An Age of Expectation

I once met Herman Grimm during his visit to the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar. He talked about how he imagined the evolution of humanity, that history was not a list of what is usually recorded as history; for him, history is an evolution of spiritual forces. But he could only bring himself to call it a history of the imaginative work of human beings. It was not possible for him to grasp that there are imaginations in the development of humanity that unconsciously flow into humanity and are transformed into human activity, that there are inspirations and intuitions in history. To him, it was 'the imaginative work of nations'. He could not come to replace the purely external, factual aspect of the Maya, which he called the “imagination work of the peoples”, with that which must present itself in the human spirit if it is to find its way out of the physical world and into the spiritual one. Only in the future will we understand what it meant for the nineteenth century when Herman Grimm said: What can interest us particularly in the way history has handed down the story of Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar – Herman Grimm says – interests me much more as he is portrayed by Shakespeare. That is truer, more historical than anything presented in historiography. – He repeatedly pointed out how much he likes to read Tacitus, for the reason that he was a person who knew how to bring to life and transform into the spiritual what he had to describe. From such conceptions there arose such a wonderful thought as that which Herman Grimm wrote down in the nineties and which is found in his book on Homer, a thought which really stands there as the expectation of what is to come as tidings from the Hierarchies: ” Recognizing themselves as a totality, human beings acknowledge that they are subject to an invisible court enthroned in the clouds, before which they consider it a misfortune not to be allowed to exist, and whose judicial proceedings they seek to adapt to their inner disputes.