Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German EditionWeininger, Otto
Philosophy
Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition
Weininger, Otto
Character; Sex; Sex (Psychology); Sexual ethics
Judaism in science, in the widest interpretation of it, is the endeavour
to remove all transcendentalism. The Aryan feels that the effort to
grasp everything, and to refer everything to some system of deductions,
really robs things of their true meaning; for him, what cannot be
discovered is what gives the world its significance. The Jew has no fear
of these hidden and secret elements, for he has no consciousness of
their presence. He tries to take a view of the world as flat and
commonplace as possible, and to refuse to see all the secret and
spiritual meanings of things. His view is non-philosophical rather than
anti-philosophical.
Because fear of God in the Jew has no relation with real religion, the
Jew is of all persons the least perturbed by mechanical, materialistic
theories of the world; he is readily beguiled by Darwinism and the
ridiculous notion that men are derived from monkeys; and now he is
disposed to accept the view that the soul of man is an evolution that
has taken place within the human race; formerly, he was a mad devotee of
Buchner, now he is ready to follow Ostwald.
It is due to a real disposition that the Jews should be so prominent in
the study of chemistry; they cling naturally to matter, and expect to
find the solution of everything in its properties. And yet one who was
the greatest German investigator of all times, Kepler himself, wrote the
following hexameter on chemistry:
“O curas Chymicorum! O quantum in pulvere inane!”
The present turn of medical science is largely due to the influence of
the Jews, who in such numbers have embraced the medical profession. From
the earliest times, until the dominance of the Jews, medicine was
closely allied with religion. But now they would make it a matter of
drugs, a mere administration of chemicals. But it can never be that the
organic will be explained by the inorganic. Fechner and Preyer were
right when they said that death came from life, not life from death. We
see this taking place daily in individuals (in human beings, for
instance, old age prepares for death by a calcification of the tissues).
And as yet no one has seen the organic arise from the inorganic. From
the time of Schwammerdam to that of Pasteur it has become more and more
certain that living things never arise from what is not alive. Surely
this ontogenetic observation should be applied to phylogeny, and we
should be equally certain that, in the past, the dead arose from the
living. The chemical interpretation of organisms sets these on a level
with their own dead ashes. We should return from this Judaistic science
to the nobler conceptions of Copernicus and Galileo, Kepler and Euler,
Newton and Linnæus, Lamarck and Faraday, Sprengel and Cuvier. The
freethinkers of to-day, soulless and not believing in the soul, are
incapable of filling the places of these great men and of reverently
realising the presence of intrinsic secrets in nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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