About the persistence of the soul after death

A last view into the thoughts of Immanuel Hermann Fichte.
Quotes from the paragraphs 133 and 134 from 'Anthropologie'.

§133

"In death and bodily decay, this regression is now completed, in which the laws of inorganic chemistry gain full rights, and let the general world substances emerge from it again independently, which had been temporarily forced to their service by organic power. This composite structure has completely disappeared, without the least substantial element being lost to it, neither the soul-substance, which organized it, nor the substances of which it was formed.

“For one hardly need ask here how the human being, in and for himself, conducts himself in this process of death. Man, in and for himself — even after the last, to us invisible, act of his life processes — remains, in his essential being, completely the same one he was before with respect to his spirit and power of organization. His integrity is preserved; for he has lost absolutely nothing of what was his and belonged to his substance during his visible life. He only returns in death into the invisible world; or rather, since he has never left the invisible world, since the invisible world is what actually endures within everything visible, he has only stripped off a particular form of visibility. ‘To be dead’ simply means to remain no longer perceptible to ordinary sense apprehension, in exactly the same way that what is actually real, the ultimate foundations of bodily phenomena, are also imperceptible to the senses.

"And certainly it is the least, but also the most certain, which one can claim, if one claims for the real, for the persistent, which is undeniably the basis of the phenomena of the soul, the same invisible duration, which is attributed to every simple chemical substance. This too, is invisible in its original nature; only when it has entered certain connections, it can corporate itself to special physical phenomena. To deduce from the appearance of death, therefore, a dying of the soul, would be the same most inscrutable liable fallacy, as to deduce from the dissolution of a certain chemical physical appearance the destruction of the simple real beings, which are demonstrably their basis.

§134
“With this concept of the continued existence of the soul, therefore, we not only transcend outer experience and reach into an unknown region of merely illusory existences; we also find ourselves, with this concept, right in the midst of the graspable reality accessible to thinking. To assert the opposite, that the soul ceases to exist, would be against nature, would contradict all analogy to outer experience. The soul that has ‘died,’ i.e., has become invisible to the senses, continues to exist no less than before, and is unremoved from its original life conditions, which means that she keeps being this space and time filling being that she was in sensory life, because she didn't become this sensory being by taking on chemical substances in her assimilation, because she cannot lose this by letting it fall.. ... Another means of incarnation need only present itself to the soul's power of organization for the soul to stand there again in new bodily activity, from which we will speak in the following part.

"We admit firmly here, that we only have proven a post existence of the soul, which could be the same in human beings as in animals, even with simple chemical substance; so we would have, judged after normal thinking, proved too much, which is not the right at all. Against this objection, if it may actually be regarded as such, can be opposed many things.
"First and foremost, it must be said that a truth that is self-evident and must be acknowledged for its own sake can by no means be made doubtful by the fact that, whether for now or perhaps forever, certain questions must be left undecided which are connected with their general principle as further implications ...


Heaven, Francesco Botticini, 1446 - 1498.About the persistence of the soul after death by