| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XI
20 Apr 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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| We would be able to see through it to the effect that we could under certain circumstances foresee our immediate future. But the will irrupts into the karmic stream and this obscures the prospect, say, of what will happen to us tomorrow. |
| Then man's whole inner perception will move in the right direction. It has to be clearly understood that the path to the spiritual world cannot be achieved all at once. It gradually leads out of the world so that we ascend to the point I have just referred to, where what used to be the world for us loses its deadness and itself becomes a living entity. |
| This is the one thing of which we must say again and again that as many people as possible must come to understand it, particularlY in the present time. All we come to understand of the spiritual world whilst here in the physical world in our physical bodies shall be as a flame to illumine the life of the spirit. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XI
20 Apr 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgatha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform. Dear friends, I want to begin today by reminding you of something I have told most of you, I think, on previous occasions. If the soul of man develops in the way I have clearly enough described in my public and other lectures, we arrive at a different image of the world. The essential point is that the soul takes the path, as it were, from the sense-perceptible into the spiritual world. As the development of the soul progresses the physical world will gradually change in our eyes into the spiritual world. We might say that the peculiar features of the physical, sense-perceptible, world gradually disappear and the forms, entities and realities of the spiritual world makes their appearance within the horizons of our conscious awareness. Something important comes to conscious awareness in this way, something I might describe as follows: We ourselves become different—as far as our vision is concerned, of course—we ourselves become different, and the world which is around us to be beheld With our senses then also becomes different. Let us stay with what is nearest to us to begin with: the world that is our earth. Basically spealung, people know really very little of the world beyond this earth during their life on this planet, at least if we persist in the way in which W have grown together with our earthly life. As we advance into the spiritual world—in which case we are outside our bodies—we shall find, as we look back on the body, or the whole of our physical life, or the whole human being, that basically it is growing richer and richer. This human being is all the time gaining in content, is expanding into a world. Man is actually growing and becoming a whole world as we look back on him. That is the reality of words we often hear stressed—in that through spiritual development man grows identical with the world. He sees a new world, a world he normally Is within, and sees it as though arising out of himself. He expands into a world. As far as the earth is concerned, on the other hand, all that is solid in it, all we are used to seeing as its mountains, rivers and so on, disappears. It vanishes and we gradually come to feel ourselves within the earth—please note I am saying within the earth—as though within a great organism. We have left our own world and this inner world, this inner reality, becomes a wide world, whilst the earthly world that was spread out around us now becomes an entity, a being, we must imagine ourselves to be within. As we grow out of ourselves our human world expands into a wide world; at the same time we grow into the earth organism and feel ourselves to be within it just as our finger, say, would feel itself to be part of the organism if it were to have conscious awareness. That is the experience human beings will have, an experience quite frequently brought to expression by more poetic natures. It is very common for instance for people to compare their awakening in the morning with the awakening of nature around them, their life in the course of the day with the ascent of the sun, and dusk with the need for sleep that develops as we get tired. Such comparisons arise with the feeling men have of being part of earthly nature. They are not worth much, however, for they do not touch on what really matters. As I have said on a number of previous occasions, if we want to choose a comparison that is really in accord with the facts we cannot compare what goes on when we go to sleep and wake up with the processes occurring in nature outside. Instead, we must compare 24 hours in our life with the seasonal cycle of the year. We must take the whole cycle of the seasons to make a fair comparison with what happens in us in a single waking-and-sleeping cycle of 24 hours.57 It is quite wrong to compare the period during which a person is awake—between waking up and going to sleep—to summer for instance. This waking state has to be compared to winter in ouside nature whilst summer has to be compared to the sleeping state in man. Making the comparison we would therefore say: The human being goes to sleep and this means he enters into the summer of his personal existence, and in waking up he progresses into the winter of his personal existence. The waking state would approximately correspond to late autumn, winter and early spring. Why would this be in accord with the facts? Because, in evolving into part of the whole earth organism in the way I have indicated, we would indeed have to note that the spirit of the earth is asleep in summer. The earth is then truly asleep; the great conscious awareness of the earth's spirit is dimming. As spring comes the earth's spirit begins to go to sleep. It wakes up again in autumn when the first frosts come. Then it is thinking, it is awake and thinking. That is how a day for the earth's spirit corresponds to the cycle of a year. Looking back upon a sleeping person we can indeed see how his going to sleep means that ego and astral body are leaving the body. A kind of plant-type activity does actually develop in the organism when astral body and ego have departed from it. Their departure initiates a particular activity in the inner man. We really experience the first stages of sleep as the onset of a vegetative process, and sleep progresses in such a way that to the clairvoyant eye the body is pervaded with vegetative growth processes that are genuinely apparent to imaginative perception. This vegetation has a different way of growing from that of the earth's vegetation, however. These things can be told and they can be much meditated on and in this way we continue to make progress. The plants of the earth grow upwards from the soil. It is different when we observe this ‘plant growth’ in man. The plants have their roots outside and grow into the human being. This means that we have to look for the flowers inside the human being. The human betng is very beautiful when seen asleep by someone who has grown Clairvoyant. He is like a whole earth shooting and sprouting, with vegetation growing into it. The picture is to some extent marred, however, for we get the impression at the same time that the astral body is gnawing away at the roots. That is how the progress of sleep presents itself. The animal world consumes, eats up, the plants that grow in summer. And we find that our astral body acts like the animal world except that it gnaws at the roots. If this did not happen we would not able to develop that core which we take through the gate of death. what the astral body makes its own in this way is the harvest of life which we do, in truth, take with us through the gate of death. I am describing things the way they appear to clairvoyant awareness. And just as winter comes upon the fruits of the earth and its frosts kill those fruits of the earth, so the entry of our astral body and ego into the etheric and physical body is like a frost coming to kill the vegetation, the spiritual plant growth, that has come up in the organism during the night. The entity I have called the earth's spirit is indeed an individual entity, just as we are, except that it has a different form of existences with a year being a day for it. Within the earth's spirit we are able to perceive everything I have said of the impulse of Golgotha,58 for within it we find the life-giving energy that was not in the earth prior to Golgotha. In it we find ourselves secure, accepted by the spirit which has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. We become aware of this when we are able to enter fully into the state where the earth has become a being, an entity, of which we are part of the way a finger is part of our organism. It is inevitable therefore that when modern man enters deeply into the world in an occult way there is also a touch to this of religious immersion in the divine element that streams through the world, filling it with spirit. It is a fact that genuine perception of the spiritual world will never deprive man of religious feeling but rather make such feeling more profound. I wanted to give an indication of what it really looks like when we enter into the world of images of spiritual reality. What we seem to be to ourselves in our ordinary everyday physical awareness is mere semblance, is only an inner core. Yet at the same time it has to be said that this is not correct, for it is not easy to find the words for these significant truths. What we seem to be to ourselves is always at our periphery when we are outside the body with our soul element. It is therefore not correct to say it is a core, for a fruit has its shell or peel on the outside and its valuable part inside. But many things are the other way round when it comes to the spirit, and the valuable Part of man is outside and the shell or peel equivalent is inside. The inner part is shell-like by nature and the spiritual part is what may be called the shell-like part in terms of space. We come to see when we take the path into the spiritual world that the human being is far from simple and indeed very complex. Something we have already made our own to quite an extent is the knowledge that man bears within him something through which he takes part in all the worlds that are accessible to him. Through our physical body we are part of the physical world, through the soul element within us we are part of the soul world, and, through our spirit, of the spiritual world. We extend into these three worlds. We know that when a human being takes the path into the spiritual world he will in fact experience himself in a kind of multiple reproduction. This is what causes enxiety. Our comfortable feeling of being of one piece is broken up and one does indeed get the feeling of belonging to several worlds. This may be presented from many different points of view. Today I shall take one particular point of view, drawing your attention again to what has been the basis of my recent lectures. Considering the life of man in its inner aspects we must think of it as based on a number of principles, and when we step outside the body man will indeed be found to be divided into four principles. First of all there is the power on which our memory is based. Through memory we raise into consciousness the things we experienced earlier on in life. Memory creates a context for our life, making this life between birth and death a whole. A second principle is the one we call thinking, the forming of ideas. I cannot define it in detail here, for that is not the point, but the activity of forming ideas takes place in the present. And moving further ahead we come to feeling and yet further on to will activity. Looking into ourselves, our own inner life apppears in the activities of remembering, thinking, feeling and exerting our will. Now we may ask: ‘What is the essential difference between these four functions of the soul?’ Psychologists will merely list these functions as a rule, making no further distinction between them. We shall arrive at the truth only by going into the essential nature of these four functions of the soul. We shall then find that will activity is more or less the baby among our soul functions; feeling activity is older, thinking still older, and the activity performed in remembering is th‘old man’, the oldest of our soul functions. You will understand this more clearly if I present the matter to you from the following point of view. It has been said on a number of occasions that man's development has not been on this earth only but that his present evolution was preceded by evolution on the Old Moon, the Old Sun and on Old Saturn. Man did not just come into being on this earth. To become what he is now he needed to go through evolution on Saturn, Sun and Moon. Now, you see, any will activity we develop is a product of man's earth life. Will evolution is not yet complete, in fact, and it is entirely a product of earth evolution. During Moon evolution man was not yet endowed with an independent will. Angels willed for him. Will activity may be said to have radiated in only with earth evolution. Feeling on the other hand was already acquired during Moon evolution, thinking during Sun evolution and remembering during Saturn evolution. If you now take this together with the thoughts expressed in my Cosmic Memory and Occult Science,59 you will discover an important connection. During Saturn evolution the first beginnings of man's physical body arose; during Sun evolution those of man's ether body; during Moon evolution those of man's astral body; and now, during earth evolution, the human ego is evolving. Let us now take a separate look at the process we call remembering. What is this? The soul retains something of the image of an event we have experienced just as a book we are reading has within it something of the thoughts of the person who wrote it. When you have a book before you, you are able to read and to think—not always perhaps, but I'll ignore that—everything thought by the person who wrote the book. Remembering is a subconscious reading process; the record consists in signs the ether body has engraved into the physical body. If something happened to you years ago, you went through the experiences to be gained from that event. What remains of this are impressions made by the ether body in the physical body. When you recall the event now, the act of remembering is a subconscious reading process. The hidden processes in the organism which enable the ether body to engrave the signs on which memory depends were in-formed into it during Old Saturn evolution. It is a fact that our organism holds within it this hidden Saturn organism. This may be perceived as a genuine entity into which the ether body is able to enter the signs which record the experiences that come from outside, to recall them again in the process of remembering. Essentially, man owes this subconscious recording faculty to the fact that his body, and specifically the element within the physical body which is to receive those imprints, is still pliable during the first seven years of life. It is therefore important not to subject children to forced memory training. I have drawn attention to this in The Education of the Child.60 During the first seven years the still pliable organism should be left to its own elementary powers and we should not use coercion. We should tell children as much as we can but not attach too much value to artificial memory development, rather leaving the child to itself where memory development is concerned. This is a point where spiritual science is of tremendous importance in educational life. The ability to remember is thus one of the oldest elements in human nature. The activity on which thinking is based is part of what may be said to have evolved on the Sun. It, too, is relatively ancient. The Sun-forces contain a principle which organizes man's ether body in such a way that it is able to perform this specific function of thinking, of forming ideas. So you see that it is necessary to go far, far back in the cosmos in order to answer the question: Why is man able to remember, and why is he able to think? It is necessary to go back as far as the Saturn and the Sun stages of evolution. To consider man's ability to feel we need only go back as far as the Moon, and for will activity to earth evolution. This will make many things clear to you. Certain individuals bear a particularly strong imprint of earlier incarnations; they are not pliable but clear cut. Much will imprint itself upon their organism. These are people with an almost automatic memory who however cannot be very creative in their thinking. The faculty of remembering thus relates predominantly to the physical body; the ability to think to the ether body; man's feelings and emotions to the astral body; and his will activity above all to the ego. Man is only able to refer to himself as T because he is a creature of will. If he were only able to think, life would proceed as in a dream. All this means that we are an organic complex of soul functions which were imprinted into our soul life in the course of evolution. I have said that our will activity only evolved during earth evolution and that spiritually higher hierarchies, the Angeloi, willed for man on the Moon. The result was that during Moon evolution all will activity in man was such that if we recall it to clairvoyant consciousness we will indeed see it to have been at a higher level, yet it was involuntary will activity in man, as we see it in animal evolution on earth today. Animals will of necessity follow whatever seethes and boils up within them for they live within the common will of the species. During Moon evolution, therefore, spiritual entities of a higher kind, the Angeloi, did our willing for us. Now, the spiritual entities of a higher kind are active in determining our karma from one incarnation to the next. The Angeloi are no longer active in our will but in the ongoing stream of our karma. During Moon evolution man did not feel his will to be his own; in the same way we do not, living on earth, believe that we make our own karma. It is controlled by spirits from the higher hierarchies. Only at times when our will is for once able to be still, as it were, will it be possible to have a glimmer of the progress of karma even for nonclairvoyant consciousness, a progress that normally stays hidden. Please hold on to the fact I have stated—that a core forms in man which enters into the spiritual realm through the gate of death. This core is the vehicle for our karma. Karma has today already determined what each of us will be doing tomorrow. We would be able to see through our karma if it were not our mission on earth to develop the will. We would be able to see through it to the effect that we could under certain circumstances foresee our immediate future. But the will irrupts into the karmic stream and this obscures the prospect, say, of what will happen to us tomorrow. The will has to be completely silent; only then will it be possible for something to come through of what will happen not through us but to us. As an example, let me give you a story told of Erasmus Francisci.61 This is based on the truth. As a young man Erasmus Francisci lived with his aunt. On one occasion he dreamed that a man whose name was shouted out to him in his dream was going to take a shot at him, but that he would not be killed, for his aunt would save his life. That was his dream. The next day, before anything had actually happened, he told the dream to his aunt. She got rather worried, telling him that someone had been shot dead quite recently in the neighbourhood. She strongly advised her nephew to stay at home so that nothing might happen to him. She gave him the key to the apple loft so that he might go up at any time and get himself some apples. The young man went up to his room and sat at his desk to read something. Yet what he had been reading was of less interest to him at the moment than the key to the apple loft which his aunt had given and which was in his pocket. He decided to go up there. Hardly had he got up from his chair when a shot rang out and the bullet went exactly to the place where his head had been. If he had not got up the bullet would have gone straight through him. A servant in the house next door—whose name was indeed the one called out to Erasmus Francisci in his dream, a name not known to him before—this servant had not known that the two guns he was supposed to clean were loaded and the gun went off as he started to handle it. If Francisci had not got up to go the the apple loft at that very moment, his aunt having given him the key, he would without doubt have lost his life. His dream therefore had shown exactly what was to happen the following day. An event occurred of which we are able to say that the will was in no way involved, for Francisci would not achieve anything with his will. He could in no way protect himself; something irrupted into the karma of this individual to the effect that this life was to continue. The spirit controlling his karma had already had the idea that would save his life. The dream represented the pre-vision of the spirit guiding the young man's karma, perceiving what was to happen the next day. Francisci's state of soul was such that a certain depth had already been achieved through natural meditation as it were, and as a result something occurred which I might also compare with something in external life. I think you will agree that man's gift of prophesy with regard to external life on earth is rather limited. In a certain sense we are all prophets for we all know that dawn will come at a certain time tomorrow and so on, or someone walking across a field today will be able to say what that field is going to look like tomorrow. He will not be able to foretell whether rain is going to fall on that field the next day and so on. It is the same with regard to the inner life. Man lives according to his will, and his karma lies within that will. It is possible to develop a certain sense for what is coming next, and in the same way there are certain people whose inner soul has been deepened and for whom an inner point of light may arise for events where the will has to fall silent. It is important in the pursuit of spiritual science to consider such things on occasion, for we then see that there certainly is something alive within man that points to the future, something man is not able to encompass in his ordinary state of consciousness. Karma emerges through a will that has fallen silent. All the things brought before our soul in this way through spiritual research are able to show us that what we call the great illusion consists predominantly in man being unable to perceive the full picture, in his ordinary consciousness, of what he is—that man is part of the whole world whilst his ordinary consciousness really only shows him the shell, as though he were enclosed within his skin, and so on. Yet what he is shown within this enclosedness is merely a fraction of what man really is, for he is as big as the whole world. We really only look back on man from the outside in ordinary life. In becoming fully aware of these things we can gradually develop a feeling for the presence in man of what is known as his ether body. It is indeed possible to make observations in ordinary life that show at least this second human being, the etheric man, within the physical human being. Imagine you are having a nice lazy lie-in one morning, not feeling inclined to get up as yet; you'd like to stay in bed and it is difficult to find the resolution to get up. If you depend entirely on what is within you it will be difficult to reach the point of getting up. But now imagine there is something in the next room which you have been waiting for during the last few days. The thought occurs of something out there and you will find that this thought can bring about a minor miracle. You will find that once you enter into this thought for a bit you will actually leap from your bed! What has happened? As you woke up, entering again into the physical body, you felt whatever the physical body made you feel and this was not likely to give rise to the thought of getting up. Your ether body then came to act independently, because you engaged it in something outside yourself. There you can see how you have been opposing your ether body to the physical body and how the ether body took hold of you and lifted you out of bed. You arrive at a very specific feeling regarding yourself, the feeling of being an onlooker and making distinction between two kinds of human actions which we perform. There are the actions we perform in the ordinary run of life and those where one is aware of inner activity coming to the fore. These are rather subtle observations and it is, of course, always possible to deny them. We have to attune our observations to life and really see through life and the way it presents itself. Then man's whole inner perception will move in the right direction. It has to be clearly understood that the path to the spiritual world cannot be achieved all at once. It gradually leads out of the world so that we ascend to the point I have just referred to, where what used to be the world for us loses its deadness and itself becomes a living entity. Gaining in insight, man thus grows together with the spiritual world. He grows together with what we may call his portion which remains when he has put away from him everything gained through the instrument of the physical body, everything which essentially made up his life between birth and death. In going through the gate of death we grow into a world very similar to the one I have just spoken of as the one revealed to higher perception. And then we shall discover something that is very important. In the world we enter on passing through the gate of death, if we want to make ourselves at home in it in the right way, we shall just as we need a light to illumine a dark room—need whatever we have been able to develop within our innermost souls whilst here on earth. Earth life is not something to be regarded merely as a dungeon, a prison cell. It is certainly Part of the natural progress of evolution that man has to go through the gate of death. And he can of course live the life between death and rebirth. But life as a whole exists in order that every part of us adds something that is necessary, something new. As we go through the present cycle, life here is to give us something that ignites like a torch, so that we are not merely alive in this life of the spirit but gain insight and live so as to illumine the whole of this life. The light which illumines us is the one thing we gain between birth and and death that shall remain for our life between death and rebirth. This is the one thing of which we must say again and again that as many people as possible must come to understand it, particularlY in the present time. All we come to understand of the spiritual world whilst here in the physical world in our physical bodies shall be as a flame to illumine the life of the spirit. In a certain sense all the difficult things the most developed part of mankind has to go through in the present time serve as a reminder that we need to deepen the life of the soul, and it will have to come about that from the depths of the human soul a longing is brought forth for the worlds of which man is part because of his soul. Let us hope that the present time will cause a longing to arise in which every soul says to itself: Man is something quite different again from what he appears to be in so far as he wears the garment of a body. May the events we are experiencing serve to remind us of the need to deepen our soul life, to let the soul become immersed in spiritual perceptiveness, spiritual vision. Out of our awareness for this need to enter deeply into spiritual science in the present time, and the awareness that the difficulties of the present time are intended as a warning, let us again conclude the way we have always concluded these meetings. I hope it will be possible to continue in the not too distant future. For today let us conclude with the words:
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| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XII
10 Jun 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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| The wood sculpture we will be placing in an important position in our building will also give expression to the fact that the view held of Christ until now cannot continue on into the future, because the relationship between Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman has not been rightly understood until now. We cannot understand the Christ unless we also have the right relationship to the powers seen as Lucifer on the one hand and as Ahriman on the other, for these ar genuine cosmic powers. |
| Faust himself says later: he was ‘…a worm, cringing with fear’.66 Then he understands himself. The earth's spirit has called out to him: ‘You are like the spirit you understand and not like me!’67 And now comes the spirit he understands—Wagner. And so, one might say, it goes on. The earth's spirit has not been grasped and the figure which appears next is really only the earth's spirit in another form: Mephistopheles. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XII
10 Jun 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform. Dear friends, it is to be hoped that the karma of the age, the karma of our movement, will one day permit the completion of the building at Dornach which is to further our movement. A group carved in wood will be given an important place in that building, in the part of it which goes to the east. The aim is to bring to artistic expression, artistic in terms of spiritual science, and to put there before our physical eyes in that building the substance and content of our spiritual movement, and, above all, to represent what our movement is intended to signify for the present age and for the further cultural and spiritual development of mankind. Every detail is to be arranged in such a way that it may be seen as part not only of a spiritual scientific whole but also of artistic forms and indeed artistic installations and furnishings. That is for example how we are trying to solved the problem of acoustics in the building. I am sure these problems cannot be solved at a first attempt, but orientation will be given by showing that calculations based on geometry and the usual rules applied in the external art of architecture cannot solve the acoustics problem. The solution will only be found by applying spiritual science. The roof structure will be a double cupola functioning like the resonance board of a violin. This will partly bring to expression the acoustic concept of the interior space. Many details would have to be taken into account in elucidating the design specifically with regard to the way words and sounds are to be given their proper value, quite distinct from the way they are commonly treated in the present time. One does not normally design circular buildings specifically for their acoustics. Most buildings are designed in such a way that an individual note cannot be given proper value distinct from those that come before and after it, for at certain points one note will always flow over into another. We are going to try and achieve a space where each musical sound can be appreciated in all its fullness from all corners of the interior space and where clearly spoken words, too, can be given full value. But I only want to mention this briefly. My main topic will be the carved group which will be occupying an important position in the building. It is primarily a group of three. More may be added, and this can perhaps be discussed at some later date. These things are not done in accord with a pre-set fixed idea but on the basis of Intuitions of the spiritual world that arise in the course of the work. Three distinct figures are of primary concern. One stands erect, expressing the true essential being of man—not in symbolic form, the way attempts have been made to interpret it even among us, but in a genuinely artistic way. Of course, it will be apparent in the figure that earthly humanity found expression in its most concentrated form in the figure in which the Christ dwelt for three years. It will be possible to see the figure as an expression of the Christ. But the issue should not be forced. We must not approach the group with the thought: ‘I am now going to look upon the Christ.’ If someone arrives at the idea out of their own feelings and out of artistic Intuition, that will be good—hut it would be wrong to approach the group with the preconceived idea that that is the Christ. The point is not immediately to introduce symbolism again, saying ‘That is the Christ’. The figure stands by a small rock slope; behind it the rock rises up high. Its feet stand upon a projection of the rock and within this there is a deep cave. Another figure is sitting in the cave. I would say it is crouching there. This figure is intended to give expression to something that relates to the figure standing above it. This appears to be letting some kind of forces radiate, stream forth, from its hands: We see how those forces radiate into the cave in the rock. The hand is within the cave; forces radiate from it, creating the impression of a hand in the rock. We see the hand, yet it is not a hand; the forces are present, creating the imprint of a hand. Only the head of this figure really has a form reminiscent of man, resembling man. Apart from this it has huge bat-like wings and the body is that of a dragon or worm. Something may be seen to be winding itself around this figure, with the figure itself writhing beneath it. And you will see that this has to do with the erect figure, that it is connected with the outstretched hand of that figure. Forces radiate in, from this hand, and these cause the winding and binding. If we allow the picture to act on our soul for a while we may come to feet that this is the gold flowing within the clefts of the earth and that the figure in the cave is held fast in the clefts of the earth by the gold. The other hand points upwards. And up there on the rock is Yet another figure. Again the head appears human; the wings are not those of a bat but hang down to the ground. The form of the body is such that we may get an inkling...—well, what does this body represent? This body gives the impression that the whole person has become a face, as though a face has been stretched, drawn out like elastic, and body contours have arisen from this. This figure is on the highest pinnacle of rock and it is falling down. As it falls the wings are broken. We see the hand reaching up from the main figure leaving its imprint in the wing. And so we have three figures: Man in his essence; beneath him—no doubt you have an inkling who it is—Ahriman banned to the clefts of the earth by the power emanating from the outstretched hand of the principal figure, held fast by the gold in those clefts because be makes his own fetters of this. The other hand reaches upwards, breaking the wings of Lucifer and causing him to fall to the depths. The point is that in the present time no one can produce such a work by simply applying the rules of the art of sculpture. (There has actually been some sort of an attempt at this when the idea had been put forward in a lecture.) It is not a question of expressing the idea in symbols; for every single trait in those three entities, down to the smallest detail, has to be created out of insight gained through spiritual science. The countenances of Ahriman and Lucifer, both resembling the human countenance, will have to be given a form that reveals the contrast between them. In the case of Lucifer this will involve the Peculiar way the upper part of the head is shaped so that it is merely reminiscent of the human. All is movement here within the spirit, nothing can force us to keep the various elements that make up the brow in the confines prescribed for the human brow. Every single element of the upper head is as mobile as the hands and fingers on our arms are mobile. It can of course only be represented like this if those movements are the genuine movements found in Lucifer. Something else to be noted is that this figure also contains an element which has remained with Lucifer from the Moon. This projects above a deeply receding countenance. It will be evident to you from my description that we are dealing with something very different from the ordinary human countenance. It is as though the skull had an existence of its own, with the part which in man is the countenance pushed in beneath it. Another thing is that particularly in Lucifer there is a certain connection between ear and larynx. These two organs have only been cut apart in man since he started to live on earth. On the Moon they were a single organ. The small wing-like structures on the larynx were tremendously expanded at that time and then formed the lower part of the auricle (external ear). Huge auricles developed more or less in that region, with the upper ear, which now extends outwards, developing out o the brow. Today these organs are separate, and when we speak or sing those activities are directed outwards and it is only the ear which listens. On the Moon they went in an inward direction and from there into the music of the spheres. Man was one great ear. The reason for this is that the wings were the ear. And so you have the ear, the larynx and the wing-like structures moving in melody and in harmony with the sound waves of the cosmic ether and these give rise to the peculiar appearance of Lucifer. They introduce something that is macrocosmic, for Lucifer merely shows in localized form something that in reality is entirely cosmic. You will realize that concessions have to be made so that people do not get a shock on seeing a face that does not have human form. You will also realize that it has to be an elongated face. Lucifer has to look like an elongated face, for he is all ear; the wings are all ear' a long drawn-out auricle. Ahriman is the exact opposite, and it comes naturally to merely hint at things in Ahriman that in Lucifer are fully modelled out and enormously expanded. In Lucifer the wing-like brow is greatly developed, in Ahriman the lower jaw. The whole of the world's materialistic attitude comes to expression in the development of the masticatory organs and teeth. Of course, none of this can be done on the basis of such a description—instead, the description had to be made afterwards-Special importance, dear friends, attaches to the following. It proved necessary in modelling the principal figure to deviate from what would seem natural to everybody, which is to make the human countenance symmetrical. A countenance usually appears symmetrical. There are of course minor asymmetries but these are scarcely noticeable. In the case of the principal figure it is a question of the whole of the left side being orientated upwards, towards Lucifer, with the left brow formed differently from the right, the latter tending towards Ahriman, The left side of the face follows the upward moving hand, the right half the downward moving hand. And so it comes to expression that the principal figure had to be given greater inner mobility than one would find in a human being. Above this sculptured figure the whole theme will be shown in painting so that the two may be seen in juxtaposition to demonstrate how the arts differ. Painting cannot convey the same thing in the same way. Everything has to be presented in a different way. I want to stress the following. It will be very important for us to sculpt the movement of the hands in the principal figure—the way the left hand moves upwards and movement of the other hand is downwards. We must make sure no one immediately feels that the principle figure is reaching up for Lucifer with the left hand, breaking Lucifer's wings with its emanations, and wrapping veins of gold around Ahriman. This must be avoided for the specific reason that at the present time in particular we are still in the process of really grasping the Christ through spiritual science. The Christ neither hates nor does he love unjustly. He does not stretch out his hand to break Lucifer's wings. The Christ is the one who stretches out his hand because it is his innermost nature to do so. He does not break Lucifer's Wings, but Lucifer up there cannot tolerate the emanations coming from that hand and breaks his wings himself. It has to be brought to expression in the figure of Lucifer that his wings are not broken by the Christ but that he breaks them himself. It is something one sees quite often in life that people living close to good people cannot tolerate this, for the influence of those good people makes them feel ill at ease. Lucifer feels something in his heart of hearts that causes him to break his own wings. Here Lucifer comes to recognize himself, to experience himself. The same holds true for Ahriman. Christ does not do anything to those two, neither his left nor his right hand is stretched out to harm either Lucifer of Ahriman. He does not do anything to them but they bring everything upon themselves. This is the basis on which spiritual science intervenes in the present age to present Christ in his true light. Understanding this, we have to say: These things are put forward in all humility, for the building at Dornach is only a beginning—as yet feeble and imperfect—intended merely to show where the path leads, a path we can in no way claim to be perfect. I therefore ask you to take what I am going to say as being in no way presumptuous but very matter of fact. There have been many portrayals of the Christ in the course of history. One of the greatest among them is Michelangelo's Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. Consider the Christ shown in the Last Judgement. His stature Napoleonic, poised in the ether, he shows tremendous power as he directs the good to one side and the sinner to the other. That is a Christ who cannot be the Christ of the future, for he rewards the good and condemns the evildoers. Future Christians will reward and condemn themselves because of what has come into the world through Christ. Michelangelo lived at a time when the most profound truths relating to the Christ could not yet be given expression. The figure presented by Michelangelo in fact has Luciferic traits on the one hand and Ahrimanic traits on the other. Those are painful words to have to say today. But the civilization of mankind only progresses when we show that past ideals cannot be our ideals for the future. The ideals of the future will be such that the Christ principle is taken to be what it is and not merely what it does or will do when earth evolution has reached its end. It will be a principle which will cause to happen whatever has to happen within souls, just because it is there. The wood sculpture we will be placing in an important position in our building will also give expression to the fact that the view held of Christ until now cannot continue on into the future, because the relationship between Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman has not been rightly understood until now. We cannot understand the Christ unless we also have the right relationship to the powers seen as Lucifer on the one hand and as Ahriman on the other, for these ar genuine cosmic powers. The issue can be made clear by referring again and again to a pendulum. The pendulum swings to the left and to the right. Moving to one of the extremes it is not in a state of balance, and the same holds true for the other extreme. Yet it would be idle, inert, lazy if it were always to stay in a state of balance, if it were not to swing either way. It is in the right position when at the centre, but it cannot stop at the centre, it has to swing to the left and to the right. Human life is like that. We are not in a position to say: ‘I'll get away from Lucifer or get away from Ahriman’. If we were to say that we would not be living. It would be like a pendulum that does not swing. Human life does indeed go through pendulum swings, swinging towards Lucifer on the one hand and Ahriman on the other. We must not be afraid of this; that is important. If we were to run away from Lucifer there would be no art; if we were to run away from Ahriman there would be no science. All art not fully penetrated by spiritual science is Luciferic and all science that is not spiritual science is Ahrimanic. That is how man swings to and fro between extremes. The important point is to realize that he wants to be in balance, not at rest. There was a time when people said it was necessary to avoid the Luciferic element, to free oneself from it by being an ascetic. But it is important not to run away from the Luciferic element but truly to face up to Lucifer; we must really swing towards Lucifer on the one hand and Ahriman on the other. The point is that they are opposing forces, like other forces in nature such as positive and negative electricity, magnetism and so on. What matters, then, will be to recognize the triad of the Luciferic element, the Ahrimanic element and that which is the Christ principle. There has to be inner recognition of the inherent greatness of the Christ, a greatness not yet to be found in Michelangelo's Christ. That, dear friends, is what has to be achieved by working with spiritual science. At present we only have the beginnings of an insight that will have to become commonplace. You see, I have also said here during these last weeks that from certain points of view Goethe's Faust has to be considered the greatest poetic work there is.63 It is one of the greatest works ever produced by man because Goethe was able to give such tremendous depth to the human element. Goethe attempted to make Faust a genuine representative of mankind. As I have said on a number of occasions, Mephistopheles is basically a mixture of Lucifer and Ahriman.64 What was the situation where Goethe was concerned? The situation was that he was not aware of there being two principles, Lucifer and Ahriman, and his Mephistopheles is hodgepodge of Ahriman and Lucifer. They are both contained in his Mephistopheles and that is the reason why the whole great work of Goethe's Faust65 did not turn out to be what it might have been if Goethe had been in a position to show Lucifer to on side of Faust and Ahriman to the other. Then the threefold nature always present in mankind would have been apparent. That indeed was the problem Goethe had with his Faust4 You see, when he started to write the work he could only take it as far as he himself had got by the 1770s. He was aware that the four disciplines representing science—philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine and, as he put it, ‘theology, too, alas’—were inadequate. These Ahrimanic disciplines could not satisfy Faust. They merely gave him an Ahrimanic, intellectual relationship to the workings of the universe. He wanted access to the reality of the universe, to go to the sources of life and experience; something living, not thought up. Something living—the earth's spirit—appears on the scene. Yet Faust cannot endure his presence. And then—this is in Goethe's very first draft—the door opens and in comes Wagner. So many people keep talking about Faust today and one has the feeling that one hears Wagner talking about Wagner. People generally talk ‘Wagner-style’ about Faust as he appears on the stage. What exactly does Wagner represent? And what is coming in with the earth's spirit? We know that all knowledge gained of the universe is knowledge gained of oneself. It is a part of Faust himself that enters with the earth's spirit, though it is part of the expanded soul that identifies with the cosmos. Faust, however, is as yet unable to understand it. He cannot yet reach out to that element which is also part of himself. It is shown in the play how far he has developed. If we were to stage Faust properly today—more properly perhaps than even Goethe did—we would have to let Wagner appear as a slightly caricatured second Faust wearing the same costume and makeup; for it is another aspect, another part of Faust, that enters with Wagner. Faust himself says later: he was ‘…a worm, cringing with fear’.66 Then he understands himself. The earth's spirit has called out to him: ‘You are like the spirit you understand and not like me!’67 And now comes the spirit he understands—Wagner. And so, one might say, it goes on. The earth's spirit has not been grasped and the figure which appears next is really only the earth's spirit in another form: Mephistopheles. He appears as Lucifer guiding Faust through everything the human being is capable of experiencing by following only his passions—lower passions in Auerbach's Cellar, and also more noble passions, though these are taken as far as witchcraft and black magic. In Part 2 Ahriman should really be taking Lucifer's place. All this is apparent if one reads Faust with real understanding, and there is also plenty of external evidence. I have already said on an earlier occasion that among the material later cut out by Goethe was a passage where Mephistopheles was referred to as Lucifer.68 Goethe always felt uncomfortable in presenting this figure which really is two figures. The Luciferic element emerges particularly when Faust's religious feelings come to the fore, made to sound peculiarly high-flown in his conversations with Wagner. Catechized by Margaret in their conversation about God, Faust says:
And this is considered the highest form of presenting the divine, as the highest form of presenting the religious element. No need to think—‘Feeling is all that matters’; this suggests that all we are able to have by way of a religious element is whatever the Margarets of this world are able to grasp, forgetting that Faust is giving instruction to a girl of 16, giving her only as much as she is able to understand. What he says about ‘smoke to obscure the warming glow of heaven’ is not intended for philosophers, and it shows lack of understanding when knowledge at the ‘Margaret level’ is over and over again seen in professorial array. It is evident from all this that Goethe initially gave expression to the Luciferic principle in its double aspect. In Part 2 it is more the Ahrimanic principle, with Mephistopheles causing the Homunculus to be created, Helena to be conjured up and all the things that give Faust a knowledge of the world that is entirely different from everything he had ‘studied assiduously, in zealous toil.’70 It has to be said that even today there is much misunderstanding where many of the details are concerned. There is the passage where it is expressly said that Homunculus intends that something within man shall be developed to fully human status: ‘...and you'll have time until humanity is attained’,71 for the path first leads through lower regions. The words are: ‘But do not strive for higher accolades’ (in German, nach Orden).72 Very curious explanations have been given for this. In reality the words should of course be—Goethe was once again using the Frankfurt dialect—‘But do not strive for higher places’ (in German, nach Orten). It does not mean to say that Homunculus and others like him are awarded decorations the way people are. Then there is the scene where Homunculus is created and Wagner describes something stirring in the retort:
The word super-creation is a compound of creation just as superman is a compound of man. People have only been talking of the existence of superman since Nietzsche wrote of ‘superman’.74 Yet Goethe spoke of superman long before that. As it is, people read the word to be UeberZEUGUNG (conviction) when in fact it is a compound of Zeugung (procreation, creation) and therefore UEBERzeugung (super-creation), just as we speak of man and superman. These things have to be understood in detail before we can perceive what Goethe intended to say. But we also need to achieve a grand and independent vision. We really have to realize the mission of our age where spiritual science is concerned, and that a mind like that of Goethe was seeking to prepare his age for this mission. In 1797 when Schiller pointed out that he ought to complete his Faust, Goethe said he had dug the old tragelaph up again—a tragelaph being a creature half-animal and half-human.75 Goethe called it an old tragelaph, and at the end of the 18th century he called it a barbaric composition. This is something we must take very seriously for Goethe knew well how good and how bad his Faust was. All these are things spiritual science should bring out so that we achieve independent vision where these things are concerned. Goethe wanted to show the spiritual self, the immortal part of man, working to attain to higher things. This is evident from an outline he wrote around the turn of the 18th century as to what he intended his Faust to be. First he wrote: ‘Pleasures of life for the individual, seen from outside’ then: ‘Pleasure of creation, seen from within’. Finally, when he had followed Faust's path all the way, he wrote: ‘Epilogue in the chaos on the road to hell’.76 Oh! the discussions I have had to listen to on the subject! They are enough to cause the deepest surprise, for people were reflecting: Did Goethe really still believe at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century that his Faust would have to go to hell? The answer is simply that it is not Faust who is speaking the epilogue but Mephistopheles, taking his departure when Faust has taken the path to his immortal self. We therefore see something in Faust that is on the way, though only on the way, to what the dominant sculptured group in our building is intended to convey—the figure of man in truly concrete terms. On the one side appears the one tendency followed by the pendulum of the soul, on the other the opposite principle. It is not possible to truly understand the nature of man as long as one is merely holding everything together or looking for a duality. That is the essential point. We must hold on to the fact that it is indeed German culture out of which this idea will take form. Two civilizations on this earth represents opposite poles and in making reference to them one is showing their justification rather than otherwise. On the one hand there is purely Oriental culture. What does it consist in? The Oriental nature of this culture consists in purely inward deepening being sought, casting off all that is merely external process in this life. We observe how in the culture which represents the highest flowering of Oriental culture, in the Indian culture, all instruction, all knowledge, is designed to influence the soul to the effect that it becomes free of the physical body. It is a purely Luciferic culture, an entirely Luciferic culture. The further east we go the more we find the Luciferic element. And when we consider the West, what do we find there? Let us go straight away to the extreme West. It is natural for us, particularly if we have learned something of spiritual science, and I want to illustrate this with an example—when we see someone who comes to accept a more spiritual philosophy where previously he followed a more materialistic one—it is natural for us to ask ourselves: ‘What goes on in the soul of such a person?’ It is particularly when we see such a major change in the soul of a person that we have to enter into the heart and mind of this person to share in the experience his soul has gone through. Nothing appears more significant to us than to share such an experience with another human being. You see, in America people have also been seen to go through what is known as ‘conversion’, that is a change from a materialistic to a spiritual point of view. And what does one do? One sits down—I am presenting rather a radical picture, but it does happen like this—one sits down and writes to these people, asking them to give the reasons why they underwent such a change of heart. And then—well, one then makes a table, establishing categories, like this for instance: Category 1 Fear of death and of hell (making a pile of those letters)—14% Category 2 Altruistic reasons, selflessness Category 3 Egocentric motives—6% (categories 2 and 3) Category 4 Striving for a moral idea—7% Category 5 Bad conscience and awareness of sinfulness—8% Category 6 Obedience to teaching (1, 2, 3 letters) Category 7 People have reached a certain age (1, 2, 3 letters), And then Category 8 Imitation (1, 2, 3 letters).—13% (Categories 6-8) Again a category of people who have seen others believing in God and have imitated them. Then Category 9 Getting a hiding—19% And so you have ‘conversion’. This, then, is the opposite. In Indian culture there is no regard for what goes on externally. It would seem quite wrong to an Indian, he would call it ‘mad’, to work out the percentages of the converted in such a way, classifying the motives that led to their conversion. In the West no heed is paid to the inner life, all trace of the inner aspect is wiped out. The most external aspect of all that is external is here compiled in tables, purely Ahrimanic. If we go to the East: innermost inwardness, purely Luciferic. Thus the globe may be said to show us the contrast between Ahrimanic and Luciferic trends. And between those two we are not at rest but in balance. It is not a question of simply rejecting the one or the other of them. We have to be aware that a culture that really extends into the future consists in finding the right measure for both, knowing how to give each it proper due. The whole of earth destiny is brought to expression, I feel, in the sculptured group. It is the mission of Europe to establish the balance between East and West. In the East the pendulum swings to one side, in the West to the other. It is not for us Europeans merely to ape the East or to ape the West. It is our mission to stand our own ground quite independently and give full recognition to the rightful existence of the one as well as the other. That comes to expression in the sculptured group. The work put in a particular position within our building therefore also relates geographically to our mission. It is placed to the east, but with its back to the east, facing west. It is in a state of balance, holding within it the fruits of a long sojourn in the East; and it will not be satisfied with the purely Ahrimanic culture which is what the West has to offer mankind. Dear friends, if our age can come to understand these things, doing so in a thinking way, with feeling, and bringing perceptiveness into it—there is no reason here for pride—it will become clear to our age that even the very painful and profoundly saddening events happening now only serve to make mankind aware of the mission it will have to fulfil in the immediate future. It is only to be hoped that the tremendous and painful experiences mankind now has to go through will truly serve to deepen human hearts and minds. Unfortunately it is true that nothing of the great seriousness the present age demands of us is to be found in what is currently brought to expression in the spoken word and also in literature. Much will still have to come upon human hearts and minds before they are really filled with the great seriousness of purpose—and it is a comforting seriousness—that man will be supported in the tasks set before him. Seriousness is demanded of us, but on the other hand it is a comforting seriousness, a bringer of hope and confidence. We merely have to realize that we are living in an age when great things are asked of us, but that we are also capable of doing these great things. Nor can we come to a pessimistic view of things in the present time. On Tuesday 22 June I shall go into these things in more detail, throwing additional light on certain points. I also intend to speak of man's immediate task for the future and the way spiritual science will help to achieve this. 77
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| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XIII
22 Jun 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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| But if he reflects carefully he may well find that the past event has undergone a complete change. It will still, however, remind him of something he experienced in the past. |
| In the case of Emerson it is always possible to detect subtle undertones of his Moon being, of the dreamer, wherever he became completely involved in a person or an object. |
| There will have to be many of them before the full meaning of Christ's words can be understood, for they are words of guidance, words given out of the spirit, yet it will only be in the course of time that they can be understood out of what human beings are able to summon up out of the science of the spirit. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XIII
22 Jun 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be With you and the hard duties you have to perform. Today it will be my task to sum up some of the things we may know already, though it is good to review them again and again, for they may serve as guide-lines for our work in spiritual science. Above all we must every now and again return to the thought that our present life on earth, between birth and death, really is an interlude between our many past earth lives and the many lives we have already lived between death and rebirth on the one hand and the many earth lives and lives between death and rebirth that lie ahead in the future on the other. An interlude is what I have called this life of ours. We may therefore expect to find something in our present life that may, as it were, be considered to have arisen out of what has gone before, and also something that may be seen to point us towards the future. Some of the things we shall discuss today will relate particularly to the latter. A person could easily believe, in considering his life, that there is really nothing in this life to indicate that the germs, the seeds of our future life are already within us. Yet that is the case. It really is the case that what is to happen with us in the future is already in preparation. We merely have to interpret our lives correctly and we shall find out that something already lies hidden within us just as the plant now before us holds within it the hidden seed of the future plant' for a plant that is still to come into being. One element in our present life which often tends to be incomprehensible is our dream life, a subject only too well known to us all. Our dream life does of course have aspects that we may consider to be to some extent comprehensible. We dream about things which remind us of something or other we have gone through in life. It does, of course, often happen that things we have gone through the day before or some time ago appear changed in our dreams, that they have undergone some kind of transformation. But still, it will often be fairly obvious that part of the life we have behind us comes up in what we are dreaming, even if it has changed. On the other hand I think no one who pays at least some attention to himself and the world of his dreams can deny that there are dreams which show us such strange things that we really cannot say they derive from something or other we have gone through in our lives. It really is a fact that a person only needs to reflect a little on his dreams and he will be perfectly aware that things come up in his dreams which he could never have thought up, could never have had an idea of, at least as far as he is aware from what he remembers. We shall understand how all this fits together if we take a closer look at what really happens when we dream. As you know, when we are asleep we are outside the physical and ether bodies with our astral body and ego. The physical and ether bodies are lying on the couch; with our astral body and ego we are outside them. Under present conditions on earth it is not possible for any one to have conscious awareness of what the astral body and the ego go through whilst they are asleep—unless they somehow acquire special faculties. These things are at a subconscious level. However, clairvoyant perception shows that what the astral body and ego live through outside the physical body is just as rich and varied, just as clearly defined, as what the physical body experiences. It is just as rich and varied, showing just as great a variety of form as many of the things we experience here on the physical plane. Our consciousness cannot take it in, but it is there and it is experienced. The astral body and the ego are normally so far away from the physical and ether bodies during sleep that these are not aware of anything that goes on in the astral body and the ego. Dreams arise when the astral body and the ego come so close to the physical and ether bodies that the ether body is able to receive impressions of what goes on in the astral body and the ego. When you wake up knowing that you have been dreaming, it strictly speaking means that the contents of your dream have become conscious because the astral body and the ego were re-entering. And before the physical body was able to become conscious of having the astral body and the ego within itself again, the ether body became conscious of this. The ether body rapidly took in what the astral body and the ego had experienced and this gave rise to the dream. A dream therefore arises through interaction between astral body and ether body. As a result the dream is given a particular colouring. It is given a kind of coating, one might say. As you know, at death the human being departs with his astral body, ego and ether body and the ether body then immediately sees the past life in retrospect. This vision of the past life is in fact attached to the ether body and the review comes to an end when this dissolves. The ether body therefore has the capacity for carrying the imprint of all the events in one's life. The ether body really bears the imprint of everything we have gone through in life. This ether body has a very complex structure. If we were able to dissect it out in such a way that it retained its form, it would be a mirror of our present life, a picture of our life going back to the moment, the point in time, to which our memory extends. As we enter into the ether body with our astral body and ego and the ether body comes to meet the incoming astral body, it carries things—memories of things it has experienced—towards that which is coming in with the astral body and it uses its own images for what in the astral body is something real. I want to put it more precisely. Let us assume someone is asleep and with his astral body and ego out there encounters, let us say, another individual. The person will know nothing about this. He experiences the encounter; he experiences a certain friendly feeling towards the other and knows that he is about to do something together with this other individual. Let us assume he experiences this outside his ether body. This is possible. Yet he'll know nothing about it. Then the moment of waking comes. The astral body and the ego return to the ether body, bringing towards the ether body whatever has been experienced. The ether body meets the astral body with all that is inherent within it, with its world of images, and the sleeper dreams. He dreams of something he undertook maybe ten, twenty years ago. And the person will say to himself: ‘Ah yes, I have been dreaming about something I experienced ten, twenty years ago.’ But if he reflects carefully he may well find that the past event has undergone a complete change. It will still, however, remind him of something he experienced in the past. Now what did really happen in this case? If we follow the process carefully, using clairvoyant perception, we find that the ego and astral body have experienced something that in fact Will only take place during the person's next incarnation: an encounter with an individual, something or other which has to do with the individual. But the person is not yet able to take this in with his ether body, for this only contains, is only able to hold, the images of his present life. When the astral body enters, the ether body expresses what really is part of a future life in images belonging to the present life. This peculiarly complicated process actually takes place all the time in the human being when he is dreaming. Considering everything you have already heard in spiritual science, this will not seem strange to you. We must be aware that in the principles which depart from our physical and ether bodies, in the astral body and the ego, we have that which tends towards our next incarnation, which is preparing in us for our next incarnation. As we gradually learn to separate our dreams from the images deriving from our present life, we come to know the prophetic nature of dreams. The prophetic nature of dreams can indeed be revealed to us; we merely have to learn to strip our dreams of the images in which they are clothed. We need to consider the nature of the experiences in our dreams rather than the actual experience. We might say to ourselves for instance: The fact that I dream of an individual is due to the nature of my ether body, the way in which my ether body goes out to meet the experiences gained by the astral body with images relating to the present. To identify the things which have already been prepared for our next life, we have to focus our attention more on the manner or essential nature of the dream, separating it from the image belonging to the ether body. Through our dreams we really have prophecies in us of things that will happen in the future. It is really most important to pay serious attention to this. Human life will be more and more revealed the more we take account of its complex nature. We'd like to have it simpler, that would be easier, but the fact is that it is complicated. You see, someone who is in the outer, physical world does not realize that there are all kinds of things within him. We have just come to see that there is a foreteller of future lives within us. But there are many other things in us, and in gaining self-knowledge we come to see more and more of what there is in us, what is at work within us, making us happy or unhappy—for all the things that are in us make us happy or unhappy. People do not usually realize that prior to this earth life they went through life on Moon—not they themselves but that which has made them human beings on earth. We know something of life on Moon and also of earlier life stages on Sun and on Saturn. Let us first of all consider life on Moon. At present we are of course living earth lives, but life on Moon was essential if earth life was to come about. Life on Moon was preparatory, producing the causes of life on earth, and in a certain way this Moon life is still in us. On Moon man had a dream-like clairvoyance. He perceived reality through dream images. Today we still have in us what we once have been on Moon; it is still in us. Yes, I know Moon man has become earth man, but this effect still holds its original cause within it, we still have Moon man in us. Looking upon this Moon man we are able to say: ‘He is what we call the dreamer in us.’ Yes, indeed, We all carry a dreamer in us, a dreamer who actually thinks and feels and uses his will in a less dense, in a thinner, way, but who is really also wiser than we earth individuals are. We have a dreamer in us. We all carry another subtle human being within us. The way we walk about on earth, thinking, feeling and using our will, is something we have been given in the course of earth evolution. What Moon evolution has left in us is a dreaming human being. We are however given more in this dreamer than we are able to have in our thoughts, feelings and will impulses, and this dreamer is not entirely inactive. We do not take him into account, but we do many, many things that we are really only half aware of, things the dreamer in us is directing and guiding. We arrange things, but the dreamer in us also does his part, guiding our thoughts in this or that direction. We may think up a sentence, for example. The dreamer will make us say that sentence in a specific way, giving it a point, a particular nuance of feeling. The dreamer is what is left in us of Moon. Let us refer to an outstanding individual and show how the dreamer can be found in him. When people get to know people in life, or get to know outstanding individuals through their writings, they usually consider the other as a human being on this earth and not as a dreamer, a poet. Yet it is there that he expresses himself more profoundly. Emerson was a great writer.78 He had the peculiarity that he always became so engrossed in whatever subject he was dealing with that it is easy to show up the occasional contradiction in his work. The reason is that he was always completely taken up with the subject he was dealing with at the time, failing to take into account that what he was characterizing at the moment was contradictory to the characterization he had given when involved in another subject. In the case of Emerson it is always possible to detect subtle undertones of his Moon being, of the dreamer, wherever he became completely involved in a person or an object. Emerson wrote two excellent essays—one on Shakespeare as the typical poet and one on Goethe as the typical writer. Now what happens is that people read this and that in Emerson's essay on Shakespeare and read this and that in the essay on Goethe and this satisfies them, they are content. But we can also take things further and say to ourselves: 'Surely there is some subtle touch of something unusual in these works of Emerson?' And We shall discover something very strange indeed, for Emerson's intention was not to characterize Shakespeare as Shakespeare, but to make him the representative, the example, of poets. It is very strange to see what has come about through Emerson's becoming engrossed in Shakespeare—if we perceive the subtle undertones that are present in this work. You know I would not say anything derogatory about Shakespeare out of chauvinism, for nationalistic reasons. Of course I consider Shakespeare a great poet, certainly one of the greatest poets of all time. But let me bring out those subtle undertones that are there in Emerson's characterization of Shakespeare. He wrote that it was not originality which made a great man. Characterizing a great poet one should not demand such a great person to be original in everything he did. And you'll find that in his characterization of Shakespeare Emerson makes it clear that the poet went to all kinds of sources, taking anything he liked and using it in his own poetic works. Emerson was making an effort, as it were, to excuse Shakespeare for not being original, for collecting his material from all kinds of sources—Italian, Spanish, French and German—and of course also from English history. Oddly enough, Emerson, a man giving such loving concern to the work of Shakespeare, characterized Shakespeare in the following words:
He excused Shakespeare's lack of originality, the fact that he collected his material from many sources. Indeed, he went so far as to say that one had to consider the nature of English audiences at the time, for Shakespeare sought to be to their taste. Emerson wrote some strange things about Shakespeare:
And the strangest thing Emerson said about Shakespeare in his loving characterization, the strangest thing—please listen to this:
Emerson was therefore trying to demonstrate Shakespeare's world renown exactly by showing that great men plagiarize on each other's works and that the themes he used in his numerous works were actually taken from the work of others. That is the subtle undertone to be found initially in Emerson's Shakespeare characterization. Let us now consider his loving appreciation of Goethe. Emerson characterized Goethe as representative of writers. Yet he said with reference to Goethe that nature depended on her wonders being put in words. Every stone, every plant, every creature in nature was waiting to be uttered in words by the soul of man. The writer, Emerson said, would be in immediate contact with nature. It was as though the creator himself has first made provision for the idea and then one day the writer would appear. It was strange, Emerson said with regard to Goethe, how this man owed none of his gifts to his people, his country, his environment, for everything bubbled up out of him. Truth and error, too, was determined by Goethe himself, everything was his own. In his characterization of Goethe, Emerson sought to find his concepts from all kinds of sources. Characterizing Shakespeare as a splendid robber he presented Goethe as someone working out of the centre of the world, as nature herself. Here are some passages from Emerson's description of Goethe:
Elsewhere he said:
He characterized Shakespeare as being the way his audiences wanted him, Goethe as a man who had been envisaged from the very beginning of the world.
And again:
Those words were used to characterize Goethe. In his characterization of Shakespeare, Emerson said that he could never do enough to collect material from all kinds of sources, particularly written sources. I would say that in his characterizations of Shakespeare and of Goethe Emerson succeeded marvellously well in bringing out the difference between Shakespeare and Goethe. Out of what we feel about this we are then able to discover what the dreamer has contributed in either case, that is how Emerson came to characterize Shakespeare as a great robber and Goethe as the great ally of the truth. This is extremely interesting, for there was no conscious intention; yet there is this particular tinge to both essays. You see, there is another way of reading than just picking up a book and going through it. In fact we do not find out the most important aspects of things if we just take them by themselves, but only by comparing them, by letting one thing act on us side by side with another. It has been possible for me to give this example because in the case of Emerson it is often the dreamer who is speaking. It is absolutely possible to be aware of two persons speaking in his voice. Emerson was of course aware of the contradictions which your run-of-the-mill reader finds in his works. After all, some of the contradictions In Emerson are so glaringly obvious you really cannot miss them. On the one hand he calls the English the greatest nation on earth, on the other he puts the Germans above them. One thing is said out of surface consciousness, the other out of the dreamer. It is particularly interesting to read the two conclusions to the essays on Shakespeare and Goethe one after the other, taking them simply as conclusions. In the essay on Shakespeare, Emerson wrote that none has as yet attained to what the poet represented in the world: 'The world still awaits the poet-priest.' Something of a feeling of resignation is apparent in the conclusion of the Shakespeare essay. At the end of the Goethe essay we find the exact opposite: that we are spurred by him to revere all truth by not merely giving it recognition but also making it the guide-line for our actions. The Shakespeare essay ends in words of resignation, the Goethe essay in words of confidence and hope. We are living in an age when it is important to consider these things to some extent, to realize them to some extent. We shall find that in all human beings there is a dreamer who makes himself known through their actions. Clairvoyant awareness is able to perceive him directly; in ordinary life we can recognize him by studying people. That is something we can do in the case of Emerson. Studying Emerson is of definite interest. The dreamer is the principle in us which is influenced by everything that is supposed to influence us from the spiritual world without our being aware of it. In the experiences we gain as human beings on earth we form thoughts and will impulses. The things we know In the ordinary way are the things we discover in the course of life. Into our dreams however come the Inspirations of the angels, of the entities known as the Angeloi. These in turn are inspired by entities from higher hierarchies. Into our dreams enter things—more so in some and less in others—that are more sensible than anything we have gained from everyday life, anything we encompass in everyday life as we think, feel and use our will. The element that guides us, the element which is more than earth-dwelling man is or ever was, enters into the dreamer in us. You see, this dreamer is capable of evoking many things that at present are unconscious in us. Oh yes, everything influencing us from the higher world by way of the entities belonging to the hierarchy of the Angeloi influences the dreamer; but all Ahrimanic, all Luciferic influences also influence the dreamer, they really act on the dreamer. A great deal of what people put forward—not entirely from their consciousness, I'd say, but at an instinctive level—is due to influence brought to bear on the dreamer from the spiritual world. Again I would like to give you an example. I would like to take this example from contemporary history on a somewhat wider scale. I have told you on several occasions that we come to know the European peoples by understanding the way the folk soul speaks through the sentient soul to the Italian, through the intellectual or mind soul to the French, through the spiritual soul to the English, through the ego to the Germans, through the spirit self to the Russians. This communication through the spirit self in the case of the Russians takes the form of instincts today that will only develop further in the future. What the Russian folk soul has to say will only become apparent in the distant future, once the human soul has developed as far as the spirit self. This is why everything that emerges to the east of us is still only germinal. Those peoples to the east of us are, however, instinctively aware that they belong to a different cultural stream. They feel that they must wait. Yet no one likes to wait in reflecting on his awareness of the present. The point is that they are supposed to wait and consciously absorb European culture. Yet there is an instinct in them that they ought to lead and to guide, that they cannot put Europe to death quickly enough. The natural course of events, however, is that in Central Europe there develops whatever can develop in the dialogue between the folk soul and the ego. As for the Russian folk soul, it must learn its lessons from Central Europe. Once it has worked through what is already being worked through in advance in Central Europe, it will be able to make its own Contribution to European culture. Instead, wild, chaotic instincts are giving rise to something very strange so that we are able to see that these instincts are brought to life in the dreamer out of all kinds of Ahrimanic and Luciferic impulses. It is due to these Ahrimanic and Luciferic impulses that the East of Europe has now turned against Germany in such a horrific way. One mind in whose utterances the dreamer is apparent is that of Yushakov79 He gave his views in 1885 on the relationship between Russian and English culture. I suggest you consider his ideas, for it seems most desirable that as many people as possible today ideas like those which not all that long ago arose in the mind of a Russian who then wrote them down. We should consider these ideas not so much for their content but rather as symptoms of something to be found in all Russian peoples. develop Yushakov said that the West had grown decadent and was ripe for decline—everything in the West had outlived its time and had to disintegrate. Russia would have to come in at this point. But Russia should not merely cultivate the West, redeem the West from its barbarism; Russian would have to redeem the whole world and Particularly Asia. The way Yushakov envisaged this redemption of Asia for the sake of the soul is as follows. Let us consider Asia. Asiatic culture really originated from Iran. Iranian culture based on Ormazd.80 The Iranians had realized that there was conflict between Ormazd and Ahriman and it has always been possible to see how the Iranians did everything in their power to spread the beneficial influence of Ormazd in Iran. Then, however, the Turanian peoples appeared on the scene. They were independent of Ahriman and constantly harried, fought and overcame the Ormazd culture. First Ormazd was in conflict with Ahriman in Iran. But If we look at the way the peoples of Europe behaved towards this Ormazd culture we find that this lovely culture had spread in the areas which were then predominantly colonized by the English. The English were absolute barbarians when it came to the Ormazd culture. Russia will have to make up for many crimes committed by the English in Asia. The English went there, took possession of large parts of Asia and exploited the Ormazd culture, sucking it dry. What did the English have in mind? Those Englishmen believed the Ormazd culture to exist for their benefit; those Englishmen said that all those parts of Asia existed only to wear English fabrics, fight among themselves with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English dishes and play with English trinkets. Asian culture, they felt, existed for no other purpose. The whole of Asia was to their mind booty won by England. Yushakov put it very precisely:
That was written in Russian by Yushakov in 1885. And what did the Russians do? Yushakov asked. They had not been able to emulate the Western European nations, the English, and without legal justification attack and arrogate for themselves the Ormazd culture which existed in Asia. They only went to the places where the Ahriman culture had spread, holding back the peoples in whom Ahriman was at work, so that they could do no further harm to all that Ormazd had achieved for Asia. Once the Russians had liberated the peoples of Asia from the evil of Ahriman they would have to liberate them from the evils due to the sins the English had committed against the Ormazd culture in those areas. To prepare for their future mission in Asia, following the liberation of Asia from Ahriman, they would also have to make good the harm European peoples, and above all the English, had done to the Ormazd culture. Asked why those peoples were unable to carry on with the Ormazd culture, Yushakov's reply was that they had become slaves to industrialism and individualism, that they always thought of themselves first whilst the Russians always thought of themselves last. Such people were of no use. Having blended industrialism into their individualism they had become bloodsuckers in Asia. Russia, he said, would forge different links; a link between the Cossacks, with their brilliant military skills, and the country people who were working with nature. Out of this would come the people who were to liberate the people of Asia. The individual who was to liberate human evolution would come from Asia. That was Yushakov's ideal—that the one to liberate the world would come out of the union between the Cossacks and the country people tilling the soil. Dear friends, you see an ideal set up here that surely makes it clear beyond doubt that something of the Ahrimanic spirit entered into Yushakov's own mind, into the dreamer. This influence on the dreamer has gradually created a mood in a whole nation—the mood we now perceive in the people who are to the east of us. We are dealing here with a popular mood, a mood brought to expression in Yushakov's words. You see, I also wanted to show how spiritual science lets us enter more and more closely, giving us deeper insights, into what people say and dream. We all have the dreamer in us, the dreamer is in all of us. Both good and evil powers influence the dreamer. We have the dreamer in us who has brought Moon nature into us, and we also have a Sun man in us from Sun evolution. This Sun man, however, is no longer able to dream. His conscious awareness if of the same kind as that of the plants. We have within us a plant or Sun man, who is asleep. And then we have in us a Saturn man who is completely dead, as dead as a stone. We have the Sun man in us who is asleep and also Saturn man who is at an even lower level of consciousness, below the level of consciousness we have in sleep. Saturn man I'd say, is our oldest cause, the innermost core in us. All the knowledge man gains at the present time in external life or in science is gained because the external world influences the Saturn man in us. We are not aware of being influenced in this way, but we are nevertheless influenced. Everything we think, feel and will penetrates to Saturn man. And Saturn man is what finally remains of us on this earth, irrespective of whether we are cremated as far as our physical body is concerned or whether we decompose. The principle we call the dreamer does not endure; the Sun man does not endure. Saturn man becomes part of the elemental realm of the earth in form of very, very fine dust particles. This endures. The earth will always contain a trace of what there has been in us. If you investigate the elemental world today you can find in it the remains of Abraham, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, though in the form of very very fine dust particles. You can find the part of them that was their Saturn man. The part of man that was his Saturn man is given to the earth, remains with the earth, remains in the earth with our permanent essential character. It was not like this in earlier times. It has been like this since the 15th and 16th centuries. Previously, the whole of the human being dissolved; only those who had been well ahead of their time, like Abraham, Plato and Socrates, left their remains to the earth. By now, or course, it has gradually come to be like this for all people. For this is what is so strange: everything presently achieved by following the path of external science is imprinted in this Saturn man and becomes part of the earth when he does. Everything else there is to man will be lost, dissolving into the universe once the earth has reached its goal. The minerals, plants and animals around us will pass away. Only the Saturn man you have been remains, in the form of fine dust particles. It will go over from earth to Jupiter existence, forming the solid skeleton of Jupiter. Those are real atoms for Jupiter. People studying external science today, people thinking in an external way, influence their Saturn man to the effect that they produce atoms for Jupiter in their Saturn man. That is how Jupiter get its atoms. If that, however, were the only thing to happen, the whole of Jupiter would be merely a mineral or mineral-like sphere. Jupiter would merely be a mineral-like sphere without plant growth. What we are able to take across to Jupiter through the Saturn man in us merely causes Jupiter to be a mineral sphere. Plants could not grow on it. If plants are to grow on Jupiter the Sun man in us must also be given something. This Sun man in us only receives something from now on and into the future if men and women absorb concepts developed in spiritual science; for the concepts we absorb outside, from external science, enter into Saturn man. What we absorb by way of thoughts engendered through spiritual science enters into the Sun man. This is why spiritual science calls for greater activity. Its thoughts differ from those of external science in that they are active. They have to be grasped in a living way and it is impossible to remain passive towards thinking activity the way we do in the external world. In spiritual science everything has to be actively thought out, we have to be inwardly active. This has an effect on the Sun man in us. And if there were no Sun principle in man, the Jupiter of the future would be entirely mineral, with no plant world. People going through spiritual development take something across that will give rise to a plant world on Jupiter. Through the Sun principle in us we take across the future plant world. All we have to do to make Jupiter barren is reject spiritual science. We can establish spiritual science now in order that there shall be vegetation on Jupiter. Unlike others, we spiritual scientists do not talk of the marvellous progress we have made. Just listen to a modern physician, one who is very much taking the present-day point of view, or to a modern philosopher and so on. They say: ‘We need not go far back to find people who amounted to nothing at all. Someone like Paracelsus really was in idiot, and a grammar school teacher today is cleverer than Plato every was.’ Plato's philosophy was thoroughly picked to pieces by Hebbel. The latter put down in his diary, as an idea for a play, that a grammar school teacher had a reincarnated Plato in his class.81 He intended to make a dramatic figure of him, showing the schoolmaster to be dealing with his reincarnated Plato who was quite incapable of grasping anything his teacher was saying about Plato. Hebbel intended to make a play of this. It really is a pity he did not do so, for it really is a very good idea. But we do not consider ourselves to have made marvellous progress. We hold a different point of view. What people consider philosophy today holds the ego-boosting view that anything going back ten years is already out of date. We know that we have to present spiritual science today the way we do. We also know, however, that a time must come when everything we now present as spiritual science will be a nonsense in a future where quite different work will have to be done within mankind. What we have to present as spiritual science today has the form appropriate for the moment, seeking out from eternity what will be for the benefit of the present age. A time will come, however, when it will be necessary for us to try and influence the dreamer in us just as we influence the Sun man, and the whole of our external science influences Saturn man. Jupiter as mineral mass will be based on what external science makes of Saturn man. Its vegetation will be based on what spiritual science makes of Sun man. Animal life on Jupiter will arise from something that is going to follow on after spiritual science. It will be based on the spiritual science of the future. Then something else will follow which will influence man on Jupiter, something which is still to come. It will provide the basis for Jupiter culture in the real sense. At present, therefore, we are in a period in life where we prepare the mineral nucleus of Jupiter through external science and where spiritual science influences its plant life, providing the basis for vegetation on Jupiter. The future will bring the principle that influences the dreamer, and this will provide the basis for animal life on Jupiter. Only after this will come the principle which corresponds to what man is today producing in his thinking, feeling and will activity. This is guided by higher wisdom to the effect that when earth evolution has come to an end man will be able to take himself, as man, across to Jupiter. This is how we are involved in the evolution of the earth, and we perceive, out of our very own human nature, that we are part of the great world, of the macrocosm. We know that everything we do is of account. We know that in joining in the pursuit of spiritual science we contribute to vegetative life for Jupiter and that through the things we put in words we create what will be given to the future at the Jupiter stage of the world. Just think, dear friends, as I have told you, everything belonging to the mineral kingdom will disperse in the world; everything belonging to the plant kingdom will disperse; everything belonging to the animal kingdom will disperse. Nothing will continue on from the earth except for the mineral atoms coming from man, from the Saturn parts of human beings. Nothing of the mineral, plant and animal worlds passes across to Jupiter. The only thing which will continue is the Saturn man now within us. This will be the mineral kingdom on Jupiter. I do not know if some of our friends still remember how we first started many years ago in Berlin. We were a small band in those days—some who shared in the experience are still with us—and we started to consider these things. Let us imagine ourselves on the Jupiter of the future. What are the atoms of Jupiter? They are the Saturn parts of present-day man. It is a nonsense to talk of atoms of the kind modern physicists speak of. Everything man gains from the whole of the earth enters into Saturn man and later becomes Jupiter atoms. It is pure nonsense to say that our minerals, animals and plants contain what physicists are looking for in them. Our present earth atoms were prepared during Moon existence and are what will prepare us to be Sun men, just as we are now preparing the Saturn man in us. I have previously spoken of the way the atom is prepared our of the whole cosmos. You'll find this in the lectures given at the very beginning of our work in Berlin.82 Today I'll have to be brief, also taking into account what we have gone through in the meantime. Our stars, too—the external physical stars, the physical sun, the physical moon we see out there in the universe—that, too, is not the way physicists see it. Physicists would be most surprised if they managed to get up to the sun, for they would find nothing at all of what they have construed. They'd be most surprised at what they saw there. What we would find if we ever could travel up there—in accord with the times it would have to be in a balloon that is still to be invented, in an ether balloon—we'd find the unexpected. We would not find what the physicists have construed; we'd find nothing at all by way of a physical body. It merely looks like that. The sun, moon and stars are part of a whole that arose at some point after Moon evolution. After Moon evolution it was not only the Moon which perished but everything that is part of the visible universe entered into night. And everything there is in the universe today really belongs to the earth, so that the end of the earth will not only mean the plant and animal kingdoms perishing with it but everything out there in the cosmos perishing as well. The stars in their present form will perish into night. And then the future Jupiter world will emerge. Its atoms will be the Saturn parts of present man. Its environment will look very different from our earth environment. A person considering all this today might ask: 'What will remain of the present world when earth evolution has come to an end?' Mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—all that disperses and passes away. What man gains today by virtue of being man, the external power of discernment he is acquiring, will pass over into the mineral kingdom of Jupiter. The spiritual science he gains will pass over as Sun man and establish the vegetation. What we say—the words we speak—will pass over. Anything moral that happens will pass over. Was not the One who was to give meaning and direction to the whole of earth evolution able to say some very special words? Was he not able to say: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’?83 Are we not now beginning to grasp the utter profundity of the words Christ spoke: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’? Is that not literally true? Words coming from external science influence Saturn man and become the atoms of Jupiter. Words coming from spiritual science and influencing Sun man pass across to form the vegetation on Jupiter. That which acts on the dreamer passes across to form the animal kingdom on Jupiter. The moral progress made by man and what he gains through words of the spiritual science of the future—that will be man on Jupiter. It will be words, wisdom of thoughts. This shall endure. Everything all around us in the cosmos will perish. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ So we gradually come to see words of profound wisdom flowing from this central place of activity we call Golgotha. They flow from that point. As I once said, the whole earth evolution to follow exists so that gradually men shall come to understand the words spoken by the One who went through the Mystery of Golgotha. Today I have tried to explain to you, out of the whole of spiritual science as we know it so far, Christ's words: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ Again and again in the future there will be people who know how to explain other words spoken by Christ out of spiritual science. There will have to be many of them before the full meaning of Christ's words can be understood, for they are words of guidance, words given out of the spirit, yet it will only be in the course of time that they can be understood out of what human beings are able to summon up out of the science of the spirit. We need to enter into this with our feelings if we are to get a feeling for the utter uniqueness of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through perception directed upwards to the infinite we shall gain the marvellous insight into the one thing that has given the earth meaning from the world's beginning to its very end—the Mystery of Golgotha. Dear friends, it will be another few weeks until we can talk again. And so it has been my task today to speak of something we are able to take into our hearts and minds and meditate on a great deal in the weeks to come. I wanted to put some ideas into your hearts and minds which you could then develop further. It always has been our summer task in spiritual science to develop further what has entered into our hearts and minds so that our souls shall grow more alive and mature. We do not progress in spiritual science by absorbing it as something theoretical, by merely absorbing ideas, but rather by transforming those thoughts into our whole inner life, letting them become living experience. If we let this thought of how man is part of the whole macrocosm act on our souls, we will come to feel part of it all as human beings. Faintheartedness, hesitation, lack of hope will have to vanish before the magnitude of this thought. We must then at last come to feel ourselves human beings in all humility. And all we have been able to absorb of spiritual science, all that can and shall come alive in us out of spiritual science—as has always been our principle until now—needs to be given emphasis in the present day. Again and again we have to remember, as we consider things today, that the great events happening in our time are a warning. We must remember those who are leaving their ether bodies behind for us while still young, ether bodies that will be a great help to us in letting the spirit enter into the culture of the future. If the spirit is to come in there must be souls that understand something of these spiritual things, souls that look up into that world and know that up there is not only what, in abstract terms, is called attraction, but up there are the living dead, up there is what they have given to mankind on earth of their own life—their unused ether bodies. Souls that have some understanding of these things will have to work together, souls whose thoughts reach upwards to meet what is streaming down from the unused ether bodies of those who have died before their time. We must fill our souls with this image of the spiritual streaming down to join the earthly. Above all, we must look up to the spiritual realm with all our thoughts, with the part of us that is already spiritual. This I have always summed up in conclusion in the words that shall also be our conclusion today:
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| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XIV
06 Jul 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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| It really seems that modern man should have a fair degree of understanding and should, with some good will, be able to accept these things. Occasionally we come across evidence of someone being aware that there is a small human being—the conscious human being—and a big human being who is the cosmic reality. |
| That, too, is what people say, only they say it by inventing philosophies and so forth. It has to be clearly understood that in the world it really makes no difference if we decide to put a limit on what is to happen, a limit to suit our reluctance to be personally involved. |
| Let us use all we have been able to absorb out of the work we have been doing these last years and try to understand clearly that there is a certain measure of spiritual power that is given to human nature. Mystical spirituality has to be thrust out of human consciousness in order that mankind can grow free in taking hold of the physical body. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XIV
06 Jul 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform. There are a number of things I want to recall in this extra session today, themes spoken of in different lectures which we shall bring together and consider from a particular point of view today. The rays of light which arise will then be directed at subjects we have previously considered from one angle or another. There is a particular prejudice, a feeling people have, which stops them from accepting spiritual science in the present age. People have so little idea of how small a proportion of whatever a human being accomplishes at any hour, any moment, basically is within his ordinary awareness of being a human individual in the physical world. Just consider how little we would be able to function as human beings if we were fully conscious of everything we needed in order to live as human beings. It is often stressed, and quite rightly so, that modern man knows very little—taking first of all the purely physical functions in life—how his brain, liver, heart and so on really work in order to accomplish what man has to accomplish to enable him to live on this earth as a physical entity. All the things man has to accomplish merely to let his external physical life progress—all those things he simply has to accomplish. But consider how little man is able to follow this with his conscious mind. Just consider some quite minor thing happening in everyday life and you'll immediately see that man as an entity in this world, an entity on earth, is one thing, and what may be called ‘conscious man’ is something quite different. In relation to what man is within his whole compass, this conscious man is small, very small indeed. It should therefore not come as a surprise that man feels a natural urge to extend this small conscious man more and more into the region that opens up when we consider man as part of the cosmos. We shall do this today by returning to aspects considered in earlier lectures and considering them in a different context. Our conscious existence as a human being starts, in a way, with sensory perception, with everything our senses perceive of the world outside us. Sensory perception—the fact that impressions are made on our senses, with those impressions arising on the basis of certain processes, is something quite different from our being aware of this. Imagine you are sleeping with your eyes open, not closed. Hares are capable of this. Unless it were pitch dark the environment would constantly leave impressions on the eye, only you would not be aware of those impressions. Our ears are of course always open, and every sound, all the things we are constantly aware of during the day when we are awake, are of course also processed in the ear when we are asleep. Our sense organs may always be engaged in the whole process of earth life; yet any significance they may hold for us depends on our following this process in the sense organs in conscious awareness' Only the things we take into conscious awareness are actually ours in this life on earth. Do these sensory perceptions as we call them, the ability of our eyes, ears and so on to perceive, have significance only for us as human beings living on earth, or do they also hold a wider, cosmic significance? To answer this question we need to use clairvoyant insight to fain an opinion as to what it is that we actually see of the stars in the universe. I think we may say that people taking the point of view of materialistic physics would say: ‘Well, when we see a planet, the light of the sun has fallen on it and been reflected, and that is how we see the planet.’ That is, in fact, the way objects on earth are seen. Physicists therefore concluded, on the basis of mere analogy, that planets are seen in the same way. There is no reason at all why something applicable on earth—the conclusion that light falls on objects and these objects become visible through that light being reflected—should also apply to heavenly bodies. There is absolutely no reason to say that this conclusion also applies to the universe. As to the fixed stars, well, the physicists say these give off their own light. I remember how, as quite a young fellow, I asked a former schoolmate from our village school: ‘What are they teaching you about light?’ Even in those days I had listened with a certain youthful scepticism to what was said of the 'real' origin of light, of all the tiny dancing particles of ether and of light-waves. The other boy, who had had his further education at a seminary, had heard nothing of this as yet. He told me: ‘Whenever the question came up as to the nature of light we were simply told: “Light is what makes bodies luminous”.’ Well, you see that really is saying something quite brilliant about light, to say that light is what makes bodies luminous. Yet modern materialistic physicists are not really saying much more than that when they say that we see heavenly bodies because they radiate light. It is very much the same in principle. I did mention on another occasion that materialistic physicists might get quite a surprise if they were able to travel to the sun to look and see what the sun really is like. I said that because in fact there is nothing at all there in the place where the sun is. What we would find would be a composite of purely spiritual entities and energies. There is nothing material there at all. If we use clairvoyant awareness to investigate the stars and inquire into the reason for their luminosity we find that what is actually there, what we call their luminosity, really consists in the ability to perceive, an ability which is rather crude in man and more highly developed in other entities. If some entity were to look down on the earth from Venus or Mars and find the earth luminous, it would have to say to itself: ‘This earth is luminous not because it reflects the rays of the sun, but because there are men on earth who perceive with their eyes.’ The process of visual perception holds significance not only for our own conscious awareness but radiates out into the whole of outer space. The light of this particular heavenly body consists in what men do in order to see. We do not merely see in order to become aware of the results of visual perception, we also see in order that because of this process the earth becomes radiant to outer space. And it is a fact that every one of our sense organs has the function not only to be what it is for us but also has a function within the universe. Through sensory perception man is an entity within the cosmos. He is not merely the entity his conscious mind presents to him as a human being on earth, he is also a cosmic entity. Considering the inner configuration of the soul at a deeper level, we come to our thinking activity. We are even more inclined to consider our thoughts our own. Not only are ‘thoughts free from toll’, as the saying goes, indicating that thoughts really hold significance only for the individual person, but it is widely thought that people merely go through an inner process when they think and that this thinking activity more or less holds only personal significance for them. The truth is very different. Thinking activity is, in fact, a process occurring in the ether body. And people know extremely little of what really goes on when they are thinking. Extremely little of what goes on when he is thinking enters into man's conscious awareness. As he thinks, he is aware of part of what he is thinking. Yet infinitely more thinking activity is associated with this even when we think in the daytime. What is more, we continue to think during the night, when we are asleep. It is not true that we stop thinking when we go to sleep and start again on waking. Thinking activity is continuous. There are many different dream processes, processes in our dream-life, and part of all this is that man's ego and astral body enter into his ether body and physical body on waking. He comes in with these two principles and finds himself in the surging billows of something very active and alive. Giving just a little consideration to this he will realize that these are weaving thoughts and that he is becoming immersed in an ocean consisting entirely of weaving thoughts. People often say to themselves on waking: ‘If only I could remember what I was thinking just now. Those were very sensible ideas, something that could help me enormously if only I could remember!’ And they are not mistaken. There really is something like a billowing ocean down there. It is the billowing, weaving, etheric world, and this is not simply a more subtle form of matter, the way English theosophists like to present it,84 but the world of weaving thoughts, something genuinely spiritual. We become immersed in a world of weaving thoughts. As human beings we are really much more sensible and intelligent than we are just as conscious human beings. This is something that has to be admitted. It would indeed be most regrettable if we were no more sensible at the unconscious level than we are at the conscious level. For we could do nothing else in that case but repeat ourselves at the same level of intelligence life after life. In fact, we already have within us during our present life the potential for our next life; this will be the fruit. If we were always able to catch hold of this element we become immersed in, we would catch hold of much of what we will be in our next life. So there is billowing, weaving life down there. It is the germ of our next incarnation and this is what we take into ourselves. Hence the prophetic nature of our dream life. Thinking is an immensely complicated process and man only takes a small proportion of what it involves into his consciousness. A thought involves something which is a process in time. Our sensory perceptions made in conscious awareness also make us part of the cosmos. The activity of seeing causes the earth to grow luminous and this makes us part of cosmic space. The processes involved in thinking activity make us part of cosmic time; all that happened before we were born and all that is going to happen after death plays its part in this. Through our thinking, then, we take part in the whole cosmic process of time, through our sensory perception in the whole cosmic process of space. Only the earth-based process of sensory perception is for ourselves. Let us move on to feeling. We are even less aware of feeling activity than we are of sensory perception and of thinking activity. Feeling is a very profound process. You see, to discover the true significance of thinking, to find the real truth—that thinking has cosmic significance—it is necessary to progress to imaginative perception, as described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.85 Stripping our thinking of the abstract nature we consciously associate with it, and entering into that ocean of weaving thoughts, we encounter the necessity to have not only the abstract thoughts in there that we have as citizens of the earth but to conceive images in it. For everything is created from images. Images are the true or origins of things; images are behind everything around us; and it is into these images we enter when we immerse ourselves in the ocean of weaving thoughts. Those are the images Plato spoke of; they are the images all who have spoken of spiritual primary causes had in mind, the images Goethe had in mind with his archetypal plant. These images are to be found in imaginative thinking. This imaginative thinking is a reality and we become immersed in it when we enter the billowing world of thoughts that move with the stream of time. We only enter into the depths of feeling when we attain to what is called Inspiration. This is a higher form of perception compared to Imagination. Everything that lies at the root of feeling in us really is a surging sea of Inspirations. Just as the image reflected in the mirror is merely an image of the object which exists in the world outside, so our feelings are merely reflections mirrored in our own organism of Inspirations that come to us from the universe. They are a mirror image which relates to the flowing movement in the universe the way a dead mirror image relates to the living creature it is reflecting. Each of those images reflects the attributes of entities belonging to higher hierarchies who express themselves in the world through Inspiration. If we do not stop at feeling activity but progress to clairaudient perception we perceive the world as the united activity of a great multitude of entities within hierarchies. The world is this entity arising out of the united actions of entities from the hierarchies. The deeds of the higher hierarchies are happening in the world. And we are involved. We are in the mirror. And the deeds of the higher hierarchies are reflected in our mirror. We then perceive what has been reflected—through conscious awareness. As human beings active in feeling, we live in the womb of the attributes of the hierarchies, perceiving those attributes because we have consciousness. When it comes to being conscious of his feelings, man is even smaller compared to what he really is in his ability to feel than he is compared to his sensory perceptions and his thinking activity. As feeling human beings we are also part of the hierarchies, are also working in the sphere where the hierarchies are at work. We are active in creating the fabric. We perform deeds that are not for ourselves alone, deeds through which we share in the great work of building the world. Through our feelings we are the servants of the higher entities that are the world builders. We may think, as we stand before the Sistine Madonna for example, that this merely meets certain emotional needs in us. The fact however is that when a human being stands before the Sistine Madonna and responds to the painting emotionally this is an entirely real process. If there were no emotional element, no element of feeling, the entities which one day are to share in the work of building Venus as a heavenly body would lack the powers they need to do this work. Our feelings are needed for the world the gods are building, the way bricks are needed in building a house. Again we have only partial knowledge of our feelings. We know the joy we experience as we stand before the Sistine Madonna, yet what is happening there is one element within the universal whole, irrespective of whether we have conscious awareness of this or not. As to our will activity, this, too, is but a mirror, though in this case the essential nature of individual members of the hierarchies is reflected. We are also an entity within the hierarchies but at a different level. Our reality lies in our will. We give substance to the world by somehow or other letting our will live in reality. Again it holds true that, in so far as we follow our will activity in conscious awareness, this has significance only for us as human beings. But apart from this, our will activity is a reality which is the material the gods used to build the world. So you see how our sensory perceptions, our thinking, feeling and will activity, have cosmic significance; how they are an integral part of the whole of cosmic life. It really seems that modern man should have a fair degree of understanding and should, with some good will, be able to accept these things. Occasionally we come across evidence of someone being aware that there is a small human being—the conscious human being—and a big human being who is the cosmic reality. Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of this in his Zarathustra, for he had some idea of it. The same holds true for many other people, except that they do not make the effort to follow the paths that will show how we progress from being a small human being to being the greater one. It is really necessary, however, that a fair number of people come to realize that the times have passed when it was possible to manage without such insight. In the past, something still remained of the old clairvoyance that enabled people to see into the spiritual world. In those days they really were able to see the way man does today when he is outside his .physical and ether bodies with his astral body and ego and out there in the cosmos. Man would never have achieved complete freedom as an individual and dependence would have been his lot if the old clairvoyance had persisted. It was necessary for man to take possession, as it were, of his physical ego. The form of thinking he would develop if he perceived the surging ocean of thinking, feeling and will activity that exists below consciousness would be a heavenly form of thinking but not independent thinking. How does man achieve independent thinking? Well, imagine it is night-time and you are lying asleep in your bed. It is the physical body and the ether body which are lying in your bed. As you wake up the ego and the astral body enter from outside. Thinking activity continues in the ether body. And now the ego and the astral body enter, first of all taking hold of the ether body. This does not take long, however, for at that very moment the thought may flash up: ‘What have I been thinking? Those were sensible thoughts.’ However, the human being has a strong desire to take hold of the physical body as well, and the moment he does so everything vanishes. Now the human being is wholly within the sphere of earth life. It is because man immediately takes hold of his physical body that he is unable to gain awareness of the subtle swell of etheric thinking. To have the awareness 'It is I who am thinking' man simply has to take hold of his physical body and make it his instrument; otherwise he would not feel 'It is I who am thinking' but ‘It is the angel guarding me who is thinking’. The conscious thought ‘I am thinking’ is possible only if the physical body is taken hold of. Man therefore must be able to use his physical body. In the time that lies ahead he will have to make use of what the earth is giving him and take hold of his physical body more and more. His justifiable egoism will grow and grow. This will have to be counteracted by taking hold of the insights provided through spiritual science. We are now at the beginning of this era. People might say:
That, too, is what people say, only they say it by inventing philosophies and so forth. It has to be clearly understood that in the world it really makes no difference if we decide to put a limit on what is to happen, a limit to suit our reluctance to be personally involved. It is quite impossible for the measure meted out to man to be reduced. If man is intended to develop certain powers within a particular era and only develops part of them, the rest will nevertheless emerge. It is not true to say that they do not emerge. When you heat up an engine the excess heat supplied does not disappear; it radiates from the engine. In the same way nothing that exists in human life can disappear. It is not true, therefore, that mystical powers—so much despised by modern man—do not exist. Man is able to deny them, yet they continue to exist as part of this world. You can deny them, you can be a great materialist in your conscious mind, but you cannot be a materialist with the whole of your being. What happens is that those powers will, unknown to man, develop in such a way that he will offer to Lucifer and Ahriman what he would otherwise have offered to the legitimate gods. Everything you suppress in your conscious mind, everything you will not allow to unfold, you offer to Ahriman and Lucifer. No culture in the present age, dear friends, can have been more intensely materialistic down to the last fibre of the soul than the Italian culture. Present-day Italian culture, the culture of the Italian nation, has developed through the influence of the folk soul on the sentient soul. It is the current mission of English culture to develop materialism. Materialism will be on the surface there, but it will be the way it ought to be. The earth does need a certain materialism and this is developing there. It is the mission of the British to bring materialism into earth evolution. With them it cannot take root in the soul as deeply as it does with the Italians. An Italian feels everything deeply and in him materialism takes root at the very deepest level. This is why present-day Italian culture goes into positive frenzies of nationalistic materialism and does so with all its soul, when in fact materialism cannot be accepted with the whole of one's soul. We may be its protagonists in the world but we cannot really develop an enthusiasm for it—unless we are part of the Italian folk soul. It is true that the present age is the most materialistic ever. It is equally true that among the people living in the south of Europe the most materialistic attitudes of all arise from the sentient soul. Fichte said: `Anyone who believes in freedom within the life of the spirit is really one of us.’86 His conception of nationalism was one entirely determined by the spirit. There is nothing of this in the Italian concept of nationalism. In their case it is entirely a matter of blood substance—their nationalism is entirely naturalistic. One man's idea of what constitutes a nation is quite different from that of another. An utterly nationalistic materialism is alive among the Italian people. This, of course, only relates to the present day. You must realize that when the soul is so determinedly aiming for naturalistic materialism in what a nation is intending, the sense for the mystical cannot be lost on account of this. It persists. It is merely thrust out from consciousness and comes to rest elsewhere. It is not thrust out from man's true and innermost being. It now serves the powers we refer to by the technical terms of Lucifer and Ahriman. Those human faculties are then not directed along the path of the progressive deities but into the path,. of Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. One would assume that something will have to emerge in those nations when powers of a mystical nature are thrust out into public life. Can we find something of this kind in the South, a stream of mystical will that has been thrust out? It was in May 1347, on Whitsunday, that Cola di Rienzi87 walked up to the Capitol in Rome at the head of a great procession. He was wearing ancient Roman armour, which was in accord with the sentiments of that time, and had four standards. The Capitol is the place from which speeches concerning Rome civilization were traditionally addressed to the Romans. Rienzi proclaimed that he had come to speak in the name of Jesus Christ, as a man compelled to speak to the Romans in the name of freedom for the whole world. Rhetoric was very much the order of the day at the time. It did have a certain significance then—in 1347—but no reality. The whole was something like a puff of smoke. But that is not really my point. I want to draw your attention to the fact that this happened on a Whitsunday—on 20 May 1347. It was then that the man representing this whole stream called himself an ambassador of Christ. Later, when he had further elaborated his message, he also called himself a man inspired by the Holy Spirit. It was also a Whitsunday that war was declared against Austria. Immediately before that a man who did not call himself an ambassador of Christ but nevertheless let it appear in what he said that he was filled with the Holy Spirit, had walked at the head of a large procession and made speeches in Rome. There certainly was no vestige in the soul of this man of the mysticism out of which Rienzi had formerly spoken. Yet—and here we get an element of mysticism that has been thrust out—the words were again spoken on a Whitsunday. Yet they were spoken in the service of those other powers. The Christ impulse had been thrust out from consciousness. And that it was very much the Ahrimanic element—an element we must of course expect in the present age—is evident from just a few words that were said at the time. A 20th century orator could not, of course, arrive in Roman armour and with four standards and so he came in a car. That is the kind of sacrifice one has to make in this materialistic age. But somehow he had to bring to expression—perhaps unconsciously—that an element of mystical power thrust out by man had been ceded to another power and was now on the move in the outside world, having been turned into its opposite. This man who calls himself d'Annuncio—in reality he is called something else89—spoke in such a way that people might have believed all the great flaming speeches of Rienzi were coming to life again—it is easy to do this in Italian—deliberately making every sentence reminiscent of him. After his oration, which to the Central European mind consists of nothing but empty words, he picked up a ceremonial sword and he kissed this sword to indicate that the power of his oratory should pass into this sword. The sword was the property of the editor of a magazine one commonly sees around when one goes to Italy. The editor of a magazine had presented the sword to the Mayor of Rome as a sacred relic on this occasion. The sword belonged to the editor of the cosmic paper Asino. In time to come a world judging these things on a different basis from that prevailing today will realize that many of the things happening at the present time have to be judged from the point of view I have presented—that much of what is present in man by way of mystical powers is thrust out, handed over to the world process, but does not get lost. It becomes the spoil of Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. Rarely is the irony inherent in world history as obvious to the eye as in the case I have just presented. Let us use all we have been able to absorb out of the work we have been doing these last years and try to understand clearly that there is a certain measure of spiritual power that is given to human nature. Mystical spirituality has to be thrust out of human consciousness in order that mankind can grow free in taking hold of the physical body. Yet on the other hand this mystical spirituality must be made part of our conscious life, otherwise Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers will take hold of what has been thrust out from conscious awareness. Again and again I want to remind you, dear friends, that having made such efforts for many years to absorb this into our conscious mind, we also have the feeling arise in us that something will have to emerge from the bloodshed of the present time that will lead mankind towards spirituality, towards recognition of the spirit. This means, as I have often said, that there will have to be souls who have grown able, through spiritual science, to look up into the spiritual world where all the ether bodies that have come from young people are present. These have reached the spiritual world and will continue to be present because on that plane, too, powers are not lost. We must look up towards them. They will unite with the powers shining down for us from the spiritual world and what the dead have to say will form the impulses of the future—if souls are present who understand their language. It it in this spirit that once again we say these simple words:
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| 157. The Etheric Being in the Physical Human Being
20 Apr 1915, Berlin Translator Unknown |
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| An important thing which now rises up in our consciousness with everything that appears before us, might be described as follows: We ourselves undergo a change—in our own sight, of course, we ourselves change, and even the surrounding world which exists in our physical-sensory perception undergoes a change. |
| If we consider man's feeling life, we only have to go back as far as the Moon evolution, and for his volitional life as far as the evolution of the Earth. This will enable you to understand many things. In the case of people who were strongly moulded by their preceding incarnation, who are not elastic, but have a sharply moulded form, many things will be pressed into their organism; they will be people endowed with an almost automatic memory, but with their thinking power they will not be able to unfold much in a productive way. |
| If the will had not to be unfolded here on earth, we might be able to see through our Karma. We could see through it to the extent that under certain conditions it might be possible to foresee the near future. But the will which penetrates into the stream of Karma darkens our outlook into the events which may happen to us, for example tomorrow. |
| 157. The Etheric Being in the Physical Human Being
20 Apr 1915, Berlin Translator Unknown |
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To begin with, let me remind you of something which most of you already know from previous lectures. When the human soul unfolds in the way which I have so often described even in public lectures, we arrive at a different picture of the world. The essential thing is that our soul follows, as it were, the path leading from the physical into the spiritual world. When the soul progresses in its development, the physical world gradually transforms itself and assumes the aspect of a spiritual world. We might say: Little by little, the characteristics of the physical-sensory world vanish and on the horizon of our consciousness appear forms, beings, and events pertaining to the spiritual world. An important thing which now rises up in our consciousness with everything that appears before us, might be described as follows: We ourselves undergo a change—in our own sight, of course, we ourselves change, and even the surrounding world which exists in our physical-sensory perception undergoes a change. Let us first consider what lies nearest to us, the earthly plane. Man really knows very little of the world which transcends the earth, if during his earthly existence he does not abandon his habitual attitude, if he remains within this whole way of looking at the world, which makes him grow together with his earthly life. When we penetrate into the spiritual world (we are then outside the physical body) and look back upon our body, upon our whole physical life, or in general upon our whole being, it is evident that we grow richer and richer; our content grows, our whole being expands and becomes a world. Man himself actually grows to the size of a whole world, when we thus look back upon him. This is the true significance of something which we have often emphasized: Through spiritual development we identify ourselves with the world. We perceive a new world which seems to come out of our own being. We expand into a world. The earth instead loses is solid substance, or what we are accustomed to see physically—mountains, rivers, etc. This vanishes and we gradually begin to experience ourselves within the earth—I purposely say within the earth—we feel as if we lived within a great organism. We are outside our own world, and our inner world, this inner reality, now becomes an immense world, whereas the physical world which surrounded us becomes a Being and we live within it. This is what we should be able to conceive. When we transcend our own self, the human world expands into an immense world, and we ourselves grow into the organism of the earth; within it we experience ourselves in the same way in which our finger would, for example, feel that it belongs to our organism—if the finger were endowed with consciousness. Man passes through this experience and this has often been expressed by more poetical natures, by people with a deeper capacity of feeling. The moment of waking up in the morning has often been compared with the awakening of Nature outside; the daily course of human life, with the sun's ascent to the zenith, and sunset with the need to sleep which appears in the form of fatigue. These similes are born out of the feeling that man stands within the life of Nature. Nevertheless they are not worth much, for they do not touch the essential. I have therefore told you many times that a comparison really in keeping with the facts must differ from the one in which Nature's course of events is compared with the processes of sleeping and waking. The course of human life during the space of 24 hours should instead be compared with the course of events upon the earth during a whole year. The simile will agree if we take the whole year and compare its events with the processes of waking up and falling asleep which take place within us in the course of 24 hours. It is quite wrong to compare man's waking life from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep with the summer season, for man's waking condition corresponds to winter, when Nature outside is awake, and summer should be compared with man's sleeping condition. If comparisons are drawn in, we should therefore say: Man falls asleep; i.e., he passes over into the summer season of his personal existence; whereas his waking condition would more or less correspond to autumn, winter, and early spring. Why is this in keeping with the actual facts? Because when we develop in the manner described and become part of the whole earthly organism, we should indeed consider that in the summer the Spirit of the Earth is asleep; summer is the earth's real sleeping condition and the great consciousness of the Spirit of the Earth then withdraws. In the spring the Spirit of the Earth begins to slumber and it wakes up again in the autumn, when the first frost falls; it then begins to think and lives through its thinking, waking condition. This is daytime for the Spirit of the Earth, in the course of the year. When we look back upon the sleeping human being, we see that when he falls asleep and goes out with his Ego and astral body, there arises a kind of vegetable activity in the organism abandoned by the astral body and Ego. There is activity in man's inner being and we feel that the first moments of sleep are like the beginning of a vegetative process; to the clairvoyant, sleep appears as if the body were pervaded by the growing life of plants. Imaginative knowledge enables us to perceive this. This vegetation, however, does not grow in the same way as that upon the earth. It is possible to describe this, to meditate over such things, for then we progress further and further. Upon the earth, the plants grow out of the soil. But it is otherwise when we observe the “vegetable growth” in man. There the plants grow in such a way that their roots are outside and grow into man; their flowers should therefore be sought in man. Sleeping man is indeed a beautiful sight—I mean, to the clairvoyant. He is like the earth with its budding, greening life, but with a whole vegetation growing into it. What disturbs the view is that at the same time we have the impression that the astral body is gnawing at the roots. This appears in the course of sleep. The animals consume, eat up what summer produces upon the surface of the earth, and we perceive that our astral body behaves like the animal world, except that it gnaws at the roots. If this were not so, we could not unfold the nucleus, the kernel, which we take with us through the portal of death. What the astral body thus appropriates, is what we really take with us through the portal of death, as harvest of our life. I am describing to you facts which rise up before the clairvoyant consciousness. And even as winter comes over the fruits of the earth and covers them with frost, I might say, so the astral body and the Ego, when diving down into the etheric and physical body cover with frost, freeze up the vegetation or spiritual plant growth which arises in our organism during the night. What I described to you as the Spirit of the Earth, is really a personality, like man—except that the Spirit of the Earth leads a different kind of life. One year is one of his days, and in the Spirit of the Earth we gradually learn to recognize the Impulse which I described to you when speaking of the Impulse of Golgotha. We find in it that vivifying power which did not live in the earth before the Mystery of Golgotha, and within it we feel in the safekeeping of the Spirit who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. We grow aware of this when we really penetrate into that condition in which the earth becomes for us a Being to whom we belong in the same way in which a finger belongs to our organism. In the present time, occult immersion in the world cannot help taking on the character of religious immersion in the divine essence that streams through the world and spiritualizes it. Real knowledge of the spiritual world cannot therefore take away religious feeling; on the contrary, it deepens it. I wished to speak of the true aspect of things when one enters the image world of spiritual reality; for what we appear to our own sight, in our ordinary physical consciousness, is merely a reflexion, only an inner kernel—but I must immediately add that this expression is not quite appropriate, for it is difficult to coin words for such significant facts; what we appear to be in our own sight always remains connected with us when we are outside the body with our soul being. It is therefore not correct to say that this is a kernel, for a fruit has its peel outside and its best substance inside—in man, on the other hand (in the spiritual, things are frequently reversed) his best part is outside and his peel inside; what exists inside is only his peel, whereas the spiritual is something which may spatially be described as peel. When we follow the path leading into the spiritual world we learn that man is not a simple, but a very complicated being. We gathered that man and everything that lives in him participates in all the worlds which are accessible to him. With his physical body he belongs to the physical world; with his soul he belongs to the soul world; with his spirit he belongs to the spiritual world. We reach into these three worlds. We know that when we enter the spiritual world we really experience ourselves in a multiplied form. What is so alarming is that the oneness, the unity is then split up, so that we feel as if we belonged to many worlds. It is possible to bring forward different points of view, but I will now draw attention to one aspect and refer to explanations repeatedly given in recent lectures. When studying human life from the inner aspect, we should look upon it as a structured life; but when we leave the body, the human being immediately appears structured, subdivided into four parts. We have, to begin with, the force which lies at the foundation of memory. Through memory, things experienced in the past rise up in our consciousness. Memory brings a connected sequence into life, so that our existence from birth to death becomes a whole, a unity.—A second element is what we call thinking, our representing power—I cannot go into further details, this is not the essential point just now, but our thinking activity is something that lives in the present. And if we proceed further, we come to feeling, and still further to the will. When we look into ourselves, our own inner being takes on the aspect of memory, thinking, feeling and will. We may now ask: What is the essential difference between these four soul activities? Ordinary psychology enumerates, but does not differentiate them. Truth can only be reached if we are able to penetrate into the essence of these four soul activities, and there we discover that the will is, as it were, the infant among them; feeling is older, thinking still older, and the activity that lives in memory is the oldest, the old man among our soul activities. You will grasp this more clearly from the following standpoint: We have often explained that man did not begin his development upon the earth, for the evolution of the earth was preceded by the old Moon evolution, the old Sun evolution, and the old Saturn evolution. Man did not first come into being upon the earth, but in order to become man he had to pass through the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon. You see, what we unfold in our will, the will as it exists today, arose upon the earth; its development is not complete and it is altogether a product of the evolution of the earth. During the Moon evolution man was not an independent volitional being; the Angels willed for him. The will rayed in, as it were, when the evolution of the earth began. During the Moon evolution, man was already endowed with feeling; he was endowed with thinking during the Sun evolution, and with memory during the Saturn evolution. If you now connect these things with other facts described in my “Akasha Chronicle” and in “Occult Science” you will discover an important connection. The first foundation of man's physical body arose during the Saturn stage of evolution; the first basis of man's etheric body arose during the Sun stage of evolution; during the Moon stage of development arose the first foundation of the astral body, and the Ego began to unfold during the earthly stage of development. Let us now consider separately the activity which we designate as memory. What is memory? The picture of an event which we experienced remains behind in the soul, in the same way in which something of the thoughts of a book's author remain in the book we read. When you read a book, you may think through (not always, but this does not count now) everything thought out by the author of the book. Memory is a subconscious reading activity. In memory remain the signs which the etheric body engraved upon the physical body. You may have lived through something years ago and gathered from it the necessary experience; what remains behind is the impression which the etheric body engraved upon the physical body, and when you remember this past experience your memory process is a subconscious act of reading. The mysterious processes which take place in the human organism, in order that the etheric body may engrave upon it the signs which lie at the foundation of memory, began to form part of man's structure during the ancient Saturn evolution. We have in fact within us this secret Saturn-organism and its existence reveals a life and being of its own. Upon it the etheric body writes down the signs connected with man's experiences in the external world, so that these signs may be drawn up again from memory. That man carries out this subconscious writing activity is essentially dependent on the fact that during his first seven years of life, the body, or that part of his physical body which receives these impressions or signs, is still elastic. Consequently we should not—as explained in my book “The Education of the Child”—maltreat a child by developing its power of memory. During the first seven years, the essential thing is to leave the child's elastic organism to its own elemental forces, without maltreating it. We should therefore tell a child as much as possible, but without stressing the point that it should unfold its memory power artificially. In regard to the unfolding of memory, the child should instead be left to its own resources. Spiritual science may thus be of immense importance in pedagogical life. Even as the power of memory is one of human nature's oldest components, so the activity which lies at the foundation of thinking is part of something which we may designate as having been formed upon the Sun. This too is relatively old. The Sun forces organized man's etheric body so as to enable it to exercise this peculiar activity of thought, or representation. This will show you that we must go far back into cosmic evolution in order to give an answer to the question: Why is man able to remember things, and why is he able to think?—We must go back to the evolutions of Saturn and of the Sun. If we consider man's feeling life, we only have to go back as far as the Moon evolution, and for his volitional life as far as the evolution of the Earth. This will enable you to understand many things. In the case of people who were strongly moulded by their preceding incarnation, who are not elastic, but have a sharply moulded form, many things will be pressed into their organism; they will be people endowed with an almost automatic memory, but with their thinking power they will not be able to unfold much in a productive way. Whereas the power of memory should be connected chiefly with the etheric body, and man's feeling life with the astral body, his volitional life should be connected chiefly with the Ego. Man says “I” to himself only because he is a being endowed with will. If he had merely the power of thinking, his life would only be like a dream. We thus have, I might say, an organic connection of inner soul activities which were impressed on our soul's being in the course of development. In regard to the will, I have already explained that it only arose during the development of the Earth. Upon the Moon, higher spiritual hierarchies, the Angeloi, still willed for man. During the Moon evolution, man's whole will was still of such a kind that when the clairvoyant consciousness tried to recall this state of existence, it perceives that although the will then existed upon a higher stage, it lived in man instinctively, in the form in which it now exists in the animals of the earth. The animal necessarily follows its hot and whirling instincts and it lives in the common will of its species. Even as higher spiritual beings, the Angeloi, willed for us during the Moon evolution, so higher spiritual beings are now at work in determining our Karma from one incarnation to the other. The Angeloi do not work in our will, but in the uninterrupted stream of our Karma. Even as during the Moon evolution man felt that his will was not his own, but that of an Angel, so here on earth we do not think that it is we who shape our Karma; this is ruled by the spiritual beings of higher hierarchies. Only if our will can be silenced, as it were, a gleam of the course of Karma, which ordinarily remains concealed, may shine through and reveal itself even to a non-clairvoyant consciousness. Bear clearly in mind what I have explained to you: That in man a nucleus unfolds which passes through the portal of death and enters the spiritual realm; this nucleus is the bearer of our Karma. What each one of us will do tomorrow is determined by Karma and already lives in us today. If the will had not to be unfolded here on earth, we might be able to see through our Karma. We could see through it to the extent that under certain conditions it might be possible to foresee the near future. But the will which penetrates into the stream of Karma darkens our outlook into the events which may happen to us, for example tomorrow. Only if the will is completely silenced, something of what will happen—not through us, but to us—may gleam through. Let me give you an example, related by Erasmus Franceschi and based on truth. In his youth, Erasmus Franceschi lived with an aunt. Once he dreamed that a man whose name he also heard in his dream would fire at him, but that he would not be killed, because his aunt would save his life. This is what he dreamed. On the following day, before anything had happened, he told his aunt what he had dreamed. She was greatly alarmed and said that quite recently a man had been shot in the neighbourhood, and she entreated her nephew to remain at home, so that nothing might happen to him. She gave him the key to the apple pantry, so that he might always go up and fetch himself some apples. He went to his room and sat down at his desk to read. But at that moment the book did not interest him as much as the pantry key in his pocket which his aunt had given him. He decided to go upstairs to the apple room. No sooner had he moved, than a shot was fired, aimed in such a way that the bullet would have struck his head, if he had still been reading. If he had not got up, the bullet would have gone through his head. In the neighbour's house, the manservant, whose name was the one which Franceschi had heard in his dream and whom he did not know, was cleaning two guns and was not aware that they were loaded. A gun went off, and if Franceschi had not risen from his chair at that very moment, in order to go to the apple pantry to which his aunt had given him the key, he would unfailingly have been killed. The dream therefore faithfully rendered what would have taken place on the following day. You see, of this event we may say that the will had nothing to do with it, for Franceschi could not influence the events with his own will; he could not protect himself, yet something entered his Karma so that he could live on. In his case, the spiritual being that moulded his Karma had already had the rescuing idea. The dream was foresight of the spirit controlling Karma, who saw what would have occurred on the following day, and because that young man's soul had, almost through natural meditation, passed through a certain deepening, something arose which may be compared with certain things in external life. In regard to external life man can prophesy only in a very limited measure. But in a certain sense we are all prophets. For example, we all know that tomorrow at a certain moment the light will dawn, or a man crossing a field will be able to foretell what it will look like tomorrow ... yet he will not be able to foresee whether rain will fall upon it tomorrow. The same applies to inner life. Man lives in accordance with his will, and Karma is contained in his will. Through feeling, we may learn to know the things which lie closest to us, and in the same way a light may be kindled in the souls of certain people who have passed through an inner deepening, so that they can see events in which the will must remain silent. In the study of spiritual science it is important to bear in mind such things, because they show us that in man's inner being lives something which he is unable to survey through his ordinary consciousness and which points to the future. Karma then penetrates through the silenced will. Everything which thus rises up before our soul in spiritual-scientific research, shows us that what we call the great illusion chiefly consists therein that with his ordinary consciousness man cannot survey his own being; he belongs to the whole universe, although his ordinary consciousness only enables him to see the shell, enclosed, as it were, by the skin, etc. But what he thus sees in an enclosed state is only an extract of what he really is, for man is as great as the universe. Even in ordinary life we look back upon ourselves from outside. When we clearly realize these things, we gradually begin to feel that within us lives something which we may designate as man's etheric body. Indeed, even in our ordinary life it is possible at least to observe this second man—the etheric being in man's physical being, but for this it is necessary to observe life in a far more delicate way than is usually the case. Think, for example, that you are lying lazily in bed in the morning and would much rather remain in bed than get up; indeed it costs you an effort to get up. You will find it difficult to get up if you only rely on what lives in you. But imagine that you are suddenly struck by the thought that in the room next to yours there is an object which you were expecting for some days. A thought connected with something outside rises up in you, and this will work almost like a miracle. For you will see that it is even capable of driving you out of bed! What has happened? When you awoke and dived down into your physical body, you felt what the physical body can make you feel; but this cannot inspire you with the thought of getting up. The etheric body acts independently, when you draw its attention to something which is outside. This example will show you how you may confront your physical body with the etheric body, and how the etheric body literally takes hold of you and pushes you out of bed. A definite sensation may be reached in regard to our own being: that of looking at ourselves and distinguishing between two kinds of human activities: the things we do in the ordinary hubbub of life, and those in which we feel that an inner activity asserts itself. These are, of course, finer observations, and if we want to, we may always deny them. But our observation should be adapted to life and we should really gain insight into life as it reveals itself to us. This will push our feeling in the right direction. We should realize that the path leading into the spiritual world cannot be discovered all at once; it leads out of the world little by little, so that we ascend to what I have described before, when that which used to be our world loses its lifeless character and becomes a living being. We thus grow together cognisantly with the spiritual world. We grow together with something of which we may say that it forms part of us when we discard what is given to us with the instrument of the physical body and what essentially constitutes our life from birth to death. When passing through the portal of death we grow into a world which very much resembles the one described just now, which reveals itself to higher knowledge. And then we notice an infinitely important thing: If we wish to penetrate in the right way into the world we enter through the portal of death, we need—in the same way in which a light is needed in a dark room—something which we unfold here on earth in the innermost depths of our soul. Life on earth should not be looked upon as a prison. In the natural course of development man must, of course, pass through the portal of death and he must pass through the life between death and a new birth, but the whole of life exists in order that each part of our being may add to us something we need, something new, and in the present cycle of evolution, life on earth should give us something that flames like a torch, so that we do not simply live through our spiritual existence, but recognize it; our life in the spiritual world will then be flooded with light. The light which illumines us is the imperishable element which we gain from birth to death for our life between death and a new birth. In connection with these things, we should always say that particularly in the present time it is important that as many people as possible should grasp that the truths connected with the spiritual world which we learn to know in the physical world, within the physical body, become a flaming light, when we live in the spiritual realms. All the difficulties which more developed human beings must encounter in the present time, admonish us in a certain way to deepen our soul and immerse it in spiritual feelings, in spiritual vision. Consciousness of the fact that a spiritual-scientific deepening is needed in the present time and that the difficulties of our age are a warning, induce us to conclude with words which we always pronounce before parting. I hope that we shall be able to continue these lectures in a not too distant future. Let us now close with the words: Aus dem Mut der Kämpfer, (From the courage of the fighters, |
| 30. Two Essays on Haeckel: Haeckel and His Opponents
01 Aug 1899, |
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| [ 5 ] The doubt as to the view that there underlies each distinct organic species a special plan of organisation, unchangeable for all time, took firm hold upon Darwin upon a journey which he undertook to South America and Australia in the summer of 1831 as naturalist on the ship Beagle. |
| Now, the organic forms living in Nature are in general purposefully adapted to the conditions under which they live. A mere glance into Nature will teach one the truth of this fact. Plant and animal species are so constructed that they can maintain and reproduce themselves in the conditions under which they live. |
| As a bit cut out of the general happening of the world, the human will stands under the same laws as all other natural things and processes. It is conditioned according to natural law. |
| 30. Two Essays on Haeckel: Haeckel and His Opponents
01 Aug 1899, |
|---|
Preface[ 1 ] I am convinced that my work, The Philosophy of Freedom, published some five years ago, gives the outline of a world-conception which is in complete harmony with the stupendous results of the natural science of our time. I am also conscious that I did not intentionally bring about this harmony. My road was quite independent of that which natural science follows. [ 2 ] From this independence of my own way of looking at things in regard to the province of knowledge that is dominant in our day, and from its simultaneous, complete agreement therewith, I believe myself entitled to draw my justification for presenting the position of that monumental representative of the scientific mode of thought, Ernst Haeckel, in the intellectual battle of our time. [ 3 ] Doubtless there are to-day many who feel the need for clearing up matters with regard to natural science. This need can best be satisfied by penetrating deeply into the ideas of that seeker into Nature who has most unreservedly drawn the full conclusions of scientific premises. I desire to address myself in this little book, to those who share with me a like need in this respect. Rudolf SteineR [ 4 ] Goethe has given glorious expression, in his book upon Winkelmann, to the feeling which a man has when he contemplates his position within the world: “When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, worthy, and valuable whole, when harmonious contentment yields him pure, free rapture, then would the universe, could it but feel itself, burst forth into rejoicing at having attained its goal, and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.” From out of this feeling there arises the most important question that man can ask himself: how is his own becoming and being linked with that of the whole world? Schiller, in a letter to Goethe of 23rd August, 1794, admirably characterises the road by which Goethe sought to come to a knowledge of human nature. “From the simple organism you ascend step by step to the more complex, in order finally to build up the most complex of all, man, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature.” Now this road of Goethe's is also that which natural science has been following for the last forty years, in order to solve “the question of questions for humanity.” Huxley sees the problem to be the determination of the position which “man occupies in nature, and his relation to the totality of things.” It is the great merit of Charles Darwin to have created a new scientific basis for reflection upon this question. The facts which he brought forward in 1859 in his work, The Origin of Species, and the principles which he there developed, gave to natural research the possibility of showing, in its own way, how well founded was Goethe's conviction that Nature, “after a thousand animal types, forms a being that contains them all—man.” To-day we look back upon forty years of scientific development, which stand under the influence of Charles Darwin's line of thought. Rightly could Ernst Haeckel say in his book, On our Present Knowledge of Man's Origin, which reproduces an address delivered by him at the Fourth International Congress of Zoologists in Cambridge on 26th August, 1898: “Forty years of Darwinism! What a huge progress in our knowledge of Nature! And what a revolution in our weightiest views, not only in the more closely affected departments, but also in that of anthropology, and equally in all the so-called psychological sciences.” Goethe, from his profound insight into Nature, foresaw to its full extent this revolution and its significance for the progress of man's intellectual culture. We see this particularly clearly from a conversation which he had with Soret on 2nd August, 1830. At that time the news of the beginning of the Revolution of July reached Weimar and caused general excitement. When Soret visited Goethe, he was received with the words: “Now, what do you think of this great event? The volcano has burst into eruption; all is in flames, and it is no longer a conference behind closed doors!” Soret naturally could only believe that Goethe was speaking of the July Revolution, and replied that under the known conditions nothing else could be expected than that it would end with the expulsion of the Royal family. But Goethe had something quite different in his mind. “1 am not talking of those people at all; I am concerned with quite other things. I am speaking of the conflict, so momentous for science, between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire that has come to a public outbreak in the Academy.” The conflict concerned the question whether each species in which organic nature finds expression possesses a distinct architectural plan of its own, or whether there is one plan common to them all. Goethe had already settled this question for himself forty years earlier. His eager study of the plant and animal worlds had made him an opponent of the Linnæan view, that we “count as many species as different forms were created in the beginning (in principio).” Anyone holding such an opinion can only strive to discover what are the plans upon which the separate species are organised. He will seek above all carefully to distinguish these separate forms. Goethe followed another road. “That which Linnaeus strove forcibly to hold apart was bound, according to the innermost need of my being, to strive after reunion.” Thus there grew up in him the view which, in 1796, in the Lectures upon the three first chapters of A General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, he summed up in the sentence: “This, then, we have gained, that we can unhesitatingly maintain that all complete organic natures—among which we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and, as the head of the last, man—have all been shaped according to one original type, which only inclines more or less to this side or the other in its constant parts, and yet daily develops and transforms itself by reproduction.” The basic type, to which all the manifold plant-forms may be traced back, had already been described by Goethe in 1790 in his Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants. This way of regarding things, by which Goethe endeavoured to recognise the laws of living nature, is exactly similar to that which he demands for the inorganic world in his essay, written in 1793, Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject: “Nothing happens in Nature which is not in some connection with the whole, and if experiences only appear to us as isolated, if we can only regard experiments as isolated facts, that does not imply that they actually are isolated; it is only the question: How shall we find the connection of these phenomena, these occurrences?” Species also appear to us only in isolation. Goethe seeks for their connection. Hence it clearly appears that Goethe's effort was directed to apply the same mode of explanation to the study of living beings as has led to the goal in that of inorganic nature.1 How far he had run ahead of his time with such conceptions becomes apparent when one reflects that at the same time when Goethe published his Metamorphosis, Kant sought to prove scientifically, in his Critique of Judgment, the impossibility of an explanation of the living according to the same principles as hold for the lifeless. He maintained: “It is quite certain that we cannot even adequately learn to know, far less explain to ourselves, the organised beings and their inner possibility according to purely mechanical principles of nature; and, indeed, it is so certain that we can boldly say it is senseless for man even to conceive such a purpose, or to hope that sometime perhaps a Newton may arise who will make comprehensible the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no purpose has ordered; rather one must simply and flatly deny any such insight to man.” Haeckel repudiates this thought with the words: “Now, however, this impossible Newton really appeared seventy years later in Darwin, and, as a matter of fact, solved the problem whose solution Kant had declared to be absolutely unthinkable!” That the revolution in scientific views brought about by Darwinism must take place, Goethe knew full well, for it corresponds with his own way of conceiving things. In the view which Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire defended against Cuvier, that all organic forms carry in them a “general plan modified only here and there,” he recognised his own again. Therefore he could say to Soret: “Now, however, Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is decidedly on our side, and with him all his important disciples and followers in France. This event is for me of quite extraordinary value, and I rejoice rightly over the general victory gained at length by a cause to which I have devoted my life, and which is most especially my very own.” Of still greater value for Goethe's view of Nature are, however, the discoveries of Darwin. Goethe's view of Nature is related to Darwinism in a way similar to that in which the insights of Copernicus and Kepler into the structure and movements of the planetary system are related to the discovery by Newton of the law of the universal attraction of all heavenly bodies. This law reveals the scientific causes, why the planets move in the manner which Copernicus and Kepler had described. And Darwin found the natural causes, why the common original type of all organic beings, which Goethe assumed, makes its appearance in the various species. [ 5 ] The doubt as to the view that there underlies each distinct organic species a special plan of organisation, unchangeable for all time, took firm hold upon Darwin upon a journey which he undertook to South America and Australia in the summer of 1831 as naturalist on the ship Beagle. As to how his thought ripened, we get an idea in reaching such communications from him as the following: “When, during the voyage of the Beagle, I visited the Galapagos Archipelago, which lies in the Pacific Ocean some five hundred English miles from the South American coast, I saw myself surrounded by peculiar kinds of birds, reptiles, and snakes, which exist nowhere else in the world. Yet they almost all bore upon them an American character. In the song of the mocking thrush, in the sharp cry of the carrion hawk, in the great chandelier-like Opuntico, I clearly perceived the neighbourhood of America; and yet these islands were separated from the mainland by so many miles, and differed widely from it in their geological constitution and their climate. Yet more surprising was the fact that most of the inhabitants of each separate island of this small archipelago were specifically different, although closely related to one another. I often asked myself, then, how these peculiar animals and men had originated. The simplest answer seemed to be that the inhabitants of the different islands descend from one another, and in the course of their descent had undergone modifications, and that all the inhabitants of the archipelago had descended from those of the nearest mainland, viz., America, from which naturally the colonisation would proceed. But it long remained for me an unintelligible problem: how the necessary degree of modification could have been attained.” As to this “how,” it was the numerous breeding experiments which he tried, after his return home, with pigeons, fowls, dogs, rabbits, and garden plants that enlightened Darwin. He saw from them in how high a degree there lies in organic forms the possibility of continually modifying themselves in the course of their reproduction. It is possible, by creating artificial conditions, to obtain from a given form after a few generations new kinds, which differ much more from each other than do those in Nature, whose difference is regarded as so great that one inclines to ascribe to each a special underlying plan of organisation. As is well known, the breeder utilises this variability of kinds to bring about the development of such forms of domesticated organisms as correspond with his intentions. He endeavours to create the conditions which guide the variation in a direction answering his purpose. If he seeks to breed a kind of sheep with specially fine wool, he seeks out among his flock those individuals which have the finest wool. These he allows to breed. From among their descendants he again selects for further breeding those which have the finest wool. If this is carried on through a series of generations, a species of sheep is obtained which differs materially from its ancestors in the formation of its wool. The same thing can be done with other characteristics of living creatures. From these facts two things become obvious: that organic forms have a tendency to vary, and that they pass on the acquired modifications to their descendants. Owing to this first property of living creatures, the breeder is able to develop in his species certain characteristics that answer his purposes; owing to the second, these new characteristics are handed on from one generation to the next. [ 6 ] The thought now lies close at hand, that in Nature also, left to itself, the forms continually vary. And the great power of variation of domesticated organisms does not force us to assume that this property of organic forms is confined within certain limits. We may rather presuppose that in the lapse of vast time-periods a certain form transforms itself into a totally different one, which in its formation diverges from the former to the utmost extent imaginable. The most natural inference then, is this, that the organic species have not arisen independently, each according to a special plan of structure, alongside each other; but that in course of time they have evolved the one from the other. This idea gains support from the views at which Lyell arrived in the history of the earth's development, and which he first published in 1830 in his Principles of Geology. The older geological views, according to which the formation of the earth was supposed to have been accomplished in a series of violent catastrophes, were thereby superseded. Through this doctrine of catastrophes it was sought to explain the results to which the investigation of the earth's solid crust had led. The different strata of the earth's crust, and the fossilised organic creatures contained in them, are of course the vestiges of what once took place on the earth's surface. The followers of the doctrine of violent transformations believed that the development of the earth had been accomplished in successive periods, definitely distinguished from one another. At the end of such a period there occurred a catastrophe. Everything living was destroyed, and its remains preserved in an earth-stratum. On the top of what had been destroyed there arose a completely new world, which must be created afresh. In the place of this doctrine of catastrophes, Lyell set up the view that the crust of the earth has been gradually moulded in the course of very long periods of time, by the same processes which still in our time are going on every day on the earth's surface. It has been the action of the rivers carrying mud away from one spot and depositing it on another; the work of the glaciers, which grind away rocks and stones, forward blocks of stone, and analogous processes, which, in their steady, slow working have given to the earth's surface its present configuration. This view necessarily draws after it the further conclusion that the present-day forms of plants and animals also have gradually developed themselves out of those whose remains are preserved for us in fossils. Now, it results from the processes of artificial breeding that one form can really transform itself into another. There remains only the question, by what means are those conditions for this transformation, which the breeder brings about by artificial means, created in Nature itself? [ 7 ] In artificial breeding human intelligence chooses the conditions so that the new forms coming into existence answer to the purposes which the breeder is following out. Now, the organic forms living in Nature are in general purposefully adapted to the conditions under which they live. A mere glance into Nature will teach one the truth of this fact. Plant and animal species are so constructed that they can maintain and reproduce themselves in the conditions under which they live. [ 8 ] It is just this purposeful arrangement which has given rise to the supposition that organic forms cannot be explained in the same way as the facts of inorganic Nature. Kant observes in his Critique of Judgment: “The analogy of the forms, in so far as they seem to be produced in accordance with a common basic plan, despite all differences, strengthens the presumption of a real relationship between them in their generation from a common mother through an approach, step by step, of one animal species to another. ... Here, therefore, it is open to the archaeologist of Nature to cause to arise that great family of creatures (for one would be forced to conceive them thus if the thoroughgoing connected relationship spoken of is to hold good) from the traces left over of her older revolutions, according to all their known and supposed mechanisms. But he must equally for that purpose ascribe to this common mother an organisation purposely fitted to all these creatures, for otherwise the purposive form of the products of the plant and animal kingdoms is unthinkable as to its possibility.” [ 9 ] If we would explain organic forms after the same manner in which natural science deals with inorganic phenomena, we must demonstrate that the particular arrangement of the organisms—devoid of a purposeful object—comes into being by reason of what is practically natural necessity, even as one elastic ball after having been struck by another is fulfilling a law as it rolls along. This requirement has its fulfilment in Darwin's teachings regarding natural selection. Even in Nature organic forms must, in accordance with their capacity for assimilating modifications which have been brought about by artificial breeding, become transformed. Should there be nothing available for directly bringing about the change, so that none but the forms aimed at should come into existence, there will be, regardless of choice, useless, or less useful, forms called into being. Now, Nature is extremely wasteful in the bringing forth of her germs. So many germs are, indeed, produced upon our earth, that were they all to attain to development we should soon be able to fill several worlds with them. This great number of germs is confronted with but a comparatively small amount of food and space, the result of this being a universal struggle for existence among organic beings. Only the fit survive and fructify; the unfit have to go under. The fittest, however, will be those who have adapted themselves in the best possible way to the surrounding conditions of life. The absolutely unintentional, and yet—from natural causes—necessary, struggle for existence brings in its train the same results as are attained by the intelligence of the breeder with his cultivated organisms: he creates purposeful (useful) organic forms. This, broadly sketched, is the meaning of Darwin's theory of natural selection in the struggle for existence; or, otherwise, the “selective theory.” By this theory, that which Kant held to be impossible is reached: the thinking out in all its possibilities of a predetermined form in the animal and vegetable kingdom, without assuming the Universal Mother to be dowered with an organism directly productive of all these creatures. [ 10 ] As Newton by pointing out the general attraction of the heavenly bodies showed why they moved in the set courses determined by Copernicus and Kepler, so did it now become possible to explain with the help of the theory of selection how in Nature the evolution of the living thing takes place, the course of which Goethe, in his Metamorphosis of Plants, has observed: “We can, however, say this, namely, that proceeding from a relationship that is hardly distinguishable between animal and plant, creatures do little by little evolve, carrying on their development in opposite directions—the plant finally reaching its maturity in the form of the tree, and the animal finding its culminating glory in man's freedom and activity.” Goethe has said of his ancestors: “I shall not rest until I have found a pregnant point from which many deductions may be made; or, rather, one that will forcibly bestow upon me the overflow of its own abundance.” The theory of selection became for Ernst Haeckel the point from which he was able to deduce a conception of the universe entirely in accordance with natural science. [ 11 ] At the beginning of the last century Jean Lamarck also maintained the view that, at a certain moment in the earth's development, a most simple organic something developed itself, by spontaneous generation, out of the mechanical, physical, and chemical processes. These simplest organisms then produced more perfect ones, and these again others more highly organised, right up to man. “One might therefore quite rightly name this part of the theory of evolution, which asserts the common origin of all plant and animal species from the simplest common root-forms, in honour of its most deserving founder, Lamarckianism” (Haeckel, Natural History of Creation). Haeckel has given in grandiose style an explanation of Lamarckianism by means of Darwinism. [ 12 ] The key to this explanation Haeckel found by seeking out the evidences in the individual development of the higher organisms—in their ontogeny—showing that they really originated from lower forms of life. When one follows out the form-development of one of the higher organisms from the earliest germ up to its fully developed condition, the different stages are found to present configurations corresponding to the forms of lower organisms.2 At the outset of his individual existence man and every other animal is a simple cell. This cell divides itself, and from it arises a germinal vesicle consisting of many cells. From that develops the so-called “cup-germ,” the two-layered gastrula, which has the shape of a cup- or jug-like body. Now, the lower plant-animals (sponges, polyps, and so on) remain throughout their entire existence on a level of development which is equivalent to this cup-germ. Haeckel remarks thereupon: “This fact is of extraordinary importance. For we see that man, and generally every vertebrate, runs rapidly, in passing, through a two-leaved stage of formation, which in these lowest plant-animals is maintained throughout life” (Anthropogenesis). Such a parallelism between the developmental stages of the higher organisms and the developed lower forms may be followed out through the entire evolutionary history. Haeckel clothes this fact in the words: “The brief ontogenesis or development of the individual is a rapid and abbreviated repetition, a condensed recapitulation of the prolonged phylogenesis or development of the species.” This sentence gives expression to the so-called fundamental biogenetic law. Why then do the higher organisms in the course of their development come to forms which resemble lower ones? The natural explanation is that the former have developed themselves out of the latter; that therefore every organism in its individual development shows us one after another the forms which have clung to it as heirlooms from its lower ancestors. [ 13 ] The simplest organism that once upon a time formed itself on earth, transforms itself in the course of reproduction into new forms. Of these, the best adapted in the struggle for existence survive, and transmit their peculiarities to their descendants. All the formations and qualities which an organism exhibits at the present time have arisen in the lapse of enormous time-periods by adaptation and inheritance. Heredity and adaptation are thus the causes of the world of organic forms. [ 14 ] Thus, by investigating the relationship of individual developmental history (ontogeny) to the history of the race (phylogeny), Haeckel has given the scientific explanation of the manifold organic forms.3 As a natural philosopher he has satisfied the human demand for knowledge, which Schiller had derived from observation of Goethe's mind; he ascended from the simple organisations step by step to the more complicated, to finally build up genetically the most complex of all, man, from the materials of the whole structure of Nature. He has set forth his view in several grandly designed works—in his General Morphology (1866), in his Natural History of Creation (1868), in his Anthropogenesis (1874)—in which he “undertook the first and hitherto the only attempt to establish critically in detail the zoological family-tree of man, and to discuss at length the entire animal ancestry of our race.” To these works there has been further added in recent years his three-volumed Systematic Phylogeny. [ 15 ] It is characteristic of Haeckel's deeply philosophical nature that, after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, he at once recognised the full significance for man's entire conception of the Universe, of the principles therein established; and it speaks much for his philosophical enthusiasm that he boldly and tirelessly combated all the prejudices which arose against the acceptance of the new truth by the creed of modern thought. The necessity that all modern scientific thinking should reckon with Darwinism was expounded by Haeckel at the fiftieth meeting of German scientists and doctors on the 22nd September, 1877, in his address, The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole. He delivered a widely-embracing Confession of Faith of a Man of Science on the 9th October, 1892, in Altenburg at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society for Natural Science of the Osterland. (This address was printed under the title, Monism as a link between Religion and Science, Bonn, 1892.) What has been yielded by the remodelled doctrine of evolution and our present scientific knowledge towards the answering of the “question of questions,” he has recently expounded in its broad lines in the address mentioned above, On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man. Herein Haeckel handles afresh the conclusion, which follows as a matter of course from Darwinism for every logical thinker, that man has developed out of the lower vertebrates, and further, more immediately from true apes. It has been, however, this necessary conclusion which has summoned to battle all the old prejudices of theologians, philosophers, and all who are under their spell. Doubtless, people would have accepted the emergence of the single animal and plant forms from one another if only this assumption had not carried with it at once the recognition of the animal descent of man. “It remains,” as Haeckel emphasised in his Natural History of Creation, “an instructive fact that this recognition—after the appearance of the first Darwinian work—was in no sense general, that on the contrary numerous critics of the first Darwinian book (and among them very famous names) declared themselves in complete agreement with Darwinism, but entirely rejected its application to man.” With a certain appearance of justice, people relied in so doing on Darwin's book itself, in which no word is said of this application. Because he drew this conclusion unreservedly, Haeckel was reproached with being “more Darwinian than Darwin.” True, that held good only till the year 1871, in which appeared Darwin's work, The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection, in which Darwin himself maintained that inference with great boldness and clearness. [ 16 ] It was rightly recognised that with this conclusion must fall a conception belonging to the most treasured among the collection of older human prejudices: the conception that the “soul of man” is a special being all to itself, having quite another, a different, “higher origin” from all other things in Nature. The doctrine of descent must naturally lead to the view that man's soul-activities are only a special form of those physiological functions which are found in his vertebrate ancestors, and that these activities have evolved themselves with the same necessity from the mental activities of the animals, as the brain of man, which is the material condition of his intellect, has evolved out of the vertebrate brain. [ 17 ] It was not only the men with old conceptions of faith nurtured in the various ecclesiastical religions who rebelled against the new confession, but also all those who had indeed apparently freed themselves from these conceptions of faith, but whose minds nevertheless still thought in the sense of these conceptions. In what follows the proof will be given that to this latter class of minds belong a series of philosophers and scientific scholars of high standing who have combated Haeckel, and who still remain opponents of the views he advocated. To these ally themselves also those who are entirely lacking in the power of drawing the necessary logical conclusions from a series of facts lying before them. I wish here to describe the objections which Haeckel had to combat. II[ 18 ] A bright light is thrown upon the relationship of man to the higher vertebrates, by the truth which Huxley, in 1863, expressed in his volume on Man's Place in Nature, and other Anthropological Essays: “Thus whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result—that the structural differences which separate man from the gorilla and the chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the gorilla from the lower apes” (see Man and the Lower Animals, p. 144). With the help of this fact it is possible to establish man's animal line of ancestry in the sense of the Darwinian doctrine of descent. Man has common ancestors with the apes in some species of apes that have died out. By a corresponding utilisation of the knowledge which comparative anatomy and physiology, individual developmental history, and palaeontology supply, Haeckel has followed the animal ancestors of man lying still more remotely in the past, through the semi-apes, the marsupials, the earliest fishes, right up to the very earliest animals consisting only of a single cell. He is fully entitled to ask: “Are the phenomena of the individual development of man in any way less wonderful than the palaeontological development from lower organisms? Why should not man have evolved in the course of enormous periods of time from unicellular original forms, since every individual runs through this same development from the cell to the fully developed organism?” [ 19 ] But it is also by no means easy for the human mind to construct for itself conceptions in accordance with Nature as regards the unfoldment of the single organism from the germ up to the developed condition. We can see this from the ideas which a scientist like Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) and a philosopher like Leibnitz (1646-1716) formed about this development. Haller maintained the view that the germ of an organism already contains in miniature, but fully and completely formed in advance, all the parts which make their appearance during its development. Thus, development is taken to be not the formation of something new in what is already present, but the unfolding of something that was already there but invisible to the eye because of its minuteness. But if this view were correct, then in the first germ of an animal or vegetable form all following generations must be already contained like boxes one inside the other. And Haller actually drew this conclusion. He assumed that in the first human germ of our root-mother, Eve, the entire human race was already present in miniature. And even Leibnitz also can only imagine the development of men as an unfoldment of what already exists: “So I should opine that the souls, which some day will be human souls, were already there in germ, like those of other species, that they existed in man's ancestors up to Adam, therefore from the beginning of things, always in the form of organised bodies.” [ 20 ] The human understanding has a tendency to imagine to itself that anything coming into existence was somehow already there, in some form or other, before its manifestation. The entire organism is supposed to be already hidden in the germ; the distinct organic classes, orders, families, species, and kinds are supposed to have existed as the thoughts of a creator before they actually came into existence. Now, however, the idea of evolution demands that we should conceive the arising of something new, of something later, from out of something already present, of something earlier. We are called upon to understand that which has become, out of the becoming. That we cannot do, if we regard all that has become as something which has always been there. [ 21 ] How great the prejudices are that the idea of evolution had to face was clearly shown by the reception which Caspar Friedrich Wolff's Theoria Generationis, which appeared in 1759, met with among the men of science who accepted Haller's views. It was demonstrated in this book that in the human ovum not even a trace of the form of the developed organism is present, but that its development consists in a series of new formations. Wolff defended the idea of a real evolution, an epigenesis, a becoming from what is not present, as against the view of seeming evolution. Haeckel says of Wolff's book that it “belongs, in spite of its small size and awkward language, to the most valuable writings in the whole field of biological literature. ...” Nevertheless, this remarkable book had at first no success whatever. Although scientific studies, as a result of the stimulus imparted by Linnaeus, flourished mightily at that time, although botanists and zoologists were soon counted no longer by dozens but by hundreds, yet no one troubled himself about Wolff's Theory of Generation. The few, however, who had read it, held it to be fundamentally wrong, and especially Haller. Although Wolff proved by the most accurate observations the truth of epigenesis, and disproved the current hypotheses of the preformation doctrine, nevertheless the “exact” physiologist Haller remained the most zealous follower of the latter and rejected the correct teaching of Wolff with his dictatorial edict: “There is no becoming” (Nulla est epigenesis!). With so much power did human thinking set itself against a view, of which Haeckel (in his Anthropogenesis) remarks: “To-day we can hardly any longer call this theory of epigenesis a theory, because we have fully convinced ourselves of the correctness of the fact, and can demonstrate it at any moment with the help of the microscope.” [ 22 ] How deep-rooted is the prejudice against the idea of evolution can be seen at any moment by the objections which our philosophical contemporaries make against it. Otto Liebmann, who, in his Analysis of Reality and his Thoughts and Facts, has subjected the fundamental views of science to criticism, expresses himself in a remarkable manner about the conception of evolution. In face of the facts, he cannot deny the justice of the conception that higher organisms proceed from lower. He therefore endeavours to represent the range and importance of this conception for the higher need of explanation as being as small as possible. “Accepted, the theory of descent ... granted that it be complete, that the great genealogical register of Nature's organic beings lies open before us; and that, not as an hypothesis, but as historically proven fact, what should we then have? A gallery of ancestors, such as one finds also in princely castles; only not as a fragment, but as a completed whole.” This means that nothing of any consequence has been accomplished towards the real explanation, when one has shown how what appears later proceeds as a new formation from what preceded. Now it is interesting to see how Liebmann's presuppositions lead him yet again to the assumption that what arises on the road of evolution was there already before its appearance. In the recently published second part of his Thoughts and Facts he maintains: “It is true that for us, to whom the world appears in the form of perception known as time, the seed is there before the plant; begetting and conception come before the animal that arises from them, and the development of the embryo into a full-grown creature is a process of time and drawn out in time to a certain length. In the timeless world-being, on the contrary, which neither becomes nor passes away, but is once and for all, maintaining itself unchangeably amid the stream of happenings, and for which no future, no past, but only an eternal present exists, this before and after, this earlier and later, falls away entirely. ... That which unrolls itself for us in the course of time as the slower or more rapidly passing succession of a series of phases of development, is in the omnipresent, permanent world-being a fixed law, neither coming into existence nor passing away.” The connection of such philosophical conceptions with the ideas of the various religious doctrines as to the creation may be easily seen. That purposefully devised beings arise in Nature, without there being some fundamental activity or power which infuses that purposefulness into the beings in question, is something that neither these religious doctrines nor such philosophical thinkers as Liebmann will admit. The view that accords with Nature follows out the course of what happens, and sees beings arise which have the quality of purposefulness, without this same purpose having been a co-determinant in their production. The purposefulness came about along with them; but the purpose did not co-operate in their becoming.4 The religious mode of conception has recourse to the Creator, who has created the creatures purposefully according to his preconceived plan; Liebmann turns to a timeless world-being, but he still makes that which is purposeful be brought forth by the purpose. “The goal or the purpose is here not later, and also not earlier than the means; but the purpose helps it on in virtue of a timeless necessity.” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. ii, p. 268.) Liebmann is a good example of those philosophers who have apparently freed themselves from the conceptions of faith, but who still think altogether on the lines of such conceptions. They profess that their thoughts are determined purely by reasonable considerations, but none the less it is an innate theological prejudice which gives the direction to their thoughts. [ 23 ] Reasoned reflection must therefore agree with Haeckel when he says: “Either organisms have naturally developed themselves, and in that case they must all originate from the simplest common ancestral forms—or that is not the case, the various species of organisms have arisen independently of one another, and in that case they can only have been created in a supernatural manner, by a miracle. Natural evolution or supernatural creation of species—we must choose between these two possibilities, for there is no third!” (Free Science and Free Teaching, p. 9.) What has been proffered by philosophers or scientists as such a third alternative against the doctrine of natural evolution shows itself, on closer examination, to be only a belief in creation which more or less veils or denies its origin. [ 24 ] When we raise the question as to the origin of species in its most important form, in that which concerns the origin of man, there are only two answers possible. Either a consciousness endowed with reason is not present prior to its actual appearance in the world, but evolves as the outcome of the nervous system concentrated in the brain; or else an all-dominating world-reason exists before all other beings, and so shapes matter that in man its own image comes into being. Haeckel (in Monism as the Link between Religion and Science, p. 21) describes the becoming of the human mind as follows: “As our human body has slowly and step by step built itself up from a long series of vertebrate ancestors, so the same thing holds good of our soul: as a function of our brain it has developed itself step by step in interaction with that organ. What we term for short the ‘human soul’ is indeed only the sum-total of our feeling, willing, and thinking—the sum-total of physiological functions whose elementary organs consist of the microscopic ganglionic cells of our brain. Comparative anatomy and ontogeny show us how the marvellous structure of the latter, of our human soul-organ, has built itself upwards gradually in the course of millions of years out of the brain-forms of the higher and lower vertebrates; while comparative psychology shows us how, hand in hand therewith, the very soul itself—as a function of the brain—has evolved itself. The latter shows us also how a lower form of soul activity is already present in the lowest animals, in the unicellular protozoa, infusoria, and rhizopods. Every scientist who, like myself, has observed through long years the life-activity of these unicellular protista, is positively convinced that they also possess a soul; this ‘cell-soul,’ too, consists of a sum of feelings, representations, and volitions; the feeling, thinking, and willing of our human soul is only different therefrom in degree.” The totality of human soul-activities, which find their highest expression in unitary self-consciousness, corresponds to the complex structure of the human brain,5 just as simple feeling and willing do to the organisation of the protozoa. The progress of physiology, which we owe to investigators like Goltz, Münk, Wernicke, Edinger, Paul Flechsig, and others, enables us to-day to assign particular soul-manifestations to definite parts of the brain as their special functions. We recognise in four tracts of the grey matter of the cortex the mediators of four kinds of feeling: the sphere of bodily organic feeling in the meso-cranum lobule, that of smell in the frontal lobule, that of vision in the chief basal lobule, that of hearing in the temple lobule. The thinking which connects and orders the sensations has its apparatus between these four “sense-foci.” Haeckel links the following remark to the discussion of these latest physiological results: “The four thought-foci, distinguished by peculiar and highly complicated nerve-structure from the intervening sense-foci, are the true organs of thought, the only real tools of our mental life” (On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man, P-15). [ 25 ] Haeckel demands from the psychologists that they shall take such results as these into account in their explanations about the nature of the soul, and not build up a mere pseudo-science composed of a fantastic metaphysic, of one-sided, so-called inner observation of soul-events, uncritical comparison, misunderstood perceptions, incomplete experiences, speculative aberrations and religious dogmas. As against the reproach that is cast by this view at the old-fashioned psychology, we find in some philosophers and also in individual scientists the assertion that there cannot in any case be contained in the material processes of the brain that which we class together as mind and spirit; for the material processes in the areas of sense and thought are in no case representations, feelings, and thoughts, but only material phenomena. We cannot learn to know the real nature of thoughts and feelings through external observation, but only through inner experience, through purely mental self-observation. Gustav Bunge, for instance, in his address Vitalism and Mechanism, p. 12, explains: “In activity—therein lies the riddle of life. But we have not acquired the conception of activity from observation through the senses, but from self-observation, from the observation of willing as it comes into our consciousness, as it reveals itself to our inner sense.” Many thinkers see the mark of a philosophical mind in the ability to rise to the insight that it is a turning upside down of the right relation of things, to endeavour to understand mental processes from material ones. [ 26 ] Such objections point to a misunderstanding of the view of the world which Haeckel represents. Anyone who has really been saturated with the spirit of this view will never seek to explore the laws of mental life by any other road than by inner experience, by self-observation. The opponents of the scientific mode of thought talk exactly as if its supporters sought to discover the truths of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so forth, not by means of observing mental phenomena as such, but from the results of brain-anatomy. The caricature of the scientific world-conception thus created by such opponents for themselves is then termed materialism, and they are untiring in ever repeating afresh that this view must be unproductive, because it ignores the mental side of existence, or at least gives it a lower place at the expense of the material. Otto Liebmann, whom we may here cite once more, because his anti-scientific conceptions are typical of the mode of thought of certain philosophers and laymen, observes: “But granting, however, that natural science had attained its goal, it would then be in a position to show me accurately the physico-organic reasons why I hold that the assertion ‘twice two are four’ is true and assert it, and the other assertion ‘twice two are five’ is false and combat it, or why I must, just at this moment, write these very lines on paper the while I am entangled in the subjective belief that this happens because I will to write them down on account of their truth as assumed by me” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. ii, p. 294 et seq.). No scientific thinker will ever be of opinion that bodily-organic reasons can throw any light upon what, in the logical sense, is true or false. Mental connections can only be recognised from the side of the mental life. What is logically justified, must always be decided by logic; what is artistically perfect, by the aesthetic judgment. But it is an altogether different question to inquire: How does logical thinking, or the aesthetic judgment arise as a function of the brain? It is on this question only that comparative physiology and brain-anatomy have anything to say. And these show that the reasoning consciousness does not exist in isolation for itself, only utilising the human brain in order to express itself through it, as the piano-player plays on the piano; but that our mental powers are just as much functions of the form-elements of our brain, as “every force is a function of a material body” (Haeckel, Anthropogenesis, pt. ii, p. 853). [ 27 ] The essence of Monism consists in the assumption that all occurrences in the world, from the simplest mechanical ones upwards to the highest human intellectual creations, evolve themselves naturally in the same sense, and that everything which is called in for the explanation of appearances, must be sought within that same world. Opposed to this view stands Dualism, which regards the pure operation of natural law as insufficient to explain appearances, and takes refuge in a reasoning being ruling over the appearances from above. Natural science, as has been shown, must reject this dualism. [ 28 ] Now, however, it is urged from the side of philosophy that the means at the disposal of science are insufficient to establish a world-conception. From its own standpoint science was entirely right in explaining the whole world-process as a chain of causes and effects, in the sense of a purely mechanical conformity to law; but behind these laws, nevertheless, there is hidden the real cause, the universal world-reason, which only avails itself of mechanical means in order to realise higher, purposeful relations. Thus, for instance, Arthur Drews, who follows in the path of Eduard von Hartmann, observes: “Human works of art, too, are produced in a mechanical manner, that is when one looks only at the outward succession of single moments, without reflecting on the fact that after all there is hidden behind all this only the artist's thought; nevertheless one would rightly take that man for a fool who would perchance contend that the work was produced purely mechanically ... that which presents itself as the inevitable effect of a cause, on that lower standpoint which contents itself with merely gazing at the effects and thus contemplates the entire process as it were from behind, that very same thing reveals itself, when seen from the front, in every case as the intended goal of the means employed” (German Speculation since Kant, vol. ii, p. 287 et seq.). And Eduard von Hartmann himself remarks about the struggle for existence which renders it possible to explain living creatures naturally: “The struggle for existence, and therewith the whole of natural selection, is only the servant of the Idea, who is obliged to perform the lower services in its realisation, namely, the rough hewing and fitting of the stones that the master-builder has measured out and typically determined in advance according to their place in the great building. To proclaim this selection in the struggle for existence as the essentially adequate principle of explanation of the evolution of the organic kingdom, would be on a par with a day-labourer, who had worked with others in preparing the stones in the building of Cologne Cathedral, declaring himself to be the architect of that work of art” (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 10th ed., vol. iii, p. 403). [ 29 ] If these conceptions were justified, it would be the task of philosophy to seek the artist behind the work of art. In fact, philosophers have tried the most various and diverse dualistic explanations to account for Cosmic processes. They have constructed in thought certain entities, supposed to hover behind the phenomena as the spirit of the artist rules behind the work of art. [ 30 ] No scientific consideration would be able to rob man of the conviction that perceptible phenomena are guided by beings outside the world, if he could find within his own consciousness anything that pointed to such beings. What could anatomy and physiology accomplish with their declaration that soul-activities are functions of the brain, if observation of these activities yielded anything which could be regarded as a higher ground for an explanation? If the philosopher were able to show that a universal world-reason manifests itself in human reason, then all scientific results would be powerless to refute such knowledge. [ 31 ] Now, however, the dualistic world-conception is disproved by nothing more effectively than by the consideration of the human mind. When I want to explain an external occurrence—for instance, the motion of an elastic ball which has been struck by another, I cannot stop short at the mere observation, but must seek the law which determines the direction of motion and velocity of the one ball from the direction and velocity of the other. Mere observation cannot furnish me with such a law, but only the linking together in thought of what happens. Man, therefore, draws from his mind the means of explaining that which presents itself to him through observation. He must pass beyond the mere observation, if he wants to comprehend it. Observation and thought are the two sources of our knowledge about things; and that holds good for all things and happenings, except only for the thinking consciousness itself. To that we cannot add by any explanation anything that does not lie already in the observation itself. It yields us the laws for all other things; it yields us at the same time its own laws also. If we want to demonstrate the correctness of a natural law, we accomplish this by distinguishing, arranging observations and perceptions, and drawing conclusions—that is, we form conceptions and ideas about the experiences in question with the help of thinking. As to the correctness of the thinking, thought itself alone decides. It is thus thought which, in regard to all that happens in the world, carries us beyond mere observation, though it does not carry us beyond itself. [ 32 ] This fact is incompatible with the dualistic world-conception. The point which the supporters of this conception so often emphasise, namely, that the manifestations of the thinking consciousness are accessible to us through the inner sense of introspection, while we only comprehend physical and chemical happenings when we bring into the appropriate connections the facts of observation through logical, mathematical combination, and so on; in other words, through the results of the psychological domain: this fact is the very thing which they should never admit. For let us for once draw the right conclusion from the knowledge that observation transforms itself into self-observation when we ascend from the scientific into the psychological domain. If a universal world-reason underlay the phenomena of nature, or some other spiritual primordial being (for instance, Schopenhauer's will or von Hartmann's unconscious spirit), then it follows that the human thinking spirit must also be created by this world-being. An agreement of the conceptions and ideas which the mind of man forms from phenomena, with the actual laws proper to these occurrences, would only be possible if the ideal world-artist called forth in the human soul the laws according to which he had previously created the entire world. But then man could only know his own mental activity through observation of the root-being by whom he is shaped, and not through self-observation. Indeed, there could be no self-observation, but only observation of the intentions and purposes of the primordial being. Mathematics and logic, for example, ought not to be developed by means of man's investigating the inner, proper nature of mental connections, but by his deducing these psychological truths from the intentions and purposes of the eternal world-reason. If human understanding were only the reflection of an eternal mind, then it could never possibly ascertain its own laws through self-observation, but must needs explain them from out of the eternal reason. But whenever such an explanation has been attempted, it is simply human reason which has been transferred to the world outside. When the mystic believes that he rises to the contemplation of God by sinking down into his own inner being, in reality he merely sees his own spirit, which he makes into God; and when Eduard von Hartmann speaks of ideas which utilise the laws of Nature as their hodmen-helpers in order to shape the building of the world, these ideas are only his own, by means of which he explains the world. Because observation of the manifestations of mind is self-observation, therefore it follows that it is man's own spirit which expresses itself in the mind, and not any external reason. [ 33 ] The monistic doctrine of evolution, however, is in complete agreement with the fact of self-observation. If the human soul has evolved itself slowly and step by step along with the organs of the soul out of lower conditions, then it is self-evident that we can explain its development from below scientifically, though we can discover the inner nature of that which emerges from the complex structure of the human brain only from the contemplation of this very nature itself. Had spirit been always present in a form resembling the human, and had it at last created its likeness in man alone, then we ought to be able to deduce the human spirit from the All-spirit; but if man's spirit has arisen as a new formation in the course of natural evolution, then we can understand its origin by following out its line of ancestry; we learn to know the stage at which it has at last arrived when we contemplate that spirit itself. [ 34 ] A philosophy that understands itself, and turns its attention to an unprejudiced contemplation of the human spirit, thus yields a further proof of the correctness of the monistic world-conception. It is, however, quite incompatible with a dualistic natural science. (The further development and detailed proof of a monistic philosophy, the basic ideas of which I can only indicate here, I have given in my =The Philosophy of Freedom, Berlin, 1894, Verlag Emil Felber.) [ 35 ] For one who understands aright the monistic world-conception, all the objections urged against it from the side of ethics lose all significance. Haeckel has repeatedly pointed out the injustice of such objections, and also called attention to the fact that the assertion that scientific monism must needs lead to ethical materialism, either rests upon a complete misunderstanding of the former, or else aims at nothing more than casting suspicion upon it. [ 36 ] Naturally monism regards human conduct only as a part of the general happenings of the world.6 It makes that conduct just as little dependent upon a so-called higher moral world-order, as it makes the happenings in Nature dependent upon a supernatural order. “The mechanical or monistic philosophy maintains that, everywhere in the phenomena of human life, as in those of the rest of nature, fixed and unalterable laws rule, that everywhere there exists a necessary causal connection, a causal nexus of appearances, and that in accordance therewith the entire world knowable to us constitutes a uniform whole, a 'monon.' It maintains further that all phenomena are produced by mechanical causes, not by preconceived purposive causes. There is no such thing as a ‘free will’ in the ordinary sense. On the contrary, those very phenomena which we have accustomed ourselves to view as the freest and most independent, the manifestations of the human will, appear in the light of the monistic world-conception as subordinated to just as rigid laws as any other phenomenon of nature” (Haeckel, Anthropogenesis, p. 851 et seq.). It is the monistic philosophy which first shows the phenomenon of free will in the right light. As a bit cut out of the general happening of the world, the human will stands under the same laws as all other natural things and processes. It is conditioned according to natural law. But inasmuch as the monistic view denies the presence of higher, purposeful causes in the course of Nature, it at the same time also declares the will independent of such a higher world-order. The natural course of evolution leads the processes of Nature upwards to human self-consciousness. On that level it leaves man to himself; henceforward he can draw the impulses of his action from his own spirit. If a universal world-reason were ruling, then man also could not draw his goals from within himself, but only from this eternal reason. In the monistic sense man's action is hereafter determined by causal moments; in the ethical sense it is not determined, because Nature as a whole is determined not ethically but in accordance with natural law. The preliminary stages of ethical conduct are already to be found among the lower organisms. “Even though later the moral foundations have in man developed themselves much more highly, nevertheless their most ancient, prehistoric source lies, as Darwin has shown, in the social instincts of the animals” (Haeckel, Monism, p. 29). Man's moral conduct is a product of evolution. The moral instinct of animals perfects itself, like everything else in Nature, by inheritance and adaptation, until man sets before himself moral purposes and goals from out of his own spirit. Moral goals appear not as predetermined by a supernatural world-order, but as a new formation within the natural process. Regarded ethically, “that only has purpose which man has first endowed therewith, for only through the realisation of an idea does anything purposeful arise. But only in man does the idea become effective in a realistic sense. To the question, What is man's task in life? Monism can only answer, that which he sets himself. My mission in the world is no (ethically) predetermined one; on the contrary, it is, at every moment, that which I elect for myself. I do not enter on life's journey with a fixed, settled line of march” (cp. my The Philosophy of Freedom, p. 172 et seq.). Dualism demands submission to ethical commands derived from somewhere or other. Monism throws man wholly upon himself. Man receives ethical standards from no external world-being, but only from the depths of his own being. The capacity for creating for oneself ethical purposes may be called moral phantasy. Thereby man elevates the ethical instincts of his lower ancestors into moral action, as through his artistic phantasy he reflects on a higher level in his works of art the forms and occurrences of Nature. [ 37 ] The philosophical considerations which result from the fact of self-observation thus constitute no refutation, but rather an important complement of the means of proof in favour of the monistic world-conception, derived from comparative anatomy and physiology. III[ 38 ] The famous pathologist, Rudolf Virchow,6 has taken up a quite peculiar position towards the monistic world-conception. After Haeckel had delivered his address on The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole at the fiftieth congress of German scientists and doctors, in which he ably expounded the significance of the monistic world-conception for our intellectual culture and also for the whole system of public instruction, Virchow came forward four days later as his opponent with the speech: The Freedom of Science in the Modern State. At first it seemed as if Virchow wanted monism excluded from the schools only, because, according to his view, the new doctrine was only an hypothesis and did not represent a fact established by definite proofs. It certainly seems remarkable that a modern scientist wants to exclude the doctrine of evolution from school-teaching on the ostensible ground of lack of unassailable proofs while at the same time speaking in favour of Church dogma. Does not Virchow even say (on p. 29 of the speech mentioned): “Every attempt to transform our problems into set formula, to introduce our suppositions as the basis of instruction, especially the attempt simply to dispossess the Church and replace its dogmas without more ado by a ‘descent-religion;’ yes, gentlemen, this attempt must fail entirely, and in its frustration this attempt will also bring with it the greatest dangers for the whole position of science!” One must needs, however, here raise the question—meaningless for every reasonable thinker—Have we more certain proofs for the Church's dogmas than for the “descent-religion?” But it results from the whole tone and style in which Virchow spoke that he was much less concerned about warding off the dangers which monism might cause to the teaching of the young than about his opposition on principle to Haeckel's world-conception as a whole. This he has proved by his whole subsequent attitude. He has seized upon every opportunity that seemed to him suitable to combat the natural history of evolution and to repeat his favourite phrase, “It is quite certain that man does not descend from the ape.” At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the German Anthropological Society, on 24th August, 1894, he even went so far as to clothe this dictum in the somewhat tactless words: “On the road of speculation people have come to the ape theory; one might just as well have arrived at an elephant theory or a sheep theory.” Of course, this utterance has not the smallest sense in view of the results of comparative zoology. “No zoologist,” remarks Haeckel, “would consider it possible that man could have descended from the elephant or the sheep. For precisely these two mammals happen to belong to the most specialised branches of hoofed animals, an order of mammalia which stands in no sort of direct connection with that of the apes or primates (excepting their common descent from an ancestral form common to the entire class).” Hard as it may be towards a meritorious scientist, one can only characterise such utterances as Virchow's as empty verbalism.7 In combating the theory of descent, Virchow follows quite peculiar tactics. He demands unassailable proofs for this theory. But as soon as natural science discovers anything which is capable of enriching the chain of proofs with a fresh link, he seeks to weaken its probatory force in every way. The theory of descent sees in the famous skulls of Neanderthal, Spy, etc., isolated palaeontological remains of extinct races of lower men, which form a transition-link between the ape-like ancestor of man (Pithecanthropus) and the lower human races of the present day. Virchow declares these skulls to be abnormal, diseased formations, pathological productions. He even developed this contention in the direction of maintaining that all deviations from the fixed organic root-forms must be regarded as pathological formations. If, then, by artificial breeding we produce table-fruit from wild fruit, we have only produced a diseased object in Nature. One cannot prove more effectively the thesis of Virchow (hostile to any theory of evolution), “The plan of organisation is unalterable within the species, kind does not depart from kind,” than by declaring that what shows plainly how kind departs from kind, is not a healthy, natural product of evolution, but a diseased formation. Quite in accord with this attitude of Virchow's to the theory of descent were, further, his assertions in regard to the skeleton remains of the man-ape (Pithecanthropus erectus), which Eugen Dubois found in Java in 1894. It is true that these remains—the top of the skull, a thigh-bone, and some teeth—were incomplete; and a debate that was most interesting arose about them in the Zoological Congress at Leyden. Out of twelve zoologists, three were of opinion that the remains were those of an ape, three that they were those of a human being, while six defended the view that they belonged to an extinct transition form, between man and ape. Dubois set out in a most lucid manner the relation of this intermediate link between man and ape, on the one hand to the lower races of humanity, on the other to the known anthropoid apes. Virchow declared that the skull and the thigh-bone did not belong together; but that the former came from an ape, the latter from a human being. This assertion was refuted by well-informed palaeontologists, who, on the basis of the conscientious report of the find, expressed themselves as of opinion that not the smallest doubt could exist as to the origin of the bony remains from one and the same individual. Virchow tried to prove that the thigh-bone could only have come from a man, from the presence of a bony outgrowth which could only proceed from an illness that had been cured through careful human nursing. As against that, the palaeontologist Marsh showed that similar bony outgrowths occur also in wild apes. A third assertion of Virchow's, that the deep groove between the upper edge of the eye sockets and the low roof of the skull in Pithecanthropus bore witness to its simian nature, was refuted by the palaeontologist Nehring's showing that the same formation existed in a human skull from Santos in Brazil. [ 39 ] Virchow's fight against the evolution doctrine appears indeed somewhat of a riddle when one reflects that this investigator, at the beginning of his career, before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, defended the doctrine of the mechanical basis of all vital activity. In Würzburg, where Virchow taught from 1848 to 1856, Haeckel sat “reverentially at his feet and first heard with enthusiasm from him that clear and simple doctrine.” But Virchow fights against the doctrine of transformation created by Darwin, which furnishes an all-embracing principle of explanation of that doctrine. When, in the face of the facts of palaeontology, of comparative anatomy and physiology, he constantly emphasises that “definite proof” is lacking, one can only point out, on the other side, that knowledge of the facts alone does indeed not suffice for the recognition of the doctrine of evolution, but there is needed in addition—as Haeckel remarks—a “philosophical understanding” as well. “The unshakable structure of true monistic science arises only through the most intimate interaction and mutual penetration of philosophy and experience” (Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 34, Vortrag). In any case, the campaign which Virchow has carried on for many years past against the doctrine of descent, with the applause of theological and other reactionaries, is more dangerous than all the mischief which a “descent-religion” can cause in unripe heads. A technical discussion on the point with Virchow is made difficult by the fact that, fundamentally, he remains standing on a bare negation, and in general does not bring forward any specific technical objections against the doctrine of evolution. [ 40 ] Other scientific opponents of Haeckel's make it easier for us to attain clearness in regard to them because they give the reasons for their opposition, and we can thus recognise the mistakes in their inferences. Among these are to be reckoned Wilhelm His and Alexander Goette. [ 41 ] His made his appearance in the year 1868 with his Researches as to the First Beginnings of the Vertebrate Body. His attack was primarily directed against the doctrine that the form-development of a higher organism from the first germ to the fully-developed condition can be explained from the evolution of the type. We ought not, according to him, to explain this development by regarding it as the outcome of the generations from which the single organism descends through inheritance and adaptation, but we should seek in the individual organism itself the mechanical causes of its becoming, without regard to comparative anatomy and ancestral history. His starts from the view that the germ, conceived as a uniform surface, grows unequally at different spots, and he asserts that in consequence of this unequal growth the complex structure of the organism results in the course of development. He says: “Take a simple layer and imagine that it possesses at different places a different impulse to enlargement. One will then be able to develop from purely mathematical and mechanical laws the condition in which the formation must find itself after a certain time. Its successive forms will accurately correspond to the stages of development which the individual organism runs through from the germ to the perfected condition. Thus we do not need to go beyond the consideration of the individual organism in order to understand its development, but can deduce this from the mechanical law of growth. “All formation, whether consisting in cleavage, in the formation of folds, or in complete separation, follows as a consequence from this fundamental law.” The law of growth brings into existence the two pairs of limbs as follows: “Their disposition is determined, like the four corners of a letter, by the crossing of four folds which limit and bound the body.” His rejects any help drawn from the history of the species, with the following justification: “When the history of development for any given form has thoroughly fulfilled the task of its physiological deduction, then it may rightly say of itself that it has explained this form as an individual form” (cp. His, Unsere Körperform und das physiologische Problem ihrer Entstehung). In reality, however, nothing whatever has been accomplished by such an explanation. For the question still remains: Why do different forces of growth work at different spots in the germ? They are simply assumed by His to exist. The explanation can only be seen in the fact that the relations of growth of the individual parts of the germ have been transmitted by inheritance from the ancestral animals, that therefore the individual organism runs through the successive stages of its development because the changes which its forefathers have undergone through long ages continue to operate as the cause of its individual becoming. [ 42 ] To what consequences the view of His leads may best be seen from his theory as to the orbital lobule, by which the so-called “rudimentary organs” of the organism were to be explained. These are parts which are present in the organism without possessing any sort of significance for its life. Thus man has a fold of skin at the inner corner of his eye which is without any purpose for the functions of the organ of sight. He possesses also muscles corresponding to those by which certain animals can move their ears at will. Yet most people cannot move their ears. Some animals possess eyes which are covered over with a skin and thus cannot serve for seeing. His explains these organs as being such, to which “up to the present it has not been possible to assign any physiological role, analogous to the snippets, which, in cutting out a dress, cannot be avoided even with the most economical use of the stuff.” The evolution theory gives the only possible explanation of them. They are inherited from remote ancestors, in whom they subserved a useful purpose. Animals which to-day live underground and have no seeing eyes, descend from such ancestors as once lived in the light and needed eyes. In the course of many generations the conditions of life of such an organic stock have changed. The organisms have adapted themselves to the new conditions in which they can dispense with organs of sight. But these organs remain as heirlooms from an earlier stage of evolution; only in the course of time they have become atrophied, because they have not been used. These rudimentary organs8 form one of the strongest means of proof for the natural theory of evolution. If any deliberate intentions whatever had ruled in the building up of an organic form, whence came these purposeless parts? There is no other possible explanation of them, except that in the course of many generations they have gradually fallen into disuse. [ 43 ] Alexander Goette, also, is of opinion that it is unnecessary to explain the developmental stages of the individual organism by the roundabout road through the history of the species. He deduces the shaping of the organism from a “law of form” which must superadd itself to the physical and chemical processes of matter in order to form the living creature. He endeavoured to defend this standpoint exhaustively in his Entwickelungs-geschichte der Unke (1875). “The essence of development consists in the complete but gradual introduction into the existence of certain natural bodies of a new moment, determined from without, viz., that of the law of form.” Since the law of form is supposed to superadd itself from without to the mechanical and physical properties of matter, and not to develop itself from these properties, it can be nothing else but an immaterial idea, and we have nothing given us therein which is substantially different from the creative thoughts, which, according to the dualistic world-conception, underlie organic forms. It is supposed to be a motive-power existing outside of organised matter and causing its development. That means, it employs the laws of matter as “helpers,” just like Eduard von Hartmann's idea. Goette is forced to call in the help of this “law of form,” because he believes that “the individual developmental history of organisms” alone explains and lies at the basis of their whole shaping. Whoever denies that the true causes of the development of the individual being are an historical result of its ancestral development, will be driven of necessity to have recourse to such ideal causes lying outside of matter. [ 44 ] Weighty evidence against such attempts to introduce ideal formative forces into the developmental history of the individual, is afforded by the achievements of those investigators who have really explained the forms of higher living creatures on the assumption that these forms are the hereditary repetition of innumerable historical changes in the history of the species, which have occurred during long ages. A striking example in this respect is the “vertebral theory of the skull-bones,” already dimly anticipated by Goethe and Oken, but first set in the right light by Carl Gegenbauer on the basis of the theory of descent. He demonstrated that the skull of the higher vertebrates, and also that of man, has arisen from the gradual transformation of a “root-skull” whose form is still preserved by the “root-fishes,” or primordial gastrea, in the formation of the head. Supported by such results, Gegenbauer therefore remarks rightly: “The descent theory will likewise find a touch-stone in comparative anatomy. Hitherto there existed no observation in comparative anatomy which contradicts it; all observations rather lead us towards it. Thus that theory will receive back from comparative anatomy what it gave to its method: clearness and certainty” (cp. the Introduction to Gegenbauer's Vergleichende Anatomie). The descent theory has directed science to seek for the real causes of the individual development of each organism in its ancestry; and natural science on this road replaces the ideal laws of development which might be supposed to superpose themselves on organic matter, by the actual facts of the ancestral history, which continue to operate in the individual creature as formative forces. [ 45 ] Under the influence of the theory of descent, science is ever drawing nearer to that great goal which one of the greatest scientists of the century, Karl Ernst von Baer, has depicted in the words: “It is one fundamental thought which runs through all forms and stages of animal evolution and dominates all particular conditions. It is the same fundamental thought which gathered together the scattered masses of the spheres in universal space and formed them into solar systems; the same thought caused the disintegrated dust on the surface of the planet to sprout forth into living forms. But this thought is nothing else but Life itself, and the words and syllables wherein it expresses itself are the various forms of that which lives.” Another utterance of Baer's gives the same conception in another form: “To many another will a prize fall. But the palm will be won by the fortunate man for whom it is reserved to trace back the formative energies of the animal body to the general forces and vital functions of the universe as a whole.” [ 46 ] It is these same general forces of Nature which cause the stone lying on an inclined plane to roll downwards, which also, through evolution, cause one organic form to arise from another. The characteristics which a given form acquires through many generations by adaptation, it hands on by heredity to its descendants. That which an organism unfolds to-day, from within outwards, from its germinal dispositions, had developed itself outwardly in its ancestors in mechanical struggle with the rest of the forces of Nature. In order to hold this view firmly it is doubtless necessary to assume that the formations acquired in this external struggle should be actually transmitted by heredity. Hence the whole doctrine of evolution is called in question by the view, defended especially by August Weismann, that acquired characteristics are not inherited. He is of opinion that no external change which has occurred in an organism can be transmitted to its offspring, but that only can be inherited which is predetermined by some original disposition in the germ. In the germ-cells of organisms innumerable possibilities of development are held to lie. Accordingly, organic forms can vary in the course of reproduction. A new form arises when among the descendants possibilities of development come to unfoldment other than in the ancestors. From among the ever new forms arising in this way, those will survive which can best maintain the struggle for existence. Forms unequal to the struggle will perish. When out of a possibility of evolution a form develops itself which is specially effective in the battle of competition, then this form will reproduce itself; when that is not the case, it must perish. One sees that here causes operating on the organism from without are entirely eliminated. The reasons why the forms change lie in the germ. And the struggle for existence selects from among the forms coming into existence from the most diverse germ-dispositions those which are the fittest. The special characteristic of an organism does not lead us up to a change which has occurred in its ancestors as its cause, but to a disposition in the germ of that ancestor. Since, therefore, nothing can be effected from outside in the upbuilding of organic forms, it follows that already in the germ of the root-form, from which a race began its development, there must have lain the dispositions for the succeeding generations. We find ourselves once more in face of a doctrine of Chinese boxes one within another. Weismann conceives of the progressive process through which the germs bring about evolution, as a material process. When an organism develops, one portion of the germ-mass out of which it evolves is solely employed in forming a fresh germ for the sake of further reproduction. In the germ-mass of a descendant, therefore, a part of that of the parents is present, in the germ-mass of the parents a portion of that of the grandparents, and so on backwards to the root-form. Hence through all organisms developing one from another there is maintained an originally present germ-substance. This is Weismann's theory of the continuity and immortality of the germ-plasm. He believes himself to be forced to this view, because numerous facts appear to him to contradict the assumption of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. As one specially noteworthy fact he cites the presence of the workers, who are incapable of reproduction, among the communal insects—bees, ants, and termites. These workers are not developed from special eggs, but from the same as those from which spring the fruitful individuals. If the female larvae of these animals are very richly and nourishingly fed, they then lay eggs from which queens or males proceed. If the feeding is less generous, the result is the production of sterile workers. Now, it is very easy and obvious to seek the cause of this unfruitfulness simply in the less effective nourishment. This view is represented among others by Herbert Spencer, the English thinker, who has constructed a philosophical world-conception on the basis of natural evolution. Weismann holds this view to be mistaken. For in the worker-bee the reproductive organs do not merely remain behindhand in their development, but they actually become rudimentary; they do not possess a large proportion of the parts necessary for reproduction. But now, he contends, one can demonstrate in the case of other insects that defective nourishment in no way entails such a degeneration of organs. Flies are insects related to bees. Weismann reared the eggs laid by a female bluebottle in two separate batches, and fed the one plentifully, the other meagrely. The latter grew slowly and remained strikingly small. But they reproduced themselves. Hence it appears that in flies insufficient nourishment does not produce sterility. But then it follows also that in the root-insect, the common ancestral form, which in line with the evolution doctrine must be assumed for the allied species of bees and flies, this peculiarity of being rendered unfruitful by insufficient nourishment cannot have existed. On the contrary, this unfruitfulness must be an acquired characteristic of the bees. But at the same time there can be no question of any inheritance of this peculiarity, for the workers which have acquired it do not reproduce themselves, and accordingly, therefore, can pass on nothing by heredity. Hence the cause must be sought for in the bee-germ itself, why at one time queens and at another workers are developed. The external influence of insufficient nourishment can accomplish nothing, because it is not inherited. It can only act as a stimulus, which brings to development the preformed disposition in the germ. Through the generalisation of these and similar results, Weismann comes to the conclusion: “The external influence is never the real cause of the difference, but plays the part of the stimulus, which decides which of the available dispositions shall come to development. The real cause, however, always lies in preformed changes of the body itself, and these—since they are constantly purposeful—can be referred in their development only to processes of selection,” to the selection of the fittest in the struggle for existence. The struggle for existence (selection) “alone is the guiding and leading principle in the development of the world of organisms” (Aüssere Einflüsse der Entwickelungsreize, p. 49). The English investigators Francis Galton and Alfred Russel Wallace hold the same view as Weismann as to the non-inheritance of acquired characteristics and the omnipotence of selection. [ 47 ] The facts which these investigators advance are certainly in need of explanation. But they cannot receive such an explanation in the direction indicated by Weismann without abandoning the entire monistic doctrine of evolution. But the objections urged against the inheritance of acquired characteristics are the least capable of driving us to such a step. For one only needs to consider the development of the instincts in the higher animals to convince oneself of the fact that such inheritance does occur. Look, for instance, at the development of our domestic animals. Some of them, as a consequence of living together with men, have developed mental capacities which cannot even be mentioned in connection with their wild ancestors. Yet these capacities can certainly not proceed from an inner disposition. For human influence, human training, comes to these animals as something wholly external. How could an inner disposition possibly come to meet exactly an arbitrarily determined action of man? And yet training becomes instinct, and this is inherited by the descendants. Such an example cannot be refuted. And countless others of the same kind can be found. Thus the fact of the inheritance of acquired characteristics remains such; and we must hope that further investigations will bring the apparently contradictory observations of Weismann and his followers into harmony with monism. [ 48 ] Fundamentally, Weismann has only stopped half-way to dualism. His inner causes of evolution only have a meaning when they are ideally conceived. For, if they were material processes in the germ-plasm, it would be unintelligible why these material processes and not those of external happenings should continue to operate in the process of heredity. Another investigator of the present day is more logical than Weismann—namely, J. Reinke, who, in his recently published book, Die Welt als That; Umrisse einer Weltansicht auf naturwissenschaftlicher Grundlage, has taken unreservedly the leap into the dualistic camp. He declares that a living creature can never build itself up from out of the physical and chemical forces of organic substances. “Life does not consist in the chemical properties of a combination, or a number of combinations. Just as from the properties of brass and glass there does not yet emerge the possibility of the production of the microscope, so little does the origination of the cell follow from the properties of albumen, carbohydrates, fats, lecithin, Cholesterin, etc.” (p. 178 of the above-named work). There must be present besides the material forces also spiritual forces, or at least forces of another order, which give the former their direction, and so regulate their combined action that the organism results therefrom. These forces of another order Reinke calls “dominants.” “In the union of the dominants with the energies—the operations of the physical and chemical forces—there unveils itself to us a spiritualisation of Nature; in this mode of conceiving things culminates my scientific confession of faith” (p. 455). It is now only logical that Reinke also assumes a universal world-reason, which originally brought the purely physical and chemical forces into the relation in which they are operative in organic beings. [ 49 ] Reinke endeavours to escape from the charge that through such a reason working from outside upon the material forces, the laws which hold good in the inorganic kingdom are rendered powerless for the organic world, by saying: “The universal reason, as also the dominants, make use of the mechanical forces; they actualise their creations only by the help of these forces. The attitude of the world-reason coincides with that of a mechanician, who also lets the natural forces do their work after he has imparted to them their direction.” But with this statement the kind of conformity to law which expresses itself in mechanical facts is once more declared to be the helper of a higher kind of law, in the sense of Eduard von Hartmann. [ 50 ] Goette's law of form, Weismann's inner causes of development, Reinke's dominants are fundamentally just nothing else but derivatives of the thoughts of the world-creator who builds according to plan. As soon as one forsakes the clear and simple mode of explanation of the monistic world-conception, one inevitably falls a victim to mystical-religious conceptions, and of such Haeckel's saying holds good, that “then it is better to assume the mysterious creation of the individual species” (Uber unsere gegenwärtige Kenntniss vom Ursprung des Menschen, p. 30). [ 51 ] Besides those opponents of monism who are of opinion that the contemplation of the phenomena of the world leads up to spiritual beings, who are independent of material phenomena, there are still others9 who seek to save the domain of a supernatural order hovering over the natural one, by denying entirely to man's power of knowing the capacity to understand the ultimate grounds of the world-happenings.10 The ideas of these opponents have found their most eloquent spokesman in Du Bois-Reymond. His famous “Ignorabimus” speech, delivered at the Forty-fifth Congress of German Scientists and Doctors (1872), is the expression of their confession of faith. In this address Du Bois-Reymond describes as the highest goal of the scientist the explanation of all world-happenings, therefore also of human thinking and feeling, by mechanical processes. If some day we shall succeed in saying how the parts of our brain lie and move when we have a definite thought or feeling, then the goal of natural explanation will have been reached. We can get no further. But, in Du Bois-Reymond's view, we have not therewith understood in what the nature of our spirit consists. “It seems, indeed, on superficial examination, as though, through the knowledge of the material processes in the brain, certain mental processes and dispositions might become intelligible. Among such I reckon memory, the flow and association of ideas, the consequences of practice, the specific talents, and so on. A minimum of reflection, however, shows that this is a delusion. Only with regard to certain inner conditions of the mental life, which are somehow of like significance with the outer ones through sense impressions, shall we thus be instructed, not with regard to the coming about of the mental life through these conditions. “What thinkable connection exists between the definite movements of definite atoms in my brain on the one hand; and, on the other, those for me primary, not further definable, not to be denied facts: ‘I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I taste something sweet, smell the odour of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red,’ and the equally immediate certainty flowing therefrom, ‘therefore I am!’? It is just entirely and for ever incomprehensible that it should not be indifferent to a number of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., atoms, how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move.” But who asked Du Bois-Reymond first to expel mind from matter, in order then to be able to observe that mind is not in matter? The simple attraction and repulsion of the tiniest particle of matter is force, therefore a spiritual cause proceeding from the substance. From the simplest forces we see the complicated human mind building itself up in a series of developments; and we understand it from this its becoming. “The problem of the origin and nature of consciousness is only a special case of the general problem in chief: that of the connection of matter and force” (Haeckel, Freie Wissenschaft and freie Lehre, p. 80). As a matter of fact, the problem is not at all, How does mind arise out of mindless matter? but, How does the more complex mind develop itself out of the simplest mental (or spiritual) actions of matter—out of attraction and repulsion? In the preface which Du Bois-Reymond has written to the reprint of his “Ignorabimus” speech, he recommends to those who are not contented with his declaration of the unknowableness of the ultimate grounds of being, that they should try to get along with the faith-conceptions of the supernatural view of the world. “Let them, then, make a trial of the only other way of escape, that of supernaturalism. Only that where supernaturalism begins, science ceases.” But such a confession as that of Du Bois-Reymond will always open the doors wide to supernaturalism. For whenever one sets a limit to the knowledge of the human mind, there it will surely start the beginning of its belief in the “no longer knowable.” [ 52 ] There is only one salvation from the belief in a supernatural world-order, and that is the monistic insight that all grounds of explanation for the phenomena of the world lie also within the domain of these phenomena. This insight can only be given by a philosophy which stands in the most intimate harmony with the modern doctrine of evolution.
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| 31. Collected Essays on Cultural and Contemporary History 1887–1901: Essays from “German Weekly” Nr. 1
30 Dec 1887, |
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| January marked one hundred years since it first appeared under its present title, and it was with not unwarranted pride that the City paper, the largest and most influential newspaper in England and the world, could look back on the hundred years during which it has served public opinion. |
| 31. Collected Essays on Cultural and Contemporary History 1887–1901: Essays from “German Weekly” Nr. 1
30 Dec 1887, |
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The official New Year's receptions, as are customary in Berlin, Paris, Pest, etc., have contributed to some extent to calming people's minds about the general situation. Speeches were made almost without exception which more or less confidently expressed the hope for the preservation of peace, and even if the present conditions were by no means described as very pleasant, it was emphasized that the times had not yet become so serious that the solution of the present entanglements was only possible through war. Of course, such remarks are of little consolation, and in view of the military events in Russia, which are striking and unusual in every respect, it is impossible to refrain from worrying about the future. The most important of the political New Year's speeches was the one with which Prime Minister v. Tisza returned the congratulations of his party. This year, as every year, the members of the Liberal Party had gathered at Tisza's house to congratulate him, and in response to a heartfelt speech by Count Bela Bänffy, the Prime Minister began by thanking the gentlemen, saying that he was aware that the flag of liberalism would always be held high in his fatherland. Progress in the country could not be denied, and the Hungarian state was growing stronger from year to year. The settlement of finances would also succeed if the world situation was not disturbed. "But," added Mr. v. Tisza, referring to external politics, "the condition is one that no one can stand for. For my part, I do not join those - and I say this quite sincerely - who regard the danger of war as imminent. I still hope today that we will escape this danger... I do not consider it justified to speak in the tone of the pessimists, but, even if I hope for the better, I would again consider it a mistake to spread optimism, because optimism often paralyzes the power of resistance which, I hope not, but which we may nevertheless need". As you can see, Tisza's language is as cautious as possible. At the Vienna Stock Exchange, his speech initially caused a real scare, as the Telegraph Correspondence Bureau had omitted the word "not" in the most important passage: "I, for my part, do not join those ....", and prices fell sharply. Once the correction had been made, the shares recovered again. A peaceful sign is also interpreted as Kaiser Wilhelm's repeated remark at the reception of the German generals that the main focus of their attention this year would be the imperial maneuvers. But even this statement is no assurance that all danger can be eliminated. And so Europe is approaching a time that is uncertain and dark, and Russia will have to give other proofs of her love of peace than she has done so far before her neighbors can once again devote themselves more carefree to their internal affairs. The German "Reichsanzeiger" published the forged documents which were handed over to the Tsar in order to convict German politics of dishonesty. These were alleged letters from Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria to the Countess of Flanders, which turned out never to have been written by the Prince, and which included a forged letter from the German ambassador in Vienna in which the official support of the German Empire was promised to the Prince. The fiftieth anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's ordination to the priesthood, which was celebrated on December 31, was celebrated in splendid fashion, and delegations from all parts of the world traveled to Rome with gifts to pay homage to the head of Christendom. Most of the European monarchs were represented by extraordinary envoys. Only the pope's unpleasant relationship with Italy added a note of discord to the festivities, and Leo XIII believed he should not refrain from attacking the Italian kingdom in a speech. The mayor of Rome, the Duke of Torlonia, was dismissed from office by the government because he had had the congratulations of the municipality conveyed to the Pope without a commission. There has been a change of minister in Serbia. After Ristic was dismissed following a conflict with the Radical Party, the King formed a new ministry with Sava Gruitsch as Prime Minister and Minister of War and Colonel Franassovic as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The new government fully adopted Milan's pro-Austrian policy. A few days after the New Year, Baron Paul Sennyey, President of the House of Lords and Judex cutiae, known as the "Black Baron" in his day as the leader of the Conservatives, died in Hungary. Sennyey had long been an avowed opponent of Tisza, but he no longer played a prominent role as an active politician in recent years. Let us also remember the anniversary celebrated by The Times on New Year's Day: on 1. January marked one hundred years since it first appeared under its present title, and it was with not unwarranted pride that the City paper, the largest and most influential newspaper in England and the world, could look back on the hundred years during which it has served public opinion. |
| 31. Collected Essays on Cultural and Contemporary History 1887–1901: Essays from “German Weekly” Nr. 2
05 Jan 1888, |
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| However, such a measure would probably have been adopted at the same time under more peaceful conditions. These are almost only minor political matters that have interrupted the week's silence. |
| More important may be the negotiations that are to be held again between the German and Czech members of parliament in Bohemia. An understanding is hardly to be expected, the differences are too great. But at least we should find out more about what the Czechs have to offer in relation to the German Fordetungen. |
| 31. Collected Essays on Cultural and Contemporary History 1887–1901: Essays from “German Weekly” Nr. 2
05 Jan 1888, |
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A significant change in Austria's relations with Russia does not yet appear to have occurred. Things are still at the same old stage. Attempts have been made to capitalize on the premature discharge of the oldest year of the Russian Guard Corps, which is now to take place, but the general armaments in Russia, of which new reports reach the world from time to time, do not really raise hopes of maintaining peace. Austria remains cautious. Even at the last ministerial conferences held in Vienna, in which the Hungarian ministers Tisza and Fejervary took part, no further resolutions were passed. The only thing that resembles a preparation for war is the calling up of reservists in Austria and Hungary for an extraordinary seven-day rifle drill for the purpose of practicing with the repeating rifle. The necessary bill has already been sent to the Hungarian House of Representatives and will soon be submitted to the Imperial Council. However, such a measure would probably have been adopted at the same time under more peaceful conditions. These are almost only minor political matters that have interrupted the week's silence. The holiday mood still lingers. The opening of a beautiful jubilee exhibition in the Vatican, a quickly suppressed coup in Burgas - that's pretty much all the news abroad. More important may be the negotiations that are to be held again between the German and Czech members of parliament in Bohemia. An understanding is hardly to be expected, the differences are too great. But at least we should find out more about what the Czechs have to offer in relation to the German Fordetungen. In the meantime, the Germans in Prague celebrated the opening of their new theater in the most festive way. On both evenings, the house was filled with a glittering audience, including the governor Baron Kraus and the colonel-land marshal Prince Lobkowitz. On the first evening "Die Meistersinger" was performed, on the second an occasional comedy by Alfred Klaar and "Minna von Barnhelm". The celebration was not disturbed in any way by the Czech population. After the performance on the second day, a banquet was held at which Dr. Schmeykal explained the significance of the celebration in a major speech. He concluded with a toast to the German people in Bohemia. Professor Knoll, Dr. Hermann from Dresden and Dr. Klaar followed the leader of the German Bohemians with uplifting toasts. |
| 31. Collected Essays on Cultural and Contemporary History 1887–1901: Essays from “German Weekly” Nr. 3
12 Jan 1888, |
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| If he should be forced to draw the sword in the current year, the Bulgarian army under his leadership would show the world that the Bulgarians knew how to die for their flag and for the defense of the fatherland. |
| 31. Collected Essays on Cultural and Contemporary History 1887–1901: Essays from “German Weekly” Nr. 3
12 Jan 1888, |
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In a letter to the governor of Moscow, Tsar Alexander expressed the confident hope that peace would allow Russia to devote all its energies to internal prosperity in this and future years. These words constitute the most gratifying message of peace that the new year has so far brought, and if the Tsar had not simply wanted to say to his Moscow governor a phrase of the kind that is used at the turn of the year without giving it any deeper meaning, Europe would have reason to breathe a sigh of relief for a while. The Tsar is regarded as a man who is too proud not to be sincere, and since no one outside Russia seriously believes that peace can be disturbed from anywhere other than St. Petersburg, this announcement is regarded as a pleasant sign that the situation has generally improved. Whether this conclusion is correct, of course, only the future can prove, for the Tsar has not so unequivocally declared his will to keep peace with his neighbors that one can now dispense with all worries. A solemn declaration, such as was expected from the Tsar from various quarters on the occasion of the Greek New Year, did not take place. Several Russian dignitaries, such as Count Tolstoy, the Minister of the Interior and the General Procurator of the Synod, Pobyedonostsev, were awarded high decorations; for the rest, everything remained quiet in Russia, only the movement of troops and the accumulation of various war material on the southern borders seem to have been uninterrupted. At a Conservative banquet in Liverpool, Salisbury was just as hopeful as the Tsar, but just as determined and resolute in his comments on the development of conditions on the continent. He said that the European situation had changed for the better and that peace was assured for the near future; the sovereigns and ministers were working with all their energy to maintain peace. Such statements have again become typical among statesmen and princes, and if the facts of all-round armaments did not exist, one would at least be able to accept them with greater confidence. It is only from Sofia that a bellicose tone can be heard. At the New Year's reception, Prince Ferdinand gave a speech to the officers of the capital's garrison, in which he said that he had become a Bulgarian in thought and feeling, and that he would never separate his cause from that of Bulgaria. If he should be forced to draw the sword in the current year, the Bulgarian army under his leadership would show the world that the Bulgarians knew how to die for their flag and for the defense of the fatherland. In the Hungarian House of Representatives, Austria's relations with Russia were the subject of two interpellations by Helfy and Perczel. The speeches with which the two deputies justified their questions were sharply directed against Russia, and the words of the interpellations themselves were no less categorical. interpellations themselves. Helfy asked the government whether it had precise knowledge of the Russian war armaments, whether the Foreign Office in Vienna had taken steps to find out from Russia the purpose of these armaments, etc. Perczel demanded straightaway that Russia should be firmly requested to cease its armaments and reduce the number of troops on its borders. Prime Minister v. Tisza should answer both questions shortly. In the last few days, the Army Committee of the Chamber of Deputies dealt with the bill on the extraordinary call-up of reservists for training with the repeating rifle. The bill was adopted in the main. On this occasion, Minister Fejervary announced that 90,000 repeating rifles with a caliber of 11 millimeters had been completed and that two army corps had been equipped with them. The House of Representatives has now entered the budget debate. Now the Austrian Imperial Council has also been convened, for January 25th, and there is renewed activity in internal politics everywhere. It seems that in one of its first sessions the Austrian House of Representatives will have to deal with a motion which Prince Alois Liechtenstein wants to submit for the introduction of denominational schools. At a voters' meeting in Kaindorf, he at least declared that his party was determined to table this motion at the beginning of the next Reichstag session. The state parliaments continue to work in part. There were stormy scenes in the Prague Landstube on January 13, caused by the fact that the aristocrats remained seated during the vote on Vataschy's motion for the introduction of linguistic equality. The Young Czechs clenched their fists against the landowners and shouted at them: "Is this the Czech nobility? The Czech nation will remember! Shame on our nobility!" And so on. There was a commotion in the house and the chairman had to have the galleries cleared. A few days later, Mattusch's motion to decentralize the elementary and secondary school system was passed. The Galician parliament also took it upon itself to raise its voice more than once in favor of extending the country's autonomy. Of two by-elections for the Imperial Council in Linz and Kuttenberg, the first was in favor of the German liberal Count Kuenburg, who had run against a cleric and an anti-Semite. In the other election, the Young Czech Dr. Herold won against his Old Czech opponent. The Prussian Parliament opened on January 4 with a speech from the throne. One of the first sentences was addressed to the crown prince, for whose recovery hopes remained high. Moving on to internal political affairs, the speech noted that the financial situation of the state had developed very favorably and that the maintenance of the balance of revenue and expenditure seemed assured "unless unpredictable events intervene". The available funds were to be used, among other things, to improve the situation of the clergy and civil servants, but above all to ease the pressure of municipal and school burdens. The speech also holds out the prospect of several other proposals, such as the construction of new rail links. The budget, which was presented to the House of Representatives, set expenditure and revenue at 1,410,700,000 marks. The German Reichstag has received the draft announced some time ago concerning the extension of the Socialist Law. According to the bill, the validity of the law would be extended until September 30, 1893 and several tougher provisions would be introduced. In addition to a custodial sentence, it is now also possible to impose a restriction on residence in a certain place. The offender's citizenship can be revoked and he can be expelled from the federal territory. These provisions are followed by several others. The explanatory memorandum to the law states that these stricter measures have become necessary because social democracy has not lost any of its strength and expansion as a result of the previous measures. |
| 31. Collected Essays on Cultural and Contemporary History 1887–1901: Essays from “German Weekly” Nr. 4
18 Jan 1888, |
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| Now the Austrian Imperial Council is meeting again, which may soon have to deal with the confessional school, and which also has to discuss the state budget. It is not under the best political and national auspices that the Austrian parliament resumes its work; the reconciliation negotiations between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia have failed, and the fact that the important Bohemian question is now further away from a solution than ever before leaves its mark on the state of affairs in Austria in general. |
| May we be permitted to add to this statement the assurance that, in view of the willingness so often emphasized by the other side to enter into an understanding with us, we did not expect to have to do without any fundamental concession on the part of the majority of the Diet and to see their concession limited to a formal admission, which certainly allows our proposals to be discussed, but does not grant us the slightest objective satisfaction. |
| In repeating the declaration of our willingness to enter into negotiations on the conditions of our re-entry into the Diet under the preconditions we have developed in the course of our previous introductory communication, we conclude with a sincere expression of gratitude for the best-intentioned intentions of Your Serene Highness Colonel-Lt. |
| 31. Collected Essays on Cultural and Contemporary History 1887–1901: Essays from “German Weekly” Nr. 4
18 Jan 1888, |
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Although the general situation has not changed in any essential respect and no state has yet retracted any of its armaments, the calmer and more hopeful mood that has prevailed for some time seems to be consolidating. Various private and official statements by high-ranking personalities are helping to dispel at least the worst fears. Prince Bismarck is said to have remarked at a dinner to a co-owner of the "Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung", Mr. v. Ohlendorff, that in his innermost conviction Germany would not have a war in the next three years. And at the reception of the Presidents of the Prussian Parliament, Kaiser Wilhelm touched on external politics with the words that he hoped that peace would be maintained. Such remarks always have a calming effect for the moment; one can observe this most clearly on the stock markets. Unfortunately, they are often only valid for a short time, and facts can destroy the most profound convictions. It must be regarded as a gain if the outlook does not deteriorate, and this is not the case, if the silence in foreign policy is to be trusted. The relationship between Russia and Austria has remained the same, and it will take some time before there is a more lasting clarification in this area. Franco-German relations, on the other hand, are no longer suffering as much from the nervousness of public opinion as was evident during the Schnaebele incident. This is demonstrated by the indifference with which a new unpleasant incident on the Franco-German border is treated by both sides. A Frenchman was hunting in the border area and, according to the French account, was attacked by a German customs guard, thrown to the ground and robbed of his rifle. The fact that Paris did not immediately become indignant about this is a welcome sign that even there, at times, such events are no longer viewed solely from the perspective of national passion, but have enough prudence not to hold the German imperial government responsible for every action of a subordinate official. In most states the week has passed fairly quietly. The parliaments are devoting their activities to dealing with current affairs. Now the Austrian Imperial Council is meeting again, which may soon have to deal with the confessional school, and which also has to discuss the state budget. It is not under the best political and national auspices that the Austrian parliament resumes its work; the reconciliation negotiations between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia have failed, and the fact that the important Bohemian question is now further away from a solution than ever before leaves its mark on the state of affairs in Austria in general. On January 22, the Executive Committee of the German-Bohemian parliamentary deputies in Prague discussed Prince Lobkowitz's last proposals and decided not to proceed with the election of delegates for further negotiations. Dr. Schmeykal was instructed to inform the Colonel-Land Marshal of this decision. The "reconciliation" thus collapsed. An exchange of letters between Lobkowitz and Dr. Schmeykal provides more detailed information about the content of the negotiations conducted by Prince Lobkowitz with the Germans. The letters have just been published, and it is clear from them that the Czech parties had no intention of meeting the Germans' demands. The concessions offered by the Czechs did not contain half of what the Germans demanded, and in particular they refused to accept the German parliamentary motions concerning the abolition of the language ordinances and the complete national division of the country. So the Germans had no choice but to resign. Dr. Schmeykal's last letter to Prince Lobkowitz concludes with the following sentences: "In the letter we received on January 5 of this year, we are informed that the representatives of the two other parliamentary clubs are unable to express the agreement in principle to our parliamentary motions that we desire, and that the counter-proposals contained in our letter of December 9, 1887, do not all appear to them to be of such a nature that they could be expected to accept them at the planned conference in accordance with our wishes. As much as our wish to reach an agreement on the conditions of our re-entry into the Landtag, which promise a peaceful organization of conditions in the country, is vivid, so sincere is our regret at the statement of the representatives of the Landtag majority, in connection with our previously communicated resolutions and the statements sent here before, to have to make the open declaration that we will not enter into the conference proposed by the Colonel-Land Marshal and therefore will not be able to accept the invitation sent to us to elect our representatives for that conference. May we be permitted to add to this statement the assurance that, in view of the willingness so often emphasized by the other side to enter into an understanding with us, we did not expect to have to do without any fundamental concession on the part of the majority of the Diet and to see their concession limited to a formal admission, which certainly allows our proposals to be discussed, but does not grant us the slightest objective satisfaction. If we consider all the difficulties that stand in the way of a fundamental acceptance of our proposals, we can only find the reason for them in constitutional views, which we are unable to follow. In repeating the declaration of our willingness to enter into negotiations on the conditions of our re-entry into the Diet under the preconditions we have developed in the course of our previous introductory communication, we conclude with a sincere expression of gratitude for the best-intentioned intentions of Your Serene Highness Colonel-Lt. Your Serene Highness the Colonel-Land Marshal." |