The Rudolf Steiner Archive

All propounders of theories of knowledge since Kant have been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the mistaken way he formulated the problem of knowledge. As a result of his “a priorism” he advanced the view that all objects given to us are our representations. Ever since, this view has been made the basic principle and starting point of practically all epistemological systems. The only thing we can establish as an immediate certainty is the principle that we are aware of our representations; this principle has become an almost universally accepted belief of philosophers. As early as 1792 G. E. Schulze maintained in his Aenesidemus that all our knowledge consists of mere representations, and that we can never go beyond our representations. Schopenhauer, with a characteristic philosophical fervor, puts forward the view that the enduring achievement of Kantian philosophy is the principle that the world is “my representation.” Eduard von Hartmann finds this principle so irrefutable that in his book, Kritische Grundlegung des transzendentalen Realismus (Critical Basis of Transcendental Realism) he assumes that his readers, by critical reflection, have overcome the naive identification of the perceptual picture with the thing-in-itself, that they have convinced themselves of the absolute diversity of the subjective-ideal content of consciousness—given as perceptual object through the act of representing—and the thing existing by itself, independent both of the act of representing and of the form of consciousness; in other words, readers who have entirely convinced themselves that the totality of what is given us directly consists of our representations. In his final work on epistemology, Eduard von Hartmann did attempt to provide a foundation for this view. The validity of this in relation to a theory of knowledge free from presuppositions, will be discussed later. Otto Liebmann claims that the principle: “Consciousness cannot jump beyond itself” must be the inviolable and foremost principle of any science of knowledge. Volkelt is of the opinion that the first and most immediate truth is: “All our knowledge extends, to begin with, only as far as our representations” he called this the most positive principle of knowledge, and considered a theory of knowledge to be “eminently critical” only if it “considers this principle as the sole stable point from which to begin all philosophizing, and from then on thinks it through consistently.” Other philosophers make other assertions the center of epistemology, e.g.: the essential problem is the question of the relation between thinking and existence, as well as the possibility of mediation between them, or again: How does that which exists become conscious? (Rehmke) etc. Kirchmann starts from two epistemological axioms: “the perceived is” and “the contradictory is not.” According to E. L. Fischer knowledge consists in the recognition of something factual and real. He lays down this dogma without proof as does Goring, who maintains something similar: “Knowledge always means recognizing something that exists; this is a fact that neither scepticism nor Kantian criticism can deny.” The two latter philosophers simply lay down the law: This they say is knowledge, without judging themselves.

Even if these different assertions were correct, or led to a correct formulation of the problem, the place to discuss them is definitely not at the beginning of a theory of knowledge. For they all represent at the outset a quite specific insight into the sphere of knowledge. To say that my knowledge extends to begin with only as far as my representations, is to express a quite definite judgment about cognition. In this sentence I add a predicate to the world given to me, namely, its existence in the form of representation. But how do I know, prior to all knowledge, that the things given to me are representations?

Thus this principle ought not to be placed at the foundation of a theory of knowledge; that this is true is most easily appreciated by tracing the line of thought that leads up to it. This principle has become in effect a part of the whole modern scientific consciousness. The considerations which have led to it are to be found systematically and comprehensively summarized in Part I of Eduard von Hartmann's book, Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie (The Fundamental Problem of Epistemology). What is advanced there can thus serve as a kind of guide when discussing the reasons that led to the above assumption.

These reasons are physical, psycho-physical, physiological, as well as philosophical. The physicist who observes phenomena that occur in our environment when, for instance, we perceive a sound, is led to conclude that these phenomena have not the slightest resemblance to what we directly perceive as sound. Out there in the space surrounding us, nothing is to be found except vibrations of material bodies and of air. It is concluded from this that what we ordinarily call sound or tone is solely a subjective reaction of our organism to those wave-like movements. Likewise it is found that light, color and heat are something purely subjective. The phenomena of color-diffraction, refraction, interference and polarization show that these sensations correspond to certain transverse vibrations in external space, which, so it is thought, must be ascribed partly to material bodies, partly to an infinitely fine elastic substance, the ether. Furthermore, because of certain physical phenomena, the physicist finds himself compelled to abandon the belief in the continuity of objects in space, and to analyze them into systems of minute particles (molecules, atoms) the size of which, in relation to the distance between them, is immeasurably small. Thus he concludes that material bodies affect one another across empty space, so that in reality force is exerted from a distance. The physicist believes he is justified in assuming that a material body does not affect our senses of touch and warmth by direct contact, because there must be a certain distance, even if very small, between the body and the place where it touches the skin. From this he concludes further that what we sense as the hardness or warmth of a body, for example, is only the reaction of the peripheral nerves of our senses of touch and warmth to the molecular forces of bodies which act upon them across empty space.

These considerations of the physicist are amplified by those of the psycho-physicist in the form of a science of specific sense-energies. J. Müller has shown that each sense can be affected only in a characteristic manner which is conditioned by its structure, so that it always reacts in the same way to any external stimulus. If the optic nerve is stimulated, there is a sensation of light, whether the stimulus is in the form of pressure, electric current, or light. On the other hand, the same external phenomenon produces quite different sensations, according to which sense organ transmits it. This leads to the conclusion that there is only one kind of phenomenon in the external world, namely motion, and that the many aspects of the world which we perceive derive essentially from the reaction of our senses to this phenomenon. According to this view, we do not perceive the external world. itself, but merely the subjective sensations which it releases in us.

Thus physiology is added to physics. Physics deals with the phenomena occurring outside our organism to which our perceptions correspond; physiology aims to investigate the processes that occur in man's body when he experiences a certain sense impression. It shows that the epidermis is completely insensitive to external stimuli. In order to reach the nerves connected with our sense of touch on the periphery of the body, an external vibration must first be transmitted through the epidermis. In the case of hearing and vision the external motion is further modified through a number of organs in these sense-tools, before it reaches the corresponding nerve. These effects, produced in the organs at the periphery of the body, now have to be conducted through the nerve to the central organ, where sensations are finally produced through purely mechanical processes in the brain. It is obvious that the stimulus which acts on the sense organ is so changed through these modifications that there can be no similarity between what first affected the sense organs, and the sensations that finally arise in consciousness. The result of these considerations is summed up by Hartmann in the following words:

“The content of consciousness consists fundamentally of the sensations which are the soul's reflex response to processes of movement in the uppermost part of the brain, and these have not the slightest resemblance to the molecular movements which called them into being.”

If this line of thought is correct and is pursued to its conclusion, it must then be admitted that our consciousness does not contain the slightest element of what could be called external existence.

To the physical and physiological arguments against so-called “naive realism” Hartmann adds further objections which he describes as essentially philosophical. A logical examination of the first two objections reveals that in fact one can arrive at the above result only by first assuming the existence and interrelations of external things, as ordinary naive consciousness does, and then investigating how this external world enters our consciousness by means of our organism. We have seen that between receiving a sense impression and becoming conscious of a sensation, every trace of such an external world is lost, and all that remains in consciousness are our representations. We must therefore assume that our picture of the external world is built up by the soul, using the material of sensations. First of all, a spatial picture is constructed using the sensations produced by sight and touch, and sensations arising from the other senses are then added. When we are compelled to think of a certain complex of sensations as connected, we are led to the concept of matter, which we consider to be the carrier of sensations. If we notice that some sensations associated with a substance disappear, while others arise, we ascribe this to a change regulated by the causal laws in the world of phenomena. According to this view, our whole world-picture is composed of subjective sensations arranged by our own soul-activity. Hartmann says: “Thus all that the subject perceives are modifications of its own soul-condition and nothing else.”

Let us examine how this conviction is arrived at. The argument may be summarized as follows: If an external world exists then we do not perceive it as such, but through our organism transform it into a world of representations. When followed out consistently, this is a self-canceling assumption. In any case, can this argument be used to establish any conviction at all? Are we justified in regarding our given world-picture as a subjective content of representations, just because we arrive inevitably at this conclusion if we start from the assumption made by naive consciousness? After all, the aim was just to prove this assumption invalid. It should then be possible for an assertion to be wrong, and yet lead to a correct result. This can happen, but the result cannot then be said to have been proved by the assertion.

The view which accepts the reality of our directly given picture of the world as certain and beyond doubt, is usually called naive realism. The opposite view, which regards this world-picture as merely the content of our consciousness, is called transcendental idealism. Thus the preceding discussion could also be summarized as follows: Transcendental idealism demonstrates its truth by using the same premises as the naive realism which it aims to refute. Transcendental idealism is justified if naive realism is proved incorrect, but its incorrectness is only demonstrated by means of the incorrect view itself. Once this is realized there is no alternative but to abandon this path and to attempt to arrive at another view of the world. Does this mean proceeding by trial and error until we happen to hit on the right one? That is Hartmann's approach when he believes his epistemological standpoint established on the grounds that his view explains the phenomena, whereas others do not. According to him the various world-views are engaged in a sort of struggle for existence in which the fittest is ultimately accepted as victor. But the inconsistency of this procedure is immediately apparent, for there might well be other hypotheses which would explain the phenomena equally satisfactorily. For this reason we prefer to adhere to the above argument for the refuting of naive realism, and investigate precisely where its weakness lies. After all, naive realism is the viewpoint from which we all start. It is therefore the proper starting-point for a critical investigation. By recognizing its shortcomings we shall be led to the right path much more surely than by simply trusting to luck.

The subjectivism outlined above is based on the use of thinking for elaborating certain facts. This presupposes that, starting from certain facts, a correct conclusion can be obtained through logical thinking (logical combination of particular observations). But the justification for using thinking in this way is not examined by this philosophical approach. This is its weakness. While naive realism begins by assuming that the content of experience, as we perceive it, is an objective reality without examining if this is so, the standpoint just characterized sets out from the equally uncritical conviction that thinking can be used to arrive at scientifically valid conclusions. In contrast to naive realism, this view could be called naive rationalism. To justify this term, a brief comment on the concept of “naive” is necessary here. A. Döring tries to define this concept in his essay, Ueber den Begriff des naiven Realismus (Concerning the Concept of naive Realism). He says:

“The concept 'naive' designates the zero point in the scale of reflection about one's own relation to what one is doing. A naive content may well be correct, for although it is unreflecting and therefore simply non-critical or uncritical, this lack of reflection and criticism excludes the objective assurance of truth, and includes the possibility and danger of error, yet by no means necessitates them. One can be equally naive in one's life of feeling and will, as in the life of representing and thinking in the widest sense; furthermore, one may express this inner life in a naive manner rather than repressing and modifying it through consideration and reflection. To be naive means not to be influenced, or at least not consciously influenced by tradition, education or rules; it means to be, in all spheres of life, what the root of the word: 'nativus' implies. i.e., unconscious, impulsive, instinctive, daimonic.”

Starting from this, we will endeavor to define “naive” still more precisely. In all our activities, two things must be taken into account: the activity itself, and our knowledge of its laws. We may be completely absorbed in the activity without worrying about its laws. The artist is in this position when he does not reflect about the laws according to which he creates, but applies them, using feeling and sensitivity. We may call him “naive.” It is possible, however, to observe oneself, and enquire into the laws inherent in one's own activity, thus abandoning the naive consciousness just described through knowing exactly the scope of and justification for what one does. This I shall call critical. I believe this definition comes nearest to the meaning of this concept as it has been used in philosophy, with greater or lesser clarity, ever since Kant. Critical reflection then is the opposite of the naive approach. A critical attitude is one that comes to grips with the laws of its own activity in order to discover their reliability and limits. Epistemology can only be a critical science. For its object is an essentially subjective activity of man: cognition, and it wishes to demonstrate the laws inherent in cognition. Thus everything “naive” must be excluded from this science. Its strength must lie in doing precisely what many thinkers, inclined more toward the practical doing of things, pride themselves that they have never done, namely, “think about thinking.”

All epistemologists after Kant have been influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Kant’s flawed reasoning. Kant’s view (that all objects given to us are merely our mental representations) arises due to his a priori stance. His view consequently has been made the principle starting point of almost all epistemological systems. What is initially and immediately certain to us, he claims, is that we only know our mental pictures (Vorstellungen). This view has been believed almost universally by philosophers. As early as 1792, G. E. Schulze claimed in his Anesidemus ⁴⁵ that mental pictures are all that we know, and that we can never go beyond them. Schopenhauer presents this same view with his own philosophical pathos, that the lasting attainment of Kant's philosophy is the view that the world is simply my own mental picture. Eduard von Hartmann finds this sentence so inviolable, that in his work Critical Foundations of Transcendental Realism he takes for granted that all his readers, by critical reflection, have freed themselves from the naive identification of their perceptual image with a thing-in-itself, and consider as evident that the seeming diversity of objects of observation in the act of mental picturing is a singular subjective-ideal content of consciousness, and consider as evident that something else exists in and of itself, independent of the form of consciousness. In other words, his readers are permeated by the conviction that the totality of what is immediately given to us consists of mental pictures (Vorstellungen).⁴⁶

In his last epistemological publication, Hartmann tried to justify his view. Our further discussion will show how an unprejudiced epistemology must respond to this sort of justification. Otto Liebmann states as the sacrosanct supreme principle of all epistemology, “Consciousness cannot leap over itself.” ⁴⁷ Vokelt had the opinion that the first, most immediate truth is that "all our knowing extends initially only to our mental pictures, the positivistic principle of knowledge, and he only considers that theory of knowing as eminently critical which contains this principle, and then develops its consequences”.⁴⁸ Other philosophers put other claims at the forefront of epistemology, for example, that the real problem lies in the question of the relationship between thinking and existence, and the possibility of mediating between the two, or the question how a being becomes conscious.⁴⁹ Kirchmann ⁵⁰ starts from two epistemological axioms, “what is perceived is” and “the contradiction is not.⁵¹ According to E. L. Fischer, cognition consists in the knowledge of something actual, real,⁵² and he leaves this dogma unexamined, just as does Göring, who claims something similar, “Knowing always means recognizing a being, and that is a fact which neither skepticism nor Kantian criticism can deny.” ⁵³ In the case of the last two, one simply decrees what knowing consists of, without asking by what right this can happen.

Even if these various claims were correct or led to correct problems, they could not be discussed at the beginning of a theory of knowing, because, as very specific insights, they all already stand within the domain of knowing. When I say that my knowledge initially only extends to my ideas or mental pictures, that is a very specific cognitive judgment. Through this sentence a predicate is added to the world given to me, namely existence in the form of a mental picture. But above all, how am I supposed to know that the things given to me are mental pictures?

We will best convince ourselves of the correctness of not placing this sentence at the forefront of epistemology if we follow the path that the human mind must take to get to it. Yet the phrase has become a part of modern scientific consciousness. The considerations that pushed it to the front can be found systematically and completely compiled in the first section of Eduard von Hartmann's Critical Foundation of Transcendental Realism.⁵⁴ What has been put forward can therefore serve as a kind of guide, if one sets out to discuss all the reasons that could lead to that assumption. These reasons are physical, psycho-physical, physiological, and specifically philosophical.

A physicist tries to reach out through observation to actual events in our environment. When we, for instance, have a sensation of sound, a physicist conjectures that there is nothing in these actual happenings that has even the remotest similarity to what we simply perceive as sound. Outside, in the space surrounding us, only longitudinal vibrations of the bodies and the air can be found. From this it is concluded that what we call sound or tone in ordinary life is merely a subjective reaction of our organism to that wave movement. Likewise, one finds that light, color, and heat are all purely subjective. The varieties of color-scattering, light-refraction, light-wave-overlapping, and polarization teach us that the above-mentioned sensory qualities correspond to vibrations or waves moving in external space, which we feel compelled to attribute partly to bodies and partly to something immeasurably fine, elastic, and flowing in the atmosphere. Furthermore, due to certain phenomena in the physical world, the physicist is forced to give up the belief in the continuity of objects in space and to trace them back to systems of the smallest parts (molecules, atoms) whose sizes are immeasurably small in relation to their relative positions in space. From this he concludes that all effects of bodies on one-another work through empty space, which indicates forces acting over distances.⁵⁵ Physics believes it is justified in assuming that the effect of bodies on our sense of touch and warmth does not occur through direct contact, because there must always be a certain, albeit small, distance between the area of skin touching the body and the body itself. From this it follows that what we perceive, for example, as the hardness or warmth of the body, are only reactions of nerve endings that are sensitive to touch or heat, and heat, reacting to the molecular forces acting through empty space.

These considerations of physicists are supplemented by those of psychophysicists,⁵⁶ which find expression in the doctrine of specific sensory energies. J. Müller ⁵⁷ has shown that every sense can only be affected in its own way, determined by its organization, and that it always reacts in the same way, whatever external impression is made on it. When the optic nerve is excited, we sense light, regardless of whether it is pressure or electric current or light that acts on the nerve. On the other hand, the same external stimuli produce completely different sensations, depending on how they are perceived by this or that sense. From this it has been concluded that there is only one type of process in the external world, namely movement, and that the diversity of the world we perceive is essentially a reaction of our senses to these processes. According to this view, we do not perceive the external world as such, but only the subjective feelings it triggers within us.

In addition to the considerations of physics and psychophysicists, there are also those of physiologists. The former follows the phenomena that occur outside our organism and which correspond to our perceptions. Physiology seeks to explore the processes in people's own bodies that take place when certain sensory nerves are stimulated. Physiology teaches that the epidermis is completely insensitive to stimuli from the outside world. So, if the end-organs of our touch-sensitive nerves near the surface of the body are to be stimulated by the influences of the outside world, the vibrations or waves that lie outside our body must first propagate through the epidermis. In the auditory and visual senses, the external movement process is also modified by many organelles in the sensory apparatus before it reaches the auditory or visual nerves. This action on the end-organs is then conducted through the nerves to the central organ, and only there, from purely mechanical processes in the brain, the sensation is generated, is born.

It is quite clear that the sensory organ stimulation is converted on its way into the brain, so much so that every trace of resemblance between the first impact on the sensory system and the final sensation in awareness is obliterated. Hartmann summarizes this consideration in the following words, “This content of consciousness originally consists of sensations with which the soul reacts reflexively to the states of movement in its highest brain center, but which do not have the slightest resemblance to the molecular states of movement through which they are exercised”. Anyone who thinks this train of thought through to the end must admit that if it is correct, not the slightest remnant of what can be called external existence would be contained in the content of our consciousness.

To his physical and physiological objections to what he calls naive realism, Hartman adds what he calls purely philosophical objections. When we examine the first two objections logically, however, we notice that we can only really come to the result indicated if we start from the existence of and our connection to external things, just as ordinary naive consciousness assumes, and afterward examine how this external world can come into our awareness inside our bodily organization. We have seen that we lose every trace of such an external world on the way from the sensory impression to the entry into consciousness, and in the latter, in our awareness, nothing remains but our ideas, our mental pictures (Vorstellungen). We must therefore assume that our image of the external world is built by the soul based on sensations. First, a spatial picture of the world is constructed from the sensations of sight and touch, into which the sensations of the other senses are then inserted. If we find ourselves forced to think that a certain complex of sensations is coherent, we come to the concept of substance, which carries itself. If we notice that certain sensed qualities of a substance disappear as others appear, we attribute this to a change in the material world, regulated by the law of causality. According to this view, our entire worldview is made up of subjective sensory content, which is regulated by our own soul activity. Hartmann says, “The subject perceives only modifications of his own psychological states and nothing else.” ⁵⁸

Let us now ask ourselves, how do we come to such a conclusion? The skeleton of the thought process is that if an external world exists, we do not perceive it as such, but rather transform it into a world of mental pictures through our organization. What we are dealing with here is a premise, that if pursued rigorously, cancels itself out. Is this line of thought a suitable basis for any conviction? Are we justified in viewing the world given to us as subjective conceptual content when this view necessarily leads to the assumption of naive consciousness, of naive realism? Our goal is to prove this assumption itself to be invalid. Can it be possible for an assertion to turn out to be false, and yet arrive at a proper conclusion? Well, that may happen, but the conclusion can never be regarded as proven in that way.

The world view that accepts the reality of the world picture that is immediately given to us as something that cannot be questioned, and is self-evident, is usually called naive realism. The opposite, on the other hand, which considers this world view to be merely the content of our consciousness, is transcendental idealism. We can therefore also summarize the result of the previous considerations with the following words: transcendental idealism proves its correctness by operating with the means of naive realism, which it aims to refute.

Naive realism may be false, but its falseness is proven here only with the help of the false view itself. Anyone who keeps this in mind has no alternative but to leave the path taken here, and attempt to take up another view of the world. But should this be done on a trial basis, with luck, until we accidentally come across the right thing? Eduard von Hartmann has taken this path; he believes he has demonstrated the validity of his epistemological approach, for it explains world phenomena while others do not. According to him, individual world views struggle for existence, and the one that proves itself best is ultimately accepted as the winner. But such a procedure seems inadmissible to us, simply because there could easily be several hypotheses that lead to an equally satisfactory explanation of world phenomena. Therefore, we would rather stick to the above line of thought for refuting naive realism and see where specifically its deficiency lies.

Naive realism is the viewpoint from which all people start. For this reason alone, it is advisable to start the correction with it. If we understand what in it is defective, then we will be guided onto the right path with a completely different degree of certainty than if we simply try something randomly. The subjectivism outlined above is based on mental processing of certain facts. It therefore presupposes, from an actual starting point, that correct convictions can be obtained through logical thinking (logical combination of certain observations). The right to apply our thinking in this way, however, is not examined from this point of view. And therein lies its weakness. While naive realism is based on the unexamined assumption that our perceived experience has objective reality, the characterized viewpoint above is based on the equally unexamined belief that one can arrive at scientifically justified convictions through the application of thinking. In contrast to naive realism, this point of view can be called naive rationalism. As a means of justifying this terminology, we would like to make a brief comment about the term “naive”. A. Doring seeks to define this concept more closely in his essay on the concept of naive realism.⁵⁹ He says about it, “The concept of naïveté describes, as it were, the zero point on the scale of reflection on one's own behavior. In terms of content, naïveté can certainly make the right decision, because it is indeed without reflection and therefore uncritical, but this lack of reflection and criticism only excludes the objective certainty of doing the right thing; it includes the possibility and danger of failing, but by no means the necessity of it. There is a naïveté of feeling and willing, as well as of imagining and thinking, in the broadest sense of the latter word, as well as a naïveté of the expressions of these inner states in contrast to the repression or modification of them brought about by considerations and reflection. Naïveté (at least consciously, not influenced by what is traditional, learned, and prescriptive) is in all areas what the root word nativus expresses, namely unconscious, impulsive, instinctive, demonic.”

Starting from these sentences, we want the concept of being naive to be a little more precise. In every activity we carry out, two things come into consideration: the activity itself and a consideration of its consequences. We can be completely absorbed in the former without asking about the latter. This is the case when an artist fails to consider how his work affects others, but rather practices his art according to his own feelings and sensations. We call him naive. But there is a type of self-observation that considers the consequences of one's own actions, and which exchanges this awareness for naïveté, and knows exactly the scope and justification of what it is doing. We want to call this critical. We believe that this best captures the meaning of the term critical, as it has become established in philosophy with various degrees of clarity since Kant. Critical prudence is therefore the opposite of naïveté. We call behavior critical when it takes control of the laws of one's own activity, to learn about their safety and limits. Therefore, a theory of knowing, epistemology, can only be a critical science. Its object to a high degree is the subjective human activity of cognition,⁶⁰ and what it wants to demonstrate are the laws of cognition. All naïveté must therefore be excluded from this science. It must see its strength precisely in the fact that it accomplishes what many practical minds boast that they have never done, namely "thinking about thinking."

• 45. Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833), Aenesidemus, Helmstädt, 1792.
• 46. Eduard von Hartmann, Kritische Grundlegung, Berlin 1875, Foreword, p. 10 of the German ed.
• 47. Otto Liebmann, Zur Analysis, p. 28 ff. of the German ed
• 48. Vokelt, Kant’s Erkenntnistheorie, section 1.
• 49. J. Rehmke, Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff uns; Berlin 1880.
• 50. Julius Heinrich v. Kirchmann (1802–1884), Die Lehre vom Wissen, The Theory of Knowledge, Berlin, 1868.
• 51. A. Dorner, Das menschliche Erkennen, usw., Human Cognition, Berlin, 1887.
• 52. E. L. Fischer, Die Grundfragen der Erkenntnistheorie, Basic Questions of the Theory of Cognition, Mainz 1887, p. 385.
• 53. C. Göring, System der kritischen Philosophie, System of Critical Philosophy, Leipzig, 1874, Part I, p. 257.
• 54. Eduard von Hartmann, Kritische Grundlegung des transzendentalen Realismus; 2. Aufl. Berlin 1875, S.37.
• 55. t/n Physicists consider electromagnetic forces, gravitational forces, weak and strong nuclear forces, as well as quantum entanglement (EPR pairs).
• 56. t/n A psychophysicist is someone who deals with the relationship between a physical stimulus and the sensation and perception it produces.
• 57. t/n Johannes Müller (1801–1858)
• 58. Hartmann's Grundproblem, p. 37
• 59. A. Döring, article in Philosophische Monatshefte, Vol. XXVI, 1890, p. 390. publ. Heidelberg.
• 60. t/n Cognition is the mental activity of acquiring understanding of sense perceptions and concepts.

Kant is generally considered to be the founder of epistemology in the modern sense. However, the history of philosophy before Kant contains a number of investigations which must be considered as more than mere beginnings of such a science. Volkelt points to this in his standard work on epistemology, saying that critical treatments of this science began as early as Locke.¹ However, discussions which to-day come under the heading of epistemology² can be found as far back as in the philosophy of ancient Greece. Kant then went into every aspect of all the relevant problems, and innumerable thinkers following in his footsteps went over the ground so thoroughly that in their works or in Kant's are to be found repetitions of all earlier attempts to solve these problems. Thus where a factual rather than a historical study of epistemology is concerned, there is no danger of omitting anything important if one considers only the period since the appearance of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. All earlier achievements in this field have been repeated since Kant.

Kant's fundamental question concerning epistemology is: How are synthetical judgments a priori possible? Let us consider whether or not this question is free of presuppositions. Kant formulates it because he believes that we can arrive at certain, unconditional knowledge only if we can prove the validity of synthetical judgments a priori. He says:

In the solution of the above problem is comprehended at the same time the possibility of the use of pure reason in the foundation and construction of all sciences which contain theoretical knowledge a priori of objects.³

Upon the solution of this problem depends the existence or downfall of the science of metaphysics.⁴

Is this problem as Kant formulates it, free of all presuppositions? Not at all, for it says that a system of absolute, certain knowledge can be erected only on a foundation of judgments that are synthetical and acquired independently of all experience. Kant calls a judgment “synthetical” where the concept of the predicate brings to the concept of the subject something which lies completely outside the subject—“although it stands in connection with the subject,”⁵ by contrast, in analytical judgment, the predicate merely expresses something which is already contained (though hidden) in the subject. It would be out of place here to go into the extremely acute objections made by Johannes Rehmke⁶ to this classification of judgments. For our present purpose it will suffice to recognize that we can arrive at true knowledge only through judgments which add one concept to another in such a way that the content of the second was not already contained—at least for us—in the first. If, with Kant, we wish to call this category of judgment synthetical, then it must be agreed that knowledge in the form of judgment can only be attained when the connection between predicate and subject is synthetical in this sense. But the position is different in regard to the second part of Kant's question, which demands that these judgments must be acquired a priori, i.e., independent of all experience. After all, it is conceivable that such judgments might not exist at all. A theory of knowledge must leave open, to begin with, the question of whether we can arrive at a judgment solely by means of experience, or by some other means as well. Indeed, to an unprejudiced mind it must seem that for something to be independent of experience in this way is impossible. For whatever object we are concerned to know, we must become aware of it directly and individually, that is, it must become experience. We acquire mathematical judgment too, only through direct experience of particular single examples. This is the case even if we regard them, with Otto Liebmann as rooted in a certain faculty of our consciousness. In this case, we must say: This or that proposition must be valid, for, if its truth were denied, consciousness would be denied as well; but we could only grasp its content, as knowledge, through experience in exactly the same way as we experience a process in outer nature. Irrespective of whether the content of such a proposition contains elements which guarantee its absolute validity or whether it is certain for other reasons, the fact remains that we cannot make it our own unless at some stage it becomes experience for us. This is the first objection to Kant's question.

The second consists in the fact that at the beginning of a theoretical investigation of knowledge, one ought not to maintain that no valid and absolute knowledge can be obtained by means of experience. For it is quite conceivable that experience itself could contain some characteristic feature which would guarantee the validity of insight gained by means of it.

Two presuppositions are thus contained in Kant's formulation of the question. One presupposition is that we need other means of gaining knowledge besides experience, and the second is that all knowledge gained through experience is only approximately valid. It does not occur to Kant that these principles need proof, that they are open to doubt. They are prejudices which he simply takes over from dogmatic philosophy and then uses as the basis of his critical investigations. Dogmatic philosophy assumes them to be valid, and simply uses them to arrive at knowledge accordingly; Kant makes the same assumptions and merely inquires under what conditions they are valid. But suppose they are not valid at all? In that case, the edifice of Kant's doctrine has no foundation whatever.

All that Kant brings forward in the five paragraphs preceding his actual formulation of the problem, is an attempt to prove that mathematical judgments are synthetical (an attempt which Robert Zimmermann,⁷ if he does not refute it, at least shows it to be highly questionable). But the two assumptions discussed above are retained as scientific prejudices. In the Critique of Pure Reason⁸ it is said:

Experience no doubt teaches us that this or that object is constituted in such and such a manner, but not that it could not possibly exist otherwise.” “Experience never exhibits strict and absolute, but only assumed and comparative universality (by induction).

In Prolegomena⁹ we find it said:

Firstly, as regards the sources of metaphysical knowledge, the very conception of the latter shows that these cannot be empirical. Its principles (under which not merely its axioms, but also its fundamental conceptions are included) must consequently never be derived from experience, since it is not physical but metaphysical knowledge, i.e., knowledge beyond experience, that is wanted.

And finally Kant says:

“Before all, be it observed, that proper mathematical propositions are always judgments a priori, and not empirical, because they carry along with them the conception of necessity, which cannot be given by experience. If this be demurred to, it matters not; I will then limit my assertion to pure mathematics, the very conception of which implies that it consists of knowledge altogether non-empirical and a priori.”¹⁰

No matter where we open the Critique of Pure Reason we find that all the investigations pursued in it are based on these dogmatic principles. Cohen¹¹ and Stadler¹² attempt to prove that Kant has established the a priori nature of mathematical and purely scientific principles. However, all that the Critique of Pure Reason attempts to show can be summed up as follows: Mathematics and pure natural science are a priori sciences; from this it follows that the form of all experiences must be inherent in the subject itself. Therefore, the only thing left that is empirically given is the material of sensations. This is built up into a system of experiences, the form of which is inherent in the subject. The formal truths of a priori theories have meaning and significance only as principles which regulate the material of sensation; they make experience possible, but do not go further than experience. However, these formal truths are the synthetical judgment a priori, and they must—as condition necessary for experience—extend as far as experience itself. The Critique of Pure Reason does not at all prove that mathematics and pure science are a priori sciences but only establishes their sphere of validity, pre-supposing that their truths are acquired independently of experience. Kant, in fact, avoids discussing the question of proof of the a priori sciences in that he simply excludes that section of mathematics (see conclusion of Kant's last statement quoted above) where even in his own opinion the a priori nature is open to doubt; and he limits himself to that section where he believes proof can be inferred from the concepts alone. Even Johannes Volkelt finds that:

Kant starts from the positive assumption that a necessary and universal knowledge exists as an actual fact. These presuppositions which Kant never specifically attempted to prove, are so contrary to a proper critical theory of knowledge that one must seriously ask oneself whether the Critique of Pure Reason is valid as critical epistemology.

Volkelt does find that there are good reasons for answering this question affirmatively, but he adds: “The critical conviction of Kant's theory of knowledge is nevertheless seriously disturbed by this dogmatic assumption.”¹³ It is evident from this that Volkelt, too, finds that the Critique of Pure Reason as a theory of knowledge, is not free of presuppositions.

O. Liebmann, Hölder, Windelband, Ueberweg, Ed. v. Hartmann¹⁴ and Kuno Fischer,¹⁵ hold essentially similar views on this point, namely, that Kant bases his whole argument on the assumption that knowledge of pure mathematics and natural science is acquired a priori.

That we acquire knowledge independently of all experience, and that the insight gained from experience is of general value only to a limited extent, can only be conclusions derived from some other investigation. These assertions must definitely be preceded by an examination both of the nature of experience and of knowledge. Examination of experience could lead to the first principle; examination of knowledge, to the second.

In reply to these criticisms of Kant's critique of reason, it could be said that every theory of knowledge must first lead the reader to where the starting point, free of all presuppositions, is to be found. For what we possess as knowledge at any moment in our life is far removed from this point, and we must first be led back to it artificially. In actual fact, it is a necessity for every epistemologist to come to such a purely didactic arrangement concerning the starting point of this science. But this must always be limited merely to showing to what extent the starting point for cognition really is the absolute start; it must be presented in purely self evident, analytical sentences and, unlike Kant's argument, contain no assertions which will influence the content of the subsequent discussion. It is also incumbent on the epistemologist to show that his starting point is really free of all presuppositions. All this, however, has nothing to do with the nature of the starting point itself, but is quite independent of it and makes no assertions about it. Even when he begins to teach mathematics, the teacher must try to convince the pupil that certain truths are to be understood as axioms. But no one would assert that the content of the axioms is made dependent on these preliminary considerations. (In the chapter titled “The Starting Point of Epistemology,” I shall show to what extent my discussion fulfils these conditions). In exactly the same way the epistemologist must show in his introductory remarks how one can arrive at a starting point free of all presuppositions; yet the actual content of this starting point must be quite independent of these considerations. However, anyone who, like Kant, makes definite, dogmatic assertions at the very outset, is certainly very far from fulfilling these conditions when he introduces his theory of knowledge.

• 1. John Locke (1632–1704), English philosopher, scholar, chemist, student of meteorology, practicing physician, political advisor, traveler, and author. For details on his life and thought, consult any standard encyclopedia.
• 2. see reference to Volkelt's book in note 71, above, (p. 20)
• 3. 81.p. 61 ff. of Kirchmann's German edition of Kant's Kritik. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introd. to 2nd edition. Sec. vi.
• 4. Kant, Prolegomena, Sec. v.
• 5. Kant, Kritik, p. 53 f. of the German ed. Introduction, Sec. iv.
• 6. Rehmke, Johannes: Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, usw., The World as Percept and Concept, etc., Berlin, 1880, p. 161 ff. of the German ed.
• 7. Note by Rudolf Steiner: This attempt, incidentally, is one which the objections of Robert Zimmermann (Uber Kant's mathematisches Vorurteil und dessen Folgen, On Kant's Mathematical Notions and their Results) show to be, if not altogether in error, at least highly questionable. (Robert Zimmermann, 1824–1898, was Professor of Philosophy in the University of Vienna, 1861–95. His book on Aesthetics was published in 2 volumes, Vienna, 1870. Rudolf Steiner attended lectures by Zimmermann on fundamentals of ethics at the University of Vienna. Steiner's impressions of this great interpreter of Herbart's aesthetics are contained in the 3rd chapter of the former's autobiography.)
• 8. Kant, Kritik, Introduction to 2nd edition. Sec. ii.
• 9. See Kant's Theorie der Erfahrung, Theory of Experience, pp. 90, ff. of the German ed.
• 10. Kant, Kritik, p. 58, Sec. v.
• 11. Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, Kant's Theory of Experience, Berlin, 1871, pp. 90 ff. of the German ed.
• 12. August Stadler (1850–1910), Die Grundsätze der reinen Erkenntnistheorie in der Kantschen Philosophie, The Principles of the Pure Theory of Cognition in the Philosophy of Kant, Leipzig, 1876, p. 76 f. of the German ed.
• 13. Volkelt, op. cit., p. 21.
• 14. Otto Liebmann (1840–1912), Analysis, 1880, p. an ff.; A. Holder, Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie, Kant's Theory of Cognition, Tübingen, 1874, p. 14 ff.; Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) Phasen der Kantschen Lehre, Phases of Kant's Theory, p. 239; F. Ueberweg, System der Logik, System of Logic, p. 380 f.; Eduard v. Hartmann (1842–1906), Kritische Grundlegung, Berlin, 1875, p. 142–172 of the 2nd German ed.
• 15. Note by Rudolf Steiner: Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, History of More Recent Philosophy, 1860, Vol. 5, p. 60. Volkelt is mistaken about Fischer when he says (Kant's Erkenntnistheorie, Kant's Theory of Cognition, p. 198 f.) that “it is not clear from the account by K. Fischer whether, in his opinion, Kant takes for granted only the psychological fact of the occurrence of universal and necessary judgments, but also their objective validity and truth.” For, in the passage cited above, Fischer says that the main difficulty of the Critique of Pure Reason is to be found in the fact that “its basic points rest on certain presuppositions,” which “must be allowed if the remainder is to be valid.” For Fischer, these presuppositions consist in that “first the fact of knowledge is affirmed,” and then analysis reveals the cognitive faculties “by means of which the fact itself is explained.”

Mr Burle: We've had the (200th) anniversary of Kant's birthday.⁷¹ 1 May I ask Dr Steiner to tell us something about Kant's teaching, what would be its opposites, and if it might today be an anthroposophical teaching?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, gentlemen, if I am to answer this question you'll have to follow me a little bit into a region that is hard to understand. Mr Burle, who also asked about the theory of relativity, always asks such difficult questions! And so you may have to accept that things won't be as easy to understand today as the things I usually discuss. But you see, it is not possible to speak of Kant in a way that is easy to understand because the man himself is not easy to understand. The situation is that all the world talks about Kant today as of something that is of tremendous importance for the world, though people are not really interested in such things; they merely pretend to be. And you know that a whole number of articles have been written on this 200th anniversary, to show the world the tremendous importance Immanuel Kant had for the whole intellectual life.

You see, even as a boy I would often hear my history teacher⁷² at school say: Immanuel Kant was the emperor of literary Germany! I once said king of literary Germany by mistake and he immediately corrected me, saying: the emperor of literary Germany!

Well, I have studied Kant extensively and—I have described this in the story of my life⁷³—for a time we had a history teacher who really never did anything but read aloud from other people's books. I thought I might as well read that for myself at home. And once when he'd left the room I had a look to see what he was reading to us and got hold of a copy myself. That was much better. I had also got myself a copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason from Reclam's Universal Library;⁷⁴ this I had divided up and put between the pages of the school-book I had before me during the lessons. And so I would read Kant whilst the teacher was teaching history. I therefore also felt perfectly confident to speak about Kant, of whom people really always say when something to do with mind and spirit comes up: 'Yes, but Kant said...' Just as theologians will always say: 'Yes, but it says in the Bible...' And many of the enlightened will say: 'Yes, but Kant said...' It is now 24 years ago that I gave some lectures at which I got to know a man who always sat in the hall and slept, always heard the lectures sleeping. Sometimes, when I raised my voice a little, he would wake up, and especially also at the end. I also said something about mind and spirit at the time. Then he would wake up, jump up like a jack-in-the-box and shout: 'But Kant said!' And so it is true that people go on a great deal about Kant.

Now let us consider how this man Kant really saw the world. He said, with some justification, that everything we see, we touch, in short, perceive through the senses, that is, the whole world of nature outside us, is not real but only seems to exist as phenomena. But how does it come into existence? Well, it comes into existence—this is where it gets difficult, you'll need to pay careful attention—because something he called the 'thing in itself', something unknown of which we know nothing, makes an impression on us; and it is this impression we perceive, not the thing in itself.

So you see, gentlemen, if I draw this for you it is like this [drawing]. This is the human being—one could just as well do it with hearing or touch, but let us do it with seeing—and somewhere out there is the thing in itself. But we do not know anything about it; it is quite unknown. But this thing in itself makes an impression on the eye. One still knows nothing about it, but an impression is made on the eye. And in there, in the human being, a phenomenon arises, and we puff this up and make the whole world out of it [pointing to the drawing]. We know nothing of the red thing, only of the phenomenon we now have—I'll draw this in violet. And so the whole world is really, according to Kant, made by man. You see a tree. You do not know anything about the tree in itself; the tree merely makes an impression on you. This means something unknown makes an impression on you and you make it into a tree, putting the tree there in your sensory perceptions. Consider therefore, gentlemen. Here is a chair, a seat—a thing in itself. We do not know what it really is; but this thing which is there makes an impression on me. And I actually put the chair there. So if I sit down on a chair I do not know what kind of thing I am sitting on. The thing in itself, the item I sit on, is something I myself have put there.

You see, Kant speaks of the limits of human knowledge in such a way that one can never know what the thing in itself is, for everything is really only a man-made world. It is extremely difficult to make this clear in any real way. And when people ask one about Kant it is indeed true that to really describe him, characterize him, one has to say very strange things. For looking at the true Kant it is really difficult to believe someone who says it is like that. But the thing is that Kant insists, on the basis of theory, of his thoughts: No one knows about the thing in itself, and the whole world is merely made of the impression we have of things.

I once said that if we do not know what the thing is in itself, it may be all kinds of things; it could for instance be made of pinheads. And that is how it is with Kant. It is fair to say that according to him, the thing in itself may be made of anything. But now there is something else. If we stop at this theory, then all of you here, as I see you, are merely something that presents itself to me; I have put you all on these chairs, and I do not know what lies behind each of you as a thing in itself. And again, as I stand here, you, too, do not know what kind of thing in itself that is, but see a phenomenon which you put there yourselves. And anything I say is something you yourselves create by hearing it. So none of you know what I am really doing here—the thing in itself, what it really does. But this thing makes an impression on you. You project the impression to this point; and basically you are listening to something you produce yourselves.

Now if we take this particular example, then, speaking in Kantian terms, we might say something like this: You are sitting out there for your morning break and say: 'Right, let's go into the hall and hear one thing or another for an hour. We cannot know what this thing in itself is that we hear; but we'll use our eyes to put that man Steiner there so that—at least for an hour—we have this phenomenon, and then we'll put the things we want to hear there so that they may be heard.' This, in the first place, is what Kant says when he insists that one can never know the thing in itself.

You see, one of Kant's successors, Schopenhauer,⁷⁵ found this so clear that he said: 'You simply cannot doubt it!' He said it was quite definite that if he saw blue, it was not that something out there was blue but that the blue was created by him when a thing in itself made an impression on him. And when he heard someone complaining of pain out there, the pain and the complaining did not come from him but from Schopenhauer himself! This, he said, was really perfectly clear. And when people close their eyes and go to sleep, the whole world is dark and silent; then there is nothing there for them.

Now, gentlemen, according to this theory it will be the simplest thing to create the world and put it aside again. You go to sleep, the world has gone; you wake up again and you have once again made the whole world—at least the world you see. Apart from this there is only the thing in itself, of which you know nothing. Yes, Schopenhauer found this perfectly clear. But he did feel a bit funny. He was not quite comfortable with the thesis. He therefore said: 'There is at least something out there—blue and red, and all the cold and heat are not out there; if I feel cold I produce the cold myself. But what is out there is the will. Will lives in everything. And the will is a completely independent demonic power. But it lives in all things.'

So he put a little something into 'the thing in itself. Everything we see before our mind's eye was to him also mere phenomenon, something we produce ourselves. But he did at least furnish the thing in itself with the will. There have been many people, and there are many people to this day, who do not really consider the consequences of Kant's theories. I once knew a person who was really full of Kant's teaching—which is what one should be if one has a dogma. This man said to himself: T have actually made everything myself—mountains, clouds, stars, everything altogether, and I have also created humanity; I have made everything there is in the world. But now I don't like it. I want to get rid of it.' And he then said he started to kill a few people—he was demented; he said he started to kill a few people in order to manage this, to get rid of something he himself had created. I told him he should think about the difference which exists. He had a pair of boots; according to Kant's teaching he had made them, too. But he should consider what the shoemaker had done, apart from what he himself created as a phenomenon relating to his boots.

You see, that's how it is. The greatest nonsense may be found in things that are most highly regarded in the world. And people will cling to the worst kind of nonsense with the greatest possible stubbornness. And oddly enough it is exactly the most enlightened who cling to it.

These things which I have put to you in a few words, difficult enough to understand as it is, have to be found by reading many books if one reads Kant. For he teased it apart in long, long theories. He started his book Critique of Pure Reason, as he called it, for example, by first of all proving that space is not out there in the world; I make it myself, I spin it for myself. In the first place, therefore, space is a phenomenon. Secondly, time is also a phenomenon. For he said: There was a man called Aristotle once, but I myself have put him into time, for I create the whole of time myself.

He wrote this major work called Critique of Pure Reason. It does make quite an impression. So if a real philistine, a smug middle-class person, comes along and picks up a big volume called Critique of Pure Reason, he'll lick his chops, for this is something terribly clever, Critique of Pure Reason; if you read something like this you'll yourself be a kind of Lord God here on earth! The introduction is followed by Part 1: Transcendental aesthetics. Well, now, that's what it says: Transcendental aesthetics. If someone opens my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity the chapter heading might be no more than 'Man and world'.⁷⁶ Oh, man and world, that is so common, one does not bother to read it. But transcendental aesthetics! When a philistine opens such a book, then this is something that must be really tremendous. As to what transcendental aesthetics may be, this is something he does not usually consider; but that suits him fine. It is a word he really has to get his tongue round. So that is the main title.

Now comes the subtitle. Section one. Transcendental deduction of space. You can't think of anything better for a philistine but to have such a chapter. And it then starts in such a way that he does not really understand any of it. But everyone has been calling Kant a great man for more than a hundred years, and reading the book our philistine gets a little bit of something, and a little bit of a delusion of grandeur.

Now comes the second section: Transcendental deduction of time. Having battled through the transcendental deduction of space and of time one comes to the second major part: transcendental analysis. And transcendental analysis mainly offers proof that man has transcendental apperception.

Well, gentlemen, the question has been asked, and so I must tell you these things, this business of transcendental apperception. You have to read hundreds of pages to take in the learned statements concocted in this chapter on transcendental apperception. Transcendental apperception means that a person develops ideas and that these ideas have a certain coherence. So if everything is merely idea, the whole world, then it must be that the whole world is a tissue created out of the nothingness of one's own nature by means of transcendental apperception. Yes, that is more or less the way this is put in those books.

We now realize that in his chapter on transcendental apperception Kant creates the whole world, with all its trees, clouds, stars, and so on, out of himself. But in reality he is creating a tissue that one keeps battling with in the whole of this vast chapter which in reality offers the same ideas, only translated into the thinking of a later age, as I wrote into the Sephiroth Tree for you the other day, though only as a mere alphabet, not in a way that enables one to read, to know something. What is more, it was something very real in the past. But Kant makes a tissue where he says: 'The world thus is 1) quantity, 2) quality, 3) relation, 4) modality.' Each of these concepts has three subsumptions; quantity for example has unity, multiplicity, totality. Quality has reality, negation, limitation, and so on. Those were twelve subsumptions, 3 times 4 being 12, and you can create the whole world with them. Good old Kant did not in fact create the world with them; he only thought up twelve terms with his transcendental apperception. He thus only created twelve concepts and not the world.

Now if there were anything in this, we should get somewhere with it. But the philistines do not notice that nothing comes of it, only twelve concepts. They go about with full stomachs and Kantian philosophy and say: Nothing can be understood! Well, we can understand this in the case of philistines who like being told that the lack of understanding is not theirs but is due to the whole world. You are right to think you know nothing; but this is not because you are incapable but because the whole world is unable to know anything. And so you get these twelve concepts. That is transcendental analysis.

Now we come to the really difficult chapters. First a big chapter with the title: About transcendental paralogisms. And that is how it goes on. You get title after title in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He wrote that some people say space is infinite. He proves it the way people prove things who are able to see that space is infinite. But there are others who say that space is finite. This is also proved, the way people do prove it. You therefore find the following in the Critique of Pure Reason—in the later chapters it always presents two opposite aspects. On the one hand it is shown that space is infinite, on the other that it is finite. Then you get proof that time is infinite, is eternity, followed by proof that time had a beginning and will have an end. And that is the way Kant did it, gentlemen. Then he gave proof that man is free, and again that he is unfree.

What did Kant want to say by giving proof of two opposite statements? He wanted to say that we actually cannot prove anything! We may just as well say space is infinite or finite; time goes on for ever or time will come to an end. In the same way we may say man is free or he is unfree. It all goes to show that in modern times we have to say: Think about things whichever way you want; you'll not find the truth, for it is all the same for you human beings.

One is also shown how to think in this way, taught transcendental methodology. And so one can first of all go through one of Kant's books. We may ask ourselves why Kant went to all that trouble. And we then discover what he really intended. You see, until Kant came, people who were philosophers may not have known much, but they did at least say that some things can be known about the world. On the other hand there was the thinking that had come from medieval times—I have shown you how ancient knowledge was lost in the Middle Ages—that one can only know something of things perceived by the senses and nothing of the things of the spirit. This was something that had to be believed. And so the idea came up through the Middle Ages and up to Kant's time that you cannot know anything about the spirit; things of the spirit can only be believed.

The Churches do of course do very well out of this dogma that one cannot know anything of the spirit, for this makes it possible for them to dictate what people should believe about things of the spirit.

Now, as I said, there were philosophers—Leibniz,⁷⁷ Wolff,⁷⁸ and so on—who said, until Kant came, that it is possible to know something, from mere common sense or reason, about the spiritual aspects of the world. Kant said it was nonsense to believe that it was possible to know anything about the spirit, and that things of the spirit were a matter of belief. For the spiritual aspect lies in the 'thing in itself'. And you cannot know anything of the 'thing in itself'. One therefore has to believe when it comes to matters of the spirit.

Kant actually betrayed himself when he wrote the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. This second edition contains a curious statement: 'I had to let knowledge go to make room for faith.' That is indeed a confession, gentlemen. It is the thing which led to the unknown thing in itself. It is because of this that Kant called his book Critique of Pure Reason. Reason itself was to be criticized for not knowing anything. And in this statement 'I had to let knowledge go to make room for faith' lies the truth of Kant's philosophy. And that leaves the door open to all faith and belief. And Kant might indeed have referred to all positive religion. But people who do not want to know anything may also refer to Kant, saying: 'Why do we not know anything? Because one cannot know anything.' So you see, Kant's teaching has really come to support belief. It was quite natural in the light of this that I myself had to reject Kant's teaching from the very beginning. I may have read the whole of Kant as a schoolboy, but I always had to reject his teaching, for the simple reason that one would then have had to stick with the belief people had concerning the world of the spirit, and there could never have been any real knowledge of the spirit. Kant was therefore the man who excluded knowledge of the spirit more than anyone, only accepting some degree of belief.

Kant thus wrote this first book called Critique of Pure Reason. It was shown in this book that one knows nothing of the thing in itself; one can only have belief in what the 'thing in itself' is.

He then wrote a second book called Critique of Practical Reason, and a third called Critique of Judgement, but that was less important. Critique of Practical Reason, then, was his second book. There he evolved his own belief. So he wrote firstly a book of knowledge: Critique of Pure Reason, where he showed that one cannot know anything. The philistine can now put it aside, for he has been given proof that one cannot know anything. Then Kant wrote his Critique of Practical Reason, in which he developed his faith. How did he develop his faith? He said: Looking at himself in the world, man is an imperfect creature; but it is not really human to be so imperfect. So there must be a greater perfection of human nature somewhere. We do not know anything about it, but let us believe that greater perfection exists somewhere in this world; let us believe in immortality.

Well, you see, gentlemen, this is a big difference from what I tell you about the aspect of man that continues after death, based on knowledge. Kant did not want such knowledge; he simply wanted to prove that humanity should believe in immortality because of man's imperfection.

He then proved in the same way that one should only believe, being unable to know anything about freedom, that man is free; for if he were not free, he would not be responsible for his actions. One therefore believes him to be free in order that he may be responsible for his actions.

Kant's teaching about freedom has often reminded me of the statement with which a professor of law always started his lectures. He would say: 'Gentlemen, there are people who say man is not free. But, gentlemen, if man were not free, he would not be responsible for his actions, and then there could also be no punishment. If there is no punishment, you also cannot have penology, which is in fact the subject on which I speak, and then you also would not have me. But I am here, and therefore penology exists, hence also a penal system, hence also freedom. I have thus proved to you that freedom exists.' The things Kant said about freedom remind me very much of those words spoken by the professor. And Kant would also speak of God in this way. He would say: We cannot know anything of any power as such. But I am unable to make an elephant. I believe therefore that someone else can make it who is better able to do so than I am. I thus believe in a God.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that as human beings we should believe in God, freedom and immortality. We cannot know anything about these but we should believe in them. Now just think how inhuman this really is. First, proof is given that knowledge is really nothing, and secondly it is said that one should believe in God, of whom one can know nothing, in freedom and immortality. Essentially, therefore, Kant was the greatest reactionary. People create apt terms. They have called him 'the crusher'. Yes, he crushed all knowledge, but only the way one crushes a plaything. For the world was still there! And with this he really gave quite considerable support to faith and belief.

This continued for the whole of the nineteenth century and right into the present century, and today people everywhere are referring to the 200th anniversary of Kant. In reality Kant is the perfect example of how little people really think. For what I have just told you has been Kant's teaching in its pure form. But the things people say—that Kant was the greatest of all philosophers, that he cannot be refuted, and so on—well, you see, if we take this example we really see that it is indeed Kant to whom the opponents of spiritual science can always refer. Simply because they are then able to say to themselves: Yes, we do not base ourselves on religion but on the most enlightened of all philosophers. But it is indeed true that the most dogmatic of religion teachers may base himself on Kant just as much as some enlightened individual.

Kant also wrote other works, in one of which he more or less considered how metaphysics may be a science in the future.⁷⁹ Here he was really proving once again that it is impossible, and so on. We really have to say that the whole of nineteenth-century science sickened because of Kant; basically Kant was a sickness of science.

So the right way to take Kant is as an example of the nonsense sometimes produced by human minds. But you will then also say to yourselves: One really has to watch out when it comes to gaining insight, for the world is terribly keen to produce the greatest possible nonsense exactly when it comes to gaining insight. And you can imagine the difficult position one is in as a representative of spiritual science. Not only does one have the representatives of the religions against one but also those other people, all the philosophers and people who have caught their ideas, and so on. Every philistine comes along and says: You say this about the world of the spirit; Kant has proved—so they say—that one cannot know anything about it. That is really the best general objection anyone can raise. A person can say: I don't want to hear anything of what that man Steiner says, for Kant has proved that one cannot know anything about these things.

Does this satisfy you?

Mr Burle said he had mainly wanted to hear what Kant had said. As Dr Steiner said, you hear a lot about Kant but nothing positive. It did, however, take quite some effort to understand it.

Rudolf Steiner: There were consequences. In 1869 someone who had taken up Kant's ideas published The Philosophy of the Unconscious, a book that caused a sensation. And Eduard von Hartmann⁸⁰ was a very intelligent man. If he had lived before Kant, if Kant had not had such an influence on him, he would probably have done much better. But he could not overcome this enormous prejudice, which came from Kant. Like Schopenhauer before him, Eduard von Hartmann realized that one does not know anything of the world except for one's own ideas of it, something one puts out there oneself. But he also took up Schopenhauer's idea that the thing in itself must be furnished with will. So now we have the will everywhere inside it. I once wrote an article on Eduard von Hartmann in which I also mentioned Schopenhauer.⁸¹ Schopenhauer said that one knows nothing of the thing in itself; one only has ideas of it. Ideas are clever, the will is dumb. So that really all one knows by oneself is no more than dumb will.

In the article in which I mentioned Schopenhauer I wrote: 'According to Schopenhauer everything that is intelligent in the world is the work of man; for man brings everything into the world; and behind it lies the dumb will. The world is thus the dumbness of the Godhead.' But this was impounded at the time. It was to have been published in Austria.

The thing is like this. Eduard von Hartmann had assumed that the thing in itself had to be furnished with the will; but the will is really dumb, and this is why things are so bad in the world. He therefore became a pessimist, as one says. He held the view that the world was not good, but essentially bad, very bad. And not only what people did but everything there was in the world was bad. He said: 'You can work it out that the world is bad. Just put on one side of the balance sheet, the debit side, everything one has in life by way of good fortune, pleasure and so on, and on the other side everything you have by way of suffering and so on. It is always more on the other side and the balance is always in the negative. Therefore the whole world is bad.' This is why Hartmann became a pessimist.

But you see in the first place Eduard von Hartmann was an intelligent man and secondly he was someone who also drew the consequences. He said: 'Why do people go on living? Why don't they rather kill themselves? If everything is bad, it would be much wiser to fix a day when the whole of humanity commits suicide. Then everything that is created there would be gone.' But Eduard von Hartmann also said: 'No, one will never be able to do this, to fix a day for general human suicide. And even if we did—humans have evolved from animals; the animals would never kill themselves; and then human beings would again evolve from animals! So we'll not be able to do it this way.' He then thought of something else. He said to himself: 'If one really wants to eradicate everything that exists as earthly world, one cannot do it by means of human suicide but has to thoroughly eradicate the whole earth. We do not yet have the machines for this today; but people have invented all kinds of machines so far; all wisdom must therefore be directed towards inventing a machine that enables one to drill deep enough into the earth and which will then blow the earth up, using dynamite or the like, so that the fragments fly out into the world and turn to dust. Then the right goal will have been achieved.'

This is no joke, gentlemen! It is a fact that Eduard von Hartmann said a machine should be invented to blow up the whole earth, reducing it to dust and rubble.⁸²

Comment: In America they want to build cannon to shoot down the moon!

Rudolf Steiner: But what I have told you was genuine philosophical teaching in the nineteenth century.

Now you'll say: There was such an intelligent man—but how can this be? He must have been dumb, stupid, the man who said this. No, indeed, Eduard von Hartmann was not stupid but more intelligent than anyone else. I'll prove this to you in a minute. But it was exactly because he was more intelligent than the teaching that originated with Kant that this stupid notion of the machine arose which might be used to throw the world into nothingness. This was seriously put forward by a highly intelligent man who had been thoroughly thrown off course by Kant.

So he wrote this Philosophy of the Unconscious. In it he said: 'Yes, it is true that human beings have evolved from animals, but spiritual powers played a role in this. These spiritual powers are powers of will, which means they are not intelligent but dumb.' And he put this very intelligently, and in this way contradicted Darwinism.

So at that time—in the 1860s—there was this intelligent work by Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, and there was Darwinism, supported by Haeckel,⁸³ Oscar Schmidt⁸⁴ and others, which was the cleverest thing there was in the eyes of other people. The Philosophy of the Unconscious contradicted it, however. So all those stubborn Darwinists came and said: 'This Eduard von Hartmann needs to be thoroughly refuted; he does not know anything about science.' And what did Hartmann do? What he did at that time is evident from the following. When the others had done shouting—on paper, in print, of course—a book appeared that had the title 'The Unconscious from the Point of View of Darwinism'.⁸⁵ It was not known who had written it, however.

Well, gentlemen, this pleased the scientists no end, for it said things that thoroughly refuted Eduard von Hartmann. Even Haeckel said: 'The individual who has written this book against Hartmann should make himself known to us, and we consider him to be one of us, a naturalist of the first order!' And indeed, the book sold out quickly and a second edition appeared.⁸⁶ This time the author gave his name—it was Eduard von Hartmann himself! He had written against himself. Then they stopped praising him. The matter did not become widely known. He thus proved that he was cleverer than all the rest. But you see, the news given to people never says anything about these things. It is, however, a piece of academic history that should be told. You can see that Eduard von Hartmann was someone who had been led astray by Kant but was highly intelligent.

Now when I tell you he wanted to blow up the world with a huge machine that was to be invented—you may well say that this man Eduard von Hartmann may have been terribly intelligent, but to us, who have not yet studied Kant, it nevertheless seems a dumb thing. And you may well think that however intelligent I told you von Hartmann was, he was nevertheless stupid. You may easily think so. But then you must also tell this last bit, and see that the others were even more stupid. I'll leave it at that, if you like. But it is perfectly possible to provide historical evidence that the others were even more stupid than the person who proved that the earth should be blown apart.

It is important to know such things; for today we still have this strange adulation of anything that appears in print. And since Kant has been published by Reclam—it was only because of this that I was able to read him then, otherwise I could not have afforded it at the time; but it was cheap, even though they were thick volumes—since then the fat is in the fire worse than ever where Kant is concerned, for everyone is reading him. I mean, they read the first page, but they do not understand any of it. They then hear that Kant is 'the emperor of literary Germany' and think: Wow, we know something of his work, and so we are clever people, too! And most of them are prepared to admit: 'I clearly must say I understand Kant, or other people will say I am stupid if I don't understand Kant.' In reality people do not understand any of it, but they won't admit it; they say: 'I have to understand Kant, for he is very clever. So when I say I understand Kant I am saying I understand something very clever and people will be impressed.'

In truth, gentlemen, it has been difficult to present this matter in a more popular form, but I am glad the question was asked, for we can see from it what goes on in academic life, as it is called, and how careful one really has to be when such things influence one, even going so far that now there is a lot of brouhaha in the papers about the 200th anniversary of Kant's birth. I am not saying that Kant should not be celebrated—others are also celebrated—but the truth of the matter is the way I have shown you.

We'll continue at 9 o'clock next Saturday.

• 71. Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), German idealist philosopher.
• 72. Joseph Mayer, who taught German literature at the secondary school specializing in the sciences in Vienna-Neustadt.
• 73. Steiner, R., Rudolf Steiner, an Autobiography (GA 28), tr. R. Stebbing, New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1977.
• 74. Reclam's Universalbibliothek, publishing venture of Philipp Reclam Jun., Stuttgart, producing the classics in reasonably priced paperback editions. Still exists today. Translator.
• 75. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), German philosopher.
• 76. Steiner, R., The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. A Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4), tr. R. Stebbing, London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1989.
• 77. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716), German philosopher and mathematician.
• 78. Wolff, Christian (1679–1754), German mathematician and philosopher who made the work of Leibniz popular.
• 79. Kant, I., Prolegomena, tr. by P.G. Lucas in 1953.
• 80. von Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard (1842–1906). His Philosophic des Unbewussten (1869) was translated into English by Coupland, with a new edition in 1931.
• 81. 'Eduard von Hartmann, his teaching and significance' first published (in German) in the monthly Deutsche Worte (Vienna), vol. XI, No. 1 (Jan. 1891) and reprinted in GA 30.
• 82. In the work referred to in note 93, vol. 2: Metaphysics of the unconscious, chapter 14: The goal of the world process and the significance of the conscious mind (numerous editions!).
• 83. Haeckel, Ernst (1834–1919), German philosopher and naturalist.
• 84. Schmidt, Oscar (1823–86), German zoologist, student of Haeckel.
• 85. Das Unbewusste vom Standpunkte der Physiologic und Deszendenztheorie. Eine kritische Beleuchtung des naturphilosophischen Teils der Philosophic des Unbewussten aus naturwissenschaftlichen Gesichtspunkten, Berlin 1872.
• 86. Das Unbewusste vom Standpunkte der Physiologic und Deszendenztheorie, 2. verm. Aufl. der 1872 anonym erschienenen Schrift nebst einem Anhang: 'Oscar Schmidts Kritik der naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Philosophic des Unbewussten', Berlin 1877.

Kant is usually cited as the founder of the theory of knowing (Erkenntnistheorie) ²⁴ in the modern sense of the word. One could rightly object to this view by saying that the history of philosophy before Kant contains numerous investigations that should be viewed as more than just the seeds of such a science. Volkelt also notes in his fundamental work on the theory of knowing that the critical treatment of this science began with Locke. ²⁵ But even in earlier philosophers, even in the philosophy of the Greeks, one finds discussions that are currently brought up again to clarify the theory of knowing. All the problems discussed there were churned and digested in depth by Kant, and following him, numerous thinkers worked through them in such a comprehensive manner, that the earlier attempts at solutions can be found either in Kant himself or in his followers. So, by being purely factual rather than historical, the present study of the theory of knowing will not miss anything of importance, but of course while also including everything of importance since the appearance of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft). What was achieved beforehand in this field has been recreated in this epoch starting with Kant.

Kant's basic epistemological question is: How are synthetic judgments possible a priori? ²⁶ Let's look at this question in terms of its lack of presuppositions! Kant raises the issue because he is of the opinion that we can only acquire unconditionally certain knowledge if we are able to prove the justification of synthetic judgments a priori. He says: "Proving this justification must include the possibility of the pure use of reason in the founding and implementation of all sciences, all that that contain a priori theoretical knowledge of objects." ²⁷ “Proving this involves whether philosophy’s first principles (metaphysics) stand or fall, and therefore whether they exist at all.” ²⁸

Is this question, as Kant poses it, free of presuppositions? Not at all, because it makes the possibility of an unconditionally certain system of knowledge dependent on the fact that it is built up only from synthetic judgments and from judgments that are gained independently of all experience. Kant calls synthetic judgments those in which the concept of the predicate adds something to the concept of the subject that lies entirely outside of it, “even though it is connected with it” ²⁹ whereas in analytical judgments the predicate only says something that already exists in the subject in a hidden way. This probably is not the place to address Johannes Rehmke's ³⁰ sharp objections to this structure of the judgments. For our present purpose it is sufficient to see that we can only attain truthful understanding (das Wissen) through judgments which add to a concept a second concept, the content of which, at least for us, was not yet contained in the first. If, with Kant, we want to call this class of judgments synthetic, we can at least admit that knowing, that understanding, can only be gained in the form of judgment if the connection between the predicate and the subject is synthetic. But things are different with the second part of the question, which requires that these judgments be gained a priori, independently of all experience. It is quite possible (by this we mean, of course, the mere possibility of thinking) that such judgments do not exist at all. At the beginning of the theory of knowing it must be considered completely undetermined whether we can come to judgments only through experience or without any prior similar experience. Yes, when viewed without bias, such independence seems impossible from the outset. Whatever becomes known, it must first enter our immediate and individual awareness, it must be a direct experience.

We also acquire mathematical judgments by simply experiencing them individually. Even if you were to believe, as B. Otto Liebmann does,³¹ that mathematical facts are grounded in the specific organization of our consciousness, then the matter would be no different. One can then say that this or that sentence is necessarily valid, because if its truth were to be abolished, consciousness would also be abolished, but we can only know it if it becomes an experience for us, exactly the way a process in external nature is experienced. No matter whether the content of such a sentence contains elements that guarantee its absolute validity, or whether it is secured for other reasons, I cannot get hold of it in any other way than by its confronting me as an experience. This is one thing.

The second concern is that at the beginning of epistemological investigations, one must not claim that knowing something’s absolute validity cannot come from experience. It is quite conceivable that the experience itself could have some characteristic which would guarantee the certainty of the insights gained from it.

There are two presuppositions in Kant's line of questioning. The first is that we must have a way other than experience to know something. The second is that all empirical knowledge (from our sensory nerves) can only have conditional validity. Kant is not at all aware that these propositions need to be examined, that they can be doubted. He simply takes them over as prejudices from dogmatic philosophy and uses them as the basis for his critical investigations. Dogmatic philosophy presupposes them as valid and simply applies them, arriving at the process of knowing corresponding to them. Kant assumes they are valid, and then only asks himself under what conditions can they be valid? But what if they are not valid at all? Then Kant's theory lacks any basis. Everything Kant puts forward in the five paragraphs that precede the formulation of his basic question is an attempt to prove that mathematical judgments are synthetic.^{32 33 34}

But the two assumptions cited remain as scientific prejudices. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he says “Experience teaches us that something is one way or another, but not that it cannot be otherwise” and “Experience never gives its judgments true or strict ones, only assumed ones and comparative generality (by induction).” ³⁵ In his preface we find, “First, as far as the sources of metaphysical knowledge are concerned, it is already inherent in their concept that they cannot be empirical. Their principles (not only their basic axioms but also their basic concepts) must therefore never be taken from experience, that is, from knowing something from physical sensation, but from metaphysical sources, from knowledge beyond experience.” ³⁶ Finally, Kant says, “First of all, it must be noted that actual mathematical propositions are always a priori judgments and not empirical, because they entail necessity which cannot be derived from experience. But if you don't want to admit this, then I'll limit my statement to pure mathematics, the very concept of which implies that it does not contain empirical knowing, but only pure a priori knowing.³⁷ We may open the Critique of Pure Reason wherever we want, and we will find that all investigations within it are conducted under the presupposition of these dogmatic propositions. Cohen ³⁸ and Stadler ³⁹ try to prove that Kant demonstrated the a priori nature of mathematical and purely scientific propositions. Now everything that is attempted in the criticism can be summarized as follows:

‘Because mathematics and pure natural science are a priori sciences, the form of all experience must be grounded in the subject. So, all that remains is the material of sensations that is empirically given (given through sensory nerves). This is built up into a system of experience through the forms lying in the mind. The formal truths of the a priori theories only have meaning and significance as organizing principles for the material of sensation; they make experience possible, but do not extend beyond it. However, these formal truths are the synthetic judgments a priori, which, as conditions of all possible experience, must therefore reach as far as the latter itself. The critique of pure reason therefore does not prove the apriority of mathematics and pure natural science, but only determines their area of validity. The prerequisite is that its truths should be gained independently of experience.’ Yes, Kant does so little to provide a proof for this a priori, rather he simply excludes it. The part of mathematics, Kant says, in which the same could be doubted, even in his opinion, is limited only to what he says can be deduced from simpler concepts. ⁴⁰ Johannes Volkelt also finds that “Kant starts from the explicit presupposition that there actually is a general and necessary Wissen (the experience of understanding sense perceptions and non-sensory concepts).” He goes on to say, "This presupposition, which Kant never explicitly examined, is so contradictory to the character of a critical examination of epistemology (kritischen Erkenntnistheorie, critique of theory of knowing) that one must seriously consider the question of whether the Critique of Pure Reason is a valid critique of epistemology." Although Volkelt believes that one can answer this question in the affirmative, for good reasons, "the attitude of critiquing in Kant's epistemology is fundamentally disturbed by this dogmatic presupposition." ⁴¹ But enough, even Volkelt finds that the Critique of Pure Reason is not an epistemology without presuppositions.

The views of O. Liebmann, Hölder, Windelband, Überweg, Eduard von Hartmann ⁴² and Kuno Fischer ⁴³ also essentially agree with my view, that Kant places the a priori validity of pure mathematics and natural theory as a prerequisite at the top of his discussions, that we really know things independently of all experience, and that experience only provide insights of comparative generality, that we could accept only as a corollary of other judgments. These claims must necessarily be preceded by an investigation into the nature of experience and one into the nature of knowing. Only after this could the first and all following sentences follow.

Now one could reply to any objections raised in these reasoned critiques the following: that every theory of knowing must first lead the reader to an unconditional starting point. What we generally know at any point in our lives is far removed from this starting point, so we first must be artificially led back to it. In fact, such a purely didactic instructional intention is necessary for every epistemologist at the start of any consideration. This must be limited to showing to what extent the beginning of knowing in question really is the beginning, for it would have to proceed in purely self-evident analytic logically-reasoned sentences, and unlike Kant’s argument, should not make any supposedly meaningful claims that might influence the content of the following discussions. It is also the responsibility of the epistemologist (Erkenntnistheoretiker) to show that the beginning that he assumes is really without presuppositions. But all of this has nothing to do with the nature of this beginning itself, but stands entirely outside of it, and says nothing about it. Even at the beginning of mathematics lessons, I must try to teach students the axiomatic character of certain truths. But no one will want to claim that the content of axioms is dependent on previous considerations. ⁴⁴ In the same way, the epistemologist should show in his introductory remarks how one can arrive at a beginning without presuppositions of any sort, for the actual content must be free of any prior considerations. The work of Kant, whose initial assertions are specifically dogmatic, is far from a proper introduction to epistemology.

• 24. t/n Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781, well before the term epistemology was introduced into the world of philosophy in 1854 by the Scottish philosopher Ferrier. The term epistemology has become more and more popular with English-speaking philosophers, and is usually used by them to translate Erkenntnistheorie, which when properly translated into native English words is Theory of Knowing.
• 25. Vokelt, Erfahrung und Denken. Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie. Hamburg und Leipzig 1886, S.20.
• 26. t/n a priori is knowing something having nothing to do with physical sense-perceptions. a priori knowing includes analytic concepts such as 2+2=4 true by virtue of their meaning alone, and synthetic concepts like “all physical bodies are heavy” (have gravitational attraction to other bodies), true both because of what they mean and because of the way the world is..
• 27. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 61ff, Kirchmann’s German edition. (All other page numbers in reference to Critique of Pure Reason are from this edition.)
• 28. Ibid, Preface Section V
• 29. Ibid p. 53f.
• 30. Rehmke, Johannes: Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, usw., The World as Percept and Concept, etc., Berlin, 1880, p. 161 ff.
• 31. B. Otto Liebmann, Zur Analysis derWirklichkeit. Gedanken und Tatsachen, On the Analysis of Reality. Thoughts and Facts
• 32. Note added later by Rudolf Steiner: This attempt, incidentally, is one which the objections of Robert Zimmermann (Über Kant's mathematisches Vorurteil und dessen Folgen) show it to be, if not altogether in error, at least highly questionable.
• 33. t/n (Robert Zimmermann, 1824–1898, was Professor of Philosophy in the University of Vienna, 1861–95. His book on Aesthetics was published in 2 volumes, Vienna, 1870. Rudolf Steiner attended lectures by Zimmermann on fundamentals of ethics at the University of Vienna. Steiner's impressions of this great interpreter of Herbart's aesthetics are contained in the 3rd chapter of Steiner’s own autobiography.)
• 34. t/n Analytic truths such as 2 + 2 = 4 are true just due to their meaning, but synthetic truths such as snow is white depends on the meaning in relationship to other perceptions in the world.
• 35. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, in Einleitung II, p. 58, Sec. v.
• 36. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Prolegomena Paragraph 1
• 37. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 58, Sec. v.
• 38. Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, Kant's Theory of Experience, Berlin, 1871, pp. 90 ff. of the German ed.
• 39. August Stadler (1850–1910), Die Grundsätze der reinen Erkenntnistheorie in der Kantschen Philosophie, The Principles of the Pure Theory of Cognition in the Philosophy of Kant, Leipzig, 1876, p. 76 f. of the German ed.
• 40. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 29, line 26f.
• 41. Vokelt, Erfahrung und Denken. Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie. Hamburg und Leipzig 1886, p. 21
• 42. Otto Liebmann (1840–1912), Analysis, 1880, A. Holder, Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie, Tübingen, 1874, p. 14 ff., Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) Phasen der Kantschen Lehre, p. 239, F. Ueberweg, System der Logik, p. 380 f., Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), Kritische Grundlegung, Berlin, 1875, p. 142–172 of the 2nd German ed., and Kuno Fischer hold essentially similar views on this point, namely, that Kant bases his whole argument on the assumption that knowledge of pure mathematics and natural science is acquired a priori.
• 43. Kuno Fischer Geschichte der neueren Philosophie VB. S.60 says that Volkelt is wrong when he comments on my own (Kuno Fischer’s) comments on Kant's epistemology (p. 198 f.) that "it is not clear from K. Fischer's presentation whether in his view Kant only supports the psychological actuality of the general and necessary judgments or at the same time presupposes the objective validity and lawfulness of the same. In the passage cited, Fischer says that the main difficulty in the Critique of Pure Reason is due to its “foundations being dependent on certain presuppositions”, “which one must have admitted to accept the following”. For Fischer, these prerequisites of Kant’s argument are that “first the fact of knowing” is established, and then, through analysis, the properties of knowing are found “from which that fact itself is explained”.
• 44. In the chapter titled "The Starting Point of Epistemology," I shall show to what extent my discussion fulfils these conditions.

With the remark that the present, in particular the German philosophy and its epistemology makes it difficult to its supporters to find access to the theosophical world view I have started these talks before eight days, and I added that I try to outline this theory of knowledge, this present philosophical world view and to show how somebody with an absolutely serious conscience in this direction finds it hard to be a theosophist.

On the whole, the theories of knowledge which developed from Kantianism are excellent and absolutely correct. However, one cannot understand from their point of view how the human being can find out anything about beings, generally about real beings which are different from him. The consideration of Kantianism has shown us that this view comes to the result in the end that everything that we have round ourselves is appearance, is only our mental picture. What we have round ourselves is no reality, but it is controlled by the laws which we ourselves prescribe to our surroundings. I said: as we must see with coloured glasses the whole world in this colour nuance, in the same way the human being must see the world—after Kant’s view—coloured as he sees them according to his organisation no matter how it may be in the external reality. That is why we are not allowed to speak of a “thing-in-itself,” but only of the quite subjective world of appearance. If this is the case, everything that surrounds me—the table, the chairs et cetera, is an image of my mind; because they all are there for me only, in so far as I perceive them, in so far as I give form to these perceptions according to the law of my own mind, prescribe the laws to them.

I cannot state whether still anything exists except for my perception of the table and the chairs. This is basically the result of Kant’s philosophy in the end. This is not compatible, of course, with the fact that we can penetrate into the true nature of the things. Theosophy is inseparable from the view that we can penetrate not only into the physical existence of the things, but also into the spiritual of the things; that we have knowledge not only of that which surrounds us physically, but that we can also have experiences of that which is purely spiritual.

I want to show you how a vigorous book of the world view which is called “theosophy” today represents that which became Kantianism later. I read up a passage of the book that was written a short time before Kantianism was founded. It appeared in 1766. It is a book which—we can say it absolutely that way—could be written by a theosophist. The view is represented in it that the human being has not only a relationship to the physical world surrounding him, but that it would be proved scientifically one day that the human being belongs also to a spiritual world, and that also the way of being together with it could be scientifically proved. Something is well demonstrated that one could assume that it is proved more or less or that it is proved in future: “I do not know where or when that the human soul is in relation to others that they have effect on each other and receive impressions from each other. The human being is not aware of that, however, as long as everything is good.” Then another passage: “Indeed, it does not matter whichever ideas of the other world we have, and, hence, any thinking about spirit does not penetrate to a state of spirit at all ...” and so on.

The human being with his average mental capacity cannot realise the spirit; but it is said that one can assume such a common life with a spiritual world. With such a view Kant’s epistemology is not compatible. He who wrote the foundation of this view is Immanuel Kant himself. That means that we have to register a reversal in Kant himself. Because he writes this in 1766, and fourteen years later he founds that theory of knowledge which makes it impossible to find the way to theosophy. Our modern philosophy is based on Kantianism. It has taken on different forms, those from Herbart and Schopenhauer to Otto Liebmann and Johannes Volkelt and Friedrich Albert Lange. We find more or less Kantian coloured epistemology everywhere according to which we deal only with phenomena, with our subjective world of perception, so that we cannot penetrate to the being, to the root of the “thing-in-itself.”

At first I would like to bring forward to you everything that developed in the course of the 19th century, and what we can call the modified epistemology of Kant. I would like to demonstrate how the current epistemology developed which looks with a certain arrogance at somebody who believes that one can know something. I want to show how somebody forms a basic epistemological view whose kind of view is based on Kant. Everything that science has brought seems to verify the Kantian epistemology. It seems to be so firm that one cannot escape from it. Today we want to roll up it and next time we want to see how one can find the way with it.

First of all physics seems to teach us everywhere that that is no reality the naive human being believes that it is reality. Let us take the tone. You know that the oscillation of the air is there outside our organ, outside our ear which hears the tone. What takes place outside us is an oscillation of the air particles. Only because this oscillation comes to our ear and sets the eardrum swinging the movement continues to the brain. There we perceive what we call tone and sound. The whole world would be silent and toneless; only because the external movement of our ear is taken up by the ear, and that which is only an oscillation is transformed; we experience what we feel as a sound world. Thus the epistemologist can easily say: tone is only what exists in you, and if you imagine it without this, nothing but moved air is there.

The same applies to the colours and the light of the external world. The physicist has the view that colour is an oscillation of the ether which fulfils the whole universe. Just as the air is set swinging by the sound and nothing else than the movement of the air exists if we hear a sound, light is only an oscillatory movement of the ether. The ether oscillations are a little bit different from those of the air. The ether oscillates vertically to the direction of the propagation of the waves. This is made clear by experimenting physics. If we have the colour sensation “red,” we have to do it with a sensation. Then we must ask ourselves: what is there if no feeling eye exists?—It should be nothing else of the colours in space than oscillatory ether. The colour quality is removed from the world if the feeling eye is removed from the world.

What you see as red is 392 to 454 trillions oscillations, with violet 751 to 757 trillions oscillations. This is inconceivably fast. Physics of the 19th century transformed any light sensation and colour sensation into oscillations of the ether. If no eye were there, the whole colour world would not exist. Everything would be pitch-dark. One could not talk about colour quality in the outer space. This goes so far that Helmholtz said: we have the sensations of colour and light, of sound and tone in ourselves. This is not even like that which takes place without us. We are even not allowed to use an image of that which takes place without us.—What we know as a colour quality of red is not similar to about 420 trillions oscillations per second. Therefore, Helmholtz means: what really exists in our consciousness is not an image but a mere sign.

Physics has maintained that space and time exist as I perceive them. The physicist imagines that a movement in space takes place if I have a colour sensation. It is the same with the time image if I have the sensation red and the sensation violet. Both are subjective processes in me. They follow each other in time. The oscillations follow each other outside. Physics does not go so far as Kant. Whether the “things-in-themselves” are space-filled whether they are in space or follow each other in time, we cannot know—in terms of Kant; but we know only: we are organised this and that way, and, therefore, something—may it be spatial or not—has to take on spatial form. We spread out this form over that. For physics the oscillatory movement has to take place in space, it has to take a certain time ... The ether oscillates, we say, 480 trillions times per second. This includes the images of space and time already. The physicist assumes space and time being without us. However, the rest is only a mental picture, is subjective. You can read in physical works that for somebody who has realised what happens in the outside world nothing exists than oscillatory air, than oscillatory ether. Physics seems to have contributed that everything that we have exists only within our consciousness and except this nothing exists.

The second that the science of the 19th century can present to us is the reasons which physiology delivers. The great physiologist Johannes Müller found the law of the specific nerve energy. According to this law any organ reacts with a particular sensation. If you push the eye, you can perceive a gleam of light; if electricity penetrates it, also. The eye answers to any influence from without in such a way as it just corresponds to it. It has the strength from within to answer with light and colour. If light and ether penetrate, the eye answers with light and colour sensations.

Physiology still delivers additional building stones to prove what the subjective view has put up. Imagine that we have a sensation of touch. The naive human being imagines that he perceives the object. But what does he perceive really? The epistemologist asks. What is before me is nothing else than a combination of the smallest particles, of molecules. They are in movement. Every particle is in such movement which cannot be perceived by the senses because the oscillations are too small. Basically it is nothing else than the movement only which I can perceive, because the particle is not able to creep into me. What is it if you put the hand on the body? The hand carries out a movement. This continues down to the nerve and the nerve transforms it into a sensation: in heat and cold, in softy and hard. Also in the outside world movements are included, and if my sense of touch is concerned, the organ transforms it into heat or cold, into softness or hardness.

We cannot even perceive what happens between the body and us, because the outer skin layer is insensible. If the epidermis is without a nerve, it can never feel anything. The epidermis is always between the thing and the body. The stimulus has an effect from a relatively far distance through the epidermis. Only what is excited in your nerve can be perceived. The outer body remains completely without the movement process. You are separated from the thing, and what you really feel is produced within the epidermis. Everything that can really penetrate into your consciousness happens in the area of the body, so that it is still separated from the epidermis. We would have to say after this physiological consideration that we get in nothing of that which takes place in the outside world, but that it is merely processes within our nerves which continue in the brain which excite us by quite unknown external processes. We can never reach beyond our epidermis. You are in your skin and perceive nothing else than what happens within it.

Let us go over to another sense, to the eye, from the physical to the physiological. You see that the oscillations propagate; they have to penetrate our body first. The eye consists of a skin, the cornea, first of all. Behind this is the lens and behind the lens the vitreous body. There the light has to go through. Then it arrives at the rear of the eye which is lined with the retina. If you removed the retina, the eye would never transform anything into light. If you see forms of objects, the rays have to penetrate into your eye first, and within the eye a small retina picture is outlined. This is the last that the sensation can cause. What is before the retina is insensible; we have no real perception of it. We can only perceive the picture on the retina. One imagines that there chemical changes of the visual purple take place. The effect of the outer object has to pass the lens and the vitreous body, then it causes a chemical change in the retina, and this becomes a sensation. Then the eye puts the picture again outwardly, surrounds itself with the stimuli which it has received, and puts them again around in the world without us. What takes place in our eye is not that which forms the stimulus, but a chemical process. The physiologists always deliver new reasons for the epistemologists. Apparently we have to agree with Schopenhauer completely if he says: the starry heaven is created by us. It is a reinterpretation of the stimuli. We can know nothing about the “thing-in-itself.”

You see that this epistemology limits the human being merely to the things, we say to the mental pictures which his consciousness creates. He is enclosed in his consciousness. He can suppose—if he wants—that anything exists in the world which makes impression on him. In any case nothing can penetrate into him. Everything that he feels is made by him. We cannot even know from anything that takes place in the periphery. Take the stimulus in the visual purple. It has to be directed to the nerve, and this has to be transformed anyhow into the real sensation, so that the whole world which surrounds us would be nothing else than what we would have created from our inside.

These are the physiological proofs which induce us to say that this is that way. However, there are also people who ask now why we can assume other human beings besides us whom we, nevertheless, recognise only from the impressions which we receive from them. If a human being stands before me, I have only oscillations as stimuli and then an image of my own consciousness. It is only a presupposition that except for the consciousness picture something similar to the human being exists. Thus the modern epistemology supports its view that the outer content of experience is merely of subjective nature. It says: what is perceived is exclusively the content of the own consciousness, is a change of this content of consciousness. Whether there are things-in-themselves, is beyond our experience. The world is a subjective appearance to me which is built up from my sensations consciously or unconsciously. Whether there are also other worlds, is beyond the field of my experience.

When I said: it is beyond the field of experience whether there is another world, it also beyond the field of experience whether there are still other human beings with other consciousnesses, because nothing of a consciousness of the other human beings can get into the human being. Nothing of the world of images of another human being and nothing of the consciousness of another human being can come into my consciousness. Those who have joined Kant’s epistemology have this view.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte also joined this view in his youth. He thought Kant’s theory thoroughly. There may be no nicer description of that than those which Fichte gave in his writing On the Determination of the Human Being (1800). He says in it: “nowhere anything permanent exists, not without me not within me, but there is only a continuous transformation. I nowhere know any being, and also not my own. There is no being.—I myself do not know at all, and I am not. Images are there: they are the only things that exist, and they know about themselves in the way of images—images which pass without anything existing that they pass; which are connected with images to images. Images which do not contain anything, without any significance and purpose. I myself am one of these images; yes, I myself am not this, but only a confused image of the images.”
Indeed—if you stick to the view that you deal in your subjective opinion only with the things of your own consciousness, then you must get inevitably to the view that you do not know more about yourselves than about the outside world. If you go over to the image of the own ego, then you do not have more of it than of the outside world. Keep this thought in mind in its full significance, then it becomes clear to you that the outside world dissolves in a sum of hallucinations, and that also the inside world is nothing else than a creation of subjective dreams fitted together. You can imagine already from the outside, I would like to say, from the corporeality that also you yourselves like the outside world are nothing else than dream images or illusions if you interpret the view correctly.

Look at your hand which transforms your movements to sensations of touch. This hand is nothing else than a creation of my subjective consciousness, and my whole body and what is in me is also a creation of my subjective consciousness. Or I take my brain: if I could investigate under the microscope how the sensation came into being in the brain, I would have nothing before myself than an object which I have to transform again to an image in my consciousness.

The idea of the ego is also an image; it is generated like any other. Dreams pass me, illusions pass me—this is the world view of illusionism which appears inevitably as the last consequence of Kantianism. Kant wanted to overcome the old dogmatic philosophy; he wanted to overcome what has been brought forward by Wolff and his school. He considered this as a sum of figments.

These were the proofs of freedom, of the will, of the immortality of the soul and of God’s existence which Kant exposed concerning their probative value as figments. What does he give as proofs? He proved that we can know nothing about a “thing-in-itself” that that which we have is only contents of consciousness that, however, God must be “something-in-itself.” Thus we cannot necessarily prove the existence of God according to Kant. Our reason, our mind is only applicable to that which is given in the perception. They are only there to prescribe laws of perception and, hence, the matters: God—soul—will—are completely outside our rational knowledge. Reason has a limit, and it is not able to overcome it.

In the preface of the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason he says at a passage: “I had to cancel knowledge to make room for faith.” He wanted this basically. He wanted to limit knowledge to sense-perception, and he wanted to achieve everything that goes beyond reason in other way. He wanted to achieve it on the way of moral faith. Hence, he said: in no way science can arrive at the objective existence of the things one day. But we find one thing in ourselves: the categorical imperative which appears with an unconditional obligation in us.—Kant calls it a divine voice. It is beyond the things, it is accompanied by unconditional moral necessity. From here Kant ascends to regain that for faith which he annihilates for knowledge. Because the categorical imperative deals with nothing that is caused by any sensory effect, but appears in us, something must exist that causes the senses as well as the categorical imperative, and appears if all duties of the categorical imperative are fulfilled. This would be blessedness. But no one can find the bridge between both. Because he cannot find it, a divine being has to build it. In doing so, we come to a concept of God which we can never find with the senses.

A harmony between the sensory world and the world of moral reason must be produced. Even if one did enough in a life as it were, nevertheless, we must not believe that the earthly life generally suffices. The human life goes beyond the earthly life because the categorical imperative demands it. That is why we have to assume a divine world order. How could the human being follow a divine world order, the categorical imperative, if he did not have freedom?—Kant annihilated knowledge that way to get to the higher things of the spirit by means of faith. We must believe! He tries to bring in on the way of the practical reason again what he has thrown out of the theoretical reason.

Those views which have no connection apparently to Kant’s philosophy are also completely based on this philosophy. Also a philosopher who had great influence—also in pedagogy: Herbart. He had developed an own view from Kant’s critique of reason: if we look at the world, we find contradictions there. Let us have a look at the own ego. Today it has these mental pictures, yesterday it had others, tomorrow it will have others again. What is this ego? It meets us and is fulfilled with a particular image world. At another moment it meets us with another image world. We have there a development, many qualities, and, nevertheless, it should be a thing. It is one and many. Any thing is a contradiction. Herbart says that only contradictions exist everywhere in the world. Above all we must reproach ourselves with the sentence that the contradiction cannot be the true being. Now from it Herbart deduces the task of his philosophy. He says: we have to remove the contradictions; we have to construct a world without contradiction to us. The world of experiences is an unreal one, a contradictory one. He sees the true sense, the true being in transforming the contradictory world to a world without contradictions. Herbart says: we find the way to the “thing-in-itself,” while we see the contradictions, and if we get them out of us, we penetrate to the true being, to true reality.—However, he also has this in common with Kant that that which surrounds us in the outside world is mere illusion. Also he tried in other way to support what should be valuable for the human being.

We come now, so to speak, to the heart of the matter. Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that any moral action makes only sense if there is reality in the world. What is any moral action if we live in a world of appearance? You can never be convinced that that which you do constitutes something real. Then any striving for morality and all your goals are floating in the air. There Fichte was admirably consistent. Later he changed his view and got to pure theosophy. With perception we can never know about the world—he says—anything else than dreams of these dreams. But something drives us to want the good. This lets us look into this big world of dreams like in a flash. He sees the realisation of the moral law in the world of dreams. The demands of the moral law should justify what reason cannot teach.—And Herbart says: because any perception is full of contradictions, we can never come to norms of our moral actions. Hence, there must be norms of our moral actions which are relieved of any judgment by mind and reason. Moral perfection, goodwill, inner freedom, they are independent of the activity of reason. Because everything is appearance in our world, we must have something in which we are relieved of reflection.

This is the first phase of the development of the 19th century: the transformation of truth to a world of dreams. The idealism of dreams was the only possible result of thinking about being and wanted to make the foundation of a moral world view independent of all knowledge and cognition. It wanted to limit knowledge to get room for faith. Therefore, the German philosophy has broken with the ancient traditions of those world views which we call theosophy. Anybody who calls himself theosophist could have never accepted this dualism, this separation of moral and the world of dreams. It was for him always a unity, from the lowest quantum of energy up to the highest spiritual reality. Because as well as that which the animal accomplishes in desire and listlessness is only relatively different from that which arises from the highest point of the cultural life out of the purest motives, that is only relatively different everywhere which happens below from that which happens on top. Kant left this uniform way to complete knowledge and world view while he split the world in a recognisable but apparent world and in a second world which has a quite different origin, in the world of morality. In doing so, he clouded the look of many people. Anybody who cannot find access to theosophy suffers from the aftermath of Kant’s philosophy.

In the end, you will see how theosophy emerges from a true theory of knowledge; however, it was necessary before that I have demonstrated the apparently firm construction of science. Science seems to have proved irrefutably that there are only the oscillations of the ether if we feel green or blue that we sense tone by the aerial oscillations. The contents of the next lecture will show how it is in reality.

In vain did Aristotle resist the Platonic division of the conception of the world. Aristotle saw Nature as a uniform entity containing the ideas as well as sense-perceptible objects and phenomena. Only in the human spirit can the ideas have an independent existence, but in this state of independence they have no reality. Only the soul can separate the idea from the perceptible objects in conjunction with which they constitute reality. If Western Philosophy had adhered to a true understanding of Aristotle's conception, it would have been preserved from a great deal that necessarily appears erroneous to the Goethean view of the world.

But this true understanding of Aristotelianism was at first an inconvenience to many of those who sought to acquire a thought-basis for Christian conceptions. Many of those who considered themselves “Christian” thinkers in the true sense did not know what to make of a conception of Nature that removed the highest active principle into the realm of experience. Many Christian Philosophers and Theologians therefore interpreted Aristotle in a new sense. They attributed to his views a meaning which in their opinion was able to serve as logical support of Christian dogma.—The mind is not intended to seek in the objects for the creative ideas. Truth is communicated to men by God in the form of revelation. Reason is only there to verify what God has revealed. Aristotelian principles were interpreted by the mediaeval Christian thinkers in such a way that the religious doctrine of salvation received its philosophical corroboration from these principles. It is the conception of Thomas Aquinas, the most important of Christian thinkers, that first tries to weave Aristotelian thoughts into the Christian evolution of thought to the extent to which this was possible in his day. According to the conception of Thomas Aquinas, revelation contains the highest truths, the scriptural doctrine of salvation; but it is possible for reason to penetrate into objects in the Aristotelian sense and to extract their ideal content. Revelation descends so far, and reason can rise so high that at a certain point the doctrine of salvation and human knowledge can flow over into each other. Aristotle's mode of penetration into objects becomes, then, the means whereby Thomas Aquinas attains to the sphere of revelation.

With Bacon and Descartes began an era where the will to seek for truth through the inherent power of the human personality asserted itself. Habits of thought had taken such direction that all endeavour ended in setting up views which, in spite of their apparent independence of the preceding Western world-conception, were in fact, only new forms of it. Bacon and Descartes had also acquired a distorted conception of the relation of experience and idea as heritage from a thought-world into which degeneration had entered. Bacon had perception and understanding only for the particulars of Nature. He believed that he arrived at general laws for natural events by gathering together equivalent or rather similar elements from the varied domain of space and time. Goethe speaks of Bacon in these apt words: “For even although he indicates that one should only gather the particulars together for the sake of being able to select from them, to coordinate them, and eventually to arrive at universalities, yet, with him, the particular cases retain undue prominence, and before one is able to arrive at simplification and finality through induction—even such induction as he recommends—life is spent and one's forces are worn out.” For Bacon these general rules are the means whereby reason is able to survey the region of the particulars. But he does not believe that these rules are rooted in the ideal content of the objects and are actual, creative forces of Nature. Therefore he does not directly seek for the idea in the particular, but abstracts it from a multiplicity of particulars. Those who do not believe that the idea lives within the single object will not be disposed to seek for it there. They accept the object as it is offered to external perception pure and simple. Bacon's significance lies in the fact that he pointed to the external mode of perception that has been undervalued by the one-sided form of Platonism already referred to. He emphasised the fact that in this external mode of conception there lies a source of truth. He was not, however, in a position to establish the rights of the world of ideas in relation to the world of perception. He pronounced the ideal to be a subjective element in the human mind. His mode of thinking is an inversion of Platonism. Plato sees reality only in the world of ideas, Bacon only in the world of perception that is free of ideas. In the Baconian conception we have the starting-point of that tendency of thought which still dominates investigators of Nature to-day. This tendency of thought suffers from a false view of the ideal element of the world of experience. It could not come to terms with the view of the Middle Ages that had arisen as the result of a question wrongly put and which led to ideas being regarded as mere names and not realities inherent in things.

Three decades after Bacon we have the views of Descartes, proceeding, it is true, from a different standpoint, but no less influenced by one-sided Platonic modes of thought. Descartes also suffers from the hereditary sin of Western thought, from mistrust in an impartial observation of Nature. Doubt as to the existence of objects, doubt as to whether objects are capable of being cognised is the starting-point of his research. He does not concentrate his gaze on the objects in order to gain access to certainty, but he seeks a tiny door, a bye-way in the truest sense of the word. He withdraws into the most intimate region of thought. “All that I have hitherto believed to be truth may be false,” he says to himself. “My thoughts may be based on illusion. But the one fact remains that I think about the objects. Even if my thought amounts to falsehood and deception, I think, nevertheless. If I think, I also exist. I think, therefore I am.” Descartes believes that he has here obtained a permanent point of departure for all further reflection. He puts another question to himself: Is there not in the content of my thinking still something else that points to true existence? And then he finds the idea of God, as the idea of an All-Perfect Being. As man himself is imperfect how comes it that the idea of an All-Perfect Being is able to enter his world of thought? It is impossible for an imperfect being to produce an idea of this kind out of itself. For the greatest perfection which it is capable of conceiving is still imperfect. This idea must therefore have been put into man by the All-perfect Being himself. God must therefore exist. But how can a perfect Being deceive us by an illusion? The external world which presents itself to us as real must therefore be, in fact, a reality. Otherwise it would be a delusive image imposed on us by the Godhead. In this way Descartes tries to acquire the trust in reality which, as the result of inherited conceptions (Empfindungen), he did not at first possess. He seeks for truth by the most artificial means. He proceeds merely from thought. To thought alone he concedes the power to produce conviction. Conviction in regard to observation can only be acquired when it is imparted by thought. The consequences of this view were that it became the endeavour of Descartes' successors to establish the whole compass of truths which thought is able to evolve out of itself and prove. Their aim was to find the sum-total of all knowledge out of pure reason. They wanted to proceed from the simplest, immediately evident perceptions and to traverse progressively the whole orbit of pure thought. This system was supposed to be built up according to the model of Euclidean Geometry. For it was held that this too proceeds from simple, true premises and evolves its whole content merely by a chain of deduction, without recourse to observation. Spinoza endeavoured to give such a system of reasoned truths in his “Ethics.” He takes a number of conceptions: Substance, Attribute, Mode, Thought, Extension and so forth, and examines their connections and content purely with the reason. The essence of reality is considered to express itself in the thought structure. Spinoza considers that the only knowledge corresponding to the real essence of the universe and yielding adequate ideas is that which exists as a result of this activity that is alien to reality. Ideas derived from sense-perception are to him inadequate, confused, mutilated. It is easy to see the after-effects of the one-sided Platonic view, of the antithesis between perceptions and ideas in these conceptions also. Only those thoughts that are evolved independently of observation have any value for knowledge. Spinoza goes still further. He extends the antithesis to the moral sense and the actions of human beings. Feelings of unhappiness can only spring from ideas derived from sense perception; such ideas generate desires and passions in man, who becomes their slave if he gives himself up to them. Only that which originates from the reason can give birth to feelings of unqualified happiness. Hence the highest bliss of man is life in the ideas of reason, devotion to knowledge of the pure world of ideas. A man who has overcome all that is derived from the world of perception, and yet lives in the realm of pure knowledge, experiences the highest bliss.

Not quite a century after Spinoza there appeared the Scotchman, David Hume, with a mode of thought again assuming knowledge to be derived from perception only. Only single objects in space and time are given. Thought connects the single perceptions together, not, however, because there lies in the objects themselves anything corresponding to such a connection, but because the intellect is accustomed to bringing them into connection. Man is accustomed to see that one thing follows another in time. He forms for himself the idea that there must be sequence. He calls the first, cause; the second, effect. Man is further accustomed to see that a thought in his mind is followed by a movement of his body. He explains this by saying that the mind brings about bodily movement. Man's ideas are habits of thought and nothing more. Perceptions alone have reality.

The combination of the most varied trends of thought that had come into existence through the course of the centuries appears in the Kantian view of the world. Kant also has no natural sense of the relation of perception and idea. He lives in the midst of philosophical preconceptions which he has assimilated from the study of his predecessors. One of these preconceptions is that there exist necessary truths, brought into being by pure thought, free of all element of experience. In Kant's view the proof of this is afforded by the existence of mathematics and pure physics which contain such truths. Another of his preconceptions consists in denying to experience the possibility of attaining to equally necessary truths. Mistrust of the world of perception is present in Kant also. These thought-habits of Kant are further influenced by Hume. Kant admits that Hume is right when the latter asserts that the ideas into which thought unites the single perceptions are not derived from experience but that they are added by thought to experience. These three preconceptions are the basis of the Kantian thought-structure. Man is in possession of essential truths, but these essential truths cannot be derived from experience, because experience has nothing of the kind to offer. Man, however, applies them to experience. He connects the single perceptions in conformity with these truths. They are derived from man himself. It is inherent in his nature to bring things into a connection that is in line with the truths which have been acquired by pure thought. Kant goes still further. He credits the senses also with the capacity for bringing what is imparted to them from without into a definite order. This order does not flow in from outside with the impressions of the objects. The impressions receive spatial and temporal order for the first time through sense-perception. Space and Time do not appertain to the objects. Man is so organised that when the objects make impressions on his senses he brings them into spatial or temporal order. From without man receives impressions, sensations only. Their arrangement in space and in time, their association into ideas is his own work. But neither are the sensations derived from the objects. Man does not become aware of the objects themselves but only of the impression they make upon him. I know nothing about an object when I have a sensation. I can only say I am aware of the appearance of a sensation in myself. I cannot experience the attributes which enable the objects to evoke sensations in me. In Kant's view man has nothing to do with the things-in-themselves, but only with the impression they make upon him and with the connections into which he himself brings these impressions. The realm of experience is not received objectively, from without, but is only instigated from without; it is produced subjectively from within. The character it bears is not imparted to it by the objects but by the organisation of man. It has therefore no existence per se apart from man. From this point of view the postulation of essential truths—truths that are independent of experience—is possible. For these truths are related merely to the way in which man determines his world of experience from out of himself. They contain the laws of his constitution. They have no relation to things-in-themselves. Kant, then, has found a way out which enables him to adhere to his preconception that there are essential truths which hold good for the content of the world of experience without being derived therefrom. In order to discover this way out he had, of course, to decide in favour of the view that the human mind is incapable of knowing anything about things-in-themselves. He had to limit all knowledge to the phenomenal world which the human organisation weaves out of itself as the result of the impressions produced by the objects. Why should Kant trouble about the essential being of the thing-in-itself if he could only preserve the eternal, necessary truths in the sense in which he conceived of them? One-sided Platonism produced in Kant a harvest that is paralysing to knowledge. Plato turned away from perception and directed his gaze to the eternal ideas, because it seemed to him that perception did not make manifest the essence of the objects. Kant, however, renounces the conception that the ideas open up a true insight into the essential being of the universe if only there remains to them the attribute of eternity and necessity. Plato adheres to the world of ideas because of his belief that the true being of the universe must be eternal, imperishable, unchangeable, and because he can ascribe these attributes only to the ideas. Kant is content with merely predicting these attributes of the ideas. They need not then any longer express the essential being of the universe.

Kant's philosophical mode of conception was nourished in a yet higher degree by the trend of his religious sense. He did not proceed from vision of the living harmony of the world of ideas and sense-perception in the being of man, but he put this question to himself: Can anything be cognised by man, as the result of experience of the world of ideas that can never enter into the realm of sense perception? A man who thinks in the Goethean sense seeks to cognise the world of ideas in its real nature by apprehending the essential being of the idea, realising how this allows reality to be perceived in the world of sense-appearance. Then he may ask himself: To what extent does this experience of the real character of the world of ideas enable me to penetrate into the region wherein the relationship of the supersensible truths of Freedom, of Immortality, of the Divine World Order to human knowledge is discovered? Kant denies that it is possible to cognise anything about the reality of the world of ideas from its relationship to sense-perception. Out of this assumption there arose for him, as a scientific result, that which, unconsciously to him, was demanded by the trend of his religious sense: that scientific cognition must come to a standstill before problems which concern Freedom, Immortality, and the Divine World Order. It followed that, for him, human cognition can only reach to the boundaries enclosing the realm of sense and that in reference to everything that lies beyond faith alone is possible. He wanted to set bounds to cognition in order to preserve a place for faith. It inheres in the character of the Goethean world-conception first to provide knowledge with a firm foundation as the result of perceiving in Nature the world of ideas in its true being, in order hereafter, within this world of ideas, to proceed to experience lying outside the sense world. Even when regions are cognised which do not lie within the realm of the sense world, the gaze is directed to the living harmony of idea and experience, and certainty of knowledge is sought as a result of this. Kant could discover no such certainty. He therefore set out to discover, beyond knowledge, a foundation for the conceptions of Freedom, of Immortality and of the Divine World Order. Inherent in the character of the Goethean world-conception is the desire to know as much of the “things-in-themselves” as is permitted by the comprehension of the true being of the world of ideas within Nature. The nature of the Kantian world-conception makes it deny to knowledge the claim of being able to illuminate the world of the “things-in-themselves.” Goethe wants to kindle in knowledge a light that will illuminate the true essence of the objects. He realises that the true essence of the objects so illuminated does not lie in the light, but in spite of this he maintains that this true essence may become manifest as a result of the illumination. Kant insists that the true essence of the illuminated objects does not inhere in the light; the light therefore can reveal nothing of this true essence.

The Kantian world-conception can only appear to Goethe's in the following light: the Kantian world-conception has not arisen as the result of the removal of old errors, nor of a free, original penetration into reality, but as the result of a logical interblending of acquired and inherited philosophical and religious preconceptions. It could only emanate from a mind where the sense of the living, creative activity in Nature has remained in an undeveloped condition. And it could only influence minds that also suffered from the same defect. The far-reaching influence which Kant's mode of thought exercised on his contemporaries proves to what an extent they were living under the ban of a one-sided Platonism.

In vain did Aristotle protest against the Platonic splitting of the world picture. He saw in nature a unified being, which contains ideas just as much as it does the things and phenomena perceptible to the senses. Only within the human spirit can the ideas have an independent existence. But in this independent state they cannot be credited with any reality. Only the soul can separate them from the perceptible things with which, together, they constitute reality. If Western philosophy had linked onto the rightly understood views of Aristotle, then it would have been preserved from much of what must appear to the Goethean world view as aberration.

But Aristotle, rightly understood, to begin with made uncomfortable many a person who wanted to gain a foundation in thought for the Christian picture of things. Many a person who considered himself to be a genuinely “Christian” thinker' did not know what to do with a conception of nature which places the highest active principle into the world of our experience. Many Christian philosophers and theologians' therefore gave a new interpretation to Aristotle. They attached a meaning to his views which, in their opinion, was able to serve as a logical support for Christian dogma. Man's spirit should not seek within things for their creative ideas. The truth is, indeed, imparted to human beings by God in the form of revelation. Reason is only meant to confirm what God has revealed. Aristotelian principles were interpreted by the Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages in such a way that the religious truth of salvation received its philosophical reinforcement through these principles. It is the conception of Thomas' Aquinas, the most significant Christian thinker, which first seeks to weave the Aristotelian thoughts as far and as deeply into the Christian evolution of ideas as was possible at the time of this thinker. According to this conception, revelation contains the highest truths, the Bible's teachings of salvation; it is possible, however, for reason to penetrate deeply into things, in the Aristotelian way, and to bring forth from them their content of ideas. Revelation can descend far enough, and reason can lift itself high enough, that the teaching of salvation and human knowledge merge with one another at a certain boundary. Aristotle's way of penetrating into things serves Thomas, therefore, as a way of coming to the realm of revelation.

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When, with Bacon of Verulam and Descartes, an era began in which there asserted itself the will to seek the truth through the human personality's own power, then habits of thought tended to lead one to strive only to set up views which, in spite of their seeming independence from the preceding Western world picture, were nevertheless nothing but new forms of1t. Bacon and Descartes had also acquired, as heritage of a degenerate thought world, the pernicious way of looking at the relationship of experience and idea. Bacon had a sense and an understanding only for the particulars of nature. By collecting that which, extending through the manifoldness of space and time, is alike or similar, he believed he arrived at general rules about the processes of nature. Goethe aptly says of him, “For, though he himself always indicates that one should collect the particulars only in order to be able to choose from them, to order them, and finally to arrive at universals, nevertheless, he grants too many rights to the individual cases, and before one can achieve through induction—even the induction which he extols—this simplification and conclusion, the life is gone and the forces consume themselves.” For Bacon these general rules are a means by which it is possible for reason to have a comfortable overview of the region of particularities. But he does not believe that these rules are founded in the ideal content of things and that they are really creative forces of nature. Therefore he also does not seek the idea directly within the particular but rather abstracts it out of a multiplicity of particulars. Someone who does not believe that the idea lives within the individual thing also can have no inclination to seek it there. He accepts the thing the way it presents itself to mere outer perception. Bacon's significance is to be sought in the fact that he drew attention to that outer way of looking at things which had been denigrated by the one-sided Platonism characterized above, that he emphasized that in it lies a source of truth. He was not, however, in a position to help the world of ideas in the same way to establish its rights over against the perceptible world. He declared what is ideal to be a subjective element within the human spirit. His way of thinking is Platonism in reverse. Plato sees reality only in the world of ideas, Bacon only in the world of perception without ideas. Within Bacon's conception there lies the starting point for that attitude of thinkers by which natural scientists are governed right into the present-day. Bacon's conception suffers from an incorrect view about the ideal element of the world of experience. It could not deal rightly with that medieval view, produced by a one-sided way of posing the I question, to the effect that ideas are only names, not realities lying within things.

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From other points of view, but no less influenced by one-sidedly Platonizing modes of thought, Descartes began his contemplations three decades after Bacon. He is also afflicted with the Original Sin of Western thought, with mistrust toward the unbiased observation of nature. Doubt in the existence and knowability of things is the starting point of his research. He does not direct his gaze upon the things in order to gain access to certainty, but rather he seeks out a very little door, a way, in the fullest sense of the word, of sneaking in. He withdraws into the most intimate region of thinking. Everything that I have believed up to now as truth might be false, he says to himself. What I have thought might rest upon delusion. But the one fact does remain nevertheless: that I think about things. Even if I think lies and illusion, I am thinking nevertheless. And if I think, then I also exist. I think, therefore I am. With this Descartes believes that he has gained a sound starting point for all further thinking about things. He asks himself further: is there not still something else in the content of my thinking that points to a true existence? And there he finds the idea of God as the most perfect of all beings. Given that man himself is imperfect, how does the idea of a most perfect being come into his world of thoughts? An imperfect being cannot possibly produce such an idea out of himself. For the most perfect thing that he can think is in fact an imperfect thing. This idea of the most perfect being must itself therefore have been placed into man. Therefore God must also exist. Why, however, should I. perfect being delude us with an illusion? The outer world, which presents itself to us as real, must therefore also be real. Otherwise it would be an illusory picture that the godhead imposes upon us. In this way Descartes seeks to win the trust in reality which, because of inherited feelings, he lacked at fIrst. He seeks truth in an extremely artificial way. He takes his start one-sidedly from thinking. He credits thinking alone with the power to produce conviction. A conviction about observation can only be won if it is provided by thinking. The consequence of this view was that it became the striving of Descartes' successors to determine the whole compass of the truths which thinking can develop out of itself and prove. One wanted to find the sum total of all knowledge out of pure reason. One wanted to take one's start from the simplest immediately clear insights, and proceeding from there to travel through the entire sphere of pure thinking. This system was meant to be built up according to the model of Euclidean geometry. For one was of the view that this also starts from simple, true principles and evolves its entire content through mere deduction, without recourse to observation. In his Ethics Spinoza attempted to provide such a system of the pure truths of reason. He takes a number of mental pictures: substance, attribute, mode, thinking, extension, etc., and investigates in a purely intellectual way the relationships and content of these mental pictures. The being of reality supposedly expresses itself in an edifice of thought. Spinoza regards only the knowledge arising through this activity, foreign to reality, as one that corresponds to the true being of the world, as one that provides adequate ideas. The ideas which spring from sense perception are for him inadequate, confused, and mutilated. It is easy to see that also in this world conception there persists the one-sided Platonic way of conceiving an antithesis between perceptions and ideas. The thoughts which are formed independently of perception are alone of value for knowledge. Spinoza goes still further. He extends the antithesis also to the moral feeling and actions of human beings. Feelings of pain can only spring from ideas that stem from perception; such ideas produce desires and passions in man, whose slave he can become if he gives himself over to them. Only what springs from reason produces feelings of unqualified pleasure. The highest bliss of man is therefore his life in the ideas of reason, his devotion to knowledge of the pure world of ideas. Whoever has overcome what stems from the world of perception and lives on only within pure knowledge experiences the highest blessedness.

Not quite a century after Spinoza there appears the Scotsman, David Hume, with a way of thinking that again lets knowledge spring from perception alone. Only individual things in space and time are given. Thinking connects the individual perceptions, not, however because something lies within these perceptions themselves which corresponds to this connecting, but rather because the intellect has habituated itself to bringing things into relationship. The human being is habituated to seeing that one thing follows another in time. He forms for himself the mental picture that it must follow. He makes the first thing into the cause, the second into the effect. The human being is habituated further to seeing that a movement of his body follows upon a thought of his spirit. He explains this to himself by saying that his spirit has caused the movement of his body. Human ideas are habits of thought, nothing more. Only perceptions have reality.

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The uniting of the most diverse trends of thought which have come into existence through the centuries is the Kantian world view. Kant also lacks the natural feeling for the relationship between perception and idea. He lives in philosophical preconceptions which he took up into himself through study of his predecessors. One of these preconceptions is that there are necessary truths which are produced by pure thinking free of any experience. The proof of this, in his view, is given by the existence of mathematics and of pure physics which contain such truths. Another of his preconceptions consists of the fact that he denies to experience the ability of attaining equally necessary truths. Mistrust toward the world of perception is also present in Kant. To these habits of thinking there is added the influence of Hume. Kant agrees with Hume with respect to his assertion that the ideas into which thinking combines the individual perceptions do not stem from experience, but rather that thinking adds them to experience. These three preconceptions are the roots of the Kantian thought structure. Man possesses necessary truths. They cannot stem from experience, because it has nothing like them to offer. In spite of this, man applies them to experience. He connects the individual perceptions in accordance with these truths. They stem from man himself. It lies in his nature to bring the things into the kind of relationship which corresponds to the truths gained by pure thinking. Kant goes still further now. He credits the senses also with the ability to bring what is given them from outside into a definite order. This order also does not flow in from outside with the impressions of things. The impressions first receive their order in space and time, through sense perception. Space and time do not belong to the things. The human being is organized in such a way that, when the things make impressions on his senses, he then brings these impressions into spatial or temporal relationships. Man receives from outside only impressions, sensations. The ordering of these in space and in time, the combining of them into ideas, is his own work. But the sensations are also not something that stems from the things. It is not the things that man perceives but only the impressions they make on him. I know nothing about a thing when I have a sensation. I can only say that I notice the arising of a sensation in me. What the characteristics are by which the thing is able to call forth sensations in me, about them I can experience nothing. The human being, in Kant's opinion, does not have to do with the things-in-themselves but only with the impressions which they make upon him and with the relationships into which he himself brings these impressions. The world of experience is not taken up objectively from outside but only, in response to outer causes, subjectively produced from within. It is not the things which give the world of experience the stamp it bears but rather the human organization which does so. That world as such, consequently, is not present at all independently of man. From this standpoint the assumption of necessary truths independent of experience is possible. For these truths relate merely to the way man, of himself, determines his world of experience. They contain the laws of his organization. They have no connection to the things-in-themselves. Kant has therefore found a way out, which permits him to remain in his preconception that there a necessary truths which hold good for the content of the world of experience, without, however, stemming from it. In order to find this way out, he had, to be sure, to commit himself to the view that the human spirit is incapable of knowing anything at all about the things-in-themselves. He had to restrict all knowledge to the world of appearances which the human organization spins out of itself as a result of impressions caused by the things. But why should Kant worry about the being of the things-in-themselves so long as he was able to rescue the eternal, necessarily valid truths in the form in which he pictured them. One-sided Platonism brought forth in Kant a fruit that paralyzes knowledge. Plato turned away from perception and directed his gaze upon the eternal ideas, because perception did not seem to him to express the being of things. Kant, however, renounces the notion that ideas open any real insight into the being of the world, just so they retain the quality of the eternal and necessary. Plato holds to the world of ideas, because he believes that the true being of the world must be eternal, indestructible, unchangeable, and he can ascribe these qualities only to ideas. Kant is content if only he can maintain these qualities for the ideas. Ideas then no longer need to express the being of the world at all.

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Kant's philosophical way of picturing things was in addition particularly nourished by the direction of his religious feelings. He did not take as his starting point to look, within the being of man, at the living harmony of the world of ideas and of sense perception but rather posed himself the question: can, through man's experience of the world of ideas, anything be known by him which can never enter the realm of sense perception? Whoever thinks in the sense of the Goethean world view seeks to know the character of the world of ideas as reality, by grasping the being of the idea through his insight into how the Idea allows him to behold reality in the sense-perceptible world of semblance. Then he can ask himself: to what extent, through the character experienced in this way of the world of ideas as reality, can I penetrate into those regions within which the supersensible truths of freedom, of immortality, of the divine world order, find their relationship to human knowledge? Kant negated the possibility of our being able to know anything about the reality of the world of ideas from its relationship to sense perception. From this presupposition he arrived at the scientific result, which, unknown to him, was demanded by the direction of his religious feeling: that scientific knowledge must come to a halt before the kind of questions which relate to freedom, immortality, and the divine world order. There resulted for him the view that human knowledge could only go as far as the boundaries which enclose the sense realm, and that for everything which lies beyond them only faith is possible. He wanted to limit knowing in order to preserve a place for faith. It lies in the sense of the Goethean world view first of all to provide knowing with a firm basis through the fact that the world of ideas, in its essential being, is seen connected with nature, in order then, within the world of ideas thus consolidated, to advance to an experience lying beyond the sense world. Even then, when regions are known which do not lie in the realm of the sense world, one's gaze is still directed toward the living harmony of idea and experience, and certainty of knowledge is sought thereby. Kant could not find any such certainty. Therefore he set out to find, outside of knowledge, a basis for the mental pictures of freedom, immortality, and divine order. It lies in the sense of the Goethean world view to want to know as much about the things-in-themselves as the being of the world of ideas, grasped in connection with nature, allows. It lies in the sense of the Kantian world view to deny to knowledge the right of shining into the world of the things-in-themselves. Goethe wants, within knowledge, to kindle a light which illuminates the being of things. It is also clear to him that the being of the things thus illuminated does not lie within the light itself; but he nevertheless does not want to give up having this being become revealed through the illumination by this light. Kant holds fast to the view that the being of the things illuminated does not lie in the light itself; therefore the light can reveal nothing about this being.

The world view of Kant can stand before that of Goethe only in the sense of the following mental pictures: Kant's world view has not arisen through any clearing away of old errors, nor through any free, original descending into the depths of reality but rather through a fusing together of acquired and inherited philosophical and religious preconceptions. This world view could only spring from an individual in whom the sense for the living creativity within nature has remained undeveloped. And it could only affect the kind of individuals who suffered from the same lack. From the far-reaching influence which Kant's way of thinking exercised upon his contemporaries, one can see how strongly they stood under the spell of one-sided Platonism.

Our thinking has a twofold task: firstly, to create concepts with sharply delineated contours; secondly, to bring together the individual concepts thus created into a unified whole. In the first case we are dealing with the activity that makes distinctions; in the second, with the activity that joins. These two spiritual tendencies by no means enjoy the same cultivation in the sciences. The keen intellect that enters into the smallest details in making its distinctions is given to a significantly larger number of people than the uniting power of thinking that penetrates into the depths of beings.

For a long time one saw the only task of science to be the making of exact distinctions between things. We need only recall the state of affairs in which Goethe found natural history. Through Linnaeus it had become the ideal to seek the exact differences between individual plants in order in this way to be able to use the most insignificant characteristics to set up new species and subspecies. Two kinds of animals or plants that differed in only the most inessential things were assigned right away to different species. If an unexpected deviation from the arbitrarily established character of the species was found in one or another creature that until then had been assigned to one or another species, one did not then reflect how such a deviation could be explained from this character itself; one simply set up a new species.

Making distinctions like this is the task of the intellect (Verstand). It has only to separate concepts and maintain them in this separation. This is a necessary preliminary stage of any higher scientific work. Above all, in fact, we need firmly established, clearly delineated concepts before we can seek their harmony. But we must not remain in this separation. For the intellect, things are separated that humanity has an essential need to see in a harmonious unity. Remaining separate for the intellect are: cause and effect, mechanism and organism, freedom and necessity, idea and reality, spirit and nature, and so on. All these distinctions are introduced by the intellect. They must be introduced, because otherwise the world would appear to us as a blurred, obscure chaos that would form a unity only because it would be totally undefined for us.

The intellect itself is in no position to go beyond this separation. It holds firmly to the separated parts.

To go beyond this is the task of reason (Vernunft). It has to allow the concepts created by the intellect to pass over into one another. It has to show that what the intellect keeps strictly separated is actually an inner unity. The separation is something brought about artificially, a necessary intermediary stage for our activity of knowing, not its conclusion. A person who grasps reality in a merely intellectual way distances himself from it. He sets in reality's place—since it is in truth a unity—an artificial multiplicity, a manifoldness that has nothing to do with the essential being of reality.

The conflict that has arisen between an intellectually motivated science and the human heart stems from this. Many people whose thinking is not yet developed enough for them to arrive at a unified world view grasped in full conceptual clarity are, nevertheless, very well able to penetrate into the inner harmony of the universe with their feeling. Their hearts give them what reason offers the scientifically developed person.

When such people meet the intellectual view of the world, they reject with scorn the infinite multiplicity and cling to the unity that they do not know, indeed, but that they feel more or less intensely. They see very well that the intellect withdraws from nature, that it loses sight of the spiritual bond joining the parts of reality.

Reason leads back to reality again. The unity of all existence, which before was felt or of which one even had only dim inklings, is clearly penetrated and seen by reason. The intellectual view must be deepened by the view of reason. If the former is regarded as an end in itself instead of as a necessary intermediary stage, then it does not yield reality but rather a distorted image of it.

There are sometimes difficulties in connecting the thoughts that the intellect has created. The history of science provides us with many proofs of this. We often see the human spirit struggle to bridge the differences created by the intellect.

In reason's view of the world the human being merges with the world in undivided unity.

Kant pointed already to the difference between intellect and reason. He designated reason as the ability to perceive ideas; the intellect, on the other hand, is limited merely to beholding the world in its dividedness, in its separateness.

Now reason is, in fact, the ability to perceive ideas. Here we must determine the difference between concept and idea, to which we have hitherto paid no attention. For our purposes until now it has only been a matter of finding those qualities of the element of thought that present themselves in concept and idea. The concept is the single thought as it is grasped and held by the intellect. If I bring a number of such single thoughts into living flux in such a way that they pass over into one another, connect with one another, then thought-configurations arise that are present only for reason, that the intellect cannot attain. For reason, the creations of the intellect give up their separate existences and live on only as part of a totality. These configurations that reason has created shall be called ideas.

The fact that the idea leads a multiplicity of the concepts created by the intellect back to a unity was also expressed by Kant. But he presented the configurations that come to manifestation through reason as mere deceptive images, as illusions that the human spirit eternally conjures up because it is eternally striving to find some unity to experience that is never to be found. According to Kant, the unities created in ideas do not rest upon objective circumstances; they do not flow from the things themselves; rather they are merely subjective norms by which we bring order into our knowing. Kant therefore does not characterize ideas as constitutive principles, which would have to be essential to the things, but rather as regulative principles, which have meaning and significance only for the systematics of our knowing.

If one looks at the way in which ideas come about, however, this view immediately proves erroneous. It is indeed correct that subjective reason has the need for unity. But this need is without any content; it is an empty striving for unity. If something confronts it that is absolutely lacking in any unified nature, it cannot itself produce this unity out of itself. If, on the other hand, a multiplicity confronts it that allows itself to be led back into an inner harmony, it then brings about this harmony. The world of concepts created by the intellect is just such a multiplicity.

Reason does not presuppose any particular unity but rather the empty form of unification; reason is the ability to bring harmony to light when harmony lies within the object itself. Within reason, the concepts themselves combine into ideas. Reason brings into view the higher unity of the intellect's concepts, a unity that the intellect certainly has in its configurations but is unable to see. The fact that this is overlooked is the basis of many misunderstandings about the application of reason in the sciences.

To a small degree every science, even at its starting point—yes, even our everyday thinking—needs reason. If, in the judgment that every body has weight, we join the subject-concept with the predicate-concept, there already lies in this a uniting of two concepts and therefore the simplest activity of reason.

The unity that reason takes as its object is certain before all thinking, before any use of reason; but it is hidden, is present only as potential, does not manifest as a fact in its own right. Then the human spirit brings about separation, in order, by uniting the separate parts through reason, to see fully into reality.

Whoever does not presuppose this must either regard all connecting of thoughts as an arbitrary activity of the subjective spirit, or he must assume that the unity stands behind the world experienced by us and compels us in some way unknown to us to lead the manifoldness back to a unity. In that case we join thoughts without insight into the true basis of the connection that we bring about; then the truth is not known by us, but rather is forced upon us from outside. Let us call all science taking its start from this presupposition dogmatic. We will still have to come back to this.

Every scientific view of this kind will run into difficulty when it has to give reasons for why we make one or another connection between thoughts. It has to look around for a subjective basis for drawing objects together whose objective connection remains hidden to us. Why do I make a judgment, if the thing which demands that subject-concept and predicate-concept belong together has nothing to do with the making of this judgment?

Kant made this question the starting point of his critical work. At the beginning of his Critique of Pure Reason we find the question: How are synthetical judgments possible a priori?—this means, how is it possible for me to join two concepts (subject, predicate), if the content of the one is not already contained in the other, and if the judgment is not merely a perception judgment, i.e., the establishing of an individual fact? Kant believes that such judgments are possible only if experience can exist only under the presumption of their validity. The possibility of experience is therefore the determining factor for us if we are to make a judgment of this kind. If I can say to myself that experience is possible only if one or another synthetical judgment is true a priori, only then is the judgment valid. But this does not apply to ideas themselves. For Kant these do not have even this degree of objectivity.

Kant finds that the principles of mathematics and of pure natural science are such valid synthetical principles a priori. He takes, for example, the principle that 7 + 5 = 12. In 7 and 5 the sum 12 is in no way contained, concludes Kant. I must go beyond 7 and 5 and call upon my intuition; [ Anschauung—“Intuition” is the conventional translation of Kant's Anschauang.—Ed. ] then I find the concept 12. My intuition makes it necessary for me to picture that 7 + 5 = 12. But the objects of my experience must approach me through the medium of my intuition, must submit to the laws of my intuition. If experience is to be possible, such principles must be correct.

This entire artificial thought-edifice of Kant does not stand up to objective examination. It is impossible that I have absolutely no point of reference in the subject-concept which leads me to the predicate-concept. For, both concepts were won by my intellect, and won from something that in itself is unified. Let us not deceive ourselves here. The mathematical unit that underlies the number is not primary. What is primary is the magnitude, which is so and so many repetitions of the unit. I must presuppose a magnitude when I speak of a unit. The unit is an entity of our intellect separated by the intellect out of a totality, in the same way that it distinguishes effect from cause, substance from its attributes, etc. Now, when I think 7 + 5, I am in fact grasping 12 mathematical units in thought, only not all at once, but rather in two parts. If I think the total of these mathematical units at one time, then that is exactly the same thing. And I express this identity in the judgment 7 + 5 = 12. It is exactly the same with the geometrical example Kant presents. A limited straight line with end points A and B is an indivisible unit. My intellect can form two concepts of it. On the one hand it can regard the straight line as direction, on the other as the distance between two points A and B. From this results the judgment that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

All judging, insofar as the parts entering into the judgment are concepts, is nothing more than a reuniting of what the intellect has separated. The connection reveals itself at once when one goes into the content of the concepts provided by the intellect.

Thinking has a twofold function to discharge: first, to form concepts with sharply outlined contours; secondly, to unite the single concepts thus formed into a unified whole. In the first instance, we have to do with the activity of differentiation; in the second with that of combination. These two mental tendencies do not by any means enjoy equal favor in the sciences. The number of persons possessing the acumen which differentiates even down to the minutest trifles is noticeably greater than that of persons possessing the combining power of thought which penetrates to the depths of things.

For a long time the function of science has been supposed to consist in an adequate differentiation among things. We need only recall the state of natural history in Goethe's day. Through the influence of Linnaeus, it had become the ideal of this science to investigate the differences among individual plants sufficiently to succeed in setting apart new classes and sub-classes on the basis of the most insignificant characteristics. Two species of animals or plants differing only in the most unessential details were forthwith assigned to different classes. If some creature hitherto assigned to a certain class was discovered to show an unexpected divergence from the arbitrarily determined class-character, the result was, not an effort to discover how this divergence might be explained on the basis of that very class-character, but on the contrary a new class was at once set up.

This differentiation is the work of the intellect. It has only to divide and to retain the concepts in this process of division. It is a necessary stage preliminary to all higher forms of scientific knowledge. First of all, must we have definitely fixed, sharply outlined concepts before we can seek for a harmony among these. But we must not stop at the stage of division. To the intellect, things are divided which a fundamental human need requires us to see united. To the intellect, cause and effect are divided; mechanism and organism; freedom and necessity; idea and reality; spirit and Nature; etc., etc. All these differentiations are established by the intellect. They must be established, because otherwise the world would appear to us as a blurred, obscure chaos which would form for us no unity except in the sense that it would be utterly indeterminate.

Intellect itself is not capable of passing beyond this process of division. It holds fast to the divided members.

The task of passing beyond this belongs to reason. It must cause the concepts formed by the intellect to pass over into one another. It has to show that what the intellect keeps in strict separation is in reality an inner unity. The division is something artificially introduced, a necessary intervening stage for our knowledge, but not its conclusion. Whoever apprehends reality only intellectually alienates himself therefrom. In place of reality, which is in truth a unity, he sets up an artificial multiplicity, a manifoldness, which has no relation to the essential nature of reality.

This is the source of the discord which arises between intellectually pursued knowledge and the human heart. Many persons whose thinking has not so developed as to enable them to reach thereby a unified world-view which they can grasp with complete conceptual clarity are, nevertheless, capable of penetrating through their feeling to the inner harmony of the world as a whole. To these is given by the heart that which the scientifically trained receive from the reason.

When such persons meet the intellectual view of the world, they reject with scorn the endless multiplicity and cling to that unity which they do not know, indeed, but which they sense more or less vividly. They see very well that the intellect is alienated from Nature, that it loses sight of that spiritual bond which units the parts of reality.

Reason leads back to reality. The unity of all being, which had before been felt or only vaguely sensed, is completely fathomed by reason. The intellectual view must be deepened by the view of reason. If the former is looked upon, not merely as an inevitable transitional point, but as an end in itself, it does not yield reality but only a caricature.

Difficulties at times arise in combining the thoughts formed by the intellect. The history of science affords numerous evidences of this fact. We often see the human mind struggling to reunite the differences created by the intellect.

In the reasoned view of the world, man finally arrives at undivided unity.

Kant called attention to the difference between intellect and reason. Reason he defined as the capacity to perceive ideas; whereas intellect is restricted to seeing the world in its dividedness, in the isolated-ness of single parts.

It is true that reason is the capacity to perceive ideas. Here we must define the difference between concept and idea, to which we have hitherto paid no attention. For our purpose up to this point it was necessary only to discover those qualities of thought which are present in both concept and idea. The concept is a single thought as grasped by the intellect. If I bring a number of such single thoughts into a living flux so that they pass over into one another, become united, thought-structures thus arise which exist for the reason alone, which cannot be attained by the intellect. The creations of the intellect surrender their isolated existence to the reason, and thenceforth they live only as parts of a totality. These structures formed by the reason we shall call ideas.

That the idea reduces to unity a multiplicity of intellectual concepts was stated also by Kant. But he defined those structures which come to manifestation through the reason as mere phantasms, as illusions, eternally reflected before the human mind because man is forever striving to attain a unity of experience which is never given to him. The unities which are formed in ideas do not rest, according to Kant, upon objective relationships; they do not flow from the thing itself, but are mere subjective norms according to which we bring order into our knowledge. Kant, therefore, designated ideas, not as constitutive principles which must be determinative for things, but as regulative principles which have meaning and significance only for the systematics of our knowledge.

But, if we observe the manner in which ideas come into existence, this point of view is shown at once to be fallacious. It is true, of course, that the subjective reason has a craving for unity. But this craving is void of content, a mere empty striving toward unity. If reason is confronted by something absolutely lacking such unity of nature, reason cannot produce the unity out of itself. But, if reason is confronted by a multiplicity which admits of being reduced to an inner harmony, then reason brings this to pass. Such a multiplicity is the world of intellectually formed concepts.

Reason does not presuppose a determinate unity, but the empty form of unification; it is the capacity to bring harmony to light when harmony exists in the object itself. Concepts themselves unite in the reason to form ideas. Reason brings the higher unity of the intellectual concepts into evidence, the unity which the intellect possesses, indeed, in its images but lacks the capacity to perceive. The fact that this truth is overlooked is the cause of much misunderstanding as to the application of reason in the branches of scientific knowledge.

To a slight extent every science in its very rudiments, and even ordinary thinking, has need of reason. When, in the proposition: “Every body possesses weight,” we unite the subject-concept with the predicate-concept, we have already a union of two concepts and, therefore, the simplest activity of the reason.

The unity which reason takes as its object is existent prior to all thinking, prior to all use of the reason; only, it is concealed; it exists merely as a potentiality, not as an actual phenomenon. Then the human mind introduces division in order that we may have a complete view into reality through the reason's unification of the separated members.

Whoever does not presuppose this must either look upon all thought-combinations as the arbitrary work of the subjective mind, or else assume that the unity exists behind the world we experience, and that it forces us, in a manner unknown to us, to reduce the multiplicity again to unity. In that case, we unite thoughts without any insight into the true reasons of the interrelation which we bring about; in that case, truth is not cognized by us but forced upon us from without. All knowledge which proceeds from this presupposition we may call a dogmatic knowledge. To this we shall later return.

Every such scientific point of view will meet with difficulties when called upon to explain why we bring about one or another combination of thoughts. That is, this point of view requires that we seek for subjective reasons for combining objects whose interconnection on objective grounds is concealed from us. Why do I form a judgment when the thing which requires the interconnection of subject-concept and predicate-concept has nothing to do with the forming of this judgment?

Kant took this question as the point of departure for his critical work. At the beginning of his Critique of Pure Reason we find the question, How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?—that is, How is it possible that I unite two concepts (subject and predicate) if the content of the one is not already contained in the other, and if the judgment is not a mere experiential judgment, the fixing of a single fact? Kant considers that such judgments are possible only when experience cannot exist except on the presupposition of their validity. The possibility of experience is, therefore, determinative if such a judgment is to be formed. If I can say to myself that experience is possible only in case this or that synthetic judgment is a priori true, then the judgment possesses validity. But this principle cannot be applied to ideas themselves. According to Kant these never possess that degree of objectivity.

Kant decides that the propositions of mathematics and pure natural science are a priori such valid propositions. He takes, for example, the proposition 7 + 5 = 12. In 7 and 5 the sum 12 is, he concludes, by no means contained. I must go beyond 7 and 5 and call upon my sense of sight, whereupon I find the concept 12. My vision makes it necessary that the proposition 7 + 5 = 12 shall be assumed. But the objects of experience must approach me through the medium of my sense of sight, thus blending themselves with its principles. If experience is to be possible at all, such propositions must be true.

Before an objective examination, this whole artificial thought-structure of Kant fails to maintain itself. It is impossible that I have no clue in the subject-concept which directs me to the predicate-concept. For both concepts are attained by my intellect, and that in reference to a thing which in itself constitutes a unit. Let no one be deceived at this point. The mathematical unit which lies at the basis of number is not primary. The primary thing is the magnitude, which is a certain number of repetitions of the unit. I must assume a magnitude when I speak of a unit. The unit is an image created by our intellect which separates it from a totality just as it separates effect from cause, substances from their attributes. When I think 7 + 5, I really hold 12 mathematical units in mind, only not all at once but separated into two parts. If I think the group of mathematical units all at once, this is absolutely the same thing. This identity I express in the proposition 7 + 5 = 12. The same is true of the geometrical examples cited by Kant. A limited straight line with the termini A and B is an indivisible unit. My intellect can form two concepts of this. At one time it may consider the straight line as a direction and at another as the distance between the two points A and B. From this fact comes the judgment: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

All judgments, in so far as the members which enter into the judgment are concepts, are nothing more than the reunifying of that which the intellect has divided. The interconnection comes to light as soon as one enters into the content of the intellectual concepts.