Chapter XVI (part 12)

He clearly affirms: I confess that I am very much inclined to assert the existence of immaterial natures in the world, and to put my soul itself into that class of beings. These immaterial beings . . . are immediately united with each other, they might form, perhaps, a great whole which might be called the immaterial world. Every man is a being of two worlds: of the incorporeal world and of the material world . . . and it will be proved I don't know where or when, that the human soul also in this life forms an indissoluble communion with all immaterial natures of the spirit-world, that, alternately, it acts upon and receives impressions from that world of which p. 195 nevertheless it is not conscious while it is still man and as long as everything is in proper condition . . . We should, therefore, have to regard the human soul as being conjoined in its present life with two worlds at the same time, of which it clearly perceives only the material world, in so far as it is conjoined with a body, and thus forms a personal unit. . . . It is therefore, indeed, one subject, which is thus at the same time a member of the visible and of the invisible world, but not one and the same person; for on account of their different quality, the conceptions of the one world are not ideas associated with those of the other world; thus, what I think as a spirit, is not remembered by me as a man, and, conversely, my state as a man does not at all enter into the conception of myself as a spirit. Birth, life, death are the states of soul only . . . Consequently, our body only is perishable, the essence of us is not perishable, and must have been existent during that time when our body had no existence. The life of the man is dual. It consists of two lives—one animal and one spiritual. The first life is the life of man, and man needs a body to live this life. The second life is the life of spirit ; his soul lives in that life separately from the body, and must live on in it after the separation from the body. In an essay on Kant in The Northern Messenger (1888, Russian), A. L. Volinsky says that both in Vorlesungen , and also in Dreams of a Ghost-seer , Kant denied the possibility of one thing only—the possibility of the physical receptivity of spiritual phenomena. Thus Kant admitted not only the possibility of the existence of a spiritual conscious world, but also the possibility of communion with it. Hegel built all his philosophy upon the possibility of a direct knowledge of truth, upon spiritual vision. Approaching the question of two worlds from the psychological standpoint, from the standpoint of the theory of knowledge, let us firmly establish the principle that before we can hope to comprehend anything in the region of noumena , we must define everything that it is possible to define of the world of many dimensions by a purely intellectual method, by a process of reasoning. It is highly probable that by this method we cannot define very much. Perhaps our definitions will be too crude, will not quite correspond to the fine differentiation of relations in the noumenal world: all this is possible and must be taken into consideration. Nevertheless we shall define what we can, and at the outset make as clear as possible what the noumenal world cannot be ; then what it can be— p. 196 show what relations are impossible in it, and what are possible. This is necessary in order that we, coming in contact with the real world, may discriminate between it and the phenomenal world, and what is more important, that we may not mistake simple reflections of the phenomenal world for the noumenal.