From a Fateful Time

GA 64 — 28 November 1915, Munich

11. The Setting of Thoughts as a Result of German Idealism

In the time of the tremendous struggle for existence in which the German nation finds itself, it may perhaps be possible to take a look at what lies within the German soul, within the German spirit, from the point of view, that is, from the mode of perception of a spiritual-scientific world view. This look at the German soul may reveal the content of the most sacred and highest spiritual task of this soul, of this spirit. I believe, however, that in so doing I am not going beyond the scope of actual spiritual science, because it will be clear from the various observations that I have been privileged to make here over the years how closely I must regard the spiritual-scientific world view as connected with what the German spirit, what the German national soul, will and has always strive for by its very nature, by its innermost nature. And so, while tomorrow's lecture will also be directed towards what moves us so deeply in our present time, in a narrower sense it will be devoted to a purely spiritual-scientific theme. Today's lecture is intended more as a contemplation of that which, in connection with the peculiar development of the German people, has been thought out by all those who have seriously reflected on this peculiarity of the development of the German people and on its task in the general evolution of the German spirit. I believe it would not be German to imitate the methods which are so often used today by the enemies of the German people, methods which are born of hatred, of annoyance or of the desire to justify some undertaking, without seeking the real reasons for it and perhaps without being able to find them in the present. So let the starting point not be taken from something that could push towards a characterization of German idealism from the immediate present, but let it be taken from a thought of a German personality who, in relatively quiet times, in memory of great, significant experiences with one of the greatest German minds, wanted to give an account of the German character. The starting point is taken from the words that Wilhelm von Humboldt inserted in 1830, when he wrote down his reflection on Schiller, at that time this reflection on German nature, - from those words in which Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the best Germans, wanted to characterize how German nature, when it is spiritual , works in all spheres of human activity from the center of the human soul, from the human spirit, from the deepest inwardness of the human soul, of the human spirit. would like; how German essence cannot think of man in a fragmented way in his spiritual connection with poetry and philosophy and science, but how German thinking wants to grasp man in his totality and, in summarizing all the forces that express themselves in the great minds of the last century, always wants to bring to revelation that which, in the totality of the human being, moves the soul in its innermost being. It was in this spirit that Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller's great friend, wanted to characterize German thinking in 1830. He said:

"To view art and all aesthetic activity from their true standpoint has been achieved by no nation more completely than by the Germans, and this has not been done by those who claim to be the poets, who recognize all ages as great and outstanding.” The deeper and truer direction in the German lies in his greater inwardness, which keeps him closer to the truth of nature, in the tendency to deal with ideas and sensations related to them and in everything that is connected with this. This distinguishes him from most newer nations and, in a more precise definition of the concept of inwardness, also from the Greeks. He seeks poetry and philosophy; he does not want to separate them, but strives to combine them; and as long as this striving for philosophy, which even among us is not infrequently misunderstood and misinterpreted in its indispensable work, lives on in the nation, the impulse will also continue and gain new strength, which powerful minds in the last half of the last century have unmistakably given. Poetry and philosophy are by their very nature at the center of all intellectual endeavors; only they can unite all the individual results; only from them can unity and enthusiasm flow into everything at once; only they truly represent what man is, since all other sciences and skills, if completely separated from them, would only show what he possesses and has appropriated. Without this focus, which is both enlightening and spark-awakening, even the most extensive knowledge remains too fragmented and the effect on the ennoblement of the individual, the nation and humanity is inhibited and made powerless, which, after all, can be the only purpose of all penetration into nature and man and the still not fully explained connection between the two."

Such minds have always sought to fathom what it is to be German by trying to delve into the essence of the German character, and they never wanted to fall into the trap of elevating the German character at the expense of other characters. If we now seek a characteristic feature of the spiritual development of mankind that also relates to such words as those just quoted, we find it in what is called idealism; a term that can literally only be understood to refer to the German world view. This is not to claim that idealism is something that only exists within the German people; that would, of course, be a ridiculous assertion. Everywhere human nature strives out of the outer life of the senses into the realm of the ideal, and this universal trait of idealism has been emphasized by no one more strongly than by the most German of Germans. But it is quite another matter when one gains insight into the fact that within German development, idealism is connected not only with the individual striving of the individual, with that by which the individual stands out from the totality of the people, but when one sees that idealism is something that is connected with the innermost nature, the innermost essence of the German people, and gains insight into the fact that German idealism blossoms out of German nationality itself. Today, some reflections are to be made on this, and also on the fact that in a very peculiar way, precisely this German idealism has raised the German world view to the arena of thought, of which one can rightly say what many of the best of the Germans stated as their conviction: that life in the arena of thought in such a way is a thoroughly German peculiarity.

How little is needed to disparage anything else when this German peculiarity is mentioned is confirmed in this consideration itself by the fact that the starting point is now taken, perhaps from a comparison of German feeling and German creativity with other feelings and other creations in a field where, from a certain point of view, even foreign feeling and foreign creativity can be given absolute priority.

I would like to start with an image, with a contradictory image. Imagine yourself in front of the painting that everyone knows, at least in reproduction, that Michelangelo created in the Sistine Chapel – the painting of the “Last Judgment” – and compare the experience you have in front of this painting with the one you have when you look at the painting “The Last Judgment” by the German artist Cornelius in the Ludwigskirche in Munich. When you stand before Michelangelo's painting, you have the impression of being confronted with a great, powerful sense of the riddle of humanity in a comprehensive way, and by looking at the painting, you completely forget yourself. You absorb yourself in every detail of this picture, you empathize with every line, every color scheme, and when you leave this picture, you have the feeling, the desire, to be able to stand in front of this picture again and again. The impression one takes away with one is this: you can only experience this picture if you recreate it in your mind, forgetting all the details, from the sensuality, so that you have the figures and colors before you in vividness.

And if one then imagines the relationship of the human soul to the image that Cornelius created here for the Munich church: one will not receive the same dazzling impression of the design, and perhaps will not feel the soul as if it were being drawn into the eye and the eyes, with their activity, resting in what the painter has created; but one will still feel transported in the holy worlds of an artistic imagination in front of the painting, and have an experience that does not go hand in hand with what one sees in the same way as with the painting by Michelangelo, but which lives in the soul like a second experience of the soul alongside what the eyes see – it stirs up all the deepest and highest feelings through which man is connected to the course of the world. And much that cannot be seen in the picture forces its way out of the depths of the soul, and a wealth of thoughts connects us with those impulses from which the artist created, which comes to life through what he has created, but which perhaps does not lie directly in his picture. And one leaves the picture with the feeling of longing to visualize this picture again and again through the elevation of sensuality into the imagination, as it is painted on the outside; but one feels transported through the picture with one's soul into a living connection with the workings of the world spirit; one feels: not only has only the creative power of the artist, but also that which man can experience on the stage of thought, when he is able to enter this stage of thought in such a way that he feels and experiences what connects the soul with the riddles of the world, what connects the soul with the beginning and end of all becoming of the sensual and the moral, of the sensual and world events. We must go from the picture of Cornelius to the scene of the thoughts, and that is because Cornelius, who is one of the most German painters, had to paint in a German way, that is to say, he could not help but go to the scene of the thoughts in art as well, because of his whole nature, his whole being. As I said, one may place the artistic sense of Cornelius far, far below that of Michelangelo. That is not the point. The point is that every nation has its task in the world, and that even in art – when it is so closely connected with the German national character, as was the case with Cornelius – even art rises to the level of thought.

From this image, let us move on to another, one that may also illustrate how one of the most German of Germans, from the arena of thought, relates to the world around him.

Goethe followed how he found himself in front of the Strasbourg Cathedral. We know from Goethe's own biography how he felt an infinite deepening of his soul when he stood in front of the Strasbourg Cathedral. What did he feel then? One may say that Goethe's German world view was confronted in a natural, elementary way by the way in which the French world view appeared to him at that time, when he saw the Strasbourg Cathedral. Goethe certainly least of all wanted to belittle its value for general development. A whole wealth of historical impulses were at work in what Goethe felt in his soul at the time, looking at the Strasbourg Cathedral, at the place where German nature had to fight so hard against French nature, at the place where German blood has to be shed again today to defend German nature against French nature. What historical impulses unconsciously worked in Goethe at that time, perhaps the following reflection can illustrate.

When the newer peoples in the last centuries, one might say, out of the twilight of the spiritual development of mankind, developed that which has given these peoples their present character, there, in that time, we find a French spirit that truly shows us the innermost impulse in the French world view, insofar as it does not arise from the individual but from the individuality of the people. I am referring to Descartes, who lived from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Descartes also elevates humanity to the realm of thought from the French essence. As a lonely thinker, emerging entirely from what the education of his people of his time could give him, Descartes stands at the dawn of the newer development of the spirit with the question: How does one arrive at a certainty about the true reasons for existence? What is really true within that which appears in the stream of phenomena before the eyes and soul of man? For the French school from which Descartes emerged had, a short time before, produced one of the greatest and most significant doubters, Montaigne, who made doubt the very content of healthy, true human feeling. Only a soul, he says, over which doubt pours out, is a wise soul, a soul that says to itself: “The revelations of the external world of space and time appear to my senses; but who dares to say that the senses do not deceive?” In my inner being, thoughts arise from this inner being that want to prove themselves. But, as Montaigne says, if you look more closely, for every proof there arises the necessity to find a new proof. There is no source of truth, either outside or within. It is unwise to believe unconditionally in any truth. Only he is wise who approaches everything with doubt, because doubt alone is appropriate to that which can develop as a relationship between the thinking and observing human being and the world.

And it was out of this doubt, as an intense fighter for the attainment of a certainty of truth, that Descartes developed his thinking. He started from doubt. Now, if this sea of doubt is poured out, may everything be doubted: is there nowhere a point to which one can hold? he asks. In the wide sea of doubt in which the soul initially swims, he found only one thing: the certainty of one's own thinking; for we do this ourselves, we can always conjure it up. Therefore, we can believe in thinking; only in this respect are we when we think. Thus Descartes, in his way, raised mankind to the level of thinking. But that is the peculiar thing about it – and I really don't want to make a one-sided, disparaging criticism – that is the peculiarly French thing about Descartes' world view, that Descartes now experiences in his soul everything that this certainty of one's own thinking can give, that he seeks to show in the soul everything that the soul can get from the certainty of its own thinking, how the soul itself finds God from thinking. But from this point of certainty of his, Descartes cannot come to that which reigns as truth in the nature surrounding man. He does raise humanity to the scene of thoughts; but he limits the scene of thoughts to the boundaries of the soul's experiences. And it is characteristic, very characteristic, that Descartes, in his task of surveying everything that thinking can find, becomes entangled with this thinking in the merely human inner being, cannot get out of this inner being and thus cannot find a way from the soul to that which lives and abides in nature. Even animals are, for Descartes, as paradoxical as it may seem to people today, only walking machines. A soul is only to be awarded to what thinks; but thinking cannot go beyond the soul, cannot penetrate into what lives and lives in nature. The animals are mechanisms, the plants too, everything is nothing but clockwork, because the soul spins itself in on itself.

But this had consequences, and led to the fact that in more recent times France became the classic land of the purely materialistic world view that had broken in when Goethe felt he was part of it. At that time, the French world view was dominated by the inability to see anything other than mechanism in what surrounds us in the world and lifts and delights us. Thus was born that materialistic philosophy which so permeates and underlies Voltaire's outlook; that materialistic philosophy which confronted Goethe and of which he says: “If it, in spite of being so barren and desolate, would only make an attempt to explain from the moving atoms something that the human eye beholds.” But not even an attempt has been made. In place of the all-pervading nature, a dry, barren, mechanical fabric is posited. Such was Goethe's feeling. This was the impression that settled in his soul when he allowed the world view, which had so characteristically emerged from the French national sentiment at the time, to take effect on him, and which he had unconsciously, so to speak, on his soul when he, with his soulful feeling, , he turned his soulful gaze, entirely from his Germanic nature, to the sky-scraping spire of the Strasbourg Cathedral and felt in his soul, in external spatial forms, the human spirit that strives from space into the spaceless-timeless spiritual-soul. One would like to say: in the Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe's living world view of Germanic culture stood out against the mechanical world view in the background, which was pressing against him, weighing on his soul as the then newest French materialism. And yet, in that very period, we see within the evolution of the Germans, from the depths and inmost being of the German soul, a striving towards the observation of nature and the contemplation of humanity, as we shall characterize it in a moment. This striving is towards the realm of thought, but not in such a way as to the arena of thought in such a way that it would be so restricted for the human soul that it could no longer find its way into the great, wide reality of nature, but in such a way that the soul feels the living possibility of immersing itself in everything that creates and lives and works and is in nature.

Two spirits within the German development should be emphasized, which show precisely in that time how German nature actually is in relation to the search for a world view at the innermost core of being; one of these spirits, who as an external personality places himself in the world-view striving, and another who actually does not stand as an external personality, but is again created only as an ideal figure out of German nature. One of them is called Kant. Let us try to imagine Kant, especially in the period of German development from which this image, which was designed in connection with Goethe, shines forth. What was he basically concerned with? It is easy to say that around 1780, roughly the time when Goethe had that insight, which was also when Kant's Critique of Pure Reason appeared. In truth, whoever delves to the innermost nerve of Kant's striving will also find in him the very opposite of the innermost nature of Descartes' endeavor. Kant does not start from the premise that the human soul is cut off from the innermost source of the world and the world spirit. Kant stands before the world and asks himself: how can we penetrate the secrets of the world? — Through that which the human being develops in the observation of the world with the senses. Kant believes that in this way the human being cannot enter into the realm of the true sources of being. Therefore Kant does not fight knowledge, but in reality, by seemingly fighting knowledge, he fights doubt. In order to divert doubt from the human soul, doubt about that which must be most precious to this soul, Kant seeks access to the sources by a different way than can be reached by ordinary knowledge. Therefore Kant spoke from the depths of his soul: He had to dethrone knowledge in order to make room for faith. But for Kant, faith is the inflow into the human soul of the conceptual world of the spirit, of ideas and ideals that come from the divine. And in order for these to live in the human soul, so that they are not disturbed by external knowledge, so that the human soul can have an inner certainty, Kant dethrones external knowledge, ascribing to it only the possibility of coming to a revelation, not of true reality. And, we may say, Kant made it difficult for himself to conquer the validity of ideas and ideals for the human soul. Before he began his critique of reason, he dealt with the spiritualist Swedenborg. What Swedenborg had attained as a spiritual vision of what lies behind the sensual world, Kant examined with the intention of gaining an insight into whether there is another way through the gates of nature to the sources of nature and spiritual existence than that which external intellectual knowledge can conquer. And from the contemplation of the seer Swedenborg, Kant emerged with what he had in mind: to expand the realm of thoughts for ideas and ideals by dethroning knowledge that can only deal with the external world of appearances.

Deepened and individualized, I would say, this Kantian striving now appears in an ideal figure, in the ideal figure that for many people is rightly one of the greatest poetic and artistic creations of human existence to date – in the form of Goethe's Faust. And by looking at Goethe's Faust as Goethe presents him to us, we directly see the path of German idealism to the arena of thought. What is Goethe's Faust actually like? It is certainly well known how Goethe makes his Faust strive for the sources of existence, and it seems almost superfluous to say anything more about Goethe's Faust. But perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves that two aspects of human spiritual life are inseparably linked with Goethe's creation of Faust, which show in a very special way a kind of human spiritual life that, when examined closely, emerges from the immediate nature of the German character. What are the two traits that are inseparably linked with Goethe's Faust creation? No matter what one's opinion of these traits may be, one may, so to speak, scoff at them if one regards them separately from this work from the standpoint of a particularly high-flown materialistic world view. But these two traits are so seriously connected with the Goethean world view and with what Goethe senses as the German world view that, despite the often trivial way in which the materialistic world view dwells on these two traits, one must still think of them as directly connected with what Goethe sensed as the innermost impulse toward a world view. The one is the way in which Faust faces the striving for knowledge of nature, and connected with this is the fact that Faust, after feeling unsatisfied by all external sense and intellectual knowledge, reaches for what is called magic. Superstitious conceptions associated with this word may be dismissed. How does this magical striving present itself to us? — It presents itself to us in such a way that we can say: Faust approaches nature in such a way that he feels: Faust feels he has come to terms with everything that can be perceived directly by the human being, and everything that can be intellectually grasped on the basis of sensory impressions. But he also feels excluded from the secrets of nature; he feels the necessity to develop something that is not present in the human being, who only directly places himself in the world, but which must first be developed out of the innermost being of nature. The human being must be so extended that something germinates in it, which creates living mediators from the innermost being into living nature itself: an extension of the human being beyond what one finds when one surveys what the senses give and what lives in thinking, to which Descartes pointed out humanity; make human nature more alive than it is placed by its own immediate creative power. Thus, for Faust, what the senses offer is only a crust, as it were, that appears to cover the true essence of nature. This crust must be penetrated, and under this crust there must be something within nature that works and lives in it spiritually and soulfully, just as the spiritual and soulful works and lives in man himself. Thus Faust stands as a living protest against what Descartes describes as the theater of thoughts, and in that Faust seeks the spirit that “rolls up and down in the tides of life,” that shapes, works and lives everywhere, in that Faust seeks “all power of action and seed,” he is the very opponent of Descartes' philosophy, which, as a logical consequence of its own principles and its popular origin, looks to nature and, through its popular character, thereby deanimates and dehumanizes nature, making it into a mechanism. That which could never be found by following Descartes' method is, for Faust, at a certain point in his life, the direct starting point. And with this trait, which we can describe as magical, which does not seek concepts, ideas, thoughts in nature, but through these seeks that which lives and works in nature, as the soul lives and works in us, is directly connected to another in the Faust legend, which in turn can be ridiculed if viewed separately from the Faust legend. Directly connected with this is something that can be described as a special regard of the human soul for evil, which we encounter in the character of Mephisto in the Faust story. This evil in the Faust story is not something that merely enters the human world view conceptually, or is regarded as a mere law, such as a law of nature. Rather, this evil in the Faust not in the usual anthropomorphic way, but in the way it consciously emerges from human struggles. This evil is depersonalized, made into a being that dramatically confronts man. Just as Faust strives on the one hand out of what is provided by the senses and intellect, as he seeks to pierce the bark to seek the living, so he must break through what appears to be mere moral legality, to pierce through to what is experienced in living spirituality behind the surface of mental experiences like a personality, like a being. On the one hand, Faust strives towards nature, towards the life behind the world of sense perception. On the other hand, Faust strives towards a relationship between the human soul and evil, which now also penetrates, I would say, the shell that rises above the deeper soul than the everyday soul. In both these respects Faust seeks a way out of the straitened limits within which, for example, Descartes and his philosophy confined the human soul: out into nature, into the spiritual depths of the soul.

And that this striving for a relationship to evil that is not conceptual and ideal but positively experienced is deeply rooted in the spiritual development of the German character can be seen from the fact that a German philosopher much inspired by Goethe, Schell ing, a German philosopher much influenced by Goethe, in 1809 in his treatise “Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom and Related Subjects” dealt in a profound way with the question of the origin of human evil; by raising the question: To what extent is that which enters our world as evil compatible with the wise divine government of the world and divine benevolence? — he comes to the answer: In order to recognize evil, one must not only proceed to the very foundations of existence, but one must proceed to what Schelling, in harmony with other minds at the time, called the “unfounded foundations of existence.” Thus the power of evil came to life within the German Weltanschauung, so vividly that the tragic struggle of the human soul with evil could only be understood in its vividness, not in mere concepts. And if we connect what Goethe embodied in his Faust out of German feeling with what Goethe occasionally expressed when he wanted to characterize the course of his own mind, we are referred again and again to that wonderful prose hymn to nature by Goethe, written in the 1880s:

“Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it.... Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance”;

then the wonderful words in it:

“She has thought and continues to think; but not as a
human being, but as nature.”

That is to say, Goethe is clear about one thing: spinning a mechanical web of concepts about nature does not provide an understanding of nature. Only such a deeper search in the existence of nature creates knowledge of nature, through which the human soul finds in the depths of this natural existence that which is related to what it can seek out in the depths of its own being when it penetrates into them.

We may now ask: Is such striving, as it can be characterized by Kant, can be characterized by the ideal figure of Goethe's Faust, - is this striving a solitary, a merely individual one, or does it have anything to do with the overall striving of the German national spirit, the German national soul? Even if we consider Kant, the abstract philosopher, who hardly ventured a few miles beyond Königsberg and spent his whole life in abstract thought, we clearly see, especially in the way he worked his way from his earlier world view to his later one, how he, despite his reclusiveness, developed out of everything all that in the German national spirit aspired after certainty, and how, owing to this national spirit, he did not come to a narrowing of the human soul to the sphere of mere human thinking, but was led up to the horizon on which the whole range of ideas and ideals appeared to him, which give man impulses in the course of his human development.

One might say that what was later expressed by the most German of German philosophers, Fichte, already lives in Kant; what has become so dear to the German worldview, especially from the eighteenth century onward, already lives in Kant. This German world view came to value having a view of the world that does not need to be disconcerted by what presents itself to the senses, for the absolute validity of that which is man's duty, love, divine devotion, moral world. overlooks the world and looks at the way in which he is placed in the world, he sees himself surrounded by the field of vision of sensual impressions and what he can divine behind them; but he also sees himself placed in such a way that he world without this second aspect of the world; he sees himself so placed that behind him, in his soul, the divine ideals are at work, which become his duty and deed, and these ideals do not bear the coarse sensual character that the world of external movement and external revelation has. One might say that when the German mind looks at the stiffness and smoothness of natural existence, to speak symbolically, at the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, it feels the need to recognize: How can we become immersed in that which is so indifferent in nature, that which appears in ideals as a demand, as a duty, as a moral life? How can we become immersed in that which appears as the highest value of life, as a moral ideal? How does the reality of moral ideals relate to the reality of external nature? This is a question that cannot be answered lightly, but which can also be found in tremendous depth, heart-wrenching. And so it was felt in the best German minds at the time when Kant's world view was forming. Sensuality had to be presented in such a way that it was no obstacle to the moral world flowing into the world through human beings. Morality could not be a reality that presents itself indifferently, and against which moral ideas must rebound. When moral ideas from the spiritual world are put into action through human beings, they must not be repelled by the rigid materialistic barrier of the sensory world. This must be taken as a profound insight, then one understands why Kant wants to dethrone ordinary knowledge so that a real source can be thought for the moral idea. Then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical , but which arose from deep German striving: “All sensuality, everything we can see and feel outside and think about the external world, is only the sensualized material of our duty.” The true world is the world of the ruling spirit, which lives itself out as man perceives it in ideas and ideals, and these are the true reality, they are what pulses through the world as a current, what only needs something to which it can apply itself, to illustrate it. Sensuality has no independent existence for Fichte, but is the sensitized material for human fulfillment of duty.

From a philosophy that seeks to validate everything spiritual, that must be sought from a natural disposition towards idealism, such words emerged; and one may find such words one-sided, but that does not matter when such words are made into dogma. But to take them as symptoms of a striving that lives in a people, that is the significant thing; and to recognize that such minds, which create in the sense of such a word, precisely because of the idealistic character of the German national soul, elevate Germanness to the arena of thought. In order to give thought its vitality, human knowledge and striving must go beyond what Cartesius could merely find. And Goethe's Faust, this image of the highest human endeavor, this image that one must first struggle to understand by allowing many German cultural elements to take effect, from what did it emerge? — It is truly not invented, did not come about in such a way that a single person created it out of themselves; rather, it emerged from the legends, from the poetry of the people themselves. Faust lived in the people, and Goethe was still familiar with the “puppet show of Dr. Faust”; and in the simple folk character, he already saw the traits that he only elevated to the arena of thoughts. Nothing is more vivid than Goethe's “Faust” to show how something supreme can emerge from what lives most deeply, most elementarily, most intimately in the simple folk being. One would like to say: not Goethe and Goethe's nature alone created Faust, but that Goethe brought Faust forth like a germ that lay within the German national organism, and gave it its essence, embodied it in such a way that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the highest striving of the German spirit for the arena of thought. Not the striving of isolated personalities out of their own nature, but precisely when it confronts us in its greatness from the whole nation, it is the result of German idealism.

And how does thought work within this German idealism? One comes to an understanding of how it works precisely by comparing this German idealistic striving of thought with what is also a striving of thought, let us say, for example, in Descartes. In Descartes, thought confines man within the narrowest limits; it works as a mere thought and remains as such confined to the world in which man lives directly with his senses and his mind. Within German idealism, the personality does not merely encounter the thought as it enters the soul, but the thought becomes a mirror image of that which is alive outside the soul, that which vibrates and permeates the universe, that which is spiritual outside of man, that which is above and below the spirit of man, of which nature is the outer revelation and the life of the soul is the inner revelation. Thus, thought becomes an image of the spirit itself; and by rising to the level of thought, the German wants to rise through thought to the living spirit, wants to penetrate into that world that lives behind the veil of nature in such a way that by penetrating this veil, man not only visualizes something, but penetrates with his own life into a life that is related to him. And again, since man is not satisfied with what he can experience in his soul, he seeks to penetrate into what lies behind thinking, feeling and willing, for which these three are outer shells, for which even the thought is only an inner revelation, in which man lives and works, in which he knows himself as in a living being that creates the scene of thoughts within him. And so we can see how, especially in those times when the German mind, seemingly so detached from external reality, from external experience, strove for a world view, this German mind felt itself entirely dominant and weaving within the arena of thought. And there is first of all Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who regards external nature only as an external stimulus to that which he actually wants to seek, to whom, as already mentioned, the whole of the external sense world has become only the sensitized material of our duty; who wants to live only in that which can penetrate from the depths of the world in a mental way and can be directly realized before the human soul. That is the essence of his world view, that only what emerges in a contemplative way from the deepest depths of the soul and announces itself as emerging from the deepest depths of the world is valid for him.

For his successor Schelling, the urge for nature, the Faustian urge, becomes so vivid within him that he considers the knowledge of nature, which only wants to express itself in concepts about nature, as nothing. Only when the human soul comes to regard all of nature as the physiognomy of man, only when nature is regarded in such a way that nature is the physiognomy of the spirit that rules it, only then does one live in true knowledge of nature; but then, by penetrating through the bark, one feels creative in nature. And again, a paradoxical but appropriate word for the essence of Germanness comes from Schelling: To recognize nature is actually to create nature! Admittedly, this is at first a one-sided saying; but a saying that represents a one-sidedness need not remain so; rather, if it is rightly recognized, this creative knowledge of nature will lead the spirit to reflect inwardly, to awaken slumbering powers within itself, which penetrate to the spiritual sources of nature. The source, the germ of that which can be true spiritual science, we can find it precisely within this world picture of German idealism!

In the third of the German idealistic philosophers, in Hegel, who is difficult to understand and who is so far removed from many, this lively character of the scene of the thoughts within German idealism appears in the same way. In our own time, when the abstract is so much decried and mere thought is so little loved, this world-view strikes us as strange. And yet Hegel feels himself closely connected with the Goethean direction of nature towards the spirit. The content of his world-view – what is it if not mere thinking, a progression from one thought to another? With his world-view we are presented with a thought organism; necessity is created for us, so that we stand face to face with a mere thought organism, which we can only create by thinking it, as we would with any other organism through our senses. But behind this presentation of a thought organism there is a consciousness, a certain attitude. This attitude consists in stripping away all sense perceptions, all perceptions of the senses, for a few moments of world-gazing, stripping away everything that one wants and feels as an individual, and surrendering to what as if the thought itself were taking one step after another, — that man then immerses himself in a world that is a thinking world, but no longer his thinking world, so that he no longer says to this world: I think, therefore I am! but: “The spirit of the world thinks in me, and I give myself to the spirit of the world as a theater, so that in what I offer as soul to the all-encompassing spirit of the world, this spirit can develop its thoughts from stage to stage and show me how it bases its thoughts on world-becoming. And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience in the soul only what that soul can experience when it surrenders all its own being to the thinking that thinks itself within it. One must also see this Hegelian philosophy, this so idealistic excerpt from the German essence, in such a way that one does not take it as a dogmatics, on which one can swear or not, but as something that, like a symptom of German striving in a certain time, can stand before us. In Hegel's philosophy, the world spirit appears as a mere thinker; but while it is true that much more than mere thinking was needed to shape the world, it is nevertheless true that the path that once led to it, to seek logic, is one which produces in man the attitude towards the living that reigns behind existence and which leads man to the scene not of abstract, intellectual thought, but of living thought, which in the experience of thought has experience of the world.

The three idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, sought to elevate the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different directions: Fichte tried to shine a light into the depths of the human ego and did not say, like Descartes, “I think, therefore I am!” For Fichte, if he had only been able to arrive at Descartes' thought, would have said: “There I find within me a rigid existence, an existence to which I must look. But that is not an ego. I am only an ego if I can secure my own existence myself at any time. Not through the act of thought, not through mere thinking can I arrive at my ego, but through an act of action. That is a continuous creative process. It does not depend on looking at its being; it leaves its previous being; but by having the power to create itself again in the next moment, out of the act of doing, it is constantly being reborn. Fichte does not grasp the thought in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the scene of the thought itself, where he creates vividly and lives creatively. And Schelling, he tries to recognize nature, and with genuinely German feeling he lives into the secrets of nature, even if, of course, his statements, if you want to take them as dogma, can be presented as fantastic. But he immerses himself in natural processes with his deepest emotions, so that he does not feel merely as a passive observer of nature, as a being that merely looks at nature, but as a being that submerges itself in the plant and creates with the plant in order to understand plant creation. He seeks to rise from created nature to creative nature. He seeks to become as intimate with creative nature as with a human being with whom he is friends. This is an archetypally German trait in the Schellingian nature. Goethe sought to approach nature in a similar way from his point of view, as his Faust expresses it, as to the “bosom of a friend”. There Goethe, to describe how far removed every abstract observer is from a contemplation of nature, there he calls what he, as an external naturalist, is to the earth, his friendship with the earth. So human, so directly alive does the German spirit feel itself in Goethe to the spirit that reigns in nature in the striving to be scientific, in that he wants to raise science itself to the arena of thoughts. And Hegelian logic – abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel – what becomes of it? When one considers how mere logic often appears to man, and compares this with what prevails in Hegel's idealistic world-view, then one gets the right impression of the world-importance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel's work, what appears to be the furthest thing from mysticism, the clear, crystal-clear, one might say, crystal-cold thought itself, is felt and experienced in such a way that although the thought , but that what the soul experiences in terms of thought is direct mystical experience; for what Hegel experiences in terms of thought is a becoming one with the divine world spirit, which itself permeates and lives through the world. Thus, in Hegel, the greatest clarity and conceptual sobriety become the warmest and most vibrant mysticism. This magic is brought about by the way in which the German mind rises from its direct and living idealism to the realm of thought. In doing so, it proves that what matters is not the individual expressions that are arrived at, but the soul foundations from which the human soul seeks a worldview. Hegel is said to be a dry logician. In answer to this it may be said: He who calls Hegel's logic by that name is himself dry and cold. He who is able to approach this logic in the right way can feel how it pulsates out of German idealism; he can feel in the apparently abstract thoughts, which in Hegel's system are so spun out of one another, the most living warmth of soul that is necessary to strip away all individuality and to connect with the divine, so that in Hegel logic and mysticism can no longer be distinguished; that although nothing is nebulous in it, a mystical trait prevails in all its details.

Even in our time, the German mind, even the opponents of German idealism, has endeavored time and again to fathom the fundamental idealism of this German nature in its significance as a riddle. And the best German minds, even those who are opponents of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, if we turn our gaze to them, we still find that the development of Germany consists in absorbing more and more of the basic impulses of this idealism.

How these fundamental impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has often been discussed and will be discussed more often. Attention should only be drawn to how – one might say – German idealism, after it had reached one of its high points in the German world view, then continued to have an effect on German intellectual life as a different impulse. There was a period in this German intellectual life, and it was lived out in minds of the very, very first order until the middle of the 19th century, until the last third of the 19th century, when the view was that such creative work as is expressed, for example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought really takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creativity, was only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, in the sphere of natural science, the same process of thinking can be observed that is expressed in Goethe's Faust. example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creation, is only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, music has a different area; that music is, as it were, the field that does not seek to grasp the highest in man by the detour of a work of fiction such as Faust, but that music is the field in which sensuality must be grasped directly. For example, the contrast between the legend of Don Juan and that of Faust has been cited, with a certain amount of justification after the experiences that could be had within the development of humanity, how mistaken it is to legend on the same level as the Faust legend; it has been asserted that what this other legend, which shows man completely absorbed in sensual experience, can be correspondingly portrayed only within music that directly evokes and seizes sensuality. — The way in which the German does not rise to the scene of thought in the abstract, but in a lively way, has also brought the refutation of this view. In Richard Wagner, we have in modern times the spirit that has triumphed over the merely external, emotional element in music, that has sought to deepen the setting of the thoughts so that the thought itself could take hold of the element that was thought to live only in music. To spiritualize music from the standpoint of the spirit, to show that, was also only possible for German idealism. One can say: Richard Wagner showed that in the most demure element for thought there is nothing that could resist or be opposed to the strength of life that dominates the German spirit. If, through his philosophy and his contemplation of nature, the German has tried to present nature to his soul in such a way that the seemingly mechanical, the seemingly external and rigid loses its mechanical aspect and what would otherwise appear in a formal way comes to life and moves as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself , on the other hand, the element that flows in the immediate sensual sequence of tones has been allowed to seek its connection, its marriage, with that which leads the human soul to the highest heights and depths in the realm of thoughts, in Wagner's music, which has thus effected an elevation of an artistic-sensual element into a directly spiritual atmosphere.

This aspect of German idealism, which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the scene of thought – I wanted to characterize this aspect today with a few strokes. This trait of German idealism, this living comprehension of the otherwise dead thought, is one side, but a remarkable side, of the nature of the German people, and will appear as a remarkable phenomenon to anyone who, I might say, is able to place themselves within the German people in a way that revitalizes thought within themselves. Indeed, the German cannot arrive at the fundamental trait of his people's character other than by penetrating ever deeper into the self-knowledge of the human being. And this the German may, as it seems to me, feel so rightly in our immediate present, where this German essence really has to defend itself in a fight imposed on it, where this German essence must become aware of itself by having to wage a fight, which it feels is due to it from the task that appears to it as a sacred one, entrusted to it by the world forces and world powers themselves. And although today, in a different way than in the times of which we have mainly spoken, the German must fight for his world standing, his world importance, it must still come to life before our soul, for which the German today enters into a world-historical struggle. A future history will have to establish more and more the deeper connection between the German soul, struggling through the course of the world, and the bloody events of the times, which, however, bring us bliss out of pain and suffering. I wanted nothing with today's reflection but to show that the German has no need to speak out of hatred or outrage when he wants to compare his nature with that of other nations. We do not need to point out the nature of the German soul in order to exalt ourselves, but in order to recognize our duties as they have been handed down to us by world history, we may point this out. And we do not need, as unfortunately happens today in the camp of our enemies, to invent all sorts of things that can serve to belittle the opponent, but we can point out the positive that works in the German national substance. We can let the facts speak, and they can tell us that the German does not want to, but must, according to his abilities, which are inspired by the world spirit, his nature, his abilities – without any arrogance – in comparison to the nature of other peoples.

From this point of view, we do not need to fall into what so unfortunately many of our opponents fall into. We look over to the West. We certainly do not need to do as the French do, who, in wanting to characterize German nature in its barbarism, as they think, in its baseness, want to exalt themselves; truly, the French needed, as they believe, a new sophistry to do so. And minds that spoke highly of the German character just before the war, even at famous teaching institutions, can now, as we can see, find the opportunity to advocate the view that, given the nature of his world view, the German cannot help but conquer and , as Boutroux says, to assimilate what is around him; for the German does not want to ascend to the sources of existence in a modest way, as Boutroux thinks, but claims that he is connected to these sources, that he carries the deity within himself and must therefore also carry all other nations within himself. This German world view is certainly profound; but it is not conceived immodestly.

Nor perhaps does the German need what is sought today from the British side when German character is to be characterized. The British, in emphasizing the peculiarities of their own national character, have never taken much interest in penetrating the German national character. When the forties in Germany were passing through a period of development, it seemed to me that the German mind was so fully occupied with the sphere of ideas that the way Hegel's disciples thought was felt by Schelling , who was still alive, and by his students, was felt to be too abstract, too logical, and that on Schelling's side, efforts were made to gain a greater liveliness for the thoughts themselves on the stage of thoughts. Whereas in Hegel one sensed that he allowed one thought to emerge from another through logical rigor, Schelling wanted people to sense the thoughts as active, living things that do not need to be proven in logic, just as what happens from person to person in living interaction cannot be encompassed in logic. He wanted to grasp it in something that is more than logic, wanted to grasp it in a living way, and that is how a great dispute arose on the scene, which the German tries to illuminate with the light he wants to ignite from his living knowledge. The English observed this dispute that arose. A London newspaper wrote what seemed to them a clever article about this dispute, in which it was said: These Germans are actually abstruse visionaries. Many are concerned with the question of who is right: Schelling or Hegel. The truth is only that Hegel is obscure and Schelling even more obscure; and the one who finds this is the one who will most easily come to terms with things—a piece of wisdom that roughly corresponds to the point of view of studying the world not when it is illuminated by the sun but at night, when all cats are black or gray. But anyone who today surveys the British judgment on the necessity of what is happening within the German character will perhaps be reminded of such “deeply understanding” words, especially when these words are used primarily to conceal what is actually taking effect and what one does not want to admit even to oneself. The present-day British really need a new mask to characterize their relationship to the Germans, and the foreign philosophers need a new sophistry to disparage Germany – a new sophistry that they have found since the outbreak of the war.

And the Italians? They also need something to reassure them about their own actions at the present time. Without arrogance, the German may say: it will uplift him within the difficult world situation when he thinks of the duty the world spirit has assigned to him, as he gains self-knowledge and this becomes knowledge of the German essence. What he should do will flow to him as realization from the realization of the German essence. When D'Annunzio spoke his resounding words before the Italian war broke out, he truly did not delve as deeply into Italian national character as he could have. But it is not for us Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in what the Roman spirit has created, to believe that d'Annunzio's hollow words really come from the deepest essence of Italian culture; but that they come from the motives that d'Annunzio needs to justify himself. The others needed sophistry, masks, to remove the causes of the war from their own soil, so to speak. The Italian needed something else, a justification that we have already seen emerging in recent years, a strange justification: he needed a new saint, a saint appointed from within the ranks of the profane, “holy egoism”. We see it recurring again and again, and it is to this that we see the representatives of Italian character repeatedly appeal. A new saint was needed to justify what had been done.

Perhaps it will lead the objective, unbiased observer of the German character to a position within today's historical events; because German character does not arise from such sophistry, such masks, nor from the “appointment of a new saint”, but from human nature, from what this human nature allows to be expressed, from what the national spirit of the German people has revealed to the best minds of this people have revealed to this people, but also what these spirits hoped for the people, because that is also a peculiarity of this German nature, which can be described by saying that the German always sought to direct his soul's gaze to what was aroused in him from the scene of thoughts, and from this he also wanted to recognize what hope he could harbor for what his people could achieve.

And today, when we need to develop love, a great deal of love, for what the ancestors of the German character have established within the German national soul and national strength, in order to place ourselves in today's historical events through this love, today, when we need faith in the strength of the present, today when we need confident hope for the success of that which the German character must achieve in the future. Today, we can look at what Germans have always loved, believed, and hoped for in the context of their past, present, and future. And so let us end with the words of a man who is indeed unknown today in the widest circles, but who in lonely thought wanted to fathom the popular and the intellectual of Goethe's Faust in those years of German life in which Germany had not yet produced the German state in its modern form. In those years, which preceded the deeds of the German power, in the sixties, a lonely thinker was concerned with the idea: in imagination, in the life of the soul, in idealism, the German wanted to rise to the highest that can only somehow be sensed by him. He had to develop a strength that must lie in his nature and that gives us hope that this strength will be fruitful, victorious in action. A simple German Faust observer, an observer of poetry that truly shows that German nature holds future forces, is quoted with his words. By pointing to words that Goethe himself, intuitively placing himself in the German future, spoke as a 65-year-old old man, he ties his own words to them and says:

"The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
the primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through rocks as through books.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
will never live in the scholarly hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken her,
She has taken the glass from the hothouse with her.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
A mild light will still pour forth,
From whose reflection of those stars
The late grandchildren will learn to see,
To report in prophetically higher visions
Of God and humanity higher things.»

And the Faust viewer from the sixties continues:

"Let us add the wish that the Master's word, which looks down on us from better stars with a mild light, may come true in its people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and urge, but with God's will, with indestructible strength, and that in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of Faust expects of the coming centuries, German deed too may no longer be a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!

We believe that such hopes, expressed by the best of Germans from the deepest German national sentiment, may be fulfilled in our own day, out of the blood and the creative energy of our courageous and active people. We believe that in these difficult days the German can develop to his strength, over which the atmosphere of hatred spreads, still another: that he can vividly grasp to strengthen his strength the love for what has been handed down in spirit and strength, in the life and work of his fathers as a sacred legacy, because he can be convinced that he, by permeating himself with this love for the past, he will find the strength to believe; because in this faith and this love he may find the hope for those fruits that must blossom for the German people out of blood and suffering, but also out of the blessed deed of the present, which the German performs not out of bellicosity but out of devotion to a necessity imposed on him by history. Thus, in the present difficult times, what may support, uplift and guide the German through the difficult struggle in which he finds himself is integrated into German life, German work, German feeling and sentiment: love for the German past, faith in the German present, confident hope for the German future.