The Eternal in the Human Soul

GA 67 — 21 February 1918, Berlin

3. Goethe as the Father of Spiritual Research

I would understand if someone were to regard the whole idea behind my lecture today as a misguided notion, and I would also understand if someone were to say how Goethe's name could be misused by establishing a connection to spiritual science as it is meant here, since it is well known that Goethe's worldview is unique in that it is purely and clearly oriented toward the external natural world, and that it must have been quite skeptical of elevating the laws of the world to ideal heights, as Goethe opposed in Schiller, for example. One might then say: How much more dismissive would Goethe have been if someone had tried to connect his concepts and ideas with what, based on very specific inner experiences, tends to assume a concrete, real spiritual world that stands alongside the natural world. I am well aware of how a mind as rich as Goethe's can be misused to establish such a relationship. For no matter how many of Goethe's sayings one quotes to reinforce this or that opinion of one's own, it is of course always possible to quote other sayings of Goethe to reinforce the opposite opinion. But in view of all this, I must mention from the outset that in my truly long-standing observation of Goethe and Goethe's worldview — my first major publication on Goethe appeared almost thirty-five years ago — I have never been interested in quoting this or that content of a Goethean sentence or a Goethean view to reinforce the worldview referred to here. My aim has always been to characterize the entire nature, the inner structure of Goethe's spiritual life in its relationship to natural events, to world events in general. For it seems to me that it is precisely when one is able to approach the inner structure, the whole direction and nature of Goethe's being in this way that one will also gain an understanding of what pedantic minds find so repugnant, namely that a mind such as Goethe's expressed seemingly contradictory views on one and the same thing. On the other hand, it will be easy for people from all sides to object to bringing Goethe into what could be called the exploration of spiritual life or, in a strictly scientific sense, the exploration of world events.

First of all, when it comes to researching the supersensible as opposed to the sensible, philosophers believe that they are called upon to do so by virtue of the training of human thinking. It has always been remembered how Goethe repeatedly characterized his entire attitude toward the world by saying that everything he had learned about the world was basically due to the fact that he had never thought about thinking. For many philosophically minded people, this alone seems to condemn Goethe's entire philosophical approach. It therefore seems necessary to reject Goethe's nature for the exploration of the world's interrelationships, insofar as such exploration must go beyond what is immediately apparent to the senses. In turn, religious natures, which want to direct the mind away from the world that surrounds humans sensually to a world that is outside the sensual, will naturally come up against a statement that is so concise for Goethe's view, as he himself made it. He clearly indicates that he always found it highly unsympathetic to speak of things from another world. He even expresses this once by saying: Just as there is a spot in the eye that actually sees nothing, so there is a hollow place in the human brain. And when this hollow place, which actually sees nothing, dreams all kinds of things into the world, one speaks of such trifles as things from another world. When Goethe made this statement, he also pointed out how a person as spiritually inclined as J.G. Hamann, who was also called the “Magus of the North” because of his spiritual disposition, a contemporary of Herder and Goethe, became restless when people spoke of things from another world. Goethe completely agrees with Hamann in this regard. Goethe energetically refused to speak of things from another world. Even natural scientists, despite the strong influence of Goethe's name and great influence, cannot, if they are completely sincere in their approach to modern science, can, according to their view, refer to the fact that Goethe, for example, showed in his theory of colors how he was never able to penetrate the strictly scientific method of research that is necessary to understand nature according to its laws, that this was never in accordance with his nature, and that it was precisely because of this that he arrived at a view of the world of colors that deviated so greatly from the prevailing doctrine.

Now, it cannot be my task here to justify Goethe's natural science on its own merits. I have done that in a whole series of writings. Today, my task is simply to draw a few threads from spiritual science to Goethe's natural science. Above all, I would like to pick up on what is truly characteristic of this spirit for those who approach Goethe: the rejection of thinking about thinking. Not only when Goethe makes a statement such as that he never wanted to think about thinking, but also wherever one is willing to recognize it, in following Goethe's worldview, one has the feeling that it was something instinctive in Goethe to shy away, in the sense of a true philosopher, as is often thought, to subject thinking itself to thoughtful consideration. He shied away from it as if it were something that would have taken away from him what otherwise constituted his strength, his power in his view of the world. At such a point, where Goethe characterizes himself in this way, one must pause, for from here one can look quite deeply into the structure of Goethe's mind. If we consider philosophically minded natures who have wrestled with what the thinking of the human soul is, we can see how the directing of the human soul's powers toward thinking, so that one would like to make thinking itself an object of observation like other objects of observation in our world of experience, always evokes something in the soul that seems like an insurmountable obstacle to anything else. This directing of thought toward thought itself brings people into a whole series of uncertainties. Although, whenever one seriously wants to explore the supersensible, one is always advised to ask oneself: Is this human thinking capable of penetrating the spiritual world? — one nevertheless finds oneself confronted with uncertainty, doubt, and a certain inner vacillation.

As a single piece of factual evidence for this, which could be multiplied a hundredfold, I would like to quote the words of a recent thinker, a thinker who has become less well known, but who, for those who know him, is one of the most, if not the most profound thinkers of recent times, Professor Gideon Spicker, the philosopher with the remarkable fate who worked his way from a confessional, ecclesiastical worldview to a free philosophical standpoint. One can trace the nature of this intellectual journey, how a way of thinking once truly rose up through its own power from a traditional to a free point of view, when reading his book "At the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin," which was published in 1910 as a kind of philosophical autobiography of Gideon Spicker. There we find the following sentence, which is the reproduction of a personal experience with thinking:

"Whatever philosophy one professes: whether dogmatic or skeptical, empirical or transcendental, critical or eclectic: all without exception start from an unproven and unprovable proposition, namely the necessity of thinking. No investigation, however deep it may be, can ever get behind this necessity. It must be accepted unconditionally and cannot be justified by anything; any attempt to prove its correctness always presupposes it. Beneath it yawns a bottomless abyss, a terrifying darkness illuminated by no ray of light. So we do not know where it comes from, nor where it leads. Whether a gracious God or an evil demon placed it in reason, both are uncertain."

This is a personal experience of thinking, of a way of thinking that was not merely driven by external scientific endeavors to clarify what thinking actually is, but that struggled to grasp the human being at the point where it thinks, in order to find at this point where the temporal, the transitory nature of man is connected to the eternal. Everyone who wants to approach the eternal essence in human beings in a deeper way, rather than superficially, must actually arrive at this point. But what does Gideon Spicker find? He finds that when one arrives at the point where thinking can be observed, the necessity of thinking becomes apparent, but so does a bottomless abyss. For beyond this thinking — what is there? Is it a gracious God or an evil demon who has placed thinking in reason? An abyss, a desolate darkness is what Gideon Spicker sees. One can immediately experience that all those who cannot go beyond the pursuit of thinking as far as thinking itself, nevertheless cannot find satisfaction within this thinking.

All this is like a spiritually instinctive experience in Goethe's healthy worldview. One cannot say that he ever found himself inwardly ready to visualize the bottomless abyss of which Gideon Spicker speaks. But Goethe felt and sensed that something like this could happen to someone who wants to solve the riddles of the world through thinking alone. That is why he did not approach this point at all, why he left the consideration of thinking outside his sphere, so to speak. We will see shortly what deeper impulses lay behind Goethe's instincts. For now, I just wanted to point out that Goethe was very much at the point where philosophers stand when they want to explore the eternal in human nature and in the world, but that he, I would say, circumvented this point, did not approach it.

Similarly, one can grasp Goethe's entire nature immediately when one pauses at his rejection of all things belonging to another world. Here we see the opposite impulse in him, which is contrary to his rejection of thinking, contrary also to the rejection of a purely philosophical worldview in general, that impulse which, out of immediate spiritual instinctiveness, asserted that one does not need to leave the world that immediately presents itself to the senses in order to find the spirit. Goethe was well aware that those who are able to find the spirit do not need to seek it in another world, and conversely, that those who feel nature so little imbued with spirit that they need to reflect on another world can, at most, find the fantastic and dreamlike in another world, but never the spirit itself. Goethe sought the spirit so much within the things of this world that he had to reject the idea of seeking it in the realm of any other world. He felt that even the idea of having to leave this world in order to attain the spirit was something spiritless.

In particular, however, one gets an impression of the nature of Goethe's observation of the world when one considers how Goethe behaved towards the phenomena of nature, how, in other words, he really sought the spirit and spiritual life in nature. It is widely known that Goethe did not approach the various branches of natural science in a conventional manner, but only in later years of his life, and that his general worldview and the ideas he had developed throughout his life compelled him to come to terms with the phenomena of nature. Herman Grimm rightly emphasized as a significant characteristic of Goethe's life that, while others were gradually and methodically introduced to this or that scientific approach during a certain period of their youth, Goethe, in many respects, was already a mature man when he was brought into contact with scientific endeavors through the necessities of life and through practical experience, so that he had to develop his own ideas about this or that natural phenomenon with a certain maturity.

As a rule, he arrived at ideas that differed very, very significantly from what the leading natural scientists of his time thought about the same things. It can be said that Goethe's view is diametrically opposed not only to the natural science of his time, but also to the prevailing natural science of the present day in a certain respect.

It is completely unacceptable when certain parties repeatedly pick out individual statements by Goethe in order to prove, in a one-sided manner, the views of Haeckel or his opponents, and the like. As I have already mentioned, if one wants to, one can prove and confirm anything from Goethe. Goethe came to botany because he wanted to take up plant cultivation in the Grand Duchy of Weimar, that is, out of practical experience. He came to geology through mining in Ilmenau, to physics because he had been entrusted with the natural science collections of the University of Jena, and so on. So, out of necessity, he sought to arrive at ideas that would enable him to penetrate the secrets of nature as he perceived them. It is well known that in this way he developed views that were partly confirmed in the course of the nineteenth century, insofar as they refer to external scientific facts. But Goethe did not arrive at these views like other natural scientists; rather, his comprehensive way of thinking compelled him to think about certain natural processes and natural phenomena in a certain way. One can say that this was the case right from his first, epoch-making discovery.

I would just like to briefly mention how Goethe's journey through natural science actually unfolded.

When Goethe became acquainted with zoology and anthropology through his observation of the anatomical and physiological collections in Jena, he also familiarized himself with all kinds of teachings that were common in the natural sciences of the time about humans as external sensory beings. At that time, people were still looking for external differences between humans and animals. They searched in a way that is no longer comprehensible to today's common view of nature. For example, they sought to find a difference between humans and animals in a single detail, saying: The upper jaw clearly shows that humans do not have an intermaxillary bone, while all higher animals have this bone. Goethe found this contrary to his entire sensibility, simply because he could not imagine that the entire remaining structure of humans, even if it differs fundamentally from the structure of animals in its overall posture, could differ from it in such an insignificant detail as the absence of a premaxillary bone in the upper jaw. Goethe now sought, by becoming an anatomical researcher himself, by examining skeleton after skeleton and comparing the human structure with that of animals in relation to the upper jaw, whether what the anatomists said really had any inner significance. And Goethe was indeed able to show that there is no difference between the human and animal skeleton in this respect. In doing so, he himself consulted embryological research, which later became particularly important, and showed that in humans, relatively early during embryonic development, the remaining parts of the upper jaw fuse with the intermaxillary bone in such a way that the latter does not appear to exist in humans, whereas in animals there is a clear separation between the intermaxillary bone and the other upper jaw bones. Goethe had thus realized that his initial feeling was correct, that humans differ from animals not in such a detail of their structure, but only in their overall posture. Of course, this did not make Goethe a materialistic thinker. But it enabled him to approach ideas that were close to his heart, especially through his acquaintance with Herder, who wanted to extend a comprehensive way of thinking to all phenomena in the world, so that the development of the world represented an inner necessity that ultimately produced humans at its peak. How can one imagine, Goethe said in agreement with Herder, that there is a great harmony, an inner lawful necessity, in the development of the world, and that then suddenly a line is drawn somewhere, with the entire development of animals on this side of the line and the development of humanity on the other side, which is supposed to differ from the development of animals by such an insignificant detail? One can see from the way Goethe speaks, when he was forced by the facts to accept this bone in humans, what he was actually concerned with. Truly, it was not about a single scientific discovery, but about seeing a harmonious order in the whole of nature, so that the individual fits into the whole everywhere, so that the individual does not fall out anywhere, so that nowhere are there gaps and leaps in the development of the world. In a letter to Herder, in which he joyfully shared his discovery with the words, “There it is, the little bone!”, one can see that Goethe found in this single fact something like a confirmation of the worldview that permeated his entire being.

He continued this view precisely in relation to the formation of animals. Here, too, Goethe came across individual facts, but these were not important to him as such, only as confirmation of his entire worldview. He himself recounts how, during his stay in Venice, he found an animal skull in the cemetery that clearly showed him that the bones of the head are nothing more than transformed bones of the spine. Goethe imagined that the ordinary ring bones of the spine, which have only individual elevations, could grow further, and that what only appears to be a ring can flatten out, so that something seemingly very simple and primitive can metamorphose in such a way that what encloses the brain in a completely different external form is nothing more than a series of transformed vertebrae. He thus found that what, as a ring-shaped vertebra, contains all kinds of growth possibilities in a concealed manner, can transform itself into the skull bone, which then encloses the brain. This led Goethe to the idea that humans and animals, and indeed all the various entities of organic life, are constructed from relatively simple structures, but from structures that form and unfold in a living metamorphosis. If one really delves into what Goethe wanted to achieve with such research, one immediately gets the feeling that Goethe actually wanted to apply this theory of metamorphosis not only to the skeleton, but to all other parts of the human being, and that it was only because, of course, a human being cannot do everything, and he was working with limited research resources, that he was only able to carry out his research in a specific area. Those familiar with Goethe's scientific writings are well aware of how carefully he demonstrated that the bones of the skull are transformed vertebrae. However, one may have the impression that Goethe's ideas in this field went much further. Goethe must have had the inner conviction that the entire human brain, as an external physical-sensory organ, is only a transformed part of the spinal cord, that the human formative forces have the ability to transform what is, at a lower level, only a limb of the spinal cord into the complex human brain. I had this feeling when, at the end of 1389, I was given the task of processing Goethe's previously unpublished writings on natural science, which had remained in manuscript form until then, in the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar. I was particularly interested in finding out whether such ideas really lived in Goethe, ideas that one could sense must have been present in him. I was especially interested in whether Goethe really had the idea of viewing the brain as a transformed spinal cord segment. And lo and behold, while working through Goethe's manuscripts, I actually found a sentence written in pencil in a notebook, as if it were Goethe's intuition: “The brain is only a transformed spinal ganglion.” This part of Goethe's scientific writings, which forms the eighth volume of the second section of the large Weimar edition, was then taken care of by the anatomist Bardeleben. There you can find Goethe's omission about the human brain cited.

As is well known, Goethe then applied the same way of thinking to the world of plants. And there, his views found just as little contradiction as in the field of anatomy. Goethe actually conceives of the whole plant as composed of a single organ. He sees this single organ in the leaf. Backwards and forwards, the plant is always just a leaf. For him, the colourful flower petal is the transformed green plant leaf; even the stamens and pistils are just transformed leaves; everything on the plant is a leaf. That which lives in the plant leaf as formative power has the ability to take on all kinds of external forms. Goethe explained this so beautifully in his 1790 work “An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants.”

Whatever one's opinion of the details, whether in this or that area of Goethe's natural science, one thing stands out as a consistent feature of his entire natural science: the way in which he conducted his research. This approach was, however, something foreign to many people, and it remains so today. Goethe himself spoke clearly about this approach. Imagine how the human soul, which in Goethe's sense faces the external world of living beings, is compelled to conceive of an organ such as a plant leaf transforming itself into a flower petal, then again into a thread-like stamen, and even transforming itself into a root. Imagine a simple ring-shaped vertebra puffed up and flattened by internal laws of growth, so that in its formation it becomes suitable for enclosing not only the spinal cord but also the brain, which itself is transformed from a spinal cord structure, and how necessary this is, which Goethe himself felt as the inner mobility of his thinking. He probably sensed what prevents us from seeing the phenomena of the world in this way. Those who have rigid thinking, those who have a way of thinking that only wants to form sharply contoured concepts, form the fixed concept of the green leaf, the flower petal, and so on, but cannot move from one concept to another. In doing so, nature falls apart into mere details. Because their concepts themselves lack inner mobility, they are unable to penetrate the inner mobility of nature. This, however, leads one to immerse oneself in Goethe's soul and to become convinced that his way of knowing is something completely different from that of many others. While for many others cognition is a joining together of concepts that they form separately, for Goethe cognition is an immersion in the world of beings, a pursuit of that which grows and becomes and is constantly changing, a pursuit such that his thinking itself is constantly changing, that it becomes continuous, constantly passing from one thing to another. In short, Goethe brings into inner motion that which is otherwise mere thinking. Then it is no longer mere thinking. I will speak more about this in the next lectures. To briefly summarize, it is about the human being awakening to an inner life of thought what is otherwise merely combinatory thinking, as it underlies what is often called “science” today. Then thinking is a life in thought. Then one can no longer think about thinking, but it transforms into something else entirely. Then thinking about thinking is transformed into a spiritual perception of thinking, and one has thinking before one in the same way as one otherwise has external sensory objects before one, except that one has these before one's eyes and ears, while one has thinking before one's soul filled with spiritual perception. Goethe wanted to move everywhere from mere thinking to inner spiritual contemplation, from mere consciousness, as it is saturated with thinking in everyday life, to contemplative consciousness, as I have described it in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Mystery of Man). That is why Goethe is dissatisfied with Kant's statement that man cannot approach the so-called “things in themselves” with his research or even to the mystery of existence, and that Kant called it “an adventure of reason” when man wants to ascend from ordinary judgment, which combines, to “intuitive judgment,” which in this way awakens combinatory thinking to inner life.

Goethe said that if one accepts that humans can rise to a higher realm through virtue and immortality—the so-called postulates of practical reason in Kant—why should one not courageously undertake the “adventure of reason” in contemplating nature? Goethe demands this contemplative power of judgment from human beings. From this point of view, it is understandable why Goethe was so shy about what is called thinking about thinking, why he did not want to indulge in it. Goethe knew that if one wants to think about thinking, one is actually in roughly the same situation as if one wanted to paint painting. One might imagine that someone wants to paint painting, that they even do it. But then one would probably say that this goes beyond what painting actually is. Similarly, one must go beyond thinking if it is to become concrete. What I have spoken about in the lectures already given in this winter cycle is that human beings are capable of developing the powers and abilities slumbering in their souls in such a way that they attain contemplative consciousness. Goethe, in turn, carried this possibility, this ability, within himself instinctively, spiritually instinctively. Goethe knew from a spiritual instinct that human beings can awaken hidden abilities within themselves. When a person succeeds in doing this, what can be called contemplative consciousness occurs, what can be called the awakening of the spiritual eyes and ears, so that the spiritual world is around us, just as the sensory world is otherwise around the senses. Then, in a sense, we step out not only of our ordinary sensory life, but also of our ordinary thinking. Then one sees thinking as reality. Thinking cannot be thought, it can be seen. Goethe therefore always understood when philosophers approached him who attributed to themselves the ability to see thinking in a spiritual vision. It always remained incomprehensible to him when people claimed they could think about thinking. To him, this was like someone wanting to paint painting. Only a higher ability allows thinking to appear before human beings. Goethe possessed this ability. The fact that he possessed it is simply demonstrated by the nature of his view of nature. For the ability to set thinking in living motion in order to follow the metamorphosis of things is, at a lower level, the same as contemplative consciousness at a higher level. Goethe felt himself thinking while contemplating. Only in Goethe's case was there a special peculiarity.

There are certain people who have what could be called a kind of naive clairvoyance, a kind of naive contemplative consciousness. It is far from me to claim that Goethe had only a kind of naive contemplative consciousness in this way, but Goethe did have a special predisposition that distinguished him from those who are only able to attain contemplative consciousness through the completely conscious, arbitrary development of the deeper abilities of their soul. Goethe did not have this intuitive consciousness from the outset, like the naive clairvoyants, but he had the ability to bring his thinking, his feeling, the whole structure of his soul life into such a movement that he could not only investigate externally and thereby arrive at laws of nature formulated in thought, but that he could also follow the inner life of natural phenomena in their metamorphoses. Now it is a special peculiarity that when one comes to the perception of the spirit in a non-arbitrary way, by having a certain predisposition from the outset — one could speak of clairvoyance, if the word were not so misused, if it were not so easily misunderstood; I understand this to mean only what I characterize as such in these lectures — that this predisposition, if one now wants to arbitrarily develop the ability of spiritual vision, is initially impaired, even extinguished. Goethe had this natural predisposition within himself to gradually develop a certain visionary consciousness with regard to natural phenomena. He did not need rules such as those I have described in my book “How to Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,” which can apply to everyone. Goethe, as I said, was not endowed with contemplative consciousness from the beginning, but in the course of his own individual development, it was natural for him to develop certain abilities differently from other people, to develop them toward contemplation. This naive talent, this instinctive advancement of his soul, would have been extinguished at first. If the talent is not present, there is no need to extinguish it; then one can calmly develop these abilities arbitrarily. But since they were present in Goethe as an inner spiritual impulse, he did not want to disturb them as such; he wanted to leave them to themselves. Hence his reluctance to engage with the thinking that he only wanted to observe with his own thinking. Otherwise, however, one must try to get to the point of thinking in order to grasp the thoughts themselves and gradually transform them into powers of observation.

It is a special individual peculiarity of Goethe that he felt the growth of those powers that can also be developed artificially. He did not want to destroy this naivety by, I would say, pouring too much consciousness over it. But this shows that it is not unjustified, especially in Goethe's case, to look not only at how his soul forces work internally, but also at how his soul forces submerge into nature, to try, as it were, to relive how he follows the changing nature, the nature progressing from metamorphosis to metamorphosis, with an inner, mobile soul life. Then one will inevitably find in Goethe a model for the development of contemplative consciousness, those spiritual powers that truly lead into the spiritual world, into the eternal.

Once one has become so attuned to what Goethe carried through the metamorphosis of nature that one not only observes it externally, but also tries to become like him oneself by activating such powers within oneself, then one also comes to transfer what Goethe pursued in his view of nature to the human soul itself. And then it becomes clear what Goethe himself neglected, because his senses were initially directed outward, toward nature, which he viewed spiritually in its spirituality: that human soul life must also be viewed from the perspective of metamorphosis. Goethe was drawn to nature by his special disposition, and because this disposition was particularly strong, I would say that he paid less attention to the life of the soul itself.

However, one can apply his way of looking at the world to the life of the soul itself. Then one is automatically led beyond mere thinking. Most people who deal with these things simply do not believe this. They believe that one can think about the soul in the same way as one can think about anything else. But thoughts can only be directed at what can be perceived externally. If one wants to look back at the soul itself, at what human thinking activates, then one cannot do so with thoughts alone. Then it becomes necessary to use contemplative consciousness, which goes beyond mere thinking; one arrives at what I have called imaginative knowledge in my book How to Know Higher Worlds and other books. One cannot apply the same abstract, pale thoughts with which one comprehends nature to human soul life. They simply do not grasp it. Such thoughts are like a sieve through which human soul life passes.

This became apparent once in a great spiritual historical moment in Goethe's correspondence with Schiller. It is precisely on this point that one can see what happens when one wants to move from Goethe's view of nature to a view of the soul. Schiller wrote one of his most beautiful and significant philosophical treatises, the “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” I will only briefly indicate the human mystery that Schiller had in mind. Schiller wanted to solve the problem of art. He wanted to answer the question: What actually happens in the human soul when a person creates or feels artistically, when he transports himself into the world of beauty? Schiller believed that when a person is merely devoted to their sensual drives, they are subject to natural necessity. Insofar as a person is subject to natural necessity, they cannot approach beauty and art. But even when a person devotes themselves solely to thinking, when they follow only logical necessity, they are just as incapable of approaching beauty and art. But there is a middle state, says Schiller. When human beings imbue their instinctive life, everything that sensuality gives them, so thoroughly with their essence that it becomes pure spirituality, when human beings raise the sensual to spirituality and press spirituality down into the sensual, so that the sensual becomes spiritual and the spiritual becomes sensual, and man experiences himself in this spiritual-sensual and sensual-spiritual, then he is in beauty, then he is in art. Necessity seems mitigated by instinct, and instinct appears ennobled by spirit. Schiller spoke much to Goethe about his intention to elevate the human soul forces, to strengthen what surges and swells in the human soul in such a way that, in the harmonious interplay of the individual soul forces, this middle state emerges, which makes human beings capable of creating or perceiving the artistic. In the 1790s, from the time of Goethe and Schiller's deeper acquaintance onwards, this was an important human mystery of life that played a major role in the correspondence and verbal exchanges between Schiller and Goethe. In his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” Schiller attempted to solve this problem philosophically. Goethe was also prompted to address this problem because Schiller dealt with it so intimately and so energetically. But Goethe had the intuitive consciousness that Schiller lacked; this enabled him to dive into the world of things itself with his thoughts, but also to grasp the inner life more intimately.

He had the opportunity to see how what lives in the human soul is much more extensive, much more powerful than what can be grasped in such abstract thoughts as Schiller did in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” Goethe did not simply want to present such thoughts and ideas in order to characterize this richly structured human soul life. And so a very different kind of work arose on the same problem.

It is very interesting to take a closer look at this particular point in Goethe's acquaintance with Schiller. What did Schiller actually want? Schiller wanted to show that a higher human being lives in every human being, in contrast to which what ordinary consciousness encompasses is a lower one.

Schiller wanted to proclaim this higher human being in the one who carries his instincts up to the spirit and brings the spirit down to the instincts, so that by combining spiritual and sensual necessity, man comprehends himself in a new way and, as Schiller himself says, appears as a higher human being within man. Goethe did not want to be so abstract. But Goethe also wanted to address what lives as a higher human being within the human being. And this higher aspect of the human being appeared to him so rich in its individual elements that he could not grasp it in mere thought, but presented it in powerful, meaningful images. This gave rise to the “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” which forms the conclusion of the “Conversations of German Emigrants.”

Those who see this fairy tale as highly symbolic fail to grasp its deeper meaning. The various characters in this fairy tale, about twenty in number, represent the soul forces of the human being, personified in their lively interaction, as they lift the human being above himself and bring him to a higher level of humanity. This is what lives in the composition of the “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” Goethe could only grasp the problem that Schiller grasped philosophically in his thoughts through images; but through images that are a world unto themselves.

It is not necessary to grasp the life of the soul pedantically in Goethe's manner, that is, only in poetic images, but rather, when one enters into the inner structure of Goethe's worldview, when one applies to the life of the soul the same way Goethe applied his flexible spirituality in his theory of metamorphosis, one can discover how the metamorphosis of the soul forces grasps the human being in a living way and leads him or her from the transitory, which the human being experiences in the body, to the imperishable, which the human being experiences as that which is within him or her and passes through birth and death. The usual teaching about the soul deals with this a great deal: should one start from one soul force or the other? Is the will original, or is imagination or thinking original? How should one conceive of the mutual relationship between imagination, thinking, feeling, and perception? If one is familiar with the usual teachings about the soul, one can see how much acumen has been applied to understanding the inner life of human beings, the interaction of the various soul forces, just as external natural science grasps the interaction of green leaves and petals or the interaction of skull bones and spinal bones, without considering the inner transition, the inner transformation. Those who are able to turn their gaze from the outside to the inside, who are able to see the life of the soul in the Goethean sense, must indeed grasp it as something alive, and in this respect even more alive than external natural life, because in external natural life one can, as it were, rest with the spiritual gaze. Natural life provides the material; one can move from form to form. Inner life seems to constantly slip away when one tries to observe it. But if one ever directs one's agile thinking, which becomes contemplative, inward, then what appears as thinking, feeling, willing, and perceiving becomes nothing other than an essential being that transforms itself into other beings. Willing becomes a metamorphosis of feeling, feeling a metamorphosis of imagination, imagination a metamorphosis of perception, and vice versa.

The development of the powers and abilities that lie dormant in human beings, of meditative thinking that leads into the spiritual world, is based on nothing other than the lively pursuit of the inner metamorphoses of the soul's powers. On the one hand, those who wish to become spiritual researchers attempt to shape their imagination and perception in such a way that they continually introduce the will, which otherwise only slumbers in perception and imagination, into this perception and imagination, so that they deliberately call to the soul what otherwise appears as involuntary imagination. In this way, what is otherwise pale thinking or forced perception is transformed into imagination, into pictorial vision. For the spiritual can only be seen pictorially. The will and the feelings, which can otherwise be imagined but not recognized in their actual essence, are transformed by the meditative life itself, so that they become imaginative life, perceptive life.

The introduction of imagination into willing, of willing into imagination, the transformation of willing into imagination and vice versa, the transformation of imagination into willing in inner liveliness, the transformation of the individual soul forces into one another—that is meditative life. If this is pursued, then inner observation reveals what cannot be revealed if one merely considers thinking, feeling, and willing side by side. If one considers them side by side, one sees only the temporal aspect of the human being, that which is enclosed in the physical body and extends from birth or conception to death. If we learn to recognize how imagination transforms into feeling and volition into imagination and perception, we learn about the metamorphosis of inner soul life, as vividly as Goethe pursued metamorphoses in the realm of external nature. Then, in this soul life brought into flow, the eternity of the human soul, which passes through births and deaths, announces itself. Through this, the human being enters into his own eternity.

What did Goethe want by pursuing something like the removal of the prejudice that humans differ from animals through a detail such as the interosseous membrane in the upper jaw? He did not want humans to stand isolated from the rest of the world; in complete agreement with Herder, he wanted to view nature as a great whole and see humans as emerging from the whole of nature. When Schiller had struggled through many prejudices against Goethe to arrive at a pure and free recognition of his greatness, he once wrote to Goethe himself about how he had to think about his way of looking at nature. Among other things, he wrote these beautiful words to Goethe: “You take nature as a whole in order to gain insight into the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the explanatory basis for the individual... A great and truly heroic idea, which sufficiently demonstrates how much your mind holds together the rich whole of its ideas in a beautiful unity.”

Schiller noticed how Goethe sought to understand human beings by constructing them from what is otherwise separate in the various other natural beings, but which can be metamorphosed by inner formative forces so that human beings appear as a summary of the external manifestations of nature in their own external form, as the crown of external nature.

One must form a correct idea of what Goethe actually wanted when one considers the other side, which results from the life of the soul. If one considers the metamorphosis of the inner soul forces in the same way as Goethe considered the metamorphosis of the outer limb formations of the human being, it follows that what appears in the human being as a summary of the metamorphosing soul forces also appears to be emerging from a great spiritual world, from the world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes behind it, just as, on the other hand, if we regard the human being in the Goethean sense as an external being of nature, this human being of nature emerges as a synthesis of the external physical world, the external physical world elevated to an inner harmony and sum total. Just as Goethe's natural science connects the external human form with the rest of the natural world, so a doctrine of the human soul in his sense connects the soul with the eternal, concrete, comprehensive spiritual world and allows it to concentrate itself in the human being. It is not by directly taking this or that sentence of Goethe's to reinforce one's own view that one can build a bridge between spiritual science and Goethe's view of the world, but by seeking to solve the problem internally — vividly, not abstractly — logically: How does one approach such a way of immersing oneself in nature? In Goethe himself, this ability to immerse oneself in nature was naive, as I have already explained. Once we have learned about it from him, we seek to bring it to life within ourselves by delving deeper into his way of looking at the world. then one arrives at the necessity of extending what was predisposed in Goethe for the contemplation of nature to the world of the soul, then one arrives at the eternal spiritual world through human soul life, just as Goethe arrived at his contemplation of the external natural world through human natural life. One must approach Goethe inwardly, one must try to enter into his intentions, try to will with love what his soul wanted in relation to nature. Then one comes to want the same thing in relation to the spiritual world, whose image is the human soul world. One comes to look into the spirit from the human soul in the same way that Goethe looked into the rest of nature from human nature. In this sense, it can already be said that one understands Goethe little if one takes him only as he initially presented himself. Goethe himself certainly did not want to be taken that way. For Goethe was infinitely close to the whole way of thinking that must come to the surface again with spiritual research; he was also close to it in the non-scientific fields, in the field of poetry, of art in general.

If one tries to immerse oneself in the mode of perception that I have called seeing consciousness, one finds that it is necessary above all that this immersion not be constantly disturbed by all kinds of prejudices that are transferred from the sensory world or from abstract, purely logical thinking into the spiritual world. An important point of view in the exploration of the spiritual world, in the pursuit of spiritual beings and facts, is that one must be able to wait. No matter how hard the soul tries to explore something in the spiritual world, if it wants to explore it at all costs, it will fail, it will deceive itself. No matter how hard it tries: if the abilities necessary for the perception of certain beings or certain series of facts have not yet matured within it, it will not yet be able to recognize these beings, these series of facts. Maturing, being able to wait until the soul has grown to the point where it can encounter what may be encountered in a particular area of the spiritual world, is something that belongs in a very special way to advancing into the spiritual world. Patience and energy are what must be characteristic of the spiritual researcher to an outstanding degree. I will characterize other laws in later lectures. Goethe was predisposed in his whole being, even as an artist, to be such that he waited everywhere.

Nothing is more interesting than to follow those of Goethe's poems that he was unable to finish, to follow how he got stuck with “Pandora,” how he got stuck with “The Natural Daughter,” which was supposed to be a trilogy and became only one play. If you compare this with what he did complete in a magnificent way, such as the second part of Faust or Elective Affinities, you begin to understand what his innermost nature was like. Goethe could not “make” something; he always had to create only that which he had reached through the maturity of his being, and if his life, as it developed, did not reach this maturity in relation to something, then he left it alone, then he simply could not continue. Those who create artistically by mere combination can always continue. Those who, like Goethe, allow the spirit itself to create within them, sometimes cannot continue, especially if they are as great as Goethe. Where Goethe had to stop, he becomes particularly interesting for those who want to penetrate his inner being. If one pursues something like the “Elective Affinities,” one finds that what lives within it was already present at a relatively early stage, but not the possibility of actually forming figures that could embody this inner mystery of nature and humanity in the Elective Affinities. Goethe left them untouched, and so he handed over the “Elective Affinities” to a time when the people who could have understood them were long gone, because they had lived through the first impulses of youth together with him.

Thus, through this real, this actual inner experience of the soul, Goethe was, in a sense, close to spiritual science; he was close to it through his urge not to remain with abstract thinking, but to progress from thinking to reality, as a natural scientist, but as a natural scientist who sought the spirit. That is why he was so infinitely pleased when, in the 1920s, the psychologist Heinroth spoke of Goethe's objective thinking. Goethe understood immediately that he did not have a way of thinking that merely spun itself out along the thread of thought, but a way of thinking that immersed itself in things themselves. But when thinking submerges itself in things, it does not find abstract material atoms in them, but rather finds the spirit in them, just as, looking inward through the contemplation of the soul's life, the eternal spirit of human existence is recognized. That is why Goethe's gaze was directed toward what reveals itself as spiritual within the world of the senses. From these hints, one can understand that Goethe did not want to think about thinking, because he knew only too well that thinking can only be observed. One can also well understand that Goethe did not mean anything irreligious, anything unspiritual or materialistic-sensual when he said that he disliked talking about things from another world. For he knew that these supposed things of another world are in this world, that they constantly permeate it and must be sought within it, and that anyone who does not seek these spiritual things and beings in nature, who denies them in nature, does not want to recognize the spirit in natural phenomena. Therefore, Goethe did not want to search behind natural phenomena, but wanted to search everywhere in natural phenomena. Therefore, he disliked speaking of an “inner nature.”

An inner nature seemed to Goethe like someone who has a picture in a mirror in front of them and decides to search for what lies behind the mirror images, the “thing in itself” that is supposed to lie behind them, by destroying the mirror in order to find what is behind it, but of course does not find it.

This is roughly how the search for the “thing in itself” works for many philosophical minds. They have the world of external sensory perceptions before them, and they recognize that these are only sensory perceptions, reflections of reality. So they search for the “things in themselves,” but not by stepping back from the mirror and searching in what the mind can grasp as mind, but by smashing the mirror in order to grasp the world of dead atoms, from which nothing living can ever be grasped.

For Goethe, this inner nature lay completely beyond the bounds of his imagination. Hence, looking back on all the efforts he had had to make to penetrate the spirituality of natural phenomena, he made that harsh statement about Haller, a very meritorious great natural scientist who had become unsympathetic to him, not because of his individual research, but because he had once said:

“No creative spirit penetrates the innermost depths of nature.”

Blessed are those to whom it reveals only its outer shell!"

Goethe did not want to speak of the innermost depths of nature at all. In the maturity of his worldview, he replied:

“Into the innermost depths of nature —”
O, you philistine! —
“No creative spirit penetrates.”
You may remind me and my siblings
Of such words,
But
We think: place by place
We are within.
“Blessed are those to whom
Only the outer shell is revealed!”
I have heard this repeated for sixty years.
And I curse it, but secretly;
Tell me a thousand thousand times,
It gives everything abundantly and gladly;
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
It is everything at once;
Just examine yourself most of all,
Whether you are core or shell!

This is basically Goethe's creed, that those who regard nature as something outside the spirit cannot penetrate the spirit, that nature, in turning to man in its various metamorphoses, reveals the spirit to him at the same time as its shell. In this respect, spiritual science wants nothing more than I would say, to be a child of Goethe. It wants to extend what Goethe so fruitfully introduced into the world of external natural phenomena, so that he could find the spirit in nature, to the phenomena of the soul, whereby these themselves come directly to life and reveal the inner spirit, that spirit which lives in human beings themselves as their eternal, immortal core. The following lectures will set themselves the task of examining this more closely.

That was what I wanted to show above all today, that when one transfers Goethe's special way of approaching nature to the life of the soul, one feels drawn to spiritual science. It is not by grasping Goethe in his individual statements that one can call him a father of spiritual science — for in this way one could make him the protector of all possible worldviews — but rather by trying to lovingly empathize with what seemed so fruitful to him. Then one may not say the same things he has already said, but spiritual science will then rightly appear as a continuation of Goethe's worldview, as something that is entirely in keeping with Goethe's worldview. It seems to me that it is entirely in line with their spirit to ascend from natural life to spiritual life. Goethe himself, when he wanted to summarize his worldview and his perception of the world in his essay on Winckelmann, described the coexistence of human beings with the entire universe as an exchange, an interaction from spirit to spirit, saying: “When the healthy nature of man functions as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified, and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself, would rejoice at having reached its goal and admire the summit of its own being and becoming.” In this way, Goethe conceived of the innermost being of human beings in lively spirituality together with the innermost being of nature and in interaction with it: nature perceiving the world in human beings, human beings knowing themselves to be eternal, but expressing their eternity in the temporality of the outer world. Between the world and human beings lives, comprehending itself, knowing itself, affirming itself in the sense of Goethe's world spirit.

Those who thought in Goethe's sense therefore never had the opportunity to fall into the temptation of denying the spirit and, for example, applying Goethe's worldview itself to affirm a more or less materialistic worldview. No, those who understood Goethe, who wanted to settle into Goethe, probably always thought that when humans encounter the things of nature and dwell among them, they simultaneously dwell in the spirituality that they enter when they pass through the gate of death. These people thought like Novalis, for example, in those of his thoughts that he adopted from Goethe's worldview.

Novalis, the wonderful genius who, in certain phases of his life, wanted to immerse himself in nature in a very Goethean way, knew that in doing so he was immersing himself in the spiritual world. His many statements about the immediate presence of the spirit in the sensory world can be traced back to Goethe's worldview.

Therefore, since Goethe is regarded as the father of a spiritual understanding of the world, we may conclude with a statement made by Novalis in the spirit of Goethe, a statement that in a certain way summarizes what should be considered today as Goethe's worldview in a brief sketch:

“The spirit world is not closed to us even here. It is always revealed to us. If we can make ourselves as elastic as necessary with our own soul, then we are spirits among spirits!”