Preface

This is a testament to poverty original: "Armuthszeugniß" — a figurative expression meaning a total lack of intellectual merit, which demonstrates how far arrogance stands below the height upon which it imagines itself to be perched.

The meager excuse of "fraud," however, which is everywhere blamed upon the sensitives individuals believed to be uniquely perceptive of subtle energy or "Odic" force whenever the phenomena are not understood—and behind which Mr. Vogt also partially seeks to hide—has already become a commonplace cliché. A natural scientist who can be lied to in matters of such depth must not have been gifted by his mother with much of a calling for the heuristic the method of discovery or problem-solving in science treatment of scientific problems. He who knows how to ask questions and is capable of judging answers will not allow himself to be led by the nose by a prankster in physical and physiological matters. He who has not mastered that should leave natural research and the judgment of natural researchers to other people.

With the polite word "nonsense," which he hurls at me, Mr. Vogt is—in accordance with the state of his social breeding—otherwise quite generous; so that, coming from such a mouth, the word must first be devalued to its true worth. When he calls the assumption of a human soul "pure nonsense," just as he does the Odic phenomena the "Od" force was a hypothetical vital energy proposed by Baron von Reichenbach, I console myself in sharing such pleasantries with many other men who stand far above the horizon of Mr. Vogt and his scalpel. If one wishes to have a say in such an important matter as the existence or non-existence of a soul, one must above all be well-informed about what the most distinguished thinkers have researched and deduced about it for 2,000 years; one must know the profound investigations which human ingenuity has conducted with great diligence and strenuous circumspection over this difficult subject. Of all this, however, little seems to be known to Mr. Vogt. In the fields of psychology, metaphysics, and even logic, he shows himself to be regrettably foreign; this is already demonstrated by his unfamiliarity with philosophical terminology, by virtue of which one finds in his writings words like characteristic and perception, intuition and representation, knowledge and observation, nature and property, phenomenon and fact, reason and cause, form and shape, etc., everywhere thrown together and confused in a colorful jumble, as is the case with people who have never learned to delimit the content and scope of their concepts and who lack higher schooling. This