The Three Motives and Reasons of Faith.-english-Gustav Theodor Fechner

The
Three motives and reasons

of
Faith.
From
Gustav Theodor Fechner.
Leipzig,
Printing and publishing by Breitkopf and Härtel.
1,863th
Foreword.
Every man has his field of faith; in part, the different areas coincide, sometimes
they diverge. But true knowledge is only one thing; is not the true faith of only
one? On the contrary, some believe that it is right and proper for everyone to have
their own particular beliefs.
In the first place, ask yourself: What is faith in knowledge? For a part of the
essence of both is in their relationship to each other. Is it a fraternal, friendly,
hostile? Does knowledge have to be the servant of the faith or the belief to hide from
the knowledge like the owl from the light? Are they stuck together like the two heads
of Janus, so that each sees in a different direction, each sees only what the other does
not see? Or can each of them, in its very nature, see it differently than the other?
These are old questions, is an old dispute that still awaits the discharge today. But
instead of taking him up here again, this little scripture, apart from the controversy,
goes a way in which there is no occasion for the quarrel, because the answer almost
finds itself before the question. What is his other intention?
As great as the area of faith and the area of believers is, it is so dark and so many
paths run partly together, partly apart. Few even think about why they believe what
they believe in, a few that entitle them to believe what they believe, a few rightly do
justice, and many lose faith over thinking because they have not taken the right , This
scripture has grown out of reflecting on what is the right and the assurance of the
right in matters of faith, and his intention to lead the way of reflection again, which
has seemed to us right, a way in which faith rather than won is lost.
Briefly, I designate the task of this booklet as showing how faith grows out of its
motives, giving birth to the motives of faith, and thus allowing faith to grow itself.
The main objects of the faith are three, and so we will find three main motives, and
consequently three main reasons for the faith, which do not differ according to the
objects, but to the bond that they have in the nature of things, a bond to add in man.
I associate the commonality of motives and reasons under the name of
the principles of faith, and so I can say that these are the principles of the faith.
We already have many textbooks of the faith; they are only too learned for most
people. We already have proof of the existence of God, the hereafter and the angels in
it; but they are only for the learned, and faith is for all. Can not the reasons of faith be
made accessible and accessible to all? Many would like to believe and can not
believe; will they be able to learn the faith from his textbooks or, according to
edificatory books which presuppose him ready to build the missing one? In this little
scripture, however, an attempt is made to teach the faith to build the faith, without the
learning of the textbooks or the requirement of the edifying books required.
Everything is so simple, clear, understandable, and self-evident premonitions
almost self-evident in the fact that I certainly provide, one will find it too much rather
than too little, after one is used to find it so otherwise in these things. And will the
word-believer also be satisfied with the fact that I simply take the most important
words which he believes in literally, the rationalist by saying that I take them
completely according to reason, and the unbeliever by saying that I have his reasons
of unbelief raise oneself for reasons of faith; since the contradiction between the
threes in which the life of faith revolves depends almost more than on others, that
they do not do justice to themselves, in which they seek their justice against each
other.
Will the progress which faith ventures beyond its previous standpoint finally be
forgiven only after the faithful count on the firm retirement of the faith as its essence?
So get yourself a booklet of a small common and tree that sleeps in the acorn. Do
you like to be a small leaf on the germ of this tree.
content
I. Faith and knowledge in general.
II. The sphere of faith in the narrower sense.
III. Motives and reasons (principles) of faith in general.
IV. Historical, Practical and Theoretical Principle of Faith in General.
V. The historical principle.
VI. The practical principle.
VII. The theoretical principle.
The argument of the spirit.
The argument of the body.
VIII. Position of an exact doctrine of body and soul (with regard to the nerve
question) to the questions of faith.
IX. Ask how faith first came to humanity, and how the motives and reasons for
believing in the existence of God are rooted in the existence of God.
X. The Orthodox and the Free Viewpoint.
XI. Review, overview, foresight.
XII. Ending.
I.
Faith and knowledge in general.
Like all general concepts, one can also conceive beliefs in different ways and
ways. But instead of arguing how it is to be grasped, we simply explain what we want
to understand and consider here under this name. Enough if we stay within the
bounds of linguistic usage, and stick it more firmly only for the purposes of the
following consideration than they are in the fluctuations of use.
Maybe it would be good to do it more often than it usually happens.
In the broadest sense, I understand and understand by faith a preservation of that
which is not certain by experience or logical inference to which the mathematical
belongs.
Should I then explain what I mean by truth, experience, logical conclusion,
mathematics? But you can see that I would not be able to cope or not come to the
beginning of what it is actually supposed to do here. The use of language and the
context of contemplation must suffice to let the material understand what is meant by
it; and it's only about matter that should be here.
If, of course, I wanted to write a metaphysics of faith, I would have to go deeper
into conceptual contexts on all sides, to go back to the point of departure, to go out of
the last, as if it were the first. But what could it lead to? After it seemed to me that all
metaphysics, dogmatics, mysticism, and mythology of the faith leads rather into
darkness than out of darkness, I neglect to enter into their depths. What we seek is
above this depth.
In the widest sense in which we first took the faith, its concept is indifferent to its
content. One can believe that there will be a god and that there will be a devil, war or
peace, of thirteen sitting at table, in this year one will die; yes what can not believe
everything. It is unbelievable what all things in the world are believed to be; and of
all that is believed, the opposite is believed. The most blatant superstition is still faith
in this broadest sense of faith.
But in a narrower sense, if you z. For example, faith, love, hope, faith, the last
resort of man, the salvation of the faith, faith, faith, believers, one understands, and
understand by faith, only faith in the highest and last things , God, Beyond, higher
spiritual existences. They give the farthest everything that is certain in those ways,
and therefore we prefer to speak of faith here. Thus, in a narrower sense, faith is only
the highest field of faith in a wider sense.
From time immemorial, the peoples have attached the conditions of salvation to the
existence of the objects of this faith and the belief in them, and sought the highest and
most universal bond in such faith. In this respect, he is also called religious belief to
the difference of common belief.
This belief in the narrower sense will be preferred here; but since he shares in the
broadest sense the most general relations and attributes of faith, which are
independent of the nature of what is believed, it will be proper to consider them for
the time being.
For some it may seem that belief in the highest and last things is altogether of a
different nature, having quite different sources and consequences, than belief in any
other things, in that which here and there, tomorrow or in the future To be a year or
not, that he is something wholly over or overriding, something specific in every
respect. And should one really be able to somehow relate it to the superstition in
one? But first and foremost, the belief in the highest and last things is a preservation
of the existence and nature of the things to which it refers, like any other belief,
without being able to be made certain by logic and experience, and thus conceptually
has something in common with it common, and it will be the task of the following to
show that the specificity of the belief in the highest and last things lies only in the fact
that these things are the highest and the last, but the highest and the last of what we
all live and weave, and the motives and reasons of every other faith culminate most in
relation to them, most complete and complete in them. So firm can not become faith,
as the belief in these things, so strikingly no motives, so binding no reasons, so far
and profoundly no consequences. Why? For the motives, reasons, consequences of
belief in the most general, highest, and ultimate things bear the nature of their objects,
to be the most general, highest, and last, but to be of those in which our whole life,
dens, and costumes are based emotional. that these things are the highest and the last,
but the highest and last of which are in which we all live and weave, and the motives
and reasons of every other faith culminate, and most fully, in the conclusion and
conclusion of all other faiths , So firm can not become faith, as the belief in these
things, so strikingly no motives, so binding no reasons, so far and profoundly no
consequences. Why? For the motives, reasons, consequences of belief in the most
general, highest, and ultimate things bear the nature of their objects, to be the most
general, highest, and last, but to be of those in which our whole life, dens, and
costumes are based emotional. that these things are the highest and the last, but the
highest and last of which are in which we all live and weave, and the motives and
reasons of every other faith culminate, and most fully, in the conclusion and
conclusion of all other faiths , So firm can not become faith, as the belief in these
things, so strikingly no motives, so binding no reasons, so far and profoundly no
costumes are based emotional. and therefore the motives and reasons of each other's
faith culminate, and most completely, in their highest and highest degree. So firm can
not become faith, as the belief in these things, so strikingly no motives, so binding no
reasons, so far and profoundly no consequences. Why? For the motives, reasons,
consequences of belief in the most general, highest, and ultimate things bear the
nature of their objects, to be the most general, highest, and last, but to be of those in
which our whole life, dens, and costumes are based emotional. and therefore the
motives and reasons of each other's faith culminate, and most completely, in their
highest and highest degree. So firm can not become faith, as the belief in these things,
so strikingly no motives, so binding no reasons, so far and profoundly no
costumes are based emotional. so far and profoundly no consequences. Why? For the
motives, reasons, consequences of belief in the most general, highest, and ultimate
things bear the nature of their objects, to be the most general, highest, and last, but to
be of those in which our whole life, dens, and costumes are based emotional. so far
and profoundly no consequences. Why? For the motives, reasons, consequences of
belief in the most general, highest, and ultimate things bear the nature of their objects,
to be the most general, highest, and last, but to be of those in which our whole life,
dens, and costumes are based emotional.
Faith is like a high pyramid. The motives and causes of all faith run together from a
broad base in the religious faith as in one last ruling point, and it is equally mistaken
who seeks the top of the pyramid as something separate above the pyramid, and who
does not raise his gaze above the base , half of it is wrong, who raises it only half.
One can believe that something is, and believe that one can rely on something; then
faith is called trust. This is often the meaning of faith in the Bible. But it is rooted in
one another's faith, for how could one believe that one can rely on something one did
not believe to be? Thus the Bible says: "Without faith it is impossible to please God,
for whoever wants to come to God must believe that he is, and will be a libel to those
who seek him" (Ebr. XI 6) True Faith in the first sense requires an increase of
determinants in order to become the last; but they also grow out of the true belief in
the right on their own. So it is not necessary to divorce the consideration in relation to
it.
Now what is knowledge against faith?
Again, it is important to distinguish between a narrower and wider meaning. What
is known in the narrowest and strictest sense, hereby the absolutely or
objectively certain, is only what is impossible to imagine or think differently
according to the law of identity, that is all through direct experience, valid logical
inference, or the latter Reason of the former recognized.
I know, in this sense of knowledge, that there is a sense of red, green, yellow in the
world when I have it myself; There is nothing wrong with that; what is there, that's
there. I know that every triangle in Summa includes two right angles; for I can not
think otherwise, without contradicting the pre-conceived conditions of the triangle; I
know, for the same reason, a sphere whose diameter I know from experience, which
is its extent and content. But whether others see the orange which lies before me as
yellow as I do, I can not strictly say; I just believe it almost as if I knew it; and as
long as I do not see for myself the validity of a logical conclusion, I myself recognize
the impossibility of dissenting according to the demands of conceptual attunement,
What we certainly know, however, is very little, apart from the very vast realms of
mathematical truths, and to be taken into account in mathematical truths, partly that
they are only one thing of the less strict knowledge, more or less only of others Part
of the cause of faith is, in part, that they do not say anything about existence in
themselves, but only say: If so, then it is so. Mathematics can not prove that there is a
space of three dimensions in which lines are drawn through which boundaries can be
defined, that there are triangles, circles, but only that, if there is a space, triangles,
circles in the sense the definition gives, from the given follows this and
that. Everything that happened before us, will happen after us, happens far away from
us and exists, the certainty of knowledge for us is in the strictest sense of
knowledge; In the realm of the experienceable, it does not go beyond what is directly
experienced and its logically analysable, combinable and developable content.
In the meantime, there are principles of the generalization of the experienced, laws
that are themselves first obtained by the generalization of experience, and which are
all the more confirmed in experience the longer and the further and the more
thoroughly we pursue them. These principles and laws and what follows from them,
one tends to reckon in the broader sense of the field of knowledge and may be
expected in the following. All natural science is concerned with the production of
such knowledge, although in the last resort the knowledge thus generated always
depends on the belief that the generalization on which we are based and the
conclusions derived from it will continue to find their confirmation, as they have
hitherto been in the sphere of experience have found. For neither logic nor experience
can prove that such must occur.
Who can say that it is proved or provable by experience or mathematics, or both,
that the law of gravitation is valid throughout all spaces, and will hold through all
times. But it has proved valid as far and as long as we could track it through the
heavens and the times. This justifies a belief which is almost equal to the strictest
knowledge of firmness, that it will continue to apply, and therefore we count it as a
matter of our knowledge, indeed as a matter of rigorous, exact knowledge.
In the vast majority of what is called knowledge, faith enters into a conditional
way, insofar as knowledge is based on the presupposition of something
believed. Thus all our historical knowledge places faith in the credibility of the
sources, all our empirical science the belief that others have rightly said, and only
what they have rightly said, our whole psychology, as far as they are not merely one
individual is to advance the belief in other human souls. And what would be left of all
our science, if all this faith fell.
So, too, the man of knowledge may not despise faith too much. There is some faith
in all his knowledge; deprive him of it and knowledge itself falls into decay. Not to
banish faith but to replace it with knowledge as much as possible can be its task as a
man of knowledge. As far as possible. And if the knowledge is not sufficient to
replace a belief, then the question may be whether the faith is at all replaceable or
not, and then the task is to overthrow it from the knowledge side, or, if not to justify
it, to do so support.
After all, is faith nothing more than an imperfect knowledge?
But that would mean badly recognizing the nature of faith. Rather, as what we
believe in a thing always goes beyond what we know of it, so too do the determinants
of faith, generally speaking, convey that of knowledge, and the inadequacy of the
latter, which takes place in every faith, by others Reasons are added. So much so that
a preservation of the thing comes to a standstill, which is often inferior in its strength
to that which rests on knowledge, and in which one can obtain the objective certainty
of knowledge, although not identical, but capable of maintaining the balance of
subjective certainty. This is a certainty which makes the feeling that it can be
different just as far away as he is aware of the clear consciousness that it could not be
otherwise. How is the truly religious man attached to the existence of God? the
muslim man to heaven with the huri's, as firm as the naturalist believes in the
universality of the laws of nature, in spite of the fact that the existence of those
objects of faith surpasses all experience and all mathematics. After all, the
foundations of faith can and do conflict with those of knowledge and often surpass
them. Or why many think a word of the Bible more than all experiments of science
and all speculation of philosophy. It is said of Luther himself: "The Sorbonne has
made the most reprehensible doctrine that what is acknowledged in philosophy must
also be regarded as truth in theology," and the Church Father Tertullian even openly
said: as firmly as the naturalist believes in the universality of the laws of nature, in
spite of the fact that the existence of those objects of faith surpasses all experience
and all mathematics. After all, the foundations of faith can and do conflict with those
of knowledge and often surpass them. Or why many think a word of the Bible more
than all experiments of science and all speculation of philosophy. It is said of Luther
himself: "The Sorbonne has made the most reprehensible doctrine that what is
acknowledged in philosophy must also be regarded as truth in theology," and the
Church Father Tertullian even openly said: as firmly as the naturalist believes in the
universality of the laws of nature, in spite of the fact that the existence of those
objects of faith surpasses all experience and all mathematics. After all, the
foundations of faith can and do conflict with those of knowledge and often surpass
them. Or why many think a word of the Bible more than all experiments of science
and all speculation of philosophy. It is said of Luther himself: "The Sorbonne has
made the most reprehensible doctrine that what is acknowledged in philosophy must
also be regarded as truth in theology," and the Church Father Tertullian even openly
said: After all, the foundations of faith can and do conflict with those of knowledge
and often surpass them. Or why many think a word of the Bible more than all
experiments of science and all speculation of philosophy. It is said of Luther himself:
"The Sorbonne has made the most reprehensible doctrine that what is acknowledged
in philosophy must also be regarded as truth in theology," and the Church Father
Tertullian even openly said: After all, the foundations of faith can and do conflict
with those of knowledge and often surpass them. Or why many think a word of the
Bible more than all experiments of science and all speculation of philosophy. It is
said of Luther himself: "The Sorbonne has made the most reprehensible doctrine that
what is acknowledged in philosophy must also be regarded as truth in theology," and
the Church Father Tertullian even openly said:"Credo, quia absurdum est." He
wanted to say that my reasons for believing are not only based on the
knowledge; they even contradict them.
No less than the causes are the consequences of faith far beyond those of
knowledge.
Faith is not merely generated; He testifies again, two male children, deeds and
conclusions, two females, hope and fear. The strength of its producers and its
children, however, is in proportion and in the last its own strength proves itself. Now
let us see that the whole action, thought, and feeling of man is determined much more
by faith by these offspring of faith than by knowledge; because there is so little we
really know. And if we take a closer look, it is the belief in the highest and last things
that most exceed our knowledge that produces the most powerful effects. And if we
take a very close look at it, one of the most important effects of this faith, which
surpasses all knowledge, is the promotion of knowledge, for what has made
Christians wiser than the Turks!
It is true that the railways and machines can not be built by faith; he must leave that
to the knowledge, although the belief in benefits that are not yet there, and often not
come, yet stimulates the building that the knowledge only carries out. But there are
greater effects of faith, with the knowledge altogether withdrawing or even more
entering the servitude of the faith.
It was the faith that led hundreds and hundreds of thousands from west to east in
the Crusades, and from East to West in the features of the Crescent, who placed the
Pope on the throne, and placed the princes under his feet Dome villages gave their
churches, hills, paths and footbridges their chapels and crosses, which has populated
Greece with statues and the monasteries with monks.
Think of the torments which, for the sake of faith, are imposed upon countless,
endured by countless martyrs, imposed on themselves by innumerable penitents; how
many people have been slaughtered and burned for the sake of faith, have been
slaughtered and burned, and have voluntarily fallen to their deaths.
"And what shall I say more - Paul concludes 1) , after he has already counted many
things in the same sense - the time would be too short for me if I should tell of
Gideon, and Barak, and Samson, and Jephthah, and David, and Samuel, and the
prophets.
1) Ebr. XI. 32 ff.
Which have conquered kingdoms by faith, kneaded righteousness, obtained the
promise, and stuffed the lion's throat;
Extinguished by fire's power, escaped from the sword's sharpness; have become
strong out of weakness, have become strong in quarrel, the strangers have laid down
armies;
Some have suffered ridicule and scourges, as well as gang and prison;
They are stoned, hacked, bitten, killed by the sword; they have gone about with
furs and goatskins, with want, with tribulation, with adversity;
And have gone to misery in the deserts, in the mountains and in the crevices and
holes of the earth;
These have all witnessed by faith. "
There is no knowledge in the world that can produce such effects that, as it were,
overcome death, that is, the fear of death and the fear of killing the defenseless,
because there is no knowledge that overcomes even death, ie Fearing death may be a
lie and the safety of a better life beyond that. Faith must take that another way, draw
its strength from another source. The fear of death is innate; how powerful is all
innate; Faith is grown, but it can override the fear of death.
But what can be the determining factors for faith that are so powerful, beyond
knowledge, and often surpassing all the determinations of it, which are able to
produce effects of such extension and power? Are they quite mystical, can not be
shown? On the contrary, it is quite obvious to point out the slightest thing, except that
the careless man easily does not see what he sees daily, and the inferior one prefers to
see what is behind his neighbor rather than neighbor, and one-sided man only sees it
looks from one side.
But before we try to show the next, but this from all sides, we encounter a second
error after the first, as momentous as may be the first, which by itself already shows
one of the three sides which it The following will be considered more closely.
As erroneous as it would be to try to make faith dependent only on knowledge, and
to see in faith nothing but an imperfect knowledge, it would be erroneous to exclude
the grounds of knowledge altogether from the determinants of belief, and in the one
to have something merely external to the other to see. In our most knowledge we
found something of faith in depth; conversely, what we know of a thing can have a
very important part in our faith, has an often hidden part everywhere, and in conflict
with other determinants of faith itself counts as one with a weight that outweighs
circumstances or can be overruled.
What awakens the faith of even the savage, who knows nothing of astronomy, that
the sun will rise tomorrow as it has gone out today? Only that he knows that she has
come alive today, yesterday, the day before yesterday, every day since time
immemorial. Such an induction can never be complete; but the incomplete
knowledge, which is inherent in it, complements itself according to a psychological
law to a faith that is all the more certain and firm, the less complement it requires.
What makes us believe in one's soul, the only one we really know, in the soul of all
other people? That we see their bodies and bodily utterances the same as ours, to
which we know bound spirit and mental activity. This conclusion in analogy can
justify knowledge in the strictest sense as that induction conclusion; but what is
lacking in this is just as much a self-supplement to faith.
To be sure, the belief in the highest and last things is not such as to require only that
weak subjective complement of the grounds of knowledge, which, negligently, we
reckon what we believe in knowledge itself. The grounds of knowledge are much less
extensive here, and the other causes of faith are by far the predominant ones; but
without the service of knowledge they would not be enough for their part, and they
would never work without them.
So the man of faith may not despise the knowledge too much. His faith would
become empty phrase or bubble without that.
After all, not the absence of the grounds of knowledge, but the inadequacy of them
to a perfect knowledge or objective certainty in the sense given above, and the
supplementation of this defect by psychological or other causes characterizes the
faith; and only relatively, may we speak of the absence of the knowledge of the faith,
if, as often, it can not afford against the other beliefs.
As the determinants of knowledge enter into those of faith, but belief has more
determinants beyond that, the whole field of faith is much greater than that of
knowledge, its influence on life, feeling, thinking, is presented to that of knowledge,
only faith If not knowledge in general reaches to the highest and last things, then one
might find reason enough to see in knowledge an imperfect faith as vice versa, and to
assign to faith rather than knowledge the higher position, if not all contention for
primacy that which exists only with and through each other, is idle at all, and a
misunderstanding of the right relation. As much as faith surpasses knowledge, take it
all knowledge, and you have only pure superstition; not even the stuff of
superstition; take knowledge to all faith, and you have only the materialistic
abundance of mathematical emptiness; you are alone with your soul in the world
without soul beside, above, before and after you. One calls the faith blind to the
knowledge opposite; he is really opposed to the knowledge of how man is blind to his
eyes, that is to say, apart from his eyes; but the right knowledge is of the right faith
eyes. So faith would find its way only through knowledge? But conversely, can the
eyes find a way without the whole person? But I do not want to pile up images that
can ask if and how far they meet, for what is clear in itself for anyone who has a clear
view of the relationship between knowledge and belief. yes, you stand alone with
your soul in the world without soul beside, above, before and after you. One calls the
faith blind to the knowledge opposite; he is really opposed to the knowledge of how
man is blind to his eyes, that is to say, apart from his eyes; but the right knowledge is
of the right faith eyes. So faith would find its way only through knowledge? But
conversely, can the eyes find a way without the whole person? But I do not want to
pile up images that can ask if and how far they meet, for what is clear in itself for
anyone who has a clear view of the relationship between knowledge and belief. yes,
you stand alone with your soul in the world without soul beside, above, before and
after you. One calls the faith blind to the knowledge opposite; he is really opposed to
the knowledge of how man is blind to his eyes, that is to say, apart from his eyes; but
the right knowledge is of the right faith eyes. So faith would find its way only
through knowledge? But conversely, can the eyes find a way without the whole
person? But I do not want to pile up images that can ask if and how far they meet, for
what is clear in itself for anyone who has a clear view of the relationship between
knowledge and belief. how man is blind to his eyes, that is, apart from his eyes; but
knowledge and belief. how man is blind to his eyes, that is, apart from his eyes; but
knowledge and belief.
Also, one will like to admit everything, and some just except that, for which it
applies the most and should be asserted here, the belief in the highest and last
things. What can the knowledge do? Says the one: nothing; so we do not have to
demand anything from him; - the other: Since nothing is known here, it is only
superstition. And so the one lets the knowledge, the other the faith fall entirely in
those things in which only the best union of all forces can lead to the at once the most
truth, the best, the highest.
II.
The sphere of faith in the narrower sense.
If the belief in the highest and last things with every other faith comes under the
same general concept, it nevertheless remains objectively something universal over
every other faith and has many things in common with none other.
First and foremost, he has in common that he is a spirit belief; for in the hereafter,
too, they are ghosts; and hereby that, at least on this side, he is always destined to
remain faithful, since everyone on this side will always be able to know only about
his own soul on this side; whereas there is another faith that is still faith today,
tomorrow is knowledge, or the aspiration to elevate it to knowledge, but promises to
succeed once. Such a success is impossible in this case.
In the meantime, he is not the only belief in the ghost and therefore not the only
one of whom this applies. The same applies to belief in other human souls, animal
souls, any neighbor souls at all; their existence can no more be ascertained than that
of God, otherworldly and higher spirits, by immediate experience and logical
inference; and conversely, the existence of these could just as certainly be
certain; and it will turn out that we have very reason to do so.
But one faith always remains something higher than the other; the reasons of one
must expand, increase to become the reasons of the other, and the interests of one
surpass those of the other.
The belief in other human souls has for us the next, most special interest in animal
souls and possible plant souls, which is already remote, and in souls on other bodies
of the world the only incidental interest; but the belief in the highest and last spiritual
powers over and over all that and every faith all-powerful, overarching, all-hanging
interests mastering, most general, highest and last, theoretical and practical interest in
man, because the believed objects have such but the farthest only in so far as it
understands the farthest in its generality.
In God, according to faith, the existence of the whole spiritual world, indeed of the
world as a whole, comes to an end, you find the bond, its tip, its primal ground, its
principle in it; which names one may need for him, one seeks those who mean the
highest to the whole. In the hereafter, the completion of the goals, the balancing of
the shortcomings of the whole worldly life is expected. For the gap between us and
God mediations are sought in higher spirits. But the totality of this faith has proved
the most general and important influence on the thinking, feeling, and acting of
humanity, and still proves it today.
Hereby he works down even into the life of the day, and thereby also gains
influence on our next and most special interests, but always from the most general,
highest, and last points of view, just as the belief in the souls of our neighbors in
state, morality, and Custom rises to higher and more general interests, so that those
highest and most general interests may grow up and grow through; but only at the
expense of the most special relations of the family and the common people. So the
difference is only relative, but relatively it is; and where there is no point of absolute
divorce, which fortunately does not exist here, the relative still has his right and duty.
In the common height above all other things, the objects of faith in the narrower
sense are intimately bound together, and therefore the faith itself is connected.
According to the Christian faith, God has his common abode in heaven with the
angels and otherworldly souls; the painters even paint him carried by angels over the
clouds and carried the souls to death after death. The saints who rose from this world
into the hereafter, and the angels who dwelt therein with God from the beginning,
convey the one on special occasions, the other steadily between us and God; yes,
many of the otherworldly souls sometimes fall in with angels themselves. But Christ,
risen from heaven through the dead, judge of the living and the dead, is at the same
time a mediator between us and God and himself one with God. Everything in the
kingdom of heaven has grown so firmly in itself; Who can finally unravel the
inextricably fused. And are there some Christians,
The heathen, instead of some one supreme god, instead of angels, have subordinate
gods, instead of lifeless souls, shadows that go down, those that go sideb to the
islands of the blessed, and some that, more than shadows, go up. The whole world is
a gods' world to them; Pluto is sitting under the earth, there are the saddest
shadows; on the Olympus Zeus, then the happiest of the heroes and thus become sub-
gods themselves. Here, too, the world of the gods and the otherworld play through
each other and partly fall into each other. Where ibis and cow are worshiped as
divine, souls are allowed to go into animals after death. And when mixed with many
pagans, linked, the service of the dead is confused with the worship of the gods in a
manner over which we, of course, think long ago to be beyond.
In short, the world of beliefs of the highest and last things is a self-contained world,
as the real world of the lower mean things we know about, only one higher one above
this lower world.
Occasionally, here and there, one or the other of the three moments of faith may
fall out of the tie; It can not happen in the whole and in the whole faith of humanity,
but then only when it immediately falls entirely out of faith or, as the residue of the
whole faith, preserves itself only miserably; for each one can retain his power only
through the connection with the others, as every limb which one separates from the
whole falls into decay. And every degeneration or lack of development of one or the
other moment is always to be regarded as a defect that drives over itself; Faith can
not stand still, must develop or give way to another.
The Jews believed in God for a long time before they believed clearly in a life
beyond, though their Sheol was a stunted idea of it. Today they believe in paradise
and hell, and once hope to come to Abraham's lap. As tenacious as the belief in the
Jews is, he could not endure that stunting.
The Buddhaists believe in life on the other side, without believing in a personal
God, and yet have their idols, temples and prayers. The departed Buddha himself
counts as an idol; - where God lacks, idols can not easily be absent; but that they have
no god over their idols will be one of the reasons that the end of days will no longer
have Buddhism; and all other reasons will depend more or less on this. Some of us
believe in God without believing in a hereafter and personal spirits between us and
God; but how dead, cold, abstract, empty, helpless is this belief; they believe in God
only for God's sake, and would not lose much with poor God.
Power, life, abundance, beauty, sublimity of the religious faith depend on the
coherent living development of its three moments. Has a religion or denomination
already reached the ideal in this regard? In fact, some people do not see the ideal in
the most possible atrophy as the most possible development of the one moment?
III.
Motives and reasons (principles) of faith in general.
The determinants of faith, so we said, are those of knowledge; and after the great
inadequacy of the determinants of knowledge in regard to the highest and last things,
and the so widespread and powerful belief in them, we had to suppose exceedingly
powerful determinants of belief in these things. What can they be?
The revelator is easily finished with the answer. The belief in these things has been
revealed by God to man himself. Of course, in the last resort everything, and certainly
preferably faith in God, will depend on God Himself. Yes, every true faith depends in
a sense on a revelation on the part of the existence of the believer. Or how could one
reasonably believe in the existence of even a tree from which no one has ever heard
or heard a leaf. But not more valid could be the belief in the existence of a God, who
did not enter into our recognizable existence with his existence; only that the
existence of the whole God can not at once enter into the existence of the little man,
which the believer in revelation does not mean. Is there really the God we believe
in? so we must also believe that he somehow revealed himself to us so that we can
believe in him, and the belief in a true God is of itself a belief in a true
revelation. The only question is, how does the revelation go? Did God speak to man
like a human? Why not? At first yes; it says so in the Bible, says the one who firmly
believes in the word of the Bible; and further he did it by his with him some son and
also by supernatural inspiration from prophets, evangelists, apostles, popes, saints,
councils, reformers. But since everything itself is only a matter of faith, for others
also rather a matter of unbelief, so the motives and reasons of such faith, if such exist,
are also subject to the general motives and reasons of faith,
Let us be open: the believer in the revelation, who relies on the Word of the Bible,
perhaps even of Luther or the Pope, as on a rock from which no chunk may fall, out
of fear that all faith will fall, becomes this have to face the whole position of the task
from the beginning. He can not tolerate that what he considers to be the firm outcome
of all judgment and of the supreme over all evil, is yet to undergo any appraisal and
question; there is no instance for him. And truly, he is right to demand something of
the religion; we will finally make this demand ourselves; but if it is already there for
him, another asks if it is there and where it is; Much is revealed for Revelation. The
question of rejection is not an answer;
The closer you can determine the reasons to believe in motives which faith drive ,
and reasons which to authorize differ. The statement of a reason we call
an argument . Motives and reasons together or the common of motives and reasons,
as I have said, principles of faith.
Well, then, one may at first ask, is faith at all something other than motives, or
more of reasons, than what enters into knowledge of it, and yet never reaches to
certainty?
In truth, he has no reasons that are anything other than the perfection of the
motives, and therefore none that are to prove, only those that are to conviction,
otherwise he would be knowledge and not faith. Thus therefore, wherever faith may
be established and sustained, doubts on the side of knowledge remain possible; doubt
can be foolish, but always possible without contradicting logic and experience; that is
already in the concept. After all, what for the existence of God, after all, what speaks
for the universality of the laws of nature, doubts the materialistic naturalist of the
existence of God, the orthodox theologian on the universality of the laws of nature,
yes he does not doubt, he denies. One doubt may be as foolish as the other, but it
remains equally possible; The error of one can be proved as little as that of the
other. Only the folly of it can be proved by the fact that what belongs everywhere else
as foolishness belongs to it in the highest degree.
A gate that seeks out of the people society on ways in which he may hope to
encounter only the same exceptional folly; you let the gates go. A gate of the one who
prefers the harmful to the useful and even declares it more useful than the most
useful; one regrets the gates. A gate that seeks in the most improbable the ground of
certainty; one has doubts about his reason.
Only in the case of matters of faith, of course, do some apply a different, even
opposite, standard. He considers all people who have believed in him and believe
him, what he himself does not believe, for fools; those who do not prefer harmless
unbelief to most useful faith, and who says: credo quia absurdum est.
There is no argument for all these. For all reasoning for faith will be based only on
asserting what is considered folly and wisdom in the smallest and meanest things,
even in the highest and last things, and in this sense the motives of faith to raise
oneself for reasons.
In fact, a major task of the following will be to show how the grounds which justify
faith are only the supreme generalization, summation, summation, clarification,
correction of the motives which lead to faith, in short, what I call the completion of
the Motivecall, are; in other words, that man may and should believe for the sake of
everything, and for the sake of which he really believes; - and how beautiful and
good it is that it is so. To show, however, that at the same time there is an
authoritative restriction, correction, and purification of the same by themselves. What
is half and single, inadequate, and even indispensable, and most motives are, can
fully and fully, and in the greatest generality, afford full thoroughness, and instead of
the half that drives man here and there to faith, to his non-drivenness but to reject it,
one has only to complete it and complete it. What has its truth and justification as a
moment, as a side, as a part, as a stage of the whole or as a whole, can, as a
whole, raised to the top, become false and non-profit; instead of rejecting it for the
sake of its imperishable value, it has only to be reduced to the degree to which it
becomes valid. This limitation and with this correction, however, the various motives
afford themselves.
The negro believes that a rock, a tree, a snake, or anything else is a god. Why? The
priests and the elders said so; he needs the belief in something that has powers
beyond the human in order, where man's powers no longer suffice, to expect help
from him through magic, sacrifice or prayer; and since he does not know the powers
of nature at all, but knows so much about them that they hand over his, why should
not the serpent, the rock, the tree, be as good as any other object of the being to which
he is attached Belief, after any, perhaps quite accidental, association, necessitates the
idea of such power. The rougher man, the lighter and the rawer he generalizes. There
are motives of faith that change here and there, can shape themselves this way But
that through all the peoples who have risen above the level of animality, the belief in
a divine being goes above the peoples, that everywhere in all highest and last matters
this belief is needed, and without it human society is forfeited, that the last Insight
into the whole nature of mental and physical things can find their conclusion only in
such a belief, are grounds of faith, which can not change so, not in the matter also
differently, and preferably we understand below reasons for such reasons ,
The rock is not a god, the tree is not a god, the serpent is not a god, the sea is not a
god, the air with thunder and lightning is not a god, the earth, the sun, the moon are
not god, what the negro, the Egyptian, the Greek who believes heathen at all. But is
all this belief a pure mistake? Take everything together, that's how you have the
world. Is she god? But does the heathen say that of all this, matter is God? He only
means that she is the bearer of a hidden spiritual power, similar to his, beyond his
own. And is it a mistake that the whole world is the bearer of a divinely spiritual
power hidden behind it?
The error of all that single faith is thus only that in the individual is sought, moved
into the individual, which rests fully only in the whole. Complement the faith of all
the heathen through each other and tie it to the whole by tying the divine spiritual
power that he attaches to the individual, so you have the right faith. On the other
hand, if you reduce the power of the individual that he extends to that of the whole to
the right degree, then you have the right faith again. After all, every natural object has
a part of the power with which the God who governs in all things extends beyond all
that is human, only he does not have the whole, the last, the highest.
Nor is the fragmenting faith of the Gentiles the only faith; from the other side, there
is a belief in God as a unified mind that is highly exalted over the world of matter,
having it to its stool, its spawn, its apostasy. If in heathen faith the right unity of the
divine essence is lacking, then in it the living relation to nature is lacking; but one
person can supplement himself by the other and correct in what everyone lacks and in
what everyone lacks; and so faith in a God who is omnipresent in nature and
universal in nature will emerge as a true faith, which all Christians confess in words,
without, of course, doing justice to the Word.
Even if we can trace the ultimate source of faith, provided it is a true one, back to
the existence of what is believed, yet this uniform reason immediately splits in its
effects into several determinants or motives. One can try to follow the dependence of
these motives of faith on the highest and last things on the existence of these things,
but then must presuppose as already given the existence and the mode of existence of
these things, which presupposition is only due to the exaltation of the motives to
justify true reasons. So rather than starting with the existence of the highest and last
things as a given and deducing the motives and causes of belief from them, we have
to begin with the motives of faith as given, rather than
Generally speaking, and as I have said, the motives and reasons for believing in
these things, ie, the highest and last spiritual existences, are none other than any
spiritual existences, yes, things at all; only increased above all others,
culminating. And why, after all, should we regard the existence of higher and of a
supreme spirit as less certain than the existence of our neighboring spirits, if we find
corresponding motives and reasons, only exaggerated, summed up? Of course, if they
are, they can not be as obvious and superficial as for those, but it will be better to
look up and hold more high than if they believe in neighboring spirits, without but
somehow to leave the field of motives and reasons that this belief has.
God sees no one; so why believe in him? But do you see the soul of your
brother? but do you believe in it? so, in any case, that you do not see a god in the
world, there is no reason to believe in him less than in the soul of your brother. You
do not even ask her to see her; Some of God seem to require it to believe in Him, and
because He mocks desire, they mock God. A worm looks very different and moves
quite differently than you; but do you believe in a soul to the worm? So even in the
fact that the world looks very different from yours and your little life is not in the
middle of the night, there is no reason to believe less of a God in the world than of a
soul of a worm. But the worm has a miserable body than you and moves more
pitifully than you; So you also believe in a miserable soul for worming than you
have. The world is an unspeakably greater and more powerful body than
yours. Include your body, your life, yes, the history and fortunes of all peoples
themselves, and you're just a miserable part of it. Could not you believe in a larger,
more lofty spirit after all, than believe in a miserable soul for worms?
But now I would not believe in the soul of my fellow human beings or of the worm,
if I had no positive reasons for doing so. Now we are looking inwardly at what ever
makes us believe in human souls, to see further how we find the corresponding and
the higher in the higher faith.
We believe in it: 1) because the belief in it has been implanted since
childhood. Hindus and other rude peoples also believe in plant souls, because the
belief in them has been implanted from childhood on, not us because the opposite is
implanted in us.
2) Because we need faith in other human souls, find satisfaction in it, even without
it practically could not get along. In the case of animal souls and plant souls, this
motive, like the others, is less pronounced; therefore the belief in it is less
general. Even animal souls are denied here and there.
3) Because the analogy, experience in general, reason on the basis of experience
lets us assume spirits corresponding to our spirit in other bodies. If we do not desire a
full resemblance of other bodies with our body to accept the soul, we require a certain
on points which we presume to be characteristic of the soul-being, although questions
can still arise and argue and really argue which they are.
Other motives for believing in neighboring souls can not be found; It is precisely
these and no other determinants which soon cause us to believe in our neighborly
souls more from this side, now from that side; but it is also those which justify us, if
they are rightly conceived, only that it is possible to quarrel completed version and
the wrong-footed ones with the right ones and can come into conflict with each other
and really come. The right-wing version will finally be the one that eliminates the
conflict. Purely aprioristic reasons for those beliefs that were not at least based on the
above, and reasons in general that emerged from the above, do not exist.
But what in this respect is valid for the belief in our neighbor souls, is just as true
for the belief in the highest and last spirits and in the belief in things of every kind.
Let us then summarize the matter more generally.
IV.
Historical, Practical and Theoretical Principle
of Faith in General.
Whatever name the motives of the faith may carry, and whatever it may be
believed, they ultimately lead back to three, which for the sake of brevity I
distinguish as historical, practical, and theoretical, and for the time being only above,
and then to go back to the more specific, in short, formulate.
Historical motif . One believes what we are told, what has been believed and
believed before us.
Practical motif . One believes what pleases, serves, piously pleases us.
Theoretical motif . One believes, to which one finds reasons in experience and
reason.
None of these motifs is freely traceable to the other. From a certain point of view,
the historical does not seem to be an original one; for someone else to communicate
to me the faith, he himself must already have determinants of faith and the
communication of faith, which will be inquired after; and if these again can lie in a
communication received from other sources, this only puts the question back further,
and then it seems that only the theoretical and practical motive remain as the last
causes of the faith and the communication of the faith. But in the sense of a specific
revelation of faith, the first communication from God Himself to humanity was made
directly or by supernatural inspiration, according to which the historical motive
would be that of the most original;The first emergence of faith in humanity aside and
asking how faith still comes first to every human being, is nevertheless certain and
will continue to find its fulfillment, that the child, to whom the faith of parents and
teachers is informed, does not on the basis of the theoretical and practical motive, but
simply accepts it because it is given to him, so that in any case nowadays for every
man, especially the historical motive is the most original.
Instead of a one-sided dependence on one of the other motives, a change of
interdependence between all is to be recognized up to certain limits. The whole
formation of the faith, which has developed through a long effect of the theoretical
and practical motive, possibly with the outcome of a direct revelation, is historically
transferred all at once to those newly entering into humanity. If faith were to be
regenerated in each one of them by mere mediation of the theoretical and practical
motive, how weak, poor, and ambiguous would it be, in how few would it ever come
to pass. The whole faith-capital of humanity inherits in the whole and after large parts
held together in humanity historically. But from the other side, Unless the theoretical
and practical motive of holding on to belief, propagating, and self-evolving, the
historical would be ineffective, the capital, from whence it always originated,
consumed, vanished. It's like the blood; the drive of what is already there gives
strength and life and strength, not food; yet the blood can not draw the strength and
life and strength of its life from itself; it needs food. yet the blood can not draw the
strength and life and strength of its life from itself; it needs food. yet the blood can
not draw the strength and life and strength of its life from itself; it needs food.
Thus, the historical motive could do so little without the theoretical and practical
and vice versa, and in fact, no one has actually embraced the development and
formation of the faith. But this co-operation and confusion of the motives does not
hinder the pursuit of each independently even to a certain extent; yes, to know what
they are working with and through each other, you have to know what each one is
doing after his side. Especially since the attunement, which proves the three motives
in general and in general, to evoke and preserve the faith in general, does not exist in
the individual and in relation to the individual of the faith. Rather, we see here in
detail this, there the motive vorwaltend or even exclusively, even hostile to the others,
escaping, and the conflict of motives as often as their contract. In Catholicism and
Orthodox Protestantism the historical principle is the predominant one, in the case of
New Catholicism and the philosophical doctrines of religion the theoretical, in the
doctrine of Confucius and the state religions as such the practical one. What the
historical motive would have us believe, often does not want to satisfy the practical
and the theoretical, since it does not appear to us to be beneficial to our salvation, nor
founded in the nature of things. From the other side, nothing more frequent than the
covenant of the historical and practical motive against the theoretical motive, and
therefore nothing more frequent than the strife of the faith with the knowledge; and
again nothing more frequent than that one of the three wants to bend the other two
under his yoke. Thus, the historical one-sided exaggeration demands what has once
been established, and if it were the most salvible as necessary for salvation, and
wants to guide all science on the rope; the practical determines and supervises
according to its purposes the teachers and the doctrine, herewith the direction of the
historical reproduction of the faith and the influences of science on it; and the
theoretical interprets and interprets the historical sources of faith in its meaning, and
sacrifices the goodness of truth.
Not only with each other can the three motives argue, each with itself; and how the
strife of the sects is often harder than that of the religions to which they subordinate
themselves, it is with the strife of the motives.
Thus, the historical motive in the belief in the Koran and the Bible, again in the
faith of the Shiites and Sunnis, here in the faith of the Pope, quarrels with Luther and
Calvin; the practical in the formation of the faith on the part of the priests and rulers
for the own advantage and for all salvation and the favor here this that side of the
advantage; the theoretical in the philosophical doctrines, as much as they exist.
The entire result of faith of humanity is the result of the cooperation and opposition
of the three motives among themselves and in themselves. It is and remains on the
whole a positive tremendous result; yes, the counteraction of the motifs themselves
helps to make it more powerful. It is the case of the eternally changing and
fluctuating sea, which, by its evaporation, fills itself again, but only through the
struggle of its waves, the more powerful. Whatever changes and staggers in it, it
remains as a whole an eternal sea from which all rivers secretly draw, in order to pour
the creature back into the goal of the course. And even what goes against each other
in this is basically and altogether related.
Here and there a materialist appears and says: There is no god. That is, he steps in
with the little bucket of his conclusion to exploit the sea and throw it away. It has
existed from the beginning and will last forever; the small buckets may be tired; what
they pour out, runs through the air back to the sea.
The cause of a history and ethnography of religious faith must be the persecution of
the three motives of this faith throughout the millennia and among the peoples, and
the reasons for its particular formation in the influence of historical precedents,
interrelationships, natural conditions, facilities and needs To look at these motives for
the peoples and to look at them from a more general point of view is a matter of great
interest, but this is not the task here. Before one can broadly trace the causes which
have given rise to faith in humanity, it is necessary to establish with clarity their own
nature and their relation to one another, and this is the task first. But for that, they are,
above all, to be envisaged,
For it is true that with the consideration of the motives of faith down to the
individual effect of them we descend into man, not say that belief in humanity also
arose through an atomistic summation of the motives in the individual; but only said
that the general, higher-reaching, reasons which produced the faith in humanity,
whatever they may be, have asserted themselves as such motives in every human
being under the influence of them; but only these enter directly into experience; only
of these can we infer ourselves to the nature of the more general grounds, and
characterize them, who otherwise remain obscure, as by their effects. So the first
thing to do is to focus on the eye so as not to begin with mystical and idle
speculations, which presuppose this only for the sake of motives and
reasons; according to which it is not only free, but the need for itself arises to ascend
from the action of the motives into the human being to the general agent in humanity,
which we will ultimately only find in an existence of the highest and last things
believed.
Thus, with our experiential contemplation of the nature and action of the motives in
their particulars, their combinations and conflicts, a coherent history and higher
conception of their action in humanity is not excluded, nor superseded; but prepared
and supported; and the conclusion in a higher conception will naturally result in the
course of the following considerations.
Each of the three motives can be raised to a true reason, pronounceable in an
argument, and thus raise above the wavering, the division, the conflict, the aberration,
and confusion, if nothing else remains but what we said, the highest Generalization,
summary, tip, clarification, correction, in short completion of one side and
authoritative limitation of other side of a corresponding motive. Each of the three
arguments is sufficient to justify and sustain the faith, but only insofar as each can be
made a primary concern and others can serve; but in so far as it requires the other,
and can thus again enter into the service of the others, finally faith finally acquires
full support only through the unanimity of the three;
It can be shown that one is right to bask in what is going through history, and even
to hint at what is going to happen in the future; but only by showing that just what
corresponds to the reason and the nature of things and the needs of man can finally
strike through and gain support, and even there is an ongoing tendency to do so. It
can be shown that one is right to consider the best to be the truest; but to arrive at the
knowledge of what is best for all and for all time, it requires the foundation of the
historically developed knowledge of it, and the progressive rational insight into the
nature of men and things. It can be shown that one is right, not only so well in
contemplation of the highest and last things, but to demand, above all and above all,
the most sensible and appropriate thing for the experiential nature of things, as in the
smallest and meanest; but how limited is the individual's reason and his experiential
knowledge of the nature of things; so again it will be necessary to rely on what is
historically valid, and to support it by asserting that, as the most correct knowledge of
what is, serves us best in our relations, and conversely, that which serves us best
That's the right thing.
All the quarrels between the historical, practical, and theoretical motives, and
within each of them, are thus finally resolved and resolved in the historical, practical,
and theoretical grounds, and the controversy in itself carries the conditions of this
solution.
In vain does one try to base the faith solely on the point of view of one of the three
reasons. The believer in revelation, who seeks to rely solely upon direct revelation
from God, must justify the validity of revelation to himself and others from the
practical point of view, that such faith is the best, above all else, which otherwise
reveals itself or makes sense. He who seeks the best religion for all, does he mean
that he himself would have invented the religion of love, which wants the best of all
through all, if he had not found it through Christ? So he needs the historical
support. Or see him among the millennia before Christ and the heathen peoples
around, whether it was so easy to invent this religion. Rather, only that he was
educated in her, He was able to find and set him the highest practical point of
view. And whoever wants to rely solely on reason and experience, he sees himself
among the free communities and materialists who have just this principle, but only
this principle, how much he still finds in the belief in God and eternal life.
Instead of rejecting one of the three stones, we have to lay them to the vault; but for
this we have to lift the stones individually.
V.
The historical principle.
One person tells the other. That is the short expression of the historical
principle. Orally, in writing, it is the same. In this way, faith is propagated from man
to man. But how did he first come to humanity?
You can only go out from the first everywhere, if you know it; but it must begin
with the later, if one does not know it, and watch whether one finds in it concluding
means on the first. The inferences about the first genesis of the faith, however, will
always remain as uncertain as the first genesis, the first state, the first development of
man himself, and the decision between the very opposite hypotheses that exist about
it will always be a matter of concern of a belief whose reasons in general we do not
believe but want to know here. So let us at least postpone that question to come back
to it later; and, instead of first asking how faith first came to humanity, we first ask
how it comes first to everyone today.
It is with the emergence of the faith as with all things. In all things the mode of the
first genesis is distinguished from the way and essentially distinguished as the genesis
of the thing is repeated. What has once arisen spares the means and costs of its first
emergence in the new genesis, where not quite, but to the greatest and most essential
part, in that it contains in its existence the conditions of the repetition of its existence
so suspended.
It was not necessary to create a statue, a painting, a poem for the first time. Once
the work is there, it is effortlessly poured out, copied, recited and reprinted a
thousand times.
Only after thousands, indeed millions, billions of years that the earth exists, could a
human couple emerge. Once there was one, it was easy to populate the earth, and
soon it will be hard to defend its overpopulation.
Nobody knows how the languages came into being, and nobody could invent them
anew; Now that they are invented, every child learns them playfully.
How much does it often take to light the fire in the stove? Once it's burning, take
care that the house is not burning.
Generating a plague, in general, exceeds the human art of damaging a plague no
less.
With the Allen one can ask for the first ground of existence, and one will usually
not find it; the reason for later existence is easy to find; he just lies in what is already
there.
It's like that with all things; it is the same with the faith.
No one knows how faith first came to be, one can already think of this and that
about it. One can also ask if it would be possible to find or reinvent it. Once it has
arisen, true or false, it propagates itself as man propagates, as language propagates, as
fire propagates, as infection spreads. And if man asks himself why he believes, then
one is, although not the last and the whole, but the next and an important part of the
whole, the answer: Because I was believed and believed for myself.
In fact, one would be greatly mistaken if one believed that man believed only in
reason or need. On the contrary, every human being already begins to believe before
reason and need can assert themselves, and faith in the majority of men, irrespective
of this, persists only by persistence. Nor is this peculiar to belief in the highest and
last things; it is just no exception to what is generally true.
No one is born with the belief in God, but everyone with such a general and
unconditional attitude of believing all that he is told is born that it is quite natural that
he also believes in God when told to speak of it ; Hence every people, having more or
less unanimous educational influences, also has a more or less consistent faith,
different from other differently educated peoples.
In fact, the child, and indeed every child, can be made to know almost
anything. Tell the child: The moon will soon fall from the sky, and it will look to the
sky and expect it to fall. Tell him: this dog is about to start talking; it will sound, and
wonder only that it does not begin.
Perhaps it was not that man's faith in God was made white in his childhood, and is
preserved only because he is again made white to every child, and man does not have
the same opportunity to refrain from the non-existence of God over him Convince
clouds, as that the moon does not fall and the dog does not talk. Especially if you tell
him that the thunder is God's voice from the clouds, and this and that to support faith
through faith? The more the child is believed to believe it, the better the child will
believe.
For all faith which is implanted in the child, the child demands no grounds; yes it
would not understand reasons. Nor is it the beauty, the sublimity, the salubriousness,
the consolation of the faith, by which it is destined to believe. It believes all the more
in ghosts, the more one is afraid of it. The thing may be psychologically simple: it
learns the word, which understands speech only by attaching to facts; conversely, it
ties the fact to the word, the speech. Or also: The child does everything for the adult
until it has acquired the skills and abilities to go beyond it by imitation, and much of
it, as it were, proves itself in him. So, too, is the faith of the grown-up in the child. I
like to admit it, that someone takes the psychological reason of the fact even
deeper. Here it is only the fact as a reason, which is also the reason of the fact.
Instead of having to learn the faith first, the child must unlearn the faith; and that
happens gradually, when man repeatedly experiences, the word can lie. Then the self-
evidentness of the association of the real with the word dissolves, the faith gradually
weakens, and at last can even turn into the opposite. But the more man stops at the
child level, and a part of the people remains close to it, the more the uncritical belief
persists. The women in particular always remain children in matters of faith, and the
faith of the masses of the masses can be led by any prophet with a sufficiently strong
voice, a lively gesture, and the power of speech, like a stream of water through a
gully.
Especially in the field of things where no experience, no discovery of an error by
facts is possible. This is where the piety of man is saved, when it is supplanted from
all areas of experience. And the fewer reasons the ignorant has for his belief and the
less he understands the reasons for it, the sooner he can be beaten to death for it, and
he kills others for it, because then so much less can be asserted against it.
But even he whose mind has matured through experience and thought, who has
learned to doubt, is not deprived of the influence of the historical motive; the opinion
about him and the authority over him exercise an involuntary power over him, and it
is not easy to lose all the faith that was implanted in him as a child, but rather
involuntarily determines much of the training of his intellect and his conclusions.
Especially when it applies to things that, with all their experience, exceed the scope
of each conclusion; and thus we see even many of the fiercest thinkers in vain
struggles to ascertain the true and the best in the field of the highest and last things by
their own reason, finally despairing, subjecting themselves afresh with conscious will
to the power of the historical principle that gives them Rest and the trust of the child
promises to return. So the end returns to the exit.
Here we see how the practical motive is added to revitalize and strengthen the
historical. Even those who implant faith in another seek to make it more plausible by
using the other motives; but if the historical motive is based on the other motives, the
reverse is no less true. Reasons of faith are offered to the people, to the child, his
salvation is attached to the faith, and he believes the reasons, believes the promise,
believes the threat quite historically without his own trial.
I want to give an example how I read it:
If one won the Elder from the mountains with money, he sent out assassins, before
whose daggers no king was safe in the heart of his palace, no army commander in the
midst of his warriors. Heissassins murdered King Conrad of Jerusalem, and many
others both Christian and Mohammedan princes and lords. The fanatical murderers
did not fear the most incurable and cruel death, because they had the firm hope that
they would immediately awaken to the bliss of Paradise, or that they would be born
again as beautiful, strong, happy people. "(Meinert's History of Religious IS 338,
according to Arnold III, pp. 148. 149. VII, c., 10. p., 204. Also, Marin, I., 297 ff.) no
army commander in the midst of his warriors was safe. Heissassins murdered King
Conrad of Jerusalem, and many others both Christian and Mohammedan princes and
lords. The fanatical murderers did not fear the most incurable and cruel death,
because they had the firm hope that they would immediately awaken to the bliss of
Paradise, or that they would be born again as beautiful, strong, happy people.
"(Meinert's History of Religious IS 338, according to Arnold III, pp. 148. 149. VII, c.,
10. p., 204. Also, Marin, I., 297 ff.) no army commander in the midst of his warriors
was safe. Heissassins murdered King Conrad of Jerusalem, and many others both
Christian and Mohammedan princes and lords. The fanatical murderers did not fear
the most incurable and cruel death, because they had the firm hope that they would
immediately awaken to the bliss of Paradise, or that they would be born again as
beautiful, strong, happy people. "(Meinert's History of Religious IS 338, according to
Arnold III, pp. 148. 149. VII, c., 10. p., 204. Also, Marin, I., 297 ff.)
Here one sees how the blindest submission to the will of a superior, the most daring
energy, and the most steadfast endurance could be produced by the firm hope of a
hereafter, which, however, according to the historical principle, was produced by
mere early implantation; and as here with the worst faith, it is the other way with that
which we consider best.
In this way, we see the faith of the elders passing to the children, spreading in the
schools, from the pulpit, through missionaries, through true and false prophets and
apostles, on and on. And the further he has already spread, the easier he finds it to
spread further, as the fire, the contagion, the easier they spread the farther they have
reached out. Who can stop last?
To the influence of the diffusion of faith comes the equally mighty of duration. To
what the parents, the forefathers, the ancestors believed, dares not so easily
doubts. Gradually, faith grows so full of the whole nature and life of the people that it
must give itself up to give it up; and almost always gives him up with his subjugation
and annihilation. The most convincing reasons fail because of the established faith,
the more certain the less faithful the faith is, because faith itself is a major source of
reason and manner, especially in its own matters. And so the faith of the individual is
held by the connection with the whole faith around him and before him.
"The more we become acquainted with the people , as I read in a missionary report
from Amoy in China, 1 , the more obvious is the powerful influence which the
prevailing superstition and the fear of calling itself a nerd by contradiction to it. For
the vast majority of the lower estates, the simple fact that idol worship has been
common among them for many centuries is quite sufficient proof that completely
overrules the necessity of the trial. "
1) Calwer Missionbl. 1847 1st of July. No. 13th
And elsewhere 2) : "I drew attention to the wrong thing in the idolatry, to which he
replied: This is how our forefathers did it, and so we must do it, no real cream can
leave the religion of his fathers our own religion, the Padre (missionaries) theirs, and
we ours. "
2) In a letter dr. Haug's. from Puna in the western East India. Sept. 7, 1861. Abroad 1862. no. 5th
But what is wrong, asks the unbeliever, not without a reason, a belief in value and
claims to validity, which in this way finds its spread through humanity in the same
way as fire and plague? a belief which has its chief root in credulity, accepted by the
child and people without understanding, spread by those who often do not have it
themselves, and who remains all the more confident, the childier and effeminate the
more incomprehensible the man remains He is harbored and can only be held by the
rational by sacrificing reason. Have not thousands and thousands of errors and
merries spread in the same way; and let us look at the faith of the peoples; is he not
full of obvious errors and fairy tales? And is not one faith against another? The
poets, Priests and rulers invented him; now he goes through the world.
These objections are on the surface; but let's go a little deeper.
It is true that faith is first accepted by everyone without reason; it does not require
the theoretical and practical motive, but is generally not held without reasons. Of the
child, in the lower classes of people and peoples yes; but that's not what keeps him
going. The child does not remain forever a child, the peoples grow up, and in each
people one part over the other, and part of the peoples rise above the others, and the
adults reign over the children and the faith of the children and the part of the people
who stays at the child level. In adults, however, the faith has to pass its tests. One
knows that he often does not exist in detail, but he persists and always survives as a
whole. He survived a French Revolution, survived a year in 1848 he has withstood
the attack of the materialists of all times; he will survive everything. And if, after a
long trial, some even sacrifice reason with reason, then even apart from reason, there
must be the most important reasons for faith. If, above all, priests and rulers strive to
implant it, if even those who seek to implant it, who do not have it themselves, must
have very general, compelling and binding reasons to plant it. If, therefore, historical
procreation in itself is not a sufficient reason to believe that what has been propagated
is true, then the generality and the compulsion of reproduction can be rejected for
general and compelling reasons. And if, after a long trial, some even sacrifice reason
with reason, then even apart from reason, there must be the most important reasons
for faith. If, above all, priests and rulers strive to implant it, if even those who seek to
implant it, who do not have it themselves, must have very general, compelling and
binding reasons to plant it. If, therefore, historical procreation in itself is not a
sufficient reason to believe that what has been propagated is true, then the generality
and the compulsion of reproduction can be rejected for general and compelling
reasons. And if, after a long trial, some even sacrifice reason with reason, then even
apart from reason, there must be the most important reasons for faith. If, above all,
priests and rulers strive to implant it, if even those who seek to implant it, who do not
have it themselves, must have very general, compelling and binding reasons to plant
it. If, therefore, historical procreation in itself is not a sufficient reason to believe that
what has been propagated is true, then the generality and the compulsion of
reproduction can be rejected for general and compelling reasons. who do not have it
themselves, there must also be very general compelling and binding reasons for
planting it. If, therefore, historical procreation in itself is not a sufficient reason to
believe that what has been propagated is true, then the generality and the compulsion
of reproduction can be rejected for general and compelling reasons. who do not have
it themselves, there must also be very general compelling and binding reasons for
planting it. If, therefore, historical procreation in itself is not a sufficient reason to
believe that what has been propagated is true, then the generality and the compulsion
of reproduction can be rejected for general and compelling reasons.
And further, if the historically propagated faith is generally full of fallacies and
tales, and one faith runs against the other, then the particulars and constitutions of the
faith are to be distinguished from the general and essential points of the faith. The
relative agreement that there is a divine over and an afterworld after give to the
human world, and that man's highest and last salvation is placed in the relations to it,
through all times and peoples is still quite wonderful. For this, too, a general validity
and a compulsion of the reasons must be presupposed for this, not for the changing
and quarreling in the faith. And as much as we may give a price for the particular
forms of the faith, we do not have to give up the whole faith. One should not spill a
child with the bath; should one pour out God with the bath?
The great achievement of the contradictions that manifest themselves in knowledge
is not to abolish knowledge, but to promote it, for with every solution of a
contradiction, knowledge rises one step higher. Should it be different in faith?
If one says that the fable of God and the hereafter has spread like any other fable
and bears the stamp of every other fable, then the very fact of dissemination itself
contradicts it and how much else. Where is the fable, the fairy tale, the otherwise
such dissemination, having gained such duration, would have produced such firm
belief. To be sure, there are some children's fairy tales and animal fables that have
been told in India for ages, just like ours; but these are also very special rarities, their
distribution is always only very poor against that of the belief in God, and what is the
main thing, everyone holds them in India and here for fables. Rather, the historical
motive of not spreading the great fable of God and the hereafter so far could be
maintained so long, if it really was a fable.
Error and truth have in common that they allow themselves to be reproduced
historically, and that the wider the spread, the easier it is to spread the more it has
already held; but there is the difference that with the truth the indefinite, with the
error only up to certain limits, by something with the true faith, as it spreads,
something constantly helpful and beneficial with, against the wrong something
constantly goes against, which at the same time grows with the spread and duration of
the faith and finally necessarily outweighs the benefit of the true faith. And it's not
hard to find that.
Why do we call a belief true and good? Because it corresponds to the nature of
things and the needs of man. Why wrong and bad? Because he is in conflict with
it. What follows from this a priori ? The more faith spreads and the longer it lasts, the
more opportunity he will offer and find to develop and prove his attunement or
conflict with the nature of things and of men; its main effects and consequences may
even develop according to its distribution and duration. The attunement becomes a
favor for , out of the conflict a counteraction againstits wider distribution and
prolonged preservation, which grows with distribution and duration. In a word, it is
the relation to the theoretical and practical principle that determines the definitive
success. The historical principle comes to equate to bad and good, true and false
beliefs; but in relation to this it is in an opposite relation to the theoretical and
practical principle. The ultimate goal is the attunement of all relationships; and it can
finally only take place with a true and good faith.
It is also here with faith as with fire. The more easily the fire has spread around it,
the easier it is to eat the fire, but the more easily it consumes its substance; and would
have gone out long on earth, if not always new material to grow. Thus, a belief that
does not replicate material from the nature of things and the true and universal needs
of man can not persist in length. The longer it has its hold on, the further it has
spread, the more its conflicts with the nature of men and things develop, and the more
it heaps and spreads its detrimental consequences, the closer it comes to its turning
point, and so we see one mistake Fable after the other fall, but the truth more and
more solidify and strengthen, gain larger and firmer ground.
Every bad faith and every evil in the faith at one time reaches that turning point
beyond which its further spread and its further duration increase the conditions of its
decay beyond that of its growth. Then, if the creed is considered very general, then
the whole faith begins to fail. The theoretical and practical principle, which at first
struggles unconsciously against the power of the historical principle, gains more and
more ground, the more the more they can arm themselves with new weapons of the
historical principle, a force of speech and deeds that transports or forces the
crowd. Unbelief, at times when the historical principle loses its old power, may at
times, here and there, outstrip faith, while a group of Old Believers gather against
him more closely and firmly under the banner of the historical principle, until finally
the conquest of unbelief and the overgrowth of the old faith by the new one has been
decided. And it is no different with the temporary weakening of the faith in the
epochs of the transition to it, as the streams for a time flow more sparingly, and then
increase more and more.
So many foolish and harmful beliefs would not even last so long and spread so far,
if it were not connected with predominantly good and true, and both could be so
easily and simply divorced, once it has taken root in the root of man. It is only by a
faith that is on the whole true and better that the existing one can be overthrown, and
that man has to overcome all the power of inertia which the historical principle gives
to the faith that once exists. Thus the paradox arises that the foolish and harmful in a
faith can nevertheless be held by the theoretical and practical principle against which
it runs; only closer looked at not by itself, but by its connection with something
predominantly true and good, and not for ever,
On the other hand, the historical principle also comes into conflict with itself, since
in the nature of a false and bad faith it is itself to rest on one-sided determinations and
thus not to be general. Thus faith begins to fight against belief, with weapons of the
word and weapons of action; yes, peoples eat out for the sake of faith; and this helps
to finally give the good and true faith the upper hand, because the good and true faith
itself is partly wisdom, strength and strength, partly related to what gives wisdom,
power and strength. Or why the pagans fall under the sword of the Christians and the
Occident triumphs over the Orient. In detail, there may be exceptions from the
victory of the true and the good, retrograde movements;
More specifically, the historical principle of belief is as follows:
If there is a belief in the existence of something that is not directly subject to
experience, there must be any reason, conscious or unconscious, of the realm of
existence that produces that belief, or needs in man that drive it , Every, even the
most erroneous, faith has reasons of its kind, though not always universally
permissible, but often merely one-sided, partial, selfish, which, by inadequate
preponderance or ineffective generalization, produce the false faith or the false in the
faith. But for the sufficiency of the reasons, and thus for the validity and quality of
the faith dependent thereupon, the greater the probability:
1) Through the more and more diverse people, peoples, times and climates, living
conditions, the faith expands, in that the faith hereby acquires the more extended,
more versatile, longer opportunity, its attunement with the entire nature of things and
the general and lasting needs of the world To prove people or to assert their
opposition.
2) The more coherent, unanimous, steady, powerful, and effective it extends
through them, demonstrating the durability, the sustainability, the unanimity, the force
of the founding moments of faith in the nature of things and of man.
3) The more unbiased and unprejudiced the view, the greater the gift of nature, the
more comprehensive the knowledge, the more perfect the moral state, the higher the
level of civilization of the people and peoples it stretches, by this on the one hand a
more perfect conception of the human condition On the other hand, the
reasonableness and goodness of the faith in its consequences is proven.
Individual cases of unbelief or dissenting faith in individuals, and even in peoples
and times, can not be considered against the superiority of a common belief that is
sustained and evolving through the course of time, insofar as it is influenced by a
one-sided or partial action of causes, which is general But that the generally
prevailing and steadily preserving faith presupposes a general, coherent, continuous
working of reasons.
According to this, one can make an inference to the truth and goodness of a faith,
without it being necessary to develop for clarity the reasons which lie in the realm of
existence, on which it depends, and in which the action itself proves its
existence. And that distinguishes the historical argument from the theoretical and the
practical, which we will continue to talk about. It excludes the effect of the grounds
on the existence of the causes, which, apart from the dark possibility of a primordial
revelation, are, after all, only the same, from which the theoretical and practical
arguments deliberately conclude. But it is of the difficulty, even impossibility, to
pursue and prove in detail the whole of the reasons which have produced faith.
After that, let us conclude the argument first with reference to the supreme object
of faith.
since it proves its power by the most powerful and lasting effects, since at last the
individual cases of unbelief occur only exceptionally, and only in individuals,
peoples, times, either of very low investment and education or one-sided direction,
then all aspects of the historical argument unite in favor of the belief in God; indeed,
the realm of existence would contain a contradiction in itself, if it were to bring forth,
receive, and develop this belief in so great a generality and with such overwhelming
power, without containing generally valid overriding reasons. so all aspects of the
historical argument unite in favor of the belief in God; indeed, the realm of existence
would contain a contradiction in itself, if it were to bring forth, receive, and develop
this belief in so great a generality and with such overwhelming power, without
containing generally valid overriding reasons. so all aspects of the historical
argument unite in favor of the belief in God; indeed, the realm of existence would
contain a contradiction in itself, if it were to bring forth, receive, and develop this
belief in so great a generality and with such overwhelming power, without containing
generally valid overriding reasons.
One has rightly objected to the historical argument, as it has sometimes been said,
"because all men believe in God, this faith must be grounded in nature," that not all
men believe in God. One must put so little emphasis on the argument of faith that all
believe the same thing as a decision in the state that all decide the same thing. But the
overwhelming number and weight of the votes must be something. Now, in a state, it
can often be very difficult to decide the conflict between what most want and what
the best and wisest want, and even to decide who the best and wisest are. And so the
states divide by putting the monarchical emphasis on the weight, the republican more
on the number of votes, they let the number decide again and again who should have
more weight than the best and wisest, who seek the weight wherever it has been so
far. But fortunately, this conflict does not exist in the belief in God. Not only the
most, even the wisest and the best, or at least the wisest and the best, most believe in
God, even if one wanted to give in to individual deniers, which in a sense is a
contradictionin adjecto is that they belong to the wisest and the best. That, on the
whole, wisdom and goodness are on the side of the devotees of God rather than the
atheists, they will scarcely deny themselves; and if they wanted to deny it, their votes
would have nothing to do with their small numbers and average weightlessness in
republican and monarchical states.
It is, however, peculiar that the very same who hold the majority of the votes in the
state above everything, the representatives of absolute popular sovereignty, are not at
the same time atheists, who do not care that they are in such great minority in matters
of faith , If in state affairs the best can be found by majority of votes, why less in
matters of faith, which after them must be so well a matter of national reason, than
the state things. Here lies an incomprehensible inconsistency.
There may also often be a conflict between the naturalistic views of the peoples,
which in a sense have the advantage of a more naïve, more naïve conception, and
those of an advanced age. But even this conflict does not exist in relation to the belief
in God, but only in terms of the formation of this belief. Natural peoples and civilized
peoples believe in God only in different ways.
But the historical argument as well as for the universal of the belief in God can be
used for the particular determinations and designs of it, except that the universal is
more assured by it than any specialty. And just as for the belief in God it applies to
the other main pieces of the faith. Next to the existence of a divine being, considering
the weight of what the voices of the peoples and times must have, the following
points can be considered well founded by the historical argument.
1) The unity and personality of divine existence, which is universally recognized by
the supreme nations, most advanced in education, undoubtedly dominant in the future
of the earth, and may even have partly made the starting point for the polytheistic
religions, by making the beginning uniform Only later, through divisiveness or
outbreaks, did a divine existence change into a multiplicity, and in some cases come
closer to the idea of a god towering over all other gods.
2) The belief in a real and moral bond between man and God and between men
through God, which exists even in the most imperfect religions up to certain limits,
raised to the purest and fullest validity and effect on the moral side but in the
Christian religion has been.
3) The connection of the belief in God with the belief in immortality, which,
although not alive from the beginning to the very beginning, has everywhere taken
place in progress and the development of religious faith, and where it is the case, not
again can go down.
4) The belief in such relationships between present and future life, that the way in
which man conducts his life implies conditions for his mode of existence in the future
life, in which the faith of the most rude and educated peoples also meets.
5) Faith in the existence of personal mediacal beings between us and God, through
which mediation is established between us and him for special relationships, in which
the pagan belief in sub-gods, heroes, demons with the Christian is conveyed to a
divine mediator, to angels, to the saints and the blessed, who are closer to God than
we are. Every religion carries with it a moment of unity and a moment of multiplicity,
except that in the Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan the unity prevails, in the pagan
actually that of the plurality, and in the Hindu religion both balance one another in
unclear mingling ,
In short, all these major elements of religious belief are decided by the historical
argument from their most general point of view; if there are more and more definite
beliefs in each of them than in the matter of the supreme belief, which concerns the
divine existence in general; as in the case of those main points the general is again
more firmly established than the individual, over which, from the point of view of the
historical principle, even the greatest doubts persist. In particular, God's real relation
to nature and to man, the relations of our otherworldly existence, and the nature of the
middle-beings, are so divergent not only between peoples at different levels of
culture, but also among the most educated peoples, and in the bosom of them
themselves, the views on it are so unclear and self-contradictory, and the Christian
religion itself has so little definite and unequivocal assertion that also with regard to
the preferential weight we owe to Christianity historically nothing can be said about
these points as decided. Rather, the theoretical and practical principle here is the task
of resolving the historical conflict, uniting the various directions that have asserted
themselves in the best possible way, and establishing something historically
resounding. and the Christian religion itself has made so little definite and
unequivocal that even with regard to the preferential weight of what we have to
reconcile with Christianity, historically nothing can be said about these points as
decided. Rather, the theoretical and practical principle here is the task of resolving the
historical conflict, uniting the various directions that have asserted themselves in the
best possible way, and establishing something historically resounding. and the
Christian religion itself has made so little definite and unequivocal that even with
regard to the preferential weight of what we have to reconcile with Christianity,
historically nothing can be said about these points as decided. Rather, the theoretical
and practical principle here is the task of resolving the historical conflict, uniting the
various directions that have asserted themselves in the best possible way, and
establishing something historically resounding.
In the process, it may still be wondering whether the points of view that we
consider to be overcome will not finally be overcome. The natural is easily crossed,
to finally return in a refined form; and an important conflict is to be commemorated.
To a certain extent, with the educational attainment of peoples and the progress of
culture, the weight of their beliefs increases. But a counterbalancing finds place. The
growing scope and wealth of knowledge and the penetrating sharpness of the
investigation, from a certain point of view, also favors the unified conception of the
realm of existence; Middle links between things and in the depths of things and in
abstractions from large circles of things are gained that are lacking in rude
knowledge; and our time is unspeakable in it against every earlier one; but at the
same time there is a growing danger of losing oneself and splintering into the
individual, the ever-increasing division of labor with a division of the object of labor,
the ever sharpening distinctions with divorce, the increasingly higher abstractions
with higher essences, confusing what is conceivable for itself with what is already
existing, and thus the danger of losing the real unity of existence. Even this danger
may be more inferior to our own time than any earlier one, and according to this side
a spontaneous contemplation, which does not divide anything, which does not even
distinguish it clearly, nor classifies it, can be abstracted, advantageous, and right
against an advanced time; while the summit and the goal of progress will
undoubtedly, with the greatest possible increase in the clear distinction, made in the
course of progress, of all parts and sides of existence, will at the same time restore the
most unified linkage, and thus on the law of touch of extremes in a certain sense will
return again to an exit where in the other sense the greatest deviation from it is
reached. Body and soul, soul and spirit, organic and inorganic, man and earth, earth
and heaven, man and God, God and world, this and the other world, finite, infinite are
not only distinguished today, but also divorced in some ways even harshly contrasted
with each other, of whom the earliest time knew nothing, and the last one
indisputably will know nothing more.
Where now a conflict of naturalistic views takes place with those of a more
advanced period, it is important to pay close attention to the nature of the
peoples. The naturalistic views of peoples from which progress has evolved will have
to be viewed with a completely different eye than those who, like those of fetish
worshipers, are simply condemned to succumbing to the advances of culture, and by
their incapacity to develop themselves have proved their injustice historically; but the
circumstance that they have established progress makes it possible for them to lose,
only temporarily, something of the points of view which rightly existed at the
outset. And secondly, secondly, it will be seen after the nature of the difference. Are
they really consistent points of view, which could have been lost in the nature of
progress, or are aspects which, like today's exact science, could only be obtained
through progress. Are they those about which the time of progress itself is in unity
and clarity, or about what it is in discord and ambiguity. In this respect, in fact, the
established views of modern science are very different from those underlying a
boundless discord concerning the relationship of God and the world, body and soul,
and all the above. Here it is possible that in some respects we will return to the exit; it
is my belief that it will happen once, but only to go beyond it from a new starting
point,
Since only the most general foundations of faith can be regarded as firmly founded,
progress, further development and new attachment of the faith to these foundations is
conceivable in any case. Whatever its nature, it will necessarily meet the resistance of
the historical principle before it becomes historical progress; However, it deserves to
penetrate it, sooner or later it will penetrate, reproduce, spread, and root, even if it is
not at the first attempt - because all first attempts fail - and thus at last prove
themselves historically. A belief or unbelief, however, which, like the materialistic,
has always occurred only sporadically,
No less than materialistic unbelief, in many particular directions or forms of belief,
judgment is dictated from the very beginning by the need to say that they can not
penetrate historically, the pietistic, and all the worldly things which refresh and
refresh the soul. rejects, the Orthodox, with their crass belief in miracles, every
Christian dogmatic at all, which at the same time opposes the intuition among the
Gentiles, and maintains the quarrel among the Christians themselves. Against this
there is a main point of view and dependent aspects of Christianity 3)What they say is
that they can not only, in the first place, penetrate universally, after they have already
been reason enough, that Christianity has penetrated through Judaism and paganism
up to this point, and that among Christians in all the quarrels of the confessions and
sects sustain a unity among them. Only this general penetration will not take place
until they have given up the solidary connection in which they are grasped with
dogmas that are not capable of general penetration.
3) Zend-Avesta II. P. 38.39. , , On the Soul Question p. 193.
But even in those directions of Christianity which are not universally permeated
and therefore can not continue to exist as they are, there will always be something in
which they are rooted in the nature of things and the needs of man, otherwise they
would not have arisen, have been able to hold themselves so long; and what is of this
nature, in a consummate religion, will find its more complete fulfillment in
accordance with that which, in seemingly quite opposite beliefs, is rooted only in
another side of the nature of the things and needs of man, than now in conflict with
it. But as long as neither of these tendencies can compel the other to attunement, it
proves that it is as it is, not yet perfected, but rather to be conquered in a certain
sense.
The materialistic unbelief itself would not have arisen and have lasted for so long
and so many times could have risen again, if it had not yet something meaningful to
offer in other directions. Only that this is not his negative side, but a positive side,
with which he holds the one opponent of a one-sided idealism and mystical
speculation. And if the historical principle is right, then what he is in the right to find
in the positive formation of a perfect faith will find even more perfect law in
accordance with the opposite right than now in conflict with it.
How, one asks, would all that be possible? What kind of utopia of faith is described
here? But the fact that it can be considered utopian proves most strikingly that the
completion of the faith that is required is not yet there. Ask yourself what the other
principles can afford to bring about historically.
VI.
The practical principle.
Man believes what he pleases, serves, pious, was the brief expression of the
practical motive.
Now, according to a psychological law, what pleases us most as being existing or
imminent, at the same time believing that its existence pleases, serves us, becomes
pious; Faith in it, even directly or through its consequences, contributes to our
satisfaction, and the tendency to this gratification involuntarily gives rise to a motive
for faith.
From the outset, one might think that such a motive might well determine man to
act in order to create or bring about the most satisfactory, but not to believe as if he
had already made it; but experience teaches it differently, even in the things of
everyday life.
Let us remember how the hopes of man are usually determined by his desires, how
he likes to believe everything, what appeals to these wishes, disbelieves what
contradicts them, how he invites his ingenuity to find reasons in that and against this
sense, and willing to be cheated and cheated. But nowhere has it been difficult for
man to find reasons when he seeks them, and the darker the area in which he moves,
the less experience a refutation allows, the more room he has for these reasons, or the
easier he believes without any reason.
One sometimes sees large colonies on the pretensions of adventurers towards
distant lands to their destruction; it is the practical motive of what it does to
ruin. They hope and believe in the future and in the distance the desires that the
present does not offer. That's why the Lotto's, the treasure hunters, miracle doctors,
alchemists, charlatans of all kinds are doing so well; they exploit the practical motive
of man, which makes it all the easier for him to believe, the more advantageous he is
to what it is to believe; and who promises the most, surpasses others.
But the same thing, which proves such great power in the domain of superstition,
proves the same, and even greater, power in the sphere of faith in the highest and last
things, so that one can certainly ask from the beginning whether it is not even greater
superstition , The conditions for the effectiveness of the motive are the most
favorable here, and so are the achievements of the same here the greatest.
For not only are these objects of belief the darkest, most abundant, and exceed the
experience; not only is the inference most uncertain here, the scope of beliefs the
greatest, but the belief and the shaping of the belief in it also has the greatest and
deepest influence on the present satisfaction of man, as well as the most important
practical consequences. In short, it is here for the practical motive in every respect the
most effective attack and most fertile soil. When there is no more human help, one
longs for a divine one, and because one longs for it, one believes in it, and still
believes in it, when, in spite of all prayer, it does not come; one takes only the other
faith to help, what God does not give in this life, he will give in a future life; and so
you also believe in another life. Who can refute our faith? Where there is no proof,
there is no refutation. So faith can calm down and one faith can increase and sustain
itself through the other. What man most would like to see and least sees, he believes
most, and sets in religious faith here no limits.
So Paul says (Ebr. XI.1): "But faith is a certain confidence of that which one hopes,
and do not doubt what one does not see." - And Pascal about (pensées p.243): reason
can not decide whether a god is or not. From this page you can bet if it's a god or
not. But one has to bet that it is God, and live in this belief, because one hereby gains
everything, if God is real, but loses nothing, if God is not real, while one wins
nothing in the bet, God be, if one is right; and lose everything if you are not right. -
and Cato at Cicero (de senectut, cap 23); quodsi in hoc erro, quod animos hominum
immortales esse credam, lubenter erro, nec mihi hunc error, quo delector, dum vivo,
extorqueri volo. "
They all characterize faith through its practical motive; and as it expresses itself
consciously here, it acts unconsciously on all sides.
In fact, without the practical motive, all theoretical motives do not want to catch
much; while they have the easiest game in the service and retinue of the practical
motive, and often naively enough in their performance, they do not really need it, and
they are not needed. It is enough to need faith, and enough to believe in something
useful.
If faith in God did not somehow serve us, how should we come to think of an
invisible God above us, to seek us within ourselves, how to find him? Now that we
need God, we seek and find him, and find reasons for it, bad, good, or just ask for no
other reason than that we need him; but without needing him, we would not find him,
because we do not seek him; and like some who lost him, found him again just
because he needed him. But when we have found God, we also shape our ideas of
him in the sense that most satisfies us, regardless of any other reasons.
Strange, which force in this respect proves the practical motive. If we look around
in the world, we see the evil in a thousand-fold formation, the widest distribution and
often prevail with overpowering force, physical, moral, plague, famine, war, water
and fire shortage, see the mischief over the just and unjust imposed, see the most
pious prayers without hearing, see innocent children carry the punishment for the
guilt of the parents. Seeing the proletarians, the violent, in possession of wealth and
power, see the truth persecuted; yes, what we do not see is everything, which speaks
fiercely in the eye against the existence of an almighty, all-wise, all-benevolent
God. Yet we see the doctrine of the Almighty and All-Wise and All-Kind God going
on in the schools and proclaiming from the pulpits, and thousands and thousands of
people based their last and only and best consolation on believing in such
God. Why? Because man needs this comfort.
Not otherwise with the belief in a hereafter.
Everything we see contradicts at first this belief; for everything falls into death, to
which the life of the soul was visibly linked. Consciousness disappears when only the
blood in the brain stops, and remains as long as it stops. And both, blood and brain,
rot in death altogether. The eye with which we see, the ear with which we hear, what
will become of them? But man wants to live, to feel for, to think further, to
progress; he needs the belief in a hereafter as a consolation in the sufferings of this
world and as a goal-setting for the walk in this world, as a temptation to the good, to
deter the evil in this world. And so he is driven by the desire to live, the need to live
in hope and a good direction in life, in faith beyond death.
But he who believes in immortality then also places certain conditions which are
not borrowed from him from the nature of the thing, of which he knows nothing, but
from the nature of his desires. No one wants to miss finding those whom he loved
here, no one abandoning the memory of the now, no-one seeing his undeservedly
suffered suffering unfulfilled. One wishes for the sun, the other for Venus, a third
wants a hike through all the heavens; wherever the desire inclines, faith also
inclines; but for most, nothing in the visible heavens, nor on earth, is good enough for
the good, and terrible enough for the wicked; so they believe in paradise and hell; and
every nation hopes in paradise for this, and dreads to fear what seems best and worst
to them.
Thus Falconer made the peculiar remark that in hot countries, where one has to
suffer much from the heat, hell is always presented as hotter, in cold, on the other
hand, where the cold is more than evil, as a cold place. And if not everywhere, then
on average the comment applies.
The old Scandinavians, for whom lust and glory went beyond everything, but who
also appreciated the pleasures of the meal and beautiful women, afterwards also
painted their Valhalla; there is still fighting, eating and drinking, and the Walkyren,
beautiful virgins, are enough to fill the horn.
When the missionaries told the Greenlanders, instead of their heaven, the Christian
sky, they replied: "Your heaven, your spiritual pleasures may be good enough for you,
but for us that would be boring." We must have seals, fish, and birds Our soul can not
exist without it, as our body, we would not find these things in your Heaven, that's
why we want to leave your Heaven to you and the worthless part of the Greenlanders,
but we want to go down to Torngarsuk, where we become abundant Find everything
without the slightest effort. " (From Prichard's Natural History)
Against this Plato believed that an investigation of the eternal truths and the free
unobstructed contemplation of the immense heavenly bodies and of all the miracles
of nature, either unknown or yet mysterious, of nature, would delight the pure,
unbound souls.
Plato, like the others, believed what he wished, and the difference was that he
desired something higher, nobler, and better than the Greenlanders.
But those who do not want to need God and the hereafter do not usually believe in
it; and in general we see those who both deny and endeavor to show that we do not
need both, if these are always exceptions; For, on the whole, the effect of the practical
motive outweighs disproportionately in favor of the religious faith.
No less than the generation, preservation, and organization of belief in each human
being, does propagation depend on it. Others, under the influence of the practical
motive, and its connection with the historical principle, depend on the greatest
accomplishments of both.
One does not only believe in ourselves what pleases, serves, piously, but also
makes others believe what pleases us, serves us, makes us believe them, either for a
selfish motive, if their faith promises us advantages, or according to a nobler motive,
as long as we keep it pious and at the same time keep it pious ourselves, to work for
its best. And while both motives are often very contradictory, in general they are in
complete agreement, as long as one's own advantage of faith is in the common sense.
The priests find it in their advantage that the people believe in God; because their
reputation, their power, their income depend on it. The rulers find it in their
advantage that the people believe in God, because the fear and reverence for a higher
can no longer exist when it fades before the highest, because faith in God gives them
the means, their dignity as one of God used to present the laws they give as
sanctioned by God; because they feel well that the maintenance of the social order
which they are responsible for and on which their own hold depends, is linked to the
preservation of religious beliefs. Priests and rulers also find it in their advantage that
the people believe in a hereafter, in order to lure with future wages and to deter them
by future punishment, where the prospect of this world is no longer sufficient, as they
are chiefly, which painted heaven and hell on the one hand with such enchanting, on
the other deterring, colors, as on command, for no reason whatsoever, as to entice and
deter; and one knows what tremendous effects have been achieved with it.
Priests and rulers are at the head of the people, directing their education, arranging
instruction; and so we see even those who themselves believe nothing, make
arrangements, that the religious faith in the people will be preserved and
propagated. For many it is but a political institution which, unconcerned about the
truth of what is believed, is kept in force for no other reason than because it finds
such usefulness. How many popes might have believed, who believed nothing, and
yet sought to eradicate heresy with heretics. Napoleon certainly believed in nothing
but his star, and yet religion did not fall. And when it had fallen at the time of the
revolution, only the cult of reason and human rights was valid,
Let us hear what Robespierre in the Convent of the Worst Dread (May 7, 1794),
turning, as it were, against the shadows of the atheistic Hebert and Eloots, 1 said :
Do you let yourself be talked about by some babbler, that there is nothing left from
them but dust? Unhappy, who you fall under the pranks of a murderer, is your last
sigh not a call to eternal justice? The innocence on the scaffold makes the tyrant on
the chariot pale. Would she be able to do that when the same grave surrounded the
oppressor and the oppressed? Unhappy Sophist, with what right do you want to wrest
the scepter of reason from innocence, to place it in the hands of vice, to throw a veil
of mourning over nature, to bring calamity to despair, to cheer up vices, to tarnish
virtue, to humiliate humanity ? The more sentiment and genius the human being
unites, the stronger he attaches to ideas which enlarge his being and elevate his
heart. And why should not such ideas contain truth? At least I do not understand how
nature could have inspired mankind with fictions that are more useful than all
truths. In the eyes of the legislator, all truth is what is useful to the world and good in
exercise. The thought of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul is an
eternal call to justice; So he is not only social but also republican. What do the
conspirators whom we have punished want to substitute for the god whom they threw
out of the temples? Nothing but chaos, nothing, death! " In the eyes of the legislator,
all truth is what is useful to the world and good in exercise. The thought of a Supreme
Being and the immortality of the soul is an eternal call to justice; So he is not only
social but also republican. What do the conspirators whom we have punished want to
substitute for the god whom they threw out of the temples? Nothing but chaos,
nothing, death! " In the eyes of the legislator, all truth is what is useful to the world
and good in exercise. The thought of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the
soul is an eternal call to justice; So he is not only social but also republican. What do
the conspirators whom we have punished want to substitute for the god whom they
threw out of the temples? Nothing but chaos, nothing, death! "
1) Beckers Weltgesch. XII. P. 321.
The speaker concluded his speech with the draft of a decree of the content: "the
French people recognize the existence of a supreme being and the immortality of the
soul, recognizing that the most dignified worship of the Supreme Being is the
exercise of the duties of man ... Thirty - six feasts were to be held to remind the
people of the deity and the dignity of his nature, "etc
Thus, faith in God and immortality were decreed from above according to the pure
utility principle, as were other generally useful institutions. And even nowadays,
nothing is more frequent and often nothing fairer than the reproach against the
governments for favoring this or that religious direction for no other reason than
because it more suits the government's interests, that the people are as easy as a flock
together and to be guided.
But the social order, which requires religious faith, the fear of a supreme over the
higher not only benefits the rulers and priests, but it benefits the people themselves,
or rather, we say, it gives the people salvation; insofar as we understand salvation to
be a benefit from the highest point of view, which is no longer called benefit. The
insight of this and the thought that goods higher than temporal and terrestrial attach
themselves to the faith of man can then also determine priests and rulers from nobler
motives, and it is at least as often the case as from the less noble, the faith to get in
the people and to meet any institutions to it. The selfish and nobler motive, in fact,
meet here in the goal so that they are often indistinguishable even at the end.
To the practical motives then also the practical means of the dissemination of the
faith come. Probably more peoples have been converted by fire and sword than by
conviction, and even fire and sword could not implant the conviction of peoples, but
at the same time secure the historical reproduction. The story speaks of pagan kings
who converted to Christianity in order to obtain a Christian prince's daughter, the
people had to be good or bad with convert; and even today, the daughters of the
priests convert from one religion to another to become princesses of
empresses. Priests tie to the incredulity the threat of eternal punishment, to the faith
the promise of future reward, and not only compel weak minds, but also make strong
spirits in unbelief questionable. Heretics are burned; the orthodox clergy get the best
jobs. And if all things have only a direct effect on producing faith, it is extraordinarily
important to preserve it historically.
To all these practical motives, of which faith reckons its origin and its spread, there
occurs still a lighter, and easier, the gravity of the other motives themselves, the
pleasure with which the creative imagination of the poets and the artists in the design
and embellishment of the ideas of faith and the easy accessibility that they gain. They
are capable of such a design, be it through beauty or through stimulation and
occupation of the imagination, which finds pleasure in its activity even in the
miserable, the desire to produce it out of the mind, but at the same time through it
Their graphic expressiveness makes it easier to grasp the concept of communicating
to large communities at once and making them capable of reproduction through the
generations.
But what does the whole faith of humankind say for value and meaning? The faith
which priests and rulers in the main have made for the sake of their own and of the
people's benefit, as he seemed to them now to advantage, and then further enriched
the poet and artist to their liking and to the people's liking have what they liked best
and in which people satisfy themselves for the sake of pleasure and pleasure. If one
thing is more true because we or others use faith or believe it to be true, it is
true. What is the use of creating amenity with truth? Is not rather the worst, the
undesirable often the truest? If parents still live a distant child, this faith serves them
for satisfaction; is he therefore truer? As much as a child can be prevented from evil
by the fear of God, it can be done by the fear of a bum; is one faith more true than the
other? Is not the faith of humanity really essentially only a political institution and
poetic machinery, resting in a fiction that, like the imaginary in mathematics, testifies
to useful conclusions, but therefore remains no less imaginary.
Yes, one might ask, is not the use itself, for the sake of which one spreads the faith,
but rather an imaginary one as a real one, and thus the fiction upon which it is based
in its dissemination, a double; or are not at least its advantages outweighed by its
disadvantages? In fact, we already recalled how the unbelievers dispute the need and
salvation of religious belief for humanity itself. With regard to the supersensible
things, according to them, they depend on the right attention to the earthly and the
care of the earthly ones, in which our life nevertheless has to move; The ideas of faith
seduce the mind to sink from rational and provable contemplations into hollow
reveries; the sense of human dignity and a conscience educated in the same sense can
replace the drives, which one seeks in the religious faith; acting out of consideration
for future wages and future punishment resists a pure moral principle; The atrocities
committed in the name of religion and still committed today are a bad sign of the
salvation of religious belief. When Jerusalem was captured by the Crusaders,
hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in the name of Christ. The Thirty Years' War
of Horrible Memory is conducted in the name of religion. The prisons of the
Inquisition, the pyres of the heretics, the persecutions of the Huguenots, the
monasteries crammed with idle monks and nuns, the self-torments of the fakirs, all
depend on the faith whose blessing one praises. The benefit for the priests and regents
is not denied; but is the people there for her sake?
In all this, there is a lot of light again from the beginning. In order to show that an
argument can still be based on the practical motive, we have two things to show: first,
that the use of faith is not merely conceited or outweighed by major
disadvantages; secondly, that if not the use but the blessing of faith really speaks for
its truth; in blessing, we understand only the greatest, the highest and the most certain
of what is individually beneficial.
In the first place, it can be said, in the first place , that all the harm that has
emanated from religious faith into humanity depends on what has been wrongly made
dependent on it in faith or in the wrong way, and that the disadvantages themselves
can not be a reason to reject the faith, but only to improve it, as they have really
always expressed this effect on the whole and on a large scale; secondly , that as
much of the foolish, false, and reprehensible as the faith of a people may contain, it is
still far better than if it had none; the disadvantages would not diminish but
grow; thirdlythat the substitutes suggested for the faith, in part, could arise only under
the general influence of the latter, and in part can not even remotely reach and replace
its efficacy.
All this, of course, is so obvious in the daytime that there is hardly any need for
showing, and all pointing can not help those who do not want to see with their eyes
open.
It is undisputed that countless abominations have been committed in Christ's
name; but are they also perpetrated in Christ's sense? Would Christ have justified and
represented the atrocities in Jerusalem, the funeral pyres and tortures of the
Inquisition and witch trials, the horrors of the Thirty Years' War? It is not disputed
that the human sacrifices and self-temptations in so many religions are something
very bad and foolish; but just because of this, these religions will not hold
themselves, but will be displaced by a religion of love and reason, and are in part
repressed. In the sense of such I see charitable institutions, charitable hearts, the most
self-sacrificing activity for others, the highest achievements of art, a shield of laws
over the human, but none of those handicaps,
And does one think that the atrocities of the Thirty Years' War would have been
spared without a Christian religion, without a religion at all? They would have been
perpetuated and exalted, for it would not have come to a durable social state, it would
each be consistent with the other; and indeed, in every nation, each one is the more
against the other, the less religion there is in the people; for all the general principles
of civilization are directly or indirectly connected with religion.
Or does one think that the disadvantages of a disorderly state would assert
themselves in such a way that men would in any case be driven to elevate them even
without religion? But this is just as if to say that the drawbacks that depend on the
lack of blood in the body would be that the organism would lift them without
blood. If it were not for the faith, surely Napoleon and Robespierre would have tried
every means but faith. But the most blatant absolutist and republican have found him
immediately necessary to maintain order in the state.
Since he did not need a restaurant to worship a god or gather for religious purposes,
he immediately had the church, which was still in the place, set up as a workshop,
and the building next to it as a dance and concert hall, as well as an apartment for
reshape philosophical lectures. There were soon several persons of both sexes who
shared these beliefs with him, especially as he combined a not so rigorous morality
and proclaimed perfect equality and communion of goods. Enthusiasts, tramps,
crooks, and lazy good-for-nothings volunteered as members of society for a time at
community expense. The Bessergesinnten who had consumed the little money
brought,
And so will any atheistic community end; and if free churches, miserably enough,
exist here and there within the womb of a larger religious community-and how long
will they last? - It's just how small cavities full of powder can exist in a solid
environment.
Even in a time, among a people, where no one believed more, the keeping of the
forms of faith in the state could still serve to afford a weak foothold; However, the
feeling of weakness would always lead to the strengthening of the faith and thus to a
stronger inner hold and has often led to times that seemed to go to the extreme.
Of course, as the blessing of a true and good religious faith transcends every other
blessing, the disadvantages of one false are greater, wider, and more profound than
those of any other faith; and this is what makes it possible to blame religious faith so
much. But even in the case of the worst religious faith, which still deserves this name,
the advantage as a whole is, I say, greater than the disadvantage in detail; it is better
for a people to believe anything that offers a hold, a hope, a help, a bond over the
earthly and temporal than to believe nothing that can not be proven and proven.
The English Government on the Gold Coast once took occasion to expose the lies
and delusion of their fetish priests in a large gathering of Negroes. "The impression,
concludes a report on it, which made it to the minds, was a mighty one.It was
impossible to see the only support, the staff of these people so broken, without having
to feel sorry for them.Many left the castle sad and depressed and they said to each
other, "What can we do now in sickness and need? Who can we turn to for help? Our
gods are not gods, and the priests cheated on us ..." (From Cruikshank's Gold Coast,
Abroad 1854. No. 9).
So the Negroes themselves found a foothold even in their very rude faith, which, of
course, they could interchange with an unspeakably better one, and yet they could not
do without feeling completely broken. But what will be able to do in the same sense a
better faith!
If we take a closer look, then the benefits, the blessing, the salvation, which come
from a good faith - but the only one to protect and sustain is the task - are doubly
from a double point of view. For once, the totality finds in this belief a point of
agreement, and secondly, each one a stopping point and a destination; In the unity, the
hold, the goal, there is an advantage over the quarrel, the wavering, the gaze and the
way without a goal, but a second in the fact that agreement, hold, aim now also take
place in a good sense and in a good direction , All these different advantages, or
rather sides of the belief-blessing, are connected by changeable conditionality and the
common point of view.
But they are easily misjudged because they are not seen there or they are looking
for where they are. The individual pays little attention to the overall benefits, in
which he shares even every day, even if he does not think about it for a day, because
the share does not turn out to be unique to him; And many do not see the great
advantage that faith could afford him in detail, because he does not even afford him
the least, since he can only afford the greatest, if he refuses to afford even the
smallest. For, as belief in the highest and last things, he grants only advantages
according to highest and last relations; in the low, narrow, short, and small you do not
have to look for them. Instead of benefits you can always put salvation and blessings.
Faith does not fill the spoon, not the plate, but the bowl. He establishes, is he the
other right, a bond between all men over all human bonds, keeps a law upright over
all human laws, hallows the hold of human laws themselves, gives in the oath the
rights of his last refuge, gives the first to the marriage alliances the last blessing of the
parental blessing, the highest consecration to the kingship; he offers science and art
the highest tasks, points of view and ideas; brings peace, security, hope, confidence in
the whole life of the individual; consoling man, where earthly comfort no longer
suffices, saves him from suicide and despair; but he gives no bread to the hungry, he
does not fill the sack, he does not enjoy.
On the contrary, the religious faith demands a thousand sacrifices, sacrifices of
time, sacrifices of thoughts, sacrifices of means that we must withdraw from earthly
affairs, from earthly acquisitions. It is necessary to preserve schools and churches, to
pay pastors, to go to church, to pray and to sing; with all this nothing comes out; How
much more useful time, means, and thought turned to. From one church one could
build a lot of houses, the preacher could, instead of eating from the work of others,
help others or teach them to work. Yes, and how much more useful could the stones
be placed in the bottom of the house, where they are of no use to anyone; you could
build the house one floor higher; it would only come to mind; and so would the
building of human society,
I once read a story, I just do not know it anymore; nothing matters. King Alexander
received from a barbarian king three hunting dogs of the noblest race. He left one in
his kennel and left a deer to go with it; the dog remained calm; and Alexander in
anger about the lazy beast ordered the dog to kill. So it was with the second; the third
division he still. When the barbarian king heard it, he said to Alexander, "You put a
deer in the kennel, let in a lion or tiger, and you will see what you have on the
dog." Thus, religious faith remains idle in life's trifles, and awakens to greater energy,
the greater it is.
Whoever believes that there is a God who, not in the moment but in the course of
time, directs everything to the best, finally forces and banishes the resisting forces,
makes evil itself the means of the better, to a God who However great the evil may
be, the means of turning it over, extinguishing it, reconciling it, and having a will and
a wisdom that go hand in hand with it, envelopes itself in a storm and hailstones that
devastate the fields of his happiness, into the trust in God as in a mantle, and know
the sun in the sky, which has not therefore gone out, will shine all the brighter; those
who do not believe in God stand defenseless, contract themselves, and look desperate
or resigned to their broken thermometer and barometer, whose leadership should
replace him with the guidance of heaven. And certainly for the day, the hour, the
circumference, which the earthly eye measures, the confidence in the earthly and
temporal aids is the best, and so erroneously, who wanted to replace them with the
trust in God. But beyond anything that can be calculated in detail, the whole thing is
unpredictable in the world, where there is only one bill left, security and consolation,
which take account of a supreme conscious action, which, on the whole and in the
course of time, steers everything to the best wants and can.
True, it is the principles of humanity that the sense of human dignity is able, to a
certain extent, to provide a good practical substitute for individuals who have no
faith. There are morally impeccable people working for the good of their fellow
human beings who believe neither in God nor in immortality. But once these are
exceptions rather than rule; The majority of the atheists are rejected men and
depravity and lack of faith are so commonly connected, mutually reinforcing and
each other, that depravity and godlessness are said to be synonymous. Secondly,
those principles of humanity, that sense of human dignity which religion should
replace, could not have evolved at all, except through the growth and education of a
people, to which they have become familiar from the religious side. May those who
believe or want to believe in such cruelty look into psychology or history to see if the
substitute could, could or could not survive without what it is supposed to
replace. Rather, we see the whole humanity with the religiosity connected, rising,
falling, falling.
The air is not thanked for being spread all over the world for breathing, the sun not
making it bright, the religion not holding the human society. The social order is
there; it is taken for granted that she is there. Why the air when you have the
breath; why religion, if you have the humanity!
It is certain that some feelings could not arise without the belief in God in man, and
just as certain that it is these very feelings in which man feels most elevated and
which make him the greatest, best, most beautiful deeds have inspired. Now it is
peculiar to point people to the feeling of human dignity, and to cut off what human
feeling itself can attain the greatest dignity. So beautiful, so wonderful are the
feelings of love, of the trust that we carry to parents, siblings, friends, to a loved one
above all; the feelings that we hold to God, we believe otherwise in God, protrude
beyond, like the umbrella-palm over flowers and grass, and are compared to nothing
of all that to procure and to replace; and the most beloved being can not, in the times
of highest need, refer you to faith in yourself and you, but only to one who is above
both masters of all need. Believing in such a Master, we see many God-trusting
people go through fat and thin, certainly a good goal if they walk in a good sense, and
lie down each evening with the consciousness and feelings of being in God's hands,
and in such faith finally die. A sublime sight! Against this, hold the one who lies
down in the feelings of his human dignity without the belief in higher protection and
future existence and dies. A sad sight! Believing in such a Master, we see many God-
trusting people go through fat and thin, certainly a good goal if they walk in a good
sense, and lie down each evening with the consciousness and feelings of being in
God's hands, and in such faith finally die. A sublime sight! Against this, hold the one
who lies down in the feelings of his human dignity without the belief in higher
protection and future existence and dies. A sad sight! Believing in such a Master, we
see many God-trusting people go through fat and thin, certainly a good goal if they
walk in a good sense, and lie down each evening with the consciousness and feelings
of being in God's hands, and in such faith finally die. A sublime sight! Against this,
hold the one who lies down in the feelings of his human dignity without the belief in
higher protection and future existence and dies. A sad sight! who lies down in the
feeling of his human dignity without the belief in higher protection and future
existence and dies. A sad sight! who lies down in the feeling of his human dignity
without the belief in higher protection and future existence and dies. A sad sight!
The representatives of the principle of humanity are not art despisers: art is indeed
one of the best educational means of man, the most important moments of humanity
itself. Well, well, they put their principle of humanity in the place of religious faith,
and see what art and the artist's enthusiasm remains. All the dome will fall or never
have arisen; the Greek idols, patterns of all times, could never exist; for the size of a
Raphael and Michel Angelo, no substance could cope; a cold history painting
becomes the highest of art; for all the warmth itself of the profane conception of
history has its hidden source in the belief in a more than merely human
coincidence; and let's take a closer look so all art has developed from religious
beginnings. At least one may concede that neither the Greek idols nor the Christian
Madonnas ever existed in the archetype; but the belief in a higher spiritual existence
over man had to exist in order to bring out these blossoms of art, indeed art itself.
True, as art grows out of faith, faith, on the other hand, grows through art; we have
already conceded it, but it can only grow it, not create it, and requires the already
existing tribe. And all the sprouts, which produced the mere imagination of the artist,
retain their motive force for a maximum of one summer of faith, then wither or
remain only as decoration of the old tribe; and new sprouts need new branches from
the tribe.
More than mere principle of humanity, the belief in a generally good world order
without a personal conscious representative of this order may serve to represent the
achievements of the religious faith in such a representative, but not the most valuable
and the best. In seeking to replace the most irreplaceable feelings with concepts, he
can not raise the spirit in the same way, fill it, drive it to the victims of love, inspire it
to the works of art. For it is in the nature of things that the highest exaltation of
consciousness can take place only in the direction of a supreme consciousness above
all consciousness, and all that one wishes to set for it is cold water into the fire.
In this respect, the belief in a conscious mind above me is no different from
conscious spirits next to me, but the same only in a higher sense. I see so little of the
consciousness of others as of the consciousness of God. But the belief that parents,
siblings, and friends have a consciousness similar to mine could hardly be
represented by the belief that they behave as one another in the sense of a proper
world order, and against each other as they do; the most precious feelings and
impulses would thus be lost; so little can the belief that there is a God with an
awareness of everything and everything be represented by the belief in any
consciously unconscious world order; the peak of all those feelings would be lost.
And no more so than for a conscious God with connections to our consciousness,
for the belief in a conscious future life with relations of our present life to find a
surrogate, which could replace the same from a practical point of view, yes, what
remotely the same thing can afford. By the examples of the Assassins, we saw what
the worst belief in a hereafter can do for effects, the worst, of course, but the
strongest; Thus, the best faith in a hereafter can produce the best and most powerful
effects and has produced them. The thought of fame can do something; I do not deny
it; but how weak is the thought that others will think with love, respect, adoration of
our forever-dead, against the thought that we ourselves think, with whom,
All that has been conceded, however, and what faith has good and works, finally
asks itself again: what proves its truth? What is the goodness of a faith's truth? Are
not these two completely incongruent things? One must search the truth without fear
and regardless of the consequences of what one finds; only then can one hope to find
her. Where interest comes into play, man becomes blind.
I often hear that saying, and research often goes in this sense, for the sake of the
sake of the sake of truth, away from everything that wants to be of true interest to
man, as if both could ever conflict. And on the other hand, one speaks again in high-
pitched speeches about the attunement of goodness, beauty, truth in their last
grounds; Speeches remain, because one does not have and sees the point of view and
core of the attunement.
Of course, where the interest of man comes into play, he becomes blind to the
highest truths; but not in that lies his blindness, that he follows his interest contrary to
the truth, but that he does not follow his interest enough, by following short, narrow,
low interests at the expense of the larger, higher, more enduring ones, in which finally
the halt, the assurance, the reason of oneself rests; or that he follows his singular
interest in contrast to the general, which includes his and all interest coherently; only
then does he come into conflict with the truth.
Everywhere else we find that the most correct knowledge of what is, in practical
terms, best serves man best leads him. How, conversely, should we not conclude that
what best serves man, best leads him, is also the truest. We find this principle all the
more confirmed, the more we expand its search for confirmation from the individual,
and thus we can expect its surest confirmation when we go to the full. A single error
can temporarily satisfy an individual; the further an error spreads, the more people
feel, think, act, the further and deeper its practical consequences are, the more it
develops in such a way, the greater, his disadvantages become more profound for
all. This is not desert metaphysics, empty conceptual game, clumsy dogmatism, but
simply a clear statement of a universally valid fact. The opposite is true. And
according to this, the truth of what is supposed to be true of all, the will, the thinking,
the feeling of all, will be so determined that the most salutary, most beneficial
consequences for all, for all mankind, will emerge from it. We call that belief the
best, and so the best faith must be the truest. But if the best faith is an ideal for
humanity, faith will approach the ideal of truth the more it approaches the ideal of
goodness. but simply a clear statement of a general fact. The opposite is true. And
goodness. but simply a clear statement of a general fact. The opposite is true. And
goodness. that from this the most salutary, most blessed consequences for all, for all
humanity, will emerge. We call that belief the best, and so the best faith must be the
truest. But if the best faith is an ideal for humanity, faith will approach the ideal of
truth the more it approaches the ideal of goodness. that from this the most salutary,
most blessed consequences for all, for all humanity, will emerge. We call that belief
the best, and so the best faith must be the truest. But if the best faith is an ideal for
goodness.
It is undisputed that the faith which parents may cherish is that a child who died in
the distance is still alive, not truer by comforting the parents. But does he carry with
this single achievement the character of the truth, which the practical principle
demands, which is not sufficient for individual achievements? Rather, if all men were
to think indefinitely in the faith, that the dead should still live, then the greater
disadvantages would arise, the greater the longer and the more they would practically
follow the faith, and that comfort of the parents themselves would be borne Length
does not stand up. That depends on his falseness. And all the more, if all men
indefinitely think, act, live a God who does not really live, and they themselves will
live in the future instead of being really dead; the consolation that mankind drew
from it for a while would not last. As much as the error would be to believe in a
living God and an eternal life of all, as in a single living man and his temporal life,
the disadvantages for all would be so much greater, and the more he spread and ever
the stronger it rooted, the more they would have to grow. But on the contrary, the
greatest spread, longest duration, greatest practical effectiveness of the belief in God
and the hereafter brings the greatest blessing, which can not be replaced by anything
else, and the longer it has existed, the more it will endure. As much as the error
would be to believe in a living God and an eternal life of all, as in a single living man
and his temporal life, the disadvantages for all would be so much greater, and the
more he spread and ever the stronger it rooted, the more they would have to
grow. But on the contrary, the greatest spread, longest duration, greatest practical
effectiveness of the belief in God and the hereafter brings the greatest blessing, which
can not be replaced by anything else, and the longer it has existed, the more it will
endure. As much as the error would be to believe in a living God and an eternal life
of all, as in a single living man and his temporal life, the disadvantages for all would
be so much greater, and the more he spread and ever the stronger it rooted, the more
they would have to grow. But on the contrary, the greatest spread, longest duration,
greatest practical effectiveness of the belief in God and the hereafter brings the
greatest blessing, which can not be replaced by anything else, and the longer it has
existed, the more it will endure. the more they would have to grow. But on the
contrary, the greatest spread, longest duration, greatest practical effectiveness of the
belief in God and the hereafter brings the greatest blessing, which can not be replaced
by anything else, and the longer it has existed, the more it will endure. the more they
would have to grow. But on the contrary, the greatest spread, longest duration,
greatest practical effectiveness of the belief in God and the hereafter brings the
greatest blessing, which can not be replaced by anything else, and the longer it has
existed, the more it will endure.
To contradict the previous principle means, with the most general experience we
can do, to contradict any reasonable interpretation we can give it.
Whatever might have created man, it is fact, she has created it so that it can exist
and develop prosperously; but only if he behaves according to the context in which
he is created; if not, it is driven by disadvantages; and his spirit itself must help him
to behave in such a way as to take his account of what is and will be in this
connection. If one thinks that power has at the same time created it so that it can only
survive and develop properly when, exceptionally, in regard to itself, the creative
power and its ultimate goal, man sets his bill for something is not yet to be, and if it
could even be in the sense of a mindless power to create creatures with such a
device, that they can not really exist without the belief in a creative spirit? It would be
too absurd. Yet some take this absurdity for wisdom.
I once read how the staghorn beetle larva builds a larger housing when it is pupated
than it needs to fill it with its curved body, so that the horns that develop at one time
will still have room. What does the larva know of her future life, her future horns, as
little as we know of our future life and our future way of being in it? but she is
already setting up her house for it, and without being able to develop it right up to
that point. If one thinks that the same power that created the staghorn beetle and the
human being has given the beetle truth in the instinct and in the faith of the beholder,
who allows him to build his present life in the direction of the future and lend it
further than he does otherwise the case would be a belief
Of course, in every single human being the belief in immortality does not develop
so much as instinct in every single stag beetle. But in mankind it develops so
necessary, and in that it stands above the instinct that it develops out of the
connection of conscious life with respect to the common end and end point of this
life, which has the same ultimate reason as life of the beetle and his instinct.
After all this I resume first the practical motive, then the practical argument 2) .
2) Here follow essentially the same propositions which I have already given in Zend-Avesta II. P. 251 only
without the preliminary discussion.
Man believes in the existence of God and what is connected with it, because in the
individual as well as in human society this belief is beneficial, wholesome, beneficial,
practically necessary to man because neither man in detail nor mankind as a whole is
without him to thrive and develop prosperously, man finds in detail a supremacy
reaching to the utmost cases, human society the most universal and binding support,
all earthly-human interest at all summit and goal in it. As man partly feels this
unconsciously and consciously sees it partly, the individual is driven to share in the
beliefs of the advantages of the latter; which larger and smaller circles of human
society, such as parents, teachers, rulers, have an incentive to propagate, sustain, and
even propagate it in these circles; but for those whose intelligence, intelligence, and
goodness precedes others, to further develop faith in such a way that, as a blessing, it
becomes easier to apprehend; in what ways this motive interacts with the historical
and works in its hands. In short, man believes in God and what is related to it in
religion, because he needs faith in it and faith in it serves man. Intelligence and
kindness that precedes others, to further develop faith in such a way that, as a
blessing one, it becomes easier to apprehend; in what ways this motive interacts with
the historical and works in its hands. In short, man believes in God and what is
related to it in religion, because he needs faith in it and faith in it serves
man. Intelligence and kindness that precedes others, to further develop faith in such a
way that, as a blessing one, it becomes easier to apprehend; in what ways this motive
interacts with the historical and works in its hands. In short, man believes in God and
what is related to it in religion, because he needs faith in it and faith in it serves man.
But that this belief is a true one is justified as follows with the following
consequences:
1) Every erroneous or deficient premise proves to be such as to be perceived as
being detrimental to the influence it has on our thoughts, feelings, and actions, or to
detracting from human happiness by giving us involved in disgusting moods and
wrong actions, which partly involve immediate unpleasure, dissatisfaction, partly
indirect discomfort, while the truth of a presupposition proves to be such by the
opposite of all this. This sentence proves itself all the more, the greater influence
error or truth gains on our feeling, thinking, acting, on a larger perimeter of people
and the longer duration it extends, while an error without considerable intervention in
our remaining feeling, thinking , Act, for a single human being or small circle of
people and for a short time may well seem satisfactory and useful. But it now
becomes clear that the religious faith, apart from the theoretical satisfaction which it
is capable of granting, also carries with it the greater, more important, and more far-
reaching advantages, while unbelief carries disadvantages for humanity and the
individual, the further or further deeper this belief or unbelief decisively interferes in
the mind and action of men, and for ever longer duration he stretches out, from
whence it comes, that unbelief can not sustain itself in the long run in a large
circle. Thus, the belief that the objects of religious belief exist carries with it the mark
of truth. apart from the theoretical satisfaction which he is able to grant, but also for
all the greater, more important and far-reaching advantages, but unbelief carries
disadvantages for humanity and the individual, the further or deeper this belief or
unbelief in the mind and the action The human being intervenes decisively, and for
ever longer duration he stretches out, whence it comes about, that unbelief can not
sustain itself in the long run in a large circle. Thus, the belief that the objects of
religious belief exist carries with it the mark of truth. apart from the theoretical
satisfaction which he is able to grant, but also for all the greater, more important and
far-reaching advantages, but unbelief carries disadvantages for humanity and the
individual, the further or deeper this belief or unbelief in the mind and the action The
human being intervenes decisively, and for ever longer duration he stretches out,
whence it comes about, that unbelief can not sustain itself in the long run in a large
circle. Thus, the belief that the objects of religious belief exist carries with it the mark
of truth. the further or deeper this belief or unbelief decisively intervenes in the mind
and action of men, and for ever longer duration it stretches out, whence it comes
about, that unbelief can not in the long run be maintained in the long run. Thus, the
belief that the objects of religious belief exist carries with it the mark of truth. the
further or deeper this belief or unbelief decisively intervenes in the mind and action
of men, and for ever longer duration it stretches out, whence it comes about, that
unbelief can not in the long run be maintained in the long run. Thus, the belief that
the objects of religious belief exist carries with it the mark of truth.
2) The closer formation of this belief comes under the same principle. Insofar as it
is found that a shaping of the religious faith contributes all the more to the happiness
of humanity, the more, the longer and in ever wider circumference it gains influence
on the feeling, thinking, action, this shaping or side is the formation of the faith to
regard as true, in the contrary as false or deficient, so that after all only faith can be
regarded as the truest, which is most salutary to humanity after the totality of their
relations.
3) In the course of the development of the faith, however, it can happen, and it has
often happened, that faith partly benefits the temporal advantages of individuals,
partly from irretrievable views of that which pervades the whole, partly through
apparent conflict with theoretical grounds, erroneous ones, and herewith the
Humanity inconvenient, takes on designs. In general, man begins to have particular
interests, and to think that the belief that he has created is the best, to explain, and
even to implant and reach others. But as the advantages of the true and the
disadvantages of falsity continue to reach into space and time, as already shown in
the historical principle, they increasingly and more severely affect all individuals who
have true or false beliefs and affirm those in the world correct knowledge,
4) Insofar as the best for man has to be considered, which gives satisfaction,
happiness, well-being, not only to individual relations, for a short time, to individual
factions, but to all sides of the human being, to the whole of humanity indefinite
duration, with regard to all consequences, the most secure and to promote, the truest
faith founded in the previous manner can at the same time be called the best, and in
the first place let the goodness of the faith make the conclusion to its truth.
5) Thus, the development and formation of religious ideas is at the same time most
harmonious and practical in connection with the shaping of morality and of life,
because the tendencies of morality and of life are directed toward asserting and
preserving what the Humanity most beneficial and most prosperous 3) . However,
religious ideas, according to the design which they accept under the influence of the
practical principle, themselves appear as the most important conditions for a
prosperous formation of morality and life, because the viewpoint of their formation is
precisely that which they regard as valid which, from the highest point of view, must
have the most general and thoroughest salutary influence on the entire human.
3) Cf. "About the highest good."
6) One can relate the previous argument to the following or to the following.
We would not the religious beliefs need when the objects thereof is not would . For
if man has made the faith because he needs him, he has not made the fact that he
needs the belief in his prosperous existence, and accordingly he is compelled by the
need to do so. The production of this belief by man must therefore be grounded in the
same real nature of things which man himself has created with his needs. Partly, it
would be to put an absurdity in the nature of things, partly it runs counter to
experience, as far as it can be done, that nature has arranged man to thrive only by
believing in something that is not.
In general, if anything is empirically proven, then it is the practical argument of
faith. And as surely as we hold the law of gravitation after it has proved its worth so
far as experience, even if it still holds valid wherever it no longer reaches it, we may
also hold that argument valid without any limits in this sense. And that is why it is of
such great importance to us that, after his general experience, as far as possible, he
represents the probation of everything that follows from it by experience in areas
where experience is no longer sufficient Hereby, what is lacking in the theoretical
conclusion to the exact, is replaced by the exactness of a practical one.
How much of theoretical motives for faith may come up in the following principle,
and how valid the point of view may be, which summarizes and elevates it to
argument, it is not enough to justify faith for certain, yet it might all be different or
not at all; The possibilities of logic and experience remain many. But at last only
those can exist that theoretically reproduce the same thing, which is practically
required. Take this and it remains of all possibilities only one.
To the uncertain theoretical conclusion, the historical revelation asserts itself as
infallible; but in every other religion, another asserts itself as infallible. Which is it? It
is finally, that practically does not cheat us.
Thus, according to the totality of the preceding, it would even be possible at all to
make the belief in the highest and last things right without regard to all that has
hitherto been believed, regardless of all theoretical grounds and conclusions, from the
outset merely according to the viewpoint. that he best served the whole of mankind
according to the highest and last relations, if only the knowledge of what they serve is
possible without that consideration itself. But that is not her. Rather, one must not
forget the change of demand, according to which the practical principle has to be
based on the other principles as well as on the contrary to that, provided that what is
best for humanity is to be believed through history as such first have to show and
prove, in order to recognize it well to transfer to posterity and posterity, and to
contribute to the early stages of a good faith belief itself, to mature the intelligence so
as to make it even better; but this is possible only with regard to a more correct
knowledge of the nature of men and things. From a purely abstract practical point of
view, the possibilities of belief would remain no less numerous than merely
theoretical or historical. But at last only those who at the same time are a theoretical
and historical possibility can exist. Add that, and there will be only one left of all
possibilities. but this is possible only with regard to a more correct knowledge of the
nature of men and things. From a purely abstract practical point of view, the
possibilities of belief would remain no less numerous than merely theoretical or
historical. But at last only those who at the same time are a theoretical and historical
possibility can exist. Add that, and there will be only one left of all possibilities. but
this is possible only with regard to a more correct knowledge of the nature of men
and things. From a purely abstract practical point of view, the possibilities of belief
would remain no less numerous than merely theoretical or historical. But at last only
those who at the same time are a theoretical and historical possibility can exist. Add
that, and there will be only one left of all possibilities.
Draw from the circumference of a sphere of three radii. You can put them on at
infinitely different points and on each one there are infinite points; but the point
where they meet is always one.
In the meantime, as we have already been able to decide from the point of view of
this principle alone in the historical Principe Manches and especially the most general
and important aspects of the faith, with the reminder that the historical decision could
only be brought about on the basis of the other principles; In this way we can alone
decide many of the most general and most important facts from the point of view of
the practical principle, with the contrary reminder that our practical reason could
mature so far only on the basis of historical development and growing knowledge of
the nature of men and things to precipitate. But we will, of course, find that what is
decided from a practical point of view is just the same again, what we have
historically been able to hold firmly and what we theoretically will have to find again,
the right meeting in the point of full certainty should take place. Only in the practical
principle can we now find the practical for the historical and theoretical grounds of
the same faith, may find it easier to lead some with the one, others with the other
principle, and where assurance by the other principles is lacking to complement them
by the practical.
Without wishing to go further into this, as already mentioned, I conclude with a few
reflections on the position of the practical principle of Christianity and philosophy
concerning the three main parts of the faith.
In so far as we stand by Christ's own doctrine, Christianity satisfies the highest
practical demands to such an extent that nothing can be conceived beyond that, that
is, Christ can rightly be called the Savior of humanity; as far as he has actually
brought the most salutary religion into the world; and the practical argument rooted in
God can not come into the consciousness of humanity abstractly through itself, but
only through the incarnation. But Christianity has received much in its historical
development, of which one can not say the same, and which hinders further historical
progress, as far as it hinders practicality.
In fact, if one looks at the reasons which make it so difficult for Christianity to
enter the Gentiles, and rather spread it by extermination as the conversion of the
peoples, it will be found that it is precisely those dogmas which but among the
Christians themselves, rather, they have been sown only as a blessing, which is held
fast by a historical motive, but which stands in the way in the way that they hinder
the historical unification of all, even the Christian denominations themselves, that
they do not stand before the historical argument consist; but they can not exist before
the historical, because they do not exist before the practical.
Apart from that, what is the general Christian belief in a personal, conscious, God-
in-the-world God with relations of will, knowledge, and feeling to his creatures in
every respect over what today's philosophy is in its most enduring systems, for I do
not assert in all, among the various expressions God has tried to substitute, or what
remains, if one seeks under the recorded name of God for the cause. There is an
absolute, an absolute idea coming to consciousness only in the individual, an infinite
substance; At last, the content of the name of God remains an ontological or moral or
causal concept, an unconscious world order, a general lawfulness of things, a
mystical ground, a teleological principle. One does not know how to cope, does not
tire of devising new phrases and words, of replacing the Christian God, of translating
it into a virtually useless entity, or of enveloping it in mystical darkness. Historically
it has not succeeded and has no chance of succeeding, even among those who are not
on this path; for no one is able to convert the other to his other names and things,
while the name and cause of the Christian God continue to be unabated by all the
raging of the Gentiles, that is, all the divisions and changes of philosophy. And why
can not it succeed? Because the Christian faith is practically irreplaceable; according
to our principle, a proof that he is right and what is going on or off, is incorrect. And
with that, every philosophy, which, contrary to the Christian faith, runs after those
basic points in which its practical value rests, the judgment already spoken; but the
one which is able to increase the confidence of it by the addition of knowledge-
reasons, and thus to increase its practical effect, the future, because the truth, the
truth, because the future, has for itself.
And as every philosophy that rejects the bread of faith will be rejected, every one
that offers an empty hand will be rejected. And are not there whole systems which
know nothing more about God than that nothing can be said of him, for practical
reasons, however, have to believe in him? but by depriving faith of everything that
makes it practical; or even demand from the practical principle the content of faith
which they would have to give to the practical, which can make only insubstantial
demands for itself. But such systems (Kant, Herbart) are the beginning and the end of
today's philosophy.
Of course, from where should philosophy take the content of faith with which it has
to fulfill the practical demand. I think where faith has always taken him from and
from whence he must have him. We want to look for him at the following principle.
Against the belief in a personal conscious continuity, materialism has reasons that
are obvious and surface. They are excellent except for one bitter point; I would even
believe in these reasons - and it remains true that we will not be, as we will be - if
they did not run counter to the practical, and therefore also historical, argument, so
that the materialistic radius does not go in the blue. Now, when they do, it is to be
asked whether it is not in a deeper understanding of the context of things that there
are deeper reasons for the hereafter, which is equally possible in itself, as the
materialistic, on the other hand, but still more excellent, that they are both historically
and practically possible, gives a radius which coincides with the other two radii in the
same point. And where else could one seek it other than idealism in its profundity, its
opposition to materialism? free; Either in other words, there are just as excellent
reasons against personal continuity as in materialism, or obscurities and dreams
which do not satisfy any of the three arguments, and thus remain far behind the
clarity and consequence of the materialistic reasons which are almost entirely
sufficient for one. not at all satisfying the other, only wanting to keep them within
limits,
Where, of course, ask yourself again, nor theoretical reasons can for be expected if
they are still found neither in materialism idealism or adequate place? And can that
really exist, for which there can be no reasons? In fact, one has almost only the
choice of whether the old faith or today's philosophy, which knows no reason to find
reasons to exist.
The belief in higher communicating personalities between us and God has
generally become very weak among us. In particular, the Protestants remained almost
exclusively Christ as mediator, and this almost exclusively the Orthodox. The
Catholics also have Mary and the saints, but almost only the common Catholics and
the painters, and these almost only on the canvas. The angels are everywhere only as
a decoration; You do not even know where to go with them anymore, than back to the
screen. But as all the disadvantages of a rude and reprehensible formation of that
belief with faith itself have been appeased or weakened, the benefits that it can have
and, whatever it may be, here and there, have fallen to us to think so much purer and
higher benefits, which he could have with a cleaner and better design. Do you want to
take away from the Catholic the help which he finds in the faith of Mary and the
saints, to convey his lowly nature with the highest, what do you give him for it, and
what do you give to the cult and the art for it? You take something for him, give him
something better, not nothing for it. Or, if you can not give him anything better that
does not demand anything better, do something better for it. How is it possible when
the whole faith is bad and wrong? But even among the Protestants the frequent turn to
the still remaining Christ instead of to God, the name of the mediator whom they give
him, proves to them a very stunted need of a mediator; and the art of the Protestants
must even borrow or lie the faith that it does not have, and therefore it's better to
become catholic right away. Thus, faith can not be impractical, and if it is practically
not replaceable, if not by a more practical in the same sense, not at all
reprehensible. Rather, it would be right development, as damping; but this requires a
new reason. Where is he? one asks again; and I answer again: Hardly there, where
today's philosophy is, even where today's theology is. But I did not ask if I did not
have another answer to all these questions. Hardly there, where today's philosophy,
still there, where today's theology is. But I did not ask if I did not have another
answer to all these questions. Hardly there, where today's philosophy, still there,
where today's theology is. But I did not ask if I did not have another answer to all
these questions.
The Christian religion, in its purest clarification of all that one may still find pagan
in it, the pagan self-considered, is at once of a marvelous grandeur at the same time
and desolate. Can she maintain this grandeur only by means of this wasteland? But
the most exalted sight of the sea is not that when one sees nothing on it, but when
ships, near, far, ever farther, give a measure of its extent; but for God we have not
been given a measure.
The Christian religion has attained its sublimity by setting the infinite for the small,
the limited, the finite, which is here and there concerned; and she is right. But having
set it for them, the Christians, in their eagerness, have dispensed with it for what they
have set it for, instead of canceling it in, concluding it, and that now gives the great
wasteland; but modern philosophy has magnified this wasteland by eliminating God
or by constructing it as a barren concept from the wasteland of metaphysics.
What does the following principle have to offer against this?
VII.
Theoretical Principle 1) .
The brief expression of the theoretical principle was: One believes what one finds
in terms of experience and reason.
1)I have already treated this principle so far in the work "On the Soul Question" (Chapter VII.), And
throughout the "Zend-Avesta" that a reference to it, if it were not here, could be enough to represent the two
other principles in conjunction and mutual complementation, whereby this writing itself becomes a
complement of them. But one can only expect the same here in other phrases and expositions, what one finds
there, and what in its fixed state just allows nothing else than other turns and explanations.
Now one can try reasonably to prove that historical and practical reasons justify our
religious faith, as has happened in the past only in a different way than in the
traditional historical and practical argument. But after all that could be done with
historical and practical reasons, the need remains, and in the final questions it has
also been found to find reasons by which the theoretical principle can serve others as
support and supplement without the service of others to need and these will now be
the case.
Reason and experience we have called levers of the principle. Reason , for insofar
as the highest and ultimate realities in their quality as the highest, the latter are not
objects of direct experience, and besides the historical and practical principle, another
source of their knowledge is sought, there must be some conclusion to come to
them , Experience- for insofar as they are the highest and last of reality, experience is
required as a basis for the conclusion. Through logic and mathematics alone, one can
neither come to believe in God and immortality, nor any other than conceptual player
evidence and empty concepts. One can do so when one ascends from our mind as a
level of spirit over all spirits, from our life as a stage to a second life. It is only
necessary to ascend, and not to stop at what experience directly offers, when it
concerns that which in its nature transcends all experience. Between these two errors,
however, even today the formation of faith on theoretical grounds fluctuates, that too
little is based on the experience of experience. Mistakes of modern philosophy and
theology, or too much standing by, mistakes of the heathen and materialists. In either
way you either lose the whole God or the whole content or extent of God, and finally
throw away the whole principle, which brought about the loss; but only its
reprehensible application is to be rejected.
What is usually called religious experience is essentially only the inner experience
of the practical impulses and effects of faith. How a foundation of faith should be
based on this was shown from the experiential point of view in the preceding
Principle. Here, however, experience is asserted in a broader sense and in a different
direction. It is not an experience of the proofs of the existence of the highest and last
things which are in our need of faith in it and the consequences of the finished faith,
but which, lying in the most general facts of existence, irrespective of us to believe,
to believe it or not, to lead to faith and thus to come to the help of the often only one-
sided asserted religious experience.
But before we show how this is done in the theoretical argument, it is necessary to
consider the motives which must be completed and completed in it.
If we look at how they really find themselves, they lie in all metaphysics,
whereupon the philosopher wants to support the faith if he wants to support it as far
as possible. No exit from the abstract concepts of being, of the absolute, of the I, of
the thing in itself, of the most perfect and therefore most real essence, of simple
things, of absolute causality, of the impossibility of actualization has led people to
believe in God. All such things have first come to faith without ever having been able
to overtake faith in its consequences, unless it has allowed itself to be followed by
it. and in many cases it has completely dissipated it.
Rather, what has been added to the historical and practical motive, to create and
shape the faith, is a conclusion that man daily consciously and unconsciously needs
and draws in his life, so to speak on himself at every opportunity that is, because that
is, that was, that is, that is, that is, that was, this will be; because that is so, was, is or
will be that, so. Every case observed involuntarily gives man reason to suspend his
expectation of other cases by expecting, in the same sense, equal or unequal
consequences for the same or unequal conditions, and the same and unequal in the
conditions of equal and unequal consequences goes backwards from the
consequences to the causes. Man thus concludes in the field of the most vulgar
things; he thus concludes in the field of the highest and last things, or rather, from
that field into this, and finally concludes all his conclusions. My house was built by
someone, and the world will have been built by someone. The world is bigger than
my house, so it will be a bigger someone who made the world. My body moves under
the influence of my feeling and will, also sun, moon, the sea, the wind will move
under such influence, but under the influence of a more powerful feeling and will,
because they themselves are more powerful. I live now and change only from one day
to another; I will live in the future and only change more. My life depends on my
breath and the warmth of my body, where they go in death, the soul will go. Every
king has his servants; God too will have his servants.
Not only the belief in the existence of God, the hereafter, higher beings, but also all
ideas of their way of being are based consciously or unconsciously on analogies and
inductions of this kind. Something experiential lies everywhere, a generalization
everywhere goes beyond, if it does Greater and higher things apply, a generalization
with an extension and an increase. And if, without the practical motive, there were no
occasion to do such a thing beyond the experiential, then the practical principle in its
turn would not be able to make the faith faithful and structured according to the
historical principle, rather would create without quite a void imagination It has also
always shown itself, where it was intended to create faith alone. On the other hand, it
is not without interest, and we have already pointed out earlier, how in every other
people the beliefs change according to his other circle of life and his other way of
life. The rougher a people, the rougher its generalizations, the more limited and
lower, the more limited and lower its expansions and increases from there into the
realm of faith. But even the faith of the most cultivated peoples owes its content
entirely to the generalization, enlargement, and enhancement of their circle of life and
their way of life, and without that would be quite empty. so his generalizations, the
more limited and lower, the more limited and lower his expansions and increases
from there into the realm of faith. But even the faith of the most cultivated peoples
owes its content entirely to the generalization, enlargement, and enhancement of their
circle of life and their way of life, and without that would be quite empty. so his
generalizations, the more limited and lower, the more limited and lower his
expansions and increases from there into the realm of faith. But even the faith of the
most cultivated peoples owes its content entirely to the generalization, enlargement,
and enhancement of their circle of life and their way of life, and without that would
be quite empty.
In this way conflicts of the theoretical motive with the practical as well as with
oneself easily enter, from which also those with the historical adult and manifold
attempts of their solution emerge. It can not be calculated, but always interpret. Who
wants to say that the belief in a bad personal basic principle, an Ahriman or a devil, is
in the practical interest. But looking at the power of the evil in the world and the
destruction threatening every creation could easily lead to generalize and increase the
evil instinct in man to a supreme impulse in a personal being toward God. But then
the practical and theoretical interest conclude their peace on the ground that, in the
course of history, the good does at last finally strike through, and honesty lasts the
longest. The good divine principle finally wins; Hell itself is overcome or even
converted.
There are peoples, according to whose faith only the assumption of a happy state in
the hereafter become partakers, that happiness depends on the range rather than the
virtue on this side. Whoever misunderstands that this practically inadmissible idea
rests on a simple analogy with this world? In the earlier so prevalent view of a Hades,
Scheol, a shadowy existence after death, the motives for thinking and wanting to live
beyond the grave may seem to be the glaring at the palpable destruction of everything
palpable in death, the Grave-night and rest have worked together to make the
hereafter so dark and sad. These conflicts, too, push for an attempt to resolve, and if
they do not rise in the peoples, they finally lift themselves up with the peoples.
But if the practical motive conflicts with the theoretical confusion, it can always
only determine the direction; the execution in a given direction remains a matter of
the theoretical motive. Be it sheol, paradise or hell, this is how it is based on the
analogy of this worldly conditions; and whoever tries to come out of it with his belief
comes from another side or even from the imagination. No matter how unrestrained
the imagination may seem, it can only do so with materials and with forms that
offered it the theoretical motive.
If one looks around for what has actually been achieved in this way, one desires
first to despair of all faith. The most foolish contradictory views of God, the
hereafter, angels, devils, have thereby come about, and yet they have found wider
dissemination than what the reason of the most rational has wanted to set for it; for in
it hardly any one individual satisfies the other. So those who say that the source of
faith in the highest and last things are not to be sought here at all, but rather to be
avoided, are not so. Yes, not considerations like the following are perfectly right:
Even in ordinary life we are mistaken daily, for we want to open up the analogy
and induction of the here and now, of the Dem and the Dem, of the So and So far, the
coming, the other; how can we dare ourselves to the highest and last things, where the
task increases to the immeasurable, and the help that is at our command there, to
confirm or correct the inference and the conclusive means by experience, goes away
rather than into us Insecure to continue to rely on unsafe yet unsafe to build. All these
inferences in the nature of things have only one significance in the finite, and the
objects of religious belief have the character of infinity.
And yet it is a peculiar thing that man involuntarily returns again and again to this
source, and even those who reject him in principle, can not help but draw from him
when they want to say something more of the highest and last things than that they
are unspeakable things; and they want to do that and even tie salvation to what they
say about it. Should a necessary source be reprehensible. In truth, one can say that we
like it or not, we must adhere to the theoretical principle; but since we can not in fact
reject it, we must best grasp it and cooperate with the other principles.
In fact, it is no different with him than with the other principles. Not that we need
it, but that we do not have enough or that we need it wrong makes it reprehensible. In
the things of daily life, too, it is not the use of the means of inference that offer us
experience and reason, which makes us err; if we wanted to drop her, we would be
completely wrong; but that we do not do it enough or that we misuse it; but the better,
the better and better we can achieve. Now it is only different with the highest and last
things, than with the meanest, once, that we, with what we reach out to them, do not
yet reach, and the more easily and seriously we err, the more we mean to submit to
it; So we need to increase, increase instead of throwing away the funds. And further:
that an experiential probation of what has been developed is by nature not to be
demanded here, because for the spiritual above me there is as little as I can have for
the spiritual next to me. So we have to replace it - it is not enough to repeat it - with
the agreement of what has been developed with the demands and consequences of the
other principles. Of course, there is no other way of testing; But there are these. Of
course, there is no other way of testing; But there are these. Of course, there is no
other way of testing; But there are these.
But now the whole theoretical grounding and shaping of the faith almost always
fails at one of two cliffs, to which the errors we have inaugurated lead us to supersede
the highest and last things to the lower and the common, conceptually or factually, or
both at the same time. as if they have nothing in common with it, and that they are
confused with lower or mean ones themselves, as if they were only something among
others, instead of lifting up the lower ones in the higher ones. And, of course, if God
were truly incomparable with all that hovered in his world, torn from the world,
above it, the world fallen from God below him, as many think, the world in which our
experiences move no conclusion from her on him possible no conclusion is possible
from the conclusion of our little spiritual world in an ego to the conclusion of the
whole spiritual world in an ego, from the domination of our mind over a small part of
the physical world to the domination of a spirit over the entire body world. But
theoretically we have no reason to suppose the supreme existence except conceptual
and factual connection with all existence, practically a god is useless, which has no
determinable and traceable relations with his world and his creatures, and he has
always been historical in such relations been presented; and whoever did not want to
do it did. from the domination of our minds over a small part of the body world to the
domination of one mind over the whole body world. But theoretically we have no
reason to suppose the supreme existence except conceptual and factual connection
with all existence, practically a god is useless, which has no determinable and
traceable relations with his world and his creatures, and he has always been historical
in such relations been presented; and whoever did not want to do it did. from the
domination of our minds over a small part of the body world to the domination of one
mind over the whole body world. But theoretically we have no reason to suppose the
supreme existence except conceptual and factual connection with all existence,
practically a god is useless, which has no determinable and traceable relations with
his world and his creatures, and he has always been historical in such relations been
presented; and whoever did not want to do it did. and has he been historically
presented in such relationships historically; and whoever did not want to do it
did. and has he been historically presented in such relationships historically; and
whoever did not want to do it did.
And, of course, if the transition to the hereafter was beyond comparability with all
transitions in this world, and in the hereafter even all conditions and laws that apply
in this world cease, then none of the inferences that we draw from one to the other
would be possible. But from time immemorial, analogies have been sought for the
transition into the hereafter in this world, and the ideas of future life have been
formed on the basis of the present; we need in practice a faith that sustains the
relationship from this world to the hereafter; and everywhere else we find
experientially contain the conditions of the future in the present and close as far as
possible to the future. Of course, our fortune is not even enough to open up, like the
orange from the foliage, the butterfly from the caterpillar, a life after birth from life
before birth, followed by a memory from intuition; how, you say, should we be able
to conclude how a life beyond the world follows from this world? But we see that the
orange from the foliage, the butterfly from the caterpillar, a life after birth from life
before birth, follows a memory from intuition, in spite of the fact that we do not
know how it follows from it; Thus it will only be valid to generalize, widen and
intensify the relation between the actual relations between causes and consequences
in the present life to corresponding ones between the present and a subsequent
life; and the same inexplicableness of these relationships here and there will only be
one more moment in the correspondence. a life after birth from life before birth,
followed by a memory from intuition; how, you say, should we be able to conclude
how a life beyond the world follows from this world? But we see that the orange
from the foliage, the butterfly from the caterpillar, a life after birth from life before
birth, follows a memory from intuition, in spite of the fact that we do not know how it
follows from it; Thus it will only be valid to generalize, widen and intensify the
relation between the actual relations between causes and consequences in the present
life to corresponding ones between the present and a subsequent life; and the same
inexplicableness of these relationships here and there will only be one more moment
in the correspondence. a life after birth from life before birth, followed by a memory
from intuition; how, you say, should we be able to conclude how a life beyond the
world follows from this world? But we see that the orange from the foliage, the
butterfly from the caterpillar, a life after birth from life before birth, follows a
memory from intuition, in spite of the fact that we do not know how it follows from
it; Thus it will only be valid to generalize, widen and intensify the relation between
the actual relations between causes and consequences in the present life to
corresponding ones between the present and a subsequent life; and the same
in the correspondence. a reminder follows from intuition; how, you say, should we be
able to conclude how a life beyond the world follows from this world? But we see
that the orange from the foliage, the butterfly from the caterpillar, a life after birth
from life before birth, follows a memory from intuition, in spite of the fact that we do
not know how it follows from it; Thus it will only be valid to generalize, widen and
one more moment in the correspondence. a reminder follows from intuition; how, you
say, should we be able to conclude how a life beyond the world follows from this
world? But we see that the orange from the foliage, the butterfly from the caterpillar,
a life after birth from life before birth, follows a memory from intuition, in spite of
the fact that we do not know how it follows from it; Thus it will only be valid to
generalize, widen and intensify the relation between the actual relations between
causes and consequences in the present life to corresponding ones between the
present and a subsequent life; and the same inexplicableness of these relationships
here and there will only be one more moment in the correspondence. how does an
otherworldly life follow from this world? But we see that the orange from the foliage,
the butterfly from the caterpillar, a life after birth from life before birth, follows a
memory from intuition, in spite of the fact that we do not know how it follows from
in the correspondence. how does an otherworldly life follow from this world? But we
see that the orange from the foliage, the butterfly from the caterpillar, a life after birth
from life before birth, follows a memory from intuition, in spite of the fact that we do
not know how it follows from it; Thus it will only be valid to generalize, widen and
one more moment in the correspondence. that we do not know how it follows from
in the correspondence. that we do not know how it follows from it; Thus it will only
be valid to generalize, widen and intensify the relation between the actual relations
between causes and consequences in the present life to corresponding ones between
the present and a subsequent life; and the same inexplicableness of these relationships
here and there will only be one more moment in the correspondence.
The errors and the cliffs at the same time finally we will avoid, and go from the
theoretical available for theoretical arguments on the following principle 2) .
2) In the writing on the soul question p. 116 set up.
"It is important to start from the widest possible circles of experience in the realm
of existence in order to arrive at the view of what, moreover, in the other, wider and
higher realms of existence by generalizing, expanding and increasing the points of
view that arise here to whom, because of their distance, our experience is not
sufficient, or whose breadth and height our experience presents and surpasses, with
the caution, the generalization, expansion, and exaltation beyond the realm of the
experienceable, only in the sense and direction that already do within the perceptible
itself, that is, to claim only that for the other, wider, and higher realms, to regard it as
valid, which is all the more generalized, augmented, augmented,the farther and
farther we turn our gaze into the field of experience, and take full account of the
difference that results from the greater distance, breadth, and height of the region.
In the same way as for the assertion of the historical and practical principle in the
form of an argument, the actual documents, which lie in the universality and salubrity
of the faith, must either be presupposed as known or particularly pointed out, so also
for the assertion of the theoretical principle the documents lying in the field of
experience the conclusion to the highest and last things. But where can they be found,
if not in reasons such as I have already suggested, those reasons which are the
historically demanded, practically demanded, belief in a personal God with
consciousness relations to his creatures, a future continuance, personal middle beings
between us and to support, consolidate or even increase and develop God from the
knowledge side?
I search around: I look for it in the dogmatic textbooks of the theologians, I listen
to the preachers in the pulpits, the schoolmasters in the schools, the professors on the
cathedrals; I turn from the rationalists to the Orthodox and Pietists now and then; I
am browsing through the dusty evidence of the existence of God; I study the
philosophical systems of Kant, von Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herbart,
Schopenhauer. It's free. I can not find anything that even gave some support, or rather
resisted, rather than believing. But at the same time I seek in vain, where I find a
clear knowledge, let alone a valid application of the previous principle; I find only a
waver between the two or a combination of both main flaws of its application, a
failure soon at one soon on the other cliff. But how can a valid argument be made by
failing or violating its principle?
On the existence of a God , as the historical and practical argument demands, in
connexion with which the other principal objects of faith are self-evident, we can
conclude, according to the theoretical principle, in two ways, and only in two ways,
though each of the two wise men in theirs Generality includes a majority of special
paths. On the one hand, when we believe of the world of our own mind, the only one
of which we know immediately, through the world of spirits, to which we so firmly
believe, according to the totality of the three reasons, as if we knew to the world
of one Secondly, ascending from the fact that our own body simultaneously reflects
and carries one mind, again the only case of knowledge of this kind, to the whole
world being the mirror and bearer of a spirit in a higher sense.
For these are the only starting points that we have from the knowledge side in order
not to deduce emptiness into the void, but from the solid to the fuller, and thus open
up to the faith its content, the only ones on which the argument can be considered
Perfection of theoretical motives according to the above principle.
Depending on whether we proceed from the first starting point merely in the
spiritual sphere or, from the second, on the body as the mirror and bearer of the soul,
two main parts, sides, forms or expressions of the theoretical argument can be
distinguished, I will briefly mention them to call the argument of the spirit and the
body. Basically, and the implications, it remains a single argument.
A few words before their installation.
It has often been occasion to point out that everyone knows of only one soul, one's
own, directly through experience. The consequence of this is that for the conclusion
on other souls, spirits, whether neighborly or higher, there is no induction at all,
which the majority of equal cases need as a basis, but only analogy to
commandments. But the analogy can not be dispensed with in this area. For as well as
conceiving of a spirit next to or above our minds without any connection to the
experience of one's own mind.
Every single analogy is trivial in its own right, but the conclusion is binding on our
neighboring souls. And how does he become binding? Let us look at the little one, in
order not to demand anything else, but only the larger of them in the end to greater
things. The fact that for the little soul he brings together what one would like to throw
away for the greatest, and only has to assimilate on the largest scale. Because it is not
a single analogy nor the sum of isolated analogies on which it is based-the circle
would have the conclusion, the statue the external form, the clock once wound up the
internal circulation with me in common; everything gives a single soul; rather, that it
is a coherent and cohesive system of analogy on all points which one has with respect
to the soul's own essence,3) - and finally by the fact that this whole system of analogy
also gives a system with the system of our practical and historical demands.
3)I believe that the general point of view and the essential point of these points are clear enough in the work
"On the Question of the Soul" on p. 49, that rationality is easy to understand. Here it will apply only the
application.
In this way, and thus alone, the inference to the existence of the little human
neighbor souls becomes completely binding and a conclusion on their mode of
existence possible at all. Metaphysics has not led to this and can not lead to it. But
nothing else, but only the greater, not the least of them, is what we have in the end to
demand for greater things in the realm of the spirits in order to gain greater
things. Metaphysics has not led to this and can not lead to it. Analogy can be missed
here just as little, is individually just as trivial; It is just such a system of analogy in
itself and with the implications and demands of other principles.
At the conclusion of the other human souls draw the analogies, makes the system to
say so by itself. A little man is so small, so close to us, so clearly
compared; Everything about it is familiar to us at first glance. In the case of God,
higher and otherworldly spirits, everything is great and wide and at first ungramped,
and it is necessary first of all to show the connection between what we are looking for
and to make everything clear and familiar. Now, however, it is not possible to show
everything all at once in the same way as it finally has to be in one at a time, so it is
not necessary to ask for it all at once. The argument of the mind as well as the body
can only develop in a sequence of moments; nothing particular in this is binding; the
binding lies not only in the details of each of the arguments, including both
arguments, which are only two sides of an argument; not only in this tie, but also in
the tie of this argument with the other two; and finally, that the three arguments give
all three main parts of the faith in one and the same band. So the binding force grows
with every step, but is not in any steps, only in the whole course.
Whoever wants to follow this connection will have it at the end and, at the end of
the whole journey, will finally have access to a world view in which faith and
knowledge can tolerate each other without contradiction and one finds support and
support in the other; Whoever seeks the result of the conclusion in its details, the
house in a stone, will never have it.
We may also recall that the same analogy, which leads us from the small and the
lower around which we know, to the belief in something greater and higher, at the
same time removes the small and the lower into the greater and the higher, thus
exceeding knowledge only insofar as it is at the same time dug into the faith as
content.
In itself, it remains a bold and daring rising, which leads us from below
upwards; who wants to say that it is safe. But let us just remember, the ladder to
climb is not in the air, it is held from above as from below. From above, by leading
into the same realm of faith that we have historically and practically need, but from
below, by introducing it from experiential reality. Whereas the beliefless materialism
rises on a ladder held only from below, the belief-less idealism descends on a ladder
held only from above.
But if the theoretical argument of this support is required by the practical and the
historical, it also makes its counter-service by preventing the excesses of the practical
and theoretical motive, with which no argument can exist. What does man not want
to demand from God, what does he not want? How much does he want in the world
itself, those who wish to be governed by God differently, yes what he does not
want; and what should finally prevent him from believing in a God and a world as he
desires, if it is not necessary to satisfy the requirements of the practical and historical
argument at the same time as the theoretical. But if the theoretical permits only such a
view of God and the world, which can exist before the glimpse of reality with all its
defects and evils, it enters by itself into the practical and historical argument,
according to which is not both true what man here and there, at that time, desires or
desired, and then has believed or believed, as what is true of the whole Humanity and
accepted forever, its thinking, feeling and acting able to guide so that the most
desirable state of humanity as a whole follows from it and is no longer an occasion to
go beyond. But for that, the truly true must be accepted as true; because only then can
man best oppose it and can have the position of duration. as what is true of all
humanity and accepted forever, so that it can guide its thinking, feeling and acting,
that the most desirable state of humanity as a whole follows from it and is no longer
an occasion to go beyond it. But for that, the truly true must be accepted as
true; because only then can man best oppose it and can have the position of
duration. as what is true of all humanity and accepted forever, so that it can guide its
thinking, feeling and acting, that the most desirable state of humanity as a whole
follows from it and is no longer an occasion to go beyond it. But for that, the truly
true must be accepted as true; because only then can man best oppose it and can have
the position of duration.
The argument of the spirit.
Our mind presents itself as a realm of manifold and changing sensations, memories,
ideas, concepts, thoughts, impulses, aspirations, desires that are superimposed,
subordinated, connected, diverging, harmonizing and quarreling. It is really a small
world.
This small world of details, for its part, is but a detail in the great spirit world, in
which on a larger scale and in a higher sense it repeats what happens in the small
world. Even in the great world of spirits, territories are subordinate and subordinate to
one another, connecting and dividing, harmonizing and arguing with one another; and
what falls into every little world of a spirit is, on the one hand, only the last branch,
and on the other, the root of that which falls into the great and passes on in broad
traits. So the greater realm is just the bigger, higher, more general one of what we
find in the small one. Now, all the details in the little world take hold of a united
feeling of the ego, a unified consciousness, a unified will. The two circles of facial
and auditory sensations seem to have nothing in common with each other; but they
have one thing in common with each other, that that ego knows the same about both,
only knows more than both; and beyond all the strife of details, there is a striving to
settle and reconcile this conflict, to bring every single one of feelings and thoughts
into such attunement, that the ego is thereby satisfied.
So although we can not know what will never become a matter of knowledge, we
may believe what we already have to believe anyway, that also over all the details in
the great spirit world in a corresponding sense a sense of the I, a unified
consciousness, a unified will, in a correspondingly higher sense, than the great
spiritual world is above the small one. The consciousness circles of different people
seem to have nothing in common with each other; but they will have that with each
other, that that ego knows for all, as if they were theirs, only more than all
knows; and over all the strife of peoples and generations, of knowledge and faith,
which in the great realm assumes so much greater dimensions and reaches higher
than in the small, but reaching into it and rising from it, a greater and higher
aspiration will also be made to lead it through the course of the history of
reconciliation. The task is greater, the time of fulfillment longer than in the little
kingdom, if you want infinitely long; but also the means in God are greater, you can
believe infinitely great, and the fulfillment in eternity therefore more perfect and
secure.
But all this could be a novel, and the fact that everything fits together would not
prevent it being a novel, for every good novel has this privilege; if the analogy that
led us upwards was also the only thing we had to rely on, not the ladder on which we
climbed, to the bottom, the upper one. But now our ascension leads us from the only
firm and clear starting-point of all human knowledge for spiritual things, that is,
contemplation of the human spirit itself, in the consequential way of expansion and
exaltation, which the principle commands, to faith in the same, infinite, eternal,
omniscient, almighty, all-benevolent God, on whom we are historically led by
Christianity and practical coercion, a source of urgency, hoard, a love-band of all
spirits, who knows about the thoughts of all his creatures as they themselves, on
which all have emerged, and in which they still live, weave, are, as he loves in them,
the one who loves his own property who, in the course of time, adds and directs
everything through the eternities to the common good of all, to which the finite spirits
can place boundless confidence in this regard, provided that what every finite spirit
strives for and attains all the more surely and more completely, the more extensive his
knowledge, the higher his desire, the more powerful his will is, to be fully expected
of God, the omniscient, all-benevolent, almighty; only that it is not required and
expected from the moment in which his eternal desire and will is fulfilled.
It may well be that today's Christian conception earnestly states that all spirits, as
they have come from God, also live and weave in God and are, and in the most
contradictory manner, admit the same according to the wording of the Word Denied
thing, and the finite spirits externally opposed to the divine, as they stand among
themselves, so that they themselves draw down into the finitude of the external
counterpart; so our argument itself will make us serious with the words. After all,
with its clear pronouncement in the sources of the Christian doctrine, it proved
necessary to accept a conception which, at the same time, consolidates itself and
resolves itself without contradiction. But also from our mind, ideas, ideas, without
leaving the mind; only so far can God know our thoughts as we do ourselves; and
when spirits quarrel in God, it will only be the same in a higher sense as we already
find in our mind, when disagreements, feelings, thoughts quarrel in the lower realms
of our mind, and even against the meaning and the aspiration to quarrel with the
whole spirit, only that in it whole spirits can fight, in us merely spiritual
moments; God is above us and we are under God, the floor below the tower. But the
right-mind, if he keeps only his life, will finally bring everything into harmony with
one another and with his supreme will, and will find even his highest task in doing
it; of God's Spirit, the ever-living, that will apply in the highest and last resort,
By thus satisfying the most general points of view of Christianity with our
argument in the conception of the divine essence, we are at the same time satisfied
with the most diverse directions into which the same has departed, as far as a
common satisfaction of them is at all possible.
It satisfies the mystic who desires to immerse himself completely in God, and seeks
the most complete satisfaction in the most complete absorption in God. He is already
sunk in God; but he will also have to realize that being in God is not sufficient to
satisfy God and to find the most perfect satisfaction, since much else is already
rejected by our little spirit, which enters into it as an idea, and seeks to eliminate what
to him contrary to feeling, more so in God's great spirit; rather, it is necessary to
clearly discern the meaning of God for highest and last relationships and to do justice
to them. Only then will he become partakers of the full bliss that he would like to
attach to the feeling of easy purchase, to be only in God at all.
It is enough for the rationalist, who demands a reasonable way to reach God and
demands clear ideas of Him. Reason can not find a simpler way to God than our
argument, and not win clearer ideas than it grants. Only reason will have to be modest
in its desire not to descend to God from an abstract void, but to ascend to it on a firm
ground, and not to rely on oneself in this rising, but only to rise so that with its own
demand as well the historical and practical demand is fulfilled.
It is thus sufficient for the believer in the revelation, who wishes to owe the
communication of the highest truths to God himself through an inspiration from
spirits preferred to him. For if even the little human spirit does not lay down its whole
being in every thought, every feeling, not every moment of its life is direction-giving
for all, or only for a great consequence, not every one is after highest and last
relations; yet there are those already in the small human spirit and life; Thus, in the
infinite spirit, instead of small moments of the little spirit, there are whole spirits,
which are again only moments of the great spirit, in which the will, knowledge,
essence of the divine spirit after highest and last relations is influenced by the whole
or one big episode in front of others, and which become teachers and leaders for the
other spirits. Such exemptions from the ordinary course of history may conveniently
be called revelations of God in a preferential sense; only that one has no exceptions to
the nature of mental things and of mental events, but to see therein only the highest,
most conscious, activities of them.
With this Allen, the seriousness of believing that we are not outside of God in God
is asserted. It is a belief in which there hang great goods, which of course remain
stunted and lost, as long as the seriousness of faith is stunted and lost, and faith itself
remains only a mere play on words; but in our argument that is impossible, because it
itself only comes into being in solidarity with this belief. It is not necessary to stifle it
by mistake, such as losing our being in God of self-reliance and freedom. For why
should our will not assert its self-power under God's higher will, even resist it, yet
that it is of the same spirit? since so much in lower realms of our own mind arises and
proceeds, even against our own will, but only that the higher and the highest right-
will finally gets the upper hand. Or that the sin of our will, in opposition to God's
will, may become God's sin by being in God. For sin refers only to the will of the
whole mind, which can not be directed against itself. But with the belief in being in
God, we gain at the same time the feeling of a closer relationship with God and
through God to each other, the confidence of finite redemption from all evils, and the
assurance of our onetime exaltation to a higher existence. The first, of course, insofar
as we feel that we are the immediate and common partakers of the One Spirit; the
second, as long as it is in the nature of the mind, no evil is unbalanced, unhindered,
unreconciled, to be able to tolerate oneself, but infinite time and infinite means are at
the disposal of the infinite spirit; Finally, we will find the third in consideration of the
following major piece of the faith.
Now one can only ask: And why does not the Almighty, All-Good, All-Wise God
suddenly raise evil? And to ask further, why is evil with one, in such a god, there?
Here we have to believe, because we can not believe anything better and more
rational, that the existence of the evil and the impossibility of its sudden uplifting are
just as intertwined with the ultimate conditions of existence as the striving and the
progressive fulfillment of the striving of its upliftment the inner essence of the spirit,
which governs the existence. But those who are afraid to bring the concept of evil
into God do not forget that what appears to us finite associates of a being in a lower
realm is an evil and has no longer the same meaning for him, that it is only motive
from below His higher will and control is, without meeting this, able to reach and
stand before it. But does anyone know how to set up a better and more reasonable
faith in this regard,4) .
4)In the 8th chap. In the essay on the question of the soul, I think that the objections that one can raise against
the immanence of the finite spirits in the divine spirit are taken sufficiently into account. to have me content
with the above hints.
We spoke only of God; But how is it with the hereafter? Where do we find the
reason for this in our argument? And God and hereafter are supposed to be
connected; not their reasons? And where the reason for those higher spirits, which
mediate between God and us from the hereafter into the here and now? Did not we
ourselves demand the coherent justification from all of them? But I mean, nowhere
else than in our argument is it to be found. By itself there is the one with the
other; yes, one thing can not do without one thing without the other; the kingdom of
heaven is so firmly united here too.
As man is born, his mind lifts from above and from below, from above with the
whole unity of consciousness, from below with the details of sensible intuitions,
sensations, feelings, impulses; nothing else. In between, there is mediation in the
progress of life. The height of the mind, as we call it, grows as the mediations move
up and down, the mind grows as the base grows from which it rises. And how does he
gain the mediations between the bottom and the top? What has entered into
sensuality, it goes out to make room for something new; but what is extinguished
awakes again on a new level, in a new spiritual state, and that extinction itself is the
reason that it can thus awake, henceforth lives on in remembrances, He continues to
work on phantasies, in the spiritual echo of the echoes of formerly extinguished
intuitions, sensations, feelings, impulses, into higher concepts and ideas, concepts of
purpose, determinations of will, determinations determined and determinable; Thus,
through ascending mediations, it unites the sensuous basis in different directions at
the same time, in itself and with the spiritual point. Pein attaches itself to the
remembrance of every evil desire and deed, as joy in the good. Because otherwise,
the mind counts from above as from below, and the memory meets the upper
courts. Determining and determinable tendencies; Thus, through ascending
mediations, it unites the sensuous basis in different directions at the same time, in
itself and with the spiritual point. Pein attaches itself to the remembrance of every
evil desire and deed, as joy in the good. Because otherwise, the mind counts from
above as from below, and the memory meets the upper courts. Determining and
determinable tendencies; Thus, through ascending mediations, it unites the sensuous
basis in different directions at the same time, in itself and with the spiritual
point. Pein attaches itself to the remembrance of every evil desire and deed, as joy in
the good. Because otherwise, the mind counts from above as from below, and the
memory meets the upper courts.
Thus, in our own minds, we already have over a lower world a second higher
world, from which the second grows out of the first, so to speak, with the souls that
rise from the corpses of the first populated. The first one is short, the world of
intuition, the second the world of remembrance, although the names are too narrow
for the cause.
And so we may believe what in its nature can never again become a matter of
knowledge, since we only believe in it what we have reason to believe from another
side, that in the divine spirit there is one in a correspondingly higher sense World of
memory over the world of intuition, that is, that our whole world-side human
visualization and memory life itself belongs only to the lower world in God; may
believe that in the world of the great spirit, every spirit, after the extinction of the
limited earthly-sensible conditions of its existence in a higher region, continues to
live in a higher state,
All this could once again be a novel and again it can not be for the same reasons
that it can not be the justifiable belief in God; He gives us back what history gave us
and what we have to demand. For did not we think otherwise of entering into a higher
kingdom with death, of encountering our loved ones there, of finding retaliation
there, and of not requiring this faith? From where else would we otherwise assume
the guarantee that independent spirits in God can rise as well into a hereafter as
dependent mental moments in us, that we do not increase with such an increase into
emptiness. But after we can find it all again and find it in no other way, what we had
before and needed, what hinders, the only way who makes it possible and even more
possible to trust? Of course, since we do not have all the spirits with a higher
kingdom in it, they can not rise in us either. But if the height of God above the finite
spirits implies that he has such a kingdom about them, why should they be able to rise
less in him than dependent spiritual moments in us, since the independence of spirits
in God is only relative like the independence of the spiritual moments in us.
Or should that stifle even the belief in the beyond that he demands faith in God,
and our being in God. Rather, having one reason to all of this belief must consolidate
and strengthen one by the other. If, of course, there were no God in whom our spirits
live, weave, are, then they could not ascend into God either, and dilute our
consciousness with death into the void; If there were no otherworld, God himself
would be barely conscious of a higher content of consciousness.
After all, every individuality that once entered our consciousness is capable of
returning as a memory in it; how should the same, which is true of all the individual
determinations of our consciousness, not apply to our whole consciousness, if only
there is a greater spirit, into which it in turn enters as a singularity? It is clear at the
same time how much we need our future life of being in God, just how certain the
future is in the fact that the present is already being led into God. And if the feeling of
one's own individuality and independence comes to us in God - that the God is above
it, does not annihilate ours - then it will no less also be our memory rebirth in him; for
every memory takes with it the peculiarity of what it grew out of.truly every
individuality in us as conscious memory again, why should we not trust the divine
spirit in this regard a mightier fortune than ourselves; since we have everywhere to
expect not the same with us, but higher and more of the same from God. The
vegetable soul has no memory, the animal, the new born child a weak one; the
capacity of memory increases in general terms with the spiritual height of the
creatures; so we may continue to increase to the spiritual creator. But theoretically it
seems unsure what we are doing; it really is; Thus we secure it again through its
encounter with the practical demand, which in turn demands theoretical
accommodation.
If we at last demand the extinction of the earthly-sensual conditions of our worldly
life of intuition for our higher life of remembrance in God, and ask where they are,
we first ask ourselves whether we already know them for the present-day life of
remembrance in ourselves not that we should solve the bigger question before the
smaller one. We do not know the physical conditions of the life of remembrance in
ourselves, so little that some doubt that such things are needed in the first place; but
there is a life of remembrance in us, so the more such will be able to exist in God
without us knowing the physical conditions for it, and no matter whether it still needs
it. But we do know something very general about the physical condition of our
memories; they do not hover in emptiness; they live in the brain; they attach
themselves to the consequences of what the intuition pinned on, be it what it is, and
indisputably will not be able to combine themselves in concepts and ideas, without
the circles of the underlying effects linking on the physical side. So we may also
expect from this, just as everything in this area expects greater things for our future
memory life in God, and will find it in the argument of the body. But now we let the
argument of the spirit take its final step, in order to arrive at the third major piece of
the faith and to close it with the other two in the same volume. and it is undeniable
that they will not be able to combine in concepts and ideas without the circles of the
underlying effects linking them on the physical side. So we may also expect from
this, just as everything in this area expects greater things for our future memory life
in God, and will find it in the argument of the body. But now we let the argument of
the spirit take its final step, in order to arrive at the third major piece of the faith and
to close it with the other two in the same volume. and it is undeniable that they will
not be able to combine in concepts and ideas without the circles of the underlying
effects linking them on the physical side. So we may also expect from this, just as
everything in this area expects greater things for our future memory life in God, and
will find it in the argument of the body. But now we let the argument of the spirit take
its final step, in order to arrive at the third major piece of the faith and to close it with
the other two in the same volume.
The realm of our intuitions not only allows ever new material to rise into our
memory life and intervenes with new determinations in it, but conversely receives
provisions, direction, meaning, higher guidance from there, yes, it is completely
interwoven with it. In everything we see, the memory of everything connected with
it, and relatives, which we have ever seen, tacitly enters, thus turning the green spot
into a forest, the white to the house; otherwise the eye would have nothing but
meaningless patches of color. The whole earlier visual life thus continues in its
echoes in the later; the same memory connects innumerable intuitions with what they
have in common, and innumerable memories connect with each other, to give
meaning to the new intuitions and to classify them according to spiritual
connections. Indeed, the whole of present-day intuition can only be continued
steadily by the fact that the whole context of the earlier concepts and ideas, which
have been reminiscent of, and derived from, and above them, continues to operate in
the present. But in so far as the former life is continued by the mediation of the
memory life in the present and developed further in the earlier sense, the life of
memory at the same time receives new determinations from the present one.
Thus the life of memory drives its roots downward into the life of intuition, from
which it draws its juices; yet at the same time it grows high above and has, like the
crown of the tree above the roots, its own kingdom. Instead of going into sensory life
in those interventions, in the retreat it rises to the greatest brightness, to self-coherent
consciousness. It is thought and brought into connection and elaborated, which only
came in from the world of intuition; but as the whole life of remembrance itself
increases to ever greater heights, it again falls back into the world of intuition from a
greater height.
And so we may again believe what we can not know, that in a higher sense it will
be in the Kingdom of God. The whole spiritual culture of the past spreads to the
present and affects every new human being from the very beginning and onwards,
and each one only adds new or different effects to or against or to what he absorbed
in the past. God, however, knows everything, and the spirits of those who have
passed away, who bear in Him, are bearers of the consciousness of these effects in
Him, with which His hereafter intervenes in His here, each one of what has emanated
from Him, and develop what they started together here, also together with God's help
and as God's help in the here and now, but no longer bound to the old
barriers. Everything, What of ideas and other effects of a spirit that lived earlier,
appears separated in this consciousness of the thousand living now, is linked in the
otherworldly consciousness of the same spirit from which it originated, and this thus
links the spirits of this world. Only this worldly consciousness of the end must first
be extinguished before the otherworldly of the consequences can awake; in that one
only awakens the way in which the other one realizes it, and the ghosts of the
consciousness of the otherworldly spirits, who associate it, are just as ignorant of it as
of the same of the opposing spirits, though each one shares something with him in the
content of his consciousness and makes suggestions therefore receives. is linked in
the otherworldly consciousness of the same mind from which it originated, and this
thus links the spirits of this world. Only this worldly consciousness of the end must
first be extinguished before the otherworldly of the consequences can awake; in that
one only awakens the way in which the other one realizes it, and the ghosts of the
content of his consciousness and makes suggestions therefore receives. is linked in
the otherworldly consciousness of the same mind from which it originated, and this
thus links the spirits of this world. Only this worldly consciousness of the end must
first be extinguished before the otherworldly of the consequences can awake; in that
one only awakens the way in which the other one realizes it, and the ghosts of the
content of his consciousness and makes suggestions therefore receives.
So each departed mind links a whole host of living beings and helps guide them,
meeting each other harmoniously or in conflict with other departed spirits, while no
one can quite lead a whole man, and each one only in what he lets himself be
led. And while he leads him in his direction, as far as he is able, he himself receives
determinations through his life, sees through his eye, hears through his ear what
concerns him together with him, and takes the thought to which he has determined
him, retuned back. For the present-day man is not merely a passive playground for
otherworldly spirits, although it is factual that he is determined in innumerable things
by the effects of earlier spirits; yes, who is able to divorce what he has from himself
and from him; it is impossible to divorce it because it is not divorced. It is not,
therefore, a matter of faith, and it must be distinguished, that innumerable former
spirits work into every human being through their effects, but rather as the fact on
which faith is founded. Only this is a matter of faith, for which reason it is necessary
to ascend to the facts of this-worldly consciousness by the thread of analogy with
these facts, that there is also an otherworldly consciousness of this advancement.
But if the afterlife then roots in this world as well as our life of remembrance in our
intuitive life, we may also believe what again can not be a fact of this consciousness,
that it will carry a corresponding crown beyond, and the life of the world Ghosts in
the afterlife would not be absorbed into the here and now. Rather, as the thoughts in
us most vividly and supremely depart from sensory life, the highest and purest
unfolding of the otherworldly life of spirits in God may take place in the utmost
seclusion from this earthly earthly, and the night and sleep of this world itself have
the meaning to wake up to it; as folk beliefs say, the spirits go in the night.
So how God lives and weaves in us in the highest and most universal sense, and we
and in him, so, after the totality of the previous, the spirits of the departed in us and
we in them according to the special relationships they have with us and God and thus
become mediators between him and us. The greatest and best spirits, however, are
called it in the greatest and best sense, for the highest religious relations for the
Christians over all Christ, rightly therefore the mediator.
And again, with all that, we basically say only the same thing that the Bible says,
expressly says of Christ; but he should be a model for all and the Christians once with
him. Indeed, in the Bible we have all the faith we have; It is only necessary to make
serious again with words that even the most faithful often take only for words; but
with our faith we take the Bible ourselves by the word.
John XIV. 20. On the same day you will know that I am in my Father and you in me and
I in you.
Joh. XVII. 21-23. So that they are all one, just as you, father, in me, and I in you, that
they too are one in us, that the world may believe that you have sent me.
And I gave them the glory that you have given me, that they are one, just as we are
one.
I in them, and you in me, so that they are perfect in one.
John XIII. 20. Verily, verily, I say to you, whoever receives, if I send someone, he
receives me; but he who receives me receives him who sent me.
Joh. XV. 4. 5. Stay in me and me in you. The vine, like the vine, can not bear fruit,
and it can not bear fruit by itself; so you do not, you stay in me.
I am the vine, you are the vine. Whoever abides in me, and I in him, brings much
fruit; because without me you can do nothing.
Gal. II. 20. But I live; but not me, but Christ lives in me. For what I now live in the
flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God.
l. Cor. VI. 17 But he who is attached to the Lord is a spirit with him.
Matt. VIII. 20. And behold I am with you every day unto the end of the world.
Matt. XVIII. 20. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am in the midst of
them.
The same, however, what the Bible says and what we believe is said, but not
believed, all the way around. For how often do we hear that the spirit of the one and
the other lives on in his and his children, his disciples? almost involuntarily forfeited
philosophers, theologians, mystics, something profound things and edifying to say the
beyond, in expressions, you need to take only literally to have our view
literally 5) ; entire belief systems almost coincide with it 6) ; Unbelievers even deny
the faith with improper version of the same words, with the actual version we claim
him 7) ; and needs, for whose sake one has devised impossible views, find therein
only possible fulfillment8) .
5) S. Zend-Avesta III. P. 78. 345 ff.
6). S, 59 ff. 79 ff. 8 ff.
7) Ebendas. P. 334.
8) Ebendas. P. 344.
In fact, what a beautiful and salutary development this faith is capable of in the
practical sense. The more we direct our senses, thinking, aspirations for one whom
we love or hold high, judge, continue his works, the more we may believe that we
become part of him and he gains in us the more more intimately and steadily grown
together with him and already in this world we can look forward to the community of
consciousness that we gain with him in the hereafter. The faith that goes through all
peoples, and is only atrophied among the Protestants, that the living can still do
something for the dead, now has its reason and its support. For all that we do, as they
have fallen in store for them when they have lived outside of us, will live for them,
since they dwell in us, all the more pleasing, coming to terms, and helping to make
their place more homely in the hereafter. But more immediate than everything that we
in their sensedo can is the love, respect, reverence, gratitude, which we their thinking,
the honor that we still testify to them, to work by being directly felt and enjoyed by
them. And in one side there will be a reason to act already in this worldly life so that
the survivors may be inclined to continue to act in our sense, to think of us with love,
respect, veneration, thanks, still after death honor, from another side a part of the
otherworldly reward of those who have done so, and part of the punishment of those
who have not acted so; finally the best consolation of those who lament a beloved
dead. They know he is still for them, they are still there for him; and it only depends
on them to give to him and to take from him; yes, even more than in this world.
Much may remain of this traffic in the unconscious; but by deliberately elevating
ourselves to the otherworldly spirits with the thoughts, they may also consciously be
with us as we are with them, or with what they enter into us consciously in us as we
do in them; because we cut ourselves with our consciousness circles. This, too,
already has Christian faith in the fact that the conscious turning to Christ also brings
with it a conscious turn to us; and Christ will only serve as a model to all here. And
with brighter consciousness we think of the departed, the more conscious and lively
the traffic between them and us becomes. But that we know this will help us to make
it more conscious and alive; but otherwise this world and hereafter are like two who
do not talk to each other, because each one of the other means that he does not hear or
understand him. The monuments, the feasts for the memory of the great and the good,
become greater and deeper meaning, and art gains new vital impulses. Every statue
erected to a great and good man, keeping alive the memory of him and planting it in
innumerable people, awakes some of his conscious life in posterity.
This is, I mean, the better at the same time and several, which one can give for that
raw belief in the intercourse between this world and the hereafter, which is not simply
reprehensible, only to be purified, in the worship of the dead, the worship of the
saints, the prayers for the deceased, in a bad sense asserted in the necromancy; but
nothing better and more, but only the affirmation and explanation of the same faith,
which, according to the Bible itself, we should have of the relation of the
otherworldly existence of Christ to ours.
The argument of the body.
Our worldly mind is bound to a limited part of the corporeal world, and what is
born and going in our minds, it is born and goes something in this small part of the
world in changeable condition. We recognize the existence of other finite spirits by
being bound to similar limited parts of the world with similar processes. But the part
of the world to which our own mind is bound stands on the one hand in such
relationships of similarity, on the other hand in the effect, thirdly in the emergence,
fourthly in the partial inclusion, fifth in the expedient inclusion, and even in the
subordination to the organic and inorganic in a higher organic interdependent world,
that we can not help but hold it for the larger, higher, wider, more general, to which
our own mind is attached, and therefore also to think in relation to a larger, higher,
wider, more general mind than our own, while at the same time thinking of it in part
and in submission. Thus, the argument of the body with the argument of the spirit
quite together.
I do not repeat the wide version, which I, elsewhere given this argument in all its
aspects and parts that can form separate arguments as much, as I rose from the big
part of whole of the world to the whole 9). It may suffice at some general
considerations on its ground.
9) Zend-Avesta Th. I and II. And Soul Question Ch. IX.
The preceding argument gave Christianity its right, this gives paganism its right,
and this, too, has its right, not according to what it contradicts the basic ideas of
Christianity, but according to what can be removed from them in these ideas; but
these ideas must be broadened by the barriers that are drawn to them, and it is this
extension that demands the current argument.
As God in the prevailing Christian view is replaced by the spirits, he is replaced by
nature, into which paganism not only completely sinks him, but into which he splits
and dismembers him. This intermingling of God with nature, this splitting and
fragmentation into nature, is the injustice of paganism, that separation over nature
that of Christianity.
To be sure, even in the Christian view there is talk of an omnipresent and
omnipotent God, without whom no hair falls from our head, no leaf from a tree; yet it
is no more serious than the words that we live, weave, are made serious in
God; Rather, nature had fallen out of God, indeed, fallen away from him, and thought
to leave her, if already put into her, but now self-reliant; even times when it was part
of the Christian style to increase God by deeply degrading nature. Again, however,
our argument will make us earnestly in those words which, at least, the Christian can
not avoid, while at the same time solving and clarifying the contradictions that do not
make him serious about it.
Our body only holds together and everything is possible only if a spirit is there; the
materialist himself can not deny it, and it does not change that he calls the mind a
result rather than a linking principle, as we prefer to call it; so the body can only hold
together with this result, and everything can go in it. So the whole world will only
stick together and everything will go in it, as long as a spirit is there; and it would not
change anything if the materialist also wanted to call this spirit a result, which
another person calls the primordial ground and we call the highest linking principle of
the whole. The thing remains the same.
This is the most general aspect of the omnipresence and all-efficacy of God in
nature, which does not exclude that he also works in it for special relationships.
Now it appears against this that the whole world holds together and everything in it
goes according to the laws of nature. But also our body holds together and everything
goes according to physiological laws, which belong to the laws of nature. But a spirit
is there and it remains true that it only holds together as long as a spirit is there. So
one can not argue against the other. Rather, the existence of that lawfulness itself, by
virtue of which the body holds together, and according to which it is alive in it,
consists only in the existence of the spirit in man and vanishes in the body of man as
the spirit dwindles. And so the more general lawfulness of the corporeal world, which
subordinates itself to it, is connected with the existence of a universal spirit, which is
subordinated to that of the human; that, of course, is related by itself.
The spirit, too, has its side of legalism-if that were not the case-how would logic
and psychology-and, of course, that, as the body and mind are compatible, their laws
so prevail. They do it factually, otherwise body and spirit themselves could not exist
and go together; and visibly both share the teleological principle. Say
materialistically that the spirit is bound by these laws or idealistic; the spirit has given
them to themselves and to nature when he gave them; the fact that we are here to do
remains the same again: the context in us is there; and if it is there in us, it can and
must finally be beyond us in what our body and spirit itself springs from and in which
it is still partly included.
The clock, too, goes by the laws of nature, without a spirit being present. But with
its legal course it belongs to the whole of nature, in which there is a spirit, and could
go without so little, as a leaf fall from the tree, a hair from your head, according to the
laws of nature. Try to think differently, and you will have to contradict the
omnipotence of God, or the laws of nature; so they agree.
But, it is said, with all legalism the spirit is also a free being, and we need a free
God. We see the signs of human freedom in the free actions of man, which are
inexplicable from no laws of mind and nature; where are the signs of a corresponding
freedom of God?
The signs of a corresponding at once and are nowhere the same, just as in man,
insofar as man himself is entered into God with his freedom; above that, however, the
corresponding ones of a higher one. For as little as we can adequately explain the free
actions of man from known laws of the mind and of nature, so little, indeed still less,
the creation of man himself, the unpredictable course of history in humanity, even if
we as well as in In the history of the individual mind many things can foresee a
general lawfulness, but not everything, only not the truly new, which itself must lay
the foundation for new foresight. But does this point to freedom in the individual
man, why not that which applies to the whole of humanity, indeed to the whole world
of creatures? to a freedom above human and all creaturely freedom, since the course
of world history can not be summed up by the sentiments and actions of the
individual. And does legality have to be compatible with human freedom in any way,
it actually does it, will not it be able to tolerate it beyond that? It does so factually as
long as one still wants to speak of freedom at all.
But he who denies freedom in man in any sense will just have to deny it in
God. But as little as he can deny the spirit, the will, the possibility of choice, the
actions that others call free, nor deny their connection and their consequences with
that denial, for they are factual, he will be able to do it with God, and only those
Conception of the ultimate reason of all that God and men have to put differently. The
existential question of God, of his essential qualities and the meaning they have for
us, always remains independent of the metaphysical question of freedom, however
much one loves to spoil the clarity of one question by the uncertainties of others.
And so, the right use of our principle to always deduce the factual from the factual,
and the larger and higher, which we ask to see the greater and higher of the small and
the low what we have, overcomes us everywhere the dispute between idealism and
materialism, freedom and necessity, in which the philosophical systems strive without
result; Although this dispute frees, we do not want to blame him; but the hand always
keeps the fact, leads the bride home, while the others beat themselves about it.
Continue:
If our whole body only holds together, and is alive in it only so long, as long as a
spirit is present, in this sense our mind is omnipresent and all-effective in our body,
yet it is not conscious in every inner movement our body; the breath goes, the blood
runs, the substance changes unconsciously; Much as the thoughts go, and the
thoughts require as a basis of this passage; the most living consciousness is with
every new spiritual creation and it stirs up the most vital life in the head. And so the
winds may go, the rivers run, the substances between organic and inorganic world
change, without the divine consciousness with the peculiarities in it goes so special,
while it always goes with the whole and is supported by the whole.
Finally:
In the human kingdom itself, much is carried out in the half or the whole
unconscious, which was learned only with the tension of consciousness. In such a
way spinners spin, writes the writer, plays the musician. Under the influence of the
attention and the will functional devices have formed in us which later spare the co-
operation of the consciousness, and spirit and body had to arrange themselves in
connection to it, brain and hand of the spinner and the player at the same time with
their spirit. In fact, all our education and training is directed, under the influence of
consciousness, to create and to develop more and more institutions in us on whose
unconscious basis the consciousness rises to new and higher activity. And so, too,
does the whole current establishment of the world, which we have come to terms as
finished, with their divorce of the elements, the organic and inorganic realm, the
division of one and the other, the formation of the embryo and its brain itself, in short
the whole order of what now no conscious activity needs, in order to emerge, to exist
and to pass, but to have given to such a side God's first origin, in order to serve as a
basis and a stage for the further development of conscious activity in the
world. Moreover, this only goes into the general principle that the first origin of
things is different everywhere than repetition. With this, however, the conscious
activity of God leads back to the first establishment of things, insofar as one can
speak of something first in it, and not rather has to speak thus:
For all this, the questions still remain unanswered, how has this activity always
been legally legal, how free have been, how can law and freedom actually and
conceptually be compatible in the world, and, finally, how was it with the first
creation of matter?
Now, as far as the latter is concerned, there will certainly always rest a greater,
more fruitful, and more easily answerable, interest in the question according to which
principles the world was ordained from the beginning, and still governed today, as it
first emerged , yes, if it ever happened. Of course, if we knew it, it would be good,
why not ask for it. Only that can not be valid, in which some seek the summit of
virtue, but comes under one of those two fundamental errors that violate the principle
of going out of dogmas or speculation about the creation of the world, the
relationship of the created world to God and the nature of things to deduce from this,
that is, to want to get from what is most remote to our knowledge to what lies nearest
to it; for what has been first, will always be found only last. So if there is a way of
knowing here, it is to be done in the opposite direction; but if there is one?
And as far as the question of freedom is concerned, it will never be possible to
decide on the basis of the factual, but the practical point of view also casts doubt on
whether the impossibility in which we find ourselves proves a firm legality in all
events is based on the fact that the principle of Legality can be lifted by abolition into
a higher principle or, with it, covering itself only exceeds the level of our
comprehension.
Of course, if we knew it, it would be fine again; why not speculate about
it? 10) . Except that one does not seek to scare the sparrow in hand with the falcon on
the roof, and not to forget that speculation can be built, but that something secure
does not depend on it.
10) Our own speculation can be found in the Scriptures on the Soul Question p. 217.
Let us support the belief in a world-omnipresent, omnipotent, the world from the
beginning in the sense of purpose-organizing and governing God only on what we
have of the facts of the material and spiritual world in us and above us In addition to
really knowing what will remain, in which the faith thus supported and demanded
would contradict the interests of a science no less supportive of facts only in a
different direction, and in which natural science itself contradicts this belief. Of
course, one does not have to ask for her to found him; it is not her business; just
enough that the reasoning does not run counter to their cause. But now we are not
looking for anything in God,
And after all this, would you ask God a body like the little man? - Not like the little
person; The comparison is true in many things, but not in the highest, last, in which
there is something everywhere that is not true in the comparison between man and
God, but rather the fundamental difference between the two.
On closer inspection, you do not want to be afraid to deal with the last, it turns out like this:
All that the mind has of all nature, of its own body, and knows, is all that is at last only something
in itself, something seen, felt, and so on. That a nature still surpasses it proves, if not by anything
else, by it that other spirits have the same or something legally related to it too. This legal context
extends beyond each individual mind, but not over God's spirit; He finally carries the whole
connection of what is seen, heard, in which rests what the creatures have of nature, of their own
body, know, complete in the unity of their consciousness, and are the laws of this connection with
this upper conclusion the eternal solidity in the whole self-contained building, which could not be
represented by any rigid, dark things behind it, in which some seek the ultimate solid core of
existence; only that new degrees are progressively being made in order to divide the intellectual
structure into the upper conclusion. So, instead of the whole of nature having fallen out of God,
God carries in himself all the nature of which he can be known, just as every finite mind carries
within it something of that nature; But for this very reason it does not have a body as external in
nature as the finite spirit in the part of nature, insofar as what appears from nature in God as
space, time, and matter can not appear to him as such; because there are no spirits outside of
him. only that new degrees are progressively being made in order to divide the intellectual structure
into the upper conclusion. So, instead of the whole of nature having fallen out of God, God carries
in himself all the nature of which he can be known, just as every finite mind carries within it
something of that nature; But for this very reason it does not have a body as external in nature as
the finite spirit in the part of nature, insofar as what appears from nature in God as space, time,
and matter can not appear to him as such; because there are no spirits outside of him. only that
new degrees are progressively being made in order to divide the intellectual structure into the upper
conclusion. So, instead of the whole of nature having fallen out of God, God carries in himself all
the nature of which he can be known, just as every finite mind carries within it something of that
nature; But for this very reason it does not have a body as external in nature as the finite spirit in
the part of nature, insofar as what appears from nature in God as space, time, and matter can not
appear to him as such; because there are no spirits outside of him. But for this very reason it does
not have a body as external in nature as the finite spirit in the part of nature, insofar as what
appears from nature in God as space, time, and matter can not appear to him as such; because
there are no spirits outside of him. But for this very reason it does not have a body as external in
nature as the finite spirit in the part of nature, insofar as what appears from nature in God as
space, time, and matter can not appear to him as such; because there are no spirits outside of him.
However much this metaphysical deepening may be the ultimate truth of the relationship between
God and nature, it is only the last; and as little as it would be practical in our reflections on the
relation of the human mind to nature to always go back to that factual truth that all that we have
and know of nature is something in our own mind, it would be convenient in our reflections on the
relationship between God and nature always to go back to the fact that all nature is something in
God; Only in the end can one remember this here and there, while at the same time reflecting on the
difference, in the last instance, of the relationship of bodily existence to us and God. Apart from
that, nature or world compares itself with one body insofar as, just as man with his seeing eye can
grant other parts of his own body, so God with his seeing human beings sees other parts of nature,
and may we ourselves speak of a living of God in the world, a bearing of God from the world, if its
higher The sphere of consciousness on the lower, in which nature or world appears, just as on a
lower condition, than our higher sphere of consciousness on the sensuous, in which the physical
appears in general, but both in the whole God just as well, only in higher Meaning, conditioned
and suspended. And it is not a matter of a metaphysical deepening, but the most common way of
representing the relationship between God and the world, which is capable of deepening, is to do
here.
Just as many, because they are incapable of attuning the conceptions of God's
control and the action of nature, elevate God with their own thoughts about nature
and let them go their way under it, so and for the same reason many are able to do so
to grasp an idea of our future spiritual existence only on the basis of a complete
detachment from the physical foundation. Be it already now the higher spiritual life
in us, the spirit in the narrower sense, not just as the lower sensual, the soul in the
narrower sense, much more bound to a bodily activity, conditioned by it, but floating
free about it, and death The only consequence is that, with the complete omission of
the sensory basis, it can finally free itself entirely from it; that's it, that the spirit seeks
a new one again, or creates one's self, or, according to the faith of the church, finally
finds the old one again. Everything is simple with such beliefs; then the argument of
the spirit suffices; an argument from the body then becomes idle; and to whom this
faith stands firm can spare itself the following. Also one can ask whether it is not best
at all, on the argument, which is enough, to keep completely alone in the question of
the hereafter. If we do not have the earthly experience of the coherence of this earthly
body, we ourselves should not be able to recognize the existence of this worldly spirit
from our earthly body; It would therefore be impossible at all to recognize the
otherworldly spirit in its bearer, if it were not for our principle, generalizing,
widening and intensifying, from the worldly side to the otherworldly, offering us a
clue to it. But how inadequate is this assertion, after arguing about the most important
conditions from which to conclude, the whole doctrine of the relations between body
and soul is still in trouble. And all that is more exact, which we wish to infer on the
basis of more abundant documents than there, would only have the character of the
anatomical and physiological, which is probably used by science, but not by life; it
would not be used by the life of faith and be useful for it. after arguing about the most
important conditions from which to conclude, the whole doctrine of the relations
between body and soul is still in trouble. And all that is more exact, which we wish to
infer on the basis of more abundant documents than there, would only have the
character of the anatomical and physiological, which is probably used by science, but
not by life; it would not be used by the life of faith and be useful for it. after arguing
about the most important conditions from which to conclude, the whole doctrine of
the relations between body and soul is still in trouble. And all that is more exact,
which we wish to infer on the basis of more abundant documents than there, would
only have the character of the anatomical and physiological, which is probably used
by science, but not by life; it would not be used by the life of faith and be useful for
it. but not needed by life; it would not be used by the life of faith and be useful for
it. but not needed by life; it would not be used by the life of faith and be useful for it.
Thus, the argument of the body for the hereafter can make no claim to safety or
infallibility at all, since the argument based on simple and easily demonstrable facts
of consciousness does not easily go to the people. If, however, the most general
aspects of the belief in a hereafter can support the same general fact of the connection
between mind and body on which the materialist relies on unbelief, in complete
harmony with the argument of the spirit, why not but to use the materialist as a
reinforcing pillar of belief, which otherwise turns against it as a strong weapon. For
how much can the materialist, and not the materialist alone, to object to the
presupposed independence of the higher spiritual life from the life of the brain, which
may well be foreseen, but which can not be refuted, hardly illusory; how much the
psychologist is opposed to any other than the conceptual separability of a mind and a
soul of a narrower mind; and what difficulty can be overcome by the total dropping
of the physical underlay, which did not recur more strongly when re-seeking,
creating, finding a new one; since everywhere else a new body can only be created by
means of an old one. and what difficulty can be overcome by the total dropping of the
physical underlay, which did not recur more strongly when re-seeking, creating,
finding a new one; since everywhere else a new body can only be created by means
of an old one. and what difficulty can be overcome by the total dropping of the
physical underlay, which did not recur more strongly when re-seeking, creating,
finding a new one; since everywhere else a new body can only be created by means
of an old one.
It is not disputed that the meaning of a book does not depend on the individual
letters, but as freely as it hovers over the single letter, as high spiritual it means, every
other sense demands a different composition and sequence of letters and words. It is
not disputed that the melody and harmony of a string playing does not depend on the
individual strings and string movements; yet the highest melody and harmony
demands a different interplay and a different sequence of playing strings. Will it be
different with the spiritual in us and the strings and games of our brain? Is not it
rather the most probable thing, because the most reasonable thing and the facts are
the most appropriate? But then the mind can never detach itself from a material
foundation, only exchange it, change its games,
If we take a closer look, then the view itself is based, which unleashes the mind in a
different sense from the matter, as it is in the sense of the previous examples, but
rather the demand that it be saved in the hereafter, one thinks that it is possible not at
all - except that it would find a support in an actual foundation and thus offer one of
the demands. But how bad is the fulfillment of the demand, if the required foundation
does not exist, how terrible it is with the certainty and firmness even of the belief in
this fulfillment, if the physiology and pathology of the brain coincide with it or
instead of facts on demands have to build. Is not faith otherwise to save?
So, after all, we leave the argument of the body at the bottom of the facts, of which
one is so afraid, nothing hiding, nothing euphemizing, nothing denying, but with the
farthest glimpse of their whole connection as leaders, his steps into the hereafter do
so, as surely as it is possible with the uncertain theory of it, gladly reveals everything,
which might rather appear as weakening than strengthening the argument of the
mind; asserting the demand that it only give us what gave us that, only demanding
that one agree with it.
Before that, however, the most important opponent of the belief in immortality,
who shares with us the outcome of the ground of the facts, the materialist, may first
speak for himself. He knows no more than we of the facts of that connection from
which he is founded, that is, the most general and the least of the most particular. But
that's always something, and we know it like him.
If, as he says, in fact, as far as experience goes, a spirit with all its related lower and
higher activities can not exist and act without a body and bodily activities, then this
fact also becomes a question as to whether and how future spiritual life is possible,
must prevail and remain the basis of every conclusion. So what will become of our
spirit when this body disintegrates? Does man now need a brain to gain feelings,
thoughts, and in fact he needs it; How can he drop it with death at once, and still gain
sensations, thoughts, and even survive, after all, with all his sensations and thoughts,
he is only a product of the brain. Again, there is nothing to argue against the
expression of the materialist; if the brain were rather the product of a creative mind,
then the human spirit could only arise with the production of this product, and it can
continue to exist here only with new procreations; and the fact that matters is the
same here as well.
But what is possible now is what the materialist considers impossible, because, as
we have already seen in examples of examples, and to remember what we have only
just found the occasion, there is no need for the same conditions and means,
something to maintain and to evolve than to produce first. The brain is, in order to
respond to the language of the materialist, an instrument to produce effects that could
never arise without it, he is quite right, but once there was no longer the conservation
of the instrument for their Forterhaltung, yes further development; he is wrong, and
new examples of examples can lead us, in ever-increasing rapprochement, to the trap
itself.
Look at the violin; the sound of it could not arise without it; but, once created, you
can smash the instrument, the sound reverberates into the distance, widening the
circle more and more, taking its whole peculiarity into the distance, through thick and
thin; At last, however, it fades away for all outer ears, because none of them can
follow its spread; but do not stop reverberating; it is still the same tone; the smooth
air suffices to preserve him, who needed the most artful instrument to emerge; and
where he meets a string of kindred spirits, she still sounds like him.
But is man a violin? - Much more than that, and what he is more than the violin and
the world around him more than the air will also result in more, not less. Continue:
An image in the eye can not arise without an eye; but, once formed, you can tear
out the eye and the memory echoes away in the brain, where the physical effects
extend from the eye and takes the whole peculiarity of the picture, echoes with this
effect the brain, because how else could it with the that which all other senses bring,
interweave into concepts, and yet remains whole in itself; but can only awaken for
oneself when intuition is extinguished; has lost the sensual strength with its
expansion, but exchanged for greater scope, greater freedom and a more lively
life 11) .
11)One will probably be able to hold it, for it is not more probable that an intuition attaches itself to the whole
tract of nervous vibrations (general psychophysical movements) which extends from the eye into the brain and
passes through the brain, but so long Intuition is in the eye and the stimulus acts on the eye, is the most lively
in the eye, so that one can speak of a relative concentration of activity in the eye during the sensory perception,
without it even persisting without the connection with the brain and in its Consciousness can intervene. If
intuition is extinguished, an immediate echo remains as an afterimage; The permanent possibility of the re-
occurrence in conscious memories and their constant unconscious continuation and participation in our
conceptual and visual life undoubtedly rests not merely on a simple evolution of the original vibrations, but on
the fact that the original vibrations thus organize, tune, and create new institutions. have intervened in the
strings and the inner string play of the brain, that this re-emergence and that continuation is possible. The more
precise form of the 'how' is, of course, completely unknown, and therefore the superficial, basically inadequate,
but short, and slightly catchy designation is preferred above as an instant. It can be explained by the fact that
even a speech outside does not propagate itself to posterity, that it simply goes forth,
But man is even more than his eye and the world around him with a thousand
brains more than his brain, and more will attach itself to the more.
And so you may at last tear out the brain too, without which neither memories nor
thoughts could arise, your whole world-view-life could not arise; and all this visual
life will continue to take along in the whole, whence its effects extended, and the
whole peculiarity of it; only as a life of remembrance can it awaken for itself when it
expires as an intuitive life; and, for the loss of sensible strength, to exchange that
expanded scope for the more developed spiritual life, which we already recognized in
the argument of the spirit as a matter of the hereafter. Thus the demand for a
liberation of the spirit from the bodily limits is fulfilled, without separating the mind
from the corporeality itself.
And if the brain is no longer a smooth air, in which the sound floats smooth, but the
memory circles in encountering each other and new views can develop a higher life
in the highly organized construction, so is the world around you with meadows,
forests , Fields, church, state, science, industry, commerce, art, the entire
concatenation and intersection of all human circles of life, in which the individual
brains only enter and intervene as moments, still less a smooth air; and the
otherworldly circles of life in this higher organized structure, not our present one, but
rather with the inclusions of the present one, will be able to find the suitable basis for
that higher spiritual life, which they lead in encountering each other and with the life-
groups on this side.
After all, from your whole intuitional life, what you are leading right now, does a
circle of effects and works extend into the human world and, moreover, around you
as well as all your intuitions extend effects into your brain and beyond, a circle that
Its relationship, its relation to the origin, and the character of that origin can scarcely
ever be lost, as the circle of the circle around the stone thrown into the pond, as the
sound wave around the violin, as the circle of effects which are in the eye of the
picture Brain range. You can not just as easily trace the connection and its continuing
relationship with its origin as with the small circles. And do you mean that in your
present visible body the vibrations of the soul are carried by invisibly fine bodily or
etheric vibrations, and what it does and does itself depend on depends on it? If they
are present, they too, invisible as they are, will, in connection with your actions and
activities, haunt the world, which for your body represents the air around the violin
only with greater accomplishments, or where should they at last rejoice, and will
continue to form a narrower soul-body in your further; The organization of this
invisible body, however, can only find its support and its external manifestation in the
visible circle of effects and works with whose formation it forms itself in connection
with itself. Thus faith can follow any hypothesis and yet needs no hypothesis.
If the world around you were dead, then the whole circle into which this life-circle
of life is transposed would also remain dead, and if this were the end of your life, or
if your otherworldly life found its material support, and hence the argument of the
body Stop more. But if God lives in the world, you already live in God, and if he
remembers you, have you lived, still of your life - but that is what we are after the
argument of the spirit - it will also become the memory of your life, your future To
make life in him, to naturally relate to the totality of what in the world reminds of
you, that is precisely to the circle of the effects and values that you have left
behind. One does not mean to have a future life without God and out of God; but not
that our present consciousness is the only one what is in God and the means of that
consciousness are the only ones God has. But if there are others, where is their job?
What prevents the circle of your future existence from being extended? Even your
present body, and therein your brain, is extended, and yet it includes and subordinates
a unified consciousness in subordination to the divine. Does it still need the old skin
in the future? And if you ask for a relative conclusion, as the body now grants it, also
for the future-in fact, the present one has already grown together with the whole
world-then the boundary of the earthly kingdom, within which your doing and doing,
becomes herewith the circle of your effects and works here concludes, grant only a
new further conclusion in a larger circumference. The current external scope of your
life is thereby lifted into an inner one. You can even, in a sense, count the whole earth
as your future body; but only after the relationship by which you work through it, you
have imprinted the character of your being, and regard your present body as the seed
from which you grow through it. The grain finally disappears and rots, while the
plant continues to grow in the higher light. Now you have a new external world once
in the totality of the circles of life, which, interweaving and crossing yourselves the
same space, grows from other exits and takes hold of it in other senses; in the other
broader sense in the whole sky around the earth. To explain it clearly, on the one
hand, many throw stones into the pond, and each circle of the circle becomes, by
crossing with all others, in the totality of others have his outer world in one sense and
in the whole earth around the pond in the other broader sense. That's how it should be
understood.
The rejection of the effects on oneself, to which someone might tie his
consciousness - unclear thought, of course, but obscurity can also be satisfied - will
only happen on a larger scale in the large circle which you will once fill out now in
small; One can show how the consequences of their causes in the great cycles of
things beyond us are no less inferior than in our little ones. But radiating from a
single point and repelling it to a single point does not yet take place in our
bodies 12) ; how should we demand it from the future. Not at all is the central essence
of the soul, that it is materially of onePoints from all sides is effective, but that it
connects a circle of material effects in uniform determinations of consciousness. Now
the transition from this world to the hereafter consists only in the fact that it
exchanges one narrower circle for another; but in order to remain the same soul, it
can only be the one which he first produces out of himself.
12) Proof thereof s. in the (Elements of Psychophysics, II ch. 37.
Now, of course, what seems to be beyond you seems lost to you; but it is not
lost; God has kept it within you, and you are catching it up with the very
consciousness that is dwindling in your present life. Already everything is ready to do
so, only it's not yet conscious for you in it; It takes nothing to elevate it except to turn
his attention to it; but he only turns them away, drawing them away from your present
life, which extinguishes them by awakening the otherworldly.
Our present body, too, was finished before it was born into present life, and was
born into consciousness only after the organs with which it was rooted in the womb
that drove it out died. So our future body; he is already here, yet not yet to conscious
life there; the present one must die first. 13) Now, this may seem different, that at
birth, consciousness rekindles itself in the child, whereas death is only meant to
change its seat to the dying. But otherwise we see so general consciousness only
arising as it dwindles elsewhere, or after it had disappeared earlier (in sleep), and
vanishing as it arises elsewhere, or to re-emerge in the future, that we may well
recognize a general law in it, under which the awakening of consciousness in the
hereafter subordinates itself to extinction in this world, and even that first emergence
of consciousness at birth can easily interpret as apparent. For it suffices to think that
out of the universal divine consciousness carried on by the world, every new birth of
a human being translates into the specialty of human consciousness.14) Thus, not only
the first creation of man, but every birth of a new man into present as well as future
life is the excitement of a part of matter, which was only the impulse to awakening,
by God.
13) A trace of this analogy f. in the booklet of life after death (by Mises).
14) This view touches on Plato, which holds the continuance of the soul after death to be pre-existent before
birth, except that we do not assume it to exist individually before birth. Rather, as a branch arises from the
common stem, without going back into it, but continuing as an individual branch of it and evolving, according
to our faith, it is with the soul.
The whole half of the earth only awakens as the other falls asleep; in order to be
properly awake, one must first sleep deeply, and if the eye is awake in us for the
objects, then one must let the ear and all other senses sleep; Let the whole life of
remembrance awake within us, and the whole of intuition live in us; and so it is only
a case of the same general principle, or a generalization of all previous cases, that
even our otherworldly memory life only awakens in God, if our worldly intuition
falls asleep within it, and our otherworldly body only awakens in the world, as the
worldly side falls asleep; But he must be there to be awakened.
It is easy on the basis of the preceding facts to present an idea which may find a brief incidental
mention here, that one, the law of the so-called conservation of force, 15) In the body-sphere
analogous law exists in the spiritual realm, and even the one is related to the other, insofar as the
spiritual is carried by the corporeal. According to that law, the same quantity of living force
(measure of physical activity in the exact sense, not to be confused with the vital force of the
philosophers) in the world does not remain constant; it can rise and fall, but always the same
possibility of its restoration by means of constantly existing real conditions in addition, so that the
living force can not disappear in any place, without again appearing either in another place or at
another time; in short, the sum of the real and, according to the existing conditions, still possible
living quantum of force always remains the same. No doubt that this law,16) ; only that this does not
prove that it is also valid for the mental activity itself; that is, the measure of the actual spiritual
activity which is possible in the return, according to the existing real conditions, always remains the
same, because the mental activity of the underlying physical is not simply proportional as I have
shown in my psychophysics. On the contrary, given the sustained total size of the psychophysical
activity, a maximum of the mental functions carried thereby takes place at a certain degree of
distribution of the psychophysical place, which, insofar as it was merely a simple sense sensations,
would be uniform, but with regard to higher phenomena a non-uniform one is unknown 17), Now, if
the world were to continue to tend to such a distribution, which can neither be asserted nor denied,
the measure of mental activity in the world would gradually increase, without that of the physical as
a whole or otherwise being changed periodically; only the distribution would have to change. From
this point of view and the principle that the content of consciousness of the later spirits coincides to
a great extent with that of the former, the possibility of the creation of new spirits without the
progressive growth of living force in the physical world and without the extinction of the former
spirits could psychophysically rest. But it is only from a progress in psychophysics that one can
expect more definiteness and light about this important, intervening, question.
15)A simple account of this law in terms of its importance to the spiritual field s. in my elements of
psychophysics. I. Chap. 5.
16) S. Psychophysics. IS 37 ff.
17) S. Psychophysics. Cape. 21st and 29th
How much could be said of facts 18) which seem to prove that, in exceptional
cases, a partial awakening of consciousness may now take place for its future wider
sphere of partial falling asleep for its present narrower only if we were sure that it
was Facts are. Nothing better could come to our faith than these marvelous cases in
which one has always been inclined to see a prelude to the future mode of
existence; but with diligence I leave aside everything that needs faith first to serve the
faith. So much so is the previous belief, in the opposite sense, that it might rather
serve in reverse to support the belief in these miraculous cases.
18) A small compilation of it s. in Zend-Avesta III. Pp. 87. 95, 206. 215.
Much remains with all this an inexplicable secret; who may deny it; but who deny
that all the inexplicable, what we believe in our future in God, really exists in us on a
lesser scale, in a more limited sense, even in the present, and thus with us only the
greater of a fact in the greater God that we have to believe in, believe.
Who may explain that so innumerable circles of consciousness, connected to just so
countless intersecting bodily spheres of activity, must be able to persist unperturbed
by one another. But even now the very same spheres of activity, which you worry that
they might disturb you beyond, enter into this world without misleading you, but
themselves contribute to the content, to the development of your conscious life; what
can change them, that they themselves carry a consciousness of which you only know
nothing, because you know nothing of alien consciousness at all? And when in the
full concert a trained ear from outside of all intersecting sound waves can already
hear the single tone, how should not differ much better those who are capable of own
distinguishing of their being. And even if the memory is able to wake up in the
distinguishable to and with others, nevertheless, that the physical documents intersect
of all in your brains; how could one not expect the greater and the higher in the much
larger and higher built world?
Whoever may explain only as a possibility what every one will demand as reality
from the hereafter, that in the other world's expanded and intersected bodily
existences there may still be a limited form of appearance in the other world. Not me
again. But as little as I can explain the possibility, I believe again in the reality of the
inexplicable beyond me, because I really find it in myself.
Do you think that the waves of action, which transmit the memory from the picture
of a rose in the eye into your brain, also have the limited shape of the rose? But the
memory mentally retains the shape of the rose; enough that it existed at the end; and
do you think that they are still as separated from each other as lily and rose, as rose
and lily are out there - impossible even when you take them one after the other with
the same point of view, sending their waves of activity into the same parts of the
brain ; - but there is still a separate appearance of the same in the memory, if it
existed in the intuition. How you can have a whole garden with trees, flowers,
animals, people in your memory, yes, many after another, and well apart,
anyway,19) . We do not know how to interpret this mystery, that in general and
everywhere the mental appearance is the short result of an extended bodily support,
or otherwise, that the mind unites in a uniform appearance, which is subject to it as
bodily connection, 20 and physically from different points of origin Crossed is still
mentally separable. Enough that what exists in us must also exist beyond us. And did
not we think otherwise, that in the hereafter we would receive a spiritualized,
transfigured body for what was hitherto understandable? We received it with the
previous one.
19) Further remarks with reference to corresponding modes of presentation Andrer s. in Zend-Avesta III. 155 ff.
20) Comp. a discussion of the actual in this respect with general implications thereof in
m. Elem. d. Psychophysics II. 526 ff.
In another sense, but again, as we have already shown, an even greater, more
powerful, firmer, more indestructible, more tangible, but not with our little human
hands encircling, heavenly body, the great body of the earth with its meadows,
forests, fields, Cities, States u. s . w., a body common to all, which we shall pervade
in the future, and which, after all, will be peculiar to each one only according to the
relationship in which he has worked through him here and will continue to work
through it.
Strange teaching! Do you exclaim, unheard of in every way! What is everything
assembled in it!
And all this strange and strangely intricate doctrine rests only in the two simple
sentences: attach to the continuation of what your consciousness is now linked to, the
future continuation of your consciousness; and believe in that on a larger scale
beyond you, what you really find in the little one in you. And all this outrageous
doctrine is yet again only the same doctrine that you find in the Bible when it says:
that our present body itself is but a grain, out of which the future body will emerge,
but will not come to life until it dies is (1 Cor. XV. 37.35); - that sown becomes a
natural body and a spiritual body is resurrected (1 Cor. XV. 44); - that when our
earthly house of this hut is broken, we shall have a building built by God (2 Cor. -
that our works will follow us, and we will reap what we have sown. Try to think it all
differently or differently coherently than it is meant here, and one will be able to
think nothing or only contradictions.
But not only the Christian faith, the faith of all peoples is so well connected by
these ideas, as it is at all linkable: the belief that the shapes of the spirits in the
hereafter are light floating images that can not be grasped; they are really pictures,
memories in God. - That the spirits go into other people, animals, plants, in the air,
up, down, over the sea, to err around the graves, not a place where the spirits were not
sought; nothing individual, but all together is true. - that they go to heaven; they will
really penetrate a celestial body. - That they wander through planets. By penetrating
one completely, they may gain more conscious share in the general intercourse of the
same with other heavenly bodies than now. - That they continue the old business in
hunting, fishing, war, etc .; they will only carry everything away from what they have
begun here.
What idea could equally satisfy the demand of the historical principle? At the same
time, it satisfies the practical in the same way as that which flows from the argument
of the spirit, by basing itself on it. And if, in the first place, spiritual existence still has
a physical basis, then it can not be thought of differently in order to satisfy both
arguments in connection with one another.
Of course, the third major part of the faith finally enters this context. Just as every
otherworldly mind connects and interacts spiritually with many things that live in this
world, so does it bodily, in that everything that goes in and goes from its spirit into it
is carried through bodily effects and carried away. The idea that has reached me from
Plato to me is through a ray of bodily action that reaches from me to him, to me; or
how was it possible without the reproduction of writing and the word and works, and
their intervention in me through the eyes and ears. And all these rays, which went out
into the world from Plato, hang together just as at the end, how the wave around the
rock thrown into the pond remains coherent in its furthest procreation despite all the
breaks and recoilings it may experience. And in which man something may extend
from such a ray, he thereby becomes a member of Plato's otherworldly body, to
which, in the broadest sense, everything contributes that has emanated from this side,
and that has no limit; but only that which emanates from consciousness-bearing
movements in him will be able to continue his conscious life and give it its physical
foundation in the narrower sense. what has emanated from this side, and that has no
limit; but only that which emanates from consciousness-bearing movements in him
will be able to continue his conscious life and give it its physical foundation in the
narrower sense. what has emanated from this side, and that has no limit; but only that
which emanates from consciousness-bearing movements in him will be able to
continue his conscious life and give it its physical foundation in the narrower sense.
And again the teaching seems strange; and yet again nothing is but literally the
Bible's very own teaching. For, according to the most repeated sayings of the Bible,
Christ, for the transition to the afterlife, has our example, Christ, in whom Christians
are said to be after death, the body in his common ground; the members are many, the
body is one 21) ; the bodies of the members of the community are of the members of
this body 22) ; in addition, bread and wine, consecrated by him, enjoyed in the
memory of him, forming in his sense community, called by Christ himself his body
and blood; according to which Luther and others ascribe to the body of Christ in his
exaltation omnipresence 23) But as Christ dwells in his earthly body as in one body,
he is said to dwell above him in a higher realm with an otherworldly community that
has come from this world.
21) l. (Cori XII 12-17, 20, 27, Romans XII, 4.5, - Ephesians, I, 22, 23, IV, 4, 11-16, 29-32, Col. 21. II. 19. - Gal
II. 20. III. 27. 28.
22) 1. Cor. VI. 15.
23) Cf. Zend-Avesta III. 376th
All true, clear, simple and understandable, if the previous teaching is true; she says
nothing more than just the same thing; hollow words, incomprehensible
contradictions, if they are not true.
In so entering from this side of the argument into the Christian view of personal
mediation that transcends the beyond into the here and now, from another side of the
argument comes a view of higher mediating existences between us and God, thus
creating the pagan belief in the divinity of the stars with the Christian angel faith,
which is with him of a historical origin, and even in the Bible still mixed with it and
confused 24), also founded together, conveyed and lifted in the belief in the one
God. The world is no longer a roll of dead balls; but the entire this side and the
mental life of every celestial body linked to just as in a consciousness unit of the
same under the divine, when the entire life of intuition and memory every creature as
a single entity of its luminary 25); and what is believed or even said, if it is not
believed again, is true that an angel leads us on this side in all our ways and finally
carries us into the hereafter; only that we have to think inwardly within him what we
thought outwardly, just as it applies to our relation to God and hereafter; and not for
every other human being there is another angel, but for every other spirit community
in heaven. But the angels, who guide every human being in particular, or rather
human society, in particular directions, he can seek in the partakers of this spirit, the
spirits of the departed, from whom he lets himself be led.
24) See Zend-Avesta I. 244 f.
25) The closer explanation and execution thereof s. in the first part of the Zend-Avesta and the ninth chap. the
scriptures on the soul question.
Thus everything becomes conceivable which we otherwise can not think, so if

everything is in harmony, which we otherwise can not bring together, then all words
come true with whose sound we otherwise only know how to play.
It was enough; I did not want to develop the faith here at all, as the motives and
arguments of the faith; but that the development of every argument of faith rejects
itself into a development of faith.
And that is the incomparable, irreplaceable nature of these arguments, that in the
causes of the thing they give at the same time the reasons for the development of the
thing. The traditional arguments are easily counted on the fingers, but as they are
counted, one is also finished with them.
For the rest, all the arguments and the connection between everything that was said
of the historical are true: the general remains more securely posited by the individual
than he is. The general, however, is so closely connected that breaking something of
this connection means breaking the ground of the whole faith.
But if this reason is established as inviolable, the quarrel about particularities may
well take its course on him and begin again and again; yes it has to be like that; for it
is different with faith than the first tower; it is only because of the quarrels and
misunderstandings of the builders that he finally rises firmly as a monument of
reconciliation.
Then no word needs to be kept still with fears, so that the faith stands; only that
each one is rejected, which does not stand on the ground of the three arguments; for
that is the foundation of the faith and its eternal progress. This whole book consists
only in the assertion of these feasts of faith and nothing else may be kept of him.
VIII.
Position of an exact doctrine of body and soul
(with regard to the nerve question) to the questions of faith.
What I just said in common with all the arguments is also true in particular of what
we have been concerned with the last time, the argument of the body; the general
remains safer in the way that the individual allows himself to be confronted with
it; and still many questions could be raised from the same point of view, without
being answered otherwise from the point of view of it, than by indefinite possibilities
or analogies that are too isolated to provide certainty. An exact science of the
connection between body and soul, I have psychohysics called, will first have to stand
firm and have come to greater development by more careful and more accurate
determination of the facts and laws of this connection in our little body and life, as
now the case, the argument of the body for this connection in a greater and the other
side Life and life to be able to offer more specific clues and developmental
moments. But surely the time will come when the small and the great, in the form of
the most diverse and equally common points of view and laws, will be subordinated
as in the pure sphere of the body the fall of the apple and the movement of the earth
around the sun Ray that shines and the ray that sounds; just as in one the other will
know to find again. But now it is peculiar that the
As the palpable fallacy is that infers from the absence of nerve absence of the soul,
I have already shown in more than one place 1) . But as we say of nature, furca
expellas, usque recurret,so you can say it from this conclusion. I let the fork rest. He
will return as long as the unbelief he proves in the circle keeps him upright and a
limited view of the world still finds a welcome support in him; only that one would
wonder how such a view on such a support could last so long. In earlier times it was
an axiom that celestial bodies can only move in circles; The same role as now this
axiom will once play the axiom that soul movements can only take place on the basis
of nerve movements.
1) Nanna p. 37 ff. - On the soul question p. 27 ff.
And if nerves were necessary, they are not lacking in the common foundation of the
divine and otherworldly world. Rather, rather than a single system, there is a system
of nervous systems, through vibrations that transmit sight and word from one to the
other, and even more than they, bound to the narrower system, bound into the greatest
by those running between all the suns. Why, however, should vibrations of this kind
between these systems be less apt to impart internal mental references than vibrations
passing between ganglion balls; and the most general system of oscillations of the
unpredictable, less suited to carry a spirit than the special ones embodied in it, one
seeks only in vain the trace of exact proof in materialists and idealists,
Compare this with the so natural conception that Plato puts into the mouth of the Socrates in one
of his dialogues (Philebos) 2) .
2) After a translation in the German Museum 1862. no. 41st
Socrates:In the same way we can call the world, which is composed of the same
constituents, a body. Will it be from this body that our body or body will feed itself?
"- Protarch:" This too is not worth the question. "- Socrates:" But does not our body
have a soul? From where could he have received it, if not also the whole body were
animated, having the same as him, and still more excellently? "
It is only in the preceding case that the term bad is mitigated; may he mean to us:
what has no power and no value for itself.
An astronomer said that he had searched the whole sky and could not find God; of
course, how one can not find the mind in our brain with all the microscopic
scrutiny; but it wonders if you can find something against it. And I say that I have
searched all psychophysics, and I did not have to, because it was to build them, and
found nothing that is going against God and the hereafter; but only because I have
thoroughly investigated it, as far as it goes so far, and have explored a little deeper
than the anatomist's scalpel and the gaze of the materialistic physiologist.
But just as a star can not stand here at the same time and that the Ptolemaic and
Copernican system, the system of emission and undulation can not both be correct at
the same time, and in this sense the truth of natural science is only one , is that of
psychophysics, which Principles whole, the material half has in common with her,
only one; and if psychophysics can afford little to accompany us on the paths to the
highest and last things, it will never be able to do so on its own, yet it closes paths
from the outset, because of the contradiction with truths fixed in it must lead us
wrong, and leaves open only the one we have entered to find the faith required
historically and practically. All those analogies with which we sought to reach from
man to God, from this world to the hereafter, by the thread of the same and unequal,
expanding and intensifying, are absent for psychophysics; It can not be built by such
a way, it is only a remote possibility for them; but they are possibilities that can even
be subordinated to aspects that are more than possibilities3) , and are the only means
of reconciling religious belief with psychophysical knowledge; otherwise the
materialism that rejects faith is right. Against this there are other views which seek to
support the belief from the body side, which are at the same time psychophysically
impossible and which make it impossible to satisfy the historical and practical
demands of faith.
3) Psychophysics II. Ch. 45th
So that much represented, according to which each soul has its seat here in one
point of the body, be it a metaphysically simple thing, be it an externally physical,
inwardly psychic, atom, which simply thing or atom deals with death free from its
wide bodily covering. The very opposite of our belief that even the present abode of
the soul is an extensive physical construction, with which it is not externally
connected, that it internally links, the otherworldly-future another construction, and
finally the residence of God the farthest Construction that includes all these burrows.
But it is impossible to hold that view from the simple soul seats without the
festesten facts psychophysics to contact contradiction 4) ; the otherworldly existence
is thereby taken away with all the means of this worldly existence, without replacing
it with others or else only with a principle of substitution; and is said to be of God in
it - but one gladly avoids talking about God - so he becomes, like the other spirits, a
point inhabitant or point, or, as a consequence, a band of points that has no unity of
consciousness, unless the simplicity of the point is to ground it. Here, too, the very
opposite of our belief that the otherworldly life can only be won by means of the
divine instead of at its expense.
4) Psychophysics II. 381 ff.
Such is the not less frequently held view that an ethereal body of imponderable
material is enclosed in our present grosser than in an enclosure, and freees itself with
death with essential preservation of its organization. But it contradicts psychophysics,
because physics, to think of an organic body consisting of imponderable substances
for itself, has a stronger desire than that liquid water retains its old form after
breaking the glass; and even more, to let him build a new one without the help of the
old weighed-up body; where did one ever see anything, as dreaming, what founded
such possibilities. This notion, too, takes away from the mind only a means of
relating to the outside world rather than expanding it. Again the opposite of our
belief according to which our future body will be a merely greater system of the
weighable and unpredictable outgrown from the whole present, and nothing hinders
us to think that the vibrations of the soul, as well as now, are tied to the vibrations of
the unpredictable; only that an organization of the unpredictable here and there
without those of the weighable is inconceivable and can not be obtained.
Generally speaking, our thorough ignorance of the fundamental relationships
between body and soul hides an immense treasure that the future has to
lift. Materialism lies like a Cerberus above this treasure, guarding that it does not
shake off idealistically, but also that it will not be raised to religion for profit, because
it will thus be abolished, ignorant of the greatness and importance of this treasure. It
would be bad for faith, if its existence and its life required the upliftment of this
treasure; but the need for it will grow as the demands of faith grow; from this, even
suggestions for its elevation will come; as it succeeds, more and more of the faith will
be lifted into knowledge; but the faith only rises one step higher.
IX.
Questions of how faith first came to humanity,
and how the motives and reasons for believing in the existence of God are rooted
in the existence of God.
Afterwards, a few more words about these questions, which we have so far set
aside, although they were crowded in from the beginning. We put them back with the
benefit that we can now meet them with greater clarity than at first, with bigger, if not
by far, full ones. Mine, belief, and knowledge still run in many ways, especially at the
first; Let's just make sure they do not run apart.
The first, it is indisputable, is next to think that belief in God has, from the very
beginning, been produced only by the action of the theoretical and practical motive,
and that it has then propagated historically. So the historical motif would originally
have only the second place. On the other hand, if the historical motive is now the first
thing that makes every man believe in God, should not it have been the first from the
outset? Not, as the parents now implant the belief in God in the children, before the
theoretical and practical motive find a point of attack in them, God as Father of men
first communicated to them faith in him in an immediate manner? Thus the historical
principle would have taken its departure from itself;
But I mean: as little as now the three principles may argue over the primacy; they
can and can only do what they do through their connection and their support for each
other; it will have been from the beginning; rather, the beginning itself has been the
first and narrowest knot of entanglement in which we now see it. And may we regard
God as the Father of man - but we may, only with the difference that God begets and
gives birth to his children in himself, instead of out of himself - so we can the way, as
the belief in God first to humanity came to compare, even only with the way in which
the belief in the parents from the parents first comes to the children, not how the
belief in God first comes from the parents to the children;
But I think so:
It is undisputed that the nature surrounding man was from the beginning intent on
allowing him to recognize a power over him, and as long as he did not
yet abstract his own mind from the bodySince he did not distinguish both at first, he
also thought that there was no reason to abstract the mind from nature; to keep the
sun, which is in the sky, as less alive, than to go on the earth; but he had to hold her
for only the more powerful, the most exalted, the more brilliant. He did not know
how to brighten the day, how to open the flowers, to ripen the fruit. Should he regard
the thunder as something weaker and dead than his voice, the storm for something
weaker and more lifeless than his breath, the sea's ebb and flow for something more
mechanical than his pulse? What is so familiar to us, after the abstraction of the mind
from nature, from the forces of the mind, from the forces of nature, has become quite
common before it has happened, and just as impossible for man to do so Abstraction
started. The need, of course, had to compel man, with the power or the powers under
whose influence he found himself and felt, to make himself heard in a pleasing
manner, and the analogy with which he must behave in the face of man. guide
him. This character has all nature religion. And here we see the first effects of the
theoretical and practical motive.
But if God really dwells in nature and lives and works, the people in God live,
weave, are; Thus this immediate manner, as the existence of God and his highest
beings first came to the sensation or consciousness of them, was also the first natural
language of God to men, whose understanding is now no longer familiar to us; in
other words, that the historical motive, in seeking its beginning in a primordial
revelation of God, can not be divorced from the theoretical and practical
beginning. After all, God's existence itself has its theoretical and practical side, and in
the original effect on both sides of the beings created in it lay the very original
revelation of God, from which all historical propagation of the faith proceeded.
Thus, the child first recognizes the parents in direct contemplation of behavior
against themselves and self-asserting practical relationships as what they are to
him. Before he understands a word, he already understands the sound, the look, the
expression, the gesture, the smile and the threat, understands everything correctly
from the right parents; and they do not speak any other language with him at
first; only later does the word take its place. God has been no less audible and visibly
condemned to the first humans by what he reaches beyond his creatures, and his
power and practical relations with them have been no less palpable to them. There
was no doctrine that God placed over the heavens, that made the world fall out of
God; man could still believe in the living, whom he had before him, to see each other,
and who looked to him; and without being able to know the name of God, he could
counteract it, have consciousness relations, feelings towards him, as it is in the nature
of the newborn child against his parents, and all this only develops further in adult
humanity.
For as the feeling of the newborn child to the parents is, from the very beginning,
the most intimate, unified and unanimous for all children, but at the same time
undeveloped, the feeling of man's relationship to God, of being and life in and with
God, from the beginning bear the same character; - who, of course, wants to recapture
it now, to describe it as it was; but with the beginning of evolution also the
decomposition, aberration, and confusion begin, from which mankind has only
gradually to recover.
This may remain essentially true, however we may think of the origin and the first
state of man, and the uncertainty concerns only the questions, which nevertheless
remain relatively subordinate in all importance , whether the feeling of relations with
God is already present in the first human being consciousThe idea of an objective
divine existence prospered, the first, perhaps even the largest, stadiums went through
in them, whereby even the first aberrations could occur, or only very gradually came
about through humanity. whether the first evolution led from beginnings to some god
or polytheism; whether she passed from one pair of people or people to all the others
or developed independently here and there. But most of these questions, if not all,
will never be decided so surely as the question of the first state, the original unity or
multiplicity, the origin of the races and languages of the people with which they are
related. One can think about it, but it remains thoughts.
If Darwin's view is true, to which so many naturalists profess or incline that all the
more perfect creatures have evolved over the course of millions of years from the
more imperfect, man being a son of a pig and a monkey, it is self-evident that religion
not even in the first man, who was just above the level of the monkey, but very
slowly came to conscious development in humanity; Even in the Negro she is still
deep. Contrary to this is the opinion that it was not the organism of the newt and
monkey, but that of the earthly kingdom, which must have once had the first
ancestors of the monkey in it, that through a series of steps of ever new creations has
so far exalted itself in its creative activity it finally in a final effort we call it the last
evolution of the earth, to bring it to the creation of man, out of the same general rising
cloud, from which the first creation takes place. And as man visibly relates to the
whole earth in a purposeful relationship, the forces of the whole earthly kingdom
would have joined together again for his creation, but not merely raised the apes to
human beings through gradual improvement.
On this assumption, the first man, from his other origin, the fresh origin of the
great, universal creation, could also have many more excellent physical and mental
qualities than the later-born, closer and more intimate cognitive and emotional
relations, especially to nature and God all first to where it comes from, more
immediate relationships than anything counterfeited; the son has closer knowledge of
the father than the grandson. From an exact point of view, however, one view is so
improbable, one might almost say as impossible as the other. And yet one must
believe in one of both impossibilities, an example of how faith can force knowledge.
In Darwin's view, the slowly transforming forces and the slow ability of the
organization to reform must have been given a scope far beyond the reach of
experience, in which conflicting revolutions of the earth are given an unknown power
and the Earth's incomparable revolutions are accepted. This view can be linked from
all sides to the present, to the known; fill entire volumes with the weaving of
inductive threads; only that no threads reach as far as they should reach, that the spun
thing runs on itself at an early stage, and that the enormous amount of evidence does
not justify the scantiest proof. The other view can not connect with anything current,
nothing known; First, on the no less valuable certainty that the unknown
forces, which she needs, even after that view, which denies her repeated action, must
have had a first effect. Secondly, on the likelihood that tremors, revolutions of a kind
of not quite recognized nature, must have really and repeatedly affected the whole
earthly kingdom in connection or greater extension; Such revolutions are still being
repeated in the science of geology, with intermediate periods and places, where only
slow uplifting and subsidence assert space. Third, on the consideration that the
teleological context, the architectural structure, and the periodicity of the earthly
kingdom so characteristic of organisms really makes it comparable to an
organism. And every new generation and birth of a man, even every breaking out of a
new tooth is effected by forces which, sleeping in the ordinary course of things,
awaken from time to time, and stir up the whole organism again; not by rectification
of an old child or old tooth. By unexplained forces; one must not believe in it; but the
fact forces you to believe in it; but returns only after longer split times; and so it may
recur in the earth after even longer intervals, than in its members; but we live in the
meantime. Only that the heap of these analogies for an exact science can mean so
little, as Darwin's heap of inductions, which in a sense let the mouse bear the
mountain, while our analogies in another sense let the mouse bear the
mouse. sleeping in the ordinary course of things, awakening from time to time, and
stirring up the whole organism; not by rectification of an old child or old tooth. By
unexplained forces; one must not believe in it; but the fact forces you to believe in
it; but returns only after longer split times; and so it may recur in the earth after even
longer intervals, than in its members; but we live in the meantime. Only that the heap
of these analogies for an exact science can mean so little, as Darwin's heap of
inductions, which in a sense let the mouse bear the mountain, while our analogies in
another sense let the mouse bear the mouse. sleeping in the ordinary course of things,
awakening from time to time, and stirring up the whole organism; not by rectification
of an old child or old tooth. By unexplained forces; one must not believe in it; but the
fact forces you to believe in it; but returns only after longer split times; and so it may
recur in the earth after even longer intervals, than in its members; but we live in the
mountain, while our analogies in another sense let the mouse bear the mouse. not by
rectification of an old child or old tooth. By unexplained forces; one must not believe
in it; but the fact forces you to believe in it; but returns only after longer split
times; and so it may recur in the earth after even longer intervals, than in its
members; but we live in the meantime. Only that the heap of these analogies for an
exact science can mean so little, as Darwin's heap of inductions, which in a sense let
the mouse bear the mountain, while our analogies in another sense let the mouse bear
the mouse. not by rectification of an old child or old tooth. By unexplained
forces; one must not believe in it; but the fact forces you to believe in it; but returns
only after longer split times; and so it may recur in the earth after even longer
intervals, than in its members; but we live in the meantime. Only that the heap of
these analogies for an exact science can mean so little, as Darwin's heap of
inductions, which in a sense let the mouse bear the mountain, while our analogies in
another sense let the mouse bear the mouse. as with their members; but we live in the
mountain, while our analogies in another sense let the mouse bear the mouse. as with
their members; but we live in the meantime. Only that the heap of these analogies for
an exact science can mean so little, as Darwin's heap of inductions, which in a sense
let the mouse bear the mountain, while our analogies in another sense let the mouse
bear the mouse.
According to this, the simplest and most appropriate of the principles which in such
cases ought to be followed by the exact statements would be to deny the genesis of
man as inexplicable for exact research, and to declare the human race non-
existent. We ourselves refrain from delving further into a question that we can not
reach.
The second question, how the three motives and reasons for the existence of God
are rooted in God's existence, is when we know that in God we do not have existence
outside of God, a question subordinate to the more general, as our whole psychic life
rooted in the divine, hence a question of divine psychology.
Above all, one wonders: How can special meditations for the faith in God within
God itself be needed, and how is a doubt possible in the existence of God in God
himself, which in many cases exists in man and hereby in God, if he is man
includes; is anyone even doubting his own existence? Can not that even justify a
doubt about the fact that God has us in him?
There is no doubt that no one doubts his own existence, so God does not doubt
either. but we are not God, because we are in God and do not include just as God
includes us, again whole beings with an I, that of the thought of a higher oneI, and
herewith also none who are capable of doubting it, are themselves the first stage of
such beings, and for all there must be a first stage. So it may take special mediation
for us to come to faith in the Higher Ego, which does not need us to come to faith in
our own self, and which also does not need God to believe but not in the highest
sphere of his consciousness. For my part, I can not teach my eye and ear with its
sensory organs anything that my ego is above them; they are unresponsive to it at
all; they have no meaning. God, on the other hand, can lead us to faith, and in that we
stand above our minds, to faith in Himself, and part of His task is to bring down the
lower Ego. s to lead the faith in his highest self. How he can lead us to that, we do not
have to open up for analogies, but rather the fact of it. Let us look at the motives and
reasons as they are; we have done it, and have thus ourselves an insight into the
context of human and divine psychology done.
Of course, not everything has been done away with. As little as human psychology
can stand by placing the individual faculties and determinations of the soul externally
next to one another; rather, it is also important to show the inner context and the
common conditions of it; if the divine will be able to stand still, man will dare to
venture on such a thing. Thus, the internal connection between the three motives and
reasons for believing in God in the subordination and subordination of human
psychology to the divine will be examined even more deeply, and must be dealt with
in greater depth into human psychology itself. But it can not happen all at once and in
the same place. Here it was not the venture of a divine psychology itself, wherein the
motives and reasons of faith have to appear as internal moments, but only the
foundation of the idea and general possibility of it through these moments. For if
there is the God whom we have found with it, and have found ourselves in God with
it, then we have also found the approach to such a doctrine.
X.
The orthodox and free standpoint.
I want to make an open confession.

However liberal the standpoint I have advocated in this work and represented in
earlier writings, the more orthodox I have encountered elsewhere, if not everywhere,
then on a larger scale, has liked me more than the free one ; and solid faith in the
Word of the Bible, even though Noah's Ark shared with all of today's wildlife and the
standstill of the sun on the day of the fall of Jericho, more than the most rational
decaying critique, but the newly Catholic and free communities always seemed like
herds who are glad to be rid of the caring dog, or even of the shepherd, and thus fall
to the Wolfe, at least only as long as a herd remain, as the grass of the same meadow
is enough to hold them together.
It may seem so; But when I think about how it comes, that is the thing.
The religion at the end of the day, as I imagine it, will produce the most solid belief
that there can be, by the most perfect satisfaction of the three principles. The
universality and unanimity, in which it will be considered the best and the truest,
because it really is, will leave no doubt in the individual's historical and practical side
against it. At the same time, by satisfying reason in all that reason demands and
surpassing every single reason, that it could not be produced by any one in this
universal satisfaction of the three principles, it automatically becomes the
subordination of the reason that sees it to the historically established faith and carry
the authority of its sources. At this firmness of faith, but a wonderful blessing will
hang on this all wavering subordination of the individual reason to the ultimate result
of the control of the divine reason in the highest and last things. Now, when I see that
some already enjoy this blessing so much, and operate in mind and action, as is
possible in the time of unfinishment, relying in part on the need of this blessing itself,
and partly on the truth and goodness To support the foundations of the Christian
religion, it fills me with silent respect and with joy. I see in it from one side the
expression, from the other side an anticipation of the meaning and the cause of a
perfect religion, an anticipation, which, however, can take place only insofar as the
religion is quite valid for that, what they are supposed to be whole in their idea and
their historical sources are considered inviolable. And are there really only points of
relatively minor importance in which they are not.
But if it be, then one can certainly ask, not to prefer to take this just as it really is, at
the same time to acknowledge the goodness of the ground and the defects in the
expansion of religion, to believe in its sources everything that is good and believable
and to emancipate oneself from belief in the rest; so accepting none of the errors of
science found in the Bible, and there are obvious errors of the kind in it; to ask
everywhere what might have been caused by the statutes for action, the clothing of
ideas by place and time, and yet it had to be conditioned by this so as not to emerge
from place and time; instead of hiding, covering up, covering and explaining the
contradictions in the Bible, there are contradictions in it;
I can not overcome myself, even on this very point of view, to say absolutely, it is
preferable, when I look around me, what comes out of such treatment of the sources
of faith commonly, the total destruction of that soul of faith, in the community and
Firmness of faith, and that is the first condition of all its blessing; In addition, see
how little the people have become better, happier, happier, and wiser because they
have begun to soak them with the mother's milk of reason in these matters. Indeed,
religion itself should offer the highest, the most secure, the most solid points of view
to the reason of the individual; Now the task of individual reason is to be measured,
improved, judged, and sifted; that's the thing upside down,
And why do not I put myself on the standpoint of unconditional faith in what has
become historical? But I can not and hundreds and thousands can not; the theoretical
principle also asserts its claims and is intended to assert them. And if the
unconditional faith in the once-existing has its irreplaceable advantages for those who
have it, then in the impossibility of all having it, reason is sacrificed to faith
everywhere, yet another task also arises in the History: The task that the advantages
which these can have almost exclusively and yet not in the most perfect degree, since
they already consider the unfinished religion to be perfect, By the very continuation
of religion to perfection, it may one day become the common good of all and reach its
full height. For that, it must come at last, that reason, instead of demanding
unaffordable sacrifices for the faith, finally obtains full satisfaction, and helps to
sustain the faith on which it shakes now. And, of course, the entry of free points of
view into history, the endeavors of a reason bound up with no solid dogmas, and its
shaking of what must finally happen, require the greatest versatility, the reciprocal
struggle, and the failure of most of them Efforts, so that after exhaustion and defeat of
all wrong ways, the right at last remains solid and secure. What is not to find space in
schools and churches; for the people - I am well advised to explain what I mean by
them - are not there to participate in the attempts to improve the faith, but to enjoy its
advantages as far as they are there; and the progress of faith does not proceed from
schools and churches, but only at last to penetrate, and will never be without a
revolution that questions and meets even more than faith. And how little will it be,
which will then finally be left over from all existing beliefs and opposing aspirations
of reason on free points of view; how little that will last have fallen from this
belief. Rather, most of them will only be all the tighter of what the reason of the
crowd has shaken out of unreasonableness, and this shaking itself will have
contributed
So there is a constant conflict between the demands and the advantages of both
positions. How to lift him at this time? He can not be lifted at all until the completion
of religion has raised him historically; and that he is not yet lifted proves himself that
religion is not yet completed. Until then it will be good that the orthodox and that
there is a free standpoint, and one will have to be modest, the advantages of the same
can not have without the disadvantages of the same, but at last for the completion of
the Have to lead faith.
XI.
Review, overview, foresight.
If one looks back, it will be found that in the establishment, discussion, and
persecution of the historical and practical principle of faith, it has not essentially gone
beyond the present standpoint of Christendom, as far as one can speak of it from a
general point of belief. For though here too some things may be differently arranged,
as otherwise stated, and the arguments of faith itself redefined, yet in the matter
essentially nothing else will be found than what every one who stands on the
standpoint of today's faith, whether orthodox or rationalist, catholic, or protestant, if
he only wishes to wish at all a religious belief, not wanting, as often as possible said,
as adequately conceived as possible, to be justified from as many sides as possible. I
take a lot,
It is different with the third, the theoretical, principle of faith, in whose
establishment, discussion and pursuit the point of view has gone so far beyond the
previous viewpoint that those who have become old in the old viewpoint can not or
will not easily follow suit; and after the masters the schools address themselves. It
went out in the same sense here as already in earlier of my writings and only in this
went beyond itself, that the hints given therein about the position of this principle to
the other two through the actual compilation with it and reciprocal support of all on
each other is executed are.
Does the theoretical seem to be preferred? I have explained often enough: There is
no emphasis on it; the emphasis is on the hold that faith finds together in all
three. But the theoretical has since been most misunderstood, rejected, and
destroyed; From this side, faith needed and needs the most help. After all, that was
what I wanted to show here.
1) Faith can not arise and exist solely on the basis of the historical and practical
principle; but requires the help of the theoretical principle. But this is just as little
sufficient for itself in matters of faith, but only in co-operation and mutual
complementation with those two.
2) It has always been a motive in this connection; In order to act as a cause,
avoiding the two opposite faults of its action as motive, of which I acted, it is to be
posed as shown, ie, it is not to be spent on the totality of what we know of existence
What we know of finite limited circles of existence, to transfer immediately to the
infinite and the eternal to which we have to believe, but in the same direction in
which we already knowingly widening from the narrower and lower circles of
existence, widening and expanding to go beyond it in such a way that we arrive at
ideas of the most general, highest and ultimate circles of existence and modes of
existence, which meet the conclusions and demands of the two other principles in the
most favorable manner. On the one hand, this compensates for the uncertainty of the
passing over of the sphere of experience left over from the knowledge side, and on
the other hand it lays the support for historically and practically based belief, which it
still requires from the knowledge side.
3) In this way the foundations of faith in the highest and last things that are
represented by this Scripture, including those that transcend the present standpoint,
are found to be necessary. For there is no other way of satisfying the implications and
demands of all three principles in connection and attunement than by means of these
points.
4) However, the previous standpoint of faith is only exceeded in so far as it sets
itself at the same time according to its most essential points of view, and unites the
most contradictory views, which have become historically asserted, as well as the
contradiction of the same permits. The most meaningful and mysterious words of the
Bible are clarified with it and thus find a more literal interpretation, than by the literal
believers themselves.
But if that is so, then, according to the general principles of this Scripture itself,
those points which are the condition of a reconciliation of all three principles of faith,
will at last strike historically in the context in which they are, and thus not both rush
as boost.
You will, I am calm and sure.
And what does it mean that they do not do it suddenly and suddenly! Also, the one-
sidedness and contradictions of existing views are historically rooted, and the
aspirations of a human being who breeds at the study table are too weak a lever to
uproot suddenly a world view that has driven away its roots in these one-sidedness
and contradictions for a few millennia, the strongest in the poetry and thinking of the
poets and thinkers themselves driven and rooting with the foothills of the whole
people has rooted. However, they are the approach of a lever, and quiet brooding
precedes the flight and song of a new bird; you do not have to want him immediately.
XII.
Ending.
In God my soul rests;

Because God lives, I live;
For He alone has life;
I can not stand beside it;
He can not let me.
You speak that she perishes;
I do not worry about that;
For ever is salvation,
which now exists in him.
My whole life is
saved in him;
And once he lifts up the
whole soul.
The soul does not see him;
There to show God the Lord,
The Witnesses descend,
Christ forwards as light.
The angel whole crowd
In his pure heights
I see the light shining,
And one carries me even.
He is the soul band;
For the sake of faith, love,
Ward first open
her soul, since she has recognized it rightly.
In God my soul rests,
it holds in itself the advice of
truth, beauty, kindness,
that unity in the mind
and goal is for the act.
What is the small part?
How far away, which I long!
Do not be afraid of the soul;
Contrasts salvation.
God affects them in themselves;
His will is my ought;
I can go against it;
But He leads it out.
In God my soul rests.
He himself does not sin, for
with his child he carries within
himself his sin. In the end,
it leads to duty.
O comfort in the greatest suffering!
God can not tolerate it.
It is only a debt of joy;
I am waiting for my time.
It's the last word;
Far away from the terrestrial harbor,
I can sleep peacefully;
He is my everlasting port.

The Three Motives and Reasons of Faith.-english-Gustav Theodor Fechner

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Droits d'auteur :

The Three Motives and Reasons of Faith.-english-Gustav Theodor Fechner

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The

Three motives and reasons

Thus everything becomes conceivable which we otherwise can not think, so if

I want to make an open confession.

In God my soul rests;

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