Selections from Elements of a Philosophy of Technology

In the early 1860s, at a meeting of the Berlin Philosophical Society during which the age of the human race was being discussed, Carl Schultzenstein remarked that everywhere the human being has appeared, he has been obliged first to invent a suitable way of life for himself and to procure this by artifice, in such manner that, in the human being, art and science take the place of the animal instinct. In this way, the human being becomes the creator of himself, even of his body's formation and refinement. In his Elements of Psychology, Frederik Anton von Hartsen briefly describes the projection that is thought to be the soul apparently stepping forth from the body as the "expulsion of spiritual attributes." He writes about the projection of both sensations and desires and claims he is able to prove that the projection of psychic attributes takes place not only in space but in time as well.