XIII

...how thoughts are [caused?] by bodily processes—vibrations of brain fibers, currents of nerve-spirit original: "Nervengeist"; a historical term for the hypothetical fluid or energy once thought to transmit signals through the nervous system, etc.—where can any justification be found for this through immediate experience or logical derivation from the same? Even if we dispense with all logic for the adherents of such materialistic views, and give them the freedom to devise and invent whatever seems profitable to them, they are never in a position to conceive of even the slightest possibility of such a mode of origin of the psychic from the physical. According to the laws of deduction, a certain homogeneity must exist between the two if one is to be derived from the other. However, this is entirely lacking between the spiritual and the material. In the case of the latter, we have only to deal with magnitudes, figures, colors, tones, affinities, molecular movements, and so on; we may heap these up, fuse them, group them, combine them, or polarize them in whatever way we wish, yet we never arrive at anything that has even the remotest resemblance to a psychic structure, to a thought, consciousness, or feeling. The heterogeneity is complete; therefore, derivation is currently impossible, and the materialistic assumption—given the present state of our knowledge of the inner essence of nature—is a thoroughly groundless and therefore unjustified and untenable hypothesis. Everything that is tossed out without justification, as we see Mr. Vogt Karl Vogt (1817–1895), a German scientist and prominent materialist famous for claiming the brain secretes thought as the kidneys secrete urine flippantly doing here, remains empty talk. Until, therefore, those ignorant of philosophy can demonstrably make it comprehensible to the "narrow-minded heads among the natural scientists" (as he puts it) that there is or is not a soul, there is still a long way to go.

One of our most distinguished philosophers, noted for his clarity and depth, the unfortunate Beneke Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798–1854), a psychologist and philosopher who argued against speculative metaphysics in favor of empirical psychology, says somewhere:

"If someone
"came to reveal to us the essence of God, the nature of our soul, or the
"purpose of creation, we would hear something infinitely
"different from anything we are currently able to imagine;
"indeed, we would not be able to grasp it; for that would require
"higher spiritual faculties than those which have been
"granted to us for this earthly life."
— This I recommend to Mr. Vogt for his consideration; perhaps it will benefit him to recover somewhat from his "brilliant" analogy between the soul and urine.

As for the Od A hypothetical vital force or life energy proposed by Baron Carl von Reichenbach in the mid-19th century, it might be advisable for him to first get to know it before he presumes to judge it with such shallowness...