# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1860_S110
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

110 On the Foundations of Schenkel's Christian Dogmatics as Set Forth from the Standpoint of Conscience, etc.

is [person], and that the whole man is likewise nothing more than person.
We cannot go along with this way of picturing the matter. But against
Schenkel's proud spiritualistic view, according to which man 'according to
his true, eternal essence is spirit,' or, as he also puts it, man not only has
spirit but is preeminently spirit, we hold up the view of David, who says of
God, Ps. 103:14: 'he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are
dust.'"

In what follows, Schenkel's conscience leaps entirely over into
pantheism. Erlangen critique, 276: "We must also take note of a third
explanation Schenkel gives of spirit (I, 16), in which he says: 'The
(human) spirit stands, as the unchangeable, indestructible, eternal, and
self-subsistent, over against matter as the changeable, destructible,
temporal, and lacking self-subsistence.' And similarly it is stated, I, 20,
that spirit, according to its true essence, is not matter-filling but pure
being; but what is to be understood by this 'pure being' is put beyond
doubt by a further passage (I, 21), where it is said: 'Spirit is immortal,
because it is not space-filling but pure, infinite being. So the human spirit
— for it is always of this that the passages cited speak — is something
unchangeable, indestructible, eternal, a pure being, indeed a pure infinite
being!'" Yet this pantheistic ecstasy, in which Schenkel regards the human
spirit as an emanation of the divine spirit, does not always hold,

for in other passages he declares it to be finite.

Amusing is what Schenkel's conscience fables about the soul. Erlangen
critique, 278: "Without having become clear as to what Schenkel actually
thinks about the human spirit, we must now turn from his explanations
about the spirit to his explanations about the soul. He speaks of it in the
principal passage (I, 21) as follows: 'The less we are able to explain how
spirit, as essentially immaterial, acts upon matter, the nearer lies the
conjecture that between spirit and matter there is, in the middle, a third
thing, which is able to bind the two into the unity of personal life. This
third thing is also, according to experience, really present; it is the soul.'
The presupposition from which this explanation proceeds is that the
human spirit has to act, and does actually act, upon human matter; but
now spirit, as something essentially immaterial, cannot act directly upon
matter, on account of the opposition between the two; hence there must
be, between the two, a third thing, which stands 'in a relation' to both.
'The soul is neither matter nor spirit, but stands in a relation to both: to
matter, insofar as it is space-filling and bound to the organism; to spirit,
insofar as it is not materially substantial.'" But if only like can act upon
like, if spirit therefore cannot act directly upon matter because it is not
also material, then the third thing, through which spirit acts upon matter
— that is, the soul —