The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I

Wilhelm Preyer was a bold researcher, a fertile thinker full of stimulating ideas, a tireless seeker of new paths and goals in science and cultural life. Physiology was at the center of his work. His comprehensive mind was at home in all areas of natural science. His thoughts and facts flowed from everywhere, which he processed into the great body of ideas that he envisioned as physiology in the broadest sense of the word. His writings open up broad, spiritual vistas. It was quite impossible for him to tread well-trodden paths. What he attacked became something new through his work, through his thinking. He had a clear, unclouded view of everything significant that has occurred in the intellectual life of recent decades. He always knew what had a future. Ernst Haeckel says in the preface to Preyer's recently published biography of Darwin: "Like me, you belong to the small number of neuroscientists who, immediately after the publication of Darwin's epoch-making work on the origin of species, were convinced of its tremendous importance and who had the courage to firmly defend its fundamental views at a time when the vast majority of their peers were still hostile or dismissive." Preyer was not one of those scholars and thinkers who are happy in their narrowness, who acquire a sum of convictions through tradition and then take a few steps further themselves in the direction that is thereby marked out for them. The belief that they are following a safe path makes such scholars unsuitable for committing great errors. They do not take bold risks in science. Preyer dared a great deal. Some of his ideas are regarded as aberrations by his peers. Much of what he held as his view will prove to be untenable in the course of time. But he was more inspiring as an erring man than the others, who could not fail to be so, because great errors cannot be made in the circulation of small scientific coins. It is said of Lombroso that he liked the new in intellectual life simply because it was new. Something similar is true of Preyer. He liked to immerse himself in areas of science that were young. Hypnotism, graphology, the question of whether Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays, occupied him and inspired him to write writings and essays that are valuable and original, even though their content must meet with strong doubts. Preyer turned his work and his thoughts to things that seem so absurd to some that he does not even want to talk about them seriously. The scientific study of manuscripts was his favorite occupation in recent times. Finding the soul of man, his essence, his character in his handwriting was considered by him to be the task of scientific graphology. Scientific prejudices and a certain type of scholarly education have led many people to believe that it is unscientific to get involved in certain things. The majority of our scientific contemporaries are of the opinion that such things as graphology are incapable of scientific treatment. They arrive at such an opinion because they have formed very definite ideas about what is possible in nature and what is not. They simply reject what does not correspond to these ideas. Minds like Preyer cannot allow themselves to be captured by such ideas. They know how tenuous the "truths" are that make up the content of our sciences. They know how uncertain, how hypothetical much of what the majority of scientifically educated people regard as absolutely certain is. That is why they are convinced that even things that at first seem very doubtful can provide important insights and experiences. Nothing in spiritual life is so certain that one can say: because we recognize these or those laws about one area of nature, something else can only be counted as an impossibility. Everything must be tried, everything must be thought through: this was Preyer's leitmotif. It led him to his immensely interesting investigations into "The Soul of the Child". In the book he wrote on this subject there are more and more significant psychological experiences and ideas than in the writings of the exact fashionable psychologists who want to get close to the human soul through experimentation in the laboratory. Preyer has a keen eye for the intimate aspects of a child's life and a tremendous gift for deduction. His observations come together in an admirable way to form a great scientific edifice. Preyer is both a master of detailed work and an ingenious discoverer of great connections. His biography of Darwin is a masterpiece in terms of penetrating the subject matter with great effective ideas. In a few meaningful strokes, Preyer outlines the contribution that Darwinism has made to all areas of modern intellectual life.

Preyer is never interested in knowledge alone. He wants to put what he has gained through scientific observation at the service of life. His book "The Soul of the Child" not only has the task of exploring the human soul, but also the other task of creating a solid psychological foundation for education. "The realization that psychogenesis is the necessary foundation of pedagogy is becoming more and more apparent. Without the study of the development of the young child's soul, education and the art of teaching cannot be founded on solid ground. ... The art of making the young child become is much more difficult than that of training it prematurely," he says in the preface to the aforementioned work. The views he expressed on the necessary reform of the secondary school system flow from the same source. Preyer is radical here. He wants the classical grammar school education to be replaced by one in the spirit of the modern scientific approach. The knowledge that moves our time should be passed on to young people by the grammar school. One need only have the courage to think in the spirit of our time and one must agree with Preyer's ideas. Only despondent spirits who are averse to any reform can disagree here. Such spirits are afraid of any upheaval. They see how the old works; they cannot or do not want to imagine how the new will work. They want the old because it is comfortable. Lively minds like Preyer hate stagnation as such. They will always carry reformatory ideas with them because they want all things to always be in a state of becoming, in flux.

II

Preyer emphasizes that "every physiological system that claims to be complete is forced to fill numerous and large gaps with conjectures. And because these are always subjective, there is no physiological doctrine that enjoys general approval. The energetic thinker made extensive use of the right to make such assumptions. For he knew that facts usually only reveal their nature to the researcher when he has first formed hypothetical ideas about their connection. The law that ultimately proves to be the correct one can be very different from the one expressed in the form of a conjecture; after all, the latter first pointed the way that led to the former. Preyer made a bold assumption about the origin of life. His courage of thought did not allow him to stop at this fundamental question of all physiology. Many contemporary physiologists do not dare to say a word about this question because science does not seem to be far enough along for them. Others are of the opinion that in the not too distant future it will be possible to solve the riddle of the origin of life by artificially producing living matter from carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salts in the laboratory. This, they believe, will prove that living things in nature once developed from inanimate things through primordial generation. The organic processes will then only appear as complicated mechanical, physical and chemical processes, and it will be possible to explain them with the help of the laws of physics and chemistry, just as the phenomena of inorganic nature are explained today. A third type of researcher, however, considers this to be completely impossible. Bunge, for example, explains: "The more thoroughly, versatilely and thoroughly we strive to investigate the phenomena of life, the more we come to the realization that processes which we had already believed we could explain physically and chemically are of a far more complex nature and for the time being defy any mechanical explanation. ... All processes in our organism that can be explained mechanistically are just as little phenomena of life as the movement of leaves and branches on a tree shaken by a storm, or as the movement of pollen blown by the wind from the male poplar to the female." The latter is also roughly Preyer's opinion. He did not admit that living things could ever have arisen from inanimate things, because the organic law seemed to him to be of a higher order than the inorganic law. Either it took place in earlier epochs, which lie far behind us in the past, and no longer takes place today, or it took place in the past and is still taking place today. In favor of the former case, it is argued that during the rapid cooling of the earth's surface there were completely different conditions than now, different air and light, different distribution of solids and liquids, different chemical compounds and different temperatures of the oceans. It is therefore possible, according to well-known researchers, that the peculiar, non-recurring process of primordial generation could have taken place under such peculiar, non-recurring conditions until the earth's surface, gradually becoming more similar to the present one, had changed to such an extent that living bodies existed, but could no longer come into being without the interposition of living bodies." Preyer believes that this view is based on weak foundations. "It is incomprehensible what, once the conditions for the combination of dead bodies into living ones were in place, whereupon life arose and persisted, should change so that it could continue in its lowest forms and develop further, but could no longer renew itself through primordial generation, but only through procreation. There is no reason why, if once self-generation took place, it should not also take place now." The conditions that are necessary for life today must have already existed at the time of the primordial generation, otherwise the generated life could not have survived. The change in these conditions of life can therefore not be a significant one. If procreation was possible in prehistoric times, it must also be possible today. But all attempts to artificially produce living things from lifeless things in the laboratory have failed. "It is true," says Preyer, "that in the next few years more such experiments will be made, and in particular efforts will be made to produce artificially in the laboratory the conditions which alone are realized on the deep seabed, but no cogent argument can be advanced in favour of the view that a positive result can be obtained at all. The number of chemical elements that can be used for such experiments is small, and even if the quantitative ratios, the absolute quantities, the degrees of pressure and the temperatures of the individual ingredients are highly variable, the possibilities of mixing in experiments remain confined within relatively narrow limits, particularly with regard to the thermal limits that are conducive to protoplasmic movements alone."

Those who deny that living matter has developed from inanimate matter in the course of time, and yet wish to remain on the basis of today's natural science, must assume that living matter is uncreated, eternal. Eberhard Richter decided on this view. In May 1865 he defended the opinion that the germs of life are eternal. However, since they could not thrive on the earth when it was molten, they must have reached our planet from other celestial bodies later, when the cooling was sufficiently advanced. Richter says: "Astronomy shows that masses of fine substances float in space; from the almost disembodied comet tails to the meteor stones that glow in our atmosphere and frequently fall to earth. In the latter, chemistry has detected remnants of organic matter (coal) in addition to molten metals. The question of whether these organic substances, before they were destroyed by the incandescence of the aerolite, consisted of shapeless primordial ooze or of formed organic structures, is to be decided in favor of the latter, because we have corresponding experience of this in our atmosphere." After Richter has spoken of the fungal germs and infusoria present in the earth's air, he says: "But if microscopic creatures float so high in the earth's atmosphere, they can also occasionally, for example under the attraction of passing comets or aerolites, reach outer space and then be caught on another world body that has become habitable, i.e. that enjoys the appropriate warmth and humidity, and develop again through self-ascending activity." Richter links his basic idea to all sorts of things that are untenable. Nevertheless, it cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. It is a fact that numerous organisms, germs and eggs on earth can retain their viability for centuries without showing the slightest sign of life. Such living substances fall into a lifeless state when deprived of the necessary conditions of life, but they can be revived if the right conditions are created. They are called anabiotic. It could therefore be that the bodies that fall to earth from outer space contain substances in which there is dormant life that can be awakened on earth under suitable conditions. In this way, the once dead Earth could have been populated with life. This hypothesis is so unadventurous that Helmholtz and Thomson have spoken out in favor of its scientific justification.

Preyer nevertheless quite rightly describes it as inadequate. It achieves nothing. She says that life did not originate on Earth from something lifeless, but came to it from other world bodies. The same question is repeated for the other world bodies. Did it originate there from inorganic matter or was it eternally present? Preyer resorts to another hypothesis. Why should not the living, the primordial, be the first and the inanimate have developed from the living alone that was present at the beginning? Preyer finds the view quite justified that "through life processes alone, which were already present before the formation of the earth, everything inorganic came into being through excretion, solidification, decomposition, cooling of living bodies, as is also the case today". Preyer finds that the difference between the inorganic and the organic is often shown by natural scientists in a completely false light. Some inorganic processes can be seen as transitions from the inanimate to the living. They represent analogies of life activity, if one looks closely. "An obvious example is the sea, which breathes in the same air as we do, takes in many things as its daily food and assimilates them by dissolving them so that they become constant marine components. The sea as such - like an organism - can only exist within narrow temperature limits, because if it solidifies when it cools down too much or evaporates when it gets too warm, its life dies out. The oceans also show currents in their interior. Rivers carry water to them like veins carry the nourishing juice to the body parts. The ejecta of the sea, its dead parts, the ice, reactants and products of its metabolism are thrown onto the beach. It produces heat through the friction of its water masses against each other, and if it is colder than the air, it swallows up its heat. It constantly generates itself anew, like protoplasm... Fire, too, can generally be called alive. It breathes the same air that we breathe, and suffocates when we deprive it of it. It consumes with insatiable greed what its lambent organs seize and feeds on its prey. It grows with slow movement, beginning in the dark, like the germ imperceptible, then it glows, unfolds ever more rapidly, growing into a heaven-aspiring blaze and propagates itself with terrifying haste, sending sparks everywhere, giving birth to new fires." Imagine these phenomena, reminiscent of life, heightened to full vitality, and you have that state of the once living earth mass from which both the presently living and the presently lifeless have separated. Preyer does not assert that the simplest life-substance we know today was present from the beginning of the formation of the earth, but that the beginningless movement in the universe is not a merely mechanical or physical one, but that it is a living one, and that the simple life-substance must necessarily have remained after the bodies now called inorganic had been separated out by the life-activity of the glowing planet on its surface. "The heavy metals, once also organic elements, no longer melted and did not return to the cycle that had excreted them. They are the signs of the rigor mortis of premature gigantic glowing organisms, whose breath may have been luminous iron vapor, whose blood was liquid metal and whose food may have been meteorites."

A similar idea to Preyer was later put forward by G. Th. Fechner in his "Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen". He also conceived of the universe as originally animate.

Preyer's view must attract philosophical minds. They will never be able to understand how the phenomena of life can be explained by the summation of mechanical, physical and chemical processes. That living things transform themselves into inanimate things is quite understandable and proven by daily experience; that living things develop from inanimate things contradicts all observation that penetrates into the essence of things. The inorganic processes are present in the organic body in a heightened form, in a form that they do not have within inorganic nature. They cannot increase themselves into organic activity, but must first be captured and appropriated by an organism in order to serve life.

In contrast to the hypothesis of primordial generation, Preyer's is the more philosophical one. More refined minds will agree with Preyer when he says: "It is indeed reasonable to assume that the life and warmth of celestial bodies and organisms in the narrower sense are not merely inseparably bound together by the same great laws, but in the last instance originate from the same source. The sun lives the most intense life. And even if our earth is only its satellite, it still has light from its light, warmth from its warmth and in its 'womb life from its life: and it is no mere fantasy to think that we humans also originally come from the fire in the firmament."

III

Preyer derives the lifeless from the living. For him, the universe is a large, all-encompassing organism. From this view, it is only one step to the further step of imagining the world as an animated, spirit-filled organism. Preyer has also taken this step. He regards the propositions of mechanics, "matter is dead; it does not feel", as an aberration. He assumes that even the smallest, apparently dead body particle is endowed with sensation, i.e. with spirit. It corresponds to the facts to assume that "nowhere is there a sharp boundary between sentient and insentient beings, but that all matter has a certain capacity for sensation, which, however, can only give rise to sensation in a certain, extremely complicated arrangement and movement of the particles. Hence the simple substances, the dead bodies, even if they are in part very easily changed by slight influences, cannot, in spite of their dark sensory faculty, feel perceptibly, but as soon as they become components of the gray matter of the brain or only of the living protoplasm (through the ingestion of food), together with others, in an incalculably complicated movement, the sensation arises explosively, if an impression is now exerted on them."

The spirit originally slumbers in matter, but it is active in this slumbering state, it shapes matter, it organizes it until it has assumed such a form that it can itself appear in a manner appropriate to it. This is the leitmotif that Preyer is guided by in all his. Preyer's observations and thinking in physiology and psychology. He did not want to follow organic development merely to see how one form emerges from the other. He sought in the activity, in the function that an organ ultimately has to perform, the reason why it develops in a certain way. "What determines the final form in the development of the stem? I answer: the function. Only when this is activated does the differentiation of the substrate of the original beings begin. It is not the organ from which the function has to derive its origin, but originally the reverse is the case. The functions create their organs. Or, to avoid an expression that is difficult to define, one can say: the need determines the organic form, which is then inherited and only precedes the function in the embryo of higher animals, at least in the disposition." For Preyer, the highest, the last thing that comes into being is the creator of the first, of what precedes it in time. "Every single function of man must be traced step by step, once in individual life back to its first appearance in the living egg and then in the series of animals that are still close to his ancestors, and from these further on to the protoplasm, which is no longer animal, nor plant, but only living. Then one will begin to know where the higher and lower functions, for example speaking and seeing, as well as breathing and growing, come from, and how they have become what they are." The need to speak causes certain organs to undergo such a development that they ultimately become organs of speech. To anyone who views organic development in this way, the endeavor to explain the processes of life and soul mechanically can only appear as a historically strange aberration. "If physiology were really nothing other than physics and chemistry applied to the processes of life, then it would not be a science in itself, it would resemble technology and mechanical engineering and other applied disciplines," says Preyer, and he continues: "The fact that it could even come to be regarded and defined as the physics of organisms or the science of the mechanism and chemistry of living bodies is a historically important fact. The great error arose from the physical explanations of individual phenomena of life that have only become more frequent in this century, especially in recent decades, and from the many artificial reproductions of chemical products of animal and plant metabolism. ... No one doubts that research into the processes of life cannot progress without the continual utilization, application and development of physical and chemical principles and theories. But this does not mean that the science of life is nothing more than the physics and chemistry of living bodies... There are so many processes in the healthy organism which, remaining incomprehensible to physicists and chemists, do not even come within the scope of their investigations that the extension of physical-chemical explanations to them must also be called inadmissible, unscientific, arbitrary. This is a case of misguided induction, as is often observed in childhood: because many things taste good that end up in the mouth, everything must be put in the mouth."

Preyer has made a number of interesting observations in the field of sensory physiology and psycho-physiology and published the results of these in writings that are exemplary in their sharp formulation of what is presented. In my opinion, these works are also influenced by the idea that it is the mind that shapes the organism. What is the interaction between mind and body? How do the senses work to provide the spirit with what it needs to maintain itself? These are questions asked by those who believe that the spirit creates such an organic form for itself that it can manifest itself in a manner appropriate to its needs. Preyer made the dependence of muscle contraction on the strength of the stimulus exerted on the muscle on the one hand and the dependence of the movement triggered in the muscle on the stimulus on the other (the myophysical law) the subject of an important treatise (1874). He also investigated the nature of sensations ("Elemente der reinen Empfindungslehre", Jena 1877) and made observations about which vibrations are perceived as sound and which no longer manifest themselves as sound because they are too slow or too fast ("Über die Grenzen der Tonwahrnehmung", Jena 1876). His research into the nature of sleep, hypnosis and mind-reading all have the same origin: he wanted to recognize the intimate relationships between the spiritual and the physical. And his endeavors in the field of graphology are no less rooted in his basic idea. He wanted to recognize in the written word the spirit that had created its own body.

The intellectual life of the present would have a completely different physiognomy if two books had not been published in this century: Darwin's "Origin of Species" and Lyell's "Principles of Geology". The professors in the lecture halls of the universities would be talking about many things differently than they do, the religious consciousness of educated mankind would be different from what it is, Ibsen would have embodied other ideas in his dramas than those we hear from them: if Darwin and Lyell had not lived. Dramatic and narrative literature would have lived a different life if we had not had these books. The content of these books is an important part of the intellectual air we breathe. We cannot easily imagine how we would think if Darwin and Lyell had not inoculated their thoughts into the mental organism of mankind. One need never have read a line in the "Origin of Species" and in the "Principles of Geology", and yet one is under the influence of these books. Not only our thinking, but also our emotional life has received its characteristic imprint from them. A young person who reads these books today believes he will find nothing in them that he does not already know. Many of us grow up with the ideas of Darwin and Lyell before we know more than the names of these great observers of nature. Many of us have to speak a very different language to people who have not grown up with these ideas than the one they are used to. We begin to look at people who don't understand our language as beings who are remnants of a past historical era. How many of them think this way is not important. The main thing is that we see in ourselves, who think this way, the real and true people of the present. We know that we are the young and others are the old. We look forwards, the others look backwards. The future cultural historian will have to let our ideas begin a new epoch of thought. The thought of the future evokes joy and delight in us, because those to come will regard us as their forerunners. These future people will know more and be able to do more than we do, but they will have feelings that are similar to ours. We are closer to these people than to the pulpit orator who was born at the same time as us. The first, the greatest, the leaders among us are Lyell and Darwin. We are infinitely grateful to them, because we believe that without them we would belong to a dying part of humanity. Our sentient life canonizes them. We shudder at the spiritual experience we would have lived if they had not preceded us. We have even lost the "right judgment" of the greats of older times, because they are the most important to us. We do not grieve about this. We do not want to take things objectively as they are; we want to live, and we want our life to become something; it should carry the forces of growth within it. We would rather look at what has not yet been done than lose ourselves in contemplations about what has happened. If we were more just, we would be less fruitful. We have the injustice of the son who loves his parents more than others who are far away from him. We love Darwin more than Aristotle, Lyell more than Plato, because Darwin and Lyell are our well-known fathers, Plato and Aristotle are ancestral images that we have hung up in our mental castle. When we read Lyell and Darwin, it is as if someone were giving us a warm hand; when we study Plato and Aristotle, it is as if we were walking in a hall of ancestors. We live with Darwin and Lyell, we learn about Plato and Aristotle.

We do not always agree with Darwin and Lyell, we disagree with them on many things, but we feel that they speak in our language even when we disagree with them. We count among our own some who oppose Darwin and Lyell in the sharpest terms, but we know that even our opposition, if it is fruitful, could only have been so through those two minds. Great minds also produce their opponents, and together with their opponents they move humanity forward. Even if future mankind should come to substantially different ideas than Darwin and Lyell had, these sons of the future will still have to honor their fathers in these two men.

Lyell gave a new character to thinking about the formation of the earth. Before him, this thinking was dominated by ideas that seem childish to us today. We do not see why the enormous mountain formations should have been caused by forces other than those that still prevail today. Lyell saw that in the course of verifiable periods of time, the flowing water detaches the rock masses from the mountains and deposits them elsewhere. As a result, formations disappear in one place and others reappear in another. This happens slowly. But if we imagine such effects continuing over immeasurable periods of time, we can imagine that the entire surface of the earth has taken on the shape it has today as a result of these forces that still prevail today. In addition, there are the transformations that the earth's surface is undergoing today through floating icebergs, through moving glaciers that carry debris and boulders with them. Think also of earthquakes and volcanic phenomena that raise and lower the ground, think of the wind that raises dunes and the slow, gradual weathering of rocks. Everything that has happened up to now to form the earth may have happened in such a way that these effects were present over long periods of time. Today we have no doubt that this is the case. But before Lyell, people thought differently. They believed that the mighty mountain formations were caused by extraordinary forces acting instantaneously. When a form of the earth's surface was ripe for destruction, the creative power intervened anew to give our planet a new face; so thought our ancestors. When we examine the earth's crust, we realize that a number of earth epochs have been there and have perished again. We find the submerged earth epochs as layers of the earth's crust piled on top of each other. In each layer we discover fossilized animal and plant forms. Our ancestors assumed that over and over again the creative power had caused the life of an epoch to perish and put a new one in its place. Lyell showed that this is not the case. Through the gradual action of the forces which are still active today, one epoch has developed from another; and in each succeeding epoch those living beings have lived which have survived from the previous one and which have been able to adapt themselves to the new conditions of life. The creatures of the more recent periods of the earth are the descendants of those who lived in older ones.

This idea was of infinite fertility for Darwin. He recognized that animal species can change over the course of time. That animal species are not each created separately, but that they are related to each other, that they have diverged. If this realization is taken together with Lyell's thoughts, it becomes clear that all life on earth, past and future, forms a great natural unity. The processes that we see today with our eyes and understand with our minds have always taken place. No others have ever been there. What is happening today is happening without miracles and without supernatural influences. Darwin and Lyell have shown that it has always been so miraculous on earth. This makes them the creators of a whole new world view, a whole new way of feeling, a new way of life.

They have the greatest influence on our ethical life. They have freed us from the feelings we should have towards beings that dwell in the wind and weather. Those who see the approaching God in the thunderstorm feel differently than those who believe that thunderstorms and earthquakes are as natural as the effect of a stone falling to the ground. Those who believe in the ideas of Darwin and Lyell have a different attitude to the forces of nature than those who believe in the supernatural gods. The gods can no longer help him, they can no longer harm him, they cannot reward or punish him. He has become free of fear and hope in the face of inscrutable powers. The natural is the universe to him, and the natural can be explored. It can also be conquered and placed at the service of human ideas. One can consciously make oneself master of the earth. Reverence diminishes, but pride increases. One wants to rule wisely, but no longer humbly obey and submit to impenetrable counsels. Darwin and Lyell have replaced the world view of pride, of self-confident man, with the world view of humility, of submissiveness. They have done unspeakable things for the liberation of mankind. They taught us not to erect an altar to the "unknown god", but to offer our services to the known spirit of nature. They taught man not to regard himself as a dwarf, but to act as a hero. They have created a free path for action, for will, because they have freed it from the heavy weight that is attached to it by the will working on the other side. They have shown knowledge where it has its field, and have thus given it real power. It is only since Lyell and Darwin that it can be perceived as truth that knowledge is power. Before Lyell and Darwin, people had to tell themselves to submit to what they were destined to do; today they can tell themselves to do what they realize is valuable.

All relapses into an old world view will not be able to stop the development described. What Ernst Haeckel said at the founding of the Ethical Society in Berlin, that modern morality, modern religiosity and modern action are based on the modern world view: it is an incontrovertible truth. I cannot speak of Lyell or Darwin without thinking of Haeckel. All three belong together. What Lyell and Darwin began, Haeckel continued. He developed it in the full awareness that he was not only serving the scientific need, but also the religious consciousness of mankind. He is the most modern mind, because his world view is free of old prejudices, as was the case with Darwin, for example. He is the most modern thinker, because he sees the natural as the only field of thought, and he is the most modern perceiver, because he wants life to be organized according to the natural. We know that he celebrates Lyell's birthday with us as a feast day, because for him it must be the day that brought the one founder of the new world view. The feast day dedicated to Lyell makes us realize that we belong to the Haeckel community. When Haeckel talks to us about the processes of nature, every word has a secondary meaning for us that is related to our feelings. He is at the helm; he steers powerfully. Even if we don't exactly want to go past some of the places he leads us to, he still has the direction we want to take. He got the helm from Lyell and Darwin's hands; they couldn't have given it to anyone better. He will hand it over to others who will lead in his direction. And our community sails swiftly forward, leaving behind the helpless ferrymen of the old worldviews.

These are the ideas that November 14, when Lyell's birthday returned for the hundredth time, stirred in me.

We feel lucky to be able to live with certain people at the same time. If I were to name such people, one of the first would be Herman Grimm, who celebrates his seventieth birthday on January 6. He showed me directions of spiritual life that no one else could have shown me. Through him, I was introduced to a world of imagination that no one else could have introduced me to. I could only name two or three contemporary writers of whom I can say the same about him: from the first sentences of each of his books, each of his essays, I have a personal relationship with him. He is one of the writers for whom I have had the greatest sympathy since my youth. There are few people I respect as much as him when I have to disagree with them. With others, the contradiction we encounter blunts our love for them. Never with him. I have the feeling that everything he says comes from high places and must be accepted, even if we believe we have to disagree. I cannot speak of error to Herman Grimm.

Everything that Herman Grimm writes and speaks has the most personal character of his being. What he researches through diligent scholarly work, what he gains through the most careful observation, he expresses as a personal view, as a subjective opinion. He never writes a sentence that does not reflect his personality. He expresses personal experiences, whether he is talking about Goethe, Homer, Raphael, Michelangelo or Shakespeare. The personal experiences of a deeply and nobly feeling spirit.

A noble personality in the noblest sense of the word stands before my soul when I think of Herman Grimm. Every thing he touches takes on a peculiar meaning in his hands. One can look at it under the idea of nobility. The greatness that lies in nobility is peculiar to him. There are things that remain alien to him because they cannot be viewed from the perspective of nobility.

Strict researchers who insist on so-called objectivity are annoyed by Herman Grimm. One could hear very derogatory judgments in this direction when his book on Homer was published. I have a very special fondness for this book. A purely human interest captivates me to the work. Others write about Homer as the impersonal "method" demands. Herman Grimm writes as someone who enjoys Homer's works with artistic sensitivity must write. He thus brings their content much closer to us than any historical-philological method can do.

Herman Grimm's works on Michelangelo and Raphael show us these artists in a light in which we can only see them through him. His view will live on in the development of art history.

Herman Grimm is not interested in the breadth of historical development. The great personalities are the essential thing for him. The fact that Western culture has produced a Homer, Sophocles, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe is what makes this culture valuable to him. What lies between these spirits should only be considered for their sake.

Although Herman Grimm opens up great historical perspectives for us, the historical approach has never obscured his feeling for the immediate present. He lives in the present, albeit in his own way. We hear his opinion on every significant contemporary issue with the greatest interest.

The image that Herman Grimm creates of Goethe is not to the liking of Goethe scholars. This is because he views every move, every utterance of Goethe with a personal interest. For him, Goethe's image is something that he regards as entirely subjective. The question of what Goethe is to me shines through all his remarks. He considers Goethe insofar as he is an element that effectively intervenes in his own life. He says things about Goethe that he feels he must say if Goethe is to be worthy of him. He does not say things that do not interest Herman Grimm, even if scholars believe that they are important for understanding Goethe. Herman Grimm's Goethe is not the "objective" Goethe, but we would not want to be without him as part of our intellectual life.

A few weeks ago, Herman Grimm gave us the third edition of a volume of novellas. All of Grimm's novellistic works have a beauty that speaks deeply to the heart. Whoever reads them feels in a characteristic way what culture is. One has the feeling that one is confronted with a personality who leads a stylish life.

The style of life seems to me to be an outstanding feature of Herman Grimm's personality. Everything he does in detail fits into a whole. Nothing stands out from the big picture that strikes us about him.

Our scientific way of looking at things is far removed from Herman Grimm. In many respects, it offends his personal sensibilities. His favorite object of contemplation is human nature as it is currently presented before our eyes and as it expresses itself in the works of imagination and reason. He is not interested in how this nature has developed organically from other forms. A natural feeling seems to give him better insight into the highest philosophical and religious questions than the scientific way of looking at things.

An expression of this way of looking at things is Herman Grimm's style. For him, every sentence springs from a personal impulse. He does not know the deduction of one sentence from another, the derivation of judgments from basic assumptions. In his progression from proposition to proposition, there are no starting points and results. Every assertion arises from a new experience. It is due to this peculiarity of his style that we believe we become richer in inner life content when reading his books.

He always gives us fresh, warm life: that's why we bring it to him.

A book that brings back fond memories lies before me. Robert Vischer, the son of the famous aesthete Friedrich Theodor Vischer, has begun publishing his father's works. He calls the book "Beauty and Art", which he has compiled with great effort and care from the papers left behind by the deceased and from the transcripts of his students.

As I read the book, all the ideas I once had about the nature of the arts come back to me. The "once" means eighteen to twenty years ago. At that time, people my age were reading works on aesthetics by Vischer, Weiße, Carriere, Schasler, Lotze and Zimmermann to find out more about the nature of the arts.

These men came from the philosophy that dominated education in the first half of our century. Some relied on Hegel, others on Herbart.

And for these men, art was a philosophical matter.

Goethe, Schiller and Jean Paul also formed their own ideas about the nature of art. They took art itself as their starting point. They expressed what people are forced to think when they allow art to have an effect on them. Their concepts of art were born out of art.

Vischer, Carriere, Weiße, Zimmermann and Schasler did not originally start out from directly living nature. They thought about the totality of world phenomena. And these world phenomena also include the products of artistic creation. Just as they asked about the nature of light, warmth and animal development, they also asked about the nature of art. Their starting points were those of cognitive people, not those of artistically sensitive natures.

Of course, I do not mean that a man like Fr. Th. Vischer should be denied artistic feeling in the highest and purest sense of the word. On the contrary: his relationship to art is the most lively and personal imaginable. But when he speaks about art, he speaks as a philosopher.

For Vischer, the world was a realization of the divine spirit. A representation of the divine spirit in marble, in lines and colors, in words is therefore art for him. How does the artist realize the divine spirit in the sensual material? That was the fundamental question for Vischer. A high, mature philosophical training underlies all his explanations. The language he speaks is only understood by a few today. It could only be understood by those who had the philosophical thoughts of Schelling and Hegel as part of their education. Only they could be interested in the questions that Vischer asked, in the thoughts that he communicated.

Today, few people can read a book by Vischer in the way his contemporaries read it. For contemporary people, it discusses things that are none of their business.

For Vischer, art was ultimately an impersonal matter. It was one of the tasks assigned to people by higher powers. Vischer did not believe in a personal God. But he does believe in a God. In a basic spiritual being that lives itself out in nature, in history, in art. This fundamental being is above man. Our best have given up this belief. For them, the spirit is nothing independent. For them, the spirit is only there insofar as nature has the ability to produce spiritual things from itself. For them, the highest spirit is produced by man, who gives birth to it out of his nature. Only when man creates the spiritual is it there. Vischer believes that the spiritual is there in itself and that man must seize it. Today's people believe that only the natural exists without man, and that the spiritual is only created by man. Therefore, for Vischer, the artist is a person who is filled with the divine spirit and embodies it in his works. For today's artists, the artist is a person who feels the need to do violence to things and give them the imprint of his personality. They do not believe that they should embody a spirit, they want to create things that correspond to their ideas, their imagination.

Vischer says: the sculptor imprints a human form on the marble that does not resemble a real human being because he unconsciously carries within him the image, the idea of all humanity, the archetype of man and wants to embody it. This archetype is the divine in man. The moderns know nothing of such an archetype. They only know that a figure appears before their souls when they look at man, and that they want to realize this figure. They want to give birth to an artificial world alongside the natural one, which their temperament, their imagination gives them. This is a humanly willed world, not one that has sprung from the divine spirit.

Today's people no longer understand it when one speaks of art as a realization of the divine, they can only understand that man has the need to shape things according to his temperament, according to his inspiration.

Modernists want to talk about art in human terms; they no longer want to go into the religious trait that underlies Vischer's explanations.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

There is an interesting essay by Goethe on this subject in the form of a conversation. In it, the question: "What kind of truth should one demand from works of art?" is dealt with in an exhaustive manner. What is said there outweighs volumes that have been written on this subject in more recent times. Since there is currently both lively interest and great confusion about the question, it may be appropriate here to recall the main ideas of Goethe's discussion.

It begins with the description of the "theater within the theater". "In a German theater, an oval, somewhat amphitheatrical building was presented, in whose boxes many spectators are painted, as if they were taking part in what is going on below. Some of the real spectators on the first floor and in the boxes were dissatisfied with this and resented the fact that something so untrue and improbable was being put upon them. On this occasion, a conversation took place, the approximate content of which is recorded here."

The conversation takes place between an artist's lawyer, who believes he has solved his problem with the painted spectators, and a spectator who is not satisfied with such painted spectators because he demands the truth of nature. This spectator wants "at least everything to seem true and real". "Why would the decorator take the trouble to draw all the lines most exactly according to the rules of perspective, to paint all the objects in the most perfect position? Why study the costume? Why would it cost so much to remain faithful to it in order to transport me back to those times? Why do they praise most the actor who expresses their feelings most truly, who comes closest to the truth in speech, posture and gestures, who deceives me into believing that I am seeing not an imitation but the thing itself?"

The artist's advocate now draws the spectator's attention to the extent to which all this does not entitle him to say that in the "theater he does not have to have the people and events before him in such a way that they seem true to him; rather, he must claim that at no moment does he have the sensation of seeing truth, but an appearance, albeit an appearance of the true.

At first, the audience believes that the lawyer is playing a pun. Goethe finely lets the lawyer reply to this: "And I may add that, when we speak of the effects of our spirit, no words are delicate and subtle enough, and that puns of this kind themselves indicate a need of the spirit, which, since we cannot express what is going on in us outright, seeks to operate through opposites, to answer the question from two sides and thus, as it were, to grasp the matter in the middle."

People who are only accustomed to living in the crude concepts that everyday life generates often see unnecessary verbiage in the delicate, conceptual distinctions that must be made by those who want to grasp the subtle, infinitely complicated relationships of reality. It is true that words can be used to argue excellently, that words can be used to prepare a system, but it is not always the fault of the one who prepares the system that there is no concept in the word. Often the person who hears the words cannot connect the concept with the word heard. It often seems strange when people complain that they cannot think of anything when they hear the words of this or that philosopher. They always think it's the philosopher's fault - often it's the readers' fault, who just can't think anything, while the philosopher has thought a lot.

There is a big difference between "seeming true" and "having the appearance of truth". The theatrical representation is, of course, appearance. One can now be of the opinion that the appearance must have such a form that it feigns reality. Or one can be convinced that appearance should sincerely show: I am not reality; I am appearance. If appearance has this sincerity, then it cannot take its laws from reality, it must have its own laws, which are not the same as those of reality. Whoever wants an artistic appearance that imitates reality will say: in a theatrical representation everything must proceed as it would have proceeded in reality if the same events had taken place. On the other hand, those who want an artistic appearance that sincerely presents itself as an appearance will say: in a theatrical representation, some things must proceed differently than they would in reality; the laws according to which the dramatic processes are connected are different from those according to which the real ones are connected.

Those who are of such a conviction must therefore admit that there are laws in art for the connection of facts for which there is no corresponding model in nature. Such laws are conveyed by the imagination. It does not create according to nature, it creates a higher truth of art alongside the truth of nature.

Goethe has the "artist's advocate" express this conviction. He claims "that the truth of art and the truth of nature are completely different, and that the artist should by no means strive, nor should he, for his work to actually appear as a work of nature".

Only those artists who lack imagination, who therefore cannot create anything that is true to art, but who must borrow from nature if they want to create anything at all, will want to deliver truth to nature in their works. And only those viewers will demand the truth of nature in works of art who do not have enough aesthetic culture to demand a special truth of art alongside the truth of nature. They only know the true that they experience every day. And when they are confronted with art, they ask: does this artificiality correspond to what we know as reality? People with an aesthetic culture know another truth than that of common reality. They seek this other truth in art.

Goethe has his "artist's advocate" explain the difference between a person with aesthetic culture and one without it with a very crude but excellent example. "A great naturalist had a monkey among his pets, which he once lost and found after a long search in the library. There the animal was sitting on the ground with the copper of an unbound work of natural history scattered around him. Astonished by this eager study of his domestic friend, the master approached and saw to his astonishment and annoyance that the sniveling monkey had eaten out all the beetles he had found depicted here and there."

The monkey only knows naturally real beetles, and the way it behaves towards such naturally real beetles in everyday life is that it eats them. He does not encounter reality in the pictures, but only appearance. He does not take the appearance as appearance. For he could not relate to an appearance. He takes the appearance as reality and relates to it as to a reality.

In the case of this monkey, those people who take an artistic appearance as a reality. When they see a robbery scene or a love scene on stage, they want exactly the same thing from this robbery or love scene as from the corresponding scenes in reality.

The "spectator" in Goethe's conversation is brought to a purer view of artistic enjoyment by the example of the monkey and says: "Should not the uneducated lover demand that a work of art be natural in order to be able to enjoy it in a natural, often crude and mean way?" - The work of art wants to be enjoyed in a higher way than the natural work. And anyone who has not imbibed this higher kind of enjoyment through aesthetic culture is like the monkey that eats the painted beetles instead of looking at them and acquiring scientific knowledge through their contemplation. The "Lawyer" puts it in these words: "A perfect work of art is a work of the human spirit, and in this sense also a work of nature. But by combining the scattered objects into one and incorporating even the most commonplace in their meaning and dignity, it is above nature. It wants to be grasped by a spirit that has arisen and formed harmoniously, and this spirit finds what is excellent, what is complete in itself, according to its nature. The common lover has no concept of this; he treats a work of art like an object he finds in the marketplace: but the true lover sees not only the truth of the imitation, but also the merits of the selected, the spiritual richness of the composition, the supernatural of the small world of art; he feels that he must elevate himself to the status of an artist in order to enjoy the work, he feels that he must gather himself from his scattered life, dwell with the work of art, look at it repeatedly and thereby give himself a higher existence."

Art, which strives for mere natural truth, an ape-like imitation of common everyday reality, is refuted the moment one feels within oneself the possibility of giving oneself the "higher existence" demanded above. Basically, only everyone can feel this possibility in themselves. Therefore, there can be no general, convincing refutation of naturalism. Anyone who only knows the common, everyday reality will always remain a naturalist. Those who discover in themselves the ability to look beyond the natural world to a particular artistic world will perceive naturalism as the aesthetic world view of artistically narrow-minded people.

Once you have realized this, you will not fight against naturalism with logical or other weapons. For such a battle would be like trying to prove to a monkey that painted beetles are not for eating but for looking at. Even if one were to go so far as to make the monkey understand that he should not eat painted beetles, he would never understand one thing, namely what painted beetles are for, since one is not allowed to eat them. It is the same with the aesthetically uneducated. It may be possible to bring him to the realization that a work of art is not to be treated in the same way as an object found in the marketplace. But since he only understands such a relationship as he can gain to the objects of the market, he will not understand what works of art are actually there for.

This is roughly the content of the Goethe conversation mentioned above. You can see that it deals in a noble manner with questions that many people today are subjecting to renewed scrutiny. The examination of these and many other things would not be necessary if one were to take the trouble to delve into the thoughts of those who have approached these matters in connection with a uniquely high culture.

The last few years have brought us a considerable number of reflections on the cultural achievements of the past century. And in the two years that we still have to live through in this century, these reflections are likely to pile up to an immense number. Those who like to emphasize the self-evident may argue that the passing of a century is a purely coincidental turning point in the development of mankind and that, in a different chronology, this turning point could coincide with a completely different phase of this development. Such an objection cannot arise in the face of the suggestive effect of the fact that the century appears numerically as a whole.

In addition to this general point, there is another particular reason to take a look at the achievements of our culture and the directions it is currently taking at the turn of the century.

The next thing that strikes the observer is the enormous wealth of new conditions for mastering the forces of nature and the associated progress in the practical organization of life. From the railroad and steamship to the telephone, one would have to review the series of inventions with their tremendous effects if one were to revive this idea from the outside.

And it is no different with the new conditions that have been created to expand our knowledge of the world. What insights into nature are provided by spectral analysis, the discovery of Röntgen, the studies on the age of the human race, the organic theory of development and others, which I will naturally refrain from mentioning here, as I am only interested in pointing to these things.

Despite all these and many other achievements, for example in the field of art, the person with a deeper perspective cannot be very happy about the educational content of the time. Our highest spiritual needs demand something that time only provides in meagre quantities.

In Goethe's sense, one can say of education that it must lead to the highest bliss through the purest culture. Our education does not lead to this bliss. - It lets the finest spirits down when they seek to satisfy the most intimate needs of their minds. In this respect, the end of the century presents a different picture from its beginning. Consider how Fichte inflamed minds a hundred years ago when he sought to harmonize the totality of the formation of time with the innermost needs of the human spirit. Schelling and Hegel deepened the knowledge of external things in the same direction. And how the voices of these spirits were heard!

A complete change occurred around the middle of the century. The innumerable insights into external things that were coming at people seemed to completely eclipse the ability to gain insight into one's own soul and to seek harmony between the external and internal worlds.

This change is expressed in an almost paradoxical way by the low esteem in which philosophy and its proponents are held today. How does Nietzsche's view that the Greeks are so highly regarded because, unlike other peoples, they do not present prophets but their seven wise men as human ideals compare to this disdain?

We should not be surprised if, in the face of such phenomena, minds with deeper spiritual needs find the proud thought structures of scholasticism more satisfying than the ideas of our own time. Otto Willmann has written an excellent book, his "History of Idealism" ¹ (Braunschweig 1894-97), in which he proclaims himself the eulogist of the worldview of past centuries. It must be admitted: the human spirit longs for that proud, comprehensive illumination of thought which human knowledge experienced in the philosophical systems of the scholastics. And this spirit will always be unsatisfied by confessions such as the one made by the great physicist Hermann Helmholtz in his Weimar Gods Speech* a few years ago. He said: in the face of the wealth of our present knowledge, it is hardly possible for a comprehensive spirit to emerge that encompasses the totality of this knowledge with a unified circle of ideas.

The urge of the human soul to integrate all knowledge into an overall view, from which the highest spiritual needs can be satisfied, is opposed in our time by the despondency of our thinking, which does not allow us to gain such an overall view.

This despondency is a characteristic feature of intellectual life at the turn of the century. It clouds our enjoyment of the achievements of the recent past.

Wherever someone appears who tries to draw up an overall picture of our knowledge, there are countless voices testifying to this despondency, emphasizing the impossibility of such an overall picture, claiming that our knowledge is far from being ready for such a conclusion. Such voices are also audible, defending the impossibility of such a conclusion. The human mind has just seen through the successes of the sciences how incapable it is of recognizing anything about those things that were once made objects of reflection by the philosophers.

If it were up to the opinion of the people who make such voices heard, one would be content to measure, weigh and compare things and phenomena, to examine them with the available apparatuses: but never would the question be raised as to the "higher meaning" of things and phenomena.

We have lost the unshakeable belief that thinking is called upon to solve the mysteries of the world. Only a few researchers, such as Ernst Haeckel, have the inclination to penetrate existing knowledge in such a way that such sense emerges. - It does not matter whether one agrees with the thoughts that Haeckel develops in his essay "Monism as a bond between religion and science" (Bonn 1892). The essential point is that here, with the means of our intellectual education, the question is raised: how can the human mind satisfy its needs through modern knowledge? This is the same question that the religions of all times and scholasticism sought to solve with their means of education.

The fact is, however, that thoughts of this kind have little effect today in the face of the general despondency, even cowardice, of human thought.

It is therefore not at all surprising that reaction in the intellectual field is rearing its head everywhere. As long as the scientifically educated thinkers are too discouraged to offer a substitute for the outdated religious ideas from the standpoint of their knowledge, people who have the need for a world view will fall back on the traditional ideas; and the few who arrange their lives according to a modern world view will remain singers without an audience. I would like to explain the reasons why the most advanced spirits of the present are so little understood.

• 1. See note, page 635

When Ludwig Büchner is mentioned today, it is rare to come across any other judgment than that his "popular talk" has long been dismissed and that "in his superficiality he offered all half-wits and dilettantes scientifically interesting facts and a childishly crude metaphysics mixed with them in an easily comprehensible form". This is how, for example, a currently much-mentioned philosopher, Theobald Ziegler, characterizes the recently deceased thinker in his recently published book "Die geistigen und sozialen Strömungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts". It is a colorful society whose members are united in this judgment. Philosophers who still believe they have higher sources of knowledge than "natural science", which clings to raw reality, are joined by pusillanimous naturalists who do not dare to draw consistent conclusions about the position of man and his spirit within nature from the facts they observe. Catholic, Protestant and other clericalism seizes on the disparaging judgments of such backward philosophers and naturalists with true lust, because the weapons stored up in their own theological arsenal have gradually become too blunt. Mystically inclined natures find their most sacred feelings violated by the "crude" freethinker who wants to reduce human soul life to material foundations. Most of these disparaging judgments of Ludwig Büchner spring from minds that take his writings in a much more superficial sense than they are meant, and who know nothing better to talk about than the shallow and shallow materialism that they themselves know how to read out of them. The man who has the boldness and sharpness of thought to draw the necessary conclusions from the scientific achievements of the century, Ernst Haeckel, only ever speaks with full recognition of the author of "Force and Substance" as a thinker who occupies a place of honor among the precursors of Darwin.

It should not be denied that Ludwig Büchner is a one-sided thinker and that one can arrive at deeper ideas than was possible for his broadly conceived ideas, even if one fully agrees with the findings of natural science. At the same time, however, it must be emphasized that this school of thought, with the feelings it entails, is infinitely closer to our modern mental life than the philosophical schools of thought which, with their higher sources of knowledge, seek to artificially rescue the outdated ideas of earlier times. It is a thoroughly modern assertion, even if it is perhaps worthy of deepening, that man is conceived from light and ashes, that the activity of the same natural forces calls him into being to which the plant also owes its existence. And all the profundity that philosophers and theologians muster to prove that the spirit is higher and more primordial than the material world is further from our sensibilities than such an assertion.

Far too little attention is always paid to where the drivel about "raw materialism" actually comes from. It is not rooted in reason at all, but in the world of feelings and emotions. A millennia-old education of the human race, to which Christianity has contributed immensely, was able to instill in us the feeling that the spirit is something high and matter something common and crude. And how can the high come from the common? Reason will strive in vain to see something lower in the marvelous structure of material nature than in the ideas that philosophers and theologians have of high spiritual beings. They will never understand why the magnificent structure of the brain should be something crude compared to heaven with its ethereal angels and saints or compared to Schopenhauer's "will" or Eduard von Hartmann's "unconscious". Only those who are caught up in the sentiments that arise from a complete misunderstanding of material existence can rebel against sentences such as the one recently expressed by Ernst Haeckel in his essay "On our present knowledge of the origin of man": "The physiological functions of the organism, which we summarize under the concept of soul activity - or the "soul" for short - are mediated in man by the same mechanical (physical and chemical) processes as in the other vertebrates. The organs of these psychic functions are also the same here and there: the brain and the spinal cord as central organs, the peripheral nerves and the sensory organs. Just as these organs of the soul have developed slowly and gradually in man from the lower states of their vertebrate ancestors, the same naturally applies to their functions, to the soul itself. - This natural ... This natural conception of the human soul stands in contradiction to the dualistic and mythological ideas which man has formed for thousands of years about a special, supernatural nature of his "soul and which culminates in the strange dogma of the "immortality of the soul. Just as this dogma has had the greatest influence on man's entire world view, it is still upheld by most people today as the indispensable foundation of their ethical being. The contrast in which it stands to the natural theory of human development is at the same time still regarded in the widest circles as the most important reason against its acceptance or even as a refutation of the natural history of creation altogether." (p.42 £.) One need only discard the prejudices one has acquired against the natural, its becoming and being, and one will find in this natural something that is far more deserving of those feelings and sensations than the so-called supernatural world to which people have attached these feelings for so long. The achievements of the natural sciences will only produce a view of the world and of life worthy of them if the life of feeling is able to judge them according to their own value, not according to a value attached to them from a mythological upbringing.

With thinkers like Büchner, it is not important that contradictions can be proven in their conclusions, but rather that they know how to attribute this value to their emotional life according to natural processes. Those who are able to think more sharply will avoid these contradictions, but they will still be in agreement with Büchner in their view of nature and the position of man within it. The finest ideas of modern philosophers, who derive the world from a special spiritual being, appear antediluvian compared to the coarse and crude thought processes of this materialist. A philosopher who today still speaks of an "unconscious spirit", of a "will in nature", and a childlike believer who has the opinion that after death his soul wanders into a divine heavenly kingdom, belong together. A materialist, who says that thoughts are products of force and matter, and a thinker, who rationally deepens this thought and develops it into a world view that satisfies both heart and mind, also belong together. The kinship in the cognitive attitude is higher than the logical power of thought. For this reason, those who know how to grasp Büchner's crude assertions in terms of higher thinking will not be able to agree with the dismissive judgments of shallow minds whose seemingly philosophical talk conceals nothing but a more or less conscious desire to salvage as many shreds of an outdated world view as is still possible. Ludwig Büchner was certainly no great pathfinder of the new world view. He was a man who grasped great truths with devoted enthusiasm and knew how to express them in a way that made them comprehensible even to those who lacked a higher logical and scientific training. And those who speak of half-wits and dilettantes getting their education from his writings should bear in mind that it is not exactly complete experts and masters who parrot Mr. Ziegler's teachings. The thousands and thousands of people who have pieced together a view of life from the propositions of "force and substance" are certainly no worse than the others who do the same with Schopenhauer's sayings or even with those of their pastors. Yes, they are probably considerably better. For it is better to be a shallow man in the reasonable than a shallow man in the unreasonable.

Whoever follows the development of intellectual life in the second half of this century will understand the misunderstanding to which Büchner's intellectual physiognomy is exposed today. It is not only the religious communities that are doing everything in their power to obscure the light emanating from the newly acquired knowledge of nature - an endeavor in which they find the strongest support from reactionary and uninformed governments everywhere - but also within the scientific community itself there is often a regrettable backwardness. How little understanding there is among the philosophers of our time for the scientific approach and its achievements! In the sixties they raised the call: Back to Kant! They want to take Kant's views as a starting point in order to orient themselves on the nature of human cognition and its limits. A large but thoroughly unfruitful literature grew out of this trend. For Kant was not interested in exploring the nature of knowledge in an unbiased, unprejudiced way, but above all he wanted to gain a view of this nature that would allow him to reintroduce certain religious dogmas into human intellectual life through a small door. He more or less consciously formulated all his concepts in such a way that certain beliefs remained untouched. He must be understood from the sentence in which he himself summarized his aspirations: I wanted to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith. Today's philosophers are serving this goal. And it is a strange spectacle to watch them at work, doing their job without being fully aware of the actual impulse of their Königsberg seducer. For those who are currently trying to build a world view, it is therefore practically useless to occupy themselves with this philosophy, which follows in Kant's footsteps. He only loses precious time through this preoccupation, which he could much better use to appropriate the infinitely fruitful results of modern natural science. In Darwin's and Haeckel's writings one finds a rich and the only correct basis for the development of a world view; those who strive for such a world view feel infinitely bored by many directions of contemporary philosophy. The thought involuntarily arises in his mind: How differently would our intellectual life have developed if we had moved on from the beginnings of a view of life based on natural science created by Büchner, instead of fighting these beginnings with unfruitful logical sophistry?

It was only because many scientific circles were incapable of going further that statements such as Du Bois-Reymond's on "The Limits of Natural Knowledge" made such a profound impression. Only a man who misunderstands the scope of the scientific method and therefore cannot come to any clarity about the conclusions to which this method leads can make such a speech. It was naivety of the highest order when Du Bois-Reymond set a limit to human knowledge because it would never understand how it is that feeling and thinking, consciousness, develop from the processes of the brain. He said: "One cannot understand why a sum of material particles should not be indifferent as to how they lie and move and why they evoke the sensation of "red" through a certain position and movement and the feeling of pain through another. The researcher, who was extraordinarily capable of investigating individual natural facts, had no idea that he had first arbitrarily formed a certain idea of the nature of the substance and its effects and that only this ingenious idea of his did not allow him to come to an understanding of the connection between brain and consciousness. The only sensible path is the one that Haeckel takes when he conceives of matter and force in such a way that the connection between them and the phenomena of the mind, which has been irrefutably proven by experience, finds its explanation.

Without an understanding of the results of natural science and the methods by which these results are obtained, no world view is possible today. And the fact that Büchner recognized this, that he sought to gain a world view on the basis of these methods and results, is his undeniable merit. What he did is much more important than anything achieved by neo-Kantianism and naturalists of the caliber of Du Bois-Reymond with speeches such as the one on "The Limits of Natural Knowledge".

The book "Force and Substance" was a major blow to traditional beliefs. And the reactionaries know why they hate Büchner to the core of their souls and gladly resort to the explanations of Du Bois-Reymond and his like-minded comrades when they consider themselves too incapable of defeating the new views from the field.

From the circles into which Büchner's views have penetrated, there has also emerged a view of the entire human way of life that is in keeping with freedom. Moral concepts have undergone a thorough reform as a result. How strong the need for such a reform was in our cultural development is shown by the progress that Hegelian philosophy made after the master's death. In their own way, David Friedrich Strauss, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner worked in the direction of the natural world view. Darwinism then offered the possibility of gaining support for the great conceptions of these thinkers from the observation of facts. Like two groups of workers digging a tunnel from both sides of a mountain and meeting in the middle, the minds working in the manner of the aforementioned philosophers meet with the researchers building on Darwinism.

Our contemporaries still have a deep-seated addiction to limiting knowledge in order to make room for faith. And minds that recognize the power of knowledge to gradually displace faith are perceived as uncomfortable. Yes, "it is a delight" if one can prove any errors in their thought processes. As if it were not an old realization that in the beginning all things appear in imperfect form!

It seems as if Büchner was painfully touched by the misjudgment he encountered in the last period of his life. Following this tribute to the deceased, the management of this journal is fortunate enough to publish an essay that is certainly one of the last things written by the bold and unprejudiced thinker, the intrepid man and strong character. And it seems as if he would not have written the remarks about the "living and the dead" without a painful view of his own fate.

I

[ 1 ] What should philosophy do alongside and above the individual special sciences? ¹ The representatives of the latter are probably not averse to answering this question simply as follows: it is supposed to be nothing at all. In their view, the entire field of reality is encompassed by the specialized sciences. Why anything else that goes beyond this?

[ 2 ] All sciences regard it as their task to research truth. Truth can be understood as nothing other than a system of concepts that reflects the phenomena of reality in their lawful context in a way that corresponds to the facts. If someone stands still and says that for him the network of concepts, which depicts a certain area of reality, has an absolute value and he needs nothing more, then a higher interest cannot be demonstrated to him. However, such a person will not be able to explain to us why his collection of concepts has a higher value than, for example, a collection of stamps, which, when organized systematically, also depicts certain connections in reality. This is the reason why the argument about the value of philosophy with many natural scientists does not lead to any results. They are lovers of concepts in the same sense that there are lovers of stamps and coins. But there is an interest that goes beyond this. This interest seeks, with the help and on the basis of the sciences, to enlighten man about his position in relation to the universe, or in other words: this interest leads man to place himself in such a relationship to the world as is possible and necessary according to the results obtained in the sciences.

[ 3 ] In the individual sciences, man confronts nature, separates himself from it and observes it; he alienates himself from it. In philosophy he seeks to reunite with it. He seeks to make the abstract relationship into which he has fallen in scientific observation into a real, concrete, living one. The scientific researcher wants to acquire an awareness of the world and its effects through knowledge; the philosopher wants to use this awareness to make himself a vital member of the world as a whole. In this sense, individual science is a preliminary stage of philosophy. We have a similar relationship in the arts. The composer works on the basis of the theory of composition. The latter is a sum of knowledge that is a necessary precondition for composing. Composing transforms the laws of musicology into life, into real reality. Anyone who does not understand that a similar relationship exists between philosophy and science is not fit to be a philosopher. All real philosophers were free conceptual artists. With them, human ideas became artistic material and the scientific method became artistic technique. Thus the abstract scientific consciousness is elevated to concrete life. Our ideas become powers of life. We do not merely have a knowledge of things, but we have turned knowledge into a real, self-controlling organism; our real, active consciousness has taken precedence over a mere passive perception of truths.

[ 4 ] I have often heard it said that our task at present is to collect building block after building block. The time is over when philosophical doctrines were proudly put forward without first having the materials to hand. Once we have collected enough of this material, the right genius will emerge and carry out the construction. Now is not the time to build systems. This view arises from a regrettable lack of clarity about the nature of science. If the latter had the task of collecting the facts of the world, registering them and organizing them systematically and expediently according to certain points of view, then one could speak like this. But then we would have to renounce all knowledge altogether, for we would probably only finish collecting the facts at the end of days, and then we would lack the necessary time to carry out the required scholarly registration work.

[ 5 ] Whoever realizes just once what he actually wants to achieve through science will soon understand the folly of this demand, which requires an infinite amount of work. When we confront nature, it initially stands before us like a profound mystery, it stretches out before our senses like an enigma. A mute being looks out at us. How can we bring light into this mystical darkness? How can we solve the riddle?

[ 6 ] The blind man who enters a room can only feel darkness in it. No matter how long he wanders around and touches all the objects: Brightness will never fill the room for him. Just as this blind man faces the furnishings of the room, so in a higher sense man faces nature, who expects the solution to the riddle from the contemplation of an infinite number of facts. There is something in nature that a thousand facts do not reveal to us, if we lack the visual power of the mind to see it.

[ 7 ] Every thing has two sides. One is the outside. We perceive it with our senses. But there is also an inner side. This presents itself to the mind when it knows how to observe. No one will believe in his own inability in any matter. Whoever lacks the ability to perceive this inner side would prefer to deny it to man altogether, or to disparage those who pretend to possess it as fantasists. Nothing can be done about an absolute inability, and one could only pity those who, because of it, can never gain insight into the depths of the world's being. The psychologist, however, does not believe in this inability. Every person with normal mental development has the ability to descend into those depths to a certain point. But the convenience of thinking prevents many from doing so. Their spiritual weapons are not blunt, but the bearers are too casual to wield them. It is infinitely more convenient to pile fact upon fact than to seek out the reasons for them by thinking. Above all, such an accumulation of facts rules out the possibility of someone else coming along and overturning what we have advocated. In this way we never find ourselves in the position of having to defend our intellectual positions; we need not be upset that tomorrow someone will advocate the opposite of our current positions. By merely dealing with actual truth, we can lull ourselves into the belief that no one can deny us this truth, that we are creating for eternity. Yes, we also create for eternity, but we only create zeros. We lack the courage of thought to give these zeros a value by placing a meaningful number in front of them in the form of an idea.

[ 8 ] Few people today have any idea of this: that something can be true, even if the opposite can be asserted with no less right. There are no unconditional truths. We drill deep into a thing of nature, we bring up the most mysterious wisdom from the most hidden shafts; we turn around, drill in a second place: and the opposite shows itself to be just as justified. That every truth is only valid in its place, that it is only true as long as it is asserted under the conditions under which it was originally founded, this must be understood above all.

[ 9 ] Who today does not cringe with respect when the name Friedrich Theodor Vischer is mentioned? But not many people know that this man considered it the greatest achievement of his life to have thoroughly attained the above-mentioned conviction of the nature of truth. If they did know it, then a quite different air would flow towards them from Vischer's magnificent works; and one would encounter less ceremonial praise, but more unconstrained understanding of this writer. Where are the times when Schiller found deep understanding when he praised the philosophical mind over the bread scholar! the one who digs unreservedly for the treasures of truth, even if he is exposed to the danger that a second treasure digger will immediately devalue everything for him with a new find compared to the one who eternally repeats only the banal but absolutely "true": "Two times two is four".

[ 10 ] We must have the courage to enter boldly into the realm of ideas, even at the risk of error. Those who are too cowardly to err cannot be fighters for the truth. An error that springs from the mind is worth more than a truth that comes from platitude. He who has never asserted anything that is in some sense untrue is not fit to be a scientific thinker.

[ 11 ] For cowardly fear of error, our science has fallen victim to bareness.

[ 12 ] It is almost hair-raising which character traits are praised today as virtues of the scientific researcher. If you were to translate them into the realm of practical living, the result would be the opposite of a firm, resolute, energetic character.

[ 13 ] A recently published work owes its origin to a firm, bold thinker's courage, which, on the basis of the great actual results of natural science and from a true, genuine philosophical spirit, simultaneously attempts to solve the world riddles: Ernst Haeckel's "The World Riddles".

II

[ 14 ] "Forty years of Darwinism! What tremendous progress in our knowledge of nature! And what a change in our most important views, not only in the fields of biology as a whole, but also in anthropology and all the so-called "human sciences"!" This is how Ernst Haeckel was able to speak of the scientific achievements associated with the name Darwin in the speech he gave at the Fourth International Zoological Congress in Cambridge on August 26, 1898. Just four years after the publication of Darwin's epoch-making work "On the Origin of Species in the Animal and Vegetable Kingdom by Means of Natural Breeding" (London 1859), Haeckel himself became the appointed pioneer, but also the continuator of Darwin's views with his "General Morphology of Organisms" (Berlin 1866). The boldness of thought, the sharpness of mind of this natural scientist and world thinker, which did not shy away from any consequence arising from the new doctrine, were already clearly evident in this book. Since then, he himself has worked tirelessly for a further thirty-three years on the construction of the scientific world view that makes our century appear as the "century of natural science". Special works that shed a bright light on hitherto unknown areas of natural life, and summarizing writings which, from the newly gained point of view, dealt with the whole field of knowledge that today satisfies our highest spiritual needs, are the fruit of this research life endowed with rare energy.

[ 15 ] And now, in his "Welträtseln", this spirit presents to us "the further elaboration, substantiation and supplementation of the convictions" which he has "already held for a lifetime" in his other "writings".

[ 16 ] What is most striking to anyone who studies Haeckel's achievements with understanding is the unity and coherence of the thinker's personality from which they emanate. There is nothing in him of the questionable striving of those who seek the "reconciliation of religion and culture" in order to be able to "feel piously and think freely at the same time". For Haeckel, there is only one source of true culture: "courageous striving for knowledge of the truth" and "gaining a clear, scientific view of the world based firmly on it" (Welträtsel, p.3 f.). He is also characterized by the iron rigour of the thinker, who relentlessly labels everything as untruth that he has recognized as such. With such rigor, he wages his war against the reactionary powers that, at the end of our enlightened century, would like to call back the former darkness of the mind.

[ 17 ] "Die Welträtsel" is a book inspired by devotion to the truth and abhorrence of outdated endeavors that are harmful to scientific insight. A book that is uplifting for us not only because of the level of insight from which the author views life and the world, but also because of the moral energy and passion for knowledge that shine out of it. For Haeckel, the natural world view has become a creed that he defends not only with reason, but with his heart. "Through reason alone can we arrive at true knowledge of nature and the solution to the riddles of the world. Reason is man's highest good and the one virtue that alone distinguishes him essentially from the animals. However, it has only acquired this high value through the advancement of culture and intellectual development, through the development of science. ... But the view is still widespread in many circles today that there are two other (even more important!) ways of knowing besides divine reason: Mind and revelation. We must decisively oppose this dangerous error from the outset. The mind has nothing to do with the knowledge of truth. What we call "mind" and value highly is an intricate activity of the brain, which is composed of feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of ideas of affection and aversion, of strivings of desire and flight. The most diverse other activities of the organism can play a part in this, the needs of the senses and the muscles, the stomach and the sexual organs, etc. All these states of mind and emotional movements in no way promote the realization of the truth; on the contrary, they often disturb reason, which alone is capable of it, and frequently damage it to a sensitive degree. No "riddle of the world" has yet been solved or even promoted by the brain function of the mind. The same also applies to the so-called "revelation and the alleged "truths of faith" achieved through it; these are all based on conscious or unconscious deception" (Welträtsel, p.19 f.). Thus speaks only a personality whose own mind is completely imbued with the truth of what reason reveals. How do those who still have words of admiration for those who build religion on the mind and want to make it "independent of progressive science as a personal experience" stand up to such courage of thought today?

[ 18 ] A deeply philosophical basic trait in his way of thinking enabled Haeckel to undertake the solution of the highest human questions from natural science, and a sure eye for the lawful connections in natural processes, which appear as intricate as possible to direct observation, bring about that monumental simplicity in his view of the world which always appears in the wake of greatness in matters of worldview. One of the greatest naturalists and thinkers of all time, Galileo, said that in all her works nature makes use of the nearest, simplest and easiest means. We are constantly reminded of this saying when we follow Haeckel's views. What many a philosopher seeks in the remotest paths of speculation, he finds in the simple, clear language of facts. But he really makes these facts speak, so that they do not stand side by side, but explain each other in a philosophical way. "We must welcome as one of the most gratifying advances in solving the riddles of the world the fact that in recent times the two only paths leading to it: experience and thought - or empiricism and speculation - have increasingly been recognized as equal and mutually complementary methods of knowledge. ... However, even today there are still some philosophers who want to construct the world merely from their heads and who disdain empirical knowledge of nature simply because they do not know the real world. On the other hand, even today some natural scientists claim that the only task of science is "actual knowledge, the objective investigation of the individual phenomena of nature"; the "age of philosophy is over and natural science has taken its place. (Rudolf Virchow, Die Gründung der Berliner Universität und der Übergang aus dem philosophischen in das naturwissenschaftlichen Zeitalter, Berlin 1893.) "This one-sided overestimation of empiricism is just as dangerous an error as the opposite of speculation. Both paths of knowledge are mutually indispensable. The greatest triumphs of modern natural science, the cell theory and the heat theory, the theory of development and the law of substance, are philosophical deeds, but not the results of pure speculation, but of the preceding, most extensive and most thorough empiricism" (Welträtsel, p. 20 f.).

[ 19 ] That there is only one kind of natural lawfulness and that we can trace such a lawfulness in the same way in the stone that rolls down an inclined plane according to the law of gravity, in the growth of the plant, in the organization of the animal and in the highest rational achievements of human beings: this conviction runs through Haeckel's entire research and thinking. He recognizes a fundamental law in the entire universe. This is why he calls his world view monism in contrast to those views that assume a different kind of lawfulness for the mechanically proceeding natural processes than for the beings (the organisms) in which they perceive a purposeful arrangement. Just as the elastic ball rolls on when it is pushed by another: all life processes in the animal kingdom, and indeed all spiritual events in the cultural process of mankind, are connected with the same necessity.

[ 20 ] "The old world view of ideal dualism with its mystical and anthropistic dogmas is sinking into ruins; but above this enormous field of ruins rises the new sun of our real-monism, which fully opens up the wonderful temple of nature to us. In the pure cult of "the true, the good and the beautiful, which forms the core of our new monistic religion, we find a rich substitute for the lost anthropistic ideals of "God, freedom and immortality"" (Welträtsel, p. 438 f.).

III

[ 21 ] The basic character of Haeckel's conception of nature lies in the elimination of any kind of theory of purpose or teleology from human ideas about the world and life. As long as such ideas still exist, there can be no question of a truly natural world view. This question of purposefulness comes to the fore in its most significant form when it is a question of determining the position of man in nature. Either something similar to what we call the human spirit, the human soul and so on, is present in the world outside man and produces the phenomena in order ultimately to create its own image in man, or this spirit is only present in the course of natural development at the time when it actually appears in man. Then the natural processes have brought forth the spirit through purely causal necessity, without it having come into the world through any intention. The latter follows irrefutably from Haeckel's premise. Basically, all other thoughts stem from outdated theological ideas. Even where such ideas still appear in philosophy today, they cannot deny their origin to anyone who takes a closer look. The crude, childish aspects of theological mythologies have been stripped away, but purposeful world ideas, in short spiritual potencies, have been retained. Schopenhauer's will and Hartmann's unconscious are nothing other than such remnants of old theological ideas. Recently the botanist J. Reinke, in his book Die Welt als Tat (The World as Act), again expressed the view that the interaction of substances and forces cannot of itself produce the forms of life, but that it must be determined in a certain way by directing forces or dominants. Haeckel's new book clearly shows that all such assumptions are superfluous, that the phenomena of the world can be fully explained for our need for knowledge if we assume nothing more than the necessity of natural law.

[ 22 ] It outlines the course of world development from the processes of inorganic nature up to the expressions of the human soul. The conviction that the so-called "world history" is a vanishingly short episode in the long course of the organic history of the earth and that this itself is only a small part of the history of our planetary system: it is supported by all the means of modern natural science. The errors that oppose it are fought relentlessly. These errors can basically all be traced back to a single one, to the "humanization" of the world. Haeckel understands this term to mean "that powerful and widespread complex of erroneous ideas which places the human organism in opposition to all the rest of nature, conceiving it as the premeditated final goal of organic creation and as a god-like being fundamentally different from it. A closer examination of this influential conception reveals that it actually consists of three different dogmas, which we distinguish as the anthropocentric, anthropomorphic and anthropolatric errors. I. The anthropocentric dogma culminates in the idea that man is the premeditated center and final purpose of all life on earth - or, in a broader version, of the whole world. Since this error is extremely desirable to human self-interest and since it is closely interwoven with the creation myths of the three great Mediterranean religions, with the dogmas of the Mosaic, Christian and Mohammedan teachings, it still dominates most of the cultural world today. - II. The anthropomorphic dogma... compares the world creation and world government of God with the artistic creations of an ingenious technician or "machine engineer and with the state government of a wise ruler. God... is... is presented as human-like... II. The anthropolatric dogma ... leads to the divine worship of the human organism, to the "anthropistic greatness". (Welträtsel, p.13 f.) The human soul is regarded as a higher being that temporarily inhabits the subordinate organism.

[ 23 ] Haeckel contrasts such mythological ideas with his - conviction of the "cosmological perspective", according to which eternal - in the sense of the divine world ground of religions - is only matter with its inherent power and from the processes of this power endowed matter all phenomena develop with necessity. The opponents of the monistic world view reject it because it declares that which bears the trait of highest purposefulness, the animal and human organism, as the work of a blind necessity, without predetermined intention, i.e. that it basically came into being by mere coincidence. If one understands by chance that which occurs without any previous thought of its existence existing anywhere, then in the scientific sense the whole universe is a mere chance; for "the development of the whole world is a uniformly mechanical process in which we can nowhere discover aim and purpose; what we call so in organic life is a special consequence of biological conditions; neither in the development of the world's bodies nor that of our inorganic earth's crust can a guiding purpose be detected" (Welträtsel, p.316). But the general law that every phenomenon has its mechanical cause exists in the whole universe, and in this sense there is no coincidence.

[ 24 ] If one follows Haeckel's explanations with understanding, one will arrive at the true concept of what today alone should be called "scientific explanation". Science must not use anything to explain a phenomenon other than what actually preceded it in time. All processes in the world are determined by those that took place before them. In this sense, they are necessary and not coincidental. However, any explanation that attributes any influence on something that came into being earlier to something that is later in time is unscientific. Whoever wants to explain man should explain him on the basis of natural processes that preceded his existence, but he should not present the matter as if the emergence of man had had a retroactive effect on these earlier processes, that is, as if these backward processes had taken place in such a way that man resulted from them as a goal. A world view that only adheres to the "before" in its explanations and derives the "after" from this is "monism". Such a worldview, on the other hand, which starts from the "after" and presents the "before" as if it somehow points to this "after", is teleology, the doctrine of expediency and thus dualism. For if it were correct, then a purposeful phenomenon would be twice present in the world, namely really in the period in which it occurs, and spiritually, ideally, according to its design, before its real emergence, as a thought, as a guiding purpose in the general world plan.

[ 25 ] May Haeckel's illuminating expositions lead to the difference between teleology and monism soon being understood in the widest circles in a way that is desirable in the interest of spiritual progress.

• 1. "The Enigmas of the World." Intelligible studies on monistic philosophy. By Ernst Haeckel. Published by Emil Strauß. Bonn 1899.

It may well be regarded as a curious symptom of the times that on the occasion of the jubilee of that body of the German Reich which was supposed to be the most learned, a theologian was at the center of the celebration. It will be said that Professor Adolf Harnack was a liberal theologian. But one thing remains true: theology can only be free-minded to the extent that it is permitted by certain basic views, without the recognition of which it would cancel itself out. Indeed, it can only be scientific to the extent that its essential dogmatic ideas allow it to be. The question: "Is theology science in the modern sense?" can only be answered with a clear "no". Science, if it is to be worthy of the name, must come to a world view independently, from human reason. Today we hear this emphasized again and again in all variations. But when a scientific body of the first rank celebrates a great feast, it does not choose a man of science, but a theologian as the main speaker and actor of its history. Theological views played such an important role at this festival that the most ultramontane press organs speak of it with particular pleasure.

For many of our contemporaries, it took the shrill discord of the lex Heinze debates to make them realize how powerfully the most reactionary attitudes intervene in our lives. Even the writers of articles in "free-minded" journals are blind to more subtle signs, such as those that emerged at the Akademiefest.

However, the reasons for the reactionary course of the present lie deep. They are to be found in the fact that the official philosophers of the present are absolutely powerless, even helpless, in the face of the onslaught of unscientific contemporary currents. In order to explain these reasons, we shall have to look at the elements which have brought about the present existence of cathederal philosophy. My view is that this philosophy is indeed unsuited to fight the battle against outmoded ideas alongside liberal natural science. In proving this assertion, I will start from the man who exerts the most profound influence on contemporary philosophical thought, Kant, and I will try to show that this influence is a pernicious one.

I

Kant's acquaintance with Hume's view shook the conviction he had held in earlier years. He soon no longer doubted that all our knowledge is really gained with the help of experience. But certain scientific theorems seemed to him to have such a character of necessity that he did not want to believe in a merely habitual adherence to them. Kant could neither decide to go along with Hume's radicalism nor was he able to remain with the advocates of Leibniz-Wolff's science. The latter seemed to him to destroy all knowledge, in the latter he found no real content. Viewed correctly, Kantian criticism turned out to be a compromise between Leibniz-Wolff on the one hand and Hume on the other. And with this in mind, Kant's fundamental question is: How can we arrive at judgments that are necessarily valid in the sense of Leibniz and Wolff if we admit at the same time that we can only arrive at a real content of our knowledge through experience? The shape of Kant's philosophy can be understood from the tendency inherent in this question. Once Kant had admitted that we gain our knowledge from experience, he had to give the latter such a form that it did not exclude the possibility of generally and necessarily valid judgments. He achieved this by elevating our perceptual and intellectual organism to a power that co-creates experience. On this premise he was able to say: Whatever we receive from experience must conform to the laws according to which our sensuality and our intellect alone can comprehend. Whatever does not conform to these laws can never become an object of perception for us. What appears to us therefore depends on things outside us; how the latter appear to us is determined by the nature of our organism. The laws under which it can imagine something are therefore the most general laws of nature. In these also lies the necessary and universal nature of the course of the world. We see that, in Kant's sense, objects are not arranged spatially because spatiality is a property that belongs to them, but because space is a form under which our sense is able to perceive things; we do not connect two events according to the concept of causality because this has a reason in their essence, but because our understanding is organized in such a way that it must connect two processes perceived in successive moments of time according to this concept. Thus our sensuality and our intellect prescribe the laws of the world of experience. And of these laws, which we ourselves place in the phenomena, we can of course also form necessarily valid concepts.

But it is also clear that these concepts can only receive content from the outside, from experience. In themselves they are empty and meaningless. We do know through them how an object must appear to us if it is given to us at all. But that it is given to us, that it enters our field of vision, depends on experience. How things are in themselves, apart from our experience, we can therefore make nothing out through our concepts.

In this way, Kant has saved an area in which there are concepts of necessary validity, but at the same time he has cut off the possibility of using these concepts to make something out about the actual, absolute essence of things. In order to save the necessity of our concepts, Kant sacrificed their absolute applicability. For the sake of the latter, however, the former was valued in pre-Kantian philosophy. Kant's predecessors wanted to expose a central core from the totality of our knowledge, which by its nature is applicable to everything, including the absolute essences of things, the "interior of nature". The result of Kant's philosophy, however, is that this inner being, this "in itself of objects", can never enter the realm of our cognition, can never become an object of our knowledge. We must content ourselves with the subjective world of appearances that arises within us when the external world acts upon us. Kant thus sets insurmountable limits to our cognitive faculty. We cannot know anything about the "in itself of things". An official contemporary philosopher has given this view the following precise expression: "As long as the feat of looking around the corner, that is, of imagining without imagination, has not been invented, Kant's proud self-modesty will have its end, that of the existing thing its that, but never its what is recognizable." In other words, we know that something is there that causes the subjective appearance of the thing in us, but what is actually behind the latter remains hidden from us.

We have seen that Kant adopted this view in order to save as much as possible of each of the two opposing philosophical doctrines from which he started. This tendency gave rise to a contrived view of our cognition, which we need only compare with what direct and unbiased observation reveals in order to see the entire untenability of Kant's thought structure. Kant imagines our knowledge of experience to have arisen from two factors: from the impressions that things outside us make on our sensibility, and from the forms in which our sensibility and our understanding arrange these impressions. The former are subjective, for I do not perceive the thing, but only the way in which my sensuality is affected by it. My organism undergoes a change when something acts from the outside. This change, i.e. a state of my self, my sensation, is what is given to me. In the act of grasping, our sensuality organizes these sensations spatially and temporally, the mind again organizes the spatial and temporal according to concepts. This organization of sensations, the second factor of our cognition, is thus also entirely subjective. This theory is nothing more than an arbitrary construction of thought that cannot stand up to observation. Let us first ask ourselves the question: Does a single sensation occur anywhere for us, separately and apart from other elements of experience? Let us look at the content of the world given to us. It is a continuous whole. If we direct our attention to any point in our field of experience, we find that there is something else all around. There is nowhere here that exists in isolation. One sensation is connected to another. We can only artificially single it out from our experience; in truth it is connected with the whole of the reality given to us. This is where Kant made a mistake. He had a completely wrong idea of the nature of our experience. The latter does not, as he believed, consist of an infinite number of mosaic pieces from which we make a whole through purely subjective processes, but is given to us as a unity: one perception merges into the other without a definite boundary.

II The reasons for the reaction within modern science

A worldview strives to comprehend the totality of the phenomena given to us. However, we can only ever make details of reality the object of our experiential knowledge. If we want to look at a detail in isolation, we must first artificially lift it out of the context in which it is found. Nowhere, for example, is the individual sensation of red given to us as such; it is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it belongs and without which it could not exist. We must disregard everything else and focus our attention on the one perception if we want to consider it in its isolation. This lifting of a thing out of its context is a necessity for us if we want to look at the world at all. We are organized in such a way that we cannot perceive the world as a whole, as a single perception. The right and left, the above and below, the red next to the green in my field of vision are in reality in uninterrupted connection and mutual togetherness. However, we can only look in one direction and only perceive what is connected in nature separately. Our eye can only ever perceive individual colors from a multi-membered color whole, our mind individual conceptual elements from a coherent system of ideas. The separation of an individual sensation from the world context is therefore a mental act, caused by the peculiar arrangement of our mind. We must dissolve the unified world into individual perceptions if we want to observe it.

But we must be clear about the fact that this infinite multiplicity and isolation does not really exist, that it is without any objective meaning for reality itself. We create an image of it that initially deviates from reality because we lack the organs to grasp it in its very own form in one act. But separating is only one part of our cognitive process. We are constantly busy incorporating every individual perception that comes to us into an overall conception that we form of the world.

The question that necessarily follows here is this: According to what laws do we combine what we have first separated? The separation is a consequence of our organization, it has nothing to do with the thing itself. Therefore, the content of an individual perception cannot be changed by the fact that it initially appears to us to be torn from the context in which it belongs. But since this content is conditioned by the context, it initially appears quite incomprehensible in its separation. The fact that the perception of red occurs at a certain point in space is caused by the most varied circumstances. If I now perceive the red without at the same time directing my attention to these circumstances, it remains incomprehensible to me where the red comes from. Only when I draw on other perceptions, namely those things and processes to which the perception of the red is connected, do I understand the matter. Every perception points me beyond itself because it cannot be explained by itself. I therefore combine the details separated by my organization from the whole of the world according to their own nature into a whole. In this second act, what was destroyed in the first is thus restored: the unity of the real regains its rightful place in relation to the multiplicity initially absorbed by my spirit.

The reason why we can only take possession of the objective form of the world in the detour described above lies in the dual nature of man. As a rational being, he is very well able to imagine the cosmos as a unity in which each individual appears as a member of the whole. As a sensory being, however, he is bound to place and time, he can only perceive individual members of the infinite number of members of the cosmos. Experience can therefore only provide a form of reality conditioned by the limitations of our individuality, from which reason must first extract that which gives the individual things and processes within reality their lawful connection. Sensory perception thus distances us from reality; rational contemplation leads us back to it. A being whose sensuality could view the world in one act would not need reason. A single perception would provide it with what we can only achieve with our mental organization by combining an infinite number of individual acts of experience.

The above examination of our cognitive faculty leads us to the view that reason provides us with the actual form of reality when it processes the individual acts of experience in the appropriate way. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the fact that reason appears to lie entirely within ourselves. We have seen that in truth its activity is destined precisely to abolish the unreal character which our experience receives through sensory perception. Through this activity, the contents of perception themselves re-establish in our minds the objective context from which our senses have torn them.

We are now at the point where we can see through the fallacy of Kant's view. What is a consequence of our organization: the appearance of reality as an infinite number of separate particulars, Kant conceives as an objective fact; and the connection that is re-established, because it corresponds to objective truth, is for him a consequence of our subjective organization. Precisely the reverse of what Kant asserted is true. Cause and effect, for example, are a coherent whole. I perceive them separately and connect them in the way they themselves strive towards each other. Kant allowed himself to be driven into error by Hume. The latter says: If we perceive two events over and over again in such a way that one follows the other, we become accustomed to this togetherness, expect it in future cases as well, and designate one as the cause and the other as the effect. - This contradicts the facts. We only bring two events into a causal connection if such a connection follows from their content. This connection is no less given than the content of the events themselves.

From this point of view, the most mundane as well as the highest scientific thought finds its explanation. If we could encompass the whole world at a glance, this work would not be necessary. To explain a thing, to make it comprehensible, means nothing other than to put it back into the context from which our organization has torn it. There is no such thing as a thing that is separated from the world as a whole. All separation has merely a subjective validity for us. For us, the world as a whole is divided into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, object and idea, substance and force, object and subject and so on. However, all these opposites are only possible if the whole in which they occur confronts us as reality. Where this is not the case, we cannot speak of opposites. An impossible opposition is that which Kant calls "appearance" and "thing-in-itself". This latter term is completely meaningless. We have not the slightest reason to form it. It would only be justified for a consciousness that knows a second world in addition to the one that is given to us, and which can observe how this world affects our organism and results in what Kant calls an appearance. Such a consciousness could then say: the world of human beings is only a subjective appearance of that second world known to me. But people themselves can only recognize opposites within the world given to them. Bringing the sum of everything given into opposition to something else is pointless. The Kantian "thing in itself" does not follow from the character of the world given to us. It is invented.

As long as we do not break with such arbitrary assumptions as the "thing in itself", we can never arrive at a satisfactory world view. Something is only inexplicable to us as long as we do not know what is necessarily connected to it. But we have to look for this within our world, not outside it.

The mysteriousness of a thing only exists as long as we consider it in its particularity. However, this is created by us and can also be removed by us. A science that understands the nature of the human cognitive process can only proceed in such a way that it seeks everything it needs to explain a phenomenon within the world given to us. Such a science can be described as monism or a unified view of nature. It is opposed by dualism or the two-world theory, which assumes two absolutely different worlds and believes that the explanatory principles for one are contained in the other.

This latter doctrine is based on a false interpretation of the facts of our cognitive process. The Dualist separates the sum of all being into two areas, each of which has its own laws and which are externally opposed to each other. He forgets that every separation, every segregation of the individual realms of being has only subjective validity. What is a consequence of his organization, he considers to be an objective natural fact that lies outside him.

Such a dualism is also Kantianism. For in this worldview, appearance and the "in itself of things" are not opposites within the given world, but one side, the "in itself", lies outside the given. As long as we separate the latter into parts, however small they may be in relation to the universe, we are simply following a law of our personality; but if we regard everything given, all phenomena, as one part and then oppose it with a second, then we are philosophizing into the blue. We are then merely playing with concepts. We construct a contrast, but cannot gain any content for the second element, because such a content can only be drawn from the given. Any kind of being that is assumed to exist outside the latter is to be relegated to the realm of unjustified hypotheses. Kant's "thing-in-itself" belongs in this category, as does the idea that a large proportion of modern physicists have of matter and its atomistic composition. If I am given any sensory perception, for example the perception of color or heat, then I can make qualitative and quantitative distinctions within this perception; I can encompass the spatial structure and the temporal progression that I perceive with mathematical formulas, I can regard the phenomena according to their nature as cause and effect, and so on: but with this process of thinking I must remain within what is given to me. If we practise a careful self-criticism of ourselves, we also find that all our abstract views and concepts are only one-sided images of the given reality and only have sense and meaning as such. We can imagine a space closed on all sides, in which a number of elastic spheres move in all directions, bumping into each other, bouncing against and off the walls; but we must be clear that this is a one-sided image that only gains meaning when we think of the purely mathematical image as being filled with a sensibly real content. But if we believe that we can explain a perceived content causally through an imperceptible process of being which corresponds to the mathematical structure described and which takes place outside our given world, then we lack all self-criticism. Modern mechanical heat theory makes the mistake described above. If we say that the "red" is only a subjective sensation, as modern physiology does, and that a mechanical process, a movement, is to be assumed as the cause of this "red" outside in space, then we are committing an inconsistency. If the "red" were only subjective, then all mechanical processes connected with the "red" would also only be subjective. As soon as we take something from the interrelated world of perception into the mind, we must take everything into it, including the atoms and their movements. We would have to deny the entire external world.

The same can be said of the modern theory of color. It too places something that is only a one-sided image of the sense world behind it as its cause. The whole wave theory of light is only a mathematical picture which represents the spatio-temporal relations of this particular field of appearance in a one-sided way. The undulation theory turns this image into a real reality that can no longer be perceived, but rather is supposed to be the cause of what we perceive.

III The reasons for the reaction within science

It is not at all surprising that the dualistic thinker does not succeed in making the connection between the two worlds he assumes - the subjective one within us and the objective one outside us - comprehensible. The one is given to him experientially, the other is added by him. Consequently, he can only gain everything contained in the one through experience, and everything contained in the other only through thinking. But since all experiential content is only an effect of the added true being, the cause itself can never be found in the world accessible to our observation. Nor is the reverse possible: to deduce the experientially given reality from the imagined cause. This latter is not possible because, according to our previous arguments, all such imagined causes are only one-sided images of the full reality. When we survey such a picture, we can never find in it, by means of a mere thought process, what is connected with it only in the observed reality. For these reasons, he who assumes two worlds that are separated by themselves will never be able to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of their interrelation.

Whoever allows the actual real entities to exist outside the world of experience sets limits to our knowledge. For if his presupposition is correct, we would only perceive the effect that the real beings exert on us. These, as the causes, are a land entirely unknown to us. And here we have arrived at the gate where modern science can let in all the old religious ideas. So far and no further, says this science. Why shouldn't the pastor now start with his faith where Du Bois-Reymond stops with his scientific knowledge?

The follower of the monistic world view knows that the causes of the effects given to him must lie in the realm of his world. No matter how far removed the former may be from the latter in space or time, they must be found in the realm of experience. The fact that of two things which explain each other, only one is given to him at the moment, appears to him only as a consequence of his individuality, not as something founded in the object itself. The adherent of a dualistic view believes that he must assume the explanation of a known thing in an arbitrarily added unknown thing. Since he unjustifiably endows the latter with such properties that it cannot be found in our entire world, he sets a limit to cognition here. Our arguments have provided the proof that all things which our cognitive faculty supposedly cannot reach must first be artificially added to reality. We only fail to recognize that which we have first made unrecognizable. Kant commands our cognition to stop at a creature of his imagination, at the "thing-in-itself", and Du Bois-Reymond states that the imperceptible atoms of matter produce sensation and feeling through their position and movement, only to conclude that we can never arrive at a satisfactory explanation of how matter and movement produce sensation and feeling, for "it is quite and forever incomprehensible that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not be indifferent to each other. -atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move. It is in no way comprehensible how consciousness could arise from their interaction". This whole conclusion collapses into nothing if one considers that the atoms moving and lying in a certain way are a creature of the abstracting mind, to which an absolute existence separate from perceptible events cannot be ascribed.

A scientific dissection of our cognitive activity leads, as we have seen, to the conviction that the questions we have to ask of nature are a consequence of the peculiar relationship in which we stand to the world. We are limited individualities and can therefore only perceive the world piecemeal. Each piece considered in and of itself is a puzzle or, in other words, a question for our cognition. However, the more details we get to know, the clearer the world becomes to us. One perception explains another. There are no questions that the world poses to us that cannot be answered with the means it offers us. For monism, therefore, there are no fundamental limits to knowledge. This or that can be unresolved at any given time because we were not yet in a position in terms of time or space to find the things that are involved. But what has not yet been found today may be found tomorrow. The limits caused by this are only accidental ones that disappear with the progress of experience and thought. In such cases, the formation of hypotheses comes into its own. Hypotheses may not be formed about something that is supposed to be inaccessible to our knowledge in principle. The atomistic hypothesis is a completely unfounded one if it is to be conceived not merely as an aid to the abstracting intellect, but as a statement about real beings lying outside the qualities of sensation. A hypothesis can only be an assumption about a fact that is not accessible to us for accidental reasons, but which by its nature belongs to the world given to us. For example, a hypothesis about a certain state of our earth in a long-gone period is justified. Admittedly, this state can never become an object of experience because completely different conditions have arisen in the meantime. However, if a perceiving individual had been there at the assumed time, then he would have perceived the state. In contrast, the hypothesis that all sensory qualities owe their origin only to quantitative processes is unjustified, because qualityless processes cannot be perceived.

Monism or the unified explanation of nature emerges from a critical self-examination of man. This view leads us to reject all explanatory causes outside the world. However, we can also extend this view to man's practical relationship to the world. Human action is, after all, only a special case of general world events. Its explanatory principles can therefore likewise only be sought within the world given to us. Dualism, which seeks the basic forces of the reality available to us in a realm inaccessible to us, also places the commandments and norms of our actions there. Kant is also caught up in this error. He regards the moral law as a commandment imposed on man by a world that is alien to us, as a categorical imperative that he must obey, even when his own nature develops inclinations that oppose such a voice sounding from the hereafter into our here and now. One need only recall Kant's well-known apostrophe to duty to find this reinforced: "Duty! thou great and sublime name, who dost not hold in thyself anything that is pleasing and ingratiating, but dost demand submission", who dost "establish a law... before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly work against it." Monism opposes such an imperative imposed on human nature from the outside with the moral motives born of the human soul itself. It is a delusion to believe that man can act according to other than self-made imperatives. The respective inclinations and cultural needs generate certain maxims that we call our moral principles. Since certain ages or peoples have similar inclinations and aspirations, the people who belong to them will also establish similar principles to satisfy them. In any case, however, such principles, which then act as ethical motives, are by no means implanted from outside, but are born out of needs, i.e. generated within the reality in which we live. The moral code of an age or people is simply the expression of how adaptation and heredity work within the ethical nature of man. Just as the effects of nature arise from causes that lie within the given nature, so our moral actions are the results of motives that lie within our cultural process. Monism thus seeks the reason for our actions within nature in the strictest sense of the word. However, it also makes man his own legislator. Man has no other norm than the necessities arising from the laws of nature. He continues the effects of nature in the area of moral action.

Dualism demands submission to moral commandments taken from somewhere; monism points man to himself and to nature, i.e. to his autonomous being. It makes him the master of himself. Only from the standpoint of monism can we understand man as a truly free being in the ethical sense. Duties are not imposed on him by another being, but his actions are simply guided by the principles that everyone finds lead him to the goals he considers worth striving for. A moral view based on monism is the enemy of all blind faith in authority. The autonomous person does not follow a guideline that he should merely believe will lead him to his goal, but he must realize that it will lead him there, and the goal itself must appear to him individually as a desirable one.

The autonomous human being wants to be governed according to laws that he has given himself. He has only one role model - nature. He continues where the organic nature below him has stopped. Our ethical principles are pre-formed at a more primitive level in the instincts of animals. No categorical imperative is anything other than a developed instinct.

IV

The assumption of the limits of human cognition brought about by the "regression to Kant" has had a truly paralyzing effect on the development of an all-embracing way of thinking. An unprejudiced worldview can only thrive if thinking has the courage to penetrate into the last nooks and crannies of being, to the heights of entities. Reactionary worldviews will always find their reckoning when thinking clips its own wings. A theory of knowledge that speaks of an unknowable "thing in itself" can be the best ally of the most regressive theology. It would be interesting to pursue the psychological problem of the unconscious, secret longing of the theorists of the limits of knowledge to leave a loophole open for theology. Nothing is more characteristic of human nature than what can otherwise be noted as a great joy by excellent thinkers. It comes over them when they seem to succeed in proving that there is something where no knowledge can penetrate - where therefore a good faith may set in. With true delight one hears meritorious researchers say: see, no experience, no reason can get there; one may follow the pastor there.

Try to imagine where we would be today if we had not had the doctrine of all possible limits to knowledge in our higher educational institutions in recent decades, but rather the Goethean spirit of research, to penetrate as far as experience allows at every moment with our thinking, and not to present everything else as a problem as unknowable, but to leave it calmly to the future. With such a maxim, philosophy could have brought the dispute against theological belief, which began somewhat clumsily but not incorrectly in the 1950s, to a good conclusion today. Perhaps we would be ready today to regard the theological faculties with a smile as living anachronisms. Theologizing philosophers, such as Lotze, have caused unheard-of misfortune. The clumsiness of Carl Vogt, who was on the right track, made the game easy for them. Oh, that Vogt! If only he had chosen a better comparison instead of the unfortunate one: thoughts relate to the brain like urine to the kidneys. It could easily be argued that the kidneys secrete matter; can thought be compared to matter? And if so, must not what is secreted already be present in a certain form before it is secreted? No, Vogt the Fat should have said, thoughts relate to brain processes like the heat developed during a friction process relates to this friction process. They are a function of the brain, not a substance separated from it. Lotze, the bland philosophical Struwwelpeter, could not have objected to this. For such a comparison stands up to all the facts that can be established about the connection between the brain and thinking according to scientific method. The materialists of the 1950s waged a clumsy outpost battle. Then came the "regressives to Kant" with their limits of knowledge and stabbed the scientific progressives in the back.

The reaction in all areas of life is spreading again today. And knowledge, which can be the only real fighter against it, has tied its own hands. What use is it for the natural scientist to open the eyes of his students to the laws of nature in his laboratory and at his teaching pulpit if his colleague, the philosopher, says: everything you hear from the natural scientist is only external work, is appearance, our knowledge cannot penetrate beyond a certain limit. I must confess that under such circumstances it is no wonder to me that the most blind charcoal-burner's faith boldly raises its head next to the most advanced science. Because science is discouraged, life is reactionary. You should be fighters, you philosophers, you should advance further and further into the unlimited. But you should not be watchdogs, so that the modern worldview does not overstep the boundaries beyond which outdated theology goes at every moment. It is truly strange that pastors are allowed every day to reveal the secrets of that world about which the unprejudiced thinker should impose careful silence. The more cowardly philosophy is, the bolder theology is. And even the views that prevail about the nature of our schools. They may try to keep everything out of the classroom that natural science links to its established facts as a consequence of worldview, because unproven hypotheses - as they say - do not belong in school, only absolutely certain facts. But in religious education! Yes, Bauer, that's different. There, the "unproven" articles of faith can continue to be cultivated. The religion teacher who knows what the geologist "can't know anything about". The reasons lie deep. Just imagine that modern natural science had confirmed everything that the Bible taught; imagine that Darwin, instead of his evil theory of man's descent from the animals, had delivered a confirmation of the faith in revelation based on natural science: Oh, then we would hear the good Darwin's fame proclaimed from all pulpits today, then the religion teachers would be allowed to talk about it. Children would probably be taught that the seven books of Moses are fully justified by an English naturalist. But perhaps we would then have no theories about the limits of knowledge. It would probably be permissible to transgress the boundaries that lead to theology. However, it is a different matter if this crossing of boundaries leads to purely natural causes of world phenomena.