# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S25
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

New Literature. 25

pressing-out beyond itself (a will to which is joined the representation of a
goal lying outside itself, which becomes a motive for it); the third, a power
of the restlessness of becoming (a will that seeks to take possession of what
is represented, in contrast to other possible representations); the fourth, a
power of the breaking-through of what is attained; the fifth, a power of
composed surrender to the light of love; the sixth, a power of the
distinguishing and audible bringing-forth of the content of the doxa; and
finally the seventh, a power that unites all the others into a whole.
Correspondingly there are in the soul seven fundamental powers: the faculty
of desire, drive, arbitrary will, the power of imagination, the power that
makes itself known as perception, feeling, and memory, understanding, and
the power of wisdom. And just as the holy Trinity reveals itself, or is
depicted, in the doxa, so the spirit is in the soul. In passing we may also
mention that the author finds again in the body a sevenfold order
corresponding to the seven powers of the soul: embryo, breathing, blood,
heart, nerves, organs of speech, the whole form; and that, according to him,
the destiny of man was that the soul, which is the middle link between spirit
and body, should spiritualize the body — which, however, did not happen,
since through the Fall the spirit instead came, by way of the soul, under the
dominion of the flesh.

The manner of investigation and the result are equally unsatisfying. If the
author wishes to comprehend spirit and soul out of the divine being and its
necessary, eternal revelation, he undertakes to grasp the comprehensible by
means of the incomprehensible. This, however, is both futile and dangerous.
Futile, for let the reader only ask himself whether, by means of the deduction
from the inward activity of God and from the seven powers that make up the
doxa, he has arrived — or, granting that he hears the author out, can hope to
arrive — at a deeper insight and a clearer understanding of what is commonly
called the soul. Dangerous, for one is thereby led into making unfounded
assumptions, such as, in the present case, that the likeness of man to God
consists in this, that his spirit possesses faculties which perform activities
similar to those of the three persons in the Godhead, and his soul faculties
similar to the seven powers in the doxa, and that the spirit stands to the soul
in the same relation, namely that of archetype to image, as the being of God
stands to the doxa. One is further led into a kind of self-deception; for,
since the incomprehensible is, after all, incomprehensible, one takes refuge,
in order to give one's undertaking at least some measure of satisfaction, in
what is comprehensible and already well conceived, but then, so that it may
still fit the incomprehensible to some degree, removes it in one's
representations into a wide, dark distance. Hence arise such expressions as
"power of self-contraction," "the pressing-out beyond itself," "the
restlessness of becoming" — expressions in which one can think something
distinct enough, so long as one holds them up against the words in which the
author speaks of the things from which he borrowed his representations, and
to which, in doing so, he had his eye fixed.