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PHYSIOLOGY AND PATHOLOGY. 235
The three assumptions which are criticised by Kant in his
Transcendental Dialectic under the names of Ideas of
Reason, and have in consequence since been set aside in
theoretical philosophy, had always stood in the way of a
deeper insight into Nature, until that great thinker brought
about a complete transformation in philosophy. That sup
posed Idea of Eeason, the soul : that metaphysical being, in
whose absolute singleness knowing and willing were knit
and blended together to eternal, inseparable unity, was an
impediment of this sort for the subject-matter of this
chapter. As long as it lasted, no philosophical Physiology
was possible : the less so, as its correlate, real, purely pas
sive Matter, had necessarily also to be assumed together
with it, as the substance of the body. 1
It was this Idea
of Reason, the soul, therefore, that caused the celebrated
chemist and physiologist, George Ernest Stahl, at the
beginning of the last century to miss the discovery of
the truth he so nearly approached and would have quite
reached, had he been able to put that which is alone meta
physical, the bare will as yet without intellect in the place
of the anima rationalis. Under the influence of this Idea
of Reason however, he could not teach anything but that
it is this simple, rational soul which builds itself a body, all
whose inner organic functions it directs and performs, yet
has no knowledge or consciousness of all this, although
knowledge is the fundamental destination and, as it were,
the substance, of its being. There was something absurd in
this doctrine which made it utterly untenable. It was super
seded by Haller s Irritability and Sensibility, which, to be
sure, are taken in a purely empircial sense, but, to make
up for this, are also two qualitates occultce, at which all ex
planation ceases. The movement of the heart and of the
intestines was now attributed to
Irritability. But the
anima rationalis still remained in undiminished honour
1 As a being existing by itself, a tiling in itself. [Add. to 3rd ed.]