Man and the Historical and Moral Life of Humanity according to the Results of Spiritual Science

The strange thing turned out to be that I was extremely surprised: some sentences could be taken as they stand in Wilson, could be taken and translated, and translated over into works by Hermann Grimm. According to their wording, they fit well. And conversely, one can take sentences as they stand in Hermann Grimm and translate and place them in Wilson's treatises. They fit in. The sentences are interchangeable. This peculiar fact presented itself to me, turned out. All the more reason to go into the psychological underpinnings, which are at issue here. In Hermann Grimm's work – and the same can be seen in Karl Lamprecht – there is a personal struggle for historical judgment. Everything that such personalities say is individually, personally experienced and fought for, is a direct personal experience in the inner struggle with the meaning of the facts. You get this feeling when you look at things quite objectively. What about Wilson? Especially where he judges so accurately, the matter is quite different. I am not afraid, because I believe that after my lecture the day before yesterday, I cannot be misunderstood with such remarks in terms of terminology. I am not afraid to use an expression that is very often interpreted in a superstitious sense, but certainly not by me, but in a strictly scientific sense, as I showed the day before yesterday. With Wilson, when you penetrate into the structure of his sentences, into the wording of his sentences, you have the insight: what he says, he does not say in the immediate struggle of the individual personality with the matter, with the object, but says it as if he this view as if he were possessed by an unknown power, as if possessed by something to which the soul is only remotely connected, which dawns in the soul from special irrational depths, whereby one is not completely aware of what one is possessed by. And I must say: when you take the accurate judgment that Wilson gives about the American national character from this development of his historical view, one feels, I would say, the exterior of the American, which he indicates there, something of this obsession with judgment. The “rapid mobility of the eye”; compare this, if one may say so, with the extraordinary calmness of the eye of a human observer such as Herman Grimm or other Central European human observers, who, although they fight with all their souls for their judgment, for their judgment, but who reflect the calmness in the eye, which has nothing of that mobility of the eye through which that which the soul is obsessed with, and also the other characteristics, which Woodrow Wilson means.