Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/336/en

Into the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century there pressed upward, out of the hidden depths of Rosicrucianism and other kindred spiritual currents — representative of which one may name the theologian and "theosophist" Friedrich Oetinger (1702–1782) — into the social consciousness of the age. German Idealism drew, in philosophy, poetry, science and the arts, from these spiritual undercurrents. From these very same undercurrents rose the ideals that stood at the origin of the French Revolution — the calls for liberty, equality and fraternity. These are, in transformed shape, the same ideals that were already laid down in the threefoldness of the free economic village communities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the same that at the beginning of the seventeenth century gave impulse to the Rosicrucian strivings toward a "general reformation"; the same that Goethe (1749–1832) shaped into poetry in his *Wilhelm Meister*, in *Hermann und Dorothea* and elsewhere. These calls, which flowed through the centuries from the stream of an esoteric knowledge — they too foundered on the retarding