3 2 2 D O C . 3 8 6 A P R I L 1 9 2 0 386. From Hans Wittig[1] Magdeburg, 76 Freiligrath St., 20 April 1920 Highly esteemed Professor, It was a few weeks ago already (moved by the incident of the supranational cold- infested greenhorns)[2] I had wanted to impose upon you with a letter, but an idea kept me completely occupied at the time. Although I do not have the honor of your acquaintance, I now permit myself to approach you in expectation that you would like to keep track of the further success or repercussions of the “relativity” you had set in motion, apart from your own recent research. I have been preoccupied since February of this y[ear] with adjusting philosophy to this new science. After your strategic advance, both disciplines fell into a discord distressing to all intellectuals on Earth. The candor with which [Dr.] Weyl admitted that, for all the precision of his physico-math. approach, he was unable to find a sat- isfactory answer to the epistemological questions was especially well taken.[3] By contrast, interpreters mostly sank into subjective helplessness. Bloch, for inst., says, Teubner [series, “A[us] N[atur] und G[eisteswelt],” vol. 618, pp. 83ff],[4] “they (phys[icists] and phil[osophers]) do not mean the same concept at all, when they use the same word (time).” This statement is according to Kant, who was root- ed in Euclid[ean] geometry like a geranium in its flowerpot!!– In order to forge ahead, I tried another approach. Purely intuitively, I arrived at a hypothesis (which is supposed to be incorporated within the bigger picture in a future paper) on “The General Extension of the Energy Principle to Psychic Phe- nomena the Law of Psychic Fields” (draft version). “Psychic energy always propagates from regions of higher valency to those of lower valency.” It was within this intuitively conceived frame of laws drawn from historical phe- nomena that I confined my inquiry: Physics = at present, heuristically the region of highest valency philosophy = retrograde. Therefore, the motion necessarily follows. Since a few weeks ago, I believe I may have reduced the discord enough (to first approximation) that a transition from phys. formalizations to psychology might take place (for the latter, not epistemology, is directly responsible!). physics philosophy