Lecture III

But still more interesting is his book published after his death by his friend Rappaport, in which all kinds of most interesting things appear. These are mostly aphorisms, and the whole bears the title Über die letzten Dinge ( About ultimate questions), the greater part of it being aphorisms. One of these aphorisms is approximately to this effect—Weininger maintains that the human soul during life before birth might have developed a certain dread of itself and because of this have longed to forget this life and bury itself in oblivion—which means incarnating. Thus Weininger expressly talks of pre-earthly life and of incarnating, only he speaks in a gloomy, pessimistic way of how the soul seeks to bemuse itself about its life before birth, and seeks this oblivion through incarnation in a physical human body. Many such direct impressions are received by present-day can concerning the path of the soul and they will become ever more numerous.