20 IRRITABILITY 



dinary degree to explain all happenings in the world anthropo- 

 morphously. All happenings in surrounding nature are given 

 the same origin as the activities of man himself. To man, on 

 this plane of phantastic religious speculation, all events in nature 

 appear as acts of the will of invisible powers, which, having 

 originally proceeded from the souls of dead human beings, think, 

 feel and act exactly as he does. This anthropomorphic conception 

 of the occurrences in the surrounding world is one of the many 

 conclusions which ensue from the supposition of an invisible 

 soul, which can be separated from the body. It was this con- 

 ception which gave the impetus for the transition of human 

 thought from the era of the naively practical to the era of the 

 theoretical spirit in that far removed age. In this anthropo- 

 morphic transference of personal subjective impulses of will to 

 the objectively observed events of the surrounding world, lies 

 the origin of causal conception, which since then has been gen- 

 erally used as the explanation of the happenings in the world. 

 One cannot assert that the formation of the conception of cause is 

 purely a product of experience, but rather a result of naive specu- 

 lation. Even if a later evolution of human thought shows a con- 

 tinued endeavor to dismantle the conception of cause of its primi- 

 tive trappings and to modernize, as it were, its outer appearance, 

 we still find today many inner components clinging to it, which 

 do not agree with the strict demands of critical scientific exact- 

 ness, demands which must particularly be made concerning a 

 conception which has been given such fundamental importance 

 in theoretical knowledge. 



I wish to observe here, however, that the conception of cause, 

 even though more or less unconsciously so, is still the remains of 

 a part of the old anthropomorphic mysticism carried over into 

 our own times. This shows itself especially in the conception 

 of force, which is nothing more than a form of the conception 

 of cause. Force is the cause of movement. One has here in 

 anthropomorphic manner transferred the action of the will of 

 man, which produces movement of the muscles, into lifeless 

 nature. The force of the sun attracts the earth, that of the mag- 

 net attracts iron, etc. In short, one has introduced a mysterious 



