Introduction to the Discoveries in General

Introduction to the Discoveries in General

I will search into the Soul and make discoveries, so far as I am able, and I dare it! For I am drawn by her beautiful form, and still more by what lies concealed behind it; and I am drawn, in general, by whatever is concealed, and I bear toward it an inexpressible longing.

But the Soul remains, still, concealed; for despite the millennia during which philosophy has occupied itself with her, one has not yet arrived at the firm insight that the Soul is a being possessed of selfhood, still less that she is a magnificent being, one that far surpasses, in fullness, splendor, and loftiness of organization, everything else in the cosmos; and there reigns, concerning the Soul, a complete uncertainty. The natural consequence of this is the total disintegration of belief afflicting mankind in the present age. Such a sorry state of affairs in the domain of the science of the soul naturally serves all the better those to whom the artful edifice of the body lies nearer the heart than the Soul does, and who boldly set up the brain in the place of Spirit, and the material tissue of the body as the source of the Soul. However degrading this may be for man, both in his own eyes and in his standing within the cosmos, one may nonetheless not bear them ill will for it, for science and her teaching are free, and must remain forever free; and so long as philosophy herself has not raised the Soul above an uncertain Nothing, every opinion about her, even the crudest, stands free. All the more, then, is it the duty of philosophy to take up the Soul anew, and to seek to investigate her, with every exertion of spirit, as searchingly as possible, setting aside all vanities, and applying only whatever leads to a real result.

And it seems to me that philosophy, so long as she has not fathomed the essence of the Soul, has staked her honor before the world; since it is she who received the highest dignities of spirit in the world of men, and who therefore owes to mankind the highest exertions of spirit, and the satisfaction of its most precious interests. To provide for the mere freedom of human development, as before, is no longer philosophy's affair, now that the State, legislation, and the free press have themselves taken this in hand; but to fathom the essence of the human spirit, for whose sake all the freedom the State has won is meant to exist, this the most excellent king cannot accomplish, nor can the joint parliamentary power of the people within the State, nor the ever-courageous cleverness of the press; but philosophy can accomplish it, to whose sphere of action it falls, and she will compel it with her acuteness and her depths, if only she is willing to compel it in full earnest.

But how must one investigate the Soul, so that she may be discovered? For what is properly at issue, I believe, is her disclosure or discovery, and not her existence, since she has already set as witnesses before the common confluence of the matter of the terrestrial globe such great works of culture, of science, of art, of religion, of the State, of freely moral historical deeds, commanding reverence, and has brought these into being; although, on the other hand, a thorough science of the soul must still inquire after her existence as well, and thereafter after her essence.

Let us see, then, first, how one must not proceed in the investigation of the Soul, if one wishes to arrive at a decided result. One cannot arrive at a result if one wished to make use solely of pure speculation; for the pure movement of reason, without regard for the very thing to be considered (that is, with the setting-aside of the receptivity of the cognitive faculty, which necessarily attaches itself to the object of cognition), remains forever and always only a one-sided, subjective movement of spirit, which, however exalted the philosophizing Subject may feel in the process, however artful, consistent, and subtle the speculation may proceed in its development, nonetheless only ever concerns itself with what it pleased a meditation, proceeding freely on its own, that is, unconcerned with the real psychical Object, to conceive of it; and precisely the freely chosen basis of the system, and its consequences, permitted one to accept as pertaining to the Soul, but not what the psychical Object itself commanded to be said about itself, and left to the subjectivity of spirit for sharper, more penetrating, and more exhaustive investigation.

For this reason, too, all previous conceptions of the Soul arrived at through speculation have remained just as fickle and arbitrary as they are insufficient, indeed, altogether void, and wholly at odds with natural human feeling. But the negation of the Soul thereby expressed does not prove that the Soul herself does not exist, but only that free speculation alone is not capable of grasping her. For the Soul is a fullness in herself; she must therefore be grasped together with the receptivity of spirit, which is fitted for the fullness of its object. Absolutely speaking, however, free speculation, even were it to arrive at reliable results, would never be capable of creating an adequate science of the soul; for speculation is, by its nature, universal and general, whereas the human Soul is everywhere organized in the finest and most delicate manner, that is, in the most particular manner, so that the subtlest precision of inquiry, and the most supple and willing pliancy of investigation, are required merely to grasp her in her spiritual nature and organization at all. Through the wide nets of general speculation, the Soul's fine, immediate essence slips everywhere through. One must fit the organs that would capture her precisely to her measure, or she remains, as before, unrecognized in her true essence. Furthermore, there lies also in the very manner in which speculation proceeds in the development of its content (in that, lacking any support or regulation on the part of the object itself, it must support itself chiefly through the correctness of its developmental form, and must therefore give the weight to construction rather than to content) no invitation for natural, vigorous human conviction; for such conviction seeks only the kernel of cognition, and not its husks, still less husks set above the kernel in worth; and a substantial, kernel-like content overcomes conviction immediately, requiring for this no artificial supports whatsoever. Speculation does, however, recommend itself, and this is its indisputable right within the science of the soul, for the highest synthesis, into a total idea, of the real cognitive content already found in its individual parts, and for all the highest surveys and regulations bound up with this. She must therefore enter in after real investigation, and not before it; then she will not need the deadening excess of construction, will preserve, in the creation of thoroughgoing, all-encompassing, and unifying ideas, the freedom and lofty sense of the movement of reason, and will exert, through the full marrow and substance of her ideas, a far greater influence upon mankind than she does today.

Next to this, however, applied speculation, that is, speculation attaching itself to the object of cognition, stands, as the steadily invigorating element of real investigation, an indispensable lever for all the deeper questions of the Soul; and it seems to me that, on the most decisive core questions concerning the Soul, which absolutely must be resolved, it is a very honorable thing for philosophical speculation to work together with real investigation, as, for instance, on the question of where the boundary lies between brain and Soul and their respective activities, and on very many others besides. That, however, a merely superficial empiricism is, in the end, not suited to the investigation of the Soul, since the most essential problem lies precisely beyond its reach, is too self-evident for us to need to speak of it at length. Let us turn, therefore, to the true manner of investigation.

First: with which faculty of thought or cognition must the Soul be grasped? To this the answer is: with the human faculty of thought and cognition taken as a whole. The human faculty of cognition contains, by nature, intuition and thought together; sense, understanding, and reason belong together in a single, inseparable organism; and the division, now grown customary, between the thinking of reason and sense amounts to nothing less than a presumptuous assault upon the very cognitive nature of man. And this assault upon nature punishes itself; for pure speculation, pursued this way, has not led to any real result, while the empiricism of natural science, for its part, persists nonetheless in a merely external mode of operation, for all the richness of its cognitive content, and fails to reach the depths of being, remaining without any thoroughgoing depth or unification of its content. All the powers of cognition condition one another reciprocally. The understanding is rooted in sensory intuition, reason in the understanding; and, conversely, reason itself encloses and illuminates both the understanding and sensory intuition, and is, from above downward, their root, just as, conversely, from below upward, sense and understanding give it life and force. It is within this total organism of the cognitive-thinking apparatus that the investigation of the Soul must move; only so does it gain force sufficiently penetrating, sufficiently comprehensive, and sufficiently supple, pliant, and elastic; only so does it yield a fully rounded result of its labor of thought; only so does it achieve a fully sustained impression upon the power of conviction, in respect of both the particular and the whole of consciousness at once. Through the vigorous exercise of intuition, the investigation of the soul becomes, in and of itself, forceful in content, fresh, and alive; through the exertion of the power of understanding, deeply incisive, fine, and sharp in its cognitive material; through the activity of reason, wholly transparent, deeply exhaustive, leading toward being, and all-encompassing, drawing from the very source of life. But through all these powers together, the idea of cognition unfolds, surging in force, in scope, in sharp emergence, in fullness, in depth, and in the exhaustive unification of its content. Should one meet this with the tired proposition that things-in-themselves are unknowable, I answer: just as the Soul, at every instant, steps forth out of her hidden inner being into outward life, so too can one, by way of her life thus stepped forth, arrive back again, by that same path, into her essence. Indeed, one sees, in considering the life of the Soul, immediately thereby into her essence; for, I must anticipate this broadly, the Soul (Spirit) is, in herself, a being of the utmost mobility, even in her very being; and her essence, in that it is, already appears immediately in movement, and has its being through movement; wherefore the consideration of the movement that has stepped forth, which is life, leads immediately into being itself. Finally, it becomes clear that, since the Soul herself is the very thing to be investigated, and is also, in turn, that very thing which grasps and investigates, Object and the power of investigation stand in complete correspondence to one another; hence the mutual, self-exhausting interpenetration of the Soul with herself must appear entirely possible and natural; and no one, however systematically paralyzed and prejudiced he may be by that unnatural proposition, will wish to deny that reason is a very deep power, and understanding a very sharply incisive one, a matter it is not the place here to pursue further.

Secondly, however: how must one investigate the Object itself, according to its own command, as against that of thought? For the Object of the psyche, however extremely mobile it is, is a crystalline content of being, persisting in and through movement, and has its own quite fixed formation within itself, and wholly immovable norms and laws of its own appearance, and cannot be molded this way or that; rather, it wills, and must, insert itself into cognition without any violation of its real nature.

To this question, then, how the Object, for its part, demands to be investigated, the answer is: exactly as it gives itself, and not otherwise; and were one to seize it otherwise, one would weaken and distort the Object, and thereby cognition itself. But as what, then, does the psychical Object present itself to the researcher's consideration? In the first place, the psychical appearance forms a massive wealth of splendid phenomena, especially in a multitude of distinct and manifold groups en gros, and there offers itself to research the fullest opportunity to grasp and sketch the Soul in her living splendor, just as one describes every other living beauty. Out of every relation of human life the Soul shoots forth; out of the living machinery of the State she herself rises up, magnificently alive; and through every great sphere of culture her immense life unfolds and offers itself to research. In each single individual, too, when one considers his life and development, and, differently again in man and in woman, one has splendid, self-moving portraits of the living Soul; and in great men especially one sees her rise, bolder still, upon her course, like star and comet. One is a fool who believes the Soul shows herself too little to be capable of investigation; rather, she shows herself too much and too often, for she shows herself continually, and it is the very universality of her immaterial light that renders her effects upon us less perceptible, especially since she does not act as material stimulus does. Yet through all her appearing there shines the manifoldness of her essence and her gathered force, and one sees, in this, the clarity of her lawful being, and, still more, the concentrated stream of being within herself, which generates out of itself all this splendor and force of life, and all this light of law. And from wherever one begins, the path opens to survey her most immediate essence itself; be it directly in the crystallization of her substantial core; be it directly in the living movement of that same substantial core; be it in the fullness, height, and refinement of her organization; be it in the inexhaustible wealth of her manifested force and development.

One need only look upon her, the Divine one, and one finds, from every side, only the immediate proof of her being, and, in contrast to matter, such a comportment of being in its own unfolding, and such a shaping in the very crystallization of being itself, that one wholly forgets to think of matter at all in connection with the Soul; although, on the other hand, real investigation can easily demonstrate where a natural transition from the psychical to living connections with matter lies. It is the case, however, viewed within the cosmos, that matter is set as the fixed foundation of the All, and bears within its imponderables the force that sustains its life-movement against congealing into rigidity; while, on the other hand, spirit is set within the cosmos as the supremely creative, ideally-moving principle of the All, and nothing is more moving and more all-encompassing in movement than spirit. And even if one considers but this one power in the Soul, how she strives, consciously active, to inwardly appropriate the whole universe, so far as ever she is able to reach it; and how she bears, remembering, the gigantic images of the universe in its totality and in the countlessness of its multiplicity, all gathered together within her own minute point of being, then one must admire her, one must acknowledge her greatness, one must at last restore to her force and rank within the cosmos, and one must, at last, deem her worthy of a grander, deeper, sharper, and more thorough investigation.

This is what I had to say, in sum, by way of introduction to my investigations, for I am not fond of long preambles, but of the deed of research itself. But if I have given my investigations the name ‘Discoveries,’ this means that I intend to strive to investigate in an original way, and to open new points of view concerning the Soul, so far as lies within my resolute strength and inborn enthusiasm for the Soul. Should the name nonetheless appear boastful, I gladly confess that to reach for the treasures of the Soul, which lie everywhere in plain view, is no great glory, although to see this fullness within the Soul seems to have been granted to very few. I shall present my discoveries under the following heads: 1) The Soul in dream (the life of the dream). 2) The Soul in the somnambulistic state (the essence of magnetic clairvoyance, real investigations into the wealth of this phenomenal realm). 3) The Soul grasped in fully formed individuality (the soul of Frederick the Great, its construction, real investigations thereupon). 4) The formation of the human soul according to man and woman (the differing structure and mode of manifestation proper to the male and to the female soul). 5) Immediate views of the organization of life within the Soul (the essence of the life-organism, the physiology of the Soul). 6) The rich structure of the Soul in her various faculties or powers (the essence of these faculties and their thoroughgoing organic oneness). 7) The being of the Soul in its universal nature and form (the construction of the Soul's being according to every decisive point of view). 8) The continuance of the Soul in particular. It becomes clear that my undertaking is to introduce a thoroughgoing real science into the domain of the Soul. If the Soul, so treated in the most real manner from within and from without, presents herself as a true, essential, and exceedingly rich, splendid, and wondrous being, then belief in her will of itself return, doubt will recede, and for this deepest wound of mankind a remedy will have been found. Come, then, whoever desires that a strong science of the soul may arise; that the soul-life within man may again become vigorous and sound; that all the ideal factors of humanity may again take effective hold; and that force may come into the ennobling of the spirit: let him step forward for the spirit, build up a vigorous investigation of the soul, and set down greater works for the Soul than my own beginnings.