to the still
overwhelming sensualism which overflowed from the last century into
this, in short--"sensus assoupire."...

12. As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the best-refuted
theories that have been advanced, and in Europe there is now perhaps
no one in the learned world so unscholarly as to attach serious
signification to it, except for convenient everyday use (as an
abbreviation of the means of expression)--thanks chiefly to the Pole
Boscovich: he and the Pole Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest
and most successful opponents of ocular evidence. For while Copernicus
has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth
does NOT stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the
last thing that "stood fast" of the earth--the belief in "substance," in
"matter," in the earth-residuum, and particle-atom: it is the greatest
triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth. One
must, however, go still further, and also declare war, relentless war
to the knife, against the "atomistic requirements" which still lead a
dangerous after-life in places where no one suspects them, like the more
celebrated "metaphysical requirements": one must also above all give
the finishing stroke to that other and more portentous atomism which
Christianity has taught best and longest, the SOUL-ATOMISM. Let it be
permitted to designate by this expression the belief which regards the
soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad,
as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! Between
ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul" thereby,
and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated hypotheses--as
happens frequently to the clumsiness of naturalists, who can hardly
touch on the soul without immediately losing it. But the way is open
for new acceptations and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such
conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul of subjective multiplicity,"
and "soul as social structure of the instincts and passions," want
henceforth to have legitimate rights in science. In that the NEW
psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have
hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of
the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert
and a new distrust--it is possible that the older psychologists had a
merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventuall