Views of the world and of life from ancient times to the present

 

Rudolf Steiner [a written summary of a series of 10 lectures given at the Worker Education School in Berlin in 1901]:

1. The Greek Worldviews

Aristotle, whom the great medieval poet Dante called the master of those who know, spoke the following beautiful words about the fact that man cannot stop at what his senses tell him about nature and about himself:

"All men naturally desire knowledge; a sign of this is their love for the senses, which they love for their own sake, even apart from their usefulness; especially those of the face. Not only for the sake of action, but also without such intention, they prefer sight, so to speak, to everything else, because this sense brings us the most knowledge of all and reveals many qualities of things. All animals live in their mental images and have but little experience; the human race, on the other hand, lives also in art and in rational thought."

And Hegel especially emphasized the seemingly self-evident, yet highly important sentence:

"Thinking first makes the soul, with which the animal is also endowed, a spirit."

Man cannot but submit to himself numerous questions about the world and about himself. The answers that he gives himself, through his thinking, to these questions, make up the "world and life views".

Angelus Silesius, a German thinker of the 17th century, aptly said that the rose blossoms simply because it blossoms; it does not ask why it blossoms. Man cannot live like that. He must ask himself what reason the world and he himself have. In the first place, man naturally puts his thinking at the service of practical life. He makes tools, machines and devices with the help of thinking, by which he can satisfy his needs in a more perfect way than is possible for an animal. But in the second place he wants to achieve something by his thinking which has nothing to do with practical utility; he wants to enlighten himself about things, he wants to recognize how the facts which he encounters in life are connected. The first mental images that man forms about the connection of things are the religious ones. He thinks to himself that the events in nature are caused by beings similar to himself. He just imagines these beings to be more powerful than himself. Man creates gods in his own image. As he works, so he imagines the world as a work of the gods. Gradually, however, scientific views grow out of the religious ones. Man learns to observe nature and its forces. He can no longer be content with imagining these forces as if they were similar to human forces. He no longer creates a God in his own image, but he forms thoughts about the connection of the world phenomena according to scientific observation provides him.

Therefore a thinking world view arises within the occidental culture in the time in which the natural science has come to a certain height. Ancient Greeks were natural the first scientists. They handed down to us a world view which no longer depended on religious mental images. Thales, the first great thinker, of whom Aristotle tells us, was an important natural scientist for his time. He had already been able to predict the solar eclipse that occurred on May 28, 585 B.C., when the Median and Lydian armies were facing each other at the Halys River. Also his contemporary Anaximander was a great astronomer.

If in our time the cultivation of the "world and life view", which is taught as philosophy at our universities, does not enjoy any special reputation, but is rather considered as a one-sided and for life dispensable school scholarship, then this stems from the fact that the philosophers of the present time have mostly lost the right connection with the individual sciences. Whoever wants to build up a "world and life view" cannot stop at a single science. He must assimilate all the knowledge of his time, everything we know about the development of nature and culture. All other sciences are tools for the philosopher. Today, however, it is difficult to form a comprehensive "world and life view" in view of the great amount of knowledge that has gradually become available. Thus it happens that the teachers of the world- and life-view often deal with questions which do not arise from a true need of man, but which are presented to them by their one-sided thinking adhering to certain traditions.

A true "world- and life-view" must deal with questions which cannot be answered in any single science. For every single science has to do with a certain area of nature or of human life. The "world- and life-view" must look for a coherence of thoughts in what all individual sciences offer us in terms of knowledge. The individual science can also not be everyone's thing. On the other hand, the "world and life view" is of interest to all people. Not everyone can develop it, because not everyone can look around in all sciences. But as it requires innumerable knowledge to bring a table into being, which not everyone who needs a table can acquire, so it requires also for the development of a "world view" a comprehensive equipment, which cannot be available to everyone. Anyone can use a table, but only those who have learned to do so can make one. Everybody is interested in world- and life-view; only those can and should build up and teach it, who can get the tools for it from all single sciences. The sciences are only the tools of the world and life views.

Kant posed the basic questions that generate in man the need for a worldview as follows: "What can I know? What shall I do? What may I hope?" Goethe expressed the matter more briefly and significantly by saying, "If I know my relation to myself and to the external world, I call it truth." In fact, man wants to achieve nothing else through a world and life view than an insight into the meaning of his own existence and how he is related to the nature that is outside of him.

The oldest Greek thinkers, so Aristotle tells us, considered the material beginnings to be the sole ones of all. That, from which all things consist, from which everything originates and into which everything finally passes away again: they thought about that. In the moist earth the seeds of the living beings develop. Thales was an islander. He saw how infinite life develops in the sea. The thought was obvious that the water is the original material from which all things develop. Thus it came that the first Greek thinker declared water to be the basis of all things. From water, he said, everything originates, and in water everything changes. Anaximander came one step further. He no longer trusted the senses as much as Thales. One can see the water. But everything what one can see changes into other. This is how Anaximander thought. The water can become solid by freezing; it can become vaporous by evaporation. Under steam and air the ancients thought the same. Likewise they called everything solid earth. The solid water, the earth, can change itself into liquid, this into air, said itself accordingly Anaximander, No certain substance is therefore something lasting. Therefore he did not look for the original cause in a certain substance, but in the indeterminate one. Anaximenes then again assumed a certain original substance, namely the air. He says: "As our soul, which is air, holds us together, so breath and air embrace the whole world."

A much higher stage of the world view stepped Heraclitus. Above all, the eternal change of all things imposed itself on him. Nothing remains, everything changes. Only our senses deceive us when they tell us that something remains. I cannot get into the same river twice. Because only apparently it is the same river, into which I step the second time. The water, of which the river consists, has become a completely different one. And so it is with all things. The tree of today is not the tree of yesterday. Other juices have moved into it; much of what was still in it yesterday has been excreted in the meantime. In the saying: "Everything flows", Heraclitus therefore sums up his conviction. Therefore the most restless element, the fire, becomes for him the image of all coming into being and passing away.

Empedocles of Agrigento started from completely different points of view. His predecessors had searched for a single original substance. He let four primeval substances be considered as synonymous next to each other. Earth, water, air, fire exist from the beginning next to each other. None of these substances can change into the other. They can mix themselves only in the most different way. And by their mixture all the different things in the nature originate. Empedocles therefore no longer believes that a thing really comes into being and perishes. He believes that something appears to come into being when, for example, water and fire mix; and he believes that the same thing appears to pass away again when water and fire separate again. Aristotle tells us of Empedocles: "His four beginnings, according to him, are always to persist, to be without coming into being, and to combine in various proportions into one object or from it." Empedocles assumes forces that prevail between his four substances. Two or more substances combine when there is an attractive force between them; they separate when there is a repulsive force between them. These attractive and repulsive forces can, according to the conviction of Empedocles, not only build up the inanimate nature from the four substances, but also the whole realm of the living. He imagines that naturally, through the forces, animal and vegetable bodies come into being. And because there is no intelligible intelligence guiding this process, there is a colorful mixture of functional and non-functional living forms. Only the functional ones can exist; the non-functional ones must perish of their own accord. This thought of Empedocles is already similar to that of Darwin of the "struggle for existence". Darwin also imagines that in nature purposeful and inexpedient arise and the world appears as a purposeful one only because in the "struggle for existence" the inexpedient is continuously defeated, thus must perish.

Anaxagoras, the contemporary of Empedocles, did not believe, like the latter, to be able to explain the purposeful order of the world from the mere working of mechanical natural forces. He assumed that a spiritual being, a general world understanding gives to the things their existence and their order. He imagined that everything consisted of smallest parts, the so-called homeomerisms, which all have different properties among themselves. The general world understanding puts these original parts together that they result in purposeful things and, in the whole, a harmoniously arranged world building. Because he put a general world understanding in the place of the old people gods, Anaxagoras was accused of denial of God in Athens and had to flee to Lampsakus. In Athens, where he had gone from Klazomenae, he was in relations with Pericles, Euripides and Themistocles.

The smallest parts, the homoeomeries, or seeds of all things, which Anaxagoras assumed, he imagined to be quite different from each other. In place of these smallest parts Democritus put such, which differed by nothing else than by size, shape, position and arrangement in space. In all other qualities the smallest components of the things, the atoms, should be equal to each other. What really happens in nature, according to this atomistic conviction, can be nothing else than that the position and arrangement of the smallest parts of the body change. If a body changes its color, then in reality the arrangement of its atoms has changed. Except the empty space and the atoms filling it, there is nothing in the world. There is no power which gives the atoms their order. These are in perpetual motion. Some move slower, others faster. The faster ones must come into contact with the slower ones. Through this, bodies clump together. So nothing comes into being by a mind in the world or by a general reason, but by blind natural necessity, which can also be called coincidence. It is explicable from these convictions that the followers of Democritus led a violent fight against the old people-gods. They were decided deniers of God or atheists. One must see in them the forerunners of the materialistic world views of later centuries.

Parmenides and his followers tried to approach the world phenomena from a completely different side than the thinkers mentioned so far. They assumed that our senses cannot provide us with a faithful, true picture of the world. Heraclitus drew the conclusion from the fact that everything changes eternally, that there is nothing permanent, but that the eternal flow of all things corresponds to the true being. Parmenides said exactly the other way round: because in the outside world everything changes, because here eternally everything comes into being and passes away, therefore we cannot win the true, the lasting by observation of the outside world. We have to understand what this outer world presents to us as appearance and can only gain the eternal, the lasting through thinking itself. The outer world is a deception of the senses, a dream, which is something completely different from what the senses make us believe. What this dream really is, what remains eternally the same, we cannot gain by observing the outside world, that reveals itself to us through thinking. In the outside world there is multiplicity and diversity; in thinking the Eternal-One reveals itself to us, which does not change, which always remains the same. Thus Parmenides expresses himself in his teaching poem "On Nature". So we are dealing with a world view which does not want to get the truth from the things themselves, but which tries to spin the original reason of the world out of thinking. If one wants to make clear from which basic feeling such a world view originates, then one must keep in mind that often thinking must indeed interpret, explain the perceptions of the senses in the right way, in order to come to a satisfying thought. If we hold a stick in the water, it appears broken to the eye. Thought must look for the reasons why the stick appears broken. So we get a satisfactory mental image of this appearance only by our thinking explaining the perception. If we look at the starry sky only with our senses, we cannot form any other mental image than the one that the earth stands in the center of the world and that the sun, the moon and all the stars move around it. Only by thinking we gain another mental image. In this case even the thinking gives us a completely different picture than the sensual perception. So one can say that the senses deceive us in a certain respect. But the world view of Parmenides and his followers is a one-sided exaggeration of this fact. For as perception supplies us with certain appearances which deceive us, so it supplies us again with other facts by which we can correct the deception. Copernicus did not come to his view of the movement of the celestial bodies by spinning it out of mere thinking, but by bringing one perception into harmony with others.

In contrast to the view of Parmenides stands another older world view. It does not proceed to regard the connections in the external world as a deception, but it wants to lead exactly by a deeper observation of this external world to the realization that in the world everything is based on a great harmony, that in all things measure and number exist. This view is that of the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras lived in the 6th century B.C. Aristotle tells of the Pythagoreans that they turned to mathematics at the same time as the thinkers mentioned above and even before them. "They first continued this and, being completely absorbed in it, they considered the beginnings in it also to be the beginnings of all things. Since in mathematics the numbers are by nature the first, and since they believed to see in the numbers much similarity with the things and the becoming, and indeed in the numbers more than in the fire, the earth and the water, so they regarded one property of the numbers as the justice, another as the soul and the spirit, again another as the time, and so on for all the rest. They further found in the numbers the properties and the relations of harmony, and thus everything else seemed to be, according to its whole nature, the image of the numbers, and the numbers the first in nature." Whoever knows how to appreciate the importance which measure and number have in nature, will not find it surprising that such a world view as the Pythagorean one could arise. If a string of certain length is struck, a certain tone is produced. If the string is shortened in certain numerical ratios, then always other tones are produced. One can express the pitch by numerical ratios. Physics also expresses colors in numerical ratios. When two bodies combine to form a substance, this always happens in such a way that the weights of one body, which can be expressed by numbers, combine with those of the other body. Such examples of which role number and measure play in nature can be cited innumerable. The Pythagorean worldview expresses this fact in a one-sided way by saying: Measure and number are the origin of all things.

In all world views discussed so far a question slumbers. It is nowhere clearly expressed in them, because the thinkers obviously thought that it answers itself with the other questions they asked. It is the question of the relation of man to the world. If Thales thinks all things originated from water, he also thinks man originated from the same source. Heraclitus was of the opinion that man swims along with all others in the eternal river of things; and Anaxagoras thought of man as being built up by his general understanding of the world from his original particles, just as the atomists imagined that chance had also put man together from the atoms. In Empedocles something of the question appears first: What is the relation between man and the rest of nature? How can he recognize the things? How is it possible for him to make mental images of that what is nevertheless outside of him? Empedocles gave the answer: Like can be recognized only by like. - Because man consists of the same substances and forces as the rest of nature, therefore he can also recognize them.

In a completely different way a number of thinkers tackled this question, who are usually unrecognized. They are the Sophists, whose most important personality is Protagoras of Abdera. They are usually considered as people who played a superficial game with thinking, a vain disputation, and who lacked all seriousness for the investigation of truth. The way in which the reactionary comedy poet Aristophanes ridiculed them in his dramas contributed a great deal to the opinion that was formed about the Sophists. It may be that individual sophists exaggerated the art of disputation, it may also be that among them there were some who were only concerned with splitting hairs and with a foppish appearance: but this does not apply to the most important of them, for there were men among them who distinguished themselves by a comprehensive knowledge in the most diverse fields. Of Protagoras this must be particularly emphasized, but also of Gorgias we know that he was an outstanding politician, and of Prodicus his pupil Socrates himself boasts that he was an excellent scholar, who was particularly concerned with the ennoblement of language among his pupils.

Protagoras expresses his basic view in the sentence: "Man is the measure of all things, of the existing that they are, of the non-existing that they are not. What can this sentence mean? One can say like Parmenides: our senses deceive us. And one could go even further than this and say: perhaps our thinking also deceives us. Protagoras would answer: what is it to a man whether the world is different from him than he perceives and thinks it. Does he then imagine the world for someone else and not for himself? May it be for another being as always: he has not to worry about it. His mental images should serve only him; he should find his way in the world with their help. Man cannot want any other mental images of the world than those that serve him. Whatever is in the world: if man does not perceive it, he cannot care about it. For him there is what he perceives; and it is not there for him what he does not perceive. But this means: man measures things with the measure that his senses and his reason give him. Protagoras gives man a firm position and security in the world through his view. He frees him from innumerable anxious questions, which he raises only because he does not dare to judge things by himself.

One may say that through sophistry man is moved into the center of the world view. The fact that this happened at the time of Protagoras is connected with the development of the public conditions in Greece. The social structure of the Greek state associations had loosened. This found its most significant expression in the Peloponnesian Wars, 431-404 BC. Previously, the individual was firmly enclosed in the social context; the community and tradition gave him the standard for all his actions and thoughts. The individual personality had value and meaning only as a member of a whole. Under such conditions it would have been impossible to ask the question: What is the individual worth? The Sophistik is a tremendous progress after the Greek Enlightenment to. Man could now think of arranging his life according to his reason. The sophists went around the country as teachers of virtue. If one wants to teach virtue, one must be convinced that the traditional moral views are not decisive, but that man can recognize virtue through his own reflection.

Socrates also lived in such mental images of virtue. He must be regarded as a disciple of Sophism. Little is known about him. The reports about what he taught are doubtful. What is clear, however, is that he was primarily a teacher of virtue, like the Sophists. And it is also certain that he was ravishing in the way he taught. His teaching consisted in the fact that in conversation he sought to draw out of the listener himself what he recognized as the right thing to do. The expression "spiritual midwifery" is well known in relation to his teachings. He did not want to bring anything into the mind of the student from outside. He was of the opinion that the truth was located in every human being and that one only had to provide help so that this truth would come to light. If we consider this, we can see that Socrates helped reason to its highest right in every single human being. He always brought the student to the point where he could form the right concept of a thing. He started from the experiences of everyday life. One can consider, for example, what virtue is for the craftsman, what virtue is for the merchant, what virtue is for the scholar. One will find that all these different kinds of virtuous life have something in common. This common feature is precisely the concept of virtue. If one proceeds with one's thinking in this way, one follows the so-called inductive procedure. One collects the individual experiences in order to obtain a concept of a thing. When you have this concept, you can define the thing. One has the definition of the thing. A mammal is a living thing with a spine that gives birth to living young. This is the definition of the mammal. It gives the characteristic - giving birth to living young - which is common to all mammals. Thus Socrates acted as a teacher of sharp, clear thinking. This is his great merit. - The Roman orator Cicero said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. By this is meant that he made his observations especially about man himself. How man should live, that was above all close to his heart. That is why we see in Greece that those who strive for a world view always ask what moral goals man should set for himself.

This is immediately apparent in the next successors of Socrates. The Cynics, whose most important personality is Diogenes of Sinope, deal with the question of a natural life. How should man live so that his life does not contradict what nature has placed in him in terms of dispositions and abilities? The Cynics wanted to remove everything artificial and unnatural from life. That above all the greatest simplicity appeared to them as the best, is explicable. Natural is what is a common need of all people. The proletarian came into his own in this conception of life. One can therefore imagine that the so-called higher classes did not like this philosophy very much. What the Cynics demanded did not agree with the artificially created needs. While originally the name Cynics came only from the educational institution - Kynosarges - where the Cynics gave lessons, later it got a contemptuous connotation. Besides the Cynics, the Cyrenaics and the Megarics were active. They, too, were primarily concerned with practical life. The Cyrenaics sought to help lust to its rights. Pleasure corresponds to the nature of man. Virtue cannot consist in eradicating lust within oneself, but in not making oneself a slave to lust. He who strives for pleasure, but always in such a way that he remains master of his pleasures, is virtuous. Only he who becomes the slave of his passions is virtuous.

The Megarics held on to Socrates' statement that virtue is teachable, that therefore the perfection of thought must also make one more virtuous. The most important representative of the megaric doctrine is Euclides. To him the good was an outflow of the highest wisdom. Therefore, he was primarily concerned with the attainment of wisdom. And from this estimation of wisdom must have arisen to him the thought that wisdom itself is the original source of the world. If - so he thought - the human being rises by his thinking to concepts, he rises at the same time to the origins of the things. With Euclid the world view takes on a decidedly idealistic coloration. One must imagine the mental image of Euclid like this: There are many lions. The substances of which these consist do not remain together. The single lion arises and passes away. It takes up substances from the outside world and gives them back to it. That what I perceive with the senses, that is the material. What is sensually perceptible at the things, arises therefore and passes away. Nevertheless, a lion which has lived a hundred years ago has something in common with a lion which lives today. It cannot be the substances. It can be only the concept, the idea of the lion which I grasp by my thinking. The lion of today and the lion of a hundred years ago are built according to the same idea. The sensual passes away; the idea remains. The ideas embody themselves in the sense world always anew.

A pupil of Euclides was Plato. He made his teacher's mental image of the eternity of the ideas his basic conviction. The sense world has only a subordinate value for him. The true things are the ideas. He who looks merely at the things of the sense world has only a simulacrum, a mirage of the true world. Plato's conviction is sharply expressed in the following words: The things of this world, which we perceive with the senses, have no true being; they do not remain. One can just as well call their whole being a non-being. Consequently, he who strives for the true cannot be content with the things of the sense world. For the true can only come from where the abiding is. If one limits oneself to the sensual perception, one resembles a man who sits bound in a dark cave, so that he cannot even turn his head, and who sees nothing but, by the light of a lamp burning behind him, the shadow images of the things behind him and also his own shadow. The ideas are to be compared with the real, true things, and the shadows with the things of the sense world. Even of himself, he who confines himself to the sense world recognizes only a shadow. The tree that I see, the scent of flowers that I breathe: they are only shadows. Only when I raise myself by my thinking to the idea of the tree, I have that which is truly lasting and not a transient mirage of the tree.

One must now raise the question: how does Plato think of the relation of his world of ideas to the conceptions of God of the Greeks? This relation can by no means be determined with perfect clarity from Plato's writings. He repeatedly speaks of extra-worldly gods. But one can be of the opinion that he wanted to lean with such sayings merely on the Greek folk religion; and one will not err if one understands his designations of gods only as figurative clarifications. What Plato himself conceives as deity, that is a first moving cause of the world. One must imagine, in the sense of Plato, that the world consists of the ideas and the prime matter. The ideas embody themselves in the prime matter continuously. And the impetus for this embodiment is given by God, as the primordial cause of all movement. God is for Plato at the same time the good. This gives the world a great unified purpose. The good moves all being and happening. The highest world laws thus represent a moral world order.

Plato wrote down his worldview in conversational form. His form of representation formed an object of admiration within the occidental culture development in the whole subsequent time. - Plato came from a noble family in Athens. From reports we know that he was a head inclined to rapture. He became the most faithful and understanding student of Socrates, attached to the master with unconditional veneration. After the execution of his teacher he went to Megara to Euclides. Later he undertook great journeys to Cyrene, Egypt, Great Greece - i.e. southern Italy - and Sicily. In 389 B.C. he returned to Athens. However, he made a second and third trip to Sicily. After returning from his first Sicilian journey, he founded his school in Athens, from which many of the important men of that time emerged. In Plato's writings one can observe a gradual change of outlook. He adopts mental images that he finds in others. In his first writings he stands entirely on the standpoint he formed as a student of Socrates. Later, Euclides had a strong influence on him, and during his stay in Sicily, he became acquainted with the Pythagoreans. In Egypt, he appropriated various Oriental thoughts. Thus it comes that his world view does not appear in his writings in such a way that it is like from a cast. He later incorporates mental images that he finds into his original views. We may count among these his doctrine of transmigration of souls. The soul already exists before the body. Yes, its embodiment, that is, its connection with matter, is regarded as a kind of punishment which it has to suffer for a guilt contracted in the pre-worldly being. But the soul embodies itself not only once, but repeatedly. Plato brings this view together with the general justice of the world. If everything were to end with one life, the good would be at a disadvantage compared to the bad. Rather, the evil committed by the soul in one life must be atoned for in another. Only when all guilt has found its expiation in the different lives, the soul returns to the realm of ideas from which it originated.

In its connection with the body, the soul of man does not form a unity. It breaks down into three partial souls. The lowest soul is that of the sensual life; it has to worry about the nourishing and reproduction instinct. Plato calls the middle soul the willpower in man. Personal courage, bravery is based on it. And the highest soul is the purely spiritual one. It has to take care of the highest knowledge. It is native to the realm of ideas. It is the real immortal part of the human soul. Plato relates his immortality thoughts to the mental image of Socrates that teaching consists only in a kind of midwifery. If this is so, then all the thoughts which are awakened in man must already lie in him. They lie in him, because he had them also already before his birth, since also the soul already existed. So he remembers in life only those thoughts which were already inherent in him before his birth.

With Plato's soul doctrine his view of the state is connected again. Also the state is the embodiment of an idea. And it is such an embodiment in the image of human nature, if it is perfect. The individual soul forces are represented in the state by the different estates. The highest soul is represented by the rulers, the middle soul by the guards, who are there for the defense, and the lowest soul by the craftsmen. The Platonic state is a communist state, but with a strictly aristocratic division of the estates. For the two upper estates Plato recommends marriage and possessing no property. Monastic community and communism of goods should prevail. The entire education of youth, with the exception of the first physical care of children by the family, should be the task of the state.

Plato's most important student is Aristotle of Stagira in Thrace. He became Plato's pupil at the age of eighteen. But he was a student who soon went his own way. In 343, Aristotle became the tutor of Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedonia. When Alexander undertook his Asian conquests, Aristotle went back to Athens and opened a school there.

The relation of Aristotle's worldview to that of Plato can be illustrated by the following comparison. Plato's ideas are quite foreign to the matter in which they are embodied. They are like the idea of the work of art, which lives in the head of the artist and which he forms into his material. This material, the marble of a statue, is something completely foreign to the artist's idea. Aristotle does not think of the relationship of ideas to matter in this way. For him the idea lies in the matter itself. It is as if a work of art did not receive its idea imprinted by the artist, but as if it gave itself its form by a force inherent in the material. Aristotle calls the ideas inherent in the material the forms of things. Thus, in the sense of Aristotle, there is no idea of the lion, for example, separate from the substance. This idea lies in the substance itself. There is, according to Aristotle, no matter without form and no form without matter. A living being develops from the germ in the mother's womb up to its formed shape, because the form is active in the living substance and works like a force innate to it. In the first development of a living being this power or form is already present; only it is not yet externally visible; it is, as it were, still dormant. But it works itself out so that the substance takes on the form which already lies in it as a dormant force in the beginning. In the beginning of things there was only external formless matter. The power or the substance still slumbered completely in it. There was a chaos with an immeasurable power sleeping in it. In order to awaken this force, so that the chaos formed itself to the manifold world of the things, a first impulse was necessary. Therefore Aristotle assumes a first mover of the world, a divine world cause.

If the idea or, as Aristotle expresses himself, the form lies in every thing itself, then one cannot, as Plato thinks, regard things as mere mirages and shadows and raise oneself with one's thinking into a completely different world, if one wants to attain the true, but rather one must turn precisely to the sensuous things themselves and bring to light the essence lying in them. Thus, thinking observation itself gives enlightenment about the world. Because Aristotle was convinced of this, he turned his attention above all to observation. He became thereby a pioneer of the sciences. He cultivated the individual natural sciences in as comprehensive a way as was at all possible for his time. He is the acknowledged "father of natural history". From him, for example, there are fine and spiritual studies on the development of living beings from the germinal state on. Such investigations were connected with his world view thoughts in the most natural way. He had to be of the opinion that, for example, in the egg the whole living being is already present, only not yet in an outwardly visible way. He says to himself: if a living being arises from the egg, then it must be this living being itself, which works its way into existence in the egg. If we look at an egg, it basically has a double essence. First, it is as it appears to our eyes. But it still has an invisible essence, which will appear only later, when it will be a formed bird.

Aristotle carries out this view for the whole nature. Only before the human being he stops. In the human egg there is already the whole man, even the soul, in so far as it carries out lowly tasks, which can also be carried out by the animal. But it should be different with the spirit of man, which carries out the higher activities of thinking. This spirit is not yet in the human germ. If the germ were left to itself, it could only reach the level of an animal being. A thinking spirit would not arise. For such a spirit to come into being, a higher creative power must step in at the moment when the purely animal development of man has progressed far enough, and create the spirit in the body. In human development everything happens in a natural way up to a certain moment, namely until the body is so far advanced that it can accommodate the spirit. Then, when this has occurred, when through natural development the body has progressed so far that it has all the necessary organs that the spirit needs for its purposes, then the spirit is created into its bodily dwelling place. Thus Aristotle thinks of man's spirit-soul as having come into being in time; but he does not make it come into being by the same forces by which the body comes into being, but by a higher influence. It must be emphasized, however, that the organs of which the spirit makes use have come into being through the development of the body. If therefore the spirit makes use of the eye, in order to make thoughts about the seen, then it can this only within the body, which developed an eye for it first. Therefore Aristotle cannot speak of immortality in the sense that after death the spirit continues in the same sense as it is before death. Because by the death his organs perish. It can no longer perceive. It no longer has any connection with the world. Therefore, one must not claim that Aristotle imagines immortality as if the spirit left its body like an earthly prison and continued to exist with the qualities that are known about it. Rather, it is deprived of all the properties that it has in its earthly existence. He then indeed leads a kind of shadow existence like the Greek heroes in the underworld. And of this life in the underworld Achilles makes the famous statement: "Better a day laborer in the light of the sun than a king over the shadows."

With such a view of the spirit Aristotle had to regard also the moral action as such, which this spirit exercises with the help of the animal soul. The animal part of the soul, after all, arose naturally. If this part acts alone, that is, if man follows his animal instincts and passions alone, then he cannot be a virtuous man. He will only become so when the spirit takes possession of the animal instincts and passions and gives them the right measure. The animal nature of man would do either too much or too little in all things. The man who merely follows his passions is either foolhardy or cowardly. The spirit alone finds the right middle between foolhardiness and cowardice, namely prudent bravery.

With regard to the state, Aristotle professes the view that the commonwealth must take into account the needs of all its members. It is part of the nature of man to live in a commonwealth. One of Aristotle's sayings is: "He who wants to live for himself alone must be either a god or an animal.... But man is a political animal." Aristotle does not assume a form of state that is right for all people, but in each individual case he finds the form of state best suited to the needs of the people in question. In any case, however, he imposes on the state the duty to care for the growing generation. Education is thus a matter for the state, and the purpose of education appears to him to be the formation of virtue.

Whoever wants to fully understand the Greek culture in its peculiarity must not forget that this culture was built on the basis of slavery. The educated within Greek culture could reach their form of education only by the fact that the possibility was offered to them by the large army of the slaves. Without slavery, even the most advanced Greek could not conceive of culture. Therefore, even Aristotle sees slavery as a necessity of nature. He simply takes it for granted, because he believes that many people are so constituted by their whole nature that they are not at all suitable for full freedom. It must not be overlooked, however, that the Greek was concerned with the welfare of his slaves; and Aristotle, too, speaks of the master's obligation to care conscientiously for his slaves and to respect human dignity in them.

Aristotle has dominated Western education for more than a millennium. For many centuries people were concerned not with the things of nature themselves, but with Aristotle's opinions about them. His writings were accorded perfect authority. All scholarship consisted in explaining the writings of the ancient sage. In addition, for a long time these writings were only available in a very imperfect and unreliable form. Therefore, the most diverse opinions were considered as those which were supposed to come from Aristotle. Only by the Christian philosopher Z7homas of Aquino the writings of the "master of those who know" were produced in such a way that one could say that one had to do with a reasonably reliable text. Moreover, until the 12th century, one dealt almost exclusively with a part of Aristotle's thought, with his logical investigations. It must be said, however, that Aristotle became particularly pioneering in this field. He established the art of thinking correctly, that is, logic, in such a way that even Kant at the end of the 18th century could be of the opinion that logic had not advanced by any essential step since Aristotle. The art of deducing, of proving, in the right way by appropriate conclusions of thought from one truth, Aristotle masterfully brought into a system. And since scholarship in the Middle Ages was less interested in expanding the human mind by observation of nature than in supporting the truths of revelation by logical proofs, it must have been particularly concerned with the handling of the doctrine of thought.

What Aristotle had really taught was clouded soon after his death by the interpretations which his successors gave to his views, and also by other opinions which joined his own. We see in the next centuries after Aristotle first three world views appear, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism.

The Stoic school was founded by Zeno of Kition in Cyprus, who lived from 342-270 BC. The school takes its name from the colorful portico (stoa) in Athens where its teachers taught classes. Public life in Greece had fallen into an even greater looseness since the days of the Sophists. The individual stood more and more for himself. Private virtue increasingly took the place of public virtue in the center of thought. The Stoics considered the highest thing that man could achieve to be perfect equanimity in life. He who can be put into mental turmoil by his desires, by his passions, cannot be granted such equanimity. He is driven hither and thither by lust and desire without being able to feel satisfied. Therefore, one should bring it so far that one is independent of lust and desire and leads such a life alone, which is regulated by wise insight. The Stoics thought of the world as originating from a kind of primordial fire. They were of the opinion that everything came out of the fire, and that also into the fire everything returns. Then again from the fire exactly the same world renews itself, which was already there. The world exists therefore not once, but innumerable times in the completely same way. Every single process has already existed infinitely often and will return infinitely often. This is the doctrine of the eternal return of all things and processes, which in our days Friedrich Nietzsche has renewed in exactly the same way. Such an explanation of the world agrees in the best way with the moral doctrine of the Stoics. For if everything has already existed, then man cannot create anything new. It is therefore natural that he sees the highest moral wisdom in equanimity towards everything that must come in any case.

The Epicureans saw the goal of life in the satisfaction that existence gives to man when he strives for pleasure and happiness in a rational way. It is unreasonable to pursue petty pleasures, for these must in most cases lead to disappointment, even unhappiness; but it is equally unreasonable to spurn the noble, high pleasures, for they lead to the lasting satisfaction that constitutes man's happiness in life. The whole of Epicurus' view of nature bears a stamp which shows that it is concerned with lasting satisfaction in life. Above all, a correct view of the power of judgment is considered, so that man can find his way in life through his thinking. For the senses do not deceive us, only our thinking can deceive us. If the eye sees a stick dipped in water broken, the eye does not deceive us. The real facts are such that the staff must appear broken to us. The deception arises only when our thinking forms a false judgment about how it is that the rod appears broken. Epicurus' view found numerous followers at the end of the antiquity, especially the Romans striving for education sought satisfaction in it. The Roman poet 7. Lucretius Carus gave it a perfect expression in his ingenious teaching poem "On Nature".

Skepticism is the world view of doubt and mistrust. Its first significant confessor is Pyrrho, who was already a contemporary of Aristotle, but at that time made little impression. Only his successors found followers for their opinion that the cognitive powers of man are not sufficient to gain a mental image of the true reality. They believed that one could only express human opinions about things; whether things really behaved as our thinking tells us, nothing could be decided about that.

The manifold attempts to arrive at a world view through thinking had led to such diverse, partly contradictory mental images that at the end of antiquity one came to distrust all sense perception and all thinking. In addition there were mental images, like those of Plato, that the sensual world was only a dream and a mirage. Such mental images were now combined with certain Oriental thoughts which preached the nothingness and worthlessness of life. From these details the Neo-Platonism was built up in Alexandria in the centuries of the antiquity coming to an end. Philo, who lived at the time of Christ, and Plotinus are to be mentioned as the most important professors of this doctrine. Philo draws from the teachings of Plato the consequences for the moral life. If reality is a delusion, then virtue can only consist in turning away from this reality and in directing all thoughts and sensations to the only true reality, which he sought in God. What Plato had sought in the world of ideas, Philo believed to find in the God of Judaism. Plotinus then does not seek to reach this God through rational cognition, for this can only refer to the finite, transient: he seeks to come to the eternal primordial being through inner enlightenment, through ecstatic immersion in the depths of the soul. Through such immersion, man comes to the primordial being who has poured himself into the world. This world is only an imperfect outflow, an apostasy from the primordial being.

2 The Worldviews of the Middle Ages and Modern Times

Something completely new appears with Christianity in the worldview development of the Occident. The rational thinking is pushed into the shade by a completely different authority, by the revelation. Truth does not come from thinking, but comes from a higher power that has revealed it to man: this now becomes conviction. It is belief in facts of supernatural significance and disbelief in the face of reason that constitutes the essence of Christianity. The confessors of the Christian doctrine do not want to believe in their thinking, but in sensuous events, through which the truth has made itself known. "What has happened from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we ourselves have beheld, what our hands have touched of the word of life... what we have seen and heard we report to you, that you may have fellowship with us." So says the 1st Epistle of John. And Augustine says, "I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so." What Christ's contemporaries saw and heard, and what the Church preserves as such heard and seen by tradition, now becomes truth; it is no longer what man achieves by his thinking that counts as such.

In Christianity, on the one hand, the religious world of thought of Judaism, on the other hand, the mental images of the Greek worldview come to us. The religion of Judaism was originally a national-egoistic one. God chose his people for earthly power and glory. But this people had to experience the most bitter disappointments. It had come into captivity and subservience to other nations. Its hopes for the Messiah arose from the fact that it expected redemption from its shame and humiliation from its God. This humiliation was attributed to its own sinfulness. Here mental images of turning away from the life that led to sinfulness intrude. One should not cling to this life, which leads to sin; one should rather turn to God, who will soon bring his kingdom to this earth and free people from shame. Jesus was full of such mental images. He wanted to speak to the poor and oppressed, not to those who cling to the treasures of this life. The Kingdom of Heaven, which is coming soon, will belong to those who lived in misery before. And Jesus imagined the kingdom of heaven in temporal proximity. He did not refer people to a spiritual hereafter, but to the fact that in time, and soon, the Lord would come and bring glory to mankind. Already through Paul, even more through the teachers of faith of the first Christian centuries, a connection of the teachings of Christ with the mental images of the later Greek philosophers took the place of naive faith. The temporally near kingdom of heaven thus became the beyond. The Christian faith was reinterpreted with the help of Greek worldview ideas. From this reinterpretation, from this collaboration of originally naive mental images with the traditional views, the dogmatic content of the Christian doctrine developed in the course of time. Thought entered completely into the service of faith, it became the servant of revelation. The whole Middle Ages worked to support the revelation with the help of thinking. How in the first centuries thinking and revelation worked together, the church father Augustine gives a testimony of it; how this happened in the church in the later time, Z7homas of Aquino. Augustine says to himself: Even if we doubt: the one fact remains that thinking, the thinking man himself must be there; otherwise he could not doubt. When I doubt, I think; therefore I am, my reason is there. And in reason certain truths reveal themselves to me. But my reason never recognizes all truth, but always only individual truths. These individual truths can only come from the being in whom all truth is, from God. So there must be a divine being. My reason proves this to me. But my reason gives me only parts of the truth; in revelation lies the highest truth. Thomas Aquino is a comprehensive thinker who processes all the knowledge of his time in an amazingly perceptive way. One must not imagine that this Christian philosopher was hostile to the knowledge of nature and reason. Nature was for him the one source of truth; revelation, however, the other. In his opinion, everything in the world comes from God. Also the natural phenomena are an outflow of the divine being. When we research about nature, we research with our thinking about the deeds of God. But we cannot penetrate to the highest deeds of God with our humanly weak thinking. According to Thomas Aquinas, we can still prove with our reason that there is a God; but we cannot learn anything from reason about the nature of God, about His Trinity, about the redemption of men through Christ, about the power of the sacraments, and so on; about this we are informed by revelation through the authority of the Church. It is not because these things have nothing at all to do with reason, Thomas thinks, that man cannot reach them by his reasoning, but only because human reason is too weak. A stronger reason could therefore also comprehend the revealed truths. This view is presented in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages.

German mysticism took a different path than scholasticism to reach the truth. The most important mystics are: Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Suso, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius, They form the forerunners of the newer world views insofar as they did not start from an external authority, but wanted to search for the truth in the soul of man and in the phenomena of nature. Not an external Christ can, in their opinion, show man the way to his goal, but only the spiritual forces within man show this way. "The physician must go through the exams of nature," says Paracelsus, to point out that in nature itself is the source of truth. And Angelus Silesius emphasizes that not apart from the things of nature is a divine entity, but that God is in nature. How nature itself is the divine and creates as the divine, he expresses in beautiful sentences, such as, "I know that without me God cannot live a nu; if I become too not, he must give up the ghost from need." God has no life apart from things, but only in things. Jakob Böhme's world view is also completely dominated by such a mental image.

It is evident from scholasticism that it was always striving to establish a harmony between reason and revelation. This could not be done without pretentious logic, without the most subtle conclusions. The mystics wanted to free themselves from such conclusions. The highest thing that man can know seems to them impossible to be based on logical subtleties, it must be revealed clearly and directly in nature and in the human mind.

Luther also started from similar feelings. He was less concerned with what mattered to the mystic: he wanted to save the divine revelation above all from the contradiction of reason. He tried to achieve this, in contrast to the scholastics, by saying: Reason has no right at all to decide in matters of faith. Reason should deal with the explanation of world phenomena; it has nothing to do with the truths of faith. The revealed word is the source of faith. Reason has nothing in common with this faith; it is none of its business. It cannot refute it, nor can it prove it. It stands firmly for itself. When reason approaches religious truths, there is only vain bickering and gossip. That is why Luther reviled Aristotle, on whose teachings the scholastics had relied when they wanted to give faith a foundation through reason. He says: "This God-cursed Aristotle is a true devil, a ghoulish slanderer, a wicked sycophant (slanderer), a prince of darkness, a beast, an ugly deceiver of mankind, almost destitute of all philosophy, an open and acknowledged liar, a lecherous goat." You can see what we are dealing with. Aristotle had wanted to reach the highest truths through human thinking; Luther wanted to secure these highest truths once and for all before processing them through reason. That is why he also calls reason "the devil's whore, which can do nothing but incinerate and desecrate what God speaks and does." We see Luther's mental images still continuing today in the same form, even if modern theology puts a progressive cloak around them. In the much praised "Essence of Christianity" by Adolf Harnack, we read: "Science is not able to give meaning to life.... Religion, namely love of God and neighbor, is what gives meaning to life.... Jesus' real greatness is that he led people to God.... The Christian religion is eternal life in the midst of time."

Shortly after Luther's appearance, reason, which he reviled, achieved one victory after another. Copernicus established his new view of the motion of the heavenly bodies. Kepler established the laws according to which the planets move around the sun; Galileo pointed the telescope out into unmeasured celestial spaces and thus gave nature the opportunity to reveal a wealth of facts on its own. Through such advances, natural science had to gain confidence in itself and in reason. Galileo reflects the feelings that settled in a thinker of that time. One believed now no longer to work in the sense of Aristotle, if one held on to what he had asserted with his limited knowledge. This is what the Middle Ages did. Now one was of the opinion that one creates in the spirit of Aristotle, if one, like him, directed the view into the nature, It is golden words which spoke in this respect Galilei. "You always have it" - he says - "with your Aristotle, who cannot speak. But I tell you that if Aristotle were here, he would either be convinced by us, or refute our reasons and teach us better. ... Philosophy is written in that greatest book which is continually open before our eyes, I mean the universe, but which cannot be understood unless one has first understood the language and learned the signs in which it is written." Giordano Bruno is one of those spirits of this flourishing thought, who was able to build up an explanation of the world in the sense of the view of nature, but who besides that completely adhered to the traditional dogmas, without giving an account of how one can be united with the other.

If human thinking did not want to deny itself, if it did not want to be pushed into a completely subordinate position, it could only tread the path again in a new way, which the Greek world views had already sought. It had to seek to penetrate out of itself to the highest truths.

René Descartes (Cartesius) was one of the first who made an attempt. His way has much similarity with that of Augustine. Descartes also started from the doubt of all truth. And also he said to himself: Even if I can doubt about everything, I cannot doubt that I am. I think when I doubt; if I did not think, I could not doubt. But if I think, then I am. "I think, therefore I am" (cogito, ergo sum), that is the famous principle of Descartes. And from this basic truth Descartes seeks to ascend to the higher knowledge. He says to himself: What I see so clearly and distinctly, as that I am myself, must also be equally true. - And now a peculiar phenomenon occurs with him. The Christian mental images of God, soul and immortality, which a centuries-long education has inculcated in the adventurous mankind, he believes to find in his reason as certain truths as the knowledge that he is himself. These essential components of the old theology reappear there as alleged truths of reason. We even find in Descartes the old conception of the soul again. He thinks of this soul as an independent spiritual being, which only makes use of the body. We have met such an idea in Aristotle. The animals have, according to Descartes, nothing of a soul. They are automata. Man has a soul which has its seat in the brain and interacts with the soulless body through the pineal gland. We see in Descartes an endeavor which is also present in the scholastics, namely to want to prove the "highest truths" brought from the old tradition by reason. Only the scholastics openly admit that they want this, while Descartes believes to draw all proofs purely from reason itself. So Descartes apparently proved from reason what came only from religion. This disguised scholasticism still prevailed for a long time; and in Germany we have in Leibniz and in Wolff its most important representatives. Leibniz saves the old conception of the soul by making everything a kind of independent animate beings. These do not come into being and do not pass away. And he saves the conception of God by ascribing to it that it brings all beings into a harmonious interaction. Again and again the old religious mental images appear as alleged truths of reason. This is also the case with Wolff. He distinguishes sensual truths, which are gained by observation, and higher knowledge, which reason draws from itself. But these higher truths, seen in the light, are nothing else than the old truths of revelation gained by mutilation and sifting. No wonder that reason, in proving such truths, relied on highly questionable concepts which could not stand up to closer critical examination.

Such a critical examination of the process of proving human reason was undertaken by the English thinkers Locke, David Hume, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Locke examined human cognition and believed to find that we can come to knowledge only by observing the processes of nature itself. Hume now asked what kind of knowledge these were. He said to himself: If I observe today that the heat of the sun is the cause of the heating of the stone: have I a right to say that it will always be so? If I perceive a cause and then an effect: may I say, that cause will always and necessarily have this effect? No, I am not allowed to. I see the stone fall to the earth and perceive that it makes a cavity in the earth. That it must be so, that it could not be also differently, of it I can assert nothing. I see certain processes and also get used to seeing them in a certain context. But whether such a connection really exists, whether there are laws of nature which can tell me something real about the connection of things, I know nothing about it. Kant, who had lived in the mental images of Wolff's world view until his manhood, was shaken in all his convictions when he got to know the writings of Hume. He had not doubted before that reason could prove eternal truths; Hume had shown that even in the case of simple truths there could be no question of proof, but that we accept everything we believe only out of habit. Should there really be no eternal truths, Kant asked himself. There must be such. He did not doubt that the truths of mathematics, for example, must always and necessarily be true. Nor did he doubt that something like the following must be eternally valid: every effect has a cause. But Hume convinced him of this, that these findings could not be eternally true, if we had gained them from observation from outside. For observation can only tell us what has always been; but not whether this must always be so. Kant found a way out. He said: it does not depend at all on the things in nature how they appear to us. It depends solely on ourselves. I am set up in such a way that for me "twice two must be four"; I am set up in such a way that for me every effect must have a cause. May it therefore happen outside, in the "thing in itself", as it may always be, may there once be the things in such a way that "twice two three" is, another time that "twice two five" is; all this cannot come to me. I can only perceive that "twice two four" is, consequently everything appears to me in such a way that "twice two four" is. I can only link an effect to a cause; consequently everything appears to me as if effects were always linked to causes. Whether also in the "thing in itself" causes are connected with effects, I don't know. I am like afflicted with blue glasses. May the things outside have whatever colors, I know in advance that everything will appear to me in a blue color tone. How the "things in themselves" are, I do not know; I only know how they appear to me. Since God, immortality and freedom of the human will cannot be observed at all, do not appear, human thinking, reason cannot make out anything about these things. They do not concern reason. But do they therefore not concern man at all? So Kant asks himself. They concern man very much, he answers. But one cannot understand their existence; one must believe it. I know that I should do my duty. A categorical imperative speaks in me: Thou shalt. So I must also be able to do it. At least I have to believe that I can. And for this belief I need another. I myself cannot give the necessary emphasis to the performance of my duty. I cannot arrange the world in such a way that it corresponds to what I must regard as moral world order. Therefore there must be a God who determines this moral world order. He also gives my soul immortality, so that in eternal life it can enjoy the fruits of its duties, which can never be granted to it in this transient, imperfect life. One sees, with Kant everything reappears as faith what knowledge can never reach. Kant achieved in a different way something similar to what Luther aimed at in his way. Luther wanted to exclude knowledge from the objects of faith. Kant wanted the same thing. His faith is no longer Bible faith; he speaks of a "religion within the limits of mere reason." But the cognition, the knowledge, should be limited only to the phenomena; about the objects of faith they should have no say. Kant has rightly been called the philosopher of Protestantism. He has himself best described what he thinks he has achieved with the words: "I had therefore to abolish knowledge in order to make room for faith." Knowledge, then, in Kant's sense, is to deal only with the subordinate world which gives no meaning to life; what gives meaning to life are objects of faith which no knowledge can approach.

Whoever wants to save faith can do it with the weapons of Kant's worldview; for knowledge has no power - in the sense of this view - to make out anything about the highest truths. The philosophy of the 19th century is in many of its currents under the influence of the Kantian thoughts. One can so comfortably clip the wings of knowledge with them; one can deny the right of thinking to have a say about the highest things. One can say, for example: What does natural science want? It can give only subordinate wisdom to the best. Kant, whom we like to call the great reformer of philosophy, has proved once and for all that knowledge is limited, subordinate, that it cannot give meaning to life. The world views of the present, which refer to such self-mutilation of knowledge, have not even penetrated to the standpoint of scholasticism, which at least felt obliged to bring about a harmony between knowledge and faith. Du Bois-Reymond even put a scientific cloak around this point of view in his famous lecture: "On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature". 3.

3 The New Worldviews

Another worldview current, which reaches up to the present, takes its starting point from Spinoza. He is a thinker who has an unconditional trust in human reason. What can be known, like mathematical truths, reason accepts as its knowledge. And the things of the world stand in just such a necessary connection, like the links of a calculation or like the mathematical figures. Everything spiritual as well as everything physical is governed by such necessary laws of nature. It is a childish mental image to believe that a human-like all-wise providence arranges the things. The actions of living beings, the actions of the human mind are subject to the laws of nature just as the stone that falls to the earth according to the laws of gravity. It is a mistake to believe that a creative power has created any beings according to certain purposes. One is mistaken if one believes, for example, that a creator gave horns to the bull so that it could push. No, the bull got his horns according to just as necessary laws as a billiard ball rolls on according to laws if it is pushed. He has the horns by nature and therefore he pushes. One can also say: the bull has not horns, so that he could push, but he pushes, because he has horns. God, in Spinoza's sense, is nothing but the natural necessity inherent in all physical and spiritual phenomena. When man looks out into the world, then he sees God; when he thinks about the things and processes, then the divine world order presents itself to him, which, however, is nothing but the natural order of things. In the sense of Spinoza one cannot speak of a dichotomy between faith and knowledge. For there is nothing except nature. Man himself belongs to this nature. Therefore, when he looks at himself and at nature, everything is revealed to him that can be spoken of at all.

Goethe was also imbued with this world view. He, too, sought in nature itself what earlier views had sought in an otherworldly world. Nature became his god. He did not want to know anything about any other divine entity.

What would be a God, who would push only from the outside,
In the circle the universe at the finger would run!
He wants to move the world within,
Nature in itself, to cherish itself in nature,
Never misses its power, never misses its spirit.

Thus Goethe says. Nature is God to him, and nature also reveals God. There is no other revelation. And there can be no other besides the essences of nature, which are to be reached only by faith. Therefore Goethe never wanted to have anything to do with the Kantian distinction between faith and knowledge.

And that everything that man can desire in truth can also be attained by the contemplation of nature and of man himself, that is also the conviction of the thinkers who in the beginning of the 19th century endeavored to create world views. This is also the conviction of the thinkers who in the second half of the 19th century want to build a worldview out of the insights of natural science. These latter thinkers, such as Haeckel, are of the opinion that the laws of nature which they investigate are not merely subordinate things, but that they truly represent that which gives meaning to life.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte places man's own "I" at the center of his reflections. What have earlier world views done with this "I"? They have lifted it out of the human being and made it a god. Thereby the human-like creator of the world came into being. Fichte leaves all such conceptions of God to themselves. He seeks consciousness where it alone can really be found, in man. Something that was formerly worshipped as God, such a spiritual being, Fichte finds only in man. Thus, when man seeks the relationship between the spirit and the world, he is not dealing with a connection of "God and world," but only with an interaction of the spirit, which is in him, with nature. This is the meaning of Fichte's world view; and everything that has been attributed to Fichte: as if he had wanted to assert, for example, that the individual human being creates nature out of himself, is based only on a very short-sighted interpretation of his thoughts. Schelling then continued to build on Fichte's mental images. Fichte wanted nothing else than to eavesdrop on the human mind when it forms its mental images about nature. For no God gives him these mental images; he forms them alone. The question for Fichte was not how God does it, but how man does it when he finds his way in the world. Schelling built on this the view that we can look at the world from two sides, from the outer side, when we look at the physical processes, and from the inner side, when we look at the spirit, which is also nothing other than nature. Hegel then went one step further. He asked himself: What is it, then, that our thinking actually reveals to us about nature? If I explore the laws of the celestial bodies through my thinking, does not the eternal necessity that prevails in nature reveal itself in these laws? What, then, do all my concepts and ideas give me? But nothing else than what is outside in the nature itself. The same entities are present in me as concepts, as ideas, which rule all existence in the world as eternal, iron laws. If I look inside myself, I perceive concepts and ideas; if I look outside myself, these concepts and ideas are laws of nature. In the individual human being is reflected as thought what rules the whole world as law. One misunderstands Hegel if one claims that he wanted to spin the whole world out of the idea, out of the human head. It will one day have to be counted as an eternal disgrace to German philosophy that it has misunderstood Hegel in this way. Whoever understands Hegel, it does not occur to him to want to spin anything out of the idea. Marx really understood Hegel in the fruitful sense of the word. That is why Marx looked for the laws of economic development where they alone can be found. Where are the laws to be found? To this question Hegel answered: Where the facts are, there are also the laws. There is nowhere else an idea than where the facts are, which one wants to comprehend through this idea. He who investigates the facts of real life thinks Hegelianly. For Hegel was of the opinion that not abstract thoughts, but the things themselves lead to their essences.

The newer natural science proceeds in the same way in the spirit of Hegel. This new natural science, whose great founder Charles Darwin became through his work "The Origin of Species" (1859), seeks the laws of nature in the realm of living beings just as one does in lifeless nature. Ernst Haeckel summarizes the creed of this natural science in the words: "The magnet that attracts iron filings, the powder that explodes, the water vapor that drives the locomotive ... they act as much by living force as man who thinks." This natural science is convinced that with the laws which reason extracts from things, it reveals at the same time the essence of these things. There is nothing left for a faith that is only supposed to give life its meaning. In the fifties, courageous minds, such as Carl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott and Ludwig Büchner, tried to reassert the view that in the things of this world their essence is also completely and utterly revealed through knowledge. Today it has become fashionable to fall upon these men as upon the most narrow-minded heads and to say of them that they had not seen the actual riddles of the world at all. This is done only by people who themselves have no idea of what questions can be raised at all. What did these men want other than to explore nature in order to gain the meaning of life from nature itself through knowledge? Deeper minds will certainly be able to extract even deeper truths from nature than Vogt and Büchner. But also these deeper spirits will have to do it on the same ways of cognition as they. For one always says: You must seek the spirit, not the raw material! Well, the answer can only be given with Goethe: The spirit is in nature.

What every God is apart from nature, Ludwig Feuerbach has given the answer to, by showing how such a conception of God is created by man, in his image. "God is the revealed interior, the expressed self of man; religion is the solemn unveiling of man's hidden treasures, the admission of his innermost thoughts, the public confession of his secrets of love." What man has within himself, he puts out into the world and worships it as God. In the same way man does it with the moral world order. He can create it only from himself in connection with his equals. But he then imagines that it is set over him by another, higher being. In a radical way, Max Stirner got to grips with such entities that man creates for himself and then sets over himself like higher powers, as a spook or ghost. Stirner demands the liberation of man from such ghosts.

The way, which frees from them, was entered only by the world views built on natural scientific basis in the second half of the 19th century. Other world views, as for example those of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard v. Hartmann are again only relapses into outdated mental images. Schopenhauer, instead of the whole human "I", made only a part, the will, the divine being; and Hartmann did the same with the "I", after he first promoted the consciousness out of this "I". Thereby he came to the "unconscious" as the primordial ground of the world. It is understandable that these two thinkers, from such presuppositions, had to come to the conviction that the world was the worst imaginable. For they have made the "I" the original ground of the world, after they have promoted reason out of it either wholly or in part. The earlier thinkers of this character first idealized the "I," that is, endowed it with even more reason than it has in man. Thereby the world became an institution of infinite wisdom.

The truly modern world view can no longer incorporate anything of old religious mental images. Its basis was already expressed by Schiller when he characterized Goethe's view of nature in his letter to the latter: "From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more intricate, in order to finally build the most intricate of all, the human being, naturally from the materials of the whole building of nature." If man wants to let his existence emerge from something, he can only let it emerge from nature itself. Man is formed out of nature according to eternal, brazen laws; but he is not yet in any way, neither as God nor as another spiritual being, already situated in nature. All mental images which imagine nature as animated or spiritualized (e.g. Paulsen's and others) are relapses into old theological ideas. The spirit has come into being, not developed out of nature. This must be understood first, then the thinking can form a view about this spirit developed within the natural order. Such a world view can only speak of a real freedom. I have shown this in detail in my "Philosophy of Freedom" and in my book "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert". A spirit that would have developed out of another spirit would have to receive from the latter, from the spirit of God or of the world, also its moral aims and purposes; a spirit that has developed out of nature sets for itself the purpose and aim of its existence, gives itself its destiny. A true philosophy of freedom can no longer speak with Adolf Harnack of the fact that knowledge is not able to give meaning to life; it shows rather that man has come into being through the necessity of nature, that he has, however, not been given a predetermined meaning, but that it is up to him to give himself a meaning. The old world views stand with the old economic orders, but they will also fall with them. The economically liberated man will also be a free man as a knowing and moral man; and if the economic order will bring to all men an existence worthy of man, then they will also make a world-view their own which will completely liberate the spirit.

Source: GA 51