16. A Forgotten Pursuit of Spiritual Science Within the Development of German Thought

Well, but I could also give you hundreds and hundreds of examples in support of the refutation of this sentence. Karl Christian Planck, for example, who was one of the most German of Germans, died in bitterness in 1880. And the dullards will no doubt say: something like megalomania sometimes emerges from the last thing he wrote - after time itself had driven him to a certain nervousness because he could not convey to his contemporaries what was in his heart. The dullards will even say: he became megalomaniac. But he died in 1880, and in 1881 his “Testament of a German” was already in print. It contained words that I will read to you now. So they were already written in 1880. Planck – about whom certainly quite practical diplomats, politicians and people who know everything about practical life will judge disparagingly – Christian Karl Planck spoke of the present war, of this war in which we are now embroiled. He spoke the following words in 1880. They were written by this “impractical idealist,” who was, however, a very practical thinker and who should have been put in a practical position, because the power that lives in the spiritual life also knows how to judge practical life correctly. This “impractical” Planck, who in 1880 wrote about the present war, which he knew would come, the words: