63. From the posthumous papers of Paul Asmus

At this point, we would like to give the floor to one of the best German thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1872, at the age of only thirty, he was snatched from a promising life. Two of his writings have been printed: “The Ego and the Thing in Itself” and “The Indo-European Religions”. These are treasures of German intellectual life. If we can see the development of this intellectual life in its true light since 1870, it is only too understandable that Paul Asmus, who died so young, could find only a few readers. This period was devoted to the development of knowledge directed towards the sensual and factual. People wanted to process the results of experiments, of the microscope and the telescope, etc., as the basis of their world view. And Paul Asmus was one of those who wanted to explore the secrets of existence in the ethereal heights of pure thought. He is a true and noble disciple of the great philosophical idealists of the first half of the nineteenth century. Today, only a few are trained in the field of pure thought to ascend to these luminous heights. Few know the significance of these regions themselves and know that it is here, and not where mere sensory observation and experimentation is carried out, that the riddles of life are revealed. — In this magazine, which serves a worldview that is supposed to lead to the spirit, some of the estate of the prematurely deceased is certainly in place. The sister of the thinker, Martha Asmus, who has herself emerged in recent years with three small volumes of stories, has provided me with her brother's manuscript “ Die Willkür”. From this, what can be published is that which can give an idea of the way in which Paul Asmus approached one of the most important human problems.