Lecture X

Take the end of the 1850's. Darwin's Origin of the Species,[^4] Karl Marx's The Principles of Political Economy,[^5] as well as Psycho-Physics by Gustav Theodor Fechner,[^6] a work in which the attempt is made to discover the psychic sphere by means of outward experiments, were published then. In the same year, the captivating discovery of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff[^7] and Bunsen[^8] is introduced; it demonstrates, as it were, that wherever one looks in the universe the same materiality is discovered. It is as if everything were being done in the middle of the nineteenth century to beguile human beings into believing that thinking must remain subjective and shadow-like, that it must not interfere in the world outside so that they could not possibly imagine that there might be reason, nous, in the cosmos, something that lives in the cosmos itself.