6. Spiritual Scientific Findings on the Ideas of Freedom and Social-moral Life

And as I mentioned such a spirit of eternity yesterday at the end, let me mention the same one today: Goethe. He also dealt with history, with the view of history. He felt, even though spiritual science did not yet exist at that time — the time for it had not yet come in his age — that what pulsates in historical life does not contain what can be brought into the concepts that open up in ordinary imagination and ordinary sensory perception. He felt that what lives in history, even the great things that live in history, contain impulses that are different from the abstract ideas of ordinary intellectual life. That is why Goethe uttered the significant words about history: “The best thing we have from history is the enthusiasm it arouses.” — a feeling that it arouses when one can immerse oneself in historical becoming and not bring down something like the theorists of ordinary consciousness, but when one brings forth something that speaks not only to imagination and sensory perception, but also to what is dreamed in emotional impulses, what is even overslept in volitional impulses. Then one has what lives in history, not the corpse of history.