The
Historical Life of Humanity and Its Riddles
Berlin, 14 March 1918
In
this time where so many people have the comprehensible need to
orientate themselves about the earth-shaking events you often
hear, history “teaches” this or that. One means
that one could judge about any fact of the present because of
similar facts of history. If we ask ourselves, which
possibilities present themselves to the human beings to judge
this or that on basis of historical experience, then, however,
you get to a somewhat dubious judgement about what history
“teaches.”
I
would like to point only to two things, but I could increase
them a hundred times. I would like to point to the fact that at
the beginning of this world disaster many people were of the
opinion that these critical events would last four, in the
extreme case six months. One regarded such a judgement as
completely entitled. You cannot say that these human beings had
not applied all logical precautions to deliver such a
judgement. Now, the facts themselves have taught such people
rather thoroughly the opposite of that what they have believed.
Just at this example, one also sees how narrowly that which
history should teach is associated with the judgement of the
social or other world relations, so that you can expect from a
consideration of the historical life of humanity that also some
light falls on the judgement you have to exert for the social
and economic living together of the human beings.
However, I would like to bring in another example of the
limited validity of the sentence, that history
“teaches” this or that. An ingenious personality
received a professorship of history at a German university more
than hundred years ago. Really, from a brilliant conception of
that which history gives and which one can apply to the human
life, this man spoke the following words approximately: the
single nations of Europe have become in the course of the human
progress, as history teaches, a big family whose single members
are still feuding, but can never tear each other apart. -
Really, a significant personality believed to be able to judge
in such a way out of his insight into the course of history at
his inaugural lecture. This man was Friedrich Schiller
(1759-1805). He spoke these words in the eve of the French
Revolution which contributed so much to that what one can call
the tearing of the European nations, and particularly if he
could see what happens in our present. It seems to me that from
such facts Goethe got the sensation, which he pronounced in a
wonderful sentence: “The best that we have from history
is the enthusiasm which it excites.” It seems, as if he
did this quotation just to reject the other fruits of the
so-called historical knowledge and to appreciate that only
which can arise as enthusiasm, as a certain positive mood from
the historical documents.
Today we want to examine which position spiritual science has
to take towards two opinions: history can be the great master
of life, and the other: the best what one can have from history
is the enthusiasm that it excites. At first it will be
interesting just in case of the consideration of the historical
life of humanity and the consequences which can be drawn from
this consideration for the judgement of the social life to
which view one has come in the present about the historical
evolution beyond spiritual science. Since the historical life
of humanity is attached to that what goes through every single
person because every human being is cocooned in the historical
evolution. And really, just in the present it is important to
look at this judgement of the contemporaries because the
judicious viewers of history think that also the judgement is
in a crisis how one should found history. I would like to talk
not in abstractions, but to attach my considerations to
realities. There one must comply with examples that of course
are single examples out of many.
I
would like to comply, for example, with the judgement about
history, how it should be anew founded in the present, which
the famous Professor
Karl Lamprecht (1846-1915) has done. You can find that
which one can feel from his monumental German History
(1891-1909), in a comfortable way summarised in his lectures
What is History? Five lectures on the Modern Science of
History (1905) which Lamprecht held partly in St. Louis,
partly in New York at invitation of the Columbia University.
There he tries to summarise what has arisen to him about the
kind how history should be taught out of the requirements of
the present. It is even more comfortable to get an idea of that
what this famous historian wanted to say, actually, by the fact
that he treated a segment of the historical evolution of
humanity exceptionally clear in the second of these lectures.
Lamprecht briefly told the whole development of the German
people from the first Christian centuries up to now to the
Americans. He told that in such a way as he meant that science
of history has to become according to the requirements of the
present. Now you can judge such things, actually, only properly
if you can compare them anyhow. There just a lecture by
Woodrow
Wilson (1856-1924) offers itself which he held on the
development of the North American life, so that you can compare
two spirits who are emotionally and spatially far from each
other how they look as historians at the history of their
peoples in each case.
Forgive if I let — not by courtesy but for stylistic
reasons — the considerations of Woodrow Wilson precede.
None who knows me more exactly states that I overestimate
Wilson. I am also allowed to point to the fact that I already
made my judgement about Wilson in a series of talks, which I
held in Helsinki before the war, indeed, at a time when Wilson
was already president of the United States (1913). At that time
I already said that it is very unfortunate that at a position
from which so much depends for humanity a personality is who is
so frightfully narrow-minded in his judgement. Since although
in those days still numerous people worshipped Wilson
enthusiastically, for example, because of his books The New
Freedom (1913) and Mere Literature and Other Essays
(1896), one could prove that his independent judgement flowing
from his personality is very much limited internally. Without
being swayed by the present political events, I stress what I
said before the war about the so misjudged, that is
overestimated personality. I have to say this in advance, so
that one does not doubt the objectivity of that which I still
want to say about Wilson as a historian.
It
is very strange if one compares how Wilson considers the
history of his people with that what Lamprecht says about the
history of Central Europe. One detects that he finds out the
most succinct point almost instinctively to answer the
question: when have we become, actually, Americans, and how
have we become Americans? How has this happened in history?
There he makes an exceptionally appropriate distinction between
all those who were sooner in the union whom he considers,
however, as “Not yet Americans” but as “New
Englanders” who are because of their whole disposition,
their mood “New Englanders,” and the later
“real Americans.” There he distinguishes to a
hair's breadth a prehistory of the union and lets the union
start its historical becoming when the population crowded
together on a narrow space in the east expands to the west of
America when the people develop that disposition which he calls
the disposition of the frontiersmen. Now he shows how America's
history consists externally and mentally of the fact that the
east expands to the west, and he shows rather obviously how the
regulation of the land distribution, of the tariff question,
even the regulation of the slave issue which he ascribes not to
some principles of humaneness but to the necessities which
arose from the settlement and the conquest of the west. All
these questions are put in the development of modern America.
The essentials of this talk consist in the fact that he shows
how the historical becoming has grasped a sum of human beings
from an outer situation, and that that which goes forward with
these human beings can be understood strictly speaking from
that what they had to undertake under the influence of the
described conditions.
Various things are interesting if one pursues just these
considerations of Wilson, and that what Wilson has performed,
otherwise, as a historian. Just to get some thoughts on various
things that are associated with the topic of the today's talk,
a comparison of that what Wilson says about the most different
historical objects with that which the Europeans say is very
useful.
It
has exceptionally astonished me at the most different places of
Wilson's explanations that there is a strange correspondence
— to me already strange because I would have preferred it
would not be this way — of the contents of sentences, of
the contents of thoughts what Wilson explains about the most
different objects, and of that what, for example, the spirited
Herman Grimm, often mentioned by me, said about various things
of the historical course of humanity.
If
one considers Herman
Grimm as brilliant as I do and Wilson as prudent, as I
must do, it may be quite unpleasant to someone if he reads
Wilson sometimes and says to himself: it is peculiar, there I
read a sentence that I could also read with Grimm. Although
this is in such a way, although I have tested it with
judgements that Wilson and Grimm made about the same
personalities, like Macaulay, Gibbon and others, nevertheless,
in spite of the often almost literal accordance, without having
any relation to each other, it is obvious that in reality the
attitudes of both men are completely different. Just on such
occasion it becomes obvious that two persons can say the same
but they do this from quite different mental undergrounds. In
this case, it is particularly interesting because the colouring
that the judgement receives in the one and the other case is
associated with the roots of the one or the other personality
in his respective national character. Just while one notices
such resemblances, one discovers that the one is American and
the other is German.
It
can strike you quite externally, which difference exists there.
There is a volume of essays by Grimm that contains as
frontispiece a picture of Grimm as this happens today so often.
The German issue of Wilson's essays Mere Literature also
contains a picture of Wilson. One can compare the portraits.
Already this proves something quite strange to someone who
knows to judge such a thing. If you look at Grimm's portrait,
after you were engrossed in what he says as a historian, then
you can realise that every feature of his face expresses that
every sentence and every turn is connected intimately with
everything that this man has wrested from his soul. Then you
look at the portrait of Wilson, after you have also read his
book first: it seems as if this man could not have been present
at all with that what was judged there in the book; a certain
foreignness appears. If you realise this, a riddle of the way
dawns how in this case two persons consider history, and you
can ask yourself in what way is this resemblance and the
strongly felt basic difference caused? Then there appears
something very strange. Just that what Wilson says about the
American people makes sense immediately, so that you know, this
is true of the historical development of this people as he
wants to show it. However, you get on gradually — only
the psychological observation can prove that —: Wilson
has not grown together so intimately with his judgement as we
imagine this within Central Europe. Another relation between
judgement and human being exists there than we are used.
I
know that I say something paradox, but it is intimately
connected with that what I would like to explain about the
historical development of humanity. If it did not sound so
superstitious, I would say, you find out for yourself that
somebody like Wilson himself does not judge if he makes such
suitable judgements as in this interpretation of history and at
other places, but he is possessed by something in his soul. I
would like to express myself somewhat different:
With such a personality like Wilson, you have the impression
that in the soul something is that suggests this judgement from
the inside of the soul. You do not have the impression that the
own individuality has completely developed it; you rather have
the feeling that something like a second personality, a second
being is in the soul, which has suggested it.
If
one looks at Wilson's appropriate judgements about the
character of the American people where he says:
-
that already the outer appearance
and behaviour shows the right American because he has the
quickly movable eye
-
that he is inclined to take up
courageous, but also adventurous lines of thought
quickly
-
that he is little inclined, on the
other hand, to be attached to his native country as other
people are
-
that he likes a lot to make plans
which can be carried out everywhere,
if
you envisage this characterisation of the Americans by Wilson,
then they have something in themselves that oppresses them
externally: not the sensibly looking, quiet eye — I could
also adduce the other characteristics —, but the quickly
movable eye is a sign of the fact that something oppresses the
American from the inside, and such suggestions continue to have
an effect if the judgement of Wilson is accurate.
We
compare what I had to say with an interpretation of history,
which is spatially and mentally somewhat far away, with that
what Lamprecht puts as his ideas about the historical
development of Central Europe. These are original ideas. He
tries to realise how this being of the Central European people
has developed in the course of centuries, since the third
century up to now. One notices that he has internally worked
for everything that he says. One has not to agree with many
things, in particular as a spiritual scientist; we will
immediately have to speak of it. However, he gained everything
from his immediate personality. It would be complete nonsense
to say, any inner force would suggest something. He does not
have it so easy. He has to grasp a thought bit by bit, has to
overcome thoughts to get to a judgement. Only then, he gets to
a conception of the historical development that is relatively
new, even in the view of Ranke
(Leopold von R., 1795-1886, German historian) and Sybel
(Heinrich von S., 1817-1895, German historian), new insofar
that Lamprecht understands historical development as the
development of the whole soul. Lamprecht tries to pursue the
mental dispositions of the people as mental expressions as the
psychologist pursues the soul development of every single
person.
Up
to the third century, the German people developed according to
Lamprecht in such a way that one can say, this development
shows a symbolising tendency. Also the outer actions, also the
political development run in such a way that one realises that
it comes from the desire to interpret the world phenomena as
symbols, to realise symbols everywhere, even to make the heroes
symbols and to revere them as living personal symbols. Then
comes the period from the third century to the eleventh,
twelfth centuries. Lamprecht calls it the categorising one.
There is no longer the desire to use symbols, but to establish
types. One revers those persons whom one reveres whom one obeys
in such a way that they work not like single individualities,
but as types of a whole clan, a whole city.
Then the time comes from the twelfth to about the thirteenth
centuries in which knighthood develops particularly; Lamprecht
calls it the conventional time in which one judges and feels
his will impulses in such a way as the convention demands it
from human being to human being, from state to state, from
people to people, the time of conventionalism. Then follows
— it is important that Lamprecht notices this, although
he does not figure the consequences out — the
individualistic age with the turn of the fifteenth century
where people really feel as individuals within a community.
This lasts about up to the middle of the eighteenth century.
There begins the age of subjectivism in which we still live
where the human being tries to internalise himself, to work out
of the depths of his personality, to work, to think and to want
out of the depths of the subject. Lamprecht divides this age
into two parts: the first lasts until the seventies of the
nineteenth century to which the great classical period of
Goethe, Schiller, and Herder belongs, and then since the
seventies our time follows.
It
is strange now, that Lamprecht, as the maybe most significant
historian of the present, is completely clear in his mind that
he has to look for an impulse first to see how the course of
history goes on, and he investigated incessantly how one should
start lining up that which the documents, the monuments, and
the archives give in such a way how to tell and describe them
so that on can call it history. So the most important question
of history, the question of existence, became topical to
Lamprecht.
He
said to himself, one can get only to history — for he did
not regard the historiography of Ranke, Sybel and others as
history — if one tries to describe the mental development
of a nation or of the whole humanity. Then one must have the
possibility to observe this mental development to find some
laws in this mental development. There it is interesting that a
strange contradiction faces us in his whole approach after the
habitual ways of thinking of the present. After the habitual
ways of thinking, Lamprecht said to himself, the former merely
individualistic approach cannot remain. How can one put the
facts in order generally? There he says to himself, you have to
look at the soul development in such a way that you describe it
social-psychologically. This arises to him from a necessary way
of thinking of modern time to take the social life, the common
being together of human beings into consideration. He says this
to himself on one side. Now he has no possibility to look at
the social in the soul life or at the mental in the social life
following a set pattern. He turns to the psychologists, asks
how the psychologists look today at the single individual
souls. Here they see in the individual soul the thoughts
associating, the feelings ascending, the will impulses
developing. Then he wants to apply this to the historical
events, wants to investigate how the thought of the one human
being works on the whole clan how the thoughts associate
externally, as, otherwise, in the individual psychology a
thought associates with the other. Thus, he wants to consider
history social-psychologically according to the model of
individual psychology.
There arises, as I have already indicated, a very noteworthy
contradiction. He wants to get away from the individual
interpretation of history and to get to the
social-psychological one; but he takes the means from the
consideration of the individual psychology. A strange
contradiction that he does not notice at all.
Something else: if one is engrossed with that which this modern
historian performs describing so clearly:
-
how a cultural age changes into the
other,
-
how the feelings of the human beings
become explosive at such transitions,
-
how there the thoughts associate
with each other and separate,
-
how they follow in rapid
succession,
-
how new feelings form,
-
how the will impulses work,
one
has the feeling that the man misses the trees for the forest. I
do not take stock in the saying that one misses the forest for
the trees. I would like to know how somebody wanted to do that
while he is in the forest and wanted to see the forest! One has
to go far away to see the forest. One has the strange feeling
that Lamprecht cannot exactly work out the differences of the
single periods. Briefly, one gets to the result that he is a
researcher who has gained a view of the historical development
for himself who, however, could not find the means to present
the question to himself: what is now, actually, this historical
development of humanity? Is that already history what one
attains from the documents, from the archives, or do we still
search anything quite different?
Here you have to start if you want to consider the historical
life and its riddles spiritual-scientifically. You have to put
the question to yourself: is the object of history already
found in the usual consciousness? Does one know already what
one wants to judge if one approaches history? To answer these
questions, however, I have to adduce something from spiritual
science that is attached to things, which I have said here in
former talks.
The
human soul life is within the change of being awake and
sleeping. However, the alternating states of sleeping and being
awake are normally considered one-sidedly, while one says, the
human being spends two thirds or also more of his life awake
and a third sleeping. However, the things are not so simple. It
is only obvious that the sleeping state continues into the
awake life that we are only partly awake in a certain sense
from awakening to falling asleep. We are in reality consciously
awake only with the percepts of the outside world and the
mental pictures that we form from these percepts. Compare only
how the feelings are experienced. Someone who gradually learns
to observe how feelings arise in the human soul, — I will
come back to this issue in the next talk on the Revelations
of the Unconscious and say something fundamental now only
—, learns to compare the emotional life, the affects and
passions with the dreams.
The
dreams put pictures before us that are not penetrated with
logic and moral impulses that we have only in the awake life.
The visions differ indeed from the feelings from the passions
and affects surging up and down, but there is something in
which both are similar concerning the soul: it is the degree of
consciousness in which we are given away to the visions. We
have the same degree of consciousness if we are given away to
our feelings, save that we accompany our feelings with mental
pictures at the same time. If we get an idea about a vision,
the light of the mental picture falls on the dream; then the
dream becomes completely conscious, then we integrate it
properly into the human life. We are doing this perpetually
with our emotional life. We integrate our feelings into life by
the mental pictures running parallel, but one experiences these
feelings are with similar intensity as the dreams, so that the
dreams continue in our wake day consciousness and become our
world of feelings. You can easily realise that, however, also
the deep, dreamless sleep continues in our awake life, namely
as our will impulses. We know in the usual awake consciousness
about these will impulses only if they are accompanied by
mental pictures. We probably imagine what we should do, but it
remains unaware to our usual day consciousness how the mental
picture changes into the will impulse and then into the action,
as we remain unaware in the deepest sleep. Only because we can
imagine our will impulses, we accompany these sleeping impulses
with the awake life.
Thus, the sleeping life continues perpetually in our awake day
life. Even if our feelings, our affects, our passions are only
dreamt by us, nevertheless, our emotional life is connected
with something objective spiritual-mental as with our own
spiritual-mental, with our mental pictures and percepts.
However, the connections of the contents of feelings and will
impulses with the objective spiritual are in the subconscious.
We oversleep this connection with the spiritual-mental, and
only that towers above the sea in which we are embedded this
way, which we experience by our mental pictures and percepts.
If you learn to behold in the spiritual world, you know:
indeed, with the usual consciousness you cannot perceive the
world in which our feelings submerge just with that part of our
soul, which remains unaware to our usual consciousness, but you
can it perceive with the beholding one. Since the soul can
develop pictures from the contact with this spiritual world by
the strengthened will or by the mental capacity strengthened by
the will impulses.
The
Imaginative cognition forms in it. It is the first level of
supersensible beholding by which you get to the real spiritual
world. This Imaginative cognition is the completely conscious
beholding in a spiritual reality, so that the Imaginations are
no imaginations, but reproductions of spiritual reality,
although the soul does not experience them denser than the
visions, save that you know that the visions have no reality
value that, however, the Imagination points to an objective
spiritual reality beyond us. You learn to recognise that with
which the world of human feelings is connected, which is only
dreamt for the usual consciousness; you learn to recognise it
in its reality with the Imaginative beholding of the world. In
the same way, you learn also to recognise that on the second
level of higher consciousness, with the Inspirative
consciousness in which the will impulses are embedded. You get
to know the spiritual world as far as the will impulses that
usually remain subconscious are also embedded in an objective
spiritual reality.
If
you have figured these things out and if you ask yourself for
the real object of the historical course, then you realise
what, actually, the historical development is. You do not
experience this as that development which is experienced in the
everyday life, while we get into contact with the object
personally. No, this historical development is something else
in which something strange is contained as it is contained in
that, which the human being experiences as a feeling, as a will
impulse. As the human being dreams his feelings, he dreams the
real stream of the historical development. This knowledge is
the stupefying result of that observation which turns away from
the human being to historical development, and it shows that we
cannot use these mental pictures, which control the outer
conscious life, to grasp history anyhow. Since that which you
experience in the everyday consciousness as a single human
being is experienced in the awake state. However, in this awake
day life history is not included at all. The human beings do
not consciously experience history, but they dream it. History
is the big dream of the development of humanity, and history
never enters into the usual consciousness.
You
may have an astute usual consciousness, you may be the most
significant naturalist with that reason which can arrange the
things according to cause and effect, and you may have that
attitude which is especially appropriate to look properly at
nature and to show her lawfulness. If you learn to recognise
the real stream of historical development, you say to yourself,
with any mental capacity that can understand nature, you cannot
look into the historical development. This is not experienced
in the usual consciousness like nature, but only on that level
of consciousness, which you have also in the dream. It will be
once for the interpretation of history one of the most
significant results if one gets on
-
that one has to find the object of
the interpretation of history first
-
that the stream of historical
development is not at all there as nature is there
-
that also that which is there as
nature, namely the facts which are registered in the
archives as documents which one normally already calls
history, are not at all history.
History is in reality only behind the facts; these facts emerge
only from the historical development and are not the historical
development.
Once Herman Grimm said to me, one could consider the historical
life only if one pursued the developing imagination of the
people. One can say that Herman Grimm was on the brink to doing
a discovery, but he did not want to make the transition to
spiritual science. Hence, it appeared to him to be the only
fertile to look not only at the outer events and to line up
them in such a way as the naturalist does it according to the
laws of causality but to look at them in such a way that he saw
through them really at the developing imagination of humanity.
This was an imperfect expression of that which he could have
recognised: the fact that the historical development also does
not take place in that which imagination experiences, but is
still much deeper in the subconsciousness in which the dreams
are woven. As well as the depths of the sea surge up in the
waves, the single events surge up in the course of history.
If
we apply our usual reason to the historical development, we
strangely meet the forces of decline only. Herman Grimm asked
himself once why the historian Gibbon
(Edward G., 1737-1794) portraying the first centuries of
Christianity describes the decay of the Roman Empire only, but
not the rise of Christianity. Grimm made a right aperçu,
however, did not get on the reason. The reason is that Gibbon,
although he is profound, applied that reason only to the
interpretation of history, which one applies, otherwise, to the
consideration of nature. There he could look only at the
decline, not at the rise since one can only dream the rise. In
the course of history that which is rising, growing, and
sprouting is connected vividly with that what is declining,
what is dying. That is why one can look with the usual reason
only at the dead in the course of history. What does you need
if you want to recognise the growing, the prospering element in
the historical development, that what furthers the human
being?
In
ancient times, one looked deeper in this respect, but just in
the ancient form. One did not tell history, one told myths and
legends. These myths and legends that should describe the
historical dreams of humanity were truer than the so-called
pragmatic history. However, we cannot go back in the
development of humanity to myths and legends, but we can do
something else. We can make up our mind to bring up that what
rests for the usual consciousness as dreams in the
subconscious, while we apply the Imaginative knowledge to the
historical development. With the historical development,
humanity and science will recognise that it cannot even reach
the object of consideration if it does not want to go over to
the spiritual-scientific consideration. Below the
consciousness, that remains which works in history, if one does
not bring up the dream into the consciousness. Then, however,
one has to bring up the dream in the supersensible
consciousness that can imagine the spiritual. Imaginative
cognition only will create history.
Then someone who can get to the heart of spiritual science and
gets involved with the struggle of a man like Lamprecht, will
realise that there a way is searched to a goal. However, where
is this goal? Why does Lamprecht try to adduce everything to
find history generally and, nevertheless, gets to nothing but
to the usual psychology, although he believes that one has to
apply social psychology? However, what the human being
experiences as a social being what becomes his history, he
dreams this, this also does not penetrate the individual
psychology. There one has to apply that new psychology which
spiritual science only can give. You find the demand with
Lamprecht, you find the answer of the riddle of historical
development in spiritual science. What will become, however,
from all that for a conception of history? You see that
Lamprecht does not get away from the intellectual consideration
of the consecutive events. He considers that what happens up to
the third, up to the eleventh centuries and so on even if he
considers it brilliantly. But he does not get on to judge the
events in such a way that he reaches that what the human being
only experiences as a dream.
One
can easily find proofs of that. I want to bring in one example
only where Lamprecht advances to the modern time. Among the
rest, he asks, which are the most significant cultural
phenomena in these modern times? Consider that Lamprecht held
the concerning talk in 1904! There he asks, which are the most
significant cultural-historical moments that appear as
achievements of humanity today? He wants to bring in the most
significant soul phenomena of the beginning twentieth century.
What does he bring in? The answer is very interesting, just for
a man who attaches so much significance to the soul. First, he
brings in the attempts to propagate unselfishness, an
altruistic life of humanity, various societies for ethical
civilisation that came especially from England and America to
Europe in those days, and secondly, he brings in the peace
movement as something especially outstanding. An approved
historian of the present says this. Is such a conception of
history on the right way, even if Lamprecht endeavours so much?
About at that time I held a talk here about similar ideas and
explained that the least of all typical ideas of the beginning
twentieth century are just these both movements: the movements
of ethical civilisation and especially the peace movement. At
that time, I summarised my talk saying: this is just the
typical that that time in which the peace movement appears
especially loud will be the same time in which the biggest
human wars will take place. However, a famous historian said
the one thing, a crazy representative of anthroposophy said the
other, and it goes without saying in the present to whom one
listens.
The
point is to recognise how one has to use the facts which one
called history up to now so that it points you to the deeper
currents of human development by this coherence between the
human soul and that only dreamt spirituality which flows along
as historical current. One can do this only if one replaces
Lamprecht's and all other conceptions of history with that
which I call symptomatic conception of history if one is aware
that one has to use everything that one can find out in the
archives, in the documents, briefly, with the usual conscious
reason that one evaluates and appreciates it, while one relates
it to something that is a symptom, an expression of it.
One
does not consider the great men of history, their appearances,
and actions, for their own sake if one wants to describe the
historical development of humanity but only as symptoms. One is
aware that one properly describes history if one is able to
connect the right symptom with the underlying spiritual current
of development. Symptomatic history will look quite different
from history, which runs in such a way, that one only strings
together the facts and tries to use individual psychology to
the explanation and analysis of these facts as Lamprecht does
it. Symptomatic history consists of the fact that one becomes
aware of this attitude which Goethe had that one can approach,
actually, a spiritual being only from all sides, that one can
get to know it only by its symptoms if one realises that that
at which one has looked as history up to now is only at the
surface and positions itself quite strangely in life like dream
contents.
Observe the dream contents, and you will realise that you often
dream something quite different from what is directly attached
to the most significant events of your day life. Nevertheless,
it is anyhow associated as memory with your life, but in a
much-concealed way, and it is associated with deeper forces of
life. There is a reason why just this or that which works in
the subconscious emerges symptomatically, while we do not dream
anything significant that seems to be significant in the awake
life, but maybe just something that appears to us as externally
unimportant.
Symptomatic historical research has to consider events that
control the situation for the outer reason as unimportant for
the true history and apparently unimportant events as
far-reaching symptoms. Only thereby, one will penetrate from
the outside to the inside of the historical life. One cannot
transfer the individual soul life to the historical development
in such an external way. Of course, I can do here no enclosing
interpretation of history to show how this symptomatic
consideration grasps the essential in the development of
humanity, but I can at least indicate something. I have said in
a former talk, if the spiritual researcher learns to behold in
the spiritual world and its development, then he notices that
the results, as one expects them, normally do not happen this
way. They happen as a rule different from one could expect them
after the judgement that one has gained in the sensory world. I
want to bring in an example:
One
could expect that the historical events run in such a way that
one could compare them to the childhood, youth, mature period,
and old age of the human being. Indeed, some historians were
under this illusion. These analogising considerations can be
rather witty but have nothing to do with reality. However,
something else appears. The result of which I have to inform
you here is attained really with the same seriousness with
which another scientific result is attained; I can state it,
however, only as a result.
Lamprecht tries to find periods of historical development for
the German people at first. I have already indicated: it is
owed to a right impression that he determines a transition from
an age to another around the turn of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. It is also very typical that he calls this
time the individualistic age. To spiritual-scientific research,
an important incision likewise appears around the turn of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, while one
spiritual-scientifically beholds in the current of the
historical development, it becomes obvious that one has to go
back further and has to disregard the borders of tribes or
peoples. One has to envisage the general historical development
of humanity. There the events combine for centuries, namely
from the fifteenth century A.D. until the seventh and eighth
centuries B.C. This age from the seventh century before the
Mystery of Golgotha to the fifteenth century after it has its
own character. This character changes from inner reasons in the
fifteenth century more than modern people believe. Lamprecht
recognises this, but he does not recognise the whole scope of
this fact. Others have already pointed out from different
viewpoints that one has to explain not for outer reasons, not
even because of the emergence of Renaissance et cetera, but
because spontaneously that significant reversal arises from
historical life, from the souls of the human beings, which
asserts itself in this time almost across the whole earth, but
particularly across Europe.
It
is remarkable that the most significant Germanist of the
present, Konrad Burdach (1859-1936), has pointed to that in
very nice essays. Burdach recognises from wholly
literary-historical investigations that from the soul
development of humanity something quite new has arisen in the
spiritual configuration, in the activities of the human
being.
Now
we live in the period from the fifteenth century on. Spiritual
science is able to go further back. Now there something very
strange appears. If you look at the impulses that control the
human beings since the fifteenth century historically, they are
different from those, which controlled the human beings in the
preceding period. However, one cannot say, the impulses of the
preceding period relate to those of the following period in
such a way as in the individual human life any life period
relates to the following one. This is not the case. Rather the
weird turns out that today the historical works in particular
in that in the individual human nature, which develops until
the twenties of life. The secret of our present development is
that we develop those forces by the historical conditions,
which belong to our individual life during the twenties. In the
preceding age, the historical life of humanity especially
grasped the thirties. One can show the matter also different.
One can say, today our souls are organised so that we develop
from childhood to the twenties, and that we carry that which we
have developed during the twenties into the rest of life, so
that the human being feels that his developmental period is
finished after the twenties. One can prove this with wholly
external things.
Scarcely anybody will state that somebody wants to learn
earnestly today during his thirties, in a time where already
the youngest people write essays in the newspapers. However,
one will experience very easily that people say, one reads
Goethe's Iphigenia, generally
the classical writers, in the youth, nobody does that in his
later life. One could still bring in other symptoms. However,
if one goes back to the preceding period, one finds that the
growing life lasted until the thirties. As paradox as it sounds
today, it is in such a way, and one will once have this as a
backed historical achievement. The Greek and Roman developed
unlike the modern human being develops, and history happened in
those days different because the human being remained longer
able of development. Spiritual science shows that one gets,
going back even further, to times where the human beings
remained capable of development until the forties. So that one
can say, one finds three consecutive periods in the historical
life of humanity: one behind the eighth pre-Christian century
in which we find human beings who feel young until the forties;
then the period of the Greek and Roman cultures comes when the
human beings remained young until the thirties; then the period
in which they are capable of development until the twenties. If
you reflect about that, you recognise that you cannot compare
the historical development of humanity possibly with the course
of the single individual life. In the individual life one grows
older and older, humanity as such develops in reverse
direction; it grows younger and younger, that is it remains
younger and younger; it carries youth less and less into the
later individual age.
Hence, the civilisation makes a younger and younger impression
in the consecutive periods; that means, the human being carries
that which he gains to himself in his youth more and more into
the old age. One could have believed that in the time before
the eighth pre-Christian century, if one had taken prejudices
as starting point, one just finds a younger humanity, then an
older one, and that we have now become much riper and older.
One has to answer the question first what in the course of
development, not in the single life, maturity and age do mean.
However, you can consider this developmental process of
humanity only in such a way as I have indicated now. You see,
something quite different results from what one normally
imagines as inner laws of cultural development if one looks
really symptomatically at the historical development.
I
want only to emphasise one thing in the end. One can also go
into the whole attitude of the human beings in two consecutive
periods. There you recognise that in the period which began
with the eighth pre-Christian century another attitude was
there than in the present period. If you consider the human
soul spiritual-scientifically, you do not have the same comfort
as the trivial psychology has it. Then you have to realise that
there are three quite different shadings of the whole soul,
and, hence, one distinguishes three soul members. I call one of
them the sentient soul. In it the desires and passions are
anchored, but it also connects the human being with the outer
nature by his senses; then one distinguishes the intellectual
or mind soul, and thirdly the consciousness soul in which the
real self-consciousness is anchored. While now in the course of
the historical development always other forces intervene in the
human soul, the following turns out: during the period which
lasts from the eighth pre-Christian up to the fifteenth
post-Christian centuries where the European civilisation is
coloured especially by the influence of the Greek-Latin culture
particularly the intellectual or mind soul is working.
Hence, everything faces us that the human being accomplishes in
the course of the historical development and in the outer life,
in the social and economic life, as if his mind worked
instinctively, as if he grasped the outer world with body and
mind equally strongly. The human body and mind are balanced in
this time, and the mind itself works instinctively. This
becomes different with the big reversal in the fifteenth
century. There the self-consciousness appears. There the
consciousness soul becomes especially strong, there the human
being does no longer have the mind instinctively, but he has to
reflect everywhere. There the individuality starts forming.
There he does no longer feel instinctively if he meets another
human being: you have to behave to him this or that way. There
he reflects, there he turns to the inside of his personality.
So that we can say, the whole historical structure since the
fifteenth century is characterised by the fact that the
consciousness soul works since that time, while before the more
instinctive intellectual or mind soul has worked. You cannot
understand the Roman Law, nothing that comes from antiquity
properly if you do not envisage this difference between the
instinctive mind and that what in modern times works in
intellectualistic way.
It
arises that that which Lamprecht searches up to the fifteenth
century is just the preparation of the consciousness soul in
the German people. The German folk soul carried that into the
coming period what flowed from the south, while it was just
minded to further the stream of historical development from the
intellectual or mind soul to the consciousness soul and its
various nuances.
If
one learns to recognise what really works there, then this
shines into the details. Then you can ask yourself again, what
is that, for example, what Wilson describes as the real nature
of the American people? This is another nuance of the
consciousness soul. The western nuance is experienced in its
archetypal phenomenon, in its original characteristic here in
Central Europe. Here the struggling egoity of the human being
is really experienced which relates to the consciousness soul
quite consciously which wants to penetrate with all forces of
personality that what wants to enter life wholly consciously.
This appears in another nuance in the American people where the
human soul is like possessed by itself. It is sometimes
disagreeable to face the truth. However, just the catastrophic
events of our time necessitate a certain objectivity. Into the
character of the historian Wilson, the light shines which
spiritual science can spread.
Only in principle I could show which direction science of
history has to take if it is fertilised by spiritual science in
the same sense as I tried to show it for natural sciences eight
days ago. Only if you consider history in such a way, you will
realise how the human being is associated with that dreamt
stream of the historical development that stirs him up. Then,
however, it will appear that that which becomes known
Imaginatively by the symptomatic interpretation of history is
internally related to the human being as a historical being.
Then you will realise that not the reason, but the
subconsciousness, the dreamlike emotional life is connected
with the historical development. Imagination will teach what
works in the mood and in the will impulses of the human beings,
while they are in the stream of the historical development.
Then something else will arise than the belief that history can
teach this or that. If it were able to teach as one normally
imagines, then one would be able to find a connection between
history and this usual reason. However, it does not exist. The
connection is there with that what works in the depths of the
soul, in the subconsciousness. The human being cannot learn,
indeed, for his usual reason from history, but from the true
history if he develops it more and more by the view of the
spirit in history, then the historical impulses settle down in
the feeling of the human being. If he faces a fact, if he is
called for action or for the right feeling towards a fact
within the social life, then his feeling will lead him
properly. Then not his reason, but his whole soul is taught by
such an interpretation of history.
With it let me summarise this consideration briefly. Goethe
suspected that history, if it is recognised truly, works in the
mood, in the feeling that it works if enthusiasm originates in
the right way if antipathies or sympathies originate for what
should be done or be omitted in a social situation. Briefly,
Goethe said out of a right notion of that which spiritual
science has to bring to light: the best that we can have from
history is the enthusiasm, which it excites. Certainly, we
cannot feel the intellectual judgement but the enthusiasm as a
fruit of history if we can recognise the real historical
development.
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