Second Lecture

It was precisely the age of agnosticism — I would say the culmination of agnosticism — that pointed out that perception itself, that is, what is experienced in complete passivity, should be placed before the soul in all its purity. I remember how a work published in 1884 by the person who later wrote the extensive book Das Ganze der Philosophie und ihr Ende (The Whole of Philosophy and Its End) made a powerful impression on me; it was the work Gehirn und Bewusstsein (Brain and Consciousness) by Richard Wähle. At the time, I saw the particular merit of this text in the fact that Richard Wahle sharply characterized what human beings actually perceive, what remains when one separates from the content of the soul everything that has been brought into it through the activity of thinking. It was precisely through this work that one could grapple with an important issue, namely that in ordinary human soul experience, there is by no means a strict separation between what is perceived and what is already mixed with thinking.