When the Outer Is Mistaken for the Inner

Franz Hartmann · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages from Franz Hartmann's Occult Science in Medicine (1893), page 92, opening with a line of Shakespeare from The Merchant of Venice and continuing with a short bulleted list.

The Shakespeare line sets the terms: it is a good divine that follows his own instructions — to which Hartmann replies that such characters are now very rare, because the world lives only in dreams. The list which follows names six kinds of person who have kept the title and lost the substance: divines knowing nothing of any divinity, medical practitioners knowing nothing about medicine, anthropologists knowing nothing about the nature of man, lawyers knowing nothing of justice, humanitarians beggaring their employees, and Christians to whom Christ is unknown. The generalisation drawn is the sentence the file is named for — that in every sphere of life the external is mistaken for the internal and the illusion for the reality, while the reality remains unrealised and therefore unknown. The closing paragraph applies this to science in particular: a superficial science can only concern itself with superficial causes and effects, however deeply it goes into the details of those superficialities, and since the mysterious powers in nature and the intelligent forces in man are almost entirely unknown, there is no way of penetrating the deeper secrets of nature except by the development of the higher nature of man.

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