Lecture V

You must regard everything I have said about Franz Brentano as an expression of my genuine admiration for this exceptional personality. Such individuals demonstrate how hard one must struggle especially when it concerns an impulse to be carried over into mankind's future. Franz Brentano is an extremely interesting personality, but he did not achieve the kind of concepts, ideas, feelings or impulses that work across into future ages. Yet it is interesting that only a few weeks before his death he is said to have given assurances that he would succeed in proving that God exists. To do so was the goal of his lifelong scientific striving. Brentano would not have succeeded, for to prove the existence of God he would have needed spiritual science.