Preface.

...on, that Odic phenomena The author refers to "Od," a hypothetical vital energy or life force he claimed to have discovered exist, and this includes the entire series that I have presented, for besides myself, no one has presented them in such a manner. He honors them, it is true, with the polite label of a "cloud of nonsense," which I might at most allow to pass my ears coming from a professor who has himself peddled so much nonsense; however, since he asserts that these phenomena all rest upon nervous excitability, and everything that rests upon something must itself be a "something," then those phenomena must be present—they must exist. — Well, with this recognition of Odic phenomena, I am satisfied thus far; in it, we have a basis that we will not allow to be conjured away from us again.

But when he continues further and counters me by saying that these phenomena "rest upon an increased nervous excitability, through which they—traceless in ordinary life—are communicated to the consciousness," I ask him: for what have I generally represented the subjective part of these phenomena everywhere, if I have not myself attributed them to a higher, an increased nervous irritability? In my very first treatise, which appeared in May 1845 in Liebig’s Annals original: "Liebigs Annalen," a prominent chemistry journal founded by Justus von Liebig, I expressed myself decisively to the effect that sensitivity rests upon an increased nervous irritability; that not only the general sense, but also the sensory nerves are in a state of heightened excitation; that "an extraordinary sharpening of the senses" takes place in smell, taste, and hearing; and that in feeling and sight, apperceptions apperception: the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience occur of which ordinary people are incapable. I have repeated the same in the first pages of the "Dynamides etc.", in the "Odic Letters" p. 13, and in a hundred other places in my writings; thousands of Germans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen who have read them are witnesses to this. What, then, is the purpose of such an objection, which is no objection at all? An objection that says nothing more than a repetition and confirmation of what has already been said by myself!

This type of increased nervous irritability with its peculiarities I have summarized in the expression "sensitivity," and I must not have been very much mistaken in it, since it involuntarily escaped Mr. Vogt Carl Vogt (1817–1895), a German scientist and materialist philosopher who was a vocal critic of the author himself on p. 300 of his "Physiological Letters," where he speaks of "sensitive nerve fibers."

To be sure, we are not yet at an end with this. Mr. Vogt actually wants to tell me even more, which in his consciousness...