1. Knowledge of Nature and Knowledge of the Mind

I would now like to consider the other side, the side that may culminate in the question: What does a thinker, a researcher, himself gain by working towards achieving the objective through weight, measure and number? One gains by the fact that one is increasingly compelled to exclude from scientific investigation, from scientific experiment or scientific observation, everything that could flow from the subject, from the human personality itself, into the formulation of these scientific findings. Everything that comes from the human subject itself must go. The aim is to develop a completely objective picture of the world. But if we take this tendency to its logical conclusion, then, my dear audience, the very thing with which the researcher, as it were, moves away from his research, from his observation, from his experiment, with which he rises to the of the laws of nature, then that which he carries away, which he then keeps within himself, must not have any part, not the slightest part, in what he regards as the true external world, as the truly objective. And if we follow this train of thought to its conclusion, we are forced to say: If, in the strictest scientific sense, everything subjective is to be excluded, then what we ultimately carry in our minds, which has emerged from combinations of natural phenomena, must not be in any way part of this external world. But what then of this external world may be in us, that we carry within us when we research, when we are no longer in living interaction with this objectivity through our mental power, but when we only look back on what has worked subjectively in us while we were devoted to research? The subjective must not be stuck inside, it must be recognized as lying entirely within the human being himself. But in so far as the human being must also belong to objectivity, it must not be stuck in the objectivity of the human being himself either. We must therefore carry something of our research results, insofar as they are our soul-good, in us, which has nothing to do with our own objectivity, although it strives to represent a true image of the outside world. By thinking about nature, no kind of being, as we ascribe it to our own objectivity, may be present in this thinking about nature. Therefore, at the starting point of an epistemological consideration, the sentence must be: “I think, therefore I am not.” Only when we dare to contrast this sentence with the great Cartesian fallacy “I think, therefore I am,” only then do we really place ourselves on the ground of scientific thinking.