Esteemed Sir,

This is the second time in my life that I write to you; you will recall that some years ago I sent you a little tract, “Glimpses into the Secrets of Natural Philosophy,” which I had had printed anonymously. But now I speak to you in an entirely different tone; now what I must do is to thank you with my whole heart.

The total story of my life, which has been published by Decker in Berlin under the title “Stilling,” demonstrates how much reason I have to believe in a God, a Redeemer, a teacher of mankind, and in a special providence. My biography shows how dreadful philosophical confusion and nonsense, Pro and Contra rationalizing, made it necessary to hold fast to the New Testament if I were to avoid sinking into a bottomless, groundless abyss. Yet my reason struggled perpetually for apodictic certainty, which neither the Bible nor Wolf nor mystics nor Hume nor Loke [sic] nor Swedenborg nor Helvetius could give me. Unconditional, fearful, anxious faith was thus my lot, while at the same time Determinism with all its conquering power pressed on my heart, my understanding, my reason, imprisoning me completely and gradually subduing me. No foe was ever more horrible to me than determinism; it is the greatest despot of humanity, strangling every incipient attempt at goodness and every pious trust in God, and yet determinism is so reliable, so certainly true, so evident to every thinking mind, that the world is inescapably lost, religion and morality are destroyed, just as soon as we isolate our sense world and believe the world to be in itself exactly as we imagine it and think.