Lecture V

One day, however, Capesius came across some literature about the philosophy of Haeckel. Up to then he had not paid much attention to these ideas, but now he studied various articles on Haeckel's atomistic view of the world. This was the reason for his tortured state of mind; a peculiar mood descended on him when he met this atomistic philosophy at a relatively late period in his life. His reason told him: We really cannot get behind natural phenomena properly unless our explanations involve atoms by way of a mechanistic conception of the universe. In other words, Capesius came more and more to recognize what is, in a sense, the one-sided correctness of atomism and a mechanistic view of nature. He was not one to fight fanatically against a new idea, for he had confidence in his own intelligence, which seemed to find these ideas necessary to explain the natural phenomena around him. Yet it troubled him. He said to himself, “How desolate, how unsatisfying for the human soul this conception of nature is. How poorly it supports any ideas one would like to acquire about spirit and spiritual beings or about the human soul!”