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What does all modern philosophy mainly do? Since Descartes ↖ Beyond Good and Evil ↖ Philosophers —and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure—an attentat has been made on the part of all philosophers on the old conception of the Soul ↖ Beyond Good and Evil ↖ Meditations ↖ Metaphysics , under the guise of a criticism of the subject and predicate conception—that is to say, an attentat on the fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, as Epistemological skepticism ↖ Beyond Good and Evil , is secretly or openly anti-Christian, although (for keener ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious. Formerly, in effect, one believed in “the soul” as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said, “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate and is conditioned—to think is an activity for which one must suppose a subject as cause. The attempt was then made, with marvelous tenacity and subtlety, to see if one could not get out of this net—to see if the opposite was not perhaps true: “think” the condition, and “I” the conditioned; “I,” therefore, only a synthesis which has been made by thinking itself. Kant ↖ Beyond Good and Evil ↖ Philosophers really wished to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved—nor the object either: the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, and therefore of “the soul,” may not always have been strange to him—the thought which once had an immense power on earth as the Vedanta philosophy ↖ Beyond Good and Evil .