APPENDICES

APPENDICESAPPENDIX IADDITION TO THE REVISED EDITION OF “THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM,” 1918.Various criticisms on the part of philosophers with which this book met immediately upon its publication, induce me to add to this Revised Edition the following brief statement.I can well understand that there are readers who are interested in the rest of the book, but who will look upon what follows as a tissue of abstract concepts which to them is irrelevant and makes no appeal. They may, if they choose, leave this brief statement unread. But in philosophy problems present themselves which have their origin rather in certain prejudices on the thinker’s part than in the natural progression of normal human thinking. With the main body of this book it seems to me to be the duty of every one to concern himself, who is striving for clearness about the essential nature of man and his relation to the world. What follows is rather a problem the discussion of which certain philosophers demand as necessary to a treatment of the topics of this book, because these philosophers, by their wholeway of thinking, have created certain difficulties which do not otherwise occur. If I were to pass by these problems entirely, certain people would be quick to accuse me of dilettantism, etc. The impression would thus be created that the author of the views set down in this book has not thought out his position with regard to these problems because he has not discussed them in his book.The problem to which I refer is this: there are thinkers who find a particular difficulty in understanding how another mind can act on one’s own. They say: the world of my consciousness is a closed circle within me; so is the world of another’s consciousness within him. I cannot look into the world of another’s mind. How, then, do I know that he and I are in a common world? The theory according to which we can from the conscious world infer an unconscious world which never can enter consciousness, attempts to solve this difficulty as follows. The world, it says, which I have in my consciousness is the representation in me of a real world to which my consciousness has no access. In this transcendent world exist the unknown agents which cause the world in my consciousness. In it, too, exists my own real self, of which likewise I have only a representation in my consciousness. In it, lastly, exists the essential self of the fellow-man who confronts me. Whatever passes in the consciousness of my fellow-man corresponds to a reality in his transcendent essence which isindependent of his consciousness. His essential nature acts in that realm which, on this theory, is equally beyond consciousness. Thus an impression is made in my consciousness which represents there what is present in another’s consciousness and wholly beyond the reach of my direct awareness. Clearly the point of this theory is to add to the world accessible to my consciousness an hypothetical world which is to my immediate experience inaccessible. This is done to avoid the supposed alternative of having to say that the external world, which I regard as existing before me, is nothing but the world of my consciousness, with the absurd—solipsistic—corollary that other persons likewise exist only within my consciousness.Several epistemological tendencies in recent speculation have joined in creating this problem. But it is possible to attain to clearness about it by surveying the situation from the point of view of spiritual perception which underlies the exposition of this book. What is it that, in the first instance, I have before me when I confront another person? To begin with, there is the sensuous appearance of the other’s body, as given in perception. To this we might add the auditory perception of what he is saying, and so forth. All this I apprehend, not with a passive stare, but by the activity of my thinking which is set in motion. Through the thinking with which I now confront the other person, the percept of him becomes, as it were, psychically transparent. As my thinkingapprehends the percept, I am compelled to judge that what I perceive is really quite other than it appears to the outer senses. The sensuous appearance, in being what it immediately is, reveals something else which it is mediately. In presenting itself to me as a distinct object, it, at the same time, extinguishes itself as a mere sensuous appearance. But in thus extinguishing itself it reveals a character which, so long as it affects me, compels me as a thinking being to extinguish my own thinking and to put its thinking in the place of mine. Its thinking is then apprehended by my thinking as an experience like my own. Thus I have really perceived another’s thinking. For the immediate percept, in extinguishing itself as sensuous appearance, is apprehended by my thinking. It is a profess which passes wholly in my consciousness and consists in this, that the other’s thinking takes the place of my thinking. The self-extinction of the sensuous appearance actually abolishes the separation between the spheres of the two consciousnesses. In my own consciousness this fusion manifests itself in that, so long as I experience the contents of the other’s consciousness, I am aware of my own consciousness as little as I am aware of it in dreamless sleep. Just as my waking consciousness is eliminated from the latter, so are the contents of my own consciousness eliminated from my perception of the contents of another’s consciousness. Two things tend to deceive us about the true facts.The first is that, in perceiving another person, the extinction of the contents of one’s own consciousness is replaced not, as in sleep, by unconsciousness, but by the contents of the other’s consciousness. The other is that my consciousness of my own self oscillates so rapidly between extinction and recurrence, that these alternations usually escape observation. The whole problem is to be solved, not through artificial construction of concepts, involving an inference from what is in consciousness to what always must transcend consciousness, but through genuine experience of the connection between thinking and perceiving. The same remark applies to many other problems which appear in philosophical literature. Philosophers should seek the road to unprejudiced spiritual observation, instead of hiding reality behind an artificial frontage of concepts.In a monograph by Eduard von Hartmann on “The Ultimate Problems of Epistemology and Metaphysics” (in theZeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Vol. 108, p. 55), myPhilosophy of Spiritual Activityhas been classed with the philosophical tendency which seeks to build upon an “epistemological Monism.” Eduard von Hartmann rejects this position as untenable, for the following reasons. According to the point of view maintained in his monograph, there are only three possible positions in the theory of knowledge. The first consists in remaining true to the naïve point of view, which regards objects ofsense-perception as real things existing outside the human mind. This, urges Von Hartmann, implies a lack of critical reflection. I fail to realise that with all my contents of consciousness I remain imprisoned in my own consciousness. I fail to perceive that I am dealing, not with a “table-in-itself,” but only with a phenomenon in my own consciousness. If I stop at this point of view, or if for whatever reasons I return to it, I am a Naïve Realist. But this whole position is untenable, for it ignores that consciousness has no other objects than its own contents. The second position consists in appreciating this situation and confessing it to oneself. As a result, I become a Transcendental Idealist. As such, says Von Hartmann, I am obliged to deny that a “thing-in-itself” can ever appear in any way within the human mind. But, if developed with unflinching consistency, this view ends in Absolute Illusionism. For the world which confronts me is now transformed into a mere sum of contents of consciousness, and, moreover, of contents of my private consciousness. The objects of other human minds, too, I am then compelled to conceive—absurdly enough—as present solely in my own consciousness. Hence, the only tenable position, according to Von Hartmann, is the third, viz., Transcendental Realism. On this view, there are “things-in-themselves,” but consciousness can have no dealings with them by way of immediate experience. Existing beyond thesphere of human consciousness, they cause, in a way of which we remain unconscious, the appearance of objects in consciousness. These “things-in-themselves” are known only by inference from the contents of consciousness, which are immediately experienced but for that very reason, purely ideal. Eduard von Hartmann maintains in the monograph cited above, that “epistemological Monism”—for such he takes my point of view to be—is bound to declare itself identical with one or other of the above three positions; and that its failure to do so is due only to its inconsistency in not drawing the actual consequences of its presuppositions. The monograph goes on to say: “If we want to find out which epistemological position a so-called Epistemological Monist occupies, all we have to do is to put to him certain questions and compel him to answer them. For, out of his own initiative, no Monist will condescend to state his views on these points, and likewise he will seek to dodge in every way giving a straight answer to our questions, because every answer he may give will betray that Epistemological Monism does not differ from one or other of the three positions. Our questions are the following: (1) Are things continuous or intermittent in their existence? If the answer is ‘continuous,’ we have before us some one of the forms of Naïve Realism. If the answer is ‘intermittent,’ we have Transcendental Idealism. But if the answer is: ‘They are, on theone hand, continuous, viz., as contents of the Absolute Mind, or as unconscious ideas, or as permanent possibilities of perception, but, on the other hand, intermittent, viz., as contents of finite consciousness,’ we recognise Transcendental Realism. (2) When three persons are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there? The Naïve Realist answers ‘one’; the Transcendental Idealist answers ‘three’; but the Transcendental Realist answers ‘four.’ This last answer does, indeed, presuppose that it is legitimate to group together in the single question, ‘How many tables?’ things so unlike each other as the one table which is the ‘thing-in-itself’ and the three tables which are the objects of perception in the three perceivers’ minds. If this seems too great a licence to anyone, he will have to answer ‘one and three,’ instead of ‘four.’ (3) When two persons are alone together in a room, how many distinct persons are there? If you answer ‘two’—you are a Naïve Realist. If you answer ‘four,’ viz., in each of the two minds one ‘I’ and one ‘Other,’ you are a Transcendental Idealist. If you answer ‘six,’ viz., two persons as ‘things-in-themselves’ and four persons as ideal objects in the two minds, you are a Transcendental Realist. In order to show that Epistemological Monism is not one of these three positions, we should have to give other answers than the above to each of these three questions. But I cannot imagine what answersthese could be.” The answers of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activitywould have to be: (1) Whoever apprehends only what he perceives of a thing and mistakes these percepts for the reality of the thing, is a Naïve Realist. He does not realise that, strictly, he ought to regard these perceptual contents as existing only so long as he is looking at the objects, so that he ought to conceive the objects before him as intermittent. As soon, however, as it becomes clear to him that reality is to be met with only in the percepts which are organised by thinking, he attains to the insight that the percepts which appear as intermittent events, reveal themselves as continuously in existence as soon as they are interpreted by the constructions of thought. Hence continuity of existence must be predicated of the contents of perception which living thought has organised. Only that part which is only perceived, not thought, would have to be regarded as intermittent if—which is not the case—there were such a part. (2) When three persons are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there? There is only one table. But so long as the three persons stop short at their perceptual images, they ought to say: “These percepts are not the reality at all.” As soon as they pass on to the table as apprehended by thinking, there is revealed to them the one real table. They are then united with their three contents of consciousness in this one reality. (3) When two persons are alonetogether in a room, how many distinct persons are there? Most assuredly there are not six—not even in the sense of the Transcendental Realist’s theory—but only two. Only, at first, each person has nothing but the unreal percept of himself and of the other person. There are four such percepts, the presence of which in the minds of the two persons is the stimulus for the apprehension of reality by their thinking. In this activity of thinking each of the two persons transcends the sphere of his own consciousness. A living awareness of the consciousness of the other person as well as of his own arises in each. In these moments of living awareness the persons are as little imprisoned within their consciousness as they are in sleep. But at other moments consciousness of this identification with the other returns, so that each person, in the experience of thinking, apprehends consciously both himself and the other person. I know that a Transcendental Realist describes this view as a relapse into Naïve Realism. But, then, I have already pointed out in this book that Naïve Realism retains its justification for our thinking as we actually experience it. The Transcendental Realist ignores the true situation in the process of cognition completely. He cuts himself off from the facts by a tissue of concepts and entangles himself in it. Moreover, the Monism which appears in thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityought not to be labelled “epistemological,” but, if an epithet is wanted,then a “Monism of Thought.” All this has been misunderstood by Eduard von Hartmann. Ignoring all that is specific in the argumentation of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activity, he has charged me with having attempted to combine Hegel’s Universalistic Panlogism with Hume’s Individualistic Phenomenalism (Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 108, p. 71, note). But, in truth, thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityhas nothing whatever to do with the two positions which it is accused of trying to combine. (This, too, is the reason why I could feel no interest in polemics against,e.g., theEpistemological Monismof Johannes Rehmke. The point of view of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityis simply quite different from what Eduard von Hartmann and others call “Epistemological Monism.”)APPENDIX IIREVISED INTRODUCTION TO “PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM.”The following chapter reproduces, in all essentials, the pages which stood as a sort of “Introduction” in the first edition of this book. Inasmuch as it rather reflects the mood out of which I composed this book twenty-five years ago, than has any direct bearing on its contents, I print it here as an “Appendix.” I do not want to omit it altogether, because the suggestion keeps cropping up that I want to suppress some of my earlier writings on account of my later works on spiritual matters.Our age is one which is unwilling to seek truth anywhere but in the depths of human nature.1Of the following two well-known paths described by Schiller, it is the second which will to-day be found most useful:Wahrheit suchen wir beide, du aussen im Leben, ich innenIn dem Herzen, und so findet sie jeder gewiss.Ist das Auge gesund, sobegegnetes aussen dem SchöpferIst es das Herz, dann gewiss spiegelt es innen die Welt.2A truth which comes to us from without bears ever the stamp of uncertainty. Conviction attaches only to what appears as truth to each of us in our own hearts.Truth alone can give us confidence in developing our powers. He who is tortured by doubts finds his powers lamed. In a world the riddle of which baffles him, he can find no aim for his activity.We no longer want to believe; we want to know. Belief demands the acceptance of truths which we do not wholly comprehend. But the individuality which seeks to experience everything in the depths of its own being, is repelled by what it cannot understand. Only that knowledge will satisfy us which springs from the inner life of the personality, and submits itself to no external norm.Again, we do not want any knowledge which has encased itself once and for all in hide-bound formulas, and which is preserved in Encyclopædias valid for all time. Each of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand, from his own immediateexperiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty in knowledge, but each in his own way.Our scientific theories, too, are no longer to be formulated as if we were unconditionally compelled to accept them. None of us would wish to give a scientific work a title like Fichte’sA Pellucid Account for the General Public concerning the Real Nature of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Compel the Readers to Understand.Nowadays there is no attempt to compel anyone to understand. We claim no agreement from anyone whom a distinct individual need does not drive to a certain view. We do not seek nowadays to cram facts of knowledge even into the immature human being, the child. We seek rather to develop his faculties in such a way that his understanding may depend no longer on our compulsion, but on his will. I am under no illusion concerning the characteristics of the present age. I know how many flaunt a manner of life which lacks all individuality and follows only the prevailing fashion. But I know also that many of my contemporaries strive to order their lives in the direction of the principles I have indicated. To them I would dedicate this book. It does not pretend to offer the “only possible” way to Truth, it only describes the path chosen by one whose heart is set upon Truth.The reader will be led at first into somewhatabstract regions, where thought must draw sharp outlines, if it is to reach secure conclusions. But he will also be led out of these arid concepts into concrete life. I am fully convinced that one cannot do without soaring into the ethereal realm of abstraction, if one’s experience is to penetrate life in all directions. He who is limited to the pleasures of the senses misses the sweetest enjoyments of life. The Oriental sages make their disciples live for years a life of resignation and asceticism before they impart to them their own wisdom. The Western world no longer demands pious exercises and ascetic practices as a preparation for science, but it does require a sincere willingness to withdraw oneself awhile from the immediate impressions of life, and to betake oneself into the realm of pure thought.The spheres of life are many and for each there develops a special science. But life itself is one, and the more the sciences strive to penetrate deeply into their separate spheres, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole. There must be one supreme science which seeks in the separate sciences the elements for leading men back once more to the fullness of life. The scientific specialist seeks in his studies to gain a knowledge of the world and its workings. This book has a philosophical aim: science itself is here infused with the life of an organic whole. The special sciences are stages on the way to this all-inclusive science. A similarrelation is found in the arts. The composer in his work employs the rules of the theory of composition. This latter is an accumulation of principles, knowledge of which is a necessary presupposition for composing. In the act of composing, the rules of theory become the servants of life, of reality. In exactly the same way philosophy is an art. All genuine philosophers have been artists in concepts. Human ideas have been the medium of their art, and scientific method their artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus gains concrete individual life. Ideas turn into life-forces. We have no longer merely a knowledge about things, but we have now made knowledge a real, self-determining organism. Our consciousness, alive and active, has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths.How philosophy, as an art, is related to freedom; what freedom is; and whether we do, or can, participate in it—these are the principal problems of my book. All other scientific discussions are put in only because they ultimately throw light on these questions which are, in my opinion, the most intimate that concern mankind. These pages offer a “Philosophy of Freedom.”All science would be nothing but the satisfaction of idle curiosity did it not strive to enhance the existential value of human personality. The true value of the sciences is seen only when we are shown the importance of their results for humanity. The final aimof an individuality can never be the cultivation of any single faculty, but only the development of all capacities which slumber within us. Knowledge has value only in so far as it contributes to the all-round unfolding of the whole nature of man.This book, therefore, does not conceive the relation between science and life in such a way that man must bow down before the world of ideas and devote his powers to its service. On the contrary, it shows that he takes possession of the world of ideas in order to use them for his human aims, which transcend those of mere science.Man must confront ideas as master, lest he become their slave.1Only the very first opening sentences (in the first edition) of this argument have been altogether omitted here, because they seem to me to-day wholly irrelevant. But the rest of the chapter seems to me even to day relevant and necessary, in spite, nay, because, of the scientific bias of contemporary thought.↑2Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.Bulwer.↑APPENDIX IIIPREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF “TRUTH AND SCIENCE”Contemporary philosophy suffers from a morbid belief in Kant. To help towards our emancipation from this belief is the aim of the present essay. It would indeed be criminal to try and minimise the debt which the development of German philosophy owes to Kant’s immortal work. But it is high time to acknowledge that the only way of laying the foundations for a truly satisfying view of the world and of human life is to put ourselves in decisive opposition to the spirit of Kant. What is it that Kant has achieved? He has shown that the transcendent ground of the world which lies beyond the data of our senses and the categories of our reason, and which his predecessors sought to determine by means of empty concepts, is inaccessible to our knowledge. From this he concluded that all our scientific thinking must keep within the limits of possible experience, and is incapable of attaining to knowledge of the transcendent and ultimate ground of the world,i.e., of the “thing-in-itself.” Butwhat if this “thing-in-itself,” this whole transcendent ground of the world, should be nothing but a fiction? It is easy to see that this is precisely what it is. An instinct inseparable from human nature impels us to search for the innermost essence of things, for their ultimate principles. It is the basis of all scientific enquiry. But, there is not the least reason to look for this ultimate groundoutsidethe world of our senses and of our spirit, unless a thorough and comprehensive examination of this world should revealwithinit elements which point unmistakably to an external cause.The present essay attempts to prove that all the principles which we need in order to explain our world and make it intelligible, are within reach of our thought. Thus, the assumption of explanatory principles lying outside our world turns out to be the prejudice of an extinct philosophy which lived on vain dogmatic fancies. This ought to have been Kant’s conclusion, too, if he had really enquired into the powers of human thought. Instead, he demonstrated in the most complicated way that the constitution of our cognitive faculties does not permit us to reach the ultimate principles which lie beyond our experience. But we have no reason whatever for positing these principles in any such Beyond. Thus Kant has indeed refuted “dogmatic” philosophy, but he has put nothing in its place. Hence, all German philosophy which succeeded Kant hasevolved everywhere in opposition to him. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel simply ignored the limits fixed by Kant for our knowledge and sought the ultimate principles, not beyond, butwithin, the world accessible to human reason. Even Schopenhauer, though he does declare the conclusions of Kant’sCritique of Pure Reasonto be eternal and irrefutable truths, cannot avoid seeking knowledge of the ultimate grounds of the world along paths widely divergent from those of his master. But the fatal mistake of all these thinkers was that they sought knowledge of ultimate truths, without having laid the foundation for such an enterprise in a preliminary investigation of the nature of knowledge itself. Hence, the proud intellectual edifices erected by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have no foundation to rest on. The lack of such foundations reacts most unfavourably upon the arguments of these thinkers. Ignorant of the importance of the world of pure ideas and of its relation to the realm of sense-perception, they built error upon error, one-sidedness upon one-sidedness. No wonder that their over-bold systems proved unable to withstand the storms of an age which recked nothing of philosophy. No wonder that many good things in these systems were pitilessly swept away along with the errors.To remedy the defect which has just been indicated is the purpose of the following investigations. They will not imitate Kant by explaining what our mindscan notknow:their aim is to show what our mindscanknow.The outcome of these investigations is that truth is not, as the current view has it, an ideal reproduction of a some real object, but a free product of the human spirit, which would not exist anywhere at all unless we ourselves produced it. It is not the task of knowledge toreproducein conceptual form something already existing independently. Its task is tocreatea wholly new realm which, united with the world of sense-data, ends by yielding us reality in the full sense. In this way, man’s supreme activity, the creative productivity of his spirit, finds its organic place in the universal world-process. Without this activity it would be impossible to conceive the world-process as a totality complete in itself. Man does not confront the world-process as a passive spectator who merely copies in his mind the events which occur, without his participation, in the cosmos without. He is an active co-creator in the world-process, and his knowledge is the most perfect member of the organism of the universe.This view carries with it an important consequence for our conduct, for our moral ideals. These, too, must be regarded, not as copies of an external standard, but as rooted within us. Similarly, we refuse to look upon our moral laws as the behests of any power outside us. We know no “categorical imperative” which, like a voice from the Beyond, prescribes to us what to do or to leave undone. Our moralideals are our own free creations. All we have to do is to carry out what we prescribe to ourselves as the norm of our conduct. Thus, the concept of truth as a free act leads to a theory of morals based on the concept of a perfectlyfree personality.These theses, of course, are valid only for that part of our conduct the laws of which our thinking penetrates with complete comprehension. So long as the laws of our conduct are merely natural motives or remain obscure to our conceptual thinking, it may be possible from a higher spiritual level to perceive how far they are founded in our individuality, but we ourselves experience them as influencing us from without, as compelling us to action. Every time that we succeed in penetrating such a motive with clear understanding, we make a fresh conquest in the realm of freedom.The relation of these views to the theory of Eduard von Hartmann, who is the most significant figure in contemporary philosophy, will be made clear to the reader in detail in the course of this essay, especially as regards the problem of knowledge.A prelude to aPhilosophy of Spiritual Activity—this is what the present essay offers. That philosophy itself, completely worked out, will shortly follow.The ultimate aim of all science is to increase the value of existence for human personality. Whoever does not devote himself to science with this aim in view is merely modellinghimself in his own work upon some master. If he “researches,” it is merely because that happens to be what he has been taught to do. But not for him is the title of a “free thinker.”The sciences are seen in their true value only when philosophy explains the human significance of their results. To make a contribution to such an explanation was my aim. But, perhaps, our present-day science scorns all philosophical vindication! If so, two things are certain. One is that this essay of mine is superfluous. The other is that modern thinkers are lost in the wood and do not know what they want.In concluding this Preface, I cannot omit a personal observation. Up to now I have expounded all my philosophical views on the basis of Goethe’s world-view, into which I was first introduced by my dear and revered teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, who to me stands in the very forefront of Goethe-students, because his gaze is ever focussed beyond the particular upon the universal Ideas.But, with this essay I hope to have shown that the edifice of my thought is a whole which has its foundations in itself and which does not need to be derived from Goethe’s world-view. My theories, as they are here set forth and as they will presently be amplified in thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activity, have grown up in the course of many years. Nothing but a deep sense of gratitude leads me to add that the affectionate sympathy of the Spechtfamily in Vienna, during the period when I was the tutor of its children, provided me with an environment, than which I could not have wished a better, for the development of my ideas. In the same spirit, I would add, further, that I owe to the stimulating conversations with my very dear friend, Miss Rosa Mayreder, of Vienna, the mood which I needed for putting into final form many of the thoughts which I have sketched provisionally as germs of myPhilosophy of Spiritual Activity. Her own literary efforts, which express the sensitive and high-minded nature of a true artist, are likely before long to be presented to the public.Vienna, December, 1891.APPENDIX IVINTRODUCTION TO ORIGINAL EDITION OF “TRUTH AND SCIENCE”The aim of the following discussions is to reduce the act of cognition, by analysis, to its ultimate elements and thus to discover a correct formulation of the problem of knowledge and a way to its solution. They criticise all theories of knowledge which are based on Kant’s line of thought, in order to show that along this road no solution of the problem of knowledge can ever be found. It is, however, due to the fundamental spade-work which Volkelt has done in his thorough examination of the concept of experience,1to acknowledge that without his preliminary labours the precise determination, which I have here attempted of the concept of theGivenwould have been very much more difficult. However, we are cherishing the hope that we have laid the foundations for our emancipation from the Subjectivism which attaches to all theories of knowledge thatstart from Kant. We believe ourselves to have achieved this emancipation through showing that the subjective form, in which the picture of the world presents itself to the act of cognition, prior to its elaboration by science, is nothing but a necessary stage of transition which is overcome in the very process of knowledge itself. For us, experience, so-called, which Positivism and Neo-Kantianism would like to represent as the only thing which is certain, is precisely the most subjective of all. In demonstrating this, we also show thatObjective Idealismis the inevitable conclusion of a theory of knowledge which understands itself. It differs from the metaphysical and absolute Idealism of Hegel in this, that it seeks in the subject of knowledge the ground for the diremption of reality into givenexistenceandconcept, and that it looks for the reconciliation of this divorce, not in an objective world-dialectic, but in the subjective process of cognition. The present writer has already once before advocated this point of view in print, viz., in theOutlines of a Theory of Knowledge(Berlin and Stuttgart, 1885). However, that book differs essentially inmethodfrom the present essay, and it also lacks the analytic reduction of knowledge to its ultimate elements.1Erfahrung und Denken, Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, von Johannes Volkelt (Hamburg und Leipzig, 1886).↑

APPENDICESAPPENDIX IADDITION TO THE REVISED EDITION OF “THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM,” 1918.Various criticisms on the part of philosophers with which this book met immediately upon its publication, induce me to add to this Revised Edition the following brief statement.I can well understand that there are readers who are interested in the rest of the book, but who will look upon what follows as a tissue of abstract concepts which to them is irrelevant and makes no appeal. They may, if they choose, leave this brief statement unread. But in philosophy problems present themselves which have their origin rather in certain prejudices on the thinker’s part than in the natural progression of normal human thinking. With the main body of this book it seems to me to be the duty of every one to concern himself, who is striving for clearness about the essential nature of man and his relation to the world. What follows is rather a problem the discussion of which certain philosophers demand as necessary to a treatment of the topics of this book, because these philosophers, by their wholeway of thinking, have created certain difficulties which do not otherwise occur. If I were to pass by these problems entirely, certain people would be quick to accuse me of dilettantism, etc. The impression would thus be created that the author of the views set down in this book has not thought out his position with regard to these problems because he has not discussed them in his book.The problem to which I refer is this: there are thinkers who find a particular difficulty in understanding how another mind can act on one’s own. They say: the world of my consciousness is a closed circle within me; so is the world of another’s consciousness within him. I cannot look into the world of another’s mind. How, then, do I know that he and I are in a common world? The theory according to which we can from the conscious world infer an unconscious world which never can enter consciousness, attempts to solve this difficulty as follows. The world, it says, which I have in my consciousness is the representation in me of a real world to which my consciousness has no access. In this transcendent world exist the unknown agents which cause the world in my consciousness. In it, too, exists my own real self, of which likewise I have only a representation in my consciousness. In it, lastly, exists the essential self of the fellow-man who confronts me. Whatever passes in the consciousness of my fellow-man corresponds to a reality in his transcendent essence which isindependent of his consciousness. His essential nature acts in that realm which, on this theory, is equally beyond consciousness. Thus an impression is made in my consciousness which represents there what is present in another’s consciousness and wholly beyond the reach of my direct awareness. Clearly the point of this theory is to add to the world accessible to my consciousness an hypothetical world which is to my immediate experience inaccessible. This is done to avoid the supposed alternative of having to say that the external world, which I regard as existing before me, is nothing but the world of my consciousness, with the absurd—solipsistic—corollary that other persons likewise exist only within my consciousness.Several epistemological tendencies in recent speculation have joined in creating this problem. But it is possible to attain to clearness about it by surveying the situation from the point of view of spiritual perception which underlies the exposition of this book. What is it that, in the first instance, I have before me when I confront another person? To begin with, there is the sensuous appearance of the other’s body, as given in perception. To this we might add the auditory perception of what he is saying, and so forth. All this I apprehend, not with a passive stare, but by the activity of my thinking which is set in motion. Through the thinking with which I now confront the other person, the percept of him becomes, as it were, psychically transparent. As my thinkingapprehends the percept, I am compelled to judge that what I perceive is really quite other than it appears to the outer senses. The sensuous appearance, in being what it immediately is, reveals something else which it is mediately. In presenting itself to me as a distinct object, it, at the same time, extinguishes itself as a mere sensuous appearance. But in thus extinguishing itself it reveals a character which, so long as it affects me, compels me as a thinking being to extinguish my own thinking and to put its thinking in the place of mine. Its thinking is then apprehended by my thinking as an experience like my own. Thus I have really perceived another’s thinking. For the immediate percept, in extinguishing itself as sensuous appearance, is apprehended by my thinking. It is a profess which passes wholly in my consciousness and consists in this, that the other’s thinking takes the place of my thinking. The self-extinction of the sensuous appearance actually abolishes the separation between the spheres of the two consciousnesses. In my own consciousness this fusion manifests itself in that, so long as I experience the contents of the other’s consciousness, I am aware of my own consciousness as little as I am aware of it in dreamless sleep. Just as my waking consciousness is eliminated from the latter, so are the contents of my own consciousness eliminated from my perception of the contents of another’s consciousness. Two things tend to deceive us about the true facts.The first is that, in perceiving another person, the extinction of the contents of one’s own consciousness is replaced not, as in sleep, by unconsciousness, but by the contents of the other’s consciousness. The other is that my consciousness of my own self oscillates so rapidly between extinction and recurrence, that these alternations usually escape observation. The whole problem is to be solved, not through artificial construction of concepts, involving an inference from what is in consciousness to what always must transcend consciousness, but through genuine experience of the connection between thinking and perceiving. The same remark applies to many other problems which appear in philosophical literature. Philosophers should seek the road to unprejudiced spiritual observation, instead of hiding reality behind an artificial frontage of concepts.In a monograph by Eduard von Hartmann on “The Ultimate Problems of Epistemology and Metaphysics” (in theZeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Vol. 108, p. 55), myPhilosophy of Spiritual Activityhas been classed with the philosophical tendency which seeks to build upon an “epistemological Monism.” Eduard von Hartmann rejects this position as untenable, for the following reasons. According to the point of view maintained in his monograph, there are only three possible positions in the theory of knowledge. The first consists in remaining true to the naïve point of view, which regards objects ofsense-perception as real things existing outside the human mind. This, urges Von Hartmann, implies a lack of critical reflection. I fail to realise that with all my contents of consciousness I remain imprisoned in my own consciousness. I fail to perceive that I am dealing, not with a “table-in-itself,” but only with a phenomenon in my own consciousness. If I stop at this point of view, or if for whatever reasons I return to it, I am a Naïve Realist. But this whole position is untenable, for it ignores that consciousness has no other objects than its own contents. The second position consists in appreciating this situation and confessing it to oneself. As a result, I become a Transcendental Idealist. As such, says Von Hartmann, I am obliged to deny that a “thing-in-itself” can ever appear in any way within the human mind. But, if developed with unflinching consistency, this view ends in Absolute Illusionism. For the world which confronts me is now transformed into a mere sum of contents of consciousness, and, moreover, of contents of my private consciousness. The objects of other human minds, too, I am then compelled to conceive—absurdly enough—as present solely in my own consciousness. Hence, the only tenable position, according to Von Hartmann, is the third, viz., Transcendental Realism. On this view, there are “things-in-themselves,” but consciousness can have no dealings with them by way of immediate experience. Existing beyond thesphere of human consciousness, they cause, in a way of which we remain unconscious, the appearance of objects in consciousness. These “things-in-themselves” are known only by inference from the contents of consciousness, which are immediately experienced but for that very reason, purely ideal. Eduard von Hartmann maintains in the monograph cited above, that “epistemological Monism”—for such he takes my point of view to be—is bound to declare itself identical with one or other of the above three positions; and that its failure to do so is due only to its inconsistency in not drawing the actual consequences of its presuppositions. The monograph goes on to say: “If we want to find out which epistemological position a so-called Epistemological Monist occupies, all we have to do is to put to him certain questions and compel him to answer them. For, out of his own initiative, no Monist will condescend to state his views on these points, and likewise he will seek to dodge in every way giving a straight answer to our questions, because every answer he may give will betray that Epistemological Monism does not differ from one or other of the three positions. Our questions are the following: (1) Are things continuous or intermittent in their existence? If the answer is ‘continuous,’ we have before us some one of the forms of Naïve Realism. If the answer is ‘intermittent,’ we have Transcendental Idealism. But if the answer is: ‘They are, on theone hand, continuous, viz., as contents of the Absolute Mind, or as unconscious ideas, or as permanent possibilities of perception, but, on the other hand, intermittent, viz., as contents of finite consciousness,’ we recognise Transcendental Realism. (2) When three persons are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there? The Naïve Realist answers ‘one’; the Transcendental Idealist answers ‘three’; but the Transcendental Realist answers ‘four.’ This last answer does, indeed, presuppose that it is legitimate to group together in the single question, ‘How many tables?’ things so unlike each other as the one table which is the ‘thing-in-itself’ and the three tables which are the objects of perception in the three perceivers’ minds. If this seems too great a licence to anyone, he will have to answer ‘one and three,’ instead of ‘four.’ (3) When two persons are alone together in a room, how many distinct persons are there? If you answer ‘two’—you are a Naïve Realist. If you answer ‘four,’ viz., in each of the two minds one ‘I’ and one ‘Other,’ you are a Transcendental Idealist. If you answer ‘six,’ viz., two persons as ‘things-in-themselves’ and four persons as ideal objects in the two minds, you are a Transcendental Realist. In order to show that Epistemological Monism is not one of these three positions, we should have to give other answers than the above to each of these three questions. But I cannot imagine what answersthese could be.” The answers of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activitywould have to be: (1) Whoever apprehends only what he perceives of a thing and mistakes these percepts for the reality of the thing, is a Naïve Realist. He does not realise that, strictly, he ought to regard these perceptual contents as existing only so long as he is looking at the objects, so that he ought to conceive the objects before him as intermittent. As soon, however, as it becomes clear to him that reality is to be met with only in the percepts which are organised by thinking, he attains to the insight that the percepts which appear as intermittent events, reveal themselves as continuously in existence as soon as they are interpreted by the constructions of thought. Hence continuity of existence must be predicated of the contents of perception which living thought has organised. Only that part which is only perceived, not thought, would have to be regarded as intermittent if—which is not the case—there were such a part. (2) When three persons are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there? There is only one table. But so long as the three persons stop short at their perceptual images, they ought to say: “These percepts are not the reality at all.” As soon as they pass on to the table as apprehended by thinking, there is revealed to them the one real table. They are then united with their three contents of consciousness in this one reality. (3) When two persons are alonetogether in a room, how many distinct persons are there? Most assuredly there are not six—not even in the sense of the Transcendental Realist’s theory—but only two. Only, at first, each person has nothing but the unreal percept of himself and of the other person. There are four such percepts, the presence of which in the minds of the two persons is the stimulus for the apprehension of reality by their thinking. In this activity of thinking each of the two persons transcends the sphere of his own consciousness. A living awareness of the consciousness of the other person as well as of his own arises in each. In these moments of living awareness the persons are as little imprisoned within their consciousness as they are in sleep. But at other moments consciousness of this identification with the other returns, so that each person, in the experience of thinking, apprehends consciously both himself and the other person. I know that a Transcendental Realist describes this view as a relapse into Naïve Realism. But, then, I have already pointed out in this book that Naïve Realism retains its justification for our thinking as we actually experience it. The Transcendental Realist ignores the true situation in the process of cognition completely. He cuts himself off from the facts by a tissue of concepts and entangles himself in it. Moreover, the Monism which appears in thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityought not to be labelled “epistemological,” but, if an epithet is wanted,then a “Monism of Thought.” All this has been misunderstood by Eduard von Hartmann. Ignoring all that is specific in the argumentation of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activity, he has charged me with having attempted to combine Hegel’s Universalistic Panlogism with Hume’s Individualistic Phenomenalism (Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 108, p. 71, note). But, in truth, thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityhas nothing whatever to do with the two positions which it is accused of trying to combine. (This, too, is the reason why I could feel no interest in polemics against,e.g., theEpistemological Monismof Johannes Rehmke. The point of view of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityis simply quite different from what Eduard von Hartmann and others call “Epistemological Monism.”)APPENDIX IIREVISED INTRODUCTION TO “PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM.”The following chapter reproduces, in all essentials, the pages which stood as a sort of “Introduction” in the first edition of this book. Inasmuch as it rather reflects the mood out of which I composed this book twenty-five years ago, than has any direct bearing on its contents, I print it here as an “Appendix.” I do not want to omit it altogether, because the suggestion keeps cropping up that I want to suppress some of my earlier writings on account of my later works on spiritual matters.Our age is one which is unwilling to seek truth anywhere but in the depths of human nature.1Of the following two well-known paths described by Schiller, it is the second which will to-day be found most useful:Wahrheit suchen wir beide, du aussen im Leben, ich innenIn dem Herzen, und so findet sie jeder gewiss.Ist das Auge gesund, sobegegnetes aussen dem SchöpferIst es das Herz, dann gewiss spiegelt es innen die Welt.2A truth which comes to us from without bears ever the stamp of uncertainty. Conviction attaches only to what appears as truth to each of us in our own hearts.Truth alone can give us confidence in developing our powers. He who is tortured by doubts finds his powers lamed. In a world the riddle of which baffles him, he can find no aim for his activity.We no longer want to believe; we want to know. Belief demands the acceptance of truths which we do not wholly comprehend. But the individuality which seeks to experience everything in the depths of its own being, is repelled by what it cannot understand. Only that knowledge will satisfy us which springs from the inner life of the personality, and submits itself to no external norm.Again, we do not want any knowledge which has encased itself once and for all in hide-bound formulas, and which is preserved in Encyclopædias valid for all time. Each of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand, from his own immediateexperiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty in knowledge, but each in his own way.Our scientific theories, too, are no longer to be formulated as if we were unconditionally compelled to accept them. None of us would wish to give a scientific work a title like Fichte’sA Pellucid Account for the General Public concerning the Real Nature of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Compel the Readers to Understand.Nowadays there is no attempt to compel anyone to understand. We claim no agreement from anyone whom a distinct individual need does not drive to a certain view. We do not seek nowadays to cram facts of knowledge even into the immature human being, the child. We seek rather to develop his faculties in such a way that his understanding may depend no longer on our compulsion, but on his will. I am under no illusion concerning the characteristics of the present age. I know how many flaunt a manner of life which lacks all individuality and follows only the prevailing fashion. But I know also that many of my contemporaries strive to order their lives in the direction of the principles I have indicated. To them I would dedicate this book. It does not pretend to offer the “only possible” way to Truth, it only describes the path chosen by one whose heart is set upon Truth.The reader will be led at first into somewhatabstract regions, where thought must draw sharp outlines, if it is to reach secure conclusions. But he will also be led out of these arid concepts into concrete life. I am fully convinced that one cannot do without soaring into the ethereal realm of abstraction, if one’s experience is to penetrate life in all directions. He who is limited to the pleasures of the senses misses the sweetest enjoyments of life. The Oriental sages make their disciples live for years a life of resignation and asceticism before they impart to them their own wisdom. The Western world no longer demands pious exercises and ascetic practices as a preparation for science, but it does require a sincere willingness to withdraw oneself awhile from the immediate impressions of life, and to betake oneself into the realm of pure thought.The spheres of life are many and for each there develops a special science. But life itself is one, and the more the sciences strive to penetrate deeply into their separate spheres, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole. There must be one supreme science which seeks in the separate sciences the elements for leading men back once more to the fullness of life. The scientific specialist seeks in his studies to gain a knowledge of the world and its workings. This book has a philosophical aim: science itself is here infused with the life of an organic whole. The special sciences are stages on the way to this all-inclusive science. A similarrelation is found in the arts. The composer in his work employs the rules of the theory of composition. This latter is an accumulation of principles, knowledge of which is a necessary presupposition for composing. In the act of composing, the rules of theory become the servants of life, of reality. In exactly the same way philosophy is an art. All genuine philosophers have been artists in concepts. Human ideas have been the medium of their art, and scientific method their artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus gains concrete individual life. Ideas turn into life-forces. We have no longer merely a knowledge about things, but we have now made knowledge a real, self-determining organism. Our consciousness, alive and active, has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths.How philosophy, as an art, is related to freedom; what freedom is; and whether we do, or can, participate in it—these are the principal problems of my book. All other scientific discussions are put in only because they ultimately throw light on these questions which are, in my opinion, the most intimate that concern mankind. These pages offer a “Philosophy of Freedom.”All science would be nothing but the satisfaction of idle curiosity did it not strive to enhance the existential value of human personality. The true value of the sciences is seen only when we are shown the importance of their results for humanity. The final aimof an individuality can never be the cultivation of any single faculty, but only the development of all capacities which slumber within us. Knowledge has value only in so far as it contributes to the all-round unfolding of the whole nature of man.This book, therefore, does not conceive the relation between science and life in such a way that man must bow down before the world of ideas and devote his powers to its service. On the contrary, it shows that he takes possession of the world of ideas in order to use them for his human aims, which transcend those of mere science.Man must confront ideas as master, lest he become their slave.1Only the very first opening sentences (in the first edition) of this argument have been altogether omitted here, because they seem to me to-day wholly irrelevant. But the rest of the chapter seems to me even to day relevant and necessary, in spite, nay, because, of the scientific bias of contemporary thought.↑2Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.Bulwer.↑APPENDIX IIIPREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF “TRUTH AND SCIENCE”Contemporary philosophy suffers from a morbid belief in Kant. To help towards our emancipation from this belief is the aim of the present essay. It would indeed be criminal to try and minimise the debt which the development of German philosophy owes to Kant’s immortal work. But it is high time to acknowledge that the only way of laying the foundations for a truly satisfying view of the world and of human life is to put ourselves in decisive opposition to the spirit of Kant. What is it that Kant has achieved? He has shown that the transcendent ground of the world which lies beyond the data of our senses and the categories of our reason, and which his predecessors sought to determine by means of empty concepts, is inaccessible to our knowledge. From this he concluded that all our scientific thinking must keep within the limits of possible experience, and is incapable of attaining to knowledge of the transcendent and ultimate ground of the world,i.e., of the “thing-in-itself.” Butwhat if this “thing-in-itself,” this whole transcendent ground of the world, should be nothing but a fiction? It is easy to see that this is precisely what it is. An instinct inseparable from human nature impels us to search for the innermost essence of things, for their ultimate principles. It is the basis of all scientific enquiry. But, there is not the least reason to look for this ultimate groundoutsidethe world of our senses and of our spirit, unless a thorough and comprehensive examination of this world should revealwithinit elements which point unmistakably to an external cause.The present essay attempts to prove that all the principles which we need in order to explain our world and make it intelligible, are within reach of our thought. Thus, the assumption of explanatory principles lying outside our world turns out to be the prejudice of an extinct philosophy which lived on vain dogmatic fancies. This ought to have been Kant’s conclusion, too, if he had really enquired into the powers of human thought. Instead, he demonstrated in the most complicated way that the constitution of our cognitive faculties does not permit us to reach the ultimate principles which lie beyond our experience. But we have no reason whatever for positing these principles in any such Beyond. Thus Kant has indeed refuted “dogmatic” philosophy, but he has put nothing in its place. Hence, all German philosophy which succeeded Kant hasevolved everywhere in opposition to him. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel simply ignored the limits fixed by Kant for our knowledge and sought the ultimate principles, not beyond, butwithin, the world accessible to human reason. Even Schopenhauer, though he does declare the conclusions of Kant’sCritique of Pure Reasonto be eternal and irrefutable truths, cannot avoid seeking knowledge of the ultimate grounds of the world along paths widely divergent from those of his master. But the fatal mistake of all these thinkers was that they sought knowledge of ultimate truths, without having laid the foundation for such an enterprise in a preliminary investigation of the nature of knowledge itself. Hence, the proud intellectual edifices erected by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have no foundation to rest on. The lack of such foundations reacts most unfavourably upon the arguments of these thinkers. Ignorant of the importance of the world of pure ideas and of its relation to the realm of sense-perception, they built error upon error, one-sidedness upon one-sidedness. No wonder that their over-bold systems proved unable to withstand the storms of an age which recked nothing of philosophy. No wonder that many good things in these systems were pitilessly swept away along with the errors.To remedy the defect which has just been indicated is the purpose of the following investigations. They will not imitate Kant by explaining what our mindscan notknow:their aim is to show what our mindscanknow.The outcome of these investigations is that truth is not, as the current view has it, an ideal reproduction of a some real object, but a free product of the human spirit, which would not exist anywhere at all unless we ourselves produced it. It is not the task of knowledge toreproducein conceptual form something already existing independently. Its task is tocreatea wholly new realm which, united with the world of sense-data, ends by yielding us reality in the full sense. In this way, man’s supreme activity, the creative productivity of his spirit, finds its organic place in the universal world-process. Without this activity it would be impossible to conceive the world-process as a totality complete in itself. Man does not confront the world-process as a passive spectator who merely copies in his mind the events which occur, without his participation, in the cosmos without. He is an active co-creator in the world-process, and his knowledge is the most perfect member of the organism of the universe.This view carries with it an important consequence for our conduct, for our moral ideals. These, too, must be regarded, not as copies of an external standard, but as rooted within us. Similarly, we refuse to look upon our moral laws as the behests of any power outside us. We know no “categorical imperative” which, like a voice from the Beyond, prescribes to us what to do or to leave undone. Our moralideals are our own free creations. All we have to do is to carry out what we prescribe to ourselves as the norm of our conduct. Thus, the concept of truth as a free act leads to a theory of morals based on the concept of a perfectlyfree personality.These theses, of course, are valid only for that part of our conduct the laws of which our thinking penetrates with complete comprehension. So long as the laws of our conduct are merely natural motives or remain obscure to our conceptual thinking, it may be possible from a higher spiritual level to perceive how far they are founded in our individuality, but we ourselves experience them as influencing us from without, as compelling us to action. Every time that we succeed in penetrating such a motive with clear understanding, we make a fresh conquest in the realm of freedom.The relation of these views to the theory of Eduard von Hartmann, who is the most significant figure in contemporary philosophy, will be made clear to the reader in detail in the course of this essay, especially as regards the problem of knowledge.A prelude to aPhilosophy of Spiritual Activity—this is what the present essay offers. That philosophy itself, completely worked out, will shortly follow.The ultimate aim of all science is to increase the value of existence for human personality. Whoever does not devote himself to science with this aim in view is merely modellinghimself in his own work upon some master. If he “researches,” it is merely because that happens to be what he has been taught to do. But not for him is the title of a “free thinker.”The sciences are seen in their true value only when philosophy explains the human significance of their results. To make a contribution to such an explanation was my aim. But, perhaps, our present-day science scorns all philosophical vindication! If so, two things are certain. One is that this essay of mine is superfluous. The other is that modern thinkers are lost in the wood and do not know what they want.In concluding this Preface, I cannot omit a personal observation. Up to now I have expounded all my philosophical views on the basis of Goethe’s world-view, into which I was first introduced by my dear and revered teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, who to me stands in the very forefront of Goethe-students, because his gaze is ever focussed beyond the particular upon the universal Ideas.But, with this essay I hope to have shown that the edifice of my thought is a whole which has its foundations in itself and which does not need to be derived from Goethe’s world-view. My theories, as they are here set forth and as they will presently be amplified in thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activity, have grown up in the course of many years. Nothing but a deep sense of gratitude leads me to add that the affectionate sympathy of the Spechtfamily in Vienna, during the period when I was the tutor of its children, provided me with an environment, than which I could not have wished a better, for the development of my ideas. In the same spirit, I would add, further, that I owe to the stimulating conversations with my very dear friend, Miss Rosa Mayreder, of Vienna, the mood which I needed for putting into final form many of the thoughts which I have sketched provisionally as germs of myPhilosophy of Spiritual Activity. Her own literary efforts, which express the sensitive and high-minded nature of a true artist, are likely before long to be presented to the public.Vienna, December, 1891.APPENDIX IVINTRODUCTION TO ORIGINAL EDITION OF “TRUTH AND SCIENCE”The aim of the following discussions is to reduce the act of cognition, by analysis, to its ultimate elements and thus to discover a correct formulation of the problem of knowledge and a way to its solution. They criticise all theories of knowledge which are based on Kant’s line of thought, in order to show that along this road no solution of the problem of knowledge can ever be found. It is, however, due to the fundamental spade-work which Volkelt has done in his thorough examination of the concept of experience,1to acknowledge that without his preliminary labours the precise determination, which I have here attempted of the concept of theGivenwould have been very much more difficult. However, we are cherishing the hope that we have laid the foundations for our emancipation from the Subjectivism which attaches to all theories of knowledge thatstart from Kant. We believe ourselves to have achieved this emancipation through showing that the subjective form, in which the picture of the world presents itself to the act of cognition, prior to its elaboration by science, is nothing but a necessary stage of transition which is overcome in the very process of knowledge itself. For us, experience, so-called, which Positivism and Neo-Kantianism would like to represent as the only thing which is certain, is precisely the most subjective of all. In demonstrating this, we also show thatObjective Idealismis the inevitable conclusion of a theory of knowledge which understands itself. It differs from the metaphysical and absolute Idealism of Hegel in this, that it seeks in the subject of knowledge the ground for the diremption of reality into givenexistenceandconcept, and that it looks for the reconciliation of this divorce, not in an objective world-dialectic, but in the subjective process of cognition. The present writer has already once before advocated this point of view in print, viz., in theOutlines of a Theory of Knowledge(Berlin and Stuttgart, 1885). However, that book differs essentially inmethodfrom the present essay, and it also lacks the analytic reduction of knowledge to its ultimate elements.1Erfahrung und Denken, Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, von Johannes Volkelt (Hamburg und Leipzig, 1886).↑

APPENDIX IADDITION TO THE REVISED EDITION OF “THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM,” 1918.Various criticisms on the part of philosophers with which this book met immediately upon its publication, induce me to add to this Revised Edition the following brief statement.I can well understand that there are readers who are interested in the rest of the book, but who will look upon what follows as a tissue of abstract concepts which to them is irrelevant and makes no appeal. They may, if they choose, leave this brief statement unread. But in philosophy problems present themselves which have their origin rather in certain prejudices on the thinker’s part than in the natural progression of normal human thinking. With the main body of this book it seems to me to be the duty of every one to concern himself, who is striving for clearness about the essential nature of man and his relation to the world. What follows is rather a problem the discussion of which certain philosophers demand as necessary to a treatment of the topics of this book, because these philosophers, by their wholeway of thinking, have created certain difficulties which do not otherwise occur. If I were to pass by these problems entirely, certain people would be quick to accuse me of dilettantism, etc. The impression would thus be created that the author of the views set down in this book has not thought out his position with regard to these problems because he has not discussed them in his book.The problem to which I refer is this: there are thinkers who find a particular difficulty in understanding how another mind can act on one’s own. They say: the world of my consciousness is a closed circle within me; so is the world of another’s consciousness within him. I cannot look into the world of another’s mind. How, then, do I know that he and I are in a common world? The theory according to which we can from the conscious world infer an unconscious world which never can enter consciousness, attempts to solve this difficulty as follows. The world, it says, which I have in my consciousness is the representation in me of a real world to which my consciousness has no access. In this transcendent world exist the unknown agents which cause the world in my consciousness. In it, too, exists my own real self, of which likewise I have only a representation in my consciousness. In it, lastly, exists the essential self of the fellow-man who confronts me. Whatever passes in the consciousness of my fellow-man corresponds to a reality in his transcendent essence which isindependent of his consciousness. His essential nature acts in that realm which, on this theory, is equally beyond consciousness. Thus an impression is made in my consciousness which represents there what is present in another’s consciousness and wholly beyond the reach of my direct awareness. Clearly the point of this theory is to add to the world accessible to my consciousness an hypothetical world which is to my immediate experience inaccessible. This is done to avoid the supposed alternative of having to say that the external world, which I regard as existing before me, is nothing but the world of my consciousness, with the absurd—solipsistic—corollary that other persons likewise exist only within my consciousness.Several epistemological tendencies in recent speculation have joined in creating this problem. But it is possible to attain to clearness about it by surveying the situation from the point of view of spiritual perception which underlies the exposition of this book. What is it that, in the first instance, I have before me when I confront another person? To begin with, there is the sensuous appearance of the other’s body, as given in perception. To this we might add the auditory perception of what he is saying, and so forth. All this I apprehend, not with a passive stare, but by the activity of my thinking which is set in motion. Through the thinking with which I now confront the other person, the percept of him becomes, as it were, psychically transparent. As my thinkingapprehends the percept, I am compelled to judge that what I perceive is really quite other than it appears to the outer senses. The sensuous appearance, in being what it immediately is, reveals something else which it is mediately. In presenting itself to me as a distinct object, it, at the same time, extinguishes itself as a mere sensuous appearance. But in thus extinguishing itself it reveals a character which, so long as it affects me, compels me as a thinking being to extinguish my own thinking and to put its thinking in the place of mine. Its thinking is then apprehended by my thinking as an experience like my own. Thus I have really perceived another’s thinking. For the immediate percept, in extinguishing itself as sensuous appearance, is apprehended by my thinking. It is a profess which passes wholly in my consciousness and consists in this, that the other’s thinking takes the place of my thinking. The self-extinction of the sensuous appearance actually abolishes the separation between the spheres of the two consciousnesses. In my own consciousness this fusion manifests itself in that, so long as I experience the contents of the other’s consciousness, I am aware of my own consciousness as little as I am aware of it in dreamless sleep. Just as my waking consciousness is eliminated from the latter, so are the contents of my own consciousness eliminated from my perception of the contents of another’s consciousness. Two things tend to deceive us about the true facts.The first is that, in perceiving another person, the extinction of the contents of one’s own consciousness is replaced not, as in sleep, by unconsciousness, but by the contents of the other’s consciousness. The other is that my consciousness of my own self oscillates so rapidly between extinction and recurrence, that these alternations usually escape observation. The whole problem is to be solved, not through artificial construction of concepts, involving an inference from what is in consciousness to what always must transcend consciousness, but through genuine experience of the connection between thinking and perceiving. The same remark applies to many other problems which appear in philosophical literature. Philosophers should seek the road to unprejudiced spiritual observation, instead of hiding reality behind an artificial frontage of concepts.In a monograph by Eduard von Hartmann on “The Ultimate Problems of Epistemology and Metaphysics” (in theZeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Vol. 108, p. 55), myPhilosophy of Spiritual Activityhas been classed with the philosophical tendency which seeks to build upon an “epistemological Monism.” Eduard von Hartmann rejects this position as untenable, for the following reasons. According to the point of view maintained in his monograph, there are only three possible positions in the theory of knowledge. The first consists in remaining true to the naïve point of view, which regards objects ofsense-perception as real things existing outside the human mind. This, urges Von Hartmann, implies a lack of critical reflection. I fail to realise that with all my contents of consciousness I remain imprisoned in my own consciousness. I fail to perceive that I am dealing, not with a “table-in-itself,” but only with a phenomenon in my own consciousness. If I stop at this point of view, or if for whatever reasons I return to it, I am a Naïve Realist. But this whole position is untenable, for it ignores that consciousness has no other objects than its own contents. The second position consists in appreciating this situation and confessing it to oneself. As a result, I become a Transcendental Idealist. As such, says Von Hartmann, I am obliged to deny that a “thing-in-itself” can ever appear in any way within the human mind. But, if developed with unflinching consistency, this view ends in Absolute Illusionism. For the world which confronts me is now transformed into a mere sum of contents of consciousness, and, moreover, of contents of my private consciousness. The objects of other human minds, too, I am then compelled to conceive—absurdly enough—as present solely in my own consciousness. Hence, the only tenable position, according to Von Hartmann, is the third, viz., Transcendental Realism. On this view, there are “things-in-themselves,” but consciousness can have no dealings with them by way of immediate experience. Existing beyond thesphere of human consciousness, they cause, in a way of which we remain unconscious, the appearance of objects in consciousness. These “things-in-themselves” are known only by inference from the contents of consciousness, which are immediately experienced but for that very reason, purely ideal. Eduard von Hartmann maintains in the monograph cited above, that “epistemological Monism”—for such he takes my point of view to be—is bound to declare itself identical with one or other of the above three positions; and that its failure to do so is due only to its inconsistency in not drawing the actual consequences of its presuppositions. The monograph goes on to say: “If we want to find out which epistemological position a so-called Epistemological Monist occupies, all we have to do is to put to him certain questions and compel him to answer them. For, out of his own initiative, no Monist will condescend to state his views on these points, and likewise he will seek to dodge in every way giving a straight answer to our questions, because every answer he may give will betray that Epistemological Monism does not differ from one or other of the three positions. Our questions are the following: (1) Are things continuous or intermittent in their existence? If the answer is ‘continuous,’ we have before us some one of the forms of Naïve Realism. If the answer is ‘intermittent,’ we have Transcendental Idealism. But if the answer is: ‘They are, on theone hand, continuous, viz., as contents of the Absolute Mind, or as unconscious ideas, or as permanent possibilities of perception, but, on the other hand, intermittent, viz., as contents of finite consciousness,’ we recognise Transcendental Realism. (2) When three persons are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there? The Naïve Realist answers ‘one’; the Transcendental Idealist answers ‘three’; but the Transcendental Realist answers ‘four.’ This last answer does, indeed, presuppose that it is legitimate to group together in the single question, ‘How many tables?’ things so unlike each other as the one table which is the ‘thing-in-itself’ and the three tables which are the objects of perception in the three perceivers’ minds. If this seems too great a licence to anyone, he will have to answer ‘one and three,’ instead of ‘four.’ (3) When two persons are alone together in a room, how many distinct persons are there? If you answer ‘two’—you are a Naïve Realist. If you answer ‘four,’ viz., in each of the two minds one ‘I’ and one ‘Other,’ you are a Transcendental Idealist. If you answer ‘six,’ viz., two persons as ‘things-in-themselves’ and four persons as ideal objects in the two minds, you are a Transcendental Realist. In order to show that Epistemological Monism is not one of these three positions, we should have to give other answers than the above to each of these three questions. But I cannot imagine what answersthese could be.” The answers of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activitywould have to be: (1) Whoever apprehends only what he perceives of a thing and mistakes these percepts for the reality of the thing, is a Naïve Realist. He does not realise that, strictly, he ought to regard these perceptual contents as existing only so long as he is looking at the objects, so that he ought to conceive the objects before him as intermittent. As soon, however, as it becomes clear to him that reality is to be met with only in the percepts which are organised by thinking, he attains to the insight that the percepts which appear as intermittent events, reveal themselves as continuously in existence as soon as they are interpreted by the constructions of thought. Hence continuity of existence must be predicated of the contents of perception which living thought has organised. Only that part which is only perceived, not thought, would have to be regarded as intermittent if—which is not the case—there were such a part. (2) When three persons are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there? There is only one table. But so long as the three persons stop short at their perceptual images, they ought to say: “These percepts are not the reality at all.” As soon as they pass on to the table as apprehended by thinking, there is revealed to them the one real table. They are then united with their three contents of consciousness in this one reality. (3) When two persons are alonetogether in a room, how many distinct persons are there? Most assuredly there are not six—not even in the sense of the Transcendental Realist’s theory—but only two. Only, at first, each person has nothing but the unreal percept of himself and of the other person. There are four such percepts, the presence of which in the minds of the two persons is the stimulus for the apprehension of reality by their thinking. In this activity of thinking each of the two persons transcends the sphere of his own consciousness. A living awareness of the consciousness of the other person as well as of his own arises in each. In these moments of living awareness the persons are as little imprisoned within their consciousness as they are in sleep. But at other moments consciousness of this identification with the other returns, so that each person, in the experience of thinking, apprehends consciously both himself and the other person. I know that a Transcendental Realist describes this view as a relapse into Naïve Realism. But, then, I have already pointed out in this book that Naïve Realism retains its justification for our thinking as we actually experience it. The Transcendental Realist ignores the true situation in the process of cognition completely. He cuts himself off from the facts by a tissue of concepts and entangles himself in it. Moreover, the Monism which appears in thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityought not to be labelled “epistemological,” but, if an epithet is wanted,then a “Monism of Thought.” All this has been misunderstood by Eduard von Hartmann. Ignoring all that is specific in the argumentation of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activity, he has charged me with having attempted to combine Hegel’s Universalistic Panlogism with Hume’s Individualistic Phenomenalism (Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 108, p. 71, note). But, in truth, thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityhas nothing whatever to do with the two positions which it is accused of trying to combine. (This, too, is the reason why I could feel no interest in polemics against,e.g., theEpistemological Monismof Johannes Rehmke. The point of view of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityis simply quite different from what Eduard von Hartmann and others call “Epistemological Monism.”)

APPENDIX IADDITION TO THE REVISED EDITION OF “THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM,” 1918.

Various criticisms on the part of philosophers with which this book met immediately upon its publication, induce me to add to this Revised Edition the following brief statement.I can well understand that there are readers who are interested in the rest of the book, but who will look upon what follows as a tissue of abstract concepts which to them is irrelevant and makes no appeal. They may, if they choose, leave this brief statement unread. But in philosophy problems present themselves which have their origin rather in certain prejudices on the thinker’s part than in the natural progression of normal human thinking. With the main body of this book it seems to me to be the duty of every one to concern himself, who is striving for clearness about the essential nature of man and his relation to the world. What follows is rather a problem the discussion of which certain philosophers demand as necessary to a treatment of the topics of this book, because these philosophers, by their wholeway of thinking, have created certain difficulties which do not otherwise occur. If I were to pass by these problems entirely, certain people would be quick to accuse me of dilettantism, etc. The impression would thus be created that the author of the views set down in this book has not thought out his position with regard to these problems because he has not discussed them in his book.The problem to which I refer is this: there are thinkers who find a particular difficulty in understanding how another mind can act on one’s own. They say: the world of my consciousness is a closed circle within me; so is the world of another’s consciousness within him. I cannot look into the world of another’s mind. How, then, do I know that he and I are in a common world? The theory according to which we can from the conscious world infer an unconscious world which never can enter consciousness, attempts to solve this difficulty as follows. The world, it says, which I have in my consciousness is the representation in me of a real world to which my consciousness has no access. In this transcendent world exist the unknown agents which cause the world in my consciousness. In it, too, exists my own real self, of which likewise I have only a representation in my consciousness. In it, lastly, exists the essential self of the fellow-man who confronts me. Whatever passes in the consciousness of my fellow-man corresponds to a reality in his transcendent essence which isindependent of his consciousness. His essential nature acts in that realm which, on this theory, is equally beyond consciousness. Thus an impression is made in my consciousness which represents there what is present in another’s consciousness and wholly beyond the reach of my direct awareness. Clearly the point of this theory is to add to the world accessible to my consciousness an hypothetical world which is to my immediate experience inaccessible. This is done to avoid the supposed alternative of having to say that the external world, which I regard as existing before me, is nothing but the world of my consciousness, with the absurd—solipsistic—corollary that other persons likewise exist only within my consciousness.Several epistemological tendencies in recent speculation have joined in creating this problem. But it is possible to attain to clearness about it by surveying the situation from the point of view of spiritual perception which underlies the exposition of this book. What is it that, in the first instance, I have before me when I confront another person? To begin with, there is the sensuous appearance of the other’s body, as given in perception. To this we might add the auditory perception of what he is saying, and so forth. All this I apprehend, not with a passive stare, but by the activity of my thinking which is set in motion. Through the thinking with which I now confront the other person, the percept of him becomes, as it were, psychically transparent. As my thinkingapprehends the percept, I am compelled to judge that what I perceive is really quite other than it appears to the outer senses. The sensuous appearance, in being what it immediately is, reveals something else which it is mediately. In presenting itself to me as a distinct object, it, at the same time, extinguishes itself as a mere sensuous appearance. But in thus extinguishing itself it reveals a character which, so long as it affects me, compels me as a thinking being to extinguish my own thinking and to put its thinking in the place of mine. Its thinking is then apprehended by my thinking as an experience like my own. Thus I have really perceived another’s thinking. For the immediate percept, in extinguishing itself as sensuous appearance, is apprehended by my thinking. It is a profess which passes wholly in my consciousness and consists in this, that the other’s thinking takes the place of my thinking. The self-extinction of the sensuous appearance actually abolishes the separation between the spheres of the two consciousnesses. In my own consciousness this fusion manifests itself in that, so long as I experience the contents of the other’s consciousness, I am aware of my own consciousness as little as I am aware of it in dreamless sleep. Just as my waking consciousness is eliminated from the latter, so are the contents of my own consciousness eliminated from my perception of the contents of another’s consciousness. Two things tend to deceive us about the true facts.The first is that, in perceiving another person, the extinction of the contents of one’s own consciousness is replaced not, as in sleep, by unconsciousness, but by the contents of the other’s consciousness. The other is that my consciousness of my own self oscillates so rapidly between extinction and recurrence, that these alternations usually escape observation. The whole problem is to be solved, not through artificial construction of concepts, involving an inference from what is in consciousness to what always must transcend consciousness, but through genuine experience of the connection between thinking and perceiving. The same remark applies to many other problems which appear in philosophical literature. Philosophers should seek the road to unprejudiced spiritual observation, instead of hiding reality behind an artificial frontage of concepts.In a monograph by Eduard von Hartmann on “The Ultimate Problems of Epistemology and Metaphysics” (in theZeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Vol. 108, p. 55), myPhilosophy of Spiritual Activityhas been classed with the philosophical tendency which seeks to build upon an “epistemological Monism.” Eduard von Hartmann rejects this position as untenable, for the following reasons. According to the point of view maintained in his monograph, there are only three possible positions in the theory of knowledge. The first consists in remaining true to the naïve point of view, which regards objects ofsense-perception as real things existing outside the human mind. This, urges Von Hartmann, implies a lack of critical reflection. I fail to realise that with all my contents of consciousness I remain imprisoned in my own consciousness. I fail to perceive that I am dealing, not with a “table-in-itself,” but only with a phenomenon in my own consciousness. If I stop at this point of view, or if for whatever reasons I return to it, I am a Naïve Realist. But this whole position is untenable, for it ignores that consciousness has no other objects than its own contents. The second position consists in appreciating this situation and confessing it to oneself. As a result, I become a Transcendental Idealist. As such, says Von Hartmann, I am obliged to deny that a “thing-in-itself” can ever appear in any way within the human mind. But, if developed with unflinching consistency, this view ends in Absolute Illusionism. For the world which confronts me is now transformed into a mere sum of contents of consciousness, and, moreover, of contents of my private consciousness. The objects of other human minds, too, I am then compelled to conceive—absurdly enough—as present solely in my own consciousness. Hence, the only tenable position, according to Von Hartmann, is the third, viz., Transcendental Realism. On this view, there are “things-in-themselves,” but consciousness can have no dealings with them by way of immediate experience. Existing beyond thesphere of human consciousness, they cause, in a way of which we remain unconscious, the appearance of objects in consciousness. These “things-in-themselves” are known only by inference from the contents of consciousness, which are immediately experienced but for that very reason, purely ideal. Eduard von Hartmann maintains in the monograph cited above, that “epistemological Monism”—for such he takes my point of view to be—is bound to declare itself identical with one or other of the above three positions; and that its failure to do so is due only to its inconsistency in not drawing the actual consequences of its presuppositions. The monograph goes on to say: “If we want to find out which epistemological position a so-called Epistemological Monist occupies, all we have to do is to put to him certain questions and compel him to answer them. For, out of his own initiative, no Monist will condescend to state his views on these points, and likewise he will seek to dodge in every way giving a straight answer to our questions, because every answer he may give will betray that Epistemological Monism does not differ from one or other of the three positions. Our questions are the following: (1) Are things continuous or intermittent in their existence? If the answer is ‘continuous,’ we have before us some one of the forms of Naïve Realism. If the answer is ‘intermittent,’ we have Transcendental Idealism. But if the answer is: ‘They are, on theone hand, continuous, viz., as contents of the Absolute Mind, or as unconscious ideas, or as permanent possibilities of perception, but, on the other hand, intermittent, viz., as contents of finite consciousness,’ we recognise Transcendental Realism. (2) When three persons are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there? The Naïve Realist answers ‘one’; the Transcendental Idealist answers ‘three’; but the Transcendental Realist answers ‘four.’ This last answer does, indeed, presuppose that it is legitimate to group together in the single question, ‘How many tables?’ things so unlike each other as the one table which is the ‘thing-in-itself’ and the three tables which are the objects of perception in the three perceivers’ minds. If this seems too great a licence to anyone, he will have to answer ‘one and three,’ instead of ‘four.’ (3) When two persons are alone together in a room, how many distinct persons are there? If you answer ‘two’—you are a Naïve Realist. If you answer ‘four,’ viz., in each of the two minds one ‘I’ and one ‘Other,’ you are a Transcendental Idealist. If you answer ‘six,’ viz., two persons as ‘things-in-themselves’ and four persons as ideal objects in the two minds, you are a Transcendental Realist. In order to show that Epistemological Monism is not one of these three positions, we should have to give other answers than the above to each of these three questions. But I cannot imagine what answersthese could be.” The answers of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activitywould have to be: (1) Whoever apprehends only what he perceives of a thing and mistakes these percepts for the reality of the thing, is a Naïve Realist. He does not realise that, strictly, he ought to regard these perceptual contents as existing only so long as he is looking at the objects, so that he ought to conceive the objects before him as intermittent. As soon, however, as it becomes clear to him that reality is to be met with only in the percepts which are organised by thinking, he attains to the insight that the percepts which appear as intermittent events, reveal themselves as continuously in existence as soon as they are interpreted by the constructions of thought. Hence continuity of existence must be predicated of the contents of perception which living thought has organised. Only that part which is only perceived, not thought, would have to be regarded as intermittent if—which is not the case—there were such a part. (2) When three persons are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there? There is only one table. But so long as the three persons stop short at their perceptual images, they ought to say: “These percepts are not the reality at all.” As soon as they pass on to the table as apprehended by thinking, there is revealed to them the one real table. They are then united with their three contents of consciousness in this one reality. (3) When two persons are alonetogether in a room, how many distinct persons are there? Most assuredly there are not six—not even in the sense of the Transcendental Realist’s theory—but only two. Only, at first, each person has nothing but the unreal percept of himself and of the other person. There are four such percepts, the presence of which in the minds of the two persons is the stimulus for the apprehension of reality by their thinking. In this activity of thinking each of the two persons transcends the sphere of his own consciousness. A living awareness of the consciousness of the other person as well as of his own arises in each. In these moments of living awareness the persons are as little imprisoned within their consciousness as they are in sleep. But at other moments consciousness of this identification with the other returns, so that each person, in the experience of thinking, apprehends consciously both himself and the other person. I know that a Transcendental Realist describes this view as a relapse into Naïve Realism. But, then, I have already pointed out in this book that Naïve Realism retains its justification for our thinking as we actually experience it. The Transcendental Realist ignores the true situation in the process of cognition completely. He cuts himself off from the facts by a tissue of concepts and entangles himself in it. Moreover, the Monism which appears in thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityought not to be labelled “epistemological,” but, if an epithet is wanted,then a “Monism of Thought.” All this has been misunderstood by Eduard von Hartmann. Ignoring all that is specific in the argumentation of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activity, he has charged me with having attempted to combine Hegel’s Universalistic Panlogism with Hume’s Individualistic Phenomenalism (Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 108, p. 71, note). But, in truth, thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityhas nothing whatever to do with the two positions which it is accused of trying to combine. (This, too, is the reason why I could feel no interest in polemics against,e.g., theEpistemological Monismof Johannes Rehmke. The point of view of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityis simply quite different from what Eduard von Hartmann and others call “Epistemological Monism.”)

Various criticisms on the part of philosophers with which this book met immediately upon its publication, induce me to add to this Revised Edition the following brief statement.

I can well understand that there are readers who are interested in the rest of the book, but who will look upon what follows as a tissue of abstract concepts which to them is irrelevant and makes no appeal. They may, if they choose, leave this brief statement unread. But in philosophy problems present themselves which have their origin rather in certain prejudices on the thinker’s part than in the natural progression of normal human thinking. With the main body of this book it seems to me to be the duty of every one to concern himself, who is striving for clearness about the essential nature of man and his relation to the world. What follows is rather a problem the discussion of which certain philosophers demand as necessary to a treatment of the topics of this book, because these philosophers, by their wholeway of thinking, have created certain difficulties which do not otherwise occur. If I were to pass by these problems entirely, certain people would be quick to accuse me of dilettantism, etc. The impression would thus be created that the author of the views set down in this book has not thought out his position with regard to these problems because he has not discussed them in his book.

The problem to which I refer is this: there are thinkers who find a particular difficulty in understanding how another mind can act on one’s own. They say: the world of my consciousness is a closed circle within me; so is the world of another’s consciousness within him. I cannot look into the world of another’s mind. How, then, do I know that he and I are in a common world? The theory according to which we can from the conscious world infer an unconscious world which never can enter consciousness, attempts to solve this difficulty as follows. The world, it says, which I have in my consciousness is the representation in me of a real world to which my consciousness has no access. In this transcendent world exist the unknown agents which cause the world in my consciousness. In it, too, exists my own real self, of which likewise I have only a representation in my consciousness. In it, lastly, exists the essential self of the fellow-man who confronts me. Whatever passes in the consciousness of my fellow-man corresponds to a reality in his transcendent essence which isindependent of his consciousness. His essential nature acts in that realm which, on this theory, is equally beyond consciousness. Thus an impression is made in my consciousness which represents there what is present in another’s consciousness and wholly beyond the reach of my direct awareness. Clearly the point of this theory is to add to the world accessible to my consciousness an hypothetical world which is to my immediate experience inaccessible. This is done to avoid the supposed alternative of having to say that the external world, which I regard as existing before me, is nothing but the world of my consciousness, with the absurd—solipsistic—corollary that other persons likewise exist only within my consciousness.

Several epistemological tendencies in recent speculation have joined in creating this problem. But it is possible to attain to clearness about it by surveying the situation from the point of view of spiritual perception which underlies the exposition of this book. What is it that, in the first instance, I have before me when I confront another person? To begin with, there is the sensuous appearance of the other’s body, as given in perception. To this we might add the auditory perception of what he is saying, and so forth. All this I apprehend, not with a passive stare, but by the activity of my thinking which is set in motion. Through the thinking with which I now confront the other person, the percept of him becomes, as it were, psychically transparent. As my thinkingapprehends the percept, I am compelled to judge that what I perceive is really quite other than it appears to the outer senses. The sensuous appearance, in being what it immediately is, reveals something else which it is mediately. In presenting itself to me as a distinct object, it, at the same time, extinguishes itself as a mere sensuous appearance. But in thus extinguishing itself it reveals a character which, so long as it affects me, compels me as a thinking being to extinguish my own thinking and to put its thinking in the place of mine. Its thinking is then apprehended by my thinking as an experience like my own. Thus I have really perceived another’s thinking. For the immediate percept, in extinguishing itself as sensuous appearance, is apprehended by my thinking. It is a profess which passes wholly in my consciousness and consists in this, that the other’s thinking takes the place of my thinking. The self-extinction of the sensuous appearance actually abolishes the separation between the spheres of the two consciousnesses. In my own consciousness this fusion manifests itself in that, so long as I experience the contents of the other’s consciousness, I am aware of my own consciousness as little as I am aware of it in dreamless sleep. Just as my waking consciousness is eliminated from the latter, so are the contents of my own consciousness eliminated from my perception of the contents of another’s consciousness. Two things tend to deceive us about the true facts.The first is that, in perceiving another person, the extinction of the contents of one’s own consciousness is replaced not, as in sleep, by unconsciousness, but by the contents of the other’s consciousness. The other is that my consciousness of my own self oscillates so rapidly between extinction and recurrence, that these alternations usually escape observation. The whole problem is to be solved, not through artificial construction of concepts, involving an inference from what is in consciousness to what always must transcend consciousness, but through genuine experience of the connection between thinking and perceiving. The same remark applies to many other problems which appear in philosophical literature. Philosophers should seek the road to unprejudiced spiritual observation, instead of hiding reality behind an artificial frontage of concepts.

In a monograph by Eduard von Hartmann on “The Ultimate Problems of Epistemology and Metaphysics” (in theZeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, Vol. 108, p. 55), myPhilosophy of Spiritual Activityhas been classed with the philosophical tendency which seeks to build upon an “epistemological Monism.” Eduard von Hartmann rejects this position as untenable, for the following reasons. According to the point of view maintained in his monograph, there are only three possible positions in the theory of knowledge. The first consists in remaining true to the naïve point of view, which regards objects ofsense-perception as real things existing outside the human mind. This, urges Von Hartmann, implies a lack of critical reflection. I fail to realise that with all my contents of consciousness I remain imprisoned in my own consciousness. I fail to perceive that I am dealing, not with a “table-in-itself,” but only with a phenomenon in my own consciousness. If I stop at this point of view, or if for whatever reasons I return to it, I am a Naïve Realist. But this whole position is untenable, for it ignores that consciousness has no other objects than its own contents. The second position consists in appreciating this situation and confessing it to oneself. As a result, I become a Transcendental Idealist. As such, says Von Hartmann, I am obliged to deny that a “thing-in-itself” can ever appear in any way within the human mind. But, if developed with unflinching consistency, this view ends in Absolute Illusionism. For the world which confronts me is now transformed into a mere sum of contents of consciousness, and, moreover, of contents of my private consciousness. The objects of other human minds, too, I am then compelled to conceive—absurdly enough—as present solely in my own consciousness. Hence, the only tenable position, according to Von Hartmann, is the third, viz., Transcendental Realism. On this view, there are “things-in-themselves,” but consciousness can have no dealings with them by way of immediate experience. Existing beyond thesphere of human consciousness, they cause, in a way of which we remain unconscious, the appearance of objects in consciousness. These “things-in-themselves” are known only by inference from the contents of consciousness, which are immediately experienced but for that very reason, purely ideal. Eduard von Hartmann maintains in the monograph cited above, that “epistemological Monism”—for such he takes my point of view to be—is bound to declare itself identical with one or other of the above three positions; and that its failure to do so is due only to its inconsistency in not drawing the actual consequences of its presuppositions. The monograph goes on to say: “If we want to find out which epistemological position a so-called Epistemological Monist occupies, all we have to do is to put to him certain questions and compel him to answer them. For, out of his own initiative, no Monist will condescend to state his views on these points, and likewise he will seek to dodge in every way giving a straight answer to our questions, because every answer he may give will betray that Epistemological Monism does not differ from one or other of the three positions. Our questions are the following: (1) Are things continuous or intermittent in their existence? If the answer is ‘continuous,’ we have before us some one of the forms of Naïve Realism. If the answer is ‘intermittent,’ we have Transcendental Idealism. But if the answer is: ‘They are, on theone hand, continuous, viz., as contents of the Absolute Mind, or as unconscious ideas, or as permanent possibilities of perception, but, on the other hand, intermittent, viz., as contents of finite consciousness,’ we recognise Transcendental Realism. (2) When three persons are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there? The Naïve Realist answers ‘one’; the Transcendental Idealist answers ‘three’; but the Transcendental Realist answers ‘four.’ This last answer does, indeed, presuppose that it is legitimate to group together in the single question, ‘How many tables?’ things so unlike each other as the one table which is the ‘thing-in-itself’ and the three tables which are the objects of perception in the three perceivers’ minds. If this seems too great a licence to anyone, he will have to answer ‘one and three,’ instead of ‘four.’ (3) When two persons are alone together in a room, how many distinct persons are there? If you answer ‘two’—you are a Naïve Realist. If you answer ‘four,’ viz., in each of the two minds one ‘I’ and one ‘Other,’ you are a Transcendental Idealist. If you answer ‘six,’ viz., two persons as ‘things-in-themselves’ and four persons as ideal objects in the two minds, you are a Transcendental Realist. In order to show that Epistemological Monism is not one of these three positions, we should have to give other answers than the above to each of these three questions. But I cannot imagine what answersthese could be.” The answers of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activitywould have to be: (1) Whoever apprehends only what he perceives of a thing and mistakes these percepts for the reality of the thing, is a Naïve Realist. He does not realise that, strictly, he ought to regard these perceptual contents as existing only so long as he is looking at the objects, so that he ought to conceive the objects before him as intermittent. As soon, however, as it becomes clear to him that reality is to be met with only in the percepts which are organised by thinking, he attains to the insight that the percepts which appear as intermittent events, reveal themselves as continuously in existence as soon as they are interpreted by the constructions of thought. Hence continuity of existence must be predicated of the contents of perception which living thought has organised. Only that part which is only perceived, not thought, would have to be regarded as intermittent if—which is not the case—there were such a part. (2) When three persons are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there? There is only one table. But so long as the three persons stop short at their perceptual images, they ought to say: “These percepts are not the reality at all.” As soon as they pass on to the table as apprehended by thinking, there is revealed to them the one real table. They are then united with their three contents of consciousness in this one reality. (3) When two persons are alonetogether in a room, how many distinct persons are there? Most assuredly there are not six—not even in the sense of the Transcendental Realist’s theory—but only two. Only, at first, each person has nothing but the unreal percept of himself and of the other person. There are four such percepts, the presence of which in the minds of the two persons is the stimulus for the apprehension of reality by their thinking. In this activity of thinking each of the two persons transcends the sphere of his own consciousness. A living awareness of the consciousness of the other person as well as of his own arises in each. In these moments of living awareness the persons are as little imprisoned within their consciousness as they are in sleep. But at other moments consciousness of this identification with the other returns, so that each person, in the experience of thinking, apprehends consciously both himself and the other person. I know that a Transcendental Realist describes this view as a relapse into Naïve Realism. But, then, I have already pointed out in this book that Naïve Realism retains its justification for our thinking as we actually experience it. The Transcendental Realist ignores the true situation in the process of cognition completely. He cuts himself off from the facts by a tissue of concepts and entangles himself in it. Moreover, the Monism which appears in thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityought not to be labelled “epistemological,” but, if an epithet is wanted,then a “Monism of Thought.” All this has been misunderstood by Eduard von Hartmann. Ignoring all that is specific in the argumentation of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activity, he has charged me with having attempted to combine Hegel’s Universalistic Panlogism with Hume’s Individualistic Phenomenalism (Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 108, p. 71, note). But, in truth, thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityhas nothing whatever to do with the two positions which it is accused of trying to combine. (This, too, is the reason why I could feel no interest in polemics against,e.g., theEpistemological Monismof Johannes Rehmke. The point of view of thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activityis simply quite different from what Eduard von Hartmann and others call “Epistemological Monism.”)

APPENDIX IIREVISED INTRODUCTION TO “PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM.”The following chapter reproduces, in all essentials, the pages which stood as a sort of “Introduction” in the first edition of this book. Inasmuch as it rather reflects the mood out of which I composed this book twenty-five years ago, than has any direct bearing on its contents, I print it here as an “Appendix.” I do not want to omit it altogether, because the suggestion keeps cropping up that I want to suppress some of my earlier writings on account of my later works on spiritual matters.Our age is one which is unwilling to seek truth anywhere but in the depths of human nature.1Of the following two well-known paths described by Schiller, it is the second which will to-day be found most useful:Wahrheit suchen wir beide, du aussen im Leben, ich innenIn dem Herzen, und so findet sie jeder gewiss.Ist das Auge gesund, sobegegnetes aussen dem SchöpferIst es das Herz, dann gewiss spiegelt es innen die Welt.2A truth which comes to us from without bears ever the stamp of uncertainty. Conviction attaches only to what appears as truth to each of us in our own hearts.Truth alone can give us confidence in developing our powers. He who is tortured by doubts finds his powers lamed. In a world the riddle of which baffles him, he can find no aim for his activity.We no longer want to believe; we want to know. Belief demands the acceptance of truths which we do not wholly comprehend. But the individuality which seeks to experience everything in the depths of its own being, is repelled by what it cannot understand. Only that knowledge will satisfy us which springs from the inner life of the personality, and submits itself to no external norm.Again, we do not want any knowledge which has encased itself once and for all in hide-bound formulas, and which is preserved in Encyclopædias valid for all time. Each of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand, from his own immediateexperiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty in knowledge, but each in his own way.Our scientific theories, too, are no longer to be formulated as if we were unconditionally compelled to accept them. None of us would wish to give a scientific work a title like Fichte’sA Pellucid Account for the General Public concerning the Real Nature of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Compel the Readers to Understand.Nowadays there is no attempt to compel anyone to understand. We claim no agreement from anyone whom a distinct individual need does not drive to a certain view. We do not seek nowadays to cram facts of knowledge even into the immature human being, the child. We seek rather to develop his faculties in such a way that his understanding may depend no longer on our compulsion, but on his will. I am under no illusion concerning the characteristics of the present age. I know how many flaunt a manner of life which lacks all individuality and follows only the prevailing fashion. But I know also that many of my contemporaries strive to order their lives in the direction of the principles I have indicated. To them I would dedicate this book. It does not pretend to offer the “only possible” way to Truth, it only describes the path chosen by one whose heart is set upon Truth.The reader will be led at first into somewhatabstract regions, where thought must draw sharp outlines, if it is to reach secure conclusions. But he will also be led out of these arid concepts into concrete life. I am fully convinced that one cannot do without soaring into the ethereal realm of abstraction, if one’s experience is to penetrate life in all directions. He who is limited to the pleasures of the senses misses the sweetest enjoyments of life. The Oriental sages make their disciples live for years a life of resignation and asceticism before they impart to them their own wisdom. The Western world no longer demands pious exercises and ascetic practices as a preparation for science, but it does require a sincere willingness to withdraw oneself awhile from the immediate impressions of life, and to betake oneself into the realm of pure thought.The spheres of life are many and for each there develops a special science. But life itself is one, and the more the sciences strive to penetrate deeply into their separate spheres, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole. There must be one supreme science which seeks in the separate sciences the elements for leading men back once more to the fullness of life. The scientific specialist seeks in his studies to gain a knowledge of the world and its workings. This book has a philosophical aim: science itself is here infused with the life of an organic whole. The special sciences are stages on the way to this all-inclusive science. A similarrelation is found in the arts. The composer in his work employs the rules of the theory of composition. This latter is an accumulation of principles, knowledge of which is a necessary presupposition for composing. In the act of composing, the rules of theory become the servants of life, of reality. In exactly the same way philosophy is an art. All genuine philosophers have been artists in concepts. Human ideas have been the medium of their art, and scientific method their artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus gains concrete individual life. Ideas turn into life-forces. We have no longer merely a knowledge about things, but we have now made knowledge a real, self-determining organism. Our consciousness, alive and active, has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths.How philosophy, as an art, is related to freedom; what freedom is; and whether we do, or can, participate in it—these are the principal problems of my book. All other scientific discussions are put in only because they ultimately throw light on these questions which are, in my opinion, the most intimate that concern mankind. These pages offer a “Philosophy of Freedom.”All science would be nothing but the satisfaction of idle curiosity did it not strive to enhance the existential value of human personality. The true value of the sciences is seen only when we are shown the importance of their results for humanity. The final aimof an individuality can never be the cultivation of any single faculty, but only the development of all capacities which slumber within us. Knowledge has value only in so far as it contributes to the all-round unfolding of the whole nature of man.This book, therefore, does not conceive the relation between science and life in such a way that man must bow down before the world of ideas and devote his powers to its service. On the contrary, it shows that he takes possession of the world of ideas in order to use them for his human aims, which transcend those of mere science.Man must confront ideas as master, lest he become their slave.1Only the very first opening sentences (in the first edition) of this argument have been altogether omitted here, because they seem to me to-day wholly irrelevant. But the rest of the chapter seems to me even to day relevant and necessary, in spite, nay, because, of the scientific bias of contemporary thought.↑2Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.Bulwer.↑

APPENDIX IIREVISED INTRODUCTION TO “PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM.”

The following chapter reproduces, in all essentials, the pages which stood as a sort of “Introduction” in the first edition of this book. Inasmuch as it rather reflects the mood out of which I composed this book twenty-five years ago, than has any direct bearing on its contents, I print it here as an “Appendix.” I do not want to omit it altogether, because the suggestion keeps cropping up that I want to suppress some of my earlier writings on account of my later works on spiritual matters.Our age is one which is unwilling to seek truth anywhere but in the depths of human nature.1Of the following two well-known paths described by Schiller, it is the second which will to-day be found most useful:Wahrheit suchen wir beide, du aussen im Leben, ich innenIn dem Herzen, und so findet sie jeder gewiss.Ist das Auge gesund, sobegegnetes aussen dem SchöpferIst es das Herz, dann gewiss spiegelt es innen die Welt.2A truth which comes to us from without bears ever the stamp of uncertainty. Conviction attaches only to what appears as truth to each of us in our own hearts.Truth alone can give us confidence in developing our powers. He who is tortured by doubts finds his powers lamed. In a world the riddle of which baffles him, he can find no aim for his activity.We no longer want to believe; we want to know. Belief demands the acceptance of truths which we do not wholly comprehend. But the individuality which seeks to experience everything in the depths of its own being, is repelled by what it cannot understand. Only that knowledge will satisfy us which springs from the inner life of the personality, and submits itself to no external norm.Again, we do not want any knowledge which has encased itself once and for all in hide-bound formulas, and which is preserved in Encyclopædias valid for all time. Each of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand, from his own immediateexperiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty in knowledge, but each in his own way.Our scientific theories, too, are no longer to be formulated as if we were unconditionally compelled to accept them. None of us would wish to give a scientific work a title like Fichte’sA Pellucid Account for the General Public concerning the Real Nature of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Compel the Readers to Understand.Nowadays there is no attempt to compel anyone to understand. We claim no agreement from anyone whom a distinct individual need does not drive to a certain view. We do not seek nowadays to cram facts of knowledge even into the immature human being, the child. We seek rather to develop his faculties in such a way that his understanding may depend no longer on our compulsion, but on his will. I am under no illusion concerning the characteristics of the present age. I know how many flaunt a manner of life which lacks all individuality and follows only the prevailing fashion. But I know also that many of my contemporaries strive to order their lives in the direction of the principles I have indicated. To them I would dedicate this book. It does not pretend to offer the “only possible” way to Truth, it only describes the path chosen by one whose heart is set upon Truth.The reader will be led at first into somewhatabstract regions, where thought must draw sharp outlines, if it is to reach secure conclusions. But he will also be led out of these arid concepts into concrete life. I am fully convinced that one cannot do without soaring into the ethereal realm of abstraction, if one’s experience is to penetrate life in all directions. He who is limited to the pleasures of the senses misses the sweetest enjoyments of life. The Oriental sages make their disciples live for years a life of resignation and asceticism before they impart to them their own wisdom. The Western world no longer demands pious exercises and ascetic practices as a preparation for science, but it does require a sincere willingness to withdraw oneself awhile from the immediate impressions of life, and to betake oneself into the realm of pure thought.The spheres of life are many and for each there develops a special science. But life itself is one, and the more the sciences strive to penetrate deeply into their separate spheres, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole. There must be one supreme science which seeks in the separate sciences the elements for leading men back once more to the fullness of life. The scientific specialist seeks in his studies to gain a knowledge of the world and its workings. This book has a philosophical aim: science itself is here infused with the life of an organic whole. The special sciences are stages on the way to this all-inclusive science. A similarrelation is found in the arts. The composer in his work employs the rules of the theory of composition. This latter is an accumulation of principles, knowledge of which is a necessary presupposition for composing. In the act of composing, the rules of theory become the servants of life, of reality. In exactly the same way philosophy is an art. All genuine philosophers have been artists in concepts. Human ideas have been the medium of their art, and scientific method their artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus gains concrete individual life. Ideas turn into life-forces. We have no longer merely a knowledge about things, but we have now made knowledge a real, self-determining organism. Our consciousness, alive and active, has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths.How philosophy, as an art, is related to freedom; what freedom is; and whether we do, or can, participate in it—these are the principal problems of my book. All other scientific discussions are put in only because they ultimately throw light on these questions which are, in my opinion, the most intimate that concern mankind. These pages offer a “Philosophy of Freedom.”All science would be nothing but the satisfaction of idle curiosity did it not strive to enhance the existential value of human personality. The true value of the sciences is seen only when we are shown the importance of their results for humanity. The final aimof an individuality can never be the cultivation of any single faculty, but only the development of all capacities which slumber within us. Knowledge has value only in so far as it contributes to the all-round unfolding of the whole nature of man.This book, therefore, does not conceive the relation between science and life in such a way that man must bow down before the world of ideas and devote his powers to its service. On the contrary, it shows that he takes possession of the world of ideas in order to use them for his human aims, which transcend those of mere science.Man must confront ideas as master, lest he become their slave.

The following chapter reproduces, in all essentials, the pages which stood as a sort of “Introduction” in the first edition of this book. Inasmuch as it rather reflects the mood out of which I composed this book twenty-five years ago, than has any direct bearing on its contents, I print it here as an “Appendix.” I do not want to omit it altogether, because the suggestion keeps cropping up that I want to suppress some of my earlier writings on account of my later works on spiritual matters.

Our age is one which is unwilling to seek truth anywhere but in the depths of human nature.1Of the following two well-known paths described by Schiller, it is the second which will to-day be found most useful:

Wahrheit suchen wir beide, du aussen im Leben, ich innenIn dem Herzen, und so findet sie jeder gewiss.Ist das Auge gesund, sobegegnetes aussen dem SchöpferIst es das Herz, dann gewiss spiegelt es innen die Welt.2

Wahrheit suchen wir beide, du aussen im Leben, ich innen

In dem Herzen, und so findet sie jeder gewiss.

Ist das Auge gesund, sobegegnetes aussen dem Schöpfer

Ist es das Herz, dann gewiss spiegelt es innen die Welt.2

A truth which comes to us from without bears ever the stamp of uncertainty. Conviction attaches only to what appears as truth to each of us in our own hearts.

Truth alone can give us confidence in developing our powers. He who is tortured by doubts finds his powers lamed. In a world the riddle of which baffles him, he can find no aim for his activity.

We no longer want to believe; we want to know. Belief demands the acceptance of truths which we do not wholly comprehend. But the individuality which seeks to experience everything in the depths of its own being, is repelled by what it cannot understand. Only that knowledge will satisfy us which springs from the inner life of the personality, and submits itself to no external norm.

Again, we do not want any knowledge which has encased itself once and for all in hide-bound formulas, and which is preserved in Encyclopædias valid for all time. Each of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand, from his own immediateexperiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty in knowledge, but each in his own way.

Our scientific theories, too, are no longer to be formulated as if we were unconditionally compelled to accept them. None of us would wish to give a scientific work a title like Fichte’sA Pellucid Account for the General Public concerning the Real Nature of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Compel the Readers to Understand.Nowadays there is no attempt to compel anyone to understand. We claim no agreement from anyone whom a distinct individual need does not drive to a certain view. We do not seek nowadays to cram facts of knowledge even into the immature human being, the child. We seek rather to develop his faculties in such a way that his understanding may depend no longer on our compulsion, but on his will. I am under no illusion concerning the characteristics of the present age. I know how many flaunt a manner of life which lacks all individuality and follows only the prevailing fashion. But I know also that many of my contemporaries strive to order their lives in the direction of the principles I have indicated. To them I would dedicate this book. It does not pretend to offer the “only possible” way to Truth, it only describes the path chosen by one whose heart is set upon Truth.

The reader will be led at first into somewhatabstract regions, where thought must draw sharp outlines, if it is to reach secure conclusions. But he will also be led out of these arid concepts into concrete life. I am fully convinced that one cannot do without soaring into the ethereal realm of abstraction, if one’s experience is to penetrate life in all directions. He who is limited to the pleasures of the senses misses the sweetest enjoyments of life. The Oriental sages make their disciples live for years a life of resignation and asceticism before they impart to them their own wisdom. The Western world no longer demands pious exercises and ascetic practices as a preparation for science, but it does require a sincere willingness to withdraw oneself awhile from the immediate impressions of life, and to betake oneself into the realm of pure thought.

The spheres of life are many and for each there develops a special science. But life itself is one, and the more the sciences strive to penetrate deeply into their separate spheres, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole. There must be one supreme science which seeks in the separate sciences the elements for leading men back once more to the fullness of life. The scientific specialist seeks in his studies to gain a knowledge of the world and its workings. This book has a philosophical aim: science itself is here infused with the life of an organic whole. The special sciences are stages on the way to this all-inclusive science. A similarrelation is found in the arts. The composer in his work employs the rules of the theory of composition. This latter is an accumulation of principles, knowledge of which is a necessary presupposition for composing. In the act of composing, the rules of theory become the servants of life, of reality. In exactly the same way philosophy is an art. All genuine philosophers have been artists in concepts. Human ideas have been the medium of their art, and scientific method their artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus gains concrete individual life. Ideas turn into life-forces. We have no longer merely a knowledge about things, but we have now made knowledge a real, self-determining organism. Our consciousness, alive and active, has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths.

How philosophy, as an art, is related to freedom; what freedom is; and whether we do, or can, participate in it—these are the principal problems of my book. All other scientific discussions are put in only because they ultimately throw light on these questions which are, in my opinion, the most intimate that concern mankind. These pages offer a “Philosophy of Freedom.”

All science would be nothing but the satisfaction of idle curiosity did it not strive to enhance the existential value of human personality. The true value of the sciences is seen only when we are shown the importance of their results for humanity. The final aimof an individuality can never be the cultivation of any single faculty, but only the development of all capacities which slumber within us. Knowledge has value only in so far as it contributes to the all-round unfolding of the whole nature of man.

This book, therefore, does not conceive the relation between science and life in such a way that man must bow down before the world of ideas and devote his powers to its service. On the contrary, it shows that he takes possession of the world of ideas in order to use them for his human aims, which transcend those of mere science.

Man must confront ideas as master, lest he become their slave.

1Only the very first opening sentences (in the first edition) of this argument have been altogether omitted here, because they seem to me to-day wholly irrelevant. But the rest of the chapter seems to me even to day relevant and necessary, in spite, nay, because, of the scientific bias of contemporary thought.↑2Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.Bulwer.↑

1Only the very first opening sentences (in the first edition) of this argument have been altogether omitted here, because they seem to me to-day wholly irrelevant. But the rest of the chapter seems to me even to day relevant and necessary, in spite, nay, because, of the scientific bias of contemporary thought.↑2Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.Bulwer.↑

1Only the very first opening sentences (in the first edition) of this argument have been altogether omitted here, because they seem to me to-day wholly irrelevant. But the rest of the chapter seems to me even to day relevant and necessary, in spite, nay, because, of the scientific bias of contemporary thought.↑

2

Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.

Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.

Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.

Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.

Truth seek we both—Thou in the life without thee and around;

I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.

The healthy eye can through the world the great Creator track;

The healthy heart is but the glass which gives Creation back.

Bulwer.↑

APPENDIX IIIPREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF “TRUTH AND SCIENCE”Contemporary philosophy suffers from a morbid belief in Kant. To help towards our emancipation from this belief is the aim of the present essay. It would indeed be criminal to try and minimise the debt which the development of German philosophy owes to Kant’s immortal work. But it is high time to acknowledge that the only way of laying the foundations for a truly satisfying view of the world and of human life is to put ourselves in decisive opposition to the spirit of Kant. What is it that Kant has achieved? He has shown that the transcendent ground of the world which lies beyond the data of our senses and the categories of our reason, and which his predecessors sought to determine by means of empty concepts, is inaccessible to our knowledge. From this he concluded that all our scientific thinking must keep within the limits of possible experience, and is incapable of attaining to knowledge of the transcendent and ultimate ground of the world,i.e., of the “thing-in-itself.” Butwhat if this “thing-in-itself,” this whole transcendent ground of the world, should be nothing but a fiction? It is easy to see that this is precisely what it is. An instinct inseparable from human nature impels us to search for the innermost essence of things, for their ultimate principles. It is the basis of all scientific enquiry. But, there is not the least reason to look for this ultimate groundoutsidethe world of our senses and of our spirit, unless a thorough and comprehensive examination of this world should revealwithinit elements which point unmistakably to an external cause.The present essay attempts to prove that all the principles which we need in order to explain our world and make it intelligible, are within reach of our thought. Thus, the assumption of explanatory principles lying outside our world turns out to be the prejudice of an extinct philosophy which lived on vain dogmatic fancies. This ought to have been Kant’s conclusion, too, if he had really enquired into the powers of human thought. Instead, he demonstrated in the most complicated way that the constitution of our cognitive faculties does not permit us to reach the ultimate principles which lie beyond our experience. But we have no reason whatever for positing these principles in any such Beyond. Thus Kant has indeed refuted “dogmatic” philosophy, but he has put nothing in its place. Hence, all German philosophy which succeeded Kant hasevolved everywhere in opposition to him. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel simply ignored the limits fixed by Kant for our knowledge and sought the ultimate principles, not beyond, butwithin, the world accessible to human reason. Even Schopenhauer, though he does declare the conclusions of Kant’sCritique of Pure Reasonto be eternal and irrefutable truths, cannot avoid seeking knowledge of the ultimate grounds of the world along paths widely divergent from those of his master. But the fatal mistake of all these thinkers was that they sought knowledge of ultimate truths, without having laid the foundation for such an enterprise in a preliminary investigation of the nature of knowledge itself. Hence, the proud intellectual edifices erected by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have no foundation to rest on. The lack of such foundations reacts most unfavourably upon the arguments of these thinkers. Ignorant of the importance of the world of pure ideas and of its relation to the realm of sense-perception, they built error upon error, one-sidedness upon one-sidedness. No wonder that their over-bold systems proved unable to withstand the storms of an age which recked nothing of philosophy. No wonder that many good things in these systems were pitilessly swept away along with the errors.To remedy the defect which has just been indicated is the purpose of the following investigations. They will not imitate Kant by explaining what our mindscan notknow:their aim is to show what our mindscanknow.The outcome of these investigations is that truth is not, as the current view has it, an ideal reproduction of a some real object, but a free product of the human spirit, which would not exist anywhere at all unless we ourselves produced it. It is not the task of knowledge toreproducein conceptual form something already existing independently. Its task is tocreatea wholly new realm which, united with the world of sense-data, ends by yielding us reality in the full sense. In this way, man’s supreme activity, the creative productivity of his spirit, finds its organic place in the universal world-process. Without this activity it would be impossible to conceive the world-process as a totality complete in itself. Man does not confront the world-process as a passive spectator who merely copies in his mind the events which occur, without his participation, in the cosmos without. He is an active co-creator in the world-process, and his knowledge is the most perfect member of the organism of the universe.This view carries with it an important consequence for our conduct, for our moral ideals. These, too, must be regarded, not as copies of an external standard, but as rooted within us. Similarly, we refuse to look upon our moral laws as the behests of any power outside us. We know no “categorical imperative” which, like a voice from the Beyond, prescribes to us what to do or to leave undone. Our moralideals are our own free creations. All we have to do is to carry out what we prescribe to ourselves as the norm of our conduct. Thus, the concept of truth as a free act leads to a theory of morals based on the concept of a perfectlyfree personality.These theses, of course, are valid only for that part of our conduct the laws of which our thinking penetrates with complete comprehension. So long as the laws of our conduct are merely natural motives or remain obscure to our conceptual thinking, it may be possible from a higher spiritual level to perceive how far they are founded in our individuality, but we ourselves experience them as influencing us from without, as compelling us to action. Every time that we succeed in penetrating such a motive with clear understanding, we make a fresh conquest in the realm of freedom.The relation of these views to the theory of Eduard von Hartmann, who is the most significant figure in contemporary philosophy, will be made clear to the reader in detail in the course of this essay, especially as regards the problem of knowledge.A prelude to aPhilosophy of Spiritual Activity—this is what the present essay offers. That philosophy itself, completely worked out, will shortly follow.The ultimate aim of all science is to increase the value of existence for human personality. Whoever does not devote himself to science with this aim in view is merely modellinghimself in his own work upon some master. If he “researches,” it is merely because that happens to be what he has been taught to do. But not for him is the title of a “free thinker.”The sciences are seen in their true value only when philosophy explains the human significance of their results. To make a contribution to such an explanation was my aim. But, perhaps, our present-day science scorns all philosophical vindication! If so, two things are certain. One is that this essay of mine is superfluous. The other is that modern thinkers are lost in the wood and do not know what they want.In concluding this Preface, I cannot omit a personal observation. Up to now I have expounded all my philosophical views on the basis of Goethe’s world-view, into which I was first introduced by my dear and revered teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, who to me stands in the very forefront of Goethe-students, because his gaze is ever focussed beyond the particular upon the universal Ideas.But, with this essay I hope to have shown that the edifice of my thought is a whole which has its foundations in itself and which does not need to be derived from Goethe’s world-view. My theories, as they are here set forth and as they will presently be amplified in thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activity, have grown up in the course of many years. Nothing but a deep sense of gratitude leads me to add that the affectionate sympathy of the Spechtfamily in Vienna, during the period when I was the tutor of its children, provided me with an environment, than which I could not have wished a better, for the development of my ideas. In the same spirit, I would add, further, that I owe to the stimulating conversations with my very dear friend, Miss Rosa Mayreder, of Vienna, the mood which I needed for putting into final form many of the thoughts which I have sketched provisionally as germs of myPhilosophy of Spiritual Activity. Her own literary efforts, which express the sensitive and high-minded nature of a true artist, are likely before long to be presented to the public.Vienna, December, 1891.

APPENDIX IIIPREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF “TRUTH AND SCIENCE”

Contemporary philosophy suffers from a morbid belief in Kant. To help towards our emancipation from this belief is the aim of the present essay. It would indeed be criminal to try and minimise the debt which the development of German philosophy owes to Kant’s immortal work. But it is high time to acknowledge that the only way of laying the foundations for a truly satisfying view of the world and of human life is to put ourselves in decisive opposition to the spirit of Kant. What is it that Kant has achieved? He has shown that the transcendent ground of the world which lies beyond the data of our senses and the categories of our reason, and which his predecessors sought to determine by means of empty concepts, is inaccessible to our knowledge. From this he concluded that all our scientific thinking must keep within the limits of possible experience, and is incapable of attaining to knowledge of the transcendent and ultimate ground of the world,i.e., of the “thing-in-itself.” Butwhat if this “thing-in-itself,” this whole transcendent ground of the world, should be nothing but a fiction? It is easy to see that this is precisely what it is. An instinct inseparable from human nature impels us to search for the innermost essence of things, for their ultimate principles. It is the basis of all scientific enquiry. But, there is not the least reason to look for this ultimate groundoutsidethe world of our senses and of our spirit, unless a thorough and comprehensive examination of this world should revealwithinit elements which point unmistakably to an external cause.The present essay attempts to prove that all the principles which we need in order to explain our world and make it intelligible, are within reach of our thought. Thus, the assumption of explanatory principles lying outside our world turns out to be the prejudice of an extinct philosophy which lived on vain dogmatic fancies. This ought to have been Kant’s conclusion, too, if he had really enquired into the powers of human thought. Instead, he demonstrated in the most complicated way that the constitution of our cognitive faculties does not permit us to reach the ultimate principles which lie beyond our experience. But we have no reason whatever for positing these principles in any such Beyond. Thus Kant has indeed refuted “dogmatic” philosophy, but he has put nothing in its place. Hence, all German philosophy which succeeded Kant hasevolved everywhere in opposition to him. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel simply ignored the limits fixed by Kant for our knowledge and sought the ultimate principles, not beyond, butwithin, the world accessible to human reason. Even Schopenhauer, though he does declare the conclusions of Kant’sCritique of Pure Reasonto be eternal and irrefutable truths, cannot avoid seeking knowledge of the ultimate grounds of the world along paths widely divergent from those of his master. But the fatal mistake of all these thinkers was that they sought knowledge of ultimate truths, without having laid the foundation for such an enterprise in a preliminary investigation of the nature of knowledge itself. Hence, the proud intellectual edifices erected by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have no foundation to rest on. The lack of such foundations reacts most unfavourably upon the arguments of these thinkers. Ignorant of the importance of the world of pure ideas and of its relation to the realm of sense-perception, they built error upon error, one-sidedness upon one-sidedness. No wonder that their over-bold systems proved unable to withstand the storms of an age which recked nothing of philosophy. No wonder that many good things in these systems were pitilessly swept away along with the errors.To remedy the defect which has just been indicated is the purpose of the following investigations. They will not imitate Kant by explaining what our mindscan notknow:their aim is to show what our mindscanknow.The outcome of these investigations is that truth is not, as the current view has it, an ideal reproduction of a some real object, but a free product of the human spirit, which would not exist anywhere at all unless we ourselves produced it. It is not the task of knowledge toreproducein conceptual form something already existing independently. Its task is tocreatea wholly new realm which, united with the world of sense-data, ends by yielding us reality in the full sense. In this way, man’s supreme activity, the creative productivity of his spirit, finds its organic place in the universal world-process. Without this activity it would be impossible to conceive the world-process as a totality complete in itself. Man does not confront the world-process as a passive spectator who merely copies in his mind the events which occur, without his participation, in the cosmos without. He is an active co-creator in the world-process, and his knowledge is the most perfect member of the organism of the universe.This view carries with it an important consequence for our conduct, for our moral ideals. These, too, must be regarded, not as copies of an external standard, but as rooted within us. Similarly, we refuse to look upon our moral laws as the behests of any power outside us. We know no “categorical imperative” which, like a voice from the Beyond, prescribes to us what to do or to leave undone. Our moralideals are our own free creations. All we have to do is to carry out what we prescribe to ourselves as the norm of our conduct. Thus, the concept of truth as a free act leads to a theory of morals based on the concept of a perfectlyfree personality.These theses, of course, are valid only for that part of our conduct the laws of which our thinking penetrates with complete comprehension. So long as the laws of our conduct are merely natural motives or remain obscure to our conceptual thinking, it may be possible from a higher spiritual level to perceive how far they are founded in our individuality, but we ourselves experience them as influencing us from without, as compelling us to action. Every time that we succeed in penetrating such a motive with clear understanding, we make a fresh conquest in the realm of freedom.The relation of these views to the theory of Eduard von Hartmann, who is the most significant figure in contemporary philosophy, will be made clear to the reader in detail in the course of this essay, especially as regards the problem of knowledge.A prelude to aPhilosophy of Spiritual Activity—this is what the present essay offers. That philosophy itself, completely worked out, will shortly follow.The ultimate aim of all science is to increase the value of existence for human personality. Whoever does not devote himself to science with this aim in view is merely modellinghimself in his own work upon some master. If he “researches,” it is merely because that happens to be what he has been taught to do. But not for him is the title of a “free thinker.”The sciences are seen in their true value only when philosophy explains the human significance of their results. To make a contribution to such an explanation was my aim. But, perhaps, our present-day science scorns all philosophical vindication! If so, two things are certain. One is that this essay of mine is superfluous. The other is that modern thinkers are lost in the wood and do not know what they want.In concluding this Preface, I cannot omit a personal observation. Up to now I have expounded all my philosophical views on the basis of Goethe’s world-view, into which I was first introduced by my dear and revered teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, who to me stands in the very forefront of Goethe-students, because his gaze is ever focussed beyond the particular upon the universal Ideas.But, with this essay I hope to have shown that the edifice of my thought is a whole which has its foundations in itself and which does not need to be derived from Goethe’s world-view. My theories, as they are here set forth and as they will presently be amplified in thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activity, have grown up in the course of many years. Nothing but a deep sense of gratitude leads me to add that the affectionate sympathy of the Spechtfamily in Vienna, during the period when I was the tutor of its children, provided me with an environment, than which I could not have wished a better, for the development of my ideas. In the same spirit, I would add, further, that I owe to the stimulating conversations with my very dear friend, Miss Rosa Mayreder, of Vienna, the mood which I needed for putting into final form many of the thoughts which I have sketched provisionally as germs of myPhilosophy of Spiritual Activity. Her own literary efforts, which express the sensitive and high-minded nature of a true artist, are likely before long to be presented to the public.Vienna, December, 1891.

Contemporary philosophy suffers from a morbid belief in Kant. To help towards our emancipation from this belief is the aim of the present essay. It would indeed be criminal to try and minimise the debt which the development of German philosophy owes to Kant’s immortal work. But it is high time to acknowledge that the only way of laying the foundations for a truly satisfying view of the world and of human life is to put ourselves in decisive opposition to the spirit of Kant. What is it that Kant has achieved? He has shown that the transcendent ground of the world which lies beyond the data of our senses and the categories of our reason, and which his predecessors sought to determine by means of empty concepts, is inaccessible to our knowledge. From this he concluded that all our scientific thinking must keep within the limits of possible experience, and is incapable of attaining to knowledge of the transcendent and ultimate ground of the world,i.e., of the “thing-in-itself.” Butwhat if this “thing-in-itself,” this whole transcendent ground of the world, should be nothing but a fiction? It is easy to see that this is precisely what it is. An instinct inseparable from human nature impels us to search for the innermost essence of things, for their ultimate principles. It is the basis of all scientific enquiry. But, there is not the least reason to look for this ultimate groundoutsidethe world of our senses and of our spirit, unless a thorough and comprehensive examination of this world should revealwithinit elements which point unmistakably to an external cause.

The present essay attempts to prove that all the principles which we need in order to explain our world and make it intelligible, are within reach of our thought. Thus, the assumption of explanatory principles lying outside our world turns out to be the prejudice of an extinct philosophy which lived on vain dogmatic fancies. This ought to have been Kant’s conclusion, too, if he had really enquired into the powers of human thought. Instead, he demonstrated in the most complicated way that the constitution of our cognitive faculties does not permit us to reach the ultimate principles which lie beyond our experience. But we have no reason whatever for positing these principles in any such Beyond. Thus Kant has indeed refuted “dogmatic” philosophy, but he has put nothing in its place. Hence, all German philosophy which succeeded Kant hasevolved everywhere in opposition to him. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel simply ignored the limits fixed by Kant for our knowledge and sought the ultimate principles, not beyond, butwithin, the world accessible to human reason. Even Schopenhauer, though he does declare the conclusions of Kant’sCritique of Pure Reasonto be eternal and irrefutable truths, cannot avoid seeking knowledge of the ultimate grounds of the world along paths widely divergent from those of his master. But the fatal mistake of all these thinkers was that they sought knowledge of ultimate truths, without having laid the foundation for such an enterprise in a preliminary investigation of the nature of knowledge itself. Hence, the proud intellectual edifices erected by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have no foundation to rest on. The lack of such foundations reacts most unfavourably upon the arguments of these thinkers. Ignorant of the importance of the world of pure ideas and of its relation to the realm of sense-perception, they built error upon error, one-sidedness upon one-sidedness. No wonder that their over-bold systems proved unable to withstand the storms of an age which recked nothing of philosophy. No wonder that many good things in these systems were pitilessly swept away along with the errors.

To remedy the defect which has just been indicated is the purpose of the following investigations. They will not imitate Kant by explaining what our mindscan notknow:their aim is to show what our mindscanknow.

The outcome of these investigations is that truth is not, as the current view has it, an ideal reproduction of a some real object, but a free product of the human spirit, which would not exist anywhere at all unless we ourselves produced it. It is not the task of knowledge toreproducein conceptual form something already existing independently. Its task is tocreatea wholly new realm which, united with the world of sense-data, ends by yielding us reality in the full sense. In this way, man’s supreme activity, the creative productivity of his spirit, finds its organic place in the universal world-process. Without this activity it would be impossible to conceive the world-process as a totality complete in itself. Man does not confront the world-process as a passive spectator who merely copies in his mind the events which occur, without his participation, in the cosmos without. He is an active co-creator in the world-process, and his knowledge is the most perfect member of the organism of the universe.

This view carries with it an important consequence for our conduct, for our moral ideals. These, too, must be regarded, not as copies of an external standard, but as rooted within us. Similarly, we refuse to look upon our moral laws as the behests of any power outside us. We know no “categorical imperative” which, like a voice from the Beyond, prescribes to us what to do or to leave undone. Our moralideals are our own free creations. All we have to do is to carry out what we prescribe to ourselves as the norm of our conduct. Thus, the concept of truth as a free act leads to a theory of morals based on the concept of a perfectlyfree personality.

These theses, of course, are valid only for that part of our conduct the laws of which our thinking penetrates with complete comprehension. So long as the laws of our conduct are merely natural motives or remain obscure to our conceptual thinking, it may be possible from a higher spiritual level to perceive how far they are founded in our individuality, but we ourselves experience them as influencing us from without, as compelling us to action. Every time that we succeed in penetrating such a motive with clear understanding, we make a fresh conquest in the realm of freedom.

The relation of these views to the theory of Eduard von Hartmann, who is the most significant figure in contemporary philosophy, will be made clear to the reader in detail in the course of this essay, especially as regards the problem of knowledge.

A prelude to aPhilosophy of Spiritual Activity—this is what the present essay offers. That philosophy itself, completely worked out, will shortly follow.

The ultimate aim of all science is to increase the value of existence for human personality. Whoever does not devote himself to science with this aim in view is merely modellinghimself in his own work upon some master. If he “researches,” it is merely because that happens to be what he has been taught to do. But not for him is the title of a “free thinker.”

The sciences are seen in their true value only when philosophy explains the human significance of their results. To make a contribution to such an explanation was my aim. But, perhaps, our present-day science scorns all philosophical vindication! If so, two things are certain. One is that this essay of mine is superfluous. The other is that modern thinkers are lost in the wood and do not know what they want.

In concluding this Preface, I cannot omit a personal observation. Up to now I have expounded all my philosophical views on the basis of Goethe’s world-view, into which I was first introduced by my dear and revered teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, who to me stands in the very forefront of Goethe-students, because his gaze is ever focussed beyond the particular upon the universal Ideas.

But, with this essay I hope to have shown that the edifice of my thought is a whole which has its foundations in itself and which does not need to be derived from Goethe’s world-view. My theories, as they are here set forth and as they will presently be amplified in thePhilosophy of Spiritual Activity, have grown up in the course of many years. Nothing but a deep sense of gratitude leads me to add that the affectionate sympathy of the Spechtfamily in Vienna, during the period when I was the tutor of its children, provided me with an environment, than which I could not have wished a better, for the development of my ideas. In the same spirit, I would add, further, that I owe to the stimulating conversations with my very dear friend, Miss Rosa Mayreder, of Vienna, the mood which I needed for putting into final form many of the thoughts which I have sketched provisionally as germs of myPhilosophy of Spiritual Activity. Her own literary efforts, which express the sensitive and high-minded nature of a true artist, are likely before long to be presented to the public.

Vienna, December, 1891.

APPENDIX IVINTRODUCTION TO ORIGINAL EDITION OF “TRUTH AND SCIENCE”The aim of the following discussions is to reduce the act of cognition, by analysis, to its ultimate elements and thus to discover a correct formulation of the problem of knowledge and a way to its solution. They criticise all theories of knowledge which are based on Kant’s line of thought, in order to show that along this road no solution of the problem of knowledge can ever be found. It is, however, due to the fundamental spade-work which Volkelt has done in his thorough examination of the concept of experience,1to acknowledge that without his preliminary labours the precise determination, which I have here attempted of the concept of theGivenwould have been very much more difficult. However, we are cherishing the hope that we have laid the foundations for our emancipation from the Subjectivism which attaches to all theories of knowledge thatstart from Kant. We believe ourselves to have achieved this emancipation through showing that the subjective form, in which the picture of the world presents itself to the act of cognition, prior to its elaboration by science, is nothing but a necessary stage of transition which is overcome in the very process of knowledge itself. For us, experience, so-called, which Positivism and Neo-Kantianism would like to represent as the only thing which is certain, is precisely the most subjective of all. In demonstrating this, we also show thatObjective Idealismis the inevitable conclusion of a theory of knowledge which understands itself. It differs from the metaphysical and absolute Idealism of Hegel in this, that it seeks in the subject of knowledge the ground for the diremption of reality into givenexistenceandconcept, and that it looks for the reconciliation of this divorce, not in an objective world-dialectic, but in the subjective process of cognition. The present writer has already once before advocated this point of view in print, viz., in theOutlines of a Theory of Knowledge(Berlin and Stuttgart, 1885). However, that book differs essentially inmethodfrom the present essay, and it also lacks the analytic reduction of knowledge to its ultimate elements.1Erfahrung und Denken, Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, von Johannes Volkelt (Hamburg und Leipzig, 1886).↑

APPENDIX IVINTRODUCTION TO ORIGINAL EDITION OF “TRUTH AND SCIENCE”

The aim of the following discussions is to reduce the act of cognition, by analysis, to its ultimate elements and thus to discover a correct formulation of the problem of knowledge and a way to its solution. They criticise all theories of knowledge which are based on Kant’s line of thought, in order to show that along this road no solution of the problem of knowledge can ever be found. It is, however, due to the fundamental spade-work which Volkelt has done in his thorough examination of the concept of experience,1to acknowledge that without his preliminary labours the precise determination, which I have here attempted of the concept of theGivenwould have been very much more difficult. However, we are cherishing the hope that we have laid the foundations for our emancipation from the Subjectivism which attaches to all theories of knowledge thatstart from Kant. We believe ourselves to have achieved this emancipation through showing that the subjective form, in which the picture of the world presents itself to the act of cognition, prior to its elaboration by science, is nothing but a necessary stage of transition which is overcome in the very process of knowledge itself. For us, experience, so-called, which Positivism and Neo-Kantianism would like to represent as the only thing which is certain, is precisely the most subjective of all. In demonstrating this, we also show thatObjective Idealismis the inevitable conclusion of a theory of knowledge which understands itself. It differs from the metaphysical and absolute Idealism of Hegel in this, that it seeks in the subject of knowledge the ground for the diremption of reality into givenexistenceandconcept, and that it looks for the reconciliation of this divorce, not in an objective world-dialectic, but in the subjective process of cognition. The present writer has already once before advocated this point of view in print, viz., in theOutlines of a Theory of Knowledge(Berlin and Stuttgart, 1885). However, that book differs essentially inmethodfrom the present essay, and it also lacks the analytic reduction of knowledge to its ultimate elements.

The aim of the following discussions is to reduce the act of cognition, by analysis, to its ultimate elements and thus to discover a correct formulation of the problem of knowledge and a way to its solution. They criticise all theories of knowledge which are based on Kant’s line of thought, in order to show that along this road no solution of the problem of knowledge can ever be found. It is, however, due to the fundamental spade-work which Volkelt has done in his thorough examination of the concept of experience,1to acknowledge that without his preliminary labours the precise determination, which I have here attempted of the concept of theGivenwould have been very much more difficult. However, we are cherishing the hope that we have laid the foundations for our emancipation from the Subjectivism which attaches to all theories of knowledge thatstart from Kant. We believe ourselves to have achieved this emancipation through showing that the subjective form, in which the picture of the world presents itself to the act of cognition, prior to its elaboration by science, is nothing but a necessary stage of transition which is overcome in the very process of knowledge itself. For us, experience, so-called, which Positivism and Neo-Kantianism would like to represent as the only thing which is certain, is precisely the most subjective of all. In demonstrating this, we also show thatObjective Idealismis the inevitable conclusion of a theory of knowledge which understands itself. It differs from the metaphysical and absolute Idealism of Hegel in this, that it seeks in the subject of knowledge the ground for the diremption of reality into givenexistenceandconcept, and that it looks for the reconciliation of this divorce, not in an objective world-dialectic, but in the subjective process of cognition. The present writer has already once before advocated this point of view in print, viz., in theOutlines of a Theory of Knowledge(Berlin and Stuttgart, 1885). However, that book differs essentially inmethodfrom the present essay, and it also lacks the analytic reduction of knowledge to its ultimate elements.

1Erfahrung und Denken, Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, von Johannes Volkelt (Hamburg und Leipzig, 1886).↑

1Erfahrung und Denken, Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, von Johannes Volkelt (Hamburg und Leipzig, 1886).↑

1Erfahrung und Denken, Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, von Johannes Volkelt (Hamburg und Leipzig, 1886).↑

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