The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have heard that the Atlanteans were still consciously at home in the spiritual world where they experienced day consciousness. So-called night consciousness was experienced in the physical world. We have subsequently followed the descent of humanity during the post-Atlantean era through the different cultural-epochs up to the Greco-Latin when Christ Jesus appeared on the earth.

We will now once again study our own time, the fifth cultural epoch. Because men's intelligence today is being directed solely to the physical plane, humanity has descended far more deeply into the physical world than was the case during the other main epochs of culture. Materialism has led to a tremendous upsurge of intellectual power and activity, with merely the satisfaction of physical needs in view. The typical hallmark of our epoch has crystallized, for example, in the department store. The culture of the present age works only for the needs of the physical plane, but it works with a subtlety hitherto unachieved. It is therefore clear to occultism why the contrast between religion and science, expressed as it is in the many different movements is so great and the cleft between them so wide. The conflict between religion and science, under which art also suffers, is always in evidence when the level of culture declines. This can be detected in the science of today, which has become irrevocably entangled in a materialistic and abstract mode of thinking. Philosophy is not something absolute but a mode of thinking that has come into existence in the course of evolution; it has certain antecedents and must be amenable to change. Before philosophical thinking, (which originated in the sixth century B.C. among the Greeks,) came into existence, the kind of knowledge then current was an extract of the wisdom contained in the Mysteries. The source of this wisdom was inner experience in the soul, experience in which the secrets of world happenings were revealed. When the human soul lost the ancient faculty of intuitive vision the intellectual analysis of sensory and soul perceptions began. But in the early days, through inner vision that was still possible for the philosophers, or through tradition, they still knew of the existence of the old Mystery wisdom and applied to it the intellectual faculty that was then developing. Seership was still the source of the wisdom of Pythagoras and Plato; Aristotle, the founder of logic, was the first to apply the technique of pure thought. Aristotelianism dominated thought throughout the Middle Ages, experiencing its heyday in Scholasticism. But an abyss gradually opened between knowledge and faith. Between reason and its mental technique on the one side and super-sensible truth on the other, a cleft arose, finding its ultimate expression in Kant. There is to be found in Kant and his philosophy one of the blind alleys into which materialistic thinking had led, and Kant, unfortunately, was the one who fertilized the whole of modern philosophy.

But it is not with the object of criticizing modern science that the spiritual investigator draws attention to such facts. He reveals them in order to shed light on the path that can lead away from the fossilizing of thoughts. There is only one solution, which is that science, art and religion, the three branches of culture, must again be united and mutually enrich each other; spiritual life must stream from them. To achieve this union is the task of Western spiritual science. It must establish harmony between faith and knowledge, the two aspects that the soul can no longer unite within itself. Even in our material. world nothing whatever takes place in which the spiritual is not an active factor. The spiritual is always the creator of the physical. The much vaunted philosophical pragmatism of James can only be designated as pseudo-spirituality, having a materialistic conception of the spiritual. For all that, however, it has also done a certain amount of good.

Our epoch places stress on the tremendous importance of heredity. In reference to this it must be said, from the point of view of the science of the spirit, which regards the physical as a product of the spiritual, that in the pathological manifestations attributed to heredity the spiritual is being obstructed by the physical and cannot take effect. But the spirit has, after all, only descended into physical matter and will ascend again when its experiences in the physical have been gathered. Everything in the world is in process of evolution, so too physical man and his organs. We know that man's physical body contains organs that today no longer function. They are organs of the past, the remnants of which we still bear within us. We also have within us the foundations for organs of the future, organs that today are in process of transition or transformation. First and foremost of these organs is the human heart, which contains striated muscle. The heart is a veritable nightmare for materialistic anatomy because it is an involuntary organ that consists of smooth as well as striated muscle, which is to be found in all voluntary organs in man. In point of fact, unsuspected by science, it is an organ of the future and is on the way to becoming a voluntary organ in the human being. In the initiate today it has already developed. The larynx, too, is an organ of the future, connected with the deep mystery of procreation. There is an indication of this at the present time in the break of the voice at puberty. In the far distant future, man will “utter” his offspring into existence, for the larynx will become a creative organ. The future of humanity lies in giving shape to the soul and spiritual in material forms. Man is on the way to spiritualization, in order to work ever more consciously at the transformation of his bodies. It behoves us to engender strength for this future task by adopting a spiritual conception of the world. Moreover, the feeling of becoming collaborators in this glorious evolution should fill us with happiness and vigor.

Let me now say a few words about the the great cosmic laws of karma and reincarnation. On Old Moon these laws were not yet in existence. The beginning of a process of reincarnation such as exists at present can first be spoken of when the ego is being incorporated into the earth, that is to say, from the middle of the Lemurian epoch until the middle of the Atlantean. For the animal, whose ego is the group soul, there is even today no reincarnation. The connection between an animal species and the ego belonging to it is to be found in the astral world. For the group soul of lions, for example, the death of a lion here on the physical plane means as much as it means to you to cut a fingernail. A lion is at first an astral structure, reaching down like a strand from the group soul; it descends to the physical plane, densifies, and at the death of the individual lion this astrality passes back again to the astral plane. The group soul draws it in again like a limb. On Old Moon the human soul underwent the same process. The human soul was then a member of its group soul and returned to it. The soul, as the Bible puts it, is sheltered in the bosom of Father Abraham.

Reincarnation and karma first began to have meaning during the Lemurian epoch and in time will cease to have significance. Man will then enter permanently into a spiritual world in which he will continue to be active. When, for example, man has developed the impulse of brotherliness in himself, the growth of races will cease, will be overcome. In the sixth cultural epoch, human beings will already understand better how to arrange their lives; concepts of race will no longer have validity. Men will no longer order their lives according to external, physical considerations but rather on a spiritual basis. In the seventh cultural epoch, which will reflect that of ancient India, there will once again be distribution into castes, but a voluntary distribution. Changes in the process of evolution constantly take place, yet continual progress is certain. In the Atlantean epoch, the middle epoch of our earth's evolution, the significant point occurred that is designated by the now complete penetration of the ego into man's physical body. The process began in the middle of the Lemurian epoch after the exit of the moon from the earth. Humanity has continued to evolve and when the concept of brotherliness finds practical fulfilment on the earth, races will be superseded. Karma will also then be overcome.

What is the law of karma? The principle of making good in a subsequent incarnation what was reprehensible in a preceding one. Differentiation must be made between karma that takes effect inwardly and one that has more external results. Karma taking effect inwardly is connected with the forming of character, talents and habits. Karma that manifests in more external ways takes the form of the conditions of life in which a man is placed, such as family, nationality and so forth. We will now consider more closely how karma works in physical life. For example, what appears in one life as urge or impulse, desire and ideation, emerges in the next life, or one of the following lives, as habit. From good habits a fine, well-knit, healthy physical body will come into existence in the next incarnation. A bad habit snakes its appearance in another life in the form of an illness or as a tendency to illness. Thus, the causes of illnesses are to be sought in the inclinations and habits of a previous life. The actual destiny of an individual is, on the contrary, the result of his former deeds. A person who radiates much love in one life will, in another, be able to stay young, inwardly as well as outwardly, for a long time. A person who harbors many feelings of hatred in one life will age prematurely in another. Individuals who abandon themselves to an ordinary, indolent life, which avoids all forms of spirituality, deprive themselves of something for their subsequent life that will be difficult for them to retrieve.

Now let me add a few words on the subject of initiation. At all times the leaders of humanity have drawn upon its fountainhead. The great individualities who presided over the Mysteries and whom we call the Masters have guided and led humanity. To understand this better we will consider the principle of initiation. Truth to tell, it is only possible since the time of the Atlantean catastrophe to speak of an initiation available to human beings because the process of initiation has also been subject to development and change in accordance with the needs of human beings. This is true not only in its outer forms.

Why is man in sleep unaware of sensory impressions although he is surrounded by a material world? It is because during the night his intellect is not working. The physical and etheric bodies of a man asleep remain in bed; his astral body and ego emerge and are in the spiritual world. But why is it that he perceives nothing of the spiritual world that is all around him and into which his astral body and ego enter during the night? It is because the astral body of the average human being who leaves the physical body during sleep at night has no astral sense organs. Hence, it is impossible for him to perceive any-thing in the astral world. Through initiation or spiritual training, the chaotic astral mass, which the astral body of the average individual reveals itself to be, is organized in such a way that it gradually begins to develop organs and can then have perceptions during the night. In normal life man is not yet able to form organs in his astral body. To be capable of this the power in his inner life must be essentially strengthened. This is achieved through definite exercises of meditation, concentration, and other indications. In his feelings and life of thought the pupil must give himself up to certain mental pictures, choosing subjects that tally only slightly or not at all with reality. Mental pictures that represent objects in the outer world are not suitable for developing organs in the astral body. But visualize a figure, for example, such as that of the Rose Cross, the black cross with the seven red roses, and if you practice the exercise with the necessary vigor and patience, you will experience something through it according to your degree of development. You will transform your astral body thereby, generating organs in it. These mental pictures should riot be abstractions; the right feelings and perceptive experiences must be involved. Only then will the desired results be achieved.

There are three different kinds of initiation, all of which lead to the same goal. There are three paths, the choice of one of which depends upon a man's individuality. One initiation is that of wisdom; it is the fitting goal for Indian and Oriental training. This path is fraught with great dangers for European and Western bodies and is therefore not the right one. The, second initiation is based upon the life of feeling; it is the fundamentally Christian path. Only few individuals can still take this path because it demands a strong power of devotion and piety. The third path of initiation is the Rosicrucian training, the path of the initiation of thinking and of will. It leads to union with the forces of the other paths of initiation. The final goal is definite in the case of every initiation, but in the course of evolution it must be adjusted in accordance with the current needs of souls and the possibilities offered by the human body.

The pupil of the old initiation was compelled to be entombed in a grave for three and a half days and was as if dead. His etheric and astral bodies were outside his physical body and in the spiritual world. The hierophant watched over the process and called the neophyte back to life. After his awakening he was a witness of the spiritual world. Such was the form of the old initiation; today that process is no longer necessary. The Christian and the Rosicrucian initiations have such powerful effects that the human being involved can achieve what, through the old initiation, was meant to be brought about by the emergence of the higher members from the physical body. The impressions from the spiritual world are now imprinted into the astral and etheric bodies without lethargy being induced for three and a half days. The modern initiation, if we like to call it so, once the purification or catharsis of the astral body has been achieved, brings about effects that lead to genuine spiritual sight and knowledge of the spiritual world based on actual experience; the impressions received by the soul in the spiritual world are then imprinted in the astral and etheric bodies. That is what is called illumination in the course of occult development.

[ 1 ] In offering to the public a book like the present one, its author should be able to anticipate, with utter calmness, any kind of criticism that is possible in our time. Someone, for example, might begin to read the presentation given here of this or that matter, about which he has thought in accordance with the results of research in science, and he might come to the following conclusion: It is astonishing how such assertions are at all possible in our age. The author treats the simplest scientific concepts in a manner that shows the most inconceivable ignorance concerning even the most elementary facts of scientific knowledge. For example, he treats concepts, such as “heat,” in a way only possible for someone who has permitted the whole modern mode of thinking in physics to pass over his head without having the least effect. Anyone who knows even the elementary facts of this science could show him that what he says here does not even deserve the designation “amateurishness,” but can only be called “absolute ignorance.” Many sentences could be quoted that express this kind of possible criticism. One could imagine that someone might arrive at the following conclusion: “Whoever has read a few pages of this book will, according to his temperament, lay it aside either with a smile or with indignation, and say to himself, ‘It is certainly queer what eccentricities can be brought forth by a wrong trend of thought in the present day. It is best that such expositions be laid aside with many other freaks of the human mind.’ ”—What, however, does the author of this book say if he really experienced such criticism? Must he not, from his standpoint, simply regard the critic as a reader lacking the faculty of judgment or as someone who has not the goodwill to form an appreciative opinion?—The answer to that is emphatically, No! the author does not do that in every case. He is able to imagine that his critic may be a very clever person and also a trained scientist, someone who forms his judgments in quite a conscientious way. For the author of this book is able to enter with his thinking into the soul of such a person and into the reasons that can lead the latter to such a judgment. A certain necessity arises to clarify what the author really says. Although in general he considers it highly improper to discuss anything of a personal nature, it seems essential to do so in regard to this book. To be sure, nothing will be brought forward that is not concerned with the decision to write this book. What is said in such a book would certainly have no reason for existence were it to bear only a personal character. It must contain views that every human being may acquire, and these must be expressed without any personal coloring as far as this is humanly possible . The introduction of the personal element is only to make clear how the author is able to comprehend the above-mentioned criticism of his expositions, yet nevertheless was still able to write this book. There would be one way, to be sure, of avoiding mention of the personal element: that of presenting, explicitly, every detail that proves that the statements in this book really agree, with every forward step of modern science. This would necessitate, however, the writing of many volumes of introductory matter. Since this at present is out of the question, it seems necessary for the author to describe the personal circumstances through which he feels justified in believing himself in agreement with modern science.—Never, for example, would he have undertaken to publish all that is said in this book about heat phenomena were he not able to affirm that, thirty years ago, he was in the position to make a thorough study of physics, which had ramifications into the various fields of that science.

The expositions belonging to the so-called “Mechanical Theory of Heat” (“Theory of Thermodynamics”) occupied at that time the central point of his studies in the field of heat phenomena. This theory was of special interest to him. The historical development of the interpretations associated with such names as Julius Robert Mayer, Helmholtz, Joule, Clausius, and others, formed a part of his continuous studies. He thus, laid the proper foundation and created the possibility of being able to follow—right up to the present—all the advances of science in the domain of the physical theory of heat. Hence there are no difficulties to overcome when he investigates what modern science has achieved in this field. His confession of inability to do this would have been sufficient reason for leaving the matter advanced in this book unsaid and unwritten. He has truly made it a principle to speak or write only about those subjects in the field of spiritual science about which he would be sufficiently able to say what modern science knows about them. This statement, however, is not meant as a general prerequisite for everyone. Others may, with justice, feel impelled to communicate and publish what their judgment, healthy sense of truth, and feelings indicate, although they may not know the point of view of contemporary science in such matters. The author of this book, however, intends to hold to the above expressed principle for himself. He would not, for example, write about the human glandular or nervous system as he does, were he not at the same time in the position also to discuss these matters from the point of view of natural science. Thus in spite of the fact that it is possible to conclude that anyone who discusses “heat” in the manner of this book knows nothing about the fundamental laws of modern physics, the author believes himself fully justified in what he has done, because he is striving really to know modern research, and he would have refrained from speaking in this way were the results of this research unknown to him. He knows that the motive for stating such a principle might easily be confused with lack of modesty. In regard to this book it is necessary, however, to state such things, in order that the author's true motives be not mistaken still further. This further mistaking might be far worse than to be accused of immodesty.

[ 2 ] Criticism could also be possible from a philosophical standpoint. It might occur in the following way. A philosopher who reads this book might ask himself, “Has the author entirely neglected to study the present day achievements in the field of epistemology? Has he never heard of the existence of a man named Kant, according to whom it is simply philosophically inadmissible to advance such views?” Again, we could continue in this direction. The following critical conclusion, however, might also be drawn: “For the philosopher, such uncritical, naive, amateurish stuff is unbearable and to deal with it further would be nothing but a waste of time.”—From the same motive indicated above, in spite of all the misunderstandings that might arise from it, the author would again like to advance something personal here. His study of Kant began in his sixteenth year, and today he believes himself truly capable of judging quite objectively—from the Kantian standpoint—what has been advanced in the present book. From this aspect also, he would have had a reason for leaving this book unwritten did he not know what moves a philosopher to find naive what is written here if he applies the measuring rod of modern criticism. It is, however, possible really to know how, in the sense of Kant, we pass here beyond the limits of possible knowledge. It can also be known how Herbart might discover in this book a “naive realism” that has not yet attained to the “elaboration of concepts,” and so forth. It is even possible to know how the modern pragmatism of James, Schiller, and others would find that this book has gone beyond the bounds of “true representations” which “we are able to make our own, to assert, to put into action, and to verify.”¹ All of this may be realized and in spite of that realization, indeed because of it, one may feel justified in writing the expositions presented here. The author has dealt with philosophical trends of thought in his writings: The Theory of Knowledge Based on Goethe's World Conception (Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung); Truth and Science (Wahrheit und Wissenschaft); Philosophy of Freedom (Philosophie der Freiheit); Goethe's Conception of the World (Goethe's Weltanschauung); Views of the World and Life in the Nineteenth Century (Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert); Riddles of Philosophy (Die Raetsel der Philosophie).

[ 3 ] Many kinds of possible criticism could still be cited. There might be critics who have read the earlier writings of the author, for example, Views of the World and Life in the Nineteenth Century, or perhaps the brochure on Haeckel and His Opponents. Some such critic might say, “It is incomprehensible how one and the same man can write these books and then, besides the already published book, Theosophy, also write this present book. How is it possible that someone can defend Haeckel and then turn around and discredit what results from Haeckel's research as healthy, monism? It might be comprehensible had the author of this Occult Science combated Haeckel ‘with fire and sword,’ but, that he has defended him, indeed, has even dedicated Views of the World and Life in the Nineteenth Century to him, is the most monstrous thing imaginable. Haeckel would have unmistakably declined this dedication had he been conscious of the fact that the dedicator might some day write such stuff as this Occult Science with its exposition of a more than crude dualism.”—The author of this book, however, is of the opinion that while it is possible to understand Haeckel very well, it is, nevertheless, not necessary to believe that he is only to be understood by one who considers nonsensical everything that is not derived from Haeckel's own concepts and hypotheses. Furthermore, he is of the opinion that it is possible to come to an understanding of Haeckel only by entering upon what he has achieved for science and not be combating him “with fire and sword.” Least of all does the author believe that Haeckel's opponents are right, against whom, for example in his brochure, Haeckel and His Opponents, he has defended the great natural philosopher. Indeed, if the writer of this brochure goes far beyond Haeckel's hypotheses and places the spiritual point of view of the world alongside Haeckel's merely naturalistic one, his opinion need not therefore coincide with the opinion of the latter's opponents. If the facts are looked at correctly, it will be discovered that the author's present day writings are in complete accord with his earlier ones.

[ 4 ] The author also understands quite well the critic who generally regards the descriptions in this book as an outpouring of wild fancy or a dreamlike play of thoughts. All that is to be said in this regard, however, is contained in the book itself. It is shown there how, in full measure, thought based on reason can and must become the touchstone of what is presented. Only the one who applies to this book the test of reason in the same way he would apply it, for example, to the facts of natural science, will be able to determine what reason proves in such a test.

[ 5 ] After saying so much about personalities who from the outset refute this book, a word may also be spared for those who have reason to agree with it. For them the most essential is to be found in the first chapter, The Character of Occult Science. Something more, however, is to be said here. Although the book deals with the results of research that lie beyond the power of the intellect bound to the sense world, yet nothing is offered that cannot be comprehended by anyone possessing an unprejudiced reason, a healthy sense of truth, and the wish to employ these human faculties. The author says without hesitation that he would like, above all, to have readers who are not willing to accept on blind faith what is offered here, but who endeavor to examine what is offered by means of the knowledge of their own soul and through the² He would like to have above all cautious readers who only accept what can be logically justified. The author knows his book would have no value, were it dependent only on blind faith; it is only useful to the degree it can be vindicated before unbiased reason. Blind faith can so easily mistake the foolish and superstitious for the true. Many who are gladly satisfied with a mere belief in a “supersensible world” will perhaps find that this book makes too great a demand on the powers of thought. Yet concerning the communications given here, it is not merely a question of communicating something, but that the communication be in conformity with a conscientious view of the sphere of life in question. For it is indeed the sphere in which the highest things and the most unscrupulous charlatanry, in which knowledge and crass superstition so easily meet in actual life, and where, above all, they can be so easily confused with one another.

[ 6 ] Anyone acquainted with supersensible research will, in reading this book, notice that it has been the endeavor of its author sharply to mark the limits between what can and ought to be communicated from the sphere of supersensible knowledge at present and that which is to be presented at a later period, or at least in another form.

RUDOLF STEINER
December 1909

• 1. This includes an earnest consideration and study of the philosophy of the “As If,” the Bergsonian philosophy, and the Critique of Speech.
• 2. Here is not only meant the spiritual scientific test by supersensible methods of research, but primarily the test that is possible by healthy, unprejudiced thought and common sense.

On the occasion of our last lecture, I spoke to you of the three meetings which the human soul has with the regions pertaining to the Spiritual world. I shall have to say a few more things as to these, which will give me the opportunity of answering a question asked at the end of the last public lecture at the Architectural Hall, regarding the forces which bring over the karma, the external destiny, from a former incarnation. I have been told that this is very difficult to understand. In the course of these lectures I will return to this subject; but it is preferable to do so after having discussed a few points which may perhaps help to make the question better understood. Today, however, in order to make the question of the three meetings with the Spiritual world still clearer, I intend to insert, by way of episode, something that it seems to me important to discuss just at the present time.

When we consider the ideas and concepts which have found their way into the souls of people of all grades of education as the result of the Spiritual development of the last century, we observe how strongly its influence tended to cause people to consider the evolution of the world and man's place in it, solely according to the standard of Natural Science and its ideas. There are of course plenty of people still living today who do not believe their attitude of mind and soul to have been formed by the concepts of Natural Science. These people do not however observe the deeper foundations upon which their minds were formed; they do not know that the ideas of Natural Science have just slipped in a one-sided way, not only determining their thoughts but even in a certain way their feelings. A man who today reflects along the lines laid down for everyone in the ordinary educational centres, whose mind and disposition have been formed in accordance with them, and whose ideas are based upon what is taught there, cannot possibly feel the true connection between what we call the world of morality, of moral feeling, and the world of external facts. If, in accordance with the ideas of our times, we ponder on the way in which the earth and indeed the whole firmament is supposed to have developed and may come to its final end, we are thinking along the lines of purely external facts, perceptible to the senses. Just think of the deep significance to the souls of men, of the existence of the so-called Kant-Laplace theory of the creation of the world, according to which the earth and the whole heavens arose from a purely material cosmic mist (for it is represented as purely material) and were then formed in accordance with purely earthly physical and chemical laws, developed further according to these laws, and, so it is believed, will also come to an end through these same laws. A condition will some day come about in which the whole world will mechanically come to an end, just as it came into being.

Of course, as I said before, there are people today who do not allow themselves to think of it in this way. That, however, is not the point; it is not the ideas that we form that signify, but the attitude of mind which gives rise to these ideas. The conception I have just alluded to is a purely materialistic one; one of those of which Hermann Grimm says, that a piece of carrion round which circles a hungry dog is a more attractive sight than the construction of the world according to the Kant-Laplace theory. Yet it arose and developed; nay, more: to the great majority of men who study it, it even appears illuminating. Few there are who, like Hermann Grimm, ask how future generations will be able to account for the arising of this mad idea in our age; they will wonder that such a delusion could have ever seemed illuminating to so many. There are but a few people who have the soundness of mind to put the question thus, and those who do are simply considered more or less wrong-headed. But, as I said, the point is not so much the ideas in themselves, as the impulse and frame of mind which made them possible. These conceptions came as the result of certain attitudes of mind; yet, though they came from learned men and were given out by them, most people still believe that the world did not originate in any such mechanical impulse, but that Divine impulses must have played a part in its creation. Still it remains a fact that such conceptions were possible. It was possible for the attitude of men's minds, their disposition of soul, to take on such a form that a purely mechanical idea of the origin of the world was conceived. That signifies that at the bottom of men's souls there is the tendency to form conceptions of a materialistic nature. This tendency is not only to be found among the unlearned, and others who believe in this idea, it exists in the widest circles among all kinds of people, yet most people today are still rather shy of becoming followers of Haeckel, picturing everything Spiritual in a material form. They lack the necessary courage for this. They still admit of something Spiritual; but do not give the matter further thought. If the above mentioned concept holds good, there can then only be room for the Spiritual and especially for the moral, in a certain sense. For just consider:—If the world really came into being as the Kant-Laplace theory believes, and only comes to its end through physical forces, dragging all men down to the grave with it, together with all their ideas, feelings and impulses of will, what then, apart from all else, would become of the whole moral order of the world? Suppose for a moment that the condition of the burial of all things came about: what good would it have been to have ever pronounced some things good and others evil? What would it avail to say this is right, and that is wrong? These would be nothing but forgotten ethical concepts, swept away as something which, if this idea of the world-order were correct, would not perhaps survive even in one single soul. In fact, the matter would stand thus: from purely mechanical causes, by physical and possibly chemical forces, the world came into being and by like means it will come to an end. By means of these forces phenomena appear like bubbles, produced by men. Among men themselves arise the moral ideas of right and wrong, of good and evil; but the whole world passes over into the stillness of the grave. All right and wrong, good and evil, is merely an illusion of man, and is forgotten and vanishes away when the world becomes ‘the grave.’ Thus the only thing that stands for the moral world-order is the feeling one has as long as the episode lasts, which extends from the first state to the last, that man requires such ideas for his common life; that man must form these moral ideals, though they can never take root in a purely mechanical world-order. The forces of nature—heat, electricity, and so on—intervene in the plan of nature, they make themselves felt therein; but the force of morality would, if the mechanical plan of the world were correct, only exist in the mind of man; it would not intervene in the natural order. It would not be like heat which expands bodies, or like light which illuminates them and makes them visible and permeates the world of space. For this moral force is present and soars as a great illusion over the mechanical world-order, and vanishes, dissolves away, when the world is transformed into the grave. People do not sufficiently carry these thoughts to their logical conclusion. Hence they are not on their guard against a mechanical world-order, but allow it to remain—not from kindness of heart, but rather from laziness. If they have a certain want in their hearts, they simply say: ‘Science does not demand that we should think deeply about this mechanical world-order, faith demands something else of us; so we put our faith side by side with science and just believe in something more than mechanical nature, we just believe what a certain inner demand of our hearts compels.’ That is very convenient! There is thus no need to rebel against what Herman Grimm, for instance, felt to be a mad idea of modern science. There need be no rebellion. But this attitude cannot be justified by one who really wishes to think his thoughts out to their conclusion.

It may be asked: What is the reason that people today live thus blindly in an impossible position, in which it is impossible to think logically? Why do they accept such a position? The reason is, strange as this may sound if one is not familiar with the thought and hears it for the first time,—the reason is that people have more or less forgotten, in the course of the last century, how to think truly of the Christ Mystery which must take its place in the very centre of the life of the age; they have forgotten how to think of it in its real, true sense. The way in which man thinks of the Christ Mystery in the newer age should be such that it rays into his whole thinking and feeling. The position which man has assumed to the Christ since the Mystery of Golgotha represents the standard of his whole collective ideas and sentiments. (I may perhaps have more to say on this subject in the near future). If he cannot look upon the Mystery of Christ as a true reality, he is unable to develop ideas and conceptions by which to gauge the views of the world held by others, ideas permeated by reality, and really capable of penetrating the truth.

That is what I wanted above all to make clear to you today. If a man really thinks in the way I have just illustrated, as most people of the present day do, whether consciously or not, the world is then divided on the one hand into the mechanical natural order, and on the other into the moral world order. Now to timid souls, who often believe themselves to be very courageous, the Christ-Mystery forms part of the purely moral world-order. This applies chiefly to those who see nothing more in the Christ-Mystery than the fact that at a particular time, a great, perhaps even the greatest Teacher of the Earth-world appeared, and that His teaching is the thing of greatest importance. Now, if Christ is only considered as the greatest Teacher of humanity, this view is in a sense quite compatible with the twofold division of the world into a natural order and a moral order. For, of course, even if the earth had formed itself as the mechanical world order represented, and is eventually to become the common grave of all things, it might still be possible for a great Teacher to arise who might accomplish much to make men better and to convert them. His teachings might have been sublime, but they would avail nothing when, at the end of all things, everything would be a grave; when even the teachings of Christ Himself would have disappeared, and there would not even be a remembrance of Him remaining in any living being. People do not like to think that; but their dislike would not alter the fact. If it be desired to believe absolutely in a merely mechanical world-order it would be impossible to avoid such thoughts as these.

Everything depends upon the fact being realised that in the Mystery of Golgotha something was accomplished which does not merely belong to the moral world-order, but to the whole collective cosmic order; something which belongs, not merely to the moral reality—which according to the mechanical world-order must be non-existent—but to the whole intensive reality. We shall be able to grasp what is really in question if we turn our thoughts once more to the Three Meetings which I mentioned in the last lecture, taking them in a different sense from that to which I then referred.

I told you that every time a person sleeps, in the intermediate state between his going to sleep and waking he meets Beings belonging to the Spiritual world, Beings of a like nature to his Spirit Self as we are accustomed to call it, Beings of the same substance and kind. This means that when a man wakes from sleep, he has had a meeting with a Spiritual being, and though he may be quite unconscious of having had this experience, yet he carries the after-effects into his outer physical life. Now what takes place in our soul during this daily meeting is in a certain way connected with the future of man. A man of today, unless he busies himself with Spiritual Science, knows very little as yet of what goes on in the depth of his soul during sleep. Dreams, which in ordinary life betray something of this, do indeed reveal something, but reveal it in such a way that the truth does not easily come to light. When a man wakes in a dream or out of a dream, or remembers a dream, this is mostly connected with ideas he had already acquired in his life, with reminiscences. These are however only the garments of what really lives in the dream or during sleep. When our dreams clothe themselves in pictures taken from our daily life, these are but the garments; for in dreams is revealed what actually takes place in the soul during sleep, and that is neither related to the past nor to the present, it is related to the future. In sleep are found the forces which in a human being can be compared to the germinal forces which develop in the plant for the production of a new one. As the plant grows it always develops the germinal forces for the new plant in the following year. These forces reach their height in forming the seed, in which they become visible. But as the plant grows, while it is growing, the germinal forces for the next plant are already there. In the same way the germinal forces;—whether for the next incarnation or even for the Jupiter-period -are present in man, and he chiefly forms these during his sleeping state. The forces then formed, my dear friends, are not immediately related to individual experiences, but rather to the basic forces of the next incarnation: they relate to the forces of the next incarnation. In sleep, a man works upon his germs for his next incarnation into the future. So that while he is asleep, he already lives in the future.

I do not wish to leave a too hazy impression in your minds in respect to this, so will at once say that in the sleeping state, the next incarnation is as the knowledge of the next day. We know from experience that when tomorrow comes the sun will rise and we know more or less how it will run its course, although we may not know what the weather will be or what separate events may affect our lives. In like way the soul is a prophet during our sleep, but a prophet who only knows of what is great and cosmic; not of the weather. If one were to suppose that the soul during sleep becomes aware of the details of the next incarnation, one would be falling into the same error as one who thought that because he knew that next Sunday the sun will surely rise and set, and knew certain universal facts as well, he could therefore predict the weather. This does not alter the fact that while we are asleep we do have to concern ourselves with the future. The forces which are of like nature with our Spirit-Self and that work on the forming of our future, meet us during our time of sleep.

Another, a further meeting—if I leave out the second—is the third meeting, of which I said in the last lecture that it only takes place once in the whole course of a man's life—in the middle of it. I said that when a man is in his thirties he meets with what may be called the Father-Principle, while he meets the Spirit-Principle every night. This meeting with the Father-Principle is of very great significance, for it must occur. You will remember I explained that even those who die before the age of thirty have this experience, only, if they live through the thirties it comes in the course of life, while when death is premature it occurs sooner. You know that, as the result of that meeting, man is enabled to impress the experiences of the present life so deeply into himself that they are able to work over into the next incarnation. Thus, that which is the meeting with the Father-Principle is connected with the earth-life of the next incarnation, whilst our meeting with the Spirit-Principle is for the whole future; it radiates over the whole of our future life, as well as over the life experienced between birth and a new birth.

Now the laws with which this meeting, that we experience only once in a life, are interwoven, they do not pertain to the earth: they are laws which have remained in the earth-evolution just as they were at the time of the moon-evolution. On the physical side they are connected with our physical descent, and with everything which physical heredity signifies. This physical heredity is indeed only one side of the matter; there are Spiritual laws behind, as I have already explained. So that everything that comes to pass regarding the meeting with the Father Principle, points back to the past; it is the legacy of the past; it points back to the moon-evolution, to earlier incarnations, while that which takes place during sleep points to the future. Just as what takes place during sleep forms the germ for the future, so that which comes about as a result of men being born as the descendants of their ancestors, carrying over from former incarnations what is necessary should be brought over; all that has remained over from the past. Both these—what relates to the future and to the past—are in a sense striving outside the natural order. The peasant still goes to sleep at sunset and rises at dawn; but as man progresses in so-called civilisation, he tears himself free from the order of nature. One meets persons in cities—though they may not be very numerous—who go to bed in the morning and arise at night. Man is freeing himself from the mere order of nature, the development of his free will makes it possible for him to do so. Thus in a sense, because he is preparing for a future which is not yet here, he is torn away from the order of nature. When he carries the past into the present, especially the past connected with the moon, he is also torn loose from the order of nature. Nobody can prove the necessity according to the universal laws of nature, that John Smith should be born in 1914; such an event is not ruled by necessity as is the rising of the sun or other natural occurrences, but by the natural order of the moon. During the moon-period everything was like the order of our birth on earth.

Man is however entirely subject to the order of nature as regards what is of immediate significance to the present, to his earth existence. Whereas, as regards the Father-Principle he bears the past within him, and as regards the Spirit-Principle the future—with respect to that meeting of which I have said that it occurs in the course of the year and which is now connected with the meeting with Christ—man is connected with the order of nature. If he were not, the consequence would be that Christmas might by one person be celebrated in December and by another in March, and so on; but although different nations have different designations for the Festival of Christmas, there is everywhere some kind of festivity in the latter days of December which always bears some relation to the meeting I referred to. Thus with respect to this meeting which is inserted into the course of the year, man, for the very reason that this is his present, is in direct connection with the order of nature; while with respect to the past and the future he has become free from it, and has indeed been free from it for thousands of years.

In the olden times man joined in the order of nature both as regards the past and the future. In the Germanic countries, for instance, birth was regulated in olden times in accordance with the order of nature. Birth, which was then regulated by the Mysteries, might only take place at a stated time of the year. Thus it was inserted into the order of nature. In olden times, long before the Christian Era, conception and birth were regulated in the Germanic countries by that of which only a faint echo has been preserved in the Myth of the worship of Hertha. In those days her worship comprised no less than the following. When Hertha descended in her chariot and drew near to men, that was the time of conception; after she had withdrawn, this might no longer take place. This was so strictly adhered to that anyone not born within the appointed season was considered lacking in honour, because his human existence was not in harmony with the order of nature. Birth and conception were just as much adapted to the course of nature in olden times as sleeping and waking, for in those days people slept when the sun had set and woke at dawn. These things have now become displaced; but the central event which is adapted to the course of the year cannot be displaced. By means of this, through its harmony with the order of nature, something is retained and must be so retained in the human soul.

What then is the whole purpose of man's earthly evolution? That man should adapt himself to the earth and take the earth-conditions into himself; that he should carry into his future evolution what the earth has been able to give him, not in any one incarnation alone, but in the whole sum of his incarnations on earth. That then is the purpose of the earth evolution. This purpose can however only be fulfilled through man's to some extent forgetting during his sojourn on earth, his connection with the cosmic and heavenly powers. This he has learnt to do. We know indeed that in olden times man possessed an atavistic clairvoyance, and into that the heavenly powers could work; man was still connected with them; the kingdom of heaven in a sense extended into the human heart. This had to become different so that man might develop his free will. In order that he might become related to the earth he had to have nothing more of the kingdom of heaven in his vision, in his direct perception. This however is the reason that at the time of his closest relation to the earth, in the fifth epoch in which we are living now man became materialistic. Materialism is only the most complete, the most extreme expression of man's relation to the earth, and if nothing else had happened this would have brought about his complete and utter subjection to the earth. He would have had to become related to it and gradually share in its destiny; he would have had to follow the same path as the earth is herself pursuing; he would have been entirely dovetailed into the earth's evolution,—unless something else had occurred. He would have been obliged to tear himself away, as it were, from the cosmos together with the earth, and to unite his destiny completely with that of the earth. That however was not planned for mankind, something else was intended. On the one hand man was to unite himself in the proper way with the earth; on the other, although through his nature he was to become related to the earth, yet messages were to come down to him from the Spiritual world which would raise him once again above the earth. This bringing down of the Heavenly Message came about through the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore the Being Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha had to take on human nature as well as that of a Heavenly Being. This means that we must think of Christ Jesus not merely as One, who although the Highest, entered human evolution and developed therein; but as One Who possessed a heavenly nature, Who not only taught and propagated doctrine but brought into the earth that which came from Heaven. That is why it is important to understand what the Baptism in Jordan really is; it is not merely a moral action—I do not say it is not a moral action, but it is not that alone. It is also a real action. Something took place then which is just as much a reality as the happenings of nature. If I warm a thing by some warmth-giving means, the warmth passes over into that which is warmed. In like manner did the Christ-Being pass into Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism by John. That is most certainly in the highest degree a moral action; but it is also a reality in the course of nature, just as real as the phenomena of nature. The important thing is that it should be understood that this is nothing originating in rationalistic conceptions, which always accord merely with the mechanical, physical or chemical course of nature; but something which as idea, is just as much an actual fact as the laws of nature, or indeed the forces of nature.

Once this has been grasped, other ideas will become more real than they are at present. We will not now enter into a discussion on alchemy, but remember that what the old alchemist had in view was that his conceptions should not remain mere ideas, but that they should result in something. (Whether he was justified or not is a not the point for the moment, that may perhaps be the subject of another lecture.) When he burnt incense while holding his conception in mind or giving voice to it, he tried to put sufficient force into it to compel the smoke of the incense to take on form. He sought for such ideas as have the power of affecting the external realities of nature, ideas that do not merely remain within the egoistic part of man but can intervene in the realities of nature. Why did he do this? Because he still had the idea that something occurred at the Mystery of Golgotha which intervened in the course of nature: that was just as real a fact to him as a fact of nature. You see upon this rests a very significant difference which began in the second half of the Middle Ages, towards our own fifth age which followed the Graeco-Latin epoch. At the time of the crusades, in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth, and indeed in the sixteenth century, there were some special natures, principally women, who devoted themselves so deeply to mysticism, that the inner experience resulting therefrom was felt by them as a spiritual marriage, whether with Christ or another. Many ascetic nuns celebrated mystical marriages. I will not enter into the nature of these inner mystic unions today; but something took place in their inner being which could afterwards only be expressed in words. In a sense it was something that subsisted in the ideas, feelings and also the words in which these were clothed. In contrast to this, Valentine Andrea, as the result of certain conceptions and Spiritual connections, wrote his Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreuz. This chymical—or, as we should say today, chemical-marriage is also a human experience, but when you go into the matter you find that this does not only apply to a soul-experience but to something not merely expressed in words, but which grips the whole man; it is not merely put into the world as a soul experience, for it was a real occurrence, an event of nature, in which a man accomplishes something like a natural process. Valentine Andrea in The Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreuz, meant to express something that was more permeated with reality than the merely mystical marriage of Mechthild of Magdeburg, who was a mystic. The mystical marriage of the nuns only accomplished something for the subjective nature of man; by the chymical marriage a man gave himself to the world. Through this, something was accomplished for the whole world; just as something is accomplished for the whole world by the processes of nature. This is again to be taken in a truly Christian sense. Those who thought more real thoughts, longed for concepts through which they could better lay hold of reality, even if only in the one-sided way of the old alchemists—concepts through which they could better grasp reality, ideas in fact which were really connected with reality. The age of materialism has at present thrown a veil over such concepts; and those who today believe they think aright about reality are living in greater illusion than these despised men at the time of the old alchemists, who strove for concepts which should help them to master it.

For what can men accomplish today with their concepts? In our age in particular we have some experience of what they can attain through these empty illusions; the husks of ideas are idols worshipped today, they have nothing to do with reality. For reality is only reached by man plunging down into it, not by forming any sort of ideas at will; yet the difference between unreal concepts and those which are permeated with reality, can be perceived in the ordinary things of the day, but most people do not recognise this. They are so absolutely satisfied with the mere shadow of ideas, having no reality. Suppose, for instance, someone today gets up and makes a speech in which perhaps he may say that a new age must come which is already manifesting, a completely new age in which every man will be measured according to his own worth alone, when he will be valued according to what he can do! Anyone today would admit that such words are in complete understanding with the times! But, my dear friends, as long as ideas are nothing but husks, however beautiful they may be, they are not permeated with reality. For it is not the point that one who is convinced that his own nephew happens to be the best man for the job should admit the principle that every man should be put in the place to which his powers are best adapted. It is not the ideas and concepts one may have that signify: what is required is that with those ideas one should penetrate the reality, and recognise it! It is very pleasant to have ideals and fine principles and often still pleasanter to give expression to them. But what is needed is that we should really plunge down into the reality, recognise it, and penetrate it. We are plunging more and more deeply into that which has brought about these sad times, if we continue to carry on this worshipping of the idols of the husks and shadows of ideas, if we do not learn to see that it is not of the slightest value to have ‘such beautiful ideas and conceptions,’ and to talk about them unless there is the will to get right down to the realities and recognise them. If we do that, we shall not only find the substance, but also the Spirit therein. It is the worshipping of idols, of the mere shadows and husks of ideas, which lead us away from the Spirit. It is the great misfortune of our age, that people are intoxicated with fine words. It is unchristian too; for the true basic principle of Christianity is that the Christ did not pour His teaching into Jesus of Nazareth but poured Himself in; which means that He so united Himself with earthly reality, was so drawn into the reality of the earth, that He thereby became the Living Message from the Cosmos.

The New Testament, my dear friends, if read aright, is the most wonderful means of education concerning reality; only the New Testament must little by little be put into our own language. The present translations do not now completely give the original meaning; but when the old meaning is put into the direct language of our day, the gospels will then be the very best means of bringing man ‘that power of thinking that is permeated with reality.’ For nowhere can thought-forms be found in them that could lead to the husks and shadows of ideas. We need but to grasp these things today in their deeper reality. It may sound almost trivial to speak of the intoxication of ideas, but this is so enormously prevalent today that the ideas and concepts themselves, however beautiful they may sound, are no longer the real point at issue: what is important is that the man who utters them should take his stand on reality. People find that difficult to understand today. Everything that comes out into the open is judged today by its content, and indeed by what is understood of that content. If this were not so, such documents, for instance, as the so-called Peace-Programme of President Wilson—which is entirely void of ideas, a husk, a mere conglomeration of the shadows of ideas—would never be taken as based on reality. Anyone having the power of discerning the reflections of ideas would know that this combination could at most only work by means of a certain absurdity, which might become a sort of reality. What is really needed is that people should try to find ideas and concepts really permeated with reality; this however pre-supposes in the seekers that they themselves should be profoundly imbued with reality and be selfless enough to connect themselves with that which lives and moves in reality. There is a great deal in the present day well calculated to lead people entirely away from the search for reality, but these things are not observed.

He who knows sees many sad things going on. For instance, that it should be possible at the present day for people to be impressed simply by a combination of words, by a number of speeches, which indeed are printed, but which, to one who does not go by mere words but by realities, are absolutely appalling. Speeches have been delivered by a highly honoured person of our day, who in his very first speech immediately takes up the attitude that man on one side of his nature, is absolutely related to the order of nature, and that the theologians are not acting aright if they do not leave the order of nature to the scientists who investigate it. The speeches go on to say that as regards the order of nature, man is simply a piece of machinery; but on this machinery depend the functions of the soul; what are then specified as functions include practically all the functions belonging to the soul. All these are then to be left to the Nature investigators! Nothing is left to comfort theology but the thought that all this has now been given over to Natural Science, and all we have to do is to make speeches—to talk! After that, of course one can only live on husks of words. Furthermore, the speeches are so composed that they lack continuity. (I shall come back to this subject in the coming lectures and go into it more fully.) If you look closely into the thought that is supposed to be connected with the one immediately preceding it, you will find that it cannot possibly be thought of as connected. The whole thing sounds very well, however! In the preface to certain lectures “On the Moulding of Life,” it is stated that they have been lately attended by thousands of people, and that certainly many thousands more feel the need to comfort their souls at this serious time by perusing them. These lectures were given by the celebrated theologian Hunzinger, and I believe are in the ‘Quelle-Meyer’ Library, under the name of Knowledge and Education. They are among the most dangerous literature of the day, because, although they sound enchanting, one's thought-life becomes simply confused, for the thoughts are disconnected and, if one strips off the fascinating words, are nothing but nonsense. Yet these lectures were very much praised, and no one noticed the confused thoughts in them or stopped to test them; everyone was charmed by the shadow-words.

Yes, the external reality entirely hangs together with that which man is ever developing. If he develops concepts void of reality, the reality itself becomes confused and then follow conditions such as we have today. It is no longer possible to judge things by what meets us today externally; we must form our opinions by studying what has been developing in the minds of men for years, or decades, perhaps even longer still. That is what must be gone into. The whole thing depends upon our not accepting the Christ from His teaching alone, but that we should look at the Mystery of Golgotha in its actuality, in its reality; that we should see that it was a Fact that Something super-earthly united itself with the earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We shall then come to realise that morality is not merely something which fades and dies away, when the earth, and even the fabric of the heavens, shall become a grave; but that even though the present earth and the present heavens become a grave, yet, just as the present plants will become mere dust while in the present plant there is the germ of the next one, so there is the germ of the next world in this world of ours, and man is connected with this germ. Only this germ requires the connection with Christ that it may not fall into the grave with the earth, as a plant germ that has not been fructified falls into dust with the plant. The most real thought it is possible to hold, is that the present moral order of the world is the germinal force for the future order of nature. Morality is no mere worked-out thought; if permeated with reality it exists in the present as a germ for later external realities. But a conception of the world such as that of Kant-Laplace, of which Hermann Grimm says that a piece of carrion which attracts a hungry dog is a more appetising aspect, does not belong to that order of thought. The mechanical plan of the world can never penetrate to the thought that morality contains within it a force which is the germ of the natural, of the nature of the future. Why can it not do this? Because it must live in illusion. For just imagine, my dear friends: if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, all would have been as in the Kant-Laplace theory. If you think away the Mystery of Golgotha from the earth, that theory would be correct. The earth had to reach such a condition that, left to itself, it must inevitably lead the human race into the desolation of the grave. Things had to take place as they have, that man might attain freedom through his relation to the earth. He will not sink into the grave, because at the critical moment the earth was fructified by Christ, because Christ descended, and because in Christ lies the opposing force to that which leads to the grave, namely, the germinal force whereby man can be borne up once more into the Spiritual world. That means that when the earth becomes a grave, when it fulfils its destiny according to the Kant-Laplace theory, the germ which is concealed within it must not be allowed to fall into decay, but must be carried on into the future. So that the Christian-moral plan of the world presupposes what Goethe calls ‘the higher nature in nature.’ We might say: A man who is able to think in the right way of the Mystery of Golgotha, as a reality, is also able to think thoughts and form concepts permeated with reality. This is necessary, this is what people must learn before all else. For in this fifth Post-Atlantean age they have either desired to form concepts which intoxicate them, or such as create blindness in them. The concepts which intoxicate are chiefly formed in the realms of religion; those which cause blindness chiefly in the domain of Natural Science. A conception like that of Kant, which, while admitting the purely natural ordering, placing the two worlds of knowledge and of faith side by side, has yet only the moral in view,—must result in intoxication. Concepts based on moral grounds are able to intoxicate, and the intoxication prevents one from seeing that one thus simply succumbs to the stillness of the grave, into which all the moral plans of the world have fallen, and perished. Or, again, such concepts as those of present-day Natural Science, National Economy, and—forgive the expression, which may be rather hard to swallow—even the political concepts of the day, may create blindness; for they are not formed in connection with a Spiritual conception of the world, but from the shreds of what are called actual (that is, actual in the physical sense), actual reality. Thus each man sees only as far as the end of his own nose, and blindly forms opinions upon what he can see with his eyes and grasp with mechanically acquired ideas, between birth and death; without having formed any concepts permeated with reality through being permeated by the Spiritual, by a grasp of Spiritual reality.

It is necessary over and over again to point out what it is that our age so desperately needs. For even history itself in our age is often no more than the mere shadow of ideas. How frequently what Fichte said to the German people is proclaimed abroad today! What he really said, however, can only be understood if one studies his whole life, that life so profoundly rooted in reality! That is why I tried in my book, The Riddle of Man, to represent the personality of Fichte, as he afterwards became, showing how closely from his childhood up he was connected with reality. I should indeed be glad if such words as these—as to the need for our thoughts and concepts to be permeated with reality—were not only listened to superficially but profoundly grasped, taken in, and really absorbed. Then only will a free and open vision, a psychic vision, be acquired for what our age so badly needs. Everyone of us should have this open soul-vision. If we do not each make it a duty to think over the facts touched upon here, we are not paying sufficient attention to the traffic going on today in the shadows and husks of words, nor to the fact that everything tends to lead people either into intoxicating concepts or to such as make them blind.

I hope you will not take what has been said today as propagandism of any sort, but look upon it as expressing existing facts. A man certainly must and ought to live with his times and when anything is described, he should not look upon it as all that is to be said on the subject; he should learn to strike the balance. It is quite natural that the world today should be confronted with impulses leading entirely to materialism. That cannot be prevented, it is connected with the deep needs of the age. But a counterbalance must be established. One very prominent means of driving man into materialism is the cinematograph. It has not been observed from this standpoint; but there is no better school for materialism than the cinema. For what one sees there is not reality as men see it. Only an age which has so little idea of reality as this age of ours, which worships reality as an idol in a material sense, could believe that the cinema represents reality. Any other age would consider whether men really walk along the street as seen at the cinema; people would ask themselves whether what they saw at such a performance really corresponded to reality. Ask yourselves frankly and honourably, what is really most like what you see in the street: a picture painted by an artist, an immobile picture, or the dreadful sparkling pictures of the cinematograph. If you put the question to yourselves quite honourably, you will admit that what the artist reproduces in a state of rest is much more like what you see. Hence, while people are sitting at the cinema, what they see there does not make its way into the ordinary faculty of perception, it enters a deeper, more material stratum than we usually employ for our perception. A man becomes etherically goggle-eyed at the cinema; he develops eyes like those of a seal, only much larger, I mean larger etherically. This works in a materialising way, not only upon what he has in his consciousness, but upon his deepest sub-consciousness. Do not think I am abusing the cinematograph; I should like to say once more that it is quite natural it should exist, and it will attain far greater perfection as time goes on. That will be the road leading to materialism. But a counterbalance must be established, and that can only be created in the following way. With the search for reality which is being developed in the cinema, with this descent below sense-perception, man must at the same time develop an ascent above it, an ascent into Spiritual reality. Then the cinema will do him no harm, and he can see it as often as he likes. But unless the counterbalance is there, people will be led by such things as these, not to have their proper relation to the earth, but to become more and more closely related to it, until at last, they are entirely shut off from the Spiritual world.

In these four lectures which I am giving in the course of our General Meeting, I should like to speak from a particular standpoint about the connection between Man and the Cosmos. I will first indicate what this standpoint is.

Man experiences within himself what we may call thought, and in thought he can feel himself directly active, able to exercise his activity. When we observe anything external, e.g. a rose or a stone, and picture it to ourselves, someone may rightly say: “You can never know how much of the stone or the rose you have really got hold of when you imagine it. You see the rose, its external red colour, its form, and how it is divided into single petals; you see the stone with its colour, with its several corners, but you must always say to yourself that hidden within it there may be something else which does not appear to you externally. You do not know how much of the rose or of the stone your mental picture of it embraces.”

But when someone has a thought, then it is he himself who makes the thought. One might say that he is within every fiber of his thought, a complete participator in its activity. He knows: “Everything that is in the thought I have thought into it, and what I have not thought into it cannot be within it. I survey the thought. Nobody can say, when I set a thought before my mind, that there may still be something more in the thought, as there may be in the rose and in the stone, for I have myself engendered the thought and am present in it, and so I know what is in it.”

In truth, thought is most completely our possession. If we can find the relation of thought to the Cosmos, to the Universe, we shall find the relation to the Cosmos of what is most completely ours. This can assure us that we have here a fruitful standpoint from which to observe the relation of man to the universe. We will therefore embark on this course; it will lead us to significant heights of anthroposophical observation.

In the present lecture we shall have to prepare a groundwork which may perhaps appear to many of you as somewhat abstract. But later on we shall see that we need this groundwork and that without it we could approach only with a certain superficiality the high goals we shall be striving to attain.

We can thus start from the conviction that when man holds to that which he possesses in his thought, he can find an intimate relation of his being to the Cosmos. But in starting from this point of view we do encounter a difficulty, a great difficulty—not for our understanding but in practice. For it is indeed true that a man lives within every fibre of his thought, and therefore must be able to know his thought more intimately than he can know any perceptual image, but—yes—most people have no thoughts! And as a rule this is not thoroughly realized, for the simple reason that one must have thoughts in order to realize it. What hinders people in the widest circles from having thoughts is that for the ordinary requirements of life they have no need to go as far as thinking; they can get along quite well with words. Most of what we call “thinking” in ordinary life is merely a flow of words: people think in words, and much more often than is generally supposed. Many people, when they ask for an explanation of something, are satisfied if the reply includes some word with a familiar ring, reminding them of this or that. They take the feeling of familiarity for an explanation and then fancy they have grasped the thought

Indeed, this very tendency led at a certain time in the evolution of intellectual life to an outlook which is still shared by many persons who call themselves “thinkers”. For the new edition of my Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Views of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century).¹ I tried to rearrange the book quite thoroughly, first by prefacing it with an account of the evolution of Western thought from the sixth century B.C. up to the nineteenth century A.D., and then by adding to the original conclusion a description of spiritual life in terms of thinking up to our own day. The content of the book has also been rearranged in many ways, for I have tried to show how thought as we know it really appeared first in a certain specific period. One might say that it first appeared in the sixth or eighth century B.C. Before then the human soul did not at all experience what can be called “thought” in the true sense of the word. What did human souls experience previously? They experienced pictures; all their experience of the external world took the form of pictures. I have often spoken of this from certain points of view. This picture-experience is the last phase of the old clairvoyant experience. After that, for the human soul, the “picture” passes over into “thought”.

My intention in this book was to bring out this finding of Spiritual Science purely by tracing the course of philosophic evolution. Strictly on this basis, it is shown that thought was born in ancient Greece, and that as a human experience it sprang from the old way of perceiving the external world in pictures. I then tried to show how thought evolves further in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; how it takes certain forms; how it develops further; and then how, in the Middle Ages, it leads to something of which I will now speak.

The development of thought leads to a stage of doubting the existence of what are called “universals”, general concepts, and thus to so-called Nominalism, the view that universals can be no more than “names”, nothing but words. And this view is still widely held today.

In order to make this clear, let us take a general concept that is easily observable—the concept “triangle”. Now anyone still in the grip of Nominalism of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries will say somewhat as follows: “Draw me a triangle!” Good! I will draw a triangle for him:

“Right!” says he, “that is a quite specific triangle with three acute angles. But I will draw you another.” And he draws a right-angled triangle, and another with an obtuse angle.

Naturally, this goes further. Let us suppose that someone says the word “lion”. Anyone who takes his stand on the basis of Nominalism may say: “In the Berlin Zoo there is a lion; in the Hanover Zoo there is also a lion; in the Munich Zoo there is still another. There are these single lions, but there is no general lion connected with the lions in Berlin, Hanover and Munich; that is a mere word which embraces the single lions.” There are only separate things; and beyond the separate things—so says the Nominalist—we have nothing but words that comprise the separate things.

As I have said, this view is still held today by many clear-thinking logicians. And anyone who tries to explain all this will really have to admit: “There is something strange about it; without going further in some way I can't make out whether there really is or is not this ‘lion-in-general’ and the ‘triangle-in-general’. I find it far from clear.” And now suppose someone came along and said: “Look here, my dear chap, I can't let you off with just showing me the Berlin or Hanover or Munich lion. If you declare that there is a lion-in-general, then you must take me somewhere where it exists. If you show me only the Berlin, Hanover, or Munich lion, you have not proved to me that a ‘lion-in-general’ exists.” ... If someone were to come along who held this view, and if you had to show him the “lion-in-general”, you would be in a difficulty. It is not so easy to say where you would have to take him.

We will not go on just yet to what we can learn from Spiritual Science; that will come in time. For the moment we will remain at the point which can be reached by thinking only, and we shall have to say to ourselves: “On this ground, we cannot manage to lead any doubter to the ‘lion-in-general.’ It really can't be done.” Here we meet with one of the difficulties which we simply have to admit. For if we refuse to recognize this difficulty in the domain of ordinary thought, we shall not admit the difficulty of human cognition in general.

Let us keep to the triangle, for it makes no difference to the thing-in-general whether we clarify the question by means of the triangle, the lion, or something else. At first it seems hopeless to think of drawing a triangle that would contain all characteristics, all triangles. And because it not only seems hopeless, but is hopeless for ordinary human thinking, therefore all conventional philosophy stands here at a boundary-line, and its task should be to make a proper acknowledgment that, as conventional philosophy, it does stand at a boundary-line. But this applies only to conventional philosophy. There is a possibility of passing beyond the boundary, and with this possibility we will now make ourselves acquainted.

Let us suppose that we do not draw the triangle so that we simply say: Now I have drawn you a triangle, and here it is:

In that case the objection could always be raised that it is an acute-angled triangle; it is not a general triangle. The triangle can be drawn differently. Properly speaking it cannot, but we shall soon see how this “can” and “cannot” are related to one another. Let us take this triangle that we have here, and let us allow each side to move as it will in any direction, and moreover we allow it to move with varying speeds, so that next moment the sides take, e.g., these positions:

In short, we arrive at the uncomfortable notion of saying: I will not only draw a triangle and let it stay as it is, but I will make certain demands on your imagination. You must think to yourself that the sides of the triangle are in continual motion. When they are in motion, then out of the form of the movements there can arise simultaneously a right-angled, or an obtuse-angled triangle, or any other.

In this field we can do and also require two different things. We can first make it all quite easy; we draw a triangle and have done with it. We know how it looks and we can rest comfortably in our thoughts, for we have got what we want. But we can also take the triangle as a starting-point, and allow each side to move in various directions and at different speeds. In this case it is not quite so easy; we have to carry out movements in our thought. But in this way we really do lay hold of the triangle in its general form; we fail to get there only if we are content with one triangle. The general thought, “triangle”, is there if we keep the thought in continual movement, if we make it versatile.

This is just what the philosophers have never done; they have not set their thoughts into movement. Hence they are brought to a halt at a boundary-line, and they take refuge in Nominalism.

We will now translate what I have just been saying into a language that we know, that we have long known. If we are to rise from the specific thought to the general thought, we have to bring the specific thought into motion; thus thought in movement becomes the “general thought” by passing constantly from one form into another. “Form”, I say; rightly understood, this means that the whole is in movement, and each entity brought forth by the movement is a self-contained form. Previously I drew only single forms: an acute-angled, a right-angled, and an obtuse-angled triangle. Now I am drawing something—as I said, I do not really draw it—but you can picture to yourselves what the idea is meant to evoke—the general thought is in motion, and brings forth the single forms as its stationary states.

“Forms”, I said—hence we see that the philosophers of Nominalism, who stand before a boundary-line, go about their work in a certain realm, the realm of the Spirits of Form. Within this realm, which is all around us, forms dominate; and therefore in this realm we find separate, strictly self-contained forms. The philosophers I mean have never made up their minds to go outside this realm of forms, and so, in the realm of universals, they can recognize nothing but words, veritably mere words. If they were to go beyond the realm of specific entities—i.e. of forms—they would find their way to mental pictures which are in continual motion; that is, in their thinking they would come to a realization of the realm of the Spirits of Movement—the next higher Hierarchy. But these philosophers will not condescend to that. And when in recent times a Western thinker did consent to think correctly in this way, he was little understood, although much was said and much nonsense talked about him. Turn to what Goethe wrote in his “Metamorphosis of Plants” and see what he called the “primal plant” (Urpflanze), and then turn to what he called the “primal animal” (Urtier) and you will find that you can understand these concepts “primal plant” and “primal animal” only if your thoughts are mobile—when you think in mobile terms. If you accept this mobility, of which Goethe himself speaks, you are not stuck with an isolated concept bounded by fixed forms. You have the living element which ramifies through the whole evolution of the animal kingdom, or the plant-kingdom, and creates the forms. During this process it changes—as the triangle changes into an acute-angled or an obtuse-angled one—becoming now “wolf”, now “lion”, now “beetle”, in accordance with the metamorphoses of its mobility during its passage through the particular entities. Goethe brought the petrified formal concepts into movement. That was his great central act; his most significant contribution to the nature-study of his time.

You see here an example of how Spiritual Science is in fact adapted to leading men out of the fixed assumptions to which they cannot help clinging today, even if they are philosophers. For without concepts gained through Spiritual Science it is not possible, if one is sincere, to concede that general categories can be anything more than “mere words”. That is why I said that most people have no real thoughts, but merely a flow of words, and if one speaks to them of thoughts, they reject it.

When does one speak to people of “thoughts”? When, for example, one says that animals have Group-souls. For it amounts to the same whether one says “collective thoughts” or “group-souls” (we shall see in the course of these lectures what the connection is between the two). But the Group-soul cannot be understood except by thinking of it as being in motion, in continual external and internal motion; otherwise one does not come to the Group-soul. But people reject that. Hence they reject the Group-soul, and equally the collective thought.

For getting to know the outside world you need no thoughts; you need only a remembrance of what you have seen in the kingdom of form. That is all most people know, and for them, accordingly, general thoughts remain mere words. And if among the many different Spirits of the higher Hierarchies there were not the Genius of Speech—who forms general words for general concepts—men themselves would not come to it. Thus their first ideas of things-in-themselves come to men straight out of language itself, and they know very little about such ideas except in so far as language preserves them.

We can see from this that there must be something peculiar about the thinking of real thoughts. And this will not surprise us if we realize how difficult it really is for men to attain to clarity in the realm of thought. In ordinary, external life, when a person wants to brag a little, he will often say that “thinking is easy”. But it is not easy, for real thinking always demands a quite intimate, though in a certain sense unconscious, impulse from the realm of the Spirits of Movement. If thinking were so very easy, then such colossal blunders would not be made in the region of thought. Thus, for more than a century now, people have worried themselves over a thought I have often mentioned—a thought formulated by Kant.

Kant wanted to drive out of the field the so-called “ontological proof of God”. This ontological proof of God dates from the time of Nominalism, when it was said that nothing general existed which corresponded to general or collective thoughts, as single, specific objects correspond to specific thoughts. The argument says, roughly: If we presuppose God, then He must be an absolutely perfect Being. If He is an absolutely perfect Being, then He must not lack “being”, i.e. existence, for otherwise there would be a still more perfect Being who would possess those attributes one has in mind, and would also exist. Thus one must think that the most perfect Being actually exists. One cannot conceive of God as otherwise than existing, if one thinks of Him as the most perfect Being. That is: out of the concept itself one can deduce that, according to the ontological proof, there must be God.

Kant tried to refute this proof by showing that out of a “concept” one could not derive the existence of a thing, and for this he coined the famous saying I have often mentioned: A hundred actual thalers are not less and not more than a hundred possible thalers. That is, if a thaler has three hundred pfennigs, then for each one of a hundred possible thalers one must reckon three hundred pfennigs: and in like manner three hundred pfennigs for each of a hundred actual thalers. Thus a hundred possible thalers contain just as much as a hundred actual thalers, i.e. it makes no difference whether I think of a hundred actual or a hundred possible thalers. Hence one may not derive existence from the mere thought of an absolutely perfect Being, because the mere thought of a possible God would have the same attributes as the thought of an actual God.

That appears very reasonable. And yet for a century people have been worrying themselves as to how it is with the hundred possible and the hundred actual thalers. But let us take a very obvious point of view, that of practical life; can one say from this point of view that a hundred actual thalers do not contain more than a hundred possible ones? One can say that a hundred actual thalers contain exactly a hundred thalers more than do a hundred possible ones! And it is quite clear: if you think of a hundred possible thalers on one side and of a hundred actual thalers on the other, there is a difference. On this other side there are exactly a hundred thalers more. And in most real cases it is just on the hundred actual thalers that the question turns.

But the matter has a deeper aspect. One can ask the question: What is the point in the difference between a hundred possible and a hundred actual thalers? I think it would be generally conceded that for anyone who can acquire the hundred thalers, there is beyond doubt a decided difference between a hundred possible thalers and a hundred actual ones. For imagine that you are in need of a hundred thalers, and somebody lets you choose whether he is to give you the hundred possible or the hundred actual thalers. If you can get the thalers, the whole point is the difference between the two kinds. But suppose you were so placed that you cannot in any way acquire the hundred thalers, then you might feel absolutely indifferent as to whether someone did not give you a hundred possible or a hundred actual thalers. When a person cannot have them, then a hundred actual and a hundred possible thalers are in fact of exactly the same value.

This is a significant point. And the significance is this—that the way in which Kant spoke about God could occur only at a time when men could no longer “have God” through human soul-experience. As He could not be reached as an actuality, then the concept of the possible God or of the actual God was immaterial, just as it is immaterial whether one is not to have a hundred actual or a hundred possible thalers. If there is no path for the soul to the true God, then certainly no development of thought in the style of Kant can lead to Him.

Hence we see that the matter has this deeper side also. But I have introduced it only because I wanted to make it clear that when the question becomes one of “thinking”, then one must go somewhat more deeply. Errors of thought slip out even among the most brilliant thinkers, and for a long time one does not see where the weak spot of the argument lies—as, for example, in the Kantian thought about the hundred possible and the hundred actual thalers. In thinking, one must always take account of the situation in which the thought has to be grasped.

By discussing first the nature of general concepts, and then the existence of such errors in thinking as this Kantian one, I have tried to show you that one cannot properly reflect on ways of thinking without going deeply into actualities. I will now approach the matter from yet another side, a third side.

Let us suppose that we have here a mountain or hill, and beside it, a steep slope. On the slope there is a spring and the flow from it leaps sheer down, a real waterfall. Higher up on the same slope is another spring; the water from it would like to leap down in the same way, but it does not. It cannot behave as a waterfall, but runs down nicely as a stream or beck. Is the water itself endowed with different forces in these two cases? Quite clearly not. For the second stream would behave just as the first stream does if it were not obstructed by the shape of the mountain. If the obstructive force of the mountain were not present, the second stream would go leaping down. Thus we have to reckon with two forces: the obstructive force of the mountain and the earth's gravitational pull, which turns the first stream into a waterfall. The gravitational force acts also on the second stream—one can see how it brings the stream flowing down. But a skeptic could say that in the case of the second stream this is not at all obvious, whereas in the first stream every particle of water goes hurtling down. In the case of the second stream we must reckon in at every point the obstructing force of the mountain, which acts in opposition to the earth's gravitational pull.

Now suppose someone came along and said: “I don't altogether believe what you tell me about the force of gravity, nor do I believe in the obstructing force. Is the mountain the cause of the stream taking a particular path? I don't believe it.” “Well, what do you believe?” one might ask. He replies: “I believe that part of the water is down there, above it is more water, above that more water again, and so on. I believe the lower water is pushed down by the water above it, and this water by the water above it. Each part of the water drives down the water below it.” Here is a noteworthy distinction. The first man declares: “Gravity pulls the water down.” The second man says: “Masses of water are perpetually pushing down the water below them: that is how the water comes down from above.”

Obviously anyone who spoke of a “pushing down” of this kind would be very silly. But suppose it is a question not of a beck or stream but of the history of mankind, and suppose someone like the person I have just described were to say: “The only thing I believe of what you tell me is this: we are now living in the twentieth century, and during it certain events have taken place. They were brought about by similar ones during the last third of the nineteenth century; these again were caused by events in the second third of the nineteenth century, and these again by those in the first third.” That is what is called “pragmatic history”, in which one always speaks of “causes and effects”, so that subsequent events are always explained by means of preceding ones. Just as someone might deny the force of gravity and say that the masses of water are continually pushing one another forward, so it is when someone is pursuing pragmatic history and explains the condition of the nineteenth century as a result of the French Revolution.

In reply to a pragmatic historian we would of course say: “No, other forces are active besides those that push from behind—which in fact are not there at all in the true sense. For just as little as there are forces pushing the stream from behind, just as little do preceding events push from behind in the history of humanity. Fresh influences are always coming out of the spiritual world—just as in the stream the force of gravity is always at work—and these influences cross with other forces, just as the force of gravity crosses with the obstructive force of the mountain. If only one force were present, you would see the course of history running quite differently. But you do not see the individual forces at work in history. You see only the physical ordering of the world: what we would call the results of the Saturn, Moon and Sun stages in the evolution of the Earth. You do not see all that goes on continually in human souls, as they live through the spiritual world and then come down again to Earth. All this you simply deny.”

But there is today a conception of history which is just what we would expect from somebody who came along with ideas such as those I have described, and it is by no means rare. Indeed in the nineteenth century it was looked upon as immensely clever. But what should we be able to say about it from the standpoint we have gained? If anyone were to explain the mountain stream in this “pragmatic” way, he would be talking utter nonsense. How is it then that he upholds the same nonsense with regard to history? The reason is simply that he does not notice it! And history is so complicated that it is almost everywhere expounded as “pragmatic history”, and nobody notices it.

We can certainly see from this that Spiritual Science, which has to develop sound principles for the understanding of life, has work to do in the most varied domains of life; and that it is first of all necessary to learn how to think, and to get to know the inner laws and impulses of thought. Otherwise all sorts of grotesque things can befall one. Thus for example a certain man to-day is stumbling and bumbling over the problem of “thought and language”. He is the celebrated language-critic Fritz Mauthner, who has also written lately a large philosophical dictionary. His bulky Critique of Language is already in its third edition, so for our contemporaries it is a celebrated work. There are plenty of ingenious things in this book, and plenty of dreadful ones. Thus one can find here a curious example of faulty thinking—and one runs up against such blunders in almost every five lines—which leads the worthy Mauthner to throw doubt on the need for logic. “Thinking”, for him, is merely speaking; hence there is no sense in studying logic; grammar is all one needs. He says also that since there is, rightly speaking, no logic, logicians are fools. And then he says: In ordinary life, opinions are the result of inferences, and ideas come from opinions. That is how people go on! Why should there be any need for logic when we are told that opinions arise from inferences, and ideas from opinions? It is just as clever as if someone were to say: “Why do you need botany? Last year and two years ago the plants were growing.” But such is the logic one finds in a man who prohibits logic. One can quite understand that he does prohibit it. There are many more remarkable things in this strange book—a book that, in regard to the relation between thought and language, leads not to lucidity but to confusion.

I said that we need a substructure for the things that are to lead us to the heights of spiritual contemplation. Such a substructure as has been put forward here may appear to many as somewhat abstract; still, we shall need it. And I think I have tried to make it so easy that what I have said is clear enough. I should like particularly to emphasise that through such simple considerations as these one can get an idea of where the boundary lies between the realm of the Spirits of Form and the realm of the Spirits of Movement. But whether one comes to such an idea is intimately connected with whether one is prepared to admit thoughts of things-in-general, or whether one is prepared to admit only ideas or concepts of individual things—I say expressly “is prepared to admit”.

On these expositions—to which, as they are somewhat abstract, I will add nothing further—we will build further in the next lecture.

• 1. First published (two volumes) in Berlin, 1900–1. In 1914 the contents were recast and published in a different form as Die Rätsel der Philosophie (Riddles of Philosophy). The fourth edition is included in the Complete Edition of Rudolf Steiner's work. (Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.)

IN THESE four lectures which I am giving in the course of our General Meeting, I should like to speak from a particular standpoint about the connection between Man and the Cosmos. I will first indicate what this standpoint is.

Man experiences within himself what we may call thought, and in thought he can feel himself directly active, able to exercise his activity. When we observe anything external, e.g. a rose or a stone, and picture it to ourselves, someone may rightly say: “You can never know how much of the stone or the rose you have really got hold of when you imagine it. You see the rose, its external red colour, its form, and how it is divided into single petals; you see the stone with its colour, with its several corners, but you must always say to yourself that hidden within it there may be something else which does not appear to you externally. You do not know how much of the rose or of the stone your mental picture of it embraces.”

But when someone has a thought, then it is he himself who makes the thought. One might say that he is within every fiber of his thought, a complete participator in its activity. He knows: “Everything that is in the thought I have thought into it, and what I have not thought into it cannot be within it. I survey the thought. Nobody can say, when I set a thought before my mind, that there may still be something more in the thought, as there may be in the rose and in the stone, for I have myself engendered the thought and am present in it, and so I know what is in it.”

In truth, thought is most completely our possession. If we can find the relation of thought to the Cosmos, to the Universe, we shall find the relation to the Cosmos of what is most completely ours. This can assure us that we have here a fruitful standpoint from which to observe the relation of man to the universe. We will therefore embark on this course; it will lead us to significant heights of anthroposophical observation.

In the present lecture we shall have to prepare a groundwork which may perhaps appear to many of you as somewhat abstract. But later on we shall see that we need this groundwork and that without it we could approach only with a certain superficiality the high goals we shall be striving to attain.

We can thus start from the conviction that when man holds to that which he possesses in his thought, he can find an intimate relation of his being to the Cosmos. But in starting from this point of view we do encounter a difficulty, a great difficulty—not for our understanding but in practice. For it is indeed true that a man lives within every fibre of his thought, and therefore must be able to know his thought more intimately than he can know any perceptual image, but—yes—most people have no thoughts! And as a rule this is not thoroughly realized, for the simple reason that one must have thoughts in order to realize it. What hinders people in the widest circles from having thoughts is that for the ordinary requirements of life they have no need to go as far as thinking; they can get along quite well with words. Most of what we call “thinking” in ordinary life is merely a flow of words: people think in words, and much more often than is generally supposed. Many people, when they ask for an explanation of something, are satisfied if the reply includes some word with a familiar ring, reminding them of this or that. They take the feeling of familiarity for an explanation and then fancy they have grasped the thought

Indeed, this very tendency led at a certain time in the evolution of intellectual life to an outlook which is still shared by many persons who call themselves “thinkers”. For the new edition of my Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Views of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century).¹ I tried to rearrange the book quite thoroughly, first by prefacing it with an account of the evolution of Western thought from the sixth century B.C. up to the nineteenth century A.D., and then by adding to the original conclusion a description of spiritual life in terms of thinking up to our own day. The content of the book has also been rearranged in many ways, for I have tried to show how thought as we know it really appeared first in a certain specific period. One might say that it first appeared in the sixth or eighth century B.C. Before then the human soul did not at all experience what can be called “thought” in the true sense of the word. What did human souls experience previously? They experienced pictures; all their experience of the external world took the form of pictures. I have often spoken of this from certain points of view. This picture-experience is the last phase of the old clairvoyant experience. After that, for the human soul, the “picture” passes over into “thought”.

My intention in this book was to bring out this finding of Spiritual Science purely by tracing the course of philosophic evolution. Strictly on this basis, it is shown that thought was born in ancient Greece, and that as a human experience it sprang from the old way of perceiving the external world in pictures. I then tried to show how thought evolves further in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; how it takes certain forms; how it develops further; and then how, in the Middle Ages, it leads to something of which I will now speak.

The development of thought leads to a stage of doubting the existence of what are called “universals”, general concepts, and thus to so-called Nominalism, the view that universals can be no more than “names”, nothing but words. And this view is still widely held today.

In order to make this clear, let us take a general concept that is easily observable—the concept “triangle”. Now anyone still in the grip of Nominalism of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries will say somewhat as follows: “Draw me a triangle!” Good! I will draw a triangle for him:

“Right!” says he, “that is a quite specific triangle with three acute angles. But I will draw you another.” And he draws a right-angled triangle, and another with an obtuse angle.

Then says the person in question: “Well, now we have an acute-angled triangle, a right-angled triangle and an obtuse-angled triangle. They certainly exist. But they are not the triangle. The collective or general triangle must contain everything that a triangle can contain. But a triangle that is acute-angled cannot be at the same time right-angled and obtuse-angled. Hence there cannot be a collective triangle. ‘Collective’ is an expression that includes the specific triangles, but a general concept of the triangle does not exist. It is a word that embraces the single details.”

Naturally, this goes further. Let us suppose that someone says the word “lion”. Anyone who takes his stand on the basis of Nominalism may say: “In the Berlin Zoo there is a lion; in the Hanover Zoo there is also a lion; in the Munich Zoo there is still another. There are these single lions, but there is no general lion connected with the lions in Berlin, Hanover and Munich; that is a mere word which embraces the single lions.” There are only separate things; and beyond the separate things—so says the Nominalist—we have nothing but words that comprise the separate things.

As I have said, this view is still held today by many clear-thinking logicians. And anyone who tries to explain all this will really have to admit: “There is something strange about it; without going further in some way I can't make out whether there really is or is not this ‘lion-in-general’ and the ‘triangle-in-general’. I find it far from clear.” And now suppose someone came along and said: “Look here, my dear chap, I can't let you off with just showing me the Berlin or Hanover or Munich lion. If you declare that there is a lion-in-general, then you must take me somewhere where it exists. If you show me only the Berlin, Hanover, or Munich lion, you have not proved to me that a ‘lion-in-general’ exists.” ... If someone were to come along who held this view, and if you had to show him the “lion-in-general”, you would be in a difficulty. It is not so easy to say where you would have to take him.

We will not go on just yet to what we can learn from Spiritual Science; that will come in time. For the moment we will remain at the point which can be reached by thinking only, and we shall have to say to ourselves: “On this ground, we cannot manage to lead any doubter to the ‘lion-in-general.’ It really can't be done.” Here we meet with one of the difficulties which we simply have to admit. For if we refuse to recognize this difficulty in the domain of ordinary thought, we shall not admit the difficulty of human cognition in general.

Let us keep to the triangle, for it makes no difference to the thing-in-general whether we clarify the question by means of the triangle, the lion, or something else. At first it seems hopeless to think of drawing a triangle that would contain all characteristics, all triangles. And because it not only seems hopeless, but is hopeless for ordinary human thinking, therefore all conventional philosophy stands here at a boundary-line, and its task should be to make a proper acknowledgment that, as conventional philosophy, it does stand at a boundary-line. But this applies only to conventional philosophy. There is a possibility of passing beyond the boundary, and with this possibility we will now make ourselves acquainted.

Let us suppose that we do not draw the triangle so that we simply say: Now I have drawn you a triangle, and here it is:

In that case the objection could always be raised that it is an acute-angled triangle; it is not a general triangle. The triangle can be drawn differently. Properly speaking it cannot, but we shall soon see how this “can” and “cannot” are related to one another. Let us take this triangle that we have here, and let us allow each side to move as it will in any direction, and moreover we allow it to move with varying speeds, so that next moment the sides take, e.g., these positions:

In short, we arrive at the uncomfortable notion of saying: I will not only draw a triangle and let it stay as it is, but I will make certain demands on your imagination. You must think to yourself that the sides of the triangle are in continual motion. When they are in motion, then out of the form of the movements there can arise simultaneously a right-angled, or an obtuse-angled triangle, or any other.

In this field we can do and also require two different things. We can first make it all quite easy; we draw a triangle and have done with it. We know how it looks and we can rest comfortably in our thoughts, for we have got what we want. But we can also take the triangle as a starting-point, and allow each side to move in various directions and at different speeds. In this case it is not quite so easy; we have to carry out movements in our thought. But in this way we really do lay hold of the triangle in its general form; we fail to get there only if we are content with one triangle. The general thought, “triangle”, is there if we keep the thought in continual movement, if we make it versatile.

This is just what the philosophers have never done; they have not set their thoughts into movement. Hence they are brought to a halt at a boundary-line, and they take refuge in Nominalism.

We will now translate what I have just been saying into a language that we know, that we have long known. If we are to rise from the specific thought to the general thought, we have to bring the specific thought into motion; thus thought in movement becomes the “general thought” by passing constantly from one form into another. “Form”, I say; rightly understood, this means that the whole is in movement, and each entity brought forth by the movement is a self-contained form. Previously I drew only single forms: an acute-angled, a right-angled, and an obtuse-angled triangle. Now I am drawing something—as I said, I do not really draw it—but you can picture to yourselves what the idea is meant to evoke—the general thought is in motion, and brings forth the single forms as its stationary states.

“Forms”, I said—hence we see that the philosophers of Nominalism, who stand before a boundary-line, go about their work in a certain realm, the realm of the Spirits of Form. Within this realm, which is all around us, forms dominate; and therefore in this realm we find separate, strictly self-contained forms. The philosophers I mean have never made up their minds to go outside this realm of forms, and so, in the realm of universals, they can recognize nothing but words, veritably mere words. If they were to go beyond the realm of specific entities—i.e. of forms—they would find their way to mental pictures which are in continual motion; that is, in their thinking they would come to a realization of the realm of the Spirits of Movement—the next higher Hierarchy. But these philosophers will not condescend to that. And when in recent times a Western thinker did consent to think correctly in this way, he was little understood, although much was said and much nonsense talked about him. Turn to what Goethe wrote in his “Metamorphosis of Plants” and see what he called the “primal plant” (Urpflanze), and then turn to what he called the “primal animal” (Urtier) and you will find that you can understand these concepts “primal plant” and “primal animal” only if your thoughts are mobile—when you think in mobile terms. If you accept this mobility, of which Goethe himself speaks, you are not stuck with an isolated concept bounded by fixed forms. You have the living element which ramifies through the whole evolution of the animal kingdom, or the plant-kingdom, and creates the forms. During this process it changes—as the triangle changes into an acute-angled or an obtuse-angled one—becoming now “wolf”, now “lion”, now “beetle”, in accordance with the metamorphoses of its mobility during its passage through the particular entities. Goethe brought the petrified formal concepts into movement. That was his great central act; his most significant contribution to the nature-study of his time.

You see here an example of how Spiritual Science is in fact adapted to leading men out of the fixed assumptions to which they cannot help clinging today, even if they are philosophers. For without concepts gained through Spiritual Science it is not possible, if one is sincere, to concede that general categories can be anything more than “mere words”. That is why I said that most people have no real thoughts, but merely a flow of words, and if one speaks to them of thoughts, they reject it.

When does one speak to people of “thoughts”? When, for example, one says that animals have Group-souls. For it amounts to the same whether one says “collective thoughts” or “group-souls” (we shall see in the course of these lectures what the connection is between the two). But the Group-soul cannot be understood except by thinking of it as being in motion, in continual external and internal motion; otherwise one does not come to the Group-soul. But people reject that. Hence they reject the Group-soul, and equally the collective thought.

For getting to know the outside world you need no thoughts; you need only a remembrance of what you have seen in the kingdom of form. That is all most people know, and for them, accordingly, general thoughts remain mere words. And if among the many different Spirits of the higher Hierarchies there were not the Genius of Speech—who forms general words for general concepts—men themselves would not come to it. Thus their first ideas of things-in-themselves come to men straight out of language itself, and they know very little about such ideas except in so far as language preserves them.

We can see from this that there must be something peculiar about the thinking of real thoughts. And this will not surprise us if we realize how difficult it really is for men to attain to clarity in the realm of thought. In ordinary, external life, when a person wants to brag a little, he will often say that “thinking is easy”. But it is not easy, for real thinking always demands a quite intimate, though in a certain sense unconscious, impulse from the realm of the Spirits of Movement. If thinking were so very easy, then such colossal blunders would not be made in the region of thought. Thus, for more than a century now, people have worried themselves over a thought I have often mentioned—a thought formulated by Kant.

Kant wanted to drive out of the field the so-called “ontological proof of God”. This ontological proof of God dates from the time of Nominalism, when it was said that nothing general existed which corresponded to general or collective thoughts, as single, specific objects correspond to specific thoughts. The argument says, roughly: If we presuppose God, then He must be an absolutely perfect Being. If He is an absolutely perfect Being, then He must not lack “being”, i.e. existence, for otherwise there would be a still more perfect Being who would possess those attributes one has in mind, and would also exist. Thus one must think that the most perfect Being actually exists. One cannot conceive of God as otherwise than existing, if one thinks of Him as the most perfect Being. That is: out of the concept itself one can deduce that, according to the ontological proof, there must be God.

Kant tried to refute this proof by showing that out of a “concept” one could not derive the existence of a thing, and for this he coined the famous saying I have often mentioned: A hundred actual thalers are not less and not more than a hundred possible thalers. That is, if a thaler has three hundred pfennigs, then for each one of a hundred possible thalers one must reckon three hundred pfennigs: and in like manner three hundred pfennigs for each of a hundred actual thalers. Thus a hundred possible thalers contain just as much as a hundred actual thalers, i.e. it makes no difference whether I think of a hundred actual or a hundred possible thalers. Hence one may not derive existence from the mere thought of an absolutely perfect Being, because the mere thought of a possible God would have the same attributes as the thought of an actual God.

That appears very reasonable. And yet for a century people have been worrying themselves as to how it is with the hundred possible and the hundred actual thalers. But let us take a very obvious point of view, that of practical life; can one say from this point of view that a hundred actual thalers do not contain more than a hundred possible ones? One can say that a hundred actual thalers contain exactly a hundred thalers more than do a hundred possible ones! And it is quite clear: if you think of a hundred possible thalers on one side and of a hundred actual thalers on the other, there is a difference. On this other side there are exactly a hundred thalers more. And in most real cases it is just on the hundred actual thalers that the question turns.

But the matter has a deeper aspect. One can ask the question: What is the point in the difference between a hundred possible and a hundred actual thalers? I think it would be generally conceded that for anyone who can acquire the hundred thalers, there is beyond doubt a decided difference between a hundred possible thalers and a hundred actual ones. For imagine that you are in need of a hundred thalers, and somebody lets you choose whether he is to give you the hundred possible or the hundred actual thalers. If you can get the thalers, the whole point is the difference between the two kinds. But suppose you were so placed that you cannot in any way acquire the hundred thalers, then you might feel absolutely indifferent as to whether someone did not give you a hundred possible or a hundred actual thalers. When a person cannot have them, then a hundred actual and a hundred possible thalers are in fact of exactly the same value.

This is a significant point. And the significance is this—that the way in which Kant spoke about God could occur only at a time when men could no longer “have God” through human soul-experience. As He could not be reached as an actuality, then the concept of the possible God or of the actual God was immaterial, just as it is immaterial whether one is not to have a hundred actual or a hundred possible thalers. If there is no path for the soul to the true God, then certainly no development of thought in the style of Kant can lead to Him.

Hence we see that the matter has this deeper side also. But I have introduced it only because I wanted to make it clear that when the question becomes one of “thinking”, then one must go somewhat more deeply. Errors of thought slip out even among the most brilliant thinkers, and for a long time one does not see where the weak spot of the argument lies—as, for example, in the Kantian thought about the hundred possible and the hundred actual thalers. In thinking, one must always take account of the situation in which the thought has to be grasped.

By discussing first the nature of general concepts, and then the existence of such errors in thinking as this Kantian one, I have tried to show you that one cannot properly reflect on ways of thinking without going deeply into actualities. I will now approach the matter from yet another side, a third side.

Let us suppose that we have here a mountain or hill, and beside it, a steep slope. On the slope there is a spring and the flow from it leaps sheer down, a real waterfall. Higher up on the same slope is another spring; the water from it would like to leap down in the same way, but it does not. It cannot behave as a waterfall, but runs down nicely as a stream or beck. Is the water itself endowed with different forces in these two cases? Quite clearly not. For the second stream would behave just as the first stream does if it were not obstructed by the shape of the mountain. If the obstructive force of the mountain were not present, the second stream would go leaping down. Thus we have to reckon with two forces: the obstructive force of the mountain and the earth's gravitational pull, which turns the first stream into a waterfall. The gravitational force acts also on the second stream—one can see how it brings the stream flowing down. But a skeptic could say that in the case of the second stream this is not at all obvious, whereas in the first stream every particle of water goes hurtling down. In the case of the second stream we must reckon in at every point the obstructing force of the mountain, which acts in opposition to the earth's gravitational pull.

Now suppose someone came along and said: “I don't altogether believe what you tell me about the force of gravity, nor do I believe in the obstructing force. Is the mountain the cause of the stream taking a particular path? I don't believe it.” “Well, what do you believe?” one might ask. He replies: “I believe that part of the water is down there, above it is more water, above that more water again, and so on. I believe the lower water is pushed down by the water above it, and this water by the water above it. Each part of the water drives down the water below it.” Here is a noteworthy distinction. The first man declares: “Gravity pulls the water down.” The second man says: “Masses of water are perpetually pushing down the water below them: that is how the water comes down from above.”

Obviously anyone who spoke of a “pushing down” of this kind would be very silly. But suppose it is a question not of a beck or stream but of the history of mankind, and suppose someone like the person I have just described were to say: “The only thing I believe of what you tell me is this: we are now living in the twentieth century, and during it certain events have taken place. They were brought about by similar ones during the last third of the nineteenth century; these again were caused by events in the second third of the nineteenth century, and these again by those in the first third.” That is what is called “pragmatic history”, in which one always speaks of “causes and effects”, so that subsequent events are always explained by means of preceding ones. Just as someone might deny the force of gravity and say that the masses of water are continually pushing one another forward, so it is when someone is pursuing pragmatic history and explains the condition of the nineteenth century as a result of the French Revolution.

In reply to a pragmatic historian we would of course say: “No, other forces are active besides those that push from behind—which in fact are not there at all in the true sense. For just as little as there are forces pushing the stream from behind, just as little do preceding events push from behind in the history of humanity. Fresh influences are always coming out of the spiritual world—just as in the stream the force of gravity is always at work—and these influences cross with other forces, just as the force of gravity crosses with the obstructive force of the mountain. If only one force were present, you would see the course of history running quite differently. But you do not see the individual forces at work in history. You see only the physical ordering of the world: what we would call the results of the Saturn, Moon and Sun stages in the evolution of the Earth. You do not see all that goes on continually in human souls, as they live through the spiritual world and then come down again to Earth. All this you simply deny.”

But there is today a conception of history which is just what we would expect from somebody who came along with ideas such as those I have described, and it is by no means rare. Indeed in the nineteenth century it was looked upon as immensely clever. But what should we be able to say about it from the standpoint we have gained? If anyone were to explain the mountain stream in this “pragmatic” way, he would be talking utter nonsense. How is it then that he upholds the same nonsense with regard to history? The reason is simply that he does not notice it! And history is so complicated that it is almost everywhere expounded as “pragmatic history”, and nobody notices it.

We can certainly see from this that Spiritual Science, which has to develop sound principles for the understanding of life, has work to do in the most varied domains of life; and that it is first of all necessary to learn how to think, and to get to know the inner laws and impulses of thought. Otherwise all sorts of grotesque things can befall one. Thus for example a certain man to-day is stumbling and bumbling over the problem of “thought and language”. He is the celebrated language-critic Fritz Mauthner, who has also written lately a large philosophical dictionary. His bulky Critique of Language is already in its third edition, so for our contemporaries it is a celebrated work. There are plenty of ingenious things in this book, and plenty of dreadful ones. Thus one can find here a curious example of faulty thinking—and one runs up against such blunders in almost every five lines—which leads the worthy Mauthner to throw doubt on the need for logic. “Thinking”, for him, is merely speaking; hence there is no sense in studying logic; grammar is all one needs. He says also that since there is, rightly speaking, no logic, logicians are fools. And then he says: In ordinary life, opinions are the result of inferences, and ideas come from opinions. That is how people go on! Why should there be any need for logic when we are told that opinions arise from inferences, and ideas from opinions? It is just as clever as if someone were to say: “Why do you need botany? Last year and two years ago the plants were growing.” But such is the logic one finds in a man who prohibits logic. One can quite understand that he does prohibit it. There are many more remarkable things in this strange book—a book that, in regard to the relation between thought and language, leads not to lucidity but to confusion.

I said that we need a substructure for the things that are to lead us to the heights of spiritual contemplation. Such a substructure as has been put forward here may appear to many as somewhat abstract; still, we shall need it. And I think I have tried to make it so easy that what I have said is clear enough. I should like particularly to emphasise that through such simple considerations as these one can get an idea of where the boundary lies between the realm of the Spirits of Form and the realm of the Spirits of Movement. But whether one comes to such an idea is intimately connected with whether one is prepared to admit thoughts of things-in-general, or whether one is prepared to admit only ideas or concepts of individual things—I say expressly “is prepared to admit”.

On these expositions—to which, as they are somewhat abstract, I will add nothing further—we will build further in the next lecture.

• 1. First published (two volumes) in Berlin, 1900–1. In 1914 the contents were recast and published in a different form as Die Rätsel der Philosophie (Riddles of Philosophy). See Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1974.

Of course, it is not possible to cover the topic of logic as fully as one would wish in the few days available. If one wanted to cover the subject exhaustively, one would have to hold a kind of course. Therefore, please take what I say here only as a few sketchy suggestions. I do not intend to proceed systematically either, but only to present some of the elementary logical truths to you, so that you may have something that you can perhaps make use of right now.

We have formed a concept of the concept itself, have heard what a judgment is and how a conclusion arises, namely through the connection of judgments. It has been said that there are certain inner laws of the technique of thinking that determine how to connect the judgments if one wants to gain correct conclusions. We gave the original form of the conclusion in the first form of the conclusion using the example: All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal. In the major premise, “All men are mortal,” we have the first judgment; and in the minor premise, “Caius is a man,” we have a second judgment. The point now is to let a new judgment follow from the connection of these two judgments, through inner conformity to law: “Therefore Caius is mortal.” We call this last judgment the conclusion. We see what this concluding sentence is based on: we have two sentences that are given, that must be present; we know what they say. The point now is to omit the middle term from these two given sentences. The subject term of the antecedent was: “all men”, the predicate term “mortal”. In the consequent we had the subject term “Caius” and the predicate term “man”. In the final sentence, the two terms that were present in both sentences are omitted, namely the term “human”. The fact that we can form the final sentence depends on how this middle term “human” is included in the upper and lower sentences. Our scheme was: \(M = P\); \(S = M\); \(S = P\).

The fact that we are allowed to construct the final sentence in this way is due to the distribution of the terms in the upper clauses. If it were different, it would not be possible to conclude as in the example given recently: “Photography resembles man” (upper clause); “Photography is a mechanical product” (lower clause). If we were to omit the middle term, which is contained in both sentences, then no valid conclusion could be formed here. This is because in both sentences the middle term is connected to the predicate in the same way as the subject. The middle term must be at the beginning in one case and at the end in the other; only then can we form a valid conclusion. Logic is a formal art of forming concepts. It is already evident in the arrangement of the concepts how one can arrive at valid conclusions. We must acquire as laws the way in which the concepts must be combined. We could also say that formal logic comprises the doctrine of concepts, judgments, and conclusions.

Now we will deal with judgments in a few remarks. Certain laws can be established about judgments. The laws of inference will only be understood once the tenets about the concepts and judgments have been established. So today we will first deal with the laws of judgments and concepts.

If we start with the law of concepts themselves, we can compare a concept such as “lion” with the concept of “mammal”. Both are concepts that we can form. They differ in the following ways. Think about what all falls under the concept of “mammal”. It is a large group of individual objects, for example, monkeys, lions, marsupials, and so on; that is much more than we summarize under the term “lion”, which gives us only a small part of the “mammal” concept. Thus, all concepts differ from each other in that some concepts cover a great deal and some only a small area. Here we say: The concepts differ in their scope; but they also differ in other respects. To define the concept of “lion”, many characteristics are needed, many features such as head, color, paws, teeth, and so on. All these things that are listed to get to the concept of “lion” are called the content of the concept. The concept of “mammal” has considerably fewer characteristics than the concept of “lion”. If you were to subsume animals with a certain hair color under the concept, that would no longer be correct. When you form the concept of “mammal”, you have to have as few characteristics as possible, a small content, for example, only the characteristic that it gives birth to live young and that it suckles them. Thus, in “mammal” we have a concept with little content and great scope, and in “lion” the opposite. There are therefore concepts with great scope and little content, and concepts with little scope and great content. The greater the scope of a concept, the smaller its content; the greater the content, the smaller the scope. Thus, concepts differ in content and scope.

Let us now consider judgments in a similar way. When you pronounce the judgment: All men are mortal, you have a different judgment than: The crocodile is not a mammal. The difference between the two is that in the first case something is affirmed, the concepts are brought together in such a way that they are compatible. In the second case, the concepts do not agree; they exclude each other; here we have a negative judgment. Thus, we distinguish between affirmative and negative judgment. There are still other differences with respect to judgment. All men are mortal - the judgment is such that something quite different is given with it than with: Some flowers are red. In the first case, the statement of the property applies to the entire scope of the subject concept; in the second case, other characteristics can be added. The latter judgment is called a particular judgment, in contrast to the first, a general judgment as opposed to a universal judgment. So we have affirmative and negative, universal and particular judgments. Other distinguishing features can also be found in judgments. For example, a judgment can be made in such a way that it is along the lines of “All men are mortal,” or a judgment can be pronounced in such a way as “When the sun shines, it is light.” The first judgment unites the subject and predicate concepts unconditionally, whereas the second unites the subject and predicate concepts not unconditionally, but only conditionally. It only states that the predicate term is there when the subject term is also there, nothing else. The first - All men are mortal - is an absolute or unconditional judgment, the second - When the sun shines, it is light - is a hypothetical judgment. So there are absolute or unconditional judgments and hypothetical or conditional judgments. Many more such characteristics of judgments could be cited; but the point is to show that some of the knowledge depends on these differences. One must master the technique of concepts in order to be able to draw correct conclusions.

If, for example, you take our conclusion after the first conclusion figure: All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal – we have a general judgment in the major premise and a singular judgment in the subordinate premise, because it is applied to only one individual, to Caius. This is a subform of the particular judgment. This arrangement of the judgments is permissible; it leads to a correct conclusion. But let us try a different arrangement. Take, for example, the proposition: Some women have red dresses – this is a particular judgment. And now let us say: Mrs. NN is a woman. – Now I must not conclude: Therefore Mrs. NN has a red dress. – I must not do that because it is impermissible to conclude according to this figure of speech when the antecedent contains a particular judgment. Only when the antecedent is a universal judgment is this figure of speech correct. Thus certain laws can be established here again. We could now also cite other properties of judgments. We have said that a judgment can be affirmative or negative. Let us take a negative judgment: The crocodile is not a mammal. This animal is a crocodile. Here we may conclude: Therefore this animal is not a mammal. The subordinate clause may thus be affirmative as well as negative.

So there is a certain technique of thinking, a law of thinking, which is formal, that is, quite independent of content. If we observe this formal technique, we think correctly, but otherwise we think incorrectly. We have to follow this technique of thinking, this law of thinking, in order to come to the right conclusions.

We now have a famous classification into analytical and synthetic judgments, which was originally proposed by Kant. Today, people who do a little philosophy can very often come across this classification. What is the difference in the Kantian sense? An analytic judgment is one in which the concept of the predicate is already contained in the concept of the subject. In a synthetic judgment, on the other hand, the concept of the subject does not necessarily contain the concept of the predicate. For example, the sentence “the body is extended” is an analytic judgment, because one cannot think of a body without also thinking of its extension. “Extended” is only one characteristic of the concept “body”. A synthetic judgment, however, is one in which the concept of the predicate is not yet contained in the concept of the subject. Subject and predicate are brought together by an external cause. For example: “The body is heavy” is, according to Kant, a synthetic judgment. For he believes that the concept of heaviness is connected with the concept of the body only through external reasons, through the law of attraction. In the synthetic judgment, therefore, the concepts are more loosely connected.

Much nonsense has been made of the concepts of analytical and synthetic judgments in recent philosophy. It always seemed to me that the most enlightening thing was the story that is said to have happened to an examinee at a German university. He came to a friend on the evening before the exam and asked him to quickly teach him a few more logic terms. But the friend realized the futility of such an undertaking and advised him to leave as he was and take his chances. The next day, the examinee was asked: Do you know what an analytical judgment is? The sad answer was: No. To which the professor replied: That's a very good answer, because I can't say either. And what is a synthetic judgment? The student, growing bolder, answered again: “I don't know.” The professor said, very pleased: “You have grasped the spirit of the matter. I congratulate you, you will get a good grade!” In a certain respect, the matter seems to me to be indeed shedding light. For the difference between the two types of judgment is indeed a floating one: it depends on what one has thought with the concept. For example, one person adds the concept of extension to the body; on the other hand, the person who adds the concept of gravity brings more to the concept from the outset than the other person. The point now is for us to recognize what is really real in the combination of concepts into judgments, or rather what the secret goal of all judgment is. Judgment is in fact purely formal at first.

But there is something connected with judging that will become clearest to you if you compare the following two judgments with each other. Let us assume – not that we are going to leave the physical plane – we have the judgment: The lion is yellow. When you form this judgment, it can be correct. But let us assume that someone imagines some concept out of his head, an animal half lion, a quarter whale and a quarter camel. He could quite well imagine it together; he calls it, let us say, “Taxu”. He could now form the judgment: This animal is beautiful. - This judgment is valid in a formal respect just as the judgment: The lion is yellow. - How do I distinguish valid judgment from invalid judgment? - Now we come to a chapter in which we have to find the criterion for the ability to form a judgment at all. You can change the judgment: “The lion is yellow” at any time, namely by saying, “A yellow lion” or “The yellow lion is”. - But we cannot say, “A beautiful taxu is”. This leads to a criterion for the validity of a judgment: one must be able to include the predicate concept in the subject concept and make an existential judgment out of it. The transformation of a formal judgment into an existential judgment by adding the predicate to the subject thus forms the criterion for validity. In the first case, [empirical] necessity unites the concept “yellow” with “lion”; in the second case, it is assumed when forming the concept that the subject has been taken from an existential judgment, whereas in fact it only arose from a formal judgment.

This is a criterion for the validity of every judgment. The formal correctness of a judgment depends only on the correct connection of the concepts, but the validity of a judgment depends on the existential judgment. A formal judgment is transformed into an existential judgment by adding the predicate to the subject; one enriches the subject. And that is precisely the goal of judging and also of concluding: the formation of such concepts that have validity. Form the judgment: A yellow lion is - then you have thought not only in terms of formal correctness, but also in terms of validity. Now you see that formal logic does indeed offer us the possibility of filling ourselves with correct concepts, so to speak, but that the formation of valid judgments is what we must have in mind; and valid judgments cannot be gained from mere formal logic. The existential judgment in our example – The yellow lion is – was gained from external sense observation. Formal logic gives us the possibility of arriving at correct concepts; with its help we can create quite fruitful concepts. But for the validity of judgments, logic will have to be fertilized by content-related aspects. People usually do not really realize what logic is at all. But if one has learned to grasp the concept correctly, independently of content, it is extremely important.

The validity and the formality of a judgment are two different things. Because people do not really understand the connection between these things, they spin out very grand theories, which some people regard as irrevocable, but which would collapse of their own accord if people were to realize the difference between “formal correctness” and “validity”. You know that there is a modern school of psychology that strictly denies the freedom of the human will. Every human action, it says, is strictly determined by previous events. There are certain methods of proving this, and these play a fateful role today in statistics, for example. For example, someone is investigating how many people in France die by suicide. That's easy, you don't even have to think about it; you just note the numbers over a period of about five years, then you examine it for another five years and so on. Then the person finds that there is a certain difference between these numbers. Now he takes larger numbers, compares twenty to twenty years and finds that here the suicide numbers are almost the same; of course not the same, because the circumstances change, - say, they increase in a certain proportion. A numerical law can be found according to which one can predict how many suicides will occur within a certain period, how many people will die by suicide in a certain period of time. Now there are people who say: if you can calculate in advance how many people would commit suicide, how can one still speak of human freedom? It is the same with estimating future crimes. According to an immutable causality - so they say - so many people would have to become criminals. It is not to be said here that the law is not valid. In a way, it is perfectly applicable in practice to certain cases. But the moment the law is applied, the worst misunderstanding will result, the essence of things or the human being will be investigated and fathomed.

Let us think of insurance companies that work with probability calculations. They arrive at very specific formulas by deducing from experience that a certain number of every hundred married twenty-year-olds will lose the other spouse to death over the course of thirty years. They check the percentage rate within a certain period of time and use it to determine the insurance premiums. It is quite practical to apply such laws in the insurance business; they are true, these laws; but they do not go to something deeper. The matter becomes strange when we take the laws more deeply! Let us imagine that someone is presented with the material of such an insurance company and finds: There is still a spouse alive who should have died by now; but this person is healthy and, according to his inner being, it does not even occur to him to die yet. Nevertheless, the insurance company still has a right to its money, because the formal laws apply very well in the world, but one cannot see into the inner being of a person through such laws. And so it is with all the laws of nature, which are only gained through the collection of external observations. One only gains a concept of the external course of events, but cannot draw conclusions about the inner essence of a thing or a person, for example, whether it is healthy or sick. In the same way, you can never gain a concept of the essence of light by observing its phenomena. You have to keep this in mind, otherwise you will come to results such as those of Exner in his last rectorate speech in Vienna.

External facts are not indicative of the inner essence of a thing. There is still a great deal of confusion in the thinking of humanity in this regard. It cannot be claimed that one can learn to think through logic; that is just as impossible as becoming a musician through the study of harmony. But logic is necessary for correct thinking, just as the study of harmony is necessary for composing for the right musician. One must know how judgments and conclusions are formed. But we must always remain in the same region if we want to make formally correct judgments. For example, the conclusion: All men are mortal. I am a man. Therefore I am mortal - is apparently not a fallacy, because here we are referring back to the subject. However, the laws of logic only apply if we remain on the same level. The conclusion “Therefore I am mortal” refers only to the body. However, our I belongs to another level; it is not mortal. The conclusion: “Therefore the I is mortal” is therefore wrong. Such formal errors are often found in the works of today's scholars. ABOUT PHILOSOPHY AND FORMAL LOGIC Munich, November 8, 1908

Today we will have a brief interlude in our lectures. We will not be speaking about an anthroposophical topic, but about a purely philosophical subject. As a result, this evening will have to bear the essential character of being boring. But it is perhaps good for anthroposophists to delve into such boring topics from time to time, to let them approach them - for the reason that they have to hear over and over again that the sciences, especially philosophical science cannot deal with anthroposophy because only dilettantes occupy themselves with it, people who have no desire to devote themselves to serious, rigorous research and serious, rigorous thinking. Dilettantism, amateurism, that is what is repeatedly reproached by learned philosophers of anthroposophy. Now the lecture that I gave in Stuttgart and which will be available in print here next Wednesday will be able to show you, from a certain point of view, how it will only be possible for philosophy to find the way, the bridge to anthroposophy, when it first finds its deepening within itself. This lecture will show you that the philosophers who speak of the dilettantism of anthroposophists simply cannot build a bridge from their supposed scientific knowledge to anthroposophy, which they so despise, because they do not have philosophy itself, because, so to speak, they indulge in the worst dilettantism in their own field.

There is indeed a certain plight in the field of philosophy. In our present-day intellectual life, we have a fruitful, extraordinarily significant natural science. We also have to show purely scientific progress in other areas of intellectual life, in that positive science has succeeded in constructing exact instruments that can be used in various fields, measuring spaces and revealing the smallest particles. Through this and various other means at its disposal, it has succeeded in advancing external research to a point that will be greatly increased in the future by the expansion of methods. But the fact remains that this external research is confronted with a philosophical ignorance, especially on the part of those who are researchers, so that although it is possible, with the help of today's tools, to achieve great and powerful results in the external field of facts, it is not possible for those to whom are the ones who are supposed to make these discoveries, it is not possible for them to draw conclusions from these external results for the knowledge of the mind, simply because those entrusted with the external mission of the sciences are not at all at a significant level of education in terms of philosophical thinking. It is one thing to work in a laboratory or a cabinet with tools and an external method in research, and it is quite another to have educated and trained one's thinking in such a way that one can draw valid conclusions from what one can actually research, conclusions that are then able to shed light on the origins of existence.

There were times when there was less philosophical reflection and when people who were called to it had trained their thinking in a very particular way, and when external research was not as advanced as it is today. Today the opposite is the case. There is an admirable external research of facts, but an inability to think and to work through concepts philosophically in the broadest sense. Yes, we are actually dealing not only with such an inability on the part of those who are supposed to work in research, but also with a certain contempt for philosophical thinking. Today, the botanist, the physicist, the chemist do not find it necessary to worry about the most elementary foundations of thought technology. When they approach their work in the laboratory or in the cabinet, it is as if one could say: Yes, the method works by itself. Those who are a little familiar with these things know how the method works by itself, and that basically it is not such a world-shattering event when someone makes a discovery of facts that may be deeply incisive, because the method has been working for a long time. When the empirical researcher comes across what is important, a physicist or chemist comes along and wants to report something about the actual reasons underlying what he is researching, then he starts thinking and the result is that something “beautiful” comes out, because he is not trained in thinking at all. And through this untrained, this inwardly neglected thinking, which clings to the scholar as well as to the layman, we have arrived at a state where certain dogmas are authoritatively bandied about, and the layman accepts them as something absolutely certain. Whereas the original cause that these dogmas have come into being at all lies only in this neglected thinking. Certain conclusions are drawn in an incredible way.

We will take as an example such a conclusion, which has a certain historical significance. When a bell rings, people say to themselves: I hear a sound; I will investigate to see what the external, objective cause of it is. And now they find, and in this case through exact experiment, through something that can be established externally through facts, that when a sound comes from an object, then the object is in a certain way inwardly shaken, that when a bell sounds, its metal is in vibration. It can be demonstrated by exact experiment that when the bell vibrates, it also sets the air in certain vibrations, which propagate and strike my eardrum. And as a consequence of these vibrations – so the initial conclusion, quite plausible! – the tones arise. I know that a string vibrates when I have one; I can prove this in the world of facts by placing little paper tabs on the string, which come off when the string is bowed. Likewise, it can be demonstrated that the string in turn sets the air in vibration, the air that then strikes my ear and causes the sound. For sound, this is something that belongs to the world of facts, and it is not difficult to follow when it is explained. One need only put the facts together and draw conclusions from them, and then what has been said will emerge. But now the matter goes further, and there is a tremendous hitch. People say: Yes, with the ear we perceive sound, with the eye we perceive light and colors. Now it seems to them that because sound appears, so to speak, as an effect of something external, color as such must also be the effect of something external. Fine! The exterior of the color can be imagined similarly, as something that vibrates, like the air in the case of sound. And just as, let's say, a certain pitch corresponds to a certain number of vibrations, so one could say that something will also move at a certain frequency, which causes this or that color. Why should there not be something outside that vibrates, and not something that transmits these vibrations to my eye and causes the impression of light here? Of course, you cannot see or perceive through any instrument what vibrates in this case. With sound it is possible. It can be determined that something vibrates; with color it cannot be perceived. But the matter seems so obvious that it does not occur to anyone to doubt that something must also vibrate when we have a light impression, just as something vibrates when we have sound impressions. And since one cannot perceive what vibrates, one simply invents it. They say: Air is a dense substance that vibrates when sound is produced; the vibrations of light are in the “ether”. This fills the whole of space. When the sun sends us light, they say, it is because the sun's matter vibrates, and these vibrations propagate through the ether, striking the eye and creating the impression of light.

It is also very quickly forgotten that this ether was invented in a purely fantastic way, that it was speculated into existence. This has taken place historically. It is presented with great certainty. It is spoken of with absolute certainty that such an ether expands and vibrates, so much so that the public opinion is formed: Yes, this has been established by science! How often will you find this judgment today: Science has established that there is such an ether, the vibrations of which cause the light sensations in our eye. You can even read in very nice books that everything is based on such vibrations. This goes so far that the origins of human thought are sought in such vibrations of the ether: A thought is the effect of the ether on the soul. What underlies it are vibrations in the brain, vibrating ether, and so on. And so, for many people, what they have thought up, speculated on, presents itself as the real thing in the world, which cannot be doubted at all. Yet it is based on nothing more than the characterized error in reasoning. You must not confuse what is called ether here with what we call ether. We speak of something supersensible; but physics speaks of the ether as something that exists in space like another body, to which properties are attributed like those of the sensual bodies. One has the right to speak of something as a real fact only if one has established it, if it really exists outside, if one can experience it. One must not invent facts.

The ether of the modern scientist is imaginary, and that is what matters.

It is therefore an enormous fantasy at the basis of our physics, an arbitrary fiction of mysterious secrets.

Therefore, at the basis of our physics there is an enormous fantasy, an arbitrary fiction of mysterious ether vibrations, atomic and molecular vibrations, all of which cannot be assumed to be possible because nothing other than what can actually be perceived can be regarded as actual. Can any of these ether vibrations be perceived as physics assumes them to be? We would only have an epistemological justification for assuming them if we could establish them by the same means by which we perceive other things. We have no other means of establishing things than sensory perception. Can it be light or color that vibrates in the ether? Impossible, because it is supposed to produce color and light first. Can it be perceived by other senses? Impossible; it is something that is supposed to produce all perceptions, but at the same time it cannot possibly be perceived by the concept that one has put into it. It is something that looks very much like a knife that has no handle and no blade, something where, so to speak, the front part of the concept automatically consumes the back part. But now something very strange is achieved, and you can see in it a proof of how justified – however bold the expression may sound – the expression 'neglected' is in relation to philosophical thinking. People completely forget to take into account the simplest necessities of thought.

Thus, by spinning out such theories, certain people come to say that everything that appears to us is nothing more than something based on vibrating matter, vibrating ether, motion. If you would examine everything in the world, you would find that where there is color and so on, there is nothing but vibrating matter. When, for example, a light effect propagates, something does not pass from one part of space to another, nothing flows from the sun to us. In the circles concerned, one imagines: Between us and the sun is the ether, the molecules of the sun are dancing; because they dance, they make the neighboring ether particles dance; now the neighboring ones also dance; because they dance, the next ones dance in turn, and so it continues down to our eye, and when it dances in, our eye perceives light and color. So, it is said, nothing flows down; what dances remains above, it only stimulates to dance again. Only the dance propagates itself. There is nothing in the light that would flow down. - It is as if a long line of people were standing there, one of whom gives the next one a blow, which the latter in turn passes on to the third and the fourth. The first does not go away, nor does the second; the blow is passed on. This is how the dance of atoms is said to propagate. In a diligently and eruditely written brochure, which one has to acknowledge insofar as it is at the cutting edge of science, someone has achieved something nice. He wrote: It is the basis of all phenomena that nothing moves into another part of space; only the movements propagate. So if a person walks forward, it is a false idea to think that he carries his materiality over into another part of space. He takes a step, moves; the movement is generated again, and again with the next step, and so on. That is quite consistent. But now such a scholar is advised, when he takes a few steps and has to recreate himself in the next part of space because none of his body comes across, that he just doesn't forget to recreate himself, otherwise he could disappear into nothingness. Here you have an example of how things lead to consequences! People just don't draw the consequences. What happens in public is that people say to themselves: Well, a book has been published, someone has set out these theories, he has learned a lot, and that's where he concocted these things, and that's for sure! - That there could be something completely different in it, people don't think of that.

So it is a matter of the fact that the matter is really not so bad with the dilettantism of anthroposophy. It is true that those who stand on the ground of intellectual erudition can only regard anthroposophy as dilettantism; but the point is that on their own ground people have spun themselves into concepts that are their thinking habits. One can be lenient when someone is led by their thought habits to have to create themselves over and over again; but nevertheless, it must be emphasized that on this side there is no justification for speaking from their theoretical point of view down to the dilettant antism of anthroposophy, which, if it fulfills its ideal, would certainly not make such mistakes as not to try to draw the consequences from the premises and to examine whether they are absurd. From anthroposophy you can draw conclusions everywhere. The conclusions are applicable to life, while they are not there, cannot be applied to life, only apply to the study!

These are the kinds of things that should draw your attention to the errors in reasoning, which are not so easy to see for those who are not familiar with them. Today, the sense of authority is much too strong in the interaction between scholars and the public in all circles; but the sense of authority has few good foundations today. One should be able to rely on it. Not everyone is able to follow the history of science in order to be able to get from there the things that teach them about the scope of purely external research and of research into ideas. Thus it is perfectly justified to ascribe great significance to Helmholtz merely because of his invention of the ophthalmoscope. But if you follow this discovery historically, if you can follow what has already been there and how it only needed to be discovered, you will see that the methods have worked here. Today, basically, one can be a very small thinker and achieve great, powerful things if the relevant means and methods are available. This does not criticize all the work in this field, but what has been said applies.

Now I would like to give you the reasons, from a certain point of view, why all this could have happened. There are an enormous number of these reasons; but it will suffice if we keep one or two in mind. If we look back in the history of intellectual life, we find that what we call thinking technique, conceptual technique, originated in Greek intellectual life, and had its first classical representative in Aristotle. He achieved something for humanity, for scholarly humanity, that was undoubtedly extremely necessary for this scholarly humanity, but which has fallen into disrepute: purely formal logic. There is much public discussion about whether philosophical propaedeutics should be thrown out of grammar schools. It is considered superfluous, that it could be done on the side in German, but that it is not needed as a special discipline. Even to this consequence, the snobbish looking down on something like the technique of thinking has already led. This technique of thinking has been so firmly established by Aristotle that it has been able to make little progress. It does not need it. What has been taught in more recent times has only been taught because the actual concept of logic has even been lost.

Now, in order for you to see what is meant by this, I would like to give you an understanding of formal logic. Logic is the study of concepts, judgments, and conclusions. First, we need to understand a little bit about how concepts relate to judgments and conclusions. Man initially acquires knowledge on the physical plane through perception. The first is sensation, but sensation as such would be, for example, an impression, a single color impression. However, objects do not appear to us as such individual impressions, but as combined impressions, so that we always have not just individual sensations before us, but combined ones, and these are the perceptions. When you have an object before you that you perceive, you can turn away from the object your organs of perception and it remains as an image within you. When this remains, you will be able to distinguish it very well from the object itself. You can look at this hammer, it is perceptible to you. If you turn around, an afterimage remains. We call this the representation.

It is extremely important to distinguish between perception and representation. Things would go very well if it were not for the fact that so little thinking technique is available that these things are made extremely complicated from the outset. For example, the sentence that is supported by many epistemologies today - that we have nothing but our representations - is based on error. Because one says: you do not perceive the thing in itself. Most people believe that behind what they perceive are the dancing molecules. What they perceive is only the impression on their own soul. Of course, because otherwise the soul is denied, it is strange that they first speak of the impressions on the soul and then explain the soul as something that in turn consists only of dancing atoms.

When you tackle things like this, you get the image of the brave Munchausen, who holds himself up in the air by his own hair. No distinction is made between perception and imagination. If one were to distinguish, one would no longer be tempted to commit this epistemological thoughtlessness, which lies in saying: “The world is my imagination” – apart from the fact that it is already an epistemological thoughtlessness to attempt to compare perception with imagination and then address perception as imagination. I would like someone to touch a piece of glowing iron and then to state that he is burning himself. Now he should compare the idea with the perception and then say whether it burns as much as this one. So the things are such that you only have to grasp them logically; then it becomes clear what they are. We must therefore distinguish between perception, in which we have an object in front of us, and the idea, in which this is not the case.

In the world of ideas, we distinguish again between idea in the narrower sense and concept. You can get an idea of the concept of a concept from the mathematical concept. Imagine drawing a circle. This is not a circle in the mathematical sense. When you look at what you have drawn, you can form the idea of a circle, but not the concept. You have to imagine a point and then many points around it, all equidistant from the one center point. Then you have the concept of a circle. With this mental construction, what is drawn, what consists of many small chalk mountains, does not match at all. One chalk mountain is further away from the center than the other.

So when you talk about concept and idea, you have to make the distinction that the idea is gained from external objects, but that the concept arises through internal mental construction. However, you can read in countless psychology books today that the concept arises only from the fact that we abstract from this or that, which confronts us in the outside world. We believe that in the external world we only encounter white, black, brown, and yellow horses, and from this we are supposed to form the concept of a horse. This is how logic describes it: we omit what is different; first the white, black, and so on color, then what is otherwise different and again different, and finally something blurry remains; this is called the concept of “horse.” We have abstracted. This, it is thought, is how concepts are formed.

Those who describe the matter in this way forget that the actual nature of the concept for today's humanity can only be truly grasped in the mathematical concept, because this shows first what is constructed internally and then found in the external world. The concept of a circle cannot be formed by going through various circles, green, blue, large and small, and then omitting everything that is not common, and then forming an abstraction. The concept is formed from the inside out. One must form the thought-construction. Today, people are just not ready to form the concept of the horse in this way. Goethe endeavored to form such inner constructions for higher regions of natural existence as well. It is significant that he seeks to ascend from representation to concept. Anyone who understands the matter knows that one does not arrive at the concept of the horse by leaving out the differences and keeping what remains. The concept is not formed in this way, but rather through internal construction, like the concept of a circle, only not so simply. What I mentioned in yesterday's lecture about the wolf that eats lambs all its life and yet does not become a lamb, occurs here. If you have the concept of the wolf in this way, you have what Aristotle calls the form of the wolf. The matter of the wolf is not important. Even if it eats nothing but lambs, it will not become a lamb. If one looks only at the matter, one would have to say that if it consumes nothing but lambs, it should actually become a lamb. It does not become a lamb because what matters is how it organizes the matter, and that is what lives in it as the “form” and what one can construct in the pure concept.

When we connect concepts or ideas, judgments arise. If we connect the idea “horse” with the idea “black” to “the horse is black,” we have a judgment. The connection of concepts thus forms judgments. Now it is a matter of the fact that this formation of judgments is absolutely connected with the formal concept technique that can be learned and that teaches how to connect valid concepts with each other, thus forming judgments. The study of this is a chapter of formal logic. We shall see how what I have discussed is something that belongs to formal logic. Now formal logic is that which discusses the inner activity of thinking according to its laws, so to speak the natural history of thinking, which provides us with the possibility of drawing valid judgments, valid conclusions.

When we come to the formation of judgments here, we must again find that more recent thinking has fallen into a kind of mousetrap. For at the door of more recent thinking stands Kant, and he is one of the greatest authorities. Right at the beginning of Kant's works, we find judgments in contrast to Aristotle. Today we want to point out how errors in reasoning are made. Right at the beginning of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, we find the discussion of analytical and synthetic judgments. What are analytical judgments supposed to be? They are supposed to be where one concept is strung on to another in such a way that the predicate concept is already contained in the subject concept and one only has to extract it. Kant says: If I think the concept of the body and say that the body is extended, then this is an analytical judgment; for no one can think the concept of the body without thinking the body extended. He only separates the concept of the predicate from the subject. Thus, an analytical judgment is one that is formed by taking the concept of the predicate out of the subject concept. A synthetic judgment, on the other hand, is a judgment in which the concept of the predicate is not yet so wrapped up in the concept of the subject that one can simply unwrap it. When someone thinks the concept of the body, they do not think the concept of heaviness along with it. So when the concept of heaviness is added to that of the body, one has a synthetic judgment. This is a judgment that not only provides explanations but would also enrich our world of thought.

Now, however, you will be able to see that this difference between analytical and synthetic judgments is not a logical one at all. For whether someone already thinks the predicate concept when the subject concept arises depends on how far he has progressed. For example, if someone imagines the body in such a way that it is not heavy, then the concept “heavy” is foreign to him in relation to the body; but anyone who, through his mental and other work, has already brought himself to think of heaviness in connection with the body, also needs only to unwrap this concept from his concept of “body”. So this is a purely subjective difference.

We must proceed thoroughly in all these matters. We must seek out the sources of error with precision. It seems to me that the person who does grasp as purely subjective that which can be isolated from a concept, will not really find a boundary between analytical and synthetic judgments and may find it difficult to give a definition of them. Something quite different is important. What is it that matters? That later! It seems to me, in fact, to be quite significant what happened when, during an exam, the two judgments were discussed. There was a doctor who was to be examined in logic as a subsidiary subject. He was well-versed in his subject, but knew nothing about logic. Before the exam, he told a friend that the latter should tell him a few things about logic. But his friend, who took this a little more seriously, said: If you don't know anything yet, it's better to rely on your luck. Now he came to the exam. As I said, he did very well in the main subjects; he was well-versed in them. But he knew nothing about logic. The professor asked him: So tell me, what is a synthetic judgment? He didn't know the answer and was now very embarrassed. Yes, Mr. Candidate, don't you know what that is? the professor asked. No! was the answer. An excellent answer! exclaimed the examiner. You see, people have been trying to figure out what that is for so long and can't figure out what a synthetic judgment actually is. You couldn't have given a better answer. And can you tell me, Mr. Candidate, what an analytical judgment is? The candidate had now become more impertinent and confidently replied, “No!” “Oh, I see, you have penetrated to the heart of the matter,” the professor continued. People have been searching for so long to find out what an analytical judgment is and have not been able to figure it out. That is not known. An excellent answer! The fact has really happened; it always seemed to me, though it cannot necessarily be taken as such, as a very good characteristic of what distinguishes both judgments. In fact, nothing distinguishes them; one flows into the other.

Now we still have to realize how we can speak of valid judgments at all, what such a thing is. This is a very important matter.

A judgment is initially nothing more than the connection of ideas or concepts. “The rose is red” is a judgment. Whether a judgment is correct or not, does not determine whether it is valid. To do that, we have to realize that if a judgment is correct, it does not necessarily follow that it is a valid judgment. In this case, it is not only important to connect a subject concept with a predicate concept. Let us take an example! “This rose is red” is a correct judgment. Whether it is also valid is not certain, because we can also form other correct judgments that are far from being valid. According to formal logic, there should be no objections to the correctness of a judgment; it could be completely correct, but it could still lack validity. For example, someone could imagine a creature that is half horse, a quarter whale, and a quarter camel. We will now call this animal “taxu”. Now it is undoubtedly true that this animal would be ugly. The judgment, “The taxu is ugly,” is therefore correct and can be pronounced in this way according to all the rules of correctness; for the taxu, half horse, quarter whale, and quarter camel, is ugly, that is beyond doubt, and just as the judgment “This rose is red” is correct, so is this. Now, one should never express a correct judgment as valid. Something else is necessary for that: you must be able to transform the correct judgment. You must only regard the correct judgment as valid when you can say, “This red rose is,” when you can take the predicate back into the subject, when you can transform the correct judgment into an existential judgment. In this case, you have a valid judgment. “This red rose is.” There is no other way than to be able to include the concept of the predicate in the concept of the subject. Then the judgment is valid. ‘The taxus is ugly’ cannot be made into a valid judgment. You cannot say, ‘An ugly taxus is.’ This is shown by the test by which you can find out whether a judgment can be made at all; it shows you how the test must be done. The test must be made by seeing whether one is able to transform the judgment into an existential judgment.

Here you can see something very important that one must know: that the mere combination of concepts into a logically correct judgment is not yet something that can now be regarded as decisive for the real world. Something else must be added. We must not overlook the fact that something else is required for the validity of the concept and judgment. Something else also comes into question for the validity of our conclusions.

A conclusion is the connection of judgments. The simplest conclusion is: All men are mortal. Caius is a man - therefore: Caius is mortal. The subclause is: Caius is a human being. The conclusion is: Caius is mortal. This conclusion is formed according to the first figure of conclusion, in which the subject and predicate are connected by a middle term. The middle term here is “human being,” the predicate term is “mortal,” and the subject term is “Caius.” You connect them with the same middle term. Then you come to the conclusion: Caius is mortal. This conclusion is built on the basis of very definite laws. You must not change these. As soon as you change something, you come to a train of thought that is no longer possible. Nobody could find a correct final sentence if they were to change this. That would not work. Because it does not work that way, you can see for yourself that thinking is based on laws. If you were to say: The portrait is an image of the person, photography is an image of the person, you would not be allowed to form the final sentence from this: Photography is a portrait. It is impossible to draw a correct final sentence if you arrange the concepts differently than according to the specific laws.

Thus you see that we have, so to speak, a real formal movement of concepts, of judgments, that thinking is based on very specific laws. But one never comes close to reality through this pure movement of concepts. In judgment, we have seen how one must first transform the right into the valid. In the conclusion, we want to convince ourselves in another form that it is impossible to approach reality through the formal conclusion. For a conclusion can be correct according to all formal laws and yet not valid, that is, it cannot approach reality. The following example will show you the simplicity of the fallacy: “All Cretans are liars,” says a Cretan. Suppose this Cretan says it. Then you can proceed according to quite logical conclusions and yet arrive at an impossibility. If the Cretan says this, then if you apply the premise to him, he must have lied, then it cannot be true. Why do you end up with an impossibility? Because you apply the conclusion to yourself, because you let the object coincide with purely formal conclusions, and you must not do that. Where you apply the formality of thought to itself, the pure formality of thought is destroyed. That doesn't work.

You can see from another example that the correctness of thought goes on strike when you apply thought to itself, that is, when you apply what you have thought up to yourself: An old law teacher took on a student. It was agreed that the student would pay him a certain fee, a portion of which would be paid immediately and the rest when he had won his first case. That was the agreement. The student did not pay the second part. Now the law teacher says to him: “You will pay me the fee under all circumstances.” But the student claims: “I will not pay it under any circumstances.” And he wants to do this by taking the teacher to court for the fee. The teacher says: Then you will pay me all the more; because either the judges will order you to pay – well, then you have to pay – or the judges will rule that you do not have to pay, then you have won the case and therefore pay again. – The student replies: I will not pay under any circumstances; because if I win the case, then the judges grant me the right not to pay, and if I lose, then I have lost my first case and we agreed that if this were the case, I would not have to pay. - Nothing has come of a completely correct formal connection because it goes back to the subject itself. Formal logic always breaks down here. Correctness has nothing to do with validity.

The mistake of not realizing that one must distinguish between correctness and validity was made by the great Kant, and that was when he wanted to refute the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God. This proof went something like this: If one imagines the most perfect being, it would lack a property for its perfection if one did not ascribe existence to it. Thus, one cannot imagine the most perfect being without existence. Consequently, it is. Kant says: That does not apply, because the fact that existence is added to a thing does not add any more property to it. - And then he says: A hundred possible dollars, dollars conceived in thought, have not a penny more or less than a hundred real ones. But the real ones differ considerably from the imagined ones, namely through being! - So he concludes: One can never infer existence from a concept that has only been grasped in thought. Because - so he argues - however many imagined thalers one puts into the wallet, they will never become actual. So one must not proceed with the concept of God by trying to extract the concept of being from thinking. But in transferring the purely logical-formal from the one to the other, one forgets that one should distinguish between, that dollars are something that can only be perceived externally, and that God is something that can be perceived internally, and that in the concept of God we must disregard this quality of being perceived externally. If people agreed to pay each other with imaginary dollars, they would not need to distinguish between real and imaginary dollars. If, then, in thinking a sensory thing could be ascribed its being, then the judgment would also apply to this sensory thing. But one must realize that a correct judgment does not necessarily need to be a valid one, that something must be added.

So we have today passed by some of the fields of philosophy, which does no harm. It gave us a sense that the authority of today's scientists is somewhat unfounded and that there is no need to be afraid when anthroposophy is presented as dilettantism. For what these authorities themselves are capable of saying when they begin to move from facts to something that could lead through a conclusion to a reference to the spiritual world is really quite threadbare. And so today I wanted to show you first how vulnerable this thinking is, and then to give you an idea that there really is a science of thinking. Of course, this could only be done in sketchy form. We can go into it in more depth later, but you have to be prepared for the fact that it will be somewhat boring.

In the last few months, we have seen an event unfold that has brought to the surface of the literary struggle opposites deeply rooted in the intellectual life of our time in their harshest form. The man who, almost four decades ago, developed Darwin's momentous ideas on the origin of living beings into a comprehensive world view with rare courage of thought, has come to the fore with a book entitled "Die Welträtsel, Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie" (The Enigma of the World, Studies in Monistic Philosophy). In this book, Ernst Haeckel wanted to provide a "critical illumination" of the scientific knowledge of our time for other educated circles and, on the basis of his rich research work, answer the question: "What stage in the knowledge of truth have we really reached at the end of the nineteenth century? And what progress towards our infinitely distant goal have we really made in the course of it?" ¹ A battle has now arisen over the explanations of the pioneer of Darwin's way of thinking, the most striking characteristic of which is that it is not conducted in a tone of calm, passionless debate, but in a bitter, stormy manner. It is not logical aberrations, not unproven assertions, not errors of knowledge alone that Ernst Haeckel has been accused of, but his scientific conscience, his moral sense, his capacity for scientific research in general. Darwin said of Haeckel's "Natural History of Creation": "Had this book appeared before my work (on the "Descent of Man") was written, I would probably never have finished it; I find almost all the conclusions I have arrived at confirmed by this researcher, whose knowledge is in many points much richer than mine" (introduction to the work "Descent of Man"). And now, as this researcher, once honored in this way by the great reformer of natural science, draws the sum of his life's work in a concluding work, we see him presented in the most exaggerated manner from many sides as the type of thinker that he should not be. For the direction in which the whole battle is being waged is characterized by the words used by one of his opponents, the widely respected philosopher Friedrich Paulsen, in the July issue of the "Preußische Jahrbücher". "It was not pleasure in the content, it was rather indignation that drove me ... indignation at the frivolity with which serious matters were dealt with here. The fact that it was a man of renown who was speaking here, a man whom thousands admire as a leader, who himself proudly claims to lead the way and show the way for the new century, increased the indignation, and it was not lessened but sharpened by the fact that I often saw thoughts worthy of me recurring here in all kinds of distortions... I read this book with burning shame, with shame at the state of general education and the philosophical education of our people. That such a book was possible, that it could be written, printed, bought, read, admired, believed by the people who possess a Kant, a Goethe, a Schopenhauer, is painful."

One wonders: what has the man done who has such accusations hurled in his face? Anyone who reads through the "Welträtsel" calmly and dispassionately, allowing their judgment to be determined solely by the scientific results of the last forty years, must say to themselves: Haeckel has, admittedly with unreserved sharpness, but appropriately presented the confession that he has formed from his tireless research work. He has made a clear distinction between the ideas of those who form their "faith" on the basis of the laws of nature and those who recognize other sources for this. He himself becomes passionate when it comes to disputing centuries-old prejudices against the view he holds, but his passion is that of a personality who clings wholeheartedly, with a deep and comfortable attachment, to what he believes to be correct. Everything that Haeckel presents in the "Welträtseln" is nothing other than the result of what he had done five years earlier in a strictly scientific manner in his "Systematic Phylogeny", in a work for which he received one of the most important scientific awards of the present day, the "Bressa Prize", which was to be awarded to the scholar by the Turin Academy of Sciences, who "during the quadrennium 1895-1898 made the most important and useful invention or published the most sophisticated work in the field of physical and experimental sciences, natural history, pure and applied mathematics, chemistry, physiology and pathology, without excluding geology, history, geography and statistics". In the wide range of all these intellectual fields, the Academy of Sciences in Turin was therefore unable to find a more "solid" work, or indeed an invention, for the years 1895 to 1898 that was more important and useful than Haeckel's "Phylogeny". - If Ernst Haeckel could content himself with presenting his insights, which encompass all the phenomena of life from the point of view of contemporary science, in a way that is recognized by the "strict science" of our time as an "exact" and "objective" method, one would probably limit oneself to making the verdict of the Turin Academy a general one and calling him the most important biologist after Darwin. But Haeckel's intellectual character does not tolerate half measures. Like so many of his naturalist contemporaries, he was unable to say: here scientific thinking - here religious faith. He demands strict harmony between the two. What his reason recognized as the fundamental nature of the world, his mind also wanted to worship religiously. For him, science has been transformed in the most natural way into a religious creed. He cannot admit that one can "believe" what is not thought in terms of science. That is why he wages a ruthless battle against beliefs that he sees as contradictory to science. He has no sympathy for those who, in Kant's sense, only want to assign a limited, this-worldly area to knowledge so that faith can establish itself all the more securely in the field of the unknowable.

Ernst Haeckel is a natural scientist, not a specialist philosopher. It cannot be denied that he sometimes does violence to philosophical concepts when he uses them. Of course, it is easy for a well-trained person well versed in the history of philosophy to prove Haeckel's errors with regard to the ideas of philosophers whom he agrees with - like Spinoza - or whom he opposes - like Kant. Paulsen then chides him for his misunderstandings with regard to Kant. Another philosophical thinker, Richard Hönigswald, has tried to prove in his book "Ernst Haeckel, the monistic philosopher" how little the terms "monism", "dualism", "substance" and so on used by Haeckel can pass the test of the usual philosophical disciplines. It is completely superfluous to get involved with such opposing arguments. All these gentlemen are right in a certain sense from their point of view. They have spun themselves into a certain conceptual web, and what Haeckel says is not correct. And he often does not exactly capture the meaning of philosophical ideas when he talks about them. But can it be the task of philosophical criticism at all to school a researcher who adheres strictly to observation from the point of view of traditional ideas? In all cases where Haeckel combats such ideas, he has a sure feeling that they are useless with regard to the real laws of nature. His attacks are not always logically correct. In such cases, however, the philosophers would have the task of understanding the naturalist in his sense, of showing how he uses the terms. Then they would sometimes find that one can say some things philosophically more sharply, more logically in the strict sense of the word than he can, but not that he is factually wrong.

One does not get a favorable idea of the official representatives of philosophy today when one sees how they misjudge their task. Haeckel calls his world view "monism". Would it not be a more worthy task to show in what sense Haeckel understands this word than to insist again and again that he assumes substance and force, i.e. a duality, and is therefore not a "monist"? Haeckel does not want any other methods of explanation for the organic world and for spiritual life than those which we apply to inorganic nature. He is of the opinion that with the same necessity with which hydrogen and oxygen combine under certain conditions to form water, carbon, nitrogen and other elements also become a living being under certain circumstances; and furthermore, that by the same kind of lawfulness by which the material world is governed, the "spirit" is also conditioned. If someone comes to him with a concept such as "raw, inanimate matter, which can never ever become spirit", Haeckel will reply: look at this matter, bring substances together under certain conditions in the retort and think logically, then you will no longer say: matter cannot become spirit, but your concept of "raw, inanimate matter" is precisely a false one, one that has no relation to reality. Unity in the whole explanation of the world: that is what Haeckel demands. And he calls this unity monistic. In view of the struggle we have witnessed in recent months, we can say that anyone who wants to understand the natural scientist must go to the natural scientist's country. It is not important that Paulsen, as he assures us, does not believe in any "special, immortal soul substance" or that "the world was once produced by a human-like individual being in a similar way to a product of human art". Rather, it is important to form such ideas about natural processes that the contradictory "special, immortal soul substance" and the "human-like being" really become dispensable within the explanation of nature.

And Haeckel presents such ideas in his book of confessions. He found himself compelled to settle accounts mercilessly with everything that belongs to other, contradictory ideas. Anyone who judges impartially must feel uplifted by the courageous consistency with which he carries out this reckoning in the chapter on "Science and Christianity". Perhaps one will not find everything in this section of the book tasteful, one will be able to admit that a different tone could have been found for many things, even that some things need not have been said at all in order to strengthen the monistic world view. But is there no longer any psychological sense in our contemporary philosophers? Is it so incomprehensible that one of the first proclaimers of a world view becomes too passionate in his explanations, that he is more than "objective", enthusiastic about a world of ideas that he has fought for step by step in tireless research and thinking? Anyone who does not find this incomprehensible will not be able to agree with Paulsen's outburst of anger at the "extremely embarrassing tendency (of Haeckel) to drag down what has been sacred for centuries into the dirt of ugly anecdotes and low jokes". However, such a person would be even less likely to have any sympathy for a writing such as that of the church historian Loofs in Halle: "Anti-Haeckel. A Replica and Supplements." Loofs takes a standpoint that has nothing whatsoever to do with Haeckel's world view, but which is as suitable as possible to divert attention from the main issue and, under the pretense that Haeckel had committed a serious injustice in a minor matter, to evoke the idea that he was a completely unscientific spirit that contradicted all true method. In his remarks on Christian church history, Haeckel relies on the work of an English thinker (Stewart Roß), which was published under the pseudonym Saladin and is available in German translation under the title "Jehovas gesammelte Werke, eine kritische Untersuchung des jüdisch-christlichen Religionsgebäudes auf Grund der Bibelforschung". Loofs presents the matter as if it were a desolate pamphlet against Christianity written by a complete ignoramus and dirty fellow, written to the exclusion of all knowledge of recent Bible research and church history. And what Loofs brings forward from the book and what he says about it is, however, only too apt to mislead those who do not take the Englishman's book to hand. They must believe that Haeckel, in his ignorance and recklessness, would really have gone so far as to refer to a diatribe of which Loofs assures us that it would be easier to "pick the fleas off a neglected dog than to collect the scientific follies contained in the book". But only those who do not know Saladın's work can make such a judgment. Anyone who reads only a little of it will soon find that he is dealing with an honest seeker of truth, even if he is not completely unimpeachable from the point of view of the opinions of church history that happen to be considered correct at the time, to whom everything else is closer than speaking in a frivolous manner about something that is sacred to people. Even if one might wish the book a more tasteful form of expression, one must nevertheless feel the deepest sympathy with the author, who wages a bold battle, which everywhere testifies to a deep mind, against ideas and institutions which he considers wrong, harmful and detrimental to human welfare. - One cannot be surprised enough that an opponent of Haeckel has been found who completely ignores the actual points of contention and who does not consider it inappropriate to attack a natural scientist in a way that would only make sense for a scholar who wanted to appear as a church historian.

At any rate, this whole battle has brought us full clarity about one thing. It has shown that our entire intellectual life is permeated far and wide with ideas that are incompatible with the honest and unreserved conclusions of the natural sciences. The lack of objectivity and passion with which the bearers of such ideas have fought this time is at the same time proof that their reasons have become weak. Even if it is to be expected that the future will correct Haeckel's thoughts in some respects, this correction will not come from those who are fighting him today. Even if he did not get it right everywhere, he has undoubtedly entered the path on which the education of the mind will continue to progress.

• 1. The author of this essay has already described the significance of Haeckel's world view and its position in contemporary intellectual life once before the publication of "Welträtsel" according to the state of affairs at that time in this journal. Compare my "Ernst Haeckel und seine Gegner" in L. Jacobowski's "Freier Warte", Vol. I (J.C. C. Bruns' Verlag, Minden i.W. 1900).

I had come from a protest rally against the “Lex Heinze”. ¹ I had heard a series of speeches - excellent speeches - against this most savage outgrowth of a reactionary mindset. It is an extremely embarrassing feeling that a person who really lives in the questions and doubts of the present brings home from such gatherings. The judgments that are pronounced there are something so self-evident for such contemporary people that one always has the feeling that the men who speak there descend deeply by uttering such things. The intellectual paucity of the personalities who challenge these judgments is so great that one feels one's soul is being contaminated by dirt if one seriously refutes them. So it was after attending such a meeting that I picked up Carl Hauptmann's “Diary”. It was then that I realized how enormous the gulf is between the struggle that a repugnant current of the times forces upon us and the ideas and feelings that occupy our best minds when they are alone with themselves. For this book gives us an account of such ideas and feelings. One of those who pursue the great problems that bled Friedrich Nietzsche's noble soul dry is Carl Hauptmann. A book that exudes the rarified air of contemporary culture. Nothing seems more inappropriate to me than to write a “review” in the usual sense of the word about such a book. Any judgment about individual aspects, or even about the whole, must cease when the personality reveals itself to us from such depths of the soul. All one can do is to say what such a personality triggers in the reader's own soul. I will therefore say nothing about the book. However, I would like to share a few thoughts that often cross my mind and which I am particularly vividly reminded of after reading this “diary”. An elite of the educated is working today on a new design for our view of life, both in terms of science, religion and art. Everyone is doing their part. What emerges from this will determine our actions. The cultivation of knowledge, truth and artistic views can be the content of common endeavors. It will then automatically result in a common ethic in many things. Let everyone openly state what he knows, let him bring to the public plan what he has achieved; in short, let him express himself in every direction: then he will be more to the whole than if he pretends to be able to tell it how it should behave. Many of our contemporaries are finally tired of the talk about what we should and should not do. They demand insight into the workings of the world. If they have that, then they also know how to behave in the world they have recognized. And anyone who does not have this insight and yet approaches them with their good teachings for our actions is considered a moral sophist. Our task within humanity simply arises from our realization of the essence of the part of humanity to which we belong. For those who recognize the truth of these sentences, efforts aimed at a common ethic are considered unfashionable and backward.

We have much more important things to do than to think about how we should relate to the old religions. Our whole life is in a state of transition because our old views no longer satisfy modern consciousness. We are once again suffering from the great questions of knowledge and the highest artistic problems. The old has become rotten. And when the great solution is found, which many people will be able to believe in for a time, when the new gospel is there, then, as always in such cases, the new moral code will also arise as a necessary consequence. New world views automatically give rise to new moral teachings. A new truth is always the creator of a new moral code. We have no need of popular educators who have much for our hearts but nothing for our heads. The heart follows the head if the latter has a certain direction.

In our time, with its predominantly practical, material tendencies, a certain slackness has crept in with regard to questions of knowledge. The lively interest in questions of knowledge and truth has died in many people. It is therefore convenient for them to be able to make themselves comfortable on the couch of a generally human moral doctrine. What they think about is not inhibited by the stereotyped morality. They do not know the torments of the thinker, nor those of the artist. At least not those who would like to work so hard today to improve our ethical culture. For those who have an ideal life within themselves, who want to move forward in the spiritual realm, the path must be clear and open, not blocked by moral prescriptions and measures of national education. To repeat a frequently used phrase, everyone must be able to find their own way to happiness. It is not only the ideas of moralization that spring from reactionary minds that stand in our way today, but also the moral endeavors of the so-called “liberals”.

Goethe said that he wanted to know nothing of liberal ideas, that only attitudes and feelings could be liberal. When I once quoted this view of the great poet to a sworn liberal, he was soon finished with his judgment: it was just one of the many weaknesses that Goethe had. To me, however, it seems like one of the many views that Goethe shared with all people who energetically engage in intellectual activity: the ruthless advocacy of what is recognized and seen through as true, which is also associated with the highest respect for the individuality of others. Only those who are something themselves can recognize others who are also something. The average person, who wants to be everything and therefore nothing, demands the same nonentities next to his own. Those who live according to a template also want to shape others according to it. That is why all people who have something to say are also interested in others. But those who actually have nothing to say speak of tolerance and liberalism. But they mean nothing more by it than that a general home should be created for everything insignificant and shallow. They should not count on those who have tasks in the world. For these it is hurtful to be expected to bow under the yoke of some generalization, whether it be a general artistic norm or a general morality. They want to be free, to have free movement of their individuality. The rejection of all norms is the very main feature of modern consciousness. Kant's principle: Live in such a way that the maxim of your actions can become generally valid, has been dismissed. In its place must come: Live in a way that best suits your inner being; live yourself out completely, without holding anything back. It is precisely when each individual gives the whole what only he can give, and no one else, that he does the most for it. Kant's principle, however, demands that everyone perform what they can do equally well. But a true human being is not interested in that. For a “free mind” of the present, who thinks in this sense, a book like that of Carl Hauptmann is an attractive reading, a book in which he should not believe, but through which he should look at a personality.

• 1. Carl Hauptmann: Aus meinem Tagebuch. Berlin 1900, S. Fischers Verlag.

Preface

[ 1 ] I am convinced that my work, The Philosophy of Freedom, published some five years ago, gives the outline of a world-conception which is in complete harmony with the stupendous results of the natural science of our time. I am also conscious that I did not intentionally bring about this harmony. My road was quite independent of that which natural science follows.

[ 2 ] From this independence of my own way of looking at things in regard to the province of knowledge that is dominant in our day, and from its simultaneous, complete agreement therewith, I believe myself entitled to draw my justification for presenting the position of that monumental representative of the scientific mode of thought, Ernst Haeckel, in the intellectual battle of our time.

[ 3 ] Doubtless there are to-day many who feel the need for clearing up matters with regard to natural science. This need can best be satisfied by penetrating deeply into the ideas of that seeker into Nature who has most unreservedly drawn the full conclusions of scientific premises. I desire to address myself in this little book, to those who share with me a like need in this respect.

Rudolf SteineR
Berlin, January, 1900.

[ 4 ] Goethe has given glorious expression, in his book upon Winkelmann, to the feeling which a man has when he contemplates his position within the world: “When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, worthy, and valuable whole, when harmonious contentment yields him pure, free rapture, then would the universe, could it but feel itself, burst forth into rejoicing at having attained its goal, and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.”

From out of this feeling there arises the most important question that man can ask himself: how is his own becoming and being linked with that of the whole world? Schiller, in a letter to Goethe of 23rd August, 1794, admirably characterises the road by which Goethe sought to come to a knowledge of human nature. “From the simple organism you ascend step by step to the more complex, in order finally to build up the most complex of all, man, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature.” Now this road of Goethe's is also that which natural science has been following for the last forty years, in order to solve “the question of questions for humanity.” Huxley sees the problem to be the determination of the position which “man occupies in nature, and his relation to the totality of things.” It is the great merit of Charles Darwin to have created a new scientific basis for reflection upon this question. The facts which he brought forward in 1859 in his work, The Origin of Species, and the principles which he there developed, gave to natural research the possibility of showing, in its own way, how well founded was Goethe's conviction that Nature, “after a thousand animal types, forms a being that contains them all—man.”

To-day we look back upon forty years of scientific development, which stand under the influence of Charles Darwin's line of thought. Rightly could Ernst Haeckel say in his book, On our Present Knowledge of Man's Origin, which reproduces an address delivered by him at the Fourth International Congress of Zoologists in Cambridge on 26th August, 1898: “Forty years of Darwinism! What a huge progress in our knowledge of Nature! And what a revolution in our weightiest views, not only in the more closely affected departments, but also in that of anthropology, and equally in all the so-called psychological sciences.”

Goethe, from his profound insight into Nature, foresaw to its full extent this revolution and its significance for the progress of man's intellectual culture. We see this particularly clearly from a conversation which he had with Soret on 2nd August, 1830. At that time the news of the beginning of the Revolution of July reached Weimar and caused general excitement. When Soret visited Goethe, he was received with the words: “Now, what do you think of this great event? The volcano has burst into eruption; all is in flames, and it is no longer a conference behind closed doors!” Soret naturally could only believe that Goethe was speaking of the July Revolution, and replied that under the known conditions nothing else could be expected than that it would end with the expulsion of the Royal family. But Goethe had something quite different in his mind. “1 am not talking of those people at all; I am concerned with quite other things. I am speaking of the conflict, so momentous for science, between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire that has come to a public outbreak in the Academy.” The conflict concerned the question whether each species in which organic nature finds expression possesses a distinct architectural plan of its own, or whether there is one plan common to them all. Goethe had already settled this question for himself forty years earlier. His eager study of the plant and animal worlds had made him an opponent of the Linnæan view, that we “count as many species as different forms were created in the beginning (in principio).” Anyone holding such an opinion can only strive to discover what are the plans upon which the separate species are organised. He will seek above all carefully to distinguish these separate forms.

Goethe followed another road. “That which Linnaeus strove forcibly to hold apart was bound, according to the innermost need of my being, to strive after reunion.” Thus there grew up in him the view which, in 1796, in the Lectures upon the three first chapters of A General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, he summed up in the sentence: “This, then, we have gained, that we can unhesitatingly maintain that all complete organic natures—among which we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and, as the head of the last, man—have all been shaped according to one original type, which only inclines more or less to this side or the other in its constant parts, and yet daily develops and transforms itself by reproduction.” The basic type, to which all the manifold plant-forms may be traced back, had already been described by Goethe in 1790 in his Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants. This way of regarding things, by which Goethe endeavoured to recognise the laws of living nature, is exactly similar to that which he demands for the inorganic world in his essay, written in 1793, Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject: “Nothing happens in Nature which is not in some connection with the whole, and if experiences only appear to us as isolated, if we can only regard experiments as isolated facts, that does not imply that they actually are isolated; it is only the question: How shall we find the connection of these phenomena, these occurrences?” Species also appear to us only in isolation. Goethe seeks for their connection. Hence it clearly appears that Goethe's effort was directed to apply the same mode of explanation to the study of living beings as has led to the goal in that of inorganic nature.¹

How far he had run ahead of his time with such conceptions becomes apparent when one reflects that at the same time when Goethe published his Metamorphosis, Kant sought to prove scientifically, in his Critique of Judgment, the impossibility of an explanation of the living according to the same principles as hold for the lifeless. He maintained: “It is quite certain that we cannot even adequately learn to know, far less explain to ourselves, the organised beings and their inner possibility according to purely mechanical principles of nature; and, indeed, it is so certain that we can boldly say it is senseless for man even to conceive such a purpose, or to hope that sometime perhaps a Newton may arise who will make comprehensible the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no purpose has ordered; rather one must simply and flatly deny any such insight to man.” Haeckel repudiates this thought with the words: “Now, however, this impossible Newton really appeared seventy years later in Darwin, and, as a matter of fact, solved the problem whose solution Kant had declared to be absolutely unthinkable!”

That the revolution in scientific views brought about by Darwinism must take place, Goethe knew full well, for it corresponds with his own way of conceiving things. In the view which Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire defended against Cuvier, that all organic forms carry in them a “general plan modified only here and there,” he recognised his own again. Therefore he could say to Soret: “Now, however, Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is decidedly on our side, and with him all his important disciples and followers in France. This event is for me of quite extraordinary value, and I rejoice rightly over the general victory gained at length by a cause to which I have devoted my life, and which is most especially my very own.” Of still greater value for Goethe's view of Nature are, however, the discoveries of Darwin. Goethe's view of Nature is related to Darwinism in a way similar to that in which the insights of Copernicus and Kepler into the structure and movements of the planetary system are related to the discovery by Newton of the law of the universal attraction of all heavenly bodies. This law reveals the scientific causes, why the planets move in the manner which Copernicus and Kepler had described. And Darwin found the natural causes, why the common original type of all organic beings, which Goethe assumed, makes its appearance in the various species.

[ 5 ] The doubt as to the view that there underlies each distinct organic species a special plan of organisation, unchangeable for all time, took firm hold upon Darwin upon a journey which he undertook to South America and Australia in the summer of 1831 as naturalist on the ship Beagle. As to how his thought ripened, we get an idea in reaching such communications from him as the following: “When, during the voyage of the Beagle, I visited the Galapagos Archipelago, which lies in the Pacific Ocean some five hundred English miles from the South American coast, I saw myself surrounded by peculiar kinds of birds, reptiles, and snakes, which exist nowhere else in the world. Yet they almost all bore upon them an American character. In the song of the mocking thrush, in the sharp cry of the carrion hawk, in the great chandelier-like Opuntico, I clearly perceived the neighbourhood of America; and yet these islands were separated from the mainland by so many miles, and differed widely from it in their geological constitution and their climate. Yet more surprising was the fact that most of the inhabitants of each separate island of this small archipelago were specifically different, although closely related to one another. I often asked myself, then, how these peculiar animals and men had originated. The simplest answer seemed to be that the inhabitants of the different islands descend from one another, and in the course of their descent had undergone modifications, and that all the inhabitants of the archipelago had descended from those of the nearest mainland, viz., America, from which naturally the colonisation would proceed. But it long remained for me an unintelligible problem: how the necessary degree of modification could have been attained.”

As to this “how,” it was the numerous breeding experiments which he tried, after his return home, with pigeons, fowls, dogs, rabbits, and garden plants that enlightened Darwin. He saw from them in how high a degree there lies in organic forms the possibility of continually modifying themselves in the course of their reproduction. It is possible, by creating artificial conditions, to obtain from a given form after a few generations new kinds, which differ much more from each other than do those in Nature, whose difference is regarded as so great that one inclines to ascribe to each a special underlying plan of organisation. As is well known, the breeder utilises this variability of kinds to bring about the development of such forms of domesticated organisms as correspond with his intentions. He endeavours to create the conditions which guide the variation in a direction answering his purpose. If he seeks to breed a kind of sheep with specially fine wool, he seeks out among his flock those individuals which have the finest wool. These he allows to breed. From among their descendants he again selects for further breeding those which have the finest wool. If this is carried on through a series of generations, a species of sheep is obtained which differs materially from its ancestors in the formation of its wool. The same thing can be done with other characteristics of living creatures. From these facts two things become obvious: that organic forms have a tendency to vary, and that they pass on the acquired modifications to their descendants. Owing to this first property of living creatures, the breeder is able to develop in his species certain characteristics that answer his purposes; owing to the second, these new characteristics are handed on from one generation to the next.

[ 6 ] The thought now lies close at hand, that in Nature also, left to itself, the forms continually vary. And the great power of variation of domesticated organisms does not force us to assume that this property of organic forms is confined within certain limits. We may rather presuppose that in the lapse of vast time-periods a certain form transforms itself into a totally different one, which in its formation diverges from the former to the utmost extent imaginable. The most natural inference then, is this, that the organic species have not arisen independently, each according to a special plan of structure, alongside each other; but that in course of time they have evolved the one from the other. This idea gains support from the views at which Lyell arrived in the history of the earth's development, and which he first published in 1830 in his Principles of Geology. The older geological views, according to which the formation of the earth was supposed to have been accomplished in a series of violent catastrophes, were thereby superseded. Through this doctrine of catastrophes it was sought to explain the results to which the investigation of the earth's solid crust had led. The different strata of the earth's crust, and the fossilised organic creatures contained in them, are of course the vestiges of what once took place on the earth's surface.

The followers of the doctrine of violent transformations believed that the development of the earth had been accomplished in successive periods, definitely distinguished from one another. At the end of such a period there occurred a catastrophe. Everything living was destroyed, and its remains preserved in an earth-stratum. On the top of what had been destroyed there arose a completely new world, which must be created afresh. In the place of this doctrine of catastrophes, Lyell set up the view that the crust of the earth has been gradually moulded in the course of very long periods of time, by the same processes which still in our time are going on every day on the earth's surface. It has been the action of the rivers carrying mud away from one spot and depositing it on another; the work of the glaciers, which grind away rocks and stones, forward blocks of stone, and analogous processes, which, in their steady, slow working have given to the earth's surface its present configuration. This view necessarily draws after it the further conclusion that the present-day forms of plants and animals also have gradually developed themselves out of those whose remains are preserved for us in fossils. Now, it results from the processes of artificial breeding that one form can really transform itself into another. There remains only the question, by what means are those conditions for this transformation, which the breeder brings about by artificial means, created in Nature itself?

[ 7 ] In artificial breeding human intelligence chooses the conditions so that the new forms coming into existence answer to the purposes which the breeder is following out. Now, the organic forms living in Nature are in general purposefully adapted to the conditions under which they live. A mere glance into Nature will teach one the truth of this fact. Plant and animal species are so constructed that they can maintain and reproduce themselves in the conditions under which they live.

[ 8 ] It is just this purposeful arrangement which has given rise to the supposition that organic forms cannot be explained in the same way as the facts of inorganic Nature. Kant observes in his Critique of Judgment: “The analogy of the forms, in so far as they seem to be produced in accordance with a common basic plan, despite all differences, strengthens the presumption of a real relationship between them in their generation from a common mother through an approach, step by step, of one animal species to another. ... Here, therefore, it is open to the archaeologist of Nature to cause to arise that great family of creatures (for one would be forced to conceive them thus if the thoroughgoing connected relationship spoken of is to hold good) from the traces left over of her older revolutions, according to all their known and supposed mechanisms. But he must equally for that purpose ascribe to this common mother an organisation purposely fitted to all these creatures, for otherwise the purposive form of the products of the plant and animal kingdoms is unthinkable as to its possibility.”

[ 9 ] If we would explain organic forms after the same manner in which natural science deals with inorganic phenomena, we must demonstrate that the particular arrangement of the organisms—devoid of a purposeful object—comes into being by reason of what is practically natural necessity, even as one elastic ball after having been struck by another is fulfilling a law as it rolls along. This requirement has its fulfilment in Darwin's teachings regarding natural selection. Even in Nature organic forms must, in accordance with their capacity for assimilating modifications which have been brought about by artificial breeding, become transformed. Should there be nothing available for directly bringing about the change, so that none but the forms aimed at should come into existence, there will be, regardless of choice, useless, or less useful, forms called into being. Now, Nature is extremely wasteful in the bringing forth of her germs. So many germs are, indeed, produced upon our earth, that were they all to attain to development we should soon be able to fill several worlds with them.

This great number of germs is confronted with but a comparatively small amount of food and space, the result of this being a universal struggle for existence among organic beings. Only the fit survive and fructify; the unfit have to go under. The fittest, however, will be those who have adapted themselves in the best possible way to the surrounding conditions of life. The absolutely unintentional, and yet—from natural causes—necessary, struggle for existence brings in its train the same results as are attained by the intelligence of the breeder with his cultivated organisms: he creates purposeful (useful) organic forms. This, broadly sketched, is the meaning of Darwin's theory of natural selection in the struggle for existence; or, otherwise, the “selective theory.” By this theory, that which Kant held to be impossible is reached: the thinking out in all its possibilities of a predetermined form in the animal and vegetable kingdom, without assuming the Universal Mother to be dowered with an organism directly productive of all these creatures.

[ 10 ] As Newton by pointing out the general attraction of the heavenly bodies showed why they moved in the set courses determined by Copernicus and Kepler, so did it now become possible to explain with the help of the theory of selection how in Nature the evolution of the living thing takes place, the course of which Goethe, in his Metamorphosis of Plants, has observed: “We can, however, say this, namely, that proceeding from a relationship that is hardly distinguishable between animal and plant, creatures do little by little evolve, carrying on their development in opposite directions—the plant finally reaching its maturity in the form of the tree, and the animal finding its culminating glory in man's freedom and activity.”

Goethe has said of his ancestors: “I shall not rest until I have found a pregnant point from which many deductions may be made; or, rather, one that will forcibly bestow upon me the overflow of its own abundance.” The theory of selection became for Ernst Haeckel the point from which he was able to deduce a conception of the universe entirely in accordance with natural science.

[ 11 ] At the beginning of the last century Jean Lamarck also maintained the view that, at a certain moment in the earth's development, a most simple organic something developed itself, by spontaneous generation, out of the mechanical, physical, and chemical processes. These simplest organisms then produced more perfect ones, and these again others more highly organised, right up to man. “One might therefore quite rightly name this part of the theory of evolution, which asserts the common origin of all plant and animal species from the simplest common root-forms, in honour of its most deserving founder, Lamarckianism” (Haeckel, Natural History of Creation). Haeckel has given in grandiose style an explanation of Lamarckianism by means of Darwinism.

[ 12 ] The key to this explanation Haeckel found by seeking out the evidences in the individual development of the higher organisms—in their ontogeny—showing that they really originated from lower forms of life. When one follows out the form-development of one of the higher organisms from the earliest germ up to its fully developed condition, the different stages are found to present configurations corresponding to the forms of lower organisms.² At the outset of his individual existence man and every other animal is a simple cell. This cell divides itself, and from it arises a germinal vesicle consisting of many cells. From that develops the so-called “cup-germ,” the two-layered gastrula, which has the shape of a cup- or jug-like body. Now, the lower plant-animals (sponges, polyps, and so on) remain throughout their entire existence on a level of development which is equivalent to this cup-germ. Haeckel remarks thereupon: “This fact is of extraordinary importance. For we see that man, and generally every vertebrate, runs rapidly, in passing, through a two-leaved stage of formation, which in these lowest plant-animals is maintained throughout life” (Anthropogenesis). Such a parallelism between the developmental stages of the higher organisms and the developed lower forms may be followed out through the entire evolutionary history. Haeckel clothes this fact in the words: “The brief ontogenesis or development of the individual is a rapid and abbreviated repetition, a condensed recapitulation of the prolonged phylogenesis or development of the species.” This sentence gives expression to the so-called fundamental biogenetic law. Why then do the higher organisms in the course of their development come to forms which resemble lower ones? The natural explanation is that the former have developed themselves out of the latter; that therefore every organism in its individual development shows us one after another the forms which have clung to it as heirlooms from its lower ancestors.

[ 13 ] The simplest organism that once upon a time formed itself on earth, transforms itself in the course of reproduction into new forms. Of these, the best adapted in the struggle for existence survive, and transmit their peculiarities to their descendants. All the formations and qualities which an organism exhibits at the present time have arisen in the lapse of enormous time-periods by adaptation and inheritance. Heredity and adaptation are thus the causes of the world of organic forms.

[ 14 ] Thus, by investigating the relationship of individual developmental history (ontogeny) to the history of the race (phylogeny), Haeckel has given the scientific explanation of the manifold organic forms.³ As a natural philosopher he has satisfied the human demand for knowledge, which Schiller had derived from observation of Goethe's mind; he ascended from the simple organisations step by step to the more complicated, to finally build up genetically the most complex of all, man, from the materials of the whole structure of Nature. He has set forth his view in several grandly designed works—in his General Morphology (1866), in his Natural History of Creation (1868), in his Anthropogenesis (1874)—in which he “undertook the first and hitherto the only attempt to establish critically in detail the zoological family-tree of man, and to discuss at length the entire animal ancestry of our race.” To these works there has been further added in recent years his three-volumed Systematic Phylogeny.

[ 15 ] It is characteristic of Haeckel's deeply philosophical nature that, after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, he at once recognised the full significance for man's entire conception of the Universe, of the principles therein established; and it speaks much for his philosophical enthusiasm that he boldly and tirelessly combated all the prejudices which arose against the acceptance of the new truth by the creed of modern thought. The necessity that all modern scientific thinking should reckon with Darwinism was expounded by Haeckel at the fiftieth meeting of German scientists and doctors on the 22nd September, 1877, in his address, The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole. He delivered a widely-embracing Confession of Faith of a Man of Science on the 9th October, 1892, in Altenburg at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society for Natural Science of the Osterland. (This address was printed under the title, Monism as a link between Religion and Science, Bonn, 1892.) What has been yielded by the remodelled doctrine of evolution and our present scientific knowledge towards the answering of the “question of questions,” he has recently expounded in its broad lines in the address mentioned above, On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man. Herein Haeckel handles afresh the conclusion, which follows as a matter of course from Darwinism for every logical thinker, that man has developed out of the lower vertebrates, and further, more immediately from true apes.

It has been, however, this necessary conclusion which has summoned to battle all the old prejudices of theologians, philosophers, and all who are under their spell. Doubtless, people would have accepted the emergence of the single animal and plant forms from one another if only this assumption had not carried with it at once the recognition of the animal descent of man. “It remains,” as Haeckel emphasised in his Natural History of Creation, “an instructive fact that this recognition—after the appearance of the first Darwinian work—was in no sense general, that on the contrary numerous critics of the first Darwinian book (and among them very famous names) declared themselves in complete agreement with Darwinism, but entirely rejected its application to man.” With a certain appearance of justice, people relied in so doing on Darwin's book itself, in which no word is said of this application. Because he drew this conclusion unreservedly, Haeckel was reproached with being “more Darwinian than Darwin.” True, that held good only till the year 1871, in which appeared Darwin's work, The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection, in which Darwin himself maintained that inference with great boldness and clearness.

[ 16 ] It was rightly recognised that with this conclusion must fall a conception belonging to the most treasured among the collection of older human prejudices: the conception that the “soul of man” is a special being all to itself, having quite another, a different, “higher origin” from all other things in Nature. The doctrine of descent must naturally lead to the view that man's soul-activities are only a special form of those physiological functions which are found in his vertebrate ancestors, and that these activities have evolved themselves with the same necessity from the mental activities of the animals, as the brain of man, which is the material condition of his intellect, has evolved out of the vertebrate brain.

[ 17 ] It was not only the men with old conceptions of faith nurtured in the various ecclesiastical religions who rebelled against the new confession, but also all those who had indeed apparently freed themselves from these conceptions of faith, but whose minds nevertheless still thought in the sense of these conceptions. In what follows the proof will be given that to this latter class of minds belong a series of philosophers and scientific scholars of high standing who have combated Haeckel, and who still remain opponents of the views he advocated. To these ally themselves also those who are entirely lacking in the power of drawing the necessary logical conclusions from a series of facts lying before them. I wish here to describe the objections which Haeckel had to combat.

II

[ 18 ] A bright light is thrown upon the relationship of man to the higher vertebrates, by the truth which Huxley, in 1863, expressed in his volume on Man's Place in Nature, and other Anthropological Essays: “Thus whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result—that the structural differences which separate man from the gorilla and the chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the gorilla from the lower apes” (see Man and the Lower Animals, p. 144). With the help of this fact it is possible to establish man's animal line of ancestry in the sense of the Darwinian doctrine of descent. Man has common ancestors with the apes in some species of apes that have died out. By a corresponding utilisation of the knowledge which comparative anatomy and physiology, individual developmental history, and palaeontology supply, Haeckel has followed the animal ancestors of man lying still more remotely in the past, through the semi-apes, the marsupials, the earliest fishes, right up to the very earliest animals consisting only of a single cell. He is fully entitled to ask: “Are the phenomena of the individual development of man in any way less wonderful than the palaeontological development from lower organisms? Why should not man have evolved in the course of enormous periods of time from unicellular original forms, since every individual runs through this same development from the cell to the fully developed organism?”

[ 19 ] But it is also by no means easy for the human mind to construct for itself conceptions in accordance with Nature as regards the unfoldment of the single organism from the germ up to the developed condition. We can see this from the ideas which a scientist like Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) and a philosopher like Leibnitz (1646-1716) formed about this development. Haller maintained the view that the germ of an organism already contains in miniature, but fully and completely formed in advance, all the parts which make their appearance during its development. Thus, development is taken to be not the formation of something new in what is already present, but the unfolding of something that was already there but invisible to the eye because of its minuteness. But if this view were correct, then in the first germ of an animal or vegetable form all following generations must be already contained like boxes one inside the other. And Haller actually drew this conclusion. He assumed that in the first human germ of our root-mother, Eve, the entire human race was already present in miniature. And even Leibnitz also can only imagine the development of men as an unfoldment of what already exists: “So I should opine that the souls, which some day will be human souls, were already there in germ, like those of other species, that they existed in man's ancestors up to Adam, therefore from the beginning of things, always in the form of organised bodies.”

[ 20 ] The human understanding has a tendency to imagine to itself that anything coming into existence was somehow already there, in some form or other, before its manifestation. The entire organism is supposed to be already hidden in the germ; the distinct organic classes, orders, families, species, and kinds are supposed to have existed as the thoughts of a creator before they actually came into existence. Now, however, the idea of evolution demands that we should conceive the arising of something new, of something later, from out of something already present, of something earlier. We are called upon to understand that which has become, out of the becoming. That we cannot do, if we regard all that has become as something which has always been there.

[ 21 ] How great the prejudices are that the idea of evolution had to face was clearly shown by the reception which Caspar Friedrich Wolff's Theoria Generationis, which appeared in 1759, met with among the men of science who accepted Haller's views. It was demonstrated in this book that in the human ovum not even a trace of the form of the developed organism is present, but that its development consists in a series of new formations. Wolff defended the idea of a real evolution, an epigenesis, a becoming from what is not present, as against the view of seeming evolution. Haeckel says of Wolff's book that it “belongs, in spite of its small size and awkward language, to the most valuable writings in the whole field of biological literature. ...” Nevertheless, this remarkable book had at first no success whatever. Although scientific studies, as a result of the stimulus imparted by Linnaeus, flourished mightily at that time, although botanists and zoologists were soon counted no longer by dozens but by hundreds, yet no one troubled himself about Wolff's Theory of Generation. The few, however, who had read it, held it to be fundamentally wrong, and especially Haller. Although Wolff proved by the most accurate observations the truth of epigenesis, and disproved the current hypotheses of the preformation doctrine, nevertheless the “exact” physiologist Haller remained the most zealous follower of the latter and rejected the correct teaching of Wolff with his dictatorial edict: “There is no becoming” (Nulla est epigenesis!). With so much power did human thinking set itself against a view, of which Haeckel (in his Anthropogenesis) remarks: “To-day we can hardly any longer call this theory of epigenesis a theory, because we have fully convinced ourselves of the correctness of the fact, and can demonstrate it at any moment with the help of the microscope.”

[ 22 ] How deep-rooted is the prejudice against the idea of evolution can be seen at any moment by the objections which our philosophical contemporaries make against it. Otto Liebmann, who, in his Analysis of Reality and his Thoughts and Facts, has subjected the fundamental views of science to criticism, expresses himself in a remarkable manner about the conception of evolution. In face of the facts, he cannot deny the justice of the conception that higher organisms proceed from lower. He therefore endeavours to represent the range and importance of this conception for the higher need of explanation as being as small as possible. “Accepted, the theory of descent ... granted that it be complete, that the great genealogical register of Nature's organic beings lies open before us; and that, not as an hypothesis, but as historically proven fact, what should we then have? A gallery of ancestors, such as one finds also in princely castles; only not as a fragment, but as a completed whole.” This means that nothing of any consequence has been accomplished towards the real explanation, when one has shown how what appears later proceeds as a new formation from what preceded.

Now it is interesting to see how Liebmann's presuppositions lead him yet again to the assumption that what arises on the road of evolution was there already before its appearance. In the recently published second part of his Thoughts and Facts he maintains: “It is true that for us, to whom the world appears in the form of perception known as time, the seed is there before the plant; begetting and conception come before the animal that arises from them, and the development of the embryo into a full-grown creature is a process of time and drawn out in time to a certain length. In the timeless world-being, on the contrary, which neither becomes nor passes away, but is once and for all, maintaining itself unchangeably amid the stream of happenings, and for which no future, no past, but only an eternal present exists, this before and after, this earlier and later, falls away entirely. ... That which unrolls itself for us in the course of time as the slower or more rapidly passing succession of a series of phases of development, is in the omnipresent, permanent world-being a fixed law, neither coming into existence nor passing away.”

The connection of such philosophical conceptions with the ideas of the various religious doctrines as to the creation may be easily seen. That purposefully devised beings arise in Nature, without there being some fundamental activity or power which infuses that purposefulness into the beings in question, is something that neither these religious doctrines nor such philosophical thinkers as Liebmann will admit. The view that accords with Nature follows out the course of what happens, and sees beings arise which have the quality of purposefulness, without this same purpose having been a co-determinant in their production. The purposefulness came about along with them; but the purpose did not co-operate in their becoming.⁴ The religious mode of conception has recourse to the Creator, who has created the creatures purposefully according to his preconceived plan; Liebmann turns to a timeless world-being, but he still makes that which is purposeful be brought forth by the purpose. “The goal or the purpose is here not later, and also not earlier than the means; but the purpose helps it on in virtue of a timeless necessity.” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. ii, p. 268.) Liebmann is a good example of those philosophers who have apparently freed themselves from the conceptions of faith, but who still think altogether on the lines of such conceptions. They profess that their thoughts are determined purely by reasonable considerations, but none the less it is an innate theological prejudice which gives the direction to their thoughts.

[ 23 ] Reasoned reflection must therefore agree with Haeckel when he says: “Either organisms have naturally developed themselves, and in that case they must all originate from the simplest common ancestral forms—or that is not the case, the various species of organisms have arisen independently of one another, and in that case they can only have been created in a supernatural manner, by a miracle. Natural evolution or supernatural creation of species—we must choose between these two possibilities, for there is no third!” (Free Science and Free Teaching, p. 9.) What has been proffered by philosophers or scientists as such a third alternative against the doctrine of natural evolution shows itself, on closer examination, to be only a belief in creation which more or less veils or denies its origin.

[ 24 ] When we raise the question as to the origin of species in its most important form, in that which concerns the origin of man, there are only two answers possible. Either a consciousness endowed with reason is not present prior to its actual appearance in the world, but evolves as the outcome of the nervous system concentrated in the brain; or else an all-dominating world-reason exists before all other beings, and so shapes matter that in man its own image comes into being. Haeckel (in Monism as the Link between Religion and Science, p. 21) describes the becoming of the human mind as follows: “As our human body has slowly and step by step built itself up from a long series of vertebrate ancestors, so the same thing holds good of our soul: as a function of our brain it has developed itself step by step in interaction with that organ. What we term for short the ‘human soul’ is indeed only the sum-total of our feeling, willing, and thinking—the sum-total of physiological functions whose elementary organs consist of the microscopic ganglionic cells of our brain. Comparative anatomy and ontogeny show us how the marvellous structure of the latter, of our human soul-organ, has built itself upwards gradually in the course of millions of years out of the brain-forms of the higher and lower vertebrates; while comparative psychology shows us how, hand in hand therewith, the very soul itself—as a function of the brain—has evolved itself. The latter shows us also how a lower form of soul activity is already present in the lowest animals, in the unicellular protozoa, infusoria, and rhizopods. Every scientist who, like myself, has observed through long years the life-activity of these unicellular protista, is positively convinced that they also possess a soul; this ‘cell-soul,’ too, consists of a sum of feelings, representations, and volitions; the feeling, thinking, and willing of our human soul is only different therefrom in degree.”

The totality of human soul-activities, which find their highest expression in unitary self-consciousness, corresponds to the complex structure of the human brain,⁵ just as simple feeling and willing do to the organisation of the protozoa. The progress of physiology, which we owe to investigators like Goltz, Münk, Wernicke, Edinger, Paul Flechsig, and others, enables us to-day to assign particular soul-manifestations to definite parts of the brain as their special functions. We recognise in four tracts of the grey matter of the cortex the mediators of four kinds of feeling: the sphere of bodily organic feeling in the meso-cranum lobule, that of smell in the frontal lobule, that of vision in the chief basal lobule, that of hearing in the temple lobule. The thinking which connects and orders the sensations has its apparatus between these four “sense-foci.” Haeckel links the following remark to the discussion of these latest physiological results: “The four thought-foci, distinguished by peculiar and highly complicated nerve-structure from the intervening sense-foci, are the true organs of thought, the only real tools of our mental life” (On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man, P-15).

[ 25 ] Haeckel demands from the psychologists that they shall take such results as these into account in their explanations about the nature of the soul, and not build up a mere pseudo-science composed of a fantastic metaphysic, of one-sided, so-called inner observation of soul-events, uncritical comparison, misunderstood perceptions, incomplete experiences, speculative aberrations and religious dogmas. As against the reproach that is cast by this view at the old-fashioned psychology, we find in some philosophers and also in individual scientists the assertion that there cannot in any case be contained in the material processes of the brain that which we class together as mind and spirit; for the material processes in the areas of sense and thought are in no case representations, feelings, and thoughts, but only material phenomena. We cannot learn to know the real nature of thoughts and feelings through external observation, but only through inner experience, through purely mental self-observation. Gustav Bunge, for instance, in his address Vitalism and Mechanism, p. 12, explains: “In activity—therein lies the riddle of life. But we have not acquired the conception of activity from observation through the senses, but from self-observation, from the observation of willing as it comes into our consciousness, as it reveals itself to our inner sense.” Many thinkers see the mark of a philosophical mind in the ability to rise to the insight that it is a turning upside down of the right relation of things, to endeavour to understand mental processes from material ones.

[ 26 ] Such objections point to a misunderstanding of the view of the world which Haeckel represents. Anyone who has really been saturated with the spirit of this view will never seek to explore the laws of mental life by any other road than by inner experience, by self-observation. The opponents of the scientific mode of thought talk exactly as if its supporters sought to discover the truths of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so forth, not by means of observing mental phenomena as such, but from the results of brain-anatomy. The caricature of the scientific world-conception thus created by such opponents for themselves is then termed materialism, and they are untiring in ever repeating afresh that this view must be unproductive, because it ignores the mental side of existence, or at least gives it a lower place at the expense of the material. Otto Liebmann, whom we may here cite once more, because his anti-scientific conceptions are typical of the mode of thought of certain philosophers and laymen, observes: “But granting, however, that natural science had attained its goal, it would then be in a position to show me accurately the physico-organic reasons why I hold that the assertion ‘twice two are four’ is true and assert it, and the other assertion ‘twice two are five’ is false and combat it, or why I must, just at this moment, write these very lines on paper the while I am entangled in the subjective belief that this happens because I will to write them down on account of their truth as assumed by me” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. ii, p. 294 et seq.). No scientific thinker will ever be of opinion that bodily-organic reasons can throw any light upon what, in the logical sense, is true or false. Mental connections can only be recognised from the side of the mental life. What is logically justified, must always be decided by logic; what is artistically perfect, by the aesthetic judgment. But it is an altogether different question to inquire: How does logical thinking, or the aesthetic judgment arise as a function of the brain? It is on this question only that comparative physiology and brain-anatomy have anything to say. And these show that the reasoning consciousness does not exist in isolation for itself, only utilising the human brain in order to express itself through it, as the piano-player plays on the piano; but that our mental powers are just as much functions of the form-elements of our brain, as “every force is a function of a material body” (Haeckel, Anthropogenesis, pt. ii, p. 853).

[ 27 ] The essence of Monism consists in the assumption that all occurrences in the world, from the simplest mechanical ones upwards to the highest human intellectual creations, evolve themselves naturally in the same sense, and that everything which is called in for the explanation of appearances, must be sought within that same world. Opposed to this view stands Dualism, which regards the pure operation of natural law as insufficient to explain appearances, and takes refuge in a reasoning being ruling over the appearances from above. Natural science, as has been shown, must reject this dualism.

[ 28 ] Now, however, it is urged from the side of philosophy that the means at the disposal of science are insufficient to establish a world-conception. From its own standpoint science was entirely right in explaining the whole world-process as a chain of causes and effects, in the sense of a purely mechanical conformity to law; but behind these laws, nevertheless, there is hidden the real cause, the universal world-reason, which only avails itself of mechanical means in order to realise higher, purposeful relations. Thus, for instance, Arthur Drews, who follows in the path of Eduard von Hartmann, observes: “Human works of art, too, are produced in a mechanical manner, that is when one looks only at the outward succession of single moments, without reflecting on the fact that after all there is hidden behind all this only the artist's thought; nevertheless one would rightly take that man for a fool who would perchance contend that the work was produced purely mechanically ... that which presents itself as the inevitable effect of a cause, on that lower standpoint which contents itself with merely gazing at the effects and thus contemplates the entire process as it were from behind, that very same thing reveals itself, when seen from the front, in every case as the intended goal of the means employed” (German Speculation since Kant, vol. ii, p. 287 et seq.). And Eduard von Hartmann himself remarks about the struggle for existence which renders it possible to explain living creatures naturally: “The struggle for existence, and therewith the whole of natural selection, is only the servant of the Idea, who is obliged to perform the lower services in its realisation, namely, the rough hewing and fitting of the stones that the master-builder has measured out and typically determined in advance according to their place in the great building. To proclaim this selection in the struggle for existence as the essentially adequate principle of explanation of the evolution of the organic kingdom, would be on a par with a day-labourer, who had worked with others in preparing the stones in the building of Cologne Cathedral, declaring himself to be the architect of that work of art” (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 10th ed., vol. iii, p. 403).

[ 29 ] If these conceptions were justified, it would be the task of philosophy to seek the artist behind the work of art. In fact, philosophers have tried the most various and diverse dualistic explanations to account for Cosmic processes. They have constructed in thought certain entities, supposed to hover behind the phenomena as the spirit of the artist rules behind the work of art.

[ 30 ] No scientific consideration would be able to rob man of the conviction that perceptible phenomena are guided by beings outside the world, if he could find within his own consciousness anything that pointed to such beings. What could anatomy and physiology accomplish with their declaration that soul-activities are functions of the brain, if observation of these activities yielded anything which could be regarded as a higher ground for an explanation? If the philosopher were able to show that a universal world-reason manifests itself in human reason, then all scientific results would be powerless to refute such knowledge.

[ 31 ] Now, however, the dualistic world-conception is disproved by nothing more effectively than by the consideration of the human mind. When I want to explain an external occurrence—for instance, the motion of an elastic ball which has been struck by another, I cannot stop short at the mere observation, but must seek the law which determines the direction of motion and velocity of the one ball from the direction and velocity of the other. Mere observation cannot furnish me with such a law, but only the linking together in thought of what happens. Man, therefore, draws from his mind the means of explaining that which presents itself to him through observation. He must pass beyond the mere observation, if he wants to comprehend it. Observation and thought are the two sources of our knowledge about things; and that holds good for all things and happenings, except only for the thinking consciousness itself. To that we cannot add by any explanation anything that does not lie already in the observation itself. It yields us the laws for all other things; it yields us at the same time its own laws also. If we want to demonstrate the correctness of a natural law, we accomplish this by distinguishing, arranging observations and perceptions, and drawing conclusions—that is, we form conceptions and ideas about the experiences in question with the help of thinking. As to the correctness of the thinking, thought itself alone decides. It is thus thought which, in regard to all that happens in the world, carries us beyond mere observation, though it does not carry us beyond itself.

[ 32 ] This fact is incompatible with the dualistic world-conception. The point which the supporters of this conception so often emphasise, namely, that the manifestations of the thinking consciousness are accessible to us through the inner sense of introspection, while we only comprehend physical and chemical happenings when we bring into the appropriate connections the facts of observation through logical, mathematical combination, and so on; in other words, through the results of the psychological domain: this fact is the very thing which they should never admit. For let us for once draw the right conclusion from the knowledge that observation transforms itself into self-observation when we ascend from the scientific into the psychological domain.

If a universal world-reason underlay the phenomena of nature, or some other spiritual primordial being (for instance, Schopenhauer's will or von Hartmann's unconscious spirit), then it follows that the human thinking spirit must also be created by this world-being. An agreement of the conceptions and ideas which the mind of man forms from phenomena, with the actual laws proper to these occurrences, would only be possible if the ideal world-artist called forth in the human soul the laws according to which he had previously created the entire world. But then man could only know his own mental activity through observation of the root-being by whom he is shaped, and not through self-observation. Indeed, there could be no self-observation, but only observation of the intentions and purposes of the primordial being. Mathematics and logic, for example, ought not to be developed by means of man's investigating the inner, proper nature of mental connections, but by his deducing these psychological truths from the intentions and purposes of the eternal world-reason. If human understanding were only the reflection of an eternal mind, then it could never possibly ascertain its own laws through self-observation, but must needs explain them from out of the eternal reason. But whenever such an explanation has been attempted, it is simply human reason which has been transferred to the world outside. When the mystic believes that he rises to the contemplation of God by sinking down into his own inner being, in reality he merely sees his own spirit, which he makes into God; and when Eduard von Hartmann speaks of ideas which utilise the laws of Nature as their hodmen-helpers in order to shape the building of the world, these ideas are only his own, by means of which he explains the world. Because observation of the manifestations of mind is self-observation, therefore it follows that it is man's own spirit which expresses itself in the mind, and not any external reason.

[ 33 ] The monistic doctrine of evolution, however, is in complete agreement with the fact of self-observation. If the human soul has evolved itself slowly and step by step along with the organs of the soul out of lower conditions, then it is self-evident that we can explain its development from below scientifically, though we can discover the inner nature of that which emerges from the complex structure of the human brain only from the contemplation of this very nature itself. Had spirit been always present in a form resembling the human, and had it at last created its likeness in man alone, then we ought to be able to deduce the human spirit from the All-spirit; but if man's spirit has arisen as a new formation in the course of natural evolution, then we can understand its origin by following out its line of ancestry; we learn to know the stage at which it has at last arrived when we contemplate that spirit itself.

[ 34 ] A philosophy that understands itself, and turns its attention to an unprejudiced contemplation of the human spirit, thus yields a further proof of the correctness of the monistic world-conception. It is, however, quite incompatible with a dualistic natural science. (The further development and detailed proof of a monistic philosophy, the basic ideas of which I can only indicate here, I have given in my =The Philosophy of Freedom, Berlin, 1894, Verlag Emil Felber.)

[ 35 ] For one who understands aright the monistic world-conception, all the objections urged against it from the side of ethics lose all significance. Haeckel has repeatedly pointed out the injustice of such objections, and also called attention to the fact that the assertion that scientific monism must needs lead to ethical materialism, either rests upon a complete misunderstanding of the former, or else aims at nothing more than casting suspicion upon it.

[ 36 ] Naturally monism regards human conduct only as a part of the general happenings of the world.⁶ It makes that conduct just as little dependent upon a so-called higher moral world-order, as it makes the happenings in Nature dependent upon a supernatural order. “The mechanical or monistic philosophy maintains that, everywhere in the phenomena of human life, as in those of the rest of nature, fixed and unalterable laws rule, that everywhere there exists a necessary causal connection, a causal nexus of appearances, and that in accordance therewith the entire world knowable to us constitutes a uniform whole, a 'monon.' It maintains further that all phenomena are produced by mechanical causes, not by preconceived purposive causes. There is no such thing as a ‘free will’ in the ordinary sense. On the contrary, those very phenomena which we have accustomed ourselves to view as the freest and most independent, the manifestations of the human will, appear in the light of the monistic world-conception as subordinated to just as rigid laws as any other phenomenon of nature” (Haeckel, Anthropogenesis, p. 851 et seq.). It is the monistic philosophy which first shows the phenomenon of free will in the right light. As a bit cut out of the general happening of the world, the human will stands under the same laws as all other natural things and processes. It is conditioned according to natural law. But inasmuch as the monistic view denies the presence of higher, purposeful causes in the course of Nature, it at the same time also declares the will independent of such a higher world-order.

The natural course of evolution leads the processes of Nature upwards to human self-consciousness. On that level it leaves man to himself; henceforward he can draw the impulses of his action from his own spirit. If a universal world-reason were ruling, then man also could not draw his goals from within himself, but only from this eternal reason. In the monistic sense man's action is hereafter determined by causal moments; in the ethical sense it is not determined, because Nature as a whole is determined not ethically but in accordance with natural law. The preliminary stages of ethical conduct are already to be found among the lower organisms. “Even though later the moral foundations have in man developed themselves much more highly, nevertheless their most ancient, prehistoric source lies, as Darwin has shown, in the social instincts of the animals” (Haeckel, Monism, p. 29).

Man's moral conduct is a product of evolution. The moral instinct of animals perfects itself, like everything else in Nature, by inheritance and adaptation, until man sets before himself moral purposes and goals from out of his own spirit. Moral goals appear not as predetermined by a supernatural world-order, but as a new formation within the natural process. Regarded ethically, “that only has purpose which man has first endowed therewith, for only through the realisation of an idea does anything purposeful arise. But only in man does the idea become effective in a realistic sense. To the question, What is man's task in life? Monism can only answer, that which he sets himself. My mission in the world is no (ethically) predetermined one; on the contrary, it is, at every moment, that which I elect for myself. I do not enter on life's journey with a fixed, settled line of march” (cp. my The Philosophy of Freedom, p. 172 et seq.). Dualism demands submission to ethical commands derived from somewhere or other. Monism throws man wholly upon himself. Man receives ethical standards from no external world-being, but only from the depths of his own being. The capacity for creating for oneself ethical purposes may be called moral phantasy. Thereby man elevates the ethical instincts of his lower ancestors into moral action, as through his artistic phantasy he reflects on a higher level in his works of art the forms and occurrences of Nature.

[ 37 ] The philosophical considerations which result from the fact of self-observation thus constitute no refutation, but rather an important complement of the means of proof in favour of the monistic world-conception, derived from comparative anatomy and physiology.

III

[ 38 ] The famous pathologist, Rudolf Virchow,⁶ has taken up a quite peculiar position towards the monistic world-conception. After Haeckel had delivered his address on The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole at the fiftieth congress of German scientists and doctors, in which he ably expounded the significance of the monistic world-conception for our intellectual culture and also for the whole system of public instruction, Virchow came forward four days later as his opponent with the speech: The Freedom of Science in the Modern State. At first it seemed as if Virchow wanted monism excluded from the schools only, because, according to his view, the new doctrine was only an hypothesis and did not represent a fact established by definite proofs. It certainly seems remarkable that a modern scientist wants to exclude the doctrine of evolution from school-teaching on the ostensible ground of lack of unassailable proofs while at the same time speaking in favour of Church dogma. Does not Virchow even say (on p. 29 of the speech mentioned): “Every attempt to transform our problems into set formula, to introduce our suppositions as the basis of instruction, especially the attempt simply to dispossess the Church and replace its dogmas without more ado by a ‘descent-religion;’ yes, gentlemen, this attempt must fail entirely, and in its frustration this attempt will also bring with it the greatest dangers for the whole position of science!” One must needs, however, here raise the question—meaningless for every reasonable thinker—Have we more certain proofs for the Church's dogmas than for the “descent-religion?” But it results from the whole tone and style in which Virchow spoke that he was much less concerned about warding off the dangers which monism might cause to the teaching of the young than about his opposition on principle to Haeckel's world-conception as a whole. This he has proved by his whole subsequent attitude. He has seized upon every opportunity that seemed to him suitable to combat the natural history of evolution and to repeat his favourite phrase, “It is quite certain that man does not descend from the ape.” At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the German Anthropological Society, on 24th August, 1894, he even went so far as to clothe this dictum in the somewhat tactless words: “On the road of speculation people have come to the ape theory; one might just as well have arrived at an elephant theory or a sheep theory.” Of course, this utterance has not the smallest sense in view of the results of comparative zoology. “No zoologist,” remarks Haeckel, “would consider it possible that man could have descended from the elephant or the sheep. For precisely these two mammals happen to belong to the most specialised branches of hoofed animals, an order of mammalia which stands in no sort of direct connection with that of the apes or primates (excepting their common descent from an ancestral form common to the entire class).” Hard as it may be towards a meritorious scientist, one can only characterise such utterances as Virchow's as empty verbalism.⁷

In combating the theory of descent, Virchow follows quite peculiar tactics. He demands unassailable proofs for this theory. But as soon as natural science discovers anything which is capable of enriching the chain of proofs with a fresh link, he seeks to weaken its probatory force in every way. The theory of descent sees in the famous skulls of Neanderthal, Spy, etc., isolated palaeontological remains of extinct races of lower men, which form a transition-link between the ape-like ancestor of man (Pithecanthropus) and the lower human races of the present day. Virchow declares these skulls to be abnormal, diseased formations, pathological productions. He even developed this contention in the direction of maintaining that all deviations from the fixed organic root-forms must be regarded as pathological formations. If, then, by artificial breeding we produce table-fruit from wild fruit, we have only produced a diseased object in Nature. One cannot prove more effectively the thesis of Virchow (hostile to any theory of evolution), “The plan of organisation is unalterable within the species, kind does not depart from kind,” than by declaring that what shows plainly how kind departs from kind, is not a healthy, natural product of evolution, but a diseased formation. Quite in accord with this attitude of Virchow's to the theory of descent were, further, his assertions in regard to the skeleton remains of the man-ape (Pithecanthropus erectus), which Eugen Dubois found in Java in 1894.

It is true that these remains—the top of the skull, a thigh-bone, and some teeth—were incomplete; and a debate that was most interesting arose about them in the Zoological Congress at Leyden. Out of twelve zoologists, three were of opinion that the remains were those of an ape, three that they were those of a human being, while six defended the view that they belonged to an extinct transition form, between man and ape. Dubois set out in a most lucid manner the relation of this intermediate link between man and ape, on the one hand to the lower races of humanity, on the other to the known anthropoid apes. Virchow declared that the skull and the thigh-bone did not belong together; but that the former came from an ape, the latter from a human being. This assertion was refuted by well-informed palaeontologists, who, on the basis of the conscientious report of the find, expressed themselves as of opinion that not the smallest doubt could exist as to the origin of the bony remains from one and the same individual. Virchow tried to prove that the thigh-bone could only have come from a man, from the presence of a bony outgrowth which could only proceed from an illness that had been cured through careful human nursing. As against that, the palaeontologist Marsh showed that similar bony outgrowths occur also in wild apes. A third assertion of Virchow's, that the deep groove between the upper edge of the eye sockets and the low roof of the skull in Pithecanthropus bore witness to its simian nature, was refuted by the palaeontologist Nehring's showing that the same formation existed in a human skull from Santos in Brazil.

[ 39 ] Virchow's fight against the evolution doctrine appears indeed somewhat of a riddle when one reflects that this investigator, at the beginning of his career, before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, defended the doctrine of the mechanical basis of all vital activity. In Würzburg, where Virchow taught from 1848 to 1856, Haeckel sat “reverentially at his feet and first heard with enthusiasm from him that clear and simple doctrine.” But Virchow fights against the doctrine of transformation created by Darwin, which furnishes an all-embracing principle of explanation of that doctrine. When, in the face of the facts of palaeontology, of comparative anatomy and physiology, he constantly emphasises that “definite proof” is lacking, one can only point out, on the other side, that knowledge of the facts alone does indeed not suffice for the recognition of the doctrine of evolution, but there is needed in addition—as Haeckel remarks—a “philosophical understanding” as well. “The unshakable structure of true monistic science arises only through the most intimate interaction and mutual penetration of philosophy and experience” (Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 34, Vortrag). In any case, the campaign which Virchow has carried on for many years past against the doctrine of descent, with the applause of theological and other reactionaries, is more dangerous than all the mischief which a “descent-religion” can cause in unripe heads. A technical discussion on the point with Virchow is made difficult by the fact that, fundamentally, he remains standing on a bare negation, and in general does not bring forward any specific technical objections against the doctrine of evolution.

[ 40 ] Other scientific opponents of Haeckel's make it easier for us to attain clearness in regard to them because they give the reasons for their opposition, and we can thus recognise the mistakes in their inferences. Among these are to be reckoned Wilhelm His and Alexander Goette.

[ 41 ] His made his appearance in the year 1868 with his Researches as to the First Beginnings of the Vertebrate Body. His attack was primarily directed against the doctrine that the form-development of a higher organism from the first germ to the fully-developed condition can be explained from the evolution of the type. We ought not, according to him, to explain this development by regarding it as the outcome of the generations from which the single organism descends through inheritance and adaptation, but we should seek in the individual organism itself the mechanical causes of its becoming, without regard to comparative anatomy and ancestral history. His starts from the view that the germ, conceived as a uniform surface, grows unequally at different spots, and he asserts that in consequence of this unequal growth the complex structure of the organism results in the course of development. He says: “Take a simple layer and imagine that it possesses at different places a different impulse to enlargement. One will then be able to develop from purely mathematical and mechanical laws the condition in which the formation must find itself after a certain time. Its successive forms will accurately correspond to the stages of development which the individual organism runs through from the germ to the perfected condition. Thus we do not need to go beyond the consideration of the individual organism in order to understand its development, but can deduce this from the mechanical law of growth.

“All formation, whether consisting in cleavage, in the formation of folds, or in complete separation, follows as a consequence from this fundamental law.” The law of growth brings into existence the two pairs of limbs as follows: “Their disposition is determined, like the four corners of a letter, by the crossing of four folds which limit and bound the body.” His rejects any help drawn from the history of the species, with the following justification: “When the history of development for any given form has thoroughly fulfilled the task of its physiological deduction, then it may rightly say of itself that it has explained this form as an individual form” (cp. His, Unsere Körperform und das physiologische Problem ihrer Entstehung). In reality, however, nothing whatever has been accomplished by such an explanation. For the question still remains: Why do different forces of growth work at different spots in the germ? They are simply assumed by His to exist. The explanation can only be seen in the fact that the relations of growth of the individual parts of the germ have been transmitted by inheritance from the ancestral animals, that therefore the individual organism runs through the successive stages of its development because the changes which its forefathers have undergone through long ages continue to operate as the cause of its individual becoming.

[ 42 ] To what consequences the view of His leads may best be seen from his theory as to the orbital lobule, by which the so-called “rudimentary organs” of the organism were to be explained. These are parts which are present in the organism without possessing any sort of significance for its life. Thus man has a fold of skin at the inner corner of his eye which is without any purpose for the functions of the organ of sight. He possesses also muscles corresponding to those by which certain animals can move their ears at will. Yet most people cannot move their ears. Some animals possess eyes which are covered over with a skin and thus cannot serve for seeing. His explains these organs as being such, to which “up to the present it has not been possible to assign any physiological role, analogous to the snippets, which, in cutting out a dress, cannot be avoided even with the most economical use of the stuff.” The evolution theory gives the only possible explanation of them. They are inherited from remote ancestors, in whom they subserved a useful purpose. Animals which to-day live underground and have no seeing eyes, descend from such ancestors as once lived in the light and needed eyes. In the course of many generations the conditions of life of such an organic stock have changed. The organisms have adapted themselves to the new conditions in which they can dispense with organs of sight. But these organs remain as heirlooms from an earlier stage of evolution; only in the course of time they have become atrophied, because they have not been used. These rudimentary organs⁸ form one of the strongest means of proof for the natural theory of evolution. If any deliberate intentions whatever had ruled in the building up of an organic form, whence came these purposeless parts? There is no other possible explanation of them, except that in the course of many generations they have gradually fallen into disuse.

[ 43 ] Alexander Goette, also, is of opinion that it is unnecessary to explain the developmental stages of the individual organism by the roundabout road through the history of the species. He deduces the shaping of the organism from a “law of form” which must superadd itself to the physical and chemical processes of matter in order to form the living creature. He endeavoured to defend this standpoint exhaustively in his Entwickelungs-geschichte der Unke (1875). “The essence of development consists in the complete but gradual introduction into the existence of certain natural bodies of a new moment, determined from without, viz., that of the law of form.” Since the law of form is supposed to superadd itself from without to the mechanical and physical properties of matter, and not to develop itself from these properties, it can be nothing else but an immaterial idea, and we have nothing given us therein which is substantially different from the creative thoughts, which, according to the dualistic world-conception, underlie organic forms. It is supposed to be a motive-power existing outside of organised matter and causing its development. That means, it employs the laws of matter as “helpers,” just like Eduard von Hartmann's idea. Goette is forced to call in the help of this “law of form,” because he believes that “the individual developmental history of organisms” alone explains and lies at the basis of their whole shaping. Whoever denies that the true causes of the development of the individual being are an historical result of its ancestral development, will be driven of necessity to have recourse to such ideal causes lying outside of matter.

[ 44 ] Weighty evidence against such attempts to introduce ideal formative forces into the developmental history of the individual, is afforded by the achievements of those investigators who have really explained the forms of higher living creatures on the assumption that these forms are the hereditary repetition of innumerable historical changes in the history of the species, which have occurred during long ages. A striking example in this respect is the “vertebral theory of the skull-bones,” already dimly anticipated by Goethe and Oken, but first set in the right light by Carl Gegenbauer on the basis of the theory of descent. He demonstrated that the skull of the higher vertebrates, and also that of man, has arisen from the gradual transformation of a “root-skull” whose form is still preserved by the “root-fishes,” or primordial gastrea, in the formation of the head. Supported by such results, Gegenbauer therefore remarks rightly: “The descent theory will likewise find a touch-stone in comparative anatomy. Hitherto there existed no observation in comparative anatomy which contradicts it; all observations rather lead us towards it. Thus that theory will receive back from comparative anatomy what it gave to its method: clearness and certainty” (cp. the Introduction to Gegenbauer's Vergleichende Anatomie). The descent theory has directed science to seek for the real causes of the individual development of each organism in its ancestry; and natural science on this road replaces the ideal laws of development which might be supposed to superpose themselves on organic matter, by the actual facts of the ancestral history, which continue to operate in the individual creature as formative forces.

[ 45 ] Under the influence of the theory of descent, science is ever drawing nearer to that great goal which one of the greatest scientists of the century, Karl Ernst von Baer, has depicted in the words: “It is one fundamental thought which runs through all forms and stages of animal evolution and dominates all particular conditions. It is the same fundamental thought which gathered together the scattered masses of the spheres in universal space and formed them into solar systems; the same thought caused the disintegrated dust on the surface of the planet to sprout forth into living forms. But this thought is nothing else but Life itself, and the words and syllables wherein it expresses itself are the various forms of that which lives.” Another utterance of Baer's gives the same conception in another form: “To many another will a prize fall. But the palm will be won by the fortunate man for whom it is reserved to trace back the formative energies of the animal body to the general forces and vital functions of the universe as a whole.”

[ 46 ] It is these same general forces of Nature which cause the stone lying on an inclined plane to roll downwards, which also, through evolution, cause one organic form to arise from another. The characteristics which a given form acquires through many generations by adaptation, it hands on by heredity to its descendants. That which an organism unfolds to-day, from within outwards, from its germinal dispositions, had developed itself outwardly in its ancestors in mechanical struggle with the rest of the forces of Nature. In order to hold this view firmly it is doubtless necessary to assume that the formations acquired in this external struggle should be actually transmitted by heredity. Hence the whole doctrine of evolution is called in question by the view, defended especially by August Weismann, that acquired characteristics are not inherited. He is of opinion that no external change which has occurred in an organism can be transmitted to its offspring, but that only can be inherited which is predetermined by some original disposition in the germ. In the germ-cells of organisms innumerable possibilities of development are held to lie. Accordingly, organic forms can vary in the course of reproduction. A new form arises when among the descendants possibilities of development come to unfoldment other than in the ancestors.

From among the ever new forms arising in this way, those will survive which can best maintain the struggle for existence. Forms unequal to the struggle will perish. When out of a possibility of evolution a form develops itself which is specially effective in the battle of competition, then this form will reproduce itself; when that is not the case, it must perish. One sees that here causes operating on the organism from without are entirely eliminated. The reasons why the forms change lie in the germ. And the struggle for existence selects from among the forms coming into existence from the most diverse germ-dispositions those which are the fittest. The special characteristic of an organism does not lead us up to a change which has occurred in its ancestors as its cause, but to a disposition in the germ of that ancestor. Since, therefore, nothing can be effected from outside in the upbuilding of organic forms, it follows that already in the germ of the root-form, from which a race began its development, there must have lain the dispositions for the succeeding generations.

We find ourselves once more in face of a doctrine of Chinese boxes one within another. Weismann conceives of the progressive process through which the germs bring about evolution, as a material process. When an organism develops, one portion of the germ-mass out of which it evolves is solely employed in forming a fresh germ for the sake of further reproduction. In the germ-mass of a descendant, therefore, a part of that of the parents is present, in the germ-mass of the parents a portion of that of the grandparents, and so on backwards to the root-form. Hence through all organisms developing one from another there is maintained an originally present germ-substance. This is Weismann's theory of the continuity and immortality of the germ-plasm. He believes himself to be forced to this view, because numerous facts appear to him to contradict the assumption of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. As one specially noteworthy fact he cites the presence of the workers, who are incapable of reproduction, among the communal insects—bees, ants, and termites. These workers are not developed from special eggs, but from the same as those from which spring the fruitful individuals. If the female larvae of these animals are very richly and nourishingly fed, they then lay eggs from which queens or males proceed. If the feeding is less generous, the result is the production of sterile workers. Now, it is very easy and obvious to seek the cause of this unfruitfulness simply in the less effective nourishment.

This view is represented among others by Herbert Spencer, the English thinker, who has constructed a philosophical world-conception on the basis of natural evolution. Weismann holds this view to be mistaken. For in the worker-bee the reproductive organs do not merely remain behindhand in their development, but they actually become rudimentary; they do not possess a large proportion of the parts necessary for reproduction. But now, he contends, one can demonstrate in the case of other insects that defective nourishment in no way entails such a degeneration of organs. Flies are insects related to bees. Weismann reared the eggs laid by a female bluebottle in two separate batches, and fed the one plentifully, the other meagrely. The latter grew slowly and remained strikingly small. But they reproduced themselves. Hence it appears that in flies insufficient nourishment does not produce sterility. But then it follows also that in the root-insect, the common ancestral form, which in line with the evolution doctrine must be assumed for the allied species of bees and flies, this peculiarity of being rendered unfruitful by insufficient nourishment cannot have existed. On the contrary, this unfruitfulness must be an acquired characteristic of the bees. But at the same time there can be no question of any inheritance of this peculiarity, for the workers which have acquired it do not reproduce themselves, and accordingly, therefore, can pass on nothing by heredity. Hence the cause must be sought for in the bee-germ itself, why at one time queens and at another workers are developed. The external influence of insufficient nourishment can accomplish nothing, because it is not inherited. It can only act as a stimulus, which brings to development the preformed disposition in the germ.

Through the generalisation of these and similar results, Weismann comes to the conclusion: “The external influence is never the real cause of the difference, but plays the part of the stimulus, which decides which of the available dispositions shall come to development. The real cause, however, always lies in preformed changes of the body itself, and these—since they are constantly purposeful—can be referred in their development only to processes of selection,” to the selection of the fittest in the struggle for existence. The struggle for existence (selection) “alone is the guiding and leading principle in the development of the world of organisms” (Aüssere Einflüsse der Entwickelungsreize, p. 49). The English investigators Francis Galton and Alfred Russel Wallace hold the same view as Weismann as to the non-inheritance of acquired characteristics and the omnipotence of selection.

[ 47 ] The facts which these investigators advance are certainly in need of explanation. But they cannot receive such an explanation in the direction indicated by Weismann without abandoning the entire monistic doctrine of evolution. But the objections urged against the inheritance of acquired characteristics are the least capable of driving us to such a step. For one only needs to consider the development of the instincts in the higher animals to convince oneself of the fact that such inheritance does occur. Look, for instance, at the development of our domestic animals. Some of them, as a consequence of living together with men, have developed mental capacities which cannot even be mentioned in connection with their wild ancestors. Yet these capacities can certainly not proceed from an inner disposition. For human influence, human training, comes to these animals as something wholly external. How could an inner disposition possibly come to meet exactly an arbitrarily determined action of man? And yet training becomes instinct, and this is inherited by the descendants. Such an example cannot be refuted. And countless others of the same kind can be found. Thus the fact of the inheritance of acquired characteristics remains such; and we must hope that further investigations will bring the apparently contradictory observations of Weismann and his followers into harmony with monism.

[ 48 ] Fundamentally, Weismann has only stopped half-way to dualism. His inner causes of evolution only have a meaning when they are ideally conceived. For, if they were material processes in the germ-plasm, it would be unintelligible why these material processes and not those of external happenings should continue to operate in the process of heredity. Another investigator of the present day is more logical than Weismann—namely, J. Reinke, who, in his recently published book, Die Welt als That; Umrisse einer Weltansicht auf naturwissenschaftlicher Grundlage, has taken unreservedly the leap into the dualistic camp. He declares that a living creature can never build itself up from out of the physical and chemical forces of organic substances. “Life does not consist in the chemical properties of a combination, or a number of combinations. Just as from the properties of brass and glass there does not yet emerge the possibility of the production of the microscope, so little does the origination of the cell follow from the properties of albumen, carbohydrates, fats, lecithin, Cholesterin, etc.” (p. 178 of the above-named work). There must be present besides the material forces also spiritual forces, or at least forces of another order, which give the former their direction, and so regulate their combined action that the organism results therefrom. These forces of another order Reinke calls “dominants.” “In the union of the dominants with the energies—the operations of the physical and chemical forces—there unveils itself to us a spiritualisation of Nature; in this mode of conceiving things culminates my scientific confession of faith” (p. 455). It is now only logical that Reinke also assumes a universal world-reason, which originally brought the purely physical and chemical forces into the relation in which they are operative in organic beings.

[ 49 ] Reinke endeavours to escape from the charge that through such a reason working from outside upon the material forces, the laws which hold good in the inorganic kingdom are rendered powerless for the organic world, by saying: “The universal reason, as also the dominants, make use of the mechanical forces; they actualise their creations only by the help of these forces. The attitude of the world-reason coincides with that of a mechanician, who also lets the natural forces do their work after he has imparted to them their direction.” But with this statement the kind of conformity to law which expresses itself in mechanical facts is once more declared to be the helper of a higher kind of law, in the sense of Eduard von Hartmann.

[ 50 ] Goette's law of form, Weismann's inner causes of development, Reinke's dominants are fundamentally just nothing else but derivatives of the thoughts of the world-creator who builds according to plan. As soon as one forsakes the clear and simple mode of explanation of the monistic world-conception, one inevitably falls a victim to mystical-religious conceptions, and of such Haeckel's saying holds good, that “then it is better to assume the mysterious creation of the individual species” (Uber unsere gegenwärtige Kenntniss vom Ursprung des Menschen, p. 30).

[ 51 ] Besides those opponents of monism who are of opinion that the contemplation of the phenomena of the world leads up to spiritual beings, who are independent of material phenomena, there are still others⁹ who seek to save the domain of a supernatural order hovering over the natural one, by denying entirely to man's power of knowing the capacity to understand the ultimate grounds of the world-happenings.¹⁰ The ideas of these opponents have found their most eloquent spokesman in Du Bois-Reymond. His famous “Ignorabimus” speech, delivered at the Forty-fifth Congress of German Scientists and Doctors (1872), is the expression of their confession of faith. In this address Du Bois-Reymond describes as the highest goal of the scientist the explanation of all world-happenings, therefore also of human thinking and feeling, by mechanical processes. If some day we shall succeed in saying how the parts of our brain lie and move when we have a definite thought or feeling, then the goal of natural explanation will have been reached. We can get no further. But, in Du Bois-Reymond's view, we have not therewith understood in what the nature of our spirit consists. “It seems, indeed, on superficial examination, as though, through the knowledge of the material processes in the brain, certain mental processes and dispositions might become intelligible. Among such I reckon memory, the flow and association of ideas, the consequences of practice, the specific talents, and so on. A minimum of reflection, however, shows that this is a delusion. Only with regard to certain inner conditions of the mental life, which are somehow of like significance with the outer ones through sense impressions, shall we thus be instructed, not with regard to the coming about of the mental life through these conditions.

“What thinkable connection exists between the definite movements of definite atoms in my brain on the one hand; and, on the other, those for me primary, not further definable, not to be denied facts: ‘I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I taste something sweet, smell the odour of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red,’ and the equally immediate certainty flowing therefrom, ‘therefore I am!’? It is just entirely and for ever incomprehensible that it should not be indifferent to a number of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., atoms, how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move.”

But who asked Du Bois-Reymond first to expel mind from matter, in order then to be able to observe that mind is not in matter? The simple attraction and repulsion of the tiniest particle of matter is force, therefore a spiritual cause proceeding from the substance. From the simplest forces we see the complicated human mind building itself up in a series of developments; and we understand it from this its becoming. “The problem of the origin and nature of consciousness is only a special case of the general problem in chief: that of the connection of matter and force” (Haeckel, Freie Wissenschaft and freie Lehre, p. 80). As a matter of fact, the problem is not at all, How does mind arise out of mindless matter? but, How does the more complex mind develop itself out of the simplest mental (or spiritual) actions of matter—out of attraction and repulsion? In the preface which Du Bois-Reymond has written to the reprint of his “Ignorabimus” speech, he recommends to those who are not contented with his declaration of the unknowableness of the ultimate grounds of being, that they should try to get along with the faith-conceptions of the supernatural view of the world. “Let them, then, make a trial of the only other way of escape, that of supernaturalism. Only that where supernaturalism begins, science ceases.” But such a confession as that of Du Bois-Reymond will always open the doors wide to supernaturalism. For whenever one sets a limit to the knowledge of the human mind, there it will surely start the beginning of its belief in the “no longer knowable.”

[ 52 ] There is only one salvation from the belief in a supernatural world-order, and that is the monistic insight that all grounds of explanation for the phenomena of the world lie also within the domain of these phenomena. This insight can only be given by a philosophy which stands in the most intimate harmony with the modern doctrine of evolution.

• 1. I have characterised the contrast that exists between Goethe's and Kant's world-conceptions, in the Introductions to my edition of Goethe's Scientific Writings (in Kürschner, Deutsche National-Literatur) and in my book, Goethe's Conception of the World (p. 37 et seq.). It shows itself also in the attitude of the two personalities towards the explanation of organic nature. Goethe seeks for this explanation along the road which modern science has also trodden. Kant holds such an explanation to be impossible. Only one who penetrates deeply into the nature of Goethe's view of the world can acquire a correct judgment as to its position in regard to the Kantian philosophy. Goethe's own testimony is not conclusive, because he never devoted himself to a closer study of Kant. “The portal (of the Critique of Pure Reason) it was that pleased me, into the labyrinth itself I could not adventure: now it was my poetic gift that hindered me, now my commonsense, and I nowhere found myself any the better.” Single passages in Kant's Critique of Judgment pleased him, because he so interpreted their meaning that they agreed with his own view of the world. It is, therefore, only too easily understood why his conversations with followers of Kant appear somewhat peculiar. “They certainly listened to me, but could give me no answer, nor in any way help me on. More than once it happened to me, that one or the other confessed with smiling admiration: it may be something analogous to the Kantian mode of conception, but a rather strange one.” Karl Vorländer, in his essay Goethe's Verhältnis zu Kant in seiner historischen Entwickelung (Kantstudien, i., ii.), has judged this relationship according to the actual words of Goethe's own testimony, and has reproached me with the fact that my conception thereof is “in contradiction with the clear testimony of Goethe himself,” and, at the very least, “strongly one-sided.” I would have left this objection unanswered, because I saw from the explanations of Herr Karl Vorländer that they proceed from a man who finds it quite impossible to understand a mode of thinking which is strange to him; however, it still seemed to me needful not to leave without answer a remark which he couples thereto. Herr Vorländer belongs to those men who regard their own opinion as absolutely right, and therefore as proceeding from the highest possible insight, and who therefore stamp every other view as a product of ignorance. Because I think otherwise about Kant than he does, he gives me the sage advice to study certain portions of Kant's works. Such a mode of criticising other people's opinions cannot be too strongly repudiated. Who gives anyone the right, not to criticise me for an opinion differing from his own, but to schoolmaster me? I have therefore told Herr Karl Vorländer my opinion as to his school-mastering in the fourth volume of my edition of Goethe's Scientific Writings. Thereupon, in the third volume of Kantstudien, he has discussed my book, Goethe's Conception of the World, in a fashion which not only far surpasses in point of form what he had previously said against me, but which is also full of objective untruths. Thus he speaks of an “isolated and embittered opposition “in which I find myself against the whole of modern philosophy (naturally exclusive of Nietzsche) and science. There at once one has three objective untruths. Anyone who reads my writings—and whoever, like Herr Vorländer, pronounces judgment upon me, should at the least read them—will perceive that I do indeed criticise technically particular views of modern science and endeavour to deepen others philosophically; but that to talk of an embittered opposition is simply absurd. In my Philosophie der Freiheit I have expressed my conviction to the effect that in my views is given the philosophical completion of the structure which “Darwin and Haeckel have erected for Natural Science” (p. 186). That I am the one who has sharply emphasised the fundamental deficiency in the world of Nietzsche's ideas is indeed known to the Frenchman Henri Lichtenberger, who observes in his book La Philosophie de Nietzsche: “R. Steiner is the author of Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Freedom. In the latter work he completes Nietzsche's theory on an important point.” He emphasises the point which I have shown that Nietzsche's Superman is not that which he ought to be. The German philosopher, Karl Vorländer, has either not read my writings, and none the less passes judgment upon me; or else he has done so, and still writes the above and other similar objective untruths. I leave it to the judgment of the competent public to decide whether his contribution, which was found worthy of acceptance in a serious philosophical review, is a proof of his complete lack of judgment or a dubious contribution to the morality of German scholarship.
• 2. Fundamental Biogenetic Law. Haeckel has proved in a series of works the general validity and far-reaching significance of the fundamental biogenetic law. The most important explanations and proofs will be found in his Biology of the Corals (1872) and in his Studies in the Gastrula Theory (1873–84). Since then other zoologists have extended and confirmed this doctrine. In his latest work, Die Welträtsel (1899), Haeckel is able to say of it (p. 72): “Although this doctrine was at the outset almost generally rejected, and for some ten years fiercely combated by numerous authorities, yet, at the present time (for about fifteen years past), it has been accepted by all well-informed specialists in the subject.”
• 3. In his recently published book, Die Welträtsel, Gemeinverständliche Studien über Monistische Philosophie (Bonn, Emil Strauss, 1899), Haeckel has given without reserve the” further development, proof, and completion of the convictions” which throughout a full generation he has represented. To anyone who has absorbed the scientific knowledge of our time, this work must appear as one of the most important manifestos of the end of the nineteenth century. It contains in ripened form a complete analytical discussion of the relations of modern science with philosophical thinking from the mind of the most original, far-sighted investigator of our time.
• 4. Those who would willingly cling in faith to the existence of purposes in Nature, are constantly emphasising the fact that Darwin's views do not by any means exclude the idea of purpose, but rather make full use thereof, inasmuch as they show how the linking of causes and effects of necessity by themselves lead to the arising of the purposeful. The important point, however, is not whether or no one admits the existence of purposeful formations in Nature, but whether one assumes or rejects the idea that the purpose, the goal, co-operates as a cause in the development of these formations. Anyone who makes this assumption defends teleology, or the doctrine of purpose. Whoever says, on the contrary, purpose is in no way whatever operative in the production of the organic world; living creatures come into existence according to necessary laws just as do inorganic phenomena, and purposefulness is only there because that which is not purposeful cannot maintain itself; it is not the cause of what happens, but its consequence: he makes confession of Darwinism. No heed is paid to this by anyone who asserts, like Otto Liebmann, “Charles Darwin is one of the greatest teleologists of the present day” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. i, p. 113). No, he is the greatest anti-teleologist, because he would show to such minds as Liebmann, if they understood him, that the purposeful can be explained without assuming the action of operative purposes.
• 5. Organs of Thought. Quite recently Paul Flechsig has succeeded in proving that in one portion of the human organs of thought, complicated structures are found which are not present in other mammalia. These obviously are the organs of those mental activities by which man is distinguished from the animal.
• 6. Human and Animal Psychology. The merit of having proved that there is no real contrast between the soul of man and that of animals, but that the mental activities of man are linked to those of animals as a higher form thereof in a perfectly natural chain of development, belongs to George Romanes, who, in a comprehensive work, Mental Evolution in Animals (vol. i) and Mental Evolution in Man and the Origin of Human Faculties (vol. ii), has shown, “that the psychological barrier between animal and man has been surmounted.”
• 6. See note on Virchow and Darwin, below.
• 7. On 3rd October, 1898, Virchow delivered the second of the Huxley Lectures in the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, in London, wherein he said: “I venture to assume that such a duty would not have been assigned to me if those who did so had not known how deep the feeling of veneration for Huxley is in my soul, if they had not seen how I have recognised his achievements from the first pioneer publications of the deceased master, and how greatly I have valued the friendship which he bestowed upon me personally.” Now, these pioneer publications of Huxley's mean precisely the first great step towards the building up of the theory of man's descent from the ape, which Virchow combats, and about which, moreover, in his Huxley address, The more recent Advances of Science, he has nothing more to say than a few words, which are wholly meaningless in face of the present position of this question: “One may think as one chooses about the origin of man, the conviction as to the fundamental coincidence of the human and the animal organisation is at present generally accepted ...” etc.
• 8. Purposeless organs. As to these organs Haeckel observes in his book Die Welträtsel, p. 306: “All higher animals and plants, indeed all those organisms whose bodies are not quite simply built, but are composed of several organs working purposefully together, reveal on attentive examination a number of useless or ineffective, yes, even of dangerous and harmful, arrangements. ... The explanation of these purposeless arrangements is quite simply given by the theory of descent. It shows that these rudimentary organs are atrophied, and that by want of use. ... The blind struggle for existence between the organs conditions just as much their historical destruction, as it originally caused their arising and development.”
• 9. Other opponents of Haeckel. Here we can only speak of such objections to Haeckel's doctrines as are, to a certain extent, typical and have their origin in antiquated, although still always influential, circles of thought. The numerous “refutations” of Haeckel, which present themselves merely as variants of the main objections cited, have to be left unnoticed equally with those which Haeckel himself has disposed of in his book on Die Welträtsel, by saying to these valiant warriors, “Acquire by a diligent five years' study of natural science, and in particular of anthropology (especially the anatomy and the physiology of the brain!), that indispensable empirical prior knowledge of the facts, which you still lack entirely.”
• 10. Limits of knowledge. In my Philosophie der Freiheit I have shown the misunderstanding upon which is based the assumption of limits of knowledge.

[ 1 ] In concepts and ideas, we have “the given”, and at the same time, that which leads beyond the given. But this offers the possibility of also determining the nature of the remaining cognitive activity. [ 2 ] We have separated out and started with a part of the given picture of the world by a postulate, because this specific part lies in what knowing really is. This separation was only done to be able to understand cognition. At the same time, we must also be clear that we have artificially disrupted the unity of the worldview. We must realize that the segment we have separated from the given stands in a necessary connection with the content of the world, irrespective of our postulate. In this way taking the next step in epistemology is set up. It will consist of restoring the unity that was torn apart to make knowing possible. This restoration occurs in thinking about the given world. In the thinking view of the world, the unification of the two parts of the world's content indeed takes place, that which we see as given on the horizon of our experiences, and that which must be produced in the act of knowing which is also given. The act of knowing is the synthesis of these two elements. In each individual act of knowing, one of these appears as something produced in the act itself, added through it to what is merely given. Only at the beginning of epistemology itself does what is otherwise always produced appear as a given.

[ 3 ] The given world infused with concepts and ideas therefore is contemplation of things by thinking. Thinking is therefore actually the act through which knowledge is conveyed. Knowledge can only come about when thinking itself organizes the content of the worldview. Thinking itself is an action that brings forth an appropriate content in the moment of knowing. So insofar as the recognized content flows from thinking alone, it presents no difficulty for cognition. Here we just need to observe, and we have the essence given directly. The description of thinking is at the same time the science of thinking. In fact, logic was never anything other than a description of the forms of thinking, never a demonstrable science. Evidence only consists of a synthesis, a union of thoughts with other world content.

Gideon Spicker rightly says in his book Lessing’s Weltanschauung (p. 5), “Whether thinking is correct we can never experience, neither empirically nor logically.” I can add, that with thinking, all evidence stops, because evidence already presupposes thinking. One can certainly prove a single fact, but the evidence cannot prove itself. We can only describe what evidence is. In logic all theory is merely empiricism; in the science of logic there is only observation. But if we want to know something outside of our thinking, we can only do so with the help of thinking.

The essence of thinking is to approach something “given” and bring it out of the chaos into a systematic interconnection with the world picture. Thinking therefore approaches the given content of the world as the forming principle. The process begins with mentally separating certain details from the whole totality of the world, for nothing is initially separate in the given, for everything is in continuous connection. Thinking now relates these separate details to one another in accordance with the forms it produces, and ultimately determines what results from this relationship. Because thinking establishes a connection between two separate parts of the content of the world, it has not determined anything about them of its own accord. We must just wait and see what happens due to establishing the connection. This result is knowing about relevant parts of the world's content. If it were in the nature of the latter to express nothing at all about itself through that reference, well, then the attempt at thinking would fail and a new one would have to take its place. All knowledge is based on the human being’s bringing two or more elements of reality into the correct connection and grasping what results from this.

Through establishing a connection between two separate parts of the content of the world, thinking certainly has not determined anything about them of its own accord. We just must wait and see what happens due to establishing the connection. This result is knowing about the relevant parts of the world's content. If it were in the nature of the latter to express nothing at all about itself through that reference, well, then the attempt at thinking would fail and a new one would have to take its place. All knowledge is due to the human being bringing two or more elements of reality into the correct interconnection and grasping what results from this.

[ 4 ] There is no doubt that we make many such forlorn attempts at thinking, not only in the experience of seeing things with rigorous logical clarity (Wissenschaft), as the history of science teaches us sufficiently, but also in ordinary life. In the simple cases of forlorn error that we usually encounter, however, the right attempt takes the place of the wrong one so quickly that we don't become aware of the latter at all, or only rarely.

[ 5 ] Kant hovered over (schwebte) our progressive activity of thinking (connected as a hoof is to a cow, zum Behuf) in systematically structuring the world-content in his “synthetic unity of apperception”. But how little he become aware of the actual task of thinking is evident from his believing that the laws of pure natural science independent of any experience (a priori) can be derived from the rules by which this synthesis takes place. He failed to consider that the synthetic activity of thinking only prepares for acquiring the actual laws of nature. Let us imagine that we detach some content “a” from the world picture, and then another content “b”. If a lawful connection between “a” and “b” is to be recognized, thinking must first bring “a” into such a relationship with “b” that it becomes possible for the existing dependency to appear to us as a given. The actual content of a natural law only follows from what is given, and it is only up to thinking to create the opportunity through which the parts of the world picture are brought into such relationships; only then does their lawfulness becomes apparent. No objective laws follow from the mere synthetic activity of thinking.

[ 6 ] We must now ask what part thinking plays in establishing our scientific worldview, as opposed to the merely given worldview? From our presentation it follows that thinking attends to, worries about, concerns itself (besorgt) with connecting things lawfully. In our scheme above, let us assume that “a” is the cause and “b” is the effect. The causal connection between “a” and “b” could never become knowledge if thinking were not able to form the concept of causality. But to recognize “a” as a cause and “b” as an effect in an individual case, it is necessary that these two correspond to what is meant by cause and effect. The same applies to other categories of thinking.

[ 7 ] It will be useful here to refer to Hume's comments on the concept of causality in a few words. Hume says that the concepts of cause and effect have their origin merely by our habit,⁶³ meaning, that often one event is observed followed by another, and we become accustomed to thinking of the two in causal connection, then when we notice the first, we expect the second to occur. However, this view is based on a completely erroneous idea of the causal relationship. If I meet the same person over a series of days when I step out of the gate of my house, I will gradually get used to expecting the chronological sequence of the two events, but it will not even occur to me to find a causal connection here between my appearance and that of the other person in the same place. I will look at other parts of the world to explain the direct consequence of the facts mentioned. We do not determine the causal connection according to the temporal sequence, but rather according to the meaning of the parts of the world called cause and effect.

[ 8 ] Following from this (that thinking only carries out a formal activity in bringing about our scientific picture of the world), the content of any bit of knowledge cannot be fixed a priori before observation (before thinking's engagement with the given), but must emerge completely from the act of thinking. In this sense, all knowing is empirical. But it's hard to understand how it could be any different, as Kant's a priori judgments are basically not insights at all, but only postulates. In Kant's sense, one can only ever say that if a thing is to become the object of a possible experience, then it must conform to these laws. These are specifications that the subject makes to the objects. But one should believe that if we are to gain knowledge of what is given, then it must flow not from subjectivity, but from objectivity.

[ 9 ] Thinking says nothing a priori about the given, but it puts in place the forms on which the laws of phenomena come to light based on experience, a posteriori. [ 10 ] It is clear, that this view can make no difference a priori about the degree of certainty that an acquired cognitive judgment has. For certainty cannot be gained from anything other than the given itself. It can be objected that observation never says anything other than that some connection between phenomena takes place, but not that it must take place, and in the same case, always will take place. But this assumption is also erroneous. For if I recognize a certain connection between parts of the world picture, then in our sense it is nothing other than what results from these parts themselves. It is not something that I add to these parts, but something that essentially belongs to them, which therefore must always be there when they themselves are there.

[ 11 ] Only a view that considers all scientific activity to be merely using subjective maxims to link the elements of experience, which lie outside of the maxims, only such a view can believe that “a” and “b” can be linked today according to one law and tomorrow according to a different law (John Stuart Mill ⁶⁴ (1806–73). But anyone who understands that the laws of nature come from what is given, and are therefore what constitutes and determines the connection between phenomena, will not even think of speaking of a merely comparative universality of the laws obtained from observation. Of course, we do not mean to claim that the natural laws we have once assumed to be correct must necessarily be valid. But if a later case overturns a established law, then this is not due to the fact that the first time it could only be concluded with comparative generality, but rather because the conclusion was not completely correct at that time either. A genuine natural law is nothing other than the expression of a connection in the given picture of the world, and it does not exist without the facts that it regulates, just as these facts do not exist without the connection.

[ 12 ] We have characterized the nature of the act of knowing above, that given world thinking will be interfused with concepts and ideas. What follows from this? If the immediately given contained a complete whole, then such processing of it in cognition would be impossible and therefore unnecessary. We would then simply accept what is given as it is and be satisfied with it in this form. Only if there is something hidden in the given, which does not yet appear when we look at it in its immediacy, but only with the help of the order introduced by thinking, then the act of knowing is possible. What lies in the given before mental processing is not its full whole.

[ 13 ] This becomes even clearer when we look more closely at the factors that come into consideration in the act of knowing. The first of these is the given. Being given is not a property of the given, but only an expression of its relationship to the second factor of the act of knowing. What the given is according to its own nature remains completely obscure through this determination. The second factor, the content of the given that can be grasped, is found by thinking in the act of knowing as necessarily connected to the given. We now ask ourselves:

• Where is the separation between the given and the concept?
• Where is the union of these?

The answer to these two questions without doubt has been given in our previous examination. The separation exists only in the act of knowing, the connection lies in the given. From this it necessarily follows that the graspable (begriffliche) content is only a part of what is given, and that the act of knowing consists in uniting the components of the world picture that were initially given separately. The given world view therefore only becomes complete through that indirect kind of givenness that is brought about by thinking. Due to the form of immediacy, the world view initially appears in a completely incomplete form.

[ 14 ] Within the world-content, if the thought-content were united with the given at the outset, then there would be no knowing. For nowhere could the need arise to go beyond what is given. If we were to produce all the content of the world with our thinking and within it, then there would be just as little thinking. For we don't need to know what we produce ourselves. Cognition is therefore based on the content of the world having been given to us primordially in a form that is incomplete, that does not embody it completely, but that has a second essential side in addition to what it presents directly. This second, originally not-given side of the world's content is unveiled, uncloaked (enthüllt) through knowing. What appears to us separate and sundered (abgesondert) in thinking are therefore not empty forms, but a sum of characterizations (categories), which however are form-giving for the remainder of the world's content. Only the gained-by-knowing world-content gestalt, in which both sides are illustrated, can be called reality.

• 63. t/n F. H. Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus; Breslau 1787, and Hume, David (1748) Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1 ed.). London: A. Millar.
• 64. t/n John Stuart Mill, System of Logic, 1843, “The most scientific proceeding can be no more than an improved form of that which was primitively pursued by the human understanding while undirected by science. (System, VII: 318-406)