealistic German world view. And Shakespeare is actually homeless in today's England.

We do not need to talk in the way that French philosophers or Englishmen talk about German nature today. We can simply point to that which is. But in pointing to it, we are aware that it is the force that must work, must work when the great world conflict has been decided, which now presents humanity with the greatest task that has ever been set. Ladies and gentlemen, the weapons, the circumstances, will decide what happens next, not the word. But there is also something to be decided that will only be decided slowly and gradually: that is the full penetration of the German spirit into the overall development of humanity. And certainly, it is not for me in this reflection to point out the more detailed cause of the war or the like. But the consciousness that must live in us in this time is certainly connected with what we can call: a sinking into the own essence of the German people and that which must continue to live and work in the German people, and in which we must trust.

What is the external situation like? Yes, actually in a most peculiar way. It is remarkable that this thought is so rarely expressed – not by us, but by our enemies. Do these enemies really need to hate the German character so much? If one may put the question in this way, does the German character take up so much of the earth's surface? The figures also answer this question: the Entente Powers possess 68 million square kilometers of the earth; the Central European Powers, on the other hand, possess 6 million square kilometers! 68 million square kilometers against 6 million square kilometers. The Central European powers have 150 million inhabitants; the Entente powers 777 million! One should also reflect on this outside the borders of Central Europe, and consider what it means in the face of this fact that 777 million people are standing against 150 million people and do not want to defeat them in open battle, but want to starve them out by surrounding them. That is the better part of valor! But to draw attention to such things so readily - it is understandable that one does not love that, and that one can love in contrast the suspicions and slanders of what the Germans have not only achieved intellectually, but are, because what has been achieved can show it to anyone who wants to see it.

Admittedly, it is easier to become discouraged when considering the German character as a Frenchman, for example, who finds – and has also told his Parisians – that a Frenchman, the same Frenchman, incidentally, who first spoke of the deep friendship between the German character and the Frenchman, who was the first to speak of the deep friendship between the German and the French character here in Germany when he traveled around: “He says that you can see from some phenomena of the German language, for example, how the Germans cannot have the nobler side of the human ideal in their world view because they do not have words for it. For example, the Germans have no word for 'generosity'; so they don't have this beautiful quality at all. The French, on the other hand, have no word for 'gloating', which the Germans often use: 'Schadenfreude haben'. So the Germans have gloating in their world view, the French have generosity!

One day, esteemed attendees, it will be recognized that there is much to whitewash and dream away, because one cannot place oneself in relation to this Central European intellectual culture today, that if one places oneself as one should place oneself, one could still appear to some extent as a person justified before himself. If you want to characterize the Germans from abroad today, you need something other than objectivity and truth. Another Frenchman, Ernest Renan, did indeed once manage –- even during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 –- to say: when he became acquainted with German literature and German intellectual life in the time of Herder and Goethe, it was as if he had entered a temple. And what he had known before seemed to him to be no more than worn scraps of paper compared to the inner gold value, compared to what German intellectual life has produced as a world view at the time of its highest idealism. But the same Frenchman, he now decides, his Frenchmen at the same time to establish such a relationship in Europe that it corresponds to the value of the German essence that he himself has acknowledged? No, says Ernest Renan, who says that what the rest of European humanity has achieved in comparison to German intellectual life is like elementary mathematics in comparison to the differential calculus. He says:

"This is a solemn hour. In France, there are two schools of thought. The first judges thus: “Let us put an end to this hateful trade as quickly as possible; let us give up everything, Alsace, Lorraine; let us sign the peace; but then, hatred to the death, preparations without rest, alliance with whomever it suits, unlimited concessions to all Russian pretensions; a single goal, a single driving force for life: extermination against the Germanic race.

This trend has triumphed in France. Nothing else can be said, except that this trend has triumphed in France. But if one has an idea of what one actually wants to destroy, if one swears destruction on the Germanic race - one actually means only the German people - then one must not admit it to oneself. And these individual nations must not admit it to themselves at all. They dare not even think about what might live in the German national character as the soul of this national character, out of which, for example, the high point of the German world view of idealism arose. They dare not admit it to themselves. Therefore, they have to whitewash it with something else. And with what? For example, Russia has to whitewash it with a mission - of course with the mission of rejuvenating Europe. One of their newer poets once characterized the French, his own French, by pointing out how the cockerel that crows in the morning when the sun rises becomes aware that there is a connection between his crowing and the rising of the sun. He imagines: if I don't crow, the sun cannot rise.

Of course, dear attendees, the tragedy of the present French people should not be in the slightest diminished by this; because it is not about the misled people at all. For those who have in fact led this “led people astray”, who can already be compared to the crowing cock, who believe that if they do not crow the sun will not rise - for there are leading French minds who hold this view: that nothing can happen in the world unless they crow to it – for this, Frenchness needs a new fantasy image from time to time. And it is from such a fantasy image that those who, in such a desolate way, especially in Paris, such as Bergson or Boutroux, want to so disparage the German essence in what is its soul.

The English – yes, these English, one does not want to do them wrong. Do the Russians need a new mission, the French a new fantasy image of their own greatness in the world – they have always needed that, and they have only ever forgotten that they had to be pushed back so that the others would also have some space – yes, what do the English need? One would not want to be harsh; one would want to be fair to the enemy. But when you hear the enlightened minds over there saying that the English only went to war because they, with their fine sense of morality, could not reconcile the fact that the unfortunate Belgian people had been invaded – because they are enthusiastic about the fact that small nations can live out freedom and independence – when you look at how strangely these Englishmen have taken on the freedom of these small nations, yes, and then hear how the enlightened minds over there keep declaiming: “For freedom” and against “unfreedom” England had to go to war, because the Germans, they are completely imbued with the saying - an outstanding English politician said that recently — the Germans are completely imbued with the saying: “might is right”; he forgot, the poor — clever man, I mean to say — that this saying was first made by Thomas Hobbes, the Englishman, yes, even advocated as an entire philosophy, that this saying is deeply anchored in the whole world view of English naturalism. Yes, if one wants to be objective, dear attendees, one cannot say otherwise: the English need a new lie to conceal the truth and justify themselves to the world. There is simply no other way than to say that this must be the verdict of history, at least with regard to the behavior of the speaking people during the war.

The Italians – they need something to whitewash what is really there. They are the people of the sentient soul. Before the war, before the world war, an outstanding Italian politician confessed to me – because one did not need to be naive before the world war, believing that when the world war came, Italy would be on the side of the medium-sized powers, right? – an outstanding Italian politician confessed to me at the time: When the world war comes, Italy will have to take part. Yes, but why? “It simply has to take part,” he said, “because the Italian people are lazy, they are depraved. If they are allowed to continue living like this for much longer,” he said, “they will become completely depraved. They need to feel something properly again” - that's where we have the sentient soul - “they need to have a feeling, a sensation.” I am not saying that this is the only cause of war. The Russian needs a new mission, since the Pan-Asian one has been extinguished; the Englishman needs a new lie; the Frenchman needs a new fantasy; the Italian needs a new sensation in – yes, in the form of a new saint, because it must first be possible to grasp it with the sentient soul: holy egoism was invented in Italy, holy egoism. In the name of holy egoism, we have been told over and over again, Italy went to war. A new saint, a new saint who is fully worthy of his great representative d'Annunzio. D'Annunzio, the priest of holy egoism – a sensation, as if made for the inner pages of the sentimental soul character!

I do not think we need to fall back on the mistakes of our enemies when we think about what is at the heart of the German people and their tendency towards a particular world view. We only need to look at what we have found to be great, significant and effective in this German people, in the folklore of Central Europe. In this respect, the Germans of Austria and the Germans of Germany are one and the same. Today they feel completely at one. The concept of Mitteleuropa must not only become a reality in an economic sense, but also in a spiritual sense. This can be said in particular by someone who, like me, lived in Austria for thirty years.

And when we look, esteemed attendees, at what appears to us as the innermost – I may say – spiritual essence, as the spiritual essence of German nationality, we must say: this essence is not directly something that can only be grasped in terms of concepts and ideas. It is something that is experienced at the center, at the core of the German soul. The German soul must remain, which can only flourish if the German soul can carry it alive from the present into the future. History will be able to show this, the actual course of the history of the Germans and Germanness, of all humanity on earth, that there is something in this German nation that has only just taken root and put forth leaves, and that carries within itself the strength to become blossoms and fruit.

But we Germans can doubt the arrogance of other peoples without being unjust to other peoples. Especially in the present difficult times, but also in the great and promising times to come, we can realize how we can feel German precisely when we also permeate ourselves with its highest development, with its spiritual life, how we can then believe: Yes, this spiritual life shows itself to us in its roots and in its leaves in such a way that we can have the deepest faith and trust in the blossoms and fruits to be borne. And so, precisely from this point of view, by keeping in mind the numbers 777 million people against 150 million people, 68 million square kilometers against 6 million square kilometers, we should never allow ourselves to be distracted from the fact that our German past presents itself to us in such a way that it guarantees our German future by its own strength, precisely by its spiritual strength, and we should never never allow ourselves to be dissuaded from the fact that our German past presents itself to us as being guaranteed by its own strength, and especially by its intellectual strength, for our German future, to which we want to fully embrace not only out of mere instinct and feeling, but also out of bright insight.

Dear attendees! In the past, almost every year I have been able to give a lecture in this city in the field that I have recently taken to calling spiritual science. Since our friends have also requested such a reflection in these fateful times, it shall be given this evening. But you will understand that in our present time, when all our feelings, our emotions and our thoughts are focused on the great events, on those events that claim so many hopes, so much confidence, on the events that undoubtedly most significant events are now unfolding, events that are also causing so much pain and suffering. You will understand that at this time, such a reflection, especially if it is to be based on the spiritual scientific worldview, must also be made in view of the fateful events of our time. But it cannot be my task to add yet another of the numerous reflections that are being set forth today in lectures on the things that are so powerfully moving our time. Rather, it must be my task to say, from the point of view of spiritual science, from which I have always spoken here, what can be said in brief about our time from precisely this point of view.

It has been emphasized many times that the present struggle, the present mighty struggle, in which, in fact, apart from smaller tribal and linguistic differences, 35 different peoples of the earth are at war with each other; it has been said often that this mighty struggle is caused above all by the present-day commercial, economic, social and political antagonisms, and that it is of primary importance to look clearly and energetically at reality and the values in question and not to obscure these considerations with metaphysical speculations. From the standpoint of spiritual science, one can only agree with such a view and never oppose it.

But spiritual science also wants to stand on the standpoint of reality. This is one way in which this evening's meditation will differ from those that are so often practiced, in that it takes into account the realistic admonition of our contemporaries, while also considering that this mighty struggle is, after all, part of the whole course of human development, in which, above all, great impulses are at work that can only be achieved through spiritual contemplation. One could also say: At that time, when the Germanic tribes of Central Europe threatened the southern empires, the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Middle Ages, only the Roman spheres of interest with their social and political intentions were confronted with what was to come from Central Europe. Of course, at the time, one could justifiably speak in this way. But if we look at things today, and judge from a higher point of view, as we must today, because the world has advanced, we would see that if these struggles had not taken place back then, the reorganization of Europe through these struggles, which were initially caused by the Roman spheres of interest, of course, took place in a certain way —, then the whole Western development up to our time would have taken on a different face. That is one thing.

The other thing, however, is that anyone who follows the intellectual development of nations, the intellectual development in history, must really come to the conclusion, without indulging in any fantasies, without speculating, that what is now being fought out between thirty-five nations of the earth is, in fact, certainly the most significant thing imaginable for the present. It is not words that will fight it out, nor thoughts and human philosophies, but the bravery of the armies. But behind all this, one can see another struggle, a struggle of spiritual forces, a struggle of world views. And without going into what has often been said, I should perhaps emphasize that history will one day regard it as the most absurd of claims that Central Europe somehow provided the immediate cause of this world war. It will be seen more and more clearly, especially when viewed from a higher perspective, that Central Europe and particularly the German people are involved in a purely defensive struggle. But if we look at this defensive struggle, then from a certain point of view we can see how this struggle is one part of a great, mighty defensive struggle that German intellectual life, intellectual impulses, have already had to fight out in part, and in part have to fight out with ever-increasing strength, against that which is also a kind of intellectual encirclement of Central European intellectual life. What I mean by this, I would like to characterize it with a symptom that may not seem very meaningful to you. But one could cite many things and one would always find the same thing.

What we in many respects count among the greatest and most significant things that the spiritual life of modern times has taken up, is called the “idea of development,” the “worldview of development.” And no one tires of emphasizing how significant it was for the whole development of the spiritual life of humanity that people learned to see how not the individual entities of the world around us stand side by side, but that they have developed apart; how one can trace a developmental series from the lowest creatures up to humans.

The one who, out of the deepest impulses of the supporting forces of the German spirit, spoke of such a development in a deeply inward sense is none other than Goethe. And it may be said that, since Goethe, German culture has had a wonderful, to use a Goethean expression: a spiritual doctrine of development. This spiritual doctrine of development has not been taken up into the general world view, nor into the European world view. In contrast, it takes five to six decades for the general consciousness of modern cultural humanity to accept the doctrine of development - but in what form - in the form of Darwinism.

When something like this is said, it still seems to have a chauvinistic coloring for many today. But future times will see it in all the power that is inherent in it. Darwinism has given the idea of development a materialistic [utilitarian] slant; and in this slant, which has been forced upon it, the idea of development has been incorporated into modern cultural ideas by an entirely English thinker. And the deeper German developmental idea is definitely faced with the necessity of defending itself. In the future, the world will realize that it is not necessary to say that Darwinism is something wrong, something incorrect, but that it will be necessary to take the deeper foundations, the more vigorous knowledge from the sources of German intellectual life for the developmental idea as well. In other words, it will be necessary to forge weapons that can defend the spiritual goods of Central Europe against the attacks that are being waged in countless fields, as in the field just mentioned, against this Central European intellectual life. And just as it is not important, when one is in the midst of a struggle between nations such as that which exists today, to wage war with these or those words, so to speak, between individual nations, whether words of hatred or sympathy, but rather, as is much more natural, to take the position that one has to defend what one recognizes as one's fatherland, as one defend one's family without disparaging anything else, so in the field of spiritual struggles, which, as everything shows, we will face in the near future in a tremendous way, it is important to be fully imbued with what the forces of this Central European, especially German, intellectual life are. In these forces there will be weapons that will be needed in the future. I cannot go into more detail, but I would like to suggest that the current struggle of external weapons will only be the beginning of what is to come in terms of spiritual struggles, and that the ill-intentioned, malicious, defamatory views that are hurled at German culture from all sides already show us the beginning.

If we now want to talk about these things from the point of view of spiritual science, it is of course incumbent upon us to at least characterize this point of view of spiritual science with a few words. Even though today, as in other lectures that I have also given in this city, I cannot go into the details of this spiritual science, which is to enter the development of time and the world as something new, and even though I will not be able to say anything conclusive in favor of spiritual science, I would still like to indicate with a few words, with a few points of view, what spiritual science wants.

Spiritual science wants to be a real science of the spirit. Above all, it wants to show how the human soul life, that which we call our innermost human nature, is connected with the real and true spirit that flows and weaves through nature and humanity. And just as natural science renewed the world view of humanity a few centuries ago, so spiritual science today wants to enter into the spiritual development of humanity in a very similar way, albeit from a different point of view.

I would like to draw attention to the following: if you were to say to someone who knows nothing about chemistry, who has never heard of chemistry and only knows water – of course, we can only imagine such a person hypothetically – that in this water, which is liquid and extinguishes fire, extinguishes fire, there is a gas in it that can be separated out, that is hydrogen; this hydrogen burns, it is not liquid but gaseous, so the person who has never heard of chemistry may consider this to be a highly fantastic idea. Natural science has made this into a very ordinary, even trivial, idea today. There was certainly a time when those who claimed such things were thought of as fantasists.

Today, on the other hand, anyone who knows nothing of spiritual science is considered a fantasist who says: When we have the human body with its soul before us, it presents itself in such a way that we cannot recognize the essence of what is directly connected to it while this essence is inside the body itself. One must separate it by the spiritual-scientific method, the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily, as one separates hydrogen from water by chemical methods, if one wants to recognize it. This spiritual-scientific method does not take place in an external laboratory, but in the intimate processes of the human soul itself.

But there are spiritual scientific methods by which man can truly become a spiritual scientist, by which he can come to separate his spiritual soul from the physical body so that it is outside, as hydrogen is outside of water. But then the spiritual researcher lives in this spiritual-soul realm. He learns to recognize the characteristics and nature of this spiritual-soul realm, that which goes through birth and death in man, that which passes through the gate of death into a spiritual world and then, after death, world with a higher consciousness, with a consciousness that the spiritual researcher learns to recognize when he applies the spiritual scientific method to his soul, just as the chemist learns the properties of water when he applies the chemical methods. A time will come when people will speak of these things as they speak today of the Copernican world view, which was also once regarded as fantasy, or of similar things.

Just as today the spiritual researcher has to present to humanity the truth that there is a spiritual core in us that passes through the gate of death to return to repeated lives on earth, to repeated and repeated lives on earth, so one day this will be a truth, as the idea of development in external natural science is considered true today. If today what the spiritual researcher has to say is quite naturally regarded as a dream, as a fantasy, from many sides, then those who have immersed themselves in these things may point out how, at a certain time, Copernicanism, which is generally recognized today, was regarded as contradicting the five senses. And so it is today. What spiritual science has to say about repeated lives on earth, about the independence of the soul, and so on, is said to contradict the five senses. And if you take a materialistic point of view, you say: the life of the soul is enclosed between birth and death.

One must compare such a view with another view that still existed in the Middle Ages: that the blue firmament arches over us, which is a conclusion, a boundary, a spatial boundary. Modern science shows us that this boundary is only formed by our ability to see, that space extends into an infinite world, that we are embedded in infinite space on the earth. When modern science dawned, the blue firmament was broken through and recognized as something that is evoked by human vision. Through spiritual science it will be recognized that the boundaries that seek to enclose life between birth and death are like the blue firmament in relation to space. Through spiritual science, people will learn to look beyond this temporal firmament, which is set by birth and death, and they will find human life embedded in a line of development from which it emerges again and again.

Between earthly lives lie realms of development of a purely spiritual nature. And so, by learning to experience himself in this way, the spiritual researcher has something to proclaim in spiritual science: in the spiritual and soul realm, the human being feels, not through philosophical speculation but through experience, a connection with the real spiritual world, which surrounds the physical, from which the spiritual-soul is released - spiritual science speaks of an experience of the spiritual world, a spiritual world in which spiritual beings are, as physical beings are around us here.

It is perhaps still somewhat unpopular today if one is obliged to present these basic concepts of spiritual science in this way. But we live in a time in which humanity is living in a time of transformation of all thinking. Just as a Copernicus or a Galilei had to be anticipated in the dawn of modern natural science, so one can see something in spiritual science that lies, as it were, in the bosom of our time.

If we now follow German spiritual life and really immerse ourselves in it, then from the point of view of spiritual science we will have to gain a very definite view of German spiritual life, of that which has constantly revealed itself in it. I cannot go into details now, only with regard to the last times of German spiritual life. Thus, I said, the peculiarity of spiritual science is that the spiritual researcher, through his special spiritual-scientific method, learns to experience himself in the spiritual-soul that has been freed from the physical body and now knows itself, not in time but in eternity.

Let us see, by visualizing this spiritual view, how the most German of philosophers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, I would say, lived out his belief in immortality and his belief in the soul. Fichte, like his contemporaries, was not yet able to have a real spiritual science. But how he drew from the spiritual life and knew this life in connection with the life of his national spirit is shown in the speeches he addressed to his people in one of Germany's most difficult times. But I don't want to talk about that today, but rather about how Fichte expressed himself, for example, where he wanted to give a “directions for a blessed life” philosophically, about his doctrine of immortality and soul. There he says:

I cannot admit that one seeks the main thing in the immortal human life only after death. That which is most important to me is that we become aware in this life of the body within us of that which passes through the gate of death and then goes into a spiritual world and lives on in it. For this invisible element living in us, I want to live through this earthly life.

This is not yet spiritual science, but it is the germ of spiritual science. And this germ of spiritual science can be found wherever we look at the fruits of German intellectual life. Everywhere we find the urge, the longing, not to satisfy ourselves with the abstractions of thought, with the external spirit of science, from which the science of the senses or the combination of the sensual is born. The German does not seek only for concepts and ideas, but also for their connection with the living spirit. The German feels moved when he can realize that science is not an external absorption of knowledge, but that it is the true life of knowledge, which he strives for so that the soul communes with the spirit that pervades and permeates the world. In the real connection with what spiritually permeates and permeates the world, the German wants to see the ideal of his knowledge, that he does not just want to absorb ideas, not just concepts, a science that is like an image of something external. He wants to have something in his soul that flows like a spiritual lifeblood in him, like the God himself who lives in him. And this is expressed more intensely and powerfully in a creation that no nation in the world has; which may not stand at the pinnacle of world creation in an artistic sense, but in the way it expresses itself, in that the German does not strive for a merely external visual connection with the spirit, but for a confrontation, spiritual eye in spiritual eye, with the spirit. You know that by this creation I mean the Goethean “Faust” poetry.

Do we not see in Faust how his consciousness turns away from all that is mere external knowledge, what is mere derivation from something external? Do we not see how he strives for the source of life, the manifestation of the spirit; how he strives to confront this spirit eye to eye? How he turns away from the external and strives to experience supersensible worlds? The German can never be satisfied with something he has achieved as knowledge. This is best seen by looking at the following: the beginning of Goethe's “Faust” has become almost trivial. It reflects the mood of Goethe in the 1770s. We see how Faust wants to get out of a knowledge that is not connected to the living spiritual world. When we grasp its full depth, we are shaken when Faust speaks the words:

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
thoroughly, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool,
and am as wise as before!

Now let us see how this German intellectual life unfolds. Let us see how Goethe, in the 1770s, longs for the appearance of the earth spirit, for the sources of intellectual life, for higher self-knowledge, which is achieved by the soul immersing itself in the living spiritual of the transcendental world.

Then we see how greatly the German philosophers strove in this respect after Goethe's time. We see that, after Goethe wrote his “Faust”, German thought, German poetry and German music all seek to look at things from the deepest sources. We see the emergence of thinkers such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; we see them connecting with Goethe; we see how they create something from a knowledge that is supposed to be more original than all that has gone before, that is also supposed to come from the very depths of the human soul; we see that they are creating a philosophy; and when we consider that Hegel created a “natural right” and that Schelling published a medical journal, that all these minds were searching for a renewal of science, despairing at Faust! They also sought to renew theology, for they all wanted to be theologians. We see how all this greatness, which has not yet been properly appreciated, springs from the fundamental forces of the German spirit, and we can perhaps say: Goethe could have stood there, after he had seen all this pass him by, and could have said: What I felt in despair back then in the 1770s has been brilliantly brought forth by the German spirit from the sources of life! And let us assume that Goethe had grown even older than he did; let us assume – and I believe that no one would dispute this hypothesis – that Goethe had begun in 1840 [or let us assume that he had been even younger ], to write “Faust” again after all that had happened in the meantime in German intellectual life, can we believe that the beginning of “Faust” around 1840 would have sounded like this:

Now, thank God, I have studied philosophy,
law and medicine, with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel
and, thank God, theology as well
with great zeal and assiduity,
and here I am, a wise man,
as wise as one can be.

Do you think the beginning of “Faust” would have sounded like that? Certainly not. It would have sounded exactly the same as in 1772. Exactly the same!

But what does that tell us? It testifies that it is in the essence of this quintessentially German, Goethean idea of Faust to regard everything that has already been achieved not as something that can satisfy the individual, but that a striving is rooted in this German spiritual life, where it is manifested precisely in its representatives, that every individual, in turn, has to go through, in every age, an eternal becoming, never being complete. This is the case because German intellectual life can only describe the grasping of the spiritual as a true one if the spirit is experienced. But it can never be experienced if one wants to grasp it in an established way. To experience the spirit, one must always approach the spirit in a renewed way. But this is a typically German trait, and at the same time it is what can be called the “supporting force of the German spirit”.

Not concepts, not ideas, not something acquired in reason is what the German strives for, but what is to be striven for is that which can be grasped again at any time in original power. Not the spirit in a coffin, but the ever-living spirit is striven for. So that we may say: Admittedly, we do not see an archetypally German striving in the older times in the same way that we see spiritual science today. But we see the seeds; in what lives in the best, we see the same striving for direct experience of the connection with the spirit. This is always being witnessed anew. That means: a real life of the spirit is presupposed, in which the individual stands. That means: the supporting power of the spirit lives in him in such a way that they hold secret dialogue, that he is touched by what the German spirit wants from him. And this we see continuing to have an effect even where German intellectual life has been pushed back on itself by attacks from left and right, from above and below; we see the original German being carried by the real spirit continuing to have an effect. I would like to mention just one of the many phenomena that could be cited from the second half of the nineteenth century.

One of the most important representatives of the German spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century, who has not yet been fully recognized today, is Herman Grimm, the son of one, the nephew of the other of the Brothers Grimm, the great researchers of myths and legends, the researcher of the German language. Herman Grimm is first known as a German cultural historian, as an art historian. If you now delve into Herman Grimm's art history, you come across something peculiar. There is nothing in Herman Grimm's writings of what could be called pedantic erudition, of external systematics, but there is something that originally springs from the spiritual. The most important thing that one can gain from the works of Herman Grimm must be read between the lines, it must be sensed from what is said. Why? Because in Herman Grimm lives the sustaining power of the German spirit, which is brought to life by him, and through which he lets himself be whispered in each individual case through an inspiration as to what he has to say about an artistic phenomenon. So that one cannot but feel the affinity between the one who writes and the one who inspires him, one feels like a living conversation of the German national spirit with the one who speaks to us through his books in terms of art history. This Herman Grimm, he prepared himself in a peculiar way for his art historical profession. In his youth, he wrote novellas and also a significant novel. The recognition of these things also belongs to the living German intellectual heritage. For it is not because of their German nature that they have been forgotten, but because attacks have been made on German intellectual property from outside.

I will briefly outline one of Herman Grimm's novellas. We will see shortly what the purpose of this is. The novella is called “The Songstress”. We are presented with a very beautiful characterization of a woman. We see a man in the woman's surroundings. The man is deeply in love with the woman; the woman cloaks herself more in a nobly flirtatious being. He suffers terribly. Herman Grimm wrote a so-called first-person novella with this novella. What he writes is as if the story were being told by a person who lives next door to the couple and experiences everything that happens. And so, in the novella, the author – but in reality, of course, his friend – describes the events that transpire. The singer's coquettish behavior finally drives the lover completely mad. He distances himself from her. He cannot bear the situation. Later, his friend meets him again and sees that he has completely fallen apart. He takes him into his house and sees that this person has come to the edge of the grave because of his love. He sees that he is on the verge of suicide at any moment. So he takes him into his house. But he sees that it is necessary to get the singer over there. He fetches her. And lo and behold, as he approaches the house with the singer, who is to come as the unfortunate man's last hope, so to speak, they hear a shot. The unhappy lover has shot himself, he is dead. The content of the novella is wonderfully beautiful in its characteristics; but that is not what matters to me now. What matters to me is what happens to the singer now that she has found only the dead, suicidal lover. The singer stays in the friend's house for some time. She explains to her friend that she cannot remain in this house, that she is experiencing terrible things in this house. The friend to whom she relates her experiences does not believe this, of course; he is a rationalist. He thinks as rationalists of the present day think. So she asks him to watch with her for one night. And there he is convinced of what is happening to this woman as a result of the death of her lover. He sees for himself how the woman straightens up. He sees a figure enter through the door; that is, he only recognizes it from the words, he does not see the figure, but through what the woman sees, he is convinced that this is indeed a subjective but true experience, that the woman is really in contact with the dead, that this is a matter of the working out of destiny, which throws its rays over death.

Not because I want to use a work of fiction to prove spiritual science, but because the spiritual scientist has to say: Herman Grimm describes like a spiritual science expert, Herman Grimm wants to describe that a person's destiny is not only understood between birth and death. This novella is wonderfully moving, deeply moving, because it describes a person's life beyond death.

Now this is not a temporary phenomenon in writing. In his great cultural-historical novel, Herman Grimm again describes a female character who also has to experience the death of her lover. He describes how real the death is, how the death of the hero occurs, how the spiritual figure rises out of the physical figure. Now Herman Grimm describes how - appropriately - this figure enters into the spiritual world and how a connection remains between the dead and what rises out of the physical body of the heroine. I describe these things because they show how, in German literature, where one is confronted with representatives of the Germanic spirit, the supporting power of the German spirit works in such a way that the novellist, the novelist, too, can do so if he wants to rise into the world of real, supersensible reality. We are shown how the best minds do not stop at outward, visible reality, but how they follow the human soul into the spiritual world. These representatives of the German character did not yet have spiritual science, but their souls were so directed that they sensed the supporting power of the German spirit, which wants to lead the German character to the experience of the spiritual. Therefore, one can have the strongest confidence in the development of spiritual science when one looks at what is there as a germ for this spiritual science in German idealism, in the German longing, not for the abstract but to the living spirit that lives in the supersensible world, just as the mineral world, the plant world, and the animal world live in the sensory world around us. This testifies to the fact that to be German means to be connected in a very specific way as an individual human being with a totality of spiritual life. And in this respect, German experience is not only easily misunderstood, but is attacked and will be attacked again and again. It is not easy for German experience, which is more profound than anything that has developed around it, to take up the weapons with which German intellectual life, which has been pushed into a corner, will have to defend itself over the course of millennia against the hostile forces that come from all sides through the conditions of life.

What then springs from these original German spiritual impulses? They can perhaps be best characterized by pointing to an older time. This German spiritual life did not first appear with this character in modern times, but already in the Middle Ages. If we go back to the mystic Angelus Silesius, he has left many sayings. One particularly meaningful saying is where he says: “Not I as a human soul experience death, in the depths of my human soul dwells God, and God experiences death in me.” The depth of such a saying is not immediately apparent. It proves the primal German thinking and feeling and sensing, which experiences in itself a being with the world spirit that permeates and interweaves everything. Let us only think of the words of Faust:

[Ehrlicher Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles,
Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst
Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet.
Gabst mir die herrliche Natur zum Königreich,
Kraft, sie zu fühlen, zu genießen. Nicht
You only allow cold, astonished visitors,
Allow me to look into their deep chests,
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks, The giant spruce topples, crushing neighboring branches, And neighboring trunks, sweeping down, And the hill thunders hollowly with its fall;Then you lead me to the safe cave, show Then myself, and my own chest secret, deep wonders open up.)

That is what the German has always sought in his best representatives. That is what he has sought: to truly find in his soul, to find in his deepest inner being the living spirit, to live together with this living spirit. So that Angelus Silesius, in all his peculiarity, already expounds great ideas of immortality when he speaks of the experience of death. For God can only be felt as alive. But he who experiences God in this way within himself knows that he is immortal. For God must be immortal, therefore death can only be an appearance. From this feeling of the German soul, even the grasp of the immortal life for this German soul emerges. But that is what has given this German soul this certainty, this firm footing in its development. That is what has always brought this German soul, of all national souls, closest to what we today call spiritual science. I would like to bring this home to your souls from a certain point of view.

Let us compare this German spiritual life with Eastern spiritual life, not in its lower regions, but let us go up to the highest regions of Russian spiritual life. Let us try to visualize one of Russia's most outstanding minds, Soloviev. Soloviev, who really took everything that was in Russian intellectual life into his soul and gave it back as a world view – not just as what is called a “philosophical world view”, but in such a way that one feels the Russian life vibrating – gave something that lived in this deep soul. I can only refer here to his works, only a small part of which have been translated, I cannot go into all of them. But I would like to point out that this philosopher, who retained his faith throughout his life – the faith that lives in many Russians, that Western European life, and Central European life as well, is a dying life, the renewal of which can only come from Russia. He lives according to this error. But this error gives his philosophy its special character. And again and again, in rousing speeches, Solowjow assures his people of the creative and sustaining forces within them. Then came the end of his life. Solowjow ended his life by increasingly arriving at a meager worldview, which I will characterize by comparing it to what lives in a similar field in the German worldview.

Let us see what lives in the German world view: it is the certainty that the human soul can live together with the spirit of the world, that it can hold its dialogue with the spirit of the world. We have seen this in the representative figure of Faust. Solowjow does not speak of the certainty of spiritual experience in the way that a human soul speaks out of the Germanic nature. Rather, he speaks thus: Yes, the Russian people have a great mission, but it is fulfilled by a divine being from the other world, who, through grace, takes hold of the Russian people and gives them their mission. God must work in the Russian people. And the Russians are waiting for the miracle, for a god, a kind of manifestation of the light of Christ, to appear and call the Russian people to their task.

In Central European spiritual culture, people know that they can experience their soul, they can experience God in their soul. Soloviev is waiting for that which pushes and drives and urges him from outside; he is waiting for the miracle. But now, in the year of Solowjow's death, the remarkable thing is that Solowjow appeared before the Petersburg public with a speech that must have been wonderfully moving, because something deeply emotional spoke from his words, which so convinced the audience that this power of persuasion passed over to people like a magic breath. He said: “Everything that has ever been believed about humanity being able to find something within itself that would redeem it, that would lead it to a divine state, is a vain deception and illusion. All that is deception, what believes that humanity will ever find the strength within itself to experience the divine through what it is now. No, Solowjow emphasizes, everything that humanity has of strength now, everything that it has of seemingly highest culture, that must perish. “The whole world lies in ruins” - such are his words - for there is nothing in present-day humanity that could lead this humanity to a spiritual goal. Only when everything has perished will the God who redeems souls step in from outside the dissolved earth, the perished earth. We cannot find anything in our souls that points us to something we could seek ourselves.

And he also describes in detail what he expects. As in a powerful vision, he sees the Asian peoples approaching, he sees them waging war on Europe, he sees how, in the twentieth, twenty-first century, Christianity will have declined to such an extent that only one-tenth of those who are on earth will still be Christians, while the whole world will be flooded with a harsh, materialistic worldview, which is pouring over the world, because “the whole world is in a state of decay.” He who listened to what the greatest philosophical mind of the Russian people spoke out of a deep faith shortly before his death, just weeks before his death, might ask: What could have inspired the one who has passed away to say: My soul, through its own power, has lost all eternity.

Let us instead consider the will and testament of a German. There are still people today who scoff at Lessing's momentous will and testament, 'The Education of the Human Race', in which he describes how development continues through all times, how souls keep coming back. For Lessing was the first to incorporate the doctrine of repeated earthly lives into German spiritual life. People often say: Well, yes, Lessing was a great man, but when he wrote this 'Education of the Human Race', he was already an old man. Well, people always arrange what they want to acknowledge as they want. But Lessing did not weaken, rather he had ascended to a deep sense of this direct communion, this speaking of the human soul with the living spirit, which pours out its sustaining strength over the soul of the individual, so that the individual soul can live with it in the sustaining strength of the German spirit. Lessing said something like the following as the closing words of his will: Is it not clear to my soul, from what it experiences within itself, that it must keep coming back to a new life on earth in order to keep learning new things and developing ever higher? That would take a lot of time, well, isn't eternity mine? - That is what Lessing extracts from the depths of the human soul itself, that is what he lays down in his testament. This is a spiritual culture that comes to different words than the one that says: We will never find the strength from the human soul itself.

From such a juxtaposition of different moods, one will understand that in the East, the Russian spiritual mood is asserting itself, which stands without understanding in relation to what is taking place in Central Europe, and which does not overlook everything that is emerging here as a living spiritual life, but always speaks of the decaying culture of the West. Thus, the so-called intellectuals justify, from a spiritual point of view, what they had always intended to do against the West, including politically. The terrible war in which we are engaged was caused as much by the moods of the East as by external interests. But these moods will not disappear with this war. In order to bring German intellectual life to bear, it will be necessary to forge weapons from the spirit, from which the greatest minds of Central Europe have taken their weapons, for this confrontation with the spirit must always be renewed.

And how, by a completely natural process, the enemies of this German intellectual life must be encircled – we can see this if we take a look at how German intellectual life is understood, the German intellectual life that I was able to sketch out in a charcoal drawing, the subject of much discussion. In defense of and in an effort to understand this German intellectual life, I would like to call to mind a Western spirit that truly belongs to the best [Western spirits] of the nineteenth century, an American who wrote in English, Emerson. He is truly not someone to invoke when one wants to describe the contrast between the West and German intellectual life based on prejudice. Emerson portrays the English people as the first world people; but strangely, he places the Germans higher. Despite Emerson's description of the English as the first world people, he says:

The English do not appreciate the depth of German intellectual life.
The German thinks for Europe.

But now I would like to mention something else that is very characteristic from the point of view on which I have based this reflection today. Emerson wrote two wonderful essays, one about Shakespeare and one about Goethe. Unfortunately, people today only read with half a mind, but it could be interesting if a number of people really did what I am about to suggest. It would be interesting to get involved in the essays that Emerson wrote and that bear the title “Representatives of the Human Race,” reading the two essays, one about “Shakespeare, or the Poet,” the other about “Goethe, or the Writer.” You will not believe that I am so brutal, or, one could also say, so “barbaric”, that I want to denigrate Shakespeare in any way, or that I do not revere him to the highest degree as one of the greatest poets of humanity. That is what he is, for Emerson too. And Emerson states that if you want to characterize the poet, you have to name Shakespeare as the representative poet. By comparison, you have to call Goethe the representative writer. Now, one should not just read what is there, but one should feel from the words what passed through the whole soul of the presenter when he gave the characteristics. Emerson tries to present Shakespeare as the representative of the poet in general, based on the characteristics of the English national soul, and then Goethe as the representative of the writer in general. And Emerson seeks to draw out the traits that one must consider if one wants to truly characterize Shakespeare inwardly. And with Emerson it is the case that when he is confronted with an appearance, he characterizes the one appearance with all the power of the word, as if there were nothing else, he immerses himself in the individual appearance. In Shakespeare, when he discusses Shakespeare, in Goethe, when he discusses Goethe. [It is a special gift.] And what is it that he seeks to express when he contemplates Shakespeare, Shakespeare the poet, [whom he regards as the most exquisite poet and this as the most exquisite of the English, and this as the most exquisite of the peoples]? He feels compelled to say, while characterizing Shakespeare: An original mind is not, as is usually thought, one that creates everything out of itself, but one that works as Shakespeare did, who goes everywhere and takes the intellectual property he can find. And now he shows how the whole of England thought like Shakespeare, how he was only the echo of his people. On the other hand, he tries to show how Shakespeare used French and Italian sources, how he gathered everything together to become Shakespeare, how he became the great man by organizing the great intellectual goods from other worlds and other peoples. That is what Emerson comes to through Shakespeare. And I would like to read you a few characteristic words:

Great men are distinguished more by their comprehensive minds [and] by the height of the vantage point from which they look down than by their originality. If we demand that originality which, like a spider, draws its own web from its own entrails, which itself finds the clay, forms stones from it and erects the house, then great men are by no means original. The essence of truly valuable originality does not lie in dissimilarity to others.

Thus Emerson characterizes Shakespeare in such a way as to show: I must show why Shakespeare is so unoriginal. “The essence of truly valuable originality does not lie in dissimilarity to others.”

And one saying, to which particularly much value must be attached in Emerson's characteristics of Shakespeare, is the following, which is not said by me, but Emerson speaks thus about Shakespeare:

It has become a kind of practical rule among writers that once someone has shown themselves capable of creating something original, they may then also discreetly steal the works of others.

So Emerson, when characterizing one of the greatest minds of the world order, needs nothing less than to excuse Shakespeare for being original, even by stealing from others and combining what has been stolen. You have to look a little deeper into what the impulses of human development are when you are standing in such a momentous world period as today.

And then we turn the page, especially in the beautiful translation by Herman Grimm, which he made of Emerson's essays on Shakespeare and Goethe. Let us now turn to Goethe. Again, Emerson delves into Goethe, absorbed in the essence of Goethe, as if nothing else existed. And what comes to Emerson's mind now to characterize Goethe as the representative of writing? He comes up with the following words: All of nature, every stone, everything that is and will be strives to be expressed. The whole world strives for expression. And favored human souls, whom other souls cannot emulate, who therefore stand alone, they find the words to express, in wrestling with the world spirit, what is wrestling with the world spirit.

With Shakespeare, Emerson describes how he [makes references everywhere].

With Goethe, he describes how Goethe himself is connected to the world spirit, which works in the individual realms of nature. Compare the one with the other. About Goethe, Emerson says:

In my eyes, the writer stands as a man whose position was foreseen in the construction of the world.

In direct contrast to the beginning of the world, he brings Goethe. Shakespeare he believes he has to excuse. And further he says of Goethe:

The position he took, he owes nothing, but he entered the world from his birth as a free, [supervising] genius.

About Shakespeare, he says:

It is easy to see that all the best that has ever been written and done in the world was not the work of one man, but the product of a vast, collaborative effort in which a thousand like one, all driven by a single impulse, lent a hand.

Shakespeare is explained entirely out of the environment, out of the world that surrounds him. Regarding Goethe, Emerson says:

He is all eye and instinctively turns to where the truth lies. Say something, and he will immediately know whether it is true or false. It is hateful to him to repeat the old wives' tales, even if they have had the good faith of humanity for a thousand years, and to be made a fool of by them. No one else needs to strain their eyes for him to show them whether something is true or a lie.

I believe, my dear audience, that one can feel something deep and meaningful by comparing Emerson's essay on Shakespeare with his essay on Goethe; one will feel everywhere that this American had a certain right to say: “The English [do not appreciate the depth of German intellectual life. The German thinks for Europe.] He tried to fathom it, but in fathoming it, he sensed something of what I wanted to characterize today as the living forces of the German spirit, which penetrate into every single soul; not that power that flows from the commonality of human beings, but from the direct intercourse of the individual soul with the spirit. And one can feel how Emerson is imbued with this sustaining power of the German spirit when, at the end of his meditation on Goethe, he speaks words that must be taken with feeling, not just with the mind. At the end of his meditation on Shakespeare, Emerson says:

It must be admitted that these were only imperfect histories of imperfect men. The world is still waiting for the poet-priest, the reconciler, who, unlike Shakespeare, does not play, who, unlike the body-burial Swedenborg, does not search in graves, but who will see and speak and act with equal enthusiasm. For knowledge will give splendor to sunshine; justice is more beautiful than secret preference, and love is compatible with all-embracing wisdom.

What feelings does Shakespeare inspire in Emerson? The feeling that we must wait for the coming of the one who will bring reconciliation.

What does the contemplation of Goethe inspire in him? He says at the end of the contemplation:

The secret of genius is not to tolerate a lie, to make everything we are aware of a truth; in the sophistication of modern life, in art and science, in [the] books and in people, to awaken faith , certainty and trust, and to honor each truth, as we begin and as we end, as we go along and as we go forward, by not only knowing it but by making it a rule of action.

Thus, it was not only Goethe but also Shakespeare who inspired Emerson not to wait for anyone. And the words I have just read are preceded by the following:

We too must write sacred writings to reunite heaven and earth.

We would say today: We have to immerse ourselves in spiritual science, in what human science can be. But Emerson does not grasp the depth of German intellectual life, and is fundamentally hostile to it.

This, however, is precisely why German intellectual life will be in a kind of defensive position for a long time to come. For it experiences strange things even with those of whom it is said that they are trying to penetrate into this German intellectual life. I would also like to give you a sample of this.

Those who are reasonably familiar with the intellectual life of the recent past may have been surprised that such high hopes were placed in some German minds before this war taught people, let's say, about someone like Romain Rolland, a different lesson. The people who admired him represent, to a certain extent, a break in the intellectual life of the present. Those who admired him could not really understand how he could speak so contemptuously of the Germans after the outbreak of the war. One has indeed been able to read strange articles in Germany about Romain Rolland. I will only refer to one work by Romain Rolland, “Jean-Christophe”. In this novel, Romain Rolland portrays a German, but you will see in a moment how. Even this description of Jean-Christophe is to be said: it is given by a person who has never been touched by the real inner strength of the spiritual life. What is Jean-Christophe in the two-volume novel? It is a German musician and how he develops in his Germanness. Romain Rolland wants to describe that. And he really does describe something, yes, you can't say otherwise, than a chaotic mixture of the destinies of various Germans such as Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Wagner, Gustav Mahler and so on. All of this is mixed up in the most impossible way, and that gives the completely impossible character of Jean-Christophe, who has been so much admired, but who shows himself to be nothing more than the result of an artist's inability to face reality, which not only records external nature but also penetrates into the depths of existence, and can see the impossibility of mixing up such chaos.

I am well aware that there may be many people who will interpret what I am about to say about Romain Rolland as “barbaric”. But I believe that I can take on what these people defend from their apparent aesthetic high ground when it comes to judging the particular aesthetic and artistic nature of people like Romain Rolland. [It has nothing to do with what Schiller said to Goethe. “People say that there is something immoral in Wilhelm Meister. No, the characters are as they have to be.”] For with Romain Rolland, you never know what the author says and what his characters say. Therefore, what his characters say can be seen as the attitude of Romain Rolland himself. This attitude comes across to us wherever he talks about Germanness. For example, he describes the father of Jean-Christoph.

I will now only quote a few significant things that we can say are a Frenchman's recent judgment of the German character. And I will cite evidence because there were people who said: This novel is the first great act since 1870 that will bring about the reconciliation of Germans and French. No political act is as important for this reconciliation as Romain Rolland's novel, so people said. Well, anyone who reads the novel will agree with me if I disagree. You can't say that Romain Rolland didn't want to say what his characters say, you just have to look at it from an artistic point of view. Because what we are hearing from this Romain Rolland, this “reconciler between Germanness and Frenchness”, has recently been presented to us in the most defamatory way as German “barbarism” from the West. So it is said of the father:

He was a fine speaker, well built, if a little heavy, and the type of what is considered classical beauty in Germany: a broad, expressionless forehead, strong regular features and a curly beard: a Jupiter from the banks of the Rhine.

Then he characterizes a number of chamber musicians, whom he considers typical of German chamber music, in the following way:

They played neither very accurately nor very in time; but they never went off the rails and faithfully followed the indicated expressive markings. They possessed that musical ease that requires little, and that perfection in mediocrity that is abundant in the race that is called the most musical in the world.

Romain Rolland characterizes Uncle Theodor, the stepson of Jean-Christophe's grandfather, as follows:

He was a partner in a large trading house that had business connections with Africa and the Far East. He was a typical example of the new type of German, who mockingly spurn the old idealism of the race and, drunk with victory, practice a cult that proves that they are not accustomed to living under that sign. But since it is impossible to suddenly change the centuries-old nature of a people, the suppressed idealism kept resurfacing in language, behavior, moral views, and Goethe quotes on the occasion of the slightest domestic events; and so, through the bizarre effort to reconcile the honorable principles of the old German bourgeoisie with the cynicism of these new shop-keepers, a strange mixture of conscientiousness and self-interest, a mixture that has a rather nauseating smell of hypocrisy, which amounts to making a symbol of all that is right, of all justice and truth, out of German strength, greed and the pursuit of personal interest.

That is Romain Rolland's description of certain Germans. We have heard it again through Romain Rolland. But then we are told about Jean-Christophe himself:

He lacked that compliant Germanic idealism that refuses to see and does not see what it would find embarrassing to discover, for fear of destroying the comfortable serenity of its judgment and the comfort of its life.

Of course, Romain Rolland sees German idealism, but he wants to show it in the light that, in his opinion, is the true light. He wants to characterize this German idealism somewhat, and there he says about this German idealism – since Romain Rolland is a good musician, his friends claim that he understands German music particularly well, he may refer to it –; Romain Rolland seeks to characterize German idealism as what the Germans delude themselves about as a blue haze that the Germans fear to see and therefore idealize. He sees in it something with which the Germans mask all kinds of things so as not to see reality. Then he says:

The Germans are not idealists for the reason that they falsify feelings.

– he speaks, I beg to be heard, he speaks as if it were a characteristic of Schumann and Wagner – that is not the problematic thing in music, that idealism fakes feelings, but that feelings are fake, that is shown in Schumann. The German feels fake. These are Romain Rolland's own words:

But it was precisely his example that led Christof to the realization that the worst falsity of German art did not lie where artists wanted to express feelings that they did not feel, but rather where they expressed feelings that they felt but that were false in themselves. Music is a relentless mirror of the soul. The more naive and trusting a German musician is, the more he reveals the weaknesses of the German soul, its insecure foundation, its [soft] sensitivity, its lack of candor, its somewhat devious idealism, its inability to see itself, to dare to look itself in the face.

He wants to get to the very heart of this German idealism. That is why he refers to Mrs. von Stael, who once characterized the Germans, as Romain Rolland reports. She said:

They are well-behaved. They use philosophical reason to explain the most unphilosophical thing in the world: respect for power and the habituation to fear that transforms respect into admiration.

Romain Rolland refers to these words of Mrs. von Stael.

Christof found this feeling in the greatest and the smallest [in Germany]

— he says. And then, to say something quite characteristic of the Germans, he adds:

from Wilhelm Tell, the deliberate, small-minded bourgeois with the muscles of a porter, who, as the free Jew Börne says, “to reconcile honor and fear, walks with downcast eyes before the post of ‘dear Lord’ Gessler, so that he can invoke the fact that he who disobeyed who did not see the hat,” up to the portly, seventy-year-old Professor Weiße, one of the most respected scholars in the city, who, when a lieutenant passed him, hastily gave way to him on the footpath and went down to the road.

[He hated the brutal militarism that he felt weighing on him, all those sabers clanking on the pavement, those pyramids of rifles and cannons set up in front of the barracks, ready to fire with their muzzles pointed towards the city.

We are hearing all of this again now. The novel already contains the same words that we are hearing again now, with the only difference being that later on, the French no longer thought that the muzzles were only pointed at their own German cities, but sensed that they could be pointed elsewhere.

But it cannot be said that Romain Rolland is entirely unjust towards the Germans, whom he characterizes in this way. He does find that these Germans have nothing of the true esthete. In music, he grants them some talent. He calls thinking “clear but cloudy,” and so on. But in the opinion of this Frenchman, who is considered one of the best minds in France today, the Germans do not have much of a sense of beauty. He describes a German girl: “The nose [gap in the text] up one side, down the other.” That, according to him, is the typical German girl. I also ask you to consider the following words:

The Germans are fortunate in their tolerance when it comes to physical imperfections: they manage not to see them; they can even come to embellish them with benevolent imagination, finding unexpected relationships between the [face] they want to see and the most magnificent examples of human beauty.

This refers to the face with the nose that I just described. It would not have taken too much persuasion to get old Euler to declare that [his] granddaughter had the nose of Juno Ludovisi.

But it cannot be said that Romain Rolland is or wants to be completely unjust. He also praises where he wants to praise and recognizes in the German character what he believes he can acknowledge. For example, after he has shown how this Jean-Christophe, who is such a talented fellow that he cannot stand it in the German world, that he strives outwards, because such a genius cannot flourish in the German world. After showing this, he finally invites him to be a guest of a professor, whom he wants to depict as a typical German. And what unfolds in the presence of this German professor is where Romain Rolland does praise the Germans, finding something praiseworthy in them. You see, the professor takes great pains to have his housekeeper prepare the best meal possible. And she, so convinced that she has achieved great art, leaves the door ajar to see how the gentlemen are enjoying their meal.

It was an exhibition of unforgettable, honest, unadulterated German cuisine, with the aromas of all the herbs, the thick sauces, the nourishing soups, the exemplary meat dishes, the monumental carp, the sauerkraut, the geese, the homemade cakes, the aniseed and caraway breads.

You can see that he also has something good to say about the Germans! And he particularly benefits from the meal that has now been taken and a real German, a singing German, is to be described. He describes him in such a way that you can see; he is actually wondering why this particular specimen can sing, and even sing well. He says that the German actually has no idea how to sing:

They are seized by the power of the song, and the song works through them as through an instrument. The spirit of the songs takes hold of them, and they obey it. For the soul of the German must do so. This soul obeys the song as the soldier obeys the general.

The so-called German militarism has grown deep into the soul of those who speak of it today with voluptuous expressions. He now describes a real singer by saying: He was a fat man who always sweated when walking, but especially when he made sounds. - He describes his nature, his figure. Then he says: He looked like a Bavarian, a particular variety of German. He says that there are many of these Bavarians, because they have “the secret of this human race, which came about through a system of pasta-eating similar to how poultry is fattened.”

He wants to find out what the people who are actually able to practice this German art of singing, which he also admires, look like.

Now, it is no wonder that this mixture of Beethoven, Strauss, Wagner and Mahler, who has the peculiarity of not having a spark of any of the four in his soul, cannot endure this artificial construct in Germany. He must get out of Germanness! It is said that although he did not know it, he is driven by German confusion to “Golden Paris”.

But instinctively his eyes looked towards the Latin South. And first of all to France. To France, the eternal [refuge] from German confusion.

Now it is described how the one who has to leave Germanness has to find his way in Latin culture. There he becomes a great mystic. I hope you will excuse me from pursuing the further paths. But we would find many a characteristic there of what must be called the misunderstanding of that which sustains and carries the individual German from the supporting power of the living spirit, with which the German essence feels connected.

Therefore, it may be said that it must be clear to all those who believe that humanity's future lies in the strong and vigorous representation of intellectual life through a world culture how the German spirit has not yet completed its mission in the world, but how this German spirit has laid the seeds from which it can be seen that they must continue to flourish ever more abundantly.

And that appears to us as the fundamental strength of the German spirit, that we know: we can only hope for the blossoms and fruits of the future. We stand confidently in the midst of it, in the living experience of the German spirit. This must also give us the strength for the necessary defense, for the defense of German intellectual life as well, which, as perhaps few today already suspect, is in a fundamental struggle, just as much as the external life of the immediate present.

It would be out of place to present a reflection that was only meant as a consolation. Who needed weak consolation or who needed words of strength or the like, when a nation that knows how to defend its goods with such strength has shown and has already held out for almost a year with strength and courage and a willingness to make sacrifices?

But we must be aware that the German spirit must be on guard just as much as external German life had to be on guard. And when we look more deeply into this spiritual life of the German, we find something of which we can say: This is the core and the root of Germanness: its yearning for the living spirit, its living together with the living spirit.

Those who revile the Germans today and say: We do not mean this German spirit when we revile them, must be told: You seem to us like someone who says: I know there is a person with strong hands, but when he uses these hands, we do not like it!

The French philosopher Bergson said in a Christmas speech that the German mind today shows that it can no longer grasp the living, it can only grasp the mechanistic. Today, only cannons stand against the French; only mechanisms are seen coming from Germany, and armies.

There is not much logic in what he says, as logic is generally missing today when the world situation is discussed so beautifully. You would have to ask this philosopher Bergson whether he expected the French soldiers to be confronted with recitations of Schiller's poems or with Novalis' works.

But a glance, which I could only hint at with weak words – a glance into the essence and life, into the roots of the German spirit, shows us that, looking at this spirit, we can say:

It has not only not completed; it shows that it is taking its ascending path to a fully blossoming and fruitful spiritual life. And anyone who can trust in inner strength can have the utmost confidence in what the German spirit is willing to accomplish. And anyone who has such an insight into the inner effectiveness of the German spirit also knows what great and powerful things must be defended with external weapons today; he knows that the soul of the German nation still has much, much more to bear.

Therefore, let me express what I wanted to express to you today in a few words, and what I ask you to take more from what underlies my words as feelings and emotions. Finally, let me summarize it in a few words that are based on my feelings, which should be words of confidence for the soul, from what can be known about the sustaining power of the German spirit, in the past and into the future. I would like to say: If you follow through in your thoughts what I have only been able to sketch with a few lines of charcoal, you will increasingly come to the feeling that I would like to express at the end with the words:

The German spirit has not fulfilled
What it should bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in worries about the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerfully
Hidden things that must still mature. —
How can a wish for his end arise in the power of the enemy without understanding, so long as life reveals itself to him, which holds him in the roots of his being?

Handwritten summary of contents for the censors.

During the war, public events were subject to the supervision of the censorship authorities. For this purpose, Rudoif Steiner wrote the following table of contents for his lecture scheduled for June 16, 1915 in Düsseldorf (NZ 1564-1566).

Contents of the lecture to be given by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in Düsseldorf. The lecture has already been given in Berlin, Leipzig and in a similar form in Munich.

The lecture begins with the introduction of personalities who, in fateful times within the development of German culture, placed the security, the confidence, the true invincibility of the German being before the soul of the people by evoking the soul's deep permeation with the effective power of the ruling spirit. For them, this “spirit” was not a “concept” or an “idea,” as it is for the naturalistically thinking consciousness; for them, the spirit was a real being with which the soul maintains contact in its deepest interior, from which it draws spiritual life-force, just as the body draws physical life-force from the air through the lungs.

Thus Fichte stood in the midst of his people when they had to work their way up to freedom, supported only by their own strength, by showing how the German people, in contrast to the Romance peoples, already prove through their language that they are connected in their very essence to the innermost roots of the vital impulse of spiritual existence. The German does not feel spiritual life as something that is only recognized in the individual human soul, but as something that reigns over this individual soul as an independent being and that carries the individual soul.

From this consciousness, a creation within German culture has emerged that is only possible within the German people: Goethe's “Faust”. Faust strives out of dead knowledge towards an inner living contact with the essence of the spirit. In Faust, the most ancient German consciousness of nature and the world comes to life again in a newer way. One does not need to deny the great significance of Shakespeare; but one must still say that in Faust, everything human rises to a nobler height than in Hamlet. Consider how, when confronted with the truly spiritual, the latter can only fall back on doubt and uncertainty, on the hopeless question, “To be or not to be?” By contrast, when confronted with the power of evil, of material things, Faust asserts the inner certainty of victory of his connection with the spirit: “In thy nothing I hope to find the All.”

Those who belong to the nations that today do not want to revile German deeds enough, must have come to the same conclusion that Ernest Renan expressed in 1870, when they sensed the nature of this in the development of German culture. 70, that Germany has added something to the development of humanity in terms of “depth and extent” that “for those who have experienced it, it is as if they only know elementary mathematics compared to those who are proficient in differential calculus”.

This connection of the German soul with the sustaining power of the world-ruling spirit has, in minds like Herder's, evoked the consciousness of the world-significant task of German culture, of the fact that this culture has a contribution to make to the overall education of the human race, insofar as this illuminates the lofty goal of working “until everything has happened, until the genius of enlightenment has traversed the earth.”

This consciousness warmed Lessing's soul as he wrote his incomparable testament to the “education of the human race,” which elevated all contemplation of history to an experience of the eternal spiritual activity of the world through the human soul.

And this consciousness lives on to the present day in the most exquisite minds of the German people. It will now be shown how this fundamental strength of the German spirit has led to a deep world view and outlook on life in individual personalities of the nineteenth century. Herman Grimm's genuine German character is characterized; lesser-known personalities are also mentioned to show what particular German character is in thinking, feeling and experiencing.

Finally, it is suggested how, in the present day, the consciousness that comes from the sources, in which the German essence is intimately connected with the power of the spirit, may live in the German mind, and how this consciousness may trust in its power within the world of enemies, in the face of which it has to assert itself in our fateful days.

Dear Attendees!

Unlike in previous years when I had the honor of speaking here in this city about subjects of spiritual science, last year I did not venture to speak about a subject of spiritual science in the strict sense, but rather about something that is connected with the spiritual development of the German people, who are currently facing one of the most significant events in world history, with world-historical facts that have no equal in the entire developmental history of modern times. And so, honored attendees, may this evening's reflection also be dedicated to such a topic, the reflection of a certain current in German intellectual life, which I believe, however, not out of a vague feeling, but out of real spiritual-scientific conviction that it contains, in the most essential, in the very most essential sense, German intellectual development, the seeds of that spiritual science as it was always meant, when I was allowed to speak about it here in earlier years.

This spiritual science wants, in the best sense of the word, to be a real science, a real, genuine continuation of the scientific world view that has emerged over the past three to four hundred years in the development of humanity. As a spiritual science, it aims to penetrate into the spiritual realm of the world, just as natural science methodically penetrates into the external world through the external senses and through the mind bound to the external senses, into the mind bound to the external senses and its observations, and into the external senses and their observations.

However, spiritual science requires a certain development of the human soul for its research. It is necessary for this research that what can lead to it is first developed from the human soul. To a certain extent - to apply Goethe's often-used words again today - the spiritual eyes and ears that slumber in man himself must first be awakened from the human soul so that he can look and listen into the spiritual world.

Now, however, it might seem from the outset, esteemed attendees, as if, when speaking of science - and that is the opinion of some; some think that one has no right to speak of anything other than such a thing that belongs to all nations. In certain circles, there is the opinion that one is already thinking unscientifically if one allows oneself the opinion that even that which is the scientific study of the world has its origins in the essence of folklore. However, as superficial as this opinion may be, it is superficial when it comes to the deeper objects of spiritual science.

The moon is also common to all peoples of the earth, but how the thoughts and feelings that the individual peoples have attached to the experiences of the moon differ. One could indeed say: that may relate to poetry. But when it comes to penetrating the deeper secrets of the world, then the different predispositions that exist in different ways in the individual peoples speak. And according to these different predispositions, people penetrate more or less deeply into the secrets of existence.

The German does not need to resort to the clay when speaking of the significance and value of the German national character for the development of the world and humanity, as the opponents of Central Europe are currently doing, using our fateful time not only to vilify the German character in the most hateful way possible, but to downright slander it. The German can quite appropriately penetrate into that which has emerged in the course of his intellectual development. And it will be shown that this appropriate consideration leads precisely to placing German essence, German intellectual life, in the right place in the world development of humanity, not through self-assured arrogance, but by letting the facts speak.

When we consider the events that affect us all so deeply today, that claim so many, so many victims from humanity, that fill us with so much definite hope and confidence, when we consider these events, then there is really only one fact that needs to be mentioned – to strike a chord that will resonate again and again in the future history of humanity: Today, around Central Europe, 777 million people stand, in a row, 150 million hostile. The 777 million people have no reason to envy the size of the land on which the other 150 million live in Central Europe; the people of the so-called Entente live on 68 million square kilometers, and the people of Central Europe live on only 6 million square kilometers!

But leading personalities in particular have repeatedly managed, out of the 777 million, to insult and defame even the best and highest intellectual products of the 150 million.

It is therefore particularly appropriate for the German to reflect on his intellectual life in such a way that it may appear to him as rooted in the actual germinating power of his nationality.

And so, esteemed attendees, we are repeatedly and again and again, although this should only be mentioned in the introduction today, repeatedly and again and again referred to the three great figures within the German world view development, which today, unfortunately, may say, unfortunately, no longer considered in the right, deep way, but whose essence nevertheless lives on to this day, and whose essence wants to rise again, [whose essence] must belong to the best impact forces of German spiritual culture in the future. Three figures are pointed out: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, those personalities in the development of the German world view who tried to lift the German people in time onto the scene of the development of thought, of the highest, purest development of thought, in the time when, from the depths of this national life, such minds as Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and all the others who belong to them have worked so that what has come from them after the Greek intellectual blossoming of humanity means a time of the highest intellectual blossoming of humanity for anyone who is unbiased.

And how does Johann Gottlieb Fichte appear in the mind's eye of the human being? That which lived in his soul as feeling made his world view appear to him, who can be called one of the most German of men, as something that he had attained by having something directly in his lonely soul life, something like a kind of dialogue with the German national spirit itself.

This mood of the soul emerged when he delivered his powerful “Discourses to the German Nation,” which sought to reveal all the power and developmental possibilities of German nationality in order to give impetus to the further development of “Germanness,” as Fichte himself put it.

But what is the essence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's endeavors? It can be said that everything that has been striven for in the best sense from the center of the German soul for centuries appears again in Fichte in the most powerful way. Thus it is that Fichte wanted to gain a well-illuminated world view, an energetic understanding of the world through this. What Fichte strove for was to delve into the human soul, to inwardly experience its deepest powers, to experience them in such a way that in this experience he also experiences what the world as a whole is living through and working through as a spiritual, world-creating entity. [What Fichte strove for was to] experience the spiritual, world-creating essence in one's own soul in such a way that, by unfolding one's own soul powers, one experiences what works and lives and dwells in the innermost part of the world. That was what Fichte wanted: to experience the spirit of the world by making it present in one's own soul.

That was for him the true meaning of the word “knowledge”. That was for him also the content of all truth worth striving for by man – the truth that for him was the direct expression of the divine spirituality that lives through the world, that knowledge, as truth, permeates the human soul so that this human soul can grasp it in an inward, powerful experience. But through this, Fichte felt as if the whole world were pulsating and alive and interwoven with the will of the world, with the divine will of the world.

And as man grasps himself in his innermost being, as he becomes in the truest sense an I-conscious being, an imprint arises within this I, a revelation of the world-will pulsating through the world, which is completely imbued of what Fichte calls the “duties”; those duties that could never reveal themselves to one from a merely material world, that penetrate from the world of the spiritual into the human soul, [which] grasp the will of humanity; so that for Fichte, the external sensual, material world becomes that which, like the material-physical, expands before us, in order to be able to live out the dutiful will and the will-imbued duty in anything.

Not that Fichte diverted his approach from the external sense world, not as if he wanted to escape into a one-sided world free of the senses! It is not like that; but it is the case that everything that the eyes can see externally, that the hands can grasp, for Fichte became the tool, the means of the spirit, so that the spirit could present itself, [so that] the spirit, -the spirit permeated by duty, the duty that man can grasp in his soul, can be represented by an external materiality: a world view that Fichte himself, in the very sense of the word, regards as a world view.

One may say, esteemed attendees, while remaining entirely objective: Nothing stands in such contrast to another as this Fichtean world view stands, say, to the world view born of the spirit of the French Romance language, as it was outlined by one of the greatest French philosophers, Cartesius or Descartes, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as an embodiment of the French spirit itself – a philosophical embodiment. Descartes, the Frenchman, the Frenchman who, like Fichte from the Germanic, so from the French national character draws and creates, Descartes starts from the fact that man feels himself a stranger to the outer world, that man must start from doubt in his soul. There can be no doubt for Fichte in the sense that Descartes means it, for his knowledge is an immediate co-experience of that which lives and breathes through the world. Fichte does not place himself outside of the spirit of the world by knowing, but inwardly seeks to unite with the spirit.

Descartes, on the other hand, stands before the world as mere observation, as external observation. What kind of world view emerges from this? One need only mention one thing that appears as a consequence of the French Descartesian world view. As I said, it is really not necessary to develop national biases, but one can remain objective when saying this. What is one consequence of Descartes' view of the world? Well, it is enough to mention that Descartes, in his striving, which also emanates from self-awareness, but from mere rational, intellectual self-awareness, not from the living inner life, like Fichte's self-awareness, this Descartes' view of the world imagines the world as a large machine, as a powerful mechanism. And for Descartes, animals themselves are moving machines, inanimate, moving machines.

Everything that developed as a mechanism in later times, as a mechanistic world view, which also took hold in other nations from France, basically leads back to this starting point of Descartes.

You only have to consider the contrast: On the one hand, the Roman philosopher who turns the world into a machine; on the other hand, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who wants to pour out the soul itself over the whole world from the German folk tradition, so that this soul can experience everything soulful, everything in the world that is pulsating with will – and one has expressed something important about the relationship of the German folk spirit to its western neighbor.

This Descartesian worldview then produced, I might say, one materialistic outgrowth after another. We see how, at the end of the eighteenth century, the worldview that Goethe encountered from France emerged, and of which Goethe, from his German consciousness, said: Oh, how bleak, how desolate! And then the philosopher shows us atoms moving, colliding, pushing each other – a mere mechanism! And all this is supposed to explain the rich abundance of the world in which we live?

It is fair to say – again, entirely objectively: From the abundance and vibrancy of the German mind, Goethe turned away from this merely mechanistic world view, which then, in de La Mettrie's “Man a Machine” at the end of the eighteenth century, had a flowering that of all those who want to build a worldview based on superficial vanity, on that vanity that would be quite satisfied if there were no human soul, but if, like a phonograph, the human mechanical thinking apparatus purred away what man has to say about the world. And well into the nineteenth century, this worldview continued to unfold.

We see it in [gap in transcript], but we also see it in a spirit like – yes, it is still not called French today, but is still called Bergson – like in Bergson, who has found the most shameful thing, again and again, to defame and slander that which wells up from the German soul as a world view. One would like to say: Because he can see nothing else in a world picture that is alive, that is filled with inner life, he believes he can defame it, defames this German world picture as such, which shows - as he repeatedly says in his writings – how the German, from his lofty position at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, has descended and degenerated completely into a mechanistic world mechanism.

It is a pity that this so celebrated Bergson not only drew a picture of the world - I have explained it in detail, not only in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, written before the war - but not only drew a picture of the world that was much more powerful, much more forceful, by a German mind, Preuss, who is rarely mentioned and little known, the German thinker, thinker, for example in his book “Spirit and Matter” 1882 [is presented] - of which Bergson either knows nothing, which is an equally big mistake, or does not want to know anything - but not only this, but it has also been shown that entire pages in the so-praised writings of Bergson are simply copied from Schelling or from Schopenhauer! – That is one way of relating to the intellectual life of Central Europe!

This intellectual life is contrasted with that of Fichte, an intellectual life that does not want to understand the world as dead, but that wants to understand the world as a spiritual-living entity, down to the smallest parts, and for which knowledge is nothing other than the experience of this spiritual vitality of the world. Just as with the French conception of the world, Fichte, with his energetic grasp of the human ego, in which he wants to experience the world, stands in contrast to the English conception of the world, that English conception of the world that took its starting point from Baco of Verul am, and which, one might say, has found its repulsive sides, its repulsive one-sidedness, precisely in the most recent world view that English intellectual life has produced in so-called pragmatism – in Baco von Verulam. As Goethe, for example, very profoundly remarks, one sees everywhere how [Baco von Verulam] actually regards the spiritual life in such a way that what otherwise [lives] in the human spirit as truth is actually only there to summarize and form the diversity of the external materials and forces of the world, which can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands, and to again disassemble them and the like. A means of dominating the external physical world is philosophy, based on Baco von Verulam, basically everything that could be called philosophy. And up to our days, this meaning has been preserved.

What actually appears as pragmatism? Within English intellectual life, something highly peculiar appears as pragmatism – Schiller, James and other representatives of this pragmatism. For these representatives of pragmatism, for these pragmatists, truth is not something that man experiences inwardly like an image of gods or spirits, something that – as in the Fichte in the sense of Fichte, enters the human soul from the spirit that pulsates, lives and weaves through the world, but in the sense of this pragmatism, truth is actually only something that man thinks up in order to have a direction in the multiplicity of external phenomena.

For example, the soul - this concept of “soul”, this unified concept of soul - you cannot see the soul: What is it then for pragmatism? For pragmatism, the unifying concept of soul, the unifying concept of the ego, of self-awareness, is nothing more than a means of holding together the manifoldness of the soul life and its expressions in the body, so that they do not fall apart in contemplation; so that one has, as it were, brackets and bindings. Concepts are created for the external material. How far removed this is from Fichte's world view, drawn from the depths of the soul, for which spirit is the most original of the world and reality, the spirit that flows into the individual human soul life. And by feeling this influx, man knows himself one with the spirit of the world. And then the external world becomes, as Fichte put it, a field for the spirit to unfold in. Exactly the opposite!

Here with Fichte: the spirit is supreme, the actual reality, the highest living thing, for the sake of which the external world of the senses exists, so that the spirit can find its means of expression in it. There: the mind is capable of nothing more than creating binders and clamps in its concepts and ideas, so that it - which is the main thing - can place these concepts in the service of external material reality, and can ultimately find itself in external material reality.

It is indeed necessary, most honored attendees, to consider the interrelations in this very light. Only through this does the German come to a real, enlightened realization of what is actually taking place in the depths of his people.

Then, in one of the most difficult times in German development, Fichte tried to express what emerged to him as a power of consciousness from this soul power, which was connected to his inner life of will, in order to inspire, to strengthen, to invigorate his people. He did this in his “Addresses to the German Nation” to the German Nation» that the true man of world-view does not merely live in unworldly contemplation, but that these contemplations can intervene directly in that which the time demands and what mankind – I would like to say – [in fact] needs in order to be strengthened and invigorated in soul.

And at the appropriate moment, a second personality appears before us alongside Fichte – the second personality who tried no less to grasp the innermost part of the world with his own soul. These spirits sought to grasp the whole, great world spirit with their own souls, investing their entire personality.

In the case of Fichte, I probably only needed to tell you a few details of his life so that you could see how truly what he experienced – I would say – on the icy heights of thought, but which were permeated by pure human warmth in his case, was connected to his personality, to his immediate human being. A picture of the very young Fichte: he is a good student, already devoting himself to his duties at school as a six- or seven-year-old. His father rewards the young boy by giving him the book 'The Horned Siegfried' for Christmas when he is seven. Fichte, the young Fichte, the boy, is completely gripped by what comes to life through the human personality that is in a soul like that of “Gehörnte Siegfried”! And so it turns out that he now needs to be admonished because he is no longer as diligent at school as he was before. One day we see the boy in his blue farmer's smock; he is standing by the stream that flows past his father's house: suddenly he throws the “Gehörnte Siegfried”, which he was holding in his hand, into the water, and he stands there crying and watches as the book floats away in the waves. His father arrives and is initially indignant that his little boy has thrown the book he had given him into the water. Then he has to learn that in this case what Fichte later made the actual core of his philosophical work – the dutiful will – that this dutiful will already lived in the boy Fichte in such a way that he could not bear, by the distracted attention to the “Horned Siegfried”, no longer fulfill his duty as a learner! And everything he experienced as a boy was probably already connected with the innermost workings and nature of his soul.

And once, when Fichte was nine years old, the estate neighbor from the neighboring village came to Fichte's place of residence. He wanted to hear the sermon; but he was too late. He could no longer hear the pastor preach; the church bells had already rung. So it was suggested that the nine-year-old boy could retell the content of the sermon to the estate neighbor. And they sent for him. Young Fichte entered in his blue peasant's smock; and after he had behaved somewhat awkwardly at first, he approached the public figure and developed the thoughts that he had taken in from the sermon with such intimacy that it was clear: he had not only taken something in externally, but had united with his whole soul what he had listened to.

Thus it was that this personality – one might say – that, if I may use the trivial word, it always absorbed everything that affected it with the whole person, out of its own genius, so effectively that everything that came from this person, on the one hand, bore the deepest human character, and on the other hand, rose again to the highest heights of world-historical contemplation.

One beautiful trait of this most German of German thinkers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, must be emphasized again and again: when Fichte later spoke to his audience as a professor, he did not want to speak like someone else who simply conveyed the content of what he had conquered to his listeners. Someone who knew Fichte well and had often heard him speak said that his words rushed forth like a thunderstorm that discharges in individual sparks; [and he said] that he not only wanted to produce good people, but great people.

And in such a way was also the work-you can not say-set up, the work of this German, because in the thoughts of this German thinker lived something in this lecture, which was much more than presented: He wanted, by mounting the lectern, to carry something up to this lectern, which flowed as a living entity from him into flowed from him into the audience, so that the audience, if they listened attentively and left the lecture hall, took with them not only a content, not only a teaching, but something that was more in their soul than what they had brought into the lecture hall, something that seized their whole humanity, permeated it, inspired it! And truly, Fichte knew how to work in this way, to penetrate so directly to the center of the human soul, that he wanted to bring his listeners, these listeners, in direct contact with his listeners, to revive in themselves what really connected them – one might say – immediately connected them to what the soul could experience of the spiritual that flows and permeates the world.

So, for example, he once said to his listeners: “Imagine the wall.” The listeners turned their eyes to the wall and thought, “That would be easy.” After he had let them think about the wall for a while, he said, “So, now imagine the one who imagined the wall!” At first they were amazed. But now a way had been found to win the hearts and minds of the audience directly for the realization of the secrets of the world, as they can play out in the human soul.

And so, with his whole personality directly immersed in the life of knowledge, was also Johann Wilhelm Schelling, of whom those who saw him – and I certainly knew such people! – who saw and heard him – not only read his books and knew what was in his books – thus they said that something emerged from his sparkling eyes that was like the gaze of knowledge itself!

Schelling, too, wanted to experience directly in his own soul what lives in nature as spirit. For him, the soul was only something like the outer face of a spirit that lives and weaves through the world. And as the human soul approaches nature, it recognizes in nature what it itself is as spirit and soul.

Spirit flows through the world. It forms an external impression by crystallizing nature around itself. In this way, it creates the ground for the spirit itself to appear in the human soul on this ground. Therefore, for Schelling, the spirit of nature and the spirit of soul grew together into a unity. And with such a view, he knew how to rise to wonderful possibilities. He only penetrated them in seemingly dry concepts – incidentally, in concepts and ideas that sometimes rose to the most tremendous, most alert, intuitive glow. He only spoke in seemingly dry terms about nature and about how one can be in harmony with nature and the spiritual world, and how the concepts arise from nature and how one can be in harmony in cognition.

Once he said the word, the word that was certainly one-sided: To recognize nature is to create nature. - Certainly, a one-sided word; one can only recreate nature in the act of recognizing it. But Schelling felt such a close kinship between what takes place in the human soul and what takes place in nature that he could imagine himself to be living as if he were creating natural forces when he believed that the right cognitive drives had been released in the soul. And so, on the one hand, the human form appears to Schelling as the highest natural expression of the natural forces of the spirit and soul, and on the other hand, art [...] that which is the human expression of spiritual striving.

One would like to say: Schelling feels the highest as two halves that only complement each other: what the artist is able to create in art, on the one hand; the human form, on the other hand, as the crown and blossom of nature. And so we see how Schelling developed a world view that is entirely born out of – indeed, itself appears like a rebirth – the rebirth of the human mind. The German mind itself has become the organ of vision in Schelling, to see in nature and in intellectual life that which speaks to the human mind as external sensory objects speak to the human eyes and ears.

But as a result, Schelling has become the one for the German spiritual development who could raise to an enormous height that which, as a spiritual world, could inspire from the Romance world view, for example, Giordano Bruno, but only inspire. How passionately born out of the [Italian] world-feeling the world-picture of Giordano Bruno appears, if we compare it with the world-picture—with the calm world-picture reborn out of the German soul—of Schelling.

And the third is Hegel. Hegel, the third, the philosopher of the Germans who, I might say, lived in the most intimate union with the Goethean Weltanschauung; Hegel, who, I might say, sought on the third of the paths that were possible from the German folk, on the third of the paths to lead the soul to the place where it can directly grasp the spiritual activity and weaving and essence of the world.

In Johann Gottlieb Fichte, it is the will that pulses through the soul and creates expression in duty; in Schelling, it is the feeling, the innermost part of the soul, while a natural will takes hold of it and gives it birth; in Hegel, it is the life of thought - the life of thought that is felt by Hegel in such a way that, as the thoughts that he lets pass through his soul are moved and experienced by this soul, they appear directly as thoughts of the divine-spiritual life of the world itself, which permeates all spaces and all times. So that man, by letting his thoughts live in himself, free from sensuality and without being influenced by the outside world, has the divine-spiritual thinking of the world simultaneously living and revealing itself in him through this experience of thought. Admittedly, this is how Hegel became a spirit who created a world view as if the whole world were built only out of logic – which is one-sided. But he added to what Fichte and Schelling had offered, the third sound from German folk tradition.

It may be said that what makes Hegel appear particularly as a German spirit is that, unlike Descartes, for example - Rosenkranz, a faithful disciple of Hegel, wrote the fine book “Hegel as a German National Philosopher” - what makes Hegel particularly German spirit, is that, unlike Descartes, who also bases everything on thinking but only arrives at a mechanistic view of the world, he does not experience thinking as if thinking were something that arises in the soul and is alien to existence, but rather: the spirit, the world spirit itself thinks itself in man. The world spirit itself sees itself through thinking in man. In his thinking, Hegel feels interwoven with the thoughts of the world spirit.

One can also say that Descartes' one-sided, naked view of the world is given life – if only as a thought – in Hegel's view of the world.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, there is no need to take a dogmatic stand on the views of the three men mentioned. We can go further than that today; to be a partisan or an opponent may perhaps view all that these minds have expressed as one-sided. There is no need to take a dogmatic stand on them; they can be seen as an extension of what lives and weaves in German national character. They are something that has emerged from the flowering of German intellectual life, which will certainly change in many ways over time as it continues to flourish and bear fruit, but which can provide the deepest and most significant insights for anyone striving for spiritual knowledge of the world because a spiritual world knowledge must arise from such a germ within German intellectual life, as was striven for by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and basically arose out of the spirit of Goethe.

What is peculiar about these three personalities is that they basically express three sides, three different shades of something that hovers invisibly over them, that was the common expression of the highest peak of German intellectual life at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, and that in Goethe and others the great fruits emerge in such a way that one always starts not to seek a knowledge of the world in such a way that one simply applies man as he stands in his powers, but that one first tries to awaken the human powers of knowledge that lie deeply dormant in the depths of the soul, and with the opened spiritual eye and spiritual ear - as I said, these are Goethe's words - then wants to look out into the world and life with the opened spiritual eye and spiritual ear.

This is how Goethe did it. That is why Goethe, following Kant, speaks of an intuitive power of judgment, which he ascribed to himself. And truly, from this intuitive power of judgment emerged the blossoms of Goethe's achievements. “Intuitive power of judgment” - what does Goethe mean? The ordinary power of judgment lives in human concepts. With this power of judgment, man faces things, he faces nature; he looks at it with his senses; with his mind he judges what he has seen with his senses. Goethe says to himself: If one can see the spiritual through the power of judgment, just as the eyes see the sensual, then one lives and moves in the spiritual. - And so Goethe wanted to look at plants and animals, so he wanted to look at human life. And so he observed it! And so he even wanted to be active in the field of physics.

There one comes upon a chapter in which it is clearly shown how German folk-life must express something different about the external facts of physical life than, for example, English folk-life. The time has not yet come, however, to see the connections in this area.

For more than thirty years now, I myself have endeavored – I may say this without immodesty, because it is simply a fact – to show what Goethe actually wanted, from a spiritual view of nature, from an judgment, as [he opposed his] theory of colors to Newton's color theory, which is based on atomism and mechanism, as a theory of life.

Today, physics cannot yet understand this. But once German culture in the spiritual realm truly reflects on itself, one will understand how the German spirit in Goethe had to rebel against Newton's purely mechanical scientific view in the field of color theory as well.

And the chapter “Goethe versus Newton” – by that I mean German science versus the mechanical utilitarian English science. This chapter will reappear. And perhaps it is precisely such a chapter that will show the relationship of the German soul in its depth and in its deeper contemplation of knowledge to the other judgments of Europe's striving for knowledge.

And what place the German national soul has come to occupy in the overall development of German intellectual life is only one particular, special aspect; but this particular, this single, special aspect is the expression of the general that lived in the Goethe , and that lives on into our days, albeit – I would like to say – under the stream of consciousness, but nevertheless clearly in all deeper recognition of the spiritual in the German: to seek the spiritual organ of knowledge.

Fichte called it a “higher spiritual sense” when he spoke to his Berlin students from 1811 to 1813. Schelling called it “intellectual intuition.” To arrive at a higher organ of spiritual knowledge – which is uncomfortable, and which a philosophy based merely on utility or mechanism, like the Romance or British philosophy, cannot achieve – to create an organ of knowledge organ that is built out of the spirit and can therefore look into the spirit; [that] does not see the spirit in abstract, dry, empty theoretical concepts, but grasps it as fully as the outer senses grasp the world of the senses.

And because such striving was so powerfully alive in the development of the German spirit, it was possible that even lesser minds that followed the time of Goethe were seized and imbued with what had germinated and sprouted in the great age of German life that has just been discussed, and that these lesser minds could even create something that is more similar to the paths that are actually the real paths to grasp the world spiritual as a human spirit in a living way, to get something that is even more similar to this real path than what appeared in Schelling, Fichte and Hegel. Because there is so much that is fruitful in this Fichte-Schelling-Hegel worldview, it could have such a fertilizing effect even on lesser minds, who - let us say - like Fichte's son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, come to recognize how in what sensually to man as a human-like form – also as a sensual animal form, but there it does not have the same meaning – what lives in the sensual human form as in a finer bodily organization in a coarser bodily organization, as we say in spiritual science: an etheric body alongside the coarse physical body; and how in this etheric body [work] the great cosmic forces that give birth to man out of the eternal, just as the physical forces give birth to him physically out of the physical. That is to say, Hermann Immanuel Fichte is already seeking a way to directly access the external physical, not only through thoughts, not only through abstractions, but by directly grasping in a higher, spiritual-sensual way that lies beyond birth and death in man.

And then we see a remarkable spirit, little known, who also walks this path, undoubtedly not as ingeniously and magnificently conceived as Schelling and Fichte, for example, but advancing further along the actual spiritual-scientific path than they, because he was allowed to live after them. Although he wrote his wonderful book “Glimpses into the Essence of Man” in 1811, we can still say that Troxler – for that is who we mean – is one of those who are truly at home in a forgotten chapter of German intellectual life. Because he lived later, Troxler was able to find true paths into the spiritual world when even his greater – greater than he – his greater predecessors could not.

It is remarkable that Troxler, when he presented his “[Lectures] on Philosophy” in 1835, spoke of the fact that man can develop something in his soul if he only wants to, something that relates to the purely intellectual view of the world, which works in theoretical concepts and, so to speak, only collects individual concepts from observation, how something could develop in the human soul, which he calls Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, an “super-spiritual sense”. “Supra-spiritual sense” - that is a soul power that Troxler refers to as [one that] can only be developed in man, and which does not, I would say, merely grasp things conceptually, not so abstractly as ordinary abstract cognition, but which grasps things so fully, so fully, that they , like the spirit itself, before man; that man thereby beholds a spiritual world, which is not exhausted in concepts, like even Hegel's, but which sees spiritual reality as the senses see sensual reality, so that the world is truly enriched by a new element of its being, by the spiritual. But the spiritual consists of concrete, fully developed entities that stand side by side and interact with each other in such a way that they can be grasped by the senses.

“Supra-sensible meaning” is one soul force. Troxler speaks of the other as the “supra-sensible spirit”. So that one must see in it that which can be developed in the human soul as a special power, so that the soul comes to go beyond the ordinary sensual, and yet not to fall into spiritual emptiness, as for example the mechanical natural science, but [that one comes to a] being filled by the spirit.

“Supersensible spirit”, “superspiritual sense” - for Troxler, these are two faculties in the human soul. He speaks of this in 1835; and one can receive an enormously significant stimulus for that which one can call knowledge of the spirit from these Troxler lectures, which consciously emerged from the depths of German nationality. For it is this German nationality that encourages us not to look at the world merely from the outside, but to really feel again and again, in what the soul can experience most intimately, the flooding through of the soul-spiritual being of the human being and of the whole world itself. Thus this German national character is called upon to develop something that otherwise could not have occurred within a national character in the course of time.

Now let us see how strangely - even if one characterizes quite one-sidedly that which is really in the sense of this national character - can be expressed, and what can be proved about these characterized spirits, let us look at what it is. We must say that we also see mysticism within the spiritual development of France and England, but this mysticism exists alongside other forms of science. It is either condemned to lead a sectarian existence alongside other forms of science or to close itself off as a special spiritual current.

German intellectual life, by rising to something like what Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, Troxler, Immanuel Hermann Fichte have achieved, shows that one can, in the fullest sense can remain in the fullest sense of the word in a scientific spirit and can work precisely out of a scientific spirit, and that which is to be achieved through mysticism, for example, does not stand alongside this scientific current, but can be directly and organically connected to it and can emerge from it.

Therefore, we see how, for example, in Hegel there arises something that lives in the purest clarity of thought – even if many dispute it, it is still so – but there is nothing in the purest clarity of thought that might be just a nebulous mysticism of feeling or what would be a mystic prattling about all kinds of things, but what, with crystal-clear thoughts, at the same time wants to grasp the thinking of the world mystically in its own thinking: we find thought-like mysticism - if the word may be used - in Hegel. And we find this intellectual mysticism spiritualized — because the life of thought is inwardly illuminated by the supersensible spirit, by the supra-spiritual meaning — in such personalities as, for example, Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler.

It is interesting to see how Troxler endeavors to reveal what should lead to a world view from the forces of the soul, how what man knows reveals itself from what actually stands behind what man has in ordinary everyday life for the maintenance and orientation of his life. In Troxler's view, man has faith - faith, which, in the realm of religious belief, supports humanity's highest spiritual supports, but which also plays a major role in other areas of human life: faith. Man has this faith in his soul life. I am not just repeating Troxler's words, but speaking as one would have to think if one took in what Troxler said and developed it a little further. This power of belief is something that the outer physical body must have, something that can be grasped by the soul just as it arises directly in the soul, even without the development of higher cognitive powers. But behind this belief lives, hidden in the soul, [a higher organ of knowledge, so that belief is, as it were, for ordinary daily life, the living out of this higher organ of knowledge. Troxler calls what lives behind faith: spiritual hearing, the supersensible, spiritual hearing. So that in Troxler's sense, faith is to be imagined as the beautiful that flows in from an unconscious or subconscious spiritual part of the soul, which drives faith to the surface. But if it is developed itself, it becomes a spiritual ear that would become hearing in the spiritual world. Spiritual hearing means perceiving in the same way as the sensory ear perceives external sounds that live in the air.

Love, a soul power, which we again find as if born out of the soul-spiritual, the most beautiful power of outer human life, love – behind it stands for Troxler – I would like to say: for Troxler's pious mind – a spiritual, a soul power of knowledge. He calls it “soul feeling”, “soul sensing”.

Thus faith is, as it were, the outer expression, the outer image of what lives in the full soul as hearing. Thus love is the outer fruit of what lives in the inner soul as spiritual sensing, as spiritual feeling.

For Troxler, hope is the outer expression of that which lives in the soul as a higher soul power, as a higher soul sense, as a super-spiritual sense in the soul as an inner spiritual eye.

It is a wonderful image, but one that is not born out of fantasy alone, but is based on real facts of the soul life that everyone can develop within themselves. A wonderful image. There stands man within the physical and the spiritual world. There he develops, in relation to what flows through the world as the Divine-Spiritual, and in relation to what flows towards him from people and other beings: faith, hope, love. He develops them because, when he carries within him that which can stand free of the body in relation to the spiritual world, because he carries within him that which hears spiritually, feels spiritually and can see spiritually. And because the human being, that which he is in his soul, has been shrouded for the time between death – or, let us say, until birth with the bodily covering – that which connects him through spiritual hearing to the world-tone harmony , with the spiritual harmony of the world, which connects him to the world, which through grace leans towards him from the spiritual, through spiritual groping, which connects with him through spiritual vision, which wraps itself for him in faith, love, hope. [And so the soul forces that confront us in everyday life and in ordinary soul education are, for Troxler, an expression of a spiritual life that slumbers down there in the soul, that weaves and lives, and that, when developed, can enter into a direct connection with the spiritual-soul life of the whole world that flows around us. In this, the Troxler feels so at home in this, one can say, temporarily forgotten link in German thought and spiritual development.

Beautifully, wonderfully, he expresses this feeling of being at home by expressing himself in connection with other spirits who have striven for something similar. He says:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body [or assumed a kind of shell for the spirit in this], a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the inner, higher human being for them. This view, even if it is only an explanation, was also held by most of the first great church fathers, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine. In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire, inward, spiritual man who wears all the limbs of the outward man on his spirit body. Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonnese under-skirt and the Platner-esque soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body rock and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What is the use and origin of these extraordinary talents and desires within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? [Why was I stuck to the dirty lump of earth, a creature with useless wings of light, when I should rot back into the birth clod without ever wriggling free with ethereal wings.] “The inner man,” he even says in another place, “this ‘veiled God in nature, is not himself of stone, like these.] In the stony limbs’

of man

“grow and mature according to a way of life unknown to us. We could”

"we could cite a myriad more similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical Apostolic idea, which Paul revealed to the Corinthians, , saying: “A body animated by the soul is sunk, and a body animated by the spirit rises, for as there is a body endowed with a soul, so there is also a body endowed with a spirit.” And in this is] contained the true, only doctrine of the individuality and immortality of man.

Troxler wanted a science that approached the world from all the powers of human nature, not just from the intellect and the ordinary, so-called powers of knowledge, but - but a science, a knowledge that the whole personality contributes to the world, so that in turn the whole human personality, the whole human being, can recreate or relive the world within itself. Not only in poetry, Troxler believes, but also in real knowledge it must become so. Therefore Troxler says the beautiful words in 1835:

"If it is now highly gratifying that the newest philosophy, which [we have long since recognized as the one that founds all living religion and] must reveal itself in every instance of anthroposophy, thus in poetry as well as in history,] is now rising, it cannot be be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true personality or individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts with it as absolute spirit or absolute personality."

Thus, Troxler is faced with the idea of an anthroposophy, as he calls it, an anthroposophy that is not, like anthropology, the study of that which can be observed externally in man with the senses and with the mind from which these senses seem to be drawn, but a higher kind of anthropology ology stands before Troxler's eyes, before Troxler's spiritual eye, which wants to develop an organ in man that is basically only the higher man in man, who then, to use this Goethean expression, directly recognizes and experiences that which is also higher than all nature: the higher nature in nature.

Then, when the whole personality presents itself to the world as a cognitive organ, as a super-spiritual sense organ, as a supersensible spiritual organ – as a “super-spiritual sense, as a ‘supersensible spirit’, [as a] spiritual organ, so that the world comes to life in the whole personality, then, in Troxler's view, ‘anthroposophy’ arises!

Thus, as if in a forgotten aspiration of German intellectual development, anthroposophy lives in the germ. Its blossoms and fruits will sprout from this German intellectual life if one correctly understands German intellectual life. And that they are intimately connected with this German intellectual life - I would like to say: every being, every trait of this German intellectual life shows it to us. It is the case in the world, esteemed attendees, that individual things that flourish in the development of humanity must live for a time, I would say, as if under the stream; the rest of the stream shows something else, something superficial; but under the stream, the deeper things live on. And so it is with what can now sound to us as a faded note from German intellectual life.

Or is it not wonderful, absolutely wonderful, when we see how out of this intellectual life - it was in 1858, when a pastor, a simple pastor in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck - Pastor Rocholl, published a little book - yes a truly wonderful booklet, in which he wanted to explain how the human spirit must elevate and strengthen itself in order to be able to join that which, as the spirit of the world, permeates and flows through the world. This wonderful, forgotten little book, which in the most eminent sense is, I would say, a document of the just mentioned faded tone of German spiritual life, is called: “Contributions to German Theosophy”. It was published in 1856 by a simple pastor, in whom his theosophical reflections sprouted from his piety. But it is a little book that must be said to rise to a truly wonderful height of spiritual insight and spiritual feeling about the world, even if it may often seem fantastic in relation to what spiritual science has to say today.

One need not be either a supporter or an opponent of these things, but one can simply face them by saying to oneself: they are an expression of what lives in German national culture. And so I could cite many, many more examples, especially from German intellectual life. Everywhere one would find confirmation that this striving for spiritual science is present in German intellectual life, which today has to present itself as half-forgotten – forgotten! And forgotten in such a way that it must be recognized in the course of time. It does no harm for something like this to be forgotten. Why does it do no harm?

Well, dear attendees, the secrets of the world that are in nature do not impose themselves in such a way that they do not need to be explored first! Why should we believe that the spiritual history of mankind does not also contain such secrets that need to be explored first? Why should we believe that only that which - I want to say - has come to light through the favor of the destiny of the time, that only that is the essence of the progress of humanity? In the subsoil of human development lives that which can only be found by those who come afterwards; but that is how it is in the history of ideas; it is also in the history of nature.

But basically, all these minds were more or less aware that – I have already used this image in relation to Fichte – that which lived in them and which was to lead them in their souls to the spiritual secrets of the world, that this was, so to speak, a dialogue with the German folk spirit itself.

And now let me give you another example. I would also mention the remarkable Karl Christian Planck, from whose posthumous writings the Testament of a German was published not so long ago. Karl Christian Planck, who, proceeding from a truly spiritual point of view, sought to place man in the context of the whole of existence. The time will come when such minds will be recognized, minds that have drawn from the depths of the German soul, when there will be full consciousness of the fact that in order that the German spirit may develop fully can fully develop – also in the realm of knowledge, everything foreign, which sometimes – like Newton's theory of colors – is more readily understood by the superficial human soul than the German, for the understanding of which one must first prepare.

What does the earth look like to a modern mind, which is completely sickened by the Romanesque-British-mechanistic in the scientific view, by the world view that is born entirely of the mind, which Schelling even called a mental power in 1803, what does the earth look like to such a view? Now the earth stands as revealed by external mechanical geology: mineral-mechanical.

Before Planck's soul, this lonely thinker in Germany, who had his first books published in Ulm in the 1860s, speaking out of the most genuine German essence, speaking out of the spiritual, but only being recognized by the better minds, how does the earth stand before his mind, before this consciously German mind? Like a mighty organism! Yes, not just like an organism, but like a blessed, spiritualized organism that has shaped its own spiritual-soul out of its own spirit: the human being himself! For Planck, the human being, with all that lives and moves in him, belongs to the earth. One does not fully understand the earth if one does not see man as the flower of the earth. For Planck, to regard the earth as the mere geologist does would be just as if one were to regard the plant only in its root and not to go to its flower. The earth must be regarded in such a way that the possibility of human development lives in the earth itself; that the earth bears within itself something that, out of its forces, out of its being, demands man as its flower!

Thus Planck's world view goes out into the great from its spirit. And how does he speak himself? In 1864, in his “Foundations of a Science of Nature,” he writes wonderful words about the earth:

“What power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

the author

“He is fully aware of the power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

What our medieval poetry has unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which has been afflicted with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his Parsifal)

written in 1864, before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the strength of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what the poem has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which her hero attains, that conversely receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

It is important to realize that such spirits are rooted in German intellectual life. It is not very helpful to keep pointing this out, but they live unconsciously in the best minds of German intellectual life.

Karl Christian Planck – I referred to him as early as 1900 in the first edition of my Rätsel der Philosophie (Mysteries of Philosophy), which at the time was called Über Welt- und Lebensanschauungen (On World and Life Views); now again in the new edition of Rätsel der Philosophie, to show what he means within the overall development of German intellectual life. One can say, dear honored attendees, in such spirits one can grasp how the German spirit has precisely this special cognitive faculty, to let the soul-spiritual experience flow into it, to let that which weaves and lives in the secrets of the world — I would like to say — in the innermost part of nature and of the spirit.

For years, I would even say, it was not given to those who are now surrounding us like a hostile ring, to recognize this, even in its external outlines, [those who now live] on 6 million square kilometers against 68 million square kilometers [within which the German national character develops]. How often the jokes that are heard from everywhere, saturated with hatred and truly defamatory, are cheap in comparison to German intellectual life, which is hated and defamed, and in relation to which one is not aware of the position it must occupy in the world by virtue of its very own strength. One only needs to recall how Emile Boutroux, not long before the war, still traveled around Germany lecturing on the beauty of German intellectual life, on the fraternization of German and Latin intellectual life – and now he repeatedly and repeatedly brings up his so that they can hear again and again that the German spirit is averse to looking at the things of the world; this German spirit imagines that it can carry everything within itself and give birth to the whole world from its own interior.

And in one of his most recent speeches, Emile Boutroux did not disdain to take the following hateful joke into his mouth – and he apparently found listeners – to make the following joke about German intellectual life and its nature. He said: The Frenchman, when he wants to describe animals, goes to a menagerie to look at the animals and then describe them; the Englishman, when he wants to describe animals, travels around the world and describes what he can observe there; the German sits down in his study — he neither travels the world like the Englishman nor goes to the menagerie like the Frenchman — but sits in his study and draws from his own inner being, from what he can experience within himself, the image of the lion and the elephant and so on.

It's just a shame – we are accustomed to the French being a witty people, aren't we? – but it's just a shame that this joke – those who know a little about intellectual history are aware of this – was first made by Heinrich Heine, that even this joke, with which the Frenchman wants to poke fun at German intellectual life, was born on German soil!

And if you wanted to go into the joke: the German would not go to the menagerie or not to the desert, would not observe the animals outside, but would create them from his own inner being. Brehm, if you were to hold Brehm's book with his observations of apes up to such a know-nothing, such a frivolous mocker, he would slander the German people, saying that they create not through world travel but from within. [Let it be said in reply that the greatest work of world travel – which must be recognized by anyone with an open mind as the work that first scientifically discovered America – comes from von Humboldt, the German!

Where it matters to live with nature and observe nature, the German truly does not need the Romance reference. And what this remarkable Frenchman Boutroux, who has become a famous man in France through a few successful sentences, has to say about German inwardness, is truly quite far removed from what this German inwardness turns out to be when you look at it at its core, as we have tried to do today with a few words.

Now, dear attendees, if we try to hear other voices, for example, Eastern voices, the matter becomes even clearer. There one must say: in Eastern Europe, on Russian soil – not only despite the great philosopher Soloviev, but precisely because of the peculiar nature of the great philosopher Soloviev, one can say – in Eastern Europe today there can be no understanding of this peculiar relationship of the human soul to the world-pervading spiritual and living essence; but over there everything is such that there is still no understanding for the experience of the spirit pulsating and permeating the world in one's own inner soul being, that one wants everything to be met halfway, that everything should come only as a revelation, albeit a spiritual revelation from outside. Thus, even the greatest Russian philosophers of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century opposed themselves completely to the actual essence of Central Europe, and by the way, even to Western Europe.

What they repeatedly had to say, great minds of Russian intellectual culture – the German just did not realize this because he simply took – I would like to say – the extraordinarily vivid description of a Tolstoy, a Dostoyevsky – the German did not realize this at all! Within Russian spiritual life, basically, only the view exists. This whole life, as it has been expressed in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, in the other Western European minds, is horrible, is repulsive basically, is an abstract life of thought, something that does not reach the heart and mind of the real human being. All this must be replaced by that which lives in the Russian human being. Whether something is categorized as political or not is not the point. The Testament of Peter the Great contains the whole spiritual philosophy of Russia; in the nineteenth century, philosophers express the same basic tenor, which amounts to regarding Western and Central Europe only as something horrible and obsolete.

Megalomania is the direct consequence of such a world view, which fancies itself as mature, but only fancies itself as mature out of immaturity. And so, for example, one can indeed experience the following. First of all - let me explain this in conclusion - an outstanding Russian spirit of the nineteenth century, Yushakov, turns his gaze towards Asia in 1885, because it is imminent that something must grow out of the same nationality in the East, directly like a great, world-historical mission. But this could never arise from the peoples of Western or Central Europe. And so, in 1885, Jushakow wrote a remarkable book, whose gaze is initially directed towards Asia – a remarkable book!

In this book, the following is expressed: When we look over to Asia, we find an old, wonderful world culture in Asia, which has only just grown old. This world culture wanted to understand itself by juxtaposing two spiritual entities: Ahriman and Ormuzd. Ormuzd is revered by these Asians, especially by the Iranian Asians, to whom, for example, the Indians and the Persians also belong, as the spirit that wins the fruits from the earth; but who also brings spiritual striving into the human soul, elevating it and allowing it to experience the spiritual.

In contrast to this stands Ahriman, who is connected with the spirit of the Iranians, the Turanians, who led the Asians through evil in such a way that the blessed conditions of Ormuzd were thwarted by him. And there we see - says Jushakow - in Asia over there Ormuzd and Ahriman fighting out their battle and man placed in this fight.

In 1885, dear attendees, please note that Yushakov wrote this! And he says: Oh, these poor Asians! What have the selfish, decrepit Europeans done to them? What have they let them become!

Yushakov presents the matter as if the Europeans, out of their selfishness and decrepitude, had taken away from the Asians what Ormuzd had brought to them as a blessing. But the Russians, out of their own philosophy of life, must bring the invigorating element of their world view into all its decrepitude. The Russians must come and help the Asians, they must join forces with the Asians. That is what Jushakow says. As I said, the focus is on Asia.

I am not saying this, Yushakov said it in 1885. And Yushakov said something remarkable: the wonderful, blessed alliance of the peasants – the Russian peasants – and the Cossacks will penetrate into Asia and will join forces with the poor Asians against Ahriman, in order to maintain the blessings of Ormuzd.

And who is Yushakov mainly opposed to? In 1885 – I have to keep emphasizing this – he says: Oh, these Asians, they have suffered terribly at the hands of the horrific Europeans, who only wanted to appropriate, in the most terrible selfishness, what Asian civilization, under Ormuzd's fruitfulness and blessing-bringing, has created for humanity. How did the Europeans view the Asians? And which Europeans does Jushakow have in mind? Jushakow, in 1885, has the English in mind; oddly enough. Let us hear what he says: “These Asian peoples are regarded by the English only as if they existed to clothe themselves in English garments, to clothe themselves in English fabrics, to fight with each other with English weapons, to work with English tools, to eat from English vessels and to play with English baubles.” Then he continues – in 1885:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting the rich peninsula. I wish

– says Yushakov – my Russian

"Fatherland nothing similar - I can only rejoice that it is ‘

sufficiently far removed’

from this state of affairs, as brilliant as it is sad,

and has nothing to do with this terrible England. So Yushakov in 1885; so a Russian in 1885 looks over to Asia.

This is probably the reason why the Russians allied themselves with England shortly afterwards, not to help the Asians against Ahriman, but to destroy what, with such deep roots, can represent such a spiritual life – in addition to all the other German qualities – as it was allowed to be described.

And so, from the place where 150 million people have to live with 777 million, there must be a powerful awakening of consciousness of what the German essence has fundamentally meant in the development of humanity.

Among those Germans whose gaze was turned to the German character, there was always an awareness of it - an awareness on both sides of the Erz Mountains, in Styria as well as on the Rhine and in the far east of Germany. And just as that which today is being forged together by the great events in Central Europe - basically, among those who understood it, always wanted to forge together - may show us a beautiful word from an Austrian German, a word written in 1862 by the Austrian German Robert Hamerling.

I may well point to these circumstances on the other side of the Erz Mountains, for the reason that I myself have spent almost thirty years of my life under German Austria as a German Austrian myself, taking part in the discussions and struggles that Germans have to face within Austria.

It is the same Hamerling who expressed his attitude towards Austria and Germany in the beautiful words: “Austria is my fatherland, but Germany is my motherland” – words that every Austrian-German who can see beyond external circumstances lives with in the indeterminable. I need not say anything about Robert Hamerling's other intellectual achievements, I just want to point out that in 1884 it was Robert Hamerling who, from Graz, called out heartfelt words to Germany when it was learned that a statue of the goddess Strasbourg was being erected in Paris and that the German flag was being burned at a festival celebrating the goddess Strasbourg. At that time, it was Robert Hamerling who sent the words from Graz to Germany:

Believe in revenge,
And in the victor's wreath of laurels:
Do not hope to steal back
A piece of German land!
You may rave like ravens Around an Alsatian statue,
Strasbourg you will not have,
Strasbourg nevermore.

In 1862, in one of his earlier poems, “Germanenzug”, the same Robert Hamerling had the ancient Germans, the ancestors of the Germans, passing before his spiritual eyes as they moved across from Asia. He leaves them still encamped in Asia, on the borders of Europe. He beautifully describes the image of the evening, the evening image, how the setting sun is above them, how the moon is rising; then he describes how everything falls asleep among the wandering Germans, how only one watches, with blond curls, with radiant eyes, inspired by the essence of his people: Teut. The genius speaks to Teut, who wants to speak of the future essence of Germanness. The genius of the German people speaks, for example, to Teut, the words to the blond, representative youth of the Germanic peoples:

"To whom will the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the strings So boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Whom leads so high, so deep his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps so faithfully the near as the far?
Where does every earthly and heavenly zone
reflect as in your thinking, O Teuton?

Then Hamerling continues by pointing out that what the Asian sought, and what the ancestors of the Germanic peoples sought in Asia, when they extinguished the human essence and suppressed the ego in order to rise to the spirit of the world, must reappear in a later form. This Asiatic way, which also appears today in Hinduism, can no longer be the present way. Now that the Christ Impulse has entered the world, the human ego must be attached to the world spirituality in a different way. The ego must be elevated, strengthened, as we see in the three - Fichte, Hegel, Schelling - and others; the ego must be strengthened; but in the way it must be, now that the greatest impulse in humanity, as the earth has seen the Christ impulse, as it must be, as the Asian striving must appear on a higher level, so it appeared from the deepest root of the national being. And that is what Robert Hamerling wants to express by also letting the genius speak to the blond Teut, to the blond representative of Germanness.

"But however proudly you may aspire, high above other swarms, you will always retain the ancient, sacred fire: the dream-filled drunkenness of God, the blissful warmth of the heart of of the old Asian homeland. This holy ray of calm existence will be devotion that wants to sink into God."

And that is precisely what the German strives for, what rises from all science, from all knowledge: this carrying over of even what can be known, as if to the altar of a divinized world view itself. Spiritual science does not want to be religion, nor does it want to replace it; it wants to place itself as true science alongside religion – it does not want to affect religion in the least, it wants to accept it – like a current that presents itself as true science, which also only wants to support religion, not replace it in any way. But what spiritual science can achieve is offered at the same time – to use Böhme's expression – in order to experience drunkenness of God, that is, to experience the spiritual of the world in one's own soul being.

That is what was felt by the German philosopher, the German mystic Jakob Boehme, and what may appear as a motto, a guiding principle of the German essence itself, when Jakob Boehme says: When you turn to the deep phenomena of the world and gaze at the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in the same you live and strive and walk, and in this God you will be buried.

This is a world view that has been decided upon from German knowledge, a spiritual world view.

And how do you encounter it? Let us just take a very brief look at Russia, to conclude. Russia needs a new delusion today: the delusion of Europe's decrepitude. It needs this new delusion of Europe's decrepitude to prove that this European intellectual life, and especially the Central European intellectual life, is outdated; a new delusion, as Russia always needed a delusion.

France – yes, one would like to remain completely objective, not to do wrong to anyone. The German has no need to join in the tones in which his enemies are indulging today. So perhaps we can listen to a French poet himself, who, not long before the war, created a dramatic portrayal of his people that is quite interesting: the French have become accustomed over the centuries to everyone listening to them. They have recently come to see themselves as the ones who set the tone in all external culture. And so Rostand himself, the Frenchman himself, believes it in this poetic representation. The Frenchman is like a cockerel: when he crows in the morning, the sun rises. And so he gradually comes to believe that because he crows, the sun rises. And he cannot imagine that the sun would rise even if he did not crow.

The Frenchman needs a new belief; he must be able to believe that nothing can happen in the world if he does not crow. He needs a new belief about his own nature. And basically, you only have to let the historical events since 1870 really affect your soul to see how this new belief has gradually emerged and how it has not left the French national spirit. You can also read about it in my little book, Thoughts During the Time of War. For Germans and those who do not believe they have to hate them.

One would not want to do the English an injustice either. But when one hears how one of the leading contemporary English politicians lets it be known to the Germans across the Channel that “might before right” applies to them, and that this would be a German principle – then one must emphasize: The principle of “might before right” as a truly justified one can be found in the works of the English writer Thomas Hobbes, where it is first mentioned. The phrase “might before right” is a specifically English product, and all law is rooted in might. And so one could find many things; one would not want to do wrong, as I said, but I must say the sentence: All these nations, they need something to numb themselves about what they are actually doing in world history, to numb what they are doing, they need something like a fog that shrouds the truth. England needs a new lie – that can be said, without becoming in any way unobjective, from the facts themselves. And Italy? Yes, before the war a not insignificant Italian politician – for there were minds that were not so naive that they would have believed before the war that Italy would ever stand up for the Central European powers, and so I was not particularly struck by this – when a not insignificant Italian politician told me: We need a war in Italy, because our people have become impotent and lazy and careless; only war can reinvigorate them. So we need the war, a new sensation, a new passion, a tremor in the soul of the people, that is why Europe is worried.

As I said, these are the words of an Italian politician. Therefore, one can say: It will seem understandable that Italy, in order to numb itself to the real truth of the situation, would have to appoint a new saint: the sacro egoismo, the holy egoism - a new saint, a strange saint indeed. And even stranger is his hierophant, the high priest Gabriel d'Annunzio.

However much the image that will arise from these circumstances in the world history of humanity is forgotten, the German can also look at these things with calm confidence, as - let it be said again - on this side and on the other side of the Ore Mountains has always done my dear teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer spoke the following words in Austria in 1859:

Let Russia and England wisely deliberate,
It may not be unwelcome,
If we get into a little fight here,
If they take away our good right
[You, German brothers, will not - advise here,
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And among us, every ambition will fade
Before: being one people in word and deed.

And if one among us has erred,
If discord has arisen in a German heart,
There is but one thing that now inspires us:
What we have in common, our joys and our sorrows!
So then let us also have in common:]
A German war, if not a German peace.

1859 – spoken in Austria by someone who felt at one with his soul with what lives and breathes in the German national identity. And then he said, the same person, that

A spirit is rising, a giant to behold
[Who will not long gather all his strength
The German spirit rises up aflame with courage
Wherever you look in all German districts.

He has been called a master in many ways,
In art and knowledge, in building systems,
He can be seen for the first time overall,
then he will be recognized by the world] for real.

I am only reading these sentences so that you can see how what the German can feel about the source and root of German national life was not just created today, as there are enough and sufficient people sitting among the honored audience here who know that I spoke about the German essence for years and years before the war, and also about the relationship to other nations. The German need not fall back on the tone that he can now hear from those who hold him as if in a ring, as if in a great fortress. He may quietly look at what he can gain from an objective observation of the nature of his people. For what he gains in this way presents itself to him where it appears like a pure tone in the development of German intellectual life, first as a germ, as a root, which will later bear flowers and fruit. And so the best that is in German intellectual life, which, as we have seen, is not yet blossom and fruit, but only root and germ, will bear blossom and fruit in the future.

And with his soul, the German turns in the present difficult time of trial, which fills us all with sure hopes and confidence, he turns with these sure hopes and confidence that fill him, to the future, in his whole heart united with the view into this future, to what will develop as the flowering and the fruit of the German national character, of German life and of German strength in general, despite all the hateful and defamatory things that are said today against this German essence – what will develop, what may be addressed by knowledge as that which will develop because it must develop!

Dear Attendees!

Once again, as in my previous attendances during this fateful time, it seems appropriate to me to begin with a consideration that is related to the development of German intellectual life, and then tomorrow to come to a subject that more strictly belongs to spiritual science.

And if today's reflection is to be linked to the development of German thought, then I would like to emphasize, first and foremost, that this reflection should not fall into the trap of establishing an external connection between all kinds of intellectual changes and the fateful historical facts of our time, a trap into which so many reflections today fall. At a time when the fate of nations is decided by the force of arms, the word cannot possibly intervene, meaningfully intervene, for example, in that which is to be decided by the force of arms. But this is the age in which self-reflection - including national self-reflection - seems to be entirely appropriate.

Now, when it is said, from the point of view of science, including spiritual science, that certain developmental forces of such a spiritual science are rooted in popular forces, as is to happen today, one will immediately encounter, dear attendees, all kinds of objections, objections that are extremely reasonable because they are so self-evident, from a certain point of view, that they seem extraordinarily plausible precisely because of their self-evidence to those who do not want to rise to certain higher points of view. In such a consideration, one will repeatedly encounter the objection that science as such, and everything that somehow wants to claim that it is so, is said to be “international,” and that one is not entitled to claim any rootedness in popular culture.

This objection can be appropriately countered only by means of a comparison. “International”, dear attendees, is also the moon, for example. It is the same for everyone; but what different things the various peoples have to say about the moon! Of course someone may object: Yes, that is in the realm of poetry. Yes, of course; but anyone who delves a little deeper into the spiritual life of humanity will notice that – even if the observations and insights relating to the external, actual things are all the same in the science of the moon – that which comes from the innermost drives of the human soul, on the basis of what man can recognize, that this is different for each individual people, and that each people penetrates more or less deeply into the secrets of existence, depending on their different dispositions and drives. And the overall progress of humanity does not depend on what is the same everywhere, but on what is incorporated from the driving forces of the overall development of humanity, which are peculiar to the innermost individual nature of each people.

From this point of view, it should be pointed out today how German nationality is intimately connected with the endeavour not only to found an external science of the senses, but also to penetrate deeply into the spiritual secrets of existence – how the very search for a way to arrive at the spiritual secrets of existence is peculiar to much of what can be called German nationality.

And there is another reason, esteemed attendees, for such a consideration here, because it is my conviction – not arising from a narrow-minded, parochial sentiment, but from what I believe is the appropriate consideration of the German essence that what has been advocated here for years as spiritual science is strongly rooted in the general spiritual life of the German people, that all the seeds of a genuine spiritual science are present in the spiritual development of the German people.

Dear attendees, I will take as my starting point three personalities about whom I had the honor of speaking here in this city a few months ago, when I tried to sketch out the world view of German idealism. Even at the risk of repeating certain details, I will take as my starting point the three great figures who appear within the development of thought and spirit of the German people and who create a world view that provides the foundation, the background, one might say, for what was then artistically and poetically achieved by Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing and so on within German intellectual life, as a flowering of the newer intellectual life in general, which can only be compared with the tremendous flowering of human intellectual life in ancient Greece: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were the starting point once again.

Fichte stands before us – and I already remarked this in the lecture a few months ago – as he has something like the feeling that he has given his people everything that he has to give as the best, in terms of a world view and insights into the nature of his people, and that he has gained this through a dialogue with the German national spirit itself. Carried inwardly by the consciousness that the most German essence speaks out of his soul, Johann Gottlieb Fichte is.

It is also he who, not only in one of the most difficult times of German intellectual development, found tones that were highly suited to inspiring the entire nation to rise up from oppression, but he was also [the one] who, in the way he wants to receive a world view for his knowledge, so clearly shows that he seeks this world view from the qualities of the human soul, from the powers of the human soul, which are essentially German qualities of spiritual life, German powers. He emphasized that. And that is certainly the truth with regard to Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

And what is it that is so distinctly German about Johann Gottlieb Fichte's endeavors? It consists in the fact that, out of his Germanness, as he himself calls it, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was led to seek in a living way to deepen and at the same time strengthen his own soul-being, his own ego, and was convinced from the living inner that what permeates the world as divine-spiritual, illuminates and warms, can flow into this I, if it experiences itself in the right way, if it becomes fully aware of itself. So that, in Fichte's view, what speaks outside in all natural phenomena, what speaks in the course of history, but also what speaks behind natural phenomena and behind history as spiritual forces, flows into human will.

The human will that asserts itself in the self is only the innermost, secret expression of the soul for that which permeates and warms all beings in the world, from the most materialistic to the most spiritual. This intimate interconnection of the experiences of the soul with the great mystery of the universe, as far as man can fathom it, that is the very German in Johann Gottlieb Fichte's striving.

And if you observe Fichte as he presents himself, you can see how this is to be judged, how it is not something invented, something acquired, but how it arises from the most secret depths of his soul as his natural disposition. To substantiate this, a few details from Johann Gottlieb Fichte's life will be given. As I said, even at the risk of repeating details that I have already taken the liberty of mentioning.

For example, we see this Johann Gottlieb as a small, seven-year-old boy in front of his father's house, who was a poor master weaver. We see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, seven years old, standing in front of the small stream that flows past his father's house; and he has thrown a book into this stream. His father comes along and is amazed at what has happened. What had happened? Well, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a six- to seven-year-old boy and a diligent student. That which is called a sense of duty lived in his soul with the greatest strength; and because he was so diligent, his father gave him a book for the last Christmas: “Gehörnte Siegfried” (Siegfried Horned). The seven-year-old boy, who could already read fluently, was so extremely interested in the book of the “Horned Siegfried” and he was always absorbed in the great figure of the horned Siegfried; so that one could have noticed that he had become a little less diligent at school, and it was held against him. Now, within the life of the will, even in the seven-year-old boy, the soul's duty stirred: he no longer wanted to read on, nor be tempted to read on in the book of horned Siegfried. And to be quite sure, he throws the book into the stream, crying! Such was the nature of the one who, according to his own consciousness, was to create the German worldview for his time!

And again, let us look at nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. One Sunday morning, the estate neighbor had come to hear the sermon. But he had arrived too late, and so was unable to hear the sermon. Some of the squire's acquaintances had hit on the expedient of sending for little Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was so good at listening to sermons that he could repeat them word for word. So they fetched nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. After he had appeared awkwardly at first in his blue peasant's coat, he then stood and repeated the sermon, but now not in a way that was only an external adherence to the words, but with the most inner participation, not only in terms of memory, but with the most inner participation, so that one saw: everything that had been spoken lived a very own life in his soul.

These are the small traits that show how intimately entwined Johann Gottlieb Fichte's soul was with what he called duty on the one hand, and on the other hand with what was in him the urge to elevate his own human ego so powerfully that what willfully permeates and warms the world as primal laws could live and reveal itself in him. And how he later aimed to work when he was appointed professor in Jena is told to us by people who heard him speak and who assure us that when he spoke, his words were serious and strict, but at the same time forceful, as if interwoven with the language that spoke the secrets of the world from the nature of things themselves. His language was like the rolling of thunder, and the words discharged themselves – so someone who heard him speak and was friends with him tells us – the words discharged themselves like lightning. His imagination was not lavish – we are told – but it was majestic and grand. And so we are told that he lived in the realm of supersensible ideas, not like one who merely dwells within it, but like one who essentially mastered this realm of ideas.

And it was also peculiar, for example, how he perceived his teaching profession: there was not much of what one is accustomed to from a speaker or teacher. He was in constant inner work. His preparation for any lecture or speech consisted not so much in working out the content as in trying to place himself, with his soul, in that spiritual inwardness that he wanted to infuse not only through the content of the words, but through the way in which he , he strove to work in such a way that it was not so much the content of his words that mattered as the fact that the souls of his listeners were moved by the whole way in which the spiritual was expressed in the flow of his speech. Thus, again, someone who knew him well could say: He strove not only to educate good people, but great souls.

We should like to draw attention to a little-known trait that must be mentioned again and again if we want to bring to life the direct and lively way in which Fichte related to his audience. For example, the deep thinker Steffens told us that in Jena Fichte said to his listeners: “Think the wall!” – The people found that easy, of course: they thought the wall. After he had let them think the wall for a while, he said: So, and now think the one who has just thought the wall! – Some were amazed!

This was an indication of one's own soul, in which that which flows through and warms the world at its deepest core should be ignited. However much he may have amazed people with this, at the same time it is also a testimony to how Fichte actually did not just want to convey spiritual ideas to his listeners with clever words. He wanted to work through words, not just in words. That is why it could happen that this man also sought to actively grasp the historical aspect of the creative national spirit. And in that he wanted to connect vividly, as with the workings of the world in general, he also wanted to connect vividly with that which is part of this world-working and lives close to him as a member of his nationality; he wanted to connect with the essence of the German national spirit. And no one can understand the meaning and the significance of the wonderful words which Johann Gottlieb Fichte addressed to the German people in his 'Discourses to the German Nation' during such a difficult period in the history of the German nation. No one can understand this unless he sees the connection between the way in which Fichte wanted to grasp the world-will in himself in his own ego, and then to carry the power that arose in his soul into action, into events, into the social and other forms of human coexistence, and into the conception of life.

There he stands before us – albeit in our way – this Johann Gottlieb Fichte! And – as I said – it is not out of narrow-minded patriotism, but rather out of actual observation that these things are to be said, which must now be discussed. We need not fall into the error that the enemies of the German spirit are now falling into, who not only accuse this German spirit, but even slander it in the truest sense of the word; we can take an objective point of view within the considerations of the German spirit and will be able, precisely through this objective point of view, to recognize in the right way what the essence of German nationality is.

Fichte wanted to grasp the will of the world in itself. And this will of the world was for him the bearer of what he called the duty of the world, which in turn separates into individual human duties. Thus, that which lives outside becomes for him a living being everywhere. But this also puts him in opposition to everything, as he himself emphasized in his “Discourses to the German Nation.” You can read about this in my essay in my little booklet “Thoughts During the Time of War,” which is now out of print , but will soon be reissued, [how] he, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, seeks the living everywhere and is aware that he is thus in opposition to much of what he calls a dead science. And this dead science, Fichte also finds it among the Western European peoples, among the French and the British. Only, as I said, for the sake of actual characterization, not to impose anything on any people, may that be said; but it must be recognized in which relation the German spirit stands to the other national spirits in this fateful time!

In my earlier essay on the world picture of German Idealism, I pointed out that Descartes, Cartesius, is a typical example of the development of the French world-view at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I pointed out how he characteristically expresses that which lives in his worldview from his nationality, in that not only the mineral and plant world, but even the animal world is nothing more to him than a sum of living — not souled, but only moving — machines! That is the peculiarity of this Western mind, that it can only grasp a dead science at bottom.

In this respect, Fichte, with his living approach in all his works, stands in essential contrast to the path of knowledge and the striving of the West, [where] animals are like machines. This has continued. And not long before Johann Gottlieb Fichte worked in Germany to show life in all the facts and beings of the world from the living grasp of the secrets of the world, a descendant, I might say, of that Descartes - Cartesius - worked in France: de La Mettrie.

And while Cartesius at least conceded to man a special soul from inner experience, from inner experience, de La Mettrie, in an exaggeration of this western dead science, expressed himself in his book “Man a Machine” that even that which stands before us as a human being is itself part of the world in the same way as a mere machine; that we can understand the whole person by regarding him as the result of purely material processes and forces. According to de La Mettrie, everything about a person, including all soul qualities and activities, should be understood in such a way that the person is only recognized as a machine.

Of course, to a certain extent, man is a machine. This is not the essence of spiritual science, that it contradicts what such assertions have right about it; but that it can show other ways - we will talk about this tomorrow - that it can show other [supplementary] ways to this, that it knows other ways that also lead beyond the justified claims of materialism. De La Mettrie is basically, from the French folklore, one of the most significant minds of this view that the whole world of man is only a kind of mechanism. And it is interesting to consider the contrast between the Frenchman de La Mettrie and the German Johann Gottlieb Fichte. For de La Mettrie, everything about man is mechanism; for Fichte, everything is spirit. He received into his soul what he calls the will of the world, and for him, the external material world is only an internalized field for the performance of duties arising from the spirit. Hence that beautiful, that wonderful striving of Fichte to derive everything that appears to man in the world of the senses from the spirit; whereas, in de La Mettrie, everything is imbued with the goal of regarding the external physical as an immediately decisive impulse for the spiritual as well.

De La Mettrie is sometimes quite witty in such matters, for he is just as deeply immersed in his mechanistic worldview as Johann Gottlieb Fichte is in his spiritual worldview. For example, when de La Mettrie says in his book The Machine Stops Here: Can't you see how the body shapes the soul? Take a famous poet, for example, whose soul can be seen to consist of one half rascal and the other half Promethean fire. de La Mettrie was a little clever in not saying which poet he meant, but Voltaire flew into a rage at this remark. When he was told this, de La Mettrie said: Well, okay, I withdraw the one half of the claim – he meant half of Prometheus! – but I maintain the “filou.” He just expressed it in his own way; there's no need to press it. But if you take the individual statements, that man is a machine – and in this he is tireless in showing how the machine-like, the heating-up [gap in the transcript] in man, as it were, how that characterizes the whole man, causes satisfaction – that is where he sometimes becomes quite remarkable. And I don't know, and I don't know with what feelings a passage from 'Man a Machine' will be read in France today! I certainly don't want to quote it as something that a German, for example, needs to share; but I would like to quote it because it is quite characteristic and because – you will see in a moment why I would like to quote it – one could perhaps ask precisely from the point of view of spiritual science: how such a soul – he did deny that this was possible – but how such a soul, more than a hundred years after its death, looks down on the praise that has been exchanged between France and England, when he, de La Mettrie, the Frenchman, in his book “Man a Machine” proves how people's characters are dependent on the way the materialistic affects them, when he says the following:

Before the lecture begins, Dr. Steiner will finish reciting the “Choir of Primordial Instincts”, the part that has not yet been recited by her. I would like to say a few words in advance, which I ask you, please, not to take suggestively; they are meant to be quite factual. We have organized things so that the lecture begins in such a way that our friends in Zurich can hopefully hear it to the end or at least to a point where they will not miss anything important. And I would like to make a comment in connection with the various requests, more or less justified requests, that have come in from here and there. This is that I would not consider it in the spirit of our movement if the opinion were to prevail that, considering the content of the lectures given here, the most important thing in our movement has already been done. Our movement should be in step with the times and take into account the things that arise from the demands of the time. And you can be quite sure that we will not achieve what you believe can be achieved by taking up the content of the lectures if we do not show ourselves to be accommodating and understanding, especially towards newer artistic endeavors that are taken up within our movement. This applies particularly to eurythmy, which is meant to be a new art in a certain sense and is meant to be felt as a new art, and to be felt as a new art in relation to all similar arts. But I myself would like it to be noted that it also applies to recitation. What one actually experiences in terms of recitation when one wants to develop artistic feeling in the world is something tremendously great, something terribly sorrowful that happens to one. We have, after all, developed a certain method that lies within the spirit of our spiritual-scientific movement, especially with regard to the art of recitation. And, no, I would not want it to be seen as if it were given, well, out of a hobby of this or that person, as an addition to our cause; no, it is one of the most important things for us to find our way into a new artistic way of feeling. As for recitation, most people have the most primitive ideas. Actually, one would think that anyone can recite and that reciting is not a special art. In a way, reciting is one of the most difficult arts, because you have to work on the material very slowly and gradually. And since we are striving to emphasize the artistically shaped word, and this is essential in the future social order of humanity for such things, that this interest is not lost, that the general bourgeois morass does not gradually take hold, which is particularly evident in as it is the recitative, which everyone thinks is just a reading, we strive for that, and I ask that this not be considered a minor matter, which, because the trains go one way or the other, can be moved to any random day or night hour.

As I said, what I said was not meant to be offensive; but I just wanted to express my opinion on our cause with regard to what is otherwise often seen only as a tendril.

Now the conclusion of “Choir of Primordial Drives” by Fercher von Steinwand is to be recited.

What I started out from in these reflections – the necessity of sensing the truth at work in the facts of the world – I could also say sensing the active reason or the active spirit – must apply particularly to the understanding that one must acquire in the age of the consciousness soul, to the understanding of this catastrophic event in which we are immersed. For basically this event originated, one would like to say, in an illusion in which people lived. I have hinted at it to you in many different ways; it could be further explained. But you have already seen that the people who were involved in the outbreak, in the last outbreak of this catastrophic event, actually moved in appearances, that they were full of phantasms and illusions, that they were far from being in reality. But it must be said that over the years, more and more of what was wrongly named, because people lived in illusions and appearances, and what was wrongly scolded, because people lived in illusions and appearances, gradually and slowly developed into that which contained the truth of the matter itself. This has already emerged to some extent and will emerge even more over the next few years. I have often pointed out that this was not a war in the old sense between one group of powers and another, which in the ordinary sense can also be ended by a peace treaty; that it was much more a matter of what will happen as a surge in the social struggles, which will take on the most diverse forms. What we have to bear in mind is that the social struggles, which will gradually emerge as the truth, have, I might say, seized the superficial appearance and are initially acting out entirely in the superficial appearance, in the illusions and phantasms that have become deeds. And we should consider what is actually alive in the final conflicts of the present, what is actually hidden in these conflicts of the present. One cannot do so without repeatedly pointing out how human thinking and imagining, even the whole conception of life, has distanced itself from what is necessary for human beings in terms of understanding the world, but which has been lost precisely under the influence of the newer development of humanity. Our spiritual science has, in the most eminent sense, the task of again accessing this lost knowledge in the modern sense and making it accessible to people for whom it is so necessary in the present and for the future.

I have often pointed out the threefold nature of man and the threefold world from different points of view, and that it is necessary to distinguish at least two other divisions in man, in addition to what is usually called man, and to distinguish other divisions in what is called the world. In all these things it is immaterial whether, as I have done for certain reasons, one calls one thing so or so out of the demands of spiritual science, or whether one calls it out of hunches, as Fercher von Steinwand does in his book Der Geisterzögling (The Spiritual Pupil). Where he speaks of what you find in my 'Theosophy' as the soul world, he speaks of 'Sinnheim'; for reasons that would lead us too far afield to discuss now, he speaks of what I have called the spirit world as 'Wahnheim', but he doesn't just mean a home where the madness is, but by speaking of 'Wahnheim' he actually means the spirit world. What matters is to really immerse oneself in these things in some way and take them seriously for one's life. One can say: With the gradual dying out of Greek culture, humanity in its development from the third to the fifth post-Atlantic period actually lost a great deal, which must be awakened again in a different form, from the point of view of the new spiritual science, if order is to be brought into the social chaos that will now develop. For it must be emphasized again and again: the most important thing today is that economic continuity is not disrupted, but that, as it were, an interim arrangement is created in the field of economic life and is also perceived as such. At the same time, however, general education must be tackled in all areas where it is so urgently needed by humanity. A new social order cannot be founded on the concepts that already exist today. It is best to try to come to terms with what is emerging as the most pressing demands, to create a provisional arrangement so that economic continuity is not lost, and to ensure that a start be made at the end where the beginning is so necessary: on the way of education, of teaching in the broadest sense, on the way of creating thoughts that start from an understanding of man and into the minds of men. Because you can only start something by creating thoughts in people's minds. If only these thoughts are already there in people's minds! You are not dealing with porcelain figures, which you can place here or there as you please and impose on them any order you like. You are dealing with human beings who must first acquire the ability to understand what is necessary in the development and evolution of mankind. The starting point of the human being must lead to a gradual enlightenment in people's minds about what people are together – call it a realm, call it a state, call it a democracy, call it what you will, all these things are much less important than the matter at hand. In the minds of men, the pure porridge has arisen in the ideas of this living together, of this form of living together, so that people can no longer form really concrete, plastic ideas of why one thing is there and why another thing is there.

Plato's tripartite division of the human being is based on the primal wisdom that has been acquired by humanity in an atavistic way, as I have often explained to you, but which must be regained in a fully conscious way by the age of the consciousness soul. Today, this is seen as something childish. But it is based on a very deep wisdom, a wisdom that is truly deeper than what is taught about man today at our universities, whether it be from the natural sciences, from economics or from other sciences.

Plato divided the human being into three parts. Today we structure things somewhat differently, but an awareness of this threefold nature was still present well into the eighteenth century. Only then did it disappear completely. And these nineteenth-century people, so clever and enlightened, only laughed at this threefold nature in its concrete form, and continue to laugh at it today. Plato first divided man, whom one must understand if one wants to understand the social structure, into the human being who unfolds wisdom, knowledge, the logical part of the soul, that which we attach to the head organism as its knowledge to its sense and nerve organism. Plato then distinguished the so-called active, irascible part of the soul, the courageous, brave part of the soul, everything that we associate with rhythmic life. You only need to read my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Soul Riddles). Then he distinguished the man of desire, the human being, insofar as he is the source of the capacity for desire, everything that we now know in a much more perfect form; Plato was able to link this physically to metabolism, spiritually to intuition, as we understand it in our threefold structure of the higher faculty of knowledge: imagination, inspiration, intuition. It is impossible to understand what is going on in the social structure of humanity and how social structures express themselves if we do not get to know the human being according to this threefold nature. For man is not so in the world, in which he is as a member of the physical plan, that he develops these three members equally in relation to their inner, intimate formations and qualities, but he develops them in different ways; one develops one part more, the other develops the other part more. And it is on the basis of the different ways in which the parts are developed that the classes are formed, as they have emerged in the course of the development of European humanity with its American appendix.

It can be said that the part that mainly considered the rhythmic life and organized education, living together, and social views in such a way that the rhythmic life was what was primarily felt as human, is the estate or class that developed as the old nobility. If you imagine a social structure that arose from the fact that people mainly felt themselves to be chest people, then you have what constitutes the group of the nobility, the nobility class. If you imagine those people who preferably develop the head, the wise part – now I am also saying something that may reconcile you with some of what I have said – those people who were united in the class , who mainly develop the brain, the wise part, the part of the senses and nerves, that is the group that gradually united in the bourgeoisie. Those human beings who today form by far the greatest number, who have preferably united in all this – but you know that intuition is spiritually connected with metabolism – that has its source in will, in metabolism, that is the proletariat. So that in fact human beings are socially structured in the same way as the human being is structured in detail.

Now, of course, one must recognize the special nature of the human association. And in this respect, everything still remains to be done for the consciousness, for the conceptualization of human beings, because in relation to what I mean now, modern humanity in particular has the most distorted ideas. This modern humanity has even gone so far as to imagine that the human being is less perfect as an individual than as a member of a state, that the human being gains something by becoming a member of a state, and it will be very difficult to get the idea into people's heads that the human being gains nothing by integrating himself into a state organism, but loses. He also loses by integrating himself into estates, into classes. That which the individual develops is not promoted by the fact that it lives in the social structure in the majority, but is instead paralyzed and suppressed.

Thus the traditions and ideas of the aristocratic caste suppress the highly individual powers of the chest man. Not that they promote them, but they suppress them, they paralyze them. That is the point. It is important to realize that, although the group of noble human beings includes those whose souls primarily long to embody themselves as chest people, the external association on the physical plane paralyzes what would come out of the chest person. It would take us too far afield to show you this in detail. But just suppose, for example, that what is honor is developed in a very individual way out of the chest man; but the external concept of honor is precisely there to create the exterior so that the interior can sleep. All aggregation is actually there to constitute something externally so that the internal, original, elementary can sleep. I need not remind you of Rosegger's saying, which I have often quoted: One is a human being, more are leaders and the many are animals. Man is indeed what he is, out of the elementary forces as an individuality. I tried to show this in a scientific way in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

All that the modern proletariat strives for is not suited to bring to perfection that which is elementary in it, but to suppress it, to push it into the background, to paralyze it. And today is the time to recognize this, when you can only get ahead if you see through things. Because the instinctive forces - I have often said this - no longer work. And the bourgeoisie - now comes the other side of the coin - its union has mainly existed to paralyze wisdom. People have already come together in the bourgeoisie whose souls have striven to educate the head people; but especially the so-called science of the social bourgeoisie has brought about a structure that has made the head person as headless as possible. And he proves himself more and more in the face of the onslaught of modern times as a truly headless creature.

Now, on the one hand, this human structure has developed in a pronounced and significant way. But the connection of understanding had been missed; one could no longer form ideas about the way one lives among people because one had lost the understanding of the threefold human being. It would be necessary, for example, and something like this would have to happen before one can set about founding a new social order somewhere or at some time: it will be necessary, for example, to study everything that is connected with the impulses of the chest-man. And only when we study this in a way that corresponds to reality, not in the way that theosophists think, only then will we have a true science of how labor, the fruits of labor, wages, rents, capital, means of production, and so on, must be arranged in the world to meet the instinctive demands of modern times. As far removed as possible from that which is officially called political economy, which is actually only a game with concepts and words and which will hopefully soon disappear from the scientific scene, as far removed as possible is that from what comes out when you really study the human being as a chest of drawers, where it comes out what must be demanded with regard to the distribution of labor, the means of production, the land and so on, as a requirement in the development of mankind. Likewise, we must study what is connected with the head, the sense and nerve man in the broadest sense, again not as abstractly as the theosophists imagine, but we must study in all concreteness what man is in the sense world as a spiritual creature with other people together in society, with other people together in any structure, be it state or other. It must be studied from the nature of the nervous and sensory human being. The study of the nervous and sensory human being gives a real social science. And finally, the study of the metabolic human being, which is connected with intuition, only this gives a real view of the development, of the becoming of the human being, only this gives a historical view of the development of humanity.

Now you can easily understand that it was impossible to have a historical conception of the development of humanity without really understanding the microcosmic human being, nor a real view of the distribution of economic values, because one does not study the chest human being; nor could one understand how the individual human being stands within human society, because the head human being, the human being of nerves and senses, is not studied in his reality, in his complete connection with the cosmos and his historical development; for all these things had actually been lost from view. For centuries no conception of these things has been formed, or if so, it has only been laughed at. Therefore, above all, chaos arose in people's imaginations and then in reality.

Now demands arose from that class of people who had been shaped by modern life, which was no longer based on outdated ideas but was moving forward. The modern proletariat has emerged from the modern machine, industrial system, from the mechanization of the world. Demands developed from this because this modern proletariat came into conflict with those who could provide the machines as means of production.

You see, the impulses for the world view of this proletariat came from the metabolic human being. But of course the human being is in contact with the other links. From this, views were formed that radiated from the other links impulses of the threefold human being; views were formed that were a necessity on the basis of the proletarian human caste. Views were formed with the help of what the bourgeoisie had established as science. For the proletarians had inherited only the science of the four or, what do I know, six faculties, to which they had now grown, that the bourgeoisie had created. With purely bourgeois science, the proletarians gradually tried to form ideas in the age of the consciousness soul about the social structure in which they lived. Of course, that could not suffice. Out of all the astute and other fundamentals, but again, because he was a child of his time and had no idea of the existence of a spiritual science as we think of it, the proletarians created a science precisely as an expression of what the instincts of the proletariat develop out of themselves in an elementary way, the Karl Marx mentioned yesterday.

The proletarians treated this Karl Marx differently than the so-called greats were treated by the bourgeoisie in the last centuries. He really penetrated the entire thinking of the proletariat throughout the civilized and industrialized world. He dominated the thoughts of the proletarians and developed these thoughts into a doctrine. Yes, for the first time thoughts have become facts, because the thoughts of the bourgeoisie are not facts, they have grown out of illusions, even if people believe that they are based on real positive science. But the thoughts of Karl Marx have become facts in the proletariat and live as facts and have an effect as facts, just as facts have an effect, with all the contradictions of life, with all the contradictions that arise in life, with all disharmony, with all that is fertilizing and destructive and paralyzing, with which life arises. In the instincts, in the subconscious of people, more is at work, especially in our age, than in their consciousness. The tripartite human being was not included in consciousness; but from instincts, and therefore insufficiently and, while fertilizing reality, converting thoughts into deeds, but insufficiently converting them into deeds, is how Karl Marx founded his doctrine of “political economy”. It was already expressed in 1848 in the “Communist Manifesto”, of which I spoke yesterday, and then in his book on “Political Economy”, which appeared in 1859, a year that was so endlessly fruitful for all kinds of achievements, at least at the end of the 1850s. Another of the many innovations of the late 1850s was Karl Marx's book “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” To mention other things: it appeared at the same time – and there is an inner connection – Bunsen's spectral analysis. In the same year, more was also known about what is called Darwinism, as well as about what, on the one hand, had an endlessly stimulating effect but, on the other hand, also led to confusion in psychology: Gustav Theodor Fechner's Vorschule der Asthetik (Aesthetics: An Esthetic Primer), which then led to a psychophysics. This also belongs to this year; many other things could be mentioned. There are inner reasons that this occurred out of bourgeois science. For Hegel is also bourgeois science, profound bourgeois science. But out of bourgeois science, Karl Marx tried to understand the social structure of human beings. The way he understood it made sense to the proletariat. But they had forgotten the most important thing: the knowledge of the threefold human being. This must above all enter into people's heads before any kind of fruitful progress can be made, not theoretically, but by really living into the situation that the present has brought about. You see, one can say: the world also confronted Marx in three parts. This physical-sensual world also confronted Karl Marx in three parts, and so he sought to unravel it in three ways: firstly, through his theory of value, the theory of surplus value — I have already mentioned some of this to you — secondly, through his materialistic conception of history, and thirdly, through his view of the socialization of man. It is remarkable how, in the minds of millions of proletarians, the tripartite social structure is reflected in the mind of Karl Marx and in the minds of millions of people in the way I have explained it, , it is interesting to see how the three-part social structure is emerging, without people having any real, solid, fundamental ideas about what a human being lives as an entity and how he enters the world as a spiritual being.

Insufficiently, instinctively, the impulses of the human being at the heart of the human being, the rhythmic human being, in whom the actual reservoir of what then becomes work in social life is, insufficiently incorporated into the ideas of Karl Marx and thus into proletarian ideas, the so-called surplus value theory developed. Let us look at this surplus value theory from a different point of view than we have done recently. The main question for Karl Marx was: How is value, be it in the form of use-value or exchange-value, actually created in the modern economy? — It is, of course, not true — as Karl Marx pointed out — that in the modern economy what a person receives as remuneration, for example, is really related to what he achieves. Such illusions can only be entertained by those who do not understand economic life, who believe that a person acquires what corresponds to his work, his performance. That is not the case. What a person can acquire in modern economic life, as it has developed over the last four centuries, especially in the civilized world, is not tied to any relationship between acquisition and work, but to the circulation of goods. What a person can acquire depends to a large extent on how values are produced by bringing goods to market, selling them and receiving a certain amount in return. That is what creates economic value. Not labor as such directly creates value today, in economic terms, but what one gets for it on the goods market when it is completed and put into circulation by the most diverse factors. So that in the modern world, when it comes to the creation of economic value, the only question that can be asked is: What is the constellation on the goods market for one thing or another? – This must be thought of in the broadest possible terms; but if it is thought of in this way, it is like that.

Now Karl Marx came to express what was instinctively felt by those people who were pushed into the proletariat by their life circumstances, by their karma. If the market value of the commodity alone really produces the value ratio for everything that exists today and is the basis of every acquisition, it cannot be true that a worker is in any way actually remunerated for what he does as work. For what one does as work has no value in circulation in the national economy, but only what has become a commodity has value. And here Marx arrived at the formulation of what the proletarians felt out of their instincts: the formulation that what matters in the modern economy is not valued as a service, as an activity, as a creation, but that this too is valued as a commodity, as the commodity “labor power”. One buys, as Karl Marx put it, one buys cherries, one buys shirts, trousers and so on, but one also buys the commodity of labor power. The person who has the means of production, who owns the land, sells cherries, sells grain, sells trousers or skirts, sells machines; the person who does not have the means of production, who is without property in modern economic life, can only bring what his labor power is to the market. He must go there himself. But only that has a real economic value, which comes into consideration as the commodity value of his labor.

What does that mean? It means that one must think about how to pay for goods. You pay for goods first according to what is necessary for their production. What happens to the goods on the market afterwards is something completely different. You pay for goods first after they have been produced. Right, you go to the cherry tree owner, and he sells the goods to you; then you ship them and so on, and it is only in the circulation process that the value of the goods is determined. But the commodity labor power must, so to speak, be bought at its source. The person themselves must carry it to the person who wants to buy it. The person must always be present. So what can the compensation, the purchase price of the commodity labor power consist of? Yes, according to what the production costs are. One has to think about how many hours of daily labor are necessary to maintain a worker with regard to his labor power, that is, to maintain him so that he is nourished, clothed, and so on. Then one must consider how many different other people have to work, how much time they have to work; let us say, for example, that five or six hours have to be worked to procure so much food, so much clothing and other necessities to equip a worker with labor power so that it can be bought and put on the labor market. The bourgeois pays compensation for what is necessary to maintain the worker, to produce the commodity of labor power. He pays for what is necessary to enable the worker to eat, clothe himself, and so on, to meet his family needs and the like, if any. For example, five to six hours of work are necessary for this. However, the worker sells himself, and by selling himself, he enters into the necessity of working longer than, say, five to six hours, through the general process of circulation. There he works for the one who is the entrepreneur. That is where the surplus value is generated. Only because labor power is a commodity in the modern circulation process and because you pay for the commodity according to the production costs, then the worker is made to work longer than he would if he only worked to earn what he needs, only then is the surplus value generated in modern economic life.

This is something that Karl Marx used Hegelian dialectics to process in his books. This is something that made a lot of sense to the proletariat because it is a science that takes the human being as a whole, so to speak, because it not only takes the theoretical mind, it also takes the moral sensations, in that the worker knows that, politically speaking, he is being told: You are a free man – but because only commodities have value in the modern economy and only commodities are paid for, his labor power is made into a commodity in the modern circulation process. This makes him look at the surplus value that is generated not only through labor, but also through mere speculation, through entrepreneurial spirit, whatever.

But something else is emerging as a result. This leads

to the development of an awareness on the part of the worker, entirely in the sense of Marx: All the talk that something can be achieved through fraternity, through charity, through a sense of benevolence, these are always empty words, they must be social phrases. For he sees what has emerged: that labor, his labor, has become a commodity, he sees this as a necessity in modern development, and he says: Now, no matter how charitable, however fraternal, however philanthropic his attitude, he cannot help himself – historical development compels him to – but buy the commodity labor power at its production costs and then supply the other thing, in its own way, to the circulation process. Therefore, it is of no value for any social thinking to preach morality, to speculate on impulses of fraternity, of philanthropy, because none of that matters. The entrepreneur cannot do otherwise than to reap the added value.

These are the things that are extremely important: that the proletarian has been drilled, so to speak, that it does not depend on the morality or immorality of entrepreneurship that he is in a subhuman existence, but that this is an historical necessity, but that it must also lead to class struggle with historical necessity; that is to say, there is no other way than for those who belong to the proletarian caste to fight those who belong to the owner caste, because they are opponents by the historical process itself. Therefore, it cannot happen otherwise than that a different order will come about through the powerful social struggle of the proletariat than the one that the last four centuries or the previous historical development has brought to the fore. What the proletarian wants is so infinitely important, it is making history, making history out of ideas, by saying to himself: Since it has come to this in modern economic development that only commodities are paid for, and I as a proletarian must sell my labor power as a commodity, but the others have something that does not come from the labor power , but comes from the surplus value, so I want to participate in the surplus value myself, I do not want to abolish the entrepreneur – because the entrepreneur has been brought about by the necessary historical process – but I want to become an entrepreneur myself, I want to take possession of the means of production as a proletarian, as a partner, in a communist way; then I myself am an entrepreneur as a partner. Only in this way can the class struggle be eliminated, when I no longer have the entrepreneur next to me, but am an entrepreneur myself. Moving on to the next historical phase, that is what follows from Marxist doctrine for the proletarian, making history, even if it can be presented more or less Kautsky or more Lenin or Trotsky, which are different shades. But what I said about the one thing that is recognized in its correct basis is true: namely, to build everything on the human being, on the human being who is in rhythm, it is the basis of the consciousness of the modern proletariat. It is something that should be seen differently, seen with enormous power and become action. And there is no other remedy than to see through the matter; there is no other remedy, since the bourgeois education with all its university system has failed to shed light on these things, since it does not even have the scientific methods to shed light on them, there is no other possibility than to create a provisional arrangement so that economic continuity is not lost, and to work for enlightenment from below. That is the starting point. Education from below can only happen if the knowledge of the threefold human being is brought into the present-day human being.

But of course, if you speak to the modern proletarian today as I speak to you now after eighteen years of preparation, you will not be understood by him, but laughed at. You have to speak to him in his own language. To do that, you must, of course, first have a command of the subject matter and then have the good will to respond to the language that is understood there. You see, this theory of surplus value is constructed in such a way that it is truly, I would say, a closed Hegelian dialectic. The curious thing about it is that when Karl Marx died in 1883, in the 1880s, bourgeois economists, as they later called themselves, social scientists and so on, were very much inclined to say: Well, socialist agitator has no scientific value; scientific socialist! — They usually say it with a certain buttery mouth, with the buttery mouth of the expert who has mastered the subject. Well, that was the case back then. But this bourgeois science did not go into the subject in depth, at most people like Sombart and similar people, they took up some of it, they let themselves be infected. The actual bourgeois public was not interested in the feelings and thoughts of the proletariat; at most, they allowed it to be presented in plays, as I told you. But the university professors, who are barren themselves, accepted some of it and then took it over lock, stock, and barrel. And so you find in many books that come from university professors all kinds of Marxist ideas, sometimes criticized, but all unfruitful, because the things are not seen through, because above all, one did not have the will to evoke a real knowledge, a real understanding of the threefold human being. If one had this understanding, then one would come to the fundamentals, which are necessary to understand, and what I can only hint at to you, but of which an understanding must be evoked. For only when this fundamental understanding sets in with regard to two points will the greatness of Karl Marx's theory of surplus value and the proletarians appear, but only then will it also become clear where the correction has to be made, where that has to be made that is based on reality, not on Marxist illusion. But it is still difficult to find understanding for this.

There are, of course, the most diverse offshoots – even if they are sometimes opponents – of the modern proletarian ethos. One such offshoot, from a completely different background – forgive the expression – came up against me in the 1890s in Berlin in the person of Adolf Damaschke, in the land reform. This Adolf Damaschke had followers, and a number of them were also our members, members of the Theosophical Society. They wanted me to enter into some kind of discussion with this Damaschke in front of them. They were our followers who had formed a group of land reformers at the same time, and Damaschke was supposed to present his thoughts on one issue or another. I then said, after Damaschke had presented his views: “You see, the situation is as follows. What you have said will certainly appeal to people, because it is presented with a certain economic clarity – I didn't say crystal clear, but that was the idea – and it sometimes seems to point in the direction I indicated yesterday. You do not want the means of production, like the Social Democrats, but you do want the land, and specifically the land on which houses stand, and thus, to a certain extent, nationalize the entire land communally, creating a sense of community in land ownership, in order to bring about a solution to the social question. Some of what you have said is correct, but the whole thing suffers from a capital error, which of course must escape you if you proceed merely theoretically and not realistically. What you say is not right, but it would be right under certain conditions. For example, if you could expand the soil elastically where two houses adjoin in a city, and a third house was to be built, so that one house stands there and the other house there, and in between you would create space for the third house – if the soil were elastic, then everything would be right. But since the earth has a certain area and is not elastic, does not grow, the whole land reform theory is in fact wrong.

This is the most important objection from this point of view. I can only hint at it. Damaschke told me at the time that he had never noticed this before, but he promised me that he would think deeply about the matter. I have not heard anything further, and I do not know how deeply he has thought about it. In his subsequent writings, nothing of this could be seen. He continued in his old way and developed all his land reform ideas in this direction. There were always people who said: Yes, the Social Democratic idea does not work, but land reform is something that can certainly be realized.

On the one hand, it must be studied in its broader scope; for social democracy also regards land as a means of production. It would only be that if it were elastic. The means of production that can be regarded in an elastic way, which is not taken into account, can be regarded in the way that Marxism does, as means of production that can also be produced, or created, if necessary. If you need machines, you can make them to produce this or that, and if you want to make more machines, you can put more workers in place; there is elasticity there. The moment you apply the same way of thinking – and it is the way of thinking that matters – to land, it fails because of the inelasticity of the land.

That is one point where one must intervene. The other point where one must intervene is that social Marxist thinking must necessarily fail because it is formed entirely out of the economic process and only thinks of the means of production, which it thus wants to administer communally, in the economic process as they are as real means of production, as means of production for manual labor. This eliminates the infinitely important position that the spiritual has in the whole process of development, including the social process of humanity. For the spiritual has the peculiarity of having a minimum of means of production. For example, the only means of production for me is the pen. You can't even say that paper is a means of production, because that is an object of circulation. Only the pen is a means of production in the Marxist sense. But through this, the whole impulse that must come from the spiritual, and which would be paralyzed if the world were arranged in a social Marxist way, this spiritual process must be eliminated by Marxist thinking. That is the other pole.

The Marxist way of thinking fails at two poles. In the middle, it is firmly established. In the middle, it is dialectically extremely astutely developed; at two poles it fails. And it fails in the most radical sense: it fails radically at these two poles. First, the surplus value theory. It fails because of the inelasticity of the land. It fails because of the inelasticity of land, in a much stronger sense than one might think. Because the entire population statistics in a limited territory do not come into their own economically, because the land remains the same, even if, for example, there is a population increase. This causes changes in the scale of values that cannot be taken into account by mere Marxist thinking. Furthermore, what cannot be taken into account in mere Marxist thinking is that which, in turn, cannot be increased or decreased in the economic process itself. It is strange that the two things are at the extreme ends of the economic process: what is in your head, excuse me for saying so, and what is on the ground. What lies in between is actually subject to the thinking of the means of production, as it is in Marxist thinking. But the soil depends on the weather, on all sorts of other things, it depends on its extent – so, as I said, it is not elastic. That is at one pole.

I can only hint at it as a kind of result. If I were now to talk to you about it, to prove in all its details that Marxism must fail precisely because it must fail at these two poles, I would have to talk a lot first. That might be so, but it would lead too far for the moment. But it can be proved. And that is the most dangerous thing in the present social and economic experiment, that no account is taken of these two poles, that everything that arises from them corresponds merely to the industrially conceived Marxist-dialectical thought-images and only reckons with industrial concepts, with that which leaves out of account, on the left and on the right, land and that over which there can be just as little arbitrariness: talents and ideas. Consider what depends on them! The economic process comes to a standstill if you do not integrate the land into the right social structure and if you do not integrate human inventiveness, in the broadest sense, into the right social structure. Everything comes to a standstill. You can only overexploit what already exists for so long. You can exploit what is already there in terms of existing economic values. But one day there will be a standstill in what is already there if one does not really think realistically, does not develop what I always call realistic thinking, if one does not think realistically but only illusively, namely, again, only considers what is in the middle and does not consider the total, the full total again.

From this, however, you can see that it is necessary above all to provide clarification. And I can assure you: the function of land and the function of intellectual activity are more difficult to understand in the economic process than what Marxism has contributed in a beautiful and astute way to the economic process in terms of insight. But for the rest, everything still remains to be done. Go peddling, and see how many people you can interest in these things today! But there is no salvation in the future without an interest in these things. And they can only be properly studied if one has the principles of spiritual science. Just as today bridges can only be built if one is a mathematician and has studied mathematics, so social structures can only be understood if one forms the elementary concepts from spiritual science. That is what must be borne in mind. Do not forget that it is necessary, above all, to create schools and educational opportunities everywhere, so that what people need to understand in this area in order to live together can enter their minds. you create only illusionary structures with all the best will in the world, with all the possible Lenins and Trotskys and Scheidemanns and all the more obvious ones that perhaps are not allowed to be named here, structures that can be plundered, but which are not real structures. It is better to create with the awareness that it is a provisional arrangement, a continuity of economic life, to regard it as a provisional arrangement and, above all, to work towards the disappearance of the bourgeois education system with its lack of understanding.

You may consider this to be somewhat difficult and inconvenient, but it is a necessity. You can either want humanity to descend into chaos or you can want this to really happen – you cannot consider it inconvenient – and now we really have to start at the right end, namely first with the radical enlightenment of people. That is where the effort must be directed. Above all, it must be clearly understood that, since Karl Marx basically only took up bourgeois thinking and developed it very astutely dialectically, Karl Marx also evokes inadequate ideas about the other two areas. One can only gain an understanding of the way in which people come together with other people – coming together arises from interest, from feeling – and one can only gain an understanding of how the social structure must form in this sense by studying the nerve or head man. But the bourgeoisie, which is particularly organized around the nervous-mental type, has so paralyzed him that all real, enlightened spiritual concepts in this area have actually disappeared. Well, they have actually disappeared quite visibly, one can say, they have disappeared so vividly: you can still see pictures today from the eighteenth century – the attitude has carried over into the nineteenth century, albeit in a less obvious form – where people delight in how man is originally a social being, pictures: princesses, queens, in short, all sorts of people who hardly exist today, they dance in shepherd's costume, indulge in the warmth and fraternity that the original elementary human being develops in social life. You cannot imagine anything more false than all these things, which only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries then took on different forms. But the lie and illusion and fantasy dominated thinking to such an extent that what I discussed from this side, the theory of surplus value, asserted by Marxism as an expression of the proletarian mood, really strikes like a bolt of lightning: oh what, wishy-washy all the talk of brotherhood , of man's standing within society, of one person belonging to another; look at how, precisely in relation to industrial life, sociability has developed, which prevails between the mine owner and those who work in the coal mines in continuous labor and have to work so and so much. Consider the human and convivial relationship between the entrepreneurs and owners of sulfur mines in Sicily and the people who work in them in this life-destroying labor, and whose surplus value they possess. — In this peculiar way in which man works for man, in which man needs man in human life, Karl Marx has truly worked in a way that the proletariat can understand. And this was understood in turn: that the effect of person to person works above all in the differentiation into classes of the propertied and the propertyless. And programs emerged with the consequence: if this is to change, it can only change through the struggle of the proletarian class against the bourgeoisie, because that is a necessity.

Of course there will be many who are mine owners, and when the sufferings of the miners are presented to them in the 'I' theater, their hearts will be full of compassion, full of sympathy, perhaps even their eyes will fill with tears. But that's not worth anything, says the proletarian, because this compassion does not help these people; they can't help it, they are not personally, individually to blame for it. Man is not an individual being; man is, through historical necessity, placed in a certain socialization - not sociability, as the idealistic conceptions of the eighteenth century were, but in a socialization that cannot be other than through a struggle. It is a necessity to understand this. There is no question of personal responsibility, because it is a necessity to promote a historical process. This is what Karl Marx drummed into his proletarians and what was so little understood in the bourgeoisie.

And the third was the materialistic science of history. But before we consider this third point, we can ask: What is important if we want to understand socialization? — For Karl Marx did not grasp what man is as a nervous and sensory being: that he is an individuality, that he is more than any society can give him, as an individuality. This is what I had to counter in my Philosophy of Freedom, which touches on the fundamental nerve of the social question precisely on this point; and this is again what must be countered to Karl Marx's theory of socialization, where the individual disappears completely, just as the function of land and spiritual labor in socializing the means of production must be countered. For again, it can be shown that all social process must come to a standstill if it is not supplied with the sources that come from human individuality.

This is important, but it will only be possible if we know the source of human impulses, human sensory and nervous beings. Again, it is necessary to start with the social work. We can only deduce what is fact from the other thoughts. Karl Marx, with a beautiful instinct, coined the wonderful word: “The philosophers have so far only interpreted the facts differently; but we want to create facts, change the facts.” And he wanted to change the facts from his thoughts, wanted to create thoughts that could become facts, and he achieved it; but he only achieved that the proletariat itself, the way of thinking, the way of feeling of the proletariat is there. But what lives in it? The thought-offspring of the bourgeoisie live in the proletariat, the inheritance of the thoughts of the bourgeoisie. This is what the proletarian must understand above all, that he cannot make progress on his way with his demands without a real spiritual-scientific knowledge of man, and that this can never come to him if he retains bourgeois science. He will understand if he is enlightened in the right way and has the opportunity to be enlightened in the right way. This possibility must be created.

And finally, the third thing is to recognize the extent to which the human being is the being that he is from his metabolic process, which is precisely connected with his most spiritual being. This is where a real conception of history arises. But because Karl Marx had no idea about the threefold human being, because he was forgotten, the conception of history became a mere materialistic conception of history. He correctly recognized that what people carry within them as their instincts is more important than what they delude themselves about as their illusions. This comes from the classes. He said to people: Look at him, the bourgeois! Don't condemn him, he hasn't become that way because of anything he can be blamed for, but in the historical process the class of the bourgeoisie has simply been formed; as a result, he lives in his class in a very certain way. This life in his class determines the direction of his thoughts. Different thoughts are produced in you. You cannot help what you think; he cannot help what he thinks, because all these thoughts arise from the subconscious, namely from the class structure, from the social structure. Do not judge the matter morally, but recognize the necessity that he cannot help but oppress you, that he cannot help but be your opponent. Therefore become his opponent. Through class struggle, create for yourselves what is necessary.

All three points culminate in the class struggle, which was presented as the great demand of the new era. Karl Marx took up the dialectic in a truly Hegelian way. He said: “As proletarians, we do not want anything that we invent, but rather what development itself teaches us; we just want to get the wheel rolling a little, so that it rolls on consciously. All that we want would come by itself, as entrepreneurship increasingly comes together in societies, trusts and so on. By putting state impulses at its service, the business community is already ensuring that it increasingly sets itself apart as a class from the proletariat, that the haves and have-nots are increasingly sharply opposed to each other , but in such a way that all this becomes more and more uniformed, that there are fewer and fewer individual property owners, but larger and larger property-owning societies, which would necessarily be brought about in this way by the proletariat. Property is organizing itself. Above all, it was the spirit of struggle that dawned on the proletariat from Marxist dialectics, from Marxist science. And this fighting spirit had been alive for decades in the antagonism between the proletariat, which felt itself to be merely the proletariat across all national and other borders, and between the entrepreneurial class, which increasingly socialized and finally grew into imperialism. So that gradually modern life more and more lost the old political form and that, of which one still confusingly had the illusion that they were old state structures, became the new imperialisms, which are actually nothing more than the embodiment of that which confronts the proletariat as entrepreneurship. And in the most eminent sense, those imperialisms include the one that imagines itself to be an old political entity, but which has gradually become entirely an entrepreneurial organization: the British Empire; and the United States belongs to that. You can read about this in the older writings and lectures of Wilson, who proved all this to be true, because in this area, in terms of perception – I have already shown it from a different perspective – Woodrow Wilson is truly an insightful man.

So that is what, one could say, actually underlies this war, so-called war; that is what lurked and disguised itself in the so-called antagonism between the Central Powers and the Entente. This has been developing for decades. It had to come to expression in some way and will continue to do so. More and more the struggle will take on the form of expressing the antagonism that has emerged between the entrepreneurs and the proletariat of millions in some disguise. In the sense that the Western states want to remain states, one can only be called a state if one is used in some way as a framework for entrepreneurial endeavors, capitalist endeavors; and opponents and opposition will emerge where the consciousness of the proletariat prevails. This smoldered, glowed, glowed, glowed - what does not quite glow glows - glowed under what extended over the world as a great lie, as the lie of the so-called world war; it used all that now sounded like a catchphrase: “Freedom of nations, right of self-determination for every nation”. “Freedom of nations” sounds nicer than saying, ”We need a market in Eastern Europe, because where there is production, there must be consumption.” Perhaps it is only said if one belongs to a very secret lodge that rules the whole situation from the rear power realms. On the outside, the whole thing is embellished with beautiful-sounding phrases, dressed up by coining words that people can be outraged by, about all sorts of monstrous deeds and so on. But what is behind things as truth will show itself to people; it will show itself that what springs forth from the sum of untruthfulness is what is behind it and what can only be cured through such a deep understanding of reality as is possible only in spiritual science.

For that which has organized itself in the old way, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that which organizes itself in a new way out of the spiritual, participates in the process in a peculiar way. We live in the age of the consciousness soul. The consciousness soul is the primary agent in all that is being united in the British Empire community in the English-speaking population. You know that I have developed in detail at other times; so that is the main contemporary issue. But this contemporary issue must actually be clothed in entrepreneurship, in imperialism. It must become world domination in terms of external material. If this is now carried out by such means, as I have also discussed here in the Christmas lectures of 1916, then it must lead to the same results as before and as it will continue to do in the future. That is what is the real driving force behind the scenes of history, the other is something that is easy to talk about. But the spread of world domination, and specifically materialistic, material world domination, that is what is actually going on — it is being promoted by one side, while people are revolting against it on the other. Everything else is just a cover. For that which has formed itself in a different order, which is less in keeping with the times in the process of human development, must also find its development in a different way. Thus it comes about that the Romance element, the most excellent bearers of which, if we disregard Spanish, which is corrupt, we see Italian and French, the Romance element, which has come from quite different conditions, inherited from the earlier cultural period, from the fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, into the fifth, will come to its decline, to its downfall, precisely through the victories it has now won. But you can also see this from certain things that can show you just how spiritual science is derived from reality.

You see, I have explained to you what French unity is in the form of a state. I am not talking, of course, about the individual Frenchman, but about the Frenchman who feels French insofar as he belongs to the state of France, that state of France that attaches importance to possessing Alsace-Lorraine and so on. There is a great difference here. Nothing that is said is directed against the individual person. It is not directed against anything at all, but only characterizes. But it is directed against the extent to which a person belongs to this or that group, which always makes one worse: “Oaner is a Mensch...” (a person is a person...) because there are usually many nations. Well! So keep in mind that we are in the midst of a threefold development. French is particularly there to develop, at the stage at which it is now possible, what we call the mind or emotional soul; we have already spoken about this. This mind or emotional soul, in its particular development, falls within the years of a human being from 28 to 35, as you know: astral body until the age of 21, sentient soul until the age of 28, mind soul until the age of 35, from the age of 35 to 42 consciousness soul, then comes the spiritual self.

But now developmental currents are running through each other. You know that the individual human being is today in the process of developing the consciousness soul, that is, he is only really introduced to the forces that his age can give him when he lives beyond the age of 35. Before that, he must learn, must be educated in it, but one can never learn even that which one's age then gives one unless one lives beyond the age of 35. This is unpleasant for those who want to postpone the voting age, but it is simply a developmental fact. So one can say: this development is particularly favorable for participation between the ages of 35 and 42. It is at this time that the forces that can really consolidate develop for that which is most in keeping with the times in the age of the consciousness soul. This could naturally lead to an understanding of how the consolidation of that which makes the British Empire great can come from English-speaking men and women between the ages of 35 and 42 – even if Lloyd George remained a twenty-seven-year-old, but Lloyd George is not a typical person for that, but a typical person for the humanity of the present, not for Britishness.

In contrast, the whole of humanity is developing in such a way that people, as they become younger and younger, are currently in the process of developing the period from 21 to 28 years, the sentient soul. These two currents now run into each other in the forward development of humanity. You see, the period from 28 to 35 years remains fallow, barren. But this is precisely the period allotted to the development of France: the years from 28 to 35. What you can investigate spiritually is so strongly expressed that even the infertility of the French population is expressed in it, the outer physical infertility. At the same time, this is a perspective indication of what could otherwise be shown in numerous occult researches: that the French people are no longer able to maintain what is the inheritance of Romanism out of the confusion. Only that which flows to Italianism from the fact that Italianism is currently in the process of developing the sentient soul, 21st to 28th year, that precisely through this renewal Italianism acquires the hegemony of the Romance peoples, insofar as they still have a task in the future. This is so important that we have to keep such big things in mind in the European process, so that we know, for example, that something that has emerged from impulses that are completely different from the present ones, such as the after-effects of Romanism in European culture, is indeed in a state of decadence, but that the Italian people are coming to hegemony.

Perhaps someone will not grant me the right to speak about this 'tragedy'. But that is also the one thing that can be said with a certain tragedy: that the French have not committed themselves to the French cause either way, but have done everything possible to promote that which will make the French essence disappear from the process of development of modern humanity.

In the East, Russian Slavdom awaits; it can wait because it is destined for the future, all that will emerge from the confused chaos of what is developing here and there. Such things are the other thing that must emerge from a spiritual-scientific penetration of the facts. What I would like to point out again and again through such considerations, which in the near future can again be increased if possibilities are still opened to us, is to decide to see things in their truth, to really go out a little, not to stop at the illusions and phantasms, but to see things in their truth. Spiritual science is something that not only gives abstract concepts, but can also familiarize us with reality. Then, when we become familiar with reality through spiritual science, we will not overestimate all the strange concepts with which the spiritual life, and also humanity, has nourished itself in recent times. These concepts have been formed in many cases, I might say, in a Luciferic-Ahrimanic way, in that people have nourished themselves in their thinking and imagining with feelings from the most ancient times, which they have carried forward in time. People cling so tenaciously to inherited concepts, and one can feel deep sorrow when one observes this clinging, this rigid clinging to inherited concepts in people. Even in this time people have spoken of “great generals”. In a certain field, a real idolatry has been nourished for people like Hindenburg and Ludendorff, a real idolatry, as if this old hero worship could still have any meaning in the whole context of the catastrophe that has taken place! All the abilities that won battles in the past, or the inabilities that led to battles being lost in the past, no longer had any significance in this war process. You either won or you didn't, depending on the material, material in the form of cannons, material in the form of ammunition, material in the form of people, that was available at a particular place and if you had it or the other side had it; depending on that you won; or depending on whether one or the other had a more or less effective or ineffective gas. Victory or defeat depended on these factors. To that extent, the personal skill of the strategist was no longer a consideration, as it had been in the past. And here, too, we come upon a terrible untruth in the judgment of one man or another. You cannot believe where it is necessary today to correct the concepts of truth and untruth. Our time is so deeply entangled in empty phrases and untruthfulness, in illusions and phantasms. Therefore, it must be emphasized again and again that we must escape from this entanglement in these ideas. And these ideas are present especially in the field of education. Starting at the top and going down to the lowest level of schooling, it is necessary everywhere: medicine and theology and jurisprudence and philosophy, and all the other subjects that have been added at these universities, then the intermediate school system and everything else, that is what was suitable to undermine the ground of truth and what has lulled people most of all with regard to this undermining of the ground for truth.

It is indeed extremely difficult to find understanding on this point, and there is no salvation if one does not find understanding on this point. Perhaps it is easier for me to have gained understanding on this point than for many others. For I do believe that it has done much, much harm in the present time, that that way of thinking has prevailed for so long and has really taken hold of broad masses of the human population, that way of thinking which consists in the parents already taking care of the young person – I will now leave out how they take care of their daughters , because that would be a chapter in itself. He just has to get a government job, where he, even if he gets it late – well, the old man has to help out there – then he rises from one five-year period to the next without having to do anything, rises from one five-year period to the next in his salary. He is provided for life because he is entitled to a pension. This lulls him into a certain carelessness. It is only a minor matter compared to the fact that you also know how to do a wide range of things: if you sit in one place long enough, you will receive the Red Eagle Order, 4th class, then 3rd class – that's in addition. That's what happens when you're at the first gate of life, the thing that can make you so carefree because it takes you out of the struggle for survival. Proletarian theory, Marxism would say: That is quite natural; anyone who subconsciously generates the ideas that arise from this sense of security of being entitled to a pension in a bourgeois way cannot understand the person who, no matter how much he destroys what is present, as a proletarian destroys nothing but his chains. — That is a constant saying in proletarian circles. But you can feel how ideas are really formed in their forms through the way you are involved in the social process. You stop taking an intense, interested part in the struggle for life, on which the only thing that depends is a prosperous, fruitful life, when you know that you will get a raise every five years and a pension of so and so much, and will be provided for for life. As I said, I don't want to talk about the daughters. But the way of thinking is by no means different in the social process with regard to the placing of daughters and women in social life.

But I believe that a great deal depends on it. The facts are now such that they are beginning, perhaps precisely by shaking up many things that were firm, that were firmly believed, to hammer other ideas into people's heads. Some who have been able to wait patiently for the changes that have been taking place year by year may look into the future with some uneasiness when the next quinquennium comes around. Perhaps the experience, as I said, that I have never consciously sought any professional or other connection with anything to do with government employment or even just in any way with the state, has helped me to gain understanding for these events. It always disgusted me to have anything to do with anything smacking of the state. I do not boast of it, for it is of course a great failing; one is then a Bohemian. Now, how did Harlan call me for the nineties in the feature pages of the Vossische Zeitung? “An unsalaried, free-thinking scholar of God.” Someone I was friends with back then and who described me in such a way that his description still fits in the present day; he described many things, and he meant that I didn't fit into the then society of bohemians any more than he did. He called me an unpaid freethinking scholar of God, which I already was at the time, and which did not really fit into the circle of that time. But the whole of society at that time – I am now putting this in parentheses, don't be offended, we know each other too well for you to misunderstand me – the whole of society called itself the “Verbrechertisch” (the “Crooks' Table”), and under this title a number of people were grouped together who set themselves the harmless program, if one can speak of a program, of annoying the philistines. Jokes are there to conceal seriousness, and yet they are often only the expression of seriousness in a self-educating way of dealing with life.

But the day before yesterday I spoke at the end about how, out of current events, Germanness must come to Judaism and Greekness in a certain way, that Germanness which will initially be eradicated, at least as a German essence, through brutalization, right? But it will play a role. Greece was also eradicated, Judaism was eradicated in a certain way. It will play its role. And it is just right for me that through the recitation of the “Choir of Primitive Instincts” one of the most pronounced minds of modern times, Fercher von Steinwand, who speaks so truly from German folk tradition, and also from that German folk tradition that thrives particularly in German-Austrian areas, has now has presented itself before your soul in those concrete, vivid ideas that will show you that a certain task has been given precisely for this Germanness, which never had a real talent for an external state structure; that this Germanness has certain possibilities of good self-knowledge precisely in such excellent individuals as Fercher von Steinwand was.

Today, one feels compelled to say so many different things to the Germans. Especially in the last four and a half years, one has always felt compelled to say this and that to the Germans from the outside. We have experienced it again in these days, haven't we? I believe it was Lloyd George, I mean his Excellency himself, of course, who, after so many other speeches, has once again spoken about all that is depraved and immoral about Germanism, as if there were no possibility that precisely within this nationality the things that this nationality needs in terms of self-knowledge could arise. In this respect, Fercher von Steinwand is an extremely good example. You see, I told you about the lecture that he, Fercher von Steinwand, gave in 1859 about the Gypsies to the future King of Saxony, then Crown Prince Georg, to ministers and many generals – remember that: to many generals, because that is militarism, isn't it –; to many generals he gave this lecture. He said various things about the gypsies, because the gypsies seemed to him to be somehow related to the role that the German people will play in the future. 1859, isn't it, it's a strong piece of self-knowledge how he imagines it on the one hand, I read it to you the day before yesterday, but I will characterize it for you from another side. And to do that, allow me to read you another small piece from this Gypsy lecture by Ferchers von Steinwand. So imagine that Fercher von Steinwand speaks, speaks about what is favorable and unfavorable for the further development of the German people, before a crown prince, before ministers and before generals, imagine that he speaks in the following way:

"In our mountainous country, there is a custom, which is otherwise praiseworthy, that immediately before bedtime, the head of the household kneels at the table and recites a prayer known as the rosary. This prayer is said aloud by the entire family, including the servants, in the present paragraphs, and its duration fills an hour, which is not to be doubted. Yes, it can be considerably extended by a pious housewife with the addition of Our Fathers. For this reason, it is not unnatural for the longed-for sleep, but postponed by continued holy “prayer for us”, to sometimes hastily take hold, interrupting the tired worker in the middle of the loud “Ave Maria” and repeatedly shakes the kneeling position of the same, and so on, until the eloquently begun piety has dragged on in a stammering manner to the end. This time, the master of the house himself was seized by the gentle hand of nature, and his “Lord, have mercy on us” had gradually lost all its usual emphasis. I myself knelt in a corner of the room, nodding more to the sleeping place than to God.

Outside the open door of the room stood silently the black-browed horde” – there were gypsy visitors, in fact – ”sometimes revealing crystal-white teeth. The prematurely-withered face of a young woman, who was quietly turned towards the entrance, was shimmeringly illuminated by the glow of the fireplace. The white in her eye seemed to fade away in increasing drowsiness. The pale yellow enamel at the glazed, circular edge of the eyeball stood out all the more clearly, a delicate pale yellow enamel that characterizes every gypsy eye and is sometimes only discoverable to the painter.

All our annoyance with the strangers had vanished, for tiredness dominated the house. Nobody except the gypsy mother we already knew, who had planted her knees in the middle of the floor, had followed the prayer with a brave voice, and piety was about to suffer a general defeat.

Suddenly, the old woman, twitching like a viper, rose up with terrible force from the floorboard, stormed with rapid-fire superiority on the flagging prayer leader and tore the beaded symbol of the rosary from his limp hand, spraying up in cherubic rage. All devout mumbling stopped as if before the blare of the Last Judgment, and the room seemed to tremble, struck by the holy earthquake. Then the pythically inspired woman leaped or sprang into the middle of the circle of worshippers; her face had taken on a Gorgon-like transfiguration, her voice intensified to a thunderclap. Stretching both arms towards the sky, she cried: “But Lord, you will spew out of your mouth those who are lukewarm.” The dim light fluttered on her coppery, black-ringed forehead, and from beneath it, like the lightning of the archangel Michael, a fiery blaze flared up. Never before had I been told with such fiery urgency that wavering and undecided people are the worst and most worthless of the Creator's creations.

What immense religious wealth this woman possessed, I thought, and how enviable!

Poor student that I was, I had not yet learned

what a difference there is between possessing spiritual content and expressing it. I did not yet know that it is enough to feel a few rudiments of content within oneself to possibly make an excellent interpreter of serious spiritual content.

I once sat under a maple tree that was growing. But it did not make that clear with any drumming. However, it cannot be denied that inner nobility is necessary to be a good drummer. If it were not so, then the greatest noisemakers and braggarts, the most skillful gesticulators, would have to be the greatest creative spirits among mortals, and boldly expansive actors would have to be the most profound playwrights and modern Germany would have no lack of excellent tragedies.

Where would such a reflection be more appropriate than in a history of the Gypsies?

That is the nature of such self-awareness, which does not need to be preached to by the world, which could judge for itself that what existed in 1870 has come into decadence. But if one understood the issues, one did it as I did in my book on Friedrich Nietzsche, where I quoted Nietzsche's words: “Exstirpation of the German spirit in favor of the ‘German Reich’.” I could not have the book on Friedrich Nietzsche reprinted during the war because of what it says. Fercher von Steinwand continues:

“The air is heavy and sulphurous from the oaths that have been sworn on constitutions for eight decades. How many states are there in which these oaths have not been broken many times over? Our minds are deaf from the blasts of the trumpets, the cries of jubilation with which we welcomed the heavenly benefactress, freedom.”

You would think that Fercher von Steinwand was talking about Wilsonianism and Entente views!

"But count the mortals who are man enough to be free! Where are there still four walls that do not resound with quotations from Schiller's writings? But where, in which hut, in which palace, under which star of the German zone, does something of the poet's energetic soul, of his fiery vein, of his stubborn urge for a great goal, still live? Who would have the courage and the gift to make his mistakes? The 'tribunes of all European empires totter under the burden of eloquence and science, through which order and happiness are to be introduced into human society.

That is why I said yesterday: At least in Central Europe it will have come to pass that some contribution will have been made to breaking through the lie. Where it has triumphed, it will continue to live.

"You of little heart! What is the thought that you have thought? Who among you is a Mirabeau? How ardent is your image of the happy state, if it is not already cold as a corpse before you announce it? Tell me, which of you is greater than the moment? How many scoundrels have you intimidated, how many noble-minded people have you encouraged? How many silent praises do you not hear in the complaints? Does misfortune not speak louder than ever? Is it really so terribly difficult to grasp the idea that every human being, without exception, must be educated from childhood for freedom, order and happiness, and even for the art of educating themselves, educated far less through reasoning than through love, patience, strictness and painful sacrifices? Is it really so terribly difficult, instead of paying for making a noise, to pay for a fruitful activity? Is it really so terribly difficult, instead of obeying the bayonets, to serve the mild, all-equalizing reason?“

”Imagine a state” — please, there are the generals! -, ”imagine a state of the first or second order. Imagine, in addition, an insightful minister” — the ministers are sitting there too — ”who does not count as his own glory what harms or dishonors a neighbor; in a word, a minister who uses two-thirds of his enormous military coffers for the education of the lowest classes of the people — what do you think? Would not such a minister, within a few years, bring about the most tremendous change in all conditions, for his own benefit, for the benefit of his people, for the benefit of his lord and king? Would such a minister not change the character of world history in less than half a generation? I would have the heart to say “Yes” again, for it matters little to me whether some polished war hero or corpulent model official calls me a foolish ideologue.

Meanwhile, take comfort, you Gypsies! You are not alone in your kind; you are not threatened with extinction: new reinforcements are flowing to you daily from all directions of life!

It is a view of life that has taken firm root in the impulses in which it is based on real nationality, which in a certain sense justifies one to make such assertions as I have done and as I do not want to make them out of some mere impulse, but as they can be proven piece by piece.

We will meet again next Friday at 7 p.m., and then we will continue our discussion.

Dear attendees! For many years now, I have had the honor of giving a lecture here almost every winter, as in various cities in Germany, on topics in the field that I dare to call spiritual science. In our fateful time, however, it will be appropriate to turn our attention to the events of which we are all participants and witnesses during this time. This seems all the more appropriate to me, esteemed attendees, as it is my conviction, flowing not from a dark feeling but from spiritual science itself, that precisely what spiritual scientific world knowledge is, is intimately connected with what the German people and the German soul have produced as the world picture of German idealism, which revealed itself most impressively and powerfully out of this German soul at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth century, but which has continued to work and has worked into our days.

In the true sense of being a study of spiritual life, spiritual science wants to be a continuation of what the natural scientific world view has achieved for the outer world of the senses. But to mature the spirit for such an understanding of the spiritual foundations of the world, this world view of German Idealism seems to me – as I said, I say this from the knowledge of the spirit itself – but this world view of German Idealism seems to me to be the actual root and the actual source. Therefore, allow me this evening to present a kind of reflection on this world view of German idealism and its influence on the present, its effect on the whole of time formation and on the world-historical development of humanity.

Of course, this world view of German idealism is born, entirely born, as we shall see, out of the essence of German nationality, and in this respect one could deny it a certain comprehensive validity according to the saying often heard today: All knowledge, all science must actually assume an international character and becomes untrue to itself if it proves to be in any way shaded by the aspect of one nation.

As plausible as it may seem at first, I would like to say, as self-evident as such an assertion appears, one must still say that from a deeper world view point of view it is misleading. It seems self-evident because it is, I would say, the most extraordinary thing that can be said about science and penetration into world knowledge. When we speak of the internationality of knowledge and insight, we are actually saying no more than that the sun or the moon are the common thought of all people. That is what they are; but the way in which what people have to say about the sun and the moon speaks from the souls, from the hearts of people, this way, it is different according to the talents, according to the spiritual directions and dispositions of the different peoples. The most diverse talents are involved in order to make this knowledge fruitful for human spiritual culture in one direction or another. That is precisely what is at stake: the extent to which what can be known can penetrate into all human spiritual development in a healthy way. But in this the talents, the soul directions of the different peoples have their very distinct specificity. Otherwise, how could it be otherwise meaningful to understand that one of the most German minds, Goethe, when he had begun his journey through the world, in order to see not only what was offered to him in the contemplation of art, but also what nature could offer him. How else could it have been possible for him to write to his German friends from Italy: “After all the natural phenomena and facts I have seen in public, I would now most like to take a trip to India - so said Goethe - not to discover it, but to see what I have discovered in my own way.

The way in which we view what is given to everyone is what matters when we consider the actual impulses and driving forces for the progress of humanity as a whole.

Now it is precisely possible for spiritual science to look at the souls of nations in a truly cognitive way. To do so, however, one must start from a spiritual-scientific insight that - like so many insights today - may be regarded by some as paradoxical, perhaps even fantastic. But what I will say next about the souls of different peoples from a spiritual-scientific point of view is something that may still seem fantastic and paradoxical to the present day, but which human knowledge wants to incorporate, just as certain physical and certain scientific knowledge has incorporated.

If we consider the soul today in the light of current psychology, we see everything that swirls and lives in the soul in terms of impulses of will, feelings, perceptions, thoughts and ideas as a unity. Of course it is; but that does not lead to any real knowledge. Nor does one come to a real understanding of the soul itself, as one might come to a real understanding of light if one did not perceive its interaction with material existence, with material things that confront it, in such a way that one would believe that one would emerge from the light the different shades of colors: the reddish-yellow nuance on one side, the green nuance in the middle, the bluish-violet nuance on the other side - just as the physicist, in his interaction with material existence, must observe these color shades, structured from this one light , and how he cannot come to an understanding of the deeds of light, as Goethe says, in any other way, one cannot come to an understanding of what the human soul actually is if one does not, I would say, also divide it into three shades of its being. And so we call the first shade of the soul being - corresponding, as it were, to the red-yellow shades of light in the rainbow - [...] then the human sentient soul. The human sentient soul contains everything that often wells up unconsciously and subconsciously from the dark depths of the soul. Everything that lives in a person without them immediately having an intellectual grasp of it – their passions, their desires and so on, as well as what gives people this or that temperament – all this wells up in the sentient soul. But in this sentient soul is contained at the same time, in a certain way, if also, one might say, in a natural way, that which can be called the eternal powers of the human soul, which pass through births and deaths and can reappear in repeated earthly lives.

Let us distinguish – as it were, as a parallel phenomenon for the greenish shading of the light – let us distinguish the so-called intellectual or emotional soul. This is the part of the soul through which man acquires an overview, a rationally considered overview, a level-headed overview of that which would otherwise live indeterminately and unconsciously in his soul as affects, as inner tremors.

And as the third shade of life - corresponding to the color blue-violet in the light - we speak of the consciousness soul. It is that through which the human being is most connected, from his soul existence, with the surrounding physical world in which he finds himself; it is that which contains within itself the most temporal, the most transient, power of human being; it is also that through which the human being appears individually as a personality, through which he puts the world to use, through which he puts that which he deliberately lets flow out of the subconscious soul life into practical life.

And just as the one light, the one sunlight, lives in the different colors of the rainbow, so the one I, the one, self-aware being of man, lives in the totality of the shades of the soul. And just as the light appears as the unity of that red and green and blue, as the unity of everything, so the self appears, so the personality, the individuality of man, the actual I appears.

I cannot say more today in the way of an introduction to this scientifically well-founded fact, law of the soul, because it seems appropriate to me to apply this law of the soul to the different national souls, insofar as they are spread over European intellectual life.

We have to say that [...] what can be called the soul of a nation is just as much a reality for spiritual science, something alive in itself, not just an abstract concept that summarizes the characteristics of a nation, but something alive in itself. You will also find the necessary references for this in our spiritual science literature, especially in my Theosophy.

And here we must say that the individual nations differ so much that in one nation more of the shades of the sentient soul comes to the fore, in another nation more of a different shade of soul life. In this way the European peoples are structured according to their folk souls – not the individual people, but to the extent that these individual people belong to the folk soul – they bring to manifestation that which lives as the shade of the rainbow in the individual folk souls.

In this context, the approach that I would like to say is justified by spiritual science shows us that when we look to the south, to the Italian people – to some extent this also applies to the Spanish people – when we look to the Italian people, we see that the folk soul of the Italian people is expressed through the shades of the and everything that can be observed in the various expressions of this Italian national soul, in its good and bad aspects, is connected with the fact that the Italian national soul is dominated by the shades of the sentient soul, that everything springs from the sentient soul.

Today, we only want to emphasize the best qualities of the Italian people that come from their emotional soul; but it will be seen that the Italian people, insofar as they appear as a national soul – not as individual human beings, as I said – must have a certain one-sidedness because their expressions and revelations come from the emotional soul. Yes, if we take the greatest – I will refrain from the development of art, the actual visual arts, but they could very easily prove exactly what I have to say – if we take the greatest – Dante, Giordano Bruno – we learn, precisely when we immerse ourselves in them, that what they have achieved in a gloriously designed world view is created entirely from the sentient soul. One only has to read Giordano's work to see how he has become a great inspirer. When one delves into what he has brought, it is like an expression of feeling for the world view that man can create out of the abundance of the world's phenomena. Feeling lives in this one of the greatest [spirits of] Italians, in Giordano Bruno. I would just like to hint at this.

It is particularly important to look at the French national soul from the point of view that has been gained. This French national soul shows itself to the spiritual-scientific gaze in such a way that it actually sets the tone for the chiseling of the intellectual soul. Everything in the French spirit that appears great but also one-sided stems from the fact that the intellectual soul finds particular expression there. And today we shall mention only that which has influenced the development of an actual world view. The greatest Frenchman in this field, under whose influence French world-view life still stands today, was born at the end of the sixteenth century and lived into the seventeenth century, namely Descartes or Cartesius; but it is precisely in this Descartes or Cart esius, the man of world-view who emerged at the dawn of the newer development of world-view — one can see how in him in particular everything lives that can lead from the intellect to a world-picture. His saying, “I think, therefore I am,” has become famous. Thinking, that is, that which lives in the soul of the intellect, is now based on the being of the soul itself.

The human mind still has the peculiarity of building the world as if it were externally mechanical. It is indeed the peculiarity of the mind that it is unable to penetrate the inner vitality of the world, that it shrinks back, as it were, from the inner vitality, and that it wants to construct everything. But this is particularly evident in Descartes, in Cartesius. And now we will draw attention to one particular way in which this world view of Descartes came about: I would say that it is the one-sided expression of intellectual life. Descartes looks at the world; and after he has given himself over to doubting everything (and this doubt is also, in turn, an expression of the intellectual way of looking at the world), he comes to saying to himself how he can form a world picture that has sensuality. Indeed, this world view becomes such that everything mechanical only wants to be included in it. The world appears as a great mechanism. And it is characteristic of this – I would say genuinely French – world view that Descartes explicitly states: we can only perceive soul in ourselves, as humans. Animals are moving machines. Descartes denies that animals, or indeed all of nature except for human beings, have souls. Animals are automatons.

Thus, for Descartes, the whole of nature except for human beings is like a complicated machine, and animals are within this complicated machine. Indeed, it is precisely the rational mind that recoils from the living. And this intellectualism, it remained in its one-sidedness, and in the end it led to the fact that precisely from France and right up to our times the impetus has been given to establish the actual materialism of the world view, of mechanism, one might say, the world view,

Dear attendees, one could very easily reproach the one who describes the relationships of the folk souls in this way today: Yes, you are describing the feelings of the present time, because the war has brought about a situation in which what we ourselves regard as our world view, as the source of our national identity, is being vilified and even defamed from all sides in Europe. And so we are now trying – I would say – in this time to either justify or avenge ourselves.

Now, esteemed attendees, there are listeners here who know that what I am saying about the different national souls in these difficult times of European events is something I have said again and again for many years, long before this war, and not only to Germans but also to members of other European nations. I consider this to be a firm result of spiritual scientific knowledge about European conditions.

The mechanistic nature of this worldview has been so ingrained in French culture to this day that it has allowed what was French, materialistic or mechanistic world view to emerge. And today we may recall how Goethe, even as a young man, confronted the French mechanistic worldview from his German consciousness, which seeks to take account of the living soul and the vitality of the worldview. He said: They bring us this mechanical play, a mechanism only, a worldview as if the whole world were just a game, a real automaton! Yes, if only what one sees in the world of phenomena could at least be explained to one! These are moving atoms! But then, when he has explained how the atoms collide, he withdraws and leaves the whole world unexplained.

This is what repels Goethe, even as a young man, about the one-sidedness that arises from a purely intellectual development of a world view. And basically, to this day, we can see how this mechanistic world view affects what we seek in a worldview, a folk worldview. For only a few individuals have tried to work their way out of it, for example, the famous philosopher Bergson, I don't know whether one can still mention him today, after the beginning of the war, after the mood of the French, or whether the word Bergson is now taboo as his name in France, I don't know. It is precisely Bergson who, since the war broke out, one might say, has continually presented his French to his French in the most savage manner against the German essence, namely against the German world view, and has managed to that it is precisely the Germans – who were great in a certain way, especially during the period of German idealism – but who have now fallen so low in the present day, [the Germans] have become a nation that only trains itself mechanically and in a machine-like way. The Germans have become a nation that itself represents only a kind of machine!

Bergson probably thought – Bergson, who formed this view of the German people because the Germans opposed the French with cannons and rifles – he probably formed this view because he believed that the Germans will oppose the products of what he calls the “greatness, the great age” of the Germans to the French cannons and French rifles by reciting Novalis and Schiller and Goethe, because that is all they would rely on, right!

Well, this Bergson, he has in a sense worked his way out. But I showed in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” - which was not written during the outbreak of the war, but appeared at the very beginning of the war and was finished long before - that those of Bergson's thoughts that are reasonably plausible could be found long before that in much more intense and much more thorough form in the minds of German thinkers! But quite apart from that, Bergson always wants to be seen as the one who brought the French a world view that went far beyond the mechanistic and materialistic view of things.

Now, this world view, how did Bergson himself present it to the Germans in his lectures, to these Germans who are said to have come down so much since the time of their greatness? It is just a shame that it has been possible to prove, especially in recent times, that Bergson copied entire pages – not just repeating, but copying – from the German philosopher Schelling, the German philosopher Schopenhauer, and so on, and so on!

What the Frenchman is able to counter as a higher world view to the German, whom he defames, esteemed attendees, is something he himself has copied! It is necessary to bear these things in mind more often in the present if one wants to have an understanding of the mutual relationship between the European peoples and what is now being said about this relationship by the opponents of this German essence.

And, dearest attendees, when we turn our eye to the British national soul, we find that this British national soul bears the very shade of the consciousness soul. And in every detail of this British national soul, one can see how it expresses this consciousness soul, how the British, the Englishman in particular, has the intention of putting what wells up from his inner being into the service of practical life alone.

This is what English culture has in itself, without taking into account the development of the whole world view. Starting with Milton and Bacon, it can be seen everywhere that a world view was actually sought that was to be placed only at the service of the actually immediately tangible life. But I will refrain from that now, I will only point out that in the very last period, this English national character, insofar as it really arose from the British national character, has led to a very peculiar direction: truth, that is what a person who has a sense of truth regards as something that is intimately and genuinely connected to the soul as a reality. Ladies and gentlemen: The English – and in this case in harmony with the Americans – have developed a world view that they call pragmatism. What is this pragmatism? Well, this pragmatism, dear attendees, is characterized above all by the fact that it treats the truth, the concept, the idea of truth itself, in a highly peculiar way. Truth as something that connects the soul with reality, with spiritual reality, is something that this pragmatism, this primeval English product, does not recognize at all. Man perceives truth as an idea, as an idea - in the sense of pragmatism - purely for the purpose of dealing with the external world of the senses, with external tangible reality, in order to intervene in it. In the sense of this pragmatism, truth is a concept that proves useful for practical life. One could say that truth is a tool for usefulness in the very outermost sense, including scientific truth, when understood in this way. Truth has no independent significance, but only serves as a tool for finding one's way in the outer life – that is what this pragmatism has brought forth.

Do we not see this consciousness soul, which places everything that the human being produces in a spiritual way only at the service of the external life? Do we not see it at work in all the details - most honored attendees - that are found in the three peoples mentioned, that order and inner understanding will come into the matter when they are considered in terms of the guidelines that can only be briefly sketched here, but which can be fully substantiated from the insights of spiritual science?

And if we now turn our gaze to the center of Europe, let us turn our gaze to German spiritual life, insofar as it is rooted in its national character. Let us turn our gaze to that spiritual striving within the German people that is to lead to a world view, to such a world view that at least corresponds to the German being, the German national character, then we find confirmed in the most comprehensive way that spiritual science also shows in other respects that this German soul is shaded in such a way that it appears like light in three different color shades: in reddish-yellow, in greenish, and in bluish-violet. That the German soul is such that the I, the self-awareness, works through the three different soul nuances, the unity of the soul-living, working through all three soul nuances, this turns out to be the essence of the German national spirit, the German national soul, in a truly lively, penetrating observation.

And this can be said in a completely objective sense; it does not require any kind of one-sided nationalistic view, as we see it emerging from the Italian, French, and British national souls.

The German is in a position to be able to truly rely on what an insight into his nature, striven for in the soul, gives him, and [he is in a position] to understand his nature from this insight.

And if one wants historical proof that this I, this self, the whole living personality in German national character is really effective through the three soul nuances, then one can present precisely the three great world-view men who, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, so clearly emerged within German intellectual life and sought to reveal German national character at the highest spiritual level. Kant, who tried to educate himself from philosophy, was indeed ahead of them; but we do not want to look at him, although he provided the foundation for the others, so to speak.

But before our soul we want to place one of the most German men, one of those men who knew - even when they strove with their thoughts to the highest, to a world view - that they can only gain this world view in the right sense, in the living sense, within the German essence if this world view is the result of a conversation with the German national spirit itself. And so Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, knew that in the world view he created, German essence was most wonderfully revealed. How does he appear to us when we first consider his personality only in terms of appearance?

Allow me, esteemed attendees, to mention just a few essential traits of his life, so that we can see how this whole man, Fichte, attempts to obtain, from the unity of human life, from the self itself, that which illuminates the world in its deepest life and can bring it to knowledge for man.

The young Fichte, how does he appear to us? Two traits, wonderfully real in this sensitive beauty, we can hardly find them in any other mind: the six-year-old son of a simple, rural man is first of all a decent student; and because he is such a good student, he is given the book “Gehörnte Siegfried” by his father as a Christmas reward - he can already read. It soon becomes apparent that Johann Gottlieb Fichte is becoming somewhat inattentive in his studies; he is reproached for this. We see him one day standing by the stream that flows past his parents' house, throwing into it the “Gehörnte Siegfried”, which has become so dear to him, on which he has pinned his entire soul. And when his father comes along, the father realizes the reason for the boy's strange behavior: he could not tolerate, in the face of the iron concept of duty that was already living in him at the root of his soul, that what was dear to him as a human being, as a personality, should remain with him if he could violate his duty over it. Thus, even the boy Fichte, the six-year-old boy, feels trapped in a world that is, I would say, completely permeated by forces of duty.

Later, when Johann Gottlieb Fichte was nine years old, the village where his parents lived was visited by the estate neighbor. He actually wanted to hear the sermon on Sunday; but he came too late. What happened? Because the pastor had already delivered the sermon, they showed him the young boy, the nine-year-old boy in the blue farmer's coat, who at first behaved awkwardly, but then, when he saw what they wanted from him, came to life and now the whole sermon, which he had listened to as a nine-year-old boy, had listened to as a nine-year-old boy, and he now recites it word for word to the neighbor of the estate, so that everything he said comes from his soul – he had connected with the innermost view of his soul with what he had just heard, and so he could let it flow out again from the innermost. Thus he lived a spiritual life in the immediacy of his own being. Thus he was prepared to find in Fichte the world picture of German idealism, which was able to flow to him, I might say, admittedly from a certain one-sided point of view, but still from a genuinely German one.

Fichte's fundamental awareness of the fact that what lives in the human being, what is inside this I, how it contains the source forces of the world itself – that which pervades and permeates the world in a divine-spiritual way – how this can be found if only man plunges completely into the depths of his inner being, this is evident in all of Fichte's work. He was appointed to the professorship in Jena relatively early, which at that time was the center of German intellectual life. But the way in which Fichte as a teacher affected his listeners is really quite different from what one - I would say usually dreams of.

People who heard Fichte characterize him in the following way: When Fichte spoke, it was like rolling thunder that discharged in sparks of lightning; and when he spoke, he wanted to educate not only good, but great individuals. And one of those who had listened to some of those standing nearby said: What Fichte said revealed that he had not practical, but bold images, energetic images, that his imagination was not graceful in the proper sense but forceful and powerful, and that he speaks in the realm of thought, in the realm of ideas, not like one who merely makes grand words, but like one who is able to rule in this invisible, in this supersensible world.

When Fichte spoke to his listeners, he did not merely seek to communicate to them the content of what he had to say to them. He never spoke the same thing twice about a subject; he never spoke in such a way – I would say that he had only a certain content in his soul that he wanted to convey to his listeners, but rather he had in his own inner being an overall feeling of what he wanted to say, an overall feeling, and above all he sought to establish an inner bond between himself and each individual listener. He wanted that which lived in his soul to become active, not just as a word, but as a force in each individual listener, [but] that it resound in each individual listener himself. He wanted to pour a living fluid over his entire audience. He wanted the listeners, when they had heard his phrases, to leave with a different inner life than when they came. He wanted to awaken something in them. But that is how he worked, vividly, seizing the self.

And so Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, was able to completely negate, I would say, that which emerged from Descartes' rational world view. Striving to be in one's own self and to strive for the divine in the self, by starting from thinking, and because one thinks, one shows – Fichte could not approve of that either – so the self would have been something dead. For him, the ego was something that could never become dead, for the reason that it constantly creates itself. It cannot cease to be - because it constantly creates itself. That is to say: He saw the essence of the ego - Fichte - in the will. And by the fact that the ego wills itself, it places itself into the world through its own power.

But this also had to result in a world view for Fichte that saw in the will that pervades the world as the actual active force in the world. And the wonderful thing about Fichte is that he says: This external sense world, as it presents itself to us, is not the true, real one. Why is it there? It is there so that man can appear within this sensory world as a sensual being; so that in this human being the will that permeates the world and expresses itself as the divine duty that permeates the world, so that this will forms a material, in order to fulfill the duty, in order to fulfill the moral. Thus, for Fichte, the whole world is permeated by moral substance, by moral reality. For him, the whole world is a spiritual whole of duty, and that which exists as an individual is so that duty, so that the will, so that the divine that is alive in the will can live out itself.

Fichte calls the external sensual world matter, the sensualized material of duty. If one tries to hold together Fichte's placing in a divine-moral world order with the mechanistic materialism that emerged from a unified rational world view, as with Descartes —- Cartesius —, one tries to recognize how this Johann Gottlieb Fichte lived - I would like to say - a certain inner connection of the soul with what, as the divine, flows through and permeates the world, how he then tried to see this connection in the individual national spirits. But Fichte could only ascribe to the German national spirit the ability of a national spirit to grasp this living connection with the universal spirit in the ego. And so Fichte became quite aware that the German national spirit, in connection with the development of humanity, would be called upon to bring living knowledge in place of mechanistic, dead knowledge.

But what is true is that the “Addresses to the German Nation” are pulsating with an ethos, a world-historical sense of duty. Fichte delivered these magnificent addresses in Berlin, in the midst of the enemies who had invaded Berlin at that time, and during his Address to the German Nation, where he sought to show how the German national spirit is called upon to grasp, out of the living self, the connection of the human being with the spirit of the world, when he delivered these speeches, which can still have a wonderfully inspiring effect on the German mind today, the marching French regiments drummed outside. He could have been captured by the enemy at any moment. But he also stood firm as the German man, aware that he had to express the world-historical mission of the German national spirit.

One need not, honored attendees, take a one-sided view today that one should accept the philosophy, the worldview, of such a mind in terms of its content as dogma. Today we can go beyond that. We do not have to profess everything that Fichte said here or there, or what the others said, which we will discuss later; we can turn our attention to the way these people strive and how, in this striving, they show – which Fichte was also fully aware of – that they wanted to draw from the depths of the German national spirit.

Thus, we see Johann Gottlieb Fichte as one of those who, out of German Idealism, sought a world view. We want to look at this striving in him, and also in the others, not at what they said. One need not be a follower of anyone whom one finds to be a great and admirable personality, but one can continue to be inspired by the individual striving, even in those areas where one believes that one cannot go with him in terms of the content of a teaching. But it is not the doctrine that matters, it is the personality that matters, which, as it stands, can serve to characterize the German people themselves, because it must lie in the essence of the German people if, as I would say, with Fichte, such a thing can arise from this German essence with such awareness as Fichte brought forth from this German essence.

Then we see Fichte's succession from another, from Schelling. Schelling is also such a personality. I am convinced, dear attendees, that precisely these three figures, whom I am speaking of here, will be called upon again when the time, which is certainly a time of great hopes and activity that we are living through, but which is also a difficult time of trial, when this time will bear fruit.

We see Fichte's successor in Schelling. In him, too, we have a personality who wants to create a world picture directly from the depths of the ego, because he is clear that the divine-spiritual is at work in what man experiences in his innermost being, and that this divine-spiritual floods through all nature and all being and can be grasped in its activity in the world. If only man is able to experience his ego strongly enough within himself.

If for Fichte the divine essence is something that permeates the world – I would like to say – like a great weaving and working morality, then for Schelling the divine essence is first of all the great artist who, out of the artistic weaving of his own being, first confronts nature in order to see his own truth, his own being and working in the mirror of nature. For Schelling, God's work of art is nature. No natural science that is to be abstractly intellectual - a natural science that works in such a way that with every idea that is brought forth about nature, the human soul feels at the same time related to nature. But Schelling feels this nature in such a way that he says: Now man has emerged, now other animated beings have emerged in nature. But all of nature had preceded this, as it were, as the unconscious and subconscious, which had to be present beforehand like a skeleton. The whole spiritualized world view is nature; as the past and at the same time as the solid ground for the present; as the past in terms of material on which the spirit can stand, having prepared its existence in the existence of nature. And so, for Schelling, nature and spirit grow together, but they grow together in such a way that what lives out of Schelling as a world view of German idealism is again connected to the entire personality, not just one-sidedly with the sentient soul, one-sidedly with the consciousness soul, one-sidedly with the mind soul, but out of the fullness of the soul's being. One would like to say: This whole Schelling was there.

Those who knew him personally described how, even in old age, he spoke with his eyes sparkling, as if he wanted to pour out to his listeners through the shining gaze of his eyes what lived in his inner being as a spiritualized, ensouled nature, whereby he always felt that the soul of man was interwoven with all of nature. Schelling felt that this world view, which I would describe as having been woven out of the German mind, out of the soul of the emotions – as was the case with Fichte, out of the soul of the will – carried him to ever greater heights, to the point where he could ultimately be understood only to a limited extent. God as the artist, nature as a wonderful work of art, knowledge of nature through the senses, which Schelling believed was so interwoven with the human ego that he was carried away to say: To recognize nature is to create nature.

Of course, these spirits were one-sided; but they were as one-sided as all human beings are one-sided, who have the faults of their virtues, not the faults of their small characteristics. - To recognize nature is to create nature! He felt that whatever lives as a force in nature can be grasped by the soul if that soul only grasps itself in its own ego, that nature can be recreated.

And the third one is the much-maligned Hegel, who is, however, revered by some in the present day. If Fichte tried to revive in the will that can permeate everything, in the ego, if Schelling tried to create an idealistic world view in the world mind that comes to life in the ego and spiritualizes and ensouls everything, then Hegel tries to create a world view out of pure concepts, out of the idea. And with Hegel in particular it is obvious that he wanted to grasp a world picture in concepts, in ideas, to compare this Hegelian world picture with the mechanistic, with the intellectual one of Cartesius, of Descartes: there everything is intellectual! But what did Hegel want? Hegel did not want the concept, the idea, in such a way that his world picture was only an instrument, as it were, to recognize an external reality. Hegel wanted to have this world in such a way that the human soul, for its part, experiences the concepts themselves, that it lives with its I into the icy regions, but thereby also forms the experience of the pure concept. For Hegel had the inner experience - one may call it the inner experience - that when man grasps the ideas of the world in their purity, that he may then partake with the innermost part of his I-being in what, as divine thought itself, underlying all of the world, participating in the thought-work of the Godhead, because a thought in the soul is, so to speak, only an ideational representation of that which, as a divine thought, permeates the world - that is what Hegel wanted.

This world view is also one-sided, because it reduces the divine spiritual beings that underlie the world to mere logic, because the whole world is reduced to a mere skeleton of its reality. But it is significant that for once — I would like to say — there appeared a stage in the development of the German being, this inwardly living feeling and interweaving of a thought that permeates the world: I want to unite myself with the thought that is active in the world, and I am convinced that in so doing I have not only something in my soul that outwardly reflects the world, but that when thoughts flow through my soul, it is divine activity itself that allows its thoughts to appear in my soul — those thoughts according to which minerals, plants, animals and human beings are created. Outside, God creates the form and the facts according to the ideas; then, having stripped them of the material, he lets these ideas flow through the human soul, and man participates by surrendering to this flow in a mysticism that is not vague, not an emotional mysticism, but an idea-mysticism, crystal clear: Man participates in the efficacy of divine thoughts in the world!

Yes, esteemed attendees, with these three figures – who, much more than one might think, also in the period when they were rarely mentioned, in the second half of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, live on in the German essence – in these three figures, the world view of German idealism presents itself to us, that German idealism that was called upon – and we can see this directly and objectively in these minds, the spirits of this German idealism, - was called upon - I would say cognitively, I emphasize explicitly, not religiously, but cognitively - although the cognitive is a support of the religious, the religious emerges from another part - to conjure up the second great tidal wave in terms of a human world view from the depths of human existence.

Let us look across to Asia. Asia, especially India, still retains, I would say, an ancient world view in which the human being has also tried to come to that from the depths of his being, which as divine-spiritual flows through, works through and lives through the world. But how does the Asian and the descendant of this ancient Asian, the present-day Indian, attempt to make the divine-spiritual activity and flow in the world present in their own soul being? By attenuating and paralyzing the soul and paralyzing the I. The I must be extinguished so that the human being can give themselves over to the general flow of Brahman. This is the ancient striving for a world picture, I would say, the primeval striving for a world picture. Characteristic of this is that the ego is tuned down, paralyzed to the point of extinction, so that what the human being experiences in his ego does not stand in the way when he wants to revive in his soul that which flows through the world in a divine-spiritual way, giving it soul. To extinguish himself so that the Divine may work in him, that is the ideal of this Pan-Asiatic world picture.

This world picture was no longer possible when the greatest event in the world development of humanity had taken place. This world picture was no longer possible when the Christ Impulse had entered into humanity. From the religious side, humanity was given a deepening, of such magnitude that the Asian religion may never again emerge in its strength, for it could never again be adequate to this event, in which the Christ Impulse lives as the highest event. It was the destiny of the German national spirit to have created an understanding of earthly existence that is adequate to the Christ Impulse.

And these three spirits are like the three symptoms in which the striving for such a world view is expressed. As I said, how does one not seek such a world view by extinguishing the self! We have seen how these three spirits in particular – Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – want to fully live out the I, how they place it at the center of the three soul shades, not by extinguishing the I, but precisely by fully experiencing it, by elevating the I; how the divine-spiritual flows into this I, that is what was incumbent on the German national spirit. And it could do so because it was able to let the I shine through the three soul nuances, just as the unified light shines through the three rainbow nuances.

To place oneself in the more recent development of the world as those who now place everything that is recognized of the existence of nature and soul in the service of such an idealistic world view, that was the duty of the greatest German thinkers, who knew themselves to be one with what the truly German national spirit wants in the further development of humanity.

It seems appropriate to me to point this out to you today, esteemed attendees. What will become of the great external events will be decided by weapons and other circumstances. But it seems appropriate to me, especially in the present, to delve into the nature of the German national spirit itself, which is now being reviled and slandered from all sides, and which, precisely because it must work in the manner indicated, is so little understood by those who, out of their hatred, today all around us, not only misunderstand the German world view, but also want to misunderstand it. But they cannot understand it because they work in a one-sided way, in the one-sidedness of their particular shade of soul; whereas the German must work out of his nature, out of his whole being, towards a wholeness.

A kind of reverent mood is poured out over what the German spirit is meant to achieve in the world. This German national soul is particularly predisposed to acquiring knowledge through nature and the soul, and then enriching this knowledge in the soul so that this knowledge is like the soul's approach to the divine being.

If we do not see this – and I would like to read these words to you literally – if we do not see this beautifully when we look at those who always wanted to visualize from the depths of the German being, that which is the German folk spirit? Do we not see this striving - to know what the German can know, how to make it accessible to the divine-spiritual, to develop a devout mood in science as well? How beautiful and wonderful it is, for example, when a German — and that is precisely why he may perhaps be mentioned today — who appears in Austria as one of the greatest German-Austrians, delves into the German essence, even if he has not perhaps arrived at the concepts that have been developed today and presented to us, so as to feel the full expression of what has been developed in ideas today here: I am referring to Robert Hamerling, Austria's greatest German poet of modern times, who spoke the beautiful words, feeling like a German in Austria, spoke the beautiful words: Austria is my fatherland; but I feel it: Germany is my motherland - thus expressing the unity that has been so firmly forged today through Germany and Austria, through Central Europe. All these peculiarities of the German national soul, which I have been trying to develop today from the idealistic world view of the Germans - at the time when they believed they could turn back the tide, when the Germans came over from Asia, bringing with them the urge to grasp the Allgeist, which they would later express in their art, in their education, in their philosophy, in all their being and working in the world, by elevating the ego, not by dampening the ego. And there, as in a beautiful poet's dream in his “Germanenzug”, Robert Hamerling remembers - the old ancestors of the Germans are still sitting over there in Asia, while these old ancestors of the Germans are moving into Europe, into the West , Robert Hamerling describes beautifully how these Teutons are camped on the border of Asia and Europe, how the sun goes down - he beautifully describes the moon that rises, the whole landscape -, how the Teutons are camped. Only one is awake: the blond Teut, the youth. But in front of Teut, the future destinies of the Germans are written in the stars in wonderful signs. And the genius of the Germans, the spirit of the German people, speaks to the blond Teut, to the leader of the Germanic peoples to the German West. And Hamerling says beautifully:

"To whom does the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so tender, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the sounds of the strings
His innermost self? Who draws the senses so magnificently
Into the blue of heaven, granite hieroglyphics
of the soul's upsurge from the narrowness of life?
Who finally ties the strands
of the searching thought to the stars
so boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Who is led so high, so deep by his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps the near and the far so faithfully?
Where are all the zones of earth and heaven
reflected as in your thinking, O Teuton?

Not from such a self-exalting consciousness, not from national immodesty, as we often find among our opponents today, but from a devout consideration of the nature of the German, of the spiritual nature that has prevailed throughout world history.

The poet speaks of duty, the Austrian poet, in complete harmony with those who have created a German world view, an imaginative world view of the Germans, out of the German world view.

That is why it is so profoundly true what the “Philosophus teutonicus” Jakob Böhme said about all research and reflection on that world view that has a right to exist, which, fundamentally, for the German national character - so Jakob Böhme believes - the search for knowledge, for science, must be a path to God, even if it does not encroach on religion. Jakob Böhme expresses this, thereby characterizing the guiding principle for the world view of German idealism, beautifully from the depths of the German mind. Jakob Böhme says:

“When you see the depths”

he means the depths of heaven

"When you look at the depths of heaven

This is the union of the most beautiful sense of the German national character with the highest striving for knowledge of that which, in a divine and spiritual sense, permeates, interweaves and suffuses the world. Thus, in order to elevate his ego, the German seeks to penetrate into the innermost nature of things, and this is indeed something that can be understood only to a limited extent.

One can see how little it can be understood! There is one of those who, shortly before the beginning of this war, used to move around in Germany as foreign spirits, talking about all kinds of friendships with the German essence, about all kinds of understanding that they claim to have acquired for the German essence: that is Emile Boutroux. Shortly before the war, he even lectured at German universities about how one should revere the depths of the German spirit. And now the true Frenchman [Boutroux] is telling his fellow Frenchmen – he wants to be funny, of course, the good [Boutroux] wants to be funny – he is telling them what a difference there is between the French, the English and the Germans; what we - though for the French, certainly in a joking way - have sought today from the depths of the German character, yes, Boutroux talked about that in a similar way to his French not too long ago. He said: Yes, when the French want to recognize a lion or a hyena – you don't get the news exactly, but that's roughly how he spoke – and in any case, what I am saying is essentially not inaccurate – when the French describe a lion or a hyena, they go to the menagerie and observe the lion or the hyena; when the English want to recognize a lion or a hyena, they travel around the world and observe the life of the lion or the hyena. But when the Germans want to recognize a lion or a hyena, they neither go to a menagerie nor travel around the world, but retreat to their study and design the image of the lion and the hyena from within, without looking at the outside!

It is certainly a witty saying, and we are accustomed to the French speaking wittily from their intellectual culture; it is just a shame that this joke is by Heinrich Heine, repeated by Boutroux, because it comes from Heine; and the Frenchman, who we are accustomed to making good jokes, made a German joke in this case, to make a witty comment about the English and the French! This is another illustration of how the opponents of Germanness try to ascribe to themselves something higher than what a German can live with!

However, this same man recently told his Parisians what a barbaric people the Germans actually are; one can already deduce this from the word. For example, he said: the Germans have no word for generosity; therefore they don't even have this quality, they lack it, only the French have it. On the other hand, the Germans have a word that the French don't have: that is the word 'Schadenfreude'; so only the Germans have the quality of Schadenfreude. The French don't have this ignoble quality. And similar things more are what indicates the spirit from which one today vilifies and degrades the German essence.

But one has not always looked at this German essence in this way! And it would be particularly interesting to see which minds have tried to find their way into this German essence, as one can also see from this just how little account is taken of the actual meaning of this German essence, this spirit. Take, for example, the writer of “The Life of Jesus” — Ernest Renan — he wrote in a corresponding way even during the Franco-Prussian War about German essence to David Friedrich Strauß, who wrote about German essence. Strangely, the Frenchman, Ernest Renan, wrote; he says that at a certain age he realized what this German essence actually means. And he makes an interesting comparison. He says that after he had absorbed the French character in his education, he approached the German character through Goethe and Herder, and it was as if he encountered realities instead of mere concepts, whereas before he had only seen a lot of faded paper flowers. And then he compares the height of German intellectual life, which has been revealed to him in this way, by saying that everything he got to know outside of this German essence seems to him, well, like elementary mathematics to differential and potential mathematics. We shall see in a moment how such a mind itself utilizes, in terms of feeling, what has come to it through contact with the German essence.

But first, let us see a little more of how this Central European, German essence is viewed in the East, in that East from which the European West, that is to say our West, is currently suffering so much for what is, after all, its sphere of influence, its work for freedom and democracy today, this European West. If we have to consider the Russian national soul, we have to say: in Russia's national soul, the direct driving force of the I, everything still lives as something external. The Russian receives his religion as a foreign one, the Greek-Christian religion, which he does not have within him in the form of rebirth, as the German has experienced it from his innermost being, but which he accepts as something like a cloud that hovers over him, that he has from outside. While the Italian works from the sentient soul, the Frenchman from the intellectual and mind soul, the Englishman, the Briton from the consciousness soul, the German from the actual self, the person who truly belongs to the Russian national soul, works from the subconscious of the ego, which still has the ego that the ego has not yet absorbed into itself, which the ego still wants to see in a mystical darkness. This Russian soul, this eastern Russian soul, works like the national soul that has not yet fully come to consciousness.

And this is why this still immature national soul has not only so misunderstood the German national soul, but also all the national souls of Western Europe, especially in the course of the nineteenth century and up to our own times, so infinitely misunderstood them.

People have not even noticed what the relationship is, let us say, between the nature of the German spirit and the Russian spirit. In selfless German modesty, one has naturally included the great Russians – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. They are not to be disparaged here; they can be fully recognized; but one must become aware of the gulf that exists between the Russian and the German essence, and which, especially in the Russian essence, has come to such an immature outbreak and revelation in our own time.

In the course of the nineteenth century, we encounter the best Russian minds, which - I would like to say - philosophically and artistically express, as in a world view, what, in political terms, the “Testament of Peter the Great” – whether it is forged or not, that is not the point now – which, in political terms, aims to achieve the complete annihilation and replacement of Western and Central Europe, as it exists today, with Eastern Europe! [The “Testament of Peter the Great” is the only thing that should be considered sustainable.] But everything, I would like to say, even Russian literary-philosophical and artistic thought, is in the service of this “Testament of Peter the Great”. And this is what we encounter again and again in all of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life.

Then we encounter the best minds in Russia, who turn their gaze to what minds like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel have achieved. I would say that Herzen is able to observe this in a single such spirit. He seeks to delve into what Western culture has brought forth; he finds that it has all grown old, has become decrepit, that it must all disappear, that it is all superficial, because he cannot comprehend how this world view of German Idealism is inwardly lived and interwoven; and so it becomes worthless to him. In his book From the Other Bank, Herzen expresses how all these ideals that have sprung up in Western Europe must be destroyed and how something else must take their place.

One of Herzen's opponents, also a Russian, wrote to Herzen: So you want to destroy everything that has emerged in Western Europe: Greater, more significant – as a Russian wrote to Herzen, one of his Russian opponents, to appeal to his conscience – Greater than all the ideals of Central Europe, is the Russian sheepskin coat to you? – the friend wrote to Herzen!

What does he mean by the “Russian sheep's clothing”? Well, Herzen said it: In what this European culture, this European spiritual life has brought forth, there cannot be anything redemptive, anything salvific for humanity; but that which is salvific for humanity is the Russian peasant; that is, the one who, in all his originality, contains within him that which must flood the whole of Western and Central Europe. And this appears to be so deeply ingrained in Russian souls, especially in the most Russian of Russians, for example in Dostoyevsky, the great artist – whom we want to acknowledge in terms of his skill – that it is increasingly apparent in his work, when we take a closer look at it, that he regards German culture in particular as decrepit and obsolete, and that he already sees Russia as destined to be the redeemer. Basically, the delusional rage that is now to be poured out over Europe is nothing more than the brutal expression of this tendency, which has even found expression in great Russian writers; however, care has been taken to ensure that the good Germans do not become too aware of this, which, I might say, has always lived and breathed between the lines of Russian intellectual life! And so it comes about that - and those who know me better know how much I appreciate Tolstoy - but what is in Tolstoy, especially in such older works as “Anna Karenina” and so on, that shows how he - Tolstoy - always aimed to depict the German character in such a way that it appears decrepit and inferior.

Why have the Germans paid so little attention to such things? Why are they now surprised at the fact that hatred is being heaped on them from all sides? Well, you only have to take the fact that, for example, the older translations of Tolstoy, namely those works by translators that people still read, up to the last translation in the middle of the nineteenth century by [Raphael Löwenfeld], which people no longer read, these translations all either left out the passages in question entirely or translated them differently, so that no one actually knows the real Tolstoy!

It will be necessary, dear honored attendees, to go a little deeper into the nuances that live in the expressions of souls, so that the German knows how to fulfill his mission in the world. And so it came about that even insightful Russian minds, such as the great philosopher Soloviev, rebelled against this generally Russian view, against the view of those who, according to a Russian world view, had grown old and died, and that Russianism should overthrow this European essence.

If I emphasize individual personalities, it is because I want to cite facts and show by individual characteristics how many there are.

There is, for example, one Danilewski, who attempts to address the question in broad terms, entirely in the spirit of the Russian essence I have just hinted at, how Russia must expand, how Europe's west and center are ripe to because the European West and the Center have fulfilled their task; and Danilewski once asks the question in a book that is so completely formed from the Russian point of view: Why does Europe not love us, why does Europe fear us? Now he seeks to answer this question from his own point of view, and Danilevsky writes for his Russians something like this: Europe does not love us because Europe instinctively senses that we are the ones who are actually the only ones still entitled to exist, and who are to replace what lives in the rest of Europe. But Soloviev takes up this question, and Soloviev is one of those who has drawn from this life himself. And the great philosopher Solowjow, who, unbiased by his own Russian nature, takes up this question: Why does Germany not love us? He does not answer this question in the way Danilewski and the spirits of the most diverse kinds of Russians speak, that Europe feared Russia, but Solowjow answers Danilewski's question: Why does Europe not love us? Why does Europe fear us?” and Danilevsky's answer to this: ‘Because Europe instinctively senses that the Russians are the only ones who are still entitled to exist and should replace what is still alive in the rest of Europe,’ Solowjow replies to these words of Danilevsky:

“And yet both the content of his book and his later admissions, as well as those of his like-minded friend”

referring to a certain Strachow

“point to a different answer: Europe looks at us with apprehension and fear”

Solovyov wrote his reply, and it is certainly necessary for anyone who wants to get to know the conditions in the Russian east to listen to these Russians. Solovyov himself says:

"Europe regards us with apprehension and mistrust because dark and obscure elemental forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural forces are poor and inadequate, but because its demands are clearly and sharply defined. The calls for what the Russian people want as a nation resound powerfully out to Europe: that it wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, conquer Germany, and seize Constantinople and, if possible, India.

And when we are asked how we intend to replace what we have destroyed and failed to accomplish, how we plan to rejuvenate the world intellectually and culturally, we either have to remain silent or spout meaningless phrases. And if Danilevsky's bitter confession is true, that Russia is beginning to fall ill, then instead of dealing with the question “Why doesn't Europe love us,” we would have to deal with another, more important question that is closer to us: “Why and how did we become ill?” Physically, Russia is still quite strong, as it showed in the last Russian war; so our suffering is a moral one. We are burdened, according to the words of an old writer, by the sins hidden in the national character and not conscious to us - and so it is necessary above all to bring these into the light of clear consciousness. As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts must only harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question of true patriotism is not the question of power and vocation, but of the sins of Russia."

Thus the Russian Solowjow, from a spiritual insight into the Russian character, thus the great philosopher Solowjow about Russia itself. And it is interesting to see this in conclusion: how have others perceived this relationship between Russia and the West, even the further West – with whom they are now in league or who is in league with them, one does not quite know how to say – how have others perceived this relationship with their further West? Oh, there are also interesting facts here! For example, a book by the Russian writer Yushakov was published in 1885. In 1885, he wrote a book in which he speaks quite differently from how he was later spoken of regarding the views that he attributes to his Russian people. It is interesting to take a look at Yushakov's ideas.

This man looks across to Asia and says: Yes, over there in Asia, we have peoples who have brought a very old culture from ancient times into more recent times. These peoples, how they have been mistreated by the Europeans. Russia must look across to Asia, and must bring redemption to this sacred, venerable, but by the Europeans mistreated Asian culture, this spiritual culture of Asia. Nice words Jushakow speaks. He says that Russia alone is capable – because it cannot yet grasp the human interior in such a way that it has been made sick and aged by the ego as in the European West – Russia alone can feel related to this Asia, which is now lying prostrate, groaning under the rape of Europe. And an old myth brings Yushakov back to mind when he says: Over there in Asia, Iranian, Turanian peoples are fighting. He himself also includes the Indians, the Persians, and so on, among the Iranian peoples. And then Yushakov says: These have found a wonderful, ancient myth of Ormuzd and Ahriman for their destiny. But we always see Ahriman and Ormuzd at work over there in Asia forever. And there, in his book, Yushakov says – in 1885 – and he points this out in his memoirs, that the Iranians worshiped the good Ormuzd over there in Asia; the good Ormuzd gave the Iranians all the fruits and crops that the earth can produce; they took them for themselves. Then they joined forces with Ahriman. These Europeans have worked like Ahriman, like the evil Ahriman himself. But Russia, by working across into Asia, will liberate people from the evil Ahriman. What the Asians have received under the blessing of the good Ormuzd, the selfish Europeans have appropriated for themselves. Russia will cross over to Asia and help by founding an alliance, yes – Yushakov says it, I have to repeat it to you – an alliance that will be formed with the greatest ideals in the world, as the most spiritual alliance in the world – Yushakov says it all, I am only repeating it. It will be formed by Russian peasants and Cossacks, who will rush over to Asia, which is groaning under European rule, and will carry over what Russia will be able to bring. Then the peasantry and Cossacks will advance into Asia, and Russia will redeem Asia from Ahriman. 1885, think Sic, written by Jushakow. It is interesting to hear some of what Jushakow said at the time in the book, which is called: “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. It says that the comrades of Ahriman, the evil god – from whom Russia must liberate Asia and bring order and harmony – are primarily the English.

The English – says Yushakov – have behaved in this Asia as if they believed that the Asian peoples existed only to clothe themselves in English fabrics, to fight each other with English weapons, to work with English tools, to eat from English vessels and to play with English baubles. And then he says:

“England exploits millions of Hindus, but her very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting the rich peninsula.”

And so he continues, Yushakov:

“I do not wish anything similar for my homeland – I can only be pleased that it is sufficiently far removed from this state, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

Apparently because these Russians were so keen to distance themselves from this Englishness, so that they could free Asia from this hideous England, they soon allied themselves with this England, not to free Asia, but to destroy Europe.

One must also look at world development from this intellectual perspective in the nineteenth century, and in this way delve into what actually constitutes the German character and how it stands now, this German character, which has to defend itself in a way against the ring that has been formed around it, yes, in a way that can be simply hinted at when numbers are spoken.

These people – who want to keep Germany and Austria locked up in a big fortress today – are taking a stand for freedom, for the rights of small nations, and for all sorts of things they believe in. You only have to look at the numbers: 777 million people in the so-called Entente around the Central European powers, against 150 million; 777 million are “fighting” - let's put that in quotation marks - “fighting” against 150 million, and fighting in such a way that to this day still want to strike at the very essence of their actual bravery, they also want to strike at the German spirit, which they believe they understand so well, that 777 million people are turning against 150 million, joining forces to starve them out, to defeat them with starvation, the better part of bravery.

Actually, they had no need to be envious of what the Central Europeans were taking away from them; for the Entente Powers possess 68 million square kilometers of the earth, compared to 6 million square kilometers of the Central European Powers. One need only let these numbers speak. These numbers speak to this day, and will also speak in world history, ladies and gentlemen, that after all, within these 150 million present-day Central Europeans and on these 6 million square kilometers of Central European soil, those people live who have the world-historical, spiritual mission that we were allowed to speak of, and which they ascribe to themselves not ascribe it to themselves out of national chauvinism, but out of their spiritual gifts, out of the spirit of their Germanness, to which they have not devoted themselves through their egoism, but to which they have to approach if they want to offer the best of their being on the altar of this their national spirit. And those who feel this German essence in Central Europe feel a close bond with it, especially the best in Austria and Germany – and I am allowed to speak about this since I have spent thirty years of my life in Austria:

Precisely the best Austrians, those who have grown up with Central European culture, like the excellent philosopher Carneri, know how to experience and fathom the relationship between their own people and the German national spirit and German essence not out of national chauvinism but out of a sure knowledge of the essence of their own people.

For example, Carneri, the most important Austrian philosopher, says of the English: “Carneri, a wonderful man who, out of the deepest suffering, has founded a spiritual world view that is so completely in line with our time, a conceptual world view from German-Austria. Carneri talks about how the English have really focused their attention on external practical culture and he says: It has become so practical, this culture, that the English had to learn from the Germans the fact that the great playwright and poet Shakespeare lived among them. For it is true that it is only through the Germans delving into Shakespeare that Shakespeare has been recognized at all. And if one day someone has to write the story of Shakespeare's greatness, it will not be an English chapter in intellectual history that they have to write, but a German one.

All this characterizes the nature of the German world view, which creates out of all intellectual inner life, in contrast to everything around it. And so we may well believe that this is what the German must strive for above all else: spiritual science, knowledge of the spirit, just as there is knowledge of nature. Knowledge of the spirit, which must be based above all on the sources, on the roots that lie in the world view of German idealism. This is, as I said, not a conviction born out of blind national sentiment, but a conviction born out of knowledge. It is that which humanity is to scientifically fathom in the future about the spirit, that this must grow out of German national culture – and above all out of the ideal world view of German national culture – as it has been attempted to describe today.

And how little understanding there is among other nations today – let me say this in conclusion – this war can show the German so clearly how little understanding there is on the part of other nations towards the world view of German idealism and the German spirit, and how he must first ensure and strive to ensure that what he is called upon to create out of the depths of the German being can become part of the world development of humanity. The French, how did they look at this world view of German idealism? Or the Russians, for example, how did they look at this world view that the Germans have formed, this world view? The Russians look at it as if it only existed to be destroyed by them, as something decrepit and worn out. While we must see roots and leaves in it, from which the blossoms and fruits must first ripen in the future! We want to commit ourselves to this view! But the Russians need a new delusion; because the ego does not yet live in their soul, they must dream of a new delusion. They need a new delusion.

What do the French need? What do the French need today if they want to characterize their relationship to the German essence? Well, perhaps one could refer to one of their youngest poets to avoid doing them an injustice. What do the French want? They have been so accustomed to their nature being everywhere in Europe, just as the Germans were accustomed to their nature living in the Germans themselves, just as the Germans were accustomed to the way they felt the power, the driving force of what, for example, also lived in this world view of German idealism, up to Lessing, until they had to free themselves, the Germans, [so] these French were so accustomed that their nature lived everywhere in Europe. And after that, they believed that nothing could actually be done without what they did and what they produced intellectually, that everything had to come from them, that they had to be the cause of everything. In a very interesting and witty poem, Rostand, one of their own poets, recently illustrated how the French – that is, his own – national character can be compared to the cock crowing in the morning; and when the cock crows, the sun rises. And because the sun rises when the cock crows, the Frenchman believes that with his crowing he makes the sun rise. So he says to himself: If I don't crow, the sun can't rise!

This is said by the French poet Rostand himself as a characteristic of the French nature. The Frenchman thinks: If he doesn't crow, nothing at all can happen in the world. And that is why it is so incredible that he no longer occupies the position he once did; for it is actually the case that the German character, as expressed by Ranke, for example, is to be defended against the delusion of the crowing of the French national spirit, as early as 1870, when the Germans had to face the French: “We are still fighting against Louis XV!”

The French need a new delusion. The Russians need a new mission. The English – well, one really doesn't want to do them an injustice. What should one say so as not to do them an injustice? They declaim to the world: for the sake of the violation of Belgium's neutrality, for the sake of justice and democracy, we must undertake this war to the point of destroying the German essence; for these Germans are disgraceful people. They preach the principle of might over right. It is likely that one only forgets, as a result of a particularly refined education, that the English minister who decreed this – only recently – that the phrase “might over right” comes from the English philosopher, English utilitarian philosopher Thomas Hobbes. But: “might over right” – and England has adhered to this phrase for centuries. [gap in the transcript] as a professor in England himself, where he said: freedom and democracy, that is something that cannot be united, which should be advocated after the last English history, but that Great Britain's expansion [gap in the transcript], he says, is also a truth, also a practical truth, as the English world view must strive for. Yes, what can you say? “Might is right” – since Thomas Hobbes this principle has been winding its way through English history, concealing the real reasons why England tramples underfoot the entire mission of the German people. Yes, one would not want to do such things an injustice, but one must say: the English need a new lie to drown out that which cannot be compensated for.

The Russians need a new delusion; the French need a new conceit; the English need a new lie. The Italians – yes, a very outstanding man told me even before the Italian war broke out: “Italy needs this war!” There are people, of course, who are not so naive as to have believed that Italy could not join the Entente in this war. Italy needs this war; we must have this war; the Italians have become lethargic, sluggish and lazy; they are actually on the road to the abyss - said this important political figure at the time - and need to have something that will shake them up again, that will awaken them to life, otherwise they will become completely rotten and sluggish! What do these Italians need? These Italians needed a new sensation in order to have something at the same time – just as the French needed imagination, the English needed a new lie, the Russians needed a new delusion, a new mission, so the Italians needed a new saint, something very special! – They truly have a saint, namely, holy egoism – sacro egoismo – which is preached everywhere and on whose altar people are sacrificed. And the apostle of modern Italian nationalism, the hierophant, is Gabriele d'Annunzio! Perhaps history will one day rank him among the buffoons of the mind – that can be said without any national chauvinism. But he will nevertheless stand without dignity as the one who also made sacrifices to this new egoism, the sacro egoismo, which Italy represents and to which they have dedicated themselves, this new saint!

When we see all this going on around us, we can truly say that, without the Germans needing to become as nationally egotistical as those who want to surround, encircle and contain them, we can truly say that, from the inner fertility and knowledge of the greatness of the German essence, to which we humbly bow, we cannot, in arrogance, say that we experience in the German essence: It is the germs, it is the roots, it is the leaves – and the blossoms and the fruits must develop from them. And we can look to the future with confidence and hope!

And finally, I would like to say that – as if in a unified thinking – those who understood the German essence in Central Europe always felt it. One of my teachers in Austria once spoke a beautiful word. I may perhaps read it to you at the end, a little poem. It is called “Austria and Germany”. Today, when Austria and Germany are welded together, I may perhaps read it, this little poem:

"Let Russia and England wisely deliberate,
Perhaps not even find it unwelcome
If we get into a little bit of a fight here,
If they take away our good right!

You, German brothers, will not - advise here,
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And all ambition will fade among us
Before: being one people in word and deed.

And if one among us has failed,
If discord has reigned in a German heart,
There is only one thing that now inspires us:
What we have in common, in joy and in sorrow!
So may we also have in common:
A German war, if not a German peace!

Thus spoke the German of Austria in 1859. Those who feel that they are part of the German national spirit, who recognize it without national chauvinism, are so united in their awareness that loyalty springs from the soul to this German essence. Then this Karl Julius Schröer, who has remained so unknown, but who felt German essence in Austria quite extraordinarily, then he said:

A spirit arises, a giant to behold
[Who does not yet long gather all his strength
The German spirit rises up, aflame with courage
Wherever you look in all German regions.
He has been called a master in many a field,
In art and knowledge, in the building system,
he is first to be seen
then he will be truly recognized by the world.

To see him as a whole, this also includes the symptom that so clearly shows how the immortal martial forces come from the German essence. Likewise, the idealistic world view of the German stems from the primal power of the German essence, which has borne its roots and its leaves, and - looking towards it - we may have faith in the future: it must struggle through to its blossoms and fruits in the future, undisturbed by the hatred of the opposition.

This awareness wells up in us as 150 million people facing 777 million, as standing on 6 million square kilometers against 68 million square kilometers; this wells up in us from the spiritual, from the soul, from the heart of the German spiritual being!

So let us speak out of the knowledge itself and out of the most justified feeling: Yes, by being aware of our essence, we may believe, we may hope that the blossoms and fruits to the roots and leaves of the German being will unfold in the future.

Therefore, we can confidently live into the future of this German national spirit, also from the depths of the German endeavor.

And so may it be, because it must be so!

Dear Attendees!

The momentous events in which the German nation finds itself justify my speaking, as I have done for many years in other German cities, about subjects related to spiritual science. This year, as in the past, last year, I shall not speak about a narrow subject of spiritual science itself, but about something that is intimately connected with the spiritual life of the German people, with that which is suitable to reveal something about the position of the German people within the overall development of humanity.

If I do this, it is certainly not to give expression to mere emotional views, which are particularly close to the soul in these difficult but also, in a certain sense, hopeful times, but because it is not based on dark feelings and perceptions , but rather, as I believe, on real facts, cognitive facts, well-founded conviction, that what has always been characterized here as spiritual science, that it is rooted in the innermost depths of precisely those expressions of German intellectual life that we can count among the peaks of that intellectual life.

We have no need, dearest ones present, as Germans in the present, to express our feelings and thoughts by denigrating and even slanderously distorting, before all things – as it is also done by the most outstanding personalities in the ranks of our enemies – that which what is outside of German life - as it is done from the other side in relation to the German essence - but we can look at it from a purely factual point of view, based on the German national character.

It should be mentioned briefly in the introduction that spiritual science, as it is meant here, is based on the fact that it is possible, from within the human soul – through processes of the soul's life, which have been described here in this city many times and which can also be found in our literature can be found in our literature, that it is possible to develop such powers in the human soul that lead a person to an understanding of that which is not exhausted in the time between birth and death, but which goes through births and deaths and represents the eternal, the immortal essence of man. That such a deepening of the soul life is possible, and such a strengthening of the powers of the soul life, that the human being becomes aware within himself within his physical body that which has shaped this physical body out of the spiritual world and which, when the human being passes through the passes through the gate of death, returns to the spiritual world, that such knowledge is possible, and that such knowledge must gradually be incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity in our time, that is the spiritual-scientific conviction as it is meant here.

And this spiritual-scientific conviction, which – as I believe – is true spiritual science, is contained in the most beautiful and meaningful striving of the German people.

Now, precisely one objection could be raised: it is supposed to be about spiritual science, about that which gives the mind a similar knowledge to that of natural science for external nature, so it is supposed to be about a science. People who stand at a certain point of superficiality will immediately object: Yes, science is something completely international!

This objection is so overwhelming for many because it is so endlessly superficial. One could say: superficial to the point of being taken for granted; because the moon, for example, is also common to all peoples internationally. But what the individual peoples have to say about the moon, what struggles out of their souls to characterize the moon, that differs from people to people. And if one could also say that this is limited to poetry, then the one who is not merely a scientist, who sees in science not only that which is a description of external things in the most external way, but also that which one can know about things , emerges from the foundations, from the basic forces and basic drives of the human being, and is individual, as the human souls themselves are individual, that is to say: that is why they are shaped so differently, depending on the way in which the individual peoples are predisposed to knowledge of the world. But these predispositions, these inner impulses of the individual people, are what carries humanity forward – not what can be described as “international” in a superficial sense that takes for granted everything that has gone before.

If we want to characterize the German quest for knowledge, what immediately comes to mind are three figures, three great figures, which should only be mentioned in the introduction to today's discussion. But the development of German thought rests on the ground they prepared. These three figures are perhaps not often mentioned in the general German nation today. But that is not important. What is important is that these three figures are difficult to understand in what they created, but that these three figures will nevertheless play an ever greater and greater role in the development of German intellectual life in the future. And these three figures are: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel – the three figures who, as world-view thinkers, formed an enormous background, [who] from the depths of German nationality provided that from which the great creations of German intellectual life also flowed, which we encounter in Goethe, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, and which, after Greek culture, represented a greatest cultural flowering in the development of humanity.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, what do we see before us? He who only appears to be a difficult philosopher to understand, who rather felt that what he had to give as so-called philosophy is really, in the highest sense, the result of a dialogue that he himself held with the German national spirit. And when we approach Fichte, what does he show us?

He shows us how a personality rooted in the essence of Germanness, in its quest for knowledge, starts from the premise that the human soul itself has something through which it can grasp and inwardly see that which lives and weaves through the world as spiritual and divine in its own inner experience.

In terms of the power with which this came to expression in Fichte's soul, one might say that Fichte stands almost completely alone in the history of human development. Fichte tried to get into his own soul what pulsates and lives and weaves through the world. He was clear about the fact that one could not get to that point, [to experiencing in one's own experience what pervades the world as its fundamental essence, divinely and spiritually], through external observation, [not] through the senses, nor through the mind that is bound to the brain, but only by invoking the soul's deep, hidden powers. And in this he shows a fundamental disposition of the German character: this growing together in the innermost part of the soul with the secrets of the world, this not being able to be satisfied otherwise than by experiencing in the innermost part of the soul what spreads in the great, wide universe as the most hidden, the most mysterious.

One need only recall a few details about this Johann Gottlieb Fichte, which I will mention because they are so characteristic of a figure like Fichte, and one will see how we have to revere in him a personality who, by virtue of his innermost disposition, must seek to give himself completely with his soul to that which he can call experiencing the mystery of the world. Fichte, the son of very simple people, from a simple Saxon village, is seven years old; he was already at school and was a good schoolboy. As a reward, he received a book from his father for Christmas when he turned seven: 'Gehörnte Siegfried' (The Horned Siegfried). After a while, it became apparent that he, who had previously been very eager to learn, was becoming careless about his studies. This was pointed out to him. One day, his father meets him standing by the stream that flows past the simple house: “Der gehörnte Siegfried”, which the boy had thrown into the stream, is floating in it.

An extremely characteristic trait for seven-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. What had passed through his soul? What had passed through his soul was that he said to himself: I have neglected my duty by taking an almost irrepressible interest in this great, powerful material of Siegfried; but duty is what must come before everything else. That is why the book is thrown into the water! To live up to his duty.

And another example: our Johann Gottlieb Fichte is nine years old; the neighboring landowner comes to the simple village one Sunday to listen to the pastor's sermon. He comes too late. The landowner is very sorry that he was unable to hear the village pastor's sermon. Then one reflects and realizes that there is a nine-year-old boy who remembers well what the pastor said in his sermon. They call the nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte; he steps forward, awkwardly, in his blue peasant's smock; but soon he gets into the rendition, so that he repeats the entire sermon with heartfelt sympathy for the neighboring estate owner – not from a dead memory, but he repeats it because his soul has grown together with what he heard and what then tinged his ear to his soul.

This is what is characteristic of this growing together of Fichte's own soul with that which is experienced. And so this develops more and more in Fichte, so that in the end the whole universe is pulsating with will. The world will, the divine world will, it weaves and lives through all spaces and through all times, it sends its currents into the soul weaving of the human being.

And when this weaving of the soul has been completely surrendered, then the soul experiences within itself a stream of the infinite world-will. Then one is united with that which pulsates through the world as Divine-Spiritual. Then one is borne by that which flows as the world-duty on the waves of the will, which shines into our soul and which is the highest that Fichte sought to grasp. Thus, his world view arises from the innermost essence of his personal character. This is the most German thing, to seek out the most personal and the most objective. Fichte is not seeking some soul essence that can be proven, but rather a soul essence that continually participates in the divine-spiritual creative power of the world, so that it can create itself in every moment. And in this inner creativity, which rests in the divine-creative, lies for Fichte the guarantee of the eternal, which goes through births and deaths and which lives in the spiritual world even after the human being has passed through the gate of death.

In his beautiful speeches in Berlin in 1806, which he calls “Instructions for a blessed life”, Fichte says of what flows from the eternal duty of the divine power into the soul of man, in Berlin in 1806, which he calls “Instructions for a blessed life” - of which Fichte says: People talk about the fact that the immortal essence of man only comes into its own after death. The one who really gets to know the soul knows that immortality can be grasped directly in life within this body; and that is why he is immediately certain that - even if this body disintegrates into its elements - that which is grasped within it through real knowledge goes through the gate of death into the spiritual world.

But Fichte is also convinced that the eternal spirit must be grasped in the most intimate inner self at the same time. Therefore, as a teacher at the then-famous University of Jena – because it was the home of the greatest German men – he is fundamentally quite different from any other teacher. He does not teach in order to impart a certain content, a certain set of propositions to his students, but prepares himself in such a way that what he has to teach is first an inner life in his soul, so that he experiences what he wants to let flow into the souls of his listeners.

One listener who understood him well once said beautifully: Fichte's speech rushes along like a thunderstorm. What he had to say in words escaped him as if in a raging thunderstorm. It is clear that he does not just want to educate good people, he wants to educate great souls. Therefore, his endeavor was not just to communicate something to people, but to let something pass into them, so that these souls became something else when they left than they were when they entered the lecture hall. And more and more he referred to the power of the soul, to the strength that lies within the human being, which is beautifully demonstrated in the following sentence. In his lectures, there was always a striving for the direct coexistence of one's own soul life with that of the audience, which he sought to achieve through such beautiful things as this one, for example. An audience member, the naturalist Steffens, described it like this. In the course of his lecture, Fichte called upon the audience: “Think of the wall!” So they thought of the wall. He let this happen for a while – so said the man, Steffens. “And now think of the one who thought of the wall!” [was Fichte's next prompt].

There the human being was referred to himself. There the listeners were taken aback at first; they could not grasp it immediately. But it was the way to refer the human being to his own soul, as to the power that can arise from it, in order to live together with the divine-spiritual powers of the world.

And so there he stands, this Johann Gottlieb Fichte, truly such that enthusiastic listeners could say of him: He lives in the realm of concepts as if in a transcendental world; but in such a way that he not only dwells in this transcendental world, but also rules over this transcendental world. And Fichte was aware that what lived in his soul had been in intimate dialogue with the spirit of the German people itself.

In saying this, I am not characterizing something out of national narrow-mindedness, but rather something that Fichte experienced directly as his perception, and through which he was able to have such a great, such a significant and supportive effect on this German nation in one of the most difficult times for the German people.

One need only compare what it means that a worldview like Fichte's could arise from a particular nationality with what is the pinnacle of the Romance worldview, a worldview that in turn arose entirely from the essence of the French national spirit. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, we have the French philosopher – one of the greatest and precisely one of those who most strikingly characterizes French nationality: Descartes or Cartesius.

He also started from what lives in the human soul. He can therefore be compared favorably with Fichte. His “I think, therefore I am,” the “Cogito ergo sum,” has become famous. But what does it consist of, what he says: “I think, therefore I am. - Cogito ergo sum”? – By the fact that the thought lives in me, I can prove that I remain myself. That which lives in the soul is revealed, it is proved by a logical conclusion. Fichte wants to grasp it in direct life, that is the distinguishing feature. This extends to the broadest aspects of the world view. You can see this from a single detail.

Dear attendees, you see, Descartes, who creates out of French folklore, comes to form a view of the world. What is this view? Yes, this view is this, that – I have to pick out one example because we don't have much time to characterize everything in detail – that he comes to see not only the external nature as one – one might say soulless, but that he also sees the animals as a soulless world. Only humans have a soul because they can experience it inwardly within themselves. Thus Descartes says: animals are no more than moving machines.

This then continued to have an effect on the French world view well into the eighteenth century, when man was also made into a machine. When this world view then confronted Goethe, Goethe, out of his German consciousness, said: Yes, they offer us a world view in which the whole world is a machine, nothing but atoms and molecules bumping into each other. And if they could at least explain to you how the beautiful, glorious world comes from this mechanical pushing, then one could still be interested in such an undertaking. But they simply put the world machine in place without explaining anything about it. That was Goethe's objection to what comes from the French West as a mechanistic worldview.

However, Fichte's view can be compared with this, which wants to immerse itself in every single creature and being, to live with everything, in order to recognize the will, the divine will in everything. This immersion in the world of beings is German.

This confronting, only seeing soul in oneself, making everything a machine - [that is not spoken out of national narrow-mindedness] - that is the French way of doing things, for example.

Now we are looking at Fichte's world view from a different perspective. For him, that which is only revealed to the senses is what he called: a material field for the fulfillment of duty. Everything that is not divine spiritual will, which weaves and lives through all beings, that which only presents itself to the senses, that is, as Fichte says, material material for duty to have an object on which it can exercise itself. That is the great thing that Fichte wants to experience – the spiritual in his own soul – and that he brings to the world, experiencing this spiritual in his own soul also from the other things.

Let us compare this with what emerges, for example, within the English world view, insofar as this English world view has emerged entirely from English nationality. Of course, it is not the individual who is meant; the individual can always rise above his nation; but what is meant is that which is connected with nationality. We see that not only in older times the world view of Bacon of Verulam is based merely on the useful, merely on that which presents itself externally to the senses, for which the spirit, which experiences in itself, stands only as bands that bind together so that the spirit can find its way. There the spirit is only the means to bring the external sense into a system. There is no co-experiencing with what lives as spiritual in all sensuality. And that has been preserved until today. We see pragmatism at work there. For pragmatism is a word for something that, placed next to Fichte's worldview, really looks like darkness next to light.

What is pragmatism? For pragmatism, there is not a truth for its own sake – truth that is sought so that one experiences it as truth in the soul – but the truth: Now, that is something that man forms as a concept, as an idea, so that he can find his way in the outside world. So man forms the concept of the “uniform soul”; but he does not want that in his soul, which is something like soul unity, but because man shows different expressions of his being, does this and does that. And one finds one's way around by assuming a concept like “uniform soul”. It is useful for holding together external, sensory things, for inventing something like truth. Truth only exists because it allows us to orient ourselves in sensory things. And in that which can be experienced at all, truth has no independent meaning.

The opposite is the case in Fichte's quest for a worldview. What is external and sensual is certainly not underestimated; we are not dealing with a false, world-alien knowledge. But we are dealing with a desire for the soul to grow together with the world spirit and with an assertion of truth, which is experienced in the spirit as the most original, living and breathing in the world. For Fichte, things are there to reveal the world, not as they are for the pragmatists as the only reality; while that which is called truth is only there to have such bindings and brackets with which to summarize the externally coincident sense world so that the mind can comfortably survey it.

I am not exaggerating, that is how things are! And so Fichte, in developing this view more and more, stands in 1811, 1813, before his Berlin students and tells them that anyone who wants to penetrate the world must look to the spirit. He speaks of a new spiritual sense – Fichte – and means by this that this sense can be developed, that when one speaks of the experiences of this sense, it is really, in the face of people who do not want to admit it, as if a single seer were speaking among a crowd of blind people! But Fichte strives to achieve in the human being that which directly connects the soul with the spiritual world. And from this he also draws the strength that is so profoundly evident in his “Speeches to the German Nation” at one of the most difficult times for the German people, through which he wanted to pour supporting forces into the future of the German people, into their souls.

One can only characterize this extraordinary personality in these few words because of the shortness of the time! The even lesser known Joseph Wilhelm Schelling then stands there as his follower. But precisely this shows the infinite versatility of the German nature: that Schelling, too, wants to arrive at a world picture through the soul's living together with the secrets of the world, but — I would like to say — through completely different soul forces. While Fichte is the powerful man who wants to experience the will in himself and, in his own will, creates the world will, the eternal world will. Schelling creates out of the soul. And through this out-of-the-mind-creation, a world picture arises for him, through which nature and spiritual life grow together wonderfully. Even if it is difficult to read today what Schelling created - it is not at all important that one accepts the content, but the striving - even if it is difficult to read: one does not have to accept it like a teaching, in relation to which one must become a follower or an opponent. Look at people who have striven in this way – who have striven from the very heart of the German national character. Schelling strove to penetrate into every single being; to experience that which works within the being as a spiritual being. In this way, nature became for him a physiognomic expression of the spirit. And the spirit was that which built itself on the soil of nature. Just as the present human soul is built on the basis of its memories, so, in Schelling's sense, man felt himself to be facing nature with his spirit, as if he had lived through all times, but had left nature behind. And as he now looks at it, it offers him the memory of what he had previously created unconsciously, so that the ground for his consciousness could then be there. In this way, soul and nature grow together in Schelling.

While Fichte had to be characterized by his contemporaries as the one who, above all, stood before them in German power, those who listened to Schelling, and who appreciate him, characterized him as a seer, as a personality who, when he spoke, was surrounded by what immediately showed that he was shaping words while his mind looked into a completely different world.

Perhaps I may read such a word of a student and friend of Schelling, because it shows more than anything else how Schelling was seen by those who knew him. Even as a young man in Jena, Schelling had such an effect that the young men around him were immediately convinced that he not only had something to tell them that would immediately ignite their souls, but that, as he spoke, his spirit lived in the spiritual world and he spoke from within it. That is why Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, a man who himself tried to descend into the spiritual depths of the human soul, says the following. He characterizes Schelling as follows:

“What was it that attracted young people and mature men alike to Schelling's lectures, from far and near, so powerfully? Was it only the personality of the man or the peculiar charm of his oral presentation, in which this attractive power lay?”

No, Schubert believes, it was not only that.

“There was a compelling power in his lively words, which, wherever it met with even a little receptivity, none of the young souls could resist. It might be difficult for a reader of our time,”

— Schubert writes down in 1854 what he had experienced with Schelling in the 1890s,

"who, unlike me, was not a youthfully participating listener, to make it understandable how it often felt to me when Schelling spoke to us, as if I were reading and hearing Dante, the seer of a world beyond that was only open to the consecrated eye. The mighty content, which lay in his speech, as if measured with mathematical precision in the lapidary style, seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds to dissolve and from whose hand to receive the unquenchable fire, is the task of the understanding mind."

So it was once possible, esteemed attendees, to speak to the German people in such a way that it made this impression, from the spiritual world, that it could make this impression!

Those who knew Schelling, and I myself knew people who still heard him in his old age, say that what he had to communicate was effective simply through the glance of his eyes, which still burned in his old age; so that one saw: it is the personality itself that wants to grow together with the world by giving a world-view.

And the third of those who, coming from the depths of the German folk-soul, wanted to penetrate to a Weltanschhauung, is Hegel. Hegel, from whom those who do not want to make any effort when they are to absorb something flee at the first sentences - Hegel, what did he want?

Schelling tried to create a world picture through the German soul. To penetrate into the spirit and the spiritual worlds through the will: Fichte. Through that which thought is, through the pure thought that lives in the soul when this soul does not turn its eye to the outer world of the senses, does not want to devote itself to the outer world of the senses with the mere intellect, through that which lives as pure, crystal-clear thought in the soul, Hegel tried to grow together in his own soul with that which is at work in the world. So that he says: When I think the thought purely, when I give myself to the life of thought, to the life of thought free of sensuality, in my own soul, then it is no longer my own arbitrary thoughts that live in the thoughts that live in the soul, but they are the thoughts that the divinity itself is in its soul. Then that which is light and illuminates the whole world ignites a little flame in one's own soul, and through this little flame the soul grows intellectually together with the world spirit. The soul rests in the world thought. In the German way, there is a striving for that which can be called mystical, but not a mysticism that revels and wants to revel in dark, confused feelings, but a mysticism that, while emotionally striving for what all mysticism strives for - a living together of one's own soul with the secrets of the world - does so on the basis of crystal-clear thinking.

And this, in turn, is something characteristic of the German character: that the highest is striven for in all-spiritual clarity, not in confused, chaotic feelings. This is the world view that is in the background and from which it has also grown – from the same mother soil – from which Goethe's “Faust” and the other great works of art and literature of that time have grown, they too have grown from this same soil, as it were. And Goethe basically stands on this same soil.

And Goethe says – in contrast to Kant – in a small, beautiful essay on “Contemplative Judgment,” he expresses how he strives for a knowledge that has indeed resounded within the soul, but which is an immediate revelation of that which is to develop out of it in the world. The soul does not limit itself to merely looking at the external world of the senses and judging it; but when the soul withdraws into itself, then something should awaken in this soul, so that the judging power itself becomes a contemplation - so that one learns to see spiritually.

Goethe speaks of spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, which look directly into the spiritual, just as the physical eyes and ears look directly into the physical world. This permeates the Goethean soul.

And Fichte could rightly say when he published his seemingly quite abstract trains of thought in 1794, he could write to Goethe:

[“Philosophy has not yet reached its goal, as the results of reflective abstraction do not yet nestle against the purest spirituality of feeling. I regard you, and have always regarded you, as the representative of the latter at the present level of humanity. Philosophy rightly turns to you. Your feeling is the same touchstone.”]

There is a close harmony between what has emerged as the greatest, also in a poetic sense, from German intellectual life, and what lives in the background as a world view. Even if, in the period that followed, simply because the height of the outlook was simply astounding, something else came to the surface within the development of German thought than a pure continuation of the powerful thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, these thoughts are, after all, what lies at the depths of the German essence, what will continue to develop, has also continued to develop, as we shall see shortly, and what must lead to the most beautiful blossoms and fruits of the German essence.

When we call to mind the spirits of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, we see that they reveal from three different sides what can be gained from a different kind of dialogue with the German national spirit. But behind them, as if invisible, is the German national spirit itself. And one expresses more than a mere image when one says: like a shade of the German national spirit itself, what comes to the surface through Fichte, Schelling and Hegel is like a shade of that which the German national spirit itself expresses. And behind that, one senses what passes through the currents of German intellectual life as an even more powerful wave.

Hence the peculiar phenomenon can occur that the great minds of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were followed by lesser minds, who were less talented and who, in a certain way, sought to present that which had passed through German intellectual development as an aspiration through the German intellectual development in an even more beautiful, even brighter light.

It is indeed a remarkable phenomenon, is it not, that minds that were less talented than these greats had more opportunities in later times, precisely because the German national spirit also stood behind the greats, which could then continue to work through the following, who already had the inspiration of the preceding ones. We see one such in the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Hermann Immanuel Fichte.

Immanuel Hermann Fichte says it outright: that which the senses can see of man, which the mind, bound to the brain, can recognize of man, but can recognize through science, that is merely the outside of man; that contains only the powers that hold man together more for earthly things. But in this physical human being, according to Immanuel Hermann Fichte's view, there lives an etheric human being who permeates this physical human being and who is just as connected in his powers with the eternal world forces as the powers that live in the physical human being are connected to the actually perishable powers of the earth.

What has been described here in these lectures over the years as the spiritual background of man, as the etheric human being, is laughed at by the current, but even within Germany , because it is influenced by foreign countries —, this etheric man has also been pointed out here in this city in lectures over the years, again and again.

But we see an even higher, even more magnificent pointer to what Fichte saw in the human soul as a mere potential force, but which can be drawn out so that these eternal forces weave and live more and more. We see this even more clearly, even more magnificently, in an almost completely forgotten spirit, Troxler: Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler. Who still knows him? But he stands on the shoulders of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel! And he delves even deeper into the spiritual background of the world than his predecessors, who were far greater in terms of intellectual gifts than he was. He was simply able to receive the stimulus from them.

What do we see in this Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler? We see in this Troxler how he definitely points out that when a person develops their soul, when a person brings out of their soul that which cannot be there for the outer life of the senses, then spirit is found in the human soul, that which Troxler calls on the one hand the “supernatural spirit”. And by this he means that if a person develops what lies dormant in his soul, he is then in a position to have nothing in his soul life when he turns his senses away from the outer world, but that an awakening can take place that goes beyond the senses – a supersensible spirit, a spirit that sees spiritual processes in the world as the senses see sensual processes and beings: a supersensible spirit. Even those who, as idealists, as abstract idealists, want to grasp the world through ideas and concepts will admit this.

But Troxler goes further. He not only speaks of the supersensible spirit, but also of the 'super-spiritual sense'. What is super-spiritual sense?

When this spirit, which looks at the world, is able to speak not only of concepts, not only of ideas, but when it can describe actual concrete entities, which it can describe as one describes an individual animal, so that one ascends to a world of higher beings that cannot be seen with the ordinary s , but which the “super-spiritual sense” can see - something that, again, popular science can easily laugh at, but which, as an energetic striving in this faded, forgotten tone, of which I will now speak to you, comes to us in such a wonderful way within the development of German thought.

It becomes even more wonderful when we see the following in Troxler. Troxler says: When the human being brings forth the most beautiful thing that can live in his soul, insofar as this soul lives in the body; when he brings forth the most beautiful thing from his soul, the most beautiful thing in the soul that is bound to the body – when the soul becomes cosmic and is confronted with the world as a cosmic soul, then it develops in faith, in love, in hope. But faith, love, hope, for Troxler they are what outwardly reveals itself as the flower of earthly life, but only for this earthly life. Behind faith, behind the power of faith, which belongs to the soul insofar as the soul lives in some way, behind this power of faith, a higher power lives in the soul; the supersensible hearing, says Troxler. And faith is only the outer manifestation of a supersensible hearing, through which one can hear, as the sensory ear hears the sensory tones, the spiritual tones of the spiritual world, the spiritual language of the spiritual world , in a sense the soul in its world, because such a spiritual hearing takes place and because the soul lives in the body between birth and death, this spiritual hearing takes on the form of faith in the physical embodiment. This faith is the external revelation for the spiritual hearing.

Love, this most beautiful, this most glorious flower of the soul's life within the body, is the outer revelation for the spiritual seeker of what he calls spiritual sensing, spiritual feeling. Just as one physically reaches out to touch material things, so behind the power of love lies another power, the purely spiritual power, through which the soul can extend its spiritual feelers to sense what lives as a concrete spiritual being in the spiritual world.

In 1835, the beautiful lectures were published in which Troxler speaks so much about the spiritual-soul person who stands behind the believing, loving, hoping person. And behind what is the power of hope, the power of confidence, lies, in the soul, what Troxler now calls: spiritual vision, spiritual seeing.

When the soul enters the body, it transforms spiritual hearing into faith, spiritual feeling into the power of love, and spiritual vision into the power of hope.

And when the soul passes through death, that which was in its power of faith in the body between birth and death is transformed into spiritual ears; that which was in its power of light is transformed into spiritual touch; that which was in its power of hope is transformed into spiritual vision, into seeing the spiritual world.

Thus Troxler speaks of “sensitive thoughts” - where thoughts do not pass ordinary judgments on the outer world, but where thoughts are inwardly so seized, so vividly seized, that through thoughts the spiritual world is directly grasped. And he speaks of “intelligent feelings,” where the soul does not judge through the intellectual power of mere intellectual science, as Schelling once expressed himself - that is strong, of course, but great people have the faults of their virtues - , but where the soul really judges in such a way that it lives with its thoughts together with the outer world, as it otherwise only lives with the feelings, but in clarity; Troxler speaks of “intelligent feeling”. Truly, this forgotten tone of the German world view, of the development of German thought, is wonderful. It is not necessary to be offended by the fact that this wonderful, faded tone has not continued to live externally visible; that does not matter, esteemed attendees: The important thing is that it is there and that, although it has not become outwardly visible, it nevertheless lives on in what Germanness strives for and hopes for in the world, and that it will revive again in the midst of even this materialistic science; and that the world position of the German people is precisely in the spiritual realm: to bring man and his soul to the spirit, as it lies in the sense of this faded, forgotten sound - only externally forgotten sound - of the German development of thought.

Troxler quotes a beautiful sentence from his book in which he describes how he now conceives of the ethereal human being, the human being who is bound to eternal forces within the physical human being, who is bound to temporal power. Troxler says:

"In the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which for them was the higher inner man... In more recent times, even Kant in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire inner spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the outer one on his spirit body; Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about Bonnert's under-skirt and Platner's soul-laced bodice Platner's soul-string-bodice, which are supposed to be hidden in the coarser body-coat and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What was the point of and where did these extraordinary abilities and desires come from, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? ... In the stony limbs”

of man

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

continue to

"we could cite a myriad similar ways of thinking and poetizing, which in the end are only different views and conceptions in which... the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man is contained.

That is a tone of the development of German thought that has faded away, but has not ceased to have an effect, and it is a great, powerful tone! If the German people today have the task of securing their place in the world through external forces, then what must be fought for today through the weapons is only the other side of the same essence, hidden in the depths of the German soul, which, through its versatility, could ascend to these peaks of thought life. - And Troxler says beautifully elsewhere:

"If it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... must reveal itself in every anthroposophy... reveals itself in every anthroposophy, it is nevertheless undeniable that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of the human being must not be confused with either what it posits as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it juxtaposes as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

Troxler is clear about the fact that there is a higher human being within each of us. And when this inner human being begins to work, then first comes not anthroposophy – anthropology, human science, first comes when the outer mind observes the human being, anthropology comes first, Troxler says. When the inner human being comes to the fore and gets to know the higher forces, the spiritual forces, the spiritual feelings, then anthroposophy comes. One therefore has the right to call a science that has grown out of the innermost striving of a German national being anthroposophy.

And this must be stated, esteemed attendees, because it must not remain merely a forgotten and forgotten sound, but must become part of German national life again. And we shall see – perhaps official science will not accept the things, but it is only a prejudice that these things are too difficult to understand – a time will come when it will be recognized that the simplest person – it is precisely the simple souls that show this when they are approached in the right way – will understand that these things can be incorporated into the education of every child! Then this education of children will also be able to create from the very depths of German national character.

This must be mentioned because one truly does not need national narrow-mindedness to characterize the world position of the German and his task in the overall development of humanity, because one does not need to lapse into a tone like that of some Frenchmen, like for example, leading world-view thinkers like Boutroux and Bergson – yes, it is still called Bergson, although it does not sound very French – like Boutroux and Bergson, who are still talking such nonsense to their French. You wouldn't believe it! For example, this striving of the German to grow together with what lives outside in things, what the soul wants to grasp within itself. Boutroux, who traveled around here in Germany before the war, who was also allowed to teach at German universities, was allowed to preach, who spoke of the fraternization of the German and the Latin, Romanic being, now, for example, he speaks of the fact that he says: the French have no expression for “Schadenfreude”. The Germans are characterized precisely by the fact that they have the word 'Schadenfreude', they have such a word; so they have Schadenfreude. On the other hand, they have no word for 'generosity', only the French have that. So the Germans don't have that, generosity, only the French have that. He also indoctrinates his French with other things. For example, the French are very easily inclined to treat everything with a certain wit.

In this regard, it is perhaps not unnecessary to read the judgment on the French character. One could still have a small spark of faith that I also wanted to speak out of narrow-minded nationality here. Therefore, I will give another judgment - a judgment on the French character, French intellectual endeavor:

“Thirst for truth”

is the verdict of this judgment.

"is not a French passion. Appearance, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, the shiny more than the fertile, public opinion more than conscience. This means that the center of gravity of the Frenchman is not within himself, but in the others, in the great multitude. Individuals are zeros; the digit that forms them into a number comes from outside: that is the sovereign, the writer of the day, the most read newspaper, in a word, the current master of fashion. All this can be deduced from an exaggerated sociability; it suffocates in the soul the courage to resist, the power of judgment, personal conviction, the cult of the ideal."

Everywhere just the opposite of what we have seen today. ... it suffocates everything!

So I am not speaking; not even a German speaks, but Henri Frederic Amiel, the French Swiss Amiel, who as a French Swiss wrote these words on January 22, 1875. I have chosen the words of this man, this man of spirit who seeks to understand life, Henri Frederic Amiel, because he is actually a French Swiss who has only just become acquainted with German life, and can therefore compare it with what he knows within the French character. The Frenchman cannot easily understand this desire to grow together with the innermost essence that lives and moves in the most outwardly sensual thing!

That is why Boutroux gives a speech in which he ridicules the German who wants to grasp everything from within: “The Frenchman,” he says, “who wants to get to know a camel goes to the menagerie, where he gets to know the camel. The Englishman goes on a journey and seeks out the camel in its environment; yes, he travels to distant countries on earth to get to know the camel where it lives. The German withdraws into his study, goes neither to the menagerie nor on a journey to distant lands, but rather deals with the camel in himself, as he can recognize it from his own soul.

From this Boutroux draws the conclusion – yes, you can present this to your French people today, present it to your Parisians – from this Boutroux draws the conclusion: the Germans imagine that what they experience in their own soul is the delusion that this is the whole world. That is the one that really matters. And that is why, says Boutroux to his French audience, the Germans also imagine that they are something in the world. And then they don't look at the world any further; rather, what they imagine they are is directly divine-spiritual. And to explain that, he then made this joke.

The French are, as everyone knows, a witty people; but the joke that Boutroux made was by Heinrich Heine! And so it is not even a joke. It was born on French soil, on French intellectual soil.

Within German intellectual life, what I have called a forgotten tone is by no means something that perhaps only presents itself on the heights of philosophical endeavor, but it lives, it really lives. Isn't it, for example, truly wonderful? In 1856, a book was published, a small pamphlet by a simple pastor in Waldeck, in the countryside, in Sachsenberg, in the Principality of Waldeck. His name was Rocholl, and he was a simple parish priest; the little booklet is called “Contributions to the History of German Theosophy,” which shows, I would like to say, how its author is completely immersed in a view of the world as it reveals itself to the spirit. Even if some of it may not appear so simple as true in this little book today, but only fantastic, it does not matter whether one becomes a follower or an opponent, but it does matter that one sees how what man's striving is towards the spirit of the world can really reveal itself everywhere, especially within German intellectual life.

If I had time, I could give you hundreds and hundreds of examples that show how, in our time – but that was not so long ago, a decade ago – a foreign essence, which also has taken over German intellectual life, [how] in an incredible way, only what can live within German intellectual life has been forgotten at first by foreign influence; for it is precisely because of this that the German people will have to take their great position in the eternity of time development.

And that is what now has to defend itself in the small, relatively small area of Central Europe against the immense superiority of the rest of the world. For how will history speak one day about what is happening in the present? One can say in simple words how history will speak: 777 million people against a maximum of 150 million people in Central Europe! That is what history will have to record: 777 million people encircling 150 million people, defaming and slandering the spiritual life of these people.

They need not be envious of the size of the earth's surface, these 777 million people! Because they have 68 million square kilometers, the 777 million people, compared to 6 million square kilometers that the Central European powers have - 6 million square kilometers that are surrounded! History will have to record that. And history will say that these 777 million people, with 68 million square kilometers, did not want to conquer the 150 million people on the 6 million square kilometers by bravery alone, but by starving them.

The German may feel what is living in his national soul and what significance this has in the overall development of humanity. The German may live with calmness and confidence towards the future, precisely because he is aware of the forces that live in the depths of his national soul. They have always lived on; for what matters is not whether they have become famous, but that which is not known externally is revealed internally as the significant, the great.

It is often difficult to bring out what is actually German spirit in contrast to foreign spirit. For example – I may mention this because I myself have been in the middle of a struggle of more than thirty years in relation to this: Goethe, in his German scientific consciousness, turned against Newton's mechanistic optics, which is still not at all understood today. But physics is so inundated with Western mechanism that today every physicist still sees nonsense in Goethe's optics. And for thirty-three years I have endeavored to establish what may be called: Goethe's right over Newton. It will take some time before people realize the situation regarding the chapter 'Goethe's Right over Newton'.

Despite everything overwhelmingly self-evident that physics has presented to Goethe, there have always been individual German minds who knew whose side the law was on in this field! From Grävell, who wrote the beautiful book “Goethe Right Against Newton,” to what I myself have written about Goethe's physical-optical studies, about his color studies, one is dealing with something that, in terms of truly entering into German intellectual life, is still reserved for the future. But that future will come.

In the 1850s, from the same stream of the faded, forgotten sound of German intellectual life, a man emerged: Planck, Christian Karl Planck. He wrote beautiful writings, wanting to see nature everywhere as itself imbued with spirit, forming the subsoil for the spirit, beautiful writings: “Truth and shallowness of Darwinism”, “Foundations for a science of nature”, “Spirit and Nature” - wonderful writings, entirely arising from - as he was aware, as he himself was aware - from the very deepest power of German thinking, German feeling, German scientific ethos, he describes the German essence. I can only emphasize one example: when we speak of the Earth today, how does external science speak of the Earth, how does a geologist speak of the Earth? The Earth is a material sphere, and it is only mentioned in passing that man also walks on it. For Planck, it is not. For Planck, the Earth is that to which all living beings belong. Christian Karl Planck seeks to develop a conception of the Earth that corresponds to what someone looking at the Earth from the outside would see, with all that it spiritually carries. It is not just an organism, but a spiritual being, and man belongs to the Earth as part of it. And to merely imagine the earth in terms of pure physical geology, that would be for Planck's consideration as if one would only look at the tree in relation to the trunk, at a lignified trunk, and does not see that what blossoms and fruits are, is connected with the innermost nature of the tree. Just as these belong to the tree, blossoms and fruits, according to its essence, so when one has the earth before one, one cannot be satisfied with a mere geological view. And so it is with Planck.

And so, in Planck's view, something comes into play that he wanted to use to have a powerful effect on his contemporaries, but was unable to do so because they were not yet mature enough to absorb this view so directly. He wanted to say: By living with nature, one lives not only with external nature, but together with the spirit of nature. That is what he wanted, that the religious consciousness of humanity should be included in the moral, in the sense of right and wrong. The time in which Christian Karl Planck lived has not yet had the opportunity to see things in perspective. It has ultimately branded him as an “overly nervous person”. Such a thinker can often stand alone, not only in life. So that his last written work was published after his death by his dear friend Köstlin, under the title Testament of a German.

All that I have mentioned led to Planck being spoken of as a hyperexcitable person; so that those who today only have a vague idea of the matter might speak of a megalomaniac. But he is a person who lives deeply and consciously within the forgotten tone of German intellectual life – so consciously that in 1864 Karl Christian Planck was able to write about what he wanted to seek as a German scientist:

“The power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

of the author

“He is fully aware of the power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

sure that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.”

Now he continues:

“What our medieval poetry has unconsciously and profoundly anticipated will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which has been visited with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his Parsifal).”

written in 1864, before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the power of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what the poem has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which is attained by her hero, is, conversely, fulfilled and made real purely naturally in the lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

Thus Planck in 1864, with the awareness that he could bring forth a spiritual-scientific discipline out of the German tradition.

Now, many people will say, won't they, “Well, a poor philosopher who dreams in his mind doesn't know anything that actually lives in reality!” In addition, there are the practical people who know how to handle and judge practical life in the right way. When such philosophers come with their ideals: But what do they know of reality? Yes, I would like to give you an example of this Christian Karl Planck. The man died in 1880; in 1881 his Testament of a German was published – in 1881, ten years after the Franco-Prussian War had changed some of the German conditions. Let us note this point in time. How many Germans have since then believed different things about European affairs, have imagined what would come, statesmen and non-statesmen, diplomats and non-diplomats, what have they all imagined the “practical” people, who know how things are going out there! What have they all imagined! How they smiled at the idealists who, from their dream world of ideas, formed an idea about the currents in the world! Well, the “impractical idealist” Christian Karl Planck wrote in 1880 at the latest – because he died in 1881 – he wrote in his “Testament of a German”: A great European war will come!

"No political wisdom, no love of peace on the part of Germany can prevent this hostile clash within the current merely national order. For more powerful than all wisdom is the nature of circumstances; and already now, despite the friendly attitude of Germany and Austria, the hostile mood of the Russian East is only emerging all the more clearly because it could not be given a free hand in everything, but rather a certain goal had to be set. And if it should come to a fight one day, then, however much we have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not stand by our side, but as in the East, we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South at the same time; on all sides, national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst.

And now I ask you to listen carefully to these words:

“And should it ever come to a fight, then, however much we may have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not find us on our side, but as in the East, we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South; hostile national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst on all sides.”

This is the “dreaming philosopher” of 1881, who says to people: You will be able to do whatever you want, I no longer believe it today - he couldn't say it then, but there is something in his words that clever people still [believed] in 1913, 1914, that for example Italy would be on the side of the Central Powers. The “impractical man”, the “impractical philosopher” Christian Karl Planck no longer believed it as early as 1880! You just have to get to know the true situation of life as it is today, the true situation of life that rests in the depths of the spiritual being, the whole situation as it is today was written down by a philosopher, by a German philosopher in 1880. It can be read by everyone! In 1912, the second edition of this “Testament of a German” was published by a publishing house that, at that time, had much more to do in its printing work than to deal with the “Testament of a German.” Rather, it preferred to focus on the numerous translations of the works of the French philosopher Bergson in Germany, as they say, popularized, that Bergson - I have in my “Riddles of Philosophy in their History as an Outline” also referred to Bergson in the new edition of the work “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century”. But however difficult it may have been, or in fact still is, to realize that, although I pointed out the full significance of Christian Karl Planck as early as 1900 in my “Welt- und Lebens-Anschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century) – supplemented by a prehistory of Western philosophy and continued up to the present – and conscious of the fact that a German philosopher can speak in this way, it did not even have the effect that I was able to point out in the past – written down even before the war – what, for example, is accepted as a particularly significant idea by those ignorant of Bergson, such as the famous sentence “Duration endures.” You could see that as saying nothing more than ‘Duration endures.’ It would be the same as saying ‘The heart beats.’ But what could be seen as something different was that in Bergson's work, the next thing that man has to consider in terms of a world view [...] is that he starts from man and puts the human being at the forefront, and the other beings as it were fall away from human development - that first the human being is there, then something arises from the realm of minerals, plants, animals, which some will consider madness, but which is the actual real world view - one admired that and pointed it out. One might say that in this case, because there is no full diversity among those who have so enthusiastically turned to Bergson's philosophy and regurgitate many things. One was somewhat saddened when Bergson concluded his speech by saying that during the war the Germans had sunk so low – and I already mentioned this last year here that the Germans have come down so low from their heights, as they once had in Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, [as they had it] in a Goethe -, [that the Germans] have come down so low now that everything is mechanistic with them, [that they] want to let everything merge into machines and the industrial. The good Bergson probably believed that the Germans would declaim a Novalis, a Goethe or a Schiller for them.

But I was able to show you at the time – this happened before the war – that what had been so admired as a weaker thought in Bergson, that in the German Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss – but in the works that appeared as early as the 1870s, especially in 1882 —, [that this] appeared and was advocated in a much more powerful way by the German Preuss!

There we see how Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, in his 1882 work “Geist und Stoff” (Mind and Matter), cites this entire forgotten and forgotten pursuit and current of German intellectual life as an example, and he very energetically points out that one must start from the human being. And only a view of nature that is not at all aware of the real connection between the human spirit and the spiritual can start from the lower beings and develop everything up to the human being, while what is otherwise present is seen as splintering. Preuss says:

"It may therefore be time to establish a [different] doctrine of the origin of the organic species, which is not only based on one-sidedly established propositions from descriptive natural science, but is also in full agreement with the other laws of nature, which are at the same time also laws of human thought. A doctrine, at the same time, that is free of any hypothetization and is based only on strict conclusions from scientific observations in the broadest sense; a doctrine that rescues the species concept according to actual possibility, but at the same time adopts the concept of evolution as proposed by Darwin and seeks to make it fruitful in its realm.

The center of this new doctrine is man, the only species on our planet that recurs: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers started with natural objects and then went so astray that they could not find the way to man, which Darwin only managed in the most miserable and thoroughly unsatisfactory way by seeking the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals, while the naturalist would have to start with himself as a human being, in order to gradually return to humanity through the whole realm of being and thinking.

It was not by chance that human nature emerged from the development of all earthly things, but by necessity. Man is the goal of telluric processes and every other form that emerged alongside him borrowed its features from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos...

When its germs had emerged, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary strength to produce further human germs. What emerged was animal or plant...

Did Bergson not know whether he had actually known Preuss, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss? Which would be just as big a mistake as if he had known him and simply written what Preuss's property is without pointing out that it is from Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss.

It would be conceivable for him – the latter as well; for it has now become sufficiently well known that Bergson – who accuses the Germans of a mechanical world view in order to prove how they have degenerated in the present day – has himself taken a very strange path. It is sufficiently well known that Bergson copied entire pages of his books – Bergson's books! from Schelling, Schopenhauer and other German philosophers, simply copied – not a mechanical way of writing his books! And to copy pages and pages from the personalities of a people, a people that is so reviled and slandered! You simply copy, and thereby gain great fame and praise.

These are things that are so easily forgotten in the present. Some people already see how things are! For example, Henry Frederic Amiel once said:

"Perhaps only the Germanic mind has the need to think for itself, to search for the origin of things. The Slavs and Romans are more strongly under the sway of convention, tradition, custom, prejudice, fashion; and when they break through them, it is as a revolt and rebellion, without therefore recognizing from within themselves the law immanent in things, their true standard, not the written, arbitrary one that has been read into them. The German wants to penetrate to nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Russian stop at convention. The root of the problem lies in the question of the connection between God and the world: immanent or transcendent - it decides from stage to stage the significance of everything else. If the spirit is outside of things, then it does not need to adapt to them. If the spirit lacks truth, then it must be given to it by the prophets. Then thought despises nature and is subject to the church, that is the Latin world."

Thus Henri Frederic Amiel, the French Swiss, who wrote these words about the Germanic spirit and the French, Spanish and Russians in 1877, when he was staying in Ems.

Through such things, dear attendees, you get to know what actually lives in the six million square kilometers that are now not only being enclosed, but also vilified and defamed by the prominent personalities of those who live on the 68 million square kilometers.

But if we try to extract the essence, the most significant part of the individual national spirits as they now have to fight with each other, yes, we can truly say: if we look at the Italian national soul – I am sure there are many listeners here who know that I have been the war, not only to Germans but also to other European nations, so that they are not just caused by the mood of this war, these words, but are based on objective knowledge of the facts. If you look at the Italian people's soul, you can find a simple word to characterize it. The Italian turns to the world – of course I do not mean the individual, but insofar as he belongs to his people – the Italian turns to the world; but he says: this world must be such that I like it! Quite solely from this point of view – nationality is that.

The Frenchman also turns to the world. But he says: This world must think nothing but what I want, what I, in my French concepts, imagine the world to be. And if he encounters different thinking somewhere, then it must be subordinated. Woe betide if something exists that the Frenchman cannot understand from his Frenchness.

The Englishman, the Briton, thinks: Yes, the world is good too; the world, right, very good; but it must be made in such a way that it serves the Briton, that the Briton can assert his ego in this world above all else, and that it is otherwise arranged in such a way that it serves him. You can read about it in detail, especially in those who believed that they were creating from the depths of the English national soul - historians, philosophers - wherever you look, you can see it everywhere.

The German in his development of thought thinks: The world is there, and as I stand as a human being before the world, I want to develop my human soul so that it becomes the threefold image of the great world. That is the essence of German thinking and feeling.

The Russian, who thinks: the world as it is, is worth nothing at all; it must be replaced by another. And it is a matter of putting that world in the place of this world, in which the Russian person can flourish. That is the mood of the Russian people.

Henri Frederic Amiel, the Swiss Frenchman, once painted a strange picture of what it would be like if the Russian national character were to flood and dominate Europe - as it wanted, and as the entire Russian national current in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually portrayed it from its own impulses. Henri Frederic Amiel says:

“What terrible masters the Russians would be if they ever extended the power of their rule over the countries of the south!”

He names Russia as the country of the north, and includes France and Germany among the countries of the south.

"What they would bring us would be polar despotism, a tyranny the world has never known, silent as the fog, cutting as ice, rigid as iron, with the loveliness of falling snow and its cold splendor; slavery without return or relief. But probably they will gradually lose the virtues and vices of their semi-barbarism. The centuries will mature these sons of the north, and they will intervene differently than as a threat or discordant note in the harmony of nations...

In relation to Germany and Austria, the peoples allied with them, as we know, that time has not yet come. But just as the East, the Russian East, gradually learned to think about the European West in the course of the nineteenth century – what the European West is for it, which in the nineteenth century included not only Central Europe but also Western Europe, France and England – that which lies in the Russian people, incited by an incomprehension of the Western intellectual culture, especially also the German spiritual culture, has heated up to the point of megalomania, which has truly not only been counteracted in the “Testament of Peter the Great”, in the falsified or non-falsified “Testament of Peter the Great”, but has been counteracted in the whole developmental principle of leading personalities in nineteenth and twentieth century Russia.

You can read more about this in my booklet “Thoughts During the Time of the War. For Germans and Those Who Don't Hate Them”; it is currently out of print, but the second edition will be coming out soon. It is therefore not available at the moment because it is out of print.

It is a strange process. More and more, one sees in Russian literature, in the descriptions of Russian philosophers, a development of thought that says: everything that lives in the West, especially in German intellectual life, these thoughts that have emerged from Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the others, are abstract thoughts that do not grasp the depths of what is happening. It is all decrepit; it is a world that must be done away with. And in its place must come the Russian world, the world that the Russian man will create. Kireyevsky is one of those who started with this way of thinking. In 1829, it was already a tone that had become dominant, then became political, and when the Russian steamroller was now to be sent over Europe. This Kireyevsky, who writes:

“The fate of every European state depends on the union of all the others; the fate of Russia depends on Russia alone. But the fate of Russia is decided in its formation: this is the condition and source of all goods. As soon as all these goods will be ours, we will share them with the rest of Europe, and we will repay all our debts to them a hundredfold.”

... 1829! So: all European goods, as soon as Russia extends over all of Europe. This is not only the political program, it is also the literary program, the artistic-aesthetic program, to possess all of Europe and then, out of good nature, to share as much as one sees fit - according to Kireyevsky.

But Russian intellectual life did not immediately embrace the West. As late as 1885, we find a book by Yushakov, who dreams, as is typical of deeply rooted Russian identity, of having to exert an influence in Asia first – a kind of Pan-Asianism. Yushakov constructs a curious theory: he says that there are peoples living over there in Asia who once had a wonderful spiritual and economic culture. They themselves – these Asian peoples – have in a wonderful but true legend of Ormuzd and Ahriman that which has arisen and developed within their lives. They call Ormuzd the good god; Ahriman was always the evil god. But the Iranian peoples, to which the Indians and the Persians also belong, have placed themselves in the service of Ormuzd. They have taken from the evil Ahriman that which opposed them, so to speak, that which Ahriman left to them, the evil Ahriman left to them, took from him. And in 1885, Yushakov looks particularly at the West, at the Western peoples of Europe, and especially at one Western European people: the English. How were they robbed of their gifts of the good Ormuzd by these English, these Asians! These English treated the Asian peoples in such a way, intervened with what could come out of their worldview. But what did they bring to these Asian peoples? - says Yushakov in his book “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”, 1885. These English came to the Asian peoples and thought that they were only there to dress in English clothes, fight each other with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English baubles.

Then he goes on to say: Now the Russians have to take charge of the cultural blessings. They will not take away from the Asians what Ormuzd has given them, but they will ally themselves with the poor people enslaved by Ahriman and share their Ormuzd with them, in order to work their way up with them and collect Ormuzd's goods anew in Asia. In their hearts, with the hearts of the Asian peoples, they will be - not I say this, but Jushakow. So it will be that they will go over from Russia, those from Russia who are the real future types of humanity from Russia, the farmer and the Cossack, the greatest bearers of the moral world order, the greatest bearers of selfless humanity. From the union of the peasant and the Cossack will come forth that which will make Asia happy again.

And then he, Yushakov, goes on to say, pointing again to England - 1885:

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

So England's existence. And then he continues:

“I wish my fatherland”

my Russian fatherland

“nothing similar – I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

and has nothing to do with this terrible England. This was said by a Russian in 1885 about England, who longs for a state and is grateful that Russia is sufficiently far removed from what England brings upon the world.

In such things lie the reasons, not the logical ones, but perhaps the illogical ones, who will then experiment on the world, who will then take the place where the Russian people have treated relations with the Asians, which, in the opinion of these people, and which one would have to free from Ahriman again that the Russians did not initially ally themselves with the Asians to fight the evil Ahriman and destroy him with them, but that the Russians initially allied themselves with the evil Western peoples, with the evil English, to crush Europe. We need not descend into the [tone] into which so much has been descended today on the part of the opponents of Germanness [...], who for martial reasons have also become opponents of the German essence and national character. With the characterization of Christian Karl Planck given earlier, we can say:

"[...] the German mind has not in vain devoted its deepest and most intimate strength to this, [not in vain has even its poetry made the image of this indelible urge to understand itself and reality. That unbiased, purely objective and universal sense, by which it has become possible for the German alone to fully appreciate foreign education and nationality, and which gives him the genuinely human consecration in religious, moral and artistic respects, it also includes the knowledge of the general natural law of things, as soon as in the perfection of time] the mind has matured for it."

Therefore, we prefer to look at what, from a world-historical point of view, in terms of pure fact, the German spirit must strive towards. There we see something that existed long before the appearance of Christ on earth, in the form of spiritual striving in Asia. There they also tried to unite with the spirit that permeates and animates the world, the whole world, to attain a culture – for no culture can be attained otherwise. But how they tried to achieve this in Asia! By weakening, by extinguishing the I, by extinguishing the I as much as possible!

This world view must belong to the past, now that the Christ Impulse, the greatest impulse to have come to Earth, has entered into life on Earth, and given it true spirit and meaning. This world view of the Orient can no longer found a real spiritual view. There the I must not extinguish itself, but must strengthen and uplift itself, and through this elevation grow as I into the spiritual universe, into the spiritual universe.

Panasiatism has thus shown this Hinduism, whose height had been reached by extinguishing the ego. In more recent times, after the influence of the Christ Impulse, the realization of the self has been sought through knowledge, not by damping down the self, but by the self becoming aware of itself, experiencing itself, so that in its experiencing it has a sense of the world. The German receives this as his task; such a task was always present in the depths of the German people's striving for knowledge. And those who lived in Central Europe as Germans were united in such striving.

And finally, I would like to mention a few words from an Austrian German, an Austrian German who says of Austria, “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland,” to express in the 1860s - it is 1862 written in 1862 to express how a shared spirit unites what was later – it only happened after Robert Hamerling's death – was later welded together so firmly by external ties, as Central Europe now stands. Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, Austria's greatest poet in the second half of the nineteenth century, summarized this in the words: “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland.”

I, as a closer compatriot of Hamerling, I, who myself lived almost thirty years of my life in Austria among Austrian Germans and fought with them, I may point out precisely this seriousness of the German character within the German-Austrian. Robert Hamerling expresses this trait, this trait in world history, beautifully in his “Germanenzug” (The German March) – as I said, written in 1862 – where he describes, as in a dream, how the ancient Germanic peoples migrate from Asia to Europe – and in them, as in a germ, the later Germans – how they seek out their new European homeland. It is beautifully described: the moon rises; it is evening. The Teutons lie down to sleep, these future Teutons migrating to Europe; only one is awake: the blond Teut. The genius of Teutonia, the genius of the later, the future Germany, speaks to Teut. He speaks of the spirituality that must rest in striving, which is German striving. Then Hamerling says, that is, he lets the spirit of the German people say it to the blond Teut:

"To whom will the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the strings So boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Whom does his urge, his foreboding lead so high, so deep?
Who grasps the near and the far so faithfully?
Where is every earthly and heavenly zone
reflected as in your thinking, O Teuton?

This is the very deepest knowledge that can be derived from the tone of the partially forgotten tones quoted today from the development of German thought. It is a tone that can never be anti-religious, the tone that will also grasp all knowledge in man in such a way that this knowledge is offered as if on the altar to the world spirit, to the spiritual, real world. that tone of which Jakob Böhme, the “Philosophus teutonicus” - as he was also called - has spoken in the beautiful words that suggest the true popular character of German knowledge:

Wenn du, O Mensch, die Tiefe

he means the depth of heaven, the blue

and the stars and the earth,
so you walk in God,
so you strive in God,
so you die in God,
and so you will be buried in God.

These are deep, German words.

And Robert Hamerling, Austria's great German, who knew how to empathize with even the smallest German being – just by the way, I mention that in 1884 a statue of Strasbourg was erected in Paris and the German flag in front of the statue was burned, that went so close to Hamerling's heart that he wrote the words:

"May you believe in revenge
And in the victor's wreath in the future

he wrote to the French

Hope not to rob back
A clod of German land!
You may rave like ravens<
Around an Alsatian statue,
Strasbourg you will not have,
Strasbourg nevermore!

So it sounded from Austria to the French as they danced around the Strasbourg statue and burned the German flag.

But Hamerling also knew how to remind people of the fact that the German spirit is the continuation of the greatest that once appeared in the world spirit in the ancient Orient, from which the ancient ancestors of the Germanic peoples emerged; he knew how to point out that, just in a pre-Christian manner, by a lowering of the ego, man wanted to merge with the universe, but how this still lives, is raised to a higher level, lives in the German character, which has to bring the greatest that the world once created in the Orient to this world in a new form, as befits Christian development.

This connection with the whole development of humanity comes to Robert Hamerling's mind – also in his “Germanenzug” – this basic trait that everything the German recognizes should grasp his deepest being, become one with his whole personality; but that at the same time it is something that is a world-historical mission and ties in with the highest aspirations of humanity in the past. Therefore, Robert Hamerling again lets the spirit of the German people speak:

"But however proudly you may strive,
high above other swarms,
you will always keep the ancient, sacred fire:
the dream-filled, drunken drunkenness of God,
drunken with God, the blissful warmth of the heart
of the ancient Asian homeland.
This holy ray, a temple fire
of humanity, free of smoke, with a pure flame
will glow in your chest and soul
and remain a pilot at your helm!
You strive only because you love: your most daring thought

We may and must actually immerse ourselves today in that which can bring us to the realization of how truly the roots of a high spiritual striving live, which must have an effect on the future for the benefit of humanity. This spirituality lives in the most beautiful expressions of German intellectual life in the 6 million square kilometers that are threatened today by people who live in 68 million square kilometers.

And one does not need to speak out of national sentiment, but out of objective knowledge, when one speaks of the world vocation of the German people, which cannot be overcome by those who today - not understanding it - not only revile but slander it.

We Germans may look back to that which, in Germany's greatest spiritual period, has incorporated itself into the development of German thought and what lives in it and will flourish again. And we may look to what has presented itself to us in such a way that we look to it as to roots and germs. And by recognizing the rooting and germinating power of that which has passed, we have faith in the continued effect of this past. And in this belief in what we have to cherish and cultivate not only for the sake of the German people, but for the sake of humanity, we may love these roots of German national identity and cherish the hope and confidence that what has been recognized as germs and roots will bear blossoms and fruit in the future! Despite everything and everyone who rises up against it today, we are imbued with the power that expresses itself on the one hand in German intellectual life and that today has to undergo such trials in relation to our external daily life. We look to the future and trust this power, which must carry the German essence in the future as it has carried it in the past.

From this, what was meant by these arguments can be briefly summarized, according to feeling. Again, in the words of Robert Hamerling, looking at what is being said against us, the Germans, and against our name, today, looking at what the German essence must be in the development of humanity, what I wanted to express today out of true, discerning feeling can be summarized in four short lines by Robert Hamerling, an Austrian German who sensed how strongly what is today welded together by the same, by such great and such sorrowful and such trials and tribulations rich time conditions in Central Europe belongs together. He, Robert Hamerling, who felt this, he coined the beautiful words with which we want to conclude this reflection:

“And when ever the German name
sees a hostile day,
From ocean to ocean
will find its way the German mind.”

Esteemed Attendees!

As I did last winter, I would like to take the liberty of speaking this evening about a topic that is intimately connected with the development of German intellectual life, and thus deviate from what I have been privileged to do for many years, both in this city and in other cities in Germany: to speak about a narrower topic of the spiritual-scientific worldview.

This deviation is certainly close to the human heart due to the great, momentous events in which the German people find themselves, due to the facts unfolding around us, which on the one hand represent a severe test, but on the other hand must become the source of many significant hopes for the future.

And besides, I don't think there's any need to speak out of a narrow-minded nationalistic spirit when one ties the great periods of German intellectual life to the spiritual-scientific considerations that have been cultivated here over the years. For it is my conviction, not based on some obscure feelings, but, as I humbly believe, on the recognition of the facts, that precisely what I have often shown here as a striving into the spiritual worlds is contained in its most significant germ in the most diverse endeavors of German intellectual life, in the flowering of this intellectual life.

If spiritual science wants to be science, then one could very easily – I would say – from a certain point of view, a matter of course, a matter of course that is superficial after all – one could very easily say: science must be international. And wanting to tie science to certain popular endeavors is unacceptable from the outset. So many people say. And it is so obvious when one speaks in this way that the matter of course already becomes superficial.

I will just say about this comparatively: for example, the moon is international, dear attendees, the same moon for all peoples; but what the different peoples have to say about the moon, from the soul, arises from their different dispositions. Now one could indeed say: that may apply to poetry, to literature. But if science is to become a worldview, then what science has to say must be objective, must be exactly the same for all people. But whether science penetrates deeply into the sources of existence or remains on the surface – to name only these two extremes – depends on the different dispositions of the individual peoples, on the impulses that the individual peoples have to give to humanity with what science is to them. And it is of the greatest importance that these impulses, these forces [...] arise out of the inherent qualities of the peoples! This is what is important for the overall development of humanity, not what can be common to all in the abstract sense!

To [hint] at what is actually meant here, one need only recall a saying of Goethe. When Goethe, on his great journey to the south, had not only viewed and explained the most diverse works of art in his own way, but had also studied natural facts and natural beings, he wrote to his friends in Weimar: After all that I have seen of knowledge and nature, I would most like to make a trip to India - not to discover something new, but to see what has already been discovered in my way.

The way of looking at what one is able to bring from the soul to the world phenomena and the world weaving is what matters. And that is intimately connected with the folk souls. And when one speaks, most honored attendees, of the German national soul and its effect within the German nation, it seems immediately obvious to anyone familiar with the course of German development that the summit reached by the German national soul at the end of the eighteenth century, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, must be reached. There, a worldview background was created, a background of knowledge, by minds such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which, within European intellectual life, became a second [...] flowering period after the Greek one, through Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing and others who belong to them. Behind Goethe's “Faust” and the other great poetic and artistic achievements stands what German world view has created in the field of thought development in those days.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, appears first before the souls of today in such a way that it seems so obvious to consider German minds in connection with the development of their nationality. Johann Gottlieb Fichte appears first as the great orator in the “Speeches to the German Nation”. If you consider what was achieved by those speeches, each word of which must still ignite in the German soul today, for the simple reason that in one of the most difficult times in German history, every mind was invigorated and strengthened by these words, and how they actually shed light on the possibilities for German development. And because these speeches arose from the most intimate feeling for German national character and from the most intimate kinship with the innermost forces of the German national soul.

But how easily one would say: Yes, what Fichte spoke to the German people in his enthusiastic, fiery speech back then will easily find its way into every soul. But if you start from what Fichte's world view actually is, then you come to something difficult to understand. Oh, honored attendees, if only this prejudice of the difficulty of understanding such creations as Fichte's, Schelling's, Hegel's could fade away: Never could a personality like Johann Gottlieb Fichte have delivered his “Speeches to the German Nation” if one had not experienced that world view in one's soul, which only appears difficult to understand and which he felt, always felt, had arisen in him as if through a dialogue with the German national spirit itself. For that is how he felt about what he had to say!

Now, spiritual science, esteemed attendees, as it is meant here, is based entirely on the premise that there are dormant forces in the human soul that are not used in ordinary external life, not even when one intelligently observes this , nor in ordinary external science; but which must first be developed, [which must first] be brought out of the depths of the human mind, and developed into what can be used for Goethe's expressions: spiritual eyes, spiritual ears - through which one can look into, listen to, the spiritual world - spiritual eyes, spiritual ears!

Spiritual science assumes that such a real inner sense is not bound to a physical organ, but slumbers purely in the soul, but can be brought out of it. Spiritual science assumes that such a sense is able to perceive a real spiritual world that is around us and to which we belong with our souls and with our spirit, just as we belong to the physical-sensual world with our body. Only that when we look at the physical-sensual world with the organ of the physical-sensual body, it presents itself to us, which dies with our death. Whereas when the inner sense of man proceeds just as scientifically as the other senses or external science and through the external mind bound to the brain or nervous system, when the inner sense proceeds in this way with regard to the spiritual world, then man comes to the observation of those forces that are within him and that permeate the entire external world. [He comes to the observation] of those forces that represent for him the eternal, the immortal forces of the soul that go through births and deaths.

To awaken such an inner sense, such inner forces, was Fichte's, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's, unchanging striving for a worldview. He strove for such a sense. He could only do so because this unique quality - we will see later why I say “unique” - of the German national spirit lived in him, this will to acquire in one's own soul, through an elevation, through a strengthening, through a development of the soul forces, something that cannot be acquired if these soul forces are not strengthened , but which is one and the same – not a vague fantasy is meant here – which is one and the same as that which, as spirit, as real, objective spirit, is as objective as the external natural objects are objective for the senses, which, as spirit, permeates and interweaves the world.

For Fichte, the human self was able to live into this human self if the human self was able to grasp itself inwardly in such a way as to grasp what pulses and weaves and lives through the world as its secrets.

Fichte believed that when a person comes to experience this inner self, this center of the soul, in the right sense, in a truly direct and powerful way within themselves, then not only does he live as an individual human being in such inner experience, but then the life of the world, the world spirit, that which is the creative spirit in all things of existence, lives in this inner experience.

This desire to recognize with the innermost sense organ is what is so characteristic of Fichte. And it is characteristic of him because it was in his very nature. It was in his nature to grow together with that which made an impression on him. He did not just hear something, he did not just see something, but when he heard something, when he saw something, he put the whole feeling and life of his personality into what he heard, into what he saw. He was so immersed in what he perceived that he felt creatively immersed in it – recreating the world, recreating nature, recreating every other human life. This was present in him as a personal disposition.

To illustrate this, I would like to mention a few episodes from the life of Fichte, or rather Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He was a small boy of seven years old, a simple weaver's son; there he stood once at the edge of a stream that flowed past his father's small house. He had thrown a book into the stream! And he stood there crying, watching the book float away. Then his father came along and saw what had happened. The fact was that last Christmas his father had given the boy, who was precocious and did well at school, the “Horned Siegfried” as a present. On the boy, on the seven-year-old boy in the blue farmer's coat, the child of simple people, the mighty, the primeval Germanic deed of “Horned Siegfried” made such a powerful impression that he became completely absorbed in it. And then it turned out that one had to say: Although he used to be so diligent, conscientious and dutiful at school, he is now less attentive. He was reproached for this.

What did the seven-year-old boy do? He said to himself: “I like ‘Siegfried’, I love him, I am attached to him; but he must not take my duties from me, so I throw him into the water.

And again: He had turned nine years old. The neighboring landowner had come to the village where Fichte lived to hear the pastor's sermon there on a Sunday. He had arrived too late to hear the sermon. Then someone came up with a solution. They said: “There is a boy of nine who is so good at listening to sermons that he might be able to repeat the most important parts by heart.” And so they brought in nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He stood there awkwardly in his blue peasant's smock. Once the ice was broken, so to speak, he began to develop the sermon as he had heard it. But not, as children relate, by reciting the words from memory. Rather, he recreated them! So that one could see: the inner fire of the soul had grown together with what had reached him from the pulpit. Even as a boy, he was so intimately united with what was around him that he absorbed everything from the world. That was what he realized, and what led him to his world view, [what led him] to his world view in such a way that he felt: What lives as will in the individual person does not live merely as will in that individual person, but what lives as will in the individual person is like that drop taken from the sea, but which is of the same kind as the whole sea. The will that man learns to recognize in his ego, that throbs, lives and weaves through all existence as the will of the world. And when man pronounces “I,” the will of the world speaks in him.

Thus in his world view, the individual ego grew together with the will of the world. And as if on the wings of the will, what radiates from the divine-spiritual existence, from the divine-spiritual will existence, shines into the human soul as duty.

To him, duty became the highest, the most significant, that which enters a person as a duty – in relation to the world and its phenomena – as a task; this was an immediate inspiration of the divine spirit of will, which pulses and weaves and lives through the world.

And so, in his will as in his ego, Johann Gottlieb Fichte felt at one with the existence of the world. He believed that when he spoke, he spoke not out of personal arbitrariness but out of that which the God who wants to speak in the soul wants to say. And one really cannot imagine that anyone could have been more earnest than Fichte was when, for example, he spoke to his audience in Jena and tried to convey to the souls of his listeners what he had experienced in his soul as a world-certainty.

It was not a matter of merely communicating certain content, certain sentences, so that they would be heard, as was the case with other speakers; no, but for him, when he ascended the lectern, it was a matter of carrying in his soul something to carry in his soul something of which he knew - in true humility, in all modesty: “The world-will, ruling through the world, speaks through me; it must be carried into the souls of my listeners on the wings of my words. And there must be established that connection between the souls of my listeners and the divine-spiritual world-will, by which I myself am aglow and inspired.

And deep within his soul – within Fichte's soul – was the realization that the deepest thing in the world must be grasped by the innermost part of the soul. In turn, here is a short story, which is familiar to those who have studied Johann Gottlieb Fichte, about how he made the following demand of his listeners, for example. As an example of how he sought to establish an immediate personal connection with his listeners, he said: “Gentlemen, think the wall.” And so the people thought about the wall; it was easy for them. After he had let them think about the wall for a while, he said: “And now think about the one who just thought about the wall!” Then the people were already somewhat strangely touched; they did not really know what they should do; they were referred to their own inner being. They should become strong in themselves, in their own inner being, that which, as something impersonal and spiritual, permeates and interweaves the world.

In this way he sought to reach his listeners. And his words were not words shaped in the ordinary way. People who knew him well said: His speech rolls along like thunder, and his words are discharged like individual lightning bolts. He sought not merely to educate good souls, but to educate great souls.

And another said of him: Oh, with Fichte it is so that he lives and moves in the realm of the invisible world of thought; not like one who dwells within, but like one who rules this invisible world.

It was out of such a spirit that Fichte then, in his Berlin lectures from 1811 to 1813, said things that were probably not often uttered before a university audience. He spoke of a “new sense”, of a spiritual sense that is necessary for man if he wants to know the eternal in contrast to the temporal. He spoke of this by comparing this sense with another sense that prevails in ordinary life. He said: “My dear listeners! If a single soul – he meant Fichte's soul – were to appear among a number of people who cannot see Fichte and have never seen Fichte, would they not declare what he has to say to be fantasy? But it is the same with everything that your senses can see compared to what man can see when the new sense - as Fichte called it - the spiritual vision, opens up to him, through which a new world arises.

A genuine spiritual-scientific striving is developed here out of German scientific striving! And Fichte said, being aware of the contrast between this German striving and the Romance striving in relation to knowledge, Fichte said: This striving, that is a striving that emerges from the original source of the living, and that does not merely want to establish a knowledge of the dead.

Even more thoroughly than Fichte was able to do, one can point to certain Western views of eternity, which show quite clearly how different Fichte is from the world development of humanity than, for example, similar spirits from the Romance, French tradition. Take the excellent philosopher Descartes, Cartesius, who was active in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In a similar way to Fichte, he wants to start from what is in the soul: “I think, therefore I am” - “Cogito ergo sum”. But what does it represent? An endeavour to use the intellect to clarify what one already has. Fichte's energetic activity strives to develop in the soul something that one does not yet have, in order to recognize the actual, deep secrets of the world. And one need only mention one thing that comes to light particularly strongly in Cartesius, in Descartes. Descartes also tried to gain clarity about nature from the innermost depths of his spirit, from the innermost depths of the human spirit. About that which is around us. But he does not start from the living and therefore cannot come to the living. And it is characteristic of Cartesius, of Descartes, that he regards not only the other natural phenomena, but also the animals as inanimate, as moving, soulless machines. This is no exaggeration, this is a genuine Descartesian theory: only man, who experiences a soul within himself, actually has a soul in the true sense of the word. The rest of nature is soulless.

Compare this view of nature as something soulless, compare the directly living in Fichte: the soul of man stands in it in the divine will, which pulses and weaves through the world. He looks at external things, but he looks at them in such a way that man is called upon to see in external, material things that in which he has to see the divine will... ... and living everywhere, everywhere ensouled.

The time will come, honored attendees, when people will indeed pay attention to these differences between the individual nations, because the realization of these differences of such outstanding minds must bear fruit. We Germans have no need to prove all that we have now heard from some outstanding personalities on the enemy side. We Germans have no need to join in the tone of not only the misjudgment but the slander of German intellectual life, as we can hear it everywhere. But we do have reason to penetrate into the peculiar, into the essence of German intellectual life.

And then, like Fichte's follower, we see standing before us, also unrecognized, but as a personality who will already celebrate his resurrection, Joseph Wilhelm Schelling. Schelling does not stand there like Fichte. That is precisely what is significant in German intellectual life, this versatility, this diversity. He does not stand there like Fichte; Fichte stands there as if emerging from the contemplation of the individual personality, becoming aware of the world-will pulsating and interweaving through the world. Fichte's entire personality is active out of the will. Out of the soul, out of this German soul – for which the other languages of the West do not even have a literal translation – out of this German soul, Schelling creates his magnificent view of nature and spirit, which only appears difficult to understand.

For Schelling, nature is not something dead, something merely mechanistic; rather, nature is that which has been created out of the same forces over the course of millennia and millennia, out of the same forces that the human soul feels within itself when it truly goes within. And then Schelling looks at nature and can say to himself: That which lives and moves out there in nature – the same powers of the human soul that now come into being in human souls – have created that, have created a foundation for themselves, a preparation; so that they can arise and appear internalized in the human mind, in the human soul.

And so, for Schelling, soul and nature grow together in such a way that he coins the certainly one-sided sentence: To recognize nature is to create nature!

It does not matter at all whether one becomes a follower or an opponent of these great people, whether one agrees or declares oneself to be an opponent of what these great minds have expressed; today this can even appear childish; it does not matter; but what matters is to look at these personalities and to see the best in their personalities, their spiritual striving. It must not be a matter of repeating what someone has said out of the spirit of his time, but of strengthening and empowering oneself in relation to one's own soul forces, in order to perhaps create something completely different today from what Fichte can give than what Fichte gave.

If you see it the way those who heard Schelling, Friedrich Joseph Wilhelm Schelling, did – I myself met people who heard him in his old age and who fully confirmed what those who were young when Schelling was young had to say, when Schelling was at the University of Jena at the end of the 1790s. This is how they spoke, for example – I am telling you what Schubert, who himself was a deep spirit who wanted to penetrate into the depths of the human soul, wrote in his diaries after hearing Schelling in Jena: If someone came during a few afternoon hours on a weekday, Schubert says, you saw an eventful life in Jena. But this eventful life did not come from some kind of frequent celebration, not from some other kind of gathering; rather, this eventful life was because the hour was approaching when not only students, but mature men of all professions went to Schelling's lecture hall. Schubert continues: “The personal impression Schelling made on me was of a great, powerful man.” When Schelling spoke, it seemed to him as if he were standing there and his spiritual musings were directly connected to the spiritual world and his words were shaped in such a way that he grasped what he had to say from what he looked into: the spiritual world.

Fichte came across as a powerful person, as a powerful representative of the German essence. Schelling came across as an educator, a philosophical educator, who appeared to his listeners as if he was surrounded by an aura of spirituality, which he knew how to communicate even as a young man to those who listened to him. And those who heard him in his old age – as I said, I myself still knew people like that – [they] assured that the eye, which still sparkled in old age, spoke of the immediate personal nature of nature, which presented itself to him in the communications that he sought to give to humanity, not out of prudent wisdom, but out of an inner vision of the spiritual world. And Schelling speaks of the so-called [intellectual] views. In this way we have coined the word in his way for the new sense, for the spiritual sense, the spiritual sense that can be awakened in man and is able to look into the spiritual world. Schelling's way of speaking of this spiritual sense may be one-sided; but the fact that it could be spoken of with such earnestness in German intellectual life is one of the most significant intellectual blossoms, in the presence of which one must feel in the right sense.

The third person to be considered among those who created the world view from which Goethe's “Faust” and the other works of art emerged is Hegel. In Hegel, we again notice how he strives to relive in what the soul experiences in itself as an individual soul that which permeates the world, that which pulses through the world. But while Fichte sought this in the will and Schelling in the mind, Hegel sought it in pure, senseless thought. And when thought becomes completely pure, when thought does not lean on that which the senses observe externally, but when thought creates itself as free thought out of the soul, then for Hegel it is not the human soul alone but for Hegel it is the divine world-being that penetrates into the soul and that now kindles its world-thoughts, which gave rise to things outside, in the human soul as the light of the soul itself.

In Hegel, we have a remarkable kind of mysticism that does not want to revel in dark feelings, not a mysticism that wants to live only in feeling, because it believes that in feeling alone it is more closely in touch with the secrets of the world than in thinking. We have a mysticism in Hegel that is intellectually clear and yet not intellectually superficial, a mysticism that is suffused with the light of ideas, with the light of thought. But Hegel seeks to bring to life in his soul those thoughts that truly bring man together with divine thoughts. I would like to say: mystical, but not mystical darkness, but mystical light, mystical brightness.

Hegel did indeed oppose the idea that the new meaning, the inner meaning, should become something that man could only receive through a special disposition; and that is why he criticized Schelling, who spoke of [intellectual] intuition. In a sense, Hegel was right, because for every human being – you only need to read about it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” , for every human being, this new sense is attainable if only he wants to develop it. And this new sense, basically it lives most beautifully, most gloriously in that man, in the German, to whom Fichte, when he showed him his seemingly so dark, arbitrary teaching, wrote in 1794: Philosophical endeavor, like every pure philosophical endeavor, weaves itself into the spirituality of your feeling; for this pure spirituality of your feeling is actually the touchstone. - So Fichte wrote to Goethe in 1794.

And Goethe himself, in the beautiful essay he calls “Contemplative Judgment,” spoke of the fact that there cannot be only one way of looking at the world that relies on the external senses. Rather, just as the power of judgment judgment otherwise judges only about the external sensory experiences, so the power of judgment can develop an impulse in itself, which unfolds an inner life, so that it sees the spiritual, as the senses see the sensual.

Kant still had this inner vision, this vision of the spiritual through the human spirit, of the divine spirit through the human spirit. Goethe said: Let us then bravely face this adventure of reason! And it is from this inner sense that everything Goethe wanted to offer to science was created. And Goethe, in his scientific and cognitive struggles, showed most clearly how the German mind must understand the world differently than the Western mind.

In his early youth, Goethe encountered what Descartes' worldview had become within the development of the French world view. While Descartes still regarded animals as machines, de La Mettrie had already written the book “Man a Machine”! The mechanistic worldview, rooted in the French national character, is a mechanistic view of the world, a view of the world as a mechanism.

And when this worldview was presented to young Goethe, he said, from his German worldview: “Now they are telling us about atoms that collide with each other; this great world machine. If only they would explain to us how this beautiful and diverse world can arise from these colliding atoms. But after they have shown us how the atoms collide and push each other, they do not explain anything more about it!

Now, this striving has been preserved in the mechanism to this day. The mechanistic world view is actually the French world view. Of course, esteemed attendees, this is not meant to apply to the individual members of a nation; individuality can rise above nationality, above that which has been discussed and which arises from the character, from the inner nature of nationality. And here I believe that the right thing has been said. I would like to let the voice of a man be heard, the voice of a man who may perhaps be heard when considering the striving of the French nation towards a scientific world view. This man says:

"Thirst for truth is not a French passion. Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, the shiny more than the fertile, public opinion more than conscience. This means that the center of gravity of the Frenchman is not within himself, but in the others, in the multitude. Individuals are zeros; the digit that forms them into a number comes from outside: that is the sovereign, the writer of the day, the most-read newspaper, in a word, the current master of fashion. All this can be deduced from an exaggerated sociability; it stifles in the soul the courage to resist, the power of judgment, personal conviction, the cult of the ideal."

This was not written by a German out of one-sided national sentiment, but rather, dear honored attendees, it was written in 1875 by Amiel, Henri Frederic Amiel, the French Swiss at the University of Geneva! He could know as someone who, although he was deeply familiar with German intellectual life, was bound to French intellectual life by his blood ties. And in 1862, Amiel wrote the following:

"I feel a common bond with a Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Leibniz, who are nevertheless sufficiently different from one another, while French philosophers, orators or mathematicians leave me cold despite their great qualities, because they do not carry the sum of general life within them, do not control all of reality, gag me or make me suspicious. What the French lack is direct knowledge of the living unity, a sense of the sacred, a feeling for the mysteries of being; what is theirs is the foundation of specialized sciences, the art of making a book, it is style, politeness, grace, a sense of order, art for art's sake, discipline, elegance, truth in the details, staging, proselytizing zeal, strength in practical conclusions. But for the journey through Inferno and Paradise, other guides are needed; they are rooted to the earth, in the realm of the finite, changing, historical, and limited. Mechanism and dualism are the pinnacles of their intellectual flight. To break out of this circle, they must force themselves.

One does not want to present a one-sided view, not out of national sentiment; therefore one must choose something that is said by someone who says it out of his own attachment, out of his blood ties to the French nation.

But the time has come when, just as other things, the relationship between the individual elements of the nation must be recognized objectively. And once one has achieved something like Fichte's achievement – Fichte, for whom that which lives outside in the world of the senses is, so to speak, the nationalized field of duty – if one compares that with what lives in the British, in the English world-view, then one need only point to where one will, take old Baco of Verulam, who would accept nothing except what the senses see externally – everything else is an 'idol' to him; and his book about idols is an attempt to prove that what man can grasp in his soul has no objective validity beyond sensuality. And if we go up to Spencer and all those who have a similar view, we arrive at the latest English world view, which has been developed out of the English view: it calls itself pragmatism. What is this pragmatism? It is not something that applies to us Germans. For us Germans, as with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, it is something that experiences truth, and by experiencing truth, one lives together with the world spirit. But the Romance peoples and the British have no conception of the objective world spirit at all. It is something that will only be fully recognized in the future. [...] Truth [...] is something that arises in the soul as a result of this soul growing together with the world spirit itself. Then the soul brings this truth to bear on external things, and the external things become a revelation of spiritual truth. What are they to pragmatism, to this pragmatic product of a worldview? A caricature! I say this, as I said, out of pure fact, not out of any antipathy. For this pragmatism, truth is only of value insofar as one connects concepts and ideas in the spiritual, which are actually only brackets, only bands that bind together the external sensual facts, so that one can find one's way in the external sensual world. Truth has no meaning in itself, has no value in itself.

A person, for example, commits an act; he has thoughts. All this is expressed. We seek the soul for thoughts and actions. The soul is a real being for us. And as we grow together with the truth, the soul itself becomes a reality for us, it is grasped as a reality.

For pragmatism, the soul is a concept that was formed to orient oneself, to hold together the otherwise disintegrating thoughts of man as with a bracket. Truth is what is useful if one wants to understand the world. - The pragmatist forms concepts and ideas with a view to usefulness, so that he can find his way in the world.

One has only to compare this with what lives in the characterized summit of German intellectual life, and one will be able to get an idea of the spiritual world position of the German within the developmental history of humanity.

But now something else comes. If you look at Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, they are great, important minds, geniuses; they represent the coming together of man with the secrets of the world from three different sides: from the side of will, from the side of thought, and from the side of feeling. If anyone today still thinks – and most people do, in fact, think – that it must be so, that they are difficult [to read and understand], then I may well express my conviction that there is a way to present what these spirits have achieved in such a form that even the simplest mind can grasp what it is about, if it only wants to. These spirits can be fruitfully employed in schools; [that they cannot be fruitfully employed there] is merely a prejudice. But the peculiar thing that confronts one when one contemplates these spirits, esteemed attendees, is that in their triplicity something like a unity hovering over them asserts itself! One has the feeling that something is being expressed in three ways, invisibly prevailing over the three. It is what one might call: the German folk spirit itself.

Amiel - again the French Swiss - has sensed something of the fact that the German folk spirit itself seeks to grow together in the souls with the innermost reason for things. Therefore Amiel says:

“Perhaps only the Germanic spirit has the need to think for itself, to search for the very basis of things.”

Amiel therefore goes on to say:

“The German spirit, like the collective inspiration, passes into these characteristic personalities; it speaks through them.”

Therefore, dear attendees, it could happen that personalities actually came along, personalities whose work is largely forgotten today. Therefore, I may speak today by wanting to reopen this as if it were a faded, forgotten pursuit of the development of German thought. Personalities who are largely forgotten today, they appear after the great personalities just mentioned. And the strange thing is that, while these personalities are smaller minds, less ingenious, after the three greats, they even show greater achievements in the field of spiritual searching, more penetrating achievements than the great ones who preceded them. Of course, the great ones need stimulation; but the lesser ones who follow usually achieve greater things, at least more penetrating things, from what has once been stimulated within German intellectual development. They are closer to the soul's inner search for the concrete spiritual world, for the search for spiritual entities that can be found with the characterized sense, just as one finds concrete external natural objects and natural facts through the external senses.

And among these lesser spirits is the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Certainly, there are not many today who still occupy themselves with this Immanuel Hermann Fichte; but Immanuel Hermann Fichte – to mention only that – already stands there and says: the human being whom we observe with our outer senses, the human being who is made of flesh and blood, is bound to the perishable earthly in terms of his material and his powers. But in this human being there is another human being. This other human being – I mentioned him earlier in these lectures. People still laugh about it a lot today. But they will not always laugh! That other person, whom Immanuel Hermann Fichte calls the “ethereal man”, is a supersensible, higher person who has certain higher powers through which he is just as connected to the eternal spiritual aspect of existence, to the whole universe, as his perishable body is bound here to the physical-sensory powers of the earth. And the etheric body, which Hermann Immanuel Fichte assumes, is what first builds the physical body!

And another spirit can appear before us, again more or less forgotten, but no less significant and no less characteristic for the innermost freedom and for the innermost strengthening of the forces of German intellectual life: that is Troxler. Who still knows him today? But how he stands before him who got to know him! Troxler wrote his beautiful lectures on a world view in the 1840s. In them, we see emphasized, again and again, how the human being who stands before us with his senses lives within a spiritual world, a spiritual human being who has a spiritual world around him just as the sensual human being has a sensual world around him. Troxler speaks of abilities that the soul has, which are only hidden in ordinary life. Troxler speaks of what he calls the “super-spiritual sense”.

What does he mean by that? When Troxler speaks of the super-spiritual sense, he means that the senses we usually call that and that have different organs are not the only organs of perception for humans; but that humans can perceive another world with new organs, with new senses, with purely spiritual senses, which is just as full of content as the external physical world.

I have said here before that many people today believe that there is a spiritual world in general. And anyone who bandies a few pantheistic terms about, thinking they are talking about a spiritual world – spirit, spirit and more spirit – is merely bandying abstract terms! Spiritual science speaks of the individual spiritual beings that can be seen; just as one does not always say only “nature, nature, nature!” when faced with the external physical world, but rather “lilies, tulips, carnations” and so on. Specifically, one shows what physical nature produces individually. In the same way, one can show what spiritual nature shows individually. This is what Troxler means when he speaks of the 'super-spiritual sense'. And then he speaks of the 'supersensible spirit', which is not dependent on sensuality, but which knows itself within the spiritual, which feels itself as a body within the spiritual.

But Troxler goes even deeper in his discussion of this spiritual, this higher human being, who goes through births and deaths. And it is wonderful how Troxler – not in an abstract, indefinite way – addresses the higher human being in a very definite way. Even if this is a faded, forgotten tone in the development of German thought, it lives in it. And whether one notices what is alive there or not is certainly important for understanding; but even if one has not noticed it, it lives in the development of German thought and will be noticed! It will celebrate its resurrection as an actual spiritual science!

Then Troxler sees that in the human soul, insofar as it experiences itself between birth and death in the outer physicality, three forces live - as the most beautiful forces according to Troxler's world of vision. First there is the power of faith - that which man has as the power of faith. What a person has as love power, he has it as the power of his soul, but in the soul, insofar as this soul lives in the body. Behind the power of faith, however, there is another, higher power for the soul itself, and Troxler calls this spiritual hearing. That is to say, he believes that the human being can develop the outer form, so to speak, the shell for a spiritual hearing, through which the human being, when he becomes aware of it, can perceive the language of spiritual beings, which speak of the eternal secrets of existence. Thus, faith appears as the outer shell of a much deeper power, an eternal power in man. Spiritual hearing is love, the power of love, which expresses itself in the body as the most beautiful, greatest flowering of the human soul. Nevertheless, for Troxler this is only the outer expression of the power of spiritual touch, of spiritual feeling. The one who loves has the most beautiful flowering of human existence on earth. For him, love is the shell for the powers of which he can become aware, which extend the spiritual organs in the material world so that he can touch the spiritual world as he touches physical things with his physical senses of touch.

And what lives in us as the power of hope is in turn the shell for Troxler, the power of spiritual vision.

So that Troxler sees a higher person in the ordinary person - a higher person who has a spiritual sense just as the physical person has a physical hearing; who has a spiritual feeling just as the physical person has a physical feeling and who has a spiritual vision, a spiritual soul. And that we can be seeing, loving and hearing people in the body, that is for Troxler because, when we go through the gate of death, our soul goes out of the body. The power of faith then appears as spiritual hearing, the power of love as spiritual touch, the power of hope as spiritual strength.

It is in this spirit that Troxler also expresses the following very beautifully. He knows that, in terms of feeling, we are closer to things on a human and spiritual level than with the mere abstract mind. But one can develop such thoughts that are just as close to the direct experience of the thing as feelings usually are. Nor does Troxler seek a sentimental mysticism. This is foreign to the essentially German nature! That vague, hazy sentimentality of mysticism is not part of the German character; it is also foreign to Troxler. But Troxler nevertheless speaks of “thoughts felt” - of thoughts that, like feelings, live as thoughts in the soul. He speaks of “intelligent feeling” and of sensitive thoughts - thoughts that touch the spiritual life!

Troxler is completely imbued with this view. And he once speaks of how he feels in harmony with the entire spiritual life of the German people through such a view, insofar as this spiritual life has appeared in great personalities after Christ. There Troxler says once - I will read these words to you myself:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the higher inner man... In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire internal spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the external one on his spirit body. Lavater writes more and thinks the same; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonn under-skirt and the Platner soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body-skirt and , we also hear him asking: “What is the purpose of and where did these extraordinary abilities and desires come from that lie dormant in us, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cutting through our earthly shell? ... In the stony limbs of

of man

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

says Troxler further.

"cite a myriad of similar ways of thinking and creating, which in the end are only different perceptions and representations in which... the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man is contained.

Troxler also speaks of the possibility of a science of man on the path of knowledge he sought, through which – to use his own terms – the “super-spiritual sense” in union with the “supernatural spirit” can grasp the supernatural essence of man in his “anthroposophy”.

Troxler cites these [individual personalities], and many others could be cited who, entirely from the essence of German national identity, sought the way to the real, true spiritual world. And before Troxler's [inner eye] stood a certain science. He thought: When man observes man himself with his senses and explains this observation with his mind, which is connected to the senses, then anthropology arises – the science of man through the senses. But anthropology arises from man observing man as a sensual being; but the spiritual man, the higher man with the awakened senses that we have already spoken of, can also observe man; then a higher science arises. In 1835, Troxler spoke beautifully of this higher science, as anthropology is, saying:

Although it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... must reveal itself in every anthroposophy... must reveal itself, is moving upwards, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts it with as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

This German spiritual life developed entirely out of the German national character. And is it not wonderful to experience such a phenomenon as this: In the 50s of the last century, a simple pastor in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck published a simple little book, a wonderful little book that is at the height of spiritual science, that stands apart from all materialism, but also from all mere intellectual and conceptual considerations, that sets out to consider the human soul in such a way that it can grasp spiritual reality.

Some of the simple Rocholler writing, which is simply written for seeking circles, may seem fantastic, but that does not matter; what matters is that we have here a simple person, at the pinnacle of education, leading a way into the spiritual worlds. It is the intention that counts. That is why intentions such as this little book, which was published in Waldeck in 1856, are so infinitely important. And anyone who might think that I am choosing to present these phenomena in order to prove something is quite mistaken.

However, over the past few decades, circumstances have developed in such a way that even the vast majority of scholars were numbed by what Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had created, and descended from this height, thinking: the one-sided, materialistic Darwinism had proved powerful, the French materialism had proved powerful.

But what I am characterizing is not something that can be explained away by German intellectual life alone; rather, hundreds and hundreds of such phenomena could be cited. When people actually become aware of this, they will see the depth of German insight that can be drawn from German national character. For that is what really strives for a German world view, from German intellectual life.

Perhaps it may be mentioned, just as an aside, how profound these things actually are. Who among physicists, overwhelmed by French mechanism and English utilitarian philosophy, does not laugh inwardly when he praises them outwardly? I may well speak about the matter, for more than thirty years have passed since I endeavored to bring out the deep significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors in opposition to that theory of colors which is completely overwhelmed by Newtonism and by mechanism in general. Whenever you talk to a modern physicist about Goethe's theory of colors, all you get is, “Goethe's theory of colors doesn't tell you anything.”

This is quite understandable for someone who is familiar with today's circumstances; but there is something here. And that is that Goethe, through his direct coexistence with the mystery of the color spectrum, has created a tremendous work about nature and dared to oppose the intellectual appropriation by the British in Newton, and that the world has not understood it. But the chapter has yet to be written: Goethe - also in the theory of colors - is right against Newton, when one will grasp even more deeply what Fichte calls Germanness within Europe.

I could point to many other minds. As I said, you only need to pick them out. For example, I could point out a soul researcher - Schultz-Schultzenstein is his name, that is certainly a German name: Schultz-Schultzenstein - who tries to place the soul life of man under the concept of “rejuvenation” in the 1850s of the last century. Schultzenstein was able to offer some wonderful insights! He said that the human soul can only be properly understood in its life here between birth and death by observing the experiences it has as feelings and thoughts at the various stages of its life. And as it progresses, one can follow how the soul, like a previous skin, sheds what has already been experienced, and something continuous, something alive is renewed and rejuvenated within the soul.

I can point to another mind, whose literary activity also began in the 1850s and who died unnoticed in 1880. In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” - [...] already in the first edition, which appeared in 1900 - I referred to Karl Christian Planck. He was a mind that was aware of how it created from German national character. Who knows him! But that does not matter, because what was in him as a force is at work in the German character, is at work in Central Europe and brings forth what belongs to the best life in Central Europe.

I would like to mention just one thing to show Karl Christian Planck's originality. Today, from the point of view of natural science, anyone who believes that they understand everything – to look at it the way the French look at the earth, the way the English observer looks at the earth, the way the geological observer looks at the earth – they look at the universe that consists of matter. For Planck, such an observer of the earth is like someone who would look at a tree only in terms of the trunk and the wood, and not in terms of the essence of the tree, the leaves, the blossoms and the fruits! For Planck, we do not see the earth in its entirety if we do not also see the whole human being on the earth. Planck looks at the earth as a spirit would, from the outside. And in what the geologist sees, we see only part of the earth, like the trunk, the wood of the tree, but nothing else of the nature of the earth. For Karl Christian Planck, the Earth is not only a living being, but a living, spiritualized living being. And what the physical human being himself is – as a flower, as a fruit – that belongs to the essence of the Earth. – A spiritual – Goethe would say – a spiritual worldview. And Christian Karl Planck is aware that he comes to such a spiritual worldview from the depths of the German people. Planck already expresses this beautifully in the 1860s. He has written several books; the books he has written breathe the breath of such a worldview. In 1864, in his book “Grundlinien einer Wissenschaft der Natur” (Foundations of a Science of Nature), he expresses beautifully how he is aware that he has come to his view, which sees the spirit in nature, from the depths of the German essence. I will read the words to you myself:

What power

writes Planck

deep-rooted prejudices from the previous view from his

the author's

writing, the author is fully aware of this; but just as the work itself, despite all the unfavorable circumstances, which, according to the author's

situation and professional position,

a work of this kind has been opposed, but has fought its way to its realization and its path into the public, so he is also certain that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

What our medieval poetry has unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation as the times mature. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which was met with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his Parzival)

In 1864, before Wagner, these words were truly written!

finally, in the strength of its unceasing striving, it attains the highest; it looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which is attained by its hero, that conversely receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.

Karl Christian Planck died at the age of eighty. He left behind a writing that he called “The Testament of a German”; the first edition was published in 1881; the second edition by Diederichs Verlag in 1912. Who has dealt with it?

Well, people had other things to do! For example, they had to deal with the books published by the same publishing house by a man who lives in a rigid spirit - of course, that is not meant as a criticism of him at all; they also dealt with the books by the French philosopher - his name is still Bergson - a French name! He is the one who, since the beginning of the war, has not found enough defamatory words for the German worldview and German intellectual life. I think I actually said last year that this Bergson kept saying to his Frenchmen in Paris: the Germans once had a significant intellectual life, but now they have completely degenerated; all that can be seen is their mechanistic life. I said last year that in earlier times, good Henri Bergson would recite Novalis and Goethe and Schiller to you, in a time when he might not yet have called it “mechanical.” It cannot be emphasized enough. One looked out into the world with admiration. Not only now, during the war and the period of hatred – I have also tried to point out before what Bergson's “philosophy” is like.

A special feature of Bergson's philosophy is the following: He comes up with an idea; but he puts it forward in a light-hearted way. It consists in saying that one does not proceed correctly when one looks at the development of the world in such a way that one regards the subordinate beings as the origin of what man descends from, because one must start from man. That is indeed a very good thought: we must start from man. Man is the most original thing before any other being of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdom existed. This is not understood today, but it is nevertheless founded in the writing on the reorganization of the world view of Bergson.

This also emerged in Planck's work: before the other things were there, man was there, albeit in different forms, and then he pushed away certain things that he could not use in his development, and so man came into being by excluding the plant and animal kingdoms. Just as man secretes his bones inwards, so that which is placed at the top, the plant kingdom, the mineral kingdom, secretes itself out of itself. This is a thought, esteemed attendees, that will become established in German intellectual life once the material colorations of Darwinism have been refuted and correctly illuminated.

All right, Bergson presents this; but I was able to show – as I said, just before the war, so that people would not think that it is only under the influence of the war events that things are now being characterized as they are here – I was able to show that precisely this idea, which – in a somewhat simplified form – the French philosopher Henri Bergson – that this idea, which already in the 1870s, 1882 [published], lived in the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss – also a faded, forgotten aspiration of German intellectual life – was powerfully and energetically advocated by Preuss!

I am quoting a few words in which I have cited this Prussian, this German view of the matter; I am quoting these words from Pruss's book “Geist und Stoff” - 1899 in second edition already published. It says:

"It may therefore be time to establish a [different] doctrine of the origin of the organic species, which is not only based on one-sidedly established propositions from descriptive natural science, but is also in full agreement with the other laws of nature, which are at the same time also laws of human thought. A doctrine, at the same time, that is free of any hypothetization and is based only on strict conclusions from scientific observations in the broadest sense; a doctrine that rescues the species concept according to actual possibility, but at the same time adopts the concept of evolution as proposed by Darwin and seeks to make it fruitful in its realm.

The center of this new doctrine is man, the only species on our planet that recurs: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers started with natural objects and then went so astray that they could not find the way to man, which Darwin only managed in the most miserable and thoroughly unsatisfactory way by seeking the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals, while the naturalist would have to start with himself as a human being, in order to gradually return to humanity through the whole realm of being and thinking.

It was not by chance that human nature emerged from the development of all earthly things, but by necessity. Man is the goal of telluric processes and every other form that emerged alongside him borrowed its features from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos...

When its germs had arisen, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary power to produce further human germs. What did arise became animal or plant...

and so on. Bergson, the Frenchman, either does not know this German predecessor – which, in the case of a philosopher, would of course be just as big a mistake as if he knew him and did not name him; but the latter is to be assumed in the case of Bergson! He accuses today's Germans of mechanism! In the meantime, it has been possible to show that entire pages in Bergson's books have been copied from the Germans, whom he now disowns. Entire pages of arguments have been copied from Schelling and Schopenhauer by Henri Bergson! This is perhaps not a mechanical way of constructing intellectual life.

I would like to say: With something like this in the background, Germany's enemies now dare, insofar as they are represented by such personalities, to defame and belittle the German essence. But precisely from what is now at stake, in the world-historical development, this German essence will learn to assert that which lies at the bottom of its being, also in world-historical becoming.

Dear attendees, what is happening now – before world history – needs little saying to characterize it as one might imagine an objective act is characterized: There are enemies surrounding Central Europe. One need only mention a few figures that will speak strongly in the future, when things will be seen differently than Germany's enemies see them now: 777 million people, not counting the Italians, stood around Central Europe facing a group of 150 million. 777 million against 150 million. Do they need to be envious of this Central Europe? Well, the property of these 777 million people covers 68 million square kilometers, compared to the 6 million square kilometers of property owned by the 150 million in Central Europe. And these 777 million – multiplied by Italy – against these 150 million, they are in a position where they not only want to fight with weapons, but also want to have the better part of the rest of the world, want to starve the 150 million people. And leading people - people called “great personalities” from Germany's side - they indulge in the most vicious accusations and slanders of the spiritual life that has emerged in the 6 million square kilometers in the middle of Europe and show how little they understand of what is alive there.

Besides Bergson, there is, for example, the French philosopher Boutroux – shortly before the war, he was still traveling around in Germany, even giving lectures in German about the close scientific relationship between Germans and Frenchmen! Now he is saying things like this to his fellow Parisians: The Germans imagined that they had come to the end of all searching. With this, they also imagined that they were at the center of the divine order of the world and that they could rule over all men. [...]

We do not need to fall into this tone; but it is necessary to point out such facts and to get to know the facts. After all, Boutroux also managed – well, the Frenchman is witty – to make a joke not too long ago: the Frenchman, the Englishman and the German are talking about the pursuit of a worldview, of knowledge of external things; Boutroux said to his partner: the Frenchman, if he wants to get to know a camel, goes to the menagerie, looks at a camel and then describes it. The Englishman goes to the area where camels live, looks at the camel and then describes it. The German neither goes to the menagerie to see a camel nor to the area where camels live in distant lands, but goes into his room and studies the camel in its inwardness in its being and creates the camel in himself out of his being. The French are witty! Just this joke about Boutroux comes from Heinrich Heine!

And so much more could be said. It must be said: the German does not really need to fall back into the ways of those around him! But the German has all the more need to engage with that which is currently the best part of his nature in the pursuit of knowledge. The German nature will also overcome those prejudices which arise from the fact that, under the influence of French and English materialism, a person who searches for spiritual science is still considered today to be a dreamer, a person who does not live in reality: Oh, when you see someone like Planck or [someone like] Preuss – well, these people can spin theories, but to engage with reality, to see what lives in reality, that's what the “practitioners” are for; someone like Planck, you can't use him for life!

I could give many examples; I will just mention one in connection with Planck, since I was allowed to discuss him: about 35 years ago (Planck died in 1881) he wrote words that I will even read out. He was not a diplomat; he was not a politician; he was not one of those preachers who believe that they have a complete understanding of the workings of the world, that they have “lived it all,” who know how to speak authoritatively about everything from a broad perspective and disdain those who live only in the spiritual world. He was none of these. He was a simple man of vision! But a man who was able to see into the course of events. And what he developed before 1881 is written in his Testament of a German. He died in 1881. In it he wrote about what presented itself to him in the development of Europe. And he looked at it with discerning eyes. He wrote that war must come. And about this war he wrote the following words:

“If a people, universalistic and central by its very nature, is now in the sharpest contrast to its earlier history, unites to form a pure nation-state and, for all others, increases to the highest military armament, what else can be the consequence in a time of the highest national aspirations than ultimately the most comprehensive clash?”

So says the “impractical man of world view”! How many people who were practically inside the circumstances did not believe, when the war broke out, that the Italian would also stand against Central Europe! But the impractical man of conviction knew how to say this in 1881. Not only will the Russian East rise up against Central Europe, but as in the past we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South.

“It is not only the antagonism of political interests that must provoke him,”

"but, as it is now becoming increasingly clear, above all the conflict of economic interests in their still nationally bound, still inorganically opposed form. And the more the contradictions and evils that this state of affairs brings about in relation to the universalistic increase of means of communication, which have already been discussed earlier, must come to the fore, the sharper the tension that arises on all sides as a result.

And to this is added another contrast, in which the inherent one-sidedness of our Western culture has created an enemy, and which, by the nature of things, must become hostile above all to the German spirit. From the very beginning, as we saw, Western Christianity and its striving for a full, humanly present mediation of the divine content has gone hand in hand with the rigid otherworldliness and bondage of the Oriental and Byzantine essence, for which ecclesiastical and political power and authority directly coincided. In this rigid unity, the Christian East remained just as unfreely confined as, conversely, in the West, the free national development overgrew religious unity and pushed it into the background. But the one-sided, secular, and outwardly material character of Western culture, which is rooted in this, has also made it possible for the unfree East to appropriate these external cultural means without having to absorb the deeper, free, spiritual side of that development. On the contrary, it only helped him to confront the West, which had fallen into a one-sided national separate existence, all the more consciously in the self-confidence of his distinctive religious and political unity, and thus, in view of the still unfinished state of other Slavic tribes and the disintegrating Turkish Empire, to claim an even more far-reaching significance for himself. And precisely because of this, by the very nature of things, he becomes an opponent of the nation, which also in this respect has its central and unifying human and universal calling, of the Germans, and especially of that empire, which for a long time has based its existence precisely on the comprehensive interweaving of German and foreign elements.

No political cleverness, no love of peace on the part of Germany can prevent this hostile clash within the current merely national order. For more powerful than all cleverness is the nature of the circumstances; and already now, despite the friendly attitude of Germany and Austria, the hostile mood of the Russian East is only emerging all the more clearly because one could not give it a free hand in everything, but had to set a certain goal. And if it comes to a fight one day, then, however much we have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not stand by our side, but as in the east, we will also have to defend ourselves in the west and south at the same time; on all sides, national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst.

But it is precisely the realization that in this last and most difficult struggle the completely inadequate nature of all previous purely national orders comes to light, that above all the universal position of the German nation, linked as it is to a series of foreign elements, is completely incompatible with it and could only lead to unending struggles. This realization will give this bloodiest of struggles its forever decisive significance and will open the minds of the nations, which are now still trapped in dull externalities, to their ultimate and lasting calling. The realization will dawn, amidst blood and tears, that it is never the mere nation-state and its commercial society that can bring peace and reconciliation, but only that of the universal law of vocation, that only in it lies the renewing rebirth for all the inner wounds, for the relationship of states to one another, for the degenerate conditions of the Orient, and for the corruption and externalization of one's own education. If the first struggle, which was intended to prevent our national awakening, has brought it to completion precisely for that reason, then conversely the second, which is caused by the very inadequacy of all this national order, will also lead beyond it forever to the humanly universal goal.

It is from the German spirit that a renewal of humanity must come, so that there may be a victory over that which lives in a sense indicated by these facts and which has come from an un-German spirit, especially in more recent times, and which can be characterized by saying: the power of incompetence that crushes all justified striving must be recognized. The German spirit is strong and vigorous and will recognize this in this area and will heal the world in this area when it becomes aware of what still lives in German intellectual life as a forgotten pursuit in many cases.

We have been able to glance over to the West on many an occasion. Finally, let us glance over to the East with a few words. This whole East, yes, how does it present itself? Central Europe?

The German essence: can it be characterized in relation to the West in such a way that one can say that one truly does not need to belittle the West in any way. One can know that the scientific spirit emanated from Italy before the dawn of the newer intellectual life. This scientific spirit has emerged from the south. One can know that the French spirit also gave rise to the rational conception of the world; that the sense of utility emerged from the English spirit, the view of the world in such a way that everything is placed in the utility. But just how far removed this British spirit is from the German spirit, well, you can tell by the fact that if someone wanted to try to characterize Fichte's theory of knowledge, where he repeatedly attempts to describe the self feeling and experiencing itself in the world spirit, if you are able to fully penetrate this field of knowledge, it would look strange linguistically alone...

If I say: “I represent the I” – not even that could be adhered to, [instead of the German word “ich” the English “i”] – not even that could be adhered to, that one [in English] goes from the lower-case “i”, as one writes in German, to the capital “I”, when you have experienced the “I” – Fichte calls it “reproduction”, the progression of culture in the “I” – within yourself, how should you call it when you want to move from the small “I” to the large “I”, since grammatically the personal “I” is written “I” everywhere.

You could say: the German essence relates to the Western essence in the same way that the Italians were the contemplatives, the French shaped reason, the utilitarian principle shaped the English; but the principle of internalization is part of the German essence. The Italian looks at the world. By looking at the world, he says: the world is quite right; but it just needs to be reshaped a little, it needs to be made to correspond to our ability, not a compulsory language, but a word that has been experienced. It is precisely when you look deep, deep inside, especially into the best sides of intellectual life, that this word is true.

The Frenchman says: This world is also worth / gap in the transcript ]. The Englishman says: [gap in the transcript] The German says: I also like the world. And within himself, he wants to create a small image of the world. The Russian, yes, one only needs to think of such characteristic figures as Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky's “The Brothers Karamazov”. But this type of Karamasov character is poured out over the whole of the East in the nineteenth century. [...] Ivan Karamasov himself says: I would still accept God; but I cannot accept the world from God. The world, in the Russian sense, is actually something that should be replaced by another, namely by the one that is made for the Russian people.

It is a seemingly radical word, but anyone who follows the development of Russian thought in the nineteenth century will find it to be true. For it is indeed strange: from the first decade of the nineteenth century in Russia it is emphasized that in the Russian countryside there lives - Dostoyevsky said it, for example, despite the greatness of Dostoyevsky, one must also bear in mind the greatness of Dostoyevsky -: the Russian person is the one in all people who, through his universal humanity, must place his spiritual life in the place of others. And man faces the world in such a way that one can say: in the nineteenth century, he is increasingly coming to say to himself: European intellectual life is decrepit and has had its day. That must be eradicated. Russian intellectual life would be young; it must dominate. The Russian language means joy, means love. The West – and that includes Central Europe, but also France, Italy, Spain and England – means struggle, means war, means selfishness. This is the underlying tone of all [Russian] intellectual life in the nineteenth century.

Outwardly it does not appear so strongly; but it is so. Only strange: Who is then actually the first to have pronounced the nature of the Slav, from which they then want something quite different than lies in the Russian national spirit? They claim that a noble man spoke of it first, and they have built on that. Who was it that first characterized the matter so beautifully, coined a word, an idea, on which they then based the whole of the nineteenth century? Herder! Herder was basically the first Slavophile. But the word of a Slavophile has degenerated into megalomania. And it came to pass that it resounded again and again: Europe is decrepit, and Russian intellectual life must take the place of European intellectual life.

Dear attendees, as I said, just one more fact: in 1885 a book was published that was written by the Russian Yushakov. Yushakov stands on a somewhat different cultural ground than the one I have just mentioned – the literary counter-image, presented for that which has emerged up to the present day and up to our current terrible events – Yushakov, 1885, a remarkable book! He does not look to the West, but to the East, to Asia, to the Asian peoples. Now, as Jusakhov says in his, as I said, remarkable book: These poor Asians, they have shown themselves how they have gradually struggled from their cultural life up to the corresponding present culture, they have shown it as the struggle between two spiritual beings. But this struggle represents a reality in Asia. According to Yushakov, the two spiritual powers under whose influence the Asians were, were represented as the good Ormuzd and the evil Ahriman.

Ahriman was always the one who was the negation of Ormuzd. Jushakow says to the Iranian peoples, to whom the Persians and Indians also belonged: Ahriman, the evil spirit, took away these fruits of both material and spiritual culture from them.

But what have the European peoples of the West done? - Jushakow asks. They have squeezed out of those Asian peoples what those peoples had acquired under the influence of the good Ormuzd! Russian culture must intervene here. Russian culture is the only one capable – Jusakhov says, I am not saying this – of lovingly embracing the Asian peoples. Two powers stand in the world that will bring happiness in the future – and above all happiness to the Asian peoples; these two powers are – I am not saying this, Jusakhov is saying it! , these two powers are: the Russian peasant and the Cossack, the two great representatives of [Russian] humanity - says Yushakov in 1885. And he does not go to Asia to bring love to the Asians, to bring love to the Asians in turn, sooner or later the evil that the Western peoples have brought over Asia, which he could not really talk about in those days in the case of Germany, will be brought to light.

Strangely enough, the book is called “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. And there Yushakov says in relation to this: The English show by their treatment of the Asian peoples as if they believed that these Asian peoples were only dependent on this unloving English love. And then Jushakow says how he imagines the relationship between his people and the English. He says to England - these are his words, his own words:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland - I can only rejoice that

my Russian fatherland [according to Yushakov]

is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as splendid as it is sad.

Thus in 1885 the Russian Yushakov on England.

He is probably not primarily concerned with the alliance between Russia and England, but with restoring the blessings of Ormuzd to the Asians. Russia will now cross over to Asia, says Yushakov, because in Russia the alliance between the all-fertility developing farmer and the all-chivalry bearing Cossack is rooted in a deep culture, Yushakov believes, and they will prefer to spread Russian spirituality across Asia first.

Thus writes one of those minds that thought this way in Russia and already expressed it in the 1820s – in 1829: Western Europe and Central Europe are decrepit, have outlived their usefulness. But we in Russia, we have the right to bring this Europe under our rule. And when we have it – so says Kireyevsky – when we have it, then we will share what we have with the others, insofar as it is right.

This is not only the “right” thing to do in the political sphere, since the falsified “Testament of Peter the Great”, but also in the entire intellectual and cultural life. And what is going on through this Russophile: the excellent Russian philosopher Solowjow has said it himself. And you can read this in my book 'Thoughts During the Time of War' – it is not available at the moment, but it will be published again in a while. Solowjow himself said it: what is alive in Russian intellectual life comes from what one could call: Russia still has a long way to go before she attains the maturity of her own nature; for Russia is still today, in fact, in the midst of it, thoroughly in the midst of unclear mysticism. That is all. One has to be 'mystical' if one is to be able to say: This German spiritual life seeks the tool of mystical endeavor. On the contrary: fully conscious thoughts, light-imbued, thought-filled views, clear views; the German seeks an image of the world in order to shape his own being as similarly as possible to this image of the world.

The other nations should not be disparaged. But what can they recognize that the German strives for, that he strives for consciously, so that he makes his own image of man similar to the image of the world? The Italian cannot strive for it so consciously if he only strives from his nationality. He would have to be taught this, as it were, by suggestion, so that what is a striving for knowledge in him would have more of an effect than a morality.

The Frenchman wants it more as an intellectual art, to give the mind pleasure, to give the mind a sense of well-being. This is basically something that lies in the fundamental character as a French imprint of the mechanistic view of nature.

The Englishman wants – he would certainly also accept Fichte's science if one could transform its truths into a principle or a machine, if one could place it in the pragmatic order of life, could make pragmatism out of it, as it was mentioned today.

The Russian still needs unclear, hazy mysticism everywhere today. I have already mentioned Ivan Karamazov from Dostoyevsky's work “The Brothers Karamazov”, who is a true representative of the Russian who has absorbed Western European culture. God would be there, yes, God, but in mystical obscurity. And one can say: when the Russian becomes atheistic, he wants a mystical atheist. The Russian can become atheistic, but he almost wants the atheist to be revealed to him by God! You could also teach him Fichte's philosophy, you could also teach him Hegelianism; but then it would have to be found mysteriously on an altar somewhere or at least bear the imprint that it came into the world in a mysterious way!

In short, the various nations surrounding the German nation still stand today in such a way to this German spiritual life that there is truly every reason for the German to become aware of the germs and roots and diversity in his spiritual being! And the fruits and blossoms will come when the German becomes truly aware of this, aware of it precisely through the difficult time of trial in which he is currently mired.

Yes, what has been attempted to be presented in brief, dear attendees, developed on the 6 million square kilometers in the center, compared to the 68 million square kilometers in the surrounding area! And as if by bonds, which are also bonds of the spirit, this Central Europe is held together. The alliance between Germany and Austria is truly such a bond, one that is also based on the commonality of the spiritual life flowing through the two countries, through the two national territories.

I may say this because I have lived in Austria for more than half of my life, almost thirty years, and have participated in all the times of these thirty years in the way in which the German essence must live there in Austria, must live in multiform Austria. I have come to know what it means to take the word of one of the most German of Austrians – Robert Hamerling, the greatest son of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century – and to feel it in the innermost being of someone who grasps the sense of belonging in Central Europe. Robert Hamerling said: “Austria is my fatherland; but Germany is my motherland”.

Robert Hamerling, as early as 1862, in his wonderful poem 'Germanenzug', spoke of this inwardness of the German world-view. Does it not appear to us in a beautiful form, this inwardness of the German world-view, when we see, for example, how Jakob Böhme, in very early times, speaks of how the German strives for knowledge, but in such a way that he wants to use it to enter into the spirit of the world? He expresses it so beautifully:

“When you look at the depths”

he means the depths of heaven

“And the stars and the earth, you see your God. And in you live and are you also. And the same God rules you also.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge is in this God. And when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

Fine words! If we take this, which I have tried to illustrate today: it turns out that in this internalization of the German essence – in this desire to grasp what, as divine spirituality, permeates and animates the world within one's own inner being – lies the profound world-historical calling of the German. And it is so intrinsic to the German that it really stands out like a second wave in the great upheaval of the human race. If we look across to the Orient – looking differently than the Russian Yushakov – then we find in the Asian peoples how they have dreamed of, how they have also once tried to penetrate into the spiritual that lives and breathes through the world. They tried to bring the I so close that it was as if asleep, [that] the actual human inner being was asleep, and so the human being could merge into what the life of the world spirit in the principle of the All interweaves and lives through the world. Now that the greatest impulse for the evolution of the Earth has been introduced – the Christ Impulse – the Asiatic type is no longer the one that can dominate the human race.

The German nature has found the right way to penetrate into the spiritual world in the sense of the Christ impulse, so that the ego is not eradicated as it was in Asia; [but that which is sought in the future of the world as a divine-spiritual, that is achieved through the elevation, through the strengthening - not through the weakening - of the ego. But the I is precisely exalted, strengthened, in order to grow together with the whole world. Thus ancient human striving continues in the newest form, as in historical vocation the essence of the German spirit.

This is beautifully shown by Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, in his “Germanenzug”, in which he describes in beautiful words how the ancient Germanic peoples, the ancestors of the Germans, once migrated from Asia to Europe, so that we take part in it, that we take part in the setting sun, in the mild twilight that spreads; and when everything sinks into a deep sleep, only one remains awake: the blond Teut. While everyone else sleeps, he is occupied with the thoughts of the future German being, the German task. The genius, the spirit of the German people, appears before the blond Teut and speaks to him of the future of the German people. This is how Robert Hamerling feels it and expresses it through the genius of the past to the blond Teut just as the Germanic peoples, the ancestors of the Germans, are crossing over from east to west. Thus speaks the genius:

"To whom will break the word from soul depths
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly in string sounds
His innermost? Who zich'n the sense so magnificent
Into the heavenly blue, granite hieroglyphics
Of the soul's upsurge from the narrowness of life?
Who finally ties the strands
Of the inquisitive thought to the stars
So boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Who is so high, so deep, his urge, his hunch?
Who grasps the near and far so faithfully?
Where is every earthly and heavenly zone
reflected as in your thinking, O Teuton?

And how related, but on a higher level, appears the spiritual search for the divine reason of the world. Here, too, the genius of the German people speaks to the blond Teut as if through Robert Hamerling's mouth, from that which I just hinted at through the words of Jakob Böhme, where devotion becomes knowledge, where devotion becomes the world view, devotion to the divine spiritual forces of the world. This is how Hamerling has the blond Teut say to the genius of the German people:

"But however proudly you may strive,
Soaring high above other swarms,
You will always retain the ancient, sacred fire:
The dream-filled drunkenness of God
of the ancient Asian homeland. This holy ray, a temple fire, will glow in your chest and soul, remain with you and be your pilot at the helm! You only strive because you love: your most daring thought will be a devotion that seeks to merge with God."

Yes, the German needs to become aware of his German essence. Then he will find the right relationship to the events of the present! For he may trust in that which exists as the source, the root and germ of spiritual striving within the German nation. And whatever has such germs may be felt with hope and confidence that its blossoms and fruits will develop, despite everything that rises in hostility in the world against this spiritual foundation in German development.

I think that a truly objective, not a narrow-minded, consideration of the German nature says this. And the German can rely on such an objective consideration. Then he can also look objectively at the way in which one not only simplifies but also defames what extends over 6 million square kilometers compared to 68 square kilometers.

Anyone who looks at this, at the roots and the hoped-for seeds, blossoms and fruits of the future, may summarize what today's contemplation was, summarize it sentimentally in a few words. Words that are intimately connected with the whole feeling of the German essence, all German essence. They, too, are by Robert Hamerling, and they, too, prove how Central Europe has been welded together from this side and from the other side of the Ore Mountains, but has also been welded together by this common spiritual weaving and essence in this Central Europe.

Therefore, let us conclude today's reflection with a word from Robert Hamerling, the Austrian German, a word that summarizes in a sensitive way what I have tried to bring before your soul in a longer exposition - an unfortunately all too long exposition. Robert Hamerling says out of the sentiment from which he said “Austria is my fatherland, but Germany is my motherland”:

“And if ever the day
Should prove hostile to the German name,
From ocean to ocean shall run
The course of the German spirit!”

Morning Session:

The chairman, Mr. Emil Leinhas, opens the meeting at 9 a.m. Mr. Wilhelm Goyert, Cologne, Mr. Wilh. Salewski, Düsseldorf, Miss Maria Hachez, Stuttgart, Mr. Fritz and Mrs. Ilse Wittenstein, Barmen, Miss Toni Förster, Cologne, Mr. Andreas Grunelius, Freiburg, Miss Erika Linke, Stuttgart, Mrs. Marie Wundt, Düsseldorf, propose the following motion for the agenda:

Agenda

Some members and delegates of the Anthroposophical Society are convinced that the path taken so far offers no possibility of reaching an understanding and overcoming the crisis. The discussion on the first evening showed that there is no general point of view from which a discussion could be fruitful. Even in the leadership, there was a difference of opinion. Mr. Leinhas pointed out that the expected overall report should provide “an orientation”. Mr. Kolisko, on the other hand, understood his report as something that should enable a general discussion, a description of local conditions, and was astonished that the discussion was getting out of hand. It is not possible for the delegates' meeting to continue on this basis.

First of all, the assembly should be presented with the issues on which we all agree and towards which we are all striving: the anthroposophical ideal. The lady from Dresden and Pastor Rittelmeyer tried to do this. This was not taken up by the leadership and did not find fertile ground among the assembled. The call was not designed to create such a situation.

Even if some points are rejected, an attempt could still be made to present the appeal as providing direction for the discussion. But it would have to be read backwards, so to speak. Then the following points would emerge, which could lead to clarification in an organically determined way:

1. Setting out the anthroposophical ideal.
2. Explanation of the basis for communication from person to person in the sense of the Anthroposophical Society. This would lead to
3. A new relationship with Dr. Steiner.
4. Attitude towards the opposition.
5. Statement on the existing institutions, etc.

We believe that this approach is more likely to lead to a general understanding and we request that the leadership of the Assembly of Delegates read this as “agenda” for the meeting.

The motion is put forward for discussion.

Dr. Hans Büchenbacher, Stuttgart: Dr. Kolisko was justified in saying that the meeting did not produce what he had expected after his lecture. The main reason for this, however, is that many friends were not sufficiently aware of the catastrophic situation in society, due to the way the call was formulated and the lecture itself. In the youth movement there was close contact with the Stuttgart office, and in these circles people were informed about the situation. Yesterday afternoon, for example, we had a really fruitful meeting in the Hochschulbund, where we were able to speak positively. The Stuttgart headquarters no longer had any lively connection with the branches. — Out of a sense of routine, the Stuttgart headquarters developed an outward-looking approach that led to unsuccessful events in many places. The anthroposophical impulses were brought to the outside world in such a way that they were met with resistance everywhere. These matters were handled in such a bureaucratic way, as in the military. We have made many enemies as a result, and have certainly not gained any connections with the outside world. On the other hand, in Stuttgart people rightly miss all kinds of branch life. This life has declined more and more, a kind of slumber has set in in many cases, or the evenings have been kept simple in the traditional way. The branches themselves are to blame for this. If in recent years someone who, through studying Dr. Steiner's works, had formed a certain idea of what the Anthroposophical Society should be like, joined such a branch, they often experienced a severe shock that made them want to leave again, or at least stay away from the evenings. It was recognized that the Anthroposophical Society had fallen behind what Dr. Steiner had given, especially in the development of humanity. The golden rule from the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” has been ignored: “When you make a step forward in the knowledge of secret truths, then make three steps forward at the same time in the perfection of your character for the better."

But in many cases, ordinary social morality has been lacking in the branches; the new members were not even introduced to the old members, they had to sit there like strangers. We would have to take it seriously, to strive for the development of the inner human being in an anthroposophical sense, then we would also find the connection with people on the outside. The outside world would have to say, we like the people who represent Anthroposophy.

Above all, however, we here on both sides must now say to each other: Oh well, enmity, quarrels or resentment, that does not exist, we must stand together. If the call and the introductory lecture have already been carried out in such a way that contact with the assembled has not been established, we delegates must try to criticize in all love and show the people of Stuttgart: This is how you can reconnect with us. It is true that the Stuttgart members are in absolute isolation; of course it is a splendid isolation (laughter and strong applause), but they cannot get out of it on their own. And when one knows how hard they have worked in Stuttgart in recent weeks to get out of this catastrophic situation, one must wholeheartedly say: We want to help these people to get out of this isolation. It will work if they express themselves in such a way that they are carried by the consciousness of striving for an anthroposophical humanity.

Mr. Alfred Reebstein, Karlsruhe, wishes to speak from the same feeling as the previous speaker. He asks for a judgment to be made on the issues at hand. Dr. Steiner had to say at the congress: I have often spoken, but people have not listened. Many would better see the seriousness and terrible implications if it were announced what Dr. Steiner said about these things in the two lectures here.

Mr. Alfred Überhahm, Breslau: We need guidelines for the Society to work on. Dr. Steiner gave two four-line sayings as a cosmic cultic act. This has not been put into practice. The speaker proposes that these words may be spoken in the branches.

Mr. Leinhas hands over the chair to Dr. Palmer.

Mr. Emil Leinhas, Stuttgart: One can only agree with what Dr. Büchenbacher said. The participants were not satisfied with yesterday's general discussion. We are already obliged not only to criticize, but to take action ourselves and make things better.

Mr. Leinhas suggests dropping the motions because there will be opportunities to speak on the individual topics during the discussion. He asks to tie in with Dr. Kolisko's presentation because everyone is concerned. He reminds us of the importance of our cause. He then asks not to hold back with criticism. He says that the Central Executive Committee is being made out to be a bogeyman, a laughing stock. Criticism should be directed at this. It need not be unfruitful if everyone is filled with a holy zeal for the cause. It should be added what should have been done and how it can continue.

Mr. Albert Steffen, Dornach: It is not my intention to be critical here, because I am convinced that this self-destruction is of no use at all. We have known about these things for a long time and should now start to speak more positively. I believe that, above all, it should be said that anthroposophy as such should give our society its configuration, that is, that which Dr. Steiner gives us out of the spiritual should be translated into the real. First of all, it should be said that this anthroposophy has freedom as its basis. It demands of each individual that he seek the impulses for his moral action in his own I. It demands, then, an ethical individualism. “Act so that you are sufficient unto yourself, that you have love for the idea, then it will be possible for the whole to be in harmony!”

The first fundamental requirement of our society is that the individual is a personality and, as such, says “Yes” to himself; as such, has confidence in himself. If he searches within himself, finds creativity and applies this creativity, then the whole of our society will also become more consolidated. — A multitude of creative personalities is necessary first.

It was said at the beginning that our society suffers from the fact that there are so many individualities that do not go together. But if these individualities think, feel and act in accordance with freedom, a whole will come about. We need original people among us, but they must not be mere originals, village or town originals, two-part originals, or a kind of domestic fool. The only way to prevent them from becoming such is for them to absorb anthroposophy as a whole.

Yesterday, a lady said in a very heartfelt way that anthroposophy is a human being. It is a human being and it is the greatest human being. It is a spiritual-soul entity, and we have to absorb this within us so that we do not become loners as personalities. But we can only do this by making the attempt to truly penetrate into the spiritual and soul life, into the supersensible. And in my opinion, the only way to do this is through the exercises, mainly the exercises found in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. This practice, in order to truly penetrate into the spiritual and soul, is the second basic condition of our society. Without it, inner consolidation is not possible at all, and even less so an external one. Above all, this must be demanded of the leading personalities among us.

For example, you all know that Goethe and Schiller were actually natures that were opposed to each other. They were unsympathetic to each other during a certain period of their lives. And the moment when they actually became friends occurred at that meeting of naturalists where Schiller began to talk to Goethe about the primal plant, where Schiller thus began to comprehend the spiritual soul life of the plant. At that moment, Goethe became his friend, and from that point on, the process began that would lead to the tremendous epoch. What Goethe found in the soul and spirit of the primal plant can be found much more easily through the exercises that Dr. Steiner has given us about the plant world. Just imagine if such exercises were carried out in one of our institutes: it would inevitably lead to the people working there becoming friends, to them becoming creative, to what they bring to light radiating out from them into the whole of culture. Nothing radiates from our universities, our lecture halls and laboratories, for example, because the spiritual and soul life is not grasped there among the professors, the lecturers and the students. In those organizations, the connection is found by having an exam ahead of you, that is, through a certain fear. That cannot be the case with us. The only motivation for us can be to seek to penetrate into the spiritual-soul, into the supersensible, as it is presented, for example, in the introductions to Goethe's scientific writings. Dr. Steiner has given such exercises for physicists, for chemists, for physicians, for sociologists, but also for human beings as such. One imagines that in our branches, too, people would really think in a lively way, which is the first exercise; this branch life would flare up again. It cannot flare up in any other way than precisely in this way. At the moment when a person who really brings something from the supersensible world speaks to us, we are a society that has a real life again. You will experience the proof when Dr. Steiner speaks himself. Then all these disputes will disappear and we will feel united among ourselves again. But for that to happen, everyone, especially every leader, would have to become a true disciple of Dr. Steiner in this respect. Or consider, for example, how and why eurythmy has flourished. But only because Dr. Steiner grasped the word as such in such a spiritually appropriate way. That is how one lives eurythmy. That is how it brings this impulse of beauty into our culture. Or think of the Waldorf School, which is to be taken quite positively. What distinguishes the Waldorf School from other schools? That the teachers there have worked something of the spiritual and soul within themselves; that a Waldorf school spirit could arise from this. All of this is very much appreciated.

When I traveled here from Dornach, I was actually very much looking forward to Stuttgart because I knew that I would find important people here. I knew that I would be enriched as a human being and as a poet through them. I was certain that I would find an important philologist here, an important historian, an important scholar of mythology, etc. And I took a notebook with me to take something home. I wanted to enrich myself. By chance, I picked up a notebook that was old, that contained a small diary that I kept before the war, four weeks before the war, when I myself worked on the construction, in which I recorded my great love for the construction, my enthusiasm for carving. I wrote a sentence: It is evening, I am very tired, can hardly move my hand. Then I look at the building again and I feel refreshed. Or I describe how I looked at the building and then went out into the quiet night and felt the stars in a completely new way. This building was a living organism for me. It was what anthroposophy should be for us, namely a spiritual-soul human being to an even greater extent. It was a being. Dr. Steiner once said to me: The building wants to hear something new, it wants lectures in which truly creative people speak. All of us in Dornach felt this building as a being, and we felt its burning down as the loss of a being.

Here, esteemed attendees, I have once again come from Stuttgart _ without actually wanting to _ to one that also seems important to me because it is important not only for Germany but for the whole world. I have the feeling that one should look further, beyond Germany, one should note that the anthroposophical cause has become an international one. We receive letters from Russia. Eminent people come from there to Dornach and tell us what is happening in Moscow, how they are working there, how they are trying to make an impact there. We receive letters from England, from Australia. An Anthroposophical Society has even been formed in New Zealand, which is joining the Dornach Society. All this is tremendously important. Therefore, the German Society, on which so much depends, must now be positive. The consolidation of the Society as a whole depends first and foremost on Germany. If we do not become a strong Society in Germany, the reconstruction of the Goetheanum is endangered; because it makes no sense to have a building if you have no Society.

It has been said that this building will not be so beautiful. Dr. Steiner will carry out this building; it will be a work of his hands and we will love it even if it is not so beautiful. I do not believe that at all. It will be different; in my opinion it will be more fortified against the outside world. It will not be made of wood but of concrete. It will have a stone armor. It will perhaps be more reminiscent of something that could be seen in the catacombs, spiritually and soulfully. It will be a castle. And I would like to end what I have said by asking you to carry this image within you. I believe that if you have this image of this armored structure, then you will also arm yourself. You will become strong. You will be able to repel the enemies. Then, what Dr. Steiner once said, will not matter at all, no matter what these enemies are, we will be armored. And if these enemies come against us with cannons, as Dr. Steiner said, we can be indifferent —- if we only have spirit in us and with it the right to exist! The gods will not abandon us.

Mr. Leinhas resumes the chair: Mr. Steffen has shown that it is possible to speak to the point.

Mrs. Gertrud Müller-Thalwitzer, Königsberg, speaks about the work in eastern Germany and suggests that branches that are close to each other geographically organize themselves together, for example, Danzig and Königsberg. One could also expect something from annual “regional conferences” of individual parts of Germany, since the individual regions of Germany are quite different. Dr. Steiner's cycles, especially the older ones, are often no longer available; making it easier to borrow for branch work would be a welcome task. Then something should be created to secure the material situation of the branches or branch offices; this is particularly important in view of the subversive work of opponents, which could cost some people their livelihoods today simply because they are anthroposophists. It would therefore also be a task to promote a spirit of helpfulness among the members.

She suggested setting up a “main relief fund” for members of the Society in need.

Rudolf Steiner: I do not really want to intervene positively, because I am convinced that in these days what is to happen must arise from the midst of the Anthroposophical Society itself and that, as far as I am concerned, it can only be a matter of a few suggestions, which I could also put forward later. What has prompted me to intervene in the discussion at this particular moment is this: perhaps I can draw attention to some points that would help to make the discussion fruitful. From various comments made in the discussion, it has become clear that our friends are not sufficiently informed about the reason why we have actually come together this time. This could be heard in the discussions, but also in the way that it necessarily had to be spoken. Therefore, I would like to save the positive things I have to say until later, by basing the two lectures I will give on this topic. Tomorrow I will speak about the conditions for community building in an anthroposophical society, and will thus deal in particular with the suggestions that Dr. Rittelmeyer and others have made. The second lecture will also be based on a topic that will arise from further discussion. But I would like to point out that our current meeting can only be fruitful if, on the basis of the realization of imperfections – which are admitted, of course – we move on to a positive development. Therefore, I would also like to suggest, in particular for the discussion of the papers in the next few hours and evenings, to mention some negative aspects, but ones that are intended to lead to something positive.

What has made the work in the Anthroposophical Society so difficult since 1918 has, I believe, been aptly brought out in the discussion, and many a word spoken by Dr. Büchenbacher, for example, could find a profound echo. I would like to take up some of the words that have already been spoken, for example the word that I also use frequently: the isolation caused by the Stuttgart system.

In 1918, under the circumstances you are aware of, the “Federation for the Tripartite Division of the Social Organism” was founded. At its founding, it could well be seen as something that had to be formed out of the intentions of the Anthroposophical Society, in line with the conditions of the time. But initially, within the overall framework of the Anthroposophical Society, work for this Threefolding League was carried out with — if I may put it this way — the apparatus, with the bureaucratic apparatus that has been set up here in Stuttgart for the Threefolding League. After all, what else could one do? But then the following happened: I came here one day and found out that a circular had been sent out a few weeks earlier, in which an appeal had been included to found the “Coming Day”. What had happened back then was a tact error, a tremendous tact error, which had to contribute to what was described earlier: One received a shock when one entered the Anthroposophical Society in 1918/19. And I simply had to point out: the two things must not be confused with each other! For what were the young members to think when they were still dealing with our idealistic things and then received the call to found the “Day to Come”? I therefore had to refuse in the strongest possible terms that such things should happen. I asked the leadership of the “Federation for Threefolding” how this had come about, and they explained to me at the time that it had happened because they only wanted to use one envelope for both. But otherwise they are not so careful about it! For in these hard times of foreign currency, I was recently given an envelope with the comment that something like that should be taken badly: an envelope with which someone received a credit note for 21 marks and which was stamped with 150 marks. It goes without saying that such thoughtlessness would not flourish on a healthy social foundation. I also made further inquiries about these matters to the leaders of the federation and learned that they knew nothing about the whole matter. So I was faced with a democracy that literally led to confusion and could not help myself but to lash out, so to speak, and say: I'm not going to take any more of this! This led to a kind of regeneration of the Federation for Threefolding - according to the personalities, but not in spirit - because what was done then was undertaken out of the same spirit.

I mention this because it shows how the things that were done here out of the intentions of the Anthroposophical Society went awry. That is why I expected that after Dr. Kolisko's lecture someone would stand up and say: We would like to hear from those who are involved in the Stuttgart system, so that they can tell us what they have to say about it! Then further discussion would have been possible. — As things have been since 1918, I was forced to work with the Stuttgart organization — because I could not ignore it once it was there. And the Stuttgart organization isolated itself more and more. But what was the result? Since I could not disavow the Stuttgart system, the result was that I was also isolated. Therefore, in the fall of 1922, I had to talk to Mr. Uehli on December 10th and discuss with the members of the central Committee how things could be different, and that if I came back to Stuttgart, the prominent leaders of the movement would talk to me about how things could be different; otherwise I would be forced to address the members of the Society directly, bypassing the organization, to make things different. — We have been asked to speak “fresh from the liver”, so I will start with that.

The isolation was almost systematic. In September 1921, a congress took place, during which a kind of assembly of the Anthroposophical Society also took place. A central board was formed there; it initially published the content of what had been discussed at the time in a 'newsletter'. From then on, the members could, in a sense, ask: Where is the central board? Because the last newsletter came out at New Year 1923, and until then the central board had never let the members receive anything of what I myself had said. So I was deprived of the opportunity to contact the Society myself. So I was isolated in the best sense of the word. I would like to ask the question – I know the answer, but here at the delegates' meeting this question must be asked: What did the Central Board do between the two bulletins of 1921 and 1923?

I am mentioning these things now because they must become the subject of the special debate. The points of the special debate have been announced; but it can only be fruitful if these things are actually answered. Because it will be possible to see from this how things have gone in the past and how they will not be able to go in the future. We must draw conclusions from what has happened in the past for our work in the future.

I would now like to point out something else that can lead us to a broader horizon. The tasks that the Anthroposophical Society has received have become ever greater. It was the duty of the leadership to grow with these tasks. To do this, it was necessary to take a keen interest in the tasks. Therefore, I would like to sketch out very briefly, because this must be incorporated into the specialist debate, that above all, from everything it does in the present, such a society as the Anthroposophical Society incurs the strictest obligations for the future. The opponents are attacking it simply because the Anthroposophical Society exists. It is not possible to do everything at once, but a start must be made. In Stuttgart things were so that we were constantly making programs and then no longer took care of them. One example is the “Bund für freies Geistesleben” (Association for a Free Spiritual Life). Without the will to carry it out — and this will is what matters — nothing can come to fruition in the Anthroposophical Society. We have founded the Waldorf School and educate students using the forces that arise from anthroposophy, with a pedagogy and didactics given by anthroposophy. The benefits of this can be felt even by the youngest pupils at the Waldorf School. But long before the Stuttgart system came into being, I repeatedly had to emphasize something that seemed painful to me. I had to say: When we have trained someone in this or that field, they then have to enter the world, which we are negating. Thus much of what we do is condemned to sterility from the outset. It goes without saying that someone who has been trained in our midst according to our principles comes into what used to be called “the outside world”, where he encounters conditions in which he cannot apply any of what he has achieved in our midst. Hence the great concern arises: How do we shape the future of those who receive their strength from our midst? I have pointed out this idea again and again because the most ideal tasks have found little favor. I now have a letter from those who are so young that they cannot yet be part of society, which you can summarize as a kind of conclusion.

Explanation

A number of students in the final years at the Waldorf School would like to bring the following to the attention of the General Assembly of the Anthroposophical Society:

At Easter 1924, the first class of the Waldorf School will graduate. In our current middle school system, this graduation is linked to the matriculation examination. However, the growing opposition directed against the anthroposophical movement and, to an equally sharp degree, against the Waldorf School, makes the exam extremely difficult for the school leaver. Furthermore, it contradicts the essence of Waldorf school education if such momentary examinations are to decide the nature of the emerging human being.

However, only this Matura examination gives us access to today's higher education system. From everything we hear about today's universities, it is clear that they no longer teach the kind of science that engages the whole person in a living way; it is only abstract, unfounded knowledge that is increasingly being put at the service of economic interests. The present situation proves that these institutions are no longer able to produce the spiritual leaders that the German people and all of humanity need in the present day.

That is why, especially today, there is a need for such universities, which fully help to develop the abilities slumbering in people and do not serve the subject of study and mere vocational training in an external way. The aims of Waldorf education must also apply to the colleges if the seeds sown in the Waldorf school are to continue to develop freely.

Waldorf students see only one way out of this situation: a free college system must be aimed for. In a free university, the anthroposophical spirit must continue what was begun with Waldorf school education. We Waldorf students hope that the anthroposophical movement will continue what has emerged from it in the Waldorf school and will meet the need for a free university. We hope that this idea will find the loving understanding and powerful support that is needed so that the forces that can be brought to bear through the Waldorf school can later also have a powerful effect and be brought to bear where they are needed.

This is where the concern of those who see what we see in the youngest, in the boys and girls who are close to our movement, speaks. This raises the question: What is the possible leadership of an Anthroposophical Society's view of the most important questions for the future? What are their thoughts on this? Of course, things cannot be done overnight. But how are things being thought about now that there has been no real thought since the program of the School of Spiritual Science was set out? So the question is to be discussed further: How does one think in the Anthroposophical Society, so to work in the future that the future is really thought about?

This failure to think about the future is very strongly expressed. We have had a series of congresses that went very well in themselves. At these congresses, outstanding work has been done by the intelligentsia within the Anthroposophical Society. But if you looked beyond the immediate horizon to consider the impact of such a congress, you would realize that, yes, what was presented was very beautiful, but the Anthroposophists are so out of touch with reality that it would never occur to us to approach them. This is something that actually had to be experienced in connection with every congress. I would like to express this in the sentence: Much has been contributed, especially by the leading personalities, through the fanaticism and narrow-mindedness that prevailed there, to repelling people whose cooperation we would very much need!

This simply followed from certain things that were unavoidable. It was not an inclination to deal with the world. And one must deal with the world if one wants its cooperation, not its opposition. This then became very clear in the real consequences. I only ask you to bear in mind that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find Waldorf school teachers. Why? Because encapsulation has become systematic. And now that the number of those who found their way into the Anthroposophical Society in its better times and these personalities have come into the relevant posts, it is no longer possible for new people to find their way in. Particularly when one comes across such systems as existed in the “Bund für Dreigliederung”, then it is obvious that personalities who could become good co-workers if they got to know anthroposophy in a human way, initially feel simply repelled, not by anthroposophy but by the treatment they receive.

These relationships must be addressed in the specialist debate, because this is where the tasks for the future lie. In many cases, the tasks lie in changing the whole tone that prevails in society. The tasks lie in the fact that it is not a matter of saying: the people of Stuttgart have no time. — Friends will not demand that hours be spent with each one; but what happens in the minutes is what matters and what has so often led to the echo from outside: Yes, when you do come to Stuttgart, it takes your breath away! And when you leave again, it takes your breath away! I am putting this in somewhat radical terms, but we were asked to speak freely about what needs to be said.

These are the things that need to be discussed by the outgoing or incoming board of directors, things that must not be kept secret. For if you ask: How did the branches fall asleep? – you will receive the answer that the board did not even send out any messages during the two years. I do not want to criticize, it is only meant terminologically. But by also discussing these things in their light on the part of the Stuttgart members, what must arise can arise and what the Society can carry forward. All that is needed for this is the will to do so. The will of the members must be able to come together with the will of the leadership in the right way. If this is not the case, then it must at least be made clear why this is not the case; then it will become clear how to remedy the situation.

So it is not a matter of our talking about very general things, but of finding fruitful ideas for the continuation of the Anthroposophical Society from the knowledge of the deficiencies. I would ask that the treatment of the individual questions be put under this point of view; then the discussion will be fruitful, even if only five minutes are spoken by each one.

In my two lectures, I would like to speak about the affairs of anthroposophical life as they arise for me from the circumstances.

Afternoon Session:

Mr. Leinhas announces that the plan is to discuss the relevant points in the afternoon and suggests that further suggestions be made in line with Dr. Steiner's suggestions.

Dr. Carl Unger, Stuttgart, wants to say a few words about the antecedents in connection with what Dr. Steiner said. Looking back, it is clear that many people in Stuttgart, especially those who were originally involved in anthroposophical work in Stuttgart, suffered terribly under what was called the Stuttgart system. As the reasons for this have been explained here, many people from outside the city were brought in to become co-workers in order to advance the enterprises. But as a result, one became dependent on what one had called up. Those called here were now also recruited to work in anthroposophical life so that they could help to bear the responsibility. But it was a time when one could not find any interest in the affairs of the Anthroposophical Society. It may have been because one was not able to keep this interest alive in general. The speaker then pointed out that he felt compelled to step back because he saw no way to continue to cultivate the anthroposophical in the way it had been at the center of things in Stuttgart for fifteen years. As the Society's tasks grew, so did its justifications. Errors were certainly made in the integration of the enterprises into the Society, and in particular there was a lack of accountability of the anthroposophical leadership to these foundations. The speaker pointed out how he felt condemned to inactivity, especially in the most important matters, because he no longer found an ear for what might have been said out of the old connection with the Society.

Mr. Ernst Uehli, Stuttgart, described how he was called to Stuttgart in 1919 as editor of the newspaper, and how he was then entrusted with the leadership of the “Bund für Dreigliederung” (Federation for Threefolding) because its leadership had become bureaucratic. He admits that he did not succeed in leading the association out of the quagmire it had got into. When he then took on the additional responsibilities of editing the “Drei” and working on the central committee, the burden became too heavy for him. He took on tasks that were beyond him. Now he wants to try to pull himself out of his isolation. He has therefore resigned from the Central Board in order to stop doing what he cannot do and start doing what he can do. He is aware of his failings in dealing with people, but will now seek to place his work as a free human being within the development of society.

Rector Moritz Bartsch of Breslau then spoke out what the branches had failed to do. The autonomy of the branches, of which Dr. Steiner spoke, had been given too little attention. In the east, people were less affected by the Stuttgart bureaucracy. The independence of the personalities and the branches is based on the spirit of the “Philosophy of Freedom”. In the inner development there is always the danger of subjectivism. Sometimes it is like in the village church, when the one who is meant is pleased that someone else has received something.

Mr. Andreas Körner, Nuremberg: There is too much talk about the reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society and too little about the principles. It seems that little has been incorporated. There is a lack of interest in the individual in the other person. We know the board from lectures and books, but the board must also know the members. Dr. Steiner once said that he thinks of every Waldorf school child every day; something similar should happen with us.

Dr. Eugen Kolisko, Stuttgart: It is not important that the Central Board apologizes, but that the concrete circumstances that led to the Stuttgart system are described, as Dr. Steiner indicated. The lack of clarification is particularly evident in the matter of religious renewal.

Mr. Uehli had been involved in all the theologian courses and in the founding of the Movement for Religious Renewal. But he was completely unaware that he had to educate the Society about the Movement for Religious Renewal. Immediately upon Mr. Uehli's return from Dornach, the Executive Council would have had to deliberate, and the news would have had to go out immediately instead of in January, and the membership would have had to be informed everywhere. It was just a very general phenomenon that there was no awareness that one had to do something for the Anthroposophical Society. It was similar at the time of the threefold social order movement. There was a time when it was as if the watchword was that it was now threefolding that counted and no longer anthroposophy. We must try to understand the psychological reasons for Mr. Uehlis's breakdown under the burden of work and Dr. Unger's inactivity. Another thing symptomatic of the “Stuttgart system” is the extent to which all sides have sinned through letters sent from Stuttgart, etc. We must be specific about such things that have happened. We will only make progress if we confront the negative and do the positive.

The chairman, Mr. Emil Leinhas, announces that the reports prepared by the conveners of the meeting are now to be presented.

This is met with general disagreement. A point of order ensues in which speakers explain that they do not want to hear the presentations now, because that would take up time and many of the friends would have to leave again without perhaps getting a chance to speak; the general discussion must continue.

Mr. Ernst Lehrs, Jena, explains that the human and anthroposophical aspects should be mentioned before the individual topics. Dr. Rittelmeyer is the most suitable person for this.

Mr. Wilhelm Rath, Berlin, and Mr. Walter Mayen, Breslau, agree.

Dr. Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Stuttgart, says that it is necessary to provide an overall picture, but he does not want to do it himself.

Dr. Carl Unger, Stutigart, points out the necessity of the presentations about the individual institutions, because the difficulties have arisen precisely from their justification.

Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, Stuttgart, asks the assembly to listen to the presentations. If they are not listened to, all the effort of preparation will be in vain, including the effort that Dr. Steiner has put into those who, after much painful self-knowledge, have undertaken to examine the methods here. The lectures will show in detail where the mistakes were made, and only on the basis of this insight can things improve. He is convinced that no one in the room, with the exception of Dr. Steiner, who is not likely to take the floor on this, is able to give an overall lecture.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner points out that we have to consider the practicalities, otherwise we will not get anywhere. Debates on the rules of procedure will not get us anywhere. Therefore, he is now also making a motion on the rules of procedure, namely:

Mr. Leinhas may ask the Nine Committee who wants to give the general presentation. If someone comes forward, that is good. If not, that is also a manifestation. In any case, only individual lectures emerged during the preparation, and Dr. Stein honestly stated the situation.

Since no one volunteers, Dr. Unger finally offers to give the overall lecture. The chairman notes that the assembly does not want this lecture by Dr. Unger.

The meeting is now willing to hear the individual presentations.

The planned presentation on threefolding will therefore follow.

Dr. Carl Unger, Stuttgart: The movement for the threefolding of the social organism is at the root of the difficulties that have arisen. This movement was directed entirely towards the outside world. Its failure has done the Anthroposophical Society the greatest harm and disrupted its work. The aim of these lectures is to determine the relationship of the Anthroposophical Society as a society to the institutions that have taken root in its midst since 1919. It can be pointed out that Anthroposophy has always carried the spiritual impulses to become effective in practical life. This has found expression in the draft of the principles, which Dr. Steiner wrote. Reference may also be made to Dr. Steiner's essays in “Lucifer Gnosis”, which appeared in 1905 on the social question. Mr. Molt, whose name is associated with the threefolding movement, was advised by the speaker around 1908 to study these essays, which had been largely ignored. In his Vienna cycle in 1914, Dr. Steiner pointed to the social question as a cancer in contemporary life, and the autumn lectures of 1918 in Dornach provided such a strong impulse that after the collapse of the German situation in Stuttgart, an attempt was made to intervene in the chaos from an anthroposophical point of view. This later led to a delegation from Stuttgart seeking advice and support from Dr. Steiner. This is not intended as a historical account, but it should be noted that this movement was undertaken out of anthroposophical enthusiasm. The rapid uptake of the Stuttgart initiative by anthroposophical friends points to the accumulated anthroposophical energy that was released. The initial success was due to the tireless efforts of Dr. Steiner. When the Kernpunkte appeared, the anthroposophical background could also be clearly recognized in this work. And here it was often tried to bring this to bear. The movement suddenly collapsed, but left behind a tremendous opposition that now pounced on anthroposophy and Dr. Steiner. Now the anthroposophical aspect should have been clearly distinguished, for which the appeal of the Cultural Council could have been a prelude. But the work of the Anthroposophical Society had been largely destroyed. The branches were taken over by the threefold social order. The agitation in public had led to a certain superficiality, which now clung to the anthroposophical lecture system.

The threefolding movement left many things behind. First of all, in a good sense, the Waldorf school, which was founded by Mr. Molt out of a social impulse, and then the “Kommenden Tag” (The Day to Come), which does excellent work within the limits it has set itself. But the various scientific institutes, the clinical-therapeutic institute, the journals and the “Federation for Free Spiritual Life”, whose relationship to the Anthroposophical Society is to be reported on by special reports, are also connected with this. For the Society itself, it is now a matter of working out the social impulse within itself. There it can contribute to the development of the whole human being. The social demand contains something that is connected with the transformation of the whole human being. The representation of the social must not be neglected externally either. The lectures that Dr. Steiner gave at the Vienna Congress are an example of how this can be done. The question of the social must not be absent from the consolidation of society if it is to take place in the right sense.

The chairman, Mr. Leinhas, now opens the discussion:

Mr. Emil Molt, Stuttgart, points out that in many respects it is important for him to start over. Much harm has been done by forgetting one's duties to society as a result of being absorbed in everyday life and in one's profession. He talks about the reasons for the paralysis of his will, but in order to fulfill his responsibility, he declares himself willing to participate in the reconstruction and asks to be helped in doing so.

Mr. Karl Herdener, Schnaitheim, talks about what weighs on a proletarian. He says that he has tried from the beginning to work together with the middle classes and tells how he came to the movement. Here he had heard that there was a working group of proletarians, which he could not understand. In Heidenheim, people worked together freely. There is always talk of community building and humanity, in almost slogan-like form. The entrepreneurial point of view was reported on threefolding. The proletarian needs the other side. The anthroposophist knows this best of all. He then talks about the school and the task of helping the children when they leave school. When he talks about love being the idea of the class struggle in the trade unions, he is always met with the argument that the shareholders of L'Avenir are capitalists. He mentions the newspaper article about the prison rules at the Waldorf-Astoria. Something must be done from the point of view of anthroposophy that takes the proletarian's point of view into account, otherwise he will no longer be able to stand up for anthroposophy in the same way when he returns. There have been too many doctors and no proletarians. He hopes to leave here having done positive work.

Mr. Adolf Arenson, Stuttgart, on the matter at hand: There are many proletarians in the Stuttgart branch, and if Mr. Benzinger has founded a special branch, he should be free to do so. Besides, a special evening has now been set up for all members.

Dr. Eugen Kolisko, Stuttgart: In the work of the “Bund für Dreigliederung” (Threefolding League), one did not know how to speak to the proletariat in such a way that it felt that a fully human being was behind it. One did not speak from the basis of anthroposophy. The industrialists were annoyed. Later, agitators were sent out without sufficient loving work and preparation of the speakers, so that anthroposophy was discredited by some speakers. This was the reason why mistakes were made in the representation of the threefold order in Upper Silesia, despite all the enthusiasm, which then led to the unleashing of national antagonism. The association's working material was handled in such a way that even an uncorrected lecture by Dr. Steiner found its way into the editorial office of Hammer (!) magazine. Dr. Steiner's lecture to the workers of the Daimler factory was sent out indiscriminately, without regard for the fact that it was given in a special situation. With an anthroposophical attitude, such treatment of Dr. Steiner's lectures would have been impossible. The call for a cultural council has been dropped, although the important question of a free university was linked to it. Since the “Bund für Dreigliederung” no longer exists, nothing positive can be said in this debate, but it can be shown from these cases how all this would not have been possible with a proper anthroposophical attitude and how anthroposophy must now be represented to the outside world.

Rector Moritz Bartsch of Breslau does not believe that mistakes were made in Upper Silesia.

Dr. Eugen Kolisko of Stuttgart offers further explanations.

Dr. Herbert Hahn of Stuttgart: One must speak the language of the proletariat when speaking to proletarians. When Dr. Steiner gave a lecture in the Waldorf-Astoria factory, the anthroposophical aspect was as alive as the proletarian needs it to be. The other speakers did not have that, and when the backlash occurred, the way they spoke had a negative effect on the anthroposophical cause.

Dr. Hans Büchenbacher, Stuttgart: Dr. Unger spoke of how the threefold social order movement arose out of the basic impulses of spiritual science. It is not necessary to say any more about this, but one should speak about whether the threefold social order movement was carried out in an anthroposophical way. If one is truly an anthroposophist, one comes to a deeper understanding of human nature and of the currents of the times. This was not present in the work of threefolding. During the fight for the plebiscite in Upper Silesia, many anthroposophical speakers in Germany also presented the threefold social order as the peaceful and only healthy solution to the question. As a result, accusations of treason arose in the press due to this position. Our speakers were able to deal with these defamatory accusations in meetings everywhere. They could always point out that if it came to a vote, the threefolders would naturally vote for Germany and that Dr. Steiner had also made this clear. A rather proud declaration was issued from Stuttgart, but it did not touch on this point at all. They had to make up for it later, but they had to be told that this position had only been adopted later because of the attacks, and so the odium of treason remained with us after all. This is a concrete example of how the threefold social order was represented to the outside world in such a way that the understanding of the human being that anthroposophy can provide was very much lacking.

Mr. Fred Geuter, Stuttgart: The so-called “Stuttgart System” has its origin in the fact that it was not understood to avoid precisely that which we criticized in all our speeches and lectures - the thinking methods and will impulses of the “West”. Among other things, the Federation was given the task of working for “honest diplomacy”. Anyone who is able to follow the development of this institution has to realize the opposite. What needs to be done first is to realize in our hearts the impulses we receive, so that we also act as we speak. Otherwise, soul tensions and conflicts arise that cause dissatisfaction, crises and only unnecessary opposition.

Mr. Johannes Thielemann, Meissen, speaks of ahrimanic effects in the etheric body of society that must be overcome.

Mr. Max Benzinger, Stuttgart, rejects Mr. Herdener's accusation. He founded a branch because he wanted to see whether you had to be a doctor or something similar to lead a branch, or whether a proletarian could do it too. Besides, he wanted to continue what had been started in the threefolding period with the proletarians. The speaker criticizes the often wrong behavior of anthroposophists towards the proletarians. For example, against servants. There is an abyss between action and words. He describes some experiences from the threefolding movement, of which he was a member of the committee. The proletarians understood Dr. Steiner, but not those who otherwise spoke about it, whose actions did not match their words. He reported from Champignystraße that an employee was told, in the matter of weekly salary payments, that he was indeed descending to the level of the workers. The worker is sensitive because he feels whether the person also does what he says. He himself was decried as a rabble-rouser.

Mr. Wilhelm Conrad, Cologne, proposes that all the lectures be heard in succession.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner: I think we really should take care to achieve a fruitful outcome. It may indeed be the case, although this has not been emphasized enough, that the fate of the Society depends on these three days. If we do not come to a conclusion during these three days, there is nothing left for me to do but appeal to each individual member of the Society to carry this out. So, if a reorganization of the Society is to take place, it must happen in these three days. We are in an Anthroposophical Society, where everything is connected. You will be best able to form an opinion and also to talk about the threefold order when you have heard everything. Everything is interrelated. Therefore, it is most practical if you let the presentations run and get the full picture, then a fruitful discussion can arise, while each speaker is tempted to talk about every detail, which leads to infertility. Mr. Conrad's proposal is that we go through the reports as quickly as possible so that we know what has happened in Stuttgart as a whole. Then everything can be fruitfully discussed.

The Conrad proposal is approved.

Mr. Emil Leinhas, Stuttgart, takes up the series of lectures with a report on the “Kommenden Tag”. He describes the emergence of the joint-stock company as an attempt to form a germinal point of associative economic life by uniting banking, industry and agriculture with economic and intellectual endeavors. The realization of the idea on a large scale failed due to the lack of understanding it was met with from influential circles in economic life. In the spring of 1922, in order to avoid lapsing into dishonesty, a “program limitation” had to be proclaimed. Within the framework of the program possible under the present circumstances, the “Coming Day” fulfills its tasks and proves to be an economically viable undertaking. Mr. Leinhas does not conceal the teething troubles that the company, which was founded in a rather difficult time, had to go through. He also points out the difficulties that have arisen in human cooperation, but which are increasingly being overcome as the company's economic tasks are successfully worked out and not mixed up with the affairs of the Anthroposophical Society. Mr. Leinhas asks the members of the Anthroposophical Society to be aware of their tasks with regard to the “Coming Day” and its individual enterprises, in particular the publishing house and the Clinical Therapeutic Institute, and to support them energetically by taking a lively interest in them and their products. The attitude of the members of the Anthroposophical Society towards all the enterprises that have emerged from the Anthroposophical Society should increasingly be one of asking: What can I do for these enterprises, how can I take an interest in them? Not: How can I interfere in the affairs of those who are responsible for managing these enterprises. In general, the principle of “What can I do?” should be increasingly applied in our Society. Not “What should others do?”

Evening Session:

Fräulein Dr. Caroline von Heydebrand, Stuttgart: A talk about the Free Waldorf School and its relationship to the Anthroposophical Society

The Free Waldorf School was founded by Mr. Emil Molt out of an insight into the social necessities of our time, for which the ideas of the threefold social organism could open our eyes. All people, regardless of their social background, should be able to enjoy an education that meets the requirements of true human knowledge. Thus, the Waldorf School became the first comprehensive school in Germany (1919). In it, only spiritual and pedagogical aspects should be decisive for teaching and education. Therefore, the Waldorf School was established as an independent school that wanted to feel responsible only to the spiritual life. Its founder, Mr. Molt, could only find the basis for his educational ideas in anthroposophy, because the works of Dr. Rudolf Steiner provide a knowledge of the human being from which appropriate educational impulses can grow. They present a story of the development of the soul of humanity that could lead to an understanding of the necessity of a genuinely contemporary art of education for the present and the near future.

Mr. Molt asked Dr. Rudolf Steiner to take over the pedagogical direction of the Waldorf School. Dr. Rudolf Steiner accepted his request. The teachers of the Waldorf School feel the responsibility that arises from the fact that the founder and leader of the anthroposophical movement is the pedagogical director of the school. They receive the rich abundance of spiritual scientific-educational knowledge in lectures and individual advice with a deep sense of responsibility to the anthroposophical movement, indeed to all of humanity. The heart of Waldorf school education is the series of lectures on education by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, which convey anthroposophical knowledge of the human being. From this anthroposophical understanding of the human being, he developed a methodology and didactics as an art of education. Convincing hearts of men without prejudice, this art of education stands in the world, working as a work of art, as once the Goetheanum and as eurythmy. Thus, from its very foundations, anthroposophy has given birth to a school and education movement that could become a global movement by its very nature. Unfortunately, the idea of a “World School Association” has not yet been realized, apart from a few tentative attempts. It is recognized in many circles beyond Central Europe that the Waldorf School is not the school of a sectarian world view, but that it has a general educational significance. Waldorf education has attracted the attention of many non-anthroposophical circles. Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave lectures on education to Swiss teachers in Basel, and at Christmas 1921/22 he gave a course for teachers at the Goetheanum that appeared to be a processing of Albert Steffen and has already been translated into Swedish. During the Oxford Conference in August 1922 on the subject of “Spiritual Values in Education and Social Life”, Dr. Steiner gave twelve lectures on education and teaching to a large number of English teachers. In the Nordic countries, Waldorf education is being studied particularly actively. Many guests visit the school, including representatives of foreign governments. For example, a professor from Japan recently spent several days at the school, showing great interest. In early January, seventeen English teachers visited the school and were truly enthusiastic about their stay. Thus, the significant fact that the anthroposophical movement has brought a pedagogy into the world as an art that is not dependent on a world view but is universally human should be vividly present in the consciousness of every member of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore, Waldorf education should not be perceived as something that satisfies the narrow needs or educational aspirations of a few parents, children and teachers, but as something that fulfills its task only when it grasps this task in terms of world history and places itself selflessly, as an artistic and healing element, in the midst of the phenomena of decline in our time. The cultivation of their spiritual life has remained the Germans' most precious possession; within the German spiritual life, educational issues have always come first. The members of the Anthroposophical Society warmly embrace the Waldorf School and its idea as a matter for humanity. It stands as a model school, as a model school, and seeks to realize the idea of free education. As such a model school, it must be the concern of the entire Anthroposophical Society. It needs the active support, loving understanding and warm interest of every single member in every respect. As a wonderful gift from the spiritual worlds, entrusted to human hearts and hands, we members of the Anthroposophical Society feel about this art of education and this school, which, under the loving guidance of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, is the only model school to cultivate anthroposophical educational ideals in a comprehensive way for the benefit of humanity. It needs a strong Anthroposophical Society that can protect, support and strengthen the good that has been entrusted to us all!

Dr. Otto Palmer, Stuttgart: Presentation on the Clinical Therapeutic Institute “The Day to Come”

At the beginning of my presentation to this assembly of delegates on the Clinical Therapeutic Institute, I would like to ask two questions, which I will try to answer myself during my presentation and which, if a discussion follows my presentation, I would ask you to help me answer.

The first question is: What does medicine, inaugurated by spiritual scientific research, promise not only to the Anthroposophical Society but also to all of humanity?

Secondly: What must the Anthroposophical Society do to gain recognition and importance for the treatment and healing methods based on spiritual scientific research in the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute?

We can only answer these questions correctly if we ourselves are completely clear about what we have been given in every respect by Dr. Steiner's spiritual science. This may seem paradoxical, but I believe that many members of the Anthroposophical Society are not clear about the importance of the spiritual heritage handed down to us. If we were clear about it, how could there be such appalling lukewarmness and indifference, which has basically led to the crisis we are currently facing.

Over time, we have become accustomed to to take the spiritual nourishment offered to us in such abundance for granted, and instead of being shaken to the core of our souls and developing the forces within us, which in turn should work with elemental force outwards and make themselves felt with a certain enthusiasm, we lay on the pillow of rest and did not even think of making use of what we had received as it should be.

In 1908, Dr. Steiner gave us a spiritual-scientific understanding of the human being for the first time in the Prague Course, which deals with “Occult Physiology”. In a whole series of lectures that followed this Prague Course, he incorporated additional comments about the nature of the human being in this direction. In other lectures, he described the karmic connections that arise from previous lives and manifest as illnesses in this one.

In 1917, in his “Puzzles of the Soul”, he gave us the physiology of the threefold human being.

In 1920/21, he introduced doctors and medical students to spiritual pathology and therapy in longer courses – and last October, he finally supplemented these courses with lectures he gave at the Medical Week here in Stuttgart. One fruit of the lectures in 1920/21 was the founding of the Clinical Therapeutic Institute, and a wealth of tasks arose for those who were appointed as staff to the Clinical Therapeutic Institute. Above all, however, we doctors were given the task of creating a movement among two to three thousand doctors on the basis of what we had been given in the courses.

To get a true picture of the tremendous achievements that have been inaugurated in the medical field through Dr. Steiner's work since 1908, one need only take a look at state-licensed conventional medicine and its helplessness, especially in the field of therapy. All the great things that have been discovered by it should not only be fully recognized, but it should be emphasized that we do not want to oppose it in terms of scientific research methods. We must be clear about one thing only: that all medical research on pathology is based on the development of pathological anatomy, that is, a knowledge of those changes that have occurred in organs during a person's lifetime as a result of disease processes and that can now be observed as such on the dissection table. To a certain extent, research in this field can be considered complete and it can be assumed that not much new will be revealed with the examination methods currently in use. Nevertheless, the motto of the Freiburg anatomist Aschoff at the naturalists' congress was: “Give us corpses!” As if corpses could give us information about the living! Or rather, about the disease processes that take place in the living organism!

With the exception of a few specific remedies, such as mercury, quinine and salicylic acid, the therapy is to be regarded as an experimental therapy. There is certainly no real rationale for most of the diseases. Why are there so many quacks, why so many lay doctors alongside conventional medicine? Surely only because people do not find what they are looking for in conventional medicine in many cases.

If we compare our time with a distant epoch, say from the fourth to the fifth century BC to the fifteenth century AD, where our scientific research begins, we can see that at that time people still had an idea of the influence of a spiritual world and of therapy based on certain intuitions and atavistic clairvoyance.

It is interesting that this period ends with the murder of Paracelsus, and that barely a century later, Rembrandt's famous painting “The Anatomy Lesson” came to symbolize, as it were, the dawning of the scientific era in which we are still immersed.

Dr. Steiner's achievement lies in having transformed Du Bois-Reymond's “Ignorabimus” (“we will not know”) into a “Cognoscimus” (we know). We can know if we have become able to see through the training of our soul organs, and even if we have not yet become able to see ourselves, it is still possible for us, with goodwill, to reflect on and grasp intellectually the spiritual scientific research results that Dr. Steiner gives us. For us physicians as students of Dr. Steiner, it is no longer a matter of including only the physical body in our research, but of taking into account the higher aspects of the human being in our research.

The threefold nature of the human being – the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic-limb system – is to be made the basis of a new physiology. In the case of disease processes, natural processes outside the body must be taken into account and placed in parallel. Cosmic-planetary influences on the one hand, telluric influences on the other, must be taken into account.

The human being, which until then seemed so simple to us, becomes the most complicated organism, which can only be understood and correctly assessed in the contexts just mentioned. Furthermore, we find a series of processes in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms that also take place in some way in the human being. It would be going too far to go into these processes further in the context of a short presentation, but it should be said that these processes provide clues as to which remedies, originating from any of these kingdoms, must be applied in a meaningful and rational way in certain disease processes. It will be the task of the physicians of the Institute to explain the methods of our work and therapy in a vade mecum and to make this vade mecum the basis of a publicity campaign among physicians. We will only gain enthusiasm for our work if we see our service to humanity and our work in the laboratory as a form of worship in the most beautiful sense of the word.

It should be emphasized that our healing method should become more and more individualized. It is well worth making suffering humanity aware of this healing method and making every effort to establish it in the world.

And this brings me to the second question: “What can the Anthroposophical Society do to ensure that the treatment and healing methods based on spiritual scientific research knowledge and represented in our Clinical Therapeutic Institute receive the recognition and spread in the world that they deserve?”

If the conditions are fulfilled, that the Clinical Therapeutic Institute, for its part, does everything to fulfill the tasks that have been set for it, that is, to make a vade mecum a movement among two to three thousand doctors, then it would be most important for the Anthroposophical Society to support the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in this task, each member in his or her own way. The individual branches should request speakers from the Institute to give informative lectures in the branches. The members should tactfully draw their family doctors' attention to our writings and remedies. I say tactfully, as there is no definition for this; it has to be felt.

I could imagine that doctors could be repelled by tactlessly conducted propaganda. Furthermore, it would have to be ensured that our remedies are available in pharmacies, or that pharmacies are informed where they can obtain our remedies. This must also be done in a tactful manner, because pharmacists are a priori hostile to all such remedies that they are not involved in producing, and which they should only sell as a merchant sells his goods.

Members may recommend the remedies to relatives and acquaintances on the basis of successful healing, but preferably not by bypassing the treating physician. It would also be very effective to recommend our products to the board members of health insurance funds or other influential people within the health insurance system, pointing out that our influenza medicine, Infludoron, for example, can greatly shorten the illness and that the health insurance fund could save a lot of sick pay in this way. If young physicians interested in spiritual scientific research are at a loss to find a topic for their doctoral dissertation, we are happy to suggest a whole range of dissertation topics that arise from Dr. Steiner's medical courses.

The eurythmy therapy we practise, which has yielded good results in numerous cases, still requires further training and should be passed on to those who wish to apply eurythmy therapy in practice under medical supervision.

Above all, however, it is important that each individual member and branch be awakened to the consciousness that our healing method is born out of spiritual-scientific knowledge of the human being, and that we become more and more aware that the “theosophy” is not a gray theory, but that it proves in its effects to be extremely practical and beneficial for humanity in all medical measures. The remedies alone do not help us if the spiritual reality of their origin has not become clear and certain to everyone. Only then can they stand up for them and propagate them in the right way.

Dr. Rudolf Maier, Stuttgart: Lecture on the Scientific Research Institute “Der Kommende Tag”

The aims of the Scientific Research Institute are determined by what is already expressed in the first sentence of the draft of the principles of an Anthroposophical Society: “For a satisfying and healthy way of life, human beings need to know and cultivate their own supersensible being and the supersensible being of the extra-human world.” Applied to the work of our research institute, this simply means that without knowledge of the supersensible, present-day natural science cannot achieve fruitful progress or a true grasp of its goals. Our research institute has therefore set itself the task of ensuring the introduction and application of anthroposophical knowledge in natural science. We seek to fulfill our task by first taking measures that are likely to arouse interest in genuine and true research into nature in the widest circles, and secondly by showing, through practical examples of the application of anthroposophical knowledge in experimental research and observation of nature, how far research into nature can go beyond what has been achieved so far. Examples of this are the treatise by Mrs. Lily Kolisko on “Spleen Function and Platelet Question” and the recently published treatise by Dr. Rudolf Maier on “The Villard Experiment, an Experimental Investigation”. Mrs. Kolisko's essay shows how an anthroposophical insight sheds light on previous research into long-known facts of observation, explaining so much of what has remained mysterious about the known facts of observation, and how this insight leads to new discoveries in the biological field (blood picture, new platelet type: regulators). Dr. Maier's paper shows how the methodology of physical research as set out in anthroposophy makes it possible to uncover major errors in previous research, and how it is thus possible to learn to experiment without bias in order to grasp the facts as they really are. Dr. Maier's essay is an example of how anthroposophy makes life practical by showing that what it contains about physical research can be applied in practice and has been shown to be correct.

We are aware that our endeavors are met with many prejudices on the part of most scientists today, especially the influential ones. However, we believe that the power of the observed facts we have researched must and will ultimately break all resistance. The anthroposophical members can help us a great deal in fulfilling our task. Even if we are met with more general interest, we feel that this is beneficial to our work, but in particular, the anthroposophical members can help us a great deal by drawing attention to our publications among their acquaintances and by ensuring that these publications also become known to wider circles. We trust that scientists who are less involved with the local scientific establishments will more readily recognize our most essential aim than others, and that they too will be furthered by our publications for anthroposophy itself, namely by the systematic work that undermines the prejudice that anthroposophy is not scientific. The Scientific Research Institute has been given tasks by Dr. Steiner, including personal advice on how to carry them out. The solution of these tasks is the focus of our efforts. In the future, we will devote even more of our energy to them than we have in the past.

Dr. Eugen Kolisko, Stuttgart: Lecture on Anthroposophy and Science

The scientific movement has to work on overcoming two barriers, one inward and the other outward. So far, this scientific movement has not been able to assert itself in the right way in either direction. Just as the educational movement and eurythmy have succeeded in expressing the universal human element in such a way that large circles are won over to it with a certain matter-of-factness, so too the scientific movement, if it is to succeed, must be conceived for the wide circle of people who today long for a renewal of science.

But now it must be said that it has not been possible to make oneself understood among today's scientists. We have not found the language to use with them that would have given our endeavors a natural recognition. This will only be possible if, on the one hand, a practical phenomenology emerges, that is, experimental investigations that speak for themselves, and, on the other hand, comprehensive overviews of the execution of our fruitful ideas are presented to the world, which must gain recognition by themselves. Above all, the most modern form of science must be dealt with much more, and we must adhere to the basic attitude of spiritual science: that the validity of today's natural science in the fields accessible to it is unreservedly recognized and at the same time it is shown how spiritual science provides the continuation of natural scientific ideas everywhere. Then no unfruitful polemics will arise, but we shall succeed in creating, also in the field of science, an intermediate layer of people who, without belonging to the Anthroposophical Society, recognize the results of our research as something important and significant.

Internally, however, it is necessary to develop the science to such an extent that it is completely imbued with the anthroposophical spirit. It must not get stuck in the subject-specific. Much harm has been done by carrying into the branches what has not been fully reworked, what is specialized in nature. In many cases, anthroposophy has been reduced to physics, chemistry, etc., instead of founding anthroposophical physics and chemistry, etc. In the past, good anthroposophical work had been done in the branches and groups. At that time, the scientific aspect was still not sufficiently included. Today it should be possible for the individual friends who work in the various scientific fields with the help of anthroposophy to completely transform the results into anthroposophy and thus return them to the work in the Anthroposophical Society. We have seen from the way in which Dr. Steiner has dealt with the most difficult problems of the individual sciences in anthroposophical lectures over the years, and how he still deals with them today, for example, in his Dornach lectures, that in this form, scientific work is no longer perceived and effective as a specialized scientific work, but as something that is generally meaningful for humanity. If this reworking of science does not happen, then, on the contrary, anthroposophical work will be destroyed. Only when our scientists work towards overcoming the subject-specific in their inner work and towards speaking about science in a truly anthroposophical way, can the gulf be overcome that Dr. Steiner spoke of at the time of the Congress of Vienna and at The Hague, the gulf that exists between the scientific movement and Anthroposophy in the narrower sense. Then the scientists can give back to the mother of anthroposophy what they owe to her.

For its part, the Anthroposophical Society has a wide range of tasks in relation to the scientific movement. The achievements in the field of science must come to be known and appreciated by the entire membership. There should be real enthusiasm, for example, for something like our friend Dr. v. Baravalle's book on “The Pedagogy of Mathematics and Physics”. They should know it, know what it means for pedagogy and science, etc. The new leadership will make it their task to ensure that the membership is truly aware of all the achievements within our movement. Because if there is no awareness in our society of what is being worked on in our research institutes, what our scientists are working on in general, what has been achieved, how is it supposed to be known outside? Correct knowledge will also prevent these scientific endeavors from being presented and represented to the outside world in an incomprehensible way.

The task at hand is for our scientific staff to direct their research with the greatest energy towards the enormous range of problems and suggestions that Dr. Steiner has provided over the past few years. Each of these problems, when properly investigated, leads to significant results that are of general human interest in terms of knowledge and practical effectiveness. There are countless tasks here that must now finally be tackled vigorously.

It has often been said that an artistic element must enter into science. Take, for example, the doctrine of the threefold nature of the human organism. One cannot approach it without an artistic-scientific view of the human being. When one experiences, for example, the constant struggle that takes place in the human being between the sense-nervous system, which is senile, dying, mineralized, and carries the germs of death, and the metabolic system, which is youthful, surviving, and resists this, and how the rhythmic system brings about a harmonious balance, then this can only be done by grasping the concepts artistically and imaginatively. As a physician or teacher, one then experiences the human being as nature's most powerful work of art. We must come to the point where we, as scientists, as physicists, as chemists, as physicians, can ultimately speak in concrete terms of the spiritual beings that are behind the external phenomena. Then, when we immerse ourselves in such a scientific-artistic element, we also find the bridge to truly religious feeling everywhere. If we succeed in leading science to the center of anthroposophy, if we talk about it in our anthroposophical branches and carry such a kind of science to the outside world, that we speak from an attitude as it has been characterized here, so that we do not repel what today longs for a renewal of science through anthroposophy, then the scientific movement will not be a foreign body within society, either internally or externally, but will fit harmoniously into the framework of our movement.

Dr. Herbert Hahn, Stuttgart: Lecture on The Relationship of the Anthroposophical Society to the Movement for Religious Renewal.

In September 1922, a movement came into being that wanted to receive the counsel of spiritual science and took responsibility for the effects of this counsel from the very beginning. This movement is dedicated to the work of religious renewal. It experiences as its essential task to carry the Christ impulse, which is progressing in time, in pure forms to many souls. But if it wants to fulfill this task properly, if it wants to serve the moral recovery of religious forces, then it can claim an anthroposophical understanding in the deepest sense.

What it encountered at the beginning of its development, however, was an insufficiently deep and warm understanding. It was often met with a false understanding or a lack of will to understand on the part of individuals who were striving for anthroposophy but did not fully live up to anthroposophical responsibility. In particular, the working groups of the Anthroposophical Society failed to recognize the significance of the religious revival movement in a way that would have allowed them to establish a clear and confident relationship with that movement in an independent manner.

In a Dornach lecture, Dr. Steiner had to use words that already referred to an existing emergency, which carried the necessary clarification. But since the method of philological nitpicking was applied in many cases to the words spoken by Dr. Steiner, which were neglected by the leading figures of the Anthroposophical Society, instead of penetrating to their own root-fresh realization, a state of emergency remained in many circles.

However, an interesting examination of the nature of the religious renewal movement can show that anthroposophists can have a warm understanding for the task of this movement because anthroposophy in Rudolf Steiner's life's work made a religious renewal that was called for by the times possible in all essential points. The religious renewal was able to draw on the content of anthroposophy. Anthroposophy was able to play a creative role in the forms that the religious renewal movement wanted to adopt from its own research. Only through anthroposophical spiritual work could the religious renewal movement be brought forth in its present form.

This can be seen in detail. While the dispute over the meaning of the word continued to grow in Protestant theology, and while the view of the letter as handed down became increasingly rigid in Catholic theology, anthroposophy led to a new understanding of the gospel. What would a religious renewal movement be without these references to the gospel? It would be condemned to complete sterility. But when a number of younger, mainly Protestant theologians approached Dr. Steiner seeking advice on religious renewal, one of the most beautiful proofs of the fruitfulness of anthroposophy in the religious sphere was the fact that the founder of spiritual science had already accumulated treasures of new gospel knowledge in comprehensive lecture cycles. Cycles about the individual gospels and the relationship of the gospels to each other. While theology became barren in relation to the gospel experience, anthroposophy brought forth a new spring of gospel life. This could inspire confidence in drawing from anthroposophy, confidence in invoking anthroposophy as a creator.

But how could trust in religious new creation be cultivated if not all perception of religious life pushed towards a true grasp of the Christ-being, finding its center in a true grasp of the Christ-being? At a time when the conception of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth had become a controversial historical problem, Rudolf Steiner proved Christianity as a mystical fact. He uncovered the powers of love for creative, moral deeds in the depths of the soul and, in the transformation of soul forces, in the reciprocal purification of thinking and willing, grasped the transforming Christ impulse in the realm of his own freedom. The Philosophy of Freedom, experienced as a living, breathing book, was and is a preparation for a new Christ-revelation. For only in the realm of freedom can the Christ impulse reveal itself today. Anything that denies freedom or cannot establish it, and yet calls itself Christian, is today abusing the name of Christianity. Dr. Steiner led to the harrowing experience of a convincing revelation of Christianity in the consciousness and in the history of the new awakenings of moral life that the I has fought for. And in his anthroposophical life's work, he showed how human history in the large is enlightened in the preparation and in the archetypal expression of the ego-strengthening sacrificial forces that were offered in the mystery of Golgotha. Here, in a twofold way, the possibility was established for a re-creation of religious cult. It could be raised to the level of the son-experience that is being sought everywhere at the present time, and it could be brought to the consciousness of the individual in forms so imbued with freedom that they alone can be grasped by this consciousness today. Where else in our time could anything have unfolded a productivity in the realm of true cultic forms? Does not all striving in this area result in a pale, impoverished reformism, which, through its weakness, only strengthens the suggestive power of outdated forms? From the supra-historical, omnipresent Christ-experience of Anthroposophy, a movement for religious renewal was able to draw strength and form. Thus it was also allowed to invoke Anthroposophy as a creator.

But all experiences of cultic forms today fail because of a fundamental discrepancy. The modern human being experiences a becoming in the transformation of inner, moral forces. He experiences a destroying and passing away in the transformation of physical earth and world forces. One does not meaningfully fit into the other; the darkness of material death today draws all moral-religious life into its abyss. Cult and pastoral care are no longer possible in the face of this gaping chasm in the consciousness of the most honest people. Anthroposophy, which was called upon to convincingly speak of the sanctifying entry of Christ into the substance of the earth, imbued all earthly processes with morality. It truly raised the chemical experimental table to the altar. In this way, however, it was able to create the foundations anew so that the world-significant, soul-renewing change experienced on the altar of cultic connections would be grasped by real devotional forces in the heart. Thus she could and may be invoked as a creator, in order to prove herself as a bridge-builder across the rift in the consciousness of the times and of the individual.

We experience anthroposophy as the creative mother of the religious renewal movement in four essential ways. Those who recognize this understand that anthroposophy itself contains a primary source of religious life. It does not need to look for it outside of its own being. But because it experiences the coming together of the rings of freedom and the sacrifices of freedom in the effect of grace in all religious experience, it also honors and loves the forces of freedom and grace imparted by its daughter movement. It assigns the Anthroposophical Society the inner duty of watchfully supporting those who want to bring religious renewal into the world. She gives it the strength to lovingly receive those who, through religious renewal, have matured to enter into Anthroposophy.

The religious renewal movement is walking the path of its own spiritual responsibility. It works out of anthroposophical strength. But it does not work for anthroposophy when it conveys the fruits of anthroposophy to a world hungry for a new Christ-healing.

The Anthroposophical Society can become one of the instruments of the anthroposophical movement, which in turn is walking a path of the highest and most comprehensive responsibility of its own. It may only bear its name if it embodies the whole human being. Religious humanism is an important revelation of the nature of the whole human being. Anthroposophy, which created the religious renewal movement, seeks to awaken the primal gifts of religious power in anthroposophical life through constant new creation for the sake of the truth of its name. Herein lie the roots of a natural and good relationship between the Anthroposophical Society and the religious renewal movement.

Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, Stuttgart: Presentation on the “Association for Anthroposophical School of Spiritual Science Work”

The School of Spiritual Science Association, which I will report on first, is also one of the institutions that was founded after that year 1918, which was so significant for our movement. What is the significance of this year? This was the question that kept coming to my mind, even when it was my responsibility to reflect on the Hochschulbund in preparation for this conference. In this year, the significance of which for our movement Dr. Steiner has repeatedly pointed out recently, the independent will of the members of our movement for the affairs of external social work was first awakened. But this expression of will was still half instinctive. It was not yet possible to realize one's own intuitions in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom.” Therefore, Dr. Steiner was repeatedly asked for advice. In the course of time, Dr. Steiner showed ever more clearly and distinctly how his goal could only be to have free people around him. He gave advice to those who were still unfree, so that they could increasingly come to realize ideas that had been grasped by themselves. Thus, since 1918, the task that the Society gradually faced has been the same as that which it faces today: to guide and lead itself. But this is the task of human beings in the age of the consciousness soul. Thus, since 1918, the task of the Society and the task of the times have grown together. And the crisis that our Society is going through today is a reflection of the great crisis of the times, which has been brought about by the conflict between two ages. The old age of the Greco-Latin cultural epoch has not yet faded away. Long ago, the Starry Scripture in the heavens proclaimed the new spirit of the age. But it has not yet been able to fight its way into the world. The spirit of intellectuality of a bygone epoch still prevails, and the spirit of the new spiritual age is still fighting for its entry. And that must be so. For the age of the consciousness soul cannot be completely victorious through the writing in the heavens, through the will of the gods, but only when the will of man makes itself a fellow-fighter of the will of the gods, because men, in their freedom, grasp what only they can realize as their very own decision.

Look at France. There an offshoot of the Latin-Roman current of peoples and times is fighting. It is a dying nation, physically dying out and tearing itself apart by mixing its blood with that of the lower-standing black races. It is a nation that, as if abandoned by the guidance of spiritual beings that otherwise guide nations, carries out actions that are carried out in absentmindedness. But this acting in the absence of the spirit is only expressed more strongly because it makes use of more powerful means. But it is a symptom of the times. The same thing is happening in all fields. A spirit of the age whose epoch has expired still clutches people and, while it itself becomes aware of it, leads people into spiritless actions. It is time for people to awaken their own spirit, because the spirit of the spiritual age will only be able to guide the awakened.

This great world-historical event also played a role in our movement. Let me show you this with a personal example. I joined the movement in 1913. I was one of those who pushed towards anthroposophy because they could not bear the university. There I ran out of breath. There was no spiritual air for living. Everything was dead. And the great minds seemed to belong to the past and were rotting in libraries. But I was looking for life for my science, which I loved. What did I care about the Anthroposophical Society? Not it, but my science was close to my heart. I felt that science and philosophy had reached a point beyond which they could not advance by themselves. Then I found anthroposophy. I was determined to get to know it thoroughly. That's why I came to Munich. An older member received me. I said: “I have come to build a bridge between anthroposophy and science.” “That has already happened,” said the member, ‘you are too late.’ So I had come for the sake of science. But now I wanted to see the mystery plays. ‘Only members are allowed to see them,’ I was told. I was not a member and did not want to become one. I turned to Dr. Steiner. Yes, that was correct – the Mystery Dramas were only open to members. But he suggested that I could become a member for the day of the performance and resign the next day. I agreed. So I was at the performance. Afterwards Dr. Steiner came up to me and asked: “Well, Mr. Stein, how did you enjoy yourself?” I said: “I am no longer an idiot like yesterday — and I am no longer resigning from the society either.” So I became a member of the society. It is symptomatic. The one who had come to build a bridge between science and anthroposophy had been won over by the Mystery Dramas. As I said, this was symptomatic. For it was the same with the others who came after me. Dr. Roman Boos and we, who belonged to that generation that could not stand it at the universities, wanted to carry anthroposophy into the lecture halls. This was to be done by means of an appeal that was sent out to German students in the fall of 1920. Dr. Steiner had, of course, spoken to students in the auditorium of the Technical University in Stuttgart about “Spiritual Science, Natural Science and Technology” in response to a request from students. In July 1920, following this lecture, Mr. Palmer and Mr. Werner Rosenthal sent drafts of an appeal to friends in Breslau, Freiburg i. Br., Hamburg, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Munich and Tübingen. Many other versions were received. Finally, we in Stuttgart processed all the suggestions into the appeal that was then sent out. This appeal was very strongly worded. Since none of the so-called leading personalities really followed it up with action, it brought us a great deal of opposition but no positive gain. Above all, the university lecturers were turned into opponents. It was a mistake to believe that anthroposophy had to be brought into the lecture halls. Science should be fertilized by anthroposophy. What was needed was not polemics but the further development of science. But it was too early for that. We were unable to renew science at that time. And the young people? Did they want science spruced up with anthroposophy? No. They wanted anthroposophy. But we did not recognize that at the time. I myself had come to the Mystery Dramas, not to Anthroposophy. But this went unnoticed. The gap grew ever wider between those who wanted to carry Anthroposophy into the lecture halls and the youngest generation, who sought Anthroposophy itself. It is only now that it has become clear to me that we ourselves did not want anything other than Anthroposophy. That is why I believe that we, the somewhat older generation, the “lecturers” of the university courses - and whatever all the events are called - will now really find ourselves with the youth. Because something was living in me, too, although I did not recognize it. That was the tragedy, that was our fault, that we had inaugurated a movement that then petered out. Dr. Steiner held scientific courses in the expectation that those who had requested them would process what was given. Only now is it happening. Dr. Hermann von Baravalle is working on optics, on thermodynamics; others are working on other things. All kinds of working groups have formed. Linguists, educators and architecture students have come together. Mr. Lehrs will speak to you about the future of our youth. I only wanted to draw your attention to the historical moment, to the storm of contemporary history that also burst into our movement in 1918. Let us consciously experience this storm so that it becomes a roar that awakens the tongues of fire that speak the language that everyone, young and old, understands.

End 11 p.m..