Lecture II

I should like to read you a short passage from Otto Liebmann’s philosophical writings because it is characteristic of a man who throughout his life made great efforts to fathom the nature of human thought and what at the present time can be said about it in the light of the results of modern science. This is what Otto Liebmann said: “Someone might hit on the idea that there is not just albumen and yolk in a hen’s egg, but besides these something of a ghostly nature - an invisible spirit. This spirit materializes itself and when it has completed this materialisation it bursts open the egg-shell with the sharp beak, darts upon the grain and pecks it up.”