Goethe and the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century

GA 171 — 14 October 1916, Dornach

Eleventh Lecture

If you reflect on what has been presented here in the last few reflections, it will be clear to you that the evolution of modern humanity contains within itself two, one might say, opposing impulses for its further development, two opposing impulses which, in a certain way, must be avoided by what spiritual science is to bring into this evolution. We have contrasted the two impulses in the most diverse ways. We have shown how one impulse, after having been prepared for a long time by various forces that we have shown and that are rooted in the supersensible or subsensible worlds, has united for human thinking and striving in what can be called the physical relationship of beings and forces – we said kinship – and that which is joined to this thinking and striving for the kinship of beings, especially for the consideration of human existence, if one uses the word as we have used it, is birth. As a kind of social ideal, so to speak, what we have called bliss stands alongside this sense and striving for physical kinship and physical origin of beings, which in the 19th century in particular has developed into the principle of mere utility. On the other hand, we have seen that this is countered by another impulse, which is less directed towards how man comes into existence through birth than towards pondering the problem: how does man go through the gate of death? So instead of birth, there is contemplation and striving for an understanding of death. Instead of the physical kinship of forces and beings, there is the contemplation of evil, pain, and suffering in the world. And as a kind of social ideal, this is joined by what we can call the redemption from or in existence, liberation, and so on.

We have seen that the culture of the West strives more for what is indicated on the left (see diagram on page 238), while the culture of the East strives more for what is indicated on the right, insofar as these cultures do not feel fertilized by the general human sense and aspiration, by the general human ideal, but abandon themselves to what, as it were, befits them by virtue of their national and climatic and other local peculiarities. We have seen how, under the influence of these general impulses, individual concepts and ideas also take on a certain coloration, nuance. We have seen how what can be called the struggle for existence, the selection of the fittest, and so on, fits so well into the main impulses that are preparing in Western culture, and how this has been opposed in the East, and in no less scientific a way than the struggle for existence emerged in the West, by what can be called the mutual assistance of beings. And I have explained to you how what was to be achieved in the West through the one-sided principle of the struggle for existence, which is based on the principles that I explained to you last time, should lead to an understanding of the development of living beings. It was said that what best exists in the struggle for existence lives on, what exists worst perishes, so that, as it were, what exists better, that is, what is relatively perfect, develops out of what is imperfect. What the struggle for existence means is mutual assistance, according to those Eastern sciences whose truly significant results Kropotkin summarized in the book I mentioned to you the other day. They believe that the best chances for development towards perfection are found in those animal species in which the principle of mutual assistance is most widespread.

And so we could cite many things that would testify to the way in which these two polar impulses have really come into humanity's evolution today, so to speak. This is what we must, I would say, look at with seeing eyes; for if spiritual science is to fulfill its task, then it is essential that both one-sidedness and both polarities be avoided and that they work together to form a wholeness. What I am going to draw today and tomorrow — today in preparation, tomorrow we will then move on to the consequences — will not be drawn in the sense that it must, under all circumstances, be placed in the world as if by mechanical necessity. Rather, it is meant that evolution tends towards these things, and that we must avoid what the one-sided development of these two poles could bring. If we do not recognize what, so to speak, if the word is not pressed, wants to come into existence, then we cannot find the right way to bring the synthesis, the summary, into life, which alone can be achieved through spiritual science.

If we first consider everything that is, as it were, carried by these abstractions here (see diagram on page 238), we have to say: that (on the left) is a spiritual cultural impulse that wants to come to life and that has its full justification in the one tendency of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch. I have shown you how this fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch has developed human beings in such a way that, on the one hand, they must strive for what Goethe calls the archetypal phenomenon, the pure, hypothesis-free, un-fantastic observation of what external natural phenomena present to the senses: the archetypal phenomena. That is one thing. The other (on the right) is an ever-increasing number of imaginations emerging from the depths of the human soul and freely shaped by that human soul. These imaginations will, one might say, arise with inner soul necessity in certain people of our fifth post-Atlantic period. Just as people in this fifth post-Atlantic period will be increasingly inclined, on the one hand, to observe nature and its phenomena impartially, to search for archetypal phenomena instead of hypotheses, so, on the other hand, people will be particularly inclined to allow imaginations to arise from their souls that can lead deeper into the spiritual world.

Today we have no idea where humanity is heading in this respect. One can oppose the direction in which we are heading, but this will not stop it and prevent its coming into existence. More and more people will stop inventing all kinds of hypotheses about natural phenomena; they will truly devote themselves purely to what is a spiritual representation of the phenomena, as Goethe did in his physical considerations. Goethe once said so beautifully: One does not make hypotheses about natural phenomena; the blueness of the sky itself is the theory; one should not look for anything behind the phenomena when they are purely understood. All the pondering over all kinds of atomic configurations, over atomic constructions, will cease; the senses will be directed purely at the phenomena and will only put them together, these phenomena, in such a way that they explain themselves. Today, this is only just beginning, but it will continue to develop further and further. Today it is in its infancy, and those who, for example, have studied chemistry in recent decades know what atomic constructions have been built, purely hypothetically. Such things are often bandied about to people by all kinds of monistic and other lay associations long after they have been overcome by science. There is a wide-ranging discussion, especially with regard to the hypothesis about atomic structures, and it is not uninteresting to take a good look at what has been discussed. For most people still get a slight shudder at the success of science in this field when they hear about the atom of this substance looking like this, the atom of that substance looking like that, and so on. People do not then consider that these are pure hypotheses, pure figments of the imagination, which are being bandied about. In particular, van't Hoff was one of those chemists who recently constructed bold stereometric forms in order to understand the atom. And we know – at least most of us will know – that theosophists of a certain orientation have also been very much involved in this nonsense about the structure of the atom. A crazy science, which can never be a science, the so-called occult chemistry, has been built up and has indeed found particular favor among those who want to approach it from theosophy or the like. But van't Hoff has not remained unchallenged. Chemists with good insight, such as Kolbe, have spoken out against what Kolbe calls van't Hoff's hallucinations.

From this you can see, by the way, that not only the spiritual is referred to as hallucinations, but that natural scientists themselves also sometimes apply this term to each other's findings. Yes, Kolbe, who wants to stop at pure phenomena in chemistry, even used the beautiful saying and said: Van't Hoff rides the chemical Pegasus, which he will have borrowed as a naturalist from the veterinary school of pharmacy that is friendly with his laboratory, and in this riding of the chemical Pegasus he finds all kinds of bold stereometric forms. One can only hint at the inner workings of science. It would take many, many lectures to show the assumptions on which what is presented to laymen today as a certainty is based. All these things, these speculations, with which the second half of the 19th century in particular has experimented with regard to the natural world, will gradually have to be left out, because science will become more and more science will become more and more convinced that these speculations are nowhere justified by the sequence of phenomena, that one can always put forward the most diverse hypotheses, and that just as much can be said for or against each of them. On the one hand, the pure recording of phenomena will be a justified impulse.

On the other hand, however, in this fifth post-Atlantic period, which, as we have heard, will last for many centuries, the human soul will be just as likely to be inclined to form imaginations. Many will consider these imaginations to be mere fantasy, mere figments of the imagination. But these imaginations will be created by the human soul to gradually lead this human soul into the realm of the spiritual world. That this consists in the fifth post-Atlantean time is based on a certain fact, on a fact that can be seen through by spiritual science, which is still far from being based on external physiology, but which can already be envisaged by spiritual science. The entire human constitution of the organism has truly become different compared to the overall constitution of the Greco-Latin period, which began in the 8th century BC and ended in the 15th century AD. Today, this can only be recognized through the observing consciousness; but it can be recognized.

Man consists essentially of the same earth-like, water-like, air-like, warmth-like elements as outer nature. He is likewise permeated by the light-like, he is permeated by the chemical-legal, he is permeated by the living like the outer nature. Thus man is permeated by the coarse physical as well as by the etheric; only subtle differences emerge in the human constitution in the successive periods of human development. Although people today generally believe in evolution in nature, they are not inclined to go into the finer details of evolution. The human body in connection with soul and spirit was quite different in the Greco-Latin period than it is during our present fifth post-Atlantic period. The main difference lies in the fact that during the Greco-Latin period, that which can be described as an earthy element, that is, that which, in contrast to the watery element, has an earthy constitution, a firm cohesion, insofar as this is present in the human organism, was closely bound to that which can be called the life ether. So that one can say, if one retains the old - today disputed, but what does that matter to us? - designation of earth and life ether: there was a close interaction of the life ether with the earth-like, thus with the solid element in man during the Greek-Latin development up to the 15th century. And the peculiarity of the present human being is that there is a loosening between the ether of life and the earth-like element. So there is a loosening. The ether of life in today's human being is no longer as firmly connected to the earth-like element as it was during the Greco-Latin cultural epoch.

These are things that can be established. Today, however, I would like to direct your thoughts to a different area and come back to this tomorrow to give you some reasons for the fact that I have just mentioned: that what a person experiences in his whole organism experiences because of the life ether within him, is, in our time, much more separated from what is experienced as a result of the earth-like element than it was in Greco-Latin times. But this means that the experiences due to the earth-like element require a pure looking at the outer world. Precisely because the earth-like element is loosened up, it becomes possible to look at the archetypal phenomena unclouded by hypothesis. And because the life ether is separated, it becomes possible to experience in this separated life ether that which permeates human beings with imaginations rooted in the supersensible world. It is precisely through this loosening that this is the case.

Now, in those cultures that are dominated by Western ideas (see diagram on page 252), the human organization, because it always develops one-sidedly, tends to draw attention to what is experienced in man by virtue of the earth-like element. In cultures that are inclined towards evil, death, liberation and mutual assistance, nature tends to focus more on what can be experienced as a result of the life ether. These are the two one-sidednesses: the one-sidedness of the West, which is experienced more as a result of the earthly, earth-like element in man, the one-sidedness of the East, which is experienced more as a result of the one-sided experience in the life ether.

These considerations lead us into the deepest secrets of evolution in our time. And they must be clearly envisaged, for otherwise humanity is threatened, as it were, by the one-sided assertion of polar opposing impulses. Today this evolution, of the one and the other, has not yet progressed very far, but for those who do not want to play the ostrich in the face of life, who want to numb themselves to the sight of reality, it is already clearly perceptible, if only they have the concepts to master the things. On the one hand, there is an ever-increasing urge to accept only what is sensually real, and on the other hand, an urge to accept only what comes from the imaginative world as the justified, not only in knowledge – perhaps even least of all there – but in everything that permeates and shapes life, which one wants to push into social life. These things develop within it. For one group, the one on the left (page 252), this can already be clearly seen; for the other group, we are only at the very beginning of a different insight. One impulse is to fight imaginative life, at least for the sake of knowledge, and to accept only the mere phenomenon. You see this tendency purely expressed when you consider all that Darwin himself has written. For it was Haeckelian doctrine that first introduced hypotheses and theories into Darwinism. In the work of Darwin we always find the desire to describe the phenomena. He only draws the broad lines from the presuppositions to which I recently drew your attention, and he draws the broad lines from what life strives for within this cultural community, now in turn only to accept the external physical and to focus more and more only on the external physical, to fight the imaginative world, to eradicate the imaginative world, even from social life. And so, I would say, a very specific human ideal arises from this complex of concepts: a human ideal that eats into everything and wants to permeate everything, that wants to make man a knower in a certain way, a knower who overlooks the external physical world but is dismissive of everything that leads to the spiritual world. Sometimes he deceives himself about the fact that he actually behaves negatively, by coining all kinds of words for strange concepts that are supposed to be spiritual, often even mystical, but which in reality amount to nothing more than what I have now characterized.

This is the case, for example, with Bergsonian philosophy. Of course, many people today believe that Bergson's philosophy is a kind of mysticism and that it intervenes in contemporary life as a kind of mysticism. But what matters is not what people think about something, but what emerges in reality. And yet this supposed mysticism will lead not to a refutation, but to a support for a merely positivistic world view.

Of course, this cultural impulse contains all the elements needed to bring about the primal phenomenal; but it also prepares the way for the one-sidedness of labeling everything imaginative as a product of fantasy and expunging it from the so-called scientific, and that with regard to man as a cognizer.

With regard to the human being as an agent, as a social being, it was also preparing itself for the fact that more and more the principle of the mere usefulness of experience and action in what is externally perceptible, what is externally there , what has value for man between birth and death, comes to the fore, and everything else is, as it were, only there to be harnessed in the right way into a blissful world or into a utilitarian world, which is there in the sensory world. Laws and ideals are made in order to be able to enjoy the sensual-real better, so to speak. This tendency can be clearly perceived in both the utopians and the socialists of the West. It is everywhere, I might say from Moras to Comte, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, it appears everywhere in theory. But it also appears in the habits of life, it permeates social feeling, social thinking, but also social action. And one can say: the ideal of man that develops under the influence of these impulses, which are here only roughly indicated by a few abstractions, that is the specter, one could say, of the bourgeois, who, like a kind of ideal, haunts everywhere where the characterized one-sided impulse wants to drive itself one-sidedly into existence. It is only a deception about the most essential if today the socialist often thinks that he is no longer dominated by the bourgeois ideal. He often strives all the more for the bourgeois ideal, in that he also wants for himself, little by little, what was granted to the bourgeois through the time in which the bourgeois just emerged. The bourgeois recognizes the sensual world and regards that which is valid for him. Concepts and ideas are only there to hold the sensual world together with brackets. The bourgeois experiences himself in that which is essential for the time between birth and death, and regards everything else that can be thought up in terms of social institutions and social ideals, insofar as it can further that which is included between birth and death.

Many who are today deeply immersed in these bourgeois ideals will fiercely resist them in their consciousness. But the same applies to them, perhaps only in a different way, as Mephisto says: “The little people never feel the devil, even when he has them by the collar.” So people often do not notice the things that influence them most.

Well, I characterized to you last time how the spiritual, if one had achieved what certain circles wanted with Blavatsky, but which was then thwarted, as well as how the spiritual should have been placed in the service of the purest bourgeois ideal: Information centers should have been set up where the media would have been used to obtain many a stock market secret and other secrets for life “through the power of the mind and the mouth”. That this urge is not without resonance in the hearts of contemporary people can be seen from much documentary evidence; for it is not so rare that letters come to me from people who write again and again that they have lost their fortune and that I should tell them for this or that kind of lottery, out of communications from the spiritual world, which number will be drawn, and similar things. You laugh about it, but these things are not so very rare, and especially from such circles of society that you would often be amazed if you were to be told the titles of the people who write such and similar things.

So also the spiritual, the power to look into the spiritual world, is not envisaged by this one-sided impulse in such a way that one should enter into the spiritual world, but that, if such powers already exist, one should grasp them in the physical world in order to further the physical world with regard to the principle of usefulness. That is one-sidedness. Today I will describe it in abstract terms, tomorrow it will be more concrete.

The other one-sidedness that threatens the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantic period is that which is influenced by those concepts and ideas in a one-sided way, where the great achievements of the phenomenal world are more rejected, but instead the cultivation of imaginations is envisaged above all. This is even more in its infancy than the other one-sidedness. But anyone who is familiar with the development of Russian intellectual life is also familiar with the many one-sided tendencies in this area. For within some Eastern circles, the tendency towards significant imaginations is becoming more and more pronounced. Anyone who is interested can see for themselves what form these imaginations take by reading the first volume of Solovyov's translation, which I would recommend. In the “Three Conversations” at the end of the volume, you will find how this most important of Russian philosophers develops truly significant , significant imaginations arise in this intellectual world, this penetration into the spiritual world, even if it is often one-sided, even if it is often wrong — that is not the point now, but the point is that this develops as a certain disposition. This is characteristic of the other one-sided impulse of our evolution of the fifth post-Atlantic period. A life will develop that attaches little importance to world phenomena, but more and more importance to the imaginations that a person brings forth from himself, imaginations that can often intensify to a visionary life. A special preference for such a visionarily shaped life will develop with all that it entails.

That which is under the western impulse, disregards the spiritual connections, goes to the physical-sensual; what is there the individual must therefore include the spiritual connections, because they are only to appear physically, in the physical forces, that is, it must flow into the power organization of social life as much as possible. Therefore this one-sided organization of power strives for great empires, for mighty organizations that destroy the individual. If such things are only just beginning today and therefore cannot be seen by those who do not want to see them, this does not do anything for the recognition of the truth. In the East, on the other hand, the spiritual is directly present in the individual human being. It is only in his individuality that man can make the spiritual real here in the physical world. Therefore, everything that is influenced by these impulses strives for the dissolution of external power organizations, for the dissolution of everything that seeks to hold people together through treaties, laws, state organizations, and so on. Such things often conceal themselves. But when great power structures and organizations arise in the East today, it is initially only a reaction against the very principle of the East, namely, forming nothing but small communities with a sectarian character, not only in the field of religious life, but also in the field of social life, of views on the most ordinary, everyday coexistence. All this strives for the dissolution of the imperialist. And the ideal of humanity that is developing is that of a person who wants to go through life to free themselves from life, to go through death as strong as possible, to overcome the impulses of evil as strongly as possible, to seek liberation from what is only valid between birth and death. This is the goal within these cultural communities: to go through life in such a way that the human being can focus entirely on the imaginative world wrestling within him, developing a kind of cosmos, a soul cosmos within himself, unconcerned with external connections. While, on the one hand, external connections will become more and more important and more and more important, while people will dream more and more of external connections and seek bliss more and more in external connections, on the other hand, there will always be the “desire to break free” in human life. While in the West the ideal of humanity is the bourgeois, in the East the ideal of humanity is – I cannot find a better word at the moment – the pilgrim, as one says in some German dialects: the 'Bilcher', who and who basically continues on this pilgrimage until he passes through the gate of death, in order to enter into the true liberation with a strong soul that has borne all experiences. If this impulse develops one-sidedly, it will deny the firm standing in the other impulse.

These are the two one-sidedness: on the one hand, the mere life in the phenomenon, in the appearances, on the other hand, the mere life in the imaginations that do not want to tie in with the outer life. And what threatens, because everything in the world must collide, is that these two one-sided impulses enter into conflict with each other, more and more into the fight. This struggle will be one of the hallmarks of the fifth post-Atlantic period. On the one hand, there will be ever-increasing efforts to create coercive organizations, and on the other hand, efforts to dissolve them. The matter is not yet so obvious, because there is always the idea that what is unfolding today, for example, in the Russian East as a seemingly great empire, is a reality. But with such things, one encounters much more slogans and false ideas than what really exists. There are no greater contradictions in reality than between what is preparing in the imperialism of the European and American West and what is preparing in the East, even as far as the East of Asia. These are complete contradictions. And what is reviving the West in many respects, what is called the national principle there, is regarded today as something the same or similar to what is called Pan-Slavism in the East. There is no greater nonsense than this; for Pan-Slavism is anything but something national. It is only seemingly characterized by the slogans of the West as something national for the Pan-Slavists themselves; in reality it is that which is about to dissolve the national. However paradoxical these things may still appear today, because what is totally different from each other is often referred to today as something the same, however paradoxical what I have to say seems, it is deeply rooted in the really moving forces. [Written on the blackboard: ]

Thus we see how two one-sided impulses threaten synthetic evolution and must be clearly understood, because all knowledge and ideas and ideals, whether based on knowledge or in the social sphere, can only be properly established for the future, if one is truly aware of these impulses, if one knows that when one reflects on law or morality or religion or any natural phenomenon, these two concepts from the subconscious of the human soul always strive to emerge and want to shape the concepts. If we consider the development from the fourth post-Atlantic period, the Greco-Latin period, up to our fifth post-Atlantic period, we can see how what I will present to you as a fact tomorrow must necessarily come to the fore in culture and set the tone. If we consider characteristic phenomena, we can see this. Take, for example, a phenomenon such as a drama by Calderon, who died in 1681 but whose work represents the after-effects of the fourth post-Atlantic period, the Greco-Latin period. Let us consider, for example, the following representation of Calderon: The hero of this representation, Cyprianus, is a pagan magician with a thirst for knowledge, who has studied everything that a pagan magician of his time can study. So this drama, written at the beginning of the 17th century, presents us with this Cyprianus, but still entirely in the sense of the fourth post-Atlantic culture, as a pagan magician who has studied everything “with great zeal” and who is now thinking deeply about religious and epistemological questions, who wants to know “what holds the world together at its core”. And while he is striving for such knowledge, an evil demon appears to him in both a spiritual and physical sense, promising to truly introduce him to the world he seeks, to let him find “what holds the world together at its This evil demon, who appears to him in human form, causes Cyprianus to also feel love, which he had not known before, love longing. The evil demon also kindles this love yearning in a young girl in order to bring about a collision with Cyprian's love yearning. And so in the drama we are led to Justine, who is a true Christian. But the demon gets to her and wants to bring her together with Faust, that is, with Cyprianus. She resists, and the demon has no power over her. That is in Calderon's mind, because she is a Christian. Then the demon seizes an opportunity. He cannot bring Justine – Gretchen – herself to Cyprianus; so he takes a phantom out of her. He separates this out, and he now brings this phantom in human form to Cyprianus, who now believes he has Justine in his arms. But she soon reveals herself as a ghost. Now Cyprian addresses the evil demon in a similar way: “Evil figure, leave me or transform this ghost into a human being of flesh and blood!” But the evil demon has no power over her, not only because Justine has just been to confession, but because she is a Christian. And when Cyprianus sees this, he also decides to long for Christianity – he is a pagan magician until now – and the demon cannot prevent him from doing so. After he has undergone long trials, has learned the secrets of nature and the spirit in nature over the course of a year, but has also accepted the Christian principle, the Christian impulse, he appears at the same time that Justine's father and Justine have been sentenced to death as Christians. And he now appears to them and demands to become a Christian. They also die together. And the demon appears, riding on a snake, and proclaims how the one who can thus receive the Christ impulse within himself can be redeemed.

Of course, I need not say, for I have already indicated it many times by misspelling, that in this Calderon's Cyprianus we have a true forerunner of Faust. But there is a characteristic difference, and we want to consider this characteristic difference. We do not want to dwell on what some particularly clever-thinking aesthetes have said about this drama: that it insults the modern aesthetic sense when Calderon, after the death of Justine and Cyprian, because it is enough to have seen him appear in the interplay of passion, all the way to tragedy, to the purely human. There is no need for the demon to appear and seal it. One can leave that to the very clever people of the present day, who just don't know that the people of the past, including Calderon, were interested in what the evil demon himself then experiences. But as I said, I don't want to get into that, I want to draw attention to another difference that really comes into consideration. If you experience Justine, with the differences that naturally arise, because one is a 17th-century Spanish drama and the other is Goethe's Faust, and if you look at things and see certain similarities – with differences – between Justine and Gretchen, for example, then one is bound to say: this figure of Gretchen is very similar to the figure of Justine in her artistic disposition, in everything. But in the overall development of the drama, there is a significant and important difference. Cyprian and Justine experience physical death, physical martyrdom, together, and with that, Calderon's drama concludes. Then there is only the demon, riding on the snake, who seals this, who pronounces the meaning of it.

With Goethe, we see something quite different. If we take the whole of “Faust” now, with its first and second parts, during the course of the drama at the end of the first part, Gretchen goes through the gate of death, and Faust develops further. And at the end, we see how Faust and Gretchen are brought together. But Gretchen, who has long been in the spiritual world above as a soul, is introduced to Faust. That is the bold, great, and powerful thing about Goethe: even at the end of Faust, he still brings Faust and Gretchen together, but Gretchen as a soul that passed through the gate of death long ago. The man, the poet of the fifth post-Atlantic age in the form of Goethe is much more spiritual than the poet in Calderon, who still represents the echo of the fourth post-Atlantic age. Of course, Calderon was better at looking into the spiritual world than Goethe. Therefore, on the one hand, there are Justine and Cyprian, both passing through the gate of death as physical human beings, and on the other hand, there is the spiritual world: the demon riding the snake and other spiritual events. But I would like to say that the two are clearly separated. And that is the important thing: in the fourth post-Atlantean period, when there is a close connection between the life ether and the earthly, the spiritual and physical worlds are strictly separated. Now the two views diverge, that which is experienced between birth and death, and that which is experienced in the spiritual world. But the relationship, the connection, must also be sought for this. This is expressed so wonderfully and powerfully in the fact that Faust and Gretchen do not die at the same time, and yet the end of the second part of Faust brings them together: the spiritual and physical worlds are poetically interwoven. In this Faust creation, you have one of the first great attempts at connecting the two things with each other for the fifth post-Atlantic period: the physical world of phenomena, of appearances, and the spiritual world of imaginations. And that was precisely the difficulty for Goethe - one can see this from his conversations with Eckermann - to present the powerful final Imagination that brings Gretchen, who has long since passed through the gateway of death, together with Faust again, and thus makes the whole world that Faust experiences after the death of Gretchen, this world of physical experiences that Faust has experienced after her death, meaningful for Gretchen as well. Of course, Faust is also dead when he meets Gretchen, but it can be seen that Gretchen's effect is intended in connection with Faust, while all of Faust's experiences from the beginning of the second part to the death that he himself undergoes at the end are intended in connection with what is mentioned above in the spiritual world, where Gretchen is already present.

Thus Goethe himself first presented a spirit that attempts to combine the two one-sided views and to create a synthesis. And it is precisely this that one can find so consciously in Goethe. Just imagine how Goethe, for his part, also strove for an understanding of the relationship between living beings, but not by seeking a merely physical order, but by trying to fertilize these relationships through the imagination, which arose in him through contemplation. This is beautifully expressed in Faust, where we see Goethe poetically expressing what he had already understood about the connection between living beings, which Faust expresses in the beautiful words in “Forest and Cave”, which I have often quoted:

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked for. You did not turn your face to me in vain
In the fire.
You gave me the magnificent nature for my kingdom,
Strength to feel and enjoy it. Not
You only allow cold, astonished visitors,
Grant me to look into their deep chests
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living Before me, and teach me my brothers In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce, falling, crushing neighboring branches
And neighboring trunks, sweeps down,
And the hill thunders hollowly with its fall,
Then you lead me to the secure cave, show
Then myself, and my own breast
Secret, deep wonders open up.

Here we see the world of phenomena understood purely, but as a gift from that exalted spirit whom Faust wants to approach. Humanity must become more and more aware that external nature must not be speculated upon, for if it is speculated upon, senseless theories will gain more and more ground; that external nature must rather be observed purely, but that the secrets of this external nature will reveal themselves to men of the fifth post-Atlantean age, through imaginations arising from the soul, which will reveal the spirit of nature. Man will come to know that which forms his cognition, his knowledge and his social life from two sides: on the one hand, from an ever-widening and deepening knowledge of the outer connections of the immediate sensory world, and on the other hand, from the grasping of real imaginations originating in the spiritual world. We will continue these reflections tomorrow. Today, I wanted to provide preparatory ideas, and tomorrow we will then move more into the specifics of spiritual life.