58. On Essays by Camillo Schneider on Questions of the Doctrine of the Soul

Anyone who follows the spiritual life of the present day has ample opportunity to see how official science is being driven by its own ideas in the direction of secret science and serious mystical endeavors. Out of prejudice, it does not even want to allow itself to make even a superficial examination of these endeavors and unconsciously and continually provides the building blocks for them with its own methods.

For some time now, essays by Dr. Carl Camillo Schneider on individual questions of the doctrine of the soul have been appearing in various magazines. Only details from two magazines will be cited here. For the purposes of this essay, it is not necessary to go into a detailed discussion of the essays. It is sufficient to say that Schneider feels compelled by his scientific considerations to resort to the assumption of a “four-dimensional space”. However, esoteric science regards three-dimensional space only as something that belongs to the world of the external physical senses, whereas it speaks of multi-dimensional spaces when discussing objects of the soul (astral) and spirit (mental) world. To show the assertions that Schneider comes to, individual passages from his essays will be cited. In one essay on “The Essence of Time” (No. 12 of 1905 of the “Wiener klinischen Rundschau”), we read: “I distinguished... between the sensual world, which can also be described as a momentary world of space, and the spiritual world, which extends over the entire time and is composed of countless worlds of space. This spiritual world is only successively given to us and, furthermore, only in an extremely small section that spans our lives. If, however, succession were abolished and all moments of time were given to us simultaneously, the world would change its appearance completely. Time would freeze into a dimension that would join the three dimensions of space as a fourth. The spiritual world, when time is fully comprehended, is four-dimensional.” — Now, what is asserted here as a result of intellectual reasoning is known to the true mystic through spiritual insight. It is only that, in the face of his more stringent requirements, Schneider's explanations seem somewhat amateurish, more like a fancifully inaccurate picture than like reality. Mysticism is decried as enthusiasm. Its strictness is simply not known.

In an article on “Psychophysical Parallelism” (No. 29 of the “Wiener klinischen Rundschau”, 1905), Schneider comes to the idea that the whole world is based on a soul and that it cannot be said that our body's brain produces something spiritual: “Our body is a reflection of our psychic world. It must be so because we utilize the sensations from the stimulus event that make up this psychic world. The plant is also only a reflection of its psychic world, as are a molecule and an atom, only these worlds are more or less insignificant compared to ours: they are smaller, or almost tiny, sections of the general psyche, of which ours is already a relatively large section. Besides being a reflection, we are now also an active link in this world that is reflected in us. In order to be able to act, our psyche is coupled to one of its contents and operates through its mediation in itself.

How fantastic this remarkable attempt to understand the world in its spiritual character is! This concept of a vague, general psyche, of a coupling, etc., is related to the explanations of the true mystic, as the following description would be related to the scientific description of a plant by a strict botanist: “The plant consists of firm plant parts and juices.” In an article on “Space Perception” (“Zukunft” of August 5, 1905), Schneider explains: “Things in themselves do not exist, only psychics. Every thing is psychic; therefore, one cannot speak of a proper sensation, since our sense organs do not feel anything; the psychic things only enter into a complex of things that we call our consciousness, but which one should better call our psychic organization. Within each individual psychic organization, which appears as a unity in self-consciousness (feeling), things present themselves somewhat differently than in another; the differences can even be very considerable (psychic defects).” What clarity would come to all these attempts to understand something if the ideas of genuine mysticism about the different aspects of the human being were applied! But even such attempts are significant. Schneider is a private lecturer at the University of Vienna.