VII. Whitsuntide Lecture

And again—let us consider something else. Faust has turned away from the sign of the macrocosm; he does not wish to experience the forces which bind man to the macrocosm, to the great cosmos. That was how the thoughts lived in the soul of Goethe himself, when he had written the first part of his Faust. When Faust had retrieved what he neglected in his youth—at least in the retrospect through the Easter-walk and all through the Easter-night—he passes beyond the stage of self-knowledge which he encountered in Wagner, and reaches the point of regaining what he had allowed to pass him by, which may be the Easter message to him. Read the sentences: Wagner does not wish it. The separate words are extraordinarily pregnant, for instance: