Preface

It would not be expected of him, were it not for the fact that he nevertheless takes the liberty of boldly telling people to their faces that "with even a modicum of consistent thinking," everyone must come to the view that the assumption of a soul is pure nonsense. Well then, why does he not tell us other "thick-headed" people what this consistent operation of thought is, or what the chain of reasoning might be, by which one arrives at such a highly important result so easily and so surely? Why does he not unfold it? — Because he has none, knows none, and is unable to develop one. First, he fantasizes that it could be so and so; soon he finds pleasure in his airy creation; then he persuades himself that it really is so; finally, he sits down with self-complacency and writes that it must be so. This is the usual course of shallow boldness based on untenable, imagined premises. Anyone who is as completely a stranger to the philosophical investigations into the concept of the word soul, its existence, and its qualities, as Mr. Vogt Karl Vogt (1817–1895) was a German scientist famous for his radical materialist view that "thoughts have the same relation to the brain as bile has to the liver." displays himself to be, should reasonably hesitate to dismiss—arrogantly and without proof, based merely on the dissecting knife and microscope—a field of knowledge that he understands so very deficiently in terms of both substance and significance. Of the nature of the substance of the soulful being within us, we know so lamentably little that only the presumption which everywhere characterizes ignorance can take it upon itself to categorically assert that a soul dwells within us or that no soul dwells within us. The metaphysics of our transcendentals A reference to Idealist philosophers who believed in a reality beyond sensory experience. as well as the "coarse realism" Realism: here used to mean Materialism, the belief that only physical matter exists. of people like Vogt, Dübois Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), a physician and physiologist known for his work on nerve impulses. and others, are equally far removed from any tenable justification for their arrogantly emphasized assertions, which in the case of the latter clearly aim more at posturing and cheap bravado than they rest upon genuine conviction. The negative answer regarding the existence of a soul in general which we receive from them relates entirely only to their own power of perception and in no way affects actual Being. The soul of man, or what we call such, they say, is a physical product of his bodily organization, and since the soul is conditioned solely by the peculiar arrangement of the body, it must likewise be destroyed with the destruction of the same; therefore, immortality is nothing more and nothing less than "a fairy tale." But what has ever been done to directly deduce these assertions from anywhere? In what manner are psychic developments—