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

But one can also bring about a special development of the soul life, to a development that leads beyond the everyday and the merely scientific life, by now not developing thinking but the will, the will that underlies what enables us to go through life actively. We speak of this will in our everyday life, in our ordinary scientific thinking. But in speaking of it in this way, we do not in any way encompass everything that lies in it. Just as thinking has the hidden side that I have just described, which leads to such an end point as I have indicated, so will also has a hidden side, only this turns out to be quite different. In order to get to know the basis of the will, it is not enough to simply develop the will as it accompanies us in life when we are active; one must, so to speak, develop the possibility within oneself not only to do, not only to be active, but to be active with a much higher part of one's soul life than one is accustomed to in everyday life. One must be able to connect one's will more inwardly with the will impulse than one usually does in everyday life. One can get into the habit of this inward concentration of the will, in contrast to the earlier concentration of the thoughts, by contracting the life of the will, by creating moments, creating instants - they certainly do not have to be long, but they must be repeated again and again if the performance is to bear fruit - when you create moments in which you withdraw from the external world and look inwardly at the world of your desires, at the world of your longings, at the impulses of your will that you can unfold, at those impulses of your will that you can bring together with the great goals of humanity in such a way that they shine in the soul when the ideals of humanity shine for us – in short, when we can engage with our will inwardly in such a way that we can bring this will more strongly into the field of attention than we can when we direct this attention to the outer form we give to the world. By letting these or those impulses of will flow out into what one is doing, when, for example, one reflects in such a way that one says to oneself, “You did that” and then tries to recall the impulse of will that was involved. When you look back on your deeds in life and pay attention to how the volitional impulse has [been incorporated], when you look at how you have willed, how you have directed the volitional direction, in short, when you become intimate with the forces of will.