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GA 30. Two Essays on Haeckel |
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GA 30. Two Essays on Haeckel |
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Goethe has given glorious expression, in his book upon Winkelmann, to the feeling which a man has when he contemplates his position within the world: “When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, worthy, and valuable whole, when harmonious contentment yields him pure, free rapture, then would the universe, could it but feel itself, burst forth into rejoicing at having attained its goal, and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.” From out of this feeling there arises the most important question that man can ask himself: how is his own becoming and being linked with that of the whole world? Schiller, in a letter to Goethe of 23rd August, 1794, admirably characterises the road by which Goethe sought to come to a knowledge of human nature. “From the simple organism you ascend step by step to the more complex, in order finally to build up the most complex of all, man, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature.” Now this road of Goethe's is also that which natural science has been following for the last forty years, in order to solve “the question of questions for humanity.” Huxley sees the problem to be the determination of the position which “man occupies in nature, and his relation to the totality of things.” It is the great merit of Charles Darwin to have created a new scientific basis for reflection upon this question. The facts which he brought forward in 1859 in his work, The Origin of Species, and the principles which he there developed, gave to natural research the possibility of showing, in its own way, how well founded was Goethe's conviction that Nature, “after a thousand animal types, forms a being that contains them all — man.” To-day we look back upon forty years of scientific development, which stand under the influence of Charles Darwin's line of thought. Rightly could Ernst Haeckel say in his book, On our Present Knowledge of Man's Origin, which reproduces an address delivered by him at the Fourth International Congress of Zoologists in Cambridge on 26th August, 1898: “Forty years of Darwinism! What a huge progress in our knowledge of Nature! And what a revolution in our weightiest views, not only in the more closely affected departments, but also in that of anthropology, and equally in all the so-called psychological sciences.” Goethe, from his profound insight into Nature, foresaw to its full extent this revolution and its significance for the progress of man's intellectual culture. We see this particularly clearly from a conversation which he had with Soret on 2nd August, 1830. At that time the news of the beginning of the Revolution of July reached Weimar and caused general excitement. When Soret visited Goethe, he was received with the words: “Now, what do you think of this great event? The volcano has burst into eruption; all is in flames, and it is no longer a conference behind closed doors!” Soret naturally could only believe that Goethe was speaking of the July Revolution, and replied that under the known conditions nothing else could be expected than that it would end with the expulsion of the Royal family. But Goethe had something quite different in his mind. “1 am not talking of those people at all; I am concerned with quite other things. I am speaking of the conflict, so momentous for science, between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire that has come to a public outbreak in the Academy.” The conflict concerned the question whether each species in which organic nature finds expression possesses a distinct architectural plan of its own, or whether there is one plan common to them all. Goethe had already settled this question for himself forty years earlier. His eager study of the plant and animal worlds had made him an opponent of the Linnæan view, that we “count as many species as different forms were created in the beginning (in principio).” Anyone holding such an opinion can only strive to discover what are the plans upon which the separate species are organised. He will seek above all carefully to distinguish these separate forms. Goethe followed another road. “That which Linnaeus strove forcibly to hold apart was bound, according to the innermost need of my being, to strive after reunion.” Thus there grew up in him the view which, in 1796, in the Lectures upon the three first chapters of A General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, he summed up in the sentence: “This, then, we have gained, that we can unhesitatingly maintain that all complete organic natures — among which we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and, as the head of the last, man — have all been shaped according to one original type, which only inclines more or less to this side or the other in its constant parts, and yet daily develops and transforms itself by reproduction.” The basic type, to which all the manifold plant-forms may be traced back, had already been described by Goethe in 1790 in his Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants. This way of regarding things, by which Goethe endeavoured to recognise the laws of living nature, is exactly similar to that which he demands for the inorganic world in his essay, written in 1793, Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject: “Nothing happens in Nature which is not in some connection with the whole, and if experiences only appear to us as isolated, if we can only regard experiments as isolated facts, that does not imply that they actually are isolated; it is only the question: How shall we find the connection of these phenomena, these occurrences?” Species also appear to us only in isolation. Goethe seeks for their connection. Hence it clearly appears that Goethe's effort was directed to apply the same mode of explanation to the study of living beings as has led to the goal in that of inorganic nature.
How far he had run ahead of his time with such conceptions becomes apparent when one reflects that at the same time when Goethe published his Metamorphosis, Kant sought to prove scientifically, in his Critique of Judgment, the impossibility of an explanation of the living according to the same principles as hold for the lifeless. He maintained: “It is quite certain that we cannot even adequately learn to know, far less explain to ourselves, the organised beings and their inner possibility according to purely mechanical principles of nature; and, indeed, it is so certain that we can boldly say it is senseless for man even to conceive such a purpose, or to hope that sometime perhaps a Newton may arise who will make comprehensible the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no purpose has ordered; rather one must simply and flatly deny any such insight to man.” Haeckel repudiates this thought with the words: “Now, however, this impossible Newton really appeared seventy years later in Darwin, and, as a matter of fact, solved the problem whose solution Kant had declared to be absolutely unthinkable!” That the revolution in scientific views brought about by Darwinism must take place, Goethe knew full well, for it corresponds with his own way of conceiving things. In the view which Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire defended against Cuvier, that all organic forms carry in them a “general plan modified only here and there,” he recognised his own again. Therefore he could say to Soret: “Now, however, Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is decidedly on our side, and with him all his important disciples and followers in France. This event is for me of quite extraordinary value, and I rejoice rightly over the general victory gained at length by a cause to which I have devoted my life, and which is most especially my very own.” Of still greater value for Goethe's view of Nature are, however, the discoveries of Darwin. Goethe's view of Nature is related to Darwinism in a way similar to that in which the insights of Copernicus and Kepler into the structure and movements of the planetary system are related to the discovery by Newton of the law of the universal attraction of all heavenly bodies. This law reveals the scientific causes, why the planets move in the manner which Copernicus and Kepler had described. And Darwin found the natural causes, why the common original type of all organic beings, which Goethe assumed, makes its appearance in the various species. The doubt as to the view that there underlies each distinct organic species a special plan of organisation, unchangeable for all time, took firm hold upon Darwin upon a journey which he undertook to South America and Australia in the summer of 1831 as naturalist on the ship Beagle. As to how his thought ripened, we get an idea in reaching such communications from him as the following: “When, during the voyage of the Beagle, I visited the Galapagos Archipelago, which lies in the Pacific Ocean some five hundred English miles from the South American coast, I saw myself surrounded by peculiar kinds of birds, reptiles, and snakes, which exist nowhere else in the world. Yet they almost all bore upon them an American character. In the song of the mocking thrush, in the sharp cry of the carrion hawk, in the great chandelier-like Opuntico, I clearly perceived the neighbourhood of America; and yet these islands were separated from the mainland by so many miles, and differed widely from it in their geological constitution and their climate. Yet more surprising was the fact that most of the inhabitants of each separate island of this small archipelago were specifically different, although closely related to one another. I often asked myself, then, how these peculiar animals and men had originated. The simplest answer seemed to be that the inhabitants of the different islands descend from one another, and in the course of their descent had undergone modifications, and that all the inhabitants of the archipelago had descended from those of the nearest mainland, viz., America, from which naturally the colonisation would proceed. But it long remained for me an unintelligible problem: how the necessary degree of modification could have been attained.” As to this “how,” it was the numerous breeding experiments which he tried, after his return home, with pigeons, fowls, dogs, rabbits, and garden plants that enlightened Darwin. He saw from them in how high a degree there lies in organic forms the possibility of continually modifying themselves in the course of their reproduction. It is possible, by creating artificial conditions, to obtain from a given form after a few generations new kinds, which differ much more from each other than do those in Nature, whose difference is regarded as so great that one inclines to ascribe to each a special underlying plan of organisation. As is well known, the breeder utilises this variability of kinds to bring about the development of such forms of domesticated organisms as correspond with his intentions. He endeavours to create the conditions which guide the variation in a direction answering his purpose. If he seeks to breed a kind of sheep with specially fine wool, he seeks out among his flock those individuals which have the finest wool. These he allows to breed. From among their descendants he again selects for further breeding those which have the finest wool. If this is carried on through a series of generations, a species of sheep is obtained which differs materially from its ancestors in the formation of its wool. The same thing can be done with other characteristics of living creatures. From these facts two things become obvious: that organic forms have a tendency to vary, and that they pass on the acquired modifications to their descendants. Owing to this first property of living creatures, the breeder is able to develop in his species certain characteristics that answer his purposes; owing to the second, these new characteristics are handed on from one generation to the next. The thought now lies close at hand, that in Nature also, left to itself, the forms continually vary. And the great power of variation of domesticated organisms does not force us to assume that this property of organic forms is confined within certain limits. We may rather presuppose that in the lapse of vast time-periods a certain form transforms itself into a totally different one, which in its formation diverges from the former to the utmost extent imaginable. The most natural inference then, is this, that the organic species have not arisen independently, each according to a special plan of structure, alongside each other; but that in course of time they have evolved the one from the other. This idea gains support from the views at which Lyell arrived in the history of the earth's development, and which he first published in 1830 in his Principles of Geology. The older geological views, according to which the formation of the earth was supposed to have been accomplished in a series of violent catastrophes, were thereby superseded. Through this doctrine of catastrophes it was sought to explain the results to which the investigation of the earth's solid crust had led. The different strata of the earth's crust, and the fossilised organic creatures contained in them, are of course the vestiges of what once took place on the earth's surface. The followers of the doctrine of violent transformations believed that the development of the earth had been accomplished in successive periods, definitely distinguished from one another. At the end of such a period there occurred a catastrophe. Everything living was destroyed, and its remains preserved in an earth-stratum. On the top of what had been destroyed there arose a completely new world, which must be created afresh. In the place of this doctrine of catastrophes, Lyell set up the view that the crust of the earth has been gradually moulded in the course of very long periods of time, by the same processes which still in our time are going on every day on the earth's surface. It has been the action of the rivers carrying mud away from one spot and depositing it on another; the work of the glaciers, which grind away rocks and stones, forward blocks of stone, and analogous processes, which, in their steady, slow working have given to the earth's surface its present configuration. This view necessarily draws after it the further conclusion that the present-day forms of plants and animals also have gradually developed themselves out of those whose remains are preserved for us in fossils. Now, it results from the processes of artificial breeding that one form can really transform itself into another. There remains only the question, by what means are those conditions for this transformation, which the breeder brings about by artificial means, created in Nature itself? In artificial breeding human intelligence chooses the conditions so that the new forms coming into existence answer to the purposes which the breeder is following out. Now, the organic forms living in Nature are in general purposefully adapted to the conditions under which they live. A mere glance into Nature will teach one the truth of this fact. Plant and animal species are so constructed that they can maintain and reproduce themselves in the conditions under which they live. It is just this purposeful arrangement which has given rise to the supposition that organic forms cannot be explained in the same way as the facts of inorganic Nature. Kant observes in his Critique of Judgment: “The analogy of the forms, in so far as they seem to be produced in accordance with a common basic plan, despite all differences, strengthens the presumption of a real relationship between them in their generation from a common mother through an approach, step by step, of one animal species to another. ... Here, therefore, it is open to the archaeologist of Nature to cause to arise that great family of creatures (for one would be forced to conceive them thus if the thoroughgoing connected relationship spoken of is to hold good) from the traces left over of her older revolutions, according to all their known and supposed mechanisms. But he must equally for that purpose ascribe to this common mother an organisation purposely fitted to all these creatures, for otherwise the purposive form of the products of the plant and animal kingdoms is unthinkable as to its possibility.” If we would explain organic forms after the same manner in which natural science deals with inorganic phenomena, we must demonstrate that the particular arrangement of the organisms — devoid of a purposeful object — comes into being by reason of what is practically natural necessity, even as one elastic ball after having been struck by another is fulfilling a law as it rolls along. This requirement has its fulfilment in Darwin's teachings regarding natural selection. Even in Nature organic forms must, in accordance with their capacity for assimilating modifications which have been brought about by artificial breeding, become transformed. Should there be nothing available for directly bringing about the change, so that none but the forms aimed at should come into existence, there will be, regardless of choice, useless, or less useful, forms called into being. Now, Nature is extremely wasteful in the bringing forth of her germs. So many germs are, indeed, produced upon our earth, that were they all to attain to development we should soon be able to fill several worlds with them. This great number of germs is confronted with but a comparatively small amount of food and space, the result of this being a universal struggle for existence among organic beings. Only the fit survive and fructify; the unfit have to go under. The fittest, however, will be those who have adapted themselves in the best possible way to the surrounding conditions of life. The absolutely unintentional, and yet — from natural causes — necessary, struggle for existence brings in its train the same results as are attained by the intelligence of the breeder with his cultivated organisms: he creates purposeful (useful) organic forms. This, broadly sketched, is the meaning of Darwin's theory of natural selection in the struggle for existence; or, otherwise, the “selective theory.” By this theory, that which Kant held to be impossible is reached: the thinking out in all its possibilities of a predetermined form in the animal and vegetable kingdom, without assuming the Universal Mother to be dowered with an organism directly productive of all these creatures. As Newton by pointing out the general attraction of the heavenly bodies showed why they moved in the set courses determined by Copernicus and Kepler, so did it now become possible to explain with the help of the theory of selection how in Nature the evolution of the living thing takes place, the course of which Goethe, in his Metamorphosis of Plants, has observed: “We can, however, say this, namely, that proceeding from a relationship that is hardly distinguishable between animal and plant, creatures do little by little evolve, carrying on their development in opposite directions — the plant finally reaching its maturity in the form of the tree, and the animal finding its culminating glory in man's freedom and activity.” Goethe has said of his ancestors: “I shall not rest until I have found a pregnant point from which many deductions may be made; or, rather, one that will forcibly bestow upon me the overflow of its own abundance.” The theory of selection became for Ernst Haeckel the point from which he was able to deduce a conception of the universe entirely in accordance with natural science. At the beginning of the last century Jean Lamarck also maintained the view that, at a certain moment in the earth's development, a most simple organic something developed itself, by spontaneous generation, out of the mechanical, physical, and chemical processes. These simplest organisms then produced more perfect ones, and these again others more highly organised, right up to man. “One might therefore quite rightly name this part of the theory of evolution, which asserts the common origin of all plant and animal species from the simplest common root-forms, in honour of its most deserving founder, Lamarckianism” (Haeckel, Natural History of Creation). Haeckel has given in grandiose style an explanation of Lamarckianism by means of Darwinism. The key to this explanation Haeckel found by seeking out the evidences in the individual development of the higher organisms — in their ontogeny — showing that they really originated from lower forms of life. When one follows out the form-development of one of the higher organisms from the earliest germ up to its fully developed condition, the different stages are found to present configurations corresponding to the forms of lower organisms. At the outset of his individual existence man and every other animal is a simple cell. This cell divides itself, and from it arises a germinal vesicle consisting of many cells. From that develops the so-called “cup-germ,” the two-layered gastrula, which has the shape of a cup- or jug-like body. Now, the lower plant-animals (sponges, polyps, and so on) remain throughout their entire existence on a level of development which is equivalent to this cup-germ. Haeckel remarks thereupon: “This fact is of extraordinary importance. For we see that man, and generally every vertebrate, runs rapidly, in passing, through a two-leaved stage of formation, which in these lowest plant-animals is maintained throughout life” (Anthropogenesis). Such a parallelism between the developmental stages of the higher organisms and the developed lower forms may be followed out through the entire evolutionary history. Haeckel clothes this fact in the words: “The brief ontogenesis or development of the individual is a rapid and abbreviated repetition, a condensed recapitulation of the prolonged phylogenesis or development of the species.” This sentence gives expression to the so-called fundamental biogenetic law. Why then do the higher organisms in the course of their development come to forms which resemble lower ones? The natural explanation is that the former have developed themselves out of the latter; that therefore every organism in its individual development shows us one after another the forms which have clung to it as heirlooms from its lower ancestors. The simplest organism that once upon a time formed itself on earth, transforms itself in the course of reproduction into new forms. Of these, the best adapted in the struggle for existence survive, and transmit their peculiarities to their descendants. All the formations and qualities which an organism exhibits at the present time have arisen in the lapse of enormous time-periods by adaptation and inheritance. Heredity and adaptation are thus the causes of the world of organic forms. Thus, by investigating the relationship of individual developmental history (ontogeny) to the history of the race (phylogeny), Haeckel has given the scientific explanation of the manifold organic forms. As a natural philosopher he has satisfied the human demand for knowledge, which Schiller had derived from observation of Goethe's mind; he ascended from the simple organisations step by step to the more complicated, to finally build up genetically the most complex of all, man, from the materials of the whole structure of Nature. He has set forth his view in several grandly designed works — in his General Morphology (1866), in his Natural History of Creation (1868), in his Anthropogenesis (1874) — in which he “undertook the first and hitherto the only attempt to establish critically in detail the zoological family-tree of man, and to discuss at length the entire animal ancestry of our race.” To these works there has been further added in recent years his three-volumed Systematic Phylogeny.
It is characteristic of Haeckel's deeply philosophical nature that, after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, he at once recognised the full significance for man's entire conception of the Universe, of the principles therein established; and it speaks much for his philosophical enthusiasm that he boldly and tirelessly combated all the prejudices which arose against the acceptance of the new truth by the creed of modern thought. The necessity that all modern scientific thinking should reckon with Darwinism was expounded by Haeckel at the fiftieth meeting of German scientists and doctors on the 22nd September, 1877, in his address, The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole. He delivered a widely-embracing Confession of Faith of a Man of Science on the 9th October, 1892, in Altenburg at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society for Natural Science of the Osterland. (This address was printed under the title, Monism as a link between Religion and Science, Bonn, 1892.) What has been yielded by the remodelled doctrine of evolution and our present scientific knowledge towards the answering of the “question of questions,” he has recently expounded in its broad lines in the address mentioned above, On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man. Herein Haeckel handles afresh the conclusion, which follows as a matter of course from Darwinism for every logical thinker, that man has developed out of the lower vertebrates, and further, more immediately from true apes. It has been, however, this necessary conclusion which has summoned to battle all the old prejudices of theologians, philosophers, and all who are under their spell. Doubtless, people would have accepted the emergence of the single animal and plant forms from one another if only this assumption had not carried with it at once the recognition of the animal descent of man. “It remains,” as Haeckel emphasised in his Natural History of Creation, “an instructive fact that this recognition — after the appearance of the first Darwinian work — was in no sense general, that on the contrary numerous critics of the first Darwinian book (and among them very famous names) declared themselves in complete agreement with Darwinism, but entirely rejected its application to man.” With a certain appearance of justice, people relied in so doing on Darwin's book itself, in which no word is said of this application. Because he drew this conclusion unreservedly, Haeckel was reproached with being “more Darwinian than Darwin.” True, that held good only till the year 1871, in which appeared Darwin's work, The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection, in which Darwin himself maintained that inference with great boldness and clearness. It was rightly recognised that with this conclusion must fall a conception belonging to the most treasured among the collection of older human prejudices: the conception that the “soul of man” is a special being all to itself, having quite another, a different, “higher origin” from all other things in Nature. The doctrine of descent must naturally lead to the view that man's soul-activities are only a special form of those physiological functions which are found in his vertebrate ancestors, and that these activities have evolved themselves with the same necessity from the mental activities of the animals, as the brain of man, which is the material condition of his intellect, has evolved out of the vertebrate brain. It was not only the men with old conceptions of faith nurtured in the various ecclesiastical religions who rebelled against the new confession, but also all those who had indeed apparently freed themselves from these conceptions of faith, but whose minds nevertheless still thought in the sense of these conceptions. In what follows the proof will be given that to this latter class of minds belong a series of philosophers and scientific scholars of high standing who have combated Haeckel, and who still remain opponents of the views he advocated. To these ally themselves also those who are entirely lacking in the power of drawing the necessary logical conclusions from a series of facts lying before them. I wish here to describe the objections which Haeckel had to combat. A bright light is thrown upon the relationship of man to the higher vertebrates, by the truth which Huxley, in 1863, expressed in his volume on Man's Place in Nature, and other Anthropological Essays: “Thus whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result — that the structural differences which separate man from the gorilla and the chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the gorilla from the lower apes” (see Man and the Lower Animals, p. 144). With the help of this fact it is possible to establish man's animal line of ancestry in the sense of the Darwinian doctrine of descent. Man has common ancestors with the apes in some species of apes that have died out. By a corresponding utilisation of the knowledge which comparative anatomy and physiology, individual developmental history, and palaeontology supply, Haeckel has followed the animal ancestors of man lying still more remotely in the past, through the semi-apes, the marsupials, the earliest fishes, right up to the very earliest animals consisting only of a single cell. He is fully entitled to ask: “Are the phenomena of the individual development of man in any way less wonderful than the palaeontological development from lower organisms? Why should not man have evolved in the course of enormous periods of time from unicellular original forms, since every individual runs through this same development from the cell to the fully developed organism?” But it is also by no means easy for the human mind to construct for itself conceptions in accordance with Nature as regards the unfoldment of the single organism from the germ up to the developed condition. We can see this from the ideas which a scientist like Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) and a philosopher like Leibnitz (1646-1716) formed about this development. Haller maintained the view that the germ of an organism already contains in miniature, but fully and completely formed in advance, all the parts which make their appearance during its development. Thus, development is taken to be not the formation of something new in what is already present, but the unfolding of something that was already there but invisible to the eye because of its minuteness. But if this view were correct, then in the first germ of an animal or vegetable form all following generations must be already contained like boxes one inside the other. And Haller actually drew this conclusion. He assumed that in the first human germ of our root-mother, Eve, the entire human race was already present in miniature. And even Leibnitz also can only imagine the development of men as an unfoldment of what already exists: “So I should opine that the souls, which some day will be human souls, were already there in germ, like those of other species, that they existed in man's ancestors up to Adam, therefore from the beginning of things, always in the form of organised bodies.” The human understanding has a tendency to imagine to itself that anything coming into existence was somehow already there, in some form or other, before its manifestation. The entire organism is supposed to be already hidden in the germ; the distinct organic classes, orders, families, species, and kinds are supposed to have existed as the thoughts of a creator before they actually came into existence. Now, however, the idea of evolution demands that we should conceive the arising of something new, of something later, from out of something already present, of something earlier. We are called upon to understand that which has become, out of the becoming. That we cannot do, if we regard all that has become as something which has always been there. How great the prejudices are that the idea of evolution had to face was clearly shown by the reception which Caspar Friedrich Wolff's Theoria Generationis, which appeared in 1759, met with among the men of science who accepted Haller's views. It was demonstrated in this book that in the human ovum not even a trace of the form of the developed organism is present, but that its development consists in a series of new formations. Wolff defended the idea of a real evolution, an epigenesis, a becoming from what is not present, as against the view of seeming evolution. Haeckel says of Wolff's book that it “belongs, in spite of its small size and awkward language, to the most valuable writings in the whole field of biological literature. ...” Nevertheless, this remarkable book had at first no success whatever. Although scientific studies, as a result of the stimulus imparted by Linnaeus, flourished mightily at that time, although botanists and zoologists were soon counted no longer by dozens but by hundreds, yet no one troubled himself about Wolff's Theory of Generation. The few, however, who had read it, held it to be fundamentally wrong, and especially Haller. Although Wolff proved by the most accurate observations the truth of epigenesis, and disproved the current hypotheses of the preformation doctrine, nevertheless the “exact” physiologist Haller remained the most zealous follower of the latter and rejected the correct teaching of Wolff with his dictatorial edict: “There is no becoming” (Nulla est epigenesis!). With so much power did human thinking set itself against a view, of which Haeckel (in his Anthropogenesis) remarks: “To-day we can hardly any longer call this theory of epigenesis a theory, because we have fully convinced ourselves of the correctness of the fact, and can demonstrate it at any moment with the help of the microscope.” How deep-rooted is the prejudice against the idea of evolution can be seen at any moment by the objections which our philosophical contemporaries make against it. Otto Liebmann, who, in his Analysis of Reality and his Thoughts and Facts, has subjected the fundamental views of science to criticism, expresses himself in a remarkable manner about the conception of evolution. In face of the facts, he cannot deny the justice of the conception that higher organisms proceed from lower. He therefore endeavours to represent the range and importance of this conception for the higher need of explanation as being as small as possible. “Accepted, the theory of descent ... granted that it be complete, that the great genealogical register of Nature's organic beings lies open before us; and that, not as an hypothesis, but as historically proven fact, what should we then have? A gallery of ancestors, such as one finds also in princely castles; only not as a fragment, but as a completed whole.” This means that nothing of any consequence has been accomplished towards the real explanation, when one has shown how what appears later proceeds as a new formation from what preceded. Now it is interesting to see how Liebmann's presuppositions lead him yet again to the assumption that what arises on the road of evolution was there already before its appearance. In the recently published second part of his Thoughts and Facts he maintains: “It is true that for us, to whom the world appears in the form of perception known as time, the seed is there before the plant; begetting and conception come before the animal that arises from them, and the development of the embryo into a full-grown creature is a process of time and drawn out in time to a certain length. In the timeless world-being, on the contrary, which neither becomes nor passes away, but is once and for all, maintaining itself unchangeably amid the stream of happenings, and for which no future, no past, but only an eternal present exists, this before and after, this earlier and later, falls away entirely. ... That which unrolls itself for us in the course of time as the slower or more rapidly passing succession of a series of phases of development, is in the omnipresent, permanent world-being a fixed law, neither coming into existence nor passing away.” The connection of such philosophical conceptions with the ideas of the various religious doctrines as to the creation may be easily seen. That purposefully devised beings arise in Nature, without there being some fundamental activity or power which infuses that purposefulness into the beings in question, is something that neither these religious doctrines nor such philosophical thinkers as Liebmann will admit. The view that accords with Nature follows out the course of what happens, and sees beings arise which have the quality of purposefulness, without this same purpose having been a co-determinant in their production. The purposefulness came about along with them; but the purpose did not co-operate in their becoming. The religious mode of conception has recourse to the Creator, who has created the creatures purposefully according to his preconceived plan; Liebmann turns to a timeless world-being, but he still makes that which is purposeful be brought forth by the purpose. “The goal or the purpose is here not later, and also not earlier than the means; but the purpose helps it on in virtue of a timeless necessity.” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. ii, p. 268.) Liebmann is a good example of those philosophers who have apparently freed themselves from the conceptions of faith, but who still think altogether on the lines of such conceptions. They profess that their thoughts are determined purely by reasonable considerations, but none the less it is an innate theological prejudice which gives the direction to their thoughts.
Reasoned reflection must therefore agree with Haeckel when he says: “Either organisms have naturally developed themselves, and in that case they must all originate from the simplest common ancestral forms — or that is not the case, the various species of organisms have arisen independently of one another, and in that case they can only have been created in a supernatural manner, by a miracle. Natural evolution or supernatural creation of species — we must choose between these two possibilities, for there is no third!” (Free Science and Free Teaching, p. 9.) What has been proffered by philosophers or scientists as such a third alternative against the doctrine of natural evolution shows itself, on closer examination, to be only a belief in creation which more or less veils or denies its origin. When we raise the question as to the origin of species in its most important form, in that which concerns the origin of man, there are only two answers possible. Either a consciousness endowed with reason is not present prior to its actual appearance in the world, but evolves as the outcome of the nervous system concentrated in the brain; or else an all-dominating world-reason exists before all other beings, and so shapes matter that in man its own image comes into being. Haeckel (in Monism as the Link between Religion and Science, p. 21) describes the becoming of the human mind as follows: “As our human body has slowly and step by step built itself up from a long series of vertebrate ancestors, so the same thing holds good of our soul: as a function of our brain it has developed itself step by step in interaction with that organ. What we term for short the ‘human soul’ is indeed only the sum-total of our feeling, willing, and thinking — the sum-total of physiological functions whose elementary organs consist of the microscopic ganglionic cells of our brain. Comparative anatomy and ontogeny show us how the marvellous structure of the latter, of our human soul-organ, has built itself upwards gradually in the course of millions of years out of the brain-forms of the higher and lower vertebrates; while comparative psychology shows us how, hand in hand therewith, the very soul itself — as a function of the brain — has evolved itself. The latter shows us also how a lower form of soul activity is already present in the lowest animals, in the unicellular protozoa, infusoria, and rhizopods. Every scientist who, like myself, has observed through long years the life-activity of these unicellular protista, is positively convinced that they also possess a soul; this ‘cell-soul,’ too, consists of a sum of feelings, representations, and volitions; the feeling, thinking, and willing of our human soul is only different therefrom in degree.” The totality of human soul-activities, which find their highest expression in unitary self-consciousness, corresponds to the complex structure of the human brain, just as simple feeling and willing do to the organisation of the protozoa. The progress of physiology, which we owe to investigators like Goltz, Münk, Wernicke, Edinger, Paul Flechsig, and others, enables us to-day to assign particular soul-manifestations to definite parts of the brain as their special functions. We recognise in four tracts of the grey matter of the cortex the mediators of four kinds of feeling: the sphere of bodily organic feeling in the meso-cranum lobule, that of smell in the frontal lobule, that of vision in the chief basal lobule, that of hearing in the temple lobule. The thinking which connects and orders the sensations has its apparatus between these four “sense-foci.” Haeckel links the following remark to the discussion of these latest physiological results: “The four thought-foci, distinguished by peculiar and highly complicated nerve-structure from the intervening sense-foci, are the true organs of thought, the only real tools of our mental life” (On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man, P-15). Haeckel demands from the psychologists that they shall take such results as these into account in their explanations about the nature of the soul, and not build up a mere pseudo-science composed of a fantastic metaphysic, of one-sided, so-called inner observation of soul-events, uncritical comparison, misunderstood perceptions, incomplete experiences, speculative aberrations and religious dogmas. As against the reproach that is cast by this view at the old-fashioned psychology, we find in some philosophers and also in individual scientists the assertion that there cannot in any case be contained in the material processes of the brain that which we class together as mind and spirit; for the material processes in the areas of sense and thought are in no case representations, feelings, and thoughts, but only material phenomena. We cannot learn to know the real nature of thoughts and feelings through external observation, but only through inner experience, through purely mental self-observation. Gustav Bunge, for instance, in his address Vitalism and Mechanism, p. 12, explains: “In activity — therein lies the riddle of life. But we have not acquired the conception of activity from observation through the senses, but from self-observation, from the observation of willing as it comes into our consciousness, as it reveals itself to our inner sense.” Many thinkers see the mark of a philosophical mind in the ability to rise to the insight that it is a turning upside down of the right relation of things, to endeavour to understand mental processes from material ones. Such objections point to a misunderstanding of the view of the world which Haeckel represents. Anyone who has really been saturated with the spirit of this view will never seek to explore the laws of mental life by any other road than by inner experience, by self-observation. The opponents of the scientific mode of thought talk exactly as if its supporters sought to discover the truths of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so forth, not by means of observing mental phenomena as such, but from the results of brain-anatomy. The caricature of the scientific world-conception thus created by such opponents for themselves is then termed materialism, and they are untiring in ever repeating afresh that this view must be unproductive, because it ignores the mental side of existence, or at least gives it a lower place at the expense of the material. Otto Liebmann, whom we may here cite once more, because his anti-scientific conceptions are typical of the mode of thought of certain philosophers and laymen, observes: “But granting, however, that natural science had attained its goal, it would then be in a position to show me accurately the physico-organic reasons why I hold that the assertion ‘twice two are four’ is true and assert it, and the other assertion ‘twice two are five’ is false and combat it, or why I must, just at this moment, write these very lines on paper the while I am entangled in the subjective belief that this happens because I will to write them down on account of their truth as assumed by me” (Thoughts and Facts, pt. ii, p. 294 et seq.). No scientific thinker will ever be of opinion that bodily-organic reasons can throw any light upon what, in the logical sense, is true or false. Mental connections can only be recognised from the side of the mental life. What is logically justified, must always be decided by logic; what is artistically perfect, by the aesthetic judgment. But it is an altogether different question to inquire: How does logical thinking, or the aesthetic judgment arise as a function of the brain? It is on this question only that comparative physiology and brain-anatomy have anything to say. And these show that the reasoning consciousness does not exist in isolation for itself, only utilising the human brain in order to express itself through it, as the piano-player plays on the piano; but that our mental powers are just as much functions of the form-elements of our brain, as “every force is a function of a material body” (Haeckel, Anthropogenesis, pt. ii, p. 853). The essence of Monism consists in the assumption that all occurrences in the world, from the simplest mechanical ones upwards to the highest human intellectual creations, evolve themselves naturally in the same sense, and that everything which is called in for the explanation of appearances, must be sought within that same world. Opposed to this view stands Dualism, which regards the pure operation of natural law as insufficient to explain appearances, and takes refuge in a reasoning being ruling over the appearances from above. Natural science, as has been shown, must reject this dualism. Now, however, it is urged from the side of philosophy that the means at the disposal of science are insufficient to establish a world-conception. From its own standpoint science was entirely right in explaining the whole world-process as a chain of causes and effects, in the sense of a purely mechanical conformity to law; but behind these laws, nevertheless, there is hidden the real cause, the universal world-reason, which only avails itself of mechanical means in order to realise higher, purposeful relations. Thus, for instance, Arthur Drews, who follows in the path of Eduard von Hartmann, observes: “Human works of art, too, are produced in a mechanical manner, that is when one looks only at the outward succession of single moments, without reflecting on the fact that after all there is hidden behind all this only the artist's thought; nevertheless one would rightly take that man for a fool who would perchance contend that the work was produced purely mechanically ... that which presents itself as the inevitable effect of a cause, on that lower standpoint which contents itself with merely gazing at the effects and thus contemplates the entire process as it were from behind, that very same thing reveals itself, when seen from the front, in every case as the intended goal of the means employed” (German Speculation since Kant, vol. ii, p. 287 et seq.). And Eduard von Hartmann himself remarks about the struggle for existence which renders it possible to explain living creatures naturally: “The struggle for existence, and therewith the whole of natural selection, is only the servant of the Idea, who is obliged to perform the lower services in its realisation, namely, the rough hewing and fitting of the stones that the master-builder has measured out and typically determined in advance according to their place in the great building. To proclaim this selection in the struggle for existence as the essentially adequate principle of explanation of the evolution of the organic kingdom, would be on a par with a day-labourer, who had worked with others in preparing the stones in the building of Cologne Cathedral, declaring himself to be the architect of that work of art” (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 10th ed., vol. iii, p. 403). If these conceptions were justified, it would be the task of philosophy to seek the artist behind the work of art. In fact, philosophers have tried the most various and diverse dualistic explanations to account for Cosmic processes. They have constructed in thought certain entities, supposed to hover behind the phenomena as the spirit of the artist rules behind the work of art. No scientific consideration would be able to rob man of the conviction that perceptible phenomena are guided by beings outside the world, if he could find within his own consciousness anything that pointed to such beings. What could anatomy and physiology accomplish with their declaration that soul-activities are functions of the brain, if observation of these activities yielded anything which could be regarded as a higher ground for an explanation? If the philosopher were able to show that a universal world-reason manifests itself in human reason, then all scientific results would be powerless to refute such knowledge. Now, however, the dualistic world-conception is disproved by nothing more effectively than by the consideration of the human mind. When I want to explain an external occurrence — for instance, the motion of an elastic ball which has been struck by another, I cannot stop short at the mere observation, but must seek the law which determines the direction of motion and velocity of the one ball from the direction and velocity of the other. Mere observation cannot furnish me with such a law, but only the linking together in thought of what happens. Man, therefore, draws from his mind the means of explaining that which presents itself to him through observation. He must pass beyond the mere observation, if he wants to comprehend it. Observation and thought are the two sources of our knowledge about things; and that holds good for all things and happenings, except only for the thinking consciousness itself. To that we cannot add by any explanation anything that does not lie already in the observation itself. It yields us the laws for all other things; it yields us at the same time its own laws also. If we want to demonstrate the correctness of a natural law, we accomplish this by distinguishing, arranging observations and perceptions, and drawing conclusions — that is, we form conceptions and ideas about the experiences in question with the help of thinking. As to the correctness of the thinking, thought itself alone decides. It is thus thought which, in regard to all that happens in the world, carries us beyond mere observation, though it does not carry us beyond itself. This fact is incompatible with the dualistic world-conception. The point which the supporters of this conception so often emphasise, namely, that the manifestations of the thinking consciousness are accessible to us through the inner sense of introspection, while we only comprehend physical and chemical happenings when we bring into the appropriate connections the facts of observation through logical, mathematical combination, and so on; in other words, through the results of the psychological domain: this fact is the very thing which they should never admit. For let us for once draw the right conclusion from the knowledge that observation transforms itself into self-observation when we ascend from the scientific into the psychological domain. If a universal world-reason underlay the phenomena of nature, or some other spiritual primordial being (for instance, Schopenhauer's will or von Hartmann's unconscious spirit), then it follows that the human thinking spirit must also be created by this world-being. An agreement of the conceptions and ideas which the mind of man forms from phenomena, with the actual laws proper to these occurrences, would only be possible if the ideal world-artist called forth in the human soul the laws according to which he had previously created the entire world. But then man could only know his own mental activity through observation of the root-being by whom he is shaped, and not through self-observation. Indeed, there could be no self-observation, but only observation of the intentions and purposes of the primordial being. Mathematics and logic, for example, ought not to be developed by means of man's investigating the inner, proper nature of mental connections, but by his deducing these psychological truths from the intentions and purposes of the eternal world-reason. If human understanding were only the reflection of an eternal mind, then it could never possibly ascertain its own laws through self-observation, but must needs explain them from out of the eternal reason. But whenever such an explanation has been attempted, it is simply human reason which has been transferred to the world outside. When the mystic believes that he rises to the contemplation of God by sinking down into his own inner being, in reality he merely sees his own spirit, which he makes into God; and when Eduard von Hartmann speaks of ideas which utilise the laws of Nature as their hodmen-helpers in order to shape the building of the world, these ideas are only his own, by means of which he explains the world. Because observation of the manifestations of mind is self-observation, therefore it follows that it is man's own spirit which expresses itself in the mind, and not any external reason. The monistic doctrine of evolution, however, is in complete agreement with the fact of self-observation. If the human soul has evolved itself slowly and step by step along with the organs of the soul out of lower conditions, then it is self-evident that we can explain its development from below scientifically, though we can discover the inner nature of that which emerges from the complex structure of the human brain only from the contemplation of this very nature itself. Had spirit been always present in a form resembling the human, and had it at last created its likeness in man alone, then we ought to be able to deduce the human spirit from the All-spirit; but if man's spirit has arisen as a new formation in the course of natural evolution, then we can understand its origin by following out its line of ancestry; we learn to know the stage at which it has at last arrived when we contemplate that spirit itself. A philosophy that understands itself, and turns its attention to an unprejudiced contemplation of the human spirit, thus yields a further proof of the correctness of the monistic world-conception. It is, however, quite incompatible with a dualistic natural science. (The further development and detailed proof of a monistic philosophy, the basic ideas of which I can only indicate here, I have given in my =The Philosophy of Freedom, Berlin, 1894, Verlag Emil Felber.) For one who understands aright the monistic world-conception, all the objections urged against it from the side of ethics lose all significance. Haeckel has repeatedly pointed out the injustice of such objections, and also called attention to the fact that the assertion that scientific monism must needs lead to ethical materialism, either rests upon a complete misunderstanding of the former, or else aims at nothing more than casting suspicion upon it. Naturally monism regards human conduct only as a part of the general happenings of the world. It makes that conduct just as little dependent upon a so-called higher moral world-order, as it makes the happenings in Nature dependent upon a supernatural order. “The mechanical or monistic philosophy maintains that, everywhere in the phenomena of human life, as in those of the rest of nature, fixed and unalterable laws rule, that everywhere there exists a necessary causal connection, a causal nexus of appearances, and that in accordance therewith the entire world knowable to us constitutes a uniform whole, a 'monon.' It maintains further that all phenomena are produced by mechanical causes, not by preconceived purposive causes. There is no such thing as a ‘free will’ in the ordinary sense. On the contrary, those very phenomena which we have accustomed ourselves to view as the freest and most independent, the manifestations of the human will, appear in the light of the monistic world-conception as subordinated to just as rigid laws as any other phenomenon of nature” (Haeckel, Anthropogenesis, p. 851 et seq.). It is the monistic philosophy which first shows the phenomenon of free will in the right light. As a bit cut out of the general happening of the world, the human will stands under the same laws as all other natural things and processes. It is conditioned according to natural law. But inasmuch as the monistic view denies the presence of higher, purposeful causes in the course of Nature, it at the same time also declares the will independent of such a higher world-order. The natural course of evolution leads the processes of Nature upwards to human self-consciousness. On that level it leaves man to himself; henceforward he can draw the impulses of his action from his own spirit. If a universal world-reason were ruling, then man also could not draw his goals from within himself, but only from this eternal reason. In the monistic sense man's action is hereafter determined by causal moments; in the ethical sense it is not determined, because Nature as a whole is determined not ethically but in accordance with natural law. The preliminary stages of ethical conduct are already to be found among the lower organisms. “Even though later the moral foundations have in man developed themselves much more highly, nevertheless their most ancient, prehistoric source lies, as Darwin has shown, in the social instincts of the animals” (Haeckel, Monism, p. 29). Man's moral conduct is a product of evolution. The moral instinct of animals perfects itself, like everything else in Nature, by inheritance and adaptation, until man sets before himself moral purposes and goals from out of his own spirit. Moral goals appear not as predetermined by a supernatural world-order, but as a new formation within the natural process. Regarded ethically, “that only has purpose which man has first endowed therewith, for only through the realisation of an idea does anything purposeful arise. But only in man does the idea become effective in a realistic sense. To the question, What is man's task in life? Monism can only answer, that which he sets himself. My mission in the world is no (ethically) predetermined one; on the contrary, it is, at every moment, that which I elect for myself. I do not enter on life's journey with a fixed, settled line of march” (cp. my The Philosophy of Freedom, p. 172 et seq.). Dualism demands submission to ethical commands derived from somewhere or other. Monism throws man wholly upon himself. Man receives ethical standards from no external world-being, but only from the depths of his own being. The capacity for creating for oneself ethical purposes may be called moral phantasy. Thereby man elevates the ethical instincts of his lower ancestors into moral action, as through his artistic phantasy he reflects on a higher level in his works of art the forms and occurrences of Nature. The philosophical considerations which result from the fact of self-observation thus constitute no refutation, but rather an important complement of the means of proof in favour of the monistic world-conception, derived from comparative anatomy and physiology. The famous pathologist, Rudolf Virchow, has taken up a quite peculiar position towards the monistic world-conception. After Haeckel had delivered his address on The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole at the fiftieth congress of German scientists and doctors, in which he ably expounded the significance of the monistic world-conception for our intellectual culture and also for the whole system of public instruction, Virchow came forward four days later as his opponent with the speech: The Freedom of Science in the Modern State. At first it seemed as if Virchow wanted monism excluded from the schools only, because, according to his view, the new doctrine was only an hypothesis and did not represent a fact established by definite proofs. It certainly seems remarkable that a modern scientist wants to exclude the doctrine of evolution from school-teaching on the ostensible ground of lack of unassailable proofs while at the same time speaking in favour of Church dogma. Does not Virchow even say (on p. 29 of the speech mentioned): “Every attempt to transform our problems into set formula, to introduce our suppositions as the basis of instruction, especially the attempt simply to dispossess the Church and replace its dogmas without more ado by a ‘descent-religion;’ yes, gentlemen, this attempt must fail entirely, and in its frustration this attempt will also bring with it the greatest dangers for the whole position of science!” One must needs, however, here raise the question — meaningless for every reasonable thinker — Have we more certain proofs for the Church's dogmas than for the “descent-religion?” But it results from the whole tone and style in which Virchow spoke that he was much less concerned about warding off the dangers which monism might cause to the teaching of the young than about his opposition on principle to Haeckel's world-conception as a whole. This he has proved by his whole subsequent attitude. He has seized upon every opportunity that seemed to him suitable to combat the natural history of evolution and to repeat his favourite phrase, “It is quite certain that man does not descend from the ape.” At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the German Anthropological Society, on 24th August, 1894, he even went so far as to clothe this dictum in the somewhat tactless words: “On the road of speculation people have come to the ape theory; one might just as well have arrived at an elephant theory or a sheep theory.” Of course, this utterance has not the smallest sense in view of the results of comparative zoology. “No zoologist,” remarks Haeckel, “would consider it possible that man could have descended from the elephant or the sheep. For precisely these two mammals happen to belong to the most specialised branches of hoofed animals, an order of mammalia which stands in no sort of direct connection with that of the apes or primates (excepting their common descent from an ancestral form common to the entire class).” Hard as it may be towards a meritorious scientist, one can only characterise such utterances as Virchow's as empty verbalism.
In combating the theory of descent, Virchow follows quite peculiar tactics. He demands unassailable proofs for this theory. But as soon as natural science discovers anything which is capable of enriching the chain of proofs with a fresh link, he seeks to weaken its probatory force in every way. The theory of descent sees in the famous skulls of Neanderthal, Spy, etc., isolated palaeontological remains of extinct races of lower men, which form a transition-link between the ape-like ancestor of man (Pithecanthropus) and the lower human races of the present day. Virchow declares these skulls to be abnormal, diseased formations, pathological productions. He even developed this contention in the direction of maintaining that all deviations from the fixed organic root-forms must be regarded as pathological formations. If, then, by artificial breeding we produce table-fruit from wild fruit, we have only produced a diseased object in Nature. One cannot prove more effectively the thesis of Virchow (hostile to any theory of evolution), “The plan of organisation is unalterable within the species, kind does not depart from kind,” than by declaring that what shows plainly how kind departs from kind, is not a healthy, natural product of evolution, but a diseased formation. Quite in accord with this attitude of Virchow's to the theory of descent were, further, his assertions in regard to the skeleton remains of the man-ape (Pithecanthropus erectus), which Eugen Dubois found in Java in 1894. It is true that these remains — the top of the skull, a thigh-bone, and some teeth — were incomplete; and a debate that was most interesting arose about them in the Zoological Congress at Leyden. Out of twelve zoologists, three were of opinion that the remains were those of an ape, three that they were those of a human being, while six defended the view that they belonged to an extinct transition form, between man and ape. Dubois set out in a most lucid manner the relation of this intermediate link between man and ape, on the one hand to the lower races of humanity, on the other to the known anthropoid apes. Virchow declared that the skull and the thigh-bone did not belong together; but that the former came from an ape, the latter from a human being. This assertion was refuted by well-informed palaeontologists, who, on the basis of the conscientious report of the find, expressed themselves as of opinion that not the smallest doubt could exist as to the origin of the bony remains from one and the same individual. Virchow tried to prove that the thigh-bone could only have come from a man, from the presence of a bony outgrowth which could only proceed from an illness that had been cured through careful human nursing. As against that, the palaeontologist Marsh showed that similar bony outgrowths occur also in wild apes. A third assertion of Virchow's, that the deep groove between the upper edge of the eye sockets and the low roof of the skull in Pithecanthropus bore witness to its simian nature, was refuted by the palaeontologist Nehring's showing that the same formation existed in a human skull from Santos in Brazil. Virchow's fight against the evolution doctrine appears indeed somewhat of a riddle when one reflects that this investigator, at the beginning of his career, before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, defended the doctrine of the mechanical basis of all vital activity. In Würzburg, where Virchow taught from 1848 to 1856, Haeckel sat “reverentially at his feet and first heard with enthusiasm from him that clear and simple doctrine.” But Virchow fights against the doctrine of transformation created by Darwin, which furnishes an all-embracing principle of explanation of that doctrine. When, in the face of the facts of palaeontology, of comparative anatomy and physiology, he constantly emphasises that “definite proof” is lacking, one can only point out, on the other side, that knowledge of the facts alone does indeed not suffice for the recognition of the doctrine of evolution, but there is needed in addition — as Haeckel remarks — a “philosophical understanding” as well. “The unshakable structure of true monistic science arises only through the most intimate interaction and mutual penetration of philosophy and experience” (Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 34, Vortrag). In any case, the campaign which Virchow has carried on for many years past against the doctrine of descent, with the applause of theological and other reactionaries, is more dangerous than all the mischief which a “descent-religion” can cause in unripe heads. A technical discussion on the point with Virchow is made difficult by the fact that, fundamentally, he remains standing on a bare negation, and in general does not bring forward any specific technical objections against the doctrine of evolution. Other scientific opponents of Haeckel's make it easier for us to attain clearness in regard to them because they give the reasons for their opposition, and we can thus recognise the mistakes in their inferences. Among these are to be reckoned Wilhelm His and Alexander Goette. His made his appearance in the year 1868 with his Researches as to the First Beginnings of the Vertebrate Body. His attack was primarily directed against the doctrine that the form-development of a higher organism from the first germ to the fully-developed condition can be explained from the evolution of the type. We ought not, according to him, to explain this development by regarding it as the outcome of the generations from which the single organism descends through inheritance and adaptation, but we should seek in the individual organism itself the mechanical causes of its becoming, without regard to comparative anatomy and ancestral history. His starts from the view that the germ, conceived as a uniform surface, grows unequally at different spots, and he asserts that in consequence of this unequal growth the complex structure of the organism results in the course of development. He says: “Take a simple layer and imagine that it possesses at different places a different impulse to enlargement. One will then be able to develop from purely mathematical and mechanical laws the condition in which the formation must find itself after a certain time. Its successive forms will accurately correspond to the stages of development which the individual organism runs through from the germ to the perfected condition. Thus we do not need to go beyond the consideration of the individual organism in order to understand its development, but can deduce this from the mechanical law of growth. “All formation, whether consisting in cleavage, in the formation of folds, or in complete separation, follows as a consequence from this fundamental law.” The law of growth brings into existence the two pairs of limbs as follows: “Their disposition is determined, like the four corners of a letter, by the crossing of four folds which limit and bound the body.” His rejects any help drawn from the history of the species, with the following justification: “When the history of development for any given form has thoroughly fulfilled the task of its physiological deduction, then it may rightly say of itself that it has explained this form as an individual form” (cp. His, Unsere Körperform und das physiologische Problem ihrer Entstehung). In reality, however, nothing whatever has been accomplished by such an explanation. For the question still remains: Why do different forces of growth work at different spots in the germ? They are simply assumed by His to exist. The explanation can only be seen in the fact that the relations of growth of the individual parts of the germ have been transmitted by inheritance from the ancestral animals, that therefore the individual organism runs through the successive stages of its development because the changes which its forefathers have undergone through long ages continue to operate as the cause of its individual becoming. To what consequences the view of His leads may best be seen from his theory as to the orbital lobule, by which the so-called “rudimentary organs” of the organism were to be explained. These are parts which are present in the organism without possessing any sort of significance for its life. Thus man has a fold of skin at the inner corner of his eye which is without any purpose for the functions of the organ of sight. He possesses also muscles corresponding to those by which certain animals can move their ears at will. Yet most people cannot move their ears. Some animals possess eyes which are covered over with a skin and thus cannot serve for seeing. His explains these organs as being such, to which “up to the present it has not been possible to assign any physiological role, analogous to the snippets, which, in cutting out a dress, cannot be avoided even with the most economical use of the stuff.” The evolution theory gives the only possible explanation of them. They are inherited from remote ancestors, in whom they subserved a useful purpose. Animals which to-day live underground and have no seeing eyes, descend from such ancestors as once lived in the light and needed eyes. In the course of many generations the conditions of life of such an organic stock have changed. The organisms have adapted themselves to the new conditions in which they can dispense with organs of sight. But these organs remain as heirlooms from an earlier stage of evolution; only in the course of time they have become atrophied, because they have not been used. These rudimentary organs form one of the strongest means of proof for the natural theory of evolution. If any deliberate intentions whatever had ruled in the building up of an organic form, whence came these purposeless parts? There is no other possible explanation of them, except that in the course of many generations they have gradually fallen into disuse. Alexander Goette, also, is of opinion that it is unnecessary to explain the developmental stages of the individual organism by the roundabout road through the history of the species. He deduces the shaping of the organism from a “law of form” which must superadd itself to the physical and chemical processes of matter in order to form the living creature. He endeavoured to defend this standpoint exhaustively in his Entwickelungs-geschichte der Unke (1875). “The essence of development consists in the complete but gradual introduction into the existence of certain natural bodies of a new moment, determined from without, viz., that of the law of form.” Since the law of form is supposed to superadd itself from without to the mechanical and physical properties of matter, and not to develop itself from these properties, it can be nothing else but an immaterial idea, and we have nothing given us therein which is substantially different from the creative thoughts, which, according to the dualistic world-conception, underlie organic forms. It is supposed to be a motive-power existing outside of organised matter and causing its development. That means, it employs the laws of matter as “helpers,” just like Eduard von Hartmann's idea. Goette is forced to call in the help of this “law of form,” because he believes that “the individual developmental history of organisms” alone explains and lies at the basis of their whole shaping. Whoever denies that the true causes of the development of the individual being are an historical result of its ancestral development, will be driven of necessity to have recourse to such ideal causes lying outside of matter. Weighty evidence against such attempts to introduce ideal formative forces into the developmental history of the individual, is afforded by the achievements of those investigators who have really explained the forms of higher living creatures on the assumption that these forms are the hereditary repetition of innumerable historical changes in the history of the species, which have occurred during long ages. A striking example in this respect is the “vertebral theory of the skull-bones,” already dimly anticipated by Goethe and Oken, but first set in the right light by Carl Gegenbauer on the basis of the theory of descent. He demonstrated that the skull of the higher vertebrates, and also that of man, has arisen from the gradual transformation of a “root-skull” whose form is still preserved by the “root-fishes,” or primordial gastrea, in the formation of the head. Supported by such results, Gegenbauer therefore remarks rightly: “The descent theory will likewise find a touch-stone in comparative anatomy. Hitherto there existed no observation in comparative anatomy which contradicts it; all observations rather lead us towards it. Thus that theory will receive back from comparative anatomy what it gave to its method: clearness and certainty” (cp. the Introduction to Gegenbauer's Vergleichende Anatomie). The descent theory has directed science to seek for the real causes of the individual development of each organism in its ancestry; and natural science on this road replaces the ideal laws of development which might be supposed to superpose themselves on organic matter, by the actual facts of the ancestral history, which continue to operate in the individual creature as formative forces. Under the influence of the theory of descent, science is ever drawing nearer to that great goal which one of the greatest scientists of the century, Karl Ernst von Baer, has depicted in the words: “It is one fundamental thought which runs through all forms and stages of animal evolution and dominates all particular conditions. It is the same fundamental thought which gathered together the scattered masses of the spheres in universal space and formed them into solar systems; the same thought caused the disintegrated dust on the surface of the planet to sprout forth into living forms. But this thought is nothing else but Life itself, and the words and syllables wherein it expresses itself are the various forms of that which lives.” Another utterance of Baer's gives the same conception in another form: “To many another will a prize fall. But the palm will be won by the fortunate man for whom it is reserved to trace back the formative energies of the animal body to the general forces and vital functions of the universe as a whole.” It is these same general forces of Nature which cause the stone lying on an inclined plane to roll downwards, which also, through evolution, cause one organic form to arise from another. The characteristics which a given form acquires through many generations by adaptation, it hands on by heredity to its descendants. That which an organism unfolds to-day, from within outwards, from its germinal dispositions, had developed itself outwardly in its ancestors in mechanical struggle with the rest of the forces of Nature. In order to hold this view firmly it is doubtless necessary to assume that the formations acquired in this external struggle should be actually transmitted by heredity. Hence the whole doctrine of evolution is called in question by the view, defended especially by August Weismann, that acquired characteristics are not inherited. He is of opinion that no external change which has occurred in an organism can be transmitted to its offspring, but that only can be inherited which is predetermined by some original disposition in the germ. In the germ-cells of organisms innumerable possibilities of development are held to lie. Accordingly, organic forms can vary in the course of reproduction. A new form arises when among the descendants possibilities of development come to unfoldment other than in the ancestors. From among the ever new forms arising in this way, those will survive which can best maintain the struggle for existence. Forms unequal to the struggle will perish. When out of a possibility of evolution a form develops itself which is specially effective in the battle of competition, then this form will reproduce itself; when that is not the case, it must perish. One sees that here causes operating on the organism from without are entirely eliminated. The reasons why the forms change lie in the germ. And the struggle for existence selects from among the forms coming into existence from the most diverse germ-dispositions those which are the fittest. The special characteristic of an organism does not lead us up to a change which has occurred in its ancestors as its cause, but to a disposition in the germ of that ancestor. Since, therefore, nothing can be effected from outside in the upbuilding of organic forms, it follows that already in the germ of the root-form, from which a race began its development, there must have lain the dispositions for the succeeding generations. We find ourselves once more in face of a doctrine of Chinese boxes one within another. Weismann conceives of the progressive process through which the germs bring about evolution, as a material process. When an organism develops, one portion of the germ-mass out of which it evolves is solely employed in forming a fresh germ for the sake of further reproduction. In the germ-mass of a descendant, therefore, a part of that of the parents is present, in the germ-mass of the parents a portion of that of the grandparents, and so on backwards to the root-form. Hence through all organisms developing one from another there is maintained an originally present germ-substance. This is Weismann's theory of the continuity and immortality of the germ-plasm. He believes himself to be forced to this view, because numerous facts appear to him to contradict the assumption of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. As one specially noteworthy fact he cites the presence of the workers, who are incapable of reproduction, among the communal insects — bees, ants, and termites. These workers are not developed from special eggs, but from the same as those from which spring the fruitful individuals. If the female larvae of these animals are very richly and nourishingly fed, they then lay eggs from which queens or males proceed. If the feeding is less generous, the result is the production of sterile workers. Now, it is very easy and obvious to seek the cause of this unfruitfulness simply in the less effective nourishment. This view is represented among others by Herbert Spencer, the English thinker, who has constructed a philosophical world-conception on the basis of natural evolution. Weismann holds this view to be mistaken. For in the worker-bee the reproductive organs do not merely remain behindhand in their development, but they actually become rudimentary; they do not possess a large proportion of the parts necessary for reproduction. But now, he contends, one can demonstrate in the case of other insects that defective nourishment in no way entails such a degeneration of organs. Flies are insects related to bees. Weismann reared the eggs laid by a female bluebottle in two separate batches, and fed the one plentifully, the other meagrely. The latter grew slowly and remained strikingly small. But they reproduced themselves. Hence it appears that in flies insufficient nourishment does not produce sterility. But then it follows also that in the root-insect, the common ancestral form, which in line with the evolution doctrine must be assumed for the allied species of bees and flies, this peculiarity of being rendered unfruitful by insufficient nourishment cannot have existed. On the contrary, this unfruitfulness must be an acquired characteristic of the bees. But at the same time there can be no question of any inheritance of this peculiarity, for the workers which have acquired it do not reproduce themselves, and accordingly, therefore, can pass on nothing by heredity. Hence the cause must be sought for in the bee-germ itself, why at one time queens and at another workers are developed. The external influence of insufficient nourishment can accomplish nothing, because it is not inherited. It can only act as a stimulus, which brings to development the preformed disposition in the germ. Through the generalisation of these and similar results, Weismann comes to the conclusion: “The external influence is never the real cause of the difference, but plays the part of the stimulus, which decides which of the available dispositions shall come to development. The real cause, however, always lies in preformed changes of the body itself, and these — since they are constantly purposeful — can be referred in their development only to processes of selection,” to the selection of the fittest in the struggle for existence. The struggle for existence (selection) “alone is the guiding and leading principle in the development of the world of organisms” (Aüssere Einflüsse der Entwickelungsreize, p. 49). The English investigators Francis Galton and Alfred Russel Wallace hold the same view as Weismann as to the non-inheritance of acquired characteristics and the omnipotence of selection. The facts which these investigators advance are certainly in need of explanation. But they cannot receive such an explanation in the direction indicated by Weismann without abandoning the entire monistic doctrine of evolution. But the objections urged against the inheritance of acquired characteristics are the least capable of driving us to such a step. For one only needs to consider the development of the instincts in the higher animals to convince oneself of the fact that such inheritance does occur. Look, for instance, at the development of our domestic animals. Some of them, as a consequence of living together with men, have developed mental capacities which cannot even be mentioned in connection with their wild ancestors. Yet these capacities can certainly not proceed from an inner disposition. For human influence, human training, comes to these animals as something wholly external. How could an inner disposition possibly come to meet exactly an arbitrarily determined action of man? And yet training becomes instinct, and this is inherited by the descendants. Such an example cannot be refuted. And countless others of the same kind can be found. Thus the fact of the inheritance of acquired characteristics remains such; and we must hope that further investigations will bring the apparently contradictory observations of Weismann and his followers into harmony with monism. Fundamentally, Weismann has only stopped half-way to dualism. His inner causes of evolution only have a meaning when they are ideally conceived. For, if they were material processes in the germ-plasm, it would be unintelligible why these material processes and not those of external happenings should continue to operate in the process of heredity. Another investigator of the present day is more logical than Weismann — namely, J. Reinke, who, in his recently published book, Die Welt als That; Umrisse einer Weltansicht auf naturwissenschaftlicher Grundlage, has taken unreservedly the leap into the dualistic camp. He declares that a living creature can never build itself up from out of the physical and chemical forces of organic substances. “Life does not consist in the chemical properties of a combination, or a number of combinations. Just as from the properties of brass and glass there does not yet emerge the possibility of the production of the microscope, so little does the origination of the cell follow from the properties of albumen, carbohydrates, fats, lecithin, Cholesterin, etc.” (p. 178 of the above-named work). There must be present besides the material forces also spiritual forces, or at least forces of another order, which give the former their direction, and so regulate their combined action that the organism results therefrom. These forces of another order Reinke calls “dominants.” “In the union of the dominants with the energies — the operations of the physical and chemical forces — there unveils itself to us a spiritualisation of Nature; in this mode of conceiving things culminates my scientific confession of faith” (p. 455). It is now only logical that Reinke also assumes a universal world-reason, which originally brought the purely physical and chemical forces into the relation in which they are operative in organic beings. Reinke endeavours to escape from the charge that through such a reason working from outside upon the material forces, the laws which hold good in the inorganic kingdom are rendered powerless for the organic world, by saying: “The universal reason, as also the dominants, make use of the mechanical forces; they actualise their creations only by the help of these forces. The attitude of the world-reason coincides with that of a mechanician, who also lets the natural forces do their work after he has imparted to them their direction.” But with this statement the kind of conformity to law which expresses itself in mechanical facts is once more declared to be the helper of a higher kind of law, in the sense of Eduard von Hartmann. Goette's law of form, Weismann's inner causes of development, Reinke's dominants are fundamentally just nothing else but derivatives of the thoughts of the world-creator who builds according to plan. As soon as one forsakes the clear and simple mode of explanation of the monistic world-conception, one inevitably falls a victim to mystical-religious conceptions, and of such Haeckel's saying holds good, that “then it is better to assume the mysterious creation of the individual species” (Uber unsere gegenwärtige Kenntniss vom Ursprung des Menschen, p. 30). Besides those opponents of monism who are of opinion that the contemplation of the phenomena of the world leads up to spiritual beings, who are independent of material phenomena, there are still others who seek to save the domain of a supernatural order hovering over the natural one, by denying entirely to man's power of knowing the capacity to understand the ultimate grounds of the world-happenings. The ideas of these opponents have found their most eloquent spokesman in Du Bois-Reymond. His famous “Ignorabimus” speech, delivered at the Forty-fifth Congress of German Scientists and Doctors (1872), is the expression of their confession of faith. In this address Du Bois-Reymond describes as the highest goal of the scientist the explanation of all world-happenings, therefore also of human thinking and feeling, by mechanical processes. If some day we shall succeed in saying how the parts of our brain lie and move when we have a definite thought or feeling, then the goal of natural explanation will have been reached. We can get no further. But, in Du Bois-Reymond's view, we have not therewith understood in what the nature of our spirit consists. “It seems, indeed, on superficial examination, as though, through the knowledge of the material processes in the brain, certain mental processes and dispositions might become intelligible. Among such I reckon memory, the flow and association of ideas, the consequences of practice, the specific talents, and so on. A minimum of reflection, however, shows that this is a delusion. Only with regard to certain inner conditions of the mental life, which are somehow of like significance with the outer ones through sense impressions, shall we thus be instructed, not with regard to the coming about of the mental life through these conditions. “What thinkable connection exists between the definite movements of definite atoms in my brain on the one hand; and, on the other, those for me primary, not further definable, not to be denied facts: ‘I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I taste something sweet, smell the odour of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red,’ and the equally immediate certainty flowing therefrom, ‘therefore I am!’? It is just entirely and for ever incomprehensible that it should not be indifferent to a number of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., atoms, how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move.” But who asked Du Bois-Reymond first to expel mind from matter, in order then to be able to observe that mind is not in matter? The simple attraction and repulsion of the tiniest particle of matter is force, therefore a spiritual cause proceeding from the substance. From the simplest forces we see the complicated human mind building itself up in a series of developments; and we understand it from this its becoming. “The problem of the origin and nature of consciousness is only a special case of the general problem in chief: that of the connection of matter and force” (Haeckel, Freie Wissenschaft and freie Lehre, p. 80). As a matter of fact, the problem is not at all, How does mind arise out of mindless matter? but, How does the more complex mind develop itself out of the simplest mental (or spiritual) actions of matter — out of attraction and repulsion? In the preface which Du Bois-Reymond has written to the reprint of his “Ignorabimus” speech, he recommends to those who are not contented with his declaration of the unknowableness of the ultimate grounds of being, that they should try to get along with the faith-conceptions of the supernatural view of the world. “Let them, then, make a trial of the only other way of escape, that of supernaturalism. Only that where supernaturalism begins, science ceases.” But such a confession as that of Du Bois-Reymond will always open the doors wide to supernaturalism. For whenever one sets a limit to the knowledge of the human mind, there it will surely start the beginning of its belief in the “no longer knowable.” There is only one salvation from the belief in a supernatural world-order, and that is the monistic insight that all grounds of explanation for the phenomena of the world lie also within the domain of these phenomena. This insight can only be given by a philosophy which stands in the most intimate harmony with the modern doctrine of evolution. |
GA 30. Two Essays on Haeckel |
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GA 30. Two Essays on Haeckel |
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Translated by Dr. Bertram Keightley In selecting such a theme as the one I propose for to-day, “Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, and Theosophy,” I am aware that to a student of spiritual life it is fraught with difficulties, and that the statements I am about to make may possibly give offence to so-called materialists and theosophists alike. And yet there seems to me a necessity that this matter should, once in a while, be approached from the theosophical point of view, since from one standpoint the “gospel” derived from Haeckel's researches has been made accessible to thousands upon thousands of mankind by means of his book, The Riddle of the Universe. Ten thousand copies of this work were sold within a very short time of its appearance, and it has been translated into many languages. Seldom, indeed, has a book of serious purpose found so wide a circulation. Now, if theosophy is to make clear its aims, it is but right that it should take into account so important a publication — one that concerns itself with the most profound questions of existence. Theosophy should deal with it comprehensively, and seek to express its attitude with regard to it. For after all, the theosophical conception of life is not combative but rather conciliatory, desirous of harmonising opposing views. Furthermore, I myself am in a very peculiar position with respect to Ernst Haeckel's conception of the universe, for I know well those feelings and perceptions which, partly by reason of a scientific consciousness, and partly from the general conditions of the world and the usual conceptions thereof, draw men as though by the power of some fascination towards such great and simple paths of thought as those from which Haeckel has constructed his conception of the universe. And here I may say that I should hardly have dared to speak my mind thus openly were I in any sense an opponent of Haeckel, or were it not that I am intimately acquainted with all that can be experienced in the process of adapting oneself to the wonderful edifice of his ideas. The very first thing that anyone bringing his attention frankly to bear upon the development of spiritual life is bound to recognise, is the moral power displayed in Haeckel's labours. For years past this man, imbued with an enormous amount of courage, has fought for the acceptance and the recognition of his conception of the universe — fought strenuously, having again and again to defend himself against the manifold obstacles that impeded his progress. On the other hand, we must not be unmindful of the fact that Haeckel's great powers of comprehensive expression are balanced by equally comprehensive powers of thought: the very qualities in which many scientists are deficient happen to be those with which he is very highly endowed. In gathering together the results of his researches and investigations under the one comprehensive title of a conception of the universe, he has boldly departed from those tendencies of scientific thought which have for several decades opposed any such undertaking; and this very departure must be recognised as an act of special significance. Another fact to be noted is, that I am placed in a singular position with regard to the theosophical conception of the universe when I speak about Haeckel; for anyone acquainted with the process of development through which the theosophical movement has passed will be aware of what sharp words and what opposition, not only on the part of theosophists in general, but on the part of the founder of the theosophical movement, Madame H. P. Blavatsky, were directed against the deductions which Ernst Haeckel draws from his work of investigation. Few publications touching cosmogony have been so violently opposed in the Secret Doctrine as that of Haeckel. You will understand that I speak here without prejudice, for I think that in parts of my book, Haeckel and his Opponents, as well as in my other work on Cosmogonies of the Nineteenth Century, I have to the fullest extent done justice to what I take to be the real truths contained in Haeckel's conception of the universe. I believe that I have sifted from his labours that which is fruitful, and that which is enduring. Consider the general attitude towards the conception of the world in so far as it is based upon scientific reasons. During the first half of the nineteenth century a totally different spiritual attitude prevailed from that known in the second half. Haeckel's appearance on the scene coincided with a time in which it was an easy thing for the new growth of so-called Darwinism to be subjected to materialistic interpretations. If, therefore, we realise how insistent was this tendency, at the very time when Haeckel was a young and enthusiastic student entering upon the pursuit of natural science, to reduce all discoveries in that domain of learning to a materialistic issue, the consequent bent towards materialism may well be understood, and may therefore lead us into a path of peace rather than of conflict. If you will consider those men who, about the middle of the nineteenth century, set themselves to confront the great riddle of humanity with calm, unprejudiced eyes, you will find two things: on the one hand, a state of absolute resignation in relation to the highest questions concerning a divine ordering of the world, such as immortality, freedom of will, origin of life — a resignation, in short, with regard to all the actual riddles of the universe. On the other hand you will discover, co-existing with this attitude of resignation, remnants of an ancient religious tradition, and this even among students of natural science. Bold adventuring towards investigation of such questions from the scientific point of view was, during the first half of the nineteenth century, to be met with only among German philosophers, such as Schelling and Fichte, as well as Oken, who, by the way, was a pioneer of freedom without equal, not alone upon this subject, but in many paths of life. All attempts made by men in the present day towards the fundamentalising of world-theories are to be found in still bolder outline among the works of Oken. And yet all this was animated by a certain subtleness — a breath, as it were, of that old spiritualism which is clearly conscious that, behind and beyond all that our senses can perceive, all that can be investigated by means of instruments, there still lurks something spiritual to be sought for. Haeckel has again and again told us how distinctly the mind of his great teacher — that deep student of natural science, Johannes Müller, of imperishable memory — was tinged with this subtle breath. You can read in Haeckel's own writings how he had been struck (it was at the time when he was busy at the Berlin University and studying the anatomy of men and animals under Johannes Müller) by the great resemblance apparent not alone in outward form, but also by that similarity which compels attention in the evolution of form. He tells us how he had remarked to his master that such resemblance as this must hint at some mysterious kinship between man and beast, and that the answer made by Johannes Müller, who had searched so deeply into Nature, had been: “Ah! he who lays bare the secret of species will indeed have reached the highest summit.” What we have to do is to attune ourselves to the spirit, the motive, of such a seeker; of one who assuredly would never have halted had he beheld a prospect of entering into possession of that secret. On one other occasion, when teacher and pupil were travelling together on some journey of investigation, Haeckel again referred to the close relationship existing between animals; and Johannes Müller once more replied very much to the same effect. In alluding to this I only wish to draw your attention to a certain attitude of mind. If you will look back among the writings of any well-known naturalist belonging to the first half of the nineteenth century — for instance, to those of Burdach — you will find that, in spite of all the careful and elaborate minutiae appertaining to natural science, whenever the kingdom of life comes to be considered, the suggestion is ever present that here no mere physical and chemical powers are in operation, but that something higher has to be taken into account. When, however, improvements in microscopes made it possible for man to observe, to a far greater extent than heretofore, all those curious formations which serve to distinguish living creatures, showing that we have to do with a fine web of the minutest animalcules, and that this actually composes the physical body — when, as I have said, so much was made visible, the attitude of the scientific mind underwent a change. This physical body, which serves plants and animals as their garment, now resolved itself, so far as the scientist was concerned, into a tissue of cells. This discovery as to the life of these cells was made by naturalists about the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century, and, seeing that it was possible to ascertain so much about the lives of such animalcules by the exercise of the senses, assisted by the aid of the microscope, it required but a step further for that which acts as the organising principle in these living creatures to be lost sight of, because no physical sense, nothing external, proclaimed its presence. At that time there was no Darwinism, yet it was owing to the impression made by this great advance in the domain of practical research that we find a natural science grounded in materialism coming into vogue during the 'forties and 'fifties. It was then thought that what could be perceived by the senses, and thus explained, could be understood by the whole world. Things that now seem puerile created then the most intense sensation, and became, so to speak, a gospel for humanity. Such words as “energy” and “matter” became popular by-words, while men like Büchner and Moleschott were recognised authorities. It was considered an evidence of childish fancy, belonging to earlier epochs of the human race, to suppose that anything that could be minutely examined with the eye was possessed of aught beyond what was actually visible. Now, you must bear in mind that, side by side with all discovery, feelings and sensations play a great part in the development of mental life. Anyone who may be inclined to think that cosmogonies are the result of bold calculations of reason makes a mistake: in all such matters the heart is active, and the secret sources of education also contribute their share. Humanity has, during its latest phase of development, been passing through a materialistic stage of education. The actual beginning of this stage is traceable far back, it is true; nevertheless, it reached its apex in the time of which we are speaking. We call this epoch of materialistic education the age of enlightenment. Man had now — and this was the final result of the Christian conception of the universe — to find his foothold upon the firm ground of reality: the God whom he had so long sought beyond the clouds he was now bidden to seek within his inner consciousness. This had a far-reaching effect upon the entire development of the nineteenth century, and anyone interested in psychological changes and caring to study the development of humanity at that time will be enabled to understand how all the events and occurrences which then followed upon each other, such as the struggle for freedom in the 'thirties and 'forties, can but be classed as separate storms and convulsions of the feelings which were the result of that newly developed sense of physical reality, and which were bound to run their appointed course. We have to deal with a tendency in human education that sought in the first place forcibly to eradicate from the human heart every aspiration towards a spiritual life. It is not from natural science that those deductions, pronouncing the world to consist of naught but what can be perceived by the senses, have been drawn; they are a consequence of the educational teaching obtaining at that time. Materialism had become interwoven with explanations relating to the facts of natural science. Anyone who will take the trouble to study these things as they really are, bringing to bear upon the subject a mind free from prejudice, will be in a position to see for himself that the case is as I am about to set forth, but it is impossible for me in the space of one short hour to deal with the matter exhaustively. The whole of the stupendous advance made in the realms of natural science, of astronomy, of physics and chemistry, due to spectrum analysis, to a greater theoretical knowledge of heat, and to that teaching concerning the development of living organisms known to us as the Darwinian theory — all these come within this period of materialism. Had these discoveries been made at a time when people still thought as they did about the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a time when a greater spiritual sensitiveness prevailed, then these discoveries would have been so construed as to furnish proofs positive of the working of the spirit in Nature — indeed, by very reason of the wonderful discoveries in natural science the supremacy of spirit would have been deemed incontestably established. It is clear, then, that scientific investigations with regard to Nature need not necessarily and under all circumstances lead to materialism. It was merely because so many leaders of civilisation at that time were materialistically inclined that these discoveries became interpreted in a materialistic way. Materialism was imported into natural science, and naturalists, such as Ernst Haeckel, accepted it unconsciously. Darwin's discovery per se need not have tended to materialism. Materialism points to Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, as its chief support. Now, it is clear that if a thinker inclining to materialism approached these discoveries, he would be sure to invest Darwinism with a materialistic colouring, and it was due to Haeckel's boldly materialistic attitude of thought that Darwinism has received its present materialistic interpretation. It was an event of great moment when Haeckel, in the year 1864, announced the connection between man and the higher animals (apes). At that time this could but mean that man was descended from the higher animals. But since that day scientific thought has undergone a curious process of development. Haeckel has adhered to his opinion that man is the descendant of those higher animals, they being in their turn the developments of still lower types, reaching back finally to the very simplest forms of life. It is thus that Haeckel constructs man's entire genealogical tree — in fact, the lineal descent of all humanity. By this means everything of a spiritual nature became for him excluded from the world, except as a reflection of already-existing material things. And yet Haeckel, having in the depths of his being a peculiar spiritual consciousness working side by side with his materialistic “thinking mind,” casts about for some means of help, since these two parts of his being have never been able to “come into line;” he has not succeeded in bringing about a working partnership between them. For this reason he comes to the conclusion that even the smallest living creature may be accredited with a sort of consciousness, but he does not explain to us how the complex human consciousness is developed out of that which is latent in the smallest living creature. In the course of a conversation Haeckel once said: “People are always objecting to my materialism, but I don't deny the Spirit, nor do I deny Life: I only want people to observe that when you place matter in a retort everything in it soon begins to work and effervesce — to ferment.” That remark shows plainly enough that Haeckel possesses a spiritual as well as a scientific mind. Among those who, at the time of Darwin's supremacy, proclaimed their adherence to the theory of man's descent from the higher animals was the English scientist Huxley. He asserted the close similarity in external structure between man and the higher animals to be even greater than that existing between the higher and lower species of apes, and that we could but come to the conclusion that a line of descent existed leading from the higher animals to man. In more recent times scientists have discovered new facts, but even then those feelings which for centuries past have educated the human heart and soul were undergoing a change, a transformation. Hence it was that Huxley in the 'nineties, not long before his death, gave utterance to the following view — a strange one, coming from him: “We see therefore,” he observed, “that in Nature life is conditioned by a series of steps, proceeding from the simplest and most incomplete up to the complicated and perfected. We cannot follow this continuity, yet why should not this continuous line proceed onwards in a region which we are unable to survey?” In these words the way is indicated by which man may, by the pursuit of natural science, rise to the idea of a Divine being, standing high above man — a being farther removed from man than man himself is from the one-celled organism. Huxley had once said: “I would rather have descended from such ancestors, ancestors similar to the brute, than from such as deny the human intelligence.” Thus do precepts and concepts, all the soul thinks and feels, alter in the course of time. Haeckel has continued his work of research along the lines he first adopted. In the year 1867 he had already published his popular work, The Natural History of Creation, and from this book much may be learnt. It teaches the laws by which the living kingdoms in Nature are linked one to the other. We can see through the veil shrouding the grey past and bring what is existent into relation with what is extinct, of which only the last remains may now be found upon the earth. Haeckel has recognised this accurately. That world-history, here in a wider sense playing its part, I can only elucidate by making use of an illustration. You may find it no more accurate than are most comparative illustrations, yet it fairly bears out my meaning. Let us suppose that a writer on art appeared upon the scene and produced a book in which he treated with consummate skill the whole period stretching from the days of Leonardo da Vinci to modern times. He presents to our minds all that has been achieved in the pursuit of art during that period, and we believe ourselves enabled to look within at the development of man's creative powers. Let us, then, go further, and imagine that another person came along and criticised the descriptive work, saying: “But, look here! Everything this art historian has put on record never happened at all! These are all descriptions of pictures that don't exist! What use have I for such imaginings? One has to investigate reality in order to arrive at the true method of adequately presenting art in its historical bearings. I will therefore investigate the remains of Leonardo da Vinci himself, and try to reconstruct the body, and then judge by the contours of his skull what brain he is likely to have had and how it may probably have functioned.” In the same way the events described by the art historian are depicted by the professor of anatomy. There may have been no mistake. All may have been correct. Well, then, in that case, says the anatomist, we must “fight to a finish” against this idealisation of our art historian; we must combat his phantasy, his imagination, for it amounts to credulity and superstition to allow anyone to attempt to make us believe that besides the form of Leonardo da Vinci there was some “gaseous vortex” to be apprehended as a soul. Now, this illustration, in spite of its manifest absurdity, really hits the mark. This is the position in which everyone finds himself who chooses to assert his belief in the Natural History of Creation as the only accurate one. Nor can this illustration be negatived by merely indicating its weak points. They are there, perhaps, but that is beside the point. What is of importance is that the obvious should for once be presented according to its inner relationship; and that is what Haeckel has done in a full and exhaustive way. It has been done in such a manner that anyone wishing to see, can see, how active is the Spirit in the moulding of the form, where, to all appearances, matter alone reigns supreme. Much may be learnt from that; we may learn how to acquire spiritually knowledge as to the world's material combination, how to acquire it with earnestness, dignity, and perseverance. Anyone going through Haeckel's Anthropogenesis sees how form builds itself up, as it were, from the simplest living creature to the most complicated, from the simplest organism to man. He who understands how to add the Spirit to what is already granted by the materialist may in this example of “Haeckelism” have the opportunity of studying the best elementary theosophy. The results of Haeckel's research constitute, so to speak, the first chapter of theosophy. Far better than by any other method, we can arrive at a comprehension of the growth and transformation of organic forms by a study of his works. We have every reason to call attention to the great things which have been achieved through the progress of this profound study of Nature. At the time when Haeckel had constructed this wonderful edifice, the world was facing the deeper riddles of humanity as problems without solution. In the year 1872 Du Bois-Reymond, in a speech memorable for its brilliant rhetoric, alluded to the limits placed to natural science and to our knowledge of Nature. During the past decade the utterances of few men have been so much discussed as has this lecture with the celebrated “Ignorabimus.” It was a momentous event, and offered a complete contrast to Haeckel's own development and to his theory of the descent of man. In another lecture Du Bois-Reymond has tabulated seven great questions as to existence, questions which the naturalist can only answer in part, if at all. These seven “riddles of the universe” are:
It was in connection with these riddles of the universe put forward by Du Bois-Reymond that Haeckel gave his book the title of The Riddle of the Universe. His desire was to give the answer to the questions raised by Du Bois-Reymond. There is a specially important passage in the lecture Du Bois-Reymond delivered on the “Limits of Inquiry into Nature,” which will enable us to step across into the field of theosophy. At the time when Du Bois-Reymond was lecturing at Leipsic before an assembly of natural scientists and medical men, the spirit of natural science was seeking after a purer, higher, and freer atmosphere — such an atmosphere as might lead to the theosophical cosmogony. On that occasion Du Bois-Reymond spoke as follows: — “If we study man from the point of view of natural science, he presents himself to us as a working compound of unconscious atoms. To explain man in accordance with natural science means to ‘understand’ this atomic motion to its uttermost degree.” He considered that if one were in a position to indicate the precise way in which the atoms moved at any given place in the brain, while saying, for instance, “I think,” or “Give me an apple” — if this could be done, then the problem would, according to natural science, have been solved. Du Bois-Reymond calls this the “astronomic” understanding of man. Even as a miniature firmament of stars would be the appearance of these active groups of human atoms. But what has not here been taken into consideration is the question as to how sensations, feelings, and thoughts arise in the consciousness of the man of whom, let us say, I perfectly well know that his atoms move in such and such a manner. That natural science can as little determine as it can the manner in which consciousness arises. Du Bois-Reymond concluded with the following words: — “In the sleeping man, who is not conscious of the sensation expressed in the words ‘I see red,’ we have before us the physical group of the active members of the body. With regard to this sleeping body, we need not say, ‘We cannot know’ — ‘Ignorabimus!’ We are able to comprehend the sleeping man. Man awake, on the contrary, is incomprehensible to the scientist. In the sleeping man something is absent which is nevertheless present in the man awake: I allude to the consciousness through which he appears before us as a spiritual being.” At that time, owing to a lack of courage in matters concerning natural science, further progress was impossible; there was no question as yet of theosophy, because natural science had, in concise terms, defined the boundary, had set a barrier at the precise spot up to which it wished to proceed in its own fashion. It was owing to this self-limitation of science that theosophical cosmogony had, about this time, its beginning. No one is going to maintain that man, when he goes to sleep “ceases to be,” and on re-awaking in the morning “resumes existence.” And yet Du Bois-Reymond says that something which is present in him by day is absent during the night. It is here that the theosophical conception of the universe is enabled to assert itself. Sense-consciousness is in abeyance in the sleeping man. As, however, the man of science uses as a prop for his argument that which brings about this sense-consciousness, he is unable to say anything concerning the spirituality that transcends it, because he lacks precisely the knowledge of that which makes of man a spiritual being. By the use of such means as serve for natural science we are unable to investigate matters spiritual. Natural science depends upon what may be demonstrated to the senses. What can no longer be sensed when man falls asleep, cannot be the object of scientific investigation. It is in this something, no longer perceptible in the sleeping man, that we must seek for that entity by which man becomes a spiritual being. No mental representation can be made of what transcends the purely material and passes beyond the knowledge of the senses, until organs, of which the scientist can know nothing if he only depends on his sense-perceptions — spiritual eyes — are developed; eyes which are able to see beyond the confines of the senses. For this reason we have no right to say, “Here are the limits of cognition;” but merely, “Here are the limits of sense-perception.” The scientist perceives by means of his senses, but he is no spiritual observer; he must become one. become a “seer.” in order that he may see what is spiritual in man. This is the bourne towards which tends all profound wisdom in the world; not seeking the mere widening of its radius where actual material knowledge is concerned, but striving towards the raising of human faculty. This also is the great difference between what is taught by present-day natural science and what is taught by theosophy. Natural science says: “Man has senses with which he perceives, and a mind whereby he is enabled to connect the evidences of his senses. What does not come within the scope of these lies beyond the ken of natural science.” Theosophy takes a different view of the case. It says: “You scientists are perfectly right, so long as you judge from your point of view, just as right as the blind man would be from his in saying that the world is devoid of light and colour. We make no objection to the standpoint of natural science, we would only place it in juxtaposition to the view taken by theosophy, which asserts that it is possible — nay, that it is certain — that man is not obliged to remain stationary at the point of view he occupies to-day; that it is possible for organs — spiritual eyes — to develop after a similar fashion to that in which those physical sense-organs of the body, the eyes and ears, have been developed; and once these new organs are developed, higher faculties will make themselves apparent.” This must be taken on faith at first — nay, it need not even be believed; it may just be accepted as an assertion in an unprejudiced manner. Nevertheless, as true as it is that all believers in the Natural History of Creation have not beheld all that is therein presented to them as fact (how many of them have actually investigated these facts?), so true is it that these facts concerning a knowledge of the super-sensual can be explained to everyone. The ordinary man, held in bondage by his senses, cannot possibly gain admittance to this realm. It is only by the aid of certain methods of investigation that the spiritual world opens to the seeker. Thus, man must transform himself into an instrument for those higher powers, one able to penetrate into worlds hidden from those still enthralled by their physical senses. To such as can accomplish this, visions of a quite distinctive nature will appear. The ordinary human being is not capable of seeing for himself, or of consciously recognising things about him, when his senses are wrapped in slumber; but when he applies occult methods of investigation this incapacity ceases, and he begins to receive quite consciously impressions of the astral world. There is at first a state of transition, familiar to all, between that exterior life of sense cognisance and that life which even in the most profound state of slumber is not quite extinguished. This state of transition is the chaos of dreams. To most people these will appear as mere reflections of what they have been experiencing during the previous day. Indeed, you will ask, how should a man be able to receive any new experiences during sleep, since the inner self has as yet no organs of cognition? But still, something is there — life is there. That which left the body when sleep wrapped it round has memory, and this remembrance rises before the sleeper in pictures more or less fantastic and confused. (Should anyone desire more information on this subject, it will be found in my books entitled The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Results, Theosophical Publishing Society, 161, New Bond Street, W.) 2Now published by the Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., in one volume, The Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Cloth, Crown 8vo, pp. 221, 6s. Now, in place of this chaos, order and harmony will, in the course of time, be brought about; an order and a harmony governing this region of dreams, and this will be a sign that the person in question is beginning to develop spiritually. Then he will cease to see the mere aftermath of reality, grotesquely portrayed; he will see things which have in ordinary life no existence. Those who desire to remain within the boundary of the senses will, of course, say, “But they are only dreams!” Yet, if they, by such means, obtain an insight into the loftiest secrets of creation, it may surely be a matter of indifference to them whether they gain this through the medium of a dream or by means of the senses. Let us, for instance, suppose that Graham Bell had invented the telephone in a state of dream-consciousness. That would have been of no moment whatever to-day, for the telephone itself in any case is an important and useful invention. Clear and regular dreaming is therefore the beginning, and if in the stillness of the night hours you have come to “live in your dreams,” if, after a time, you have habituated yourself to a cognisance of worlds quite other than this, then will soon come a time when you will learn, by these new experiences, to step forth into actuality. Then the whole world will assume a new aspect, and you will be as sensible of this change as you would be of threading your way through a row of solid chairs, through anything your senses may at this moment be aware of in their vicinity. Such is the condition of anyone who has acquired a new state of consciousness. Something new, a new kind of personality, has awakened within him. In the course of his further development a stage will at length be reached where not only the curious apparitions of the higher worlds pass before the spiritual eye as visions of light, but the tones also of those higher worlds become audible, telling their spiritual names, and able to convey to the seer a new meaning. In the language of the mysteries, this is expressed in the words, “Man sees the sun at midnight;” which is to say, that for him there are no longer any obstacles in space to prevent him from seeing the sun when on the other side of the world. Then, too, is the work of the sun, acting within the universe, made plain to him, and he becomes aware of that harmony of the spheres, that truth to which the Pythagoreans bore witness. Tones and sounds, this music of the spheres, now become, for him, actual. Poets who were also seers have known of the existence of something approaching this music, and only those who can grasp Goethe's meaning from this point of view will be able to understand those passages, for instance, occurring in the “Prologue in Heaven” (see Faust, pt. I), which may be taken either as poetic phraseology or as a lofty truth. Where Faust is a second time introduced into the world of spirits, he speaks of these sounds:
Here we have the connection between natural science and theosophy. Du Bois-Reymond has pointed to the fact that the sleeper only can be an object for the experiments of natural science. But if man should begin to open his inner senses, if he should come to see and hear that there is such a thing as spiritual actuality, then indeed will the whole edifice of elementary theosophy, so wonderfully, constructed by Haeckel — a structure none can admire more profoundly than I — then will this great work glow with a new glory, revealing, as it must, an entirely new meaning. According to this marvellous structure we see a simple living creature as the archetype, yet we may trace back that creature spiritually to an earlier condition of consciousness. I will now explain what theosophy holds as the doctrine of the descent of man. It is obvious that in a single lecture like the present no “proofs” can be advanced, and it is also natural that to all who are only acquainted with the theories commonly advanced on this subject everything I say will appear fantastic and highly improbable. All theories thus advanced originated, however, in the leading circles of materialistic thought, and many who would probably resent the suggestion of materialism as utterly foreign to their nature, are nevertheless (and indeed quite comprehensibly so) caught in a net of self-delusion. The true theosophical teaching concerning evolution is, in our day, hardly known; and when our opponents speak of it, he who does know is at once able to recognise by the objections raised that he is dealing with a caricature of this doctrine of evolution. For all such as merely acknowledge a soul, or spirit, to which expression is given within the human, or animal organism, the theosophical mode of representation must be utterly incomprehensible, and every discussion touching that subject is, with such persons, quite fruitless. They must first free themselves from the state of materialistic suggestion in which they live, and must make themselves acquainted with the fundamental attitude of theosophical thought. Just as the methods of research employed by physical science trace back the organism of the physical body into the dim distance of primeval times, so it is the mode of theosophical thought to delve into the past with regard to the soul and the spirit. Now, the latter method does not lead to any conclusions antagonistic or contradictory to the facts advanced by natural science; only with the materialistic interpretations of these facts it can have nothing to do. Natural science traces the descent of the physical living being backwards, arriving by this course at organisms of a less and less complicated kind. Natural science declares: “The perfect living being is a development of these simpler and less complicated ones;” and, as far as physical structure is concerned, this is true, although the hypothetical forms of primeval ages of which materialistic science speaks do not entirely conform with those known to theosophical research. This, however, need not concern us at the present moment. From the physical standpoint theosophy also acknowledges the relationship of man with the higher mammals, with the man-like apes. But there can be no question of the descent of our humanity from a creature of the mind and soul calibre of the ape, as we know it. The facts are quite otherwise, and everything that materialism puts forward of this nature rests upon an error of thought. This error may be cleared up by means of a simple comparison sufficient for our purpose, though trite. We will imagine two persons, one morally deficient and intellectually insignificant; the other endowed with a high standard of morality and of considerable intellectuality. We will assume that some fact or other confirms the relationship of these two. Now, I ask you, will the inference be drawn that the one in every way more highly endowed is descended from one who was of the standard described? Never! We may think it a surprising fact that they are brothers. We may find, however, that they had a father who was not of exactly the same standard as either of the brothers, and in that case one will be found to have worked his way up, the other to have degenerated. Materialistic science makes a similar mistake to that here indicated. Facts known to it induce the acceptance of a connection between ape and man, yet from this it should not draw the conclusion that man is descended from the ape-like animals. What should be accepted is a primeval creature, a common physical ancestor, from the stock of which the ape has degenerated, while man has been the ascending “brother.” Now, what was there in that primeval creature to cause this ascendance to the human on the one hand, the sinking into the ape kingdom on the other? Theosophy answers, “The soul of man himself did this.” Even then the soul of man was present, at a time when, on the face of this physical earth, the creatures possessing the highest sense of development were these common ancestors of man and ape. From amid the multitude of these ancestors the best types were capable of subjecting themselves to the soul's progress, the rest were not. Thus it happens that the present-day human soul has a “soul-ancestor” just as the body has its physical forebear. It is true that, so far as the senses are concerned, those “soul-ancestors” could not, according to our present-day observations, have been perceptible within our bodies. They still belonged in a sense to “higher worlds,” and they were also possessed of other capabilities and powers than those of the present human soul. They lacked the mental activity and the moral sense now evident. Such souls could conceive no way of fashioning instruments from the things in the outer world; they could create no political states. The soul's activity still consisted to a great extent in transforming the archetype of those ancestral bodies themselves. It laboured at improving the incomplete brain, enabling it at a later period to become the seat of thought activities. As the soul of to-day, directed towards external things, constructs machines, etc., so did that ancestral soul labour at constructing the body of the human ancestor. The following objection can, of course, be raised: “Why, then, does not the soul at the present day work at its body to the same extent?” The reason for its not doing so is that the energy used at a former time for the transforming of the organs has since been directing its whole effort upon external things in the mastery and regulation of the forces of Nature. We may therefore ascribe a twofold descent to man in primeval times. His spiritual birth is not coeval with the perfecting of his organs of sense. On the contrary, the “soul” of man was already present at a time when those physical “ancestors” inhabited the earth. Figuratively speaking, we may say that the soul “selected” a certain number of such “ancestors” as seemed best fitted for receiving the external corporeal expression distinguishing the present-day man. Another branch of these ancestors deteriorated, and in its degenerate condition is now represented by the anthropoid apes. These, then, form, in the true sense of the word, branch lines of the human ancestry. Those ancestors are the physical forebears of man, but this is due only to the capacity for reconstruction which they had primarily received from the human soul within. Thus is man physically descended from the “archetype,” while spiritually he is the descendant of the “ancestral soul.” But we can go even further back with regard to the genealogical tree of living creatures, and we shall then arrive at a physically still more imperfect ancestor. Yet, at the time of this physical ancestor, too, the “soul-ancestor” of man was existent. It was this latter which raised the physical ancestor to the level of the ape, again outstripping its less adaptable brother in the race for development, and leaving him behind on a lower stage of creation. To such as these belong those present-day mammals of a lower grade than that of the apes. Thus we may go further and further back into primeval times, even to a time when upon this earth, then bearing so different an aspect, existed those most elementary of creatures from which Haeckel claims the development of all higher beings. The soul-ancestor of man was also a contemporary of these primitive creatures; it was already living when the “archetype” transformed the serviceable types, leaving behind at different stages those incapable of further development. In actual truth, therefore, the entire sum of earth's living creatures are the descendants of man, within whom that which in this day “thinks and acts” as soul originally brought about the development of living beings. When our earth came into existence, man was a purely spiritual being; he began his career by building for himself the simplest of bodies. The whole ladder of living creatures represents nothing but the outgrown stages through which he has developed his bodily structure to its present degree of perfection. The creatures of the present day differ widely in appearance from that of their ancestors at those particular stages where they branched off from the human tree. Not that they have remained stationary, for they have deteriorated in accordance with an inevitable law, which, owing to the lengthy explanation it would involve, cannot be entered into here. But the greatest interest attaches to the fact that through theosophy we arrive, so far as man's outward form is concerned, at a genealogical tree not altogether unlike Haeckel's. Haeckel, however, presupposes as the physical ancestor of man nothing but a hypothetical animal. Yet the truth is that at all those points where Haeckel uses the names of animals, the still undeveloped forebears of man should be installed; for those animals, down to the meanest living creatures, are but deteriorated and degenerate forms occupying those lower stages through which the human soul has passed on its upward journey. Externally, therefore, the resemblance between Haeckel's genealogical tree and that of theosophy is sufficiently striking, though internal evidences show them to be as wide apart as the poles. Hence the reasons why Haeckel's deductions are so eminently suited for the learning of sound elementary theosophy. One need do no more than master, from the theosophical point of view, the facts he has elucidated in so masterly a manner, and then raise his philosophy to a higher and nobler plane. If Haeckel seeks to criticise and belittle any such “higher” philosophy, he shows himself to be simply puerile — after the fashion, for instance, of a person who, not having got beyond the multiplication table, yet presumed to assert: “What I know is true, and all higher mathematics are only imaginary nonsense.” No theosophist desires to deny or contradict the elementary facts of natural science; but the crux of the matter is that the scientist, deluded by materialistic suggestions, does not even know what theosophy is talking about. It depends upon a man himself what kind of philosophy he adopts. Fichte has put this in so many words:
The same thought has been voiced by Goethe in a well-known phrase:
and an expression of Feuerbach, if rightly conceived, proclaims that each one sees God's image after his own likeness. The slave to his senses sees God in accordance with those senses; the spiritual observer sees the Spirit deified. “Were lions, bulls, and oxen able to set up gods, their gods would resemble lions, bulls, and oxen,” was the remark of a Greek philosopher long ages ago. The fetish-worshipper, too, has as his highest principle something we may call spiritual, but he has as yet not come to seek for this within himself, and this is why he has not got beyond beholding his god as anything more than a block of wood. The fetish-worshipper cannot raise his prayer above what he can inwardly feel, for he still regards himself as on the same level as the block of wood. And those who can see no more than a whirl of atoms, those to whom the highest resolves itself into tiny dots of matter, such as these, too, have missed recognition of the highest principle within themselves. It is true that Haeckel places before us in all his works the information he has honestly acquired, so that to him must be accorded “les defauts de ses qualites.” The sterling worth of his teaching will live, its negative qualities will vanish. Taken from the higher point of view, one might say that the fetish-worshipper worships in his fetish a lifeless object, while the materialistic adherent of the theory of atoms worships not alone one “little god” but a whole host of them, which he calls atoms! The superstition of the one is about as great as that of the other; for the materialistic atom is no more than a fetish, and the wooden block is made up of atoms too. Haeckel says in one passage: “We see God in the stone, in the plant, in the brute, in man — God is everywhere,” yet he only sees God as he can comprehend Him. How enlightening here are Goethe's words, when he says:
Thus does the materialist mark the whirling atoms in stone, in plant, in animal, and in man, possibly, too, in every work of art, and claim for himself a knowledge of a monistic cosmogony that has overcome the ancient superstitions. Yet theosophists have a monistic cosmogony too; and we can say, in the same words as Haeckel uses, that we see God in the stone, in the plant, in the brute, and in the man; but what we see are no whirling atoms, but the living God, the spiritual God, whom we seek outside in Nature, because we can also seek Him within ourselves. |
GA 30. Two Essays on Haeckel |
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GA 30. Two Essays on Haeckel |
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This translation of two of Dr. Steiner's works on Haeckel was originally published by the Theosophical Society in one volume with an essay on the Working of Karma. By the courtesy of the Theosophical Society and with the kind consent of the translator, Dr. Bertram Keightley, LL.D., M.A., the parts referring to Haeckel are now reprinted in this volume. In the original German the two parts were published separately:
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GA 31. Individualist Anarchism |
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GA 31. Individualist Anarchism |
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Dear Herr Mackay! Four years ago, after the appearance of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, you expressed to me your agreement with my direction of ideas. I openly admit that this gave me deeply felt joy. For I have the conviction that we agree, with respect to our views, every bit as far as two natures fully independent of one another can agree. We have the same goals, even though we have worked our way through to our world of thought on quite different paths. You too feel this. A proof of this is the fact that you chose me to address the above letter to. I value being addressed by you as like-minded. Hitherto I have always avoided using even the term “individualist anarchism” or “theoretical anarchism” for my world view. For I put very little stock in such designations. If one states one’s views clearly and positively in one’s writings: what is then the need of also designating these views with a convenient word? After all, everyone connects quite definite traditional notions with such a word, which reproduce only imprecisely what the particular personality has to say. I speak my thoughts; I characterize my goals. I myself have no need to name my way of thinking with a customary word. If, however, I were to say, in the sense in which such things can be decided, whether the term “individualist anarchist” is applicable to me, I would have to answer with an unconditional “Yes.” And because I lay claim to this designation for myself, I too would like to say, just at this moment, with a few words, exactly what distinguishes “us,” the “individualist anarchists,” from the devotees of the so-called “propaganda of the deed.” I do know that for rational people I shall be saying nothing new. But I am not as optimistic as you, dear Herr Mackay, who simply say, “No government is so blind and foolish as to proceed against a person who participates in public life solely through his writings and does so in the sense of a reshaping of conditions without bloodshed.” You have, take no offense at me for this my only objection, not considered with how little rationality the world is governed. Thus I would indeed like to speak once distinctly. The “individualist anarchist” wants no person to be hindered by anything in being able to bring to unfolding the abilities and forces that lie in him. Individuals should assert themselves in a fully free battle of competition. The present state has no sense for this battle of competition. It hinders the individual at every step in the unfolding of his abilities. It hates the individual. It says: I can only use a person who behaves thus and thus. Whoever is different, I shall force him to become the way I want. Now the state believes people can only get along if one tells them: you must be like this. And if you are not like that, then you’ll just have to be like that anyway. The individualist anarchist, on the other hand, holds that the best situation would result if one would give people free way. He has the trust that they would find their direction themselves. Naturally he does not believe that the day after tomorrow there would be no more pickpockets if one would abolish the state tomorrow. But he knows that one cannot by authority and force educate people to freeness. He knows this one thing: one clears the way for the most independent people by doing away with all force and authority. But it is upon force and authority that the present states are founded. The individualist anarchist stands in enmity toward them, because they suppress liberty. He wants nothing but the free, unhindered unfolding of powers. He wants to eliminate force, which oppresses the free unfolding. He knows that at the final moment, when social democracy draws its consequences, the state will have its cannons work. The individualist anarchist knows that the representatives of authority will always reach for measures of force in the end. But he is of the conviction that everything of force suppresses liberty. That is why he battles against the state, which rests upon force and that is why he battles just as energetically against the “propaganda of the deed,” which no less rests upon measures of force. When a state has a person beheaded or locked up one can call it what one will on account of his opinion, that appears abominable to the individualist anarchist. It naturally appears no less abominable to him when a Luccheni stabs a woman to death who happens to be the Empress of Austria. It belongs to the very first principles of individualist anarchism to battle against things of that kind. If he wanted to condone the like, then he would have to admit that he does not know why he is battling against the state. He battles against force, which suppresses liberty, and he battles against it just the same when the state does violence to an idealist of the idea of freedom, as when a stupid vain youngster treacherously murders the likeable romantic on the imperial throne of Austria. To our opponents it cannot be said distinctly enough that the “individualist anarchists” energetically battle against the so-called “propaganda of the deed.” There is, apart from the measures of force used by states, perhaps nothing as disgusting to these anarchists as these Caserios and Lucchenis. But I am not as optimistic as you, dear Herr Mackay. For I cannot usually find that speck of rationality that is, after all, required for such crude distinctions as that between “individualist anarchism” and “propaganda of the deed,” where I would like to seek it. In friendly inclination, yours Magazin für Literatur 30 September 1898 |
GA 31. University Education and the Demands of the Present Time |
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GA 31. University Education and the Demands of the Present Time |
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Translated by Thomas O'Keefe We are now living in the time of reformation. The “people” want, from the bottom up, to bring about new conditions of governance from above down. Therefore, one should not be surprised when thoughts of reformation emerge from various quarters regarding the most conservative institutions of our public life: the universities. I am not speaking of such superfluous things as the so-called “Lex Arons.” It will be a harmless law, if not abused. But what law does not give rise to abuse! If one abuses this law, then it will be harmful; if one does not abuse it, then it is unnecessary. But it is futile constantly to pose the question to the legislative assemblies: “Toward what end?” After all, one also had the wish to do something, to speak about something, and ... to need to reform something. I would like to speak about something else, which appears to me important because it originates from a man who has experience in the relevant area, and whose occupation it is to generate improvement in one sphere to which he has devoted himself with all his powers. Ernst Bernheim has just published a pamphlet that deals with the theme of University Education and the Demands of the Present Time. The author knows how to uncover deeply-seated detrimental tendencies. Detrimental tendencies that are known. For he proceeds from the notion that “today” students skip class more often than was the case in any previous time, and that this, measured by the most modest of standards, is desirable. And — certainly in contrast to many of his colleagues — the author does not seek for the cause of this in the students themselves, but rather in the peculiarities of university education. He discovers that the lecture courses for the students have become too uninteresting. He finds the reason for this fact in the trend toward specialization in the sciences, which currently necessitates that the lecturers compose their so-called private lectures from narrow areas of study involving the elaboration of infinite details. Earlier, such a course would cover, for example, general world history, general history of ancient times, of the Middle Ages, and of more recent times; now hardly anyone undertakes to provide such courses of study; one lectures on the history of the Middle Ages, for example, in particular fragments, such as the history of the migrations of peoples, of the time of the German Caesar, from the Interregnum until the Reformation — indeed, in still shorter fragments; in addition, constitutional history, economic history, church and art history are studied in separate colleges. Now this is very well and good for one who wants to train as a researcher and — to stay with our example — has chosen to take something of the Middle Ages into his field of work; but one who intends to become a teacher and wants to take his state examination in history sees himself so overwhelmed with this kind of lecture course — in which he must get to know antiquity, the modern era, etc., in the same manner — that he does not know which way to turn. At first, he sets out with the confidence of a newcomer — boldly taking on five, six, seven private lectures; but soon his strength does not suffice to be attentive and taking notes for so many hours a day. In the best case, one will be so sensible as to abandon several of the courses completely and limit oneself to the regular attendance of only a few — and thereby hold as a top priority the commitment not to allow the task originally taken up to fall into such complete lawlessness that one ultimately ends up disgusted with the whole thing, discouraged and indifferent. Bernheim raises these conditions in relation to the question of whether it is at all justified to maintain the establishment of private lectures, considering the now sweeping specialization of the sciences. Today, if the teacher intends to bring forward all the details of his area of expertise, then he has to lose himself to such a great extent in the specific that he has no time left to offer the great, essential vantage-points according to his personal understanding. In addition to this is the fact that it is no longer even necessary to provide this sum of details in the lecture courses. For we currently possess compendiums of these details, which are excellent, and whose current level of comprehensiveness would earlier have been inconceivable to us. On the basis of these considerations, Bernheim comes to the conclusion that one should structure the private lectures differently. They should comprise much shorter periods of time. In them, one should renounce the enumeration and critical evaluation of the particular details, and instead set oneself the task of holding orientation lectures in which one develops an overall understanding of a certain subject, a general point of view. By contrast, [the author further proposes that] the practical exercises at the universities, the work in seminars, should see a greater expansion. Such work should not, as is currently the case, begin only in later semesters, but already at the beginning of university studies. Here the students should learn the methods of scientific investigation; here one should concretely train oneself to become a researcher. I do not fail to see the benefits to be had from a college education established in the sense of these suggestions. In particular, it seems to me very advantageous to reformulate the private lectures in the sense envisioned by the author. For it cannot be denied that much of what is said today at the lectern is actually easier and more convenient to gain from the existing manuals. And most importantly, such a reform will better allow the personality of the university professor to emerge into the foreground. And nothing works on people more than precisely the personality. A receptive spirit will be more inspired by a peculiar, even if ever so subjectively colored perspective, than by a myriad of “objective” facts. In contrast, I would not so readily agree with Bernheim's proposal concerning the practical exercises. It may be beneficial for the average student if, under the guidance of a professor, he or she were to learn the method of research, down into the details. But one should not always concern oneself with the average person.One could do so if it were true that the gifted spirit breaks through no matter what, even against all fettering hindrances. But that is not in fact true.The things one does to help the average person hinder the gifted spirit in the unfolding of his individuality. They cause his originality to atrophy. And if the institutional examinations require one to have proof — as is the case for the present writer — of having taken part in a certain number of practical exercises, then for the one who intends to go his own way, such a measure becomes a shackle. The focal point of university education must consist in the personal inspiration brought about through the professor. Thus we see the value of lectures on general themes that are furthermore delivered from a personally-won point of view. As for the exercises, let those partake in them who have the need. But at the time of examination, do not ask someone what he has pushed himself through during his time of study, but rather what he is now able to achieve. How he has attained his competence must be a matter of indifference. One can offer practical exercises for those who need them, but one should not make them into an obligation for those who are able to meet the requirements of the examination without them. |
GA 34. Reincarnation and Karma |
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GA 34. Reincarnation and Karma |
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(a): It is necessary to make this statement, for today superficial readers are numerous, and they are always ready to read all manner of nonsense into the expositions of a thinker, even though the latter takes great pains to express himself precisely. For that reason I should like to add here quite especially that it would never occur to me to fight those who, resting upon scientific premises, follow up the problem of “spontaneous generation.” But even though it may be a fact that somehow mere “lifeless” substances do unite to form living albumin, this does not prove that, rightly understood, Redi's conception is wrong.(b): The adherents of Wundt must feel disagreeably affected by my speaking of “soul” in such outmoded fashion, while they swear by the words of their master who just recently has proclaimed that we ought not to speak of “soul” since, after the “mythologizing of phenomena has evaporated into the transcendental,” nothing has remained of this “super-real” soul substance but an “interrelated occurrence.” Well, Wundt's wisdom resembles the assertion that we must not speak of “lily” because we are merely concerned with color, form, the process of growth, and so forth. (Wundt, Naturwissenschaft und Psychologie, Natural Science and Psychology.)(c): There may be many people today who wish to inform themselves quickly about the teachings of spiritual science. They will find it very bothersome if we first present to them explicitly the natural-scientific facts in a light that will make them serve as the basis upon which an anthroposophical view may be erected. They say: we wish to hear something about spiritual science, but you give us natural-scientific facts which every educated person knows. This is an objection which shows very clearly how little our contemporaries are inclined to think seriously. In reality, those who make the above statement know nothing at all about the far-reaching consequences of their knowledge. The astronomer knows nothing about the consequences of astronomy, the chemist nothing about those of chemistry, and so forth. There is no salvation for them but to be modest and to listen quietly when they are shown that, because of the superficiality of their thinking, they know nothing at all about that which in their conceit they believe they have completely exhausted. — And even anthroposophists often believe that it is unnecessary to prove the convictions of karma and reincarnation by means of the findings of natural science. They do not know that this is the task of the human groups to which the inhabitants of Europe and America belong; and that without this basis the members of these groups cannot truly attain to spiritual-scientific insight. Whoever wishes merely to repeat what he hears from the great Teachers of the East, cannot become an anthroposophist within the European-American culture.(d): The writer of this essay cannot be charged with failure to acknowledge the great merits of our modern believers for the very reason that he himself, in his book Die Raetsel der Philosophie (Riddles of Philosophy), has presented these merits in connection with the spiritual evolution of their epoch, fully appreciating and acknowledging their value.(e): I can imagine that there are many people who consider themselves standing at the pinnacle of knowledge and who consider the present exposition “completely unscientific.” I can understand these people, for I know that this objection forces itself upon anyone who has no experience in the domain of the supersensible and who, at the same time, lacks the necessary restraint and modesty to admit that he still might learn something. Such people, however, should at least refrain from stating that the processes described here “contradict the intellect” and “cannot be proved by the intellect.” The intellect cannot do anything but combine and systematize facts. Facts can be experienced, but not be “proved by the intellect.” With the intellect, you cannot prove a whale. Either you must have seen it yourself, or you must let somebody describe it who has seen one. It is the same with the supersensible facts. If we have not yet attained to the point where we can see them ourselves, then we must permit them to be described to us. I can assure everyone that the supersensible facts which I describe in the subsequent pages are just as “factual” for the one whose higher senses are opened, as is the whale. |
GA 34. Reincarnation and Karma |
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GA 34. Reincarnation and Karma |
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Francesco Redi, the Italian natural scientist, was considered a dangerous heretic by the leading scholars of the seventeenth century because he maintained that even the lowest animals originate through reproduction. He narrowly escaped the martyr-destiny of Giordano Bruno or Galileo. For the orthodox scientist of that time believed that worms, insects, and even fish could originate out of lifeless mud. Redi maintained that which today is generally acknowledged: that all living creatures have descended from living creatures. He committed the sin of recognizing a truth two centuries before science found its “irrefutable” proof. Since Pasteur has carried out his investigations, there can be no longer any doubt about the fact that those cases were merely illusion in which people believed that living creatures could come into existence out of lifeless substances through “spontaneous generation”. The life germs entering such lifeless substances escaped observation. With proper means, Pasteur prevented the entrance of such germs into substances in which, ordinarily, small living creatures come into existence, and not even a trace of the living was formed. Thus it was demonstrated that the living springs only from the life germ. Redi had been completely correct. Today, the spiritual scientist, the anthroposophist, finds himself in a situation similar to that of the Italian scientist. On the basis of his knowledge, he must maintain in regard to the soul what Redi maintained in regard to life. He must maintain that the soul nature can spring only from the soul. And if science advances in the direction it has taken since the seventeenth century, then the time will come when, out of its own nature, science will uphold this view. For — and this must be emphasized again and again — the attitude of thought which underlies the anthroposophical conception of today is no other than the one underlying the scientific dictum that insects, worms and fish originate from life germs and not from mud. The anthroposophical conception maintains the postulate: “Every soul originates out of the soul nature,” in the same sense and with the same significance in which the scientist maintains: “Everything living originates out of the living.” A1It is necessary to make this statement, for today superficial readers are numerous, and they are always ready to read all manner of nonsense into the expositions of a thinker, even though the latter takes great pains to express himself precisely. For that reason I should like to add here quite especially that it would never occur to me to fight those who, resting upon scientific premises, follow up the problem of “spontaneous generation.” But even though it may be a fact that somehow mere “lifeless” substances do unite to form living albumin, this does not prove that, rightly understood, Redi's conception is wrong. Today's customs differ from those of the seventeenth century. The attitudes of mind underlying the customs have not changed particularly. To be sure, in the seventeenth century, heretical views were persecuted by means no longer considered human today. Today, spiritual scientists, anthroposophists, will not be threatened with burning at the stake: one is satisfied in rendering them harmless by branding them as visionaries and unclear thinkers. Current science designates them fools. The former execution through the inquisition has been replaced by modern, journalistic execution. The anthroposophists, however, remain steadfast; they console themselves in the consciousness that the time will come when some Virchow will say: “There was a time — fortunately it is now superceded — when people believed that the soul comes into existence by itself if certain complicated chemical and physical processes take place within the skull. Today, for every serious researcher this infantile conception must give way to the statement that everything pertaining to the soul springs from the soul.” One must by no means believe that spiritual science intends to prove its truths through natural science. It must be emphasized, however, that spiritual science has an attitude of mind similar to that of true natural science. The anthroposophist accomplishes in the sphere of the soul life what the nature researcher strives to attain in the domains perceptible to the eyes and audible to the ears. There can be no contradiction between genuine natural science and spiritual science. The anthroposophist demonstrates that the laws which he postulates for the soul life are correspondingly valid also for the external phenomena of nature. He does so because he knows that the human sense of knowledge can only feel satisfied if it perceives that harmony, and not discord, rules among the various phenomenal realms of existence. Today most human beings who strive at all for knowledge and truth are acquainted with certain natural-scientific conceptions. Such truths can be acquired, so to speak, with the greatest ease. The science sections of newspapers disclose to the educated and uneducated alike the laws according to which the perfect animals develop out of the imperfect, they disclose the profound relationship between man and the anthropoid ape, and smart magazine writers never tire of inculcating their readers with their conception of “spirit” in the age of the “great Darwin.” They very seldom add that in Darwin's main treatise there is to be found the statement: “I hold that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from one primordial form into which the creator breathed the breath of life.” (Origin of Species, Vol. II, chapter XV.) — In our age it is most important to show again and again that Anthroposophy does not treat the conceptions of “the breathing in of life” and the soul as lightly as Darwin and many a Darwinian, but that its truths do not contradict the findings of true nature research. Anthroposophy does not wish to penetrate into the mysteries of spirit-life upon the crutches of natural science of the present age, but it merely wishes to say: “Recognize the laws of the spiritual life and you will find these sublime laws verified in corresponding form if you descend to the domain in which you can see with eyes and hear with ears.” Natural science of the present age does not contradict spiritual science; on the contrary, it is itself elemental spiritual science. Only because Haeckel applied to the evolution of animal life the laws which the psychologists since ancient days have applied to the soul, did he achieve such beautiful results in the field of animal life. If he himself is not of this conviction, it does not matter; he simply does not know the laws of the soul, nor is he acquainted with the research which can be carried on in the field of the soul. 1While research has been undertaken in the “field of the soul” by modern psychologists, the only difficulty is that modern psychology denies the existence of the soul apart from the physical body. (Editor.) The significance of his findings in his field is thereby not diminished. Great men have the faults of their virtues. Our task is to show that Haeckel in the field where he is competent is nothing but an anthroposophist. — By linking up with the natural-scientific knowledge of the present age, still another aid offers itself to the spiritual scientist. The objects of outer nature are, so to speak, to be grasped by our hands. It is, therefore, easy to expound their laws. It is not difficult to realize that plants change when they are transplanted from one region into another. Nor is it hard to visualize that a certain animal species loses its power of eyesight when it lives for a certain length of time in dark caves. By demonstrating the laws which are active in such processes, it is easy to lead over to the less manifest, less comprehensible laws which we encounter in the field of the soul life. — if the anthroposophist employs natural science as an aid, he merely does so in order to illustrate what he is saying. He has to show that anthroposophic truths, with respective modifications, are to be found in the domain of natural science, and that natural science cannot be anything but elemental spiritual science; and he has to employ natural-scientific concepts in order to lead over to his concepts of a higher nature. The objection might be raised here that any inclination toward present-day natural-scientific conceptions might put spiritual science into an awkward position for the simple reason that these conceptions themselves rest upon a completely uncertain foundation. It is true: There are scientists who consider certain fundamental principles of Darwinism as irrefutable, and there are others who even today speak of a “crisis in Darwinism.” The former consider the concepts of “the omnipotence of natural selection” and “the struggle for survival” to be a comprehensive explanation of the evolution of living creatures; the latter consider this “struggle for survival” to be one of the infantile complaints of modern science and speak of the “impotence of natural selection.” — If matters depended upon these specific, problematic questions, it were certainly better for the anthroposophist to pay no attention to them and to wait for a more propitious moment when an agreement with natural science might be achieved. But matters do not depend upon these problems. What is important, however, is a certain attitude, a mode of thought within natural-scientific research in our age, certain definite great guiding lines, which are adhered to everywhere, even though the thoughts of various researchers and thinkers concerning specific questions diverge widely. It is true: Ernst Haeckel's and Virchow's conceptions of the “genesis of man” diverge greatly. But the anthroposophical thinker might consider himself fortunate if leading personalities were to think as clearly about certain comprehensive viewpoints concerning the soul life as these opponents think about that which they consider absolutely certain in spite of their disagreement. Neither the adherents of Haeckel nor those of Virchow search today for the origin of worms in lifeless mud; neither the former nor the latter doubt that “all living creatures originate from the living,” in the sense designated above. — In psychology we have not yet advanced so far. Clarity is completely lacking concerning a view point which might be compared with such scientific fundamental convictions. Whoever wishes to explain the shape and mode of life of a worm knows that he has to consider its ovum and ancestors; he knows the direction in which his research must proceed, although the viewpoints may differ concerning other aspects of the question, or even the statement may be made that the time is not yet ripe when definite thoughts may be formed concerning this or that point. — Where, in psychology, is there to be found a similar clarity? The fact that the soul has spiritual qualities, just as the worm has physical ones, does not cause the researcher to approach — as he should — the one fact with the same attitude of mind as he approaches the other. To be sure, our age is under the influence of thought habits which prevent innumerable people, occupied with these problems, from entering at all properly upon such demands. — True, it will be admitted that the soul qualities of a human being must originate somewhere just as do the physical ones. The reasons are being sought for the fact that the souls of a group of children are so different from one another, although the children all grew up and were educated under identical circumstances; that even twins differ from one another in essential characteristics, although they always lived at the same place and under the care of the same nurse. The case of the Siamese Twins is quoted, whose final years of life were, allegedly, spent in great discomfort in consequence of their opposite sympathies concerning the North-American Civil War. We do not deny that careful thought and observation have been directed upon such phenomena and that remarkable studies have been made and results achieved. But the fact remains that these efforts concerning the soul life are on a par with the efforts of a scientist who maintains that living creatures originate from lifeless mud. In order to explain the lower psychic qualities, we are undoubtedly justified in pointing to the physical forebears and in speaking of heredity, just as we do in the case of bodily traits. But we deliberately close our eyes to the most important aspect of the matter if we proceed in the same direction with respect to the higher soul qualities, the actually spiritual in man. We have become accustomed to regard these higher soul qualities as a mere enhancement, as a higher degree of the lower ones. And we therefore believe that an explanation might satisfy us which follows the same lines as the explanation offered for the soul qualities of the animal. It is not to be denied that the observation of certain soul functions of higher animals may easily lead to this mistaken conception. We only need draw attention to the fact that dogs show remarkable proof of a faithful memory; that horses, noticing the loss of a horse shoe, walk of their own accord to the blacksmith who has shod them before; that animals which are shut up in a room, can by themselves open the door; we might quote many more of these astonishing facts. Certainly, the anthroposophist, too, will not refrain from admitting the possibility of continued enhancement of animal faculties. But must we, for that reason, obliterate the difference between the lower soul traits which man shares with the animal, and the higher spiritual qualities which man alone possesses? This can only be done by someone who is completely blinded by the dogmatic prejudice of a “science” which wishes to stick fast to the facts of the coarse, physical senses. Simply consider what is established by indisputable observation, namely, that animals, even the highest-developed ones, cannot count and therefore are unable to learn arithmetic. The fact that the human being is distinguished from the animal by his ability to count was considered a significant insight even in ancient schools of wisdom. — Counting is the simplest, the most insignificant of the higher soul faculties. For that very reason we cite it here, because it indicates the point where the animal-soul element passes over into the spirit-soul element, into the higher human element. Of course, it is very easy to raise objections here also. First, one might say that we have not yet reached the end of the world and that we might one day succeed in what we have not yet been able to do, namely, to teach counting to intelligent animals. And secondly, one might point to the fact that the brain has reached a higher stage of perfection in man than in the animal, and that herein lies the reason for the human brain's higher degrees of soul activity. We may fully concur with the persons who raise these objections. Yet we are in the same position concerning those people who, in regard to the fact that all living creatures spring from the living, maintain over and over again that the worm is governed by the same chemical and physical laws that govern the mud, only in a more complicated manner. Nothing can be done for a person who wishes to disclose the secrets of nature by means of trivialities and what is self-evident. There are people who consider the degree of insight they have attained to be the most penetrating imaginable and to whom, therefore, it never occurs that there might be someone else able to raise the same trivial objections, did he not see their worthlessness. — No objection can be raised against the conception that all higher processes in the world are merely higher degrees of the lower processes to be found in the mud. But just as it is impossible for a person of insight today to maintain that the worm originates from the mud, so is it impossible for a clear thinker to force the spirit-soul nature into the same concept-pattern as that of the animal-soul nature. Just as we remain within the sphere of the living in order to explain the descent of the living, so must we remain in the sphere of the soul-spirit nature in order to understand the soul-spirit nature's origin. There are facts which may be observed everywhere and which are bypassed by countless people without their paying any attention to them. Then someone appears who, by becoming aware of one of these facts, discovers a fundamental and far-reaching truth. It is reported that Galileo discovered the important law of the pendulum by observing a swinging chandelier in the cathedral of Pisa. Up to that time, innumerable people had seen swinging church lamps without making this decisive observation. What matters in such cases is that we connect the right thoughts with the things we see. Now, there exists a fact which is quite generally accessible and which, when viewed in an appropriate manner, throws a clear light upon the character of the soul-spirit nature. This is the simple truth that every human being has a biography, but not the animal. To be sure, certain people will say: Is it not possible to write the life story of a cat or a dog? The answer must be: Undoubtedly it is; but there is also a kind of school exercise which requires the children to describe the fate of a pen. The important point here is that the biography has the same fundamental significance in regard to the individual human being as the description of the species has in regard to the animal. Just as I am interested in the description of the lion-species in regard to the lion, so am I interested in the biography in regard to the individual human being. By describing their human species, I have not exhaustively described >Schiller, Goethe, and Heine, as would be the case regarding the single lion once I have recognized it as a member of its species. The individual human being is more than a member of his species. Like the animal, he shares the characteristics of his species with his physical forebears. But where these characteristics terminate, there begins for the human being his unique position, his task in the world. And where this begins, all possibility of an explanation according to the pattern of animal-physical heredity ceases. I may trace back Schiller's nose and hair, perhaps even certain characteristics of his temperament, to corresponding traits in his ancestors, but never his genius. And naturally, this does not only hold good for Schiller. This also holds good for Mrs. Miller of Gotham. In her case also, if we are but willing, we shall find soul-spiritual characteristics which cannot be traced back to her parents and grand-parents in the same way we can trace the shape of her nose or the blue color of her eyes. It is true, Goethe has said that he had received from his father his figure and his serious conduct of life, and from his little mother his joyous nature and power of fantasy, and that, as a consequence, nothing original was to be found in the whole man. But in spite of this, nobody will try to trace back Goethe's gifts to father and mother — and be satisfied with it — in the same sense in which we trace back the form and manner of life of the lion to his forebears. — This is the direction in which psychology must proceed if it wishes to parallel the natural-scientific postulate that “all living creatures originate from the living” with the corresponding postulate that “everything of the nature of the soul is to be explained by the soul-nature.” We intend to follow up this direction and show how the laws of reincarnation and karma, seen from this point of view, are a natural-scientific necessity. It seems most peculiar that so many people pass by the question of the origin of the soul-nature simply because they fear that they might find themselves caught in an uncertain field of knowledge. They will be shown what the great scientist Carl Gegenbaur has said about Darwinism. Even if the direct assertions of Darwin may not be entirely correct, yet they have led to discoveries which without them would not have been made. In a convincing manner Darwin has pointed to the evolution of one form of life out of another one, and this has stimulated the research into the relationships of such forms. Even those who contest the errors of Darwinism ought to realize that this same Darwinism has brought clarity and certainty to the research into animal and plant evolution, thus throwing light into dark reaches of the working of nature. Its errors will be overcome by itself. If it did not exist, we should not have its beneficial consequences. In regard to the spiritual life, the person who fears uncertainty concerning the anthroposophical conception ought to concede to it the same possibility; even though anthroposophical teachings were not completely correct, yet they would, out of their very nature, lead to the light concerning the riddles of the soul. To them, too, we shall owe clarity and certainty. And since they are concerned with our spiritual destiny, our human destination, our highest tasks, the bringing about of this clarity and certainty ought to be the most significant concern of our life. In this sphere, striving for knowledge is at the same time a moral necessity, an absolute moral duty. David Friedrich Strauss endeavored to furnish a kind of Bible for the “enlightened” human being in his book, Der alte und neue Glaube (Faith — Ancient and Modern). “Modern faith” is to be based on the revelations of natural science, and not on the revelations of “ancient faith” which, in the opinion of this apostle of enlightenment, have been superceded. This new Bible has been written under the impression of Darwinism by a personality who says to himself: Whoever, like myself, counts himself among the enlightened, has ceased, long before Darwin, to believe in “supernatural revelation” and its miracles. He has made it clear to himself that in nature there hold sway necessary, immutable laws, and whatever miracles are reported in the Bible would be disturbances, interruptions of these laws; and there cannot be such disturbances and interruptions. We know from the laws of nature that the dead cannot be reawakened to life: therefore, Jesus cannot have reawakened Lazarus. — However, — so this enlightened person continues — there was a gap in our explanation of nature. We were able to understand how the phenomena of the lifeless may be explained through immutable laws of nature; but we were unable to form a natural conception about the origin of the manifold species of plants and animals and of the human being himself. To be sure, we believed that in their case also we are concerned merely with necessary laws of nature; but we did not know their nature nor their mode of action. Try as we might, we were unable to raise reasonable objection to the statement of Carl von Linné, the great nature-researcher of the eighteenth century, that there exist as many “species in the animal and plant kingdom as were originally created in principle.” Were we not confronted here with as many miracles of creation as with species of plants and animals? Of what use was our conviction that God was unable to raise Lazarus through a supernatural interference with the natural order, through a miracle, when we had to assume the existence of such supernatural deeds in countless numbers. Then Darwin appeared and showed us that, through immutable laws of nature (natural selection and struggle for life), the plant and animal species come into existence just as do the lifeless phenomena. Our gap in the explanation of nature was filled. Out of the mood which this conviction engendered in him, David Friedrich Strauss wrote down the following statement of his “ancient and modern belief”: “We philosophers and critical theologians spoke to no purpose in denying the existence of miracles; our authoritative decree faded away without effect because we were unable to prove their dispensability and give evidence of a nature force which could replace them in the fields where up to now they were deemed most indispensable. Darwin has given proof of this nature force, this nature process, he has opened the door through which a fortunate posterity will cast the miracle into oblivion. Everybody who knows what is connected with the concept ‘miracle’ will praise him as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race.” These words express the mood of the victor. And all those who feel like Strauss may disclose the following view of the “modern faith”: Once upon a time, lifeless particles of matter have conglomerated through their inherent forces in such a way as to produce living matter. This living matter developed, according to necessary laws, into the simplest, most imperfect living creatures. These, according to similarly necessary laws, transformed themselves further into the worm, the fish, the snake, the marsupial, and finally into the ape. And since Huxley, the great English nature researcher, has demonstrated that human beings are more similar in their structure to the most highly developed apes than the latter are to the lower apes, what then stands in the way of the assumption that the human being himself has, according to the same natural laws, developed from the higher apes? And further, do we not find what we call higher human spiritual activity, what we call morals, in an imperfect condition already with the animal. May we doubt the fact that the animals — as their structure became more perfect, as it developed into the human form, merely on the basis of physical laws — likewise developed the indications of intellect and morals to be found in them to the human stage? All this seems to be perfectly correct. Although everybody must admit that our knowledge of nature will not for a long time to come be in the position to conceive of how what has been described above takes place in detail, yet we shall discover more and more facts and laws; and thus the “modern faith” will gain more and firmer supports. Now it is a fact that the research and study of recent years have not furnished such solid supports for this belief; on the contrary, they have contributed greatly to discredit it. Yet it holds sway in ever extending circles and is a great obstacle to every other conviction. There is no doubt that if David Friedrich Strauss and those of like mind are right, then all talk of higher spiritual laws of existence is an absurdity; the “modern faith” would have to be based solely on the foundations which these personalities assert are the result of the knowledge of nature. Yet, whoever with unprejudiced mind follows up the statements of these adherents of the “modern faith” is confronted by a peculiar fact. And this fact presses upon us most irresistibly if we look at the thoughts of those people who have preserved some degree of impartiality in the face of the self-assured assertions of these orthodox pioneers of progress. For there are hidden corners in the creed of these modern believers. And if we uncover what exists in these corners, then the true findings of modern natural science shine forth in full brilliance, but the opinions of the modern believers concerning the human being begin to fade away. Let us throw light into a few of these corners. At the outset, let us keep to that personality who is the most significant and the most venerable of these modern believers. On page 804 of the ninth edition of Haeckel's Natuerliche Schoepfungsgeschichte (Natural Genesis) we read: “The final result of a comparison of animals and man shows that between the most highly developed animal souls and the lowest human souls there exists only a small quantitative, but no qualitative difference; this difference is much smaller than the difference between the lowest and the highest human souls, or the difference between the highest and the lowest animal souls.” Now, what is the modern believer's attitude toward such a fact? He announces: we must explain the difference between the lower and the higher animal souls as a consequence of necessary and immutable laws. And we study these laws. We ask ourselves: how did it come about that out of animals with a lower soul have developed those with a higher soul? We look in nature for conditions through which the lower may develop into the higher. We then find, for example, that animals which have migrated to the caves of Kentucky become blind there. It becomes clear to us that through the sojourn in the darkness the eyes have lost their function. In these eyes the physical and chemical processes no longer take place which were carried out during the act of seeing. The stream of nourishment which has formerly been used for this activity is now diverted to other organs. The animals change their shape. In this way, new animal species can arise out of existing ones if only the transformation which nature causes in these species is sufficiently great and manifold. — What actually takes place here? Nature brings about changes in certain beings; and these changes later also appear in their descendants. We say: they are transmitted by heredity. Thus the coming into existence of new animal and plant species is explained. The modern believers now continue happily in the direction of their explanation. The difference between the lowest human souls and the highest animal souls is not particularly great. Therefore, certain life conditions in which the higher animal souls have been placed have brought about changes by means of which they became lower human souls. The miracle of the evolution of the human soul has been cast out of the temple of the “modern faith” into oblivion, to use an expression of Strauss', and man has been classified among the animals according to “eternal, necessary” laws. Satisfied, the modern believer retires into peaceful slumber; he does not wish to go further. Honest thinking must disturb his slumber. For this honest thinking must keep alive around his couch the spirits which he himself has evoked. Let us consider more closely the above statement of Haeckel: “the difference (between higher animals and men) is much smaller than the difference between the lowest and the highest human souls.” If the modern believer admits this, may he then indulge in peaceful slumber as soon as he — according to his opinion — has explained the evolution of the lower men out of the highest animals? No, he must not do this, and if he does so nevertheless, then he denies the whole basis upon which he has founded his conviction. What would a modern believer reply to another who were to say: I have demonstrated how fish have originated from lower living creatures. This suffices. I have shown that everything evolves — therefore the species higher than the fish will doubtless have developed like the fish. There is no doubt that the modern believer would reply: Your general thought of evolution is useless; you must be able to show how the mammals originate; for there is a greater difference between mammals and fish than between fish and those animals on a stage directly below them. — And what would have to be the consequence of the modern believer's real faithfulness to his creed? He would have to say: the difference between the higher and lower human souls is greater than the difference between these lower souls and the animal souls on the stage directly below them; therefore I must admit that there are causes in the universe which effect changes in the lower human soul, transforming it in the same way as do the causes, demonstrated by me, which lead the lower animal form into the higher one. If I do not admit this, the species of human souls remain for me a miracle in regard to their origin, just as the various animal species remain a miracle to the one who does not believe in the transformation of living creatures through laws of nature. And this is absolutely correct: the modern believers, who deem themselves so greatly enlightened because they believe they have “cast out” the miracle in the domain of the living, are believers in miracles, nay, even worshipers of the miracle in the domain of the soul life. And only the following fact differentiates them from the believers in miracles, so greatly despised by them: these latter honestly avow their belief; the modern believers, however, have not the slightest inkling of the fact that they themselves have fallen prey to the darkest superstition. And now let us illumine another corner of the “modern belief.” In his Anthropology, Dr. Paul Topinard 4Paul Topinard, M.D., anthropologist; Paris, 1830–1911. has beautifully compiled the findings of the modern theory of the origin of man. At the end of his book he briefly recapitulates the evolution of the higher animal forms in the various epochs of the earth according to Haeckel: “At the beginning of the earth period designated by geologists the Laurentian period, the first nuclei of albumin were formed by a chance meeting of certain elements, i.e. carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, under conditions probably only prevailing at that epoch. From them, through spontaneous generation, monads developed (the smallest, imperfect living creatures). These split and multiplied, rearranged themselves into organs, and finally, after a series of transformations which Haeckel estimates as nine, they bestowed life upon certain vertebrae such as the amphioxus lanceolatus.” We may skip the description of the further animal species in the same direction and add here at once Topinard's concluding sentences: “In the twentieth earth epoch, we find the anthropoid ape approximately during the whole Miocene period; in the twenty-first, the man-ape which does not yet possess speech and a corresponding brain. In the twenty-second period, Man finally appears as we know him, at least in his less perfect forms.” And now, after having cited what is to be understood as the “natural-scientific basis of the modern belief,” Topinard, in a few words, makes a significant confession. He says: “Here the classification comes to an abrupt halt. Haeckel forgets the twenty-third degree in which the brilliant Lamarck 5Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, Paris; 1744–1829. and Newton 6Sir Isaac Newton, Cambridge, London, also France; 1642–1727. appear.” A corner in the creed of the modern believer is thereby exposed in which he points with the utmost clarity to facts, concerning which he denies his creed. He is unwilling to rise into the human soul sphere with the concepts with which he tried to find his way in the other spheres of nature. — Were he to do this, were he, with his attitude of mind acquired through the observation of external nature, to enter upon the sphere which Topinard calls the twenty-third degree, then he would have to say to himself: just as I derive the higher animal species from the lower through evolution, so do I derive the higher soul nature from the lower through evolution. I cannot understand Newton's soul if I do not conceive of it as having sprung from a preceding soul being. And this soul being can never be looked for in the physical ancestors. Were I to look for it there, I would turn upside down the whole method of nature research. How could it ever occur to a scientist to show the evolution of one animal species out of another if the latter, in regard to its physical makeup, were as dissimilar to the former as Newton, in regard to his soul, is to his forebears: One conceives of one animal species having proceeded from a similar one which is merely one degree lower than itself. Therefore, Newton's soul must have sprung from a soul similar to it, but only one degree lower, psychically. Newton's soul nature is comprised in his biography. I recognize Newton by his biography just as I recognize a lion by the description of its species. And I comprehend the species “lion” if I imagine that it has sprung from a species on a correspondingly lower stage. Thus I comprehend what is comprised in Newton's biography if I conceive of it as having developed from the biography of a soul which resembles it, is related to it as soul. From this follows that Newton's soul existed already in another form, just as the species “lion” existed previously in a different form. For clear thought, there is no escape from this conception. Only because the modern believers do not have the courage to think their thoughts through to the end do they not arrive at this final conclusion. Through it, however, the reappearance of the being who is comprised in the biography is secured. — Either we must abandon the whole natural-scientific theory of evolution, or we must admit that it must be extended to include the evolution of the soul. There are only two alternatives: either, every soul is created by a miracle, just as the animal species would have to be created by miracles if they have not developed one out of the other, or, the soul has developed and has previously existed in another form, just as the animal species has existed in another form. A few modern thinkers who have preserved some clarity and courage for logical thinking are a living proof of the above conclusion. They are just as unable to familiarize themselves with the thought of soul evolution, so strange to our age, as are the modern believers characterized above. But they at least possess the courage to confess the only other possible view, namely: the miracle of the creation of the soul. Thus, in the book on psychology by Professor Johannes Rehmke, one of the best thinkers of our time, we may read the following: “The idea of creation ... appears to us ... to be the only one suited to render comprehensible the mystery of the origin of the soul.” Rehmke goes so far as to acknowledge the existence of a conscious Universal-Being who, “as the only condition for the origin of the soul, would have to be called the creator of the soul.” Thus speaks a thinker who is unwilling to indulge in gentle spiritual slumber after having grasped the physical life processes, yet who is lacking the capacity of acknowledging the idea that each individual soul has evolved out of its previous form of existence. Rehmke has the courage to accept the miracle, since he is unable to have the courage to acknowledge the anthroposophical view of the reappearance of the soul, of reincarnation. Thinkers in whom the natural-scientific striving begins to be developed logically must of necessity arrive at this view. Thus, in the book, Neuchristentum und reale Religion (Neo-Christianity and Real Religion), by Julius Baumann, 8Julius Baumann, 1837–1914. professor of philosophy at the University of Goettingen, we find the following (twenty-second) paragraph among the thirty-nine paragraphs of a Sketch of a Summary of Real-Scientific Religion: “Just as in inorganic nature the physical-chemical elements and forces do not disappear but only change their combinations, so is this also to be assumed, according to the real scientific method, in respect of the organic and organic-spiritual forces. The Human soul as formal unity, as connecting Ego, returns in new human bodies and is thus enabled to pass through all the stages of human evolution.” Whoever possesses the full courage for the natural-scientific avowal of faith of the present age must arrive at this conception. This, however, must not be misunderstood;we do not maintain that the more prominent thinkers among the modern believers are cowardly persons, in the ordinary sense of the word. It needed courage, indescribable courage to carry to victory the natural-scientific view in face of the resisting forces of the nineteenth century. But this courage must be distinguished from the higher one in regard to logical thinking. Yet just those nature researchers of the present age who desire to erect a world conception out of the findings of their domain are lacking such logical thinking. For, is it not a disgrace if we have to hear a sentence like the following, which was pronounced by the Breslau chemist Albert Ladenburg, in a lecture at a recent (1903) Conference of scientists: “Do we know anything about a substratum of the soul? I have no such knowledge.” After having made this confession, this same man continues: “What is your opinion concerning immortality? I believe that in regard to this question, more than in regard to any other, the wish is father to the thought, for I do not know a single scientifically proven fact which might serve as the basis for the belief in immortality.” What would the learned gentleman say if we were confronted by a speaker who said: “I know nothing about chemical facts. I therefore deny the chemical laws, for I know not a single scientifically proven fact which might serve as the basis for these laws.” Certainly, the professor would reply: “What do we care about your ignorance of chemistry? First study chemistry, then do your talking!” Professor Ladenburg does not know anything about a substratum of the soul; he, therefore, should not bother the world with the findings of his ignorance. Just as the nature researcher, in order to understand certain animal forms, studies the animal forms out of which these former have evolved, so the psychologist, rooted in natural science, must, in order to understand a certain soul form, study the soul form out of which the former has evolved. The skull form of higher animals is explained by scientists as having arisen out of the transformation of the lower animal skull. Therefore, everything belonging to a soul's biography ought to be explained by them through the biography of the soul out of which this soul concerned has evolved. The later conditions are the effects of former ones. That is to say, the later physical conditions are the effects of former physical conditions; likewise, the later soul conditions are the effects of former soul conditions. This is the content of the Law of Karma which says: all my talents and deeds in my present life do not exist separately as a miracle, but they are connected as effect with the previous forms of existence of my soul and as cause with future ones. Those who, with open spiritual eyes, observe human life and do not know this comprehensive law, or do not wish to acknowledge it, are constantly confronted by riddles of life. Let us quote one example for many. It is contained in Maurice Maeterlinck's book Le Temple Enseveli (The Buried Temple). This is a book which speaks of these riddles, which appear to present-day thinkers in a distorted shape because they are not conversant with the great laws in spiritual life of cause and effect, of Karma. Those who have fallen prey to the limited dogmas of the modern believers have no organ for the perception of such riddles. Maeterlinck puts [forth] one of these questions: “If I plunge into the water in zero weather in order to save my fellow man, or if I fall into the water while trying to push him into it, the consequences of the cold I catch will be exactly the same in both cases, and no power in heaven or earth beside myself or the man (if he is able to do so) will increase my suffering because I have committed a crime, or will relieve my pain because I performed a virtuous deed.” Certainly; the consequences in question here appear to an observation which limits itself to physical facts to be the same in both cases. But may this observation, without further research, be considered complete? Whoever asserts this holds, as a thinker, the same view point as a person who observes two boys being taught by two different teachers, and who observes nothing else in this activity but the fact that in both cases the teachers are occupied with the two boys for the same number of hours and carry on the same studies. If he were to enter more deeply upon the facts, he would perhaps observe a great difference between the two cases, and he would consider it comprehensible that one boy grows up to be an inefficient man, while the other boy becomes an excellent and capable human being. — And if the person who is willing to enter upon soul-spiritual connections were to observe the above consequences for the souls of the human beings in question, he would have to say to himself: what happens there cannot be considered as isolated facts. The consequences of a cold are soul experiences, and I must, if they are not to be deemed a miracle, view them as causes and effects in the soul life. The consequences for the person who saves a life will spring from causes different from those for the criminal; or they will, in the one or the other case, have different effects. And if I cannot find these causes and effects in the present life of the people concerned, if all conditions are alike for this present life, then I must look for the compensation in the past and the future life. Then I proceed exactly like the natural scientist in the field of external facts; he, too, explains the lack of eyes in animals living in dark caves by previous experiences, and he presupposes that present-day experiences will have their effects in future formations of races and species. Only he has an inner right to speak of evolution in the domain of outer nature who acknowledges this evolution also in the sphere of soul and spirit. Now, it is clear that this acknowledgment, this extension of knowledge of nature beyond nature is more than mere cognition. For it transforms cognition into life; it does not merely enrich man's knowledge, it provides him with the strength for his life's journey. It shows him whence he comes and whither he goes. And it will show him this whence and whither beyond birth and death if he steadfastly follows the direction which this knowledge indicates. He knows that everything he does is a link in the stream which flows from eternity to eternity. The point of view from which he regulates his life becomes higher and higher. The man who has not attained to this state of mind appears as though enveloped in a dense fog, for he has no idea of his true being, of his origin and goal. He follows the impulses of his nature, without any insight into these impulses. He must confess that he might follow quite different impulses, were he to illuminate his path with the light of knowledge. Under the influence of such an attitude of soul, the sense of responsibility in regard to life grows constantly. If the human being does not develop this sense of responsibility in himself, he denies, in a higher sense, his humanness. Knowledge lacking the aim to ennoble the human being is merely the satisfying of a higher curiosity. To raise knowledge to the comprehension of the spiritual, in order that it may become the strength of the whole life, is, in a higher sense, duty. Thus it is the duty of every human being to seek the understanding for the Whence and Whither of the Soul. |
GA 34. Reincarnation and Karma |
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GA 34. Reincarnation and Karma |
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SLEEP has often been called the younger brother of death. This simile illustrates the paths of the human spirit more exactly than a superficial observation might feel inclined to assume. For it gives us an idea of the way in which the most manifold incarnations passed through by this human spirit are interrelated. In the first chapter of this book, Reincarnation and Karma, Concepts Compelled by the Modern Scientific Point of View, it has been shown that the present natural-scientific mode of thought, if it but understands itself properly, leads to the ancient teaching of the evolution of the eternal human spirit through many lives. This knowledge is necessarily followed by the question: how are these manifold lives interrelated? In what sense is the life of a human being the effect of his former incarnations, and how does it become the cause of the later incarnations? The picture of sleep presents an image of the relation of cause and effect in this field. I arise in the morning. My continuous activity was interrupted during the night. I cannot resume this activity arbitrarily if order and connection are to govern my life. What I have done yesterday constitutes the conditions for my actions of today. I must make a connection with the result of my activities of yesterday. It is true in the fullest sense of the word that my deeds of yesterday are my destiny of today. I myself have shaped the causes to which I must add the effects. And I encounter these causes after having withdrawn from them for a short time. They belong to me, although I was separated from them for some time. The effects of my experiences of yesterday belong to me in still another sense. I myself have been changed by them. Let us suppose that I have undertaken something in which I succeeded only partially. I have pondered on the reason for this partial failure. If I have again to carry out a similar task, I avoid the mistakes I have recognized. That is, I have acquired a new faculty. Thereby my experiences of yesterday have become the causes of my faculties of today. My past remains united with me; it lives on in my present; and it will follow me into my future. Through my past, I have created for myself the position in which I find myself at present. And the meaning of life demands that I remain united with this position. Would it not be senseless if, under normal conditions, I should not move into a house I had caused to be built for myself? If the effects of my deeds of yesterday were not to be my destiny of today, I should not have to wake up today, but I should have to be created anew, out of the nothing. And the human spirit would have to be newly created, out of the nothing, if the results of its former lives were not to remain linked to its later lives. Indeed, the human being cannot live in any other position but the one which has been created through his previous life. He can do this no more than can certain animals, which have lost their power of sight as a result of their migration to the caves of Kentucky, live anywhere else but in these caves. They have, through their deed, through migration, created for themselves the conditions for their later existence. A being which has once been active is henceforth no longer isolated in the world; it has inserted itself into its deeds. And its future development is connected with what arises from the deeds. This connection of a being with the results of its deeds is the law of karma which rules the whole world. Activity that has become destiny is karma. And sleep is a good picture of death for the reason that the human being, during sleep, is actually withdrawn from the field of action upon which destiny awaits him. While we sleep, the events on this field of action run their course. For a time, we have no influence upon this course. Nevertheless, we find again the effects of our actions, and we must link up with them. In reality, our personality every morning incarnates anew in our world of deeds. What was separated from us during the night, envelops us, as it were, during the day. It is the same with the deeds of our former incarnations. Their results are embodied in the world in which we were incarnated. Yet they belong to us just as the life in the caves belongs to the animals which, through this life, have lost the power of sight. Just as these animals can only live if they find again the surroundings to which they have adapted themselves, so the human spirit is only able to live in those surroundings which, through his deeds, he has created for himself and are suited to him. Every new morning the human body is ensouled anew, as it were. Natural science admits that this involves a process which it cannot grasp if it employs merely the laws it has gained in the physical world. Consider what the natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond says about this in his address, Die Grenze des Naturerkennens (The Limits of the Cognition of Nature): “If a brain, for some reason unconscious, as for instance in dreamless sleep, were to be viewed scientifically” — (Du Bois-Reymond says “astronomically”) — “it would hold no longer any secrets, and if we were to add to this the natural-scientific knowledge of the rest of the body, there would be a complete deciphering of the entire human machine with its breathing, its heartbeat, its metabolism, its warmth, and so forth, right up to the nature of matter and force. The dreamless sleeper is comprehensible to the same degree that the world is comprehensible before consciousness appeared. But just as the world became doubly incomprehensible with the first stirring of consciousness, so the sleeper becomes incomprehensible with the first dream picture that arises in him.” This cannot be otherwise. For, what the scientist describes here as the dreamless sleeper is that part of the human being which alone is subject to physical laws. The moment, however, it appears again permeated by the soul, it obeys the laws of the soul-life. During sleep, the human body obeys the physical laws: the moment the human being wakes up, the light of intelligent action flashes forth, like a spark, into purely physical existence. We speak entirely in the sense of the scientist Du Bois-Reymond when we state: the sleeping body may be investigated in all its aspects, yet we shall not be able to find the soul in it. But this soul continues the course of its rational deeds at the point where this was interrupted by sleep. — Thus the human being, also in this regard, belongs to two worlds. In one world he lives his bodily life which may be observed by means of physical laws;in the other he lives as a spiritual-rational being, and about this life we are able to learn nothing by means of physical laws. If we wish to study the bodily life, we have to hold to the physical laws of natural science; but if we wish to grasp the spiritual life, we have to acquaint ourselves with the laws of rational action, such, for instance, as logic, jurisprudence, economics, aesthetics, and so forth. The sleeping human body, subject only to physical laws, can never accomplish anything in the realm of the laws of reason. But the human spirit carries these laws of reason into the physical world. And just as much as he has carried into it will he find again when, after an interruption, he resumes the thread of his activity. Let us hold on to the picture of sleep. If life is not to be meaningless, the personality has to link up today with its deeds of yesterday. It could not do so did it not feel itself joined to these deeds. I should be unable to pick up today the result of my activity of yesterday, had there not remained within myself something of this activity. If I had today forgotten everything that I have experienced yesterday, I should be a new human being, unable to link up with anything. It is my memory which enables me to link up with my deeds of yesterday. — This memory binds me to the effects of my action. That which, in the real sense, belongs to my life of reason, — logic, for instance, — is today the same it was yesterday. This is applicable also to that which did not enter my field of vision yesterday, indeed, which never entered it. My memory connects my logical action of today with my logical action of yesterday. If matters depended merely upon logic, we certainly might start a new life every morning. But memory retains what binds us to our destiny. Thus I really find myself in the morning as a threefold being. I find my body again which during my sleep has obeyed its merely physical laws. I find again my own self, my human spirit, which is today the same it was yesterday, and which is today endowed with the gift of rational action with which it was endowed yesterday. And I find — preserved by memory — everything that my yesterday, that my entire past has made of me. — And this affords us at the same time a picture of the threefold being of man. In every new incarnation the human being finds himself in a physical organism which is subject to the laws of external nature. And in every incarnation he is the same human spirit. As such he is the Eternal within the manifold incarnations. Body and Spirit confront one another. Between these two there must lie something just as memory lies between my deeds of yesterday and those of today. And this something is the soul. It preserves the effects of my deeds from former lives and brings it about that the spirit, in a new incarnation, appears in the form which previous earth lives have given it. In this way, body, soul, and spirit are interrelated. The spirit is eternal; birth and death rule in the body according to the laws of the physical world; both are brought together again and again by the soul as it fashions our destiny out of our deeds. (Each of the above-mentioned principles: body, soul, and spirit, in turn consists of three members. Thus the human being appears to be formed of nine members. The body consists of: (1) the actual body, (2) the life-body, (3) the sentient-body. The soul consists of: (4) the sentient-soul, (5) the intellectual-soul, (6) the consciousness-soul. The spirit consists of: (7) spirit-self, (8) life-spirit, (9) spirit-man. In the incarnated human being, 3 and 4, and 6 and 7 unite, flowing into one another. Through this fact the nine members appear to have contracted into seven members.) In regard to the comparison of the soul with memory we are also in a position to refer to modern natural science. The scientist Ewald Hering published a treatise in 1870 which bears the title: Ueber das Gedaechtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten Materie (Memory as a General Function of Organized Matter). Ernst Haeckel agrees with Hering's point of view. He states the following in his treatise: Ueber die Wellenzeugung der Lebensteilchen (The Wave Generation of Living Particles): “Profound reflection must bring the conviction that without the assumption of an unconscious memory of living matter the most important life functions are utterly inexplicable. The faculty of forming ideas and concepts, of thinking and consciousness, of practice and habit, of nutrition and reproduction rests upon the function of the unconscious memory, the activity of which is much more significant than that of conscious memory. Hering is right in stating that it is memory to which we owe nearly everything that we are and have.” And now Haeckel tries to trace back the processes of heredity within living creatures to this unconscious memory. The fact that the daughter-being resembles the mother-being, that the former inherits the qualities of the latter, is thus supposed to be due to the unconscious memory of the living, which in the course of reproduction retains the memory of the preceding forms. — It is not a question here of investigating how much of the presentations of Hering and Haeckel are scientifically tenable; for our purposes it suffices to draw attention to the fact that the natural scientist is compelled to assume an entity which he considers similar to memory; he is compelled to do so if he goes beyond birth and death, and presumes something that endures beyond death. He quite naturally seizes upon a supersensible force in the realm where the laws of physical nature do not suffice. We must, however, realize that we are dealing here merely with a comparison, with a picture, when we speak of memory. We must not believe that by soul we understand something that is equivalent to conscious memory. Even in ordinary life it is not always conscious memory that is active when we make use of the experiences of the past. We bear within us the fruits of these experiences even if we do not always consciously remember what we have experienced. Who can remember all the details of his learning to read and write? Moreover, who was ever conscious of all those details? Habit, for instance, is a kind of unconscious memory. — By means of this comparison with memory we merely wish to point to the soul which inserts itself between body and spirit and constitutes the mediator between the Eternal and that which, as the Physical, is inwoven into the course of birth and death. The spirit that reincarnates thus finds within the physical world the results of its deeds as its destiny; and the soul that is bound to it, mediates the spirit's linking up with this destiny. Now we may ask: how can the spirit find the results of its deeds, since, on reincarnating, it is certainly placed in a world completely different from the one in which it existed previously? This question is based upon a very externalized conception of the web of destiny. If I transfer my residence from Europe to America, I, too, find myself in completely new surroundings. Yet my life in America is completely dependent upon my previous life in Europe. If I have been a mechanic in Europe, my life in America will take on a form quite different from the one it would take on had I been a bank clerk. In the one case I shall probably be surrounded in America by machines, in the other by banking papers. In every case my previous life determines my surroundings, it attracts, as it were, out of the whole environment those things which are related to it. This is also the case with my spirit-soul. It surrounds itself quite necessarily with what it is related to out of its previous life. This cannot constitute a contradiction of the simile of sleep and death if we realize that we are dealing only with a simile, although a most striking one. That I find in the morning the situation which I myself have created on the previous day is brought about by the direct course of events. That I find on reincarnating an environment that corresponds to the result of my deeds of the previous life is brought about through the affinity of my reborn spirit-soul with the things of this environment. What leads me into this environment? Directly the qualities of my spirit-soul on reincarnating. But I possess these qualities merely through the fact that the deeds of my previous lives have implanted them into the spirit-soul. These deeds, therefore, are the real cause of my being born into certain circumstances. And what I do today will be one of the causes of my finding myself in a later life within certain definite circumstances. — Thus man indeed creates his destiny for himself. This remains incomprehensible only as long as one considers the separate life as such and does not regard it as a link in the chain of successive lives. Thus we may say that nothing can happen to the human being in life for which he has not himself created the conditions. Only through insight into the law of destiny — karma — does it become comprehensible why “the good man has often to suffer, while the evil one may experience happiness.” This seeming disharmony of the one life disappears when the view is extended upon many lives. — To be sure, the law of karma must not be conceived of as being so simple that we might compare it to an ordinary judge or to civil justice. This would be the same as if we were to imagine God as an old man with a white beard. Many people fall into this error. Especially the opponents of the idea of karma proceed from such erroneous premises. They fight against the conception which they impute to the believers in karma and not against the conception held by the true knowers. What is the relation of the human being to his physical surroundings when he enters a new incarnation? This relation is composed of two factors: first, in the time between two consecutive incarnations he has had no part in the physical world; second, he passed through a certain development during that period. It is self-evident that no influence from the physical world can affect this development, for the spirit-soul then exists outside this physical world. Everything that takes place in the spirit-soul, it can, therefore, only draw out of itself, that is to say, out of the super-physical world. During its incarnation it was interwoven with the physical world of facts; after its discarnation through death, it is deprived of the direct influence of this factual world. It has merely retained from the latter that which we have compared to memory. — This “memory remnant” consists of two parts. These parts become evident if we consider what has contributed to its formation. — The spirit has lived in the body and through the body, therefore, it entered into relation with the bodily surroundings. This relation has found its expression through the fact that, by means of the body, impulses, desires, and passions have developed and that, through them, outer actions have been performed. Because he has a corporeal existence, the human being acts under the influence of impulses, desires, and passions. And these have a significance in two directions. On the one hand, they impress themselves upon the outer actions which the human being performs. And on the other, they form his personal character. The action I perform is the result of my desire; and I myself, as a personality, am what is expressed by this desire. The action passes over into the outer world;the desire remains within my soul just as the thought remains within my memory. And just as the thought image in my memory is strengthened through every new impression of like nature, so is the desire strengthened through every new action which I perform under its influence. Thus within my soul, because of corporeal existence, there lives a certain sum of impulses, desires, and passions. The sum total of these is designated by the expression “body of desire.” — This body of desire is intimately connected with physical existence, for it comes into being under the influence of the physical corporeality. The moment the spirit is no longer incarnated it cannot continue the formation of this body of desire. The spirit must free itself from this desire-body in so far as it was connected, through it, with the single physical life. The physical life is followed by another in which this liberation occurs. We may ask: Does not death signify the destruction also of this body of desire? The answer is: No; for to the degree in which, at every moment of physical life, desire surpasses satisfaction, desire persists even when the possibility of satisfaction has ceased. Only a human being who does not desire anything of the physical world has no surplus of desire over satisfaction. Only a man of no desires dies without retaining in his spirit a certain amount of desire. And this amount must gradually diminish and fade away after death. The state of this fading away is called “the sojourn in the region of desire.” It can easily be seen that the more the human being has felt bound to the sense life, the longer must this state persist. The second part of the “memory remnant” is formed in a different way. Just as desire draws the spirit toward the past life, so this second part directs it toward the future. The spirit, through its activity in the body, has become acquainted with the world to which this body belongs. Each new exertion, each new experience enhances this acquaintance. As a rule the human being does a thing better the second time than he does it the first. Experience impresses itself upon the spirit, enhancing its capacities. Thus our experience acts upon our future, and if we have no longer the opportunity to have experiences, then the result of these experiences remains as memory remnant. — But no experience could affect us if we did not have the capacity to make use of it. The way in which we are able to absorb the experience, the use we are able to make of it, determines its significance for our future. For Goethe, an experience had a significance quite different from the significance it had for his valet; and it produced results for Goethe quite different from those it produced for his valet. What faculties we acquire through an experience depends, therefore, upon the spiritual work we perform in connection with the experience. — I always have within me, at any given moment of my life, a sum total of the results of my experience. And this sum total forms the potential of capacities which may appear in due course. — Such a sum total of experiences the human spirit possesses when it discarnates. This the human spirit takes with it into supersensible life. Now, when it is no longer bound to physical existence by bodily ties and when it has divested itself also of the desires which chain it to this physical existence, then the fruit of its experience has remained with the spirit. And this fruit is completely freed from the direct influence of the past life. The spirit can now devote itself entirely to what it is capable of fashioning out of this fruit for the future. Thus the spirit, after having left the region of desire, is in a state in which its experiences of former lives transform themselves into potentials — that is to say, talents, capacities — for the future. The life of the spirit in this state is designated as the sojourn in the “region of bliss.” (“Bliss” may, indeed, designate a state in which all worry about the past is relegated to oblivion and which permits the heart to beat solely for the concerns of the future.) It is self-evident that the greater the potentiality exists at death for the acquirement of new capacities, the longer will this state in general last. Naturally, it cannot be a question here of developing the complete scope of knowledge relating to the human spirit. We merely intend to show how the law of karma operates in physical life. For this purpose it is sufficient to know what the spirit takes out of this physical life into supersensible states and what it brings back again for a new incarnation. It brings with it the results of the experiences undergone in previous lives, transformed into the capacities of its being. — In order to realize the far-reaching character of this fact we need only elucidate the process by a single example. The philosopher, Kant, says: “Two things fill the soul with ever increasing wonder: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Every thinking human being must admit that the starry heavens have not sprung out of nothingness but have come gradually into existence. And it is Kant himself who in 1755, in a basic treatise, tried to explain the gradual formation of a cosmos. Likewise, however, we must not accept the fact of moral law without an explanation. This moral law, too, has not sprung from nothingness. In the first incarnations through which man passed the moral law did not speak in him in the way it spoke in Kant. Primitive man acts in accordance with his desires. And he carries the experiences which he has undergone through such action into the supersensible states. Here they become higher faculties. And in a subsequent incarnation, mere desire no longer acts in him, but it is now guided by the effect of the previous experiences. And many incarnations are needed before the human being, originally completely given over to desires, confronts the surrounding world with the purified moral law which Kant designates as something demanding the same admiration as is demanded by the starry heavens. The surrounding world into which the human being is born through a new incarnation confronts him with the results of his deeds, as his destiny. He himself enters this surrounding world with the capacities which he has fashioned for himself in the supersensible state out of his former experiences. Therefore his experiences in the physical world will, in general, be at a higher level the more often he has incarnated, or the greater his efforts were during his previous incarnations. Thus his pilgrimage through the incarnations will be an upward development. The treasure which his experiences accumulate in his spirit will become richer and richer. And he thereby confronts his surrounding world, his destiny, with greater and greater maturity. This makes him increasingly the master of his destiny. For what he gains through his experiences is the fact that he learns to grasp the laws of the world in which these experiences occur. At first the spirit does not find its way about in the surrounding world. It gropes in the dark. But with every new incarnation the world grows brighter. The spirit acquires a knowledge of the laws of its surrounding world; in other words, it accomplishes ever more consciously what it previously did in dullness of mind. The compulsion of the surrounding world decreases; the spirit becomes increasingly self-determinative. The spirit, however, which is self-determinative, is the free spirit. Action in the full clear light of consciousness is free action. (I have tried to present the nature of the free human spirit in my book, Philosophie der Freiheit, (Philosophy of Freedom — Spiritual Activity.) The full freedom of the human spirit is the ideal of its development. We cannot ask the question: is man free or unfree? The philosophers who put the question of freedom in this fashion can never acquire a clear thought about it. For the human being in his present state is neither free nor unfree; but he is on the way to freedom. He is partially free, partially unfree. He is free to the degree he has acquired knowledge and consciousness of world relations. — The fact that our destiny, our karma, meets us in the form of absolute necessity is no obstacle to our freedom. For when we act we approach this destiny with the measure of independence we have achieved. It is not destiny that acts, but it is we who act in accordance with the laws of this destiny. If I light a match, fire arises according to necessary laws; but it was I who put these necessary laws into effect. Likewise, I can perform an action only in the sense of the necessary laws of my karma, but it is I who puts these necessary laws into effect. And new karma is created through the deed proceeding from me, just as the fire, according to necessary laws of nature, continues to be effective after I have kindled it. This also throws light upon another doubt which may assail a person in regard to the effectiveness of the law of karma. Somebody might say: “If karma is an unalterable law, then it is wrong to help a person. For what befalls him is the consequence of his karma, and it is absolutely necessary that it should befall him.” Certainly, I cannot eliminate the effects of the destiny which a human spirit has created for himself in former incarnations. But the matter of importance here is how he finds his way into this destiny, and what new destiny he may create for himself under the influence of the old one. If I help him, I may bring about the possibility of his giving his destiny a favorable turn through his deeds; if I refrain from helping him, the opposite may perhaps occur. Naturally, everything will depend upon whether my help is a wise or unwise one. [The fact that I am present to help may be a part of both his Karma and mine, or my presence and deed may be a free act. (Editor.)] His advance through ever new incarnations signifies a higher development of the human spirit. This higher development comes to expression in the fact that the world in which the incarnations of the spirit take place is comprehended in increasing measure by this spirit. This world, however, comprises the incarnations themselves. In regard to the latter, too, the spirit gradually passes from a state of unconsciousness to one of consciousness. On the path of evolution there lies the point from which the human being is able to look back upon his successive incarnations with full consciousness. — This is a thought at which it is easy to mock; and it is easy to criticise it negatively. But whoever does this has no idea of the nature of such truths. And derision as well as criticism place themselves like a dragon in front of the portal of the sanctuary within which we may attain knowledge of these truths. For it is self-evident that truths, the realization of which lies for the human being in the future, cannot be found as facts in the present. There is only one way of convincing oneself of their reality: namely, to make every effort possible to attain this reality. |
GA 34. Reincarnation and Karma |
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GA 34. Reincarnation and Karma |
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The following question has been asked: “According to the law of reincarnation, we are required to think that the human individuality possesses its talents, capacities, and so forth, as an effect of its previous lives. Is this not contradicted by the fact that such talents and capacities, for instance moral courage, musical gifts, and so forth, are directly inherited by the children from their parents?” Answer: If we rightly conceive of the laws of reincarnation and karma, we cannot find a contradiction in what is stated above. Only those qualities of the human being which belong to his physical and ether body can be directly passed on by heredity. The ether body is the bearer of all life phenomena (the forces of growth and reproduction). Everything connected with this can be directly passed on by heredity. What is bound to the so-called soul-body can be passed on by heredity to a much lesser degree. This constitutes a certain disposition in the sensations. Whether we possess a vivid sense of sight, a well-developed sense of hearing, and so forth, may depend upon whether our ancestors have acquired such faculties and have passed them on to us by heredity. But nobody can pass on to his offsprings what is connected with the actual spiritual being of man, that is, for instance, the acuteness and accuracy of his life of thought, the reliability of his memory, the moral sense, the acquired capacities of knowledge and art. These are qualities which remain enclosed within his individuality and which appear in his next incarnation as capacities, talents, character, and so forth. — The environment, however, into which the reincarnating human being enters is not accidental, but it is necessarily connected with his karma. Let us assume a human being has acquired in his previous life the capacity for a morally strong character. It is his karma that this capacity should unfold in his next incarnation. This would not be possible if he did not incarnate in a body which possesses a quite definite constitution. This bodily constitution, however, must be inherited from the forebears. The incarnating individuality strives, through a power of attraction inherent in it, toward those parents who are capable of giving it the suitable body. This is caused by the fact that, already before reincarnating, this individuality connects itself with the forces of the astral world which strive toward definite physical conditions. Thus the human being is born into that family which is able to transmit to him by heredity the bodily conditions which correspond to his karmic potentialities. It then looks, if we go back to the example of moral courage, as if the latter itself had been inherited from the parents. The truth is that man, through his individual being, has searched out that family which makes the unfoldment of moral courage possible for him. In addition to this it may be possible that the individualities of the children and the parents have already been connected in previous lives and for that very reason have found one another again. The karmic laws are so complicated that we may never base a judgment upon outer appearances. Only a person to whose spiritual sense-organs the higher worlds are at least partially manifest may attempt to form such a judgment. Whoever is able to observe the soul organism and the spirit, in addition to the physical body, is in a position to discriminate between what has been passed on to the human being by his forebears and what is his own possession, acquired in previous lives. For ordinary vision these things are not clearly distinguishable, and it may easily appear as if something were merely inherited which in reality is karmicly determined. — It is a thoroughly wise expression which states that children are “given” to their parents. In respect of the spirit this is absolutely the case. And children with certain spiritual qualities are given to them for the very reason that they, the parents, are capable of giving the children the opportunity to unfold these spiritual qualities. Question: “Does Anthroposophy attribute no significance to ‘chance’? I cannot imagine that it can be predestined by the karma of each individual person when five hundred persons are killed at the same time in a theater fire.” Answer: The laws of karma are so complicated that we should not be surprised when to the human intellect some fact appears at first as being contradictory to the general validity of this law. We must realize that this intellect is schooled by our physical world, and that, in general, it is accustomed to admit only what it has learned in this world. The laws of karma, however, belong to higher worlds. Therefore, if we try to understand an event which meets the human being as being brought about by karma in the same way in which justice is applied in the purely earthly-physical life, then we must of necessity run up against contradictions. We must realize that a common experience which several people undergo in the physical world may, in the higher world, mean something completely different for each individual person among them. Naturally, the opposite may also be true: common interrelations may become effective in common earthly experiences. Only one gifted with clear vision in the higher worlds can give information about particular cases. If the karmic interrelations of five hundred people become effective in the common death of these people in a theater fire, the following instances may be possible: First: Not a single one of the five hundred people need be karmicly linked to the other victims. The common disaster is related in the same way to the karmas of each single person as the shadow-image of fifty people on a wall is related to the worlds of thought and feeling of these persons. These people had nothing in common an hour ago; nor will they have anything in common an hour hence. What they experienced when they met at the same place will have a special effect for each one of them. Their association is expressed in the above-mentioned common shadow-image. Whoever were to attempt to conclude from this shadow-image that a common bond united these people would be decidedly in error. Second: It is possible that the common experience of the five hundred people has nothing whatsoever to do with their karmic past, but that, just through this common experience, something is prepared which will unite them karmicly in the future. Perhaps these five hundred people will, in future ages, carry out a common undertaking, and through the disaster have been united for the sake of higher worlds. The experienced spiritual-scientist is thoroughly acquainted with the fact that many societies, formed today, owe their origin to the circumstance of a common disaster experienced in a more distant past by the people who join together today. Third: The case in question may actually be the effect of former common guilt of the persons concerned. There are, however, still countless other possibilities. For instance, a combination of all three possibilities described might occur. It is not unjustifiable to speak of “chance” in the physical world. And however true it is to say: there is no “chance” if we take into consideration all the worlds, yet it would be unjustifiable to eradicate the word “chance” if we are merely speaking of the interlinking of things in the physical world. Chance in the physical world is brought about through the fact that things take place in this world within sensible space. They must, in as far as they occur within this space, also obey the laws of this space. Within this space, things may outwardly meet which have inwardly nothing to do with each other. The causes which let a brick fall from a roof, injuring me as I pass by, do not necessarily have anything to do with my karma which stems from my past. Many people commit here the error of imagining karmic relations in too simple a fashion. They presume, for instance, that if a brick has injured a person, he must have deserved this injury karmicly. But this is not necessarily so. In the life of every human being events constantly take place which have nothing at all to do with his merits or his guilt in the past. Such events find their karmic adjustment in the future. If something happens to me today without being my fault, I shall be compensated for it in the future. One thing is certain: nothing remains without karmic adjustment. However, whether an experience of the human being is the effect of his karmic past or the cause of his karmic future will have to be determined in every individual instance. And this cannot be decided by the intellect accustomed to dealing with the physical world, but solely by occult experience and observation. Question: “Is it possible to understand, according to the law of reincarnation and karma, how a highly developed human soul can be reborn in a helpless, undeveloped child? To many a person the thought that we have to begin over and over again at the childhood stage is unbearable and illogical.” Answer: How the human being can act in the physical world depends entirely upon the physical instrumentality of his body. Higher ideas, for instance, can come to expression in this world only if there is a fully developed brain. Just as the pianist must wait until the piano builder has made a piano on which he can express his musical ideas, so does the soul have to wait with its faculties acquired in the previous life until the forces of the physical world have built up the bodily organs to the point where they can express these faculties. The nature forces have to go their way, the soul, also, has to go its way. To be sure, from the very beginning of human life a cooperation exists between soul and body forces. The soul works in the flexible and supple body of the child until it is made ready to become a bearer of the forces acquired in former life periods. For it is absolutely necessary that the reborn human being adjust himself to the new life conditions. Were he simply to appear in a new life with all he has acquired previously, he would not fit into the surrounding world. For he has acquired his faculties and forces under quite different circumstances in completely different surroundings. Were he simply to enter the world in his former state he would be a stranger in it. The period of childhood is gone through in order to bring about harmony between the old and the new conditions. How would one of the cleverest ancient Romans appear in our present world, were he simply born into our world with his acquired powers? A power can only be employed when it is in harmony with the surrounding world. For instance, if a genius is born, the power of genius lies in the innermost being of this man which may be called the causal-body. The lower spirit-body and the body of feeling and sensation are adaptable, and in a certain sense not completely determined. These two parts of the human being are now elaborated. In this work the causal-body acts from within and the surroundings from without. With the completion of this work, these two parts may become the instruments of the acquired forces. — The thought that we have to be born as a child is, therefore, neither illogical nor unbearable. On the contrary, it would be unbearable were we born as a fully developed man into a world in which we are a stranger. Question: “Are two successive incarnations of a human being similar to one another? Will an architect, for instance, become again an architect, a musician again a musician?” Answer: This might be the case, but not necessarily so. Such similarities occur, but are by no means the rule. It is easy in this field to arrive at false conceptions because we form thoughts concerning the laws of reincarnation which cling too much to externalities. Someone loves the south, for instance, and therefore believes he must have been a southerner in a former incarnation. Such inclinations, however, do not reach up to the causal-body. They have a direct significance only for the one life. Whatever sends its effects over from one incarnation into another must be deeply seated in the central being of man. Let us assume, for instance, that someone is a musician in his present life. The spiritual harmonies and rhythms which express themselves in tones reach into the causal-body. The tones themselves belong to the outer physical life. They sit in the parts of the human being which come into existence and pass away. The lower ego or spirit-body, which is, at one time, the proper vehicle for tones may, in a subsequent life, be the vehicle for the perception of number and space relations. And the musician may now become a mathematician. Just through this fact the human being develops, in the course of his incarnations, into an all-comprehensive being by passing through the most manifold life activities. As has been stated, there are exceptions to this rule. And these are explicable by the great laws of the spiritual world. Question: “What are the karmic facts in the case of a human being who is condemned to idiocy because of a defective brain?” Answer: A case like this ought not to be dealt with by speculation and hypotheses, but only by means of spiritual-scientific experience. Therefore, the question here will be answered by quoting an example which has really occurred. |
GA 34. Anthroposophy and the Social Question |
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GA 34. Anthroposophy and the Social Question |
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Everyone who looks with open eyes at the world around him today sees the so-called “Social Question” looming at every turn. No one who takes life seriously can avoid forming ideas of some kind about this question and all that is involved with it. And what could seem more obvious than that a mode of thinking, which makes the highest human ideals its particular concern, must arrive at some sort of relation towards social wants and claims. Now Anthroposophy aims at being such a mode of thinking for the present times; and therefore it is but natural, that people should enquire what its relation is towards the social question. It might at first seem as though Anthroposophy had nothing particular to say in this connection. The most striking feature of Anthroposophy will be deemed, at first sight, to be the cultivation of the soul's inward life and the opening of the eyes to a spiritual world. This endeavor can be seen by any unprejudiced person from the most cursory acquaintance with the ideas promulgated by anthroposophic speakers and writers. It is harder, however, to see that these endeavors at the present moment have any practical significance: in particular, its connection with the social question is by no means self-evident. Many people will ask: “Of what use for bad social conditions can a teaching be which is taken up with Reincarnation, Karma, the Supersensible World, the Rise of Man, and so forth? Such a line of thought seems to soar altogether too far off into cloudland, away from any reality; whereas just now every single person urgently needs to keep all his wits about him, in order to grapple with the actual problems of which earth's realities give him enough. Of the many and various opinions that Anthroposophy inevitably calls forth in the present day, two shall be mentioned here. The first consists in regarding Anthroposophy as the outcome of an unbridled and disordered fancy. It is quite natural that people should take this view; and an earnest anthroposophist should be the last to find it strange. Every conversation that he overhears, everything that goes on around him, and in which people find amusement and pleasure, all may show him that he talks a language which, to many of them, is downright folly. But this understanding of his surroundings will need to go hand in hand with an absolute assurance that he himself is on the right road; otherwise he will hardly be able to hold his ground when he realizes how his views conflict with those of so many others, who count as thinkers and highly educated persons. If he does possess the due assurance, if he knows the truth and the force of his views, he says to himself: — ”I know very well that today I may be regarded as a crackbrained visionary; and I clearly see why. But truth, even though it is ridiculed and mocked at, will have its effect; and its effect is not dependent upon people's opinion, but upon the solidity of its own foundations.” The other opinion which Anthroposophy has to meet is this: that its ideas are all very beautiful and comforting, and may have their value for the inner life of the soul, but are worthless for the practical struggle of life. Even people who demand anthroposophic nourishment for the appeasing of their spiritual wants may be tempted, only too easily, to say to themselves: “It is all very well; but how about the social distress, the material misery? That is a problem on which all this idealistic world can throw no light.” Now this opinion is the very one which rests on a total failure to recognize the real facts of life, and, above all, on a misunderstanding as to the real fruits of the anthroposophic mode of thinking. The one question that people, as a rule, ask about Anthroposophy is: — What are its doctrines? How are its statements to be proved? And then, of course, they look for its fruits in the pleasurable sensations to be extracted from its doctrines. Nothing, of course, could be more natural; one must certainly begin by having a feeling for the truth of statements that are presented to one. But the true fruits of Anthroposophy are not to be sought in such feeling. Its fruits are first really seen when anyone comes, with a heart and mind trained in Anthroposophy, to the practical problems of life. The question is, whether Anthroposophy will at all help him towards handling these problems with discernment and applying himself with understanding to find ways and means of solving them. To be effective in life, a man must first understand life. Here lies the gist of the matter. So long as one asks no further than: What does Anthroposophy teach? — Its teachings may be deemed too exalted for practical life. But if one turns to consider the kind of discipline that the thoughts and feelings undergo from these teachings, this objection will cease. Strange as it may seem to a merely superficial view of the matter, it is nevertheless a fact: These anthroposophic ideas, that appear to hover so airily in the clouds, train the eye for a right conduct of everyday affairs. And because Anthroposophy begins by leading the spirit aloft into the clear regions above the sense-world, it thereby sharpens the understanding for social requirements. Paradoxical as this may seem, it is none the less true. To give merely an illustration of what is meant: An uncommonly interesting book has recently appeared, A Working-man in America (Als Arbeiter in Amerika, pub. Sigismund, Berlin) The author is State-Councillor Kolb, who had the enterprise to spend several months as a common worker in America. In this way he acquired a discrimination of men and of life which was obviously neither to be obtained along the educational paths that led to councillorship, nor from the mass of experience which he was able to accumulate in such a position and in all the other posts that a man fills before he becomes a Councillor of State. He was thus for years in a position of considerable responsibility; and yet, not until he had left this, and lived — just a short while — in a foreign land, did he learn the knowledge of life that enabled him to write the following memorable sentence in his book: “How often, in old days, when I saw a sound, sturdy man begging, had I not asked, in righteous indignation: Why doesn't the lazy rascal work? I knew now, why. The fact is, it looks quite different in theory from what it does in practice; and at the study table one can deal quite comfortably with even the most unsavory chapters of political economy.” To prevent any possible misunderstanding, let it be said at once, that no one can feel anything but the warmest appreciation for a man who could bring himself to leave a comfortable position in life, in order to go and do hard labor in a brewery and a bicycle factory. It is a deed worthy of all respect, and it must be duly emphasized, lest it should be imagined that any disparagement is intended of the man who did it. Nevertheless, for anyone who will face the facts, it is unmistakably evident that all this man's book-learning, all the schooling he had been through, had not given him the ability to read life. Just try and realize all that is involved in such an admission! One may learn everything which, in these days, qualifies one to hold posts of considerable influence; and yet, with it all, one may be quite remote and aloof from that life where one's sphere of action lies. Is it not much the same, as though a man were to go through a course of training in bridge construction, and then, when called upon actually to build a bridge, had no notion how to set about it? And yet, no! — it is not quite the same. Anyone who is not properly trained for bridge building will soon be enlightened as to his deficiencies when he comes to actual practice. He will soon show himself to be a bungler and find his services generally declined. But when a man is not properly trained for his work in social life, his deficiencies are not so readily demonstrated. A badly built bridge breaks down; and then even the most prejudiced can see that he who built it was a bungler. But the bungling that goes on in social work is not so directly apparent. It only shows itself in the suffering of one's fellow-men. And the connection between this suffering and bungling is not one that people recognize as readily as the connection between the breakdown of a bridge and the incompetent bridge builder. “But what has all this to do with Anthroposophy?” someone will say. “Do the friends of Anthroposophy imagine that what they can teach would have helped Councillor Kolb to a better understanding of life? Of what use would it have been to him, supposing he had known about reincarnation and karma and any number of supersensible worlds? Surely nobody will maintain that ideas about planetary systems and higher worlds could have saved the State-Councillor from having one day to confess to himself, that at the study table one can deal quite comfortably with even the most unsavory chapters of political economy?” The friend of Anthroposophy might indeed answer — as Lessing did on a certain occasion: I am that “Nobody”, for I do maintain it! Not meaning of course, that the doctrine of reincarnation, or the knowledge of karma will be enough to equip a man for social activity, that would, of course, be a very naive notion. Naturally, the thing is not to be done simply by taking the people, who are destined for Councillors of State, and, instead of sending them to Schmoller, or Wagner, or Brentano at the University, setting them to study Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine. But the point is this: Suppose a theory of economics, produced by someone well versed in Anthroposophy — will it be of the kind with which one can deal quite comfortably at the study table, but which breaks down in the face of practical life? That is just what it will not be. For when do theories break down in the face of real life? When they are produced by the kind of thinking that is not educated to real life. Now the principles of Anthroposophy are as much the actual laws of life as the principles of electricity are the actual laws for the manufacture of electrical apparatus. Anyone who wishes to set up a factory of electrical apparatus must first master the true principles of electricity: and whoever intends to take an effective part in life must first make himself acquainted with the laws of life. And remote as the doctrines of Anthroposophy appear to be from life, they are no less near to it in actual truth. Aloof and unpractical to superficial observation, for a genuine understanding they are the key to real life. It is not merely an inquisitive desire of new things which leads people to withdraw into an “anthroposophic circle” in order to obtain all sorts of “interesting” revelations about worlds beyond; but because there they learn to school their thought and feeling and will on the “eternal laws of life”, and to go forth into the thick of life with a clear, keen eye for the understanding of it. The teachings of Anthroposophy are a detour of arriving at a full-lived thinking, discerning, feeling. The anthroposophic movement will first come into its right channel when this is fully recognized. Right doing is the outcome of right thinking; and wrong doing is the outcome of thinking wrongly — or of not thinking at all. Anyone who has any faith at all in the possibility of doing good in social matters must admit that the doing of it is a question of human faculties. To have worked patiently and persistently through the anthroposophical conceptions means enhanced faculties for effective social work. It is here not so much a question of the thoughts that Anthroposophy gives a man, as of what it enables him to do with his thinking. It must be confessed that, within anthroposophic circles themselves, there has hitherto been no very marked sign of any effort in this particular direction. It is therefore equally undeniable that, on this very account, strangers to Anthroposophy have as yet every reason for questioning the above statements. But it must not be forgotten that the anthroposophic movement in its present form is only at the beginning of its career as an effective force. Its further progress will consist in its making its way into every field of practical life. And then, in the Social Question, for instance, it will be found that, in place of theories “with which one can deal quite comfortably at the study table,” we shall have others which facilitate the insight required for a sound, unbiased judgment of life's affairs, and direct a man's will into lines of action that shall be for the health and happiness of his fellow-men. Plenty of people will say at once: Councillor Kolb's case itself is a proof that there is no need to call in Anthroposophy; all that is wanted is that anyone who is preparing for a particular profession should not acquire the theory of it solely by sitting at home and studying, but should be brought into contact with actual life, so that he may approach his work practically, as well as theoretically. Kolb, after all — they will say — merely required a brief glimpse into real life, and then, even what he had already learnt was quite enough for him to come to other opinions than those he had before. No, it is not enough, for the fault lies deeper down. A person may have learnt to see that, with a faulty training, he can only build bridges that will tumble down, and yet still be very far from having acquired the faculty of building bridges that do not tumble down. For this he must first have preliminary education of a kind that has the seeds of life in it. Most certainly a man needs only a glimpse into social conditions, and, let his theory as to the fundamental laws of life be ever so defective, he will cease to say: “Why doesn't the lazy rascal work?” He learns to see that the conditions themselves are the answer. But is that enough to teach him how to shape conditions so that men may prosper? All the well-meaning people, who have concocted schemes for the betterment of man's lot, were undoubtedly not of the same way of thinking as Councillor Kolb before he took his trip to America. They were certainly already convinced, without such an expedition, that every case of distress cannot simply be dismissed with the phrase: “Why doesn't the lazy rascal work?” But does this mean that all their many proposals for social reform would bear fruit? Assuredly not; if only for the reason that so many of them are contradictory. And therefore one may fairly say that even Councillor Kolb's more positive schemes of reform, after his conversion, would possibly not have any very marked results. This is just the mistake which our age makes in such matters. Everyone thinks himself qualified to understand life, even though he has never troubled to become acquainted with its fundamental laws, nor ever trained his thinking powers to recognize what the true forces of life are. And Anthroposophy is indeed a training for the sound judgment of life, because it goes to the bottom of life. It is of no use whatever simply to see that the conditions bring a man into unfavorable circumstances in life, under which he goes to grief. One must learn to know the forces by which favorable conditions are created. That is what our experts in political economy are unable to do — and for much the same reason as a man cannot do sums if he does not know the multiplication tables. You may set columns of figures before him — as many as you please; but staring at them will not help him. Put a man, who has no thinking grasp of the fundamental forces of social life, before the actual realities; he may give the most telling description of everything that he sees; but the windings of the social forces, as they twist their coil for human weal or human woe, will yet remain insoluble to him. In this age we need an interpretation of life which leads us on to life's true sources. And Anthroposophy can be such an interpretation of life. If everyone, before making up his mind as to the particular social reform that “the world wants”, would first go through a training in the life-lessons of Anthroposophy, we should get further. That anthroposophists today only “talk” and do not “act”, is a meaningless objection; for of course people cannot act, so long as the paths of action are closed to them. A man may be an expert in the knowledge of the soul, and ever so well acquainted with all that a father should do for the upbringing of his children; yet he is powerless to act, unless the father gives him the charge of their education. There is nothing to be done in this respect, save wait in patience, until the talking of the anthroposophists has opened the minds of those who have the power to act. And that will come. This first objection no more holds water than the other one: That these anthroposophical notions have not yet been put to the test, and may very likely prove, when brought into the open, to be every whit as barren a theory as the political economy of State-Councillor Kolb. But this again is no argument. Indeed it can only be urged by someone who is wholly unacquainted with the very nature and essence of anthroposophic truths. Whoever is acquainted with them well knows that they rest on quite a different footing from the kind of thing that one “tests”. The fact is that the laws of human welfare are inscribed with as much certitude in the very first fundaments of men's souls as the multiplication table. One must only go down deep enough to the basis of the human soul to find them. No doubt what is thus inscribed in the soul can be demonstrated objectively; just as it can objectively be demonstrated that twice two is four by arranging 4 peas in two sets. But would anyone maintain that the truth “Twice two is four” must first be “tested” on the peas? The two things are in every way comparable. He who questions an anthroposophic truth is someone who has not yet recognized it; just as only a person can question that twice two is four, who has not yet recognized it. Widely as they differ, inasmuch as the one is very simple, and the other very complicated, yet in other respects there is an analogy between them. It is true that one must first study Anthroposophy itself before one can clearly perceive this. And therefore for those who are unacquainted with Anthroposophy, no “proof” of the fact can be adduced. One can only say: First become acquainted with Anthroposophy, and then all this too will be clear to you. The great mission of Anthroposophy in our age will first become evident when Anthroposophy works like a leaven in every part of life. Until the road of actual life can be trodden in the fullest sense of the word, those into whose minds Anthroposophy has entered are but at the beginning of their work. So long, too, they must be prepared to have it cast in their teeth that their doctrines are the foes of real life. Yes, these doctrines are the foes of real life, just as the railway was the foe of a kind of life which regarded the stage-coach as life's only reality, and could see no further. They are its foes in the same way as the future is the foe of the past. The next essay will go more into special points in the relation of Anthroposophy to the Social Question. |