The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Modern Idealistic Worldviews

[ 1 ] In the second half of the century, three thinkers merged the scientific way of thinking with the idealistic traditions of the first half of the century to form three worldviews with distinct individual characteristics: Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), and Eduard von Hartmann (born 1842).

[ 2 ] If one wants to understand Lotze and Fechner, one must, in a sense, isolate oneself completely with them. One must stand aside with them from the stream of modern thought development and allow nothing else to reach one's ears from other contemporary views. For both of them also go their own way, almost stubbornly ignoring what is going on around them. There is something anachronistic about their opinions. And yet both of them started from the most powerful driving force of the time, natural science, and were themselves natural scientists. In his work on “Life and Vital Force” published in 1842 (in R. Wagner's “Handwörterbuch der Physiologie” [Concise Dictionary of Physiology]), Lotze decisively rejected the belief that living beings possess a special force, the life force, and defended the idea that the phenomena of life can only be explained by complex processes of the kind that also occur in inanimate nature. In this regard, he sided with progressive science, which sought to bridge the old divide between the inanimate and the animate. His works dealing with scientific matters are written from this perspective: his “General Pathology and Therapy as Mechanical Natural Sciences” (1842) and “General Physiology of Physical Life” (1851). In his “Elements of Psychophysics” (1860) and his “Preliminary Course in Aesthetics” (1876), Fechner produced works that embody a strictly scientific way of thinking, in fields that had almost without exception been dealt with in an idealistic manner before him. However, Lotze and Fechner felt a strong need to go beyond the scientific approach and construct an idealistic world of ideas. Lotze was driven to do so by the nature of his mind, which not only demanded that he think about the natural laws of the world, but also led him to seek life and innerity in all things and processes, as humans themselves feel it in their hearts. He wants to "constantly argue against ideas that want to know only one and lesser half of the world, only the unfolding of facts into new facts, of forms into new forms, but not the constant re-internalization of all this externality into that which alone has value and truth in the world, into bliss and despair, admiration and abhorrence, love and hate, to the joyful certainty and doubting longing, to all the nameless yearning and anxiety in which life passes, which alone deserves to be called life." Like so many others, Lotze feels that our image of nature becomes cold and sober if we do not bring into it ideas taken from the human soul (cf. above p. 34 [259]). What in Lotze is a consequence of his disposition appears in Fechner as the result of a richly developed imagination, which has the effect of always leading from a logical understanding of things to a poetic interpretation of them. As a scientific thinker, he cannot merely seek the conditions of human origin and the laws that cause humans to die after a certain period of time. For him, birth and death become events that lead his imagination to a life before birth and one after death. “Man,” Fechner explains in his “Little Book on Life after Death,” "lives on earth not once, but three times. His first stage of life is a constant sleep, the second an alternation between sleep and wakefulness. The third is eternal wakefulness. In the first stage, humans live alone in darkness; in the second, they live sociably and separately alongside and among others in a light that reflects the surface; in the third, their lives intertwine with those of other spirits to form a higher life in the highest spirit, and they see into the essence of finite things. - On the first stage, the body develops from the germ and creates its tools for the second; on the second, the spirit develops from the germ and creates its tools for the third; on the third, the divine germ that lies in every human spirit develops and already here points beyond humanity to an afterlife that is dark for us but clear as day for the spirit of the third stage, through intuition, faith, feeling, and the instinct of genius. - The transition from the first to the second stage of life is called birth; the transition from the second to the third is called death."

[ 3 ] Lotze has given an interpretation of world phenomena that corresponds to the needs of his mind in his work “Mikrokosmos” (1856-64) and in his writings “Three Books of Logic” (1874) and “Three Books of Metaphysics” (1879). His approach is to pursue the strictly natural laws of the world and then to arrange these laws in the sense of an ideal, harmonious, soulful order and effectiveness of the world's foundation. We see one thing affecting another, but the former could not affect the latter at all if there were not an original kinship and unity between the two. The second thing would have to remain indifferent to what the first accomplishes if it did not have the ability to arrange its own actions in accordance with what the first wants. A ball can only be set in motion by another ball that pushes it if it, so to speak, responds to the other with understanding, if it has the same understanding of motion as the first. The ability to move is something that is common to both spheres. All things and processes must have such a commonality. The fact that we perceive them as things and events that are separate from one another stems from the fact that, in our observation, we only get to know their outer side; if we could see inside them, we would see what does not separate them, but connects them to a great whole. There is only one being that we know not only from the outside, but also from the inside, that we not only look at, but can also look into. That is our own soul, the whole of our spiritual personality. But since all things must have something in common within themselves, they must also have in common with our soul that which constitutes its innermost core. We may therefore imagine the inner nature of things to be similar to the nature of our own soul. And the foundation of the world, which reigns as the common element of all things, can be thought of by us as nothing other than a comprehensive personality in the image of our own personality. The longing of the mind to grasp as reality the highest thing it is permitted to imagine can be satisfied or even considered by no other form of existence than that of personality. So convinced is it that living, self-possessed, and self-enjoying individuality is the irrefutable prerequisite and the only possible home of all that is good and all goods, so much so that it is filled with quiet contempt for all apparently lifeless existence, that we always find the nascent religion in its myth-forming beginnings preoccupied with transfiguring natural reality into spiritual reality; it has never felt the need to trace spiritual vitality back to blind reality as a firmer foundation." And Lotze expresses his own feelings toward the things of nature in these words: “I do not know the dead masses of which you speak; to me, all life and activity, and even rest and death, are only the dull, passing appearance of restless inner weaving.” And if the processes of nature, as they appear in observation, are only such a dull, passing appearance, then their deepest essence cannot be sought in the laws of nature as they appear in observation, but in the “restless weaving” of the overall personality that blesses them all, in whose goals and purposes they are to be found. Lotze therefore imagines that in all natural activity, a moral purpose set by a personality is expressed, toward which the world strives. The laws of nature are the outward expression of an all-pervading ethical lawfulness of the world. Lotze arrives at a worldview via a detour through natural science, which Ernst Haeckel says compares God's creation and governance of the world with the artistic creations of an ingenious technician and the government of a wise ruler. Lotze's views on the survival of the human soul after death are entirely consistent with this ethical interpretation of the world: "No other thought is available to us except the general idealistic conviction: everything that has been created and whose continuation is part of the meaning of the world will continue [...]; everything whose reality had its rightful place only in a temporary phase of the world's course will pass away. It hardly needs to be mentioned that this principle does not allow for any further application in human hands; we certainly do not know the merits that can earn one being the right to eternal existence, nor the shortcomings that deny it to others.“ (”Three Books of Metaphysics," $ 245) It is therefore merits, a moral trait of the soul, that can give it the right to continue to exist.

[ 4 ] In the pamphlet “On Life After Death,” Fechner discusses the relationship between humans and the world. "What does the anatomist see when he looks into the human brain? A tangle of white fibers whose meaning he cannot unravel. And what does it see within itself? A world of light, sounds, thoughts, memories, fantasies, feelings of love and hate. So imagine the relationship between what you, facing the world externally, see in it, and what it sees within itself, and do not demand that both the external and the internal be more similar to each other in the whole world than in you, who are only a part of it. And it is only because you are part of this world that you also see in yourself a part of what it sees within itself." Fechner imagines that the world spirit has the same relationship to world matter as the human spirit has to the human body. He now says to himself: Man speaks of himself when he speaks of his body; and he also speaks of himself when he speaks of his spirit. The anatomist who examines the tangle of brain fibers has before him the organ from which thoughts and fantasies once sprang. When the person whose brain the anatomist is examining was still alive, it was not the brain fibers and their physical activity that stood before his soul, but a world of ideas. What changes now when, instead of the human being looking into his soul, the anatomist looks into the brain, the physical organ of this soul? Is it not the same being, the same human being, who is being observed in both cases? The being, says Fechner, is the same, only the observer's point of view has changed. The anatomist sees from the outside what the human being previously saw from the inside. It is like looking at a circle once from the outside and once from the inside. In the first case, it appears raised, in the second hollow. Both times it is the same circle. So it is with human beings: when they look at themselves from the inside, they are spirit; when the natural scientist looks at them from the outside, they are body, matter. According to Fechner's way of thinking, there is no need to consider how body and spirit interact. For the two are not two different entities; they are one and the same. They only appear to be different when observed from different locations. Fechner sees in humans a body that is also spirit. From this point of view, Fechner sees the possibility of imagining the whole of nature as spiritual, animated. In themselves, humans are able to view the physical from within, that is, to recognize the inside directly as spiritual. Is it not obvious to think that everything physical, if it could be viewed from within, would appear as spiritual? We can only see plants from the outside. But isn't it possible that if they were viewed from the inside, they too would prove to be souls? This idea grew into a conviction in Fechner's imagination. Everything physical is also spiritual. The smallest material thing is animated. And when material parts build themselves into more perfect material bodies, this process is only visible from the outside; it corresponds to an inner process that would appear as a composition of individual souls into more perfect total souls, if one could observe it. If someone were able to view the physical machinery on our earth with the plants living on it, with the animals and humans romping about on it, from the inside, this whole would appear to them as the soul of the earth. And it would be the same with the entire solar system, indeed with the entire world. Seen from the outside, the universe is the physical cosmos; seen from the inside, it is the universal spirit, the most perfect personality, God.

[ 5 ] Anyone who wants to arrive at a worldview must go beyond the facts that present themselves to him without his intervention. There are widely differing views on what is achieved by going beyond the world of immediate perception in this way. In 1874, Kirchhoff expressed his view (cf. above p. 84 [318 ff.]) that even the most rigorous science can achieve nothing more than a complete and simple description of actual processes. The worldview movement that follows Haeckel's line of thought does not go that far. It harbors the conviction that through thoughtful observation of world phenomena, knowledge of their interrelationships can be gained that goes beyond mere description. However, it does not assign thinking the task of adding other facts to the facts of observation, but rather ideas through which the interrelationships of phenomena can be explained. Fechner takes a different point of view. He believes that "the great art of drawing conclusions about the hereafter from the here and now lies not in reasons we do not know, nor in assumptions we make, but in facts we know, in order to draw conclusions about the greater and higher facts of the hereafter and thereby to consolidate and support the practically required faith, which is dependent on higher points of view, from below, and to relate it to life in a living way“ (”Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode" [The Little Book on Life After Death], 4th ed., p. 69f.). In line with this opinion, Fechner not only seeks the connection between physical phenomena that can be observed and spiritual phenomena that can be observed; he also adds other phenomena to the observed phenomena of the soul: the earth spirit, the planetary spirit, and the world spirit.

[ 6 ] This inference from one series of facts to another series that is not given in an observation distinguishes Fechner from the scientific way of thinking associated with the names Darwin and Haeckel. However, where Fechner does not venture into such conclusions, in his investigation of the connection between external material influences on human beings and the corresponding spiritual processes in the human soul caused by these influences, Fechner stands entirely on the ground of the aforementioned natural scientists. It was he who created the scientific methods for this field. His “Elements of Psychophysics” (1860) is the fundamental work in this field. The basic law on which psychophysics is based is that the increase in sensation caused in humans by a growing external impression occurs at a slower rate than the increase in the strength of the impression. The greater the existing intensity of the stimulus, the less the sensation increases. Based on this idea, it is possible to obtain a ratio between the external stimulus (e.g., the physical intensity of light) and the sensation (e.g., the sensation of light). Following the path taken by Fechner has led to the development of psychophysics as a completely new science of the relationship between stimuli and sensations, i.e., between the physical and the mental. Wilhelm Wundt, who continued Fechner's work in this field, characterizes the founder of “psychophysics” in an excellent way: "Perhaps in none of his other scientific achievements does the rare combination of gifts that Fechner possessed stand out as brilliantly as in his psychophysical works. A work such as “Elements of Psychophysics” required familiarity with the principles of precise physical-mathematical methodology and, at the same time, a penchant for delving into the deepest problems of existence, a combination that only he possessed. And for this he needed that originality of thought which knew how to freely adapt traditional tools to his own needs and had no qualms about striking out on new and unfamiliar paths. The observations of E. H. Weber, admirable for their ingenious simplicity but nevertheless limited, and the isolated, often more accidental than planned, experiments and results of other physiologists formed the modest material from which he built a new science." Important insights into the interactions between body and soul were gained through the experimental method inspired by Fechner in this field. Wundt characterizes the new science in his “Lectures on the Human and Animal Soul” (1863): "In the following investigations, I will show that experimentation in psychology is the main means of leading us from the facts of consciousness to those processes that prepare conscious life in the dark background of the soul. Self-observation, like observation in general, provides us only with the composite phenomenon. It is only in the experiment that we strip the phenomenon of all the accidental circumstances to which it is bound in nature. Through the experiment, we artificially create the phenomenon from the conditions we have at our disposal. We change these conditions and thereby also change the phenomenon in a measurable way. Thus, it is always and everywhere the experiment that leads us to the laws of nature, because only in the experiment are we able to see both the causes and the effects at the same time." Undoubtedly, it is only in a border area of psychology that the experiment is fruitful, namely where conscious processes lead over into the no longer conscious, material background of the soul life. The actual phenomena of the soul can only be gained through purely spiritual observation. Nevertheless, the statement by E. Kraepelin, an outstanding psychophysicist, is entirely justified: “The young science ... will be able to maintain its independent place alongside the other branches of natural science, and in particular physiology.” (“Psychological Works,” edited by E. Kraepelin, vol. 1, issue 1, p. 4)

[ 7 ] When Eduard von Hartmann published his “Philosophy of the Unconscious” in 1868, he had in mind not so much a worldview that took into account the findings of modern natural science, but rather one that elevated the ideas of the idealistic systems of the first half of the century, which he considered inadequate in many respects, to a higher level, cleansing them of contradictions and developing them in all respects. He believed that the ideas of Hegel, Schelling, and Schopenhauer contained seeds of truth that only needed to be brought to maturity. Human beings cannot be content with observing facts if they want to understand the things and processes of the world. They must progress from facts to ideas. These ideas cannot be something that is arbitrarily added to the facts by thinking. There must be something in things and events that corresponds to them. This correspondence cannot be conscious ideas, for such ideas come about only through the material processes of the human brain. Without the brain, there is no consciousness. One must therefore imagine that the conscious ideas of the human mind correspond to an unconscious ideal in reality. Like Hegel, Hartmann also regards the idea as the reality in things that exists in them beyond what is merely perceptible, accessible to sensory observation. However, the mere content of ideas in things could never bring about a real event in them. The idea of a sphere cannot push the idea of another sphere. The idea of a table cannot make an impression on the human eye either. A real event requires a real force. To gain an understanding of such a force, Hartmann draws on Schopenhauer. Human beings find in their own souls a force through which they give reality to their own thoughts and decisions: the will. Just as the will expresses itself in the human soul, it presupposes the existence of the human organism. Through the organism, the will is a conscious one. If we want to conceive of a force in things, we can only imagine it as similar to the will, the only force immediately known to us. But again, we must disregard consciousness. Outside of us, therefore, there is an unconscious will in things, which gives ideas the possibility of becoming reality. The ideas and will of the world, when combined, form the unconscious basis of the world. Even though the world has a thoroughly logical structure due to its ideas, it owes its real existence to illogical, irrational will. Its content is rational; the fact that this content is a reality is due to irrationality. The reign of the irrational is expressed in the existence of pain, which torments all beings. Pain predominates in the world over pleasure. Eduard von Hartmann seeks to substantiate this fact, which can be explained philosophically by the illogical element of will in existence, through careful observations of the relationship between pleasure and displeasure in the world. Anyone who does not succumb to any illusions, but rather objectively observes the evils of the world, can come to no other conclusion than that displeasure is present to a far greater extent than pleasure. From this, however, it follows that non-existence is preferable to existence. But non-existence can only be achieved if the logical-rational idea destroys the will, existence. Hartmann therefore sees the world process as a gradual destruction of the irrational will by the rational world of ideas. The highest moral task of human beings must be to participate in the overcoming of the will. All cultural progress must ultimately lead to the final achievement of this overcoming. Human beings are therefore morally good when they participate in cultural progress, when they demand nothing for themselves but devote themselves selflessly to the great work of liberation from existence. They will undoubtedly do so when they realize that displeasure must always be greater than pleasure, and that happiness is therefore impossible. Only those who believe it to be possible can selfishly desire happiness. The pessimistic view that pain outweighs pleasure is the best remedy for selfishness. Only by losing themselves in the world process can individuals find salvation. True pessimists are led to act unselfishly. However, what humans consciously accomplish is only the unconscious that has been raised to consciousness. Conscious human cooperation in cultural progress corresponds to an unconscious overall process, which consists in the progressive liberation of the primordial being of the world from the will. The beginning of the world must also have been subservient to this goal. The primordial being had to create the world in order to gradually free itself with the help of the idea of the will. “Real existence is the incarnation of the deity, the world process is the passion story of the incarnate God, and at the same time the path to the redemption of the crucified in the flesh; morality, however, is the cooperation in shortening this path of suffering and redemption.” (Hartmann, “Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness,” 1879, p. 871) Hartmann developed his worldview in a series of comprehensive works and in a large number of monographs and essays. These writings contain intellectual treasures of outstanding importance. This is particularly the case because Hartmann knows how to refrain from his basic ideas when dealing with individual questions of science and life and to devote himself to an unbiased consideration of things. This is especially true of his “Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness,” in which he presents the various types of human moral teachings in a logical structure. He has thus provided a kind of natural history of the various moral standpoints, from the selfish pursuit of happiness to selfless devotion to the general world process through which the divine primordial being frees itself from the misery of existence. Since Hartmann places the idea of purpose at the center of his worldview, it is understandable that he regards the scientific way of thinking based on Darwinism as erroneous. Just as the idea as a whole works toward the goal of non-existence in the world, so too is the ideal content in the individual a purposeful one. Hartmann sees a purpose being realized in the development of the organism, and the struggle for existence with natural selection are only the handmaidens of purposeful ideas. (“Philosophy of the Unconscious,” 10th ed., vol. III, p. 403)

[ 8 ] From various sides, the intellectual life of the nineteenth century leads to a worldview of desolation. Richard Wahle declares with absolute certainty that thought is incapable of doing anything to solve “exuberant” questions of the highest order; and Eduard von Hartmann sees all cultural work as merely a detour to finally bring about complete redemption from existence as the ultimate goal. Against such currents of thought, a beautiful passage written by the German linguist Wilhelm Wackernagel in 1843 (in his book Über den Unterricht in der Muttersprache [On Teaching the Mother Tongue]) can be invoked. He believes that doubt cannot form the basis of a worldview; rather, it is an “insult” to the personality that wants to recognize something, and equally to the things that are to be recognized. “Recognition begins with trust.”

[ 9 ] If such trust is lacking, then a worldview can never be achieved. Strict proof stops at certain points of thought. If you want to prove something, you must always have certain prerequisites from which to prove it. If you demand logical proof for everything, you will end up in a bottomless pit. Individual truths relating to this or that thing or event can be proven; and you cannot trust them until they are proven. Those who demand scientific proof for truths become accustomed, through the procedure they rightly apply in the individual sciences, to demanding proof everywhere. In doing so, they do not take into account that there are basic facts that we experience directly, which justify themselves. Because they demand proof even for such facts, they lack the necessary devotion to them. They no longer hear what these facts express through themselves. This is the case with Richard Wahle. He seeks a scientific justification for thinking. He takes thinking as an ordinary occurrence that appears in our worldview like any other. How can we believe in and trust this mental event, which forms ideas that summarize things? He asks. In doing so, he only shows that he has approached thinking from the outside. If he were to engage with thinking, if he were to experience it within himself in its true form, he would no longer be able to ask his question. Gideon Spicker says: “We can never know for certain, either empirically or logically, that thinking is right in itself ... .” (“Lessing's Worldview,” 1883, p. 5) This judgment is also based on a skewed view of thinking. Only if one demands that our experience of thinking should be the same as our experience of other things can one make assertions such as those of Wahl and Spicker. But we live, weave, and exist in thinking. We experience thinking directly. We stand within it, not outside it, as is the case with other things. Anyone who wants to learn something about thinking need only look within themselves. Anyone who does not find what thinking is cannot be talked to about it. No scientific method can enlighten them about thinking, just as no scientific method can enlighten a blind person about color. Experiencing the power and scope of thinking within oneself is the basic prerequisite for any worldview. And if one experiences the power of thinking within oneself, one also has the confidence in it with which all knowledge begins. The same applies to the motives behind our actions. Individual impulses to do this or that can be justified on the basis of certain preconditions. When it comes to the highest impulses, justification ceases. They justify themselves. They arise within us and we follow them joyfully because we find their value and purpose in them. Anyone who goes beyond this and asks about a purpose, like Eduard von Hartmann, only shows that they are incapable of perceiving the immediate value and purpose. Anyone who takes no joy in existence because they are not moved by its immediacy cannot be dissuaded by any proof that existence is worthless. Like others with regard to thinking, they have no trust in existence.

[ 10 ] In his “Philosophy of Redemption” (1876), Philipp Mainländer (1841-1876) expressed his distrust of existence in a captivating way. If the sight of existence offers only worthlessness, then its destruction can be the only goal of the world. Humans can only see their task as participating in this destruction. Mainländer ended his life by suicide. The world has only one purpose left, which is that its destruction will also destroy God. Indeed, God created the world only to free himself from the torment of his own existence. “The world is the means to the end of non-existence, and indeed the world is the only possible means to that end. God realized that only through the becoming of a real world of multiplicity ... could he step out of being into non-existence” (“Phil. der Erlös.”, p. 325).

[ 11 ] In his powerful work on worldview, Atomistik des Willens (Atomistics of the Will), published after his death, the poet Robert Hamerling (1830-1889) opposed the view that arises from mistrust of the world. He rejects logical investigations into the value or worthlessness of existence and takes his starting point from an original experience. "The main thing is not whether people are right in wanting to live, all of them, with very few exceptions, at any price, regardless of whether they are doing well or badly. The main thing is that they want to, and this simply cannot be denied. And yet the doctrinaire pessimists do not take this decisive fact into account. In their scholarly discussions, they always weigh up the pleasures and displeasures that life in particular brings, weighing them sensibly against each other; but since pleasure and displeasure are matters of feeling, it is feeling and not reason that ultimately and decisively tips the balance between pleasure and displeasure. And this balance actually falls in favor of the pleasure of existence for all of humanity, indeed for everything that has life. That everything that lives wants to live, to live under all circumstances, to live at any price, that is the great fact, and in the face of this fact, all doctrinal talk is powerless." Hamerling does not entirely succeed in grasping thinking as a fundamental inner experience. But he strives toward this fundamental experience everywhere. He recognizes a major flaw in recent worldviews when he states: “The fact that the latest philosophy harps so much on the ‘I’ can be explained [...] by the fear of a soul, a ‘soul being’ or even a ‘soul entity.’” Rather, it can be explained by the fact that people, too accustomed to imagining everything in sensory terms, cannot bring themselves to view thinking in its non-sensory purity. Everyone involuntarily embodies thinking when they want to imagine it; they imagine it not as a thinking activity, but as a thing. Then they arrive at the hypothetical soul being, about which Haeckel so aptly says: “This hypothetical ‘spiritual world,’ which is supposed to be completely independent of the material world of the body, and on whose assumption the entire artificial edifice of the dualistic worldview rests, is merely a product of poetic imagination.” (“Welträtsel,” p. 105) Without being fully aware of it, Hamerling meaningfully points to what is important: “Emotional moments play into the thoughts of the ego.” “What the mind has not experienced, it is also incapable of thinking...” All higher worldviews depend on feeling thinking itself, on experiencing it. In this respect, modern thinking could learn a great deal from the medieval worldview that has been revived within Catholic theology, as expressed in particular in the ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). One must be able to disregard the fact that this worldview allowed itself to be completely taken in tow by ecclesiastical dogma; one must be able to focus solely on its world of ideas. These thinkers were truly able to move within the world of ideas without embodying this world in a grossly sensual form. And the Catholic thinkers who are striving today to renew this art of thought are well worth considering in this regard. What one of them, the Jesuit priest Joseph Kleutgen, says in his book Die Philosophie der Vorzeit (The Philosophy of Antiquity, Innsbruck, 1878) will always be valid: "The various teachings about our cognition, which we have just repeated, are based on two propositions: the first is that our reason recognizes not only the true, but also the truth of its cognition; the other that it begins to recognize through abstraction from the sensual, and therefore the intelligible in the sensual is its closest and actual object. For both propositions, the scholastics initially referred to experience and self-observation; but they also demonstrated the metaphysical reasons for both. They understood the ability of reason to recognize the truth of its cognition, and thereby to become certain of the true, from the nature of the mind as an immaterial substance whose activity takes place within itself, so that it becomes aware not only of its activity but also, through it, of its being, and can therefore make both the one and the other the object of its contemplation." (Phil. D. V., vol. 1, p. 861f.) One need not go along with the latter turn of phrase, but can remain with experience and self-observation. If, in Kleutgen's sense, one were to go beyond observation to an immaterial substance, one would be misled, like someone who was not satisfied with seeking the reason why the clock tells the time in the artful arrangement of its parts, but who, in addition to the individual metals, sought a special “immaterial substance” that moved the hands forward.

[ 12 ] If one wants to get to know the individual parts of the clock – their material nature – one observes them with the senses. If one wants to get to know the mechanism of the clock, one must rise from sensory observation to ideas (thoughts). But one cannot demand that these ideas correspond to something of a material nature. Haeckel says: “In my opinion, what we call the soul is in truth a natural phenomenon; I therefore regard psychology as a branch of natural science.” Just as we observe the arrangement and functioning of the parts of a clock when we want to understand its ability to tell the time, so we observe the physical effects that, through their organization, constitute the phenomena of the soul. But just as we do not proceed from the clock to a clock-being that moves the hands forward, so we cannot do this with soul phenomena either. No one can find a “being” of thought who does not see or experience this ‘being’ in thought itself (cf. my “Philosophy of Freedom,” Berlin 1894).

[ 13 ] When Wilhelm Wundt (born 1832) expresses the opinion that a worldview is only possible if thinking progresses from the given to the non-given conditions of existence, or that reason has the task of supplementing experience with ideas that encompass all experience and yet do not belong to any experience (“System of Philosophy,” 1889, p. 179ff.), he is living in the bias that runs through many currents of modern idea development. He feels compelled to progress to ideas, but he is not satisfied with the ideal existence of these ideas. They seem unreal to him because they are not real like other things of experience. If Wundt understood himself, he would have to admit that, from his point of view, only the parts of the clock and their mutual interaction belong to experience, but that the person who looks at the clock to tell the time adds something to the clock. Otto Willmann beautifully shows in his “Geschichte des Idealismus” (Braunschweig, 1895-1897) how the newer worldview has gradually lost the ability to recognize the ideal factors of existence in their very essence. However, since he stands on a Christian-positive standpoint, he too contaminates the pure observation of the world of ideas by constantly embodying it. Nevertheless, his book proves extremely fruitful for understanding the development of idealistic views, because one can completely disregard his dogmatic thoughts. All his statements can be reinterpreted in the spirit of modern science in order to be useful.