Second Lecture

Everything I have said today, albeit only hinted at, will make it clear to you that I had to write in my “Epistemology of Goethe's Worldview” that the most important question of our age is whether the nature of our external experience already presents us with a reality. For if external experience already presents us with a complete reality, then our knowledge can only be a repetition of this external reality. But if external reality presents us with only half, only a part of the whole, true reality, then the following must be said, which you will find in my 1886 publication “Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (Fundamentals of a Theory of Knowledge of Goethe's Worldview): “It would be quite different if, in this form of reality” — which is conveyed by the external senses — "we were not dealing with the essence of reality, but only with its completely insignificant outer side, if we had before us only a shell of the true essence of the world, which conceals the essence of the world from us and challenges us to search further for it. We would then have to strive to penetrate this shell. We would have to start from the first form of the world in order to grasp its true (essential) properties. We would have to overcome the appearance to the senses in order to develop a higher form of appearance from it."