First Physical Dissertation on the Bond Connecting Soul and Body

present [work] I prepare, cherishing this moment more specially, in which it will have to be asked: What Bond intervenes between Soul and Body.

Nothing deters me from this undertaking, even though we read that very much has already been elaborated by philosophers—partly those who have written on Pneumatics, partly those who have indulged in physical speculations—about both parts of man, and that enough controversies have been heaped up. Nor does it drive me to take my hand from the tablet original: "manum de tabula tollere", a classical idiom meaning to finish or give up that I recall that in the nearby Academy of Wittenberg a Dissertation on the same Bond of Soul and Body was written by the Magnificent and most Reverend D. KLAUSING and publicly held in the year 1713. For I use here the liberty with which citizens of the Republic of Letters are endowed, according to which it is permitted to everyone, being immune from the blind law of belief, not only to examine everything but also to propose their own meditations and sentiments about each thing soberly. I also remove this, so that no one may believe I am about to serve warmed-up cabbage original: "cramben bis coctam", a classical idiom meaning to repeat the same thing over and over, while I am personally persuaded that this business cannot be exhausted in two sheets, as he did: a fact which I shall demonstrate by the work itself, dedicating three Dissertations to this argument.

I shall indeed dispatch the whole matter in such a way that in this first Diatribe original: "Diatribe", a scholarly discourse, I shall set forth what is necessary to be known beforehand; in the second, I shall propose what seems to me to be the case regarding this notable bond; finally, in the last, I shall examine the expressed opinions of Authors on the bond, and their various views, and I shall recount certain other dogmas of philosophers from which conjectures about that bond can be instituted. I shall take pains that everything may be tested by the norm of right reason, which is also made right by God.

I confess, indeed, that what I thus undertake is arduous. Therefore, if by reason of the frailty of human genius it is not granted to touch the point of hidden truth everywhere, but only to graze the barks, the benevolent Reader will find me to be a man, and one subject to the common condition, just as others are; and then that which is commonly said will have a place: