Professor Rachfahl has replied to me once again in four issues of the Internationale Wochenschrift. Instead of honestly admitting his gross errors and superficial reading, he partly takes a new turn and partly compounds these errors even more desperately, and generally continues in just the way I was compelled to characterise previously. At the end we find him assuring us in a way that strikingly recalls the habits of American party hacks during an election campaign that he has ‘fulfilled’ his ‘purpose’ and ‘burst the bubble of soap on the Neckar’. At another point he even avers that he, Rachfahl, will seem to me ‘like the vulture that feeds upon the carcass of his opponent’. Well now, we shall see that this ‘carcass’ is in fact still quite alive and kicking; and in its eyes Rachfahl looks very unlike an eagle or anything of that nature, but rather, as always, in both his reply and review, like a very light-feathered and yet all too heavily pedantic species of writer, against whom it is not even possible to bear any ill-will – for all one's head-shaking – because his often quite unbelievable lack of any sense of the need for literary honesty stems from the quandary he has fallen into, outdone only by the equally incredible naivety of his quite unwavering conviction of being always in the right. Now that I have followed the wishes of my friends and taken on this sterile and irksome business of tackling his purely semantic sophistry, which disguises the clear facts of the case, I shall have to carry it through. In what follows, then, I shall of necessity (1) establish the ‘spirit’ of Rachfahl's polemic once more – and in order to follow him into all the nooks and crannies of his case, this will, unfortunately and in the circumstances unavoidably, be a rather prolonged discussion which I leave to every reader with no particular interest in it to skip – and then (2) for my part – in the face of the confusion caused by Rachfahl and now increased by his avoidance of any admission of injustice – draw together again in a few pages some threads of my real ‘thesis’ which Rachfahl has stubbornly ignored, simply for the benefit of those who have not carefully examined my essays.