Chapter XI

With such a view a materialistic observer of nature can declare himself in perfect agreement unless he considers all talk about the spirit as a fantastic playing with words which signifies nothing real whatever. He then sees in his system of ideas directed toward the things of sense the sole justifiable basis for knowledge, and in the mystical relation ship of man to the spirit something purely personal, to which one is either inclined or not inclined according to one's temperament, but of which one can never speak in the same way as one speaks of the content of a “positive knowledge.” Man's relation to the spiritual must be relegated entirely, he thinks, to sphere of “subjective feeling.”