Preparation for the Instructions of the Second and Third Main Levels

body could neither feel nor sense nor think. However, as soon as these heterogeneous particles come into harmonious connection by chance or intent, such that they constitute a body regular and organized according to laws, wherein each particle contributes carefully to the maintenance of the whole according to the measure of its proportion, in that moment feeling, sensing, and, depending on the nature of this organization, also thinking take their beginning in matter, and continue undisturbed as long as these particles remain in harmony and the chain of organization is not interrupted.

2tens Secondly, they have the confirmation of this thesis from an even deeper source, in that they first reverse the proposition and prove the inadequacy to feel, sense, and think in the simplicibus simple substances cum vehementia et impetu with vehemence and force as follows: If that which feels, senses, and thinks must absolutely be a simplex, then furthermore, [since] the simplex can neither be visible nor divisible, then in the sequence of its efficacy, neither change nor communication nor increase in effective powers can take place.

Furthermore, if this is so, then this power must also act from matter independently, always the same or of one kind, and consequently a newborn child would have to feel, sense, and think just like an adult man, and the latter like an old man, and the old man no differently than a newborn child. And thus, a defect that had struck the bodily machine could have no influence on the power to feel, sense, and think. Since, however, it is confirmed sufficiently by experiences drawn from physiology and psychology how much this acting power depends on the state and condition of the organized matter, and how much the slightest injury to those nobler parts that preside over these functions alters the supposed abstract but positive power to feel, sense, and think—and insofar as it is not disturbed or cannot be disturbed, the same is completely destroyed and abolished—the deplorable examples of madness, frenzy, fistulas in inflammatory diseases, stroke, fainting, gluttony, drunkenness, injury to the nerves, injury to the organs that constitute our external senses, etc., confirm [this]; so there remains no doubt that the power to feel, sense, and think must be determined merely by the harmony of the material particles, by their proper assembly or

or organization. And finally, let there be

3tens Thirdly, [the argument that] since, in the nature of things, that which has no parts is a mere chimera and a non-entity, of which a pure concept could never be formed. But even if one posits that such a being could exist, it must act either by itself alone or through the body of that which we call feeling, sensing, and thinking. By itself alone, however, it cannot act, because we experience that the frailty of the organized body abolishes its actions and efficacy.

Through the body, however, it can act even less, because with a thing that is supposed to have no parts, we cannot posit any contactum contact or touching, and without contact, no effect can take place in the nature of things.

It can easily be inferred from these brought-forward antitheses how much the freedom in thinking and acting, how much the concepts of reward and punishment for our actions—in short! how much the true and real [state] of humans, that which determines and points to their happiness and their blessedness in the fields of virtue, of pure joy, and of eternal transfiguration—must be altered.

In order to properly fix the refutation of the above-mentioned not unimportant objections against the existence of spiritual beings—as the named materialists cannot imagine and think them to be—we must take the demonstration ab obliquo from an oblique angle and indirecte indirectly, and first of all make mention of such beings existing and undeniable in the nature of things, which

a, indeed exist in and of themselves, yet nevertheless do not fall into the feeling of our external senses without the application of scientific art, and then
b, the existence of those things whose being is brought into the feeling of our external senses by no scientific art, and whose existence can therefore not be denied.

We must now [classify] the beings of both kinds according to
1, into bound and not free, and