Lecture II

I have said that, if we observe the age into which Goethe was born, we note at once a certain harmony between the individuality of Goethe and his age when taken in the broadest sense of the term. Bear in mind that, in spite of all the dissimilarities between Goethe and Schiller, there is, nevertheless, something quite similar in them—not to mention other less important contemporaries. Consider, for example, how much is resplendent in both Goethe and Herder. But we can go much further. When we look at Goethe, it does not, perhaps, appear at once—we shall come back to this later—but, when we look at Schiller, at Herder and Lessing, we shall say that their lives were different, of course, but that in their tendencies and impulses a portion of the soul's potentialities is present that, under other circumstances, might just as well have made a Mirabeau[^4] or Danton[^5] of them. They truly harmonize with their age. In the case of Schiller, this would by no means be so hard to prove; as the poet who composed The Robbers, Fiesko, Intrigue and Love, he will not seem to anyone to be far removed in disposition from a Mirabeau or Danton or even a Robespierre.[^6] This same soul's blood flowed likewise in Goethe, even though we might at first consider him far from being a revolutionist. But by no means is he so remote from this. There comes about in Goethe's complex nature a special complication of karmic impulses, of destiny, that places him in the world in a most unusual way, even in earliest youth.