From Central European Intellectual Life

GA 65 — 13 April 1916, Berlin

14. The Development of the German Soul

Those of you who have been attending these lectures, which I have been giving in this hall for years now, know that I only very rarely mix personal remarks into these reflections. But today I would like to ask you to allow me to make a personal or at least seemingly personal comment by way of an introduction. For I would have to feel quite foolish and simple-minded if I could believe that my remarks on this topic today could be anything other than highly imperfect, perhaps even amateurish. What I want to sketchily suggest with regard to the nature and development of the German national soul could be a part, let us say a chapter, of a science that does not yet exist today, a science that one can have as a lofty ideal. But what would have to work together to really bring such a science about! First of all, it would perhaps require not one but a whole series of personalities who have the dedicated spirit of research for everything that makes up the nature, character and development of a people, such as Jakob Grimm had, who mainly directed his studies to the two expressions of the folk soul, the myth, the saga and the language. But the same spirit should spread to many other expressions of the folk soul and should be able to find laws about this folk soul that can compare with some of the wonderful laws about language that the German researcher Jakob Grimm, for example, has found.

Now, of course, I cannot boast of such a science. However, I did have the opportunity to enjoy the long-standing friendship of a good successor and student of Jakob Grimm, the Austrian dialect, legend and myth researcher, and later also Goethe researcher, Karl Julius Schröer. I have already spoken about this in these lectures, except about what he, I would like to say, tried to research so truly in the spirit of Jacob Grimm, namely about the intimate life relationships of the German folk soul to the various folk souls that prevail in Austria. For many years I was privileged to participate in his attempts to fathom the essence and significance of the German dialects prevailing in Austria – and there are many prevailing there – and I can say that I participated with heartfelt interest. I was also able to see how the soul of a people, especially the German soul, comes to life where it has to blend with Slavic and Magyar folk traditions. In those years, when I was young, one could already study the mutual relationships between the souls of nations. If one considered what happened in Austria in the 1870s and 1880s, one could apply in a vivid way what a researcher, a student of Jacob Grimm, could bring to bear from his science about the nature of the soul of a nation. And then I was able to deepen what had been offered to me in this way, again through an intimate friendship with the now long since deceased scholar of legends and myths, Ludwig Laistner, a friend of Paul Heyse. And so I was at least offered the opportunity to get to know the way in which one can immerse oneself in that external science that summarizes everything that is lawful in the nature of the folk soul and its development.

Secondly, however, anyone who wants to found such a science, as I envision it, would have to thoroughly experience the discipline of modern scientific thinking and its methods. In response to this, I can at least say that my entire youthful education is based on natural science and that I enjoyed a certain education in this method for a long time.

But all that is found externally through a people's soul study in the sense of Jakob Grimm and is steeped in the spirit of truth and knowledge that follows from scientific discipline, requires a third party. Anyone who has this ideal of science before him would have to justify it by adding, as a third element to these two, what I have tried to present in these lectures over the years as modern spiritual science. For only through the interaction of these three spiritual currents of the human soul could it really come about that a science of the folk soul can shed light on the peculiarities of the workings and effects of a folk soul. And so today, for the reasons given, I would like to speak briefly and sketchily, and of course in a rather amateurish way, about the nature and development of the German soul, the German folk soul.

You know that someone who speaks in terms of spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not speak of the national soul in the sense that one so often speaks of the national soul when one is an abstract thinker or a more or less mechanistically thinking scientist, but that such a spiritual researcher speaks of the national soul as something that really exists, just as the individual human being exists within the physical world. Naturally, in today's lecture I cannot repeat all that I have been saying on this subject for years. But one need only refer to the writings often quoted here to find so-called proofs of how justified it is, on the basis of spiritual scientific research, to speak of such higher souls that have not descended to the physical body, as is to be done here with the folk soul. But if one wants to speak about the folk soul in the spiritual-scientific sense, one must first consider certain things that relate to the individual soul of man. For, in the first place, we have before us the working of the folk soul in such a way that the working of the individual human souls, the nature of the individual human souls, so to speak, flows out, forces its way out of what is the folk soul. Now there are certain things in life, especially in the life of the soul – but this life of the soul is, of course, intimately connected with the physical life between birth and death – that come into consideration for spiritual research in a completely different sense than they do for what is often called natural science today, or at least for that within which natural science is so often limited today.

First of all, I must direct your attention to the development of the individual human being. For the spiritual researcher, there are certain stages in human life that he must pay particular attention to in order to penetrate the secrets of the development of the human being, of the whole human being. As I said, I cannot prove the details today; I can only cite the results of spiritual research. As far as the reasons are concerned, I must refer you to my earlier lectures or to my writings. One such stage occurs during the years when the human being is going through the process of changing teeth. Much of what I now have to say certainly seems fluid compared to the scientific concepts that are so firmly established and so sharply defined today. But spiritual science really must play a role in many cases, which I would like to compare with what the painter spreads over a landscape as a mood, which he otherwise, insofar as houses and trees are concerned, paints in fixed outlines. What is there of houses and trees in fixed outlines, what is, so to speak, a sharply outlined drawing, only becomes real in the right way, I just want to say now, in a painterly way, when everything that is now the mood of the picture has been poured out. And this mood content truly cannot be captured in such fixed forms as that which is drawn below in houses, trees and the like. So the seventh year approximately – of course, all these numbers are to be understood only approximately – the time of the change of teeth, is to be considered particularly. And there, to the spiritual researcher, certain processes appear in human development that are certainly more subtle, that, I might say, are poured out, as it were, only in the mood over the human soul life, but that are of great importance for the understanding of this soul life. For the spiritual researcher, this change of teeth expresses a complete shedding of what had previously worked in him as physical forces, and like the emergence to the surface of a being that has certainly wanted to come to the surface for a long time, but which, I would like to say, is like a duplication of his being. And in the eruption of the first teeth and their replacement by the second teeth, something that is going on in the whole human organism during this period is expressed strikingly and outstandingly in a particular place.

Now the spiritual researcher must bear in mind that what we encounter in human development as a whole, in the full human being, shows us that the external material, the physical, is always permeated, imbued with spiritual soul. But if one regards human development in the way that one is scientifically accustomed to today, then one grasps this development in such a way that one now actually only follows the events in the succession of time. One looks at an earlier state, a later state, again a later one and so on, and always imagines the later one emerging from the earlier one. That is how one regards development. But just as it would be wrong to look at the human organism in spatial terms, as one would a machine, in that one only considers the neighboring parts in relation to each other, so one must consider the human organism in such a way that there are, as it were, mysterious relationships between the most distant organs, which do not spatially neither do we, when we consider the whole human being in his fullness, consider what happens in the succession of time in such a way that things do not simply develop apart in the succession of time, but that what happens to the human being is intertwined in many ways. You will soon see what I mean. For the spiritual researcher, it is clear that in human development up to the change of teeth, the soul-spiritual, let us say, pushes out of its inner being – I cannot speak more specifically today due to the limited time – and, imbued, as it were, physiognomized, the material, the material. What is it exactly that pushes out as soul-spiritual during the period just mentioned?

To arrive at an answer, we must first distinguish between the development of boys and that of girls. We shall therefore speak first of the development of girls up to the change of teeth. One must consider a completely different period of human development if one wants to understand spiritually what is actually pushing its way out of the human being's inner being, not only into the face but into the whole physiognomy of the human being, what also permeates and imbues him until his teeth change, what works and lives and is active in him.

If you want to find what is inside the girl and, as it were, gives her organs plastic form, then you must first turn your gaze to certain peculiarities, but inner peculiarities, not to what the soul has learned through education, through school, but to the inner configuration, to the inner formation of the soul. First, from about the age of twenty to twenty-eight or thirty, what one must first consider comes to light emotionally and becomes visible to the outside observer. Then we must leave aside what is to be found in the period from twenty-eight to thirty-five or thirty-six, and must again consider what is in the soul in question from the age of thirty-six to forty-two, forty-three, forty-four.

If you examine people in general, you can apply more general principles. If you want to examine an individual person, everyone can easily object, but the objection is fair, I just can't go into it now: Well, if you want to understand the person, you have to wait until they have changed their teeth, until they have become that old. Of course, you have to wait for the individual person if you want to understand them. But you know, science is not achieved through individual observations alone, but by applying what is observed in one case to the general case. And now you have to try to recognize how certain peculiarities of the soul present themselves during these years. And if one were to undertake a kind of amalgamation of the qualities in the first twenty years and the qualities in the second thirty years up to the forty-second and forty-third years and form an idea of what the soul life is in these years, then one comes to the conclusion that in the girl, until the teeth change, it presses into the physical. The way in which the physical configures itself, how it forms plastically, within which the soul lives and works, is only revealed in later years as a soul configuration in the manner indicated.

Let us now consider the boy up to about the age of seven, until the change of teeth. If we want to understand him, we must consider not two periods of time, but one period of human soul development, namely the period that lies roughly between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five. If we form an image in our minds of what emerges in the soul during this period and then consider what drives and propels the entire physiognomic development, lawful formation and plasticization of the boy's body, then we come to a certain understanding of the connection between the external-physical and the soul-spiritual.

Then we have to consider what lies in the second period of human development. For the spiritual researcher, this second period lasts from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, that is, up to the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth year. During this time, we must again distinguish between the boy's and the girl's organism. What the girl's organism adds here in terms of body and soul is precisely what the boy's body incorporates in its first seven years, that is, what is experienced by the soul between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five. And what the boy's body then assimilates during these years is what we had to say earlier that the girl's body assimilates during the time until the change of teeth. So we see that the conditions actually overlap; that what later appears in the soul, that is, in the refined soul-spiritual state, in the internalized state, initially has a formative, invigorating effect on the person in the dull subconscious, just as he or she appears to us as a physical person.

And if we then consider the later developmental periods, we have to say that they are not as sharply defined as the first ones, but that for a more subtle observation of human life, later periods can be considered in a similar way. But what has been developed then appears in a more inward form. From puberty onwards, what used to work on the organism is withdrawn, so to speak, from imbibing, let us say, the organism, and develops internally. From this point onwards, anyone with an eye for such observations can clearly see how, from puberty to the early twenties, both in the male and female organism, the two later periods - the unified and the separate - still interact in a more individual way, but how then, to a certain extent, this distinction ceases and the soul becomes more unified, so that we can no longer say: From the early twenties onwards, we find in the soul itself something that can be related to other periods in such a way as to characterize the physical and psychological development in the first two or three stages of life. We find the soul working more out of a unified whole; we find it asserting itself as a unified whole out of a certain inner harmonious fullness. Nevertheless, with more subtle observation, we can again clearly distinguish how a mood — and an even subtler mood — is poured out over the soul life, just as this soul life itself was poured out over the physical life earlier.

We can distinguish three periods within the development of the soul. I have already hinted at them: from the beginning of the twenties to the end of the twenties; from the end of the twenties to the age of thirty-five or thirty-six; from the age of thirty-six to the age of forty-two or forty-three. The human soul does go through certain developmental phases that can be clearly distinguished, even if, as I said, what can be distinguished here only spreads like a finer mood over the soul life. There is a spiritual and soul element to the development in these years. And those who are familiar with the difference between the spiritual and the soul, which has often been mentioned here and to which I will return, will understand what I mean. In these years, up to the forty-second, forty-third, forty-fourth year, we are dealing with inner development alone, one that is colored by soul and spirit. Then a more spiritual development of the inner life begins. The inner life withdraws even more than in previous years from the saturation and permeation of the organism. It lives even more within itself. And the possibility of distinguishing periods of time for the future is hardly appropriate for the present state of development of humanity. Only when earthly development has progressed further will it be possible to distinguish between the decades of human life in the way we do for the earlier years. Thus we see how, in a quite remarkable way, the soul and spirit interact in what confronts us as human beings in the physical world.

Something must be added to these considerations about the physical, mental and spiritual development of the human being if one wants to look at the human being as he emerges, emerging from the national soul. We must add an understanding that this human soul is something composite, despite all the objections of so-called monism. I have often said that if, according to the view of certain people, one wanted to be a monist and not a dualist with regard to the soul and bodily life, then one would also have to regard water as a single entity and claim that it cannot be regarded as something composed of hydrogen and oxygen! Of course, one can be a very good monist if one regards water as composed of hydrogen and oxygen, just as one can be a very good monist if one summarizes the whole of human life as consisting of soul and spiritual elements on the one hand and bodily and physical elements on the other. In this way, the human being remains as he appears to us in the outer physical world, a monad, just as water is a monad.

Now, I cannot go back today to some of the things I have often explained here. You can read about this in my books “The Secret Science” or “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Those who do not have the time to do so can inform themselves very briefly about these things in the short essay that I have written in the magazine “Das Reich”, which is about to be published. We must face a fact that cannot be found with the ordinary powers of cognition, but with those powers of cognition that are developed in the way I have often described here. It must be recognized that the life of the soul and spirit has a certain independence, an independence that can actually be observed and experienced in inner experience and knowledge. It must be recognized that man is capable, by developing certain soul faculties, of detaching the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily in the same way that the chemist separates hydrogen from oxygen when he breaks down water, and that one can recognize through this immersion in the spiritual-soul, that man can enter into other connections through this spiritual-soul, or let us say, in this spiritual-soul, than merely those that exist with the physical-bodily. Just as hydrogen can be separated from oxygen and then combine with other chemical elements and form other bodies, so that which is released as soul-spiritual in supersensible knowledge enters into other connections when the physical body departs at death, but only for the sake of knowledge. It surrounds man, as has often been stated here, just as the physical-sensual world surrounds him, and it can only be denied by someone who suffers from a similar state of mind as someone who has not heard anything and knows nothing about the air and denies that the air, because it cannot be seen, is not there, because there is nothing in space. With his soul and spirit, the human being belongs to a spiritual world, a real spiritual world.

A further insight of spiritual science is that we have to look at the two alternating states between waking and sleeping in such a way that the soul-spiritual really, in a certain way – but this is more figuratively speaking – leaves the bodily-physical during the state of sleep. Our language is only created for physical connections. One has, so to speak, no words to express this. One must take words that express the matter more or less figuratively, so to speak. So the spiritual-soul leaves the physical-bodily in the state of sleep. We can therefore also say figuratively that the soul and spirit are outside the physical body during sleep. And when the person wakes up again, the soul and spirit return to the physical body. For anyone who experiences the things that have often been described here, this is a real process that can be experienced. It is not something that has been made up, but a process that can be experienced. And what emerges from the physical-bodily is not only that which is encompassed by our ordinary physical consciousness, by that consciousness which, for the physical world, is bound to the body – as I just explained in lectures I gave here weeks ago – but it is still a deeper soul element, a soul element that is connected to the conscious soul, a subconscious soul element that is much more powerful than the conscious soul element, a soul element that can have a much greater effect on the physical than the conscious soul element. I may be able to say more about this the day after tomorrow.

Now we have to imagine that this spiritual-soul element, together with the subconscious spiritual-soul element, is not only active in the unconscious state from falling asleep to waking up, but that it also permeates the organism from waking up to falling asleep. But only part of it, as I have indicated, expresses itself in the conscious mental life. Another part works in a spiritual-soul way, working down through the entire evolution in the human physical-bodily organism. What we do while we sleep, we do from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. Just as dim light is obscured by brighter light, so what takes place in our body at the subconscious level is drowned out by what we perceive as the stronger consciousness during the day.

If we wish to study such processes as I have described, the working of a later lifetime in an earlier one, let us say, the soul conditions from the twenty-eighth to the thirty-fifth year in the boy's body until the seventh year, then we must also think of this working of the later soul in the earlier bodily realm in terms of the way in which the soul-spiritual always works subconsciously in us, always works subconsciously in us throughout our entire life. Down there, spiritual-soul activity is taking place, truly spiritual-soul activity, not merely fine material activity. Down there in the human organism, in that which takes place without the consciousness, which accompanies the human organism with its knowledge, with its cognition, knowing anything about it, in these subordinate parts of the human organism, there lives a part of the soul lives in these subordinate parts of the human organism during the waking 'daytime life' with the spiritual of the environment, just as our lungs live with the air, with the spiritual of the environment, only not the spatial environment. But as I said, I cannot go into these finer concepts. A spiritual-soul life really does develop between a spiritual world and the human being as a whole, and this is just as real and real as the interaction between the air and the lungs.

And underlying what takes place throughout the whole of human life lie the influences of what we call the soul and spirit of the people, and the like. Just as during the time of individual human development up to the change of teeth in girls or boys, that which later expresses itself in the way described, works through our whole life, an existing spiritual-soul element works through our whole life, which is a higher spiritual-soul element than the human spiritual-soul element, or at least a higher one. This works in, working together with our own subconscious, which we have drawn out during sleep. And there is a continuous interaction between the soul of the people and that which is individual in us in the way indicated, like a continuous interaction between the human lungs and the air. Not in language as such, not in what is expressed first in the art, the poetry or the myths of a people – these are all effects of a supra-sensual or, one could also say, subsensible – but in a much 'deeper level, the mysterious interactions take place between man with regard to a certain inner being, which I have just characterized in its essence, and what we call the soul of a nation.

Now, as you know, it is not my way to engage in anthropomorphism in the sense of Gustav Theodor Fechner or similar people, whom I highly esteem, by the way, and to seek anthropomorphic analogies. Instead, I try to look the facts in the eye, but the facts in the physical world as well as the facts that are in the spiritual world and only show themselves in the physical world through their effects. The first step is to consider how the peculiarity, the character, the essence of a national soul can work into a person at all, what this national soul actually consists of. Those who make cheap analogies and proceed anthropomorphically take the individual human being, the boy, the development of youth and so on, and then look at a people as it also develops from certain beginnings in youth to a certain state of maturity. As I said, that is not my task.

If we now look at the way in which the soul of the nation can be recognized in the human being as a whole from the spiritual-scientific point of view, that is to say, if we approach the matter with the knowledge that I have often presented here as a spiritual-scientific method, we find that the individual national souls differ considerably in character. Now, of course, when speaking of the soul of a nation, it must be borne in mind that, when we use spiritual scientific concepts, we have something flexible and pliable, I would say in color effects, while we have firm contours in everything that is in the physical world. So, of course, it is very easy to object to what I am about to say. But if we had a few days instead of an hour or an hour and a half, we could discuss all these objections here. Of course, it is not at all a matter of criticizing any national soul, of presenting any national soul as if it had a different value from any other national soul, but of objective characteristics. What I am about to say about the individual national souls does not imply that one is of greater or less value than another, but is considered objectively.

If we study the nature of the Italian national soul from a spiritual scientific point of view, we find that such a national soul does not work as I have indicated in the life of an individual person, in that a later period of time imprints its characteristics on an earlier one; rather, such a national soul works on the human being from certain depths of the spiritual being throughout his or her life. Of course, this does not have to be the case. A person can leave one nation and be accepted into another. But the effects are the same, even if they are modified by the change. The folk soul is there, and what I have to describe is, in a sense, an encounter with the folk soul. A person who remains within his own nation throughout his life will experience this effect his whole life long. If you move from one nation to another, you will first experience the influence of one national soul and then that of the other. That is not the point now. It would be interesting to hint at the individual effects of changing the folk soul, but there is no time for that. Throughout human life, then, what comes from the folk soul can have the same effect as what comes from the stages of life in the periods of time indicated. And if we look at the Italian national soul, at its peculiarities, in the way it takes hold of people when it imprints its moods on the soul, imprints them on the whole person, we find, quite that there is a certain strong affinity between the forces of this Italian national soul and the individual forces that a person develops from the beginning of their twenties to their twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth year. So one can study the real inner essence of the Italian national soul if one can study the affinity, I would say the elective affinity, that exists between this national soul and what lives in the human soul between the twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth years. One must only add – but in such a way that this second element only hints at what is lived out in the soul from the age of thirty-five to the age of forty-two, forty-three, forty-four. But the stronger element of the Italian national soul is that which is related to the early twenties. It is only shaded by that which, as I have indicated, is being lived out in the later years. The power of the Italian national soul takes hold of the individual human being who places himself in it and allows the soul to be imbued with the mood of the national soul. It takes hold of him in the way that the years between the twentieth and the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth can be most powerfully and intensely seized by the soul and spirit.

You see, the human being is a very complicated thing, and one must see many, many things together if one really wants to study this human being. But you will recognize from what has been indicated that everything that can be regarded as Italian folk tradition is imbued with the same mood that comes from a folk soul related to the human individuality in the way indicated. Something that is intimately related to what lives in the soul from the age of twenty to twenty-eight, imprints itself in the Italian folk soul in man.

If you take the French folk soul, it imprints something in the same way in man, which is roughly related to the soul life between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five. If we take the British national soul, then this imprints something in the human being, that is, it pours a mood content over the entire human being from childhood on, something that then interacts with the other mood contents, which is related to the human soul in its development between the ages of thirty-five or thirty-six and forty-two, forty-three, forty-four, but shadowed by what has been in the soul since the early twenties.

Thus, the only way to study the peculiarities of the national soul is to examine its affinity to what is found to be the deeper characteristic of the individual human soul. The task is to look into this and see what forces are at work within. Of course, today the human being as a human individuality transcends nationality. But when you look at what makes an Italian Italian, you see, so to speak, not the interaction of the soul of the people with the soul of the individual, as if in an experiment, but rather an observed interaction by observing the interaction between the national soul and the individual soul during the period between the twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth years.

You may think that such things as I am saying now have somehow been invented. They are no more invented than, say, the laws of sound change formulated by Jacob Grimm were invented, on a completely different level. It doesn't look as if it was thought up when you say: words that are related, that are in development, have a “t” in Greek, for example, and the same word, as it develops up to the Germanic, has a “th” or a “z” in the same place; when it has developed up to New High German, it has a “d”. These laws of sound change show how, in the succession of time, conformity to law prevails wherever the soul comes into play. If you simply develop them as Jakob Grimm presented them, they naturally appear in their abstractness; but they can be substantiated, proven in all the cases that matter, from the full breadth of experience. And so today I can only characterize these fundamental laws, as it were, which I have hinted at to you. But anyone who wants to go into what external experience offers to a spirit like the one I have described, who, like Jacob Grimm, can research the nature of the people using the methods of external science, will see the truth of it everywhere. There is not enough time today to go into this, which would be very interesting, to show how these general laws are realized in all soul phenomena, and how these soul phenomena of man and his appearance in the physical world, insofar as he belongs to any folk soul, can only be explained by coming behind the particular configuration of his appearance in this way.

Let us take a look at the Russian national soul. What we find is that the peculiarity of the national soul, the character of the national soul, turns out to be related to a kind of mixture between what happens in the individual human organism from sexual maturity to the beginning of the twenties; and that is shadowed by what happens from the age of forty-two or forty-three to the age of forty-nine or fifty. If you imagine these two soul characters in a state of confusion, that is to say, what is at work in the organism from sexual maturity into the early twenties, still permeating it, but also at work in the soul, if you imagine this overshadowed , thoroughly organized, of what works at such a late time, then you get, so to speak, an arithmetic mean, let me express the rough word for this fine thing, which shows what the peculiarities of the Russian national soul are. For the Russian national soul works with the forces that are similar to the forces just characterized in the human organism.

And other overall souls work in a very similar way. For example, we can consider an overall soul that has had a truly far-reaching effect throughout Europe from the south. Everyone can imagine for themselves how this overall soul essence has worked. I am referring to the collective soul of Christianity. Just as one can speak of the soul of a people, one can also speak of the collective soul of Christianity. What streams forth from Christianity, what it works out, permeates and shapes human beings, has done so for a long, long time and will continue to do so. But here too we are dealing with a process that must be put together in a similar way. We are dealing here with a process that draws its strength from what lives in the human being between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, mixed again with what lives there from the forty-second to the forty-ninth year. Of course, it must be much stronger forces, organizing man, than even the folk soul character, which, so to speak, shapes him religiously. Those who consider the strength with which religions have shaped people will not find what I say unreasonable.

And let us contrast all this, but really not to make value judgments, but only to emphasize peculiarities, with the basic character of the German soul, the German national soul. What I have to say about the German national soul can be wonderfully corroborated, not only from the German's own views on what lives and abides in his soul, in the soul lives and from the but also from the expressions of the other nations, especially from the impressions of unbiased observation in the other nations. The soul of the German people is truly a most peculiar thing. It is, I might say, somewhat uncomfortable to have to say this as a German, but it is truly a most peculiar thing. It should not be judged, but approached objectively. If one examines its basic character, one finds that it now permeates and interweaves the human being, giving him a certain emotional content, so that the forces in this folk soul are related to everything that is in the soul of the human being from the beginning of the twenties to the beginning of the forties, up to the forty-second, forty-third, forty-fifth year. That is the remarkable thing about the German national soul. If this should make the other nations uncomfortable, then they need only take comfort in the fact that what is poured out over three stages of life in the human being, so to speak, has a weaker effect, is diluted, as it were, while what concerns the other national organisms has a stronger effect, penetrates the human being more strongly. I would like to say how, in relation to the other thing I have said, these things can be made wonderfully clear to us in a few examples, so the facts about the German national soul that have just been hinted at can be made clear to us through certain phenomena. Those who, as I said, do not look directly at the folk soul itself in language, but at an effect of the folk soul, will not be surprised that a wonderful genius is at work in language. It is precisely the genius that is the folk soul that works. And how often is language cleverer than we are! How often do we only find out afterwards what has been ingeniously expressed in language. Of course, one can only characterize such things if one is aware that the things one says can actually only be said in one language in this way, and would have to be said differently in another language. But what I am saying now can be said in German. For example, the fact that it is expressed in two terms is wonderfully ingeniously designed: we do not say “father tongue” and “mother country” in ordinary language. We say “mother tongue” and “fatherland”. And for the humanities scholar, this expresses in the fullest possible way the whole way in which the native landscape is passed on to man through the paternal inheritance and in turn affects his unconscious; and how that which lives in language flows over to man from the maternal side through the forces of inheritance. But much, much more could be cited. Regarding what I have just said about the peculiarity of the German national soul, I was repeatedly confronted with an experience that perhaps I was able to make more easily than some others, since I spent a large part of my life, almost three decades, in Austria. In later years, in close harmony with the dialect research of my very esteemed teacher and friend Schröer, I was able to see how the German national soul develops when it moves into other national soul areas, into the Czech national soul area, into eastern and western Hungary, where, under the beautiful name of Heanzen, Germans live as far as the Wiesenburg district. Then we come to the areas below the Carpathians, where the Germans of Spiš live; then we come to Transylvania, where the Transylvanian Saxons live; then to the Banat, where the Swabians live. All these peoples will gradually – no value judgments or criticism should be made about this – be completely absorbed by the Magyar element. One can study a remarkable peculiarity here. It may well be mentioned: how easily the German in particular loses his nationality, gradually sheds it when he moves in with other nationalities. This is connected with the peculiarity of the German national soul of which I have just spoken. It takes hold of the human being, I would say, in a lighter, more delicate way with the forces that lie in the individual development of the human being between the ages of twenty and forty-five. But by characterizing him as more emotionally unstable, she makes it possible for him to strip away his emotional ties more easily, to denationalize himself and nationalize himself into other nations. He is not so strongly, so intimately imbued with this German essence that comes from the folk soul.

Another fact is added to this. I can only hint at these things. If one were to study the details of what I have just said, for example on the basis of Schröer's explanations of grammar and his dictionaries of Austro-German dialects, one would truly be able to prove the sentence just uttered as one would any scientific sentence. Another peculiarity that follows from this fact of the German soul is that the German soul needs the emotional connection to what is native and similar, the coexistence with what is native and similar, in order to feel the freshness of this native and similar again and again. The German is not able to push his way into foreign folklore with strong inner strength that leaves him unchanged, as the Englishman does, for example. If he wants to experience his own folk-spirit inwardly and vividly, he needs to be in direct contact with the whole aura, with the whole atmosphere of the folk-spirit. That is why something develops within this aura, this atmosphere of the folk-spirit, that is so difficult to understand for those around it, that is so difficult to grasp for the more rigidly configured folk-spirits, which immediately want to force everything into their categories and thereby distort it; whereas in the unstable, in the light equilibrium in which everything hovers in the German national soul, everything wants to be directly experienced and lived in the living connection with the national soul element itself. This is beautifully illustrated in certain sayings of the truly genuine German spirit Herman Grimm, who has often been mentioned here. More than many others, he has realized – not in the distinctly spiritual scientific form that I am now expounding, but in an inner feeling – how the German soul needs this constant, ever-present fertilization of the mind, and how it can only flourish there. Here he expresses very beautifully how that which the German forms, what the German forms, can actually only be fully understood by this German soul itself, which can be characterized in the way just indicated, and how that which is to be grasped from this soul is distorted, caricatured, by foreign folklore, for the very reason indicated, because the reasons I have already indicated. Herman Grimm says very beautiful and wonderful words, which perhaps many non-Germans do not appreciate, but they are wonderful. They are not only beautiful but also wonderfully true:

“A German who writes the history of France, of Italy, of Russia, of Turkey: in this, no man finds anything incongruous, anything contradictory”; — Herman Grimm thinks, because this German soul becomes pliable and flexible through this expansion, this German soul knows how to find its way into these other national souls – “but a Russian, Turk, Frenchman, Italian, who wanted to write about German history! And if the book should impress a few innocent people because it was written in a foreign language, then all that is needed is a translation. A Russian has written about Mozart and, buoyed by the success of his work, also about Beethoven. “Is this Mozart, is this Beethoven?” asks Herman Grimm. — “Music seems not to have any fatherland. These two people” – Mozart and Beethoven – ‘are two composers, one of whom wrote Mozart's works’ – according to what the Russian says – ‘and the other Beethoven's, but they themselves’ – he means the people the Russian is describing – ‘have nothing in common with the book and its judgments.’

There is an indication of this immediate coexistence, of this immediate connection. And Herman Grimm says particularly beautifully in the continuation of the passage just quoted:

"Is this the Goethe about whom Lewes has written two volumes? I would have thought we knew him differently. The Goethe of Mr. Lewes is a worthy English gentleman who happened to be born in Frankfurt in 1749 and to whom Goethe's destiny has been attributed, insofar as it has been received from first, second, third, fifth hand, and who is also supposed to have written Goethe's works. The book is a diligent piece of work, but there is little in it about the German Goethe. The English are Teutons like us, but they are not Germans, and what Goethe was to us, we alone feel."

The aforementioned characteristic of the German national soul means that what provides an understanding of the German national soul must be sought in this easy surrender, which, however, does not necessarily have to be associated with a certain weakness, as one might so easily think. And precisely this could emerge from the words of unbiased observers of the German soul. There is, for example, an unbiased observer – I almost shrink from reading these words aloud because, as I said, it is uncomfortable for a German to hear such words spoken about the Germans. One poem is called “To Germany”. It may be said that this poem is imbued at once with the diversity, the delicate balance of the German national soul and the strength that flows from this very balance. And so the poet says:

No nation is greater than you;
Once when the whole earth was a place of terror,
Among the strong nations none was more just than you.
You have Frederick Redbeard, and also Frederick Schiller.
The Kaiser, the spirit fears this summit, this lightning.
Against Caesar you have Hermann, against Peter Martin
Your breath is music – [Luther.
You have more heroes than the peaks of Athos.
Your deeds of glory are everywhere, be proud, you Germans!

Well, it may be read aloud for this reason, since the poem is by Victor Hugo and was written in 1871! It is part of a poem that he titled “Choice between Two Nations.” The first part is “To Germany,” and I have just read it. The second part is “To France,” and it reads, “Oh, my mother!” I would like to say: It is emblematic of the difficulty one has in grasping what is rooted in one's own national soul.

I have tried to give you a hint of how the facts speak volumes for what I have stated. But naturally I can only point to individual facts in a very sketchy way, which indicate the direction in which the empirical facts can be sought.

Now we have this German national soul in its development. We encounter it already so wonderfully vividly and magnificently described by Tacitus in the first century AD, which for earlier centuries points to the Germanic national soul from which the German national soul has grown. We see it then in its development through the Middle Ages up to its newer blossoms, where it was immersed in the poetry of Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and immersed in the great musical development of the newer German spiritual life. But Christianity, a different communal soul essence, intervenes and permeates this folk soul essence. If we examine the course of events in detail, we can see how these great aspects that I have mentioned are confirmed in the individual expressions of the soul of the people. For example, we can ask: If the being that unconsciously works in man until sexual maturity is truly seized by such a communal consciousness as Christianity, what wants to be incorporated? We need only take words, foreign words that the German language has adopted through Christianity. Such foreign words have entered into the German being that refer to what must be grasped in sensory perception, albeit with a supersensible character, for which one already needs a deeper soul life that can imprint itself in the way I have characterized. For example, the word 'nature' entered the Germanic character of Central Europe through Christianity. Of course, the way it was understood at that time, the word 'nature' is beyond the grasp of anyone who takes it only in the sense in which we understand it today. But in the dialects it still lives in the old meaning. And there we see how this word “nature,” which penetrated Central Europe with Christianity, developed further with folklore. From this one word “nature” and from other words in older versions that have been adopted in this way, we can see how the forces that have been hinted at, which have entered into human individuality from Christianity, are effective in such words.

Let us take a time when the influence of another national soul on the German national soul was more effective, let us say the thirteenth century. Because the soul of the German people has been poured out throughout the entire period of the development of the human soul, from the age of twenty to thirty-five or thirty-six and even later, because it is spread throughout this entire period, it can also absorb influences from outside through all the qualities I have mentioned. We shall see in a moment how particularly shaped these influences are. We have seen here how Christianity has flowed into them. We could demonstrate these peculiar words in words, in word transformations, which flowed in as foreign words at the time when the French folk soul nature had attained a particular strength, as in the thirteenth century. Then quite different words come in, words that grasp the inner soul, words that are grasped only by the subconscious and undergo their development, foreign words, yes, today one no longer knows that they are foreign words; they will therefore escape the fate of being eradicated as foreign words. Words like “price” and “clear” come in in the thirteenth century. The word “klar” (clear) does not exist before the thirteenth century; “Preis” (price), “etwas preisen” (to praise something), “einen Preis haben” (to have a price) comes in at that time. These are words that are connected with the soul being. What we have recognized in the French folk soul being has an effect on the German folk soul being.

In this way, one could follow in many individual ways how the German soul-nature is developing through the influence of foreign soul-natures. But just as we have to look for the interaction of conditions in the individual, also in the sequence of time, as I indicated in the first part of my lecture, so, if the development of the German soul is to be fully understood, the work of this German soul must be understood. And I can characterize this for you briefly in the following way. As I said, we find the German national soul already in very ancient times. You know that I do not love vague, mystical, and especially not materialistic-mystical concepts, but in this case you will forgive me: This German national soul acts like a mighty alchemist, bringing about what has been taking place among Germans in the center of Europe from ancient times, going back to pre-Christian centuries. It is already at work in such a way that the earlier activity is connected with the later one, when there could not yet be any question of the configuration of the French, Spanish, Italian, as well as the British, being present in its present form. It continued to work through the centuries and continues to work today. As we have often said in these lectures, it carries the seeds of a long-lasting effect. Precisely when one recognizes it, one can see this. And it can work through such long periods of time, in so many transformations, precisely because it contains such widespread forces as those present in the human soul from the beginning of the 1920s to the 1940s. But, as we have seen, it has been at work since ancient times. But how did it work then? Now we see how this mighty alchemist, the German national soul, comes into play, bringing about the conditions described by Tacitus, and how later there came the time when that which had been wrought out of this national soul made an onslaught against the southern, western, Roman nature.

Now we see something highly peculiar. Certain parts that were originally connected with the German folk soul move into the Balkan Peninsula, move into Spain, into present-day France, move across as Anglo-Saxons to the present-day British Isles. That which was connected with the German folk soul through blood is given off to the surrounding area, to the periphery. And the surrounding peripheral cultures arise from the fact that other folk souls in turn act like the supersensible alchemists, that, for example, the Romance element is mixed together in an alchemical way, right down to the language, with that which is the old Gallic element, but into which has flowed what was connected with the Germanic blood of the German folk soul character, which has been drawn into the Franks in the Frankish Empire. This is what is present in France of the German folk soul itself, what lives in it, what is mixed with the other element through the alchemist of the French folk soul. The same happened with the Italian element, and the same with the British element. The Anglo-Saxon element, in a state that still testifies to a relatively early development, an earlier stage of development of the German folk soul, pushed into Celtic nature. It was met by a Romanesque nature. And so the alchemist of the British national soul had to do, as it were, what I have characterized as the interrelations of these individual Western national souls with the individual human beings, who have their soul-mood character from the individual national souls. So that if we look into the surrounding area, we find that it contains truly ancient Germanic soul elements. That is there. And what has emerged in the way I have described has come about precisely because — just as substances are obtained in chemistry through the interaction of other substances — folk soul elements have been mixed together in this way. But in the center of Europe, what has undergone a continuous development is what has always remained in line and current with this broad character that I have described.

That is the difference between the people of Central Europe and the surrounding nations. That is the difference that must be borne in mind if one wants to understand how this German national soul developed further. How closely it still felt connected to what was around it! How it has in a certain way brought back what had first flowed out of Central Europe! How Italian art flows back from Italianism, and one does not need to be a racial fanatic to describe this, how the spirit of Dante flows back into what is the nature of the German folk soul! How French essence flows back, how British essence flows back! It has flowed into our days in a way that I have often hinted at here. Thus we see that this peculiarity lies in the development of the German soul. It remains in Central Europe, it creates an environment for itself and interacts with this environment. Through this, I would like to say, it fertilizes that which, because of its extended character, is only visible in individual shades.

Thus it has come about that within this German national soul those motives that lie within the national soul character of the environment could be renewed and perfected. How we hardly see the environment that emerges in the German Siegfried. And how we see how that which has been brought into Germanism from the power of the folk soul, in a certain time, seizing everything as a folk soul, has found expression in the Siegfried saga. Then this soul recovers, makes an inhalation – in contrast to the exhalation in Siegfried – in order to make a new exhalation in the twelfth or thirteenth century, a new approach, and to bring forth from itself the character opposite to Siegfried, the Parzival character. And one need only compare these two characters, who really arose from the innermost being and weaving of the German folk soul, one need only compare these two polar opposites, Siegfried and Parzival, and one will see the breadth of the German folk soul and the possibilities for development that are expressed in the path that this development has taken, from Siegfried, whose already lost song was rediscovered and written down at the time when Wolfram von Eschenbach was writing his Parzival. Yes, the German national soul goes through what it can only go through over a long period of time because of its breadth. This is the significance of its development. This is what we can still recognize today as infinitely broad possibilities in the development of the German national soul, if we look at this German national soul in the right way. But what takes hold of it, takes hold of it with a certain strength because it takes hold of it comprehensively, because it takes hold of it with the harmony of all soul forces.

It would be easy to reproach me for presenting things here that only lie on the surface of life. That is not the case, and I do not want to do it. What I have expressed as the character of the German national soul comes to one, if not in the abstract way in which I had to express it today, then, I would like to say, as a truly intuitive recognition. Wherever the German soul lives, it lives there in some form or other, and everywhere the German soul relates to other souls in the way that had to be characterized today. In this way the German soul also relates to that which flows into it as Christianity, completely embracing this Christianity with the soul and giving birth to it anew from within. One does not remain merely on the surface, on the educated surface of the German national soul, when characterizing something like this, but one expresses what is the fundamental character of the entire German soul.

I could give many examples. I will mention just one, which shows how a Catholic priest's awareness of the German national soul is lived in his feelings and perceptions, as I have indicated today in terms of knowledge. In 1850, Xavier Schmid wrote in an unassuming booklet in which he advocated a shared, in-depth understanding of Christianity as felt by the Germans: “Just as Israel was chosen to bring forth the Christ in the flesh, so the German people are chosen to give birth to him spiritually. Just as the political liberation of that remarkable people was dependent on the inner one, so the greatness of the German people will essentially depend on whether it fulfills its spiritual mission.” How is the grasp of Christianity in the mind of this simply educated priest Xavier Schmid characterized! What I have characterized is already alive in the deepest popular mind, even if, of course, one would have to coin different words than I had to coin here today to show how what has been characterized today lives in the simplest popular mind.

And how the breadth of the German national character is connected with the spiritual, one can, if one has an eye for it, also study from the external aspects that present themselves in life. Just one more example. I have in front of me two essays, one by a German and the other by someone else. Jakob Grimm, who grasped with such deep love what lived in the German national character, had an inkling of the breadth and expanse that I have characterized today. Precisely because of his love for the German people, it was clear to Jakob Grimm that there must of course also be dark sides. That is why Jakob Grimm wrote an essay about German pedantry, in which he even goes so far as to say that the Germans invented pedantry if it had not already existed in the world. But that is also indicative of the breadth of the German character. Jakob Grimm's essay on German pedantry, especially in language, is very interesting. But it also shows that the German has this peculiarity of grasping everything from the breadth of his emotional life.

We hear words about German freedom from a German, from Professor Troeltsch. Of course I do not want to take his point of view, but I am characterizing the peculiarities of the German soul. With truly German thoroughness, but also with German acumen, he sets about showing how freedom is shaded according to the Italian, the English, and the French national character. He conscientiously accounts for how the idea of freedom is conceived among these nations. And then he attempts to characterize the concept of freedom that the German people have, a concept of freedom of which Herman Grimm himself also spoke, more beautifully than Troeltsch, but in almost similar words: “It was reserved for the German people to recognize as the character of the human being in the idea that freedom which unites the full development of human individuality and personality with harmonious cooperation in the totality.” When such people characterize freedom in such a way that man works in freedom, it is always meant that what can flow from his soul as freedom is integrated into spiritual life. And especially before the middle of the last century, no German could have spoken of freedom without characterizing this freedom from the depths of spiritual life. It was only after the English influences in the second half of the nineteenth century that Germans also more or less abandoned this. But little by little they are coming back to it. And the essay continues: “If one wants to formulate a formula for German unity, one could say: organized national unity based on a dutiful and at the same time critical devotion of the individual to the whole, supplemented and corrected by the independence and individuality of free spiritual education.” — At least one idea of freedom, albeit perhaps one that could be called pedantic, but one shaped out of the abundance of spiritual understanding, an answer from the spirit to the question: What is freedom?

I will read to you an answer to the question, “What is freedom?” from the other book. For when considering the soul of a nation, it is not merely a matter of looking at the content. Someone may say, “Yes, the one from whom I am now reading sees something quite different from the other.” But that is not the point when considering the souls of nations. The souls of the people are unconsciously driven into the current in which they drift. And the fact that one person has this effect, the other that, one these ideas, the other those ideas, one these images, the other those images, even if they are both correct, is not the point when one wants to characterize the souls of the people in this unconscious work.

“What is freedom?” says the other. “The image that comes to my mind is a large, powerful machine. If I put the parts together so awkwardly and clumsily that when one part wants to move, it is hindered by the others, then the whole machine bends and comes to a standstill. The freedom of the individual parts” - note: the freedom of the parts of the machine! - ‘would consist in the best adaptation and composition of all.’ - To characterize human freedom, he says all this! ‘If the large piston of a machine is to run perfectly freely, it must be precisely adapted to the other parts of the machine. Then it is free...’ -— So, to know how man becomes free, one examines the machine! “... then it is free, not because it is isolated and left to its own devices, but because it has been carefully and skillfully integrated into the rest of the large structure. What is freedom? We say that a locomotive runs freely. What do we mean by that? We mean that the individual components are put together and fitted into each other in such a way that friction is kept to a minimum. We say of a ship that she cuts easily through the waves: how freely she sails, and mean by it that she is perfectly adapted to the strength of the wind. Set her against the wind, and she will hold and sway, all the planks and the whole hull will tremble, and immediately she is moored.” Now he shows that this applies to human nature as well as to machines, to the steamboat and so on: “It is only released when it is allowed to fall away again and the wise adaptation to the forces it must obey is restored.”

One can say that in such things one can see how the soul of a nation enters into human individuality, sometimes in the way I read it to you in the case of the German, and sometimes in the way I read it to you in the case of a very important American, Woodrow Wilson. He is most certainly a very important American. The point is to see how the human being is seized by the folk soul. One can clearly notice the difference when one goes down to the depths of the human being, where the folk soul unconsciously influences the individual human being, as I have characterized it.

I would have to say much more if I wanted to give a complete characterization of the development of the German soul in the directions indicated. But I think that at least the main points of view have been outlined, and they do testify that there is something in this German national soul nature that is predisposed by its very nature to have an effect on others. It has had an effect. We have seen how what remained in the center, what was concentrated there, was released into the periphery through blood. It continually released, I would say continually exhaled and inhaled again, what relationships are with the other national souls in the surrounding area.

In the direction I have indicated lies a science that will one day, when it exists, make understandable what exists between nations. Only then will there be a great possibility that nations will consciously understand each other fully. We see at the same time how great the distance is between what one can imagine as an ideal of understanding between nations and what one encounters in our difficult times. I did not want to weigh or evaluate. But in the end, things evaluate themselves in a certain way.

I don't know – I say this, of course, only in a very modest way – whether similar considerations are being made in Europe's periphery that strive for objectivity in the same way as we have done here today, regarding the relationship between the Italian national soul and the German national soul, the French national soul, the British national soul and the German national soul. But perhaps this is also a peculiar characteristic of the German national soul. In any case, it is already in the German national soul that, as it seems to me, the German can understand the others better than they understand him, even if they do not have to understand him as badly as they do now in our fateful times.

Does it not seem almost like a realization of what we are living in when we measure such a consideration of the national soul against all that is said today about the nature of Germanness? It is indeed our time that these things are put together. As you have seen in Victor Hugo, there were times when Germanic character could be regarded in a way that was in line with today's developments, even if not in these terms. Yes, such sentiments have been felt time and again. And there were quite a few until recently and there are certainly still some now – quite a few until recently, who also made themselves heard, pointing out how wrong it is to treat German civilization as it has been treated, for example, by the British. I can refer to words that were printed on August 2, 1914. The words were printed: “England's war against Germany in Serbia and Russia's interest is a sin against civilization.” On August 2, 1914, these words appeared in the “Times” in London, signed by C. G. Brown, Cambridge University; Burkitt, Cambridge University; Carpenter, Oxford University; Ramsay, formerly of Aberdeen University; Selbie, Oxford University; J. J. Thomson, Cambridge University. And added to these words are: We cannot know, but it may turn out – or something like that – that our country could be involved in this war through all kinds of agreements. We hope not, but if it happened, we would have to – out of a sense of patriotism, of course – well, there is something like: – keep our mouths shut. – Well, these things are not only in England, of course. But we do not want to hope – the Englishmen in question continued – that this could happen to a people that is so close to us and has so much in common with us.

There was felt what must not be expressed later. Well, of course, many things must not be expressed in our country either, that goes without saying. And from this side, the gentlemen whose names have been read out cannot be particularly reproached. But perhaps it is less important what may or may not be expressed and more important what is expressed when certain others cannot speak. And here I would like to say: I cannot believe that a weekly paper within the German national territory could be found that would write similar words about another nation in these difficult times, would have them printed, as was written on July 10, 1915 in an English weekly paper, in “John Bull,” one of the most widely read weekly papers in England, - written where others must remain silent. Don't say: John Bull is just a scurrilous paper! I say: I cannot believe that it is possible that in the most, most scurrilous paper, a similar way could be written about another nation, as it is written to characterize the German character. I will read just a few sentences: “The German is the stain of Europe, and the task of the present war is to wipe him off the face of the earth.... As he was in the beginning, so he is now and so he will remain forever – bad, brutal, bloodthirsty, cruel, mean and calculating. He is a voluptuary, is sleazy, shifty, thick-skinned. He slurs his speech in guttural sounds. He is a drunkard, miser, rapacious and fawning. That is the beast we must fight... He lives in apartments that, in terms of hygiene, are on par with a pigsty.” And now the weekly paper rises to a kind of, I would say, prayer from this mood: “Look at history wherever and however you want, you will always find the German as a beast!... God will never give you, English people, this opportunity again. Your mission is to rid Europe of this unclean animal, this beast. As long as this beast is not destroyed, the progress of humanity will be delayed. England is slowly but surely approaching the final milestone of her destiny, and when we have passed it, and the hour comes when we want to enter the gate of heaven, the Huns must not be the reason that we are sent back. But the gates of heaven would be slammed in our faces, because the heavenly realms are only for those who have destroyed the devil. The Germans are the plague-boils of human society. And these times of war are the X-rays that reveal their true character. This plague-boil must be cut out, and the British bayonet is the instrument for this operation, which must be performed on the beast when our poisonous gases have chloroformed it.

I do not know whether it would really be possible, within the bounds of what the German national soul encompasses, to find similar words in a similar direction. I think that it is precisely what can be recognized as the character of the German national soul that will prevent the Germans from doing so.

But in conclusion, I would like to say a few words: Long may the Germans preserve their spiritual character, falling into such grotesque madness. It is madness, but there is method to this madness. For it is he who develops, while the others mentioned must remain silent. These here characterize what they actually have to do against the Germans, what they are fighting for, not only in the field where the fight is with external weapons, but also in the spiritual field. We look at this. We consider it madness, albeit methodical. But the others call it: “The battle of civilization against barbarism!” - “The battle of the spirit against matter!” - I don't need to say anything more about that and I can leave it to your own thoughts as to what you want to think about it.

The day after tomorrow I will talk about the human soul and its stages of development through birth and death and its connection with the universe.