Preface

With this, we see ourselves once again dragged onto the field of coarseness by one of these learned gentlemen and placed in the weary necessity of defending ourselves against injustice with reluctance and disgust on his rough-clodded soil. — In the procedure of the attacker, one must distinguish two things: a moral and an immoral act. Insofar as he raises scientific objections, he is within his rights; insofar as he adds coarseness, he commits a wrong. The defense therefore has a twofold task: to refute the objections concisely, and then to reject the insult and punish the coarseness.

It must be noted that the man who speaks here with such "manners" and "deliberation" is the same bearer of his much-mentioned name The author refers to Karl Vogt (1817–1895), a famous German scientist and politician known for his radical materialism. who, without possessing even a faint idea of political basics, had the courage to let himself be sent to the German Parliament in Frankfurt; who then, from the rostrum of St. Paul's Church The Paulskirche in Frankfurt was the seat of the first freely elected German legislative body during the Revolution of 1848. with the pretension of political-scientific insight, "puffed out the whole series of nonsense into the world," with which, in boyish political ignorance, he did his utmost to deprive Germany of the fruits of its movement of 1848, and whom the best and noblest men of our fatherland have to thank for the fact that German "professorial wisdom" has become a mocking proverb in Europe.

A similar small sample of scientific insight Mr. Vogt now seems to want to provide regarding sensitivity and the Od Od: a hypothetical vital energy or life force proposed by Baron Carl von Reichenbach. He will allow us to subject his attempts at this to a little dissection. — First, he counters me by saying that "the whole series of Odic phenomena rests solely on an increased irritability of the nerves." — Very well; he thus recognizes, word for word,