1. The World View Of German Idealism. A Consideration Regarding Our Fateful Times

But a world picture emerges from it, dear honored attendees, over which the whole nature of the mind is poured out. The mind has the peculiarity that it is, so to speak, a self-contained entity in itself and also in its setting in the human personality. It does not go beyond the boundaries of the human personality. I would like to say: Descartes also remains in a sense in thinking. He does not stimulate in himself the other powers of the soul, those powers of the soul through which we can let the whole human being flow into nature and its secrets, in order to feel and sense this nature and to live with it. Descartes remains in thinking, remains in ratio. This characterizes his entire world view. The characterization, which is particularly characterized, dear attendees, by the fact that Cartesius, by only focusing on self-assurance - on what his own thinking assures him of as certain - comes to believe that animals are only living machines. They are not ensouled like humans. The thinking that has become fixed in one's own personality - I would like to say - does not find the way out of itself to submerge lovingly into the outer nature. It does not even reach as far as the soul for the animal world. Soul-less machines, mechanisms, moving machines are the animals. [He penetrates even less to the essence of the other nature. To arrive at certainty, realism withdraws the means by which it could penetrate to the soul of all the rest of nature. One would like to say: This world view wanted to secure human truth; and in this way it secured it, that it renounced a way of living in nature.