55. From The “Modern Soul”

I recently heard a witty writer say: when a book by one of the latest writers appears today, I read one from the good old days to console myself. This may sound paradoxical at first; it may be inspired by a prejudice against everything new. Nevertheless, there are many things that even those who are sympathetic to the new suggest a practice that is not inappropriately described by the above sentence. Three books have appeared in the last few months that are characteristic symptoms of our times: “The New God”, a look at the coming century by Julius Hart, “The Modern Soul” by Max Messer and “The Revolution of Lyric Poetry” by Arno Holz. It may be ventured to assert that it is advantageous for the critic of these three intellectual achievements to delve into an older work in the same field after each of them. After Hart's “New God”, one should read Friedrich Theodor Vischer's “Kritische Gänge”, for example; after Messer's “Moderne Seele”, one could read Moriz Carriere's not even very old treatise on Christ in the Light of Modern Science; and after Arno Holz's bold statements, the chapter on lyric poetry in Max Schaßler's “Ästhetik” would not be bad. Comparisons of this kind will lead you to some surprising insights.

Julius Hart is undoubtedly a true philosopher. Those who read his book will gain more from it than from a dozen thick tomes written by the official representatives of philosophical science currently occupying university chairs. And they will also have the pleasure of receiving significant insights delivered in an enchanting lyrical diction. Compared to Vischer's great monumental trains of thought, however, Hart's ideas seem like miniature philosophies. And there is something else. In Hart's work, the emphasis on the importance of his ideas is almost annoying on every page. “In short, my work is an attempt to establish a new worldview,” Hart said in Hans Land's “New Century”. And he lets us know this throughout his book. Vischer never said anything like that. And yet, what greater perspectives, what depth does the older thinker have compared to the newer one! With Vischer, one has the feeling that a giant of the mind is speaking, who in each of his works gives a few mighty chunks from an immense abundance. We sense something inexhaustible in the personality that is being lived out. With Hart, we have the feeling of a very respectable thinker, but we do not suspect much more than he says. Yes, he stretches and expands the few thoughts he has, not only writing them down, but writing them down again, then again in a slightly different form, and then he summarizes the whole thing and underlines it three times. This will be proven in the following. Max Messer is a religiously feeling nature. One of those who are forced to seek a path into the depths of knowledge for themselves. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by reading his “Modern Soul”. The intellectual innocence that reigns in it is touching, as is the naive awkwardness. One often has the feeling that a child is playing with the most fragile tasks of knowledge; and one worries that the delicate vessels of thought that it holds in its trembling hands will not slip out of its hands. One would like to give the young author the aforementioned Carriere book as a friendly gesture, so that some strength might enter his mind. And despite all the youth that is expressed in such works, there is also something in them that reminds one of old minds. There is too much criticism and rejection in the intellectual achievements of the present. The old ideas of idealism and materialism, mind and matter, good and evil, etc.; Messer says that peace can only return to the mind if reason, which has rationalized everything, is shown its limits. There was something more cheerful, more youthful in the minds that worked away at the opposites of spirit and matter, good and evil, to see how far they could get with it, and also in those who preferred to use their reason rather than criticize it. With Arno Holz, it is now a peculiar case. What he says in his writing “Revolution of Lyric” is as indisputable as the truths of elementary geometry. I have followed what has been objected to him from various sides. I always had the feeling that his opponents were roughly on the same level as someone who is fighting against someone who puts forward the Pythagorean theorem in a new formula. To put it bluntly: Holz's logic is so tightly knit, so clear, that a hundred professors and three hundred lecturers could hold fifty conferences and they would search in vain for a fallacy. And yet: there is something annoying about these explanations, something that makes the schoolmasterly thoughts of old Schaßler more pleasant than this cutting logic. Holz likes to refer to Lessing, indeed he says in the “preface” to his book: “Since Lessing, Germany has had no more critics. It had no Taine and has no Brandes. The gentlemen today are only reviewers.” There is indeed something of Lessing's spirit in Holzen's expositions. Anyone who really takes Lessing on today will perhaps be no less annoyed by Laocoon than by Holzen's “Revolution of Lyric Poetry”. Here, the three symptomatic books will be discussed in more detail.

Julius Hart is of the opinion that the century just ended was the great dying century of Renaissance culture, which once took the place of the medieval and which swayed restlessly back and forth between all possible opposites without reaching a satisfactory worldview. “Since the dawn of the modern era, in the entire course of Renaissance culture, the contrasts of becoming and passing away have never been more clearly evident than in this last century. They clash harshly with each other, and if in the intellectual life of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the last great unities are always revealed, our time is characterized precisely by its fragmentation and disunity. All forces are separating and striving apart. And thus this century proves to be a true century of great change; a decisive break is taking place between two worlds, as was last the case between the world of the Christian Middle Ages and the rebirth of Greco-Roman antiquity. Just as the entire content of the purely theological and theocratic man's view of the world, his thoughts and feelings, disintegrated before the new way of seeing, so the intellectual world of the Renaissance is also disintegrating before our eyes. We recognize all kinds of half-measures and incompleteness, we see contradictions that are destroying it.» («Der neue Gott», $. 26.) Hart thus feels dissatisfied when looking back on the century. He sees nothing but idols that have misled people. “Altruistic morality culminates in the sentence: Do not oppress, do not rape, do not rule! The Stirnerian egoist says: Do not let yourself be ruled, oppressed or raped. Whether you follow one or the other advice... the result for you and for the world will be exactly the same. Leave the dead words and look at the matter.» («The New God», p. 295.) But how, dear Mr. Hart, if the words you speak of do indeed point to things, and it is only because you do not see the things that the words are dead to you. You are making things a little too easy for yourself. You explain, not in a concise manner, but nevertheless not with very meaningful words: “Altruistic and egoistic morality are in full combat readiness. Each wants to eradicate the other. The philosophy of egoism teaches us with a raised finger that every altruistic act is only seemingly for the sake of the other, but in truth only for the satisfaction of one's own ego. Of course - of course! But with exactly the same right, every act of egoism can also be interpreted and recognized as an altruistic act! That should reveal the true relationship to you clearly enough. There are no contradictions at all. Egoism is altruism, altruism is egoism.” But don't you realize, Mr. Hart, what a terrible philosophy you are pursuing? Let me show you your way of thinking in another area, and you will see how you are sinning. Imagine that someone said that bees and flies both come from a common original insect that developed differently in one case and in the other. If you disregard the special characteristics of the bee and those of the fly, they are the same; they are insects: The bee is a fly; the fly is a bee. No, my critic of modern man, you cannot dissolve everything into a gray, undifferentiated sauce and then decree: “All the great and eternal opposites that have torn and splintered your thinking, feeling and believing – all of them – are in truth nothing but great and eternal identities.” Progressive civilization has differentiated things and phenomena from one another; it has worked out clear concepts through which it wants to come to an understanding of processes and beings. Selfless action has been analyzed psychologically, and so has egoistic action, and differences have been established. And since all things are in a necessary relationship, the relationship between egoism and selflessness has also been examined. A trace of egoism was found in the most selfless act, and a trace of selflessness in the most egoistic act; just as one finds something of the fly in the bee and something of the bee in the fly. It is quite certain that one cannot get on with distinguishing, with setting up opposites alone; one must seek the related in the phenomena. But first you have to have the details in clear outline before you, then you can go for their common ground. It is necessary to shine the light of knowledge on everything. Daylight is the element of knowledge. You, Mr. Hart, spread a night-time darkness over all opposites. Don't you know that all cows are black at night? You say, “World and I. They are only two different words for one and the same being.” No, my dear fellow, they are two words for two quite different beings, each of which must be considered in itself, and then their relationship, their real relation, must be sought. But you do not think of anything right with the words, and therefore everything blurs into an indefinite primeval soup. No, you rush too quickly over the ideas that have been generated over the centuries; you let the content slip away and keep the empty word shells in your hand, and then you stand there and declare: “Nothing is more barren than a fight for concepts.” Of course, if the concepts were the insubstantial things that you understand by them, then you would be right. Those who see nothing in “world and I” but themselves may always throw them together. But there are others who look out into the world of manifoldness that lies spread out before the senses, and which we try to comprehend by thinking; then they look into themselves and perceive something to which they say “I”; and then the great question comes to their mind: what is the relationship between this “I” and that world? You, Mr. Hart, are making yourself quite comfortable. “You see one and the same thing eternally from two opposite sides.” Oh no: we see two things: a world that surrounds us and an I. And we do not want to dogmatize away the difference between the two with talk, but we want to delve into both things in order to find the real, the actual unity in them. Selfless and egoistic actions are not the same. They are based on completely different emotional foundations of the soul. There is certainly a higher unity between them, just as there is a higher unity between a bee and a fly. I would like to quote a word from Hegel, Mr. Hart, which you do not seem to be familiar with. This man calls a way of thinking in which “everything is the same, good and evil alike” a way of thinking in the worst sense, which should not be spoken of among those who recognize, but “only a barbaric way of thinking can make use of ideas”. Hegel sought to clearly elaborate the ideas of freedom, justice, duty, beauty, truth, etc., so that each of them stands before us in a vivid, meaningful way. He sought to place them before our spiritual eye, as flowers and animals stand before our physical eye. And then he sought to bring the whole diversity of our mind's ideas into a whole - to organize the thoughts so that they appear to us as a great harmony in which each individual has its full validity in its place. Thus the individual flowers, the individual animals of reality also stand side by side, organizing themselves into a harmonious whole and totality. What does Julius Hart do? He explains about us people of the nineteenth century: “How have we allowed ourselves to be intoxicated by the sound of lofty words, such as freedom, equality, beauty, truth, concepts that dissolve into mist and smoke when you try to grasp and hold them, to translate them into sensuality and action, and to order life according to them?” No, dearest, that is your fault. You should not have allowed yourself to be intoxicated by the sound of lofty words. You should have delved deeper into the differentiated content that the thinkers of the nineteenth century gave to these words. It is painful to see how someone first turns the great minds of the century into miniature pictures of his own imagination and then holds a terrible judgment over this century. What a pygmy of a mind Julius Hart makes of Max Stirner! The latter has shone a bright torch into a region of which this interpreter seems to have no idea. Into a realm that neither our senses nor our abstract thinking can penetrate. He has shed light on a realm where we do not merely perceive the highest that exists for man with our senses, nor merely think it in terms of concepts, but where we experience it directly and individually. In the world of our ego, the essence of things becomes clear to us because we are immersed in a thing here. Schopenhauer also had a presentiment of this. That is why he did not seek the I of things in sensual perception or in thinking, but in what we experience within ourselves. However, he made a mistake at the next step. He tried to express this essence through an abstract, general concept. He said that this essence was the will. How much higher is Stirner's thinking than the “I”? He knew that this essence cannot be reached by any thinking, cannot be expressed by any name. He knew that it can only be experienced. All thinking only leads to the point where the experience of the inner must begin. It points to the I; but it does not express it. Julius Hart knows nothing about this, because he dismisses Stirner with words like: “The ego that he had in mind is ultimately still the wretched ego of crude and naive realism, wrapped in the darkest delusion of knowledge, which in the philosophy of the super human philosophy as Caliban, lusting after Prospero's magic cloak; but behind him rises a synthesis, more sensed than clearly recognized, of the purely ideal, absolute ego of Fichte and the real one-ego of Buddha and Christ. Stirner still does not fully understand the true nature of the ego, but he does sense its greatness, and he therefore pours a wealth of the deepest and most powerful truths over his readers. But the reader must go through the confused world of the “unique” with a very clear head and make the distinction between the concepts himself, which Stirner has not given. Although the word “I” appears a few times on every page, Stirner never approaches a firm and clear investigation of the concept and therefore often confuses the images that make it up.” It is not like that. Hart demands a clear investigation of the concept of the “I” and thus proves that he has no idea what Stirner is talking about. No name can name the “I”, no concept can express it, no image can depict it; all that can be done is to point to it. And when Stirner uses the word “I” a few times “on every page”, he is always referring to an inner experience. Hart cannot live this out and wants an idea, a concept, a notion. It is strange: in so many places in his book, Julius Hart warns us not to overestimate words and concepts, but to stick to things. And with Stirner, he has the opportunity to find words that are only intended to point to a thing. And here he wants words, concepts. But Hart doesn't want to know anything about the concrete, seen, experienced self in everyone's inner being; he dreams of an abstract “world self”, which is the idealized copy of the human individual self. He cannot therefore understand Stirner, just as he cannot understand Hegel, because he dreams of a grey, contentless unity, whereas Hegel strives for a manifoldness full of content. Julius Hart believes he is criticizing the century. He criticizes nothing more than the man that the century has made of Julius Hart. The century cannot be blamed for the fact that so little of its content could flow into Julius Hart.

I now turn to the evidence that the “new worldview” that Julius Hart wants to “found” contains nothing, absolutely nothing, but elements from the worldviews of the past that he dismisses as outdated – no new idea, no new nuance of feeling, no new image of the imagination.

In the “New God” we encounter nothing but very old, well-known gods, and we are constantly amazed that Julius Hart should rediscover what had long been discovered.

The sentiments from which Julius Hart's “New God” is written are reminiscent of the inner life of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, whose world view Goethe felt repelled by, just as he was attracted to his personality. However, what can be explained in Jacobi's case by the intellectual state of his age can be attributed to a lack of philosophical imagination in Julius Hart. Jacobi saw the things that he felt to be the highest and most valuable destroyed by the progress of intellectual knowledge. The divine truths, the religious ideas could not exist in the face of the intellectual formation that occurred in the Age of Enlightenment in such a way that its results could not be doubted. To the intellect, all world events appeared to be the work of a cold, sober, mathematical necessity. What had previously been considered the work of a personal, divine will was now seen to be entirely governed by eternal, iron laws, which, as Goethe said, not even a deity could change. In the past, people had asked: what did the infinite wisdom, the creative deity, want when they wanted to explain a single thing, a single fact of nature? In Jacobi's time, reason viewed the phenomena of the world as a mathematical problem. According to this view, everything is necessarily connected like the limbs of such a problem. Jacobi had no objection to this rationalization. It was clear to him that reflection cannot lead to a different view of things. But his feelings would not let him rest. These needed the old God and the world order established by him. Therefore, he explains: as long as we look at the world, the mind has every right to search for eternal, iron laws; but before the fundamental truths, before the knowledge of the divine, this mind must stop; here, feeling, faith, comes into its own. We gain knowledge of nature through the mind. And there is no other view of nature than that which is derived from intellectual knowledge. But while it is true that correct knowledge of nature can be attained in this way, it is never possible to reach the highest, divine truths in this way. It was Jacobi's principle that Goethe encountered with the greatest antipathy. He had renounced all faith in the best days of his life; he recognized knowledge of nature as the only source of truth; but he strove to penetrate to the highest truths precisely from this knowledge. For him it was clear that everything that a bygone age had gained through supernatural revelation, and that Jacobi wanted to gain through faith, must result solely from a deepening of the eternal life of nature. He characterized his opposition to Jacobi aptly in a letter to him: “God has punished you with metaphysics and put a thorn in your flesh, while he has blessed me with physics... I adhere to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave you with everything that you call and may call religion. You believe in God; I see.” The man who said this felt the ability within himself to arrive at truths and ideas from the contemplation of nature that satisfy the human capacity for knowledge just as much as it has been satisfied by the divine truths of revelation. However, in order to gain such truths, something was needed that Jacobi completely lacked. It was the gift of being able to form vivid, colorful ideas about the things and phenomena of nature. Anyone who, when thinking about nature, could only come up with abstractions that were empty of content, arid and bloodless, would feel dissatisfied with their knowledge of nature and, in order to escape this dissatisfaction, would have to resort to the old beliefs. This was the case with Jacobi. However, Goethe had the ability to form a knowledge of nature that could compete with the beliefs in terms of content. When he reflected on the nature of plants, he found this essence in the primeval plant. This is not an empty, abstract concept. It is, as Goethe himself put it, a sensual-supernatural image. It is full of life and color, like every single perceptible thing. In Goethe's contemplation of nature, it was not just the abstracting intellect, the bloodless thinking, that prevailed, but the imagination. This is why Heinroth, in his anthropology of Goethe's thinking, was able to express the view that this was “objective thinking”. In doing so, he wanted to point out that this thinking does not separate itself from objects: that the objects, the views, are intimately interwoven with thinking, that Goethe's thinking is a viewing, his viewing a thinking. With such thinking, the contrast between abstract knowledge and sensory perception, between faith and idea, between science and art was overcome. This world view and the scientific thinking of the nineteenth century belong together. And the researcher who undoubtedly has the best judgment on the tasks of the natural sciences, on the nature of the scientific age, Ernst Haeckel, repeatedly emphasizes that we have to honor Goethe as one of the co-founders of the modern world view. The true form of the Goethean world view simply does not exist for Julius Hart. And he criticizes the nineteenth century, at the beginning of which this Goethean view is placed, for only producing critical minds that dissected and tore apart, that tore down; and he expects the future to produce creators, faithful souls, builders. And he wants to “found” this constructive worldview with his “new god”. Anyone who delves just a little into Goethe's way of thinking will find everything that Julius Hart presents as small and insignificant to be great and significant. The nineteenth century contains a culture that is eminently constructive; it has brought together a great deal, a great deal indeed, for this construction. Julius Hart takes a big mouthful and tells us that we have left behind us a purely Alexandrian century, a century of abstract knowledge, of erudition. And then he takes the same approach and announces a few general statements that are to form the basis for the culture of the coming century, for the “new god”. If Hart understood just a little of Goethe, if he understood the scientific worldview, he would have to find his general statements infinitely trivial, as truths that, in the light of Goethe's worldview, appear self-evident. No, Mr. Hart, what you want is nothing new; it is something that will be achieved when the best content of the culture of the nineteenth century experiences a natural continuation. For the small minds, which are in the majority, and which parrot “Ignorabimus” because they do not know how to achieve satisfaction through the paths of knowledge of the nineteenth century, Goethe and those who thought like him in his youth have pondered in vain. But if someone can only see these little minds, then he should not stand up and trumpet himself as the founder of a new worldview that has long since been established. What Julius Hart knows about the “new worldview” is just enough for him to sit down and study Goethe's worldview. He is prepared enough to achieve some success in such a study. But at such a preparatory stage, to “found” a new world view! You must be told, Mr. Hart, that there are many who could found world views like the one you found; but they are prevented from doing so only by the fact that they have learned a little more than you and therefore know that your world view has long been founded.

Julius Hart's inner life is organized like Jacobi's. The contemporary thinker differs from Goethe's contemporary in only one respect. Hart has a definite longing for the world view that was expressed through the objective thinking developed in Goethe. He just does not have the ability, the intellectual imagination, to take a single step into this world view himself. He is only aware of abstract, bloodless intellectual concepts, not of meaningful, sensual-supernatural archetypes of things. He is just as opposed to the abstract world of the intellect as Jacobi is. There is no new nuance in these perceptions. And because he only longs for the world of vision that Goethe speaks of, and cannot create in it, he does not add any new ideas to the old ones through which humanity has so far understood the world. He does not have a thinker's imagination. We therefore look in vain in his book for something like Goethe's imaginative images: the primeval plant, the primeval animal, the primeval phenomenon are.

The final chapter of the book “The Last God” is the unclear confrontation of a person who has an inkling of what “objective thinking” is, but lacks any clear idea of it, and above all completely lacks the awareness that in Goethe's thinking that which he seeks in vain comes into being. Julius Hart wants to overcome the “last god”. He understands this god to be the idea of cause and effect. “Why? The word with its question mark is the great pride of our human spirit. The hunger for the why has led us from victory to victory, from discovery to discovery, from invention to invention, from insight to insight for thousands of years. We have torn all the gods down from their clouds and mists; in the eternal questions of why, they have grown so pale and decrepit that they now only creep through the living world like shadows. Only the god of why remained eternally young and new, he drank the blood of the others and became ever more powerful and strong, until he sat down on the throne as sole ruler in our time... To every why there is a why, and therefore the great causality must appear as the great ruler of the universe. It gives us the weapons in our hands by which we make ourselves masters over other people, by proving to them that we are in the right, ... by virtue of reasons.»

This description of the principle of causality is based on a genuine yearning. “Objective thinking”, “looking” is absorbed in the context of the world of appearances and seeks to recognize it through the senses and through the imagination of thought. This looking remains within the world of appearances, because when it considers things in their proper relationship, it finds in them their essence, everything it seeks. The question of “why” is still a remnant of that old world view that wanted to derive the essence of phenomena from something that lies behind these phenomena. The reason should explain a thing according to its origin, just as the world, according to its origin, should be explained from God. Those who have truly overcome the old worldview of the intellect do not see the ultimate wisdom in reducing all questions to the “why?” but rather see things and their relationships as they present themselves to their senses and their imaginative thoughts. A hint of this can be found in the words of Julius Hart: “You can only look at your world and not prove it. You can prove nothing – nothing. All knowledge is only a direct look. And understanding and reason are only the epitome of your sensory organs. Their knowledge does not extend further than your senses. There lie the boundaries of your humanity.” All that Hart darkly suspects, Goethe clearly presented when he uttered the sentence: ”The highest would be to understand that all factual is already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color phenomena. Do not seek anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the lesson.” Goethe contrasted his theory of colors, which adheres to the factual, which is already theory, with Newton's, which deals with the misunderstood concept of causality; and Goethe contrasted his view of the original plant with Linnaeus's view of reason. Goethe viewed the world from the standpoint that Julius Hart stammers towards. Julius Hart dreams of a world view in which “I and the world” no longer stand opposed to each other, but appear in a higher unity. Goethe treated the world of color processes from the standpoint of such a world view. Julius Hart repays him with the words: “The conviction of Goethe and all healthy people appears under the rays of Kant's eye as an Indian conception and is nothing but the impudent, uncritical assertion of a completely naive, crude realism that asserts something that cannot be proven.” I do not like to do it, but I have to speak in your own words, Mr. Hart. Your conviction is, in contrast to Goethe's world view, a “bold, uncritical assertion of a completely naive person” who has taken a few steps into a world view and who belittles the genius that has developed it to a certain perfection because he does not understand it.

If Julius Hart could understand Goethe, he would have to take a similar position to the one I take in my book “Goethe's Weltanschauung”. In this book, I have shown that Goethe 'founded' the world view that Julius Hart now wants to make himself the superfluous founder of. Anyone who understands Goethe can only see Hart's book as a bottomless arrogance, arising from ignorance of what has been achieved so far in the great questions of world view.

Rarely, perhaps never, have I written a review with such a heavy heart as this one. I value Julius Hart as one of the most outstanding poets of our time. The poet also comes to the fore in “The New God”. The book is a model of excellence in terms of presentation and style. I am very fond of Julius Hart personally. I may well confess that I would have been happy, and not for one reason, if I had been able to deliver a review of this book that was in every respect approving and appreciative. But unfortunately I must consider the book to be harmful. It can only envelop those in a vain self-satisfaction who do not have the ability to reach the heights of thought where the questions that come into consideration here may be discussed. It can only strengthen their feeling that something can really be done with such lightly-dressed chains of thought as Hart's. To the regret of all those who appreciate Julius Hart, it must be said that he unfortunately does not know the limits of his abilities. I maintain my claim that a true philosopher's spirit lives in Julius Hart. But he has not developed this spirit to the point where he could really contribute to the construction of a worldview. It is not acceptable to criticize things that one does not know. Julius Hart is guilty of contradicting his own assertions. He himself says: “The Ptolemaic system was a truth, a correct combination of many correct views. However, the human mind gained even richer and different ideas, and Ptolemy's truth was transformed into that of Copernicus. Do you think that this Copernican truth is the last and final truth? It is only the truth of today, and astronomy already possesses knowledge today that cannot be reconciled with it and points to a new truth for the future.” It was with this sentence in mind that I thought about the ‘New God’ before I read it. I believed that old truths would be overcome by Julius Hart and replaced by richer, different ones. Instead, I find a critique of old, richer truths, and then – old, poorer ones in their place. I put down the book by the young Max Messer, “The Modern Soul”, with a feeling of unease. It seems to me that a person is speaking here whose heart is not understood by his head and whose head is not understood by his heart. We encounter many people in the present who are like this. It is difficult to communicate with them. They are incapable of absorbing and mentally processing that which could restore the inner harmony of their soul forces. What they complain about is that our culture is to a large extent a culture of the head, of bright, clear, conscious thinking. They never tire of emphasizing the dark side of the culture of the head, of conscious rationality, and of pointing out the advantages of the unconscious, of elementary instincts. The clear thinker who wants to use reason to gain insight into the secrets of existence is a sign of decline and decadence to them. They praise the powers of the soul that work darkly and instinctively. When they encounter a personality who does not walk in the elements of crystal-clear ideas, but who produces dark and ambiguous thoughts, possibly wrapped in a mystical garment, then they are happy to join him. I see almost all of Nietzsche's followers in the crowd of modern souls that I describe. If this following could clearly visualize Nietzsche's thoughts, which they do not understand, they would flee from the prophet, whom they sing hymns to in their ignorance, in a stormy manner.

It is an incontrovertible fact that the development of the human spirit consists in the gradual progression from unconscious, instinctive states of the soul to conscious states. And the person who is able to illuminate his drives and instincts with the torch of consciousness becomes not poorer but richer. Say it over and over again: compared to instinct, compared to the rich unconscious, the bare, bloodless, colorless thought appears empty and poor. You are wrong. It is because you cannot see the richness of the world of ideas. In the thought that appears in clear consciousness there is a content richer and more colorful than in all instinctive, unconscious elements. You only have to see this content. You feel cold when natural scientists present you with the abstract laws of stones, plants and animals. Your blood runs cold when the philosopher shares his pure ideas of reason about the secrets of the world with you. On the other hand, you feel good when you can indulge in an unconscious feeling, in a mystical dream. You don't want to get out of your emotional indulgence. “Silent music is the music of the being, of the unconscious, the soul of 'dead' things. It does not sound to the conscious. It is heard by the heart, not by the mind. All its heavenly melodies and voices sound to children and women, as well as to Christian men, as people who have overcome consciousness and become unconscious! (“The Modern Soul”, p. 70.)

Before me stands the bust of a man who lived entirely in the realm of conscious ideas. His features speak to me of the blissful rapture of the spirit that ruled in the light. He saw all things in their full, fresh colors because he let the light of the idea fall on them. He only smiled at the sentimentalists who believe that they must lose their enthusiasm and warmth for the phenomena of the world when they rise to clear insight. He smiled at the weak-minded who need darkness in order to be able to feel with the universal soul of the world. Before me stands the bust of Hegel.

No, thinkers are not colder, more sober natures than mystical dreamers. They are only braver, stronger. They have the courage to face the riddle of the world in broad daylight.

They do not have your fear, which prevents you from raising to consciousness what lives in your instincts, in your unconscious. You do not know the warmth that thought radiates, because you do not have the courage, the strength, to face it with your eyes open. You are too cowardly to be happy in the world of consciousness. Or too childish to bear the light of day in a manly way. Max Messer's “Modern Soul” is an unmanly book. It was created out of a fear of clarity. The human spirit was born out of obscurity. It has struggled to achieve clarity. But it must now find its way back to obscurity. This is its content. “The intention of Christ and those who preach about the superhuman was to show all people the path of suffering, to make it easier for them, and to lead all people back to unconscious being through consciousness.” (“The Modern Soul,” p. 62.)

Mankind will not take this path. It will not allow itself to be held back in its progress towards ever more conscious states. But it will increasingly gain the strength to derive the same satisfaction from consciousness as the undeveloped person derives from the unconscious.

Trembling, with shaky legs, Max Messer stands before the world picture that spreads out before him in the light of knowledge. He would like the soothing twilight to spread over it. But it would be better if he practiced mental gymnastics, strengthened his nerves so that he would no longer tremble, so that he would learn to stand bravely upright in the bright light of day.

Then he will also learn to understand me when I tell him: it is better to speak than to be silent; and nature does not allow the youth to mature into a man so that he looks back in sorrow at the ideals of lost youth.

Books of the day's brightness are above all to be valued. But one can also take pleasure in books from the dawn. Our contemporaries, however, like to walk in the twilight after they have dozed through the day. Our present knowledge of nature is the day. Max Messer dozes through it; he half-closes his eyes to it. He cannot bear it. One would like to call out to him: Wake up! Then continue writing, just as honestly as you are now, as a dozer.

I called Arno Holz's “Revolution of Lyric Poetry” an annoying book, although I consider all the claims made by the author in it to be as incontestable as the propositions of elementary geometry. I must emphasize from the outset that in my judgment I completely separate the latest phase of Holz's lyric poetry from what Holz argues theoretically about lyric poetry. I am very impressed by Holz's latest lyrical creations – not all of them, but many of them. And I must confess that I admire a poetic power that dispenses with the traditional, significant means of form, that spurns everything except the “last, lowest formal principle” of lyric poetry, and that expresses such greatness within this simple, final formal principle. I find it perfectly understandable that a personality with such a strong inner life can feel disgusted by the ever-recurring old forms.

But Holz's theory seems like Spanish boots, in which his own poetry is constricted, and in which he basically wants to constrict all poetry. He has come forward with this Spanish boot theory. The venerable German critics, with their extraordinary artistic understanding, have tried to show that the Spanish boots are bad. Holz now had an easy game. He has written his “Revolution of Lyric Poetry” and shows his attackers that his Spanish boots are flawless, that the critics' exhibitions are foolish, that they understand nothing about boots. It is sad to see the enormous amount of foolishness that has been brought forward to refute Holz's theory. But he has made perfect Spanish boots; and there is nothing wrong with them. Let us take a closer look at Holz's theory. Our old lyric poetry expresses feelings and ideas. This expression has certain forms. These forms are added to the expression; they have nothing to do with it. If I want to express that I am standing in the forest, that there is peace all around, that the birds are silent, and that I will soon go to rest, I can do so in the way that Goethe did in his famous poem “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh”. But there is no doubt that the rhythm and verse structure are something other than the content expressed. Something that could also be different. This form cannot therefore be essential to lyrical creation. The essential is not this external form, but the inner rhythm of what is expressed. If we strip away everything that poetry has added over time to what is essential to it, what remains is Holz's definition of an original lyric: “which renounces all music through words as an end in itself and which, purely formally, is carried only by a rhythm that lives only through what struggles to express itself through it.” Anyone who objects to this definition simply does not know what is original about poetry and what is derived from it. If a poet remains with this original form of poetry, that is his business. The critic has only to understand him, not to patronize him.

However correctly the original form of lyric poetry may be defined by Holz, it must not be tied to reality like a Spanish boot. The forms of lyric poetry to date are irrelevant to it. Yes. So it is nonsense to demand that it be recognized as something permanent, as essential to all lyric poetry. What follows from this? That it can be replaced by new forms. But not that they should be discarded and replaced by nothing at all. My skirt is unimportant to me. I can take it off. Holz is undoubtedly right so far. And it was stupid of his critics to want to forbid him to take off an old skirt. But does that mean that Holz has to go around completely naked? I think that when you take off an old coat, you put on a new one. It will be the same with the development of poetry. The old forms will fall away and new ones will take their place. Holz has taken the old poetry off its clothes. He leaves the poor thing wandering around without a covering. The critics come and explain: this naked poetry is false. Of course, he has an easy job of it. For it is simply nonsense to call the naked one false. But it is a defect that wood cannot find new clothes for the old ones. In reality, things do not expose themselves purely with their essence; they clothe themselves with all kinds of unessential things. Wood has only done half the work. It has separated the essential from the inessential; but it has not been able to find a new inessential. The new lyric will contain not only the essential but also the inessential, new forms. It would be like tying it into Spanish boots if one wanted to restrict it to the essential.

When nature progressed from the ape to the human race, it created a new form of mammal. Man has many things that are not essential to him as a mammal. But nature did not go back from the ape to the original mammal in order to develop further. Holz does this, which is contrary to nature. He wants to develop lyric poetry. That is his right. But he goes back to the original form of lyric poetry. Nature would never do such a thing. That is why his view of development is misleading. And his theory, despite its incontrovertibility, is an annoying one. All theory is annoying, which, although correct, is incontrovertible, but which, narrow-minded, resists any expansion. It cannot be refuted because it is true. But there is another truth besides its truth. And the annoying thing is the denial of this expansion of truth. Holz had to expand his definition of original lyric poetry, which, purely formally, is carried by a rhythm that only lives through what it expresses, to the following: the new lyric poetry will retain only the rhythm of the old, which lies in the expression, but will seek a new, insignificant form that, like the old forms, presents a certain music through words as an end in itself, in addition to the expression.

I have described the three books discussed as symptoms of certain intellectual currents of our time. These currents can be characterized by describing their proponents as superfluous reformers and revolutionaries. What they do is based on the fact that they have not sufficiently familiarized themselves with what intellectual culture has achieved so far. If Julins Hart had 370

lived in the world view of the Goethe era, he would not have “founded” his world view. He certainly would not have talked so much about the overthrow of the God of “causality” if he had considered that Schiller, by considering Goethe's points of view, had come to the conclusion much more perfectly than is possible from his world view: “In terms of its relation, it is the eternal endeavor of rationalism to ask about the causality of phenomena and to connect everything qua cause and effect; again, this is very commendable and necessary for science, but it is also highly detrimental due to its one-sidedness. I am referring here to your essay itself, which excellently criticizes this misuse, which the causal determination of phenomena causes.” Schiller expressed this view on January 19, 1798. Julius Hart expressed it much more imperfectly a century later. And now he wants to give the impression that he is reforming the world view.

Max Messer has not yet had the time to familiarize himself with the world of thought of the nineteenth century. He therefore knows nothing of the satisfaction that can flow from such a familiarization for the modern soul. He should say to himself: the world of thought lies before me; I must see what it can offer to man. That is too difficult for him. He cannot really keep up. He would like it to be just as easy to immerse oneself in the educational content of the time as it was in earlier, more primitive cultural periods. He conjures up a theory out of his personal inability and writes a book about it. The time has too many conscious thought elements in it. It must become more unconscious again. If Max Messer had entered the spiritual world of consciousness and immersed himself in it, he would have written a different book. He would not have asked himself: how can we get out of consciousness to achieve satisfaction? But rather: how is it possible to achieve this satisfaction within the world of consciousness?

Arno Holz seized upon the idea that spiritual life is also subject to the law of development and applied it to the evolution of lyric poetry. But he has grasped it too fleetingly. According to the idea of evolution, the development of mammals has progressed beyond apes to humans. Holz acts as if humans had not replaced apes, but rather primal mammals. Poetry will certainly shed its previous forms and reveal itself in new forms at a higher level of development. But it cannot become primal poetry in the course of development.

This is what I have to say against Arno Holz's theory. I am not fighting it. I am simply arguing that it needs to be expanded. I see Holz, the poet of today, differently. The biogenetic law of development says that every higher species of organism passes through the stages in a shortened form in the embryonic state, which its ancestors have gone through as species over long periods of time. Poetry certainly develops into a higher form. Before its birth, it passes through the earlier forms in a kind of embryonic development in a new form. Holzen's poetry is a poetry embryo at a very early stage. He should not persuade himself and us that it is a fully developed child. He should admit that his embryo must develop further.

Then we will understand him and - be able to wait. But if he wants to talk us into accepting his embryo as a fully developed being, then the midwives of criticism - he despises the gentlemen as “reviewers” - should make him aware that he is dealing with a miscarriage.