Thus Spoke Zarathustra

—namely that the "body" and the "soul" are not something separated and separable, nothing merely pushed into one another: that, rather, the "soul" is only a function of the body, standing in relation to it entirely as effect to cause, rising and falling with it, and changing immediately with the slightest organic, especially cerebral, change—this monistic conception of the human phenomenon is fortunately spreading more and more, but officially it is not yet recognized. Officially, the dualistic conception is still preached: the soul is not dependent on the body! The body is a secondary matter and deserves no attention! The soul dwells in the body only for a time! It is the soul that moves and directs the body! . . and other such errors, long since exposed by physiology. This doctrine, insofar as it still prevails among us, is to be traced back to a founder of religion who was predisposed to the conception of the human phenomenon neither artistically nor scientifically—but only morally, and this again quite one-sidedly: the entire intellectual labor of the actual teachers of higher humanity, the Greeks, had been for nothing for him! He did not even have knowledge of Eleatic, Heraclitean, or atomistic problems, of Hippocrates, Aristotle, Epicurus, or even of the reveling in the most sublime states of soul, as Pindar or the Dionysus-choirs of Antigone express them. . . How the Occident, which for several centuries has been trying to continue the work of the Greeks, comes to maintain exactly this doctrine by state authority, at great expense, and with even more damaging biological consequences alongside its other cognitive activities that work against it, is and remains a mystery—but it does not provide a favorable concept of the radicalism of European thinking. On the whole, even the most enlightened people, in their thinking about psychic processes, still draw from the conceptual capital that the worldviews of ignorant ages, the religions, have provided. For as much as has been researched, discovered, and causally recognized to this day in the fields of the external, perceptible world—in the field of psychic processes, almost nothing of the sort has happened. Only physiological psychology has been scientifically cultivated. But this side of psychology is the subordinate one, easier to work on; its results are self-evident to anyone with a scientific taste. The...