As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the best-refuted theories that have been advanced, and in Europe there is now perhaps no one in the learned world so unscholarly as to attach serious signification to it, except for convenient everyday use (as an abbreviation of the means of expression)—thanks chiefly to the Pole Boscovich: he and the Pole Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and most successful opponents of ocular evidence. For while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does NOT stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing that "stood fast" of the earth—the belief in "substance," in "matter," in the earth-residuum, and particle-atom: it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth.
Nietzsche cites Copernicus and Boscovich as theoreticians who convinced humanity to contradict their own senses. We experience the world as non-moving, and yet Copernicus tells us the earth is perpetually in motion. We experience things around us as unities, and Boscovich convinces us that everything is made of particle atoms. Without sufficient evidence, how are we to accept these ideas?
One must, however, go still further, and also declare war, relentless war to the knife, against the "atomistic requirements" which still lead a dangerous after-life in places where no one suspects them, like the more celebrated "metaphysical requirements": one must also above all give the finishing stroke to that other and more portentous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the SOUL-ATOMISM. Let it be permitted to designate by this expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science!
The idea of atomism, which contradicts our senses and experience, leads to dangerous convictions. Christianity atomizes the soul and tells us our souls are “indestructible, eternal, indivisible." And yet, they have no evidence to back up their claim; no sensual data to convince us. It should be made explicit that this is not science.
Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul" thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated hypotheses—as happens frequently to the clumsiness of naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new acceptations and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul of subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the instincts and passions," want henceforth to have legitimate rights in science.
We don't need to renounce the idea of the soul entirely. We can refine it based on grounded ideas: mortality, subjectivity, instincts, passions.
In that the NEW psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust—it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT—and, who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.
This re-conception of the soul will produce new psychologists who are no longer disillusioned with the Christian soul. The soul will be based instead on the human psyche. These new psychologists are upon a new horizon of invention and discovery.
Nietzsche doesn't explicitly point to who these new psychologists could be, but during this writing, Freud and Jung were already making discoveries in then ew field of psychoanalysis.
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