Date: Sat, 2 Mar 1996 12:17:15 -0400
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: ENGELS ON EMPIRICISM & SUPERSTITION


At 11:06 PM 3/1/96, Ralph Dumain wrote [quoting Engels]:

>Here it becomes palpably evident which is the surest path from
>natural science to mysticism.  It is not the extravagant
>theorizing of the philosophy of nature, but the shallowest
>empiricism that spurns all theory and distrusts all thought.

This reminds me of Adorno's observation, in his "Theses on Occultism," that
the mystics of his day professed to hate science, but nonetheless were
obsessed with weighing the soul. I think he was referring to the
"experiments" popular in the 1940s and 1950s among proto-New Agers, which
placed a dying person on a scale and hoped to see a few grams of weight
disappear when the soul left its former corporeal sublet.

Doug

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Doug Henwood
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