Chapter 1

A concept of soul must be sought free from everything
that operations of the mind may have added when composing it

57. One of the principal causes rendering philosophical questions difficult and almost inextricable is the fact that, in trying to understand something about an object, we are obliged to receive it as it has been conceived by our own mind (if it had not been conceived, we could not have considered it at all). We receive it in the greatest good faith, not doubting that we possess it just as it is in nature. This happens either because we do not reflect that it is the mind, not nature, which gives it to us, or because we are already under the preconceived opinion that the mind is as faithful in giving it to us as nature would be if she presented it to us with her own hands.

58. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the mind, in placing things before our thought, does not offer them just as they are outside the mind, but as the mind itself has made them through the subjective laws of its own being and activity. At one and the same time, the mind has, as its first object, truth which never deceives, and its own proper nature which imposes certain laws. These laws certainly do not deprive the mind of its possession of truth, but they act as a brake holding it back from total sincerity in pursuing the truth which it attains only when, with the help of the objective light shining in it, it discerns within its thoughts its own work and what remains when its own work has been removed.

59. One of the most careful philosophical investigations, which calls for the greatest watchfulness and sharpness, must consist in first separating from every object about which we want to philosophise, all that pertains to our own mental activity and that which pertains to the naked object itself as it comes forth free from all the enfolding veils in which the mind itself has enmeshed it. All philosophers must begin willy-nilly from the intellectual state in which they find themselves;(33) and they have to receive the object, as we said, just as it is in the mind when they begin to philosophise.

60. This, of course, applies to ourselves as well, as we start to expound the teaching about the human soul. We cannot but begin from the concept we possess of the soul. First, therefore, we have to see if the soul, as we conceive it, is truly the soul as it is in itself without any conception of our own, without anything that our mind may have added when conceiving it.

Notes

(33) NE, vol. 3, 1466-1467.